The Building Blocks of Business
An idea is only as good as the people dedicated to bringing it to fruition. While it’s easy to point out the Job’s, Musk’s, and Bezos’ of successful companies and lump their respective companies achievements into a singular person, the truth is, its much more about their ability to champion other motivated people to their cause, with these people being the drivers of success long-term. As modern companies turn to expand and work-forces grow into the literal tens if thousands, I am personally thankful that the focus on people and company culture have again begun to see a renaissance. As someone with an educational background (plus life-long student) in psychology and having experience in building teams from the ground up, I can definitively say that building the right teams are integral to a companies success.
Below is a brief summation of my experience building teams and also expanding culture that thrived.
To show what it means to integrate people to a cause, lets start from the beginning. Hired as employee number 7 at UNU, I had my hands full with building out a company that had gone from 250k gross-profit in its first year to +2MM in its second. The need to expand the team was crucial for continued success. Below is an org chart demonstrating the teams I personally built out and oversaw. Any bubble in blue represents a team I created.
.
When I started at the company it was quite the start-up. It reminds me of that circulated picture of Jeff Bezos working at his desk in the early days of Amazon. The first task at hand before bringing in new people was to establish guidelines for everyone. When everyone knows what the expectations/goals are, that’s when a company can move forward. To start this, I wrote out an employee manual. (I did this once more later for another company (maxboost) down the road too.)
As the team grew it became more and more important to establish team unity and cohesion. Today a prominent buzzword is “cross-functional” and making teams function together that may not always work in close proximity all the time is paramount to success. It started out small with “Donut Friday’s” where I brought in breakfast snacks for everyone, to more large scale group activities in and outside the office. Below is one outing where we all went tree-climbing in Santa Cruz. The focus was primarily on team-building activities. Other such events that I arranged were escape rooms and holiday parties.
Building a solid culture doesn’t always mean that its internal. Sometimes a bit of culture building happens in an outward facing manner. At UNU, I made it a goal of ours to help others in need. Showing altruism leaves us all feeling better, and in regards to business’ bottom-line, a small concession can pay dividends later. In this particular case, a teacher who had just received a set of new iPad’s for her 1st graders did not have a way to protect the devices. She reached out for help and we provided a set of waterproof iPad cases free of charge. Here are the letters the kid sent back as thanks! Ultimately, another school district heard about the cases and the company was able to bulk ship over 10,000 units the following year.
Final Notes
In the last decade, I have hired over 100 different people for over 30 different roles. In that time, I have also built on successful teams from the ground up and created successful companies that have preformed YOY, simultaneously employee turn-over rates are below industry levels, while we have continued to grow in talent with programs such as work-study internships with CSUEB where many interins continued on with us as full-fledged employees after graduating.