1: Talent development in the company? Do we really want to play with it?

Design Mentorship (00:27.054)
I greet you very warmly, I am very happy that Michael is with us, he agreed and even more so that... I thank you for the invitation. What else came to us, not only when it comes to know Michał from Brand24, whether from his profile or photos, is that he is also a mentor in the New York edition of the Founder Institute, so this is also another thing that I think Michál is worth talking about. And that is why today we are meeting to talk about these talents, about the development of employees.

which was such a first trigger for me to write to you, because I remember our meeting, I remember our workshop, the ups and downs, but your support for the whole team and that enthusiasm in the workshop and that is the main theme of today's meeting. And so I will also link to one post that you added that you have nine people on board who have already been working for over 10 years with you.

And say so from your perspective. I don't believe it. Yeah, I don't want them to disbelieve, so we want it. 70-axle company, because that's worth adding, because if there were 3,000 people on board, there's probably a better chance of that. And a company for 20 years or 30 years is probably a better chance for that, but it's been in business for 12 years, there are 70 people on board right now, so I'm very proud of that. But do you think this is good for the company?

And you are proud, and how does it work out in practice? It seems to me that this is very good for the company, because people have the opportunity to build their long-term competences, they can grow from often juniors to strong, strong seniors or even to management or managers of the entire company. We have traveled this road a little bit, but such roads inside

people who seem to have moved from a more or less basic role to a managerial role. However, as if the subject of any promotions there is, it is probably secondary. The coolest thing to observe is how these people have developed simply in the time they have traveled with us. And as a man who in today's world, which is a little detached from that loyalty,

Design Mentorship (02:52.974)
I respect this loyalty very much, and sometimes I even say that I am morbidly loyal. In some ways, I even have a problem with it because I don't handle people leaving. I mean, especially somewhere in the early years of our activity, I had a terrible experience with every passing of a man from Brenda. And it was I think that...

I even survived so unhealthily. At the moment, too, I have managed to sort it out somehow, but in general I have such a character trait that one might call morbid loyalty. I've been with one woman, my wife, for twenty years. Like I have a steady, very consistent loyal menu.

This is also a quality that is very important to me. And I think that's also a trait that people might associate a little bit like, okay, well, maybe Brand24 is a company where it's easy for people to settle down and grow a little bit like that and stop growing. Because as much as we can develop after 10 years, we have to look for new challenges, some new taste, new sensations.

But I think the beautiful thing about Brand24's work, and that's probably the reason I've been developing this project for 12 years, is that every year it's a little bit different. And we can learn some other skills, we can acquire new skills, we can kind of learn new things from a startup where a few people did everything ourselves.

through, say, such a slightly more mature organization, where you had to learn to delegate different things, about such an already developed one, I don't want to talk about, here is already a 70-person corporation, because oh my God, this word has some negative connotations, but already a more mature, really mature company, where we have organized management, mid-level, most of such key roles are filled.

Design Mentorship (05:14.03)
And I think we can focus more and more on this kind of creative, long-term problem solving, and not necessarily putting out fires, as a startup typically is from one fire to another. I will push, I will pull, because now you are talking about a reality that seems to me like the narrative of Green Island. Fantastic, it's beautiful.

And when I look at the labor market, I see phenomena such as great resignation, or mega turnover, less loyalty of employees, self-doubt. How would you do that?

It seems to me that there are several aspects. The first is that we create an environment and it will all sound like that crap from a corporate HR manual. Most of these texts that I'm going to say in the context of the crew, it sounds like the subtitles that corporations themselves...

they print and hang in the toilet to feel better. But we really believe that it is worth talking to someone who has ever worked at Bren24L, because he still works, that will probably confirm it, but it seems to me that we have healthy priorities. I mean, for example, the first thing we say to people coming to Brenda is, look, we're doing some really cool stuff here that we're proud of, but

Nothing we do here is more important than your health or your happiness or yours or your family. So it's like the company is kind of goal-oriented, but if I had to choose between the weightlessness of some important goal for I don't know, the stock market or the shareholders, and the health of either person.

Design Mentorship (07:22.83)
So I can honestly say that I would choose this health, or I would try to find some kind of compromise where, I don't know, I can help meet one and the other somewhere, but never, never compromise things like that. And people, I think, feel it. At first, when they hear about it at the first meeting, they probably think it's such body-bullcrap, but in a situation where, God forbid, it happens to someone and all sorts of adventures happen.

