Podcast EP 110 | Common Questions (and Answers) about the Scaling Up Framework

What are the most com­mon ques­tions about the Scal­ing Up frame­work? In this week’s Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast, Kevin Lawrence and Brad Giles are talk­ing about the most fre­quent ques­tions they are asked about the Scal­ing Up oper­at­ing sys­tem — a frame­work to sim­pli­fy and con­trol the chaos that’s involved in grow­ing a company.

The Scal­ing Up book and method­ol­o­gy ques­tions are:

1. How long does it take to com­plete the One-Page Strate­gic Plan (OPSP)? How often does it need updating?
2. How would you get your team to buy into the Scal­ing Up methods?
3. Who on my team should be involved in the Strate­gic Plan­ning Meet­ings? My exec­u­tive team, my whole lead­er­ship team?
4. What’s the num­ber one thing that blocks com­pa­nies from Scal­ing Up?
5. Do I need a coach to imple­ment Scal­ing Up? And bonus num­ber six…
6. Which of the ten Rock­e­feller Habits do you think is most important?

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing, great com­pa­nies. My name is Brad Giles, and as always joined today by my co host Kevin Lawrence. Hel­lo, Kevin, how you doing today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:26

Great Brad. You know, I real­ized that say I’m doing great every episode. How about yourself?

Brad Giles 01:09

It’s autumn here. Autumn is a beau­ti­ful, beau­ti­ful time of year. Every­thing is good. I might even go as far as great.

Brad Giles 01:22

We like to start with a word or phrase of the day.

Kevin Lawrence 01:33

When I think of the word of the day, I would say? ground­ed. You know, I’ve had a bit of time with COVID, where I had a bit some time just where I could­n’t real­ly do much of any­thing. Except for a bunch of think­ing, a lit­tle bit of Net­flix, and a bunch of think­ing. And, you know, on my table in my place in Van­cou­ver, I’ve got all these plans mapped out every­where. And I was writ­ing on my tablet, print­ed off a bunch of stuff. So kind of very re ground­ed and things felt like a men­tal reset. Thank you to some down­time. So that was me. So ground­ed. How about yourself?

Brad Giles 02:24

Yeah, for me, it’s gross prof­it mar­gin. A bit dif­fer­ent from your­self. But yeah, like I’ve spent a lot of time late­ly, because we’re see­ing prices increase across the board. And just doing analy­sis with lead­ers and teams about gross prof­it mar­gin, and how all the chang­ing prices affect­ing their gross prof­it mar­gin and the flow on effect and how much to increase your prices by so let’s see a stitch togeth­er grounded.

Kevin Lawrence 03:01

If you don’t man­age your gross prof­it mar­gin, your busi­ness is gonna get ground­ed and not in the way that you want. It’s gonna get ground­ed into the ground, and you won’t have a busi­ness. So that’s awe­some. Well, let’s get into so what are we dig­ging into today?

Brad Giles 03:17

Today we’re talk­ing about the five most com­mon ques­tions that we get about scal­ing up book and method­ol­o­gy. You know, that book, you had some­thing to do with that, did you?

Kevin Lawrence 03:30

Yeah, I did a lit­tle bit of work on that book a few years ago.

Brad Giles 03:33

But look, it’s some­thing that we’re cer­tain­ly very pas­sion­ate about. And we know. And we’ve spent a lot of time with each of us. And it’s how we orig­i­nal­ly met about 10 years this is and yeah, it real­ly does. It real­ly does present a case of best prac­tices on how to run scal­ing a mid-mar­ket busi­ness. And it’s not per­fect, but you know, there was a lot of things that we cer­tain­ly aligned with.

Kevin Lawrence 04:06

Yeah, it’s a frame­work to sim­pli­fy the chaos, and give us con­trol of the chaos that’s involved in growth, ini­tial­ly based on a book called Rock­e­feller habits. And when I got involved to help to cre­ate the new ver­sion of the book, we called it scal­ing up because a lot of the method­olo­gies have deter­mined, it was a great expe­ri­ence, because I inter­viewed 50 CEOs around the world who had very suc­cess­ful­ly scaled using the Rock­e­feller habits frame­work and grab their insights about what worked and what did­n’t, and went into the cre­ation of the new book or the updat­ed frame­work called Scal­ing up. So amaz­ing method­ol­o­gy as a frame­work to give you the tools and point you in the right direc­tion of the things to think about as you’re bring­ing your team togeth­er to scale. So today, we’re going to dig into some of the most com­mon ques­tions about the framework.

