In this truly tremendous episode, Rachel Turner, Co-founder and Principal of VC Talent Lab, shares how she turned her own struggles scaling her businesses into a powerful tool for Founders.
You’ll learn what it means to scale yourself while you scale your business so you don’t get left behind with lack luster results or worse.
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And I’m here with yet another high demand coach. And I cannot tell you how excited I have been about this conversation. As with Rachel Turner, this actually the first time we met, but I feel like we’re kindred spirits. Already. Rachel is a founder and an outfit whisperer. With more than 20 years of experience as a transformative coach and leadership team and culture consultant. Her superpower is coaching entrepreneurs who need to scale themselves to scale their businesses. And her new book, The Founders Survival Guide is the go to book to help founders to scale and adapt their leadership style as their company grows. Rachel, I know we’re gonna have a fascinating conversation around this, I cannot wait to get started. But I’d love to just pause for a second and start with how you got into coaching in the first place. So tell us a little bit about what you were doing and why you made the leap into coaching.
Rachel Turner
Right, nice to meet you. And to be here. Thank you for the invitation, Scott. So I think like a lot of people in our world, Scott, we get into it, because we’ve we’ve struggled. And we want to help people overcome the challenges we’ve overcome. And so I am, my previous pre coaching experiences was was as an entrepreneur in the music industry. So I was on a gap year before I was supposed to go to London School of Economics to read history. And I managed to talk my way into a job at a record label. And then I set up a record label before my 19th birthday, then a management company looking at managing DJs. And musicians, then the record label and the publishing company in all sorts of by the time I was 25, I’d established five companies. But I couldn’t scale. So I could start things. But as soon as I had more projects that I could put on the back of a napkin more people, I could sit around a table, I just didn’t know how to do it. I was a very good individual contributor, but I didn’t know how to manage and lead. And so I sold the businesses when I was in my mid 20s. And was fascinated by why couldn’t I do it, you know, I’m not a thick person. So I went back to university studied psychology, trained did a two year qualification and executive coaching. And then I spent the last 20 years really supporting founders and leaders to avoid the mistakes that I made.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow fascinating. And so I want to just jump right into this because I think the content that you’ve really uncovered is a fascinating one, because this is where I spend the probably the majority of my time, it’s probably split, about half of the time is helping people just scale their business, what are the systems, the tactics? Who do you need on your team, the other part of it, and arguably the harder part, you know, to kind of get moving, but the more fulfilling part to succeed in is getting folks to grow and scale themselves and helping leaders like yourself back when you are super successful starting, but then I keep hitting this wall, and I don’t know what it is. That is that’s the that’s the rule. It’s not the exception, right. And so you’ve seen this, you recognize, hey, this isn’t something that just affects you. And you’ve started to actually not even started to but you’ve actually codified what this journey looks like. So talk to us a little bit about what it was that was actually holding you back and what folks can do about it.
Rachel Turner
So if I can ask that in a slightly more meta level. What I’ve noticed in the last 20 years, and I can only qualify after I mean 20,000 hours of coaching is that 90% 90 to 99% of the time, most of the challenges are things that hold founders back break down into one of three key areas, which are the leadership styles or modes, as I call them in the book, different styles of communication and self mastery. So at any time, I think you could speak to a founder and you could spot within those three, I call them the three legs of the founder survival story, you need all three legs to be strong, you need to be able to communicate to influence and manage, I could only communicate influence I could sell. I could sell anything to anyone but I couldn’t communicate to manage people. You need to be able to max operate as a leader in three different ways. This is not entrepreneurial, what I call brave warrior leader, the management sort of operational leadership or what I call considered architected leadership mode. And then finally that visionary strategic leadership Moses Manik leadership, most founders, this is including me were brilliant warriors were kind of you know, solo contributors goal oriented and make anything happen you know, go for it but when it comes to growing some of that considered architect muscle or the more sort of thoughtful strategic visionary wise, Monique muscle we’re less effective. I definitely my my Achilles heel was I couldn’t do considered architect. I didn’t even know what that was. I couldn’t set people up for success. I couldn’t manage groups manage teams, I couldn’t. I didn’t have the patience to do Run team meetings or give good feedback or even help people identify their OKRs. And their goals, I just my approach to management was that hire and hope approach, which is sort of the, I’m going to hire, you just let you get on with it, then get really upset when you don’t do it, then I’m gonna micromanage you, and then eventually I’ll fire you. And what I didn’t realize, of course, is that I was managing my team the way I wanted to be managed, I don’t need direction, I’m a warrior. So I need a vision and a laptop. Yes. But if your team needed what you needed, they’d be running their own business, they wouldn’t be working for you. And the majority of the time, our teams need clarity on what’s expected of them what success looks like, they need support, they need coaching, they need feedback, they need plans, and I didn’t know that they needed any of that. And then the final thing is, it’s no you can be you can communicate to influence and manage, you didn’t get a tick in that box, you can lead as a warrior architect and Manik ticking that box, but if you don’t have self mastery, you know, if you’re showing up stressed out hungover, tired, exhausted, burnt out, full of ego needs driven, annoyed, frustrated, resentful, none of that is going to work and you’re not going to be the kind of person that people want to work for. So sort of underpinning all of that is what I call them a bit of self mastery. And I break it down into mind mastery, so really, how to how to manage your mind so that the best version of you shows up, and not the kind of irritated, frustrated resentful, narky version of you. Is narky and American word as well ?
