Relationships & Skills

[Peter Montgomery]

It's super easy if you're looking at other companies to see gaps, the challenge is actually seeing gaps in your own company. So I actually had people come in trying to point out the gaps to me, but I can- if I'm looking at it from a New Zealand Inc perspective, gaps I see around leadership definitely- definitely around capability, would be two of the main areas. And that capability particularly these days around digital, so they do need a lot of help with that. And sometimes I see governance can be quite challenging for a lot of companies as well in New Zealand, and having, you know, good structures in place and succession planning.

What I've learned is to be incredibly patient and build a great team around it. And that- and you're constantly iterating your team in a way because you know people are coming and going, and that's just life but if you got a good team working on great product and you actually understand its market-fit with a customer, you have got a higher probability of success.

[Timothy Allan]

Startups are interesting because one of the peculiarities is that someone might be fine for us today, but in one to two years' time they may not be. And that's super hard, right, like people tip their heart and their soul into something and then to, you know, you're confronted with this reality that your skills basically are no longer a productive fit for the company. And you know, I think that generally held consensus is that in the early stages you need people with a really strong set of general skills. And as you develop, you need people that have more specialised knowledge in- and deeper knowledge in particular areas. So, let's say that you know I might have covered compliance 3 years ago, you actually now need a dedicated engineer that deals with compliance, because it's just that single area is now too big for like someone to just do it as sort of like- something extra on what they do on their day job.

And so, I mean even with my role, the learning is brutal because you have to change the way that you work continuously, you've got to adapt and evolve consistently, if you don't then you know, you're not going to be here in 5 years' time. So, it's a challenge to yourself, which I enjoy I mean like I- I love the process of learning. And so for me, part of the reason I like the job is that it is just relentless, you know, like you can't just stop and go 'okay well it's all good'. I mean you finished raising a big capital round you can't just sit there and, you know, have a big party about it because I'm already two years down the road thinking about 'okay well that's where we need to be'. Because everything is- whatever you do today is essentially going to matter in two years' time, the choices you make now. So, you know it is- it is very challenging on the people's side, and maintaining a cohesive culture is an intentional thing- like once you get to a certain scale, you can't do it organically, it has to be intentional. You have to be clear what you stand for, you know, we were just talking about values just before and you know it's easy to be trite about it, but it does actually matter. I mean you do have to be clear about 'this is what we want from you, and this is what you should expect from us as a company', so that you have a common understanding together.

[Bridgit Hawkins]

No one is actually born a leader, we all learn as we go. So, be open to advice from those around you, there's always plenty of people who are happy to mentor and support you. You know and be open to that and if you're worried about how you're doing as a leader, reach out and ask for some help. There's lots of fantastic networks and support networks in the New Zealand and the startup ecosystem now. And the hardest thing sometimes is to- is to reach out for help.

[Sam Gribben]

If you don't stay ahead of that People and Culture stuff, it's just always the hardest thing, you know. There are product things you can work out, if you've got problems with your people and they're not- and there's tension between them or people are unhappy, it has a huge impact on the company and it's not something you can just kind of roll up your sleeves and do an all-nighter and fix. You know, you have to- a lot of those problems if you let them go too far they take a lot long time to unwind, you know, if you make the wrong hire and you don't act on it quickly enough or um don't define people's roles quite enough. You know, it's all fine at the beginning, nice and kind of fast and loose and startupy, but you know, stay ahead of it because it matters to people. I think as time goes on that they're um being heard and listened to and that you're- the leadership is putting the effort into making sure that the company's really on point with those things.

[Aroha Armstrong]

Being a business owner and an entrepreneur and a business leader, especially in te ao Māori, can be a lonely journey. And people tend to battle away at it on their own and try and solve those problems alone. I think if there is a network of people that you are engaging with that are sharing the same problems, that gives you heart that you're not alone that those problems are common. It allows to help solve each other's problems, because someone will say 'oh yeah, I made that mistake 2 years ago and this is how we overcame it.'

[Sam Gribben]

Part of what we need to do as leaders is to push the team to do more than they think they're capable of. You know a lot of people put limitations on themselves that, as a leader, you can see don't exist, so you want to encourage people and put a good culture in place. I think that's something that gets talked about a lot but is um can't really be talked about enough, you know, can't really be overemphasised. You just got to really really take care of your people and make sure it's really fair and you're really staying ahead of the areas of People and Culture that you need to develop as the company grows.

[Mahmood Hikmet]

When I first started my job I thought that I'd be spending a lot of my time dealing with technical issues, but what I found is that the soft skills and the communications and the stories and the ways in which you speak to people about the technology is such a big component to ensuring its success. It's not enough just to have a technology solution, but you need to think a little bit beyond that and think 'how is it going to serve people?', 'how am I going to communicate with people about it?', 'how do I tell the story of what's happening here?', so that people are ready to accept it and use it as a normal part of their lives.

[Angie Judge]

I think when anybody in life makes the transition from being a sole operator to leading a team, you sort of understand and get to this point within yourself, when you know that to go fast you go alone and to go far you need to go together. And funnily enough, I think all the skills that get us in life to that point of making that transition are the skills that have made us successful as an individual contributor. And we then have to spend the rest of our careers in pursuit of the right leadership skills that help us then lead a team to whatever outcome or achievements we're looking for.

