Can you believe that we're close to reaching 100 Moz employees? We can't, either!
It's easy to get excited about new people, new products, and new adventures. But while scaling your business, you have to remember to scale your culture alongside. A big part of having the right culture is having the right people to carry it forward.
This week, Rand discuss how SEOmoz has handled our incredible growth without sacrificing our culture. We'll also talk about making the choice to maintain what you've built over focusing on building new features.
How does your company maintain its culture? Leave your thoughts and questions in the comments below!
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. I wanted to do something a little different for Whiteboard Friday because the company is kind of changing. I'm changing a little bit. The things that we've done and accomplished are very different to what we focused on in the past. I still love talking about SEO tactics and social media marketing tactics and content marketing and email, and all these inbound marketing stuff.
But I also wanted to give you some sense of kind of what's been going on here. We have grown in the last only 7 months from about 50 Mozzers on the team to 100 people. We're going to be probably hiring our 100th person either as you watch this or in the week or two following that. We're up at 92 as I record this, which is prior to my trip to Ireland.
So this number is kind of crazy to me. When I started the company, there were three of us. It was me and Matt Inman, who's now the Oatmeal guy, and Jillian, my mom. The three of us would sort of sit in the office and try and figure out what could we do, and for four years, we didn't really have a whole lot more team members. I think Matt joined in like year one or two of that, and then a few years later we had four or five people.
But it's been a strange and crazy journey. A lot of it is self-analysis and self-reflection, trying to figure out, "What did I do right? What did I do wrong? What's going well? What's not going well?"
So, I figured I'd share some of the things, particularly in the last seven months, as we've kind of had this very exciting time of scaling up the company and taking funding from Brad and Foundry Group and having them on the team. Growing the team dramatically, doing our first acquisition, doing some interesting sorts of top-grading additions to the team. Adding in new managers in places, and growing almost a layer of management that we've never really had before, because teams are getting huge, and 18 people can't report just to Jamie. So this interesting time has brought a few lessons that I want to talk about.
So one is that productivity and features can win short term, and a lot of the time when you're building a company, I know I was like this, I mentored some TechStars companies and talked to a lot of early stage startups, and they have this thing too. They think that the accomplishments I need to make are all inside the product, that the product and the features are really what's going to build and sell the company, and it's true. I agree with that to some degree, but that's a short-term kind of win.
What I mean when I say that is that that will not necessarily attract great people to your company. You will not necessarily build a long-term, repeatable, scalable business model. It will not necessarily build up a culture that can hold up to challenges that you almost certainly face as you grow and scale. What will do that are culture and people.
So what I've sort of seen here is that when we have tough challenges and when we've gone through times like everything is broken, customers are very angry and upset, we did something wrong in the community, we're getting a lot of criticism for a blog post that I wrote, or we were getting sued for something that Sarah put on the blog, this was years and years ago. All these types of challenges, we can't raise funding. We went through these two rounds in '09 and 2011 where we couldn't raise any money, the thing that has gotten us through those really tough times has not been, "Oh, well the product is really good. Open Site Explorer is a really good product, or SEOmoz Pro is a really good product." Those things certainly help and they keep customers with us, and they're good things to focus on.
But for me and for a lot of the executive team, what's been the challenge has been focusing on these two things - culture and people. Let me give you a perfect, perfect example of this.
So, we had a really crappy outage with Mozscape, with our web crawl, just this problem where it was going to be, I think, a week and a half, two weeks late. This was earlier this year. It turned into being quite late, and it was just really bad. Like you promise customers, right on the calendar it says, "Hey, Mozscape will update this day." Then two weeks later it's like, "Where the hell is that index? What's going on?"
In any case, so I was emailing with the exec team, and I'm sort of like,
"Hey, we have poured money and resources. We've hired the best people we could possibly find who've done all sorts of amazing things in their career. We're throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month at Amazon building up more instances. We're running simultaneous indices. What's going wrong? Why can't we solve this problem? What's going wrong here?"Our CTO, Anthony, replied with, "Hey, let's talk about this in depth."
Anthony and I talked about it. I talked to Carr and some of the other team members who are on the big data team. One of the interesting things that I found digging into the problem was that someone on the team had written some code for deployment that kind of failed, and it really borked us, like badly, just really hurt us. What Anthony said that was fascinating was,
"It's okay. Not only is it okay, we're going to work with this guy and we'll get better."But the beautiful thing that I realized, I was so upset when I had sent that email, and then the beautiful thing that I realized is that we had the culture and the people right, because no one on that team threw that guy under the bus. No one. Think about that. Right? Someone is causing insane, massive amounts of pain to your customers, and no one on the team is going like, "Hey, you know what? This is this guy's fault. He broke this. He f***ed this up."
Well, man, like . . . oh, I probably shouldn't swear on Whiteboard Friday. I'm sorry about that. When you see that happening in your company, when you see that recovery from challenges, that team spirit, that nobody gets thrown under the bus, this isn't one person's fault, this is, "Hey, we're all on the team together," you know you have the right thing right and you can fix this.
The Mozscape update will come out. It'll be okay. Customers will be angry. Some of them will quit, but they'll come back. We'll build the product up better. Six months from now it'll be great. A year from now it'll be the best thing on the Internet. It's okay. If the culture is in the right place, this happens.
Another great example of this, we had a very big launch that was planned for November of this year of 2012, and it got pushed to probably March or April or something of next year. It's super frustrating, right? It's like,
"Oh, my God. We've been waiting for this for so long, and it's such a big project," da, da, da. "We really want to get it out the door, but we have to wait these extra four or five months." Just a killer, and yet, Adam, who is our Chief Product Officer, and Anthony, our CTO, Anthony noted that in any other company he's ever been at and most companies in the world, they would be fighting with each other to show whose fault it was, whose team was responsible for that.But there was none of that at all. There wasn't even a tiny bit of that. It's that getting the culture and people right first, and then focusing on that stuff. This will come over time with great people and great culture. So, that's an exciting thing but a hard thing to realize.
