The key to scaling an organization successfully
By: Mike Wessinger, CEO & Co-Founder, PointClickCare
PointClickCare, EHR software for senior and assisted living, continuing care retirement communities and skilled nursing facilities, started very much as a family affair. We knew the senior care industry and we wanted to make a long lasting positive impression on it. At the time (in the 90s) we were one of the first to think about offering Software as a Service.
Fast forward to today. We now employ more than 1000 people and serve more than 12,000 senior care facilities across North America. The team at SoapBox asked me to provide my thoughts on how you maintain a high-performance culture in the midst of growth and success. Here are some of my thoughts.
Relinquish control
As a founder, you have to make the transition of being less directly involved as you scale. Your job is to work on the business, not in the business.
When you’re a founder at a startup, you’re touching everything. But as your company grows, you need to let go. You need to release the rings and accept that you can’t do all the work anymore. Because you can’t. You shouldn’t be cutting the code. Or participating in every sales call. Sure, you should still be available to jump on a call when needed. But only then.
Hire people you trust and let them go. You should still create a formula or model for your employees to run the day-to-day activities and to solve problems, but let them learn from their own experiences. Let them take over and improve on the formula over time. They may not do something the way you would, but it can still work and may be better than how you do it. Let them fail and make mistakes and learn from those mistakes.
This is common sense, but I think it’s rare. I feel like many people struggle with delegating.
I look at some of my previous managers who worked 80-hour work weeks because they didn’t know how to delegate effectively and relinquish that control. Managers shouldn’t have to experience that. It tells me that they’re holding onto too much and not allowing their team to take on more responsibility.
Focus more on reporting and data
When a startup is small, it’s safe to assume that the founders know their industry inside and out. You can rely on their insights without a lot of data. As you get bigger, the landscape changes and suddenly, the founders don’t know everything anymore. When the business becomes more complex, you need to start making fact-based decisions. This means moving away from gut instincts of a few to get reporting systems in place.
This was a big transition for us.
It’s important to put some time and energy into determining what the right set of data is to review. Then make sure that every team is aware of the data they need to provide during monthly and quarterly reviews. As soon as people were looking at the same data and facts, disagreement dropped by 80 per cent. It made a huge difference in growing the organization.
By bringing consistency to what we reviewed and by centralizing data, it takes the out noise out of the air. For us, it meant that we no longer wasted time debating numbers or going through explanations of how we got numbers; the discussion moved to what the data was telling us and most importantly, what we need to do about it.
Ultimately, we decided to use a balanced scorecard system that looks at revenue, net promoter score and several leading indicators on our three key strategic priorities. Each leader in the organization presents some high level context on these numbers without getting too detailed.
Hire great people
You have to think about what your value proposition is to prospective employees, but also to what keeps people engaged. As you scale, you still need to put the same emphasis on hiring great people — people you and your colleagues like, those who you can learn from and who inspire you. That’s a key ingredient to keeping people engaged.
One important element is that you need to provide a connection to meaningful work. This is especially important in attracting the now largest part of the North American workforce: Millennials. For Point Click Care, we’re on an exciting mission and that helps attract people.
Another factor that attracts people is high growth. High growth creates opportunity and excitement, learning opportunities, and allows you do exciting things to accomplish your mission.
Focus on culture
I saved perhaps the most important thing for last.
Focusing things on culture is the singular competitive advantage an organization has. Anyone can rent the same office space, hire from the same schools, follow roughly the same strategy. But none of our competitors can easily replicate our culture. It’s something we invested in heavily and continue to focus on.Our culture helps us out-perform everyone who can copy everything else we do
At the beginning, we didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. We had this startup culture that was an expression of us as founders. We would hire people based on our own self image, those who shared the same core values. As we got larger we realized we needed to institutionalize our values. We needed to find way of getting people to understand and talk about them. Determining our values was more about discovery than trying to invent something. They are:
● We play to win
● We take care of the customer
● Work shouldn’t (always) suck
Recruiting is done around these three tenets to support the culture. As CEO, I need to make sure that everyone I recruit shares our core values and culture.
Culture is one of those things that you have to deliver on. It’s not going to happen naturally.
You have to work to continue building and reinforcing your values and culture until they become institutionalized. We discuss culture all the time, even during Town Hall meetings. I try to make it fun by asking things like “what are the top 10 signs you are a douche bag manager”. Talking about it helps reinforce behaviors. We can’t hire douchebags. That’s why I encourage even the most junior person in the organization to call out douchy behavior, even if it means calling out his manager.
Conclusion
Every organization that starts wants to be successful, but managing through success and the associated growth does require some adjustments. The biggest thing as a leader is accepting you’re no longer directly involved with the day-to-day.
In order not to stifle the organization, you have to
1. Learn to let go and trust your people to take on more responsibility. This means being okay with mistakes and failure, and always taking the long-term view/approach.
2. You need to put some new systems/processes in place to allow you to effectively stay on top of the most important parts of the business. Consistent use of data is your friend.
The things that differentiated you in the marketplace at first are the same things that will continue to differentiate you as you scale. Just remember that when you’re successful, people will copy you. They’ll copy your strategy, where you hire from, etc. But one thing they can never copy is your culture. So don’t let your culture develop without purpose. Put the time and effort into cultivating the values and behaviors that made you great in the first place.
Mike Wessinger
Mike Wessinger is the Founder and CEO of PointClickCare, the recognized leader in cloud-based Software for the senior care market. An entrepreneur and Software-as-a Service (SaaS) pioneer, Mike introduced the first cloud-based electronic health records platform in the long-term post-acute care industry in 2000. Mike has been an instrumental force in changing the way long-term and post-acute healthcare providers leverage innovative technologies to maximize financial outcomes and improve the health and wellness of the seniors. Mike’s forward-thinking vision to design the industry’s first EHR solution leveraging a SaaS model proved to be a game-changer that has become standard software delivery model in the long-term and post-acute care industry.
