Life & Business: Dash Solutions CEO Stephen Faust on Lessons Learned from 20+ Years Growing a Family-Owned Company
Stephen Faust has been a part of Dash Solutions, a payment and engagement solutions provider, for more than 20 years. Since taking over the CEO role and now unveiling their new brand transformation (formerly Prepaid Technologies), he’s learned many invaluable lessons from the family-owned company.
He revealed to Edison Partners on the Electrifying Growth podcast three main things:
- The importance of maintaining your ego
- Leveraging your employees as recruiters and fans of your brand
- The role of mentorship for people, leaders and the organization at large
Stay Humble to Avoid Getting Complacent
Entrepreneurs and early-stage companies: Stephen’s message is clear. Remaining humble despite your success is what will keep your company strong for years to come.
“It's been a great learning experience for me. I'm doing a lot of things for the first time. I try to lean on other people smarter than me that have been there and done that and get good feedback and just try to make smart, educated decisions on what's next for the company.”
As you and your company grow, it can be hard to remain humble and on-your-toes. Easier said than done.
But the payoff is great, as Stephen alluded to. Humility is what will allow your company to withstand economic downturns, slow sales cycles, and decades in business.
Your Employees Are Your Best Recruiters
Stephen emphasizes the importance of hiring the right people who will represent your company’s culture and values, no matter their background. And if you treat your employees well and they benefit from your intentionally-designed employee experience, they’ll be your biggest fans.
Recruitment has never been so easy!
“We get so many proactive resumes into our company. Our greatest recruiter has been our employees because they say, ‘You gotta come work over here. This is just fantastic.’”
Mentorship Is Underrated
Stephen stressed the importance of mentorship in Dash Solutions and the success it has brought them. Although they don’t have a formal, structured mentorship program, they’ve leveraged mentorship in a few different ways.
Namely, Stephen’s relationship with their board.
“We went from a strategy where the board meetings were more just updates, high fives, we hit our plan numbers, let's move on. To pushing us and asking good questions to say, ‘How are you looking ahead? What are those three big bets that you wanna make next year that can transform the company? How are you investing in that with people and resources?’ And challenging us to think differently. That's been a very positive change cause it gets us thinking more about the business than just operating the day to day.”
You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So surround yourself, your employees and your leaders with no one but the best.
Three takeaways from Stephen’s episode are:
- Remain humble as you grow
- Your employees will be your best recruiters if they enjoy working for you
- Mentorship is important to not only employees, but your leaders and executives too
Learn more about Dash Solutions or CEO Stephen Faust.