Lisa
I’m Lisa Calhoun, General Partner at Valor Ventures. I’m really excited to welcome to the Atlanta Startup Podcast program today, Amy Zimmerman. Amy Zimmerman, welcome! So glad you’re here.
Amy Zimmerman
Thanks, Lisa. I appreciate you having me.
Lisa
Well, congratulations on your recent exit via Kabbage. That’s exciting!
Amy Zimmerman
Thank you so much. It was a lot of work and a lot of fun but we’re excited about the journey ahead for sure.
Lisa
I definitely think it’s a great jumping off point to talk about what it takes to build a winning team. A team that earns an incredible exit like Kathryn Petralia and Rob Frohwein, and the team that you work so hard with to build a Kabbage. Let’s talk a little bit about your background and your role because people who are listening or watching us are going to say, “Wait, that’s not Rob or Kathryn. Who’s Amy Zimmerman?” Let’s make sure they get a chance to learn more about you.
Amy Zimmerman
Awesome. Interestingly, I joined Rob and Kathryn as a consultant probably close to eleven years ago now when they’re literally [still on] pre seed. I started working with them when they got their first seed round. I got a call from Kathryn, who happened to have been a longtime friend. She and I worked together at the first startup that I ever worked at a small tech firm in Atlanta called Visionary Systems, who had a successful exit in, I want to say, it was 2004. We were acquired by TransUnion. Kathryn and I worked together then and kept in touch. She went on and did some really great things and ultimately landed with Rob and Marc Gorlin over at Roadie. They got their first round and they called me up and said, “Hey, we need you to help us hire our first architect. We need to build Kabbage.com.” I started consulting at the time after that exit and started with them with that first hire and many, many more after. I help them kind of envision what the org needs to be. Ultimately, I want to say it was about two years later, that I wound down my consulting firm and joined them full time and that was pretty much my last decade. We went from zero to 620 odd people in five locations, including India. We spun up an operation there and grew it to over 100 people. We just did some really, really, really neat things and ultimately, I think one of our huge credit for part of our biggest success was the incredible hiring we did. We had an amazing team and it started with the very first couple people, which I know that we’re going to focus on here today.
Lisa
That’s just what I hoped we could talk about, especially for the founders out there. When you’re trying to build an incredible company and specifically in FinTech or in technology in software, there are a lot of lessons learned by people the hard way. You’re one of those people.
Amy Zimmerman
No doubt lots of hard lessons.
Lisa
It’s painful. I definitely would like to hear from you, especially for our founders. What are some of the things you’ve learned about hiring? Let’s focus on the first ten to fifteen people just to start. What is it like hiring those first 10 to 15? What do you think the company’s focus should be?
Amy Zimmerman
Awesome. The first thing I always tell people, and honestly, I don’t know that the first ten to fifteen matter or the next multiple hundred. I think the first ten or fifteen are certainly, incredibly critical to get right. But hiring based on your values and if you’re a founder listening to this right now and you’re thinking, “Values? I haven’t even created those yet. I don’t know what my values are.” I would say it doesn’t have to be a formal process. Think about what you as a founder values because ultimately it’s your company and what we create from a values perspective for the company is likely going to be an offshoot of what you value as an individual. Really, really think about what you value because that is going to drive and inform the kind of people that you hire. You’ve got a lot of hard decisions, and ultimately, the company’s values are going to become a shared language. You want to hire people that really understand that language and are aligned. That’s one thing. I think a second thing is communicating clearly, and often. What winds up happening sometimes is people hire other people and they just assume that they know what you know as a founder and they don’t. It can become very frustrating. The truth is, it’s frustrating for everybody. You’re frustrated as a founder because you may not be getting what you need or what you expect or what you’d like, and the other person is frustrated because they can’t read your mind. They’re not clear on what you want or need. You might have hired based on a title or based on, you know, a perceived need. But as we all know, in those early stages, you’ve got a higher utility that can cover a lot of ground and wear a lot of hats. If you go too deep in a specialization, it can create a lot of frustration for everybody, including yourself. The third thing I would say, and this is more of a cautionary tale, is don’t just hire a friend because you know and trust them. It’s really difficult to fire friends and it’s really difficult to fire family. Sometimes things don’t work out even with the best of intentions. It doesn’t always work out and so you’ve got to hire somebody that you believe has the skills that you vetted very thoroughly to ensure that they’ve got the skills and the values that align with the way you operate. Things like urgency and things probably for a founder in those early days when everything is urgent. Hiring somebody who is used to having time, which as we all know, is not a founder’s friend, is probably not going to be an ideal fit early on. You’ve got to really be clear about what you need and take your time to find the right people, even when time is of the essence, and you’re in a hurry.
