Spotlight on President and CEO of Reliant, Chris Wright, Ph.D.

By Cara Whedbee, Ph.D.

The “spotlight” interview below features a successful entrepreneur, Dr. Chris Wright, who is the founder, President and CEO of Reliant. Dr. Wright helped design all of Reliant’s Strategic Talent Management (STM) products and content which help companies better acquire, develop and retain talented employees. He has consulted with many Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, non-profit organizations and academic institutions. Dr. Wright’s work with these organizations has varied from working with key executives to align human capital and business strategies to organizational survey research to the design and implementation of assessment and selection, performance management and learning management processes and applications.

Wright received his Doctorate in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Tulsa, located in Tulsa, Okla. He has been a frequent presenter, speaker and panelist at conferences such as the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology, the Academy of Management and the Society for Human Resource Management. He has published articles in the Journal of Business Psychology and the Journal of Applied Psychology. Wright has also served as an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Tulsa.

You can find out more about Wright and his company, Reliant, by visiting their Web site: www.reliantlive.com.

HRT: Well thanks for taking the time to visit with me today and share with our readers your entrepreneurial experiences, Dr. Wright!

CW: It is my pleasure, Cara.

HRT: We here at HRTools.com love entrepreneurs like yourself, so tell me: how did you come up with the idea for your company, Reliant?

CW: Well, the idea for Reliant stems from my educational background as a Ph.D. in industrial organizational (IO) psychology. Because of this background, I’ve always had an interest in helping companies better hire, develop and retain employees.  It’s really what IO psychology is all about, and back in the mid-90s I was working for a Fortune 500 energy and telecom company serving in various roles where I was helping with employee selection, employee development and employee retention strategies, all from within the human resources (HR) department of this corporation.  In the mid-90s is also when we began to use the Internet to streamline some of our HR processes and that’s when a light bulb went off for me and I really thought, “Wow, the Internet is going to be a tool that companies can use for conducting testing and assessments, to delivering web-based or online training, to employee development, 360-degree performance management, performance appraisals, online surveys and so on.”

In other words, for all of the things that are so important in the selection, development and retention of talent, the Internet would become a tool that companies could use to do those things better and more efficiently, not to mention more cost effectively.  So that was really what sparked my leaving that company and beginning to work on what we have today, which is a unique suite of talent management solutions that includes scientifically developed assessments and other products that our clients use specifically for hiring, developing and retaining their talent.

HRT: Wow! What a great idea for a company! So once you knew that you wanted to start your company, how did you get it going?

CW: Well, you know Cara, I had never started a company, so to be honest there were a lot of important things that I did not know. So what I did initially was reach out to other friends and colleagues that I knew had started their own companies and I received lots of advice from people that I trusted. I also reached out to my local Chamber of Commerce organization here in Tulsa, Okla.  They have a small business resource group that will provide information and resources to start-up companies that are trying to get off the ground.  We also raised some capital when I first started my company, so I met with financial consultants and others here locally to help get that process started. 

The very first thing that I had to do was put together a business plan, and again I had never written a business plan before, so I had to reach out to the local Chamber and other experts to get some assistance with that, but I found that everybody that I reached out to was really accommodating and encouraging. Usually the Chamber organizations in most mid-sized to larger-sized cities are going to have really good resources for small business owners.

HRT: Great! What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far about being a business owner?

CW: Well, I think for me hiring the right people is so critical.  When you think about it, that’s critical for every business, but when you’re a new business owner and you’re starting a small business, hiring the wrong person can have a devastating impact on your company. So clearly defining the roles that I needed within my organization and then spending a good deal of time and energy trying to make sure that I found the right people, I believe, is a critical part of the business. 

Also, particularly if it’s a start-up organization, bringing a good CFO into the company can have such a huge impact. When you are starting a new company, managing your cash flow is probably one of the biggest challenges most small business owners face and are not prepared to deal with, nor do they usually understand how to deal with it.  So being able to predict cash flows, and understanding how to manage cash, is so important and a good CFO can often make or break a start-up company in that respect.

