“Landfills are the next cigarette.”

While some entrepreneurs start in garages, Nate Morris began his crusade from a garbage dump.³ After graduating from Princeton with a master’s degree in public administration, he stumbled on the perverse incentive of the garbage-hauling business. The two largest players in the space, Waste Management and Republic Industries, generate much of their profits through owning landfills and charging customers a tipping fee for dumping each ton of garbage into the earth. With such financial incentives, Morris worried how the industry would ever be motivated to divert more garbage into the recycle stream.

Righting the wrongs of the waste business became his mission and that of the company he founded and runs, Rubicon Global. He created what is known as an asset-light business, in which his firm owns no trucks or landfills, but rather provides a brokering system, as Uber does with passenger cars. Morris aspired to help large customers like Wegmans Food Markets and Walmart divert more of their garbage to recycling. His company studied the contents of their dumpsters and bid out contracts to haulers who specialized in each kind of material—one hauler would take the glass, another the cardboard, and so on. In so doing, Morris figured out a way to increase the proportion of dumpster waste that could be diverted to recycling; his firm now often reduces the annual costs of his customers’ garbage collecting expense by 20 to 30 percent.

Morris’s recruiting efforts in his fledgling business were aided when Oakleaf, the first company to attempt this strategy, was scooped up by the industry leader. This powerful incumbent disassembled Oakleaf, leaving the vision of increased recycling as one more idea thwarted by the power of capital and the seduction of trading mission for money.

But this is the very stage on which Crusaders love to play. The vision was validated, the first company to pioneer this approach had been acquired by the “black hats” (in the vernacular of a classic western movie) and now the Crusaders must only ride in on their steeds, gallantly restate the vision, and draw the experienced talent to their side of the battle. And this is just what Morris did. Once their noncompete clauses had expired, Morris recruited the top five executives from the remnants of Oakleaf, attracting them with his mission and the opportunity to realize their original dream. Morris captured his motivation for the Rubicon crusade in the simple line: “Landfills are the next cigarette.” Maybe soon, thanks to Morris and his business, Americans will have landfill-free communities like we now have smoke-free offices.

As Geoffrey Moore would describe it in Crossing the Chasm, Crusaders excel at securing support from early adopters willing to take a chance on a largely unproven solution to an important problem. These customers like to be in on the ground floor of helping build a big dream. The transformative value Crusaders can create in the solution dynamic is precisely the ability to attract newcomers—team recruits, early investors and alpha-stage customers—to the vision itself.

Capturing the “lost boys” through in-game advertising

Katherine Hays, a serial entrepreneurial leader, was the first person to build a new media business at scale capable of delivering the “lost boys” demographic of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old men, who in the early 2000s had dramatically reduced the number of hours they watched television. She transformed a small tool company that served video-game developers into a major media company by figuring out how to insert what appeared to be outdoor advertising in the context of video games in real time. Massive Inc., her in-game advertising company, enabled major brand advertisers like Sprite and Dunkin’ Donuts to show their ads as billboards in car-racing and first-person shooter games. This idea enhanced the perceived reality of the game while tapping an incredibly valuable audience.

Hays created something from nothing in the complex video-game ecosystem by aligning the interests of three constituencies. Most people might not see inserting advertising in video games as a crusade as worthy as diverting more garbage from landfills into the recycling stream. However, her approach reveals a key attribute of the Crusader: the ability to observe alignment gaps and opportunities in the complex network of interconnected players. She listened carefully to the wants and needs of game publishers, advertisers, and hard-core gamers and then stitched together a solution that created and captured enormous value. For game publishers, Hays helped to produce about 33 percent more profit per game sold. For advertisers, she delivered a highly valuable and difficult-to-reach audience. For gamers, she enhanced the immersive experience, making the games more realistic with current advertising campaigns that were simultaneously running in other media channels. Microsoft marveled at her creation and acquired her company for $280 million.

If you are a corporate Crusader, you face particular challenges inside established companies, unless your particular vision aligns clearly with the professed strategic priorities and competitive positioning of your firm. If it does, you can become an influential banner carrier, showing your colleagues—through personal example and leadership style—how to accomplish the company’s version of the crusade you and the company care about. This kind of crusade is like any new product—it faces tough odds and needs lots of trial-and-error testing and the ensuing flexibility on your part to incorporate critical feedback into your planning.

If, on the other hand, your vision is not on your company’s radar screen at all, be prepared for a different kind of campaign altogether. This situation calls for clever and creative translation that clearly connects your notion with something else your company does care about, whether that’s differentiating your firm’s brand reputation, getting on the Best Workplaces list, or winning the Baldrige Award for quality.

