Building a culture of performance: hiring hacks from RevZilla (Part 2)

If you missed the first episode with Anthony Bucci, co-founder and former CEO of RevZilla, be sure to listen now. He explains how he and his co-founders scaled RevZilla from an idea to over $140 million in revenue without raising any outside money. Today, we shift gears to talk about people – hiring, leading and managing.

Anthony is a self-proclaimed nerd when it comes to people issues. In this episode, he will challenge your thinking on hiring, leading and managing. He’ll give you a powerful concept we recommend our portfolio companies: the 5-15. Anthony mastered keeping signal strength throughout the business, and he explains in great detail how and why you should use a 5-15 with every direct report.

Anthony also shares about how he debugs his own psychology by utilizing mentors, board members, and outside executive coaches.

Other Topics from Today’s episode include:

  • When you need to start obsessing about hiring the best people
  • Your role as a leader in hiring and how that changes from the start-up phase to the scale-up phase
  • How long should you expect new hires to perform before you worry about the company outgrowing them?
  • What’s more important: cultural fit or ability?
  • How to measure cultural fit – in an interview and beyond
  • The importance of measuring output for each new hire
  • The danger of hiring someone that is not a cultural fit
  • How to use the 4 Magic numbers to balance happy employees, raving customers, revenue and profit
  • Why you should have counterbalance measures you should obsess about
  • How to keep your employees engaged by using the 5:15 format
  • What should be part of a performance review
  • When to lean in with direct reports vs. when to let them stub their toe
  • Why Anthony used three different CEO coaches during his tenure at RevZilla
  • What he used the different CEO coaches for along the growth journey
  • How to think about an external coach vs. informal mentors and friends
  • The importance of having someone to debug your psychology

We spent over 2 hours with Anthony covering a wide variety of topics. To break down the episodes into digestible bites, we’ve broken up our interview into two parts:

  • Episode 1: You’ll hear the process Anthony and his co-founders used to start and generate the idea for the company that became RevZilla. Anthony also goes into great detail about how they differentiated themselves and quickly scaled from $0 to over $140 million in annual revenues. Anthony shares why and how they achieved hyper-growth without raising money.
  • Episode 2 (Today’s Episode): Anthony’s provides specific details of how they approached promoting and hiring, ahead of scale. He offers insights and lessons learned about how to scale people, processes and product – before everything breaks. He also shares what how he utilizes executive coaches, mentors and advisors.

Be sure to subscribe on iTunes (or Spotify or Overcast) to make sure you don’t miss one of these compelling episodes.

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