Technology

Growing with purpose

By Kristy J. O’Hara

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When Ed Burke decided to grow a part of Informatics Inc.’s business from $26 million to $100 million in four years, employees could have easily freaked out at the rapid growth rate. But instead, the goal focused them on really getting better.

“It really stretched us to think about how we were going to do that,” Burke says. “Whereas, if it’s incremental growth, ‘Well, we can up this a little bit, this a little bit, and all those little bits will probably get us there,’ but this other way makes us focus a lot more on what we’re really looking for.”

As president and CEO of Informatics, he maintains a growth mentality for the $41 million company, which provides bar code technology for small and medium-sized businesses.

Smart Business spoke with Burke about he ensures his company maintains a competitive advantage to keep his company growing.

Q: What’s the key to growing your company?

The first part is delivering the products and services the customer really needs and understanding your competitive advantage in that. You’ve got to understand what the customer wants and be able to deliver it better than anybody else.

Spend time talking to the customer. That’s one of the big, often overlooked aspects of business.

We get going in our offices, and we think we know it, or we get too busy with the internal stuff and never talk to the customer.

Q: How do you understand your competitive advantage?

If you don’t really think you have some, look hard because you probably do. Oftentimes, I don’t think companies do, and it’s hard to grow because their offer isn’t that compelling to the customer.

Make sure you do, and then quarterly have a competitive advantage review. Are we really designed for the customer? Are we offering some sort of differentiating product or service to our customers? If not, you’re going to lose them.

Q: How do you communicate with customers?

Part of it is just putting it on the calendar. Devote some time every week to make some of those calls. Even if it’s just one call every week, make it. You have to have the discipline.

Keep it brief. Don’t go into 25 questions. We have basically four questions that we ask, and it takes literally a few minutes if they just want to answer the questions and not go into the editorial response.

Keep it simple. Everybody’s busy. You can call them up, ‘If you can just give me two minutes, I just have a couple questions for you.’ They’ll say, ‘OK, I can handle a couple minutes,’ and you hold to it so you don’t violate that confidence. If you have it distilled down to what you’re interested in, you can usually do it pretty quickly.

Q: How do you hire as you grow?

We do a good job of isolating what we’re specifically trying to look for in each individual job. There’s a big difference in what you look for in a salesman versus a software developer. The personalities are dramatically different. Make sure you’ve defined what you’re looking for in each position.

Then we have a personality test that we give every applicant. Then we do team-based behavioral interviewing of those candidates.

As an individual trying to do all that myself, I can’t read the personalities effectively in an hour meeting or interview. Sometimes you’re looking for something, and you may be looking too hard to find it or too hard the other way not to find it, so the team-based [interview] works well.

We’ll do the interview and immediately sit down and compare notes. We grade each on a scale of one to 10 — then we have more of an objective measure. Let’s say I gave them a nine and someone gave them a seven, we say, ‘OK, it’s got to be within one point,’ so we compare notes and, ‘OK, I’ll lower mine to an eight,’ or if I say, ‘No, he’s really a nine,’ and he says, ‘He’s really a seven,’ we throw out that question.

Q: How do you prepare for growth?

You have to have a vision for growth. There are so many businesses out there that are just happy rocking along. They have a good process, and they deliver plus or minus 5 percent growth every year. You have to have that ‘big hairy audacious goal’ mentality.

Do you want to grow? And if you do want to grow, then you have to set something ambitious and get it on everybody. That lessens a culture shock kind of thing of, ‘Man, are we really going to do that?’ That’s part one.

Then part two is to say, ‘Where are our best opportunities for growth?’ We have different modes of going to market and different products we can deliver. What’s going to be our biggest bang for the buck?’ We just started working through that. It’s always that constant thing in the back of our mind.

HOW TO REACH: Informatics Inc., (972) 881-5500 or www.informatics-inc.com