Category: Leadership

Q: What were some of the scaling and operational mistakes you made (at the time of adding 20 employees a week)?

8/9/2024

Victoria Ransom
CoFounder @ Wildfire
(acquired by Google in 2012)

A: There were so many. In particular, our desire to stay ‘flat’. We hated anything that had any slight smell of bureaucracy or ‘large company-ness’. But [we learnt] when you’re growing at that rate you need leadership. We kept the organisation too flat. When we did need leaders we promoted people, leaving capability gaps.

Our sales organisation was a good example of this. We needed managers to support our sales people, so we promoted some of our best salespeople. This worked well for the most part. Except we lacked the depth for active salespeople to move into managerial roles. We saw a drop in sales for a few months until we got a handle on that.

The other learning was around the things that you think suck. Your employees want performance management and to get regular reviews. You think they suck, but they matter to your employees. [We made mistakes with] the some of the things that relate to hiring and developing your employees. Along with firing them at the right time!

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Q: How did you figure this all out? The lifetime of the business was four years. You were busy scaling the business, getting customers and hiring four hundred people. It doesn’t leave you that much time to learn. What did you do as a founder to figure

8/9/2024

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Victoria Ransom
CoFounder @ Wildfire

A: We did a lot of 'on the fly' learning. I remember the first day back at work each year. I'd say ‘okay, my new year's resolution is to spend more time reading in the business’. I’d spend the first week while it was still kind of quiet doing lots of reading, and it felt amazing. Then week two rolled around, and everything was chaos again. You're making decisions on the go and all that flies out the window. So, the truth is I didn’t spend a whole lot of time reading management books or blogs. And I also - to my detriment - didn’t spend an awful lot of time cultivating mentors. I didn’t feel like I had the time for it. I wouldn't advise that, it was just me.

We did work well as a team. There was a lot of smart people in the room. When challenges came along we had the kind of culture where we’d sit down and hash them out. If you have a few smart people in the room and you’re willing to listen to each other it’s amazing what you can figure out. We also made lots of mistakes along the way; you have to when you’re moving that fast. We made mistakes, reacted, fixed them and learnt from them.

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Q: What’s some advice for founders and teams who don’t know what they don’t know? What should they focus on to get ahead of the curve?

5/24/2017

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Rod Drury
CEO & Founder
Xero

A: Building a mental model of your industry. How things work. Who the key people are. How you get to see them. With Aftermail, we knew getting on the Gartner magic quadrant and having the analysts understand what we are doing was really important. So who are the analysts? Ring them up. Are they speaking at a conference? Can you meet them face to face? Can you ask them out to lunch?

I was pretty ruthless at that networking. I remember going to the angel investment conference before we raised any money. I was thinking where’s all the money? Oh, all those people are together, they have a conference. They had an event at Black Barn and when I got up to speak I said I’m so disappointed there’s no cheeky founders here. Any cheeky founder would have done the mapping and worked out that all the money was going to be at an event in Hawkes Bay for two or three days, that’s where you want to be to build that relationship. The money you want to raise in New Zealand will come from people in that room. So working out how to get in there.

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Q: How do you handle the movement of people who are only suited at certain stages of growth and maturity at Xero?

5/24/2017

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Rod Drury
CEO & Founder
Xero

A: If you’re a public company and your results go out every 6 months then you’ve got to make moves. One of the interesting - and hard - parts about Xero is that we’re growing so quickly that people who’re great at certain level might not be right for the next. We tend to have those conversations pretty early. For people who haven’t been right, they’re usually valued inside our network so we help them to get their next job and keep their career moving. We care about all of our family. But there are a few people where we’re at just might not be the right place for them. They may be halfway to where they need to be but if we replace them it’s going to get rid of the job they had. We try to be very human about that, make sure they’re not financially effected too much. We’re very positive and proactive about getting them into their next opportunity, and it’s exciting to see how they flourish.

We also sometimes get people to change careers inside the business. Quite a few people bounce around inside the business until they find their thing, and then they’re off and running. We also occasionally hire over the top. While that can be traumatic, 9 times out of 10 the feedback a few months later is that they’re enjoying work much more learning from someone. All those dynamics are things we care about and are working on all the time.

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Q: How do you make sure you get the nourishment you need in terms of intellectual conversations, and keeping a view on what’s coming ahead?

5/24/2017

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Rod Drury
Founder & CEO
Xero

A: We have people right through all levels of the business that really get it. You naturally build those relationships and so get a lot of that internally. If you do find people from other companies you look forward to those interactions. CEO’s share a lot of stuff. I just had a text from Mike Cannon-Brookes yesterday, wanting to benchmark some policies they were doing. So you just ping it straight back on a text. There is lots of support in the network. We’re all time poor so we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so we ask for help quite often. When you find people that are stimulating, push back, and have a good perspective, it’s really interesting.

Some tips on this. I’ll see one of my staff and they’ll say ‘hey Rod, how are you?’ And I often think doesn’t really matter, does it? Ask me a question or something relevant. When you’ve got fifty people asking you how you are it gets a bit tiring. But if someone says ‘hey Rod, I’ve got a problem or what do you think?’ That’s really interesting. Asking questions is a great way to connect and just get to it, because you don’t have time for pleasantries when you’ve got lots of people. At a certain size there is this asymmetry where everyone wants to talk to you, but you’ve heard every conversation - unless someone blows you away and it’s really interesting. So consider that perspective if you want to network with important people. Ask them a question that makes them think. Chit chat isn’t really that interesting, we’re all too busy.

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Q: What were some of the scaling and operational mistakes you made (at the time of adding 20 employees a week)?

Q: How did you figure this all out? The lifetime of the business was four years. You were busy scaling the business, getting customers and hiring four hundred people. It doesn’t leave you that much time to learn. What did you do as a founder to figure

Q: What’s some advice for founders and teams who don’t know what they don’t know? What should they focus on to get ahead of the curve?

Q: How do you handle the movement of people who are only suited at certain stages of growth and maturity at Xero?

Q: How do you make sure you get the nourishment you need in terms of intellectual conversations, and keeping a view on what’s coming ahead?

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