In this empowering episode, Brad Koch shares how you can take control of your business by shifting your mindset and focusing on key strategies. If you’re struggling to let go of daily tasks, or if you feel overwhelmed by scattered marketing efforts, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What daily 1% progress can do to steadily scale your business
– Why shifting your mindset helps you delegate and focus on your zone of genius
– How to focus on one marketing channel to drive growth without burnout
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And here with us today is, I think in my book, the high demand coach. Oh, high demand coaches. He is the one and only Les Mckeown, a dear friend, a mentor and the author of the book, predictable success. We’re gonna get into that here in just a moment. For those of you I don’t know how this would be true, but if you don’t know less, he is a serial entrepreneur who launched over 40 companies, co founded one of the world’s first business incubators spanning several continents, and then went on to consult with Fortune five hundreds and a number of the largest government agencies in the world. As I mentioned, he’s also the author of the book, predictable success, getting your organization on the growth track and keeping it there, in which he details the seven stages every organization goes through and how to navigate them effectively. Les, I don’t know if you know this, but probably about once a week I introduce you as the Morpheus of the business world, because your your book predictable success, kind of like, it’s like seeing the code of how organizations work, and then you can’t unsee it. So I’m constantly apologizing for folks, like, you’re just not going to be able to not see this anymore. And then about a week later, they invariably Call me or text me like, I see it everywhere. Everyone’s in Whitewater or something. So you are. You’re the Morpheus. I guess we’re still in search of Neo but we’ll figure that out when we get there.
Les McKeown
Well, obviously that you’re that you’ve got to be the Neo in that day, you have a big pill decision coming up somewhere along.
Scott Ritzheimer
Red or blue, red or blue. All right, so today we are going to talk about what I’d like to think of as kind of the hidden chapter of the book. For anyone who’s read the book, I guarantee you haven’t read it before. And we’re going to get a little fancier for just a moment and unpack the fractal nature of predictable success. It’s not one arc, it’s many arcs. And if you’ve read the book, and I’ve had this experience with folks, they’ve kind of struggled to understand what stage they’re in, because I feel a little bit of this stage, or I feel a little bit of that stage where we just starting out, how are we in Whitewater already? Or, you know, we’re way down into it, and it feels like there’s treadmill whitewater going on. There’s multiple stages. It’s not really, really clear. And so for folks that are new to predictable success, and you want to know how to grow. For those of you who are have been around predictable success and want to really supercharge your understanding of it and put it to work for you, it’s gonna be a fantastic episode. So I have to, I have an admission to make for everyone, unless you know this, but I think this was our first like disagreement, if you could call it that for folks, just a funny story. We do a summit every year for our scale architects, and we do kind of a deep dive on the model and train them how to use them, how to help their clients better. It’s a great time. We were going into the very first one of those. Everyone who’s in the program is new to the program, because it was the first summit. And I every year, I asked Les, what, what do you want to teach on? And he’s like, I want to teach on this topic that we’re gonna we’re gonna cover here. And I wouldn’t let him. He kindly obliged, and even though I was wrong, and we talked about something else, but we finally got to it in year three, and we’re getting to it here today. And mystery revealed. What are we talking about? We’re talking about something that we’ve come to call small w Whitewater. And just before we get to what small w Whitewater is, why it matters, and what do we do about it? Les, I’m wondering if you could, just for those who are brand new to it, just the the least we need to know, a quick run through of the seven stages, just so we’re on the same page for what this language means?
