A pilot will tell you that there are two critical times for a safe airline flight: the take-off and the landing. These are the two time where there is the most strain on the aircraft and when the most things can go wrong.
Entrepreneurial ventures have two similar critical points for success. The first is aligning your business to the market properly before you even open the doors. This is the process of opportunity assessment. The second critical point is when the business hits its growth phase. StartupJournal has a good case study of the challenges entrepreneurs face when they try to prepare a business for successful growth.
During growth, both the business and the entrepreneur have to go through transitions. For the business, the entrepreneur has to build systems and processes that can handle processes that the entrepreneur managed himself when the business was smaller. And that leads to the second transition. As the entrepreneur builds more and more of the day-to-day details into systems and delegates responsibility to the expanding team, his job must change. As seen in the case at StartupJournal, the transition from being mostly a “doer” into becoming a “real CEO” can be one of the biggest challenges an entrepreneur can face.
Dr Jeff Cornwall
Co-founder of The Entrepreneurial Mind, serial entrepreneur and professor of entrepreneurship.
It would seem every entrepreneur would eventually want to delegate. If he or she isn’t concerned about the growth of the business, he or she is still probably concered with freeing up more personal time. It is an interesting dynamic that delegation is still so difficult during a growth phase….