Jim Johnson argues that when scaling a business you must prioritize leadership first — strong leadership creates culture, which enables reliable processes, finance management, accountability, and team performance. Only after those foundations are in place will technology, marketing, sales, recruiting, hiring and onboarding become effective and scalable. He notes many entrepreneurs seek help with sales, marketing, or hiring out of order, which undermines long-term growth.
Chapters
When I first started coaching, I wasn't really focused on the leadership one because I just assumed somebody starting a business already knew that they were pretty good leaders. And funny enough, that was not the case. It's a hard thing to share with others. If you don't have good leadership, you're not going to build great culture. And if you don't have great culture, you're not going to build solid processes together as a team. And you're not going to develop the team performance stuff that needs to happen in your business, which leads to not managing your finance and numbers real well and then ultimately holding people accountable to the standards that we would like to have. And if we do those things well first, then the technology, marketing, sales, production, training, recruiting, hiring and onboarding are much more effective, efficient and those type of things. So if you look at it backwards, that's the key thing here. Most people would come to us for coaching for a couple of major things. They would come to us for sales like, hey, how do we sell more jobs? They would come to us for marketing, how do we get more opportunities? And they would come to us for recruiting, hiring and onboarding. How I scale my business, I need a hire a bunch of salespeople. And the problem with that is they're out of order. If you don't have those other things done well.
