- One of the most transformational years I had as a founder
was a year where I went from a relatively flat team
to actually building out leaders
and an actual executive leadership team.
It was the year where I actually hired VPs
to take on some of that load.
So in that year where we actually brought on those VPs,
we actually grew 300%
we went from a million to 3 million ARR.
We started off the year by raising our series A
end of the year we're raising our Series B.
It was an incredible year and in that incredible year,
I started building out that executive team.
In this video, I'm gonna walk you through
the three principles that I followed
to actually make that happen.
Intro
(upbeat music)
What's up everybody,
welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK on this channel, I help SaaS founders like you
navigate the path to the next stage of growth,
navigate the path to product market fit,
navigate the path to the next round of funding.
So if you are new here, welcome.
I drop an episode like this with the TK Energy
three times a week.
So be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon,
so you get notified when I drop an episode.
Also, if you're already part of our community,
and you're back, welcome back.
It's really exciting to have you here.
In this episode I'm gonna be talking about
that year where I actually built out
my executive leadership team.
And specifically, I'm gonna walk you
through the three principles that you got to know
if you're just at that journey.
In that year where I built out that team,
we actually accelerated our growth massively.
It was also that year where I felt like
I didn't have to carry everything
as the founder and the CEO.
I happen to be a solo founder.
So it was actually a huge load off my back
to actually bring on some leaders
that could take on the load and it could be like,
Okay, you got this, right?
Then they'd be like, yeah, no, we got this.
We know what we're doing.
Then I'm like awesome, thank God.
It was incredible year, and in that year, we grew to 300%.
We also raised our 15 million Series B
led by Andreessen Horowitz.
And then we went on to expand the leadership team.
It was just all awesome.
And in that year, I really learned
that when you're building out your executive team,
you really have to follow certain principles.
So these are some things that I learned
as I went through that journey.
So if you're excited, dig in through my three principles
that I learned and building out
your executive leadership team,
hiring this first set of VPs.
Go ahead and smash that like button and let's get started.
So the first principle is you got to know
who you need to add to the team, right?
This wasn't obvious to me.
And I kind of learned it
and my board members coached me through it.
One of my earliest investors was Greg Gretsch
from Jackson Square Ventures, incredible person.
And I remember I used to call him up that first year
I was like, hey, Greg, I got a really dumb question for you.
And he was extremely gracious
one of the best investors in the valley.
He's was like TK, there's no such thing as a dumb question.
And I would ask him these questions,
and he would send people my way
to actually coach me on certain things.
It was incredibly helpful.
And so I essentially put together like,
okay, here are the key people I need to add as leaders
into my executive team.
Now, there's a reason why I'm saying leaders and not VPs
because you will have to decide
on what the best candidate you can find
and what you need and what you can afford for your business.
In some cases, it'll be VPs.
In some cases, maybe directors,
in some cases, maybe senior managers,
you'll have to decide that.
So I'm going to use the word leaders
because what's more important
is you get leaders for these functions
based on the needs and the budget
that you have within your business.
So here are the key people that you would need
and this may seem obvious or may seem not obvious,
but here are the key people that I would hire
if I were building out my executive team again,
this is what I did the first time around.
The first one is your sales leader.
Second one is your marketing leader.
The third one is your engineering leader
or your product leader.
The next one is your customer success
or support leader or both.
And then the last one is your biz ops slash finance leader.
These are essentially the most important roles
that you would need to get, right?
Sales, marketing, engineering and product,
Customer Success and Support, I used to call them happiness
and biz ops and finance, right?
This is the first principle is just mapping out,
here the key people that I need to add to the team
here the functions we need to start standing up.
Because if you're at that million ARR,
going towards 2 million real fast
and you wanna get to 10 million as fast as possible,
you'll need to start to think about
how to scale your business in the right way,
so that you actually have proper functions in the company,
you'll notice that there are a lot of startups
that start off with, like,
yeah, we want flat management structures,
we don't want any managers,
but when they really start to scale,
when they really need to figure out
how to cluster human brains and make them
successful and coordinated, you need leaders,
that's just what you need.
That's just how human brains work.
And that's how clustering of human beings work.
So you need to do it the right way.
Okay, so principle number one is know the right players.
The second principle is know how to prioritize
the right players.
And again, this is the same list,
but I'm now gonna tell you the principles that I followed
to prioritize the right leaders
because here's the thing,
you can say I need to build out a full executive team.
