Last night, a few of us had the opportunity to attend the Churchill Club panel discussion “Learning from the Masters: How America’s Highest Growth Companies Executed to Achieve Success.” Odd they would let us in, but since we worked to get client Network Appliance CEO Dan Warmenhoven on the panel, they made an exception.
This was a memorable event. Dan was joined by Tom Stemberg, Founder & Former CEO/Chairman, Staples; Venture Partner, Highland Capital Ventures and Jeff Weedman, Sr. Vice President, External Business Development & Global Licensing, Procter & Gamble. The panel was moderated by Dave Thomson, author, Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth.
Thomson is a sharp guy and a great moderator. Part of me was thinking, he must’ve read Guy’s “How to be a Great Moderator” post. For his book, Thomson studied hundreds of “blueprint” companies over several years. He concluded that only 5% of the companies that IPO ever achieve $1B in revenue. Additionally, these companies delivered two-thirds of the market value of all IPO companies. Wow.
Anyway, I thought we’d share a few memorable quotes from some of the panelists. There’s some good color in here for all you entrepreneurs looking to build that billion dollar (plus) baby.
“I run into a lot of investors with deep pockets and short arms”
-Jeffrey Weedman of P&G describing his experiences with “gun shy” internal investors
“I disagree with your point that everyone is replaceable. Our tech visionary is a guy named Dave Hitz…graduated high school at 14…has 200+ IQ…probably the smartest guy I’ll ever meet. How do you replace that?”
-Dan Warmenhoven of NetApp refuting a claim that ALL good executives render themselves useless
“No offense to the financial analysts, but the minute we stopped listening to them was the minute we began to succeed.”
-Tom Stemberg describing his experiences with analysts that he says forced Staples to think short term“Sometimes you take a wrong turn and end up in a deep swamp. But you can learn a lot in those swamps.
-Weedman on making the wrong business decisions and their repercussions“You wanna talk about a swamp? Before NetApp, I lived in the deepest, darkest swamp - somewhere out in the Amazon, I believe. I’m more comfortable on dry land.”
-Warmenhoven on the same topic and his role as CEO of less successful company, prior to NetApp“Why should a small business owner pay $3.49 for a box of Bic pens when a big wig with a large company pays 20 cents for the same damn pens? That was my “big idea” moment.”
-Stemberg describing why he launched Staples - on the premise that small business owners should get the same bulk discounts as large companies“In World War II, the U.S. Department of War decided that military deserters would be shot in public. The head of the department believed that by making an example of one deserting soldier, they may be able to minimize the amount of desertions. You know how many soldiers deserted in all of World War II? Just one.”
-Warmenhoven describing his philosophy on how to grow a company quickly - trust employees and don’t waste time watching over their shoulder. But for those that abuse that trust, deal with them swiftly, severely and publicly.
– Dave Black
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