STAGE

TRAILBLAZER

Hey, Dave, I need to give you a head’s up,” the email began. “Something happened, and we took care of it, and we did exactly what you would have done. We just wanted you to know we did it because we dropped some money on it.”

The email was from my operations guy, one of the three guys who, at that time, was running the company with me. I was on vacation with Sharon and the kids, getting in touch with our Scottish heritage at the Ramsay family’s ancestral castle. At this point in the growth of the company, things were starting to get really fun. For the first time ever, I wasn’t worried about cash flow. All our numbers—sales, volume, profits—were trending up. We could see the trajectory, a hockey stick up and to the right. It seemed like everything we touched turned to gold, and we were starting to see that we could have a $300 million company someday.

So, when that email came in, I wasn’t panicked like I might have been a couple years before, but I was definitely interested to find out what the heck was going on. The email explained that Steve, one of our team members, had a twelve-year-old son, Will, who was at a youth camp in Asheville, North Carolina. Will had been playing dodgeball when he got hit in the head with a ball. Until that moment, no one knew Will had been born with a weak blood vessel in his brain. The impact from the dodgeball caused the aneurysm to burst, and Will was rushed to the hospital. The doctors there phoned Steve and told him that Will had only a few hours to live. Now, there are no commercial flights to Asheville, North Carolina, from Nashville. And it’s an eight-hour drive by car. There was no way Steve could get there in time to see his son.

Our HR policy is the Golden Rule, straight out of the book of Matthew: “Do to others what you would have them do to you” (7:12 NIV). If it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me and my team. So, when they heard about Will, my team did what we always do: Treat others the way we want to be treated. How would I want someone to treat me if my kid had a few hours to live and he’s an eight-hour drive away? Well, I know what our team did. They chartered a jet for Steve for eight thousand bucks, and he was at his son’s side in less than two hours.

I felt a lot of things as I read that email. Mainly, I felt heartbreak for Steve and his family over what they were going through. What we didn’t know at the time was that Will would survive the aneurysm and eventually come home! He had a tough road ahead of him to recover from the damage that was done, though. So Steve organized the WillPower 5K race to help raise money and awareness for the condition that led to Will’s injury. And this time, the entire company jumped in to support Steve and his family. That tradition continued for several years, even after Steve left the company. And the great news is that today, Will is a grown young man and doing well, thank God.

I think you’ll understand when I tell you how proud I was of my leadership team for the way they took care of Steve. They never asked me what to do because they knew, without a doubt, that I would handle it exactly the way they did. At that moment, as I sat at a dinner table in a Scottish castle, I realized we’d hit a whole new level. I didn’t have to carry the whole company all by myself anymore. That moment showed me that all the work we’d done in the Pathfinder stage to define our mission and vision, develop our core values, and communicate them—over and over again—was starting to work. The alignment we’d created meant I could stop being hyperfocused on the day to day, and I could start thinking about how to become that $300 million business I knew was possible.

Hitting the Ceiling

Now, before you get the wrong idea and assume everything was perfect, let me be clear: We still had a lot of work to do to have a shot at fulfilling our potential as a business and have the kind of impact I believed we were capable of. While my leadership team and I had clearly built a ton of trust, there were still too few people trying to hold the business together. In fact, the biggest challenges business owners face during the Trailblazer stage is that you don’t have the leadership team or the strategic plan you need to scale your business.

I had three guys leading the company with me, but the team and the business were growing so fast that the four of us became a huge bottleneck. We didn’t have the capacity to support the amount of work we wanted to do. On top of that, we weren’t planning far enough out to assign resources where they were needed most. Our business unit leaders were playing tug-of-war over people and processes in an effort to get their work done.

Another common challenge Trailblazers deal with that we had to overcome was the fact that while our business had exploded, our processes hadn’t changed much from the early days. We were still entering every customer’s bank and debit card info by hand, for crying out loud! Did it work? Sure. But in addition to the enormous security risk, it was a lot of extra work, and working harder just wasn’t getting it done. We had to figure out how to work smarter. When your processes are not strong enough to support your big vision, it’s like trying to put out a fire using a bucket that’s full of holes. You’ll never get enough water in that bucket as long as it keeps leaking out.