Lisa
Let’s unpack some of that a little bit and I’m going to go all the way back to the beginning when you talked about core values. I think one of the things that happens with founders is that they assume that their values are everyone’s values, because they’re their values. They are obvious and simple, right? An example of them, my value is transparency, and directness, honesty, being open to new ideas and urgency, that’s part of being transparent and direct. Those are my values, aren’t those everyone’s values? In an interview, it can be like, “Do you care a lot about transparency and getting things done quickly? And the other person is telling, “Yeah, of course. Right?” How do you pull out a founder’s values in a meaningful way so that it influences the interviewing process directionally?
Amy Zimmerman
It’s a great question. I realized probably not as intuitive as it might be for people like me who kind of live it. The truth is sometimes a sanity check, whether it’s a partner that the founder has, or whether it’s a business confidant, a coach, a trusted investor that they can lean on, but I think it’s easier to have this exercise done with more than one person for the founder to be able to talk about what their values are and to collaborate with somebody on trying to come up with what the right questions are. If you go at those questions directly, you’re leading the witness, so to speak, right? You’re telling the person what you want to hear and of course, they’re gonna say, “Oh, yeah, of course, I’m transparent and I act with a sense of urgency.” Maybe a question around urgency is, “I send you an email at 2pm on a Saturday, when can I expect to hear back from you?” It’s a real life scenario. If you’re a person who expects an immediate turnaround, because time is of the essence and you’re in the critical path of getting an MVP out the door or something like that. You might need somebody to say, “Yeah, I’m gonna respond within an hour. I check often.” Or somebody might say, “Listen, I’m a hard worker Monday through Friday, but I don’t check email on the weekends. You should know that.” Now, if you ask the question differently, “I need you to work all the time, seven days a week on weekends.” You might alienate everybody. You want to be careful about how you approach the subject but you should be clear on what your operating style is so that you can ask questions that give people the opportunity to actually answer objectively without you leading them to the answer that you want. Hopefully that makes sense.
Lisa
What I’m hearing here is that you like a behavioral interview process where you’re actually checking on the behaviors that they do and maybe you’re not even asking a question, you’re actually doing a prompt of some sort to see what you get back. But very behaviorally focused, rather than headspace. Like, “What do you think you’re like?” It’s like, we’ll find out what they’re actually like. Tell me a story about a time how they actually behave.
Amy Zimmerman
Absolutely. I think there’s probably a combination of both. Both of those are gray on both sides. I think learning who they are and what they value, and also how they behave is a good compliment. I think it tells the full story, rather than just getting one aspect of it. The other thing that I think is important, is multiple conversations. You can get a good gut for somebody in a 30 or 45 minute conversation, but a couple follow ups are really important. Right now, it’s difficult to do anything in person. I would say if time permits, having a drink or a coffee or lunch, or something like that is always helpful to really get to know somebody as well and in a way that’s not so formal. You’re not just firing questions away but you’re having a conversation. With everything going on, obviously, it’s difficult to do that but if you prioritize a couple different times, and you focus on different topics, so to speak, you can make it more casual. You can get to a place where you really understand their style in a way that a straight interview isn’t going to allow.
Lisa
Let’s get a sense of your rather incredible depth of experience on this. In your career in talent management, how many roles have you filled, would you take a guess at?
Amy Zimmerman
Oh, man, many thousand. The truth is we had 600+ at our peak at Kabbage, that doesn’t contemplate alumni and that’s just Kabbage. For six years prior to Kabbage, I consulted with 15+ companies and spent a lot of time on the front lines as a recruiter. With Visionary Systems prior to being acquired, I started as the recruiter there before I took over HR and ran the full department. So, many thousands of people hard to zero in on exactly how many.