The second thing I want to talk about, so at some point, sustaining what you've built, keeping consistency, keeping quality up, all that kind of stuff, actually is more important than building all the new features. At some point, people will go, "Hey, I am joining SEOmoz Pro," or, "I'm joining Survey Monkey," or, "I'm joining Unbounce," whatever that product they're subscribing to, "because I love the service. I love it as it is. I know you want to add new features. I know you want to make it better. But I like this product."
Therefore, keeping that product stable and up and reliable and consistent, and spending a lot of engineering time and effort and tech ops' time and effort, and product time and effort, marketing time and effort, customer service time and effort on making that solid, actually becomes more valuable to the business than adding the new features, which is what everybody gets excited about in startup land.
So you sort of have that startup scale point, and then right about here is you've acquired customers, you've got thousands of people on your platform, and they're relying on you. New features becomes a great way to keep growing and expanding, but you've got to have a solid product.
A few weeks ago, when you're watching this, hopefully it's a few weeks ago, our ranking stuff was out, our AdWords data was gone - that might not even be back yet - Open Site Explorer was having problems, the API was having problems, like just everything. Followerwonk was like, "Okay, that's working." But just so many things were broken in our product, and there were just engineers scrambling, staying up until 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning.
You're getting emails from people on the all-staff alias, that are like,
"Hey, I won't make it in until noon, because last night was just hell for me." Man, I mean, these are really, really tough times and tough challenges. But it's a realization that we can't have 90% of the team working on all the new features and 10% of the team trying to sustain everything else. It's got to flip. It's got to be at least a half and half balance, maybe even more towards sustaining. I think that's going to happen here at Moz, and I might recommend it for other companies too.The third thing, one of the challenges we've been experiencing with people internally is that . . . I'm sure you have this in your career too. I'm sure you get this problem. You're an SEO or you're an inbound marketer, social media marketer, community manager, you're a content marketer, blogger, whatever you are inside your organization, and you think, "Well, how do I grow my role in the company? How do I become more important to this company and a more valuable asset to them, and grow my title and my salary?"
That progress is so important to people. Especially in sort of first-world economies, white collar industries, that kind of stuff, seeing that progress is incredibly important. If you make it such that managing people appears to be the only way to scale up your career, you're going to fail.
This is one of the things that Google got so right. If you're Google and you're an engineer, there's this whole different track for non-manager, non-
product engineers to grow up. I can't remember exactly what it is, but I think it's engineer, senior engineer, distinguished engineer, and then Google fellow or something like that. It's very hard to achieve those top levels.I think Matt Cutts, who many of you might know because he's the head of the Webspam team, I believe he's either a distinguished engineer or a Google fellow. I think he might be a fellow at this point, and it's a big, big deal. It's very hard to reach those top levels. Obviously, lots of salary and stock and recognition comes with that.
That's a wonderful, wonderful thing because what you don't want to do is you don't want to encourage an engineer or a customer service person or a marketer or a fantastic designer or a great product person to only have the path of success be management. It shouldn't be that way. Management is a very different kind of discipline. It requires a lot of empathy and therapy and those types of things. Being a fantastic engineer, designer, tech ops person, doesn't necessarily correlated with that.
Two of my, like three actually of my absolute role models at this company are people who have held management positions, and then after working with their manager said, "You know what? I don't think this is the right role for me." They've actually stepped down into individual contributor roles, but stayed here.
One of the people who did that years ago was Jeff Pollard, who was our CTO right after we got funding, after Matt Inman left in 2007. He was our CTO until 2009, when we hired Kate Matsudaira. But he came to me in '08. I remember sitting back in our old office above the brewery. He pulls me out of the office, and we're just chatting literally in the hallway because there's no private office space.
He's like, "Rand, I think what this team needs and the degree of technology and engineering that we need to get to, I'm not the guy to lead this team. I think we need to go out and we need to find someone." We did. We had an exhaustive, long search. But think about the humility and the empathy and the just amazing wonderfulness in the person of Jeff, who unfortunately left now. He's at Disqus down in San Francisco, and we wish him the best. But to be able to step down from that role, and then to work here for another two and a half years under Kate's leadership, to kind of grow his own skills, it just takes amazing self-recognition.
The last point I wanted to talk about, this challenge of single points of failure. So as your company gets bigger, your startup gets bigger, you find that, hey, we have that one person working on X project and then they leave. They get sick. They want to work on something else. Their skill set doesn't meet the demands of scale that are reaching up there, and they need some time off. They burnt out. Whatever it is, those single points of failure, people points of failure, technology points of failure, they'll fail.
If there's anything I can promise you in startup life, it's not death and taxes. You'll probably live, and your taxes will probably be low because you're not making very much money as a startup usually. But you will have all your single points of failure fail. I promise. It sucks. It's hard. We've had it so many times. Sometimes you don't even know how many single points of failure you have. So you have to be planning and knowing that all this kind of stuff is going to happen.
Two things on this, number one, the obvious one is that you have to build redundancy. I don't just mean redundancy in terms of like, hey, now we have two people who know how this works, or now we have three people. But, "Hey, what if our hosting here in Seattle fails? Can we have some backup system, something that it goes to? Can we have an error message that is empathetic and smart, and directs people to the right place, and all those things ready to go?" So instead of, "Oh, we didn't even know this could fail, and now we have no error message for it."
So - excuse me - our customers . . . that's me drinking carbonated beverages. I'm going to do some branding for Coke Zero apparently.
All these kinds of things just will build up, and if you can have those redundancy points, it will help you to absorb some of that. You should plan for failures in all of those areas. It's something that we've been kind of obsessed with lately.
But it's one of those things, like in a startup, you just always have the,
"Oh, my God, this thing is really painful. Well, but we have these 20 other things that are super painful. Okay, we have to deal with 17 of those before we can get to this one. Oh, my God. It just got so painful, it's moved up to number four and now it's number one."That's just how it goes, right? You're constantly plugging holes in the dinghy, while you're trying to build a battleship around it.
