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PART 2 - Paradigm Shifting as Companies Grow: Commandos, Infantrymen, and Policemen
This is Part Two of Paradigm Shifting as Companies Grow: Commandos, Infantrymen, and Policemen. Make sure to read part one for the context for this entry.
The Pivot Point
When I sat down with my CEO, it was a different conversation that I thought we were going to have. He discussed some concepts he shared in his blog recently.
At the beginning of a startup you need a Commando who will just take the beach-head. A Commando will break all the rules and just execute. He will never say this is not my job. He will just take the hill. Later as a company grows you need infantrymen: they will build supply lines and they will set you up for large scale growth by making processes repeatable and predictable. On the downside though infantrymen effectively pour cement on your business plan so if you need to change it or need to be low cost they are not the people for you. Finally once you have a successful venture you bring in the policemen who will make sure nothing is broken and will optimize things on the margin. Policemen may still make the company $100M by tweaking some efficiency by 1% because the scale of the company is so large at that point.
The key to running a startup is to hire the right people at the right stage. Hire an infantryman before you have traction and suddenly you’ll spend 3x more because they need a team to get anything done or you’ll iterate the product 1/3 slower because planning and measuring will add tremendous overhead. Hire an infantryman too late and you’ll see outages and crashes. The biggest trouble with executive hires is that usually most big name executives have only learned to be policemen or at best infantryman. They don’t like to be commando’s and are frequently not very good at it. The best hire of course is one that can behave differently in each stage.
I was blown away.
That moment was a paradigm shift. My past jobs were different from Riya: Audible needed Infantrymen, LowerMyBills.com needed policemen and all I knew was how to drive growth in channels that were already at least partly open. I had been a commando early in my life in politics, but not in business. I had never thought this way in marketing.
It was a pivot point, I realized that I knew more than enough about search, but I needed a different paradigm for making decisions that were right for Riya. I just needed to embrace my inter-commando.
Final Thoughts
I look at seasoned executives in our business, Todd Crawford, Lisa Riolo, Steve Denton, Tim Storm, and Matt Coffin (my old boss at LowerMyBills.com) and I’m inspired by their flexibility. They have all worked through the three stages of a company’s growth; it’s pretty impressive. Others in our community have not been able make the transition, yet others like Shawn Collins have found they are much happier as Commandos and doing their own thing than working for companies.
What I love the most about affiliate marketing is the amazing entrepreneurial sprit of affiliates which is part of being a commando, but to get to the next step, people need to migrate their thinking to infantrymen and become much more oppertunitistic than entrepreneurial. Some affiliates have chosen to grow while others have not because they are just happier being commandos.
Also, I raised this now because Riya 2.0 is about to launch and Munjal has been chronicling the process in a blog with a compelling narrative that presents tons of concepts for building a company. Since the affiliate marketing world is full of the best marketers and entrepreneurs around, I think Munjal offers some business insight anchored in a strong narrative that is worth a read.
And so you all just don’t think I’m buttering up to my boss, here is a quote from another blogger who is a VC: “Readers interested in a remarkably detailed perspective on how startups navigate changes of course should check out Munjal’s blog, which reads almost like a thriller as it walks us through Riya’s evolution after its launch.”
Good metaphor, I love metaphors because they can help to make a paradigm or problem understandable and accessible to somebody who does not know about and understand the details of the thing you are talking about.
You don’t need to say that you are not buttering your boss. People that know you know that you put your money where your mouth is. You either say something honestly or you don’t say anything, if you can’t say it honestly.
I was myself a policeman, infantryman and commando. I can live as a policeman and like a lot of aspects of it, but I am better and happier as a commando. I suck as infantryman and hate it from my heart. This said, I want to be a commando until I drop dead or retire as policeman, in the case that I become a cripple during an attack on another beach. I would get shot as Infantryman for insubordination.
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Good post (I read both as one because I do not mind long posts
Cheers,
Carsten
Sam,
Lol! Freakin’ hippy I tell ya!
You know, when I was in DC lobbying for environmental groups, I hated the war metephors since I’m as much of a blue stater as anyone. But the thing of it is, the miltary understands how to focus and organize people to accomplish goals and defines roles in such a way, that one can create metaphors that people will understand. It’s not a my favorite choice of a metaphor, but I could not come up with a better one to be honest that worked for all three phases.
I agree that the promise of Web 2.0 lets us embrace the true promise of affiliate marketing and I hope I get to work a little on this in this job. However, here is where I get concerned on whether that promise of affiliate marketing will actually work in this new world. Let me explain why.
If you have a community base of traffic, you really want sponsorships or CPM money. P4P money is not as profitable. Look at blogs, they have a community of traffic and don’t they embrace the core value we want as affilaites? Blogs move away from CPA as soon as they can. And who can blame them.
Web 2.0 will let us see if the true promise of affilaite marketing is really community based marketing I think and sometimes I think it is and sometimes, I think affiliate marketing is really just small direct marketing companies on the web.
As always thanks for the interesting conversation and the kind feedback on the blog. I like writing these more interspective blogs, but I tend not to be able to force them; they just kinda happen when the muse inspires me and I have time. Also, the nice thing about Riya is that Munjal will let me write these blog — an advantage of being commando is I get to blog about work. As a note, both LowerMyBills.com and Audible were truely great about me bloging, but I had more rules to follow. Kudos for both being publicly traded companies that let me blog.
Cheers,
Beth