Well, this is what you can see and and and regardless of whether it affects people who sort of look at it personally or as third parties, it seems to me that somewhere there cements a certain relationship with the company as some kind of substitute family more than a bunch of contractors who work together somewhere out there and try to strike in one direction somewhere.

There are several such things. We try to give people the freedom to make decisions. We have such a corporate value that we emphasize very often that it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission. So we encourage people to mess things up, because there's often a great lesson to be learned from fakups.

Design Mentorship (08:51.598)
email verification model, where the theory was that we would verify the emails of those who register with Brand24 and we would ask that before proceeding to the next stage of registration a person open an email there and verify the email at registration. This is a standard that you have probably gone through in different products. We had no verification so far, we thought simplicity was better.

so that in a few tens of seconds you can arrive at a value to shorten that time to a value. But there was a theory that we would limit the registration, because surely if we do the verification, the number of registrations will decrease, but the ones that last will be more involved and in this way we will increase the conversion. Well, as part of such a test, it turned out that this is not the case, so it was a mistake, but we extracted knowledge from it, thanks to which we see...

as adding more steps lengthens that conversion, so we can swing the pendulum the other way and in the next test go a little bit or in a completely different direction and improve the company. So we like to spoil things, because from this mess we often get some kind of information that can push the company further. We also invest a lot in personal brands, that is, we try to encourage people to...

They built their authority in the industry so that in whatever area they are, whether they are content creators, programmers or specialists of this intelligence, to push them to various types of conferences, interviews, talks. Because we also like to show the human face of this business. It's also a bit of a paradox, because most people associate Brenda because of me, unfortunately.

And there may be a feeling that I drink the cream of hard work, which I probably do, it's not just an impression, but I probably actually drink the cream of the hard work of 70 people. But this is not due to a lack of attempts to push people away. Of course, if only they want to and build that authority. And such probably small elements that affect

Design Mentorship (11:14.734)
more like we have a super human approach. I don't know how someone, we had a programmer who broke both hands. Well, it wasn't that I don't know, for three months we cut his salary because he couldn't do anything, because he couldn't do anything. And we were just paying normally, plus we added to the surgery to speed up the recovery. I know they are like that, I feel like it should be

unfortunately it is not. So such little things, such a very human approach. And we also easily take responsibility for people, that is, when someone joins Brand24, it is a bit of our problem, I would say, because if we were a company that is 100% owned by us, ours as founders, or the majority of the share would be

Maybe we could be a more human company. However, in a situation where we have a shareholder, we are on the stock exchange, etc., it is as if the problem is a bit precisely that we, if someone does not perform, it is in a normal organization in today's world that we simply part with such people, they say it did not work out and try to help these people. We often give a first, second, third, fourth chance, etc.

We do everything we can to make it work for these people. And it also has huge big pluses, because... Huge big. It also has a big plus, because we have a couple of people who didn't come out the first time or the second time, but we gave the third chance and it turned out that after the third chance they really became stars. Also... But as if I suspect that someone who would enter an outside organization might...

Some expect greater debtlessness in making such typically managerial decisions. As long as we are here, it will probably be more human. I don't know Kasia like you, but is the listener watching us right now that there's some kind of tension that I feel between that

Design Mentorship (13:31.886)
You still want it to be fun, it's not always fun because you can make it fun, even if the Pact itself or you mentioned the stakeholders, the fact that you are on GFD, that there is some such... No, for now it works, only we are such a valve between the one and the other, that is, for some of these things we get in the head and we are so...

Design Mentorship (14:01.678)
We try to ensure that these criticisms do not spill over, or those voices do not spill over into meetings within the company. In general, everything is going well now and we have great results and so on. Also, we do not have any criticism from the shareholders at the moment, but in times when it was difficult, in which there was some significant dissatisfaction with how it was going, in some crises that we were going through.

Well, we tried to protect the crew so that they wouldn't get upset with, say, this feedback from the maxinarians. It all sounds great. And this is difficult. We guess, we can too, because as we touch design, so making mistakes, testing is close to us, but we know how to... It is close to us, but it is not close to companies. It's very interesting what Michael said.

You can make mistakes because you know that you learn from them, so it's like in my perspective, Kasia, in yours, even designers and designers who watch us, or people who understand it, then making mistakes is an integral element of business as such. Come on, science. It's just that it's not a popular claim. Certainly not in companies that have stakeholders that are in the stock market. And now yes, you will teach this to people.

