Larry Weidel argues that managing a small team and a large organization follow the same principles, just with added structure and layers. He uses examples from family, sports, and the military to show how discipline scales as teams grow.
For you to get big, you're going to have to have more people than yourself. And there's one fear you've got to get past and that is, oh, gracious, how can I have something small and run something big? Well, it's a lot like same process. You go like if you have a family, people have the same thing. You know, we've got a married, got the two of us, we have a child, but whoo, how do these family units, how do they keep up with it when they have got a husband and wife and they have all these kids? And it's just scary for the years they develop their own families and everything. It just seems a nightmare at Christmas, birthdays. How do you keep up with, you know, I know we keep up with our one child, but gee, I wonder how you keep up with, you know, four, five, six kids and then maybe they get grandkids and wow, I see these Christmas cards come in with these big mobs of people. It just seems like a full time job. Then the other thing is you look at sports teams. In sports you have some teams, you know, if you got a badminton or you know, small teams, like you can have basketball, you've got a coach, he's got maybe 10 players on there. A lot of the high school things got one or two coaches. But you get into football, you got your head coach, some of those coaches, they'll have that many assistants and then you have each of them have players, they're position coaches and they'll have players to keep up with in the first string and the second string. And you're saying, wow, I don't know how I can keep up. I could keep up with this. But it's a similar thing you go through in the army. You're not going to win a whole lot of wars with a couple of Rambos. You're going to have to have a lot of people. And the same thing in business. If you're going to have a mom and pop operation, sure it'll be like this little family, but then you've got all the pressure on you too and you're limited by what you can do. But you get into a global enterprise, it's just going to be people here in this country, in that country and regulations and shipping stuff back and forth over there and this explodes over here and you're going to be flying down there if you're running this whole thing. Because what happens, obviously you would know that if you want to be the person in charge, you're going to be the someone who has to figure out how things are going to be done. You'll have a staff, they'll make recommendations, but you're going to have to figure out how this thing flows. The other thing is you're going to have to figure out how to install it, how to instruct people, get them up to go. And then you, as you get in, you're going to find out why it doesn't work the way you thought it would, or what surprises come along. And you're going to have to make the adjustments. All of this is going to be you. But here's why. Let's get into seeing if you don't. Of course, if you don't make the adjustments, then your organization falls apart. But here's why. You can start settling yourself down. Well, before we talk about that, let me just say what do you have to figure out as you get bigger, as you go from small to big? What happens is you add in layers of structure, you add in layers of discipline, routine, which is your cycles of growth routine, your cycles of meetings, and whatever you do, if you're in retail, your cycles of sales, you know, your buying cycles, you know, you develop all of this stuff. Those are your cycles. Then you have to develop also the organization. Add in layers of organization, same thing. Family, sports, business, army, all of these things. As you go from smaller to bigger, you develop more need for all of these things. But here's why you don't need to panic about it on the front end, which is what people do, they go, oh my goodness, I don't understand how they keep up with it. So therefore kind of afraid to get going on it. Here's what it is. When you're small, it starts with just you. Now, once you figure out how to become. See, as you go out there and you rev up your activity, you find out things you would never know. And that is how you can be the most productive. You figure out a way that works. So whatever it is that you're doing, you know, if it's business, sports, whatever, you've got to find a way because there's always lots of ways of getting things done. But you find something that works millions of ways that don't work, but you find a way that works for you. And once you find so. And there's no way you can find that unless you work like a dog. But once you find out what works for you now, you can add to yourself, you can add one, two, three people. They can get. You can start building teams, and you start building off of that here's the great news. You are always in control. It's your business. You decide, you put things in that make sense for you. That works with your personality, your skill set. You add people in on your team who could fill in the gap and do things that you're not that great at. And see, it's all of the big is an extension of you. Now, of course, as you get bigger, you give up some freedom. You know, you give up freedom, individuality, as you add in the individuality, some of your flexibility. Because you've got an army now. And it's like you go from a rowboat to an ocean liner. You can't turn spin on a dime and change things overnight. When you have a rowboat, you were one or two people in there versus an ocean liner. You know, you don't want to be the guy like the guy in Italy that flipped the ocean liner. They're still trying to get that off the rocks. So you give up some of your freedom, your impulse ability to impulse call a shot, change. But it's as you add this structure in, but you give that up for the chance of being big and having the big army. But the deal is you don't have to let it overwhelm because you are always in charge. It is always you and it is you expanding your business. So as a result, it'll always make sense to you. You will have just like a child when it's young, you'll know what it was like when it started, you know, what makes it work, what doesn't. You know when it's good, when it's bad. You'll have the instincts. It all starts with you. Don't worry about it. It's you, it's your business. No one's going to take it away and bring it back and you can't understand it. You're going to grow into it one step at a time. That's why you can run. If you can run a small team, which starts with just you running yourself, of course you can run a big team because it's just an extension of a well run small team getting big. And that's why you don't have to worry about it. Don't hold back. There's nothing to be afraid of. You're not going to be running somebody else's strange operation. You're going to be running your own. You're going to understand it. You're going to understand the people. All right, let's go build something big for yourself.
