June 23, 2025 • 43 mins
In this illuminating episode, Les McKeown shares how you can navigate the hidden stages within your business’s growth arc to overcome chaos and scale effectively. If you’re struggling to understand why complexity keeps derailing your growth, or if you feel overwhelmed by chaos despite early success, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
- Why small W Whitewater in Fun requires tweaks, not enterprise-wide systems
- How to make sales repeatable in Fun to boost consistency and growth
- What minimal systems in Early Struggle keep you afloat without overwhelm
This episode is ideal for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stages 3,4 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz
Les McKeown, Founder of Predictable Success, has over 25 years of global business experience, including starting 42 companies in his own right. Before founding Predictable Success, Les established himself as a serial founder/owner, starting over 40 companies. He was the founding partner of an incubation consulting company that launched hundreds of businesses with thousands of employees. His expertise is helping organizations achieve scalable, sustainable growth, and his breakthrough strategies have been widely recognized and implemented.
Want to learn more about Les McKeown's work at Predictable Success? Check out his website at https://www.predictablesuccess.com/
To learn more about Scott, visit https://www.scattritzheimer.com.
To get help scaling your own business or nonprofit, visit https://www.scalearchitects.com
Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
races.
Hello, hello and welcome.
Welcome to the Secrets of the High Demand Coach podcast.
And here with us today is, I think in my book, The High Demand Coach of High DemandCoaches.
He is the one and only Les McEwen, a dear friend, a mentor, and the author of the book,Predictable Success.
(00:24):
We're get into that here just a moment.
For those of you, I don't know how this would be true, but if you don't know Les, he is aserial entrepreneur who launched over 40 companies, co-founded one of the world's
first business incubators spanning several continents, and then went on to consult withFortune 500s and a number of the largest government agencies in the world.
As I mentioned, he's also the author of the book, Predictable Success, Getting YourOrganization on the Growth Track and Keeping It There, in which he details the seven
(00:50):
stages every organization goes through and how to navigate them effectively.
Les, I don't know if you know this, but probably about once a week, I introduce you as theMorpheus of the business world.
because your book, Predictable Success, it's like seeing the code of how organizationswork and then you can't unsee it.
(01:12):
So I'm constantly apologizing for folks.
You're just not gonna be able to not see this anymore.
And then about a week later, they invariably call me or text me and like, I see iteverywhere.
Everyone's in white water or something.
So you are the Morpheus.
I guess we're still in search of Neo, but we'll figure that out when we get there.
Well, obviously, you've got to be the Neo in that case.
(01:34):
So you have a big pill decision coming up somewhere along the line.
Red or blue, red or blue.
All right, so today we are going to talk about what I'd like to think of as kind of thehidden chapter of the book for anyone who's read the book.
I guarantee you haven't read it before.
(01:54):
And we're going to get a little fancy over just a moment and unpack the fractal nature ofpredictable success.
It's not one arc, it's many arcs.
And if you've read the book and I've had this experience with folks, they've kind ofstruggled to understand what stage they're in because I feel a little bit of this stage or
I feel a little bit of that stage where we're just starting out.
(02:15):
How are we in whitewater already?
Or, you know, we're way down into it and it feels like there's treadmill and whitewatergoing on.
There's multiple stages.
It's not really, really clear.
And so for folks that are new to predictable success and you want to know how to grow, forthose of you
who have been around predictable success and want to really supercharge your understandingof it and put it to work for you.
(02:38):
It's gonna be fantastic episode.
So I have an admission to make for everyone, unless you know this, but I think this wasour first disagreement, if you could call it that.
For folks, just a funny story.
We do a summit every year for our scale architects, and we do kind of a deep dive on themodel and train them how to use and how to help their clients better.
(02:59):
a great time.
We were going into the very first one of those.
Everyone who's in the program is new to the program because it was the first summit.
every year I asked Les, what do you want to teach on?
And he's like, I want to teach on this topic that we're going to cover here.
And I wouldn't let him.
He kindly obliged.
And even though I was wrong.
(03:19):
And we talked about something else, but we finally got to it in year three and we'regetting to it here today.
And mystery revealed.
What are we talking about?
We're talking about something that we've come to call Small W Whitewater.
And just before we get to what Small W Whitewater is, why it matters and what do do aboutit, Les, I'm wondering if you could just for those who are brand new to it, just the least
(03:42):
we need to know a quick run through of the seven stages, just so we're on the same pagefor what this language means.
Sure.
So the predictable success model is predicated on a reality out there, which is why, youknow, once you know about it, you can't unsee it because it's not like it's some academic
thing that was made up.
All I did was watch what happens and then codify it.
(04:04):
And essentially what happens is every organization goes on an arc.
And I'm doing this arc shape with my hand, for those of you that can't see it.
It's just like tossing a ball up in the air.
goes up, reaches the
Is that the apogee?
I think it is.
And then it falls, excuse me.
And that arc breaks down into seven stages.
(04:25):
So there's three on the left-hand side, which is the growth side going up.
There's a peak stage.
And then there's three stages on the decline on the right-hand side.
On the left-hand side, the first stage is one that's familiar, I think, probably to everysingle person who's listening here.
I call it early struggle.
Some people call it the startup phase.
I hate that because it's become this glorified, beautiful, golden basking startup.
(04:51):
Ooh, it's horrible.
It's an existential threat to your existence.
And the only valid strategy for a startup is to stop being one.
So you're in early struggle.
80 % of all new ventures fail.
So to get to the next stage is a considerable event.
And that's all about finding your market.
And you get to the first real growth stage, which I call fun.
(05:11):
So at early struggle, are we going to make it or not?
We make it, we get into fun.
And, you know, it's fun because it's not early struggle.
We've found a market, we can actually grow.
And it's the phase when the vast majority of our listeners, if you've been in business,that's the stage when, you know, you're having fun and you think this is it, this is why I
did this.
And most of us would like the curtain to come down at that point for that just to staylike that forever.
(05:36):
But what actually happens is because we're in fun and we're enjoying it, we've got amarket, we grow.
And we grew to the point where just the complexity of running this thing begins tooverwhelm us.
We hit a third stage, stage I call Whitewater.
It's the one at the north west of the arc.
It's just, it doesn't feel like this.
(05:58):
It's a dark day before the wonderful, great, apogee top stage, which I call predictablesuccess.
Whitewater feels like you're going to die for a while.
because it's just everything was going so well.
Now, complexity is overwhelming us.
So we've got to do a whole bunch of stuff to either go back to fun, nothing wrong withthat, or master this whitewater thing, get through into predictable success.
(06:23):
And that's all about putting systems and processes in and adhering to it.
If we do the right thing, unlike human life cycle, we can stay there in predictablesuccess for as long as we want.
And it gives us the, unlocks the ability to scale, to really have a J curve.
You can only do that.
success.
Unfortunately, most of us take the same approach I do to dessert.
(06:46):
I really like that.
So give me more.
So we put systems and processes in that really did a good thing, got us the ability toscale.
So, hey, let's be clever, put some more systems and processes in and we begin down thedecline stage.
First of those I call treadmill natural stage for any organization.
We're just a little over processed.
Everything's got a bit meh.
(07:06):
We sort of rinse and repeat.
So
Don't do that.
Lift your foot off the brake pedal, which is really what is happening.
Systems and processes are sort of pushing in the brake pedal.
Just ease up when the systems and processes get back into predictable success.
If you don't, what will happen is you'll slide into a long decline stage.
It's a long, slow slide into a relevance that I call the big rut.
(07:28):
And what's happening there is systems and processes are everything.
They're just taking over everything.
That's all that matters is that we fill in this checklist.
And ultimately you can't get out of the big rut.
There's only one way to get out of a big rut and it's very, very, very painful.
But you will slide into what I call death rattle when it looks like, oh, something'shappening, but all that's happening is you're being put to bed.
(07:52):
So those are the seven stages.
So the vast majority of the work that you and I do are kind of in and or near thatpredictable success stage.
We help folks out of Whitewater.
