Lessons on leadership, timing and building high performance teams with Mark Woodland (Co-founder & CEO - Kismet) | Ep173
Key takeaways from Episode 173 of The Startup Playbook Podcast
Hello everyone š
Welcome to The Startup Playbook Newsletter where I share details from the latest podcast episodes as well as diving deeper into some of the topics, themes and insights discussed on the podcast.
This weekās guest is a serial entrepreneur who gave a masterclass on leadership and building high performance teams!
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A little history on Mark Woodland, Xplor and Kismet
Mark has had a fascinating life path so far.
He joined the military as a teenager to live out his brothers dreams after he tragically passed away in a car accident, before leaving a promising career in defence to do āadminā for his mums childcare business.
Being in and around childcare businesses exposed Mark to some of the issues with the sector which led him to starting Xplor education, a childcare management platform that he grew from $0 to $40M ARR in 5 years before eventually being acquired by Advent International.Ā
Since he was young, he had planned to retire by 40, a goal he was able to achieve after Xplorās acquisition. He bought a farm, moved his family in and a large tractor, but āretirementā only lasted a few weeks for Mark before he jumped back in the founder seat.
Mark is back with his next company, Kismet, to reduce the barriers to access disability and healthcare services ā a company that he initially had the idea for and pitched way back in 2010 before being laughed out of the room because as Mark puts it, it was a different generation back then!
Fast forward to today and Kismet raised a $4M pre-seed round led by AirTree Ventures in early 2023 and recently closed a Series A funding round after seeing exceptional growth for the company.
Iāve been fortunate to
This episode was packed with insightful tips on leadership, building high performance teams and how to build a successful startup.
Here are 7 key takeaways from the episode!
1. Standing out from competitors
A common question that early stage startup founders get asked when pitching to investors is how they will stand out from incumbents/future competitors and win the market.
Thatās something Mark was asked in the early days of Xplor, when they only had a handful of childcare centres compared to the industry leader that had over 100 childcare customers signed up.
Markās response led to an investment by AirTree in Xplor! Hereās how he handled this tricky question!
2. The importance of setting the right culture
The benefit of being a second-time founder is that you can learn from the experiences of the first time round!
I asked Mark what was important to get right/make sure he avoided doing the second time around and the answer was clear for him - itās culture!
But culture can be such a nebulous concept to define. As Mark mentions, to him itās about āall the small detailsā - hereās how he defines and approaches building culture at Kismet that allows the company to punch above their weight with a small team.
3. Markās servant leadership principles
Something that stands out about Mark when you look at the companies he has built and speak to people close to him, is what an exceptional leader he is.
He takes a servant leadership approach and is something thatās been evident from earlier in life as well as how he approaches leadership in the business.
In this clip from the podcast, Mark shares some of his leadership principles and approaches through some specific examples of how he lives out these values as a CEO.
4. Building a culture of sustained high performance
Every founder and business leader wants to build high performing teams, but thereās a fine balance between pushing your team enough to challenge, test and push them to achieve while making sure that you donāt break them in the process.
On the podcast, we discussed a story where one of his Co-founders would set what he thought were aggressive targets, only for Mark to come in and increase them by 30%! His justification was that he knew this person really well and felt that they could achieve an increase of 40% but knew that a 30% increase would be enough of a stretch to push and challenge.
As Mark mentions, a lot of this comes down to understanding each of your individual team members and knowing how hard you can push them, but ultimately ensuring that there are pathways for your team to āwinā.
5. Overcoming process creep
As a startup grows (particularly if this growth is rapid), a startup will need to mature quickly from being a scrappy startup with a handful of people in a business to tens/hundreds of employees. This maturation means that more systems and processes need to be added in.
Where previously the founders would make decisions across key areas of the business, at scale, this approach breaks at scale and the idea behind adding processes and policies is that they can enable a company to continue moving quickly by enabling people to make decisions on behalf of the team.
However, this can also go too far with processes and policies that are counterproductive or were never intended to be created in the first place!
In this clip from the podcast, Mark shared an example of this where a non-existent policy was being enforced at Xplor and how a change in this led to hiring an exceptional engineer who would go on to become a Co-founder at Kismet.
6. Why timing is a critical to the success of your startup
Investors (and experienced founders) often speak about how crucial timing is for the success of a company.
Launch an idea thatās ahead of itās time and too early and the market or technology may not be ready for the solution yet! Launch too late and it may be too difficult to cut through the competition and build a product that stands out enough from the competition.
Understanding if itās the right time can be difficult to gauge, but you may be able to gather some insight through changes in trends or the release/uptake in adoption of new technology.
Sometimes knowing when is the wrong time is a little easier, particularly when you get laughed off stage!
Thatās exactly what happened to Mark when he initially pitched the idea for Kismet at a conference in Canberra way back in 2010. Instead of persevering, Mark realised that the market wasnāt ready for Kismet so he pivoted and focused on Xplor, all the while knowing that one day he would come back and build Kismet!
7. Balancing short term wins with long term vision
What gets you to one milestone may not be what gets you to your long term goals and objectives.
With the pressure to demonstrate growth and hitting key KPIs and metrics, it can be easy to get distracted by short term wins at the cost of getting further and further away from your long term vision.
This is a challenge that a lot of founders face and is something Mark faces daily at Kismet.
Their long term goal is to go after the global aged care market, but have a large opportunity with the NDIS that can get them short term gains!
Hereās how Mark balances short term visions while not moving away from the long term vision of the company:
The rest of this interview is jam packed with even more insights and lessons from Mark and his journey from the military and childcare to startups!
You can find the full podcast episode on all of your favourite podcasting apps by searching for āThe Startup Playbook Podcastā or you can find all of the links here:
YouTube (video) - full episode below!
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