If you are a Crusader operating in either the corporate or startup context, converting your idea to product requires your missionary zeal to align the interests of heretofore-disconnected parties. Ben & Jerry’s did it by connecting the best-tasting ice cream in the world to social activism. Nate Morris did it through leveraging technology to connect independent recycling haulers to national customers like Walmart. Katherine Hays did it by inserting advertising in video games in real time, making the game more realistic for gamers, delivering a valuable audience to advertisers and more profit to game publishers.

“I’m successful at giving a lot of rope, but not too much.”

A digital media company founded by Katherine Hays, who also built the aforementioned startup that inserts real advertising in video games, helps consumers create branded content they can share virally. At ViVoom, Hays seems to have struck just the right balance of attracting capable collaborators who thrive within a nondictatorial environment. She explains her approach with her collaborators: “I try to make sure the team has a really clear mission so people can make their own decisions at every level. If everyone understands why we’re doing it and what we’re trying to accomplish, we will create better outcomes.”

Hays notes who her best followers tend to be: “Someone who’s not at the peak of his or her capability. Someone who, if only given an opportunity and some headroom and a little guidance, can grow significantly in their career, can leapfrog four or five places . . . I think I’m successful at giving a lot of rope, but not too much rope—doling it out at the right time so they’re always just a little bit uncomfortable and have a little more to take on.”

If you are a Crusader, you are probably good at attracting passionate followers, but those followers need your passion translated into nuts-and-bolts priorities, a practice that is not always a strong suit for your Builder Personality Type. If you struggle with this challenge, perhaps Hays is a good role model for you. She is very deliberate in linking mission to task, hiring those who have the competency, and then providing just enough room to grow.

As the business grows, your challenge as a Crusader lies in keeping your troops motivated over the long haul. In the early days of Ben & Jerry’s, explain cofounders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, it was not uncommon for employees to come in on weekends with their own tools to make sure everything was all set for the next day’s opening. Cohen says, “There was an energy and a feeling for all of us, working together and an excitement about growing something out of nothing.” Greenfield adds, “They managed the business through the philosophy of ‘If it’s not fun, why do it?’” Cohen and Greenfield also pointed out that an “inexorable drift toward the mainstream” can easily compromise the very mission, vision, and values with which they started.

A final challenge for Crusaders arises from colleagues’ tendency to see the builder as the personification of the mission itself —a view the builder himself or herself might also share. This impression can be a powerful magnet. But if you are a Crusader, it can also set you up for a feet-of-clay fall if your behavior or judgment do not live up to the ideals or values expected of someone carrying your banner. Your shortcoming can leave colleagues disillusioned and can open the door to the kind of cynicism that might corrode the inspired camaraderie of a Crusader-led business.

The meteoric rise and stumbles of Elizabeth Holmes, the Crusader who dropped out of Stanford University to found Theranos, is a case in point. Fueled by a self-confident, audacious vision of transforming health care (making early disease prevention a reality through access to actionable health information), the company began with a provocative idea for doing blood testing. Holmes attracted not only a cadre of dedicated, passionate followers (including one of her former Stanford professors) to her team but a blue-ribbon board of directors to boot—not to mention an excited group of eager venture capitalists who signed up for the ride.

On the way up to a $9 billion–plus valuation in less than thirteen years, almost everything seemed fine to Holmes’s band of disciples. But starting with some disturbing questions about the veracity of the company’s scientific claims and then investigations by various regulatory agencies, her flaws as a visionary Crusader were revealed. Following multiple investigations by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission, in addition to numerous patient and investor lawsuits, many estimate Theranos to be worth close to zero as of the close of 2016.

As a Crusader, you sometimes need to keep in mind that vision is no substitute for supervision. Like all four types, a Crusader is like a Shakespearean tragic hero, in whose greatest strength lie the seeds of his or her downfall. So it is with some Crusaders in this team dynamic. A mission can attract many people with good intentions, but operational competence aligned with the mission—a far more difficult task—trips up many of your fellow Crusaders as they try to achieve scale.

“We’ll figure out a way to make it happen.”

Nate Morris describes how he approached one of his early and then-biggest sales pitches. He was calling on Wegmans, the Rochester-based grocer and one of the mostly widely respected companies in America: “I walked in wearing khakis and a button-down shirt, no jacket. I was sitting in the waiting room, and there were four salespeople from Waste Management, all in suits and ties, formally dressed, very buttoned up, and I was more casual. It was very intimidating.”

