In this exceptional episode, Les McKeown, Founder and CEO of Predictable Success, shares how he co-founded one of the first business incubators in the world, evolving it into a global consultancy that advises numerous ventures worldwide.
You will discover:
– How to know if your team members have what it takes to reach the next level
– The three skills that separate leaders who are great executives from leaders who are great managers
– The shift you must make BEFORE you build an executive team
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And I am here with the high demand coach of high demand coaches. It is the one, the only Les McKeown, in addition to being a dear friend and mentor of mine, he’s also the founder and CEO of Predictable Success. But he’s not just an advisor to CEOs and senior leaders, but also a sought after speaker for Fortune 500 companies. His expertise lies in helping organizations achieve scalable, sustainable growth, and his breakthrough strategies have been widely recognized and implemented before founding, predictable success lessen established himself as a serial founder, owner and entrepreneur, starting more than 40 companies, I believe, by the age of 35 somewhere in there, and was also founding partner of an incubation consulting company that advised on the creation of growth of hundreds of more organizations across the globe. He’s the best selling author of predictable success the synergist do scale and do lead amazing books. Highly recommend them, and he’s here with us today. And being that it’s our 200th episode, I couldn’t think of a better guest, and I honestly, I couldn’t think of a better topic. The most common question that I get asked when I’m working with leaders that are trying to get to predictable success is, can I take my current team to predictable success? Are they the ones that are going to get me there? And behind that is this idea less that they don’t even know where to start answering that question, right? It just feels so foreign. You know, they’ve added folks that are just the ones who’ve worked here the longest, that they like the most, and that’s been the leadership qualification to date. But they’re looking at it saying, hey, this thing’s changing. We don’t I don’t really understand how it’s changing. And I know that my leaders have to change too, but I don’t understand how they change. So when you’re faced with that question, I know you get asked all the time, you do I have the team that will get me to predictable success. How do you start?
Les McKeown
I typically start by saying, maybe, because who knows yet, part of the challenge, as we say many times, is that when you’re growing your business through what we call a fun stage, and then you hit that point, which we call Whitewater. It’s a bit like taking your business into a tunnel, and you know, there you are. You got all the right people on the bus. You’ve been going along and successful for quite a few years. You drive into this whitewater stage. And the reality is, what comes out the other end, it’s not, it’s not even, it’s not that. It’s not the same bus. It’s not even a bus anymore. It’s a different thing. It’s, it’s a bit like that. You know, stage from Caterpillar to to butterfly, when the change happens, it’s the same organic entity, but it’s a very, very different thing. And not every team, and almost always, not every member of every team can make the transition. Many can, some can. But the key thing that I look for is, does the founder? Sometimes it’s not a funder. Usually it is. Let’s call them the MSC, the most senior executive here it is, pushing this thing forward. Do they understand that that change that chrysalis like event? It’s got to start with them. And what happens mostly is they see an Intuit, I need more from my team, and I’m sure we’ll have time to talk about what that actually means, because it means some very practical, real world things, needing more from the team. And they start working their team to try to get that more to be defined. But they are still showing up the way they’ve showed up forever, which is a way of showing up that makes different demands. And I want to give a very specific example here. When you’re the founder, up until this point, you’ve had one job that’s to fix everything. That’s your job as founder. You You’re Solomon, you make to sit that final decision about everything, and almost always that final decision isn’t saying, you know, do this or do that. It’s usually saying, Okay, I’ll do this. Or, you know, you do a thing, you fix it. You can’t get to scalability that way. So you’ll never get to predictable success, because that’s the key to predictable success, is scalability and the mind shift that has to change, is a real, real thing. It’s stopping thinking it’s my job to fix it, and to start thinking every minute of every day, it’s my job to build the team that fixes it, but if you keep showing up as the person that fixes it, and then berate your team because you want them to fix it, you’re just sending mismatched expectations all the time.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s so true. It’s so true. I actually, in my book The Founders Evolution, call it the CEO shift, right? It’s that move from exercising your superstar skill in decision making, right to using that strength to build a team. Capable of a phrase I got from you, high quality team based decision making. It’s really, really powerful, but I want to unpack that a little bit, but I want to rewind the tape a little to kind of set the context for how do we get here in the first place? Because it’s not that we choose the wrong leaders out of the gate. Right many times is that we choose the right leaders for the right time, but then it changes. So wondering if we can compare and contrast a little bit the skills needed from your leaders in that fun stage, that organic growth stage, early on, relatively nimble, to the skills that you’re going to need that more that you need from your team in predictable success. So starting with fun, what are some of the skills that we tend to either intuitively or intentionally seek out from leaders and fun.
