Sean: Look, Jan, a lot of people, when they hear the leader, the thing that comes to mind is the guy or the girl that's most paid, that gets the special parking slot, that gets the special corner office that gets all the perks of the executives like. These are the things that come to mind in our world today when you say, leaders. So what do you mean when you mentioned earlier that you're going to have to be a leader in the scale-up phase later?

Jan: You've got to be, for one who continually inspires people, which doesn't have anything to do with the pay at the office or any of those things you mentioned, unfortunately. But you've got to be the one that gets everybody going. That can be your investors, your stakeholders, your people most of all. You know, you've got a layout that gets people so excited that they want to get on that train ride, and they want to develop themselves and do better so the next day.

Jan: And you've also got to find the people to do it. You know, if you can do those things if you can lay on a vision and keep people on-site and inspired and keep finding people who are ideally better than you are. And that means you've got to be pretty secure because you've got to take on people, you know who you look up, "Oh, without them what would I do." But you know, most of the people like them, are going to take your business forward?

Jan: So yeah, it's a lot about finding the right people, people where it's just lovely - I think it is Warren Buffett quote, but you need intelligence, integrity, and energy, that's right, because if you think, if the people you need to take on, you want to be intelligent, you want them to be good at pushing the business forward, but you want to have the energy, you know, there's nothing worse working with flat negative people who go, "Yeah, we could do that." You know you want them to go, "Wow, how exciting."

Jan: And that helps you feed off their energy, too. And I think that's really big. And people forget that you need the energy to flow both ways. Then it's about the integrity thing, of course, because they have to genuinely buy into your vision. As well as, you know, integrity at the other end does not actually help themselves to everything in the business that we're talking about, earlier.

Sean: For sure. And you mentioned that in the startup phase, we both agreed that you're the go-to person during the scale-up phase, when you're the one, in your words, casting the vision and inspiring your people, does that mean you stop being the go-to person for these tasks?

Jan: Yeah, it does. And I think that's really hard. I mean, you know, to some extent, you need to be available, which is a different thing from being the person who steps in and does for you. You have to let go and let them do because you simply can't do the visionary stuff otherwise. You have to be on peak performance.

Jan: And I think that's one of the really hard transference because going back to the people we are with the imposter syndrome and we know we put a lot wrong and all this, you know, to say 'I am worse because I am leader,' I am worse saying, 'no, you don't, I'll do it. You know, I'm going to stand back from here. I'm not going to be the one who works till midnight' is really, really hard.

Jan: Because once natural inclination is to function and do it for them, and help out because that's what we want to do. We want to help people. But you can't, you're actually going to have to stand back, and you're going to have to work on you, and you're going to have to let them develop because that's how you get better people.

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