2
THE DRIVER 
Relentless, Commercially Focused, and Highly Confident
If you buy my mussel-shell ashtray, Mrs. Teetor, you won’t have to worry about ash getting ground into your rug.
—Chris Kuenne, age seven, Driver and Rosetta’s founder
One of us (Chris) will share a bit of his own entrepreneurial story: I’ve been an inveterate marketer since I first got the idea of painting the mussel shells I found along the shores of Lake Champlain and selling them as ashtrays door-to-door on Thompson’s Point, where generations of my family have spent summers. It was 1969, and I was seven years old.
I went up to Mrs. Teetor’s house. She smoked like a chimney. I explained the benefits of my painted shells: she would never have to worry about ash getting ground into her rug. I also pointed out how nice they would look around her porch.
The Driver Profile
| Factor | Description |
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| MOTIVATION |
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| DECISION-MAKING MODE |
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| MANAGEMENT APPROACH |
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| LEADERSHIP STYLE |
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Next I went to Mrs. Colby’s cottage. She didn’t smoke, but I figured she would buy my ashtrays because she was very proper and grew up with my grandmother. My pitch to her was different. I suggested she needed ashtrays on her porch when she hosted guests who smoked, while also subtly playing to our multigenerational family connection.
From that point on, I realized I had the blessing some considered a curse: I am a commercial animal—or, as my dad used to put it, I had a dollar sign for a brain. Although at age seven, I would not have described this as an intuitive drive, it nevertheless was. I had a sense of what people wanted and the drive to make it and convince them to buy it.
Fast-forward twenty years. Working at Johnson & Johnson (J&J) on the Sesame Street Vitamins brand, I found a problem with the conventional approach to segmenting consumers. The approach lacked the personality insight I had intuitively used at Mrs. Teetor’s and Mrs. Colby’s doorsteps. My early customers, although of similar age and background, bought for two very different reasons.
In the spring of 1998, I dusted off my ashtray-selling skills, built a PowerPoint pitch, and sold Bristol-Myers Squibb and J&J on my idea for a better, more actionable way to segment customers to improve sales effectiveness. For each client, we discovered the target segment of consumers whose underlying preferences best aligned with each brand. This insight allowed marketing teams to adjust their pitch to each consumer target. We proved this practice made their marketing three times more effective than their prior approach. The results were like my earlier success with selling ashtrays door-to-door: with over-the-counter remedies, personality-based sales and marketing worked much better.
Over the succeeding thirteen years, my Rosetta team and I further refined and patented our Personality-Based Clustering approach to customer segmentation, embedding it in each major form of digital marketing—from building e-commerce sites to customer-relationship marketing. This methodology became the basis for scaling Rosetta to become the world’s largest privately held digital-marketing company, before we sold it to the Publicis Groupe for a record price. In fact, Personality-Based Clustering is the same approach my coauthor and I used to identify the four Builder Types for this book.
In the parlance of Builder Personality, I am clearly a Driver. Early on, I discovered that my purpose was to identify market needs and commercially exploit them as a form of personal validation. If you’re a Driver, you were born to be an entrepreneur. You’re motivated to discover unmet customer needs through a market-sensing intuition and then propelled to build a superior solution, even at a young age. You’re comfortable basing decisions on that blend of confidence and gut instinct.
As Drivers, we have a management approach that is very hands-on and intense, and we expect our colleagues to be equally fixated on impact. For me, this style proved effective early on in attracting many enormously talented team members whose gifts led to Rosetta’s scale and success. However, my leadership style proved challenging as the company scaled to nearly a dozen offices and more than twelve hundred people. I fell into the trap of many Drivers who define themselves through tight control over everything, confusing the seductive quality of management control with genuine leadership—a Driver tendency we explore later in this chapter.
How Drivers Engage:
“I Know What Customers Are Looking For. Trust Me!”
If you’re a Driver, you engage each growth dynamic with intensity and confidence. When it comes to the solution dynamic, you are in your element, sensing market direction and fitting your product to needs that customers may not yet even know they have. Your intense drive helps in recruiting expert employees, early-adopting customers, and certain investors who stoke your need for validation and market impact. But at successive levels of scale in which leadership requires releasing such a tight grip on every aspect of the business and empowering others, you begin to run into challenges. Let’s take a look at each growth dynamic to understand the pattern.
The Solution Dynamic:
Converting Ideas into Products
Ben Weiss is the builder of Bai Brands, the wildly successful new-age beverage that has quickly gained distribution across the country—and, with it, brand loyalists. Weiss started his career in beverages by working on a coffee drink for Godiva Chocolates. This assignment led to his belief that coffee, and its source, the coffee bean, perhaps held the key to a totally new kind of drink. He began experimenting with the coffee bean’s shell—the part usually discarded—because he knew it is actually rich in antioxidants.
