The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Founder’s Evolution, Conquering the Journey Every Founder Must Face by Scott Ritzheimer

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

The Founder’s Evolution, Conquering the Journey Every Founder Must Face by Scott Ritzheimer Scalearchitects.com Show Notes About The Guest(s): Scott Ritzheimer is the founder of Scale Architects and the author of "The Founder's Evolution: Conquering the Journey Every Founder Must Face." He has helped start nearly 20,000 new businesses and nonprofits and specializes in helping founders and CEOs identify and implement the essential strategies they need to achieve predictable success. Summary: Scott Ritzheimer joins Chris Voss on The Chris Voss Show to discuss his book, "The Founder's Evolution: Conquering the Journey Every Founder Must Face." Scott shares his personal journey as an accidental entrepreneur and how he learned the importance of understanding the different stages of business growth. He explains the seven stages of the founder's evolution, including the dissatisfied employee, startup entrepreneur, reluctant manager, disillusioned leader, chief executive, true owner, and visionary founder. Scott emphasizes the need for founders to recognize the stage they are in and focus on the one essential strategy that will move them forward. He also highlights the importance of finding joy in each stage of the journey and being present in the moment. Key Takeaways: Recognize the stage you are in as a founder and focus on the one essential strategy that will move you forward. Understand that each stage of the founder's evolution requires different skills and approaches. Avoid skipping stages and embrace the challenges and growth opportunities they present. Find joy in each stage of the journey and appreciate the progress you have made. Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you and delegate tasks that are not your strengths. Quotes: "The fundamental challenge is how do we identify what the time and place is for each question: why, when, what, who, and how?" - Scott Ritzheimer "The better you are as a star player, the harder it is to get to the next stage." - Scott Ritzheimer "There's a time when you should be the best, but there's also a time when you need to delegate and let others excel." - Scott Ritzheimer "Recognize what stage you're in personally and cut 10 hours off this week's work by letting go of things you should not be doing anymore." - Scott Ritzheimer "Find joy in today and appreciate the stage you're in right now." - Scott Ritzheimer

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm host Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, folks. The lady, when she sings it, that makes it official.

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of knowledge. Impairment? That's not even right. Impairment of knowledge impairment that's not even right or impairment of knowledge being implemented into your brain use stop me before you use i verbs anymore or adjectives i don't know i flunked high school everybody knows i flunked second grade but we have always the most amazing authors the most amazing brilliant minds the people that will change your life like i there isn't a show that goes by and I've been talking about this lately where I don't have an epiphany and we talk about it in some of the private groups that we have for the Chris Voss show.

If you go to Facebook and other places for it, and there's always like tidbits, these gems of information in every show. And if you're not listening to every show three to four times a day, weekday, uh, 15 to 20 times a week you are missing out so i hope you lose a lot of sleep at night with fomo just catching up on the show uh as always we ask you for the show to your family friends and relatives go to goodreads.com for chest christmas linkedin.com for chest christmas youtube.com for chest christmas christmas one on the tickety-tockety and you know we actually have a private chat now going in a group on Facebook. It's got about 5,500 people in it. It's actually been around

for several years, but we got a private chat now going where you can chat with me and the show and what's going on and episodes and all that good stuff. So check that as well. You can go to chrisfossfacebook.com to get a link to that. As always, we have the most brilliant minds on the show and they share with you the years the tens of thousands hundreds of thousands a lifetime of study that they have gone into it and today we have another brilliant mind on the show with us today uh scott ritzheimer is on the show he's uh the scale architect and author of a book called The Founder's Evolution. And he'll be giving us the deep dive on everything that went in his book,

his career, what you can learn from it, and all that good stuff. He is a gentleman who helped start nearly 20,000 new businesses and nonprofits with his business partner. And they started their multimillion-dollar business through an exceptional extended growth phase over 10 years with 10 of double digit growth all before he turned 35 he founded scale architects to help founders and ceos identify and implement the one essential strategy they need right now to get them on track to predictable success and we're going to get into his details and everything that goes on

there. His book, of course, that you can, I believe, get free from a download is called The Founder's Evolution, Conquering the Journey Every Founder Must Face. Welcome to the show, Scott. How are you? Hey, Chris. I'm very excited to be here. I love doing podcasts. And the reason for that is a podcast changed my life, actually. It was a show like this I was listening to. And the reason for that is a podcast changed my life. Actually, it was a show like this. I was listening to is one of those days, you know, entrepreneurs have those days. It doesn't matter how successful you are. You do not graduate from those days.

And so I'm having one of those days. I'm sitting in my truck, probably on the way to like a doctor's appointment or something because I wasn't at the office. I'm driving off somewhere and I'm just kind of feeling bad about myself. We've got a multimillion dollar business. I'm in my 20s. I should not be feeling bad about myself, but it was just hard. And the real life bits here, I was contemplating whether or not I was going to have to fire some of my best friends. That's really what it boiled down to. And what made it hard was it wasn't necessarily because they were doing something wrong. It's that I didn't know that they could do what was coming.

