The success we’ve seen here at Seventy Ninth Resources in the past few years is truly remarkable. As the company’s CEO since 2022, I’ve been privileged to see this unprecedented growth at first-hand, and I’m enormously proud to have played my part in this transformation.
Nevertheless, being in a leadership role during a period of rapid growth has not always been plain sailing. Yes, it’s an exciting and deeply rewarding experience – but it comes with its own set of challenges, too.
For instance, as your business grows at pace, so do your staffing needs. That means you’re continually recruiting, trying to find the best talent to expand your capabilities as well as helping new hires to settle in. And then you’ve got all those new projects launching month after month, requiring you to balance an ever-growing range of priorities without taking your eye off the ball.
Personally, this is a challenge that I’ve really relished. It’s been an incredible learning experience to help a company develop through what one of our consultants called its “teenage” years – that period of sudden growth that can be as disorientating as it is exciting, and which can lead to a great deal of uncertainty and confusion.
As they go through this phase, companies have a choice: they can either push through and continue to evolve or they can stagnate. Here at Seventy Ninth Resources, we chose the former. We learned how to manage the risks that come with rapid growth, embraced the steep learning curve we faced, and made the most of this experience.
Of course, we did have an advantage: we’re a company that’s got a lot of experience in risk management. Our global scale means we’re constantly working on multiple projects across different parts of the world. That means we’ve had to get very good at assessing risks and putting plans in place to limit any threats to our stability.
Through this period of unprecedented growth, myself and the rest of the Seventy Ninth Resources team have learned a huge amount. We’ve learned how vital it is to build strong teams, especially as we’ve begun to open new offices across the world to support our global growth. Our incredibly effective and hard-working teams have played a vital role in our success – we simply wouldn’t be where we are today without them.
And because we started as a small family business and have scaled up, we’ve also learned how to combine the best of both worlds. We’re still committed to the personalised, hands-on approach that we began with, but we’ve learned how to scale that up to operate on a truly global scale. This means that we still benefit from the direct insights and in-depth knowledge that you simply can’t get if you work through third-parties.
In this article, I want to break down some of the lessons I’ve learned from this period of high growth. My aim is to help business leaders who might be looking to scale up in a similar way or going through their own “teenage” years.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the most important things I’ve learned from the rapid growth of Seventy Ninth Resources.
Investing in your teams
If you want your business to succeed, you have to invest in your staff. It’s as simple as that. If your staff are excited to come to work, if they feel cared for and valued, if they have opportunities to learn and grow as your business does, then they will be truly committed to delivering their best work.
Compare that to a team that’s overworked, under pressure, stressed out, and unhappy. There’s no way round it: they’ll struggle to deliver quality work even if they wanted to – and they may well have one eye on their next career move.
Let’s keep it simple: if you want to reduce turnover, improve productivity and attract the best talent, you need to provide a working environment that’s fit for purpose. So, how have we achieved this at Seventy Ninth Resources during our period of rapid growth?
Our first step was to expand our teams in both the UK and the Republic of Guinea, where we hold an extensive portfolio of natural resources assets. In the UK, we focused on our adding to our operational staff to help ensure everything is running smoothly, as well as new members for our marketing team to help promote our ongoing global growth.
In Guinea, we expanded our head office team in the lead-up to our drilling operations in order to minimise disruption and avoid staff becoming overloaded. This team is led by our In-Country Manager Eric Ntube, who recently shared his own insights into how he approaches building a happy, motivated team.
Investing in a team isn’t just about hiring new staff. Yes, having enough resource is important – after all, a team that’s too small to handle the workload is likely also going to be stressed, tired and overworked. But it’s also essential that you really commit to the learning and growth of every employee. That means providing training opportunities to help them build their careers, as well as benefits packages to ensure they are rewarded for contributing to the success of the business.
It’s also essential that your staff see opportunities to progress and develop both in their existing roles and in new ones. On the one hand, this involves ensuring there are obvious ways to progress as their skills and knowledge grow. On the other hand, it means supporting sideways moves into new departments, so that your staff can try new things and explore new interests.
At Seventy Ninth Resources, we truly believe in building an environment where people are encouraged not just to pursue their own growth and development but also to support others in doing the same – and this applies to our teams across the world. We’ve provided extensive educational and training opportunities to our Guinea team, including a range of trade-specific training to provide them with transferable skills.
Forging business partnerships
Another essential lesson I want to share is that you don’t know everything. No matter how much experience you have, no matter the positions you’ve held or the years you’ve spent in a particular industry, you have to accept that there’s someone out there who knows more than you do – someone who can offer you a new insight or a fresh perspective.
