Is It Time to Fire the Founder?

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Nick Herinckx: The best definition I've heard of early-stage owner, CEO, we might call 'em entrepreneurs. The goal at the early stage is to take a product to market to see if people will buy it, and that's it. It's not even to build a huge team or become the best manager, it's just that, and that's at the very early stage.

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Subscribe now to never miss an episode. For more resources, visit great talent podcast.com where you can download this episode's free worksheet designed to help you apply today's insight to your business. And now here's your host, Rob Levin.

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Nick Herinckx: Thanks. I wish I could say it was all masterminded, but it wasn't really. I just kind of started to follow the things that seemed fun, and it kinda led me here. Yeah.

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It's not even to build a huge team or become the best manager. It's just that, and that's at the very early stage. That's zero to one, but then, I usually see it change a little bit more into things like, okay, how do we scale? Business model starts to matter, like structure starts to matter. Being a good manager now starts to matter more and more when we're trying to scale.

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Nick Herinckx: Okay. So a lot of times, the challenges that they think, and I think they're correct, I don't think there's a lot of challenges that they're just wrong about. Right. A lot of times they're seeing challenges like, how do we get more predictable success in this company, I hear that some version of that a lot.

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And, I also hear a lot of times there's challenges, it's almost easier to talk about what they think is going well. I will say, like, this list could keep going; a lot of the challenges include the leadership team that comes up all the time, the senior leadership team, do I have the right people on the team?

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Sometimes they're maybe not even involved, a few layers down to know really what's happening, and then we're really at risk of focusing on the wrong things; we tend to think things are a people problem when often they're a process problem. That's one of the biggest mistakes I find, a perfect example of that is when we dig into scaling pains, when people are going through whitewater, and things are breaking.

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I'll do 'em one at a time. You said something that really got my interest, which is, are they, meaning the leadership team, let's go back from managers up to the leadership team. Sure. Come back to the managers.

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And so I know that I have a senior leader on my team that's good when a few things are true: one, they push me, they're bringing me ideas, they're challenging me. They might even be coming to me saying, Hey, what's your plan for AI? I've got some ideas. What are you doing? I was like, oh wow, they're pushing me, I've got a real leader on my team reporting to me when that starts to happen. Right.

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Rob Levin: Yeah. Just a note to the audience, that experience that Nick is referring to is heaven. You haven't died, but it just feels glorious, right?

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And that's, that founder mode is being a little bit more directive, I think is how people like really took that. And not being afraid to dive into the details and call out when things are not good enough; we get what we tolerate, so tolerate less, I think, as part of what was in founder mode, and so, first of all, I already love it just because it's not the standard advice. Right.

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I think where I really took from it, and my take on it, is that there's a lot of nuance, of course, if you put too much nuance in there, I thought it would dilute the message; so I think he did the right thing by not having a lot of nuance in the message. In practice though, I think what it means is that as founders and as CEOs, even if we're not the founder and we're the CEO, we have unique abilities, we all do, everybody has unique abilities and a unique ability is something that is almost effortless for me, that is hard for other people and I love it. Yeah, I love it. It's fun.

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Rob Levin: Yeah, I went through this personally, where a member of our leader, I was very, you know, I'm the visionary, and of course you know my partner 'cause you coached Andrew during one of our biggest growth periods. I'm the visionary, and I want to be in the background. I wanna let Andrew do his thing, and I wanna let the leadership do their thing. And then we were at a meeting, I think it was a semi-annual retreat, and one of them said, Rob, you have this amazing experience and this unique ability, we want to hear from you, and that was a little bit of a light bulb moment for me. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if that's the same thing as founder mode, but it was like, Hey, I have these abilities, maybe it's a gift in certain things.

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I think what can happen sometimes, and I think where founder mode can go wrong, is do with the opposite of what you did, which is to say, oh, I'm good in in these areas, that means I have to happen to every area in the company, and they start being really controlling in the company and not hiring the talent they need and delegating to them in the areas that are not their unique ability.

