Dan Martell - Team Building： How To Build a Strong Team That Grows Your SaaS Faster

00:00:00.080 Hey there, Dan Martell here,

00:00:01.040 serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS Academy.

00:00:03.160 In this episode, I'm gonna share with you

00:00:04.640 how to build a strong team for your SaaS business.

00:00:09.000 This means that you are working less

00:00:11.560 but getting way more done,

00:00:12.960 or at least working on higher leverage stuff.

00:00:15.120 And be sure to stay to the end

00:00:16.280 where I'm gonna share with you how to get access

00:00:17.840 to my high octane team,

00:00:19.680 outline the six core functions of your SaaS business

00:00:23.760 and the specific four strategies that you need

00:00:25.920 to be holding your leadership team accountable.

00:00:28.640 Let's get into it.

00:00:30.000 building teams is probably one of my favorite topics to share on because I really believe

00:00:47.720 that we build the people and the people build the business. But when we're starting off and

00:00:51.720 we're that solopreneur and we're really trying to, you know, hire our first maybe support person or

00:00:56.400 another developer, whatever it is, it's really tough to understand how does the big picture

00:01:00.460 look? And I know when I started my company Spheric when I was 24, you know, that was a

00:01:06.180 frustrating part. I felt like I was always, you know, carrying the weak people, had some great

00:01:09.920 people, but I definitely, you know, we grew to about 30 people in four years. I was carrying way

00:01:14.280 too many people on my back. I was working a hundred hours a week and it was really frustrating.

00:01:19.080 Even though we had an incredible outcome, you know, exiting that business and making me

00:01:23.640 financially wealthy, you know,

00:01:26.300 I feel super blessed for that experience.

00:01:28.580 I went on to find a different path and different strategy

00:01:32.320 and moving to San Francisco,

00:01:33.580 building my company Flowtown with my co-founder Ethan,

00:01:36.200 scaling that company was dramatically a different experience

00:01:39.840 in regards to just quality of life,

00:01:42.000 leverage of my time and the people that I surrounded myself.

00:01:45.320 And then after that building another venture backed company,

00:01:48.280 Clarity raising 1.6 million,

00:01:50.280 scaling that company to 20 people in the first year.

00:01:52.880 That was way easier, and over the years,

00:01:56.600 I've just collected a bunch of different strategies

00:01:59.140 that's allowed me to go from just frustrating

00:02:02.380 people side of the business to a point now where today,

00:02:05.300 every team I'm involved in, the executive leadership team,

00:02:08.200 all the way down to the frontline people,

00:02:10.280 they are incredible folks,

00:02:12.360 and there's a very specific process ensuring that happens,

00:02:15.180 and that's what I'm gonna share with you today.

00:02:17.080 Number one, buyback time.

00:02:18.940 So I coach very high-performing founders.

00:02:21.700 some of my clients are doing 150 million

00:02:23.940 in annual reoccurring revenue in their B2B SaaS businesses.

00:02:27.100 And so these are high performers.

00:02:28.640 And one of the strategies that I teach them

00:02:30.700 all the way down to the folks that are, you know,

00:02:32.820 still just, you know, 10K a month

00:02:34.360 trying to get things built out

00:02:36.500 is the idea of buying back time.

00:02:38.300 So most people hire under the context

00:02:41.080 of just adding capacity.

00:02:42.540 I need to hire a developer,

00:02:43.780 I need to hire a marketing person,

00:02:45.080 I need to hire a salesperson, et cetera.

00:02:46.620 We're just adding capacity to our team.

00:02:48.840 What I encourage my clients to do

00:02:50.880 is it's still adding capacity but it's the lens

00:02:53.280 that we're looking through those hires from

00:02:56.460 is the idea of I'm looking at my calendar

00:02:59.120 and I'm buying back time off my calendar.

00:03:00.940 So whatever you're doing, especially if you're a founder,

00:03:03.080 you're probably kind of wearing many hats.

00:03:05.540 You wanna figure out where's the lowest value,

00:03:08.960 highest time suck work that you should be hiring 0.99

00:03:13.160 to backfill, buy back that time

00:03:15.480 to get more leverage with your time.

