Latest / The Enterprisors / Finding Your Tribe
Transcript
- Tim Meadows-Smith: Welcome to the flip. Every successful CEO faces a choice. Keep doing what got you here, but no further, or flip to building what gets you there. Two 20 million pound businesses make different choices. 10 years later, one is worth 35 million. The other is worth 4.4 billion. That's not luck. That's not market timing. That's the flip. from founder dependent to enterprise, from hero to architect, from 35 million to 4.4 billion. This is the flip. Tim. Hi. Hi again. So today we're going to talk about how important networking is. Because in the previous episodes, we mentioned that If you're a CEO, sometimes you are alone in that position and you need to find your tribe, you need to find your peers, you need to find people that are actually above the status that you're in. So how important is that and how important is networking? So I get it. People have tried networking. It hasn't worked and they think it's not worth the effort. That's true if what you've been doing is turning up at the local chamber of commerce and the local coffee morning and the local IOD because it's full of two groups of people. One is the people who haven't got enough to do because they haven't yet built their business to be busy. Right. And they are still trying to get ⁓ somewhere near a million in sales a year. And the other group of people is predatory salespeople trying to services, accountants, lawyers, all kinds of professional services people trying to sell to you and they stand up and they pitch at you and they talk at you and they don't listen ⁓ and you've concluded absolutely rightly that kind of networking does not work so we're agreed The wrong sort of networking is an absolute waste of your time and money and it's really frustrating when you're already too busy. There is another way, but you have to be determined, have to understand the benefit and you have to go out of your way to find them. And we covered in an earlier episode, you know, there are only 13,000 people who founded their own business, broke that first million barrier to be in the less than 5 % who make it, broke the 10 million barrier to be, you know, in the under half a percent who get over 10 million. ⁓ Went through all of that stuff, got themselves enormously busy, stressed over worked, hardly able to pay for the things that they need to pay for, and then found delegation and started to work out some of those early stages of turning doing into beyond doing and creating something that runs by itself. But we've still got a shadow to learn lots of new techniques, lots of things that enable us to keep growing at 50 % a year instead of 5 % a year, hiring the people with the right skills and understanding of what good looks like and understanding that loyalty isn't keeping your mate in a job that they can't do, it's finding somebody who can actually perform the job and still valuing your mate for what they have done but making certain that they're not blocking progress. that all of us absolutely every one of us needs supporters we need to know where we get the advice and skills from and if you buy it it costs a fortune and actually most of the people who are selling services have not done what you have already done. So are we going into sort of like the coaches? Yeah some of them yeah but even even if you hire somebody who was a couple of million quid a year on the board of a major company willing to do non-exec work at, I don't know, 30 grand a year for a ⁓ day or two a month. They haven't done what you have done. No, they have never seen the problems that you have got and they don't understand. So you have to go past four hundred and twenty odd business leaders before you find one your size. You said that. Yeah, that takes a lot of looking for. It doesn't happen by accident. So how do we find our tribe? Well, you find you you find somebody who does so you're asking your Who else do you work for that is already turning over 20, 30, 40, 50 million a year? Can you introduce me please? you can ask it of your lawyer, your insurance broker, any number of your professional services suppliers, the bank manager. Can you please help me and introduce me to one or two of your customers who have a similar size to me? But then when you meet them, start to network, because they've got a network, and these things expand out. But the thing that you want is people who are going through what you're going through can give you the confidence that that 30, 40, 50 % growth is possible. It's not exceptional. It's good, but it's not exceptional. And it's already seven, eight, nine times the growth rate that you're passing off as good now. And once you've got people around you who give you that confidence that it's okay to be successful, then you can start. to. find out where they found the right advice from, how they hire the right new directors to work on their board, where they find a non-exec. In fact, as mid-sized business owners, inviting each other to serve as non-execs on each other's boards broadens our experience because one thing, we have to think deeply about somebody else's problems and two, we get somebody who's living what we're living with to challenge our voice of caution in the finance director, our voice of nobody listens to them, the person who does operations and start to value all of the relevant voices and start to give people their heads so that they can power your growth. Having a... 25, 30 people on your payroll and only having the output as to what you tell them to do is probably getting only about half the value out of your payroll. If you set them free, you might double your profits per employee. That's doubling productivity. Costs you no extra cash to double productivity. Double your profits through sales. you need to borrow a load more money to fund the cash flow. Whereas if you do it through productivity and drive your profitability up, you grow without needing more cash and you build strength into the business and you multiply the value of the business really quickly. And so we're talking about that sort of... loneliness at the top and the fundamentals that go with that support system that you don't necessarily get. in that boardroom unless you invite somebody