Outdated Plans, Exhausted Teams: How to Regain Momentum and Navigate Market Volatility

What You Will Hear:

00:00 Even perfect execution of plans can mean outgrowing relevance if the market moves faster than internal priorities.

• The dangers of focusing on checking boxes, which can result in focusing on outdated priorities.
• How to know when you are not adapting to current conditions.
• Attention: Don’t equate busyness and task completion with true progress.

06:40 Organizations must move beyond rigid checklists and experiment with new solutions in order to keep pace with rapid technological change.

• The challenge of integrating new technology such as AI into business strategy.
• Experimentation and dynamic learning are ways to adapt to evolving business environments.
• It is important to continuously question whether current tasks are still relevant.

08:30 Long-term plans will require revision due to external changes.

• The impact of unforeseen changes on established strategies and how quick adaptation is necessary.
• Adjustments are part of maintaining focus on long-term goals amidst shifting circumstances.
• Know the pitfalls of relying only on pre-set plans, especially when external partners or markets pivot unexpectedly.

12:50 True leadership means continually orienting and re-orienting to organizational purpose, ensuring everyone stays aligned.

• Your Red Direction is a metaphor for use in order to anchor around one organizational purpose.
• Multiple initiatives pulling in different directions can create confusion and loss of focus.
• It is essential to regularly clarify what remains relevant as conditions and opportunities evolve.

27:15 Open dialogue within teams helps organizations recalibrate when moving quickly.

• Open communication is vital for surfacing issues before they become bigger problems.
• Giving team members the chance to express their perspectives improves buy-in and engagement as decisions are made.
• The importance of recalibrating together when the pace becomes too rapid for effective change.

32:15 Regular reflection on effort, not just outcomes, builds resilience and calibrates performance.

• The importance of recognizing both sufficient and excessive effort to avoid burnout.
• How to use reflection to refine future actions and resource allocation.
• Celebrating progress, not just end results, motivates ongoing improvement.

41:55 Scaling a business today depends on empowering top talent and leveraging new tools.

• Technology now enables smaller teams to achieve what took much larger staff in the past.
• Having excellent talent is considered irreplaceable, even with automation and AI.
• Developing and supporting people is key to executing ambitious growth strategies efficiently.

47:30 BOLD action means letting go of outdated approaches and decisively responding to current market volatility for competitive advantage.

Resources

• Bob Rogers – Deep Story, One Objective: The Secret to BOLD Brands
• Alexis Sikorsky – CEO Confessions: Loneliness, Building the Right Team & Bold Growth
• Dr. Jennifer Berry – Productive Struggle and Joyful Leadership: Redefining Success in Business
• Kim Bohr – Clarity, Fairness, and Care: The Secret to High Trust Organizations
• Tracy Holland – Building, Buying, and Scaling Businesses for Modern Entrepreneurs

Transcript

Jess Dewell 00:00
What if hitting every single target on your strategic plan is the exact reason your growth just hit a wall? You’re checking off boxes. Your team is checking off boxes. Everyone’s working harder than ever. Deep down, deep down, there is something trying to be heard, nagging to be acknowledged. And that’s a truth that maybe we don’t want to face. Maybe we’re not ready to face. Maybe we’re even ignoring. That executing yesterday’s priorities today in a market that has moved on is holding you back. That is the linear trap. And trying to out-hustle a strategy that is rooted in the past, that lacks dynamic elements, that’s not grit. That’s slow motion failure.

Announcer 00:54
This is the Bold Business Podcast, created for companies running real revenue. Your host is Strategic Growth Advisor Jess Dewell. Here, we drop the I’m fine mask. Here, we face today’s market demands together. Here, we build business instinct. Because the action we take today creates our company’s future relevance and the room for our teams to grow. Now, grab your tea or coffee and get ready to build your business instinct.

Jess Dewell 01:30
Today’s episode, we’re going to break the linear trap cycle together. I am going to take you on a four-part journey. First, why checking every box on a broken roadmap is flying blind. Second, how to strip away that noise and lock on to a single North Star. or your Red Direction. Third, how can you calibrate an exhausted team operating all the way in fight or flight? And finally, how you can install a systems-led execution engine to stop you from being the bottleneck, to stop individual knowledge owners on your team from being the bottleneck. Growth is a double-edged sword. If you remove operational drag without absolute clarity, all you’re doing is running faster toward the wrong target. Let’s re-architect together. So let’s start with the problem. The linear trap problem rooted in checkboxes.

