In part 2 of our 2-part special celebrating the 100th episode of The Secrets of the High Demand Coach Podcast AND Scott Ritzheimer’s new book The Founder’s Evolution, he and Les McKeown go deeper into the practical next steps you can start implementing today to further your journey as a truly successful founder.

You will discover:

– Why being highly competent becomes highly problematic
– Why you should stop calling yourself founder today
– Why you are probably thinking about succession completely wrong

Episode Transcript

Les McKeown

Welcome back to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. This is part two of our discussion of Scott’s new book, The Founders evolution, conquering the journey every founder must face. Now in this second of these two episodes, we’re going to go deep into the practical implications of the seven stages of the finders, evolution. And if you haven’t listened to the previous episode, usually what hosts like me say at this stage is I strongly advise you to go back and listen to it, you really should go back and listen to it because the framework, or what we’re about to discuss is in that previous episode, GM, listen to get go back, listen to it, bring it episode. Pause for a second. You’re done it, you’re back. Great. Now that you’re all caught up, we’re going to get into the detail of how you transition through certain stages. And the first question I have for you, Scott is probably the most frequent question I get about predictable success. And the model there is, can you skip a stage?

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah, I wish. And so the first is this kind of it has a couple of presuppositions built into one that you know where you are, and you know where you’re going. And I just want to make sure it’s clear, the point of this model is to help folks to AI to diagnose where they are, and where they want to get to. And not everybody has to go up into the right. Some will always be star players or startup entrepreneurs, some you can pick whichever stage you want to stay in and make it your home. But if you want to get you know, let’s say from stage three to stage six, you got and this is so common. Stage three is our reluctant manager, they’ve got people, they hate leading people, they just want to do their thing. And they’re the great idea this stage is I’ll get someone else to run the business for me, right? I’ll get someone else who can handle all the little bits and pieces. And what we try and do is skip all the way to stage six. And while you functionally you can pull that off to a certain extent, there’s two things that happen. One, it doesn’t work, as well as if you had gone all the way through the process, right? It’s just and I cannot, you know, say this in a way that is going to emotionally connect with the person who’s doing it. But just suffice it to say, it’s not going to work as well as you think. The second thing is, you increase your likelihood of failure or falling short or having to settle for less by 100x. Or it’s just you haven’t again, it you haven’t figured out how to manage people, how can you manage someone who knows how to manage people. And so anytime you try and skip a stage, you will invariably stunt the growth of your own development as a leader and your organization as well. Now, that doesn’t come with judgment to say that you can’t do it or or you’re a bad person, if you do it, you can do whatever you want. But when we start to abandon the pattern, the likelihood of failure goes up exponentially. The second thing that happens.

Les McKeown

Just before we get into the second thing is got real briefly on that first one not skipping, particularly the two stages that you talked about. Do you think that is it possible for a serial entrepreneur who’s done it, you know, maybe multiple times before? Are they more likely to be able to say, Yeah, I see what’s coming. And I know that I can do it, because it did it before but I’m going to accelerate through that.

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah, what I tend to see is, there’s a couple deviations from the standard, which would be partners, right? If you go into business with two people that can be that’s gonna there’s gonna look a little bit differently. The other part of it is what I generally see in that sense, is a rapid escalation through the same stages, right, where they move through them, it may take you 20 years, the first time the example I was used as I used to change that my own brakes on my car, right in the first one, you do it once a year or once every however many years, I don’t know how often you change brakes in a car, but it was often enough that I completely forget how to do it every time. And so I remember I was changing the brakes on my 95 Audi cuse ace ASICs, and it took me four hours to change the first break. Right, it took me 20 minutes to change the other three. Yeah, and so that’s what 10 Stop night looks like. I skipped all kinds of steps on the back. But I did it because the brakes work on all of them. So what what we tend to do is rapidly accelerate through each of the stages because of the lessons we’ve learned if we act each stage out appropriately. Right. The temptation here for folks who’ve been the later stages is to to regress to another stage maybe for a new endeavor, and try to keep behaving like the later stage. Right? That doesn’t work either. Right?

