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Last Thursday’s Built In Colorado Digital Leaders Luncheon hosted 70 digital leaders from both Boulder and Denver at the Med for a fireside chat with Matt Blumberg, Chairman and CEO of Return Path.
Return Path, the email marketing solution company backed by Foundry Group, will soon be the “world’s smallest conglomerate” led by a “fire-in-the-belly” CEO, co-founder of Foundry Group Ryan McIntyre said before Blumberg took the stage. Nick Wyman of Galvanize and Bill Hueston of ViaWest further revved up the crowd and paid homage to Return Path’s growth.
Blumberg co-founded Return Path in 1999 - and has kept at it since then because “entrepreneurialism is in my actual DNA,” he said. What has allowed Blumberg to lead Return Path for the past 15 years is the way he organizes the company’s management and fosters its culture, he said.
Blumberg mentioned he created a business operations system with an agenda that forces the organization to naturally filter the excessive amount of day-to-day stimuli. This is key to the company’s growth and can be observed by the management team at Return Path, which has included many intermediate management teams since it was founded. This management style helps Blumberg concentrate on building teams that can self-manage - and he uses data rigorously to support that process. (Soliciting an outside executive coach and integrating an interactive employee review process are two of Blumberg’s key devices to building strong, independent teams.)
An integral part of Blumberg’s management style is also in the way he steers his board meetings, which include board members Brad Feld and Fred Wilson. “We prepped the board to maximize value and time,” Blumberg said. Instead of having a Powerpoint set the pace, the board does its “homework” and has a strategic discussion: “It made the team sharper and, as we continued to cultivate a group with balance, we gleaned more valuable insights.”
In addition to a highly-organized management style, Blumberg said his company’s employee- focused culture has been what steered the company’s growth for the past 15 years. He refers to Return Path’s culture as the “the heartbeat of the company,” and urged other leaders to also spend time to “find their internal company rhythm.” Blumberg said he does this by looking at metrics regarding employee satisfaction such as longevity, internal job changes and employee referrals. “We are bent on being a people-first organization,” he said. “We don’t have resources that happen to be human.”
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Despite that focus, there have been a few low points in Return Path’s 15-year company history like laying people off: during those times, Blumberg said it was important to start analyzing why something went right versus why something failed.
As Blumberg drives principles internally at Return Path, he said it’s all about a value system that focuses on the ‘“how vs. the what” and immersing the entire company in that value-based system. He did just that in 2008, writing the values from the bottom up and continuing that tradition orally. This underscores what Blumberg calls Return Path’s “ingrained learning culture."