The second thing that I would say is that you have to have almost like a happiness that is not tied to just how your product's doing. Or just how your customer service is doing or just how your marketing is doing, right?
I mean marketers have this all the time right? Where we build something, we're like "oh man, this post is really good, this video's really good, this campaign's really good and I'm going to launch it . . . Awww, it just died." Y'know it got like four retweets, a couple Facebook posts, nothing. What'd I do wrong? What is this?If your fundamental internal happiness is tied to how you perform on those projects, startup life is going to be very depressing for you. And you are going to burnout, I promise. But if you can tie it to something bigger, particularly if you can tie it to like, the longer term success so you can say "Where were we six months ago? Where were we six months before that? Am I better off? Is our traffic doing better? Are our metrics going better? Are we getting better at customer acquisition? Is my position in the company better? Are we better off as a culture?" All those kinds of things. And then you go "Wow. We have made a ton of progress" and these little failures that happen day to day won't destroy you. That's what you need, you need that kind of resolve. That redundancy in people and on specific items in the startup, customer facing items. But you also need the redundancy in your own happiness.I don't know what you guys thought of this Whiteboard Friday. Honestly, I mean this is very different for me, I haven't tried this before. But please, let me know with the thumbs, let me know with the comments. If you want to see more tactical SEO stuff I can stick to that. I'm happy to do this format maybe once every few months too. I really look forward to seeing you.If you do like this, I've got a blog where I write much more about this stuff at moz.com/rand so you can check that out, too.Alright everyone, take care! We'll see you next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Thanks for bringing up the old lawsuit Rand! That's not a sore subject at all. ;) Ha!
It's a hilarious subject! :-)
Hi Rand,
Just watched your WBF and I think this one is (for me) probably one of your best ones I've seen from over the years of watching you and your teams videos.
We are a small team of what 16/17 people in Scotland working in the software industry but we're growing and growing quick. We now have an great wee office in Houston and cover loads and loads of clients all over the world, from clients in Seattle to New Zealand, Alaska you name it, all great but no doubt will be bloddy tasking in the years to come.
So we are evolving and developing all the time and your talk today I feel provides really great insights into the trappings and tribulations that can befall any organisation as it plans to grow and I commend your sincerity on how MANY challenges can impact your business, culture and staff.
PS Great company, great team and keep the knowledge you bestow on us coming !!!
PPS Please don't swear Rand, children might be watching and my flat screen I have just found out is not resistant to a mouthful of coffee spray!!
Best
David
Yeah - sorry about that. Will be more careful in the future. Thrilled you enjoyed the video!
Had to register just to post and say thank you about this post.
So here it is "Thank you rand about this post". I'm also one of those folks in startup and this post gave alot of tips keeping everything together and planning the "Future releases" abit further if it gets abit tough. The community and working enviroment is one of those things that we don't really have that much in my country but this post encourages to build up some. Even if not in the same business but the same area and work together to bring better SEO services for all the folks.
Great Whiteboard Friday Rand. I especially liked two points you made. First the point you made about culture an people. This is so very true. I have worked in companies of both flavors. One company culture that was completely siloed and spent nearly all of its energy blaming other departments, and another that has a great team environment (despite some managers who try to get in the way of that!). Needless to say, the first is failing and the second id growing.
The other great point you made was about redundancy. This can apply to so many things in a business, people, resources, supply chain. We recently launched a niche business based on a product that, at the time, had one manufacturer. It is an edible product. That's scary. What if the factory goes down? What if the health department shuts them down. Then what? Fortunately, recently, another company began manufacturing an identical product. Now, if one plant goes down, we at least have an alternative.
Thanks for a great post. I've been a fan of Whiteboard Fridays for years!
Dana
LOVE this, Rand. Yeah it's not the typical actionable marketing stuff, but I think these are all things that we all think about and need to be thinking about. I love your point about having multiple ways to level up within a company, as management isn't for everything. This is something that we talk about internally at Distilled all the time.
Your point about having multiple points of failure, and that they will all fail, is great. It's sobering to be sure, but it's an important one. Sure, it may feel like the end of world (or it may just be annoying for a while), but the good ones push through, apologise, and keep pushing forward.
So thanks. This was awesome.
Rand cussing!? He's a saint! LOL. Rand, I really enjoyed this WBF. Regarding the question 'If we would like to see more of this stuff', I sure would. But I don't know if WBF would be the optimal place to do it because many people visiting this blog are probably only looking for SEO information. We business owners (and aspiring business owners) would LOVE to hear about your road blocks & lessons learned. It may help us out while we grow our own companies.
I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs, but how high he bounces when he hits bottom. -George Patton
First of all, congratulations on your growth. Definitely not a typical whiteboard Friday but that's good sometimes.
For me, I enjoy this type of corporate culture post. I read the Zappos book and study the insanely good customer service businesses - LL Bean, Trader Joe's, Nordstrom. Even companies like Google and Apple are obviously doing something right when they can recruit some of the best of their industry.
It's the same with some pro sports teams. People *want* to go there. Here in Australia, we have an AFL team that players regularly take less money than they can get elsewhere just to stay on the team. Once you have the secret, just don't lose that advantage.
I think Moz seems like the place to be for those who want to do anything similar to what you're doing. You get to help your colleagues do their jobs more efficiently and proficiently, as well as promoting the overall good of the industry.
Congrats on the success. I can't wait to see where you go in the future!
Rand, I love, love, LOVE you!
Seriously though, good intelligent post. I'm in an MBA program right now and I learned more about good management from your video than I have from any of my books. Please make this a recurring topic!
And I was just kidding about loving you. I really just love you for your WBF’s.
