The Visionary's Journey | E106

Well, hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Chris Plackey, and this week we're going to talk about the visionary's journey. Let's go.

Welcome. Welcome. So I'm thrilled that you're here. It's been a little while since I've recorded a podcast, and I want to talk with you today about something that's been really closely on my heart, honestly, personally, and also because of so many of the conversations I'm having with so many of my friends and colleagues and clients. And I want to talk to you about the journey of a visionary and what I witness through the women that I've worked with. This podcast in my mind is about being as honest as I can and sort of sharing with you some changes that I have made in the way that I think about what I do as a result. First of all, welcome. If you're new to the podcast, I'm Chris Plackey. I'm a master certified coach, and I've been coaching CEOs and female entrepreneurs for years. And I have coached thousands and thousands of leaders over the last 28 years. I'm honored to do what I do. To be able to sit with other women who have had the courage to take an idea that's in their brain and turn it into a product or a service or a thing in the world is so impressive. I love working with these women, particularly because of their shared intelligence and gravitas and courageousness and also vulnerability, open mindedness, curiosity, and willingness to learn.

So as a visionary, what that really means is that you have the ability to see something that other people don't. You see a way that something could be offered, served up, produced, created as something that never existed before. You see it in a way that other people never imagined was possible or never even knew could be possible. And the beginning of that journey for most visionaries is the coalescing of the vision into an actual deliverable. So if it's a product, if it's, you know, clothing or jewelry or lotion or face cream, you know, that's the translation of the vision into the tangible asset. For other people, it's content, it's creating, it's ideas, it's books, it's videos, it's modules. For other people, it's the production of a prototype, or it could be a movement. It's. It's a coalescing other people around the ideas that you have to then change something in the world. I think there's a lot of places that visionaries end up in this area, but nonetheless, we all have to go through that very initial first stage of coalescing the vision into with something that other people can see. It's not just something you talk about. And the next step in that journey is once you have done that, you have the opportunity to see if people want it, will people invest in it, will people buy it, will people wear it, will people talk about it, will people get engaged with it? That's that next step of that journey for the visionary. And once you have built now interest and engagement, now you can translate that vision into something bigger than just a one time offer. We can package it, we can promote it, we can sell it, we can scale it, we can make it available for many people. That can be done quite simply on your own, with a little bit of support to maybe seven figures, depending on what it is, and you might even be able to get to 5 million, 6 million. But once we get beyond that as the visionary, as someone who is translating what's in your brain into a thing in the world, once we get beyond a certain scalable point, and I do believe for every business, it's a little bit different because I certainly see that with the clients that I work with. But inevitably, everybody seems to hit this.