Weiss sensed the diet and nondiet beverage segments had evolved to a point where a new opportunity was taking shape. As he explains, “The millennial consumer said, ‘I don’t want to drink my calories and I don’t trust artificial sweeteners.’ So, when I stumbled upon the formula for Bai (making it with a blend of natural sweeteners including stevia, so it only has five calories), I found the answer to the diet dilemma. It’s the intersection of ‘good for you’ and ‘great tasting.’ We are the Bevolution and we’re redefining flavor without sacrifice.”1
If you’re a Driver, your desire to plumb market need and develop product-market fit is a nearly primal instinct. Howard Lerman is a Driver and the builder of Yext, the leading location-based marketing firm. The firm is responsible for ensuring that more than 2.5 million small businesses have their street address, telephone number, and hours of operation accurately represented in every major search engine. Yext helps ensure consumers can move from an internet search to finding the physical store location. When we asked Howard about this challenge, he said: “Translating an idea into reality is something I specialize in. We saw early on that proper representation in Google, Yahoo, and Facebook was going to be fundamental for every business on the planet. But ideas are a dime a dozen. The thing I really do that sets me apart is, when I see something, I’ll keep at it and actually make it happen. I have an intense bias for action.”
The Driver has a unique combination of intuition and intensely focused discipline. While many people may tend to be either more logical or intuitive in their thinking patterns, Drivers have both tendencies. As a Driver, you are particularly focused on creating and capitalizing on customer value. You dismiss those who say luck plays a key role in business-building success. You believe your success is a function of your talents, and you deliberately focus these talents on an opportunity for which you sense the market need and address it through careful market experimentation, feedback, calculated risk-taking, and your innate selling abilities. Your Driver’s confidence and ability to convince others of the value in your solution translates into the sales equivalent of “I win, you buy.”
“If I analyze the situation . . . hold the problem . . . I can see the flow.”
We observed this very same passion to identify and capitalize on product-market fit in the fashion industry. Mi Jong Lee is a fashion designer in New York City, selling her collection, Emmelle, through her own retail store as well as in more than sixty-five other stores throughout the country. Lee’s compulsive market sensing has been one of the keys to her success.
She describes how she obsessively watches, studies, and thinks about the underlying needs and wants of her target customers, professional women ages forty to fifty-five: “I know what they want. It’s the fit. It’s the fabric. It’s the aesthetics. I’m dressing women elegantly, but those women don’t want to stand out. They can be feminine, sharp, but not too sexy.”
Lee’s drive to serve this professional woman is a delicate balance between intuition and facts. As she puts it, “I have to say it is mostly intuition, but I like analyzing. I am forever analyzing. This may sound strange, but I’ve always found that if I analyze a situation and I hold the problem and just observe, I almost can see the flow of where the market is going.” This organic balance, propelled by a strong personal drive for commercial success, is reflected in how Lee continues to run and grow her company. She says, “I always feel that, for me, if I lose that organic sense, I’m losing the whole sense of why I have this company.”
The solution dynamic taps the Driver’s defining gift. As a Driver, you relish each part of the process: from the inspiration that comes from your ability to sense how the market will develop, to your drive and confidence to translate this insight into something real. In fact, the energy that flows from your success in this dynamic carries over to each of the other dynamics, at least in the early going. Sometimes your energy is positive and deployed constructively, while other times it can obscure signals coming from others, occasionally leading to the alienation of team members and sometimes even customers and financial sponsors.
You are likely to encounter this challenge at successive levels of scale as your initial product idea evolves to a portfolio of products or services and often from there to a genuine platform and the geographically distributed offices or divisions that come with it. Your desire to remain hands-on can work against your ambition to expand. You must empower others to build on and extend your initial idea not only to fit new and broader-ranging customer needs and markets, but also because with cocreation comes greater follower empowerment and thereby leverage. In other words, if you can let go of some of the creating, you will tap a reserve of creativity far greater than just your own in this dynamic.
I was all over everybody every single day.
—Steve Breitman, SEBCO Laundry Systems
When Steve Breitman left the blighted Bronx neighborhood where he grew up, he swore he would provide a better life for the family he hoped to have someday. At the age of nineteen, he had saved enough money to purchase three coin-operated laundry machines. That was almost fifty years ago. He now owns more than forty thousand laundry machines (at $4 per wash, you do the math).
