Speed of Service
VeriFone’s Bud Waller puts his customers, and yours, first in the effort to grow payment processing.

Devin Bates: Where do you look for your leadership ideas?
Bud Waller: I don’t pretend to think I know all the answers about leadership, so a lot of it has come from books. Some  has also come from the people who have been my mentors in business. And what I’m finding is a lot of the advice that I’ve gotten through my career was as applicable years ago as it is today. And I’ve managed to maintain a pretty good network of professional people, so when I come up with what may be a hair-brained idea I can bounce it off them before I go public with it.

How do you take what you’ve picked up from talking to other folks or reading in books and how do you share those ideas?
My favorite quote to my staff has been “Working for VeriFone is not a spectator sport.” That was something the original chairman and founder of VeriFone used to say all the time and I’ve kind of plagiarized it now because I thought it was appropriate. Get involved. Understand every aspect of your business and what your employees do. Spend a lot of time with the customers and in the field. I go to virtually every industry show so I can get a pulse for what’s going on in the business. What are people talking about? What are the hot buttons? Then I take that information, along with the leadership skills I’ve learned over the years, and work with each one of my staff to make sure that they’re as sensitive to those things as I am.

What are the most important values that you demonstrate as a leader?
Number one, honesty. You have to be truthful in all of the aspects of your life. If you’re not an honest person with integrity, I don’t have a lot of use for you. And I think that’s pretty much the case with most people. You have to treat people with respect and you have to be honest with them. They may not like what they hear, but I think they will respect the fact that you were honest with them.

You were at General Electric for years…
Yes, I started in finance in the IT infrastructure of GE, so it was kind of a unique position to be in at the time. I went through their management recruiting program, basically classes three nights a week taught by GE managers after I worked all day at GE. In the first class the instructor said, “You’ve learned the theory in college and now we’re going to teach you the reality of the business world.” It was a tremendous education process. And GE traditionally has been a very financially run company. I think anybody that’s running a business today needs a strong financial sense and can look at a balance sheet or a financial statement and understand what they’re seeing. We have a very ambitious growth plan for VeriFone, you really need that kind of foundation to know what you’re looking at. And you don’t necessarily get the practical side of that in college.

In your tenure at VeriFone there have been a number of changes. What has allowed you to keep this company together and move forward?
When I first joined the company in the eighties it was a small company, and not a public company. We had what I would call a strong “believer” theme, which we see in a lot of start-up companies. It’s almost as if those early employees in your company will sacrifice a tremendous amount for the cause, for the company. A lot of people later on say, “Boy, you’re on Easy Street,” but they don’t realize what many of our employees went through in the earlier years to take a company from a good company to a great company.

Hatim Tyabji, probably the most prominent individual at VeriFone after the founder, promoted this believer theme. He believed that if you really worked at it you could maintain it. But as your growth continues to grow, that believer theme tends to diminish. And he spent an awful lot of his life trying to change that. He just wrote a book about his experiences at VeriFone — and I have a very warm spot in my heart for this guy because I think he’s a rare breed of people who has managed to be very successful and navigate through the constraints on businesses today —  and it’s pretty amazing because he’s not pounding his chest about his successes; he’s just saying if you have those kinds of philosophies you live by them. He calls them his ten tenets and he published them in a booklet when he was at VeriFone. Every employee had one. And it was kind of like a test, if you were out calling on a customer, Tyabji would say, “Where is your book? You need to live by that.”

And even as VeriFone grew, I learned through watching all the changes. Bill Melton, the founder of VeriFone, is a successful entrepreneur and has started a number of different businesses. What really impressed me most about him was that he knew he was an entrepreneur and running big companies was not necessarily his strength. I had a conversation with him one night and I said, “For you it must be like taking one of your children and giving it to another family to raise because you think that other family will do a better job than you will.” He said it was a great analogy. But it is probably those kinds of people who have taken VeriFone to the next level.

One of the things you mentioned as creating success for you is being able to spot talented people. What do you look for when you’re looking to fill a slot?
You know, I don’t necessarily look for people that have experience at that specific job. We’re all trainable. I view any education as very, very important, but it really is your badge that says, “I’m capable of learning. I’m capable of changing. I’m disciplined.” And I think reading a résumé is only to make sure the badge is there. But I think through conversations with people, it’s really their attitude, their fire in the belly, if you will, to want to get involved that’s impressive. Because it’s getting harder in the business world today as we’ve become more of a global economy.

And recruiting is a seven-day a week, 24-hour a day job. It’s not something you just do when a résumé hits your desk. It’s when you get waited on in a restaurant…
…It’s sitting on an airplane, talking to person next to you and saying, “Now there’s somebody I would like to have on my team.” I probably would say most of the key positions that I fill have been people I’ve met through my travels or through word of mouth. If you’ve got good people they generally help you attract good people.

