EP 126: Leading the Charge: Strategies for effective hiring and talent management for startups.

Join host James Mackey as he explores top-notch leadership hiring strategies for startups with guest Steve Coulson, Founder & CEO at Kitt. They discuss the challenges of early-stage hiring and effective team management. Discover insights on CEOs' hiring tactics, promoting internal talent, talent attraction, improving hiring processes, and maintaining a strong company culture during growth. 

Don't miss this episode for essential tips on scaling your startup effectively!

   0:35 Steve Coulson's background
   1:46 Leadership hiring strategies for startups
19:40 Talent acquisition and hiring process improvement.
25:52 Company culture evolution and hiring aligned with it

Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!

Our host James Mackey

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:27

Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, james Mackie. Thank you for joining us, really excited for today's episode. We are joined by Steve Colson. Steve, thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. For sure. So before we jump into our topics, let's do a quick overview on your background. Could you share a little bit about yourself with everyone?

Speaker 2: 0:47

Yeah, sure. So I started life as an investment banker, consultant, predictable career path type of thing and then I had a moment of clarity where I decided I wanted to get stuck into a startup. So I joined a company called Just Park at a very early stage. Just Park was originally a peer-to-peer drive for a Wensel platform. So if you want to make money from your spare, from your spare drive, you could put it on the website and then it would get rented out where people go into events or whatever it was. And yeah, quite quickly after joining that I ended up taking on the management of the business and we scaled that business nicely and I then left that business to start my own company with someone I worked with, previously called Kit and Kit. We design and operate inspiring workspaces for the world's most vibrant brands and we do that in London and most recently in New York.

Speaker 1: 1:37

And your team has been expanding over the past couple of years, and how long have you been in business now?

Speaker 1: 1:42

Coming up to five years now, so it's been a while Right, so you've a lot of experienced building teams and growing the company. I think one of the hardest things, as you're in the initial stages of scale, is getting leadership hires and I thought maybe we could let's start there on what you've learned over the years, maybe what you've learned from also mentors, other CEOs and advisors and board members of these types of things. I would love to dive into leadership hiring and I know you have some pretty interesting thoughts on that, specifically to diving into hiring senior execs, the skill sets you should be looking for and just the amount of experience of these types of things. So do you have any high level thoughts on leadership hiring that we can dial into a couple of different areas?

Speaker 2: 2:34

Sure, I think leadership hiring is particularly hard to do because your business is so uncertain when it's in the early stages. So I think, certainly sub 50 people. But even more than that, I think the temptation is to try to hire people who are going to solve the problem for you. And the problem with that is you can only solve problems if they're clearly articulated and they remain the most relevant problems. And one of the skills of being an entrepreneur is to adapt as you learn new things and you then reframe the problems so you can then reframe the work and that's, you know, in your first three months that's happening every day and then maybe in your first six months it's happening every week and so on and so forth. So I think when we've hired experienced people at particularly the very early stage I'm talking the first year, maybe 18 months we're hiring generalists who had never done just one thing and had probably worked in small teams or even worked on their own often, but were multidisciplinary and they were happy with the change or excited by it and they just want to be a part of something. And I think what's interesting for those people is, once you get beyond 50, 60 or so, you start codifying what's important. And things change less often and I'm not saying they stay the same for two years at a time. I think they probably change more, like every six months or so, but then the skillset starts to adapt.

Speaker 2: 4:02

At that point, and I think when we think about the people we hired in and around when we were 40, 50 people who have gone on to be really successful in the business, you shift from looking for someone who's multidisciplinary and who is just up for the ride, whatever that means.

Speaker 2: 4:18

So a slightly tighter resolution. And I think, for one person example, I would describe her often as someone who is able and able to change the world but is willing to change a light bulb. And I think they have a defined skillset, but they've got very low ego and they're willing to do whatever it it takes to make it work. And I think where we've made mistakes is we've probably hired people who have been very successful in 500 to 1000 person companies within a very specific part of their role as a pure manager and leader, and I think that didn't work when we're at this kind of stage, simply because you're looking at different skillset altogether. So the real balance is knowing where actually are you as a business and then making sure you hire in line with that. And as much as you want to be aspirational and clearly we have venture capital, bats and so we have a big vision for where we want to go with this business you also have to optimize for today as well as the next 24 months.

