Are You Leading for the Stage You’re In?
Experience without drive is common. So is drive without experience. Last month in Mexico City, I met a team that seems to have both, led by a founder whose persistence helped create the opportunity in front of them.
I went to assess PesoRama, the Canadian company building the JOi Dollar Plus retail chain in Mexico, and to spend time with its founder and CEO, Rahim Bhaloo. (Disclosure: I am a shareholder in PesoRama. These observations reflect my time with Rahim and his team.)
In July, I wrote The Leadership Question I Was Asking Wrong, which laid out four scorecards for judging leaders: character, leadership, operating ability and institution building. Mexico sharpened one point. All four matter, but the stage of the business changes how much each should weigh. Character is non-negotiable at every stage. What shifts is the balance between building the team, driving execution and creating an organization that can thrive without you.
Persist, but adapt
What I saw took seven years to build. PesoRama opened its first stores in 2019. Rahim committed significant personal capital, hired a team and initially relied on others to run the business. Progress fell short, and the lessons were expensive.
He stayed committed but changed how he pursued the opportunity. Eventually he stepped into the CEO role and took direct charge of execution. That is the hard part. Conviction carries us through setbacks, but it can also lock us into assumptions that need to change.
What should you stay committed to—and what must change about how you pursue it?
Hire for what people still want to prove
Success in a large company does not automatically translate into success in an entrepreneurial one. Established systems, resources and brand recognition can conceal whether someone has the appetite to build those advantages themselves. A résumé won’t tell you whether they do.
Rahim’s team came from Walmart, Tiendas D1, WeWork and Kraft Heinz. Their experience was impressive, and their hunger was even more so. At dinner one evening, I mostly listened. No one needed prompting, and the conversation kept returning to what they could build together. They spoke like owners. Equity connected the company’s success to their own ambitions: making a name for themselves and creating wealth for their families.
Compensation attracts talent. Pride in what people are building helps sustain their commitment when the work is hard and the outcome is uncertain.
When you hire, are you as curious about what people still want to accomplish as what they’ve already done? Do you know what makes your vision worth pursuing for them?
Lead visibly
Rahim starts early, works long hours and is visibly in the work alongside his people. The team matches him. One executive commutes two hours each way. Hours alone don’t prove performance, but the purpose behind these hours was clear: a group of underdogs who believe they can build something together.
Turn commitment into execution
In retail, ambition is tested through purchasing, leases, inventory and store openings, and those decisions have to be made well again and again. Rahim built expertise around those requirements and partnerships to strengthen them. One is strategic shareholder Coppel, which contributes site-selection analytics and introductions to landlords.
The pace has changed. By September, PesoRama reported opening 18 stores since February, compared with ten over the previous three years combined (company-sponsored profile, BNN Bloomberg). Sustaining that pace is the harder test.
What does your growth plan require that you haven’t built yet? Be as precise about the missing people, processes and relationships as you are about your targets.
Look beyond the familiar
Canadian expansion conversations usually jump straight to the U.S. A short flight from Toronto put me in an enormous consumer market, with talent determined to build something. How much opportunity are we missing by staying with what’s familiar? And as our businesses mature, do we keep the curiosity and hunger that got us started?
Weigh the scorecards for your stage
My strongest observations were on leadership and operating ability. Character takes longer to judge, because it shows through hard decisions and competing interests. One visit can’t settle it.
Institution building matters, but I wouldn’t make independence from Rahim the measure of PesoRama today. The business appears to be moving from years of learning into rapid expansion. From what I saw, his direct involvement is a strength at this stage. Over time, more responsibility will need to move to the organization he is building. The involvement that speeds growth today can become a constraint tomorrow. Knowing when to make that shift is the leader’s job.
That is the real value of the scorecards: they help you recognize when the approach that got you here needs to change. That is hard to see from inside your own business.
Are you leading for the stage your business is in, or the stage where you got comfortable?
And who around you will give you an honest answer?
That is the kind of community we build at PEO Leadership | Innovators Alliance, where leaders bring real decisions into the room and leave with perspectives they can put to work. If you’re navigating your next stage of growth and want peers who will challenge your thinking, reach me at lgoren@peo-leadership.com.
