An Interview With Ken Babcock
Scaling the leadership is another thing. One thing we have learned is you can’t scale your leadership as easily as you can scale your business necessarily, which puts a natural stopper to the speed. You can, for example, recruit people fast in the house, but if the leadership doesn’t grow the same way there will be trouble. So one thing companies should put enough effort into is developing and scaling their leadership.
Startups usually start with a small cohort of close colleagues. But what happens when you add a bunch of new people into this close cohort? How do you maintain the company culture? In addition, what is needed to successfully scale a business to increase market share or to increase offerings? How can a small startup grow successfully to a midsize and then large company? To address these questions, we are talking to successful business leaders who can share stories and insights from their experiences about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”. As a part of this series, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Henri Nordström.
Jobilla CEO Henri Nordström has seen all sides of the fast-growing startup life — bringing the company back from the Valley of Death into a roaring success. With a background as a serial entrepreneur and successful sales executive, he knows what it takes to make a successful business and lead a well-cooperating team where everyone values one thing: to serve their customers in the best way possible while being considerate of their own employees as a whole.
Thank you for joining us in this interview series. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’?
I guess I can say I’m a serial entrepreneur already. I’ve had my own companies since my early 20’s and I can say it really is a lifestyle for me. I’m not sure if I’d be able to do anything else. I’m the type of person who, when seeing a challenge, wants immediately to solve it. So as an entrepreneur one is in a position to have free hands to try putting things right the way one sees meaningful and right.
I have always been inspired by and wanted to be able to influence things that matter and do things that are meaningful to me. When I was young, I dreamed of being able to take part in European politics to be able to affect things internationally. But now that I think of it, entrepreneurship is probably better for my personality since in politics, you can’t decide how to solve things and it’s a slower and more complex process. Of course, the topics are on a much larger scale, but so far I’ve been happy with my choices.
You’ve had a remarkable career journey. Can you highlight a key decision in your career that helped you get to where you are today?
Key decisions — what a great question! Often I have noticed that success doesn’t come from any singular events but rather from the tiny daily actions and routines that you keep doing — also when there is no light at the end of the tunnel and you just keep carrying on. This is the part of the story that is often left untold, probably because it is quite hard to describe it.
Yet there are some big decisions that define whether things start going in the right direction or not. So, when it comes to success, I would highlight it as a big theme that some moments are definitely more significant than others, in terms of making important decisions that enable one to proceed by leaps and bounds, and that at that particular moment, one has to have the courage to make that decision to move things to the right direction.
One Key Decision I could name was when I was in my 20s and studying full-time at the university. At the same time, I was a full-time entrepreneur, and did these both for 7 days a week. I realized I must choose between the two paths because it was not possible to carry on like that, especially if I wanted to do something well. So, even though I had aimed to be at the university all my life and it was the idea I was brought up to, I had the guts to hop off from the university. Of course, quitting university is not good in itself, and for me, I think the key question was: what do you do then instead. But that I was brave enough to put all-in to develop as an entrepreneur was a significant decision for me, and I think I wouldn’t be here now had it gone differently.
Second Key Decision for me was when I was working for a short period of time as a salesperson doing outsourced sales for a big insurance company. When they started to privatize their offices, they offered the chance to start managing that. I dared to take the challenge with my then business partner, and that came out to be the 1st business that really took me forward in my life. It has stayed as a meaningful period in my mind, running offices with tens of good employees in many locations. We were able to build a business and many good things were going on. But the big moment was to make the decision. We had just established a real estate company so we established those two companies at the same time and worked on both of them. I was considering it for quite a while would this be something I want to do, but now in hindsight it was definitely the right call.
The third Key Decision was what turned out to be the path that led to Jobilla. The market situation and the business surroundings of my then company had changed and the future seemed there were no possibilities to grow. I decided to sell my part of the company to my business partner and dared to be for a while without any clear plan of what I’ll do next. Instead, I took time to carefully consider what the next step would be. The recruitment challenges had been going around in my head already, and I had already plans on how to solve them. But then my long-time friend Tommi Siro had thought of that too and they already had Jobilla in a starting stage, so we thought there was no point in starting two similar companies but better to join forces and do something together.
The common nominator is I haven’t let limitations or fear guide my doings but done what I have in mind and think is the best. You can’t ever know if it leads to anything good or if it’ll fail a big time. If it fails, just get up quickly and put a new worm into the hook. My advice for the young people who consider entrepreneurship would be: just start. Learning is the thing. It doesn’t matter what your first company is or whether it succeeds or fails. You have learned and the second business will go already better.
