WHY YOUR COMPANY ISN’T SCALING (AND HOW TO FIX IT WITH BETTER LEADERSHIP)

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's stream, livestream. Today, we're talking about why your company isn't scaling and how to fix it with better leadership and a bit more than that. I'm Claire Hayek, your host. I'm a neuroscience-certified coach, a mental fitness coach, and the founder and CEO of MSP Team Building. And I just want to be real with everyone today. And in a way, if your company is not scaling, you can think it's a market problem. You can think it's a pricing problem. You can think it's your product. It may be all of that. But one of the main things is the leadership. And I don't want to only blame it on the leadership, but it's a big, big part of why. That why. You need a leadership team that knows exactly how to execute acute growth without guessing, right? But you also need a growth blueprint that scales revenue, leadership, and operational efficiency. Which brings me to introducing my guest today, David Solomon. He's a fractional Chief Revenue Officer with over 3 decades of experience in corporate management and business development. David has created and implemented go-to-market strategies and growth plans. He also lectures on strategic revenue growth, In the MBA program at McGill University, my favorite place. David, how are you? I'm doing great, Claire.

Your favorite place.

That's great to hear. Yeah, well, I did. I studied engineering McGill. Then I went back and did an executive MBA with McGill and HEC Montreal.

I must say, that was great. That's a great program, by the way.

Phenomenal.

Highly recommended.

Yeah, absolutely. David, so happy that you could join me here today. We have a lot to tackle. We have a lot to talk about. And I just want to welcome everyone that is joining us. And if this is the first time you're joining us, you'll notice that I'll be working the chat. I'll be sharing some comments in the chat. The idea is to keep this interactive and to make sure that, you know, this is not a one-way conversation. I know it's live and we're on a screen, but we all know virtual doesn't mean boring. Virtual can be engaging. So, let's start with one question to get you all engaged. Where are you joining us from? Put it in the chat. Let us know which neck of the woods you're joining in from today. It's always nice to see. And I'm gonna follow up with a quick question here. What's your number one frustration right now?

Oh boy!

What's happening? Is it team performance? Inconsistent revenue, mental load as a leader, or something else, please do drop it in the chat. Okay, we want to make sure that we are assessing a little bit the need. And so, we can kind of gear the conversation around it. We do have an agenda but we're very flexible that way. There we go. So, that's one reality check that I want to share with you that 65% of businesses actually fail within 10 years. That's kind of scary. I don't know about you, but that scares me a lot having a small company. But you learn a thing or two about growth. You learn a thing or two about agility and you learn a thing or two about leadership. It's one little also fact, actually not fact, but research from Harvard Business Review that I want to share with you that 90% of executive teams don't execute well Not because of bad ideas, because of bad leadership infrastructure. All right. So again, we're going to be talking about leadership. We're going to be talking about the growth blueprint, that perfect formula. Nothing's perfect but a good guideline and how we can make it work. So today, we can share a lot of gold nuggets and you can part away with very functional and valuable information. So, One of the things when it comes to leadership is that we're often as a leader, we have a decision paralysis, mental fatigue problem. Why? Because leaders are often in survival mode. And if you're in survival mode, you can't scale. Because when you're in survival mode, you are reacting. You're hesitating. You're not aligned. You're completely off track. So, being able to scale in a smart strategic way, you need to be focused. You need to be laser-focused and you need to master your brain. PQ research, positive intelligence research shows that mental fitness is a stronger predictor of team performance than skill set. And basically, if you're under pressure right away, leaders or people in general, they default to the amygdala-led decisions. So, right in the back of your brain, your prefrontal cortex is no longer— it's completely bypassed. So, that's your decision-making. That's the CEO of your brain. It's completely bypassed. So, you're emotional. Maybe your decisions are scattered. It's fear-based. It's unsafe and it's short-term. David, I want to throw this your way now. So, when it comes to scaling, Tell us a bit more about maybe why sometimes some scaling fails. What are the things that we should look out for when it comes to growth? And when we talk about this blueprint, what are we talking about?