Lisa
Let’s call it 2000, just give it a low, many thousands. Let’s assume that you’ve filled 2000 roles, it’s probably more but at some point, you can’t count that high. How many people do you think are looked at for each role? What is a thumb rule for yourself realizing that C level roles in some roles are much harder to fill than others. But still, just to give founders a thumb rule on how much talent you review in order to fill a role look like
Amy Zimmerman
It’s a great question. I think they should interview at least three to five and that’s conservative. That’s on the low side. I’m not a recruiter. I have other things I need to do with my time. If I spent time talking to ten people for each role, I’d have no time to do anything else. I realized that so I think prioritizing efficiency is really important. But comparing folks and getting a sense for what you can get quoted for the money, if you’re going to spend money and you’re going to invest, you ought to see what you can get. Admittedly, I’m a buyer, not a shopper. I don’t really do a ton of comparison. When I see what I want, I go for it. I think there’s lots of founders that probably have kind of a similar style as that. Even if you only talk to two because you’re really clear on the role, maybe on the roles that you’re not as clear on you talk to a couple more, the three to five. If you’re super clear and you’ve done that job before, you know exactly what success looks like. I’d still always look at a couple because there’s nuances that you’ll pick up, that’ll help inform that decision to make sure you’re making a good one.
Lisa
One of the things that at Valor where we’re really focused on is inclusion and building inclusive teams. Not only do we think that it’s morally the right thing to do, not only do we think that it’s practically the easy button in an environment like the southeast where we’re so blessed with lots of people of color and lots of professional women, but it’s also financially something we think is the most advantageous path forward. So many studies show double digit financial returns from inclusive teams. What do you think about building an inclusive team from the beginning?
Amy Zimmerman
I love it and truly it’s an act of intentionality. The path of least resistance is interviewing the candidates you get, right? A lot of times you get a bunch of candidates and depending on the kind of role, it might be a slate of candidates that are less inclusive. Tech, for example, is a challenge. It really is a challenge. In Kabbage, I think we did a phenomenal job on bringing in a diversity of race, religion and all the things that most of us anyway care about. But we didn’t do as good a job on the racial side of the tech team specifically. It wasn’t because we didn’t care about it and it wasn’t because we didn’t want to. We tried really hard. In fact, I would say in the last year and a half, it became a requirement of our recruiters that they present underrepresented minorities in every candidate slate for every role. Admittedly, it took a little longer to do because it was a very intentional process and sometimes they had to dig a little deeper. Sometimes they had to hit pipelines that were not the typical pipelines that they would go to but the creativity was important to us and it was something that we valued so we focused on it, but probably not as much. Ten or eleven years ago, when we started, we did it. We do have a female founder. There was an underrepresented, I would call it minority, in FinTech especially because it’s not as common in FinTech but on the racial side, we had to be really intentional, particularly on the tech hires. It’s your point where I agree, it’s super critical.
Lisa
The way the demographics are trending our whole economy and society and civilizations, US is a multiversity. Historically we’ve been a white dominated society and that’s also by the numbers. But now the demographic trends, one of the things that’s so fascinating to me is that if you’re 40 or younger in the US, you already live in a population that’s over 50% non white. If you’re building tools for the active part of our growing young, professional society, well then you need to be building tools with eyes that look like America. I think it’s been, to some extent, something that people have thought, “Oh, it’s nice to have.” I believe it’s a competitive must. I like your approach that we just required it. “We weren’t getting what we needed so we started requiring it and that changed our pipeline.” That’s a great takeaway. Is there anything else you’d want to add to that, about lessons learned hiring inclusively, especially for a startup? Let’s face it for all of us, usually the person that looks most easy to get is someone who looks like us. That’s just human. Going beyond two steps of change or one step of change, [do you] have any more thoughts around professionally doing that?
Amy Zimmerman
If you cast a wider net, I think it really goes back to that intentionality. If it’s something you care about, and it’s something you prioritize, it’s something that is within reach. Casting a wider net, there’s tons of organizations and especially in Atlanta. I was gonna say southeast but specifically in Atlanta. We’ve got an amazing culture of difference. It’s not hard. I imagine in other cities, there might be different challenges but in here, we’re super lucky. Also based on what work looks like in the future where many of us are going to be telecommuting probably for the foreseeable future, it means we maybe don’t have to look within our city. We can cast a wider net to other cities where cities have more diversity of talent and have all kinds of things. I think it’s just being open to it.
Lisa
When you’re interviewing your diverse pool of candidates for a position, and maybe you’re at that five, six or seven people, do you have any favorite interview questions, secret questions that help you decide who that person is, and kind of cut the wheat from the chaff early on in the process?
