Visionary & Integrator Dynamics - Mark C. Winters Pt. 1

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Contractor Evolution. We have a phenomenal episode today because my guest is Mark C. Winters, co author of the best selling book Rocket Fuel. The visionary integrator relationship is one I hear a lot of business owners wrestling with, and here's why. A lot of you likely fall in the visionary end of the spectrum. With a head full of ideas and a hunger that needed to be satisfied, you took the entrepreneurial leap and gave birth to what would become the business you own and lead. Today. Every venture needs the creative juice and gusto we associate with visionaries to get off the ground. Without visionary leaders who see things so clearly in their mind's eye in a way others can't, much of what we marvel at in the domain of human achievement simply wouldn't have happened. No Sistine Chapel, no moon landings, no Internet. You get the idea. In fact, you could make the case that without visionaries, we'd still be living in an agrarian society. Because remember what a wise man once said, Everything is created twice. First in the mind and then in reality. But here's the thing. While the epic visionaries of our time get the lion's share of attention. Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, and Elon. Our visionary obsessed world obscures the truth of things. Because not one of these leaders who are placed on massive pedestals would have accomplished anything without their integrators. Their behind the scenes number two, their right hand man or woman who dutifully leads the execution of the vision and spends almost no time in the limelight for it. Who does the dirty work and through their super rare set of skills, makes real what the visionary imagines. Okay, I'm being a little grandiose here. You get my point. Integrators are the yin to the visionary's yang. And a lot of you listening are going to need one at some point. Now, I try on this show to go straight to the source whenever possible for answers. And Mark is a great example of that. He and Gino Wickman were the first to observe, study and write about this visionary integrator dynamic. And we're super blessed to talk to him about how all this plays out in our our construction and trades environment. Also, you'll see if you're watching on YouTube. I'm out of our normal studio setup again. I had to record this one while I was on the road in Austin, Texas specifically. Hence my sick new Style Switch barbecue hat, which you'll see in a sec. If you're ever in Austin, go to Style Switch immediately order the beef ribs. You can thank me later. Anyway, back to Mark. Our conversation is in two parts. Okay, this episode is part one and we're going to talk about the profile of visionaries versus integrators. We why they're different and how that healthy friction ignites organizational growth. Next week in part two, we'll talk about where visionaries should begin their search for their integrator and what systems and processes need to be implemented to breed long term success within VI relationships. So let's dive into part one with Mark C. Winters.

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Mark C. Winters, it's an honor to have you. I've been looking forward to this interview for quite a while. In the intro, I would have told the listeners a bit about Rocket fuel. Most of them know about this book and you your work, the Traction Library. But for the few that don't, let's just, let's dive in. Right off the hop here. Tell us a bit about how it works.

Yeah. So the visionary integrator structure is something that Gino discovered and articulated when he first wrote Traction as it was a real dynamic in an entrepreneurial company where you have the visionary entrepreneur, typically the founder, the one that has that entrepreneurial seizure and just can't resist it. And they start a business and they put it out there, they got lots of ideas, they're seeing the future. They'd love to build relationships, particularly big external relationships. And then the other type of leader is this integrator. And they're much more executional in focus and really following through on things, making sure that things get done, they're making it happen, they're understanding the vision and from that visionary, and then they're working harmoniously through and between the other leaders on the leadership team to actually make it happen, make it real in the world. What Gino saw was that when you had those two leaders together in an entrepreneurial company, the results were just explosive in terms of how much better they were, how much faster they could grow, how much farther they could get, how much more successful they could be. It resonated with experiences that I had had first in my own entrepreneurial journey and then as I began to work with the EOS model in my clients. And so I saw it, it was real. And so that's really what Rocket Fuel is all about is how do you take these two types of leaders that are by their very nature wired very differently, so their tendency is going to be to kind of collide and butt heads and create lots of friction between them. And so Rocket Fuel is all about the structure that we put around that relationship to help take that frict friction and blend it into a positive powerful force that can then propel the company to even higher levels.

Somewhere near the early stages of the book, you guys describe it. This is a philosophical belief in a sense that different people have different God given talents. And there's a really compelling way you guys talk about it in terms of this two piece puzzle thing. Can you just unpack that idea? Because I think it's a really memorable sound bite that our listeners who maybe aren't as familiar with your work will just totally glom onto.

