In this candid episode, Scott Ritzheimer, Founder of Scale Architects, shares why being over-synergized (too people-focused) is a common way founders force themselves into Whitewater too early. If you prioritize harmony and family culture yet still feel stuck with complexity and low output, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What to do: hire operators and manage them with clarity, authority, and accountability
– Why hyper-focusing on people and consensus drives out operators and limits impact
– How to recognize if you are over-synergized rather than legitimately in Whitewater.
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. Over the next few months, we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about the seven levels that founders face. But before we do, I’m trying to squeeze in a little mini series here about the stages that organizations go through. Most importantly, we’re talking about this really difficult stage, the third stage in the process that is called whitewater. And whitewater is what prevents organizations from getting to predictable success. It prevents them from scaling. It prevents them from achieving all the vision that you have for your organization. Now, whitewater is not inherently the proof that something has gone wrong, although it feels that way because it’s a really, really difficult season where complexity is piling up. We’re making mistakes and errors. We’re losing confidence. We’re losing profitability, or we’re fighting with our team. We’re frustrated by their performance. There’s a lot of stuff that goes wrong in this whitewater stage. If you’re unfamiliar with what it is, check out the first episode in this little mini series. We talk about the different stages and what’s going on.
If you want to explore it further, we go deeper in the previous two episodes to this one, episode two and episode three of the mini series, where we talk about two of the ways where you can end up in whitewater by accident, because that’s what we don’t want to do. the The whole point of this series is to to identify a growing trend for folks who end up in whitewater long before they should, and in doing so, we’re identifying the three kind of categorical errors, the three primary ways that this happens, and it doesn’t happen so much because you do the wrong thing, especially in the case of this reason. It happens because you believe the wrong thing, and I’m going to step on some very sacred cows today. You might not like me after this episode. You might not ever listen again. I hope that’s not the case, and I hope you hear the heart that I’m coming from, because I have to say things that a lot of people don’t say, won’t say, and a lot of things that people say the opposite about. Now, I want to address this with the caveat that when I say these things, I don’t mean that they are always true all of the time. What I mean when I’m saying, “Hey, this isn’t the way to grow, or “That’s not what you need to do, or “That’s not what leadership looks like, I’m doing all of that through the very specific lens of right now for your organization. So I’m I’m very specifically talking to those of you who are in whitewater prematurely and why that is.
To identify what prematurely means, we have to look at what the only reason is that you should actually end up in whitewater, and I believe that is because you are over-operated. What does that mean? It means that you’ve got a bunch of operators, the get stuff done kind of people, and they’re out running all over the place, doing all kinds of things, and and you’re you’re growing, you’re big, and it’s awesome, and then they all start screwing up and making mistakes systemically across the board. You’ve reached a requisite level of complexity, even though you’ve done everything to stay as simple and lean as possible, even though you’ve done everything to build a system for your operators to succeed, you still hit a level of complexity that forces you to change the game that you play. That is whitewater, and that’s a that. If you hit it that way, it’s actually a sign that you did something right. It’s that you created enough growth to end up in whitewater the right way, however, one of the things that gets in the way of that is to end up in whitewater because you are over synergized. Over synergized. What does that mean? Well, the synergist style is what we mean by by synergizing, and the synergist style they’re like the people people they’re the leaders who like their whole goal for starting the business was to help people. Wonderful, wonderful. Again, I’m gonna I’m gonna poke on some of this stuff.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s not a bad thing, but what we have to recognize is how we help people. And to illustrate this, I wanna I want to use an example because, again, synergist leaders tend to kind of lead in a family style. That that that’s language that they use a lot. We we’re a family. We have a family culture. I don’t want to lose our our family feel. You hear that a lot with synergistic leaders. But imagine a family, just for a moment, where neither mom or dad work, and there’s no trust fund, right? And they decide they’re just going to stay home all day, every day, and they’re going to stay inside all day, every day, and they’re going to stay with their kids all day, every day because they love them so much. That why. Like they don’t want to work because that would take away from their time with their kids. That sounds really noble, right? Like if you look at our culture, how many people out there say like you know stop overworking and spend more time with your family and it’s your family that’s going to be around you at your deathbed? Yes, Absolutely, unequivocally, like yes, but you’re probably all. I’m not gonna say that.