I didn't know that they could do the next thing that was coming. And I didn't know how to process that. I just, you know, what do you do with that? And it kind of felt like, and you're in the entrepreneurial space, it kind of felt like I was the only one who had this problem, right? I was the only, you know. And so I'm sitting there kind of feeling bad for myself. I turn on a podcast and this guy starts talking about the most exciting business topic you can ever hear of. Ready? Business life cycle stages. Thrilling, right? Stunning. It could be the most

boring thing in the world, but it was like the guy was reading my mail, right? It was like, he had just gone through my inbox and looked at the last correspondence I had with half my team members. It was like he had a camera in my office. Maybe he did. Maybe he did. I'll have to ask him. He's a good friend now. But basically what happens, he goes through and describes the situation that I feel like I'm the only one who's ever had. And it was the very first time that I ever felt like I was on a map. It was the first time I felt like someone knew where my business was. Someone knew where I wanted it to go. And someone else knew the path between where I was and where I wanted to go.

Because before that, it was kind of like I had bought into the idea that every day we stepped off the map into the wild unknown. And I had a map of what was behind me, but I had no into the idea that every day we stepped off the map into the wild unknown. And I had a map of what was behind me, but I had no idea what was up ahead of me. The first time I sat in a leadership team meeting was the one that I led. I had no idea what I was doing. And this guy, it gave me so much hope. The idea that I didn't have to figure it all out, the idea that someone really had gone down that road before, uh, and, and could show me the steps through, it was, you know, it just totally changed my

paradigm for business. I went, I got his book, uh, you know, people hear about books on podcasts all the time. And then I do it too. We don't go and get the book, go get the book. Uh, I go get his book. And then I do what we always do do with with books that we hear on podcasts i stuck it on my shelf and didn't read it for like three years read the book too and so and so i do i do it too uh so i'm sitting there uh three years later and i'm having another one of those moments you know i still haven't graduated from this and i'm'm like, why is this so hard? We should have this wonderful business. We've got millions of dollars coming in and it just seems to all be evaporating away. Why is this so hard? I was like, I remember this guy had a funny Irish accent. He had an idea

about how to fix this. Let me go find that book. And I did. It's this book behind me. It's called Predictable Success. And I basically opened it up, went to the backside of the book, did the poor man's implementation and just went to my team and said, this is what we're going to do, right? We read through the book together and said, how are we going to do that? And we walked through, he's got five steps in there. We walked through and in a year we tripled our bottom line. The next year we added another seven percentage points to our profit margin. The next year, we did it again. Oh, wow. And it just completely changed the trajectory of my business.

But more than anything, it changed the trajectory of my life. And so this is a very long answer to your question, but I love podcasts for that reason because I've seen the transformative power that they can have. There you go. We're going to hire you as an ad salesman. There you go. So give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the

interwebs, order up this book, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah. So good luck spelling my name, Scott Ritzheimer. We'll get it in the show notes, hopefully. But if that wasn't hard enough, I have folks on my show and they say, just look up my name. I'm the only one out there. Well, Scott Ritzheimer should be a unique name, but I'm not the only one out there because I'm a junior. So if you look up Scott Ritzheimer, the one who looks like he's about 14, that's me. The other one's my dad. He's a wonderful guy. He will mess with you if you try and connect with him. So don't do that. Don't do that.

But no, if you go to scalearchitects.com or you look up Scott Ritzheimer, you'll find us all over the place. A ton of free resources for founders and entrepreneurs awesome sauce so give us a 30,000 foot overview of what you do there at scalearchitects.com yeah there's this unique thing in kind of the course of starting businesses that I think this isn't the last time it's going to be this way but I think it is the first time. And it's that as founders and leaders, we've got so much access to brilliant minds, right? How many podcasts do you do a week? I think you said 20 that you publish. There's never been a time in human history where entrepreneurs have had as much access to really great advice as there is now. The problem with that is,

how do we know what we need to apply today, right? How could I possibly keep up with a flow of things that really, really smart people are telling me I should do? And so we've got this challenge ahead of us, which is we've got all this wonderful information. What do we do with it? How do we know which of those really, really smart things are actually going to move us forward? And so what I do and what my team of scale architects

does, we use a couple of different tools, both for organizations and individuals to help them dial in on what I think is the most important question in business and really in any type of organization and in many ways in life is when, right? Not why, right? Simon Sinek nailed it with why, but that's not the most important thing. Not even what or how or any of those things. There's a time and place for all of those. And there's a time and place when each of those questions, why, when, what, whoever, whatever it may be, there's a time and place for each of those questions. But the fundamental challenge that I think we're missing is how do we identify what the time and place is for that?

