E27 with Scott Ritzheimer. Finding Joy and Purpose in Business Growth

What if understanding the life cycles of your business could drastically transform your leadership and profitability? Join us as we unravel this compelling question with our extraordinary guest, Scott Ritzheimer. Scott's unique perspective as an entrepreneur who has helped launch nearly 20,000 businesses and nonprofits provides invaluable insights into navigating the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. In a candid conversation, Scott shares the pivotal moment that rekindled his enthusiasm for leadership during a challenging time and underscores the profound impact of mastering business life cycles.

We explore the deeply personal and often intense bond founders feel with their businesses, akin to a parent-child relationship. Scott opens up about his critical decision points and the emotional struggles of facing stagnation and overexpansion. You'll hear about his eye-opening experience during a trip to the Monaco Grand Prix, where a business audiobook provided the clarity needed to realign his company's vision. This moment of internal reflection proved vital in steering towards a more sustainable and fulfilling future.

Finally, we dive into the practical and emotional aspects of navigating growth stages, from the 'early struggle' to the exhilarating 'fun' stage, and the daunting 'Whitewater' phase. Scott discusses the importance of joy in the process, not just in achieving milestones. He shares personal stories of difficult decisions, such as restructuring leadership and fostering scalable structures, to ensure predictable success and personal fulfillment. This episode is a heartfelt reminder that true happiness in business comes from embracing the journey, not just the destination.

Guest Linkedin: Scott Ritzheimer
Guest website: https://www.scalearchitects.com/
Free Book: The Founder’s Evolution

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Let me invite you to sit back, drop your jaw, tongue and shoulders, take a deep breath and, if you like, close your eyes for a moment and feel the beat within. In a few seconds, you just jumped from your head to your heart and felt the beat within opening up to receive even more value and fulfillment out of your business and life. And today's episode. I'm your host, nico van de Venne. Confidant to successful CEO founders and entrepreneurs who are striving to achieve everlasting fulfillment.

Speaker 1: 0:38

Welcome to the Everlasting Podcast with our next guest, scott Ritzheimer. Scott helped start nearly 20,000 new businesses and nonprofits and, with his business partner, started their multi-million dollar business through an exceptional and extended growth phase over 10 years of double-digit growth Wow All before he turned 35. And that's the point where we need to say oh, wow. Today, he helps founders and CEOs identify and implement the one essential strategy they need right now to get them on the fast track to predictable success. Welcome to the show, scott. It is great to have you. Nico, I'm so excited to be success. Welcome to the show, scott. It is great to have you.

Speaker 2: 1:27

Nico, I'm so excited to be here. There's this kind of moment it's right around now in a show where I get this anticipation, because a podcast recording like this actually changed the entire course and trajectory of both my business and my life. It was just that right now word for me and for where I was, and so every time we hit record right, we jump in. I get this like man. I hope that that happens for somebody listening today, and I think it will.

Speaker 1: 2:00

So what was that specific trigger for you then? That one podcast moment. What happened at that time?

Speaker 2: 2:09

So there's this, and I think just about every leader goes through this and to some extent we feel like we're kind of walking out into the unknown and there's maybe a half-decent map of what's behind us, but we have no idea what's ahead of us. Right it just, each and every day we kind of take that step of faith into the wild of our business, of our life, of our relationships, of our market, whatever it may be. But particularly for entrepreneurs who, you know, root definition of the word entrepreneur is to go between right there's this feeling of just stepping off the map. And don't get me wrong, that's really fun, at least at first, right, it's kind of exciting. You know, it's like we're doing this, we're figuring it out. No one can tell us what we can and can't do. We run into an obstacle and we find our way around it and we make a map for the folks to follow us and we, and we rinse and repeat and uh, and so I was there and I, but I'd been in that mode for about 11, 12 years at this point and it just it wears on you, right, and you, you, over a period of time like that as a leader, anyone who's been doing this for more than five years has has run into some really significant obstacles. We've probably explored some of those as we go through the show here, and I was in one of those, right.

Speaker 2: 3:32

I was in one of those moments where I didn't know the road ahead of me and, probably for the first time, I was more scared of what was ahead of me than what was behind me. I had screwed up so many times and my business was not in great shape. My leadership was not what it needed to be. My leadership team wasn't what it needed to be. Things were just not going well and I felt completely alone in it. I had all these people around me wonderful people but I even had a co-founder in my business, so it's not like I was alone, but I felt alone, right, I felt like I, and to an extent, we were walking off the map every day and I was frustrated by it.

Speaker 2: 4:18

And so I'm in my truck, driving to the office one morning and listening to a show. I listen to all the time and there's good stuff that would come on it, but this one particular episode, a gentleman who is originally from your side of the pond, who now lives here in the US, had this funny Irish accent and I think it was the accent that kept me on long enough. You know, because for any American an Irish accent is just like you've gone to heaven, you know, I think they speak Irish and in heaven. And so he's talking, and actually I know it was the accent because it was one of the most boring topics that you could probably think of. It was business lifecycle stages, right, not super exciting, not super exciting, but there was just something about again, I'm joking about his voice, but there was something about the way that he saw it and the way that he understood it. And he's walking through these stages.