00:03:17.520 So it's not to say that it's demeaning work,

00:03:19.820 it's less work, but it's at the end of the day,

00:03:22.180 it's where we wanna buy back our time

00:03:24.800 to do higher value, higher leverage things,

00:03:27.680 typically around revenue generating activity.

00:03:30.260 So that's number one.

00:03:31.380 Number two, follow workflow.

00:03:33.960 So the idea of workflow, if you think about it,

00:03:36.580 every business, and I talk about growth engines often,

00:03:39.460 especially my ACEs growth engine,

00:03:41.160 attract, convert, expand, scale,

00:03:43.080 that engine is all about the workflow,

00:03:47.260 the process of building a software company.

00:03:49.960 And in software, there's six core functions,

00:03:53.380 you know, at a high level, things like, you know,

00:03:55.440 product engineering, marketing, customer success,

00:03:57.740 sales, ops, and admin, that we wanna focus on.

00:04:00.640 We wanna understand that at scale, when we build our teams,

00:04:04.440 we're gonna have no more ideally

00:04:06.800 than six to seven direct reports.

00:04:08.900 Maybe you have 12 right now,

00:04:10.580 because you have a 12 person team

00:04:11.940 and you haven't been able to start offloading

00:04:14.160 some of those direct reports.

00:04:15.420 But at scale, it doesn't matter if you're,

00:04:17.560 one of my mentors grew his company to 5,000 employees

00:04:21.020 in four years, a company called Uber.

00:04:24.860 It doesn't matter if you're 5,000 employees,

00:04:26.640 you're always gonna typically have six to seven

00:04:28.420 direct reports and it works the same as you're scaling

00:04:31.660 so that you understand how to follow the workflow.

00:04:33.760 Where is the bottlenecks in that engine of growth

00:04:38.520 or building the product or getting the product

00:04:40.840 from the customer and how do we backfill

00:04:43.340 and hire people to really own that area of the business.

00:04:46.240 And they don't always have to be,

00:04:47.220 when you're starting off like super senior people,

00:04:49.440 they just have to be anointed and given accountability

00:04:53.200 so that they know, hey,

00:04:54.260 I'm in charge of this area of the business.

00:04:56.320 And you can start looking at where are the gaps,

00:04:58.520 where are you missing people to increase that throughput

00:05:01.380 through that workflow.

00:05:02.540 Number three, set the roles.

00:05:04.540 So one of the biggest waste in company

00:05:07.500 when it comes to people and building the structure

00:05:10.400 is lack of accountability,

00:05:12.400 or even just awareness of who's accountable for what.

00:05:14.760 So I'm gonna highly encourage

00:05:16.120 that you kind of think of those six core functions,

00:05:18.640 kind of map everybody to it,

00:05:20.100 and really just ask everybody on the team,

00:05:21.760 what are the areas of the business

00:05:23.220 that you feel 100% accountable to?

00:05:24.620 If you had to give me four to seven things,

00:05:28.060 processes, outputs, et cetera,

00:05:31.120 outcomes that you're accountable for,

00:05:33.220 what would those be?

00:05:34.540 And just putting that on a grid,

00:05:36.520 it's called an accountability chart, right?

00:05:38.500 It's kind of like an org chart,

00:05:39.460 but it's more about who owns what, right?

00:05:42.360 By having that, I will tell you,

00:05:44.260 it will be in value in regards to quickly making decisions,

00:05:47.380 allowing new people, this is a big one,

00:05:49.320 every new person that joins my teams,

00:05:51.460 they have to be aware of the accountability chart

00:05:53.700 so that if there's issues,

00:05:54.740 they know exactly who to go directly to

00:05:56.500 to get that issue resolved, right?

00:05:58.560 So they have the information of like,

00:06:00.940 you know, if I have a marketing idea,

00:06:02.780 I can share it with this person.

00:06:03.840 If I have a sales tweak, I can share it with this person.

00:06:05.880 Too often in businesses,

00:06:07.100 People are really aware of their immediate teams.

00:06:10.040 They don't really know who,

00:06:11.220 like what does Mark do in that department, right?

00:06:13.540 Having this ability to check this grid,

00:06:16.940 the structure of who owns what, who's accountable for,

00:06:19.980 and most importantly, who is DRI,

00:06:22.660 direct responsible individual.

