Allan Boyle — Scaling Well

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatant.com Bill G Again, that's doxatant.com BillG One more time. Docsatalant.com Bill G Check it out today. There it is live once again. We are talking about getting ready to scale in the early stages of scaling. How do we get going? What are the critical moves to do? We've got a guest on who's going to share some experience his own and clients work in getting ready to scale and dealing with the kinds of things you want to have in place or get in place very quickly as you move past series A, B or whatever the even if you're bootstrapped, like what are the those kind of critical things? When we get ready for that, that first inflection point, I got my second cup of coffee in me. I'm raring to go. My name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast. We're here every week with new shows, gurus, experts, authors, CEOs, coaches and more talking about lessons of growing your company. How do you grow your company and not lose sight of the original vision? How do you grow the company and still keep it together? Fulfill on what you want and have a great life. Enjoy the process. That's what our show is all about. We bring them to you every week. You'll find them wherever you're getting this right now, like subscribe, all that kind of thing, it helps you, it helps us. It's a good thing to do. Go ahead and do it right now, click it and all that kind of thing. If you give us a review that helps us, that's groovy for us. That's nice. Thank you for doing that. If you want to do us a favor. But subscribing not only helps the channel, but helps you get the notices every week. You can find our back catalog and all that and more@scalingcoach.com ScalingCoach.com is where we live. All right, I'm joined now By Alan Boyle. Alan is an all around rock star. I'm actually going to let him tell his story, but he joins us from Dublin, Ireland. He's going to talk about getting ready. He's got years of experience in technology across a range of things in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and he works today as a consultant with an organization called Saltwater Consulting. Welcome to the show, Alan.

Bill, it's great to be on the show. Thank you very much. It's 5pm My time in Dublin, so I'm definitely not on coffee at this point of the day. But I'm looking forward to chatting to.

You today and stay up till 3am like a proper coder.

Right?

Yeah. So Alan, tell us a little bit more about your start in the sector and your growth and how you moved into consulting. Let's get a little bit more picture of Alan.

Sure. So I mean dial back 23 years and I got involved with it and I was in the infrastructure and storage side of things. I worked in financial services. I did a small stint in Citibank in Saudi Arabia and then I moved to Dublin and spent some time there within financial services. We were virtualizing IT infrastructure at the time. This was pretty new. Early 2000s. Fast forward to around 2008. I moved back to South Africa, to Cape Town. I was passionate about virtualization and cloud was a new word that was coming up and implementing cloud solutions for companies starting to move infrastructure off site. So I got involved in the sales side of things and that was pretty exciting. I didn't realize I enjoyed sales until I actually started doing it. And I could empathize with IT managers about deleting exchange servers and backups and things like that. So they kind of really connected with me. I was able to sell solutions into them and we helped them move their workloads into the cloud. And then sort of going forward a bit more. I went into, into sort of 2018, returned to Ireland and joined one of the big tech firms, Amazon Web Services. I'm sure a lot of your listeners will know of them and again moved into quite an operational road role, but very, very cloud based and helped in a number of initiatives with them. And that was working with partners, helping partners provide better levels of support, working with critical incident management and support and service on the cloud perspective there. And again, Amazon is what I would call is where I learned my special ops. I got my special ops training. They definitely know how to operate well at scale. Exactly. That led me. I enjoyed working with smaller organizations and helping. I've worked in startups I've worked in scale ups. I even at one point in life co founded a craft beer and burger bar in a very hippie part of Cape Town. So that was quite unusual. So I got to play there for a while. And I don't know Bill, if you've ever heard of the ROE or return on ego when you bring your mates to your own restaurant and then realize that running a restaurant is actually damn hard work. So got out of that pretty quickly.

There's an awful lot of celebrities and sports athletes that make a little money and then promptly lose some of it in the restaurant and bar business.

Yeah, well it's quite nice when you're selling cloud solutions and you can bring people to your own place. You know, you get a bit of a deal as well. But then anyway, sort of fast forward a little bit. Around 2020 I had spent some time, as I said at AWS and it was time to go back into helping companies scale. Well, I kind of liked what I was learning in big tech. I liked the principles, I liked how they use their culture to drive their business forward very quickly and it made sense for me. So I founded Saltwater Consulting and the whole idea around Saltwater Consulting was to, to work with tech scale ups, pretty much I would call it. They've got product market fit more than a startup and they probably got their first round of Series A funding and they're on their way to Series B. Or it could be another type of company that, that's at a point where they have product market fit and they're ready to expand the team, implement sales, implement different functions and I kind of want going into those companies and helping those companies and a kind of bringing in best practice from big tech and best practice from what I've learned in my career to what I would call introduce operational rigor to their organizations.

