315: Richard Shaull — The Three Key Roles of a CEO

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. Hey everybody, it's Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm here once again with a great guest to talk to you about everything to do with Scaling up and your leadership and what it takes to grow the business. Our guest today, we'll get into that in just a second. Our show comes to you every week. Usually on Wednesdays we drop, we'll drop some extra episodes sometimes. But for five years we've been ringing new shows every week now on something to do with scaling the company and leadership. Lessons from gurus, authors, experts in the world of business growth, as well as CEOs about their journey, their experiences along the way. So you can find all those episodes and more@scalingcoach.com or wherever you're getting this right now. So iTunes, YouTube, Stitcher, Spotify, LinkedIn, Facebook, I don't know where you got it, like it, subscribe to it. If we can help you find a coach or some resource in your area, love to do that. You'll find all that and more@scalingcoach.com all right, so we're getting into it now with Richard Shaw. Richard is a, he's does very similar work. He is co founder of a company called Unleashed that does work with helping get people unleashed, get CEOs, business leaders unleashed and focus on what they think is really the core job of the CEO. We're going to talk more about that. Richard, welcome to the show.

Honored to be here, Bill.

So we've kind of teed up the topic a little bit and that kind of thing. I think it'd be great to give people your background as a CEO. What did you do before you got into this? What was the epiphany? What was the moment? Tell us the long version of that story.

The long version starts back when I Was a baby. And no, I'm just kidding. We don't go quite that far back. But I do remember a pivotal moment for me when I literally walked through my, my apartment door. I was in my first year of marriage, closed the door to my office and went to the corner curled up in a fetal position and literally cried out to God for help. At the time, I was running two companies, two service based businesses, both of which I had started. And in my naivety I thought that one business was good, so two was better and so started the second one.

More is better, right?

Investor money in.

More is always better.

Investor money in. Yeah, we, we had basically taken millions of dollars and poured it into kind of growing real estate market. And again, in my kind of hubris as an entrepreneur, I'd read a couple books on real estate and found a partner who was skilled and experienced in the area and was like, we're going to do real estate development and this high appreciation rebound market after the 2008 crash. At the same time, I was running a financial services and wealth management firm and literally that business almost killed me. I tell people we got defrauded by the state government. We got sued. We had partners who literally stole money from the company. We had project managers who literally walked off of, you know, projects mid project, leaving them just the workers like a bandit. Didn't even know what to do on the job. People are just sitting around. We were bleeding money left and right and our investors were literally threatening to pull out funding and also potentially sue us as well.

What kinds of projects were you doing?

Primarily real estate development and rehabilitation. So we were taking existing multifamily commercial properties and rehabilitating those and increasing the value and then either selling them as turnkey properties or filling them ourselves and buying and holding some of the best.

So you're doing like apartment complexes or condos and rehabbing them and.

Yeah, correct, got it. Yep, yep. And so we had no idea the waters we were truly swimming in and the level of, you know, the shark infested waters that we, we had found ourselves in. But it's really interesting when I look back on that because the, the fatal flaw, right. When I look back on that moment and the learning lessons from it, the fatal flaw was my leadership, which I know is what you guys talk about over and over and over here at Scaling up, right? We had a sound business model. We were actually externally what people thought were very successful. Like we won some awards and you know, people were kind of recognizing us. We were building things, but we were A mess. And I remember even talking to you, Bill, about some similar experiences you had with a couple of businesses you were running, where everybody externally thought you were doing great, but internally it was chaos. And that was definitely the truth for me. And so a couple discoveries from that that I made was one, everything rises and falls on leadership, and I wasn't leading well. I was an entrepreneur. I had ideas. I had tons of confidence and ambition and aspiration. But at a certain point, that drive failed me, and I had to learn to become a much better leader. It was not hustle and grind was what got me here, I like to say, would not get me there. Right? So the hustle and grind that got me to kind of the current place was not what was actually going to take me to where I wanted to go in entrepreneurship and business. And then the second thing that, you.

