In this video clip, Dan Price, founder and CEO of credit card processing company Gravity Payments, explains why you shouldn’t always hire the rainmaker. He emphasizes the importance of knowing your culture and understanding the impact of a rainmaker who isn’t the right fit.
“Famously an executive at Yahoo took an 80% payout to come work at Gravity and to serve our mission of both helping independent businesses succeed, saving them money on their credit card processing, but also try to create a work culture that actually meets the needs of humans. A culture that actual serves rather than just takes away. She was really passionate and wanted to see that succeed. I’ve had opportunities like that in the past, maybe not quite at her level to bring on people that are way more qualified than me, and really highly qualified people who are real rainmakers. But most of the time it hasn’t been the right fit and I’ve elected not to hire them. I didn’t hire them because the reason why they wanted to be there didn’t align with our culture, didn’t align with our strategy.
So you can have somebody who is an incredible, powerful rainmaker. Someone who would do such a great job, is very tactically gifted, but if they’re not aligned with the real why in their heart of why they come to work with your company, they’re going to change the culture and they’re going to create a divide where things will get worse and not better. So to me the key to attracting the absolute best talent is to really know what’s important to you, to know who you are, to know where you want to go as a company, and to stay loyal to that, regardless of what opportunities you have to turn down.”
-Dan Price CEO of Gravity Payments
