Strategy Determines Team

Building the system is different than thriving within a system.

It didn’t take long at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center to notice a recurring pattern: people (smart, successful people!) consistently underestimated the difference between working in a business-building vs. business-running environment. Time and time again, successful corporate performers would jump to entrepreneurial or high-growth teams and fail. And everyone would act surprised, again.

I usually heard common symptoms along the way, from both the entrepreneurial leaders who hired the corporate leader and the corporate leader themselves.

From the entrepreneurial leaders:

• They aren’t producing a fraction of the results they seemed to in Corporate America.

• They seem to complain again and again about having to do lower-level tasks that they didn’t do before – but I told them we were a lean team, what did they expect?

• They seem to say that a lot of topics aren’t within their expertise, but we can’t afford experts in those areas, I need them to work more broadly outside of their perception of their role.

• They are so slow!

  
  

From the corporate leader:

• I’m frustrated that I’m not getting to make the difference I’m used to making.

• This company doesn’t have a fraction of the basic business functions figured out compared to what mature looks like. I knew this would be different, but this different? I'm making my own copies. I don’t understand how they’ve successfully gotten this far.

• Am I the only one who values expertise? They’re asking me questions that someone else more qualified should answer.

• I don’t have what I need to go fast!

  
  

There’s a ton of permutations, but again and again the story is the same. Everyone is well-intended, talented and hard-working. But everyone drastically underestimates the size of the gap between business-building and business-running.

Building a rapidly growing business emphasizes imagination, vision, working with ambiguity, and accepting imperfection as an iteration that moves the business forward. People have to wear more hats, decide what needs to be done, and thrive in an ambiguous, iterative environment.

Running a business that has been successfully built emphasizes discipline, clarity, structure and process. People have more narrowly defined roles, know what needs to be done and how to do it, and thrive at doing it over and over really well.

These are not the same people. The strategy of the business (build vs run) determines the type of team member you need.

I know the pressure on everyone is real. This challenge thrives in all environments, from early stage ventures to lower middle market private equity.

For the employer, there’s always pressure to hire, to resource the team, to attract a big name or logo, to feel the validation of getting someone who is a known winner. I’m sure these candidates interview great (within the standard interview process) and are genuinely amazing performers in their world. Still, employers, take a moment. Pause. Assess. Ask, how will what this person actually did on a day-to-day basis translate to what they will do here? How are the skillsets and demands different? How explicitly have I explained our situation, needs, and expectations?

For the potential hire, there’s plenty of pressure as well. There’s the desire to seize on a tremendous opportunity (likely sold to you very well), to work with some people who are passionate about their work, and to go make your mark building something. But odds are that in your case, those upsides are exaggerated and the downsides are minimized. Before taking the jump, do everything you can to get the most possible clarity on what the work is that you will actually do. Throw every assumption about what the work is, the resources it has, and how much everyone knows, out the window. Take a zero-based budgeting approach – assume the company uses paper and pencil for everything and doesn’t know what your functional area is. Then investigate, ask questions (respectfully) and build up your view of the company from there.

Afterwards, if both parties still want to join forces, then by all means go for it. These marriages, when they work, can be some of the best.