The Compound #7: Promotions from within, the one trait I actually hire for, and running on empty

I’ve spent the last week trying to see as many people as possible…friends, family & industry contacts, all before we fly to Bali on 2nd June. My calendar has been relentless in the best possible way.

This is the first quiet hour I’ve had all week. Cody is asleep. Let’s go.

At Toucan we promoted someone to Director this week. He joined us as a designer. He's been with Toucan for six years. When he started, we weren't the business we are now. He grew as we grew and now he leads his department.

It got me thinking about the pattern, because it's not an accident. Look around the leadership team and you'll find version after version of the same story: people who joined early, stayed, and built the thing they now run.

I've hired over a hundred people. I've made good hires and bad ones. I've hired for skill and been burned. I've hired for experience and been burned. The one trait that has consistently predicted who stays, who grows, and who you can trust when things get difficult is…honesty.

Not honesty in the abstract. I mean the specific kind: people who tell you what's actually going on, who say "I don't know" when they don't know, who flag a problem before it becomes your problem.

You can train almost anything else. You cannot train someone to be transparent when the stakes are high and it would be easier not to be. That either exists in someone or it doesn't. I've stopped trying to interview for skills and started trying to find people who show up when things are uncomfortable.

“You can train skill. You cannot train someone to be honest when it costs them something.”

We leave for Bali in less than two weeks. Three and a half months away. So the last two weeks I've been trying to see everyone…friends, family, people from the industry. Dinners, lunches, catch-ups that I kept putting off because London proximity made it easy to. That excuse disappears when you're seven hours ahead and 24 hours from home.

I thrive on routine so the hectic schedule has been hard. The one fixed point in all of it has been training. Every day, regardless of what the day or night before looked like, headphones are in and I train hard. Some sessions were rough. Tired legs, injuries creeping in. Didn't matter.

There's something about having one hour in the day that belongs entirely to you that keeps everything else manageable. Not because it's relaxing, sprint intervals are never relaxing, but because it's the one thing that runs on your schedule and nobody else's. It’s the one hour that messages and calls get ignored. When everything around you is other people's plans and other people's energy, that hour is the reset.

Six weeks to Jakarta. The training doesn't get easier from here. But the last two weeks have reminded me that the sessions I do when I least feel like it are the ones that matter most. Not for the fitness. For the sanity.

Toucan just moved into a new office. Same building. Top floor now, floor to ceiling windows, views across London. Not bad for an independent agency that started in a one bedroom apartment. We're presenting to an Amazon partner team this month. We have a webinar on AMC in early June. The team going into the second half of the year is the strongest we've had.

I've been reflecting on what the business actually looks like eight years in. The leadership team is full of people who joined before we were big enough to justify their roles. The client list has names in it that I genuinely dreamed about working with when we started. The c-suite structure we put in place is already making decisions faster than we could make them alone.

The thing nobody tells you about building a business is that the best indicator of where you're going isn't the revenue line. It's whether the people around you are growing. If they are, everything else tends to follow.

Eight years in and most of the people I'm most proud of are people we hired when they were less senior than they are now.

“The best indicator of where your business is going isn’t the revenue line. It’s whether the people around you are growing.”