Member-only story
Founder to CEO: Scaling Leadership
When your business begins to rapidly scale, so must your leadership
In my first article on the challenging transition from Founder to CEO, I focused on the change in responsibilities in that shift. In coming articles I will expand on those new and refined roles. As leaders focus on expanding your skills and learning new tools to master those responsibilities, it is critical that you do so with an understanding that the scale of your activities is also changing.
Four of the most important dimensions in which your leadership must scale are:
- Scope
- Horizon
- Cycle
- Staff
Scope
As a reminder, the transition from founder to CEO happens when your business transitions from startup to enterprise, or as Steve Blank defined it, when your search for a “repeatable and scalable business model” has been successful and you actually begin to scale that business. This “search” process is often described in terms of several stages of “fit”:
- Problem-Solution Fit: You’ve identified a real problem that customers have and can describe a solution (or value proposition) that addresses the problem.
- Product-Market Fit: Customers have…