Exactly, Wojtek, you touch this topic well, because I would like to return to the team, to the crew, because this is the key to these talents that Michał has in the company. What if, in fact, as you say, sometimes it's three attempts. Do these same people themselves come to the point of solving this problem, testing these possibilities? Is there any support? Just how can you support development, but also...

Reduce the number of mistakes made in the company. Sure. This is eminently somewhere out there such a derivative within the company. Well, I don't know if mentoring sounds so crazy, but just getting involved and supporting different processes. So when we see that someone is not selling, we sit down and...

Design Mentorship (16:22.862)
We begin to analyze what this results from, we check at which stage of the funnel the problem is, if not enough messages are sent or if the messages have too low open rate. If they have both good ones, then we look to see if the content of these messages converts to any response, whether there are enough of these responses. If it's whether it's easy to get a date, or if it converts well to a meeting.

We think about where the problem is, we try to help this person diagnose, because they are often people, they are not experienced people, to approach the solution of the problem so analytically and as if to say to myself, OK, I have poor results in the sales quarter, I will do an analysis of the aisle and trace myself exactly where the problem is. People are often unaware, as if...

like the concept of a sales funnel or that kind of thing, they don't know how to do it, what tools to measure it with, if Google Sheet is enough, if you need a complexion and so on. So we go through it all by the hand, we sit together with this person, just like I don't know, I'm sitting with my daughter, who I teach math, the same way I can sit with the person inside the brand who has weaker sales or doesn't perform something in the content somewhere.

Or in other areas where... It has a character, I'm sorry, but it is an institutional one, because that is also what we strive for. Is it possible to build something like this that creates, a tall word, but it is, the culture of the organization. No? That we do certain things, certain things we don't do, certain things we avoid, that's just who we are. Exactly. Is it a question of training, is it a question of some kind of quoting of individual work with a human being, or how does it...

to achieve that in a group like you, which is focused on the product, but it is not joyful creativity, because behind all this there is some umbrella of stakeholders, etc., how do you do it, how do you approach it? How come it suddenly appeared? What happened? Good question and I can probably tell you the most about how it is with us...

Design Mentorship (18:38.606)
happened and speculate a bit about what it might look like in other organizations. With us, this is a derivative, we have developed this culture of organization simply over the years. It can be said that the culture of an organization is very strongly linked to who the founders are, what the founders are like. So all the values that we have inscribed in our, let's say,

Decalogue or manifestation of the values we live by as an organization. These are the values that we also live by as ponderses, as human beings. I mean, most of these things, I might write myself, could be completely unrelated to business. And it just overflows, so we recruit people who live by similar values. And as if even if...

I am not the person who will do this kind of mentoring inside the company, only our sales manager will sit down with such a salesperson and will combine how to help him or how to help her. Well, he does it exactly as I do, because he is like that, because in these areas he is the same person as me, or at least similar, and also lives the same values, for example.

Do not look only on the principle of performance, whether it delivers, does not deliver, sorry, goodbye, we take another person, we check, deliver or not deliver. No, I think that was also partly due to the fact that historically we had very shallow pockets when it came to recruiting. I mean we couldn't afford top people, top talent and we had no choice but to recruit juniors and make them seniors.

themselves. So this model kind of, I would say, created this culture of organization, because there was simply no way out. We have come to terms with the fact that we are not recruiting a ready-made sales gun from the market, we are recruiting someone who can be such a person in a year, two, three years from now and we have to put a lot of work into it to become such a person.

Design Mentorship (20:56.014)
So this is probably also some element there, although now we seem to act a little differently and now we can just now afford to recruit the best people on the market. And then we recruit people who just live similar values. So from what I understand you don't have such a process set up, I don't know, some coaching, mentoring programs.

You act on your own trust, cooperation, but also such a degree of solitude. And this usually happens precisely, whether you do joint trainings, workshops, or these are actually one-on-one meetings, because I think that each of the businesses is time-consuming and expensive. Sure, both. There are probably the most of them on ones, but we regularly do workshops to which we invite external or internal guests. As interns, they are not specifically guests, but just...

we take people inside the company who are well versed in a certain area. However, it is not super formalized, so I think that even people would ask if we have a mentoring program at Brand24, they would say no. But how do you ask them for specifics.

Whether Michał spends or I don't know if your immediate supervisor or the leader of your team spends time with you there helps you solve the problem, advises you how to do it and so they will tell things. So I hope so, that's how it works. And it seems to me that it is not.

