Spotlight interview with...
James Johnson
Founder Coach, Peer Effect
Spotlight interview with...
James Johnson
Founder Coach, Peer Effect
What is your career background?
I’m a founder coach and advisor. I work with seed and Series A founders on how to scale, as it requires a whole different set of skills. They need to change their habits and behaviours, build a management team, and then look at their culture.
I like to help people on both the personal side and the business side, because for founders those two things are very much interlinked. I work with founders across the world, usually with up to 10 at a time.
Before this, I did business turnaround in Asia for a multinational corporation – the last business I worked on was turning around an engineering company.
What role do you think communications should play in helping a company break through to the next stage of growth?
When you’re in the early stage of fundraising (the survival stage), your role as a founder is very much just to get things done. You’re trying to do as much as possible to see what sticks.
But when you start shifting into the Series A and later stages, your role changes and you become a CEO. You take more perspective; you have less direct control of your people, and often you’ve got a management team in place.
One thing I work with my clients on a lot is this idea of controlling the narrative, because I truly believe that if you lose control of the narrative, you lose control of your business. As your business gets bigger, different narratives start surfacing. People will take the data they’re seeing and interpret it in different ways – sometimes accidentally, sometimes maliciously. They may have an agenda they want to promote, and if you’re not on top of your narrative and not being very clear about what it is, other narratives can take over.
So I actively work with clients on defining what their narrative is and what mechanisms they have for getting that out internally and externally.
How do you know when that narrative and that communication is actually working?
I think it’s really hard to tell when it’s working, but it’s quite easy to see when it’s not. Internally, you start to feel resistance to what you’re doing, and you start hearing a narrative that isn’t yours.
Let’s say the business is going through a period of change. Some people internally might want to present that as a failure, whereas as a leader it might be an active choice to make a change for growth. There will always be people who have a strong incentive to position it as something that should be fought or as something driven by poor performance – protecting jobs, departments and budgets. If you start hearing the same narrative pop up in meetings, that’s a sign that you’re losing control or that someone else is trying to hijack your narrative.
Externally, fundraising is a good example. Having a carefully crafted narrative is just as important when you’re fundraising. You can tell if it’s not landing, success rates drop, you hear the same challenges pushed back at you, or there are almost too many questions because the message isn’t landing easily. So you can see when it’s not working a lot easier than when it is working.
Do you have an example of where communications or narrative building has directly helped hit a big milestone - winning customers, raising funds, or building culture?
One of my clients went through a big restructuring – they let go 50% of their team. In a near period, they also had co-founders, and one of the co-founders left. Both of those things could have been perceived quite negatively: headcount reduction seems bad, and a co-founder leaving is not great.
We did a lot of work on the internal message, being very conscious of how it might be perceived and what the message should be. It went from being quite a defensive move to positioning it as an offensive, positive one: how it would unlock growth, why it was good, what it meant for the whole business and for the people remaining. It actually energised people around a new message of “this is an opportunity.”
It came down to execution, that was really the message. We need to be a really efficient, highexecution business in this next stage. The co-founder was right for the beginning bits; he’s not as interested in the next stage. We’re bringing the team down to core.
It was a very well-crafted message and the remaining founder said it was key in unlocking the next fundraising round because he felt very much on the front foot with investors.
What kind of report or format actually helps you understand the impact of the communications? How do you visualise that for yourself?
There’s always a challenge around external comms of how you prove the financial value of what you’ve done. Internal messaging is easier; you can see whether it’s landing. With fundraising, you can see it as well. But picking up new clients or being in a magazine, how do you attribute a financial value to that?
For me, it’s a belief that if you’re being featured in the right places, and everything that’s being featured is aligned with the message and narrative you’ve agreed, then that’s a win.
So, for me it breaks down like this:
Objective: how often are we being featured externally?
Subjective: how aligned is what’s being featured to our core messages?
You need to do the work on your message and make sure your external and internal narratives are consistent so you’re not pushing two different narratives. That comes back to bite you quite quickly.
How do you create a space to learn from both your communication failures and successes?
This ties to control and how do you make sure your team’s narrative matches your own? I think that’s a dangerous expectation. In the later stages it’s more about invisible control rather than direct control.
If you have a very clear narrative that people understand, your key story and talking points, you can be much more relaxed when reviewing what they’re saying. You’re not signing off every external statement, which is slow and inauthentic. Do the work to be clear with your team, check back in quarterly, or if something’s gone particularly right or wrong, take those examples and work through them.
“Don’t make any social media comments,” “no external articles without sign-off” that kills motivation. Much better to say something like here’s the key messaging; if someone approaches you, unless it’s someone super high-profile, go for it. If you think it’s something the CEO or founder should do, flag it. Better to do stuff, then review it and ask how to do it better next time.
How much experimentation should a comms team do in a high-growth company, and where do you personally draw the line of risk?
I’ve always erred on the side of action versus review. If you’re doing the basics right — you’ve taken the time to define your key messages, and importantly you’ve hired well and spent time with your team so values are aligned, then you can let people go out and do more. People will make mistakes, but if values are aligned, they’re probably not going to say something that signs you up for a political direction you don’t agree with or make a D&I statement that goes against your core commitment.
If you’ve done the preparation properly and equipped people with your vision and values, you can let them be pretty experimental. Ultimately, if you’re not willing to be experimental, why have you got them in your business? Unless you’re a comms professional, your opinion is just an opinion – get it out into the market and see what lands.
Have you ever had to pivot your messaging - or a client has - during a scale-up phase? What triggered that, and what did you/they learn?
You see that a lot by Series A – the “we’ve successfully done our seed” and “we’ve successfully done our Series A” messaging. But at some point, people fall off the track of raising every 18 to 24 months. The environment changes: the economic situation, the VC climate, fundraising conditions. Sometimes, through no fault of the company, the environment shifts and they have to change their message.
Not changing your message in response to your own performance or to external factors is the mistake. Hunkering down and insisting that the same message still works doesn’t hold up, people will see through it.
How do you make sure the story grows in credibility as the company scales beyond just the founder’s voice - becoming a narrative of the whole company, not just the CEO or founder?
Internally, regular town halls are really valuable, with a quarterly cadence where you communicate. Some founders like to send a weekly email; it depends from founder to founder, but at a minimum you should be doing a quarterly update about what you are seeing and reinforcing the mission. You are equipping the whole business with information.
As a founder, part of your job is being the chief storyteller, identifying examples of people doing things the right way and spreading those stories. You should be talking to your management team and to individuals, and each of those conversations is an opportunity to share an anecdote such as “this person did X.” If you tell enough people the same story and they start groaning at you, that is probably a sign your comms strategy is landing.
What advice would you give to other CEOs and founders on treating comms as a growth driver rather than just a support function?
Control the narrative. It means you control the direction of your business. It helps with fundraising, client acquisition and talent acquisition and retention. It starts with you as the founder, particularly at Series A and beyond, because you have the time to take perspective and think further ahead. What are the key talking points you want people to know? What is your key narrative?
That will unlock faster growth. If it helps with fundraising, if it helps with acquisition, if it helps with client wins, it is a very powerful tool. It is hard to see when it is working, but you can really see when it is not. As a founder, you can sense when it is not working, so it is worth taking the time to really think about what you are trying to achieve.
About James Johnson
James Johnson is a founder coach recommended by VCs to Seed and Series A founders to help them unlock their £10m+ business. He’s best known for his No Excuses framework which creates cohesive management teams and a high performance culture.
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