In this strategic episode, Scott Ritzheimer, Founder of Scale Architects, shares how to push forward into Predictable Success even when your team is imbalanced and you’re already in Whitewater. If external pressures force you to scale despite missing the ideal style mix, you won’t want to miss it.

You will discover:

– What five systems you must build while still freeing operators to execute

– Why some organizations must drive to Predictable Success even with an imbalanced team

– How to protect the operator voice using the designated driver strategy

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 we are here in part five of our series. You’re not in whitewater, dot dot dot yet, and we’ve covered a lot of ground so far. If this is your first time hearing about us, you might want to go back and check out a couple of the previous episodes because we’re going to give you a much easier path to success if you’re feeling some of the problems we’re going to talk about in this episode. In episode one, we talked about the life cycle, we talked about the leadership styles, and we talked about really the only good reason for ending up in that this third stage that we call whitewater, and you don’t want to end there for any reason other than the reason that you have to, and that reason is because you have you’ve operated so well that you’ve created so much success that the complexity from that success has thrust you into the whitewater stage, and if that’s the case, you need to add some systems and processes to how you make decisions as an organization, and that’s what’s going to help you get to predictable success, where you can scale.

And this is all based on the predictable success model from Les McEwen. In the three episodes that followed, we talked through the three categorical errors that organizations make in the stage before that, in the fun stage, that causes them to end up in whitewater prematurely, and you don’t want to do that because if you do, you end up in this really gnarly stage where you’re making a bunch of mistakes, where there’s infighting on the team, where you’re losing confidence as a leader, where profitability drops, all the bad things, lots of bad things. You end up in that stage twice as long. It’s twice as hard to get out, and it’s going to cost you twice as much to do it. And so we want to avoid those as much as we possibly can. And the answer, if you end up in any of those categorical errors, is to try and unwind it to get back to the fun stage, to simplify, and then to refine refine the system so that your operators can succeed. That’s fundamentally the same pattern in every single one of them, although the root is a little different. But here in this lesson, I want to talk about your other choice because you really do have a choice when you’re in the whitewater stage, whether you did it by default or by design, you’re left with a choice. The only thing that you can’t choose is to stay in whitewater.

But the two things that you can choose are to go back to fun, which is what we’ve talked about in these last three episodes, or you can drive forward into predictable success, and so what I want to talk about in this episode is for those of you who are either a glutton for punishment, really like to do hard things just because they’re hard, or are in some type of a situation where you have to move forward to predictable success, and I want to talk about what those are and what you would do about it. All right, so let’s look at this. Why would you have to get to predictable success even if you have an imbalanced team? So if you’re overvisioned and need to get to predictable success, or overprocessed or over synergized, well, oftentimes it’s because of things that are happening outside of the organization, or promises that are made outside of the organization, and so when we look at organizations that are overvisioned, that have to get to predictable success, the most common reason why is because they’ve made commitments to outside stakeholders and they have to fulfill them. Again, this is the primary challenge in tech industries, especially the venture-backed tech industry, is that we we hyper invest in these early stage organizations expecting huge returns. Which means that if you’re going to survive as an organization, it’s you have to knock it way out of the park and then maybe even out of the stratosphere, or you disappear.

Scott Ritzheimer

Those are organizations that have so much investment that they can’t actually stay in fund because they would never be able to pay the investment back. So they have to get to predictable success, and they usually have to do it pretty quick. An overprocessed organization that has to get to predictable success is usually one that the process isn’t just the the nature of the founder or leadership team, but it’s a necessary underpinning for the industry. Some examples of this are like financial services, especially these days. There are so many rules and regulations that you almost have to have processors in the mix pretty early, and and so some of you, if you’re trying to scale a firm in a space like that, attorneys, similar thing for attorneys. Sometimes you have to have a lot more process than would be ideal for the fund stage, and we have to figure out how to scale anyway. How about synergists? Well, if you’re in the nonprofit space. It kind of comes with the territory.

Most of the people are going to be attracted to working in a nonprofit. Generally, want to do it because they want to help other people, and so you might find that in a nonprofit or in a super customer service heavy industry like a concierge service, for example, you have to have a lot of synergists just to do whatever it is that you do to be a concierge. You need a lot of that people orientation, and so there will be circumstances when you don’t have the ideal mix, but you still have to get to predictable success anyway. And what I want to talk about is how you can do that, or at least give yourself the best shot of doing it because there’s no guarantees. You’re in for an uphill battle, one that can be won, but you have to recognize that it’s going to be a challenge. Fundamentally, what you need to do is you need to fight on a couple fronts at the same time. The first thing that you have to do is you have to really fight for your operators.