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Rob Levin: Nick, you talked a little bit about a mistake, and you were really talking about people getting promoted into the manager level without the training, so you have somebody who's good at something that they do, a lot of times we naturally assume, or, and a lot of business owners assume, oh, well they're gonna make a great manager. You know, and you see this a lot, particularly with sales, right? You take a great sales person, make them a sales manager, and nothing is going well.

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By the way, now manage people and do your old job, right? Right. And so what happens, the people we're promoting want to do a good job, they want to grow and develop, but they're not receiving any training and development. So what used to work, what got me here is gonna get me there. And so what happens is a lot of times managers will default to smoothing the waters on their team and making everybody happy rather than driving performance, because driving performance, amongst others, forces us into our personal growth edges around things like conflict and hard conversations, managing up, dealing with other people not liking us sometimes. Yeah. That is, when we move people into management, it is not professional growth just, it is also personal growth, and we drop the ball on giving our managers the personal growth. So what should you do about it?

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I haven't seen internal programs, quite frankly, be any good unless the company is nearing, like, at least Fortune 1000, if not Fortune 500, just to be frank. So what I tend to see going best is to outsource their growth and development, but it needs to also involve your current leader so everyone's speaking the same language.

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Nick Herinckx: It's different. The process can look similar, the structure can be different, and I do view those as separate journeys. So, going from individual contributor to just high-impact, highly effective manager, that is its own journey; it is a different one, when we start talking about go from high-impact manager to a leader, how are those different?

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Rob Levin: Do you recommend to owners that when they're promoting people who are great managers into leadership, should they be investing in external training for those people as well? Or is that a little different? Is that more now the owner kind of mentoring and coaching him or herself?

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Rob Levin: It makes sense. Nick, so many companies, including all of our clients, are working in a remote or hybrid environment. What's the message to business owners for themselves, for their leadership, and for their managers to be really effective in some sort of remote/hybrid environment?

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So, here's kind of what I think on the remote side of things. Clear and open, and honest communication is more important than ever because we don't get the nonverbal as well. If I'm not in person with you, I can't pick up the energy the same, if the team's not together, we're not feeding off each other in the same way, and so, I think the skillset for managers and leaders, and us CEOs, and owners is it's on us to actually be much more clear and communicative with our team, to maybe to the point of even feeling like we're repeating ourselves.

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And I think those are different things. I think that's one of the number one things that's really important. I do think in-person time matters, the data proves that out.

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Nick Herinckx: Yeah. And I think what WorkBetterNow does a really good job of, it's interviewing and vetting process. And so this is where I see sometimes if I'm talking to a CEO, and they're having an issue somewhere with people struggling with the remote aspect of their job, maybe they feel like they're less efficient, they are actually less efficient, less responsive.

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Rob Levin: That's something that our recruiting department has done an exceptional job of is. Oh yeah. Being able to identify whether somebody will do well in a remote environment or not.

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I think the important thing to remember is every buyer is different, every deal is different, and the terms are different. And so, don't get too caught up in like, what some m and a person says you need to do; every buyer, I've seen all over the board in terms of founder involvement or not, or team or whatever.

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What I like about that is you're also secretly connecting with your own personal values, and you're much more likely to set it up in a way that will attract the kind of acquirer who you will want to buy your company later and who will want it. It's only about fit, exiting a company, you don't sell a company, it's a fit. And so being authentic and building a company to be authentic to you, if you like being involved in product and that's authentic and you love it, set it up that way. You're probably gonna want an acquirer that's gonna be involved in the product.

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Nick Herinckx: So we'll get stuck in our head, and all we need, and this process and this leadership team and this incentive structure and this, we need to position the company this way, and all that stuff. And then you get towards the end, and you start to realize, I actually really hate these private equity people that are wanting to buy my company.

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Those are the two best ways to get ahold of me. And any of your listeners, feel free to reach out. I love meeting other business owners, even if it's just to network and have some good conversation.