Founders can be the biggest constraints to growth (I will not promote)
I've been mentoring startups for many years now. Thought I'd share some advice over a few posts that I always end up giving new entrepreneurs starting out. Here's one:
Founders can often be the constraint for growing their company.
Founders are often smart people with a very healthy ego built around their company and their accomplishment in building and running it.
As a result they often build their companies with a structure that looks like this, /\\, with themselves at the top and everyone else in the company below them (intellectually, experience, knowledge). As a result, they are not likely (beware of generalizing, there are always exceptions) to hire someone smarter than them.
It might threaten their view of themselves and their perception of how the world views them and their company. They feel they must be the leader.
When I mentor founders, I always advocate for wrapping their success and ego up in the company outcome, not just it's structure. In other words - the company's success is their success.
In other words, I advise consciously building a company that looks like this, \\/, with themselves at the bottom. If they can manage to focus their ego on the outcome of the company and not the need to be at the top (intellectually, experience, knowledge), they will have an opportunity to hire much smarter people than themselves and they will have an opportunity to learn a lot from them.
In essence, in the first case, the founder becomes the limiting factor in the company's success to protect their own ego and perception of a founder. In the second case, they have an opportunity for their company to have an unlimited upside where they are not hindering their own success.
This is a very difficult thing for a founder, as it seems contradictory to the very qualities that allowed them success in starting their company.
It's definitely a different skillset to learn to lead people smarter or more experienced than you, but definitely worth learning.
More in future posts. Hope this helps some.