If I Were a Founder Again, Here is What I Would Do at Every Stage of Growth
- Jun 3
- 10 min read
Greg Tennant is the scaling partner to some of the world’s most ambitious founders and senior leaders. He is the founder of andExecute, where he helps startups and scale-ups make scale work. Drawing on 20+ years across 20+ countries, his focus is leadership, execution, and building businesses that perform as they scale.
Most founders know what to build. Very few know how to build the team, the culture, and the operating model underneath it. Here is what I would do differently at every stage, from the first days of inception through to scale.
The game changes at every stage that most founders do not
Every stage of a startup's growth brings a different set of challenges. The product evolves. The team expands. The markets multiply. The complexity compounds.
But here is what most founders do not change fast enough. How they lead, how they build their team, and how they design the operating model underneath all of it.
Most startup advice focuses on the commercial side. From incubators, venture studios, and accelerators, it is validate the MVP, nail the GTM, perfect the pitch, close the round. From investors and GPs, it is scale the revenue, hit the milestones, prepare for the next raise, enter new markets.
What gets far less attention, at any stage, from any part of the ecosystem, is the deeper how. Not just the product management side, although that is taught in accelerators and online courses. The harder questions.
How do you set up a founding team with the right chemistry and ways of working?
How do you build values that hold and design a culture on purpose rather than inherit one by accident?
How do you design teams and departments around the customer value chain?
How do you scale that design across multiple teams, divisions, and markets as the business grows?
How do you build a truly agile business, where 90 day cycles, 30 day delivery rhythms, and weekly sprints run across every function, not just product and tech?
How do leaders and teams come together to plan, execute, test, learn, and coordinate across all of it?
What are the behaviours, mindsets, and ways of working that make all of that actually function?
Some founders learn this through trial and error. Some get coached. Some read about it. Some were part of an organisation that underwent this design. But knowing the theory is very different from doing it under pressure. Most of the advice that exists sits a level above where the real work actually happens.
Building and running a business with people, systems, and ways of working is fundamentally different from building a product. The product is one dimension. The human and now AI augmented operating system underneath it is another entirely. Very few people in the startup ecosystem teach founders how to design their teams, their leadership structures, and their business for success and eventual scale. Most assume it will figure itself out. It does not.
I have worked with founding teams and scaling businesses across three continents over twenty years. The what is rarely the problem. The how underneath it almost always is.
Here is what I would do at each stage, if I were building from scratch today.
Stage one: Inception to pre-seed
Problem solution fit through to early traction and MVP validation
At this stage, the focus is right. Get to product market fit. Validate the problem. Build the MVP. Test fast. Learn faster. Iterate before the runway runs out.
But there is a second layer of work that almost every founding team parks to the side because it feels less urgent. It is not less urgent. It is the work that determines whether the team survives long enough to reach product market fit in the first place.
The part of how nobody talks about
Most early founders are still learning the product management side, the MVP cycle, sprints, validation. That is fine. It is learnable, and there is plenty of support for it.
The operational, structural, and cultural side is a different story. Most founding teams are two to four people trying to build something together under significant pressure. That is one relationship, one dynamic, one set of expectations that either gets designed or gets left to chance. Almost nobody in the ecosystem talks about getting this right because technically there is no business yet. There is only a founding team. That is exactly why it matters.
First time founders skip it entirely. Serial founders do better, they have felt the damage of skipping it before, and they show up with more care around the teaming side. But even experienced founders typically spend 90% of their energy on product and commercial work and 10% on the structural and cultural foundations. The ratio is still wrong.
The honest reason is not ignorance. It is capacity. Serial founders are running hard. What they need is someone fast, affordable, and experienced enough to come in and do that work alongside them, so the foundations get built right without pulling them off the thing only they can do.
