Business Leadership and Management Tips for Scaling
My team instructed me to read the article, Great Leadership Is Essential To Growing Your Business, before penning this piece. I agreed with its conclusion that “developing best-in-class leadership is essential for the success of your business. It sets clear goals and direction, fosters a positive work culture, encourages innovation and creativity, and increases the productivity and efficiency of your team.” I also appreciated some of the statistics it mentioned, such as, “One poor leader costs a company more than $126,000 over the course of a year.” However, I felt underwhelmed and thought about how poor business leadership would cost any clients at Marion Street Capital (“MSC”) at least $10MM in value.
Forget Everything You’ve Learned About Business Leadership from Working for the Corporation that Grows at the Pace of GDP
MSC services many companies aspiring to $1B+ valuations. The leader at many of these companies needs to build teams to find early angel capital, create and iterate around products that achieve product-market fit, identify Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs), iterate around efficient Go-To-Market (“G2M”) strategies, source institutional venture capital, hire and train within Product and Customer Success and Sales / Marketing and Finance / Accounting functions, and report out in real-time to shareholders. The leader must do this within budget and within 3-7 years. Poor leadership likely means that the subject company becomes worthless. A great leader likely achieves great wealth alongside an excellent reputation that paves the way for future success. In Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking, author Shane Snow argues that the best predictor of whether a startup will succeed is the prior success of its Founder.
What defines “great leadership?” Webster’s lists three definitions for “leadership,” the second of which reads, “Capacity to lead: This highlights the ability or skill to guide, direct, or influence people.” This aligns with the conclusion from the Forbes article I referenced above. For leaders of many of MSC’s clients, I would add the qualifier “… while under constant duress.”
How does great leadership for business growth succeed? The leader puts the right people in the right roles and tasks each of those people with ONE mission-critical objective at a time. Repeat Founders often cultivate teams with whom they’ve previously worked. First-time Founders must determine which roles to fill and where to find those people. Friends, family, and former corporate colleagues often make poor choices. Founders need SEAL teams of experts in their particular domains of expertise.
MSC can “rent” to Founders our experts in capital sourcing, Sales & Marketing, Finance & Accounting, and Data Science until Founders can find and afford permanent full-time resources in these functions. Full-time resources need to embrace a lean startup culture where they must devise creative solutions to time-sensitive challenges with scarce resources. Professional experience working only at large corporations growing around the pace of domestic GDP rarely fits this bill. A great leader needs tireless and ambitious people who want to help an innovative growth company achieve greatness.
I hope it’s now apparent why the best predictor of a startup’s growth may be the Founder’s prior business leadership success. The odds are long that any one startup achieves greatness. Still, previously successful Founders learned the “cheat codes” and how to become great leaders capable of generating millions, if not billions, of enterprise value. MSC learned alongside many great Founders, having worked with 85 innovative growth companies over the past 5+ years.
We know that scaling your business requires more than great ideas—it demands exceptional leadership and operational excellence. Marion Street Capital’s RevOps services are designed to help you build a scalable, efficient infrastructure that supports growth and maximizes enterprise value.
Ready to scale smarter with experts with a proven track record of success? Explore our RevOps Services and FinOps Services and learn how MSC can partner with you to drive measurable business leadership success.