HRT: Excellent point and nice segue! Since we focus on human resources on our site, I’d like to know: what is your HR strategy for Reliant?

CW: Well, our HR strategy is we have to practice what we preach because we’re out advising companies and selling products to companies that help them better select employees, develop their employees and then retain their employees, and so we utilize the same skills testing and assessments that our clients use for hiring all of our internal employees at Reliant.  We also use the same performance management appraisals, including 360s and tools that our clients use within our own company.  We make training available to our employees using our own internal learning management system, and then we survey all of our internal employees to first of all identify if they’re engaged and then to discover what we can improve as an organization from their perspective. So again, we’re utilizing all of the same tools that our clients are using.

In terms of compensation and benefits, that’s an area where we have assistance. We turn to outside consultants to help guide us in making smart decisions when it comes to compensation and benefits strategies and best practices.  The cost of benefits to any company, but particularly to a small business, is something that can really be devastating because you want to be competitive by being able to offer the same kinds of benefits packages that larger companies do, but a lot of times, or almost always, as a small business you don’t have the purchasing power that a larger company has.  So turning to outside consultants to help you be competitive and make smart business decisions in those areas is really important.

HRT: Well I am glad to hear you “walk the talk” with your HR strategy! How do you approach customer service at Reliant?

CW: Well, definitely for Reliant, customer service, like with any company, is so critical and we like to have a personal touch to our customer service. Any time you call Reliant’s customer service, you’re going to get a Reliant person. You’re not going to speak to an outsourced customer service rep. At the same time we utilize technology through our customer service portal to empower our customers to be able to solve their own problems, if they like.  So we’ve got demos for all of our software products and we have a searchable knowledge database with the most frequently asked questions that customers can access to get answers to the most common questions that clients have with our products and with our software. Then we also guarantee response time for any clients that submit a trouble ticket or an issue that they’re having with one of our products. We guarantee to have that issue resolved or question answered within a certain period of time.

Just establishing those kinds of things upfront with our customer I think helps us manage our customer expectations and also helps our customers understand how we’re going to approach and solve their problems. Also, with larger customers we’ll enter into service level agreements that clearly spell out how the customer engagement process is going to happen.  Just trying to manage customer expectations, I think, is half the battle.

HRT: Definitely. So last question: if you could give one piece of advice to your fellow entrepreneurs, what would it be?

CW: My best advice is to be patient. I think from the statistics I’ve read, about 50% of most small businesses fail within the first year of operation. The point is, those small businesses that fail, I think the reason they fail is that a lot of folks lose patience. If they don’t immediately have success within the first year or first two years of starting their business, they give up. Had I done that, then Reliant wouldn’t be here today.

We started our company in 2000, so we were coming in at the tail end of the dot-com boom, right before 9/11 hit, and then right into a period where the economy was really lagging, so the first several years of our business were really tough. There were times where we had talked about whether we were going to shut the doors, but we just stayed committed and we were patient and just weathered the storm during the rocky period and were able to emerge from that rough time and become successful. So I think my advice is just to have patience. Don’t expect success to come overnight, and that’s probably the best advice that I have.

HRT: Well, that’s great advice. What I appreciate about you, just talking to you for this short amount of time, is that you automatically assume that taking care of your employees and having excellent customer service should be something everybody wants to do, and that everybody should do. And even though a lot of companies say that that’s what they would do or that they’d like to do, not a lot of companies follow through.  So I just want to say that I’m impressed with your ability to follow through.

CW: I appreciate that. That’s definitely something that we work on. We’re not perfect, but we certainly work on it and make every effort to do our best.

HRT: Well it shows! Again, thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. Our readers will certainly be able to get a lot out of what you had to say.

CW: Thank you, Cara, for the opportunity!

The “spotlight” interview below features a successful entrepreneur, Dr. Chris Wright, who is the founder, President and CEO of Reliant.