A founder who scaled his company to tens of millions in revenue explains why he fires himself regularly. Always deliver more value than you're paid for. Raise prices only when your learning velocity increases faster than your costs. If you're not improving, you need to go.
So today your business is doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue. You have 140 employees and you're directly managing several billions of dollars. That's pretty incredible. Just in and of itself as a business story. Do you have any lessons about that journey that you can share with, you know, the people that are listening?
My mind goes to a couple places. I think very simple principle is always deliver way more value than you're paid for. And There's a catch 22 there. It's actually you want to keep increasing prices constantly. But if you're increasing prices, you got to be increasing the value proposition at 1 point x plus or 2x plus like some higher multiple of than the price increase than the price increase at all times. And you also have to be, your learning velocity has to increase as well. So it's not like, oh, you're going to be paying me for the same old me, and not just me, some of our team members, but really pushing our team members to learn and grow and evolve so that who they're paying for next year is actually an upgraded version of who they paid for last year. So I think that perpetual desire to both increasingly add more value even if you're not increasing fees, always adding more value and increasingly evolving the talent density, sometimes that means improving the people that you have and sometimes that means hiring better people that will either raise the bar or filter out those that perhaps don't cut it anymore. That is difficult. That is, you know, every company that's growing starts out when you're a small little sort of 1 to 5, 1 to 10 person employee. You will take anybody that's willing to work for you and sort of buys into your vision and sort of scrappy and will tolerate, you know, kind of a dose organized but mission driven organization. But all of a sudden, as the organization grows to 25, 50, 75 employees, all of a sudden you have some structure and organization and management and delegation of both resources and management duties. Like there's some people that just don't cut it anymore. And it's hard. It's hard confronting the reality that the people that you started with, the ones that got you here, won't necessarily get you there. And it's even harder to look yourself in the mirror and say, am I the right leader for this moment? Maybe I was the right leader to get us here, but maybe I'm not the right leader to get us there. And at minimum look at what it will take to get somebody there and say, could I evolve to that? So that level of both collective awareness and self awareness at every level of management and leadership is sort of critical.
