The best thing you could do as a founder to grow your business is delegation. Growth is teamwork. Most importantly, if you have to spend all of your time in managing the operation and doing trifles, when would you think, strategize and think about the bigger picture? That’s why many successful entrepreneurs suggest that you have to continuously fire yourself as a founder from your current role and move to the next most important role.
Raisul Kabir, Founder, and CEO of Brain Station 23, has used this same strategy to grow Brain Station from a team of 3 people to a team of 185 people today. In an interview with FS published on February 3, 2019, we asked Mr. Raisul how has he grown Brain Station 23 to where it is today? His answer would surprise you.
When I started to trust people to this degree, two things happened: 1) they started to take ownership 2) and I became free and I could focus on other important things and expansion of the business.
Question: You started as a three-person company and today, you are a team of 185 people. It has been a phenomenal journey so far. How have you grown the business? What have you done to grow?
Raisul Kabir, Founder, and CEO of Brain Station 23: Initially, when we were small, the main challenge for us was employee retention. Today, our retention is very good. In 2018, we had only one person who properly left us. We lost only one person who was basically preparing to go to Germany and so he decided to leave. And we lost another person who left because of my mistake. We hired a bad manager and one of my people left because of the bad behavior of that manager. It was mostly my mistake.
In order to overcome our challenge with retention and build a great culture, we have done some good work. For example, trusting and empowering people. What do I mean by that? When you are dealing with a person, considering that he or she is capable and would do his job well – having faith in the capacity of people. When you trust people and empower them, then people who are really good they take ownership and rise up to the responsibility. The people who are not good they fail to deliver and deviate from their responsibility to the extent that they willingly leave the organization after a while. It is the best strategy to build a culture of meritocracy. We have never taken the strategy that we would give the highest salary in the market. Our strategy has always been that we would give a salary above 80-90% of the companies in the market. So if someone wants to take advantage of a situation they leave after a while when they get a better opportunity.
People who are genuine they love the environment and stay with us. This strategy has helped us in employee retention and ultimately in growth. Whenever we made any profit, we kept reinvesting that money into the company. We would hire more people with the proceedings of every project so that we could work more and invest in further growth.
The other aspect of trust was that when we had a project I used to connect the programmer assigned to the project and the client and allow them to directly collaborate and get it done. There is a risk associated with this approach that the programmer and the client could both leave along with your project and business. Many people fear that and seldom allow a programmer to directly work with a client. But I thought differently that it is a good thing if a bad client and a bad employee both are gone!
When I started to trust people to this degree, two things happened: 1) they started to take ownership 2) and I became free and I could focus on other important things and the expansion of the business.
It has helped our growth tremendously. Many organizations don’t do this introduction for two reasons mainly. Fear of losing is one of the reasons. The other reason is that if I introduce between my developer and client, it could happen that my developer might not do a good job of communicating with the client. But I decided to believe in people and in their ability. I set a high standard and then tell that we have to meet this standard. As a result, even if someone is not good at communication, after trying hard for a while he becomes good. Initially, they face some hiccups but after that, they grow pretty fast. This has been the secret to our growth.
This an excerpt from our interview with Raisul Kabir, Founder, and CEO of Brain Station 23, you can read the full interview here.
Cover photo: Photo by Emilio Garcia on Unsplash
