Building a team to grow your business.

[csalvato]

Preface
This one isn't for the newbies, so I think most people won't get value from this. If you're just trying to figure out what kind of business to start, then you can just close this thread.

This post is for the people who have a business generating 6 or 7 figures, and want to break through to 8, 9 or even 10 figures.

This post is also not for people who want to be solopreneurs and communicate through email. If that's your jam, that's fine (I think that's most people's MO on this forum, and that's totally cool).

But if you have a product or traffic source that's working, and you've got money to spend and want people to grow your business for you, then you might want to read on.

If you read on, I am going to assume:

• You've got a business generating revenues in the mid-six-figures or greater.
• You want to grow the company by an order of magnitude (10x current revenues)
• You may have some team members. You may be a lone wolf.

Wait, who are you?

I am the head of product for a VC-backed startup called Territory (f.k.a Power Supply). We're only in four cities, but our founders have raised 6.7M in our last round and over 11M in total. For the past 18 months, I have operated in the following capacities:

• Growth Hacker - a single dude trying to break open new channels
• Head of Customer Acquisition - a single dude trying to break open a lot of new channels
• Head of Product - managing a team of engineers and designers to improve product and grow revenues.

In the time I've been with this company, it's undergone massive growth (I obviously can't disclose numbers, but it's public knowledge that I was employee #15 and we are over 60 employees now). Our VCs are investing hoping we get to 9 figures and beyond (duh, that's what VCs do).

Defining the Growth Effort
First thing's first, how does a company grow?

Here's how I think about growth, in a sentence:

Conduct experiments along your entire customer journey that move you towards a key metric.

That's it. It's that simple. You just have to keep it that simple.

Facebook does this. Their metric is Daily Active Users.
AirBNB does this. Their metric is Nights Booked.

Defining your metric

Let's look back at Facebook and AirBNB. Notice something about their metrics? Neither include revenue.

Shocking, right? Well, that's on purpose.

Revenue is just an indicator of value being exchanged. Rather than focus on the proxy (money), you want to focus on the actual exchange of value. You want to focus on what your customers view as success.

A user on Facebook doesn't gauge their success with FB based on how many ads they click, or how much revenue is generated by their browsing. But the users do get value. So Facebook focuses on providing that value to the user first. Without Daily Active Users, they have no product to sell to their advertisers.

Similarly, a customer doesn't gauge their success with AirBNB based on how much money they give to AirBNB. They gauge their success based on their night being booked.

What's the metric in your business? What are you selling?

• If it's a food product, it's meals served.
• If it's an ecommerce platform, it's orders placed.
• If you're selling a handstand lesson course (one of my side businesses), it's students enrolled.

Think about what you're selling, and come up with the one metric that you can focus on to move your entire business.

Defining Your Team
Your growth team is different to most other teams on a company that simply "keep the lights on". A growth team needs autonomy, and the ability to rapidly conduct experiments along your entire customer journey that move you towards a key metric.

So you need to ask yourself - what people need to exist on this team so they can get shit done?

Well, first thing you definitely need is someone to be a beast with data. Remember, we are conducting experiments along your entire customer journey that move you towards a key metric.

EXPERIMENTS means that there are hypotheses you are testing, and you need to know if your hypotheses were right or wrong. And the only way to do that is by collecting:

• Customer behavior data (closed contracts, callbacks, click rates, purchase rates, etc.)
• Qualitative user information (NPS survey scores, CSAT survey scores, etc.)

Collecting and analyzing this data is the most important part of the entire process.

Sidebar: The CEO of Ring, one of the fastest growing CES companies in the US, stated that the inflection point in his business was when he hired someone to nail down all the tracking on his site and all channels (e.g. Amazon) as best as he could. That gave him the insight he needed to make better decisions on what to build, try and improve upon.

So get your data dialed in first. If possible, hire a data scientist to take the lead on this, and he will also let you know where there are holes in your data collection that would help him do his job (which is to inform you on how you are doing and new opportunities).

The rest of your team composition is going to depend heavily on your product and distribution. All that matters is that this team is cross functional and capable of running experiments across the entire customer journey.

Here's an example: Let's say you run a SaaS company with a team of devs -- your growth team would have people who can satisfy these roles:

• Growth lead (can be CEO in small companies)
• Back end developer
• Front end developer
• Data scientist
  
• Designer

In a SaaS company, this team is completely independent:

• The data scientist and back end developer make sure that data is being collected in a way that's easily visible and/or processable.
• The designer and front end dev can brainstorm ideas together, and create wireframes/mockups quickly that become code in your SaaS product.
• The growth lead coordinates the two pieces and keeps morale up, since 80%+ of experiments will be failures.

Here's another example: Let's say you run a 7-figure amazon business, and want to expand into wholesale stores. Your growth team would have people who can satisfy these roles:

• Growth Lead (can be CEO in small companies)
• Copywriter
• Print Designer
• Sales Person
• Manufacturing/Fulfillment Person

This team is also independent:

• The copywriter can hack at the existing Amazon listing to drive sales.
• The print designer can work with the copywriter to work on new packaging/insert designs that might drive referrals.
• The sales person, print designer and copywriter might make collateral to send to prospects with the goal of driving up lead generation.

Bear in mind, these aren't necessarily different people. Depending on the stage of your company, the growth lead could also be the copywriter and sales person if they are capable of wearing all those hats (though, that's rare).

There's a lot written here and its 1:00 AM and I got tired of writing.

If people are interested in this, I'll continue with: The Experimental Process

Post below if you want more.

 

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