Speaker 2: 5:11

I'm kind of looking back at the road behind me, if you will, not the literal road, but of my business. I'm like, no, that's exactly what I went through. And then he explains the next thing. He's like that's exactly what I went through. No-transcript.

Speaker 2: 5:45

And the confidence that I had and and, honestly, the renewed enthusiasm that I had about the road ahead, just it was like night and day for me.

Speaker 2: 5:54

It was kind of like the moment when Morpheus in in, uh, uh, the what's?

Speaker 2: 5:59

The movie, the Matrix, you know, when he sees the Matrix for the first time, it was like that and and and you know, fast forward the story. We can unpack it if you'd like, but got the copy of this guy's book, went through it, worked through the process with my team and we went from our profit margin having each year right like dropping in half year over year to we tripled it in a single year. It went up another five percentage points the year after that and our margin went up another five percentage points after that. And how I showed up as a leader just radical difference. We don't have numbers for that. I can't tell you numerically how much better, but I finally understood how I needed to show up as a CEO and why it was so different than what I'd been doing all along. And again, you create that type of transformation in a business that you own and it will affect not just your business Entrepreneurs know this but it'll have a deep impact in your personal life as well.

Speaker 1: 7:02

Yeah, I get it. Life as well yeah, I get it. And indeed you need to have one kind of recognizable point where somebody else has been there to get yourself to the next point, where you stake the actions for your future. Now you were saying that at some point you were feeling very isolated as a leader. Now, if you wouldn't have had this epiphany moment within the wonderful Irish action, telling you what you need to do, Mr Sean Connery coming out I think that's Scottish, Don't blame me, I'm just. You know, I'm from Europe.

Speaker 2: 7:43

It was Les McKeown who did it, so we can use less his name. He's amazing guy. He's dear friend of mine now, but les mcqueen is our our mystery irishman. But yes, keep going okay, okay, cool, cool.

Speaker 1: 7:53

That's good to know. So what? What would have been the situation for you if you would? You would have, you know, not not seen that happen. What would have been the worst situation that would happen then?

Speaker 2: 8:06

wow, um, like, uh, I think what was so scary about it was that, um, we were on a really clear trajectory, right, like I was, uh, I was working a ton. Um, we had gone through some really, really difficult personal crises at home, uh, with a death in the family, my business partner and I were not doing great, right, we had very different. You know, when you're winning, right, everyone's on the same team. You know, like everyone likes to be on a winning team, high fives are really easy when it's going well, and when it's not going well, the high fives start to disappear real quick. You know, and and it was we were like that relationship was being tested, uh, one of the dearest and closest friends that I had as well, right, so there's that spillover into the personal world. What?

Speaker 2: 8:58

What folks outside of the entrepreneurial community don't always understand although there's a lot of parallels is just how deeply personal business decisions are to entrepreneurs, especially founding entrepreneurs. Like that. It's almost like you and the business are the same thing, right, that's not healthy, it's not helpful. We have to kind of break free of that, but it's understandable. And so what that means is, when it's doing poorly, it's kind of like your kid's not well, right, you know, like, if your kid's sick, it's not just that your kid's sick, it affects you. Same thing for me If your business is sick, it affects you, and so I mean I can tell you where I was at the time.

Speaker 2: 9:41

Fortunately, between that and actually some additional help I got, we're really able to turn it around. But like, the questions I was asking myself is is this as far as I can take the business right? Like, do we just have to scale it back and, you know, shrink it dramatically to something that you know we had success at some point in time? Right, that's why we're here. I was wondering, if you know, if I needed to put somebody else in my role. I was wondering on some days, quite honestly, I was wondering if we would be there in a few years. So what would have happened? I don't know, but based on the trajectory we were following, we were rapidly moving toward a completely unsustainable situation.

Speaker 1: 10:24

We're rapidly moving toward a completely unsustainable situation. So that's very good to look at because if you're looking at that moment in time, it is a, let's say, you're in the darkest of darkest and that's usually where a lot of us start to look for alternative solutions and, like you said, finding somebody else to take over your role or maybe putting the business into a new direction, or even maybe going to the extreme, like going bankrupt, or going in that direction. It could go any place and there are moments in life where we encounter certain moments. So let's put it in in general a moment in life where, where you, you yourself, find something, but then still you have to grab it, you actually grab that moment to go from, from the position you were in to to a new future. So when you were in that moment, did you even notice the effect of that moment or what happened that time?

Speaker 2: 11:28

It's another great question. I love this. The podcast wasn't that moment actually. So the podcast started that space in between that you're talking about. That moment didn't come until I actually got the audio book of where he really went into detail on it and sort of the challenges. I mean, you know, really went into detail on it. And it's one of the challenges. I mean you know this from being a podcaster it's tough to to really cover ground in a relatively short format medium. I mean, compared to like a, a TikTok reel, it's pretty long but like there's there's a lot more to cover. So fast forward it was. It was a little while, but several months later I was listening to the audio book and I was again on your side of the pond.

Speaker 2: 12:09

My wife is from Norway, and so what we would do by this time we had a couple of young boys and we would kind of pawn them off on the grandparents in Norway and then find tickets to somewhere else in Europe, because it's a heck of a lot cheaper to travel from Europe to Europe than it is from the U S to Europe. And just so happens that we were there at the same time as the Monaco grand Prix, and you know love formula one. There's a there's at least a part of me that is more European than American, cause, you know, nascar is not my thing, sorry, if you're listening, it's wonderful, lots of left turns, go for it. But I love Formula One and so I kind of like talked her into like hey, monica is nice, you know, like, what do you think about? And and she was all in.

