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Perry Evans of Closely, on Craftsmanship and Early Rising

Perry Evans says he regularly awakes at 4 a.m. and spends “two hours every morning just calibrating what’s going on in my market.”Credit...Earl Wilson/The New York Times

This interview with Perry Evans, chief executive of Closely, a digital marketing firm, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. What were some early influences on your leadership style?

A. My mother was a very strong woman — she taught nursing, was very meticulous and very professional. She was very proud of her craft. And I come from a family of shipbuilders on my dad’s side. My uncle had a cabinet manufacturing shop that I grew up working in.

So I’m a big believer in mastering your craft. I always seek out people who have real strong pride in craftsmanship, and I look for that in engineers. To me, the things that matter most are pride in their work and curiosity. When you find someone with that combination, they can do amazing things.

Q. Tell me about your college years.

A. I jumped around a lot. I went from aeronautical engineering to law to fine arts and finally graduated with a degree in commerce. Part of what drove me into that was a professor I stumbled upon who was a really interesting, eclectic character, and he had an entrepreneurial spirit.

Q. Early management lessons for you?

A. I ended up with two or three people working for me when I was fresh out of college. I was way too smart for my own good and managed to anger a lot of older people who were intimidated by the young kid, or just annoyed by the kid who thought he knew everything. I learned to step back, listen, figure out the person first — where they are and where they’re trying to go — and then calibrate their role and contribution.

Q. You’ve worked in the digital space a long time. Thoughts on innovation?

A. I’m a real student of business transformation. In any transformation I’ve seen, the winner is always the one who takes out a clean sheet of paper and says, “This is how you would do it if you didn’t have the drag of your traditional business.”

Q. Tell me about the culture of your company now.

A. I like the concept of a core team that stays small until you really are forced to scale. There are a dozen of us, and it’s a chance to really try a much more open style of management and culture. There are no offices, and I’m sitting next to a developer and a designer and a marketer, and they’re hearing almost every conversation I have on the phone, including with investors and partners.

I’m really intrigued with how much better this approach works in terms of helping everybody really live the business. The more context you give to people helps them better evaluate every decision they make. And in technology companies these days, you often have three or four people who will go on to start their own company. A big part of the appeal of working with our team is that you’re absorbing a lot of learning that goes beyond just being a good engineer or a good designer. At a broader level, a sense of impact is important for any employee, and people really underestimate that.

Q. Any feedback you’ve heard over the years about your management style?

A. My tendency is to hire really smart people and spend enough time with them for them to know what they do. But I often expect too much of them in terms of independence of action. It’s about giving people a clear picture of what success means. I tend to underestimate the importance of giving people feedback in a more formal and regular way.

Q. How do you hire?

A. First of all, I always have my list of people I either have worked with or would like to work with, so I always have an ideal team list in my head. I tend to have done my homework quite a bit before I interview someone. I prequalify competency before I sit down with someone, so it’s really an exploration of relationship and culture. It’s really about how well they would fit in a puzzle to complement other key people.

Q. And the questions you ask?

A. “What did you do in your career that made you happiest, and what are you most proud of? And what things made you really frustrated?” And I always ask, “Tell me about a time when you were asked to do something you didn’t feel good about, or when you had to manage an ethical challenge, and describe where that led you in your career.” It’s always fascinating to see people react to that, because they never expect that question, and it’s also a really good barometer of management character. The best leaders I’ve ever worked with are ones who delight in that question and are very introspective about it.

I also ask about side projects. There’s a side project in everybody, whether it’s technology-related, or pursuing an interest and activity. I focus on those because those are the things that people initiate on their own, and they’re instructive about what drives them.

Q. What would you say if a job candidate asked you, “Perry, what should I know about working with you?”

A. One pattern I have, which surprises a lot of people, is that I get up at 4 every morning. I’ve done that for 15 years. It started when I had offices in Amsterdam and Melbourne, so your schedule has to change to stay ahead of things. So I spend two hours every morning just calibrating what’s going on in my market, which gives me a really strong barometer of where the product and the company need to go. Part of what I’m trying to do is really appreciate the challenges in each job function.

Employees can see that as either a threat or an opportunity, and the ones I delight in see it as an opportunity, because what it means is that I’ll understand what they do way more than the average C.E.O. would. I’ll appreciate their craft, but I’ll also be able to say, “Hey, look at this new thing we found — what do you think of that?” Or, “Should we be worried about this?”

It gives me the context and the knowledge to help the team and appreciate the team, and also to calibrate whether we’re staying ahead or not. People working with me have come to expect that I am a lot more connected to their work than the average executive.

You can’t be easily intimidated by someone who may find out something about your job space that you didn’t hear about first. That’s not the point. It’s that combination of pride and craft and curiosity that I think is perfect for the kind of businesses I create.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: The Early Bird Gets the Picture. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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