In this paradigm-shifting episode, Scott Ritzheimer, Founder of Scale Architects, shares why your past success can trap you in the wrong stage. If you struggle with outdated playbooks, stalled growth, or repeating old patterns, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– How to use stage-specific frameworks to break free from what’s holding you back
– Why experience that created your current success actively blocks the next stage
– What to filter past wins and failures through to adapt for your current stage
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the start, scale and succeed podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a founder, I’m your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and today I’m going to do something a little different. This is going to be part of a three part solo series that I think may very well changed the way you make decisions in your business, church or nonprofit, because here’s the thing, you’ve fought hard to get where you are. You’ve earned real experience, and that experience is probably the single biggest thing keeping you stuck right now, not because it was wrong. It wasn’t. It worked.
You created the success that you’ve enjoyed by doing those things, but it worked in a stage that you’re no longer in, and because you don’t have a way to see where one stage ended and the next began, you may very well be running a playbook that’s expired without even knowing it, and that’s what we’re going to unpack today and over the course of the next three episodes. So what’s going on here is that folks don’t succeed without doing the right things. Now, sometimes we succeed despite ourselves, sometimes we succeed because of ourselves, but by and large, most of your success has come about because you got enough things right to enjoy that success. And the problem with that is we don’t recognize how that success changes us. You see what happens is we learn what it takes, both consciously and subconsciously, to succeed, and we should. That’s by design. That’s how we’re built, that’s what we’re made to do. The problem comes, like we mentioned in the intro here, the problem comes when we don’t recognize when the game has changed.
And for founders, you’ve heard me say this a million times by now, probably, but the game is invisible. And for you guys listening, I know you know the stages, you probably have a good idea the stage that you’re in, but for folks that are new and listening, or just as a reminder to folks who’ve been listening for a while, Marshall Goldsmith was right when he said, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, but we need to unpack why? Not only will it not move you forward, but what got you here will keep you stuck. You see what’s going on is that again, we both consciously and subconsciously learn what works, and we do that over and over again. And I hear this a lot. When folks come to me for for coaching and consulting, they’ll they’ll tell me they want to get to the next level. But as we begin to unpack it, and especially as we begin to watch how they behave when they’re working, what you really see is they’re not actually looking for the next level.
Number one, they probably couldn’t define it. Hopefully you can, because you know what the different levels are. Number two, they’re not actually asking for the next level. Because if they were, they’d realize how much harder at least, the start of that next level is going to be, because at the beginning of every stage, there’s this brief little honeymoon period, and then the reality of that stage sets in, and it’s hard work all over again. And so when folks are asking, Hey, I want to get to the next level, they’re kind of asking, Hey, I want to do all this hard work again, but they’re not really realizing that, and so that’s not actually what they’re asking for, what they’re asking for most of the time, and what you may be hoping for right now, right or wrong, is more and better version of what you’re doing right now. And the problem with that is that’s why you’re stuck. If there was a more better version of what you were doing right now, and all you had to do was just keep doing more of it better than you would like.
You’ve already learned that game. Now you might be in the process of learning that game. And so for some of you, just learning to thrive in the stage is what you need to do. But I’m talking about folks who’ve learned to thrive in this stage and are stuck trying to thrive in a new stage with the with what they did to thrive in the previous stage. For example, you’ve probably heard the funny story about the coach who jumps onto the field and and how we don’t see that in professional sports, we never will see that in professional sports because there’s a big white sideline that prevents the coach from getting on to the field. Everyone can see it. Everyone knows what it means. But we don’t have sidelines in our organization. In fact, most of the time we don’t even have, especially in the earlier stages, people you know, telling us No, let alone you defending those those sidelines so we don’t have these big sidelines to tell us what to do and what not to do. And so an example of your experience trapping you in a later stage, the same experience that created success earlier is what creates success. Let’s say in stage three, for example. Tool is you’re managing folks. And in stage three, you’ve got to be the one to pioneer stuff, the vast majority of new things that come in, you develop yourself.
And in stage three, because you’re the pioneer who figured it out the first time when something goes materially wrong, you’re the one who has to go in and fix it. You’ve got to dive in save the day, and that’s fine because you’re on the field, you’re a captain on the field with the team, so diving in and saving the day is not breaking any rules. It’s not causing any massive problems. You can overdo it. That’s going all the way back to stage two, but learning how to, you know, to dive in when it’s appropriate, is a noble thing for a captain on the field, for a manager, founder in stage three, but jumping in the field to save the day in stage four is not a noble thing. It will undermine your leaders. It will cause you to make some really big mistakes, because what you don’t recognize is that the game has changed.
It’s kind of you see this in sports. It’s the same game, but 10 years later, it’s played a very different way. And so even if you were to take players from 10 and 15 and 20 years ago and put them in their prime today, they would still have to adapt to the way the game is played, and that’s true inside of your organization. The way that you did things, when you did things, is very different than the way that your team does things in these later stages. So one, you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to do things the wrong way. Two, you probably didn’t do it the right way in the first place. You just did it right enough to get it done and and that doesn’t scale very well in stage four and number three is when you jump in to save the day. Like that, in stage four, you actually rob your leaders of the experience that they need to grow into, the leaders that you need them to be. Do you see that? So it’s not just that this prevents you from achieving greater success in a kind of nice, neat little way. It’s that it actively undermines your ability to create success.
