1. Opening Scaling Tension

Mat Sorensen spent years as an attorney representing self-directed IRA companies — the same companies that are now his competitors. He was good at it. Good enough that when one of the businesses he advised sold for a hundred million dollars, he realized something uncomfortable: he knew that company’s operations better than the people who ran it. He was billing hours as the expert in the room, while the value he was creating accrued entirely to someone else’s balance sheet.

That’s the tension most founder-led firms eventually hit. Revenue climbs, the calendar fills, and the founder becomes indispensable in exactly the way that caps growth — every decision, every client relationship, every fire still routes back through one person’s bandwidth. Being excellent at the work and building a scalable business turn out to be two different disciplines, and the first one can quietly block the second.

2. The Hidden Constraint

The constraint isn’t market size, capital, or even headcount. It’s decision load. Sorensen put it plainly: trading time for money is a structurally poor way to build wealth, because every hour spent executing is an hour not spent building the systems, roles, and judgment infrastructure that let the business run without him in the room. The expertise that makes a founder valuable also makes him a bottleneck — every unresolved question, every exception, every client issue defaults back to the person who “knows how this works.” That’s not a bandwidth problem you fix by working later. It’s an execution systems problem, and it compounds as volume grows.

3. The Operating Shift

The shift Sorensen made wasn’t “delegate more.” It was narrower and more durable: identify the three functions the business could not survive without, and permanently assign ownership of each — before adding anything else. For Directed IRA, that was financial and compliance control (the company is licensed, regulated, and audited, so this function is pure risk management), operational execution (service delivery clients could rely on independently of him), and customer acquisition (the one function he kept for himself, because a good structure with no customers doesn’t work).

This is the core operating principle underneath everything else in the conversation: leverage doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from building a decision-making framework where each critical function has a single accountable owner, so decisions get made once, by the right person, instead of re-litigated every time volume increases.

4. Execution in Practice

Four insights from the conversation show how that principle gets operationalized.

A minimum viable org structure, not an org chart built by instinct. Sorensen started with exactly three hires — a controller, a paralegal, and himself running sales — because those were the three functions the business could not scale without. Everything added later got layered onto that foundation rather than replacing it.

Shedding responsibility in phases, deliberately. Directed IRA opened roughly 500 accounts in its first year. It now opens over a thousand a month. That volume didn’t get absorbed by working harder — it got absorbed by continuously offloading tasks the founder had been doing personally. Sorensen frames this as becoming a different “version of yourself” at each stage: the dynamic generalist early on, then someone who actively sheds work as the business can support it. The operating discipline here is recognizing that the tasks worth removing from your plate change as you scale, and waiting too long to remove them is what creates the bottleneck, not the growth itself.

Relationship-vetted hiring over open recruiting. Eight of Sorensen’s ten-person leadership team never applied for a job. He hired people he’d already watched perform, under real conditions, over years. That’s a risk-management decision as much as a hiring one — it collapses the ongoing verification cycle most founders run informally every time they wonder if a new hire is actually going to own their role, because the track record already exists before day one.

A risk-versus-goodwill trade-off on brand. Sorensen is explicit that Directed IRA has sacrificed short-term growth and margin to protect service quality. The logic is a capital allocation decision dressed up as a values statement: a strong brand generates referral-driven customers at close to zero acquisition cost, while a damaged one forces permanent, expensive advertising spend to compensate. He’s seen both models in his industry. One compounds; the other bleeds cash indefinitely.

5. Leverage Outcome

Put together, these choices reframe leverage correctly: it’s expanded capacity, not extended hours. Sorensen calls Directed IRA a human capital business — payroll is its largest expense line, ahead of any other cost — which means the entire growth model depends on how well roles are structured and owned, not on how many hours anyone puts in. Scaling discipline, in his account, is really leadership bandwidth protection: deciding in advance which decisions deserve the founder’s attention and building everything else so it doesn’t need to reach him at all.

Connect With the Guest

To learn more about Mat Sorensen and his work:
Website: https://directedira.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matsorensen/

The Immediate Move

The constraint on your business right now is very likely not capital, headcount, or demand — it’s how many decisions still have to pass through you before anything moves. Structure beats effort here: a role with clear ownership and defined judgment criteria eliminates the same decision from ever needing to be made twice. That’s the actual mechanism behind operational leverage, and it’s also the fastest way to protect the one resource you can’t buy back — your own bandwidth.

Watch this before you hire your next support role.

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Full Podcast Transcript

All right, listeners, quick question. What do you think your retirement account is doing for you right now besides sitting there while you hope that the market’s kind to it?

Because here on Scale Smart Grow Fast, we like to poke at that assumption a little bit, since those dollars can actually go to work in real estate, private funds, or all kinds of

alternative assets if you know about how to do that. And my guest today has basically built this amazing empire and company around showing people how to do that.

He also gets that once things start growing fast, you need real execution behind it. He’s got an amazing team helping him at directed IRA. And that’s what we like to help people build with full-time ultimate executive assistants here at Worker Genetics. So please welcome Matt Sorensen, the founder and CEO of Directed IRA and Directed Trust Company, and the guy who literally wrote the book on self-directed IRAs. So let’s get into it. Matt, thanks for joining me today.

Thanks, Adrian. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here talking about, you know, directed IRA, my baby. you know, you have a business owner come on talking about their business. They could talk your ear off all day just like they can about their own kids. So excited to be here.

Well, let’s get started at the beginning before directed IRA really took off. When you were at the start, you know, grinding it out as an entrepreneur. What did a normal week actually look l for like for you back then?

Well, for me, I mean, I was actually a lawyer helping clients investing with self-directed IRAs. I was representing a lot of self-directed IRA companies, banks and trust companies that are now my competitors. So I was working just as hard, just doing different things. You know, I was a an attorney billing hours. And quite honestly, I had seen a company in my industry sell for a hundred million dollars. And I was like, wait a second, I advised that company.

I knew more about their business than they did. I felt like I was more of an expert. And here I am billing hours. And I thought, I’m in the right industry, but I got the wrong business billing hours as a lawyer. So that was honestly the impetus is just that work as a lawyer, becoming an expert, knowing the business and understanding the customer, and then seeing a company have success. So that’s what my day looked like. It was kind of doing the same stuff, but just in a different way as a lawyer advising clients on tax and legal stuff.

Right. And I love how you really highlight there that you were, you know, you were billing for hours, right? You were doing what we, you know, think of as like trading hours for dollars, and you realized

Yeah.

that you could instead work on building a business where the value would exceed more than just your hourly rate.

Yeah, I mean trading time for money is like the worst way to, you know, earn a living. I mean, you can scale it, of course, and get other people that they’re trading their time for money and you’re making margin on that. And that that that works. I mean, there’s plenty of businesses like that. but as a professional, I think a lot of professionals realize this. It’s like, how do I make more money? Well, you work more and you get into this rut of just

kind of trading your time for money. And it’s well, quite honestly, it can be a little frustrating when you try to get some work life balance. if there if there even is a thing. But anywho, yeah, that was my that was kind of a realization for me of I didn’t like the way my life looked at that point and the way that business was building compared to other companies I could start and something like what we’re doing at directed IRA.

Perfect. And so I think that kind of sets the the framework for the rest of our conversation today, because I think what we’ll talk about first is how you’ve built directed IRA and how our listeners can think about building a business where you know you’re a business owner and you’re making money when other people work, right? And not just your

Yeah.

own billable hours. And then we’re also gonna get into how people can make money with their money, right? With investing like in self-directed

Mm-hmm.

IRAs. Does that sound like a good plan?

Love it, sounds great.

All right. So let’s first talk about you building out directed IRA and some of the takeaways that our business owner, entrepreneur listeners can have for that. So as you focused instead of just billable hours as an attorney and you started building this company, what are some of the first things that you stopped doing yourself and started outsourcing to other people so that you could become this business owner and not just trade your own hours for dollars?

Yeah, I mean, I think at first, I mean, we started with three people, you know. So, I took a controller from my law firm, young guy with an MBA, getting his CPA license, who’s now the CFO, and I took a paralegal in my law firm that had worked directly for me for probably seven years, super experienced. We worked well together, had a lot of great operational stuff. And it was just the three of us that started. So

I I knew that I needed someone to handle the kind of the financial details. I mean, we’re we’re licensed, regulated, audited, all of that. Like you can’t like mess up or you lose your ability to do business. I needed operational execution. And then my job is really the sales and marketing. Like, you know, you can have the greatest, best you know, structure and people and processes and technology, but if you can’t acquire customers, it isn’t gonna work.

So I was out there kind of doing the customer acquisition, not actually opening the accounts, but just spending the time building the relationships, making the sales, opening the accounts. and and that’s how it started. I mean, but you know, even in our first year, I don’t think we didn’t even open up 500 accounts. I think it kinda took us a little over a year to get to 500 accounts.

We’ve opened up over a thousand accounts a month now. So like we’ve came a long way from where we started just seven years ago. But it was really about figuring out what were the what were the core things that the business needed to function. and it was really solving it first on day one, kind of those those three pieces. I needed some sales and marketing, I needed some operational execution that customers could rely on, and I needed the finance accounting and the dollars and cents that we had of other people’s money.

to make sure that they were adding up and and and and flowing properly.

I think there’s a lot of great takeaways in what you shared already there, Matt. Like it’s a snowball. That’s what I think about when you’re saying, you know, now you open twice as many per accounts per month as you opened in an over an entire year. And so it

Yeah.

takes some time to get that ball rolling for new companies.

How do I?

So for somebody who’s in that stage where they’re still working to get to get it rolling, what wisdom would you have for them?

I I think like the the first thing is is there’s gonna be different versions of yourself in the phases of your business. And the first version of yourself that the business needs is you need to be pretty dynamic and be able to do a lot of things until you get to a point where you have enough customers and business to where you then need to start shedding responsibilities to scale to where, you know, we we are doing twice as much in a month we were doing in a year.

So I I think at at first when you’re in kind of this first version of maybe it’s you or you and a couple of people, whether these are contracted out, these are assistants, these are, you know, I think even like hiring your first assistant for for many people is like an important first step is you’ve got to get like that customer acquisition down. You’ve got to figure out what are the core services that need to be offered. And and then you’re likely providing them, possibly.

but then maybe get your administrative duties off the table. I mean, everybody’s got a different thing. I knew from day one I had to go for it. I was like, I’m gonna get at least two people, like highly skilled people that I’ve worked with for years. I didn’t post to do a job posting. I recruited everybody individually who I wanted because I’ve worked with people over the years. And and so this is kind of the first phase is like it everybody’s different. And I’ll and and I’ll say that. The other thing I would say is, what are you good at?

Like you’ve got to get really honest with yourself about what you’re good at and what you’re bad at. And find people that can supplement what you’re bad at and can make up for your weaknesses. Hire that. and focus on what you’re good at so long as that can drive revenue and value in the business.

