CHAPTER 5
Master the Maneuvers
Like many entrepreneurs, I began a company by focusing on things I loved to do and could do well. I’ve found that no matter where you are in an organization, combining those two vital ingredients—passion and expertise—produces high-octane fuel for success. If you love what you do and you’re great at doing it, you’ll move much faster down whatever road you’re on. You will grow. Your team will grow. Your organization will grow. And growth is good, right?
Well, maybe it’s good, but it’s not always easy. In fact, for many of us, growth is often a series of crazy steep, downhill, 180-degree blind curves that have the potential to send us sliding headlong into a ditch. We may know that growth is “out there.” We sense it; we want it. Then it comes upon us suddenly, and the realities of it are seldom exactly what we anticipated. It’s hard to stay under control, and that’s no fun when we’re flying down the highway full throttle.
When your career and organization begin experiencing some momentum, however, there’s a natural inclination to go faster, faster, faster. You don’t want to miss the window of opportunity. This, I believe, is one of the most challenging phases in a leader’s journey. It certainly has been for me.
This type of fast-paced growth can distract you from your destination, prevent you from enjoying the journey, or both. But by leading through the turn, you can see what’s coming and organize your world accordingly—in real time. You don’t lose focus on where you are, but you know the road is changing and you adjust. You master the maneuvers that allow you to successfully navigate rapid growth.
I learned a great deal about these maneuvers when I transitioned from a practitioner involved in every aspect of a start-up to a CEO building a rapidly growing, multimillion-dollar business that began operating on a national scale. I wish I could say I learned everything I needed all at once, implemented it, and immediately began reaping the benefits. But the reality is that I learned these maneuvers slowly over a period of years as we managed through the various stages of growth.
Growing Pains
Mitchell Communications Group began in 1995 as more of a consultancy than an agency, and it stayed that way for most of the first 10 years. The business largely revolved around me getting the work, doing the work, or assigning the work out to a small group of subcontractors. The company grew at a steady but modest pace.
Success, however, eventually resulted in growth spurts that were consistent with what’s known as the Greiner Curve. Larry Greiner, professor emeritus of management and organization at the University of Southern California, came up with this model for organizational growth in 1972 and updated it, adding a sixth stage, in 1998. He points out that organizations grow until they reach a predictable crisis point. If they address the crisis successfully, they grow through the next stage until they hit the next predictable crisis point. Each crisis point requires different solutions, and each of the six phases requires different approaches from management and leadership. This was Mitchell Communications: Growth. Crisis point. Address it. Growth. Crisis point. Address it.
The first growth spurt began in 2005, which is what spurred me to hire Michael Clark. We had already been working with Walmart and J.B. Hunt, and that summer we won the national public relations account for Tyson Foods. I desperately needed a number two. Getting Michael was a coup because he was a talented competitor in Northwest Arkansas. I wooed him away from his brother’s ad agency, which was based in Little Rock. Michael saw the opportunity to grow Mitchell into something substantial if we joined forces. To his credit, he was willing to take a big leap of faith and leave a secure situation, not to mention leaving his brother’s company, to go with something quite unpredictable.
I’ll never forget the day we fully committed to grow into something bigger than a consultancy. We had been driving hard for new business, and we were getting more and more work. But we were starting to feel the pressures of that success. The tipping point came at the end of a long week when Michael had been dealing extensively with a tough client situation. As we talked through it, his frustration mounted until he finally just stood up, said, “I have to go,” and walked out the door.
What does that mean? I thought. For good? Or will he be back tomorrow?
He came back the next day, thankfully, and I told him I didn’t want us to be miserable in our work. We could walk away from clients anytime we wanted. We could go back to being small, if that was more rewarding. I loved working with clients, and it gave me joy. But I could already foresee that the more we grew, the less time I would have with clients. So I was on the fence about our future.
“I don’t want to get small,” Michael said. “I want to build something really great.”
At that point I knew I wanted that, too. Right then and there we committed to building a bigger company, and a great company. We started making plans, taking action, and making progress.
