The 4 Forces That Drive Business Growth

There's a moment in every business where everything looks fine on the surface. Revenue is steady. The team is busy. Meetings are happening. Everyone's working hard. And yet, somehow growth has quietly packed its bag and left the building. And that's what we're talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to this episode of Marc Haine Live. Of course, this is where small business owners and entrepreneurs can pick up some core skill sets to help them create the show-stopping, jaw-dropping experience that our customers and our employees deserve. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. And today, my guest is Kevin Lawrence. And today, We will be unpacking why companies stall, drift, and quietly lose their growth edge. And really, what it takes to build a business that actually scales upwards. So, stick around with us. If this is your first time with us, I'd like to say welcome. If you find this episode valuable, please check out our past episodes. We have, oh, 295 others. And if you haven't done so yet, please make sure you're subscribed to this podcast. That way, you get notified each and every time we bring you fresh new content each and every week when I bring you new guest experts. Oh, that's a fun screen, isn't it? Oh, it's all white. I'm gonna have to figure out why that happened. Anyway, thank you very much for investing your time with us. I hope you find it really, really valuable. It's interesting because in my time working with businesses, I see businesses pour their heart and souls into their business. And I understand that you've probably got a solid business. You have good people. You have decent systems. Customers aren't running away screaming, which in today's economy feels like a win. But something might be feeling off. You're busy but not growing. You're improving but not scaling. You're working harder but not getting ahead. Add to that, most leaders in this situation don't really think they have a problem. They're thinking, hey, we just need to tweak a few things. Meanwhile, the business is slowly drifting off course like a shopping cart with a broken wheel. And that brings us to our Question of the Day. So, where in your business are you mistaking activity for growth? And what is that actually costing you right now? I'd love for you to be part of this conversation. If you'd like, you can share a link to this episode. Hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership. Share it on your favorite social media platform. Put down your comments and become part of this conversation. If you're tuning in live, feel free to go to the comments section on this YouTube broadcast and put in your questions and your comments. And we can answer your questions live with our guest. As I mentioned today, he is Kevin Lawrence. And he is a growth advisor who spent over 30 years helping companies do something most businesses never quite figured out. And that is how to keep on growing. He's worked alongside CEOs and leadership teams across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, helping organizations scale from tens of millions to hundreds of millions in revenue. Kevin was also a key contributor to the best-selling book Scaling Up: Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 2.0, which if you have never tried to grow a business and and keep your sanity at the same time, this is basically required reading. And he's also the author of Your Oxygen Mask First and his latest book, The 4 Forces of Growth, where he dives into what it really takes to scale sustainably without burning you and your team out. So Kevin, welcome to the show! It's so great to have you. Thank you for making time.

Yeah Marc, I'm super excited to be here today. This is a lot of fun talking about the growth of ourselves and our companies. And yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

So, maybe you could start off maybe telling us a little bit about who you serve and how you serve them.

Yeah, basically most of our clients, and we have over 100 of them around the world, are CEOs or founders of growth companies. And they get to a point in their growth where they want to keep it going and they want someone to partner with them and help them navigate it and help them get to the next level. So, CEOs, founders, they could be family-owned or they could still individually own the business. A bunch of them are private equity backed. And they want to build a great enduring organization. These are not people who want a quick win and let's exit tomorrow. These are people that want to build a business that will endure for decades.

Lovely! And so, our topic today, why do so many companies really seem like they stall even when they're doing or thinking they're doing everything right?

Yeah, because it's complex. There's this concept I talk about in The Four Forces called spatial disorientation. It's where everything in their being tells them they're doing the right things. But they're actually doing the wrong things. It feels intrinsically good. It seems common sense. But really, they might be making their business better. But they stop doing the things that actually fuel the growth engine and they don't even see it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, as I was introducing our segment today, I mentioned this idea of growth drift. And I've seen this. I've seen it in my 30 years working in hospitality. seen this constantly go off is that we start focusing on different things. What does growth drift really look like in real life? I mean, if the metrics are on point and everything is pointing that we're being successful, what are the signs that our business is drifting?

