When your business was still in the early stages, it was easy to get on top of just about everything. There are so many things you don’t need to worry about.
Once your business hits hypergrowth and scale mode, you’re faced with new challenges with the way your team works and how you manage it. Watch this video as we share how technology has helped us successfully went through these changes.
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Transcription:
Hey there, Pete Moriarty here. In this video, I’m going to talk about some of the things that are critical to our business. Now we have reached scale mode that we just did not need to worry about when we were in startup, launch, and growth mode. This video is part of our Scale Series, which is for businesses that are typically more than 20 employees and are going through the challenges of technology, people, growth, scale, and needing to make sure that everyone runs swimmingly together in the same direction as the founder is off the tools, the business has the business model proven, things are pretty well systemized, but you’re really starting to enter, not quite hyper-growth mode, but sustained growth mode. And so if this is interesting to you, if you’re a scale business, you’re going to get a lot of value from this. If you’re a business who is aspiring to be a scale business, then this is also going to be useful and helpful for you too.
Now, when our business was in the earlier stages, I started the business at 15, we grew and scaled it, and I ticked all my income boxes by the time I was 30, and the business was mostly systemized and running without me. Now, that was when we were at about 20 employees and things were going well. I could step back and not do too much work when I didn’t have to. I still had responsibilities in the business, but for the most part, it ran itself and made money for me and all was going well. Now, once we got past that marker of 20 employees, things started to change. I didn’t have a personal relationship with everyone in the business. Some of the newbies that we hired, I wouldn’t even speak to for sometimes months after they’d started in the business. And for myself, settling into that founder/CEO role, things really started to shift and change for me in how I needed to show up and manage the business.
It really became less about “managing” day-to-day things because I had managers in place and an executive team to even look after those managers. But what became more and more important for me is to really become a custodian of the brand and a custodian of the culture within the business. And so that meant that I had to put things in place which were going to affect everyone. I had to put in place culture, which was going to affect everyone. And I don’t like even saying, put in place, it’s really more cultivating culture that’s going to affect everyone. So, how do you cultivate that? How do you lead people with culture? How do you make sure that your team are actually on board with the way that you want the business to be run or the way that you want to mass out the business to be run? Because you don’t have full control anymore.
Once you’re at the stage of a scale business, you’re no longer the controller of the business, the business runs itself and it’s up to you to massage and chaperone it into the way that you want it to run. Well, you start hearing words that are thrown around like collaboration and innovation and silos. And when you’re a small business owner, they seem like airy, fairy type words, and I know they definitely did for me. I’ve never really worked in a large corporation. I started my business out of high school and so everything about leadership and management and running a business, I learnt by doing and I learnt by reading and I learnt by listening from others. I didn’t have that experience myself. What I found was, once we reached that tipping point into the scale side of the business, all of those buzzwords that I thought were buzzwords started to become much more important and started to become in fact critical for the business. Things like collaboration and breaking down silos really started to matter a whole lot more.
So I want to share a bit of my experience with going from a growth business to a scale business and how I needed to shift myself and I needed to shift the way that my managers managed, and with that shift, really the whole culture of our business. So these are some of the things that we laughed at when we were small, but all of a sudden got really important. Let’s talk about the number one, which is the first one here is collaboration. And previously I thought about collaboration as like three people working on a Google Doc at the same time. And yeah sure, that’s certainly important. It’s really important for people to be able to work quickly and gone are the days where you’ve got to work on one document and save it to Dropbox and wait for it to synchronize, or save it to a server and wait for someone else to open it in read only mode, those kinds of things. Those days are gone, and if you’re still doing that inside your organization, we can help. Watch some of our other videos on switching across the G-suite.
But collaboration for our teams really changed when we started having Peter not call all of the shots anymore. And that was really when I stepped completely off the tools and I started saying to my team, “Hey, I want you to help with strategy. I want you to help with implementation of the goals and the tactics of what we’re going to do to move the business in the direction that we want to.” I had to say to my team as well, “I’m not going to be the only one deciding we do in deciding where we go,” and going from a very push management and push strategy to a strategy that actually involved everyone. Now, my role as the CEO and as the founder of the businesses to set the vision of what I think the purpose of the business is, what I think the mission of the business is,, what we think the values of the business are, but that’s not for me to set and dictate to everyone. That’s actually an effort that everyone needs to be a part of.