So for example, there are some clients that we have and we take them through this process of building more system and process. They don't have enough system and process inside their organization. This is just kind of fundamental. There are other organizations that have too much system and process.

They're bureaucratic, they're arthritic, they're weighed down, they're moving slow. They're arthritic, I love that term. Yeah, yeah. So you've got someone who comes on the show and they're like, companies to succeed, they need more systems and processes. Here's three stories of people.

We added systems and processes and they scaled to 10x. But you're sitting there and you're like, and I feel like we have too much system and process. What's wrong with us? Right? So anything that we do, any strategy that we have, it has to be tempered by and filtered by that question of when. When are we in our life cycle as an organization? When am I in my journey as a founder or a leader? And what are the things that will give me a disproportionate return right now?

There you go. So in your book, let's get a 30,000 to review that as well. So I start the book with a story, and it's the best way of describing what's at stake here so let it's football season now uh so this is very timely so imagine it's the big game we can't say the name of the big game because we'll both get in trouble but it's the big game uh and uh and and your team is down by four you got to get a touchdown good news is you're only a couple yards away right so on the three yard line You got to get a touchdown. Good news is you're only a couple of yards away, right? So on the three yard line, you got to get in and, uh, it's, you know, it's fourth and is fourth

down. Everything's on the line. There's a couple seconds left. You name it, it's happening. And, and so you've got it, you've got the perfect play. You guys have run it a thousand times, you know, like the back of your hand. Uh, and so you call the play and then you stand on the sideline because this time you're not the player on the field. You're the coach on the sideline. And the best you can do is hope that you've trained your team well enough to execute on the plan. So it's the perfect call. You know that you know it's going to work. Make the call. Quarterback, everyone lines up. Ball's hiked. Quarterback gets it. It's a fake to the running back so you fake to the running back it all works the defense bites right everyone collapses on the

hole they uh and it's just it's a dream come true everything is working perfectly and you kind of pan to the left and the star wide receiver who's supposed to be making a break for the back of the end zone all by himself got the wrong call so So he's sitting, he's blocking, right? And it's like horror of horrors. Like, what do you do? And so, you know, without a moment's hesitation, you know exactly what to do. And, and no one else knows how this is possible. They're going to study the physics on it for the next 40 years, but somehow you take off down the sideline, right? You chuck the binder, the headset goes flying, the jacket falls off,

and you're sprinting faster than you've ever run in your life. You make it to the end zone. You dive just in time to make the catch where the ball's flying. And you've done that hundreds of times. You're ready for the applause. You know what comes next. But what happens? Silence, right? You could hear a pin drop. 80,000 people that were screaming a moment ago, sit there stunned and shaking their

heads. The only thing happening is these little yellow flags start come flying in your direction and men in black and white stripes start running at you and and what used to be uh the most the diving cat right the most celebrated move is now an embarrassment to yourself and your team oh man i hate it when that happens and and so what what you what you would have thought it would made you famous now makes you infamous right uh you are now the talk of the town and for not the right reason your team loses uh and and you've made a laughingstock of everyone and and we've never seen this happen in you know the big game uh in the whole history of the big game and it would be ludicrous if it did but this happens all day every day in almost every single business and so you you talk

in the in the uh some of the contents of your book the founders evolution uh stage one the dissatisfied employee uh you've got the startup entrepreneur the reluctant manager the disillusioned leader the chief executive the true owner the, the visionary founder, and finding a guide. And I like the analogy used of your company's arthritic. Tell us a little bit about your hero's journey, how you got through life, and what got you into this business. What made you want to start this company, Scale Architects, and do it? Yeah. And that goes to the story I mentioned here. So the rest of that story, it's a weird one, just buckle up. So I was an accidental entrepreneur. I accidentally co-founded a company when I was 21 years old. And to understand how that happens, we got to wind back about 18 months. I was a 20 year old. I was just married and moved to Atlanta,

Georgia, and I needed a job. This is how much I've planned ahead. I'm in a place, I'm married, I don't have a job. And so I bumped into a guy at my church and he's like, hey, I heard you were looking for a job. We need someone to come in. And I, I, I did the mailroom thing. Like I literally checked the support inbox for the, the business. And, uh, and about three months later, he, he sold the company. He owner financed it to another group, sold the company. And, uh, and I watched over, you know, about 15 months, I watched the businesses systematically but unintentionally destroyed. It couldn't have gone worse. And this is my introduction to the world of business, right?

And I was fascinated by it. In one of the most painful seasons of my life, I fell in love with business. And I got to see what made that not work. I learned more about what made business work and not work over the course of it than someone else. Then I could have, and I actually did end up going back and doing college later, which is a little bit of a joke, but I learned a heck of a lot more in 15 months than I did in four years of business school. So, um, as, as that, you know, is, is just falling apart.

