At $20M revenue, a founder needs recruiting first—building a bench of strong functional leaders. Storytelling ranks second, to keep investors and hires aligned on the company's narrative. Financial literacy is third. Negotiation and delegation round out the top five, though the speaker would swap those two in hindsight.
Blind rank how valuable these founder skills are when you're at $20 million in annual revenue. Storytelling. Uh, 2. At $20 million, you're telling your story to possible investors, to key hires, you're repeating it to your team. Storytelling is big at all levels. Recruiting. Recruiting is number 1. At $20 million, your main job is to make sure that you've got a phenomenal bench of functional leaders, and ideally you're starting to build in some people who can step in for you. I'd say recruiting is number 1. Next one is financial literacy. 3. Boy, if you don't have it at this point, you definitely need to make sure that you got it at this point. We're down to 4 and 5. We're at the bottom. Okay. Alright. Negotiation. Yeah, I'm fine with negotiation being 4. I'm a little worried about what we're going to stick at number 5 now. Delegation. Look, if I had to do it all over again, I think I would flip delegation and negotiation. But I still think financial literacy is going to be more important at this point. And if you're recruiting, haha, you are delegating. That's how we make it work. Huzzah! There you go. Perfect list, actually. Perfect list.
