Category: Scaling Fast

Q: How did you figure this all out? The lifetime of the business was four years. You were busy scaling the business, getting customers and hiring four hundred people. It doesn’t leave you that much time to learn. What did you do as a founder to figure

8/9/2017

Victoria Ransom
CoFounder @ Wildfire

A: We did a lot of 'on the fly' learning. I remember the first day back at work each year. I'd say ‘okay, my new year's resolution is to spend more time reading in the business’. I’d spend the first week while it was still kind of quiet doing lots of reading, and it felt amazing. Then week two rolled around, and everything was chaos again. You're making decisions on the go and all that flies out the window. So, the truth is I didn’t spend a whole lot of time reading management books or blogs. And I also - to my detriment - didn’t spend an awful lot of time cultivating mentors. I didn’t feel like I had the time for it. I wouldn't advise that, it was just me.

We did work well as a team. There was a lot of smart people in the room. When challenges came along we had the kind of culture where we’d sit down and hash them out. If you have a few smart people in the room and you’re willing to listen to each other it’s amazing what you can figure out. We also made lots of mistakes along the way; you have to when you’re moving that fast. We made mistakes, reacted, fixed them and learnt from them.

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Q: How do you handle the movement of people who are only suited at certain stages of growth and maturity at Xero?

5/24/2017

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Rod Drury
CEO & Founder
Xero

A: If you’re a public company and your results go out every 6 months then you’ve got to make moves. One of the interesting - and hard - parts about Xero is that we’re growing so quickly that people who’re great at certain level might not be right for the next. We tend to have those conversations pretty early. For people who haven’t been right, they’re usually valued inside our network so we help them to get their next job and keep their career moving. We care about all of our family. But there are a few people where we’re at just might not be the right place for them. They may be halfway to where they need to be but if we replace them it’s going to get rid of the job they had. We try to be very human about that, make sure they’re not financially effected too much. We’re very positive and proactive about getting them into their next opportunity, and it’s exciting to see how they flourish.

We also sometimes get people to change careers inside the business. Quite a few people bounce around inside the business until they find their thing, and then they’re off and running. We also occasionally hire over the top. While that can be traumatic, 9 times out of 10 the feedback a few months later is that they’re enjoying work much more learning from someone. All those dynamics are things we care about and are working on all the time.

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Q: How did you figure this all out? The lifetime of the business was four years. You were busy scaling the business, getting customers and hiring four hundred people. It doesn’t leave you that much time to learn. What did you do as a founder to figure

Q: How do you handle the movement of people who are only suited at certain stages of growth and maturity at Xero?

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