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Leaders who have scaled up their businesses know that protecting company culture is a key to successful change. At the Inc. 5000 conference, held last month in Phoenix, three leaders who have recently gone through big growth spurts shared their tips. Shuman Ghosemajumder, co-founder and CEO of the AI-powered cybersecurity firm Reken joined Kelly Johnson, founder of the advertising agency ANOVA Digital, and Ian Yang, the founder and CEO of the custom lighting design firm Gantri spoke about how they anchored their companies’ core values amid big shifts and rapid growth.
Take Stock of Your Company Culture
For Yang, the growth of his company Gantri was a long time coming, but it has made great leaps in a relatively short span since the pandemic. The Bay Area business, which clocks about $14.1 million in annual revenue, started out as a sustainable lighting and design firm in 2016, and this year launched a platform for designers to use Gantri’s manufacturing capabilities — including 3D printing — to bring their own products to market.
“The process of mass-producing designs is very costly and very time-consuming, and so a lot of great designs don’t get to be brought to market and a lot of really creative, really amazing designers don’t get a chance to share their own ideas and build businesses,” Yang explained.
As the company was growing, he consulted talent coaches, who asked the founder, “‘What do you want? What company culture do you want the company to exhibit?’ And I described all these things, and they’re like, ‘Those things are not present in your current company.’ And that realization I think was huge.”
But with the company’s growth and diversification, “there was a difference between what the company culture was and what I wanted to be,” Yang said. “What I wanted was to empower my team was the idea of ownership, accountability, but most importantly the safety to take risks. I think with any startup, if you’re not taking risks, if you are not feeling a bit stressed about the decision you’re making, then you are not going to succeed because you’re status quo.”
Make Hiring Decisions That Support the Culture You Want
When Ghosemajumder, a veteran of Google’s trust and safety group, founded Reken in 2024, his aim was “building a platform to protect against scams and fraud that are enabled by AI that allows cyber criminals to be far more sophisticated than they’ve ever been before,” he said.
Ghosemajumder said he took lessons from his long career and kept them in mind when building out Reken. “You’ve probably heard the quote from management theorist Peter Drucker, that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast,’ so whoever you hire in your organization, they’re going to dictate what your culture actually is regardless of what you tell them to do,“ he said. “You can’t hire a group of people who operate a certain way and then tell them, ‘We want you to operate in a completely different way, our culture.’ And so from the very beginning, one of the things that we did was we wrote down what we believe in as a company.”
You want demonstrate that you’re an organization that wants to learn as much as possible, he said, because that is a conscious break from some of the know-it-all aspects of tech culture. “It actually takes a higher level of both competence and humility to say, ‘I’m open to new ideas and open to being challenged, and I want to be able to learn what’s required in this particular role,’ because that’s actually the thing that is most important in a startup.”
Look for Employees With Entrepreneurial Spirit
As ANOVA, an agency that specializes in lead generation for professional services clients such as law firms and financial advisers, hit an inflection point, Kelly Johnson suffered severe health problems in 2022. She realized that the company needed a full-time team, and also that it had to shed some smaller clients that took a disproportionate amount of time and effort, because they were holding back growth. Her days as a one-woman powerhouse were over, and that realization made all the difference as the agency took off.
“It was at that moment that I realized I can’t do this anymore. I need to hire, I need to grow this. I’ve got a great opportunity,” that required focusing on growth clients, she said. “We just basically pivoted and focus on where we had the most experience and making the most income.”
But building a high-growth oriented team required a certain amount of balance in the workplace and outside it, she said. “I want people to feel authentic at work,” she said. “We brought on an HR consultant that does all the pre-screening, she makes sure everyone fits together. We wanted people that have an entrepreneurial spirit and they feel like they can really own what they’re doing. [Now,] we have a great team.”
Set the Right Tone for Your Business
While each CEO’s path to scaling progressed differently, a common thread emerged in the discussion. When it’s time to pursue scale and growth, leaders need to take a thoughtful, hands-on approach to hiring people who can produce in a hands-off environment.
“Organizations that are highly decentralized that are able to make decisions at the lowest possible level that are able to then reorganize themselves in order to be able to constantly shift their strategy as opposed to having to make every decision in a top down monolithic fashion,” Ghosemajumder said.
The mix of control and autonomy creates the ideal blend for growth culture, which the Google vet pointed out is never a one-size-fits all template.
“We have an infinite amount of LinkedIn, fortune cookie wisdom that we get on how to create culture and how to manage effectively,” he said. “And when you look at the most successful companies ever, the one thing that they have in common is that they weren’t blindly applying somebody else’s methodology to their organization.”
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Will Swarts
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