Acorns to mighty oaks: scaling from solopreneur to corporate giant

In this blog written by member Richard Swale, we discuss the unique challenges and opportunities of the non-executive role in growing a start-up business and supporting a solopreneur on a journey to building a corporate. We invite you to read on to inform you view on whether you would thrive in such a role given the specificities.

Introduction

Entrepreneurs building business from scratch face a wide range of challenges. “Being your own boss” can be truly exciting activity but unless the ambition is to have a business constrained by a single resource – the entrepreneur – there is the need to add people to take on specific roles and responsibilities to get the business beyond the initial phase. This means taking a hard look at the various tasks the company needs to perform on a day-to-day basis and think about the tasks that need to be undertaken to scale up and beyond the single trader business. Non-Executive Directors and Advisors can play and essential part in achieving this path to sustainable growth.

Growing up, growing down and growing across

A single entrepreneur will quickly become aware of the hats that need to be worn to get things going. They may also be aware of some of the specialist skills required to build a sustainable business. Some of these specialist skills can outsourced; for example, the basics of finance and tax reporting can be outsourced to a general accounting practise, or legal services secured to address the basic areas needed by any small business. However, as the opportunity for expanding the business becomes clearer, the need to bring people in to take on specific roles and responsibilities will become both more apparent and more critical to ongoing success.

Look at a large company, such as one of the household names from the FTSE100. The annual report and accounts will disclose a mature and complex management structure of a fully fledged board of directors, non-executive directors and operational managers with responsibilities for large portions of the company. A start-up will never look like this, nor will it need to – and nor should it! So how do we go from the acorn of the single entrepreneur to a bigger, grown-up, business that is enabled for sustainable growth and able to take full advantage of the market opportunity envisaged by the entrepreneur?

Just like a tree, a start-up business will need to push roots down to grow. This means adding employees to the business, so activities such as sales, marketing or the operational production or delivery of the goods or services offered can increase in scale. A key facet of this phase will be ensuring those aspects of the day zero business that the entrepreneur feels most comfortable with off-loading to someone else are clearly defined with job specifications that allow the entrepreneur to cleanly off-load the tasks and responsibilities defined while ensuring overall management control and governance is maintained. Clearly during this initial phase, some functions such as accounting can be simply outsourced to specialists in their field. This can free up the solopreneur to focus on the fundamental core value-add of the business.

With success will come the need to expand the resources within the company, to ensure the key differentiator of the business is expanded to meet demand. This presents the solopreneur with a number of choices;

• expand the functions of the business with the creation of a board – bringing in specialist focussed directors to grow the capacity and capability of the company,
• add non-executive directors to provide breadth of perspective outside of day-to-day management activities,
• create an advisory board to engage specialists who can help provide limited access to specific skills necessary to help the business grow, or
• add employees to take on specific roles and job functions.

Depending on the specific nature and circumstances the business finds itself in, one, some or all these options may be appropriate vehicles for helping the solopreneur grow and expand their business. Prospective Non-Executive Directors or Advisors therefore need to understand the stage the business they are looking to engage with is currently at in terms of maturity and how the specific skills, knowledge and experience they have can contribute to its future success.

Related resources: member success stories

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