In our 100th episode, we turn the mics around and Les McKeown, Founder and CEO of Predictable Success, host this special 2-part series, and interviews Scott Ritzheimer about his exciting new book, The Founders Evolution: Conquering the Journey Every Founder Must Face.
You will discover:
– Why your relatively nimble organization’s growth has slowed, even though your giving it all you’ve got!
– What the biggest limiting factor is for your organization’s ability to scale.
– How you can setup your organization to thrive when you are gone, even if right not it is way too dependent on you.
Episode Transcript
Les McKeown
Hello, hello, and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach. I know the astute amongst you are wondering, who’s this weird guy on watch with a strange accent. I’m clearly not Scott Ritzheimer, your regular host, I’m Les McKeown, founder and CEO of predictable success. And I’m a friend and a mentor, I guess to Scott in many ways. And since this is a really special episode, it’s on the one hand, Episode 100, which is unbelievable. God has already done more podcast episodes than I’ve done in my entire career, I think. And because he’s just launched a new book more about that in a moment or two. He’s asked me to pinch out the hosting role, which I’m very happy to do, and turn the mics around and interview him. And I couldn’t be more delighted and happy to do that. Scott’s launched the digital version of his new book, the funders evolution, conquering the journey every funder must face. And it’s brilliant. And I’m really looking forward to getting into it in more detail. And for the future, there may be some of you for whom you’re listening to this for the first time. And you might not know this, Scott, and the teams is he is lad, which include RK Dre of scale architects have helped start and scale over 20,000 organizations that includes for profit businesses, nonprofits, even churches. And having seen so many funders and heard their stories, Scott discovered that underneath this, there really only is one founders story. And those who succeeded, had grown to understand that journey, and had evolved at each stage along the way, and those that failed, or came up short. it so many times just because they didn’t understand that one story, the founders journey and beat them. So Scott sat down. And like I said, he’s written this great book where he maps out each stage. And he took what he learned from all those 1000s of leaders, as well as from interviewing over 1000, high demand cultures. It’s a big number of people to talk to it, you see a lot of patterns, and you talk to them, many people, many of them have been on the show. And Scott identified the essential strategies you can use in each stage of the funders journey. So Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott Ritzheimer
Thanks, Les. It’s so fun being on this side of things, we actually kicked it off with a friend Josh Elledge of mine, he hosted episode one, you know, as I was looking at what was going to happen with episode 100. And what we’re going to do around this new book, I wanted someone else to come in and join me, I wanted to be able to turn the mics around here a little bit. And it was an easy and instant and obvious choice to have you come on. So I’m just absolutely delighted that you’re here. Super excited about this conversation. Me too. And the first thing that I want to know is something pretty simple. Being somebody who’s you know, has written many books myself, and I know, just watch involved. Why did you do it? What’s what’s the reason that you sat down and created the finders evolution model in the first place? Yeah, I actually open up the book with a story that really helps kind of make sense of all of this. And I’m not a huge, huge sports guy, and you and I share the affinity for not overdoing sports analogies, but I just bludgeoned a sports analogy to this book, I’m just gonna, you know, just put it out there and say that that’s just the way it is. And I’ll explain why that is a little bit later. Because there’s a really important distinction there between the sports world and what we’re doing as founders. But if you imagine, right, well, it’s let’s take American football for our international audience, American football, you got to get the ball into the end zone, that’s the goal. So Well, let’s take like championship game, you’re on the three yard line, there’s just a couple yards away, you could sneeze and fall over and get it in. But there are 11 full grown men that want to crush you in the process. Right. So balls on the floor, we got to get a only a couple of seconds left have to get in the underwent otherwise we lose and you know exactly the play to run, you’ve done it 1000 times over your career. And it’s it’s a fake to the running back and then a toss to the back corner of the end zone to your star