The Driver seeks hardworking followers cut from a similar cloth. Reflecting on the early days, Breitman says he “was looking for people who were willing to commit and put in as many hours a day as necessary and as much of their life as was needed.” He describes how he trained people: “I worked side by side with people. It was like osmosis. They kind of started to live and breathe like me.”
In terms of management style, Breitman says, “Twenty years ago, I was all over everybody every single day. I probably worked eighteen hours a day, six or seven days per week.” This is the intensity of the Driver burning through.
While he was working all hours, Breitman also thought about how to build out the organization. He explains, “You need to align yourself with people who know the operational side, the finance side, and the marketing side of the business so you can put it all together. I was fortunate that I just have the skill in all of them myself.”
The Team Dynamic:
Galvanizing Individual Talent for Collaborative Impact
Your market-sensing and product-creating energy also attracts some of the best talent in the early years of the company, when inventiveness is core to survival and initial growth. Howard Lerman was fortunate to meet his cofounders in high school.
Lerman has always been the ringleader. He describes how he saw opportunity and then inspired and directed his buddies in the early days: “When we started off, there were three of us in a little rowboat. Sean MacIsaac and Tom Dixon would row, and I would say, ‘Row in that direction because I see something there.’” And indeed he did see something there.
From that metaphorical rowboat, Lerman and his high school pals created and sold Intwine, their first company, just three years after college. Intwine was a consulting firm specializing in Microsoft’s .NET programming language. They grew Intwine to $5 million in sales, sold it to Daltran Media for $7 million, and then moved on to building their current venture, Yext.
Lerman now leads a company of nearly a thousand people, but continues to inspire through his market-sensing strength. As he puts it, “Now I’m CEO of an armada. There’s a giant ship in the middle and twenty-eight smaller ships around it, and they all have complex interlocking parts. The core of my job is now to steer from the middle, but when we make up a new product, I literally jump right back into that rowboat. We now call this process ‘jumping into the pirate ship.’”
Lerman shows how Drivers leverage their market-sensing and product-creating gifts directly in attracting, inspiring, and directing followers. Unlike corporate CEOs, Drivers do not hesitate to create the next product themselves. Fueled by market understanding and self-confidence born from their commercial track record, they inspire employees, customers, and investors to follow.
As a Driver, you are most effective in recruiting the first set of expert team members and inspiring them with your commercial sense. Your real test occurs at subsequent levels of scale, when you must empower others to invent. Lerman learned to adapt his leadership style and role so that his culture accepts and is perhaps even inspired when he jumps back into the pirate ship to create the next big idea.
Certain industries, such as those centered on technology, allow for this kind of inventiveness to be powered by the builder and a small team. In professional services businesses, it works less well because client service teams must be able to invent on the spot and the Driver can’t be the sole engine of client problem solving. In these industries, the Driver’s skills of recruiting, training, and inspiring others are rigorously tested.
“I defined personal success as . . . changing the game.”
Laurie Spengler is a professional services Driver hybrid, who blends the mission-centered values of a Crusader with the high emotional quotient of the Captain as a guide to her approach to team building. Spengler built, scaled, and ultimately sold back to her management team a company called Central European Advisory Group, which specialized in advising entrepreneurial companies in Eastern and Central Europe on how best to raise outside growth capital.
Spengler clearly draws from the gene pool of the Driver: “Early on, I defined personal success as being the go-to adviser for entrepreneurs in Central and Eastern Europe . . . To meet that gap in the market and . . . to change the game.” However, Spengler also understands the importance of building and bringing the team along: “It’s one thing to be the entrepreneurial founder,” she says. “The idea is super clear in your own head. You think to yourself, ‘Wow, this is all so obvious.’ But it’s quite something else to have to articulate that to others and really build the best of teams.”
In her first staff meeting, Spengler surprised her team of experts by not lecturing to them for an hour (the norm in Central Europe), but rather spoke for two minutes and then posed a question, asking each person to provide his or her own answer. Later, one of her team members said, “Laurie, you know everyone walked out of that meeting very upset. They thought it was very strange that a founder would ask a question and wondered if that meant you did not know the answer.”
Spengler was operating against the social norms of the region and against the Builder Personality preference for a Driver. But she is aware of the inherent tension all Drivers need to consider: how best to strike the delicate balance between leading by example, teaching, and providing the opportunity for others to develop and hone their own inventiveness. She explains: “I wasn’t saying, ‘I’m the founder here—I created this really neat business model, and I expect you guys to execute my ideas.’ I was telling them I expected them to debate and challenge. If you’re not hashing it out inside the company by speaking your mind and debating, we’re never going to be able to advise our clients effectively.”
