I recently went one-on-one with Joe DeRosa, President and CRO of SAFEBuilt.
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? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Joe: I grew up in a big Italian family. Full tables, loud conversations, and a lot of love. If you wanted to be heard, you learned to listen first. I didn’t have the words for it back then, but I was an introvert trying to keep pace with a house full of extroverts. I could “turn it on” when I needed to, and I often did, but I always recharged in quiet. Years later, Susan Cain’s work gave me language for all of that, and it changed how I led. I realized my edge was in observation, connection, and steady decision-making.
My career has been shaped by headwinds as much as tailwinds. The global financial crisis taught me that hope isn’t a strategy and denial is expensive. During that season, I watched leaders calm the room not by saying “everything’s fine,” but by telling the truth, showing their homework, and pointing to a rational plan. The pandemic made the stakes more personal.
That period reinforced my belief that empathy is the entry ticket to earning trust. People will follow you through hard changes if they believe that you see them and that you mean what you say.
I’ve made my share of mistakes. Early on, I equated decisiveness with speed and answers. Over time, I learned decisiveness is actually about asking better questions faster and then committing with clarity.
My career has really been a steady build toward the role I’m in today as President and Chief Revenue Officer at SAFEbuilt. I was initially brought in as a strategic advisor, and before long was asked to take on the full revenue function. Now I lead sales, marketing, client success, enablement, and communications, mentoring a 60-person national team and driving a unified growth strategy.
Everything I’ve learned from scaling organizations, navigating disruption, and building high-performing teams has led me here. Today, I’m focused on expanding nationally, strengthening client relationships, and introducing automation and AI tools that make us sharper, more efficient, and more resilient.
Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?
Joe: For me, it always starts with truly understanding your customer. Not an internal slogan, not a slide, but a sentence you could imagine your customer saying back to you. “In three months, this will be a success if…” When you anchor there, strategy, enablement, product, and service all have the same north star, and meetings get shorter because the decision filter is obvious.
From there, I pay a lot of attention to what I call “pulling the thread all the way through.” Macro conditions matter (rates, employment, inflation, regulation), but they only create value when you can connect them to the specific business in front of you. If wages are moving or credit is tightening, what does that actually mean for your buyer’s demand curve or their cost to serve? Growth shows up when your teams consistently turn data into insight and insight into action the customer can feel.
The next piece is people. I’ve borrowed a line from Herb Brooks for years: You don’t always need the “best” players…you need the right ones.
I’ll take values, learning speed, and chemistry over a highlight reel any day. A team that shares credit, learns together, and adapts fast will outrun a set of soloists nine times out of 10.
Finally, resourcing to the mission is key. Ambition without resourcing is a morale problem waiting to happen. If you’re asking the organization to deliver “X” in the next 12 months, give them the tools, the talent, and the instrumentation to do exactly that.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?
Joe: In sales, I think the most precious thing you can earn is time. You earn it by bringing insight, not pressure. The old playbook of objection-handling and clever rebuttals is a dead end. Curiosity works better. Define the problem together. Share patterns you’re seeing with similar leaders. Co-design the path forward and be honest about tradeoffs. That approach requires practice. We role-play a lot. Rehearsal makes the real game feel slower.
In marketing, tell the truth beautifully. Clarity beats clever, every time. Start with the outcome your customer actually cares about, show the gap between where they are and where they could be, and then prove it with stories and evidence. Consistency matters more than any single campaign. When your point of view is steady across channels, trust builds.
Brand, to me, is simply how your people behave when things get hard. Logos and taglines are fine, but customers experience you in the handoffs. If your internal culture promises empathy, clarity, and accountability, your brand will reflect it without you having to say a word. If the inside and the outside don’t match, customers notice immediately. I’d rather do the unglamorous work of tightening our operating habits than polish the slogan.
If there’s a thread across all three, it’s narrative. I like a one-page story we can all carry in our heads. The market context, the customer problem, the consequence of inaction, our approach, our proof, and the simple next step. When everyone can tell that story in their own voice, things click.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Joe: The best leaders exemplify empathy with standards. They see the person first, not just the role, and they hold a high bar without shaming anyone.