Scott Ritzheimer
Snarky it would be our version.
Rachel Turner
And then energy mastery. So you know, the founder journey is a marathon, not a sprint, and you need to be much fit for the marathon. So I failed on all of those are, the only thing I could do was warrior and influence, I couldn’t architect I didn’t manage, manage, I didn’t manage my mind. I couldn’t communicate to manage, all I could do was warrior and sell.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, and I think what’s so brilliant about this is that that’s what it takes, right? In the beginning. That’s what it takes, like, you have to be the brave warrior, you have to be able to communicate to influence it, you don’t get to the later stages, if you don’t do that. But then it’s at some point, it’s not enough, right. And so where I feel like a lot of the the books that are out there, you know, leadership is influence kind of idea, you know, don’t manage lead it. It’s, it’s true in a time, it’s true in a place, but it doesn’t really capture the essence of how that changes and moves over time. And so I’d really like to dial in on these three leadership, styles modes, however you’d like to do it and kind of put some some flesh on that for folks. So brilliant, I’m sorry, the warrior have just forgotten the word that you…brave! Brave warrior. Thank you. Tell us what is a brave warrior what defines them.
Rachel Turner
So first of all, can I just say, I love that you picked up on that one of my one of my bugbears or not one of my bugbears, one of the things I found challenging in my world is that most coaches spend their lives coaching in the corporate setting, where you’re, where you’re coaching people who are just leading. Now the thing is, as a founder, you need to be entrepreneur, manager operations lead, and you need to be all three of our often multiple times in a week. And so you’re dealing with, and also you’re doing it without any of the support of HR or any of the systems from a big established organization. So I really think founders have a much more challenging leadership journey than than traditional CEOs in large organizations. And as you said, I don’t know how you think about the stages of growth, I think of them as startup, scale up and scale up for me really happens when, like I said, before, you’ve got more projects that you can manage on one spreadsheet and more people than you can sit around one table, then you’re in scale up, and then grown up, which is the more traditional sort of, you know, 2,3,400 people plus when you can just be a traditional leader. So the brave warrior. And the interesting thing, of course, is that will make you brilliant, at one stage is actually the weakness of the next stage. So what makes you brilliant as a brave warrior entrepreneur, startup stage, is the kryptonite of scale up. And so suddenly, you’re moving to a place where, you know when you when you start to start to scale. The things that may have made you brilliant so far are the things that will make you unsuccessful, and that’s so hard to get your head round. So I should answer your question. I’ll try that sorry. Okay, so you asked what is a brave warrior. So, if you think about a traditional brave warrior, you know, as an archetype, they are brave, fearless monomaniacal on a goal absolutely focus, you know, tell it tell a brave warrior to take the gun target and they will do or die trying. And all of those traits that those ways of being really lend themselves to that entrepreneurial startup phase, you know, you, you’re risk, you’re okay with risk, great, because otherwise, you’re not going to leave your safe job. You’re fearless. And you know, you’re going to pick the phone up 100 times and have 99 knows it, keep picking it up. And you’re absolutely mono maniacally focused on a goal. You know, that’s, that’s you almost it’s like a rocket, you need that, that, that fuel to get it off the ground. But then as soon as you get it off the ground, and you’re starting to build the business, then those things that were so powerful become problematic.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yes. And so how does that how does that start showing up? Right? When when someone’s sitting there, they’ve done the brave warrior thing for a while it’s served them really well? What kind of problems do they start bumping into, that are our early warning signs or indicators that, hey, there’s an adaptation that needs to happen.