Les McKeown

That’s a really good point. I stopped you. You’re about to move on to your second.

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah. And so the second is, the more likely scenario, you’re gonna end up fighting two battles at the same time, right? So for those who try and skip that stage one of learning how to get into the game and just go straight to stage two, I started the thing. A lot of the time why businesses fail in that first few years, that early struggle stage that we talked about, is because they’re trying to learn how to do all this stuff. They could have learned to do when they had time, right when they had money when they had a little bit of margin. And now they’re trying to figure both out at the same time.

Les McKeown

That makes absolute sense. And I really liked your earlier point a moment ago about, it’s easy to see, in retrospect, in the rearview mirror that, you know, as you were coming along the funders journey, you needed to change your behaviors in order to succeed in each stage, then, you know, if you are fortunate enough, or unfortunate enough to be a serial entrepreneur, and you’re doing a second or third time, it’s absolutely categorically categorically just as bad to try to bring all the practices you learned in stage seven, and try to start there on stage one that’ll kill you in so many different ways. So you identify in the book three primary places on the journey, we’re partners get stuck. So tell us what those three places are? And what should they do about it?

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah, these lineup with the three challenges, and that is kind of the route that causes each of those challenges. So remember, the first ones at Nimble organization, that gap between where you want to be and where you are, is just, it’s just agonizing. And what’s happening, there’s what I call the star player paradox. And we’ve, we’ve talked about this alluded to it a couple of times, and that is, the more competent you are as a star player, the harder it is to become an effective captain. The better you are with a ball, the bigger the gap is between you and the people you’re trying to lead, and the more likely you are to undermine their growth. The other interesting thing is, especially for founders, we kind of use ourselves as a model for performance assessment for hiring, right? We’re trying to hire people who are like us. And what happens is when you have this really, really competent person, the gap between you and what’s needed for the job, right, is so big, that you can’t again, can’t tell if this person is just not like me, but competent enough? Or if they’re just not competent, right. And so, what I’ve found that the folks who struggle the most is usually that stage three issue, the ones who struggle the most in stage three are the ones who succeeded the most at stage two,

Les McKeown

Right. Yeah, you put it well, in the book, you call the star player paradox, right? And that’s what it is. Theoretically, that’s the best thing in the world to be, but it has an awful lot of problems. If you convince yourself you should be replicating this. Yeah. And you know, first of all, it’s almost impossible to do because other people aren’t out there. And secondly, if even if you were vaguely successful with it, you get into the all star team problem, right? Where bringing in superstars to do everything, doesn’t mean you’re going to have a superstar team. Now, it’s a different thing altogether. So that’s, that’s one.

Scott Ritzheimer

The second one is what I call the chief executive shift, right? It’s that move from founder to CEO and to scale, you need to stop using your superstar skills at decision making. This is usually where the start showing up. Alright, it’s our magic eight ball. We’ve got inside I think you called the Golden gut, we have to start building a team that’s capable of what you’ve coined the high quality team based decision making. We have to move from making policy policy decisions being the genius to making people decisions, knowing how to build and orchestrate the right team who can make those decisions far better and far more consistently than you can.

Les McKeown

It’s an it’s problematic, I think, for a lot of funders, because not so much that taking a lot of the chief executive side of the mantle, it’s letting go of the founder aspect, isn’t that right? That’s a you know, one of the things that I I say to people I mean, I’ve I see somebody with founder and CEO on the card. If they’re what they’re talking to me about, which they typically is why they call me is because they genuinely want to scale not just grow the business, but SkeleT person and say to them, the first thing you got to do just drop the pond or something, you got to not use that ever again, part from when you’re talking about ownership issues with your accountant or your lawyer or whatever. And he said, Well, why is that? I said, Well, you know, it basically what, what it says is God, this is you know, I get to decide anything on any whim at any time. And of course, that’s true. Do you want to hold on to that you’ll never really become a CEO. You’ve gotten to put self imposed disciplines in place, and it’s really tough, isn’t it?