Speaker 2: 12:53

So we're on a flight from Amsterdam to Nice, france, and I'm looking out over the French countryside and it's stunning. I'm with my wife on what will be this beautiful weekend trip to one of the most amazing places in the world to watch fast cars go around tiny streets, eat amazing food, like, everything about like, as, like, as, almost as romantic as it gets right. And what am I doing? I'm listening to a business book on lifecycle stages.

Speaker 1: 13:23

How many times did you fall asleep? Oh, I, I didn't.

Speaker 2: 13:27

That was the thing so I'm sitting there and you know, uh, fortunately I was holding my wife's hand, so there was at least some modicum of connection happening here, uh, but I'm I'm looking out the window, um, and and I'm listening to uh him narrate through these different stages. He gets back to that stage again against, called Whitewater, and he's talking about the challenges that happen in this stage and how normal that is and eventually, how to overcome it. But as he's doing it, two thoughts come through my mind almost instantaneously. The first one is we really are in whitewater and this guy knows how to get out right, like that. That was the first thought and I was like we're going to do this Right. And right after I got back, we set about doing it created the massive transformation was amazing, uh.

Speaker 2: 14:15

The second thought that hit me instantaneously, that actually caught me off guard, was if, if I could help other people get out of this stage that I'm feeling right now, if I could do that for a living, I would die a happy man, right and just totally out of the blue.

Speaker 2: 14:32

I had never thought about becoming a coach, never thought about becoming a consultant, didn't really have any experience with the coaching or consulting world. In fact, the only experience I had had was three really, really bad experiences with coaches and consultants, and so I had just terrible taste in my mouth from the industry and in that moment that moment that you're talking about that clarity of vision I realized where we were. I had hoped to get through there and I discovered I'm not just doing this for me, right, I'm going to get us out so that I can get others out. And that started the clock. It was about a four or five-year journey. After that that I got my company to a point where it was healthy enough and stable enough and ready to succeed even more without me and transition full-time as a coaching consultant, built the Scale Architects firm. And so that's what I do I help folks get through that very same moment that I was in, and I get to do it day in and day out.

Speaker 1: 15:38

I'm envious. It's as simple as that. If you found that mission that drives you to make your company productive in a point where you can swap over to a completely new story to even help others create that same breakthrough, it's amazing you took that in in, you know, with your both hands, and started doing that, because we need a lot more people to do that in the world. You know, to get that pure hard experience because this is not easy people. This is really hard to get through. You know you're talking like you. You went to to europe and flew with a plane from one place to another. It all sounds beautiful and easy and you know, oh, this guy's got money, so he's got flights, whatever. But in essence, as an entrepreneur, you are in the S-H-I-T the whole time, unless you start accepting it and start saying, okay, I need to get through this, I need to take the next steps, I need to do something about this, et cetera, et cetera. And you're going the extra mile, saying, okay, let's do this and I will use this experience to help others go to the next level. So that's very, that's very. That's beautiful to hear. It is something that is unknown unless you start becoming an entrepreneur or when you come into the high achievement leadership position, where you discover what actually every decision that you make, what the effect is, what the unknown outcomes, how you learn to live with those, because each morning you get up you don't know what's going to happen. You know, I told you in the green room, you know, I stepped out of my job at IBM in November. I started my company in February and a month later, with a fully booked agenda and I was going the highway, I was on one of those dirt meat roads that I don't even think it was a road when I ended up there but that was just. You know, I went from the highway right straight into I don't know trees, so I had nothing left on my agenda.

Speaker 1: 17:53

And that's the point where a lot of people don't take that leadership, because it's personal leadership. It's not always about, you know, the big company, many employees and so on. No, it all starts from within and that's a core that is. I think it's kind of. It starts off as something challenging and then it starts to grow into something oh, I want more of this. It kind of becomes addictive as well. I kind of call it my own drug.

Speaker 1: 18:23

Where you start? When is the next decision coming? Yeah, I'm going to take that next one and take the ball, and it might be hot, but we'll decide. And then I see a lot of high-achieving leaders who take the ball. They make a decision and then they drop the ball to the next level and they think that that's going to solve it. I'm sorry to bring out the bad news and that's not going to solve it, because you need to keep that hot ball close to you up to the moment where everything goes through and that's beautiful what you're saying. You found the methodology or whatever it might be, or a process that helped you through that, and now you can reform that into a beautiful thing that can help others. So I see that the predictive success is one of the ways that you do that. Could you enlighten us on? How does that kind of fit from that point on where you said, okay, I'm going to do this for a lot more people. Yeah, what's the next story there?

Speaker 2: 19:29

So, yeah, let's kind of unpack it a little bit. Maybe it would be helpful for folks to know what are these stages he keeps talking about, if they had such a big impact in his life. Like, what are the other ones? We've only mentioned one of the seven and we've mentioned it a whole bunch of times. So the least you need to know about each and every one of these is that every business, every new product line, every new location, every new entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial endeavor right, it even happens in relationships and in marriages.

