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Enetrix CEO Carlson an enterprising salary manInterviewed by Nathan Leaf
President and chief executive officer of enetrix, 8476 Greenway Blvd., Middleton Age: 60 Family: Wife Susan, two children Background: Born and raised in Onarga, Ill. Education: Bachelor of arts from University of Illinois; masters in public policy and administration from UW-Madison. Professional background: Served a one-year tour in Vietnam as a military journalist in the Army from 1969 to 1970; worked as an executive recruiter in Los Angeles from 1970 to 1971; reporter at the Beloit Daily News from 1971 to 1972; personnel director for city of Beloit from to 1972 until 1974 when he entered graduate school at UW-Madison; founded human resources management consulting firm Carlson Associates in 1975; personnel director at UW Hospital from 1982 to 1986; also served as chief negotiator and labor relations advisor to the UW-Madison Chancellor's office from 1977-82 and 1985-89; resumed consulting business in 1986; part-time adjunct assistant professor of economics at UW-Milwaukee from 1990 to 1994; sold consulting business to David M. Griffith & Associates in 1992 and joined the company as regional manager and national account representative; returned to Carlson Associates in 1995 and formed Carlson Dettmann Consulting in 1996 and then added Survey Research Associates in 1997. Survey Research Associates was rebranded as enetrix in 2006. About the company: With about 20 employees and annual sales between $2 million to $3 million, enetrix primarily conducts salary survey research and hosts the information online for trade associations and companies. It also has a human resources consulting division and develops online catalogs. Q. You took a sabbatical before starting Survey Research Associates. What did you do? A. Wrote. Spent time with my family. My parents were elderly and I wanted to spend time with them. Spent time with my kids, my wife. I traveled. Started writing poetry and other things that were important to me. I thought about what I wanted to do next and concluded that what I wanted to do next is build a human resources consultant firm that emphasized technology. ... What I wanted to do initially was to use online accessible databases to collect information on pay and then make that information accessible to associations. Q. Why emphasize technology? A. We (thought) that the primary market for us should be associations - trade and professional associations, national, state and local associations. And the reason is that essentially what an association has is two assets. One, their relationships. Two, information. And lots of associations did salary surveys. So we just said we're going to step into that marketplace and we're going to replace all that with our technology and build a business. Q. Why do associations and companies come to you for help? A. My mother used to ask me the same question. "Now tell me what you do." I said "Mom, we advise companies on how to pay people." And she said "They pay you for that?" Yes they do. It's an important question because you don't want to be wrong. How to structure compensations so people feel fairly treated. How to deliver compensation in terms of annual increases. Is it based upon how long you've been there? Is it based upon performance? Some combination of the two? What should benefits be? ... We've developed over the years a blue-chip client list of major associations. Our intention was to focus on growing sectors of the economy. Electronics. Engineering. We do survey work for the National Society of Professional Engineers. Q. What percentage of your business is in online catalog development? A. I would say probably 25 to 35 percent. And a major breakout for us in 2007 will be in that product line. Q. With more commerce happening on the Internet, developing online catalogs would seem to be a competitive business. How do you compete? A. The way that you break out is that you've got to be doing something different than the competition. You can compete on price but that's tough. You've really got to compete on features, and that's what makes you different. What makes us different is that at our price point, the breadth of the offering in terms of the back-room reporting, in addition to all the things that you can do with e-commerce, is just a start. We're going to add some other features that are going to be rolled out this year. Q. Why did you rebrand the company as enetrix? A. Survey Research Associates was too narrow a name. A lot of life is about imaging and impression and people were seeing us as being a survey research house. But we were doing human resource consulting and this cataloging work and e-commerce content management so we needed a broader name. We happened to own the name enetrix. ... We were doing searches yesterday on URLs trying to come up with a new name for a product line. It's a miserable experience (because so many are taken already). So I finally called a halt to it and I said, that's enough of that. We own enetrix. OK, we'll have to tell people how to pronounce it and explain to them what it is, but that's a good name. Q. Do you expect the company to expand again in the near future? A. Yes, I do. As we become more focused on what we do, we'll expand fairly rapidly. We've now developed a library of products and we've got a standard compensation survey that's very repeatable. Any organization could adopt it. ... Increasingly, our work is not compensation. It's benchmarking. It's operational analysis. Statistics on operations, sales volumes, turnover. Q. Is the increasing complexity of compensation plans helping your business? A. Oh, it always does. From a compensation standpoint, it's an absolute growth industry. Q. How do you apply your experience as a military reporter in Vietnam to your everyday job? A. Essentially they gave me a notebook, a typewriter and said go find a story. And I do the same thing every day. I'll look at a prospect or think about something and I'd say "Who's doing this?" And I'll pick up the phone and call anybody. It doesn't bother me a bit. Same thing as when I was a newspaper reporter. I don't have a problem asking a question. And I approach it from a naive standpoint. ... One of the key qualities that has sustained me over the years is that I'm just innately curious. I like to meet people. I like to know what they do - I care about what they do. nleaf@madison.com madison.com ©2009 Capital Newspapers. All rights reserved. |
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