Dean Niebuhr: The other thing that's probably different in entrepreneurship is you have very fast growth, often times in number of employees. Some of those are looking at you as a role model for that, but others at the speed at which you grew. I think you went from 2 people to 3 to 5 and all of a sudden you were at 200 individuals in a very short span of time. How do you deal with leadership aspects in that kind of expanded growth phenomenon?

 

Tom Herman: It's very challenging to maintain the culture that you want to maintain. It's not so much the number of employees that are being added, but it's the percentage growth. When you're growing at 100% per month there are a lot of new members of the corporate family; be it a small business or a large business; that need to learn the culture and need to drink the Koolaid as it were and get excited about what the endeavor is. So, I think that's one of the biggest challenges in really fast growth. I think, personally, it's very exciting. I love the process of meeting people and recruiting people. I love the way that, in some ways, my work life and my personal life blur in terms of networking and meeting people and recruiting people and going out on personal travel that morphs into business travel and business travel that always morphs into personal travel as well. Again, the challenge is finding the individuals, recruiting the individuals and then helping those individuals to teach the culture to all of the people that come there after; the culture of hard work, hopefully the culture of a balanced life, hopefully the culture of real quantitative results driven performance metrics and hopefully the culture of creative thinking. And not spinning your wheels, but focusing your time in a really productive manner and working 8, 9, 10 excellent productive hours instead of 12, 13, 14, 15 hours of wasted time and not making people feel like it's a face-time culture where your performance is based on how often you're there and the boss notices who's there at 7 o'clock at night or 8 o'clock at night or who's there at 6 in the morning. It's really about what you get done, not how much time you spend in the office.