SIGNS YOU MAY BE IN THE
TRAILBLAZER STAGE

Working longer hours isn’t working like it did before.

Hiring more people to solve problems doesn’t work anymore.

Processes and systems are not strong enough to support the vision.

You’re striving to establish plans and processes to scale your business.

You’re working on the basics of a powerful and healthy organization to get reliable results.

FRUSTRATIONS YOU FACE IN THE TRAILBLAZER STAGE

You’re trying to figure out how to operationalize the company.

You don’t know how to get your leaders to think about bigger-picture problems.

You’re having trouble scaling the business.

You feel stretched way too thin.

The team has more work than they can handle.

Business owners who are in the Trailblazer stage often say things like:

“I feel like we’re flying by the seat of our pants. It makes me sick to my stomach.”

“It’s hard to get everyone in the same room, and we really need to so that we know everyone gets the same message.”

“As the owner, I struggle with leading leaders. I don’t want to manage people or projects directly myself. But I want my leadership team to be visionary leaders, and I’m not sure how to help them do that.”

“I want my leaders to learn in five years what took me ten years to learn. How do I help them avoid making all the mistakes I made?”

These problems feel big, especially when your biggest problem used to be how to make payroll by Friday. But the Trailblazer stage is full of opportunity too. Like us, a lot of owners in this stage see, maybe for the first time, that it’s possible to grow the business tenfold given the right circumstances. I’ll show you how we addressed these challenges at Ramsey Solutions—sometimes against my better judgment—as we worked through the Trailblazer stage.

Fulfilling Your Business’s Potential

Jeff Bezos has an interesting team-building principle he calls the two-pizza rule. The idea is to keep your team size small—small enough to feed with two pizzas. Why? The smaller the team, the better the communication and collaboration. It’s just easier to keep a smaller team on the same page.

In the Pathfinder stage of business, your team likely fit the two-pizza rule, and you could personally share the mission, vision, and values to create the alignment your team needed to be successful. But as a Trailblazer, your team has probably become too large to feed with two pizzas, and that means you can no longer rely on one-off conversations to keep everybody plugged in. Now’s the time to start the process of hardwiring those foundational pieces of your company culture into your operations. Your hiring process, comp strategy, communications rhythms, and everything else you do need to stem from your mission, vision, and values to keep your team and your company unified and moving in the right direction as you grow.

That begins, of course, with your leadership team. You need people at the top who can finish your sentences and make decisions just like you would even when you aren’t in the room. The goal is to build a level of leaders who are so aligned with your mission, vision, and values that you can delegate to them without hesitation—and this goes way beyond delegating tasks. The Trailblazer has to begin delegating actual leadership of teams or areas of the business. You need rock stars leading things like all of marketing, all of operations, all of finance, all of HR. The first time I felt like we actually had a shot at fulfilling our potential was when I added our first CFO and head of HR to the leadership team.

With a group of leaders like that working alongside you at an executive level, you’re ready for the next huge step you’ll take as a Trailblazer: strategic planning. This is where you look ahead to identify what the company will look like in the next three, five or ten years so you can get your team working on the right things to bring that vision to life. Those two things—the right leaders and the right plan—have the potential to blow your business wide open!

