Pop Quiz, Monday with Ruth Plater
The Pop Quiz, Monday is a fun little exam that we love to give to savvy business owners. The examination is not a surprise after all since the interviewee already knew about the questions in advance. However, we can always pretend and have fun with the scenario of a young entrepreneur sitting in class nervously biting on their pencil. They are ready to take a pop quiz on a chapter that they were supposed to read the night before. Instead, they played Metroid all night on their SNES (Oops, this was me in high school). The real purpose of the pop quiz is that this is a fun way to introduce business tips from real-world experiences that you can not learn in a classroom. We want to thank our entrepreneur for being a good sport and volunteering their time to answer a few questions to help our community grow from their knowledge.
I want to introduce you to our guest today who will be taking our Pop Quiz Monday.
Can you please tell everyone your name?
Yes. It’s Ruth Plater
What is your job role?
CEO
Tell us about your company?
Radial Path is a close-knit team of industry experts and specialists in the fast-moving global tech and telco industries. We apply new sales and marketing methodologies to emerging business models and dare our clients to go beyond the traditional press release and trade show. We create engaging, positive and continuing journeys for our clients’ customers and partner ecosystems for infinite results.
This includes startups and scaleups in new tech (IoT, AI, Blockchain), telcos launching new business models, DX and CX solutions providers, and community-led projects and non-for-profits in the digital infrastructure space.
What do you love most about your job?
Working with smart people in our core team and the partners we consult with. Marketing is vast and complex these days, and we’re continually learning from each other, from the results we get for our clients and testing the boundaries of our own creativity to deliver strong messages that stand out. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s challenging, which I love.
What motivates you to get up every day and go to work?
Building our business and working with really cool new tech companies, or companies trying something new. It’s amazing when the team works hard together, with our clients, and we see the fruits of those efforts and the client is happy.
How do your co-workers inspire you?
Their ideas. Always. They each have their own areas of expertise, and they’re constantly thinking of ways we can improve and grow the different elements of our business. I’m a firm believer of constantly changing and perfecting…it inspires me massively when my co-workers take pride in their bit of the business and find new ways to improve our service for clients and how we operate.
How do you have fun at work (team building, pranks, etc..)?
Team nights bowling has been a winner. It gets competitive though! We also have team lunches out sometimes and meetings offsite in coworking spaces…some of the team live in these buildings. We also have three office dogs that the team love to play with when they’re having a break.
What are some of the challenges of your job?
Being reactive. It’s critically important that we are when we’re working with startups and launching new products, but it’s definitely challenging to shift gears with a team to quickly respond to new opportunities that emerge, or change tactics when the client’s strategy changes. We have a very efficient business model to make sure we can meet these sorts of challenges. We’ve spent two years building processes, project management templates with solid workflows, as well as a flexible points pricing model that is built to cope with this sort of strain when it occurs.
What are some lessons learned from a past project that you can share with us?
I’ve learned many things from past projects. In particular, learning that you have to be very strict with managing client expectations and relationships. When you’re starting out it can be difficult to say no to some things and have confidence in doing so. Everyone wants to please in the beginning — and in a way, this is necessary for the when you start out. But I’ve learned that as we grow, we’re now able to manage client expectations a lot better. We provide them with more information, more tools, and updates, and we tell them when we believe they’re heading in the wrong direction. We can also now be clear on what we’re good at and our core capabilities. If your clients’ core values aren’t very aligned with your own, or there’s a misunderstanding of what you’re there to help with, you’ll likely have a lot of stress with that project, perhaps you’ll make less of a return owing to changes and alterations in what you’re delivering and, even after all that effort, the client may not be happy because from the start you’ve not been aligned in your goals. This is a tricky thing to get right, but it comes with the growing pains of starting up.
What advice would you give to someone who is starting out in your industry?
Jump in. Don’t be afraid to try things, but keep an eye on building solid foundations. The first few years will be challenging but as you build from the ground up and you onboard the right team, things will become easier to manage, and you won’t be juggling as much on your own.
Thank you for taking our pop quiz today. You get an A+ for effort. You can learn more about our interviewee and their business by visiting them on the web:
radialpath.com
twitter.com/radialpath
https://www.linkedin.com/company/radial-path/
Originally published at https://thestartupgrowth.com on February 13, 2019.
