Often you have different barriers as you grow. When you’ve got 10 to 12 staff is one, and the next one’s maybe 20, and then maybe 50. What have been your humps?
When we left home, that was a big one. We were nine people in a front room before we left home – like literally the front room. And that was sort of a particular hump, and then the next office we had wasn’t an office it was a terrace house. And we ended up with 23 people, they were all on top of each other.
But it was almost as we got to these offices and now that we started recruiting more people that became a turning point. It really stopped from being “mum will help us out” to being “oh my goodness this is a serious business and we’re up to serious things and we’re doing significant things here”.
Did you bring in more highly-skilled people to lead that team then? How did you make that transformation?
I’m not saying it was easy, because it was actually really, really tough. We were all mates, we were all friends, and I was one of the boys. Then all of a sudden I had to make some really hard decisions. You know, I had generalists that I loved to bits, but they couldn’t take us to the next level and I had to recruit specialists.
And what happened to the generalists?
Well I had to work with them, but you know some of them I had to let go. And that was the hardest thing. Because they love you dearly, they love what you’re up for. But they too in their hearts know that there is frustration.
One of my colleagues, she was just fiscally irresponsible. She just couldn’t manage her budget, and in a marketing role you’ve got to be able to manage your budget. So I really had to work with her on that. It wasn’t going to be successful. Finally when I came to her and said “I’ve got to set you free; there’s so much opportunity out there for you, you’re wonderful, you’ve been with us three years”. She said “oh thank goodness”.
I sort of got a get-out-jail-free card on that one, but she had wanted to go and study her MBA, she wanted to go and start her own business, but because of this camaraderie and the love that we have and what we were up to, she didn’t have the heart to tell me.
What about the ones that were shocked? How do you handle that?
There’s never an easy way but one, you have to fulfil on your word and our first value is do what you’re saying you’re going to do. And we say to people if you’re not living our values, you don’t belong here. So if somebody’s not living the values then the release is much, much easier than if they are absolutely. And quite frankly I’ve seen my role to train and develop people if they don’t have the skill set. But you can’t teach somebody who they are, they have that in their heart or they don’t.
This is a big thing at the moment we’re seeing with our smart companies, I suppose particularly as the new IR laws are coming in and suddenly there are people around that really want to work for them and have got great skills and they’re looking at the 60 percenters, the 70 percenters, the people that are doing an OK job and they’re thinking “can we go to the next level with these new skills?” How do you let those people go?
Look, everybody wants to run a team of A-graders, but you’ve got to find the right person for the right role. And I would say that an organisation has a certain responsibility to make sure they’ve got the right person in the right role. So we use some tools to find out what their strengths are.
We use the Gallup tool and we look at what people’s strengths are. So if you’ve put somebody into an analytical role and they’re really, really struggling with it and they are at 60%, and then you look at what their strengths are and they might be “WOO”. WOO is “winning others over”, and speaking to people – it might be positivity; they’re as bubbly as anything and you’ve got them in an analytical role. You’ve actually put them in the wrong role.
So I think there is a certain responsibility for employers. If you’ve recruited somebody in, be responsible about making sure you have the right role for them and you’re delivering what you’ve promised.
It’s a two way street here; don’t bring them in to do what you think is one role and then shift them into another one because that is more urgent than the others. And that happens a lot in organisations.
So I think if I’ve got somebody at 60% or 70%, quite frankly I don’t think they’d do because we’ve been through this process over and over again. And it’s an every four-month review process of how are we living towards our values, how are we going with this strength, what else can we contribute to these people? So I would be surprised if somebody in my organisation slipped to a 60% and we didn’t notice really, really quickly.
How did you prepare for the downturn? When did you know?
What downturn, Amanda?
When did you know it was coming and what did you do?
I look at our scoreboard everyday and I get the SmartCompany newsletter and I go “oh, this downturn thing, is it hitting my scoreboard yet?” No, it’s not hitting my scoreboard yet, maybe tomorrow this downturn is going to hit. I don’t know.
