UpTrajectory Review

Entrepreneur has published a piece by Aida Vopyan arguing that the most effective way to scale talent development inside a growing company is not to develop individual contributors one by one, but to invest in managers who can, in turn, develop the people beneath them. The logic is multiplicative: a founder or senior leader personally mentoring five employees influences five careers; a manager trained to coach and grow people can influence an entire team, and then the teams those team members eventually lead. It is a reframe of the classic build-versus-buy talent question, applied not to hiring but to learning and development capacity.

For a small-business operator, this framing cuts directly against a common instinct. Most owners and operators pride themselves on being the best developer of people in the building, and in the early days that is often true and necessary. But as headcount grows past roughly twenty or thirty, the founder-as-mentor model breaks down structurally, not because the founder cares less but because there are only so many hours in a week. The operators who stall at that inflection point are often the ones still trying to personally touch every career, while the ones who break through are those who have built a layer of managers who can carry the development load without constant oversight.

What is genuinely useful in Vopyan's framing is that it treats management development as an operating system decision rather than a soft HR nicety. The contested part, and where we would push back gently, is the implication that developing managers is a cleaner or easier path. In practice, many small businesses promote their best individual contributors into management roles without any training, and those new managers often replicate the worst habits of whoever promoted them. Developing managers who can actually grow people requires real investment, real feedback loops, and a willingness to remove managers who cannot do it, which is harder than it sounds when that manager is also your top salesperson.

The second-order effects are worth sitting with. When development flows through managers rather than directly from the founder, the culture becomes less dependent on the founder's personality and presence, which is both a strength and a risk. It frees the operator to focus on strategy, customers, and capital, but it also means the company can drift from the founder's values if managers are not aligned and held accountable. There is also a cost question: training managers properly is not cheap, and the return shows up over years rather than quarters, which makes it easy to defer when cash is tight.

Our read is that Vopyan is right about the math and right about the direction, but the piece likely underweights how deliberately a small business has to build that first layer of manager-developers. It does not happen by accident, and it does not happen by sending one person to a leadership seminar. What to watch for in your own operation: whether your managers are having real development conversations with their direct reports on a consistent basis, and whether you are measuring that the way you measure revenue. If you are still the primary developer of everyone in the company, that is not a badge of honor. It is a bottleneck, and it will eventually cap your growth whether you notice it or not.

“If I develop five people myself, I can influence five careers, but if I develop a manager who knows how to grow people, that manager can develop an entire team.” — Entrepreneur

Takeaway: Stop being the sole developer of your people; train managers who can grow teams, or your growth will stall at your personal capacity.