Grow Yourself to Grow Your Business

I heard many times from various entrepreneurs “What got you here, won’t get you there.”  Sometimes it was phrased as “What got you from point A to point B, won’t get you to point C.”

When I heard this, it made total sense to me. If our company grew, things would have to be different. A reciprocal way of saying this is “Your business is precisely engineered to give you your current results.”

When I heard this, I almost exclusively thought of it as external advice.  In other words, if our company grew, it would need different people, with different skills and capacities. Growth would require different processes, different ways of doing things.  Growth would require different service offerings.

The only thing I thought of about myself (internally) was that I would likely have to be doing different things or do current things differently.  I never internalized the advice and understood that I would have to change. Boy, was that a hard lesson to learn.

I had reached a point where my company had reached MY cap. The company couldn’t grow because of me. Not the other employees, the market, the service, or any other external thing. Sure those might have to change as well, but until I changed, it didn’t matter what I changed outside of me.

That was a very profound wake up call, and it didn’t come all at once. It was a lesson I learned over several years. As I discuss in my book, Profit First for Creatives, there was a point where I was completely sick of my business. I hated it. So much so that I left the business in my brother’s hands and started a software company (please don’t laugh). I vowed that I would never come back.

Well, I did, because the business was failing. When I came back, I decided that I was going to do things differently. After all, keep doing the same things the same way equals same results.  It was then that we implemented the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). And then something interesting happened.

We had attempted to implement EOS a couple of years earlier by ourselves, the second time we hired a professional. When we attempted implementation ourselves, we failed. It wasn’t until working with a professional Implementor the second time around for a couple of years, I was able to see why our original attempt ended in failure. It was because there was no trust among the team. That was a particularly bitter pill to swallow, but it was true.

I didn’t trust that the team would do what they committed to, and they didn’t believe that I would let them do it and not change something. To meet the requirements of EOS, I had to build trust. Because I couldn’t do anything about the team, I had to work on me. I saw that the team didn’t trust that I wasn’t going to be on to the next shiny object in a couple of months. They didn’t trust that I was going to actually let them do what I had delegated to them without stepping in and “fixing” things.

This led to “why” questions. Why was I acting the way I was? Why was I feeling the way I was? Why was I resisting so many things? Over time, as I answered those questions, I was able to see what I was doing, and how I was showing up for the team was causing unintended, negative, consequences.

I believe one of the most powerful things a business owner can do is obtain a deep understanding of their motivations. Understand yourself, why you think the things that you do, why you act the way you do, why you feel the feelings that you feel.  It is an ongoing journey, and I’m not sure it ever ends!

If you haven’t read Profit First for Creatives yet, and you are in a Creative industry, why? Are you satisfied with your company’s profitability and cash flow? If not, read the book! Why are you resisting it? I realize this is a self-serving statement, but the advice can be applied to any business situation you are balking about.

Why? What is keeping you from growth?