I know a lot of companies that have it written in the manifesto, such a mentoring program, or they have it announced, linked in slack, they have a beautiful shell of formalities around it, but they don't live as if it really is. So when it comes to what, they forget so little about the fact that they have somewhere written in some values, that if necessary, we sit down with people and help them solve the problem, they just say where the damn solution is to be done.

Design Mentorship (23:11.982)
or good-bye or something. Also as if... I smile silently, because in fact there are also such situations that I think that mentoring is some kind of tool, but what is important is what happens inside, how we approach it, because how we warm up this mentoring, it's about what we say, that these are joint meetings, relationship, conversation and this is this way, or the already known and...

feedback that everyone talks about everywhere, just how we understand it and how we apply it. And then we go to what the effect is. No? So I am very, very glad that you are talking about all this, about your employees. Although, you might guess, easy math. You are one, and you have dozens of people. Yeah, but luckily we have what it's like not a startup anymore and we have a lot of leaders. And we have top people in marketing and in customer service and in sales topics.

Probably in none of these topics I am no longer the best person in the organization, although I think that I am still able to suggest something somewhere there. And Michał, if we were to leave your company further regarding your title of mentor at the Founder Institute, we are curious about this story with what you encounter, whether there are so-called stereotypes regarding this...

For example, the mentor must be older. What does it look like? What did you encounter in this environment? No, I don't think a mentor needs to be older. I learn a lot from people who are fundamentally stronger than me. Anyway, it's changing that way at the moment. Sometimes I meet 19-year-olds who have a thriving startup. And in many ways, as if...

There are already a few levels ahead of me and I can really learn a lot from them. It also seems to me that it is not even a question of age. It may not be a matter of general experience either, because even if someone has been running a company for three years, it does not mean that I still think that there are quite a few aspects, areas in which you can teach someone who runs a 12-year company, something interesting.

Design Mentorship (25:33.806)
Also here I think the question of age is irrelevant, and I think that this mentoring, I mean I will honestly say that this mentoring is also, I don't know, maybe somewhere there it is also satisfaction for me, because my grandparents were teachers, so somewhere there I think I have it in my blood, but on the other hand I admit that I also learn a lot during this mentoring, that is...

How sometimes someone will ask me to meet, to find half an hour, or today at 11 am I have such a meeting where such a start-up asked me to find time for them and they want to ask me a few things, then with some conversations I do not learn anything, but with many I also learn something from them. That is, often sometimes it turns out that...

In some problems I was able to help them, because I have experience in this, but in some problems, and some problems that I am currently going through, they have already solved, because somewhere out there they just went this way a little differently. I am gaining a lot of knowledge on this. I also think that this mentoring is very beneficial both for the recipients, and for the donors or the mentors themselves. Okay, nearing the end.

These are the kind of 30-minute pills we promised. I have two questions from our viewers. Question from Peter. Peter, thank you for this question. Hi. Is it not with the growth of the company and business that it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep that human face? And that's also the question that's been going through my head all the time, that 70 people, okay. And what if you can imagine a situation where you just copy it to 700 people, 7,000 people, 70,000 people, or 700,000 people all over the world?

Which, of course, he wishes you. We will never be an organization that employs 700,000 people. You never know. Maybe indeed. In any case, it seems to me that this is simply a derivative of what kind of people we have as leaders in individual segments. If we recruit these people for the values that shine through to us somewhere out there, it's going to be very easy to keep, because I see that...

Design Mentorship (27:57.998)
Justyna, who a year ago appeared as the head of our marketing department. Historically, I was in charge of our marketing department. This is a person who seems to have very similar values to me and I have full confidence that if there is a need for me to quack someone or do mentoring, etc., she will solve these problems in a very similar way.

Like me, maybe even better. It also seems to me that here, as if with this traditional, cascading approach, this problem can be solved, scaling and preserving this human face, although it is not easy, is it? It's not easy and I think there are so many little treats that allow you to do it. For example, one of these delicacies is that

He wasn't afraid to go back to the trenches or he wasn't afraid to go into the trenches. That is, we make sure that we are never the kind of generals who sit in the headquarters somewhere, look only at the maps and decide the lives and destinies of the people.

A space they've never been to, they haven't seen how real they look. As if we even have such a program, where within basically any role you can spend at least one day on customer service, that is, such a very...

in the role where you are closest to the customer. This is the kind of work in the trenches, I call it, because it comes into contact with the immediate problems of the client. You can also see how the company works. And it is also important that this is one of such small delicacies, of which there are really many more, which can be taken care of so that people do not feel that somewhere there, for example, managers are on a pedestal and somewhere there detached from reality.