Whooaaa Rand dropping an F-bomb on WBF lol. Loved this edition and it is a really interesting look at how it is to be in charge of a company that has grown so well. I feel, as a complete outsider, that it is easy to tell that you have kept the culture that you envisioned intact. All of us enjoy thoroughly the job you are doing and the service you are providing. Also, this WBF was on my 27th birthday and I realized that is why I missed it
Rand -- Great video! I'd certainly love to hear more of these.
In fact, I'd like to hear more about the early days. We're a team of two, working virtually with a handful of contractors, and are looking to make the jump to an office with a few full-time staff. Growing from there seems logical, but we're not sure how to best make that jump.
This video gave me some great insight into how to take our business from year 5 forward, but we're at year 2 now and would love some additional insight from the early days.
You can get a glimpse here, on Moz's very first YouTube Channel (2007-2008) ;-)
That's where it all began! Even when I didn't know about internet marketing I had heard of SEOMoz but had no clue who you guys were :P
"But you also need the redundancy in your own happiness." I love that statement, Rand. Thank you.
Rand, I'm the guy who complains the loudest when stuff doesn't work on here. I'm the guy who refuses to act like a SeoMoz fanboy and kiss your backside every time you post a blog or speak online.
So, when I tell you that this was my favourite WBF, please believe it. Truly inspiring. I got the feeling that you needed to say this at least as much for your own sake as for ours. Frankly, I think your talents are wasted in the SEO industry.
As someone who is always quick to jump on your back when stuff goes wrong, let me - just this one time - give you a big pat on the back. Just don't expect me to make it a habit :)
Nice work
Danny
Thanks Danny - and thanks for giving us a tough time, too, when we deserve it. It's good to stay on your toes, and not think that goodwill and the hope of working software will get us through.
Rand, your comments on the management path issue that a lot of business have is dead on! Management is not for everyone and it ask for specific skills that not everybody want to perfect. It sad me to see that so much business and even employees see managing other people as the only career path. :-/
Great addition in WBF, i am always waiting for the WBF when friday comes. I have seen this video and it is really nice i think one of your best WBF. You have shared your journey it is realy great to know for me. I have always appriciate SEO tatcics and new startgies from you, but i need more stuff about Social media tactics like you have given about SEO.
Great WBF!
Can I just ask - What camera and video platform do you guys use to get such great quality video? I am trying to do webinars for some of my clients and cant get near the HD quality you get.
Thanks!
This Whiteboard Friday from Nick Sayers should give you all the info you need to solve the problem :)
Hi Rand,
I know it's Tuesday and this was published Friday, but to maintain a work-life balance here we had Monday off as Friday was our crazy month-end time!
There's a real marked change in the Rand who makes these presentations and it's a Rand I can relate to, at last. We've been in business around 4 years and we've had those points of failure fail, but looking back we've grown a huge amount in the last year - and to remind ourselves that is really important. Thanks for sharing your start-up points and various other features.
It would be good to have this sort of presentation periodically. Do you know why? Because it enables me to see your bigger picture - as great as SEO tactics are - without the bigger Moz picture, without an appreciation of you as a business, without the understanding that you know what small business is like, even when you've outgrown the title, without all that, simple SEO presentations become just a library of information - another resource.
We stay with Moz no only because the software meets our aims, but because of the Company that backs it. SEOmoz is a company who sent me a get-well gifts by international mail when I fell ill with internal bleeding and stomach ulcers - that's a company of culture, of care and one that does not exist purely for profit. That's a company I can work with. That's a company when everything goes pear-shaped says that's the case and does its best to fix it.
I'm not perfect, we don't live in a perfect world so I don't expect perfection. You guys work hard and I for one, appreciate that. Keep your culture as you continue to grow and we look forward to continuing to work with you as well.
Thanks again :-)
Very Interesting post, I enjoyed reading a lot but still I got little confusion on few points. Well I am sure I am going to make it clear. Thanks for sharing this wonderful post.
Great insight on how culture ultimately drives a team through difficult product and scaling challenges. Thanks for sharing, Rand!
Such a great WBF! It is hard to not get caught up in the excitement of building bigger and better but you made a great point about ensuring that you have the basics mastered before continuing! It's also refreshing to hear that management is not the only key to career growth - nor should it be. Very interesting! I look forward to the next one!
Great video, Rand! I love your comment on the path to progress. I run a company that used to have 25 employees and have made the mistake of promoting salesmen to managers. Long story short- it was a big mistake. Props to you for building such a large company (a great one at that), and don't worry about the swearing. As long as you don't do it in Utah, you should be good. Haha.
Chris Kilbourn
Great video Rand! Just to note that I see everyone has ignored @
Markus Allen
comments........but you know, I really think he has some good points here and sharing experiences in the community! How to grow a business?....if I knew 5 years ago what I know today yadayadayada!
Cheers
Virginia
Awesome. As someone at a similarly sized company that has about 20 people reporting up through them, I can totally relate to everything you mentioned. As for the effort split between producing new and maintaining current features, it's been my experience that the stable, repeatable, and reliable ones are what you become known for and have an easy time selling over and over again. They become your business. Usually, for the better.
I'll also add that someone with way more smarts and experience building companies reminds me frequently that there's a difference between going from $0 to $10 million and going from $10 million to $50 million. It sounds like you all are in the middle of that second push and I'm super eager to continue reading about it as it happens.
Keep it up,
Phil
One of the best White board Friday ever. In one word "AWESOME".
Great stuff ! These are the sorts of things I love to read, honest and helpful. Thanks !
I loved this WBF so much. I honestly cannot think of a place in this industry I'd rather work. If I lived on the west coast that's what I'd be shooting for! I particularly loved the part about management not being the focal point of success. Rand, I've always found your humility and transparency refreshing.
Read the transcript (mobile). Will watch the video later. Does Jamie really have a team of 18 now? Way to go Jamie!
I got a lot out of this wbf. Thanks (and let's hope to avoid single points of failure for a while!)