Speaker 1: 5:23

So it sounds like one of the first things you're looking at is the environment they're coming from and their point of impact. It sounds like those the size of the company and their point of impact. There's a tight correlation there, tight relationships, would you say. That's one of the first things you look at is you don't want to hire people that maybe come from larger organizations, even 500 to 1000. It's not like that's a huge company, but it's still there. 500 to 1000 employees, that's still. They're at a much different place than where you're at when you're sub 100 employees.

Speaker 2: 5:55

I think it's like what is the actual job you're wanting to do and 500 to 1000 employees, the actual job and the actual work day today is completely different to when you're 75 people. And I think when we think about how do we test for those things, it's partly their capabilities thing, of how comfortable are you juggling so many different things at the same time with varying degrees of involvement? Right, because I think people at big companies they have a person for each part of their priorities who's responsible and they are ultimately shaping it completely, whereas in a smaller company you are part doing and you are part managing at the same time, and that's the challenge. So how capable are they with context switching and managing the kind of being at the very top and the very bottom of their team? And then the second is the willingness in that to do that is a very specific choice and it's quite a stressful choice because context switching is really hard and I think we test very hard for both the ability to do that and we do that through asking about how they do time management.

Speaker 2: 6:57

And when I asked how do you manage your day and how do you know what's going to happen when you turn up on a Wednesday morning like what you're supposed to work on, and if they say something like you know what, I'm someone who keeps things in my head or I write things on a piece of paper that's a huge red flag.

Speaker 2: 7:12

Because if you've been successful in that stage of context switching between being leader and doer and being able to willing to do both your time management has to be absolutely incredible. So I want to hear things like I do inbox zero, then I shift all my tasks into Trello or Asana or whatever it is, and then, before I turn up to work every single day, I prioritize and reprioritize every day off the back of a weekly sprint that I set up on a Monday. If I don't hear that kind of energy, then that person hasn't been under that kind of pressures for long enough to figure out how to adapt to it, and so we test very hard for that, and then the willingness is much easier. If you're honest with what the reality of the day to day actually is in the business, people will self select themselves out of the process.

Speaker 1: 7:52

Yeah, I think it's like really dialing into the challenges of the business to. I've always had a positive experience just sharing very openly what are the biggest challenges of the business to and what are they going to be the hardest parts of the role, because you want people that are essentially inspired by that, yeah, and other people that are going to be like turned off by that, and so I think you're right, like, getting people to self select out is really important. It's like this part of recruiting is almost like you're trying to pull people in and you're pushing them away at the same time. Like you want to bring them in and get them really excited about the mission which you're building, but you also want to push them away and help them self select out if they're not the right fit yeah.

Speaker 1: 8:33

And I think it's like this push and pull thing that's happening essentially at the same time is what the way that I essentially look at it sometimes?

Speaker 2: 8:40

For your own worst enemy right, because more often than not, well, you're often hiring because you really need someone and I think when you really need someone, you end up ignoring amber flags that can go on to become red flags. If you really explored it properly and I think wishful thinking on the one side of it is if it did work, it would solve. So many problems we're facing right now Makes you forget all of the pain of making a bad hire.

Speaker 1: 9:09

Yeah, you just you start to get into this hopeful mindset where it's like it's important to be optimistic but you need it to be grounded and based on reality and you can't start to just almost romanticize the future or just get to this place where it's not based on sound logic and reasoning. And being really disciplined is, like, incredibly important and I think that that's whether you're a CEO or like a recruiter or hiring manager, whatever it might be it's really easy to do that right. Because, particularly when you're in our types of environment, like a scale up environment, like my company doing embedded recruiting for 200 companies over the past 10 years, we consistently see the struggle to balance urgency with quality and making sure that we're not taking misstepping. And particularly for high leverage positions like leadership roles, it can be. It's very painful to have that type of role open for too long, and particularly for a CEO that's basically jumping into that role trying to deliver on that when there's a hundred other things that they need to prioritize as well.