So again, if you’re in, we’ll go back to the concierge service, and and you’ve got a bunch of synergists around, and they’re driving your operators crazy, and maybe even driving them out of the organization. You cannot sustain predictable success without enough operator. It it won’t happen. You have to have all four styles in predictable success, which means you need to have operators. So it’s you have to start by fighting for the operators that you have, and trying to make sure as best you can that you have that operator voice as part of your decision making process. Now the obvious way to do that is to add an operator to the team, but that’s not always a possibility. Sometimes you don’t have them. Sometimes you don’t trust them. There are many reasons why you might not be ready for that or able to do that. And so, what we want to do is we want to use something called the designated driver strategy, and that is where we designate somebody in the meeting as our operator for the meeting, right? It’s not the same person every time because we don’t want someone to be pigeonholed into that role, especially if it’s not their strong suit. But if we share that burden as a team and we kind of rotate it through and we say, you know, Jimmy, you’re our operator for today’s meeting. You good with that? Jimmy says yes, and Jimmy just sits there and thinks, hey, what would an operator say in this situation, now Jimmy may be skilled, Natty may not, but that is a skill that you can develop as a team: is to try and see the challenge that you’re discussing through the lens of an operator, through the eyes of an operator, and so that’s a really helpful way. If you can’t get someone on the team, then try and get someone who’s already on the team to to carry more of that weight for you, and the best way to do that is to alternate it and cycle through the different members. One of the things that you’ll find, and a quick plug for our team leadership styles report-it’s a great way of figuring this out.

Scott Ritzheimer

But one of the things that you’ll find is that you might have folks on your team who aren’t operators. It’s not like they’re strong suit, but that they do have that operator trait in them. It’s blended in with something else. Those folks make great designated drivers in the the VOPS format of that. The visionary operator processor synergist, not trying to get home after a fun night. The next thing that you need to do, and and these are really simultaneous. They’re overlapping, which is what makes it so hard. Is that you also have to recognize what the systems and structures you are you need to overcome the complexity that you face, which is going to be a lot. And what we have to do is recognize that the systems and processes that the industry demands are generally not the same systems and processes that scale demands, and this is why in very processor-heavy industries you don’t see a whole lot of big organizations. Actually, a better way of saying it is you don’t see a whole lot of mid-sized organizations because you’re either really small or you get really big, and the reason for that is because navigating the space of getting the right systems and processes that don’t chase your operators away, that meet the industry need, and then adding the system and process that’s necessary for scale is pretty tricky.

There are five key areas that this happens, and they are in your organizational structure being really clear, the way that you make decisions being really clear, the way that you integrate sales and the other functions of the business that are necessary to deliver value for your client, we call that cross functionality. You have to have not just have a mission, vision, values, but you have to be able to align every action in the organization with your mission, vision, values, and you do that through clear tactics and clear strategies, and then finally you have to have a mechanism for empowering decision making throughout the organization, not just from the central team. Les goes over all five of those in his book, Predictable Success. We’ve got something called an acceleration program for those of you who want to implement. All of our scale architects are highly trained in those five areas and can help you to to figure out which of them is most relevant for you and your organization. So, check out one of our scale architects in the directory and ask them about an acceleration program. They’ll be able to help you out.

And what that acceleration program will do, what again, the Predictable Success book will do is help you to recognize the difference between the industry procedures that are necessary and the systems and processes that you need for scale. And again, you have to walk the tightrope of freeing your operators as much as possible while staying within the industry procedures and adding system and process outside of it is not an easy thing to do, but because it’s not an easy thing to do, generally the rewards of doing it are astronomical. If you can get through adding all of that system and structure we talked about and still have quality operators in key roles, those are organizations that achieve, you know, to some extent, like hyper predictable success. This is where you’ve got the blend of processor and visionary, and the operator holding that all together and driving it forward. You can see some extraordinary results from teams that figure this out. Extraordinary results.