This is where Spengler was channeling her inner Captain, because she knows the most important part of forging a powerful team, after recruiting the right players, is trust. As she told us, “I was clear that creating that atmosphere of trust, of candor, intellectual rigor, and engagement [came from my] leading by example.”
So as a Driver, you should be mindful of the balance Spengler highlights. Your determination and gift for converting ideas to products inspire others to join you. However, you must subjugate your urge to create to your need for the operating leverage that enables scale. Such leverage can only flow from teaching and empowering others to create in their own ways.
The Customer Dynamic:
Transforming Buyers into Partners
“Wearing the annual forecast around your neck: 6,058,921 cases of Bai Brands.”
Ben Weiss genuflected toward a bottle of his five-calorie Bai drink and explained how he has earned a coveted position with his largest customer, the Dr Pepper Snapple Group (DPSG) distributor: “I have a product here that does the heavy lifting. I have such a confidence in it that allows me to fight for my consumers every day.” In this case, Weiss is referring to the fight with his distributor for more shelf space in stores, a fight he is clearly winning. As a measure of Weiss’s charisma and confidence in himself and his product, he is now the darling of the CEO of DPSG, a $6 billion publicly traded industry leader.
In fact, Weiss convinced the CEO to wear a set of Bai-branded dog tags emblazoned with the annual sales quota Weiss recently negotiated with him to deliver. This is vintage Driver—create a product that has such exquisite product-to-market fit you can convince the CEO of a giant company to wear your annual forecast for sales to his company around his neck: 6,058,921 (to be exact) cases of Bai. Perhaps the most remarkable part of this story is that Bai was less than 2 percent of the distributor’s annual volume at that time. But the strength of the product and the charisma of the Builder inspire his customer, the distributor, to go all out in support of both.
“I’ve worked with twenty-two agency partners across our ecosystem. Not a single one has ever done what you just did.”
For a Driver, the very best outcome you achieve with your customers is to dissolve the boundary between your company and your customer. When your cash register rings, so does your customer’s. Rick Greenberg, the builder of the Kepler Group, describes such an example in his fast-growing digital marketing firm. Greenberg’s team was at the end of the first of a two-day offsite meeting with his client, planning the following year’s marketing strategy. As a wrap-up to the day, Greenberg asked a question: “How do you guys allocate your marketing spending by media channel?” His client answered that it was done ad hoc—everyone opined, they fought a bit, and then they landed on an allocation that was anything but empirically derived.
Greenberg was hooked. Rather than accepting the client’s offer to join them for dinner that night, he and his team pulled an all-nighter, developing a model to answer the channel allocation question on a more empirical basis. After seeing their work the next morning, the client exclaimed, “I’ve worked with twenty-two agency partners across our ecosystem. Not a single one has ever done what you just did.” Part obsession over client need, part motivation to delight the client, and mostly the Driver’s goal to serve his client better than any of his competitors, Greenberg’s approach—like that of other Drivers—was to apply his product-market fit skills to convert his customer to a partner.
Len Pagon, like Greenberg, founded his company Brulant, a digital systems integrator, with a similar passion to “quickly generate trust and credibility with our customers.” One of Len’s customer growth strategies centered on building a channel relationship with IBM, becoming the largest independent implementer of its WebSphere e-commerce platform. This led to winning client relationships with several Fortune 500 companies in the eastern United States, including TRW, Eli Lilly, BP, and several others.
As a Driver, you are particularly effective in mastering this customer dynamic in the early stages of building your company. You tend to do so with the customer segments Geoffrey Moore calls the “innovators” and “early adopters” in his famous book, Crossing the Chasm. These customer segments actively seek as-yet-unproven solutions to problems before the rest of the market even sees them.
However, don’t confuse early growth ignited by the early adopters with the broader appeal required for scalable success. You are particularly vulnerable to falling into Moore’s chasm—the gap between the early market and the later, mainstream market—because you derive so much satisfaction from customers who “get it.” Remember, early adopters typically represent less than 15 percent of the market. To cross the chasm, you must attract and partner with both the early and later buyers, who represent the lion’s share of many markets.
The Sponsor Dynamic:
Aligning Financial and Other Supporters
Ben Weiss’s passion and sales momentum won him early investors ranging from Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator and National Basketball Association star, to Ashton Kutcher, the actor.
When he was raising money from his first backers, he merely placed a bottle of Bai in front of each person, suggested they take a sip, and then began to rifle through the sales velocity data at his best retail stores: “We are outselling Honest Tea by five times here, and we are at the sales rate of Vitamin Water there. Oh, by the way, Vitamin Water sold to the Coca-Cola Company for $3.5 billion.” (This line proved prescient, since Ben signed a deal in late 2016 to sell his company for $1.7 billion to his distributor customer, DPSG.)