Yes. So the two piece puzzle has actually evolved since we wrote the book into a three piece puzzle. But let's start with the two pieces of the visionary and the integrator. And I don't know if philosophical is the right word. I think the science backs us up in terms of people are different and they're, they're inclined to do certain things and not do other things. They're gifted with talents that are just contrary to other things that don't go together. For example, if I was to say to someone, let's say you've got someone in an organization, that their ideal world is to be in a dark cubicle away from people with their computer where they can just crank away on spreadsheets and do that. But they come to work through the side door where they don't have to say hi to anybody. They leave a little bit early, maybe get there a little bit early so that they just can kind of avoid the interactions. And you say to them, hey, we're going to put you in this role where you get to go out and meet new people all the time. Your job is going to be to go out and try to find people and meet people. They just aren't wired for that. Right. Likewise, if you were to take the person who loves being out there doing all the things, meeting all the people and say, hey, the rest of your life is to be stowed away in that cubicle. They are just not wired for that. Right. So we all have these things that we're just made for. So when you think about the visionary and the integrator, fundamentally they're made for the kind of thing I described, the visionary for ideas, seeing the future, being out there in the world, and the integrator for really having that executional focus to get it done. But there's overlap. There's certain things that maybe they cross over a little bit to this side or that side. They're not mutually exclusive all the way across. And so if you think about how two specific visionaries and integrators may fit together, a puzzle is just a great way to visualize it. And so the moral of the story is we want to find the match where that edge between the two pieces of the puzzle fits together as cleanly as possible. Meaning we don't want to have too much overlap where we're just alike. We don't want to have too many gaps between us where we've got these big holes in where the two pieces connect. And so, you know, we've got a tool to kind of help understand that, help do it. But ideally they're complementary where between the two of them they have great coverage, they have great ability all across the of things that the visionary integrator duo needs to be great at. And between the two of them, they don't have too many things where they're the same, they're wired alike and they're going to want to fight for the wheel. They're going to get confused about who's doing what because instinctively they're both going to want to go after it. Does that make sense for the two piece?

It makes total sense. Maybe you could expand a little bit on the traits and then the accountabilities that most visionaries have. And then the same thing for the integrators. You mentioned it a bit at the beginning. One guy's ideas oriented, big picture oriented. The other is a little bit more detail oriented, more focused on day to day. But if you could just get. I don't know if there's a laundry list you have or you could just kind of go through your stereotypical profile of these two. Just help.

Yeah, so there's a laundry list in the book, but it's very long. So I'm not going to try to. I couldn't remember them all anyway. But you know, at the high level, starting with the visionary, just kind of thinking about, we talk about their DNA. You know, they are see in the future, they're thinking about where the world is going. They are trying to understand how can we best position our company along that path to where it's going to be the best opportunity for us. They're always generating lots of ideas. You know, we'll sort of say 20 a week. They don't recognize it, but you know, 18 of those may be bad ideas, a few of those maybe kill the company bad ideas. But one or two of those are just gold and they're just moonshots. They're the kind of things that can just really change the game in a positive way for us. And they don't know the difference. They all look great to them. Right, so that's the visionary. When you talk about accountabilities, you know, one of the discoveries really is that we want to. Visionaries don't do great with accountabilities. They don't do great with, you know, we say visionaries don't have rocks. And so we try not to give them like specific concrete, you know, time bound accountabilities when we don't have to because they struggle with them, they're not good at them and it becomes very frustrating for them and frankly for the rest of the organization, the rest of the team. But they do have an accountability to be generating those ideas and be thinking about the future and doing those kinds of things. Now the integrator, they're all about accountability. That's core to their DNA. They're all about that follow through execution, the to dos that have to get done, getting everybody aligned. They play a bit of a translator for that visionary. You know, the visionary has all those ideas flying up here at 30,000ft. The integrator may not fly at 30,000ft, but they fly at 20. Or they can close enough to kind of hear them and understand them and then translate those to the rest of the organization, the rest of the team. Oftentimes the integrator has an accountability really for the P and L for making sure that all of the business operations, whether it's revenue generation, expense control, whatever drives together to drive the profitability of the, of the organization. That's really where it all meets. So they're accountable for that. They're accountable for breaking down barriers. So sometimes that looks like a leader that just gets stuck. They've tried this and that, they just can't get there. So the integrator can kind of work with them to kind of see other possibilities, maybe bring in other resources, maybe you know, do something to kind of help them break through the wall and be able to get going again. They break ties. So often happens where multiple leaders on the leaders team will get crossways and you know, sales and marketing is going hey, we got to go this way. While, you know, finance is saying, no, no, no, it has to go this way. And they find themselves at odds and they try and they just can't work it out. They just can't get on the same page. So we can't stay there stuck. And so we need somebody to swing into that conversation, listen to all sides in the context of the greater good of where we're trying to go and make the call and make the decision that gets us unstuck, gets us moving forward again, so we can get on to whatever the next decision is that we need to make. So that's a common accountability for the integrator as well.

