Scale your business while staying sane

Leading a startup through growth can be challenging on many levels - not the least in personal areas of leadership and I am no stranger to those side effects of not sleeping, doubting your every step and literally not being able to think clearly (today I know why that is, back then it was just frustrating).

I have been building and leading multiple companies over the past 10 years which has taken a big toll on me and requires constant recalibration. I want to focus in this post on a few leadership qualities every (aspiring) founder or entrepreneur needs to build, hone and master:

1.Developing a compelling vision that connects to all stakeholders. Clear goals, simplified complexity.

It sounds so easy and totally makes sense in your head. And sometimes, they just don't get it. And it's easy to blame them, your team, your potential investors, your dream customers.

It's quite hard to look at yourself. In my experience, most often it is myself. I am not clear, simple, and concise enough.

The founder rambles because they do not understand it enough. Or because they are too deep in the details and people lose you. It's all about telling a story that connects with the audience in front of you.

Investors want to hear the long-term money story and you get clients repeatedly, ideally without effort.

Employees want to hear the vision of your product or service you are selling, how it changes the world, and how they can be part of it.

Your clients need to hear how you are solving their problems before they even mentioned them to you.

Your partner wants to hear that you love them, that they matter most to you, and that you hope they can support you openly through long hours and late nights.

Tailoring your story to your audience is key. But first, you need clarity and simplicity in your own mind and that is a hard thing to come by. Here are a few tips:

- The mom test: Tell it to your mom. If she gets it, you might think you got it. But she will lie to you because she loves you. So also tell it to kids. They will be honest about it and ask the truly hard questions. It will be annoying but that's exactly what you need.

- Can you draw it without words and people get it? If not, go back and redesign.

- Can you summarize what you are doing/trying to achieve in one sentence? And not of those long german sentences with semicolons and stuff, just one plain English sentence. This is hard, take a day or two to hone these words, practice them and then go back to your stakeholders to see how they react.

2. Drop the ego and urge for control

I am sure this is none of your issues. But just in case, I thought I would list it here.

Ego has definitely taken the best of me in my first big startup. Ask my then cofounder and thankfully good friend today: We bickered about roles, and titles. Useless at best. Focus on the tasks that need to be done and that add most to your vision. Get those done well, and the rest will follow automatically.

And now around the sense of control: It is so easy to get bogged down by daily tasks, to-do lists, and that logo font. Important, absolutely. And keep bubbles of time for yourself to get out of it, detach and let it all go, and go back to 1. It is so important to give others, experts, and your team the freedom to experiment, push something of their own through and create, fail and learn from it. It will be so valuable in the long term because you will never be able to do it all by yourself. Never - you shouldn't and you don't want to.

?? So let it go, let it gooo ??

3. Enabling and empowering others for long-term success in scaling your business

There are a couple of communication and leadership cheats that you can use. They are easy enough to adopt and hard to practice in the long term so take it as a nudge - and reach out if you are serious about implementing them in the long run to make sure you keep your head above water in the storm of your scaling up the process:

- True listening & asking the right questions. Listening means being fully present. This seems to be the hardest thing for any busy person these days. Being really with the other person, listening not just to their words but their backstory, their body signals, and their emotions that come through to you. This requires practice and skill.

Way too often we just want to reply. Catch yourself this week and truly go on and listen.

- Mastering the wide range of emotional and communication skills required to keep people emotionally engaged is super hard. Everybody needs something else from you. Everybody needs something from you. Sometimes, a decision, money, a signature, a reply. They need clarity. But most of all they need to hear that you value them and their work truly. They all want to be seen, heard, and loved (yes, this is the 3rd time I am talking about love in this post, isn't it marvelous?)

- There is a lot to say about pleasing communication behavior, giving the righ way of feedback and saying no graciously. I wrote a few posts about those skills you can read more here.

The last piece is about mastering your own mini-traumas, negative patterns, and mental health. Shame and insecurity can creep in and are utterly contagious. Your responsibility as a founder is to protect your team from your traumas and negative patterns. This requires a lot of work.

In short, keep your own mess away from running your business. It's your responsibility to take care of this so your team is not suffering - and doing this requires hard reflection, honest feedback and deep humility, and commitment to personal growth.

I got you! In case that's what you needed to hear today.