Courtesy of H.Bloom Zach Brown, SEED's first graduate.One year ago we spoke with Bryan Burkhart about H.Bloom, a luxury floral delivery service with a Netflix-style subscription model.
At the time, Mr. Burkhart, a co-founder, said staffing was his biggest challenge. Aiming for ambitious growth â€" 25 cities in five years â€" he created a six-month leadership program for nurturing young talent. He called it SEED, for Start-up Education and Entrepreneurial Development.
H.Bloom has since expanded from three markets â€" New York City, Chicago and the District of Columbia â€" to five, adding San Francisco in February and Dallas this month. The company grew to 75 full-time employees, from 38. It raised another $10 million in angel and venture capital, Mr. Burkhart said, for a total of $18 million. And it now serves nearly 500 corporate customers â€" more than twice as many as a year ago â€" that account for 85 percent of revenue. (Here's a story about other Web businesses that use subscription models.)
When we checked in early last fall, Zach Brown, the first graduate of SEED, had just been dispatched to Chicago. Now the 25-year-old is running a 12-person operation there and the city is on track to bring in $1 million in annual revenue, said Mr. Burkhart. We followed up with a few questions to learn more about the training program:Â
Many start-ups rely on informal mentoring to train young employees. Why set up a dedicated leadership program?
Developing talent is one of the most crucial things for a company. In order to do it well, you have to set up a formal pro gram that provides a pathway for people, along with training and practice. Our head of talent, Rebekah Rombom, finds the very best folks to bring into the SEED program. She makes sure they go through operational training â€" a rotation with a market manager â€" and classroom training with me, and then sets up the tests to evaluate if they are ready to graduate.
How do you find talent?
Rebekah is a prolific user of LinkedIn Advanced Search. There's a set of attributes â€" not experience, but sort of personality types â€" we look for. We essentially run a sales campaign where we build a big database of people that we think fit the profile. We send them LinkedIn e-mails. We expect about a 20 percent response rate. That's not all people saying, “Hey, I'm interested in talking to you,†but just responding to us. Then we prosecute a campaign, starting with cold, first-round phone interviews. For the people who make it through that, we go and have a battery of in-person interviews, where they meet with a whole host of different folks.
What attributes do you look for?
The first is work ethic. These folks come in early in the morning to make sure deliveries are going out. They're essentially on call all the time.
The second is intellectual flexibility. We don't hire people from our industry. What we're doing is a completely new paradigm and, frankly, how we do it has changed every year. The folks who get exhilaration from hearing “it's changing all the time†and “you can contribute to how we do it going forward,†those are the types we want.
Third, we look for natural leaders. Every market that we open is a start-up. All start-ups are very hard. A leader demonstrates by doing but also is proactive, exuding a positive energy to pick up everyone else when there is a tough day. We look for athletes, student leaders, people who have demonstrated leadership quality in the past. And then the SEED program allows us to vet whether they truly exhibit that in the work place.
What kind of results are you getting?
We've had some really great early success. We have five graduates of the SEED program, all relatively young, who are now off managing markets. Only two have not moved on to manage a full market on their own. Of those two, one was a terrific employee and still works with us here in our New York market. He just wasn't the right fit to manage an entire market. And only one is no longer with the company.
Have you found any downsides to hiring young people?
For almost all of them, this is the first time they've been part of a fast-growing start-up. It's stressful, and it's hard, and it's an emotional roller coaster. No one had experienced that before with the exception maybe of my co-founder, Sonu Panda, and myself.
For some of them, this is their first job. So we have to say basic things like, “This is what we suggest you wear to work†and “When you are interacting with the general manager of the Sofitel Hotel, this is the sort of language, English language, that you need to use. It's not the smiley face, the sort of thing you might tweet or text.â€
Moreover, these are folks who have never managed people before. So just this year, we started formal management training. We go through the process of “You've got to do one-on-ones every week and give candid feedback, and here's how you do that. Here's how you do recruiting.â€
We think we can overcome these things. We think that it's better than hiring folks who have lots of experience but are set in their ways.
Do you worry about losing employees after putting in all that training?
Part of the reason they enter the SEED program is because ultimately they want to run their own businesses. And we acknowledge the fact that someday some of these folks are going to want to move on and do other things. And we'll applaud them, be excited for them, try to help them in any way we can. If given the opportunity, we will invest in their new businesses.
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