Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Welcome everyone, thank you for joining this Mishcon Academy Session, it’s part of a series of online events, videos and podcasts taking a look at the bigger issues faced in society today. Just to introduce myself, I am Geoff Dragon, I’m one of the Partners in the Emerging Companies Team here at Mishcon de Reya and I’m hosting today’s event. So I am joined today by Simon Court. Simon has worked as a leadership coach and guide to business founders, leaders and leadership teams for more than 25 years um, and has a huge breadth and depth of experience across sectors, cultures and types of company, working from kind of start-ups right through to EC Fits and sustainable businesses. Um, he is also the author of ‘Founder’s Legacy’ – 50 game changing leadership lessons for great businesses. Simon, welcome um, tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of your experience to date?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
So uh, I guess there are three parts to my life and you’ve covered a couple of them. One, is I am now an author since last year, I published Founder’s Legacy. Secondly, I’ve founded my own company, 27 years ago Value Partnership, it’s a leadership consultancy. I founded it with my wife and uh, it’s still doing amazing work around the world today and I’m chairman of that and uh, the third part is me as a leadership coach uh, leadership team coach and I’ve as you’ve said, I’ve been doing that for the best part of 30 years now so uh, along the way I have worked with businesses, of all scales really from the huge to the small, very small and the last 10 years I guess I’ve been really focussed on working with founder CEOs to help them to grow their companies and uh, I helped to create two unicorns in the last 10 years, Miniclip and Tipico, so they, all of that experience I’ve tried to somehow condense into the book.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
And, and on the kind of your, your style of leadership coaching and you mention it in the book.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
You talk about how typical coaches like to kind of ask a lot of questions and let their clients kind of find the answers. That’s not quite your style. Am I right in that?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah I think that’s uh partially true. I mean I, there’s a lot of coaches out there who are following a process and uh, they don’t ever leave that process because they are so committed to it. I nearly said wedded to it, but let’s just agree they are committed to it. Um, given I’ve got all that experience it seems a shame to me to keep it all locked up and not to share it or use it so I do share my experiences sparingly but I do share it because I think it’s valuable and I try and do it in a way that, at the right time in a way that’s useful to the client because with all those variety of businesses that I refer to you know, they all need to hear different things at different times so that’s part of my judgment I guess.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
And I don’t want to start off this kind of conversation on a gloomy note but I think it is important to address it and…
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
…um, you mentioned it in your book and, and we kind of mentioned it a lot to our clients and we use it in the marketing for this event um, but we quote you as saying kind of 9 out of 10 start-ups will fail. Um, with your experience and your kind of expertise in this area, why do you think that is and what can we do to kind of change and help that narrative?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah it’s carnage isn’t it really. Uh, so I think creative destruction is part of capitalism and as long as we’re are running a capitalist economy, uh, we have to accept there’s a certain amount of failure. However, um dig into the data a little bit, uh, the 90% number is based on, the explanation of why it is 90% is founder reported reasons. So when you look into those reasons they are typically things like uh, run out of cash, uh, didn’t find product market fit, got out competed, uh, the founding team sort of fell out uh, there’s a host of things. There’s about two dozen things I think that come up. The thing you notice if you look behind the data is that what they all have in common is a founder who uh, didn’t find the answer to some of the big questions facing their business, they didn’t know enough about how to raise money, they didn’t surround themselves with the right people um, but there’s a host of things and what they all come back to is the capability of the founder and their ability to lead their mason business. So my conviction about this is that if a founder can learn to lead they can mitigate a lot of those risks. They can’t prevent all of them but a lot of the ones that I describe are highly preventable and I think it is quite important to help founders to recognise what learning to lead really means and my um, intention here is to write a book that gives founders the learning they need to reduce the risk of failure but also turn that on its head, enhance their chances of success considerably. So back to a more positive mind-set about this. Um, but there is one thing that you may have picked up because I know you’ve read the book, there’s a chapter in there about what I call the, I’m not the first person to call it this, but the founder’s mind uh, founder’s trap.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah, yep.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
And um, for those who aren’t familiar with it or haven’t read my book, the founder’s trap is the idea that despite their best intentions, and their commitment, their grit and their hard work, founders sometimes are their own worst enemies and uh, the time you notice this most I think is when the business has got to a certain size, and a certain level and the next stage requires it to scale. And that scaling requires a set of skills and capabilities that many founders have never learned. And why would they really, they didn’t set up a business to become a leader, they set up a business to solve a real world problem or…