You imagine the family though, like how sustainable is that if neither parent works because they’re just there, you know, being with their kids. As wonderful as being with your kids is, you can’t take care of them because you have no resource to do it. Part of being a great parent is knowing that maybe you have to step away from just this hyper focus on your child to actually create the resource for your child to thrive. The same thing is true in our hyper family oriented businesses. When we over-synergize, when we say, “Oh, it’s not about the revenue, it’s not about profit, it’s just about people. Again, there’s beauty in that. I don’t want to take away from that. But how how many people can you help with zero revenue? And if you’re at this point, it’s probably not that you have zero revenue, but let’s say you’re at a million dollars of revenue, or let’s say you’re at $5 million of revenue. How many people can you help at $5 million of revenue? And let’s let’s say that that is you can serve 1000 clients a year at that point. I’m just making up stuff, but just for kicks. If you have a vision of serving 10,000 people, that means there’s 9000 that you’re not helping relative to your vision, and you’re not going to get those other 9000 by staying at revenue of $5 million.
Revenue doesn’t have to be the the goal. Like it, it’s in fun in particular, right? Revenue is is similar. Jim Collins talks about this with profit, and he says more than profits, and he talks about how profit is like oxygen, and that’s really helpful. But that’s more of a predictable success thing, and and and we’re not going to go into reasons why. But in the fun stage, we can take a a derivative of that because it’s still actually right. But the way that we achieve profit is different in fun. In the fun stage, you achieve profit and impact and growth and everything else that you want to achieve by growing revenue, until you reach the size that your vision demands, right? Once you reach the size your vision demands, you can do whatever the heck you want. But until you’re serving as many people as you want to serve, if that’s your reason for doing it, the best and fastest and most sustainable way to get to where you’re serving all of those people is by increasing revenue, and you can imagine how uncomfortable this is for all those nonprofit leaders who listened to the last episode and and thought that I was going to tell them how to grow and that it was going to be really wonderful and lovely, and now I’m sitting here just talking about revenue, and it’s true. It’s true for nonprofits. I I’ve helped a lot, a lot, 1000s and 1000s of nonprofits and their founders to grow and and succeed. And I have seen 1000s of them fail. I’ve seen 1000s of them get stuck in the early struggle stage and never exit.
Scott Ritzheimer
In fact, one of the real tragedies about nonprofits is that they will they will get stuck in in early struggle, unprofitable and unscalable, and they will stay there indefinitely because they think that’s the goal is to be a nonprofit. And so let’s stop talking about them as nonprofits. We can talk about them as tax exempt organizations if you want a you know very technical way of describing it, but let’s talk about them as organizations. If an organization is going to succeed, it has to have a source of life coming into it, and for organizations, that’s resources. And in today’s you know day and age, one of the most prominent resources is revenue, because you have to pay people, right? You have to inspire people. You have to give them opportunity. You have to resource them to do their job. You have to have tools for them to do their job, and the way that all of that is paid for in every circumstance, at least sustainably, is not through like some kind of venture capital campaign. It’s through revenue. Now that might be from donations, it might be from grants in the nonprofit world, and and in the business world, it’s going to be from sales. But the reality of it is, is we have to have a focus on revenue, and people, people, right? Very people-centered leaders will have a.
Very strong temptation, especially once they have even just a little bit of revenue, to stop focusing on revenue prematurely and just focus on their people. And what we do is we take the little revenue that we have and we use it to try and make our people’s life easier, instead of using the little revenue that we have to make our people better, so that they can increase the amount of revenue that we have, so that they can increase the amount of work that we do, so that they can increase the impact that we can create. When you look at where these styles conflict, because there is a lot of conflict between them, the primary challenge is between visionaries and processors. Those those two like cats and dogs, they they just do not get along together, and it’s pretty easy to see why when we look at how those two are are wired. But what we fail to recognize sometimes is the second highest level of conflict is between operators and synergists, between task people, doers, ruthless finishers, and people people. Right, the ones that we’re looking at and and saying, hey, we just want everyone to feel great. We want everyone to succeed. We want everyone to be in harmony. Those two styles don’t get along very well.
hose two styles can conflict significantly. And again, if you’ll remember from the course of these you know lessons that we’re going through here, these episodes, you need a bunch of operators and fun. In fact, I will go so far as to say, and and nonprofit leaders hear me on this. I promise it’s true for you too. A lot of nonprofit leaders, in particular, when I talk about the different stages, will say I don’t ever remember a fun stage, and that’s usually for two reasons. One, they never got out of early struggle, right, because they didn’t have enough operators to get stuff done, or two, they never really went far enough in fun because they never had enough operators to get stuff done, what that means is that the degree to which the fun stage is fun is directly proportionate to the quantity and quality of the operators you have on your team, and great operators don’t want to work for ambiguous, overly nice, hyper empathetic, but you know, Gumby types. They want to fall. They want to have a vision. They want to know what they need to do to get to that vision, and they want to know whether or not they’re winning. They want goals. They want objectives. They want they want to be pointed in a direction and then left alone to work, they don’t want to sit around singing kumbaya. They don’t want to sing songs and whatever. Like they want to go and get stuff done, and they want a leader who celebrates that. They want a leader who inspires that. They want a leader who makes getting all those things done worth it.
Scott Ritzheimer
And when you’re a synergistic leader who’s like, ah, don’t worry about the future, or we’re just here to take care of people, or don’t worry about revenue, or we don’t set goals like that because those are just numbers, and and and we’re not in it for the numbers. If you have a vision that’s greater than your current numbers will allow, let me tell you what the numbers matter. It’s just like the family with no income, right? If that family has a vision to being a multi-generational family, they’re going to have to find a way of generating some revenue. Otherwise, they’re not going to be around for multiple generations. They, you have to have income. You have to, in an organization setting, have to have clarity. You have to have a vision. You have to direct people toward that vision. You need to give them space and and a structure to achieve that vision. And you have to let them know if it’s not working. And so, what can happen is we can we can be so people focused, so leadership centric.
I see this in like very hyper leadership organizations. Is oh, everyone’s a leader. Everyone needs to be a leader. Well, the folks who don’t want to be a leader in the way that you probably define leader is operators. Operators don’t want to be leading a bunch of people. They want to be left alone to get their job done. They don’t want to be in like some hyper strategy meeting talking about what the world’s going to look like in 100 years. They want to know what they need to do, and they want to be left alone to get it done. They don’t want to have to wait for nine other people to voice their opinion before a decision’s made. They want to know what the decision is, and then they want to be left alone to execute it. And what will happen if you over synergize is that you will drive out. First off, you won’t really attract operators, and second, even if you do, you will drive them out because you won’t honor the their gift. You won’t honor their ability to get stuff done. You’ll, in fact, try to drive it. Out of them, you’ll probably try to turn them into something else. And visionary synergists do this more than anybody else, or synergist visionaries. When you have the combination of those two styles, they will accidentally, but in a very real way, weaponize it.
Where they try and turn everybody into a visionary synergist. They want everyone to be an idea person who leads a group of people because that’s what leadership is. That’s not what leadership is, especially in fun. Leadership is any act that that helps two or more people achieve their common goals. That’s what leadership is, which means a huge chunk of leadership, especially in the fun stage, is getting stuff done because if you don’t get anything done, you don’t achieve any of your goals, and you end up in the exact same place you were a year ago, just a little worse and maybe a little fatter. Like that’s that’s all that happens. Nothing good comes out of not getting anything done, and very little good comes out of trying to take operators and turn them into something else, rather than appreciating what they really are. And so, for all you hyper synergist nonprofit leaders who are struggling to have fun in the fun stage, or even struggling to get out of early struggle, or you feel like we’re in whitewater, it’s all complex, and it’s it’s such a mess, and nobody’s getting anything done. But you’re sitting there with like five people on your team. That’s because you don’t have people who get stuff done. It’s not because you’re in whitewater. It’s because you don’t have operators. And and and I I I know that this is hard, and I know I’m stepping on some toes, and I’m not actually trying to say that like your views on leadership and life are wrong.
Scott Ritzheimer
What I’m trying to do is gift you the ability to recognize that the way that you achieve those ends, the way that you achieve your vision, the way that you achieve the leadership culture that you want, the way that you do that-if you’re in the fun stage, or if you should be in the fun stage-is by hiring operators, giving them clarity, giving them authority, and then holding them accountable. It’s going to take metrics. It’s going to take clarity. It’s going to take a little bit of structure. It’s going to mean that you’re you’re not as much a family as you are an organization, and that’s actually not such a bad thing. And when you operate in that way, when you get the right people who can operate in that way, then your ability to achieve the vision that you have will become dramatically greater, dramatically greater. In fact, I think chances are very good that you’ll never actually fulfill the vision that you have if you keep trying to do it this way, I really mean that, and it doesn’t mean that that vision is wrong. It just means that you probably have to be more pragmatic about your approach to that vision.
