How Growing Up on a Grape Farm Prepared Me to Lead a Tech Company

What comes to mind when you try to picture a future tech CEO? Do you picture a lone programmer working out of his humble garage in Palo Alto, bent over a motherboard with a screwdriver in a pair of Levi’s 501s? Or do you imagine some Ivy Leaguer building the next major social media platform in his dorm while his roommates are busy going to parties and trying out for the rowing team?

No matter what you’re thinking of, I’ll bet it’s not a teenage kid harvesting grapes in rural Washington State. But that’s exactly how my career started, and I’m glad it did.

Before I was the CEO of an industry-leading power dialer for outbound sales teams, I spent my days helping out on my parents’ concord grape farm: a 700-acre property located a few hours southeast of Seattle.

Pruning vines, managing canopy growth and shearing clusters might not seem analogous to living in Silicon Valley or going to Harvard. But these experiences taught me some of the most memorable and valuable lessons of my life.

Now it’s time to harvest those lessons and bring them to you. Here’s what growing grapes in my youth taught me about how to grow a company.

A time to plant and a time to harvest

One lesson from my childhood that I come back to over and over again is that growth happens in cycles. It’s rarely consistent and linear. You have to plant seeds before you can reap the fruits of your labor.

Concord grapes are normally harvested at the end of the summer or early in the fall. It’s an immensely satisfying time of year. You can tell they’re ready to come off the vine because they turn a distinctive, dusky shade of purple that makes them stand out like precious stones in the early morning sunlight. Dawn is the best time to collect them, just after the morning dew dries.

But that means you spend the rest of your year working, and working hard. Grapes don’t grow by themselves. Winter is for pruning and cutting back dead wood so that your fruit-producing canes are free to grow. Spring is when you’ll maintain your trellises and monitor your grapes for weeds or signs of disease. And canopy management will eat up most of your summer as you remove excess leaves to increase the amount of sun and airflow your crops are getting.

That takes a huge amount of effort, especially when you’re doing it for 700 acres. But every phase is an essential part of producing the end product.

The same thing applies to PhoneBurner. Tech companies that are market leaders face immense pressure to innovate. But we can’t just deploy new features all the time if we want to grow the platform sustainably. For instance, we could have rushed into parallel dialing to help customers dial contacts faster. Instead, we focused on making our single-line power dialer faster and easier to use. It may not chase vanity metrics, but it helps teams have more real conversations while protecting their caller ID reputation.

Decisions like that were our way of tending the vineyard — being deliberate about where we invested our time so we could strengthen the parts of the platform our customers rely on most.

Protecting your crop as a lesson in risk management

Grapes and technology are both more vulnerable than you might think, and grapes aren’t the only thing that grew on my parents’ farm. If we weren’t careful, we also got black rot and mildew. Keeping our grapes safe meant constantly taking steps to prevent those threats and mitigate the damage they caused whenever they did manage to show up.

Outbound calling has its own version of crop disease. Phone numbers can get mislabeled as spam, blocked by carriers or filtered before they ever reach the person you’re trying to call. When that happens, it doesn’t matter how strong your team or message is — your calls simply stop getting through.

That’s why PhoneBurner released ARMOR® and was among the first to focus heavily on number reputation, answer rates and Responsible Communications™ practices. If your numbers aren’t healthy, your calls won’t reach people. And if your calls don’t reach people, nothing else in your outbound strategy has a chance to work.

Growth and sustainability

Finally, I want to push back against a narrative I hear about all too often in tech: that successful entrepreneurship looks like getting in on the ground floor of an idea when it’s profitable, making a lot of money quickly and then getting out before it inevitably collapses. I have never believed in this kind of approach to business, and I never will.

None of the really successful people I’ve met in my lifetime have been flash-in-the-pan founders. The Forbes business empire is 108 years old. Steve Forbes, whose advice I once asked for at a book signing in my twenties, never staked his family’s legacy on a quick cash grab. The risks he took were calculated to help him continue his stewardship of what the generations before him had started.

I don’t work full-time on the family farm anymore, although I try to help out whenever I’m back in the area. But working there years ago helped me understand the value of building things that last, and that’s the attitude I’ve applied to all of my business ventures — from PhoneBurner to the DRIVE (Data Reporting Information and Visualization Exchange) Conference at the University of Washington, which I founded in 2011 and which is still going strong today.

Instant gratification is nice, but it’s not a plan for the future. The greatest achievements come from putting in time and effort over years, decades, or even generations.