Rachel Turner
It’s for me, it’s normally when people start complaining about their people. My people aren’t performing my I’ve hired the smart people, weren’t they doing what they should be doing? It’s normally when people when when founders start to complain about their people that I would start to suspect that the business has gone into scale up, but they’re still worrying. And they need to start architecting. Because not always, not always, but a large, a large proportion of the time. Problems of performance and problems of team are either a lack of effective management or a lack of effective communication. And so that’s when that you know, if the brave warrior is is sort of goal oriented, and action orientated and jumping in, you know, if you see a problem, hammer it, fix it. Now, today, do it quick now, that sort of speed and, and focus on action, when you suddenly now got a team of people. And your job is to align them make sure they’re all pointing in the same direction, they’re all clear, they’re working well, together, they’re working to one plan, that tracking performance, if you start kind of jumping in changing your mind flexing, you know, promising a client that you’ll do it with, you know, gold leaf and Tubular Bells when your team think they’re selling fruit salad. This is when it starts to create absolute chaos. And it’s, it can be a really tricky moment. Because, you know, founders, they like to act fast, they like to act, you know, in on their own and encouraging them to think about who do you need to triangulate with? How clear are the team? You know, have you given them the feedback? Is everyone you know, it’s sort of it feels? Yeah, it feels uncomfortable for a lot of founders?
Scott Ritzheimer
I call it the reluctant manager, right? That it’s there. I don’t want to do it. And the defining question is, what’s wrong with these people? Right, it’s exactly what’s wrong with these people, you know, and, and as you’re saying, you know, the truth is, yeah, there probably is something that, you know, he’d probably didn’t hire all that well. But the bigger challenge is you. So we’ve got the brave warrior thing down, we’re recognizing that it’s not necessarily enough for where we’re trying to go, we want to improve, we want to get better, what’s the next step?
Rachel Turner
So the considered architect, and you’re right, because most clients, most founders will be reluctant at this, because it doesn’t feel very creative. It doesn’t feel free. And don’t forget the number one, the abiding psychological need of entrepreneurs is a need for freedom. That’s why they kicked against their employees and kicked against bosses and wanted to do that their own way. So they’ve gotten started a company because they need freedom. And now suddenly, you’re asking them to manage and management can feel like a real limitation on psychological freedom. I’ve got to show up to a stand up meeting once a week. I’ve got to ally with people. I’ve got to listen to all this nonsense when I already know the answer. You know, it’s tricky. So I call the reluctant manager, the considered architect. So if you think about, well, the brave warriors fighting on the beaches taking the gander at the considered architect is back in the War Room. I don’t know if you ever saw those world war two movies where you’d have the War Room and the big map and people moving tanks around. That’s a little bit like the considered architect, the considered architect is looking at the whole field. And in a business, that means the system’s the people, the teams, it’s looking at, does everyone have what they need in order to be successful? Is everyone clear on the plan? Is everyone going to go at the same time? are we supporting each other? So that’s how I think about the considered architect. And like you, most of my clients are reluctant managers. So I introduced this idea of minimally viable management. I did an analysis over Christmas and I and and there are about three things I think founders needed to be able to do to provide minimally viable management and what One of them for exists to give you an example is an annual cadence of management meetings, which a considered architect, for example, will have their team strategizing annually, planning quarterly, tracking progress monthly and huddling weekly, I did some math, that’s about 4% of the founders time. Now, I if I spent less than how I sell it to founders, because you have to sell it to founders, if I if I said your founder, okay, give me 4% of your time. And you can radically reduce the people problems you’re facing and bobbin sales complaining about Mary in marketing, you know, you can reduce all of that at really significant amount and radically improve your team’s performance. Would you be willing to give 4% of your time even doing something you don’t like? Most founders being very goal oriented, will then say yes to management.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s excellent. All right. And okay, so I want to, I want to keep us going here, because I want to make time to get to this this last stage. So we move into this considered architect, you’re starting to get the pieces moving, right, we’ve got the War Room figured out, we don’t have to be there fighting every battle, at least right, we can start moving some people in the right places, organizations usually growing, scaling up what comes after that.
