The Fundamental Six

As more high-growth companies turn to fractional leaders to help sustain their business, fractional leaders are coming together and forming communities.

We’ve created one such global community of Fractional Executives and it’s grown super fast.  Coming together enables us to share our models, learnings and experiences with each other across New Zealand, Australia, USA, Philippines, Ireland and the United Kingdom.

Collectively, we’ve noticed clear, profound patterns worth talking about:  

We are being brought into technology startups and high-growth businesses to tackle the same 6 problems. And we’ve all noticed that these are foundational issues, which often mask the underlying causes. 

We call them 'The Fundamental Six'.

Typically, we’ll  meet with a company executive who will explain a series of challenges.  They’ll tell us: 

“Our sales cycles are too long”

”There’s conflict amongst teams” 

“We have so many silos” 

“The sales team is  over-promising the product” 

“Our marketing doesn’t work”; or 

“Innovation is slowing and we can’t evolve the product fast enough”

These statements may sound familiar to you. You may even be facing some of them right now. But when we start to ask key questions, to understand what’s really going on, we reveal that these complaints are merely SYMPTOMS of the larger underlying problems.  

So, we thought we would share our observations of the six fundamental issues facing startups and high-growth companies. In the future, we’ll delve into how to start to fix these issues, but identifying the problem is the first step! 

1. Missing the “Why” – Companies often  struggle to articulate their “Why” and jump straight to the "what.” As well, they have not taken the time to develop values to drive innovation and differentiate them from their competitors. This creates a  “purpose-disconnect” for potential customers.
2. No Data-Driven Approach – Without a data-driven, experimental mindset it’s very difficult to achieve Product-Market-Fit and, ultimately, paying customers.
3. No Standardised Playbooks – Proven Commercial Playbooks are missing from the customer-facing functions (Sales, Marketing, Customer Success) to achieve predictability in leads, sales, conversion and churn retention.
4. Mixing Tech and Product Functions – When Technology teams present themselves as “leading the product” we often find the craft is completely missing from the business. In reality, “Product” is a business function, not a technology one. 
5. Disorganised Company Structure – If the company grew “organically” and without a clear purpose or leadership coaching, growth suffers and creates dysfunction/frustration throughout the organisation. This inhibits the team’s ability to work effectively and harmoniously together as they grow.
6. Poor Strategic Communication and Framework – When company strategy and objectives are not communicated succinctly AND within a framework which can be operationalised across the business, there will be a disconnect between leadership and staff. Strategy will stop at the Executive team. A framework is required to connect the day-to-day work back through to the CEO’s vision, strategy and overarching business goals.

Certainly, we see nuances and versions of these six fundamental problems, depending on the size or growth phase of the company. We see hurdles at 20, 70 and 150. The point is that  if these foundations are not sorted by a company size of 200, then the only strategy left to the business is “innovation-by-acquisition,” due to dysfunction.

We are clear on one thing: there are Six Fundamentals, which we are all coming in to fix. Can you relate to any of these? We’ll provide a deeper break-down of the six  points above, in a series of posts. Help is on the way, so stay tuned! 

Contributing Fractional Execs: Elyssa (EJ) Guren ; Christelle Blanchet-Aïssaoui ; Zachary King ; Abi Williams ; Liza Cichowski ; Jordan Dalladay ; Steph Kumar ; Steve Kazan ; Lone Thomsen ; Shona Grundy ; Michael Gubman ; David Peterson

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