Les McKeown
Sure. So the predictable success model is predicated on a reality out there, which is why you know, once you know about it, you can’t unsee it, because it’s not like it’s some academic thing that was made up. All I did was watch what happens and then codified and essentially what happens is every organization goes on an arc, and I’m doing this arc shape with my hand. For those of you that can’t see it, it’s just like tossing a ball up in the air. It goes up, reaches the is that the apogee? I think it is. And then it falls, excuse me. And that arc breaks down into seven stages. So there’s three on the left hand side, which is the growth side, going up, there’s a peak stage, and then there’s three stages on the decline on the right hand side, on the left hand side, the first stage is one that’s familiar, I think, probably to every single person who’s listening here. I call it early struggle. Some people call it the startup phase. I hate that, because it’s become this glorified, beautiful, golden basking startup. Oh, it’s horrible. It’s a nice event here existence. And the only valid strategy for a startup is to stop being one. So you’re in a struggle. 80% of all new ventures fail. So to get to the next stages of can. Considerable event, and that’s all about finding your market. And you get to the first real growth stage, which I call fun. So at early struggle, are we going to make it or not? We make it. We get into fun. And you know it’s fun because it’s not early struggle. We find a market we can actually grow. And it’s the phase when the vast majority of our listeners, if you’ve been in business, that’s the stage when you know you’re having fun and you think, this is it. This is why I did this. And most of us would like the curtain to come down at that point for that just to stay like that forever. But what actually happens is, because we’re we’re in fun and we’re enjoying it, we’ve got a market. We grow, and we grow to the point where just the complexity of running this thing begins to overwhelm us. We hit a third stage, stage I call Whitewater. It’s the one at the north west of the ark. It’s just it doesn’t feel like this, which is a dark day before the wonderful, great Apache top stage, which I call predictable success, whitewater feels like you’re gonna die for a while because it’s just everything was going so well. Now complexity is overwhelming us, so we gotta do a whole bunch of stuff to either go back to fun nothing wrong with that, or master this whitewater thing, get through into predictable success. And that’s all about putting systems and processes in and adhering to it, we do the right thing. Unlike human life cycle, we can stay there in predictable success for as long as we want. And it gives us the unlocks, the ability to scale, to really have a J curve. You can only do that in predictable success. Unfortunately, most of us take the same approach I do to dessert. I really like that. So give me more. So we put systems and processes in that really did a good thing, got us the ability to scale. So hey, let’s be clever. Put some more systems and processes in, and we begin down the decline stage. First of those, I call treadmill, natural stage for any organization, just a little over processed. Everything’s got a bit meh. We sort of rinse and repeat. So don’t do that. Lift your foot off the brake pedal, which is really what is happening. Systems and processes sort of pushing on the brake pedal. Just ease up when the systems and processes get back into predictable success. If you don’t, what will happen is you’ll slide into a long decline stage. It’s a long, slow slide into a relevance that I call a big rut. And what’s happening there is systems and processes are everything. It’s just taken over. Everything that’s all that matters is that we fill in this checklist, and ultimately you can’t get out of the big rut. There’s only one way to get out of bed, and it’s very, very, very painful, but you will slide into what I call death Raul when it looks like, oh, something’s happening, but all that’s happening is you’re being put too bad. So those are the seven stages.
Scott Ritzheimer
So the vast majority of the work that you and I do are kind of in and or near that predictable success stage. We help folks out of Whitewater. We help folks get back from treadmill. And so a lot of the conversations I have are with folks who are dealing with this whitewater stage in particular. And what I think is really clear for most people is, why, why do we hit Whitewater? Because of the complexity, because we don’t have enough system in process. What I think isn’t always super obvious is when, right? That’s what functional. Is it like at year five? Is it when we hit 5 million? Is it when profit is 5 million or 500 customers or 50 people or so? When do we hit the white water stage?