Bob Rogers 02:37
And I talk about several different types of project leaders. One of them is the captain checklist. Okay, we’re doing a show. So first we need a script. Look at all those pages. Yes, we have a script. Now we need a production breakdown to see how many days it’s going to take to shoot this. Look, we have a production breakdown. That’s great. Now we turn that into a budget. Oh, that’s too much. It’ll have to be a little less money. We can shave here and there. Now we need a, uh, a schedule. Now we need this. Now we need that, you know, and you can check off every item in the list and you get down to the last item. The audience loves it. No, actually they don’t because you didn’t produce a show. You produced a budget and a schedule and a checklist. And yes, you did all the steps in the checklist, but you got lost along the way. And the checklist does not guarantee the emotional connection with the audience.

Jess Dewell 03:44
The entire conversation that I had with Bob Rogers talks about the heart. Our heart and why we’re doing what we’re doing. Our customers’ heart and why they want to be connected to us in some way. And the heart that we overlap in, how well are we doing it? So really recognizing breaking it down into a checklist, all it does is it gets us to a goal. It will get us to a deadline, maybe, and it will definitely get us to something that we all agreed upon that we wanted to complete. The thing is, being able to pause along the way, having a responsiveness and fluidity. I like the word dynamic better. A dynamicism that we can work with together is what keeps us on track with our heart as an organization, your customer’s heart and the market’s heart and that place where they both overlap. So the at all costs checklist approach really does tell you and give you a roadmap that is independent and siloed away from what’s actually going on in the world around us. And that we try and remove those in our own organization. So, of course, we could take that same approach and bring that to how we’re showing up to the rapid change, the demands of today’s market, and know that a roadmap, a path forward, a plan may have twists and turns along the way. Here’s Alexis Sikorsky. He’s the special advisor to startup founders, and you can’t say it better than this.

Alexis Sikorsky 05:38
Man make plans, God laughs. so I have a rule the way I operate usually is I talk to a founder and I ask him what his number is like how much you want to sell that’s the beginning of the conversation I don’t do five million exits that’s not what I’m good at I don’t do one billion exits that’s not what I’m good at I do 100 200 million exit let’s say 50 to 200 million exit so if the person I’m talking to goal is within that range, then the only question I ask myself is, can I get there in four years? If not, I’m out. Like 10 years plans and everything, I’m out. If you’re a startup, you’re going to do what the market tells you to do. It’s that simple. You’re going to pivot and react. Plans are important and they get more important when you get close to the exit because that’s what the people who buy in you, especially if you talk private equity, that’s what they want to see.

Jess Dewell 06:42
What stands out to me here that I also believe in and it may sound like, just throw the checklist out the window. And I think, you know, Alexis does a pretty good job of saying, yeah, that might be true. And at the end, he’s talking about what do we need to do and how do we need to show up to actually get to that next step. And sometimes, and in some places, and at some stages, that plan becomes more important than ever and being able to move with it, being able to practice the dynamic elements of moving with, reading market demands, how we move forward, actually gives you and me and your teams and my team all the ability to work within a plan and keep that ability to flex and adapt as we’re moving from stage to stage in our company. The more we understand what we can and can’t do, where we are and we aren’t, we can understand expertise we might need to bring in, ways that we need to grow if we’re willing, and what is really important to the integrity of the service and product that we’re providing to remain relevant today and keep staying relevant over time. That trap though is constant, that linear trap, checking off boxes and then responding to all of the things that show up because of checking the boxes. There’s always reactions and firefighting because we may be at too much capacity. And Kim Bohr, CEO of Spark Effect, she talks to us about that in a previous episode. And I wanted to pull that into this conversation of what we’re talking about here in this linear trap.