Right. Well, generally what happens is businesses grow. And as they get to a high level of performance, more of the metrics are about keeping the existing business healthy Customers happy, quality of service, efficiency, profitability, all of those things. And basically, the metrics tend to drift towards the lower part of the income statement— operational excellence, quality, efficiency, etc. And the focus comes away because they often have the wrong metrics. They have great metrics for today and this week and this month. But they don't have metrics or things to be calibrated about next year or 2 years down the road. So as a result, everyone swarms all the problems, swarms all the issues. And they do make the business better. But no one's putting any energy into the next year and the year after and laying the foundation for future growth.

So, are there any early warning signs that a company is veering off then? Like, because people tuning in might not understand when we talk about the metrics and such. They're seeing the metrics are consistent and they're seeing that So, are there any early warning signs they should be aware of to just say, hey, wait a second, let's take a peek at this?

There is. There is. It's how much of your time in your meetings are you talking about problems versus creating more customers in the future. And we break it down really simple. How much of your time as a CEO and executive team is focused on driving your core unit of your business, which we call your X's, right? So, if you're a consulting firm, it's number of clients. If you're A dentist, it's number of patients. If you're a hotel, it's number of room nights. If you're a restaurant, traffic, or same with a retail store. So, whatever your core X is in your business, how much energy do you have into expanding it, which is the source of growth versus optimizing it? And as most companies grow, most of the energy gets pulled down by problems and they start focusing on optimizing The work that they're doing versus expanding the impact they're having to—

Oops, sorry. My fault. I went too prematurely. So, instead of focusing on what? Hello? Do you have me? So Kevin, when we think about those metrics that you just mentioned— oh, I'm sorry about this, folks. It looks like we have a connection issue. And it seems like our speaker has just popped off. It's interesting what Kevin was saying. I'll just wait for him to see if he pops back on. If he doesn't, then we can always kill the broadcast and then start again. So, It's interesting that as we go forward, this idea that we're looking at the wrong metrics is very interesting because I know that from an operation standpoint, you're probably looking. If you're a good operator, you're probably looking at your financials every week, every month. And if you're not looking at your financials every month, shame on you. But part of the challenge with getting in and getting the metrics that matter is now a question of who do I need to talk to to understand this? In past episodes, we've talked about things like cash flow that people aren't— they see that their money's coming into the bank and the money's going out. But they still seem to feel, oh, my cash flow is not good. I'm still not— it just doesn't seem like I have the money to do what I need to do. Even though when you look at your margins of individual product sales and that sort of thing, it seems like it's going okay. When you take a look at your customer attrition rates, maybe it looks like they're doing okay. But to what Kevin was just talking about, I wonder if as we go through this process, do we actually have an idea of what our 2-year and 5-year success strategy is going to be? So, it's really interesting. And I think that we can start checking out other metrics as we're going to uncover today. So Kevin, I'm sorry about the fact you got popped out. I was just keeping the conversation going a little bit.

Yeah.

So, we're thinking about this idea of all the different kinds of metrics that we get thrown with that say, hey, we're successful. But does it seem like companies are doubling down on the wrong things when ultimately, that slows their growth?

Sometimes. I mean, at the end of the day, you need metrics that indicate your growth and where you're going to go. And you need metrics to indicate how you're performing and delivering on your promises to your customers or your employees. today. You need both. It's just in the, what we call spatial disorientation of it all. When there's so much going on, we get twisted around. And sometimes, we don't know which way is up. And what we focused on naturally is fixing problems because they make a lot of noise. And we improve short-term performance and we feel good. Like solving problems is intoxicating. And I call it in the book, the intoxication of improvement. Improving things Feels good. But unfortunately, what happens as businesses get more complex is people navigate towards improvement versus the things that actually drive future growth. And it's hard to do both. Like, it's hard to grow and dial in or operate a business at the same time because it's really 2 very different types of thinking.

Well, we have the whole Japanese proverb of constant growth, right? This philosophy that we have to constantly look at making systems better.

