The Vision Trap: How Founders Kill Their Businesses
10 years ago I was sitting in my office handing over mock-ups for the new MVP the design team had worked on for 6 months.
“Scrap that”, the founder said.
“We’re building a new app, and here’s what I’m thinking.”
6 months later, the whole project went down the drain. He had yet another brainwave.
I fell in love with the start-up culture very early on in my career. In fact, my first job was at a six-person start-up. I experienced the thrill first-hand of wearing the very many hats that it takes to build a business from scratch and see it through to the exit. My favourite person was the visionary founder. His drive was contagious. He was always full of energy and enthusiasm. With him at the helm, the whole team worked hard and dared to dream big. That’s the magic of somebody who leads the organisation with a purpose.
He was also the worst manager I’ve ever worked for. His constant flow of new ideas interrupted and halted project delivery as the team was asked to drop the latest idea they were working on and focus on the new grand thing. Two whole projects were binned because of this delivery paralysis. The money lost went into the millions.
This was not an isolated incident. I later witnessed a $1 billion company being led by a founder-CEO spend more money on external executive consultants rather than on the internal payroll. The founder would often get involved with mundane tasks such as the choice of imagery on ads. He had a clear vision and great intuition, but failed to communicate and transfer it to the professional executive leadership. He was eventually replaced by a professional CEO with the help of a “slight” push by the Board.
First, let’s get one thing out of the way. Everyone who starts a business is a founder, but not everyone is a visionary founder — and the vision doesn’t come as a given. It’s pretty easy to recognise which ones are, as you would feel the focus of the company is always steered towards that vision. If you don’t know what the vision of the company you are at is, your founder-CEO is not a visionary. It’s as simple as that. These folks have different motivations.
There are a few reasons people start businesses, and depending on their primary driver, you won’t find visionaries in every category. A founder can be motivated by more than one of these, but one always comes up first. The most common reasons people venture into entrepreneurship are:
Wealth creation: Very simply — they’re after making money. Purely creating wealth is not a vision by itself. They are good at identifying market opportunities and exploiting them, but may not have a strong vision or passion for their product or service. If somebody is in the business of purely making money, it’s not likely you’ll find a visionary there.
Society transformation: These people start businesses because they really care about solving a problem. Often, this comes from a personal story or a pain they have experienced. They are driven by making a positive impact on society and give people better tools and opportunities. They have a strong vision and passion for their product or service, and are often wonderful visionaries.
Autonomy: These are the people who thrive when they have control over their work and lifestyle. They start businesses to give themselves the freedom to govern their own life. Visionaries? Sometimes, but not necessarily.
Sense of achievement: Some people like to compete with themselves and are driven by their own achievements. They like a good challenge and pushing themselves to get to some sort of public recognition. You
will find some visionaries here, unless their goal is purely “to be at the top”, in which case the only “vision” they’re chasing is to boost their profile.
You will notice that people who start their business with the purpose of self-gratification are rarely visionaries. I won’t focus on this group right now, as they have a different means of killing their businesses. Let’s instead explore how visionaries, despite their brilliance, can unwittingly become liabilities within their own organisations.
Who is a visionary?
First and foremost, let’s define what makes someone a visionary. A visionary is a person who has a clear and captivating idea of the future they’d like to create. They possess the unique ability to envision possibilities beyond the present reality. They are also great champions of their vision, and have the unique ability to inspire others and take them along on a transformative journey.
Identifying one is relatively straightforward:
Their vision is clear, leaving no room for doubt about their intended destination.
They always see the bigger picture, ensuring that every decision aligns with their vision.
They are great communicators. They could explain this vision in their sleep and you would understand it.
They are willing to (intelligently) take a risky or unconventional path that can lead towards reaching their vision.
They are curious and open-minded, and willing to learn and grow. This makes them great innovators and problem-solvers.
A visionary is the instrumental figure in a successful organisation. They are a catalyst for innovation. However, being a visionary leader is not by itself enough to make a healthy business. In fact, it can sometimes be detrimental if not backed by appropriate operations to ensure everyone stays on course. This operational management can sometimes come from the founder themselves if they have good operational skills, but more often than not come as a burden to their need for creativity and innovation. In that case, the role of an executive operator is as essential to keeping everyone’s feet firmly on the ground.