wide receiver. And so you call the play everyone sets up. And And as everyone sets up, you realize everyone’s set up on the field but you’re on the sideline. Now. You know the difference in the 1000s of times you’ve done this, you’re the coach on the sideline. And you’ve the best you can do is hope that you’ve trained your people enough to get it done. So now let’s fast forward the hike the ball gets to the quarterback phase, the handoff the defense bites, right brilliant play call works fantastic. And everyone collapses on the hole. Your star was wide receivers can be wide open and you look over and horror of horrors. He got the call wrong and he’s blocking instead of running to the end. So what do you do like and just every time I tell the story, I just imagine it’s like you just take off down the sideline faster than you’ve ever run in your entire lifetime. And by the time you know, uh, you’re not necessarily in the same shape that you were beforehand, but somehow, like you are booking it, the headsets fallen off the, you know, the board to the side, it doesn’t matter, all bets are off in your gun in it because you know where that ball is going to be in, you know where someone has to be to catch it. And somehow, nobody can really calculate why they’re going to study the math on this for years. Somehow you make it all the way down to the corner of the end zone, make the diving catch just in time. And what you expect to hear is the crowd goes, Oh, right. But there’s 80,000 people in the stadium and you could hear a pin drop. Yes, exactly. Right. And the only thing that happens is these little yellow flags start flying toward you and men in black and white stripes are running in your direction. And everyone shocked you should your team is like woefully embarrassed the very same thing that would have been the talk of the town. And you’d have been the hero right? Especially in your town for at least the offseason. Right. And they go in history of this amazing catch is now a laughingstock in this sport, right. It’s an embarrassment to the people that you’re trying to help. And never as has happened in the in the history of professional football, at least American football, this has never happened, right? And they would absolutely ludicrous if it did. But I can tell you, and you know this from working with founders and leaders every day, it happens every single day, in the business every single day in the business world, we do the thing. And fundamentally, what’s happening here is we’re doing the thing that gave us success in the past, but doesn’t anymore, we don’t learn it to embrace our new position as a coach on the sideline. It’s not about how fast we can run, it’s not about how, how far we can throw the ball or how high or vertical leap is. And none of that matters anymore. But the reason why I use the sports analogy, and the reason why it’s so important for founders is that in sports, there’s a sideline, it’s, there’s a white painted line on the ground. And when you’re on one side of the line, there’s a set of rules. And when you’re on the other side of the line, there’s another set of rules. And in the in the world of business, we don’t have sidelines. And as particularly as founders. That’s why their journey is so different from everybody else is there’s not even distinct stages, there’s not there’s not like you got a promotion, and you move to another stage. It’s not like maybe even you open another site and move to another stage. There’s no demarcation point. And so when you look at it, the founder is CEO from the day they start, right, they print up their business card, and it says founder and CEO on it. But the reality of it is we don’t act like a CEO for a very long time. Some silly people never get there. Yeah, yeah. And so that definition is changing all the time. And because of that, we’re crossing over the sideline and back, and it’s frustrating our team, we’re exhausted, right? You imagine this happening in the sports world, some, you know, 55 year old head coach trying to keep up with his players on the field, by running up and down every time the play is called, you know it, of course, we’re exhausted. And so as I was looking out there, I’m seeing this happen in real time with the coaches I’m working with. And, and they’re just chronically overwhelmed. I was actually sitting with a group of CEOs this morning, and they went around the room, and they’re talking about how it wasn’t every single one of them said, some degree of I’m exhausted, I’m overwhelmed, I’m anxious about the future. These are successful men and women, right? These are not slackers. These are not like the downcast of society. Nothing wrong with any of that. But these are people who from the outside looks like they have it all together, but from the inside, they’re completely overwhelmed and don’t know where to go to fix it.