In the first year, we doubled the business. Over the next three years, we grew from about $750,000 annually in revenue to more than $2.5 million, and from 3 full-time employees to 13. As we developed an incredibly experienced leadership team, we were on the verge of making something substantial happen.
In early 2007, we moved into a quaint old house in a cool neighborhood right off the downtown square. It had a red front door and a wraparound front porch. Every time someone came in the side door, one of the neighbor’s cats would slip in to visit. We often held our team meetings around the kitchen table, complete with a buffet of home-cooked food.
It was a fun time because we were thoroughly enjoying ourselves in that little house while the business was really growing. In fact, we outgrew it pretty quickly. As 2008 came to a close, we invested a significant amount of our profits into the company to help get it to the next level. We leased new office space, staffed up, migrated to a business enterprise software system, and acquired the training business I had cofounded eight years earlier with one of my best friends, Blake Woolsey. We’d placed all our bets on what looked like strong future growth.
Blake and I had founded the training business in 2000 in response to clients who were asking me for everything from media training to sales training. I lacked the capacity to deliver training, and I knew I needed to develop curriculum—I didn’t want to just do anything off the shelf. Blake, one of the most talented speakers I know, agreed to partner with me to found Executive Communications Consultants (ECC), and it grew to include training, facilitation, and executive coaching.
We wrote dozens of original trainings and finally reached a point when we had to make a decision: put infrastructure and a support staff in place, or sell it to Mitchell and merge it into the agency, which had the staffing and resources we needed. So Mitchell acquired ECC in 2008, and Blake became the leader of the Center for Training, Business and Leadership Excellence—or the Center, as we refer to it today.
She was a significant leadership and talent acquisition for the agency, and we have benefited tremendously from her contributions. But when we acquired ECC and ramped up the other investments in our agency in 2008, we met one big hurdle to our growth that we hadn’t anticipated: a recession.
Technically, the Great Recession began in December 2007, but recessions don’t really have start and stop dates. They begin with a slow boil and are hard to recognize until they are out of control. For us, the reality of the recession hit as the leaves were changing in early fall of 2008. Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy. Washington Mutual was heading into receivership. The subprime mortgage crisis was in full bloom. Suddenly our plans for growth looked like sunflowers facing a long, harsh winter.
It was September, and we had gathered as a team to celebrate our move to a new building.* We would have an entire floor, giving us room to spread out and grow. It should have been a festive evening. Despite my high hopes for a great night, however, I quickly realized my team wasn’t worried about where they were going to sit in the new office. They were wondering whether they’d have a job by the end of the year.
You may have found yourself in a similar situation, either at that time or in other challenging times. The recession tested the mettle of everyone, not just entrepreneurs like me. As a leader, no matter how hard you try to be ready for anything, some unexpected challenge will happen and you won’t know how to respond. This is especially true during growth spurts, because the business can change so quickly. When these situations arise, others turn to you for answers you just don’t have. What do you do then?
That September night in 2008 was just such a situation for me. As I looked at the faces of my team, I knew I had to figure out our next move. So I simply dug deep and spoke to my passionate belief in our ability to succeed.
I got everyone’s attention, looked them all in the eyes and told them, “Do not be afraid of what you cannot control; instead focus all your energy on what you can control. I believe clients are dying to meet agency partners like us who are smart, results-oriented, hardworking, nimble, and determined. I believe not only will we survive; we’ll thrive. I believe we are on the cusp of greatness.”
At that point, the mood in the room changed. We began talking openly about what we were afraid of and what we could do to win in spite of what was swirling around us. This gave us confidence and a clear direction, and it became a turning point for the company.
The recession created a speed bump of sorts. But we rallied as a team and recommitted to growing our business even in the tough economic climate. We worked hard into the next year, determined to make this our reality. We were very fortunate that several of our longtime clients in industries such as retail, food, and energy actually were doing really well. As they succeeded, so did we—in fact, far more than we could have predicted. During the next two years, growth came over us like a waterfall. We found ourselves with more work than we’d ever had before, and more was on the way.