Rachel Turner
Yeah. So this is when we go into the stage, which is much more like the leadership that you read if you pick up a traditional leadership book. So at the stage where a founder has a really high performing leadership team, of probably a group people who know more about that job than that they do, at that point, they need to elevate out of the weeds so that the architect is quite in the weeds in the detail. And if you continue to do that, when you get to 234 100 people, then you start to sort of suffocate the business through micromanagement. And you need to elevate back out to the 10,000 view, and what I call this wise, Monique. So you think about a wise monarch in history, they really are focused on a couple of key things are focused on the external environment, threats and opportunities. They’re focused on alliances and innovations. And they’re focused on their nobles, which here would be your leadership team, getting the right nobles in place, getting them working with each other, not infighting, and making sure that that entire group of nobles or leadership team are all pointed in the same direction. So and there, it’s much more about you know, leadership really is about being somebody that people want to follow. That’s pure leadership. So brave, brave, Warrior, brave, re boreale give me the wise Monique really is all about being a leader that people want to follow. The considered architect is much more being operational leadership, which creates clarity for everybody, and the brave warriors being the entrepreneur.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic. And the reward of getting there, right, it’s the the idea of being able to sit, you know, and and see what you’re doing over decades, right, as opposed to days and to create an impact that lasts well beyond your time. That’s tough to do. You know, people might tell your story, but they don’t necessarily feel the effect of what you do as a brave warrior. As a, I always forget the word right in front of it, but the wise monarch? Yes, thank you. It’s something that you’re doing. That’s where legacy really comes into play. Right, which I think for a lot of founders, especially later in their time, there’s actually a kind of a pool between that freedom that’s been driving them all along, and that they still want, and this desire for legacy and impact long term. And I think the this idea of kind of the the monarch being able to sit back, but doing it intentionally, really captures that I absolutely love it, I adore it. I can I can literally spend days and days on this. But we’re gonna..
Rachel Turner
Can I just say another thing? There’s another, there’s another payback. You know, I looked at your, your CD, you were very successful, and you exited. That’s not the vast majority of founders. I mean, my company focuses on venture backed founders. And in that pot, only one in four founders remain as CEO at an IPO. Now, that means that the vast majority have been exited. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been around someone been around a founder who’s been exited by the board. But it’s actually largely the reason I wrote the book because my dad that was my dad, and it happened to him twice. And it’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking. I was my heart was broken when I couldn’t scale. And I’ve seen I’ve seen my you know, saw it with my father. I saw him being exited and it broke his heart. So also being being like you said, intentional. Choose staying in the business for as long as you want to do continuing to be valuable within that and defining your own So far, that’s what I want for any founder. I do think founders should stay with their businesses forever. But I would love it if founders got to choose when to exit intentionally.
Scott Ritzheimer
I could not agree more, I could not agree more as exceedingly wise point. So it leads us well into my next question here. And that is, what’s the one thing that you if we were to kind of boil this down? What’s the one thing that you wish everyone listening today knew? We’ve got lots of founders in the audience, probably the vast majority of our audience is founders so that you’ve just opened up this entire world for them? What’s the one thing that you’d want them to take away from this conversation?
Rachel Turner
It’s really hard. I’ve got two. Go for it. Yeah, the first is, while you may need freedom, your team need clarity. And, and so many times I see founders think that it would be rude to set direction or to to clarify expectations or to give feedback, because they would hate it if someone tried to do it to them. But your team need clarity. So they need clarity, and much more than you do. They chose the pay packet, not the freedom and the autonomy. So give them the freedom, you know, manage this, is it manage people the way they want to be managed? Not the way you would like to do manage? That would be one? And the second is? I’m just trying to think of a can I say ass? Yes. All right. Don’t be an ass. Now what I mean by that is something really specific, which is, when we are triggered when our fears are triggered, or our needs are triggered, we all bounce into a set of really unhelpful shadow behaviors. For example, when I have my need for approval doesn’t get met, for example, it unless I’m managing myself, I can turn controlling people pleasing a bit vacuous. We’ve all got shadow behaviors that get triggered when we’re afraid or our needs aren’t met. And if those are running you, your business will suffer. So spend some time understanding what your you know, what triggers fear for you, what triggers need for you, what your shadow behaviors are, what you’re like on a bad day, and do whatever needs to happen so that you don’t show up to lead like that. Yeah. And that’s where I think, you know, people really come to you and to i for coaching and support. So manage people the way that they want to be managed, don’t be an ass.
