Change Management is Hard. But it can be easier using these tips

We have proudly served 100 or so B2B technology companies. 90% of the time our customers are founder-led, somewhere between 10-100 employees, going at it for over a decade, and doing it as a cash-funded business. Why is the ‘cash-funded’ reference meaningful? Well, when you aren’t spending free money or a pensioner’s savings going for gold, you tend to run a more responsible, profit-minded company. Because you have no other choice. This means growth is often slower and you can’t always swing for the fences taking big risks.

So when these companies decide they want to change their trajectory and grow, often with the mindset of creating more value for a potential exit; there is sudden pressure on the organization, and the topic of change management comes into full view. For many founder‑led B2B companies, change management becomes unavoidable at this stage.

To make change management for founder‑led companies easier, I’ve collected a group of frameworks. I can attest that they work. Maybe there is something here that will help you achieve the goals you set for the company.

Establish Personal Goals as a Founder

The outcome of the company is ultimately the outcome of your personal life, and your family’s as well. The stakes are high. One of the best suggestions I’ve ever heard is from Debbie Millman, a successful marketing executive who guest appeared on a Tim Ferriss podcast a while ago. She made her students write a 10-year plan. That plan was excruciatingly detailed and long-form. It described a typical day 10-years in the future. What are you doing? Where are you? Who are you with? What are you doing on this random day? Nine times out of ten, that plan will come to fruition. Visualization is an important exercise. Since your personal outcome is tied so heavily to the business you are running, you want to be purposeful in what that outcome should be. Debbie was working with students in their twenties, so a 10-year horizon made sense. For the rest of us dinosaurs, you can set a five-year horizon too.

Set a North Star

Finish this statement: “In 5 years, my company will be….”. This becomes your North Star. How big are you, who are you serving, how big is the team, where are you serving customers? Be as brief as you can be. Once this statement is set, your North Star can be communicated to the team, and every decision you need to make needs to answer the question “Does this decision get me to my North Star?”

Set Values

Walt Disney famously said, “When values are clear, decisions are easy.” Set a value system that you can live with. Don’t make them altruistic or impossible, or cliché, but set them. Every time you or your team run into a touch decision, test your instincts against this value set.

Establish a Clear Decision-Making Framework

Jeff Bezo’s framework is a great one. He uses it primarily for big strategic decisions. Any decision we make is smaller and less consequential in comparison. So I would say it works. All decisions fall into four quadrants based on two axes:

Applying the Pareto Principle, 80% of your decisions will be inconsequential, but the 20% that are consequential carry 80% of the weight on your North Star. There is a great opportunity to delegate decisions and help you leadership team get a little more coaching.

Consensus vs Consultative vs Authoritative Approaches

Decisions can be made using three different approaches.

• We will make the decision as a management team. Every vote counts. We go with the consensus.
• A leader will consult with their management team and use the information gathered to make a decision, reserving the right to have full authority on the final decision. It helps to establish this as your decision approach in advance when consulting your team. “I’m collecting people’s perspective on this issue so that I can make an informed decision.”
• This is when you just make the decision, without consultation. It’s okay to use this approach, often reserved for the consequential and irreversible decisions that are often strategic. Your team may not have your experience, perspective, insight, information, or carry the same consequence of the decision.

Identify Problems and Blockers

My favorite consensus building approach is to build the 5-year outcome as a team, break the five years into annual targets, and then let each team build the annual operating plan they need. This exercise will take much longer than you doing it yourself, but it will create ownership with your leaders, and help them understand that they don’t work in silos.

Build a plan using OKRs

There are a few great goal setting frameworks. I would say the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework is the best one. Set corporate Objectives each year and then Objectives in each department. Each Objective should have measurable, trackable, and attainable Key Results. You’ll look at these every quarter in a quarterly review.

Monitor the plan

Each quarter, review where things are at with the team. A great facilitation approach is to have each team track progress on one slide broken into four quadrants:

• New Discoveries – what is new that could impact the plan positively or negatively.
• On Target – what objectives are on track
• Off Target – what objectives are off track
• In Need of Change – this synthesizes the off target and new discoveries with action that needs to be made in the coming quarter.

Do not use this meeting to review metrics or financials. This information should be available in a package sent in advance of the meeting. Everyone should review it before the meeting.

Change is inevitable. Chaos isn’t.

With clarity on where they’re going, how decisions get made, and how the team actually moves together instead of in parallel, change can feel manageable instead of chaotic. That kind of clarity matters most when you don’t have room to get it wrong. This is what practical change management for founder‑led companies looks like in practice.