Les McKeown
23rd of April? It’s called White Water No, that’s that’s just a joke. We hit the white water stage. So the early struggle stage, all of this going to be vast generalization, fast generalization. It’s usually two to three years you’re going to get through it. You’ve usually got a year when you think everything’s going to be and that’s awful. And then you’ve got a second year when you think, oh shoot, I’ve got to do stuff to find this market. Then you find it in your third year. Fun can be any length of time you could. You can rocket through fun in less than a year and hit wider outward almost immediately. It just depends on your ability to grow your market. It’s how fast can we get complex? That’s not what you’re setting out to do, but that’s what’s going to happen. And sometimes it takes like that’s I’ve known organizations that have been in fund for 1520, years, so it’s impossible to put a calendar date on it. What you can say is, you’ll hit white water. You’ll only hit white water after you’ve got into fun, right? You can’t hit white water from early struggle, right? Because you’re still trying to find your marketplace. So you get into fun. How quickly do you get to the to the percentage market share. That means you just can’t wake on up every morning say yes to everything, which is what we do in fun, and then tap dance our way to success. And if I was to be ridiculously, ridiculously generalist about it, sort of around five to seven years in. Fun in the sort of feel of it. But like, I say, could be in six months, it could be in 20 years.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. And then some folks, you know, because of a lot of what happens in the market, will say, like, is it a certain dollar number? Is it like, have you found that there are any metrics that go along with that? How do you measure, maybe even the complexity to know if you’re in Whitewater?
Les McKeown
Big, big, big lagging indicators, they’re not very close proxy. But if you’re in a service business, you’re probably starting to feel it when your employee group is is, you know, in the late teens, early 20s, you know you got your 18th employee. You mean, you will have had a tough times before then, yeah, but you know, once you’re into double digit employees as a service business, or let’s call it a non manufacturing organization, so it could be a faith or cause based organization, if you’re in manufacturing, you can sort of keep it going to 5060, employees. But, you know, they’re very broad indicators. Like, I say it’s all about market share, because that’s what brings the complexity.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so there’s some folks listening to that and feel like 20 what’s like? We’ve got five, and the world is on fire and, and you kind of mentioned that there are tough times. So we know that early struggle is a tough time. Are there tough times in the fun stage?
Les McKeown
Oh, yeah. So do you want me to you want me to reveal the elephant in the room, the thing that they were there. You didn’t want me to talk about before at the summit, and which, actually, I remember get putting my behind on a on a stool that you provided and tried to get into it, and you quite rightly feel Jerry for reasons it’ll become clear. So there are, you said, there’s a, you know, a missing chapter in the book. There are actually two, two missing chapters, one, and I just want to talk about dispose of it, and then come back to answering what we’re talking about here. So predictable success is all about that arc that we just talked about. Here’s what I couldn’t have put in the book, because it would have, nobody would have read it. It’d been too big, too complicated. One is that if you take, if you were to draw, and I’m drawing this arc with my left hand of your organization, well, there’s five people, 50 people, 500 people, 50,000 people. That’s your that’s that’s your world, but it’s only part of it above your organization. There’s the arc of your industry. Your industry is somewhere in this whole thing, and where it is is like a big gravitational pull. There’s then that the geographical area, I mean, the market for product X is very different in South America than it is in Asia, right, in different stages. So you’ve got these sort of overarching umbrella versions of the life cycle that have massive gravitational pulls, like it’s like the pull of a moon on the tides. It really does impact your business. And listeners have to forgive me, I’m just coming off the back of a head coach, so I’m going to be sputtering a little bit, but the bit that we’re here to talk about today is that if you were to drive deeper inside, you know, we’ve looked at the outside now to look at at the inside. Not only is every project, group, team, marketing channel, all going through their own version of the life cycle, which can come back and talk about, if you wanted, only but for the purpose of what we’re talking about now, each of the seven individual stages has a