What’s the most impactful initiative you’ve led that you’re particularly proud of?
It would probably be something that I’ve done with Jobilla. We have done brave moves in pretty gloomy circumstances. Maybe spring 2020 with COVID-19 pandemic was one of those moments. The market situation was really uncertain, nobody knew if anybody was going to do any recruiting within the next 6 months. So we kept our business at full speed and kept our head high and just thought if this goes wrong we will go belly up gloriously. But we just pushed hard and all’s well that ends well! That extra push actually started our growth.
Another example of dire straits was when we were at the crossroads of the company in our early years. The financial situation was uncertain and we were in a conversation whether we should cut off our production development and become a successful consultant business. My principle has always been to keep the production team working full speed, even in financially difficult moments. Everywhere else, we can do magic tricks, but if we don’t have production development we can forget everything else. The suggestion was a way out from a tough place, but at the same time it was a way out from all the grand visions we had for the company. It would have left us working as a small consulting firm, and I thought this was not the game we went in for, so we won’t start playing that game now either. So if we would fall, we might just as well give it our best go and then go down with it, our head held high if that was what was going to happen.
Sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a mistake you’ve made and the lesson you took away from it?
Oh, there are so many…! I always remember only the lessons, so it is hard to remember the mistakes that led to them. But one of the big mistakes was that at the beginning of our business we raised money too carefully. We were counting too much on the thought that we have to sell and base our growth on that. Half of the money was going to the production, so it is impossible to finance that through sales only. We raised too little money from investors to support our business. But thinking of it, raising capital is what all the growth companies do.
When I woke up to that realisation the only way to keep our thing going is to find investors to help us forward. Afterwards I wonder why on earth did we think or did it like that. But then again, what we learned from that is how to drive business with very little cash flow. That has definitely been an advantage. We also learned the meaning of investments. If you always have less income than what you spend, you’ll always think very carefully about where and how you spend your money. You don’t take the taxi but you’ll use the bus no matter how important the meeting you have ahead. The second big thing that we learned is that now that we have more money, we still know how to think really carefully where and how to use it.
How has mentorship played a role in your career, whether receiving mentorship or offering it to others?
Mentoring and receiving it has played a big role in my career, especially receiving it so far! I have always had people I look up to, and I have always known people who are successful entrepreneurs. At the beginning, the mentors didn’t even need to be too successful in any particular way though it was enough they encouraged me to go forward. For example, I had a childhood friend who was the only person I knew during my early years who had entrepreneur experience.
Now we are in a mentor program with people that have gone through the same path as we are about to go. To have this is very significant because you can really talk about the problems you have with a person who has been there and who really knows what you are talking about and going through. How do I work myself as a mentor — I’ve never considered myself as a mentor, I’ve never thought of that term as something that describes me. It has always been more that I’m always happy to spar ideas and discuss things if somebody wants to share their thoughts. But I’m always happy to share thoughts and advice!
Developing your leadership style takes time and practice. Who do you model your leadership style after? What are some key character traits you try to emulate?
There have been several leadership models during my career. An important character trait in a leader is to be someone whom people can trust. The leader should also have a clear sense of direction of what we do and what we don’t do. Also, the leader should be stable even though the world around is changing and evolving.
For example, at the beginning, we had plenty of ideas on how our service could be used, what we could offer or what kind of problems we could solve. But it has crystallized here on the way — and the more clear the idea is, the easier it is to bring more people to the same focus.
Thank you for sharing that with us. Let’s talk about scaling a business from a small startup to a midsize and then large company. Based on your experience, can you share with our readers the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”? Please give a story or example for each.
From startup to growth company: what you do as an entrepreneur and with your team is completely different at the beginning or when you scale up.
In the beginning, when you have around 20 people, you have to be a handyman. You can’t have anybody who wouldn’t be able to do many things or plan as we go. Your daily life is like you are the person doing the job but your brain works like a leader’s.
The beginning means that you live in a death valley for 3–5 years. There are many lions and snakes that can eat you and there is no possibility to take things slowly and to chill out.
When scaling, the more you do yourself, the more you harm the company. The company should gradually become independent, first in daily operations, then the management, then even the big decision-making should become more independent. You can compare it to a baby: when the company is small, it’s like a baby and you need to take care of it every moment. When the company grows bigger, it should learn to do things itself. This doesn’t mean it is easier, but it is different. You have to create clarity and direction, and there are many things that need to be established because they haven’t been needed yet while the company is young.
