Employee’s Visions: the unsung heroes in startups
Taking a vision and turning it into reality is one of the most rewarding experiences about being an entrepreneur. The best entrepreneurs and leaders are constantly imagining a future that they’re a key piece of. What some inexperienced entrepreneurs might not realize is that when their employees also have a vision of how and where they could fit into the company it significantly increases the company’s odds of success.
Nothing can motivate an employee more than themselves. That’s the power of the entrepreneur in all of us! A good founder will get all of their first employees so excited about their vision, that the employees will create a plan of how they can fit into that vision.
The employee’s plans, when unleashed, builds an unmeasurable amount of value in the company for years to come.
One of our first employees at Favor, Rob Pennington taught me this lesson. Rob joined Favor in May of 2014. Zac & I had just closed another $1.5M to extend our seed round to a total of $2.1M. We were making our first real hiring push and planning to grow the team of 5 (including ourselves) to 15. Rob actually came to our office on assignment from Torchy’s Tacos. We were working with him to see how we could integrate into their site. Rob met with my co-founder Zac. 45 Minutes in, Zac found me in another room and said, “you have to meet this guy, he’s going to come work with us.” I was surprised, but I trusted Zac’s instincts.
Fast forward 3 years later and Rob is our Director of Brand & Creative. To put it simply, Rob owns the brand. Rob didn’t start here though, he had a personal vision for himself and he didn’t stop until he made it a reality. He is amazing at whipping together elaborate ways of bringing the brand to life; through video, illustrations, & clever real world representations of our brand. These all reflect both his aesthetic standards and his true belief in our company’s core values.
Honestly, as a first time founder CEO I originally didn’t understand his vision nor the importance of it. I knew Rob was talented and I knew that at the least he could accomplish what had to be done at that time (May 2014): web design, front-end engineering, and back-end engineering.
Rob didn’t consider himself a back-end developer, but he had so much experience messing around with WordPress that he picked up a good amount of PHP (our backend coding language). First, Rob mapped out & built a whole new version of our site. Later he designed and built brand new versions of some of the earliest & most important internal tools. After about 6 months, Rob started telling us about some of his plans for the future.
Rob envisioned a future where Favor was a well known brand where he had a team of talented creatives and designers.
Knowing how much value Rob currently brought to us as a full-stack engineer, I pushed back at first. Anyone who has scaled a tech company knows recruiting engineers is very challenging, especially for first-time founders. Their lack of a network makes it tough to recruit and screen potential engineers. Long story short, I tried to convince Rob to help us with engineering for as long as I could.
In March of 2015 we finally closed our Series A. A sizable one too, with $10M+ in the bank we were ready for our next big hiring push. Rob had been patiently waiting in the wings graciously coding for us with a smile for almost a year. It was definitely Rob’s time to shine. At first I was still reluctant about Rob moving into more of a managerial role and losing his talents as an individual contributor.
Coming out of Series A, one of the most important things that I had to do was scale the engineering team. But during the process of raising the A round, we had actually lost some of our best engineers and somehow found ourselves down to only two engineers. It’s honestly not a good place to be in. During those times, Rob continued to juggle helping us code, while starting to build his team. He really was a great sport and six months later we had successfully recruited a solid engineering team & creative team for Rob. He has been off to the races ever since!
My advice to every startup founder is to put a big emphasis on having every employee develop their own personal vision.
When I say “personal,” I mean thought of on their own. Your vision for the company will obviously influence theirs. They have to believe in your vision (the founders), that’s table stakes. The next step is encouraging them to think seriously about where they want to be in five years, then help them to believe that their vision can become reality.
I meet so many people who chuckle when they explain to me who they’ll be in five years.
Like they don’t actually believe it can happen. Or they give a generic answer like “I’ll be successful.” I’m here to tell you that whether it happens or not is entirely up to you! It’s also up to you to define what “success” is! Create a personal vision and then make it a reality, then you’ll understand the true joy it is to be an entrepreneur.
Love,
Ben
