A Founder’s Balancing Act: Growth & Day-to-Day Management

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🔗 Jake’s Picks

Must-Read Resources for Founders

🚀 Scaling Startups

• A VC Firm Tracked 200+ Startups Through The Chaos Of Growing Fast: Here’s What It Found (Crunchbase News)

🧠 Founder Self-Development & Mental Health

• Protecting mental health: Entrepreneurial strategies (Killer Startups)

📈 Productivity Hacks

• 40-year-old CEO shares her No. 1 productivity strategy (CNBC)

🛠 Tools for Scaling

• Asana AI Studio now offers AI agent creation for workflow management (VentureBeat)

💡 Hiring Insights

• Tim Cook says he uses ‘a very good formula’ to look for Apple employees—these are the 4 traits he seeks out (Yahoo Finance)

👀 ICYMI

• This is why a growth mindset matters so much (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

🌱 Your teams will evolve, therefore so will you

When you start a company the first thought is almost always about how successful it’s going to be.

But from day 1 it’s a roller coaster ride of unknowns.

Even when you think you know what you’re doing, there’s always something that throws you off course.  The mental toll this takes can be the difference between winning and losing - or simply giving up and shutting the business down.

The pivotal moment when you change as a founder is when you break through the glass ceiling and begin to see that elusive hockey stick growth.

All founders hope to see company growth when they first start, however when it actually happens, a giant “now what” moment follows.

Your role as a founder will continue to change as your company evolves:

Yes, you’ll still be the leader.

Yes, this will still be your company.

No, it won’t be the same.

It’s important that you recognize this and adjust - from the way you communicate with teams to the way you handle your own health, company growth will influence a large component of your professional and personal life.

🚀 What if this 10x-ed tomorrow?

In the early days of your company, it’s no question you’ll be doing every job possible, regardless of what you call yourself in your Linkedin profile.  Your day-to-day is more likely filled with tasks to do versus tasks to manage - this is normal.

Just ask Mark Zuckerberg, who initially focused solely on coding the first Facebook website.  It was only until the company moved to Palo Alto did Zuckerberg officially take on a full time leadership position as the true CEO.

As you hit growth inflection points, you should be asking yourself, ‘What if this 10x-ed tomorrow?’

Future-proofed teams

There’s no question that having the right people around you will alleviate a lot of stress and anxiety that comes from scaling a company.

This is why you want to hire for the long term.  Insert people who share your vision, people who are the right fit to handle subsequent growth phases.

With Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg focused very early on cultivating a team for the long haul, onboarding people he knew he could eventually put in leadership roles.

As Facebook saw its growth, it maintained its culture through their leadership, as these employees were there from the very beginning.

Ahead of your blocking with systems

With every new team and project I’ve been a part of, I’ve always had a systems mindset.

Investing time up front into systems and templates, even if it feels like it might be too early, puts your whole company in a position to streamline growth.

There’s nothing more stressful than trying to build templates and systems while you have 30 customers knocking on your door.  That said, your job as a founder is to stay level headed, even in the heat of the moment,  asking ‘What if X happens...’ so you can determine what you can do to get ahead of it.

Stylistically speaking, to your employees

The team conversations you have when the company can fit in a pod of desks versus the conversations you have as a team when you can barely fit everyone in a boardroom are very different.

With growth comes an adaptation of your communication style.

Bringing it back to Zuck, in his early days as CEO he asked for and absorbed feedback from peers and mentors so that he could figure what communication style worked best with his employees.

He also went to public speaking workshops, paying close attention to his presence, voice modulation, and body language.

The larger the company, the higher expectations your employees will have in how you communicate - invest in your communication abilities.

As more people join your team and company, you need to be able to synthesize messaging in a way that all employees can understand through:

• Transparency

• Straightforward language

• Using analogies to explain examples

• Listening and engaging with feedback

🤕 Then there’s your own growing pains

If growth takes a toll on your company, it will definitely take a toll on you too.

Continued growth will unlock new hardships as your company evolves from scaling beyond a small, single digit team.  How you deal with these general challenges really comes down to how you deal with yourself.

Managing yourself in the face of all the challenges from your company’s growth really starts with prioritizing your own wellbeing.

The ‘M’ word

Stable mental health for founders, above everything else, is so crucial to be an effective leader, supportive colleague, influential business person, successful entrepreneur, a good person in society, and the list goes on and on.

Depending on the source and study, the numbers seem to always come in well above 50% when looking at founders who suffer from mental health challenges.

This is why it’s so important as a founder to find ways to unwind and de-stress.

Your options are whatever works for you but may include:

• Physical activity

• Take breaks

• Sleep (more)

• Engage in a hobby that shifts your mind

• Connect with those you make you feel good

The balancing act that is being a founder

There’s days where it feels like you’re in the ocean and the water just carries you wherever it wants to go - this ocean only gets bigger as your company grows.  This is why setting expectations for you and your work is so important, even if finding work-life balance seems next to impossible.

Your goal should be to create work-life integration - the notion of creating boundaries between your personal and professional life that blend in harmony.

It’s much easier to shut off after a traditional 9-5 job than it is as a founder running your own company. However, you can also be more flexible as a founder during traditional working hours.

• Slower parts of the day can be used for personal time.

• Mobile working can make you more flexible to life outside of your company

• Breaks can be taken at points in the day where you need it most, not just at typical “coffee hours”

When keeping it real matters most

It’s no question you want to progress as quick as possible when you’re running your own company.  Reality plays a key role in helping you understand how quick you can actually can go.

One of Ray Dalio’s principles in his book Principles: Life and Work is to embrace reality and deal with it.  Dalio emphasizes not to get hung up on your views of how things should be because you’ll miss out on learning how they really are.

Be realistic with yourself and your expectations, to the point where the plan is based, not only what you and your team’s capabilities are, but also on outside factors around the market and resources available.

This may include setting personal goals for yourself, celebrating the little wins, reminding yourself to stay patient, and surround yourself with empathetic thoughts.

It’s far too easy to get caught up in anxious thoughts as a founder that you forget the fact that there’s always another side to the story.

Breath.

A big pain point for founders is their inability to separate their emotions from reality.

As your company grows and scales, it’s okay to continuously reset your thinking - in fact, expect to do this a lot.  The key to navigating growth is staying flexible and accepting the fact that your company, in the business landscape, is fluid.

You can only control so much - and that’s okay.

🎬 TLDR — Your Actions For The Week:

• Scale Your Team → Ask your teams what if the company grew 10x tomorrow and get them provide suggestions on how they would adjust

• Scale Yourself → Define what it is that helps you mentally unwind and build that into your work calendar

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