I LOVE the point about "management cannot be the only path to progress." I worked in a company where to advance and earn more, I had to move into management. I was okay at it, I certainly TRIED very hard....but ultimately....I did NOT enjoy having ~10 people report to me on a daily/weekly basis.
What I learned? To maintain a strong culture and excellent people, you need to give them a variety of ways to better themselves, that they're AWARE of (this is key,) that do not involve moving into management. Even in a 20 employee company there MUST be multiple paths - that's an important aspect of building a culture that encourages excellence and retains employees.
I also 100% believe that Executive Management needs to think of their management team as a department that MUST be taken care of, rewarded, helped, challenged, and nurtured, just like the departments that report to each manager. A lot of company owners and executives pile tasks on middle managers with little to no reward for being a super-effective "cat herder" and little to no credit for the millions of ways these skills keep the company running smoothly.
I really enjoyed this edition and the explanations you gave around your commitment to culture and people, it's something a lot of companies need to pay close attention to :)
Nice that you get so emotional about it. (Emotional in the positive sense)
:-)
Agreed. It's always a pleasure to see someone speak about something they really care for.
More like these please Rand!
I'm going through a bit of a start-up phase at the moment with my first 2 employees starting last week at our new office. Having worked in corporate & agency environments, I've found that people & culture are paramount in so many ways. After all, people spend a third of their lives at work & become part of the extended family.
One of my goals is to continuously ensure that the environment created is enabling & one that I'd be happy to work in myself in any given role. Promoting everyone as contributors rather than managers is something I'll be focusing on too. Everything will be very lean to eliminate as much waste as possible. The office is open (without walls) so there is no need for meetings - we can just collaborate on the fly.
So far we have a couple of golf clubs, a basketball ring, pizza Fridays & free fruit. Due to the time dif here in Australia we might have to do a weekly belated screening of Whiteboard Friday on Mondays :)
Also, I didn't realise the Oatmeal guy was an original mozzer - that's cool
Thanks for the insights! Very useful :)
Great whiteboard, Rand. The transparency and team effort culture should be the goal for any company.
Congratulations Rand you seem to be a great person and I have followed your work for many years now. You are passionate about your work so don’t pay attention to negative comments. You have decided what your path and your company’s path will be so keep moving forward and don’t look back. Best wishes for all the upcoming years.
a precious sharing of experience: thanks Rand :-)
Great video Rand. Thanks for sharing your insight. It's definitely interesting to hear how the "No negativity" helps and how everybody else understands and interprets it. Kudos to you and the entire Moz team.
Lol, so good its emotional
First off, thanks for your talk at Hackers and Founders yesterday- great stuff. I've just started down the A/B testing rabbit hole and have also been thinking a lot about how to get more feedback from potential customers, so I found the topics and tactics you covered super relevant and helpful.
The Whiteboard Friday, though, was really fascinating to read (I'm in a public place and forgot headphones!). I work at a start-up that's raised over $35M and grown from 150ish to over 200 in the 7 months I've been there, so the challenges of scaling are something I've thought about a lot - particularly as it relates to culture and changes in individual responsibilities. I found it really throught-provoking and inspiring to read your reflections on the topic as someone with a much different (read: much more executive) role within a growing start-up.
Anyway, I just want thank you, because I'm going in for my first review tomorrow, and your insights about growth and culture at SEOMoz have helped me better consider the big picture both in terms of what makes sense from the company's perspective and what's most important to me about working there.
Great job, I can relate to several things you've said and really agree with the importance of the culture of the company. Fortunately like you, we have a culture that is fun and easy-going, but also includes a lot of smart people that can get the job done when it's hard. Thanks for sharing.
Just wanted to add to the positive comments of this whiteboard friday. I'm working for a company very early in the start up life, that has scaled massively and hopefully will start learning some of these lessons.
Thanks.
Just an awesome WhiteBoard Friday!
Really good to get a couple of insights into such a model online business. Thanks so much Rand for this.Businesses always hit that failure button along the road, whether it's revenue generation, customer dissatisfaction or even the desirable growth strains (where the business is growing too fast for the culture). Everybody can get through it and if you are struggling, there are a million amazing people on these blogs and the forums who are more than willing to help! Just ask.
Also, I have just bought 10 cases of Coke Zero to be just like you, ha ha ha.
Once every couple of months for these types of videos is a vote from me *thumbs*
Your personal brand, your thoughts on deeper issues, followed by highly useful tools is the #1 reason why I subscribe. Certainly your other team members and the mozzer community is absolutely invaluable as a subscriber, *but* mechanics change constantly. Big issue, like culture, etc, defining what is ethical and what our imperatives are -- THAT is the soul of business. As a marketing leader for small tech companies, "SEO tactics" is usually not the real "problem." And why you addressing these is of value to me. Because honestly, these are the real problems I face as a marketing leader within the organizations where I work.
This past year's SEOmoz Conference topics were similar to your post here and why I will be first in line next year. Mechanics and tidbits are good, but I'm here for the meal! Outstanding job, Rand. Thank you!
I know this is a bit late, but I've had this bookmarked to watch for awhile! Loved this, Rand. Very informative and insightful, and I love the personal feel and getting the inside story on your team's journey. I think it helps as a brand, humanizing SEOmoz even more (not that you need it, of course!) and it's a great resource. Thanks for it!
Rand, this is perfect. The startup I'm a part of is in the middle of moving to our first set of offices and leaving the basement (fingers crossed!) and adding new staff. You managed to distill a lot of the conversations that we've been having about growth and how best to move forward, and I'm passing this along to our CEO. Love you guys and love your tool, keep up the great work!
Don't often feel moved to comment on WBF's as I'm not sire I'll add value, but as the owner of a small business, this really helps give a sense of perspective and some really interesting ideas - love the idea you talked about Google and Engineers - rather than going into management - having an alternative path to Distinguished Engineers and Google Fellows. V interesting, thanks.
Inspirational WBF Rand - thanks for sharing.