00:06:25.300 Regardless of who's doing what,

00:06:26.920 there's always should be one person that's DRI on a project.

00:06:30.900 That accountability chart will help you get clear on it.

00:06:34.120 Number four, revise over time.

00:06:36.940 So the way I think about it, it's a two by two matrix.

00:06:39.040 You've got a quadrant.

00:06:40.120 On the bottom axis, the X axis,

00:06:42.520 you have the values that the people do.

00:06:45.980 They embody the values of our organization.

00:06:47.900 If you don't have values set out, start there.

00:06:49.940 But if you have values,

00:06:51.280 or you just know like people that really work well

00:06:53.440 with the rest of the team, that's on the X axis.

00:06:55.560 On the Y axis, I want you to put skills. 0.98

00:06:58.180 People that you feel have really strong skills

00:07:01.600 for that role in the business.

00:07:03.640 And what you end up doing is you have a grid

00:07:05.740 and you have people that have high skills, high values,

00:07:09.180 those are your A players.

00:07:10.380 You need to make sure you're talking to them frequently

00:07:12.060 and making sure that they're retained,

00:07:13.440 compensation, all that stuff.

00:07:14.780 They're the people you need to pay attention to.

00:07:16.940 The other ones that are kind of like,

00:07:18.580 you know, if you're the grids like this

00:07:20.100 that are kind of like below there or over here and there,

00:07:24.820 those people need to be coached into that.

00:07:27.020 So they might have high skill, they're incredibly talented,

00:07:29.220 but from a values point of view, they're horrible.

00:07:31.900 Well, I'm assuming you wouldn't let people

00:07:33.140 like that stick around,

00:07:33.960 but let's just say they just don't really embody

00:07:36.400 some of the core values that you set out.

00:07:38.200 Coach them up.

00:07:39.520 So those two quadrants need to be coached up

00:07:41.880 into high skills, high values.

00:07:44.380 The folks in the bottom corner, okay, you know who they are.

00:07:47.420 You can do this as an executive team.

00:07:48.900 You can say, hey, let's draw this grid, this quadrant,

00:07:51.840 this Dan guy, you know, share the strategy.

00:07:54.440 Have your team do it and kind of compare notes.

00:07:57.140 Whoever's in that bottom quadrant,

00:07:58.980 you've got 60 days to transition them out of your business.

00:08:02.100 60 days is the most amount of time.

00:08:04.020 If I gave you 90, you don't need 90.

00:08:06.100 You don't need to be reactive,

00:08:07.520 but you've got 60 days to say,

00:08:10.060 we need to hire somebody, we need to backfill,

00:08:11.780 we need to document their process,

00:08:12.980 they gotta be moved out of the company.

00:08:14.160 Why?

00:08:15.000 They don't have the skill, they don't embody the values,

00:08:17.900 and at the end of the day,

00:08:19.820 there is probably an incredible company

00:08:21.720 where they can rock at, they can be a rockstar,

00:08:24.200 and it's just not gonna be yours

00:08:25.400 based on the way you've structured things,

00:08:27.380 and that's totally fine,

00:08:28.840 but they just can't stay on the team, okay?

00:08:30.860 It's hard to say, big circle, they gotta go.

00:08:33.620 If you do that at least every six months,

00:08:35.860 that's my process.

00:08:37.480 Every six months you evaluate and you make adjustments.

00:08:40.780 You'll never run into an issue

00:08:42.340 where somebody totally lets you down.

00:08:44.000 There's a critical failure

00:08:45.080 because there was an underperformer.

00:08:46.700 You have somebody that's rude,

00:08:48.060 especially on the value side,

00:08:49.040 that's rude to other A players on your team

00:08:51.040 and they quit because of that person.

00:08:53.320 I don't care how skilled somebody is,

00:08:54.680 if they do not follow the values over time,

00:08:58.240 it risks me losing my A players

00:09:00.500 and that to me is too critical.

00:09:01.820 So if you do that every six months,

00:09:03.380 you'll never run into those issues.

00:09:04.940 Number five, make hard decisions.

00:09:07.080 Look, I'm bringing this up again

00:09:08.540 because I know you know who those people are

00:09:11.360 that have to bounce on your team.

00:09:12.720 I know you know who they are.

