Building a successful startup isn’t just about growing revenue or users – it’s also about growing yourself as a leader. As your business scales, the transition from founder to leader can be one of the hardest shifts to navigate. Many Perth entrepreneurs start as hands-on innovators, but to guide a larger organisation, you must embrace new roles: visionary strategist, team builder, coach. In essence, scaling a company requires scaling your leadership. This blog explores the mindset and leadership development journey a founder must undertake to lead a growing business, drawing on wisdom from entrepreneurial playbooks and leadership experts. If you’re a founder in Perth with big growth ambitions, here’s how to ensure your growth as a leader keeps pace with your company’s expansion.
Why Founder Mindset Matters in Scaling
We often hear heroic tales of visionary founders, but the reality of entrepreneurship is more gruelling. As Reid Hoffman writes, “easy, inevitable success” stories are myths – in truth, the startup journey is filled with massive challenges, delays, and setbacks. Thriving in this journey starts with mindset. A growth mindset for founders means viewing every challenge as a learning opportunity and being willing to evolve. In the early days, your passion and grit got the business off the ground. But what happens when your startup matures from a tight-knit team of 5 into a company of 50 or 100? The skills that made you a great founder (hustle, control over every detail, working crazy hours) won’t necessarily make you a great scale-up CEO.
As your company grows, your mindset must shift from solopreneur to organisational leader. This involves a few key attitude changes:
- Letting go of absolute control: The “I do everything” approach must give way to trusting others. Founders who micromanage or make every decision become growth bottlenecks. A scalable leader delegates and empowers a team of talented people.
- Embracing process and structure: Early on, processes felt like bureaucracy. But at scale, the right processes (for hiring, for product development, for customer service) create consistency and free you from constantly “putting out fires.” A mature founder doesn’t rebel against structure – they leverage it to enable faster growth.
- Long-term vision over short-term reaction: Startup life is firefighting; scale-up leadership is steering the ship. As a leader, you need to spend more time on strategy, culture, and removing roadblocks for others, rather than handling all the day-to-day tasks you used to.
Crucially, self-awareness is the foundation. Not every brilliant founder automatically knows how to manage a 100-person organisation – and that’s okay. The key is recognising that you need to grow personally for your company to grow. Adopting a learner’s mindset (sometimes called the “beginner’s mind”) will set you up for success. David Kidder, after interviewing dozens of legendary entrepreneurs, noted that becoming the best entrepreneur you can be requires “a never-ending and humbling commitment” to reflect, learn, and improve. In other words, great founders are constant students of leadership.
Adapting Your Leadership through Each Stage of Growth
One thing is certain: the role you played when your company was 5 people will look very different when it’s 50, 500, or 5,000 people. In Blitzscaling, Hoffman uses a vivid metaphor to describe scaling stages – from Family to Tribe, Village, City, and Nation – each roughly an order of magnitude bigger in team size. At each stage, the demands on a founder’s leadership fundamentally change. Practices that worked in the “family” stage “break down once the scale-up reaches the next phase”. For example, when you led a Family-sized startup (say 5-9 employees), you were likely involved in every hire, knew everyone personally, and made most decisions directly. By the time you have a Village or City on your hands (hundreds or a thousand+ employees), that intimacy and direct control is impossible – and trying to maintain it would be disastrous.
Hoffman points out that each stage has critical differences in management and leadership. “When you’re head of a Family, you have close relationships with all members. When you’re the head of a Nation, you’re responsible for people you’ll never meet.”. The lesson for a scaling founder is clear: you must evolve your leadership style at each phase of growth:
- Family (1-9 employees): It’s all about direct action and passion. You’re leading by example, doing individual contributor work while also setting the vision. Communication is informal and constant.
- Tribe (tens of employees): You become a team leader. You still know everyone, but you start delegating tasks. You establish first-level managers or team leads. Communication needs to be a bit more structured (regular meetings, updates) to keep everyone aligned as the team expands.
- Village (hundreds of employees): Now you’re a organizational leader. You likely have layers of management. Your job shifts to setting strategy, clarifying culture, and making sure the right people are in leadership roles. You can’t be in every decision, so you focus on empowering others and establishing clear values and goals.
- City/Nation (thousands+): You become an enterprise leader. Much of your role is representing the company externally, guiding high-level strategy, and trusting a strong executive team to run operations. Communication is formal (think all-hands meetings, company-wide memos). You rely on data and dashboards for insight, since you’re too removed to see issues firsthand.
While most Perth startups won’t become “nations” overnight, the principles apply even on a smaller scale. For instance, a local Perth tech firm growing from 5 to 25 staff will feel the strain unless the founder steps back from every technical task and grooms a leadership team. We’ve seen founders who successfully navigate this by hiring a seasoned operations manager or a CTO, freeing themselves to focus on strategy and client relationships. Others bring in mentors or join peer networks (like Entrepreneur’s Organisation or local incubators) to learn how to handle the new challenges of managing a bigger team. The bottom line: as your startup grows, deliberately upgrade your management approach. Each stage of growth is like graduating to a new level – it comes with new responsibilities, and yes, you might feel like a novice again. Embrace that. Seek advice from those who’ve led at that scale. Your willingness to adapt is what will carry your company through its growing pains.
Building Your Team and Developing Leaders
No founder can scale a business alone. One of the smartest things you can do is surround yourself with talented people and develop leaders within your team. Think of it this way: early on, you hired people to do the work; as you grow, you need to hire (or develop) people to lead the work. Your success as a founder-turned-leader will increasingly be measured by how well you can build a leadership engine beneath you.
