OMX Founder Nicole Verkindt and Change and Innovation Visionary Michael Hyatt share screen-time as Next Gen Den Dragons, but they’ve also taken small businesses and turned them into large ones. In this piece from BetaKit, they go into some of the nitty-gritty on getting to the next entrepreneurial level:

For Hyatt, that structure is reinforced by hiring quality people and trusting them to grow the business.

“The tough thing from going to a founder-based business to a larger, real company is you’re going to have to hire some really fantastic people, give them complete authority over the business unit, let them hire, and own that,” he said. “You gotta figure out how to let people have authority and run the business to get bigger.”

Of course, that presupposes a business has the cash to hire the right people. Having bootstrapped their way to growth through sales at their respective businesses, both founders lamented the current fixation with pre-seed or seed rounds of funding and not enough attention on revenue.

“It’s really about going back to the fundamentals and figuring out how to build a real business than being so obsessed with the round,” Verkindt said. “It’s about doing the hard work on the ground with the customers than spending all your time on fancy PowerPoints.”

Watch the video of their conversation: