How to get the right team for a fast-growing business

Craig Lovett runs venue and events cleaning firm Cleanevent. He took the company from $35 million to $135 million, and says other businesses can do the same.

“It’s people first, people second and people third – and if there’s enough time for anything else let’s think more about people as well.
“So therefore you wish you could pay everybody everything you want to pay them. You can’t necessarily do that. But I employed them because if I’d looked at what the business was going to do in the next 18 months or the next two years, they were the right person at the time at the right money at the time. But where was the growth in that person?

“Keep it grounded and let’s understand what we’re doing on a day-to-day – what comes in and what goes out. And then you empower people inside the organisation to make decisions in their own right.

“But if you’re going to empower them you’ve got to give them every piece of the empowerment. You’ve got to give them what we call inside our business the ARAs – the accountabilities, the responsibilities and the authorities – that go with it. Because you can’t empower anyone unless you give them all three.

“We’ve grown at such a rate that the options of giving away little pieces of equity earlier at the local account level, we sort of went past that. And the next step for us is to look at, as we move forward with our business, to look at the top 20 or 30 people in that business and work out how we give all of them equity in our business.”

Read more about Craig Lovett and Cleanevent.