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1. Make building an A-team your first priority
Most entrepreneurs fail to make the transition from entrepreneur to enterprise leader. Once you have product/market fit and a business worth growing, your priorities as CEO shift.
You can no longer be primarily focused on sales, innovation and production.
Instead, your top priority becomes building the team and organisation that will in turn drive sales, innovation and production and manage all other elements of the day-to-day operations.
If you, as the owner, don’t make the transition from hands-on doer to enterprise builder and leader, you’ll get stuck fighting fires all day.
If you focus on building an A-team and an organisation that performs, the organisation will do the rest.
2. Clearly answer the simple question: ?“What do you do?”
You need a simple ‘elevator pitch’ on your business’ unique contribution to the world.
It tells customers why they need you, in the language of their needs.
Simplicity and clarity take time.
‘We help companies save money and time on waste disposal’. ‘We create cheap dream holidays.’ Build your entire business around this statement.
3. If you’re not an enterprise leader/scale-up CEO, get one
Take a role in the business that fits your strengths.
If your business is going to grow (say, to 10+ white collar staff) and you have never had a senior management role in a well-run business, it is most likely you do not have the skills, experience, knowledge, or desire to run your company well.
I say ‘desire’ because while every entrepreneur wants to run their business well, that is until they know what that entails!
Most – if they only knew what lay ahead – would choose to do what they are good at (e.g. head up marketing, or sales, or product development) and just hire a great CEO.
In my experience, roughly 20% of really great entrepreneurs have the aptitude to make really great scale-up CEOs.
Becoming an enterprise leader is a 10-year journey that entrepreneurs need to compress into two to three years while spending 80 hours a week running a business. It’s painful.
Fewer than half of the really high-potential entrepreneurs who choose to stay in charge manage to grow their skills and knowledge fast enough to remain a good CEO in practice.
Most become the main bottleneck to their own company’s growth and performance, and the achievement of their own dreams. And they don’t realise it.
To avoid this, either: Make re-inventing yourself into an entreprise leader one of your top three business priorities (and do not underestimate how hard this is in the midst of the entrepreneurial vortex), or...
Jason Goldberg is the executive director of Edge Growth, which was established in 2007 to help corporate customers across industries integrate their enterprise and supplier development programmes into their procurement and supply chain strategies. He is also chief investment officer of the Vumela enterprise development fund, a social venture capital fund Edge manages in partnership with FNB.
This is an excerpt from an article that originally appeared in the 3 December 2015 edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.