Speaker 1: 10:18

It can be very challenging to not get the right person in, but it's easily a seven, potentially an eight figure problem if you get the wrong person in that seat, like the leverage is just so incredibly high and it can set you back several quarters, if not a year, and the compounding impact on missing out on that potential growth as a company due to getting it wrong is just it's so insanely high and that's why it's always it's better to move slowly, right, and we're still not always going to get it right even when we move slowly. But we should be really critical and if the person isn't like a hell, yes, 100%, then we should pass right. There should be no, they seem pretty solid, pretty good, especially for leadership. You really need that top player right, like one of the best out there in the industry.

Speaker 2: 11:07

And I think speaking I mean one of the one of our customers who's gone and has become a mentor really they're a thousand plus person company doing, incredibly, and we've done a few offices for them. Now we had a conversation around hiring and and I think every CEO has this dilemma of like, how'd you get senior highs right? It's really hard, and so on and so forth. And his strategy was relatively radical, which is, he said, look, think about your, think about the best person you've hired, or think about yourself, right, cause we all probably think we we were good at our jobs when we were younger, who knows. But think about yourself at 23 and it's like how good were you at work when you were two years into your career versus today? And I said something like maybe I was like 20% as effective, maybe 30%. It was like no, the answer is probably like 80%, so saying you were probably 80% of your output capacity once you've done a couple of years in and you were fresh, hungry and not hugely experienced. And therefore, if you think about hiring people, people who are like that, who go on to be senior, have either started their own things and gone on to be fabulously successful or they've been paid an enormous amount to be a very high-impact person. So actually, your ability to attract those people. You're competing for a smaller and smaller pool of people, whereas actually the competitive edge can be spot the people when they're earlier on in their career and nurture them through the business and accelerate them appropriately.

Speaker 2: 12:36

And I think what I quite like about that model, particularly for us, if I think about people who are most successful, they have been of that profile where they've come in with a few years of experience but they're hungry and they're very talented and we've promoted them through the business very quickly and they've gone on to take leadership roles that would be really hard to hire for.

Speaker 2: 12:55

And I think clearly you can't always build that way and you have to bring externals in. But I think for us that's been a way of taking the pressure off having to bring in experience the entire time and it puts a lot more focus on bringing and nurture the hyper-talent that you have within your business and if you get really good at that, you've reduced one of the major risks At least they know and understand and have your business and they have alignment to your values. So you're not having to test for that your assessment of how capable they are is very high quality. You're taking a lot more risk when you bring in leaders from the outside, so I think for us it's wherever you can promote from within and then, whenever you bring them aside, spend a very long time referencing and whiteboarding and doing whatever you need to do to feel like you're not going to get that sinking feeling three weeks in when you realize they're not quite right.

Speaker 1: 13:45

Right, and it's also the idea of distinguishing. We all know the importance of the. There's a big difference between somebody who's a great strategic thinker and somebody who's willing to grind and how well they're actually going to be able to execute. And the reality is that when sometimes, when people get really far along in their career, they might have a great strategic mind and know exactly what needs to be done. But if you're sub 100 employees, maybe they're at a point where they don't necessarily want to grind it out to the point that it's necessary to actually be successful. Right, it's not enough to have great ideas. As you said, you need somebody who's going to be able to work high level strategically, but also able to roll up their sleeves. And sometimes people get to the point where maybe they were wildly successful in this type of environment, but they get to the point where they no longer really have as much fire or ability to desire to do that again. And maybe some of those folks, if they're adaptable enough, they start to push into larger organizations where they can have more support and play more of that strategic role, which is another thing I see. So I think promoting internally one of the other benefits too. It's like people are typically like very hungry to take on that next level role. There's more of that incentive to prove themselves in that position and I think I've done that and I'd say the best leader in my company, securevision, is somebody that was homegrown and actually started off as an individual contributor and now runs our entire delivery process to overseas all of our customer relationships, making sure that we're performing on over like everything that is customer related reports up into her, and she does a fantastic job.