Yeah. So focus on the operations, the execution side of things and where that meets people. We're going to get into all that in a minute. Before I do that, just a little curious thing. Where's the name saltwater come from? What does that for you?

Not many people ask me that, which is quite interesting. But you know, I had a choice. Do I, do I call my business Alan Boyle Consulting or do I sort of create something that might be a little bit bigger than myself at some point, you know, so. But saltwater, I firstly, I love swimming in the sea. I grew up in windy Cape Town. I did a lot of windsurfing. I know you're a big foil border or a new foil Border. I haven't tried it yet, but something, something to try, but certainly the sea, swimming in the sea. And I think there's a quote that whether it's blood, sweat or tears, saltwater heals. So I kind of liked the name Saltwater and Bridgewater was already taken, so I couldn't use that.

I like it. Personal fixation. Well, obviously I am from Los Angeles, grew up in Hawaii and the Mediterranean, other places. And I'm obviously very fond of sailing, swimming, surfing, all things like that. Love that, name it after a particular passion and tie into that whole thing. Well, so let's talk about some of the examples. I think the core idea here is that there's something as you start to find some traction and start to grow up, that there's some key moves required to scale. And I think we see some of the same things again and again about getting ready when we get the people together with the processes to work in, especially for our tech companies. But this could be, I mean, think about any company that starts to find some growth or is not yet growing, but planning for a big growth sees an opportunity to open. What are the key moves? So you're in Dublin these days and let's talk about some of the companies that you've worked with. The first one that you did sounded like they did some talk to me about was like infrastructure type stuff and they needed to get ready to hire fast. Tell us about that business.

Yeah, so look, I mean I've worked with a number of different types of companies. I like tech, so I like working with technology companies. Having worked in technology, I tend to get on very well with CTOs and CTOs sometimes don't like to, don't generally get on well with people. They use technology to solve the problem. And I can come in and help with the people process stuff. So this is a company particularly that was they were hiring quickly. You grow beyond the village.

Let me underscore that before you tell that story because it just hit me a second after you said it. Technology people don't particularly like the people. If you're comfortable with technology, in truth, if you're comfortable with sort of any subject matter area, like a solution, a discipline, a craft, like anything, there's a good chance that you have a vision for the difference that could make in the world and some way that you want to increase it. But people vex you. People are challenging, people are not logical. And yet you realize to do anything big, you've got to get good at leading people, ultimately leading leaders, developing leaders. Right to really scale to go from a few hundred to many thousands. You've got to get good at developing and working through leaders of leaders. And that is a key thing I think that we're about to get into with this story. I think we so often underestimate this, but lean into this because there's like, just because you think it's not for you, there's a way. Sorry for that. I just, I thought it's so foundational to put that in. As you, as you talk about this.

Company and you, and you see this in technology companies a lot because when they, when they start, you're scrappy. You have to be scrappy. In fact, the founders are in there in the trenches. Everybody's working very, very hard to get stuff done. And you're coding, you're building to get this product market fit. The minute you go beyond that, that founder needs to become a CEO. You need to step out of the engine room and step on top, you know, and that's.

Or stay in R and D. Right. Or let somebody else do that role. Yeah.