in, Annette, or unless you go out and find your tribe or find somebody else to then enable you to do that, to encourage you to actually let go of the nursery, you know, the apron strings to your team and let them do their stuff and to give you the confidence. That requires quite a a bit of bravery or courage is the word and vulnerability. It does. You know, people don't find what they're not looking for. No. And the truth is, I I've probably over 25 years, met a ⁓ thousand mid-sized business owners and nearly every one of them is surrounded by people who keep telling them that 5 % growth is good. It's not good. It's just not going bust. It's a zombie. Good is 35, 40, 50%. Exceptional is doubling revenue every year. Good is increasing by 50 % every year. 5 % growth, forgive me, you may be proud of it, your team may be proud of it, it's not good. We're talking zombie, aren't we? It's not much more than inflation, frankly. It's almost zombie territory. And what you need is just a few people who match your ambition. ⁓ your capability. You are a rare individual, of, you know, less than half a percent of all the people who ever founded a business are as good as you. ⁓ You are in the top half a percent. You are at the pinnacle of being an entrepreneur, but what you are not yet is an enterpriser. You need to shed all of those things, behaviors that go with being a great entrepreneur, a great problem solver, and just keep them as background skills and learn to be an enterpriser. Somebody who looks at big enterprise borrows things that really work and adapts them to the scale and size that you're at now to enable you to go beyond doing. And in order to do that, all of us need supporters. Yeah. And examples. need it. We do. So that we can see how it's been done and what's happened at the end. And they inspire us. Otherwise, why would we do that? We're going down an alley blind. It's really quite... We don't all want to be pioneers. We've got to be a follower. And I mean, I watched the tennis at the weekend and you saw Djokovic for the 10th, 12th, 15th time. failing to get that one extra grand slam to be an all-time record breaker. But you think about it, that guy has spent 15 years at the top of his game and never actually met a peer who is ahead of him until the last five years. And now it's a bunch of youngsters who've got more energy than he has, and he's just never going to meet somebody who helps him just get that. final fraction of a percent more that enables him to be that all-time world's greatest. We as mid-sized business owners are in exactly that situation because we never get to meet anybody who matches our ambition and capability. So we have to go out and create our own networking because there are, as you say, within this whole work environment, there only 13,000 people who have done it. And if you look at 13,000 people and the great number of millions upon millions upon millions of people who work, we're not likely to bump into them, are we? No, it's too. Look, I mean, if there's a thousand people, a thousand business leaders, there's you and one other who've reached that scale. But it's not the Holy Grail. mean, the Holy Grail has not been found yet. You can find a few of the other 13,000 people who've got to the same stage as you have. similar capability and similar ambition and when you meet them they will help you to redefine what you think is possible and help you match your personal definition of success. Yeah absolutely and so in terms of doing that for our audience we are looking to do something along those lines aren't we so actually invite people to a small environment with people of their own. tribe who've done it and the first step is here we are podcasting for you so that you can actually meet people and understand them but we are taking that into another environment obviously at stage. yes I mean listen I've had the very great fortune of building three great businesses total value today over 10 billion in global sales. Wow. but nobody wants yesterday's news, nobody wants yesterday's hero. Are you talking about yourself? Well, you know, who wants a has-been? I am today active in a number of mid-size scale-up companies on the board, active every day. And there's nothing I like more than meeting another mid-size scale-up enterpriser who is hungry to meet with others who've got the same problems. And I am happy to have a cup of coffee and for free connect them up with anybody else I know in their geography, a relevant type of business who could help them understand that what they're trying to do is absolutely possible and they should continue to believe. That's amazing. And that falls into your whole new way of thinking of enterprise-ation, is what you have cloned. And so, is something that you are inviting people in to do whatever form suits them, however they want to do it. You are happy to help guide, introduce into something that could be mentoring, peer to peer, NEDs or anything like that. Yeah, look, hands up. I'm guilty. I've bastardised the British language. I've created a couple of words that didn't exist before. I am humble enough to tell you that I would never have done the things that I never dreamed of doing but have if it wasn't for the people who mentored and helped me at every stage of my career. And if I can't help a few people believe in themselves and meet people who can help them to get to the next stage, I don't know what life's all about. Wow. Okay, so watch this space because we will start to introduce ways and people ways to do things and people who've done it for you so that we've actually you can listen, you can pitch up, you can have a coffee, you can come for lunch, whatever it whatever form that takes. This is the environment to feel safe in. And if you've got any questions, we welcome them because then we can address them in forthcoming episodes. I'm a lifelong learner and the only people I'm learning from are mid-sized business owners who solve problems I haven't yet solved. Brilliant, brilliant, love it. So yeah, we are now actually opening the floor up to you if you want to ask us any questions that we haven't covered yet in the episodes that we've done. Going forward, we hope we can help you. Yeah, that's the idea. Fantastic, thanks Tim.