It’s “who” you pay not “how much” you pay that drives performance

Reflecting on my entrepreneurship experiences of the last 8 years, there have been certain interesting observations of mine with respect to people.

We started TestVagrant with a vision of how we can reduce the time to market a software product by designing scalable test automation solutions and making testing a lean and effective process within the Org. As a result, we consult with the fast scaling B2C companies to assess their current QA solution. We provide recommendations and own the implementation to build and deliver you the improvised testing solutions & process.

A vital ingredient of any consulting business like ours is the quality of people. Some of the values you will find across all of us would be craftsmanship, passion for quality, and engineering excellence [For us, tech is a major differentiator and we take pride in the solutions we build as it facilitates decision making for the product engineering team]. Almost across 200 people we hired in the last 8 years and who decided to work with us, there was a common thread between all the exceptional performers.

Purpose and clarity of thoughts. The majority of the high performers will have a purpose. They have an identity of that they associate with the work they do. They have a sense of pride in what they are doing and they do it because the work becomes an extension of their personality. They are driven by the thought of quality than quantity, so a high-quality output is one of the traits. They are intrinsically motivated and spend more time than an average performer on research and perfecting their deliverables.

In the 8 years, I also learned that people perform because they love to perform, they have this intrinsic drive to perform and shine. Offering more compensation and perks neither converts nor motivate an ordinary performer to become a high performer.