The Entrepreneurial Challenge

By definition and entrepreneur is someone who starts things. And starters are essential to keeping a society growing! Whether it’s a new business, church, school, or just about any other new thing you can imagine without the starter types we’d be stuck in a rut!

But there’s a problem that happens in these start up scenarios that often causes them to fail. And if we’re honest with ourselves, it in a way is the starter’s fault. Many starters can’t make the transition to the roles needed to keep an organization or business sustaining .

You see it takes a special breed of individual to start something. But often the kind of person who starts something isn’t the same skills needed to keep it going.

Another term for this is the founder’s trap. The person who founded the organization keeps functioning like the starter when the organization is well beyond the founding stages.

You see when a new business or even nonprofit is started, the founder plays a lot of roles. Pretty much the founder does everything!

I remember when I started a church. I was the janitor, set up guy, tear down guy. I changed the lightbulbs and made sure the bathrooms were fully stocked. I vacuumed the carpets. I sometimes even pulled the trailer. I did the powerpoint set up and picked the songs we’d sing. I had my hand in just about every part of the church.

Now this is not to say no one was there to help but as the founder or starter I was kind of expected to be in all the things of the church. And that can’t last forever. The longer I let myself stay in the founder or starter seat, the harder it was to get out of that chair. The more things I did, the more things were expected of me. The starter needs to figure out a way to transition from the everything chair to the leadership chair and quickly give some authority away.

Entrepreneurs are wonderful people! I have some of those entrepreneurial tendencies to this day. I love to get a new thing going. But what I’ve learned, with some age and experience, is to give things away sooner rather than later.

Now here’s a little piece of experiential wisdom. The person you give it to likely won’t do it exactly the same way you do! And you have to be ok with that. If there’s a system, then they have to stay within the system. But if you give them the task of making it their own, you have to be willing to give it up!

I get asked questions a lot about things I have no control over anymore. I have given things to other people trusting that they will do the job to the standards we have set up. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. When they do it is applauded and I know very little about it. When things don’t stay within the framework of our structure or move toward the targets we have set up, then things go off the rails quickly and I have to get involved in areas I don’t want to touch anymore!

If you’re a starter kind of person, then find people you can trust and hand things over to them. Hand over tasks to people who can only handle tasks. But to those people who’ve proven themselves responsible, give away the authority that is need to get the job done. The more authority you can give away, the more work gets done and the more effective and efficient the organization becomes.