How Marc Blumenthal introduces new ideas to his team at Intelladon

Marc Blumenthal, owner and CEO, Intelladon

To follow the trends in the market, Marc Blumenthal decided that his company needed to broaden its product and service offering for customers. While it was easy to make this decision from an organizational standpoint, the real challenge was moving this idea from thought to reality.
“Everything tends to have a ripple effect,” says Blumenthal, the owner and CEO of Tampa-based technology services firm Intelladon. “Every little decision that gets made, I have to get a few dozen people to change the way they do things a bit.”
By implementing new ideas to drive growth, Blumenthal has led Intelladon’s expansion from a handful of employees into a 40-person company.
Smart Business spoke with Blumenthal about how he floats new ideas to take hold in the organization.
Build critical mass.
Usually I’ll bring an idea through some level of gestation. I tend to incubate things first a little bit from the team as a whole until I get some critical mass around the idea and some validation.
I might talk to some of our customers. I might talk to some fellow CEOs. I have a whole lot of people that over the last 25 years I’ve gotten to know and I can run things by.
Then I bring the team in. The benefit is that I don’t disrupt the team on every idea that ever comes up, because there are many more ideas that get generated that never even get evaluated and still fewer that actually get implemented. The penalty I pay is that I have to work backward to catch them up when an idea has reached critical mass and it’s time for them to get involved. But if I got them involved in every idea that came up, they would never have time to do their jobs.
Involve your leaders.
I usually will meet with the person who has the greatest knowledge of subject matter expertise on that topic and vet a few things with them along the way. Usually one member of the leadership team has a little more experience in the area I might be working on. I sit down with them over lunch or coffee and brainstorm a little bit, and say, ‘Well, what would you think if …?’ If the feedback is positive I will take it to my COO, who is really the guy that runs the company on a day-to-day basis. His name is also Mark, but I call him the anti-Marc. He’s the opposite of me. I pull him out of his comfort zone and he pulls me back. In the end, we end up in a good place between the two of us.
Present ideas with a purpose.
My approach has been for every 10 ideas that I have, I may only present two or three, and only one may make a lot of sense. Don’t present all of your ideas, because people have a tendency to think that all of your ideas are supposed to be run with. Ideas need baking. In the early days of the previous company, I used to throw out all these ideas and we’d have a brainstorming session with the leadership team. Then I’d come in the next day and a couple of people started working on some of them. I’m like, ‘What are you doing? That was just an idea.’ You have to be careful about discerning between what ideas are and what you are actually asking for. So I try to be very careful about what I put forth and when I put it forth.
Help people to run with it.
It’s really important to give the team the opportunity to change, refine and make the decisions to make it their own, what gets changed and what doesn’t. At that point, you can step away from it and it’s no longer your idea, it’s the company’s. It’s the team’s. Once that happens, you are almost assured of success.
I try and pull the team along a little bit. I try to be a little bit disruptive, but not too disruptive. I like to be the sand in the oyster. So a pearl forms because I’m rubbing up against them, pushing them a little bit. We end up being a little bit better, growing a little bit faster, trying a few new things that might not otherwise get done or get tried if I wasn’t pushing and pulling a little bit.
Part of that is I’ve learned that if you give the team the power to make great decisions, they elevate to that in most cases and they actually do a better job than I might do by infusing myself in a lot of decisions.
How to reach: Intelladon, (813) 814-2345 or www.intelladon.com