Ques­tion num­ber one. And oh, and with a friend we’re look­ing at the core tool is the one page strate­gic plan is to track the strate­gic plan­ning on the page. And that’s like the bass line tool. And then there’s oth­er tools in there. So relat­ed to peo­ple and exe­cu­tion and cash and some strat­e­gy. But the one page plan is real­ly the, I would say, the great­est val­ue in the sys­tem. It’s a sim­ple tool. So the ques­tion is, how long does it take to cre­ate that or draft that one page strate­gic plan? And it’s kind of like ask­ing some­one how long is a piece of rope? Like, it depends, it all depends, in our expe­ri­ence, in two or three days, you can get a decent draft, you can get a B grade draft, where it’s good, because some of these things need time to sit and think and stew. So whether you spend two or three days, you can get a rea­son­able draft and get incred­i­ble align­ment for your team. But man had to get it done. To get it com­plete, where you would say this is a plus qual­i­ty work. Let’s get out the chis­el and carve it into stone, like we nailed this thing. No bread. No, we talked about this before. But it’s a cou­ple of years. I mean, some of these con­cepts like just to get the vision parts, right? You know, the pur­pose and the BA and the core val­ues. To get it right, you got to do some iter­a­tions and get feed­back and things like that. Those are six to nine months to get that part, right, just that part. So look, you can get a real­ly good work­ing draft that allows you to push your head in the right direc­tion, aligned as a team. But to get it real­ly mas­tered it’s going to be a cou­ple of years. That’s my take on it. Brad, what would you add?

Brad Giles 07:01

I want­ed to just re want to add on some­thing that you said then. So why one page, you said the great­est val­ue is prob­a­bly the one page strate­gic plans. So why one page? Well, this actu­al­ly comes back to Jack Welch, who was the CEO of Gen­er­al Elec­tric, Jack Welch had a train­ing facil­i­ty in Cro­ton Ville that he would send all of the best man­agers and lead­ers to, to learn from some of the best peo­ple from around the world. And man­agers would come away from there with these great big, thick, com­pre­hen­sive, detailed busi­ness plans, and then go back to their offices wher­ev­er they were in the world. And then they would put them in a draw­er, and they would­n’t get used. And this became very frus­trat­ing after see­ing this time and time and time again for Jack. So he said, If he can’t fit it onto one page, it isn’t impor­tant enough. And that real­ly trans­lates to my jour­ney. Because in about 1999, I start­ed a busi­ness and I built a very com­pre­hen­sive busi­ness plan to the point where my accoun­tant said, that’s the most com­pre­hen­sive busi­ness plan that he’d ever seen.

Kevin Lawrence 08:14

Shock­ing, Brad, that you would do some­thing com­pre­hen­sive who would have thought.

Brad Giles 08:19

And it was good. But then a cou­ple of years lat­er, 2001, I came across mas­ter­ing the Rock­e­feller habits, and then switched it to one page and that source become more effec­tive over time. So busi­ness, a busi­ness plan needs, we need to under­stand all of the parts that make up a busi­ness plan in a com­pet­ing envi­ron­ment that they’ve got to be impor­tant enough to put onto a page and not just fill­ing boxes.

Kevin Lawrence 08:51

And it’s hard to put it just on what’s hard­est to put it on one page. Yeah, I mean, you know, we have many clients come to us to help dial in and opti­mize their strate­gic plan­ning. And nor­mal­ly, when we asked to review, either they’re doing noth­ing, which means they’ve scaled by luck, or they haven’t scaled, or these plants, they just give me a headache. And when we had one recent­ly, that a client had an aide paid the one of the local, you know, con­sul­tan­cy firms to do it. I mean, there’s was a strat­e­gy of more is bet­ter. You know, vol­ume is val­ue, the more pages and the more doc­u­men­ta­tion I looked at it, it’s like worse than that. In their struc­ture. It was so com­plex. They were doing every­thing includ­ing the kitchen sink, the bath­room tub, the toi­let, the solar pan­els on the roof, and the hot water heater and the damn swim­ming pool for good luck. I had every­thing going in every direc­tion. I mean, it was so com­plex, even if it was bril­liant, which it was­n’t even if it was US, it would be way too hard to fol­low. Like, it’d be like hav­ing, you know, a map with 1000 dif­fer­ent lines on it con­fus­ing the heck idea.

