Latest / The Enterprisors / The Learner-Driver in the F1 Car
Transcript
- Tim Meadows-Smith: Welcome to the Enterprises. This week's episode, the learner driver in the F1 car. The founder who has crossed 10 million in revenue is not failing. They passed their test. They can drive. They're about to climb into a machine with 10 times the power, 10 times the consequence, and completely different physics. Their learner driver instincts will either be unlearned or they will do the damage. Tim, you use the metaphor of the flip as a learner driver climbing into an F1 one car. What do mean by that? Okay. So, ⁓ if anybody's not, most people have not been in a, in an F1 car, but there is a world of difference between the normal road car that you use to commute to work or go and do the shopping or go on the family holiday and a really powerful, highly engine beast. that most people when they get in will either stall or spin or do something drastic with. The two are a bit like running a small business and running a big business and being the leader of one of those requires you to do a flip. You need to completely change the way you think about how a business is run when you move from the family saloon to the Formula One car, which is the thing that's gonna take you from maybe having grown to about 10 million all the way up through 100 million to potentially two, three, 400 million. And is that drastic, is it? It really is that drastic. The way you think about running the business, the way you approach things, the way you behave, the way you think about your life and the things that you do. are entirely different from that ⁓ hands-on problem-solving ⁓ improviser that got you from nowhere to somewhere. And then you learned the art of delegating, but you're still right in the middle of it with everybody asking you for all of the questions when things get difficult and you being very hands-on and the organization being entirely dependent on you. And then to drive this new high performance activity from 10 million up to through the mid-size to large requires an entirely different way of thinking and being. Entirely different way of driving. So you say, and you've said repeatedly that people who get to this stage of 10 million pounds revenue haven't failed. They are genuinely good. Yeah, absolutely. Look, absolutely brilliant. at the things that start from nothing and get to something. But in, again, taking a transport analogy, where that journey from deciding to start, starting and getting to 10 million is the equivalent of buying a plane ticket, getting on the plane and taxiing to the end of the runway, ready for takeoff. In order for you to take off, in order for that plane to take off, you have to flip. You have to change the way you do things. Somebody capable of flying the plane is not the same person who could taxi around the airport going nowhere. Fair enough. So, but the fact is that you've taxied to the end of the airport, at the end of the runway, and you are genuinely good ⁓ at that because a lot of people can't even do that. Absolutely. But the flip, you mentioned the flip, we've mentioned it several times. You have trademarked that, haven't you? I have. Absolutely. And so... When someone hears the phrase, which we're going to be using, what does it mean? What's your definition of a flip? Not necessarily in Formula One, but in business. Okay. So in business terms, the flip is a change of activity from being an entrepreneur, an improviser, to being on the first rung of the ladder towards becoming an enterprise. you have to turn yourself from being a founder into a leader, from being an entrepreneur into an enterpriser. And the first thing that has to change is the method of leading. So most of us understand the age old command and control method of leading, which is the sort of thing that you read in your history books with ancient ⁓ battles and warriors where the person that usually a man who leads the activity is giving direct orders to people he can see and shout at. Back in Napoleonic times, they found that wars were lost because the leader couldn't get messages to the people at the battlefront fast enough. ⁓ for the soldiers not to effectively commit suicide by continuing to do what they've been told to do instead of adjusting and adapting to do something effective in the circumstances. They invented command and control, sorry, mission control where the soldiers at the front knew what the objective was and were given the authority to adapt their behavior to the circumstances to achieve the objective. So command and control is where the person at the head is telling everybody what to do and giving them quite clear instructions, hopefully clear. Mission control is where everybody agrees on what the objective is and what the strategy is and how to get there, but is given the authority to adapt so that they can give of their best and can use their ⁓ skill and experience to deliver the best outcome, even though the leader is not there to make any decisions when circumstances change. So the flip then is not necessarily a skill to acquire, but it's a decision to be made, is it? It's both. It's both. It's a decision. It's a decision to be made and it's a really tough emotional decision for a founder to decide to become a leader and a developer of leaders within their organization so that the organization can grow and you can get the full value from your payroll. Why is it so difficult? When people are commanding and controlling a business as big as 10 million, they're usually getting only a fraction of the value of the time and skill and experience that they're paying for. When they make the flip and move to a mission control system ⁓ with the tools that go with it, and those include an operational business plan, then they start to get the full value of the people whose wages and salaries they're paying. Interesting. And so what does a founders week look like before the