We went from 13 employees to three, uh, and they were all, and we're all part-time when we were left. They basically call and say, Hey, we're not doing it anymore. We're done. We're going to declare bankruptcy. If you want any of your stuff back, come and get it. And at this point, um, you know, just everyone has lost in this situation but coming back and getting it you know the business was like two broken computers and you know those office chairs that have been used so

much that they're just plastic on the bottom you know there's there's no padding left like that that is the the cumulative assets of the corporation at this point, where two broken computers and a painful chair. That painful chair lived another seven years. I don't know how, but it stuck around for a long time. But he calls me on his way back. He's in a U-Haul with the two broken computers and the nasty chair and says, hey, will you relaunch this company with me? And so he did. We relaunched the company together now this is

september 2008 not a great time to launch a business uh so stock market falls 40 percent and and somehow we pull through uh we ran the thing from his basement uh until the hoa would just not have it any longer uh and then we kept going by busing people in, uh, in my pickup truck. And so like, we, we just, it was the entrepreneurial story. Right. Um, and, and it, you know, it worked really well. It was fun. It was so much fun, uh, until it wasn't. And that was that moment that we, we talked about and, and, and going through that and,

and, you know, Les McKeown's the guy, was on the podcast who wrote the book Predictable Success. And he has this chapter in the book on a business lifecycle stage called Whitewater. And that's where my business was at. It's where the complexity inside the business causes us to start causing problems. It's where these young, successful entrepreneurial organizations almost start caving in on themselves. And that's exactly where we were. And all the things that we were doing are all the things he said you do, you know, that don't really work all that well. We tried to sell our way out. We tried to hire our way out. We tried to market our way out. We tried to lead our way out and inspire our way out. And it was

all good. There was nothing inherently wrong with any of those things, but it wasn't enough to get us out. And so there were two things I learned in that process. One I already shared is how to get out of whitewater, right? And it's actually a relatively simple task once you know what to do. It's not easy to do. It's easy to understand. I'll be clear on that. The second one was I'm built for that. As painful as it was, once I finally understood it, I realized it was a strange thought to have, but I remember still to this day, I'm sitting on a plane. My wife's from Europe. She's from Norway. And so when we'd get an opportunity to go back to Norway, we'd kind of ditch the kids and go do something in Europe because the tickets were cheap. So we ditched the kids. We fly down to norway to kind of ditch the kids and go do something in europe because the tickets were cheap so we ditched the kids we fly down to nice uh france right on the the riviera and we hang out in monaco and watch formula one cars all right it's like the trip of trips and what's mr romantic doing on the way down there i'm listening to an audiobook on business life cycle stages that's stank present yeah uh. So, so dad, husband, you know, Mr. Romance,

you know, but I still remember looking out and I'm literally looking out the window over the countryside of France and he's talking about Whitewater. And, and that's when I realized it's like my two things, my business is in whitewater and this guy's got a solution on how to get us out the second thing i realized was if i i could get other people out of whitewater if i could help them avoid getting stuck where we've been for the last three years and do that as a living i would die a happy man and and that's where scale architects came from it came from the desire to take what i learned what worked for us and to help other business owners and non-profit uh leaders as well to recognize if they're in that white water stage and what to do about it how to get out oh wow and so that became your big motivation to

help others deal with the uh this is the thing i love about entrepreneurs they go through uh you know they find something or they solve something and they go hey i bet a lot of other people have this problem and they expinate it from there and share it to people and help change everyone's life yeah so that's the beautiful thing about it so in the book uh let's talk about what are the seven stages if you could tease some of those out to us of the founder's evolution so how long we got about two hours right uh no i'm just kidding uh so uh we won't be able to buy the book we you know yeah so just just and you listen we'll kind of listen we'll listen off and uh we'll drill into a couple that are particularly poignant for for most leaders where we tend to get stuck uh so first one is dissatisfied employee and there's

lots of dissatisfied employees. And there's lots of dissatisfied employees out there who have no business starting a business. But when you look at those who started, it is the beginning of the story. And interesting, you say, what's your hero's journey? I actually built my model off of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. So this is the call. This is the time where it's like, hey, you can keep doing what you're doing. Now, most founders are actually reasonably well employed. They're usually when you look at the research on there, they're making about 150 to 180 85% of what other people make in their role. So if they're selling, they're really good at selling. If they're doing ops, they're really good at doing ops.