Brad Giles 10:11

Here’s the cool thing about what you just said, and this is the biggest chal­lenge that we over­come, or we have to over­come. And that is, that plan might have worked real­ly well in a multi­na­tion­al. Okay, when is it but it might have, but we need to trends. So if you get some­one who comes from an enor­mous cor­po­rate busi­ness, and that’s what they’re used to, and that’s what suc­cess rep­re­sents even a con­sul­tant that comes in and write your busi­ness plan, then that’s going to be their lan­guage. But for us, it’s got to be, it’s got to be sim­ple and effec­tive. It’s got a, you know, peo­ple don’t have time to go through all this. And they don’t have the resources to go to the lev­el of under­stand­ing the nuances to use your bloody ter­ri­ble anal­o­gy of the swim­ming pool. And so it’s so it real­ly mat­ters that it’s sim­ple and high­ly effec­tive, because peo­ple don’t have time in the mid mar­ket, go to all of these levels.

Kevin Lawrence 11:18

And I would say they don’t have time in the big firms, either. They can just get away with medi­oc­rity and com­plex­i­ty in some of the big firms because there’s so much, you know, mar­ket share or demand or what­ev­er it hap­pens to be. They don’t have to be as lean and nim­ble no mat­ter what, the com­plex­i­ty does­n’t work any­where in my mind. But no mat­ter what, and we see. So the idea, it’s hard to get a com­plex now what’s also required to make that one page plan work is a lot of humil­i­ty on the part of the con­sul­tant. Because it’s the most basic unim­pres­sive damn thing in the world, when you look at it, when you get into it, it’s incred­i­bly impact­ful. But the work prod­uct isn’t over­ly excit­ing, sexy or impres­sive. You can’t do a 50 page report, all you can do is use the flip charts from the room maybe and put them in a deck. But it’s so basic. For some peo­ple, they can’t, they’re their ego can’t han­dle doing such sim­plis­tic basic work. So it’s, and it’s very, insane­ly impact­ful. And that’s the oth­er part, the way we look at it is look, there’s lots of lit­tle box­es, and you have to be suc­cinct. And on my mind, a 10 year old should be able to read the plan and under­stand it. That’s a real­ly high bar. That means it’s got to be so sim­ple. And Right. which usu­al­ly means that that’s why it takes time, it requires a lot of debates, to real­ly get through the views in the room and boil down to the essence. That’s why it takes cou­ple years. So as Brad said, one page, it’s got to be sim­ple. It’s got to be real­ly basic, oth­er­wise, it does­n’t work. And you know, we’re talk­ing about mid mar­ket com­pa­nies here. But even a large com­pa­ny has com­plex­i­ty is gen­er­al­ly a prod­uct that peo­ple who don’t know what they’re doing. So they just throw every­thing into it. Right. That’s my one of my favorite quotes that I don’t even know if it’s accu­rate­ly attrib­uted to him or not. But I’m told Mark Twain, but the research says Mark Twain, but a cou­ple of places say maybe not. But it’s, I would have writ­ten you a short­er let­ter, but I did­n’t have the time. And that’s what strat­e­gy and the one page plan is about. It’s about sim­plic­i­ty. But it takes a lot of work to get there over time, which is fine.

Brad Giles 13:42

Yeah, it’s not just goal set­ting, right goal, set­ting my form a part of it. But if we said, we’re at $20 mil­lion busi­ness, we’re gonna go to 40 mil­lion in five years. That’s just, that’s just a hope. It’s the plan­ning, that gives you the con­fi­dence. So let’s spin into these five ques­tions. The first one, we kind of touched on already, how long? The ques­tion is, how long does it take to com­plete the one page strate­gic plan? And you said, How long is a piece of string? Well, I would respond by say­ing it depends on how long you cut it. So how often does it need updat­ing? is the kind of sec­ond part of that? Well, I kind of look at this whole ques­tion as being it’s like brush­ing your teeth to switch from a string anal­o­gy to a dif­fer­ent one.

Kevin Lawrence 14:30

Got analo­gies every­where, so that’s awesome.

