The Three Roles of the Founder

By: Rachel Bartholomew

Being the founder of a start-up company is a difficult career path to pursue that requires taking an unknown leap of faith into uncertainty and high risk. There are many reasons why entrepreneurship is difficult and many aspects that explain why only 50% of start-up companies survive after five years. How does a founder manage the blood, sweat and tears of starting their own business while being a good role model for their team and making good business decisions? The choice to become an entrepreneur is challenging because Founders play three roles at one time while trying to succeed and survive.

These three important and challenging roles impact a founder because in most other work situations only one these three roles are usually taken on at one time. These roles include being an entrepreneur, a leader and a manager. The combination of these positions is the reason why a founder feels the extreme emotions, time pressure, stress, heightened demands and challenges they do to keep their company afloat.

The first role a founder plays is as an entrepreneur solving real life problems through creativity and exploration. The entrepreneur side of the founder must be able to handle uncertainty when taking on large risks to create opportunities for their company to move forward. The self-motivation and discipline to stay ahead of the competition and industry, while remaining solutions-driven and innovative in both the problem they are solving with their product or service and the problems that occur in their business, is essential to entrepreneurship.

Secondly, a founder is a leader, not only for their team, but also for themselves, their community and the industry they are trying to make a difference in. They need to be a visionary for all of these stakeholders to push both their company and their industry forward. They must be able to build a powerful vision to create a strong team support system, all while being engaged and interpersonal as a role model of their company. A strong sense of self-efficacy and responsibility within themselves, their team and their company is the foundation for motivating change in their targeted industry.

Finally, a founder also plays the role of a manager, ultimately managing many things; both the things they love to manage and things they have to manage to keep their business alive. At the operational level, they are organizing, commanding and monitoring their team while executing the vision they initially set up. They are also controlling the plan to reach goals, providing feedback along the way and sometimes even doing the operational work themselves.

To provide some key advice to be able to take on these three roles at once, a founder must be able to handle their personal life and their business separately with healthy time, stress and growth management. If they are able to isolate business pressure from personal pressure, they will be able to achieve great management, leadership and entrepreneurship.

Rachel is the Founder of The Mod Market, a software company supporting the aftermarket automotive industry and is a recent graduate of the Masters of Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology program at the University of Waterloo. She is also an Entrepreneurial Advisor to approximately 200 undergraduate and graduate start-ups in the Waterloo region and has recently taken on the position as Managing Partner for CyberNorth Ventures Inc., an investment fund focused on seed stage investments into technology companies based out of the Waterloo region.