how my $20M company is ORGANIZED

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. Today I'm going to be talking about different stages of leadership. As you're growing your business from your first employee all the way up to 500 plus employees. The different stages of what you'll need and the different skills that will be required. If you don't know who I am, I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We're a franchise that does over $20 million in annual revenue. And today I'm going to be talking about some things I've learned. And I actually had like a list of 15 different stages of category and categories of leadership, but I wanted to consolidate those as much as possible into seven. So these are the six stages, according to me, which is probably better ones that other people have come up with. But these are kind of the different stages for small businesses. All right? I'm not talking about, like multinational conglomerates. I'm talking about the thing that you're gonna be going through in stages of leadership. So the first thing is role model. All right, so this is gonna be when you have somewhere between one and three employees. All right, so one to three employees. Now, you could do this by revenue for your different companies, but I feel like leadership really comes down a lot of your leadership style. And the way that you're leadership is going to be dictated by how many people you're leading. If I am trying to go on a canoeing trip with my family, two or three people, it's not a big, big adventure. I don't have to take a lot of leadership planning. I don't have to, like, figure things out and organize a whole bunch of stuff. But if I'm taking like all of a gustination, hundreds and hundreds of people, we're going to have a lot of buses, and food's got to be figured out and a lot of more logistics. So I feel like leadership honestly comes down to a lot of it, is, how many people are you leading? And that's gonna be the dictator of what your role is as the leader. So when it comes to leadership as a role model, you just have one of three employees. And really you're just leading by example. This is the classic lead by example that is really gonna be important at this stage is your role model. You're trying to work the same way that you want your one to three employees to work also. Now, this number of employees, it is a couple things. Number one, it doesn't go away. Like, you should always be a role model as a leader. But what it means is this is the strongest in my mind, the strongest thing that's gonna be most important at this stage of your business is you simply having great work ethic that these first few employees can emulate and copy. Because honestly, what you need them to be doing, these one to three employees is just doing work. They're typically gonna be taking the production side of the job off of your plate first, allowing you and freeing you up to do things in the business like selling, hiring, et cetera. So the first stage is just a role model. That's like when we look at leaders, if you have one to three employees, you just. To be a good leader, you just need to be a really good role model that other people can copy, other people can follow, and they can just be like, oh, he shows up early, I'll show up early. He or she works hard, I'm going to work hard. And so you just gotta be a good role model during this stage. Now, the next stage organizer is someone that's going to have, again, this is my interpretation, three to ten. Three to ten employees. Okay. Again, these numbers are just rounded, but this is kind of what sticks well in my brain because the organizer really has to. Has so much going on with three to 10 employees. And no longer can you keep an eyeball on everyone, and no longer are you in the role model phase where everyone's watching you because you're not around them all day long. Now, with three to 10 employees, you can't keep them in proximity to you all the time. You can't be watching over them all the time. And this is like the classic octopus, where all your employees are like the tentacles, but they all kind of still connect back to you. And you, as the head of the octopus, have to be very organized to make sure that everything is going on correctly. And they're just extensions of you. At this stage of leadership, the employees are still just extensions of you doing the work, typically. But you've got to be very organized because now you got like, you know, trying to manage two legs for most people and two hands is pretty impossible. Imagine if you have eight appendages like an octopus. Like it's. You ought to be organized. You got a lot of stuff going on. And so as an organizer, as a leader, you gotta be very organized at this phase of the business because you are the octopus. Everything is still connected back to you. And you've got to make sure that you keep. Keep all those employees, their tasks, their responsibilities and their production organized, because otherwise the business will become chaotic. And so being a good leader at this stage Just keeping everything organized is the most important task that the leader is going to have. All right, the third stage. Again, this is just my interpretation. It could be wrong. Probably is wrong. All right, eight to 20 employees. All right. Again, my content is mostly for small businesses, so I'm not gonna break this down, like chunk it all into one. Originally when I did 15, I was like, well, theoretically I could probably put all from zero to employees under one category. But for most of you watching this, you're going to be somewhere in these first three. And so that's why I wanted to break it down a little better for you. So in this stage, in the third stage now. Sorry, what did I do? Eight. That's horrible. That's bad math. Okay, so this should be 10. Alright, 10 to 20 employees is what we should have had here for the trainer. So at this stage now you start becoming really a trainer. The leader is the person that is trying to replicate themselves because they were able to find some good people here in stages one and two. But at stage number three, when you're trying to get from 10 to 20 employees, you've got to be able to replicate yourself. You can't do the work yourself. You can't be doing everything yourself. So you got to train other people how to do it. And that might mean siloing