Driving Return on Time with your Hiring
“Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.” — Peter Drucker
By: Rick Zullo, GP & Co-Founder at Equal Ventures
Early hiring in a startup is one of the make or break moments in a company. A lot of 1st time founders carry the world on their shoulders during these early days, staying scrappy to save money. As the best CEOs grow, they learn the best ROI they can drive is Return on Time.
The CEO is special for a reason. Inherently, they have a super power (or powers) that make them special. That said, most 1st time CEOs aren’t spending their time as specialists leaning in on their super powers, they’re being the jack of all trades. This dilutes their strength. These CEOs get bogged down in everything from accounting, to SWAG shopping to finding office leases, on top of mission critical tasks like sales, fundraising and team building. This may work in the early days, but as a company grows, the burden becomes unmanageable. The CEO goes from being a star performer to a bottleneck and can often find themselves drowning in their duties.
When this happens, I ask the CEOs to write down a list of the core functions they focus on, take a look at their last week and assign every hour of their day to those buckets. Here is a representative result from some of the recent exercises I’ve done with my CEOs.
That’s a long week. That’s not counting all the other things that come up in the day, the water cooler chat (or Slack these days), grabbing lunch, maybe going to a networking event or having to take a flight. No one said being a CEO was easy, but clearly, every minute a CEO can get back would be valuable. I then ask the CEOs to assess their “ability” (a subjective opinion on their ability to do that task better than others) and “criticality” (an objective opinion on its importance to the success of the organization) for each of those tasks. Representative results are below.
In this case, the CEO is spending 30 hours a week doing Low Value tasks that they were either unexceptional at or were not mission critical to the organization. That’s a week’s worth of time that could have been spent doing high value tasks like recruiting and sales. If we wanted to drill even further, we could find the highest value tasks within that segment, such as executive level recruiting vs junior recruiting and/or enterprise sales vs. digital marketing. This CEO could arguably reallocate 40+ hours a week from low value activities to the areas they were best at, sales and executive level recruiting. This is 100% natural. We spend more time on the things that we are less proficient at. Think about cooking dinner. I’m a pretty pedestrian cook and if you asked me and David Chang to make the same recipe, I’d spend more time to ultimately arrive at a worse result. But I’m pretty sure I could crush him in excel though…😊
The goal is to re-allocate your time to focus it on the top-right quadrant of the diagram below. Lean-in on your mission-critical super powers. These may evolve as you grow over time, but these are the ways you can drive the greatest impact to your organization. Areas like “Pet Projects” and “Bottle Neckers” can be alluring or often justified under the guise of “It’s fine, I can handle it”, but it’s a tremendous mistake. Every moment not spent in the top right quadrant is a moment wasted on maximizing your impact on the organization. Even worse, when things get busy and the CEO begins to feel they are drowning (which is inevitable as success snowballs), mission critical tasks ultimately get compromised, whether they be the ones you are good at or not. It’s critical to hire for the areas before you need them, because if you are trying to recruit while you are already drowning, you are likely to sink.
After I see the results, I propose a new schedule to the CEO that optimizes their Return on Time (the one below). In this case, the CEO would spend 10 hours more a week on the team/recruiting and sales, while delegating/hiring in areas like Customer Service, Tech/Product/Eng and Finance & Ops. They also would bring on a Chief of Staff that would help across these areas, while lightening the load on email and desk research. When CEOs agree to these changes, they are generally happier and more effective with that schedule. They get to spend more time doing the things that they are great at (and love), while driving higher output for the organization. It also ends up saving them time (the new schedule is 10 hours of less work a week) making their habits more sustainable.
To achieve this plan, we would need to bring on a VPE, who could take product and junior engineering recruiting off the CEOs plate, a Director of Finance and a Chief of Staff, while realigning some of the customer success responsibilities to the sales and account management teams. Yes, this is three more employees in additional headcount, but it’s three people who would be better at performing those jobs, while enabling the CEO to focus on the tasks they are best at. It’s three more hands on deck to make sure the CEO doesn’t drown. Also, it turns out that great people will not only grow into their function, but find other ways to contribute to the organization beyond their job scope. This realignment gives the chance for other talent in the organization to emerge and demonstrate that they can be leaders too, often improving staff morale as well. CEOs can bridge this transition with dedicated 1-on-1s for the new functional leaders, enabling those meetings to not only serve as ways to stay abreast in those areas, but as dedicated bonding time with emerging leaders in the company.
Yes, this costs money, but ultimately talent compounds. If you can bring great functional talent in early that enables your super powers to compound as you grow (while making sure other mission critical areas are addressed by other staff), it will be an incredible ROI for your company.
The secret to doing this is to hire AWAY from your super powers. Prioritize hires that fall into the low/negative value buckets so you can take those off your plate as quickly as you can. This will enable you to focus on higher value activities while you progressively rotate your schedule to the upper right quadrant. Hiring is about Return on Time — how you can hire folks that get the greatest leverage for the company. As the CEO, you’re its most valuable asset. Hiring people who give you better leverage on your time is the single best investment you can make for yourself AND the company.