Know, hang on one second, we'll go into that second thing, but use two buzzwords, right? Which I think are misleading and dangerous. Hustle and grind. And I mean, there's some respect for getting out there and doing something and getting started and throwing your weight into it, but. But we lose our perspective and we hear it thrown out like hustle and grind. And we get this notion of, I'm just going to work 24 7. I'm going to pour my heart and soul into this thing at the expense of my health, my relationship, my family, whatever, my spirituality, every other kind of thing. And then hustle and grind becomes this badge of honor of being a bad leader. I'm just going to work too hard and not actually having fun. And we have a motto around here, around enjoying the ride, like having time for play. And that there's actually value in all that other stuff you do. There's value in having a healthy family and relationship. There's value in having some free time, some play, some other interests. Like, we get great ideas from that. So I love when terms like hustle and grind come up because they're major catch points. And then you're going to speak to that as well. I just thought I'd hit the pause before you go on to point number two.

There's 100%. And I think one of the things I love to say is that my title was CEO, but my actual role was chief Everything Officer. That comes back to, I didn't know how to truly lead and empower people. I was overseeing everything. I was the nucleus at the center of the atom. I was the sun at the center of the solar system. Everything orbited around me in the business. And I think what you just said is so key, which is that a lot of entrepreneurs take it as a badge of pride that they can outwork everyone around them. But at a certain point, the amount of production that you produce is no longer the metric of success. And you could make the argument that it never was. But what you can produce individually by hustling and grinding, so to speak, you have to change your metrics of success. From what can I produce to who can I empower. The people that can actually do far more and far better than you within your company. And so again, I totally agree with what you shared on the hustle and grind mentality so important to speak to the second learning lesson. I just realized something inherently about myself that I would never have seen apart from mentors and coaches in my world at that time. And that was that despite my high optimism, I can do anything mindset as an entrepreneur. I had glaring weaknesses, glaring weaknesses that I didn't want to admit. I wasn't good at managing finances and I was do, I was managing the finances for our business. I was terrible. I was not a good manager right from a standpoint of process management, holding people accountable, you know, the day to day operations of the company. I was really, really poor at the, at these things at scale and it was why a lot of things fell apart. Yeah. And so that realization really led me to a discovery that I didn't have to do everything by myself. I didn't have to operate as this lone wolf over entrepreneur that had a bunch of helpers. I could actually become a leader and own my strengths, but also own my weaknesses and surround myself with a team of people who had strengths where I was weak. And that was, I think, a big, you know, big paradigm shift for me during that time. And thankfully we were able to turn that company around I think in part because of those paradigm shifts, turn that company around, bring it profitably back into the black, actually sold that company because I never should have been in real estate to my partner at the time and moved on to something that was far more fulfilling and more aligned with my skill sets at the time.

Yeah, it's really great that you did that. And we're going to talk about what those skill sets are and that kind of thing. But maybe you could share with us some examples or stories of the companies that you've worked with where they struggle with letting go of control, where they struggle with empowering other people.

Yeah, I'll give you a great example. So I know a CEO right now who literally just a couple Months ago, received an email from his second in command. And essentially the email was an ultimatum. And the ultimatum essentially said, hey, you either step down as CEO or I'm leaving. I'm putting in my resignation in. In like, seven days. Yeah. And, you know, I got, I got. I became aware of that ultimatum in that situation. It was fascinating as we dug into the root issues, because at the root, there was all sorts of dysfunction and dysfunction, you know, not all of it the CEO was 100% responsible for. But the root of it came down to the guy was just a control freak, right? Just an absolute control freak. And I find this to be so common among entrepreneurs where, you know, this guy, it was his baby, right? He built it from the ground up, but he had become its greatest bottleneck. And it was apparent to everybody except him, right? He was. He was shooting from the hip, making decisions, cutting the legs out from under his leaders constantly and not even realizing how. His words were like damaging daggers to the hearts of people around him. What he interpreted as feedback felt like constant warfare and challenge to the people who were supposedly empowered to actually own their roles. And so I know it's a vulnerable story, and I want to be careful to protect anonymity, but I see that trend and pattern so often, and it may not be as extreme. You might never receive the ultimatum email, but I think it embodies this core control problem that a lot of entrepreneurs have. And for them, it manifests as them feeling like, oh, I have to play chief everything officer. I can never trust other people. You know, if I put something in somebody's lap, it always comes back to me. But I feel like 80% of the time when you dig to the root comes back to control, like, there are absolutely people issues and process issues that have to get solved. But if you don't solve the leadership issue, you don't solve the control issue. Some of the other issues are really, really difficult to solve because they just. They multiply like rabbits.