We help folks get back from treadmill.
And so a lot of the conversations I have are with folks who are are dealing with thisWhitewater stage in particular.
(08:12):
And what I think is really clear for most people is why or why do we hit Whitewater?
Because of the complexity, because we don't have enough system in process.
What I think isn't always super obvious is when, right?
That's what folks want.
Is it like at year five?
Is it when we hit five million?
Is it when profit is five million or 500 customers or 50 people or so?
(08:36):
When do we hit the whitewater stage?
23rd of April, it's called Whitewater.
No, that's just a joke.
We hit the Whitewater stage.
So the early struggle stage, all of this is going to be vast generalization, vastgeneralization.
It's usually two to three years.
You're going to get through it.
You've usually got a year when you think everything's going to be awful.
(08:58):
And then you've got a second year when you think, oh, shoot, I've got to do stuff to findthis market.
Then you find it in your third year.
Fun can be.
any length of time, you can rock it through fun in less than a year and hit white wateralmost immediately.
It just depends on your ability to grow your market.
It's how fast can we get complex?
(09:20):
That's not what you're setting out to do, but that's what's gonna happen.
And sometimes it takes, like I've known organizations that have been in fun for 15, 20years.
So it's impossible to put a calendar date on it.
What you can say is you'll hit white water
You'll only hit whitewater after you've got into fun, right?
You can't hit whitewater from early struggle, right?
(09:40):
Because you're still trying to find your marketplace.
So you get into fun.
How quickly do you get to the percentage market share that means you just can't wake upevery morning, say yes to everything, which is what we do in fun, and then tap dance our
way to success.
And if I was to be ridiculously, ridiculously generalist about it,
(10:03):
sort of around five to seven years in fun is often the sort of feel of it.
But like I say, could be in six months, it could be in 20 years.
Yeah.
And then some folks, you know, because of a lot of what happens in the market will say,like, is it a certain dollar number?
Is it like have you found that there are any metrics that go along with that?
(10:24):
How do you measure maybe even the complexity to know if you're in whitewater?
Big, big, big lagging indicators.
They're not very close proxy.
But if you're in a service business, you're probably starting to feel it when youremployee group is, you know, in the late teens, early twenties.
(10:44):
You know, you got your 18th employee.
I mean, you will have had tough times before then.
But, you know, once you're into double digit employees as a service business,
or let's call it a non-manufacturing organization.
So it could be a faith or cause-based organization.
If you're in manufacturing, you can sort of keep it going to 50, 60 employees, but youknow, they're very broad indicators.
(11:09):
Like I say, it's all about market share because that's what brings the complexity.
Yeah.
So there's some folks listening to that and they're like, 20?
What's like we've got five and the world is on fire.
And you kind of mentioned that there are tough times.
So we know that early struggle is a tough time.
Are there tough times in the fun stage?
(11:30):
What does?
Yeah.
So do you want me to do you want me to reveal the elephant in the room?
The thing that that you didn't want me to talk about before at the summit and which Iactually I remember getting putting my behind on a on a stool that you provided and tried
to get into it and you quite rightly pulled the auto.
For reasons that will become clear.
(11:52):
So there are you said there's a know, a missing chapter in the book.
are actually two
two missing chapters.
One of them I just want to talk about, dispose of it, and then come back to answering whatwe're talking about here.
So, success is all about that arc that we just talked about.
Here's what I couldn't have put in the book because nobody would have read it.
It'd been too big, too complicated.
(12:13):
One is that if you were to draw, and I'm drawing this arc with my left hand, of yourorganization, whether it's five people, 50 people, 500 people, 50,000 people, that's your
That's your world, but it's only part of it.
Above your organization, there's the arc of your industry.
(12:34):
Your industry is somewhere in this whole thing.
And where it is, is like a big gravitational pull.
There's then the geographical area.
I the market for product X is very different in South America than it is in Asia.
We're in different stages.
So you've got these sort of
overarching umbrella versions of the life cycle that have massive gravitational pulls.
(12:59):
It's like the pull of a moon on the tides.
It really does impact your business.
And listeners, have to forgive me.
I'm just coming off the back of a head cold, so I'm going to be spluttering a little bit.
But the bit that we're here to talk about today is that if you were to drive deeperinside, you know, we've looked at the outside, now look at the inside.
Not only is every project, group, team, marketing channel all going through their ownversion of the life cycle, which you can come back and talk about if you want to in a
(13:31):
moment or two, but for the purpose of what we're talking about now, each of the sevenindividual stages has a version, or can have a version of all seven of the overarching
stages.
To give you an example, you can be in fun and you have an early struggle period of funwhen yes, we're in fun.
(13:56):
We're not in early struggle anymore, capital E, capital S, but we're in the first littlestage of fun and it's an early struggle just to really make sure that we get it and we
grab hold of it.
You then have wonderful fun, fun.
That's like mid fun.
That's fun squared.
And that's, know, we're fist bumping the whole time, having beer, busts, all that sort ofstuff.
(14:18):
But in fun, you can have a little mini white water.
We call it small W white water.
And you can have them multiple times.
You can cycle through quite a few times.
You're going all the way up the fun arc.
It's not that you're not going up, but you're doing it in these little spiral turns whereyou have, that's a little, we've added a new product line.
(14:42):
We're still in fun, but that's an early struggle.
That's sort of giving us these early struggle vibes.
And then some or all of the business can have a little need to bring some systems andprocesses in because two people got sick drinking our mineral or our product, right?
That's not full-blown white water.
(15:02):
It's not capital W white water.
It's small w white water.
And the same can happen in any of the stages.
The key thing is this.
And I came back from Chicago.
I was working with a large church group out there.
We had to get into this in detail because they were very clearly not in Big Whitewater,but it felt like it.
(15:27):
And the reason is that they were in another one of the stages going through that stage'sown mini W.
And of course, you want to know, well, which is it?
And it's very important.
Big Water, Big Whitewater, capital W, always
brings an existential threat to the existence of the organization.
(15:50):
It feels like, it could kill you.
You don't get it right.
You're going to get strangled and or overtaken by your competitors.
You don't get it right.
You're going to lose what you've built.
Whereas Small W Whitewater doesn't have that threat.
It may still be painful.
You may still have your hair on fire, but it's just one of the bumps on the road.
(16:13):
And that's why people can quite rightly and understandably get confused.
Yeah, one of the ways that I'll describe this for folks, because it's really, important,and it can be a little hard to grab hold of sometimes is to look at what it looks like in
early struggle.
Because for many of the folks we're working with, they're beyond this point.
So you can kind of look back at it in the rear view mirror and a common illustration I'lluse is like a tech company.
(16:37):
You see this all the time on the West Coast here in the US.
They're in early struggle.
They've got an idea.
You know, they go out and they pitch it and somebody believes in them, right?
And they get enough to get some money in the door.
And once one person believes in you, it's a whole lot easier for the next person tobelieve in you.
Don't even have a product necessarily at this market, right?
(17:00):
We're just, you know, just raising funds.
And so definitely not out of early struggle, but we have some money to work with.
It's a lot of.
hire some engineers, get things rolling, realize engineers are a pain in the butt.
And so now you need systems and processes to deal with all of the different people whorunning in different directions and keeping the code sorted and all of that.
It's just messy.
So we solve for that.
(17:22):
We get the team all moving in the right direction.
We're programming away and this kind of golden era of the startup happens, right?
Where we've kind of mystified the startup stage.
And it's small P predictable success in early struggle still haven't sold anything, youknow, and so we're still not out of early struggle, but we have what feels like it.
We're kind of playing adult at that stage and we haven't really grown up yet.
(17:45):
You find out you don't have market fit.
It's not as easy as you thought.
And you're just like, well, we've made a bunch of promises we got to pull through.
So now we're in treadmill because we're just trying to rinse and repeat to get the thingout the door.
And you do that long enough, you commit long enough, it starts to get harder and harder toraise funds.
You have to you have to double down even more just to try and get the thing out and makeit to the next day.