Kim Bohr 08:31
I find that I’m working to become more disciplined in that area and trying to think about how to how does that time get preserved because there’s so much change happening. So, you know, we think about we’ve got these three-year plans. And yeah, we have and we know what the end game is, but the road to get there is really, really twisty and turny. And we, you know, we have just set some plans that like I just mentioned with the Google site, part of our go-to-market strategy just kind of got blown up, you know, with some of the changes they just made. And we’re like, okay, we’re back to rethinking this one, but we still have the eye on the prize. Yet it’s taking that space so that we’re not just firefighting to realize, okay, well, where do we, where is that, that adjustment need to be made?

Jess Dewell 09:14
So what happens when your plan is gone? Have you ever thought about that as, as a vision holder, as the person responsible for holding the path forward, guiding your company, that’s an interesting thing to really pause in and use in your next Present Retreat, your next strategic time where you’re taking it with yourself and your management team. Maybe even, maybe even asking a few key people on your team, what do you think? What would happen if? And really understand there’s something about worst case scenario that just knowing it could happen means that anything that would happen might never get that bad or be that difficult. Yet the fact that any headspace, any energy was given to it allows us to meet in motion without having to stall, pause, or start over and keep moving forward. Oh, I’m telling you, because that firefighting and if everybody’s at capacity and something like what Kim is talking about happens, man, it’s really hard to go. I’m just exhausted. We’re just exhausted. How do we take this on too? We don’t have time, money, energy, resources, whatever it is. We don’t have. And when that starts to come up, that’s the time to find a pause for yourself to do some of this work and actually evaluate how much linear planning have we been doing and what can we do to remove some of the rigidity so that we can ensure we’re doing the right work so that we can do as much of the right work as possible without burning out. So a question here for you. What outcomes are you driving? And are you linearly stuck in managing a checklist and accountable to a checklist? Or are you accountable to outcomes and creativity and adaption and flexibility? I’ve worked with companies that when they realize that There’s so much that gets in the way. I mean, you know, you can feel it in your body. When somebody says deer in the headlights, we just know what that feels like, looks like. And if that realization happens and if that stuckness is something you start to feel while you’re listening or the days after you’re listening, just know doing more of what used to work isn’t going to work. Revisit this part and think about, are we managing to a checklist? Did we lose our connection with heart? And are we lacking the discipline to be dynamic in the way we’re showing up to work, in the way we’re showing up to what’s in front of us? Because when we aren’t showing up to what’s in front of us right now, we are in slow motion failure. So instead of trying to fit those pieces back together, think about what those pieces are showing and the new something new that can be built from it. And this is the start of being able to be resilient and re-architect the way you show up and the way your teams can show up. As we move into the second part, finding your Red Direction, also known as your true north. It doesn’t matter if you’re actually going to Magnetic North or if you want to go east or south or northwest. It matters that you always have your anchor to Magnetic North, your Red Direction, which is the purpose of your company, the way you do your work, how you were deciding what is relevant today so that tomorrow you still have relevance and you are still being of service and making the difference in the world you want to make. And that comes down to, you can have three compasses and they’ll all point the same direction. The thing is, with priorities or initiatives and organizations that span 12 months or more, when you have more than one, they’re all pointing in different directions. And it gets confusing and it gets messy. And so the Red Direction, your magnetic north, your north star, your true north, whatever you’re calling it today, one thing gives you direction. So before fixing more operational drag, what if, what if you looked at all the pet projects and all of the current initiatives and figured out and made hard decisions about what’s knowing your non-negotiables, knowing what accountability looks like, knowing when we’re in checklist mode and a linear trap moving forward. And then knowing and taking all of that and figuring out to apply to figure out what is the objective driving your business right now. Because it’s what we’re doing today that determines our relevance tomorrow. And this is the core concept of a Growth Framework Reset. That linear planning shifting to adaptive architecture. Being able to guide your company forward according to your own Red Direction. We’re getting ideas all the time. Cool systems, cool technologies, creative ideas. And we want to implement them before we figure out what it actually helps with. How it actually uses what we have today to make us better, more adaptable, dynamic, evolve, even being pushed out of our comfort zone. So we need to know as we’re bringing all of this in, we might be losing sight of where our Red Direction is. And we’re taking all of these seemingly awesome, exciting side roads to make forward progress. Yet, instead of amplifying our strategy and our work, it actually mutes it. Because sometimes technology and operational tools try to execute that strategy and do the work of the thinking and the business instinct for us. And they just can’t. They just help it when we use it right. So we, you in your organization, me helping your organization to define the exact outcome you need before you add, replace or change any sort of technology, tool, process or system. And that is easy to say. It is so easy to say, yet in practice, I’ll speak for myself here, in practice, it is really hard to do. Here’s what it actually looks and sounds like. Bob has a great visual for us.