Yeah, I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit here. One thing that really occurred to me when I read through the book, and this also could be my bias working in the industry that I work in, when I read through the accountabilities, I.

Look at it and I just can't.

Help but have the impression where I'm like, okay, one of these, Mark sounds a lot easier and a lot more fun than the other. Okay. And I'm gonna hyperbolize to make the point. In one case, we have this ideas guy who gets to play with whiteboards and spout out cool stuff and go to fancy dinners with clients and be the hero and get the sexy name visionary slapped on their name tag or whatever. And then you have this other person who, again I'm doing a cartoon example, who's essentially doing all the work and you say, okay, well you know, they have 20 ideas a week and maybe two are good. If you were a three point shooter and you were shooting 10%, you wouldn't be in the NBA. I don't even know if you'd be playing college, so tell me why that's wrong. Or maybe that says something about me and my perspective.

Have you been asked that question before?

Do you have thoughts on that? Sort of. That takes.

Sure. And I think it a couple things to kind of ground it. So one is we are clearly influenced by our own bias based on who we are and how we see ourselves. Right. So the lens that you're looking at it through, if you are a pure visionary or you are a pure integrator or you're neither, is going to influence how you see that situation.

Right, right.

And in that. And if you're neither, recognize that most people are neither. So everybody's not one or the other. There's a lot of people that are neither. And so that's okay. Right. Everybody is not, you know, it's not wired to be this. This visionary leader or this integrator leader. Now for those that are, here's what, what we found. So I'm a visionary. I'm a. I'm a pretty high visionary. So I'm 96 on our indicator for that. I'm low on the integrator side. So for me, I can do some of the integrator stuff, but I'm not good at it.

Not that good at it. Right.

And if I am good at it, it just almost kills me. So it just zaps all of the energy that I've got, all the energy units I've got to spend as a human, they all go there and there's nothing left over for that other side. So recognize that that equation seems to work the other way as well. Although I think it's true that a lot of integrators aren't capable of some of the ideation, some of the visioning that visionaries do. They just can't do it.

You know what's interesting? You say that I kind of asked the same question to a group in our marketing huddle a few weeks ago. I said, I've got Mark C. Winters coming on. I'm really excited. This is something that's on my mind. I'm going to ask him this. And I said, I did the exact same them as I just did to you. And I was surprised because about three or four people in the group raised their hands and said, I have zero interest in being a visionary. I don't care at all. That's not where I play. That's not where my mind goes. In my free time. I am more than happy, even excited for you to give me the play and me execute it. And I was like, okay, all right, I'm wrong.

So this is exactly what we found. That's the pure integrator mindset, is give me the thing. I don't want to spend my cycles trying to come up with that great thing. Give me that great thing. I can then play it against the world of execution. And I can tell if that plays gonna work or if we can run it right here with our offense. Right. And so that's really what they want and they're good with that. So the people, Benji, and you may be one of these, that kind of. They're sort of frustrated. Well, I want to be on that side. That side looks more fun. You may be both. You may be kind of in there. So you've got kind of a foot in Both worlds. So you feel that way. You feel drawn in both directions. And that's a. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's a little bit of a trap to just be cautious of where you really need to kind of spend some intentional time thinking about. All right, which one of these do I enjoy more?

I think it's a good comment to just be aware of the bias and how that might change the lens through which you look at this whole dynamic. And that probably says something about where I sit on it, and I'm curious to learn and discover more about that. One thing I, you know, it's not talked about a ton in the book. Maybe it is elsewhere. But I'm curious about the environment where this whole thing was discovered, because this Rocket Fuel book has really become very widely distributed, certainly in our construction and trades industry markets. Very, very popular. I know a lot of visionaries who are looking for integrators. Some have been very successful, some have not. We'll get into some of the practical steps in a minute. But where were you guys at in Kore and in life when the aha moment around this happened? And perhaps while you're kind of discussing that, you could share a bit about the Mark C. Winters background and story and all of that as well.

Yeah. So first, you know, full credit to Gino for the discovery. And he really discovered it in his own family business. When he discovered, you know, this, it was a situation with his. His father and then some other leaders that were involved in the company and him just trying to sort of pull their hair out in Gino's case, maybe literally trying to figure out how to make it do what they wanted it to do. And they stumbled on this structure of visionary and integrator and tried it, put some language to it. And then from there, after he had experienced that personally, he began to talk to some of his early clients when he was first sharing EOs, which he had developed and used really for his own family business with some other, you know, those initial clients. And it. And it. And it worked. And so then over a period of time, he saw success. It got written in the book Traction. And then, you know, when I first saw it as he had written it, it totally resonated with me because I had had a couple of company experiences where I'd had that person didn't realize it, didn't know that there was a name for that. But it just sort of logically, that's how we had structured things to where I could spend more time doing the stuff that I was really good at, get me out of the stuff that I wasn't good at and bring somebody in who was really strong. And so I was like, oh, that's a thing. That's a real thing. And so then as I began to work with more and more clients, as I began to teach the entrepreneurial operating system, just again and again I saw this pattern where, where if they were both there, they could do things that they just couldn't do, if it was just the one. And it really. They failed less, they grew faster, they got more things done, people were happier, more fulfilled. I mean, it's just kind of all the things that you want to see happening had seemed a much higher probability of happening when those two roles were present in a healthy.

My next question, which you've kind of answered to some degree, I don't know if there's anything else to add to it, but are there broad aggregate observations you can conclusively make about businesses? What happens to them when this gets fully implemented? You mentioned more fun, the business is better. But can we say meteoric growth as well?

Yeah, we'll pick your superlative adjective or whatever to describe it. I mean, in practical terms, I would say it's consistently a factor of double digit higher growth. That's based on my firsthand knowledge. But the interesting thing to me is it starts with this visionary entrepreneur. And so here's what I see and really this is sort of the thing that I'm passionate about is I see and I am one of these. I've been one of these. So my history, I think we're up to 15 different companies that I either started, bought, shut down or sold to somebody in all different types of industries. So, you know, I've been, you know, that, that visionary entrepreneur for a long time. And here's what I see and was my personal experience is I wow, yeah, I want to be an entrepreneur. I think I can do this. I want to do this thing. I see this opportunity in the marketplace. That's an unmet need, It's a new product, it's blah, blah, blah, it's whatever. So I can, I can see a way to, to put that out there. And this is going to be great. I'm going to make a lot of money. I'm going to be able to make a difference in the world. I'm going to have more time to do other things that I want. I'm going to be able to work with fun and interesting people and this is going to be great. I'm on fire. And I make the leap and I jump out. Uninformed optimism, we call that uninformed optimism. Yeah, it's the entrepreneurial seizure that you can't resist. Right. It just happens. Okay, so now you're out there and then you fast forward six months, a year, whatever the time is for this particular entrepreneur and you go take a look at where they're at and what's happening and what you see is they're making no money. They're getting paid less per hour than they've ever been paid in their life. They're making zero difference, it feels like to them, because they're just not. It's not getting out there, it's not far enough. It's not doing exactly what they thought it would. They have zero time. That's discretionary. They're just putting it all in there, trying to save this thing. And they frankly are having to deal with people they don't like just to kind of survive and get by. And so it's this stark contrast to what they wanted when they did that. And so you bring the integrator into the equation and it's almost like you can save the visionary entrepreneur from their self created hell and get them back up out of this ditch and back up on plane with where they're trying to go. And so that's what we see when it works. When they bring the right integrator together with them, they put the structure around it to make it healthy and they do the hard work that you have to do to get on down that path. Then all of a sudden they start to realize the benefits that they were after in the first place. They're making a difference.

