This FinTech Company Sets an Internal Goal for 100 Percent Growth Each Year. Here's Why. Failing at ambitious goals is often better than succeeding at small ones, according to the company's founder and CEO.
By Nick Dimengo
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TouchSuite caters to restaurants, food trucks, salons, spas, retail establishments, festivals and businesses on-the-go, all through one thing: point-of-sale systems that are fully integrated with affordable payment processing services. According to Sam Zietz, the fintech company's founder and CEO, the brand's success lies in empowering employees to think like entrepreneurs and a constant push for creative ideas.
Entrepreneur spoke with Zietz about his definition of success and company culture.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What does your company do?
We are a financial technology company focused on the payment space. At our core, we enable businesses to accept credit cards for payment, then provide the technology to facilitate it. Recently we acquired a company called Grubber, which in my view is the most disruptive thing going on in the payment space right now. It's a tool for the hospitality space, but one of the most notable parts of the company is their self-ordering kiosks. For restaurants, stadiums, arenas and casinos, it's a complete gamechanger, because very rarely do you have a technology or an investment you can make that dramatically decreases expenses while increasing revenue and improves customer experience all at the same time. Usually, you only get one.
How do you define success?
I believe in that famous quote about shooting for the moon; if we come up short, we hit the stars, and things are still pretty good. We have very lofty expectations of where to go. If you set low expectations and meet them, then that's all you get. Internally, it's our goal to grow at 100 percent each year. If we fall short and only grow at 50 or 60 percent, then we'll take it on the chin and gear up for the next year. If we shoot for 8 percent and hit 10 percent, well, that's not all that exciting.
How important is your company culture?
Company culture starts at core values, and that starts for us when we hire people. We hire 50 percent on aptitude and 50 percent on core value fit. In fact, during the interview process, we have questions that are designed to highlight our core values, and assuming somebody fits both, we bring them on board. Somebody could be the number-one person in the country at what they do, but if they're not a core value fit, we will not bring them into the organization. I like to use a lot of football analogies, so here's one: Someone might be a great player on the field, but they're not a great fit for the team in the locker room. Certain coaches have key players who set that culture, and business is no different.
How do apply your company's core values into your work and culture?
Our mission is to empower entrepreneurs, and that drives people to want to work with our organization. Our clients and the business owners we work with are entrepreneurs, as are our partners. We talk about our core values each day in meetings. We also encourage people to put a spotlight on their coworkers when they do something that embraces our core values, and then we have a little toy that we give out. One of our core values is having the passion to win, so we give out footballs. Another one is having no excuses, so we've got one of those little exercise bands. My favorite one of our values is that problems are opportunities, so after we solve a problem, maybe we identify it as a potential product that we go to market with.
What differentiates you from your competitors?
It breaks down to people, process and products. On the people side, it's how we hire and we train: by running a lot of front-end processes to ensure we bring on the top talent. We spend a lot more time on the initial process to make sure we have the right people and that they're in the right position to do the right things. Process is important because everything we do has to be scalable. It takes a lot of time to figure something out and make sure it runs smoothly, so if it's not scalable, why invest all that time and energy? Finally, we want to be ahead of the curve as far as innovation so that when people are looking for the latest and greatest, our products that are at the forefront of that.
What advice would you give an aspiring entrepreneur?
Make sure that no matter what you go into, you have an extreme passion for it. It's that passion that gives other people purpose, which others are looking for in life. If you're passionate about what you're doing, others will want to join in or follow.
When things go wrong — and they always go wrong — that passion will allow you to keep getting back up. If you don't have passion for what you're doing and it's just a paycheck, the first time there's a roadblock, you're going to think: That's it. I'm out of here. I'm done.
