Building Stackable Teams

Discovering Blitzscaling as a Culture-Growth Concept

I’m fortunate to work in an industry that is perfect for the word I’m going to introduce next: Blitzscaling.

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What is blitzscaling? A term coined by one of my favorite entrepreneurs, Reid Hoffman, blitzscaling is a favorite word amongst the startup environment. It’s essentially when you need to grow really, really quickly because of market conditions or opportunity in order to be the first mover at scale.

Early on during my time at SMKC, I read this article in Harvard’s Business Review by Reid Hoffman that has stuck with me since. First, because it was so relevant to our growth and process at SMKC, and secondly, because it got me thinking about the foundation that I’ve used to build and maintain our company culture at Smoke Cartel.

Essentially, in a blitz-scaling company, there are a few things that are the same — the chaos, the constantly changing environments, the lack of strong hierarchical structure. There is generally a lot of confusion about who to report to, what’s going on all the time, day to day tasks, and things may change rapidly and strategies may change rapidly depending on sudden industry changes or events.

As the article says, “If a start-up determines that it needs to move very fast, it will take on far more risk than a company going through the normal, rational process of scaling up. This kind of speed is necessary for offensive and defensive reasons. Offensively, your business may require a certain scale to be valuable. Defensively, you want to scale faster than your competitors because the first to reach customers may own them, and the advantages of scale may lead you to a winner-takes-most position.”

So this concept of blitzscaling has really framed my thoughts about leadership and growth as a whole.

Why else is this important? The article also mentions, “the three things you have to get right” — and it says that people are naturally focused on two of them: growing your revenues and growing your customer base. And of course, if you don’t get those right, then nothing else matters. You have to have customers, and you have to have profits.

But very few businesses can succeed on those fronts without also scaling the organization.

And what does that mean?

How do you scale an organization? What do you need to focus on in order to get it right?

I think it comes down to people, but it comes down to evolving with people. I knew this wasn’t something that we were going to accomplish entirely on our own. As the colloquialism goes, it takes a village.

You realize that in order to really grow your people base that you need to focus on two things consistently — one , How will you grow your talent? Two, how will you hold on to your culture?

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Knowing that SMKC was going to grow rapidly, and that discomfort would be part of the ride, — how do you plan and account for that? How do you plan to tolerate discomfort? How do you get people to sign up for, and stay, for chaos and rapid change?

What was going to be the best way to create an unbreakable culture that would grow with our team and provide the amount of support needed to grow the company into the massive conglomerate we’ve been aiming towards.

To discover my answer, I needed to focus on what was holding everyone together. Why were people coming to work in the morning? What was the driving factor behind successful companies? What was the secret sauce? And I read a lot of books, I studied people, and the thing that it really boiled down to — was the “vision”. The vision that a team could achieve together, that we were stronger as a united front.

Internally, that reason was company culture. People need to believe the vision. People love a good story, and even more so, they love to be a part of that story. Especially if sometimes it feels like a fairytale. In a rapidly scaling startup, people feel like they are on a rollercoaster, holding on by the tippy tips on their fingertips, but they do the crazy thing because they believe in the vision. Because they believe in you. The thing about fairytales, they aren’t always sweet. Grandma gets eaten, but LRRH doesn’t keep that tale to herself. There’s still a lesson to be learned in the tale, and we still consume it voraciously. We still participate, knowing the challenges ahead.

Theres a sense of excitement about what’s happening and the vision of a great future as a team. Because I’m part of a team that’s doing something big, I feel empowered to do great things. I know I can succeed with my ability and the ability of those around me. People were buying our “why”.

So for us, our why was the growth of our people, which progresses the growth of our company. Let’s dig into that.

I think this is a great way for any business owner or person to start on their journey. What are your values? Why do you do this crazy thing? For us, this was three ideals that we’ve outlined in our operations.

People

We are committed to being professional and kind. Our goal is to provide excellent customer care that surpasses expectations and to maintain culture rooted in relentless growth. Products

Our goal is to continuously deliver high-quality products that exceed the expectations of our customers. Progress

We are committed to progress in every aspect of the organization and believe that we all have an instinctive need to improve and advance. We work hard to foster an environment of on-going self-improvement, professional development, and lifelong learning.

So, this is a section from our actual company handbook. We drilled down on our company values — and what we wanted people to focus on as we grew — development of people, producing high quality products, and progressing our abilities.

There’s a few key words that I want you to really take away from this : Relentless advancement of self, of operational procedures — and infinite possibility.

We needed people to believe in the possibility of this amazing dream we can build together on both fronts. You can have an excellent concept, but for a true success story, you want to be able to convince your team it’s excellent — that your group can achieve excellence.

We needed them to believe that anything — everything, was made up of infinite possibility. And to me, that means — continually trying, continual learning from failure. The ability to improve, to learn from those around you, and the ability to constantly grow — knowing that tomorrow holds infinitely more possibility than today.

So of those three, people and progress can be applied everywhere, to almost every business. Progress, then people. You need to teach people that progress is important, that you are dedicated to your progress, their progress, and the company progress. Once you’ve convinced people “of” progress, the progress part begins.

Photo by Kevin Butz on Unsplash

You need to remember that your first and foremost job is to be a teacher about your business. The perfect employee does not exist on day one, and it’s going to be your job to train that person and ensure that they understand the vision of your business and why they would want to believe in that as well. If they aren’t convinced it’s good for them and their life, you aren’t going to get anywhere. So be absolutely sure that your set-ups for your team are win/win, because it’s easy to forget that everyone desires to be successful.

It’s even easier to forget that the carrot & stick method is the most outdated motivational technique in the book — so why does everyone still use it?

Teams consistently outperform individuals. Competition is a great tool for inspiration — but there is nothing as strong as feeling biologically tied to a group of people that you legitimately believe exist to help you solve problems and progress in your life and career.