Right. A lot of great takeaways there. I love how and you bring up a good point. And I see entrepreneurs need this, right? They need to hear when you get started, you are gonna have to wear all of those hats. And yet as you grow, then you can start to build your team. And people create issues when they go to the extremes in either one. Either they get too top heavy, they build too much of a team too early, or they need a team. They’ve gotten that that they’ve scaled and they don’t bring the team on. And so you kind of

we’re

able

Yeah.

to walk that middle line relatively successfully obviously because the company’s done great now.

Yeah, and I think, you know, there’s there’s not a right or wrong way. I think some some people will wait too long to bring on other people. And even a lot of small businesses that might have ten employees, you know, the business owners frankly taking too much money out of the business than they should and should be reinvesting and and focusing more on growth.

but they get comfortable with a certain, you know, standard of living and you know, they wanted all the financial rewards of the business. And now they hit a certain level and they just start draining the business and not reinvesting like they were on day one. So, so so this is not like a day one problem. This is a problem you’ll always have in the business when you’re scaling. So, but I think some people wait too long to hire and they stunt the growth of the business because of that. Other people h hire too fast and they’re they’re

They’re losing out on profitability and margin that they could get in the business. And so like s some people are like, Do you need the income? Like, how much can you risk also? And so I, you know, we used this is why, you know, there’s so many successful tech companies of people in their twenties. They can go all in. They live in a dorm.

Right.

They live at their parents’ house. They have four roommates, you know. They don’t need

Mm-hmm.

to they’re not taking money out of the business. They’re all in, they’re putting their time and money into it. So,

So I know there I don’t think there’s a there’s a right or wrong way for it. You gotta figure it out for yourself, but have some self awareness. That’s like, you know, understanding yourself and having some self awareness is probably the most important thing.

Mm-hmm. That’s very good. very good point. So something as we talk about hiring, talking about building the team, something I know

Yeah.

that a lot of our listeners have talked about as a challenge right now is is the hiring. Getting somebody on your team who’s really gonna own their responsibilities instead of just like checking a box, being like, Yep, I did it, I did it.

So what insights would you have about hiring or onboarding people to your team so that they actually own their role and their responsibilities?

Yeah, I think I think a lot of business owners think in terms of like what they need. they need to be thinking of what does their employee need? Like if I’m hiring someone, what does that person want? What are they expecting? what am I offering them? You know, like what’s the opportunity for them? I mean, seriously, like you gotta like if if you want good people.

You’ve got to be willing to answer that and have a really good answer for that. Like, what is your sales pitch? Seriously, if you’re writing job postings and and not and getting like terrible candidates or people that aren’t what you’re looking for, you need to kind of rethink. Well, like, well, who am I looking for? I think a lot of small businesses, and and I’ve had to do this and many other companies I’ve owned to, is is you can’t afford you know, everybody’s like, hire an A player. Well, duh.

You know, like I if I could just get like five LeBron Jameses on my team, I’d do that too. Like even the Lakers can’t afford that, you know, or whoever wherever he’s playing now. I don’t know. You know what I mean? Like, duh. Okay. So so like, okay, well, okay, I’m gonna go get eight players. But when you’re starting out and you’re brand new small business, how do I get those people? What what I did, the nice thing about my pathway at least.

Is I met a lot of people over my career that I liked working with. I had been a lawyer for 15, 20 years, and I had been in the space, well known. I had met people. So those first two people I hired, I’d worked with them before. I recruited them. They believed in me. They trusted me. They were starting the they were this is a brand new company, you know. They were leaving a law firm to go work at. So, but

So I really built my team through a lot of personal relationships and people that I knew that I knew were excellent at what they did. And this was really important because it it leads to the next phases that are critical in the business. So I then went and recruited a COO in my company who was a guy I met that was running events in my industry. I would speak at his events. He understood sales and marketing. He could fill a room of people. And I’m like, I need that on my team. It took me two years to get him to join.

He’s our COO now, right now. and then we did an event, one of our own events, and I had about 10 people up from my team. We did a little team picture. This is part of our leadership team here. And I want to say, like, eight of those 10 people didn’t apply for a job. Like they did not even apply for a job. They were people that I knew or someone else on the team knew that brought him in and said, You need to work here. So

I think you can lean on your personal relationships, people that you know, but but they’ve got to be sold on you and the vision that you’re trying to build. And I think you need to think about what does this mean for them? Like what’s in it for them? And if you can answer that, you can attract and retain really good people. Now, after that, if you get a core group of people that are great, that are good at what they do, your company’s gonna thrive. Your customers are gonna like you.

Other people that you hire later are gonna like working with them because they’re gonna be like, this is a cool place to work. People here are really good at their job. Their customers love this business. You know, it becomes part of your culture now. So easier said than done, but that has probably been one of, if not the most important piece of our success, is getting a really strong core team who was good at what they did, who liked working with each other, that created this.

love that our customers have for us that have differentiated us in the marketplace and that also created a really good culture for anyone else who joined the team, whether you’re no matter where you are in the organizational structure of where it’s like, these are actually really great people. I enjoy coming to work and I like, I like what this company’s doing.

That’s a lot a lot of good wisdom in that. Thank you so much, Matt. That’s fabulous. Now,

Mm-hmm.

I’m curious, because we talked about the beginning. You talked a lot about your growth. I’m curious how many years has it been? And now you told us a lot what it was like at the beginning. You know, you’re having to be dynamic, you’re having to wear a lot of these hats. What does your day to day look like now compared to that?

it’s it’s a little different, you know, like I don’t talk to people like customers at all anymore, really. I mean very rarely. So I would say a lot of my time is spent in management functions, obviously, with the leadership team, with other managers. I’m very connected to the marketing team and still part of marketing and customer acquisition, imp important relationships. And another big piece is is like recruiting.

employees and and recruiting team members. we had a period of growth where we were hiring an employee every few weeks, you know, and we were tr really trying to be diligent and getting good people. so I spent a lot of time just recruiting. and I think that’s I think as a business owner, you’ve got to, you know, like we’re a human capital business. Our largest expense item is payroll. We’re not like a, you know,

capital intensive business. We’re not like buying a lot of inventory, right? We’re providing a service and and accounts. But payroll is our number one expense item. And so it’s important for us in our profit margins, but it’s also it’s like critical in of the delivery of services. Like our customers are in the end working with a person. So so so I think nailing your people is is big. And so I spent a lot of time on that. But from

beginning to now and and it just gets more and more intensified the the the larger I get.

Right. that’s I think really helpful for from like a meta perspective of of course for any business, we really a through line from a lot of your your answers has been the importance of like that marketing piece, right? Of making sure that your client understands the value you’re providing and then the back end piece of making sure that you’re doing a quality job of providing it.

Yeah, and that’s your brand, you know, like the service you end up providing becomes your brand. And, you know, we we we grew so fast and we’ve been on the Inc. 5000 list four years in a row. we’ve grown tremendously fast. And when you do that, if you screw it up, you’re gonna mess up your brand. And every industry, you’ve got a brand reputation. And I’d been in my industry long enough to know the companies that had a good reputation and the one whose reputation sucked. And I was like very

Right.

Like I’m like, we are not gonna screw this up. We are gonna have the best brand in the industry. And and and I think that’s what we’ve built. But being you have to be like intentional about that. And we’ve sacrificed growth for that. Like we could have grown faster, actually. We had sacrifice growth for that in the short term because we wanted to make sure that we were delivering a high level of service and some margins too. I mean, you could obviously we could be jamming through more customers at a lower service level and be making more money.

But in the long in the end of the day, there’s not much the the brand is gonna suffer for that. And so, so yeah, I mean it’s there’s just all these different levers in the business and things you gotta think about. I don’t want to get like too theoretical here, but you know, I I don’t care whether you’re a plumbing contractor or, you know, whatever you’re doing and you’re thinking, all right, I need to hire more plumbers. how can I get more margin out of this? I can pay them less.

I can have them do more work. I can charge the customer more. I mean, you have a lot of decisions to make there, but you if in the long run, like if you can make some short term decisions there that might look good on an Excel spreadsheet and and on your bottom line, but in the long run, your brand’s gonna suffer. And now what do you gotta do? You gotta market twice as hard to overcome that crappy brand.

Because if the brand’s strong, they’re gonna recommend their friends. You’re gonna get a lot of free revenue in the future if you build a strong brand. Whereas if you don’t, you’re gonna have to go pay. And now you’re bleeding money out on advertising and marketing expense to get customer acquisition because your brand sucks. and there’s a lot of companies in my industry that have to do that. They’re the ones advertising all over everywhere because their natural customers they get aren’t gonna refer their friends and family.

You know, I had an episode a few weeks back, Matt, with a a property manager and turnkey company in the real estate investing space who does zero advertising because they have their core client group and they get referrals and that brings them plenty of business. And I had just gone to a a conference where there were a lot of their competitors who were paying a lot of money to have fancy

Yeah.

booths at that conference. And it was a good a good contrast between the points that you’re making.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean there’s really there’s so many different ways to to build a business. And, you know, you’re gonna have different strengths. So obviously everybody’s gonna have their different strengths, but I would not lose sight of your brand and what’s the brand value that you have. I know it seems, you know, when you’re if you’re star starting out and smaller, it’s like, yeah, that doesn’t seem that big of a deal. But as as you start trying to retain your customers and grow your customer base, it’s like this.

free gift of new customers that you get and that you don’t have to go pay for, like like the property manager you’re talking about that doesn’t have to advertise.

Right.

Well, that’s been a lot of great wisdom, I think, to help our entrepreneur audience think about how they could build a business, become a business owner, and make money off of the business and not just their own hours. I’d love to shift gears and talk about that second piece that we mentioned at the beginning, how you entrepreneurs can have their money make the money for them. And let’s dive into self-directed IRAs. You know, I have had a self-directed IRA for years. we use it for our our private money lending within the real estate space.

Yeah.

And

I think it’s fabulous and a not a lot of people know about it. So for our business owners who’ve never used one, can you give an introduction of like what is a self directed IRA, this service that you provide to people?

Yeah. So essentially what a self-directed IRA is, it’s an IRA that can invest in any asset allowed by law. So most people think of an IRA or 401k buying a stock or a mutual fund. Like that’s the investment, right? And your your IRA or 401k goes up if the stock goes up, or maybe there’s some dividends paid. That’s all building up in your IRA account, right? And you can get it when you’re 59 and a half. Well, in a self-directed IRA, you can go and invest the account into

Real estate. So instead of the stock or the mutual fund being the investment asset, like you own the rental property down the street, you know. and the income on that, the rental income goes in the IRA. When you sell the property, the gain goes in the IRA. And you literally take distribution to 59 and a half. So that’s all growing in the account, tax deferred if you have a traditional account or tax-free if you have a Roth. And so now and you could do private lending, which is what you do. I do a lot of private lending out of my own self-directed account too, where

I’m lending other real estate investors money. They’re paying me 12% interest and two points, annual interest and then points. So I’m getting a 15, 14% annual return, let’s say. But that’s going back into my IRA. It’s not hitting my 1040. I’m not paying taxes on that income. It’s building in a tax advantage retirement account.

