Learn How To Be A Great CEO, Not Just A Founder with Simon Court

Simon Court is the author of Founder's Legacy: 50 Game-Changing Leadership Lessons for Building a Great Business

In this conversation we discuss:

• The journey from startup to scaling business requires a shift in leadership approach and mindset
• Startup failure is often attributed to leadership decisions and the lack of a growth mindset
• Recruiting the right team involves understanding the pivotal skills needed and using tools like the GC index for assessment

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Previous guests include: Arvid Kahl of FeedbackPanda, Andrei Zinkevich of FullFunnel, Scott Van den Berg of Influencer Capital, Buster Franken of Fruitpunch AI, Valentin Radu of Omniconvert, Evelina Necula of Kinderpedia, Ionut Vlad of Tokinomo, Diana Florescu of MediaforGrowth, Irina Obushtarova of Recursive, Monika Paule of Caszyme, Yannick Veys of Hypefury, Laura Erdem of Dreamdata, and Pija Indriunaite of CityBee.

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Transcript

Eric M. (00:02.794)
Simon Court, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? Yeah. Nice to see you. First of all, Simon Court, it kind of reminds me of like Simon Bond. Or I think about the leader of Duran Duran when I hear the name Simon. That was his name, right? Simon something? Yeah, yeah. Simon LeBond. But Court, you know, is also very, very cool too. So it's like, you know, hey, you got Court Simon? I don't know. There's just, will you ever?

Simon Court (00:05.32)
I'm doing great, thanks. Nice to see you, Eric.

Simon Court (00:20.04)
Simon Le Bon, I think you're thinking about, yeah, exactly.

Simon Court (00:31.624)
It follows me around every time I get to a reception of a company. It's like Simon who? Simon Court. And I have to say as in tennis, as in law, as in... I've got hundreds of them.

Eric M. (00:32.874)
Do it.

Eric M. (00:43.868)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's a very, very cool name. Mr. Court, it's very respectable, very distinguished. Yes. A little bit English, but you have the Simon aspect, which is like the Duran Duran hungry like the wolf. Yeah, Yeji Court.

Simon Court (00:51.848)
little bit English probably.

Simon Court (00:57.96)
Yeah, that's the edgy part of me. And the court is actually a French word for short, of course. So it's a Huguenot name originally, but...

Eric M. (01:08.17)
Alright, let's jump into this. In one of your articles, you emphasize the importance of leadership and preventing failure specifically for startups. And I was wondering if you have any specific examples, maybe even stories from other startups that you collaborated with and really want to know what leadership qualities are crucial for a startup's success.

Simon Court (01:16.744)
Yeah. Yeah.

Simon Court (01:32.872)
Okay, well, there's a lot in there. Let's sort of take it one step at a time. So first of all, there's stats on startup failure makes you wonder why anybody starts a business in the first place. I think 90 % failure rate, if you count the first five years or so, seems to be about average. And so yes, there's a certain amount of madness in becoming a founder and...

So it does raise the question of what does it take for a founder to avoid failure? If you ask founders, and there's been loads of surveys on that, if you Google this, you'll find endless stats on this. And they usually found it self -reporting why they failed. And the founders tend to say things like, I ran out of money, I was poor, product market fit, I fell out with my co -founder. There's a whole list of them. And the truth is,

In my experience, and you can see from the wrinkles on my face that I've got quite a lot of that, it's actually a leadership failure in the end. And what I mean by that is the decisions that founders make, the people they go into business with or recruit, or the investors they decide to allow to invest in their business.

Those decisions are the things that in the end trip them up and lead to problems. So if you as a founder can actually take a really strong growth mindset into this and say, I know I'm not the finished article. I know that I'm gonna run into difficulties. I need to surround myself with the kind of people who can really give me some help and guidance when I need it.

And if I take that growth mindset into almost every aspect of the way I lead and try to build my business, I'll be okay, actually. That's at the heart of this. And founders who think that they've got the best idea the world has ever seen and they're so committed to it, they won't change direction. They just will keep bashing away at it.

