It All Starts with Culture and Communication: Interview with Jason Hogg, Founder of Revolution Money
I recently went one-on-one with Jason Hogg. Jason founded Revolution Money, a secure payment card company which he sold to American Express for $300 million five years later. Jason is a former FBI agent, an Executive in Residence at Great Hill Partners, and an advisor to G8RSkin.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here?
Jason: Before we get started, I want to thank you for affording me the opportunity to talk to you and share my experiences. Looking back, I would say that I’ve been fortunate to work with many incredibly talented people, each of whom played critical roles in achieving our shared vision and goals. I’ve been equally fortunate to have fantastic support on the home front from my wife, two boys, and a handful of close childhood friends that are always there for me. The journey has been filled with a lot of long hours and hard work that’s been softened by the people in my life that have great senses of humor and high-motor personalities. It enabled us to have fun, some great laughs at our mistakes and keep our perspective and egos in check along the way.
Adam: What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Jason: Oh, where to begin. The quick answer is ALL of the failures, setbacks, and challenges were instrumental. My Dad had this great expression that I’ll clean up for your readers, “if you muck up, buck up.” Any progress or success depends on taking a deep look at why you failed, understanding it, and changing your behavior so it doesn’t happen again. My first big mistake came in the first year of my career when I didn’t double-check the return address on a direct mail piece we were sending out. It was the first time we used first-class mail, which gets returned, versus third-class mail which does not. This caused thousands of returned mail pieces to go into the sorting machines that opened applications. In short, I broke all of the machines because I lacked attention to detail and didn’t take the time to understand the upstream and downstream effect of my actions. Following the ethos of owning your mistakes, I went down to the mail center and helped everyone sort the mail by hand for hours over the weekend while the machines were being repaired. That’s probably the biggest reason I didn’t get fired and was able to continue on to a successful career at MBNA. That left a big impression on me to always tolerate well-intentioned failure versus being completely risk-averse.
Adam: What are the best lessons you learned from your time in the FBI?
Jason: There are so many things I learned in the brief time I was a Special Agent. First and foremost, there is a bright line between the truth and a lie. That goes not only for being honest with the people in your life but most importantly with yourself. This requires you to ask the hard questions; is something working as intended or not, if not, why not? Be open to criticism even though it stings, don’t have pride of authorship. Assess the feedback you receive, combine it with your own analysis, and then act on it. I’m a huge fan of anonymous 360 feedback because it most closely emulates the in-your-face feedback we received at Quantico and enables you to be introspective. I was also able to carry forward an ethos from the FBI that it’s better to be tried by twelve than carried by six. While not life and death like the FBI, business is dynamic, competition is fierce, and time is not your friend. This ethos translates roughly in business to making decisions and acting with the best information available at the time and not being afraid to be judged for your decisions versus hesitating and being caught dead on your feet.
Adam: How did you come up with your business ideas and know they were worth pursuing? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with and test business ideas?
Jason: My wife will laugh at this answer because she’s had to listen to me go through this process for over 30 years with everything from big ideas to complaining about inefficient line strategies in the grocery store. I’m constantly asking three questions as I go through my day; what are we doing, why are we doing it and how can we make it better? More often than not the best business ideas and the patentable ideas usually start with the answer; this is the way it’s been done for decades. That screams archaic technology, outmoded practices, and myriad opportunities to make “it” better. The next two questions I follow up with are, is the proposed solution mitigating a large problem and, if so, who cares? If the answer to the first question is yes and the solution reduces friction or complexity, then we analyze if it addresses a “big” problem for a large constituency or ecosystem and then quantify it. It can help make people safer, it can radically reduce cost, or it can provide access for the underserved example. Ideally, it threads all three needles.
Adam: What advice do you have for others on how to come up with and test business ideas?
Jason: After analyzing if an idea is worth pursuing, you’re really just starting the process. We like to use a TLI or test-learn-iterate approach, where we test the idea in some small practical setting, get feedback from the customer, learn from the feedback, and then iterate on the product or service. You’ve likely heard of the fail fast and fail small approach, that’s what TLI is all about. With today’s technologies, building prototypes is vastly easier than it was ten years ago. Having a prototype and then an initial product enables you to get radically greater and more specific feedback from prospective customers because they can touch, feel, or see the solution in action.
Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your businesses? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?
Jason: It all starts with culture and communication. That always sounds cheesy, but I’ll break it down into the three key pillars we focus on. First, you want everyone in your endeavor to practice transparency. This means that everyone involved should feel that they can share their thoughts, positive or negative, in a productive and respectful manner without retribution. The best advances in product, sales, processes, and controls come from practicing transparency.
