Season 1. Episode 25. Unscripted with Russ Reeder

Your best employee might be the reason you can’t scale. I’ve hired them, and I’ve defended them in meetings. There was the account manager who crushed his number every year and was universally disliked by everyone around him. There was the consultant who was brilliant with clients and quietly toxic to the team. It took me too long to see it. You can put your values on every wall in the office, but if you keep employing people who break them, your team hears a very different message. This week on Unscripted, I sat down with Russ Reeder, who has put a name on this problem. Russ has led nine PE-backed companies across six continents. He started Rightsline, which now runs the rights and licensing back office behind Netflix, Hulu, Sony and Universal. He helped sell Media Temple to GoDaddy. Today he runs KeyDelta, helping leadership teams fix the operating model before they bolt AI onto it. His new book is called Heroes Don’t Scale. A “hero” is the engineer who is the only one who knows how the code works. It’s the rep who hoards every client relationship, or the manager who treats information like currency. Everyone celebrates them, and the company slows down around them. Russ has replaced five CEOs. Three of them were heroes. A few more moments from the conversation stuck with me: Back in 2006, his team had encrypted movies streaming from hotel basements into people’s homes. They had the studio deals and the set-top boxes, and Warner Brothers was ecstatic. One controlling shareholder killed it. You know who built that business instead. AI is about to create a new generation of heroes. Picture the one employee who vibe-coded your sales automation and is the only person with the login. People who are scared of AI taking their job should be scared. Russ argues the cure is curiosity, because you can’t be curious and afraid at the same time. Companies are bought, not sold. Cutting your way to $5M more in EBITDA doesn’t fool the buyer. Russ asks one test question in his book: if your key person quit tomorrow, would the business still work? Most leaders say no. Russ says nearly every company would survive. The fear of losing that person is usually the real problem. So tell me in the comments: who is the hero in your company, and what is it costing you?   #Leadership #AI #PrivateEquity #Scaling #Unscripted