What you’re feeling right now
You’ve built something remarkable, and keeping it growing requires thinking you haven’t needed before. Your executives and managers are competent, and some are clinging to the status quo. The systems work, but speed and energy are fading, and you can feel it in the meetings. You’re in the big leagues: the market watches what you do and reacts. Complexity is high, and bureaucracy may be quietly choking the innovation that built the company in the first place.
Name the underlying issue to solve it
All business issues fit into 27 categories. Stop the trial-and-error, name the root cause of your Top 5 Challenges so you can solve them now.
What it costs
The research puts it plainly: you can tame a wild duck, but you can’t make a tame duck wild. The efforts that professionalized the company can crush the entrepreneurial spirit it now needs, and the companies that get left behind at this stage get left behind by newer, hungrier entrepreneurial firms. Complacency at 300 employees looks like stability right up until the market moves and the company can’t.
What changes here
Transition zone: the Wind Tunnel.
You entered Stage 7 through a Wind Tunnel: letting go of methods that no longer work and acquiring new ones that do. The method to let go of, strangely, is some of the professionalization you fought for in Stages 4 through 6. The one to acquire is the oldest one you have: the Stage 1 spirit of exploration, now operationalized across hundreds of people instead of carried by one founder.
What the stage asks of you
Go back through the company lighting fires: inspiration, innovation, and the spirit of reaching into new territory. Be relentless in allowing mistakes in the pursuit of new endeavors.
The only stage where Profit sits at the third gate. At this size, if the people and the process are right, profit follows.
Three-quarters of your week on where the company is going. The steward of the culture and the vision is a full-time job now.
Everybody in a company this size needs to know where it’s going, and they need to hear it from you.
Confidence forward, with enough caution to keep hundreds of livelihoods safe while you take the company somewhere new.