During 2009 and 2010, we grew revenue from $2 million to $6.5 million. We grew full-time staff from 13 to 37, including our future president, Sarah Clark. Sarah had been a client for nine years before leaving Walmart to spend more time with her son, Eli, whom she had adopted from Siberia. Once Eli had acclimated to his new home and Sarah was ready to return to the workforce, she agreed to join us as a senior vice president, instead of taking any of the other offers she had. Sarah headed our corporate communications division, a position I created to get someone of her caliber and expertise.
This time period also was a turning point for the agency because we started our creative department. Most small-to-midsize agencies hadn’t ventured into the creative services arena, but we were able to get ahead of the competition by hiring a creative leader from the ad industry, who was a game changer for Mitchell. It allowed us to diversify our revenue and move into content creation ahead of our competitors. We began offering creative services such as copywriting, graphic design, website design and development, social media platform design and content creation, social media training and consulting, digital asset management, and e-communications.
At the same time, we were moving into video and digital production. Our first hire was a young, talented graduate of John Brown University with a degree in digital cinema production, photography, and broadcasting. We had hired him and another producer on several occasions to handle our growing video work, so it was a natural next step for us to begin building this capability in-house, and we were fortunate to get him. In a way, we were leading through the turn by offering services before they were popular at other agencies.
To accommodate our growth, we took over the remaining three floors of our four-story building; our office space grew from 4,400 square feet to nearly 12,000 square feet. During 2011, we grew to 61 employees and $11.5 million in revenues. We launched another new practice area (digital and social), and we acquired two major new clients: Hilton Hotels & Resorts and Procter & Gamble. In fact, we experienced 445 percent growth over a four-year period from 2008 to 2011.
During all of that time, however, one question lingered. It was the same question we faced the day we agreed there was no turning back from growth: How do we grow bigger, stay great as a company, and find joy in our work?
You see, growth wasn’t the problem. We had the passion and expertise to succeed and an abundance of opportunity. Managing and adapting to the rapid growth was the problem. Our once small company that ran on organized chaos quickly had become a growing company that was less organized and more chaotic. We had to lead and operate differently, but we weren’t sure how.
As a leader, I had to master the maneuvers of rapid growth or that growth could kill our company, make us all miserable, or both. Here are the maneuvers I’ve learned that helped us navigate the stages of rapid growth.
Maneuver No. 1: Admit You Don’t Know. Then Go Find the Answers.
Success brought us face-to-face with the types of challenges all rapidly growing companies have. Maybe you’ve been someplace like this and can relate to challenges such as:
• Not having enough staff
• Not having enough time to interview job candidates
• Once they’re hired, not having enough time to train them
And not just people challenges. Rapidly growing companies have plenty of operational challenges, too, such as:
• Processes and systems created for a smaller company that now strain to handle a much greater volume of work
• Not enough technology—both hardware and software
• Worst of all, a leadership team working overtime and then some trying to keep all the balls in the air—with stress beginning to take a toll
I found myself running from one thing to the next, sticking my finger in the dike everywhere I could. But it was clear to me something bigger had to be done to manage this flood of growth before we all drowned. The problem was, I had no idea what to do. I’d never been here before—facing a challenge of this magnitude. Everyone was looking to me for the answers.
I also found myself at a leadership crossroads. I needed to pick the right path—right now—for our firm or risk watching it all fall apart.
Have you ever felt this way: that the challenge before you as a leader was so great that you might not be able to lead effectively through it? One of the worst feelings a leader can have is self-doubt. That’s a dark place to be. But if you can identify why you doubt yourself and change that, you can take the first step down a new path.
My self-doubt was based on one simple thing: lack of knowledge about what to do in this specific situation. It was compounded by the fact that I knew few people to turn to, as not many companies were growing during the recession. Fortunately, I recognized two things:
• I knew there were things I didn’t know.
• I needed to do whatever it took to find those things out.
I first began addressing this challenge in the fall of 2009, when I set out for Hanover, New Hampshire, for a week of executive education at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. I’d always wanted to do an executive education class, and now was the time. I attended “Growing the Minority Business to Scale” and spent five days—and most nights—totally immersed in the learning process, trying to figure out everything I could from our professors and my classmates, who were also entrepreneurs, and then applying it to our situation at Mitchell.
