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 said the mistake founders make is to send in one soldier when the mission requires a squad.
Team Genius author, Rich Karlgaard, told me he believed entrepreneurial duos like Jobs and Wozniak were what can lead to some of the most incredible successes. One focused on vision, the other on execution. It doesn’t need to be just two people. Today, teams like Derek’s at S1S provide that balance in a fractional model as companies are moving 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
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 targets to be met quickly.
Chris Yeh, who co-authored Blitzscaling with Reid Hoffman, told me that there was danger when growing linearly if the market demands exponential speed. Yeh said many startups feel the need to “fake it till they make it.” That strategy may buy time, but it also increases risk. What makes models with the ability to hire cross-functional teams compelling is that they blend credibility with real-time execution.
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 showed that CMOs were drowning in a sea of packages and platforms that didn’t connect, forcing them to stitch together solutions that were supposed to simplify the customer journey but often made it harder. Leaders needed a way to coordinate across multiple moving 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 makes an impact. Instead of trying to piece together unproven hires or contractors, founders get 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
One of the most common mistakes founders make is the search for a “founding AE.” If you scroll through LinkedIn and you see post after post from startups looking for one person who can sell, build process, shape messaging, handle outbound, and even run marketing. It is an impossible requirement to ask 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 made a bad hire and start the cycle over again, wasting precious time. By launching a full team from the start, startups get 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 faster pipeline, better conversion, and a clear demonstration that the company has a repeatable growth engine.
From Corporate Leaders To Founders Advocates
Guy Kawasaki, one of the original Apple evangelists, who has spent years coaching founders on investor readiness, told me founders make many mistakes, including their initial deck. He said he gets frustrated with “ridiculous PowerPoint decks” where he sees small 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 told me, Derek agreed with his sentiments adding, “It’s not just the deck. You need 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, helping 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
Former Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine shared with me that elite teams succeed because 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 changed modern military strategy, strike force teams like S1S are helping founders lead with the people and skills needed to go to market. The Navy SEAL comparison is a fitting visual because it shows the speed, discipline, and adaptability startups need to survive in today’s business world. In Derek’s words, “Founders don’t need another advisor. They need a squad that shows up on day one ready to execute.”