Forbes talked to
Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan about his unique management style at the Golden Triangle based compliance company.
Excerpt:
Raised in Germany where his father was stationed in the Army as a Colonel. His mother is a native German and Patrick spoke German for most of his childhood. His father moved the family back to the U.S. to Denver where Patrick went to school in the inner city. "I learned a lot in the hallways of the inner city school," says Patrick. He was not the best of students and later joined the Army which was one of the first steps in turning his life around.
"I came from the Army and served in Desert Storm," says Quinlan. "The Army teaches you the discipline of mission and team work. You understand what hill is your mission. Not that you always understand how high the mountain is or how cold the journey may be," further states Quinlan. The experience taught him that mission and teamwork are the keys to success and that you need an "A" team behind you in order to accomplish the mission. Being in combat though made him realize that the Army was not a career for him, however formative the experience may have been.
"My partner and I got here by failure," says Patrick. "You learn more from failure than you do success." After the Army, he and his co-founder Barclay Friesen worked 7 years to build a company which became successful in many respects, but went bankrupt in October 2008 during the financial collapse. "It caused both of us to lose everything. We had to move back with our parents and start over," states Quinlan. "Four months later we were at Rivet Software."
Read the rest
here.
Enjoy this story?
Sign up for free solutions-based reporting in your inbox each week.