A founder-CEO shares four mistakes he's made: floating half-baked ideas that confuse your team, overthinking instead of executing, juggling too many initiatives at once, and letting impatience damage relationships. Focus on three key decisions a day and delegate everything else.
Earlier today, I was talking to a founder CEO about how I was a terrible CEO once. I basically made more mistakes than you can count, and I certainly made all the mistakes that everybody from afar would be like, dude, that's a mistake. And so I thought about what some of those things were and what kind of advice to give this person as we were talking about it. And so I wrote some of them down and I'll share them with you here. So the first one was one of the mistakes that a lot of founder CEOs make is they share too many ideas before they're fully baked, right? So they have an idea, they have a thought, they call somebody in the office and say, hey, why don't we do this? Or they say it at an all-hands meeting, oh, I think we might want to consider doing this. What happens is a lot of your team will hear that and be like, oh, that's great, brainstorming back and forth and not really do and take much of it. But some team members will be like, oh, now the ship is heading in that direction, and they'll start running or looking towards an idea, towards an endpoint that to you was just a random thought. So just be mindful of the fact that all eyes on you and sharing things before they're fully baked can cause the ship to go in a different direction than you actually intended. The second thing is Execution overthinking. So execution instead of thinking, not overthinking. And the point here is that, you know, as a CEO, it's really important that you just do the things that just you can do. This is not about letting everybody else do everything else, but it's about being mindful that there are certain things that your position, your role is the only person in the business that can take decision on. You can involve others in the discussion, but at the end of the day, you need to make a decision. And so you should spend your time on those issues and execute, execute on those issues. Anything else should be delegated. A lot of thinking can be done by other people. It's, it's fun to sit around and think big thoughts, but in essence, what your team needs is your decision-making ability, and that requires a mental capacity and space to execute when somebody comes to you with an issue that only you can make a decision on. So that's another one. Doing too much at the same time. I think we've all been guilty of that one. So trying to do all sorts of different things. Oh, we're going into Spain and France and, oh, we're also going to launch a digital new service and we're hiring 15 people and we're doing all this other stuff. So a lot of the time it feels like there's a lot of things that are important. And they probably are. But you cannot do a lot of things well at the same time. So the greatest tool in your arsenal is going to be sitting down and saying, all right, today, what are the 3 things I need to do? What are the 3 decisions that I need to make in order for our business to move forward? Then tomorrow I can look at other 3 decisions. But it's not about throwing more up against the wall. It's about how do I make a decision today that moves our little boat forward in the right direction? Um, the 4th one and last one— well, not the last one, there are many more— but the 4th one I thought of earlier today was being impatient. A lot of founder CEOs are by nature impatient. They want to get to market. They want to show the world their brilliant idea or their brilliance, whatever they may feel. They want to go out there and do things, and they want to do them fast. Impatience is good, but it's not good when you start becoming impatient with the people around you because you either haven't explained something fully enough, they are working on something else that you were impatient about last week. Impatience is an energy inside of you that can drive you to start making decisions, as I talked about, but it shouldn't be something that spills over into your relationship with your colleagues, or anybody else around you. That's really tricky to manage that balance. So the next time you find yourself being impatient with somebody around you, think, well, am I impatient with them specifically, or am I impatient with how we're moving forward as a company? Most often it's the latter. Then you need to look at the choices that you've made, the decisions you've made, and evaluate those before becoming impatient with the people around you trying to execute. Those were 4, uh, kind of rules, uh, to avoid making some of the mistakes that I've made. If you want to hear more about the mistakes you can make as a CEO, as a founder of a company, let me know in the comments and I'd be happy to record another video on mistakes.
