An article by Shahnaz Hamade, Founder and CEO of Harmonie Consulting
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that many founders understand. It comes from being the answer to every question, the approver of every decision and the person whose phone is never truly off.
From the outside, this can look like commitment. Inside the company, however, it may signal something more serious: the operating model has failed to keep pace with the business.
In the early stages, centralised leadership is often necessary. The founder holds the vision, understands the customer and can make decisions faster than any committee. But as the company hires more people, enters new markets and manages a wider product portfolio, that same concentration of authority can begin to constrain growth.
Research cited by McKinsey found that around 80 per cent of startups in a sample of more than 3,000 'Series A' companies that successfully launched and developed a product did not take it through to full scale. Investors attributed 65 per cent of portfolio-company failures to people and organisational issues.