Clarity is right next to empathy. Say the quiet parts out loud. What are we doing? Why now? What does good look like? What will we not do? Ambiguity is expensive. The best leaders remove fog.
Curiosity keeps a leader honest. When your questions get better, your decisions get better. Curiosity also keeps ego in check. It’s hard to be a know-it-all when you’re genuinely interested in learning.
Courage and conviction matter because someone has to make the call. Courage is owning your choice in daylight and adjusting when the facts change. And then there’s consistency. Teams should never have to guess which version of you is walking into the room. Steady leaders become anchors when the water gets choppy.
Finally, visibility. I don’t mean town halls. I mean being present where the real work happens. On calls, in reviews, in the field. People believe what they see you do.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Joe: Adopt a learner’s cadence and protect it. Read outside your lane. History and biographies are underrated operating manuals because you see patterns: How people decide under pressure, how they recover from mistakes, how they communicate in a crisis.
Build practice into your calendar, not just meetings. Run pre-mortems on important decisions and ask a colleague to “red team” your plan. Role-play big conversations. The point is to build instincts you can trust when the clock is ticking.
Engineer honesty around you. Create a small circle of trusted advisors who will give you the unvarnished truth. Then make it safe for your team to disagree with you publicly. If no one ever pushes back, you’re not hearing the full story.
Another tip is to design simple triggers that protect your focus. I lay out my priorities the night before and attack the hardest thing when I’m freshest. I set up my environment so the path of least resistance is the one I want to take. Small, boring habits move the needle more than big, inspirational speeches.
And take care of your body. This job is a stamina sport. Sleep, movement, and decent nutrition make you a better decision-maker.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Joe: If I boil it down, the first thing is trust before tasks. Start your one-on-ones by checking in on the human being, not just the project. When people feel seen and respected, they’ll tell you the truth faster and take bigger swings with you.
Second, define success in a sentence. “By this date, we will achieve this outcome, measured by this metric.” It sounds almost too simple. It’s not. If you can’t write it crisply, you can’t execute it cleanly.
Third, know your numbers and your narrative. The metrics tell you what happened; the story tells people why it matters and what we’re going to do next. You need both if you want to rally resources and sustain momentum.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Joe: Hire for values and learning speed. I look for people who are humble enough to ask for help and hungry enough to chase hard problems.
I also conduct regular self-assessments so I can take an honest inventory of my skills and the skills needed to achieve the objective at hand and hire to that gap.
When it comes to your environment, create a culture where psychological safety and accountability live together. Those aren’t opposites. Safety makes truth possible, while accountability makes progress possible. If people can speak plainly and know that commitments matter, you’ll move quickly without drama.
Make your “how we work” rules explicit. Who decides? How is input gathered? What does “disagree and commit” look like here? I like to put those expectations on one page and revisit them when we drift.
And keep the scoreboard simple. A few leading indicators everyone understands and can influence beat a dashboard of noise. Look at them at the same time every week so the team learns the rhythm of cause and effect.
Adam: What are the key steps to growing and scaling your business? (condensed “playbook” turned prose)
Joe: If you asked me to stitch the playbook into a single thread, it would go like this: Begin by aligning the organization around a customer-written definition of success so everyone can point to the same horizon line.
Make a habit of turning macro data into customer-specific insights that your teams can use in real conversations. Hire people whose values and learning speed fit your culture, then coach them until their confidence is earned, and promote them when their impact is felt by others, not just measured by their own numbers.
Build simple operating cadences and protect calendar time for them the way you would protect revenue. Resource the mission at the level you’re asking people to deliver, and then inspect what you expect.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Joe: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” I heard it early, I relearn it often. When I slow down enough to understand the person in front of me — their pressures, hopes, and roadblocks — everything else gets easier.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Joe: Two quick closing thoughts. First, your habits are your strategy. Big plans matter, but your team experiences the culture in tiny, repeated moments. If you want a culture of clarity and care, model both in the small things, every day.
Second, be an anchor. We’ve had a long stretch of uncertainty, and there will be more. Leaders help people sail through storms. Empathy calms. Clarity guides. Courage moves. Consistency sustains. Give people those four, and they’ll give you their best.
