Chris Kuenne - Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win

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Building for growth is the business imperative for every entrepreneur, leader, manager, and company. So, are you built for growth? Because who you are shapes how you build.

If youre a builder of a new businesswhether youre running an independent startup or a new venture inside an existing companyyou face a unique set of challenges. You must convert your ideas into products, galvanize individual talent for collaborative impact, transform buyers into partners, align financial and executive support, and elevate your business to meaningful scale. And all the while, youre fighting the status quooften meeting powerful resistance to your new idea from people who dont get it.

Weve been intrigued with these challengesas advisers and consultants to organizations and startups, as investors in new businesses, as professors, and as business builders ourselves. Over our careers, we have shared with hundreds of management teams and thousands of Princeton and Berkeley students the principles of starting and growing new businesses, and we have made investment decisions on dozens of fast-growing startups across the market landscape. Through each of these vantage points, we are constantly amazed by the variety of paths leaders and entrepreneurs take to build successful, growing ventures.

Probably like you, we wondered if its possible to codify the different paths of success. Who succeeds, and how? Are there hidden patterns that determine the success of building and growing a new business? How can someone get better at it?

To answer these questions, we employed a patented research methodology to better understand who builds successful new businesses and how they do so (see for a discussion of our research methodology). In addition, we reviewed the literature on successful entrepreneurs and conducted in-depth interviews with dozens of seasoned business builders.

Our conclusionand the core idea on which this book is basedis that the personality of the leader or founder is the animating force in building any new business. That is, the particular combination of beliefs and preferences that reflects his or her motivation, decision-making mode, management approach, and leadership style. These factors play out dramatically throughout the startup and scaling of a new business. The Builders Personality is the essential engine of shaping the team, product, and overall businessbut can also be a formidable obstacle to them. Anyone involved in leading, supporting, or funding new businesses needs to understand how the force of the Builder Personality impacts the growth process.

Of course, many elements shape the success or failure of a new business, whether its a stand-alone startup or a new venture inside But unlike the other resources you need to successfully grow a business, personality is the one directlyand quintessentiallyin your control.

This book decodes the interplay between the business founders personality and the dynamics of growing a business. Our research has revealed four Builder Personalities, and we demonstrate how each one succeeds and fails in different ways in growing a new business. In this practical book, we provide you with tools and examples for assessing your own personality and blueprints to help you apply these ideas to grow your business, build your team, and win.

The Four Business Builder Personalities

Our research has discovered there is no single type of highly successful business builder, but rather four distinct Builder Personalities. We call them the Driver, Explorer, Crusader, and Captain. Each Builder Personality Type builds for growth in markedly different ways, based on four discriminating factorstheir motivation to become an entrepreneur and their styles of decision-making mode, management approach, and leadership style. discuss each of these builder personalities and give examples and stories illustrating how they work. For now, here are brief descriptions of each personality. Which one sounds most like you? After you have read these summaries of the four types, look for the section Which Builder Personality Is Most Similar to Yours? for guidance on deciding which personality you are most like.

Driver:
Relentless, Commercially Focused, and Highly Confident

Drivers cant help themselves. They have to become builders of business or social ventures of their own as a means of self-validation. Entrepreneurship is almost hardwired into their very identity. They are supremely confident individuals, relentless in pursuing commercial success based on their uncanny anticipation of what markets and customers are looking for.

Drivers often dont last long as employees in other peoples organizations. They eschew rules and bureaucracy, seeing them as tools to focus the average person, yet often confine the truly gifted, independent-thinking actor. Drivers are willing to do whatever it takes to realize the commercial success inherent in what they believe is their unbounded potential, in fact their destiny.

While not universally the case, the Driver often has something to prove. Perhaps he or she has been thwartedpassed over or even firedin an earlier job. Or perhaps having grown up in modest circumstances, the Driver is fueled by a desire to apply his or her innate skills to build enormous value and, in so doing, enjoy a better life. Mark Cuban is a famous example. The son of a car upholsterer, he always believed he could and should build a stronger future for himself and, eventually, his family through his drive and innate commercialization skills. This chip on a Drivers shoulder fuels an inner need to prove him or herself to others.

Drivers are not dreamers caught up in the world of ideas; they are doers, willing to outwork, outthink, and outsell anybody in their path. As Ben Weiss of Bai Brands, a new fast-growing healthy beverage company, said, Theres a tenacity to who I am, that gave birth to this