Pamela Coker’s Acucorp Inc. employees start their work day far earlier than employees at a typical office so that they can work with people at the company’s European offices.
Working unconventional hours has paid off, as the COBOL-based software provider has grown from a $200,000 start-up with six employees in 1988 to a $20 million corporation today, with 115 employees and offices in five countries.
Smart Business spoke with Coker, president and CEO of Acucorp Inc., about expanding a business across the Atlantic.
How would you describe your management strategy?
There are two ways to run a company; you need to decide who you are.
There are the people who want to swing for the fences and hit that home run. That’s riskier, because if you swing that bat and it doesn’t work, you’ve got nothing. I heard this a lot in the dot-com era — ‘We’re going for broke’ — and a lot of people succeeded in becoming broke.
I’ve never gone for broke. I would rather get a walk, steal a base and eke out the runs in a safer way so the longevity of the company continues. You’re more likely to build a solid business in the long run than outlast all the people in the long run.
How do you communicate your message to your employees?
We create the vision together, so we have a lot of meetings where we discuss what our core values are, what you figure what you’re best in the world at.
Once you figure out what you’re best in the world at, you can create a vision for the company. By doing it that way, we get buy-in from all the employees.
Although we only have 115 people … our products are sold in 100 different countries, we have several million customers around the world and we had to be pretty darn clever to figure out how to do that.
How do you expand globally?
With difficulty. The key factor is hiring employees that have a global perspective. Our employees can speak 25 different languages besides English. That gives us a lot of coverage. We also have 15 employees who can do business in three different languages.
That’s called careful hiring of people I call citizens of the world, who think of themselves as global players. It’s very important for our people to have a global perspective.
We form a corporate culture that’s not based on any single national culture but is a corporately created culture just for us, because we’re pulling people from Asia and all over Europe. We’re pulling from so many cultures, we can’t have one single culture dominate, so we’ve created a corporate culture we all adhere to.
As CEO, I live about five months a year in Europe. It gets me on their time zone in six- to eight-week increments. I can visit all the offices while I’m there.
By being there, I learn these cultural differences more deeply. You can’t do it just by showing up and spending two or three days in each office. You’ve got to really live there.
I’ve been in this half-time Europe, half-time San Diego for the last five years, and it’s only over those long periods of time that you really start to understand those cultural differences.
How do you know when it’s time to grow a company?
When we were smaller, I never worried about the economy. It didn’t seem to matter. Everything depended on our ability to connect with customer and sell to them.
As the market has become more global, those economies do make a difference. As we’re selling to larger corporations, economies in each country do make a difference.
What pitfalls should a CEO try to avoid?
Part of the learning I’ve had to go through is understanding how to do business in all these different cultures. How you do business is very culturally dependent. How you get a sale in other countries is different than in the U.S.
Also, the legal and accounting regulations in each country are different. We had not only to learn them but to learn what they mean in terms of making a decision. One of the early problems we had was we have five operations in Europe and we had a strong legal counsel and accounting counsel in each country.
We would ask them for advice, and when we got the advice, we would make a decision based on American eyes looking at the advice. I’ve had to hire some European eyes to evaluate advice so we could make a decent decision.
My mistake was taking advice and making decisions based on how we would receive that advice in the U.S., but the advice is interpreted different ways in different cultures. We needed a lot of cultural help for that.
How to reach: Acucorp Inc., (858) 689-4500 or www.acucorp.com
