Companies are built by founders, but after a certain point, the founder needs to step back from parts of the business and hand the responsibilities over to an experienced executive. This can be difficult for the founder because they have to give up control, but it also can be difficult for the people who work for the founder.
In “How Agency Owners Get Unstuck,” a wide-ranging conversation between Isabelle Papoulias, Head of Operations and Marketing at EliteOps, and Matt Cornelison, Founder of Fungi Media, they discussed some of the factors that can constrain growth and make it difficult for a company to scale.
Papoulias has spent much of her career in big corporations, but for the last 10 years has been working with startups in marketing and operations leadership roles. Her insights were excellent and I wanted to share some of them with you.
What is the number of employees after which the founder needs to focus on stepping back? And why can this stress the company? Papoulias says:
But when you get to a certain stage, and I’m going to say from personal experience, you get to about 50 people and you’ve hired enough smart people, enough senior people, how do you start to transition a lot of the work, and trust those senior people to take on areas that maybe aren’t in your strength areas or in your passion areas?
I think what happens is it’s a very hard mindset shift to make for the founder because they created this thing, it’s your baby, and now you have to hand it over to someone else. Releasing that ownership is hard, but it’s also hard for the rest of the company. And that’s what’s interesting. I’ve noticed there’s a habit, and I don’t know if it’s true here, but it’s like we need Matt for this, we need Matt for that because yeah, we may have hired more people that can do it, but we’re not used to it – it’s not a muscle that we’ve practiced and so we automatically default to you.
This makes a lot of sense. In my experience, there is a certain revenue number or number of employees where the ad hoc processes and ingrained communication channels need to change. It’s not easy, but it is necessary. It is a case of what got us here will not get us where we want to go, especially if the company is looking to scale quickly.
Papoulias suggests that founders take an honest inventory of what they are strong in and what they are passionate about and delegate the functions in the business that are not their strength or passion.
Papoulias put on her operations leader hat and coached Cornelison on what he might need to do in his business. If some processes need to be documented, is he the right person to do that, or should someone else be in charge of that? Basically, is he the right person within the company, even though he is the founder.
I hope you enjoy this conversation. It definitely got me thinking.
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