00:09:13.660 The folks that you're micromanaging,

00:09:16.180 the people that you argue with when you're getting an update

00:09:19.220 because they're always talking about busy work

00:09:21.300 but nothing's actually getting done.

00:09:23.120 Or they're the ones that keep coming up

00:09:25.280 for causing conflicts or not responding to things

00:09:27.600 or not managing their time properly.

00:09:28.940 whatever it is, you know who those people are.

00:09:31.500 And I'm going to challenge you 100%, straight up,

00:09:35.960 hopefully I can convince you

00:09:37.420 that removing those people from the team,

00:09:40.120 creating the hole amongst your team to have to fill it.

00:09:43.260 Because if you don't remove them,

00:09:45.180 then there's no vacuum, there's no need to fill it.

00:09:47.480 There's no need to like prioritize getting that job posting,

00:09:50.640 sourcing new candidates,

00:09:51.840 going through the recruiting process, et cetera.

00:09:53.220 There's no need to prioritize that.

00:09:54.800 And you're being incredibly selfish to that person

00:09:58.080 because they're not gonna be allowed to shine

00:10:00.140 and spread their wings in a company

00:10:02.160 where they could be world-class

00:10:03.460 because you are too self-centered and selfish,

00:10:08.060 and that's really what it comes down to,

00:10:09.660 to let them move on because you don't want it to hurt

00:10:12.520 or frustrate you and your business.

00:10:14.680 So it's not even about your business in many of the cases,

00:10:17.140 it's just, it's easier to keep them around

00:10:19.840 and that's selfish for them

00:10:21.160 and it's the wrong thing for your team.

00:10:23.240 So you know who those people are.

00:10:26.060 I want you to have that tough conversation,

00:10:28.160 make a hard decision and, you know,

00:10:30.840 build a plan 60 days at the max.

00:10:32.680 But honestly, if you know they'll go

00:10:34.060 and there's no impact to your business,

00:10:36.160 let them go on a Friday, okay?

00:10:37.500 I have a whole video you can go find on my YouTube channel

00:10:40.480 on how to, you know, let people go.

00:10:42.380 Do it on a Friday, don't do it on a Monday.

00:10:45.340 That'll give them time to calm down.

00:10:46.640 You can kind of really do right by them,

00:10:48.640 but make the hard decision.

00:10:49.780 So quick recap, how to build a strong team

00:10:52.440 for your SaaS company.

00:10:53.600 Number one, buy back time.

00:10:55.600 Number two, follow the workflow.

00:10:57.600 Number three, set the roles.

00:10:59.660 Four, revise over time.

00:11:01.340 And five, make that hard decision.

00:11:04.900 As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,

00:11:06.120 I wanna share with you an exclusive resource

00:11:07.920 called the High Octane Team Technique.

00:11:10.620 In it, I have a very structured planner

00:11:12.780 that you can use to kind of map

00:11:14.120 where you're at as the CEO and founder

00:11:16.140 and the six core functions of the business,

00:11:18.420 specifically the four outcomes

00:11:20.780 that are required by your executive leadership team.

00:11:24.160 Those four, quick recap,

00:11:25.280 They're all covered in the download.

00:11:26.920 You click the link below to get a copy

00:11:28.160 is strategy, delivery, systems, and reporting.

00:11:32.140 I dive into those and those core functions.

00:11:35.260 And then within that, I even give you a worksheet

00:11:37.280 you can use to upgrade your team,

00:11:39.880 identify the weaknesses, talk through the strategies,

00:11:42.300 and also be clear on the metrics

00:11:44.700 that you're holding them accountable to.

00:11:46.180 That is typically what's missing for you as a leader

00:11:48.900 to feel more comfortable with the performance

00:11:50.580 of a team member.

00:11:51.720 And it gets everybody on the same page.

00:11:53.700 so you can click the link below to get your copy.

00:11:55.780 If you like this video, be sure to smash that like button,

00:11:58.100 subscribe to my channel,

00:11:59.420 and if there's anybody you think this video could serve

00:12:01.080 directly, feel free to share it with them.

00:12:03.080 As per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life

00:12:05.100 and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday.

Dan Martell - July 06, 2020

Team Building： How To Build a Strong Team That Grows Your SaaS Faster

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