(18:08):
You're in the big rut.
And then that leads to the inevitable decline into death rattle.
All that happened before you ever really found your profitable, sustainable market, allseven stages in one.
And it's a really, really profound principle.
So for someone then who's sitting there thinking,
man, maybe I'm wrestling with a small W Whitewater.
(18:33):
What do you do with that?
Like, what is it that that tells us, how do we take that and turn it into action that canhelp us get out?
I think the key thing is to bear in mind if it's a small W of whitewater, you've only gotto solve for the stage that you're in, right?
The mistake is, and I'll take it on my shoulders if that's helpful for folks, is that youread Predictable Success or somebody tells you about it, or you just mentally work this
(19:06):
out for yourself.
what needs to happen with capital W Whitewater, which is enterprise wide systems andprocesses.
think, okay, well, let's do that.
That is not the answer, right?
The answer is just to solve for whatever the process, whatever the...
Whitewater is always caused by chaos.
(19:28):
It's always caused, and chaos is always caused by complexity overwhelming us.
And whether or not it's the complexity of now in...
early struggle having, you know, nine offers for some funding that would help.
And all of the stuff that comes with that, there's all these documents to read, there'sall this due diligence being done, all that sort of Solve for that.
(19:53):
Do not try to bring a big W solution.
So in Whitewater in fun, that means narrowing down, probably not bringing in.
an internal source and investing in an internal solution.
probably means getting hiring a small P, whoever the person is like you're in fun.
(20:14):
I just going to make something up here.
And you discover, you know, you just go, don't people don't discover they haven't donetheir taxes for five years.
You admit to yourself, finally, I haven't done my taxes for five years.
And, you know, everything's coming in on you.
You know, the IRS have got your number, you know, other tax.
raising organizations are available.
(20:37):
And you're just getting overwhelmed.
You don't want a CFO.
You want to find a good local CPA, pay them, get that fixed, right?
The one difference I would make is if it's a health and safety issue, therefore it's to dowith your core business, the thing you're doing, you may well bring in an internal
(20:59):
solution to that.
But nine times out of 10, you solve for the
problem in the stage that you're at.
Right.
And I'll give an example, which may not be one that our listeners immediately relate to,but it's a it's a I think it helps bring out the distinction.
You can hit whitewater and treadmills.
The weirdest, weirdest thing that makes it really makes your head spin.
(21:23):
Here we are in treadmill means we're over processed.
So we've got to get to the back to the point where we've lifted process.
Right.
But then we do that and we swing back into treadmill again.
So we cut off a few things, we go back into it.
At some point you realize in treadmill, I gotta put up, we're in whitewater with thisthing, I gotta put a process in place for culling process.
(21:51):
Most healthy organizations have got a really good process for culling redundant process.
They figured that out in Treadmill Small W Whitewater.
That's the only time it occurs to you, because until then you think this is a one-timething, two-time thing.
shit.
We've got to systematize desystemization.
(22:12):
Yeah, yeah, it's so good.
So small w whitewater then in the early struggle phase is really just what are the minimumsystems and processes you need to find a profitable, sustainable market.
If it doesn't drive you to selling more to people who are willing to pay enough for you tomake a profit on it, it's probably not a process you need unless it keeps you out of jail
or health and safety, right?
(22:33):
So
I'll give you the single most common one which nobody likes to talk about.
And it's sitting down once a week and spending whatever time it is, it shouldn't be muchmore than 30 minutes, just staring down your cash flow.
You have to look at it.
You can't just hope.
(22:54):
I mean, I don't do a lot of work in early struggle these days because I spent the firstthird of my career doing nothing else.
I'm very familiar with it.
Started over 40 businesses myself.
I know it sounds mathematically impossible, but I did.
And one of the things that I learned is you can't, excuse me, just hope against hope thatall the stuff you're carrying around in your head will net out being able to pay payroll
(23:19):
next week.
You've got to actually learn how to look at a simple Excel spreadsheet, tiny, tiny thing.
Doesn't need to be complicated.
And you've got to have a process that says,
whatever works for you, Friday morning, 9 a.m.
to 9.30, I'm staring at and working with my cash flow.
That's a system, but it's the minimal system that's gonna keep you afloat.
(23:41):
Yeah.
Yeah.
So early struggle, minimal systems for cash flow.
I love that one.
Hate that one.
It's not fun to do, but it's very important to do.
And not to kill it to death, but the last thing you need to do at that point is to buyQuickBooks and become a QuickBooks expert, right?
That's big whitewater stuff.
(24:03):
That's actually fun whitewater stuff, it's, you know, the minimum amount you need to do.
example of that, that I see a ton of people wrestling with is CRMs, right?
everyone has to have a CRM.
It's like, you just sit there and click all day, every day.
Well, tell me how many leads you had come in last week.
I have no idea.
So yes, the simplest solution possible, the simplest system in process and keeping thatruthless focus.
(24:29):
Super helpful for some folks.
Let's fast forward, small w, white water, and fun.
What's going on here?
It's usually about making the sales activity something that's much more repeatable.
So what tends to happen is we get to mid-fun, the fun part of fun, because of the work ofwhat we call in our world, big dog operators.
(24:58):
So these are salespeople who are really good salespeople.
They don't give too much of a hoot about anything else.
They just, live for the hunt and they're good at it.
You get to the point, however, where you start to leave, I was going to say money on thetable, but that sounds like you brought this thing out.
(25:18):
You leave leads out there unexplored.
You leave conversions uncompleted because all of what's happening is unsystematized.
It's just who texts your big dog?
that first thing that morning, they get the attention, right?
Who's ready to just push over the edge?
The other folks that could be pushed over the edge aren't getting the attention.
(25:42):
So it's here that we are beginning to think, you know, we could actually get more out ofour CRM.
You know, I'm going to give some examples that are clearly particularly focused towards aparticular type of industry, but it's still only to give an example.
You might for the first time start to think about inside sales.
(26:03):
know, maybe you never did inside sales before.
Everybody was riding the range.
Now you're thinking, you know, we could warm a bunch of people up.
Right.
Stuff like that.
So it's not enterprise wide.
Everybody's going to get in on this.
It's very specific.
And if you're in a, in a faith or cause based world, it's, it's the same proxy thing,which is whatever you're doing.
(26:29):
to end up paying the bills at the end of the day is the first thing that lends itself tohaving a small W of whitewater impact on you.
Because it's the thing you've got to get right.
It's hard to change the world if you can't pay the bills.
There's something that's so easy to gloss over because it's such a non-phrase, butrepeatable sales.
(26:49):
Like that's the name of the game.
And there's all kinds of things that are kind of fighting against that.
There's the roller coaster that a lot of, especially when it's like founder led salesteam, it's just like, you have a, it's just up and down, up and down.
It's agonizing because it's largely just based on your personality.
It's largely based on, you know, your whims and when you're interested and when you're notinterested.
(27:11):
So,
Making that repeatable and then looking further downfield and saying hey, it's not justabout bringing in new folks But how do we keep them longer?
What do we how do we serve them longer and and that repeatable nature so important theother thing that fights against that is We like to say yes to everything But when you say
yes to everything new that's inherently not repeatable, right?
(27:35):
They're all different things.
And so you find these folks who said yes to like a thousand things I heard my
My favorite metaphor for this was it's like drunk kids on jet skis.
It's wide open in every direction.
It's probably not the safest, but it's a lot of fun.
so this idea of repeatable is not just internal, but it's also external.
(27:59):
Talk to us a little bit about like, what are we saying yes to?
What are we saying no to with Small W Whitewater?
Well, in early fun, it's really important to say yes to everything for one simple reason.
Early struggle indeed, all of the difficult stages in the life cycle, I mean, there's fourof them, but early struggle in particular has this massive gravitational pull.
(28:24):
It's trying to suck you back in, doesn't let go too easily.
those of us, know Scott, you've been in this position as well.