But at the end of the day,
you are essentially the bottleneck, right?
You have to recruit those people
you have to actually interview them
to see if they're the right fit
and even if they're the right fit,
then you have to convince them
that they should join your incredibly risky startup.
So you're gonna have to prioritize
on what you need the most.
Now, there's this weird thing where
with most SaaS businesses in the early stages,
the principles you need to follow on who you need to recruit
are kind of the same.
There's certain certain pecking order,
you might think that well, you know what
we need to drive growth, I need to hire sales leader,
that's actually not true.
What I learned and I credit Jason Lemkin for this.
I was talking to Jason Lemkin, this is way back in the day.
And he was like, hey,
how's everything going with the business?
I'm like, oh, we're doing this, we're doing this.
We had a million ARR I think like,
we're gonna raise a series A we're gonna do the next round.
He's like, and he looked at me,
he almost shared it with me,
like, almost like it was a secret.
He was like, you should hire a VP of customer success.
And I looked at him like,
no, I don't think you heard me like,
I need hire a VP of sales.
And if you notice,
every single one of his articles
are all about hiring a VP of sales,
and I was obsessed about hiring a VP of sales.
And I'm like, we got our VP of sales and it's so hard and
he's like, no, you have like, fast growing revenue,
you need to find a VP of customer success.
Like that's what you need to do.
That's what you need to do, ASAP.
Then I was like, oh, yeah, I think you're right.
And it makes sense,
like if you're operating a SaaS business,
you have a whole bunch of customers,
you're adding you have revenues flowing in,
yes, you will drive the growth.
But what's most important,
what's the most important for SaaS businesses
is to manage churn, is to make sure these customers stay.
And so what I always say and I agree with Jason Lemkin,
I did it and I'm very thankful for that advice,
it paid off really well for me,
was number one, the number one person
you really need to fill in your executive team
in your leadership team
is your head of Customer Success and Support.
And again, this could be a VP, this could be a lead,
or it could be like a director,
you decide that and you need to get the right person
that you can afford that you can convince to join
and is the right fit,
but you need to actually make sure
your customers are taken care of.
So customer success/support
that's the number one thing that I would hire,
that you should hire.
Once that was locked down, then I said,
Okay, we need to hire a VP of sales.
And in fact, I did this simultaneously,
'cause I still wanted my VP of sales,
then you need to decide which one you need,
the VP of sales or the VP of Marketing.
And you'll notice over here in terms of polarization,
I kind of put, bucketed them together
and put them as number two priority.
How do you decide?
It depends, it depends on whether
you're a sales driven SaaS business
or a marketing driven SaaS business.
How do you know the difference?
I did an entire video right here,
there are two different SaaS sales models,
either the talk to sales button on your homepage,
or to sign up for a trial button in your home page.
And it totally different growth models.
Totally different ways to grow.
And it's hard to do both.
And so depending on which sales model you have,
and I'll link to the video below
you don't have to go there right now.
That's what how you'll decide whether you need to hire
the VP of Sales first or the VP of Marketing first.
My opinion this is just my opinion,
majority of companies should hire a VP of sales.
Hire a VP of Sales because
then you'll actually get the revenues going more,
you'll force yourself to get to higher value customers.
Your deal sizes will go higher.
Then you can bring in marketing
to drive more of that demand.
So that's what I would do but I'm open for debate
hit me up in the comments if you think otherwise,
or you'll have nuances around this.
So number one is Customer Success and Support.
Number two is sales and marketing.
Number three I would do is biz ops/finance.
This is one of the things as an early stage
almost really a first time solo founder
for a venture backed company.
I didn't appreciate what finance really does,
I was like, okay, CFO we'll get a part time person,
don't do that get a really, really,
really great part time CFO,
or an in-house finance person, or a biz ops person.
For me, Leo Troy was our my internal finance biz ops person,
he was incredible.
My external part time CFO was this guy named Greg Capitolo.
Greg Capitolo still operates right now,
he's a part time CFO for some of the most amazing companies
I highly recommend him.
But you should get that in place.
You should get that in place because it'll allow you
to make decisions as a CEO a lot more effectively.
And when you wanna say no to something,
you don't wanna be the bad guy and just say like,
finance told me I can't do it.
And it's, usually finance will tell you not to do it.
But also you can use them as a bad cop,
which works really well.
