Being a founder means fighting for the success of your company every day.
You have to figure everything out from scratch, while your team looks to you for answers you don’t necessarily have.
You’re wearing dozens of hats, always working on seizing opportunities as well as fighting fires.
It’s a never-ending crucible, requiring you to show up every day to once again be what Theodore Roosevelt has called “the man in the arena”.
Except you’re not fighting in one arena, you’re actually fighting in three.
Let me explain.
The Three Arenas
For my business coaching, I show my clients that they are constantly facing challenges in three distinct, but related arenas.
The best way to understand these arenas is by visualizing them as concentric circles.
On the outside is the outside world, then comes your company, then comes you.
And each arena comes with its own challenges.
WORLD – How do you stand out in a saturated market, and get players to find, play and pay for your games, or buy your services? How do you identify opportunities, and how do you choose the ones that are right for your company?
COMPANY – how do you ensure that your team is working on the right things in the right way? How do you set up your team for success? And how do you grow the company without losing your culture?
YOU – How do you scale your role as a founder and leader? How do you leverage your strenghts, and minimize the impact of your weaknesses? How do you manage the highs and lows of entrepreneurship?
How to compete in each arena
Each arena is mastered through a different approach.
You manage your relationship to the outside world by defining a coherent strategy. It dictates your unique position in the market, and what games, products or services you make for which audience.
The next circle is the company. Here, you define management structures and processes that allow your team to communicate and work together effectively to execute the company strategy.
Finally, in the middle, there is you. Here, the goal is to improve your self-leadership: improving yourself as a person and a leader, so that you become the best person to deal with the many responsibilities that will come at you as the head of this organization.
How The Arenas Connect
The three arenas are intimately connected.
For example, if your performance in all three arenas is weak, here is how they are likely to interact:
- If you don’t have a solid strategy, you will have to make decisions that are fundamental to your business on the fly. This puts a huge load on your team, who now have to figure this stuff out without clear guidelines.
- This load is even worse if there are little or no management structures or processes in place, and people are mostly left to their own devices to deal with these questions.
- If your team is struggling, they will turn to you for guidance. All of these ad hoc problems will pull you into the operations of your company, limiting the time you have to actually work ON the company, and lead it forward.
- And if you, the final link in the chain, don’t have a grounded understanding of your own capacity, strengths and weaknesses, you’ll end up overstretched and out of your depth. This quickly becomes a vicious cycle that will have you treading water for a very long time.
But even if you already dominate in two arenas, things fall apart without the third.
- If you lack a good strategy, you’ll be aimless even if your team runs like a well-oiled machine and you’re the most self-aware person for miles around.
- If you lack management foundations, you’ll be ineffective regardless of your world-class strategy and impeccable self-leadership
- And if you fumble self-leadership, you’ll have glaring blindspots that will make it that much harder to lead your company to success.
Because both success and failure in one area can quickly spill over to the others, it is crucial to pay attention to your performance in each one.
And to build a truly great company, you’ll have to master them completely.