HOW TO KNOW YOU NEED A REORG
Advice from the founders ofAmerica’s fastest-growing private companies. AS TOLD TO KATE ROCKWOOD
“I started the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, and it stressed that we had to work on our business, not in it. But that felt impossible! We’d schedule strategy meetings, and they’d get crowded out by tedious tasks. I’m a control freak, but as we grew, there just weren’t enough hours in the day. We finally reorged into two teams, with two managers who report up to the co-founders.”
—
BETSY MIKESELL
Co-founder and CEO, Beddy’s (consumer products and services) 2018 RANK NO. 270 GROWTH 1,817% REVENUE $4.8 MILLION “Staff members didn’t want to come to me first, but they didn’t have anyone else to go to when a client requested something out of scope. So teams were consistently delivering more work than we were paid to do. Now that we have a clear hierarchy, people aren’t grinding out that extra work or sweeping it under the rug.”
—
ALI GRANT
Founder and CEO, Be Social (advertising and marketing) 2018 RANK NO. 542 GROWTH 926% REVENUE $3.5 MILLION “The engineering team came to us with ideas to improve the user experience of our website. But we’re not tech experts; we couldn’t quickly assess which ideas were phenomenal. That’s when it was clear we needed to reorg.”
—
AMY NORMAN
Co-founder and co-CEO,
Little Passports (consumer products and services) 2018 RANK NO. 1,387 GROWTH 341% REVENUE $23.6 MILLION “People started asking things like: ‘Who do I request time off from?’ and ‘Who’s my direct report?’ and ‘Who’s on my team?’ And they were frustrated that I didn’t have immediate answers. It was hindering our culture, and that meant it was time to change.”
—
KORY STEVENS
Co-founder and CEO, Taft (consumer products and services) 2018 RANK NO. 56 GROWTH 4,795% REVENUE $5.7 MILLION
“When we didn’t have much staff, everyone naturally did a bit of everything. We reached our breaking point during our busiest season last year, when I saw leadership handling customer calls. I realized I could hire someone a lot less expensive for the small tasks while those leaders helped grow the business—but only if we gave people clear roles to own.” — MICHAEL MORAN Founder and CEO, Private Label Extensions (consumer products and services) 2018 RANK NO. 278 GROWTH 1,776% REVENUE $4.2 MILLION