In addition to operationalizing your culture, building a solid leadership team, and landing a sound strategic plan, you’ve also got to identify and implement processes you can rely on. Up to a point, personal heroics, like working late and working on the weekends, are enough to get stuff done. But eventually that breaks down. There literally aren’t enough hours in the day to keep up. To scale your business, you need processes that generate repeatable results and don’t require you to hire more and more people to manage them. All those things boil down to the four key skills we’ll talk about in this chapter that will move you from Trailblazer to Peak Performer:

• Intentional culture
• Leadership development
• Strategic planning
• Repeatable processes

Intentional Culture

In the Pathfinder stage, getting clear on your mission, vision, and values helps you create direction for your company and your team. They are the foundation of your company’s culture, and you need them to conquer that stage of business. But by themselves, they don’t create a company culture. That happens in the Trailblazer stage, when you begin to hardwire your mission, vision, and values into all the processes in your business. When your mission, vision, and values define how you do business—how you hire people, how you pay people, how and why you fire people, how you communicate and celebrate team members, and even how you do meetings—you bring your company culture to life for your team.

As I mentioned before, it’s not possible for you to do this on your own. There aren’t enough hours in the day for you to have all the individual conversations it takes to operationalize the company culture for a growing team. This was a tough realization for me because it forced me to the conclusion that it was past time for me to hire an HR director. I avoided that hire because at the time, I didn’t have a real appreciation for HR. Honestly, I thought of HR as a bunch of bean counters who would try to tell me who to hire and how to run my business—like a bunch of lawyers. To me, HR was the place employees went to whine instead of working out their issues with their leader. I had no idea how important a well-staffed and great-functioning HR team would be for the growth of the business.

When we did make that hire, though, we hit the jackpot with Rick Perry. Rick was a genius not only because he didn’t do any of the dumb things I had worried HR would do, but also because, in the nearly twenty years he was with Ramsey, he changed the whole shape of the company—in a good way. In the Pathfinder chapter, I told you about how Rick helped us recognize and document our core values. That was our first step toward operationalizing our culture because it made it possible to scale the way we taught our leaders and team members the principles that guide all our business and personnel decisions. We also started using the core values as the basis of our hiring process so that, in addition to finding qualified thoroughbreds who could do the work, we also were able to increase the odds of hiring people who would be a good culture fit. It was brilliant! (And I wish we’d done it much earlier.)

So, why is this important? Why put so much time and energy into building and operationalizing a quality culture? In EntreLeadership, I wrote about the five enemies of unity:

Poor Communication

A team must be on the same page. If the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, disunity, anger, and frustration will fill your company.

Lack of Shared Purpose

A lack of a shared purpose causes a lack of unity. If the team doesn’t share the goals of leadership and of each other, there isn’t unity.

Gossip

I absolutely hate gossip. If people have an issue, they need to speak up to their leader, not out to their teammates who can’t fix it.

Unresolved Disagreements

Disagreements that go unresolved grow. They eventually paralyze people. Leaders must step in to help resolve the problem.

Sanctioned Incompetence

When a team member is incompetent, for any reason, and leadership won’t act, the good team members become demoralized.

Any of these issues has the power to wreck your company overnight. But a strong, intentional culture that defines the way your business works creates unity within your team. It is the infrastructure that defends your company against the enemies of unity. But a strong culture doesn’t spontaneously appear. Peter Drucker, author and famed management consultant, nailed this idea on the head: “Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and under-performance. Everything else requires leadership.” That’s why the Trailblazer must “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3 NIV). And that begins by first defining your mission, vision, and core values as a Pathfinder and then, as a Trailblazer, making them concrete for your team members by building them into the processes they use every day.

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

When you delegate a task to another leader, you’re telling the leader to get that task done. But when you delegate leading to leaders, you’re not just delegating tasks. You’re delegating the careers and lives of the people on that person’s team. If you’re like me, you probably have a lot of feelings about turning over that kind of responsibility. How will that person treat or mistreat their team in my name? How could that affect the company’s reputation? Will the team be taken care of? Will the leaders get the work done? Are they enabling bad behavior? Is everyone goofing off?

I’ll be honest, you will probably run into some problems as you build up your leadership team. I had one leader who loved to celebrate wins with his team by treating them to pizza or ice cream when they hit their numbers. One day, he came to my office to invite me to join in that month’s ice cream celebration, but the team hadn’t hit their numbers. Now, I don’t have a problem with ice cream. I don’t have a problem with the team celebrating when they hit their numbers. I do have a problem celebrating when the team hasn’t hit their numbers.