And in some cases, especially the ones that are scaling super quick, you know, they tend to bring in CEOs. I mean, we've seen the big examples. But if you're scaling at a normal pace, you're scaling fast, you've got some investment that, that, that founder tends to move into a CEO type role. Right. But, but I think one of the things that the people becomes a big part. Right. So I, I kind of say, right, you got your product market fit in this particular case. And again, you know, this is one example, but I've seen it everywhere. I've seen it in companies I'm talking to across the globe at the moment. Once, typically your series A comes the venture money or the funding, whether it's private equity, it doesn't really matter, is generally the announcement goes, we've just got some funding, we're going to double the team or we're going to hire 40 people or we're going to hire 100 people. And that sort of tends to trigger the let's get a talent acquisition person on board or let's enable the HR teams or let's bring HR in house, it might have been outsourced before then and start getting these teams ready to go. And I think one example, I worked with a company and as I mentioned earlier, once you grow beyond the 150 or mark, you're not a village anymore. So your leadership team can't interview everybody, they can't caretake everybody, and everybody's not in the same place. Look, most companies are distributed now these days anyway, but this particular company, as part of their next level of growth, they were starting to build up teams in the UK and in other parts of the world. And one particular conversation I had with a tech leader was al we hired somebody and I met them at the end of year function, the end of year party. And I said to the guy was in product or whatever, how many people have you met in the organization? And this person said, only four. Now the person was on board in a different city and had been in the company for four months, possibly a little bit introverted, but had only met three or four people in the organization. Whereas in the previous world, this village world or where they were all in the same city early stage, everybody was meeting everybody. So you immediately sort of had new people coming into the organization and not experiencing that same onboarding that the company would have done when they were younger. So I kind of said, do you know what I said to this tech leader? I said, it kind of feels like you need an employee launch plan. And I said, this is something that I got when I was back at aws and I found it fascinating. I joined an aws, quite a senior type role and my first three to four months was taken care of. So interesting story. I mean like everybody's traveling all the time there and you know, you're on a plane, you're in different parts of the city. And I had quite a global role at the time. So the launch plan that I got was basically right. Month one, I need you to get over Seattle. I need you to go and do this, this training. Month two, I need you to go and meet these people, get over to London, do this, this type of training to get, get on board. I need you to start writing narrative documents. It's a big Amazon thing. They write a lot of documents. And again, quite an interesting process and, and I've learned a lot from that process. You know, switching from presentations to docs, but another story for another day. But you need to learn how to write documents, you need to learn how to live the Amazon principles every single day. And the launch plan gave me all the tools I needed almost to onboard myself. So it kind of put onboarding in my control. And then what I would do is I'd feed back on the launch plan when I was meeting with my manager from time to time. So I thought, hang on, this is a brilliant, this is something that we could bring into these scale ups. And I think one of the challenges we see with scaleups, they get talent acquisition rights. They're very good at hiring, they're very good at interviewing. They bring people in. But on day one, after they've got their backpack, their laptop, they've had their induction presentation and that's day one, what happens next? Their manager goes off on a business trip for two weeks. They're not present, the person's sitting there, they haven't really connected with the rest of their team. They're not sure what training they need to do. And I kind of felt, well, here's an opportunity to sort of put responsibility with the hiring manager to set the launch plan up properly, put the launch plan with the employee and then have HR measure that at the end. So after three to four months, that launch plan then sort of goes full circle to HR to measure how did that employee actually onboard. So that's kind of the idea around, you know, when you, when you're scaling fast, don't just focus on acquiring staff or talent and then the induction day, focus on those first three to four months. And I think that's a gap that a lot of companies face at the moment. Bill.

Well, so let's take two parts of that. The first one is getting ready to hire a lot of people quickly. And I think you need to approach that from a couple of different ways. As you were pointing out. One of them is you may need some outside resource for that. People start to use recruiters a lot, but if you just use recruiters without regard, that could become very expensive very quickly. You want to develop your internal processes and think about your hiring recruiting process, the one that's going to work for you and your environment, the kind of people you're recruiting and have that adapted to each section. We have a partner to suggest. Past guest of the show, Evan Sohn with Recruiter.com has a special offer for our listeners and we'll throw it up there. But@recruiter.com, they have a new service called Shortlist. And if you use the code scale up, you'll get a special deal. What's cool about the shortlist thing is for 3,000, 3,000 bucks, they'll give you 10 candidates, 10 pre screened, ready to go, candidates that are interesting to that. So we'll put the full link and the code in there. It's start.recruiter.com shortlist and the code is scale up. Anyway, so that's a special offer kind of thing. But you want to think about and look at those kinds of resources that can help you quickly get to hiring and you want to have internal and external resources. So somebody that's a champion for shepherding people through the process internally to get your hiring done really fast. As you say, go for as we frequently do, hey, we're going to hire 100 people this year, we're going to hire 500 new people or in one case we want to hire 500 per month with one of our client companies. So that's a really, really heady pace of hiring. And you want to get well honed processes distributed throughout the company, internal, external, that kind of thing. And then you bring people on, right? If you don't want to have high turnover, as you say, if you don't want to have people bailing out or coming on and starting to work in weird ways, get this onboarding process worked out. And you talk about helping a company to create a mixture of a really well honed thing, but in part something that people have some agency over themselves that they can use and help themselves through the process. There's a link on the screen, screen. If you look at the video, startrecruiter.com shortlist, the code is scale up to use to get the special deal that we have for our listeners. So then there's that whole onboarding process. And you mentioned talking about and learning the way we do things around here, right? Learning kind of the things that work for Amazon, which are different than the things that would work at Apple, profoundly different. But the way we do things around here are the values of the company enshrined in actual actions and behaviors. So we want to teach people why does this company exist and how do we do things around here and what do our customers expect from us and how do we operate with vendors and each other and that kind of thing, that's a whole world of stuff beyond, like just get yourself to California and go work with this team or fly to Seattle and start documenting some things, right? Like then the task, the objectives to be done, how you're going to do things, why we do, where we work, the tools we use. It's a whole world of things. And so many companies, I've worked at them, you've worked at them, where you just start and they're like, okay, you know, and barely like anything set up for you. Like, okay, how do I get my phone turned on and how do I get connected into the email system and where are the documents and there's a.