Now we have people’s IRAs that invest in startups, in private funds, in crypto, in small businesses, in livestock. I mean, we’ve had a lot of clients’ IRAs invested in private companies that have gone public now, that have invested in professional. We have a client’s IRA that’s invested in a professional Mexican soccer team. Like you can invest in really any asset allowed by law, which the law only restricts like S corporation stock.

Life insurance and collectibles. Those are the only investment assets you can’t own with an IRA. So everything else is fair game. And real estate is like the most common asset because you know it’s more people have become millionaires from real estate than anything else. So that’s definitely very popular. A lot of our accounts are doing real estate. But that’s the nutshell, self-directed IRA.

Thank you. That was fabulous overview. And for somebody who’s listening and they’re like, they’ve got, you know, retirement accounts in conventional, you know, stock market, and they’re like, why would I do this instead? What is your response to that?

you would do it instead if you believed that the investments that you could make, whether it’s a real estate deal, a small business, crypto, a private fund, is better, a better investment than the stock market. So, you know, there’s $50 trillion in US retirement accounts. Like there’s more money there than anywhere to invest. And many Americans, most Americans, have their own little sliver of that $50 trillion. And so

You know, Wall Street has basically said, hey, we control most of the IRA accounts. You can invest in what we sell. And for a lot of people, that’s fine. And even for many Americans, it’s like it’s a it’s good for a portion of their retirement account, maybe even the majority. But for a lot of people, that’s not necessarily the best investment. It’s not always gonna be buy a stock bond or mutual fund, invest in the public stock market. Like that is not always the best answer. So

Well what you can do with a self-directed IRA, what we do at directed IRA is your IRA can invest in the best investment you can find. If that happens to be a small business deal, a real estate deal, then do it with your IRA. And I’ll see too, self-directing isn’t for everybody, you know, but for like you was you mentioned, like your audience of business owners, for business owners and entrepreneurs, real estate investors, it’s probably the account they should be using. They’re more entrepreneurial, they’re willing to go make deals.

Yeah.

They’re willing to go look at things and use their judgment and and they like betting on themselves, so to speak. So I think and so we get a lot of clients that are business owners, entrepreneurs, real estate investors, those are perfect people that love a self-directed IRA.

I know what I hear a lot of people kinda along the lines like you’re saying with entrepreneurs, business owners, is I hear a lot of people saying they don’t want the the potential gain or loss of their investment to be off of what somebody who’s running a you know, let’s say a Fortune five hundred hundred company or something like that.

Yeah.

they want to be able to control their own destiny a little bit more. And they feel like with a self directed IRA

Totally.

they can do that.

Yeah, that’s me. That’s like me to a T what you just described there is like even if I lose, even if I’m it’s like, you know what? That was on me. I I like having control of my destiny and deciding, you know what, if I go make some great decisions and I go find some good deals, you can structure the investment. Right. I mean, the stock market and publicly traded assets are take it or leave it. And there’s a lot, so much of it’s about timing and to and right when you’re getting in and out of the market.

You know, the stock market’s been great recently, but is it at a high? What’s gonna happen the next year? Is this the time to get out? And maybe you should invest in alternatives. You know, there’s always the you know, buy low, sell high. Is this the sell high time? And everybody’s got to make their judgment on that.

Yeah.

But yeah, I think that that is like the that’s the thinking of the self-directed investor is that control of your own destiny, being more attached to your money.

You know, so for so many Americans, they have hundreds of thousands of dollars in an IRA or four or one K. And most of them can’t even tell you what’s in what it’s invested into. Like, I’m, you know, they’re like, I don’t know what’s

not at all.

in my IRA or four one K. I’m like, I know, but what’s it invested into? They’re like, I don’t know, you know, and that’s really sad. Even if they’re not gonna self-direct, they should really be attached to what is that investing in. We spent years, decades, so many Americans.

you know, sacrificing money in the account and then we’re just like, I don’t know what it’s invested in. I mean, it’s insane to me, but

Right.

this truly gives you the connection to the dollars to invest it in the investments that you figure that you determine to be the best.

That makes a lot of sense. Now, if somebody’s thinking about this or gonna maybe get into a self directed d IRA for the first time, what is one of like the top mistakes you see people make when they start self directing the IRA funds so that all of our listeners can avoid that?

the first thing you should know is when we’re talking about real estate in particular, that’s where you see some do see some mistakes is the IRA is not buying real estate for you. It’s not buying real estate for you to use. We’re talking about the IRA’s buying a property because it’s a good investment, because there’s gonna be good cash flow on the rental, or you’re lending money to some other investor because of the interest rate. So there’s there are some rules called prohibited transaction rules you can violate.

If you’re buying the real estate so you can use it, or your kids can stay in it, or you’re lending money to yourself or your own company from your IRA. That actually violates the rules. So when you think of using your IRA to invest, let’s say in real estate, you’re doing that because you believe the real estate asset to be a good investment, not because you’re trying to get some personal benefit of the asset by having use of it or something like that. So I’d steer clear of that. The other thing I would say is.

Get some education on it. I always say self-directing an IRA is not rocket science. It’s more like a board game. But even with the board game, you need to know the rules before you start rolling the dice and playing it and moving pieces around. So it’s it’s not that hard. Once you’ve played it once or twice, you’ve done a couple of investments. The rest are all the same. So it’s just a little different than typing in a ticker symbol on an app on your phone to buy or sell something.

So you just need to learn learn the process. And our team’s here, you know, it’s not like I said, it is not hard. it’s just different than typing in a ticker symbol. You’re gonna find the investment. Your IRA’s gonna own it. There’s some actual paperwork sometime that typically that’s gonna happen. but our team helps with all of that and helps guide you through it to make sure it’s done properly.

you’re mute.

Thank you. we’ve had some background noise here, so I’ve had to mute more than I usually do. so let’s say we’ve got this listener and they are like, my goodness, self-directed IRAs are for me. I want to invest in these alternative assets with part or all of my retirement. They’re sitting on an old 401k or an IRA from a previous job. What’s the first practical step to get that money working in alternative assets through this self-directed IRA?

Yeah, I just book a call with our team. This start from there, it’s free. So you can just go to our website, directed IRA.com, click book a call, set up a an appointment with one of our account reps. And these are all highly experienced people on the team that that do these calls. So they can walk you through like what you’re actually thinking about doing and start guiding you in the right direction. And it might be like the answer might be like, here’s some more education on that. We do a webinar every week. Like there’s like 50 webinars a year that we’re doing the on different

Wow.

topics.

We have two annual events. I, as you mentioned at the beginning, I literally wrote the book on this. Like if you’re the the pilot, the engineer, the doctor that wants to like deep dive something, I wrote a book with a hundred plus citations, you know, on the tax code and everything.

Mm-hmm.

I’m a tax attorney. So like, so whether you want kind of like however you want to learn about it, we basically have resources for you. and we know there’s a little education gap because the the most typical customer we get is someone that’s never done this before.

And so that we know there’s a little bit of a learning curve to be like, all right, I need to understand how this works, how do I do it? So just get a little educated on it first. And this is your retirement dollars. I mean, there’s lot of money there for for many people. So you want to make sure you you learn before you kind of dive in. and then you can make the decision to say once you’ve got a little education, it’s like, all right, this makes sense for me. And if it does, great. If not, nope, you know, no big deal. Just be a little more focused on your retirement dollars now and what you’re doing.

that’s true. I mean the thing is any of our listeners can walk away with this and I at the very least I hope that you are motivated to look into how your retirement dollars are working for you, seeing how that is, making sure it is to your best advantage. And if it’s not or you think there could be improvement, then you can look at transitioning over to a self-directed IRA and putting it into some alternative assets with directed IRA. And Matt has a great team ready to educate and help you determine if that’s the right choice for you.

Yeah, well thank you, Adrian, and thanks for having me. I appreciate you giving me a little commercial there. I I appreciate that. always love talking about directed IRA and thanks for giving me that opportunity.

Yeah, thank you for coming on, Matt. It’s been great to hear about how you built this business. You’ve got a lot of wisdom here for all of the entrepreneurs and business owners in the audience. And then, of course, helping them have their money do the work so that they don’t have to work you know, forever. So thank you so much, Matt. And thank you to our listeners for joining me on another episode of Scale Smart Grow Fast. I’ll see you again next week.

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The post Scaling Discipline: What Directed IRA’s Founder Learned About Operational Leverage first appeared on Workergenix.

1. Opening Scaling Tension

Revenue climbs. Headcount grows. The org chart finally looks like something. And yet the founder is still the one who has to sign off, still the one every decision routes back to, still the one carrying the operational weight of a company that was supposed to be running without them by now. This is one of the least discussed failures in scaling: growth doesn’t automatically produce leverage. For a lot of operators, it produces the opposite — more surface area, more re-decisions, more cognitive load, and a founder who is technically leading a bigger business but functionally more constrained than when it was small.

This is the tension executive coach Angelica Ventrice unpacks with Adrienne Green on Scale Smart, Grow Fast: the habits and instincts that got a founder to $3M, $10M, or $50M are frequently the same habits capping what comes next. Ventrice calls this the identity trap — and for operators evaluating where their scaling discipline is actually breaking down, it’s a useful diagnostic, not a motivational concept.

2. The Hidden Constraint

The real constraint in most founder-led businesses isn’t capital, market, or even talent. It’s leadership bandwidth. Ventrice’s framing is direct: the traits that make someone a high performer — overachievement, hypervigilance, the instinct to hold every thread personally — are identity-level patterns formed early and reinforced by early-stage success. They worked when the business was small enough for one person to be the execution engine. They stop working the moment the business needs the founder to operate at a different altitude.

The failure mode isn’t laziness or lack of systems knowledge. It’s that the founder is still personally routing decisions that no longer require them, because letting go reads as risk — reputational, operational, or identity-based. That’s the hidden constraint underneath most “we need to scale” conversations: it’s not a systems problem yet, it’s a bandwidth allocation problem, and no amount of hiring fixes it until the founder changes what they’re personally holding.

3. The Operating Shift

The operating shift Ventrice describes is straightforward in concept and difficult in practice: separate what genuinely requires the founder’s judgment from what is only routed to the founder out of habit, identity, or unexamined obligation. She frames this as an audit question, not a mindset platitude — look at the full list of what currently sits on your plate and ask, for each item, whether it’s there because it demands your specific judgment or because it’s fulfilling a need to feel necessary.

This reframes delegation. It isn’t about offloading hours. It’s about correctly classifying decision rights — which is the actual mechanism behind operational leverage. A founder who delegates tasks but keeps making the underlying decisions hasn’t reduced their load; they’ve just added a reporting layer on top of the same bottleneck. The shift only produces leverage when authority, not just activity, moves off the founder’s desk.

4. Execution in Practice

Three execution patterns from the conversation translate directly into scaling discipline for operators managing real capital, teams, and risk exposure:

Reducing cognitive load through disciplined list-cutting. Ventrice’s client work starts with radically shortening the operating list — not a productivity hack, but a way to force clarity on what actually requires founder-level judgment versus what has been kept out of habit. Fewer open decisions per day is a direct lever on decision speed and decision quality, which compounds over a quarter far more than working longer hours does.