Bob Rogers 16:36
And probably the single biggest mistake that leaders make when they approach something like this is they try to skip over the first step, which is determining the goal. They immediately plunge into the presentation technology. Ooh, there’s this news, high-tech, whiz-bang thing that I saw at the electronics show. This is going to be great. We’re going to use this. Or they start thinking about the messages they would like to send. Those are messages that are important to the sender, not necessarily to the receiver. Write this quote down. Your need to tell does not cause in me a need to hear. That’s a Bob quote. They get preoccupied with design quotes or design concepts. Somebody draws a picture of an exterior of something and they get all totally engaged with that. They come up with a great story idea, a great creative idea. The creative people on your team would love to do something that calls attention to their own creativity. And sometimes you fall in love with that. All of these things need to be avoided until you know what it is that you’re trying to do. You need to figure out your end before you start dealing with the means. And as an example, I use my brother wakes up on a Saturday, says today would be a great day to fix something around the house. so he goes out into the garage he rummages through his tools and he finds that brand new hammer oh it just has a great weight to it it feels good in his hand so armed with the hammer he enters the house and starts looking for something that needs to be repaired if he comes across a picture that needs to be hung and he’s got a nail in his pocket then boy the hammer is the perfect tool but if the first thing he comes across is a clogged sink and he tries to unclog it with the hammer, he’s going to make a hell of a mess. So before you choose your tool, figure out the task.

Jess Dewell 18:47
So taking that time to remove the fuzziness and get the objectives into a single priority, taking into account non-negotiables, taking into account resources and constraints. If it doesn’t fit, be ruthless, ruthless about initiatives and letting them go and saying no. They don’t have to be saying no and putting them in a bin to never address again. They could be good enough to save and put on a shelf for some other time. Here’s the deal, though. If it distracts from the primary objective, cut it because it takes away from your Red Direction, no matter how clever it feels. And no matter how interesting it might be. And don’t take it from me. Bob actually talked about that in our interview as well. And I’m going to bring it back here because this concept, this true north, this one north star, your Red Direction, and being ruthless about it is something that everybody benefits from.

Bob Rogers 19:52
that ruthlessness comes in getting very specific and limited about what you’re trying to do. You know, can you get it down to 20 objectives? No, you need to get further. Can you get it down to 10? Can you get it down to five? Can you get it down to three? You need to get it down to one. One objective, one North Star. You can’t have three North Stars. got to have one objective and everything else needs to become second to that focus focus focus focus a machine should have no unnecessary parts you go through that experience and you edit edit edit edit to you throw things out until you get it pared down to what absolutely has to be there and there’s nothing else, nothing else at all. No side ideas, no pet projects, no pet this, no, nothing decorative.

Jess Dewell 20:56
So let’s come back to the first section. That plan on paper looks amazing. It’s been stress tested. Maybe you’ve even done a variation or the whole thing before. You have a different team. You have a different set of situations that you’re facing today. You have a different level of pressure in terms of economic, technological, supply chain, access to talent and finding the people who want and are excited to hitch their mission to the company’s mission. And here’s the deal. When we have too many things going on, we get exhausted and we get anxious and we can’t really figure out how are we going to get it all done. And that drag, that drag creates exhausted humans. So that flying blind, splitting time across many initiatives amplify some fight or flight. And the person who I spoke to recently, Dr. Jennifer Berry, CEO at Smart Labs, talks about this.

