Sharing an Ambitious Vision Exposed Velocify’s Path to Growth

El Segundo, Calif. – If Velocify Chief Executive Nick Hedges has his way, sales people awaiting leads from the boss that mostly won’t pay off, as in David Mamet’s famous play Glengarry Glen Ross, will soon become a thing of the past.

Although most of the more than 1,500 companies that Velocify has helped have excellent marketing teams generating many leads and sales opportunities, “the trouble is the sales team can’t keep up with the amount of volume that is coming in” weakening sales prospects, he explains.

Velocify software collects information from emails, online queries and incoming calls and analyzes what prospective customers are interested in. That data is then matched against the sales teams’ past performance and their individual attributes to make intelligent decisions about how an opportunity should be handled, Hedges says. This gives the sales staff control over the entire process.

Velocify currently has some 130 employees, but Hedges plans to double that number within the next 12 months.

The company had $18.5 million in revenue in 2012. “We should come in over $30 million by next year,” predicts the former Fulbright Scholar with a Harvard Business School MBA, because Velocify is “growing at 50 percent to 60 percent year-on-year at the moment, and we actually see that growth is accelerating as well.”

Hedges, who joined the company in 2008 after stints at Bain and Company, Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) and as an account manager at Ogilvy and Mather Advertising, was named CEO in 2011. Under his guidance during the past three years the company has experienced 185 percent growth.

He says the first order of business was to meet regularly with all employees and share his ambitious vision for the company. He realized that could foster that vision only if he had excited, ambitious people willing to step up and do what was necessary to grow the company. “Not everyone had the same level of ambition and I really needed to ensure that people in the company were focused in on what we needed to do,” he says, and those who didn’t buy into the vision left the company.

The next step was to raise capital, “not because we necessarily needed it right then but I knew that an ambitious vision of how to get to $1 billion when we were only a $10 million company was a somewhat risky proposition for most people who had got used to a slower growth company,” Hedges explains.
After raising $15.25 million from two venture capital firms and with employees onboard, Hedges was confident that Velocify could afford to be bold and take a few risks. His next step was to realign the company culture based on some new guiding principles.

“We started hiring differently,” he says. Velocify now uses a matrix that has skills and experience on one axis and company culture on the other. “One of the mandates I set was that we would never hire someone who we thought was not a good cultural fit.” So half of each employment interview focuses on the candidate’s ability to do the job, the other half centers on whether the candidate fits within the company culture.

A second principle: All employees have equity in the private company, but they needed to act as if they had a big ownership stake and that means “we embrace ambiguity,” Hedges says, because in a high-growth environment “you have to have folks who are willing to be flexible and change and make decisions when there is limited information.”

Hedges also fostered the principle that dissent is an obligation. “When people disagree they need to speak up. If I say something and it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t matter what someone’s title is, they have to stand up for what they believe in.”