Eliminating re-decisions through structured hiring and onboarding. The case example in the conversation — a founder whose business scaled faster than its hiring process could support — is a familiar pattern for operators managing multiple properties, entities, or business lines. Fast, under-specified hiring creates people who require constant founder correction, which is a re-decision tax paid indefinitely. The fix isn’t more hiring, it’s more rigor per hire: real SOPs, real screening criteria, and slower onboarding traded against long-run execution stability. Hire slow, fire fast is a risk management principle as much as a hiring one.

Separating leading from managing as a capital allocation decision. Ventrice’s distinction — leading sets direction and develops others’ judgment, managing keeps a hand in every operational detail — maps directly onto how capital allocators think about time. Every hour a founder spends managing instead of leading is time not spent on the decisions that actually move enterprise value: capital deployment, risk exposure, market timing, and portfolio-level tradeoffs. Protecting leadership bandwidth is, functionally, a capital allocation decision.

5. Leverage Outcome

None of this is about doing less for its own sake. It’s about correctly locating where founder judgment adds real value and removing the founder from everything else. That’s what leverage actually is: expanded capacity through structure, not endurance through longer hours. Operators who make this shift don’t just recover time — they recover decision quality, because the decisions that remain on their desk are the ones that genuinely need them.

The founders who scale past $10M without losing control of their business aren’t the ones who work harder than everyone else in the room. They’re the ones who built the execution systems and ownership transfer early enough that growth stopped requiring more of them personally. That’s the difference between a business that scales and a founder who’s just gotten better at carrying more weight.

Connect With the Guest

To learn more about Angelica Ventrice and her work: Website: https://angelicaventrice.com/ LinkedIn: [Add confirmed LinkedIn URL here — not independently verified]

The Immediate Move

The constraint on your business right now is almost certainly not capital, market, or headcount. It’s how much of your own judgment is still routed through decisions that no longer require it. Structure — not effort, not another hire, not longer hours — is what expands capacity. That means auditing what’s actually on your plate, transferring real ownership (not just tasks) off it, and building the disciplined decision-making that removes re-decisions from your day permanently.

Watch this before you hire your next support role.

Like what you read? Get weekly insights on scaling, efficiency, and profitability straight to your inbox. Click here to subscribe.

Full Podcast Transcript

Welcome back to Scale Smart Grow Fast. My guest today is Angelica Ventrice. She’s a TEDx and keynote speaker, an executive and leadership coach, and she works with high-achieving founders on something she calls the identity trap, which I love the name of that. The patterns that got you here, but might be capping what comes next. Her background is a mix of behavioral psychology, holistic health, and human performance, which you know I am here for all of that. And she has spent

Fifteen years helping ambitious leaders operate differently under pressure. So, Angelica, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for having me.

And when when did you first notice that the patterns that were making leaders successful were the same ones that were holding them back?

With myself, qu quite honestly. So, you know, I come from that background in pharmaceutical sales and then I became an entrepreneur. So really like high achiever perfectionist ingrained in me. And I was like, these things, they made me really successful, right? They made me a number one rep in the country. They made me a successful entrepreneur. But at the same time, the overachievement, right? The overdoing, the extra pressure, the hypervigilance living in that, it started to cost me like my health. At one point my revenue drop because I just was I was doing too much and I was like.

trying to handle it all. So I first noticed it within me. So that was the first, yeah, with within myself.

That’s so true. And I love that you could notice it in yourself and then you can, you know, take those lessons you learned to improve yourself to help others.

Course.

So let’s talk about what is the identity trap in plain terms and how does somebody know if they’re in it?

Hmm,

great question. The identity trap, similar to what you said before, is often the identities that help us survive, make us successful, are not the same identities that we need to carry to the next level in our lives and our health and our business and our relationships. But we cling on to them because most of us attach them from the time we were like, you know, ages zero to twelve. And they can come from our environment, our parents, our teachers, our friends, things we heard, or maybe even a pressure we put on ourselves. And because those identities kept us safe, secure, and validated.

We can become trapped in them, right? It’s like your ego is keeping you safe and you feel good in this one identity, even though maybe deep down you know it’s time to shift, right? And I actually teach four phases of identity transformation. The first phase is awareness, the second phase is radical acceptance, the next is embodiment, and the next is mastery. So when you’re in the identity trap, it can take quite some time to get out of it. How does someone know they’re in it? Tapping into yourself and finding places where you feel out of alignment.

you feel like you’re not operating at your highest level where you feel like maybe you want to move here or go there, but there’s this this quiet voice saying, no, you’re not worthy or no, you you shouldn’t do that. So it it first comes with having level awareness. So paying attention to your habits, your the voice in your head, the behaviors that you’re you’re doing day in and day out, the way you’re operating.

Right. I will say it’s funny because we’ve traveled internationally for two and a half years and so often when you’re in that same day today, it can be really you’re kind of like deaf to like that

Mm-hmm.

little voice, right? That voice of what’s a good fit for you and what isn’t. And now that like I have stepped away from I think the day-to-day of American life or so much, I get a very I I I hear that voice and it screams and I have a very hard

There we go.

time

It screams.

doing something

that feels out of alignment. I’m like, I and because I have a very expressive face. Yes.

Literally visiting. Yeah, well viscerally in your body too, right? It’s it’s learning how to check

in with your body. And yes, and I wanna point out something you said. You had to step away. So really, how does someone know they’re an identity trap? They have to tap some space, they have to have some white space, some clarity time, some time away from the business, time away from the day to day, like you just said, to be like, Wait, the way I’m living isn’t really in alignment with my values and who I want to be.

Yeah. And then and then it screams. So let’s say a lit a leader’s yes.

A leader’s listening, they’re like, Hey, this is resonating a little bit. I want to learn more. They’re starting to see maybe some patterns. You said the first move to break it is is awareness. Can you dive into that a little bit?

Yeah,

giving yourself the space to become aware. And the only way I would do that, if I were to coach, I would say, okay, let’s take a look at what you do from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed. And I’ll often like take a look at how my clients are operating. I’m like, where’s the time for you? Where’s 10 minutes to breathe? Where’s five minutes to go outside to get some sunlight? Where’s the time for you to have some space, mental space?

What high achievers, leaders, founders love to do is like they’d like to add another thing on the to-do list, another thing to their project list. And that doesn’t allow them to create the space to even become aware of what’s holding them back, right? You can only really become aware if you take a few moments to slow down. And a lot of people are aware of the things that hold them back. They just don’t want to put in the effort to change because the ego is protecting them.

Yes, yes. And change is difficult. It requires learning something new or unlearning a past habit.

Right.

So I think in a similar way, what I see a lot through like Workergenix and helping people delegate is that a lot of founders and entrepreneurs, they struggle to let go of control, right? That’s one of the issues.

Yeah, me there. Not me.

So how do you walk somebody through that?

First

things first, with what what are you doing that doesn’t light you up?

Right. As entrepreneurs, we can wear a lot of hats. We could do the finance, we could the marketing, we could do the funnel work. And that was something for me. I was like, why am I doing all this work? And that’s when I brought in these because I’m like, I could learn click funnels, I could learn active campaign, I could learn all these CRMs, but do I enjoy it? Absolutely not. I hated it, wanted to pull my hair out. So I was like, what’s the first thing I can give away that’ll bring give me more energy? Take a look at what’s draining your life. And for most entrepreneurs’ leaders, it’s some people like the techie stuff, but some people don’t. Some people, it’s like it’s marketing. What is draining you? And

sometimes it could be something you’re semi good at, but is it draining your energy? Right. Like that’s how that’s how I how help my leaders. Like if this is something you could be good at, but if you really, really hate it, eventually that’s gonna catch up to you and it is going to affect your revenue.

Yes, and I love that. And that’s another example of like listening to that voice inside, right? Listening to that voice about is this giving you energy, is it exciting you or is it draining you?

Yeah. Like does it make you I always say does it make you expand or contract? And anything that comes up with tech or funnel or things like that, my body’s like, no, I’m contracting, like help me. But then if you talk about marketing and sales, I’m like, let’s go. You know what I mean? Like I light up. So yeah, paying attention to your

Right.

body cues.

And one thing that this reminds me of is a recent conversation I have. I mentioned to you before Heart Rock Collective, my mastermind for women real estate investors. And what I love about that business is I have a co-founder and we have different things that light us up. So we’re able to then divide. Like you give me the back end operations and I’m making an SOP in systems, I’m happy all day. And she’s like loves to talk to people, find new members, like connect with them. And so it’s nice when we can have a team.

Right. Compliment each other.

Yes. Yeah. Love that. Yeah.

Exactly. And we’re all in our zone of genius. So

what I’d like to let that’s continue down like, you know, the client journey for these leaders and entrepreneurs. So they’ve identified something, they’ve recognized like they they see that there’s an issue, they’ve identified something that makes them contract. When they finally hand off that task, what changes for them and what changes for the business?

So

much clarity, so much lightness, so much alignment, and not just

In the business, in their relationships, in their health. I just see my clients transform in all areas. There’s often when my founders come to me, they’re very successful, but there’s a heaviness that I often feel from them. And it’s because they’re hyper-vigilant, doing everything, operating. Once again, high achievers love to operate under pressure. It’s like normal for them. It’s like, yeah, we’re just it’s pressure. It’s it’s normal. It’s like it’s not normal. You don’t need to live that way. So there’s just a a load that comes off of them energetically, spiritually, mentally. And then of course it trickles into their business because they’ve delegated or because

they’ve

taken some things off their plate, right? That they that no longer was aligned to them, they feel better. That means they show up in the area of business that they really can excel in. Like you said, their zone of genius. And automatically then the not automatically like doesn’t happen like that, but the business then starts to grow in a more sustainable, fun way for them, really. And they’re happier doing it, which is what it’s all about.

And what you’re saying, you the way you say it, I mean, I could see a listener going and being like, yeah, that makes sense. This makes perfect sense. And it does. And yet, what the

It’s C part.

high achiever thinks, the high achiever thinks, no, my business is going to do better if I do more, right?

hands with everything.

Yeah, well, I mean, I’m a perfect example of that. You can only, you know, when I first started online years ago is holistic health coaching. I got to so many clients and then I was doing everything the finance and the marketing, doing wearing all the hats. And I’m like, I literally can’t take on any more clients because I’m doing all these other things. So you have to get real with yourself. You want to scale you want the name of this podcast, right? You want to scale your business, you have to take a hard look and say, I am I the bottleneck right now because a lot of entrepreneurs become the bottleneck

Right. And and so many entrepreneurs, business leaders, they’re mission driven, right? They want they believe in what they’re doing. And the cool thing, if people can get it, which I get, it’s a hard thing to you know, to take in mind is wow, if I do less and I do and yet what I’m really doing is my zone of genius and what I’m doing well, I will help more people. My mission will be further than if I do it all, and I’ll make more money. Yes.

Make more money. Right. And I’ll make

money. I literally had a client said that to say that to me recently. She was like, Well, since you told me to cut my to-do list in half, in half, and take like, you know, walk in the middle of the day or just cut my day off early because she was one of those like working with the computer in the bed, right? She’s like, I’m actually making more money and getting more referrals and I feel so much better. I’m like, What do you know? What do you know? I love it. Yeah.

