Peer Effect
As founders we’re sold a lie. The journey has to be tough. Isolation is normal. We have to choose between work and life. On this podcast, James Johnson, renowned coach to Series A+ founders, explores a better way. One where you build a great business and a great life.
It’s time to take back control. The answers are out there. Your peers have already uncovered hard-won insights, practical tips and people to look out for.
That’s the Peer Effect.
Tune in every Wednesday for 30 minutes that will inspire new thoughts, avoid expensive mistakes and keep you energised.
Peer Effect
Scaling Smart: Hiring, Delegation, and AI in Business Growth, with Richard White
Are you hiring the fans of your company, and the people who already love your business’ product?
In this episode of Peer Effect, Richard White, Founder and CEO of Fathom, offers valuable insights from his lessons learned in scaling his team from 15 to 50 this year and securing a $17m series A.
Together, we uncover:
- How to build a motivated and efficient team early on, allowing founders to focus on strategic, high-impact work.
- Why delegating small tasks is crucial for founders to avoid burnout and focus on long-term goals and growth.
- Bottom-up hiring strategies that prioritise skill-based assessments and the right hires for tactical tasks, helping you scale without unnecessary executive overhead.
Learn more about Richard White’s work at Fathom AI, the world's #1 AI Meeting Assistant, or follow Richard White on LinkedIn for more AI and founder insights.
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Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
Question for the founders listening Are you feeling overwhelmed by the endless small tasks while trying to scale your business, and do you ever wonder how successful entrepreneurs manage to focus on big picture growth while keeping everything running smoothly day to day? Well, in today's episode, we're uncovering insights into effective hiring and delegation so you can focus on what truly matters for your business growth. So you can focus on what truly matters for your business growth. Joining us is Richard White. He's the founder of Fathom, the world's number one rated AI note taker. Over the past year, he's successfully scaled his team from 15 to 50. They've also just secured a $17 million Series A. If it's your first time listening, I'm James Johnson, my coach. Series A plus founders to take back control so they can take their business further and live a great life.
Speaker 2:We've grown the team from about 15 people at the beginning of the year to now about 50 people and frankly, we're in that stage. It's a little scary to hire a person a week sort of thing, right from a company culture perspective, especially as a remote team. For context, fathom is actually now the number one rated AI note taker on G2. We join your Google Meet, zoom, microsoft Teams meetings. Send a little bot, it transcribes the meeting, it records it and within 30 seconds of call ending, we give you these really good AI generated notes and we even like take those notes and automatically fill in your CRM if you have any sales and stuff like that. But and we provide that for free. So we have some premium offerings on top of that now, which we've been scaling revenue over the last year. But at its core, fathom is a completely free to use product.
Speaker 1:Obviously, this is the second time we're on the podcast, but what's interesting is the first time I didn't know people that had used it. And now, in the last sort of couple of years, like I would say, at least half of my founder clients are using it and it's kind of like it's just quite, it's quite funny to hear that, so that that change and that feels like quite a rapid adoption, just how people are using it yeah, I mean I think it's probably about 18 months ago we did the last podcast together.
Speaker 2:I think we've probably grown usage about 20 to 25x in that time. So yeah, it's kind of cool to see. I just run more and more around people like oh, I just saw someone using Falcon today and that used to be kind of. We hear that occasionally. Now we hear it every day of the week, it seems like. So it's fun. I mean, I think we started scaling revenue at a pace this year well beyond what we were doing last year and it's one of those things where, honestly, at first you're like is this a blip, like, is this, you know, like or is this a new normal? And it turns out thankfully it was a new normal and not just a blip sort of thing.
Speaker 1:And I mean, and what you said at the beginning, with that growth comes challenges challenges to culture, challenges to scale, challenges to things working. What is something that you found useful at this stage that you might share with others?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know if you've ever read the book the Great CEO Within by Matt Mishari Fantastic book. He also has some free content on his website. One of the things he's really adamant about is this idea of building out a really strong biz ops or executive ops team. There's a couple of different flavors of that, but for us it means I think one of the things I've seen is there's a lot of little stuff. I always call myself the chief, everything else officer.
Speaker 2:I tend to get saddled with all the little operational processes and stuff like this and as a founder, one of my favorite things to do is like airdrop into a problem and team tabbing, help them work it out, help them build a process, help them hire someone to fix that problem, sort of thing.
