Page 125 - John Kador - 201 Best Questions to Ask on Your Interview-McGraw-Hill (2002)

INTERVIEW THE INTERVIEWER

All the other questions in this book are fair game, and will give you
good information. But the main challenge of working with a company
founder or owner is not in getting the job offer, but in succeeding at
the job. If it doesn’t work out, often it won’t be because of perform-
ance but because of the inability of the company founder or owner to
let go of the reins. Thus, the questions you ask in this circumstance
need to give you sharp information about fit.
Business history shows that few company founders have the skills to
manage the company when it gets past a certain size. Few such man-
agers, however, acknowledge this reality. One of your main goals in the
interview, then, is to try to determine how you will be able to work with
this individual and, by extension, his or her heirs, all of whom have a
stake in the business. To satisfy yourself of the viability of the situation,
you are entitled to a much greater degree of latitude.
Company founders and owners have tremendous pride in the success
of the organizations they built. They will generally resist sharing their
organizations with anyone else. The big issue, then, is how willingly the
company founder or owner is prepared to adjust the company’s balance
of power and, perhaps, ownership. The questions that follow are de-
signed to give you a clue about how flexible the company founder or
owner might be. The questions assume the candidate is interviewing for
a senior executive position, perhaps the COO to the founder’s CEO.
Use these wordings as the basis for customizing questions to your
unique situation:

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What are the success factors that will tell you that the decision to bring
me on board was the right one?
This question starts the conversation off on the success factors that you
will bring to the organization.

8-88
How would you describe the company you’d like to leave your heirs
in terms of sales, size, number of employees, and position in the
industry?
This opens the conversation about heirs and what impact they may have
on the negotiations.

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