A couple of things can happen. The first one is the visionary gets bored. She tires of the ideas that she's been promoting. She wants to do something new. She's a natural visionary, she's a natural creative. She's onto something else. But the business is over here. That presents a whole Easter egg of issues. She doesn't want that business anymore, she doesn't want to do it anymore. She can't find inspiration in it anymore. And if the business was just based on the visionary's passion, that creates problems. Another potential part of this journey is that the business itself has reached a scalable point where it's beyond the visionary's capacity. And the dependency that the business has had on the visionary to drive the creativity is unscalable for the visionary. She's exhausted, she's tapped out, she's overworking, she's hyper producing all the time and she feels burnt out of her own business. It's like getting blood from a stone. But one of the other things that we have to be honest about and couple that with for the visionary is that a lot of times we struggle with control and we want extreme control over production. Creativity, ideas, language, everything that goes out needs to be of us, because everything that went out before was of us. And so therefore our requirements to not only be involved, but for what we produce to be so aligned is unscalable. It hits a wall where you can't, you can't expand because you can't find the people to do it because it's too much of you. And this is where I've been meeting a lot of my clients lately. Maybe they built a very successful team and then two or three key players transitioned, which is normal. And then the business goes right back into the visionary's lap and she feels defeated and exhausted. She felt the touch, she touched that moment of freedom that she could have, and now it's all back in her lap and she has to find those people again. But her desire for it to be exactly like she wants is creating roadblocks for her to advance. My former client and girlfriend, Eleanor Beaton said to me a while ago, but she said, you know, this sort of launch strategy that's based on the ideas and creativity of one person is not a scalable business model. And I'm now witnessing that in so many people that I know who have built personality brands and online brands that they just can't find the team who can produce success the same way that they can. And it leaves me wondering, what's the problem? Like what's the, what's the problem here? And then what's the solution? Because if, if the solution in my mind has always been hiring and finding the right people, but those people will transition, then the business can only perform as well as its lowest performing person. And so if we've just replaced the dependency of the success of the business on, on these core people, from the founder, from the visionary, we haven't really built a business that's scalable because it's still too talent dependent. So what's the solution? And I'm still working on that, I'm going to be honest with you, because it's where I am in my business. It's where a lot of people I know are. And I know that there's one potential, there's. Well, I see several, but I, I think there's one particular potential response which is that at some point, as the visionary, we have to either remove ourselves from the day to day weeds of the business, so much so that that business can take the life of its own and no longer be of me. That's an option, right? We can also, in the same vein of that, hire people who have responsibility to run and manage and lead it, and also that their compensation is tied to the success of it and it is lucrative enough that it's a valuable role to someone else. I think a lot of visionaries tend to hire high level people, but they still treat them like tacticians of their ideas. But high level people want to be strategists and they want to incorporate their own ideas into the business. And that may mean that the business doesn't have the same trajectory that it did under the visionary, but that doesn't make the trajectory bad. You know, over the last several years with COVID there are so many companies that we're seeing hand over fist growth every year, right? 20, 30, 40% growth, that everybody started thinking that's what's normal. And if that's not happening, then we're failing. We have to be careful. There's startup growth and then there's maturity growth. And that maturity growth has to be built off of honestly, very boring systems. And there are people on the planet who love maintenance, who love maintaining with maybe a slight bump and a slight increase. They love that. They love to repeat the same processes all the time. That's their jam. It is not what visionaries want to do, I can assure you of that. Visionaries, their boredom becomes a mess, it becomes tinkering. So to decide, there have to be these inflection points where we make these decisions, like, oh, okay, now the team is completely running my business. Everything is moving really smoothly. I am barely involved. This is the moment where you need to challenge yourself to reconsider your business model. Not after those people have quit, because if those people resign tomorrow, it's on you. You haven't built this to be independent of you. And we've got to figure that out. So one idea is that you do really engage people at a different level. The second one is you change your business model. You create a board, you create an executive team, you put yourself in a chairman role, you get a president, you get a CEO. Another model is that you sell it, you let it go, you create an employee stock option plan and you let the employees start to be owners. There's a lot of ways to think about it. But I want you as you're listening to me, if you're a visionary, I know you're going to have a visceral reaction to what I'm saying. But I have seen this now happen too many times where I've spent all this time teaching my clients, who 90% of them I would call visionaries, learn how to lead and manage and build that team and damned if they didn't. Good job. And only to realize that it's not enough because it's only as good as the people you hire and as well as you manage them. And so what I've realized is I need to help my clients who are visionaries learn how to lead, not learn how to manage. I want to help your managers learn how to manage, and we're working on that right now. But we have to open up the way that we think about our businesses if we are creative visionaries, because otherwise, either we'll get in the way or the business will swallow us up. And I don't want either one of those, really, for myself or for any of you. But I think it begins with a very honest conversation to say it's normal. Think about raising children, right? We have children, and we know. I mean, society here in the US anyway, says 18. Everywhere else, it's different. But we know that we sort of have these kids in our lives until they graduate high school. We're responsible for them. That our job is to raise them and infuse them with our values and teach and all the things that we do. But then we let them go. I don't think that we have a clear roadmap for visionaries on when we're supposed to let go, do you? I think that honestly, the sort of social wisdom is you don't let go unless someone wants to buy it. But what if that's not true? I don't know what is true, but I do think we have to start to ask the question, because what I'm witnessing is a lot of women who are incredibly talented becoming absolutely overwhelmed and frustrated and burdened by the rat race and the repeated issues that are happening because they haven't expanded their business model. So, as is always the case, I'm always curious what your thoughts are about this. I'm gonna continue to talk more about this in different ways. And as we get closer to our rebrand and our relaunch, which you're gonna start learning more about here very soon, I want to make sure that you have a sense of the direction that I'm moving with my clients. Women who are able to build a business that generates two, three plus million dollars a year. This is, as I said to my clients yesterday, you are a thoroughbred. You are exceptional. You raised your hand and said, I'm going to do this, and you did it. And you're special to me. Like, you really have something magical about you that others don't. You see the world. Once you touch these kinds of accomplishments, you see the world differently. You have a different expectation of yourself and of others. And moving you forward is my pure joy in life. But I see the roadblocks you're running into that nobody's talking about. And I want to talk about them. And I want to be honest with you about it. I want to tell the truth. I see what you're dealing with. I see that you don't know if you can do this again. I get it. I see that you keep telling yourself you're terrible at managing people. Maybe you're not. Maybe you just don't have clear leadership direction. Maybe you don't even know what your options are. What if that were true? I wonder. So I'm going to be putting together a live course I'm super excited to invite you to. It's called the Leader in Crisis. We're going to talk all about what those challenges are that I know so many of you face, whether it's on the team or in your own brain or in your own life or with a customer or customers or clients or vendors. Maybe it's your boredom, your restlessness, but regardless, you are facing something that you feel is very important and very critical, but you're not sure how to triage yourself through it. I'm going to teach a two hour course live on what to do. If that's you, it'll be called the Leader in Crisis. If you aren't on my website or on my mailing list right now, just go to Chrisplackie.com and put your name in our private subscriber list. You will be first notified. That way you can register as soon as it comes out. We're going to have registration be very reasonable. I think It'll be about $397 or something. It's not going to be a lot. I really want to invite you to be a part of this. If you're a current client, you will have access to this course. So you don't need to register for it. And we will. If you're a current client, we're going to be sending you a link so that you can share it with your friends and your friends will get actually a little discount for registering. But that's coming because I think we have a lot more we can be talking about. And I, you know, just in this past several days, let's say two weeks, I've had several, five more clients in one way or another. Reach back out and say, I really need help with this. Can I have a call? Can I do this? Can I get back in? And the answer is, of course, always yes. And it really sort of helped me realize that I'm really good at helping you solve your problems, and I'm really good at helping you think through what your challenges are if you're willing to solve them. And I want to show you what it is I do with every client when I meet her in the middle of a crisis moment. How do I help her do that? I'm going to help you do the same. So I hope you'll join me for that. Just go to Chrisplackie.com and pop your name in the private subscriber list and we'll make sure to get you the information as soon as it's ready. And yeah, more to follow. Thanks for tuning in.

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