Team Building: The Carrier Personality

Do opposites attract in the mobile world?  When it comes to start-up companies and the carriers, nothing could be more like oil and water.  It’s like the elephant and the mouse:  big, slow and impossible to push around vs. small, fast moving, and nimble.  Each of these business animals requires a different set of personalities to operate and be successful.

Carriers (especially the ones in the U.S.) are blanketed with governmental rules and regulations.  Which means they are not too far removed from the same culture that runs our bureaucratic-heavy and lobbyist-influenced government.   That also puts them in a separate category from the more common, free-market enterprise corporations.  Therefore, the same rules don’t apply for engaging in business with the carriers.

A start-up, or a small company with a new and disruptive technology, runs by a different set of rules…or maybe they even make up their own rules as they go.  This breeds a culture and personality type that is counter to that of a carrier’s.

Young, slightly arrogant, shoot-from-the-hip start-up types can send the wrong messages to the carriers.  Yet, hire a typical carrier type of personality into a start-up, and it may not be the best fit.  So, how do you find the right personality to successfully deliver into the carriers? What do you look for? And by “deliver”, consider anyone that is client facing/engaging within your company:  Sales, Sales Engineering, Professional Services, Product Management, Marketing, etc.

Ultimately, it’s about finding the right balance of experience.  The types that I commonly see fail or get rejected in a mobile start-up are on the right and on the left.  On the right, are those with substantial start-up experience and limited carrier or enterprise exposure.  The ones on the left have almost exclusive enterprise and/or carrier employment backgrounds.

The ones with limited carrier exposure may not know the carrier politics, technical workings, and who makes or influences decisions.  Conversely, individuals with no startup experience and coming from an exclusively large enterprise background, may be used to things moving at a different rate, have access to more substantial resources, and used to a very different work culture that they may not be able to adjust to from.

What might an ideal candidate look like then?  It’s all about balance.  Someone must show that they can thrive and be successful in a smaller company.  That means having the ability to wear more than a few hats; able to put up and manage often chaotic decision making processes; being extremely resourceful to get the job done; and in many cases…going beyond the typical corporate 9 to 5.

Yet, they also need to bring a bit (a lot?) of the carrier personality.  This is someone who can be buttoned up and professional; very comfortable with a more bureaucratic org. structure and decision making process; knowledgeable of carrier grade technologies and infrastructure requirements; and can be a corporate peer to those they need to interact with on the carrier side.

They might have a background that is a mix of start-up and enterprise employers.  Their background should show that they were successful in a smaller company(ies), and not something they tried and then had to go running back to the enterprise environment.   Some of the start-up experience should have been within a recent time period as well.

Exclusive start-up experience could work, but it’s a bit more risky than having a mix.  If someone does have almost all start-up in their background, they should be able to show a long timeline of successfully delivering into the carriers and building relationships or doing business in that environment.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule.  But the experience I’ve had recruiting for mobile start-ups, has is proving out these guidelines.

On a side note, it’s not just your employees that will enable success with the carriers.  The stability of your company and longevity of your product plays a huge role.  Since the carriers are very conservative in nature, your offering and company MUST convey a perception that they will be around for the long haul.  Your technology should be relatively future-proof.  The carriers not only require your offering provide a proven ROI, they also need to know that the costs and efforts of deployment into their vast sets of IT, systems, network, handset, and base station ecosystems will not be in vain.  So, even though you may have the most disruptive technology since the Internet itself, you will still have many obstacles to overcome in order to gain acceptance by the carriers.