Speaker 2: 20:00

Anytime we get to a group of two or more together to achieve common goals, that group starts in the very first stage and it's called early struggle. Right, and that you know, you've, you've, you know and you've got it. We've, we've, we've heard about like it's tough, it's really tough to start something from nothing. Uh, I think it was peter teal wrote the book zero to one and just talked about it's also massively powerful. But that first stage, that early struggle stage, I liken it to, uh, the, the rocket launches. We get to see them all the time. Now, right, there's this uh brief bit where it was. It was hard to use as an analogy, but now you can see them all the time. I think there's just recently one early.

Speaker 2: 20:38

If you watch a rocket launch, they'll do the countdowns like T minus five, four, three, two, one, zero, and when they hit zero, the, the full force and effect of, like it's a hundred percent propulsion, instantly Right. And you would expect, with that much force attached to anything, they would just, you know, like gone. But if you watch, it actually just sits there and shudders for a moment, right, different rockets for different amounts of times, but it just kind of shudders. It's all this force, it's all this energy. You can feel the ground shaking for some of these things a mile and a half away, right, and it doesn't move. Like that's what early struggle is like. It's this enormous amount of energy, it's an enormous amount of rejection, most of it feeling very personal, even though it isn't it's all we've got. You know, and if you can keep it pointed in one direction long enough, then, just like the rocket, it'll start to move right. It's like slower than you could think anything that big could possibly move right, it's just kind of creeping and you just keep working, you just keep focused, you find that profitable, sustainable market and then you know, you wake up one morning and it's like it's a little different. You know, like there's some momentum here, here, like we're actually like our schedule is full. You know that's never happened before. We can hit payroll on Friday, that's really never happened before. And the business, for you know, starts to move into the black. This happens for nonprofits as well, by the way. Is you move into the black and and again, just like our rocket launch. It's like you're picking up speed faster and faster and faster.

Speaker 2: 22:20

Now, organizations that get to this place. They get into the second stage, highly technical name definition. It is fun, right, it's. It's, it's just awesome. Right, like it's a lot of fun. Now, it's not easy. Folks hear fun and they think easy, it's not easy at all. It's a breathless sprint across the finish line. We end the day righteously exhausted from stealing victory from the jaws of defeat. Right, it's like they're just diving catches all over the place. I mean, pick your metaphor, we're doing it.

Speaker 2: 22:51

And organizations in the stage they grow really fast. Oftentimes Not always, but you'll have 10 or 20 or 100 or sometimes like a thousand percent growth. That sounds really cool At the beginning. It's not all that remarkable because their market share at the beginning was like 2% of the square root of squat. It wasn't a whole lot to start, but it feels good, we're winning, we're succeeding and and and. That fun stage, uh it just it creates new opportunity. You feel like you finally figured it out. It's the reward for all of that work that you did in uh, in whitewater, I'm sorry in early struggle and to a certain extent, like that's when I didn't care if there was a map right. It's like it doesn't matter, like everything behind, like we got out of the hard stuff right, it's just, it's fun and we're off to the races. We kind of think in that stage I know I did and I've coached a lot of people through this as well we think that the rest of business is up and to the right.

Speaker 1: 23:53

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 23:54

Right, we think that it's just kind of like this linear or even like this J curve growth is just going to kind of magically happen and and it does for a little while, right, maybe a year, two, three, five, 15 years. But at some point in time the complexity inside the business starts to cause us to cause problems. Right, we kind of hit our teenage years as a team and as an organization, like our feet are a little bit bigger than the rest of us and we're clumsy and awkward. We got pimples, like there's stuff that's going on and it's like, but it doesn't make sense. And it doesn't make sense for a couple of reasons. One is what you said earlier, and that is these are usually relatively successful organizations, and so folks from the outside are saying like, hey, how did you get so successful? Like it must be amazing. Right, you've got, you've got that much revenue. Wow, right, you've got that much profit. Wow, you're like you must know everything. And you're like, yeah, I do, you know. It's like we would never say that, but we kind of feel that way. It's like we would never say that, but we kind of feel that way. And so when we start screwing up, that's a really hard pill to swallow because I thought I knew everything right. We've been like we've done this a thousand times and we got it right every time. Why are we screwing it up now, right, like, why is it so hard again? And that vision of up and to the right is slowly but certainly shattered and it's in that stage.

Speaker 2: 25:24

Usually profitability will start to plummet at some point. There's infighting. The leadership team's not getting along. The people you've hired recently to help you out don't get you. You don't get them. They're annoying, right. They ask questions, they do all kinds of stuff and, like folks are, they're not keeping up.

Speaker 2: 25:40

You know, we, we used to make big promises and somehow pull it out of the bag. Now we make big promises and we're left holding the bag. You know, like it's. It's just it's it's really tough season. That's whitewater. And for most folks who we, we understood why early struggle was tough. Right, we're building something from nothing. Of course it's hard. We understood why fun is fun because we knew what we were doing, right, at least that's what we think. Whitewater is proof that we had no idea what we were doing all along. Right, we just we caught enough of the wave. We kept the rocket pointed in the right direction long enough.

