Bradshaw, 29, said she will help Zahedi with management tips, including how to hire more women and use their multitasking and management skills to help the company and diversify the workforce.
“We hope to learn from Zahedi as well,” she said, “knowing that he has overcome many obstacles to build his company back in Afghanistan.”
Threespot’s co-founder, David Belman, 43, hopes to explain how to find and keep customers.
“I will talk to him about the importance of building relationships and a hands-on way to help him organize a project,” said Belman, who has 70 employees with clients including the Humane Society, the World Bank and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “Profitability is the result of building long-term relationships as opposed to one-off projects.”
Threespot, whose founders cut their teeth on designing Web sites for Crayola, Haagen-Dazs and Kellogg’s, helps organizations locate digital consumers and turn them into customers and, eventually, longtime loyal fans. The audiences range from curious middle-school students who want to know more about the Peace Corps to the 60-year-old woman whom Planned Parenthood wants to “activate” so she can write a letter to her representative in Congress.
“We wrestle with business problems every day,” Belman said. “We bid a big client in the past two months and came in about $100,000 over their price point. But we were able to still convince them we were the right people for the job by moving the conversation to another plane about experience and ideas. That’s the kind of business advice we can use to help Reza.”
I asked Zahedi in an e-mail about his view of American business.
“As you know we are a web and software company,” he wrote. “Most of the software and social network websites originated from the USA. Google, Facebook, YouTube . . . are all gods of our business. So I am so excited to travel to the country of my gods.”
Follow me on Twitter: @addedvalueth.
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