Conclusion
Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
—Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance artist and inventor
Congratulations – you now have all the tools at your disposal to grow your business from entrepreneurship to enterprise! You can fulfill your dream and scale your business as you have detailed in your Big Picture Vision. Nothing will hold you back – unless you think small, revert to old habits, or cave in to your emotions.
The Five Phases of Constructing a Self-Managed Company
As we’ve discussed throughout this book, your ultimate goal is to shift from being the boss to becoming a leader. Your end game is to remove yourself from the equation and build a self-managed company. Your role as the founder is to let go of the day-to-day, to strategize and build relationships to supercharge growth, and to inspire your team to achieve greatness.
I have shown you how to accomplish this through the Four Quadrants and ultimately by replicating yourself, so that you can devote your time exclusively to making a big impact with your Big Picture while adding in more play days to enjoy at your heart’s content. The Five Phases, as I describe them, are another way of framing and summarizing the entire process.
Phase 1
This is your starting point. You run and rule everything in your domain. In fact, you are the domain. You create, implement, project manage, direct, coordinate, sell, and oversee every step in your company’s process. At this stage, you are a solopreneur.
Phase 2
Your business is off the ground and you recruit a bare-bones staff. You may have an assistant, a marketing coordinator, and a bookkeeper. You’ve started to delegate a few things to keep people busy and earn their paychecks, but you are still reviewing and approving everything that comes in and out of your company.
Phase 3
Your business has taken root. You build a lean team consisting of talented employees in admin, finance, marketing, sales, customer service, and fulfillment. In this phase, you are:
- Clarifying your Big Picture Vision.
- Leading team meetings and sharing your Big Picture Vision.
- Collaborating with your team to create systems and processes.
As this is happening at a ferocious pace, you are simultaneously building a company culture and developing its core values. In all likelihood, you still have your hand in most decisions. You continue to review everything and perhaps undo and redo your team’s hard work, causing churn and communication problems.
You may start to see your team feeling frustrated and unmotivated. They make mistakes and don’t seem to take responsibility for their actions. This shouldn’t be a surprise, even among talented employees: according to Gallup, over 70% of the US workforce say they are disengaged from their jobs.
Not to worry, however, because this is just a natural development phase that you are passing through.
Phase 4
This is where you realize you need to start trusting others so you can remove yourself from the day-to-day tasks. You recruit the best talent and/or promote and train team managers to lead the divisions of your company. You start to let go of reviewing and approving everything, empowering your team members to become solution oriented so they can step up as decision-makers. Your department heads stop acting like rule followers. They take ownership of their teams and become leaders.
You and your teams are now:
- Cocreating solutions.
- Brainstorming new opportunities and winning ideas.
- Showing up as thinkers versus clones.
- Empowering one another and building trust.
Your team members challenge themselves by asking these questions:
- How can we delight our customers?
- How can we innovate?
- How can we increase revenue and profit?
- How can we improve our systems and processes to save time and money?
As this transformation is occurring, you are focused on your Big Picture Vision and where your company will go next. Create extended products? Offer new services? Acquire another company?
In order to facilitate all this, you are coaching and mentoring your leaders and training them to do everything that you do. You are replicating yourself, so you can focus on these other business opportunities.
Phase 5
It’s time for you to step back from meetings and resist adding your two cents to every discussion and decision. Lighten up the reins and allow your team leaders to run with their ideas and decisions.
It’s difficult to let go so completely because you are accustomed to controlling everything. The company was your baby from the beginning, and your ego keeps telling you that only you know the best way to do handle things.
It is essential that you bite your tongue and resist the temptation to constantly provide input and/or have the last word. At this stage of the game, your team members don’t need you. It’s like adding caramel to an already great chocolate sundae. Yes, it might taste good, but the ice cream, hot fudge, whipped cream, sprinkles, and cherry-on-top are more than delicious without anything else.
