Plant Daddy Shawn

18 months ago, @epicgardening was a team of me + 4 contractors doing $7.3mm/yr at 30% net profit. Today, we're a team of 60+, acquired @botanicalseeds, and will do $30mm+ this year (profitably). I'm learning as much as I can, as fast as I can about this mind-bending role change from Creator ➡️ Creator CEO None of this should be considered "advice", more notes to myself that I hope you derive value from: Find and un-limit the right people Earlier this year, we purchased another gardening blog run by @incomejar - he'd grown his blog to rival our own blog's traffic in under a year. While this initially pissed me off, I had to tip my cap and recognize the truth: he was better than us at growing blog traffic. We struck a deal to acquire his blog, and I hired him as our Director of Editorial, responsible for all written content in the EG universe. Result? We'll be the #2-3 gardening site in the world this year, by organic traffic. @incomejar manages his department like a true pro, with an eye to the bigger picture of what we're building. More people != More progress When growing, you'd think throwing more people at business problems helps them get solved faster. I haven't found this to be true. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. It's more optimal to have less people with higher agency and more talent, then empower them to operate with a relatively high degree of freedom. Basically create a ton of "intrapreneurs." Beware "Advanced Stupidity" It's easy for "smart people" to theorize a business strategy that "should" work, or that "checks out" on a spreadsheet. Oftentimes, this is extrapolated from other industries and slapped onto your business model. The problem with is simple: if you build something GREAT, it doesn't conform to models. It's a reverse black swan event to the upside. As @mikebeckhamsm says, "Great marketing breaks spreadsheets" - so seems to be true for great companies. Perfect attribution is a pointless goal If someone invented a tool that could quantify customer attribution perfectly, it'd be one of the most valuable pieces of software on the planet...not for its commercial value, but because it'd be a perfect predictor of human behavior. The goal should actually be to FAIL at perfect attribution because your products spread so well organically that sales are impossible to perfectly attribute. A few years ago, I got an email from a long haul trucker who said he'd listened to our podcast for over a year on his drives and discussed it over CB radio with other truckers. They all started gardens on hteir off time...try to attribute THAT! Clarity begets action At a team size of four, communication was easy. As team size grows, so do the # of lines of communication. Giving clear directives, designating clear owners, and setting clear deadlines speeds up action. On a broader level, there seems to be no limit to the amount of times you can reinforce your mission, vision, and values as a company to your team. It helps every single time you do it. Purchased growth needs to be digested It's no secret we've acquired companies in order to bolster our growth - it's part of the strategy. While our smaller acquisitions (blog, seed tray company) were relatively simple to integrate, larger acquisitions take an incredible amount of time, energy, capital, and relationship building to properly digest. If you don't digest, your parent company gets indigestion which causes an overall efficiency and output drop across the entire organization. Culture regulates behavior I didn't really know how to define "company culture" for a while, but these days I see it as "the way we do things around here." As a founder, you get to set them as you build the company, but they evolve and morph as you add more people to the team - they should, otherwise you're ruling with an iron fist, which won't end well. Culture is a way to speed up decisionmaking, add guardrails to behavior, and guide action. It's a way to scale "correct action" in a company, and a competitive advantage if your culture > other cultures in your industry. More to come, have learned a LOT in the last 18mo!