That’s what can happen when you delegate to delegate to delegate. It’s like playing a game of telephone. Your original message is “Celebrate the wins!” But by the time it gets to all your leaders, it’s just “Celebrate!” As a Trailblazer, you’ll have to teach each layer of leadership how things work. In fact, a big part of your job in the Trailblazer stage will be to bring what Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, calls the last 10 percent of truth. You’ll be the one who stands up and says, “This is not okay,” “We’re headed in the wrong direction,” and, “We have to fix this.” Just like I had to do that day when I made it clear that it’s okay to celebrate as long as we’re celebrating the right things.

I mentioned before that back in the early days of the business, I had three guys running things with me. It was the first time we had layers of leadership that were effective. I had a ton of confidence in them because number one, they showed me in the way they handled the issue with Steve and his son that they understood how to lead the way I needed them to. And number two, they were making tons of progress in their areas and getting a tremendous amount of work done with their teams. But we had big issues to fix. Anything the company did had to come through the four of us, creating a leadership bottleneck. Plus, each area was built as a separate profit center, creating silos that kept us from thinking strategically across the whole business. Winning in our business became a game of getting your pet project approved by one of the four of us. VPs started vying for our time ruthlessly. We called it “VP on VP violence,” and it became kind of an inside joke with the team. We even made a short parody video about it for our team Christmas party. But the constraint it put on our business was no joke.

We’ve restructured the company several times since those days, working through multiple iterations of executive-level leadership. Today at Ramsey Solutions, our top leadership team is our operating board. Every Monday, after our staff meeting, the operating board meets to hash out what needs to happen for the business to win. These are all leaders who have a ton of experience. Most of them have been with the company for over a decade. A few are newer but had a lot of experience before they joined the team. They are what we refer to as Leaders of Leaders and have been winning in their leadership roles for years.

As a Trailblazer, your leadership team won’t necessarily need the same level of business or leadership experience Ramsey currently has on its operating board. At this stage, your focus is on building a strong cross-functional leadership team that can handle the challenges that come with rapid growth so you can seize the opportunity that exists in the market. The good news is that the people who have the potential to help you 10x your business are also the ones who have the potential to grow into executive leaders. Here’s what I look for:

• Ability to spot and develop talent in key roles
• Ability to grow not just a great team but great leaders
• Ability to cast vision and inspire teams
• Ability to think and plan strategically

As you observe leaders within your team, look for these traits. These are the folks you can lean on to build your leadership team and help you move your business into the Peak Performer stage.

Since we’re just scratching the surface here on the topic of leadership development, we’ll give you access to a couple more important resources at the end of this chapter, including The EntreLeadership Reading Guide. Whole books have been written on how to build strong and effective leadership teams, and since leaders are readers, I strongly suggest you make reading a habit. I’ve become a student of the work of experts like Dr. Henry Cloud, Patrick Lencioni, Jim Collins, John Maxwell, and others who’ve become friends of the company and speak at EntreLeadership Summit, one of our annual leadership events.

You’ll also get access to a seven-step guide to help you build an intentional leadership development plan for your business using principles we follow at Ramsey.

STRATEGIC PLANNING

One day, several years back, I happened to see a large group of our Financial Peace University team heading into our conference center. Of course, I was curious about why so many people weren’t working and bringing in the revenue they were hired to bring in. When I asked one of the leaders what was going on, she informed me that the team was participating in a two-day strat-op. She might as well have been speaking a foreign language. What the heck is a strat-op? Turns out, the goal of a strat-op is strategic operations planning. Essentially, the team was going to spend two days’ worth of payroll sitting around tables and talking about a five-year plan for the business. On top of all that, they’d paid someone—someone who didn’t run a company—several thousand dollars to facilitate the meeting and tell us how to run a company.

