Leading a business from an idea, through start-up right into the scale-up phase can be hugely rewarding, but it is one of the most challenging journeys in the business world. Successful navigation relies on enormous change and development of mindset and skills; running a 50 – 200-person team in a fast-growing company requires a radically different approach to running a 5 – 20-person start-up.
Success in the scale-up phase requires letting go of your need to control in order to attract (and most importantly integrate and motivate) experienced specialists who can increase your competitive advantage and exploit the market opportunity. Recruiting the right people, retaining or saying goodbye to members of your original team, and seeing your own role change out of all recognition are all difficult emotional as well as operational challenges.
Delegation for higher valuation
The Founder’s Dilemmas book by Noam Wasserman (see Frog book club review) takes an empirical approach to show that self-awareness and flexibility are key to scaling a startup successfully. Obtaining the human, social and financial resources required to drive value creation requires a trade off against control. Wasserman also states that “Founders that maintain control have obtained significantly lower valuations than those where the founder has relinquished control”. He suggests the data points to the premium for giving up control is as much as 100%.
A founder transition, done well, can therefore be a huge value add for a company and we have seen a great example in portfolio company Winningtemp, the AI driven SaaS Employee Engagement Platform. The highly regarded Swedish scale-up business has matured, built a strong C-suite team and reached profitability in 2023, despite a difficult economic climate.
Congratulations
In reaching profitability co-founders Pierre Lindmark and Mathias Hansson Fredlund have reached a significant milestone. Winningtemp was founded 10 years ago with a simple yet powerful purpose – to create successful organisations with the help of science and intuitive data. With the leadership team in place the business is now ready to scale across Europe, enabling the founders to move back from day-to-day operations and focus on their board roles as major shareholders.
“It feels very good. The company is built to scale further without us,” says Pierre Lindmark.
Congratulations to Pierre and Matthias on their amazing journey and their demonstration of self-awareness and flexibility for the benefit of Winningtemp.