Brad Giles 14:33

Yeah. You know, brush­ing your teeth, it’s an all the time job, like you don’t say, I need to build a busi­ness plan. And then it’s done. It’s not like you say, I need to brush my teeth. And I’m not going to do it again. Like, you need to then do it the next day and the next day and it’s the same with the busi­ness plan. It’s going to last about 90 days. That’s the answer. There are some bits that will endure past that, there are some bits that will be stressed, test­ed or talked about more deeply in 90 days time, there are some bits that will have expired, because the pri­or­i­ty that you said would have a 90 day time­frame. So the answer is, it’s real­ly like an oper­at­ing sys­tem as much as any­thing, which is it’s going to con­tin­ue to endure and to focus you in the right direction.

Kevin Lawrence 15:26

Yeah, and to boil it down, I would say, Look, when you’re first get­ting going, you might look at a bunch of the pieces every 90 days, as you’re get­ting it sort­ed out. Once you’ve nailed it. And the plan is sol­id, you’ll update the quar­ter­ly sec­tion every 90 days. And the rest will reset every year. And once you get it going, it’s a once a year on the big pic­ture, quar­ter­ly update what you’re going to achieve the next quarter.

Brad Giles 15:52

Yeah. But I would prob­a­bly allow a cou­ple of days to get with the lead­er­ship team to get a first draft of the one page strate­gic plan done. Yeah. Yeah, by the time you work through all of this stuff, it’s you know, to get that lev­el of con­fi­dence, it’s a cou­ple of days, and then you want to update it 90 days later.

Kevin Lawrence 16:14

Per­fect. Ques­tion to how would you get your team to buy into the scal­ing up method? Well, there’s a cou­ple of things here, first of all depends on you as a leader or a CEO, some lead­ers come away in every cou­ple of weeks, they got the new reli­gion of the week, and the team is new idea resis­tant, because there’s been so many new things thrown at them. So you know, often they think it’s the fla­vor of the month or the idea of the week, and you got to be care­ful with that. But at the root of it, once you’re clear the val­ue, it can add, there’s a cou­ple of things that we’ve seen, real­ly, real­ly work. One is get peo­ple to read a few pages of scal­ing up, espe­cial­ly the intro sec­tion to get a sense of bar­ri­ers. Yes. And the over­all view of the that is one thing, I would nev­er ever, ever get peo­ple to read the whole book, it’s almost 100%, about 100,000 words, it’s the work­ing title, when we did it was the imple­men­ta­tion guide. It’s like the detailed how to of doing all solv­ing all these dif­fer­ent prob­lems. Get­ting peo­ple to read the whole thing, before you’re ful­ly com­mit­ted is not a good choice. So read the first cou­ple sec­tions upfront num­ber one, to get get a coach or an advi­sor to come make a pre­sen­ta­tion on it or anoth­er CEO who uses it or anoth­er exec­u­tive at a dif­fer­ent com­pa­ny. Now we have peo­ple on our team and you’re brand new, you’re new, and you’re your asso­ciate, and we’ve got a bunch of peo­ple on our team who do this. They go in and make a pre­sen­ta­tion about the frame­work, how it works and why it works. That’s anoth­er way to help get peo­ple bought in if you’re hav­ing some ini­tial resis­tance. Some­times peo­ple just want to do it so bad. They’re thrilled to do any­thing. But if you have resis­tance, there’s a cou­ple of strategies.

Brad Giles 18:14

So often, what we see is either the leader, the CEO has read the book and got excit­ed, or and they like, Yep, I want to get this or they’ve had a friend who’s been using it, or a col­league, and they’re like, this is the thing that you need to do. So that’s how it kind of starts. Yeah, I agree. Maybe get the lead­er­ship team to read the bal­lot, the bar­ri­ers chap­ter. It’s like the first sim­ple chap­ter. It’s com­plete­ly digestible. And it out­lines the prob­lems. And you know, real­ly, they’re all going to be nod­ding their head say­ing, yeah, like, that’s the prob­lem. Yeah. And so then that kind of sets the tone, like, either you’re going to do it your­self, or you’re going to use a coach, that’s prob­a­bly the two meth­ods. Either way, just jump in and have a go at work­ing togeth­er. Of course, you know, Kevin, you and I are both, this is what we do. So we’re going to advo­cate that you get a coach because it’s going to be much more effec­tive. But no mat­ter what you do, set a date or two and just jump in and start doing it.