You have to be less dogmatic about the hyper leadership, hyper synergist culture that you hear from very big, very successful people. And it’s not that they’re wrong. It’s just that they are wrong for right now. There is a right time for a lot of that, not all of it, but a lot of it. But it’s not here and right now. Most of that stuff finds most of its merit in the predictable success stage. So if you love that stuff and you want more of it, then do the things that you need to do to get to the predictable success stage. I once heard it described this way. It’s kind of like going up to someone in the gym and asking you know, and and you know who has great abs, and taking whatever workout they do. You know, you see them doing bicep curls, and it’s like, well, bicep curls must create great abs. And so instead of doing what what got them here, you’re doing what they do now that they are here. That doesn’t work. I heard it recently. You want to model the rise, not the result. That’s a great way of putting it.
You you need to do the thing that will get you to predictable success, not just pretend you’re in predictable success. You can’t be like my son Liam and just put on the clothes of an adult when really you’re still a kid when your organization is still a kid, and that means that we have to just embrace the fact that having an organization that’s still a kid is not a bad thing. The best thing for a kid to do is to be a kid on route to becoming an adult. The best thing for your organization to do is to pour into the operators on your team to to to find that operator way and cultivate it so that you can get big enough and then add the systems and processes that you need to create predictable success and then and only then can you really fully invite all. Four styles: the visionaries, the operators, the processors, and the synergists-all four styles to come together and contribute because that’s what happens in predictable success. So, for all of my over-synergized folks, please know I love you.
You’re awesome. You’re amazing. You’re also probably making your life a lot harder. And if instead of again trying to hyper leadership everything, if instead of that you just recognize we need to manage this group of operators well right now, we need to give them what they need to succeed. You’ll find yourself having a lot more fun and enjoying the fun a lot more too. A couple of signs that that you can do this. If you have you know 10 people on your team and five of them need to weigh in before you make a decision, you’re probably over synergized. If you’re hitting whitewater where it’s super complicated and everyone’s overworked and it’s exhausting and it’s really hard, and you have less than 45 employees, there’s a good chance it’s because you’re over synergized.
Scott Ritzheimer
If you find yourself regularly trying to use whatever resources you have to make your team’s job easier instead of helping them get better, you’re probably over synergized. And so this is the final of the three kind of categorical errors for what gets us into whitewater, and and for those who are over synergized, I I hope you recognize. But to just be clear, the path back is to say whatever this extra synergy, leadership, HR, you know, nice guy thing is that is causing things to be too complicated for us to succeed. We need to unwind some of that for now and build up to a place where those actually make sense. And you’ll find that some of them do make sense later. You’ll actually find that some of them never make sense, and and that’s another lesson for another time. But you need to you need to simplify. You need to double down on your appreciation for and your your optimization for the operator style, and they might rub you the wrong way. Not all operators are great people, but not oper all operators are bad people either. And so, if you can find some really quality operators to come in and help get things moving in the right direction, you’re all going to be better off for it. Once they come, take good care of them as well, in the way that they want to be cared for, which is not the same as you as a synergist.
And when you do that, you’ll be in great shape. You can create a lot of growth very simply and have a lot of fun doing it. It really, really is pretty cool. So that’s it. the The top three ways that we end up in whitewater when we shouldn’t is by being over visioned, overprocessed, or over synergized. And the way that we solve all three of those is by actually going back a little bit, simplifying so that we can bring that operator style up, give our operators what they need, and then let them make it happen. But what if you’re in a position where you don’t really have that luxury? What if you have to get to predictable success, or what if you’re struggling with one of those things, but you’re already up in the 4050 or or 450 range? What do you do? Well, that’s what we’ll talk about in the the final episode in this series, where we talk about how you can achieve predictable success, even when you have an imbalanced team. I hope to see you there, and it’s going to be a good one. It’ll be a lot of fun. Take it easy.
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