Child Entrepreneur Kevin Sproles: CEO Of Volusion (Part 4)

SM: How has your relationship with your business partner evolved over the past five years?

KS: It has been great. It is one of those things we have always heard you have to be cautious about. I hear that when there are two partners, statistics show that the business will have conflict. We have been really lucky to have an excellent partnership. We have never clashed. Our personalities are tied together well. We both trust each other on our respective specialties. He does not know much about the inner details about the technology. He understands it from the user perspective, which is great. He sees our customers’ perspective of the technology.

He trust me on the highly technical aspects of the business. If we were both sales and marketing experts, then we would clash. I know he is a sales and marketing expert so I stay out of his way. I focus on what I know how to do.

SM: Generally, complementary skill sets create good partnerships. The trust is really important. You are delegating a very big chunk of the business in another person. How old is your partner? Your situation is unique as you are so young.

KS: We have some pictures of the first time I flew out to Austin. I look at those now and realize how young I was. I think he is nine years older than I am.

SM: It is great that you found a partner in whom you can have a lot of trust with. It is almost like a business marriage, and often those do not work out – although it is great when they do.

KS: We did a lot of talking about values and trust before we joined on the business side. That was important to me. It helps that we did not do a 50/50 partnership. That has helped things work well.

SM: I assume that it was understood that you had already built a large chunk of the business, that he was coming in later in the game, and that he was going to have a lower share of the company.

KS: Yes, we had those conversations and agreed on everything.

SM: When you had the conversation on values, what did your values consist of?

KS: We talked about our visions for the company. We talked about what we wanted to build, which would be a product for the masses in the small business market. It is hard to know how to ascertain someone else’s values. It is something that requires a lot of conversation, and then you make determinations. You can get a picture of someone’s true personality over time. You can tell if they are an honest person or a salesperson.

SM: Once he came on board, how did the business evolve?

KS: We immediately decided to hire some people and open the Austin office. We hired four salespeople.

SM: Where they selling on the phone? What was your sales model?

KS: One of the keys to our success is that I had developed a free trial for the software. When we did online advertising the click-through went to a page that allowed the user to generate a store right then and there. The people who signed up for free trials became our lead pipeline. Our salespeople called them and closed deals with those who had free trials. We did try some outbound sales to generate leads, but that did not work well.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Child Entrepreneur Kevin Sproles: CEO Of Volusion
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