You Can’t Do It All — Part II
Nurturing Startup Teams in Hypergrowth
Note: if you haven’t read Part I yet, head over here first.
So who is the gardener?
My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.
Jack Welch, Former CEO of General Electric
Did you guess the CEO? This is a popular answer. VP People? Potentially. Head of Talent? It’s possible.
The answer is: it depends.
It depends on the size and capabilities of your team and your rate of growth. As the CEO, you will always be the Chief Gardener. In a 12-person seed stage company, the founders are doing most of everything on sales, marketing, and the people side of the business.
What do I mean by the people side? I mean everything having to do with hiring, developing, and retaining your team. Sure, you may have an office manager pitching in. But the People strategy, to the extent that there is one, is coming from the CEO or another founder at this stage.
This works, for a time.
But not long after raising a series A, the CEO will find herself in the same position as Tom in the second season, overwhelmed and under-resourced. And your office manager is unlikely to have the skillset to tackle the people challenges of rapid growth. This skills and attention deficit will cost you in productivity loss and morale as well as hard cash.
The exact timing when the break happens depends on a multitude of factors. Here a few of them:
- How experienced is the CEO in hiring and managing teams of 50+ people? How capable are the rest of the managers?
- How quickly will you be going from 12 people to 50? And to 100?
- How well is your current team doing? Are they super engaged? Highly productive?
And many related considerations. When I meet with our founders I run through these questions and we talk openly about where they are, where they’re going, and whether it’s time think about delegating the people duties.
Ultimately the timing will vary for each company but there is a litmus test founders can use to figure out if it’s time to bring on more help. I call it the time-tracking exercise:
For two weeks, carefully track your time in 30-minute blocks from when you wake up to when you go to sleep. You can do this on your calendar or by taking a few minutes each day and writing down three things for each block of time:
1. What happened?
2. What did you accomplish?
3. What was on your mind?
Include your personal time in this. What kept you up at night or preoccupied at dinner can be the most telling.
On day 14, go through your notes and categorize things under functional labels: product, customer, people. Any time spent on hiring, onboarding, training, compensation, team performance and productivity gets labeled ‘people’.
As a rule of thumb, if you’re spending more than 25% of your time in the people category, it’s time to expand the ‘gardening’ team.
Once you’ve determined that you need to hire someone to help, the next step is to figure who you need and how to hire them which are big topics worthy of their own posts.
What happens if you keep doing it all by yourself?
You’ll become a bottleneck and slow down your growth. Or worse you will make big mistakes that will not only cost you but also weaken your foundations. In the latter case, you may keep growing, rapidly even. But it will eventually catch up with you as it did with Zenefits and Uber.
Yes, it’s easy to criticize these companies now, but that is not the point. The point is to remember that Uber managed their success in spite of their internal problems because they were able to secure and deploy large sums of capital to hoover up all the best talent and grow in a Napoleonic fashion. Not many companies can replicate Uber’s momentum and many have failed trying.
Instead, you can invest the time and resources needed to build a robust People team to help you nurture your people and make them as fruitful as they can be.
