Recently, I had a really interesting conversation with one of our founder clients. He runs a medium-sized business, and has a team of people operating at various levels below him.

He knows them all because it isn’t a big team, but it’s grown over recent years, so his ‘open door policy’ doesn’t really see them pop in to talk to him about their problems anymore. 

He thought he still had a good handle on what was going on in his business. 

Cue one of his employees leaving, someone needing a file they had, and he did as all founders often do, throwing on another hat (the tech guy) and jumping in quickly to the ex-team member’s inbox to retrieve the missing document. 

When they left their job, their email of course stayed behind, as did everything that was in it. 

Along with the file his current employee needed, after logging into the inbox, this blissfully ignorant founder and CEO also got an eyeful of this:

‘He’s an absolute a**hole to have done that, and just trying to cover up his own incompetence.’*

And that started a whole thing!

The inbox was just the tip of the iceberg…

Now, I was going to move straight on to the main point of this article, but I can hear every one of you waiting with bated breath to find out what happened next to our client. 

It turned out, the message our client found was just one of many circulating between a group of employees who worked under one particular manager. A group of good performers who had been dwindling of late. Being blunt about it, that team was not having a good time. 

They were in unanimous agreement that the manager was a bully, with story after story to illustrate that point, and beyond that, his incompetence would have been hurting the business if they didn’t do most of his job for him. But he talked the talk, and the work was done, so senior managers just weren’t seeing the problem. 

We’ve all been there (right?), had that manager who somehow simultaneously gives us a solid dose of imposter syndrome, while we’re doing their work for them and they’re taking the credit. Either way, clearly, that sort of leadership is not conducive to a strong culture, in fact it can be toxic, and it certainly wasn’t something our founder had been aware of until then. 

How he solved that problem is a tale for another day, the focus of this one, however, is what else he realised when he went into that ex-staff member’s email:

They had control of the company’s website domain. 

The domain, registered so long ago that none of them could remember, was up for renewal according to the team EA, but no matter how many account retrievals they’d tried to do, they couldn’t work out who actually ‘owned’ it.

The list went on from there: the Meta assets were all sitting inside a Business Portfolio set up under this person’s own account, and the portfolio can’t be transferred. 

And on both of these, because this employee followed the office-specified protocols, they had multi-factor authentication… to their personal phone (work phones weren’t issued). 

As a marketing officer on the team, this person was also the main admin on the website, controlled the Google profile, and had a long list of subscriptions for analytics and other platforms all attached to their email with 2FA protection. 

Almost fortunately, the need to access the employee’s old inbox had enabled the founder to stumble on the fact that their offboarding and their succession planning had allowed full ownership and access to absolutely critical parts of their marketing to still sit with someone who no longer worked for the company. 

And if you think your company is exempt from this, 89% of former employees retain access to at least one application from their previous employer. Of 500 respondents to a OneLogin study, more than 100 admitted that failure to terminate former employee system access directly contributed to a data breach at their company. 

Despite the bullying manager, the employee had left on excellent terms with everyone else, still aligned to the company vision and loyal to the founder. Calling them up to get the 2FA codes and promptly move that service was not a problem… though it was an awkward conversation for both of them, given the other emails unearthed. 

This could have worked out much differently. We’ve seen it over and over again. 

We’ve seen others, mainly marketing managers, leave disgruntled, and businesses forced to rebuild Meta accounts and campaigns from scratch, petition their provider to regain control of their own domain, cancel business credit cards, and go back and forward with tech platforms for weeks and even months trying to close down subscriptions coming from those cards. 

The situation can be dangerous and damaging to the business and brand, and can suck up a lot of time from people who could be doing better things.

It could also be easily avoided…

For many years, Kris, myself and our little team worked in pure marketing, building strategies and tactics for various organisations to help them achieve growth. 

But all too often, especially in founder-led scale-ups where the start-up phase is fast-paced, slightly chaotic, and very product-focused, things went wrong. Sometimes they were things like the example above that cost a little money and a lot of time, but sometimes they literally put the business at make or break points.

What we realised is that for marketing to be successful, it actually has three parts. 

The first is making sure the business has a strong foundation upon which they can launch that marketing; we call this STRUCTURE. They need to have smart policies and processes in place, the right systems that talk to each other, clear communication, effective leadership, and a positive culture.

If marketing is built on top of something that isn’t this – that is cracked and fundamentally flawed – it’s not long before everything sinks and the effort behind initiatives and campaigns is wasted. 

Structure is what you build growth on. 

The second requirement is STRATEGY. And though the concept is simple; really researching and thinking about things before you put them in play, it’s one of the most overlooked and forgotten steps in business because we’re all in a rush to get to the doing, to see what the action can produce. 

More than 4 in 10 external administrators cite ‘poor strategic management’ as a cause of company failure.

Strategy is what you build growth from. 

And the third, is the action, the part we call SCALE. It’s the prescriptive plans you follow and roll out, driven by strategy, supported by structure, and measured and monitored for success, that create growth that will really last. 

Scale is the actions you build growth with.

And yes, we know it’s not always that straightforward…

What we’ve also learned, more from working with established business clients than our start-up clients, is that sometimes, before you start to optimise structure, strategy or scale, a diagnostic is needed first. 

Businesses often come to us with a particular challenge, like: ‘my sales are down and the sales and marketing team are at each other’s throats’ which looks like one problem, but is actually just a symptom of something bigger.

A significant part of our work is helping leaders identify and solve the real problem that is disrupting their business and success, deal with the symptoms, then clear that debris out of the way so when they start to firm up their structure, they can be sure it will hold strong as they build strategy and launch scaling programs from it. 

What’s in the box…?

Yes, we borrowed that line… but coming right back around to the beginning: as a business, getting your structure and strategy set up well so you can avoid unnecessary problems and actually make the most of your marketing efforts is critical to success. 

As an employee, think about it… what did you leave in your inbox at your last job? 

*Changed to protect privacy, but along these lines.