Letting go of the Vine

I have had the pleasure of working in startups for over 16 years. And part of that journey is getting to work side by side with several founders and visionary leaders. One of the patterns I have observed is that founders are often misunderstood. This happens especially when the company has found market fit and is now trying to grow a company from that first handful of overworked, passionate individuals to a more sustainable business model.

A couple of things are happening at the same time:

1. Team sizes grow, and the number of communication pathways increases, increasing the difficulty in keeping everyone on the same page.
2. Ownership of work needs to be more equally distributed amongst roles as the workload increases to justify the headcount growth.

These two things alone create many challenges for a small startup as it scales up, especially for the founders. Oftentimes, founders wear all the hats, with some exceptions where they have co-founders or have brought in contract help to fill some gaps. They have a lot of pride in getting the company to a place where they meet a market need and provide value to customers. As they should, this is a monumental achievement and probably far more difficult and painful than they had imagined. They know how things are done because they’ve had to do it and how it should be done because it worked; otherwise, they wouldn’t be here.

However, something changed along the way. The things that used to work, especially around communication, aren’t working anymore. The people hired to take over certain job responsibilities aren’t doing it the same way the founder did. New processes are being introduced that seem to overcomplicate value delivery to customers. Some customer requests are being ignored, some customers aren’t renewing, and new pricing models are being created that force some initial customers out who helped get the company founded.

This is all happening very quickly; things feel like they’re spinning out of control, and the knee-jerk reaction for a founder is to get more involved. After all, who would know how to right the ship better than the person who founded the company?

This is the trap. Companies are adaptive complex systems, and believing that what gets them here will get them there isn’t an accurate belief. Things must adapt and change as the company does, which is especially important for leadership models.

In the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), this is called letting go of the vine. It’s giving the founder the freedom to let go and trust the team they’ve hired to bring the company to the next level. This is critical because at least two things happen when a founder dives into the day-to-day and tries to exert more control and influence:

1. They end up micro-managing, demotivating, and creating followers, not leaders. They don’t empower the team and take away autonomy, which means they’ll only create more work for themselves and slow the company down exponentially.
2. The vision and mission of the company are lost. The founder can no longer work ON the business because they are consumed by working in the business. This means the ability to know which direction the company is rowing in begins to be foggy, and it’s easy to get off course.

EOS doesn’t just say take a leap of faith, but it provides the tools required to make it possible for a founder and visionary leader to let go of the vine. This allows them to realize they have a particularly unique gift that needs to be utilized: steering the ship, setting a course, and not paddling the boat.

The best thing a founder can do in this situation is to find an integrator whose skills reflect running the day-to-day, ensuring the right people are in the right seats, allowing the ship to follow the course, and ensuring it meets the goals to reach its destination.

If you’re new to EOS, have been doing it for a while, or have never heard of it. A fractional Integrator can give your company much value in helping empower founders and visionary leaders to let go of the vine and focus on what they’re best at.

If you want to learn more, schedule a 30-minute discovery call with me!