Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher

Dave Kashen is on a mission to help people love their work life by eliminating ineffective meetings. Did you know there are over 3 billion meetings a year in the United States, and over half of them suck? This is why Dave co-founded Worklife Inc., a tech startup that helps maximize team productivity without the meeting! Meetings are a fabric of our working lives and they help with collaboration. That being said, when groups of people get together, it seems meetings become an ineffective experience and nothing substantial is achieved. So, why is that? Well, Dave set out to find the elements that make up an effective meeting, and then simplify the process further by implementing software to optimize it. Dave found several contributing factors to how a successful meeting occurs, breaking down the process in three stages: before the meeting, during the meeting, and after the meeting. One of the factors to a successful meeting was to create an agenda before the meeting takes place. This makes a huge difference because it serves as a clear road map for those who are attending the meeting. An agenda allows your staff to prepare for the meeting. It also opens up a collaborative conversation before the meeting occurs, as staff brain-storm for an ideal solution. Further, it clarifies to the team who needs to and doesn’t need to attend the meeting. On your agenda, it's important to have a list of topics as well as what you want the ideal outcome to be. This will help direct your staff towards a goal as oppose to just spit-balling it. During the meeting, one of the biggest problems is that each staff member ends up leaving the meeting with differing opinions on what the solution is to their problem or what the company's next big action step is. So, to solve this, it is key to come to a shared agreement between everyone present on what the solution or next action step will be for the company before the meeting is over. This means everyone will be leaving with a clear goal in mind. After the meeting, communication goes out to the relevant staff members who can help execute the plan and then it's just a matter of accountability. The good news is, Dave's software makes this entire process incredibly efficient and effective. This software allows staff to collaborate and to come up with creative solutions in real-time before the scheduled meeting begins. When they attend the meeting, they already have several solutions to draw from and all they have to do is optimize the solution and create action steps before leaving the meeting.   Interview Links: www.worklife.com More Resources: ScalingUpBusiness.com:  Learn about how growth coaching can help you and and your business see big results. Scaling Up Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Bill on YouTube: Short videos to keep you Scaling Up. Did you enjoy today's episode? If so then head over to iTunes and leave a review. It helps other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. __ Scaling Up 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 and I'm a certified Gazelles business coach.  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).

Nick Nanton is a four-time Emmy Award Winning Director, Producer, and Filmmaker. A master storyteller, Nick is recognized as one of the top thought-leaders in the business world, and is the author of StorySelling. Nick and I dive right into the art of storytelling and how to tell your story in a compelling and engaging way. A friend once told Nick that he has a unique skillset, as he is able to create media on a budget that looks like it came out of Hollywood; and that he should get out of the music industry and join the business world instead. Nick took his friend's advice and now ten years later, here he is today. So, how do you create your own personal story? First of all, most people take their own journey for granted. Why talk about that? It's boring. That couldn't be farther from the truth. If you tell your story well, it will position you as the only person in the world who can possibly solve your ideal clients' problems. Your story has to make sense or at least connect well with what you're currently doing. When it does, it builds trust. When it doesn't, it just seems weird and awkward. However, when you've told your story a thousand times, you might feel like everyone has heard it. Often, this is not the case. You need to keep re-telling your story as if it's the first time you've ever told it and it needs to keep making sense. When you tell a compelling story, the listener's brain acts differently and it begins to build a bond of trust with the storyteller. A good story means you have body chemistry on your side. It also means you're able to transport your listener into another atmosphere and make them feel like they were a part of your journey. How does all of this tie into running an effective business? It all comes down to trust. In order for somebody to give you their hard earned money, they need to be able to trust you. The more personal hooks you add into a conversation, the more likely the listener will feel like they have a lot of things in common with you. By telling a story, you're relating a piece of your life to others and this makes them feel more comfortable around you.   Interview Links: www.nicknanton.com www.celebritybrandingagency.com StorySelling by Nick Nanton More Resources: ScalingUpBusiness.com:  Learn about how growth coaching can help you and and your business see big results. Scaling Up Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Bill on YouTube: Short videos to keep you Scaling Up. Did you enjoy today's episode? If so then head over to iTunes and leave a review. It helps other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. __ Scaling Up 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 and I'm a certified Gazelles business coach.  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).

