Dan Hoffman Assumes New Leadership Role with ShoreTel – Keith Nealon Becomes President and General Manager of the Cloud Division

On paper, it has been a long time since I had a new job.  But , in growing M5 from zero to $70 million, I've had a new job every year. I've had to change my leadership style constantly as we grew from five people to 50 and now to 250 people.   As Christopher Columbus supposedly said (in Portuguese), “You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

The personal learning has been thrilling.  Public speaking, team-building, managing people, designing sales processes, embracing the Agile development methodology, building culture, strategic planning, bits and bytes – through it all, I've had the joy of working with world-class teachers and experts, many of them on my own staff.

This Wednesday, we had the unique opportunity to host a group of reporters and analysts at the Boston Celtic’s game.  The Boston Celtics are a customer of our on-premise business phone solution.  They took on the Brooklyn Nets, a customer of ShoreTel Sky’s cloud-based solution.  We were joined by IT executives from both teams and despite the intense cloud vs. premise rivalry, all of the violence remained on the court.  (Celtics point guard Rajon Rondo was suspended by the league for two games for his role in a shoving match with Nets forward Kris Humphries after a foul on Celtic’s Center Kevin Garnett.*)

M5 Networks‘ president and CEO, Dan Hoffman, talks to NY Report publisher and CEO Rob Levin about selling his business and some past tough times

ShoreTel Cloudies:

What a day!  For about half of you this is your first M5 birthday party. Enjoy the start of your journey.  For the rest of us, this is a day filled with nostalgia and pride.  It is the one day a year that we are all together to thank each other, and slap M5 high-fives.  We've accomplished so much this year.  And I don't only mean the 42 people that learned to rock, or the 17 that learned to roll.  We've built a rocket and readied it for lift-off.  You can feel the rumbling of the engine, the smoke billowing beneath us, the tight straps holding us in, the countdown ... I say it every year, but picture what next year's event will be like!

Last week, I had the great pleasure of joining Peter Blackmore and other ShoreTel executives for ShoreTel’s investor day at AT&T Park in San Francisco.  We had the opportunity to speak to investors and analysts about the future of ShoreTel, unified communications and, of course, the acquisition of M5 Networks.

This was a whole new game for me.  One of the things I like best about my job is that it feels completely new every six months.  I was anxious about how "The Street" would receive us.  But it is great to learn from pros like Peter and his team.  I thought the event was excellent.

Today, we sold the company

Every month, since 2003, when co-founder Jay Kaminsky suggested that the (then) twenty-five of us should get together and talk more, I’ve played opening music at our company meetings.  I try to pick songs that capture the company mood.  Tomorrow, I’ll be playing Lenka’s “The Show” mixed into the new De La Soul, “Pushin’ Ahead, Pushin’ Along.”  Lenka makes me tear up.  De La Soul’s new hit track psyches me up.

Selling M5 to ShoreTel is the solution I was looking for all year.  The problem?  Our market has matured.   It is exploding.  All the things we do -- VoiP, Unified Communications, Mobile, and Cloud -- are combining to create a perfect storm of customer demand.  A classic, Geoffrey Moore style Tornado.  Who wins big in a tornado?  The #1 company.  The leader gives Main Street buyers a safe choice, makes it easy for pragmatic buyers to join in, takes more than its share and outpaces the competition.

Steve Jobs touched so many aspects of my life. I wanted to write about one sliver of his legacy that directly impacted M5’s business phone system business, and illuminated our vision.

Ever notice that while mobile phones are now smart, office phones are still dumb?

Wikipedia claims “Smart phones” have been around since 1922. Nonetheless, I credit Jobs. iPhone was a natural extension of his original vision – from everyone having a computer to everyone having a computer everywhere, all the time. That’s the first thing missing from office phones – they are stuck on desks. People move around. The office is the worst place to work. Nothing that doesn’t move with people can extend their intelligence.

I'm nervous!  Tonight I have to sing in front of my closest friends, colleagues, and five rolling cameras. For a sneak preview, watch our Introduction video. Flashbacks to the last time I did this at the 4th grade holiday play.

The adrenaline, the racing imagination - that's what learning feels like. It's uncomfortable. It can't happen without putting your body in a new and awkward place. It can't happen without the other people looking at you either. Learning is a team sport, and rarely happens when you are alone with your thoughts. 

Over the last twenty years, business operations have become more dispersed. Most mid-size businesses have deployed some kind of “front-office” software to help coordinate. This is certainly better than the old manila client records that can’t be shared, let alone easily managed.

Anyone that has deployed one of these systems, whether it is ACT, Salesforce.com, Siebel, or a “home-grown” CRM is familiar with their greatest weakness. The systems are passive. If staff doesn't enter notes, the system is useless. Sales teams scramble at the end of the month to enter client records so their managers can update forecasts. And that’s if you have excellent adoption.

We wrote a 105-page business plan this year.  The exercise was mostly a success in getting my managers to write out and share their thinking.  The entire company was invited to read the plan and review it, but very few actually did. Only a portion of the senior executives read each other’s sections.  The end result was an excellent roadmap, although I’m a fan of the Helmuth von Moltke the Elder quote “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

We cooked and ate the thing, but I’m not sure we digested it.