Making the transition from a startup to a scale-up can be a hugely exciting time for many founders; you are seeing traction in the market, you have found customers for your products that may be paying you revenue, and investors may have committed to or be keen to invest in your company. However, having worked with many founders over the years, let us offer some advice on some of the other things you will have to deal with and think about when this happens that can be challenging and worth thinking about.
Many of the early stage founders build their teams out of necessity, hiring local people, they knew previously or who was recommended to them, and they are the heroes that got them to this stage but might not be the right people to develop into the levels of leadership that you may need going forward.
Raising funding is hard, it takes a lot of time, focus, and energy, which previously you had put into the product, working with the team, talking to those customers, and now will be diverted away to focus on investors, gaining meetings, preparing documents. You will be working on requests constantly, and updating pitch decks so need to rely more heavily on a team that until now has been used to having you around and doing some of the heavy liftings.
Technical Founders who take on the CEO role face a difficult choice, making a change from being focused on the product and their domain into a different set of skills, and leadership challenges & leaving a large vacuum for the team underneath them, in time may even decide to make the move back. Julian Hearn at Huel was super passionate about his product and marketing and made the difficult decision to appoint a CEO to scale the business out while he focused back on product and Marketing. Huel went from £12m to £100m in revenue in the next 5 years.
Hiring your functional replacement is sometimes an even bigger challenge; you want them to be better than you, and add value to the team, yet it is still your baby. Understanding why you are doing this is sometimes half the battle, convincing yourself that it’s too much for yourself to handle is the other.
Scaling means teams, early-stage founders generally build one team and hire a mix of generalists before the next phase of specialists, a lot of these people brought skills that helped the business get to where it is but may not want or be capable of leadership. Being the founder means dealing with these issues, having to let go of your early-stage people, hiring above them, or reassessing what development they need for the future, fortunately, its a well-trodden path and there is lots of advice out there in the ecosystem to support.
TalentHackers have worked with lots of founders to help solve these problems, to find out more talk to one of the team today 0330 133 2097 or email enquiries@thetalenthackers.com.
