In this insightful episode, Scott Ritzheimer, Founder of Scale Architects, shares how to discover and evolve your true organizational vision across all seven stages of the Founder’s Evolution. If you struggle with unclear purpose, motivation dips, or building a team around something that doesn’t truly matter, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– How to evolve your vision from short-term survival fuel → team inspiration → future legacy
– Why your organization should (or did) still matter 50 years from now
– What makes a vision compelling enough to fuel you through decades of sacrifice
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the Start scale and succeed podcast. Yes, it’s the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder. And I’m your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and you get me today in another solo episode that’s going to follow up on the last solo episode we did, because I got a few questions regarding a big, really, big piece that I just didn’t talk about, and that is the whole idea in the last episode was that you should build an organization that’s as big as your vision needs it to be, which is great and well and good. But then the question is, well, what is the vision? What does that actually mean? How do you decide that? And how can you get clear enough about your vision to know how big an organization you should build? And more specifically, one of the things that I talked about in the previous episode was, is it actually your vision? And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, is what is your vision for your organization? And what we want to do is really dive into unpack what is vision, right? And there’s about a million different definitions for this. I’m actually not going to offer another definition. Instead, I’m going to give you a question that I think is really helpful. And that question is this, if you’re trying to figure out what your vision is, the question you should ask yourself is, why did or does this organization exist 50 years from now? So if we were to fast forward the tape 50 years from today, as of the recording, it is 2026 just hit 2026 and so we’d be talking about 2076 that’s a really long time.
I can’t even imagine right now, with the rate of change, what that’s going to look like, but I can stop and think, will my organization matter then? Now it might not matter to the globe. It might not matter to my entire state or city or country or whatever it might be. It might just matter to my kids or my grandkids, and if it doesn’t even matter to them, then there might be a problem there. So we really want to get out of the hustle and humdrum of daily life, really look further down the road and say, Hey, why do we want this organization to exist? Now, what I’m not saying in this I’m not saying that the organization has to exist 50 years from now. That’s not true. You might be retiring. You might be reaching the end of the run for your business, and you’re okay with it going away. It served you really well. That’s fine. I’m not talking about your business existing 50 years from now. It can, it can’t. Doesn’t matter. What does matter is, does the organization still matter 50 years from now? Does the impact that you’re making today matter in the long run? And that opens up a whole realm of different possibilities. It really dials in on that. Why? Why does your organization exist? Or, if we’re looking 50 years from now, why did it exist? And the range of possibilities is borderline endless, right?
It could be something as you know, what we would consider deep and meaningful as finding a cure for breast cancer. Or it could be as simple as I want to get enough money to put my kids through college debt free. It could be something not interesting and passionate, like transforming the city through giving away $10 million annually to charities, or it could be something internal, like, Hey, I just want to prove that I can do it, not to anyone else, not for anyone else, but I just want to prove that I can build a $10 million company, or something like that. Now that last one is dangerously close to violating the rule around these, which is the vision itself can’t just be a $10 million company because, because the it’s possible that it can be. But the real challenge here is that when you find folks who have visions that are round numbers, especially around the orders of magnitude, like a million dollars or $10 million or a $1 billion IPO, frankly, those are almost never real visions. They might be goals, but a goal, in and of itself, is going to leave you feeling empty and void on in the pursuit of it, and then even worse afterwards is what we talked about last time with my amazing half marathon story that was much longer than a half marathon and and so what we want to look at here is really Staying away from the trap of pursuing someone else’s race really being clear on why we’re doing what we’re doing and why it matters, and really when we’re looking at why it matters, the first and foremost, the only person that it really matters to has to matter to is you if it matters to.
Everyone else, but it doesn’t matter to you. It’s not going to work. I would highly recommend against that. Now, in terms of, does it have to matter to anybody else? Well, there’s a couple questions to that. If it just matters to you, can you create enough value with it that it will still have some meaning 50 years from now? If that’s so, then that’s that’s great. If it doesn’t, then it might not matter to you. It might just be a selfish desire to you, which is something that you’ll want to explore. So will it matter a few decades from now, at least, another group that you have to pay attention to? Will it matter is those that you love most? I was just thinking through my values again today, and rephrased my first one, which is to remember who’s going to remember you. And sometimes we we pour so much into a vision for an organization that we end up sacrificing our vision for our family, for those that we love the most, or those things that matter most to us. And so when you’re thinking in terms of your vision and what the meaning is of it, and does it matter, you also want to think through, what does it mean for your family, for those that you love the most, for your friends, even, or for your faith, or those, again, those things that matter most to you. How does it matter to them?
Another group you’re going to want to think of, and this is something we’re going to dive into in a moment, because it becomes much more relevant as you progress through the stages. But if you are going to need other people around you, then you’re going to probably want to have a vision that motivates them as well. And so if it’s something that matters deeply to you, but in a selfish way, you’ll find it’s very difficult to orient other people toward that goal. But if it matters to you in a meaningful way, it’s far less likely to have that problem. We’ll talk more about that in just a second. But it needs to matter to you. It needs to matter to those that who are going to remember you, and it also needs to matter to those who are going to help serve you. Now, to some extent, it has to matter to your market as well. Although that’s not inherently true, you can serve a market for reasons that don’t matter to the market at all. A good example of this would be, I’ve just totally forgot the name Shoe Company Zappos, because Tony Tsai was was you created that organization to deliver happiness. It really had nothing to do with the shoe market, but he did that really well. So doesn’t actually have to matter to your market. Other things do though. So the market is important. It’s just not as relevant to your vision.
