Hiring the Right Employee Helped Save My Company

By Ken Robbins, President, Response Mine Interactive, Atlanta
In June of 2009, my digital marketing agency lost its two biggest clients, The Home Depot and Staples. Our monthly revenue dropped from $550,000 to $300,000, forcing us to lay off 22 of our 50 employees. This is the story of how we turned the situation around with the help of one good hire.

We hired from within
In 2008, The Home Depot put our company under review. Our head of business development thought she saw the writing on the wall and resigned her position, creating an opening in what was to be perhaps the most vital position in the company. We needed to fill that role with a leader, someone with creativity and boundless energy who could make up for the devastating hit we were about to take.

At the time, our account supervisor for The Home Depot was an employee named Leah Peterson. I already knew she was a tireless worker -- she'd often work 14-hour days -- and was great at networking and building relationships. When we were preparing for the review process we discovered that she had 72 contacts at The Home Depot in her BlackBerry that she stayed in touch with on a regular basis -- seventy two! I thought, "Oh my god, she should be in sales."

So we asked Leah if she'd take the job.

We gave her the support she needed
Initially Leah had doubts about her ability to succeed in the role. But I assured her that I would give her the support she needed to grow into the job, and eventually she took it.

Before Leah took the position, we went on the road for a few weeks and she shadowed my pitches to clients. When we came back she was ready to start, but she still needed lots of help.

Pitching a company like ours is hard. Leah often has to pitch to a room full of stakeholders, including the CFO, CEO and chief marketing officer -- all of whom have different questions and concerns. It can be like selling services to a politically charged budget fiefdom.

In the first few months, because of her lack of experience in sales, Leah relied heavily on the input of executives at our company -- including the VP of client service, VP of media and myself -- when creating presentations for clients. It was a lot of extra work for some of us, but instead of begrudging her our time and resources, we kept our promise and helped her succeed in whatever ways we could.

With experience and encouragement, Leah became more knowledgeable and confident. In early spring of this year, she turned a corner. Now she's an expert on client presentations. Her energy and enthusiasm had prevailed, as I knew it would.

We made an investment
Sometimes helping a promising employee reach her full potential means making a significant cash investment. When we hired Leah, she asked for a junior employee to help her with mailings, follow-ups, database and PR, which meant adding a $25,000 salary to overhead. The fact is, I didn't want Leah spending time on administrative work, so we made the investment.

One of Leah's first suggestions was to hire an outside prospecting firm to cold call CEOs and executives at potential client firms. Testing the prospecting firm's services would cost us $18,000, and hiring it full time would cost us $75,000.

Here's my philosophy: I am willing to test any reasonable idea that an employee pitches to me, as long as it won't break the bank. Worst-case scenario meant blowing $18,000 to try the firm and then moving on to the next idea; best case, we hire the firm full time and win millions of dollars worth of new clients. So many firms make their first few million in revenue and become protective of that capital. They lose their willingness to experiment, gamble and risk, and they stop growing.

In the end, hiring the prospecting firm turned out to be a great move. And that isn't the only investment we've made at Leah's urging that's helped generate more clients. She also has been pushing us to completely rebrand the company: Leah wants us to design a new logo, redesign our website and work more closely with our PR agent, which would require a commitment of time and energy from all of management. Leah places a high value on PR, for which she needs the expertise of our executives. A few months ago she landed a speaking engagement for one of our VPs, who wound up spending 100 hours in six weeks preparing.

Our belief in her paid off
There's a running joke around here that it's actually management who works for Leah instead of the other way around. But here's the bottom line: Leah has helped us land more than a dozen clients. In some ways, she's directly responsible for 25 percent of our revenue. We are currently generating $7 million a year -- back to where we were before we lost our two biggest clients. Next year we are projecting more than $9 million in sales.

-- As told to Harper Willis

Response Mine Interactive received a dozen awards in the past 12 months, including three awards for excellence in search engine marketing at the 2010 Summit International Marketing Effectiveness Awards.
Resources

• Want to cut costs and boost creativity? Read this article for advice on how to make the most of employee feedback.
• Read one business owner's strategy for evaluating employee performance and building a stronger team.