Jennifer Berry 22:00
I think of the businesses in three different pockets. I think of, obviously, the longer term goals, right? Maybe a three-year strategy, sometimes a 10-year strategy. Generally, I think in three-year strategies. I work with a private equity organization. So we think in three-year strategy. Then, of course, you have your annual KPIs that you’re trying to achieve for that year to hit the targets that are expected of the organization to be sustainable, to have your growth that you need, right, to meet the expectations of the stakeholders. Then you have your sort of priorities. When I think about annual goals, I bucket them under what we call strategic imperatives. So they’re key cornerstone imperatives that the words don’t change, the definitions get tweaked a little bit. From there, we say, OK, if we care about growth for the organization, we care about sustainability, we care about impact, we care. Those are our corner strategic imperatives. OK, how do we define those for this year? And every year I work with my leadership team and we define them differently. So growth one year could be we want more partners. Next year it could be we want more labs sold. OK, next year we want more students. OK, next year. Right. Whatever it is, we define it differently. But growth is the word. OK, but how do we want to grow this year? Then we create the definition. Then we go, OK, how are we going to measure that? And then we create a KPI and then we monitor it every month like, you know, everybody does.

Jess Dewell 23:23
Something I appreciate Dr. Berry talking about here is that the way we show up in year one of a three year cycle definitely will be different than year two. And how year two shows up is going to relate directly to what year one ended with, looked like, resulted in. And so there is, even in a three-year cycle, you can have this moving outcome in the general direction with which you want to go. Having one, one strategic imperative allows you to break that down. And guess what? Every single thing we do around that one impacts all the other things that are in our awareness and adds to how we build our business instinct and how we can evaluate opportunities for now, later, or never. And be okay and solid in the no when it’s a no, which is most of the time. So this is another step, right? Having this Red Direction is removing the set of instructions that just weight down getting work done and eating up the energy that’s available so that the energy can be utilized and amplified in the right work right now. Knowing how hard it is to find a single initiative, it’s easy to say, hard to do. Without it, though, that energy expenditure, there is a lot of lost energy and a lot of spent energy, time, money, other resources as well. That comes down to the cost of ambiguity. And this is a lever that we forget about as business owners and business leaders. That ambiguity creates exhaustion. Decision, decision, decision creates exhaustion. Just the amount of work from all of the checklists create exhaustion. And all of it together is this whirlwind, this whirlwind. When you have claimed, yep, I do not wish us to operate by checklist anymore. I can recognize it in my organization. And, hey, I understand and we can get to a single initiative and that might make next year’s initiative and the year after that’s initiative this and that. Let’s just see how it goes. Here’s where we’re focused at right now with our eye into the future, with our eye at the end of the journey. Being able to take all of that shifts the energy in a team, the resources available to a team. It shifts the way that teams work together and build trust. It also shifts the way people show up and can now see, here’s where I am today. Here’s where I can go, maybe want to go, maybe I’m excited to go to grow with our organization. Because none of us like whiplash. None of us like to be going down a path and automatically being told, turn left now. And building trust in culture isn’t about stopping the hard left turns, for example. It’s not about avoiding hard decisions. It’s about giving people space to voice their own state of being and naming frictions in their own role and with those that they’re working with before a full stop and backtrack occurs. And we’re going to set the stage for this with Kim Bohr, CEO of Spark Effect, and what she has to say about moving too fast.

Kim Bohr 27:18
It is about giving people space to voice the concerns to be heard, not because they’re expecting a change, but that they want to just be a part of where the company is going and the solution. And that’s part of the process, right? I think inside our own organization, on a smaller scale, we’re doing those things too. And one of the, but what’s helpful is that we, because we’re moving so fast, sometimes it does take somebody to say, hey, maybe we need to message this differently because we’re, you know, it’s, we’re, we’re kind of going really quick. Maybe we should stop and recalibrate. And it’s like, you know what, you’re right. We should. So having that team aligned in the way that we’re trying to do things, then where somebody could say, whoa, whoa, whoa, we’re going a little too fast. Let’s catch everybody up, is really, really important.

