Super humans: and why a leader should have them.

I just finished one interview with South African wine business magazine. They had sent me some questions. One of the question was "How did you manage to turn BTN into a successful global brand?".

I wanted to share that answer. May it helps other leaders / founders / CEO's.?

Our internal mantra in BTN is scaling by code and attention. When we started it was me and my CTO, Mauricio Perez (in the header picture). For the first 4 years we did this on the side while I had my other wine business and the subscriptions in BTN were good enough that it looked like a small business that can cover its own expenses. Launched USA Trade Tasting and then IBWSS and then it became a real business. What I mean by real business is my main business.

My vision was always to build an ecosystem, have our own media, our own events, own all the data, our own competition systems and software, our own ticket systems. Give more value to brands (customers), become more relevant to buyers and industry.

Over the last 2 years we have invested a lot in technology. I am so ready to grow! In simple words, our system infrastructure is so amazing that I am not doing justice by doing 1000+ vendor trade shows or managing 20000 entry competitions. System and process is bulletproof and ready.?

As the foundation of ‘our systems’ is very strong, that's one main thing that allows me to grow and replicate processes.

Second is my people. Amazing hard working, talented people. Now that I look back, I was lucky enough to have the first 4-6 people with me who were super ninja’s. I call them super humans. And you need that in your core team. I surround myself with such people, that allows me to think we can do anything, are happy and get the job done (any job). I can do an event in India, Hamburg, Tokyo, China, Brazil, anywhere in the world - because I have superhumans with me. So that's what allowed me to scale and take on risk. Now we have grown into a 60 people company. But I always want to have 4-6 super humans around me as that's how I get motivated.

Here I want to give you an example. My CTO Mauricio Perez. The guy who designed all systems, but I can give him 5 minutes notice and say, come with me, and film this interview and send the video files to video team. That is the key. May be at the show, the truck driver forgot pallet jack and venue does not have any option, I can tell him, we don't have staff today, lets unload the truck.

Having such people is the key. Most of the time, CEO is the person who's always managing where the fire is, or can be and works like a fire fighter once you have a little larger business. If you have more people who can help you there, the faster you can grow.

I learn a lot from their qualities (super humans always have one very special skill). So how good it can get for the CEO, as he/she can learn and get motivated and grow overall skill set. From some people, I take optimism, from some, I will learn about how to be calm, from some I will learn how to be happy, from some I will learn about the work ethic.?

And third is what I call scaling by attention: which means media assets to social assets. Wherever we can keep growing our attention assets, we grow and communicate and add value to the reader, listener. So that is the super long play - which is building the brand. Eventually we will be at the stage where everyone will know we give far more value in return. Right now I keep myself very low, we have 20 business units and all are very small designed to make this global ecosystem fall in place. Just a matter of time, maybe 5-6 years.