certain departments. That might mean literally you teaching other people how to do things. You become the ultimate trainer because you're starting to realize if you're going to grow past 20 employees, you've got to train your employees on how to do the tasks that you've been doing from day one. You've got to train them how to take care of the equipment. You've got to train them how to take care of the customers. You've got to train them how to take care of an unhappy customer and do resolution of a customer. You've got to teach the office person how to answer the phone and do the email. So you are the consummate trainer at this stage of the business. Again, that's 10 to 20 employees. Now the next stage is the manager. Now I'm going to talk about this at the end of this. Stick with me to the end because I got to make a synopsis on all of this. I'm teaching this stuff, but I'm. The main point is coming at the end, but you gotta understand this first, right? So the manager, in my opinion, is 20 to 50 employees. It's really gonna come down to who is a good manager, who's gonna succeed at this stage of the business. And at this stage, hierarchy is going to start meeting requirement, right? So at the trainer stage, just to back up for a second, this is when you are out of production. The reason you started training people is cause you are no longer producing anything. If you're doing sales, you are no longer like doing cold calls. If you're doing lawn care landscaping, you are no longer pushing the MO at that trainer level, you are out of production. Okay? And production can be anything from producing goods and, you know, whatever goods or services you're creating. The trainer, you are now out of production as the manager. Now you're going to need hierarchy. All right? I'm gonna spell it wrong because that is how we do it, okay? So hierarchy is gonna be required because now past 20 employees, you can no longer just have one person. You at the top with a whole bunch of people. Up until this point, you could do that and become the consummate trainer that allows all these employees to be efficient. You could be the great organizer that keeps us all in line. You could be the great role model that everyone looks up to and is able to emulate your actions and your behaviors. However, at this fourth stage as a manager, from 20 to 50 employees, you need hierarchy. You're gonna need some sort of middle level management. You're gonna need some sort of other roles between you and frontline staff. And that could mean that you have departments that could. You have middle level managers. However, your hierarchy is, you're gonna need it at this stage. And a manager is very different than someone that is an entrepreneur typically. And so again, these are personality tapes though, that the entrepreneur typically has to fall into. If you're growing the business from zero up to a big company, what typically happens, the best of the best will usually get hired in. So the best managers will typically get hired by a Fortune 500 company to be a manager from day one because they're great managers. But if you're a small business owner, you're gonna start as a role model, you're gonna grow the business to the point where you have three to 10 employees and you're gonna have to become an organizer. And then you're gonna have to grow to the point where you're out of production and you're gonna train other people how to do the job and you become a trainer and then you go to become a manager. And a lot of times people fall apart. This manager part, because most entrepreneurs aren't very good managers. Let's just be honest. And so again, hierarchy is required here. You're gonna still need all of these things to be a good manager. You're still going to need to be organized, you're still gonna have to be a good role model, you're still gonna have to train other people. But the manager level is really all about now letting go of tasks and decision making abilities inside the business. Cause now you need middle level managers to be the trainers. You need mid level managers to be the people who organize things, the office managers, et cetera. You're gonna need mid level managers to be the role models, to be the people, be out with the people doing production. So it's not to say the role model level is any less than the manager. It's not to say that. It's just different skills that are required in my opinion, to grow the business effectively. All right, fifth one executive. And I did not get this from a book or anything like that. People have said this in the comments, like, oh, you're just taking this. I made this up, literally. I wrote this down on my little notebook here. It's called remarkable. It's great. All right, so an executive again, this is from 50 to, in my opinion, 500 employees. This is the one that I had broken down quite a bit before. But an executive here is now losing touch with frontline staff. And it's not because they want to, it's because you almost have to. Like when you are getting 100, 200 employees, you are not going to know people's name, you are not going to know what they do. You're like, who in the world is that and what do they do here? You're going to be that way because you're now focusing on other things inside the business. And you're not gonna have the time to be able to, to know everyone's name and what they're doing. And it's really impossible to know what everyone is doing and how to do everything in the business. You're going to walk into a meeting one day and be like, I have no idea what they're talking about. Because as an executive, you've delegated other things to other people in terms of middle level managers, trainers, organizers and role models to where you do not have the time. You do not have the time to do that. And this is typically where a CEO is going to come into play. And again, most companies, if they're mature and established, are going to go hire a great executive and pull them right to the stage. But as an entrepreneur, if you're starting from zero and growing yourself, you're going to have to go through all these and realize it's a big, big step going from manager to executive. Completely different. Because as the manager, your hands still get dirty, you still get the nuts and the bolts. And you understand because you create the hierarchy that everyone else falls into. As an