You know, you might as far listeners, viewers, you might say to yourself, I'm not a control freak. But I promise you, we all are to varying degrees, a control freak in some area or another, right? There's always something that we hold on a little tightly to. And if you really like, we're creating a worldwide movement, not just an organization you'd have to let go somewhere and almost everywhere, right? The leaders of really global organizations only have control of a few things, and everything else is just kind of happening and working together. And we're going to get into what that Takes in some of your lessons, Talk to us, then maybe share another story about what happens, what it looked like when one of the companies you've worked with has kind of seen that and they let go and what their role ended up being.

Yeah. So I always like to refer to this as the light bulb moment. And I know a lot of people have used that phrase, but for me, the light bulb moment is when an entrepreneur realizes that the company doesn't need an entrepreneur, so to speak, anymore. It needs a CEO. And for me, those two things are very different. Now, entrepreneurs can make great CEOs. So I want to be clear about that, because a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs question, should I even be the CEO? Should I exit? Should I sell? Not necessarily. That might be the right route for some in the short term or long term. But entrepreneurs can make great CEOs in many cases. Right? But you have to realize that the skill set, the way that you did things in the beginning, is very different than how you have to do things moving forward. You have to change, you have to transform. You have to make the shift from entrepreneur to CEO. And, Bill, this even ties back to a conversation you and I had, I think, on our podcast, where you talked about, when you're a parent, you exert a lot of control in the early stages of parenting. Why? Because you don't want your kid to run out into the road and get hit by a car. You don't want them to put their hand on the stove and get burned. But as they grow, if you continue to exert that level of control, they will resent you. You will break relationship and trust with them, and good luck getting them back when they're older. And I think the same is true in entrepreneurship. When an entrepreneur truly realizes that I have to actually change my identity, my identity can't anymore be that the business is my baby and the business is built around me, and I get my value from being the superhero who saves everything and shows up and catches all the balls when they drop and has all the good ideas. When the entrepreneur has not just the mindset shift, but the identity shift, that now I'm actually ascending to become a leader and empower of other people. Somebody who goes into the future and creates vision for a company and then brings it back before it ever gets executed to a team they can trust. When they make that identity shift from entrepreneur to CEO, I think it's just. It's just pivotal. And to use a specific example, I think of a client. His name's Rick. That's funny. It's same, same core name. His full name is Richard. And I think of Rick. And when we first initially started working with him, they're, you know, doing a couple million in revenue, but they have an incredibly innovative product. And Rick engineered this thing from the ground up. He's got all sorts of degrees. He's way smarter than I am. Maybe too smart in the sense that, I mean, this guy was literally waking up in the morning at like 4 in the morning and going to bed at like 1 or 2 in the morning and then waking up and doing it all over again, getting a couple hours of sleep a night. Right. And honestly, when I first started working with him, I kind of thought he was a little crazy. Like he was maybe on the Einstein scale of smart, where like, you know, hair is flying out and you're Elon Musk staying up through the middle of the night engineering things that nobody else even understands. And I remember with him, one of the key turning points for him was actually going to his team and vulnerably, for the first time, talking and sharing about where he was at, about how much he was working. Like, even his staff didn't even fully see it and understand it. Sharing the vision, but also vulnerably sharing his weaknesses and the areas he wasn't good at. To see from that conversation, within six months, he literally had a COO we were able to raise up from within the ranks who was fully qualified, who took over the entire management of the day to day forum. He had a medical practice director who, I can't remember if we elevated them from within or we actually externally recruited them. I think we may have recruited them, but they came in and they were fully aligned with the technology and the philosophy he had that he thought nobody else could get but him. Right. And then to literally just see probably somebody who was sitting in, gosh, 15 seats within their org chart, end up sitting in two within six months was just absolutely transformational. And so now Rick is spending more time with his family, Right? He's spending more time doing the things he actually loves and is great at within his business. Right. He has a team in place that he can trust. He's far more fulfilled, he's sleeping better, his health is better, his marriage is better, and he's having a whole lot more fun. I mean, that, to me, is what being, as we like to say, unleashed is all about. So that's an example, I think, of that light bulb moment that we talk about and how it can have a huge impact on your business.

