What We Believe Our Clients Actually Hire Us For

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After 30 years of work­ing with growth CEOs, we recent­ly set our­selves a sim­ple chal­lenge: explain what Lawrence & Co. does in about a minute.

It took months. Not because we did­n’t know the answer, but because we’d spent years describ­ing it the wrong way.

Tools were nev­er the offer.

For a long time, we talked about our work in terms of method­ol­o­gy: Scal­ing Up, the Rock­e­feller Habits, Jim Collins’ frame­works, the 4 Forces of Growth. We still use all of them. They work.

But when we looked hon­est­ly at why clients come to us, and why most of them stay for five, ten, even twen­ty years, it was­n’t the tools. Nobody wakes up want­i­ng strate­gic plan­ning. Nobody is look­ing for coach­ing for its own sake.

CEOs want a part­ner to help them dou­ble their busi­ness, and then dou­ble it again. They want some­one who will push the pace, hold the line on pri­or­i­ties, and act as a cat­a­lyst for the growth they need to make as lead­ers along the way.That’s the job. The frame­works are just how we do it.

The 18-month shift

There’s a pat­tern we’ve seen enough times to count on.

The first year and a half is usu­al­ly the hard­est. That’s when the big issues get con­front­ed: the wrong peo­ple in key seats, pri­or­i­ties that com­pete instead of align, a plan that lives on paper but not in the busi­ness. It’s demand­ing work, and it should be.

Then, some­where around 18 months, it changes. The plat­form sta­bi­lizes. The team is aligned. Growth becomes repeat­able instead of hero­ic. And the work stops feel­ing like a grind and starts feel­ing like purpose.

That’s when the sec­ond dou­ble becomes real. Not as a stretch tar­get, but as the obvi­ous next step.

Grow­ing the com­pa­ny means grow­ing the leader

A com­pa­ny can’t dou­ble twice if its CEO stays the same. The busi­ness will out­grow any­one who stops learning.

So a big part of our work is mak­ing sure lead­ers keep pace: build­ing the skills, judg­ment, and team to run a com­pa­ny two or four times the size. When that hap­pens, some­thing else becomes pos­si­ble too. CEOs get to enjoy the ride, and to build a busi­ness that sup­ports the life they actu­al­ly want, rather than one that con­sumes it.

We don’t see a great com­pa­ny and a great life as a trade-off. The best CEOs we’ve worked with have proven they can have both.

Six­ty-five seconds

We’ve learned an enor­mous amount from the CEOs and advi­sors we’ve worked along­side over the years, and that expe­ri­ence is what final­ly let us say it simply.

Here’s the short ver­sion: we help growth CEOs dou­ble their busi­ness, then dou­ble it again, and enjoy the ride along the way.

Chal­lenge: 

Can you and your team explain the real val­ue you cre­ate for your cus­tomers in about a minute?

• If you can, con­grat­u­la­tions. That clar­i­ty is a real com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, and it shows up in how you hire, sell, and make decisions.
• If not, it’s worth explor­ing: what do your cus­tomers actu­al­ly engage with you for? Our answer turned out to be sim­pler than we’d been mak­ing it sound, and yours might be too.

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Growth CEO Interview

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Book: The 4 Forces of Growth 

• 4 minute Overview
• 45 Minute Webinar
• Buy on Amazon

Book: Scal­ing Up

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• Arti­cle: 10 Years After Scal­ing Up: What I’ve Learned About Growth

Book: Your Oxy­gen Mast First

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• Resilience Webi­nar