A founder took a month off traveling through London and Portugal while his team ran the business independently. He calls this "Scalecation" and says it forced his team to handle clients, make decisions, and step up under pressure, while he focused on strategy and writing his book "Fuck the Slides."
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Hello, how are you? Good to see you all. So I'm back from my vacation and I wanted to talk to you today about a new concept. I'm thinking about calling it Scalication. The concept is pretty simple: why you need to take a vacation as a CEO or founder and why that vacation could help your business scale. Ready? We can start. Let's do it. So as some of you probably know, I just came back from London. I've been in Portugal for about 8 days, did an EO, the Entrepreneurs Organization. We had an alignment day for Europe, stayed for a few days with the delegation. I don't know, 3 or 4 days. We did Web Summit. Lovely. I really enjoyed it, and I'll do a video about that in a later stage, probably next week. And went off For a month. I flew to London with one idea, one concept, to write a book. And the book is called Fuck the Slides, and it's a whole new concept about how you can create better presentations, the one that can help you raise money or do a better pitch. Oh God. We'll talk about that in probably a few weeks. But here's what happened is before I left, we had a discussion in the company of what can we do in order to allow me the time I need Part of it was that we can manage everything together as a team, and another part of it is the team can manage it without me. And we decided to take a look, and that's how the Scalecation came to be. What did we learn? That the team can do it by themselves. And it's interesting because then I have time to do business development, to think about the next year. So we know the plan for 2022, 2023, where I had time to break it into pieces. Diversify the clients we want and everything. But in order to succeed, we had to put in place a few things. What is the structure? How the company is going to operate? And the understanding that they will need as a team to handle situations that maybe they would otherwise, I don't know, probably won't deal with them because I could take care of it. And they did it and it was amazing. We also had the understanding that if they screw up, they fuck up, we lose a client, that's part of the business. Oh, shit! By the way, some of our clients really enjoyed meeting the team. They're so different than my usual meetings. I'm more creative. Everything's a bit high level. Suddenly they come in. Here are the details. Here are the points. Here's the execution. Great. They wanted creative. They WhatsApp me or text me and I said, no problem, I'll take care of it. And then less than 48 hours, they had it. I understand what we keep working in our businesses. And there's a saying that you need to work on your business and not in your business. But we're small businesses. I understand that. A part of it is you fuck off, take a vacation, but ensure you put everything in place before. It's also a great way for managers and staff to kind of step up and see what they're really made of and how immersed they are with their clients and the business, how much they believe in it, what their strengths and weaknesses could be. How they really operate together under pressure. For us, it's been amazing. It's the potential, it's the, the opportunity to scale now is amazing because we understand that I can move on to the next step of just getting the right clients or focusing on our book. And the book again, Fuck the Slide, is a concept for a funnel to find the right niche, the right types of clients. And now my responsibility is being able to help my team with the right clients, not any clients. So what about you guys? Ready to take your vacation, step it up, help your team grow? If so, feel free to write me. Love to talk, love to chat. I promise by the next video I'll lose this beard. And, um, huge, huge thank you to everyone following and reaching out on DMs on Twitter and LinkedIn and the ones following my Medium. I, I appreciate it. And if you need anything, let me know. I'd be happy to help. See you guys on the next video. Thank you.