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
…to do something amazing. So uh, I try to fill that gap through my coaching and uh, in a way through, now through my writing.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
And you mentioned obviously Founder’s Legacy is, is the book. You mentioned kind of wanting to help and kind of give them the tools that founders need so predominantly the book’s aimed at founders. What’s kind of the core purpose writing it? Was it a, uh, was that you kind of identifying a gap in the marketplace or were there people that you’d coached saying, ‘hey Simon you know, you should actually get some of this stuff down’ and um…
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
People have been saying that to me for years but I mean writing a book requires like committing probably 2 years of your life really. And I am not sure I could have afforded to do it or I knew enough when I was younger. I wish I had known what I know now when I was 30 or something but such is life right and so um, so the book is aimed squarely at founders who want to learn how to lead and it’s also aimed at leaders who want to lead with a founder’s mind-set because I believe that a lot of corporate managers and corporate leaders would really benefit from learning from that founder mentality. And um, so given that um, I think my hope for the book is that it really does um, unlock knew learning for leaders, for founders they learn to lead and as a consequence they, just think about the potential economic and social value of reducing that failure rate from 90% to say 85%. It doesn’t sound like much. You scale that up though, it’s potentially enormous and um, that, that is my hope I guess for the book.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Perfect and you’ve kind of split it out into, into chapters. The subtitle is 50 game changing lessons to building a great business. Um, why did you structure it that way and also if someone’s reading the book and the founders are all leaders, how should, how should they or how should they read it…
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Make the most…
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
…yeah get the most out of it because you know, we spoke about the founders trap just now and as I said before, kind of if you flick to the kind of contents page there’s certain chapters like founder’s trap that kind of grab your attention straight away?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah, yeah no that’s, that’s all very intentional I can assure you. So, so the book is in three sort of chunks. The first part is what does it take to lead. So it talks about things like um, courage. It talks about risk, it talks about the growth mind-set you need to be a great leader. Um, the second part looks at the job of a leader so we are looking at things like how do you build strategy, how do you create a culture that is distinctive and really drives performance. And the third part deals with all the sort of tactical challenges that every founder will be familiar with such as hiring or managing performance issues or um, you know, so very basic things like listening which are remarkably important um if you really want to learn and grow. So um, that’s how I sort of structured the book. Um, the 50 chapter idea was simply that um, founders are unbelievably busy people so 50 ten minute chapters is a lot more digestible than 10 thirty minute ones or whatever it is. So uh, it was intentionally made to be a kind of companion, uh, it’s not a novel, it is a sort of a book with information and knowledge in it and it is designed to replicate in a way what it would be like to be coached by me I guess. Scary thought I know but I mean, it’s a lot cheaper than being coached by me and it, it is um, so what you find in each chapter is uh, some information about the issues involved in that. You’ll get a bit of theory, you’ll get some stories to bring it to life and then at the end of each chapter there are some questions. They are the kind of questions that are using coaching and my hope is that people really reflect on those questions and even further, they act on those questions, they… because the only way you learn how to lead is through practice so what I want the book to do is stimulate people to think differently and then act differently. That’s how you get better I found.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
And, and we’ve spoken a bit in kind of who the books for but there seems to be quite clear in your mind definitions or distinctions between these are founders, these are leaders um and, and you know, you can be both. They are kind of separate concepts so can you define what you mean by founder versus what you mean kind of by leader and how you distinguish between those two?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yes they are definitely not the same thing and sometimes they confuse um, uh so the founder is the biological parent or parents of the business right. They bring it into the world through their own sort of hard work and um, imagination and creativity and they have a very great attachment to it which shows up in both positive and negative ways but they um, they passionately care about its long-term future and it’s mission and what it’s trying to achieve in the world. Um, leaders uh, are the people who take responsibility for the current performance and future of a business and they have a different mind-set and they take decision that not only affect things like it’s mission and it’s product but they care about every aspect of the business and they take responsibility for every aspect of the business. So ownership and leadership are not the same thing. We know that in big companies, it’s obvious to us. The shareholders and the management are distinct but sometimes they get a bit confused in growing companies and I think it’s really important that founders don’t just think of themselves as founders that when they step into the CEO job they actually learn the job which is why there is a chapter in the book called ‘Job of the CEO’ because I don’t think you learn that as a founder. Where would you learn that? You have to, you kind of learn it on the job right?
