Consumer Products
Youth movement
How to get the people in place to grow through today's technology
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Northern California | January 2009
Page 1 of 2
Mike Rippey
CEO, 1-800-Radiator
Mike Rippey admits that he
would love to be lazy.
“My selfish objective is to do
as little work as possible,” he
jokes.
Of course, Rippey hasn’t
given anyone the opportunity to
call him lazy. The CEO and
majority owner of auto-parts
distributor Radiator Express
Warehouse — which does business as 1-800-Radiator — has
twice grown companies to land
spots on the Inc. 5000, including when his current company
jumped from $60 million in revenue in 2004 to revenue of
$116 million in 2007.
And Rippey is getting closer
to his goal. 1-800-Radiator can
credit its boom to expanding via
franchising starting in 2004,
and Rippey happily concedes
that it was his employees who
designed the necessary technology infrastructure.
He’s not exactly putting his
feet up on the desk, but Rippey
has become comfortable growing his company with a young
and purposefully less experienced team that adapts to the
incoming technology of the field.
Smart Business spoke with
Rippey about why you have to
trust your best people and why
someone with lots of experience knows too much about the
’80s to find technology-driven
solutions.
Forget experience, hire young to fit
today’s technology boom. Try to
hire young people. I had another company back in the ’80s
that was a fairly fast-growing
company, as well. We went
from zero people to 500 people and zero dollars to $50 million in sales in just about five
years — and with that company, as we grew, the main thing
we looked for was experience
in the industry.
Today, when I go try to find
someone, I don’t go for experience at all; I go for youth
because young people understand the current technology
much better than anyone
who’s got a lot of experience
does. They look at solutions
from an IT standpoint, and
that has helped us really leverage it more, and today, we’ve
got almost three times as
many young guys and girls
that really get the IT side of
stuff as we did when we first
started growing. And this is in
a world where today’s kids
know how to do the parental
locks for televisions at home
better than the parents do.
I’ve had a lot of older people
who come in who have a lot of
motivation and drive, but
today, they just don’t have the
technology, and the solutions
that they come up with are
solutions that apply 10 or 15
years ago. They don’t think
about going on Google and
finding an answer that way. Or
they don’t know things.
For example, most of the
people here know how to
write SQL (structured query
language), which is a computer code associated with most
Microsoft products. And these
guys that have been around
corporate life for 10, 15, 20
years don’t even know what
SQL is.
