I’m a minority partner in a large scale food business that I helped start several years ago. We had significant traction in our initial offerings, and have pivoted multiple times to adjust to more scalable opportunities that became available to us. We’ve done what we needed to survive, but due to the shifts, our partnership has devolved into dysfunction.
The primary partners have little in the day to day and are essentially disconnected and allow managers to handle specific functions. We do have a viable product and there is significant traction and opportunity on the horizon with it. However, due to the internal dysfunction, I am extremely skeptical in our team being able to execute – especially at the scale of our impending opportunities. As a team, our long term planning ends up akin to shooting from the hip — not the brightest idea with what is essentially a manufacturing operation.
Our saving grace is that the opportunity is large enough that we continue to have many investors wanting to buy in (when we need money) — diluting us further — which allows us to continue to stay afloat but barely survive when we continuously underperform on the opportunities given, but now with a much higher monthly overhead cost due to the opportunity’s increased scale. It’s incredibly disheartening to see such opportunity not maximized. I almost get the feeling that we are simply scaling to be larger to become “too big to fail” by our investor’s egos, suppliers, etc, but never really fixing the foundation (right team and methods) to scale properly. Worst of all is the time spent feeling that I’m wasting precious time/energy on this project. I’ve privately touched on this in a gentler way with my partners so that it doesn’t become personal, but I didn’t perceive that the other partners genuinely want to change their behavior so we continue the status quo.
My biggest fear is that I leave now with the opportunity so large that an established player acquires us to gain market share in this niche, but I see myself caring less each day because of the lack of vision and execution. And honestly, it simply goes against how I imagined my company to have evolved into. Have I stayed past my welcome? What would you suggest?