I run a small company and your 4th point about emotional "happy" redundancy is bang on the mark and very insightful. With so many elements to consider, unless we remind ourselves of the "why", it can be a bit like a roller coaster. One of the most important things we ever did was to write up a "Business Values" list that we aspire to every day. We also have a mission statement that reminds us daily of why we exist.
Our operation has been going for just over 4 years and the SEOMoz story has been such a motivation - knowing the challenges you faced when starting your business and the intense financial pressure you and yours went through, proves that with a dream, passion and an endless pit of determination, others can aim to achieve similar success.
And it was your original trial offer of $1 when I first started out that got me in - what a bargain... I've been hooked ever since. Keep up the fantastic work!
PS Loved the swear slip up - shows you care and that you're real ;)
Rand,
Love the post and whiteboard Friday. Because we have followed your advise, used SEOMoz, and are in this digital space, I'm confident in saying that most of us are growing with the industry, and facing these challenges. Very timely for our own agency as we've hired a new employee and are closing more leads.
Mike
I loved this WBF. Company culture is one of my all-time favorite things, and it's great to be reminded how amazing SEOmoz's culture is.
Rand,Loved the post! I shared it with my development team. I found synergies between our team's journey and your experiences. Thank you!
Rand,
I have to ask, is the "not throwing under the bus" employee thing observed across the whole corp? I have seen many a developer "saved" [which most of the time is 'male' when they make a mistake and other finance, customer service and marketing people thrown under the bus.
Mary Kay
Rand, It's really great the SEOmoz is growing to be a large and prosperous company. Keep it the amazing work.
Absolutely awesome video! Normally I might not be as thrilled about this type of topic, but today I am. I will share with you why.
Yesterday me and my business partner met with our FIRST EVER potential client! It was pretty cool thinking that we have come that far in building a business.
On the way to the meeting we were both pretty excited but not sure how this was going to go. Well shortly after we started the meeting we both new it was not going as planned or hoped! lol! We lost control of the conversation very quickly.(side note: this client was a bit of a bigger fish for us, at least mentality wise! In my opinion). To make a long story short, we had a completely different idea of this meeting than the client did, and we tanked! We were both pretty embarrassed when we walked out. You know you did bad when you had planned for an hour, and walked out 15 minutes after you started!
Well, we talked about what went wrong, and how we could fix it, and with a little time we will fix the issues. It was a hard hard lesson to learn but I suppose it was bound to happen and needed to happen, so that we can improve our business in a way we didn't pay much attention to.
This post was a bit of a pick me up if you will, that I desperately needed. Thank you so much Rand for this. Couldn't have come at a better time!
Such a great video Rand! This is why so many people want to join the Moz team. The culture is strong, open, and free.
It's nice to see that consistency is becoming such a large focus. Sure, it's great to keep shipping, but at some point you need to build something with lasting value and I think you have. And you're right, that lasting value is going to need people to maintain it.
I work for a department with many of the same pieces you've spoken of here. We have the developers who are always chasing new technology and building new things and we have others who are content to produce a lot of our maintenance releases and perform testing. Some people love to always be working on something new and others love to improve existing products. We also have a managerial path as well as a technical path for team members to progress on in their career growth.
It's good to hear you've been considering all of this; it's a sign that you have built a team that knows what they are doing and that will continue to succeed in the future.
Edit: Some feedback here - we've been having paragraph spacing issues with commenting on the blog that we don't see in the Q&A.
Been there done that :)
For me keeping the spirits up in spite of failures was the hardest thing and the most important thing.
As for redudancy: Redudant Offsite Backups :)
Really emotional, inspiring and overall great WBF.
Hi Rand. First of all congratulation on your Dublin Summit last Friday. I was there (flew there from Italy) and I have really enjoyed your choosetallwomen presentation opening the path to explaining biases. Very well done. This WBF has been unusual but all the same inspiring too. Thanks again.
Thanks for a great video! Our company has doubled in the past 2 years and we are getting ready for another jump within the next 8-12 months. We struggle with company culture, which is something I am passionate about maintaining. I appreciate the messages about the people over-riding the products, because products can be fixed. Keep these types of Whiteboard Fridays coming!
Great stuff Rand, impressive development!
Cheers / Niklas
Fantastic video Rand, and congrats on your companies growth. I work in an SEO company who has grown significantly this year as well at around the same pace. It's a great feeling.
As a fan of the Whiteboard Friday videos please feel free to do more like this one. It's great to see how a company is progressing and how they're solving problems along the way. It can help inspire other companies, especially start ups!
I particularly enjoyed hearing your issues around redundancy because like you I feel it's an important point that needs addressing. There have been a few times when I wished my own hosting had redundancy but paying for it out of my own pocket doesn't make it feasible for my own sites. If it were company sites and the funds were available I would almost definitely have redundancy in place. Even during outages I do admire the transparency of your explanations and you don't promise anything you can't uphold. More companies should take this approach!
I look forward to hearing news on your new hybrid cloud and dedicated hosting set up for the Moz services. Perhaps you could do a Whiteboard Friday video around that when it's ready for prime time?
Keep up the good work guys, and good luck with present and future projects.
Definitely a good idea! We write about that a bit on our devblog today: https://devblog.seomoz.org/ but a WB Friday on the private cloud infrastructure we build could be really cool, too.
First of all, even with sounding a little bit spamish, I must say that this is just a great video. Although it answers so many questions that the average start-up doesn't commonly care about, figuring things out even before an idea, a product, takes on towards success, is just great.
What you comprised into this video is, in a way, a guide to gradual growth accompanied by sound decisions and hints. Anyway, me sounding spamish again.
My point being, sometimes even a blog, a single product, needs consolidation of ideas and expertise, and such a thing is hard to manage even on the small scale, say handful of team members. We are having a blog and an idea of expanding into both the app market as well as trying to add some more demanding features to it. I cannot imagine how things can be managed in order to achieve just that. It puzzles me to say the least. Though it is challenging to the point of becoming addictive.
