Within my readership, today I am particularly focussing on leaders of early-stage and fast-growth companies. Please give me some of your time.
To begin, Lisa Thomson is the founder of Purpose HR, a fast-growing HR outsourcing business that not only provides core HR services but also works proactively and strategically with their clients, early-stage and fast-growth companies. Lisa was my guest this week on #WhatComesNextLive and one area we delved into was her advice to Founders/CEOs of such companies.
The core piece? Invest in Culture and Leadership early. That investment creates a foundational asset in your business that will give you returns for years to come.
Now, I smile as I realise that the last sentence is the TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) on the show for those who choose not to invest only thirty minutes to listen to Lisa and gain from her insights and wisdom.
Both Lisa and I have worked with many start-up / early-stage / fast-growth companies and they typically are so, so busy they don’t have any time. Certainly, no time to listen to a thirty-minute conversation that could give them insights to transform their business. Typically too busy to focus on the soft skills in their business, as they drive for new sales and new investors.
I get it, and that short-sightedness is a big gap in where investment in your business will drive value.
If you are one such leader, perhaps you also focus on what is easy, what is “urgent” rather than what is “important”. Perhaps it is that the soft stuff is the hard stuff. In our conversation, Lisa references a recent post I wrote that highlights this: “Hard sciences are easy, it is the soft ones that are hard“. Hey, that one is a two minute read, albeit with at least an hour of links to insights from one of the worlds top behavioural thinkers, any one of his many insights could be one that changes the whole direction of your business.
One example of that comes in a thirty minute podcast by Matthew Syed called “A Recipe for Happiness“, the story of how a founder made over $260m by the age of 24 in selling his first business, but that is not the story. No, he hated what he had created, neither he nor those in the business were happy at work. He then set about building a company where Happiness was the focus, selling it for $1.2bn, primarily on the value of the asset he created through a focus on Leadership and Culture. Oh, and he then stayed on as the CEO as he loved it there. Now, the podcast then tells the story of how he took time to go to a conference to learn new ideas, coming back with one that then further revolutionised the business. The individual was Tony Hsieh, whose ecosystem I had the privilege of getting involved with in Las Vegas as all of that was being deeply focussed on (2014 and on).
I mention that last piece for a simple reason. As a founder/leader/CEO of an early-stage / fast-growth company, do not expect yourself to have all the answers as to how to lead, how to build a culture where humans and your business flourish. Instead, make it easy on yourself, talk to people like Lisa or me who live and breathe this and can help you with your Vision, then your Strategy, then with implementing this systematically. Oh, and I don’t have all the answers either, but I do have quite a few, and am constantly focussed on learning more each day so as to support leaders hungry and open for it.