Well, there's a lot there. So, let me go back a step to what you just said before. Okay? And it's a statistic that I've been talking to people about is that only 2/3 of leaders believe that their organization is good at crafting the strategy. But less than half believe that they're good at implementing. And what we find is, is because there's a great disconnect. And what happens here is, look, let's, let's go to the very beginning of the basics. You got into this business and you think that everybody wants your product or service. How do you know? How did you figure that out? Okay, because what ends up happening is people have, I have a great idea. I'm going to sell this pen to everybody because everybody needs a pen. But do they really need a pen? Hmm. Do they need this pen? Does it solve a problem that they have? Does it— is it unique enough that I'm going to now want this pen? And who is the right customer I'm trying to sell this to? Now, that's very basic, Claire. But that's the psychology. And that's going back to your neuroleadership. It's like we have problems in business we need solving. Are you the right person to— or you're the right company to solve it for people? And we just assume that Yeah, everybody's my customer. So, this is why many organizations have that disconnect because they didn't validate as part of their blueprint. Are you solving a client's problem first with the right solution?

Right.

Not the other way around. So, when I talk to clients and I say, all right, let's talk about your growth blueprint. The first question I ask them, I mean, there's a second question. There's a first question which is a little off this topic. But my first, which I'll get to in a second. But the question is, what are you solving for customers? Is it a need? And that is what a lot of companies don't understand why the scaling doesn't happen. The second reason scaling doesn't happen is because they don't think they need it.

Yeah.

Claire, oh, year over year, my sales are flat. My company is stable. All is good. Problem is that last year's dollar is not this year's dollar. And as a result, you know, when you're— what you could pay— let's think of cost of living, people. If you've been dealing with inflation lately and your cost of labor and everything. Guess what? There's going to be a big, big change. So that revenue dollar at the top say, oh, we're stable. That's a disaster. The final thing is, and this is where it goes back to my first comment, business owners do not share the vision of where they want to take the company.

Mm-hmm.

If I'm a business owner, I'm a solopreneur, or I'm the— I'm the CEO of a company, whatever. And I say I want to scale from $5 million to $20 million. Because in 10 years from now, I want to retire. I now have the leadership in that organization now understands the path I want to take. But if you don't share that, how in hell am I going to be effective as a leader to develop that blueprint? Because the blueprint, Claire, at the end of the day is the path for growth. Okay? And everybody then is aligned, whether you're in sales and finance, operations, HR, you name it. Everybody's now aligned in there. And if I don't understand the path we want to take, the journey we're going to take together along with the blueprint, I can have the best team in place. I'll be a failure.

Exactly, yeah. They go hand in hand, definitely.

1,000%.

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, we see also a lot of challenges when it comes to the leadership also with the team. Things like not being able to make the right decisions or just make a decision. The sales team is not really communicating well or collaborating. There's no accountability, for instance. Or maybe if there's a lack of communication or the culture is not there. There are so many elements that affect growth, affect scaling from a human level, individually. to a team level, to your plan, to your strategy. So, I do want to put up a question here on another question for our audience. So, where do you think your team or your organization is hitting friction, hitting a problem here? Is it on the decision-making level, sales follow-through, accountability? Is it just really the essence, which is communication and culture? I will share this the chat as well. I'm trying to multitask here. So I do want to go to the chat and see what we got so far. Let me see here. We got Chelsea. Chelsea, thanks for joining in. And please do weigh in on some of the questions that I put up here. Would love to hear from you. And I know a lot of people are joining but not chatting. I know also a lot of people probably multitasking and working and listening to this as a podcast. Or maybe it's a Who knows? It's all good. We're here anyway to have an awesome and fruitful conversation. So again, when we talk about human beings, human behavior, and just the thought of scaling is scary. Sometimes, it's a big, what am I jumping into? Where do I start? We think we got it all down but we don't. Like you said, mentioned a lot of factors, David, that are very, very relevant. But the thing is, if you're overwhelmed, the system will not hold. You need to have laser focus. You need to be aligned. You need to be in control of your brain. And not because we need to control everything but more in control of who you are being while you're leading this growth.

Right.

Because it's like anything else. If you're scattered, maybe your plan is not going to be executed. You can have the perfect plan on paper. But doesn't mean it's gonna be led and executed well, right? So, I do wanna move to how to make it better. How do we fix it? All right. I mean, we're gonna try to attempt to give you solutions here. But obviously, in 30 minutes, it's impossible. Okay? I mean, who are we kidding? But I think the idea here, David, when we both talked about this and said, you know, let's do a live, it's just to get the conversation going and tell people, you know, we hear you. We know people are thinking of this, whether you're a small company, medium-sized, doesn't really matter. I think of scaling all the time. It's like, where am I going? Should I be scaling? You know? And it's a bit like unknown. It's like, oh, where are we going here? Let's do this.

