Hey Founder ... I’d Like You to Know that I Hear You.

I hear you when you tell me it’s hard to scale passion and impact in your business. You started your business with a driving force not only to get your idea off the ground but also to use it to express something important about who you are and what kind of impact you want to make in the world. That passion carried you through the startup phase and into GoGo where your team is growing, you’re getting new investors and financial worries seem to be squeezing your passion out of the business.

I just want to encourage you to believe that it doesn't have to be that way. As a founder, you really do need to find ways to reconnect with your energy throughout successive stages of growth. I would submit that doing so isn’t something that would be nice to do — it is really important at all costs.

So, I’m going to double down on my empathy with you and use this space from now on  to do what I can to help you be happy and live your most exquisite life through your business. And if you're not getting it from the business, I want to help you figure out how to go and get it.

For quite a while now, I’ve been working on figuring out the most authentic and useful way of communicating with you. I think I’ve found an answer, which is to write in a more direct, one-on-one style of a personal letter. The kind I write to you in emails or texts where we work through an issue or problem, or that we talk out by jumping on a Zoom call. That’s what I’m devoting this space to doing, and wherever you are in your journey — whether you’re starting out, dealing with rapid growth, or embarking on your second or third venture — you’ll find a thought partner, a strategy partner and a life coach in this space.

That’s my commitment to you, dear colleague, dear reader.

At ScalePassion, we know that each of you will be at a different point in your adventure, so we will tailor this blog to cover the two stages each of you must go through to start and scale an impact business like yours.

Let’s take up each stage and its main challenges.

Stage I

If you have to go back to the beginning, this is where you go. You’ll know you’re in this stage when you find yourself answering “no” to questions like, “Am I showing up with the right energy?” “Am I focused on what matters most?” “Do I have clarity on where I'm falling short?” “Is my strategy clear to me? To my team?”  Stage 1 involves two steps:

1. Leading yourself: the first thing you have to do in order to be able to inspire others is to feel inspired yourself by connecting with your purpose, which is the thing that energizes you, and focusing on that like a laser beam. This is the starting point for any founder but it’s not limited to the startup phase; founders who have lost their sense of purpose, energy and focus have to reconnect with them.

2. Nailing your strategy: Once you have your purpose in order, it’s time to nail your strategy, which involves a seven-point blueprint that includes knowing: yourself, your customer, your market, why you exist, what you do, how you behave (core values) and what’s most important right now. I invite you to go deeper on this topic here. 

As with leading yourself, nailing your strategy isn’t something you do once and forget about it. To the contrary, it’s something you return to again and again to keep yourself and your team heading in the right direction. 

Stage II

This is the stage in which you are busy growing your business and asking yourself the questions that can keep founders up at night. “Am I leading the right team?” “Are we executing effectively and doing what we say we’re going to do?” “Why doesn’t my team get it?” “How can I get my team to think like owners instead of worker bees?” Founders in Stage II are contending with three main challenges:

3. Leading others: This area describes the founder’s role as a coach, teacher and inspirer of others, including employees, vendors, investors and customers. As with leading yourself, leading others calls into play conscious leadership principles and techniques that help you reduce drama and sharpen collaboration between you and your team and within your team.

4. Executing: This area involves the ways you work together with your team: how you meet, make decisions, resolve conflicts, evaluate your objectives and metrics, learn from mistakes, start over and a hundred other ways of doing what we say we’re going to do and keeping impeccable agreements.

5. Inspiring: Transactional relationships can only last so long, and inspiration and belief are what attract the people you want to your project and keep them there. You have to keep yourself inspired in order to inspire others and execute in a way that inspires the marketplace. This brings us around full circle, right? The inspiration piece runs through everything.

Does this kind of “Dear Founder” letter sound like something that would engage you? I hope so because the tone I’m trying to strike, the energy I’m looking to impart and help you find in yourself, and the actual examples of the ups and downs of being a founder all come from my work with you.

So, here’s your call to action: take the are you ready scale assessment. That'll help you understand where you might be falling short on one of these five areas. And if it makes sense to do so, let’s tackle this thing together.

Sincerely,

Rob Craven, ScalePassion

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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!