Scott Ritzheimer

And it’s funny that you say God because, uh, one of the places where we have the primary offenders for this is in the church world. I work with lots of churches, right. And you have the senior pastor, right? Founding founding pastor. Yeah. And it’s the exact same thing. We use different language. We spiritualize it a lot, but it’s the same, same thing that has to happen. And it’s really hard. It’s genuinely hard to do. And one of the things that I say one of the essential strategies is you got to go get help, right? You got to get a guide, someone who can call you out too. Well, the emperor doesn’t have pants on, right? Someone who’s not in your sphere of influence is not orbiting around your sun. Right? And, and who can tell you the truth, but is only doing it because they want to see you succeed.

Les McKeown

Right? Right. They’re not they’re not making a judgment. They’re just telling you, you know, this is what you want to have happen. This is what you’re going to have to do. And I know it’s really tough, but you’re gonna have to, you’re gonna have to do it.

Scott Ritzheimer

Third one here. Yeah, a third one secret is what I call the secret to successful succession. And it’s this successful succession, it’s hard to say, is not about finding a CEO to pursue your vision for your organization. This is earth shaking for folks, right? It’s about finding the CEO that you trust to create the next vision for your organization. Right, I was consulting with a group and they’re like, We got to find someone who’s got our core values. I said, No, you need to find someone who’s ready to set the next set of core values for your organization.

Les McKeown

You can want them to be congruent, right?

Scott Ritzheimer

Yes, yes. But there’s going to be an evolution there, right. There’s this. It’s really, really brutal. But there’s this church, I think they were in Texas, and they’re they were literally shrinking because their their congregation was dying, you know, that they were aging out. And they’re like, they’re desperate. They go hire a consultant to say, hey, help us figure out what we need to do to change, right? How can we succeed as a church we need to grow. He comes in interviews, everyone sits through a couple of services comes back two weeks later to sit with the board of elders. And they say, what do we do? And he said, Well, you put a fence around the outside charge admission to the gate and a for how Church used to be done in the 50s. Right, and that’s what happens to these organizations. If you put someone there to just do what you always wanted, your your your forever capping their ability and vision at what you always wanted, they become caretakers and amuseum of the vision of the past. Right? Not a vibrant, visionary organization to leap forward.

Les McKeown

That’s a really good point. And, you know, it’s the flip side of something that you said, In our previous episode, we’re one of the challenges of the founder, is when it gets to the point when they’re having to ask themselves, if I’m not my business, who am I? Yeah, this is the same coin. And the other side of saying, if, if my business my organization, isn’t me, what is it? Yeah. And and am I prepared for it to be something different? Near Yep, absolutely right on the button without Scott. So I have a personal interest, obviously, in the model that you put together, you and I met and bonded and became brands and colleagues first, and then friends over the predictable success model. And if you not only know it incredibly well, you run this cable architects group, which are the printable predictable success, licensed practitioners, that’s hard to say as well. So you know, you’re steeped in the predictable success model. I’ve never seen anybody ever pick it up as intuitively as you do. And so tell me where you see the funders evolution funders journey fitting in, alongside the predictable success model? Or does it at all?