As a result of what I learned at Tuck, I worked with our leadership team to develop a plan to strengthen our business and address our most pressing needs by focusing on four things:
1. Operations
2. Growth
3. People
4. Culture
Underpinning this plan was a focus on further developing our legal savvy, as well as more sophisticated financial controls to help us sustain our growth for the long run.
Over the course of the next few years:
• we made a lot of big decisions as a company
• we took some calculated risks to invest in talent, technology, and infrastructure
• I spent a great deal of my time simply being a storyteller—sharing the history of our company, talking about our values, and creating ways to bring our unique and compelling culture to life—and not just for our current employees, but for the new people we were bringing in, as well
I also endured more than a few sleepless nights wondering if any of this was going to work.
I knew I didn’t have all the answers to our growth challenges. I was an expert in public relations, not a classically trained business management professional. Not knowing, however, was only a problem if I couldn’t admit that I needed help and if I didn’t find the help I needed.
That’s why attending the growth program at Dartmouth, and a leadership program a few years later at Harvard, proved so valuable. And that’s why having mentors, surrounding myself with talented leaders and consultants, and turning over every possible stone of information and wisdom I could find has proven so valuable.
When you’re growing as a leader, by definition you’re finding yourself on unmarked highways. You can ask for directions or wander aimlessly. My advice: do whatever it takes to find the right path.
Maneuver No. 2: Upgrade your ride.
When I started Mitchell Communications, I was the quarterback for the team—and the running back . . . the wide receiver . . . the entire offensive line . . . the coach . . . and the water girl. You get the idea. I did it all. When I hired people to help, they did it all, too. We all did it all.
I remember the days when I would go to a client meeting, take notes on the client’s needs, come back and figure out how we could tackle those needs, and then write a proposal with deliverables, pricing, and a plan. When we secured the contract, I would figure out how we would implement the plan. I found excitement and fulfillment in being able to do it all, in becoming essentially a master craftsman.
If I needed help, whoever was available would help. If someone else needed help with a project, I’d jump in and lend a hand. That’s the way it is when you have a small team. It’s like tossing balls. Something’s going on, and somebody tosses you the ball. You catch it, and you run with it. Work gets done in a spontaneous manner that’s based more on the availability of people to jump in and help than on organized structure, roles, and responsibilities.
Then there comes a day when you realize you can’t always catch the ball and run with it. It no longer works for you and your team to catch-as-catch-can. As the leader, you need a game plan, which means you have to spend more time coaching the team or planning and managing the game. You need to step out of the practitioner’s role and into more of a strategist’s role where you’re not doing everything from start to finish.
To do this, you need more structure. One of the key lessons I learned at Dartmouth was that operations, processes, and systems become critical pieces that allow an organization to successfully maneuver—and make the most of—growth. When these are done well, it keeps you and your organization heading in the right direction and allows you the freedom to enjoy the experience.
I first realized the need for more structure in my company in 2011. I always had an open organization, so everybody was in the leadership group and involved in all the decision making. But in about two years we had tripled in size to nearly 45 full-time employees, and it was time to put in a new layer of leadership—an executive committee. It consisted of five senior-level leaders who represented the different parts of the organization. Instead of collaborating with 15 or 20 people in a leadership group about decisions, I could do that with just 5 people on the executive committee. This is a structure you might consider not only when your organization is growing, but when you find yourself with too many direct reports, or you simply need to concentrate your time with fewer leaders in order to make a bigger impact.
Frankly, I was scared to add another layer because I was afraid the organization would become hierarchical and that people would feel removed from me and the rest of the top leadership. It worked, however, because we kept the larger leadership group in place. We just met less frequently and I didn’t bring every single thing to them. I still kept them very informed and sought their opinions at times, but the executive committee handled the more strategic decisions and the more confidential decisions such as finance and human resources.
We also created several ways of cascading communications through the organization so that everybody would feel connected and informed. As an organization grows and needs different levels of leadership, it’s critical to have a process for communicating often and as transparently as possible so people don’t feel like they’re no longer in the know.