And what they do is the difference between a dissatisfied employee who is an entrepreneur at the beginning of their journey and a dissatisfied employee who is an entrepreneur at the beginning of their journey and a dissatisfied employee who just needs to get over themselves is that the dissatisfaction doesn't get better when the job conditions change. I always tell folks, if you can do anything other than start a business, do it. And only once you realize there's no other way, there's nothing else that's going to satisfy this burning desire that I have. That's an indication that it's at least worth a shot. It's still going to be a hard time, but that's what it takes.

It takes that type of, it has to be to get through. So dissatisfied employee, the dissatisfaction boils, you get to a point where it's like, all right, let's go. And you jump in. And the second stage is where most folks start. It's the startup entrepreneur, right? I'm hanging my shingle. I'm doing my thing. For me, it's when it's your full-time job, right? It's not necessarily a side hustle. There's a part of that, but the overall transition from stage to stage, it's like, hey is we're doing this for real this is our full-time deal and and what i like to what i do in the book to make this easier because

it's kind of abstract for founders right we call ourselves ceo from day one but you don't really start acting like a ceo until stage five and so what happens in between? What else is there? And so what I've done is for each stage of the journey that we go through, I've also identified a stage in the architecture of a football team, basically. So where I'm going with this is stage two is the star player. That's how you win. It's stage two, right? If you get out there, you sell a whole bunch of stuff, you deliver, you do it by being awesome at what you do. That's how you win as a startup entrepreneur. And when you do that, what happens? You get more clients. When you get more clients, you get more work. When you get more work, what do you need? You need more help.

And something shifts when you've got about a handful of employees, right? When you've hired a handful, there's this tipping point where you move from having folks that help you to, I got to pay for all these people, right? And what makes it, it'd be fine if they were unbelievable in every single way, shape or form, but they're people and they don't think like us. And if they did, it would be even worse. And so we've got these people who don't really think like us. And there's two reasons for that. One is that you don't really want people who think exactly like you because they wouldn't come work for you in the first place and you wouldn't want to manage them if they did. That's true. And you don't have all the answers too. That's what I learned early in business. So I need people that are more diverse, would have different experience. And hopefully maybe you're smarter than me because I need all the help I can get.

That's 100% right. And so you also don't know how to hire very well. So it's like, I need people who are smarter than me, but there are some people who are smarter than you that'll move you forward like lightning in a bottle. And there are other people who will not move you forward. Right. And we don't quite know how to differentiate those yet. And so we become what I call the reluctant manager. There's not a founder out there who, who starts a business so that they can manage people. Right. It's just, it's just not how founders are wired. And, and to an extent is something I call

the star player paradox, but the better you are as a star player, the more brilliant you are at making strategic decisions, the better you are at selling the, the smarter you are as an attorney, the harder it is to get to the next stage, the harder it is to be an effective manager, especially as a founder. and so that third stage that reluctant managers it's like being a captain on the field right you don't have the luxury of being able to stand back and kind of watch everything unfold you got people trying to take your head off right you like you've got to do your job in real time and somehow keep the other 10 people on the field moving in the same direction at the same time.

And it's hard. It's just, you're constantly juggling. Most reluctant managers are exhausted. They're working massive hours, but it doesn't feel as fruitful as it used to. And so the great news is that it gets worse. And so what happens is we move from this reluctant manager, we finally get a couple of people around us that can help kind of with the management load. And then again, the organization takes off. But as it does, we keep finding out that there are a lot of people who are smarter than us. We keep finding out that we're not quite as clever as we thought. We're not quite as good a leader as we thought. And we end up like that coach on the sideline running up and back, you know, up and down the field,

trying to like, will our team forward, but you can run until you're blue in the face, but your team's got to move the ball forward. That's true. You know, you bring up some good paradigms. I like this.

You know, I'm thinking as you're talking about this, I'm thinking in my head of who's the Patriots coach. There you go. this you know i'm thinking as you're talking about this i'm thinking in my head of uh who's the patriots coach uh there you go and you know it's true you hire top performers that are good at what they do like i was i was i was a pretty good ceo and knowing how to manage a company be an entrepreneur i was a pretty good salesman but i wasn't a great salesman and i hired some great salesmen tom Tom Brady type salesman, and those guys could kick ass. And yeah, you're right. I like this analogy you're using because the other thing you mentioned earlier that I wanted to fall back to, to really put a highlight

on is you talked about how these employees don't think like you. That was one of the dumbest and hardest things that I've struggled with as an entrepreneur was trying to realize that not everybody had my sort of motivations. And not everybody sort of had my sort of drive. And, you know, for me, I'm like, hey, I'm building this empire and this great company. And it's my dream. And other people are just like, hey, I'm just collecting a paycheck here, man a paycheck here man i'm doing my job and you know some people were kind of phoning in some people were working out hard but they just kind of that was their scope and so you know i was kind of like why does everyone want to go home at five i like staying here 24 7 and uh you know