Scott Ritzheimer

Yes, a great question. For those who know about the predictable success model, describing the founders evolution is very, very simple. It is the founders personal journey to predictable success. That’s it, right? It’s what’s happening between the ears and inside the chest of the founder as they go. And one of the things that I found as I was implementing predictable success, is the biggest problem you have is the founder right now. They’re the ones that are paying you and bringing you in. So they’re also the biggest answer to the biggest part of the solution. But particularly in the fun stage, you have these organizations that are doing really well, they’re not necessarily looking for help, because all the numbers are ticking up into the right, they’re selling more, they’re hiring more, they’re doing more than getting accolades. But what I found was even in the midst of all this, you know, significance and success, founders are really, really, really struggling, they’re burning out. And so if we’re to quickly line them up, stage one happens before early struggle, right. And hopefully, if you do stage one, right, it shortens early struggle. Stage two is, is usually square in early struggle. So startup entrepreneur, you there by yourself, we talked about this unpredictable success, he gotta get at least the visionary operator thing working together. So you gotta have a couple of people. You can get out of early struggle as a startup entrepreneur, you can do like you and I do and have your own great kind of solopreneur thing. You got a couple of people to help around you, but you don’t really have a huge management burden, right? It’s usually in early part of fun, maybe even late early struggle that you’ve got enough people to actually have to spend time managing them right. And so usually early lead to mid fund is that reluctant manager and then mid to late fun is that the captain on the field or the disillusion leader, and that really hits hard in Whitewater, right that disillusionment reaches a peak in the whitewater stage, because it’s not just personally challenging. Your organization is struggling because of it. And it’s usually that shift to ce o. ‘s, is it I mean, not usually it is a necessary and essential part of getting out of whitewater into predictable success.

Les McKeown

It’s a little bit between late whitewater and early predictable successes, right on that pivot point.

Scott Ritzheimer

Because you can, I can tell you tips and tactics and tricks all day long. But if you keep coming in and run into your rear founder freak flag, it’s none of that’s gonna stick. It’s not gonna work. So the key point here, because then there’s predictable success and treadmill and we go down the recovery side, the key is you want to do succession before you hit treadmill, one of the big big mistakes that we make as we wait until we’re ready to leave, right, right, which is for most honest, usually treadmill, it’s a little bureaucratic, there’s not room provision anymore, we’ve kind of chased ourselves out, what you really want to do is leave whenever you can leave the organization in the best shape it can be in, which is going to be predictable success.

Les McKeown

What a great point. We have another element in the predictable, predictable success model, I can’t say the name of my own model, which are four leadership styles. And you’ve sort of alluded to a few of them. And I know many of your listeners do well aware of it, but we’ve got visionaries, operators, processors, synergists. In our world, most successful founders, they’ll have a range of styles, but their primary style is almost always not up to the vision visionary. Is this only for visionary leaders. Where did the other styles fit in here?

Scott Ritzheimer

Yes, it’s a great question. Uh, typically, you’re gonna see it to really walk through this founders journey, you got to have at least some visionary style. And I would say most of them are what you and I would call a dominant visionary. Right. And this book in particular is written for dominant visionaries. And it would be nine other books to describe what you do if you don’t have those styles. But where this where these two intersect, and we’re not going to teach what the styles are, you want to find out about them. There’s, there’s stuff on both our sites predictable success.com, and scale architects.com, you can find all kinds of stuff about it. But the really fascinating thing that I found is that we’re progressing through these stages is that it starts with learning to lead yourself, right? That the end, you’re essentially learning to lead a visionary, how do you build an environment for a visionary to succeed, that’s what the star player thing is about. Your first couple of people are there to just support your your visionary craziness, right? And then what happens is that a shift changes, and this is in that reluctant manager role, you have to learn to lead operators, right, the organization you’re building is no longer a visionary based organization, it needs to become an operator based organization still led by a visionary. But the ethos becomes more operator centric, you have to learn to lead operators. Now once you get to stage four, and you’re starting to build a leadership structure, you’re starting to put systems and processes in place, you’re wrestling with some of that whitewater that we’ve talked about. Now you need to learn to lead processors, and a big part of the disillusioning process is leading processors. Because I mean, you know this better than anybody, they are so different when you look at not like me, that is the picture of not like me is visionaries and processors. And you and I can have a great laugh at this. Because we are both both right. We’re both visionary processors. So all of that happens in our chest every single day. But the big part of the disillusion process is you mean, I gotta lead that guy to right, the bean counter that I’ve been eating for the last 15 years, right? You told me he’s necessary for scale?

Les McKeown

Who by the way, I’ve been trying to keep out of my ecosystem for so long.

