Latest / The Enterprisors / The Foundation Ceiling
Transcript
- Tim Meadows-Smith: Welcome to the Enterprises. This week's episode, do you know what good looks like? Most founders of mid-sized businesses have never worked inside a company operating at the next level. They've never seen a functioning finance department, a proper planning cycle, or a real leadership team. They are building from the inside of their own experience, and that experience has a ceiling they cannot see. Tim. This is unusual framing. You're saying founders at mid-size are structurally disadvantaged by not having seen what good actually looks like. Can you unpack that a bit? Sure. So by the mid-size, I'm imagining somebody who's got to maybe 20 or 30 million in revenue is making maybe a million or a million and half in profit has got maybe 30 to 50 people and has a relatively financially comfortable existence. But they are growing probably at 5 % per year in scale. They are operating at about a third of the productivity that they could be. They're probably making a half or a third of the profit that they should be. And they're not able to make the progress that they could and the business is capable of because neither they nor any of the people who work for them has ever seen anything bigger than the business that they've already grown. So the organization was super effective for two, three, four years ago when they were half the size and is now really struggling to keep up. where they are now. And in order for that business to grow instead of at 5 % at 25, 30, 35 % and instead of being ⁓ about a third productive being a half productive, they need to have seen what it looks like at that next level and what you have to do in order to achieve it. So the first thing that is in the way is that everybody in the organization is quietly saying to you, 5 % growth is rather good, but actually it isn't. And what you need to be doing is meeting with people who have a similar size business to you and they're hard to find and talking about the fact that good is at that 25, 30, 35 % level. not the 5 % that you're at. Then having understood that you were right all along and you should be growing faster, you then need to understand how. And in order for the how to happen, you probably need to hire two, three people who've worked in the business at the next level that you're hoping to move towards. You need to buy in ⁓ coaching and ⁓ training services from people not who are professional trainers, but specializing companies half the size of yours, but people who have actually worked in and coached people at the size that you expect to be in two or three years time. People who know what good looks like. Accountants, lawyers, coaches, they don't... coaches, sales advisors, marketing advisors, all of the different disciplines, you need to understand what good looks like at the next stage, not what it looked like at half the size you are now. Knowing what good looks like doesn't just mean knowing what good looks like at the next level. It means knowing what good looks like at the people you're inviting to coach you to the next level as well, doesn't it? Yes. Absolutely. I mean, the market for business coaches, mentors, wellbeing advisors is huge. But most of them are micro businesses themselves who've never worked in an organization as big as yours or for another organization as big as yours, but they want to coach you anyway. All that's gonna do is confirm the view of the team that you're doing rather well and you're not. In order for you to understand how you get better, somebody needs to tell you that better exists, that it is possible for you to be growing at five, six, seven, eight times the rate that you are now, to be doing the same work with half the number of people that you have now and generating twice or three times the profit that you're generating now. Until somebody explains to you that those things are perfectly possible and normal for people who know what they're doing, you will continue to think that you're really rather good when in fact you're struggling and not much more than a zombie. this whole self-made myth that we are actually taught, you know, here you go, you're self-made and you're going to be wonderful. It's actually not doing us any good. It's harming founders, isn't it? Well, most founders have at some point in their lives endured an episode of Britain's Got Talent. And we know how excruciating that is. And guess what? In the business world, you're one of them. Dancing with your dog on stage. It's brutal, but that's who you are. You know, I've used this analogy before. If you compare a 10 million turnover business to the world's largest business, is Walmart. It's like comparing your day old chick to Walmart's blue whale. And a blue whale, by the way, is five or six times the size of a full grown African elephant. The difference is vast. And trying to pretend that somehow you are a captain of industry and are merely ready for major investment and a listing at the stock exchange. is deluding yourself. In order for you to get better, you have to be humble, you have to be curious, and you have to want to learn, and you have to recognize exactly where you're at. And you're not at about 80%. You're barely at 1%. But somehow, we walk around the world thinking we're at about 80 % because everybody we know is doing less well than we are. If however, you start to actively seek out people who have founded and lead businesses bigger than you are, you will start to realize that you're not ambitious enough and you need to be looking harder for the answers that will help you perform at the next level. Interesting. Yeah. And so when you say looking harder, can you compensate by reading and taking courses? by hiring consultants? You can, but reading doesn't do you any good. I I tried that at university. didn't get me very far. You actually have to act on the information that you got out of the book. And so the reading will open your eyes to some of the techniques and what other people are ⁓ doing, but you... physically need to be meeting with and talking with people who actually have done the things that you hope to do soon. And that's the fastest route to improving. Absolutely it is. And by the way, the cost of buying the knowledge and experience of somebody else's mistake and graze knees and bloody nose is a lot less expensive than getting your own grazed knees and bloody nose. It really is much more efficient to learn from the experiences of people who've gone before us and already solved the problems rather than us having to solve the problems for ourselves or as the saying goes, reinvent the wheel. Yeah, it's so true, but yeah, we are stuck in this. I don't know, self-made myth, ⁓ the myth that we've got to do it ourselves, the ego that we've got to do it ourselves, that reinventing the wheel is the way to go. And yet, what you're saying is quite simplistic in as much as go find people who've done it, copy what they do. Human beings are made in a way that gives them satisfaction when they build something. When you go on holiday, It's actually quite fun building sandcastles. If you're at home, it's actually quite fun to build your own shed. It's quite fun to do a bit of DIY. It's quite fun to maintain your own car. But it's an awful lot more efficient to pay somebody else to service your car. And to run a business on the basis of indulging yourself, and you are indulging yourself at the expense of the people who you have hired and employ, when you try to do it all for yourself, when for less expense, you could get more progress and grow the business faster. And so for the person who's listening, the business owner who wants to scale up, And has built everything for themselves and they are now at this particular position. What's the first practical step that they can take? Find a business coach who is ⁓ used to coaching business leaders at your size and bigger. For goodness sake, do not engage somebody who is only coaching people smaller than your business. Absolutely. And could you help them with that? If somebody wanted to ask you who to go to, would you be able to help? I can help by pointing people at a coach, but please don't ask me to do No, I didn't mean that. I've raised children and they didn't listen to me either. No, what I mean is if somebody doesn't really know which way to go, you have an arsenal of coaches who have been in the way where they need to be. I have a number of friends who coach at most levels, who I would be very happy to connect up with somebody who was humble and serious about understanding how they grow. Thank you very much, Tim. Thank you.