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This week I would like to share some of the work I’ve been doing with interviewing small businesses, founder-led businesses, so these are businesses sort of with three or more people, they got a product in market. They might be earning money and collecting revenue, and they’ve got a bit of a culture in place and some basic processes in place but for them a lot of the work they do is manual. It’s about covering multiple bases and having fingers in many parts.
If that’s you, you know what I’m talking about and I’ve interviewed 15 of those sort of types of businesses in the last 2 months. I’m interested in doing my work with those types of businesses.
I want to do today’s talk about the nature of aligning those founders, what alignment looks like in those businesses. So what I see is that overtime what can happen is because you’ve got your finger in so many tiers, momentum slows. Almost your spirit or your desire, your reason for being in that business asked us to get undermined. Let me just share with you how I think about this problem and what to do about it.
The Challenge
I kind of call it alignment but it’s actually a broader problem than that. Think about the fact that in a founder business, it’s personal. It’s about profit, but fundamentally it’s actually both of those people make up a massive segment of that small business. Both of these people have ambitions, both of these people have a skillset, and both of these people have opinions about the future, not to mention their own unique life situations. Sounds familiar with the bigger businesses with a leadership team as well, it’s much the same.
When we come to the profit side, these founders often have different views over what success looks like, where to invest capital, whether to seek outside funding. And that creates an environment where there’s a lot of opportunity for both alignment and also misalignment. Now, if you don’t want too much alignment, you don’t want to be too similar, otherwise you don’t get that amazing thing that happens when you test one another and give feedback to one another.
So tension could be good at some level but when it comes to much, what happens is the business over time can sort of ramp up, and then what happens is it feels like the momentum slows. So when the momentum slows a couple of things are happening. First of all, there’s no risk being taken.
Co-Founder Alignment
Think about the beginning of a business because it was all risk, you got to put in money, you’re taking a punt, you’re making assumptions, you’re operating with little information and testing and learning. And then you get to this certain point of using your only money and the momentum starts to slow. No risk has been taken.
And also that your operational demand, so you think about your fulfilment your ability to deliver to your customers. You’re starting to delegate and systematise which is awesome. But that just kind of feels boring, it feels like the problems you need to solve, that needs to be solved, but for some of the founders it’s not particularly inspiring.
Here is the challenge, if you’ve reached this critical point or a point like that, you need help. You can’t do it alone. You can’t navigate through this alone. Let me show you what I did with a client of mine who was at this point. And that’s where the passion goes out of business and it’s not clearly on your path forward.
What we did was we basically look at the two founders:
We list out how they view the business now and what they see in terms of what they want in their own future and also the future for the business. And we do it for both, and then the third phase we did was we worked out where is the shared path forward.
When they are able to discover that yes they are different and they want different things, but amongst them is an agreement on two or three things. What I did was to see that to move forward both had got to compromise, something gotta give things and lose things.
And in the process where it was released is whatever they let go of is their assumptions about one another, and so they are able to see the truth, and what increased was that energy and passion to make it happen. I’ve seen all the things, everything in context the truth of what it was.
Summary
So here’s the thing, we know your bunch of work on alignment in founder teams and how they operate and some of the dynamics. If you’re chasing something and the momentum slows, you’re not taking risks and you’re really unclear what your path forward is, you need help.
And here’s what I recommend, you need to sit down and understand what you want now and into the future and see whether the shared path forward. Is it really hard to do it by yourself?
The only thing I would recommend is worth just having a little chat to see what would work in your situation and how to create a particular environment where the conversation will work for you.
Leave me a comment or Get in Touch
I hope that’s been useful. I’ll be doing more of these in the next couple weeks, sharing things I discovered. And if you have any questions leave them down below, any comments around how to utilise this, I love comments.
Otherwise, stay safe and sane, talk to you soon.
When you are ready…. let’s work out if we are a good fit.
If you’re a growing mid size business and you want help to get more focus in your leadership team, scaling with people and systems or leading inside and outside your organisation, then click the link below. You’ll be taken to a super short survey and then asked to book in an initial 20-minute call where we can work out if what you need is aligned with the results I can deliver.
I look forward to the chat…