Les McKeown
Well, in order to see that in its broadest and most applicable context, let’s just sit for a moment or two with, how do they get there? How do those people we’re calling leaders get there? Because that doesn’t happen. You know, it’s like, Monday morning, we walk out, walk in and say, Okay, you you and you’re not leaders, and you can use a capital L, and here’s a little, you know, gold star, you can, you can, where to show everybody that you’ve been really good people, and now you’re a leader. That doesn’t happen. What happens is, you start this business, or it could be your not for profit, your churches, any organization you start off, and there’s you and maybe some co founders, and there’s stuff to be done. That’s the starting point. I realize this sounds like I’m starting, you know, with the with the beginning of the universe, but that’s, that’s what happens. And then the next thing that happens is we have people who are doing those things, right? So there’s us and and I don’t mean us and them, and in us and them sense, but there’s the founder group, one people, one person, two person, three person, and there’s people, and then we get a bunch of people, and we’re a bit bigger, and we think, I can’t be talking to five salesmen, sales people every day. Pardon my gender normative. So I really would do much better talking to one person. I’m gonna make Jenny a manager. Again. It’s not just like that. Dialog happens, but that’s what happens. Jenny emerges a manager, primarily to help communications and so forth. And then we get a little bigger, and we got 567, people who are like Jenny, they’re they’re vertically managing some other people in their own function. Now here’s the next bit is really important. The group that we call that we’re going to call leaders, sounds like a very unfortunate phrase, and it’s got a slightly different connotation in the UK, so forgive me, if it doesn’t come across quite the way it should, what happens is there’s sort of like a crust forms within that group of managery people of two or three, maybe were with us from day one, or maybe one of them’s her brother in law. Or they sort of get things a bit better for various reasons that are usually subliminal, they sort of begin to form a little tighter group, and that’s the leadership group, and they’re not they’re not leaders. They’re the primary water carriers. They’re the folks whose main job is to get what you want as founder and make it happen through other people. So that the first thing to say is that’s the group we’re talking about, and the communications we have with them are almost always at this early stage of growth binary. So I talked to Jenny about what she needs to be doing about sales, and I talked to Eric about what he needs to be doing in the warehouse. Right? Eric and Jenny aren’t spending much of any time together, and if they are, is to fix something that went wrong. There’s no sense of cross functionality, or what we will come to call lateral management. So our we’re expecting two key things alone. One is to get us, you know, get me, get what I want, get to the point where you can finish my sentences for me, whether you do it or not, but I want to see you nodding early on when I’m saying something. I want to see that sign in your eyes that you get it. And the second skill is to do it, to do the thing that you just got. And it helps an awful lot if you can use the other people that we’ve got out there to make that up. And that’s it. That’s as simple as that. That’s all that we’re looking for, and that together. Builds a really, really high performing team in fund the founder in the middle, like a conductor, with five or six people who have sort of emerged to a senior leadership thing. May not even have titles, but everybody knows who they are, and they do two things. They get what we want them to do, and they get it done, and that’s it. And if you try to grow in any other way, non organic, organic way, in the early stages, you will slow up your growth. That’s the right thing to do. But then, as you’re about to move us into I’m quite sure it works really, really well until it does.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, and I want to stress that, because some folks listening to this might be in the stage where that’s the team they need right now, correct, right? If you’ve got 1525, people, if, if growth is still coming relatively easily, if you’re not experiencing some of the pain points we’re about to talk about here in a second, there’s nothing. It’s not like this is like the lesser team, and we’re about to start talking about the better team. It’s about having the right team for the right stage. I love about the way you laid that out, and it is, it is the fastest way to grow in that stage. But then, like you said, you get to this point where you know it works, until it doesn’t. What does it doesn’t look like? What are some signs that folks can look for? Because I’ve found most folks don’t notice these signs fast enough, right, right? It starts happening. Starts happening. And there’s some denial. There’s so, you know, we try to, like, write it off, but it builds and builds. What are some of the signs that we need to look for to know that our leadership structure has to change.