Yeah. You know, I've seen that happen a whole bunch of times in companies. We coach and, and observe and have trained in some capacity. But I'll see a CEO try to Superman it either through a crisis or as a general way being or after an acquisition or whatever. And they'll try to operate on two to four hours of sleep a night, like all the time. Right. Not, not like the exception for a particular crisis, but like continuously and then work. And I've seen like very, very large companies with, in fact I had 1000 employees and the CEO would send somebody an email at 3 in the morning because he's taken a red eye or he's just up all night and he's like, I'd like you to have this ready in the morning for the meeting. It was going to be like at 9:15. And so that person wakes up and unfortunately checks their email at like 6 in the morning and then proceeds to have a shitty day because they just got a huge project dumped in their lap, a surprise of something. They had to be ready or face embarrassment by 9:15. That's awful. Right. Like that's just setting your people up for failure and that's like doing everything by instinct and everything reaction and thinking, well, you know, it's just terrible. And, and that that particular CEO ultimately failed and, and the company was sold successfully, but not, it didn't help them, wasn't a personal win for them. And I've seen variations on that happen a couple times and then sometimes other things will, will catch them up. Right. They try to do that like Chief Everything Officer. Right. So talk to us about then. What are the appropriate roles that you say for the CEO? What's my job as CEO?

Yeah. And just to add context to that, I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs who at the core don't even understand what a CEO does. And this could be because a. There's a lot of varying definitions out there for what a CEO is and what a CEO does for sure. Right?

Absolutely.

I think another reason is a lot of specifically an entrepreneur company is a lot of entrepreneurs did not come out of corporate. They did not come out of a, at least a healthy functional environment where they saw that role at its best. And so they really have just never had anyone modeled away. So result, they end up with a title at the end of their email signature and no idea what they really do other than just try to hold everything together. Right. And keep all the wheels on the bus and keep everybody happy. Yeah. So after a lot of conversations, you know, we we literally went and we surveyed successful CEOs. We've had tons of podcast interviews like this where we've asked what are the most impactful things you do? Right. What are the things that you absolutely essentially must do that you really can't, you can't delegate these things and still consider yourself the captain of the ship. Right. It comes down to three key roles, right? So we break CEO down into three key roles. And you can say it this way, it's simply vision, culture and growth. Or another way to say it. We like to say Chief Vision Officer, Chief Culture Officer and Chief Growth Officer.

Let me just reinforce them. Vision, right? The future of the company, what it looks like. We talk about vivid vision. You'll share some other things. Culture, how it operates, what it feels like, what it looks like, smells like, sounds like. Right? The rituals and traditions. And then growth. How are we growing? Right, Growth. Growth is the future. Where it's coming from, where it's going to, not operating here and now. Right?

Yeah, 100%.

Just adding a little reinforcement. Definition go into each of them.

Well, I know you love analogies and stories too, so I'll use an analogy, Bill, real quick to demonstrate this because an old mentor of mine used to tell me the role of a leader is if you imagine a train that's trying to get to a destination, the role of the leader is to a get clear on the destination, the magnificent destination, I think, as Tony Robbins calls it, that's a vision. Where are we going? Where are we going as a company? Where are we headed? Right. The second rule that we just talked about, right, which is culture, is actually what does it feel like on the train? What's the culture of the train? What's the carpet like? What's the experience like for the people riding in the train on the way to the destination? Right. And then the third one, growth, is the tracks, right? And there's short term tracks, which is keeping the train moving forward, and then there's long term tracks which is building back from the destination so the two meet in the middle. And I think that when you think about it that way, that's really what a CEO does, right? They, they, they, they clarify and set the destination and keep the organization with their internal compass and Northstar headed in that direction. They make sure that the train car, the people actually love the experience, don't want to jump ship, and they're cohesively all working together to get the train there. And then they're laying tracks, they're making sure that the business can actually Move forward smoothly across those tracks to get to the destination as quickly as possible. And so to break those down a little bit more in detail. What is vision? Let's just talk about vision for a second. Bill, I'm just curious because I feel like vision is one of those ethereal things that you talk about at a Tony Robbins seminar. And a lot of times leaders go, oh yeah, I know, I need to have a vision. I need to have a vision statement, I guess. Bill, I'm curious real quick. How do you define vision? How would you define what is vision?

