For the last year I've hired a General Manager and stepped away from Video Husky. Here's how it all played out.
Covid and Responsibility
The first time I realized that Video Husky mattered to people was when we let go of 17 people in one day because of Covid in March of 2020. At that point, a third of our clients left us overnight and we had less than 15 days worth of cash in the bank. If things didn't change, Video Husky would be over.
With the challenge ahead of us, I had to acknowledge I couldn't continue managing Video Husky in the same way and needed to become a different kind of leader. Although we had plateaued a bit even before Covid-19 became a thing, all of 2019 Video Husky had mostly been growing leaps and bounds. I assumed that the growth was because of all the client acquisition efforts that we had put in at that time. Coming from a marketing background, I assumed that it was the solution to all problems and didn't realize that my constant reinvesting of profits into growth instead of building up reserves or even investing into product and operations was putting the company at risk
Realizing my mistakes in the form of relatively little money in the bank was painful but an important lesson. The next six months were tough. Everybody took a 20% paycut and I stopped paying myself. But eventually we slowly turned it around through disciplined management of expenses. Not only turning a profit but started growing again and could even repay the 20% paycut that I asked of everybody
My own struggles at lack of job fit leading to resentment
Going through this experience forced me to grow as a leader, particularly in financial and people management. Gaining the discipline to grow profitably, while on paper sounds simple, in practice was difficult. Internally I was constantly at war between my natural tendency towards optimism and growth versus the constant need to remind myself of the importance of turning a profit and building cash reserves.
Beyond that, we restructured almost everything related to people in the company:
from the types of clients that we work with
to the types of editors that we hire
Clarifying the roles of each individual in the team and making sure we all know who was responsible for what
...on top of rebuilding our sales process and testing out new products.
But as much as all these things needed to happen, I resented being the one to do it. With every decision came the need for communication across all stakeholders about why things were changing (which at hundreds of customers and dozens of staff is a lot of communication). As an non-social introvert, doing 10+ calls a week I was doing between customers, internal team members, accountants etc. was not quite how I imagined my perfect day going
Burning out and business coaching for perspective
By the time that 2021 came around, I was frustrated, disgruntled and while I didn't know it yet, starting to burn out. Whether it was customer calls or internal meetings, I could feel myself just going through the motions, no longer able to give the best of myself. This article from Jason Lemkin describes how founder burnout tends to set it around year 3-4 and it was exactly what I was feeling.
As a result I started working with [[Taylor Pearson]] as my entrepreneurial coach and he was a godsend. Working with him provided new perspective as he essentially painted three options for the future for founders in my position:
Sell the business
Work in the business and get paid a lot of money
Hire a GM and live off of less, but still reasonable amount of dividends
When he put it that clearly, it became obvious that I would rather have less money and not work at Video Husky and as a result, the key realization that Taylor helped me achieve was that Video Husky and I were no longer the right fit for each other.
As a bootstrapped founder/business owner, there's a tendency to think that you have to be the one to run a business forever. But as I came to acknowledge that:
I no longer related to our customers (since we started working with more creators rather than small business owners)
I didn't enjoy the daily work of being a "responsible" Founder/CEO/Manager or whatever the title is.
Even if I did enjoy both things of the above...perhaps there is somebody out there who can do a better job than me.
...and the performance of the company over the long run would suffer as a result of these realities. Given that, it would have been irresponsible for me as the "owner" of the company to continue allowing myself to run this company and that the best thing I could do was move on and find a better solution.
Selling wasn't something I considered given the relatively low pay out and the uncertainty that would cause for Video Husky's staff and customers. So the best solution was to find a GM. That way that I could bring in somebody experienced to provide the leadership necessary for the customers and staff at Video Husky to thrive, but also give myself to the room to explore other opportunities and hopefully find a better role for myself in the future.
Hiring and transitioning
For anybody who needs to hire at a senior level I recommend the book "Who" which outlines a great process on how to interview candidate, while I recommend working with Dynamite Jobs to source candidates quickly. All in all it took around 6 weeks to find a candidate I was happy with at a rate that Video Husky could afford. So by end of August 2021, Fed joined Video Husky.
Nine months into the transition, I'm satisfied with where we're at. It hasn't always been smooth sailing, and while I won't dive into the details here, learning to step away from Video Husky has been both more of a relief and challenge than I expected.
A relief in that I no longer feel the pressure of having to be something that I'm not, whether it's relating to being a video creator like the majority of our customers, or a manager like what was required of me at Video Husky.
Yet a challenge in that my identity is tied strongly to being an entrepreneur and that I still wanted Video Husky to do well. However learning that even inadvertent comments made by me can have much larger ripple effects and consequences for my GM and staff at Video Husky was something I didn't foresee and had to pick up from experience.
What happens next
Learning to let Video Husky go and separating myself from it so that I can explore other areas of interests has been harder than expected. Video Husky provided a sense of identity and certainty that I now don't have.
Nine months in, it was the right decision. This allows the team at Video Husky the room to grow without the overbearing presence that comes with being the founder of a company. And for me, it provides the opportunity for a new phase of life. A journey that I'm grateful, excited and scared to go on given the unknowns, but one that feels right.