FOUNDER MISALIGNMENT
New entrepreneurs often struggle to find the best fit between what they personally bring to the table (strengths, weaknesses, needs, and hopes) and what the new business requires. The more passionate the founder, the more likely he or she will drift toward one of two extremes. At one end are founders who focus only on what they love to do, thereby neglecting other important areas of the business. In this scenario, the entrepreneur’s passion becomes an end in itself, rather than something that fuels a higher business purpose. He or she confuses positive emotion with progress, and “feeling good” becomes the moment-by-moment measure of success. At the other extreme are founders who try to do it all, taking on roles that don’t play to their strengths, spreading themselves too thin and refusing to let others take up the slack. In this case, new business owners become overextended and overwhelmed while the startup challenge grows in complexity, urgency, and scope.
I remember a conversation with Mark Williams in early 2006, not long after he raised his initial funding for his idea to create learning products for the Apple iPod. “I’m going way too fast,” he told me, “and I’m going nowhere at all.” Mark was working at breakneck speed with a couple of software developers to design and build Modality’s first product prototypes. The work was obsessive but clunky—one step forward, two steps back. He was frequently traveling to New York and Philadelphia to wrestle with publishers over licensing deals and to California to meet with key Apple representatives. His remaining time, like scarce butter on toast, was spread thinly across everything else in the business—forecasting a budget, planning an office move, designing a brand, and assembling the pieces of an e-commerce portal—all of this while being continually jerked around by the unexpected daily crises that define startup life. “At that time, you’re doing everything,” he remembers. “You’re not sleeping, of course. You’re working around the clock. You’re incredibly intense about meeting deadlines that are externally imposed. You’re running this race against all kinds of unknowns.”
Mark had reached a breakpoint that required him to expand his team and let go of key task areas. We talked about the importance of the founder’s role in building longer-term capacity and discussed how he could position himself over time to exploit his strengths and cover for his weaknesses. Looking back, he remembers how challenging it was to “make a pit stop,” as he called it, to bring on additional talent and offload some of the work. “There was such a great dialogue between the two or three people I was working with at the time,” he recalls. “It was very natural and nonverbal—unconscious in many ways. We had been together from day one, so bringing additional people into the fold was a struggle for many, many reasons.” But by doing this difficult work, Mark and his team began to generate much more MGP (his acronym for “making good progress”) on all essential fronts.
A related problem with founder alignment is seen in freedom - crazed entrepreneurs, who dive headlong into startup adventures with little awareness of how their founding role in the new venture will adversely impact their loved ones and their well-grooved lifestyle. At the startup’s inception, they envision a thriving venture and happy families all around. Then the realities of getting a business off the ground begin to sink in—the never completed to-do list, the mind constantly riveted to work-related challenges, and the fact that families and friends usually sacrifice more than expected. If expectations and reality are not aligned, new founders can be overwhelmed with unnecessary stress, fatigue, and guilt.