Well, there's a couple things that matter more to us and that I found helpful. The first one is the longest term kind of goal that you're heading for your North Star, your mountaintop, like whatever it is, Right. And that tends to be the BHAG, and that's usually 10 years or better. I actually created a 30 year BHAG for myself because I wanted to think about this as like my last job, my last business. And so I wanted to help. What did I want to do before I retired was to help 5 million business leaders. So that's a particular. That's an aspect of vision. It's not very rich, but it's like, okay, 5 million. Somehow I got to that. And then there's an interim thing that I do personally and with a lot of the companies we work with, and that's a vivid vision. And that's a Jim Collins term for something that's three or five years out in the future. And we'll pick a year and then we'll keep updating that continually. But that's a very rich picture that we try to create. It's not mired in the here and now. It's definitely a couple years out. But like five years out is not a bad place to be. My current vivid vision is around 2025, which is a three year kind of a thing. And it's like a milestone, you know, a five year mark. But for that one, I want to describe like a rich picture of who we work with and what we do and what it feels like and what the team looks like and what our ways of working are and how people see us in the world and like, you know, all of that kind of thing. It's a very vivid picture. It includes pictures and rich descriptions. There's even notes about the revenue and things like that that we're going to. I don't know exactly how I'm getting there. I have some ideas. Right. But anyway, there's the vision. Right.

You did such a good job breaking that down. And that was the reason why I asked is because I think for a lot of leaders, vision, when we say chief vision Officer, they're like, oh, great, I need to go on a retreat in the mountains. Well, maybe, but. But truth be told, this doesn't have to be rocket science, right? As a leader, you need to figure out where is your company ultimately going, typically defined by that number one big BHAG goal, which is a Jim Collins term, right? Big hairy, audacious goal. What is that 10 to maybe 30 year target that you're like, hey, this is the number one goal of the organization that we're all rowing towards. That's number one. That's that destination. I think another thing you have to get really clear on is what do we need to do in the next couple years? What does it look like, feel like, smell like? As you said to be here, how are we perceived in the marketplace? What new products and services are we releasing? That's something that a CEO needs to spend time on. They need to spend time there, thinking, working on the business, not in it. Because ultimately, CEO, that's what you get paid to do. Yeah, that's what you get paid to do. And I think to the extent most CEOs could even just master those two things, they would be so far up the road from many of their competitors when it comes to playing that Chief Vision officer. And then of course, you have to do a good job communicating it consistently because vision leaks. So it's not just about do you have a vision, it's about is it living in the hearts of your people day by day, Are they inspired by that? Are they motivated by it? Are they making decisions with that as the lens that they're looking through. And I think that's part of the leader's job is figuring out how to consistently, as I say, iv drip that vision to your people on an ongoing basis.

So Pat Lencioni has said a few times, listen, when your team can do like an amusing caricature of you, like an impression of you delivering the company vision and values and things like that, you're probably starting to talk about it enough like it should be kind of amusing, the broken record that you are about a few little things that you say more and more and more. And, and I think that starts even early on. Like we think, oh, that'll be fine if I'm a multi billion dollar company. But part of the way you become a multi billion dollar company is by focusing on those key messages and then Getting out of people's way.

So good. So good. You almost need to obsess about. It's not about actually more. It's about obsessing more about the few things that you communicate.

Right, right.

Because. Right. As leaders, by the time we're sick of it, people are just starting to get it.

Yeah. So if your job is the vision, the culture, and the growth, what is holding you back? What's got you leashed?

So I think there's a couple things. One is what I call the four flaws of the entrepreneurial personality type, the entrepreneurial archetype. And this is specifically calibrated to entrepreneurial people. But I think it's the conversation nobody wants to have and no entrepreneur wants to admit to. Right. And you already touched on a few of them earlier. Right. It's impulsive, impatient, inconsistent. And when an entrepreneur. And the last one. Sorry, insecure. When an entrepreneur finally realizes that they are struggling with at least a few of these four flaws.

Yeah. Impulsive, impatient, insecure and inconsistent. Inconsistent. Yeah.

Inconsistent, impulsive, impatient, insecure and consistent. TM no, I'm just kidding. When you think about those four flaws.

Well, they're all about I. Right.

