 Hello, my name is Joel Florey. I am the co-founder and CEO of VSCO. And VSCO, we create creative tools in a community driven by self-expression. And our mission is to help everybody fall in love with their own creativity. And at VSCO, we are guided by that mission. And as the host mentioned, we recently, in early 2017, launched a subscription model at which we reached over a million paid subscribers by Q1 of 2018 and now have over 2 million paid subscribers. Today, I'm here to talk to you about scaling your business. But before I do, I want to say a big thanks to a few special people that are in the audience. I have my wife, my two daughters, and my parents who are here who without them, none of this would have ever been possible, quite literally. I wouldn't be here. So huge thanks to my family. So I want to set the context, because I think as many of you that are out there that are starting a business, the early days are a blur. And if I were to go back to starting VSCO in 2011, yes, I was CEO, and yes, I was co-founder. But that didn't really mean anything. I did everything, ran products, support, social media. When even so far as my family and I would go in on weekends to clean the office in order to save a little bit of money and not hiring a cleaning crew, because as a kid, I was a janitor. And I thought I could do it all. And I think for anyone really on, when you do that, you don't really know what your role is. A title means nothing. You just get it done and you get your business off the ground. But there comes a point where just getting it done and doing everything doesn't scale. You are the bottleneck. And I think the problem for me was, is I didn't realize it. And so that's something that I really want to encourage each of you, is as you're scaling your business, there comes a point where you no longer can do everything. And the problem is, is you don't realize it. So at this time at VSCO, we had hired a VP of people. And I had hired her, because I had recommendations from others that we needed someone to help us scale, recruiting, and hiring. But even more importantly, how well people worked at VSCO, how we helped people grow in their careers. And so the first thing I did when I hired, her name's Katie Shields. And I hired Katie and I said, Katie, I need you to help us scale the team. And she looked me in the eyes and I'll remember this moment. And she said, yeah, let's start with you. And I was shocked. I was like, me, there's nothing wrong. I have it all figured off, figured out. The business is scaling. I'm off to a great pace. And so I hired a coach and did a 360 review for the first time. And let me tell you, it was one of the most painful experiences of my life. But I'm so glad that I did it. I can remember the night I received the feedback and I literally grabbed it and ran home, curled up in a ball on the floor. And I was telling my wife, I don't know if I can go back. Because amidst all the great feedback that you get of how people love working with you and all the positive stuff, negative feedback is really difficult to take. And I think this was one of the first times that I was faced at VSCO with this choice. And I think many of us are faced with this choice all the time. And that's am I going to have a fixed mindset and take this moment in time and be defeated or be angry, maybe go back and retaliate around some of the people that gave me this negative feedback? Or am I going to take this with a growth mindset and a growth opportunity? There's a great book called Mindset that if any of you haven't read, highly, highly recommend. And one thing you'll hear from me throughout this talk is there's a lot of book recommendations because you have to read in order to scale your business. And so this notion of growth and in scaling yourself is, it's really key. You have to work on yourself. You have to develop you. And you take that feedback and you can really do one of two things, as I mentioned. You can be frustrated, upset, or you can really hone in on it and how are you gonna grow. Because truly in order to scale your business, the first thing you have to do is scale yourself. And so working with a coach, taking 360 feedback, and really trying to omit all of the feedback, understand what you're gonna work on, is really for me was this moment of I needed to focus. I couldn't, if I just took everything that someone gave me of a point of feedback that I needed to work on, it was de-abilitated. It was just literally put me in a ball on the floor. And so you have to take that moment and find your focus. Another great book by Greg McOwen called Essentialism is a book that I read at this point. And what Greg talks about in this book is finding what is essential to you in your life. And so even before I get to VSCO, I had to really figure out what was important to me. Where was I gonna spend my time? And so for me, I focus on three things. First is taking care of myself because if I don't take care of myself, I can't take care of anyone or anything else. This is kind of that put your own bag, your mask on your face when the plane's going down for your oxygen so you can help others. And then after taking care of myself, I have to take care of my family because if I'm not taking care of my family, then nothing else matters. And so I tell this to everyone at VSCO, again, take care of yourself, and you can insert if you don't have a family, significant others, maybe you're really close friends, those people that are important to you. And once that's done, then it's taking care of VSCO. And that's it. If it's not one of those three things to me, I say no. And it's been a difficult thing of trying to not please everyone and saying no to certain events or I don't go to dad's nights out because that's not investing in myself, my family, or VSCO. And then for VSCO, I had to really hone in on what that focus was because, again, as a founder, you can't scale and do everything. So at VSCO, I focus on four things. And I want to be careful here as I list things that I focus on or list. You have to find out what's right for you. Hopefully what I'm saying might be a catalyst to finding your way and what you need to focus on, but maybe you take what I say and use it but challenge that and find you. So I focus on four things at VSCO. First is building the team. As a CEO, that is my number one job, is to build the team. Second thing is I need to grow that team, really working on a way of how well we work together. Another book plug, a book by Patrick Lincione called The Advantage, is a company's greatest advantage is not its technology or product, but how well they work together. The health of the organization and the team is everything