I think originally it was attracting talent. I think when you’re a brand new start-up business people are scared to work for you. I mean a lot of the really good talent that’s coming out of university and the like don’t feel that good about jumping into an untested entrepreneurial business. You start off having to find talent from different sources of people who are maybe a little more comfortable with risk and happy to have a go at it. So finding talent was the first bit.
I think the biggest challenge is that the kind of people you have that are really great at helping you grow the business when you’re 10 or 20 people are probably different from the ones that you have when you’ve got 200 or 300 people in your business. So for me one of my greatest challenges is learning how to manage people who manage other people. So when you’re a really small business, it’s you and a bunch of people, and you all sit around a lunch room together. If you’ve got a problem you talk about. As you become 100 people, you can’t get everyone on the kitchen table anymore and have a chat to them, so the communication breaks down. Suddenly your message that you’re giving to people is being delivered by another layer between you and some of those people.
Those handful of people who were inspirational and helping you grow your business from a five person business to a 25 person business – some of them are now out of their depth when you’re a 100 person business. They’re trying to learn how to be managers of lots of people, and you’re caught between this massive loyalty and love for these people who helped you get to where you want to be, and now the fact that they are challenged by what you need them to be.
That transition is a difficult thing and most companies like ours will have done that numerous times. Every time that you double your business or grow your business, you’ve got to face that challenge. It’s a tough one. If you’re really lucky you can help those people find a new role in the business, or even better, help them adapt to the new world, but that’s not always so easy. So I think talent attraction and retention, management, has always been our biggest challenge.
I’ve made plenty. I’ve made different mistakes at different stages. I think one is leaving people in key positions when the position has outgrown their capability, but you love them to death because of their loyalty and their heritage within the business. That’s certainly one.
I think another one is not experimenting with new ideas enough. When you’re really young and entrepreneurial, you can’t afford to fully implement something because you just don’t have the funds, or the capacity or the people, so by default, you have to experiment. You kind of do a bit of it and see how it works. I always thought when we were young that we were only doing that because we couldn’t afford to do the massive preparation and implementation.
I now know that even when you can afford it, it’s a dumb idea, because you won’t know whether you’ve really found the niche or the perfect opportunity and if you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars preparing to do something, and you prepare it over then it can be wasted. So that was a lesson I learned – just having heaps of funding and capacity doesn’t make you better. In fact, sometimes it can make you worse at what you’re doing.
My tip to other entrepreneurs is that it has been from day one and still is 17 years later – one of the trickiest parts of the business to run. Salespeople are unique beings in their own right. My tip is that if you can convince your salespeople that staying with you and working with you is really developing their careers and their skills alongside of paying them well, you’ll get much more from them in loyalty in the long term.
So we spend a disproportionate amount of time teaching and coaching our salespeople how to be successful as individuals as well as salespeople. A lot of our best loyal salespeople say that they stay here, even though it might not be the best money because they feel it’s kind of like sales university for them, and they are getting better and better. An example might be – we just finished running a whole program on the seven habits of highly effective people. We invite all of our staff, and a lot of our salespeople come along to these programs.
I think the other tip is all salespeople are different. The formula for success is a very wide and varied one, and I’ve seen people be really successful for a whole number of different reasons; so don’t be too judgemental about what success looks like. Yet the reasons for failure are very consistent. And so that might sound a bit weird, but if I look through our sales team and ask why these people are successful, there’s just such a good bunch of reasons, but if you look through the ones who are struggling, why did they fail? They fit into a common group.
So today when we hire people, we focus more on looking to make sure they don’t have the reasons they’re likely to fail, rather than focusing on the reasons why they’re likely to be successful. It seems a bit back to front for a sales company because it’s pessimistic but it’s certainly working very well for us and our business.
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Cara Waters is a former SmartCompany editor. Previously, Cara was a senior reporter for the Financial Times’ website and worked for The Sunday Times in London.