I love that. So

that brings me to my next question, Angelica. If you were designing someone’s week for all of this optimal performance, right? In the sense of like optimal performance isn’t doing the most, it’s doing the best. What would you build in first?

White

space for them. Yeah.

Whether that’s five minutes in the morning, 30 minutes at lunchtime, white space, because like I said earlier, and I know you would agree, what we see high achievers, high level founders, leaders do is pack the calendar. And just because the calendar is packed doesn’t actually, you know, busy doesn’t mean productive or efficient. And a lot of high achievers tend to think that well, I’m going here, I’m doing this. It’s like, is everyone you’re meeting with, do you need to meet with them? Is that necessary? Is every connection call necessary? Is every networking event necessary? Is every meeting you’re sitting in, do you need to be there? So really taking a look at

The it once again goes back to energy, physical, mental, spiritual energy is the way I view it. but I would give them more white space. Cause if I look at the patterns of all the clients that I’ve helped, that’s one of the first things. It’s like where can we build in some space for you during the day? Because you’re giving to your business, you’re giving to your kids, you’re giving, giving, giving. What about pouring back into you first?

And so when I think of like the challenges you probably get when you bring that to people or the challenges people get when they look to implement it, one of the first things is I could see being like, well, what do I do in that white space?

Yeah, yeah, that they say that. What do I do? And I say sit there in silence. And they’re like, what do you mean? I’m like, sit there, no phone, no computer, nothing, nothing. Just sit there and sit with yourself and see how uncomfortable that feels for you to check in with yourself and be present and listen to the birds or listen to the ocean or listen to the beeping horns if you live in the city, whatever wherever you are. Like, what does that feel like? And that’s how you get in touch with yourself. And that’s how you grow to the next level in your life, in your business, by getting to know who you really are, aka your identity, right?

Right.

That’s

where you discover the identity trap when you’re sitting there in silence, like, wait, I’m not really liking this direction I’m going. wait, this doesn’t really feel in line.

Mm-hmm. Right. I love that. It it reminds me a lot of the idea of like meditation and the idea of just being present in the moment. Yeah.

Yeah. And baby step. Being present.

Like I do teach my clients meditation, but I’m never gonna tell them to meditate for thirty minutes every morning like me when they can’t even sit still for two. So we start with two minutes, we go to three. I also record them short meditations so they can get used to it. And they like, I think, the comfortability of like it being my voice rather than a random person off YouTube or whatever. So that really helps them and I’ll get messages like that was amazing, that really helped me. So just little things like that. Baby stepping it out.

Right, just like the first time you go to the gym. You’re not gonna go lift the heaviest thing for your squats. You’re gonna start with ten pounds, twenty and go on. So it’s the same thing with sitting in silence and meditation. Giving your time that self is really important, especially as an entrepreneur.

That makes sense and I think when you present it as like, Hey, we’re gonna start with baby steps, you’re not gonna jump the deep end of the pool from day one.

Right. Yeah.

That makes it little more approachable for people.

become Buddha like meditating for three hours a day right off the bat. But can you do something for yourself? And if you’re like I don’t really I really don’t want to sit then I’m like then take a walk. But do something for yourself. Whatever to maybe. Yeah, turn inward.

Right, yeah. That makes sense.

Now the second piece I think actually pause and John’s gonna cut this, because I had a second question that was related to this.

about the meditation.

And

it it was this it was something else with I know what it was. Okay, so the second thing I think of, let me restate that. The second thing I think of when you’re like, okay, give more white space, cut out what’s non-essential, is the idea that people are like, but I’ve always done this, right? Or if I cut this meeting that I I don’t get anything out of it, but I’ve been meeting with this, you know, this mastermind of this cohort for years.

Yes.

What’s gonna happen, right? Scarcity mindset, limiting beliefs, sunk cost fallacy. Talk

to us about that, because I’m sure immediately when people think about, if I was gonna

Yeah.

cut out, let’s say, twenty percent of my day, a lot of objections are gonna come into their brain.

Totally.

I get the objections all time. So one of the main things I noticed is like the old people pleasing tendencies because this is how they grew up, like making sure everyone else is okay. Like, well, they’re used to seeing me at this time and they’re used to me leading the call or they’re used to me being in this meeting. It’s like they may be used to it, but like, what does it feel like to you and your body and your schedule and you know, for you? And it’s like asking yourself that question. It’s like, are we the more you say yes to everyone else and everything, the more you’re saying no to yourself, your needs, your true alignment.

And no is a complete sentence. Let’s remember that. It’s okay to say no. So it’s it’s dealing with the people pleasing tendencies that a lot of these leaders have. And then it’s going back the way I helped them work through, is going back to like, where did this come from? it came from when you were five and your dad did this or your mom said this and then you did this. So it’s like these are deep seated. They’ve been carrying it for 30, 40, maybe 50 years. So you know just snap your fingers and work through it. But it’s it’s it’s a slow process to work through it, but it it definitely creates a shift for them after all the objections.

I will say when I’ve been in masterminds or with like other groups of women, all the time I I’m telling them, no is a complete sentence. So I

Thank you.

love that you threw that out. That is like one of my things. That if I’m in a group, people know I’m gonna say it.

Yeah, I love

that. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s important for people to know that it’s okay to say no without always explaining. If you’re the leader of your company and say, Hey, I’m not gonna be attending this meeting anymore, period. You can explain it, but you could also say I won’t be attending this meeting. XYZ will be stepping in for me to take notes. Whatever, you know, how however you want to word it. Yeah, there’s a difference between leading and

I love that.

managing, right?

Like

leading is you’re helping lead other people and you’re being your highest best self. Managing is having your hands involved in every little thing and thinking you need to control everything. And if you’re trying to scale your company, you need to learn how to be a leader, not a manager. Very different.

Well and I think even Angelica, your description there of like leadership and management, leadership felt exciting and light and manag management did not.

Right? Totally. Yeah. No one wants to be a manager. So yeah, if you’re listening to this and you are a leader, a founder, and those two definitions, if one just made if the way I describe manager feels like you, check in with yourself. What can you delegate? What can you shift? How can you make it lighter for you so you feel like you’re actually leading and helping other people develop other people, help them grow? That’s the fun part about being a leader.

Love that. And I just love how everything you’re saying is really reframing what could be seen in a scarcity mindset into an abundance mindset and an exciting opportunity instead.

Yeah.

Now, if a leader is is starting down this path, they’re starting to shift out of this constant doing, they’re identifying the identity trap and starting to make these changes. What are some of the early signs that you see like with your clients that that it’s working? What are some of the early differences that come about?

Things

like I told you my client said to me. I cut my sk I cut my to do list in half. I told her only put six things on and she’s already feeling like more clients are coming in. She’s feeling lighter, she’s having more time for herself and to work out. I see it impact their lives overall. So they all

Eventually start to make more money. Like I had a client we’re working through some of her childhood trauma, releasing the you know, her parents told her when she was young that she was dumb and she’s carried this with her into being a high level luxury realtor and she still doesn’t feel like she deserves these properties, XYZ. So we’re working through that. We work through it, and like a few weeks later, she gets three buyers who want to buy in the ten million, you know, because she’s now starting to believe in herself and vibrate at a different level, right? So those are some of the amazing shifts. And then marriages are better, bodies are better.

Routines are better. So it it s it spills into all areas of their life.

love that and the thing is like I could see somebody who let’s just say is like low vibration and doesn’t believe it being like no this is too good to be true and yet it really is. So do you have any other we’re gonna kind of cut this a little bit here I think but I love because you’ve answered like all of our questions super fast, which I love. Like you are no nonsense, but I don’t want to like have it be a super short episode and like whatever not have people feel like they get enough time to get to know you.

Yeah.

So

I was thinking we could do s like like a a case study or something if that works for you. Okay, so I’ll ask for that. And if you’ve got someone in mind, like Jen or

Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, we can talk about Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Jayin or whatever. But I know you’ve given a lot of examples where maybe you can like a whole case study beginning to end kind of thing.

Sure, yes, I’ll go.

Okay. All right. Angelica, you’ve given us so many great examples. I would love to hear kind of like a case study. You know, the situation when somebody started, how how bad it was, and what they were able to be at when they were

experienced working with you and working through this system.

Yes,

let me think. So I have a client, we’ll just call her Jen. Her and her husband own a very successful construction business. And when they came to me, she was doing everything. She was doing everything to the point that she was crying to me on the phone with how miserable she was because she’s like, I’m doing things I really don’t even like doing. Do I even want to be in this business? And, you know, she felt bad because she wanted to be there for her husband. This is their business. But she also was like, I also want to do things that light me up. So we started working together.

What she realized was that okay, I need to hand off these pieces of the business and I need to do something a little bit for myself. Whether it was, I mean, she thought maybe she was gonna go into nutrition coaching, now she’s maybe going to be a travel agent because she loves travel. That really is neither here nor there.

But it was allowing herself to see like I can still help my husband with this business and help be successful by seeing what I can outsource. Because she said something you said earlier. If I don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. If I don’t do it, I you know, it’s it’s not good enough. And it’s like we have to hire people that are actually better than us. So I helped her create SOPs, recruiting questions, really good like, really take that process seriously because what I think they were doing before, you know, when you’re you start out as a small company and then you grow so big and now they’re expanding into other countries as well, which is amazing.

But you don’t really have all your SOPs or operations or processes. And sometimes you hire people that I hate to use this word, F you over, right? Like they’re not the right people because you didn’t really have an in-depth hiring process. So I helped I helped them with that, getting more in-depth with the recruiting, who they’re hiring, taking their time. You know, I always say like hire slow, fire fast. And I think because they were expanding so much and she was like, I need to offload, get rid of this stuff. It’s like you hire too fast, and then you end up back going backwards sometimes. So helping her with that and then helping her find really who she was.

And what’s aligned to her. And through doing that, giving her some space to say, I love nutrition or I love traveling. Maybe I’m gonna dabble in this while still helping my husband has allowed their relationship, is better, their business is doing amazing, and they’re expanding into other countries. So it’s just beautiful to see. Like you, like we said, you can be good. She was good at so many things in the business, but it was really bringing her down because it wasn’t lighting her up. She felt so drained, so out of alignment. So yeah, now she’s on an amazing path.

That’s a fabulous example. And I think you brought up a really good point about delegation as well. So often people like you’re not gonna have a hundred percent success rate with hiring. That’s just across the board. That is a given, right?

Right, totally. Yeah.

And so many people, when they delegate, maybe they are hiring like, you know, their neighbor or their best friend’s son or something.

Right. Yeah. I’ve done that. I

just hire this friend or this person that I know from X

Yes.

Y Z. Yes, totally been there. Yeah.

And and it may work greatly right great, but it might not. And so

Right. Right. Exactly.

one like let’s say strikeout with delegation doesn’t mean that delegation doesn’t work. It means that

Exactly.

delegating to that person didn’t work. And it sounds like that’s kind of what you helped her work through

Yeah. Yes.

and develop a system that was gonna have a much higher chance of success.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, and she and you know, they’re very thankful that for that and they’re doing so much better. you know, there’s still some times where I see her get a little caught in the weeds and I’m like, Okay, it’s time for another hire in the in this area, but she’s at least they’re they’re more open to it and she’s more open to it.

