From Start-Up To Established Business, These Leadership Strategies Will Drive Success

Organizational leadership begins with the determination and adoption of key corporate competencies

Having led three companies – two of which I founded – that would later go on to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, I have gained a great deal of perspective about leadership. For me, there is a sequential order to starting a business that has largely centered around devising a business model and then arranging a capitalization strategy to open the company’s doors. Once those doors open, things can get very busy very quickly and leaders must be prepared.  

The Four Key Objectives

All businesses exist to solve problems. A problem can be as simple as a restaurant serving meals or as complex as launching satellites into space. Ultimate success comes from conceiving solutions to customers’ problems, combined with a deep understanding of the associated customer benefits. When it comes to getting revenues to pour in, an understanding of the latter is important. As Theodore Levitt, former marketing scholar and Harvard Business School professor astutely observed, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.”
 

All successful companies, even in their start-up phases, have competitive advantages. Successful corporate leadership begins with:
●    An understanding of the problem to be solved,
●    The development of a business model to profitably solve it,
●    A full grasp of the disciplines needed to execute the model, and
●    A feel for the deliverable customer benefits.  

Core Competencies

Building a company around these four key objectives requires the development of core corporate competencies. These are the activities integral to business model execution along with solution and customer benefit delivery. For a company to focus on anything else, especially in its early life, is a distraction that can detract from success.

Much attention is paid to corporate value statements, which set important tones. But I find that corporate value statements tend to have high levels of similarity. Notions of integrity, respect for individuals, customer attentiveness, stakeholder custodianship, and more are universal, and I find myself drawn to most every corporate values statement I have read.  

I believe that organizational leadership begins with the determination and adoption of key corporate competencies. Core competencies tend to be far less universal than corporate value statements. And they are not always simple to determine. Considering what all should be your corporate competencies can take a great deal of collective leadership team thought.    

The companies that I led were engaged in the ownership and long-term rental of real estate to businesses that required such property to conduct their operations. When starting the second and third of these companies, the leadership team and I made various business model refinements designed to reduce our staffing requirements, elevating the simplicity and efficiency of our business model. By limiting our span of direct process controls, we were able to narrow and refine the corporate competencies that would prove essential to our market leadership, competitive advantages, and business model success. We did not focus on anything else.

Organizational Leadership

Leadership is multi-faceted. There is daily and project leadership where Andrew Carnegie observed that leaders encourage teamwork enabling “common people to attain uncommon results.” Then there is fundamental organizational leadership, where leaders work collectively to refine their business models and then buy in to a narrow group of core competencies. As a serial starter of businesses, I found myself often playing in this foundational leadership arena.

Companies are like life forms. Once entrepreneurs unleash a successful business, the leaders they assemble for this effort begin hiring future leaders and staff. Before long, you can find your team growing meaningfully as you run increasingly into new faces in the office. Where your reach once grasped an entire organization, you can find your touch to begin to have limits. This is where organizational leadership becomes so valuable.

Having worked with and coalesced a group of leaders who have bought into a business model and the core competencies needed to execute that model becomes foundational in determining your corporate identity and culture. In the middle of all the many changes and innovations that organically happen as companies grow, organizational leadership remains a constant.

Think Like a Founder

As we would grow our companies over the years, we found it to be important to take the time to have an annual employee or leadership retreats. The general purpose? To refine our business model and to reset our organizational leadership with the help of our growing leadership team.  

Refinements made to organizational leadership make all the difference in establishing that a company has a commonality of purpose. New leaders get the opportunity to think like a founder, contributing to business model improvements and core competency refinements. Collective core competency ownership is foundational to both a company’s mission and the tasks undertaken by leadership. Setting and resetting core competencies is essential for growing leadership teams to think like founders.

Organic growth within a company is healthiest if it plays out within the guardrails established by organizational leadership. It is how companies adhere to the missions set out for them by their original and successive founders. It is how companies avoid unneeded distractions from their corporate competencies. And it is here that leaders can enable team members to work together to achieve uncommon results.

Author Bio

Christopher Volk, the author of THE VALUE EQUATION, has been instrumental in leading and publicly listing three successful companies, two of which he co-founded. The most recent of these is STORE Capital (NYSE: “STOR”) where he served as founding chief executive officer, and then as executive chairman. Volk began writing about corporate finance early in his career, devising the Value Equation concept, which garnered an award upon its 1999 introduction. He eventually created an award-winning video series on the topic while at STORE Capital. A 2019 regional winner of EYs’ Entrepreneur of the Year award, Volk is a frequent university lecturer and serves on multiple non-profit boards. Visit https://thevalueequation.com Connect Christopher Volk