executive, you now have managers underneath you making all key decisions and you actually have no idea what's going on. And that's okay. That's a good thing. Because if you knew everything that was going on, it would require you to be the bottleneck and everything will move so slowly that nothing would get done and you'd fall behind competition and you would make no progress. Innovation would grind to a halt or at least slow dramatically. So as an executive, it's not about knowing that and bolts. It's not about being a good trainer or manager or organizer or role model. Because I can't be a role model in front of 500 people. It's just not going to happen because I'm not going to have interaction, shake their hand and have lunch with them. I'm just not like if I had lunch with every person every single day of the year, I wouldn't even get to one time per year with every employee. So there's no reason. Trying to be a good role model as the most important part of being a leader is not to say you should not be a good role role model. It's just to say that that's not going to be the most impactful or effective form of leadership at this size of business. And you are welcome to disagree with me in the comments because I'm probably wrong. All right? This is one man's opinion, all right? Visionary. That's the number one, number six, one visionary. And everyone when I say visionary is like, ah, butterflies, warm fuzzy feelings start to happen and this is typically going to be happen again in my opinion, 500 plus employees. Okay, now I'm not trying to like say that I'm like a leadership expert or anything. I am just going from my perspective and from my experience of what I've seen. And currently I'm kind of like in this phase going from executive to visionary. Just so you know, personally, that's where I'm at. So the visionary here is really all you're trying to do all day long basically is you're thinking about strategy, strategy and you are thinking about ideas and planning. Like that's really all the visionary is doing. Right. I can promise you that There are people that are focused on like intel for example, or Apple, like Tim Cook as the CEO, as the executive, becoming the visionary, he is now focused on like what's next for Apple, the Apple car, or like VR for Apple. He is not focused on how do we put the glass with a smaller bezel, bevel, bezel, bezel into the iPad. He's not concerned about that. There's other people inside the organization. As the visionary, he's focused on larger tasks, visions, ideas, what's happening in the future, planning, strategy, mergers, acquisitions, all that good stuff. That's what he's gonna be focused on because he has 500 plus employees. And that's typically gonna be the most valued task that entrepreneur can add. That leader can add is adding vision, making the vision clear for the organization to follow. Because this person has to be at the front. The leader is typically leading at the very front. Now this is the part I want you to get. First and foremost is that the goal as an entrepreneur should be what stage is your strong point? And then trying to focus on that stage of growth. A lot of people are like, well, I want to grow an X amount of revenue business, so therefore I'll need X amount of employees. And that will then correlate with what type of leader I need to become. And I think that's the wrong way to do it because you're not playing to your strengths. I think you should play to your strengths in business. I really do. So if you're like, man, I'm just really not very good at training other people. I can't deal with a lot of people that just create. My head hurts, it's a headache. I don't deal with people's drama. Then you probably don't want to get to stage number three as a trainer. You probably will want to stay at a slightly smaller business. Hey, I can stay organized with my stuff, but as soon as I start getting other people responsibility, they just drive me nuts. Well, you probably don't want to grow far beyond 10 employees. It's gonna drive you nuts. When you start getting beyond that, you say, well, I like staying in control. As soon as I start having middle level managers, I just feel like there's drama. And I feel like they're making decisions without me and I don't like them making decisions without me. Then you probably don't want to ever become an executive. You would probably say the manager. So you create the hierarchy. You know where everything's at. You still have your hands dirty in the business. And so I really believe you gotta be really honest with yourself and ask yourself, which one am I good at? Which one is my strength? Which One would I love to do, which one would I enjoy doing? Like, there are people that just love training other people. Like, they're really good teachers. They'd be really good at this stage of business. They'd be really good at a 10 to 20 person business. There's really good people who are great at organization. Like everything is like color coded and they have Excel spreadsheets and they have like this nice task thing and everything is done just that's gonna be someone who really does well at three to 10 employees. But as soon as you start getting bigger than that, it might create too much anxiety for them because they can't create that level of organization for all these hundreds of employees that they are so meticulous and so great at. So first is find which one's your forte. You should probably build your business to that size. Now if you want to grow your business bigger, you can still do that. But your role should stay the one that you're the strongest at. Because guess what you can do? You can hire someone to fill in the gaps for you. So if you're like, okay, I'm really good at 1, 2 and 3, I stink at number 4 because I hate meetings. And these ones I can probably figure out down the road too. Okay, then that means you're going to have to hire a really good coo, a chief operating officer, someone that does love the nuts and bolts and great at having meetings. So for me, Liz is the person that is number four for me. She has meetings all the time. She meets with different departments, they figure stuff out and she's great at that. I actually really enjoy meetings, but I don't like meetings that talk about nuts and bolts. It just gets me really agitated because I'm like, I don't feel like we're going fast