You have superb leaders in place. You have systems and processes that work efficiently and are constantly improving. Your team is accomplishing great things independently because you trained them, trusted them, and empowered them. They are happy and are engaged in their jobs. You are no longer getting in everyone’s way.
Meanwhile, you have moved on to your next business venture. You are taking Play Days. You are getting closer to achieving your Big Picture Vision.
Congratulations! You have scaled your business.
Principles Inherent to Scaling
Here are the top 12 principles to emblazon in your memory (if you haven’t already):
- Don’t be afraid to fail. It’s okay to fail – and you will at some point. Then you will recover and be smarter, stronger, and more resilient than ever before.
- Passionately believe in your Big Picture Vision. Share it with your team, your customers, your partners, your friends, your family – anyone who will listen. Shut out the voices of those disbelievers. Don’t allow them to throw you off your path.
- Always focus on ways to generate sales and keep cash flow going. There are myriad ways to generate revenue to scale your business, including: Leveraging; Replicating Yourself; Hiring Forward; Upselling and Cross-Selling; Getting Customers to Buy More; Licensing; Expanding Globally; Franchising; Creating Certification Programs; and Buying Competitors. Find the ones that fit your model best and dive deeply with them on a daily basis.
- Invest in hiring your A Team. Having experts to run the weakest of your Four Quadrants will free you up to focus on where you shine most. Make sure the people on your team are in the right positions and fit your company culture. Then inspire them to accomplish great things.
- Learn how to make quick decisions and stick to them. I hope I’ve drilled this in enough by now!
- Delegate, delegate, delegate! Get out of the way of your employees and empower them, so that your company becomes a self-managed one.
- Deal with the elephant in the room; embrace conflict to ultimately resolve it. Practice saying “no” and setting boundaries, even if they might disappoint people. Remember: “No is the new yes.”
- Create and improve systems and processes that support and drive your Big Picture Vision. Build your business through your systems – not your blood, sweat, and tears.
- Don’t work with negative people. Life is too short. Period.
- As the leader, everything bounces off you. To grow your business to 10 times its size, you need to elevate your own personal growth and leadership by 12 times, to handle all that growth.
- Get support. Stop losing opportunities and wasting time and money recreating the wheel. To reach your goals in a fraction of the time, work with mentors who have walked this path before you – and succeeded.
- Focus on creating abundance. Constant worry about your finances can wreck your business fast.
The SCALEit Method: Your Never-ending Mission
As I’ve emphasized many times throughout this book, bad things will happen that impact your business the first time you scale, the second, the third . . . and, come to think of it, every time you scale. This is not negative thinking or by any means wishing bad things upon you, it’s simply how things work in business and in life. Just as good fortune sometimes magically smiles upon you at just the right moment and saves the day, unfortunate events and circumstances occur at unexpected times as well. No matter how much you learn from your experiences and how hard you work to safeguard your business, unpredictable things always happen and somehow seem to conspire to derail you. The things that went awry with your first scaling effort might not be the same ones that happen with the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, and so on. Or, the solutions that worked the first time don’t succeed on the second.
The SCALEit Method outlined in this book should be in practice every time you scale. It’s all too easy to become complacent and overlook or take for granted simple execution methods that could have prevented a catastrophe. Mistakes creep in because you and your team may have stopped paying attention or failed to notice that things changed or shifted since the prior scaling effort.
Each time you scale, ask yourself these questions:
- Are you sticking to the Three Ps of Planning?
- Do you write out Mile Steps and Mini Feats when beginning a major project?
- When was the last time you examined and did troubleshooting on your systems and processes? Think of yourself as a mechanic working on your car: Have you done regular oil changes? Regular tune-ups? A 100,000-mile checkup?
- Are you staffed enough for the next scaling effort? You may think, “Oh, I just created all of these new positions three years ago, isn’t that enough?” But every time you scale, the work will increase exponentially and your resources need to be in place, trained, and ready to handle it.