Simon Court (03:53.256)
And don't listen to advice and don't sort of listen to what the marketplace and their customers or potential customers are telling them You quite quickly run into trouble

Eric M. (04:03.114)
Yeah, this made me think of this analogy where I read about Djokovic, the tennis player. And 15 years ago, he was ranked in the top 20 and he was probably winning 51 % of the points. And over the years, within three years, he incrementally improved his tennis game where it got like 4 % better. I think that was it, just 4 % better and he won 55 % of his points.

Simon Court (04:11.144)
Yeah.

Simon Court (04:26.152)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Eric M. (04:32.682)
all of a sudden he's a top five player. Now he's considered one of the top three greatest in the world. More Grand Slam trophies than anybody else. So let's imagine we've got somebody like a founder, he's strong in mindset, he's willing to improve, he's hungry to learn, he's committed, he's doing everything he can. He's already got the mindset piece. Is there anything else that you recommend to startup founders to where they can get incrementally better to give them that edge?

Simon Court (05:01.48)
Yeah.

Eric M. (05:01.482)
in the highest chance of success.

Simon Court (05:04.424)
Okay, so as you know, the book I've just written and published has actually got 50 leadership lessons that I think are potentially game changing. So there are lots of things that founders can take on board and think about when it comes to trying to get their business on the right track and make sure it's successful. And the...

The answers are very specific and very unique to the individual, the business they're trying to build. So I'm, in a way, the philosophy behind the book is that there are no silver bullets. There are no kind of easy wins here, unfortunately. I'm sorry to be the bearer of that news. But there are some, I picked four kind of themes that.

I think are really important for every founder to sort of grapple with. Number one is learn how to be a great CEO, not just to be a great founder. Now, you know, there's a few people out there have written about this subject. I mean, founders don't know how to do the CEO job typically. And why would they? Because, you know, they didn't...

go into business on their own in order to become a leader. They went into business on their own to become, to bring, I mean, last night I met a young woman who's putting a new vermouth in the market here in England and she's using English wine to make it. She's totally committed to her challenge, but she has no idea how to be a CEO or how to be a leader. And so she's running into all sorts of problems to do with leadership.

Eric M. (06:57.322)
Mm -hmm.

Simon Court (06:57.48)
and to do with running a commercial business that she's never encountered before. So you've really got to learn how to be a good CEO. Ownership and leadership are not the same thing. So a lot of founders don't know how to do that job. If you're going to do the job, you need to step into it. So I'm sorry, I'm only on the first lesson here. I mean, I'll give you one concrete example. I met Rob Small, who was the founder of Miniclip.

Eric M. (07:17.322)
Yeah.

Simon Court (07:26.408)
gaming company that quite a lot of people will probably know the name of. They're currently owned by Tencent and they're turning over nearly a billion dollars a year. This is a huge business now. When I met him back in the end of 2012, 2013, this was a struggling $30, $40 million turnover business that wasn't really making any money. It flatlined.

Eric M. (07:56.586)
Mm -hmm.

Simon Court (07:56.808)
He'd taken his business model as far as he could. It was on the web. All the growth was on mobile. And he had surrounded himself with people who he trusted, who were his mates, who he'd been introduced to. He thought would make a great team because he would trust them all. But the business was completely flatlining. And when I met him, we sort of talked about...

Eric M. (08:20.042)
Mm -hmm.

Simon Court (08:24.168)
what it meant to be a CEO. He was thinking, do I step away from this business, try and hire somebody? How do I do this? And it wasn't really an affordable solution. So he and I basically said, come on, you're going to have to learn how to do this job. And we embarked on the journey. And the first thing you've got to do is get your team right. And that, in a way, is the second of those sort of themes I wanted to talk about with you today. Surrounding yourself with the right people.

Not the people that you have happened to me and you trust and think would be great because you're mates with them, but people who really know how to do the job that's required and who can face into the challenge that's required. And for them, that was about pivoting into mobile. If he was going to start to grow this business and start generating money, he had to pivot into mobile and he needed a team that was capable of doing that.

