Category Archives: iorios

Aug 16

What has been your most disappointing moment?

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I think there are a lot of ways to answer this question…disappointment in myself? in others? in relation to my business? and so forth.

For the purposes of today’s daily thought question, I’m going to answer it in terms of my most disappointing moment as an entrepreneurial leader (as that is the context the question was originally asked to me).

So here it goes…

I remember my most disappointing moment as an entrepreneur like it was yesterday (because it also doubles as most difficult & emotionally challenging).  My most disappointing moment as an entrepreneur was firing the first “long term” employee for which I had high hopes for.  This particular team member had been with our company for over a year & was on track to run our newest gelateria & become our first non-family member partner.

Think about it..this is like deciding who to marry.  Big decision.  Really important person in your life, right?!

I was at a wedding when I got the call.  It was Labor Day weekend, 2011.  When I received reports of the wrongdoing of one of my team members I was shaking with all sorts of emotion – anger, frustration, disbelief, confusion, guilt, disappointment, and beyond.  As much as I wanted to talk myself out of it, I knew the fire needed to happen.  It was agreed upon by our leadership team.  When someone violates rules that are very clearly laid out & agreed upon, there’s no excuses.  Allowing slippage in rule breaking creates a poison that will ultimately kill a company.  And I didn’t want that.  Driving back from the wedding to the store was such a difficult drive.  I rehearsed my planned script the entire way.  I was shaking.  I got the chills.  I couldn’t feel my legs.  I felt sick to my stomach.  I didn’t want to do this.  I knew I had to though.

Why was this disappointing?

  1. I let my team down.  Not only did I put my team in a potentially dangerous situation, but I felt like I let them down as a leader.  I invested a lot of time, energy, & resources into shaping a future leader only to set us back.
  2. I let my customers down.  Customers knew this individual by name & even still asked about the person after the fact.  Letting them know that the person was no longer apart of the business wasn’t a fun story to tell.
  3. I let myself down.  I let my judgment down.  I was disappointed in myself for not recognizing the character of the person before it came to this.  I felt like I should’ve been able to predict this & thus prevent it before happening.  I was also disappointed in myself for not being a better leader…perhaps something I could have done (or not done) could have prevented this.

Fortunately I learned a lot from this experience.  A lot about myself.  People.  Hiring.  Firing.  Leading.  What to do.  What not to do.  Hindsight is 20/20 after all.

What has been your most disappointing moment?

Venture on,

mel, the venture gal

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Mar 22

ES569: People and Culture featuring Serial Entrepreneur Josh Pokempner

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Tuesday night’s class focused on People & Culture, the most important part of any organization (in my opinion).  Our guest speaker was Josh Pokempner, serial entrepreneur & founder of several successful companies.  Below are some of my raw notes for that night’s discussion with Josh:

  • Business is trying to control circumstances so intended results happen.  my response:  life is trying to control circumstances to intended results happen.
  • we can’t control how well a product does, but we can control our corporate culture.
  • how to create that great culture?
    • servant leadership
      • rich person = someone so in love with what they do, so much they can’t wait to get out of bed to do it. can’t wait for alarm to go off so you can get out of bed. my response: what is it that i can’t wait for? what is it that makes me wish my alarm will go off?!
    • create & practice a shared mission, vision & values
    • “5 ways of being”
  • book recommendation: “Man’s Search for Meaning” – achieve happiness by dedicating yourself to someone or something.
  • “there’s a soul to a company” – JP
  • “In this business you have to be comfortable with bumpy flights” – JP on the life of an entrepreneur

After Josh shared his stories & wisdom, students asked some thought provoking questions.  Some that were especially thought provoking for me include:

