D.C. entrepreneurship comes with a few assumptions: funding is top priority, and a startup’s investors and employees have different jobs.

Marc Langer, founder and president of Recovery Point Systems, believes these assumptions are outdated noting his company works in “the recovery of IT infrastructure, and the capacity to do business.”

“Can you imagine if the police department lost its computers?” Langer said. “Wherever that computing is being done, if that building went away, this is an alternate site, an alternate computing resource that would be able to do it.”

When starting Recovery Point, “we put our own money into it … we really avoided raising money at all costs. [Raising funds] is the siren song of liquidity — and it’s also ego-inflating,” said Langer. However, by accepting funding, he said, a company risks losing control of its path and purpose.

“We found ways to use our own cash flow to solve our problems, and in the end it’s been very helpful,” he said. “You figure out ways to do a lot with a little.”

Connection with employees is pivotal, Langer told What’s Working in Washington.

“At the end of the day, to me, what matters is your employees. The people who are working for you are the people who will either make or break your relationship with your customers,” he said, noting that some of his employees are still working for him some thirty years later.

“I think customers want to see continuity of interface with a company… you really can’t do that when you have high employee turnover,” he said.

Langer’s care for employees also extends to customers. “We saw that, in the industry we were then going into, there was a dominant competitor in this area… at the end of the day, they had committed the sin of arrogance,” he said.

“We would go to customers of theirs, and instead of saying to them, ‘here’s what we have to offer,’ we would ask them what they wanted. And the dominating player never did that,” Langer said. “We listened to customers and we listened to employees.”

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