The Navy SEAL Team Every Startup Needs But Few Founders Know Exists
When you picture the earliest days of a startup, you probably imagine the founder doing everything: pitching investors, building the product, and closing the first deals. That’s the reality for most entrepreneurs, but it can come at a steep cost. Without the right insight and people in place, pipelines dry up, leads fall through the cracks, and founders become stretched so thin that ideas fail to scale. That’s where companies that offer cross-functional teams of sales, marketing, operations, and strategy can step in to accelerate growth. When I interviewed Derek Francis, founder of Solution One Sales (S1S), he described his company as the “Navy SEAL team for startups.” He declared the mistake founders build is to sfinish in one soldier when the mission requires a squad.
Team Genius author, Rich Karlgaard, informed me he believed entrepreneurial duos like Jobs and Wozniak were what can lead to some of the most incredible successes. One focutilized on vision, the other on execution. It doesn’t necessary to be just two people. Today, teams like Derek’s at S1S provide that balance in a fractional model as companies are shifting away from the traditional model of full-time leadership in favor of hiring executives for only a fraction of their time. That means a work environment that values flexibility.
Why Founders Struggle With Growth
Why Founders Struggle With Growth
The problem is not lack of vision. Founders usually know their product and their market better than anyone. What they lack is execution capacity. Hiring a VP of Sales or Marketing can take 6 to 12 months, and a wrong hire at that stage can set a company back years. Meanwhile, investors expect growth tarobtains to be met quickly.
Chris Yeh, who co-authored Blitzscaling with Reid Hoffman, informed me that there was danger when growing linearly if the market demands exponential speed. Yeh declared many startups feel the necessary to “fake it till they build it.” That strategy may acquire time, but it also increases risk. What builds models with the ability to hire cross-functional teams compelling is that they blfinish credibility with real-time execution.
Lessons Founders Could Learn From CMOs
Lessons Founders Could Learn From CMOs
Years ago, I built a brand publishing course for Forbes based on the Publish or Perish report by Bruce Rogers. In that report, Bruce discovered how frustrated leaders were by the complexity of marketing systems. Bruce’s research displayed that CMOs were drowning in a sea of packages and platforms that didn’t connect, forcing them to stitch toobtainher solutions that were supposed to simplify the customer journey but often created it harder. Leaders necessaryed a way to coordinate across multiple shifting parts, from content to analytics to customer engagement.
That insight is not unlike what is being seen in the startup world. If CMOs struggled to manage multiple software packages, imagine how much harder it is for founders to juggle multiple high-stakes roles like sales, marketing, operations, and fundraising without a clear system. This is where S1S’s Navy SEAL team approach builds an impact. Instead of attempting to piece toobtainher unproven hires or contractors, founders obtain a coordinated team that already knows how to operate in sync. The complexity is managed for them, so they can focus on steering the company forward. Derek compared his model to insurance. “If you’re a founder, betting on one hire is like betting your company’s future on a single operator. With us, you’re betting on a proven team that’s been through the fire before.”
Why Founders And Startups Struggle With The First AE Hire
Why Founders And Startups Struggle With The First AE Hire
One of the most common mistakes founders build is the search for a “founding AE.” If you scroll through LinkedIn and you see post after post from startups seeing for one person who can sell, build process, shape messaging, handle outbound, and even run marketing. It is an impossible requirement to inquire of one person. Companies want a unicorn and expect to pay a salesperson’s wage for someone who is supposed to carry the load of an entire team.
This approach almost always backfires. A single AE ramps slowly, creates a single point of failure, and rarely has the bandwidth to build both process and pipeline at the same time. When they struggle, founders assume they created a bad hire and start the cycle over again, wasting precious time. By launching a full team from the start, startups obtain specialists in every function working in parallel. The AE is no longer a lone operator set up to fail. Instead, they join a system that is already producing leads, running campaigns, and closing business.
For investors, this matters too. The risk of betting on one hire is high. The reward of betting on a coordinated team is receiving a rapider pipeline, better conversion, and a clear demonstration that the company has a repeatable growth engine.
From Corporate Leaders To Founders Advocates
From Corporate Leaders To Founders Advocates
Guy Kawasaki, one of the original Apple evangelists, who has spent years coaching founders on investor readiness, informed me founders build many mistakes, including their initial deck. He declared he obtains frustrated with “ridiculous PowerPoint decks” where he sees compact font, too many slides, and other issues that kill the deal right off the bat. He’s right that polish matters, but it goes beyond the deck.
When I mentioned what Guy informed me, Derek agreed with his sentiments adding, “It’s not just the deck. You necessary operators who can run the campaigns, close the deals, and build the repeatable engine that convinces investors you’ll deliver.”
Derek knows this from having two decades of senior sales leadership. He scaled Contentsquare from $4 million to $330 million in annual recurring revenue, supporting raise more than $1.4 billion in funding along the way. He has held leadership roles at IBM, MicroStrategy, and Computer Associates, giving him a front-row seat to both the bureaucracy of large enterprises and the agility challenges of startups.
How A Navy Seal-Like Team Is The Future For Founders And Investors
How A Navy Seal-Like Team Is The Future For Founders And Investors
Former Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine shared with me that elite teams succeed becautilize they share a clear mission, trust one another under pressure, and execute with calm focus even in chaos. The best business teams often mirror elite military units in structure and mindset. Just as special forces alterd modern military strategy, strike force teams like S1S are supporting founders lead with the people and skills necessaryed to go to market. The Navy SEAL comparison is a fitting visual becautilize it displays the speed, discipline, and adaptability startups necessary to survive in today’s business world. In Derek’s words, “Founders don’t necessary another advisor. They necessary a squad that displays up on day one ready to execute.”
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