Why Founders Must Evolve to Scale Their Business

I’m going to share an uncomfortable truth about building a great company with you today. Eventually, every strategy, system, and organizational structure reaches its limit. Every leader does, too.

I’ve experienced this more than once in my now four-decade entrepreneurial career. Some transformations have come by force, several by choice, but most because I eventually faced the same reality: either I grew, or the business died…and with it, a big part of who I was.

There have been times when I thought the business needed to change with the times, when in reality I needed to change.

I needed to think, lead, trust, and communicate differently. And perhaps most difficult of all, I needed to let go of what had once made me successful. I learned that’s one of entrepreneurship’s paradoxes. You never really arrive. You just keep moving the target and choose which suck you’re willing to embrace: the suck of growth and success or the suck of stagnation and failure.

The person who can build a $1 million company may not yet be the person who can lead a $10 million company. The person who can build a $10 million company may not yet be able to lead a $100 million organization. Not because they’re incapable. Because every new level requires a new version of you.

The qualities that build it can become the qualities that limit it.

If you’ve already started a company or you’re thinking about starting a new venture, here’s the reality that hits you smack dab in the nose pretty quickly. To get it off the ground, you—the great and wonderful you—have to make the decisions, solve the problems, sell your goods or services, recruit the team, manage the staff, create, push, and carry the entire enterprise on your shoulders.

At first, that isn’t dysfunction; it’s survival. Your business needs you like a child needs its parents. It needs you to feed it, nurture it, love on it, and protect it with your energy, conviction, and willingness to do whatever it takes.

It works.

And that’s when things get interesting.

What starts as a breath of fresh air can eventually feel like you’re suffocating. Almost imperceptibly, the very behaviors that helped you build the company begin limiting what it can become.

The company hasn’t stopped growing because you’ve become less capable. Quite the opposite. It has grown to the edge of your current capacity. That’s where the next transformation begins.

At Chiro One, one of the most important lessons I learned was that I couldn’t simply keep asking people to produce more. I had to develop people capable of more…including myself.

My background was in wrestling and coaching. I learned something from athletics that became invaluable in business: You don’t prepare for the next level by continuing to perform at the current level. You train for your next opponent and keep your eye on the prize.

As a coach, my job wasn’t to wrestle the match for my athletes; it was to develop athletes capable of stepping onto the mat without me and performing when it mattered.

Business leadership eventually requires the same evolution. If everyone needs you to make the decision, you haven’t built decision-makers; you’ve created dependency. Like children who are never allowed to make decisions for themselves, they never develop the confidence to function without you.

The key is to understand this well enough to build an organization that can run without you and, eventually, an institution that can outlive you. Leadership is not about creating followers.

I believe one of leadership’s highest responsibilities is developing people who eventually need less of you. People who can take direction and run with it, who understand the mission deeply enough to make decisions when you aren’t in the room. People who don’t bring you every problem expecting an answer, but have the confidence and freedom to bring you solutions…even when those solutions are different from what you would have done.

Eventually, they begin developing other people capable of doing the same. That’s not addition…that’s multiplication. Doing this requires something from a founder that can be extraordinarily difficult:

You have to stop proving how valuable you are by being needed. This can be especially difficult for successful entrepreneurs because being needed is often how we built our identity in the first place. We became the fixer, the rainmaker, the problem-solver, the one everyone counted on. Those qualities were rewarded for years.

Then one day, the organization needs something entirely different from us.

That’s what makes this transition so difficult. You’re not simply changing what you do. You’re surrendering an identity that once made you successful.

Your value has to migrate from doing to developing, from answering to questioning, from controlling to trusting, and from producing results yourself to creating the conditions where other people can produce extraordinary results.

Which brings us to a much bigger question. Who must you become for your organization to become what you say it should be?

Or, in other words: “What part of your current identity cannot come with you to the next level?”

This is where scaling stops being merely a business conversation. It becomes an identity conversation, one I know quite intimately. I’ve had to confront this reality myself more than once, and I know I’ll have to confront it again, because there is no final version of us.

Only the version of us required for what comes next matters. And your next level may not require more from the person you are today. It may require someone you haven’t become yet.

On October 29 in Chicago, I’ll be bringing 30 founders together for the LARGER THAN LIFE Business Summit.

We’ll spend the day examining not only how to grow bigger businesses but also how to build organizations capable of scaling beyond the founder—and ultimately becoming something that can endure beyond us.

We’ll examine your business, your organization, and perhaps most importantly…you.

Be Larger Than…