making that different reality and then understanding what people want so I could serve them better was really a transition. It took me years to kind of identify and make. I couldn't figure out why everyone wasn't as pumped as I was. But I also like that analogy of how you have to realize what your position is, especially in servant leadership, to be the one who's the cheerleader the the coach who's helping your team succeed because there are things you can't do like you know i i can't do a lot of the redundant work like accounting and and uh although i did some accounting um but uh uh i i can't do some of the redundant stuff that people are really good at and yeah and that they excel at that but i can't excel at that i expect excel to vision innovation so i love that analogy you bring up the football

analogy because it really helps you understand your place so hopefully people think of that when they're listening yeah 100 and and at this stage it's what i call the disillusioned leader to kind of get us this is stage four of the process and uh I kind of like it. We're kind of on a storytelling movie thing here. It's kind of like about 80 minutes into a 90-minute movie. If you look at what's happened, just about everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. You stop most movies about 10 minutes before the end, and they're downright miserable. People are dying like you know it's just it's just bad it's messy now if you like rom-coms they're they're not

together anymore you know it's this everything yeah everything that could go wrong did go wrong and and and if you were watching the movie it's a really bad time for the hero to make a decision right but this is where a lot of entrepreneurs start questioning, can I take this? Is this it? Like, is this as good as it gets? Is this as far as I can take my business? Do I need to hire a professional CEO? Do I just need to sell and start over and do something else? And all of those are valid options, but there's a better option, right? There's a way to get to those last 10 minutes. And when you do, you move into the next stage, stage five, I call it the chief executive. It's where you really become a CEO. And most visionaries are so good at it once they

understand what that actually means. And most founders would sell their organization short by not making that leap. I kind of liken it to being a GM in the box. And it's nice because you get air conditioning now, right? There's some perks that come with the transition, but more than anything, it allows you to get back to being the visionary that you were when you started the organization. Yeah, that's what you want to be is in that visionary state where you have the big picture. You get lost in the muck up of the details or trying to do everything yourself. You don't delegate.

That's another important aspect of the analogy used of the coach and the Bill Belichick and stuff, if you are the star player in your team, that might be a bad thing, really, when it comes down to it, right? Because you want to hire people that are smarter than you and that bring something to the offer. If you just hire people who are about as dumb as you are, I'm not talking about you, but as dumb as I was, you're just going to have the same people and you're just going to have all the same ideas and you're just going to not talking about you, but as dumb as I was, you're just going to have the same people and you're just going to have the same ideas and you're just going to be sitting around going,

well, we all agree on everything, which it still sucks. So this isn't working. It's so true. And it's why I think when is such an important question, because there is a time when you should be the best, right? When you're starting off and it's just you, you don't have anyone to delegate to. Now, hopefully you can get you're starting off and it's just you, you don't have anyone to delegate to. Now, hopefully you can get through that relatively quickly and there's different strategies around that. But there's a time when it really is about you pushing the envelope. It really is about you being exceptional, right? You may not be the best sales rep in the world, but you needed to learn how to sell what it is that you did. Otherwise you were never going to make it to

the next stage anyway. So I think why it's so hard, and this is why we get stuck is because the things we're holding onto, the things that made us the best player, right? You look at a quarterback in the combine, they're looking at their hand size. They're looking at all these different, it doesn't matter how big your hand is or what your zero to 40 is, or your 40 yard dash when you're a coach on the sideline. Those things don't matter anymore. And when you're a coach on the sideline, that's obvious. It's blindingly obvious. But when you're a coach inside of your organization and you're the founder, it's not that obvious, right? And you still feel like, hey, I got to make the diving catch. I got to move us forward. It's on me. It me it's on me it's on me and it just isn't anymore and so we get stuck hanging on to the strategies

of the past and not only are they not serving us well they're actively undermining our ability to proceed wow uh you know that's this is so important uh you know you one thing you talk about in the book is uh why do so many organizations begin to die the moment their founder leaves? Is this kind of why maybe, you know, they try and do everything? This is one of the reasons. So one of the main reasons, especially for young entrepreneurial organizations, is that the founder tries to skip a stage or two or six, right? So it's not until stage six that you become what I call a true owner. So you get to stage five, chief executive, you get to stage six, true owner. And there's a reason

for that progression. We laid out in the book, you understand why, but here's the thing. You do not get to skip stages in here. You can pretend like you've skipped this stage, but you won't learn the skills that are necessary to succeed at the next stage because they build off of the previous stage. And so one of the reasons why is because the founder, there's this kind of obsession with owning, not running. And there's truth behind that, but only in the proper time. So that's one reason. The second reason, which is really what we go after in the book, is that even those that do get to that stage, there's one critical error that they get wrong 90 plus percent of the time. And that is that we look for somebody to succeed us, right? So once the founder leaves, it doesn't matter if they sell or hold, right? It doesn't matter if they own it or sell it. Who owns it is largely irrelevant, although it has some to do with the inner workings. But the big reason why is the person at the top of the org chart that's replacing the founder is not a visionary. It's very difficult for visionary founders to hand off their company to other visionaries.

Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's tough. Yeah. I mean, it's the passion and sometimes either don't have a vision maybe they have a different vision it's a shock to the system where people are like yeah this wasn't when i signed up with when i signed up with the previous guy so i'm out um but i i love what you talk about about getting to be the stage seven the visionary founder you know a lot of people um you know it takes a while to get through that whole process. And I like how you've laid it out so that people can understand the different stages.

Do you find, you know, you guys talk about on your website, I believe you guys helped launch over 20,000 new businesses and stuff like that. Is that correct? Yes. There you go. And so you found that this archetype of these seven stages really follows the true success of launching companies. Yeah. Again and again and again. And like you mentioned, there's 20,000. There were businesses in there. There were nonprofits in there. There were churches in there and schools and scale-ups and startups. It was

just the whole gamut. And as I'm looking, particularly for founders, it's different for even generation two inside the company or the people who buy companies. There's a difference. But when it comes to those who start those organizations, it doesn't matter if it's for-profit or non-profit, they're cut from the same cloth. And what was happening is even though there's a thousand different variations and all these different industries and all these different people, this one story is playing out again and again and again and again. And that's where it came from. Awesome. Awesome. So as we round out the hour, let's talk about what you guys do,

how people can onboard with you off your website, what sort of, you know, I see a link here where they can, of course, download the free ebook that we've been talking about. There's a free consultation set up. Talk to us about what you do there at Scale Architects and how people can onboard with you, if they're a good fit or not, etc., etc.

Yeah. So we work largely with entrepreneurial organizations that want to scale up and are anywhere along that journey. So we've got a team of scale architects across the country, several other continents as well, but primarily here in the US who specialize in helping business leaders, nonprofit leaders, founders, entrepreneurs to recognize what stage they're in personally, what stage their organization is in together, and then boil all that down to, hey, what's the one thing that we really need to be focusing on right now? And in doing so, there's so many things that folks get to stop doing. It's not even funny, right? I tell folks, you go through the book and you just look at what stage you're in personally, you can cut 10 hours off of this week's work just by recognizing there are things that you're holding onto you should not

be doing anymore. There are things someone told you for five stages from now that you don't need to be doing yet. And by understanding what you need to do right now, you understand there are 20, 30 things you don't need to do right now. And is that because they need to delegate it or it's a waste of time? Yes. It's all of those right uh it's because individually you're hanging on to stuff that you should have gotten rid of two stages ago and it's because organizationally you guys are doing stuff that was necessary for a previous stage but isn't necessary anymore so it's both i mean i've had uh teams go through this together and then usually

come in especially in that whitewater stage we'll come in and work with the whole team. A session or two in, they'll realize about 40% of what we're doing is nonsense. And it's not that it was always nonsense. It's just nonsense now. We've not had a frame to go back and reassess. These are great things from a long time ago that we've carried forward through good things. And now they're just downright bad things that are getting in the way. Wow. And these are things that trip up a lot of different entrepreneurs. You guys have diagnostic workshops you do, accelerator workshops, one-on-one coaching. There's even some, I like this,

take the, what is your natural leadership style? You've got a styles quiz on here. Visionary operator, processor, synergist. You've got a styles quiz on here. Visionary operator, processor, synergist. You left off alcoholic. That's bonus points. That's the last question. Bonus points.

Don't do that, people. That's just a joke. I've seen that movie. And you've got a free life cycle quiz where you can get a, kind of see where you are. If you're in the whitewater treadmill area, uh, where you are in your business and light likely you're in the whitewater area. If you're, if you need help, but you know, the asking for help is so important, you know, sometimes, uh, owners and correct me if I'm wrong here, but sometimes what owners do is they just think if they just keep treading water, things will get better. Yeah. Sometimes, you know, you, you build a great business model and you're successful and, and whatever stage you're in, you know, you've, you think you got it down and then

the market changes and suddenly your legs have gone up from under you and you know, you're bleeding, you're bleeding expenses and profit. And you've got to course correct. And you're like, well, I don't know, we've got to do something different than what we've always been doing. How do we do that? And so you need help. And, you know, when we used to take over companies or look at taking over companies, we used to run an ad in the paper that said, you know, we have money to loan companies that are in trouble. And really what we were looking for is companies to take over because nine times out of ten, the people that needed money to loan were failing at their business,

and they had just been treading water for the longest time. And they were the people who needed to be removed. Sometimes they had great cash opportunities or assets. They were asset-rich, cash-poor, because they bled their companies out treading water. But nine but nine times out of 10, they, they were the ones who needed to go. So we were white knighting a lot of stuff. And then sometimes a lot of stuff would fold into our little empire companies. Um, so we could, you know, it'd be like, Hey, we can use the furniture or, you know, sometimes the employees, uh, were the valuable ones you could bring in.

