Why the Kid Who Works at Your Gym Might Be Your Best Employee

One of my favorite things about my job is getting face time with successful and innovative business men and women and really picking their brains about what they do and how they do it. Yesterday, I moderated a panel discussion for the New York Post’s “NYC Start-Up” event that more than qualified for the “favorite part of my job” category.

On the panel were: Kevin P. Ryan, founding president, Double-Click, chairman and CEO AlleyCorp; Samer Hamadeh, Co-Founder, Vault.com; Joy Bauer, founder, Joy Bauer Nutrition and NBC Today Show Health Expert; and Robert Tuchman, founder and CEO of TSE Sports & Entertainment. I asked the panel how they get the most out of their employees and they all agreed that process begins with the hiring. 

Kevin shared a story about one of his first hires, Mike Walrath (yes, the Right Media founder who sold to Yahoo! for $680 million in 2007). When Kevin was building Double-Click, an Internet marketing technology company, it was 1996 and no one had experience working in the Internet space because the space was so new. Kevin hired Mike when he was working at New York Sports Club selling memberships. At that time, Mike had no experience, but Kevin felt he had a talent level there that was bigger than the company, and he proved to be a leader and an integral part of DoubleClick’s success. “Whether you have 10 employees or 1,000, you should hope that you are surrounded by people on their way up,” said Kevin. “If you are, you can do great things.” 

Speaking about great things, Kevin sold DoubleClick Hellman and Friedman LLC for $1.1 billion in 2005. The company was then sold for $3.1 billion to Google Inc. in 2008.