Whole bunch do you know, it's interesting and just when you speak about recruiters, like recruiters like working with the internal Talent acquisition people because they understand each other and there's definitely a need for both to work in harmony together. And the talent acquisition people can help, as you say, shepherd people through the culture and the values. And it's so interesting because there are many companies that it takes a while for new onboarders to understand the company values. And I can understand sometimes we call it tenants or the ways of working or whatever it is. And if they can understand that and they can get given working examples throughout. And another thing that I like to introduce, introduced to the onboard plan is and this is where accountability comes in and also giving new hires the permission to bring their opinions to the table. They're like, that's so important. Because sometimes people might go three or four months and say, do you know what? I'm going to keep my head down, I'm not going to get into trouble, get through my probation period. But if you actually say part of your onboarding plan is to you're the hiring manager. The employee meets the hiring manager once a month and in that provides a one page report. One of the things we should stop. Typical retros. You probably run them all the time with companies you work with as well. I love it. It's a stop start, continue. But you almost say to a new hire, what should we stop doing? So almost like they've been given permission in month one, two and three to actually challenge the status quo. Because that's what you want. You want to bring new people in there because you want to scale and you want these new people that are specialists coming into the organization to challenge the status quo from time to time and have permission almost to do that.

You know, here's the interesting thing. At the age of 58, with some success and experience as a highly paid coach, I'm not shy about challenging why people do things the way they do or that kind of thing. Sharing my opinion, maybe you should reconsider that. Or I've seen this happen somewhere else. But earlier in your career in a new job where you really need and want that job, you want it to turn out. It's very uncomfortable in the beginning to really speak up. For most people, it's almost like, like a character flaw. If you feel some unrestrainable compulsion to open your mouth and sound off about things that could be very damaging. But if you create as the company, as the hiring body, a process where privately you can solicit that feedback and people can say, yeah, I wonder why we do that. Maybe we should stop do that. Or maybe we should start doing. Because I've learned these things from other companies. They may or may not be relevant in that company. Like it might be useful to say, okay, thank you for that input. That is not going to work for us. But to let that outside opinion come in. One of the most valuable things that I do as a coach is bring an outside perspective to a business. Right. I look at, it's interesting you do that in this industry. That's not how other industries do that. And I think you might consider changing it. Sometimes that leads to some of the most dramatic breakthroughs. Just introducing a point of difference to the standard way of operating.

Completely agree with you. And I think you just hit the nail on the head there as well, that outside perspective. So when I come in and I work with teams and I work with talent or HR or senior tech leadership teams, it's when I run the retros, the impact is so much more beneficial. I've been working with a company for over a year and they provide construction tech. So we're going off a tangent now, but they provide construction technology type services and I worked with them, we implemented a number of operational changes, value based hiring mechanisms and various other things. And you know, I'd finished my engagement, they called me up and they said, we need you in to do the quarterly planning. We need you in to actually help ask the right questions that we can have an outside perspective so, you know, mature as well to bring them into the leadership team to say, yeah, we want to be challenged and we don't mind being challenged from somebody outside again, you know. So again, some of these consulting engagements tend to tail off and then they pick up again, which is quite nice.

We're going to talk about another business now, an audiotek company in Dublin that you mentioned. I did a bit of work with an awesome audio tech business a couple of years ago. You can go back and listen to the show with Chin Beckman of DSP Concepts for our listeners. But in this company, I think you highlight something that we've also talked about a couple times with Brian Scudemore of 1-800-GOT Junk. That is the importance of envisioning, envisioning the company in the future and creating kind of a picture of how it's going to be on the people side of things. What's the org chart, who's working there, how many people? How does that go? Talk to us about that company and what went on there.