Kevin Lawrence 19:29

And there’s dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios. I’ve got one CEO that I coach in the US and, you know, they’re, you know, well over half a bil­lion of rev­enue head­ing towards a bil­lion, and they have an exist­ing process. And when I start­ed work­ing with the CEO, we looked at the process, it’s messy, and clunky, but yet it is their oper­at­ing sys­tem. You know, as we got into it, and we start­ed talk­ing more about scal­ing up. He real­ly wants to do it, and we’re look­ing for ways To make a smooth tran­si­tion, so we’re engi­neer­ing a tran­si­tion to a sim­pler plat­form than what they have. Now, they had one of those very com­plex plat­forms. So in his case, it’ll hap­pen over a cou­ple of years because of the way that they’re scal­ing and what they’re doing. It’s already work­ing, we don’t want to dump the whole thing upside down. So we’re engi­neer­ing it. And again, like every­one, he sees the val­ue and one of his col­leagues who con­nect­ed us is using scal­ing up and he goes, Yeah, windy is some­thing that’s sim­ple. So that was the point of it is, you know, find a way to get going, get­ting peo­ple to read, learn, talk to oth­er exec­u­tives, some­body make a pre­sen­ta­tion. And at the end of the day, your cir­cum­stance will depict how you do it, but find a way to get it rolling. And with your com­pa­ny, decide how quick you want to get it going, whether it’s a slow start, or like tomor­row, let’s just switch it on.

Brad Giles 20:55

So what’s the next ques­tion that we’ve got? Who on my team should be involved in the strate­gic plan­ning meet­ings? Like my exec­u­tive, all the man­agers? And am I going to upset some peo­ple like this is often a bit of a ques­tion? Yes, start­ing set­ting this up.

Kevin Lawrence 21:16

Num­ber one rule, who­ev­er you invite ini­tial­ly is going to be upset if you don’t invite them in the future. So be very care­ful about the ini­tial invites, it’s easy to add peo­ple. It’s almost for some peo­ple, espe­cial­ly when it’s new, it’s almost insult­ing or demor­al­iz­ing for some peo­ple to be unin­vit­ed. So the main thing is take some time on this. And bet­ter to start small­er if you need to, if that suits your circumstance.

It’s like a fam­i­ly, it’s very hard to vote peo­ple out of the fam­i­ly. And because it’s seen as being, you know, the pow­er cen­ter and the deci­sion mak­ing cen­ter not being a part of it, I’ve seen some mes­sages from that. So let’s get so that’s that kind of pay, be care­ful here. But there’s two dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives on this. One, if we real­ly need to ham­mer out and debate the strat­e­gy and make some big deci­sions. I pre­fer just the exec­u­tive team and small­er, which is like six peo­ple. But the oth­er ver­sion is, is if you’re more con­cerned with align­ment, team build­ing, DNA trans­fer, and involv­ing the peo­ple who are going to do the work, it’s often the exec­u­tive and what we call the lead­er­ship or, you know, the exec­u­tives, direct reports, or most of them, not all of them. So that takes it to the 12 to 15 to 18 peo­ple, very dif­fer­ent meet­ings, when you just have those five or six execs, it it’s a very it’s more strate­gic meet­ing. When do you get up to the 12 to 18, it’s more of an align­ment meet­ing, both work, depend­ing on your cir­cum­stance. And we do both all the time.

Brad Giles 23:33

It’s hard to be pre­scrip­tive for every sit­u­a­tion. I would say once you get over about nine or 10 peo­ple, it kind of turns into a speak­ing gig. Rather than a facil­i­tat­ed strate­gic plan­ning meet­ing. I would use slight­ly dif­fer­ent lan­guage in that I would say the lead­er­ship team, and then the mid man­age­ment team, but again, it’s just a depends on the size of the company.

Kevin Lawrence 24:00

An 800 per­son com­pa­ny, you’re not even touch­ing the bid man­ag­er with 18 peo­ple, not for a small­er com­pa­ny that would be rel­e­vant for sure. Yeah. And I know we do, I would make the dis­tinc­tion. strat­e­gy ver­sus align­ment because, you know, we do strap plan­ning meet­ings with like 20 peo­ple, break­out groups, peo­ple work­ing on ques­tions and sort­ing stuff out, like very inter­ac­tive. And I know you do too. It’s just, it only real­ly works for input to strate­gic, but he can’t make the deci­sions of that many peo­ple but input it in thought gath­er­ing flow­ing up, or tac­ti­cal deci­sions is what I find. The key is you got to fig­ure out what do you need to achieve? Is it more impor­tant? They get a few peo­ple to quick­ly fig­ure out strat­e­gy strate­gic things. small­er group. If it’s more impor­tant, you know that you get more align­ment and get a wider group involved for the align­ment and grow have a big­ger group. Now, we have some com­pa­nies where we do both. We’ll do some pure strate­gic work with my clients that was in India, in Feb, myself and the three broth­ers, the direc­tors that run it, the four of us met for a day in advance and did a whole bunch of the strate­gic stuff. And then we come to the team for two days. And then we share the strate­gic work, get feed­back and get a pres­sure test­ed, and then do the annu­al and quar­ter­ly exe­cu­tion work with them. And it works out I’ve got a few clients where we do that work as they get big­ger, that works very, very well.

