Scaling Up

02Attracting and Keeping the Right Team

Your business is ultimately nothing more than a collection of human beings trying to accomplish a shared goal. You can have the most revolutionary product in the world, backed by millions of dollars in venture capital, but if you do not have the right people driving the vision forward, you will fail. Attracting, hiring, and retaining top-tier talent is the most crucial, yet most frustrating, aspect of scaling a business. In a small startup, a single bad hire is a minor inconvenience that can be quickly corrected. But in a scaling company, a bad hire in a key leadership role can destroy company culture, alienate your best clients, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity. Therefore, getting the "People" decision right is your absolute first priority. The foundation of the People decision is a surprisingly simple mantra: you must have the right people, in the right seats, doing the right things. While this sounds like common sense, it is incredibly rare in practice. To achieve this, Scaling Up introduces a powerful tool called the Function Accountability Chart, or the FACe tool. The purpose of this tool is to eliminate the ambiguity that plagues fast-growing companies. In many organizations, when a major task fails, multiple people point fingers at each other because responsibilities were never clearly defined. The FACe tool lists every single core function of the business—such as marketing, sales, operations, finance, and human resources—and demands that you assign exactly one name to each function. This rule of "one name per function" is non-negotiable. If two people are accountable for a single outcome, nobody is accountable. When everyone is supposedly in charge, it means no one will lose sleep if the project fails. By assigning a single, specific person to own a function, you create absolute clarity. But accountability is only half the battle; you also need to measure performance. The FACe tool requires you to define both leading and lagging indicators for every single role. A lagging indicator tells you what happened in the past, like total revenue generated this quarter. A leading indicator tells you what is happening right now that will predict the future, like the number of outbound sales calls made this week. When you have one person accountable for a function, and clear metrics to track their success, you instantly eliminate the drama and confusion that slows down growth. Once your functions are clearly defined, the next challenge is filling those seats with "A-players." What exactly is an A-player? An A-player is not just someone who works hard or has a good attitude. An A-player is defined as someone who is in the top ten percent of the available talent pool for a specific role, at a specific salary level. A-players are self-motivated, highly competent, and deeply aligned with your company's core values. They do not need to be micromanaged; they need to be pointed in the right direction and unleashed. However, A-players are rare, and they are usually already employed somewhere else, working for your competitors. To build a team of A-players, you have to completely change how you view recruitment. Most companies treat hiring as a reactive emergency. Someone quits, panic sets in, a generic job description is quickly posted online, and the first decent candidate who walks through the door is hired. This reactive approach is a recipe for mediocrity. Instead, scaling companies must treat recruitment exactly like they treat marketing. You should always be building a pipeline of talent, even when you do not currently have an open position. You need to identify where the top performers in your industry hang out, what magazines they read, what conferences they attend, and what kind of company culture they crave. When you finally get a candidate into the interview room, you must abandon the standard, ineffective interview questions like "What is your biggest weakness?" Top candidates have rehearsed answers for these clichés. Instead, Scaling Up recommends adopting the Topgrading methodology, which involves a deep, chronological interview process. You walk through the candidate's entire career history, asking specific questions about every single job they have held. What were they hired to do? What were their actual results compared to their targets? Who was their manager, and what will that manager say when you call them for a reference? This last point is known as the "Threat of Reference Check," and it is incredibly powerful. When candidates know that you will absolutely be calling their former bosses to verify their claims, the honest candidates will shine, and the embellishers will quickly filter themselves out. Equally important to hiring the right people is ensuring they align perfectly with your core values. Core values are not just nice words to paint on the lobby wall; they are the behavioral boundaries of your company. If you hire a brilliant, high-performing salesperson who constantly disrespects their coworkers and violates your core values, they are a toxic presence, not an A-player. A true A-player must possess both high performance and high cultural fit. If you tolerate high performers who poison the culture, your actual A-players will become disgusted and leave. As a company scales, the role of leadership must also evolve. In the early days, leaders are individual contributors who also happen to manage people. But as the team grows, leaders must shift from doing the work to coaching the people who do the work. Great leaders act like sports coaches. They do not run out onto the field to kick the ball themselves; they stand on the sidelines, analyzing the game, calling the plays, and developing the skills of their players. By clearly defining accountability, aggressively recruiting top-tier talent, enforcing core values, and transitioning from managers to coaches, you build a resilient, unstoppable team. When you get the People decision right, the rest of the scaling journey becomes infinitely smoother.

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