Two directors or two founders involved in the business. One came in after the other. But when I started going in and saying, right, what are Your plans, what do you want to do? And you would set the 10 year vision. You try and go as far forward as possible to say, okay, well, you know, they want to exit, they want to do whatever. And then you try, you bring that down, you, you bring that right back into, okay, what does it look three, like three years from now? So what I typically do with companies is say, okay, well, you want to grow to a certain revenue point, you want to have X amount of staff. Where do those staff fit into an org chart? Let's design the org chart of the future. And it kind of gets them a little bit. Okay, this is interesting because you normally go in and ask them for their org chart now, but the org chart now would be pretty flat in that particular company. But when you design the org chart of the future, you say, right, well how are you going to manage these 50 people or 60 people or 100 people or 200, and where are they going to sit and what are the roles? And through that exercise we then map everybody. And this is where it gets quite exciting because when you start saying, okay, so what role are you running? Founder 1. What role are you running? Founder 2. And you found overlaps. And then I went and started circling around some of the teams and found that everybody thought they were reporting into both founders. So you know, you've got one founder that's involved with a bit of, with a couple of key partners, with a couple of key customers, with a number of projects that they're close to their heart. The other founder's doing exactly the same thing. And you see this often in leadership teams where there's overlaps. And that's okay for the leaders because they get each other, they started this business together. Right, but what about the staff coming in when they say, well, you know, you got to do it this way when you're speaking to this guy and you've got to do it that way when you're speaking to that person. So what I, what I take is that org chart of the future and say, right, which roles are you as co founders going to step into? And they found it quite hard initially because they were like, well, I kind of need to do both or I want to do both or you know, I don't mind doing a little bit of sales, but he should do the marketing. And you kind of realize how disjointed that org is. And I think that's, that, that's a very, very powerful thing is when you start plotting them into that org chart as in the founding team or the leadership team, you kind of see why it's difficult for the staff to actually get things done or to scale. Well, because the staff don't necessarily aren't getting clear direction. That's the one piece. The second piece with the org chart is you get into roles and responsibilities as well. So I'd normally start at very high level and say, right, okay, so what does a head of product do? For example, what are the five key things that they do? And then what does this person do? Okay, so. And then that would very quickly determine what that role looks like in the future and who would potentially report into that role. And by plotting everybody in there, you can then say, okay, well of your staff, you've got 30 people in your organization, you're growing to 100. Which of those 30 people are on a potential promotion path up? Which ones are you going to move up the org chart? Which ones need to be spent? Need to move into specialist individual contributor roles. And that's another thing I've seen often and is is individual contributors to retain them. They moved into management roles and they're just not ready for it. They don't want to do it, but they haven't been given a promotion path to become almost a principal or to become a specialist. So they end up getting made into a manager because they've got extra responsibility, they're being paid more. That can disrupt the org chart as well because they're just not ready for it.

Let me underscore a few things there I think that are really valuable in the scaling up world. We usually start first figuring out what the core functions are of any company and then the unique ones to your company and starting to clarify and have individual accountability for those things. We also look at the common or core processes to your specific business that's ends up kind of being a matrix of things that cross functions. So in the beginning there's confusion, there's overlap, and that results in people stepping on each other's toes, contradicting each other, that kind of thing in the organization. It creates a real problem. We also find in the early stages your companies are designed in weird ways. You have all sorts of odd, weird ways of setting up things that are not very standard and counterproductive to being able to hire and scale well, then there's the actual structure that you got that's going to evolve over time. And then there's the roles that you all as founders or earlier stage employees should be in. Are you going to grow? Do you really want to be CEO or CTO or Whatever. Do you want to instead head up R and D or do you just want to run the finance side of things? There's not any right answer to that thing, but there is a thoughtful application of that. So you don't end up with yourself in too many of the different roles and doing all of them badly.

Absolutely.

Or other people who are forced into roles that they weren't ever suited for because they went along or they felt like they needed to.

And I think if, if you can map it out for everybody and you can map out the roles, it also allows that founding team to say, do you know what I actually want to say? I was chatting to somebody today as part of a diagnostics that I was running and the person is operating in a managing director type role, but they want to be in a CTO role. They want to be developing the product, developing the team, but they've got both hats on and they know they need to bring in more people to eventually get into the managing director role. They just don't want to do that. And that clarity kind of hit them which allows them to say, right, okay, what do we need to do to fill that MD role in the future? So people love the idea of, yeah, I'd like to run the company, but there's a responsibility that comes with running a 100, 200, 300 person company. And it's not easy. Right. I call it, it's great to do the announcement and say, hey, we've got our series, we're growing, we're going to the next level. But it's actually, you're running a business at the end of the day and I think that's the important thing.

Well, and as you grow in the senior, in the most senior roles, you are leading leaders and that's a very different thing. So you have to get your hands out of the details in the day to day to teach people how to fish, rather than fish for them or show them exactly where. But you want to be a coach, a support, and as the organization grows, you've got to be coaching and developing people who are coaching and developing others. So it's more at that point about the overall strategy of the company, the values, and then helping them to manage all of the details, not getting involved in every single policy decision, who moves where, what to do, that thing. You really have to stay out of people's business or you destroy their authority, their leadership in the organization. If you keep meddling as your organization has grown and you have offices and divisions and departments and things like that. So I think the other thing is that clarity about like what is a role you talk about, you know, what are the different things that are going to manage a product or service within your company. You've got the development side of things, the marketing side of things. Are those aligned, are those not aligned? Do you have different people doing different parts of them? I think we see that again and again as organizations evolve and grow that there's a lot of confusion about who's actually managing what.

