STARTING OUT
“The career advice that I give everybody is run toward their problems,” says Ron Alvesteffer, President & CEO of data center solutions provider Service Express. “Go try to fix it; go add value. Solve as many problems as you can by getting involved. And if you do that for enough people at your company, you start to make a name for yourself. That’s how I built my whole career.”
Alvesteffer says if he had told anyone about his path from college to becoming a CEO, they would likely tell him, “That’s the dumbest plan I’ve ever heard of in my entire life, and it has no chance of working.”
And yet here we are.
In college, Alvesteffer pursued a career in teaching history and physical education.
“As I got through college, and through my student teaching, I had some friends that were a little bit older than me who had graduated from college and started sales careers,” he remembers. “And that just really started to appeal to me as a 22-year-old.”
While he continues to think of teaching as an amazing profession – indeed, he married a teacher – he realized there were elements of the career that wouldn’t quite suit him in the long run.
In the early 90s, there weren’t sales development positions, so you had to jump in wherever you could. Alvesteffer cut his teeth selling health club memberships, then moved on to hawking long distance telephone services.
“I did cold calling. It was brutal, but it was educational. I learned a ton and I got my butt kicked. But that helped me develop the tough skin that you need to succeed in sales,” he says.
However, the product itself – in this case, the long-distance plans – left a lot to be desired. Alvesteffer says this was when he learned a lot about how hard it is to sell a product if you’ve stopped believing in the service.
“I believe sales is a high calling involving solving people’s problems, not forcing something on them that they don’t need. So I quit that job,” says Alvesteffer. He notes that he taught himself the nuances of sales and leadership by reading a dozen books a year.
“I never went back and got my MBA,” he says. “But that was me investing in myself outside of any training a company would give me. I think when you get out of school, you’ve basically learned how to learn. So you have to use that and keep learning.”
He continued honing his craft at sales jobs, met his wife, and then eventually joined Service Express in a sales position.
“The owner hired me,” Alvesteffer remembers. “We had four sales reps. He told me he wanted me to take over the sales reps and grow revenue. And so I did that until 2002. We’d more than doubled the company at that point.”
At that point, with the owner stepping back, Alvesteffer moved into a role as president and CEO of the company.
“I don’t have a finance background. I don’t have a technology background. I don’t have my MBA,” he says. “But here I’m really back to teaching and coaching, to be honest. The skills I learned when I was training to be an educator are what I’m using in my career here.”
Looking back at his career arc, he says that the highest highs for him always seemed to come after the lowest lows. He explains that sometimes when you’re grinding and trying to figure stuff out, things don’t always work and not everything’s going to go your way. “But when you finally get those big unlocks, that’s where the big growth comes,” Alvesteffer marvels. “And the other side is glorious.”
CULTURE
The company’s culture sprouts from what Alvesteffer calls its foundation – made up of a core value, a purpose, and four core objectives.
“Our core value is cultivating a culture of growth that empowers our people to achieve their personal, professional, and financial goals. And that’s everything for us,” he says. “It’s really based on a Zig Ziglar quote, ‘You can have everything in life you want if you just give enough other people what they want.’ That quote hangs right outside my office; I look at it every day.”
“Our goal is that everybody makes more money here than they’ve made anywhere else in their career because they’re adding value,” Alvesteffer says by way of explaining. “So if we can figure out what people want in those three areas – personal, professional, and financial – and we create a roadmap to help them achieve those goals, then our company goals will be blown out of the water.”
The second basic element of the culture is the company’s purpose, which Alvesteffer says is about providing the best experience to its customers, partners, and employees.
“We want to be the best service delivery company in the world. We’re fanatic about it,” he says. “If you’re a vendor of ours, we want to be your number one choice. And we also want to be the best place to work in the world.”
That leaves the company’s four core objectives: Revenue growth, excellent customer service, employee engagement, and margin retention.
“Those four core objectives are really how we run the business. They’re the four things we’re constantly trying to do, in no particular order. They’re equal. They’re like four legs on a table,” says Alvesteffer. “If we get out of line on those, and the table becomes wobbly, we’re in trouble. If you grow so fast that you burn your employees out and you can’t keep up with service delivery, then that table will collapse. If you don’t grow fast enough and you can’t deliver for your team on the opportunities you set out for them, everything crumbles. So we’re trying to do those four things all the time.”
CANDIDATES
For those interested in joining the Service Express organization, Alvesteffer reminds us that the company is still growing and evolving, and that candidates hoping to get on board must thrive under a lot of change.
“I love change,” he says. “That’s what’s kept me here almost 25 years. We’re always evolving and growing. People that come here to work need to know that they’ll be challenged, but that they’ll grow in the process. We use the term ‘failing forward,’ meaning that we learn from our mistakes. Everything we do well today, we did not do perfectly at one point. We figured out what needed to be improved, and then started doing those things well. And we went forward from there – making other, different mistakes in search of value.”
Service Express also often hires outside the tech industry in order to take advantage of a wider breadth of team experiences.
“We can teach new hires about the industry, we can teach them technical skills – as long as they don’t have preordained ideas about the growth of this particular industry,” Alvesteffer says.
GOING FORWARD
“I’ve had sleepless nights,” he says. “I’ve been up from two to four in the morning trying to solve things in my head. It’s not ideal. But when I look back, and when I talk with my executives and team members who’ve been with us for a long time, the stories we remember and laugh about are the stories from those times of trying to push through to that next unlock. What stories do you tell when you go on vacation? The stories about when everything went wrong, and then how it eventually turned out alright.”
The moral of the story, again, is that you should always run toward your problems. Solving those problems can be unfathomably difficult and frustrating, at times, but you’ll have the time of your life doing so.
“I really don’t like to talk about regrets, because all of them shaped me,” Alvesteffer says. “And I think that’s how you get through life. There are a bunch of different paths, and you can’t get through any of them unscathed. But if you can keep learning and growing at every step, you’re going to do well.”
Alvesteffer is incredibly excited about his organization’s future. Service Express is turning the lessons from the last few years of pandemic-affected operations into features rather than bugs.
“That’s going to take us for another long run,” he says of the success to come. “Everywhere I look, people are figuring things out and making names for themselves around here. I always knew they could, but now I know they can.”
“In the midst of this incredible transformation, there is no playbook – which can sometimes be frustrating, because sometimes you just want the answer,” Alvesteffer adds. “But we get to create the playbook. We get to find the answers. We get to lead our organization through this new landscape. And there are no more exciting times to lead than when you’re figuring that stuff out. Looking back at this time, we’ll think, ‘Wow, look at what we were able to accomplish; look at where we landed.’’
