The journey from startup to established business is often compared to raising a child: what works in the early stages may become counterproductive as the company matures. For founders navigating their company’s growth from inception to £1-5 million turnover, understanding how their role must evolve is crucial for both personal satisfaction and business success.
When a Founder Should Stop Wearing All The Hats
In the early stages of a business, founders typically find themselves doing everything—from strategic planning to answering customer emails. This ‘jack of all trades’ phase is necessary and can be exhilarating at the start. But more often than not this stage lasts for longer than founders would like. When a company doesn’t start making its millions and running as smoothly as planned in the early days, this exhilarating diverse role can become cumbersome.
What makes this more tricky, is that the company has always run the way the founder wants it to. Based on the founder‘s decisions and choices. The confidence every founder has, and needs, to be successful, turns into a weakness. Inevitably the self-confidence of a founder’s own decisions becomes at odds with the challenges holding the company back.
And who can blame them? They got the company to where it was, its their baby, they made it successful to this point and their desire to overcome challenges will drive them to continue to face each challenge head on.
But how does a founder know when to stop? When does their drive to personally solve problems head on become a hindrance?
From my experience working with scale-ups, some of the telltale signs include financial stagnation and staff movements.
The classic is the 1 million barrier. Around about this time, a company needs a different approach, and for many early day founders, there is a drive to personally breach this barrier. This doesn’t always happen at 1 million, it could be less, or much more, depending on the structure of the company and the scalability of the product. However, it is at around this point when many companies reach a plateau.
If as a founder, you have been struggling to breach a financial plateau or your staff are feeling unsettled, it’s time to take a long hard look at what your role in the company should be, and what the company needs.
‘The Art of Delegation: Understanding When to Let Go
The transition from doing everything to delegating effectively is perhaps the most crucial skill a founder must develop. This process typically begins when turnover reaches £500,000 to £1 million, a point where the complexity of operations demands specialist attention.
Successful delegation requires founders to:
Honestly assess your strengths and weaknesses: Being a founder requires a very unique and special set of skills. Not many people can start a company and grow it to the point where an article such as this becomes relevant. And there’s no shame in recognising, as a founder, that you might not be the best person to continue making all of the decisions, or getting involved in, for example, all of the sales meetings.
The easiest way to approach this is from the company perspective, assess where the company is doing well and where it is doing badly. Then look at where you have been involved. Identify where you are involved in things going well, are they going as well as you want them to? And how can they continue to go well if and when you step back? The more tricky item to identify is where you have been involved in things that aren’t going well, and ask yourself if you the right person to continue wearing this hat?
Identify key areas where specialist expertise would benefit the company: As a follow through from the above assessment, areas where you need external expertise will be highlighted. You might for example know a bit about sales and marketing, but what range of experience do you have outside of your current company? Are you making it up as you go along? Could the outcomes be more lucrative, or the actions involved be less arduous?
One way to test how much you know about an aspect of your company, is whether you can identify what the pain points are. Where are things going wrong? How can you fix them? If you don’t know, you have a skills gap. And no one in your team knows, your company has a skills gap. In this scenario, why not ask an expert to take a look?
Develop robust systems and processes that allow others to take over tasks:
If as a founder, you are still at the stage where client information is in your brain, and you couldn’t possibly delegate client and prospect communication, you need to change your approach for the sake of expansion. You can not carry all sales activity for the company and enable growth at the same time. This isn’t just relevant for sales, it’s relevant for all aspects of your business. You need to build robust systems and processes to grow.
You need a robust pipeline for both sales and marketing. So robust that if you had to step back for a while, it could continue without you.
In the context of sales and marketing this means an effective CRM, that feeds into an organised sales pipeline with clear stages for prospects. You need to know what is feeding into your pipeline and probability of sales completion. This will provide you with two essential pieces of information (1) where you are losing prospects and (2) a more accurate sales forecast. If you can’t forecast effectively, your company can’t plan ahead and this can cause other problems, such as hinder product development, or worse, leave a blind spot in foreseeing a cash flow problem.
Trust your team to make decisions and learn from mistakes: Your team are smart. If they weren’t, you probably wouldn’t have recruited them. Hopefully, you’ve managed to recruit people that have skills and expertise that you don’t. Your job as a founder is to enable them to be the best they can be. If you don’t give them the opportunity to excel in decision making and the delivery of their responsibilities, they will end up holding you back rather than driving you forward.
If you are finding that you want to be in every meeting, that you want to be involved in the details of every decision, you probably need to better enable your teams. You can work with them and guide them based on your experience of the company, but trust that they have skills you don’t. Then when you are confident, let them take the lead in their role.
The Comfortable Plateau: Freedom to Choose
When a company achieves stable growth and healthy profits, founders face an interesting choice: they can remain deeply involved, step back into a strategic role, or even transition out entirely. This decision should be based on personal goals, company needs, and honest self-assessment.
The freedom to choose only comes once a company is in a stable position. Until then, the founder has to work hard on what is best for the company. And in some cases this means changing the role of the founder to whatever role is best suited for the company, while letting others take the lead in areas where the company is struggling.
When Founders Become the Limitation
Perhaps the most challenging scenario is when a founder’s skills, which were perfectly suited for the startup phase, no longer match what the company needs to grow further. This mismatch often becomes apparent when the company’s growth plateaus despite market opportunities or when team members consistently raise concerns about outdated processes or missed opportunities.
As a founder, you can’t expect anyone to tell you when this is happening, you need to be the one to identify it. As I mentioned earlier in this article, what you have achieved so far takes significant and rare skill. If you want to continue to be an amazing and successful founder, you might have to delegate, you might have to step away from certain parts of the business, that‘s a sign of success, not a sign of weakness.
The happiest founders I‘ve worked with, are the ones that have found great people to take over aspects of the business that were previously stressful for them.
Looking Forward: The Founder’s Evolution
The most successful founders are those who view their role as evolving rather than diminishing. Whether choosing to stay involved, step back, or move on entirely, the key is to make decisions based on what’s best for both the company and themselves.
As companies grow beyond the startup phase, founders must transition from being the person who does everything to the person who ensures everything gets done—whether by them or, more likely, by others. This evolution requires emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and the courage to make difficult decisions.
The most important skill a founder can develop is the ability to recognise and adapt to the changing needs of their growing business.
Growth Marketing Specialist
Commercial Growth Specialist
