ZT20 #013: Hiring and Firing

This week's blog is a collaboration with Erin Robertson of J&O, the law firm I have used to help build multiple SaaS companies over the last 10 years. I hope you enjoy.

With a combined 30 years experience advising early stage companies on sales and people strategy respectively, Wayne Morris (Founder of Wayne Morris Consulting) and Erin Robertson (Head of People at J&O and People Consultant) believe that the two most impactful elements of a company at any stage, but in particular post-Series A, are Product and People. These two components, more than anything else, can drive a company’s success or failure. 

 That’s right: Product and People.

Not product and funding, not product and board members, not even product and investors: product and people. Why? Your team at any stage is your biggest asset and your biggest potential liability; they bring your vision and goals to fruition while also bringing their own experiences, expectations, and sensibilities into the workplace, regardless of whether that workplace is virtual, physical or a combination of the two.

Wayne has been a leader for over twenty years at several high-growth companies and lays it out perfectly in this post:  

Erin and Wayne share their combined wisdom and a few shared themes from their experience on how startups should think strategically about building (or rebuilding) their team during that first crucial transition period and actionable steps they can take to get it right. 

Theme #1: Self-awareness is critical to getting post-Series A hiring right. 

Erin: Attract talent with authenticity.
Hiring is marketing. The most promising companies are competing for the most coveted talent.

Being upfront about your employer brand is an invaluable tool for helping candidates opt in or out instead of realizing misalignment after being hired. Your culture, your work ethic, and frankly, the way you choose to run your business will not be for everyone. 

You need an employer brand that tells prospective employees a compelling story. The product you’re selling is your workplace. Employer brand is typically expressed through the company’s employees, values, and workplace norms - not just the ability to talk about them but how they are experienced in the workplace.

Wayne: Make a realistic assessment about where you are on your GTM journey so that you don’t hire later stage talent too soon.
Founders must realistically level set about where they are on their maturity curve. Because where you're at will impact greatly who you should hire.

Most companies don’t need a Chief Revenue Officer (“CRO”) in the Product Market Fit stage or the Go-to-Market fit stage, and you may not need one in the first iteration of the scale-up phase either. You may just need a VP of Sales alongside a VP of Customer Success and a VP of Marketing all reporting up to the CEO. Depending on how you’re structured, the earliest I would recommend a CRO is at the point of scale, when the CRO is leading leaders versus leading individual contributors.

Theme #2: You may be surprised at who you need - and who you don’t need - to get to the next level. Get ready for some uncomfortable personnel decisions.

Wayne: Founders who don’t have a sales background tend to abstract themselves from sales too soon but they won’t be as successful if they do.
In this situation, the founder has two options: look for a co-founder with a sales background or hire an executive co-pilot to get you go-to-market fit then hire your VP of Sales.

Hiring a co-founder is the best operational approach in my opinion. You’ll have to give up a chunk of equity, a board seat, a vote etc. and most founders I know are not prepared to do that, largely because they get to this realization once the cap table is already set and won’t allow for such dilution. In that case, the executive co-pilot option is where they should focus, later on leveraging them to help hire the new VP of Sales… when the time is right.  

Erin: The opposite will need to be executed simultaneously.
At the same time that a founder might be considering bringing on a co-founder or co-pilot to help navigate new territory in sales, the same founder needs to be auditing their current team to make sure that as the company progresses, the employees they have today are right for the company tomorrow.  

Transitioning early team members out of their roles can feel downright confrontational. Yet, once you’ve come as far as your Series A, what you need from your early team members is going to evolve, often from generalist work to specialization. It will be time to bring on some experts. This transition is essential and typically very difficult; it means that there may be great early employees who rolled up their sleeves to figure things out, but who aren’t equipped to lead the team of tomorrow. 

Theme #3: Ambiguity doesn’t scale. Be clear about what you need from your team and know how to measure it. 

Erin: Once your team no longer fits in a standard conference room, it’s time to create structure and management expectations. 
This doesn’t require expensive platforms or time consuming performance reviews. On the contrary, performance management tactics can and should be baked into the employee experience throughout the year, with goal-setting and feedback being part of regularly cadenced check-ins. The earlier you begin this practice, the easier it is to customize and build on as you go. Most importantly, the sooner you start creating structure and management expectations, the more experienced your team will become with giving feedback and identifying employee performance issues early on. Although most start-ups thrive in the day-to-day chaos in the early days, structure and management is absolutely vital to any growing organization, especially one with a rapid high-growth trajectory.

Wayne: If founders need a different framing for the value of Performance Management, they can consider it a means of valuing revenue.
It’s rare that managers ever receive training and support to manage, and actually transition out of the role of individual contributor, setting them up for failure. Operations in this process is really critical because it enables you to put data behind what's happening at every stage of the go to market process: who's contributing what and what impact is that having? What impact is it not having and how does that compare across the team? Then you have empirical data to determine where you prioritize your time from a leadership, mentorship, and training perspective and that goes hand in hand with enablement.

In conclusion, execution is the key to fast growth, therefore treat your team as your single biggest asset that will impact that growth.

Check out Wayne’s blog here and Erin’s recent article about early-stage performance management here. If their practices can help you work through and apply any of what you’ve read (or more), book time with Erin here and Wayne here.