flip? And then what does it look like? after they've made the flip? Well, generally, mean, a flip suggests like a gymnastics flip that it happens in seconds. In the case of business, it takes a bit of getting used to and the maneuver might take a few weeks or months rather than an instant. The decision if you are disciplined and make it stick is an instant, but the experience and behavior takes much longer. But essentially, in a command and control structure, you're the go-to person that everybody comes to when they've got a problem. And as soon as a problem arises, generally speaking in a command and control structure, people don't think, what can I do about this? Can I come up with a solution? They think, I'm going to go straight to the leader and ask for some direction. and the leader becomes totally overwhelmed with a queued up series of problems to solve, not enough time in the day to solve them, feeling under intense pressure because there are people waiting for ⁓ orders or deliveries or wanting money back or a whole raft of issues that have to be dealt with that are backed up and causing stress and preventing the leader. from getting on with anything more creative or anything else. Once mission control takes place and the tools that go around it, people only come to the leader with, I've got this problem, here's my proposed solution, are you all right with that or have you got a better idea? Then you've got loads of time to firstly appreciate this ⁓ team member who's taking an initiative. And secondly, to think about whether there isn't a better way than just coming up with something that works to get people off your back. It's a much calmer, more considered, higher quality process. Absolutely. So the decision to flip can be made in an instant. The skill doing the flipping takes time. And so how does somebody go make that transition from being the control and command to actually being able to, I was going to say control, being able to look after a mission control which operates properly. Well, firstly, most founders have never seen mission control operating and don't know what good looks like. So they've probably read about it or been coached into and encouraged to make that decision. The next thing that has to happen is that that leader has to develop themselves in understanding the leadership skills that are necessary and then putting them into practice and then getting good at them and making a change that nobody in the organization has seen work anywhere else, which is why we constantly have these ceilings that stop the progress and growth of a small business. And the leader has to constantly reinvent themselves to be ready for the next stage that allows the organization to grow and the profits to grow and the sales to grow. all of those things we can revisit in other episodes to understand what looks good like and to how to develop a leadership skill we can come back to in other episodes, in future episodes. Exactly that. And a part of this is taking the decision to no longer allow yourself to be the smartest person in the room. Generally speaking, as people grow from half a million through a million, three, five, and 10 million, they've hired people that they delegate to who are quite easy to manage, and the leader is able to do each of their jobs probably better than the people he hired or she hired. at the time. And so they're surrounded by people who are ⁓ less able than the leader, but, the leader is the smartest person in the room. In order for you to go from 10 million to 20 million, you need to find a way of being the least smart person in the room for each of the specialist disciplines that you've employed. A la Henry Ford. need to hire people better than you in that area. not necessarily at leading, but that's something that over time you should be encouraging each of the people who produce things, who sell things, who market things, who analyze things. They should be ⁓ smarter than you at that and become leaders in their own right so that they develop a team of people underneath them. And that's what enables the organization to grow and to become more profitable. and to become more productive. And that's the difference, isn't it, between a leader and a manager? Indeed. Yeah, I mean, we gave from being the operative to the supervisor, to the manager, to the director, to the leader, and a developer of other leaders. And being a leader, as we've seen, is absolutely a skill that needs to be learned and practiced. It is. Being a leader in these terms means creating an environment where everybody else and therefore the organization can thrive. So if I am a founder who's not sure how to lead and how to make the flip. Where do I go and how do I start the process? Well, candidly, most founders who are on that three, five, seven, 10 million journey already think they're great leaders. They're mistaken. You're not born with leadership skills. They have to be learned and developed. And generally speaking, the people who cut through this fastest are people who have good mentors and coaches, either free or paid for, who have already done the job and been through the stage of growth that you hope to go to in their own life experience and can help you to understand what needs to happen next in order for you to realize your aspirations of ⁓ growth in scale and in competency and effectiveness and productivity and profitability. Brilliant. Thank you. Is there anything else I need to, we need to include in this episode? Look, only the age old advice for all business founders, which is to remain humble, remain curious and understand that every day is a school day. We learn more every day and if we stop learning and we stop investing in ourselves because we're too busy investing in our business, the business will stop growing. You can't grow a business faster than you grow yourself and your leadership. Brilliant. Thank you very much, Tim. Thanks for that one. Thank you.