Yes, Kaizen. Yes, yeah.

And so, when is that too much?

I mean, that's the magic question, Marc. And that's the piece. And it's like because it's never going to be good enough. And there's a balance. So, what we talk about, for example, just for a CEO or a business owner is ideally, they would have half of their energy on future growth of the organization. And then, less than half, whether it's the ongoing improvement and dialing in the as-is business. Now, if you're— so, let's say it's at least 50% of your time on growth for a CEO. But say, you're the head of operations. Maybe it's 15%, right? If you're the CFO, maybe it's 20%. So, you constantly have to be conscious about how you're allocating time because if you don't, you'll get stuck in improving and fixing things all day, every day. So somehow, you just have to protect. And that's the whole idea in this book is there's a framework for people to see. And just making sure you have enough of your own time and enough of your company's resources allocated to growth. The business will consume the rest of it.

And I love that you just segued into my next question because I'd like to spotlight your 4 Forces of Growth. And we'll get to that right after this. You remember the moment. That speaker who made the whole room lean forward. Who said exactly the right thing at the right time. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens through curation. Elite Headline Speakers is a boutique speaker curation service. We find the voice that fits your event like it was made for it. Visit EliteHeadlineSpeakers.com. Elite Headline Speakers, the right voice, your stage.

When the spotlight shines on your business, are customers applauding or yawning? In other words, how is your business performing? Make your business a star with the new book, Lights! Camera! Action!, business operational excellence through the lens of live theater by Marc Haine. Marc uses his business and acting experience to help you see your business like a live show so you can create a performance your customers will never forget. Buy Lights! Camera! Action! today at your favorite online retailer or directly at marchaine.com.

Welcome back! I am speaking with Kevin Lawrence. Kevin, okay, I just shamelessly plugged my book. Why don't we shamelessly plug your book? Why don't you tell us a little bit about it?

Well, at the end of the day, the 4 Forces of Growth is pretty straightforward. Companies grow and they often succumb to their own success. And what happens, no different than a plane taking off, and it takes the metaphor of flight and the 4 forces of flight and converts it to business. And just like to keep an airplane in the air for a long time and on course is difficult, the same thing is to lead a business to the destination that you want to. So, it takes and breaks it down to a very, very simple model. To have you understand when you and your team are focused on activities that directly drive growth versus all the other stuff that you need to do. And the punchline is if you don't have enough of your energy as a CEO or for key executives focused on growth, you'll get less of it. But you get tricked. You get tricked into thinking if we just solve all these problems and make our business perfect, it'll grow more. No! You'll have a perfect business or closer to perfect business. But your growth engine will suffer and the growth will slow.

And so, why don't you tell us a little bit about— can we dig a little bit into the 4 Forces of Growth just so the audience has some understanding of what they need to understand? Sure.

So, if you look at what makes an airplane fly, it's the lift of the wings and the thrust of the engine pull the plane up into the air. And that is the principles of flight. There's more to it but that's the simple piece. So, lift and thrust gives you altitude. For a business, our lift is looking at opportunities and possibilities. And as a leader, if you don't pull your team up towards opportunities and possibilities, they will get pulled down by problems. And they'll start focusing down and looking at their toes in the short term and fixing problems versus opportunities to have more impact on more great customers. The other axis, instead of the thrust of the engine that takes the plane forward and helps it to rise, we have courage. And the same thing as the CEO or senior leader. If you are not leading and bringing the courage like the pilot hits the throttle to get thrust, if you're not leading the courage of the organization, it'll gradually naturally slow down and become more fearful by nature because that's what humans do. is that courage is hard and it's a muscle that has to be pushed. So, just like the pilot is hard on the throttle and it adjusts the flaps to create altitude, as a leader and a CEO, we need to push towards opportunities and then have the courage to move ahead. And that's where growth comes from because growth is scary. It's doing new things, getting new customers. And one of the things I talk about in the book is it's much easier to farm an existing client base, like nurture and take care of existing clients than it is to go and hunt and get new ones. And every business starts out with that courage and does a lot of hunting. But over time, they become more insular and play safe. And that's not where the growth is. You have to take risks in order to grow.

