In this closing episode, Scott Ritzheimer, Founder of Scale Architects, shares why level 6 ownership is not the end and when to move to level 7 legacy. If you’re in stage 6 with time and financial freedom but wondering what’s next or struggling with purpose, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What it takes to shift from personal ROI to planting trees whose shade you’ll never sit under in level 7
– Why you must have a compelling vision for what comes after the CEO role before fully stepping down
– How to thrive as a portfolio owner in level 6 while preparing for greater impact
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 levels of your journey as a founder. I’m your host Scott Ritzheimer, and today we close the series, the the seven part series. Can you believe it? With the level that most founders dream of, and that is a business that runs without you, right? The one where the checks just come in the mail. They don’t really come in the mail anymore, but the deposits hit your bank account, and your time is yours. This is level six. Level six is where you actually, literally, deeply, meaningfully have true time and financial freedom. If you look back over any other level, you probably had one or the other or none. Like level six is really the first time that you genuinely have both pure financial and time freedom, and that’s strikingly difficult. Our kids go to a very nice school, and folks there have lots of money, and it’s good for them. But the the the the challenge that I see playing out there, and you see this in families all the time, from rags to riches to rags in three generations, is.
How do you say no? How do you resist your most basic impulses? How do you become the best version of yourself when nothing forces you to? How do you get up early in the morning and start working on a project when nobody else is expecting you to do it. How do you carry the the desire to to keep winning when you’ve already won? Level six is beautiful, especially when it’s right for you, but it can also be kind of empty. Instead of feeling like the massive success that we are, many times we feel like, “Well, now what do I do? Like I, I did all that, but who cares? And it’s at this stage that we’ve got one more revelation on hand, and that is that owning and not running your business is not the pinnacle. Starting a church and then handing it off to the next generation isn’t the end. Building a nonprofit from scratch and then entrusting it in the hands of a brilliant executive director to take it further, while you sit as chairman of the board, isn’t the last act? There’s one more that’s available now. It’s not right for everybody.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s not right for most. There’s probably something like 10 times as many level six leaders as there are level one seven founders, and what’s the difference? Well, in level six, and if you don’t know what level six is or level seven is, I forgot to mention this at the open. But this is part of a seven-part series. If you go back just to part one of this series, we lay out the context for what these different levels are, why they matter, and we’ll help you find out which level you’re in. and And this episode really is for folks that are in level six already. Now, anyone can listen to it, anyone can watch it, anyone can learn from it. But this is going to be deeply relevant for those of you who aren’t leading your business anymore, and may not even be limited to one business anymore. So, what happens? Let’s let’s go just from CEO stage onward, which is level five. Level five, you’re leading an organization, super successful, and you exit. And there are lots of ways that that can happen. You can cash out. You can partially cash out. You can just hold it and own it. None of that really matters so much. But what happens is you end up with money and time, and and no responsibility to lead an organization every single day, and that’s what brings us into level six. And then we realize in level six that hey, now that we have all this time, now that we have some cash, now that we’ve got these relationships and these connections and all of these different types of assets. Well, why don’t we put them to work for us? Well, why don’t you start to leverage those things instead of your time?
Scott Ritzheimer
And it’s crazy, but like you can make way more money in terms of annual income in level six, working half as much, a third of as much, if at all. Than you did earlier. Why? Because you’re you’re continuing to reap the fruit and letting those other assets work for you. Again, might be financial, but it might be relational. It might be reputational. How many commercials does Shaq do? Right, and and so level six is really about playing that game. How do you win as much as possible in as little time as possible? How do you leverage the assets that you have to get as big an ROI as you can in as little time as possible? And that’s a fun game. That’s where you move from being a true owner, someone who’s defined by this one organization that they built, to becoming a portfolio owner, someone who has multiple interests in multiple enterprises and is is getting a high ROI out of those. Now, being a great CEO does does by no means guarantee you to be a great owner. In fact, there’s something called the halo effect that will trick a lot of great CEOs into thinking that they’ll be great owners. And I’ve seen more than one go from level five to level six and lose it all. So just because you’re great in level five doesn’t mean you’re going to be great in level six.
