Honored to be a HUBweek Change Maker
On Wednesday, September 28, I’m on the “Next Generation of Ideas, Featuring the Beantown Throwdown” panel at Hatch Fenway. It’s all part of HUBweek, A weeklong celebration of innovation and creativity in Greater Boston Founded by MIT, Harvard, Mass General and The Boston Globe.
In advance of the event, HUBweek named me a “Change Maker.” Below is a re-post of the conversation I had with the organizers.
HUBweek Change Maker: Frederick Townes
Co-Founder and COO, Placester
Frederick “Fred” Townes is the co-founder and COO of Placester. In this role he focuses on technology leadership, product strategy, business development and company culture. Prior to Placester, Fred was a member of the founding team at Mashable, a leading media company that informs, inspires and entertains the connected generation. As CTO of Mashable, Fred developed interactive user experiences, strategies, and media partnerships that helped grow the company from a few million unique visitors per month in its early days to over 42 million today.
Your prior experience runs the gauntlet, and you were a pivotal element of Mashable’s success. As an “all-in-one CRM platform… fundamentally changing how real estate works,” Placester seems to target a niche audience. What was your inspiration? Interestingly, the target audience is actually the majority of real estate agents. The most exciting ventures are those that demonstrably improve the way value is created (or delivered) at scale in a market. At Placester, we found that while there were lots of tools available in the market, the notion of an integrated platform remains a novel value proposition in real estate, and therefore worthy of pursuit. Again, our inspiration came from having experienced the pain of using tools, as well as being a client in the industry, and we were able to create a clear vision of what life could be like on both sides of the table. Sometimes, grand ideas emerge, and it’s not clear how to be impactful. Inspiration doesn’t follow in those situations.
In what ways do you feel that your prior experiences in digital strategy and UX prepared you for this venture? Were any experiences particularly formative? I think the time spent funding my own businesses in years past was of the greatest help. In particular, helping other scaling businesses with marketing, product strategy and engineering were of the most utility. W3 EDGE, an interactive agency and my first venture, afforded me the opportunity to assist hundreds of growing businesses by adding value cross-functionally, often from a technical perspective.
In addition to business development and product strategy, you also spearhead company culture in your current role. For you, what makes for a positive company culture? How do you actively foster it within your organization? Company culture has lots of attributes, chief among them are the values that are shared by all employees. Two key values that go far in creating a team atmosphere are embracing challenges together, and being transparent about our efforts (and their successes or failures) as a group. In short, I find that positivity comes from bringing folks together and making sure that they are unified around a common goal.
To offer an example from Placester: every Friday around lunch time, we have a “demo day,” where progress against initiatives is shared with the entire team. During those sessions, we recognize achievement and also keep stakeholders and others looped progress towards business objectives and goals. This habitual behavior is one of the more critical activities that helps teams rally each week to work with one another across the organization.
What has been the most challenging obstacle you’ve faced as a company co-founder, and how did you overcome it? Did you take away any insights that are applicable to a universal audience? The most significant challenges that leaders often face are typically turnarounds or pivots — situations where the company was originally marching north and needs to march west or even south. This presents a challenge either because of the time constraints on executing the change, or because of the changes in resources required to achieve the new business goals.
In terms of insights, I’ve found that pivots and the change management that go along with them require a culture that habitually shares objectives and key results, recognizes and celebrates healthy behaviors, and practices making business cases for initiatives. I’ve frequently found that contributors need guidance on how to work backwards from business objectives and goals, and the training that goes along with that is what empowers contributors with healthy autonomy and self-organization skills.
So, that’s the starting point: helping folks understand that initiatives are a process that an organization undertakes in order to improve the day-to-day activities of the business. The next critical piece is making sure that you’re involving contributors with the skill sets needed to execute changes and keep folks looped. Change management requires practice and sharing the outcomes with one another. I’ve found that irrespective of experience levels, many folks do not have first-hand experience with owning outcomes, nor have they experienced true empowerment. The shared journey towards true teamwork and empowerment begins with shared values and transparent objectives, goals and collaborative workflows.
You’ll be joining us on September 28 for the Next Generation of Ideas, featuring the Beantown Throwdown. What advice do you have for those who might be considering striking out on our own? Don’t try to do it all yourself. Great leadership begins with an understanding of yourself, and specifically of your weaknesses. Once you have that, you can be thoughtful around what your teams are contributing and build an organization that compensates for those weaknesses. You also need to be empathetic and develop insight into how your contributors operate. This will give you the confidence to trust and empower those contributors to move the organization forward.
We heard that you’re a BU grad. Do you think that Boston’s innovation ecosystem stands apart from other innovation hubs? What differentiates us, and how does that impact entrepreneurs like you? Over the past decade and a half, I’ve seen tremendous growth not only in what BU has to offer, but also the growth in the Boston-area local startup community at large. Having said that, I feel very strongly that Boston is a unique ecosystem and definitely a growing hub for entrepreneurship.
Given what Boston has to offer, including the sheer number of world class schools, I think what we’ll see even more entrepreneurs create their founding teams and successfully develop customers or raise capital because more investment dollars will be flowing through the market. In turn, Boston will draw even more great talent which, in the past, might have left for other markets.
For more insights and perspective from Fred and other founders, we invite you to join us at Next Generation of Ideas, featuring the Beantown Throwdown during HUBweek 2016.
The HUBweek Change Maker series showcases the most innovative minds in art, science, and technology making an impact in Boston and around the world.