Right. And so Angelica, if somebody’s listening and they feel like they have some of the challenges that we’ve talked about, what is one small thing you would recommend that they start this week to start to break that identity trap?

Great.

So I would write out a list of everything I’m doing, like not your to-do list, right? Which is usually very long for high achievers. And I would ask myself, is it on there because

It makes me feel value and needed and you know, it’s fulfilling a sense of urgency, or is it really urgent? Does it need to be in there? Because sometimes we put things on our list to give us to give our ego a certain feeling. I feel value. I feel needed when I show up in this meeting, right? I’m the leader who’s needed. I gotta be in all these meetings. But are you doing it because you really need to be there, or are you doing it because it’s fulfilling an old wound or need and a piece of an identity that is no longer serving you?

That is super helpful and something people could easily do. Thank you, Angelica. And if people would like to connect with you or learn more about the identity trap and what you do, what is the best way for them to do so?

Instagram that’s way at the Angelica Ventries send me a message. I have a high performance audit you can take. It’s a little 20 question assessment that’ll actually show you which identity you’re operating from and then we do a little quick call to talk about that. Or you can connect with me on LinkedIn, just type my name in there as well.

Perfect. Well, thank you, Angelica. And for our listeners, what I love about this conversation is the reframe that the habits that built your success aren’t automatically the habits that will get you to the next chapter. Angelica gives us a real way to look at that honestly, spot some of these like destructive patterns, and start learning and leading from a different place that doesn’t cost you your piece. So if you’d like to go deeper with Angelica, please reach out. like she said on Instagram or on LinkedIn. Everything is below in the show notes. And

Perfect. That’s it. Let me just and then join me again next week for another episode of Scale Smart Grow Fast.

Thank you.

The post The Identity Trap: Why Growth Feels Heavier Instead of Easier first appeared on Workergenix.

Opening Scaling Tension

Most founder-led businesses hit the same wall on the way to $10M, $25M, or beyond: the org chart grows, the reporting improves, the team gets more capable — and decisions still route through one person. Not because the systems are broken. Because the operator at the center of them has never questioned whether they’re capable, in a given hour, of making a good decision.

This is the blind spot in most conversations about operational leverage. Founders audit their capital allocation, their pipeline, their SOPs, their hiring. Almost none of them audit the actual instrument making the calls: their own cognitive state. And that gap shows up exactly where it hurts most — in decision speed, in delegation that never fully lands, and in risk management that quietly degrades because the person setting the risk tolerance is running on inflammation and adrenaline rather than judgment.

The Hidden Constraint

The conversation, with neurologist and Brainshift Institute founder Dr. Romie Mushtaq, surfaces a constraint that rarely makes it into a strategy conversation: chronic stress produces measurable neuroinflammation, and neuroinflammation degrades the exact functions a scaling operator depends on — focus, impulse control, and the ability to tolerate letting go of control.

This matters for anyone allocating capital or building execution systems for a reason that has nothing to do with wellness framing and everything to do with operating discipline. A leader who is neurologically overloaded doesn’t make worse decisions because they lack frameworks. They make worse decisions because the part of the brain responsible for calm, data-driven judgment is functionally offline, and the part responsible for threat response and control-seeking is running the show. Delegation, in that state, isn’t a systems failure. It’s a biological one. The founder holds on to execution not out of poor management, but because the nervous system has classified letting go as unsafe.

That reframes the usual diagnosis. Most operators assume a delegation breakdown means the SOP was unclear, the hire was wrong, or the incentives were misaligned. Sometimes that’s true. But when the pattern repeats across multiple hires, multiple functions, and multiple attempts at structured delegation, the constraint isn’t the system. It’s leadership bandwidth — and specifically, the operator’s capacity to sit in ambiguity without re-inserting themselves.

The Operating Shift

The shift the conversation proposes is sequential, not parallel: protect your brain, then protect your team, then protect your business. Most operators run this backwards. They pour resources into team structure and business systems while treating their own cognitive load as a fixed cost, something to push through rather than something to manage as an input.

The reframe is closer to how a disciplined allocator treats any other constrained resource. You don’t deploy capital without first understanding your liquidity position. You don’t extend leverage without first pricing your risk tolerance. The same logic applies to the operator’s own attention and judgment: it is a finite asset, it can be measured, and it should inform how much responsibility a leader can competently hold before decision quality degrades. Treating cognitive load as unmeasured and infinite is itself a risk management failure — arguably a more consequential one than most balance-sheet risk, because it sits upstream of every other decision the business makes.

Execution in Practice

Several concrete mechanisms from the conversation translate directly into execution systems for an operator or investor:

A measurable baseline before a structural fix. Just as an allocator won’t extend credit without a score, the framework proposes a “brain score” — a validated diagnostic taken before any leadership or delegation intervention. The principle generalizes: don’t redesign your org structure, hiring plan, or decision rights until you’ve established a baseline for the thing actually constraining the redesign. Fixing a system on top of an unaddressed constraint just relocates the bottleneck.

Empathy and trust as a measured leadership skill, not a soft skill. The conversation describes an internal “trust index” used to measure whether team members trust their manager and leadership — treated with the same rigor as any other operating metric. For an operator scaling past the point of personal oversight, this matters more than most KPI dashboards: execution systems only function if the people running them trust that escalation and error-reporting won’t be punished. Trust, in this framing, is not a culture nicety. It’s the mechanism that makes decision-making frameworks actually get used rather than quietly bypassed.

Function transfer over hour transfer. Rather than measuring delegation in hours recovered, the more durable move is transferring ownership of a defined function entirely — a full handoff of scope and decision rights, not a partial offload of tasks. Partial delegation keeps the founder as the final checkpoint on every decision, which preserves the exact cognitive load the delegation was meant to relieve.

Trust built in drops, lost in buckets. This is a risk-asymmetry principle worth treating like any other exposure on the balance sheet: the downside of a single breach of trust with a team member or partner vastly outweighs the upside of many small deposits. Leadership bandwidth, once spent rebuilding trust after a breach, doesn’t return to its prior baseline — it has to be re-earned at a slower rate than it was lost.

Leverage Outcome

None of this is about working longer or pushing harder. It’s the opposite case: operational leverage comes from expanding what a leader can competently hold, not from adding hours to what they already do. A founder operating with a clear, well-regulated cognitive baseline can hold more complexity, delegate more completely, and make faster, better-calibrated decisions than the same founder running on adrenaline and inflammation working twice the hours.

Scaling discipline, in this framing, starts one layer below the org chart. Protect the instrument making the decisions first. Everything downstream — team structure, execution systems, capital allocation, risk tolerance — is only as sound as the judgment behind it.

Connect With the Guest

To learn more about Dr. Romie Mushtaq and her work: Website: https://www.drromie.com LinkedIn: [Insert LinkedIn Link]

(Note: I found and confirmed Dr. Romie’s website through search, but could not verify an exact LinkedIn URL — please confirm and drop it in before publishing.)

The Immediate Move

Leadership bandwidth is the real constraint on scaling — not headcount, not SOPs, not another tool. The founders who scale cleanly aren’t the ones working the most hours or holding the most decisions personally. They’re the ones who’ve reduced their own cognitive load enough to transfer real ownership, hold a team accountable to disciplined decision-making, and stay out of execution they’ve already delegated. Structure beats effort. Every time a founder re-inserts themselves into a decision they already delegated, it’s a signal to check the constraint — not the system, the operator.

Watch this before you hire your next support role.

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Full Podcast Transcript

Dr. Romie (00:00) Okay.

Adrienne Green (00:00) Sure.

A lot of entrepreneurs have what Dr. Romy likes to call a busy brain. And that is a challenge we are going to dive into today. So if you feel like maybe you can identify with that term of busy brain, today’s episode is going to definitely be worth your time. So Dr. Romy, thank you so much for visiting with me today and being on this podcast.

Dr. Romie (00:22) Adrian, it’s so important for us to have this conversation for your audience of entrepreneurs as a fellow entrepreneur. And I always start a podcast out with an intention and a gratitude. I thank the listeners who are taking time out of their schedules to put our voices between their ears. And my intention is that you are going to leave with an action step to brainshift from a busy brain to being focused, calm, and clear.

Adrienne Green (00:50) I love that. I I’m the the former teacher in me loves and we can start everything with like an objective of this is what you will accomplish at the end of this activity or exercise and that’s what you really just set up for us. I love it, Dr.

Dr. Romie (01:00) Yes. And and and my and

mindful leadership is about being intentional, right? And and so really is how can you and I be of service to the audience today completely.

Adrienne Green (01:11) I love it. And for our listeners, if you’re intrigued now, I do want to take a minute to tell you a little bit of like Dr. Romy’s like street cred here. Okay. She has over two decades of experience in the neuroscience field with leadership and workplace wellness, which is what we’re gonna, you know, dive into a little bit today in terms of applying her background as a physician with neuroscience into our work as entrepreneurs, how we are setting up our lives and setting it up so that we can stay focused.

not have burnout and really be healthy, happy and whole. So Dr. Romy, can you share the moment that kind of shifted your approach to leadership and wellness and how that shaped this brain shift and busy brain idea?

Dr. Romie (01:54) Yeah, Adrian, thank you so much. So for everyone listening, I am a triple board certified physician in neurology and integrative medicine. I entered neurology at a time where less than five percent of the brain doctors in the United States were women. So not only was I seeing patients, I was doing cutting edge research on the role of women’s hormones and the brain. And this was back before we would dare whisper anything about mental health in the workplace. And the term burnout didn’t even exist in our vernacular.

Adrienne Green (02:23) Yeah.

Dr. Romie (02:23) And

I learned firsthand that chronic stress can cause disease and chronic stress can kill you. And it nearly killed me. In 2010, I ended up in life-saving surgery. But Adrian, the worst part wasn’t waking up in the ICU wondering what the cardiothoracic surgeon was going to say to me. It was

that I knew in that moment what it felt like for hope to depart my soul. And I remember feeling alone, that nobody at work had asked if I was okay.

And I was visibly struggling. So today, as the CEO and founder of the Brainshift Institute, our neuroperformance and workplace culture programs ensure that everybody in the workplace feels seen.

Heard and that nobody feels alone at work. I take that into the workplace as a keynote speaker in researching brain and mental health in the workplace. And I currently serve as chief wellness officer for Great Wolf Resorts, where I oversee the workplace wellness with data-driven solutions for more than 14,000 employees.

Adrienne Green (03:24) That is a lot of people that you’re getting to help and a lot on your plate. So I do appreciate you taking some time to help our listeners today. Now, my understanding is that you had an early leadership challenge that taught you about mental bandwidth and ownership.

Dr. Romie (03:39) I would say that has not been an early challenge, but a lifelong challenge, Adrian. If we could be

Adrienne Green (03:45) very true.

