I’ve worked under 3 different companies over the last 5 years that have gone on to be EXTREMELY successful (each passing a $30M annual run rate):

1. 
   Closers.io

2. 0 Percent

3. Fundera (acquired by Nerdwallet back in 2021 ago)

All 3 of these companies had leadership teams comprised of 2 key personality types who also had 2 main skill sets.

Let’s dive into this:

Leadership Personalities:

I think you need:

1) a great Founder and

2) a great Operator

(generally these two are in direct contradiction to one another).

Both of these, in my personal opinion, should own a substantial amount of the company (they shouldn’t be employees, managers, or other people who can walk away).

I believe a Great Founder is someone who moves insanely fast, can wear a lot of hats, has a really high pain tolerance + thrives in chaos, and never overthinks things (simply takes a ton of action).

They’re like a racehorse - they just put the blinders on and run as fast as they can.

This is the type of person who:

• 
  thinks of an idea on a Thursday

• throws together the funnel + launches ads (with an aggressively high budget) that night

• takes sales calls all weekend

• …and has found someone to fulfill by Monday

None of these things has to be done at an A+ level…but they have to be done extremely quickly (and good enough).

Someone who moves like that is the perfect Founder in my opinion.

For example:

At Fundera, our CEO Jared Hecht was an absolute terminator.

This guy founded Groupme (a group - messaging app, very similar to whatsapp), built it, and sold it for over $80M in 385 days (at 25 years old btw).

That’s a VERY fast exit.

He later took Fundera to a 9 figure exit in 5 years. Not as fast as Groupme, but it was a much larger exit and required him to be more intentional.

Which ties into point #2.

At scale, relying solely on a Founder doesn’t really work.

Which is why you need a good Operator.

I think a good Operator is someone who takes all of the 1,000,000 different things that the Founder is doing and finds a way to get the entire team to execute on it (without everything falling apart).

The Founder leads the vision and the action-taking, the Operator creates systems to make the Founder’s vision happen.

For example:

When the Founder decides to double the previous month’s quota (based on no data whatsoever)…

The Operator is the one who reverse engineers this and runs the numbers on:

• 
  how much call volume has to increase

• how much the paid traffic budget has to increase

• how many more people need to be hired on both sales+CS…

• then most importantly…has the leadership skills to make sure that the team can actually make this thing happen

For example:

My VP of Sales at Fundera, Tommy McNulty, was a beast of an operator.

He had ridiculously high sales quotas imposed on him, a minimal budget (which obviously effects the talent of employees he could hire), yet he still managed to grow revenue 100% year over year consistently for 4 years in a row.

Many times, the employees of the company KINDA HATE the Founder.

The Operator is the one who keeps everything from falling apart, keeps key employees from quitting, and basically manages execution of everything.

I will say after having worked for and consulted with TONS of companies over the last few years…

I’ve met a TON of really great Founders.

Not to sound “woo-woo” but I think being a great Founder is mainly a mindset thing and that it can be learned by simply surrounding yourself with a bunch of other great Founders.

Yet I can count the number of great operators I’ve met on one hand.

I think it’s one of those things where you either have it or you don’t.

…and most people don’t (I certainly am not a good operator).

I believe a great Founder can take a company to $250,000 - $300,000/mo, but very often plateaus at this range.

But when paired with a worldclass operator, this is ultimately the key that takes them to $10,000,000/year and even $30,000,000/year.

Let’s shift gears here and talk about the next topic:

Skillsets

I think it’s pretty simple…

I believe equity owners need a worldclass sales mind and solid marketing mind (assuming you’re not starting a SaaS or tech company that will need a killer CTO or someone else with an engineering/coding background).

Sales has a few pieces to it:

1. 
   Raw sales skills - can they hop on calls and close deals (a great Founder can put the team on his back, pound sales calls all day, and take a company to $100,000/mo - I’ve seen it happen plenty of times)

2. Sales process - can they build a seamless sales process. Is it simple enough that you can hire 2 setters with zero sales experience and 2 closers, insert them into the business, and have them do a decent job.

3. Sales leadership - can they spot sales talent, bring them in, and turn them into a top producer. In addition to this, can they spot LEADERS. Can they develop a head of sales, and sales managers under them. This is a necessity once you hit the $10,000,000+ range and it’s also extremely difficult to accomplish.

It’s one thing to do this on a smaller scale with say 2 Closers and 2 Setters.

It’s a TOTALLY different ballgame when you’re doing $30M/year with a 60 person sales team.

Entropy sets in.

A bad Manager has an entire team that fails.

This one time at Fundera, we had a Manager named Jason.

Super nice guy, incredible individual contributor as a salesperson.

But he had no clue how to manage a team.

He had a team of 10 people (5 AE’s 5 SDR’s) and the entire team underperformed. Basically everyone had to be fired.

Therein lies the difficulty of sales leadership.

Opportunity cost is VERY high at scale and has massive costs associated with it if you fuck it up.

If each of those 5 AE’s had a $100,000/mo quota (or $1.2M annually) and all 5 got fired, you’re now $6M under your annual quota.

When the Founder is trying to sell his company during the middle of COVID, having a $6M hit to revenue is NOT a good look.

This is why it’s super important that you become even more disciplined and level up the standard as you grow because you INEVITABLY have bad hires and sales team churn that skew your numbers.

Sales can’t function without marketing, I believe marketing needs someone who is fullstack:

1. 
   Knows how to create great offers

2. Writes solid copy

3. Knows how to run ads

4. Ideally has some random tech skills (knows SEO, CRO…etc)

5. Can adapt quick to changes in the advertising landscape

(side note: I think that a lot of Founders don’t know how to run ads even at a basic level and this is a HUGE mistake because they have no pulse on whether their media buyer or agency is doing a decent job or not).

At Fundera, our CMO, Meredith Wood was absolutely DOMINATING the game with SEO (we had $1M+ unique site visits per month driven mainly through SEO).

We were doing $37M/year and the large majority of that came from SEO, which makes for an extremely profitable business.

One day, Google’s algorithm changed and we lost our #1 ranking for “small business loans” and got moved to the bottom of the first page.

Luckily Meredith was able to adapt, we scaled FB and Google ads quickly, got our SEO fixed within a month, and were back on top of the game.

I wouldn’t necessarily say SEO is the best platform to build a company off of in 2023…

But my point remains the same - someone from the leadership team needs to be adaptable and able to learn new platforms (and quickly).

They need a killer pulse on the market to know what offers will work and what won’t work.

I think copy is very important in some markets (like coaching/consulting) but I think it’s less important in others (tech startups for example).

Overall…

I think that if a leadership team can pull together these two personalities and two skillsets, it is basically inevitable that you’ll be really successful.