Morris entered the big boardroom with notes he had jotted down on a single piece of paper—the three things he felt he could deliver to Wegmans. But more important than the content of his pitch was who he was and how he connected with this potential first, giant customer. When the Wegmans folks called him back to tell him he had won the business, they told him: “It was a no-brainer for us. Your approach made us feel like we were part of your family, and you seemed to fit right into the Wegmans culture. There was no pretension. You were very humble; you stated what you wanted to accomplish. Your competitors were just a bunch of . . . sales pitches.”

Morris reflected back on that meeting when he spoke with us. “I think we were coming from a very thoughtful place of integrity and a place that we wanted to showcase value.”

The Wegmans relationship has been transformational for Morris’s Rubicon because it led to securing Walmart as a client and, from there, many other major national players. For Rubicon, Wegmans had become the referenceable account every chasm-crossing entrepreneur dreams of. As Morris puts it, “They’ve truly been evangelists for our business. They like the fact they helped build our business and have been able to see it grow. They feel very aligned with our approach and our values and the way we look at the world.” Wegmans is an archetypal example of the early adopter customer.

That’s the kind of bond a Crusader can forge with a very early customer, even one that is on everyone’s A-list of sales targets. As a Crusader, you can rely on the power of your vision to pull others to your agenda, rather than using the product-push approach often favored by your Driver cousins.

Jim Hornthal, a venture investor and serial builder with more than ten startups to his credit across a broad swath of products and markets, has used this ability well. He is somewhat of a composite, with a Crusader-esque sense of mission for his ventures, combined with a Driver’s curiosity and confident market-sensing willingness to bet on his pattern recognition insights about emerging technology or social trends. And more recently, he’s honed an Explorer-like fascination with cracking the code of complex systems, in this case applying the lean startup framework of rigorous, iterative hypothesis-testing with customers to “evidence-based” entrepreneurship and innovation itself. As he says, “The entrepreneur who is not willing to fire the hypothesis leaves no choice but to fire themselves.”

“You gotta look beyond the recipe . . . have imagination.”

Angelo Pizzagalli ran into some problems scaling his construction business, first because his aversion to outside funding and leverage translated into pressure on current cash flow. In his words, “We had to make money!” That meant scaling was a job-by-job grind, and the growth opportunities from future investment in people, technology, or equipment were constrained by the profits available from the current portfolio of projects.

Pizzagalli found that reigniting the entrepreneurial spark in his key people was difficult as the company grew to become a major player in its industry and became more systematic and regimented: “We used to have a lot of discussions with some of the managers because they weren’t acting entrepreneurially. Some of those were hard talks, you know, because we didn’t want them to always follow the recipe. You never get a surprise if you just do that. You gotta look beyond the recipe . . . have imagination.” In other words, as their businesses scale, Crusaders still want their companies to reflect some of the spark and spunk they themselves brought to bear in the beginning.

A challenge all builders face in scaling their companies is the tendency to hire people like themselves. If you’re a Crusader, you may be especially prone to this hiring practice, given your emphasis on the inspirational vision that motivates you. This kind of doubling down on new hires who resemble the founding builders’ own style may work up to a point. For example, Jenny Fleiss commented: “I think I have hired most successfully when I’ve hired mini-me’s. I’m able to relate to most of those individuals—smart, type-A doers, self-starters, go-getters, all-around athletes. They don’t necessarily need to have performance conversations all the time. It’s transparent, constant conversation and communication. They’re just focused on the doing. They’re not getting clogged with other stuff.”

But scaling the business can be particularly tricky for Crusaders because they have preferences that can confound the effort. As we have seen, they can attract followers more motivated by the mission than necessarily possessing key functional competence. Some Crusaders prefer to hire replicas of themselves or folks with whom they want to have breakfast and then do not always feel comfortable letting underperformers go.

As a Crusader, you’ll find that translating your mission into a set of values that guide hiring is one of your most important tools to scale the business. Ben Cohen rued some of the hiring choices he and Jerry Greenfield made as their business was growing: “We ended up hiring people who had the skills, but not the values. What we realized was you can teach someone the skills, but you can’t teach them the values. If you [look beyond] what’s going to serve the company for the next little while and focus on what’s really going to make us successful for the long term, you’ll give values a lot more weight.”

So as a Crusader, you may be wondering how to balance your tendency to remain above the fray, recruit those motivated by your mission and aligned with your values, and still ensure the operational discipline to scale the business. Katherine Hays achieved this balance, attracting talent with headroom to grow, clearly connecting task to mission, and then giving her collaborators just enough rope.