Congrats on the success so far, and please keep posting videos like this one. There are many start-ups in the Moz community who I believe will greatly appreciate such advises. I know I do. A lot.
Thank you Rand for another great WBF, insightful, and inspiring.
Truly inspiring. Thanks!
Rand... you asked for honest feedback - here we go.
And to quote your favorite comedic hero:
"I mean, it's like the movie 'Rocky.' All right. The president in this case is Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed is -- everything else in the world. It's the tenth round. He's bloodied. His corner man, Mick, who in this case I guess would be the vice president, he's yelling, "Cut me, Dick, cut me!," and every time he falls everyone says, "Stay down! Stay down!" Does he stay down? No. Like Rocky, he gets back up, and in the end he -- actually, he loses in the first movie."
Watching today's WBF was painful. Your body language (and edit) tells me you didn't enjoy taping this like many other WBFs you do so well.
This brought back bad memories:
Over a decade ago, my mentor gave me HORRIBLE advice - at least for me. He told me to build a business bigger than myself.
I get the impression you're following the same path. And there's no turning back.
Yes, I built my postcard mailing business from scratch from the bowels of my parent's basement - ultimately into 3,000+ square feet of flex space...
... And yes, in my final year I generated almost a million dollars in revenue. Holy smokes that's still hard for me to grasp.
But when I factored in overhead and employees and taxes and insurance and alarm systems and consultants and postage and advertising and donations and profit sharing and on and on - the business ultimately went bankrupt (twice actually).
Each and every month, I had to generate a gross profit of $22,500.00 just to meet payroll and pay the overhead. That $22,500.00 a month did not include paying me... and it didn't include the cost of goods sold, either.
This was during a period of time when business was a cinch to come by (compared to these days).
Yes, software is WAY more profitable a business. It's true. But when you grow, expenses grow as a bigger percentage of revenues. And when you get funding, everyone thinks it's your "responsibility" to up the ante.
Being the "team" guy and not paying myself was a BIG mistake. And it wrecked my family life. I'm still paying for this mistake today, as I'm still paying off personal loans. I know you can relate Rand as you've been transparent about this many times.
The worst part is I was way ahead of the curve back then... offering revenue sharing (not profit sharing)... surprise meals out - I even sponsored a soccer team because my "team" (staff who played in a league) couldn't afford soccer jerseys.
But in the end, all of these benefits worked against me... I actually had some of the "team" using the company gas card to fill their own cars. And behind my back, my "team" was talking crap about me. And on my honeymoon (when I barely took 2 days off), the "team" was goofing off instead of running the business better than I could do so myself.
Ah, the Great American Dream... because you have to be asleep to believe it.
I took radical steps since then. I work from home. I am the business. And my overhead is barely a blip...
... Because today monthly expenses are "dreamy" - VPS hosting at $90 monthly and $30 monthly for my email robot account. That is it. Heck, I don't even have a printer anymore. If I need to send a fax (remember those), I hit the general store and pay a buck - happens maybe once a year.
It's literally impossible for me to ever go into debt again (unless I do something stupid and add expenses and/or overhead).
Needless to say, my stress level is nonexistent compared to a decade ago. I work a few hours a day (max). Because I don't have to scramble every minute of the day worrying about begging prospects to become customers. I can't tell you how amazing this is.
But the best part is I'm nimble...
... For example, I ate at my second office (the Park City Diner in Lancaster, PA) and created a sort of side business over lunch. I'm interviewing the SEM industry's top "thought leaders" and asking them all the same 39 questions - condensed into an hour...
... I searched for questions at Quora and Yahoo! Answers and quickly wrote down the most-common-questions asked about SEO.
I then sent an email to my first interviewee (Ryan Healy - this dude is sharp as a tack). He replied back to me in 53 minutes and agreed to be interviewed. About 90 minutes later we recorded a 66-minute audio.
If today wasn't Friday, I would have soft launched the product today. Instead, I'll launch early next week.
The bottom line is growing a business bigger than yourself sounds fantastic on paper. But from my personal hell (and from your video today), I suspect it's taking a toll on you, too.
I'm guessing you're spending WAY too much time on things you hate to do (like hiring and fixing broken systems) and less time on the stuff you love to do (like blogging and speaking about new SEM stuff).
As a creative person, it's repugnant for me to worry about profiting. It gets in the way of doing the things I love to do... much like you Rand I enjoy helping people mixed with this cool thing called the Internet.
We have a lot in common.
Personally, this video helped me erase from my brain a bad inspiration... because for a fleeting moment, I thought about visiting Sand Hill Road to take my business to the next level. I've canceled that trip.
Markus - appreciate your perspective and story. I think our beliefs and desires about what we want from life are very different from one another (which isn't a bad thing - good to have diversity). I love the challenges, I love the growth, and I don't mind the overhead or responsibility at all. As I said in this post - https://moz.com/rand/ipos-acquisitions-and-the-long-term-for-moz/ - we want to build a big, public company in Seattle, and hopefully help create a lot of wealth that can go back to the community.
If I seemed uncomfortable in the video, I suspect that's the format (which is new for me) and not anything to do with where we're at or where we're going.
BTW - glad to hear you're happy with where you've arrived. That's a great thing - to know what you want and what you don't, and to have the right one.
I do appreciate your growth and like your success story. You know what's good about this whiteboard friday Rand? I'm an seo manager in a abig online travel agency (on french market). I have been reading seomoz blog posts for years now and never had the idea to interfere in discussion; after i saw this vid and read Markus Allen story, i do love to participate and tell you : YES, i'm with you Rand !!! I do support you a,d i do believe in what you believe: Growth, Growth and Growth. Play Big and you will get bigger. It's internet guys, and limit is sky!
You give me this kind of feeling that i would like to take my place with you in SEO moz. If you think of hiring a freelancer from abroad, i'll be happy to be the number 100.
Congratulations again
Great video Rand... company culture and the people you work with are so important.