  • How do you balance sharing information with your company & sharing information that scares people? (for instance, the company is low on cash, & you don’t want to scare people into thinking they’ll be cut)
    • Josh recommended “Just tell them”
    • In my own experiences an open book culture is a powerful way to get the team to take ownership & better know how they can impact the success of the business.  People cannot act in the best interests of the company when they don’t know what those interests are.  Being honest & open beats little to no transparency.  Be authentic. Don’t unpleasantly surprise your team & they won’t unpleasantly surprise you
  • For companies early on, low on resources, how do you build a fun team environment?
    • My thoughts: So you don’t have cash to take your entire team to Cedar Point, how do you still incorporate fun team activities (if that’s part of your culture)…do it within your means.  You don’t have to spend a ton of money (or any at all) to build culture through activities.  Going to a park & playing frisbee will cost you the price of the frisbee.  At Iorio’s we do team bonding activities when times are flush & when times are less cash rich.  It doesn’t matter.  Be creative & find a way to make it work.
  • How did you find the people you hired?
    • Josh brought in people he had worked with before.
    • If you don’t have that luxury & you’re starting for the first time, or you need to hire more people than you have previous colleagues, remember this – building your culture starts with your job posting & application.  What do I mean by this?  The language of your job posting & application sets a tone.  If you are a fun & creative company, make your job description & application fun & creative.  This is the best way to attract talent aligned with your culture & give you a great pool of candidates to hire from.

After Josh finished speaking, the discussion about culture & people continued.  A few nuggets of wisdom to share:

  • “Culture is based on 99% of what the CEO does & 1% on what he says” – Fry
  • “Culture is the single most important factor in recruiting & retaining key employees” – Fry
  • “Employee behavior consistent with the culture should be recognized” – Fry
  • CEO plans culture, lives it, reinforces it, manages it, tracks & measures it, modifies as needed
  • “Personnel selection is decisive. People are our most valuable capital” – Joseph Stalin
  • “as leadership changes, the effectiveness of people may also change”

And some questions that were asked:

  • Should vision statement be about 1 product (if company only has 1 product) or something bigger?
    • Tony thinks it should be bigger
    • I think a vision is big.  Your core vision for your company is that north star…what are you reaching for.  For instance, Disney’s vision is to “make people happy”.  At Iorio’s our vision is to “deliver sweetness”.  These visions are big & broad.  I have found it helpful to also write “vision statements” that may reflect more tangible, shorter & longer term visions for specific aspects of the company.  A vision statement that is written out could be short term focused & looking out at 1 year from now & that may only include 1 product.  I recommend writing vision statements when launching a new product, taking on a new initiative, starting a new company etc…answer questions like “what does this product/company look like?” “how do our customers respond?” “what are the challenges we are overcoming?”  paint a picture of the future.  Put yourself in the future.  A vision statement should be written as if you are in the future.  For more visioning tips I recommend reading some of Ari Weinzweig’s tips on visioning. I, and many others, have learned from him.
  • What do you think comes first, the culture or the people?
    • Tom mentioned that half the people he meets that start companies don’t think about the culture, even if, as an investor, he hints at its importance.
    • I think culture is an iterative process, especially early on.  Like product iteration.  Create culture consciously. Bring on people that align with that culture, learn from them & team dynamics, iterate culture consciously, bring on more people. Rinse & repeat.

Bottom line: Create culture consciously & continually.  All this talk about culture in class has me enthused about learning more & sharing more about what I’ve learned about culture.  What questions do you have?  What would you like to learn about culture & people?

Venture on,

MEL aka Venture Gal

Mar 15

Growing Companies – Culture & Leadership Featuring Serial Entrepreneur Jennifer Baird

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This week our class hosted our first guest speaker for the semester.  Jen Baird, serial entrepreneur, currently CEO of Accio Energy & former founder & CEO of Accuri Cytometers.

Jen got her interest in being an entrepreneur when interning for a VC firm.  After graduating from the University of Michigan with a psychology degree & from Kellogg School of Management with her MBA, she worked in consulting for over half a dozen years.  After consulting she took the leap into carving her own path, a route that was quite challenging for her.  When she co-founded Accuri Cytometers she was at the start of a 5 year journey creating, launching & scaling a product & team.  She grew the company from 2 to 80 employees, raised close to $30M in capital, launched a European subsidiary, & approached profitability.  Jen claims to really excel at is the people part of the organization (which I would argue is the most important part!).  She claims “companies are built of people.  They are the building blocks”.  This makes sense given her psychology degree & operational experience building & leading teams.  She clearly has learned a lot from her experiences.