Les McKeown
And one word, one big law or triangulation, you know, it’s not working when you’re mired in, you know, just endless triangulation. And here’s what I very specifically, what I mean by that, and the example we just gave, everything works really well. When I can talk to Jenny, I start a sentence about my my view for our sales goals next quarter, making stuff up here Jenny I see gets it, maybe add some value in the conversation. Then when I see her back as she moves towards the door or the zoom window closes, I I’m feeling really confident she’s gonna, she’s gonna, pretty much make that happen. And I’m talking to Eric, and I know the connotations of what Jenny’s going to do, or for the warehouse in the next quarter, I talked to Eric. He gets it zoom window. Closes off. He goes, I feel comfortable. What happens when, when we get complex? And I’m not talking about 500 people, I’m talking about probably certainly happening at 15. By the time you’re into 20 people, you’re marred in this you are being called by Eric and or Jenny all the time to deal with the implications of what the other one has done that they didn’t know about. That mean you’ve got to fix that thing. And now you’re fixing stuff all the time, and you’re in these endless triangulated discussions. For one reason, you’ve trained these people by commending them, by bonusing them, by congratulating them on delivering in their let’s use the word silo. It’s not a popular word, but that’s what it is, and that has worked. No it doesn’t work anymore. Now you’ve got to take that as a hygiene factor, that they will do what they need to do in their own department or division or project or group or team, that what you’re commending, bonusing, congratulating them for is sorting stuff out. Maybe another word that comes to your mind when you think about this between themselves and those that are listening to the audio. Can see me making little between themselves, gestures with my hands, and sorting things out with an assumed, delegated responsibility, or an actual delegated responsibility. Maybe we’ll come back to that. That means that escalation isn’t a chimney anymore. It’s not the case that every time I Eric have a problem. It’s just like in that Harry Potter movies, you know, where you throw something into the chimney, into the fireplace, and Bucha goes off and appears somewhere else, like on your desk as the founder. They’re sorting stuff out. And in our world, what we call that is lateral management, which is fueled by something you haven’t been teaching your folks, which is to take an enterprise view, that when you make non trivial decisions, you’re no longer thinking. What does this mean for my sales team? You’re no longer well, you are. But that’s taken for granted. That’s there’s no discussion about you filtering everything that happens through your sales team, because that’s what you’re paid for. No, there’s, there’s no binary brownie points for filtering things through. What does that mean to my warehouse team? That’s what you’re paid for, what you’re now here to deliver. The brownie points are for working out what I’m about to do and how it impacts everybody else, and getting the team to begin to work as a team is the crucial next step. But the problem is, and I’ll put it in very simple terms, and we can explore it further if we wish, is that what I see all the time is, here’s the founder, intellectually knowing I need this team to step up and start acting like a team and begins beating that drama. Go. I hear this phrase all the time, actually, to be quite honest with you, it drives me crazy, because it’s lazy and you know what I’m going to say, why don’t they think like owners? Well, they don’t think like owners because they’re not freaking owners. If they were owners, they wouldn’t be here. That’d be your competitors, right? You’re the owner. You think like an owner. You may want them to pretend they think. You don’t really, but here you are. You’re saying, I need you to work as a team. I need you to work as a team. But you are still turning up as that binder picture. You’re still triangulating. You’re still the final point of escalation. So you’re just putting tension on people. You’re asking them to do something that you’re not giving them the resources and tools to then do, and 99 times out of 100 if not more than that, we end up having to spend more time together. Founder and I working on their mindset to begin to get the ball rolling on building the team they want to go straight to the team. Will you coach them? Will you make them better? I will whatever you have made the mental shift necessary.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s so true and and to just add a little color to it, it feels really, really good and really, really bad all at the same time. It’s really nice to have someone who’s completed your sentences for the last seven years on your team, right? It’s really, really nice to have someone that you know can just walk out and we’ll get it done, that will walk through walls to make it happen, right? It’s, it’s really nice to have a whole team of those. It’s really nice to be able to just decide this is what we’re going to do, and not wait around for everyone to answer the question, yeah, and to chime in. And it really, really sucks to be just everything’s coming into your office, everything like playing traffic cop all day, every day, babysitting the differences between departments. And it feels like the good stuff we ought to keep all the good stuff. I want people to just finish my sentences and do this stuff. I just don’t want to have to deal with all the complexity of all of this, right? I don’t want to like they. They just need to get their stuff together and and so it’s why it’s so hard, I think, for founders, is because a certain portion of that does feel really good, and we want to hang on to that. We want to hang on to it, but it undermines everything else that we’re trying to do. So let’s so much we could go into on the mental shift you have to make as a founder. We’re gonna save that for another episode, another time. We’ll have you back. What I’d like to look at now, though, is, can we get some clarity on what we actually need them to do? What are the skills that we need from our team to make this leap. What are the skills we need from an executive and predictable success?
