E06 – Two CEO Transitions with Simon La Fosse

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E06 – Two CEO Transitions with Simon La Fosse

"I've never met anybody that has a complete skill set from a business perspective. We all spike in different areas. And that's the joy of teamwork."

Oct 09, 2024

Transcript

This is one of my favourite episodes so far. Simon is a good friend; we’ve known each other for years. I admired the business he built from the distance because both La Fosse Associates (his business) and Makers (mine) operate in the tech talent space but without competing head-to-head.

There are several reasons why La Fosse stands out from the competition. First, they achieved great financial results — nearly 500 employees, nearly £200m in revenue (archived link) — all without raising funding. Plus, they won so many awards for being a great place to work, that they built a dedicated page on their website to list them all in fine print.

What’s more, Simon chose to make La Fosse an employee-owned organisation. Despite being a sole owner, he chose to give over 50% of the equity to the team, ceding the ultimate control for the benefit of the team. This is far more generous that a 5-20% employee options pool most startups have.

Given all this success and care for the team, you might be surprised to learn that Simon is not a CEO and hasn’t been for a very long time. He promoted an internal candidate to an MD position when the company was only 40 people, having recognised that his own talents lie elsewhere.

The first CEO did an incredible job, but when the time came to find a new leader, Simon promoted someone else into the CEO role again. Looking back, both CEO transitions have been a success.

In this episode, Simon and I discuss why he wanted to build a company “like no other”, the reasons he focuses so much on treating people well and how that helped La Fosse become a great business it is today.

Enjoy the conversation!