Only Once

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Protecting the Inbox

Protecting the Inbox

We only have one out of our 13 core values at Return Path that’s closely related to the content of our business. But as with the other values, it says a lot about who we are and how we approach the work that we do. That value is:

We believe inboxes should only contain messages that are relevant, trusted, and safe

We occupy a pretty unique space in the email universe – we serve senders and receiving networks, but aren’t directly in the mail stream and therefore don’t directly touch end users.  So much of our business, from our Certification or whitelisting business, to our new Domain Assurance anti-spoofing/anti-phishing business, revolves around building trust in our company that this core value is critical to our survival. If we ran afoul of this core value — and it comes up all the time — we’d be dead in the water.

Here’s how it comes up:  because our Certification program is the closest thing on the Internet to guaranteed universal email delivery, every spammer and grey mailer in the world wants to be on it. We don’t just SELL access to our whitelist. Even once a prospect has been converted to an under-contract client, they have to APPLY for Certification.

It’s not easy to GET Certified. You have to be a really, really good mailer. Not just a real entity. Not just a big spender. You have to send mail that is safe and secure and wanted by end users. We have a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods we can use to determine this, and the requirements for Certified status and therefore Inbox placement are carefully negotiated and regularly reviewed with our ISP partners. Once a client is Certified, it’s not easy to STAY Certified because we are monitoring all of those same standards in real time, 24×7. Clients who go out of bounds get immediately suspended from the program until they are back in bounds. Clients who go out of bounds enough, we just terminate from the program for good.

By the way, just because we won’t certify a particular client isn’t an indictment that they are a spammer. It just means that their email programs still need to be subject to all the state of the art filtering and security measures that our ISPs have in their arsenal.  And most of the time, it doesn’t mean that we won’t work with them to improve the quality of their mail programs so their messages are relevant, trusted, and safe.

But at the end of the day, we’d rather not take money from questionable clients than compromise the quality of our Certification program. That’s a hard decision to make sometimes.  I’ve had to call large clients who are poor mailers and fire them more than once, and I’ve had to take angry phone calls and threatened legal action from clients or prospects many times over the years.  But for us, respect for end users and inbox security are deeply baked into the culture.  It’s why we developed the Domain Assurance product and launched it earlier this year.  And that’s why it’s one of our core values.

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More Than 1/3 of Your Life

More Than 1/3 of Your Life

When I was a kid, so my parents tell me, I used to watch a lot of TV. For some reason, all those episodes of Gilligan’s Island and Dallas still have a place in my brain, right next to lyrics from 70s and 80s songs and movies. I also tend to remember TV commercials, which are even more useless (not that JR Ewing or Ferris Beuller had all that many valuable life lessons to impart).  Anyway, I remember some commercial for some local mattress company which started out with the booming voiceover, “You spend 1/3 of your life in bed — why not enjoy that time and be as comfortable as you can be?”

Well, we humans frequently spend MORE than 1/3 of our lives at work. Why shouldn’t we have that same philosophy about that time as the mattress salesman from 1970s professed for sleep?  Another one in my series of posts about Return Path’s 13 core values is this one:

We realize that people work to live, not live to work

There are probably a few other of our core values that I could write about with this same setup, but this one is probably the mother of them all.  I even wrote about it several years ago here.  Work is for most people the thing that finances the rest of their life — their hopes and dreams, their families’ well-being, their daily lives, and ultimately, their retirement. I think many people wouldn’t work, at least in most for-profit jobs as we know them, if they didn’t have to. And that’s where this value comes from.

How does this value play out?

First, we are respectful of people’s time in the daily thick of things.  We know that society has changed and that work and personal time bleed into each other much more regularly now than they used to.  As I’ve written about before in this series of posts, we have an “open” vacation policy that allows employees to take as much time off a they can, as long as they get their jobs done well. One of the real benefits of this, besides allowing for more or longer vacations, is that employees can take slices of time off, or can work from home, as life demands things of them like dentist appointments and parent-teacher conferences, without having to count the hours or minutes.

Second, an important part of our management training is to make sure that managers get to know their people as people.  This doesn’t mean being buddies or pals, though that happens from time to time and is fine. Understanding everything that makes a person tick, from their hobbies, to their kids, to their pets or pet causes, really helps a manager more effectively manage an employee as well as develop them. And as Steven Covey says, it’s important to “sharpen the saw,” which a good manager can help an employee do ONLY if they are in tune to some extent at a personal or non-work level.