version of can have a version Of all seven of the overarching yes stages. So to give you an example, you can be in fun and you have an early struggle period of fun when, yes, we’re in fun. We’re not an early struggle anymore, capital E, capital S, but we’re in the first little stage of fun, and it’s an early struggle, just to really make sure that we get it and we grab hold of it. Yes, you then have wonderful fun, fun that’s like mid fun, that’s fun squared, and that’s, you know, we’re fist bumping the whole time, having beer busts, all that sort of stuff. But in fun, you can have a little mini white water. We call it small w white water, yeah. And you can have them multiple times. You can cycle through quite a few times. You’re going, you’re going all the way up the fun arc. It’s not that you’re not going up, but, but you’re doing it in these little spiral turns where you have, oh, that’s a little we’ve, we’ve added a new product line. We’re in, still in fun, but that’s, that’s, that’s an early struggle, that’s, sort of giving us these early struggle vibes. And then some or all of the business can have a little, you know, a little need to bring some systems and processes in, because two people got sick drinking our mineral or our product, right? That’s not full blown white water, it’s not capital. W white water, it’s small. W, white waters, i. The same can happen in any of the stages. The key thing is this big, and I just, I came back from Chicago, was working with a large church group out there, and we had to get into this in detail, because they were very clearly not in big Whitewater, but it felt like it. And the reason is that they were in another one of the of the stages going through that stages on many w. And of course, you want to know well, which is it? It’s very important. Big Water, pig, white water, capital W always brings an existential threat to the existence of the organization. It, it, it feels like and it could kill you. You don’t get it right, you’re going to get strangled and or overtaken by your competitors. You don’t get it right, you’re going to lose what you’ve built. Whereas small w whitewater doesn’t have that threat. It may still be painful. You may still have your hair on fire, but it’s just one of the bumps on the road, and that’s why people can, quite rightly and understandably get confused.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, one of the ways that I’ll describe this for folks, because it’s really, really important, and it can be a little hard to grab hold of sometimes, is to look at what it looks like in early struggle, because for many other folks we’re working with, they’re beyond this point. So you can kind of look back at it in the rear view mirror. And a common illustration I’ll use is, like a tech company, you see this all the time on the West Coast, here in the US, they’re in early struggle. They’ve got an idea, you know? They go out and they pitch it, and somebody believes in them, right? And they get enough to get some money in the door. And, you know, once one person believes in you, is a whole lot easier for the next person to believe in you, right? Don’t even have a product necessarily, at this market, right? We’re just, you know, just raising funds and so, definitely not out of early struggle. But we have some money to work with. It’s a lot of fun. Hire some engineers, get things rolling. Realize engineers are a pain in the butt, and so now you need systems and processes to deal with all of the different people are running in different directions and keeping the code sorted and all of that. It’s just messy. So we solve for that. We get the team all moving in the right direction. We’re programming away. And this kind of golden era of the startup happens right where we’ve kind of mystified the startup stage, and it’s small, P predictable success in early struggle. Still haven’t sold anything, you know, and so we’re still not out of early struggle, but we have what feels like it. We’re kind of playing adult at that stage, and we haven’t really grown up yet. You find out you don’t have market fit. It’s not as easy as you thought. And usually, well, we’ve made a bunch of promises. We got to pull through. So now we’re in treadmill because we’re just trying to rinse and repeat to get the thing out the door right. And you do that long enough you commit, long enough it starts to get harder and harder to raise funds, you have to, you have to double down even more, just to try and get the thing out and make it to the next day, you’re in the big rut, and then that leads to the inevitable decline into death rattle. All that happened before you ever really found your profitable, sustainable market, all seven stages in one. And it’s a really, really profound principle. So for someone then who’s sitting there thinking, man, maybe I’m wrestling with a small w Whitewater. What do you do with that? Like, what is it that that tells us? How do we take that and turn it into action that can help us get out?
