Casey Gauss scaled his company to 30 employees while staying profitable without outside funding. He hires experienced people, promotes from within, appoints team leads to reduce founder bottlenecks, and protects culture by being intentional about who joins.
Questions this video answers
Around 30 (had ~30 people) and expected to reach 35 in the next 2–4 weeks.
No — they had not raised capital.
Yes — Casey stated they remained profitable.
Chapters
People run into a point where they then become the bottleneck because they can only handle so many. Yeah.
Yeah.
So many products. What do you say to somebody in that situation?
Well, so would the answer of building a team help to solve that?
I mean, that's usually my answer. It's like, all right, now we got to teach you how to be an entrepreneur.
Yeah. Yeah.
Who actually runs a real business. Like, congratulations, you hit the next challenge in your life. Yeah. Which is figuring out how to run a real business. You actually did that successfully. You had a team of 30ish people.
Yeah. Now.
And you're like 12 years old.
A little bit older.
That is a hard pivot to make, especially when you're in your 20s. So what was that like for you?
I mean, it's a huge learning opportunity. So. Yeah, in like, that's a great way to put.
Was a great learning opportunity.
I'm really passionate about learning. So, you know, I aspire like everybody else that's an entrepreneur to have this huge business someday. Right. And to do that, you have to learn a lot. You have to have a team to get there. So I'm excited to learn. What is it like to have 10 people? What is it like to have 20 people in office? All these things. Because that means I'm that much closer to that big business that I wanna have. Right. So, yeah. So that's why it's cool from a learning perspective. But for the most part, it's been pretty cool. We're at a really pivotal point. So like you said, in the next two to four weeks, we'll have 35 people, and we've kind of begun hiring adults, I like to say, so people that have worked at, you know, some Fortune 500s that have, you know, 15 years of experience or whatever, and they know how to do this. They know how to, you know, scale an engineering team or a product team or manage HR or whatever. So that's where there's a lot of learning. And I'm excited to learn from them as well. So, yeah, it's been cool for the most part. You know, it's like, okay, we need someone to write listings for people. Okay, so we'll hire someone that knows how to write listings or is a good copywriter. And then, oh, now that person's too busy. Now we'll hire another one. Okay, now we'll hire another one. So that's been pretty simple. But hiring for looking ahead, I think so. Versus defensive. Oh, we have all these customer emails coming in. So now we need to hire another coach. Or another customer, success person, that's pretty straightforward. But when it comes to like, I want to hire a director of marketing or whatever, well, if I'm not a marketer, which I'm not, that becomes that much more difficult because now I need to hire somebody that isn't similar to myself or doesn't have necessarily this very specific skill set. Right. Shooting photos, that's pretty straightforward. So that's been huge on learning. And I think the big thing is just protecting your culture initially because if you have someone that may do the job well but know is terrible for the team, that's scary for everybody involved. So.
Yeah, but I'm amazed you talk about this like it's not a big deal, but this is your, your first real success as an entrepreneur and you've scaled to 30 people and have a real culture. Like how? I mean, I have not made. I have not built a team that big. I have not made that pivot. So, like, what are you doing that I. That myself and other entrepreneurs in my situation are not? I don't know.
Maybe I just like to really plan ahead for success. Right. So like, maybe we don't need a director of engineering right now, but he's going to help us down the road. So I don't know.
But you've done, you've done this. You haven't raised capital, right?
Yeah. No.
And you've remained profitable.
Yeah, yeah.
And you've maintained a culture and hired all these people like this. This does not happen, Casey.
So appreciate it.
What are you doing?
Helping people? I guess that's the answer, right? That's the one thing that everybody on the team kind of engenders and that I'm really passionate about is just helping people. There's all these quotes. I don't have one off the top of my head, but if you help enough people, there's this quote, if you help enough people, then you'll get what they want. Then one day you'll get what you want. And I don't know who said that, but anyways, we're really passionate about helping people. And I think because we are helping people and sometimes to such a big degree, we have all these case studies where in the first 3 months you go from nothing to 85k a month or something. Right. So in significant ways.
I guess the money comes in from that or something.
But I know a lot of people who get to maybe seven or eight people and then their lives are completely monopolized of just managing other people. You just seem to have cruised through that Stage and gone to, like, middle management. And now you're hiring C level people.
Yeah.
How'd you cruise through that?
Silly, silly. I think maybe part of it is just making sure we're hiring people that are good at managing themselves and then setting up a good structure of them reporting to you and then putting someone that is like, oh, good, this girl is really great at copywriting. And she is very, you know, she was. Is very organized. Okay, now you're the lead copywriter. So then all the other copywriters report to her. She reports to me. But I still try to have like a good relationship with all the copywriters because again, I think culture and having a team that's really excited about the vision. Yeah, I'm bored.
So at first you're hiring for skill to create a service, and then more people to support them, and kind of the leading person on that team starts to emerge. They become the team lead. And now you have the direct reports emerging.
Like, I like the safe bet. Right. So it's very intimidating for me to hire someone to be a manager from outside because, you know, I don't know if you're good at managing the team, if you're going to, you know, work well with me and the people there. And also, I think you really need to understand the perspective of the people you're managing. And who's better to understand that perspective than someone that's been doing it for a while? And so a lot of people we kind of raise up. So this guy's killing it as a coach. Okay, now you're the lead coach, and that's cool because then we want to be the launchpad to success both for our clients and people internally. And so we give people this opportunity to come in at the ground level or at whatever level, but then become whatever it is they aspire to become. And so they're going to work so much harder and they're really going to put forward worth their effort, but they're going to be really responsible. So there's a lot less management on my end. You should be looking at hiring someone as like an upgrade. Right now I have somebody that can do this thing. Now I can do so much more. I get really excited about that.
