Let Customers Rain In Get out your umbrella--hiring a rainmaker can make profits pour.
By Mark Henricks •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Michael Lacey is in the business of IT consulting, not creating weather. But the 38-year-old Plymouth, Minnesota, entrepreneur knows that hiring employees who can make it rain is critical to the continued success of Digineer Inc., the 87-person company he founded in 1998. Three years ago, Lacey brought on a new salesperson he felt would be a rainmaker--someone with a marked ability to attract and retain customers.
The company's rapid expansion since then--sales growth of more than 80 percent a year to the current level of $14 million--is due largely to the direct and indirect effects of adding that rainmaker, Lacey says. "If I had hired another salesperson, a good salesperson but not a great one, we would have grown," he says, "but I don't think it would have been as explosively."
