In this diagnostic episode, Scott Ritzheimer, Founder of Scale Architects, shares how being over-visioned creates unnecessary complexity and pulls you into Whitewater far too early. If you’re chasing too many ideas, struggling to manage operators, or hitting systemic problems at a small size, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What to do: rein in shiny objects and manage operators so you can stay in Fun longer
– Why too much vision multiplies complexity and forces premature Whitewater
– How to diagnose whether you’re over-visioned or simply over-operated
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 while we talk a lot about those seven levels, we’re actually here in part two of our series. You’re not in whitewater yet to talk not about the levels that you go through as an individual, but through the stages that your organization will go through with you at the helm. Most notably, we’re going to talk about the whitewater stage. And if you were here in the previous lesson, you know what whitewater means, and and you know that more than ever, folks are finding themselves in this whitewater stage prematurely, and when you do, you end up having to deal with all the terrible parts of whitewater, which we didn’t go into a ton. But I just want to lay out here to kind of set the stage for why this matters so much. And the first thing that’ll happen in whitewater for many organizations is that you’ll start making a bunch of mistakes, there will be a bunch of errors, and you’ll start to recognize it’s not just one or two people, it’s not just one or two things, it’s just systemic problems all over the place.
Doesn’t sound good, does it? No, not at all. Second thing that you’ll notice is because of those mistakes and errors, oftentimes we start running into profitability issues again. That’s not fun either. The third thing that will happen is that we will try to overcome those mistakes and errors. We will try to redeem profitability, and we won’t be able to. And so, what happens is, as a leader, we’ll start to doubt ourselves and we’ll start to lose confidence. Many of you may recognize this is a big part of what can happen in level four, or if you ended up in whitewater prematurely, actually back in level three of your founder’s evolution. the The thing that happens when you start to lose confidence, when you start to lose confidence in your leaders, is that you start to see some frustration and some infighting on your leadership team, and a big part of that is because you’re trying to get visionaries, operators, and processors together, and maybe synergists too, and and that’s just a messy problem. But if you got into whitewater prematurely, that’s actually part of the reason why you got into whitewater prematurely is because of the composition of your leadership team.
And so, what we want to do is help you to recognize that if you want to get to predictable success, which many of you likely do, the way to get there isn’t by doing the things that you do in predictable success, namely getting visionaries, operators, processors, and synergists to work together and create high-quality decisions. Instead, we have to do the things in fun that allow us to to grow as big as possible in fun, so that we can be in this nasty whitewater stage for as short as possible. There are a few things that get in the way of that, and notably for this series, what I want to talk about is the effect of leadership imbalances and how they can unintentionally but very really pull you into whitewater prematurely, and again, that’s a big deal. We don’t want that to happen because then we end up having to fight the the whitewater thing and a growth thing all at the same time, and it’s really really hard, and the three big ways that we tend to get this wrong are that we tend to be overvisioned, overprocessed, or over synergized, and we tend to do so because we have too many visionaries, too many processors, and/or too many synergists. In other words, the only real way we want to end up in whitewater is because we were so effective at leading through so many operators, the fourth style, that we were necessarily thrust into whitewater because of the complexity of us, the size and scope of the organization, and that’s really important because that tells us what actually puts us into whitewater isn’t so much that we have too much of any one given thing; it’s that too much of any one given thing will create too much complexity.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s the real problem: is that too much complexity is actually what leads us into whitewater. Now we can do that because we have to, because there’s no other way, because we’ve over-operated and we’ve done everything that we can in the fun stage. We’ve won everything that we can win, and now it’s time to change the game. Great. However, if we end up there for some other reason, like the one that we’re going to talk about in this episode, which is if you end up there because you are overvisioned, that’s going to be a really big deal. Because if you end up there overvisioned, then now you have two problems that you have to solve. First, you have to get appropriately visioned. You have to have less vision, and. You also need to, if you’re going to solve for whitewater, you also need to add systems and processes and how you make decisions. And really, the third problem is, and you have to get enough operators to pull you through all of it. And and so, what ends up happening when we end up overdoing any one of these things is it it multiplies our problems. Well, how do you know if you’re overvisioned? What does that actually look like? This one used to be the most common of the three wrong ways to get into whitewater, and and it might still be, but the others are catching up very quickly, and and we tend to see this.