Uh, but you know, nine times out of 10, they were just trading water. Like how many people that for like months and months, if not years had somehow been just throwing good money after bad and borrowing money and doing everything they could. And, and you just come in and you're like, you're six months away from bankruptcy. I don't think you realize where you're at and how hard you're bleeding out. And a lot of times, you know, we'd offer them a first-runner refusal because they'd be like, well, if you're interested in my company, there must be a way to save it. I'm like, no, the way to save it is we give you some locking money and you go away. Yeah.

And we'll come in and we'll do what we do to save the company, but we can't have you in here anymore because you're the problem and uh so that that uh you know you've got to make that decision that like hey i need help i need people that are smarter than me i need to go beyond that because when you get the stage where i show up uh and it's funny we give people a first right refusal and i tell tell them 100% of the time, do not call me a week before bankruptcy. We need to do this deal now, because in two, three months from now, my offer is going to be half of what it's going to be. If you call me a week before bankruptcy, there is no offer. So don't do it.

You know when everyone called me? A week before bankruptcy. Hey, are you still interested in buying my turd not now no you've that thing is probably so far upside down i i can't save it i might be able to i mean i'll buy your furniture off you or something but i'm not buying that business of the liens that are going to be on it yep um and stuff you know i'll scrape your employees or something but no by that time you're just like i told did i not tell you but yeah so great point to the treading water thing and asking for help and reaching out to people like yourselves that know how to people get through their white water final

thoughts and pitch out as we go on on the show man so the big thing that i i actually end every chapter with this and and every time i get an opportunity to come on a show like this, I always want to end here as well, because the threat of knowing what the next level actually is, is that we withhold our joy until we get there. Right. I'll be happy when I become a true owner. I'll be happy when I become a visionary founder.

I'll be happy when I can just get out of being a reluctant manager. And the reality of it is you won't be happy there either. Right. And so the story I always tell is we had our first kid when I was 25 years old and we had our last when I was 35 years old. And the degree to which I showed up as a dad for the first two years of my daughter's life versus my son, who was 10 years earlier, I was a different person over 10 years. And the joy that I had in the first two years of my daughter's life just recently versus what I lost with my sons. I was just with my sons. It's kind of like here, mom, you give them back whenever they can play soccer or something. I don't know what to do. What do I do with this?

And and so the the biggest thing that I want folks to get out of this is not to weaponize the next stage and put everything, including yourself at risk. But to but to simply go and look at where can I find joy in the stage I'm in right now? And that's the biggest thing. A lot of times when I'm coaching with folks, yes, we help you get to the next stage, but especially in my one-on-one stuff, it almost always boils down to what do you have to do to be happy now? You're doing great. Enjoy it. Yes, you can tackle the next hill and yes, I'll show you how to do that, but how can you find joy in today? There you go. Finding joy in today, people. It's kind of fun. Being present.

That's another big action. I think that's what you're trying to say too, right? Coming from the guy who was listening to Business Cycle books on a romantic trip, but that was also 10 years ago. So yes, absolutely. Being present in the moment. And it's more than just kind of the cliche that that sounds like, not the folks

that are saying that mean it as one, but it's saying, what specifically about today can I enjoy that I won't have anymore? Because when you achieve the success that you want, it's going to cost you something that you're taking for granted today. There you go. It's so important. So how can people onboard with you what website do they need to go to to pick up the book and get to know you better absolutely it's all at scale architects.com uh all together no dots or dashes or anything like that scale architects.com if you head to forward slash founders or click on free book at the top of the site you can get a copy of the full book uh we decided to make it free for everyone uh so go ahead and get it you

can download it instantly uh and you'll see there's there's like you mentioned there's quizzes and assessments and uh consultations everything that you need is right there on that one page there you go well it was fun to have you on thank you very much scott we really appreciate it an absolute pleasure chris thanks so much there you go guys get the free book i love the stages thing it's so complete on everything else that goes into it. And I've got this on a different screen. It is called The Founder's Evolution, Conquering the Journey Every Founder Must Face. And I highly recommend it from the discussion we've had nowadays.

It's so complex going into being an owner. And everybody thinks, oh, I'm the CEO now. I started my company and bought the.com. So I'm a CEO. No, you have to earn that title, baby. Uh, it takes a while and there's a journey. It's a journey of life. You know, it's not, it just doesn't come to you. Uh, anyway, guys, uh, thanks for tuning in. We really appreciate you guys supporting the show. Be sure to share it with your family, friends, and relatives. Call them up right now. Don't call them.

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