The People Make the Place

In his song, ‘Say Goodbye to Hollywood,’ Billy Joel explains, ‘Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes and I guess it’s time for goodbye again.’ This past October, for the last time, I made the short commute from my home in Virginia to my other home, Logi Analytics. After a successful exit to insightsoftware earlier this Spring, it was time to bid farewell to a company that had reinvented my career and captured my heart for over a decade. I kissed the sales bell for the last time. Packed up my stuff. And as I walked for the door, I turned to my teammate Charles Caldwell and told him I was going to miss the place. At which point, Charles immediately remarked, “It’s not the place. It’s the people. The people make the place.”

While I expected to spend a good long time on sabbatical, instead I wound up taking an interim CEO position the very next day, where I met and briefly led an incredible group of people I never knew existed. And just last week, I took on a permanent new role as the CEO of Redwood Software. Needless to say, it’s been a busy non-sabbatical. However, between all of this, Omicron, the holidays, and a New Year, I’ve been doing some serious reflecting. Reflecting on what I love to do and what drives me. And no matter where my thoughts wandered, I kept coming back to Charles’ comment, “The people make the place.”

Charles is a unique person. He’s part Jedi, an incredible dad and husband, and increasingly quite the yoga and meditation master! He’s also one of the few software leaders who can talk circles around other developers when it comes to technology, but can also explain to the rest of us in super simple human terms. And during our time together at Logi, Charles was the heart of the company. Someone who literally put his actual heart into the business and realized the heart of business really matters. It gave us purpose. It defined our vision. Our mission and our values. And it brought us together and kept us together as one heartbeat across the globe.

While I’d like to say I came to an epiphany on my own, I can’t. The credit goes to Charles. Seems obvious. Seems almost trite. But man is it true. I wasn’t going to miss the hallways or the weekly forecast calls or deal reviews. It wasn’t even all the cool new things we’d done to the office environment (that none of us really ever got to see!) to bring our new branding to life that gave me pause. It wasn’t the logo. Or even the products we sold. It was the people. Plain and simple. The people I worked with. The people I learned from. The people I served as customers. The people I had the privilege of calling my teammates. That’s what I cared about. And that’s what I was going to miss.

What’s the point? It’s this.

The people make the place. I don’t care what it is. Your company. Your sports team. Your support group. Your friends. Your country. The lake I’ve talked about so often, Lake of Bays. Seriously. It’s just a bunch of water and trees and fish and boats like plenty of other lakes. What makes it special? The people there. The folks I know. The kids of the kids of the kids who knew my great grandfather. They are the ones that make the place.

And now, I’m about to take the reign of yet another company to try to steer it into the future. Time for goodbye? Yes. It was.  But now I’m more focused on the fact that it’s actually time for hello again. I look forward to beginning my next journey at Redwood Software. I look forward to meeting the people who make it what it is. And I hope they look forward to meeting me. And I hope above all, we can make the place a better place than it is right now, which is pretty freaking great already.

Happy New Year! Anyone know how to say, ‘Hello,’ in Dutch?