In this clarifying episode,Scott Ritzheimer, Founder of Scale Architects, shares why you must stop relying on individual advice and start following proven patterns. If you struggle with overwhelming noise, conflicting guidance, or outdated experience holding you back, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What focusing on high-probability patterns accelerates success at every level
– Why patterns across stages filter out 90%+ of irrelevant advice
– How to use organizational and founder stages as your decision filter
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, as always, Scott Ritzheimer, and this is the final episode in our three part solo series. In part one, if you haven’t watched it, I’d highly recommend it. We talk about the problem of experience. We talk about how your own experience of both success and failure can and will actively undermine your success today if you’re not careful. And then in part two, we talked about how even great advice from smart people is usually that means most of the time, something like 95 to 92% of the time the right answer at the wrong time. And those two episodes highlighted the very big problem that you have today.
In fact, I think it’s the biggest problem that all founders face today in our current environment, and that is, if you can’t fully trust your experience, and you can’t just follow the advice of folks who should know what they’re talking about, then what do you actually do? Here’s the answer. You have to stop looking at individual people, and you need to start looking at the patterns that play out here. You see, when you study enough founders, you come across enough stages, there’s something that becomes undeniable, and that is that the same problems show up at the same stages, and the same types of solutions work every time. Now, it’s not the same tactics, it’s not the exact same actions, but it is the same patterns. And once you can see the pattern, everything changes. This has come up a couple of times in my life, and the first one is, I was like most founders, you know, the first leadership team meeting I was in, I was leading. I had no idea what I was doing. Was learning everything from scratch, every step of the way, and and I got stuck in in stage four. I didn’t know it was stage four at the time, but I was stuck there.
My organization also got stuck. This is a real big part of the stage four challenges. It’s not just that you get stuck, but your your organization gets stuck as well your business or your nonprofit, because stage four usually coincides with another stage called Whitewater. And if you’ve been listening for a while, you probably heard me tell this story, but I remember, I was riding in my truck on my way to work. I wanted it was like a Monday morning. I would have quit if I didn’t own the place, like I had to show up, I had to be there, and I was CEO. It’s kind of sorry, but it’s true. And I’m listening to a podcast that I really enjoy. This guy with a funny Irish accent comes on, and I can say that because he’s now dear friend and colleague les McEwen. But Les starts talking about these different stages that organizations go through.
And as he’s talking about each of these early stages, early struggle and fun. And then when he gets to this whitewater stage, I’m like, looking around my truck wondering, Is he have access to my emails? Like, does he have cameras in my office? How could he possibly describe exactly what’s going on here? I had what I call a you are here moment. It was the very first time that it felt like me, my leadership, my business, being a founder, the things that I was doing were actually on a map somewhere, and I realized I just didn’t have the map yet before that, I thought we were making it up as we went. I thought we were paving uncharted territory. And there’s some valid reasons for that, and a lot of invalid reasons for that. But those aren’t as relevant to the story as the idea that I just I didn’t recognize that there were patterns, and once I saw the pattern, I couldn’t unsee it. It’s this funny thing that happens, especially if you’ve read predictable success.
If you haven’t read predictable success, you should. If you have read predictable success, you know exactly what I’m talking about, because les does this masterful job at showing this very simple pattern that all organizations go through. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s kind of, I call les the Morpheus of the organizational world, because, you know, he kind of lets you see behind the, behind the, what’s the code, the matrix. And once you know, you know, you can’t unknow it. And that’s a really cool thing about patterns, is that once you recognize them, you can see them everywhere. It’s very, very simple to see them, and it’s actually quite easy to apply them, especially with practice over time. And so that was the first one is my you are here moment. And the second one, I ended up selling the business and went and started working alongside less and using his, his predictable success model for my clients. And I started to see that some of them that I was implementing with would succeed. I did. The exact same thing with others, and they just wouldn’t have as much success.
And I couldn’t figure out what was, what the difference was, and, and I realized the difference was the founder there was, there’s something going on between the ears of the founder that was preventing even the right organizational tactics from working and, and so I started to kind of unpack what the difference was. I went back over the experience that I’ve had that’s like a straight A strange thing to say, but I’ve helped 20,000 different founders start their organizations, lots of businesses, lots of nonprofits and lots and lots of churches. And I had the luxury because of that experience of seeing 1000s of founders, and when you see 1000s of founders, you start to see patterns emerge. You start to see how they decide to make the leap or not, and what how they fail in that process, or how they succeed in those early days that entrepreneurial stage, and how they fail in that stage, and you start to see these patterns that govern success, and you see how these patterns change over time, and how success is governance changes over time and and so what, what you can do is you can use some of these founders, and there’s lots of different patterns out there.