Speaker 2:But now we're in this place where I can't do that all the time, like I don't have the bandwidth to do that at the scale right now. We have too many people and too many little things break here and there, too many things in the automation, and so we've been now building out this kind of business operations team. We've got two people on right now and the profile is you know, we're hiring folks that are former founders themselves, yeah. So they're like really high work ethic but they're also like really autonomous, right, and you know, a lot of times they overhear me kind of lamenting something and the next day I know that thing's getting fixed, sort of thing right, and so it's been really helpful, you know, to grow up this team to just cool take on this whole project, take on this whole project, take on this program, that sort of thing, because there's always stuff where like, oh, we should hire someone for this, but we don't have like full-time need for this thing yet and having this team of folks, you can just deploy into.
Speaker 1:That's been fantastic. So this is this has worked for you and it kind of sounds like it has. You've gone from like one, one of them to two and now you're hiring a third. Yeah, what was the, what was sort of the trigger stage for that first person? What sort of size do you think?
Speaker 2:uh, I think we were about 20 when I hired the first person to do this and it's kind of like the other thought with this, too is I really think AI is going to do to the operational side of businesses what open source did to the software development side. You will soon be able to if not already have a $100 million software company with probably 20% the sales head headcount, 20% of the support headcount that you did 10 years ago, but it'll put way more emphasis on ops, right, internal operations, to go build these workflows with AI and learn these tools and stuff like that. So, honestly, I think we could have probably did hire this earlier. It didn't make sense to hire before we really started scaling. But once you start scaling, like I said, we're constantly trying to find ways to be more efficient, so we don't have to hire as many people.
Speaker 2:And so I think hiring these, the goal of these folks is to basically help us in that effort to keep headcount as well as possible. Again, have that founder mindset so they don't mind doing the stuff that I think other people will find. Like you know, this isn't the most fun work sort of thing.
Speaker 1:How do you go about sort of managing them, getting what you want from them?
Speaker 2:I mean, I think part of the beauty of it is I don't really manage them Like I kind of.
Speaker 2:I just try to expose them to problems and expose them to other teams and there's a roadmap that they work from, but it's very fluid and I kind of it's. You know, I think that job is more fun when it's more self-directed. Right, I'm intentionally hiring people that are, you know again, ex-founders, because they're good at being self-directed and good at kind of self-prioritizing. They don't necessarily need me to do that sort of thing, so I act more as a support resource where I'm like maybe I'll come and say that's really not that important to the business. Right, do my ass is this? You know, this functional leader really is hot and heavy and doing this and like, okay, well, you know, here's why maybe that's not important. But outside of that I said, I'm usually just offering context and just encouragement, like I'm really just trying to cut them loose, because if I actually have to manage them a lot, it kind of defeats the purpose of it, right?
Speaker 2:The whole point is they are. You know, there are many CEOs that can kind of run around and fix things, or many founders and run around and fix things.
Speaker 1:So I kind of the visual got my head is you've kind of got your probably a very bad visual. I'm thinking of you as Gru and you've got your minions kind of like mini sort of running around all over the place doing these things, which sounds fantastic in some ways in that they're self-directed. They're great people. They'll fix problems, they will change things At some point. That could become. Are they spending time on things that are not important to you? Are they fixing things that aren't broken? How do you get that balance?
Speaker 2:I mean, it's always a matter of perspective, right. But you know, we have a very kind of like planning light culture, intentionally as well. I think a lot of companies actually are taking a bad trade off where they spend a lot of time in planning to get really good accuracy and prioritization and I'm always like, hmm, I will trade some accuracy and prioritization for like speed and bias to action. Um, because you know, sometimes we may retrospective like, oh, maybe we didn't need to do that or maybe that was the best use for our time. But it feels like it's pretty rare, right, um, and again, it wasn't that we shouldn't have done a. It's like maybe we should have done a after B, but no, well, it did it Right.
Speaker 2:And I think also I see this a lot in engineering too where it's like if you give people also, you also want people to be able to self-direct their work, because people are most productive when they're happy, and they're happy when they're getting to do the thing that they woke up wanting to do that day for the most part. Um, so I think there probably will become a point right, I think this is probably a great team for us when we're going from 15 to 100 type folks. At some point you'll probably have to have folks that do line up under specific functional leaders, right, and so it's not a shared resource sort of thing. But I think you know Mishara has it in his book there's a lot of companies that have whole teams like 10, 20 people doing this, and even at 500,000, 2000 person companies. So I think we'll probably eventually add some stuff that's a little more structured, but there will always be a place for things that fall in the cracks between departments. I think that happens a lot.
Speaker 1:Do you think you do a good job, then, of sort of setting out the vision, like if you've got a very clear vision, you can probably sacrifice some planning, if you've got some really good people, but if you don't have that vision, then they can't know where to go.