Jess Dewell 28:04
And this is true every day. It’s especially true in times of rapid change. Your fatigue, your fight or flight, is something that you are working on. And you, as the guide, bringing an awareness of other people’s state of beings also matters. And having that space for your people to step up and say, hey, what’s happening? Where are we going? I don’t understand this. Wait, I feel like we’re going, but the decision hasn’t been made yet. All of those things indicate a level of trust that can open critical thinking instead of shutting it down. Because here’s the deal. Our intention, without saying things out loud, does not equal impact. We can be a caring leader and still miss the cues. So knowing what we’re going to say, knowing how we want to say it so that the receiver wants to hear it and is open to hearing it, Bob mentioned that earlier, allows for the space to process. Unified intent is incredibly important and the only way for that to occur is with clear, concise, sometimes seemingly repetitive messages that become part of the way work is done. So being able to, in your Present Retreats, take the time to think about what needs to be said and how to say it. It’s taking into account Winfinity, really. What is in it for you and why you have to say it at all and what needs to come of it. The person, the purple, the people or person receiving it, how will they receive it? And what that impact to them is and why it’s important for them to consider. And then the result, the rest of the team, the rest of the organization, the rest of the community, whatever it is, also can be named. And that Winfinity is something that just a little tweak in how we approach things can change the ruthlessness we need to be. Not that it goes away, but that we can be more ruthless. This is in, this is out right now. This makes sense. No, this doesn’t align right now. Kim goes on to talk to us about ensuring how their message lands correctly and the benefits of Winfinity.

Kim Bohr 30:40
So one is it’s taking like it’s getting that the neuroscience of the fight or flight. It’s kind of getting us into really grounding us. And especially in a really stressful situation of like, OK, let’s go back and let’s think through. how can we be empathetic in this situation if we can just take time to write you know we talk about write three sentences that forces your brain to kind of come back online it really helps you regulate where you’re trying to communicate or what your situations you’re seeing the other side of what it does is it creates us discipline you know and and I think you know most leaders are trying to obviously be fair and caring but like they’re the way they do it doesn’t mean And, you know, their actions and their intentions may be misaligned or just may be that the way they do it isn’t really effective for the person who’s on the other end. And so really trying to to use that that activity as a way of of saying, OK, like, is is this going to show up right for if I’m thinking about for this particular person on my team who maybe has a different kind of context or experience? Is this going to land the way I want it to land? I mean, I think so much of leadership is around influencing, right? And it’s influencing people not to manipulate. It’s influencing to really say, okay, how do I need to think about the way I need a message for you in the way you take in information and in the way your role is structured?

Jess Dewell 32:06
So how do we celebrate and reflect on effort? There are a lot of ways to do it. Dr. Berry shares hers.

Jennifer Berry 32:14
Effort builds the reward. So it’s not about the outcome, but it’s about the effort is really key. But more importantly, reflecting on the effort that you put in that day, whether you had your tea or not, reflecting on the effort and going, you know what, that was the level of effort that I was capable of today. And what do I need to do tomorrow to either put in more effort or put in less effort? Because sometimes we put in way too much effort and we’re banging our head up against the wall. And it’s not getting the result that we want. So that real concept, and I work with this with my team a lot, of like celebrating effort and reflection wherever you ended up on that effort meter that day or that week or that month.