The best example that I can give is actually the high tech world, the venture backed model. Many of these organizations are overvisioned. There’s this idea that we can be unprofitable for decades because we have this big vision that’s worth everything one day. And what happens is because we we have so much vision, we create so much complexity. I was just actually in a meeting with a gentleman who was in the the early struggle stage, and he was stuck there. And I believe that a big part of why he was stuck there was because he was trying to over engineer his vision to become, you know, not necessarily even for the wrong reasons, but to become like a billion dollar startup right away, and so because of that, he was saying yes to all of these things, and he was he was creating all kinds of complexity by being over vision, by being too visionary, instead of recognizing, hey, here’s a problem, here’s a solution, let’s go and sell the blank out of that solution. Let’s get as many people on that solution as possible. He thought, well, let’s help as many people by doing as many things as possible.
And so, I think even by his admission, he had like five businesses that all existed inside of one. That’s a classic example of someone being overvisioned. Historically, if you were overvisioned, you didn’t really end up in whitewater because you never made it that far. Most overvisioned organizations actually fail in early struggle because most early struggle organizations start with a visionary. This is true for businesses and nonprofits. We’ll get to nonprofits in a couple episodes because they they tend to have their their struggle in another area. So being overvisioned usually is that we say yes to too much, we pursue too many shiny objects, and again, usually that that there’s a Darwinian effect to that. That if you can’t say yes to the right things and then stay focused enough on those right things. You’re usually going to struggle with early struggle, and you’re probably never going to get out, or you’re going to kind of be permanently stuck there, thinking you’re one idea away from a billion dollars. But let’s say you you you get enough of those operators around that we’re looking for, and they get to work doing this thing over here, you can still get yourself into whitewater by being overvisioned by tackling too many new things at once. If you’ll remember when I briefly went through the stages, the goal of early struggle is to find a profitable, sustainable market. The goal of fun is to sell so you can mine that market, so you can make as much revenue from it.
Scott Ritzheimer
One of the things that overvisioned organizations do is they start too many things too quickly, and the result of that is that they have too much of their organization stuck in early struggle. Because everything that you start, no matter what stage you’re in right now, that new thing starts in early struggle, and you can imagine how complicated that makes things because you’ve got this kind of core business that’s that’s that’s not all that solid. Like it’s doing all right, but the core business starts to struggle under the weight of all of these little new business ideas that are sucking life and cash out of it. You see this happen a lot with with with you know not necessarily franchise but like multi location organizations like a multi site church or a a new coffee store chain or anything a new restaurant anything like that that has little locations, you’ll see that they can get over visioned where they grow faster than their capacity. They they add a store. It works. They you know they fight scroll fight fight and scroll. They fight claw scratch and itch their way to success. And then they think, hey, let’s do another one.
And they learn some things, and they’re able to get that other one up off the ground a little bit faster. What they don’t recognize is when they try that again the third time, it’s not that they don’t know how to start a restaurant; it’s that they don’t know how to lead three restaurants. Again, it’s another example of being overvisioned, and so you can end up in whitewater by biting off more than you can chew from a vision standpoint by saying yes to things that your operators can’t actually execute. And this is the one that’s probably the hardest to discern between you know the the natural legitimate cause for whitewater and this one. And so, how you can figure out if it’s that you’re over visioned or that you’re you’re just over operated and you’re legitimately in whitewater. The first thing that I’ll point to is not perfect, but it’s a pretty helpful guideline, and that is, if you have more than 40, 5060, people, then there’s a good chance you’ve run the right place long enough that you’re actually in what we would call capital W Whitewater, because to get to that point, it requires that you structure things pretty well for operators, so that’s the first one that we want to look at. If if you’re hitting whitewater, we’re screwing up, we’re making mistakes.