It's a very relatable situation where you're like sitting there six months in or a year in, or heaven forbid, a few years in to a venture and you're going, man, this is not how I drew it up on the whiteboard at all. So there's like a bit of a. An implementer can be a savior when you find the right one, which. An integrator, sorry, an integrator. And we're not to get those terms mixed up. I know that an integrator. I'm going to move into the next section here that I wanted to discuss and I sort of framed these up as questions on behalf of visionaries because we, we work actively with about 500 entrepreneurs, we coach them, we help implement a management system, we watch their businesses grow. And I'd make the case that fully three quarters, maybe more are in the visionary category. And So I want to just ask some questions on behalf of them. And one of the things that you talk about in Rocket Fuel is this idea of a visionary spectrum. And, and maybe I'll try my best to explain what I think it means and maybe you can refine it and then talk about how to do the calculations. But it's basically the idea of how much visionary juice does an actual business need based on a few different factors. Another cartoony example is a lemonade stand doesn't need an Elon Musk type brain. You know what I mean? There are certain models or industries or types of businesses where you need more visionary than others. Is that a good way to say it?

100%. Okay.

And what are the factors?

Well, so let me kind of back up to that three piece puzzle that I talked about before. So remember the two pieces of the visionary and the integrator coming together. So now imagine that we stack those two pieces on top of a third piece, which is the business. And so think about the visionary themselves has to click in with a fit to that business. That's right. And the integrator has to click into the fit of that business. So they all fit together just right. And so where those two roles click into the company, that's where that spectrum lies. The spectrum is the shape of that edge for that company. Right. So on the visionary side, for the visionary spectrum, how much visionary does this company need? And so there's three different factors that we talk about there. We talk about industry type, we talk about the growth aspirations of that company. We talk about if there's complexity or market change. So think about a company that is global in scope. They have a lot of different business units or product lines. They've got thousands and thousands of people. There's regulatory complexity, there's technology, technical complexity. There's just all these different kinds of things. And it's changing very rapidly and everything's moving around and. Right. So that's kind of one end. The other end is, I think your lemonade stand is a great example. Right. It just kind of, it just kind of is what it is, is what it is, is what it is. And so, you know, you. There's no like, okay, it's a 78 or it's a 24 or there's no like, specific number on that dial. But I think it's a general awareness of, all right, you know, what do we, what do we got here? What do we, what do we really need on this part of the equation to get this thing to do what we want it to do. And so you're right. And we sort of jokingly say if you're on the high end of the visionary spectrum in terms of complexity and growth and all that, then maybe you need an Elon or a Steve Jobs or just some sort of a classical visionary. That's their head is there. Very few people's head is there, but theirs is. And it needs to be to make it go on the other end. We jokingly say that maybe a Mr. Magoo would do somebody that doesn't need to see very far into the future. They just need to kind of see, you know, to the end of the block. And so it's turning that dial to see what's right. And the same is true on the integrator side, right? So how much integrator does this business need? And you can think about that again, if it's, if it's that big complex organization, lots and lots of people, lots of different geographies, lots of different locations, you know, lots of. Maybe it's, maybe there's a labor union, maybe you've got other kinds of complexity that's going on there. There's just a lot of things that that integrator is going to need to be capable of that they're not going to need to be capable of to run that lemonade stand. Even if we've got 12 lemonade stands, it's just a different ballgame. So on the near end, on the lower end of that spectrum is more like a project manager. It's more like an administrator, right? Somebody that can handle. It's still execution focus, it's still making it happen. But remember, the vision is smaller, right? And so on the high end of that integrator spectrum is somebody who's really got a lot of horsepower and can handle all that complexity. And they're a leader of leaders because there's nobody doing all that stuff, right? There's no one person that can do all that stuff at scale. And so they've got to be able to lead and develop, develop the leaders that can then get that stuff done through a bunch of other sets of leaders all the way down. As big as that organization might be.

