C-Suite: Joe Ehrhardt

Fast Fact: Ehrhardt started Teslar in 2008 to provide automated workflow and portfolio management tools to help community financial institutions.

What’s the most recent book you read? I just reread (listened to) one of my favorite business books, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz.

What’s the most interesting thing about you that isn’t on your resume? My team hates me for it, but I work best under insane time pressure.

What is the best business advice you have ever received? As a CEO, you have three core responsibilities no matter the size of your company: have the right strategy, hire great people to execute that strategy, and make sure there is enough money in the bank account to accomplish it.

What keeps you up at night or worries you the most? For a long time, it was running out of money, like any startup. Now, it’s all strategy and culture. In the high-speed fintech/SaaS world, one can become irrelevant quickly, so we have to move fast while keeping Teslar Software one of the best places to work. I know everyone says culture eats strategy; I sort of agree, but if no one buys your product, you are still out of business even if you’re the best place to work in the world.

What is the best business advice you have ever given? Never be afraid to hear bad news every day. Yes, it’s very hard, but you can learn more and accomplish more from that news than you can good news.

If you had $1 million to give, what would you support? Education. Increasing and passing knowledge to our children is the greatest achievement humankind has ever done.

If you weren’t in your current profession, what would you be doing? I would either be a banker/lender, working on robots, or a park ranger.

In your company/industry, what are the main differences between pre- and post- COVID-19? In banking and fintech, COVID has been tough on traditional lending and, like in all industries, created uncertainty. At Teslar Software, our team quickly pivoted from our existing growth strategy to help with PPP. It was a huge challenge for our company and derailed a lot of our plans, but the team here was amazing and managed to keep us off a cliff. We ended up processing over 22% of all PPP loans in the nation in 2021. That changed us forever and was not on any one-year or five-year plan we had.

What is the most used app on your phone? Directly, Outlook. In the car, Audible. Sad, I know.

What is one thing you would change about your company if you could today? Clone every person we have. We have an amazing team, and I wish I could just replicate them so we could grow without any more interviews.

In one sentence, can you express what the most important thing about being a leader is? Grow people by empowering them, letting them fail (and letting them know that is OK and expected), and being blown away when they succeed in ways you never expected.