Lessons - Should You Grow or Exit? | Chris Smith - Co-Founder of Curaytor

In this lessons episode, discover insights on building a sustainable business with a culture that scales balancing long-term growth with investor pressures and knowing when to bring a new talent for evolving needs. Learn about setting clear expectations, staying adaptable, and even embracing side hustles to foster a thriving, committed team. So when you're building a company and you want to build something that has some longevity and lifetime and legacy to it, it seems like that's what you're doing right now. And you want to test out different things, there's a lot of pressure from external stakeholders because a lot of entrepreneurs, they bring in VCs, venture capitalists, investors, and there's a timeline as a ticking clock before they have to have an exit event. So you want to build something long-term, doesn't investor have that same shared opinion? And I guess the question would be, for a founder, if they want to take that pressure off, they want to build something that could be more of a lifestyle, have some longevity to it, should they work with venture capital, investor, outside money, just going to put all of that pressure to expedite everything. No, you know, I wore this sort of anti-silicon valley, anti-venture capital hat for a while, similar to the guys from Base Camp, where it's like, hey, there's another way, you don't have to do it this crazy way that Silicon Valley does it, like, be proud of, you know, being profitable as an example, like things like that. Yeah. And simply, I actually, as I've gotten a little bit older, I just, it's kind of back to that example we just gave. There's a lot of ways to do things, and I don't know how to do it the Silicon Valley way, and that actually now bothers me, Scott. I'm now basically saying the thing I made fun of for 10 years, that's actually the thing that I need to understand better, if I'm going to continue to be the best marketing sales professor in the world, because it's incredibly difficult to keep up with this stuff. I got to push alert yesterday. Google Optimize going away in 2023. I'm like, dude, that's in my book. I can't unprint my book, but I know that going in. So anyway, I hope that makes sense. I wanted to follow one point about who to onboard though. You know, who do you onboard? Who do you off board? Is a really interesting question too, because there's these people that like push you up the mountaintop and they follow you like a disciple. They really do. When you have a great culture and you have a great mission and you have, you know, founders that are passionate like it's sort of a good cult, right? It's awesome. There's words, there's colors like they're like it's it's a real thing. It's amazing. It's hard to replicate, but that startup phase has to change to continue to scale. So all of a sudden, you've got these people that post you up to this huge mountain that you're grateful to have ever seen the top of and you're starting to realize that they're the wrong people to help you go up the next mountain. And so that change management is tricky. You know, because you've got all these people that got you there, but you know, they won't get you here, but you're not going to just lay off all your rest people. It's it's hard. And so to me, you need to have some sort of unemotional line in the scene where we are going to be, you know, founder led service led passionate when we hit these numbers, we are going to then go find experts like this to help us do this. If that was clearly defined on day one, people would know which exit ramp they wanted to take, but who knows what's going to happen with a company? We could have gone bankrupt several times. So like they don't even like they're buckling up, but they don't know for how long? How do you make that decision? How do you make that decision on the right people? On the right people with the people with higher fire on your culture? Yes, not it's really not even overly designed. You know, it's more about are you willing to hire someone and fire someone based on what I'm about to sort of rattle off as who we are as a company? Because we're talking about trying to get to this huge scale, but to get to that scale, it's also very hard to get to that first milestone of call it 10 million, because that also involves all these departments and people that you're no longer involved with, even to get to there. So this is, you know, part of what people should do is once you have your culture code dialed in, and once you know what it is, it should be on the shirts, it should be on the walls, it should be on the booklets, it should be the window with the decal over it. Like you have to say it out loud a lot, and you have to prop it out when it happens, and you have to call people out when they're not embodying it. To me, these are the ways that you scale with quality. So number one, it starts with us, you know, like we always look at ourselves as the problem before anyone else, and that starts with the founders. We take full accountability for the mistakes, and unless we can sort of give ourselves an alibi, we don't, it starts with us. And whether that's a client service issue or a, we used our own products for the first like eight years to do marketing. We're not even real estate agents, and we're using our own products to do marketing because it starts with us. For breaks, we want to feel the pain, be the expert. That's another one. Like if you're not committed to learning and becoming an expert, you're not going to work here. And so we literally, we only really hire sponges because it's hard to be an expert in all the different things that we do as far as digital marketing, real estate conversations matter. This is the philosophy that says, let's quit emailing the actual talking matters. You'd be amazed how often that principle, that culture code, in real life, you get an email from an angry client, and knowing that conversations matter, you pick up the phone and call them. You don't email them back. Debate it, then do it. You can talk amongst yourselves in an effort to get something done, not an effort to see who's smarter, right? Solutions focused culture. Stay positive. It doesn't say be positive. It says stay positive. We attract positive people. It's hard to stay positive. Man, it's hard for us to stay positive. So it's more about like, not even are you positive? It's, can you stay that way when it gets really freaking hard? And then the last one is just go the extra mile, which everybody knows what that means. So that is our secret sauce. And I can tell you that we've had at this point, you know, when you're 10 or 11, you do have turnover, even if you have a, even if you have an amazing run, you know, somebody, well, I love to hear your opinion on this. Like, I think somebody's staying at a company nowadays for, I shouldn't even say this, I think somebody's staying at a company right now for three years is a blessing to the company. I think it is. I think it's rare now. I think it's very rare now. Dude, if I get three good years out of somebody in the peak years of their life when they're excited to be working there and they're all in and they're drinking the blade, like, I am going to be pumped for them when they leave. I'll be mad right when they leave. Yeah. But I'll be pumped for them deep down. We've actually explored creating. Well, people can look up lattice. You ever heard of lattice? No, never. What is that? It's like HR software. And it's one of the industry standards, like Salesforce for H. Okay. And what lattice did is they noticed that like, Hey, we've got all this data and we kind of see when people are kind of leaving. And we see the reasons are leaving. And more and more with side hustles and Gary Vient culture, there's people leaving that are wanting to start a business. And there's no option for them to work with us to accomplish that goal. Why not? So they're actually starting like an accelerator that if you want to be an entrepreneur, we will invest in you're doing so. But you have to be there for three years or more. So I love that. I absolutely love that. That's amazing. So now you set, you set that expectation three years. And we're going to actually, you know, we know what the culture is. You know, the side hustles exist. Regardless of whether or not we like them, you're going to do shit on the weekends. We can't, you know, as much we can try and police it. We're not going to be able to police it. So why not set up an accelerator? Now it's a business opportunity. So now there's a contractual obligation for three years, business opportunity, investment opportunity. That's spinning up companies solving problems that, you know, are probably very relevant to them. Maybe a little bit of a reason to be better to work with for those three years because we, you know, we don't have to invest in you. We might. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.