I still haven’t experienced big company leadership, but I’ve been working with one nearby. How I’ve seen it and how I think it is so far is that there you should be even further from the daily routines but focus on the vision. Large companies are also often not relying only on one thing but on several business lines and production lines. So combining these two things, visions and direction. You need to be able to be a strategic, visionary leader but still be able to create structure into the organisation that enables creating more production lines and opening new business areas — which means new babies to take care of inside the company.
Can you share a few of the mistakes that companies make when they try to scale a business? What would you suggest to address those errors?
The situation in the market is quite unstable at the moment. Generally speaking, people have lived a scale-at-any-cost era in many ways for quite some time. One of the biggest mistakes is that you scale something that doesn’t work yet. You start scaling too early a business that is not ready — organizationally, not in a profitable way or production-wise — to do that. You’ll end up creating a business that burns too much money that it can’t afford.
Scaling the leadership is another thing. One thing we have learned is you can’t scale your leadership as easily as you can scale your business necessarily, which puts a natural stopper to the speed. You can, for example, recruit people fast in the house, but if the leadership doesn’t grow the same way there will be trouble. So one thing companies should put enough effort into is developing and scaling their leadership.
Scaling includes bringing new people into the organization. How can a company preserve its company culture and ethos when new people are brought in?
You need to crystallize your business. Under 100 people you can keep it with human connection in some way. But keeping control of what really happens in the organisation when we go above that becomes hard, so the culture and values need to be clear and they need to be implemented and systematically supported throughout the company. If you have people who don’t for some reason behave according to your company culture, you can either try to get them to move your direction or you go your separate ways. So the culture needs to be really cherished, so that things don’t go as in the famous saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.
The culture often finally defines what really happens in the organisation. This is especially important in today’s world where people work a lot remotely and the trend is, like in our company too, that there is a lot of freedom in how people want to work. So a strong culture to support the company mentality plays a more significant role than probably ever before.
In my work, I focus on helping companies to simplify the process of creating documentation of their workflow, so I am particularly passionate about this question. Many times, a key aspect of scaling your business is scaling your team’s knowledge and internal procedures. What tools or techniques have helped your teams be successful at scaling internally?
This is an important question. We have loads of different tools that we use. The big thing is to have all the processes work coherently and the same technology used throughout the company on which the procedures are based. Everything needs to be thought carefully from A to Z. This helps especially when scaling up.
Another important part of scaling is measuring. We have developed our own measuring system, which allows us to manage things based on numbers. Everybody should be able to track how their work affects these numbers.
What software or tools do you recommend to help onboard new hires?
In our case the onboarding is seen as something that starts already in the recruitment. It is not something that happens only after the hire. The whole funnel, from the beginning of the recruitment until it is finished, is designed to give the best experience to the candidate.
We have developed our own recruitment process and technology and a large number of the people who work for us have been recruited through our own recruitment process. They think wow, this is how recruitment should work, this is how recruitment should feel like! So the biggest impact of our onboarding is that after our recruitment process people are genuinely super excited to get to work in this company and represent the product we have.
For example, many of our sales reps say that it is so easy to sell our product forward since you only have to share your story of how you got recruited, so they really can share first hand experience from an employee’s point of view on this. Or in the production team people are really motivated to develop things further, since they were so surprised by how good the experience was. So they want to give the same experience forward improved by their own best expertise.
Because of your role, you are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.
To me the significant thing is that people can express themselves freely and disagree on things. This is something that I’m a little bit worried about at the moment. It seems that people are not allowed to disagree or argue passionately about topics anymore. In my opinion there shouldn’t be any topics that would be a taboo. Of course the conclusions of those conversations are another topic itself, but the freedom of defending your right to speak and express your opinion is the basis of democracy.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
LinkedIn and Jobilla’s blog, interviews in different media.
This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!
About the interviewer. Ken Babcock is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tango. Prior to his mission of celebrating how work is executed, Ken spent over 4 years at Uber riding the rollercoaster of a generational company. After gaining hands-on experience with entrepreneurship at Atomic VC, Ken went on to HBS. It was at HBS that Ken met his Co-Founders, Dan Giovacchini and Brian Shultz and they founded Tango.
Henri Nordström Of Jobilla On 5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.