Bill Canady says the skills that work in a startup's early phase become liabilities later. About 70% of CEOs are replaced between months 18 and 24, when companies hit the cost of skipped growth phases. Success requires building clean market segments, real profit margins, and a self-sufficient team from the start.
The skills that win you phase 1 will lose you phase 3 if you don't put them back down and pick up different ones. Second, you can't skip a phase. You can only defer it, and deferred phases get more expensive every single quarter. If you're on day 500 and nobody in your building can state the goal, you don't have a growth problem. You have a phase 1 problem and you're paying interest on it. Okay. Third, 70% of CEOs get replaced And it clusters around month 18 to month 24. It's not a coincidence and it's not bad luck. That's the moment the second phase bill comes due and the bill arrives for a year of expansion that got mistaken for growth. Which brings me back to where I started. Luck is the residual of design. You will get lucky perhaps, but don't count on it. A competitor is going to stumble or a strategic buyer is going to show up with a reason to pay too much. Or a market is going to turn your way for reasons that have nothing to do with you. That's coming. The only question that matters is whether on the day it arrives, your business is in condition to catch it. Clean segments, real margin, a team that runs without you in the room. That condition doesn't happen in the last 90 days. It happens because somebody started designing it on day one.