Once you accept this fact – as hard as that can be sometimes – you realise it’s not an admission of failure. In fact, it’s a major asset. It not only helps you continue to grow and develop as a leader, but it also encourages you to build partnerships and collaborate with the best talent out there. You want to go out and find those people who can expand your knowledge – you want to learn from the very best!
That’s why, at Seventy Ninth Resources, we’ve built a team of advisors, consultants and non-executive directors who bring enormous expertise across a wide range of fields, from mining and commodities to finance and law. Thanks to this collaborative approach, we have a source of knowledge and experience on-hand to guide us in every single project we embark on.
It also means that we work with world-renowned, industry-leading external partners to help us deliver on our ambitions. SRK Exploration, for instance, are the global leader in mineral exploration, and Ernst & Young, Fieldfisher LLP, and Ardalan & Associates ensure our operations in the region are fully compliant and face minimal risks.
Ultimately, when you’re pursuing high levels of growth and tackling ambitious global projects, you need to start from a firm foundation. And you have to accept that going it alone is limiting – you need the best possible support to ensure you’re building something that will last.
Committing for the long term
If you want to see success in business, you can’t focus on the short term. Particularly when it comes to the most exciting and ambitious projects, it takes long-term commitment to see results. You’ve got to have the patience and the dedication to lay the groundwork carefully and then follow through step-by-step.
If you take this approach, you also have to accept you aren’t going to see results right away. You might start to doubt yourself, or to question whether it’s time to change course. But it’s essential to trust your instincts and stick to your guns. Ultimately, you will reap the rewards.
Our Chairman Dave Webster, alongside his sons Jake and Curtis, first began taking regular trips to the region back in 2011. For more than a decade, they’ve carefully built their knowledge of the local area and its diverse communities, as well as gradually increasing their portfolio of concessions, making Seventy Ninth Resources is now one of the largest developers of natural resources in West Africa.
Reaching this point was an enormous operation that moved through several phases, each of which posed its own challenges. Through it all, we had to coordinate teams across different continents and time zones and ensure everyone was on the same page – no mean feat!
At every single stage of the project, we brought the same level of focus and commitment. Our recent drilling operation, for instance, involved many months of planning, including careful budgeting and building our own internal ROIs. Developing and monitoring this process is a big part of my role, and it’s something we do for every project in order to ensure we’re able to spot any issues as they arrive and adapt accordingly.
And this is an important point: long-term commitment doesn’t mean blindly following a plan. In natural resources and financial services, especially, it’s impossible to predict what the future holds. So, while you do need to plan carefully, commitment is also about knowing when you need to change course. From a practical standpoint, that’s why we’re always factoring in variability in our plans – we don’t make our margins and deadlines as tight as possible, because then there’s no room for movement.
Maintaining your connections
Seventy Ninth Resources is a global enterprise with ambitions that extend across multiple continents. If you add to this the kind of long-term plans we’ve discussed above, it means that knowing how to stay connected with your teams, your partners and your stakeholders is essential. Even in periods where it feels like things are moving slowly and there’s nothing to discuss, it’s important to check in regularly.
And when it comes to staying connected, there’s nothing that can compare to being on the ground with your projects. I’ve discussed elsewhere just how important our regular visits to Guinea have been to the development of our natural resources offerings in the region.
But this extends to all business relationships. Face-to-face contact is so important to building lasting connections – it’s something that no Zoom call can replicate. I would always advise aspiring leaders to focus on meeting as many people as possible and forging those powerful ties that often come in very handy when you’re facing a challenge and need advice.
It’s also vital that you take the time to understand local nuances. And this is true not only if you’re operating across different countries or continents, but even just across different regions within a single country. You have to accept that you are coming into someone else’s space – and that means respecting their knowledge and valuing their insights and taking their perspectives into account.
This respect for local communities is a value that I’ve always put at the forefront wherever I’ve worked, and I’m so thankful that Seventy Ninth Resources have truly embraced this commitment. Our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESC) policies are second-to-none, and I’m incredibly proud of our ongoing efforts in this area.
I think nothing shows this more clearly than our ongoing work in Guinea. Every step of the way, we’ve made sure that our ESG commitments are tailored to the specific needs of the communities we’re working with. We take the time to learn about their concerns and understand what would truly help them – and we do it face-to-face.
In summary, there are four key lessons I’ve taken from being a leader in a high-growth environment over the past few years: invest in your teams, commit for the long term, build strong partnerships and maintain your connections. I feel that these tactics have helped to secure our ongoing growth at Seventy Ninth Resources, and I hope that they can help leaders who are trying to navigate their own periods of rapid growth.