Les McKeown
I’m, I mean, I get it and like us, that’s why I work with every day. And you know, as I think about the analogy, which I’ve had the pleasure of you sharing with me before, so I’ve had time to, you know, sort of dwell on it and reflect how accurate it is. One of the other two of the other things that I think we’re at meets very well as an analogy is that when you’re the funder, nobody’s gonna throw flags, you know, they’re very few people, maybe your spouse or somebody who’s very close to you may push back a little. But by and large, there’s certainly no quotes authority out there, that’s going to tell you that you’re not doing the right thing. The other thing that happens, and we may get into this a little later, is you do that often enough, and all your best players leave me Why would they be there, when you’re going to be jumping in every minute to do what they should be doing and sort of becomes a self defeating thing. You then have to do that more often. Because you don’t have really first class people executing and that can become a bit of a cycle. So I know that you that you’ve identified three ways in which that shows up as a challenge for founders. So share with us what those three challenges are.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, and you’ll see as we go through this They kind of tied to a couple of the stages, some of the stages are harder, similar to your predictable success model. And some are easier. But there’s three really, really big challenges that that successful founders face, right? Kind of earlier stages, those makes sense. There’s a lot of work out there on that. And we don’t go into a ton of that, other than to just say, hey, here’s what the stages looked like. But there were three big challenges I kept showing up. And when I was coaching folks, I realized that just about every challenge, they’re facing boiled down to one of these three things. So the first one that comes up is typically a young kind of entrepreneurial, nimble organization. And I don’t know that I’ve ever met a founder that felt like they were growing fast enough, even if they were growing way faster than they ever thought possible, or ever could, there’s this gap between what we can see as is maybe available, maybe not even possible, but available. Right? And, and where we are right now. And for some folks, that gap is just massive. They’ve, they’ve grown a little bit, and they’re just that feels like they’re walking through mud, and they can’t figure out what it is. And so what makes it so hard though, is they’re they’re so in the business that they don’t have the time, or the energy, or the just the mental capacity to take that step back and figure out what’s going wrong, right? They’re just trying to tread water. And like even like thinking about growing is exhausting. But they want it right. And that’s that’s what makes it so hard is because it’d be like, it’d be fine if it was just we’re okay with not growing. But I’ve not met a founder who’s worth their salt is not okay with growing, at least in that stage. The second one that I found is a really big one is, again, typically a slightly larger organization, very successful by just about anybody standard at this point. But these are folks who are really wanting to scale up. But they realize that they’re the bottleneck, right? There’s something in the way they’re behaving in what decisions are still on their plate, there’s something about it. But again, because they don’t have this sideline in the visible, they don’t have some clear way of understanding what needs to change and what doesn’t. They know something needs to change about the way that they’re leading, but they just don’t know what it is, right. And so what happens is they change things that they’re not supposed to, they hang on to things that they’re not supposed to, there’s no real guideline for how to make this successful transition to a scalable enterprise. And, and then the third one is much later in the process for most folks, but it’s this idea of a for founders, especially wanting to leave a legacy behind. Right, most founders is some are in it to flip and some build their companies to sell. But I found that’s an exception, at least in my world, most founders wanted it because they believe in what they’re doing. And even if they’re done, right, they still want the organization to live on, they still want it to thrive after they’re gone. And after some soul searching, they wanted to do better than it did when it was under their guidance, right? That’s a little little bit of a hard pill to swallow. But it’s ultimately one it’s worth it. But the problem is they realize they built a business or or a nonprofit happens in the nonprofit world. That’s that’s just way too dependent on them. It’s highly refined to functioning around them in their skill set. But who else are you going to find to do that? And they look down inside their org chart, and they’ve got wonderful people, but nobody who can step into that role. They look outside their organization and think how could I possibly trust someone to come in out of the cold and take care of this, you know, my nth child, if you will, right, it’s a baby to them. And, and so, I’ve found, one of the places that successful founders mess up the most is this idea of succession. And I wanted to go straight at that in the later stages of it, because why it’s so important is not just so that the organization lives on. But one of the things that I found is when we sell ourselves short in succession, when we don’t do the hard thing, that’s the right thing on it, what happens is we actually undermine our ability to function in later stages as well.
