BC Business
William Bakker, Think Social Media | BCBusinessWilliam Bakker identifies staff selection as key to successful growth.
Control – how to get it, when to let it go – dictates your business win-loss record. Steering a business from startup to stability, through the ups and downs of market cycles and changes in ownership are challenges entrepreneurs face throughout their life. But many small-business leaders are putting lie to the old adage about it being lonely at the top and instead are finding strength in numbers.?
Steering a business from startup to stability, through the ups and downs of market cycles and changes in ownership are challenges entrepreneurs face throughout their life. But many small-business leaders are putting lie to the old adage about it being lonely at the top and instead are finding strength in numbers.
Think Social Media, a Yaletown digital marketing startup, pursued a group-leadership model from the outset. Since its debut in 2010, Think has expanded from founding partners Ben Vadasz and Rodney Payne to 13 staff, and is now planning to open an office in the U.S. William Bakker, who previously oversaw online marketing for Tourism BC and recently became the company’s third partner, eschews what he considers the outdated approach to management that emphasizes face time and cubicles. Instead, he favours giving people room to meet goals, a style that Think has adopted in order to thrive in an asynchronous online environment that allows people to work together but independent of common working hours.
“We lead by putting a lot of trust into our staff,” Bakker says. “If you give people the responsibility and the authority to make their own decisions and to excel, people will take way more ownership of what they do.” Think’s project managers lead efforts on particular jobs, while relationship managers liaise with clients to ensure customer satisfaction.
With leadership being a broad responsibility, selecting staff is critical. “Those are the kind of decisions that are really, really hard, and fundamental – particularly when you’re small,” Bakker says. “You add one person to the team, and it could change your culture; it can add all kinds of complicating factors.”
Gregory Henriquez learned through experience about the importance of sharing leadership responsibilities. “The biggest thing that any entrepreneur or small business has to do is to learn to let go a little bit,” says the managing partner of Henriquez Partners Architects, the firm his father Richard Henriquez established in Vancouver in 1969. A second-generation business owner (he joined his father’s firm after completing university in 1989, and became managing partner in 2005), he has what many would consider the daunting responsibility of continuing the firm’s history of excellence into his own generation. That responsibility was put to the test while navigating the economic downturn that followed the financial collapse of 2008. Henriquez’s firm cut a quarter of its staff while overseeing completion of the Woodward’s redevelopment, the biggest and most challenging project in the firm’s history.
The experience was humbling but also healthy for Henriquez, who says the firm experienced a fundamental shift in how it operates. It has returned to its pre-recession size of 42 staff and is designing a new headquarters for Telus, but Henriquez is letting others share leadership.
“We’ve gotten bigger and I just don’t have a choice. I can’t do everything myself. If I could do it all myself, I probably still would, but I just can’t,” he says. While the creative vision of the firm rests with him, the realization of that vision is something everyone in the firm is responsible for expressing. “All of the rigour has to be there with all of the other people. That’s the trick. And the bigger you get, the harder it is to do that.”
Developing a set of clear expectations for new employees is one way of broadening the leadership base, says Jyoti Stephens, director of HR and sustainability, for Nature’s Path Foods Inc. and daughter of founders Arran and Ratana Stephens. The family-run company was launched in 1985 and has annual revenues estimated at more than $200 million with 400 staff in Canada and the U.S. Responsibility for growth has shifted from the founders to a management team that includes Jyoti and her brother Arjan and other staff.
“We’ve really brought in a top-quality management team where my parents have been able to step back and focus on more of the overall strategy and get less involved in the day-to-day minutiae,” says Stephens, who stepped into her management role with Nature’s Path in 2002. “They’ve been great at doing that and empowering people to go about and do what they need to do while they provide a clear vision of where the company has to go.”
The next step is developing a team model that will allow workers in Nature’s Path processing plants to take ownership of their corner of the operation. “They know best how to improve the performance of the line,” Stephens says. “If you give them the tools and the authority to manage, they’ll take that leadership and do amazing things with it.”