Speaker 1: 15:22

I think that there's, of course, opportunity for blind spots when you have homegrown leaders and for me, like our solution to that was standing up like a really good advisory board. I get in really senior people in place that can have conversations with our leaders and myself, of course, on a monthly basis to help us avoid big mistakes or find high leverage opportunities. So I still definitely think that there's a place for experience and there's no substitute. I think it's like every organization is different, but I think ultimately, as we scale, I want both. I want some leaders who have been through the entire life cycle of growing and selling a business and then I want some internally homegrown folks that are going to be really hungry, right, and they're very competent and going to put in the hours, and maybe it also depends on the type of leadership roles too.

Speaker 1: 16:13

If I'm hiring a CFO, I don't know how important it is If they're grinding it out like 60 hours a week. Maybe somebody who's just been there done that, has helped fundraising, really good at forecasting, budgeting, these types of things can put together great reports and knows how to translate them into the simple business terms. I feel like that's almost okay. But if I'm having somebody running customer success, like I need you grinding out, like making sure that customers are happy and being very fucking aware, you have to go to get down in the weeds and notice everything and you have to have your hands in everything and sometimes, like those homegrown people that are really hungry to move up, might be better equipped for that type of role that requires a lot of hustle. Is that similar? Are you seeing? Does that?

Speaker 2: 16:55

make sense to you. Yeah, I think the way I think about it is where do you need to overindex within your business, based on the products that you have and the customers you serve? No-transcript Certainly for this business. It's an operationally intense business. We run almost 100 mini hotels across London and New York as your own service office for you, so it's an intensive business and the thing, as a result, when we're now having success is over indexing on business operations, because it's not just the operations function, is stitching the whole business together. So we've really focused on having a big hire in there who can strategically pull the business together, because that's one of our most important things, and I think every business will have its one or two things that it has to get right in order to scale to the next phase, and we've identified that's one of ours and therefore we've worked really hard to bring someone in who knows what they're doing. So, yeah, it's horses for courses. I think we say this side of the Atlantic.

Speaker 1: 17:51

Gotcha. Yeah, I think, again, leadership hiring is probably the most important hiring motion to get right. And just because of the leverage and it's like you get the wrong person into, it's like it impacts the entire department, like everybody, even your A players, everybody's going to be less productive, everyone's going to be more frustrated. You know, it's just, it's a massive issue. So I feel like that's where we should be as rescaling as CEOs and executives and again, rather regardless of the point of impact, it's slowing down and saying, okay, how much time are we dedicated to this? Like maybe we should. What, if? What would happen? Like if we spent four X more time on leadership hires? Let's just assume it's going to be a massive amount of like hours put in. Let's say that on average, if we're spending, doing the math and realizing we're spending about like 70 hours per hire for individual contributor roles, let's just assume that it's going to be for at a minimum, four to 10 X that amount of time. And are we really budgeted and have a realistic expectation on what it's going to take?

Speaker 1: 18:49

But a lot of the best executives I know like we're working with a customer right now at Secure Vision. We're working with a customer that's a CEO of about a 200 person SaaS company and she is. There's a huge sense of urgency to get the role filled. Like she's got the board really down her neck, like she's. It's a lot of pressure to get it done, but she's unwilling completely to settle for anybody other than like the very best and she's willing to keep it open for a quarter or two to make sure that there isn't any false start. So like having that level of discipline where you're moving as fast as you can but not dropping standards is definitely, I feel, like the something that you see in season. Ceos like that have been burned, they've gone through the pain of not getting it right and they're willing to deal with the pain of moving slower because they know it's ultimately a lot less Right.

Speaker 2: 19:40

Yeah, you save time and that'll work Right.

Speaker 1: 19:43

For sure. So let's talk about just talent attraction and outreach Right. I would love to hear your thoughts on how you think about partnering with the recruiting team and, like the sales pitch aspect, I'm sure there's been a lot of lessons learned to attracting talent and we can move beyond just leadership now it's more of getting people really excited about joining the organization. How do you think about positioning selling kit to candidates? And then how do you basically train up your team on getting that pitch right, because you can't be on every interview, you're not going to be on top of funnel screening calls. How do you do it?