Les McKeown
You actually what you need to do is make a complete sort of leftward shift. And again, for folks just hearing the audio, not seeing me, make a fantastic hand gesture that shows this leftward shift, which is a shift from the things you that up until this point, not just you think, but have been the things that are reserved for you have got to be things that move to the team, and they, in turn, free up other things for you, for you to do, the things that you’re only you are doing as the founder or the MSC, if you’re not the founder in the early struggle, then through fun right up, still, almost certainly still doing it in the first third of whitewater are you’re the one that’s thinking strategically, right? If you’re going to scale, you need your team. You need your t1 your that that’s needs to become an actual form of team with a name and a mandate and a regular inventory of effective meetings and a good quality agenda that allows them not to come as most t1 meetings Are leadership meetings are and talk about management issues. You know, the biggest machine we have in the warehouse is broken, or, you know, do it with a budget to replace it. Or this big client wants us to code out module Z in our software. You know, that’s not thinking strategically, but most leadership teams still get trapped in that, because that’s what the people on the leadership team have been thinking about up to now. And they get in a room together and they think, Oh, he or she our founder wants us to talk with each other about all the things that we have to deal with, and those meetings become the most boring reporting in reporting, I’d call it what you want. I don’t know why it’s managed to have both titles reporting I’m reporting in or I’m reporting out, but anyway, it becomes that and everybody’s bored out of their skull, because that’s not what you’re there to do. You’re there to begin to think strategically, and that you’ve got to hand out over to your team. Now you have got another mind shift to make, which is this, most founder owners are visionary leaders in our visionary operator process or synergist world. If that’s all news to you, don’t worry about it. Just relate this to your own experience, which is, most founder owners are visionary types. They’ve got two modes of being in meetings, whether they’re four. And more informal meetings, physical or virtual meetings, they’ve only got two modes, in charge or not here, that’s it. I’m either here and in charge. And for some people, that means overt, and it’s obvious. For many leaders, it’s not so overt, but it’s still the case. I’d like to think of it this way, and fun, if you got to look, you know, you sat in on a zoom leadership meeting, or got to look through a window into an office where people were meeting. It wouldn’t take you more than three minutes to know who the boss is. It all the body language will show it. People look at the same guy or person over and over again, and you realize, oh, okay, that’s the boss. You’ve got to transition to a point where it’s going to take a good 90 minutes before it begins to become clear from the pattern of the how the team are interacting, who the boss is, because you’ve got to learn to not either be in charge or not be there. You’ve got to be there as a team member, so you’re not upsetting yourself from thinking strategically. But what you’re doing is you’re modeling to the team that you want them to do it, and then the second thing is they’ve got to take from you what you’ve been doing up until now, which is to be the group that implement change. You have been the one that does that all along. You come in on a Monday morning having been on vacation or gone to a workshop or read, you know what, Elizabeth Jones fantastic books, and you come in with these sweeping things, and you’re the one that drives for that to happen. If you’re serious about there’s nothing wrong with that. And if you just want to continue growing, I say just as you can say at diminutive, you want to continue growing your business, you can stay like that forever. But if you want to truly scale, you’ve got to teach your team that they’ve got to be the ones that think strategically. Would you involve? And as owner, you still have, let’s face it, you have still got an ultimate veto, but your team is the driving force, and they’re the driving force to implement. And if you don’t make that shift mentally and then model it. And also, here’s the really hard so many funder owners can get started with that, and they give up because after the third meeting, it hasn’t taken. They don’t get they’re still talking about the broken machine. They’re still talking about the client demands. They’re still operating in what we call the t2 level. T1 senior leadership, t2 management. They’re calling in and stuff. Now it takes at least six to nine months of of, you know, obscene amounts of resilience, determination and pressure to just begin to get them to change, and typically, a year to 18 months to make that shift. So sticking with it is really, really difficult.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, one of the things that’s so hard about sticking with it is that we don’t have the confidence that it’s going to pay off, right for a few different reasons. One, we’ve never done this before, right? And as much as we like and and trust, you know, the one guiding us through this process, it’s still had, I there’s something in reserve. And then again, going back to kind of our initial question, the I would say the more poignant one is, okay, I think we can do this, but I don’t know if Jim can do this right. If I give six to nine months of just waiting, right, is Jim really going to make the leap? What are some signs that that you look for when you’re working with teams to help kind of, you know, play that out and say, Hey, does Jim have what it takes? Doesn’t Jim have what it takes? What can we look for along that road?
Les McKeown
Well, the first thing is just to look for is just the statistics. And I have no reason why this is and I’m not going to just try to justify mathematically what I’m about to share. I’m just going to tell you, this is what I see all the time. A third of your group don’t have what it takes. So if your trustish leadership teams, three people, almost certainly one of them won’t make it. If it’s six, two probably won’t make it, and so on and so forth. Now don’t ask me why that is. It’s just how it’s shown up over the years. And so you got to accept one of the things that is a barrier. And it sounds like it shouldn’t be so, but when you think about it, and you put yourself in the founders, there’s position, it’s it comes out of a good place. Some funders just get to the point where they think Jim isn’t going to make it. But I don’t, I don’t want to do what’s necessary to accept that and work with it, which would mean, you know, finding some or something else for Jim to do. So they just stick with what they’ve got. And a lot of, I see a lot of founders, you know, they bump up against that come back and then the pain of not being able to scale gets so hard to come back up, but it takes two to three runs. And that’s what for all good reasons. Anyway, that wasn’t the question. The question is, what are you looking for? You’re looking for two things. One is, you’re looking for somebody who, no matter what you do and no matter how you try to paint it up, can’t get out of the t2 mindset. They apply it to everything. Even you’re talking about the need to think strategically. They’re they’re moving into that space with the t2 Toolkit. That’s the only thing that they want to use. The others may be still using their t2 mindset, but you can see they’re trying to make the shift necessary to begin to think differently about all of this. But if someone is relentlessly just looking through the t2 lenses, then here’s what’s happening. It’s not that they’re bad or incompetent people. It’s that you’re trying. You’re pushing expectations on them that they don’t. Probably, whenever you you confront them with the implications they don’t want to fulfill those expectations. I’m the best warehouse manager in the world. I want, would you please just let me go back to being a warehouse manager? That’s a great conversation to have look, you know, bring in a director of operations, and I’ll report to them. Let me be the warehouse manager. Stop trying to force me to be the Director of ops, because I just don’t want to do that. That’s a great thing to have. The other thing to watch for is where the gym in this world, Pearl Jim, where you see him start to triangulate behind your back. So that’s worse. That’s not Jim not stepping up. That’s Jim trying to harm the direction of growth you’re going in. So you’re having discussions, you’re getting a bit of traction, and then you either hear or you notice or you see, Jim’s sort of picking at that, you know when, and you begin to hear, you know, Jim, Jim doesn’t think we are who we used to be. And, you know, afraid we’re losing our sense of perspective. Or, you know this, this drive for relentless, drive for growth is just making us all machines. That sort of mindset that is much more dangerous, because that’s not just finding that you’ve got a round peg in a square hole. That’s finding you’ve got somebody who’s actually trying to stop what you’re trying to do. And that’s something which if you’re serious about scaling, you’ve got to put a stop to as soon as you possibly can.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I really want to highlight that those two, those two are the way you deal with those is very differently, completely, right? Someone, they’re on board, but they’re making it really clear by their actions and their abilities that being a manager is great for them, right? They don’t have to be on the executive team. It might be a little hard for their ego. It might be just a difficult transition. I’ve found that when you’re really clear about that and clear on what the expectations are, a surprising number of folks will self select down in the org chart. It shocked me, as we started doing this work with a bunch of other organizations, how many folks could see, Hey, I see what being a t1 executive look like I’m actually really happy being a t2 manager. Can I just go do that right and get me out all these meetings, get me, you know, get me out all this like, I don’t want to think strategically about 32 years from now. I just want to make sure we have a great warehouse and and so a lot of folks will self select, and if they don’t, it’s still worth the conversation to talk to them and get them plugged into the team. If someone is actively resisting the move and that transformation, right? You’re a butterfly with one wing. You’re not going to fly real far and and so when you have that, when you have folks that are are opposing the direction, either advertently or or quietly behind the scenes, you have to deal with that very quickly. And you have to deal with it very firmly. Would you agree?
