Hypergrowth is uncharted territory for my young startup, and it’s a road we’re still learning to navigate. After my real estate crowdfunding platform, Realty Mogul, raised a $9 million Series A, we wanted to capitalize on that momentum. We put our foot on the gas, expanding our team from six to 30 people in 90 days.
I’ll be honest: despite the fact that I led the charge to scale up quickly and there are no signs of slowing down, we were blindsided by some of the organizational changes we began encountering almost immediately. For instance, we didn’t anticipate how badly crippled our organization would be when the need for parking spots quintupled in just one week. Nobody could get into the office on time and our employees suffered numerous parking tickets. While issues like too few parking spaces or not enough desks can be relatively easy to fix, the harder challenge is seamlessly integrating that many people into an already fragile startup culture we worked so hard to build.
My team had to learn to keep pace with our company’s explosive growth. But to be an effective CEO, I had to learn to keep up, too.
Don’t just do a CEO’s job. Be a CEO.
In the earliest days of a startup, a CEO’s greatest strength is being able to manage and execute in every role. When we launched Realty Mogul, I was up until 2 a.m. every night designing new marketing campaigns, following up from the days sales calls, and weighing in on every bit of minutia in the product design. But as we rapidly expanded, I simply couldn’t handle every task or be in every meeting.
The great CEO coach Jerry Colonna told me, “If you’re writing code, designing, or selling the product or service, you’re not doing your job.” It’s called being a CEO for a reason. And the secret to being a CEO is not to have a hand in every project. Being a CEO is about building a strong, dynamic team of leaders who can execute on their own. A strong team of managers doesn’t need me leaning over their shoulders, watching their every move.
In the past, I thought if I could execute something quickly, I should handle it on my own. Now, if there’s a project I could handle without help, I intentionally don’t do it. Right now, we’re in the process of redoing one of the main pages on our website. Historically, I would write out all the functional specs in detail, exactly how I wanted it to look and perform. I can still do that quickly, but this time, I leaned on my team to do it.
What would’ve taken me 20 minutes took six cycles of revisions.
But guess what? We suffered through those six cycles because for the next batch of page revisions, it only took two rounds to reach a consensus. Next time, it might take just one. We can’t scale if I have to be everything to all people. And now, I’m not.
Step aside to get ahead
Generally speaking, CEOs try to encourage our teams to employ the same think-on-their-feet resourcefulness. But part of our growing pains as a company meant accepting that instead of less, we needed more bureaucracy—better defined policies and procedures—to effectively scale up. When we hired several dozen new team members earlier this year, I realized that maybe we weren’t such a scrappy startup anymore—and that I needed to get out of my own way.
I set aside a weekend and spent 30 hours writing six training manuals. Then, I scheduled five trainings over the next week, pulling in senior managers and interns alike. By training employees at every level, I could both onboard new employees while teaching senior staffers to run the same training next time. My goal was simple: I never wanted to have to handle another one of the same training session again.
I like training, but passing along those skills to our managers and empowering them to train and lead is a testament to what a solid, supportive team we’ve built.
One playbook for every team player
One of our best team-builders was born out of a personal belief that every employee should know what the company stands for. It’s not about just training an employee to do their job, but training the employee on how we expect our team to make decisions and the core values at the company. Like the way that Tony Hsieh built an incredible culture at Zappos and the way Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz talks about culture being the lifeblood of their company, I knew culture had to be at the forefront to build Realty Mogul into what we want it to become. For us, our culture is a culture of “A players”, who believe in what we call AEIOU which stands for:
Accountability
Execution
Investor Protection
Operational Excellence
User Experience
It sounds simple enough, but empowering the staff with these directives mean they now lead without me. It means that we keep our team marching in the same direction, and that they have a framework within which to make decisions. No one forgets what we stand for, or his role in creating and cultivating our company culture.
Especially when a company is expanding at an explosive rate, the CEO can’t be involved in every department’s day-to-day operations. What a strong leader can do is lean into the mental shift that happens on an accelerated growth trajectory. Once you’ve hired a team for all the roles you used to run yourself ragged trying to fill, you can focus on being a CEO who focuses on teaching others to lead, building your brand, and nurturing your flourishing company.