Here is what I would prioritise above all else:
Priority one
Agree your cadence and execution rhythm, together, before the pressure hits
Do you work in one week sprints or two? Does every founder operate on the same cadence, or is the engineer running a different cycle to the commercial lead? Decide this together before the pressure sets in. When one founder is running two week engineering sprints and another is making daily commercial decisions on a different rhythm, the misalignment does not feel structural. It feels personal. That friction kills founding spirit faster than any market challenge.
Priority two
Define how the founding team works together, out loud, on paper
What does your weekly rhythm look like? When do you come together to reflect, learn, and refocus? What do you expect from each other? What are your individual and collective commitments to this stage? These sound obvious. They are. Very few founding teams answer them before the pressure forces the conversation at the worst possible moment.
Priority three
Establish early cultural norms, this is the foundation everything else is built on
The habits and chemistry you establish in those first weeks become the foundation for everything that follows. The culture you build at Series A, the operating model you design at Series B, all of it traces back to how the founding team worked together in the early days. Start with bad habits, or let bad habits take hold, and they are twice as hard to break later. Culture is not something you design at Series A. It is something you either build on purpose from day one, or inherit from the chaos of not thinking about it.
The founding team is the first version of your culture. How you work together now is the blueprint for how the business will work at scale.
Stage two: Seed to series A
Early growth, first hires, and the transition from founder led to vision led
You are hiring now. More people, more opinions, more hands, more lines of communication for the message to travel. The team that once sat in one room now spans functions, time zones, and experience levels.
The founder is still involved in everything. Understandably. This is their vision. Their company. Founder led intensity is what got the business here. But it has a limit. At this stage, that limit arrives faster than most founders expect.
The founder must become a visionary, not remain an operator
Most founders struggle with this transition, not because they lack vision, but because everything still feels personal. The business is theirs. Letting go of the doing, even when the business needs them to, is harder than it sounds.
That only happens when the founder invests in the aligning. Hire well. Empower leaders. Help those leaders own their piece of the mission so completely that the direction flows from founder to delivery team naturally, by design, not by the founder being in the room.
Here is what I would prioritise above all else:
Priority one
Design ownership, do not assume it transfers with the job title
Redefine roles, responsibilities, and ownership clearly. Not to create bureaucracy, but to remove ambiguity. A job post lists responsibilities. An HR profile lists skills. But having something listed and designing for it are entirely different things. When you hire, you hire for capability. But you also hire for capacity. This person needs these skills because we need them to run point on this, own that, lead and steer this. Most businesses hire well and integrate poorly. The role exists on paper. The ownership never transfers. Six months later, the founder is still making decisions that person was hired to make.
Priority two
Build a planning and delivery rhythm the entire business runs on
Twice a year, bring the leadership team together to set big strategic focus areas. Where are you going? What are the big bets? What does the next six months need to look like?
Every 90 days, translate that strategy into specific initiatives and priorities and allocate capital against them. This is how funding gets the right home and runway stays managed. But the 90 day cycle is not just an execution tool. It is also your moment to assess. Markets shift. Conditions change. What felt like the right priority three months ago may need to be reconsidered. The 90 day rhythm gives the business a regular, structured opportunity to make those calls, adjust focus, and reallocate resources before drift sets in.
From there, leadership sets OKRs they own and cascades them into delivery teams. Those teams break the OKRs into a clear 90 day scope. Every two to four weeks, leadership and delivery leads track performance, assess what is working, and decide what needs to change. Two parallel tracks. Both designed. Both running at all times.
Priority three
Give people a real voice, culture is a design input, not a morale exercise
Run culture and operating model health checks every quarter. But they only work if people tell you the truth. Give them a genuine mechanism to surface how they feel about the business, about leadership, about the culture they work inside every day. What excites them. What disappoints them. What they need more of and less of. Leaders will always have a hunch about what is broken. They will almost never know why unless they ask and actually listen. You hired these people so they could be successful too. What they tell you shapes how the business evolves. Part of every funding round should go toward that evolution, the ways of working, the training, the coaching that keeps the business healthy as it grows.
The founder's job at this stage is not to run the business. It is to build the leaders who run the business and make sure every one of them carries the vision as if it were their own.