Finally, our sabbatical policy — beyond our fairly generous and flexible vacation policy — ensures that every handful of years, employees really can go off and enjoy life. We’ve had employees buy around-the-world plane tickets and show up at JFK with a backpack. We’ve had people take their families off for a month in an exotic tropical destination. We even had one employee spend a sabbatical in a coffee shop learning how to write code (names masked to protect the innocent).

The challenge with this value is that not everyone treats the flexibility and freedom with the same level of respect, and occasionally we do have to remind someone that flexibility and freedom don’t mean that work can be left undone or delayed.  We believe that by providing the flexibility, people will work even harder, and certainly more efficiently, to still go above and beyond in terms of high performance execution.

In my CEO fantasty world, I’d like to think that given the choice, most of our employees would still come to work at Return Path if they didn’t have to for financial reasons, but I’m not that naive. Hopefully by setting the tone that we understand people work to live and not vice versa, we are allowing people to enjoy life as much as possible, even in the 1/3+ of it that’s spent working.

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Beyond Policy

Beyond Policy

Policies are an important part of managing employees. Similarly, contracts are an important part of running the commercial side of the business.  But it’s impossible to legislate every potential down-the-road situation ahead of time. That’s why one of the 13 core values at Return Path is

We believe in doing the right thing

I’ll admit that more than most of our values, this one sounds like Motherhood and Apple pie. Who doesn’t want to do the right thing?  The reason this value is an important part of our culture is that when we are in a tough situation, we stop and ask ourselves the most basic, yet thought provoking question — what’s the right thing to do here?

• When you fire an employee immediately before a major block of stock options vest, what’s the right thing to do?  Vest the options
• When you have a client who for some reason can no longer use your product or service or legitimately can’t pay their bill, what’s the right thing to do?  Let them out of their agreement, or at least let them suspend their agreement, even if it’s a long term contract
• When you make a payroll mistake and the employee doesn’t notice it but you discover it after the fact, what’s the right thing to do?  Let the employee know…and make them whole (the reverse is true of course as well, in cases where employees are the beneficiaries of an unnoticed payroll error – the right thing is to let the company know and make the company whole)
• When you have a choice of a car service (price equal) that runs only hybrid cars or more luxurious gas guzzlers for your routine trips to the airport, what’s the right thing to do?  Go green, baby!
• When you make a mistake and a client is adversely impacted but doesn’t notice it, what’s the right thing to do?  Fess up, quickly and thoroughly

I’m sure we don’t always get the tough calls right. That’s part of being a community of humans with emotions and faults. But we know that our reputation as a business goes well beyond following our policies and contracts and try to do the right thing as circumstances dictate.

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Building the Company vs. Building the Business

Building the Company vs. Building the Business

I was being interviewed recently for a book someone is writing on entrepreneurship, which focused on identifying the elements of my “playbook” for entrepreneurial success at Return Path.  I’m not sure I’ve ever had a full playbook, though I’ve certainly documented pieces of it in this blog over the years.  One of the conversations we had in the interview was around the topic of building the company vs. building the business.

The classic entrepreneur builds the business — quite frankly, he or she probably just builds the product for a long time first, then the business.  In the course of the interview, I realized that I’ve spent at least as much energy over the years building the company concurrently with the product/business.  In fact, in many ways, I probably spent more time building the company in the early years than the business warranted given its size and stage.  This is probably related to my theme from a few months ago about building Return Path “Backwards.”

What do I mean by building the company as opposed to building the business?

• Building the business means obsessing over things like product features, getting traction with early clients, competition, and generating buzz
• Building the company means obsessing over things like HR policies, company values and culture, long-term strategy, and investor reporting

In the early years, I did some things that now seem crazy for a brand new, 25-person company, like designing a sabbatical policy that wouldn’t kick in until an employee’s 7th anniversary.  But I don’t regret doing them, and I don’t think they were wasted effort in the long run, even if they were a little wasted in the short run.  I think working on company-building early on paid benefits in two ways for us:

1. They helped lay the groundwork for scaling – what we’re finding now as we are trying to rapidly scale up the business, and even over the last few years since we’ve been scaling at a moderate pace, is that we are doing so on a very solid foundation
2. The company didn’t die when the product and business died – because we had built a good company, when our original ECOA business basically proved to be a loser back in 2002, it was a fairly obvious decision (on the part of both the management team and the venture syndicate) to keep the business going but pivot the business, more than once

Starting about four years ago, for the first time, I felt like we had a great business to match our great company.  Now that those two things are in sync, we are zooming forward at an amazing pace, and we’re doing it perhaps more gracefully than we would be doing it if we hadn’t focused on building the company along the way.

