Last week, in my blog post You Are The Limit, we discussed the critical need for founders to stop “being” the operating system and start “building” the operating system. This identity and leadership shift is what’s necessary to build a $100M+ business that becomes truly LARGER THAN LIFE.
This week, we’re going to tackle the hidden tax that plagues most growing companies. This insidious culprit quietly destroys momentum, profitability, speed, and scalability. It rarely appears on financial statements, yet it can be the Grim Reaper, arriving to kill your business.
Its name is Founder Dependency.
Unlike the invisible Grim Reaper to the naked eye, you’ll recognize it when:
- Employees wait for approval before moving forward with clearly defined initiatives.
- Leaders within your company avoid taking ownership of outcomes.
- Decisions move slowly, and the buck is repeatedly passed.
- Problems aren’t solved at the level at which they were created and escalate upward.
- You start experiencing death by meetings, repeating the same conversations in seeming perpetuity.
At lower revenue levels, founders compensate by working longer, pushing harder, and attempting to move faster. But eventually the business becomes too complex for heroic leadership, and the tax starts compounding. Your company becomes slower, the leadership team becomes reactive and points fingers, and you, as the founder, become overwhelmed.
Most leaders of their businesses misdiagnose this problem and think, “I need better employees, more meetings, accountability, and better communication. The best ones, looking in the mirror first and taking full responsibility for their company’s success or failure, put these challenges squarely on their shoulders to solve.
The real problem isn’t them; it’s structural because the organization is still designed around you, the founder. To scale a business, you must redesign it so execution can happen without your constant involvement. To a “raise yourself by your bootstraps” founder, this can be the wake-up call that forces you to get out of your own way and learn to trust your team.
If you do this, it can be the pivot point in your business growth trajectory that becomes your game-changer. If you don’t, you’ll relegate yourself to the 98% of global businesses that never surpass $ 1 M in gross annual revenue.
One may ask, “How do I get out of my own way and surround myself with people I can trust to run their parts of the business so I don’t have to micromanage them?” The answer lies in being brutally honest about yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, and in finding those who are better and smarter than you in areas where you lack the expertise, experience, or a proven track record to command authority.
If you’re a strong leader, as evidenced by your company’s results, and are among the 1.5% to 2% of businesses that generate $1M to $3M in gross revenue, know this. The majority of your staff will do half as much as you do exceptionally well and twice as much as you suck at.
Let that sink in for a moment…
This mindset helps reset and manage your expectations when hiring. Though you’d love it to be the case, you’re not expecting everyone to do what you would do, and you’re looking for the very best, whose skill set makes yours pale in comparison.
Here’s one of the most enlightening experiences I’ve ever had to understand this in simple terms. While building my Amway business back in the 90s, I attended a conference called FED (Free Enterprise Day), and I learned from an Executive Diamond distributor named Ray Youngblood. He was from Louisiana and, in his slow, southern drawl, shared this story of a frog-jumping contest they held regularly down south.
“Down in Louisiana, we have frog jumpin’ contests. To participate, you gotta find you a frog, line ’em up, and when the whistle blows, the frog that gets to the finish line first wins. I gotta tell you it’s the funniest darndest thing you ever done seen. At the beginning, all these frogs are at the startin’ line, and when the whistle shrills, some start jumpin’ a-boing, a-boing, a-boing; while others just sit there and go “ribbit”. If they’re just sitting there, you grab your prod and push ’em in the rear so they start jumping. When looking for the best frogs, you wanna find the one that just be jumpin’, and all you have to do is guide ’em. The rest of ’em are like most people. If you gotta prod them to get movin’, you ain’t got a winning frog!”
As the Founder and Owner of your company, in key leadership positions, you’re looking for people who just be jumpin’, and all you have to do is guide them. When you find people with talent like this, get out of their way, let them jump their hearts out, and simply guide them toward the finish line.
Here’s to no “ribbits” and finding the winning people disguised as frogs;-)
Be Larger Than…
