During my decade in corporate advertising and a total of 15 years in creative crafts, I’ve spent the past decade observing how а wide range of founders and CEOs carry themselves and their businesses. From proposals related back-and-forths via e-mail to six hour long heated debates about what should actually be communicated to the audience, I’ve been lucky enough to have seen the intimate side of many well known, yet faceless brands.

When I look back at those years, both the time as a freelancer as well as an agency rat, I can’t help but notice the fact that marketing and design as such have always been secondary to something else.

In this article I’d like to talk about that ‘something else’ and share some thoughts and observations that I find noteworthy. Mainly I want to focus around founders and CEO’s and how their personalities and inner workings define and affect the businesses they run.

Building and running a business is like building and maintaining a relationship

Terms like legal entity, brand, corporation or a company are no more than concepts and formalised labels that serve no bigger purpose than categorising things for the sake of communication. In reality, business is between people.

People gathering around a common need or interest and turning it into a system that generates a circulation of resources. Businesses don’t serve trees nor birds. Businesses serve people. Businesses are people serving people, thus businesses are webs of productive relationships. And basically the demand for, agility and survivability of those relationships defines whether the “business” will live and grow or fall subject to capitalist natural selection.

A business mirrors its founders habits and ethics

Every founder inevitably imprints their worldview onto the company they build, the same way a craftsman leaves fingerprints on their work. When there’s multiple people making executive decisions, then an amalgamation of their personalities is imposed.

Why does it happen? Because agendas, ideas, decisions and actions come from people and their frameworks and points of reference. Because those people figured that this exact way is fit. A potato is peeled the way the person peeling it deems fit. If a head chef decides that a potato should be peeled a certain way, all of their cooks will be peeling potatoes that way. The only thing that those cooks can do is “add their style” to the preset routine. Is there an unbiased way to do it? I think not.

Even AI is a subject to frameworks and agendas. After all it didn’t emerge on its own, it was programmed by people and it was trained on data collected by people, interpreted and published/posted by people. So I believe it could be said that businesses mirror the personalities of their founders and CEOs.

You can even verify it yourself by looking at how stock prices of businesses fall when CEOs that are unfit for the industry are onboarded and vice versa. You can see it in the branding, you can see it in PR and communications, of course with some lower executive adjustments and shades of personality that are added by those communicators.

So all in all, if you have the opportunity to meet the founder or the CEO of a company before doing business with them, I highly recommend doing so. If you match, there’s a good chance your business relationship will not be too stressful. If you don’t have a match, then there’s something to think about.

A business will go only as far as its founder is willing to go

A business is only as agile as its engine (upper management). Yes, unarguably businesses consist of more people than just founders, but I’m yet to see a team overpower its founder and their ability to run the company into the ground.

If a founder is unwilling to accept critique, unable to pivot or incapable of adopting an alternative perspective even temporarily, there’s a good chance that the business they’re running will end up rigid and short lived. Although my sphere of expertise has been dominantly marketing, analytics and strategy,

I’ve had to attend a fair share of upper management meetings that related to my activities in rather distant ways (or one would naively think so). During those meetings, I’ve seen very little constructive debate, justified decision making and reasoning and a lot of ego wrestling. More often than not, I’ve seen people try to justify their flawlessness in their worldview and why something was inevitably the fault of someone else and why they can’t be related to the problem in any way, rather than collect feedback and adjust accordingly.

For example I’ve been asked to collect detailed data on a subject because the upper management of that company wanted to have an objective overview of why an agenda of theirs wasn’t working the way they expected. After reviewing the data, both founders laughed at it and concluded that either the data was faulty or the market was “confused”. Why did that happen? Because the only other interpretation of that data would have meant that their tactics were not as good as they thought they would be. And because their tactics were based on their individual subjective experiences in their industry (thus appealing to their own authority), their tactics being wrong would have meant that they are not as competent as they think they are and that can’t be tolerated because accepting that would undermine their authority and their image of self.

If a founder is willing to be flexible and has the will to adapt, observations and feedback will be considered, adjustments will be made and things will develop. The ambitions of a business are somewhere between how far the founder is willing to go plus how well they fill in the gaps of their incompetence with people more competent than themselves. If a founder prioritises their comfort over their business, the business will inevitably suffer.

Final thoughts

The strength of a company rarely lies in its product or process, it lies in the founder’s ability to adapt and to replace ego with awareness. Markets reward momentum, but longevity rewards adaptability and the most resilient companies are built not by the smartest founders, but by ones who keep learning after they’re certain that they’re right. At the end of the day, every company is not only a mirror of its founder, but also a dynamic organism that’s in a constantly changing relationship with its environment.