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah and you spend so much of your time you know, dealing with issues as they crop up, trying to raise funds which takes you know, can take months out of your time, you don’t actually have time to scale up yourself necessarily as you go along the way which is crucial.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
I quote Ben Horowitz, who’s a well-known entrepreneur and venture capitalist in the book and he said the thing that seems to surprise investors and it shouldn’t is that founders don’t know how to do the CEO job, they really don’t and so uh, we need to help them to learn otherwise their business will fail and um, yeah so, finding the right founder, the right co-founder as well, this sort of brings us into things like team dynamics, the, I think that’s quite important as well because a lot of businesses are not a solo founder right, they’re a co-founder or two co-founders.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
And so you know, taking it back to kind of companies that are starting up with that founder lead businesses and we talked about you know steps you needed, they are not kind of necessarily ready for the CEO role. What can that mean for kind of founder lead businesses in terms of you know, what strength do those founders bring because they bring a lot of strength to the role.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah they do yeah.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Um, but also what kind of weaknesses, what are those kind of gaps?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
It’s almost as if you, you take every one of these strengths that I am now going to talk about and if you turn it over you’re going to see the, the weakness that is visible in it. So um, you know, start with this amazing sense of purpose. Their, you know, founders are generally more purpose driven I think than a lot of corporate leaders you know, you get appointed into a senior leadership job and you start talking about purposes, it’s like a mission statement on a wall but for founders it’s in here. And of course the, when you lift that up what you find is that after a while they are so deeply attached to that um, and they can become so wedded to that that they can lose sight of all the other things that matter when you are trying to build and grow a company. Um, they have immense energy and they um, and drive and you can see it in some of the well-known founders that we see in public life um, and of course that sometimes means that they just don’t know when to slow down, when to reflect, when to stop listening to other people um, their egos can run amok even um, uh, what else. They, they are risk takers right, they love, they don’t view risk in the same way as most mortals do. Um, but of course sometimes that means that they take excessive risk and uh, they are a bit blind to the consequences of that risk so there are lots of ways in which founders bring this incredible energy, this creativity, this obsessive drive and this kind of um, impressive force of nature. It’s like an elemental force really into the world and at the same time they, they can stop listening to other people. Uh, they won’t or don’t build a team, they try to do far too much themselves. They have a sense of uh, themselves that is a bit disproportionate to the success of their enterprise because they can’t do everything. They simply can’t and uh, it’s really important that they grow into somebody who recognises that I am trying to build a culture in which lots of people can contribute to this mission as opposed to me and my close mates if you like.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah and it’s you know, it’s something that we see quite a lot with some of the clients that we act for when there’s you know, especially in those larger teams that you mention where everyone’s trying to have a role but actually acting as a group is, is important as well.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah. I mean if you ask investors to describe a management team and we’ll get into this sort of topic of teams a bit later I think but investors tend to view a team as the sort of the sum total of all of the different competencies that are represented in it. But the way I view a team is that it is about not just that, but it is also realising the synergies between those people and getting it really functioning as a high performing team. That gives you next level performance. Um, so it’s not just the names and the job titles and a chart that they stick at the back of deck to try and win uh, some investment. It is actually about building a real team of people who can do uh, who can outperform.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah, but I appreciate we’ve you know, we’ve spoken a lot about the founders and um, and the challenges of going to CEO, we’ve probably made it sound slightly daunting to, to some. Um, but it can be done uh, you know some people have natural leadership qualities but it can be kind of learnt and you can skill up and that’s a process that you go through. You, you mentioned you kind of worked with a couple of unicorn companies and actually a lot of the clients that you work for are founders becoming leaders.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Mm.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Can you give us an example of a CEO that you’ve worked with if possible, where that transition has happened and you’ve seen that kind of flourish and be a success?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah for sure I think I’ll talk a bit about Rob uh Small who um, he’s, I guess he’s one of the heroes of the book um, so Rob um, founded Miniclip, the gaming company in his bedroom um in the 90’s and uh, he did a fantastic job with Miniclip.com in building it into a website which had a lot of traffic and what little revenue he did have come through advertising but uh, it wasn’t monetizing particularly well and by the time he got to 2020 when I met him um, the business had flat lined and it was in a lot of trouble and Rob was unsure what to do and one of the reasons it was in difficulty is because um, good old Steve Jobs had introduced the iPhone 3G and every gaming company was building mobile games and Miniclip was on the web. So there was a big decision facing Rob uh and he had uh, he wasn’t equipped to do the CEO job, he didn’t have a team that was good enough to uh, make the pivot to mobile. He didn’t have a strategy at the time to move to mobile and uh, he was yeah, he was in a lot of trouble.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
And uh, when he and I first met, we, we started sort of exploring all of this and um, we talked about his options because one of the options facing the founder is to sort of stand back and hire somebody to come in and do that job right, the CEO job and uh, Rob didn’t have enough money to do that so we had to make uh, a decision and it was pretty obvious what it was, that Rob had to grow into the CEO the business needed. Rob had the kind of mentality to role his sleeves up and say, okay what do I need to learn here and we started by transforming his team. One role, one person as a team, we started to make progress, built a strategy and uh, Miniclip was sold less than 3 years later for, um, well in excess of uh a billion um, Euros, Dollars, Pounds whatever you like and um, it was bought by Tencent of China uh, Rob realised his dream for the business. Today Miniclip is uh, is probably revenue of a billion, not valuation of a billion. It is a phenomenal success story and I think it, it largely resulted from Rob truly embracing the CEO role and having that growth mind-set you need to make that change. Now if I just to finish on that, I think there were like three things that, by the way this is for every coaching assignment I’ve ever done, I look for these three things in somebody to have a sense of whether they can make that, that growth journey or not. One is do they see themselves accurately, have they got realistic self insight and Rob was under no illusions about where he was and what he knew and what he didn’t know. He had that lovely honesty about this is who I am, um, can I do this? Um, the second thing is, is he motivated to make this transition and it was about rescuing his company which deserved to be rescued really, um, and then the third part is, do I know what to do differently? Can I, do I understand what are those new behaviours that I need to practice? And I, I just said to him, I can help you with that, you know, we can work that out together.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