Assess. Right. They're all about I. If you can honestly assess where you are on the four flaws, the four character flaws of the entrepreneur, you are, you're taking the first step on the path to freedom. Right. Because I can't remember who said this, but you cannot change what you will not admit. And, and a lot of entrepreneurs don't want to admit it. And so this is the conversation I, I, I hesitate to have with entrepreneurs, but it's always transformational when they accept it is, is, is. It comes back to that moment for me as an entrepreneur where I was actually confronted with my weaknesses and my flaws, and I had to choose, am I going to ignore that and run from that and pretend like that doesn't exist and put a, put a happy face on and pretend like I still got all the answers? Or am I going to realize I'm playing chief, everything, officer? It's detrimental to my company. It's not going to get me to my vision, and I've got to grow. I got to become a leader. I've got to become a CEO. And so I think it starts with that. I think it starts with, you know, realizing that the path to freedom is actually letting go of control. It's not just allowing yourself to be the.

Surrender.

Impulsive, impatient.

The surrender experiment. Michael Singer.

Surrender. I think it starts there. So what's leashing us is these four flaws and the way to break the leash. It starts with ownership, Right. Admission, ownership, and then a true commitment and accountability to change, which I think starts with coaching, something very similar to you guys do. But also sometimes it can mean structural change. And of course, you know, in our context with what we do at unleashed, that oftentimes looks like very clearly delineating between what are you great at as a leader? What do you suck at?

Yes.

And then how do we actually find the operations minded counterpart who's great at all the things you suck at?

Yes.

And define that role clearly for your company. Find that role on board them so they're actually empowered and then train the two of you to work in tandem until you achieve mastery in your relationship.

So, you know, there's some interesting things in what you're saying. So our founders and owners are by nature impulsive.

Most often, yes.

It's impulsivity that had you start a business. It's impulsivity that had you buy a business. Maybe you're way more deliberate than most, but as a leader of a business, you probably have some impulsivity just by your very nature. Right. And then consistency. We'd all like to think we're consistent, but we're not. And we say one thing one day and then we contradict ourselves and we forget, then we deny it. Right. And then insecure.

Yeah.

Some of the most overbearing bullies in, in business and politics are profoundly insecure. You know, there's, there's quite a bit of evidence for that. And we all have areas and moments of that kind of thing. Right. And what was the other one? Impulsive, Insecure. Inconsistency.

Impulsive, Impatient.

Impatient, Right. And impatience is also pretty much wired into the sort of person that starts or buys companies. Right. I'm like, go, baby, I'm sick of this. And then you segued into, we all have strengths. Right. And I'm a Gallup strengths coach as well. And we use it with our senior leaders. But even the strengths, there's a time and a place for them. Right. I'm an ideator. I just wake up with ideas. I have more ideas. I have ideas in the middle of this conversation, and only with experience have I learned to just let most of them go, oh, there's an idea, like, there it goes. And just like release. It has nothing to do with this moment. It's not needed to forward this conversation. Let it go. I don't even need to write it down anymore because I'm like, if I need it later, It'll come back. It's not that important.

That's key. That's key. And I think that's where for a lot of leaders there's character development and then there's also containers. And I think both are important, right? You have to develop your character, develop your, develop your weaknesses, develop your strengths. But then there's also creating containers for yourself and I think for me, having the container of a structure where you know that your job is to be at times ideating, building big relationships, playing the role of a CEO and building the future growth that's needed, but also knowing that there's a team whose job is not to be doing those things. And it is not your job as a leader to be constantly interjecting feedback and ideas to them because you're going to drive them crazy. That's where you have to create containers for you and your team. Where you go, here are spaces for ideating, here are spaces to present new ideas and innovation to the company. Those spaces are not slack. Those spaces are not your weekly team meeting where you just burst in and go, I've got a new idea, everyone. I think those are some of the things that we, and I'm sure you guys really coach these crazy visionary entrepreneurs on, is to, is to create containers and structures to harness and channel their strengths and gifts in the right way, but also prevent them from having a destructive effect on the organizations that they lead.

