Building Your Management Team Might Be Easier Than You Think

Yesterday I had the privilege of interviewing Matt Ocken, one of the founders of Kindred Partners.

Kindred Partners might be the best at recruiting executives for high-growth technology companies. In fact, some of the top venture capital firms continuously use Kindred to find executives for the companies they fund.

If that’s not enough, consider that Kindred was responsible for placing CEO Meg Whitman at eBay as well as key executives at Google, Amazon and Facebook.

So, Matt was obviously uniquely qualified to answer my questions about how to expertly build your company’s management team.

Matt started by going through the four tactics for building a great management team. Surprisingly, the first tactic was pretty simple and should be used by virtually all entrepreneurs.

The tactic? Figuring out who you already know that could be a good addition to your team. As Matt pointed out, there is a proven correlation between success and a team having worked together in the past. So, if you have successfully worked with someone in the past, your chances of successfully working together again are high. And investors know this and are keen to fund companies led by teams with history of successfully working together.

So, a first step is for the entrepreneur to do an audit of who they have worked with successfully in the past. You could have worked with them in school, at a job or at an organization. Create this list and then narrow it down to include the individuals you truly respect and would like to work with again in the future. Then, contact these individuals to see if they are interested in joining your team.

Note, Jay Turo, Growthink’s other co-founder, and I met at business school. We worked together successfully on a couple of projects during school and were friends. So, Jay was the first person I approached after I had the idea for Growthink. We’ve now run Growthink together for 10 years, so I can personally vouch to Matt’s approach!

Click here to download the interview as an MP3 file and the PDF transcript.

And here is a preview of the first few minutes of the interview (click the blue triangle to play):