Les McKeown
I think the key thing is to bear in mind, if it’s a small w, white water, you’ve only got to solve for the stage that you’re in, right? The mistake is, and I’m going to take, I’ll take it on my shoulders, that that’s, you know, helpful for folks is that, you know, you read predictable success, or somebody tells you about it, or you just mentally work this out for yourself. What needs to happen with capital W Whitewater, which is enterprise wide systems and processes. You think, Okay, well, let’s do that. That will that is not the answer, right? The answer is just to solve for whatever the process they wherever the Whitewater is always caused by chaos. Always. It’s always caused and chaos is always caused by complexity, overwhelmingness, and whether or not it’s the complexity of now in early struggle having, you know, nine offers for some funding that would help, and all of the stuff that comes with that. There’s all these documents to read, there’s all this due diligence being all that sort of solve for that. Do not try to bring a big W solution. Yes, so in why water and fun? That means narrowing down, probably not bringing in an internal source. And. Investing in an internal solution. It probably means getting hiring a small p whoever the person is, like, you’re in fun. I just gonna make something up here. And you discover you, you know, you just go, you don’t people don’t discover they haven’t done their taxes for five years. You admit to yourself, finally, I haven’t done my taxes for five years. And you know, everything’s coming in on you you know, the IRS have got your number. You know, other tax raising organizations are available, and you’re just getting overwhelmed. You don’t want a CFO. You want to find a good local. You know, CPA pay them get that fixed, right? The one difference it would make is if it’s just health and safety issue, therefore it’s come it’s to do with your core business, the thing you’re doing, you may well bring in an internal solution to that, but nine times out of 10 you solve for the problem in this stage that you’re at. Yeah, right, yeah. And I give an example, which may not be one that our listeners immediately relate to, but it’s a, it’s an, I think it helps bring out the distinction. You can hit white water and treadmills. The weirdest, weirdest thing that makes it really makes your head spin. Here we are in treadmill means we’re over processed. So we’ve got to get to the back, to the point where we’ve lifted process, right? But then we do that, and we swing back into treadmill again. So we cut off a few things, we go back into at some point, you realize in treadmill, I gotta put up. We’re in Whitewater with this thing. I got to put a process in place for culling process. Yes, I Yeah, most healthy organizations have got a really good process for culling redundant process. They figured that out in treadmill, small w Whitewater, right? That’s the only time it occurs to you, because until then you think there’s a one time thing, two time thing. Oh, shoot, we’ve got to systematize de systemize. De systemization.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, it’s so good, so small. W Whitewater. Then in the early struggle phase is really just what are the minimum systems and processes you need to find a profitable, sustainable market, if it doesn’t drive you to selling more to people who are willing to pay enough for you to make a profit on it is probably not a process you need, unless it keeps you out of jail or health and safety, right? So
Les McKeown
I’ll give you the single most common one, which nobody likes to talk about, and it’s sitting down once a week and spending whatever time it is. It shouldn’t be much more than 30 minutes just staring down your cash flow. Yeah, you have to look at it. You can’t just hope. You know, I mean, I don’t do a lot of work in early struggle these days, because I spent the first third of my career doing nothing else I’m very familiar with it. Started 40 over 40 businesses myself. I know it sounds mathematically impossible, but I did, and one of the things that I learned is, you can’t, excuse me, just hope against hope, that all the stuff you’re carrying around in your head will net out being able to pay payroll next week. You’ve got to, you know, you’ve got to actually learn how to look at a simple Excel spreadsheet, tiny, thing doesn’t need to be complicated, and you’ve got to have a process that says whatever works for you. Friday morning, 9am to 930 I’m staring at him working with my cash flow. That’s a system, but it’s the minimal system that’s going to keep you afloat.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. So early struggle. Minimal systems for cash flow. I love that one. Hate that one. It’s not fun to do, but it’s very important to do?
Les McKeown
But not to do, not to kill it to death. But the last thing you need to do at that point is to buy QuickBooks and become a QuickBooks expert, right? That’s, that’s, yeah, Whitewater. That’s actually fun whitewater stuff, but it’s, you know, the minimum amount you need to be.
Scott Ritzheimer
Another example of that that I see a ton of people wrestling with is CRMs, right? Oh, everyone has to have a CRM. It’s like you just sit there and click all day, every day. Well, tell me how many leads you had come in last week. I have no idea. Like so, yes, the simplest solution possible, the simplest system and process and keeping that ruthless focus super helpful for some folks. Let’s fast forward small w whitewater in fun. What’s going on here?
