Whether the ball is in his court or not, you can be sure that Michael Rich is playing offense. For proof, just look at what he’s doing with Equitrac Corp. in the midst of a recession.
The president and CEO led the company to record product sales and $60 million in revenue for fiscal 2008 by expanding into the education market. Now, you’ll find Equitrac’s print management solutions in 50 of the top 100 universities, in addition to the offices of about 20,000 customers in 40 other countries.
“We could have said, ‘Let’s brace for the worst recession ever,’ and the next thing you do is you start retrenching, limiting your plans, cutting costs, firing people,” says Rich, who manages 300 employees. “If you believe in your vision, you’ve got a great team and you’re executing in the market, you don’t go into a highly defensive posture. You’ve got to stay on offense and work through those challenges.”
Smart Business spoke with Rich about weighing opportunities to grow during a recession.
Maintain marketplace awareness. Customers and partners are the best resource to help guide your direction and strategy. So we spend a lot of time in the field engaging our customers and partners. Over the past year, I have been in the field almost on a weekly basis meeting with C-level executives of our end customers as well as our channel partners.
It’s very easy when you engage your customers and partners to want to deliver some presentation to them and do most of the talking. We are disciplined in making sure that we’re doing more listening than talking, and as a result, we get a lot of excellent input. We have to stay on top of (their requirements), and the best way to do that is by direct interactions.
We have to span a number of different conversations with our business partners, not only in terms of what the end customer wants but what we need to do as an organization to support the business relationship. With end customers, you look at their specific feature requirements. You look specifically at their workflow needs in their firms and how to tailor your applications to provide a compelling value proposition. You need to ensure that you’re solving real pain points for the customer.
You need to amalgamate that customer feedback into a set of market requirements. Customers and partners will ask us for enhancement requests for the product. We try to assess how many of our customers are asking for similar things, and then we can make a priority call in terms of what to actually include in the end product.
We will author a document, which lays out the feature requests. Before you actually commit to any specific development agendas, we like to have our partners and customers review those expressions of their requirements to ensure that we have them right.
So the first part is getting the feedback. The second is synthesizing it. And then thirdly is reviewing that information with the customer to make sure that we’ve heard them correctly.