Eric M. (09:18.09)
To get the right team on board, was there anything specific that he, in the interview process or in the recruiting process, and hopefully I get to that position where I need to take my company in the future to the next level.

Simon Court (09:33.768)
Yeah.

Eric M. (09:34.698)
Is there any specific things that you do, any tips that you can do to, to kind of give you better assurance that you, this is the right person. And I'm just thinking out of the box here. I mean, do you, do you ask them, Hey, if you were in my shoes, what would you do for the next five years in order to five X this company, the way it is? I, again, I don't really know what good questions would be for the recruitment process, but.

Simon Court (09:55.912)
Yeah, so the first thing if you're trying to surround yourself with the right people, a team that's capable of really growing a company, and in his case, in the mobile space, mobile gaming and web gaming, quite different sets of skills and demands. So the first thing is saying, what do I actually really need in terms of, for example, my finance lead? Because he had nobody who could really...

provide the kind of advice and experience that he needed at that stage in his business. And they had a contract with a business in the US that was causing him endless problems and financial distress. And we found somebody who was, you know, some CFOs are really good at thinking strategically and doing &A. This CFO was really good at contracts.

really was the kind of guy who rolled his sleeves up. And at that time, that's what we needed. So being really clear what are the pivotal things that you need from that position when you're recruiting is job number one. And it's the thing that leaders do and founders sometimes don't do. The second thing is to say, okay, do they have the right kind of impact for this business? Are they gonna fit into this team? Are they gonna roll their sleeves up because we're in the...

relatively early stages of moving into a new type of business area for us. So they needed to have that capacity to be pragmatic, to learn. And we use two kinds of tools. Interview is what everybody does, but of course it has big downsides to it. And all the research shows is that no one person can interview well or better than three or four people.

So basically we would always interview two or three different people would interview that person. The optimum number is four by the way, according to Google research, but that's another four. I mean, they used to interview 26 people would interview somebody to try to get the right person. I mean, it's completely mad when you think about it. The answer after which you get completely diminishing returns is four. So get four different people to interview them.

Eric M. (11:59.05)
Okay.

Eric M. (12:13.066)
Okay.

Simon Court (12:16.2)
they together will have a much better judgment of that person than any one person on their own. That's proven. The other thing to do is to use useful tools. We use a tool called the GC index, which is the game changer index, which is basically, it's not a psychometric, psychometrics look at personality. Personality does not determine performance. If you're an introvert or an extrovert, it makes no difference to how you perform. However,

If you have an energy for being highly creative, or if you have an energy for execution, or if you have an energy for being a playmaker and really pulling a team together, that can make a really big difference if you choose the right person for the right role. So we use tools like that, which help us to get a really good sense of whether this person is going to have the right kind of energy and the right kind of impact.

Eric M. (13:08.33)
What does that look like? Is that like a 15 minute assessment that the person just fills out like different questions?

Simon Court (13:13.32)
It's an online tool and it's got about 50 questions. It's very kind of straightforward to execute and you'd need to be debriefed by somebody who's accredited and trained to interpret the data. But it's very easy for people to read and understand its simplicity is part of its value really. And it's highly predictive.

I mean, it takes us typically maybe three, four months to really see and understand somebody's impact. This reduces that to an hour or two. That's valuable. But it's called the GC index. We can include a link in wherever you include a link. That's fairly straightforward. I use it quite a lot in coaching and in team coaching. It's very potent when you're trying to build a team to understand.

Eric M. (13:54.058)
Yeah, what's it called again, Simon? The GC what?

Okay.

Yes.

Simon Court (14:13.16)
what are the complementary skills that we have in this team? Because another classic thing that founders tend to do is recruit people a bit like themselves. And actually, the thing we want to do is to recruit people very different from ourselves so that we surround ourselves with different kinds of energy and energy that's really designed to help build the company that we're trying to build.

Eric M. (14:23.306)
Right.

Eric M. (14:37.274)
absolutely, I know myself well enough that I need somebody who's the opposite of me. I'm not that organized, I'm not that diligent, but you know I'm more of like the creative thinking and the idea, so.