Amy Zimmerman
I always go to values specific. I know I almost sound like a broken record, but can’t go wrong. We had a slate of interview questions at Kabbage that we did to assess culture. People would say things like they weren’t a culture fit. Well, what does that mean? Well, they’re not somebody I’d want to necessarily have a beer with, right? I think that was, unfortunately, the vibe that I received. Anyway, when people say the person’s not a culture fit, I’d say, “Why? Help me understand what that looks like.” Unless I heard, “They don’t align with our values”, then I pressed really hard, I challenged, and I pushed back because culture fit needs to be about values. People need to fit within the company’s needs, in terms of what the goals are, what the KPIs are, what we’re trying to accomplish, and not whether there’s somebody I want to be a good friend of, or whether I want to go have a beer with, or whether there’s somebody that I can relate to, looks like me, shares my background in my history, and that sort of thing. The questions were really objective around values. Are they fit in that regard? One of our values at Kabbage was care deeply. We wanted to hire people that cared deeply about one another, not people who just tolerated one another. People who actually wanted to genuinely know who people were and what made them tick. We asked questions such as what are three positive traits that somebody close to you would say that you possessed? Not that you believe you possess, but what do people around you say? What are the three negatives? So it’s not just the positive, but if it was a younger person that was a new college grad, for example, what did your mom say? Or what would your dad say? Or a significant other or sibling or you know, something like that? What do you suck at? Because it’s easy to talk about all the things you’re great at, but tell me something that you suck at and something that you should be better at, right? Something within the world that you work in or live in not just, “I suck at basketball.”, “Well, did you ever play basketball?”, “No.” You know, okay, fine. It makes sense that you suck at that but let’s talk about something more impactful and direct. It really is about getting to whether the person is a fit. Skills match questions, completely independent of that. Once they got to kind of the final round, either I or a combination of myself and the founders did all of those interviews. When I say I interviewed or hired thousands of people, by the way, Rob and Kathryn were involved in many, many thousands of interviews as well, because all of the finalists went to some combination of the three of us.
Lisa
Fascinating. As a company scales and Kabbage is an enormous firm with 600 people, hundreds of people and different sizes, but a lot of times the people listening to our program are going to be, you know, hiring smaller numbers. When do you feel like delegating hiring becomes something that’s effective for the founding team, just based on your experience? And it sounds like, hiring wasn’t really delegated, it was more streamlined. What do you think about that because I know that every founder is always looking for the right process to get things done faster and more effectively?
Amy Zimmerman
I’ll tell you and I might be biased, but I think a really, really good recruiter early on is a huge investment. If the kind of business you’re building is going to be people intensive, it’s a really important investment because you don’t have the bandwidth and you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to allow somebody to do it that you trust implicitly. [Someone] that represents your values, represents your company, and understands what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Now, you can certainly outsource that but it’s really difficult if it’s not somebody who knows you and that you trust implicitly. Rob, Kathryn and Marc at the time trusted, knew and allowed me to run it, but they hired me and I was literally the friend, of course. I was a contractor early on, but they brought me in [plus] they had one intern. It was three of them and an intern, and they brought me in to go find people. Now, that doesn’t mean they weren’t involved in the interview process. The truth is they were involved throughout and continue to be involved. [The] final interviews go to a combination of them or when I was there, to me. I know a lot of companies that I work with now that aren’t involved. The founders aren’t involved in hiring decisions even now because they have a handful of people on the team, and they trust them. It’s great to trust. I’m not suggesting the founders shouldn’t be able to trust a key member of their team to make hiring decisions for their own team but when you’re thinking about building the culture and being intentional about the people you bring on, I think it’s an important exercise to have another perspective, or another couple perspectives. It’s not a huge investment in time. Our final interviews at Kabbage are 30 minutes. Some of them were even quicker because it was so obvious the person was great that you didn’t even need the full 30 minutes. We did that at the first hire and we did that on the 625th hire. It was something that absolutely scaled, despite lots of people saying there’s no way this process scales. It’s just a matter of what you as a founder prioritizes.
Lisa
To boil it up, based on your experience, you’re a huge fan of hiring and on-staff recruiting talent to help with talent management, and not so much a fan of outsourcing it in because that person doesn’t necessarily know the founding team at a values-level as well.
Amy Zimmerman
Generally, yes. By the way, the recruiter can be a contractor, right? I would say bring them on. You can do an hourly type of engagement where it’s less expensive and there’s less of a liability from an expense perspective to having somebody. Somebody that is literally a representation and an extension of you and what you value, and how you operate.