The whole thing went against the grain with me in so many ways. I’m an entrepreneur. I believe in killing things and dragging them back to the cave. Up to that point, our business strategy was to do that enough times to make it to Friday. And if we did that enough times to make it to December, our strategy worked. The idea that so many people would take time away from the work that would bring in revenue today to talk about dreams and ideas for tomorrow was lost on me.

I have a bunch of folks on my team who have their master’s degree in business administration, and I have them to thank for introducing me to the concept of strategic planning. I have a degree in DUMB, not an MBA. But what I’ve learned about folks with an MBA is that they understand the value of getting a thirty-thousand-foot view of your business so you can steer around problems instead of barreling right into them. That’s really what the team wanted to accomplish in their strategic planning sessions.

Much to my surprise, that first planning session actually worked! The team went back to work energized by the plans they made, and that profit center immediately went gangbusters! After that, we started doing strategic planning on a regular basis company-wide. And once I realized strategic planning will help you solve growth challenges that can’t be overcome by hiring more people (our usual go-to problem-solving method), I started to buy in to the idea too. If your business is experiencing any of these issues, it’s time to get more strategic with your planning:

• Your revenue has plateaued.
• Your market has changed.
• Your business is experiencing a crisis.
• You’re making decisions in silos.

Do I enjoy going to these strategic planning sessions now? No—they’re about as enjoyable as a root canal for me. But my son, Daniel, who is now the president of Ramsey Solutions, is wonderful at strategic planning. And I do love what happens when we as a leadership team align on our plan. We lay out a vision for it, put stories around it, and create dashboards so we can see the work we need to do and track our progress.

Don’t miss that last part. Strategic planning isn’t finished until you document your plan and define how you’re going to track your progress. At Ramsey, our leadership teams leave planning sessions with a Desired Future Dashboard for their area of the business. It captures the plan we’ve all aligned to and boils it down to three elements that we can roll out to the team: a desired future statement that paints a picture of where we want the business to be in the next twelve months, the defining objectives that describe the chunks of work we need to do to get there, and the key results that define which metrics we’re going to use to measure success.

Each of these components are essential for knowing where you’re headed and what winning looks like for your company. Think of your desired future as the destination, your defining objectives as your road map, and your key results as the milestones that confirm you’re on track to get where you want to go. Once it’s all laid out, your leaders should consistently check in on the Desired Future Dashboard and use a simple system to track progress on your defining objectives and key results. We use color codes: green for on track, yellow for slightly off pace, and red for falling behind. Pretty straightforward. But this helps us surface problems quickly so we can have the right discussions (or debates) to get us back on track.

Now, once you’ve carved out the time and committed to doing the strategic planning work, here’s how you can get your team started on creating and maintaining a Desired Future Dashboard:

Step 1: Brainstorm

Gather your key leaders and decision-makers in a strategic planning meeting and ask, “Where do we want our business to go in the next twelve months?”

Step 2: Narrow the Options

Focus on narrowing your options to three to five ideas that will define your strategy for the next year.

Step 3: Create Your Desired Future Statement

This should be a simple yet powerful statement that clearly communicates your goals to your team. A useful formula to follow is: “By [DATE], we will [CREATE OR DO THIS], resulting in [THIS].”

Step 4: Define Your Objectives

These are four to six challenges that must be overcome to achieve the desired future. Your objectives answer the question “What must be true to reach our desired future?” They’re the foundational steps toward achieving your desired future.

Step 5: Assign Ownership

Each objective needs an owner. This person will define specific key results, ensure the team stays focused on the right work, and report regularly on the team’s status.

Step 6: Track Your Progress

Set aside times in weekly leadership meetings to review your Desired Future Dashboard and discuss whether objectives and key results are on track or if anything needs to change. Check out the example below to see what this looks like in action.