This just happens to be two that I think are very relevant, but the organizational stages and the leadership levels, these are two patterns I think are really, really powerful. I would call them imperative for founders. But they’re not the only patterns that are there. But if you can recognize what these patterns are that are governing success. You can start to do a couple of things. One, first and foremost, it becomes a filter for your past experience and for the advice of others. And once you know the pattern, you know someone can tell you, Hey, I did this, I did that, and you can actually look at it and say, Yeah, that was probably a factor, but these other things probably took place as well, because you know the pattern. Or someone says, Hey, you should do this, or you should do that, you can look at it and say, Well, what stage are they speaking from? Where is that relevant? They’re probably 100% right in that stage over there. But that’s not where I’m at right now.
And so you can go from feeling an obligation to do, you know, 100 out of the 100 things that you’re told, and recognize that you can actually filter that down again to 567, percent of what you’re told, five, six or seven things out of 100 you can do 100 out of 100 you can’t do. And the patterns are what allow you to ignore the 93% of noise that isn’t helpful. It really allows you to an example of this is in in communications, there’s there’s something called a noise to signal ratio. And if you imagine, if you’re in a room where a bunch of people are talking and you’re trying to listen to just one that’s very difficult to do.
There’s a lot of noise, and it’s drowning out the signal. But if you can pull that person aside and step into another room, all the noise goes away, and the signal can be even lower. They can talk quieter, but you can understand it better. That’s what these patterns allow you to do they allow you to step out of the noise, into the quiet and really just focus on the signal that matters most to you. And here’s the thing for founders that’s really important about patterns is that patterns aren’t rules. You see a pattern doesn’t say you have to do something. A pattern says that this thing is highly correlated with success. So patterns aren’t universal truths. They are patterns. They’re high probability, actions, strategies, whatever you’re looking at, whatever the pattern is about, experiences.
These are the ones that have the highest probability of success. And so this is great for founders, because it doesn’t mean someone’s going in and telling you what to do and what not to do. A pattern doesn’t tell you what to do. A pattern doesn’t tell you what not to do. A pattern is a filter by which you can figure out what you want to do. A pattern gives you the authority to choose what you do. You don’t have to give that authority to someone else, to someone’s experience or someone’s advice. You can own all of that. And what I hope to have be, what I hope to accomplish with this series is one to help you see some of the things that probably aren’t serving you as well as you think. But more than all of that, I want to give you permission to ignore the vast amount of noise that’s out there.
I want to give you permission to just focus on that five or 10% that’s actually relevant to you doesn’t. Matter who said. The rest. Doesn’t matter what they’ve done. Doesn’t matter how awesome you think they are. You can look at their advice, you can look at their experience, you can look at the own your own advice and your own experience, and you can run it through these patterns that we’ve laid out for you, or the patterns that you find on your own. By all means, look for these patterns. You’ll see them everywhere. Because the big thing here is you don’t need more advice, you don’t need more knowledge, you don’t need more strategies.
You need to know how to filter out all of the advice, all of the knowledge and all of the strategies to just the things that are relevant to you and your organization, right here and right now. And when you do that, when you get rid of all the noise, you’ll find your mind quiets down, your focus increases, and the success will almost certainly follow when you really dive into the patterns and what creates success over time, across different people, across different experiences, and you understand how that those play out again and again. When you look at in the context of what we do here at scale architects, when you look at the stage your organization is in the level you are as a founder, you can take those patterns, filter out all the noise, and figure out, hey, here’s the one or two things that I really need to focus on right now.
And if you can have the the courage and insight to ignore all the other stuff that doesn’t match the pattern, and you can take agency of choosing what you do want to focus on that’s where you’re going to unlock success, not just right here and right now. This is a really important point. If you’re just trying to figure out how to make one decision one time, like pick whatever you want, you might get the right thing or the wrong thing. What I’m teaching you throughout this series is a framework for how to pick the right thing at the right time, how to do it again and again. And so this isn’t just about what you need to do right now.
This is about building the skill and ability to choose what you need to do now and in the future, choose what the future needs and again and again and again. And in doing that, you’ll spend way less energy on way less things and create way more success. That’s just the way that patterns work, and it’s the way that you can stand the greatest chances of achieving the greatest success in your organization and in your journey as a founder. That’s it. That’s everything I’ve got for this three part series.
I hope this was helpful for you. If it was, give us a shout out, let us know. Us know if you think that this series would be helpful for somebody else. The greatest gift you can give us is to give it as a gift to somebody else and share it with them. It’s easy to do and all the different platforms, and we will continue on with our normal programming after this. But again, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. Your time and attention mean the world to me. I hope this series helped you, and I look forward to helping you again in the future. I’ll see you next time.
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