By background, Mike and I are both technical folks. We went to the same school, graduated from the same program. While we both speak conversational English (as opposed to off putting tech), neither of us has great expertise in marketing. Opinions? Yes. Expertise? Not so much. We have known for years that we would eventually need help in sharing Rustici Software’s products and abilities with the world. We just knew that finding the right person would be a magnitude more difficult than finding the right developer.
So, what did we do? We punted. We just kept finding great developers, handing over our development responsibilities to them, and taking on more of the marketing work ourselves.
A few months ago, I was perusing Seth Godin’s blog as I often do, and I came upon this post about his alternative MBA program. First off, the program itself sounded incredibly interesting. Second, I came upon someone’s bizarre concept of hiring a boss. This was intriguing. Bold even. So, I clicked through.
Can you say SERENDIPITY? (My mother certainly can; it’s among her favorite words!)
I kid you not… Mike and I both read Susan’s site cover to cover and immediately knew that she got the single most important thing to us… tone. SCORM we can teach. Tone, in our book, is something that has to be innately understood. We were going to be asking someone to help us market our company, and it was fundamentally important to us that her voice, her ethos, be consistent with ours.
So, we started to work our way through Susan’s well defined 10 step process. By about step 3, everyone in our offices knew that I was pretty excited. By about step 7, my dad was wondering what this was all about. (No, Dad, hiring process aren’t exactly what they were when you worked at the industrial brush company.)
And finally, step 10, where Susan comes to work, is set to occur August 24th. We’re thrilled. Sincerely. Susan is going to be helping us define, market, and evangelize the SCORM Cloud and the applications that get built around it. We hope you’ll come check up on Susan, Rustici Software, and what we build together over the next months and years.
Kudos to Susan on a bold approach to finding the right job. Kudos for voicing what we could expect of her and what we couldn’t. Kudos on her great taste in bosses. 😉