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean it, it's. I feel like it's not that complicated. You know, we kind of have this thing of how do we get four percent better every week, um, and so, uh, and we do that because four percent per week is about seven x per year and that's generally what we want to be doing, um, and so I kind of just, you know, impressed upon them like, hey, you can look at any process in the org. You look at lifecycle emails, you can look at sales qualification, you can look at swag we're sending out to customers and you know, any of this stuff is your target. Your question is, you know, can you reflect on each week and be like, oh, I made some part of the company 4% better this week? And I think, just like, getting people to justify that in whatever way is pretty easy, north Star metric, I mean.
Speaker 2:I think also I'm a solo founder here at Fathom and I think if you, when you have a couple of co-founders, you tend to see those there's usually one person that takes on this kind of mantle.
Speaker 2:Anyways, right, there's always like, oh, I'm the technical founder, maybe I'm the CEO founder, but there's like, oh, I'm the you know, business founder and I I know a couple, a number of friends who've been kind of COO eventually became COO but, like, we're these like operational founder types, right, I don't have that, and so in some ways that's what I'm kind of hiring for here. Um, is, you know, built getting on a team of folks that have that kind of, like I said, founder type mentality and high. I think the thing you have to find is you're gonna find folks that have like high ownership and for the most part, both the folks who've all the folks who've hired on the team so far were like fathom fans first. Uh, really love the product, like, and so they're like really they, they get the vision, they get the product and you know they have like really high ownership. Think makes it easy to not worry about prioritization and stuff like that, because they keenly understand what we're trying to do.
Speaker 1:Okay. So if someone was listening to this and go right, this sounds like a fantastic idea. I'd love to have some people running around fixing problems for me. For all the that I have, what are the key elements that you would suggest to them to execute this right?
Speaker 2:In terms of like what are the traits to look for, or like how to set up the team.
Speaker 1:I think both would be very handy.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, again, I think founders are great and you want people that are super resourceful, super high work ethic, super high ownership. I mean, obviously high integrity, that kind of is table stakes. I also look for a lot of folks that are like this is just a general trade I look for across the team or like low ego, and I think that's often the hard thing to find. It's like founders that are also low ego sort of thing, because high ego folks may not want to get into all the dirty little corners of the business and make it better, sort of thing. Um, and yeah, I really think, like I said, above all else, I'm really looking for enthusiasm, right, like someone who really enthusiastic, like in the hiring process, is falling aggressively. It's just like you know, I think one of the things I discounted previously but I know per premium on, is like people that are kind of like this infectious excitement for the business and the product and bring that to work, because people want to work with people like that, and that part is really hard to almost impossible to manufacture If they don't have it organically, no amount of presentations you're gonna put them in front of, it's going to turn them into that sort of thing Right. So I, you know, I really think you want to find folks who are almost like almost kicking down your door looking for the opportunity, and that was the case in both of these.
Speaker 2:I mean, I also, early in my career, was this person where I cold emailed into the startup and said, like hey, I really like your product, but like I think your design is pretty weak and I want to be a designer and I'm working with them, and I was super motivated, right, because I like, felt like I got the job I wanted. I kicked in the door and I got it. So I think I lean a lot on folks that are honestly reaching out to me. Both of these folks were opportunistic hires. They were reaching out to me and saying I really just want to work at Fathom. Do you have any role for me?
Speaker 1:And I was like, yes, I have the perfect role for're very clearly one of the two. Like if you're a fixer, the idea of operating doing the same thing again and again would literally well you you wouldn't do it and you have operators who the idea of, like, their role changing every week is just awful, because they want that certainty. So it's quite interesting how you're almost building that blend in this team from the beginning going okay, but bring in a fixer, bring in an operator, bring another fixer, bring another operator.
Speaker 2:It's kind of scaled nicely yep, yeah, I was thinking about being like almost a pyramid, right, we're going to have a foundation of a lot of operators and we're above them. We're going to have fixers that are going in and you know, building some of these processes. Right, I was thinking it's like builders or maintainers on the engineering side.
Speaker 2:So I think, very common archetype and both are super important, right, I think you know, sometimes it's easy to overlook the, the maintainers or the operators, as you put it, but you need both. Uh like, they are very different mindsets and both of them are super important I'm gonna go on a limb here and I reckon you're a fixer yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't want me living in a process too long. I'll get bored of it and then I'll do a bad job.