Here are key steps to building that leadership capacity:
- Hire (and empower) the right people: Jim Collins famously said to “get the right people on the bus.” For a scaling Perth company, that might mean bringing in experienced hires who have scaled companies before, even if they come from Sydney, Melbourne or overseas markets with deeper talent pools. Look for individuals who not only have the skills but also align with your values and vision. Once on board, trust them. Micromanaging senior talent will simply drive them away. Instead, give them ownership and hold them accountable for results.
- Create a culture of growth and learning: Encourage your team members to develop new skills and step up to new challenges. This could mean investing in training programs, leadership workshops, or simply a culture of mentorship where senior staff coach junior staff. A practical tip for Perth businesses is to tap into local networks – for instance, the Perth startup community often hosts peer learning sessions and meetups. Support your emerging leaders in attending these; they’ll gain confidence and new ideas.
- Delegate decision-making: A common mistake founders make is trying to sign off on every decision as the company grows. This not only slows things down, but it deprives your team of growth opportunities. Start by delegating smaller decisions, and progressively larger ones, to your team leads. Show them you trust their judgment. If mistakes happen, treat them as learning moments rather than reasons to grab back control. Over time, you’ll create a team of problem-solvers, not just order-takers.
- Retain your talent: As you scale, the competition for skilled people heats up – and Perth has a tight-knit business community, so word gets around. Develop a reputation for being a founder who invests in their people. Celebrate their successes, give credit publicly, and offer clear paths for career progression within your company. Remember, your goal is to turn early employees into the future managers and executives of your growing firm. When people see growth opportunities, they stick around and commit to the company’s success.
It’s worth noting an insight from The Startup Playbook: successful entrepreneurs “assemble networks of support – teams, finance, and expertise – like pioneers preparing for a long journey”. In plain terms, don’t try to do it all yourself. By investing in your team and building a strong support network, you not only multiply your company’s capacity, you also lighten the personal load on yourself. Leading a scale-up is intense, but having fellow leaders to share the responsibilities makes it far more sustainable (and enjoyable!).
Lifelong Learning: The Evolving Leader
Leadership is not a static skillset – especially not in the dynamic world of startups and scale-ups. The best founders view leadership growth as an ongoing journey, not a box to check. In fact, stepping up as a leader often exposes how much more there is to learn. This humility is a strength, not a weakness. Remaining curious and open to new ideas will keep you and your company adaptable.
Consider adopting some of these practices to continue developing your leadership capabilities:
- Seek mentors and peers: Find someone a few steps ahead on the journey – perhaps a Perth founder who scaled their company or an executive from a larger company – and learn from them. Regular coffee chats or an advisory relationship can provide invaluable perspective and prevent you from reinventing the wheel. Peer founder groups (like a CEO roundtable) are also great for sharing challenges openly and getting advice in a trusted circle.
- Keep reading and upgrading your playbook: Tapping into thought leadership can spark new insights. Books in your library – from Blitzscaling to Scaling Up, from Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers to Patrick Lencioni’s team leadership fables – all contain principles you can test and apply. Make it a habit to periodically revisit key chapters or read new leadership material. Even seasoned CEOs say they continuously learn by reading; for example, learning how to avoid “willful blindness” in decision-making or how to foster innovation at scale. Each stage of growth might cause you to seek out different knowledge (finance management, international expansion, etc.), so stay curious.
- Solicit feedback – and act on it: As a leader, honest feedback can be hard to come by (your team might hesitate to “criticise the boss”). Proactively create channels for feedback on your leadership. This could be anonymous team surveys or hiring an executive coach to do 360-degree feedback interviews. Showing your team that you’re willing to improve sets a powerful example. Maybe you discover that your team feels uninformed about company direction – you can fix that by communicating more openly. Or you learn that your tendency to jump in is undermining managers – you can work on stepping back. In short, continuously refine yourself just as you would your product.
- Maintain your resilience and well-being: Scaling a company can be stressful. It demands not just business skill but personal stamina. Don’t neglect your own well-being – burnout can undermine your ability to lead effectively (as many founders learn too late). Build habits that keep you grounded: exercise, time with family, or simply connecting with Perth’s community and enjoying our great lifestyle. A clear, healthy mind will make you a better decision-maker and a more empathetic leader.
In the end, remember that becoming a great scale-up leader is a journey, not a destination. In The Startup Playbook, Reid Hoffman compares entrepreneurship to “jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.” By the time you assemble that plane and it starts truly soaring, you must also evolve from pilot to air traffic controller – guiding not just yourself but a whole crew and fleet. It’s a challenging transformation, but it’s one you can master through dedication and learning.
Lead Your Business to New Heights with Rolling Start
Every founder has the potential to grow into an exceptional leader with the right support and mindset. At Rolling Start, we are passionate about leadership development in Perth’s startup community. We’ve helped founders transition from working in the business to leading on the business – developing the skills to inspire teams, implement scalable systems, and drive strategic growth. Whether you’re feeling the strain of letting go or unsure how to build a management team, we offer coaching and practical frameworks (drawn from first principles of the very books discussed above) to guide you.
Your business can only scale as far as your leadership will take it. The good news is that you don’t have to figure it all out alone. With Rolling Start as your partner, you can accelerate your growth as a CEO while avoiding common pitfalls on the scale-up journey. Ready to become the leader your growing company needs? Contact Rolling Start today – let’s work together to turn your startup success into lasting, scalable success, powered by strong leadership.