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Gaining ground
How to manage a growing company
By Brian Horn
Smart Business | November 2009
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Sarah Eck-Thompson, co-founder, president and COO, All Terrain Inc.
When Sarah Eck-Thompson and her co-founder, Brook Jay, founded their company 11 years ago, they were doing it all. But, as All Terrain Inc. grew, they realized they had to start delegating more at the marketing company, which posted more than $5 million in 2008 revenue.
“It’s a balance on defining what you want the company to be and then allowing people to put their own spin on it in maybe a slightly different way than you would,” says the co-founder, president and chief operating officer of the company.
Smart Business spoke with Eck-Thompson about how to manage a growing company and create a casual culture.
Q. What advice would you have for another leader who is going through growth?
I am definitely an advocate of a leadership coach or just someone like an objective, third party that they can just sit down and talk to and talk through some problems or issues. Because it really helps give you some clarity on how you are communicating and how you are affecting other people in good and bad ways.
When we started our company, I didn’t ever really think of how we were communicating because we were still a really small group, so we were just going doing our work.
As we were growing and adding more people and different layers of management and stuff like that, it was really crucial for us to take a step back and look at that.
Q. How do you communicate feedback?
Our environment is pretty casual, so I would say it’s not a big issue.
(It’s) just calling (employees) into your office and saying, ‘Well, such and such didn’t go so well. Why don’t we take a look at what went wrong and how we would attack that differently in the future.’ …
The key to being a good leader is being accountable. It’s easy to jump out in front and claim the big wins and the big successes, but it’s also you need to acknowledge and appreciate people’s accomplishments and not jump in front of them and take credit for them.
At the same time, you need to, as a manager, take some ownership of the failures, too, and make sure that you use those as a way to learn from them. Look at them honestly and learn from them moving forward.
If someone has a failure of some kind or fails in their job — before trying to say, ‘Oh, they screwed up,’ I like to look at it and say, ‘Well, did this person know what their job was? Did they have the skills and traits in order to fulfill that job and did we give them the resources to do it?’
Before saying, ‘This person isn’t right for this job,’ looking at the situation like, ‘Did we give them everything they needed to have to be successful and were they the right person to be successful?’
