Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Should You Grow or Exit? | Chris Smith - Co-Founder of Curaytor

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Lessons - Should You Grow or Exit? | Chris Smith - Co-Founder of Curaytor · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, discover insights on building a sustainable business with a culture
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  that scales balancing long-term growth with investor pressures and knowing when to bring
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  a new talent for evolving needs. Learn about setting clear expectations, staying adaptable,
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  and even embracing side hustles to foster a thriving, committed team.
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  So when you're building a company and you want to build something that has some longevity
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  and lifetime and legacy to it, it seems like that's what you're doing right now.
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  And you want to test out different things, there's a lot of pressure from external stakeholders
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  because a lot of entrepreneurs, they bring in VCs, venture capitalists, investors,
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  and there's a timeline as a ticking clock before they have to have an exit event.
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  So you want to build something long-term, doesn't investor have that same shared opinion?
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  And I guess the question would be, for a founder, if they want to take that pressure off,
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  they want to build something that could be more of a lifestyle, have some longevity to it,
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  should they work with venture capital, investor, outside money, just going to put all of that
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  pressure to expedite everything. No, you know, I wore this sort of anti-silicon valley,
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  anti-venture capital hat for a while, similar to the guys from Base Camp, where it's like,
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  hey, there's another way, you don't have to do it this crazy way that Silicon Valley does it,
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  like, be proud of, you know, being profitable as an example, like things like that.
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  Yeah. And simply, I actually, as I've gotten a little bit older, I just,
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  it's kind of back to that example we just gave. There's a lot of ways to do things,
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  and I don't know how to do it the Silicon Valley way, and that actually now bothers me, Scott.
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  I'm now basically saying the thing I made fun of for 10 years,
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  that's actually the thing that I need to understand better, if I'm going to continue to be the best
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  marketing sales professor in the world, because it's incredibly difficult to keep up with this stuff.
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  I got to push alert yesterday. Google Optimize going away in 2023. I'm like,
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  dude, that's in my book. I can't unprint my book, but I know that going in. So anyway, I hope
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  that makes sense. I wanted to follow one point about who to onboard though. You know,
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  who do you onboard? Who do you off board? Is a really interesting question too, because
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  there's these people that like push you up the mountaintop and they follow you like a disciple.
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  They really do. When you have a great culture and you have a great mission and you have,
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  you know, founders that are passionate like it's sort of a good cult, right? It's awesome.
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  There's words, there's colors like they're like it's it's a real thing. It's amazing. It's hard
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  to replicate, but that startup phase has to change to continue to scale. So all of a sudden,
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  you've got these people that post you up to this huge mountain that you're grateful to have ever
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  seen the top of and you're starting to realize that they're the wrong people to help you go up
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  the next mountain. And so that change management is tricky. You know, because you've got all these
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  people that got you there, but you know, they won't get you here, but you're not going to just
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  lay off all your rest people. It's it's hard. And so to me, you need to have some sort of
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  unemotional line in the scene where we are going to be, you know, founder led service led
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  passionate when we hit these numbers, we are going to then go find experts like this to help us do
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  this. If that was clearly defined on day one, people would know which exit ramp they wanted to take,
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  but who knows what's going to happen with a company? We could have gone bankrupt several times.
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  So like they don't even like they're buckling up, but they don't know for how long? How do you make
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  that decision? How do you make that decision on the right people? On the right people with the
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  people with higher fire on your culture? Yes, not it's really not even overly designed. You know,
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  it's more about are you willing to hire someone and fire someone based on what I'm about to sort of
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  rattle off as who we are as a company? Because we're talking about trying to get to this huge scale,
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  but to get to that scale, it's also very hard to get to that first milestone of call it 10 million,
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  because that also involves all these departments and people that you're no longer involved with,
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  even to get to there. So this is, you know, part of what people should do is once you have your
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  culture code dialed in, and once you know what it is, it should be on the shirts, it should be
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  on the walls, it should be on the booklets, it should be the window with the decal over it.
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  Like you have to say it out loud a lot, and you have to prop it out when it happens, and you have
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  to call people out when they're not embodying it. To me, these are the ways that you scale with
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  quality. So number one, it starts with us, you know, like we always look at ourselves as the problem
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  before anyone else, and that starts with the founders. We take full accountability for the mistakes,
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  and unless we can sort of give ourselves an alibi, we don't, it starts with us. And whether
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  that's a client service issue or a, we used our own products for the first like eight years
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  to do marketing. We're not even real estate agents, and we're using our own products to do marketing
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  because it starts with us. For breaks, we want to feel the pain, be the expert. That's another one.
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  Like if you're not committed to learning and becoming an expert, you're not going to work here.
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  And so we literally, we only really hire sponges because it's hard to be an expert in all the
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  different things that we do as far as digital marketing, real estate conversations matter.
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  This is the philosophy that says, let's quit emailing the actual talking matters. You'd be amazed
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  how often that principle, that culture code, in real life, you get an email from an angry client,
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  and knowing that conversations matter, you pick up the phone and call them. You don't email them back.
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  Debate it, then do it. You can talk amongst yourselves in an effort to get something done,
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  not an effort to see who's smarter, right? Solutions focused culture. Stay positive.
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  It doesn't say be positive. It says stay positive. We attract positive people. It's hard to stay
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  positive. Man, it's hard for us to stay positive. So it's more about like, not even are you positive?
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  It's, can you stay that way when it gets really freaking hard? And then the last one is just go the
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  extra mile, which everybody knows what that means. So that is our secret sauce. And I can tell you
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  that we've had at this point, you know, when you're 10 or 11, you do have turnover, even if you
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  have a, even if you have an amazing run, you know, somebody, well, I love to hear your opinion on
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  this. Like, I think somebody's staying at a company nowadays for, I shouldn't even say this,
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  I think somebody's staying at a company right now for three years is a blessing to the company.
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  I think it is. I think it's rare now. I think it's very rare now. Dude, if I get three good years
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  out of somebody in the peak years of their life when they're excited to be working there and they're
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  all in and they're drinking the blade, like, I am going to be pumped for them when they leave. I'll
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  be mad right when they leave. Yeah. But I'll be pumped for them deep down. We've actually explored
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  creating. Well, people can look up lattice. You ever heard of lattice? No, never. What is that?
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  It's like HR software. And it's one of the industry standards, like Salesforce for H. Okay.
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  And what lattice did is they noticed that like, Hey, we've got all this data and we kind of see
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  when people are kind of leaving. And we see the reasons are leaving. And more and more with
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  side hustles and Gary Vient culture, there's people leaving that are wanting to start a business.
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  And there's no option for them to work with us to accomplish that goal. Why not? So they're
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  actually starting like an accelerator that if you want to be an entrepreneur, we will invest in
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  you're doing so. But you have to be there for three years or more. So I love that. I absolutely
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  love that. That's amazing. So now you set, you set that expectation three years. And we're going
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  to actually, you know, we know what the culture is. You know, the side hustles exist. Regardless
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  of whether or not we like them, you're going to do shit on the weekends. We can't, you know,
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  as much we can try and police it. We're not going to be able to police it. So why not set up
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  an accelerator? Now it's a business opportunity. So now there's a contractual obligation for three
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  years, business opportunity, investment opportunity. That's spinning up companies solving problems that,
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  you know, are probably very relevant to them. Maybe a little bit of a reason to be better to work
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  with for those three years because we, you know, we don't have to invest in you. We might.
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  Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you
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  never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links
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  in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.