Because the very thing you need to be doing in stage four is leading leaders. And so if you’re jumping in and saving the day again, something that was entirely appropriate back in stage three. If you’re still doing that in stage four, you’ve got a very big problem on your hands. Now this plays out in all the different stages. Another example would be from stage five to stage six. In stage five, you’re the CEO. Ultimately, when that those top three, four or five decisions have to be made. You have to be the one to make them, and you need to be preparing the rest of the year to make those decisions. But in stage six, if you mistake those CEO decisions as owner decisions, what are you going to do? You’re going to actively undermine your CEO you’re going to step back into the CEO role. In doing so, you’re going to push them out in some way, shape or form. They’re not going to like that. Whether they should or not, is entirely irrelevant.
It’s an inappropriate thing to do, and a great CEO is going to leave. And so what we have to recognize is that our experience of success, if not, run through the filter of what’s needed for success. Now we’re going to talk about this in the third episode in the series. Is the very thing that’s going to undermine our ability to grow and thrive in the next level. But that’s not all right, it’s relatively simple to see that in the world of success. But that’s not the only place that it holds us back. You see one of the areas that more hold that holds us back even more and does it almost entirely subconsciously, is where we failed in the past. And these are these deep, deep memories that it takes a while to chip away at. But an example of this, we were working with a group, and they had a core value of do it now, because in stage one, stage two, stage three, really, even to stage four, there’s a high return on do it now. If you don’t do it now, you’re going to miss the opportunity. You don’t need extra steps. You don’t need extra hoops to jump through. You don’t need any of that. You need to get it done. And the reason why you realize that that’s what you need to do is because of the missed opportunities that you didn’t capture early on, because you didn’t move fast enough, right? So what we what we’ve done, is we’ve built, in this case, an entire culture. It was a core value of this organization to prevent the failure of missing out on opportunities by moving too slowly.
Scott Ritzheimer
And as you progress into stage five, you can’t just go haphazard into anything you run just as much risk of. Of screwing up what you already have as you do, missing out on a new opportunity, you have to hold both of those intention and so if you as an individual, you as a leadership team, and you as a company, have a culture of do it now, instead of doing it right, you’re going to create really significant problems. And so not only do we learn lessons from success, but we also learn lessons from failure. The other part about learning lessons from failure is that we don’t necessarily learn the right lessons. And do you want to use an example from outside the business world? I forget who it was who said this, but they said that children are they’re excellent at perceiving, but they’re very, very poor at understanding what’s gone on and and so we can apply that same idea not to say that that early stage founders are children, but the world is so new to them that they are childlike in many ways. And so a lot of things happen to you in those early years that you don’t actually fully understand, and if you’re not careful, you’ll learn the wrong lessons from those.
An example we talk about on the show all the time, but just a nice concrete example is in stage two, you try to delegate the wrong thing or to the wrong person or in the wrong way, you might not be blamed for learning the lesson that delegation doesn’t work. That’s the wrong lesson. Now it might serve you well in stage two, because it might cause you to jump back in and really take ownership and get the thing done, but in stage three, if you can’t delegate anything of any type of significance, you’re going to get stuck there. And so one of the things that we have to recognize in our own story, in our own struggles today, is to what extent are those struggles rooted in US, over relying on our past experience, and not recognizing how the game has changed around us and how we must adapt and evolve in that and so the thing I really want you to get out of this episode is not just the what’s now, you know, unfortunately, becoming a bit of a cliche, what?
What got you here isn’t going to get you there. We can take that a step further and say the things that got you here are highly likely to prevent you from getting there. They’re actually going to work against you if you don’t recognize how things have changed. And so we’ve got to be really, really cautious of over relying on our past experience, especially when we’re struggling in the present. There may be an opportunity to adapt. There may be an opportunity to evolve. And a big part of why we separate all the episodes on this show by their stages, is so that you can help get some insight into what those things are. So let’s say to end the show here, let’s say that you are in stage four and you’re struggling with sales. Well, we’ve just recently had a guest on who that’s what he does. He specializes in helping them names completely off my head at the moment, but if you look back to the previous episode assigned to stage four, you’ll find it.
We’ll put it in the show notes for you. But if you are trying to solve your sales problems in Stage Four the way that you solve them in stage three or in stage two, it’s going to hold you back. And so what you can do is not only use these episodes to learn how to succeed in the current stage, but you can also use these episodes to learn how to filter your own past experiences through the lens of what will and will not work in your current stage. I hope this episode was helpful for you. We really wanted to unpack how our experience of both success and failure can be the very thing that not only prevents that, not only doesn’t allow us to get to the next stage, but actively disallows us from getting to the next stage. And how you can use resources like the podcast or our website or the founders evolution material to really understand what does work at this stage, and run your own experiences from the past through the filter of what will work moving forward.
Now this is part of a three part episode, so I want to give you just a little hint of what’s coming up. I full disclosure, haven’t decided how we’re going to release these yet. I think they’re going to be about a week apart, so by the time you’re listening to this, you’ll know more than I do now. But what’s going to come in the next solo episode is we are going to talk about the curse of advice. And if I were to name any one thing that I think is causing founders more trouble than anything else, it’s this one challenge, and that is the curse of advice. You have more advice, wisdom, knowledge and understanding being thrown at you than founders have in the rest of human history combined, and you need a way of filtering out what’s the right advice for you and what’s the wrong advice for you. We’re going to talk about that in. Uh, the next episode. So make sure you tune in. I hope this episode was helpful for you. You know your time and attention mean the world to us, and I hope to see you in the next episode as well. 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/