From the quiet corner of a Santa Monica coffee shop to an international tech powerhouse. Molly Raycraft quizzes start-up guru Nick Worth on building a culture of marketing and business innovation
Nick Worth’s experience of innovation is impressive. Today, he’s CMO at Selligent, but between 1999 and 2007 he co-founded and ran tech-based start-up Schematic.
Like many entrepreneurs, Nick’s efforts began in a coffee shop in Santa Monica, California. He started with a mere party of five but when he sold the interactive marketing and software agency in 2007, it had stretched to 350 employees across three countries.
Here, Nick shares how he built the business through a culture of innovation – including the challenges and lessons he experienced.
Choosing the right team
To develop innovation within a business, you need an open-minded company culture, and that starts with finding the right people. Creating the balance is imperative, and this applies to both skills and personalities. “If you have a team of incredibly creative maniacs, that’s wonderful but someone needs to keep the project moving. You need somebody who’s organised, self-disciplined, and usually, those people don’t have a huge appetite for innovation,” Nick says, explaining the dilemma.
Nick started by creating a balance between good design and coding. “We looked for designers who loved great software, and software people who understood that great design was part of what they needed to do,” he explains.
Many companies decide to experiment with innovation in the confined safety of small-scale pilot schemes led by a small team. That group similarly needs careful selection. “The team has to be open and excited about innovation. It can’t be a collection of people swept from the company and told ‘we’re all becoming innovators’, that’s not going to work,” Nick observes.
They must also be protected from the eyes and expectations of the wider business, he adds. The company at large should understand that the pilot team is not there to transform the entire business – at least not overnight.
When starting out, it’s best to avoid giving the team too big a brief, as pressure can hinder innovation. “They are there to innovate on a small scale and to figure out how to grow that against larger problems,” explains Nick.
“You have to shine the light away from the team as they go through the cycle of success and failure that all innovators go through. Keeping all eyes on innovation puts the weight of the entire company on that team.”
He also stresses the importance of having project managers who are able to maintain lines of communication between the innovators and core functions, which, crucially, should ensure respect from all sides.
“We required that all the crafts in the chain hold each other in mutual respect. The real pirates of the place – the ones who thrived on doing stuff that had never been done before and loved working without a net – had to understand the project managers and producers had equally important roles. Even if the collective discipline they were enforcing was less exciting than the breakthrough work of the creative and tech pirates,” Nick says.
Building the customer base
Innovation has the ability to differentiate companies from the competition. For Schematic, it established a strong customer base beyond those who wanted generic web designs – and this led to further innovation.
As recognition for the company grew, its reputation for innovation brought desirable clients into the fold – who ultimately gave the company the opportunity to innovate in new ways and establish itself as a leader in tech and software.
“If you have a team of incredibly creative maniacs, that’s wonderful, but someone needs to keep the project moving”
Upscaling innovation
Like many small businesses, Schematic faced the challenge of scaling at speed, and, at times, its clout grew beyond its size. “We were selling a website to a big company and they wanted to come to our offices, which was a big problem because we’d pretended we had 35 people when actually, we had about 12,” Nick recalls.
“We hired 20 temps. We didn’t have enough computers for everybody, so we had to put them in conference rooms. When the client came we had 30 people in the office; it was just that most of them didn’t work for the company.”
Having led innovation for both start-ups and large organisations, Nick understands the struggles of upscaling. Meeting big client expectations when you’re small can be a challenge, but the problems don’t cease as you grow. For example, the hierarchal structure of large organisations can easily quash innovation.
Nick’s hardest challenge was in losing key advisors to managerial duties, making decision-making slower. “You can’t get the five great people from every discipline in the room to solve every problem. Those great people are managing departments of 50 people, so it all gets very diffused and levelled,” he says.
Nick and his employees learned that career success shouldn’t always mean managerial progress. Rather, he had to find each employee the right job for the business. “If you’re taking on someone who’s really good at coding and at innovating and you make them the boss of 10 other coders, that person would write much less code and wouldn’t be good at being anyone’s boss. You have to change the culture of the company so you’ve got the great people doing innovative work and not filling out holiday request forms,” he stresses.
Responding to resistance
You’re bound to come across people in your culture whose scepticism for innovation is reinforced by its potential risk. Communication is the key to resolving this. “You need to talk about what you’re trying to do in terms of goals and how to measure its success over the long term,” says Nick. Painting a clear picture of a beautiful future and a bit about how to get there will be enough for most.
“You have to change the culture of the company so you’ve got the good people doing innovative work and not filling out holiday request forms”
Dealing with failure
Despite growing and selling a successful business, Nick’s had his fair share of failure. His first business stalled after launching several failed products, such as Alphaview, a platform for experiential online market research.
Schematic was initially created as a side business to fund that failed company. “It turned out we were actually really good at the stuff on the side,” Nick explains.
Recognising good things can come from failed attempts is crucial for innovation, and this knowledge should be shared throughout the business so staff know it’s okay to try without always succeeding.
“The biggest thing is accepting that success is not inevitable and it’s ok to fail,” Nick says. “We failed, and when we did, we didn’t hide it, we dealt with it – we figured it out and tried to make it right. In any culture, truth-telling is really important because you can’t move forward otherwise.”
Many leaders shudder at announcing their own failure, but having transparency with staff will boost credibility amid any short-term personal embarrassment. Nick recalls a project that nose-dived and the course of action he took to address the failure. “We were very open with the team about what had gone wrong. We didn’t pretend it was okay, but we also didn’t say it was the end of the road. It wasn’t, we’d let a client down, which was terrible, but not a death toll.”
Large organisations, particularly, struggle to reveal failures to shareholders due to the potential implication in share price. But Nick says the best way to deal with the matter is to tell the board quickly and clearly. “You need to say what happened, where you are and neither exaggerate or minimise. Be clear that you’ve thought about the implications of what’s happened.”
It can feel embarrassing to fail, but that shouldn’t inhibit honesty. That failure can create guidelines for future projects, and perhaps signal the start of a whole new success story.
Nick Worth: Quick CV
- CMO, Selligent: 2014–present
- Adviser to start-ups and mid-stage companies: 2013-present
- President, Americas and MD, corporate development, Possible: 2011-2012
- President and COO, Schematic: 1999–2011
Nick, now CMO at marketing automation platform Selligent, will be speaking at B2B Marketing InTech 2018 on 14 March in London. Hear him share how to gain clients and avoid catastrophe with the use of AI during his talk – ‘Artificial intelligence is here: How can you ensure it doesn’t make your customers hate you?’