But those of us who have done startup more than once, realize that you can actually getstuck in this sort of limbo land where you think you're getting out of fun, out of early
struggle, and you probably are and you're in fun for like a month or a quarter and thenyou, my goodness, I'm back here again.
(28:49):
And so saying yes to everything, part of what you're doing there is you're just gettingenough traction, enough momentum to really push you out of the gravitational field.
The problem comes later whenever, as you say, continuing to say yes all the time.
It's just like watching a beaver's build those little bridges across the stuff.
(29:09):
It's just all this stuff's being thrown down, thrown down, thrown down, thrown down.
And it's beginning to mat over our ability to deliver.
you pointed out one of the things, which is you just build that sign up that you have asense that I have to keep saying yes to everything.
Well, there comes a point when you don't and actually you need to start to say no.
(29:31):
However, I actually quite like, I find it quite interesting watching how the team that'sin fun responds to what needs to happen in small W, Whitewater, because what are we doing
in essence?
We're taking, we're plucking out of an individual.
(29:52):
something that they're doing that's giving them something.
They're making the diving catch.
They're pulling in that client or whatever.
And when you take, you you begin to peel any part of that away and say, hey, we could getan, you know, a person on inside sales making calls that would tee you up for this or
could close, you know, you've left it all with them.
(30:14):
You don't have, we shouldn't be waiting on you to make the, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I've built this relationship with these people.
They don't want to hear another, all that sort of stuff.
You get a foreshadowing of whether or not this entity as a whole, may only be threepeople, 15 people, are they going to make the transition to predictable success?
(30:36):
And should they even be thinking about it?
Because let's be honest, a lot of us are built for fun.
We want the personal identity connection that comes with
being the one that makes the diving catch, being the somebody who pulls all-nighters.
We want to continue to be part of the myths and legends of this business.
(31:00):
So it doesn't always go well, but that can tell you something in and of itself.
So just to offer some contrast then, because and you go into great detail on this with thebook, so folks can go check out the book.
I used the one chapter in the book to triple our bottom line.
really, really works before becoming a skilled architect.
So it's there.
(31:20):
But contrast what we've talked about so far with these small W.
Whitewaters with what you have to do to conquer capital W.
Whitewaters.
Well, bringing this stuff in to overcome, and we'll stick with the fun example since howwe went into so much detail there.
(31:41):
What you're doing there is essentially making little incremental tweaks that make whatwe're currently doing better if you do it right.
So we can still show up and say yes to quite a lot of stuff.
And every day,
brings new challenges and a lot of difference.
(32:03):
And we're still perceived as not just high status people in our business, but like subjectmatter experts.
We know more than everybody else about everything.
And we're still the center of making it all happen.
The solution in Big W Whitewater is
(32:25):
to change the organization.
If what you want to do is go through Whitewater, right?
So you might hit this and say, for old me listeners, screw this, I can't stand this.
I'm just going back to where we were before.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But I'm talking about those founders, leadership teams who hit Whitewater, big WWhitewater, and say, I'd like to get to the other side of that.
(32:47):
There is a change, and I'm pointing to my temples.
There's a change in the mindset.
Yeah.
a fundamental change in mindset that moves from I'm the business, the business is me, it'sall about me to it's all about the business.
What is my role as a steward of making this as big a business as it can be, big anorganization as it can be, rather than what is it going to continue to do to feed my ego?
(33:16):
And that's a very difficult.
you're talking about
Bringing in system-wide systems and processes the majority let's be honest You and I knowthis very well the majority of founders as an example who are typically still around at
this point Their mindset is we really need this and I'm completely in support of it Justnot whatever percentage involves me doing it right, right?
(33:40):
Because I don't a I don't want to change and be That sort of changes how other people seeme
If I'm adhering to all of these systems, I'm the big kahuna here.
I'm the magic secret sauce, right?
That's the key difference.
You can still be the big kahuna with the magic secret sauce overcoming small w in fun.
(34:01):
All you're doing is actually tweaking the environment.
You do it right to allow you to do the bits of being the big kahuna with the secret saucethat you like, not getting sucked into the bits that you don't Getting through whitewater,
and I'll finish this roundabout with this.
Many of your listeners I know by self-filtering, they listen to these things, they readbooks.
(34:26):
So they'll be familiar with Jim Collins' great books, particularly Good to Great and Builtto Last.
And he talks about having the right people in the right seats on the bus.
And I like to think of the bus coming up fun and you're putting the right people in theright seats and you've got it all sussed.
You've got this beautiful bus with great people in great seats.
(34:49):
You go into white water, it's like that bus goes into a tunnel.
What comes out the other end in predictable success?
It's not only not the same bus, it's not a bus anymore.
It's a whole different thing.
It's like some sort of a drone.
And that requires everybody at the core of leadership, everybody in the organization, butmostly the senior leaders to change their mindset away from what's this doing for me to
(35:16):
what do I do for this?
it's so good.
So good.
Incredible.
Les, you've been on the show a couple of times.
You know what's coming next.
We've got a question we ask everyone.
And that is this.
What would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn't a secret at all?
What's that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening to they knew?
(35:36):
Well, you you've asked me, I think this is the third time that you've asked me this.
And I, so I'm down to number three in my list, but it's still a very important issue.
And I think the answer that I would give you about this at any time is always going to mapdirectly into my own life, right?
(36:00):
So for the moment, the thing that I've been sitting with is most of us, and I would say 90% of our listeners are by definition great leaders.
They wouldn't be investing the time to listen to us rambling on here.
if they didn't have an interest in being really good leaders.
(36:22):
And for 90 % of them, the reason that they may not achieve or be achieving what they feelthey are is through a simple hygiene factor.
They're just not in charge of their environment enough.
I see it over and over again.
A great young leader whose phone is just constantly blowing up.
(36:44):
They have to...
duck out of every meeting just to take this one call.
They can't engage eyeball to eyeball because they're constantly looking down at something.
So kill your environment, make it work for you.
You don't have to become inbox zero guru.
You don't have to be a productivity black belt.
(37:06):
You just need to be able to focus on something without being inundated.
by stuff that's outside your control.
So just control your environment and you'll be a much, much better leader.
That's so good.
It's interesting that you say that because one of the most common suggestions I've givento leaders over the past six months is to find a third place.
(37:27):
know, pre-COVID, you could kind of go home and work there and create a little bit ofspace.
Well, now home and work are kind of synonymous.
The office and work are synonymous.
And all that space has been taken up.
I think to some extent, it's harder than ever because we're so connected.
But having a physical space to queue
that difference in environment, even if it's a couple of times a week or a couple of timesa month, is a fantastic habit to get into.
(37:53):
And it's like one of those keystone habits that bleeds into the rest of your time, right?
If you can be unavailable for two hours because you're somewhere else, it's not that hardto imagine being unavailable even if you're at your office.
And it just starts to break down that cycle.
And I love that environment piece because it is so easy to overlook.
Less, yeah.
for anybody that doesn't think that it's important, I give you one challenge.
(38:16):
I'm sorry to speak of you.
And my challenge is this, and I give it to everybody.
Look at your calendar literally as soon as we hang up here.
Look at your calendar, identify one meeting in the next week that's longer than 15minutes, a physical meeting, and go to it without your phone physically in your presence.
(38:37):
Just try it out and you will discover.
just how much you're addicted to being interrupted.
Mm, wow, wow.
Folks wanna know more about Predictable Success, maybe even get a copy of the book.
Where can they get a copy of the book and find more out about you?
Just come to Predictable Success to find out all about me.
Go to Predictable Success, free-book, and you can get a copy of the book.
(39:00):
Just pay shipping, 8.95 or something like that.
we're literally, we're seeing hundreds of copies of the book go out every week, absolutelyfree to people.
They just pay the shipping, and I would love for any listener who wants it to get it.
So that's predictablesuccess.com forward slash free-.
That's fantastic.
Get a copy, links in the show notes.
(39:23):
For anyone who wants a little bit of extra help, you're also welcome to check out ourscale architects.