Yeah, great. And so then, the other 2.

The other— so the force, those are opportunities and courage. So, opportunities are pulled down by problems. Right? They're fought by problems that pull you down. And courage is fought by fear. So, if you're basically controlling opportunities or problems, Mother Nature will pull everything down to problems. You have to lift up towards opportunities. And then, there's courage to go forward and then fear to slow down and be more conservative. So, those are basically those 2 levers help you manage those 4 forces and how much growth you're going to have in your business.

And so, when you're thinking about these 4 forces, how does an operator know which of the forces he needs to focus on at any one time?

Well, the way we do it, make it even simpler, Marc, is that we get people to really look at how much of their resources are going into the growth quadrant. That is the simple hack. So for example, when we go and look at your calendar, we have CEOs and executives go and split their time between how much of your time is in growth and how much of time is in improvement. Where improvement's good. You need a whole bunch of it to run an organization well and take care of your customers and provide good service and what you promised. So, we have them look at how much of their time is in the different quadrants because it's really easy to look at. So for example, I got a CEO who sends me a weekly report of his calendar and what percentage of his time is in each of those different quadrants. And he knows he needs to be more than 50% in growth to get where he wants to go. So, that is the simple. The second And the one where as a firm, and we do a lot of work, our firm is a huge amount about working with the CEO and coaching them one-on-one. And then secondly, driving the growth strategy of the firm to get them to their next major level they want to get to. And the acid test that we use on this is, let's go look at your strategic plan. Let's look at your 3-year growth strategy and how much of it is in each of the quadrants. And inadvertently, The companies that are growing like crazy and doing well have a whole bunch of their strategies about growth. Usually, what happens when we start to review this, especially when companies start to really get going, is their strategy converts almost all to improvement because they're surrounded by problems.

Right.

So, logic says, hey, if we fix all of our problems, we make our customers happy, make our employees happy, we get more efficiency, we get more quality, we'll win. And that's not a growth strategy. That's an improvement strategy. And it's not bad. It's healthy for the short term. But that's where we look at the quadrants. Usually, there's not enough resources allocated to growth and then they don't grow.

Would it be fair to say that most operators, especially the ones tuning in today, maybe looking at and trying to understand what we're talking about today, would it be fair to say that a lot of them are saying right now, I'm just way too busy with dealing with the day-to-day that I'm really— I have no time to think about growth.

Yeah, exactly. And as the best operators should say, that's the way an operator is supposed to think. But that's why we need the strategic CEO to say, okay, great. But we need to zoom out and look at the opportunities and things. So, I'll give you an example. One of my clients in the U.S. that we work with as a firm, we acquired their number They're the number 1 in the market. We acquired number 2. The team was exhausted. I mean, doing acquisitions can be a lot of work. And the team was exhausted and everyone's like saying, hey, we need to take a break. We need to take it easy. We need to focus on a whole bunch of internal things and stabilize things. And we'll just leave the acquisition alone for now. And that's great operational thinking. But the growth CEO is like, we need to do the opposite. Actually, we just spent X millions of dollars for this business. It's going to disrupt a lot of our clients. And if we don't proactively go and meet with every single client and talk to them about why this acquisition is beneficial to them, we're going to end up with a serious problem. And we'll lose a bunch of clients. And we'll lose all the opportunity we thought we were buying because these clients were underserved. And we knew that we could bring them into our platform and serve them better. So, at the end of the day, the good operator is we need to take a practical step. But the strategic growth CEO is like, no, no, no. We need to do the opposite. And that's the challenge with growth. It's often counterintuitive because it's messy.

Right.

Because the operators are right. There's a whole bunch of problems we should clean up. But the CEO did the strategic math. Hey, fixing those problems is worth about $500 grand to the business. Leveraging this opportunity with this acquisition and the upsells that we can do into possibilities is worth about $10 million. So, he had to do the math. So, operators aren't wrong. But you often need a strategic lens focused on opportunity to pressure test your thinking. And most people when things are messy feel nervous to grow. They don't want to push for some of that stuff. And the reality is it's always going to be messy.

