How to Get Your Business Through Adolescence
Photo by Lance Grandahl on Unsplash
Hey Founder,
Let me guess. It was exciting to grow from 2 to 6 to 20 and now 30 employees, but these days not everybody shares your energy and passion, and you find yourself increasingly frustrated that your growth seems to have hit a plateau long before it should. “I feel like the company can’t keep up. Why can’t they just get it? Why do they need me to make all the decisions,” you find yourself wondering over and over again.
Or . . . maybe you’ve just raised capital — not from your loyal friends, family and fans, but serious money from serious capital folks who are now asking for things you may not think are even worth it. Entrepreneurs set big goals for their organizations and get everybody barreling forward. But now your new stakeholders, who are far less risk tolerant than you, are demanding monthly reports and quarterly board meetings that take you and your team off chasing those big goals; and their expectations border on crazy! Your world is turning upside down!
Do either or both of these scenarios sound familiar? If not, someday they will; if so, allow me to get the ball rolling by saying, “Welcome to corporate adolescence!”
One of my intellectual heroes, Ishak Caleron Adizes, developed an influential theory of corporate life cycles to explain the growing pains businesses and their founders must go through in order to successfully scale. Adizes proposes that companies, like people, move through a series of developmental stages, beginning as a gleam in the entrepreneur’s eye, then moving into what Adizes calls Go-Go and Adolescence en route to Prime.
Each stage in your company’s life involves having to make changes that present unique challenges to the organization. The challenges are hard but natural parts of growing your company. If you want to grow and prosper, you must meet these challenges head on so you can advance to the next stage.
Right now, you are in the midst of adolescence and attempting to figure out what’s going on. You have a challenge before you: you need to understand that what got you to where you are today absolutely, positively will not get you where you want to go tomorrow. How do I know you are experiencing this adolescent growing pain? Because my team and I at ScalePassion work with companies that look exactly yours.
And what exactly would that “look” be, you ask? I’ll tell you. You have been a founder-driven company in which you and your co-founders have made all, or practically all, of the decisions and your strategy has mainly consisted of all hands on deck. This approach worked when you were smaller and in Go-Go mode, but cracks have appeared in your systems, such as they are, and in your people, who you feel may be in over their heads, and in your own energy, which seems a little down and stressed out as of late.
At this point, the worst thing you can do is to try and “power through” the coming weeks and months by hiring and firing people and trying to will your baby on to the next level. Plenty of founders have tried this and the vast majority have failed to grow to expectation. They never learned that what got them here will not get them there.
You need to rethink your business from top to bottom — your leadership, your team, your strategy, your systems — and make adjustments to them in a deep way.
But here’s the kicker: the problem isn’t out there in your people and systems etc. The problem begins in here (I’m pointing at my own head.) You have to decide whether you have it in you to give up some control in your company by empowering others to run the business on a day-to-day basis. It doesn’t mean hiring a COO and asking her to “do everything I’m not doing.”
There’s quite a bit more to it. The good news is that the pathway through a healthy adolescence has already been charted by the team at ScalePassion. In the next blog, we’ll look at the characteristics of healthy business adolescence.
Your first step? Ask yourself whether you are ready to be less “in” the business and more “on it, laying track for your amazing team to make day to day decisions.
Sincerely,
Rob Craven, ScalePassion
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