What does VeriFone do better than anyone else?
We really spend a lot of time listening to and interacting with customers. The term “partnership” unfortunately gets abused in business today. People will call it a partnership if it’s a benefit to them, but is that really a true partnership? I can name an awful lot of companies today that, if it wasn’t for our partnership with them, we wouldn’t be where we are. Some were major oil companies, some were independent businessmen. Some people like yourself. You have to ask “What do people want?” And I think when you go through those kinds of discussions, you invite people that you respect, and you have a discussion with them and try and learn what those things are, and then adopt them and integrate them into your solutions. I think that served us well. The other thing that I’ve tried to instill in our people is that this is a team business. The salesperson may go out and sell the first widget or hardware piece, but it’s really the infrastructure behind him that sells the next 200.

What are you guys passionate about?
Again, helping our customers is number one. And a lot of our customers are personal friends. Some of my customers have gone to my children’s weddings. If you can have that kind of relationship with people, you can be honest with them and they’ll be honest with you. And in many cases I’ll talk to a customer about an idea and say, “What do you think about this?” And it may even be a new business venture beyond what we’re doing today, and I’ll ask, “Do you think this has any merit?”

And so that’s what gets me up every day. It’s by far the biggest single ingredient I think to success.

A lot of what you do is payment-related; it’s where you came from early on. What do you see as the next step in payment?
I think ACH and some of the new loyalty programs are things that will continue to grow. And they need to. It helps the retailer and the consumer. From a technology standpoint, it’s incredible to me how quickly wireless technology is expanding. What is happening with wireless — making transactions faster than cash and hopefully less expensive — I think those are the areas where we’re focusing our attention. We also have this huge infrastructure within VeriFone that is looking at what people are doing around the world. From a payment standpoint I don’t think there’s anybody in the world that has the resources that we have to really experiment.

The other thing besides wireless has been universality. The universality that we started with has served our company and customers well. I have lots of different locations with lots of different pumps, branded with different oil companies. I would like to have a product that’s the same in all my locations no matter what the pumps or the fuel tank monitoring systems are. And that’s really what we try to provide. Even today as we move ahead, our phrase of ‘Migration, not obsolescence’  is still applicable.

What we’ve tried to do is come out with new systems that allow people to continue to use the old ones in addition to the new technology, not in place of. We acquired a company in the U.K. that has a PCI-certified outdoor payment device. At the NACS Show, that will be our showpiece, if you will, the ability to take this module that is totally PCI-certified today and put it in existing pumps regardless of the pump manufacturer, or put it on a post or on an island. 

You just mentioned “PCI compliance.” Our organization is going through this process. How can VeriFone help retailers become PCI compliant?
We’re looking at security requirements around the world. Germany, for example, probably has some of the most stringent security requirements. Even Canada is more security conscious than we are. This has been going on around the world for a number of years. It may not have been called PCI, but we knew it was coming. PCI is not static. It’s changing. From a manufacturing standpoint that becomes a challenge because now you have to worry about how long you’re manufacturing a product because at some point you’re not going to be able to sell it anymore.

I’ve long been involved with the NACS technology initiative and now PCATS. And VeriFone has been at that table from the very beginning. Why is that? What does VeriFone see as the value of standards?
Again, if you go back universality, the reason we’ve been successful is because there haven’t been standards. But by the same token, I think we could spend more time and energy on other things to benefit the industry if we weren’t worried about how do we get everything talking to each other. Obviously we don’t provide all the pieces of the solution. Other vendors provide other pieces. And we often look at, for our own growth ambitions, some of those other businesses. But the reality is that if we could get the industry to adopt the standards, and that includes ourselves, it would result in more economical and better products for everybody.

I want to kind of come back a little bit to leadership — what do you do to grow leaders?
I give out management books that I think are relevant. My favorite gifts to anybody, business or personal, are books. And in years past I’ve used books to give to customers as well as salespeople. And I travel a lot so I find myself on a lot of planes with a lot of time to read. I try to share those things. If I’ve read something interesting or some new statistics, I’ll bring those up during our all-hands meeting. So it’s not just sharing with my immediate management staff but with the whole organization.

We talked about books all morning long, so what is your favorite business book right now?
I thought Good to Great  [by Jim Collins] was an excellent book. It begged the question of what does it take to get to be great? What you find is some of the same things that you need to be great in business, you need to be great as a person. Maybe as you get a little older you get more philosophical about some things, but I think people who are personally great will be great at business. They go hand in hand.

We have several customers that I believe run great companies. And to be a great company doesn’t mean you’re a big company. Some of my favorite companies are great companies and intentionally don’t want to be a big company, but want to be great. And I think that’s an admirable place to be.

But really, there’s not one management book out there that answers all the questions. Like anything else, you take little bits from different things that you come in contact with.

Right. One of my favorite quotes is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.” I think that continually learning and reading and not thinking you know it all is what’s helped make you and VeriFone a success.