Well, it's interesting in our little construction and trade space right now because it is changing so quickly. I mean, talking 2022, right, like today there's an onslaught of new softwares and technologically based tools that have hit the market over the last 10 years. There is, is big smart money quickly and surely making its way to this space as well. You see that in the centralization of large construction businesses. I've mentioned this a few times, but BlackRock is buying up apartment complexes at an alarming rate. That's for another podcast. But you are seeing change to this specific little part of the economy at a rate that I don't think we've ever seen. So there's room for some huge visionary type entrepreneurs to come into this space and they have and they will continue. But there's also room for businesses that are less visionary. I'll give you an example. Some of the businesses listening to some of the entrepreneurs listening to this podcast would be doing maybe they run a million dollar a year painting company and it would score lower on the visionary needs end of the spectrum. Because. Because while a great business that makes money and serves the client and feeds the family of the people that work within it, let's be real, it's a relatively simple entity. A few teams. There's a sales and marketing arm of it. There's a little bit of project management, a little bit of qc, some finance, some admin.

On the other end.

You have people like Tommy Mello who we just had on the podcast a couple weeks ago and he's trending to do two. You know Tommy? Yeah, yeah, he knows you.

Yeah.

He's trying to get $200 million. He's operating in 16 states last time I checked. Maybe it's up to 18 now. He's got massive scale training and onboarding systems that would blow your mind. Entire facilities to train technicians, how to install garage doors like that. A huge brand. He's made a whole bunch of splashy plays in the content world that have led to some of the relationship relationships that he's built that would explain the growth. And so I see this as a, you know, it's a neat time in our little world where there' where there is 30 or 40 years ago it would be sort of Chuck in the trucks primarily. Now there's some big players. There's a bit of a tangent, but the question that I wanted to sneak up to here is this. You can obviously see what would happen to a business that needs big visionary thinking but does not have it. But they would get crushed. They're just not playing a big enough game. They're playing checkers when they need to be playing chess. And they would have maybe some short term success, but they wouldn't be playing for very long because the industry type, the growth aspirations and the complexity of that business demand more. That's obvious. Here's the opposite question. If a business Needs something relative to, doesn't need that much visionary juice in it, but it has too much can that do harm? Have you ever seen an instance where it's like, hey, this is like a relatively simple model. We don't need this many ideas, we don't need this much visionary power and can that do harm or like what happens in situations like that?

So for sure it can. And I think, actually I, I want to attribute this to Jim Collins. I think it's right. But he says that business is more likely to die of indigestion than starvation.

Right.

And it's just, it's taken on too much stuff and not getting focused on the thing that you can execute. Right. So that's a real thing, particularly in an acquisition oriented mode. I guess that's where you see it a lot, right. So somebody's rolling things up, up, they're buying, buying, buying, buying, buying, but they haven't figured out how to efficiently make those transitions and plug those things in and do all that kind of stuff. So I'd say you can get in just as much trouble on that side as the other. In what I see.

I really love. I can't believe I never heard that Jim Collins quote. A business is more likely to die from indigestion than starvation. And it's so true. You see it all the time, just way too much coming down the pipe. And it's like, hey, let's just, let's just do the, let's just focus on the fundamentals really well right now because those aren't even in place. I love your like fun and cool and sexy idea about the future, but our present day is not fully looked after. Let's do that first. It's a really interesting.

So quick comment on that, Benji. So one of the things that I see sort of in the evolution of a business not specific to your industry, but just across many, many industries, is it's the evolution of the leadership team. Right. So when I first see them a lot of times they're kind of frantic. There's fires everywhere and a lot of their focus is trying to put out all these fires. And so they never seem to have time or capacity to put towards the next big thing. And that's frustrating. That's its own form of frustration. And then they sort of, they do what they can and they kind of add on where they can, but they really get intentional about focusing on building capacity so that they can kind of get out of that mode of doing all the work and actually leading and getting things done through Others and as they start to climb that curve, you know, fast forward, you know, two years, three years, you know, whatever the time frame is into the future and they become much more leader oriented than doer oriented. And the balance of the priorities starts to shift from all firefighting to in the middle. You know, we're doing some firefighting, but we're starting to do some new strategic kind of, I call them multiplier types of priorities. And then, you know, they get to a place where, you know what, almost everything that we focus on as a leadership team of the organization is strategic. You know, our priorities quarter after quarter and certainly year after year are the big things that if we can get that done, it's not just going to pay us this quarter, it's going to pay us again and again and again as we go down the road.