Les McKeown
Right? Right. That’s absolutely true. The, we’ll talk about this stages in detail in a moment or two, but I think sure that this will come out from what I know of your book, having had the chance to read is that part of the problem is that the behaviors that need to change are typically not always but they’re typically not in and of themselves bad things in fighters even more confusing. They’re things that were typically highly successful. Yeah, at the right time. But as you know, my old friend Marshall Goldsmith put it brilliantly in one of his best books. It’s just that What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. And that’s sometimes you know, that feels a little flabby it Okay, so what got me here won’t get you there. It’s actually stronger than that. What got you here will stop you from Getting there. And I think we’ll see that when we talk quite a lot through the stages. But before we get into the stages of one question that I maybe should have asked upfront, I just want to clarify it. Mostly for our listeners. Why is the Book about founders and not leadership in general?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yes. It’s a question I actually get asked a lot is like, does this apply to just founders? Does it apply to others, I’m very specific in the way I talk about as I’m talking to founders. And it’s, it’s actually the exact same story for leadership in general. In fact, if you want to really nerd out on it, it’s the same story of like a Luke Skywalker, it’s the same story of Jesus, right? It’s like it is the hero’s journey. For those who are familiar storytelling, it’s the same pattern that falls through is a universal pattern here. But the reason there’s a couple of reasons for founders, one, just I love working with founders, and, and because of that, that there’s just the entrepreneurial part of that, that I feel like once organizations get a little bit bigger, they start to lose that it loses its dynamism. Right. So it’s just the founders are such interesting people. Many of them are just completely weird and crazy, and I’m one of those I can say it, but like, they’re just really cool people. And so that’s a big part of it. I just, I love the ability to work with folks that are that challenge me, right, that make me think differently and, and are challenging their industry. And, and, and not just from like an idea standpoint, or there’s lots of people who talk about disruptors and their bloggers, right? It’s like, Well, okay, that’s fine. There’s no, again, there’s a place for that. But founders don’t just talk about it, they go and do it, right. And oftentimes, they do it a lot more than they talk about it. Right, which I love. I absolutely love that. Second one. And I kind of mentioned it before. But if you’re in a leadership journey, and you’re moving through these stages, you usually have a different title at every stage, right, or you move to a different company have a different promotion, there’s some physical real world indicator that the game has changed. Now, it’s still hard, you still have to make the shift. And there are lots of folks who still struggle with that the classic version of your best producers, not your best manager, right. And it’s not because they’re a producer, it’s because the skill that they have in producing does not translate one to one as a manager. And then they’re more likely to over rely on that than somebody else later. Same thing happens for founders, but they don’t necessarily have this point where they’re upgraded into a management, it kind of happens to them when they get enough people on their team. And then the third reason why and this goes, it’s kind of tied to the first one. But the third reason why is it was the highest impact for my time, right? I’ve actually I’ve done the founders thing, I’m a relatively young guy, get that but you ran a company and scaled it up. And like, I know what that tastes like, I know what that looks like. And I know how hard it is to feel like you’re doing it alone. And I also know that those few people and you’re one of them who, who radically shaped my ideas and understanding of how businesses are built and run and scaled that they they didn’t just move me downfield, they moved my entire company, my company, when I left it in many ways, thanks to the predictable success model that you created was so much better to work for than the company it was three and four years later, earlier when we were in this whitewater stage, and I had no idea what to do about it. So there’s an impact thing for my time that if I can help one founder, it helps their whole company, right, it affects the families of their employees. And I love being able to do things at that level.
Les McKeown
I totally empathize with as you know, it’s where my heart is too. I just love working with founders. And the other element of of working with them that I just really thrills me is that a funder is all in typically, because they have no alternative but to make whatever this thing is work. Not always the case, but mostly the case. And you know, if you’re a non finder leader, and I have the privilege of working with many wonderful non funded leaders, then law making this a judgment factor, it’s not one’s good, and the other one’s bad, but even your CEO of mega Corp, and you know, a household name. If for any reason, it doesn’t work out, you’re gonna get another job, you know, you’re gonna go somewhere else and get the chance to do it again. You’re the founder, you know, you get knocked down, you got to get back up again, in the same environment, make the same thing work again, and I find that incredibly motivating. So, let’s get into the detail. Here Scott, you lay out seven stages. And the final is evolution is an evolutionary process. So in as not overly concise a manner but as concisely as usable for a podcast. Take us through what the seven stages are, tell us what their names are on. And what are the main features of being an each of those seven stages.