A Model for Growth

If there’s one book I’ve recommended to every client this past year, it’s Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams by Matt Blumberg. What I love about this book is how it’s a road map for many of the roles in scaling organizations. 

In session after session, I’ve heard about scaling teams and the individuals that haven’t done their roles before. Without knowing what it means for each function of the business to function fully operationally, and what that function needs to focus on, tend to, and grow, startup employees can feel lost. Heck, so can their CEOs who have never led those roles, nor been in those roles. 

It sounds like variations on a theme of “how do I scale?” and “how do I help the key players on my team scale?” and “what are these roles, and what am I hiring for?”

“I’m needing to hire a new sales leader and haven’t done that before. I don’t know what to look for.” 

“My VP of Marketing is feeling out of her league as the team grows. I think I need to hire above her, but want her to feel like she has a career path. How can I help her out?” 

“Now that we’re of a certain size, I feel like my team doesn’t know what their roles are. I don’t either. But I need them to know.”

“We just raised another round. I’m getting pressure to scale now more than ever. I don’t even know what my job is at this point, or if I’m the person to lead this company anymore.” 

In all instances, I offer up Startup CXO as a place to start. It’s a perfect handbook for all the roles in an organization, what they do, and how they scale. This makes it the perfect primer for anyone in any role in a startup to understand their functional role and the potential for that role even better. 

Because, if we don’t have a model for what’s possible, how do we know what to grow into? If we don’t fully understand our functional role and the other functional roles in the business, how can we be successful leaders of this business function in the larger organization?  

Matt joins us in this podcast conversation with Jerry, in which he talks about his own growth and scaling as a person from his 20 year run as the founder and CEO at Return Path and now in his encore role as one of the founders and CEO of Bolster at his mature and seasoned age of 50.