Scale Architects
Powered by Predictable Success
I wanted to take a moment in this article to talk about a trap that a lot of business owners (and just people in general) fall into all the time. I know about the trap because I spent more than ten years in it. Looking back now, I know it caused me extra stress, gave me less joy, and limited the growth of my business substantially.
One common misconception leaders have is to believe they can scale their business by doing more of what they've always done. Pivot. Say yes. Save the day. Then, do it all over again. However, growing and scaling are two completely different challenges.
You created a great ebook. Then you put it up on your website and low and behold; people started downloading it! New leads started coming in, and all was well. But something didn't quite seem right.
There is one choice every successful Founder must make. At some point, every Founder will need to choose between transforming culture and character of the organization to create the ability to scale OR limiting the growth of the organization to keep it within its current operating capacity.
Let's face it; not everyone is ready to buy on their first visit to your website. I'm probably not going to buy that beautiful house I just clicked on in a Facebook ad this morning, no matter how convincing your website is. This is especially true of traffic from social media.
How do you decide who you let in influence the vision and direction of your company? I'm not just asking about ownership, but on other issues like leadership, decisions, advice, and authority, who do you allow inside?
Do you make decisions in meetings but fail to follow through? Do you regularly have the meeting after the meeting where real decisions are made? Do you have leaders on the team or departments in the company that can't seem to get in a rhythm, or even worse, just don't like each other? Do you have trouble getting some people to speak up in meetings or difficulty getting others to be quiet? Do team members point fingers and say I told you so when something goes wrong?
Your business culture isn't a fixed set of values you scribbled with your mission statement on a napkin one night. Instead, it is a dynamic set of hierarchical values that can and should change in response to the business' growth and development.
It's time for the single most significant cultural change your business will experience, stage 3 of the Predictable Success model. Culture in Whitewater. To be honest, I cringed when I wrote the heading "Culture in Whitewater." Culture in Whitewater can be summed up in one word: awful.
An automated email sequence is a set of emails, usually five or more, that go out at pre-scheduled times starting immediately after someone subscribes to your list. This may sound complicated, but automated email sequences are quite easy to set up, and they are an incredibly powerful marketing tool. They are very low cost, and the best part is they work 24/7 with almost no maintenance requirement.
The question of who "owns" a company culture is a tricky one. There are lots of right answers that are wrong, and lots of wrong answers that are right. Let me try to make some sense of all of this for you.
Writing blog content can be a lot of work, but even as little as a single blog per month can bring a significant return.