Design Mentorship (30:02.126)
only that the company has a fairly flat organizational structure, even if between me, and this is also kind of an important thing, that we often emphasize that you listen, you have your leaders, etc., but as if very strongly at every stage we emphasize that we are also available at any time of the day and night. So if you have a problem, of course you can go to the leader of your team, etc. Great, but remember that we are also always there for you.

that is, you can always come to us too, and often people come to us and have the feeling that this structure of the organization is still quite flat. Supposedly you can say four times finishing, so far there have been two. I have another question from Paul that bothers me too. You mentioned that you're pushing people out to show up outside.

You can see you, you see a lot of you, we meet often on different stages, but whether you promote your own people, do you encourage them to perform outside and promote themselves, is it as part of some program that supports it, is it this... How do you approach this? This is as part of, I would say, a constant reminder to people about...

About this in different types of town halls, especially at on-boarding meetings, when someone enters the organization, we try to talk on one on one, where we ask, you know, where you want to be in two years or something like that, that sounds like again. What kind of animal are you, a very good question. Corpo Bullcrap, but as if we're asking, look, would you like to, would you like to...

Go out to people and show them somewhere. I consider you a top, top expert in sales, content marketing or something else. I ask honestly, have you thought about building your authority on this topic? Because I think you're a cat. So these are things like that. There is no program where it is a PDF linked in slack with the inscription Stay.

Design Mentorship (32:13.998)
Brand 24 expert. Okay, but in closing, you're not afraid that as someone... A very popular question. He will go outside, it will simply be three headhunters who will bag him immediately after the performance come off the stage, they will grab him in the bag and take him to themselves and tell him how much Sadowski gives you, I will give you one and a half times, and that's it. Does it fit? And after melting.

Such situations do happen, but they are relatively rare. Because, first of all, we no longer have such shallow pockets as we had at the beginning of our story, and secondly, so we can pay very reasonable rates, and secondly, it is not so bad if there are very many people in the market who are felines and came out of Bren 24.

There's such a thing as PayPal Mafia, where the people who worked there then monstrous Tesla, YouTube, Yelp, LinkedIn, TripAdvisors, etc. And it seems to me that we too are building a kind of mafia for ourselves, where the people who worked at Brand24 are now turbo and were cats, whether they became turbo cats at Brand24, now they are turbo cats somewhere in other organizations and that It's great, because it's like...

We have friends because we always part in a really good atmosphere. We have friends in many relevant organizations and that helps us do business. So as if it's not some big problem. We approach it a bit like I don't know if anyone is the master of football, but I am and there is a club like Atletico Madrid. I'm not some kind of Atletico Madrid superfan, but I respect them a lot because they do every year

of the top players or every few years they lose the top players and the players who are the top players in the world most often go through Atletico Madrid, and yet this team fights for the top titles every year, because they simply have such an organized organization to be able to manage calmly, even when such a goat leaves. And as I said, even in such a departure there are benefits.

Design Mentorship (34:39.982)
Listening to you, I think there is also the possibility of returning in case. And I think we wish you that. It happens, too. It's nice that we even have people who, after the crisis, in which we had no choice but to fire a dozen people, because we simply could not afford it for a while and we had a very difficult moment, and we even have cases where we managed to get these people back at the moment when we were already there.

and have gained additional experience in the market. So I think Wojtek, we all wish you to have the 24 Mafia brand on the market that will circulate and come back. In the sense that it already is. Yes, it already is. So that it continues to develop and I think we will probably end our meeting on this question as well. We are running out of time, so Wojtek, as you can see, 30 minutes is not a good time at all. I think, but Michael, thanks for sharing with us and your experience

and an honest statement about what's going on inside you, in the company, what attitude you have, how you react to how people go outside, and how you share that knowledge, so I'm really glad you found the time and shared it with us here, so thank you again. I thank you very much. Thanks. See you yesterday on Friday. In closing, I also thank you very much, thank you all very much for participating,

Design Mentorship (36:07.15)
Of course, the record of this recording. If in the meantime, this is the first meeting, I repeat, if in the meantime you have a question in your mind, something bothers you and you want us to ask whether it is Michał yet or other guests and our guests, then please ask these questions, send them to us directly. Best of all, but we'll keep you posted. So far...

Thank you very, very much Michael. Thank you all very much for the conversation. She inspired me a lot and I believe that you will be the organization that will have, maybe not 700 thousand, but at least 70 thousand. I wish you that with all my heart. Thank you very much. See you. See you. Hi.