Speaker 1:I think most founders have had to do the operator role at some stage in their career, often when you're a junior at some stage. And it's really good practice because you've got to learn how it works and learn that you never want to have to do it. But until you can build a good process and maintain a good process, it's very hard to design a good one.
Speaker 2:Yep 100%, you can build a good process and maintain a good process.
Speaker 1:It's very hard to design a good one. Yep, 100 of office of your sort of founder context, would you say that this is a concept is gaining traction and you're seeing it happen more and more yeah, like I said, I got this concept from mashari's book and he got this concept from other startups.
Speaker 2:So I think it is something that is um kind of perforating. I still think it's probably not the norm. Based on folks I've talked to, I still think the norm is you go just each functional team leader department is in charge of their ops type of stuff. Um, so I still think it's probably a little.
Speaker 1:It's a little up and coming, not maybe standard operating procedure for most reps I think what's really interesting about this is this idea, though, of how you're scaling a business differently, like it feels like one is using a lot of tech, but two is just the, let's say, the order of hiring, the fact that you're bringing in this team early, and potentially, if you did it again, you'd bring it in even earlier. Do you think you could go back to not having that team?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, if we didn't have this team, I would have, I think, a lot less time for more strategic thinking and work, right, I would be much more bogged down in a lot of you know minutia and kind of like you know, playing whack-a-mole with all these sorts of asks and requests of team leads and stuff like this.
Speaker 2:Um, at least in the short term, maybe we would be able to again hire some functional specific ops folks to take on some of this stuff.
Speaker 2:But again, I think a lot of these things are things that fall between departments, right, or we're not big enough to have a full people ops department or HR department or like IT department or all these sorts of things. So I think there's just like a lot of things where you need like one-eighth of a department sort of thing, right, hard to hire one eighth of an it person sort of thing, um, so it always ends up falling to you. So, yeah, I mean, I think my balance of work lately has skewed much more towards things that I think would I would look at like, oh, this is far more on average, far more impactful than stuff I was doing six months prior because I got to get out of some stuff that is like important for the business Again for achieving our efficiency goals of being 4% better every week, maybe not as important as me doing something only I can do for the business, right from a product perspective or from a customer perspective.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of founders can use. They enjoy doing it. It can be quite fun problem solving. It can be quite a good excuse not to do the big work that needs to be done, like the big pitch or the big presentation. You feel like you're doing valuable work. Was there any sense of that?
Speaker 2:name it, but one of my strengths is achiever, which basically means I love checking things off the to list, uh, and so there is kind of this unhealthy obsession you can get with like, well, let's check a lot of little things off the list and skip that one really big, chunky one that we don't really want to do, right, Um and so I think in some ways, yeah, I'm, I'm trying to give away the candy, give away the dopamine hits to other folks and let them, you know, check all this stuff off the list, because if I put on my list I'll be too tempted to do it Right.
Speaker 2:Or it's like sometimes stuff is like urgent but not important sort of thing, right. And so, yeah, I I do miss some of these things because I just get like I got a bunch of little easy wins. But, yeah, I think you tend to find you quickly habituate whatever your new experience is, and now it's like, okay, I've got new things I can win at and they're probably a higher order of magnitude and impact.
Speaker 1:Because often, as a founder, you've given it up, either to your team, to your clients, to your investors. It's kind of like you've actually lost control of your time, lost control of your diary and you're responsive to other people's things. This feels like a really nice practical way of taking back control of your time by paradoxically giving away quite a lot of control.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think about this a lot of like where am I spending my time and what's? You know what's the next 20% of my workload that I should delegate to someone else and what should it be? And is it? You know, it's often not the stuff that it's like core to me. What's the next 20% of my workload that I should delegate to someone else and what should it be? It's often not the stuff that's core to me, like product stuff.
Speaker 2:We're 50 people. We have no PMs, just me, and I can do that because I'm continuing to lop off all these things and give them to other people. Similarly, early on, we hired some data analysts really early on because that was a lot of the work I was doing as a product person. So I feel like I'm constantly just looking at my own workload, introspecting it and saying which of these things feels like something that's easy to hand off or is a basket of things I can hand off. And the thing I ran into recently that got to this team is like there wasn't one thing. There was a lot of little things right, so it wasn't. Before. It was like oh, hire an analyst because I spend three hours a day doing writing SQL queries. Okay, that's easy and obvious, but when it's like, oh, I spend like half my day doing just a million little things.
Speaker 2:Oh okay, let's go find someone who wants to wants to. You know, knock off that checklist every day.
