Building a Team of A-Players

In the third of a six-part series of blogs about the growth of The Lit­tle Pota­to Com­pa­ny (LPC), and the lead­er­ship CEO/­co-founder Angela San­ti­a­go, we talk about how she built a team of empow­ered A‑Players who teach, guide and enable her to succeed.

Angela San­ti­a­go has a super­pow­er. She finds amaz­ing peo­ple to join her team.

Her suc­cess is usu­al­ly ground­ed in two principles:

• Find peo­ple who have been where you are going
• Start with frac­tion­al roles.

This approach enables her to build the com­pa­ny she wants to have, in the future, and sat­is­fies her insa­tiable appetite to learn from oth­ers. She epit­o­mizes the qual­i­ties of what Jim Collins calls a Lev­el 5 leader: some­one who taps into the bril­liance of others.

“This is my one kick at the can.

I don’t plan to start anoth­er busi­ness, so this is it.

It’s go big or go home.”

“I give space for more expe­ri­enced peo­ple and get a lot by sit­ting in a room with peo­ple who know more than me,” she says. ​“I give room for peo­ple to lead and actu­al­ly lead me in cer­tain areas. I think that’s an empow­er­ing feel­ing for people…because they can build their own great orga­ni­za­tion with­in the orga­ni­za­tion. I find that quite exhilarating.”

Not a Chief Prob­lem Solver

Many lead­ers have to learn how not to be a Chief Prob­lem Solver (Chap­ter 12 of Your Oxy­gen Mask First) for their team. Angela comes by it nat­u­ral­ly, inten­tion­al­ly hir­ing capa­ble peo­ple. And she gives them room to thrive, free­ing her time to focus on the strate­gic lead­er­ship of her company.

Hire Before You’re Ready

One of the sto­ries in my upcom­ing book (com­ing out lat­er in 2025) is about how Angela brought on her head of sales.

She real­ized ear­ly on that if she want­ed to grow LPC, she need­ed some­one to lead sales. Instead of hold­ing back, like many small busi­ness lead­ers who assume they can’t afford top tal­ent yet, Angela took a smart, frac­tion­al approach. She found a top-tier sales exec­u­tive who worked part-time with a hand­ful of oth­er clients. His flex­i­ble arrange­ment allowed her to start scal­ing the busi­ness right away, and even­tu­al­ly, he joined her team full-time.

Dis­cov­er what Angela looks for when recruit­ing and how she gets top tal­ent on board in the full sto­ry. In this clip, Angela talks about recruit­ing executives.

These peo­ple rec­og­nize the rare oppor­tu­ni­ty to ​“put their fin­ger­prints on the company”.

“It’s about being OK that I don’t know how to get to the next $100 mil­lion but that per­son does. So how do I get them on my team?”

Lis­ten to Angela’s pas­sion about the oppor­tu­ni­ties she can offer to peo­ple on her team and how she gives oth­er peo­ple room to lead.

And she’s done this to build amaz­ing teams in finance, HR, mar­ket­ing and sales.

Such a sim­ple and pow­er­ful strategy.

For more, here are links to our recent LPC Case Study and watch the full inter­view with Angela below.

Oth­er Blogs

• Types of A Players
• Hid­den Cost of Not Hav­ing a Team of A Players
• 91% A Play­ers. What’s Your Number?
• Fool­proof Hir­ing: Dou­ble Your Recruit­ing Success

Old­er Podcasts

• How to Iden­ti­fy A Players
• Jim Collins’ 6 Char­ac­ter­is­tics of Right Peo­ple in the Right Seats