Brad Giles 25:40

And I guess to close out that ques­tion, the only oth­er point I’d make is, if you’re build­ing a lead­er­ship team, to end to begin this process, you want to get a diver­si­ty of voic­es from all of the busi­ness, if your back­ground as the lat­er is sales, maybe you’re more aligned with the sales­peo­ple, but you want to have peo­ple from sales and oper­a­tions and maybe mar­ket­ing, like you want to have the heads there. But also you want to know that you’re get­ting in all of the cor­ners of the busi­ness for one of a bet­ter term. So that’s num­ber four. What’s the num­ber one thing that blocks com­pa­nies from scal­ing up?

Kevin Lawrence 26:19

I love that. What’s the num­ber one thing ques­tions? You know, it’s kind of like Fam­i­ly Feud. And what do peo­ple think every scene that Fam­i­ly Feud? We know like most things, then the answer is it depends. It depends. We can tell you com­mon things that we see, like very com­mon, but every com­pa­ny is dif­fer­ent. I’ve been into com­pa­nies where cash is the issue. I’ve been in com­pa­nies where lega­cy prod­ucts and old busi­ness mod­els are hold­ing them back. Some­times they haven’t found the Hon­ey Hole of demand. It’s a sales and mar­ket­ing prob­lem or posi­tion­ing prob­lem. Or, or busi­ness mod­el. You know, you and I talk all the time in this pod­cast about the qual­i­ty of the team. Yeah, some­times it’s the damn CEO. Some­times the CEO is in the way of the busi­ness or the founder, the founder, if there’s still I mean, it’s a lit­tle bit of every­thing. And you know, it’s, it’s a lit­tle bit of every­thing. But nor­mal­ly the com­mon denom­i­na­tor is dis­ci­pline around core areas. Yeah, it’s nor­mal­ly a dis­ci­pline, we just don’t know where.

Brad Giles 27:43

Yeah, so scal­ing up is found­ed on these four prin­ci­ples of you got to have the right peo­ple the right strat­e­gy, you’ve got to exe­cute cor­rect­ly, and you’ve got to have the cash or the busi­ness mod­el. Right, that ele­ment. So the answer to that ques­tion, what’s the num­ber one thing is prob­a­bly with­in one of those four areas? And it’s prob­a­bly going to be, it’s prob­a­bly going to be an issue that is there before you start, if that makes sense? And then how do you solve that, because if your busi­ness mod­el isn’t per­fect, it’s going not per­fect, but if your busi­ness mod­el isn’t effec­tive, it’s going to trans­late. So it comes down to one of those. So the next ques­tion that we’ve got is, Do I need a coach to imple­ment scal­ing up.

Kevin Lawrence 28:32

You know, it’s inter­est­ing, I’m going to I’m going out on Thurs­day, to learn how to dri­ve my new race car, I got a new race car last sea­son, nev­er ful­ly mas­tered the car. And of course, my bud­dies will glad­ly help me because so my bud­dies have the same race car, and they’ve been doing it for longer. But I hired one of the top rac­ers. I know a young kid who races around the world, I got him com­ing out, I’m gonna warm up in the morn­ing, get back into the car and get sort­ed. And I’ve got him com­ing in the after­noon. Because I want to learn how to mas­ter this damn thing. And I am going to hire a mas­ter to learn how to mas­ter it. And some peo­ple and by the way, it’s because I believe in short­cuts, smart short­cuts. Some peo­ple would do it all them­selves and take six months and do it on their own, hey, what­ev­er floats your boat. But this is busi­ness and time is mon­ey. And mon­ey is about get­ting a return on your invest­ment. So like you can do any­thing your­self. It’s just know my default is I just had anoth­er con­sul­tant up with me last Fri­day, I was telling you about to give me some guid­ance on scal­ing our firm. Why? Because that’s what he’s done for 30 years in his life. And I saw growth some­one who was an expert so you and I are both peo­ple who default experts. So that’s our view. On Brad. Obvi­ous­ly, we’re both quite biased as well. What else would you add to that?