Speaker 2: 26:16

And it's interesting because we can kind of extend the rocket metaphor and if you ever listen to one again, you'll notice this. If you haven't so far, you've got an engineering background so you probably already knew this. But the most critical point in the path or the journey of a rocket is not the launch pad right. The most critical point is what they call max Q right. It's where the intensity of all of the counteracting forces gravity, the atmosphere, the propulsion right All of that is at its maximum right. And if the frame of the ship is going to fail, if the structure of the ship is going to fail, it's not on launch, it's at max Q. And that's what we experience. Is that we have a successful company? Yes, absolutely. But we've not built a successful company. We don't have the structures and system and process that we need to truly scale.

Speaker 1: 27:15

That's indeed. I love the metaphor, by the way. Indeed, that point is is I see a lot of, I've seen a lot of companies at that point where I love it when the leader comes in and thinks he's an over it all and then you shatter them in like five minutes. When you confront them with reality and usually that reality is within themselves you know they're not listening to what's going on, they think their way. Or the highway and all those beautiful metaphors on that side of the story where I've noticed at that point there's like a tipping point there where a leader either goes into you know the classic stories of burnout or anything like that because they just keep driving forward, or there are leaders who say hold on, this is not okay, I need help. And that's where you know people like people like you, myself, and so on, step in all in different kind of parts of the entrepreneurs whole body. Let's say it that way.

Speaker 2: 28:29

You know you get the leader side, you get the private side, you get the person as themselves, um, as I focus on the person, sorry, yeah yeah, here's the interesting part about that, because it is it is a very, very personal thing, right Again, especially for for entrepreneurs, and and here's what's actually at stake, and you're a hundred percent it's actually entirely a personal decision, right, the the main thing that's going on is that we haven't actually decided to change and keep pace with our organization, right, and so what has to happen in this stage? If someone's sitting there and they're like man, how do I get out? Here's the really great news there are two exits, right, and either one of them are equally valid. Actually, right, it's just like the Green Day song you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. You know, like, the only thing that you can do wrong is to keep doing what you're doing, because it's not going to change anything. So you either have, you have to change in one of two ways. The simplest and oftentimes the best way to do it is, you know, just like when you're on a plane. So sometimes the eggs, the closest exit, is behind you, right? Similar thing in business Sometimes you just have to take a step back, right, like you don't need that 90,000th product line.

Speaker 2: 29:49

Right, like you, maybe you can deal with 80,000, 990, you know like. You don't need all of that. You don't need that big new initiative that made things hard. You can actually take a step back. You don't need to build a billion dollar business. You never wanted that in the first place, you just thought it looked cool.

Speaker 2: 30:06

And so what has to happen is founders have to make the decision right of do I really want to embrace the type of leader I need to become, to scale this thing right, to move forward into the next stage, or was I actually really happy with what I had? And if I can just let go of these fake vision and goals that are really someone else's right and just get back to what really makes me happy and go back to the fun stage, right that that are equally valid and so you're right, that takes, that takes some time, right, like it takes. It takes really digging down internally and saying, hey, what do I actually want? Right, not what's available to me, not what I can do, not even what I should do. What do I really want for me and for my business?

Speaker 1: 31:02

Yeah, that's a very good point, and usually what I see happening is they're starting to look around on what are my peers doing, people in similar kind of companies company size, the amount of employees, turnover they start looking, what are they doing? And they start switching to other strategies that are made for other businesses. And there's a good thing on looking on the outside and see what else is possible. Absolutely, you need to get those fresh ideas. But what I see happening as well is they turn around and they look at their employees and they're thinking like I need to push through. You know these people are here. I need to continue and do whatever it takes to get there. And actually that's the point. What you're saying right there is what am I doing? Who am I here as a person and what is my capacity?

Speaker 1: 31:56

Because, in all honesty, we are only human, all entrepreneurs, just you know big news, people we're all human beings. We are not robots or anything like that. You know we get sick as well. We don't show it, but we we get sick as well and and all those struggles that you've had in the beginning of taking choices, making choices and going on from there to the point where you are right now. The biggest decision that at that point is and that's the question that I usually ask is what makes you fulfilled, what fills your bucket of happiness and purpose? And that's where a lot of them either break down or they push through, and then something else might happen.

Speaker 1: 32:41

Like you said, the business goes down or anything like that, and then, stepping aside or backwards, or it is indeed a very, very valid point where just I think it's kind of the realization point, all the rest around it, it's the next step, but the realization of here I am right now, what's my next step? Asking that one question what do I want? Indeed is very important. So when you write the Whitewater story, so what happened at that point? So what happens at that point? But what happened for you at that point? So what happens at that point? But what happened for you at that point? To go to the next stage.

Speaker 2: 33:21

Yeah. So for me it was really clear what the next stage had to be, right? So for us, going backwards wasn't an option, not because that's not okay, but because the clarifying criteria on that is, once I got past all the extra stuff, what is my vision for this company? What are we trying to build? And what we were trying to build couldn't be done at a smaller scale. Right, the vision demanded us to grow up as an organization. It demanded me to change as a leader. So, uh, that was for some people that's really hard to get to right. For others it's a little easier. But however you go through that process, you have to go through it. Well, because of the conviction that it takes to see it through, making that decision is the first step. We are going to move through to the next stage, which, uh, by the way, is predictable success, and it's super cool. We'll get there in a second.

