1211 - Navigating the 'White Water' Stages of Business with Scale Architects’ Scott Ritzheimer

May 31, 2022

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In this episode of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur, your host Josh Elledge speaks to the CEO of Scale Architects, Scott Ritzheimer.

Scale Architects helps entrepreneurial companies find the right coaches for where they are in their business growth. Beyond that, they train their coaches to understand how what stages they work best at. This means Scale Architects matchmakes their clients and coaches so that they have the best people providing the right help at the right time.

Scale Architects have seven formal stages of business development that they follow. Stage one, naturally, is ‘early struggle.’ Every business, no matter how successful, started small and struggled in the beginning at times. As a business grows and overcomes these challenges, they move into the next stage: ‘ organic fun.’ Most entrepreneurs would agree that this stage of experimentation and scaling is exciting because it’s all about getting yourself out there. Delivering quality, again and again, leads into the next stage, ‘white water’ complexity. Suddenly, all the go-to levers you might have used in the past don’t work anymore. Now you have to strategize solutions that don’t affect your profitability. You can’t outsell your way through this complexity, Scott shares. You have to take a step back and look at how to actually address the issues behind that complexity; this comes with systems and processes.

You can’t tackle a systemic problem from the front end. Mistakes and systemic failure happen where the decisions are made. It could be senior leadership or an executive team, but either way, your decision-making has to match your execution. The truth is, when you’re in this stage, even the most senior executive, needs the systems and processes just as much as anyone else (maybe even more.) But what do you do during the ‘white water’ stage? You have to reduce complexity and enjoy the ‘fun’ stage, or you can do the systemic work to scale and reach predictable success. Revenue goes up during this difficult stage, but systemic failure begins to occur chronically. You might lose valued clients or talent; there is no one event that triggers this stage, but many small failures of the system that build up as complexity grows.

You have to bring others into the decision-making process during this stage. Scale Architects works with businesses at a team level to help get them through the white ‘white water’ stage of growth to help launch businesses into the final stage later on, ‘predictable success.’

Want to learn more? Check out Scale Architects’ website at https://www.scalearchitects.com/.

Check out Scale Architects’ free book Predictable Success at https://www.scalearchitects.com/free-book/.

Check out Scale Architects at https://www.linkedin.com/company/scalearchitects/.

Check out Scott Ritzheimer on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-ritzheimer/.

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