Scott Ritzheimer
So good, so good. So I work with lots of coaches and consultants, I get a wonderful opportunity to interview many of them there. And one of the things that I’ve found is that we can give our very, very best energy and time and effort and thought to our clients, but oftentimes do it at the expense of sometimes taking our own medicine. So I’d love for you to take off your advisor hat for a moment, your coach hat put on your CEO hat and and talk to us a little bit about the next stage or phase of growth for you and what challenges do you feel like you’re gonna have to overcome to get there.
Rachel Turner
I’m, I’m very lucky I because I I trained coaches for 12 years, and the university I was part of really insisted on very, very high levels of personal development and sponsorship and supervision. So I had it drilled into me for over a decade that I needed to walk my talk. So I without sounding too much like I’m blowing smoke up my own backside, I do actually walk my talk. So I do do all the things that I talk about with clients. So having said all of that, last year was a big inflection point for us. My business partner and I founded our company VC talent lab, three years ago to really focus on leadership development and venture backed businesses. And it has been very, very, very successful. And then with the launch of the book towards the end of last year, we’re in the rapid scale up. So we’re in we’re in the rattling wrap rocketship phase. So we’ve just taken on a team of eight practitioners. We’re currently updating all of our systems. We are hiring a new ops manager. So this is yeah, we started last summer this sort of rattling rocketship phase. I almost feel like we’ve got one more hire to do and then I think we’ll be in relatively because I think with scaling, it’s not always frenetic, you have kind of a moment of kind of, okay, this is working, and then I’ve got to climb another mountain and then a plateau then up another mountain. I think we’re two thirds of the way up the scale, this particular scale mountain. The thing that is difficult for me is saying no to work, because I love my clients. I I love doing the work, but I know that this year, I need to coach 30% Less Yeah, so that I can provide the leadership so doing less of the coaching is a challenge.
Scott Ritzheimer
So I know some folks are Listening. And this is just like you’ve put words to something that they’ve not been able to express for a very long time. You’ve given them a hope and a point of frustration, and they’re just, we’ve got to know more. So how can folks find out more about you your work and even your book.
Rachel Turner
So the book is called The Founders Survival Guide, and that’s on Amazon, or founderssurvivalguide.com. My company is called vctalentlab.com. So if you’re a founder, particularly a founder of venture backed business, but not all of our clients are, but the vast majority have VCs involved with them in some way or angel investors, then you can have a look at our coaching programs that we do there and, and then we do what we call founder scale programs. We do team scale programs, and we do custom programs for larger organizations. So you can have a look at the work that we do there. Or you can follow me on LinkedIn.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. We’ll put all those links in the show notes for everyone who’s interested. Do check it out that absolute gold, I’m so excited to put that in your hands. But Rachel, thank you so much for being here. I mean, just what a pleasure and honor having you on the show and for everyone listening your time and attention mean the absolute world to us. I hope you got as much out of this episode as I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Rachel Turner
Rachel Turner is a founder and ‘Alpha Whisperer’ with more than twenty years’ experience as a transformative coach and leadership, team and culture consultant. Her superpower is coaching entrepreneurs who need to scale themselves to scale their businesses and her new book, The Founder’s Survival Guide is the go-to book to help founders to scale and adapt their leadership style as their company grows.
Want to learn more about Rachel’s work at VC Talent Lab? Check out her website at https://www.vctalentlab.com/ or grab a copy of her book, The Founder’s Survival Guide at https://www.thefounderssurvivalguide.com/.
Want to learn more about Rachel’s work at VC Talent Lab? Check out her website at https://www.vctalentlab.com/ or grab a copy of her book, The Founder’s Survival Guide at https://www.thefounderssurvivalguide.com/
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