By Bryan Collins - Forbes - May 16, 2019

What does it take to go from the owner of a new business to the CEO of a global corporation?

Phil Shawe is the CEO of TransPerfect, a translation service based in New York City.

Shawe set up the company with a former business partner while attending business school in New York City 27 years ago.

Over the years, his company evolved from a dorm room idea into a global corporation.

In 2018, TransPerfect generated $705 million in revenue. It currently employs 5,000 people around the world.

As a leader, Shawe had to acquire new management and leadership skills to meet the company’s needs.

“When a company is small, as the entrepreneur or the leader, you're having personal interaction with most of the people on … a daily basis,” Shawe said.

“You're able to ensure the culture and the spirit of client service that you're looking for is permeated throughout the business via your own actions.”

1. Recognize When Flat Stops Working

Entrepreneurs and small business owners involve themselves in almost every part of their business by necessity as much as by choice.

That’s just not possible when a small business becomes much larger.

“The flat hierarchy … works well up until eight people. Once it gets beyond that, we really encourage people to create levels within their divisions and create a hierarchical system,” said Shawe.

“It's just very difficult to give the appropriate attention to the career paths of everyone underneath you when you have … up to 15, 20 people working for you,” he said.

Today, Shawe attributes the company’s success in part to hiring the right people. 

2. Don’t Assume Culture Happens By Accident

The 5,000 employees at TransPerfect undergo various types of training from in-person workshops to e-learning, something Shawe sees as key to the company’s culture.

“If the corporation gets larger, and a hierarchy develops in management, and you get further and further removed from the day-to-day … what's really important is that you have a training process and great people,” he said.

The right mix of training methods vary from company to company.

“It just cannot be overestimated how important it is, especially as you get larger, to make sure that your culture and your processes are not lost  as a corporation grows and becomes a larger entity,” he said.

As TransPerfect has grown, Shawe’s team has leveraged economies of scale to get more value from training and experienced executives.

“We try to create systems that align incentives such as financial reward systems, or other systems that allow people within the company to earn more and get promoted faster, based on the success of their division. And then we try to … get out of the way,” Shawe said.

TransPerfect managers often pair a seasoned executive from a larger office with a newer hire from a small office in a different market.

“That combination really allows us to both maintain TransPerfect's culture and also operate in a manner that's appropriate for whatever market we're entering,” said Shawe.

3. Define What Productivity Looks Like

In a small business, you can often attribute productivity to the actions of the owner or several individuals.

Sometimes, even software or a new tool can help a small business become more effective.

In larger companies, productivity is less about what one person does and more about how teams serve the business as a whole.

It’s difficult for managers to gauge productivity too, but Shawe approaches this problem using variance analysis.

”If a customer is doing $100,000 a month in business [revenue] for us, and then all of a sudden that business drops to $30,000 … our systems start going off,” he said.

“That gets escalated, and we find out what's going on and what has happened in that department, what has happened with that account, what has happened with that salesperson.”

Embrace Managing Your Time

Shawe, like many successful business leaders in companies of all sizes, is disciplined with how he spends his time.

 

“If a problem is big enough, or it's something that has reach throughout the organization, then I absolutely encourage people to escalate things to me,” he said.

“If we've got an internal deadline for meeting a technology, doing a release of our software, that's extremely important, and I want to keep tabs on that.”

Shawe also spends his time keeping up-to-date on the latest technologies, such as artificial intelligence and how it might potentially affect TransPerfect.

Entrepreneurs and new business owners often have to learn many new skills over a short period after they set up their businesses. Shawe’s path shows that learning never stops, no matter what level you’ve reached.

Original Article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryancollinseurope/2019/05/16/shawe-productivity/#67a7e09e623e