A year ago, I was sitting in my office late at night, wondering if I had become a corporate sellout. I couldn’t help but ask myself: Was I trading in some of the most productive years of my life to build a company I was no longer passionate about?
Over the years, I had gone from being an entrepreneur to a manager. I was 24, had 150 employees and netted US$20 million in sales. I had achieved all of the goals I had ever set out for myself … but where was the entrepreneurial passion? Sure, my company had gone from a ranking of #20 to #2 in our market in just five years, but I had no idea how we would get to #1. I thought it might be time to find my replacement. My confidence was wavering, and as a result, I had made some big mistakes:
- I waited too long to launch a stock option plan for the whole company.
- I hadn’t hired a chief marketing officer soon enough.
- I hadn’t built the right ecosystem of mentors that could help me get to the next level as a CEO.
- I focused too much on the surrogate-family side of our culture and not enough on the performance-focused side that was needed.
- I hadn’t created values that people believed in and used every day. I could recall just four of our 10 values without looking.
- I waited too long to start a formal manager-training program.
- I hadn’t truly aligned my passion for social responsibility into the ethos of the corporation.
- I hadn’t created any effective mechanism for communicating strategic direction to the company. As a result, we had a lot of confusion regarding our focus, and operating choices were being made with different assumptions as to direction.
And these were just the mistakes I knew about! As I sat in my office that night, I wrote in my journal, “I’m not sure I’m the right person anymore to lead the company into this next stage of growth. We need to make some changes to keep the growth and hit our goals. Scary to think about; it’s terrible to have lost some of my confidence.”
Afterward, I wrote an e-mail to our CFO regarding succession planning. I wasn’t sure whether we should try to get acquired or keep the faith that we’d get to the US$60-$70 million in annual revenue we needed to go public and stay on track for a 2012 IPO. At certain points, I lost faith in my business. It wasn’t until October, however, that my foundation was on the verge of crumbling.
In the same week, my best friend and my business partner got cancer (they are now both doing well!), my mom started having worsening chronic arm pain (she is now doing better), and a company that was looking to acquire us said they weren’t going forward. They say that difficult times are the foundry from which greatness is cast, but it’s sure not fun being the molten iron!
Through that baptismal fire, I came to a critical understanding of myself and what I needed to do to align what I love with what I do— something I’ve been preaching from atop the mountain for five years in speeches but only half-heartedly living. This realization helped me discover my authentic self, and I managed to make a lasting change in my life and business. Here are three things I decided to change:
- I worked to align my long-term life mission with what I do every day. My life mission is to “be a leader of our generation as we work to end extreme poverty in our lifetimes.” While I was learning a lot about leadership and management—and being paid to do it—I was unclear about how building a company aligned fully with my desire to end extreme poverty in the developing world over the next 50 years. The incessant question in my head was whether I’d be better off finding my replacement or moving to Africa to invest in entrepreneurs. I wound up launching an expanded corporate social responsibility (CSR) model that emphasized my mission. Since we’ve expanded this CSR program, I’ve been able to see the tangible and immediate connection between my passion for social responsibility and what I do at work every day.
- We changed our company values. I realized last year that we had 10 “Corporate Values,” but I could only remember four of them without reading the sheet. At an EO executive education program I attended in June, I learned that you should never have more values than you can remember, and that to be worthy of being a company value, you’d have to be willing to let someone go if they didn’t live up to it. Today, we hire and fire by our new values, and we hold each other accountable to them.
- I let go of control. The best thing I’ve ever done for the growth of my company was to let go of control (I’m still working on this skill). We have a six-person senior leadership team, all of whom do their jobs much better than I can. We also have a 13-person leadership team underneath them, all of whom have more business experience than I do. When I realized that my job was not to ensure they did their jobs the right way but to enable them to do their jobs and hold them accountable for the results, my world shifted.
As a result of these key changes, we found complete alignment. We’re now at a US$34-million revenue run-rate (and growing that by more than US$1 million each month), we will hire more than 50 new team members in 2010, and we’re well on our way to fulfilling our dream of “building a great sustainable company for our customers, employees and community.” Oh, and we’ve got a plan to go from #2 to #1 in our field. We have a plan to win.
Today, I no longer question whether I’m a corporate sellout putting in my time. I’m surrounded by amazing people every day who know how to do what they do so much better than I ever could, and I couldn’t be happier!