There comes a time in the life of every start-up company when the founders need to bring in some outside help. Your VC investors and recruiting consultants can help you to build a management team to take your company to the next stage of growth.

This can be a tricky proposition, to say the least.

If your company brings in the wrong management team, you might alienate some of your co-founders. You might lose control of the company. The company might go down the wrong path.

But if you hire the right management team, you will complement the skills of the founders, bring in outside expertise, and open new contacts in other industries or markets – the opportunities are huge.

The biggest reason why so many start-up companies eventually hire new management teams is because there are different skills required at each phase of a start-up’s life.

Consider these “three stages” of a start-up:

• Stage 1 – Pre-Launch: During the early days of a start-up, everyone is focused on launching. This requires the team to be highly entrepreneurial, dynamic, flexible, able to change course, and willing to work insanely hard to get the product ready to introduce to the market. This phase requires extraordinary dedication, focus and passion for the product – this is the stage where many inventors and entrepreneurs thrive; it’s the stage of dreaming, designing, and building.

• Stage 2 – Evolution: Then, after the launch, the team needs to be able to adapt to the feedback and changing demands from the market to adjust their product to get a better fit with what the market wants. There has to be a willingness to let their ideas evolve. (There’s a great saying from VC investor Paul Graham: “Launching teaches you what you should have been building.”) Sometimes a start-up doesn’t know what they have until they launch – and then they quickly have to re-evaluate, re-focus and often re-launch a modified product that might bear little resemblance to the original.

  Again, this stage requires a unique level of adaptability, and it also requires the management team to develop a sense of what their customers want. It’s not all about “the product” at this stage, it’s more about interacting with the market, finding out what people want to buy, and finding out how to deliver the right solution. If an inventor or entrepreneur is excessively enamoured with his invention and is not willing to listen to feedback and adjust the company’s strategy, then this stage can be difficult. Passion is good, but sometimes it’s possible to have too much passion – when “passion” becomes “stubbornness,” that’s when companies often fail. If a company’s founders are too stubborn, their VC investors might see this as an opportunity to bring in a new management team.

• Stage 3 – Long-term Growth: If a company is going to grow and build up to a serious scale, it is often necessary to build a new management team. This is the stage where most start-up companies look to hire outside managers – the workload has grown beyond the capacity of the founding team, and different management skills are going to be needed. Getting a start-up launched is a different sort of project than managing an established company for long-term growth. And many start-up founders prefer to focus on Stage 1 – the dreaming, designing and building – rather than the more humdrum and routine tasks of managing a larger enterprise.

So if your VC investors are starting to talk about bringing in new management, understand that it’s not a criticism of you or your leadership. It’s a natural part of the evolution of a start-up – in fact, many start-up founders have it as a goal to eventually replace themselves (and depart with a big payday).