Science
When Rick Carlson founded SharpSpring in 2012, he didn't think of himself as a CEO. “My co-founder and I were doing whatever it took to survive,” Carlson says, and they were responsible for everything from software development to buying office supplies. In the early days of the automated marketing software company, “there were so many failures it was hard to name them all,” according to Carlson. “There was an immense amount of wasted effort in figuring out what customers wanted. Over the years we think we’ve gotten smarter about how we make those decisions.” The company went public in 2014, after being acquired by SMTP, and is currently listed on the NASDAQ. TRANSCRIPT: Intro (00:01): Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace. Starting and running your own company: it's not for everyone, but for those who have done it, it can be exhilarating, exhausting, and easily the hardest thing they've ever done. So we decided to go out and talk to some of those people and find out what they've learned, what they'd repeat, and what they'll never do again. We'll hear stories from their first year, then from the period when they realized they're going to survive, and how they intend to position their companies for the future. We'll find out what a CEO's normal day's like, how they build and manage their teams, what it's done to their personal lives. And finally, when is the time to move on? Join us for CEO 101, a limited series of deep looks at people who are their own boss for better or for worse. This episode's guest is Rick Carlson, CEO of SharpSpring, a comprehensive sales and marketing automation platform. Richard Miles (01:25): Rick, welcome to the show. Glad to have you on to get your experiences as CEO of SharpSpring. We're going to start by talking about the very beginning. So if you could take us back literally to your first year, really your first few days as CEO, and let's get a snapshot for people who've never done this before, what that is like. And obviously, you put in work before you probably became a CEO into the company, the idea, but let's start with the first 30 days. You've got your company, it started, maybe it's just you, maybe you have a handful of employees. What was that experience like? Rick Carlson (01:56): First off, thanks so much for having me, appreciate the opportunity and I'm glad to be here. So when I heard you pose the question, your first day as CEO, actually what immediately came to mind is during that first year or even two years, or maybe three years, I certainly did not think of myself as a CEO. CEO is what I am now managing a very large team with managers and a couple of hundred people. When I think about that first year, I think about struggling with a fledgling team where I am just another team member, and that's exactly what it was like. I was a founder of a business, much more than a