While a certain drive is needed in a founding team to go from concept to startup.
Sometimes new skills are needed to lead the bridge between startup and scaleup.
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And who should you be looking for?
But when a company starts growing, this changes.
First you have no board.
Then you might get investors.
Then you get a board at the scaleup level.
And once you land serious financing, you also get serious oversight, van Nispen says.
This is also the phase when cracks in the founding team start to show themselves seriously.
She says:
Moving into a scaleup, you need specialists.
And that can be hard, because sometimes people who founded the company just dont fit anymore.
First of all, the final decision to replace someone can often take six months or more.
Often, the board will give the responsible department head a few board meetings to catch up.
Two things are important to have clear before setting out to find a new candidate.
First, a company needs to know the cause of the initial problem.
Second, you gotta have a clear and unanimous strategic goal.
Say you want to conquer the German market in the next year.
How do you attract suitable candidates?
Everyone is aware of the ongoing war for talent facing scaleups.
Good compensation is probably not the (only) answer.
C-suite roles at scaleups all offer similar salaries, stock, and benefits.
She says:
Its all about people.
you might have great plans and amazing financial forecasts, but the people have to execute those.
So the team is incredibly important.
First, there are entrepreneurs who are passionate about founding.
They love setting up a business, scaling it, selling it, and doing it all over again.
Second, there are people who are passionate about inventing creating new, better products and innovations.
And finally there are people who thrive on developing things like team-building, culture, and are more people-focused.
Difference in intensity of passion was another indicator of success or failure.
She mentions that more and more VCs are taking these types of personality tests along with due diligence processes.
This in turn creates a clear job description, with actionable challenges the company is facing.