We've got a whole directory of folks who do this day in and day out and would be happy tohelp you figure out if you're in small w whitewater, capital w whitewater and build a plan
to get through it and enjoy fun, enjoy predictable success, enjoy leading the organizationthat you've built.
(39:44):
So it's a lot better than getting stuck in any kind of whitewater.
Well, I could go on forever.
I love our conversations.
Just an honor and privilege to have you here on the show.
Appreciate everything that you've done for me, for the show, for the scale architects ingeneral.
It just means the world to me.
Thank you very much.
And for those of you watching and listening today, you know your time and attention meanthe world to us.
(40:09):
I hope you got as much out of this show as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you nexttime.
Take care.
races.
Hello, hello and welcome.
Welcome to the Secrets of the High Demand Coach podcast.
And here with us today is, I think in my book, The High Demand Coach of High DemandCoaches.
He is the one and only Les McEwen, a dear friend, a mentor, and the author of the book,Predictable Success.
(00:24):
We're get into that here just a moment.
For those of you, I don't know how this would be true, but if you don't know Les, he is aserial entrepreneur who launched over 40 companies, co-founded one of the world's
first business incubators spanning several continents, and then went on to consult withFortune 500s and a number of the largest government agencies in the world.
As I mentioned, he's also the author of the book, Predictable Success, Getting YourOrganization on the Growth Track and Keeping It There, in which he details the seven
(00:50):
stages every organization goes through and how to navigate them effectively.
Les, I don't know if you know this, but probably about once a week, I introduce you as theMorpheus of the business world.
because your book, Predictable Success, it's like seeing the code of how organizationswork and then you can't unsee it.
(01:12):
So I'm constantly apologizing for folks.
You're just not gonna be able to not see this anymore.
And then about a week later, they invariably call me or text me and like, I see iteverywhere.
Everyone's in white water or something.
So you are the Morpheus.
I guess we're still in search of Neo, but we'll figure that out when we get there.
Well, obviously, you've got to be the Neo in that case.
(01:34):
So you have a big pill decision coming up somewhere along the line.
Red or blue, red or blue.
All right, so today we are going to talk about what I'd like to think of as kind of thehidden chapter of the book for anyone who's read the book.
I guarantee you haven't read it before.
(01:54):
And we're going to get a little fancy over just a moment and unpack the fractal nature ofpredictable success.
It's not one arc, it's many arcs.
And if you've read the book and I've had this experience with folks, they've kind ofstruggled to understand what stage they're in because I feel a little bit of this stage or
I feel a little bit of that stage where we're just starting out.
(02:15):
How are we in whitewater already?
Or, you know, we're way down into it and it feels like there's treadmill and whitewatergoing on.
There's multiple stages.
It's not really, really clear.
And so for folks that are new to predictable success and you want to know how to grow, forthose of you
who have been around predictable success and want to really supercharge your understandingof it and put it to work for you.
(02:38):
It's gonna be fantastic episode.
So I have an admission to make for everyone, unless you know this, but I think this wasour first disagreement, if you could call it that.
For folks, just a funny story.
We do a summit every year for our scale architects, and we do kind of a deep dive on themodel and train them how to use and how to help their clients better.
(02:59):
a great time.
We were going into the very first one of those.
Everyone who's in the program is new to the program because it was the first summit.
every year I asked Les, what do you want to teach on?
And he's like, I want to teach on this topic that we're going to cover here.
And I wouldn't let him.
He kindly obliged.
And even though I was wrong.
(03:19):
And we talked about something else, but we finally got to it in year three and we'regetting to it here today.
And mystery revealed.
What are we talking about?
We're talking about something that we've come to call Small W Whitewater.
And just before we get to what Small W Whitewater is, why it matters and what do do aboutit, Les, I'm wondering if you could just for those who are brand new to it, just the least
(03:42):
we need to know a quick run through of the seven stages, just so we're on the same pagefor what this language means.
Sure.
So the predictable success model is predicated on a reality out there, which is why, youknow, once you know about it, you can't unsee it because it's not like it's some academic
thing that was made up.
All I did was watch what happens and then codify it.
(04:04):
And essentially what happens is every organization goes on an arc.
And I'm doing this arc shape with my hand, for those of you that can't see it.
It's just like tossing a ball up in the air.
goes up, reaches the
Is that the apogee?
I think it is.
And then it falls, excuse me.
And that arc breaks down into seven stages.
(04:25):
So there's three on the left-hand side, which is the growth side going up.
There's a peak stage.
And then there's three stages on the decline on the right-hand side.
On the left-hand side, the first stage is one that's familiar, I think, probably to everysingle person who's listening here.
I call it early struggle.
Some people call it the startup phase.
I hate that because it's become this glorified, beautiful, golden basking startup.
(04:51):
Ooh, it's horrible.
It's an existential threat to your existence.
And the only valid strategy for a startup is to stop being one.
So you're in early struggle.
80 % of all new ventures fail.
So to get to the next stage is a considerable event.
And that's all about finding your market.
And you get to the first real growth stage, which I call fun.
(05:11):
So at early struggle, are we going to make it or not?
We make it, we get into fun.
And, you know, it's fun because it's not early struggle.
We've found a market, we can actually grow.
And it's the phase when the vast majority of our listeners, if you've been in business,that's the stage when, you know, you're having fun and you think this is it, this is why I
did this.
And most of us would like the curtain to come down at that point for that just to staylike that forever.
(05:36):
But what actually happens is because we're in fun and we're enjoying it, we've got amarket, we grow.
And we grew to the point where just the complexity of running this thing begins tooverwhelm us.
We hit a third stage, stage I call Whitewater.
It's the one at the north west of the arc.
It's just, it doesn't feel like this.
(05:58):
It's a dark day before the wonderful, great, apogee top stage, which I call predictablesuccess.
Whitewater feels like you're going to die for a while.
because it's just everything was going so well.
Now, complexity is overwhelming us.
So we've got to do a whole bunch of stuff to either go back to fun, nothing wrong withthat, or master this whitewater thing, get through into predictable success.
(06:23):
And that's all about putting systems and processes in and adhering to it.
If we do the right thing, unlike human life cycle, we can stay there in predictablesuccess for as long as we want.
And it gives us the, unlocks the ability to scale, to really have a J curve.
You can only do that.
success.
Unfortunately, most of us take the same approach I do to dessert.
(06:46):
I really like that.
So give me more.
So we put systems and processes in that really did a good thing, got us the ability toscale.
So, hey, let's be clever, put some more systems and processes in and we begin down thedecline stage.
First of those I call treadmill natural stage for any organization.
We're just a little over processed.
Everything's got a bit meh.
(07:06):
We sort of rinse and repeat.
So
Don't do that.
Lift your foot off the brake pedal, which is really what is happening.
Systems and processes are sort of pushing in the brake pedal.
Just ease up when the systems and processes get back into predictable success.
If you don't, what will happen is you'll slide into a long decline stage.
It's a long, slow slide into a relevance that I call the big rut.
(07:28):
And what's happening there is systems and processes are everything.
They're just taking over everything.
That's all that matters is that we fill in this checklist.
And ultimately you can't get out of the big rut.
There's only one way to get out of a big rut and it's very, very, very painful.
But you will slide into what I call death rattle when it looks like, oh, something'shappening, but all that's happening is you're being put to bed.
(07:52):
So those are the seven stages.
So the vast majority of the work that you and I do are kind of in and or near thatpredictable success stage.
We help folks out of Whitewater.
We help folks get back from treadmill.
And so a lot of the conversations I have are with folks who are are dealing with thisWhitewater stage in particular.
(08:12):
And what I think is really clear for most people is why or why do we hit Whitewater?
Because of the complexity, because we don't have enough system in process.
What I think isn't always super obvious is when, right?
That's what folks want.
Is it like at year five?
Is it when we hit five million?
Is it when profit is five million or 500 customers or 50 people or so?
(08:36):
When do we hit the whitewater stage?
23rd of April, it's called Whitewater.
No, that's just a joke.
We hit the Whitewater stage.