It’s a culture-killer when people begin thinking, “We’ve become so big now that nobody cares anymore about me, and nobody communicates anymore with me.” So we had a very intentional, specific plan for sharing information people wanted or needed to know so they never had to worry or wonder what was going on with the company. That’s one of the ways you can overcome getting big and creating layers. You have to be very intentional and forthcoming about communication.
What that looks like, of course, can vary from one organization to the next, and technology is always changing the game. At Mitchell, we use video messages, all-office email, team meetings, departmental meetings, and staff meetings. Sometimes team leaders are expected to share information. We now have Kudos, a socialized employee recognition platform that works on the company intranet. You can post communication that every employee has access to and can read. Sometimes it’s just walking the halls, talking to people, and checking in. “Hey, did you guys hear about this? What kind of questions do you have? Let me know if you want more information.”
This structure is important because it allows you to accomplish the next, and perhaps most difficult, maneuver.
Maneuver No. 3: Release Your Leaders.
The idea of delegation goes back forever.
As communities formed, tasks were delegated based on skills and experiences that would best help the group: some hunted, some gathered, and some drew stick figures on the walls in caves. As cultures evolved into villages, cities, kingdoms, and empires, the delegation evolved with it. Not only did people gravitate toward certain roles, but they found that delegation provided a way to train new leaders (and other workers) for the roles that were essential for survival.
As old and proven as this solution is, however, delegation is still something leaders struggle with, especially during times of growth. This is when you as a craftsman have to challenge yourself to grow into the role of a real leader: someone who can let go and empower and equip others around you.
People who really like to be in control and who are really good at what they do often struggle to hand things off to others. When they do, they face the temptation to jump back in and take over at the first sign of trouble: “I can do it smarter,” “I can do it faster,” “I can certainly do it better than this team, because I’m the master craftsman,” “I’m the one who designed this program or built the relationship with this client or developed this process.”
But when you turn roles and responsibilities over to other people, you have to give them the good stuff that goes with it. You have to release them to lead. You can’t give somebody a responsibility but then take the credit for what happens when that person does the job. Or you can’t give someone a client relationship but still hold onto it so the client continues to call you.
You have to empower, equip, and enable people to succeed with what you’re giving them. You have to knock all the barriers out of the way for them to become the star in the areas of responsibilities that you’ve given to them. You have to let go of the work but still stay close enough to coach them when they need help and make sure they’re moving in the right direction.
When I committed to empowering others, I began to learn how beneficial it was to me, the people around me, and our organization. Other leaders would take things I use to do to a whole new level of excellence simply because they had a talent or an ability or a perspective that I lacked. They just gave the challenges more attention. When I took nine different things I was juggling and divided them among two or three different people, those capabilities in the organization became much better because those people had time to really dig in and do them well.
On the other hand, if you don’t truly release leaders—that is, if you don’t empower, equip, and enable them—you’ll discover that the talented, capable, smart people you worked so hard to get on your team will soon leave for some other team. They should, because you aren’t providing opportunities for them to reach their destinations and enjoy their journeys. Why would anyone stay with somebody who’s selfish, driven by power, and hungry for credit?
That’s not the leader I wanted to be. I wanted to help people around me grow. I wanted to watch them soar. When you do that as a leader, you keep great people on your team and you engender loyalty, confidence, and commitment from them. They’ll walk through fire for you because you’re helping them grow and shine, too. Not coincidentally, that’s when your organization not only grows and shines, but soars.
Mastering these types of maneuvers as a leader will help you thrive in growth periods: not only big ones like we faced at Mitchell Communications, but also the more subtle ones. These maneuvers allow you to lead through the turn and make the adjustments to get you where you want to go.
* I later learned our new building wasn’t just any building; it was a historical landmark, originally built in 1905 and formerly a theater. When my parents visited after we first moved in, they told me the building was where they had gone on their first date in the 1950s to see a movie when they were students at the University of Arkansas. It had fallen into disrepair in the 1990s, so the mayor and city council planned to tear it down and, as the song goes, put up a parking lot. Instead, a 12-year-old boy collected enough signatures opposing that idea, so the city relented and the building was renovated.