enough here. But guess what? It has to be done. It's extremely important work. But I've realized number four is not my strong point. So I've got to hire a really strong coo. Okay. If you're really, really bad at training other people, you just can't verbalize things. You can't describe what you're trying to make them do. You're probably going to need to find someone that's really good at the task that you're trying to train and make sure they enjoy teaching. Alright. There's several people in our organization that are great at training people because I know he watches these videos. I'll say one of them, that's Brian. Really, really good at training and enjoys it enjoys a student Learning and seeing them grow in their skill set. They're a great trainer. So you've got to find these roles if you're going to get to the point and grow past certain areas of weakness in your own skill set. Because as the entrepreneur, we're like, oh, you got to do everything you do. But as you get bigger, you can't do everything. And you're going to have to hire people to do other things in the business that you're hopefully not as strong at. Because what you want to be doing is the thing that you're the strongest at. And most of you watching right now, well, I'm the best at visionary. I'm very visionary. I come up with great plans and ideas. And I am an entrepreneur. And you still put E before you on entrepreneur. Okay, so entrepreneur, visionary. Most of us like to the romantic thought process that we are a visionary. We are a visionary. And I go with great ideas. I am the next Steve Jobs. Some people think that. And so a lot of you right now have already when I said that, choose your forte. I like visionary. The reason is because as an entrepreneur, we typically like to live in the future and we like to think about things that we're going to do and we like to think about strategy and planning. We're really. That's our strong point. And so what you gotta realize, though, is being great at being a visionary is fine. But if you have a hole or a weakness somewhere up here, it's gonna prevent you from ever doing visionary work. Because you should not be a visionary if you're at three to five employees, like, it's just not gonna work. There's no way point in pontificating about the future of your industry if you have three to five employees. Like, it's probably not going to make a big impact you taking a half a day to think about strategy and planning of your company. As a visionary, though, everyone likes this thought, and theoretically, everyone likes to be this position. Everyone likes this thought. The thing that people forget is the visionary is also one that gets blamed when everything goes wrong. Because it means that their ideas and their strategy and their planning was wrong or they make a mistake. The visionary will usually get blamed. But the visionary has to realize if they're not a good trainer, their business will just stop here. It will never grow past 20 employees. If they're really just horrible at managing other people. They're horrible at having meetings, they're horrible at hiring and training and all that. They'll never get past this stage either. You've got to Hire someone else to do it. Or you've got to realize that you have this weakness and I'm going to stink at this stage of business and I'm probably going to stop here if I don't find someone else. Or maybe that's the least profitable part of my business, or this is where I just don't enjoy business. And that's what most of the time happens. People want to become visionaries, they want to grow a big business. But because they hit the part that they're not really good at, they just get disillusioned, they get discouraged and they quit. Because what they are actually good at is being visionary. But because they don't ever get to that stage of size of business where it actually is meaningful to be visionary. They get this illusion after 10, 20 years in business because they just cannot get above 20 employees because they stink at being a manager. And what they should do is go hire a manager if they want to keep growing to this stage of business. Let me make sure my notes are correct and I've got everything. Last thing I want to say, and that is just because you are the visionary does not mean you are better than the executives, the managers, the trainers or the organizers or the role models in your business. You absolutely need every single form of leadership inside the organization. Regardless of whether you're not a three, four, five person business. As you move up this or down, down this chart and your business is growing, it does not take away from the fact and the importance of having role models in the business. You need frontline staff to be leaders by being role models. That's going to come in the form of making sure they have audio books, having team meetings, having training, having a culture, having where role models can grow up inside the organization and lead microcosms of a few employees to greatness. You've got to have organizers, you gotta have office people, you gotta have people that create SOPs, standard operating procedures. You gotta have people that know how to use Excel and can look at software packages and compare the pros and the cons. You've gotta have organizers, alright? People that are in the nuts and the bolts. You've gotta have trainers, people that can train and replicate people. Because if you're gonna have this many people in your business, you still need trainers, you still need managers, you still need executives. It does not take away. It is no less leadership as a role model compared to a visionary. And as you become the visionary, you also need to still maintain certain levels and degrees of aptitude in these different skill sets. Of being a leader. But the most effective or the most value producing and profit driven form of leadership is going to depend on, on the size of your business. And this, in my opinion, is what's going to be the part kind of the role that you fall into as the leader of the company. I hope that was helpful. If it wasn't, watch this video here. If it was, watch this video here. Because this video is going to talk about the different stages of leadership and how you can get closer to becoming a better leader, in my opinion. Again, Mike Andes, founder of Augusta Lawn Care, signing off.