Telecommunications
Getting others involved
How to share the role of leading your business
By Mark Scott
Smart Business Orange County | August 2008
Page 1 of 2
Joseph Renton
Chairman and CEO, Innovative Media Solutions
It’s a decision every owner of
a growing business has to
make: Just how big do you want your business to be?
“It’s really a matter of what are
you trying to do with your company,” says Joseph Renton,
founder, chairman and CEO of
Innovative Media Solutions, an
entertainment and communications solutions provider for the
travel industry. “If you want to
grow your business and the
whole process flow comes
through one person, that being
the founder, it just doesn’t scale.
You recognize growth can’t come
through one person every day.”
When Renton was finally
able to step back and involve
other people in the leadership
of his company, his business
took off. And doing so freed
him to better map out the
future of the company and
develop a strategy for continued growth. As a result, IMS
jumped from 2006 revenue of
$18 million to 2007 revenue of
$23 million with 97 employees
and contractors.
Smart Business spoke with
Renton about how to get other
people involved in leading your
business so you can focus on
the big picture.
Q. How do you assess your
own workload?
You really have to look at what
it is you are trying to accomplish. You may be perfectly satisfied with being a small, maybe
10-person firm. You still have a
role in technology, and you can
still run the company and participate in day-to-day fulfillment.
That may be great, and you may
be more than fulfilled.
If you want to try to enhance
or expand your offerings, then
you find someone else to come
in and run the corporate side
and you continue to be a technologist. If you see everything
coming through you, then you
know that’s not going to scale.
Q. How do you get others involved?
We sit down as an organization. We sat down in 2007 and
defined what we wanted 2008 to
be. Part of that definition was
markets, revenue and profitability. When you’re moving forward,
you always have that outline or
guideline to help you with your
decisions. You’ve already decided where you’re going to play
and what you’re going to
do, and you try to work
within that framework.
We have a very competent
and strong executive management team. As a group,
we make sure that collectively we’re aligned and then
we each have the responsibility to disseminate that
vision and consistency
through the organization. As
the CEO, clearly I’m required
to describe, define and continually articulate it to everybody in the company.
The people who work on
the executive team have the
same goal. It’s really the collection of the message being
consistent from every leader
and making sure everybody
understands the ambition and
the goals for the year.
The repeated conversations
just reinforce that message. It’s
not just the CEO.