I’m not saying that there’s a right path or a wrong path here when you compare business building with company building, although as I wrote this post, my #2 conclusion above is a particularly poignant one, that without a strong company, we wouldn’t be here 12 years later.  Of course, you could always argue that if I’d spent more time building the business and less time building the company, we might have succeeded sooner.  In the end, a good CEO and management team must be concerned about getting both elements right if they want to build an enduring stand-alone company.

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Challenging Authority

Challenging Authority

My dad told me a joke once about a kid who as a teenager thought his father was the dumbest person he’d ever met. But then, as the punchline goes, “By the time I’d graduated college, it was amazing how much the old man had learned.”

The older we get as humans, the more we realize how little we know — and how fallible we are. One of our 13 core values at Return Path gets right to the heart of this one:

We challenge complacency, mediocrity, and decisions that don’t make sense

I will note up front that this particular value statement is probably not as widely practiced as most of the others I’m writing about in this series of posts, but it’s as important as any of the others.

Very few things make me happier at work than when an employee challenges me or another leader — and quite frankly, the more junior and less well I know the employee, the better. No matter what the role, we hire smart, ambitious, and intellectually curious people to work at Return Path. Why let all that raw brainpower go to waste?  We thrive as a company in part because we are all trying to do a better job, and because we work with our eyes open to the things happening around us.

I have no doubt that some real percentage of the decisions that I or other leaders of the company make don’t make sense, either in full or in part. And I’m sure that from time to time we become complacent with things that are running smoothly or quietly, even if they’re not optimal or even moderately destructive.  That’s why I’m particularly grateful when someone calls me out on something. We have made great strides in and changes to the business over the years because someone on the team has challenged something. We’ve terminated employees who were poisonous to the organization, we’ve reversed course on strategic plans, we’ve even sold a business unit.

One of the things we do well is blend this value with one I wrote about a few weeks ago about being kind and respectful to each other.  The two play together very nicely in our culture.  People are generally constructive when they have feedback to give or are challenging authority, and people who receive feedback or challenges assume positive intent and nothing personal.  We specifically train people around these delicate balances both via the Action/Design framework and a specific course we teach called Giving and Receiving Feedback.

It takes courage to challenge authority. But then again, nothing great is ever accomplished in life without courage (and enthusiasm, so the old adage goes).

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Why We Occasionally Celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day

Why We Occasionally Celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day

No kidding – next Monday is September 19, and that is, among other things, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. We’ve done a variety of things to celebrate it over the years, not the least of which was a series of appropriately-themed singing telegrams we sent to interrupt all-hands meetings.  I can’t remember why we ever started this particular thing, but it’s one of many for us.  Why do we care?  Because

We are serious and passionate about our job and positive and light-hearted about our day

This is another one of Return Path’s philosophies I’m documenting in my series on our 13 core values.

I’m not sure I’d describe our work environment as a classic work hard/play hard environment. We’re not an investment bank. We don’t have all 20something employees in New York City. We’re not a homogeneous workforce with all of the same outside interests. So while we do work hard and care a lot about our company’s success, our community of fellow employees, solving our clients’ problems, and making a big impact on our industry and on end users’ lives, we also recognize that “playing hard” for us means having fun on the job.

It’s not as if we run an improv comedy troop in the lunch room or play incessant practical jokes on each other (though I have pulled off a couple sweet April Fool’s pranks over the years). But as the value is worded, we try to set a lighthearted and positive atmosphere. This one is a little harder to produce concrete examples of than some of our other core values that I’ve written up, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less important.

Whether it’s talking like a pirate, paying quiet homage to our unofficial mascot – the monkey, stopping for a few minutes to play a game of ping pong, or just making a silly face or poking fun of a close colleague in a meeting, I’m so happy that our company and Board have this value hard-wired in.  Life’s just too short not to have fun at every available opportunity!

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A Community of Employees

A Community of Employees

One of the most memorable moments in a valedictorian speech that I’ve heard or read was at my sister-in-law’s graduation from Northwestern about 10 years ago. The speaker’s closing line was something like “Most of all, when you go out into the world, remember to be kind to other people.  It’s one of the best things you can do for the world.”

It’s not as if people are generally trained or predisposed to be UNkind to each other. But respecting other people and being kind to them is sometimes elusive in our busy lives. I think one of the things that makes Return Path more of a community and less of just a “place of work” is this one of our 13 core values:

We are obsessively kind to and respectful of each other

Kindness and respect in the workplace start with the seemingly trivial.  Holding doors open for colleagues, cleaning the coffee machine, helping someone lug a big jug of water and lift it onto the dispenser, and saying a simple “thank you” or “well done” here and there are all acts of kindness and respect. These might seem trivial, but don’t discount the trivial in life.  Being vigilant about the small things sets the right tone for the big things, sort of like the ”broken windows” theory of policing says about crime. An atmosphere where people seek out opportunities to help with things like the coffee machine is likely an atmosphere where people seek out opportunities to collaborate on solving problems or cover for a vacationing colleague.

