Jason M. Lemkin identifies five signs a VP won't scale: poor organization, hiring people worse than themselves, cloning their own type, fear of bigger teams, and threatening to quit if someone senior joins above them.
Hi everybody.
I really hope you're coming to Saster Europa on June 12th and 13th in Paris.
I'll be there on the whole Saaster team. So please join us.
It's going to rock.
What I want to chat about briefly today are six signs that a VP you may love, especially a first time vp, but really any VP isn't going.
To scale to the next level. And that's always a tough one when someone that does a great job at 1 million, 2 million, 3 million, 5 million isn't going to get to the next level.
But there's really six telltale signs I.
See again and again.
The first one is lack of organization. If you're managing three or four reps or a couple of folks on your marketing team, you can get by not being organized.
You can get by without processes and kanban and tracking and management.
But when I see ahead of sales.
In particular, just try to randomly whiteboard processes with an organization I know they never scale.
The second one is when they hire.
Managers under them that are worse than them, that aren't great.
And you see this so much with.
First timers is they struggle to bring in a director or manager of sales or success or whatever under them and.
They'Re just not good enough.
They're worse than them and they really should bring in folks that maybe are.
Young and first timers, but everybody knows they're great. That's who you want to see them.
Hire under them or people better than them. But when they start hiring mediocre folks, you gotta find a new vp.
Unfortunately, even if they're great managing a small team themselves, the next one is when they hire too many people just like them. This sometimes is okay in the early.
Days, even if it's not diverse hiring your friends.
But boy, if you only hire your.
Friends and people like you, you'll never be able to get past a single digit number of hires that won't work.
So watch for that. Watch for fear of large numbers. Yes, doing a million a month is amazing, but later you're going to have to do a million a week, and so on and so on. And when you start to hear excuses about the numbers being too big, that doesn't work in SaaS. The revenue recurs.
It should always be growing.
And lastly, the one I always worry.
About, and I guess we'll only have.
Time for five, is when they threaten.
To quit if you bring in someone on top of them.
This may sound natural, but the best folks know that if they can't scale.
You'Ll need to bring in somebody.
And if they try and hold you.
Hostage or threaten you, you're going to have to hire someone new in the next six months.