Most financial sponsors obsess over the question of product-market fit, or in the entrepreneurial vernacular, “Do the dogs eat the dog food?” This question is home base for you if you’re a Driver. You relish the opportunity to demonstrate your deep understanding of customer need and how your product or service meets that need. You capture the imagination and confidence of financial sponsors by leveraging your core commercialization strength. However, as experienced investor and partner at Venrock, Bob Kocher, pointed out, “Drivers can be harder to work with, because they have total conviction they’re right and some of them can be less susceptible to new information and changing their views or listening to their teams.”
If you are a Driver operating inside a corporation, the sponsor dynamic represents a trickier balance than it does for your startup counterparts. While a startup Driver must attract the right investors, he or she can choose from many (if the Driver is good and has created momentum in a hot domain). As a corporate Driver, however, you are stuck with the existing sponsors inside your firm. In this case, you must learn how to temper some of your impatience in order to translate your vision into their budgeting and investment priorities. If you can do that, you may unleash enormous impact over time through the budget you tap and corporate peers with whom you collaborate.
Many corporate Drivers may find it difficult to adapt to the slower-paced complexity of the typical corporate environment. Your very drive and need for autonomy may turn into impatience and frustration. If that sounds familiar, you might want to take a deep breath before you walk out the door. Why? You may be leaving behind access to many crucial resources your outside counterparts would die for—things like early funding, access to proven talent to build your initial team, and entrée to potential customers or suppliers.
Ask yourself whether you and your idea might be better off if you pushed for an agreement with your employer to build your business under your current company auspices. Take a look at open-innovation companies like P&G, Nike, 3M, GE, Cisco, and Microsoft—not to mention Shell, Walmart, and many others—for examples of how big companies are demonstrating greater flexibility to accommodating your kinds of initiatives, which serve both your ambition and the interests of the corporate shareholder.
What may differentiate you from your corporate peers is your willingness to assume more personal and professional risk, and this can be your trump card. So consider offering to shoulder some of your company’s risk in exchange for a more lucrative upside beyond what you would probably receive as a regular employee. This risk might take the form of phantom stock in your new venture, a negotiated super bonus tied to the venture’s performance, a spinout arrangement with possible buyback by your sponsoring company, or even an equity split up front.
If all else fails and you decide to launch your idea as an independent venture, consider two other suggestions. First, make very sure your exit is a clean one—with no appearance of your having misused company resources, access to information, or other valuable assets to develop your idea on the company’s time or dime. And second, leave as diplomatically as you can. You never know when you may find yourself across the table from your former employer as a potential customer or acquirer of your new business.
The Scale Dynamic:
Elevating the Business
In many respects, the scale dynamic is the toughest one for Drivers, because many of the factors that drive their behaviors in the other dynamics collide here. As a Driver, you have an obsession with creating products with exquisite market fit, a penchant for doing everything yourself, and an expectation that everyone you hire is like you in terms of skills, drive, and passion. These tendencies can conflict with the kind of followers you need to attract in the later stages of scaling your business.
Drivers tend to recruit early followers in their own image—hard-charging, confident experts who can discern the beat of the market’s music. In the later stages, when roles are more defined, Drivers are forced to hire followers more comfortable following specific instructions. In some cases, the pure drive to achieve significant scale becomes the catalyst for change. In other cases, the fiery Driver chafes upon discovering followers who do not fit his or her ideal profile. Let’s look at an example.
Adam Jackson, the cobuilder of Doctor On Demand (a health tech startup recognized in Goldman Sachs’s “Top 50 in Digital Health” in 2015), is a classic Driver. He grew up in Cleveland and quickly realized he was far more ambitious and driven than those around him. Moving to San Francisco right after college, Jackson taught himself to code. He served other founders until he found a big idea he felt would change the game in health care: video visits with doctors over smartphones for acute conditions like cold, flu, rashes, and urinary tract infections.
Jackson, Phil McGraw (the popular host of the Dr. Phil television talk show), and McGraw’s son launched the business in 2012. The service is now available as a benefit to major corporations such as American Airlines, Comcast, and The Home Depot, as well as to the policyholders of health insurance companies like United Healthcare.
Jackson describes his managerial approach: “I rely on myself, and I take a lot of pride in being hands-on and detail-oriented.” On the one hand, Drivers tend to be controlling perfectionists. On the other, they realize that to achieve the scale and impact they aspire to, they can’t do it all alone. Jackson explains how he resolved this conflict: “I learned this lesson in two tranches. The first was realizing there are only a couple of people like Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan who single-handedly create billions.”
