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365 Retail Markets was founded in 2008 with the ambitious goal of revolutionizing the vending industry. In the 7 years since, the company has proceeded to do just that with innovative solutions and an eye towards the future. As Director of Product at 365 Retail Markets, Ryan McWhirter is responsible for maintaining this tremendous pace of innovation, iteration, and growth. In this latest “Small Business Spotlight” interview, he shares the importance of prioritizing what matters most and always moving forward.
1. What made you decide to start/make the jump to your company today?
365 Retail Markets built an organic image of innovation and excitement, and that drew me to meet with their two principals at the time. After confirming that the hype was real, I distinctly remember asking what their growth plans were, leaving a larger company at the time. “We are skipping medium and going straight to large” said Matt Caston, now our Chief Strategy Officer. The conviction and confidence of that statement was enough to make me jump onboard immediately, and most importantly that statement has held true, if not exceeded.
2. How do you balance the multiple hats that you are required to wear?
My advice for anyone juggling multiple roles is to schedule time on your calendar to focus on each role every week. Depending on the roles, you may need more time for one than the other, but having that time to take stock of where things are on each plate is crucial. For non-critical requests, I let them stack up and don’t typically complete them until I have 3 things to do, letting me batch my work and focus on my main role the majority of the time.
3. What are the top three company priorities that you focus on?
365 Retail Markets is a pioneering SaaS company. Therefore, our mission and subsequent top priorities focus on making sure our products are scalable, secure and integrated. When I joined 365 Retail Markets in 2012, we had about 60 or so kiosks out in the field. We now have well over 3,200! Obviously we’ve put a lot of thought into scalability. On the security side, we’re proud to be one of the few in our industry who is PCI Certified, handling millions of credit card transactions a month. Lastly, we realize our products are part of a larger ecosystem, thus we’ve led the way in creating industry standard API s that interconnect our products to the rest of the industry.
4. How do you prioritize initiatives? Walk us through how you determine where you invest time, people, and dollars.
When you’ve grown as fast as we have, you quickly begin to receive requests from every side to suit specific needs. These can range from minor enhancements all the way to wholly new products. To ensure we are delivering meaningful changes to the masses, we’ve continued to refine our idea funnel, and will be introducing more ways to collect customer feedback in 2015. Today, the majority of customer feedback originates from our focus group status calls (a collection of top customers), trade shows, and emails to our Innovation Team. We are also big admirers of the Salesforce Idea Exchange, and look forward to implementing a similar interactive community in the future.
5. Walk us through the characteristics that you look for when hiring top talent.
We have an incredible team at 365 Retail Markets! When we look at bringing new team members on board, we look for those who have directly interacted with customers in the past, those who have worked on complex projects and those who mesh well with 365’s culture of innovation.
6. What are the keys to your company’s successful growth?
Our company values are built around something we call iCASH (Innovation, Collaboration, Accountability, Service and Happiness). When you look at each of those words, each one represents a focus that led us to our successful growth. Through collaboration and accountability, we continue to deliver exceptional innovation and service which leads to happy customers. Our exponential growth underscores how real that happiness is, and our commitment to these values is central to every all-hands meeting within our organization. We even pass out mugs (one for each letter) every month to those team members who exhibit each value the best.
7. What is the one piece of advice that you want to share with executives of other small businesses?
Regarding Salesforce specifically, most executives buy-in, login for the first time, look at the tabs across their home page, then draw a shortsighted conclusion about what Salesforce is as a product. What’s driven our growth is the realization that Salesforce is a platform, and not just a product. I’ve seen the AppExchange begin to tease that realization out of other Salesforce users over the past couple years, and every Dreamforce is becoming more and more robust with complimentary add-ons that make our investment in Salesforce much more valuable. As a customer company, we run our entire business in Salesforce, and can’t imagine how we would have skyrocketed to such heights without it!
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