Your best people are spending all their time firefighting. It may be because you said yes to too many things too quickly, especially if that happens at five or 15 or 25 people. You don’t want to be in Whitewater at 15 people. That’s a really, really big deal, and it’s a really, really bad sign. That is not a mark of accomplishment. That that’s usually not because you created so much success and fun, although it can be. These aren’t these aren’t unequivocal. But generally, if you’re in Whitewater at 15, you’ve unless you can figure out how to get back to fun, which we’ll talk about in a moment specifically for this problem, then again, whitewater is going to be really, really hard because you’ve got a long way to go and a lot of work to do to get to a size that can sustain predictable success. So that’s the first one. Pay attention to the organization size. The second one that you want to pay attention to, and this is a little bit more qualitative over quantitative, and I’d encourage you not to just ask it yourself, but to bring in a couple of those trusty operators that you have around, and I want you to ask if you have fully mined your market. If you offer some type of service to the Northeast region, right? There, there’s probably a a very very big market that you can access, and so let’s assume that it’s not all of the Northeast, but it’s in a drivable three-hour range, just to give ourselves some parameters.
Scott Ritzheimer
If you are not reaching that whole market, if you’ve not mined that whole market, if you’re not to the point where you have so much market saturation that things are not just slowing down because you’re bored with what you’re doing, but slowing down because you are running out of clients to to bring in, and that’s usually going to be at a minimum 5% of the market, right? The total market. So you can compete with 20 other people the same size as you or bigger. That’s not a scientific number. That’s just a ballpark figure that we’re not talking about like a 10th of a 10th of a percent of the market. If you haven’t really saturated the market to that extent, then you probably have a lot of mining left to do. And if so, you want to find a way to get back to fun and mine that market. Get to five or 10 or 20 or even 50% sometimes depending on how good you are. Instead of again trying to fight whitewater and this market problem at the same time.
So, think about how much of the market have you accessed. Now, if you’re sitting there saying, “Well, it’s only a small percentage, then the question, the next question is, “Well, why? And oftentimes, if you’re overvisioned, it’s because you’re too busy chasing other things. You’re too busy chasing other products or or adding other locations somewhere else. You’ve artificially created complexity. An example that I have of this: there’s a local business here, and they were thinking about. They were sitting just under $5 million, I think. They were in fun. They’re having a great time, and they had an opportunity to open another location about eight or nine hours away. And when I sat down with the founder and we talked through this. I recommended that he really strongly consider not doing that. Ultimately, it was his decision, and and you know I could show help him figure out how to build an organization that could span that type of a distance. But I asked him. I said, “Well, how much room do you have to grow here? He’s like, “I don’t know, maybe 3x, maybe 4x. I’m not sure. And so I encouraged him just consider it.
And ultimately, he decided to just stay here in Atlanta and double down on this location. And so instead of what he thought he was going to do, have a location sitting around 5 million and another location hopefully getting to 3 million in a couple years, he was able to create an organization that exceeded $20 million dollars. Last time I checked, I think they were around 25. With one location right here, didn’t have to travel anywhere. Didn’t have to, you know, lead a whole nother team some in some other state. He could do all of it right here. That’s the power of not overvisioning your organization of. Adequately visioning it, but not too much. So, adding that other location that far away would have dramatically increased complexity, but it wasn’t necessary-at least not yet. And that’s the really big deal with overvisioning an organization. The last thing that I want to point to here, because this is a really common factor, and it’s going to be a little bit more of a personal one. Most of the time, overvisioning is a pure reaction from the founder, and this is kind of true for all three of these problem problem approaches that we’re going to talk about. But this one in particular is pretty poignant because a lot of founders are very strong visionaries. It’s kind of needed in the early part of the game. Very visionary leaders often struggle to do the type of management that operators need. They get bored with it. They get frustrated by it, and they make the mistake of thinking, “Well, I wouldn’t want to be led that way, so I’m not going to lead them that way. And the truth is, and the the best thing that I can give you right now is that you have to recognize that you’re not managing you. You’re not managing you. You’re a visionary. They’re operators. Now operators don’t want to and can’t be micromanaged. It’s not going to work.
Scott Ritzheimer
But they do like to be managed well, even if they wouldn’t use that language, what I mean by managing well, most operators will thrive in that kind of an environment. What is managing well? It’s giving clarity on the vision and expectations. It’s delegating authority, staying out of their way is a better way of putting it, and it’s holding them accountable when the job is done to the results that you expect. When you learn to do that effectively, you can generally get the most out of your operators and create an environment for them to thrive. And when you do, you can do like this gentleman here in Atlanta did and grow to four and 5x what you are right now without ever leaving the fun stage, without ever having to overcome Whitewater. Imagine like he could have hit Whitewater at 5 million and hit it really hard, but instead he’s going to get to hit Whitewater at 25, 30 million. Who knows? That’s a huge difference. You have so many more resources. You have so many more opportunities.