Dr. Romie (03:46) honest, right? It was one of the things, how many of you listening out there are impact-driven entrepreneurs or leaders in a workplace? Because we’ll be sharing this episode and I have a very large corporate audience, and you know your why.

And you’re driven by that mission. That’s exactly who I was, changing the face and the scope of how we approached women’s neurological care. And it felt like I had to do it all. And that anytime I slowed down or delegated something, God forbid, that somehow I wasn’t succeeding as a leader. That was number one. Then as I became an entrepreneur.

a lot of high functioning professionals, whether you’re a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, exiting a traditional corporate workplace, going into entrepreneurship, take that same attitude and mission of, well, only I know my why. And if I don’t do it, I’m not gonna find somebody who’s gonna care to do it well as me. And that dogma was a aha moment I had, one, because it led me to the ICU.

And now too, in my business at the Brainshift Institute, it was a scaling problem. And that was it. Is I was stuck at low six figures and knew that something had to change. And while your podcast and your company talks about those systems and scales, the place why I’m here today most, Adrian, is because we don’t talk about

the state of our brain and our brain score. And that will directly impact whether people are able to let go of the work and put the systems into place you teach. I’m gonna pause really quickly. Are

Adrienne Green (05:26) Sure.

Dr. Romie (05:26) you hearing static?

Adrienne Green (05:28) I am not. You’re actually sounding great.

Dr. Romie (05:31) Okay, as long as you’re not

I’m hearing something and I didn’t know if it was the gain on my microphone or something, but if if you’re not hearing something in the background, then it’s okay. It sounds like a vacuum cleaner or something is running in the background. So okay.

Adrienne Green (05:40) Yeah, no, actually. that’s

so funny. Yeah, no, I don’t hear anything in my world and I don’t hear anything on the headphones. It’s actually sounding good. Okay.

Dr. Romie (05:48) Okay, perfect. Okay. Okay.

Adrienne Green (05:52) So what I love about that, Dr. Romy, is I will say when I work with business owners, entrepreneurs about delegation, the issue really is these these psychological blocks. It’s not

knowing the logistics, it’s nothing like that. It’s it’s the psychological blocks that keep them from learning to delegate, from learning

Dr. Romie (06:10) Like

Adrienne Green (06:10) to use executive assistance, something like that. So what I will go ahead.

Dr. Romie (06:13) It is. And and then and then

they put that pl in place, right? And then they have such severe anxiety over it that you’re now becoming an ineffective leader because it turns into looking like micromanaging, not trusting your employees, not trusting that. This is all your busy brain.

Adrienne Green (06:31) Mm-hmm. I I I love this. I think it’s so helpful. and so how do you help leaders or, you know, business people reframe busyness into meaningful progress, right? The work that I like to say it’s their top twenty percent, and start to trust their teams so that they’re not having to do everything.

Dr. Romie (06:50) Yes. We have a framework, whether you’re a business of five or a business of 50,000 that I’m working with. And it’s in three steps. We talk about protect your brain, protect your team, and protect your business. What most business owners, whether you’re generating $1 million in revenue or $1 billion in revenue, the mistake we’re making in today’s world with AI and this rapid change that is happening and

What feels like uncontrollable global political economic issues, the number one mistake we make is we put all of our focus on acquiring the client and the client work or a a patient or that. And we don’t put the onus, and if there’s time, we do a team-building exercise, we throw a holiday party, we give

branded merch, you know, to our employees and we call it a day if there’s time and money left over for a culture activity. And the teams and the companies that I see, regardless of where your revenue is, that do this right, as number one as a leader, the first and most important thing is you protect your brain. And the next part is we talk about how to protect your team. You put those two things in place. That’s what helped me

scale and succeed a big neuroscience program in a private hospital in Arizona after I was sick. And it’s what’s helped me today as a chief wellness officer scaling programs to 14,000 employees and run my own business successfully as well.

Adrienne Green (08:16) So let’s dive into those, right? And I’ve heard you speak before and yet I still want to hear again and have you dive into if if we’ve got a listener here and they’re like, well, but you said start with protect my brain. What does that mean?

Dr. Romie (08:27) Yes, it is. It’s no so many people say, I’m burned out, Adrian, you’re burned out, we’re both burned out as women. We may be caregivers or business owners or all that. Who isn’t burned out and we just push through it? That is actually not accurate. It’s just here in the United States, you cannot pertain obtain a home mortgage, car insurance without a credit score check. Well, we should be doing the same.

For our brains. And we actually do something, which is we check people’s busy brain and we give you a brain score. It is, we will put it here in the show notes. It is for free on my website, on LinkedIn, Instagram. It’s called the busy brain test. This is an actual neuropsychology battery. Takes less than five minutes to do, and it gives you a score. And what we see is if you’re below 30, you’re in a healthy brain state. These are the

When I’m talking to a founder, these are the people whose advisory boards or boards I will sit in where I will think to invest. I look at someone’s brain state before I look at their financials. And if you’re above a a 30 to 40, we know you’re having change fatigue. The rate of change in our world, business and professionally, is so large that it can there’s

There’s easy things to do in that place. When you’re above a 40, we know you now have busy brain and you’re heading towards burnout. That is kind of like having a fair to poor credit score. And we need to fix your brain. And that is the neuroinflammation that you and I are going to dig deep into. And we look at few key areas and personalize that to everyone.

Now, how does that translate to a large organization? When I go in to give keynote lectures for teams or workshops for leadership retreats, everybody takes the busy brain test. Not only do you individually walk away with a plan of what to do, but now I’ve got aggregate data for your organization of what is the health of your leadership team or of your employees. And then we can start putting in systems in place with HR that can help that.

Adrienne Green (10:22) I love that. And that’s where you’re thinking like protect your brain. And then you took it to that step of protect your team. So it’s like individually, you take this, you know where you stand and can, you know, remedy any challenges you have.

And then as you know, if you’re a business owner or an entrepreneur with a team, you can know where your team stands. And that then gives you, and I am like data is my favorite word, I think. Data is my love language, let’s say. And what I love and what we have been trained to do as business owners is to have that data and to make data driven decisions, a phrase I noticed you say early on in this presentation. So you’re working with these companies to help give them the data so they can make data driven.

decisions about the wellness of their entire

Dr. Romie (11:06) Yeah.

Adrienne Green (11:06) organization.

Dr. Romie (11:07) And this is really difficult to say. It it makes sense. You and I are saying that our listeners are nodding along, but you and I have both sat there with other founders who are so passionate about their mission or the people they’re helping or their nonprofit that emotions is driving them and not data. And Adrian, I will tell you,

Adrienne Green (11:26) Mm.

Dr. Romie (11:26) I guarantee you, 90% of those entrepreneurs have a busy brain score above a 50. They’re in burnout.

And passion is disguising a busy brain and burnout. And you know, you

Adrienne Green (11:37) Right.

Dr. Romie (11:38) and I are both very good and passionate what we do. And in a calm brain state, we make data-driven solutions. I can’t give away my time that Great Wolf has about 50% of my protected time every year for free or at a lower cost. It just doesn’t make sense data-wise as a business owner.

Adrienne Green (11:56) Mm-hmm. Right. And I I think you’re right. I think a lot of my experience with business owners and entrepreneurs and and business leaders is that they don’t have the data or know how to get the data. And so they are making these emotional decisions. And what I think is

Dr. Romie (12:08) Yes.

Adrienne Green (12:09) it’s it reminds me of the phrase of like sometimes you have to slow down to speed up, right? And it’s like when somebody is

Dr. Romie (12:13) Yes, absolutely.

Adrienne Green (12:14) burned out and overwhelmed while they want to help, you know, whatever their mission is, further their mission, they’re less able to do that than if they paused.

fixed these issues and then we’re like I think of like scarcity and abundance mindset. Then they’re able to kind of approach everything from a better place, kind of like an abundance mindset, we might say, instead of stress.

Dr. Romie (12:31) Yes. But if if you’re in

change fatigue or a busy brain, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off, you can’t shift to that abundance mindset. No amount of meditation, manifestation, you have to heal that busy brain and the burnout and calm that neuroinflammation down. Otherwise, an organization like yours can come in and put the best systems in place and virtual assistants in place. But if an individual leader is having a busy brain or burnout,

It’s going to feel impossible for them to execute. And then we get to the protect your team, which you and I will discuss next, and they lack complete trust and empathy with their team members and it becomes a toxic work environment.

Adrienne Green (13:10) So let’s move on to that because I think when you say

Dr. Romie (13:12) What’s

Adrienne Green (13:13) toxic work environment, most people can be like, yeah, I’ve experienced that. So let’s let’s dive

Dr. Romie (13:18) Yes, we have.

Adrienne Green (13:19) into what does more of this protecting your team look like?

Dr. Romie (13:21) Yeah. When we think of toxic workplaces, most people will jump to say, I was doing the work of three people, which is every industry right now. And if you’re a business owner, we’re wearing 10 hats simultaneously at once. But when you break down the psychology of an employee or team member of what they call a toxic workplace, it isn’t that you were asking them to do more or work during a busy holiday season. It’s that they felt like

Their immediate manager or supervisor, the person they report to, does not care for them. A lack of empathy and a lack of trust. Those are the two things. Now, these sound like I loathe this word, Adrian, and I know you do too, soft skills. Am I right? But these are not soft skills. These are actually brain

Adrienne Green (14:05) Yeah.

Dr. Romie (14:07) states that you can train people on. You can, again, both of our favorite words, data. We go in.

And we use the ABI trust index. We can actually measure: does your team trust one another? Do they trust another department? Do they trust their manager manager? Do they trust corporate leadership, however big the infrastructure is? And we can measure that and we can train. And so the next thing we say is to protect your team, we institute empathetic communication. And this isn’t just a theory.

Please know I am chief wellness officer of over 14,000 employees. I am one person that scaled this program across two corporate offices and 23 lodges. And we put this into place with measurable action. And we saw a 10 point percentage jump in engagement data. And we directly measured: did people feel cared for? Did they trust their manager, their supervisor?

Adrienne Green (15:03) That’s amazing. And I I do think that that’s important and that’s something that’s a challenge when we to look at the idea of delegation from another perspective is let’s say you were the CEO of of Great Wolf, Great Wolf Lodge, right? And you’re bringing in this management team as the business grows, and it’s one of those things of like, hey, I maybe was a CEO and I was a fabulous manager and I was empathetic, and my team knew I cared, and I was.

had this great corporate culture, then as I hire other people to manage and to lead, maybe they don’t have that same natural soft skill of of creating that sense of empathy and everything. And so you’ve created a a system that people can use in their organization to ensure that, hey, we can teach these people, we can create a system within the organization that prioritizes

Dr. Romie (15:41) Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Absolutely.

Adrienne Green (15:48) and builds these skills that are so important for corporate wellness.