And so we started that journey together and, uh, it was a phenomenal relationship. I don’t know if you can imagine this but the thing about coaching is it’s all done in private, behind closed doors.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Which is why writing a book was quite difficult for me really because I think I am sharing all of this stuff and I, I had to be very careful what I could say about whom because it’s, a lot of it is confidential. So I tend to talk publically about success stories and, and obviously for people who went through a tough time I’ve disguised them, names and so on so, yeah.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah. Amazing. And Rob, I mean I am massively grateful for Rob for, you know, most IT lessons in high school and then, you know, I’m still playing Miniclip games now so I’m glad it pivoted. Um, you know he sounds, you know, he, he is someone that doesn’t sound like a great CEO who became an exceptional CEO in quite a short space of time.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah, yes.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
I know you’ve touched on, um, his humility and I’ve heard him speak and that comes across in terms of, you know, how he approached that but are there, are there other lessons more generally that, that founders can, can learn from someone like Rob in terms of how to approach that transition?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
That is, that is a really great question, um, I should probably answer it, I just wanted to say to you I was in, with him and his family and my wife and I in Estonia and we’re getting a ferry across to an island where nobody lives and the ferryman when he discovered that this was Rob Small, the founder of Miniclip, he just started talking about all the games he played when he was a kid.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah I was there.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Um, even in rural Estonia. So, um, so yeah what are the lessons about Rob, uh, and how applicable are they beyond that. So Rob, um, he is a great leader, um, but he’s not a unicorn if I, if you like, himself. He just did the work and, um, the things that we worked on together I think there were probably four things. One is, which I’ve already touched on which is his learning to be a great CEO. So learning what are the things that, I haven’t wanted to focus on in the past but I need to put a lot more time and energy into now. And he was prepared to do that work, um, and he had me to help him with that. The second thing is he built a fantastic team and every founder either knows this or finds out the hard way that this is true. If you can build a great team, your business has potentially got lift off already and so we worked out how to build a great team and for him that meant facing some very difficult personal challenges with, because one of the things that founders do is, you’ve probably experienced this, they tend to surround themselves with people they know and trust, uh, sometimes even family and friends and they are not always the best people. Um, the difference in leadership mentality is I am going to surround myself with the very best people who will know what to do, uh, when faced with a difficult contract in United States or a, uh, an advertising decision or whatever and so we together worked to transform his team into a great team. The third bit, is, is about strategy, um, there was a bit of prevarication because the website was something he was deeply attached to, it was sort of his baby and that attachment thing that we talked about earlier that founders have was probably getting in the way of the necessary change the business needed to go through. So we went all in on mobile, uh, you have got to have a strategy that solved the decisive challenge facing your business otherwise you won’t be successful. You have very limited resources as a founder right, so you’ve got to make your bed and go all in on it otherwise you’ve got no chance. And then the last thing is, it makes it sound like it was all pretty straight forward. It was one problem after another. I feel like it’s a casualty department of a hospital sometimes. You, you need a triage nurse at the front just telling you whether you, can you save this patient or not? Um, so I think his resilience and his grit stemmed from his purpose and his belief that he will find a way to do this and I think that’s probably one of the things that all founders need in spades is this incredible grit and resilience. And it’s super hard building a successful business.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
It is and you never know what’s going to kind of come up next that’s going, it’s like you said, it’s like a casualty room and it’s, again, yeah you made it sound like it was, um, you know, let’s deal with this, let’s deal with this, let’s deal with this and obviously that’s, when we speak about it, that’s how we talk about it but all those things are happening at one time right and it’s…
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
At breakneck speed.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah at breakneck speed, exactly. It’s difficult. Um, you kind of mentioned it previously when we were speaking about the book and the book being in three parts. There’s a, a kind of a theme running through the whole of the book I guess but especially in the first part of it that’s around personal growth of the founder and…
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
…that kind of shifting from, from kind of founder to CEO and how you deal with that, um, you know, recognising strengths and weaknesses, having some humility, um, identifying kind of the founder’s patterns, what needs to change, uh, how you deal with failure of which there is, uh, you know, we talk about nine out of ten start-ups fail but even the successful ones have a number of failures along the way which they have to get over. Um, why, why do you put such an emphasis I guess on the first part on personal growth and, and those types of items?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah. So, um, I guess when you think about Rob’s story you can see how important that growth mind set was.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Um, and growth mind set is the chapter one in the book, it’s not an accident obviously. Um, look I mean, uh, you are faced with so many things that can disrupt you as a, as a founder, the, things like interest rates or what, what Donald Trump decides to do today, um, they’re, they’re not within your control so when you find something that is within your control it’s well worth investing in it and your own mind set, your own growth, your own skills, these are things entirely within your control. So my starting point for people is to say, look I’ve got some good news for you, you can do this, you know, you, it’s a combination of motivation, self-insight and being ready to try and practice new skills and new ways of acting and, um, so that is why that is sort of a central plank in the theme of the book I guess. Um, and then we come to sort of self-insight, um, so if you know your strengths you can focus your energy and, uh, you will target things which really play to your strengths. Uh, if you know your weaknesses, you can, um recruit people and surround yourself with people who can compensate for your weaknesses. If you don’t have self-insight you can do neither, you’re kind of blind so that’s why I believe self-insight is an absolutely crucial component of, of leadership and really understanding yourself and how to get the best out of yourself and then the best out of the people around you. Um, you know, don’t make that classic mistake of surrounding yourself with people who tend to agree with you and they look up to you. Surround yourself with people who are different from you and who can provide you with some perspective. Um, what, what were some of the other things you mentioned?