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So, again, what I use to help illustrate this, because we don’t have sidelines as founders is, I went through and looked at that kind of the hierarchy of a sports organization. And found there’s a great parallel there for each of these stages. So to just introduce it, and again, there’s a book that you guys can get on this will show you how to get it later. It’s free for everyone, you can dive into all the details there. But what I just want to do is kind of walk through what are the seven stages? And what’s the thing that we can look at, to kind of represent this stage, what’s the parallel in the sports world. So I actually believe that the founders journey and our evolution as founders starts long before we ever start our organization, whether it be business or nonprofit. And it starts in a stage that I called the dissatisfied employee, when you look at founders that are about to be founders, and without fail, they’re sitting somewhere, and it’s sometimes it’s in school, and they’re dealing with that institution, some, oftentimes, they’re working somewhere, they’re actually doing well at it. And what separates, you know, will be founders as dissatisfied employees, from people who are just grumpy about their job, or in a bad job is that even when it’s good, they’re not satisfied. Right? Even when they’re making great money, they’re not satisfied that there’s just something in them. I always tell folks here in this stage that we’re trying to figure out, are you dissatisfied employee? Or do you just need a better job, I always tell him, like, if you can do anything, and I think I may have even gotten this from you, if you do anything, but start a business do that. Right? If you can do anything else, because if you can’t do anything else, then then that’s a great indication that you’re ready. And what this this in our analogy is, that’s the trainee on the sideline. Right? They’re not in the game yet, right? They’re kind of watching the game. And there’s this little bit of calling little bit of arrogance of, I could do that better. You know, there’s, there’s just this like thing of like, I bet I can do that. And the main, the main thing that you want to do here is not rushed this stage. Everyone tries to skip through this stage, because it’s so uncomfortable to just sit there and wait, right? It’s uncomfortable to sit in what feels like a dead end job. And as soon as the founder kind of makes that emotional, like, I’m going to do this, it’s like they’re gone, they’re off. And we’ll we’ll talk about why that’s a problem a little bit later. But my best piece of piece of advice for someone here is to wait. And the reason why is you’re learning on someone else’s dime. Right? Once you make the leap, once you go full time you’re learning on your own penny, and it’s really expensive, and it’s really hard. So it’s our training on the sideline that just trying to win their shot at the game. And then the next one is us are dissatisfied employees. Stage two is where a lot of us would say the entrepreneurial journey starts and that’s the startup entrepreneur, right. And it’s, it’s, it’s not unlike being the star player in the game, your job is to be the best at what you do. Now, that’s yes, your kind of functional skill, but it’s also being the best at selling what you do, right and closing what you do, and marketing. Like you’ve got, you’ve got to up your game across all these different, you know, you’re doing the one man band thing and you gotta you gotta sound good, otherwise, nothing else happens. So it’s about being a star player. And the focus here is on doing what it is you do better than anyone else around you, right? It’s how fast you run. It’s how high you can jump, it’s how well you can catch. And and you know, the one thing I always joke about this with folks, and this is something from our world and predictable success as well. But you can always tell a startup entrepreneur by that what I call, like, the entrepreneurial smile, right? It’s kinda like it, how’s it good, good. You know, it’s hard. But but but you’re still smiling that the thing about this is you are still smiling. And, again, founders are they’re just able to take a punch in the face and not stop grinning. It’s involuntary, right? And, and you’ll face more rejection and difficulty in two years than a lot of people would in two lifetimes in this startup entrepreneur, and it’s worth it right. It’s just worth it. And what happens when you do this? Well, when you make the diving catch when you when you are the star player and you do it well. We have success right? And success brings in more clients and more clients brings in more work and more work means we need more help. And and so the natural thing is okay, I’m gonna go find somebody and it’s usually your niece, right? who just got out of marketing school or you know, or you know, your neighbor who who could use a part time job or whatever it may be. He hits you, whoever has a heartbeat around you and is within proximity and you can calm them into coming and working for you. That’s basically who it is. Since you’re hung people, yeah. You bringing in people, you’re bringing people on your team, and you don’t have the first clue about who to bring in and who not to bring in right and but it doesn’t really matter just you need the help. And so you bring in a couple Have people it’s okay. But I found somewhere in that 510, maybe 15, this, this shift happens and it doesn’t happen all of a sudden, it doesn’t happen right when you hire somebody, but somehow the water temperature changes. And the way to know that you’re here or not, is if you find yourself asking the question, What’s wrong with these people? Yeah, I’ve got this over, there’s something just fundamentally wrong with all of them. And you you, if you’re here long enough, you’ll start to lose all hope in humanity, because the reality of it is the people who will come and work for you and the people who should come and work for you are going to be wired differently than you. Right? in your, in my world, we call these operators. And the other problem, though, is there’s a lot of people who aren’t like you and shouldn’t work for you. But you don’t know the difference. Right. And so we’re very clumsily hired and so you find yourself as what I call the reluctant manager. Most founders are not born to be managers as it’s just not their natural aerial thought. And when you combine that with the fact that they don’t have the right team, either, and they can’t tell who’s the right team that’s not being managed well, and who’s the wrong team that no matter how well you manage them, they’re not going to be there. It’s exhausting. For founders. It’s just utterly exhausting.
Les McKeown
And it’s not as if they they don’t have anything else to do, all the other stuff hasn’t gone away. This is all additive, right?
