CEO & Founder of Elite High Performance, Top Leadership Mindset Coach.
How do you scale a business? As a high-performance leadership mindset coach, I have had the privilege of working with numerous scaling tech entrepreneurs who face unique challenges in their journey from startup to successful business. Business expansion strategies play a crucial role in assisting scaling tech leaders to overcome these challenges when rapidly increasing their headcount to meet market, revenue and profit goals. These challenges are so significant that only 20% of startups become successful companies in the long term.
Often, the entrepreneurs who started the company aren’t able to transition from startup to business leader. These people are incredibly smart, talented and hard-working, and have the ability to learn the strategies needed to succeed. So why don’t they succeed?
Their mindset. What do I mean?
Have you ever driven somewhere and, when you arrived, you didn’t remember how you got there? That’s the power of the subconscious mind. In fact, 95% of cognitive activity—so most of your decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior—is from the subconscious. Even the 5% of conscious decisions are governed by your mindset, but at least you’re aware of them.
Mindset, not skills or strategies, is one of the biggest reasons why entrepreneurs fail or succeed in business. So let’s look at three top problems that scaling leaders face and how mindset can solve these problems.
How Do We Use Mindset Strategies To Scale A Business?
1. Lack Of Strategic Vision
Entrepreneurs want to solve big problems and they build solutions to fit that market. Many entrepreneurs are known for their ability to “get the job done at all costs” to “respond quickly at any moment” and to be the ultimate “doer.” Being the one who delivers results gets them recognized and praised by their customers, investors and team members. This belief about themselves can ultimately crash their company by burning them out, making them the bottleneck and not empowering their team to solve problems.
Solution: Entrepreneurs need to change their mindset about who they are and what their role is. Working on their mindset can shift their beliefs from “doer” to “leader.” This leads to the ability to create a strategic vision, build an empowered team and succeed.
2. Inadequate People Development
As the business scales quickly, so do the demands of the people within the business. Top individual contributors become managers, and these new managers are now in charge of building their own teams. Without the right leadership development, managers can flounder and destroy their company from the inside out.
In fact, most leaders don’t receive leadership training until they are 42 years old, 12 years after people usually become managers. This gap gives us mediocre results; 65.1% of the workforce experiences a leader who is destructive to their well-being and the success of corporate goals.
Solution: Entrepreneurs need to change their mindset about people development. When it’s a startup, often there’s no budget for people development and people figure things out as they go. Scaling companies don’t have the time or resources to figure it out. Entrepreneurs must invest in developing their people into leaders and building high-performance teams in their companies. Just any leadership training doesn’t work either; 75% of leadership training isn’t effective because it doesn’t address the leaders’ mindsets. Focus on leadership mindset development and your people can thrive in your scaling business.
3. Overexpansion
As companies scale, entrepreneurs can become too aggressive or can be pushed by investors to develop new products to fit other markets. This can lead to hiring too many people, spreading focus from winning products and, ultimately, increasing the burn rate until the company is not sustainable. Even if entrepreneurs recognize this problem, layoffs aren’t a solution because they hurt profitability and reduce the productivity of people who remain.
Solution: Entrepreneurs need to ensure they have the right mindset during scaling. This means working with their mindset to make solid business decisions versus fueling the ego’s needs, wants and desires.
Final Thoughts
Fast-scaling tech entrepreneurs have all of the intelligence, work ethic and talent to become successful tech leaders, but they must work on their own mindsets, as well as their people’s, to bridge the gap from flash-in-the-pan to long-term success.
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