The other day I met a startup founder, who had been struggling getting his business of the ground as a business for the past couple of years. Despite claiming the ambition of millions of users worldwide, he had only reached a couple of thousand within the first couple of years.
While there is always reason to celebrate great knowledgable people for taking the plunge to pursue their passion and their dreams and turn both into a startup, there are also times when you need to step back and take a more sombre look;
This particular startup was in reality nowhere. In order to have any prospects of success, they needed to step back, look at their core assets and find ways to build a revenue stream around those. Not out of curiosity. But out of necessity.
And yet the founder resisted. While claiming to be open to change, he was still very much set around the same set of assumptions that had brought him and his colleagues so little over the past couple of years. When I asked him what in their performance so far he thought mandated to continue approaching things the same way, he didn’t really give an answer, and I totally understand why: There was no real good answer.
The founder was faced with a ton of challenges, but what also become apparent to me is that he was at the center of a lot of them. And that maybe the best prospects of success for him and his startup was for him to find someone with a pair of fresh eyes and the right capabilities in terms of building the business, and then step back to another more product related role for himself.
He sort of agreed. Until he didn’t the next second. And we could have continued that way for ages.
While I completely understand that it can feel totally wrong to think in terms of finding someone better to replace you in a key role – and especially in a startup you founded – I think there are times, where it’s truly the best solution for all parties concerned. If you believe that the most important thing is to build a thriving business, personal considerations should matter less.
For myself I have always believed that building winning teams is about looking at the challenges facing you and then go about trying to recruit someone much better than yourself to help you overcome those challenges and move on to the next level with the business.
For that reason I have always tried to recruit the best and brightest and get someone who could not only challenge me and my thinking but also contribute to some vastly improved results within their areas of expertise. I think it’s wise for founders to think in those terms too.
The last thing anybody needs in any company whether it being a corporate and a startup is someone at the top with the ambition of always being the smartest person in the room, no matter what. Yes, that person might be brilliant and truly the smartest person, but in most instances – and my experience – there are quite a few even smarter people out there, we should instead be looking to recruit, onboard, get to work and start generating successes with.
Having this unbiased view of your own role can help you build the team that builds the great business together with you. If your too stuck on your own ego to realize that, you risk ending up becoming a founder who will look back and reflect on what potentially could have been but never materialized because you failed to make the right decision and move over to provide room for other great people.
(Photo by Greg Shield on Unsplash)