(bell rings)
- [Pre-Recorded Voice] Shame, shame.
- So I would say third would be biz ops and finance.
And then number four,
I would circle back to engineering and product.
Why do I say circle back to the engineering product,
because I have a base assumption
that if you've gotten this far,
you already have a pretty core engineering team
that's working well.
So I wouldn't prioritize that right away.
I wouldn't rock the boat there right away,
I would get all the other things in place
that will force the business to up-level.
And then you'll see that oh,
we need to actually do more in engineering and product
so let's hire more people there.
So that's how I would prioritize it right?
If step one is identify all the key players,
step number two is prioritize it.
Now before I wrap up, and go to step number three,
let me just pause here for a second.
The one thing I want you to realize is being a founder,
you're carrying a lot
and if you're really gonna scale your business,
you have to first scale yourself,
then you have to scale your team,
and then you can scale the business, right?
And so you're starting to see the power in this
and actually mapping out what my prioritization should be
what the key players would be,
can I just get a yes in the comments below
and also smash that like button.
If you're shy to smash the like button.
If you're not shy, put a yes in the comments.
If you're both, is that a thing?
Just do both.
It would be awesome to hear from you.
Also, if you're thinking about this stuff,
you're thinking about driving
or building the growth strategy for your business
be sure to check out my 5-point SaaS growth guides.
It's a strategy guide that I created,
has all my best ideas on how to create
a one page strategy document.
I'll tell you more about it at the end of this video.
The third principle you guys ready for third principle,
have you smashed that like button for the YouTube algorithm?
Okay, third principle is
once you have your prioritization
you need to actually treat recruiting as a sport.
A lot of founders that I meet,
think of recruiting as this thing that like,
like yeah, we got to do that.
No, you got to like own it.
You got to like not,
like it needs to be a big part of what you're doing
and you need to be conscious about that time investment
you're gonna be making.
So the couple of things you can do
to treat a sport, number one, hire executive recruiters,
they essentially go for 100k per role.
It varies based on recruiter to recruiter
but 100k per role.
And they will force you to make this a priority
and treat it like a sport
and give you a framework for it.
If you don't wanna do that,
or you can't afford that or you're too cheap to do that
you can cold message people on LinkedIn
and see if they'll meet with you and recruit them yourself.
And the third thing you can do
is you can ask for recommendations,
you can go to your board, you can go to your investors,
you can go to peers and say Hey, who do you know,
that would make a great VP of sales
and go to them and kind of manage it that way.
For my VPs majority of them.
I hired an executive recruiter
that ended up being a really great process for me,
but your mileage may vary, your budget may vary
just depends on how you wanna
spend your time and your money.
I wanted to work it like a job.
I wanted the best executive team on board it.
So that's how I did mine.
So there you have it, if you are starting to build out
your executive leadership team,
three principles to follow is,
Know who you need to build into your team.
Number two, prioritize the people appropriately
and then knock them out.
And number three, treat recruiting as a sport.
If you got value from this video,
please be sure to smash that like button.
In some future episodes,
I'm gonna be digging a little bit deeper
into hiring VP for each of these roles
what I learned from each of them,
I have some crazy stories to tell you
the time where a VP of sales got on board
and quit after three weeks, it's been, it was insane.
I'll share a lot more of that
I think I'm also gonna do an episode
on how to do recruiting as a sport,
like a recruiting one-on-one for SaaS founders.
So if you're interested in that,
let me know in the comments.
And so in order to be notified
for those episodes when they drop,
be sure to hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon so that you're notified.
Also, if you're in the stage
where you're building out your executive team,
you're trying to figure out how to scale revenues
trying to figure out your growth strategy.
I encourage you to download
my 5-point Startup Strategy Guide.
My 5-point Startup Strategy Guide
will give you all the resources you need
to actually craft this one page strategy for your business
it's incredibly powerful,
it's been downloaded thousands of times,
it's one of my best pieces of work.
It's completely free.
Follow the link below or just go to
getunstoppable.com/strategy to download it for yourself.
And also if you're part of a SaaS founder group,
you've got a bunch of SaaS founder friends,
you're part of a WhatsApp group, please share this video,
it would mean the world to me and my team,
we put a lot of effort in these videos.
We wanna get them into as many hands as possible.
Lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life
and their business but when you are with us,
yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, I'll see you in the next episode.
(bell rings)
- [Pre-Recorded Voice] Shame, shame.