I recently went one-on-one with Puneet Raj, CEO of Fieldwire by Hilti.
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?
Puneet: My path has looked less like a straight line and more like a series of deliberate detours. I have lived and worked in seven countries, and in most of those moves I chose the harder assignment over the safer one, because the difficult situations were the ones that taught me the most. Early in my career, I cared far more about range than about titles or comfort. I spent a year traveling around the world, and over time I worked across sales, product, engineering, and technology, which gave me a feel for how a business fits together rather than how any single function operates in isolation.
The experience that shaped me most was leading a large sales organization while I was still fairly junior. I had to learn how to navigate uncertainty, how to manage people who came from very different backgrounds and carried different skills and motivations, and how to keep a group pointed at results when the route to those results kept changing under our feet. I learned more about human behavior in that role than any book or course could have taught me, and much of how I lead today traces back to it.
I am drawn to chaotic, unstructured situations where I can set the narrative, drive growth, and assemble a strong core team to carry out a vision. Stepping in to lead Fieldwire after the founders had moved on fit that description almost perfectly. The business was primed for its next phase of growth, and I also knew the first several months would be bumpy, as they tend to be whenever founders leave the building. We have since built a team I trust for the stage ahead, and that has done more than anything else to shape how confident I feel about where we are headed.
Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?
Puneet: Moving from a startup to a scaleup calls for a genuinely different set of muscles. The behaviors and instincts that carry a company through its scrappy early days rarely survive the journey to the next level intact, and pretending otherwise is how promising companies stall. In the startup phase, you lean heavily on individual standouts, the kind of people who can carry the day through sheer talent, hustle, and force of will. As the organization scales, the profile you need shifts toward people who can design and run repeatable processes, so that success stops depending on a small number of heroic efforts and starts becoming something the whole company can reproduce.
Much of the work then becomes identifying and setting up the team members and leaders who are ready for that next stage, and giving them enough room and responsibility to grow into it before you strictly need them to. Pace matters every bit as much as direction. Scaling too quickly strains the organization, its systems, and its culture, while scaling too slowly cedes ground to competitors who are willing to move. Setting a steady, sustainable rhythm and holding the discipline to maintain it through good quarters and hard ones is one of the more underrated responsibilities a leader carries.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Puneet: Begin by understanding your own management style and the conditions in which you do your best work. I know that I am at my most effective in high-growth, rapidly evolving environments, and considerably less effective in a steady, slow-growing business. Being honest with myself about that helps me choose the right roles and surround myself with the right people rather than forcing a fit that was never going to work.
From there, build a team that complements your strengths and quietly shores up your weaknesses, rather than one that simply reflects your own instincts back at you. Let the best ideas win, and make peace with the reality that most of the best ideas will not originate with you. The leader who listens carefully and invites people to challenge his assumptions consistently ends up with sharper decisions and a more committed team. Hire and develop people who are better than you at what they do, and treat their strength as an asset to be celebrated rather than a threat to be managed. The managers who surround themselves with talent more capable than their own tend to be the ones who build something that outlasts them.
Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?
Puneet: A capable leader cannot afford to miss a macro technology shift. The rise of the Internet of Things around 2017 and the surge of artificial intelligence in the mid-2020s are exactly the kind of movements you have to recognize early and take seriously, because the cost of ignoring them compounds quietly until it becomes very hard to recover. At the same time, it pays to respect the shape of the adoption curve. We tend to overestimate how much will change in two years and underestimate how much will change in ten, so both patience and persistence belong in the same conversation.
My strongest advice is to stay hands-on with the technology itself. Work with the new tools directly, experiment with them, and even play with them without a specific goal, because firsthand use is how you come to understand both what a technology can genuinely do and where it quietly falls short of the hype. I also recommend finding a more junior, technology-forward colleague to serve as a kind of reverse mentor. Some of the most useful guidance I have received on emerging technology has come from people much earlier in their careers, who live closer to these tools than I do and carry none of the assumptions that experience sometimes hardens into blind spots.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Puneet: Effective leaders understand the situations where they add the most value, and they position themselves accordingly instead of trying to be equally good at everything. They take the wheel decisively when the moment demands it, and they hand it off just as readily when someone else is plainly better suited to lead. There is a quiet confidence in that willingness to step back, and it is a trait many leaders never quite develop, because it runs against the instinct to stay in control.