Yeah, and I'll tell you Bill, there's a good story here as well as I was working with a, a pretty large company in London. They're 5250 company with their IT teams are about 300 people across the IT organization. And I at one point was asked the question, there was a head of product, there was a VP of product, there was a senior product manager. But at one point I realized it came to me that they're actually all in the same role, similar compensation. And I just thought what happens when you bring in the next 20, you know, product managers across this organization? And that creates confusion because, and this happens, you know, you see this, this happens in marketing. It happens in any, any division within an organization. They may bring in specialist type people and give them a specialist title. But then fast forward a few, a few years and how do you promote these people? How do you put people on various promotion parts? Because you've got to keep it as flat as possible. You've got to understand your roles. And that's why I say create this org chart very early so you can say right, we're going to have product management and our product management, we're going to have level one, two, three or whatever it is. And you're quite clear on that. And this is where corporate get it right. If you join a law firm, you join as an associate and you go through the ranks and you get to partner, you know exactly where you are, you know your plan. But in tech you see less of that because it's quite, it starts scrappy and if you start growing it can stay scrappy if you don't implement this org chart of the future. So I think it's a very powerful tool for getting everybody centered around the idea of okay, we are going to hire 100 people and it's going to look very different when we do it. Let's get the foundations in place now.

Yeah, I think you got to be careful about handing out projects willy nilly to people and not thinking about where those really belong. And you end up with that kind of accidental org chart that isn't very thoughtful and creates that kind of confusion. I think it's interesting about arraying that in that way. One of the companies we worked with a few years ago and it was quite successful, it sold for over a billion dollars recently. But when we were trying to do their quarterly and annual planning, they wanted to have over 25 people in the room. It took more than four times as long to do what we do. When we have a more typical senior leadership team, we've six to 10 people in the room. Six to nine, really. I don't usually like to go to double digits, but we have a wider range of second tier managers. So I might have 30 people in the second tier managers. But we can focus the conversation by having a few people that are there together making core decisions, informed by the wider group and then supported by the wider group, but not as many voices in those critical things. So this company really struggled with growth and they did get and sell for over a billion dollars, but it took a lot more work than it needed to because they couldn't get some of those founders out of all of the key conversations. They all wanted to be involved in everything all the time, and it was painful as a coach to help them through that process. So spare yourself some of that challenge. I hear your junior partner. I think the things that we're hearing so far are the need to get the people right, to have some forethought and not to let the whole thing get out of control and accidentally end up in weird ways and resist the urge to meddle in things and start to level up your approach to leadership. And some of those people may see themselves in different ways. It's really useful to think about where do you want to go and to ask each person and think about how does your role evolve and where do you end up over time? What kind of work do you personally need to do? How do you need to shift yourself? Is a really useful thing to think about. Let's talk about the meeting cadence and so on. You were working with a FTSE 250 company in London that you shared about and getting ready. Talk about how their organization evolved their whole operational cadence.

Yeah, I think it's quite interesting. I think, you know, simple things like getting a meeting right or getting a team to think about their operations. And every team, whether it's sales, whether it's marketing, if they can be operational even just once a week and bring in operational rigor through how they run their meetings, is super powerful. So similar company I was working, you know, with the various different product types, roles, but doing the same job. This organization, they had a number of teams that had been reorganized, there'd been a couple of IT reorganizations. Teams are doing different things, reporting structures changed, the usual stuff. You see individual contributors moving into management roles. And they kind of wanted to bring some sort of connection to all of these teams. And one thing they used, I mean the company used G suite and they use Google Slides and I stumbled upon, I mean I like to introduce a one page report and we use the GC and I'll get into how that works now in a second. But the one page reporting and I saw this working very well again during my time at Amazon. Operational teams would get together and a lot of teams would share a lot of information very quickly in a short space of time. So in one hour you could get through six to 10 teams, different team leaders and you could get through their information. And all they had, each team had was a single one page, I wouldn't call it a matrix, but divided into four blocks. And it just made so much sense to me. And the top block would be your highlights. Again, value based. Always bring your, your wins to the table first. What are the highlights? How do we really live our values this week? How do we, Amazon's a classic example. Customer obsession. How do we demonstrate customer obsession this week? What do we do for our customers? And that be the highlight block. And then the next block would be something along the lines of what the goals are. Whether it's okrs, kprs, it doesn't matter. There's so many different types, but what the goals are. But make sure that you're trending those metrics, you're looking at your goals over a long period, five to nine weeks. You don't want to be looking at what we did this week and what we did last week, what we did this month, what we did last month. You kind of want to look at everything over long lines that you can see very clearly. If you're trending towards your metrics going red or you going green because then you can sort of take action on that. And then the next box would be around projects, any key things. And then there may be a box around team, you know, big tech scaling companies, companies that are scaling quickly. There's always going to be something around team development, hiring. So I think that's, that's something that, that we, we looked at what they were using, we said, hang on, I want to bring these one page reports into your meeting every week. So the six team leads, when I say team leads, they were heads of department and they all needed to report into cto. And it was basically saying, right, okay, well there's a, in a typical tech team, you might have your security team, you might have support, you might have your legacy systems, you might have your new cloud systems engineering. All of these teams were actually talking different languages. There was ego in some of the teams. You know, engineering managers, you know, didn't necessarily want to talk to people within support. You know, when support managed big onboarding, you know, if 50 people came in, they needed to procure hardware. So all of these teams are talking different languages. So what we did was we again, we figured out their ways of working. We implemented a, a, we, we implemented a weekly meeting at a certain time. This happened to be a Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday was good because they could get their stats and their metrics from up to Friday and they could use Monday to get it, get it going. And then Tuesday they'd be able to have a conversation about what happened in the past, what's going to happen in the future. We then worked out ways of working. So I call it tenants, but you can call it ways of working, principles, whatever you want. But one of the tenants, for example, just in this particular company, because there was ego within some teams and other teams felt that they weren't being heard, we created a tenet. There's no such thing as a stupid question. Now it sounds okay, why are you creating a tenant like that? But you're almost inviting the introverts in the room to speak. You're making it clear that people can actually have an opinion and say something. And you're also making it very clear to the people that are on the receiving end of the question to back off, even if they think it might be silly. Because sometimes those silly questions, and I'm good at it. I always go in as the, you know, I've worked in tech for years, but I go in as the non tech person saying, hey, listen, I'm going to ask a couple of questions. You might find them a bit silly, but they tend to start conversations and they tend to move things forward. So anyway, back to this reporting Google Slides. You go through the rules of work, you almost do a preamble. So every week, right, what's our mission? What are our values? And they're like, do we have to call out our values again? Yes, you do, because you need to be talking about your values every week.

