Apologies to my editors and most dedicated readers… I’m doing it again! 

As you know if you’ve been reading my books or blog posts for any length of time, the scope of subjects I write about is wide and getting wider. I’d like to think that’s a good thing. I’m quite sure, however, that the good people that edit and publish my writing may not see it that way. “Enough is enough,” they advise. “You can’t expect your readers to be happy about the blog getting longer and longer.”

And so I’m sneaking this in here – one more department for the monthly issue. I’m calling it Business & Wealth Building because that’s what it’s going to be about: everything I’ve learned about starting and growing entrepreneurial businesses and multiplying personal financial wealth.

It was one of the principal topics of the two digital newsletters I published from 2000 to 2010 and then from 2010 to 2020. What prompted me to get back to it now is how often I read articles and essays these days that seem to be presenting as “new” ideas that I was writing about 20 years ago.

This morning, I read such a piece in The Free Press. Its thesis was that to lead a satisfying life, one should understand that there is more than one kind of wealth (i.e., financial). There is also physical wealth, intellectual wealth, and social wealth. And the author provided tricks and techniques for enhancing and enjoying all of them. 

I swear – I felt like the entire piece was ripped off from me. I felt robbed! 

But over the years, I’ve done more thinking about many of my ideas about business and wealth building, and now I’d like to share the “new and improved” versions with my current readers.

Today’s topic is something I see it as a big, potentially transformative idea – an idea that has played a key role in growing from $1 million to $10 million more than a dozen businesses I’ve owned and/or run, several from $10 million to $100 million, and one from $100 million to more than a billion.

And if you want better credibility than that, it’s also the secret that made billionaires out of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk.

Growers and Tenders: Partners in Entrepreneurial Success 

Some years ago, I came up with a metaphor to explain an idea I was chewing on about leadership.

The spark that ignited my thinking was an essay written by an Ivy League professor in a business magazine. His thesis wasn’t unusual. He was arguing that CEOs are overpaid and that starting and growing a successful business is not about singular genius but is a communal activity where every player has an equally important role.

There is no doubt that running a large business requires the participation of dozens or even hundreds of smart and hardworking people. But starting a company from scratch and then growing its revenues to reach the $1 million mark, and then growing them again to $10 million, and then again to and beyond the $100 million barrier is, in my experience, almost always the result of a single, fanatically dedicated, extremely demanding and endlessly energetic and optimistic entrepreneur.

Read the biography of any of the great industry builders – from Andrew Carnegie to JP Morgan to John D. Rockefeller to Henry Ford – and that is the sort of person you will see. If you prefer contemporary examples, study the careers of Sam Walton, Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk and you’ll see the same sort of hard-driving, single-minded, relentlessly demanding personality.

I’m thinking here about entrepreneurs, not CEOs that are appointed to run Fortune 500 companies. That’s an entirely different type of leadership, requiring different personality types with a sometimes overlapping but largely different set of skills.

I’ve written about this, in one form or another, since I began writing about business building and entrepreneurship 20 years ago. In Ready, Fire, Aim, The Reluctant Entrepreneur, and dozens of essays I wrote during that time, I documented what I discovered by reading business biographies and autobiographies – but more importantly, what I experienced in growing dozens of start-up businesses, including several that grew to revenues of more than $100 million and one that broke the billion-dollar mark.

About 10 years ago, during an executive retreat in Dubai with the senior executives of that business, I gave a presentation that identified what I believe may be the most important insight I ever had into the question of how entrepreneurial businesses grow.

My thesis was that there were basically two kinds of business leaders – those that have the personalities and skills to start and grow small businesses into large businesses, and those that have the personalities and skills to manage businesses once they become large.

I named the first type “Growers” and the second type “Tenders.”

It was no coincidence that I used agricultural metaphors. I was in the early stages of developing a palm tree botanical garden, starting with five acres and about two dozen species of palm trees, and eventually growing it to 25 acres and more than 600 species – making it the largest such natural conservatory in the continental United States.

Living through that experience, I couldn’t help but notice that I was always pushing to acquire more land and plant more trees. But if that was all I did, my garden would have turned into a weedy jungle.

The success of the garden was very much due to the people I hired to manage it. And the best people I hired to manage it had very different personalities and skill sets than I had.

I spent more than 80% of my time thinking about growing the garden. They spent more than 80% of their time thinking about tending it as it grew.

On the one hand, I could not have successfully grown the garden to the size it is today without their constant tending. On the other hand, there’s no doubt in my mind that had I not been constantly pushing for growth, the garden would be a beautifully kept five-acre plot of fewer than 50 species.

At the Dubai conference, I reviewed the history of the company from the perspective of the executives that were instrumental in achieving its growth from a relatively small business when I joined it to the indisputably large business that it had become. By presenting my thesis in terms of the true history of the executive leaders of the business, I was able to demonstrate that of the top 50 who had been instrumental in that growth, about 45 of them fit the profile I had named as “Tenders,” while only five demonstrated the personality characteristics and skill sets that I attributed to “Growers.”

Growers, I explained, are leaders who are inspired by the ambition of growing the business and are persistently looking for ways to do that. Tenders are leaders who are inspired by solving problems and minimizing mistakes and work instinctively and persistently toward that end.

Growers worship at the altar of More and Bigger. Tenders worship at the altar of Order and Peace.

Growers are forever pushing people to do more than they want to do and to move more quickly than they think possible. Tenders are forever overcoming obstacles, resolving disputes, and making the machinery of business run as smoothly as it possibly can.

To launch and develop a large and healthy business, you absolutely need both Growers and Tenders. You need Growers to grow the business and Tenders to keep it healthy as it grows.

When your business is starting out, you need a Grower to run it. If you are the founder, that Grower must be you.

Once it is launched and growing, you will need executives that are capable Tenders to execute your plans by dealing with the chaos and solving all the problems you, as a Grower, will cause. And you won’t need just one. You will need three or four or five as the business escalates, because the problems that growth will cause will mount exponentially as revenues climb.

Here’s something you should know. Growers are rare birds. Only one person in a hundred has the personality characteristics and skill sets to grow your business. Tenders are more plentiful and therefore much easier to find. But that doesn’t mean you can hire anyone for that job if your business is growing – and especially if it is in its early stages, where the rate of growth is fast and steep.

Good Tenders need to have great intelligence, deep industry knowledge, and an ability to negotiate and keep workers happily employed. But if they are going to help you grow your company as big and fast as you want, they must also be Tenders that like growth.

That may sound like common sense, but it is not at all common for Tenders to feel comfortable let alone feel motivated in a work environment where things are constantly changing.

I believe this is an important idea for both CEOs of large companies and founders of smaller, entrepreneurial companies. Understanding the difference between Growers and Tenders is essential for not only making the right hiring decisions but also knowing what is expected of you.

I’ll be writing about this more in the future. In the meantime, if you have comments or critiques about this idea, I’d like to hear them. You can contact me here.