The other thing that is discussed a little bit is this readiness factor thing about the VI relationship. And so I don't know how well you know this space, but maybe we could try to speak to this to the world of the contractor who is doing, I think our listeners are doing anywhere from like 1 million to 10 million a year in revenue. A good.

Shh.

There'd actually be a pretty, there'd be a pretty percentage of those. Hard to say, I don't have the data in front of me, but there'd be a good chunk that are well above that. Some people north of 10, north of 20 and beyond. And then there'd be a pocket as well that are smaller than that. They're doing $500,000 a year, 750k a year. But they're all very systems minded, they're all very growth oriented. Talk about the readiness factor as well as you can for these businesses. Listening.

Yeah. Just to kind of ground this contextually compared to our focus as EOs and for the work we've done with Rocket fuel is on companies really with 10 to 250 employees. So that's kind of our sweet spot. So that sounds like that lines up perfectly with your audience. Right. So this should be very relevant. So readiness factors. So there are four. So the first one is financial and it's really the visionary being able to get their head around, okay, I'm gonna have to pay an integrator how much? And that's an easy Can I afford it? Well, can I afford it and should I afford it? Right, but it's easy for them to see, Right, it's easy for them to see how much that check's going to be, how much that expense is going to be for a year. And it's not always as easy for them to see how much the financial benefit is going to be. Not that it's not there, that they just aren't thinking about it. It's not in their face like that, wow, I'm going to have to start paying this person this much a month. So they've got to kind of do the math on that and get to a point where. Where two things are true. One is their pain is sufficient to cause them to move. Where they go, I can't do this anymore, and so I need to make a change. Two is they've sort of added up the stuff and they can see that, you know what, this is actually a huge ROI that I'm going to get. And a little method that we'll use to kind of help them see that is take all the issues on their issues, list all the different things that aren't working right now, and have them go down through that and go, all right, if you had a rock star integrator in place, which ones of these things would get solved? And they go, well, check, check, check, check, check. And they identify all these things and go, okay, so let's put some sort of a dollar number on those things in terms of how much benefit the company's going to be able to get if that's fixed. And then you check, check, you put dollars on those, and then you add it up. And I'm telling you, Benji, almost every time it is a very lopsided scale.

And they're kind of, the math is not hard.

The math is not hard. You get there.

It's pretty cool, Clear.

So that's the financial readiness. If they're not really ready, then they're going to go into it kind of clenching their teeth and their fists and digging their heels in, and they're just not wanting to. And that's not a good recipe for success. They got to be ready.

Well, and they probably just need to suffer a little more, wouldn't you say?

The pain side's got to be true, too, and that certainly motivates a lot of movement. The next greatness factor that we talk about is psychological. And this is the.

The.