Speaker 2: 34:22

But the path to predictable success is not easy, right, it meant for me personally, it meant that I had to fire a couple of my friends who were just the company had grown a lot faster than them in their leadership capacity, and I'd love to say I did that really well. Every time. I think I did it okay a couple of times. I did it really poorly a couple of times, and so that was really tough. Again, the hardest challenges in business are not the strategies and stuff. It's when those strategies and the choices we need to make have a personal impact. Right, every single of the most difficult challenges were because of that. It's the intersection of me and my life and my business, and firing your friends is one of them.

Speaker 2: 35:11

We had to hire leaders directly into our executive team that had never worked for us before. That was brand new for us. Right, we had raised everybody up along the way, but we just needed more horsepower under the hood to get us where we needed to go, which meant we had to learn how to hire executives. Right, we had to learn how to assimilate them. We had to learn what it really meant to be an executive team. We had to, like I mentioned earlier, we actually had to not just work in the business but on it. We had to build very specific structures that were necessary to be scalable, right, les always likens it to fun is kind of like, you know, running up and down a flight of stairs and it's like, yeah, we did it right and it's like, okay, we're going to grow, so next time two flights of stairs.

Speaker 2: 35:58

And say, yeah, we did it Right. And it's like, okay, we're going to grow, so next time two flights of stairs. And oh, by the way, here's an extra backpack I need you to take to the top right. Just two flights of stairs. And we do it. It's awesome and we're sweaty and we're high fives, right.

Speaker 2: 36:07

And then it's three sets of flights of stairs and then 31 day, right. It's like this is exhausting. And if you can take the time to take about 10 steps to the right and then build an elevator shaft right and the footer that makes that possible, and install an elevator, then you go from zero to floor one to 30 with one push of a button. Right, that's what we're talking about. So you have to, but you have, but it takes a lot of effort to do that and you're still running up and down flights of stairs to make it happen, right. So that whitewater journey is really tough because you're doing everything that you were doing beforehand and we'd start to trim away a little bit.

Speaker 2: 36:46

But you also have to do the hard, dirty fingernails work of restructuring the organization for scalability and the only thing that makes that worth it is the vision that demands it right, and we wanted to have a national impact. We had to help thousands of organizations. We wanted to help tens of thousands of organizations more. The need was there, the market was there, the vision was there and that was the only way we were going to get to it, and so that's what it was for us. We walked through the process of. You know, I had to completely change how I showed up as a leader and as a CEO. I went out and got a personal coach to help me do that. We had to change how we did leadership team meetings. We had to build another layer of leadership inside the organization and in his book, les really lays out a few really, really clear steps, and I hesitate to call them simple, because they are simple to understand but very difficult to do. They are simple to understand but very difficult to do, and I learned that firsthand.

Speaker 1: 37:52

Yeah, I believe. I believe. Indeed, usually, you know, picking up the book is is is a very important step. Understanding it is the next one, but then the implementation, that's a whole different story indeed. Um, and replacing people that you work with for so many years is is a hard step, but sometimes it's the biggest gift that you can give those people as well. I've learned that in the past. I fired my portion of people as well, and and some of them were really close colleagues that I'd work with for years and even you know blood, sweat and tears.

Speaker 1: 38:29

Um, when you're sitting in that office and you got that one piece of paper in front of you and you know you need to bring out the news, there's no way of making it easy. That's true. I've learned to make it short and sweet and then afterwards go out for drinks. Some of them say yes, others just go home to their wife and say, well, I got the news to break. But usually people know what's going on before it happens and within business, it's not about being harsh or emotionless or anything like that. It is actually understanding what it is to grow and everything you know.

Speaker 1: 39:14

I don't know if you remember yourself, but when I was like I think I was 14, 15 years old. I had enormous growth pains in my knees and in the beginning I was like what's this? This is not normal. I was kind of a little bit afraid or apprehensive and then my doctor just said these are growing pains and you're going to have them the whole period of your life from now on. You are going to have them.

Speaker 1: 39:38

And I didn't understand the metaphor, because he was not talking about the little pain. He was talking about the fact that all our life as a human being, we have struggles. And what I find in the last couple of years I've started and I'm not a macro, macro, macro, whatever you call it, or somebody who likes pain, but I've I've come to a point where I understand that this pain is something I kind of enjoy, because I know if pain is there, there is transformation. And when there is transformation, there is a new light coming around the corner. And you're going to new light coming around the corner and you're going to either be successful or maybe not even, but you're going to learn something. And that's what I've understood as well. And what you're saying is to to the point where you're struggling, you're trying to keep the company alive, but on the side, you're, you know, building something new.

Speaker 1: 40:32

I'm actually kind of in that same situation right now, where I spent the last two years focusing on one project to build enough financial credit to be swapping over and now launching a new product. And that's something you just have to do. It's as simple as that. You can start complaining about how many hours you do or how many conversations you need to have, or whatever. You kind of switch the mind to okay, I'm just doing this. I know the outcome is going to be different and, to my mind, what I've found as well is when you find the right people, the people that are no longer right will go, or will be requested to go, because it's a natural evolution and it's that natural pain of growth, yeah. And when you see those new people coming in who have different mindsets, who have different influences every step of the journey has their amount of wisdom, knowledge necessary to move to that next stage, and I I, I believe you've also, you know, encountered those, those differences.

