I didn’t make a conscious choice to implement radical transparency at GrantTree, at first, but I wish I had. If there’s one tool from this book that I’ll keep even if everything else changes, it’s this one.
The way it happened was, at first it was just me and Paulina, my cofounder and, at the time, girlfriend. Of course, I wasn’t going to hide anything from her, this was our business.
Then we hired a subcontractor based in India to help with the writing. She was smart, eager, and I was quite happy to coach her and delegate as much as she could handle. And it was just a tiny business, what was there to hide? Since she needed to send invoices, I gave her access to the financial system (running on a tool called FreeAgent at the time).
The next hire was meant to be a “Junior Client Manager”. We interviewed just 4 people. One lied to me about having a connection to YCombinator during the phone screen, so he was out. Two were what we were looking for - young folks eager to learn in a startup environment. The fourth one was something else. Let’s call him Charles, since I’ll refer to him again later.
Charles had six years of client management experience at a large investment bank, and a Cambridge degree in Economics: wildly overqualified, but willing to take an extreme pay cut to come and work with us.
Some people get scared of hiring overqualified people. I think that’s nuts, especially if you want the company to run and grow itself eventually. We hired him. Since, to me, Charles was obviously “operations director” material, I wanted him to have as much access to everything as possible so he could take over as much of the running and growing of the business as he felt like. So, again, full transparency.
The next hire was an “admin person” (a terrible job design - I don’t recommend it), who was going to deal with invoices, receipts, etc. So she needed access to the financial system, of course.
Finally, the one after that was “just” a salesperson. Let’s call her Violet. Technically, Violet didn’t need access to all our finances. But despite being pretty bad at “people” at the time (I’d argue I still am in many ways!), I was perceptive enough to sense someone with a fairly big ego, who would be mortified if she was told that everyone had access to the financial system except for her.
What the hell, I thought. Le’ts give it a try.
And so she also had access to everything. And, until I could come up with a good reason to change this, so did everyone else we hired afterwards.
The reason never came. Instead, what I observed over the following years convinced me that having total transparency, especially over finances, is one of the most powerful underpinning factors to create trust in a company.
Without transparency, trust is impossible
In fact, I’d go as far as to say that not having total transparency makes trust much more difficult to build, especially as you scale. I have heard of smaller companies managing to maintain trust without transparency, but it seems to me that such trust is always “on probation”, one secret away from being shattered.
It takes a lifetime to build a reputation, and only a moment to destroy it.
Moreover, it’s not just that employees won’t trust you if you’re not transparent with them. It goes in both directions.
If someone doesn’t have all the information to make the right decision, then no matter how smart they are, and honest, and diligent, you still can’t trust them with that decision.
This is one of the simplest ways to force a power hierarchy between people: if I know things you don’t, then I have power over you. I can always deny your sensible suggestion by saying “you don’t have the full picture”. Even if the only difference between us is that I know your salary and you don’t know mine, that thin veneer can be enough to enable all sorts of unjustified applications of forceful authority.
If you want to be able to trust that people will make good decisions even when you’re not around, you need them to have access to all the business information that you have. Every secret you hold gives you power - and also tightens the cuffs around your wrists.
Do you want to be free? Then be transparent.
I’ve been making good progress on writing, and even started charting the progress, because why not!
Apart from writing, I’m also figuring out the tricky work of how to present the contents of this book in video form for the new YouTube channel. I think I’ve landed on at least one viable thumbnail and title, so hopefully there’ll be something soon, but given how much effort and time it takes to make even one YouTube video, and that I’m writing a book at the same time, it might be a little bit slow to take off.
That’s it for this week! Remember to get in touch if you’d like to help beta-read this book once it’s ready for feedback (my ambitious estimate is: in a couple of weeks or so).