A Certified Gazelles Coach with quite a rich background, Jim Jubelirer helps leaders improve their business performance and personal satisfaction. He also speaks to a wide variety of audiences about leadership and business excellence. On this episode, Jim and I expand upon a topic the show has covered in the past and that's people! People seem to be the biggest challenge and resource for entrepreneurs and other business professionals. So, how can we get the right people on the bus? Through the use of Topgrading methods. Jim expands on how you can apply Topgrading with software tools and how you can effectively use the  assessments Topgrading provides to gain a different perspective. Jim also provides key tips on how to hire effectively. Topgrading tells us that only one in four people turn out to be a top performer, which means around 75% of people you hire don't move the needle in terms of culture and performance. Poor performance is one of the top complaints among growth companies. Companies are quite poor at hiring talent. In fact, after growing the company for nearly three years, one bad hire nearly destroyed an entrepreneur's entire business. One person! The cost of a bad hire is enormous. If it's a frontline worker, it can be as much as 4x their salary if you get it wrong. But what if it's a C-suite or an executive? It can be as much as 15x their salary. So, what if Jim told you that you could hire A-players and go through the hiring process much more effectively without even reading their resume? Well, it's true. You can stop reading resumes! You can now cast a wide net to attract a variety of different and high-quality talent. The biggest concern for entrepreneurs is that they don't want to sort through all the resumes after that net has been cast, but through the use of software like Hireology, you can now find the right candidate in much less time. There is a lot of testing and measuring to get it right in the beginning. But once you have it dialed in, it can give you a lot of power to assessing talent and saving you from those costly hiring mistakes. You can apply this method to any industry as well. What kind of assessment tools can a hiring manager or entrepreneur use that goes beyond their own personal opinion about that prospect? Jim wants you to be aware that this is a multi-step process, there isn't just 'one thing' you need to focus on. Jim personally likes to use the Caliper Profile assessment test, but there are others like DiSC and Predictive Index. The reality is we're just not good interviewers and the mistakes can be costly, so we need to put extra measures in place to ensure we get it right the very first time.   Interview Links: www.jubelirerresultsgroup.com www.topgrading.com www.hiremojo.com www.hireology.com www.calipercorp.com www.predictiveindex.com www.discprofile.com www.strengthsfinder.com More Resources: ScalingUpBusiness.com:  Learn about how growth coaching can help you and and your business see big results. Scaling Up Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Bill on YouTube: Short videos to keep you Scaling Up. Did you enjoy today's episode? If so then head over to iTunes and leave a review. It helps other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. __ Scaling Up 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 and I'm a certified Gazelles business coach.  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).    

Michael Synk is the owner and execution coach for In-Synk. He is also a Senior Certified Gazelles Coach with over 14 years of coaching experience. Michael and I talk today about brand promises, how to improve on them, and offer two client case studies to boot. Let's dive right in. Michael has been coaching Uniform Masters for the last year and a half. Unfortunately, it was only until two months ago that he and his client began to see brand promise. It has taken them quite some time to figure out the market and their core strengths. The company itself has been around for seven years and their operations have been great, but they've just been a little too shy in telling their company story. Although some time has passed, quite a bit of things have improved in the last year and a half. When Michael kept highlighting the company's key strengths, that's when he was able to see brand promise shine through. This is often a very different approach compared to the norm. Normally to achieve brand promise, you first look into the customer data and the first-hand customer experience. However, Michael began by digging into the customer experience from an operations point of view. He found some interesting points and discovered that competitors were having a difficult time keeping up with the quality of service Uniform Masters offered. Once equipped with this data, he took it to a marketing firm to help spin it in a customer friendly way. The second company Michael is working with is a food co-op startup. They are currently in their second year and are working with 16 farmers. The farmers focus on raising grass-fed meat and the co-op handles the processing and the sale of that meat. The client was a bit self-absorbed in their message, which was that their customers bought from them because they wanted to support local farmers. Michael wanted to put this to the test and so he asked 10 of their best customers about why they chose to buy from this co-op. The results? They were completely different than what the client originally thought, but you'll have to listen to the interview to discover what that is! Don't miss this portion of the interview as it is filled with great insights on how to leverage a company's strengths and advertise them to the market.   Interview Links: www.uniform-masters.com/ www.in-synk.com More Resources: ScalingUpBusiness.com:  Learn about how growth coaching can help you and and your business see big results. Scaling Up Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Bill on YouTube: Short videos to keep you Scaling Up. Did you enjoy today's episode? If so then head over to iTunes and leave a review. It helps other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. __ Scaling Up 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 and I'm a certified Gazelles business coach.  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).