Speaker 1:I definitely every day. I definitely see like kind of series, a founders, that is that big first hire mistake. It's kind of you get to that stage and go right, I'm gonna go make a spot, I'm gonna go and hire this, this very expensive person to do this often sales but and that often has a big name attached and comes with a big company and often doesn't work and has to be exited about six months later for a lot, of, a lot of money and waste of time.
Speaker 2:But it feels like.
Speaker 1:This is a very different approach. Okay, rather than I'm going to keep the big stuff and actually all those small things that pop up, I'm going to going to outsource those, which kind of avoids a the big sticker cost for role that probably doesn't exist at that stage, but also allows you to focus on on the key stuff yeah, I'm very I'm very much a fan of kind of like bottom-up hiring and really focus on you know you need to have leaders in key places.
Speaker 2:But I also think sometimes people especially if you get a bunch of money you're just like, oh, I'm going to go hire these big, expensive executives and they're going to solve all these problems for me. Like I look more at like let's go find people to like do the tactical stuff that needs to be done. And then you know, give them enough leadership to support them, but not overlook the importance of just hiring really good, you know individual contributors.
Speaker 1:If you are going to focus on like hiring really good individual contributors. We're focused on sort of the importance of belief and product their enthusiasm, these things. What is your process that you would put people through to identify these, these people?
Speaker 2:it really depends on the functional area. Yeah, well, we've been working with an amazing recruiter, uh, who you know what's first kind of advising us, and uh, now in in house with us and we focus a lot on you know, skills first assessment sort of thing, a lot less of tell me about what happened at this last company and a lot more of like great, let's figure out a way to kind of play, work through what you're actually going to be doing here. We're going to ask you to on our roadmap we're going to ask you to work on. And I think, when you get down to being much more specific about kind of paradoxically I said earlier, we don't plan a lot, but yet we do, at a high level, kind of know roughly what we're going to do and we hire someone we don't just hire someone to generically do sales or generically do engineering we say, hey, you're going to do specifically this stuff, and then it allows us to kind of build a skills test around that as well.
Speaker 2:But we tend to find people really like it, because people always want to know what exactly am I going to be doing here, what impact am I going to have? And I go back to how do you get people excited? You want someone to come in and be like oh, I'm super excited that I'm going to get to work on this. Worst thing is get someone who's kind of excited about your company and you bring them in and you're like we want you to work on CRM integrations. They're like oh, I hate CRM integrations, like. So I think that kind of enthusiasm alignment is super important, but it requires you to be more thoughtful up front about what exactly you're hiring each individual person to do, not just a job title perspective.
Speaker 1:And again this sounds like this having the right balance of clarity versus planning. Let's say, like what does success look like for your role? What does success look like for your role? What does success look like for um fathom in the next? It's much like there is, there is flexibility, but there is still that sort of feels like clarity is really important to your, the whole way of doing this yeah, good, high level clarity.
Speaker 2:Right when we first started the company, we were like we're only working on retention and we don't care about onboarding, we don't care about activation, we don't care about monetization monetization, right.
Speaker 2:And then we okay, great, now we're working on onboarding. And so I kind of am like really aggressive about what are the big guardrails we put on the business of like here's what we're focused on for the next six months. But I'm really then loose in the within the you know, next 30, 60 days about what exactly. We're going to launch this feature in three and a half weeks, right, because we spent a whole day's worth of time talking to engineers to figure out exactly how we're going to get it done in three and a half weeks, whereas I'm just like we'll just keep working, we'll probably get done somewhere in the next two to six weeks, right, and it's not worth it to me to spend the time to get the exact fidelity of when that thing's going to get done it's more about sort of freedom rather than control, but it just what allows this is this real clarity around these other priorities for this period, so you're spending your time thinking big on it rather than in it yeah, I think you spend a lot of time.
Speaker 2:Okay, what's the most important thing to do now like last week I thought it was this. Is it still? Still this, I don't know. Like, let's kind of always be constantly reassessing and never be beholden to previous conceptions about how things should go.
Speaker 1:A big thanks to Richard White for joining us today. We covered some great insights, including the importance of building a strong business operations team to manage growth efficiently and free up time for strategic thinking. Rich also shared the value of hiring resourceful, low-ego team members who can work autonomously and take ownership of their roles. Remember, if you're a founder looking to take back control, the answers are out there. Your peers have already uncovered hard-won insights, practical tips and people to look out for, and that is exactly what makes PeerFX so special. If today's episode resonated with you, don't forget to share and leave a review. As always, I'll see you next week with a new episode. Until then, keep making it happen.