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s 100%. Not only do you have a, you still have your job to do, but your jobs like four times harder, because you have to sell something for all these people to be able to put money on the table, right? So what I call it, the captain on the field, you’re still in the game, they’re still giant men who want to take your head off, right? Like, you’re still getting hit. And while you’re getting hit, you’re trying to get everyone else moving at the same time, you don’t have the luxury of the big fortune, something CEO whose job is to just lead, right, right, or even the line manager whose job is just to manage, you’ve got to lead, manage, do a line admin, like you’ve got it and all of it, and you just don’t have time to get any of out of the way.
Les McKeown
And also you don’t you don’t have a playbook at this stage, right? And it’s not like you’re in the locker room and telling people you go up here and you do. Everything is an audible, right? Yeah, everything.
Scott Ritzheimer
Everything’s in between your ears, right? And you just do it naturally, you don’t actually do it naturally. Some of that’s true, but you’ve been doing it for 10 years or three years, right? And you bring these people that have been doing it for three months, there’s no possible way that they could think like you, right? And so there’s this this kind of underlying frustration. Now, it’s not necessarily a bad stage, because organizations at this stage led by reluctant managers are growing like crazy many times, right? Not always, many times. But what’s happening is, is that’s where that gap shows up of between our vision and how fast we want to grow, it just gets harder and harder. So that reluctant managers being the captain on the field. And, again, if we get it by, right, if you figure out oh, actually, I have to manage these people, I have to learn what the plays are. And then I can still call audibles when I want to, but I have to say it so everyone else can hear it, right? If we do that, well, organization continues to grow. But what happens is, is the founders evolution is not up into the right. What happens in stage four? Is it actually in the founders kind of perception of it personally, it’s another step down into the right, right moving from startup entrepreneur and all its glory and fame to a reluctant managers, not something we all aspire to, right. And then it happens again, at this what I call the dissolution leader stage, this is where we’re the coach on the sideline, we don’t get to touch the ball with like we used to, right? When When, when it’s down on the line, and something’s hard happened, we don’t get to just jump in and fix it anymore. And if we do, we’re not in the shape to fix it. So it nearly kills us. And like you mentioned earlier, drives all our best people away, so we can’t keep our good people around. And and it leaves folks asking the question, is this it? Like, did I really start a company and scale it to $5 million to feel like this? Right, right. Like, from the outside, everyone’s, oh, must be wonderful, you’re so successful, it’s so cool. And they’re quietly dying inside, and they feel guilty for it. Right? And.
Les McKeown
I see so many leaders get to the stage. And they get stuck here permanently, because what they in essence do is they take a role, which is like a player coach, because they want to be the coach, but they can’t help themselves being on the field. And so they end up oscillating backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards and they never make the full transition that’s necessary to get to your next stage. Isn’t that isn’t that true?
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s exactly right. And, and when you look at it, it doesn’t seem like there’s any reward for doing it right. If you kind of map this trajectory, it feels like we went here to here now to here. And if you map a line through that, we’ve got a pattern now so as CEO, if I keep going down this road, it’s gonna go down again, right? And I actually couldn’t be further from the truth, right, but those who get stuck in this stage, it’s like why seeing a movie to 95% and and turning it off, right? You will be a miserable, hopeless, like, be like, if you watch a movie, they’re terrible, right? It’s like just everything that code can go wrong does go wrong, it’s not until the last 5%, that it all becomes worth it. And it’s the exact same thing. It’s the biggest single transformation in this whole evolutionary processes from stage four to stage five. And it’s where you actually start acting like the thing you’ve called yourself all along, and that is CEO, right? It’s the move from founder to chief executive. And to extend our sports analogy, it’s the move for the coach on the sideline where you’re right there at the ground level, still constantly with the temptation of crossing the line, to actually taking a step up into the box where you can see the whole thing.
