How Do You Know When You Have The Right Team?
Louis de Rohan is one of the biggest success stories I’ve ever been a part of.
He built his PR agency into a million pound plus business that works entirely without him. Then recently he took an 8 months sabbatical to travel the world and fulfill loads of exciting dreams that have nothing to do with his business. What a star!
Before he left I asked him for a favour: Come and do a no-topics-off-limits Q&A session with 40 of my coaching clients so they can find out how you really did it.
I’m not sure he knew quite what he was getting himself into!
Forget the run of the mill questions you normally hear successful entrepreneurs answering on TV.
Here’s the kind of questions people asked:
“How did you handle giving away control of the business you spent 6 years building?”
“Honestly, what fears and worries held you back?”
“How did you decide who was right for your team vs who you needed to fire?”
So here’s the first of several videos exclusively from that Q&A session. Enjoy!
Transcript:
I think entrepreneurs never feel that they really have the right team because your vision is light-years ahead. You’re way down the track. It’s an ongoing quest to identify the right people for your team and I think as the business grows, certainly as ours has grown, the requirement of people we bring into the business changes. You can’t – unless you’ve grown a business and sold it, you can’t really know. You’re flying blind a little bit. It’s about faith and focus, and that’s what we’re doing.
I’m lucky to have Edwina, who’s my number two, and she’s outstanding. She’s the ying to my yang. I’m the creative; I’m the go-getter; I’m the visionaire. She’s managing the cash flow; she’s ensuring all of our deliverables or all of our campaigns are profitable.
[Audience member: How did you find her?]
Great question. Oh, my God, I – we had our backs against the wall, and it was just about the time of the recession. The recession had really kicked in. We lost two big clients, which we collected bad debt against – big lesson learned there – and I just called people. I just called contacts. It was, I’d say, a stroke of luck, but that person turned into a powerhouse in the business.
She’s the one who will essentially be running it while I’m gone. Again, one of the greatest things we have together is we have the same values as individuals, and we have the same belief in realizing the potential of a business and people on the team.
Her background was PR. Very interestingly, her father is an entrepreneur, so she was brought up with a can-do attitude. Yeah, I guess she was just focused on success and deserved success. You’ve got to graft, you’ve got to work hard. You’ve got to learn; you’ve got to grow as a person. We’re both committed to growing as people. If we think our business is going to grow without us growing, we will fail.
We actually, apart from this, do additional coaching, Edwina and I, which is pretty deep stuff. It’s about emotional states, and it’s about limiting beliefs, which Parag has obviously talked to you about this morning. We see that as an incredibly valuable opportunity to constantly change. Certainly come into these sessions and her and I working together, we would challenge each other constantly, and we embrace that in the business.
I guess that’s the great thing about it, too. When you’ve got the team, and you create a dynamic, and you co-agree that challenge is healthy and we’ll always maintain respect between individuals in the company, it is awesome. What you can see in terms of results is awesome because we don’t know individually everything, and other people’s point of view may lead us to a better solution.