Speaker 2: 41:40

Yeah, yeah, and because there's kind of alluded to this, but there's folks listening like you mean, you know I've got to go fire my friends, and the answer is yes and no. Right, it is. No, you don't just have to arbitrarily fire people. And no, you don't have to scale the organization to a size that doesn't fit them anymore. Right, it's actually. It's an extremely valid reason, and it's the most common reason that folks who know how to get through white water choose not to, and that is that they have a couple of leaders that they just know they cannot survive in that water. It's like taking a freshwater fish and putting them in the ocean it's still water, but it's not going to work very well. And they say, hey, I actually value this relationship and friendship. We started this company so that we could go into business together. The vision is this relationship and the company is just a conduit for that Great.

Speaker 2: 42:39

Go back to a size where that works. Go back to a size where there's nothing wrong with that. You're not settling for less, you're not selling out. You are following your values, you are following your vision. In the same token, scaling it up and moving, moving it. It's not a personal thing either. Right. Think of the amount of opportunity that you create for everyone else in a large and healthy organization. And so do you have to fire your friends? No, but you have to be honest about what that means, right? You have to be honest about the limitations that it will create if you don't, and you have to be honest about what your true vision is for you and your organization.

Speaker 1: 43:20

Yeah, yeah it's. You know, what I sometimes wonder is how much is the outside influence actually the trigger why a company just focuses on the growth and not realize what you're just saying? You know it's not always necessary to grow, it's not always necessary to, you know, hit the next billion dollar or one million dollar or whatever revenue story, it's what's. I'm going to put this another way it's not the external accolades that makes you happy, it's what the inside says. That is okay, and learning what is okay. That brings you to a point where actually success is a nonstop story. Because even if you stay at that same level of how your revenue is, or how many people you have, or how many people you have, or how many output you have, or whatever, that's a win. You know, as a leader, as a team, as if you have a company where everybody walks in in the morning with a smile on their face, you've got to win, you just got to win, and that's where everybody should be.

Speaker 2: 44:33

And let's take that out of a business context for a second right, because this is a really powerful principle. I was 25 years old when my first son was born and at 25, I was what we say here in the South full of piss and vinegar, right, like I was ready to go and take over the world and I loved my son, but I had no idea what to do with him. Right, when he was zero, one year old, like I didn't have the you know the, the raw goods to give him most of what he needed and I was kind of like I love you, I adore you, I think you're the greatest thing since sliced bread. I have no idea what to do with you. Come back in two years when you can kick a ball and we'll have a blast, right. And then about two years later we had another one and it was kind of the same thing. I was like I just I don't know what to do with you. Like I like you, I really do. I just don't know what to do with you. And and so with each of my sons, I kind of put my joy in our relationship on hold for a couple of years until they kind of met me on my terms if that or they reached a milestone that for some reason, I thought was appropriate and and it was fine. I didn't love them any less, you know like, and we have a great relationship now. There's no, you know, lasting damage to that, but it didn't feel quite right, you know.

Speaker 2: 45:52

And so fast forward forward about eight years, and a whole lot of life and death and everything in between, and we had our third child, our daughter Isabel, and when we brought her home, I remember saying to myself I'm not going to do it again, right, like, I still have no idea what to do with you, but I'm not going to put my joy on hold this time, I'm going all in. Right, and, nick, I fell asleep on her floor like more times than I fell asleep in my own bed. Right, my wife has, like this, like photo collage of, like all the like, all the different times I fell asleep in her room before she did, right, a book on my face or, like you know, like lying on the floor and and and I and I, I experienced more joy, right, I experienced more happiness in the first two years of her life than I did like in the 20 years before that, not because I was any more equipped to do it, but because I chose to right. I chose to have joy in the process, not just some destination.

Speaker 2: 46:57

And for anyone who thinks that their business will be more joy filled when it gets bigger, the painful truth if you have not learned this already, the painful truth that I guarantee you will learn is that businesses get bigger, they do not get better. Right, your problems will scale faster than your profits virtually every single time. Right, it's not all bad. But if you have this thing where, like, I'll be happy when I will have arrived, when, right, we can take a break when we get to a million, 5 million, 10 million, a hundred million, I don't care what the number is it's not going to do anything. It's not going to do anything for you. Maybe like a half an hour of champagne, right, like that's, that's about it. And then you gotta, you know I'll hang over the next day. That's even worse. So you can not put your joy on hold. Your joy will not come from a destination. Joy only and always comes from the process.

Speaker 1: 47:55

It only and always comes from the process. Yes, absolutely, I 100% agree. Absolutely. It is the journey. It is not. There is actually no destination. That's the illusion that's been created over the years, that there is a destination. There is none.

Speaker 1: 48:12

And along the way, in that journey, you meet the right people, whom you carry with you for a while or for much longer, especially when it comes down to family and especially children and so on. But even business partners or members of your team, they stand. You know, people leave as well, and it's not because of you as a person. It's sometimes they just have another agenda or something else that they want to do. You as a person, it's sometimes they just have another agenda or something else that they want to do, and that's as well something that a lot of leaders can take with them.

Speaker 1: 48:41

Uh, about our conversation today indeed, I think you've got, you know, really hit the hit it on the on the head, the nail on the head right there, by saying that, indeed, the journey is is where the focus is, because that's one of the, the things that I try to learn, to teach or to guide people into, and I don't want to teach anymore. I want them to find it themselves, but it's not always easy to get them there, so sometimes you need to kick them in the butt, but anyway and I always say a little pillow between it so it doesn't hit that hard. But yeah, I know, it's indeed the story.

