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Course: Entrepreneurship > Unit 1
Lesson 11: Dave Smith - CEO & Founder of TekScape ITShifting from Loyalty to Accountability
When Dave Smith came to the harsh realization and he alone was in charge of his future, he took a resourceful route to become an expert in his field. Mixing the desire to make it with the imagination to fake it, he went to great lengths to connect with TekScape IT customers and make them believe that his tiny organization was big enough to solve their trickiest problems. Created by Kauffman Foundation.
Want to join the conversation?
- He says people were more willing to tell them what they really thought when they didn't know he was the CEO. So he pretended he wasn't the CEO. I don't see how falsehoods like that could be beneficial enough to make them an acceptable practice. And I don't see how being upfront about who he was could have been detrimental enough to to make lying the prime option. Is this commonly done?(6 votes)
- Ceo or coordinator but each party has a say in fact theyre v 2mngmnt 3drctr all mntres synhcruoain(1 vote)
- Dave mentioned about the need to 'cut' those who were close to him since he was young, given there is a need to get people who have more accountability over loyalty.
Learning from this and starting a new business/venture, would you say to initially get people who are competent and accountable over those who are close to you?(4 votes)- i always feel so hard to work with someone who is close to me because maybe i can't separate between work and private life(2 votes)
- Where do you draw the line on infrastructure frugality? At what point did you get an office and buy chairs?(4 votes)
- What was the criteria used to select CEO's to speak for these videos?(3 votes)
- That's a great question! I think it was simply based on their availability and their own personal desire to share their story with us. I am glad they shared!(1 vote)
- I appreciate the can-do attitude, but if you are lying to your customers to make them think you are bigger than you are, for me that crosses an ethical boundary. If I was a customer and learned that was your practice, my first thought would be, what else are you lying to me about?(3 votes)
Video transcript
- Hi my name's Dave Smith,
the name of the company is TekScape IT. When you're starting a company you have to make certain decisions. Do I get VC capital? Do I get somebody, you
know an angel investor? Or do I bootstrap it
and build it on my own? I did it on my own because
I had a technical expertise. My mom she's a great lady
but she would always tell me like make sure you can afford it, make sure you can do this,
make sure you can do that. So she was always very concerned about me. She didn't realize until
three and a half four years into the business that
alright you're actually good. She would send me oven mitts you know to make sure I had stuff for
my apartment and so forth. My business card said
Director of Services. I went to a customer and
the customer said to me, "I want to talk to your manager." I said tell me what your complaints are and I'll talk to the manager
and I'll come back to you. He's like, "Look the prices are too high." And I'm like alright what do
you need to get the price at? And he's like, "If I got
it here I'd be happy." So I said give me a couple
days, I'll talk to him, I'll come back to you
or I'll bring him in. So I came back to him and I
said look he says he'll do it. He's like I'm so happy that
you talked to your manager for me. I had to present myself as
not the CEO because I needed the ability to negotiate with people. If I was the last stop, it
would've been a very difficult conversation but if I had
presented myself as somebody in the middle, they were
much more open and it gave me what I needed to know in
order to close the deal. I had two people that worked
for me out of a studio apartment, we did conference
calls in our office and one of us would be in the closet,
the other one would be in a bathroom and we'd be
pretending as if we were in different locations
in the United States. How's Boston today Paul? I paid $2000 a month in rent
and sold 1.3 million dollars in revenue. I knew we were going
to deliver what we were going to deliver, but if they
knew how big I was sitting at a glass table with three
of us around it, we had folding chairs because I didn't
want to buy the $250 chairs. I had a $75 Target chair in my apartment. I had one that was padded and
one that wasn't so whoever got there first got the
padded one, the other one got the other one. My initial team were people
that I could trust or that I worked with in previous
engagements or people that I had went to high school with or
people that I was best friends with, what I learned over
the period of time is that there's a certain point
where loyalty has to change to accountability. And so that was a very huge
shift in my business where I had to switch from this
loyalty to accountability for the people that are
friends of mine since I was 15 years old. But I needed them to be
accountable for the product that they were delivering
and that shift was hard. I'm harder on the people that
I knew before the business than the people I hire after
the business 'cause I have way higher expectations for these people. That's the fight and the people
that are here are successful because they fought through that.