Stage three: Late series A to series B
Scale up, new markets, new layers, and the battle for execution precision
The business is scaling now. New markets. New layers of leadership. New hires who did not grow with the company, who bring their own culture, their own habits, their own ways of working built somewhere else. Sometimes that is exactly what the business needs. Sometimes it is disruptive. Either way, how you integrate those people into what you have spent years building is one of the most important things you will do at this stage. Left to chance, it fractures everything.
Here is what most founders do. They let leaders and teams figure it out. The intention is empowerment. The result is fragmentation.
Leaders optimise for their own areas. They chase their OKRs. They build their teams in their own image. Silos re emerge hard, particularly across distributed and globally dispersed teams where the informal glue that once kept things connected no longer exists.
The communication challenge grows with every layer added. Strategy and direction now need to travel across markets, divisions, and functions that may never sit in the same room. What felt clear in the leadership meeting arrives three levels down as something slightly, dangerously different.
Here is what I would prioritise above all else:
Priority one
Make leadership alignment so robust the business runs without you
The planning rhythm and delivery cycle need to be so embedded that if the founder took a month off, the business would not miss a beat. That is the test. Not whether the founder trusts the team. Whether the system runs without them. Strategy and direction need to travel all the way from founder to delivery team without losing clarity at every layer it passes through. If it does not, the founder is still the operating system. At this stage, that is a problem.
Priority two
Hire for the operating model and bring in expertise to build the capability
The operating model needs a dedicated owner at this stage. Hire a growth lead, strategy lead, or transformation lead with a clear mandate to own and evolve how the business runs. Not someone with a day job who also handles strategy to execution. Someone whose entire focus is how the business plans, coordinates, and delivers as it scales. Then bring in an outside expert to set the foundations alongside them, accelerate the learning, and transfer the knowledge. The goal is building the internal capability to run and evolve the operating model permanently.
Priority three
Make the strategic choice and back it with data
By this stage, you should know what your competitive edge is and what you want to be known for. Companies win through differentiation, execution efficiency, or both. The strongest businesses build both. But that requires significantly more capital. If capital is constrained, pick one and understand the full weight of that choice. If you compete in a crowded market where the product is head to head with others, your edge may not live in the product at all. It lives in how you operate. How you execute, allocate capital, and move faster with less waste than the company next to you. Making your operational efficiency the moat means your cost to deliver and grow becomes the competitive advantage. Push hard on product innovation, or push hard on how the business runs. Both are defensible. But you cannot drift between them. Pick one, back it with data, and design everything around it.
At this stage, growth is not the problem. How the business runs at scale is. Your operating model is the multiplier. It turns a great product into a dominant business.
The thread that runs through every stage
The what changes constantly. Markets, products, teams, complexity, all of it shifts at every stage. But the how underneath it holds the same thread from the very first days of a founding team all the way through to scale. How people work together. How strategy reaches the people doing the work. How culture is built and protected. How the business evolves as it grows.
Most founders focus on the what. The ones who build companies that last focus on both the what and the how. How you start is how you build. How you build is how you scale.
Companies do not scale. Capabilities do. Build them intentionally, at every stage, before the weight of growth makes them harder to build.
Continue the conversation
If you are a founder navigating any of these stages and the operational layer is getting harder, not easier, that is where the real work begins.
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Greg Tennant, Scaling Partner to Startups and Investors
Greg Tennant is the scaling partner to some of the world’s most ambitious founders and senior leaders. He is the founder of andExecute, where he helps startups and scale-ups make scale work. Over the last 20 years, Greg has worked across APAC, Central Asia, EMEA, and the US, supporting growth, expansion, and operational scale across more than 20 countries. His experience spans technology startups, global corporations, and industries including automotive, energy, finance, telecommunications, retail, and hospitality. Through andExecute, Greg helps businesses stay aligned, effective, and coordinated as complexity increases. His belief: scale is not a strategy. It is a capability.