Brad Giles 29:57

Well, no ath­lete ever achieved peak per­for­mance with­out a coach. Yes. You know, I mean, if I don’t know you, like me have prob­a­bly built more than 1000 busi­ness plans. Okay. Yes, the iter­a­tions that we have seen the dif­fer­ent nuances how it all plugs togeth­er, it’s, it’s sim­ply sec­ond nature to us, and as many oth­er coach­es who you know, who are pro­fi­cient in the space. So yeah, I think that, yeah, you can def­i­nite­ly do it your­self. There’s no doubt about it. And you can have amaz­ing results. But if you’re in a scal­ing mid­mar­ket firm, you need to get the best results that you can. And if you’ve got some­one who’s high­ly pro­fi­cient in an area, that can pay mas­sive dividends.

Kevin Lawrence 30:57

If you look at the val­ue that the exter­nal per­son, but it’s actu­al­ly believe it or not, I was say­ing to a CEO the day, you know, when we’re doing strate­gic plan­ning, the val­ue that we myself, you and our teams bring to this one is facil­i­ta­tion around the frame­work to help the team align and make deci­sions. Struc­tur­ing, run­ning and facil­i­tat­ing that meet­ing itself is a skill. And I think it’s worth the fee that we charge, because that is a very hard thing to have some­body do. And that way one of your team does­n’t have to play facil­i­ta­tor, they can be team mem­ber and thinker. The sec­ond is the wis­dom that we bring from all the oth­er com­pa­nies that we work with. Yeah, so there’s two dif­fer­ent angles. And for both of those rea­sons, it for a lot of peo­ple, they con­tin­ue to have some­body do it. Now, the wis­dom is always help­ful and might be more help­ful ini­tial­ly. But the facil­i­ta­tion, it’s just damn hard to run these meet­ings. We have one of our clients, who worked with us for quite a few years and is wild­ly suc­cess­ful. And I chat­ted with him this week, they need­ed some help, again, because they decid­ed to take the meet­ings inter­nal­ly and run them inter­nal­ly. And over the last cou­ple years. It just it did­n’t work. They hired some­one to han­dle it. They tried. And it just it the dis­ci­pline fad­ed away, which is not uncom­mon. So yes, you can. And there’s great ben­e­fits to hav­ing some­one else, first of all the meet­ings hap­pen, and you accom­plish most of what you intended.

Brad Giles 32:33

Okay. Which of the last ques­tion, which of the 10 Rock­e­feller habits do you think is the most impor­tant? Well, I’m going to start off there, I’m not even going to give you a chance, because I reck­on it’s num­ber one, the exec­u­tive team is healthy and aligned, right? If you don’t have a healthy exec­u­tive team, like you look at all of the oth­er nine things in the Rock­e­feller habits check­list, it’s going to be prob­lem­at­ic. So I, I’d say, most impor­tant that thing, a strong, cohe­sive exec­u­tive team, and then every­thing else can begin to occur after that.

Kevin Lawrence 33:13

Yeah, and I was there for so for those of you that aren’t famil­iar Rock­e­feller habits is a set of 10 habit habits in the book scal­ing up, orig­i­nat­ed in the book, Rock­e­feller habits a lit­tle we updat­ed, and when we did scal­ing up, and the first one is about the team, sec­ond one’s around hav­ing clear line goals, the third one’s around meet­ings, the fourth one’s around account­abil­i­ty, then we get into cus­tomer feed­back, employ­ee feed­back, etc, etc, etc. So I’m going to agree with you. And I’m going to also add num­ber two. And when we start with com­pa­nies, I look into places aligned tight team, and clear goals that every­one’s march­ing towards. And if we’ve got real­ly clear goals, and a tank team, that’s a foun­da­tion we can roll with. And if we don’t get those two in place, you know, I know that we’re going to slip on a lot of crit­i­cal stuff. Now, as always, the answer is it depends. It depends on your com­pa­ny and your cir­cum­stance. But as those two are crit­i­cal in the long run, once you get the goals going, which we nor­mal­ly do in our first few ses­sions, that team piece becomes more valu­able because the goals become like a basic, of course, you have goals, and you’re aligned. But get­ting that team strong becomes a mas­sive focus.