Yeah.

So, you have to be comfortable with growth and you have to be comfortable with operators being uncomfortable because They should take a stand for having things run well. That's their job. But it fights growth.

Yeah. So, I mean, this is fascinating. For the people tuning in who go, oh my goodness, this really resonates. Could you let everybody know how they can get in touch with you if they want to work with you?

Yeah, for sure. Just lawrenceandco.com. Lawrenceandco.com. And we've got a bunch of advisors that we do this work every week. with different companies around the world that really are serious about growth. So yeah, there's all kinds of blogs, articles, case studies, all this stuff just like you have on your website, Marc. We have all that stuff for the services we provide. And if we can help, we're happy to help. We love this game.

Terrific! So Kevin, like we're talking about kind of people being kind of nailed down to today's issues. I mean, some of today's issues can be business-threatening. I mean, if you're All of a sudden, if you have high attrition and now you have to make up for the shortcomings, your people are burnt out because you've been short-staffed. Something changes in the economy and because of that, you're losing customers. How does one prioritize being able to deal with the day-to-day crisis? At the same token, make sure that they have an eye kind of what that growth would be.

Yeah, exactly. And that's the hard part. You've got to do some strategic mathematics. The challenge is if you don't do what I call strategic math, every problem looks— every burning fire looks like it should be put out. And most of them don't need to. There are some that are life-threatening. They are serious ones. But not as many as people think.

Yes.

And the undisciplined mind and the non-strategic thinker will swoop into all the problems. And I had one client once that had a big issue that I thought. And it was a A massive business. He'd built a massive enterprise. And I said, look, in this one part of the business, we're burning $1 million a year. And he's like, okay, anything else? And what I learned for him to pay attention, it needed to be closer to $5 or $10 million before it was worth him getting involved. Now, that seems crazy to a lot of people. But at the scale of his business, $1 million wasn't worth paying attention to because He had these multi-million dollar opportunities that were begging for his attention. Saving a million bucks a year was good. It just wasn't— it didn't meet the filter. So, that's where people need strategic filters based on obviously the scale and their business. And you got to apply math. And for some reason, a lot of people aren't good at doing strategic math.

Right.

And they weight all things equal.

Because their resources are limited? And they think, because my resources are limited today, when I do the planning, I can't really think beyond that.

Yes, and because problems make a lot of noise. And because our egos love solving problems. And by the way, that's our job and we get awards and accolades. So, it's wired into our operating systems to pull towards problems because of all the drama and the intrinsic rewards we get.

Yes.

And that's hard. So, having the best CEOs are very good at discerning what we pay attention to and what we ignore.

Yeah. Is there ever a situation where a business in their planning might be scaling too fast? Like even though they might have a 5-year growth plan, maybe they're not ready for it. How do they know?

Well, you're never ready for it. I mean, the thing that we look at Usually, the thing that breaks is the people. You don't have enough strong leaders. So, if you don't, if your leadership team doesn't have, they'll call it the leadership muscle to manage the business, that's where it'll crack. And we watch for that. The thing is nobody's ready. Nobody's ever ready for the growth they want to do. It's always messy. It's just, are you going to put the business at risk? So, one is if you're creating too much risk in terms of your leadership strength to be able to handle it. Or geographic expansion can get people in trouble. Or in a capital-intensive business, are you putting too much risk on the balance sheet? Like more than you can bounce from. So, yes. And that's again, that's discernment. But usually, like in a people-intensive business at scale, like 30 at a reasonable size, it seems to be people-intensive, non-software business like traditional business. Yeah, like beyond 30% a year compounded, it tends to become an issue. Software is different or SaaS. You can grow faster than that. But usually, we run out of people talent or leadership talent to hold it together. That's the big risk and it happens all the time. But if you're constantly recalibrating, you can catch it and adjust.

