You are the DNA of your company. What you are it will become

Everyone knows the importance of hiring well. Everyone knows that the people they hire will set the culture and the prospects of the company. Anyone who has ever worked in a company has seen that the characteristics of that company are the manifestation of the team that works there. The kindness, diligence, discipline and efficacy of the company all flow from the corresponding characteristics of the team that operates it.

Great people beget great people. However many entrepreneurs fail to grasp the corollary to that. They fail to realise that their strengths are the strengths of their company. And so are their weaknesses. Their work ethic, their skill set, their interests and their values will be the same skill set, interest and values that will manifest throughout the company. What the founders are the company will become.

It wasn’t until I was working to sell my first company that I really grasped the significance of this. I started to see that great engineers produced great engineering companies and that dreamers produced companies that never quite delivered on those dreams. And I also realised something very sobering. I realised that I didn’t have the DNA to build the type of company I wanted. At that point in time, my characteristics didn’t contain the characteristics of the company I wanted to build.

I think that my younger self thought I might find such characteristics in the people I hired (actually a younger me thought that he already had those characteristics). However Joseph Smarr, an amazing engineer once said to me that “it easy to hire down but very hard to hire up”. And so I realised that while I might get lucky, I should assume that my best characteristics would also be my limiting characteristics. They were both the best and the worst in those that I should expect to be able to hire.

At the time I was a saviour-driven entrepreneur. I believed in the saviour-feature, the saviour launch, the saviour investor, the saviour meeting. Many entrepreneurs think that way. Films teach us to believe that that’s how it happens. They start off with enthusiasm and gusto, have a serious setback a third of the way through that causes us to sit back and re-evaluate. Then, following an eye-of-the-tiger training-montage we go on to snatch the final prize in a flood of glory, Hans Zimmer orchestrals and wingman soundbites.

That’s not how real life works though and I was still to learn how destructive such a saviour outlook actually was. I was still to develop the stamina and focus it takes to do the many small and boring things that will never feature in any montage but on which a company is built. I was still to become the entrepreneur that was capable of leading the company that I actually wanted to build. I was still to become someone that *I* would aspire to work with.

I happened to be in Dropbox’s office when they went to pitch for Techcrunch 50. It was a high-visibility conference and if it had been me up there pitching I would have been prepping for the two days before, practicing and changing it up hour by hour. If ever there was a saviour moment to savour it was pitching for the finale of a big conference.

Drew and Arash, the Dropbox founders, did none of that. They spent the morning programming, they went to the pitch, fumbled it, took second place and then came straight back to the office to carry on working. Dropbox did nothing but work relentlessly, day-in, day-out on making the product perfect. Drew and Arash aren’t splashy people, they’re engineers and so they created an unsplashy company full of engineers. Their DNA replicated itself out and throughout their company.

Virgin, by contrast is a very splashy and flashy company. It’s sexy, adventurous and edgy just like Richard Branson. Zappos is a caring, community-driven company focussed on metrics, efficacy and culture building just like its founder, Tony Hsieh. These companies may be outliers and reflect extreme personalities but when you get close to most companies you see the strengths and values of the core team replicated out throughout the rest of the organisation.

It’s important to remember this as you build your company. However it’s critical to remember this when you conceive your company. It’s critical to ensure that what you expect to be special in your company is also what is special in you. Because if you create a company that’s critically dependent on engineering and your founding team doesn’t include engineers then you will have a very very hard time. Equally if you create a company like Jordan Belafort’s Stratton Oakmont and your team doesn’t include a ruthless, frothing-at-the-mouth-sales guy you probably aren’t going to sell a lot of penny shares.

SoleTrader.com makes websites for tradespeople. The websites do exactly what those tradespeople need and the company is growing fast and making a lot of money. However, if you’d have asked me in abstract whether the world needed another website-creator I’d have said no. If you’d told me that the founder wasn’t an engineer then I’d have said that the company had no chance at all.

But while Seb, the founder, wasn’t an engineer, he was a salesman. And for the first year he and his partner would each make 200 phone calls a day to builders, plumbers and electricians asking if they wanted a website. With a 0.5% conversion rate their job was the envy of no-one. But bit by bit they built up customers and wired the websites together using Wordpress. Today the company is doubling in size every few months and has a highly refined sales pipeline, lead identification process and customer on-boarding. The company grew because it played to the strengths of the founder. Those strengths were sales, not technology and they’ve built a strong business off the back of it. They use technology heavily and they’re now deepening their investment into it but that’s not what they’re really about, that’s not what differentiates them from their competitors.

So when you decide what company you want to build and what its unique differentiators will be, make sure that you already have those. Be loyal to what you’re unusually strong at and your company will reflect that strength. If you don’t have a particular strength (say engineering) then that doesn’t mean that your company won’t have an engineering component to it — just that you shouldn’t expect it to be the company’s key differentiator.

Play to your strengths. You are what your company will become. Make the most of your strengths and your business will do the same.

Originally published at peternixey.com.