Simon Court (14:41.76)
Thank you.

Simon Court (14:49.224)
Yeah, so you'd end up being on the GC index, you'd be either a game changer or potentially a strategist. If you look at the data on this, this is quite interesting because we've looked at all the data that GC index people have collated over the last few years from using this tool around the world and found is something like 66%. I think it was 66 are game changes.

And that means that they are both creative and obsessive. It means, you know, what we'd expect to see that they have an idea, it probably breaks new ground, and they are absolutely committed to finding a way of realizing that in the real world. The other creative part of this, and there are five different derivatives, is the strategist. And the strategist is more pragmatic, less obsessive.

So what you tend to find is that two thirds of corporate leaders, they're in working for other companies, leaders, tend to be strategists. They have a more derivative form of creativity. So they kind of connect things together. They join up the dots and they say, okay, here's what we need to do over the next two to three years. Founders don't tend to think like that. So you see really strong distinctions between different kinds of leaders with that tool.

Eric M. (15:55.242)
Yeah.

Eric M. (16:13.898)
Yeah, that makes so much sense. Simon also read somewhere that, you know, on average, once a founder gets to maybe, let's just say $10 million in ARR, to take it to the next level, $30, $40 million, they themselves have to have to have a dramatic switch, a dramatic change. And then once you get to the $40 million level, to get to the next, you know, $100, $200 million, it's a different person. It's, you know, different qualities. Right, right.

Simon Court (16:31.176)
Yeah. Yeah.

Simon Court (16:39.816)
of often.

Eric M. (16:42.122)
Often. And then after that, even get to the unicorn level and above, it's a different mindset, different game. And in your experience, how have you helped people in the past, founders in the past, or even CEOs get to that next level? I guess what are some of the coaching that you provided? And yeah, I mean, for the audience, what were some of the things that really resonated with them and helped them get to that next level of success?

Simon Court (17:03.112)
Yeah.

Simon Court (17:09.672)
So it's typically called the founder's dilemma, right? And the question is framed by the author of the book as, do you want to be rich or do you want to be king? Because typically founders become richer by handing their business over to sort of professional managers. And that happens typically when outside investment comes in, substantial outside investment. Now,

I think it's a bit of an illusion because it's a sort of self -fulfilling prophecy really. And actually the truth is, if you're a founder who learns to lead, why shouldn't you go further on that journey? Why would you hand that company over to someone else or be forced to do it? If you have learned how to be a good CEO, there's no reason why that should happen. It is absolutely true to say that the challenge is involved in

building an early stage business, the scrambling you have to do and the constant flexing that you have to do are really a little bit different from the challenges you face when the business is scaling and you need a really smart strategy and you need good financial management and you need to be hiring potentially large numbers of people. You know, they're very different. People are adaptable. People learn, they grow. And...

Rob, who I referred to earlier, my mini -clip founder, he became a great CEO. And I kind of tell his story in the book. He went through the pain of saying, okay, I need to change my team. Simon and I are going to do that. We're going to progressively build a much stronger team. We're going to develop a strategy that will really start to drive growth. And we pivoted really hard into mobile so that the company became extremely focused.

the kind of behavior that you would expect from a good, smart CEO. But the great thing about Rob and the great thing about founders is that founder mentality is something that corporate leaders badly lack, is that Rob never lost his passion and his commitment to democratize gaming and to make games accessible and available to a much wider group of people. So personally, my experience is that founders can learn.

Simon Court (19:36.104)
and grow and adapt and they can take their business on that journey. Rob, by the time he let go of the CEO role at Miniclip, I think it was 2018 when he finally said, I'm going to, I'm going to manage my own succession. The business was already a unicorn. I mean, it became a unicorn within about three years of our collaboration starting. So it doesn't have to be that stereotype of the journey and the.

you know, the founder stepping away. It doesn't have to be like...

Eric M. (20:10.45)
Okay, well Simon, one question that I sometimes get because I've interviewed over 100, usually early stage founders based in Europe and people always ask me like who are some of the most successful founders that you've interviewed? And I always tell them that, well, obviously there's been a number of what you call successful from a financial perspective, but for me personally are the ones that can talk about their failures and obstacles with a smile on their face. And...

