What It Takes by Raegan Moya-Jones

Author:Raegan Moya-Jones [Moya-Jones, Raegan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

LEAD YOUR TEAM

Back in grade school I was terrible at math, and I’m not sure I even passed it in high school. The one subject I struggled with most when I was going for my MBA was accounting. I am fairly sure the only reason my professor passed me was so he didn’t have to see me in his class again. I drove him to distraction because I just didn’t get it (and a part of me didn’t want to get it). While I could work out 18 percent of 368 in my head, I could never put together a P&L (profit and loss statement) or a balance sheet, and I could never understand T accounts (those double-entry accounting methods that look like the letter T). Markos, on the other hand, can look at a quadratic equation and solve it instantly. It blows my mind just thinking about it. We could not be more different when it comes to our mathematical abilities.

So, despite the fact that I’ve just told you not to go into business with an equal partner or with your spouse, I roped Markos into helping me—temporarily, and not in an official capacity as an aden + anais employee. After Claudia, who had covered finances (though not so well, as previously discussed), was no longer around I couldn’t handle the books all on my own; I needed help. It was early 2009, and Markos was in between jobs. Since he knew far more about the financial side of things than I did, he came on for a month as my unofficial controller to help me straighten things out.

While I was happy to have Markos at the helm of our financial ship, we had a new problem: Everything was in our apartment. The dining room table had become our office, and every closet in the house was stuffed with inventory and marketing materials.

With three kids at the time and a small New York apartment, we had no room to spare. And we had a large demand for our product and a growing pile of work, but not enough hands. We needed help, and we needed space. Previously, Claudia and I had outsourced everything that we couldn’t handle ourselves. Like our nonexistent marketing budget, we had no money to hire employees, bar one jack-of-all-trades who helped us out for about six months prior to our breakup. But with aden + anais making a consistent profit and growing larger by the day, it was time to bring on help. I hired our first full-time employee in New York, Andrea “Ang” Veiga, ten months prior to leaving The Economist.

It was David who came through with the recommendation. He could see that the stress of managing the growing company was taking a toll, so he suggested Ang, who has been his best friend since high school. Entrepreneurs often hire people from within their friend pool for better or worse since you need people ASAP who can run with whatever task they’re given.

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