Speaker 2: 20:19

I think we think of the talent team as the same way as we think of our sales team, and I think they go through almost an identical onboarding process, which is you need to, hey, when you're hiring for that person, getting that higher right is one of the most high leverage hires because, to your point, especially in a market like this running market, you're fighting for the top talent and you have to be quick to win that fight. And I think when we treat it like sales hiring, so I think you can get your process driven, elements of your talent team together to make sure that the kind of equivalent of RevOps is happening. So peopleOps, I guess, is what it's called in this handle talent ops maybe and you can use a lot of data to figure out where are we dropping off in the pipeline for these roles, why are we getting such a drop off? And you can learn all those things. But fundamentally it's a people business and people get excited by the excitement that's generated by the talent team. So we focus really hard on that.

Speaker 2: 21:17

We make sure that their pitches are in line with all of the sales teams pitches and then we try to use data to understand where we need to adapt for different roles, and I think the more we've run it like a sales team, the more we get predictable results out of it and also the more you learn, because I think it's easy to say, oh, there's just no good candidates right now, but that's almost always not the answer.

Speaker 2: 21:40

The answer is probably you haven't quite tailored the pitch, you aren't quite looking in the right places, and so on, and so, in the same way, with an outbound sales motion, you really have to think critically around your lead source and around the value prop to that particular customer segment. I think we think about it pretty similarly and our team in particular are very passionate about and EVPs are getting the right value proposition for the person you're hiring. We understand that it makes the outbound much more successful, but I think when we work with externals, again, they're an extension of your sales team and particularly for a product like ours, where we're selling services, people taking offices, anyone you speak to could become a potential customer. So not only is it potential hire, but it's also potential revenue could generate and even when it comes down to the process our team are very passionate about. Even if it's a rejection which often it is you have to leave them feeling like that was a great process, because you never know what's gonna happen in the future.

Speaker 1: 22:34

Yeah, for sure. One thing that we at SecureVision that we work with our customers with to tell them hires is we talk to executives and say it's actually not enough to review the candidates when they get to the point where they're interviewing with you or the executive team. Like, reviewing conversion rates is important, but also it's really important to understand the quality of the pipeline. So maybe you have a couple of great people in the final round process, which is great, but it's also important to look up funnel. Okay, when we were doing the first hiring manager interview or the first onsite interview, what did our pipeline look like then? Maybe there was even better people than the ones you in the final round?

Speaker 1: 23:15

We don't really know, and so it's a good motion for executives to actually look up funnel and not only know what's the percentage of drop off, which you don't necessarily want. Conversion rates always has to be too high because we want to vet people out. Just because they're good on paper doesn't mean that they're gonna be the right fit. So it's not that those have to be particularly high. They should be high enough to where we're not like wasting a ton of time. But it's not always better to have the highest conversion rates per se. But I also think it's like monitoring the quality of the pipeline at each phase.

Speaker 1: 23:45

Maybe your dream candidate that would have been perfect dropped out after a screening call. Why? Why did that happen? So it's not necessarily even enough to just look at final round. So that's something like whether it's like partnering with a recruiting team that can help highlight that hey, we had these two really good people that didn't make it through and honestly, you have to like somebody should be validating that and checking that outside of town acquisition. It's not like people necessarily love talking about something that could be perceived as a failure. So I think it's like at our scale of phase, it's like rolling up our sleeves, like occasionally going into greenhouse or whatever applicant tracking system we have and say, okay, who did we screen last week for this VP role?

Speaker 2: 24:21

Yeah, are they set up?

Speaker 1: 24:23

Like did they make it through? Why or why not? Are we getting the best of the best? Are we getting people that just maybe they're decent but they're not the absolute? They're not gonna give you the leverage. I think you called it bullets versus what was it? You had some analogy.

Speaker 2: 24:37

Bullets versus barrels.