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah. I have actively resisted. And then a big part of my success has been actively resisting them. And then fascinating thing, once we get to that Chief Executive, we’re making people decisions, not policy decisions, we have to get more synergistic visionary operators and processes, right, we need that synergist style. It’s a big part of what separates executives from just the leaders that you’ve been leaning on so far.

Les McKeown

That’s very well put. I hadn’t thought that element through until I heard you share. You know, one of the things that I really loved about the owners evolution is it’s, it’s like my to do books. It’s short, you can read it. In one city, I was able to read it. And in one sitting was incredibly practical. And you pepper it through it with what you call essential strategies. Tell us what those are. I don’t mean to list all of them. But tell us what your central strategy is good with an example or two.

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah, so we’ve kind of been talking about them along the way. And this is where a podcast is not the format that we can really dive into it because there are Essentially, right to overdo that word, there’s two or three for every stage, when you multiply that over seven stages, we could spend a long time talking about 20, some odd strategies. But here’s the thing that I really want to get out at once you know what stage you’re in, or the CPE, is the CG should be it right? Like, if you’re still hanging on to stage two, and you really should be three, when you want to know how to succeed at a stage, there’s really just two, maybe three activities that are necessary for success in that stage. And it sounds overly simplistic, and it’s not in a vacuum, and no one’s ever going to just do those things. But if you give your best time and energy to those, you’ll see a 10x 15x 20x return. And here’s what happens when I’m coaching folks on this. In particular, I was just working with a company and he was making that shift from stage four to stage five, we realize 75% of what he was doing, he didn’t have to do, right 75%. So the real power in this book, and it’s I made it short on purpose, right as the book that was written for founders, because none of us have time to sit there and read lengthy, you know, academic books, is you’ll get back the time that you spent reading the book in the first week you read it, because you’ll find if you know, the two or three things that you need the absolutely need to be doing. That means there’s 20 3200 300 things that you don’t actually need to be giving your best time and attention. And the amount of freedom that comes from that is staggering.

Les McKeown

I totally underline what you just said. I mean, I know from my own years as a serial blunder. I mean, I’ll just say what I’m fortunate that people said to me, as well, I wish I’d had your book bike when I was 22. And starting my very first go run and all of this, because it’s not just the two or three things that if you do them, they’ll make a big change. And that’s hugely important. It’s the dawning realization that the other side of that equation is there’s 20 or 30 things I’m spending a lot of time on, that isn’t going to make me transition from one stage to the next. And I need to drop those off. Okay, good. It has been just a fantastic. I second part of this two part. Episode, I’ve got two questions left for you. In all the stuff that you were writing it, you know, one of the things that I really enjoy when I read a book is what, there are very few things that join already over, but one of them is self realization, you know, you you write something you think, Oh, I just thought of something or I saw something or whatever. As you were putting the funders evolution together. What’s the biggest sort of hidden secret of developing well as a, as a founder going through the journey that you wish wouldn’t secret at all that everybody got it?

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah, it’s fun. I asked this question of all my guests, and one of the things you hear is just about all of them give a different answer, right, which is probably profoundly confusing for a lot of folks. So how can you have all these, like, really smart people all get different answers? And the reason why is because each of them specializes in a different stage of this journey. Right? And so when you look at it, you can actually see there’s a handful of trends. And the biggest secret is that there is no one secret other than the fact that you need to recognize that the secret is always changing. And that’s why it’s woefully exasperating if we don’t have a map, but if you know what the different stages are, you don’t have to be blindsided when that happens. And so the thing that I wish everybody understood is leadership is not static. And there’s not just one definition, particularly for founders, it’s dynamic, it’s consistently changing. And we have to know how and when to evolve with it.