Les McKeown
I do. And depending on the historical relationship you have with the individual, even that, in the second case where somebody sort of self harming the attempt to continue to develop the team, you’ve got a couple of options. You know, if it’s somebody that’s relatively new. Maybe I’m painting a picture here that just happens to be one that is reasonably it’s not infrequent. You know, they’ve come in relatively new. They see these changes. They also think they sort of know better, a little bit, that’s that can become toxic. And the best thing to be bluntly honest with you, is just accept they’re not right for here, and you can be gracious about the way that you Yes, and help them find somewhere that will be better for them. But often it’s somebody who’s been around, you know, from the very early days of not day one, and they were big dogs in the in the growth of the organization, and there’s a lot of stuff tied up, you know, if somebody’s been around for quite some time, and you’re trying to then make this shift from the sort of crusty type of we became a sort of a leadery team to, you know, an executive leadership team that with real expectations on them, and somebody’s not making the move, the biggest problem for them and dealing with it publicly is often just straightforward proximity. They they fear the loss of status that comes with the loss of proximity with you. They were they had your ear all this time. They were seen as big. Dogs by other people, and this feels it’s not even so much like a demotion in terms of status and title. It’s more like a sort of an estrangement, like they’re being forced out of the inner circle. Now Ruth is like sort of are, but what you can do is you can and I, and I gotta apologize from a choice of terminology, but I haven’t put a better one yet. You can build a dinosaur park for people you know, where you know. You wouldn’t want to use that phrase. But essentially, what you’re saying is, look, Jim, I love you, man, you know, and you know, maybe Jim’s also married your daughter, who knows, or you know, because you hire people for weird reasons earlier. But I really do value all that you’ve done, and I want you to continue to do it. And you know, you and I, our relationship’s not going to change on a personal basis, but it does change as we grow in a business sense. Now I want to, you know, take away from you all of the pressure, the stuff you don’t like, and I’m going to let you continue to do what you’re doing, yeah, but there’s just one thing that I’ve got to make a red line. You don’t undermine what we’re doing. Just don’t do that. Leave it alone. Let it be and let’s just continue working together. And that doesn’t always work. You know, often what happens is that goes on for about six months. Jim can’t help himself, and you’ve got to say, Gemma, I’ve got to have to help find you somewhere else, but it’s worth trying at least.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I think one of the things that we mistake is expressing our kindness and our humanity in keeping people on the trajectory that we’ve already placed them on, right and what’s not kind about that is, especially in situations like this, you put them on a trajectory to make them into something other than what they are. There’s nothing kind about that, right? And so we’ve got to kind of break our idea of being kind with stuff means that they’re always forever on our team, always forever growing with us, and make our kind of saying, Hey, we’re gonna we’re committed to getting them in the right place for them, whether that’s inside the company, whether it’s outside the company, but if you can shift that mindset, you can be much more kind in how you do it and what you do without sacrificing the growth and the structure that you’re building for the rest of the team.
