“If it means you have to give away some of your shares to get the right people, give away your shares and get them”

In Fitzgerald Power’s interview series, we’re speaking to people, with different perspectives, who feel they can offer more to the workplace – from the water cooler all the way up to C-Suite.

Business growth – be it in terms of clients, services or production – is a major achievement. That said, with larger-scale operations come larger-scale problems. There’s no denying that, in business, the best way to go is up. However, a challenge that many companies face as they grow is losing sight of the thriving culture that made it a great place to be in the first place.

Advisor, scaling expert and Galwegian Jarlath Dooley is no stranger to creating change. The youngest of six, he grew accustomed to watching his older siblings and friends dread work and live for the weekend. “I thought to myself,” he smiles via Zoom from his Dublin home. “I could never do that.” He left for the University of Limerick as a teenager, hoping to postpone the dread of working life by attending university. There, he discovered HR and Organisational Psychology. “I thought to myself, maybe I could use this to change workplaces. And shift a job from being extrinsically rewarding by way of paycheques to being intrinsically rewarding by way of being a place you actually wanted to go and succeed in.” And so his passion for culture, and change, began. “I realised when working in a multinational that they’re just too big to change. They’re not really going to change until they fail. And that’s been proven many times over my career. I’ve seen a lot of them go that way. So, I saw that I could really have an impact on SMEs and, particularly in IT, where there were a lot of really exciting SMEs growing. I ended up being  fortunate enough to work in three of Ireland’s most successful IT companies and I count myself very lucky in that.”

Dooley boasts extensive senior leadership experience in the Irish IT landscape, specialising in People & Culture, Business Performance and M&A (Integrations). During his time, he’s worked with some of Ireland’s most successful companies, including Iona Technologies, FINEOS and Version 1, and has operated at board level for many years. His passion lies in scaling fast growth, high potential Software/IT businesses with a focus on creating high-performing cultures, aligning management teams focused on business performance and integrating newly acquired businesses. “So, if we take Version 1 for example,” he says. “I would say that the strategy was a very good strategy, but it wasn’t genius… or even very clever. We knew our business model, we knew the customer pain we were solving and we said we would become the best at solving that and then that would feed our growth. Obviously, there was more detail than that but it was nothing inventive or novel. But what was central was that culture was going to be the accelerator. We used culture to drive growth. Even Ryanair’s strategy at the beginning was this simple. It was about short haul routes, using one type of plane, etc. But they were outstanding in their execution, and that’s where culture comes in. If you can build a culture that supports executing your strategy, then growth is easy.”

There are a number of things that help scale at pace, Dooley says. “We were obsessed about core values,” he says. “In that, we totally understood what they were, and no matter how big we got, we never lost sight of them. That ensures excellence is built into the culture very early on.” Ambition sat at number two. “I think the first thing I say to people is to be really ambitious. People overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in five years. Before I left Version 1, the CEO set a goal of being a billion-euro business – and everybody laughed. Yet, it’s far, far exceeded that today. It’s probably closer to one-and-a-half billion. So, you know, if people don’t snigger or laugh at your ambitions, they’re probably not big enough.” Promoting from within, building an organisation that could sell, ensuring a no-ego strategy – where everyone sat at the same table, and CEOs had to book meeting rooms just like graduates – and making decisions based on data also proved really important when scaling. But above all, investing in people proved to be worth its weight in gold, time and time again. “If it means you have to give away some of your shares to get the right people, give away your shares and get them,” Dooley says. “Because remember, at the end of the day, you want to make a big cake, not a small cookie. If you make a big enough cake, everyone gets to benefit. And you know, it’s so much easier for an entrepreneur, if he or she surrounds themselves with good people. It immediately takes the pressure off.

“It’s an excuse for people to say that we can’t do what the multinationals do – don’t be looking at what the big guys do. What I say is, look at what you can do, and there’s nothing out there stopping any company building a high performing culture with a winning team that will drive the business forward.”

Identifying core values is not as simple as selecting words or phrases that look nice on a boardroom poster. In essence, they should become a way of life. But, how does one choose the right core values – is it about what you want to create, or what you have now? “It’s about what you have done to date,” Dooley says. “What stands out about your business? So it’s part of what made you successful, and the words people use to describe it. It’s what behaviors are evident all the time – which is why you can’t make them up. And that’s where people go wrong.

“Every business is unique. And, you know, I would never have put down the core value of “Have Fun,” in Version 1, like other businesses did, because that just wasn’t true. We were hard working, and the reward came from achieving and growing and learning, not from having fun. Don’t get me wrong, yes, we had fun, but it wasn’t a core value. So it would have been a good one to put down to attract talent, but then people would’ve come in to say this is different to what I was promised. What we wanted were people who were keen to accelerate quickly, to learn and to grow. And that was one of the key points in our growth; we were always looking for talent; we were always ruthless in our decision making and we always hired the right people. If you get the right people coming in, then you protect your culture. If you hire people just to fill jobs, your culture starts to fall apart.”

When it comes to what not to do for scaling SMEs, Dooley’s answers are simple. “Owners need to understand finance and capital, as well as learning the difference between investment and cost,” he says. “You know, many SME owners see everything as a cost. But it may cost you a lot more money not to invest in things like recruitment. Spending money on fancy offices is a cost, I don’t think you get much back for that, but you will certainly get a lot back for building a recruitment engine or building a sales engine.

“I think the first thing is that too many founders are happier to have 100% of a cookie than 20% of cake. It’s about understanding capital finance – that’s a big one. The second one is thinking that growing revenue is about hiring sales guys. It’s not. Real sales success is building an organisation that can sell, and the sales guy takes the order. A lot of SMEs rely on a hero sales guy or two, but selling is about the organisation – it is about pre-sales, marketing, brand, technology, data, process – it’s about how you deliver excellence and how you manage the customer. Selling is a complex organisational exercise that needs to be nurtured and mastered.

“Finally, after building a high performing culture, there are two things a company needs to grow: one is a sales engine and the other is a talent engine. If you have both of them, you can fix everything else. If you’re missing one of those, you’re not going to grow. That’s just something I find; people don’t fully understand the growth impact of building a sales engine and they don’t fully understand the criticality of being excellent at talent acquisition. But yet, I think those are the two most important things in scale – without them, you’re done for.”

For more information on Jarlath, as well as his thoughts on scaling, check out his LinkedIn page here.