Yeah.

you do this every day. You speak to an expert like yourself. We're not really sure where to start. And you don't want to start aiming endlessly in so many different directions. So, this is why I mentioned Growth Blueprint. And David and I spoke so many times. I'm like, how can we do this? How can we help people let's not make this a taboo thing. He has a lot of experience with growth. I have a lot of experience with leadership. How can we put these 2 together and serve our people, participants, clients, leaders, companies, owners in a way that we can simplify the whole process? And again, I'm really excited to partner up with you, David, on this adventure.

Of course.

And it is a thing that is important. survival of your company. Sometimes, you got to take it into a whole different direction sometimes or just push it forward. So, I'm going to put up here on screen a— you can scan the QR code. I will also share the link shortly in the comments. We put together just a page, a simple page that walks you through the why, the how, the etc. And we're going to continue on with this conversation as well, give you some gold nuggets. We'd love to hear from you. And you can— there's basically a link on this page where you can book a call basically with David and I. We can talk about— talk you through it and talk about where you're at. And it's kind of like a free consultation in a way just to get the conversation going. And maybe you can part with this with amazing insight that will get you going. And this is the whole goal. Okay, so I do have the QR code there in the top right. Yeah, there you go. In case you do want to scan this throughout this conversation. So, I just wanted to tease the next section. I didn't want to just jump in there. But yeah, let's go back. Let's go back and refocus on the how. Okay. So, when it comes to leadership, Mental fitness is key. I cannot stress this enough. So, what does that mean? You need to have a calm, focused mind so you can make clear decisions and you can have stronger teams. Because believe it or not, if you are not calm, if you don't have clear decisions, if you're not laser-focused, if you don't have the right attitude, remember leaders bring the weather. How can you lead the team through it? Okay, now your team may not be aligned. But if you are all over the place, trust me, this is not going to help you. There's so many ways and so many tools that you can use to get everybody aligned, get people more mentally fit, such as PQ, the PQ Way, developing your positive intelligence as a team, which would involve understanding who your— what your saboteurs or what's standing in your own way? What's going on in your head throughout the day? How are you really making decisions? And understanding also your working genius. I actually had a guest on this a couple of weeks ago and talked about the working genius. It's like, where are you really thriving? What are your strong assets? What are the things that you do that you're good at? But it's not your best? And what are the things that you're really, when you do, you're frustrated doing? So, understanding where your working genius is and where your team working genius is, is very important because then you can align things accordingly. And of course, the culture, the open conversation, good communication, having a psychologically safe space where you can share your ideas, There's no issue with trust. There's accountability. And it's just simple, good leadership overall that is agile, is able to kind of be guided and work with that wind that could drag us to the right and sometimes to the left and knowing how to work with that wind, right? It's not a straight line. I mean, I know we have it on the graph like a straight line, but we all know that it doesn't work that way. Never.

Never does.

Exactly. And so, here's another fact actually from Gallup and the PQ research. Teams with high trust culture and brain-aligned leadership are 31% more productive and 40% more resilient. So, imagine you are parting with that into your execution plan. I mean, this is kind of like having a solid ground, right? You're not wobbling, right? So, moving on to— so that's the leadership part of this is what you need. This is like the basic here. Basic. It's way more than that. You need way more than that. But if you don't have that, then you gotta think again. Let's move on, David. I want to hear from you on the growth infrastructure that maybe every company, scaling company should look at or need. I'll leave it to you to tell us basically how do we— the how of the work.

Listen, you know what? Without the right leadership team in place that has a growth mindset, you're wasting your time. So, you got to start with the right people around the table. And before I get into the infrastructure, let me share just a quick story about why that's so important. So, I went to go visit a prospect in his facility. And he's a visionary. And everybody around the table were just a bunch of operational and finance people. And no matter what he said, they said no. And I pulled him aside and I said, you have the wrong people around the table. These are not growth-driven. These are silo-driven. These are people who are afraid to break what they built in this side. They're comfortable and they're not willing to break some eggs in order to try to create something new and much more powerful. And he looked at me and goes, but these are people who've been with me for years. I said, yes. And how much have you grown? That's where the conversation ended because he realized at that point that he does not have the right people around the table. Because when you come in with what I'm talking about, we need people around the table who will think scaling, growth. What we currently have, we've grown to a certain extent. Now, could we grow it more in our market? So, is it a new geography, a new product or service? Where are we going to go? Do you have the people around the table who can have those serious conversations? If you're talking new geography, where do we go? Why? And that's where I tend to come in is I help them to discover that undiscovered country. Where to go, where to go, how to go, blah, blah, blah. But then I come back and say, okay, but I need— in order to sustain this growth, I need this.

