I hear a lot of complaints from founders as they are trying to build out their leadership teams.

“I can’t find good people.”

“I have to micromanage everyone.”

“No one takes ownership.”

The response that I always give is to ask a question—

“What if the problem is YOU?”

The Three Mistakes

I’ve found that the vast majority of the time, when a founder tells me they have a problem with their team, or with a particular person, it’s not because of the person, but, at least in part, because the founder has made one or more of the following three mistakes.

Firing Too Slowly

At the beginning, founders tend to hire people they know who are excited about being with a growing organization. They tend to be relatively good at a lot of things, and passionate about startups.

But the jack of all trades that is helpful at $5 million or even $10 million of revenue is often a disaster at $50 or $100 million.

That pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality that is so helpful at the beginning no longer works at a bigger organization. What you now need is clear ownership and systems and processes.

My friend Ken Goulet, an advisor to several health care startups, calls this the “fire your friends” stage of leadership.

Hiring Wrong

Anytime you hire someone for your leadership team, you need to hire for the organization you are wanting to become. Not the organization you currently are.

One of my clients was struggling with his CFO. He decided to make a big leap. To hire someone who had CFO experience at a company TEN times the size of his.

At the time, it was a huge investment. But within six months he saw all the ways that his new CFO could contribute (and he let her run with them—see the third mistake below).

Today, that CFO will likely become president as my client spends more of his time thinking about bigger picture issues around vision and growth.

Leading Wrong

One of the most difficult things for a founder to hear is that they have, most likely unconsciously, trained their team to behave exactly as they currently do.

The first few times a founder hires people they have been doing things a particular way, their way, and they want to hire a person who will continue to do it their way.

They will monitor the person and make sure that they do it their way. They will correct them if the new leader does not do it their way.

In other words, they are training their people to think like them and check with them if there is any doubt.

They are training them to be micromanaged.

Most founders have never been a CFO, or a head of sales, or a head of product at a larger organization.

They only know what they have been able to cobble together in startup mode.

If you want to grow, though, continuing to do more of the same thing (just with more people) is a disaster.

A former client of mine got stuck on this. He could never find a COO who would run things exactly the way he would. He admitted this to me.

“The one thing getting in the way of my being a bigger company is me.”

Unfortunately, he is still saying this. The progress he has made on this front is minimal, because he continues to think that new people have to think like him.

You have to hire people better than you and let them run.

Control Versus Growth

Once you have a solid business, this is the most important question—

Do you want control? Or do you want growth?

This question will show up in different versions throughout the startup journey. With your team, with your investors, with an exit partner.

A founder who wants growth will hire good people (better than the founder!) and point them in a direction. Give them no more than three priorities, which will tend to conflict. For example—

• Profitable delivery model
• Customer delight
• Rapid growth

Hire excellent functional leads, give them simple priorities, and let them run.

You’ll be amazed at what happens when you do this. The tension between the priorities will create conflict, and conversation. Good leaders will thrive in this conversation.

The results will not only be different than the way you would have done it, but it will be better.

Way better.

I was working as an advisor to a co-founder who took over when the founder died.

The advisory team provided her lots of new ideas on how to grow the business, and its impact, in a way that honored the founder.

But the co-founder was comfortable with the way things were. She said she wanted to grow, but she wasn’t willing to try anything new.

That organization is slowly dying today.

Pruning is necessary from time to time. But only to make room for new growth.

Going Deeper

Does that resonate?

If so, reach out to me and I will send you a special video that goes even deeper.

More and more founders like you are coming out of the spiritual closet and seeing their work as a vital personal journey to both abundance and meaning.

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, no matter where they are in their transformation.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

This week’s newsletter is a response to another newsletter I saw—

Tony Robbins wrote this week that 2025 is all about knowing what season your business is in.

He equates growing a business to the phases of growing up. Including the prime of life and then decline and death.

As if you are your business. But you are not your business. You are the parent of your business.

I notice this all the time with my clients.

If they are in start up mode, they are just trying to get the kid fed and get enough sleep.

As their business grows and matures, their leadership has to grow and mature as well, or else, as one of my clients put it, “the business is running you rather than the other way around.”

There is a stage, (the pre-tween years?) where everything you do and say is revered.

And then suddenly you have to be very clear about the guidance you provide.

You can gently nudge but more and more your leaders have ideas of their own. (And some of them are better than yours!)

As the business gets more and more successful, you actually need to have less and less involvement. “Helicopter parenting” can frustrate your team and even backfire.

At some point, if you have done your job well, your business no longer needs you. (If you’ve really done well, it, or the proceeds from its sale, might even support you in your old age!)

Many parents get their identity from parenting and from their kids. And when the kids move out, they struggle. I’m going through a version of this right now with my youngest in Japan for a year. It’s been really hard figuring out who I am with no kids in the house.

The same can be true for founders.

What about you? What happens when the business starts to succeed without you? Or when you become a “business empty nester?”

Here’s the original Tony Robbins post—

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tony-robbins-2025-all-knowing-what-season-youre-tony-robbins-kcgjc/?trackingId=F%2FzRTjSPN38wkFoXIfgSXA%3D%3D

As I founder myself, I understand the value of feeling driven. It can help you produce much more than the people around me and much of the time that can be very helpful.

But sometimes I can’t turn it off. And I notice that I can’t actually say what’s driving me. It’s hidden. I’ll say it is for the sake of the business, or the mission, or the vision.

But is it?

Maybe what I really want is to be noticed. Or to be liked. Or to feel like I have enough, or AM enough.

We All Have Drives

Some of these drives we call addictions.

What’s the difference between a drive and an addiction? Simply put, I’d say that I have some level of control over my drives. They feel a bit more conscious, and a bit more in my power to honor or not, to employ or to take a break from.

My addictions feel more like they have me.

As an example, I did a video this week where I explored this in a bit more detail. I was walking uphill with a weighted backpack on a snowy road with my dog.

I’m huffing and puffing pretty hard. I’m unshaven and sweaty.

Why did I do that?

Because I get some of my best thinking when I am exercising. So I decided to pull out the phone and take a video in the midst of that thought. I didn’t want to miss it. It became the basis of this post.

Exercise, for me, is a tool. It clears my head and makes my body feel better in the process. I am driven to exercise but I am also in control of that drive and able to use it in a way that benefits me.

But I know people who are addicted to exercise. Especially in a mountain town in Colorado. Who use exercise almost like some people use alcohol or other drugs.

To avoid feeling things they don’t want to feel.

When A Drive Becomes A Ghost In The Machine

And that, to me, is where the line is. What do you avoid feeling, over and over again? And what is your strategy for avoiding it?

I had a client early in my coaching days who ran his own business. I asked him how much he wanted to make in his business and he could not identify a number.

As we talked about his childhood, he shared that for most of it his parents had struggled with money. That much of the time, his room had no heat in the winter.

His ghost was the drive for money. He had never had enough when growing up and even today, there is no amount that will make him feel safe.

What he longed for was to be ok with what he has, which by any reasonable measure is plenty.

For him, working more was his ghost. He could not stop. His fear would not let him.

There are addictions that everyone frowns on. Food, drugs, hoarding.

There are others though, like fitness and work, that are often celebrated in our culture, even though they can be just as destructive. (And are just as useful if the goal is to avoid feeling something.)

What is the fear that you don’t want to feel? What is the ghost that’s helping you to avoid it?

Going Deeper

Does that resonate?

If so, reach out to me and I will send you a special video that goes even deeper.

More and more founders like you are coming out of the spiritual closet and seeing their work as a vital personal journey to both abundance and meaning.

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, no matter where they are in their transformation.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.