Les McKeown
It’s usually about making the sales activity something that’s much more repeatable. So what tends to happen is we get to mid fun, the fun part of fun because of the work of what we call, in our world, big dog operators. So these are sales people who are really good sales people. They don’t give too much of a hoot about anything else. They just they live. For the hunt, and they’re good at it. You get to the point, however, where you start to leave, I was gonna say money on the table, but that sounds like you brought this thing, like you leave leads out there, unexplored. You leave conversions uncompleted, because all of what’s happening is unsystematized. It’s just who texts your big dog that first thing that morning? They get the attention, right? Who’s ready to just push over the edge? The other folks that could be pushed over the edge aren’t getting the attention. So it’s here that we are beginning to think, you know, we could actually get more out of our CRM, you know, I’m going to give some examples that are clearly particularly focused towards a particular type of industry. But it’s only to give an example you might, for the first time, start to think about inside sales. You know, maybe you never did inside sales before. Everybody was riding the range. Now you’re thinking, you know, we could warm a bunch of people up, yeah, all right, stuff like that. So it’s not enterprise wide. Everybody’s going to get in in this it’s very specific. And if you’re in a faith or cause based world, it’s, it’s the same proxy thing, which is whatever you’re doing to end up paying the bills at the end of the day, is the first thing that lends itself to having a small w whitewater impact on you, versus the thing you’ve got to get right? Yeah. You know, it’s hard to change the world if you can’t pay the bills.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yep. So there’s, there’s something that’s so easy to gloss over because it’s such a non phrase, but repeatable sales like, that’s the name of the game. And there’s all kinds of things that are kind of fighting against that. There’s the roller coaster that a lot of, especially when it’s like, founder led sales team, it’s just like, you have it’s just up and down, up and down. It’s agonizing, because it’s largely just based on your personality. It’s largely based on, you know, your whims and when you’re interested, when you’re not interested. So making that repeatable, and then looking further downfield and saying, hey, it’s not just about bringing in new folks, but how do we keep them longer? What? How do we serve them longer and and that repeatable nature is so important. The other thing that fights against that is, we like to say yes to everything, but when you say yes to everything new, that’s inherently not repeatable, right? They’re all different things. And so you find these folks who’ve said yes to like, 1000 things. I heard my my favorite metaphor for this was it’s like drunk drunk kids on jet skis, right? Just like, it’s wide open in every direction. You know, it’s probably not the safest, but it’s a lot of fun and and so this idea of repeatable is not just internal, but it’s also external. Talk to us a little bit about, like, what are we saying yes to? What are we saying no to, with small w Whitewater?
Les McKeown
Well, in in early, early and early fun. I’m sorry, um, it’s, it’s really important to say yes to everything for one simple reason, early struggle, indeed all of the difficult stages in the life cycle. I mean, there’s four of them, but early struggle in particular has this massive gravitational pull. It’s trying to suck you back in, doesn’t it go too easily? And those of us I know, Scott, you’ve been in this position as well, but those of us who have done startup more than once realize that you can actually get stuck in this sort of limbo land where you think you’re getting out of fun, out of early struggle, and you probably are in your in fun for like a month or a quarter, and then you, oh, my goodness, I’m back here again. And so saying yes to everything, part of what you’re doing there is you’re just getting enough traction, enough momentum, to really push you out of the gravitational field. The problem comes later, whenever, as you say, continuing to say yes all the time. It’s just like, you know, watching beavers build a, you know, those little bridges across the stuff. It’s just all this stuff’s been thrown down, thrown down, thrown down, thrown back. And it’s beginning to matte over our ability to deliver. And one of the you pointed out, one of the things, which is, you just build that sign up, that that sent, you know, you have a sense that I have to keep saying yes to everything. Well, there comes a point when you don’t, and actually you need to start to say no. However, I actually quite like I find it quite interesting watching how the team that’s in fun responds to what needs to happen in small w Whitewater, because what are we doing? In essence, we’re taking, we’re plucking out of an individual something that they’re doing that’s giving them something they’re making, the diving catch. They’re pulling in that client or whatever. And when you take you know, you begin to peel any part of that away and say, hey. We could, we could get an into, you know, a person on Inside Sales making calls that would tee you up for this, or could close, you know, you’ve left it all with them. You don’t. We shouldn’t be waiting on you to make the Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. I built this relationship with these people. They don’t want to hear another all that sort of stuff. You get a foreshadowing of whether or not this entity as a whole may only be three people, 15 people, are they going to make the transition to predictable success, and should they even be thinking about it? Because, let’s be honest, a lot of us are built for fun. We want the personal identity connection that comes with being the one that makes the diving catch, the being the somebody who pulls, you know, all nighters, we want to continue to be part of the myths and legends of this business. Yeah, right. So it doesn’t always go well, but that can tell you something in and of itself, yeah?
