Focused Structure

There are six common traps that founders and entrepreneurs unknowingly fall prey to during the early days of their new business. The first step to avoiding them is knowing that they exist.

As humans, we grow up, reach our prime, and then walk the road of wisdom as a simple function of time. In other words, we grow old. However, businesses don't face the same sort of mandatory aging. Instead, your business can, in theory, stay in top form for as long as you'd like. Here's how you and your business can defy the laws of gravity for as long as you (and even your successors) would like!

How fast do you want to grow your business? As your business progresses through each stage of growth, you will need to strategically decide whether you are willing to make the changes necessary to keep growing.

Where does growth come from, incremental gains, or quantum leaps? There are so many articles written on this question, and they come to virtually every single conclusion. I'd like to take a moment to try to explain why the answer is "YES" and what that means for your business.

If your business growth was once booming but has since slowed, where do you think you should look first? Pricing? Nope. Costs? Nope. Marketing content? Nope. You may have problems in all three of these areas and probably have a lot of problems in other areas too.

Though spikes and disruptions will hit and the future is far from clear, many businesses would benefit from taking a step back to reassess not only their long-term goals but also the process by which we establish those goals. This is one of those areas that, if was as leaders are not intentional, we could end up suffering from a side-effect of COVID-19 for a very long time: a heightened emphasis on urgency.

The Founder's Evolution culminates in Stage 7: The Visionary Founder. At this stage, the Visionary Founder's legacy is truly established. But at the end of the day, it's not about how skilled you are, how amazing your organization is, or how much you are worth. Instead, it's about something far more meaningful, something far more powerful.

Most Founders never make it to Stage 6 of their Founder's Evolution, and they never experience the joy and freedom of becoming a True Owner. They also never discover the most valuable asset a True Owner has because it certainly isn't cash (even though they have a whole lot of it).

Stage 4 of the Founder's Evolution is the single greatest shift in the entire journey. Your entire history as a founder and a leader up to this point has taught you the skill of winning the game on the field. Unfortunately, very little of that matters in Stage 4. In fact, the better you are at the earlier stages, the harder it will be for you to embrace this next phase in your journey.

We hit the ground running. It was September 2008 when we relaunched our business, and although much of the world was in the tumult of the financial crisis, we were on fire. The relaunch had gone stunningly well, even though we had inherited some severe problems from the previous owners. We had debt-ridden relationships with …

If you were to go out and ask any random startup entrepreneur how the new business is going, you would get a huge smile followed by a whole list of superlatives. “It’s wonderful.” “It’s amazing.” “I’m loving it.” Simultaneously you feel like all your life has prepared you for this moment, AND like you are way in over your head because you are. And despite the smile, you show everyone around you, inside, you are plagued by the question: What was I thinking? Did you make a mistake, or are you on your way to the success you’ve dreamt of?