Lisa
I was just gonna say a lot of recruiters charge a percentage of first year salary and sometimes all kinds of schemas come up for founders. It can be really hard, especially for new founders, to think through all the different models that are coming their way from the recruiting population. Could you boil up what you think is effective, or what you see is fair in the market today?
Amy Zimmerman
You can get a strong recruiter on a contract basis if you need to start on a contract basis for a reasonable hourly rate. They’re going to charge probably a little more per hour than their hourly rate would be if they were salaried and they were actually on your payroll, because they’re not going to have benefits, they’re going to pay their own taxes, etc. but you can do it. In fact, that was the business that I ran prior to my joining Kabbage. I did that for upwards of twenty clients over time and had any number of roles flying for multiple clients at the same time. I built an hourly rate and it was a model that worked really well for the company and for me because I got paid for every hour that I worked so I wasn’t getting a giant fee at the end. There wasn’t also the risk of what if they don’t hire my candidates and I invested 50 hours in the search, and it was all for nothing. There’s less risk for me because I get paid for every hour so I feel good about the work and there’s less risk for the company because they’re only paying essentially it wound up being probably 5% or less on the fee, all things considered, than it would have been otherwise. A lot of the agencies in town, and I don’t mean to knock my friends that work at agencies, but for a new company and a new founder, a 20% or 25% fee is expensive.
Lisa
Yeah, that can really add up especially if you’re hiring a C suite and the rank underneath them when the C suite comes on and they want to hire the rest. At 15 to 20%, it adds up as you say, very, very quietly, even if you have venture backing in the Atlanta market. I know that a number of recruiters as well as talent management specialists, people like yourself that work a little bit higher level than recruiting, what is the range of rates in Atlanta that you’ve seen effective in the last couple of years?
Amy Zimmerman
I think you can get somebody pretty good as low as $60 an hour and I’ve seen them go as high as $110 or so an hour. I’ve not seen executive search though on an hourly basis like that. That’s usually kind of rank and file like your engineer hiring, accounting, marketing, customer service and etc. The other thing is, I have guided some clients on how to get around trying to build a pipeline. In fact, I had a conversation yesterday with a client who is a head of SDRs at their company, and she was complaining that she can’t upgrade talent because she can’t hire fast enough. She needs butts in the seats so mediocrity is better than nothing and I was like, “Oh, you’re killing me. No, that’s not good. Your CEO is not going to be happy to hear that message.” What I said to her was 25% of your job has got to be recruiting and if it’s not, you need to reprioritize your workload because you cannot accept mediocrity. Your founding team would be very unhappy to hear that. They want to know that you’re constantly top grading. If people aren’t, from a sales perspective, meeting quotas, be reasonable, right? Don’t just fire people haphazardly. That’s not a fair way to treat people either. If there’s no surprises- I’m a broken record of no surprises, how you treat people, and you’re continuously communicating- and it’s clear where somebody’s falling short, you’ve got to do better. Leveraging LinkedIn, leveraging your networks, leveraging Glassdoor, and there’s free sites like Indeed for you to constantly refresh job posts and be active building your brand. It will create a network that will fuel your pipeline and it’s not a huge investment. I realized Kabbage was a bigger company but part of what we built over time created an amazing employer brand. It created an environment where when we interviewed people, almost 100% of the people wanted the job and that was our goal. That was a very intentional decision. I said to the recruiters, “It’s your job to make sure that these candidates have the best experience of their life. We want the decision on whether they join us or not to be ours, not theirs. Let’s make sure that they really understand what we’re about and what the opportunity is so that we can make that decision.” We wound up hiring less than 1% of our applicant pool. We had very few recruiters on staff. A fraction of what most Atlanta based tech companies that are growing rapidly have. Why? Because we invested in our brand. When founders up front are investing in their brand, getting the community and the population of potential employees excited about who they are, what they’re about, and what they can expect, if they come to work at the company, the recruiting expenses will be a fraction of what they’d be otherwise.
Lisa
When you’re constantly upgrading your team, one of the things that happens is you’re kind of constantly letting people go and letting them know that there’s not necessarily a fit for them. I want to talk about firing people. It’s a subject that I always encourage my founders in the portfolio to actually have to become great at this. This is a muscle. It’s a muscle that’s really hard to develop. It’s always painful. I think most founders, including myself, if there’s a need to let someone go, you blame yourself first because you brought them on to the team and now it feels like you’re letting them down by having to let them go. What are some of the lessons you’ve learned about how to let people go?
