You might not know this about me, but in high school, I was a sprinter. The fastest white boy at my high school, in fact.
And on our relay team, we practiced our handoffs over and over. This seemingly simple task, is quite tricky in practice.
Tipping points have two sides.
There's the driving force.
And there's the counteracting force.
Too often, we only think about one side of the equation.
A few months ago, I joined Brian Lofrumento on his Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
I was flattered when, a couple of days after we recorded, he told me our conversation was one of the most thought-provoking he’d had over the 1000+ episodes he’s recorded.
Why? Because we dug into a topic that almost every business owner talks about, but few truly define: scalability.
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Delegation is often practiced. Escalation is not practiced enough.
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(But it makes for a great business consultant)
If you’re a curious person, you’ve doubtless heard the adage "curiosity killed the cat.” Maybe it was even told to you as a warning. But did you know that there’s an important end to the saying that is almost always left out?
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I recently had the chance to sit down with Mark Hayward on the Business Growth Talks podcast, and it got me thinking about some of the common myths that often trip up founders on the path to scale.
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A few years ago, I decided to cut goals out of my life.
Why? They weren't working for me. Simple as that.
And I suspect the way most people set goals doesn’t work for them either.
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How Getting Married Reinforced My Belief in Work-Life Integration
I think most of us have realized by now that the role of work in our lives has fundamentally changed.
Long gone are the days when our work and personal lives were two separate and disconnected worlds. Even the focus on work-life balance – which views work and life as separate but connected – is on its way out.
Instead, in both my own experience and the experience of many I’ve spoken with, the era of work-life integration has arrived. We are whole and complete humans who are living our lives at all times. Work is life. Home is life. Travel is life. Hobbies are life. It’s all just life.
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It was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Picture this. I had just graduated from the University of Maryland magna cum laude with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. But instead of following the expected path of working at a big fancy engineering firm, I became employee #2 at a startup energy auditing company running out of the back room of a house in the suburbs.
I was living my entrepreneurship fantasy.
There was just one problem…
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I'm back! Did you miss me?
Did you even know I was gone??
Over the past few weeks, I was enjoying the sunny Mediterranean with my partner, Joe and our families.
But I did a couple of things differently this time.
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Treating imperfection as an operating expense
In 2008, some college friends and I started the first stationless bike sharing program in the North America, a decade before bikes and scooters appeared on the streets of every major city.
And the first question everyone asked us was this...
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This is my culture ethos.
In business, stuff goes wrong. We all know this. And as a company scales, there's more stuff to go wrong. So it will.
And when that inevitable something goes wrong, how do you respond?
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Here’s what a business actually is
How do you think about purpose in the context of what you do? Are the two joined at the hip?
Well here's my hot take. Business is not a purpose.
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If you could have a meal with anyone famous alive or dead, who would you want to have a meal with?
What is the #1 place you have always wanted to visit, but haven’t gotten the chance to go?
What's your favorite podcast?
These were the hard hitting questions Brian Haney asked me when we sat down to record an episode of The Haney Company's Financial Guy Podcast.
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Do you ever wish you had the power to see the future? 🔮
Having a scalable business gives you that power.
Why?
Because when your business is scalable, it has the flexibility and adaptability to respond to future possibilities that you can't see today, but you very much expect to happen.
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This hit home for me recently when a client said something that I thought was really insightful.
"Brad, we need our systems to be as simple as our business is complex."
But why is simple so hard?
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One of the most common mistakes I see my clients make as they scale is becoming too reliant upon back and forth communication to get stuff done.
You know what I mean if you've ever had to send 6 back and forth emails just to get a status update, if you've had to answer the same question a million times, or if you've had to dig through your inbox or chat history for that critical piece of information you're looking for.
Yes, communication is incredibly important. But too much of it becomes detrimental if you want your business to be scalable.
Why?
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What are the most important metrics if you want your business to be scalable? 📈
I get this question a lot. I guess people think I'm a data nerd (and they're not wrong. 🤓)
While of course there's not a one-size-fits-all answer, here are the 4 key metrics that I focus on with my clients as they scale their business…
How many times have we all been told that it pays to be different?
What we weren’t told is just how difficult being different can actually be.
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A Hindu priest and a philosopher dismount their asses and walk into a bar...
At least that's how I'd like to imagine the story starts.
In any case, the two were having a dispute about the path to enlightenment in which the philosopher argued the following...
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