AskMyBoard

Kurt Donnell on at Freestar (the number one fastest-growing company in the U.S. on the 2019 Inc. 5000 list)

"If it's something that we we don't see moving away from, we will take advantage of multi year discounts by locking in a segment or amplitude or anything like that."

Dribbble

"Yeah, I mean, it's been great from the hiring perspective. It's great. It also sets the tone for employees coming on that like they're working you know, there's there's no big checkbook behind this. We're all working together to you know, make this work. We're in charge of our own kind of destiny. We don't have you know, a big equity player or, you know, a bank breathing down our neck on covenants. Or you know, blocking us." - Brandon Green, Dribbble

"If you didn't pay before the run date of your campaign or advertising, we wouldn't run it. So you know, the carrot was you had to book your inventory ahead of time, pay ahead of time. So we really minimized the risk of non payment and bad debt."

Great advice when starting out your business, especially if you're bootstrapped! Dribbble

Kurt Donnell, President and CEO of Freestar (a Top 40 fastest-growing company) shares why transparency is crucial to running a business, and breaks down some of the ways in which he creates transparency at his company.

“I think they waded into some waters that they just were not familiar with and that they had to become digital media publishers in a different sense than they'd ever been before. And so I think the lesson there is probably, if you're good at one thing, and you're gonna set out to build a business around that one thing, don't add in a bunch of other things that make it harder, like stick to the knitting, like really go do the thing that you're great at.”

"We've continued to do this on our own dime over time, and it really is just managing how profitable you want to be. We're not running the business to maximize EBIT debt at the moment right now, it's not for sale or anything like that. Profitability is really important to me."

- Kurt Donnell, Freestar

"Be the best of the thing you can be the best at and once you've done that, go one swimlane over, don't try to boil the ocean and chase the shiny objects and do all of those things. And if somebody else has built a company around something that'd be a feature for you, it's probably better to just partner with them and let them build that thing."

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"So we're continuously investing in ideas, we call it swinging for the fences. On our team as a rule if you haven't made three or four mistakes throughout the year, you're really not trying and we've always got projects where we call it swinging for the fences and that those will fall under our R&D expenses. And sometimes we hit those home runs and sometimes they're complete strikeouts and you get those in play all the time."

We love this line of thinking - the importance of a company comfortable with making mistakes cannot be underestimated!

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