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“Don’t obsess about the fact that you don’t always understand what the next step is.” — Jay Fulcher
Today, Chad sits down with Jay Fulcher, CEO and chairman of Zenefits which offers cloud based software as a service for companies to better manage their human resources. Having learned the ropes of leadership by being a serial entrepreneur and CEO, he was brought on to lead Zenefits in 2017 after the company had suffered from internal issues and infamously grew too quickly. Jay decided to flip this situation upside down and created a brand new business model and leadership team. Zenefits to this day has become one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history and has created a value of 4.5 billion dollars in six years.
“We’ve worked hard at building this very tightly integrated, interoperable platform, a single code base that a customer knows when they do business with Zenefits, all of the applications are going to look and behave the same way,” says Jay. “The employee experience is not going to be good, it’s going to be phenomenal.”
From being the CEO of Agile software to the CEO of OOyala, Jay has an extensive track record for bringing in great returns and driving growth in the companies he has served. Jay continues to serve as an advisor for other startups making their break into the tech industry.
On this episode of Mission Daily, Jay shares the guiding principle he looks for in a company he chooses to be a part of, the importance of being committed to a growth mindset, and how to build a company that is resilient.
Quotes from Jay:
“For the last 20 years, I’ve been running companies that are global businesses and have employees all over the world that come from a variety of different backgrounds. And that’s an environment that I’m really comfortable with and frankly, that makes for a more interesting work environment.”
“It’s the employees that are inspired by what we’re trying to achieve and where they understand the guardrails in which we’re going to operate. They’re the ones that come up with all the great breakthrough ideas and, and they’re the most innovative.”
“Purpose is really rooted in being able to solve these problems for small and midsize businesses who don’t have both the resources, the head count and the capital to be able to go attack these problems. They have to rely on a partner like Zenefits to help them with their HR issues.”
“I had a woman tell me not so long ago that she and her CEO bought Zenefits because of what they thought buying Zenefits said about their company to their employees.”
“The big thing here is to make sure that you’re putting yourself in a position to learn, grow, develop and feel like you’re being challenged.”
“We’ve got to build companies that are resilient. We’ve got to build companies that have real business models that undergird them. The business models themselves need to be built on top of an operating model that is clear and understandable and foundationally set around the culture you have in your business.”
“It’s just no longer true that culture is this amorphous thing that you can’t define. It can be defined.”