I love you. Reinforcing that. I say this again and again to Teams. No, we are going to repeat our purpose, our values, our brand promises on like a daily basis, ideally. And we're going to reflect on that. This is a thing that takes like two minutes. But people so resist the routine and road of it and then they go off to other practices in the world where they do that and they don't realize how important these things are. I mean cultures and religions are based on these kinds of things and yet we resist doing them in our companies. Like, no, let's build our own little culture.

Yeah. And it is a bit cult like. But when you can run your company based around your values and you can start your meeting as you say, Bill, it takes a minute, it takes a minute to read out your seven tenets or whatever it is and your mission. Okay, what is our mission? Why are we sitting around this table today? We want to move the dial this quarter there. And then you suddenly get into your reports. Now this is something that was also quite Amazonian and there's books about it, so I'm not sharing trade secrets or anything. But they had document reviews. Yeah. And as part of the document review, pre. Now this is very, can be seen as a bit cult like they have quiet time where you would read a document before you actually start talking about it. So I kind of introduced this into. I like that. And I introduced it into their report meetings. I said, right, we got an hour long meeting on a Tuesday afternoon. The first 10 minutes each of you there's going to be silence. We're going to put a ticker on and you go through the Google Slides. Nice thing about Google is you can actually comment on it quite easily. So people could highlight a section in the report and say, hang on, I don't like that metric. The support person can go to the head of security. There goes my dog again. Apologies. Hopefully if it gets annoying, I'll sort it out. And you can have people from different teams actually cross checking each other saying, hang on, what's going on with that metric? Or I see we had a security breach there. What does that mean for everybody else? And for 10 minutes people are just looking at each other's reports, the various team owners looking at each other's reports and actually commenting on it. And then you get into discussion and then the report owner goes through and they spend 10 minutes per report. Within an hour you've shared so much information and that's in my mind absolutely critical to break down silos is get different teams together, share the reports and then you go a step further after the meeting you share the reports with as many people as you possibly can. You're transparent around everything. So they can see that there's been debate happening and that knowledge sharing is just absolutely. It takes time, Bill, I'm not going to lie to you, it takes time. I mean the first few couple of months was we have to do this.

Well, let me share a couple things or call out something in there that I think is implied. And so many companies don't want to do good meetings require preparation on the part not only of the person calling the meeting, but the participants. You've got to prepare your reports, you've got to prepare your updates and things like that. And that's useful. Not calling and reading out slides to everyone is like a blessing. Right. So another way of doing that besides the pre reading of all the things is just to focus on the highs and lows in our world. We have people do a quick scan of dashboards and priorities, looking at red, green, yellow, and then we pick a few things to talk about. We don't try to talk about everything and we don't just take it in turn, but we focus in on one or two areas which are ending up doing with the same thing by people preparing detailed reports. And there's pre reading time and there's commenting and discussion. So you're focusing in the time that you actually spend discussing and not letting it randomly occur by the first person or the most dominant person who's going to speak out. I think is really useful there.