Les McKeown
Absolutely right? And you know one of the and dealing with those shifts, particularly with the folks who are finding it difficult to process the shift in there what I refer to as that proximity, relationship side. One of the metaphors that I’ve used with leadership teams that has proved helpful is to just point out that, you know, when you’ve got your tiny little business. Imagine that the size of a golf ball, and here’s the boss, and here’s Jim, you know, and they’re standing in the positions they have in the business, no matter where they start, not a little golf ball, they’re right next to each other. They’re nowhere else to go. But nothing needs to change. Nothing needs to change except the business gets bigger. They stay in the exact same place, and this is now the size of a watermelon, there’s distances grown between them just by the thing growing. Now you pump that up, do what the cool kids call 10x and now you can’t even see the tip of each other’s heads, right? The complexity of the business is what’s come between you, and it doesn’t need to change the interrelationship personally, except in so far as that might send bad signals to the rest of the team. And there’s sometimes some you know, if you’re seen to be traveling to and from work every day with Jim and going golfing with him three times a week, you’ve got a problem if he’s not on board. But it doesn’t mean to say that you can’t still keep a friendly relationship and have him accept Jim, in this case, that this is not about me as the founder walking away from you. We’re growing, and we just found ourselves in different parts of this thing.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so Les, I want to kind of wrap it up with this. There’s a question I like to ask all my guests. You’ve been on the show. You’ve heard this before, but in the context of all this of the leadership change that we need to make of finding the right leaders for our team, what would you say? May even be something that you’ve said already so far in the episode, but what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing as we close today that you would want everyone watching you listening today to knew?
Les McKeown
You said it actually earlier in our conversation, I mentally nodded and assented to it. I’m going to paraphrase it, not use the same words you did, but it’s so, so easy, not just to underestimate but to completely be unaware of the addictive nature of being a founder, there’s something about it. It gives you a sort of almost God, like status within the organization. You have 20,000 votes to everybody else’s half a vote. You can change anything, any moment, anytime, on a whim. That’s why you started this thing. You. Were the one that went through the existential crisis and early struggle. You were the one sobbing at night. You were the one who everybody was looking at and thinking, you’ve really screwed this up. And you’re the one that came through it. You made it happen. And just, you know, in the back in the days of the Roman Empire, and I’ll make this really quick, great Roman generals who made their name, you know, like Scipio, Julius Caesar, Pompey, when they conquered a foreign tribe or country, they were allowed something called a triumph. And what the triumph was was they would come back with their legions that wait outside Rome until they were allowed to have their triumph. And then there’d this, be this massive parade, and the, you know, the leader of the tribe that conquered would be in chains in a big cage. There’d be exotic animals, there’d be all the loot, and then would come the general, and the general would maybe have his face painted red, like Jupiter, and he’d be dressed like Roland, one of the Roman gods. And by law, there was, and forgive me, it’s why it was at the time by law, there was a slave standing behind the general, banning him and saying, permanently, remember you’re human. Remember you’re human. Remember you’re human, and nobody does that to us. And what happens is, as founders, we just get to the point where everything, just the little knowing glance that you’re the one, just the silence when you’ve made a statement that you can make clear is the way it’s going to be. You’ve got to give that up to scale, and that’s tough to do.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it sure is. It sure is. Les, Where can folks find more out about these stages, that you’ve talked about, these leadership styles, and find the help that they need to make this transition from founder to CEO and build the right team around them. Where can they find more out about you?
Les McKeown
Google. It’s a fantastic thing. I found it a while back. And open AI and Claude anyway, you just go to predictablesuccess.com. And it’s all there.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic, wonderful. Well, thank you, friend for being on today. Just loved this conversation. It’s just super, super helpful and insightful. Glad you’re here. Thanks for coming, and for those of you watching and listening today, I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Les McKeown
Les McKeown, the Founder and CEO of Predictable Success, is not just an advisor to CEOs and senior leaders but also a sought-after speaker for Fortune 500 companies. His expertise lies in helping organizations achieve scalable, sustainable growth, and his breakthrough strategies have been widely recognized and implemented. Before founding Predictable Success, Les established himself as a serial founder/owner, starting more than 40 companies. He was also the founding partner of an incubation consulting company that advised on the creation and growth of hundreds more organizations worldwide. He’s the bestselling author of Predictable Success, The Synergist, Do Scale, and Do Lead.
Want to learn more about Les McKeown’s work at Predictable Success? Check out his website at https://www.predictablesuccess.com/.
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