Amy Zimmerman
You’re right it is a muscle. The more you do it, the more comfortable you become. I don’t want to say the easier it is because you never want to take for granted that impacting somebody’s life in a way that’s hard is an easy thing for you or an easier decision you took lightly. I think empathy is absolutely the most critical element or emotion to have when you’re letting somebody go. Treating them the way you treated them as an employee is critical. We treated current and former employees and candidates for that matter at Kabbage. All the same. Why? Because it was a core value. Part of what we committed to and our shared language was caring deeply. It didn’t stop when you stopped working for us. It was as critical, a part of who we were and what we valued, as it was when somebody was employed. Treating people with respect and being decent to them. It’s not standard practice to pay somebody when you let them go unless you’re laying them off. The concept of severance is about a layoff. Separation pay is a less common concept and not something everybody does but I would challenge that if you expect an employee to give you two weeks notice when they’re leaving, you should be just as generous. [Give them] two weeks notice so you’re not putting somebody on the street without even so much as a warning that their income is going to end. It is the human thing to do, right? I think that’s the first thing. Second, people should never be surprised. If you fire somebody and they are genuinely blindsided, you really did fail them. It is imperative that people understand where they’re falling short and that they’re given the opportunity to step up because the truth is people aren’t mind readers in many cases. If the expectations aren’t clear, it’s not fair to expect that they know exactly what you want. Being clear, being concise, being transparent, being direct, having regular, continuous communication is really important. A lot of people will say they didn’t expect it because on that particular day, they maybe didn’t expect it. Few people wake up in the morning thinking, “Well, today’s the day that I get fired.” But if people are being honest with themselves and their manager or the founder had regular conversations about areas where they just weren’t happy and where it just wasn’t working out, [the person would say], “I’m bummed it didn’t work out, but it really wasn’t a good fit. But they were generous on my way out. They were empathetic in their delivery. They gave me a couple weeks to figure things out and get on my feet and that’s all I can ask.”
Lisa
How many people have you had the opportunity to assist with offboarding, Amy?
Amy Zimmerman
Probably not the same many, many thousands of people that I hired but I’d be surprised if it weren’t a thousand people. It’s certainly many hundred and unfortunately, a couple of reductions, which are bigger, obviously. The truth is at Kabbage, we let a lot of people go. We created a concept called success criteria. Basically what that was was we defined what success looked like at Kabbage from a traits and characteristics perspective. We informed our hiring process or interview process with the success criteria so that it was clear to us. We know what works at Kabbage and we generally know what doesn’t so let’s be really clear about that in our hiring process. The other thing we did was we shared that with folks during onboarding. We’re really transparent about the people that do wildly well in this environment are people that possess these traits and characteristics. If it’s not something that’s natural for you, it’s something you probably ought to learn.
Lisa
Let me just interrupt you right there. Give me some examples, and they don’t necessarily have to be Kabbages examples, but success criteria is a bit of a code. You know what it means and you probably invented it. But for those who haven’t worked in talent management, let’s throw out four or five examples of success criteria so that founders get an idea about the kind of communication you’re talking about.
Amy Zimmerman
That’s great. Said very simply, everybody has somebody on the team that they want to clone. I have heard probably a hundred times from founders, if I could only clone X, so and so, fill in the blank, I would have the most amazing, successful team. We would be so productive. We’d be so fast, the code would be beautiful, the user experience would be amazing, and all of that. You basically take those people and you take the traits and characteristics, and you basically codify them, right? It’s somebody who has a fire in their belly and they just are unstoppable. They’re constantly curious and they don’t take no for an answer. They see roadblocks as an opportunity, not an obstacle. You think about the kind of people that absolutely helped you take your business to the next level and then you create success criteria around their traits and characteristics and you hire more people who have them.
Lisa
A lot of those are culturally mediated and as companies grow and are trying to be inclusive, things like fire in their belly, that’s a code within a culture. It’s a pretty big culture but nonetheless, it’s not too different from saying, “I’d like to have a beer with them.” I think this is where founders can really hone in their ability to be exceptional operators by knowing how to tease out the behaviors inherent in the actions they like. Can you think of a couple of examples where you translate something like “constantly curious” into the behaviors that actually show their team that they are constantly curious? Because the fact is if we come from very different backgrounds, you may be top 5% curious in your environment. But your environment is different from mine, I never got the opportunity to observe you being curious.