Scott Ritzheimer
So just to offer some contrast, then, because and you go into great detail on this with the book, so folks can go check out the book, I used the the one chapter in the book to triple our bottom line. It really, really works before becoming a skill architect. So it’s there, but contrast what we’ve talked about so far with these small w white weathers with what you have to do to conquer capital. W Whitewater,
Les McKeown
Well, bringing this stuff in to overcome, and we’ll stick with the fun example, since how we went so into so much detail there, what you’re doing there is essentially making little incremental tweaks that make what we’re currently doing better if you do it right. So we can still show up and say yes to quite a lot of stuff, and every day brings new challenges, a lot of difference, and we’re still perceived as not just high status people in our business, but like subject matter experts, we know more than everybody else about everything, and we’re still the center of making it all happen. The solution in Big W Whitewater is to change the organization, if what you want to do is go through Whitewater, right? So even I’d hit this and think, for me, listeners, screw this. I can’t stand this. I’m just going back to where we were before. There’s nothing wrong with it. But I’m talking about those founders, leadership teams, who hit Whitewater, Big W Whitewater, and say I’d like to get to the other side of that. There is a change, and I’m pointing to my temples, there’s a change in the mindset. That’s fundamental change in mindset that moves from I’m the business. The business is me. It’s all about me, to it’s all about the business. What is my role as a steward of making this as big a business as it can be, big an organization as it can be, rather than what is it going to continue to do to feed my ego? And that’s a very difficult so you’re talking about bringing in system wide, systems and processes the majority, let’s be honest, you and I know this very well. The majority of founders, as an example, who are typically still around at this point, their mindset is, we really need this, and I’m completely in support of it, just not whatever percentage involves me doing it right, right? Because I don’t a, I don’t want to change and B, that sort of changes how other people see me. If I’m adhering to all of these systems, I’m in a big kahuna here. I’m the magic secret sauce, right? That’s the key difference. You can still be the big kahuna with the magic secret sauce overcoming small w in fun, all you’re doing is actually tweaking the environment. You do it right to allow you to do the bits of being the big kahuna with the secret sauce that you like, not getting sucked into the bits that you don’t like getting through white water. And I’ll finish this round about it with this. You know, many of our, of your listeners, I know by self filtering, they listen to these things, they read books, so they’ll be familiar with Jim Collins’s great books, particularly good to great and built to last. And he talks about having the right people on the rights in the right seats on the bus. And I like to think of the bus coming up fun, and you know, you’re putting the right people in the right seats, and you’ve got it all sauced. You got this beautiful bus with great people in great seats. You go into Whitewater. I go that bus goes into a tunnel. What comes out the other end in predictable success. It’s not only not the same bus, it’s not a bus anymore. It’s a whole different thing. It’s like some sort of a drone, yeah, and that’s that require. There’s everybody at the core of leadership, everybody in the organization, but mostly the senior leaders, to change their mindset away from What’s this doing for me to what do I do for this?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s so good, so good. Incredible. Les, you’ve been on the show a couple times. You know what’s coming next? We’ve got a question that we ask everyone, and that is this, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching and listening today knew?