So the early struggle stage, all of this is going to be vast generalization, vastgeneralization.
It's usually two to three years.
You're going to get through it.
You've usually got a year when you think everything's going to be awful.
(08:58):
And then you've got a second year when you think, oh, shoot, I've got to do stuff to findthis market.
Then you find it in your third year.
Fun can be.
any length of time, you can rock it through fun in less than a year and hit white wateralmost immediately.
It just depends on your ability to grow your market.
It's how fast can we get complex?
(09:20):
That's not what you're setting out to do, but that's what's gonna happen.
And sometimes it takes, like I've known organizations that have been in fun for 15, 20years.
So it's impossible to put a calendar date on it.
What you can say is you'll hit white water
You'll only hit whitewater after you've got into fun, right?
You can't hit whitewater from early struggle, right?
(09:40):
Because you're still trying to find your marketplace.
So you get into fun.
How quickly do you get to the percentage market share that means you just can't wake upevery morning, say yes to everything, which is what we do in fun, and then tap dance our
way to success.
And if I was to be ridiculously, ridiculously generalist about it,
(10:03):
sort of around five to seven years in fun is often the sort of feel of it.
But like I say, could be in six months, it could be in 20 years.
Yeah.
And then some folks, you know, because of a lot of what happens in the market will say,like, is it a certain dollar number?
Is it like have you found that there are any metrics that go along with that?
(10:24):
How do you measure maybe even the complexity to know if you're in whitewater?
Big, big, big lagging indicators.
They're not very close proxy.
But if you're in a service business, you're probably starting to feel it when youremployee group is, you know, in the late teens, early twenties.
(10:44):
You know, you got your 18th employee.
I mean, you will have had tough times before then.
But, you know, once you're into double digit employees as a service business,
or let's call it a non-manufacturing organization.
So it could be a faith or cause-based organization.
If you're in manufacturing, you can sort of keep it going to 50, 60 employees, but youknow, they're very broad indicators.
(11:09):
Like I say, it's all about market share because that's what brings the complexity.
Yeah.
So there's some folks listening to that and they're like, 20?
What's like we've got five and the world is on fire.
And you kind of mentioned that there are tough times.
So we know that early struggle is a tough time.
Are there tough times in the fun stage?
(11:30):
What does?
Yeah.
So do you want me to do you want me to reveal the elephant in the room?
The thing that that you didn't want me to talk about before at the summit and which Iactually I remember getting putting my behind on a on a stool that you provided and tried
to get into it and you quite rightly pulled the auto.
For reasons that will become clear.
(11:52):
So there are you said there's a know, a missing chapter in the book.
are actually two
two missing chapters.
One of them I just want to talk about, dispose of it, and then come back to answering whatwe're talking about here.
So, success is all about that arc that we just talked about.
Here's what I couldn't have put in the book because nobody would have read it.
It'd been too big, too complicated.
(12:13):
One is that if you were to draw, and I'm drawing this arc with my left hand, of yourorganization, whether it's five people, 50 people, 500 people, 50,000 people, that's your
That's your world, but it's only part of it.
Above your organization, there's the arc of your industry.
(12:34):
Your industry is somewhere in this whole thing.
And where it is, is like a big gravitational pull.
There's then the geographical area.
I the market for product X is very different in South America than it is in Asia.
We're in different stages.
So you've got these sort of
overarching umbrella versions of the life cycle that have massive gravitational pulls.
(12:59):
It's like the pull of a moon on the tides.
It really does impact your business.
And listeners, have to forgive me.
I'm just coming off the back of a head cold, so I'm going to be spluttering a little bit.
But the bit that we're here to talk about today is that if you were to drive deeperinside, you know, we've looked at the outside, now look at the inside.
Not only is every project, group, team, marketing channel all going through their ownversion of the life cycle, which you can come back and talk about if you want to in a
(13:31):
moment or two, but for the purpose of what we're talking about now, each of the sevenindividual stages has a version, or can have a version of all seven of the overarching
stages.
To give you an example, you can be in fun and you have an early struggle period of funwhen yes, we're in fun.
(13:56):
We're not in early struggle anymore, capital E, capital S, but we're in the first littlestage of fun and it's an early struggle just to really make sure that we get it and we
grab hold of it.
You then have wonderful fun, fun.
That's like mid fun.
That's fun squared.
And that's, know, we're fist bumping the whole time, having beer, busts, all that sort ofstuff.
(14:18):
But in fun, you can have a little mini white water.
We call it small W white water.
And you can have them multiple times.
You can cycle through quite a few times.
You're going all the way up the fun arc.
It's not that you're not going up, but you're doing it in these little spiral turns whereyou have, that's a little, we've added a new product line.
(14:42):
We're still in fun, but that's an early struggle.
That's sort of giving us these early struggle vibes.
And then some or all of the business can have a little need to bring some systems andprocesses in because two people got sick drinking our mineral or our product, right?
That's not full-blown white water.
(15:02):
It's not capital W white water.
It's small w white water.
And the same can happen in any of the stages.
The key thing is this.
And I came back from Chicago.
I was working with a large church group out there.
We had to get into this in detail because they were very clearly not in Big Whitewater,but it felt like it.
(15:27):
And the reason is that they were in another one of the stages going through that stage'sown mini W.
And of course, you want to know, well, which is it?
And it's very important.
Big Water, Big Whitewater, capital W, always
brings an existential threat to the existence of the organization.
(15:50):
It feels like, it could kill you.
You don't get it right.
You're going to get strangled and or overtaken by your competitors.
You don't get it right.
You're going to lose what you've built.
Whereas Small W Whitewater doesn't have that threat.
It may still be painful.
You may still have your hair on fire, but it's just one of the bumps on the road.
(16:13):
And that's why people can quite rightly and understandably get confused.
Yeah, one of the ways that I'll describe this for folks, because it's really, important,and it can be a little hard to grab hold of sometimes is to look at what it looks like in
early struggle.
Because for many of the folks we're working with, they're beyond this point.
So you can kind of look back at it in the rear view mirror and a common illustration I'lluse is like a tech company.
(16:37):
You see this all the time on the West Coast here in the US.
They're in early struggle.
They've got an idea.
You know, they go out and they pitch it and somebody believes in them, right?
And they get enough to get some money in the door.
And once one person believes in you, it's a whole lot easier for the next person tobelieve in you.
Don't even have a product necessarily at this market, right?
(17:00):
We're just, you know, just raising funds.
And so definitely not out of early struggle, but we have some money to work with.
It's a lot of.
hire some engineers, get things rolling, realize engineers are a pain in the butt.
And so now you need systems and processes to deal with all of the different people whorunning in different directions and keeping the code sorted and all of that.
It's just messy.
So we solve for that.
(17:22):
We get the team all moving in the right direction.
We're programming away and this kind of golden era of the startup happens, right?
Where we've kind of mystified the startup stage.
And it's small P predictable success in early struggle still haven't sold anything, youknow, and so we're still not out of early struggle, but we have what feels like it.
We're kind of playing adult at that stage and we haven't really grown up yet.
(17:45):
You find out you don't have market fit.
It's not as easy as you thought.
And you're just like, well, we've made a bunch of promises we got to pull through.
So now we're in treadmill because we're just trying to rinse and repeat to get the thingout the door.
And you do that long enough, you commit long enough, it starts to get harder and harder toraise funds.
You have to you have to double down even more just to try and get the thing out and makeit to the next day.
(18:08):
You're in the big rut.
And then that leads to the inevitable decline into death rattle.
All that happened before you ever really found your profitable, sustainable market, allseven stages in one.
And it's a really, really profound principle.
So for someone then who's sitting there thinking,
man, maybe I'm wrestling with a small W Whitewater.
(18:33):
What do you do with that?
Like, what is it that that tells us, how do we take that and turn it into action that canhelp us get out?
I think the key thing is to bear in mind if it's a small W of whitewater, you've only gotto solve for the stage that you're in, right?