So the vision is held by the head of the company, the CEO. We will often use the term strategist more than visionary because visionary can sound a little like loopy, profity, say like that. But the idea that like you help to create a picture of the future and to talk about the major moves to get there, the longer term things you're holding that and then the look and feel of the company, the culture, right? What does it look like, sound like, feel like, taste, smell, Right. What's the experience of being in and working around the company? What are the ritual habitual things? Think about, what does culture mean for you? Think about a strong culture. Great. What is it defined by foods and holidays and practices and terms and songs and clothing? Great companies have many of these same elements of things. We have a certain look and we play that game and it's part of being in that tribe, right? It's tribal. You could also say culty. And in the best sense, right? Not the creepy sense, but in the very best sense. Great, great, great, great. Highly valued companies are cultish in their nature, right? So you create all that stuff, but then you need that counterpart. The people that execute, the people that follow through. And they want direction and clarity and they're the doers and they're the people that do consistently follow through with things. We talk about that person as the orchestrator. Right. Because we think about a symphony and all the things being orchestrated and coordinated together. Right. So that's the kind of mindset that we think about as your counterpart to that. But each of you have strengths and weaknesses and a time and a place for those roles.

Right? 100%. 100%.

Let's just talk about, say a little bit about the kind of work that you do and where and that kind of thing. We'll throw your link up on here, Unleashed. We'll put on the crawl for you here. But tell us just a little bit about the work that you do and where it begins and ends.

Yeah. So for us, really what we do is matchmake kind of more orchestrators, as you put it, with more strategists. Right. Another way to say it would be the CEO with the COO or the visionary with the integrator, whatever term you use, second in command, these visionary entrepreneurs. Yeah. Find that second in command and not only find it, but make sure that they find their actual, true counterpart. And I love the analogy of yin and yang. Right. They're almost exact opposites, energetically. Right. But complemented together, they create something really powerful. And that's what we've seen for so many of our clients. And so to do that, we have kind of a simple four step process. We define who is the end to your yang. What does your company actually need to reach its goals in the next season. We have a very unique kind of matchmaking matrix process that considers all of these different variables to actually spit out a success profile that's truly customized to you. We're not talking about a job description here. We're talking about who is really the counterpart, the end to your Yang that your company needs. From after we define, we go find them and we use every available method. But one of the coolest things I think we've been able to create is our unique kind of COO network. We've created a network of these people who are actively looking to be part of entrepreneurial companies that we can offer to our clients. And then every great person who understands hiring a role at this level would say, you need an onboarding coach if you've never worked with somebody like this before. So our team helps facilitate the onboarding process to make sure it's seamless and the person is actually empowered. And then lastly, we train the two of you to work in tandem to both use your unique abilities to actually grow the company. And that comes back to creating the right containers and the right communication methods for the relationship to succeed and thrive. So to do that is typically about a six month process. And we believe that every CEO who is currently playing chief everything officer and knows that they need that counterpart can, can realistically free up, you know, 30 hours a week that they're spending right now in day to day management to actually focus on growth if they follow that process.

So you know, if I can, I like to have that person within the company already. But many times you don't and you have to go outside. What we know lots of examples now of people in the Scaling up world who tried to bring on a coo, a president, whatever, and did it in a not a careful way and it was dangerous and destabilizing. So the idea of using a partner if you're gonna have to go outside to help like clarify it, profile it, recruit it, onboard it, coach it and teach you to work together, that's a really useful kind of thing to think about to make that successful. Because bringing an outside person and doing a bad job of it is really, can be really disruptive to a company. And some companies are actually, you know, it can be the thing that makes everything or the thing that tanks everything and, and that balance is, is definitely a challenge.

We built our, built our company because we've seen it go wrong so many times.

Yes, it's great. Unleashed CEO. A reminder to everyone. If you like it, if it was good for you, click it, subscribe it, give us a review. If you subscribe, you'll get them every week in your feed. If we can help you or you want to give us some feedback on something, suggest a show, a guest, ask a question, find a coach that fits your situation or in your area, whatever it is, like that. Send us a note info @scaling Coach Coach.com ScalingCoach.com is our web address of course for our website is. But info@scalingcoach.com is an email you can use to give us if you get in touch with us. So and of course our show now, five years of these every week, so and more. All that wherever you got this, YouTube, Stitcher, Spotify, iTunes, etc, all that and more. I want to give a big shout out to Vern Harnish, author and creator of the Scaling up framework that we know originally, the Rockefeller Habits and then to our show producer Wanda Mitchell, there in the background, getting our guests ready and scheduled, getting our shows out the door, and so on. Our production team at Podfly, who edits our audio and gets everything groovy and dialed in for us every week. Podfly Productions, Albert Burge, Anna Quidditch, Tim McGowan, etc. All those folks. Thanks everyone for listening for watching. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep Scaling up. Bye bye now. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app, you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Aligned. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.