I know a wonderful entrepreneur – he’s creative, energetic, instinctive and permanently fizzing with ideas. He spots opportunities other people miss. He knows everybody. He’ll have a conversation over breakfast and by lunchtime there’ll be a new project, a potential recruit or possibly an entirely new business.
It’s exhausting – but It’s also one of the reasons he built a successful company in the first place.
And therein lies the problem
As businesses grow, we often assume that the founder needs to grow with them; become more strategic, more structured, more process-driven and better at delegation. They need to be more comfortable with plans, budgets, management meetings and the disciplines of running a larger organisation – or do they?
It’s true, up to a point, but be careful. You may accidentally be trying to domesticate the very person whose entrepreneurial flair created the business.
What got you here might not get you there
Start-up businesses need entrepreneurs. They need people who are comfortable making decisions without enough information, changing direction quickly and doing whatever needs doing. Roles are fluid. Processes live in people’s heads. Opportunities are pursued because they feel right. It’s messy, but it works.
Then the business grows: there are 20, 30, 50 people instead of five. Customers expect consistency. Managers need authority. People need to know who is accountable for what. Processes can’t depend on the founder remembering how everything works.
The organisation needs to mature. The mistake is assuming that everybody in it has to mature in exactly the same way.
Perhaps the founder isn’t the problem
In the business I’m thinking of, the founder eventually handed leadership to the next generation – on paper.
In reality, he found letting go extraordinarily difficult. He continued coming up with new projects. He suggested people the business should recruit. He questioned decisions. He wandered back into areas that were no longer his responsibility – you can imagine how well that went down.
It would have been easy to conclude that he needed to change, to become more disciplined, learn the systems and adapt himself to the requirements of a scale-up business.
I’m not sure, though, that that would have been the right answer.
This man was a born entrepreneur. Why would we want to turn him into a conventional manager? Requiring him to become the person who maintains the machine might have removed exactly the talent, flair and personality that had enabled him to build it.
The business needed to change and his place within it needed to change. It’s a subtle but importantly different point
Design around people’s strengths
As an organisation grows, different kinds of leadership become important.
You need people who enjoy creating clarity, and people who can translate ideas into plans. People who build repeatable processes, manage performance and make sure the next exciting idea doesn’t derail today’s priorities.
Your entrepreneur may be capable of doing all those things, but are they the best person to do them?
More importantly, what happens to the entrepreneurial part of the business if you succeed in turning your founder into an administrator?
A better answer may be to design the organisation around complementary strengths. Give the entrepreneur somewhere useful to point that energy. New opportunities. Key relationships. Innovation. Business development. The things they are unusually good at.
Then create clear enough boundaries that every exciting new idea doesn’t immediately become everybody else’s new priority – that’s the tricky bit.
Letting go still matters
None of this lets founders off the hook – if you’ve handed over responsibility, you also have to hand over authority.
You can’t tell your new MD they’re running the business and then overturn their decisions. You can’t ask managers to take accountability and intervene whenever they do something differently from you. And you can’t build proper systems if everybody knows the founder can bypass them.
That isn’t preserving entrepreneurial flair. It’s preventing other people from doing their jobs.
So yes, founders often need to learn to step back. But perhaps they don’t need to become more corporate, more conventional or more managerial.
Perhaps everyone needs to recognise that the business has entered a different stage – and redesign roles accordingly.
Growing up without becoming boring
One of the challenges of moving from start-up to scale-up is introducing enough structure to make the organisation reliable without squeezing all the life out of it.
Clear roles don’t have to mean bureaucracy. Processes don’t have to kill initiative.
And organisational maturity doesn’t mean turning your entrepreneur into a sensible grown-up who spends Tuesday afternoons reviewing spreadsheets.
Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is let entrepreneurs remain entrepreneurs – just don’t let them run everything!