The mistake is, and I'll take it on my shoulders if that's helpful for folks, is that youread Predictable Success or somebody tells you about it, or you just mentally work this
(19:06):
out for yourself.
what needs to happen with capital W Whitewater, which is enterprise wide systems andprocesses.
think, okay, well, let's do that.
That is not the answer, right?
The answer is just to solve for whatever the process, whatever the...
Whitewater is always caused by chaos.
(19:28):
It's always caused, and chaos is always caused by complexity overwhelming us.
And whether or not it's the complexity of now in...
early struggle having, you know, nine offers for some funding that would help.
And all of the stuff that comes with that, there's all these documents to read, there'sall this due diligence being done, all that sort of Solve for that.
(19:53):
Do not try to bring a big W solution.
So in Whitewater in fun, that means narrowing down, probably not bringing in.
an internal source and investing in an internal solution.
probably means getting hiring a small P, whoever the person is like you're in fun.
(20:14):
I just going to make something up here.
And you discover, you know, you just go, don't people don't discover they haven't donetheir taxes for five years.
You admit to yourself, finally, I haven't done my taxes for five years.
And, you know, everything's coming in on you.
You know, the IRS have got your number, you know, other tax.
raising organizations are available.
(20:37):
And you're just getting overwhelmed.
You don't want a CFO.
You want to find a good local CPA, pay them, get that fixed, right?
The one difference I would make is if it's a health and safety issue, therefore it's to dowith your core business, the thing you're doing, you may well bring in an internal
(20:59):
solution to that.
But nine times out of 10, you solve for the
problem in the stage that you're at.
Right.
And I'll give an example, which may not be one that our listeners immediately relate to,but it's a it's a I think it helps bring out the distinction.
You can hit whitewater and treadmills.
The weirdest, weirdest thing that makes it really makes your head spin.
(21:23):
Here we are in treadmill means we're over processed.
So we've got to get to the back to the point where we've lifted process.
Right.
But then we do that and we swing back into treadmill again.
So we cut off a few things, we go back into it.
At some point you realize in treadmill, I gotta put up, we're in whitewater with thisthing, I gotta put a process in place for culling process.
(21:51):
Most healthy organizations have got a really good process for culling redundant process.
They figured that out in Treadmill Small W Whitewater.
That's the only time it occurs to you, because until then you think this is a one-timething, two-time thing.
shit.
We've got to systematize desystemization.
(22:12):
Yeah, yeah, it's so good.
So small w whitewater then in the early struggle phase is really just what are the minimumsystems and processes you need to find a profitable, sustainable market.
If it doesn't drive you to selling more to people who are willing to pay enough for you tomake a profit on it, it's probably not a process you need unless it keeps you out of jail
or health and safety, right?
(22:33):
So
I'll give you the single most common one which nobody likes to talk about.
And it's sitting down once a week and spending whatever time it is, it shouldn't be muchmore than 30 minutes, just staring down your cash flow.
You have to look at it.
You can't just hope.
(22:54):
I mean, I don't do a lot of work in early struggle these days because I spent the firstthird of my career doing nothing else.
I'm very familiar with it.
Started over 40 businesses myself.
I know it sounds mathematically impossible, but I did.
And one of the things that I learned is you can't, excuse me, just hope against hope thatall the stuff you're carrying around in your head will net out being able to pay payroll
(23:19):
next week.
You've got to actually learn how to look at a simple Excel spreadsheet, tiny, tiny thing.
Doesn't need to be complicated.
And you've got to have a process that says,
whatever works for you, Friday morning, 9 a.m.
to 9.30, I'm staring at and working with my cash flow.
That's a system, but it's the minimal system that's gonna keep you afloat.
(23:41):
Yeah.
Yeah.
So early struggle, minimal systems for cash flow.
I love that one.
Hate that one.
It's not fun to do, but it's very important to do.
And not to kill it to death, but the last thing you need to do at that point is to buyQuickBooks and become a QuickBooks expert, right?
That's big whitewater stuff.
(24:03):
That's actually fun whitewater stuff, it's, you know, the minimum amount you need to do.
example of that, that I see a ton of people wrestling with is CRMs, right?
everyone has to have a CRM.
It's like, you just sit there and click all day, every day.
Well, tell me how many leads you had come in last week.
I have no idea.
So yes, the simplest solution possible, the simplest system in process and keeping thatruthless focus.
(24:29):
Super helpful for some folks.
Let's fast forward, small w, white water, and fun.
What's going on here?
It's usually about making the sales activity something that's much more repeatable.
So what tends to happen is we get to mid-fun, the fun part of fun, because of the work ofwhat we call in our world, big dog operators.
(24:58):
So these are salespeople who are really good salespeople.
They don't give too much of a hoot about anything else.
They just, live for the hunt and they're good at it.
You get to the point, however, where you start to leave, I was going to say money on thetable, but that sounds like you brought this thing out.
(25:18):
You leave leads out there unexplored.
You leave conversions uncompleted because all of what's happening is unsystematized.
It's just who texts your big dog?
that first thing that morning, they get the attention, right?
Who's ready to just push over the edge?
The other folks that could be pushed over the edge aren't getting the attention.
(25:42):
So it's here that we are beginning to think, you know, we could actually get more out ofour CRM.
You know, I'm going to give some examples that are clearly particularly focused towards aparticular type of industry, but it's still only to give an example.
You might for the first time start to think about inside sales.
(26:03):
know, maybe you never did inside sales before.
Everybody was riding the range.
Now you're thinking, you know, we could warm a bunch of people up.
Right.
Stuff like that.
So it's not enterprise wide.
Everybody's going to get in on this.
It's very specific.
And if you're in a, in a faith or cause based world, it's, it's the same proxy thing,which is whatever you're doing.
(26:29):
to end up paying the bills at the end of the day is the first thing that lends itself tohaving a small W of whitewater impact on you.
Because it's the thing you've got to get right.
It's hard to change the world if you can't pay the bills.
There's something that's so easy to gloss over because it's such a non-phrase, butrepeatable sales.
(26:49):
Like that's the name of the game.
And there's all kinds of things that are kind of fighting against that.
There's the roller coaster that a lot of, especially when it's like founder led salesteam, it's just like, you have a, it's just up and down, up and down.
It's agonizing because it's largely just based on your personality.
It's largely based on, you know, your whims and when you're interested and when you're notinterested.
(27:11):
So,
Making that repeatable and then looking further downfield and saying hey, it's not justabout bringing in new folks But how do we keep them longer?
What do we how do we serve them longer and and that repeatable nature so important theother thing that fights against that is We like to say yes to everything But when you say
yes to everything new that's inherently not repeatable, right?
(27:35):
They're all different things.
And so you find these folks who said yes to like a thousand things I heard my
My favorite metaphor for this was it's like drunk kids on jet skis.
It's wide open in every direction.
It's probably not the safest, but it's a lot of fun.
so this idea of repeatable is not just internal, but it's also external.
(27:59):
Talk to us a little bit about like, what are we saying yes to?
What are we saying no to with Small W Whitewater?
Well, in early fun, it's really important to say yes to everything for one simple reason.
Early struggle indeed, all of the difficult stages in the life cycle, I mean, there's fourof them, but early struggle in particular has this massive gravitational pull.
(28:24):
It's trying to suck you back in, doesn't let go too easily.
those of us, know Scott, you've been in this position as well.
But those of us who have done startup more than once, realize that you can actually getstuck in this sort of limbo land where you think you're getting out of fun, out of early
struggle, and you probably are and you're in fun for like a month or a quarter and thenyou, my goodness, I'm back here again.
(28:49):
And so saying yes to everything, part of what you're doing there is you're just gettingenough traction, enough momentum to really push you out of the gravitational field.
The problem comes later whenever, as you say, continuing to say yes all the time.
It's just like watching a beaver's build those little bridges across the stuff.
(29:09):
It's just all this stuff's being thrown down, thrown down, thrown down, thrown down.
And it's beginning to mat over our ability to deliver.
you pointed out one of the things, which is you just build that sign up that you have asense that I have to keep saying yes to everything.