What really stood out to me about Jen is that she knows herself well, exudes passion, is very personable, & is quite confident.  In particular, this is what I learned from listening to Jen & reflecting on her discussion:

“Power of focus is what you choose NOT to do”

On any given day my to do list could be pages long, but really do I need to be doing all those things?  Where is my time best spent?  I have been attuned to this lately & the way Jen described “choosing NOT to do something” caught my attention as a different way of thinking about prioritization.  Another piece of advice she had was to check in every 6 months to see what else can be delegated or eliminated.  Otherwise I become a restraint (similar to how I felt at Iorio’s – stifling our growth).

There are aspects of us that are similar.

Jen’s open style of management mirrors my open book philosophy & values based management style.  A few things we both advocate: all hands meetings, open door policy, building trust & communication.  She also mentioned that she likes to share details & has learned that sometimes it’s better to not share too much.  Something I’m working on also.

I still have questions I’d like to ask Jen, & I will ask her:

  • How do you decide which business opportunities to pursue?  Why Accuri?
  • Challenges you faced as female? How did you overcome them?
  • Where do you learn? (books, people, etc)

Following Jen’s talk Tom discussed management styles.  The key thing I took away after this lecture is that knowing who you are you are is a continual process/discovery that never ends.  In particular he asked: Who are you?  What is your impact on people?  What are your values?  What does success look like for you?  We need to figure out who we are.  It is hard enough to be ourselves, let alone someone else.  If we don’t know who we are it’s difficult to hire people around us to make us better.  Tom recommended developing a vision for yourself.  Know what you’re good at & what you’re not good at.  How best to do this?  I’m still figuring that out.  I do know that spending time with myself, in silence, thinking & reflecting has helped me.

He also emphasized the importance of trust.  To earn the trust of others (e.g. board of directors, customers, employees) you must first trust yourself.  If you don’t trust yourself, it will show, & others won’t trust you.  A great book I read that goes into detail about trust is “The Speed of Trust” by Stephen M.R. Covey.

We also questioned “what is the role of the CEO?”  50-75% of the time she/he is working with people. From time to time GreatLakesVC shares his Weisdom with me & he once told me that the job of a CEO is to make everyone else better at what they do.  To achieve the most in a resource constrained organization, the CEO should be controlling about the company vision & values because every employee should know the story of the company & exactly what the company is trying to accomplish.  The danger of being controlling is slowing down progress & not empowering people to the fullest.  The more someone wants control, the more things need to go through that person, & it slows things down (exhibit ME/Iorio’s).  It is really important to get the message right for the first people you hire & make the culture & values clear.  This way, when you stop hiring people, the people who are hiring people get the message right & hire based on the culture & values of the company.  Recently at Iorio’s we saw a great example of congruency without our organization.  One of our team members created a series of “Iorio’s Ten Commandments” to be a way to share the ground rules & operations of the business.  The result – a set of guidelines that scream Iorio’s culture as we created it.  The fact that we didn’t write them…& that they are so spot on to our culture & values is a huge testament to our ability to create congruency in our business.

Eccellente!

Venture on,

MEL aka Venture Gal

Mar 08

Has your company outgrown you? Or have you outgrown your company?

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It’s that time of year when I run errands in the morning, eat dinner in my car, & spend more time at the University than I do at my house…that’s right…it’s the second half of Winter Semester at the University of Michigan (UofM).  During this time, both partners at RPM Ventures teach classes at the UofM.  Marc’s class, “Venture Business Development”, is taught through the Center for Entrepreneurship at the College of Engineering.  It’s a two week intensive course where students work on teams to evaluate a real business idea – everything from developing an elevator pitch, to rapid prototyping, & talking with customers.

Tony’s class “Managing the Growth of New Ventures” is taught through the Ross School of Business to second year MBA students.  This course takes place once per week for half a semester and is co-taught by Tom Porter.  This year is my second year involved with this course & my role is basically the person who does whatever needs to get done to be helpful.  I found articles for course readings, grade homework, track participation, take attendance, & brainstorm ways to improve the course for future sessions.

This week’s class included introductions and a roadmap for the course, as well as a discussion about the five stages of business growth.