You have so many more great leaders. You have the ability to pay even better leaders. When you can get big in fun, it really really helps. Now, how do you do that? So let’s say you you’re recognizing, hey, I I either haven’t managed my operators well, or I’ve said yes to too many new visionary ideas, and I need to I need to unwind that so that I can get back to fun, get a lot bigger before we hit whitewater. That’s that’s what you do. And what’s hard about this is that it’s not actually hard to understand what you need to do. What’s hard about this process is that it’s not glamorous. That’s really it. When I when I help a team, and we recognize, hey, we’re over visioned. We’ve been chasing too many things. It’s it’s causing us to to be in trouble. What do we need to do? The answer is, you need to mine your profitable, sustainable market. You need to find a handful of operators, either inside your organization or a combination of inside and outside, or you have to bring a couple in, and you need to give them clarity, delegate them authority, stay out of their way, and then you know help them see whether they’re winning or not with accountability.
That’s not that hard to understand intuitively. If you’re sitting there, you probably already know what you’ve done to make things too complicated, but here’s what’s uncomfortable about it: it means you have to say no to some shiny objects, you have to say no to some good ideas, or at least not yet. You have to exercise some discipline that maybe you thought you had graduated from because you were so successful, and I’m not trying to be hard on you, but but I do want to help you see that a big part of the reason why you ended up in Whitewater prematurely is because of the way that you’re showing up. Now that’s bad news because it means that you’re a big part of the problem, but it’s actually really good news because it means that you’re part of the solution, and that’s actually fantastic news because it means that it’s actually going to be relatively easy for you to do something about it, and and so that’s what I would encourage you to do. I would encourage you to take inventory of what’s going on and how you’re making decisions, and say, am I managing my operators well, or making sure they’re managed well, and are we being disciplined in what we say yes to, so that we can really focus on mining our profitable, sustainable market by getting as big while staying as simple as possible for as long as possible? And so, as we wrap up this one, I just want to reiterate that being overvisioned can look really great. Right, like being this guy with a super big vision, and you might even be able to attract really great people by having this super great vision and being super visionary. But if you don’t find a way to to to harness that vision into a usable energy and infrastructure for your operators, you’re going to end up in whitewater way before you should.
Scott Ritzheimer
You’re going to end up like Liam, my son, wearing you know an adult’s clothes in a kid’s body, pretending to be a bigger visionary than you are, and being frustrated by how inadequate your team is to achieve that vision. It’s not just their fault. It’s that you are overvisioned as an organization, and so rather than fight against that, rather than trying to de like to to minimize your vision, increase your operator, and build systems and processes for Whitewater all at the same time, we can split those out. We can lessen vision a little bit, increase operator a little bit, get those back into balance, and then drive that thing for as long as it’ll run. And then when the time comes, we can address bringing the processes in, bringing the process soars in, and ultimately getting to predictable success.
But the best thing that you can do is to stay in fun for as long as you can while still growing like you want, and that’s very cool. Now, what that brings us to is the second reason why folks end up whitewater when they shouldn’t, and it has to do with those systems and processes that I just talked about as being the key to getting out of whitewater. And we’ll talk about those in the next episode in this series, it’s going to be really important because the fastest rising wrong way for a business to end up in whitewater is exactly what we’re going to talk about in that episode. I hope to see you there.
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 is the founder of Scale Architects and a leading expert on organizational life cycle and founder leadership. He has helped launch nearly twenty thousand businesses and nonprofits and, before turning thirty-five, built and sold his own multimillion-dollar company after a decade of double-digit growth. Today he helps founders and CEOs who have people to lead but are still buried in the daily grind, giving them a clear next step instead of a theory. He is host of the Start Scale Succeed podcast and author of The Founder’s Game.
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/
Pre-order a copy of Scott Ritzheimer’s book “The Founder’s Game” at https://www.scottritzheimer.com/book/pre-order