David Porter is CEO of
FURminator Inc., but
that’s not his only title.
According to his business cards,
he’s also the company’s top dog.
Porter and his wife, Angie,
developed FURminator’s
unique pet grooming products,
but another part of his job is to
maintain an environment where
employees can think outside of
the box — an atmosphere that
he says is key to the success of
FURminator.
“If Henry Ford would have listened to his customers, we’d all
be riding horses,” he says.
The 24-employee company’s
innovative tools and creative
workplace have propelled it to
a three-year growth rate of
nearly 500 percent to post
2007 revenue of $25 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Porter about how to create a
culture where employees feel
appreciated and why you have
to act fast to weed out the bad
apples in the bunch.
Q. What are the keys to
being a good leader?
When you get a business to a
certain size, you need to work
on the business instead of in the
business. People are absolutely
critical. They need to know
where you’re going.
Set your north up, as far as
where you’re going. Then drive
everything from the top down,
whether it’s customer service or
really going in and establishing
that corporate culture.
Realize there is so much more
to a job than a desk and a
phone and a paycheck. There
are certain things that really get
a person to buy in to what
makes a company great.
For instance, we’ve got a great environment. Every day is bring
your pet to work day. We throw
Lunch-a-Palooza every month,
when we turn our conference
table into a 14-foot shuffleboard
table for fabulous prizes.
If you do things like that, you
can really build the camaraderie.
Instead of managing through
fear, enable people to make
decisions and get things done.
Measure results and efforts; set
their goals. There are a whole lot
of things that go into leadership,
but lead by example and let people support (you) to grow.
Q. How do you get
your employees to buy in
to your vision and your
culture?
First of all, you have to
empower them to let
them know that they can
make decisions on their
own. It gets back to
working on the business
versus working in the
business.
You’ve got to have
some mutual trust and
look at them like a person. You want them to
set goals, not just business goals but personal
goals. You want them to
have that life balance so
that they’re working to live and
not living to work.
So be concerned about them,
but still instill that everyone
should have that sense of
urgency of getting things done.
I get on my soapbox all the
time at work and say,
‘FURminator is your nondysfunctional family. If you
want dysfunction, come to my
house for Thanksgiving. But if
you’re the type of person who
likes talking behind people’s
backs or making cliques, it’s not
going to fly here.’
This is where we’re going to
be spending a lot of our lives.
So we regularly have team-building activities, not only
from our Zen lounge, which is
our cool break room, but other
things we do once a month.
These are just things that build
the FURminator family.
