My role has changed many times over the years of growing my business.

It has needed to transform as the needs of the business evolved.

To sustain growth, you need to force yourself to learn rapidly and fill gaps in the business until help arrives. 

In the beginning, you’re wearing 50 different hats - doing HR, finance, sales, production, delivery and marketing amongst other things.

Eventually, you start to delegate those things so you can focus on what you’re good at, or what the business needs in that moment.

Even if that means doing a role you’re not excellent at.

And when I look back, sometimes my (lack of) growth in a role screwed up the business's growth. 

The rate of our growth often reflected my ability to direct, empower and hold accountable high-level people to ensure we’re all pointing towards a shared vision. 

The better I could communicate and align our people, investors, customers and partners, the faster we could accelerate growth. 

Similarly, the slower you are to embrace a role and learn the skills, the slower you grow (and the more problems you encounter).

Often founders and entrepreneurs can be the growth bottleneck.

Stopping business growth while you flop around learning the skills when you could have asked for help, done a course, sought out a mentor or cut out other things to focus on learning faster.

To give you an example, today, my title is CEO.

The faster I learn that role and become highly effective, the better my company will be.

The problem is, learning new skills requires time so you've got to be preparing for the new role in advance.

Here's what the phases looked like for me:

𝗣𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗢𝗻𝗲 (𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗨𝗽): 𝗔𝗹𝗹 𝗥𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 

At the start, everyone was doing anything and everything to grow the business, handle challenges and find a way to deliver on the work. 

It's important that the people on the team can jump into any role and fix what breaks to maintain momentum.

In this structure, normally everyone in the business is reporting to you or a small group of managers (including you).

It’s here that you need to start accelerating your learning for the next few phases so you have time to test and learn.

𝗣𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗧𝘄𝗼: 𝗛𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗹𝘆 𝗦𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗱 

You start to need an extra layer of skilled management or specific product leaders.

So you promote your best people or pull in a few more high-level team members to share the load and gain greater leverage.

This is the first step towards corporate structure and a sign that your role has changed.

People will have very different expectations of your now and you’ll need to manage new problems that come up such as start-up employees losing direct access to you and feeling like they’ve been left out.

𝗣𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲: 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁𝘀 

At this point, hyper-focused people are required to do specific roles and the company is behaving like a corporate beast.

You shift from a team of generalists to a team of specialists in core parts of the business including, finance, people, products, sales and marketing. logistics/delivery and parts of the operation.

It’s here that you should be well on track to become an executive manager focused on leading your key management team, setting the long term direction and influencing the culture.

𝗣𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗿: 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝘀 

You begin to invest in other people who can unlock growth.  

Up to this point there's only room for one or two people looking externally and everyone else is looking internally at jobs to be done.  

Some of your time must be spent on finding Intrapreneurs - They're entrepreneurial thinkers who apply their skills inside existing businesses.

This is your ticket to expanding to new regions, diversifying growth and spreading risk, vertically integrating and creating completely new opportunities.  

And these people need a different type of leadership and structure.

𝗣𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗙𝗶𝘃𝗲: 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 

I'm not here deep into this phase yet so I'll keep you posted... 

But this phase will include bringing in high-level C-suite operators, equity partners or people who think like owners to take the business to the next level more autonomously.

I’m holding off on this one until I know what I want to scale but like each phase prior to this, it takes time to learn what this looks like so I’m already starting to educate myself on my role in an organisation like this.

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The bottom line is, everyone identifies with a certain job title or idea of who they are and what they are, and aren’t, good at. 

That type of thinking holds you back from when you’re growing a business. 

It’s about being humble enough to accept you don’t know what you’re doing.

But trying your best to adopt key roles fast enough and well enough until you learn to love it or a big enough to delegate it.

The key is hitting each phase with massive curiosity to learn, test and iterate. 

If you can do that inside a business, there’s nothing stopping you from reaching insane business and career growth. 

Thanks for reading. 

I hope this was useful.