This is the note I keep writing in different forms. I’m publishing it here because every founder I talk to thinks the thing they are feeling is unique to them, and it is not. It is a pattern. If you are between month 15 and month 21 of running a consumer brand, this might be for you. If you are earlier, file it somewhere you will find it later.
Across twenty-nine conversations with founders over the past three years, I have watched a specific and quiet thing happen at month eighteen. The brand is past the launch story. The early press is spent. The retailer listings are in. The team is maybe twelve people. Revenue has not gone vertical, the thing the founder privately believed it would. It is growing at, call it, thirty percent a year, which is not nothing, but is also not a vertical line, and after the first eighteen months of running at whatever multiple of normal human effort you can sustain, thirty-percent-a-year begins to feel like a treadmill. The founder does not say any of this out loud. They say, usually to me, over coffee, something like: “I think I need to bring in a CEO.”
I want to be careful here. Sometimes — maybe one in six — that is exactly what the business needs, and the founder has correctly named it. The other five out of six, the founder is not describing a business need. They are describing an emotional state. The emotional state is: I cannot bear to keep doing the specific boring thing the brand now requires of me, which at month eighteen is not product launches and it is not ad shoots. It is the argument with the buyer about gondola ends, the NPD roadmap that involves a sensible line extension of the original SKU, the monthly operations meeting with finance and logistics. It is the work that does not look like the work the founder went into the business to do.
Month eighteen is when the brand becomes a company, and the founder has to decide whether they are, actually, going to run a company. — Glow field note #18
§I What is actually happening.
What is happening is quite specific. Two forces meet. On one side, the brand has accumulated enough scar tissue — listings, team size, capital raised, promises to retailers — that the founder can no longer be reckless in the way that made the early brand good. The founder feels this as a loss of something they had. They did have it, and they are right that they have lost it. It is not coming back. The brand has become a shared object now, with obligations to other people.
On the other side, the brand has not yet accumulated enough scale to reward the discipline required by the first force. Revenue is still tight enough that the founder cannot stop paying personal attention to the operating detail. The founder is, in other words, required to be at once more disciplined than they naturally are (scar tissue) and more operationally present than they want to be (scale). This is a narrow window. It lasts six to nine months. Inside that window, the probability of a founder quietly giving up is, in my small dataset, well over sixty percent.
§II What it looks like from outside.
From outside, month eighteen looks like stability. The brand is turning over. The team is larger than before. The founder is still posting on the brand’s LinkedIn. The press release about the new head of growth goes out. The decline from outside is not visible; the only evidence is the slow leakage of the specific judgments the founder used to make and has stopped making.
Inside, the team feels it first. The team feels the founder pull back from the creative gate. They feel the briefs get vaguer. They feel that the rejection of the okay work has become less certain. They compensate — good teams always compensate — by filling the gap with their own taste. This produces a brand that is still professional but is now somebody else’s brand, slowly, over quarters. Six quarters on, the founder looks at the brand and says: “I don’t recognise it anymore.” Which is correct. They stopped making it at month eighteen.
§III What the founders who pushed through did.
Of the twenty-nine founders I spoke to, nine pushed through the month-eighteen trough without disengaging. I asked them, at different times and in different ways, the same question: what did you do. Their answers, summarised:
They refused to become operational. Six of the nine hired a second, operational person into the business — a COO, a head of operations — within month nine. Early. Before they felt they could afford it. The effect was that by month eighteen, the founder was not being asked to run the operation. They were being asked to run the brand. That is a different job. They could still do it.
They kept walking the stores. Seven of the nine walked supermarket aisles at least monthly, well past the point at which their team assumed this had become a junior person’s job. The act of walking the stores kept the founder in direct contact with the thing the brand was actually doing. They could not stop caring about the gondola end because they had just stood in front of it.
They wrote. Five of the nine kept a regular writing practice — a newsletter, a founder email, a column — that forced them, weekly or fortnightly, to articulate what they were trying to build. The writing did not have to be public. What mattered was that the founder was required, on cadence, to say out loud what they were doing. The writing kept the editorial voice alive in the founder’s head, and from there it spread into the brand.
The founders who made it through did not grind harder. They made sure they were only asked to do the work they were good at. — summary of field conversations
A thing I have stopped believing, after these conversations, is the advice that founders should “get out of the way” after a certain size. The founders who got out of the way at month eighteen are running brands that are now, at month forty-eight, losing category share they cannot explain. The founders who refused to get out of the way — who insisted on staying inside the editorial judgements while getting out of the way of the operational ones — are running the brands I now have to pay retail to study.
§IV If you are at month eighteen right now.
This is the short list I give, and it is not original. It is the list the nine told me.
First: hire, above yourself, the operational person, this quarter if you have not. The business will feel it cannot afford them. The business is wrong; the business cannot afford for you to become them. The financial maths is straightforward.
Second: keep a founder calendar block, every week, for the thing only you can do. Two hours at a minimum. Pack reviews. Shopper walks. The hard email that gets written today, not next week. If this block is negotiable in the weekly operational cadence, the business is already in month twenty.
Third: write something. Doesn’t have to be good. Doesn’t have to be public. It has to be regular, and it has to be about the brand, not about the business. The distinction is that the business is the organisation; the brand is what the business is trying to make. The writing keeps you in the second, not the first.
Fourth, and this is the one I am still working on myself: accept that the romance of month three is not coming back. The month-three feeling was produced by a situation that was temporary and unsustainable. Trying to get it back is the thing the founders who disengaged were doing when they disengaged. The work, now, is different. It is narrower, quieter, and much more commercially valuable. The founders who make peace with this get to still be the founder ten years in. The founders who don’t, quietly exit their own company while continuing to be paid by it.