It’s really really cool, so it’s worth it if you can get all the way through, and that’s just the cost that you have to count before you you really go at it. The next one is the the over synergized organization. So if you’re an over synergized organization and you need to get to predictable success, what would a good example of this be so? I’ve seen this happen for for a nonprofit that gets a gigantic grant. Right, they’ve been plugging along at about a million dollars a year, and then they get a $10 million grant given over you know two years or three years, and it’s just like we’ve got to we’ve got to deliver on this because there’s $100 million grant behind it if we can deliver, and like you have to go from zero to 1000 like overnight.

Scott Ritzheimer

You gotta go, and you’ve got a bunch of people who aren’t used to that. They’re not used to that pace. They’re not used to that speed. They’re not used to the corporateness. They’re not used to the accountability. They’re not used to the pressure, and it’s a real challenge. Well, again, similarly, what you have to do is make sure that you optimize for the operators that you have, like we talked about earlier, and especially so because being super synergistic is very likely to alienate your operators. So one of the things that I would encourage you is usually what happens in this circumstance is that you’re adding a bunch of people, and the first thing that you want to do is use that org chart stuff that we talked about earlier, the organizational design, and design it with operators in mind, not just the synergists that you would normally know and like and hire. And instead of creating a hiring process to bring in a bunch more visionary synergists like you, try to create a hiring process that attracts operators as well. Really, really important. Create roles in which operators can thrive, so that when you scale up, you bring in operators.

You get a bunch of folks who get stuff done. You can actually deliver on the promises you made that led to the reason you need to scale up in the first place. And then it’s the same areas that we talked about earlier. It’s the organization design. It’s how we make decisions. In fact, usually for synergists, it’s getting beyond consensus and this kind of over focus on buy-in and actually moving it to where the smallest number of the right people can make decisions as quickly as possible, as opposed to the greatest number of everybody as possible. And so, in all of these, what has to happen is you have to focus on those big five areas, right? And you have to increase the operator style. And generally, what that means is decreasing whatever other style came in at the same time, and the problem with that-the real problem with that-is not actually tactical in nature at all. It’s cultural in nature. The hardest part about having to do both of these things at the same time is that you have to-you have to, to some extent, rewire your culture to fully embrace operators, while also going through the process of rewiring your culture to embrace processors as well, while also implementing all these systems and processes, while also continuing to try and grow, it’s just a lot all at the same time.

And for those of you who are in that position, and really anybody, we’d love to help anybody, but for those of you who the stakes are that high, I would highly recommend that you don’t try to do it alone because you can get through, but it usually takes about three times as long when you’re trying to figure it out on your own as it would if you had a guide that would help you through it. And so, I don’t want to make this a sales pitch that’s. What it’s about all the time, but for those of you in the highly unenviable position of having to plow through and get to predictable success quickly, even though you don’t have the ideal combination to get there, I would strongly encourage you to find some help. Get a guide. Get a skill architect to come in and help you out, and it’s going to make a huge, huge difference because you won’t have to guess how to grow. You can bring someone in who’s got the skill, who understands how these are, who’s done it, you know, hundreds or 1000s of times, who’s seen the patterns, who knows how they play out, and can help you to avoid some of the biggest pitfalls. So check out our directory. We’ve got lots of great scale architects all across the country. In fact, we’ve even got some around the world that you can check out, and they’d love to help you out. They’d love to help you out. And with that, I hope you learned a lot about Whitewater. I hope you. I hope many of you realized you didn’t actually have to be in Whitewater, and that you’ve got plenty of time left in fun. That that really is my deepest hope.

Scott Ritzheimer

And for those of you who realize, hey, we really are in whitewater. We’ve got enough people around here. We’ve got enough on the line that we have to do it now, and I really mean have to do it now. I hope you’ve got some insight into what that road’s going to look like, how to start addressing it both culturally and tactically, and and I hope you get the help to do it as well. So with that, I want to thank you for going on this journey with me as fun little project. This is something that I’m seeing a lot of. The reason why I wanted to take some time on this and really make a series of it is because I’m finding most of the people who think they’re in whitewater are actually not there by necessity. Most of the people that I’m finding in Whitewater actually don’t have to be there, and that might be the case for you as well. And so, with that, I hope this was helpful for you. I hope you enjoyed this little series. I hope it was interesting. I hope you learned something, and more than anything, I hope you have confidence in the next step that you need to take for your organization to achieve your vision. With that, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I thank you so much for sharing that with us, and I hope you enjoyed this series. I can’t wait to see you next time. 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 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