Mm-hmm.

More inventory, more cash, better people, new people, this, that. It doesn't matter. And we have to create clear goals or key performance indicators. We need to have ongoing conversations. We need to have that alignment. And we need to have people, you know, You said it yourself. I don't want meetings for the sake of meetings. I want people to go around the table and say, hey, we kicked ass this month. What's next month looking like? How do we grow it again? Because if everybody is just as jazzed— and I know I'm being a little over-the-top emotional about it because, you know, we don't want everybody to be over the top. But I'm doing that on attitude, not necessarily the statements and the emotion, but the attitude of we did X this month. How do we do X+ next month and then X++ the month after? And also to have that opportunity to go review and Now, Claire, you talked about all the headaches at the beginning of this chat. And the one thing that is very current right now are tariffs. You know, in the United States, the tariffs are really shocking the system and people are going, okay, I'm not going to— I'm not going to expand. I'm not going to grow.

Absolutely. Yeah.

No. If you have the right blueprint and the right feedback, now we pivot. You need Plan A, B, maybe C, because you know that you can't control external factors. And these external factors are way out of our control right now. Don't know what the president is going to be doing next. We have no idea. But if I want to do business in the United States and grow and scale, mm-hmm, I have to be prepared to pivot. And therein lies the feedback that everybody is giving. It's not no, but what do we do next? And like you said, no drama. If I have drama, I am draining energy. I am ruining my growth plan. Every blueprint I'm trying to do, out the window. I need people who are level-headed, level-minded so that when I put this into place and I need to pivot, we're thinking straight.

Absolutely.

Okay, we're thinking going forward, not backwards all the time. And so, that is really— so when I work with companies, I make sure, just to give you an idea everybody, that I will go in because people don't know what a Chief Revenue Officer does. In my case, I look at the new market. I look at the new growth. But I'm also looking at the team at the same time and saying, okay, Claire, we got to fix this team because, you know, there's a— there's an issue here. But reality is, if I don't see the team blueprint, it's a waste of time. But I'm helping them build that blueprint for growth and helping them to understand how to scale. If you can't, you're in deep trouble.

Absolutely. I love how, you know, you, you make the conversation very real, David. You have this thing about you. that just, um, it's no BS. This is not theory. This is— this is based on actual facts. This is based on actual, you know, case studies, right? So 100%.

So I teach students at McGill and I— and they say to me, oh, you know, hey, this is— how come there's no textbook? I said, because there is no textbook for this. This is reality. And when you're going into the market You deal with real factors, not theory. So, if you are not ready to scale both operationally and mentally, you'll be a statistic just like Claire started at the beginning of this broadcast.

Yeah. So, just to summarize here. So, the key to success, the how. Again, we can't go into too much detail here. But it's the leadership basically levers. So, Mental fitness, calm mind, clear decisions, stronger teams, aligning that laser focus on where you really thrive, being open, being innovative, not standing in our own way. And that's where mental fitness comes in. You need to train your brain to be that. It doesn't come naturally because you decide, I want to be open and innovative today, right? There's actual practice you need to do in order to build that gray matter into your— we call it the sage brain or the right brain, where the creativity innovation flows, right? So again, and of course, the culture is important. Trust, accountability, and communication, everything that comes with it. Now, resilience. It's so much to mention.

Oh yeah.

And of course, David, you mentioned having your revenue engine with a clear KPIs, a good rhythm, being synced with leadership alignment, and not meetings, the meeting about the meaning of the meeting, the other meeting. And having that feedback, right?

Yes.