When your team actually have buy-in, and that’s another buzzword, that they actually have a piece and a say in the strategy, in the purpose, in the mission, and where the business is going, you’re going to find that you have your team a lot more on board with actually working on executing that vision and that mission. And so one of the first things that I did as I went through this shift was I started really involving my team in the strategy of the business. Now, don’t get me wrong. Managers are not that interested in coming up with the vision themselves. It’s probably not going to be productive if you say to your management team, “Hey, go away and think about some strategies on how we can grow the business and bring them to the table and I’ll review them.” That’s not really their job. Their job is to execute, but provide input on the strategy.
What I tend to find works best for me is, when I share a bit of a picture about roughly where I think we might be able to go, or roughly what I think an idea is or a purpose is, and then have the team all share in nutting that out and working out what’s best for all of us. I see my role as a facilitator of the vision, a facilitator of the goals, a facilitator of the purpose, and then we all come together to make sure that it works for everyone and that it’s something that we’re all interested in actually doing. Jim Collins said in his book, Good To Great, that, “You should first get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and only then do you worry about putting the right people in the right seats.” And that’s really what this is about. First you get the right people in a room, and then you work out where do you want to go.
Next up, let’s talk about silos, one of my favorite buzzwords from the corporate world, which I never really understood. And silos started emerging for us when we really had distinct teams in different areas of the business. We developed a marketing team, we have a sales team, an account management team, we have a support team, we have a project delivery team, we have an admin team, and we’ve actually now built out an HR internal team as well, which is crazy, as well as the other cross teams like management, communities, and committees that are like sub teams within the business. Now, silos are when one team is not talking to another team or people aren’t collaborating and working together, and what can tend to happen is teams can get a little bit of tunnel vision of what they’re working on.
We’ve got five people in the marketing team now, and inside that team, they’re not always talking to what’s happening on the ground with the sales team. They’re not always making sure that they’re tracking what leads are coming from what lead sources and what deals are closing or not closing. That’s vitally important information for a marketing team, don’t you think? Yes. We’ve then got our finance and administration team who set things around policies like when we collect from customers invoices, and what we write off as bad debt, and they deal with any legal disputes, if we need to issue a refund to a customer. Well, if they’re not talking to our delivery team to analyze, okay, well, what kind of projects are running afoul and potentially in refund territory or we’re potentially going to have a customer with an issue, or if they’re not identifying, well, which salespeople are making promises that can’t be fulfilled by the delivery team causing disgruntled customers, then the finance team would only really be following tunnel vision on one problem, which is, for them, collecting cash.
They’d only be worrying about that without looking at the bigger picture. And so the legwork of breaking down silos really should be done by the managers. It really should be about having them talk to the different team members, create a leadership committee where they’re going to be able to share and talk with each other on what’s going on in their different area of the business, and just bring those things up. And that could be done with a weekly retrospective, it could be done in a huddle for your leadership team. But what I really love is when those team members actually spend time with each other one-on-one, when the marketing team sits down with the sales team and says, “Hey, what’s working? And how can we support you better?” when the finance team sits down with the support team and says, “Hey, what’s working and how can we support you better?” that really helps right across the board everyone to work better together.
Let’s talk about HR processes and this is the kind of thing that you go, “Oh my God, that sounds so boring,” and to me, it was really boring. I thought HR was the kind of division inside of business that had blue forms that you would report when someone said something offensive to you at the water cooler. I didn’t know what it was. But in a small business, what I’ve really come to understand is that your HR department or the function of HR within your business is really a coaching, learning, and support function. This is really about making sure that the people you bring into the business are the right kind of cultural fit for your business. And I must say, we have an amazing, amazing team that we’ve built in the function of HR who now are so, so damn strict about the culture of team members that we employ, it means that when people come into our group, into our family at itGenius, they are the right kind of people to work with us.
And we can train them for the skills and we can get all their competency up to speed, but we know that the way they work is going to work with the way that the rest of the team works. Now, also an important function of this area of the business is coaching, training, and support, making sure that everyone’s competencies in the business are mapped and making sure that there is a plan for each person for career progression, for increasing their skills, for moving them to the right area of the business if they’re looking for a change. And I’m very, very thankful to say that these guys do an amazing job of coaching and supporting our team members to feel like they’re in a great place when they come to work. For me, as the founder, I really want everyone who’s working in my business to go home at the end of the day and feel like they’re a winner. I want them to feel like they’re smiling, that things are going well, and that there is fair exchange between them working with the organization and the organization giving back to them.