Caryn Kopp is an award-winning CEO, best-selling author, and self-proclaimed Chief Door Opener at her company, Kopp Consulting. Did you hear that 40-second audio recording at the beginning of the show? What is wrong with that message? Well, for today's podcast episode, Caryn will shed some light as to how to never be that kind of sales opener. People are missing several components when they're trying to get into the right door. Most of the time, people are lacking one or more of these five key pillars. To give a quick overview, the five pillars are: The right target/sales message, the right answers for objections, the right door opener doing the work, which also includes the right door opening mindset, then the right execution followed by the right workflow by that right person. It boils down to hiring talent and using their strengths effectively for the position that needs to be filled. Although it may sound easy, this is a big blind spot for companies. If you hire a closer to be a door opener, this will often lead to disaster and you will find yourself having trouble scaling. Very few people are able to be both an opener and a closer at the same time. So, after you have the right people in place, how can you get into these doors? It takes a bit of digging. The biggest mistake companies often make is looking at their current A-list clients and asking them what they did right, but what you should focus on instead is why did your very best clients originally want to speak to you in the first place? Dig at this why and then see if there are parallels based off what your different clients are saying. When you get this feedback, you can take it to the market and attract new customers that otherwise wouldn't have known or even realized you offer x service. It's not always obvious to your customer what you offer, so being able to highlight specific things that your A-list clients loved about you is a great door opener.   Interview Links: www.koppconsultingusa.com/ Biz Dev Done Right by Caryn Kopp More Resources: ScalingUpBusiness.com:  Learn about how growth coaching can help you and and your business see big results. Scaling Up Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Bill on YouTube: Short videos to keep you Scaling Up. Did you enjoy today's episode? If so then head over to iTunes and leave a review. It helps other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. __ Scaling Up 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 and I'm a certified Gazelles business coach.  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).

David Hassell is a serial entrepreneur and founder of 15Five, a SaaS company focused on helping managers and CEOs get effective insights from their people. Having managers and high-level executives become more aware of certain aspects of their company, allows them to proactively address issues before they become problems, acknowledge successes, discover great ideas, and support their team's growth and development. When David was a young entrepreneur, he raised some capital to build his business, but shortly after, the dotcom crash happened and his capital quickly dried up. This forced him to reinvent his company during a market crisis. He could no longer offer competitive salary to his talent, so he got creative with the hiring process. Instead of finding emerging talent from amazing universities, he looked for the diamonds in the rough that perhaps had gaps in their resume or were only high-school graduates. As his company grew, his talent was given much more responsibility and autonomy than they ever had before. This allowed them to excel and grow, exponentially, within the company. Resumes don't always reflect how your talent will react in a real work scenario. What might look like a B or C team on paper, would actually become an A team in reality, just by the way the team engaged and communicated with one another. Fantastic A teams on paper don't always work well, or become difficult, when engaging with other talent, as they're used to being the lone wolf that hogs all the attention. What did companies do differently where they were able to accomplish their goals and objectives years down the line vs. the ones that couldn't? The thing David kept coming back to was that it all boiled down to the team. You obviously need clarity and clear objectives, but does the team have a good culture? Is there high engagement? What are the dynamics that create these things? These questions are how David got to where he is today, and it is what led him to create his company, 15Five.   Interview Links: www.15five.com More Resources: ScalingUpBusiness.com:  Learn about how growth coaching can help you and and your business see big results. Scaling Up Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Bill on YouTube: Short videos to keep you Scaling Up. Did you enjoy today's episode? If so then head over to iTunes and leave a review. It helps other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. __ Scaling Up 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 and I'm a certified Gazelles business coach.  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).

Kevin Daum is an award-winning and bestselling author of 5 books. He is a marketer, speaker, and columnist for Inc.com and Smart Business Magazine. On this episode, Kevin and I dive into one of his books, ROAR! Get Heard in the Sales and Marketing Jungle. What does ROAR mean and how is it useful? Kevin says the idea behind ROAR came from seeing so much noise in the marketing space and how advertisements and other marketing pieces would all just fall so flat. Everybody has a story to tell and most people simply do not care. However, with ROAR, Kevin addresses two of the above issues. The first one speaks to how you can tell your story in a compelling way. You may have fantastic ideas for the world, but the reality is the world is not about you. Boasting about how great you are will rarely generate good results. However, telling a great story has to start with empathy. What is the pain that you're solving? There are three core emotional motivators people will buy on: logic, greed, and fear. The most powerful of those three is fear. The weakest is logic. A perfect example of this is our current presidential election. How are the candidates selling? They are selling fear. To achieve massive growth, it's not about the customers you currently have; it's about the ideal customers that you want. When you've found the optimal customer that you're looking for, what is their pain that you have yet to address? If you're able to communicate that pain to them on the level of empathy, that becomes a magnet to them. Once you've gotten your ideal customer to realize they have a pain point and they have connected to it emotionally, the next step is to address that pain point objectively. What is the solution? When you present it objectively, it starts a conversation. Do not try to sell the solution at this point in the process, all the customer needs to realize is that there is a solution for their problem and that you have the answers to it. What does this mean for the end-goal sale? When the customer becomes aware that there is a solution, the sell becomes an easier conversation to handle. By trying to convince them off the bat that they need your service, and only your service, their guard is up and they are unlikely to pursue you further.   Interview Links: www.kevindaum.com More Resources: ScalingUpBusiness.com:  Learn about how growth coaching can help you and and your business see big results. Scaling Up Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Bill on YouTube: Short videos to keep you Scaling Up. Did you enjoy today's episode? If so then head over to iTunes and leave a review. It helps other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. __ Scaling Up 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 and I'm a certified Gazelles business coach.  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).