Source: EntreLeadership Elite Desired Future Tool

The best thing about strategic planning and tools like the Desired Future Dashboard is that they get us where we want to go much faster than we would without it. It’s too easy for entrepreneurs like you and me to get distracted by a shiny new idea instead of focusing on the high-return activities we already have in place. On top of that, it can be tough for entrepreneurial types to give up on ideas that just aren’t working out. Strategic planning helps you develop the discipline to choose the best things over the good things and avoid distractions so you keep moving toward the truly important goals you set.

Like I said, these aren’t my favorite meetings to sit through, and they may not be for you either. But if there’s anything worse than attending a strategic planning session, it’s attending one that doesn’t accomplish anything. At the end of this chapter, you’ll get access to two resources to help you do this right: our guide to planning and running a strategic planning session that will lead to meaningful insights you can act on to push your business forward and a more in-depth look at the process for developing a Desired Future Dashboard to track your progress on that plan.

Repeatable Processes

In the same way I waited too long to hire Ramsey’s first HR director, I also ended up hiring our first CFO several million dollars in revenue too late. That’s because I’m a hardwired sales guy. An entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. No matter what, I’m getting the deal done because that’s the only way to make sure we live to fight another day. The upside of being wired that way is that we did live to fight another day, and now we have a business that’s helped millions of people change their lives for the better. The downside is that I didn’t always have a lot of appreciation for people who didn’t follow that same approach.

Bookkeeping and accounting—and the people who live for that stuff—fall into that category of folks whose strengths are completely different from mine. I do love being in the numbers because I’m a math nerd, but I loathe the accounting process. That’s why one of the first three people I hired was somebody to do bookkeeping so I wouldn’t have to. That was a good decision while we were a smaller business. But a few years later, I looked up and realized I was running a $14 million business with just a bookkeeper, and that was just dumb! Once we added a CFO to our leadership team, though, it was easy to see what we’d been missing. And it was great because he saw things that helped us. He started moving stuff around and creating metrics, and I was like, “Okay, that’s cool.” He developed systems and made us more sophisticated, which allowed us to get to another level.

Hiring an HR director and a CFO helped move Ramsey Solutions to the next level. Now, I’m not saying that not having those roles is what’s wrong with your company. But you may be missing a layer of leadership and an area of sophistication that could be keeping you from scaling. And you thought it was just that you needed to sell more. Because that’s what I thought. I always thought I could outsell my stupidity. I’m still trying at times.

What Winning Looks Like

If there is an overarching theme for the Trailblazer stage, it’s the idea of scaling—scaling your leadership, scaling your planning, and scaling your processes so you can scale your business. As a Treadmill Operator, you planted the seeds of sound business principles like time management, delegation, and budgeting. As a Pathfinder, you created alignment for your team by defining your mission and vision and establishing core values. As a Trailblazer, that work begins to bear fruit, like it did when my team showed me they not only understood how to make the decisions I would make, but they also understood why I would make those decisions.

This is a pivotal moment for your business. I’ll use an example from what I teach about building wealth to show you what I mean. Wealth building begins with a strong foundation for your money, meaning you’ve got to get out and stay out of debt and save up an emergency fund. That alone will create more financial security than most people have ever experienced in their lives, and they could decide to stop right there and simply enjoy that level of security. But to build the kind of wealth that changes family trees, you have to keep building on that foundation. You have to invest and pay off your home. You have to keep pushing and working toward the future you envision. The same is true in the Trailblazer stage for your business. As a reminder, here’s what we covered:

• Intentional culture
• Leadership development
• Strategic planning
• Repeatable processes

If you’ve come this far, there’s a potential in the market for your business to grow exponentially. But unless you keep pushing and building on the foundation you’ve already built, it just won’t happen. Your leadership team must take more ownership. Your business strategy must become more sophisticated. Your company culture has to become operational. Your processes must scale to meet the needs of the business. In short, it’s time to work smarter, not just harder, and you as the Trailblazer are still the driving force making all that happen.

Click the QR code below to get a comprehensive step-by-step action plan with tools and resources that will help you scale your business so it can have the impact that matches its potential.