There are skills to be learned here, and one of those skills is you know how to make great bets on other people’s endeavors where you don’t get to control it yourself. Another is building out your new team because you’re going to leave your executive team behind with the company, and now you’ve got what I call the wealth team, what many people call the wealth team, and that’s a that that’s a different way of leading. That’s a different type of of people that you have to inspire and coordinate. So there’s different skills here, but level six isn’t the end. There is another level after it, and and and so when we understand that level six is all about generating ROI and leveraging your wealth team to do that, when it’s about maximizing, one of my friends who works a lot in this level, he says it’s not about what you make, it’s about what you keep. Right, maximizing the free cash flow from that or the total net worth increase from that is is the game. It’s actually a pretty fun game, complicated but fun. And at some point in time, if it hasn’t hit you before, but certainly in level six, which you know for many happens later in life, you have some folks in their 20s and 30s, who you kind of had their one hit wonder and it set them up for life. But for most folks, this is something that you get into in your 50s, usually your 60s or 70s, and our own mortality starts to come into view, and you realize, yeah, I could make that investment, I could get that ROI.
I could add another million dollars to this bank account that I’ve never seen. But why? Like, other than just winning, is there some material benefit to that? Well, you can pass it on to your your kids and to other generations, but. but wouldn’t it be a lot more fun to pass it on now while you’re still alive? What if, what if this whole journey wasn’t actually about you at all? What if this whole founder saga was really an opportunity for you to caretake all this value, curate it, and make it available to solve problems that other people can’t solve because they don’t have the time or the resources to do it. What if the best investments aren’t measured by their financial ROI, but the legacy that you leave behind? That’s level seven. And what makes level seven a little weird and a little scary is that for most folks who move from level six to level seven, they actually perform worse. They’re ROI goes down. The things that they use to measure their success in level six get objectively worse. Their time commitment goes up, but this is what makes it worth it. They’re leaving the world behind a better place. They’re leaving a road for their successors, not in a literal sense, but those who come behind them.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s easier to walk than theirs ever was. They’re moving their little corner of the world, or maybe even a huge chunk of the world. Much better off than it was when they found it. They’re moving society forward. There’s this brilliant Greek proverb, and and if you’ve ever heard me talk about level seven, you’ve heard me say this proverb because it it encapsulates it perfect, perfectly. And the the proverb is this: A society grows great when old men or women plant trees under whose shade they’ll never sit. Right. It’s not about planting trees to make your house look nicer. It’s not about creating opportunities for you to enjoy, but it’s the absolutely stunning gift and ability to be able to afford, in any measure that we would choose, to to plant trees under whose shade you’ll never sit, and think about how much better we become as mankind when we have founders who do. When you think back to some of the most remarkable people in history, many of them, whether they were founders or not, this is just the founders’ version of this. Were the people who focused not on the ROI in their lifetime, but the ROI in lifetimes to come.
They had a vision that extend extended beyond their lifetime, and they moved us all toward it. That’s what level seven is about, and that’s pretty exciting, but it’s not right for everybody. And so let’s take a look at those of you who are in level six. You’ve got a legitimate shot at getting to level seven now. So let’s take a look at how you decide which one is which, and we’re going to do this somewhat quickly because I’ve gone too long already. If you can’t tell, we’ve recorded all of these today, and so if I turn totally soup silly, you know why. Here we go. Reasons why level six might actually be right for you. That you’re loving the game still. You feel like you still have gas in the tank. You. love the thrill of the win. You’re you’re doing pretty well financially, but you’re not quite at the place where you don’t need to invest anymore for your own income. You. you figured out how to make your money work for you in a literal sense, but you’ve not quite developed the skill or the desire to figure out how to make money work for others in multiple ways, you you like the concreteness of being able to measure objectively whether what you’re doing is working or not. You like to be able to identify and evaluate investment opportunities that you. you can prove whether or not they worked. You still have an unfulfilled part of your vision for your lifetime. Those are all great reasons why level six might be the best tool for you.
Those those might be necessary parts. You you may have enough asset value, creating enough income to kind of live a quiet life, but you may want to do more without having to go back into the game full time yourself. And so you might need to sit in level six a little while longer, win a little bit bigger to create that real opportunity to give back beyond the measure that you could right now. Those are all great reasons to stay in level six, and for many, they’ll they’ll stay there for the rest of their life. And if you can get to level six, you have more than earned the privilege of getting to stay there, if that’s what you choose. For some, it’s not enough. For some, it’s time to move to level seven. So, if level six is that owner level, level seven is what I call the visionary founder, and this is where we move to. It’s kind of like being in the Hall of Fame, where your your primary function is to actually inspire the next round of visionaries and to make their lives more effective. And so, if you don’t need to work or even actively invest to pay your bills, right, aka Bill Gates, kind of a thing. Not not quite that for everybody, but if you don’t need to worry about your own income at all, which is a lot of people in level six, and you’re ready to to tackle an even bigger challenge, level seven may be perfect for you. You’re okay changing the measure of success.