So, is it fair to say that a lot of what we're talking about really today is leadership mindset? We're looking at the wrong things. Because of that, we're handicapping ourselves. So, what does it mean to kind of think around or assume the mindset of like a growth CEO?

Yeah. So, the simplest way that I can put that is to be fixated and locked on where do we want to be in 10 or 20 years down the road, like the long-term vision. And then, locked and loaded and committed to where we're going to get whether it's 3 years, or 4 years, or 5 years. And what the organization looks like. Like, that's what a growth CEO does. And whether there's good weather, bad weather, whatever it happens to be, they're locked in. Now look at maybe it takes 4 years. Maybe it takes 5 years. But what we look at is normally, it's doubling the Xs of the business, doubling that core unit. So, if their core unit and let's say they are— I was talking to a charity down in the U.S. yesterday and they help provide beds for children that sleep on the floor. And it's called Sleep in Heavenly Peace. Amazing, amazing organization. So, if you were going to say— and I forget the exact number of how many kids they put into beds. I think it was more than 70,000. And I apologize if I have the number wrong. But so, they say they did 70,000. As an organization, as they want to expand, in theory, it would be, let's get it to 140,000 kids that we support on an annual basis and by providing beds for those kids. To take that concept. So normally, the growth CEO has the target on when they're going to double the enterprise. And everything is about getting to that and doing it well.

So again, we're talking about growth. We're talking about future plans. You know, one thing in our recent history, we didn't see COVID coming. How flexible is this line of thinking and how inflexible is some of This line of thinking?

Great question. Yes, that COVID thing was wild.

It was just a little thing, right?

A little. Yeah, that was something. So, the goals don't change.

Right.

The time frame sometimes changes. Just no different than if you're a real estate developer right now in a soft real estate market in Canada anyways. You know, your goals might not change but the time frame has to because the market isn't there today. So, during COVID For all of our clients, nothing changed except for we had to expand the time frame or in some cases, contract the time frame if COVID gave them a big lift. So, all those external things, you're locked and loaded that you're going to get there no matter what. But you obviously have to be flexible based on the conditions.

So, a lot of the success that we saw during COVID was we saw a lot of new businesses launched because of COVID because they were already— they launched within the constraint. But a lot of successful businesses were able to do little pivots. They were able to change their business model a little bit in order to secure kind of their future. And because of that, they actually created brand new businesses or brand new arms to their businesses.

Yep.

That to me seems like, oh, we're going this way. Oh, now we're going to go this way. And you create this new branch. How do we create that flexibility that in changing markets, in changing political systems, in goodness knows geo situations around the world, how are we able to maintain that level of flexibility? flexibility to be able to be open enough that we might have to do major pivots?

That's a great question. And most businesses don't. Most businesses, once they have a solid model, they don't need to pivot like that. Actually, the challenge is to not do too much of it because that gets them in trouble. Another chapter in The Four Forces is called The Impulse to Improvise. And the reason most companies don't scale is they improvise too much. They can't stay in their lane. They have what one of my friends calls an idea monkey CEO, which I can be sometimes, that has too many ideas. And they take their business wide and dilute it versus staying focused and crush it. So, the risk is actually too much. Once you understand your core principles and you know where your customers are and where your market is, the hard part is keeping it on the rails and not doing the innovation. To innovate is human. It's easy. But to pick—

And it's fun, right? The innovation and creative side is fun.

It is. It's way more fun. It's not disciplined. And it usually, when people get too excited about it, it hurts their business. So, to be able to stick to your strategy actually is the hardest thing. The improvising, it'll happen everywhere. But that is normally the problem. Too much of that.

Too much, yeah. I'd like to get into some more pitfalls and cautionaries. And we'll get to those right after this.

Sure.

When you're delivering an important speech to a huge audience, it's easy to lose your place or go way over time. Give yourself an advantage with the Pro Speaker Presentation Speech Timer app. No more checking your watch or calling for time. The Pro Speaker Presentation Speech Timer app keeps you on track with easy-to-see timers, even changing color for visual prompts during your speech. And you can set audio cues to practice or set it to vibrate so you don't even have to Don't look. Be the pro you know you are. Download the app at speakerpresentationtimer.com.

