Larry Ellison replaced Oracle's entire senior team when the company hit $1 billion because managers who ran a $50 million company couldn't lead at the larger scale. Evan Carmichael shows how Ray, hired for admin work in the Philippines, is now being groomed to run his entire website. As your business grows, your job shifts from doing the work to finding people who can.
Good morning, Believe Nation! Today's message is put the right people in the right positions. Over to you, Larry Ellison. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.
Suddenly we hit a wall. We reached a billion dollars in revenue and we were having serious management problems all over the place. And the people who were running the company, the billion-dollar company, were the same people that had run the company when we were a $50 million company, one-twentieth the size. And I had an incredible sense of loyalty to those people who had worked with me to build Oracle. And it was a very painful realization in 1990 that I was going to have to change the management team, that the company had outgrown the management, that people who are good at running a $50 million company are not necessarily— doesn't have the same skills. They're just different, not one is better or worse. They're just entirely different skill set in running a $50 million company than a billion-dollar company. And both skill sets are rare and precious, but we needed a different group of managers, and virtually the entire management team had to be replaced. And that means I had to ask people who I'd worked with for a decade to leave. I had to fire people. And that was the most difficult, the most difficult thing I had to do in business, asking a bunch of people to leave Oracle.
One of the most difficult challenges of being an entrepreneur and building a team and running a company is going to be your team, right? As you grow, your impact on the business goes down as a percentage of what your team does. Your role as one man in, or one woman in a 100-person company, you're not doing as much, you're not adding as much value as when you're a solo entrepreneur. And so if you want to really grow, it's going to be about the team that you build, their abilities to contribute to towards your goal and do their job in a really effective way. And so getting the right people on board is really paramount, and then as they grow, giving them positions that meet their skill sets, their desires, their ambitions. I want to share a quick story of a guy who's on my team named Ray. I first met Ray through his girlfriend. I hired his girlfriend, and over time she started slipping. She wasn't doing a great job, uh, maybe she had personal issues, and her work quality was declining to the point where I was about to fire her. And Ray took over for her as she left and moved the country, I forget what happened there. And Ray took over, and my expectations for Ray were really low. I gutted a lot of the position to be only really minimal stuff that were not of super high importance to the business because of the responsibilities that this woman could not keep up with. Ray then blew my mind. Ray then not only did all those responsibilities in an amazing way and started giving me feedback and new suggestions and new ideas to the point where then I wanted to give him more assignments and more tasks and increase his responsibility. And now it's to the point where, you know, Ray is in the Philippines and he was initially hired to do just administrative, really low-end stuff. Now he's being groomed and promoted to become in charge of my entire website. And so that's a major promotion for him, where most people might have a North American team and then outsource things to the Philippines, where now I'm taking somebody from the Philippines, making him in charge of my North American team. And that's because he's just gone over and above, and I've got to groom him and train him and get him ready to, to take on that role. It's not going to happen overnight, but it's just a matter of recognizing the talents on your team and doing an ongoing evaluation of How can I stretch this person or not? Are they willing to take feedback? Are they willing to grow? And do I always have the right people in the right positions? And asking that question to yourself and trying to push your team on a constant basis to get better will help you fill out your management group and build an organization that can really get amazing things done and you can be proud of. So get the right people in the right positions. Believe. So my question of the day for you guys today is, do you have the right people in the right positions? And the second question is, who was the first person that you hired and what are they doing for you? Whether it's full-time, part-time, uh, you know, hour a week freelancer, I'm really curious to find out. Leave in the comments below and I'm going to join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe And I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso.