Scott Ritzheimer
You’ve probably. Pursued vision-fueled financial success for like your whole life, and you’re despite whatever age you are at this point, you’re ready to say, “Hey, I want to play a new game, and I’m willing to redefine success to do it. If you have a vision that extends well beyond your lifetime, if you are ready to to actually give yourself to something bigger than yourself, if you are willing to not not determine, hey, what is it that’s going to give me the most freedom, but what is it that’s going to help plant the greatest legacy? Then level seven is absolutely going to be right for you. Now, how do we get there? So it’s the same with all the stages and and I’m sorry, levels, and that is that to reach level seven, you must have thrived in level six. So if you’re sitting there in level six and you haven’t quite figured out the game yet because you’re still stuck with some level five skills, that’s the first thing to do. You want to learn how to really be good at being an owner because being really good at being an owner is going to equip you to be really good at inspiring other owners, and it’s going to teach you how to lead through inspiration. It’s going to teach you how to judge efficacy from afar.
It’s going to teach you how to run from the board room and and not the the leadership room. And those are all mandatory skills for a level seven leader. So if you are are in that owner stage, and you’re working to thrive as a portfolio owner with diverse interests, generating high ROI. That’s all going to help in your journey toward becoming a level seven visionary founder. If you’re ready to make the leap, then it’s time to start changing the goalposts, and that is to move away from the ROI in your lifetime, to the legacy that you leave behind, to the vision that can be achieved well beyond your lifetime, and that’s that’s pretty cool. The fun thing about both levels, level six and level seven, level six you’re not limited to the effectiveness of one organization anymore, and so you can you can use your assets, your relationships, your connections, your finances, you can your knowledge, you can use those to to do work in all kinds of different places, and in level seven, it’s like if you want to talk about freedom, right? Freedom is not I can go play golf today. Freedom is I’m working on something that I don’t even have to have finished in my lifetime.
That’s freedom, because that’s the ultimate time. Freedom. It doesn’t matter if it’s done now, when you look back at what a lot of great folks have accomplished, when you look back, one of my favorite quotes in this line-it’s a little different space, but it articulates the same pattern. And a historian, really profound historian, was asked 200 years after the French Revolution, what was the true global effect of the French Revolution? And their response was, “It’s too early to tell. Think about that. Think about the freedom of someone looking at your life 200 years from now and asking, “What was the effect of that life? And someone else responding, it’s too early to tell. If that fires you up, and you’re already in level six, then level seven may be exactly where you need to go. Whether you choose level six or level seven, know that I’m rooting for you. If you’ve made it to level six and have the option to get to level seven. I think the world of you-very, very, very, very, very few people ever make it that far. But you have well done, very well done. And with that, that concludes our series of should you really. And I hope what we’ve been able to take from this is that, as amazing as each of these levels is, there’s no mandate that you have to get to the next one. And so, regardless of which of the six transition points you’re at, from one to two, two to three, and so on, regardless of which one of those you’re at, you have two great options for how to move forward, and you get to pick which one you want. So take the agency, the control, the authority, and choose which.
Scott Ritzheimer
Conviction, the level that’s right for you, and give it everything you’ve got, and you’ll do great. With that, thank you so much. You know that your time and attention mean the world to us. We spent a lot of time in this series together, and especially those of you who watched all of these. And I just want to express my deepest appreciation for that. Even more so, I want to express my appreciation for being a founder, for jumping into the game, for doing what very few can actually do, and bearing the consequences and the benefits of that. Thank you. You make the world a better place, and hopefully, this conversation left you just a little more clear than you were last time. I cannot wait to see you in the next episode. Take care.
Scott Ritzheimer
Hey everyone, Scott Ritzheimer here. Thank you so much for listening to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast. I hope this episode gave you exactly what you need for the level you’re in right now. If you want to discover what level you’re in, take our 10-question Founders Evolution Quiz for free at foundersquiz.com. That’s foundersquiz.com. It’ll pinpoint exactly where you are and give you tailored tips to move forward and reach that next level in your journey as a founder. If you got something out of today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, or review. It helps us reach more founders like you, and let’s be honest, it means a ton to me, my team, and all our incredible guests. So keep starting, scaling, and succeeding, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
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/
Connect with Scott through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottritzheimer/