Venture Money In, Entrepreneur Out

A recent edition of Profit Magazine is headlined “Lessons from Canada’s Best Employers”. It features a collection of “highly successful” entrepreneurs regaling on how to create “loyal, turbo-charged teams” and great businesses.

Inconveniently, at least one of the featured entrepreneurs was removed from the helm of his business before the magazine hit the newsstands. A man of undeniable vision, this entrepreneur had proven adept at attracting and energizing a team of bright, young employees in the pursuit of that vision. He possessed the same evangelical abilities with customers who signed up in droves for his product offering. But as the business grew, the supremely confident entrepreneur proved less adroit in evolving the hands-on, micromanaging leadership style that served him well when the firm was small. This in turn had a negative impact on his ability to attract, manage and retain an executive team capable of scaling the business. Though strong revenue growth temporarily cloaked the costs of this churn, maturation clouds were on the horizon. Given enough time the young entrepreneur may well have sorted out the leadership requirements of a growing, more complex business. But time became a scarce resource the moment the entrepreneur pursued big-time U.S. venture capital to fuel the next stage of his firm’s growth.

While in the business of risking capital, venture capitalists take every step possible to de-risk their investment decisions. Each success and failure is analyzed and processed into lessons learned, best practices and playbooks for future investments. Proven leadership is valued over its alternative, and young, promising entrepreneurs are rarely more than a few missteps from replacement. This is especially true in Silicon Valley where a class of serial CEOs and executive teams provide a bench of standby replacement talent. With the costs of trial and error learning thus needlessly high, it took but a few execution errors for the Canadian entrepreneur to find himself unceremoniously dumped at the helm of his own company. It took less than 4 months for the entrepreneur’s new ‘partners’ to become his executioners.

Learning is an iterative process, a cycle of action, reaction, reflection, adjusted action and so forth.  Self-awareness lubricates the cycle either increasing or reducing the time for individual learning. Hubris is a decided inhibitor. Entrepreneurs who own their businesses outright have the benefit of time to learn from the trials and tribulations of growing a business. But for those who secure professional investors or go public, their time becomes enmeshed with others money and a compression effect takes place. Their trials must now be almost error free. For our young Canadian entrepreneur, an award winning company and glowing magazine articles could not protect him from these realities. The good news, if it can be called that, is that he now has time to reflect on the meaning of hubris, humility, personal development and resilience.

About the Author

Robert Hebert is the founder and Managing Partner of StoneWood Group Inc., a leading executive search firm in Canada. Since 1981, he has helped firms across a wide range of sectors address their senior recruiting, assessment and leadership development requirements.

Contact Robert by email at rhebert@stonewoodgroup.com or call (1) 416-365-9494 EXT 777