Well over and beyond just getting paid, that obviously makes sense, but I want to make sure that people actually have a great relationship and this feels like, “Huh, this is a great place to work and this is helping me to achieve my personal goals by participating in being a part of this business.” Your HR team are the enforcers of that. They are the ones who will keep tabs on just how well you’re doing. And the key KPI for a team like that is to measure, what is your employee churn? Are your employees sticking around? Are they feeling like they are growing and they are progressing? Maybe they’re leaving reviews for you on a public review site like Glassdoor, and if you’ve got a good online reputation there, if your team are sticking with the company, then you can say that the team are doing a good HR job. Now, what about the actual more practical side of things in HR, things like literally filing leave requests or creating policies for the team?
It’s funny, when we were a younger company, we never had to worry about things like, how many weeks notice should you give before you go on leave? And the kind of things that have now popped up for us are surprise, surprise, we need to make sure that we’re managing our resources effectively, and so people need to give us notice when they’re going on leave. We need to make sure we can still deliver consistently to customers. We need to make sure that no two people take leave on the same week. We need to make sure that if someone actually is going to take leave that they have someone to fill in for them and there’s a plan around that. And so all of these things where we laughed at it when we were a younger company, are like, “Oh crap, we better actually start thinking about these things now.”
And, of course, we support this with our technology. And if you’re interested in assistance with that, please let us know. We use things like Google Forms. We use Google Chat. And we use a number of automations like Google Script to actually take these requests and these HR functions and make them faster and easier for our team. We use an inbuilt system using just a Google Form for someone to create requests inside of their Google Drive. We embed that into our Google Sites, and so anyone who needs to access HR forms and go to Google Sites, they fill in a form, and then that is automatically going to notify our team members in Google Chat whether they want to approve or deny that request. If you’re interested in a system like that for G-suite to help support your HR functions then please get in touch with our team. We’ve got heaps of resources inside Genius Academy, which is our community for our concierge members, and our team are also available for custom builds of some of this Google scripting type technology.
Finally, I want to talk a bit more about reporting and check-ins. Now, previously, we’d let people come and go. We’re a remote company and we had pretty strict KPIs for everyone, and so we let people just work a little bit when they want it to work. And we had things like a form at the start of the day and a form at the end of the day so you’d fill things out and let people know where you were and what you’ve got up to today. And what we had to transform our business from was method of control and a method of keeping tabs by, let’s say, invasion in a way, where are you now? What are you up to? And we had to really switch that to the way of working where we’re focused more on the KPIs, we’re focused more on the results that someone gets rather than just what their activity is and what they’re doing.
And we found that implementing things like daily huddles, implementing weekly retrospectives, and really implementing a different way of managing, where we’re focusing more on empowering and objectives rather than control, command and tactics, it really makes things run a whole lot smoother for us. And so we’ve really had to shift how we manage and how we work with our team members to move away from the idea of just having rigid systems and rigid processes that everyone needs to follow, and move to more of a flexible arrangement where it’s focusing more on empowering the team to get great results, and then helping support the team to make sure that they can do that as much as possible. I hope that’s been helpful for you, me sharing just a couple of things along our journey of graduating from a growth business into a scale business.
If you’re a founder or you’re a senior manager at a growth or a scale business, or if you’re just looking for help with anything to do with your technology stack, itGenius can help. If you have grown out of that growth stage and you’re now in scale, the owner is off the tools in the business, but you need help in making sure that your team are well supported, they’re breaking down their own silos, they’re collaborating with synergistic lists, if you need help with that, then please get in touch with our team. We have a free consultation for organizations that are growing and are looking to make sure they are well adopted in their technology, their team are being led well with technology tools supporting that, and that you build a great organization with smooth operational flow.
So if you’re interested in a free consultation, jump on the link down below and have a chat to our team at itGenius. We’d be very happy to see where you’re at, give you some advice, and offer our solutions if you are a good fit to work with us. Until next time, we’ll catch you later, and we’ll see you in the next video.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
