Darcy Tuer is the Co-founder and CEO of ZayZoon. And doesn’t mess around. His company recently raised $15 million to increase employee financial wellness. As an experienced founder & personal growth geek, he offers a lot of wisdom to other culture builders out there! Most importantly, mastery has become a core component of their culture. You'll find out how Darcy provides leadership to this concept that so many aspire to obtain.
Previously to ZayZoon, Darcy was co-founder and president of Spira Data Corp. for 11 years. In his tenure at Spira, Darcy and his team took the company from concept to processing over $3B annually in revenue and payroll data.
In this episode, you will learn:
- Most of your employees experience financial stress which can affect their performance, their ability to work collaboratively and how they show up at work.
- The importance of onboarding and integration, also spending a lot of time with a new hire even before their first day.
- How a standard daily 15 min scrum is critical > takes process & discipline.
- Encouraging employees to have internal side-gigs becomes a crucial part of helping people build mastery and encourage innovative thinking.
- Daily scrums are also essential for accountability to align with the organization’s core values.
- Navigating the growth of your team and why it may be wise to bring on an additional, even third, co-founder to ensure you have all the skills needed to thrive as an organization.
- Conflict is best entered into if you put your ego aside.
- Navigating decision making with 2 doors, from Jeff Bezos. Essentially, if you can make a decision (e.g. walk through a door), and still come out of it easily (e.g. walk back through the door), you should do that swiftly to try. If you can’t walk out, spend a significant amount of time deliberating on the decision.
- How do you build high-performing people and sustain this type of environment?
- As you grow, jobs of your team are quite wide with multiple competencies, as opposed to when you grow, you may need someone who has deep competency in just, for example, enterprise sales.
- Maintain a high-performing environment by keeping them intimately connected to your customers, the people you serve and the impact you’re making. “Why are we doing this?” Only possible if you share across departments who don’t interact with customers as well.
- “Predict out of the gates, before you raise the capital, to show investors that you can within 80% of said prediction. That will engender a tremendous amount of confidence from the investor community; they’re looking for a great story, they’re looking for a great team, they’re looking for execution. Can you set a realistic plan where you can achieve certain milestones with the capital available to you, and progress by de-risking the business.”
- “If I’ve ever seen a common denominator with the successful founders I’ve seen is a grit and determination, along with the team you surround yourself with.”
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