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Uh.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
I’m getting old I can’t remember.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Um, identifying your patterns was, was one and I found that quite an interesting concept, firstly for kind of, what do you mean actually by patterns and then how do you like…
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Your sort of default patterns.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
…yeah, how identifying them can help?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah, yeah no I think that, that’s what we’re talking to with, you know, strengths and weaknesses and understanding your patterns of behaviour. So for example, I had a guy who was coaching who was, um, he was a fantastic problem solver and unfortunately he solved everybody else’s problems for them as well as his own and they felt disempowered by him, uh, and, uh, so through coaching I got him not to let go of his strength as a great creative problem solver but to become a creative problem solving coach. So he helped other people to solve their own problems by helping them to see the question to ask and help them to solve those problems in a more effective way. So they’re a bit wiser and less dependent on him rather than ever more dependent on him. But I think one of the others is humility right.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
And, um, we don’t live in an age when humble leaders are all around you. It is like we are living in the opposite era and yet, you know, I think the truth is that humility is probably one of the smartest places to land if you’re interested in great leadership. It, it’s like a filter, it converts knowledge and sort of evidence into wisdom and insight, um, it stops you from having a kind of distorted view of the world. It enables you to see things accurately and to listen to other people. Um, and as a founder you really do need to listen to the people around you and take on board their perspectives and actually ask yourself, am I right about this? Because lots of time we are wrong, right. But it sort of plays into the other thing you mentioned about failing and being comfortable with failure. I mean you’re going to fail loads of times…
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
…as a founder. I mean, failing fast is now fashionable in founder circles for good reasons right, we want to find the cheapest possible way and the quickest possible way of figuring out what really works and that’s what all start-ups get and not just for tech firms. Um, it’s just a smart way of operation. You really have to put your ego to one side and try things and use failure not as failure but as learning, as an opportunity to pivot and grow and given all the uncertainty surrounding us is the, kind of the only way that makes any sense for us really. It’s how you navigate this world I think.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
I think they all, as you said, they all kind of combine don’t they because you need the humility after failure as well to just say, okay that, we tried that, that didn’t work, let’s move on?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
What have we learned?
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah, what have we learnt rather than, well that failed but I think I can still get to work if I do X, Y and Z and spend a lot more time on it.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
It, it also is the route to success I think because, um, there was this, I heard, um, Roger Federa talking about this. He, he’s got the stats on his win rate, he’s only one just over, I think it was 54% of the, every points he’s ever played, he’s only won 54% of them but when it comes to the really big points.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah, that’s when he wins.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Or when he won.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
So we, you know, we should just really relax about learn, failing and learning from failure.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
And, uh, we, we’re, it’s a lot of strategy, nowadays it’s more sail boat thank speed boat, we have to keep tacking so every time we learn that this isn’t working, we tack and I think that’s true for us as individuals and the leaders and it’s true our businesses too.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
And kind of I guess on that, that theme of humbleness and we talked about kind of certain points and teams, um, as well, I know you quote Steve Jobs in your book when you say, great things in businesses are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people. Which is a, you know, in the earlier Steve Jobs days is probably slightly ironic quote but the…
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
That’s fair actually.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
…but the, the kind of the third part of your book, the final part has quite a strong focus on, well this is how we build and this is how we manage a team.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Um, kind of what’s your advice for founders in those areas because we spoke, you know, you mentioned Rob and his difficulties in, I know from hearing he speak, he said he struggled emotionally with having to say, goodbye to some of his earlier team members. Um, we spoke about how most of our founder teams are not just one person, it’s two, three or four. How do you advise kind of founders and what are your thoughts on kind of team building?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
So, um, there’s a whole science and art to building a great team and I, the first thing I think is to recognise just how important it is. I mean I, um, if you look at sport you can see the mentality they have about teaming, um, it’s not always successful, uh, but, you know, think about the effort and care that goes into selecting players in any team sport on the basis of their skill level, their mentality, their sort of flexibility and positional sense, their level of conditioning and then you think about the work that goes into preparing them for key moments against key competitors, under pressure and helping them to learn how to cope under pressure. And what do we do in business? We kind of recruit people, we view them as somehow distinct positions and we get them in a room and we call them a team but do we do the work? No, in my experience and I, honestly I’ve been called to help so many teams over the years because I’m a team as well as an individual coach and what I see is, teams frequently where trust is low, where discussions are a bit fragmented, where they don’t reach decisions, they don’t reach good conclusions and founder teams are, slightly better than a lot of corporate teams, but they are still not good. I mean