Scale Architects
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Did you know there are different types of founders? Do you know what type you are? Did you know that there are different strategies for each type of founder? Where many founders get it wrong is they choose the wrong strategies simply because fail to recognize these differences.
Passion is the primary source of fuel for founders. It's what gets them through setback after setback in the early days. It keeps their unwarranted optimism afloat long enough for it to become warranted. But what happens when you, as the founder or even the CEO, lose your passion for your business?
Where does growth come from, incremental gains, or quantum leaps? There are so many articles written on this question, and they come to virtually every single conclusion. I'd like to take a moment to try to explain why the answer is "YES" and what that means for your business.
The #1 reason founders (who want to take their business into Predictable Success) never make it there has nothing to do with the value of their product, the size of their market, or their capacity as a leader. In this article I’ll show you exactly what it is.
Culture is what you communicate, celebrate, and compensate. Culture is not your cleverly word-smithed statement or aspirational values or wall art or a well paying corporate job for your local screen printer. It is not some credo crafted at an offsite convention. Culture is much less glamorous and much more relevant than that.
Ask a room of 100 successful executives what the most important business question is, and you will get close to 100 different answers. However, you will find that you can boil those responses down to just four one-word questions. "Why?", "What?", "How?", and "Who?" These questions seem relatively straightforward until you recognize that you have a bias toward one or two of these questions.
Your culture isn't the words on your walls, t-shirts, and website. It is those things that you do as a company that works and is therefore promoted, encouraged, repeated, and honored. Let me pick on integrity to illustrate my point as many, many businesses will include integrity in their core values.
The question of who "owns" a company culture is a tricky one. There are lots of right answers that are wrong, and lots of wrong answers that are right. Let me try to make some sense of all of this for you.
The "Stop Doing List" has been one of the most painful but powerful tools I have had to learn to use over the last 13 years of running a successful small business.
Do you have executives or leaders? Unfortunately, many founders and CEOs make the tragic mistake of assuming achievement is the same as leadership. However, the primary function of an executive team is not achieving today's success but instead securing tomorrow's success.
Day two of your executive offsite is where the rubber meets the road and where discussion transforms into action! You’ll pick up right where you left off in day one, with goals. As the day progresses, you and your team will get increasingly precise until you've boiled those goals down to the specific, actionable tasks that you can assign to your team members.
From day one, this step-by-step agenda will give you and your team an opportunity to reflect on past successes and challenges and cast a vision for the company so powerful and enduring that it will outlast everyone in the room.