Keith Upkes has a financial CFO background and is a business growth coach for The Upkes Group as well as for Gazelles International Coaches. In this episode, Keith and I talk about creating an effective dashboard, as this is something many clients and companies struggle with. Keith believes dashboards are important for three specific reasons. Number one, it helps get raw data into the right hands. Clients often do not know their numbers and this is because they do not have the right data in front of them. Number two, it quickly summaries data that clients need. When clients have data in front of them, many of them don't know how to make sense of it, but dashboards help simplify this process significantly. Number three, it helps get the most relevant metrics into the clients' hands quickly after each accounting period. The client is able to quickly see what is relevant in their industry based on data collected by dashboards and give the relevant data to their leadership team. How can teams make dashboards effective? You are able to track metrics that are not only specific to your industry, but your company in real-time. For instance, when your company has goals and objectives they're looking to achieve, dashboards help make sure your company is on the right track with those goals. Also, when you may have different priories to target based on your industry, dashboards are able to effectively separate those goals for you and your team. With this in mind, it's important to note that your dashboards have to change over time. A mistake clients often make is that they set their dashboards to their goals, rely on it, but forget to update their goals after each quarter. This means that the dashboards and the data they produce could get thrown off course and that's how data and information discrepancies happen in your company. What are Keith's thoughts on keeping score on a handwritten white board vs. using technology such as a dashboard, to do the same thing? Keith doesn't particularly care how you measure your results, as long as you're making an active effort to measure them and you are using it to make a difference in your company. Some companies prefer using the old-fashioned whiteboard because it fits in with their company culture and business. Tech companies, for example, would prefer using dashboards’ services because the culture is much more tech inclined.   Interview Links: The Upkes Group's Website More Resources: ScalingUpBusiness.com:  Learn about how growth coaching can help you and and your business see big results. Scaling Up Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Bill on YouTube: Short videos to keep you Scaling Up. Did you enjoy today's episode? If so then head over to iTunes and leave a review. It helps other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. __ Scaling Up 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 and I'm a certified Gazelles business coach.  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).

