Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher 079: Robert Glazer - Is Your Growth Holistic Enough?
How can you develop yourself and your team more holistically than just job training? In the beginning of the company there’s a lot of focus on job programs to help staff learn how to do their job, but what about after, when you have those systems in place? Today’s guest will show you how!
Robert Glazer is the Founder and Managing Director of Acceleration Partners as well as the Founder and Chairman of BrandCycle. He is a serial entrepreneur with a proven track record of success. On today’s show, Robert discusses different ways you can develop your team (and yourself) beyond simple job training.
Robert was always an entrepreneur and as he was getting comfortable with risk, he was also finding ways to minimize it. Through this, he started to align himself around how to make processes better and how he could also make himself and others better.
After running a high-performance company, he came to notice that you end up breaking a lot of people along the way. When you’re growing 30-40% a year, most people simply cannot keep up with that. Robert was finding issues where his team was great, at first, but he kept having to shift them out of positions as the company grew bigger and bigger. How could he keep and retain his people no matter what the company’s growth looks like? Robert was determined to break the cycle.
One of Bill’s values today is ‘Never Finished,’ which means that it’s important for him and his staff to always be growing and evolving. If companies want to scale up, they have to develop themselves and their leadership team along the way, because strategies and tactics will only get you so far and you will plateau.
People want to talk to Robert about their product, but Robert is more interested in the business of the business and the business of people. In fact, every business has two parts to it: the product and the business of the business. Many founders love working on their product, but completely ignore the business side of things and get overwhelmed by the growth.
As the founder, leading based on the company’s level of growth can be very tricky. You start off small and are visible to everybody, but as you grow, you have to begin putting new leaders in place, so that you can become a different kind of leader within your company. It’s difficult for many founders because their management/influence styles have to adapt rather quickly and that isn’t always easy.
When you focus on people not just in their job role but help them holistically develop themselves that they can apply it to their professional and personal life, you get a more engaged and dedicated workforce. However, with that being said, that can’t happen if the founder doesn’t lead the charge and work on improving him or herself first.
Interview Links:
The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz
The Miracle Morning, by Hal Elrod
Resources:
Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops.
TWEETABLES:
“One of our values today is ‘Never Finished.’ Always be growing and evolving until you die.”
“Every business has 2 businesses: the product and the business. A lot of founders don’t like the ‘business’ part.”
“You’ve got to be a different kind of leader and influencing differently than you do in the beginning.”
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Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with a Gazelles.
We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).