Second, you need to explain what and why to everyone involved. We always put forward a concise draft vision and mission statement and then get people’s feedback. We make sure to incorporate the feedback so that everyone has a sense of ownership. We also put forward three or four precepts, which are the expectations of what it means to be part of the business and how we behave individually and collectively.
Third, we preach that everyone should assume positive intent when they are judging an initiative, priority, or action that is taking place. Nobody’s first thought when their feet hit the floor in the morning is, “I’m going to really screw up today and mess with everyone’s initiative so I can personally screw a colleague over.” If you’re practicing transparency, you have a clear mission, vision, and precepts and you feel like something is going wrong, you’ll be able to speak up and ask questions. From these three key pillars, a million formal and informal steps flow.
Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?
Jason: I have three; talk to your customer, talk to your customer, and talk to your customer. I have led three turnaround efforts of venture-backed companies and every time what we found is that the product was cooked up in a vacuum and brought to market without input from the customer. The key part of TLI is speaking to the customer, with things as simple as using Survey Monkey to focus group to innovation partnerships at the other end of the spectrum. We always look to prototype the product as I mentioned earlier and get it in people’s hands and get quantitative feedback to marketing phrases, images, segments, etc. One of my long-time marketing colleagues likes to say that we take a shotgun approach, but our shotgun has a laser sight and shoots deer slug. This means you can’t fall in love with your own ideas no matter how cool you think they are if the customer sees it differently. We always throw in a champion challenger test to optimize sales or adoption conversion and invariably the champion turns out to be based on the customer’s feedback.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Jason: Be a human being. Share your life, the ups and downs, show your passion and commitment. It’s ok to be intense and driven. Point the finger at yourself when the team fails, don’t ever throw your people under the bus, treat them with respect even when you’re disappointed. People want to know that you’ll roll the sleeves up, take the blame for noble failures, and recognize them for the sacrifices they’re all making. I always make a point of sending teammates to collect the awards, even if the credit is going to me because I’m the inventor or face of the organization because without the team I’d just be a person with a bunch of ideas.
How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Jason: Never ever stop trying to improve and be intellectually curious. The wonderful chestnut of the older I get I realize how little I knew is something to embrace. For me, the biggest realization as I’m now in my early 50’s is I don’t just look up for mentorship advice, I look all around me. As I’ve started to become a mentor and am the grey hair in the room, I seek to establish relationships where I ask questions of mentees as much as answer them. I’m learning as much if not more than I’m teaching and frequently like to dive deep into a subject where I’m not up to speed. It helps keep me current.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Jason: On building the team, diversity across all qualities of your colleagues is critical to ensure optimized results. We’ve talked about leading and managing the team a lot, so I would just add that you need to lead by example, embody the precepts and display the behaviors you hope your teammates will emulate, and be tenacious in your efforts.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Jason: In entrepreneurial endeavors and new initiatives, I like to say that the first year is 24 months so you should practice deliberate patience. Things take time to start from scratch and one needs to appreciate what I call wisdom teeth problems. Like wisdom teeth that only need to get pulled once, there are a bunch of foundational firsts that are painful and take time, but you only need to do once. So, the first tip is to be patient and don’t cut corners as you’re going through this foundational phase, as long as you’re making marked and deliberate progress appreciate that the attention to detail in building this foundation as it will pay dividends when you begin to scale rapidly.
The second tip would be to never throw in the towel, get knocked out instead. Making progress is hard work and very discouraging at times, don’t quit on yourself or the team.
The third tip is to keep perspective. When you’re working super hard, don’t lose sight of the things that are really important, especially your health, your family, and close friends. Take the time to make sure you focus on them each and every day because otherwise, what’s the point?
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Jason: The best advice I ever received was from my Dad when he told me, “Work the hardest at the things you like the least and enjoy the success that comes from those efforts.” It’s easy to pour oneself into initiatives that you’re passionate about or enjoy, but in my experience, success depends on making sure the small details, often difficult or mundane, are completed with excellence and efficiency. Whether it was the subject matter in school I found difficult, learning to speak in public, reading complicated contracts, looking into the small details on complicated systems architecture, those words often drive me to push through my personal ugh factor.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Jason: I just want to reiterate how much I appreciate the opportunity to share my thoughts with everyone. Hopefully, some entrepreneur or executive is out there grinding away and maybe they can find something useful from my past thirty years in the arena.
Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one-on-one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.
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