He describes the second tranche of learning: “I was criticized for this kind of controlling behavior. That was painful, but I made it as constructive as possible . . . Sometimes I have to remind myself, but once you get past that hurdle, you are free to go find people way better than you and feel really good about putting those people in place where they can outshine you in order to scale the business.”
As a Driver, you tend to approach the scale dynamic the way you conquer markets, new-product ideas, and customers—with the brute force of your personality. However, when it comes to hiring a leader of operations for your venture, you may run into an obstacle.
Matt Blumberg, the founding builder of Return Path, a global platform company that enables safe and effective email marketing for companies around the world, saw this firsthand: “As the company gets bigger, we’ve been getting into the nitty gritty of operating details. I would say that many of the people I’ve run across for these roles are complete and total jerks, and a large number we hired couldn’t handle working in an environment like ours and didn’t work out.”
In our experience, those with strong operational skills find itdifficult to balance the dictates of customer needs with the practicalities of operational efficiency. These hard-nosed operating leaders often choose efficiency over delving into the subtleties of customer and market. Since an intuitive mastery of market demand defines the Driver, it is inherently challenging to find operational counterparts who fit.
We love it when other people are distracted from growing. We are never distracted.
—Charlie Cawley, MBNA
After being let go from Beneficial Finance earlier in his career, Charlie Cawley had something to prove.2 In 1982, his boss tapped him to run the credit card portfolio of Maryland National Bank in neighboring Baltimore. Under Cawley’s driven, fastidious, and occasionally imperious leadership, a small business unit was converted into the publicly traded credit card giant known as MBNA.
Cawley moved the credit card operation north, across the border to Delaware, where interest rate regulations were more favorable to card issuers. From an abandoned A&P supermarket, he began to apply his Driver gifts. At the time, big banks like Citibank, Chase Manhattan Bank, along with nonbanks like American Express, dominated the credit card market. As a loyal alumnus of Georgetown University, he had the idea of linking a credit card to the alumni association, reasoning other alumni might like to carry a card that benefitted their alma mater.
With the commercial sense and force of will that characterize a Driver, Cawley solved two problems at once: he differentiated a commodity piece of plastic we all carry in our wallets, while generating a new method to raise endowment funds for his alma mater. This Driver created the affinity credit card, just like those you probably have in your wallet or purse right now.
Cawley believed the customer is always right and customer care is essential to building trust and loyalty. Cawley and his team quickly proved and then scaled this magic affinity marketing formula for both new customer acquisition and exquisite customer care.
In less than a decade, Cawley’s division of Maryland National Bank was more valuable than all the other assets owned by its parent combined. In 1991, MBNA went public as an independent entity. When it was acquired by Bank of America in 2006, it had fifty million customers, thirty thousand employees, and $120 billion in loans.
If you are a Driver, it is when you are scaling your support functions that you must conquer your urge to hire in your own image and to maintain your firm grip on the wheel. This is when the best Drivers release their grip. You need to hire for specific skills and empower others to flourish. When engaged effectively, the scale dynamic can spur enormous personal and company growth, if you’re willing to allow your ambition for achieving scale to neutralize your central tendency to do it all yourself.
The Driver’s Gifts and Gaps
We’ve seen how Drivers have a keen commercial instinct, fueled by self-confidence and perhaps even a chip on their shoulder to prove something to the world. If you’re a Driver, you live for that moment when you can combine your sense of where the market is heading and your inventive spark to create the next big idea.
Will Margiloff, the CEO of IgnitionOne, a marketing technology company, typifies this characteristic. He told us, “I’m not a coder, and I’m not a technologist. I see where the market eventually will go. We saw the biggest problem marketers would have is integrating all the disparate pieces of technology. We were the first ones to figure out the cloud idea.”
Your confidence and intensity attract talented followers who begin to fill out your initial team. Your commercial skills win both customers and investors as you build up a head of steam in preparation for leaping across Geoffrey Moore’s chasm. But watch out! What got you to this point will not get you across. You are likely to hit an unexpected barrier that can keep you from achieving the level of scale to which you aspire. Your intense energy and need to prove something to the world as a Driver can—pardon the pun—also drive away the very people you need to scale your business.
Here is a quick profile of your gifts and gaps:
- A keen commercial sense: We saw how Ben Weiss capitalized on the intersection of “good for you” and “great tasting” to create the new beverage juggernaut called Bai Brands. It was that same sense that still leads Howard Lerman to leap back into his “pirate ship” to shape the next big idea at Yext. Laurie Spengler was driven by the same force, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as she saw the opportunity to help emerging entrepreneurs fuel their dreams by showing them how to raise investment capital.
