Travis S. Crabtree (’00)

UH Law Center alum Travis Crabtree was a recipient of the HBJ Most Admired CEO awards. He is President of Swyft Filings

 

What was the biggest lesson you
learned about yourself during the
pandemic and how did that affect
your leadership style? Empowerment
works. Empowerment has been one
of our core values since day one. We
help empower our customers to start
their own businesses, and we empower
our employees through trust and
communication. After the pandemic
started, we began doubling down, and
it’s the resiliency of our team that got us
through.
What changes made during the
pandemic do you intend to keep?
Before the pandemic, we believed we
had to make a choice between being
customer-focused and team-focused.
We’ve now learned the best case for
success is becoming both. It doesn’t
have to be a binary choice — we
can support both our team and the
customer. We’re continuing to find
ways to combine the two to support
customers and employees at the same
time. We serve an incredibly diverse
set of small business customers, and
we found we could support them while
also providing fun activities for our
employees.
What has surprised you the most
since becoming a top executive?
Just because someone has a “high title”
doesn’t mean they know everything. We
go through the same processes at the
executive level as the rest of our team.
There are lots of things you don’t know
out there and you just have to figure
it out. We encourage an atmosphere
of admitting when we don’t know
something and arming people with the
power and tools to learn the answers.
What advice would you give to
emerging leaders? Hire people
smarter than you, learn from them, and
feel comfortable delegating things to
them. This goes hand in hand with who
you hire. If you’re afraid to delegate
to someone, you don’t have the right
person. Manage your leadership by
building up your team and being able
to move on from one task to the next by
leaving it in good hands.

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