Jess Dewell 33:02
We forget to do this, don’t we? We forget to celebrate the actions and the work that the effort of taking a time out, showing up, communicating clearly, aligning the desired outcome with the words we say, with the actions we take, being the model for other people, also asking them to be the model for you and having everybody engaged and own their part. We don’t celebrate enough in general. You may be like me. We get it done. Good. We did it. Is there anything to learn? What was the good stuff? And off we go to the next. And we forget. We forget that celebration. We forget to go, huh, look at that. When we pause, we actually make more progress. When we understand how much effort to result we’re giving and we can calibrate that, we actually are making directional changes in motion that are flexible and dynamic so that we don’t have to run only by checklist all the time. It’s pretty neat. Pretty neat to think about. A real honest audit of your own leadership flaws, your own personal flaws, are an insight to the blind spots that you face guiding your organization forward. Some of us think about reflection as something where we have to face and own all of these things that we don’t want to because we already know and so all we’re doing is berating ourselves. Well, guess what? If that’s the way you’re doing it, I suggest a flip of script. And that comes up for me sometimes too. However, more often the self-reflection is, okay, when I know where I fell short, reacted poorly in hindsight, could have done something different in hindsight, those are things that allow me to find my own bottlenecks. Same for you. And it also creates a space where when we must have difficult conversations or how we are recognizing effort or putting the discipline into what needs to be said to reduce friction overall we can’t unless we’re really truly ourselves and if we’re lying to ourselves about us we’re not ever going to be able to claim those friction points and really show up truly with another person to solve problems, to execute on opportunities to make a difference. So looking inward with an advisor or coach is a prerequisite for leading with outward authority. This is hard to do. It’s hard to do when we are always navigating what do we tell the people around us? What is too much information that gets in their way? What is just enough to be engaging? what do we really need and who can we talk to because that person may not be somebody in our organization today we may accidentally overwhelm our peers not to mention the teams that report up to us for the things that we think about face work with and trying to distill down and ultimately when we take the time to work on that for ourselves, we can show up in a whole different way across the board, not only as a strategic leader that knows and claims the Red Direction guiding a company forward, also one that sees and makes a difference in the world outside of their profession and their office. Speed might be confused with momentum and in the end unchecked can destroy execution and so building and working with all of the elements of what does trust look like? How do we work together and calibrate the way we work together to have this high performance rapport, to have unified intent, and to be able to push forward in the same direction? That’s what we have set up so far. And now that work, by the way, is not just a and tie it with a bow and off we go. That work is ongoing. In fact, every section of this podcast that we’re talking about today with this, I will tell you, I will tell you is wild and interesting and is always evolving. So are we stacking? Not necessarily, but maybe all of them are parts of a foundation that we need because we need to be able to recognize where the decisions are getting stalled in our organization, where there is lack of clarity to create fatigue and unsureness when it comes to the priorities that we have demanding each person’s attention. So moving into unlocking these multipliers, we really want to execute more with less. We want to do more with less. we’ve always wanted to more than ever now because of the way we can. We have more technology available to us. We have AI coming in and changing the game. We have systems that can support and automate and do things in a way quicker, faster, and differently than we ever thought possible. And so we want to make sure that they’re all in place and that we get out of the way. That we, and we includes the people in our organization that also have the knowledge that are also bottlenecked, like we can be, to get out of the way and let things move and people to step up and increase how dynamic we are day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year. This is where businesses scale. Now, the confusion of urgent operational noise and important strategic work is something that has existed since the beginning of business. Before any of us listening, watching, engaging in business today were born, and longer even before that. So here’s the thing. The thing is this. Protecting our time matters. And you’ve heard me mention Present Retreat a couple of times. Being able to pause and take a look at what’s going on. For a while, you may want to perform a daily calendar audit. Look at the macro tasks that you’re doing simply because you haven’t delegated them yet. What are the things that really aren’t the best use of your time? And then understanding what makes them land on your plate. Because being able to systematically eliminate or delegate the things that aren’t responsibilities that you are uniquely qualified for ensure the right systems and information disseminates better than it ever has before. This is something that Alexis Sikorsky shared with me.

Alexis Sikorsky 40:43
Exhaustion in the sense that you get to the point that you confuse what’s urgent with what’s important. And that’s the actual bottleneck. Bottleneck is not like, oh, how much time I can spend on the company. That comes earlier, actually. And that’s solved with a PA. It’s not solved by a deep, profound transformation. Very simple and extremely boring. No skill required, no fancy mentor advisor required. At the end of every day, before you go to bed, you open an Excel spreadsheet and you list all the tasks you’ve been doing during the day. Then you end up with a massive list of tasks, right? But you already instinctively, you already know that. But just seeing it is interesting. And then you identify the task that you’re uniquely qualified to do. Not the task that you haven’t delegated yet, not the task that you don’t have somebody to delegate to. Oh, I wish I had somebody who can do that. No, that’s not what we’re looking for. Because these are operational issues.

Jess Dewell 41:57
Everything that you are not uniquely qualified to do is an operational issue. This is something that has become a mantra of mine because cheers. Maybe you can relate. Maybe you can relate to that. Technology today can allow us to take a focus team of 10 to execute what used to require 40, if not more people. And I think that’s incredibly important to hold. And I also think it’s incredibly important to say sometimes we can’t imagine it yet. Even though it’s possible today, how can we actually imagine this in our organization? So scaling today isn’t about creating more resources through adding more people or adding more systems. It’s about preparing and equipping the people you are working with, your top talent, with a modern execution architecture. And here’s the deal. People, more than ever before, are going to be key to making a business scale and relevant in the future. Tracy Holland, founder of Inter5th, shares with me.