- A creative impulse that enables you to convert customer need to a product or service that fits: Mi Jong Lee, the fashion designer, applies this impulse to serve professional women ages forty to fifty-five. Adam Jackson figured how to bring a doctor directly to the patient with an acute condition like the flu through video chat enabled by the expansion of mobile bandwidth and the broad adoption of smartphones.
- The ferocious intensity to make your venture successful: This uncompromising focus was reflected in Ben Weiss’s negotiation with the CEO of Dr Pepper Snapple Group, to ensure his five-calorie beverage would gain coveted shelf space in grocery stores across the United States. Similarly, it was this force of will and belief in their ability to crack the code on marketing mix that led Rick Greenberg and his colleagues at the Kepler Group to work through the night for one client to demonstrate they could optimize their media mix.
- A tendency to overcontrol and underforgive your people: Throughout our entrepreneurial and consulting careers, we have seen Drivers whose need for perfection and unforgiving nature chased away the unique talent their drive and vision initially attracted. A boutique consulting firm we know was launched by a Driver who was a former McKinsey consultant. In the early years, his firm was neck-and-neck with others like Oliver & Wyman and Alvarez & Marsala, both of which are now more than ten times larger than his firm. This Driver could not let go, allowing his need for control to choke out the independence and inventiveness of others to contribute to the firm’s success, thereby inhibiting it from ever achieving the scale and impact he had originally hoped for.
- Vulnerability to product narcissism: By connecting your self-identity to your product, you can miss subtle signals from the market and fail to pivot when the need to do so is indicated. You may fall too far or too long in love with your product or service baby. Product narcissism is the equivalent of the innovator’s dilemma for startups and can lead some Drivers to be one-hit wonders.3
- A tendency to overreach with investors and customers: One of the Drivers we interviewed told us, “I will go to the end of the earth to get the money I need on the terms I deserve. I’ve told plenty of people on Sand Hill Road [the favored address for many Silicon Valley VCs] to f— off.” Your early market momentum can lead to an arrogance with investors—arrogance that can push your own valuation expectation so far above market you may not get the funding you need to continue to realize your dream of scale. Likewise, as growth and scale require expanding your customer base from tolerant and inventive innovators and early adopters to later-stage customers, you may have a hard time putting up with customers who aren’t as imaginative but who are far more demanding on pedestrian issues that may not inspire you.
So what can you do with this mixture? Some people start playing to their strengths, or as we call it, elevate their gifts; others decide to work around their weaknesses, or delegate their gaps, and others employ a combination of both. Whichever approach you choose, here are five concrete suggestions you can start applying today to become a stronger Driver.
“Elevate and Delegate” Strategies to Become a Stronger Driver
In this chapter, you’ve seen how the Driver’s single-mindedness and self-confidence can lead to exciting commercial success. But while this obsession can generate early momentum, it also presents challenges later on. Let’s take a look at how you might address those.
Shift from product creator to market scout: In the early days, you saw the opportunity and conceived the idea, and your team helped you build it as you sold it to early customers. As you scale, you should become more of a scout in the market, utilizing your ability to sense where it’s headed. If you identify and specify what the market will need next, your crew members, if hired and trained correctly (see below), can cocreate with you. This shift in your role provides you with leverage and them with the sense of ownership and shared inspiration for what your company is bringing to the market.
But that requires sharing, and we appreciate sharing does not come easily or naturally for most Drivers. Chances are, your ability to share your gift depends on how well your colleagues pay attention to often-subtle shifts in market dynamics and customer expectations. And that, in turn, depends on careful customer listening.
Bring along some of your talented up-and-comers to watch you in action. Talk with them about why you ask the questions you ask, why you are curious about certain issues and trends, and how you try to stay ahead of what others are doing—but make it a conversation, not a lecture. Be prepared to listen to their ideas and instincts. Expect key employees who attend industry conferences to share what they’ve learned and observed, with a specific agenda of identifying the possible implications of those findings on your company’s current strategy. They are your fellow scouts; don’t shoot them.
Don’t expect everyone on your core team to share your passion and intensity: While it may be ego-gratifying to surround yourself with comparably obsessed professionals, such team members may not be necessary or even helpful to scaling your business. It’s more important to hire functional experts who are strategically aligned with that task and then give them enough open road to drive their own work. Chances are, they work in areas you may not be particularly keen on anyway, like finance, operations, and talent management. These leaders need a deep understanding of your market strategy and the ability to incorporate that strategy into their functions, but you must also let them feel ownership over how they do their jobs.
