Why Scrappy Founders Have a Hard Time Growing into Scalable CEOs
Image Credit: Under30CEO
I’ve been thinking about how fear shapes our decision making as entrepreneurs, often in non-obvious ways. I wanted to share one particular fear-based pattern I’ve seen limit many talented entrepreneurs over the last year.
The fear of not being (resourceful) enough
I spoke with an entrepreneur the other day who explained that he spared no expense when it came to investing in the growth of his business. He told me about his primo office right in the middle of downtown, which allowed him to attract better talent.
He told me about paying for laptops for all his employees, and paying for them to attend conferences for professional development. Better to have well trained people leave, he said, than to have poorly trained people stay. He told me about his unlimited vacation policy.
With pride he explained how all this supported the rapid growth of his business, and then admitted that he himself hadn’t taken a vacation in eight years. He told me about his refurbished desk for his home office, picked up from a garage sale.
He told me he was excited to transform his business by implementing EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System), but was going to try to implement it himself rather than spend the money on hiring a trained consultant.
I see this particular inconsistency of thought all the time in entrepreneurs, particularly those navigating the chasm between the resourceful startup founder and the CEO of a growth company (and mostly men, which might say something as well). We make very sane, logical, ROI-driven investments to grow every area of our company…except ourselves.
When it comes to our own professional development, we disregard the investment frameworks that we use (successfully) everywhere else, and underinvest in areas that would make us more effective, or make our job easier, out of a misguided expectation that we should simply be Superman.
Rather than addressing our professional development needs as we would any other issue in the business — namely, solving for them — we believe that our shortcomings mean we’re not good enough in some core, primal way, so we can’t justify investing in our own development. Instead we need to simply “be better.” To not need the help in the first place.
Since the point of highest leverage in any company is its leader, this instinct to suck it up and “be better” rather than investing in your own growth as a leader can significantly flatten the trajectory of your company.
To get a company off the ground, an entrepreneur must be uncommonly resourceful. They must double-dip, pinch every penny, and accomplish a lot with very little money. A founder’s ability to succeed at the early stages is a testament to his resourcefulness regardless of circumstance, as much as anything else.
But as a company grows up, that bias to resourcefulness-over-resources that was so helpful in the early stages can blind us to the fact that, just like our employees need development, time, technology and support to perform at their best, we do, too.
The person that started your company is not (yet) the person capable of scaling it. Only by taking intentional action on your own development and support can you change that.
By Ryan Vaughn. Ryan is the founder of Second Mountain Startup, a weekly newsletter for purpose-driven entrepreneurs. A highly sought consultant among startup founders, he is known to help with issues associated with rapid growth.
