The Five Games of Business
A founder running a $1 million company and a founder running a $10 million company can both call themselves CEOs. They can even face problems that sound identical: hiring, cash flow, accountability, sales, execution. But they are not playing the same game. In this free masterclass, Brett Thomas introduces the five games of business. The gate is the revenue milestone. The game is the developmental challenge underneath it.
You must know which game you are playing to understand its rules and to figure out how to win it. Crossing the revenue number gets you through the gate financially. Mastering capability gets you through the gauntlet organizationally. Businesses of different sizes reflect very different levels of complexity, and each level asks something different of the founder, the leadership team and the managers. That is why some of the best advice in business becomes bad advice when it is imported from the wrong game, and it is one reason founders struggle more than they should.
In this masterclass, drawn from The Founder's Gauntlet, Brett introduces his five games model, built on the field of corporate life cycle theory, which has been studied for sixty years but which most founders have never been exposed to. For each of the five games you will learn the stage it covers, the question it asks, the name of the game, the rules of the game and what winning actually requires.
Why this matters to founders
Founders read books written for another stage. They take advice from people who built a different kind of company. They import enterprise practices into an organization that has not yet earned the complexity those practices assume. Timing is everything: right advice at the wrong time sabotages the company and the team. The lesson is free and takes about twenty minutes. What you get back is a simple question to ask before you act on any advice: what game am I actually playing?
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Game one, Start-Up: under roughly $1 million in revenue and fewer than 10 employees. The question is, can you prove it? The game is viability: staying close to the customer, acquiring customers at break even or better, and proving a real market exists. Why advice to add layers of management and get out of the way is the wrong advice until you cross the $1 million gate.
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Game two, Stable: roughly $1 to $10 million in revenue and 10 to 20 employees. The question is, can you repeat it? The game is repeatability: sales that work beyond the founder's personality, delivery beyond improvisation, and the arrival of roles, standards, financial discipline and basic management routines.
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Game three, Growth: roughly $10 to $50 million in revenue and 20 to 50 employees. The question is, can you organize it? The game is organizational capability: converting founder capability into organizational capability in a stage too messy to scale. More headcount creates coordination, not capacity, and founder dependency becomes the ceiling. This is the growth game the founder's trap is named for.
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Game four, Early Scaling: roughly $50 to $100 million in revenue with hundreds of employees. The question is, can you decentralize it? The game is distributed authority: delegating authority and decision rights, not just tasks, so executives and managers own outcomes and important decisions happen correctly throughout the organization without founder approval.
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Game five, Mature Scaling: $100 million and beyond with hundreds to thousands of employees. The question is, can you institutionalize it? The game is institutional maturity: the CEO and C suite lead through architecture, strategy, capital allocation, governance, succession, culture and renewal, so the organization performs beyond dependence on any single person.
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The closing discipline: each gate tests whether the company can stop relying on the capability that won the last game and build the one the next game requires. Founders rarely get into trouble by stopping what worked. They get into trouble by continuing it after the game has changed. Know the game, know what winning requires, then decide whose advice to take.
You have to know which game you are playing before you can determine how to win the game.
There are a lot of great resources on this site to help you pinpoint the game your company is actually playing and map your journey through the current stage, through the next gate and into the next game. The Founder's Map locates where you sit on the terrain. Or start a conversation with Brett about how to win the game you are playing now. Initial consultations are free. Scaling is not just getting better at business. It is recognizing when the game has changed and becoming capable of winning the new one.