Tracy Holland 43:12
No longer do I carry a $9 million payroll because I don’t need to. And I think what I would say is it’s not a license to say you don’t need team because team is the talent. Talent is the business and the business scaling is predicated on having excellent talent that can execute. But I think what used to take a team of 30 to 50 can now be executed on 10 to 20. And then maybe that can kind of tap out there and you can keep going and scaling.

Jess Dewell 43:54
Yes, yes, yes. And here’s the next piece of that. When scaling, sales tends to hide operational flaws too. So realistically, we’re talking about operational flaws in all parts of our business, in ourselves, in our team, in the way we communicate with each other, in the decisions that we choose to allow to be made, in the focus or lack of focus, ruthlessness around a single initiative. When growth slows down, which it will, or growth is in a slow moment and then something’s going to happen and unlock and break the infrastructure that you have, there is some opportunity here to keep doing, keep growing, keep focusing on sales. and during those quieter periods, intentionally build operating procedures, scalable processes, because all panicking does is end up chasing a number outcome at the end. Whereas intentional work around the systems we have, where do we see them stalling? Where do we see them breaking first? This is the work that’s done. So when the breakthrough happens next, your margin can stay healthy and you and your teams can stay sane when growth surges.

Tracy Holland 45:18
I am a firm believer that revenue and sales cures all else. It absolutely will cure any issue. You can always staff, borrow, or grow when you have a revenue pipeline, which is why I’m saying building your personal brand and being thoughtful about being online, having an online presence, having a personality, having your positioning out there. is mission critical in whatever capacity you’re going to do business. But I think number two is at every size of business, there is a plateau stage in which things slow way down. And you may have way too many staff or you may have way too much inventory, but there’s this slowdown period that can take place and it happens quickly at times. And you think, my God, what am I going to do? So building up your social and online presence is what lets you start and stop easily in terms of fluctuating on growth. When you start to think about growth and you see it across the board, you know, it’s just a one day at a time kind of thing. And you just, the best thing you can do is when things do slow down is make sure you have SOPs and systems in place to be more efficient so that when the fire hose moment happens, you have a process and a plan for how to build and scale that feels manageable. Because that’s where the wheels fall off the bus is when people are like, okay, we’ve done 20,000, but we’ve never done 200,000. Like, what does that look like and how do we need to scale that? How do we finance that? How can we run our line time? How long will it take? Where do we store raw materials while we’re making things? Like these are real crunch issues that come up in real time. And, you know, the best thing you can do to hedge on growth is to start to plan for those moments when things are slow.

Jess Dewell 47:30
That’s where strategy, clarity really comes into play. And that’s where you can reclaim your growth framework and make it dynamic along the way. The action you’re taking today is where your company’s competitive advantages went or lost. Regardless of what’s being done right now, your business instinct knows. Are you? Are you listening to it? Is it a little nudge in the back of your mind? Is it the pattern you’re not willing to recognize in reports that you’re receiving? So it knows. It knows you can’t use a linear plan. It knows you can’t use last year’s plan. It knows that you can’t out-execute ideas and processes that sound good and are actually obsolete. So if you want to ensure the actions that you prioritize today, your Red Direction that you are anchoring to as you navigate business and want to remain relevant three years from now, it’s time to stop chasing those milestones and it’s time to start showing up to today’s market volatility. The action you take now is the difference between striving for your competitive edge and actually securing it. If you’re interested, don’t wait for the market to tell you that your plan is outdated. Take a look at the link to the Growth Framework Reset in the show notes today. Let’s diagnose your strategic jet, build your adaptive architecture, and get you the clarity that you need to scale on purpose.

Announcer 49:11
Future relevance isn’t built in theory. It’s built on the actions we take today. Don’t let what you heard today stay in this episode of the Bold Business Podcast. For full show notes, transcripts, and over 500 episodes created for companies running real revenue, visit reddirection.com. To continue the conversation with strategic growth advisor, Jess Dewell, reach out directly. Thank you for joining us. Keep building your business instinct. Produced by The Scott Treatment