Book Review
Rachel E Turner, serial entrepreneur and author of the new book, The Founder's Survival Guide: Lead your business from start-up to scale-up to grown-up, understands all too well that start-up leadership skills and experience will only get you so far. The founder path is isolating, stressful and overwhelming, and few founders survive the scale-up journey unscathed. If you don’t scale your leadership as you scale your company, you’re unlikely to survive.
Rachel E Turner has spent over twenty years helping founders of growing businesses to survive and thrive, so they can lead successful and healthy businesses. Her new book, The Founder’s Survival Guide, shows you how to do the same. It shows you how to adapt your leadership style and shift from brave warrior, to considered architect, to wise monarch as your business grows. It addresses some of the most common challenges scale-up founders face, and provides an extensive toolbox to help you manage your team, your energy and your mind.
Read this book to:
Understand what your business, people and stakeholders require of you at different stages of growth, and adapt your leadership style accordingly
Master the skills of communicating to influence and communicating to manage, and know when to use which
Stay energetically fit for the marathon, not the sprint
Avoid the self-sabotaging ego defences that can hold back even the most inspiring founder
Scale your leadership as you scale your business – from start-up to scale-up to grown-up
Author Quotes
If you don’t scale your leadership as you scale your company, you’re unlikely to survive.
Founding and scaling a business is isolating and stressful. You need to be a visionary leader, skilled manager, operations genius, salesperson par excellence, and technical whizz-kid, often all on the same day.
My job is to enable founders to survive and thrive so that they can lead profitable, healthy and successful businesses and enjoy the journey along the way.
About the author
Rachel E Turner is a 'Founder Whisperer’ with more than twenty years' experience as a transformative coach and leadership consultant. She started her professional life in the music industry, founding five successful dance music enterprises with her then partner Carl Cox before her twenty-fifth birthday. She left the music industry in the late 90s to retrain in psychology and launched her first coaching practice in 1999. After two decades refining her skills, she co-founded VC Talent Lab in 2020 to put leadership talent development at the centre of the VC ecosystem. Her extensive experience as a transformative coach and consultant helps founders and entrepreneurs to cultivate healthy, thriving businesses. Her superpower is helping her clients scale themselves to scale their businesses. Rachel serves as a senior advisor on behaviour change to global/multimillion-dollar organisations. She is passionate about impacting leaders who impact the world and tithes a percentage of her professional time to not-for-profit organisations. She is married to her teenage sweetheart, Francesco, and splits her time between their homes in the Sussex countryside and central London.
Why LoA loves it…
We all know how tough the startup journey can be, not to mention what happens what that business goes into growth mode. It can be daunting, stressful, challenging, and so much more. In her new book The Founder's Survival Guide: Lead your business from start-up to scale-up to grown-up, Rachel E Turner has so much great advice and practical insights to help you to do just that. She knows from first-hand experience what it takes, and what can happen when you don’t have the right approach and strategy. This is a really good read and importantly is like having a business coach with you to guide you through the various growth stages of your business, empowering you to deal with each one of them positively and with the right support tools. A must-read if you are really committed to not just growing your business, but thriving in it too. — Melanie Hawken, founder & ceo, Lionesses of Africa