And so if you’re sitting there thinking, Man, I just don’t know what my vision is. I thought I was clear on it, maybe I’m not. Maybe I was clear on it, but it’s not the right thing. How do you find your vision? Well, there’s a handful of questions that I think are really helpful, and you can pause these think about each one. You can write them down later. But the first question is this, what is that better way that led you to start? So if you kind of rewind the tape to Hey, why did you start this thing? For some of you, it may be, hey, I needed money. I lost my job, I did something, but you still chose to do something specific. Why? What was it that led you to believe that you could make a difference there, that you could add value there. What was that better way? Even if it was a couple layers under the surface, I’m pretty sure it was still there. So what’s the better way that led you to start sometimes, especially in stages three and four, when that the chaos of life and work and organizational doings, it can get real easy to lose sight of that better way, and we lose sight of our vision. So go back to the beginning. Might be a good place to find why you’re doing what you’re doing. Another thing that might indicate your vision is pretty interesting, and it’s actually to think through what makes you angry, and not just in your work life, not just within your team, but like, what are the big things that make you angry? What are those things that you find yourself just viscerally pushing against? Because your vision may very well be the opposite. You see this a lot in really clear visions, and one of the things that’s cool about the nonprofit world is that they do this pretty well, and so you might see someone who experiences poverty early in their life, and they know kind of viscerally how that feels, and they dedicate their life and their resources and their wealth to solving that.
That’s something that made them angry, and their vision is to rid the world of it. That’s pretty cool. So think about things that make you angry again, not just how your team’s driving you crazy, but the big things, the big moving parts in life. The next one is you’re going to give years to this thing. You’re going to give a lot of blood, sweat, tears, emotional energy, mental energy, physical energy. It’s going to beat you up. You’re going to feel rejection. You’re. Gonna have setbacks. You’re gonna say no to a whole lot of other things to make this organization a success. What makes that sacrifice worth it? What makes the years of those sacrifices worth it? When you really dial down on not just what the benefits are, but what you’re willing to give to achieve it, you can really start to dial in on what matters most to you. And one of the things that you can do the fourth question here is actually a question that you can tack on to any of these, but once you find an answer to one or even all three of the other questions, the next thing you want to do is just ask yourself, Well, why is that? Well, why is that? Well, why is that?
Well, why is that, and why is that? We call this the five whys, and you might not make it to all five. You might get to the bottom of it in two or three or four. But not just taking that surface level concept, but really digging underneath the surface is a great way to find that most meaningful, most purposeful vision that you’re looking for, cool. I hope that’s helpful in terms of practical ways of pursuing and defining your vision. Now what I want to do just very, very briefly, this is a kind of least you need to know moment, but one of the things we have to recognize is the way that we relate to that vision, the role that it serves in our organization, the standard for what qualifies as an effective vision, not a right or wrong, but effective. It actually changes quite a lot over the course of your journey as a founder. So in stages one and two, the vision is primarily just a short term fuel that you need. It’s whatever gets you up again, whatever helps you get through the adversity, the setback, the resistance. And many times I see folks like their vision is just to make it in this stage, and that’s fine. What qualifies as a great vision in stages one and two are really what do I need to get through this? What do I need to keep going? What do I need to stay committed? What do I need to be to feel purpose in what I do? And so it’s really just that short term fuel that you need to get through what can be an immensely difficult season for a founder. After that, it starts to change a little bit, and the reason for that is that your team starts to change a little bit better yet you actually start to have a team. And so what you’ll see, and we’ve talked about this many times in the past, but in stage three, you need to have operators around you.
It’s really the key insight for success in stage three. And operators have a really interesting relationship with vision in that they don’t really have it in and of themselves. There’s a fun story that I like to tell. Don’t have time for it now, but just suffice it to say, when you really dig in for an operator and try and get them to describe vision. It could be a real challenge for those of you who are founders and you are operators, you’ll probably recognize that in yourself as well. You might jump to like most people do when you ask them their vision. Who are not visionaries, they’ll just talk to you about what they need to do, or what problems they need to solve. We want to go deeper than that with a why. Now, just because operators aren’t good at coming up with vision doesn’t need that. They mean that they don’t need it. In fact, you your operators, great operators need great visionaries. For that reason, they need someone else to give them a vision. They need someone else to point them in a direction. And so what you want to do in stage three is to paint an ever clearer picture of a more promising future. That’s really what the vision needs to do. It needs to paint that ever clearer picture of a more promising future and not send them in 1000 different directions, which we’re prone to do as visionaries, we want to start to dial in on that one compelling vision, and that’s going to set us up for stage four.