Everyone deserves to work somewhere that makes them smile as they get to the office/factory/school/etc!
Cheers,Simon
Hi Rand,Excellent WBF. I think every company strives to create a culture like this and it's great to see someone actually doing it and succeeding. I think you are reinforcing what many business owners are already thinking, and letting us know that it is indeed possible.
The 'Points of Failure' segment was also very good. It's important that everyone understands that bad stuff will sometimes happen and you can't let it get to you. Fix it and move on...
Echoing David, thanks for a WBF that I found to be one of my favorites so far!
Jim
This amazing video.
Rand, I think you hit every fan of Moz bang on in this WBF. Reading through most of these comments, it's clear that everyone agrees this video is both educational as it is inspirational. In most cases, it is not how badly you make mistakes while feeling growth pains, it is how you respond to them that determines the success of your company when in start up. Even during technical blackouts SEOMoz has seen, there is still reassurance that your team is working day and night, but also there is another side of the business that keeps not only myself, but everyone coming back. Education. We all know SEO is an industry that is always changing, and Moz provides both the tools and knowledge to stay ahead of the game.
Congrats Rand on your 100 employees, and to the entire team at SEOMoz. Keep up the amazing work.
I honestly enjoyed hearing a little about how things have grown for you guys at SEOmoz. For me, its inspirational to read about your growth from a small 3-person team to what's now a 100 player operation! Our company has this same sort of startup, my boss started on his own, then brought me on board about a year ago, and now we just signed our 3rd member!
And I can totally understand how tying yourself to the direct success of your projects will take its toll and burn you out. I do SEO because I enjoy how it feels bringing success to our clients. But what we tell them all the time is that things may or may not work, but the one thing you can believe we'll do for you is never give up and always push the bar to do better than the day before.
I usually tune into WBF for tips on how to improve myself as an SEO, but I'm glad you talked a little bit about your company instead. I feel like I found a new end goal that I can share with my co-workers, giving us a new energy and flow in the office.
Thanks!
Lovely WBF so far.. specially because found new side of Rand, and found him very kind-hearted ! all the best Rand for the future.. :)
Easily the best WBF I've watched. Tactical is great, but this sort of transparency and insight into startup growth is undeniably captivating. Well put, through and through.
Rand congrats on the success, you do have a great product and usually customers don't even think about the "behind the scenes", about all the hard work and all the people behind each new product or update. So I totally agree that "culture and people" are 2 out of the most important things for a company and are often to be the difference between a failing company and a profitable company and between a profitable company and an awesome-very-profitable company!
When you said: "We have grown in the last only 7 months from about 50 Mozzers on the team to 100 people." I was hoping to hear a bit more about the process, such a big change can't be easy for anyone in the company - from the last of your employees who had to switch desks 3 times and all the way up to the CEO and CFO who now have to make sure that those "extra" 50 salaries are actually worth it.I was also hoping to hear more about how did and still do the team leaders deal with it, what kind of things did you change in the company's culture or structure.. I'm sure you've hired or promoted new team leaders, that's a big thing - new people that are now managing other new people!
And regarding this -> "18 people can't report just to Jamie" - well.. in my company we had this too. So those 18 people, to how many can they report in your opinion?
And another thumb up!
Thank you for the WBF, Rand. I love the SEO videos, but I must admit, the odd business focused post is incredibly useful and interesting. I find that when it comes to SEOs, a large number of SEOs are trying to run their own businesses and/or building applications, yet there is so little information out there on running and scaling an SEO company. I've started running my own company, which has a strong focus on SEO, things are going really well, but I can't figure out how to move away from the home office and scale upwards in a manner that is financially safe, for example.
PS. LOL @ SWEARING!
Great Post! I especially loved the reference to the importance of having a strong career progression path for expert technicians. Really good stuff, very timely and helpful, thanks!
Love It Rand. Awesome insight. Love the culture you guys are inspiring the rest of us to create.
Thanks Rand! Fascinating stuff. I'm in a much smaller startup at this point, but I really liked your point about keeping your eye on the big picture, the long term vision. That definitely does get you through the hard work of day-to-day startup life. These broader business insights are great, so yes, I'd love to see more.
Very well spoken, It was a WBF that I didn't need to take notes, Thanks
Your thoughts of creating a good culture is great. I work for a family owned business and it grows every year. And we all work together as family and friends
Thanks again
I've been watching whiteboard Fridays for 7 months since finding the site and as good as many of them have been, this was one of the best. Sure, it wasn't SEO oriented, but very insightful about good business practices and culture. Many of us who work heavily in SEO work in different companies as an employee, do private consulting, or even create our own companies that will have good culture. Having things explained through your experiences was great. Thank you for doing so! I thought this particular whiteboard post was so good, I just had to finally sign up and post a comment to let you know.
LOVE this. The last point you make has been my biggest lesson over the last few years. By nature, startups are a total rollercoaster ride. Ben Horowitz talks about the "WFIO moments" that are a natural part of the startup lifecycle ("we're f***ed, it's over") and it's way too easy to get sucked into both the highs and the lows. About two years in, I made it a point to stop focusing on the point-in-time situation (performance of campaigns, competitive activities, etc.) and instead started focusing on the trends. It made me a lot happier and also led to better decision-making for the company.
Rand,Thank you for this weeks WBF. I found this weeks video extremely insightful! My 5 favorite points you shared, that I feel can help any start up business are as follows.
1 internal division can destroy a company as much as anything else2. Sustaining current products is just as important as adding new one's3. Being placed in a management role is not the only way to level up in a company.4. Avoid major issues by having solutions for problems before the problem is there.5. Base the success on a long term scale not on a per project basis.
Again thanks for the great insight into the lessons you learned in growing a successful company, I found this very insightful and would love to see a few more of these.
I loved this WBF. My guess is that a lot of people in the SEOmoz community have their own company or deal with the issues you discuss in this video.
For me it was especially interesting because besides online marketing, I ‘am specialized in entrepreneurship.