Brad Giles 34:31

It’s just when you worked with a team for a year or two, you begin to see just how impor­tant the strength of that align­ment with­in that lead­er­ship team becomes. Because all of the oth­er bits can be under­mined, if that isn’t there, and it becomes incred­i­bly frus­trat­ing when we’re try­ing to do a lot of oth­er things. So yeah, I mean, yeah, sim­i­lar sign enter­ing whatever.

Kevin Lawrence 35:03

I had a meet­ing last week with a com­pa­ny for two days, they’ve been around about 60 years. We start­ed apply­ing scal­ing up to it both two years ago. In that time­frame, already, the busi­ness is pret­ty well dou­bled a 60 year old busi­ness. The strength of the team is changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly. We had a ses­sion where one of the key lead­ers in the room is no longer with us. But two of that per­son­’s juniors were in the room, it kind of got pro­mot­ed. You could feel the ener­gy and the har­mo­ny of the team, the qual­i­ty of the dis­cus­sions and based debates was the best it’s ever been. Yeah, I’ve been run­ning his quar­ter­ly meet­ings. And it was so obvi­ous that one of the peo­ple was not like the oth­ers. And there need­ed to be a change. We saw the change. It was a beau­ti­ful, beau­ti­ful thing. And we iden­ti­fied it as one of the biggest obsta­cles to our growth, we knew it was going to be an issue if we did­n’t fix that, that team issue. And even if we were doing a tal­ent review, we spent two and a half hours debat­ing the tal­ent review of all the oth­er key peo­ple in the busi­ness and just the qual­i­ty of the team. It was absolute­ly awe­some. Awe­some. Awe­some. Awe­some. All right. Well, let’s review here. So we’re talk­ing about ques­tions about scal­ing up great method­ol­o­gy, we both believe in it. We both have iter­at­ed on at oth­er tools and oth­er things to enhance it based on what our clients need. But the first ques­tion, how long does it take to com­plete the one page strate­gic plan? The answer is, you can get a good B qual­i­ty draft in a cou­ple of days to three days. And then you’re going to chip away at it and iter­ate it for a year or two. Before you could say it’s like a piece of work. Sec­ond ques­tion, how do you get your team to buy into the method­ol­o­gy? Well, it depends. But you know, get­ting them to read the first cou­ple sec­tions of scal­ing up. Or maybe have a coach come in and make a pre­sen­ta­tion and have a dis­cus­sion around it and how they will see a get valu­able, or it was Brad talked about, you know, some­times it just got to get start­ed. And as I shared, some­times you got an engi­neer a plan to make a tran­si­tion to a bet­ter plat­form like this over a year or two depend­ing on your situation.

Brad Giles 37:22

Well, it depends. Ide­al­ly, six to eight exec­u­tives. We want some diver­si­ty in the busi­ness, but it real­ly depends on your sit­u­a­tion. But we want lead­ers who are going to make deci­sions and we don’t want any peo­ple who are pas­sen­gers. Num­ber four, what’s the num­ber one thing that blocks com­pa­nies from scal­ing up? Depends. But we look to peo­ple strat­e­gy, exe­cu­tion cash, we’ve got to get those things right, whichev­er of those is the least Right? Or the ones that are not per­form­ing? Well. That’s what’s going to hold you back and what we’ve the prob­lem that’s going to be solved? Do I need a coach to imple­ment scal­ing up? Look, I hate to say it again, but it depends. You can do it your­self for sure. If you want an accel­er­at­ed jour­ney, if you want to real­ly invest to get the best results, obvi­ous­ly coach­es will cre­ate bet­ter results. And then final­ly, which of the 10 Rock­e­feller habits do you think is the most impor­tant? My con­tention is num­ber one, the exec­u­tive team is healthy and aligned. Kev­in’s is one maybe plus two. What a good chat we’ve had today. Enjoy the ques­tion for­mat bit of a change.

Kevin Lawrence 38:37

Yes it is, I real­ly liked it to some good think­ing on espe­cial­ly on a frame­work that we’re big advo­cates of So hey, thanks for lis­ten­ing. This has been the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast with Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence. If you want to get more we’ve got both have excel­lent newslet­ters and you know and we’re here to sup­port and you know, help you scale. Brad you can get his newslet­ter and go to a site evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au And for myself, Lawrence and co​.com Hope you have an awe­some week and con­tin­ue to scale and grow.