Brian Scudamore is the Founder and CEO of 1-800-Got-Junk? and has been running the company since 1989. Since then, he has started several companies like Shack Shine, You Move Me, and Wow 1 Day Painting. Today, Brian and I discuss the process of how he comes up with big vision ideas and how he's able to get his team to execute them. After growing his company to a million dollars in 1997, Brian found himself depressed and comparing himself to other extremely successful people around him. He was a high school and university dropout and didn’t have a lot of money at the time. So he decided to stop the negative thinking and thought about what his company would’ve achieved without him.  What could the future feel and act like? Right then and there, Brian took out a piece of paper and started to write down his visions and his dreams for the company he had built. Brian calls this process the 'painted picture', because a picture says a thousand words and he put a thousand words on paper to create the vision for his company. The painted picture process is incredibly simple. It starts with the person being in an inspirational place. Then they just have to take out a piece of paper and write very specific and intentional language. Brian didn't write, 'I hope to be' or 'I want to be', he wrote, 'I will be'. He gave himself incredibly specific goals, in this particular case, a five year goal to achieve his big vision. After writing out the big idea, he added color to the picture. What would we feel like as a company, what would the culture be like? How would the brand be presented to the world?   What is your top-line revenue? How many people are on your team? How would your people describe the culture of your company when talking to a family member? What is the press saying about your business? Be as specific as possible: what would your local paper say about your company? What would your favorite magazine say? What do your people love about your vision and where the company is headed? How would a customer describe their experience with you? What would they say to their best friend? What accomplishment are you most proud of? What accomplishment are your people most proud of? What do you do better than anyone else on the planet? Describe your office environment and culture in detail. Describe your service area. Who are your customers and how do they feel? When he was finished, he was surprised by the results. As he re-read what he wrote down, Brian realized what he wrote was absolutely possible, so he shared it with his team. As the staff read his vision for the future, some became excited and 100% on board, but others decided it was best to leave as that did not match their ideal environment. When companies are often facing big shifts like this, they can experience huge turnovers by the team. While this is good in the long-run, it can be be difficult keeping up with demand on short staff and sometimes painful in the short-run. Brian believes it's best to come up with a vision about where you're going and then recruit the who - the people that will help figure out how to get there. However, the one thing a painted picture will not do or even tries to do, is say how to get there. The reason for this is that the CEO doesn't always know best. His team will sometimes have a better execution plan than he will. It also prevents the CEO or founder from getting cold feet when he realizes the 'real' work involved. It can be scary to plan accordingly, especially if you don't even have the current team in place for it.   Interview Links:Painted Picture Visualizationwww.o2ebrands.com 1-800 Got Junk WebsiteGood to Great by Jim Collins Brian on LinkedIn Twitter - @brianscudamore Facebook - facebook.com/bscudamore Instagram - brianscudamore   More Resources: ScalingUpBusiness.com:  Learn about how growth coaching can help you and and your business see big results. Scaling Up Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Bill on YouTube: Short videos to keep you Scaling Up. Did you enjoy today's episode? If so then head over to iTunes and leave a review. It helps other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. __ Scaling Up 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 and I'm a certified Gazelles business coach.  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).

Daniel Marcos is the CEO and co-founder of Gazelles Growth Institute as well as a certified coach of Gazelles International Coaches. Daniel has coached individuals all over the world and works with a wide range of businesses from the million-billion dollar range. Today, Daniel and I focus on the 4 key stages of growth in a business. Let's dive in. After being an entrepreneur for the last 16 years, Daniel has realized that the decisions you have to take in each growth stage are completely different and this is where CEOs seem to face the most trouble. CEOs often want to execute the same decision for each stage and they often encounter a substantial amount of pain points with this method along the way. If you want to grow your company, the first bottleneck is you, the leader. Companies need to evolve the leader from an entrepreneur to a CEO and turn their startup into a well-run organization. Daniel defines each stage by the quantity of employees on payroll instead of the amount of sales that are generated. His reasoning for this, he says, is that as the company gets larger, people find it more and more difficult to communicate throughout the organization. The first stage is a startup and everyone is wearing different hats in the company. The most important part during this stage is product development and understanding what it is you are selling and to whom you're selling the product to. Stage two is the small business. The company size ranges between 6-15 employees. The entrepreneur now has to be a leader. Once a leader, he/she has to do two very important things to keep this status – learn how to give directions to your team and delegate tasks. Daniel believes stage two is the hardest stage for the entrepreneur, because both your clients and employees expect more of you. Stage three means you're a leader of leaders. You have between 16-250 employees and now the most critical role is you building up team leaders. You have to develop talent and teach people how to lead others. The problem during stage three is communication, because communication gets broken as the chain of command goes further down. It's almost like you're playing the Telephone Game. At the end of the day, you have to respect the position of your leaders. As an entrepreneur, you get so used to fixing everything, but at this stage you need to give up some control and trust in the people you've trained. You have to begin to shine the spotlight on them instead of you. This is why most CEOs are stuck at stage three and are not able to move on to stage four. To get to stage four, you have to be humble and really let go. Your role is to have a great first layer of executives. If you have a great sales manager, for example, you will never have a sales problem. Though, as Daniel points out, we secretly don't want a great sales manager, because then we know we won't be needed anymore. What does stage four look like? The operation runs flawlessly without you. You leave for vacation and everything is absolutely fine when you come back. The entrepreneur, turned leader, turned leader of leaders - is now an innovator, change catalyst, and chief of culture in the organization. Your duty is to design a culture that's respected all through the organization and to change what's currently not working within the company.   Interview Links: Growth Institute Website More Resources: ScalingUpBusiness.com:  Learn about how growth coaching can help you and and your business see big results. Scaling Up Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Bill on YouTube: Short videos to keep you Scaling Up. Did you enjoy today's episode? If so then head over to iTunes and leave a review. It helps other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. __ Scaling Up 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 and I'm a certified Gazelles business coach.  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).