#ScaleStrategy is produced by DX Journal and OneEleven. This editorial series delivers insights, advice, and practical recommendations to innovative and disruptive entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs.
In three-and-a-half years, Wealthsimple has raised $165 million in capital from the Power Financial Group and scaled from three employees to 175. And in early 2018, the company announced a milestone of more than $2 billion in assets under management and cemented itself in the vanguard of Canada’s new breed of financial services businesses.
“I’m on a personal mission to build a Canadian company globally,” says Co-Founder and CEO, Mike Katchen. “I want to see more companies in Canada take on the world and build long-lasting global institutions.”
Wealthsimple’s scale-up story is the stuff of legends (you can read our piece on their journey here). As part of #ScaleStrategy, Katchen spoke with Bilal Khan, Managing Partner of M6ix Ventures and the founding CEO of OneEleven, about the pressure, pain and pleasures of growing rapidly.
Bilal Khan: What has the experience of scaling your business been like?
Mike Katchen: I think the hard part for me is that we’ve never done this before. We didn’t really know what good process looked like. I like to think that good process is something you can’t even see. It’s just a way of operating that makes everyone better, but not something you pay attention to or gets in the way of work. Today, we’re trying to introduce structure to make people more productive, but we still have a ways to go on that front.
Khan: And you’re happy to let team members build the processes themselves?
Katchen: I’m very hands-off. I’m here to support our people to do the best work of their lives.
Katchen: If they need my help or support, they want to problem-solve things, come to me. But I am not going to drive the agenda for each individual team as to what they’re supposed to accomplish, what they’re working on, what their goals are. I’ll encourage them to push their thinking, but it’s not up to me to set each person’s ownership over their parts of the business. That’s a key point of our style.
Khan: Was there a time when you realized a certain process or system that you were using was starting to become disastrous and you had to introduce something new there?
Katchen: On the people side, I led HR and recruiting for the first 50 hires. It was really important on the recruiting side, but a terrible idea on the HR side. Quickly after that, our first HR leader came in and helped to structure some of the “people process” that we have here, which made a big difference. At some point you transform from being a small, scrappy family-like team to building a company where things like career paths, trajectory, titles, salary and benchmarking become really important. As soon as you hit a certain size, you have to think about what the company starts to look like rather than just a group of folks trying to will something into existence.
On the product side, in the early days, you go by your gut. You build the things you want. That’s still is a part of our ethos because we are clients of our products and we love to build things that we want to use. At the same time, you start to pay real technical debt if you build things you’re not going to commit to, and you become much less nimble as you scale. In the last year, we really tried to implement a better product planning process where anyone in the company can pitch what we build, but we have a process in place on how we decide what to build, what to kill. This is important to help us stay focused on building the right things.
Khan: Tell me about a scale pressure that was a hard nut to crack.
Katchen: Last year we were unprepared for the enormity of tax season in Canada. The industry talks about taxes being super seasonal and that tax season is the busy time of year, but we never experienced that before. We didn’t anticipate this huge spike. During last year’s tax season, we were wholly under-resourced on our customer support team, and this led to some poor experiences and delays that we had to crawl our way out of it. People were working 120-hour weeks for a couple of months straight to try and dig our way out of that hole.
This year, we tried to be a lot more thoughtful about it. Rather than hiring an army of customer service people, we threw a technology team at our customer support operations and tried to figure out if there was software we could build that would both support our customer support resources as well as eliminate the need for customers to call in.
What we found is that last year, there were something like 35,000 interactions in the month leading up to the RRSP season deadline. This year, we have more than three times the amount of customers but only had 40,000 interactions. All without a bigger team.
Khan: How do you continue to be innovative, test new product offerings without impacting the business at scale?
Katchen: We get really excited about big ideas and probably throw too little resources at them and don’t always see the ideas all the way through to where they need to be: robust and scalable.
We need to focus on maintaining our positioning and growing our market share, keep optimizing to deliver a better experience, keep improving to make the fundamentals of our business better. But our aspirations are much bigger than just that. We want to build a business around the world that truly transforms the landscape of financial services. That requires some big bets and not all will pay off.
So, one of the new things we’re introducing is an analogy from one of our team members: Garden and Plant. This describes those two activities of growing market share and making big bets. We need to be smart about how we resource between those two activities. To do that, we’ve decided that 75 percent of the company resources should go toward gardening activities that support business growth, and 25 percent should go toward planting or cultivating new ideas. I think it will bring some more discipline to allocating resources.
Khan: How do you manage culture with 165 employees and growing?
Katchen: We’ve done a few things right with culture at scale.
Katchen: We still have an all-hands meeting every week, and we’ve iterated a lot on the content of that meeting and who leads it. I used to lead them all the time, and then my co-founder and I started sharing the responsibility, and now it’s everyone on the leadership team can run them. I think people enjoy that different team members from other parts of the business get to share how the company is doing. It adds perspective on how things are going that I think is valued.
And at that meeting, we try to do things that ensure that people know where we are going. We remind people of the company priorities and how we’re doing moving against them. We talk about metrics.
Specifically, we have a concept called FUD, which we stole from Stripe, who we really admire for their culture). It stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. It is a chance for anyone in the company to publicly or anonymously share what we call “an existential concern” that they have about the business. It’s a pretty jarring thing for people the first time they hear it. But I think it inspires a culture of transparency and enforces that it’s okay to have tough conversations here.
Khan: Have you had the conversation around potentially bringing in people who have done it before.
Katchen: Ah, the grey hair question. We’ve been fortunate and managed to grow very quickly. Boards are happy when you grow fast. For me, I’ve always had the mindset that there might come a day where it makes sense to bring in someone. To me, there’s no ego about it. I’m here because I believe in what we’re building at Wealthsimple. I believe in the team. I want to see this through to building a truly transformative company that makes people’s lives better. Right now, I am probably the right person in this role. If that changes, that’s cool, so long as it’s for the right reasons and it’s the right person.
For Wealthsimple, we gave up control as a business. We sold the majority stake to Power Corp., which is a really unusual thing to do for a business of our size. And the reason why it’s okay is because to take a company all the way to IPO, you’re going to have to do that at some point. For us, hanging on to control is less relevant. It’s a question of “how do you set up your business for long-term success?” We tried to find a partner that we trusted and believed could be a long-term partner to help us get there. It made that trade-off a lot easier. They share that trust with us and our management team.
Khan: What books helped you in your scaleup journey?
Katchen:
- “Why Mexicans Don’t Drink Molson” By Andrea Mandel-Campbell. This book was a huge wake-up call on the need to think big and do things differently. I talk about the book a lot because it informs a much of my thinking around Canada and how we need to build global companies.
- “The Lean Startup”. By Eric Ries. How many businesses get built where people spend years of their time on products and projects that don’t have fit because there’s no market for it? They never test it. Everyone has to know that.
- “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz. In the first year of scaling, I remember reading what he wrote about hiring friends who have been a part of the business from the beginning and how much that sucked. And it does, it’s heart-wrenching.
