A Chat With Paal Gisholt, President/CEO, SmartPak Equine

And so we spend a lot of time working on defining the values that are important to us as a business. We tell new employees about them; we celebrate them through awards. We spend each quarterly meeting discussing a particular value and examples of things that people have done in the organization that really illustrate those values. As a result, we don’t have extensive scripting of our telephone interactions. We give people a lot more authority and autonomy, a lot more control over their day-to-day existence. And it frees them to perform at very high levels and to grow incredibly fast. When a business is growing very fast, it’s like a big sucking sound pulling people up in terms of responsibility and authority. And if you’re not growing people very, very fast within your organization, you’re going to hit the wall in terms of being able to do all of the things you need to do to keep the wheels on the wagon. And so, by managing the team through culture and a set of expectations as opposed to micromanagement of exactly what needs to happen at every moment and every interaction, it’s a lot easier for us, and it’s a lot more fun for our people. And they grow fast and develop and can take on more and more responsibilities. And that’s a really nice element in terms of creating a career path for people.