Trimming the top team...

One of the most difficult things I had to do as I grew my company was to make changes in the leadership team. My wife would always know when this was happening, as we'd both suffer with disturbed sleep, while I wrestled with the whole head v heart thing.

As your company grows, it changes. "What a revelation!" you may scoff, but it's amazing how many entrepreneurs and leaders are blind to this.

Often at start-up, your core group act more as generalists; from writing, to selling, to paying the bills. For the first few years of The Key’s life for example, I had to do the payroll each month and it used to take me ages, recognising the painful impact on my colleagues should any mistakes be made. I was also involved in the quality assurance of some of the content we were producing. We simply couldn’t yet afford the specialist roles that make life so much easier.

As we grew though, it became clear that the need for specialist input was inevitable and much-needed. I remember well the initial shock in employing our first product manager; joining us from Tesco's on a starting salary of ￡60,000 (which was easily ￡25,000 more than we were paying our organically developed, in-house team members). I can also recall my reaction when the (relatively new) CFO suggested that we needed to buy licenses for Zendesk, at a cost of about ￡50,000 per year. He was confident that this would free us from the financial burden of employing expensive temps, and would lead to an overall reduction in our cost base, as well as lifting staff morale.

In time, I also realised that the huge management team that we had become (at least 8 people) was unwieldy.

We were in a period of very fast growth, with our revenues increasing dramatically and it was time to look more closely at our cost base. I realised that we had been too heavily influenced by the old, civil-servant-type thinking; behaviour that had formed back in the days when The Key was still a government pilot scheme which we had been employed to run. Bringing in a CMO, whose background was entirely in the digital space (her previous role had been with Avios), was eye-opening, humbling (I remember feeling a bit thick), exciting and anxiety-creating. Within about six weeks, she pointed out (to a now-greatly-reduced senior team) that our operating model needed to change and our focus should be entirely product-centric. Once we had come to terms with this, we set about reorganising the entire company.

By this stage, the small, friendly outfit that we had started with was an enterprise of considerable size, with several offices in different parts of the country. I don’t think I could have avoided making the changes that I did, which inevitably drew opprobrium from a number of people.

Some really lovely, talented people left us. Some of their own accord, some by requirement. I made it my mantra that anyone leaving on account of their skills no longer being required should leave with their dignity intact. I tried as much as I could to help them into appropriate roles elsewhere. Sometimes that went well, sometimes not so well. I had to abandon any thoughts of being everyone’s friend and I certainly remember walking around the office at those difficult times, assuming that everyone had malevolent intentions towards me.?

We all seemed to get over it but as we know, trauma affects us physically and I’m sure this led to a bit of premature ageing and the introduction of face conditioner into my self-care regime....however much you know you are doing the right thing, only a sociopath would fail to feel some pain and challenge around self-image.

I’ll write another blog about culture, but it's my belief that you can have demanding standards and an openness to change in personnel, without destroying a positive culture. We certainly managed that.

More anon.