ALEXANDRA LOPEZ-PACHECO
Step by step - that’s how Vancouver-based Gossamer Threads Inc. has evolved from a one-man operation into a 30-employee software and web hosting company with a roster of heavyweight international clients that includes CNN Radio, the European Chamber of Commerce, Timex and the U.S. Department of Defense.
“If you’re listening to any radio station across North America and you hear it cut away to a CNN news clip, that was delivered through the system we designed and built,” says Alex Krohn, who founded the company in 1995.
For its first four years, Gossamer Thread was a one-man operation. “By 1999, it had grown to the point I realized this was a viable business and could turn into something really successful,” Mr. Krohn says. “That’s when we started getting employees.”
A year later, Mr. Krohn had the insight and pragmatism to realize he would need help to take the company to the next level. He brought in long-time friend and entrepreneur Jack Ong, as chief operating officer. “I come from a computer science background,” Mr. Krohn says. “So I’ve always been more a techie at heart whereas Jack has been more a salesperson, so it’s been a good fit. It’s been great.”
There are two conditions under which entrepreneurs bring in a leadership team, says Jeffrey Gandz, professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. “One is that they have evolved toward creating a leadership team. That’s almost certainly the best way. The other is when the business gets so out of control, becomes so impossible to deal with that they have to bring in a leadership team.”
And at that point, the entrepreneur is facing a sink or swim situation, Mr. Gandz says. In other words, by knowing when it was time to bring in another set of hands to help lead the company, Mr. Krohn has been able to guide Gossamer Threads far more effectively and successfully than if he’d held tightly to the helm until the ship was too large to navigate single-handedly. “The reality is a lot of entrepreneurs never manage to get that far and they strangle the organization they’ve built because they can’t get over the fact they have to control everything, including the minutia,” says Mr. Gandz, who is also managing director, program design and executive development at Ivey.
By 2005, Gossamer Threads had reached another milestone in its evolution. “We had primarily been a software development shop, selling products for use on large and complex websites and we were constantly having animosity issues between ourselves and hosting providers when something would break on a customer’s website. The customer would be upset, and we and the hosting provider would be arguing who’s right, who’s wrong,” says Mr. Krohn. “We just thought, let’s start our own hosting business, have our servers running our products. We know how they should run and how they should be supported and if anything goes wrong, there’s just a single point of support, one company to deal with it whose responsibility it is to get it up and working.”
The company’s growth rocketed as a result-and this, all by word of mouth because Gossamer Threads does not advertise. “We started hiring client managers in late 2008,” says Mr. Ong. “And that was when we began transferring the daily client contact away from us to the client managers.
We still very much run the business from the 35,000-ft. view whereas the project managers have taken over the day-to-day running of the projects and communication with the clients but we still handle all the strategy side of things.”
Last year, Gossamer Threads took another team-building step forward and hired a director. “He came to us with a lot of experience in our industry so we found him to be a perfect fit because of his technical knowledge and experience level,” Mr. Ong says. “He has basically taken over the management of the development team and project managers so we can concentrate more on the new business side of things.”
Every single step in building their leadership team has required adjustment and it has not been challenge-free. Change never is. “It’s especially tricky to introduce a new boss,” says Mr. Krohn. “We have quite a strong culture here and some of our people have been here with us for years so to try to put a new boss in the middle of things when people always dealt directly with us has been pretty challenging.”
The evolution continues and Gossamer Threads is gearing up for the next step. Despite its success over the years through sheer customer satisfaction and word of mouth, Mr. Krohn and Mr. Ong are considering adding marketing expertise to their leadership team. “We’ve always grown through word of mouth and that’s been good but at the same time we’re may be losing opportunities so I can see that’s an area we can expand into,” Mr. Ong says.
http://www.financialpost.com/small-business/advice/story.html?id=3007524#ixzz0na3aJ9JL