The small things lead to the big things.  We take fit incredibly seriously here.  Fit doesn’t mean that we all have to be the same type of person, or that we all have to like the same kinds of food.  But it means that you have to be kind.  You can be totally frank and direct and challenge authority (more about that in a future post) and still be kind and respectful.  Being a Bull in a China Shop doesn’t work here.

And that’s the difference between a pace to work and a community.

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People First

People First

I do not think it’s telling that my fourth post in this series of posts on Return Path’s core values (kickoff post, tag cloud) is something called People First.  Ok, it probably should have been the first post in the series.  To be fair, it is the first value on our list, but for whatever reason, the value about Ownership was top of mind when I decided to create this series.

Anyway, at Return Path,

We believe that people come first

And we aren’t shy about saying it publicly, either.  This came up in a lengthy interview I did with Inc. Magazine last year when we were profiled for winning an award as one of the top 20 small- and mid-sized businesses to work for in America.  After re-reading that article, I went back and tried to find the slide from our investor presentations that I referred to.  I have a few versions of this slide from different points in time, including one that’s simpler (it only has employees, clients, and shareholder on it) but here’s a sample of it:

That pretty much says it all.  We believe that if we have the best and most engaged workforce, we will do the best job at solving our clients’ problems, and if we do that well, our shareholders will win, too.

How does this “people first” mentality influence my/our day-to-day activities?  Here are a few examples:

• We treat all employees well, regardless of level or department.  All employees are important to us achieving our mission – otherwise, they wouldn’t be here.  So we don’t do a lot of things that other companies do like send our top performing sales reps on a boondogle together while the engineers and accountants slave away in the office as second-class citizens.  That would be something you might see in a “sales first” or “customer first” culture
• We fiercely defend the human capital of our organization.  There are two examples I can think of around this point.  First, we do not tolerate abusive clients. Fortunately, they are rare, but more than once over the years either I or a member of my senior team has had to get on the phone with a client and reprimand them, or even terminate their contract with us, for treating one of our employees poorly and unprofessionally. And along the same lines, when all economic hell broke loose in the fall of 2008, we immediately told employees that while we’d be in for a rough ride, our three top priorities were to keep everyone’s job, keep everyone’s compensation, and keep everyone’s health benefits. Fortunately, our business withstood the financial challenges and we were able to get through the financial crisis with those three things intact.
• We walk the walk with regard to employee feedback.  Everyone does employee satisfaction surveys, but we are very rigorous about understanding what areas are making people relatively unhappy (for us, even our poor ratings are pretty good, but they’re poor relative to other ratings), and where in the employee population (office, department, level) those issues lie.  We highlight them in an all-hands meeting or communication, we develop specific action plans around them, and we measure those same questions and responses the next time we do a survey to see how we’ve improved
• We invest in our people.  We pay them fairly well, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  We invest in their learning and growth, which is the lifeblood of knowledge workers.  We do an enormous amount of internal training.  We encourage, support, and pay for outside training and education.  We are very generous with the things that allow our employees to be happy and healthy, from food to fitness to insurance to time off to a flexible environment to allowing them to work from another office, or even remotely, if their lives require them to move somewhere else
• I spend as little time as I possibly can managing my shareholders and as much time as I can with employees and prospective employees.  That doesn’t mean I don’t interact with my Board members – I do that quite a bit.  But it does mean that when I do interact with them, it’s more about what they can do for Return Path and less about reporting information to them.  I do send them a lot of information, but the information flow works well for them and simultaneously minimizes my time commitment to the process:  (1) reporting comes in a very consistent format so that investors know WHAT to expect and what they’re looking at, (2) reporting comes out with a consistently long lead time prior to a meeting so investors know WHEN to expect the information, (3) the format of the information is co-developed with investors so they are getting the material they WANT, and (4) we automate as much of the information production as possible and delegate it out across the organization as much as possible so there’s not a heavy burden on any one employee to produce it
• When we do spend time with customers (which is hopefully a lot as well), we try to spread that time out across a broad base of employees, not just salespeople and account managers, so that as many of our employees can develop a deep enough understanding of what our customers’ lives are like and how we impact them

There are plenty of companies out there who have a “shareholder first” or “customer first” philosophy.  I’m not saying those are necessarily wrong – but at least in our industry, I’ll bet companies like that end up with significantly higher recruiting costs (we source almost half our new hires from existing employee referrals), higher employee churn, and therefore lower revenue and profit per employee metrics at a minimum.  Those things must lead to less happy customers, especially in this day and age of transparency.  And all of those things probably degrade shareholder value, at least over the long haul.