- Are you managing your time well? This is the easiest place for CEOs to relapse. Don’t allow yourself to get sucked into handling minutiae!
- Do your team members feel like entrepreneurs and owners of their respective areas? Don’t assume they do, even if you feel you have this covered. Ask them!
- Are you doing regular check-ins with your team? Again, you are not micromanaging. Things might be going perfectly well, which is exactly what you want to see and hear. But you won’t know unless you periodically engage in big picture check-ins. You are simply staying close to the business, knowing what is happening, and demonstrating to your team that you are paying attention and care about them.
It’s easy for a business to become complacent. Don’t ever settle for just coasting along, which leads to mediocre performance and flat results. Always demand the best from your team and from yourself. If your execution proves to be 100% flawless beyond a shadow of a doubt, perhaps it’s time to take a day or two out of the office with your Big Picture Vision. If you have truly crossed the finish line with it, then it is time for you to think big and . . . create a new Big Picture Vision!
Parting Words
Remember Apple’s brilliant “Crazy Ones” commercial from 1997? Can you name the twentieth-century icons who appear in it? The list is astounding, primarily because all of the figures continue to stand up to the test of time: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Branson, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali, Mahatma Gandhi, Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Jim Henson, Maria Callas, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Ted Turner, and Martha Graham.
To paraphrase the commercial and underscore its obvious point, genius is often mistaken as crazy and/or rebellious. If you want to “think differently” and produce something truly extraordinary, memorable, and lasting, do not let anyone deter you from creating your own trapeze in your business (or in your backyard). Do your thing, do it your unique way, do it well – and don’t ever give up!
When I jumped into the beverage industry, I found that there were so many people around me saying that my ideas wouldn’t work. For example, my company didn’t use preservatives. I didn’t realize that prior to Hint there were no water products that used our technology – heat. We pasteurize our product so that we don’t use preservatives. I didn’t want to use preservatives in my water.
I tried to network and talk to as many people in the food and beverage industry as possible for feedback. Everyone I spoke to at places like Coke and Pepsi – one executive, in particular – told me that my idea about being preservative-free was “just terrible.”
These industry experts also told me that the way to do things was X and, if you went outside of that box, then you were never going to be able to do it. I encourage entrepreneurs today – no matter what industry you’re in – to meet with and listen to those people. They have a roadmap and it’s good to know what they think. But there are also times when you need to make your own decisions. In the end, I was so excited to hear that the executive from Coke was going one way because I was going another way.
—Kara Goldin, founder and CEO of Hint, Inc. and keynote speaker
Scaling your business is one of the wildest rides you will ever take in your life. It gives you the opportunity to utilize your gifts and solutions to not only affect those around you, but to literally impact millions – and potentially billions – of people around the world. In the process, you will build an asset that can support your desired lifestyle for years to come.
Achieving your goals gives you an incredible sense of accomplishment. You are always challenged to learn a new trick (or business strategy) or to increase the height, rotation, speed, or timing of your current tricks (or tactics). However, to make that happen, you will experience hundreds of misses, falls, and complete fails. Without the fails, you will not experience the wins. They are a necessary part of the journey. They make those solid catches so much sweeter because you know you have earned every single jump by overcoming your fear, braving every twist and turn, and reveling in the Yes, I did it! sensation – regardless of the pain you experience along the way. Then recognize and celebrate all the tiny (and big) victories along the way. There are many more of these than you give yourself credit for!
To scale from entrepreneur to enterprise, be willing to take the leap. Otherwise, you will be stuck on the ground, looking up at the ladder, and always wondering what might have been – if only you had climbed.
One final thing. Since we’ve just mentioned John Lennon, I implore you to keep his profound words with you at all times: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
While you are scaling and meeting with success, pause and reflect on all the things that matter in your business and your life: your health, your family, your friends, your business network, your team, and your customers. Once you’ve learned how to live in the moment and enjoy it to the fullest, you can resume flying through the air with the greatest of ease.