Simon Court (20:32.2)
Yeah.

Eric M. (20:40.778)
they treat their business or their business as if it's a game. And for me, I consider that to be successful. In your experience, if somebody asked you the question out of all the founders and CEOs that you mentored, what would you consider the most successful and why?

Simon Court (21:01.705)
In terms of a person or yeah. So I'm going to come back to Rob because of his adaptability. I mean, it was an absolute joy working with him. I think the key and he illustrates the key for what I found in the mindset, this growth mindset I talked about. He would come into our coaching conversations and he'd say, I don't know what to do. Or, you know, I've got all these options. I can't, I'm...

Eric M. (21:04.01)
Yes.

Simon Court (21:30.728)
this? Can we just talk about it? It's the deliberation of actually not knowing and being honest about it and actually saying, can we just go exploring? And we'd agree, you know, let's get some more data because we can't make this decision. How are we going to get to a better place? And I think that mindset of get rid of your ego, get rid of your pride, stop

telling yourself or others that you know all the answers or you think you know all the answers, just liberate yourself. I have to tell you one of the great things about getting a bit older, because by the way, there's no evidence that younger founders do more better than older founders. In fact, if anything, the good thing about being older is that you stop worrying about what other people think.

Eric M. (22:23.306)
I'm starting to get to that age.

Simon Court (22:25.544)
And then, well, there you go. I'm good. Good for you. You got there earlier than I did. But that, but that moment means you can actually take a bit more risk, a bit more personal risk and maybe a bit more business risk as well. So I think it's, it's really all about that. That mindset is absolutely, I mean, you know, everything else flows from that kind of starting position, which is why it's chapter one of the book and everything else you will learn.

if you kind of start from that healthy, personal place, right? Yeah.

Eric M. (23:03.53)
I can't wait to read it. I've got an Amazon right now. So it's called the Founders Legacy 50 Game Changing Leadership Lessons for Building a Great Business. And so many stories based on your experience. So I'm bound to find a few that resonate with me and my current current place where I'm at in my business. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I do have some rapid fire questions for you, Simon. Are you ready? Okay, first one is here. What is an unusual food that you consume?

Simon Court (23:12.648)
It is.

Simon Court (23:26.344)
Alright, give it a go.

Simon Court (23:33.064)
Unusual.

Eric M. (23:34.09)
unusual.

Simon Court (23:37.252)
I know it's supposed to be rapid fire I'm trying to think what's unusual I don't know it's unusual for me I don't know edamame is not unusual

Eric M. (23:42.154)
Yeah.

Eric M. (23:50.154)
Okay, Edamame, all right, all right, next question. Blank is a crazy thing you did in college or university.

Simon Court (23:58.28)
Carrie, a friend of mine got a bit drunk. We moved his whole his with him sleeping on it. We moved his bed, his bedside table, his lamp and some of his personal effects and his chair out into the middle of a football pitch right next to the halls of residence. So when he woke up in the morning, all of the people were at the window looking at him, watching him wake up.

Eric M. (24:24.97)
He must have been out. He must have been gone. Okay, what's the most interesting thing you did in the last 26 days?

Simon Court (24:27.792)
He was truly out.

Eric M. (24:58.602)
Yeah, now I've had a couple of courageous guests on the show and they tell me go to some of the islands that they're absolutely beautiful. So I believe it. Yeah. Okay, last question for you. The Academy Award for Blink goes to Simon Quartz.

Eric M. (25:22.986)
All right. Thank you so much, Simon. I will include a link to your LinkedIn profile and link to your book, Founder's Legacy, in the show notes. And thank you so much for coming on the show.

Eric M. (25:36.586)
Nice chatting with you. I'm sure once we hang up, you're going to think of something that you eat and you're like, why didn't I say that? Yeah, that always happens. Yeah. All right, everybody listening, thanks for tuning in. And if you enjoy this, hit that subscribe button, tell others about it. Until next week, this is Eric signing off. Cheers.