When entrepreneur Timothy Armoo set up his social media advertising business Fanbytes in 2017, it was just him and his co-founders. Five years later, the company had more than 65 employees, clients including some of the biggest companies in the world, and was sold for a reported eight-figure sum to global marketing company Brainlabs.
Growth at that pace doesn’t come without its challenges. “We started to have several different stakeholders, whether it was the team, investors, or customers, and that meant I was getting hit by so many people who wanted my focus,” says Armoo, who became a self-confessed “bottleneck” because everything from decision-making to document-signing came through him.
It’s a common challenge for entrepreneurs who, having nurtured and grown their businesses, understandably feel they need to be involved in every part of it.
In fact, getting “bogged down in the minutiae” is something Armoo thinks most CEOs can fall victim to. These days, his approach has changed; he believes that establishing decent systems throughout a business is key for those at the top to be able to achieve some kind of balance. “Everyone in the business should be able to focus on the 80/20 rule – the 20% that drives the 80% of output,” he says. He says that identifying the 20% of tasks where he could have most impact transformed his productivity.
The 28-year-old started Fanbytes with two friends while studying computer science at Warwick University. The business helps brands to engage Gen Z audiences on social media, offering services such as influencer marketing, content creation and social campaigns, with clients from Sony Music and Burger King to the UK government.
Running a business requires a lot of learning on the job, and a crucial lesson for entrepreneurs can be figuring out their role in the organisation. Armoo says bosses must get past believing that they need to be involved in every single part of the business for it to be successful. “When you’re reading about businesspeople you always tend to hear about the one or two people – with Facebook you think of Mark Zuckerberg. That creates what I call the ‘Zuckerberg complex’ – attributing the success of an entire organisation to one individual. I think I had that. I felt I had to be the person who was constantly trying to solve the problem. I had to be the superman, to figure out the solution.” Accepting that you don’t need to have the answer to every problem can be liberating and help business owners achieve a better balance.
Another useful lesson has been around improving processes. Armoo recalls a problem he was having with documents: “People would send me documents – I’d get something from an employee, something from an investor – and I would say: ‘Isn’t there just a simple way to see things and sign them?’.”
In looking for a way to simplify things, the impetus came from the company’s largest investor at the time. “We sent him a shareholder’s agreement in Word format and he said: ‘I’m travelling, just make it as easy as possible.’ So, I searched for something that would do that.” That search led him to the Adobe Acrobat family of application software and services which help users create, review, scan, convert, e-sign and edit online PDFs for free. “He was the first meaningful investor we had and I thought, ‘right, this is how the big boys play’. It was a bit of a mental levelling up.”
Armoo starting using Adobe Acrobat across the business for everything from reviewing proposals and presentations on the move, to signing important documents. “It freed up time to focus on things that mattered in the business – getting and keeping customers rather than being bogged down in feedback and signing things, or saying: ‘Hey can you send this in a format I can read on my phone?’ I must have said that about 5,000 times in my time at Fanbytes.”
Another worthwhile lesson, says Armoo, is that in business, not everything goes your way. Accepting you may fail at some things can be a challenge, but it “lowers the bar of perfection” and removes pressure. That removal of pressure is also achieved by the realisation that a business is often just one chapter in a much longer career journey, rather than the be-all and end-all.
“It’s important that you understand that whatever business success or failure you have, it’s a stepping stone to doing more and more that you want to do in your entire life. That will reduce the pressure you put on yourself and on your business – otherwise you say: ‘This has to work because this defines me’.”
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