Les McKeown

It’s it’s so easy to become the goldfish in the water, isn’t it and not realize that I’m the one that needs to evolve here. It’s, you know, as a funder, it’s so easy to look around and think, oh, this needs to change and that person’s, you know, not doing a job at the demographic and my market has shifted, you know, all these new laws are going to shift everything. And, you know, I tell people a version of what you say all the time that the biggest challenge you have is, is right here. It’s Can you uh, we’ll have to what’s happening next. And your book is literally a roadmap to doing that. So final question. Take your guru hat off your author, hot off your podcast, interviewee hot or even your coach hot off your thunder. You’re one of the people that you wrote your book for? What staging Are you? What is the next stage look like for you?

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah, we already kind of alluded to this a little bit earlier, but I’m one of those people who’s going back to the future, if you will, right. So que the Marty McFly I did the journey again, early in my career just had the wonderful luxury of being able to go through some really hard times growing a business. And I made it to what was stage six. And I was far too young and energetic and stupid to be stage seven. So I was like, what am I going to do next? And so I started the journey over again, and I am proud fully and horribly in stage two, right startup entrepreneur. And the the next stage for me is actually to just embrace this stage. It’s, I remember when COVID I started this business, right, right before COVID hit. And I remember when it hit, and like teams are going through a terrible time. And the thing that I missed the most was leading a team. Leading a team through that challenge, right? It was that was so hard for me and so painful to not have any more. And if I’m not careful, I will I’ll look down on being in stage two, right, I’ll look as if it’s a lesser thing. And and I’ll try and pretend that I’m in a later stage. Every once in a while. It doesn’t, it doesn’t work. So for me, it’s actually about and this is something I talk about in the book, it’s embracing the joy of the stage that you’re in right now is one of the things is, especially as founders, we have this rush to get to the next stage, I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go. And actually learn this in part from you. And you talk about how you named fun, right? And fun was one of the hardest stages to name. And he discovered it because people said whitewater wasn’t fun anymore. Right? Right, the biggest tragedy of that stage. And the biggest tragedy I see in this evolution is that we fail to embrace the joy of each stage until it’s gone. Right? We don’t recognize the value of being able to just do it yourself. You don’t have to wait for you know, nine people or do the other thing. And so, for me, it’s embracing the joy that’s only available in stage two.

Les McKeown

I love that. And you know, you don’t do that. It’s I think often, you know, one of the limiting mindsets that we have as founders as thinking of our of our businesses or ventures, whatever they are, as like one of our children. That really is it feels like that certainly through the first 30 stages. And one of the things that you can do if you’re not careful is not appreciate every single stage of your children lives the growing up, it might be her challenging times, like, you know, the two year olds, the adolescence, you know, everybody would love to just have wonderful times at every stage no like that. But it’s still a wonderful, wonderful experience. And you’ve described it incredibly well in your book. Just a reminder to everybody, this has been a two part episode or a two Episode Part whatever way you want to think of it. If you’ve stumbled on the second art, go back to the previous episode, and you’ll hear even more about the funders evolution. Before we go, Scott, where can people get a copy of the book?

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah, again, for those of you listening, you can get it for free on our website scalearchitects.com/founders. Enter your name and info, you can get a download link right there. I promise you download it today. You read through it. Again, it’s a quick read, it’s made for founders. It’s a half book, right? It’s not even a full book. And that’s done on purpose. And you will save that time. If you implement what you learn in there. You will save that time this very week.

Les McKeown

And if people have been listening to what you’ve been saying, I think I needed to talk to this guy, same place.

Scott Ritzheimer

Yeah, if you go there, you also see an opportunity to schedule a time with me, we can do a discovery session, sit down, find out what stage you’re in. What stage is right for you. And I’ll help you find out how to get there.

Les McKeown

Well, as you all know, and I’ll share with the listeners, I’m all in with Scott Ritzheimer
. What what you’ve done with the predictable success model and know what you’ve done with the funders evolution is just an incredible tool and resource for everybody. Thank you for asking me to come host. It’s been privileged to do it. And it’s been nice to meet a whole bunch of new people. And Scott, we’ll see you next time.

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Instantly download your free copy of Scott’s book The Founder’s Evolution at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders .

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