Les McKeown
Well, you know, you’ve asked me, I this. I think this the third time that you’ve asked me this. And I, I’m so I’m down to number three in my list, but it’s still a very important issue. And I think the the answer that I would give you about this at any time is always going to map directly into my own life, right? So for the moment, the thing that I’ve been sitting with is most of us, and I would say 90% of our listeners are, by definition, great leaders. They wouldn’t be investing the time to listen to us rambling on here if they didn’t have an interest in being really good leaders. And for 90% of them, the reason that they are, they may not achieve, or be achieving what they feel they are is through a simple hygiene factor. They’re just not in charge of their environment enough. I see it over and over again. A great young leader who’s got their phone is just constantly blowing up. They have to duck out of every meeting just to take this one call, they can’t engage eyeball to eyeball because they’re constantly looking down at something. So kill your environment. Make it work for you. You don’t have to become Inbox Zero guru. You don’t have to be a productivity black belt. You just need to be able to focus on something without being inundated by stuff that’s outside your control. So just control your environment, and you’ll be a much, much better leader.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s so good, it’s interesting that you say that, because one of the most common suggestions I’ve given to leaders over the past six months is to find a third place, you know, pre COVID, you could, you could, kind of go home and and work there and create a little bit of space. Well, now home and work are kind of synonymous. The office and work are synonymous, and all that space has been taken up. I think to some extent it’s harder than ever, because we’re so connected, but having a physical space to cue that difference in environment, even if it’s a couple times a week or a couple times a month, is a fantastic habit to get into, and it’s like one of those Keystone Habits that bleeds into the rest of your time, right? If you can be unavailable for two hours because you’re somewhere else, it’s not that hard to imagine being unavailable, even if you’re at your office, and it just starts to break down that cycle. And I love that environment piece, because it is so easy to overlook.
Les McKeown
For anybody that doesn’t think that it’s important. I give you one challenge, and sorry to speak over you. And my challenge is this, and I give it to everybody. Look at your calendar, literally, as soon as you hang up here, look at your calendar, identify one meeting in the next week that’s longer than 15 minutes, a physical meeting, and go to it without your phone, physically in your presence. Just try it out, and you will discover just how much you’re addicted to being interrupted.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow, wow. Less folks want to know more about predictable success, maybe get a copy of the book. Where can they get a copy of the book and find more out about you?
Les McKeown
Just come to predictable success to find out all about me. Go to predictable success free dash book, and you can get a copy of the book. Just pay shipping. I think 895 or something like that. But we’re literally we’re seeing hundreds of copies of the book go out every week, absolutely free to people. I just pay the shipping, and I would love for any listener who wants it to get it. So that’s predictable success.com. Forward slash free dash book.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic. Get a copy. Links in the show notes for anyone who wants a little bit of extra help. You’re also welcome to check out our scale architects. We’ve got a whole directory of folks who do this day in and day out, and would be happy to help you figure out if you’re in small w Whitewater, capital W Whitewater, and build a plan to get through it and enjoy fun, enjoy predictable success, enjoy leading the organization that you’ve built. So it’s a lot better than getting stuck in any kind of Whitewater. Well, Les, I could go on forever. I love our conversations. Just an honor and privilege to have you here on the show. Appreciate everything that you’ve done for me, for the show, for the scale architects in general, just means the world to me. Thank you very much. And for those of you watching. Listening today. You know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this show as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Les McKeown
Les McKeown, Founder of Predictable Success, has over 25 years of global business experience, including starting 42 companies in his own right. Before founding Predictable Success, Les established himself as a serial founder/owner, starting over 40 companies. He was the founding partner of an incubation consulting company that launched hundreds of businesses with thousands of employees. His expertise is helping organizations achieve scalable, sustainable growth, and his breakthrough strategies have been widely recognized and implemented.
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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