Welcome back! I hope you're getting tons of value from today's episode. As you can tell, Kevin and I are passionate about today's topic. So, if you belong to an organization that could use our help, or you might be planning a leadership retreat, an industry conference, leadership conference, whatever it looks like, drop us a line. We'd love to explore how we can be of service to you and your people. So Kevin, let's talk Cautionaries and pitfalls. We've mentioned a few of them as we're going forward because I mean, let's face it. When we're thinking about long-term strategies, there's going to be a lot of tripping hazards. Tons!

But most of them are obvious and known. Most businesses that don't do what they want, it's not because most of the stuff the CEOs or the executives know. They just don't want to deal with it. And like one of the biggest ones is what I call the loyalty liability. It might sound a bit cheesy but it's true. It's that most CEOs and founders in particular are very loyal to people. That's why they built great teams and they're not the monsters that we see on TV. But that becomes a liability because when they've had someone with them for a decade who is a wonderful human being but no longer can be a high performer in their job, if they hold on to those people, they end up slowing the business down and putting more pressure on themselves. Basically, they end up with a bunch of part-time jobs backfilling for these weak people. And interesting, we go into organizations, we normally have to make a lot of people adjustments or moves to different roles or different structures because the team isn't strong enough to do it. Like one of our case studies is Amish Shah from down in the U.S. And he had an amazing— he built a spectacular business, a big business. But when I started working with him, he hated his business. But he had basically outgrown a whole bunch of his team. But he was stuck in that loyalty liability. It happens all the time. So, that is one of the big pitfalls that it's so easy to slip into because you want to be good to people and you appreciate people that have helped you.

Yeah, well, you know, part of that loyalty component is they helped me get to where I am today. Yeah, right.

Yeah. But they might not be for tomorrow. And also, when people start to slipping their roles, it's not fair to them because they have to go home at the end of the day not feeling great.

Yeah.

The other major one is complexity. Like business is simple. The game is really simple. And when people don't— like I can tell how well the people know their business by how complex their plans are. And when there's a lot of complexity, that means you don't have masters. You have people that are trying to figure it out. It takes one of my favorite quotes. And I haven't been able to source whether it's truly from Mark Twain or not, but I give him credit. But it might be somebody else. It's hard to confirm. But the quote is, I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time.

Yeah.

I love it. And if you look at the most beautiful strategy work we do with companies, it's insultingly simple. Like, it is so— like, the best strategy is so basic. Like, you would As a consultant, you need a lot of courage and confidence to put that out as the final product because it's so simple, so obvious. And so, the best things in business and the things that work are so simple that a 12-year-old could understand it in a minute. And where people want to come up with this complex stuff because it makes them feel good about themselves.

I was just going to say exactly, it's the complexity, the ego part of their build.

It is.

Yeah.

Like, even think as an author, as you know, like as an author, like how hard it is to write a very simple, to-the-point book. Like, I had to fight myself on The Four Forces of Growth because it's like I made it so simple that it was nothing and then brought it up one notch. Literally, it's so insanely simple. But that's hard because I'm supposedly a smart guy with 30 years of experience and I know a lot of stuff and I want to tell people everything I know. But that's not good for the customer. That's not what the customer needs. That's what my ego wants.

Yes.

So, keeping it insanely simple on the— and one of the chapters I talk about is just what are the 3 big moves to double the business. Maybe it's 4. But it's like, it's really, really simple. And that's a trap people fall into all the time. And when they hire more experienced executives from bigger organizations, Usually, they bring in a lot of complexity. So, to keep it distilled and simple is another huge trap.

Yeah, yeah. And again, because people will look at it and go, that's just way too simple. It's like, it can't be that simple.

Correct.

Any other traps?

The final one is the numbers in a business. And where organizations get in trouble when they build systems and they build reporting dashboards and they build them for the executive suite instead of for the operators.

Right.

All of the information systems should be built for the person