With a corporate leadership background spanning companies in the hospitality and food and beverages sphere, John B. Richards leads the “active lifestyle” cruise line Blue World Voyages as CEO. John B. Richards has experience in driving growth as companies transition from early investment support from friends and families to ones in which an outside, market-driven perspective is introduced. 

Threshold companies that succeed quickly learn to identify the intrinsic cost involved in heeding familiar, early stakeholder counsel over outside voices that are constructively critical. Expansion requires new and often highly specialized talent, and knowing which specific growth milestones necessitate new personnel and investors is often as much an art as a science. There is an implicit cost to loosening the reins, with less personal control exerted over the company as outside capital is secured and the operation expands. 

The resulting “tension between trust and talent” takes many forms and is often defined by the degree to which either organic growth or acquisition-enabled growth is favored. Those early-stage executives who thrive as the firm reaches new markets are able to actively read the nature of the growth and assess when a new infusion of capital and talent is required. Those who fail to heed growth-defining forces, as well as their own limits, can easily burn through capital as operations become inefficient and overextended.