Speaker 1: 24:39

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 24:39

Yeah, what was that again? So it's the concept that you've got two types of high. You've got your bullets and you can, if you point a certain direction and you fire, they're gonna do the JD right and they're gonna make it happen. And then you've got the barrels and they represent your capacity. And I think your barrels are your genuine leaders who create capacity for the founders or for the execs.

Speaker 2: 25:04

And the mantra I've heard I can't remember who I heard this from was once you find a barrel, you have to hire them immediately and then figure out what their job role should be. Second, because it's so hard to find and I think this comes back to the point around seniority we have hired barrels in our businesses who aren't supposed to have the responsibility that we give them. Once you find that skill set and that hunger you find, all of a sudden you can do more as a business in parallel and you, they themselves, could be the ones firing more bullets. We find that pretty helpful. We haven't gone so far as to categorize them on our talent software Are they a barrel? Pretty quickly.

Speaker 1: 25:41

Right.

Speaker 2: 25:43

And also a barrel won't be a great bullet, and vice versa. Like someone who creates capacity, you don't want to get them doing the same thing every day.

Speaker 1: 25:54

I get it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And one other topic that I wanted us to discuss is transition of culture. You mentioned that it was a pretty big transition when you went from, let's say, around 20 folks to around 70 plus 50, 70 plus right, and so I think let's highlight how the culture shifts and then, specifically, let's get into hiring, because it's you're hiring for, potentially, an evolution of your culture, but the people interviewing and the people like the mindset of the people that are part of that process have, like your existing 20% culture mindset. So I'm curious about what the evolution looks like and then how you actually help the company hire people that are going to be aligned with the evolution of that culture.

Speaker 2: 26:41

Yeah, I think early on, for better or worse for us it's always felt you have that family feel at the beginning, right when the lack of process is overcome by the strong relationships you build. And I think that's why I often think it's hard to get businesses off the ground because people, if you don't build a relationship with the early stage people, they'll churn out very quickly Because on paper, being one of the first 20 employees is quite crazy. You're not paid market rate salaries because you're there on equity and the company can't afford it at that point. Your job description changes wildly month to month and you don't know whether it's going to work or not. And also, I think one of the things I found hardest about transitioning into the very early stage you don't know whether you're being good at your job in the same way you do when you're at a 10,000 person company. I was an investment bank. I knew very well how I was doing because I was given a number every three months, whereas in a small company you'd have no natural mechanisms for am I doing a good job or not? At that stage you have to rely upon higher level principles of am I thinking through problems in the right way and am I shaping the solutions in a way that makes our customers happy, and so on. So I think the family feel is a great way of getting loyalty by and drive and direction in that very early stage. But it comes wildly inappropriate quite quickly when you start getting to your first management layers, because you can, with a team of, let's say, 10, you can all stand in a circle and talk about what you're doing that day and then get on with it. But when you start get to, when you need a management layers that say 20 people plus, all of a sudden you have to democratize your values and actually define what they are. And then you have to put process and systems in place to make sure that the behaviors you want to see are actually happening in real time at the lowest level of the business.

Speaker 2: 28:34

And I think what people who thrive in the early stage maybe find harder later is their scope reduces. And the first thing is why am I getting a manager? I shouldn't need one of those. And why are you taking away all the things I used to do? Because I really enjoyed doing them. And I think those who are successful, when they get a manager who knows what they're doing. They're like oh wow, I love having a manager and I've not really had one up until now and I'm learning a lot from this person.

Speaker 2: 29:03

But those who struggle can't make that adaptation as easily and they're always resisting the fact that there's someone else between them and the founders. And I always say look, we are not managing you. Right now it is not possible to do that because we are standing up in a room and basically saying here's the plan every single day. You are going to thrive if you have the right mindset, with someone who can be dedicated to making you successful. And management isn't telling you what to do, it's working with you to make you successful.

