For entrepreneurs scaling a business, focus on your weakest priority instead of fixing everything at once. Use the Rockefeller Habits checklist to identify gaps, then improve one or two things. The speaker compares growth stages to animals: mouse for startup, gazelle for fast growth, elephant for industry leader.
Hey there. I don't know if you ever get overwhelmed, but I heard from an entrepreneur this morning about a common complaint that I hear from a lot of folks a lot of the time, and that is overwhelm. I don't know if you ever get this or if you're overwhelmed right now, but scaling up a business is hard work. It's not easy and it's often overwhelming, right? If you take together any of the things. So if you read our scaling up book, if you read the original Rockefeller habits, if you went through the entrepreneurial master's program or the accelerator program or any of the other sort of places that you learn about what it takes to scale up a business, it can be overwhelming pretty quickly. So I want to make it easier for you right now and I want to break it into a couple of things. So first of all, there are three stages that we think about when we think about scaling up a business. The first stage is the startup phase. And you might think of that like being a mouse. You're darting here and there, you see opportunities for things and you're trying to take advantage of those opportunities. But all around you are faster moving creatures and bigger creatures, right? So in this sort of analogy, the mouse is the startup phase. The second phase is what we like to think about and what we work with is fast growing companies. And we like to call those companies Gazelles. It's the one of our coaching group is named Gazelles and so many things around us are named gazelles. That's the piece we deal with. Fast moving, fast growing companies, high performance, and that's what we're focused on. The next one though is also interesting. And that's the industry leaders, the giants, the dominant old companies, mature companies, and we like to think of those as elephants, right? So the elephant is, is that stage of business. And you know, we'd all like to get to that stage and that's what the gazelle is really heading towards, being bigger and more dominant and like that. But getting there is not easy. And if you'll take a look at things like scaling up and the Rockefeller habits and any of the programs I mentioned before, you'll notice there's a whole lot of stuff to do there. Well, here's the thing to remember. You can't become the elephant, right? All at once. You can't even eat the elephant. If you were going to sit down and you were going to consume that elephant, you were going to take it on. You can't do that all at once. You've got to Eat the elephant one bite at a time. So the simplest thing I think to do that is to take the Rockefeller Habits checklist from the book Scaling up or the original Rockefeller Habits, take the checklist that that we provide and then go ahead and just assess yourself on where you're doing well and where you're not doing well. Rank yourself on all of them if you can. Use your whole team or your leadership team anyway to rank yourself on how you're doing on them and then pick the lowest one or two things and decide which of those to focus on. Focus on just one area at a time until you get so working on your business. You've got a lot of things to do in your business at this stage. Keep doing those things, but in working on your business, just add one more thing at a time, get that one in and then move on to the next one. And don't run all over here and there trying to be everything to everyone. Just do one thing at a time. So the simplest way to do that is to do some self assessment and figure out which area is your weakest and then go to work on that. If you'll just work on your weakest area one thing at a time, pretty soon you'll turn around and you'll be a high performance company, growing, consistently, producing lots of cash, profitable with a happy team of people, and executing without drama. So that's what we wish for you. Listen, if you are wondering at what stage you're at or what to focus on, you like anything, just go ahead and drop me a line. Look, my purpose is helping leaders build a better world and the purpose of my life is making a difference. So if, if I can help you in any way, it doesn't have to be business for me. I'm happy to help you and give you some thought on what to do. I'm happy to talk to you about when you're ready for a coach and then help you find a right coach. I can only work with a handful of companies at a time, so I probably can't help you myself. But I will be sure to have lots of ideas for you. Anyway, hope that's helpful and we'll talk to you soon.
