To Recruit the Best, Admit Weaknesses

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Meanwhile, I confronted the paradoxical problem you face when you have a growing business: not knowing how to scale it. I realized that identifying what I didn't know how to do was critical. Equally important was recruiting talent to help me fill these holes.

I set to work putting these realizations into practice, first hiring someone to head customer service who had helped run the flagship Apple (AAPL) store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. His contributions paid off quickly. We now called every new customer to ensure their pants fit perfectly, developed an online dashboard to measure our performance, and segmented our e-mail marketing to offer relevance based on purchase history and geography. Our e-mail unsubscribe rate went down to less than 0.5%, word-of-mouth became the No. 1 form of customer acquisition, and repeat purchase rates hit 50% within 12 months.

"I Need Your Help"

Having seen the transformative power of industry talent, I was hooked. After struggling mightily to select the right e-commerce platform, I turned to a recruiter for help. I ended up hiring the No. 2 engineer from Zappos, who moved from Las Vegas to New York City to become my vice-president for engineering. After his arrival, I was quickly able to attract a full engineering and Web design team. Our engineering vice-president also led the development of a set of company core values that would make even his former employer, which is known for its culture, proud.

The final frontier in recruiting for me was to bring in people from the apparel industry, the same industry that didn't believe in what I was doing two years earlier. I worked hard to persuade some of the industry's finest that their prospects with Bonobos burned brighter than anywhere else they could go. By the end of this year, it was an easy sell: Much of retail was getting killed, but our revenue had almost tripled year over year. My vice-president for sourcing formerly sourced several hundred million dollars of goods a year at Old Navy (GPS). My design director designed men's wovens at everywhere from Banana Republic to Club Monaco before joining us.

My job as CEO, I now realize, is easy. All I have to do is recruit superstars. Of course, it's more than that: They need fair salaries, meaningful equity stakes, and most importantly, the authority to make decisions. To make this happen, I had to accept three difficult principles: 1. As a leader, I have meaningful weaknesses which will become an obstacle to growth; 2. the company is better off hiring those weaknesses, which means I need to hire people better than me and then give them equity and power; and 3. although I love my job, my goal ultimately is to make the company safe for my departure. It may take 10 years, but I must work toward that every day.

The funny part is that once I accepted these principles, it gave me the humility I needed to inspire key recruits to join. In their eyes, I saw not only excitement for the equity we offered, but the earnest belief that they would be entrusted to do their jobs with my counsel, if they sought it, but without unwanted meddling. By accepting and acknowledging my own weaknesses, I was able to prove the naysayers wrong and hire winners from both worlds. I now begin my conversations with potential recruits with a sentence that always brings a smile: I am not good at what you do, and I need your help.

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