Because if you haven’t done it by stage four, you’ve got a big group of people around you at this point, you’ve got to figure out how to make your vision matter to someone other than you. It’s not, you know, something like a profit goal, or, frankly, even a revenue goal, or some type of personal life satisfaction goal, those don’t cut it. Nobody can’t say. Nobody. Very few people are ultra inspired by you working three days a week. They’re not going to work five days a week to make that happen. Most people won’t, but they may be inspired by whatever you do with those three days. And so we really want to dial in on a why that motivates, not getting away from work, but why we work, and what you can use to motivate your team. So by stage four, it has to be more than clear. It also has to be compelling. And that’s a really, really important point for stage four. It’s also a place where we start to question our vision quite a lot, especially if it’s the wrong one. So some of you stage four founders listening, who are really in that, man, is this it mode? Or you’re really struggling with the that disillusionment that we face in stage four? A big part of the reason might be that you’ve got the wrong vision you’re going after. And so what you want to really look at is, what is the right vision for you and your and are you building the right organization for it? All right? That takes us through stage four. Stage Five is where this thing really starts to get scaled up. And one of the things that I see for folks at in Stage Five is that they’ve created so much success by this point that they start to get a little bored with their vision. They start to get a little distracted by things other than their vision. They lots of good things. You can get distracted by sales.
You can get distracted by systems. You can get distracted by synergizing with the people around you, but for success in stage five, and I wrote about this in the book that’s going to come out later this year, the big question you have to ask yourself as to whether or not you should be the CEO or chief visionary officer even better for your organization, it comes down to this question, do you have a vision for your organization’s future, not just for where you’ve been, not just for what you’ve achieved, but for the future, and do you have the energy to lead your team there? That’s really it. That’s the qualification for a chief visionary officer in an organization who is the founder. Right? You’ve proven you’ve got everything else you need to get to that point. The one thing that you’ll continue to have to answer for yourself, not necessarily prove to yourself, but answer for yourself, is, Do I have a vision for the future, right? Are you willing to challenge the vision of the past, for the vision of the future, and do you have the energy to lead your team there? If you answer no to either one of those questions, you either need to figure out how to say yes, or it’s time to start looking at getting into stage six and handing off that role to somebody else.
And that’s what brings us to stage six. Stage six is where you own without operating right. You move out of that CEO, Chief, visionary officer, CVO role, and what you need to do at that point is shift from a vision for an organization more toward a vision for your life. I call this shifting from one to many. And so you start thinking about your vision as something separate from and above, bigger than the vision that you had for your organization, and that’s really, really fun. It’s a little bit of a challenge because you’ve only thought in terms of the vision for that organization, and you’ve had to stay focused for so long that removing those blinders can be a little harder than we think. But the reality of it is, once you do, the world becomes your playground. Again, it’s a whole lot of fun at that stage. So you want to shift your vision from one to many. And then finally, in stage seven, this the fundamental change between stage six and stage seven, is that your vision goes way beyond your lifetime.
Scott Ritzheimer
So in stage six, you’re really looking at your vision for your life. In stage seven, you’re looking for a vision that extends beyond your lifetime. And one of the things I like to encourage my stage seven folks to do is to think of and really develop and pursue and communicate 100 year vision, something that is guaranteed to outlive you. And that’s really what allows us to run with this, the proverb you’ve probably heard me say multiple times, but it’s this for stage seven, especially when it comes to vision, is that a society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they’ll never sit. Brilliant, brilliant proverb. And couldn’t describe stage seven any better. So that’s what that 100 year vision does. It goes beyond you and starts to create things that you’ll never benefit from. But those who follow in your wake will now one of the things that you’re going to bump into, I’m going to end with this. Sorry, this episode is a little longer than normal, but one of the things I want to end with is a paradox that folks usually run into when they find their right vision, and that is, when you have the right vision.
Achieving that vision is more rewarding than you can imagine right now. You can probably think of some pretty cool stuff that will happen when that vision happens, but that pales it’s not even comparable to what the experience of fulfilling that vision or of living a whole life in the vibrant pursuit of that vision, it’s way, way better than you think. If I told you how wonderful that’s going to be, you’d think I was lying. Today, we’ll put it that way. However, the road between here and there, the road that you’re going to have to travel to get there, is a lot harder than you think. And so if you don’t have the right vision, that. Road is going to trip you up, but if you do have the right vision, it’s going to be worth it. So what do I want encourage you to do if you haven’t already done this? Go back and listen through those questions. Really refine that vision down to make sure that it is your vision for your organization. Make sure you’ve identified why you want your organization to exist or have existed and still matter 50 years from now, with that, I want to say thank you. You know that your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much fun out of this conversation as I got sharing it. This stuff lights me up, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Scott Ritzheimer
Scott Ritzheimer helped start nearly 20,000 new businesses and nonprofits and with his business partner started led their multimillion-dollar business through an exceptional and extended growth phase (over 10 years 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 the fast track to Predictable Success.
Want to learn more about Scott Ritzheimer’s work at Scale Architects? Check out his website at https://www.scalearchitects.com/