Amy Zimmerman
Right. It doesn’t necessarily translate and I think it translates differently based on, like you said, style and personality. I’ve heard recently a founder say to me, “I’ve got more problems than I have problem solvers. How do I solve that?” Right? It’s about hiring people who aren’t traditional. People that are traditional take, and that comes in all forms, shapes, sizes, cultures, etc. but if you’re somebody who needs a lot of structure, a lot of process, and a lot of direction, you might go really deep in a specific area. You may be a great hire when I have two hundred people, but when I only have ten people, I can’t afford somebody who needs a lot of structure, a lot of process, and a lot of direction. I need somebody who is able to kind of take liberties, has good judgment, and isn’t afraid that there’s a wall in front of them because they’ve got the tools to cut out the holes that they need to get to the other side. It’s about finding people who understand what the challenges are and aren’t afraid to power through, even when they don’t necessarily have the resources, the tools, or the process created for them already.
Lisa
I think we can all relate from the startup world to those types of people. They are highly valuable, generally very well paid, and quite a bit at the time have an opportunity to earn equity because they’re solving problems. Those problems have big numbers associated with them. You gave a couple examples of success criteria for just that persona we were talking about, the kind of natural problem solver that assumes they can jump over the wall and they don’t ask permission.
Amy Zimmerman
In different environments, it looks differently. I don’t know how comfortable you are with me using a four letter word that starts with S. That is maybe not a word that the public school system would allow but Kabbage, one of our success criteria was get shit done.
Lisa
There you go. It’s very direct.
Amy Zimmerman
Very direct. There’s not a lot of guessing there but it was very clear. We had sentences under it that described what that looked like so people understood very directly what we expected from somebody within that element of success criteria. Again, to your point, it’s different in every company. There’s certain industries that may be speed and urgency is less pronounced. I can’t think of an example of one, but I’m sure they exist. There might be other things that are more important in different industries and different businesses. I think the success criteria is similar to values where I think there’s overlap and a lot of companies in terms of how they operate and what they value. They say it differently based on the style and personality of the founder of the founding team.
Lisa
How have you learned to give feedback relative to, of course, the values but the success criteria. I think that another common shortcoming is that the founder grasps it mentally. Mentally, they’re generally faster graspers than the rest of the population anyway. The routine of putting that into practice on a pattern sort of gets lost in the shuffle of going for that next big KPI or that next fundraise. What would you advise founders in their first couple of years of scale building towards their first 50-100 people on how do you give efficient feedback on the success metrics? So there’s no surprise if the fit isn’t what you hoped it would be.
Amy Zimmerman
I think it’s actually easier to be totally honest. I think rather than going in, it’s more personal to somebody to give constructive feedback on specific behaviors or examples of behaviors that the person demonstrates. But when they tie it back to the success criteria, they make it more objective, and they make it more about, “This is what success looks like in this environment and the reason this is how we defined our success criteria is because the results of these types of behaviors, got us our MVP or got us to $5 million in whatever the metric is for our company.” It makes it less personal and more objective to actually tie it back to a success criteria. Now, early on, a lot of times, companies or founders don’t really understand what that’s about, and they haven’t really codified that. The conversations are more personal and they’re because they’re more personal, they’re a little more difficult. My challenge to every founder out there is nobody wants to work in a role where they aren’t succeeding. Everybody wants to feel good about their contributions and they want to feel good about successes. They want to be able to celebrate what they’re doing. If that’s not happening, you don’t only owe it to yourself, to the future, the success of your own business, to the investors, and everybody that’s affiliated, but you owe it to that employee. It’s a commitment that you should make, even if it’s a silent commitment that you’ve made to yourself. “This person’s future and this person’s growth depends on how I lead.” If you commit to being a strong leader and that means sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes you could be the most amazing leader and it’s just not a fit for whatever reason. If you keep that in mind, and you’re direct, and you commit to that, that the outcome is going to be the outcome. Sometimes we can control it, sometimes we can’t. But what we can control is how we behave within that set of circumstances. If you commit to being empathetic, being open, being transparent and being direct, you’ll be better off for it and so will that person even though it feels like a hard conversation.
