No Vision All Drive, 3rd Edition

Chapter 7 Growing the Company

After TransCare we were off to the races. We grew steadily and faced a steady stream of new operational problems. We referred to the sales process as “both feet on the brakes,” because if we sold too much we weren’t able to install and support the new customers. We felt strongly that customer satisfaction was too important to give up.

Our growth was pretty steady over the years, both in terms of the number of employees and the amount of sales. By 1999 we were riding pretty high. We had finally penetrated Rural/Metro, the second-largest ambulance company in the United States, and they were purchasing several systems for their operations nationwide. Meanwhile, the Y2K scare was causing customers that had older CAD systems to want to upgrade. We played up the fact that our system was conceived and written for Windows and had always been Y2K compliant. That certainly helped our sales.

One of the painful lessons we learned early on was that management by consensus doesn’t work. In the early days whenever there was an important decision to be made, we’d gather everyone around and talk it out. As we grew, it became impossible to get everyone to agree on any one decision. Then invariably, when we’d decide on something, those who had taken the opposing view felt that they weren’t being listened to. This drove the need to set up a good structure with separate groups having responsibility and accountability for decisions.

We felt great that we were able to ...