The strongest leaders I have worked with also invest real, sustained time in understanding what motivates their key people. They come to know what each person genuinely cares about, where each one hopes to go over the coming years, and how to help them become the fullest version of themselves along the way. Leadership understood this way is measured less by what you personally accomplish and more by what you make possible in the people around you. The multiplier effect of a well-understood, well-developed team dwarfs anything a single leader can produce alone.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Puneet: Leadership is a practiced skill, and it improves the same way any real skill does, through repetition paired with honest reflection. Treat each meaningful decision and each difficult conversation as another repetition that sharpens your judgment for the next one.
Seek feedback widely, and resist the temptation to gather it only from those above you. Ask your peers and the people who report to you how you are performing on your decision-making, your day-to-day behaviors, and the way you interact with people under pressure. The feedback that stings a little is frequently the feedback most worth holding onto, even when your first instinct is to defend yourself. Read widely as well, since there is a genuine wealth of thoughtful material on leadership in books and blogs, and much of it will spare you from learning the same lesson the hard way. The leaders who keep learning deliberately, long after they have earned the right to coast, tend to be the ones who keep rising.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Puneet: Three principles travel well across entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders alike. First, stay relentlessly curious. A great many important problems still lack good solutions, and curiosity is what keeps you searching for them long after most people have stopped looking or settled for what already exists. Second, add value before you ask for anything in return. Durable relationships and strong reputations are built by giving first, and the returns tend to find their way back to those who lead with generosity rather than keeping score. Third, aim to be a net positive, both to your own organization and to the wider society you operate within. When the people, teams, and communities around you are measurably better off for your involvement, most of the outcomes you were chasing have a way of taking care of themselves. None of these principles is complicated, yet living them consistently over years is what separates the leaders people remember from the ones they merely worked for.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?
Puneet: You should be able to explain your brand and the value it delivers to a four-year-old in under a minute. If you cannot make the idea that simple, something in the underlying proposition needs work, and no amount of clever marketing will paper over the confusion for long. Clarity at that level is a discipline in its own right, and reaching it forces you to strip a message down to what truly matters to the person on the other side.
Coherence is what separates memorable brands from forgettable ones. Every customer touchpoint, across sales, marketing, and branding, should feel like part of a single coordinated story rather than a collection of disconnected efforts stitched together after the fact. When the experience holds together from the first advertisement a prospect sees to the final invoice they pay, customers trust you more readily, and that accumulated trust compounds in ways that are hard for competitors to copy. Consistency, delivered patiently over time, is one of the most powerful and least glamorous advantages a company can build.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Puneet: The best advice I ever received came down to two words: brutal prioritization. One of my first managers gave me thirty minutes of his time once a month, and I would show up with a long list of topics I was eager to cover. He would listen patiently to all of it, then tell me to focus on two or three items and throw the rest into the bin. It felt harsh in the moment, and yet it taught me a lesson I have carried ever since, which is that leadership attention is a scarce and precious resource, and spreading it thinly across everything all but guarantees meaningful progress on nothing. I still run my own priorities through that same filter today, and I encourage the leaders I work with to do the same, because the discipline of deciding what not to do is often more valuable than the enthusiasm for doing more.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Puneet: If I were to leave readers with one final thought, it would concern the privilege of building something during a period of real change. Construction is among the oldest industries in the world, and it is finally seeing modern technology reach the people who do the physical work on site, rather than serving only those planning the work from an office. Helping to lead part of that transition, alongside a team I believe in, is the aspect of my work I find most rewarding on the hard days as well as the good ones. My encouragement to anyone who has the chance to shape their own industry’s next chapter is straightforward: which is to take that chance seriously and to bring good, capable people along with them, because the work is far more meaningful and far more fun when it is shared.
