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Breathe Precious New Life into Your Organisation
Businesses grow, merge and sometimes change course for new opportunities. In doing so, they often lose what’s known as the founder’s mentality. At its heart, it’s a dogged, focused and accountable mindset that drives early business success. Knowing how to develop and retain it can help you breathe precious new life into your organisation and make it more competitive than ever.
Getting Back to Winning Ways
For over 50 years, Starbucks has put a caffeinated spring in the steps of coffee lovers. The coffee house launched in 1971 and grew from a humble bean-selling street store to a global corporation with almost 36 000 outlets and a reputation for personalised customer service.
But in 2007, they hit a rough patch resulting in the closure of hundreds of stores and a stop to expansion plans. Ex CEO Howard Schultz was then called back to rekindle the Starbucks flame.
Schultz had previously implemented some of the company’s most customer-enthusing initiatives. He immediately saw that they’d begun to lose the personal connection with people and emphasised the need to find their roots and become number one again.
For Starbucks, it was a profound awakening that inspired a cultural transformation and an opportunity to learn from a common business challenge.
The Spirit of the Founder
Many businesses, driven by their passionate founder, begin hungry and committed to wowing their customers. Then, as they grow, shift, or become more corporate, that personal founder flavour fades. This is what undermined Starbucks’s journey.
Chris Zook and James Allen zeroed in on this phenomenon in their book, The Founders Mentality, which delves into the importance of the startup mindset and the need for it to remain part of your business’s DNA.
Zook and Allen’s model offers a superb blueprint for maintaining a positively engaged approach while scaling your business. The founder’s mentality has 3 components:
Insurgency refers to a bold sense of challenge with a clear “why”. This helps you see your business as a disruptor and an innovator and inspires you to deliver where a customer’s needs may be unanswered.
Frontline Obsession speaks to your commitment to excellence in empowering and engaging frontline employees and enhancing processes to provide an exceptional customer experience.
Owner’s Mindset encourages accountability at all levels and inspires action. It gets employees to focus on real-time priorities, promotes agility and helps you avoid bureaucratic traps.
Their model is spot on. Think of a new business owner, hands-on, passionately engaged with their operation, strategically pursuing their goals and edging the competition. This is the spirit that drives early success and the energy we want to develop as we grow.
Businesses that maintain this startup mindset over the long-term have an advantage. Amazon is a prime example. As the third largest public company in the world, with over 1.2 million employees, they still display urgency, a healthy obsession with their customers, and an authentic sense of ownership. It reflects in their bottom line too.
Coaching Ignites the Startup Mindset
If you’re pursuing a competitive edge, embracing the founder’s mentality and working the philosophy into strategic leadership structures could energise the life of your business.
Best results can be achieved when Zook and Allen’s principles are combined with professional Executive Coaching and Leadership Development initiatives that support you as you learn to master its components.
Change Partners will walk this journey with you. Our future-relevant mindset tools, coaching skills and extensive business experience deliver critical leadership insights and inspire growth.
Our individual coaching and team coaching services can help you and your team develop a positive sense of insurgency to motivate and make you mission focused. It can enhance your approach to frontline excellence and can encourage deep levels of accountability.
Developing your founder’s mentality may be the key to writing your most successful chapter yet!
With a diverse team of professionals experienced in unlocking leadership excellence, and tuned to the future of leadership development, Change Partners is perfectly positioned to help you advance.
Pieter Venter is an International Executive Coach at Change Partners with a wealth of experience in business and leadership development. He’s passionate about empowering leaders to tap into their greatness and make a significant impact. Contact him at pieterventer@change.co.za or on 083 306 0578 to help you and your team unlock your highest potential.