When we spoke with Matt Blumberg, he saw himself (as did our Builder Personality Discovery instrument) as a Driver, but he also noted he shared some of the tendencies of a Captain. This observation and Blumberg’s characterization of his journey as a builder are instructive for those who aspire to become more enlightened Drivers as they seek to grow their businesses through others. Blumberg told us, “I would say sixteen years ago, I did not fully understand how to create a learning culture that empowers through delegation, but now halfway through the journey, I do. And in so doing, I can unleash the power in others.” Blumberg now obsesses over cultural fit, rather than cloning himself, when he recruits talent to grow the company.
Don’t let your product narcissism lead to innovation complacency: It’s great to take pride in your product, but remember—its life span is probably shorter than your admiration for it. Ben Weiss says of his “Bai-lievers”: “I have people here, you cut their veins and Sumatra Dragonfruit [a Bai flavor] comes out.” While this may sound like product narcissism, Weiss goes on to say, “I have always felt that the next Bai is in someone else’s basement. We’re just leading the change.” If you’ve really cracked the code in your marketplace, others will follow quickly and, if you’re not careful, perhaps even out-innovate you. Don’t let this happen!
Remember, your early success stemmed from your commercial sense. Now you must start relying on your team to continue to evolve your current product offerings to ensure they fit with emerging customer expectations and competitive realities.
Dan Raju, the cofounder of Tradier, a financial-technology innovator for investors, traders, and advisers, did just this early on by hiring as his firm’s chief technology officer a professional who was skeptical whether Tradier’s core business solution could be produced. This person’s team literally tried to disprove the theory of the founders, on the assumption that if their own skepticism could be overcome, the firm might actually be on to something. That baptism of cold water has now led to a thriving, growing business that simplifies the trading process for active stock traders.
Admit you may not be the best salesperson for every prospective customer: Drivers are often great persuaders and salespeople, sometimes accompanied with an intense “I win, you buy” approach to customer interactions. But as the market matures and the selling process becomes more institutionalized, you are no longer selling to like-minded early adopters. The sales cycle elongates and becomes more bureaucratic. You may find this infuriating to the point of actually alienating some of these less-inspired or less-decisive prospects. Consider delegating selling during this part of the growth cycle. If you have hired and cultivated your team members well, your sales force will do a better job than you, freeing you up for scouting the next solution opportunity.
One of us (John) learned this lesson the hard way years ago when building a national health business newspaper venture with a cofounder. Industry executives and health-care providers quickly became avid readers of the newspaper, and having personally convinced several major firms to become charter advertisers directly, I assumed I could do the same with the next tier of targets. But many advertising budgets were closely guarded by ad agency media buyers reluctant to recommend new channels in our market. Most were young people who didn’t really understand the complex changes reframing the health-care business.
So in meeting after meeting with these gatekeepers to our next-stage prospects, I tried to impress, educate, and convince them why our publication made sense for their clients—with precious little to show for my efforts in terms of ad buys. I would leave these sessions exasperated. On reflection, I think my confidence in our product came across as arrogance to many of these folks. Finally, I backed off and let my sales staff handle these calls without my founder’s ego getting in the way, with noticeably superior results. The moral: sometimes Drivers win from the shoulders, by letting other players on the road.
Watch your hubris-to-valuation gap with financial sponsors: Remember, almost every venture hits a rough patch along the way. You want to align with the right investors, allowing them an attractive return for the risk they take and the value they help you create.
Several Drivers we interviewed (who shall remain anonymous for obvious reasons) acknowledge they had unwittingly boxed themselves into a corner by being too aggressive in hyping the value of their business with investors. As one expresses it, “Now that we have closed the round, we need to grow the business to fill in behind the valuation our investors just gave us.”
Given how many other factors are uncertain or beyond your control in growing your business, an early valuation victory with investors can prove to be a Pyrrhic one, if you overreached and then underperform. In these cases, you might require a flat or down financing round to extend your runway. So try to resist the temptation of many Drivers to reach for more than your fair share of the chips on the table, and leave room to reward your investors commensurately with the risk they are taking on. And remember: all bubbles are filled with air; make sure it’s mostly your actual results and realistic prospects, not your own hot air, that support your valuation as you grow.
These suggestions for how you can better frame your own game as a Driver are just that—possible ways for you to elevate your strengths and work around or delegate some of your weaknesses. In chapter 9, we encourage you to move beyond these initial steps and put yourself on a steeper growth trajectory. We call this path the master builder strategy, in which you take on some of the strengths of another Builder Type and make them your own.
