Maybe you suck and not your employees

Hey there,

Today I want to talk about a super important part of building a company - building a team. And no, it isn’t about just the tech team, but about any team in your company.

Over 6 years, I have gone through various phases of Flexiple. Along the way, I have recognized patterns and the many mistakes I have made.

I will share my observations and list my learnings too. I have put quite some thought into this and believe this can help you. Let me know if you agree/ disagree.

For now, I will get started.

Early Days

The first couple of years of a startup are just brutal. You are literally trying to create something from nothing. This naturally implies that you are fighting all odds.

Doing this is no mean feat. That’s why the major heavy lifting HAS to be done by the founder(s). There is just no other way.

Sure, you will try to assemble a small but good core team. But, they will derive all their sense of purpose from the founders who have to lead by example.

Also, whether people like it or not, there is rarely any work-life balance in this phase. Again, especially for the founders.

My learning: Startups that don’t survive this phase have it so because their founders can’t take the unrelenting pressure day after day.

Early growth

As you find your feet a bit and start growing, slowly the founders start becoming bottlenecks. This is where real team building starts.

Founders have to snap out of being pure individual contributors to enablers. They can’t distance themselves from execution, but can’t do it all themselves either.

The best hires in this phase are still generalists - because the team is still not very big, the company still has many unknowns to figure out, and that too across multiple domains.

The work environment is still tough, but hopefully, now the pressure is lesser and also divided across more people.

My learning: The most logical solution in this phase is to find the functions that are stable and to start delegating them. This is where founders face & need to overcome their own mental block.

Later Growth

This is when the company has found stability. The tricky thing now is that what got the company till here likely won’t take it 10x further.

Founders have to disengage from day-to-day execution. Instead, team building is possibly the main skill that decides whether the company floats in mediocrity or grows to become a truly great company.

I say this because I believe this is where Flexiple is now. The problem though is that the earlier “pure hustle” mindset is tough to get rid of. As a founder, distancing yourself from immediate execution is not easy.

In hiring, you try to find “clones” of yourself. Since, of course, they don’t exist, you take too long to hire and even after hiring have unrealistic expectations of them.

Anyway, the best hires in this phase are specialists. The reason is that the team will slowly become bigger and you need specific skills now. You can’t find a large number of people who can keep up-skilling themselves. Instead, you need to find people with specific skill sets and allow them to excel in that niche.

My learning: In this phase, if people can’t succeed in a role well-defined as a 9 to 5 job, you as a company can’t grow sustainably.

It is super tough to find a large number of people who are willing to work in a tough environment month after month, and that too for someone else.

Till you reach a place where you can actually build such an environment, you can’t succeed. That’s got to be the goal.

Best,
Karthik

P.S. Please consider forwarding this to a friend! It would really help my two startups.

Were you forwarded this email? If yes, you can subscribe to my newsletter too: Click Here!

If you missed reading my previous newsletters, you can find them all here :)