Well, there comes a point when you don't and actually you need to start to say no.
(29:31):
However, I actually quite like, I find it quite interesting watching how the team that'sin fun responds to what needs to happen in small W, Whitewater, because what are we doing
in essence?
We're taking, we're plucking out of an individual.
(29:52):
something that they're doing that's giving them something.
They're making the diving catch.
They're pulling in that client or whatever.
And when you take, you you begin to peel any part of that away and say, hey, we could getan, you know, a person on inside sales making calls that would tee you up for this or
could close, you know, you've left it all with them.
(30:14):
You don't have, we shouldn't be waiting on you to make the, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I've built this relationship with these people.
They don't want to hear another, all that sort of stuff.
You get a foreshadowing of whether or not this entity as a whole, may only be threepeople, 15 people, are they going to make the transition to predictable success?
(30:36):
And should they even be thinking about it?
Because let's be honest, a lot of us are built for fun.
We want the personal identity connection that comes with
being the one that makes the diving catch, being the somebody who pulls all-nighters.
We want to continue to be part of the myths and legends of this business.
(31:00):
So it doesn't always go well, but that can tell you something in and of itself.
So just to offer some contrast then, because and you go into great detail on this with thebook, so folks can go check out the book.
I used the one chapter in the book to triple our bottom line.
really, really works before becoming a skilled architect.
So it's there.
(31:20):
But contrast what we've talked about so far with these small W.
Whitewaters with what you have to do to conquer capital W.
Whitewaters.
Well, bringing this stuff in to overcome, and we'll stick with the fun example since howwe went into so much detail there.
(31:41):
What you're doing there is essentially making little incremental tweaks that make whatwe're currently doing better if you do it right.
So we can still show up and say yes to quite a lot of stuff.
And every day,
brings new challenges and a lot of difference.
(32:03):
And we're still perceived as not just high status people in our business, but like subjectmatter experts.
We know more than everybody else about everything.
And we're still the center of making it all happen.
The solution in Big W Whitewater is
(32:25):
to change the organization.
If what you want to do is go through Whitewater, right?
So you might hit this and say, for old me listeners, screw this, I can't stand this.
I'm just going back to where we were before.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But I'm talking about those founders, leadership teams who hit Whitewater, big WWhitewater, and say, I'd like to get to the other side of that.
(32:47):
There is a change, and I'm pointing to my temples.
There's a change in the mindset.
Yeah.
a fundamental change in mindset that moves from I'm the business, the business is me, it'sall about me to it's all about the business.
What is my role as a steward of making this as big a business as it can be, big anorganization as it can be, rather than what is it going to continue to do to feed my ego?
(33:16):
And that's a very difficult.
you're talking about
Bringing in system-wide systems and processes the majority let's be honest You and I knowthis very well the majority of founders as an example who are typically still around at
this point Their mindset is we really need this and I'm completely in support of it Justnot whatever percentage involves me doing it right, right?
(33:40):
Because I don't a I don't want to change and be That sort of changes how other people seeme
If I'm adhering to all of these systems, I'm the big kahuna here.
I'm the magic secret sauce, right?
That's the key difference.
You can still be the big kahuna with the magic secret sauce overcoming small w in fun.
(34:01):
All you're doing is actually tweaking the environment.
You do it right to allow you to do the bits of being the big kahuna with the secret saucethat you like, not getting sucked into the bits that you don't Getting through whitewater,
and I'll finish this roundabout with this.
Many of your listeners I know by self-filtering, they listen to these things, they readbooks.
(34:26):
So they'll be familiar with Jim Collins' great books, particularly Good to Great and Builtto Last.
And he talks about having the right people in the right seats on the bus.
And I like to think of the bus coming up fun and you're putting the right people in theright seats and you've got it all sussed.
You've got this beautiful bus with great people in great seats.
(34:49):
You go into white water, it's like that bus goes into a tunnel.
What comes out the other end in predictable success?
It's not only not the same bus, it's not a bus anymore.
It's a whole different thing.
It's like some sort of a drone.
And that requires everybody at the core of leadership, everybody in the organization, butmostly the senior leaders to change their mindset away from what's this doing for me to
(35:16):
what do I do for this?
it's so good.
So good.
Incredible.
Les, you've been on the show a couple of times.
You know what's coming next.
We've got a question we ask everyone.
And that is this.
What would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn't a secret at all?
What's that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening to they knew?
(35:36):
Well, you you've asked me, I think this is the third time that you've asked me this.
And I, so I'm down to number three in my list, but it's still a very important issue.
And I think the answer that I would give you about this at any time is always going to mapdirectly into my own life, right?
(36:00):
So for the moment, the thing that I've been sitting with is most of us, and I would say 90% of our listeners are by definition great leaders.
They wouldn't be investing the time to listen to us rambling on here.
if they didn't have an interest in being really good leaders.
(36:22):
And for 90 % of them, the reason that they may not achieve or be achieving what they feelthey are is through a simple hygiene factor.
They're just not in charge of their environment enough.
I see it over and over again.
A great young leader whose phone is just constantly blowing up.
(36:44):
They have to...
duck out of every meeting just to take this one call.
They can't engage eyeball to eyeball because they're constantly looking down at something.
So kill your environment, make it work for you.
You don't have to become inbox zero guru.
You don't have to be a productivity black belt.
(37:06):
You just need to be able to focus on something without being inundated.
by stuff that's outside your control.
So just control your environment and you'll be a much, much better leader.
That's so good.
It's interesting that you say that because one of the most common suggestions I've givento leaders over the past six months is to find a third place.
(37:27):
know, pre-COVID, you could kind of go home and work there and create a little bit ofspace.
Well, now home and work are kind of synonymous.
The office and work are synonymous.
And all that space has been taken up.
I think to some extent, it's harder than ever because we're so connected.
But having a physical space to queue
that difference in environment, even if it's a couple of times a week or a couple of timesa month, is a fantastic habit to get into.
(37:53):
And it's like one of those keystone habits that bleeds into the rest of your time, right?
If you can be unavailable for two hours because you're somewhere else, it's not that hardto imagine being unavailable even if you're at your office.
And it just starts to break down that cycle.
And I love that environment piece because it is so easy to overlook.
Less, yeah.
for anybody that doesn't think that it's important, I give you one challenge.
(38:16):
I'm sorry to speak of you.
And my challenge is this, and I give it to everybody.
Look at your calendar literally as soon as we hang up here.
Look at your calendar, identify one meeting in the next week that's longer than 15minutes, a physical meeting, and go to it without your phone physically in your presence.
(38:37):
Just try it out and you will discover.
just how much you're addicted to being interrupted.
Mm, wow, wow.
Folks wanna know more about Predictable Success, maybe even get a copy of the book.
Where can they get a copy of the book and find more out about you?
Just come to Predictable Success to find out all about me.
Go to Predictable Success, free-book, and you can get a copy of the book.
(39:00):
Just pay shipping, 8.95 or something like that.
we're literally, we're seeing hundreds of copies of the book go out every week, absolutelyfree to people.
They just pay the shipping, and I would love for any listener who wants it to get it.
So that's predictablesuccess.com forward slash free-.
That's fantastic.
Get a copy, links in the show notes.
(39:23):
For anyone who wants a little bit of extra help, you're also welcome to check out ourscale architects.
We've got a whole directory of folks who do this day in and day out and would be happy tohelp you figure out if you're in small w whitewater, capital w whitewater and build a plan
to get through it and enjoy fun, enjoy predictable success, enjoy leading the organizationthat you've built.
(39:44):
So it's a lot better than getting stuck in any kind of whitewater.
Well, I could go on forever.
I love our conversations.
Just an honor and privilege to have you here on the show.
Appreciate everything that you've done for me, for the show, for the scale architects ingeneral.
It just means the world to me.
Thank you very much.
And for those of you watching and listening today, you know your time and attention meanthe world to us.
(40:09):
I hope you got as much out of this show as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you nexttime.
Take care.
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