94. Helping founders buy in to “governance”

SCRIPT Part of why I like to say that corporate governance is just the way that decisions are made in a corporation is rooted in my experiences speaking with – or TRYING to speak with – entrepreneurs about governance. Most of them shut down the moment they hear the word governance because all they can think about is bureaucracy, cost, and a loss of control. So by positioning governance as the process of making decisions they can just say “Hey, I make decisions! Does that mean I have governance?” To which my answer is always “YES!” And I sincerely believe it’s true. And anyone who’s worked with or inside a founder-controlled organization will tell you that even the conversation I just described is a pretty big win in most cases. Founders, in general, are obsessively focused on just doing stuff, and they tend to think of governance as – at best – thinking about doing stuff, and at worst they imagine a group of strangers getting together to tell them NOT to do stuff. But here’s the thing, I don’t care how complex, or fast-growing, or specialized your organization is, there are hundreds – thousands, maybe – of other founder-run corporations that are more complex, faster, and more specialized AND have built some kind of formalized or independent governance model. Even just knowing that can be a huge relief to a lot of founders, to know that someone out there has been through what they’ve been through so that they don’t need to blaze the trail themselves. If you’re a founder who’s nervous about governance – or you work with one – take some time to build a network of peers and ask them about their experience. It’s not as scary as you think.