to being able to scale and have a successful business. After building the team and growing the team, I work on setting the vision. And there's a subtle nuance in this one in which that used to be set the vision and the details of how to get there. Every little detail of the product, as a photographer, building four creatives, I wanted to really get into every meeting and every detail of the product. But that's no longer the case. My job is to set a vision of where we're going. And then the fourth thing that I focus on is telling the story. How are we gonna get there? What is VSCO? Helping people remember why we started, the vision, the mission, and how everything they're working on ladders up to that, focusing on PR, speaking at conferences. And these are the four things. And if it's not one of these four things, guess what I say? I say no to it. Or I delegate it. And this is a very interesting thing and something I really want. Whatever your focus areas may be, you either need to say no to anything else or you need to delegate it. But this is a huge opportunity. Because I think one of the greatest opportunities as a CEO is to create space between you and the people that report to you. And what I mean by that is by elevating yourself and giving them space to own parts of the business and how things get done. You give them an opportunity to grow. You allow them to be fulfilled and grow in their career. And great things happen. It's actually how you multiply yourself and scale the business. And so this is such a key foundation to myself and what I challenge every single one. This is a mantra for our entire leadership team is elevate to lead. How are you creating space for those that work for you in order for them to take ownership of their work? How are you setting a vision and not all the details of how to get there? How are you leading by asking questions and not giving answers? And again, for me, this was a really big challenge. So I had to focus on some practical tips on helping me get there. I mentioned reading. I read as many books as I can. A big fan of Audible. Finding advisors. Finding people that have gone before you have tackled some of these challenges and issues that you're facing. And seek advice. Admitting you don't know every answer on how to get where you're going. And ask them for help. This is a big one. Hire people that are smarter than yourself. I think something that we so often want to do is to be the smartest person in the room and be the leader that knows everything about your business. That doesn't scale. You want to hire people that are smarter than yourselves. You want to give them ownership of those areas of your business. And another part is to not hire for culture fits. And this is a... It's tricky, because I think all the time people want people that are a culture fit. And what I want you to focus on, what we've had to focus on is hiring culture ads. Your culture should always be evolving. You should always be bringing new people into your company that are challenging how you do things. That are challenging where you're going, that are bringing new perspectives from their experiences. And you, again, by elevating the lead, you have to give them space to own it. And maybe you set that vision of where you want to go three years and maybe they just take it a little bit, like, one degree to another direction. But ultimately it's the right way and it's what's healthy for the business. And so this notion of elevating to lead is a really key one, because when it really comes down to it, once you've focused on developing yourself and working on yourself as a founder and a CEO, and that's continued. This is something where literally every year I set a goal of 100% year-over-year growth. I look at continual feedback from the team, asking them what went well, what could I do better at, kind of the start, stop, and keep doing mentality. And each year I set a new plan for how we're gonna grow. And I still take that same framework around building, growing, building and growing the team, setting the vision and telling the story. But where do I need to grow that next year as a leader? And this is so key of developing yourself. Really then setting focus. You have to be relentless. At VSCO we say our number one competitor is lack of focus. And I worked on a mentor session earlier today for a couple startups. And for each one there was so many good ideas, but that's the problem. There wasn't focus on exactly who they were serving and how they were planning to serve them. It was we could do this and we could do that. You have to focus. Once you've done that, once you've developed yourself, once you've found your focus, you really then have to elevate to lead. And it's difficult. This is not something that I say is really easy to do. To give away ownership of something that you've held for many, this startup is your baby. You've put so much into it. This is seven years in, I've poured everything. This company, it flows through me and I love it. And to give away that ownership and to not give everyone the answer, but to give them just questions that help them grow, learn. Because ultimately for success of your business you want it to carry on past yourself. My co-founder and I recently took this challenge to ourselves to set a 30 year vision for VSCO. And it really was how does VSCO live on beyond us? How do we set up a structure and a framework that has enough guidance and direction setting the vision of where it's going, but gives enough room for others to take it to where it needs to go? Because that continual innovation, that of that involvement that has to happen every year's new, every week's new, every day brings new challenges. So you have to be prepared and ready to do that. So all of this, once you figure this out and it's this continual development, it doesn't just like you've developed yourself and it stops. It gives you this moment in time where you can move with confidence. It allows your business, when you have that mission that's aligned and you yourself as a leader know where you can take that business, you can move with confidence. And it's a feeling unlike any other. It's the happiest I've ever been. We're now seven and a half years in running the company. We've hit cash flow positive, the business is scaling. And it's a really exciting moment in time. And so I encourage all of you to focus on developing yourself in order to scale your business, scale yourself. With that, I am gonna be over at the Founder Studio immediately after this, answering any questions, maybe asking a few questions myself to you and hopefully giving some answers. So really appreciate your time today. Have a great one. Thank you.