Musa Indegi

Relationship building

Founder instinct is a real tool that works well, but it doesn’t scale It can drive early success, but it becomes a bottleneck as the company grows

When a founder’s intuition becomes the final word in every decision, it stifles the leadership team’s ability to act, leaving the organization unable to respond quickly to crises or new challenges

Companies need formal decision frameworks, defined decision rights and leadership empowerment so decisions can be made effectively without the founder

The founder of one of our portfolio companies created a company with approximately $200 million in revenue purely on instinct The founder had spent a large amount of time around the products and relationships with customers, so that he could literally go out onto the production floor and identify the machine that would be broken down in a week, and he would reject a price recommendation from his financial staff because “it didn’t feel right!”

However, after buying another company and nearly doubling the size of the business, all of the things that made the founder successful initially started to work against him

Eventually, over a period of six months, I watched the speed of the company’s decision-making slow to a crawl What was once a strength was now a barrier that none of his senior managers knew how to overcome

Sales team trainingFounders who successfully navigate this transition do not try to fight their natural tendencies — they redirect them Rather than using their intuition to make every decision, founders start to use their intuition to build people who can help them make decisionsFor example, a CEO I am currently consulting with spends about 50% of his time having one-on-one meetings with members of his executive team, where he walks them through the thought process he used to solve a specific problem, not just the solution itself

Staff management

Motivational skills

A founder’s instinct is a real tool that works well I have seen it often enough to know that it is not just luck He has experienced each and every area of the business, and all of this collective experience produces a type of judgment that is faster and more accurate than any committee or groupIt is not that the founder’s instinct stops providing valuable insight It is that it does not grow Research by McKinsey states that 78% of companies that have successfully found product-market fit ultimately fail to grow their companies

Product knowledge

Sales expertise

Sales presentations

Client relationship management

Sales strategy development

Strategic planning

Direct sales

Sales process

Sales planning

Sales tracking

Sales operation

Goal setting

Account management

Rapport and relationship building

Sales coaching

Sales reporting

New business development

Analytical problem solver