Lisa
I love that. So much of life is you can’t control the outcome. Founders may think they can. Sometimes I like to think I can. But the truth is, the outcome is not really up to us but we can control how we show up, the process, and put some real thought around how we do the things we can control and that was really a lot of wisdom right there, Amy. Founders who are listening to this are going to think, “Wow. I wish I could have her consult me.” And the nice thing is, the chances are, perhaps they can. Can you share a little bit about how to contact you in your current consulting business where you’re really advising founders on their talent management challenges?
Amy Zimmerman
Absolutely. I appreciate the opportunity. In fact, and I would say, it’s interesting. I used to use the word contractor and kind of fractional interchangeably. Recently I’ve shifted because I was talking to a founder who wanted to bring me on to help him and his team grow and he said, “But are you a consultant? Are you a contractor? Are you fractional? Help me understand what this looks like.” And I was like, “You know what I keep using the word interchangeably so I understand why it’s confusing, but I’m fractional. I am in it. I am your partner in this. I’m not just giving you advice and then writing off on my horse and not helping actually execute.” I’m basically acting as a Fractional Chief People Officer to help founders and help founding teams, grow their businesses, grow their talent, create infrastructure, build values, build success criteria, and figure out what performance development looks like. It’s different for every company. There’s not like a one size fits all cookie cutter type of solution that I’m just trying to push on everybody. I really dig in and understand the business and what their goals are and that’s how I focus.
Lisa
How would they contact you?
Amy Zimmerman
Yes, the company’s name is PeopleCo. I’ve got a website. It’s peopleco.io. Of course, I’m on LinkedIn. My email address very simply is amyzim@gmail.com. So easy.
Lisa
Awesome. Before I let you go, I always ask everyone who comes on the program, who are two to three people in Atlanta that every Atlanta founder should know? Based on your own experience and what they’ve meant to you, I’d love to hear who you feel that your founders should really reach out to should put on their must know list.
Amy Zimmerman
I love that. I’d have to think about actual people but I’ll tell you more broadly. I think the couple of people that every founder should know is every founder should have a trusted coach. I serve in that capacity for quite a few both in my fractional work as well as my advisory work. I’m an advisor to a couple different startups as well so that looks different based on what the engagement is but everybody needs a sanity check. Whether it’s me or whether it’s somebody else, and it doesn’t even have to be somebody in my role. It can be an investor or it could be a best friend that they just trust and knows them and has their best interests in mind. I think everybody needs a trusted coach. I think every founder needs a strong communications person. That might be kind of weird and not traditional but what I’ve learned from the partner that I’ve chosen at PeopleCo is that you can have the best ideas and if you don’t have somebody who knows how to articulate the story, it’s completely lost in translation. Having a really strong communications person that can take your talking points, your content, your half baked ideas, and actually create an eloquent story and build a deck that tells the story, whether it’s for investors or whether it’s for customers, or for employees that you’re trying to recruit. It’s critical for all constituents. The third person that I think every founder needs to know are investors and other people that they can network with and get coaching from. Not just like a confidant but how do I hire and like operators, right? How do I get my hiring message out? I have a marketing problem, I don’t have the bandwidth, or the need, or the money at this point to hire a senior marketer. How do I get access to a marketer? I think those networks are absolutely critical, especially early on, when you don’t know as many people and you probably feel a little more alone.
Lisa
Those are three really important lenses that a founder can really only- founders are great at everything- but they can only focus on one or two things at a time. A lot of times founders do become their own glass ceiling. That’s the nature of the role. But those are three really Important lenses, so I appreciate you sharing that. Are there any shoutouts any people you wanted to share in the Atlanta community that you think are really worth founders focusing on?
Amy Zimmerman
Oh, man. I feel like if I say some names and then I forget others that I’m gonna wind up in more trouble than if I just don’t say, anybody. But I do think there are a ton of really incredibly talented people. As I was mentioning, with the different types of people that I think everybody should know, I think it takes a village. If you’re a founder, don’t try and brave it alone. I think if you surround yourself with people that can help make you and your idea even better, you’re going to be better for it. If it means having to share a little equity in the process, I think your outcome will be significantly better than trying to do it alone. I refer people all the time so if someone needs somebody specifically, they’re welcome to reach out to me. I’ve got quite a network of people that I can refer to and I love doing that.
Lisa
Well, thanks so much for being on the program, Amy. This has been the most provocative conversation.
Amy Zimmerman
Thanks, Lisa. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Lisa
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