But really, a restructuring had to take place. Paul Keating said it all that time ago “the recession we had to have” and there are certain industries that fundamentally had to be restructured. I have some concerns about the stimulus package, that we’re going to hide some of the restructuring that still needs to be done, and therefore we’re going to need to restructure in only about four years instead of waiting for a seven or eight or 10-year period.
But what did you do? Did you change anything you were doing or does your company operate just as well in bad times as in good?
We have not taken our foot off the pedal. We are running as hard as we have ever run. We’re still investing in our people, we’re still recruiting. I’m investing more in IT and infrastructure than I have forever. The plan that we have over the next two years is to build something that is absolutely mammoth and scalable for global use.
So you’re a bit of a geek. Tell us what are your favourite things at the moment? How are you working smarter and quicker and saving money?
This is the point. It’s about being clever. So when we wanted to get a little bit more efficient, save some money, instead of telling people what we’re going to cut, we’d ask people what could we cut. Get people involved in that decision.
So who did you ask?
Our people, our team, the RedBallooners. And it’s amazing. Things like instead of putting our 1300 number on every single thing, people can use the 02 number. Or another thing is when we’re talking to people interstate, why don’t we use Skype?
And there have been some really funny ones, hilarious little efficiencies. Because we started at home, when you move into the office, what have you got? You’ve got a kettle, so everybody can have a cup of tea. So people will go and press the button and wait for three minutes for the kettle to boil. Somebody suggested that we put in one of those hot water systems. What efficiency we get – 50 cups of tea really quickly.
Some of them were really silly but so fabulous, like automatic duplexing on printers; there’s all sorts of little things. But ask your people. Your people know better than you do about how you can save money, and it’s not about looking to save money, it’s about saving money.
My concern with corporate Australia is that they’re looking, they think that it’s bad to be spending money. Actually I think it’s a good thing for corporate Australia to be spending money and to be supporting Australian businesses.
You know with all these bushfires going on in Victoria, well what can we do? What can RedBalloon do? The first thing we did was got on the phone to our suppliers in the area and asked, what’s the best thing we can do for you and Victoria?
And they said just keep sending us business, it’s all we want. Get people redeeming their vouchers, taking their activities and going off and doing their things. And that’s all we want is to keep spending money, keep doing activities, it’s the best thing we can do.
What about spending on technology though? You’ve got kids, you’re busy, you’re doing talks, you’re running this company – what do you do as a business leader to save time and be more productive in your day? What do you love?
I think I’m actually a bit of a Gen-Y. I think I’m actually 23 years old. I’m love multi-tasking, I will never watch a video or sit down to watch a DVD without at least one other activity going on. I wouldn’t actually write a blog for you at the same time as watching a DVD, but I would be scrolling through images or selecting images for presentations or something like that.
Well we know when we are doing our webinars there are people chatting, talking, doing polls, doing their emails while they are listening. But what’s your favourite thing at the moment?
Well I’ve got my Mac, which I love to bits and have had for years and years, but my iPhone means I don’t have to lug my Mac around all the time because it’s got everything on it. And now we’ve got Skype on my iPhone as well, thank you very much SmartCompany.
So it’s a fabulous little device. And you know what’s so exciting for me is that this is only the first generation. Can you imagine how powerful this tool is going to be? Even, for instance, on my iPhone our IT developers developed a tiny little app so I can see how my daily scoreboard is going. I really don’t even need to see my own scoreboard now, as it’s an iPhone app as well.
So what’s on your scoreboard?
My scoreboard is the number of people we’ve made a difference to today. So we’re changing gifting in Australia forever and we will know if we’ve got there, our big hairy audacious goal – we’ll know if we’ve got there if two million people have had a RedBalloon experience by 2015. We will know, and so we have a scoreboard, a big scoreboard in the middle of our office.
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