Great People Grow a Great Business, Not Vice Versa.

“No company can grow revenues consistently faster than it’s ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth and still become a great company”. – Good to Great, by Jim Collins

This quote from the amazingly insightful read, Good to Great, hit a nerve with me the minute I read it.

For an owner of a young business—particularly a first-time business owner (which I still consider myself to be)—hiring is among the most challenging things.  Why?  Because you’re taking a leap into the unknown.  You can’t know for sure that you’ll get a return on your investment when you hire someone.  You have to place an enormous amount of trust not only in the person you’re hiring, but also in the strength of your business to ride this wave of growth and turn it into profit.  Ultimately, you’re placing trust in yourself that you’re making the right decision—both in terms of when to hire as well as who to hire.

But the concept in this quote turns this challenge on it’s head.  The wisdom here is that you must hire great people first, then thrive, not the other way around.  It’s this trust of yourself, your company, and your people that separates the good from the great.  It ties directly into the central theme of the book, which is that good is the enemy of great.  That it is possible to coast by and never fully fail, but the only way to become great is to abandon things that just work, and embrace changes that will make you thrive.

Applying These Ideas

2011 has been somewhat of a turning point in my business.  This is the year I’m fully embracing the idea of the distributed agency model and abandoning the do-everything-myself model.  While this transition started about two years ago, it’s reaching a critical stage right about now.

Up until now, I had always maintained a balance between doing technical work myself and hiring help.  As an experienced designer/developer, it felt natural for me to assume those technical duties while at the same time running the business (which are two very different roles).  I went from being a solo freelancer, to hiring help on 10% of the work, to 50% of the work, to today where I rely on my team for roughly 90% of the technical work that goes into client projects.  It’s finally time to hand off that remaining 10%.

The reason this transition played out so gradually over a long period of time (relatively speaking) is I had always hired based on a pre-existing need.  I’d have a green-lit client project with a budget and I’d bring on contractors to work with me on it.  On a project-level, the economics are easy:  Project budget is X, hiring costs are Y, X minus Y equals profit.

But on a big-picture level, you begin to see the risk.  Hiring teams on all projects limits the overall profit margin of the business.  So I had to pick and choose when to hire and when to handle the technical workload myself.  As more projects with larger budgets came in, I shifted that balance slowly over time.  But there was always that nagging fear of hiring out too much of the work.  Something in me always feared a potential slow-down in new projects, leaving me with too much time on my hands when I could be doing some tech work myself and saving on hiring costs.  Too much time on my hands?  Good one.

This year, I’m beginning to fully realize the benefits of hiring teams 90-100% of the time.  There is no such thing has having too much time on my hands.  There will never be enough time in the day to cover everything I need to do as the owner of this business.  From strategy and building systems to networking, hiring, sales, marketing, and administrative duties, I have more than enough to keep busy.  I’d add project management and information architecture as part of my job, which arguably are a bit technical, but are more strategic and collaborative in nature, which is what I enjoy most about client work.

The critical decision I’m making right now is to build teams for all technical tasks on all projects moving forward.  Those tasks would include: Designing mockups, copywriting, front-end and back-end coding.  I’m going to focus 100% of my effort on the things I mentioned above, which is precisely what will keep the business running smoothly and ensure a steady stream of new (and hopefully bigger and better) projects coming in the door.

After spending the last 2+ years improving the processes of hiring, collaborating, and growing the business, I’m ready to put my full trust in these systems and move the ship forward.