they are often dominated by the founder and everyone’s looking at him or her to sort of take their cue. So you, there’s a bit of learning to do here and there’s a chapter in the book, it’s one of the most frequently, uh, cited chapters, Chapter 38. I haven’t memorised all fifty but there’s Chapter 38 and you, in that chapter I set out what are the disciplines that you need to build a great team and what are the dynamics that you’re looking for and that, there’s a bit of magic in that because if you put those disciplines and dynamics in place you will be amazed at the uplift in the performance of your team, I’ve seen it many times. Um, but I think there’s another side to your question about, because there’s more than just building the team, it was, it was about managing, getting the best out of people and, um, let me just think about that for a second. I think, well one thing I would say is too many founders try to be an octopus, they have their sort of hands everywhere and try to shape far too much and, uh, they believe that, you know, if you want it done properly you do it yourself. There’s a little bit of that going on right and, and the more octopus like you are, um, the more frustrated the people around you are probably going to be and, uh, less they are going to grow and you’re not going to get the best out of them and if you expensively hire really good people to do the job, you’re undermining them in a way if you are not careful.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
So I really think founders should think about, they, they need to learn to stand back a bit, learn to empower or delegate, um, and recognise that individually they’re not scalable, um, what makes them scalable is if they build a culture that reflects their values and the way they work. So culture building is another big theme about sort of the second part of the book. Um, other than that, I think, uh, hiring is another sort of big topic, um, founders are always in hurry to hire people and they don’t always have a great process, don’t always do enough care, take enough care over it. So I think, invest in a really good hiring process because every time you recruit somebody you are shifting the culture of your firm, especially if it’s still quite small and every time you make a mistake it’s costing you a lot of time and money, um, so getting the hiring process right and efficient and also really understanding the, what I call in the book, the pivot, the critical combination of capabilities that will make the difference between high performance and low performance in, in a given role. So getting that right is a, is another thing and the last thing I’d probably pick on is, if you want to manage performance and get the best out of your team, um, learn to coach, um, you know, learn to have the right kind of conversations with them over the course of a year and, uh, I sort of like Marcus Buckingham’s idea of a year is 52 short sprints so you, you use every week as an opportunity to reflect on what I learned last week, what went well, what didn’t, what have I learned and what am I going to do next week that is really going to be transformative and really move things forward. Because if you have that kind of dialogue and relationship with the people who work for you, the pace and energy it brings is phenomenal so, anyway.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Amazing and I think, I think there are some valuable lessons particularly, uh, around kind of recruitment and how that’s done. I know you draw parallel to the support a lot in your book and the kind of lessons we can learn but especially around, you know, if you think about the Premier League as it is, so much like data driven, analytics before you, before you hire a player or sign a player, the kind of moneyball aspect to baseball and I think you’re right, we don’t typically when hiring kind of apply those same mind steps, we just think we need someone to fill this position and we’ll, you know, we’ll do a short process and get someone that we feel is right but.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
I mean I, I can tell you a story from a, very briefly, from a, a inshore tech, uh, firm in Austria. They, what happens is when you’re, if you’re an Austrian company you build a successful business ball that works in Austria. You go into Germany, you need a head of sales for Germany and they hired somebody and, uh, they discovered over the course of, so they took probably three months to hire him, uh, they let him go into Germany, six months in there were absolutely no results coming back. Uh, over the next six months they tried to manage it, uh, he was asked to leave after twelve months with no results and, and then another three months to hire, and then three months to get up to, so they lost two years.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Wow.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
And it killed the company and when you look at what they hired, uh, nice fella but he had the mentality and the image, he had a strategist and a relationship builder, he didn’t have the mind set and energy of somebody who is going to win business, convert it and communicate really well with the team in Austria about the progress he’s making and how to accelerate things. So, get the hiring right.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah. Um, I have one final question for you and then we’ll it open it up to the floor and, uh, and online questions.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah, good.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Um, we’ve spoken a lot about founders kind of to build a great business, build a sustainable business, the need to kind of change their approach slightly and become leaders, become CEOs. Um, is there a risk that if we are asking them to make that change that they start to feel like they are selling their soul a little or losing what, you know, the drive that made them want to be a founder in the first place?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah, I’m laughing because I, I’m just imagining if Rob Small was here saying yeah, he would be laughing because he, he would say, well I didn’t sell my soul, I sold my company though for a lot of money. I think, um, no I don’t think, you know, that’s true. I think what they learn when they grapple with this is they just become, uh, they have more agency, they have more impact, uh, I, if you read the book you’ll know that I don’t ever for one second think they should let go of what makes them unique and special and their sense of purpose. So I celebrate that and I think you can combine that and, uh, with learning to lead and I think leadership is their best friend and they need to get closer to it.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
Perfect, thank you. Um, we’ll open up to questions, any from the floor or online?