  1. Existence
  2. Survival
  3. Success
  4. Take Off
  5. Maturity

The class focuses mostly on the first four stages, building a company from absolutely nothing to a company and navigating the stages of growth along the way.  There is so much more than building product when building a company.  Building team is equally if not more important.  Team, culture, strategy, are the less glamorized aspects of starting a business, but so important.  In this first class I pulled away a couple reflections:

Know Thyself & Discover Wealth

As a leader of a company, being able to be reflective & introspective about your role with the company is very important.  In light of my recent unplugging & reflecting on so many things in my life, this is especially relevant.  During quiet time to thing about life, interests, passions, I learned a lot.  In an organization, for a CEO or leader, it’s important to take that time to pause & reflect on what you’re doing from a high level & ask yourself “am I the right person to be doing this or could someone else do it better?”, “would I be better suited somewhere else in the organization?” “would I add more value somewhere else in the organization?” because someone who may be great at creating and figuring out if something works may not be the same person who takes it from 10 employees to 50 or 50 to 100 and scale the business into the next stages of growth.  Think of companies where the CEO/Founder has been the same throughout all stages…it’s very few…Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell.  Being abel to figure that out as a leader is very important.

When thinking about a leadership role in a growing company, I think there are two aspects to consider:

  1. Role, in terms of what functions you are  best at doing.  Where do you add the most value?  Where do you thrive?  Is it the operational details, making sure money is the bank, paychecks are sent out, wheels are turning day to day. Or are you more strategic, thinking about where the company is, where it’s going.  Are you great at graphic design? etc.
  2. Stage.  What stage of growth is your paradise?  What time during the company do you want to be there?  When the company is 3 people with an idea & lots of ambiguity?  or when the company has 100 people with more developed systems & lots of names & faces to remember?  Holding your role constant, if you’re doing the same role in a 10 person company, it’s going to be different (even in that same role) than in a 100 person company.

I don’t think you need to figure out one before the other.  For me, I’m still trying to figure out what the function is optimal for me & even more broadly, what industry, general space interests me most.  What’s the space? What makes me tick?  Now I have several interests in broad areas & am exploring them further to discover what really could be right for me.

In terms of stage, I like the early stuff…the ambiguity, figuring things out, the creation, having a blank canvas.  I’m energized by a small team, setting the culture, & taking on the start of something with big plans. in a small team.

Transitioning Leadership

Another thing that came up when discussing the 5 stages of growth was this idea of transitioning from each stage, when you need to transition leadership.  Let’s say a leader isn’t a right fit in a company that is going from Survival to Success & that leader could better be replaced by someone else to lead the company, & the original leader could be better off somewhere else in the company (with a different role perhaps).  For the original leader it’s tough to make this transition…this is his/her baby, his/her creation. It’s very difficult.  I’ve experienced this personally with Iorio’s.  Just two weeks ago was the first time handing the reins over to someone else to run Iorio’s Gelateria in Ann Arbor.  I think our delay in transitioning leadership has limited our growth because things are funneled to go through few people & there’s not breakup of decision making at a higher level.  My biggest challenge & opportunity is preparing transitions so the company can successfully operate without the presence of the founders & early leaders.  The first experiment for this went well. Transitioning leadership also illustrates the importance of hiring people & building a team of people you trust.  It makes it a smoother transition if you trust the person you’re transitioning to.

I have also seen this play out in RPM Ventures‘ portfolio.  In particular, there is a company where the CEO is doing a lot of operational/day to day things that maybe he doesn’t have to bother himself with. If he brings in someone else, he can step into a more strategic role, which is what he loves & is really good at.  For instance, he could spend more time on things like product, vision, & leading the team in that direction.

Transitioning leadership is a common thing for companies.  Though not just high tech, as Iorio’s is a great low tech example, it is prevalent in high tech as well.

What does this all mean?

When starting a company, think about how you are going to work yourself out of a job.  How do you develop a company, build a culture, put systems in place, that will exist without you?

Sometimes the best thing you can do is pull yourself out of your company, or take yourself out of your current role, & do something else.

Have you ever transitioned leadership in your company?  What did you learn?  Do you think your company is ready for a transition?  Is your current leadership team holding your company back?  I’d really like to hear about your experiences!

Venture On,

MEL aka Venture Gal