Yeah. And I think to that point is if you put your report into a one page format and you focus on the highs, as I said earlier, and you focus on the metrics and what's trending up or down and a couple of the key projects on a traffic light basis, teams can very quickly share information and you know, you start taking out the weasel words in these reports. Weasel words. Another thing that I learned sort of in big tech, but you don't say, hey, we had a significant month last week. You talk about the variance change and what happened and what that impact is and you name people that potentially need to action things and you have a discussion box. So saying this is something I need to raise with all of you this week. So very, very powerful. And I think, you know, I look back at some of the testimonials of all the operational type work and the structured reporting seems to win all the time for people. They really like it and it kind of helps change culture. So yes, you can bring the engineering and the sales team together on a Friday, play some pool, have a bit of beer and pizza. But where they really start organizing and getting themselves on the same page is when you run good reports. That's why I like the meeting rhythms. And you see that in Scale Up. You see it in EOS systems. They all talk about getting a really good structured meeting in place and going through from one to the other using time boxes, which I think is powerful.

So in the world of Scaling up and EOS is just a offshoot of our work originally learned, but we start with a daily huddle that not that many, certainly they don't do. But Daily Huddle is let's get all the teams in sync with each other and let's cascade that all around the world. We see many organizations do that quite successfully, from special ops teams to major hotel chains and so on. So let's get a daily huddle to sync things. Then let's do a weekly meeting where we go into four dimensions and take those meetings to 11, right? Level them up and focus on the discovery and the discussion and make decisions and delegate things so that we know where we're going in every meeting. Have a really well run, well prepared meeting that we can look at. Let's use our dashboards and priorities really well to do that. Makes a big sense. A couple things that I heard to stand out, to call out and to kind of summarize before we run out of time here, as you start to get ready to scale, right, it's important to start to think about the future. What's the organization going to look like in two, three years from now and where are your roles in it? So start to imagine the future of the organization, the number of bodies, that kind of thing. And then get ready, get internal and external resources ready to hire a lot of people and develop a robust onboarding process so that people get brought on and they start the right way and they stick and they don't churn out of the company as quickly as you might have. If you don't do that whole kind of thing, then establish a great operational cadence where you've got the right preparation, visibility for the meetings to keep people on the same page and clarify. Then the other thing that I heard in the design of your organization is to get clear about what each one does. And I think one of the best ways that I know you didn't speak to this, but just like a side hack is start to get clear and take out some of the jargon about it. So aside from all the industry terms, oh, we're DevOps and we're this and we're that kind of thing. Think instead like we build the products, we deploy the products, we keep products running, we get customers working. What do you actually do that can take away from some of the confusion, ambiguity of industry jargon in any particular industry? Right. Medical construction. They all have a lot of nonsense that isn't fully well understood and we speak in acronyms and things like that. Get clear what are you actually doing in simple terms and that can help a lot through that process. Alan Boyle is at saltwaterconsulting, ie saltwater. We'll put that thing up there in the link in the show notes here if you want to get in touch with Alan and see more about his work. Obviously you've got a wealth of experience and perspective in here and can really be helpful. Based in Dublin, Ireland. You're working broadly though not just in Dublin. Yes.

Yeah, broadly. As I say, I got a couple of projects happening in South Africa, in Cape Town. I quite like Cape Town. Any excuse to go back home, effectively. Italy, London and there's a number of tech hubs. And as I said, I kind of like to align with tech companies. So it could be anywhere around Europe.

And then very much in line with this and very helpful in doing this thing is that hiring side and our sponsor recruiter.com as a special offer, a really cool thing. You can give them a list right now and get 10 pre selected interested candidates in a very short period of time. So you're going to go to to start.recruiter.com shortlist use the code scaleup for a special deal. 3000 bucks gets you 10 pre qualified pre screened candidates. Boom. Short circuit your key hiring decisions. Our sponsor recruiter.com they're super useful for us. Want to give a I don't know how to get more info. If we can help you find any other resource in your neighborhood or one of the scaling up coaches or anything like that or if you want to give us feedback on the show, suggest a guest, that kind of thing. We get suggestions every day, many times a day actually. Infocalingcoach.com is a good email for the show info. Scalingcoach.com you can find us on the web at scalingcoach.com where we'd love to help you with anything you need to do with scale or connect you to our guests and partners in the show. I want to give a big shout out to Juana Mitchell for getting the show ready. Our guests prepared the show out the door every week week to Verne Harnish my friend and mentor, the creator of the whole Scaling up system, the original Rockefeller Habits, who keeps kind of the core tools alive in our work for our thousands of clients around the world. And then to the folks at podfly Productions who get our show ready and sweetened up every week and out the door along with Wanda Mitchell. Thanks to podfly Productions. Thanks again everyone for listening for watching. Keep scaling and we'll talk to you again next time. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by alignment, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app, you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth both in our Scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.