Les McKeown
Which is really viscerally very difficult for many, many funders, and many just never make the transition. For me in the predictable success world, this is this is the stage at which the only stage, I’m making the transition from your stage four to stage five into chief executive, it’s only then that you can truly scale, right? Yes, you stay as the player coach, sure, you can continue to grow, you can continue to win the occasional game, but you’re not going to the Super Bowl, you just have no chance of building it if you stay in stage four. But some funders, they can’t give up the visceral reward of just having our hands on the on the ground, you know, on the pitch in the dirt. So getting into the chief executive stage, you equate it to being the manager in the box.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, the GM in the box. The really nice thing about the GM in the box is a couple of things. One, there’s air conditioning, right? Like, there are some perks like don’t get me wrong here, right? There are some perks, it’s gonna cost you something but that AC in the middle of the winter is really nice, right? It could be 100, outside or 30. Outside it is sunny with a full bar. So like there’s some perk to this. The second part of it is, this is where we start to achieve asynchronous work. Right? Where as founders.
Les McKeown
You do not need to be there for it to happen.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. You’re not even thinking about this year anymore, right? Your primary focus is on next year, right? Your primary focus is on where are we going in 10 years, this is where you actually get to be a visionary again, and it’s again, it’s still that last 5% of the story, it’s if you can make that transition, It’s so fulfilling. And by doing this, well, by not getting stuck in that earlier stage, by learning the skills that you need to actually be that Chief Executive, you’re going to set yourself up for the thing that a lot of us want, but have no business pursuing yet. And that is to become a true owner, right to own and not run your business. And I think the reason why this fails so often in the reason why it’s just a pipe dream for so many people is because they’ve not done these earlier stages, right? They haven’t been a CEO. So how can you expect to lead one? Right? And, and there’s, this is where that idea of succession really comes into play. And it’s something I learned from you is that you cannot hand off your business to your number to nine times out of 10, right, because what it takes to be a great number two is not what it takes to be a great number one, and predictable, successful we call these visionaries. But the challenge is, you’ve been the visionary you are the vision and that it’s a huge soul searching exercise to be able to open up your company to another visionary. It leaves you asking, and this is stunning to most people who are not there. But everyone I’ve seen there resonates with it instantly. It leaves you the successful founder asking the question, Who am I? Who am I really, if I’m not my business, who am I? And the reason why I’m so passionate about this, because you can sell your business however you want, you can transition it to whoever you want. But if you do the really, really hard soul searching work of of being able to hand it off effectively to another vision, you not just dump it on them, but hand it off to them well, to learn how to lead them. What it sets you up for is, is the seventh stage. This last stage what I call the visionary founder. It’s like being the Hall of Famer. Right, and it’s where you now get to do it just for the love of the game. Right? You’re not working because you need to, you know, you’re not you’re not playing golf, because you have to get away but you actually get back to the game. And you do it by serving other visionaries. But you can’t do that if you never learned to lead one.
Les McKeown
Right. And reaching that stage. You get to the point where you really are bringing a massive multiplier effect because you’re not helping other people. Yeah, go through this process, not just having negotiated it for yourself. And I think one of the great things that your book does that, if I may say so is there are a lot of people who get to that stage, they are actually visionary founders. And they’re very confident about what they achieved. What they’re not confident about is that the path that they took to achieve it is replicable. Because how would they know? What your book does is say, Look, this there are there are underlying patterns to this. There’s a way to do this. And I can help you identify where you’re at, and how you can move through those stages. Yeah, no, we want to do that. Because of the sheer amount of great stuff you have in the funders evolution, we’ve had to break this into two podcasts, everybody be delighted to know, you’ve just given us a tour de force and outlining the overall structure and the seven stages. And when we come back in the next episode, we’re going to dive into what does that mean for you? Where are you, aren’t I? And how do you progress through that? So everybody is listening? I’m not, I hope, your need to come listen to the next episode in the secrets of the veteran coach podcast, because we’re gonna get into the detail of how this applies to you. But before we do that, um, before we close off this episode, tell folks how they can get a copy of the book, you mentioned that you’re going to make it available for folks, how does that happen?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, anyone can get their own copy for free. I can get it online at scalearchitects.com/founders. You just plug in your name and info. And you’ll get an instant download link right there on the next page. You can download it. It’s got all seven stages. And it’s got two to three essential strategies for every single stage. And the thing I want people to catch hold of is when you understand the stages, not only is it hey, here’s more things that Scott’s telling me to do. What it allows you to do, the most powerful part is it tells you the 20 to 30 themes that people said you should be doing that you don’t have to be doing right now.
Les McKeown
Right, super, that’s fantastic. Well, Scott, I will definitely see you on the next episode and everybody that’s listening. I look forward to seeing you there, too. See you next time.
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