Long before I ever started coaching clients, I observed a phenomenon in my own family business that was a surprising inhibitor to the company’s growth. You would never think that the creative, energetic drive that a small business entrepreneur brings to a new enterprise could hinder its growth, but it can—and it happens more often than you think.
Start Up to Success
Starting a new business is exciting. Many entrepreneurs and business founders describe the feeling as they make their ideas turn into reality like that experienced by adrenaline junkies.
If you’re a founder, you know how necessary that energy is to starting a successful business. Over time, however, a business needs to develop strong, solid systems to help you determine and develop your business’ capacity to deliver excellent services or products consistently. The point of a system is that it makes sure things repeat. A healthy, growing business needs to know its strengths, and be able to use them.
Want to See Where Your Business Stands?
For long-term success, it is vital that business owners have an accurate picture of where they are today.
Sometimes, however, what’s healthy for the business isn’t always compatible with how the founder operates. An entrepreneur can frequently miss that energy and creativity of the early days because operating by a system is the opposite of how an entrepreneur naturally approaches things. If they aren’t conscious of that, and don’t understand that establishing systems can be a healthy thing, the business can suffer.
Don’t Let Your Creativity Inhibit The Business
Founders who don’t realize the importance of establishing systems sometimes continue to approach their business with that entrepreneurial energy just to satisfy their need to feel the adrenaline that comes from change. I’ve seen founders shake things up for no reason other than because they’re bored.
One of the best things founders can do is to determine their strengths, skills and needs, and to lay these on a plot line of traditional business growth. This helps you be aware of where your personal skills and desires may be at cross-purposes with those of the business.
This is part of the challenge of the Founder’s Cap. I don’t usually see this tendency as a primary issue in most businesses but it is definitely something every founder needs to keep in mind as your company moves from being a start-up to an established and thriving business.
A great founder knows how to take off the Founder’s Cap and to use his or her creativity and energy in new ways.