Founders usually start as CEOs, a necessary role during the early stages of a young business. They serve as the chief decision-maker, until the company gets to a place where the business requires more niche experience in sector leadership, rather than the generalist person most founders need to be. But some struggle to let go once their organisation grows. When growth keeps adding new layers of complexity, they can struggle with people management and focusing more on strategy than execution. These new challenges can often induce anxiety and desperate attempts to micromanage in order to feel “in control”. In short, things get messy and confusion creeps in.
There are a few ways in which founder-visionaries can drag their business down, and some extreme stories even make the headlines. Here are the common ways they can halt the growth of their organisation.
Over-reliance on intuition
As the business grows, so does the need for niche skills within every department. The nature of starting a business calls for reliance on intuition, and that’s not a bad thing. It helps fast-track the development of the business in the early stages. It’s also far easier to pivot a small, lean team that is just starting to capture a percentage of the market. This is the environment founders are comfortable with, and again, it’s a great thing for a start-up.
The game completely changes once the data starts showing big numbers. By that time, the team is larger and needs more structure; moving wheels requires lining up a whole chain of events that a growing number of people is now responsible for. This stage now surpasses the capacity of the intuition of one person. In spite of that, they might keep listening to their intuition, thinking that it’s going to take them through any challenge like it historically has, and all they need to do is feel. And what they feel is their vision, so this feeling is better to listen to. After all, that’s been working wonderfully so far, so why change?
Wrong. It’s not to say intuition doesn’t have a place in the business, but it needs to be grounded in data and expertise to turn a growing start-up into a well-operated and mature business.
(Think Travis Kalanick, who failed to address the cultural and ethical problems at Uber that damaged its reputation and growth)
Resistance to feedback
One of the core strengths of a visionary is deep belief in their vision and the ability to stick to it through thick and thin. Because their vision usually comes from within, and they can have a strong connection to a cause, visionaries are excellent at re-directing everyone’s focus towards that vision once people get blind-sighted by day-to-day demands. Once the team starts throwing down a myriad of great ideas, they can filter through them and press the “go” button on the ones that will actually help reach the goal.
They can also blindside themselves. They can miss spotting undeniable cues that point at critical blockers and show their path has a dead end. Other times, they might become too confident in their abilities. This is dangerous territory, as they become deaf to feedback, ignore market signals or customer feedback and refuse to adapt or pivot when necessary. At least until they can no longer deceive themselves and so turn to desperate strategies to salvage a business that is rolling down a road to death. That’s when vision goes out of the window and they venture into a pure cashflow game to reach solvency.
(Think Elizabeth Holmes, who persisted with her flawed blood-testing technology despite scientific and regulatory challenges)
Loss of motivation
In order to become a reality, vision requires passion. That is how it moves from “just an idea” stage into an operating business. The founder’s passion is essential fuel to getting this idea to materialise. At the beginning, they are responsible for about 50 roles at their start-up, which they are all mostly doing themselves. Knowing the ins and outs of a business is a level of control us humans find exhilarating, and for some founders, it helps to fuel this passion.
However, many struggle to sustain their enthusiasm once problems change shape. At some point, a business becomes a steady sail that doesn’t offer as much room for creativity as do the early stages of a business. For somebody whose mind is wired to look for opportunities and move quickly, this can feel very underwhelming.
They might get bored with success and seek a new thrill. In this case, you can see them getting more and more detached from their organisation and becoming less present. There is no longer that strong push for innovation that should keep people stimulated, and for the employees the job starts feeling increasingly more like a month-to-month pay-check from another insignificant brand they work for.
(Think Evan Williams, who left Twitter to pursue other ventures that he felt more passionate about)
How to avoid dragging the business down
To avoid these traps, there is really no way around having the founder take a good, deep and honest look within themselves. These issues appear because of a lack of their own self-awareness, self-gratifying motivations or the anxiety founders can face. Some of these are deeply rooted in their personality, but other are honest mistakes that can be corrected. They need to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and surround themselves with people who can give help or guidance when needed. For someone who has proved to be successful in building a business, this pill can be hard
to swallow.
But they need to remember that their vision is not only theirs, but also shared by their team, customers, investors, and partners. Those that can honestly answer the question:
“In what way am I a liability to my business?”
and take steps to combat their weaknesses will have a bright journey ahead of them.
