Navigating Through Multiple Pivots: Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was your next move after you came out of school? It sounds like you came back to Denver?

Patrick Quinlan: I did. I’d been planning on joining the Peace Corps and was accepted, but due to some health issues, I was not able to go forward with my training. I needed a job. So, I got a job at a small company that sold recording systems for businesses. But I got fired within a week, because it didn’t make sense to me what they were asking me to do.

I apparently gave too strong of an opinion to the owner on how he should run his business. I ended up getting a job a couple of weeks later at a small translation company in Denver Colorado called Delta Translation. They had about 40 or 50 team members at that time. I was the third assistant on this project for General Electric. They were building a power plant in Argentina. They needed all of the operating manuals translated.

In that process, I was the lowest assistant on the totem pole. I had come in as a contractor for six to eight weeks and got hired as an employee. The company had made the decision before I got there to work with a company in Argentina to outsource a lot of the actual physical translation. In signing this contract for an Argentinian company, there were a lot of culture gaps between that organization and Delta.

The senior project managers had never worked in a global environment. The guy who ran the project got fired. The assistant got promoted, but he also got fired a month later. Assistant number three gets promoted and that guy also gets fired. Six months in, I was the last guy standing. It’s so interesting in these moments in life when you realize that if those three people hadn’t have been fired, would I be doing what I’m doing today. I told the owner, “I’m going down to Argentina. Give me some cash. I’ll fix the problem.” I didn’t speak Spanish. I had traveled quite a bit in the world, but I had never been to South America or Argentina specifically.

I found myself in Rosario, Argentina and didn’t have a friend or a person I knew. I had this organization that was trying to figure out how to milk the Americans for everything they could. They were operating on Argentinian time. Over the course of six to eight months, I made friends and I learned how to influence people. I took all those things of being a white kid in an African-American school and put them all back to work. I met some folks outside of the company that I could trust. That helped me navigate Argentinian culture.

We got the project done and we delivered it on time about six to seven months later. Right when I’d been there for a year, the guy who owned the company asked me to go for a run and asked me to become the President. It was very exciting except that I didn’t have any idea what that meant. I was an American Studies major who didn’t read or write very well. I was just good with people. I had one of those funny experiences about two to three weeks into the job. I was sitting in the office still trying to figure this whole thing out. The entire company reported to me. He was only coming in maybe two or three days a week right from the beginning.

The controller walked into my office and set the monthly statement in front of me. He said, “Can we go through this?” I said, “Can we do it tomorrow? My schedule is full.” The reason I told him my schedule is full was I had no idea what it was. I called my dad and asked, “Do you know anybody that can explain this to me tonight?” He called a buddy of his who was a banker. I went over the guy’s house and he taught me the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow in one night. I walked in the next day.

Sramana Mitra: How big was the company?

Patrick Quinlan: At that point, it was doing about $10 million a year and had 64 employees. It was a project management company.

Sramana Mitra: It was not like it was a very small company.

Patrick Quinlan: No, and I hadn’t taken a business class in my life. We ended up selling the company to a private equity firm two years later. They were doing a roll-up in the industry. It was interesting because the owner said, “I think we should sell this.” I was like, “You can do that.” I literally knew nothing. There’s something that you learn in the military. The mission is always very simple. The military’s mission is very black and white.

Growing up in that culture, you get to experience amazing leadership from the day you go to basic training. In the military, leadership is a life and death scenario. If a leader makes bad decisions, people die. In the military, there’s a tradition that when you’re leader, if one of your soldier dies, you write a letter to the family. Even today, it happens. They’re handwritten letters. If you think about that sense of having to write a mother, father, or wife and explain how your husband, wife, son, or daughter died and what cause they died for and accept the responsibility, that’s a huge responsibility.

I think I was a really bad leader when I started, but I always started with the feeling that it’s an obligation and it’s a huge responsibility. Your job is to always own up to the failures. You eat less. You sleep less. Those things have been ingrained into me from day one.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Navigating Through Multiple Pivots: Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan
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