Entrepreneurship
Hugo Brooks on Why Founders Need People Who Will Challenge Them
The serial entrepreneur explains how unchecked ambition and early success cost him a thriving agency, and why a support team built for perspective is the safeguard many founders skip.
Hugo Brooks - Ambition Is Not the Problem - Your Missing Questions Are
Video from Youtopia.
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Why do founders need a support team that challenges their thinking?
Hugo Brooks argues that a founder's drive is essential but tends to shut out questions. After losing a fast-growing agency in his early thirties, he concluded that his biggest failure was not asking questions. His answer is a support team chosen for perspective: people willing to challenge the plan, and a founder willing to ask for and accept that challenge.
Hugo Brooks spent more than 30 years setting up and running design, brand and innovation consultancies, advising the owners of global brands such as Unilever, Coca-Cola and Nestlé. On The Ups and Downs of a Small Business Owner podcast, the serial entrepreneur looked back on that career with unusual candour and named one habit behind his biggest setbacks.
That habit was letting ambition run the show. Brooks describes ambition as a powerful force, the desire to make tomorrow better than yesterday, but one that dislikes being questioned. Through his twenties and thirties, he says, it pushed him from one goal to the next without ever stopping to ask whether the direction still made sense.
His remedy is practical rather than philosophical. Founders, he argues, need a support team built around perspective, and the humility to listen to it. He learned that lesson the hard way, through a collapse that cost him almost everything, and it now shapes how he coaches business owners who want to grow without repeating his mistakes.
Key takeaways
- Early success can be dangerous, because ambition combined with success persuades founders to believe in themselves too much.
- A business built in boom times can collapse quickly if it is undercapitalised and clients cut spending at once.
- The most valuable thing a support team offers is perspective, including people willing to challenge what the founder thinks.
- Strong leaders hire people better than themselves for key roles, rather than versions of themselves who feel easier to control.
1. Why early success can mislead a founder
Brooks left school at 16, went to art college and trained as a designer, then realised that other designers were better than he was. Rather than compete with them, he decided it would be smarter to employ them. After a failed first attempt at a business with no clients or experience, he joined an agency, learned the trade and rose to partner.
When he finally set up on his own, success came quickly. The business started with three people in a temporary office off the King's Road in London, grew into a large office in Richmond and then opened in New York. He describes flying back and forth weekly and living the life, convinced that the growth would simply continue.
Looking back, he sees that period as a warning rather than a triumph. In his view, ambition and success are a dangerous combination, because founders begin to believe in themselves a little too much. The drive that built the company had, as he puts it, replaced sense, and the weaknesses in how the business was run went unexamined.
2. What a collapse taught him about running a business
The downturn arrived when the economy turned and his clients cut their budgets almost overnight. Brooks says he lost literally everything, including the family home, in his early thirties. He was starting a young family at the time, and he now says he should have been building security and certainty instead of behaving, in his words, like a fighter pilot.
He is candid about the business failings behind the fall. The company was inadequately capitalised, and he admits there were a hundred things wrong with it that success had hidden. His industry, he explains, behaves like a roller coaster: clients spend freely when the economy is strong and turn the taps off at the first hint of trouble.
His instinct after the collapse was to dust himself off and start again as quickly as possible. He is grateful for that resilience, but he also recognises what fuelled it. Part of his ambition, he says, was about running away from something rather than running towards a goal, and that kind of drive rarely leaves room for reflection.
3. Building a support team for perspective
Brooks calls himself a natural lone wolf. He found it hard to acknowledge that he needed help, harder still to ask for it, and he tended to hear advice as criticism. Running companies felt safe precisely because he sat at the top. It took repeated hard knocks, he says, before he accepted that seeking help from others is the smarter way to work.
If he were starting again, he would always have a support team, and he is clear about its purpose. Its value is perspective: people willing to challenge what the founder thinks and says. The advisers can hold wildly different views, and the founder's job is to sit in the middle, weigh what they offer and decide what to try.
He applies the same thinking to hiring. A great chief executive, he argues, puts people better than himself in every key role, not versions of himself who feel easier to control. Brooks now passes these lessons on as a coach and speaker, and he explores the force behind them in his book Ambition: Redefining Success for a Restless Age.