Speaker 2: 29:34

And I think when we think about hiring, then we've always brought our talent hires in after a certain point and we've done that deliberately because I think, learning the DNA of what you need you haven't even set that yet, so it's quite hard to hire against them. We've lent into in-source solutions much like yours, because you get it out of the box and so long as you align yourself with the right partner, who a value is aligned, you're generally going to get what you're looking for, particularly at that early stage, I think, having an internal team and we sort of partner with agencies, as you'd expect, only really makes sense at a certain point. For us, it's critical that you hire someone who isn't looking for the family feel that they're trying to stretch your business so they can take you to the next stage. We got really lucky with our first time in Hire. It's been incredible, but I've heard of a number of people who've made a number of mistakes for trying to take someone out of the early stage and push them into the scale-up phase, which is really hot.

Speaker 1: 30:33

Yeah, it definitely is. I would say that after the start of early days it's good to have that type of relationship with the team but ultimately, when you're scaling and everything has to be very metrics-driven and process-driven, you almost want people that love that type of environment, that like to have a clear measurement of what success looks like and thrive in that and are competitive and not necessarily with the team but with themselves and that get a sense of pride from being able to deliver on it, even if it's evolving and changing. Somebody that is excited about having more clearly defined metrics. It feels really good about that. At the end of the day, they know that they had a good day at work and they can feel good about that because of the specific things that they can play or that are on track for some clearly defined goal. And I do feel like that's a really important aspect of our top performers as we've started to scale is they really like to have that clarity and focus? And I think the other thing is thriving under a process, like people that like the idea of optimizing and finding those little areas for improvement, like we're really big in the process.

Speaker 1: 31:42

Optimization I find it incredibly important.

Speaker 1: 31:44

I don't like the idea of there's just such a risk of you don't want to be in a position where the company's too highly leveraged on any single employee, where if somebody leaves, then a bunch of knowledge goes out the door as well.

Speaker 1: 31:54

So I think that that's also part of the cultural shift as well. It's like making sure that knowledge isn't necessarily living only in people's heads, like it should be right. Your leaders should know in their brain how all this stuff works. They shouldn't have to constantly review process docs. They should be working with the team on regular updating those and optimizing them and then figuring out how do we bake that into technology properly and how do we train in our team and onboard our team to actually follow the process. But I think it goes beyond that. Right, somebody who's finding people that really do thrive in more of a metrics process-driven environment, right, if they just want to have we're so casual conversations that sets the tone for the day or the week or the month, like they're probably not going to thrive, they're probably not going to like it and they might even resist it. If you start to see that resistance and the culture change, like that's probably a pretty good sign that those people are unfortunately, might even hold your team back because of the resistance.

Speaker 1: 32:52

Very great, yeah. And there's some people too that they want to grow right. They want to go from that. We have one of our leaders who has been with me for, I think, around like six years. We started off in a much more casual let's figure it out not necessarily as much metric-driven like the role. Our roles were frequently changing right. We were seeing what worked, experimenting a lot, but she's really loving building out process and operationalizing the business at this point in time and making sure our process documentation is up to speed, and we're looking for efficiency gains in different areas and optimizing onboarding as a result, and she's really loving that.

Speaker 1: 33:30

So, everyone, somehow you will get people that can evolve with the company right. That's it. That's it. You've got to keep them. Yeah, find a way to keep those key people. Look, this has been a lot of fun. Steve, I appreciate you coming on the show. We're coming up on time here, but I just want to say thank you for coming on sharing your expertise with everyone. I know this could be really valuable for all the executives tuning in today, so thank you.

Speaker 2: 33:52

No thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure, thank you.

Speaker 1: 33:54

For sure and for everybody tuning in, we have a lot of really exciting guests coming on the show, so I just wanted to let you know that we have a co-founder and CEO of Greenhouse coming back on within the next few weeks. We have Steve Bartel, who's the co-founder and CEO of Gem, and we also have the CEO of a company called Tenable coming on the show and he built and sold a couple of cybersecurity companies. Now he's running Tenable for the past six years, which is a publicly traded category, leading cybersecurity companies. He's coming on. We have the CEO of Glassdoor coming on the show in the next couple of weeks as well. So a lot of really cool episodes coming up. So make sure to tune in. Thanks for joining us today, everyone, and we'll talk to you next time, take care.