[Philip Fierlinger]

This is, you know, one of those things about a- warning for companies, about growing too fast. So, we grew incredibly quickly at Xero, and so all of a sudden you're in- people are working in silos, so you had this clash between marketing and sales, and it's an age-old clash that marketing and sales don't get along, they undermine each other and they point fingers and blame each other for- you know, 'we're not making sales because you', 'no we're not doing...'

And so, with Upstock to have... that level of collaboration and that we're all synchronized, the relationship between product, sales and marketing, we're all on the same team, we're all working together, we're all collaborating in each other's spaces. So, you know product people are helping marketing people and helping salespeople and salespeople are helping- you know, all each other. Each one of us is overlapping in various ways and collaborating constantly.

[Adrian Packer]

So, one of the challenges we find in most businesses as they scale is the 'founder's mindset' we like to call. It evaporates as we bring in professional managers. So, there's an upskilling component to all businesses that can successfully, repeatedly innovate. And that's to train their entrepreneurial managers or to train their managers to be entrepreneurial.

If we're going to engage our manufacturers or our operations team or our supply chain team in the innovation process in order to mitigate the risks that will pop up as we scale our product, if we're going to include them in this process, then we need to think about how they deal with uncertainty, how they deal with risk, how they manage their time to dedicate sufficient time to that innovation process. So, these are skills that we need to have in our operational teams, in our management force. Of course, another thing that we need to be considering is how do they have the time to do this Innovation work. If they're uh fully occupied with the day-to-day working in the business, how do they find the time to work on the business and if so, we find one of the key capabilities that's required to build sustainable innovation practices is the ability to plan for innovation and to provide the capacity to do that innovation work. And all of this can be learned.

Businesses are structured in silos as we've talked about, right? And so, you can't innovate from out of a silo very easily, right? You have to bring more people within- a more cross functional team and ideally including people from outside of the organisation right. And when this is happening, we find that the existing structures with- that kind of hold the current way of working together need to be changed in some way, even in a small way, we need to be adjusting them, we need to be changing them. So, there's no organisation that I've that ever seen that doesn't have to tackle that in some way, right? Doesn't mean we all need to set up skunk works and external entities to do this work, but we do need to manage the change that's required for new.

[John Mansell]

Often in the early stages of a product development cycle, there's input from various parties, and some of those are- people who are employees or participants in the company. And sometimes, you're getting input from external providers, contractors or developers who, you as the principal, will be, you know, seeking input from. And it's really important at that point to understand the obligations that those other parties have in terms of transferring rights in their contributions through to you as the principal. So, making sure that you've got your engagement agreements in place and that they speak to the sorts of issues that are likely to arise in the course of the product development process that you're engaging in.

So, for example, you might be developing a product and it might involve some 3D modeling, it might involve mold making or casting, it might involve a whole lot of software generation. Each of those things may have different IP aspects to them, and they're handled in slightly different ways, and so you want to make sure that your commissioning agreements address the transfer of information and the transfer of ownership appropriately through. So that when you come to protect your product, and more, you know, often the case that arises where someone's looking at your product offering and thinking 'hey, do I really want to spend $3 million investing in this company? And do I know that they own all the stuff that they purport to own?', that's when all those issues can come to light. And so knowing that you have robust ownership of your product offering and all the underlying IP that facilitates it, is a really good thing to bear in mind as you you're starting out on that process. And that does two things, it gives you a degree comfort that you'll sleep at night, and it also gives you an ability to show investors or participants down the line, commercial partners, that you have all your ducks in a row, you understand the value of that, and you're building that asset for the for the value of the company.

I think it's important um particularly in product development where people are bringing, you know, a lot of- a lot of experience, a lot of insight, a lot of creativity to that, that those contributions aren't under-represented or under-valued. And so, realising that where you are creating you have a hand in the creative process, that you're, you know, valuing that contribution appropriately, you're not giving it away, you want to recognise the value that that embodies for your company or for your product or the product development process itself. That's a really important thing for people to hold in the forefront of their minds as they're going through this process. So, I'd counsel that we ought not be reluctant to have those agreements in place at a very early stage in the piece, because it's a good testing point to... interrogate, I guess, the willingness of all the parties to understand their respective positions. But it's also a good testing point to see what the relationship might be as it moves forward as well.

[Sam Burton]

The key gap in our knowledge was around the foot health and podiatry angle. We reached out to Monash University in Melbourne, and we've been working really really closely with them to develop... I guess, that really strong understanding of how kids' feet move. And then that's been feeding the design team with a lot of insights; but also the marketing team and sales too, because we get these really nice nuggets that we can then carry forward, which are, you know, great ingredients for the sales team too.

In terms of the wider team, we have been working really really hard on developing a really strong culture. One of the big changes that we made was actually from out in East Tamaki, where we used to manufacture, right into the city in New Market, in this beautiful office there. The reason we wanted to do that is because we wanted to really put a stake in the ground to say 'we're not a manufacturing business, we're a design and a marketing business', and create an environment that surrounds us that really celebrates that.

Having the design lab right next to customer service is really nice too because customer service can just walk straight in there and ask a question, and keeps people really close to the product. We're also trying to maintain the links between all of the different departments as much as possible and break down those silos, so it's really important that we've got a really strong relationship with design and marketing, so that we're telling the right stories but also the design team is getting those great insights to be able to actually create the right product for the people who really need it.