Speaker 2: 49:18

Now, in the context of that, because I think joy in the process is always there what I want to make sure folks understand is that just because you have joy doesn't mean that your situation is perfect and can't be better, right. So there are things that we can do to make our businesses better right, and especially if you're in that whitewater stage, we've got to learn to start from a place of being okay personally, but we don't have to accept whitewater as permanent right. We have the opportunity and a really clear roadmap on how to get out of whitewater into predictable success. And I'll tell you what like the ease with which you can lead, the speed at which you can grow, the fun you can get back to having just in a real practical sense. It's just a little easier to have joy in predictable success than it is the ability to scale. It's where we've learned to take and harness that entrepreneurial zeal that we have and marry it up with the right systems and structures and how we make decisions and how we execute on those decisions, to where you say go right.

Speaker 2: 50:32

Whenever he took over after Jack Welch at GE, he said when you put your foot on the gas in this organization, it goes forward and when you put the brake, your foot on your brake, it slows down right the ability to be in control of that rhythm and to lead with a team and to see the wind start coming back in. Is it's borderline magical, right? It really is. There is a distinct difference to leading in predictable success and if you want to scale and you're feeling the pain of whitewater, you don't have to stay there. You really don't, but you do have to find the route out and it's not the same way that you got there.

Speaker 1: 51:12

Yeah, yeah, it's like you said. You're at a point where you make a decision either you scale up or you just, you know, step a little bit easier and keeping the company flowing nice and easy and everybody happy, and that's sometimes enough. It's just enough at that point, isn't it? Yeah, so, scott, you've walked us through all these different beautiful phases and you're also yourself an example of predictive success, because you've actually shown us as well, or explained to us, what your story is. What's, for you, the next step in your story or, let's make it broader, your story and how do you see it in the world of business?

Speaker 2: 52:12

Yeah, it's a great, great question. I got to predictable success and two things happened. One I realized I was really really good at the whitewater stuff and knew that that's where I needed to be. But I also knew I couldn't perpetually plunge my organization into whitewater.

Speaker 2: 52:30

That's not healthy right, that's really painful for everybody, so I had to find a third option. It's really painful for everybody, so I had to find a third option. And and so what I was able to do again, because we were in predictable success and had the stability and structure there I was able to really seamlessly sell my company and install a new leadership team and they they grew even further and faster without me than when I was there, which is a little bittersweet thing to that. You know, it's like man there's like. But no, it was, and they'll tell you it was because of what I was able to let. What I left behind is what gave them the platform to grow, and it's one of the biggest accomplishments of my life is the growth that they had once I left is significant.

Speaker 2: 53:12

Now, to put this in terms, this is fascinating. Now, to put this in terms, this is fascinating. I and my company, now Scale Architects I intentionally choose to be able to do that as a coaching and consultant, while also trying to give my full time and attention to others who are doing that. Just wasn't going to happen. So I realized at this stage, and how I've structured my organization, is that I will intentionally stay small and nimble right. I'll intentionally keep the limit on the complexity of my operations so that I can keep my focus where I believe it belongs at this stage, which is with my clients, who are trying to achieve predictable success here.

Speaker 1: 54:18

Even me. I'm very intrigued by, by predictable success. Like I said, I might be a little bit in the white water right now, so the next step might be, you know, going for that. Where can people find you and are there any other triggers where they, you know, might find some information or anything like that?

Speaker 2: 54:30

Yeah, you can find us at scalearchitectscom. There's tons. If you go there and search for predictable success or if you're in Whitewater, you search for Whitewater there's tons of free videos and articles that are available. We've got a podcast there called Secrets of the High Demand Coach as well. But if you head on over to scalearchitectscom, you'll find just a ton of resources that are truly dedicated to helping folks get out of whitewater and enjoy predictable success.

Speaker 1: 54:56

Okay, great stuff, great stuff. You know, people, this podcast episode is a jewel, if there is any. All the information that Scott just gave us, you know. Just listen again to the podcast, because I think there's a lot of little triggers there that can help a lot of people get through where they are right now. So, in any case, thank you everybody for listening to the podcast today and check out the new e-book on the website as well, nicovandafennacom and always remember to jump from head to heart and feel the beat within. Have a nice one. Bye-bye everybody.

Speaker 1: 55:33

Thank you for listening to the Everlasting Podcast. Let me leave you with a few questions to answer in the comments. How do you see the different topics we discussed during this interview? What are your thoughts? What stood out for you? Let us know in the comments or just send us your feedback. We launch new episodes weekly. Don't miss any by ensuring you are subscribed to the show. Click the follow button now. We depend on the organic growth of the podcast to inspire more and more people. So by giving us a five-star review and sharing this episode with at least one of your friends who might be interested in the subject, you will significantly help more people become inspired, but more than anything, I am grateful to you for taking the time to listen to the show. If you're also a successful CEO, founder or entrepreneur who has inspiring words to say, feel free to contact us for an interview at contact at nicovandevenacom. Thank you for listening. We will see you again soon with more inspirational conversations on achieving everlasting fulfillment.