It's the letting go factor. And, you know, one of the assumptions that I had when we started working on this book was that visionary entrepreneurs were control freaks and that they, in their very nature, they just kind of wanted to hold on to things. And the more I talked to others, the more I found it to be true that it really wasn't about control, it was about trust. And what's happened is somewhere in their past, they've taken something that's precious to them and they've handed it to somebody to take care of. And then they sat back and then they watched that person drop it and break it and they, ah, they freaked out and they run over and they pick it back up again, they try to put it back together again. But they've got that scar from their past that now as they start to think about letting things go, like to an integrator, they just are, for example, and because they don't have the trust yet that the integrator is going to be able to care for it in the same level of care that they would give it. So they got to get past that and they've got to. You know, there are ways to help them have the confidence and trust that is necessary. But a lot of it is just time. A lot of it is just getting started and trusting the process and of getting the right person and then having the right relationship and then letting that trust build over time so that they can let go more and more. That's what we mean by the psychological readiness. The third one we talk about is life lifestyle readiness. So this is a simple progression of your stereotypical entrepreneur that when they start, a lot of times they're young in life, aren't married, have no kids, really, the only thing they've got going is this new company that they've started. And so they're 24 7, you know, they're sleeping, you know, at the shop. They're just there all the time. This is their life, this is their entertainment, this is their sports, this is their everything. Well, fast forward and they do, you know, get a spouse, they do have some kids, kids play some sports, kind of want to go watch the kids play sports. Maybe I want to coach them, right, all that kind of stuff. And so you start to get this other tug, and that's what we talk about is lifestyle race. So I'm, I'm ready to get out of the 247 at the business thing and kind of go live the rest of my life. That's an important factor. And then the last one, Dan Sullivan has a great term, unique ability, which really speaks to this unique individual giftedness that we all have. And so unique ability readiness is about, hey, I'm ready to spend most of my time in my sweet spot, in my space of the stuff I love to do and I'm great at and minimize, if not completely eliminate the time and energy I spend on that other stuff that I hate. And frankly, I'm not very good at at. Okay, so those are the four factors. So it's just an exercise really for the visionary to go through that and self assess, where am I at? And am I really ready? And just recognize if I'm not, then I'm hurting myself. In terms of probability of a good.

Result here, the psychological readiness one I find the most interesting, or it leaps off the page to me the most with the people we work with. I had a gentleman on the show a few weeks ago. His name is Dan Young. He runs a large roofing and construction business in Indiana. He's one of our members, and he's grown. You know, he's gone from 3 million a year to. I think they're on trend for 16 million this year in about three years, which is in our world. That's fast, you know. And so I wanted to pick his brain on how he did that. And a really central part of the conversation was on the leadership team that he's built. And we got to this part of the chat where he. He said this line, which I remember he was working with a coach, and the coach asked him, dan, do you.

Really want leaders or do you just.

Like the idea of sat him down? He had to think about it for, like, six months and really swallow the pill and do some thinking, because he was in this space where he was like, I want an integrator. I want people to really take the ball and run with it. And then when people started to use a football analogy, like, hey, say I'm open. Pass me the ball, he'd be like, he'd hold onto it too long, and he couldn't. And I just see that pattern so often. Do you have any, like, bits of wisdom or just practical advice on moving through that psychological readiness thing faster, or is it just an organic process that needs to take the time it takes?

Yeah. So great question. And actually, Jim Collins has another term. It's referenced in Rocket Fuel, but it's a genius with a thousand helpers numbers.

Right.

And it's this idea that, you know, hey, I know it all. I see it first. I know all the right answers. And so, you know, I don't want, you know, competing generals here, but I kind of want another level down that's just kind of all people that are not going to question me, they're going to do what I say. And so it's kind of a. I mean, it's a dictator model, right? So it's just Kind of everything flows from the top, top. It's not a leadership team model that's really based on health and building trust and being able to hand those things off and let them take the accountability and have the glory or not, depending on how it goes, that goes with it. And basically it's a shift to we win as a team and that's the big thing. It's not that I win, but we win. What I see, Benji, is that's a fundamental choice. So the path we teach and really believe in because we see what it can do, is I would call it a team health based path versus a, you know, a dictator or genius with a thousand helpers based path. Now, it's important to note they can both be wildly successful, right? So you can do it that way. You can do it, you know, the dictator model. And, you know, you can't argue with the results that some people have been able to have with that. But is that really what you want? And there's some risks that I see when I look at that, which are, you know, if something happens to you, game's over. You know, it can be very difficult to recover, if at all. It's just you're not as resilient, you're not as adaptable, you know, so there's some big challenges. But that said, again, I've seen companies that have had, you know, many, many, many decades of success riding that one leader.

Right? Well, hey, look, let's go geopolitically. Some nation states have also, and we don't, we don't really like them and they sort of have a certain connotation, but hey, within the walls or within their borders, they've got some machinery that's working for them. And I guess it is a question of, of personal preference at the end of the day. And I like that Team Health term. It's a nice way to anchor your thinking around this.

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