Audience
Thank you, um, I found that really interesting and I’m looking forward to reading the book. Um, one of the things that you talk about is the, um, the characteristics of founders, were talked about quite a bit. When they come to you for coaching I guess one of the similar characteristics they have is that they’re open to be coached. Do you have any examples of where you’ve managed to persuade somebody who kind of had quite a negative attitude towards coaching to be coached with successful results?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Yeah, that, that, it’s a great question. I, I suppose the first thing I should say if I am being honest is the ones who come to me tend to be the ones who are open to being coached so, it kind of screens out a lot, a lot of more intransigent ones but I have people who have a like a, they seem to flirt with me. Like, there’s one founder, I won’t mention his name for obvious reasons, he, every, every sort of couple of years he sends me a message and he goes, hey Simon how’s it going. I’m thinking maybe we should meet up for a cup of coffee and I get the impression that he’s skirting around this, this idea of coaching but, um, and I think some of the people that I do coach in the early stages, they make the right noises about being open but actually when you start the conversation you realise that they quickly shut down things that feel uncomfortable and, uh, it is actually learning to be more comfortable with discomfort that enables you to grow as a, as a person right. We know that from any part of our life, you know, that you need to find some courage if you’re going to step out of your comfort zone and try something new. So it, I usually find that after maybe two, three, four sessions, uh, that some of those barriers drop and it starts to feel real and I, I know that we’re going to be able to do good work together when they say that, I don’t know what to do. The moment you’re that vulnerable, I feel like, well this is good. I mean they don’t feel good in that moment but I feel really good because I know I can help at that point.
Audience
Hi Simon, thank you.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Hello.
Audience
Um, I was wondering how you would describe the writing process and what would you suggest to anyone that was going to write a business book?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
I, (laughs) don’t do it. Don’t do it if you want to, um, become rich or anything. Um, do it because you have something you need to share with the world. Uh, it’s about having a really strong sense of purpose behind it. That’s what drove me to get up in the morning and do the work and, and then, um, I think, uh, you have to treat it like a job when you’re in the writing process and lots of author’s I think, uh, have learnt this long before I did and I, I just took that advice and so, you know, Monday morning it’s chapter 12 I’m going to, I’ll do my research in the morning, I’ll write in the afternoon and I’ll put it to the test with my wife in the evening and she’ll either send me back to the drawing board or enable me to do some minor editing and more on. And, uh, I have a, a professional editor as well that honestly there’s only one person for most of us I guess, whether it’s a spouse or a close friend, who really knows your voice and whether or not when you’ve written something and you read it out loud whether it sounds like you. And, uh, so my wife deserves more than a lot of credit for the content of this book. She helped me to capture it. Because it’s quite hard when you get to my age and you try to remember so many stories and try to condense all that knowledge, uh, into this sort passion project really.
Audience
Thank you.
Mishcon online
A question from online here, um, if you could give one piece of advice to a corporate leader looking to have more of a founder’s mind set, what would you say?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Goodness, it’s, it’s not hard to think of things, I’m just trying to choose the one thing. Um, I mean every time, uh, you try and change something in a large corporation it feels like you need to get an army of people on board and you need to write a business case and, uh, you know, a business case on a scale that is entirely disproportionate to the thing that you need to try. Uh, I would say just unleash a lot of easy change by reducing the barriers to being much more experimental. Um, it is that experimental kind of approach and mind-set that I think makes founders learn faster, move faster and their businesses move faster. As soon as you, you know, you put in place too much process, too much bureaucracy, you kill a lot of innovation and change. So I, I would probably say that. Make it much easier to try and test new things, um, and by the way, I, it just triggered a story in my mind, I was, um, I did a lot of work with Canon, uh, quite a long time ago and all of their products were designed and created in Japan and here in Europe or in EMEA we would just sell them, find customers for them. Uh, they weren’t designed around customers here, they were designed around the Japanese kind of approach, Japanese mentality. And, uh, they realised they needed more innovation to be able to use their products, uh, in a consumer market so they started acquiring small start-ups, um, in Shoreditch and places like that and the first thing they would do, they would tell them to use their HR, finance, IT and all of their processes and, uh, they were killing the very start-up cultures they were buying, um, it was a huge mistake so you need to really try to find a way of relaxing some of those constraints to encourage a lot more innovation.
