Managing a Growing Team
An Interview with Krystle Mobayeni
By Patrick Casey
Originally posted March 21st 2018
In the past three years, BentoBox Co-Founder and CEO Krystle Mobayeni has led her team through a period of rapid growth.
BentoBox offers restaurants an integrated web presence to connect with their guests and drive revenue online. As restaurants rushed to sign up, Krystle grew the BentoBox team from two people to more than fifty in short order (pun intended).
In this interview, Krystle shares her advice on managing a fast-growing team.
Can you tell us about BentoBox’s background?
I’ve always been focused on web design, digital design, and product design. I earned a degree in digital design, then worked at a number of different ad agencies in New York City before starting my own boutique design agency in 2010.
One of my clients was a well-known New York restaurant that needed help creating its website. I became very familiar with restaurants’ pain points around technology. For example, third-party systems like Seamless, Yelp, and OpenTable had done a great job helping restaurants grow their businesses, but they had also driven a wedge between restaurants and their guests.
In the hospitality industry, that relationship with guests is essential. And a restaurant’s website is the only place online where it has complete control of its brand — it’s truly an extension of the brick and mortar property.
Soon, I was hearing from several other restaurants that had similar needs, including very successful establishments like The Breslin and The Meatball Shop. As a service provider to restaurants, I saw a huge need for a platform like BentoBox.
That was in 2013. These restaurants became the first to buy into BentoBox before the platform was even built. So Pierre, who is my co-founder, and I built out the first version of the platform and started growing from there.
I think it was key that we convinced restaurants to buy into our product before it really existed. That set us up for success, and it proved the market demand.
We bootstrapped the company for about a year and a half while we worked with our first 40 or 50 customers. That patience was also very important. Before taking outside funding and committing to a growth trajectory, we were able to work on understanding our customer base and getting our product market fit just right. That helped us avoid a lot of pitfalls and grow in the right way. If we had tried to scale immediately, I think we would have run into a lot of problems.
Rapid growth started in 2015. Today, we have more than 50 people in New York, and we also work with a 12-person, contract-based team in Honduras.
Did your career before BentoBox prepare you to lead a large team?
Working for myself gave me some raw skills necessary to scale the team, but I didn’t have direct experience. Our investors, advisers, and board really helped with this.
We established a board early — right after our 2015 seed round. At the time, many people told me that we should avoid establishing a board for as long as possible.
They said a board would only slow us down. That was wrong, though — the board has been a crucial part of our success.
It’s important to be held accountable as a CEO. It’s also been very helpful to have a board and a great set of investors and advisers who are willing and able to help.
BentoBox employees enjoy lunch at the office
What advice do you have for founders on managing functions outside of their core expertise?
Initially, my core expertise was in product — and also, to some extent, in marketing. At first, it’s very scary to take on unfamiliar functions. The CEO has to be willing to make early mistakes and then iterate very quickly.
It’s important for every CEO to understand the limits of their expertise. At the beginning, I was not an expert on every topic. If I had pretended that I was, I think it would have led to a lot of problems.
Understand your limitations.
Instead, I gave the right people a lot of ownership, then set the expectation that they needed to be the experts. That motivated the team and kept people accountable.
It’s critical that our leadership team leads more by example than by authority.
Executives have a far greater impact when they can back up their instructions and expectations with behaviors. Leaders also earn a lot more respect when the team can see they aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. From the beginning, that approach has been critical to how our leadership team works.
What should be the most important criteria for early hiring decisions?
These criteria should change as a company matures.
It’s always been important for us to hire leaders with experience in their functions. But it’s more important that they aren’t afraid to get in the trenches and do a bit of everything.
At the early stage, you need to be able to jump on the phone if it’s ringing and no one is there to answer it — even if you’re the CTO. It was critical to us that no one in a leadership role should think that any job was beneath them. In the early days, this is more important than hiring someone who has 10 or 15 years of experience at a brand-name company.
At the start, everyone was a bit of a generalist, including our leadership team. These jobs have really changed, and now our leaders are running slightly more specialized functions. As departments grow, communication becomes dramatically more important, especially for leaders. We started to do workshops and offsites for the leadership team to arm them with the management skills they need. It’s been an exciting experience — for them and for me — to watch our leadership team evolve.
We’re constantly learning to be more effective and proactive about hiring for support functions. When you’re scaling very quickly, everyone is focused on the roles that are directly related to product and revenue, like engineering and sales.
It’s easy to put off the hires that don’t directly impact your growth. This would be a mistake.
It’s extremely important to address the less-noticeable hiring needs — for example, in HR and accounting. When you get to about 30 people, this becomes very important. This was not obvious to me until someone told me that it was a bad idea to continue outsourcing finance and HR.
In the cases when we were late to hire, the roles became reactive. Even now, we’re playing catch up in some areas. It was game changing, though, in the cases when we hired before the need became critical. This helped ensure that we didn’t stumble as we grew.
How have your interviewing and hiring processes changed as BentoBox has grown?
We’re still working on how we interview and hire — and we always will be.
It was very important to codify our values and mission and then actively think about how to implement that into our hiring process. For example, this helps identify who is and isn’t the right fit. In the past, it was very difficult to assess this in a meaningful way.
We’ve also found that when we’re interviewing, it’s very helpful to have someone from a totally different role and part of the organization do an interview.
For example, we’ll have an engineer interview a sales candidate. This is a great way to get a balanced view on a candidate from someone who isn’t wrapped up in the interviewing process and feeling pressure to hire, immediately.
Communication can easily break down as a team grows. A handful of close-knit employees can build trust and rapport, but it’s difficult for dozens of new hires to do the same. How have you managed internal communication as BentoBox has grown?
This has been a real learning experience.
One great tactic is the all-hands meeting that we hold every Friday afternoon. We started doing this when we had only five people, and we still do it every week. I provide an update on major items — like our financials and new hires — and then we have different departments provide an update each week. People use the time to thank each other and highlight work that they are proud of.
Our all-hands meetings have been great for cross-departmental transparency, and it’s crucial that the updates don’t only come from me.
I think and hope we can continue to hold these meetings even as we grow to 100 people and beyond!
We also host offsites twice per year, and every quarter, we hold a one-hour company review with the team. These help people stay connected to the mission and big picture — especially the new and junior employees who don’t speak with the founders every day.
For most of my career, I held less public roles. Because of that, I’ve needed to think carefully about how to inspire the team and keep the energy level high. I’ve turned this lack of experience into a strength by empowering the team to inspire and rally each other. The all-hands meeting and offsites are great opportunities for that to happen.
If you could give new founders one piece of advice about managing people, what would you say?
I think that one of the most important things a CEOs can do, especially as the team grows, is to maintain a relatable and approachable culture.
There’s a common misconception that the CEO needs to be on some sort of higher plane to convey authority.
I think it’s more effective to be relatable, keep your feet on the ground, and connect with every employee.
I’ve started doing “skip-level 1:1s.” Over the course of the year, I’ll talk to every employee at the company for at least a 30-minute meeting. This helps me stay informed and in touch, and it makes me far more effective at responding to unexpected issues.
Originally published at launchcapital.com.
