You have a successful business, but new dynamics have presented you with the opportunity to create significant growth. You are excited about the potential and you start to make changes and hire additional employees. If you hire inexperienced talent, you find that the load on you, the chief decision maker, becomes overbearing and growth is diminished. If you hire experienced / skilled people, you start to feel out of control; you see decisions being made without you, purchases you did not approve, etc. You dive back into the details, request explanations, and reassert your position as chief of all things.
And in this process, founders become the roadblock to growth. They hire inexperienced people that cannot manage growth, or they hire experienced talent and give them responsibility without authority. They micro manage; inserting themselves, delaying actions, failing to take advantage of the skills hired, and in the process demoralizing their team. And while believing every step of the way that they are right, they themselves kill the ability to succeed.
The type of leadership and team required to succeed at one level of business can be significantly different than what is required to profitably scale to a much higher point. It is most certainly true that to take maximum advantage of new opportunity; old thinking must also be examined and modified. The number one killer of business opportunity is the inability of leadership to embrace the change needed in themselves.
Not knowing what you don’t know and stifling input and action from others that do know is the surest path to failure – driving many once-successful businesses under. Goals and actions created for growth become the sword by which a business actually meets its demise; all at the hands of a founder that would not change or get out of their own way. These same people believed they were right, and it was the new hires or market dynamics that caused their failure, when in fact the reason for their demise was looking at them in the mirror all along.
