Building the leadership and structure to succeed beyond the founders

When the founder becomes the bandwidth

When Elliot from Beyond Potential came into Airlab, Carl D'Rose and his business partner Chris were running the business off the back of phone calls between two cars. As Carl puts it: “Our board meetings was me and Chris driving down the road in separate cars on the phone on the way home, going ‘what should we do here?’” The work was successful. The structure wasn't.

Neither had formal business training. “Chris and I had no formal training other than engineering degrees,” Carl says. “We just put our hands up and said, ‘Help us be a better business.’”

Building capability beyond the founders

Elliot came in as independent board chair. He ran structured strategy sessions, brought rigour to how decisions got made, and over time helped Carl and Chris see that the role Chris was holding wasn't the right one. Chris was managing director of Airlab and a director of Pacific Commissioning, the sister business. Both were suffering.

Carl and Chris weighed the options and settled on promoting Jason, the operations manager, to general manager. Elliot stayed on as Jason's coach and continued as board chair.

For Carl, the personal shift came first. “I feel that I'm more in control, and I've developed more as a person, as a leader,” he says. “People around here surprise me every day when I relinquish control and let them run with something. It works out.”

Decision-making moved from instinct to evidence: “We make decisions based on data and logic and a bit of gut. No more shooting from the hip. There's more rigour.”

A business that could carry on

The business followed. Revenue grew 45%. Headcount grew 35%. Staff satisfaction passed 80%, with an eNPS above 50 and turnover down 17%. Under Jason, the business completed a rebrand, launched a new website, and built marketing infrastructure it had operated without for years.

The outcome that mattered most to Carl was the one behind the numbers.