We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Elise Martin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Elise below.
Elise, appreciate you joining us today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?
When I started at Real Change Now I was the Executive Assistant. I hit the ground running with no predecessor that could do a handover. It was hard learning about the company since it was an industry that I was not familiar with. Our owner Dr. Daren Martin is a Keynote Speaker, C-Suite Coach, Trainer and WSJ Best Selling Author. If you asked me in 2016 what a Keynote Speaker did I would not have known the answer. Starting a new job is always bewildering. You feel dizzy from all the new information and you hope that once you have absorbed enough knowledge about the business the learning curve will be easier but in fact, this is not always the case. In order to scale a company and grow in the ranks with that company you need to be continuously learning. Constantly trying to find ways to improve the company, decrease costs and learn all the new tech that can assist you in doing so. Over the past five years as my role changed from Chief Marketing Officer to Chief Operations Officer and finally CEO here is what I have learned about scaling a company.
Scaling up a business:
Hiring the right people is key. A dear friend of mine says it best “Hire the right people then get out of their way”. As an executive that started at the bottom doing everything under the sun, you tend to get a little stuck in the systems and ways of doing things the way they have always been done. You’re also used to grabbing the reins and pushing all the balls uphill yourself. This is death for any business because one person can not possibly do it all.
Allowing people to fail. My saying is “First we let them try, then we tell them why”. What I mean by this is even if it looks like an idea that won’t work from my perspective, if they come with a plan and an expected outcome it’s important to let them try. Afterall, I’m human and I could be wrong, even if I think that I’m right. Shooting down ideas can have a bad effect on the person who came up with the idea. The more ideas the better especially from a new generation with new perspectives on the world. If you shoot them down too many times they are liable to just stop bringing new ideas to the table. The world is moving and shifting constantly in terms of technological advances and the way people work. When you hire the right people and allow them to try new things and to fail without feeling like failing is as bad as all that. New fresh approaches come to light and scaling becomes possible. Winston Churchill. said, “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often”. If they do fail then you tell them why you thought it failed, that is the why. You discuss it and sometimes come up with an even better plan.
Many businesses are a 15-year overnight success so to speak. The best way to explain this analogy is through ART. Let’s say you ask an artist to paint you a landscape and they complete the task in 1 hour and then set the price of the piece at $15,000 dollars. You say “But it only took you an hour?” We forget however that you are not paying for him to paint that painting but for all the years of hard work and learning how to paint that skillfully. We often look at businesses that seem to arrive and become successful overnight but we forget to look at all the hours of learning and failing on other projects, businesses, and so on.
Learning is crucial to every person who wants to be successful. At some point, even the smartest entrepreneur can get stuck or run out of new ideas. Reading helps us spark the embers of new ideas that can turn into a blazing flame. As you scale you need to hire new people to take on some of the work. Doing so without having at least a basic knowledge of what they are supposed to be doing would be tantamount to business suicide. As a CEO if I need to hire a marketing company, a social media specialist, or a bookkeeper I know that first I need to educate myself on at least the basics of that field. When you don’t, that is where you end up hiring someone who takes you for a ride. We see this in movies where the young heiress gets left a lot of money and there is someone entrusted with taking care of that money for her because she never learned to manage money for herself. As a result, she blindly trusts the people around her to do so. One day when that person loses all her money or steals it all she will only have herself to blame. A good leader is constantly learning all aspects of their business, not just the role they play in that business.
Lastly, it’s important to have what a teacher of mine once told me a long time ago. A hit by a bus plan. We all know that when someone is about to leave we ask them to put together a list of projects they are working on, their day-to-day tasks, their passwords, and so on. But why do so many businesses wait until someone is leaving to have them do this? Having a hit by a bus plan means answering one question every day. If I was hit by a bus tomorrow suddenly, could the next person easily come in and fill my shoes based on the preparation I had done to aid my replacement? If the answer is no, then you need to stop what you’re doing and start putting a plan together. When I was a receptionist at D Magazine we had a cheat sheet for the front desk that included daily responsibilities, how the phones worked, passwords, and logins for accounts, when to order coffee and everything else under the sun. Once a week and sometimes more often I would update the sheet as things around the office evolved. Asking employees that have been with you 10 years to do this can be tricky but if you ask them to do this on their first day as a standard practice it will be better received. My advice is to have everyone create and maintain their own sheet. This way when someone walks out or gets hit by a bus the new person can jump right in. Project Management Software can help but I still suggest a cheat sheet. Think of it as having a will and just making sure all is in order.
You’ll fail a lot as you scale, you’ll learn a lot as you scale, you’ll hire, fire, let go, lose and gain talent from the most unusual places but in the end no matter how daunting any project or task feels remember that you have the know-how to figure out the solution because you have the passion to see your business succeed.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I was born in California but I grew up in Saudi Arabia. It gave me an interesting perspective. In business, in life, and many other areas. I had always wanted to be a kindergarten teacher from a young age. When I reached that goal life brought another opportunity to me to work for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. It was during the Iraqi war and I felt that with my language skills I could really be of assistance to those poor refugees who had crossed the border into the United Arab Emirates. It was a tiring and never-ending job. I was in the middle east and when I was awake HQ in Geneva was asleep and when we started to sleep Geneva would wake up and work would start all over again. After a while I decided it wasn’t for me so I left my job and traveled to America where I lived for the first time in my life. Everywhere I worked before working for myself was fulfilling in its way but nothing can compare to building something of your own. It was a hard adjustment at first but over time America proved to be everything people said it was. A place where a person of any means or background can go from having nothing to owning a business and being very successful in just one generation. Here is what I will close with, The American Dream still exists but you need to make it your reality. Never be afraid of ambition only the lack of it and when it comes to dreams one may falter but the only way to fail is to abandon them.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
Managing a team goes hand in hand with getting the right people on the bus and the right people in the right seats on that bus so to speak. Once that is done you need to give them room to grow, fail, laugh and cry when needed. The world of work is not like it was 30 years ago. People are no longer just cogs in a wheel, they are human beings who will have good days and bad but if you have the right people in the right spots you’ll find work gets done no matter what. Maintaining high morale is easy if you try not to take everything too seriously, nothing is the end of the world, clients will come and go and money can be found if you keep pushing forward.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Collateral, collateral, collateral. When I joined the company in 2017 I immediately noted the need for collecting collateral. There were some but the more the better and we never stopped collecting it. Since we represent a speaker that meant filming every Keynote talk he ever gave whether the room was pretty or not, whether the audience was big or not. So many speakers make the mistake of only caring about filming their big audience venues which in the end will limit the amount of collateral they have online. You never know what video or picture will speak to whom so you need to have a large variety of collateral. The collateral can then be broken down into pieces and turned into short clips that can be released throughout the year to promote the speaker. You don’t need to hire a camera crew every time often all you need is a good camera or a cell phone nowadays and a tripod. In the speaking business collateral is everything.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.darenmartin.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elise_m_martin/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eliseevansmartin
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elisemmartin/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/EliseMMartin
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXrXOvbiGG8&list=PLRfVbu08jsVIeJRo7sYEv0mXeSk9MdPh2&index=2