And just say, wow, this worked. What can we do next? I'm kind of paraphrasing here. I'm trying to repeat that kind of bring forward the energy you brought in a couple of seconds ago when you were explaining this. So, it's not about drama. It's about just optimizing and doing, keeping that momentum. So, I just want to put up here another question on screen. What's the one shift you know your team needs but you've been avoiding pretty much? Just put it in the chat and let us know. Having shared all this with you, David and I, what do you think you need to shift in order to maybe start considering growth or even start having the conversation in your organization, within your team, within the leadership, and with experts that can help you. So, do put it in the chat. I would go back and check the chat in a second. And after, because we're so short on time, time always flies by. I will— David and I actually will look at the chat if you have any questions. please put them in the chat. We'll get back to you if this actually— you listen to this after we're done when we're not live. So, to wrap up here, I do want to share again the QR code to have a bit more information about the growth blueprint and how to lead smarter and to be able to build that team that you, you know, that will back you up and have that blueprint, you know, that growth blueprint strategy. This, when you scan this code, it'll bring Bring you to a page. It'll give you a bit more information about what we are offering here, which is simply a private executive briefing with me and David to talk about what's going on and see how we can help you. So please do scan this, and I will also put this link in the chat. And if you have any questions, it would be time to also share it here in the chat. So David and I can answer it. I don't see any questions right now.

Let me tell you one of the first questions that I get. And I just want to— I think we could both address this.

Great idea!

Where do you start first, the human side or the blueprint side? Where do you suggest, Claire?

Honestly, I think we need to work on the human side. It's a bias probably. But I think if your team or you, I think the first thing you need to work on is yourself. If you're the leader, if you're the owner, you're the founder, you're the one driving, whoever's driving this, before you even start, you need to see if you're in the right mindset in order to do this. And is it really you that needs to drive it? Should you be the one maybe supporting and having somebody else? So, assessing really the The leadership, the skills of the team is extremely important to even have the conversation and start designing the process. My 2 cents, David.

I don't disagree actually. And it's funny you're going to say that because to me, it starts at the top. If the leader leads and says, I want to scale and I'm ready to make it happen, the domino effect is there. You can't put a blueprint and then be the leader and say, oh, I don't want to do this. So I do agree. It has to start with the leader at the top ready to say, we need this change. We want to grow. What do I need to do as a leader to make it happen so that everybody else follows me? Otherwise, I could do all the work in the world. But if you're not ready, I'm wasting everybody's time. So no, I think that's critical. Pardon me. For the growth is it starts with the leader, the top, top individual, the owner, the CEO, whatever. You set the tone. Please set the right tone.

No, I couldn't have said it better. So hopefully, you scale now or think of scaling by thinking smarter, not by pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing for it. But just think smarter, lead smarter. And hopefully, you can take one tip that you heard today and maybe try to apply it and fix it with leadership first, right? Like, you gotta start by looking at leadership before anything else. And then, everything will flow. will flow from there. And again, to remind you, I have put a QR code here on screen and I have shared the link in the comments. If you're listening to this at another time, please do click on the link. Book that call. David and I would be more than happy to meet with you and advise you to the best of our capability on what, you know, maybe a custom blueprint for your company or any advice we can give you on how you, you know, what are the next steps. steps and how you can move forward with this. So, you don't feel that you're starting, you're in the dark. You're more guided and you feel that you're following a blueprint that actually works and that actually is put together by people that have been doing this for a while. So, with a lot of humility here, I say this. But it's true. David, you have, I mean, I don't know how many years experience. But Maybe you could confirm that in 30 years, 20 years.

35. But yeah, no, it's a little— yeah, it's over a 30-year process. So definitely.

And folks, I hide the white hair.

Take advantage. Well, yeah.

Well, they're hidden, but they're there. That's all I'm trying to say. Yeah, 25+ years of experience, definitely working in engineering and leadership. 100%. So the idea here is to, for you to feel that, you know, you've been, you're being supported by, with the right people. Okay, so without further ado, it's already 12:02, and again, I just want to wrap this up and let you know that you can also put in the chat the keyword growth, and we will also can get back to you if you don't want to visit the, uh, the site. And finally I just want to introduce next week's live. My God, I'm so excited for this one. We're going to be talking about music and how it's a performance tool. Nobody thinks of music as a performance tool. We think of it as a vibe, as entertainment. And I'll be joined with Alison discussing basically everything about music. All of you know, or some of you know, that I'm also a musician. and had a music career. Still have one. So, I have a thing or two to talk about when it comes to music leadership and performance. Very interesting one. Please do scan the QR code. I will also mention this in the comments. David, we're gonna wrap up. It was a pleasure. And I will leave you with the last words, man.

Look, folks, the world is smaller than it has ever been before. And the opportunities are there. Don't Don't be shy. Don't get scared, but be prepared. The challenges are there for sure, but don't ignore scaling.

Absolutely. Love it. Thank you so much, David. We'll talk to you very, very soon. And thank you everyone for joining us. We'll see you next week, same time. All right, take care.

Bye everyone.

Bye.