In this episode, Scott Becker shares 10 key insights on building strong teams.
Chapter 1: What are the key insights on building teams?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Today's discussion is 10 points on building teams. So my education on building teams really came from two core places, obviously from experience, but more than that, from discussions with a great healthcare partner who is a leader of the practice at Latham, one of the great rooms in the country named Jerry Peters.
Just a brilliant, brilliant guy who just constantly harped on me. If you want to build a great business, you want to build a great practice, you better build teams. And second, Jim Collins, one of the great business thinkers of the last several decades, who had the core philosophy that everything was about getting the right people on the bus and building teams.
If you had the right people, you could almost do anything you wanted to. So that's sort of the starting point on teams. And in terms of my own perspective, Every success I've had has been built around building great teams.
Chapter 2: Why is team building essential for business success?
And every failure that I've had has really been where I haven't made the effort to build a team or I've tried to do it other ways, either on the cheap or because I'm lazy because I don't want to build a team. But every time I've failed in a business, that's really been the situation. The next point I'll make on this, as we talk about teams, is as follows.
that if you're going to build teams, one of the hard parts about building teams is when you get going, you have to do a lot of sorting out people. And this means figuring out Who's going to be great? Who's an important member of the team? And who shouldn't be there?
Chapter 3: How do you identify great team members?
And what I have found in all the businesses that I've been involved in is if you don't foundationally do that early on and make the effort to do it early on, you could be doing this for the next couple of decades and in a very mediocre way.
So there's no way around having to put this effort into sorting out your teams, figuring out who's going to be on the teams, who's not, and who's going to lead and who's not.
As you build teams, you start to see leaders emerge and you need to do everything you can to sort of embrace those leaders early, to identify them early, to double down on them, to try and support them and to try and retain them. And this is a key, key part of building teams and building leadership.
And again, not to make this entire discussion about leadership and building teams, but it's everything to business. So as you see great people emerge, do everything you can to wrap your hands around them, to keep them, to retain them, to keep moving forward with them. The next point I'll make is I served on a couple of different boards.
One of these boards or two of these boards, the companies had great success and it's really because they made the effort to put out serious teams of leaders. In contrast, I served on another board that had one sort of what I would call a supernova leading the company So I'll give you the contrast. One of the companies that really built out great teams ultimately sold for nearly a billion dollars.
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Chapter 4: What role do leaders play in team dynamics?
The other company that never really got past the supernova. So just a huge difference in outcome and the ability to really thrive and succeed based on did they build teams or not. There's a lot talked about today in terms of the solopreneur, and if you're on Twitter at all, you would think that the world is run by solopreneurs.
My sense is that this is very, very far and few between, and all the great iconic leaders of our past generation, whether it's Steve Jobs, the Bill Gates, the Jensen Wongs, every single one of them ultimately had to build serious teams themselves. to build serious businesses. And that's really, there's a real myth of this solopreneur concept.
The next point I'll make is that we're a huge fan in building companies and you stack resources in your core areas. You stack them around your most important customers, your most important service areas, your most important, whatever you're doing.
And in building the media company, we stacked resources around things like, just as an example, the editorial team, the conference team, the key company management team, the sales team, And we ultimately outsource everything else. In fact, to this day, 30 years later, we ultimately outsource the receptionist. We don't have a receptionist.
Chapter 5: How can teams impact business outcomes?
We just ultimately outsource anything that is not critical to your business and really stack all your resources around building core, core teams. Again, I'll go back to the Jim Collins philosophy. Everything is built around this concept of good to great. Get the right people on board. You can do almost anything you want as I build another company.
If I'm lazy about investing in the team and growing the team, I can't really go any place with it. We'll talk further about this team concept. We talk about in entrepreneurial companies, the evolution of a founder from stage one to stage three. Stage one is the typical startup. The founder does almost everything. He's the cook, he's the bottle washer, he's the old adage, does everything.
Stage two is the founder starts to hire people, but he's not necessarily, he or she is not necessarily hiring people that are better than him or herself. They're basically filling out positions. And this is still a very important part of development because the founder can work on growing the business while also taking care of the business. But this is a 2X solution at best.
It's not a 10X solution. It's not where companies can really scale. My experience is that companies really grow and really scale in is when the founders ultimately hired all the leaders around him or her, and those leaders all do the job better than that founder could do it. I remember about five, 10 years ago, having a serious discussion with my partner CEO who's been with me for 20 plus years,
Chapter 6: What myths exist around solopreneurship?
And at some point she was there with me and said, do you want to come back and do this? And the reality is there's no way I could do it as well as she did. So you can't, you just can't do it. But you want to get to that stage three where the business is less reliant on you and really could grow into a different level of business.
The next concept we'll make is you need to judge people, but you can't overly prejudge people. I can't tell you how many times people have hired people thinking that's the next star, and they've not been. And then in contrast, the other person that they thought was not going to be a star ends up having an extremely high motor, great drive, and ends up being the leader the company builds around.
I have seen this so many times. It's incredible. The next thing about startups is people talk about, again, the small businesses. But the scary reality is you probably can't be too small a business. You have to have a certain enterprise, a certain size to hire people so that you build a big enough team.
I remember being on the phone with somebody this morning who called me for a job but wants to work for a big company. I was like, oh, I'm doing another startup. Ain't no big company. There's no structure in it. But early on in businesses, you're very reliant on a couple of key people. You've got a lot of ride or die people. And I'll talk about this in a second.
You're going to have throughout your career what I think of as ride or die people that are indispensable to you. The number one job is to take care of those people, embrace those people, and not to lose them and to get other great people, but to do so in a way where the person who's number one realizes they are number one.
I've had great luck in the legal practice, in the business, in retaining for 20-plus years as partners the Ryder and I people that really run those enterprises today. I think a very, very important concept. And I'll give a quick shout-out to – Judy Faulkner here in Madison, who's just done an unbelievable job of keep on doubling down on teams. That's epic. Again, so that's the concept today.
Keep doubling down on teams. Keep building teams. It's everything to business. Thank you for listening to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast.
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