Greg Murtagh promotes innovation at Triad Retail Media


Give management enough rope. You have to let other people take the rope and trust that the people you’ve hired are going to do what you need them to do. A lot of times, people don’t do that. They try to do too much. They make every single decision, and as a result, the company slows down to a snail’s pace, because everything has to go through the person who is clogging the pipes. Even though you hire a great staff that you like and trust and you think are making the right decisions, and you are delegating, you have to let go a little bit. I’m not an IT person. I’m a sales and marketing person, but I live in an Internet world. There are lots of technical things that I am completely ignorant about. I have to hire people, especially in the IT area, who are telling me to make investments that cost millions of dollars and are giving me recommendations as to why we need that. I have to trust people and that they are telling me the right thing.
Reward innovation. We have a whole series of monetary awards called the Star Awards, where we give money to people every year to come up with ideas in certain areas in all different categories, such as $10,000 to the team that brings the best new idea to market during the year or $10,000 to the team that came up with most creative idea to save the company or grow revenue during the year. We pay people and reward people for being innovative. If you have clear communication and you have compensation that’s aligned with what you want to occur, then people will line up against your vision and make it happen.
Place bets on money makers. A lot of people see shiny new things and basically pick up the phone and tell their organizations, ‘We have to do that! We have to do that!’ And as a result, they waste a lot of time, a lot of energy and a lot of money on things that they shouldn’t have spent time on. In the Internet space, there are lots of shiny objects. You have to step back and look at that stuff with a very cold eye, and ask yourself, ‘Is it really going to be a transformational thing?’ There’s social. There’s mobile. There’s Facebook. There’s Twitter. There’s video. There are 18 different things that we should be thinking about, planning for and doing. You have to pick and choose your shots. I never put a dollar into anything that I don’t expect to make money. If things don’t work out, usually within six months, it’s not going to work out. If something is a success, it usually takes off.

How to reach: Triad Retail Media, (813) 286-6586 or www.triadretail.com