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Peter Principle, Applied to Management

Peter Principle, Applied to Management

My Management by Chameleon Post from a couple weeks ago generated more comments than usual, and an entertaining email thread among my friends and former staff from MovieFone.  One comment that came off-blog is worth summarizing and addressing:

There are those of us who should not manage, whose personalities don’t work in a management context, and there is nothing wrong with not managing.  Also, there promotion to management by merit has always been a curiosity to me. If I am good at my job, why does it mean that I would be good at managing people who do my job? In other words, a good ‘line worker’ doth not a good manager make. I’d prefer to see people adept at being team leads be hired in, to manage, then promotion of someone ill-fitted for such a position be appointed from within. This latter happens far to often, to the detriment of many teams and companies.

For those of you not familiar with the Peter Principle, the Wikipedia definition is useful, but the short of it is that “people are promoted to their level of incompetence, when they stop getting promoted…so in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out their duties.”

Back when I worked in management consulting, I always used to wonder how it was that all the senior people spent all their time selling business.  They hadn’t been trained to sell business.  And a lot of the people great at executing complex analysis and client cases hated selling. Or look at the challenge the other way around:  should a company take its best sales people and turn them into sales managers?

We’ve had numerous examples over the years at Return Path of people who are great at their jobs but make terrible, or at least less great, managers.  The problem with promoting someone into a management role mistakenly isn’t only that you’re taking one of your best producers off “the line.”  The problem is that those roles are coveted because they almost always come with higher comp and more status; and if a promotion backfires, it generally (though not always) dooms the employment relationship.  People don’t like admitting failure, people don’t like “moving backward,” and comp is almost always an issue.

What can be done about this?  We have tried over the years to create a culture where being a senior individual contributor can be just as challenging, fun, rewarding, impactful, and well compensated as being a manager, including getting promotions of a different sort.  But there are limits to this.  One obvious one is at the highest levels of an organization, there can only be one or two people like this (at most) by definition.  A CEO can only have so many direct reports.  But another limit is societal. Most OTHER companies define success as span of control.  You get a funny look if you apply for a job with 15 years of experience and a $100k+ salary yet have never managed anyone before.  After all, the conventional wisdom mistakenly goes, how can you have a big impact on the business if all you do is your own work?

The fact is that management is a different skill.  It needs to be learned, studied, practiced, and reviewed as much as any other line of work.  In most ways, it’s even more critical to have competent and superstar managers, since they impact others all day long.  Obviously, people can be grown or trained into being managers, but the principle of my commenter – and “Peter” – is spot on:  just because you are good at one job doesn’t mean you should be promoted to the next one.

I’m not sure there’s a good answer to this challenge, but I welcome any thoughts on it here.

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Keeping Commitments

Keeping Commitments

Today’s post is another in the series about our 13 core values at Return Path, about making commitments.  The language of our value specifically is:

We believe in keeping the commitments we make, and we communicate obsessively when we can’t

Making and keeping commitments is not a new value – it’s one of Covey’s core principles if nothing else.  I’m sure it has deeper roots throughout the history of mankind.  But for us, this is one of those things that is hard wired into the social contract of working here.  The value is more complicated than some of the other ones we have, and although it is short, it has three components that worth breaking down:

• Making commitments:  Goal setting, whether big company-wide goals, or smaller “I’ll have it to you by Tuesday” goals, is the foundation for a well-run, aligned, and fast-paced organization
  
• Keeping commitments:  If you can’t keep the overwhelming majority of your commitments, you erode the trust of your clients or colleagues and ultimately are unable to succeed
  
• Communicating when commitments can’t be met:  Nobody is perfect.  Sometimes circumstances change, and sometimes external dependencies prevent meeting a goal.  The prior two parts of this value statement are, in my mind, pay to play.  What separates the good from the great is this third piece — owning up loud and clear when you’re in danger of blowing a goal so that those who are counting on you know how to reset their own work and expectations accordingly
  

It’s worth noting on this one that the goal is as relevant EXTERNALLY as it is INTERNALLY.  Internal commitments are key around building an organization that knows how to collaborate and hand work off from group to group.  External commitments — from meeting investor expectations to client deliverables — keep the wheels of commerce flowing.

I’m enjoying articulating these values and hope they’re helpful for both my Return Path audience and my much larger non-Return Path audience.  More to come over time.