I got some really fun questions after the video on the stages of growth, most of them about stage three: founders asking how they actually get organized. This is one of my favorite things in the world to talk about and help founders with. So here’s a quick version of what the playbook for the “get organized” stage looks like.
Your first priority shifts
In the stage before this one, launching the venture, your hyper-focused goal is the product. Can you build something that grows the business on its own because of how good it is?
In getting organized, your first priority becomes cohesion.
Pat Lencioni says it best: “If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”
Cohesion looks like a high-trust executive team that fights about things really well. Good debate, good conflict, good decisions, and people holding each other accountable. If you use EOS language, it’s the visionary and integrator humming. As a founder you often end up playing visionary. Not always. But if you do, how do you become the best visionary possible, then hire and build real trust with an integrator? That relationship is one of the main things that holds businesses back from getting organized.
Cohesion is also alignment on the most important questions your team needs answered to be successful. Alignment on values. Alignment on priorities. Alignment on how you define success and what really matters right now. Alignment on why this company exists versus other companies and what makes it different, so people can row in the same direction. That’s the biggest competitive advantage in any market.
Nothing else matters if the team isn’t cohesive. You can’t be successful.
Second priority: consistency
When you’re launching the venture, consistency isn’t that important, because you don’t know if it’s working yet. You shouldn’t be highly consistent about how you do things until you know they’re the right things. It’s only when stuff starts to stick to the wall that you want to systematize what sticks.
That looks like consistency around your funnel. Are you putting out good content that grows awareness? Are you doing what’s needed to increase consideration and conversion? Are you doing what’s needed to retain customers? Is your funnel anemic anywhere? Are you consistently running the tactics that help it grow quarter over quarter?
It looks like consistent accountability. Clarity comes less from the founder standing up in a meeting with a mic saying “here’s what matters and here’s why we exist,” and more from systems where people, individually and as a team, are held accountable. Are we implementing what we decide? Are we having good meetings? Are we hitting the KPIs we set? If not, we talk about why, consistently.
And huge inside consistency: consistently good meetings. Meetings become the playground where founders and companies operate at this stage, and they’re often the worst part of the business. After we get clarity on what a business is and its playbook for growth, meetings are usually the first place we start with clients. Are they talking about the right things in the right ways? Are they making clear decisions that get communicated, implemented, and held to?
Third priority: make it compelling
Compelling leadership first. Not just creating clarity, but leading in a way where people aren’t forced to follow you. They want to. That usually looks different than founders think. It’s not saying more things. It’s asking better questions. Taking more time to listen. Being more consistent and available. And it’s also saying, “Here’s why this exists, and we’re not going to do that thing that seems really good, because it isn’t what this company is about.” The more you do that, the more you build a compelling culture around your leadership and inside the organization, and that becomes fuel on the fire for everything the company does.
Then compelling externally: the words you use to market and sell, the creative you use to market and sell. After you’ve launched and started to see success, you need to build an identity around your products and put equity into the brand, so success isn’t based on your charisma as a founder or on being early to market. Because now you’re probably getting competition, and “first” is less of a reason to buy yours over someone else’s.
So: cohesion, consistency, compelling. Make sure the team is cohesive. Value consistency and help people be consistent. Make sure everything you do, internal and external, keeps getting more compelling.
The part nobody talks about
It’s usually not the stuff that keeps people from getting organized. It’s that this is a hard shift for founders to go through.
I’ve been through it more than once. You start something and build it, and it kind of becomes your identity. You like the work of launching. You like coming up with new ideas and throwing things against the wall. You can see opportunities other people can’t, and some of them are legitimately game-changing. You’re good at rallying people task-force style. You’re good at pitching, so people buy in on your charisma.
Part of getting organized, and often the thing holding it back, is that you have to reimagine your role. If you want this thing to grow up, get out of the house, get a job, mature, and become what you know it can be, you have to see your role differently.
And it’s scary. You have to stop doing things you like doing. You have to hand off things you care about and watch them not get done as well as you would do them. The business starts to take on an identity separate from you, because other people put their fingerprints on it. That’s a hard, emotional thing I don’t think we talk about enough. It takes time. It’s a process.
So if you’re a founder with a product that’s working and you know the next step is to organize and scale it: really commit. Even get some coaching around how you shift your mindset and your definition of success, away from launching this cool business and toward inviting other people to put their fingerprints on it. The goal becomes getting other people, other systems, other sources of energy than you to contribute as close to 100% of their potential every day as possible, so the business grows on other people’s time and talent, not just yours.
The byproduct is a more successful business. You get to redo your role once things are organized and put yourself back in your sweet spot, as a visionary with an integrator and an executive team humming. And you stop waking up every day knowing the business will live or die on what you contribute that day. That pressure is so stressful. It’s time, if you can, to get organized so that isn’t your experience of going to work.
Founding, scaling, and organizing a business is really hard, and also really fun. I hope this helps.
— Craig