Virtual Causeway is a leading provider of integrated sales and marketing services for the tech industry. The company’s President, Rick Endrulat, started his business with two other partners after experiencing several acquisitions and mergers at Sybase. He realized the need for smaller companies to have access to enterprise sales and marketing strategies, particularly when it comes to process, infrastructure, and managing data.

For Endrulat, spotting potential in new hires and finding the right fit for them has been an asset to his company in terms customer of success and company growth. “As a technology sales and marketing firm, people assume that we recruit only business and technology grads and experience,” Endrulat says. “We find, however, that arts degrees offer a certain worldview and communication skills that are very complementary to our business.”

Building a strong team is only the first step in running a successful small business. Endrulat also relies on cloud technology to help everyone at Virtual Causeway stay focused on goals and connected to their tasks at hand. “I am a strong proponent of technology,” he says. “I find that I live insalesforce.com for most of my day. I try to use it as much to help manage my sales and marketing activities as well as other project management. And I’m a huge believer in building a dashboard culture in your organization — so every employee has relevant dashboards in Salesforce that they view consistently to help manage to their goals based on progress to-date.”

Virtual Causeway’s winning combination of a strong team paired with real-time CRM business insights allows it to deliver the valuable services and expertise its clients have come to expect. Read on to find out more about how Endrulat prioritizes company initiatives, and his advice on how to avoid the “tyranny of the urgent.”

What made you decide to make the jump to your company today?

I worked at a large enterprise database/software company (Sybase — now part of SAP) — and had been there for more than seven years. We had gone through a few different acquisitions and mergers, so it was an interesting place to be. But I was realizing I wanted something different. I had worked in different areas of sales and marketing and had a lot of fun building teams, products, solutions, and departments. Plus, I had the chance to work with some really smart people, and I learned a lot about high-tech sales and marketing, and, even more importantly, the need for solid processes, data, and infrastructure.

So, I started thinking about where I wanted my career to go, and realized that a lot of the cool stuff I was doing at Sybase I would really enjoy bringing to others… so I started Virtual Causeway with two other partners. We found a couple initial clients, and started from there. I made the jump immediately. It was a little nerve-racking, but my wife was very supportive and the steady income earner for a while. Plus, I really enjoyed being able to bring some of the big company sales and marketing thinking to smaller clients. Every day I see how we’re helping our clients and I feel proud of what we can do for them.

How do you balance the multiple hats that you are required to wear?

Depending on the day, that can be tough. As someone running a small-to-medium business, your duties and responsibilities can change on a daily basis. I always joke that — especially during those first couple years of business — I would be running a marketing call with a billion-dollar software client, doing a press interview, then fixing the plumbing in the bathroom. Now that we are bigger and have a structured management team, it’s a little easier to balance activities. Having a strong support staff and management team is critical — this allows you to distribute tasks and priorities easily.

What are the top three company priorities that you focus on?

My role encompasses a few key priorities/tasks:

1. Manage the overall business health: That includes many dashboards and reports pulled from Salesforce, everything from financial performance to team performance, client retention, etc.
2. Keep us relevant: As a services organization, it’s always important to understand where the market is going, and ensure that the company’s solutions and services are still providing the same value to our clients.
3. Keep our clients happy: We have great account and project managers here, but I still stay extremely involved in overseeing our client project delivery. This also helps me stay on top of trends and get some very specific and timely feedback from our clients.

Many of these items are managed within Salesforce, and we have many custom executive dashboards and reports that I use daily to manage the business.

How do you prioritize initiatives? Walk us through how you determine where you invest time, people, and dollars.

To prioritize, I use a technique that I learned from a non-profit company where I served on the Board of Directors (Sustainable Waterloo Region — Environmental nonprofit). Based on our overall corporate objectives, priorities, and strategy, we developed a scorecard; a checklist of items that tie back to our corporate priorities and goals. Every time we have a new initiative we are evaluating, we run it against the scorecard. If it doesn’t align we don’t move forward.

It’s really simple. This helps us vet new initiatives very quickly, and only those that pass the scorecard move to the next stage and get any kind of resource attention.

What are the characteristics that you look for when hiring top talent?

From the beginning, we’ve always looked at hiring in the following way: While we may have a specific role we are hiring for, we look for a candidate’s potential. Do they have the right skills? Will they fit with the culture? Do they have the potential to grow with the organization? Do they have a positive attitude and motivation?

We’ve gone through this process many times in the past, and sometimes hired someone that wasn’t right for that specific role, but was right for the organization — and then grew their role as time went by. That is how two people from my management team were hired and promoted very quickly from within. Sometimes, we may not hire for the role to which they applied, but found and built a role that better matched them and benefited the organization overall.

What are the keys to your company’s successful growth?

Virtual Causeway started in late 2000/early 2001, focused specifically on working with technology companies. Yes, right after the tech bubble burst. However, we were still able to start and grow in an environment that wasvery challenging. This to me shows how our services and expertise are integral to a company’s success. We were able to see a market-need and niche, focus our efforts on serving that need, building our customer base, then expanding from that.

We’ve continued to do that over the years, especially when entering new industries. First, establish a beachhead by getting a few reference-able and recognizable customers. Then use those customers and leverage those references to find other customers in that segment. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

What is the one piece of advice that you want to share with executives of other small businesses?

Make sure you keep an eye on the longer-term goals and bigger picture of your business. Getting too caught up in the daily tactics can very quickly increase stress levels and cause you to lose sight of your organization’s overall goals. An advisory board, or at least a couple of strategic mentors, can help you keep your eye on the bigger prize. Even if it’s just a 20-minute phone conversation or a coffee — having someone outside the organization to talk to and bounce ideas off of can be a great resource and a great way to stay focused on the right things for your business!