Mike AndesFounder, Augusta Lawn Care and Homeworks · Founder of Homeworks and Augusta Lawn Care

What I Learned Growing Biz from $0 to $50M+ #Leadership #businessgrowth

1 Jun 2024 · 1 min

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Mike Andes reflects on leadership lessons learned while growing a company from $0 to over $50M in annual revenue. He emphasizes a leadership tension: leaders must deflect praise to their teams while personally absorbing blame and customer backlash, a role that grows harder as leaders become more removed from day-to-day work. The segment highlights accountability, communication to customers, and the emotional/operational burden of being the filter for both praise and criticism.

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In growing a business from zero to over $50 million in annual revenue. One of the biggest things I've learned that makes it so hard to be a good leader is the fact that as you grow the business, all the praise and the positive things that happen in the company, you actually want to deflect that praise and give it to your team. Any accomplishments, any sort of public praise, you defer that to your team. But any sort of negativity, any sort of customer backlash, you actually absorb that. You take full ownership of it and have to deal with the consequences and take accountability yourself. The thing is, as you grow a business, especially past a million dollars in revenue, 2 million, 5 million, et cetera, you actually get removed more and more from the actual doing of the work because you're working on the business, but yet you are still the communicator to the customer. And they're going to hold you responsible for both the positive and the negative things that happen. But the problem is, as a leader, you're a filter. Anything that's good goes to your team. Anything that's bad, you absorb it. That gets very, very difficult.