Mishcon online
And, um, another question online but one I wish I’d asked myself really. Um, when thinking about building a team, how do you feel about psychometric testing or personality test to ensure you get the right fit?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Oh good, good question. I do actually say a little bit about that in the book, um, so, um, I think they are a very useful, uh, part of a process. Um, in the book I talk about the most powerful tools and the most powerful tool of all is to use a variety of tools in combination to triangulate what we know about somebody but one thing I would say specifically about psychometrics is that, um, people view the product of them as objective truth. They are not. And secondly, uh, psychometrics are designed to measure personality and, uh, personality does not predict performance. So be very cautious about how you interpret that data. I am a bigger fan of things like, um, a tool I mention in here called the GC Index which is basically a, it evaluates what kind of energy for impact you have and it’s a much more behavioural tool and, uh, if they, for example, my, um, my example from the Austrian inshore tech business, if they had done a GC Index on him they would have discovered that he was a strategist and what they really needed was an implementer and they probably would have avoided that very, very expensive hiring mistake. I hope that answer the question.
Audience
Um, to what extent do you think received wisdom on the founder’s journey is predicated on male founders and their approaches? Are there adaptations that need to happen to support more women in designing and building their businesses?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
What an interesting question. So, I was talking to a female founder literally just before this conversation and she was describing some of the challenges she faced in dealing with a male investment community and, uh, the quite male dominated culture that sort of persists particularly around tech start-ups and that sort of whole world so I mean I, you know, Silicon Valley, is just a monster really and a venture capital environment around Silicon Valley is just, uh, is very male dominated, uh, it’s, it’s white, it’s male, it’s got a set of values that it’s now projecting even into Government. So I am going to be slightly wary of how far I go with this line of argument. But, so I, I think that is something that, uh, every founder has to reckon with and try and find their own solution for. Um, there are now communities of female founders, communities of female investors who are trying to find ways of actively supporting female founders. Uh, when I wrote this book I was thinking very carefully about how to frame it so that it doesn’t come across, because it isn’t, as about male founders and how male founders succeed or fail. Uh, it’s not about that, it’s about, when I talk about humility for example, you are far more likely to find humility in female founders than in male founders. Uh, when I talk about emotional intelligence, regrettably as a man, you are far more likely to find emotional intelligence in female founders, you see this time and time again. Uh, male founders are more likely to take big risks and, um, blow things up if they get, if they get those risks wrong so there are some real differences. By the way, the data shows that female, uh, lead founder businesses outperform male ones. So investors are missing out if they don’t invest, it’s foolish and if they are driven by the numbers, they should be investing.
Mishcon online
Um, this is a question from Gail Leonard online, you talk in your book about managing energy, what activities are founders prone to that you think should be the first that should be pruned?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
(laughs). So, hello Gail. I know Gail, bless her. I really like her, sorry this is all going out live isn’t it, um.
Geoff Dragon
Partner, Mishcon de Reya
(laughs).
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
So Gail is a, um, I don’t know if I fully understand the question Gail but, um, I think, um, there’s a whole chapter in the book about you can’t, managing your time is a bit of a kind of dead conversation for me because it’s, you’re completely limited in terms of your time but energy levels can be lifted and sustained and, uh, when I coach people, when they come on lives often it’s on a screen now, you can see from their face almost immediately whether they are burned out and exhausted, they’re feeling a bit defeated or that they are actually in a quite healthy place where you can perform at your best. So it almost takes me back to the previous question about the culture around start-ups is you should be, you know, working 24/7 and forget balanced life, forget the fact that you might have some children at home or you, you have a need to look after your physical health. I strongly encourage founders to look after themselves as, as humans. You know, there’s a stat that says like 70% of founders in the sort of bay area have got a self-reported medical, um, mental health problems. You can’t build a successful business if you’re not well and if you’re not taking care of yourself. So, you know, you should think about this quite carefully. I’m not saying, don’t work hard, I’m not saying don’t work, um, and for short periods you might have to work the weekend and pull out all the stops to get the product out the door. Of course that’s true but don’t transform that into a way of life, the way you should behave every week, week in, week out. It doesn’t work. It will grind you.
Mishcon online
I am just going to try and fit in one more question before we close, um, how important do you think purpose and story is in creating a successful business?
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Well the short answer is very.
Mishcon online
Okay.
Simon Court
Leadership Coach and Guide, Author
Um, the, the storytelling part, I just did some work with a colleague of mine with Saga, um, an amazing gaming company, um, we, uh, this is Saga, uh, this is gaming they, um, and we worked really hard with them on how they tell the story of their iconic products and, um, and what they’re trying to do now in operating much more globally and, uh, that is how leaders in some ways project their vision and their, um, energy to a much wider group. Um, and the whole process of storytelling, something I do explore in the book, you can take a leaf out of some of the greatest storytellers out there, um, you know, individually, sort of someone like Steve Jobs, and I, I take what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to think about, how do you want your audience to think, how do you want your audience to feel and how do you want them to act as a consequence of the story that you tell. And if you think about it on all three levels rather than, how do I want them to think, um, you’ll have much more compelling impact and you are far more likely to affect the way they behave coming out of the room.