My biggest mistake: Rob Hango-Zada, co-founder of Shippit

Rob Hango-Zada had built a career working for others in the retail world before founding his own business with longtime friend, William On, in 2014. 

Hango-Zada admits there are “so many” mistakes he’s made through his career, but with Shippit being the first business he’s run and founded, he can safely say his biggest mistake comes down to one thing every business relies on: people. 

“The biggest mistake is not hiring soon enough, in certain areas,” Hango-Zada told SmartCompany Plus. 

“When you’re running a company, you think you need to be the expert in all things, and you tend to keep your finger in a lot of different pies,” he said. 

But his time at Shippit has taught him that sometimes letting go of the reins is just as important, especially while leading a business reliant on the retail sector through the pandemic.

The mistake

Technically Hango-Zada is the chief marketing officer of Shippit — but he’s never actually held a chief marketing officer position before. He’s worked in marketing roles previously, but he wouldn’t consider himself an expert.

“So it makes sense for me to relinquish that title and actually bring the experts in,” he said.

It’s this kind of thinking that Hango-Zada acknowledges has been the company’s biggest mistake all along — not bringing the right people in to help grow the business in the right way, and instead believing the existing team could handle it all themselves.

But with 300% growth since the start of the pandemic, there simply weren’t enough hands on deck for Shippit.

The context

Hango-Zada says a mistake like this “just creeps up on you”.

“You’re trying to think about what’s the optimal time to let go [and] let the reins go on certain responsibility areas,” he said. But life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans, as the saying goes.

And Shippit’s rapid growth through the pandemic left little time for hiring.

Plus, as a founder, Hango-Zada says you often have a high pain threshold, which results in taking on a lot more than you’re actually able to do so that you can keep churning through the work — a mindset that both Hango-Zada and On doubled down on during the pandemic.

“I think we kind of got stuck in just getting through the motions of the growth of the business, and we kind of weren’t able to make the space to bring the right people in,” Hango-Zada acknowledged.

“It wasn’t through a lack of intent. It was just keeping things going without thinking forward enough.”

The impact

“Once you get to a certain scale, it becomes impossible to serve the company [in every way],” Hango-Zada said. 

And trying to do so just leads to “really bad outcomes”, like the fact that Hango-Zada was positioned as the chief marketing officer, despite there being other people with better expertise and experience in Shippit’s remit. 

Hiring experts and leaders was something the co-founders were actively doing in the early days, but Hango-Zada believes it was the “sheer volume of work that came through the last two years really forced us to just constrain the thinking”. 

“We’ve always tried to surround ourselves with really capable, really smart people. And that’s been key to our success.

“But finding really good talent is a real challenge for anyone,” and during the pandemic, hiring wasn’t front of mind — which meant Shippit was dealing with rapid growth in customers without a significant growth in headcount. 

The fix

Historically, Shippit liked to operate with a “fairly flat organisational structure”, Hango-Zada explains, as there was a “real resistance” to building in a hierarchy in its early days. 

“But then it gets to a point where that doesn’t work anymore”. 

Recognising that — along with the realisation that the founders needed to start working “on the business rather than in the business” — is ultimately what helped change this mindset. 

Shippit now has its own dedicated chief marketing officer, as well as a chief of staff to help with the staffing growth.

“Now, the flatness for us is more about how open we are to our team — we’ve still got a very open door policy,” Hango-Zada said.

The lesson

Hango-Zada says the lesson he’s learnt from the mistake isn’t simply to ‘hire more people’. It’s also to “make yourself redundant as soon as possible”. 

“One of the things that gives me a great deal of pleasure is seeing my team up on stage at events … they’re talking about a side of things that I couldn’t even dream of. So I think that empowerment piece is really important,” he said.  

“Empower staff fast and early in your journey, and bring the right leadership team around you because they’re going to be critical to your success.”