Dr. Romie (15:52) It is. It’s it it is so let’s backtrack there a couple of things. Empathy is not a soft skill, it’s a leadership skill. And when we’re hiring at the Brainshift Institute, and when I’ve seen other companies hire, you hire both for leadership skills and for your job skills, both. And so interviews

now actually look, you know, that I

I know it’s a toxic term, culture fit, but what they’re actually screening for is your level of empathy and your level of trust and your ability to have trust and build trust. Those are actual leadership skills that we develop in workshops with teams. And we teach people how to do this and continue to build that trust. So I want to say this, and this isn’t just about wellness, this is about a culture shift that.

is happening in the organization because if you and I put this in a bucket of a soft skill and wellness, you and I both know as business owners, people are like, I don’t have time for that. I’m putting out fires right now. I’m trying to grow business in this economy. And what if if I said without these leadership and culture skills in place, your business will erode and will not scale? I’ve been there. You’ve been there. You’ve seen so many, like you said, clients in that place.

Adrienne Green (17:06) Mm-hmm. Right. And that’s I think a good point you’re making, that this is something that directly ties to like the bottom line, we might say.

Dr. Romie (17:14) It it does. We actually

Adrienne Green (17:15) So

Dr. Romie (17:16) can go ahead.

Adrienne Green (17:17) No, go ahead.

Dr. Romie (17:19) Yeah, go

ahead.

Adrienne Green (17:19) what I was gonna ask next, Dr. Romy, is if you could share a story or example of of what you’re talking about here so people can see what it looked like in an organization.

Dr. Romie (17:30) Yeah, you know, I think we shared Great Wolf already. What I would love to do, knowing that you have business owners of various size businesses, a case study that is in my book and chapter 16 of the Busy Brain Cure, Kelly. I cringe at this, and this is why the US Healthcare is failing medicine. It broke my heart.

She was a seasoned sales executive on the pathway to promotion to VP,

SVP, and a you know, a C-suite executive one day in her industry.

And she was suffering crippling anxiety. That was her only symptom. Crippling anxiety. She had two children under the age of 10, and her primary care doctor said, You know what, Kelly? Either you choose your job or your children. You can’t have both.

How many employees have been told that? That you have to sacrifice your loved

Adrienne Green (18:20) Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Romie (18:24) ones, your family, your caregiving for the sake of work. And that’s not true. She was ready to walk away and she begrudgingly took the busy brain test because there, that company was a part of our research study and her entire sales team was doing it. And she played along and said, okay, I’m gonna go do the labs.

Well, it turned out her busy brain score. No surprise she’s anxious, anxious was above a 60. So she’s in burnout. That got her intention. She went back to the same primary care doctor and demanded these labs get done and threatened him,

Adrienne Green (18:54) Mm-hmm.

Dr. Romie (18:54) and he did them. And it turns out all of her markers of inflammation that we check were through the roof. A woman in her 30s looked like an 80-something year old with markers of inflammation with chronic disease.

But her thyroid panel was grossly abnormal. So much so that he did an emergency ultrasound and they found a stage one thyroid cancer. And remember, her only symptom was crippling anxiety. What happens when we push through change, we have a busy brain

Adrienne Green (19:17) Yeah.

Dr. Romie (19:26) and burnout is we keep pushing ourselves to exhaustion and we think everything is fine when we know in

Women, that 80% of women’s symptoms of burnout and hormone imbalance will present as I can’t focus and I’m anxious. And for men, it will feel like I’m no longer keeping up. And for men, we check a full thyroid panel and testosterone and other labs as well. So this is for men and women. So she does this, the anxiety goes away. She’s still working, she’s still a very engaged mother, and anxiety.

The and busy brain have been completely healed. And so think of this when you’re feeling like I have too many browser windows open on my computer and in my brain, and I’m wearing too many hats. Is it a busy brain and neuroinflammation that has sent your hormones and vitamin D levels out of balance?

Adrienne Green (20:16) Mm-hmm. And that’s with the Brizzy Brain, excuse me, with the Busy Brain assessment, you also have this recommendation of certain tests to get then.

Dr. Romie (20:25) Yes. With the imagine I many of your listeners have probably paid tens and thousands of dollars to go see an integrative functional medicine doctor like me. And I knew that’s out of reach for 99% of Americans and people around the world. So I used the research to make this eight-week, eight-step program. And week seven is checking labs. We’ve double-checked that most major US insurance health insurance care carriers cover these labs.

And they will find 90% of the problems of busy brain. So if you’re chronically stressed out, it will throw your brain and body in balance. We ask that you go check these labs. They are there in the book in chapter 16 and online as well. And we save lives every time we run those cohort and it up levels your.

Performance. If people ask how I do what I do, running a big successful business and being a C suite executive, and I say I practice what I preach, I brain shift, I check my labs twice a year, I’m on the correct hormones, etc.

Adrienne Green (21:25) Right, right. And I will say I found your lab list helpful. I know. so for listeners, I met Dr. Romy at a retreat in May. And since then it was like I did the busy brain test. I did the labs and I was happy that my scores on both were good, which you know, I think traveling the world and being out of the rat race in the US helps with that a lot. but I can testify that these were helpful assessments and tests to get done.

Dr. Romie (21:50) Thank you. I’m so glad that you took the busy brain test and checked lab panel and found answers that were helpful for you. So it is. And remember that you were in a normal range. We also look at what are your symptoms and what is your busy brain score. And then those labs are a snapshot so that everybody’s thyroid and in men testosterone and in women your estrogen, progesterone, thyro testosterone levels fluctuate. And so

we can now know what needs to be done. And this is not just for women and men that are in middle age. You know, this starts I I’m dealing with high functioning male executives that are in their twenties and suffering busy brain and may have an abnormal thyroid or testosterone level. So this is for everyone.

Adrienne Green (22:31) That’s a very point. Now, one more thing I’d love for us to dive into because it, you know, is specifically for my business and I know for a lot of our listeners is we have these virtual or remote workplaces now, right? Where maybe we’re leading or managing people that we’re not seeing, you know, face to face, we’re not skin to skin. And so how can this apply? How can leaders think about this and have it apply when they have a virtual or remote team?

Dr. Romie (22:58) Yeah. I think this is so important. most of the workplaces I deal with are hybrid or remote. I myself run a fully remote team. And my I I I had two swings and misses, Adrian. And I don’t know if other business owners did. At first, when I hired virtual

team members about a decade ago, I was very transactional. I need you to do this and that. And it was very cold and I didn’t get results. And I probably it wasn’t a pleasant team. Then I somebody told me about culture and I was all about the feelings and cultivating fun on the team. And there was no accountability for work getting done. Right. And that’s everybody’s worst nightmare. And there has to be that balance. And how you do that is in protect your team and protect your business. And that

is starting with that laying down the foundation of empathy and trust. And I I would say if you can make sure your team meets in person at least once a year, skin to skin, as you say, that is an ideal situation and budget for that as you’re in budget season. And for the teams that can’t, because you have international team members, is really getting to know another employee’s why.

Why are they working? What’s important to them? And understanding what motivates them and taking that time to show empathy and build trust. We talk about trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. And it is on you and I as the

Adrienne Green (24:26) Yeah,

Dr. Romie (24:28) leaders and the business owner. It feels like a one-way street. The biggest mistake I see leaders making is.

Wow, well, I care for my team and I know everything that’s going on in their families. And nobody asked me how I was doing. Well, you know what? That’s okay. You’re a CEO, you’re a founder. That’s why we have business masterminds. That’s why we have therapists. That’s why we have our friends. But be that leader. And so, you know, a concrete example I will tell you is we love four legged family members on team brainshift. I make sure to know everybody’s pets, their names.

They get sent treats on a basis as often and and I’m always knowing what’s going on. And we welcome four legged friends making appearances on our virtual meeting. It just becomes this culture that something that is important to my team members is now important to me.

Adrienne Green (25:20) Right, right. Yeah, I I think that really resonates. I know for us at Workergenix, we a couple of years ago, or maybe even longer now, but at some point we were one of our challenges was turnover with the virtual assistants. And we focused on culture and community and building a lot of these things that you’re talking about, right? We implemented like a monthly happy hour and some other things to really work on this.

and show exactly what you’re talking about, where the executive team showed all this empathy and caring for everybody else and it’s really made a difference and it’s made us have virtually no turnover. So I can see that. Now, Dr. Roman

Dr. Romie (25:53) Amazing Adrian. Yeah, you’re you’re a case study right there. And yeah,

thank you.

Adrienne Green (25:57) Sorry, I I think we have some internet lags, so it’ll all get cleaned up in the recording. But Dr. Romey, you’ve shared so much for us. I appreciate you taking the time to come here and give some people this great wisdom. If somebody would like to learn more, what’s the best place for them to reach out?

Dr. Romie (26:11) Adrian, thank you. I think the first thing I would tell you as a business owner is what’s your brain score? It’s going to determine your success and your ability to scale. So we’ll put a link here in the show notes, but also you can go to my website, dromy.com, Instagram, LinkedIn. And if you have questions about your brain score and what to do next, message me back and you’ll receive an email with the instructions and the protocol that we researched in over 17,000 people. And, you know, in a

Today’s world, which it can feel like we’re walking slowly in molasses and chaos everywhere, take the time to practice empathy with another member of your team. And that’s how you and I, one interaction at a time, can make the world a better place.

Adrienne Green (26:54) my goodness. Yeah, you can’t end it better than that, Dr. Romy. That was so good. Thank you. Because it is really about not just our transactions, not just the business, but making the world a better place for other people. So thank you, Dr. Romy, and thanks to our listeners for joining me for another episode of Scale Smart Grow Fast with Workogenix. Join me again next week.

The post Why Your Systems Aren’t the Bottleneck: The Overlooked Constraint on Scaling first appeared on Workergenix.

Opening Scaling Tension

Every growing business hits the same wall. Not a revenue wall. A decision wall. The volume of inputs — channels, campaigns, product lines, dashboards, reports — outpaces the operator’s ability to know which of them actually matter. Revenue keeps climbing. Confidence doesn’t. Decisions start getting made on instinct, on the loudest number in the room, or on whichever dashboard was open last. That’s not a data problem. It’s a visibility problem, and it quietly caps how far most operator-led businesses can scale.

For founder-led firms, real estate investors carrying multiple doors, and capital allocators weighing where the next dollar goes, the friction shows up the same way: too many numbers, too little clarity on which one changes what you do next.

The Hidden Constraint

Tyler Ryan, founder and CEO of Data Driven and a former NASA JPL engineer whose platform has analyzed more than $3 billion in sales data, frames the constraint plainly: most businesses don’t have a data problem, they have a which numbers actually matter problem. And the number that matters most — customer lifetime value, resolved at day 0, 30, 60, 90, and 180, across every product, funnel, traffic source, and affiliate — is one that roughly 95% of operators cannot see.

That gap isn’t cosmetic. LTV is the metric that determines what you can afford to spend to acquire a customer, which channels deserve more capital, and which product lines are quietly draining margin. Without it, half the fundamental equation of the business is invisible. Every downstream decision — ad spend, hiring, product investment, capital allocation — is being made with one eye closed.

The same principle carries into real estate and capital allocation. A blended cap rate, an average tenant tenure, or a portfolio-wide return figure tells the operator almost nothing about which assets, markets, or partners are actually generating the return. Averages kill insight. That is the hidden constraint.

The Operating Shift

The operating shift is straightforward, and it applies well beyond e-commerce: stop optimizing for more data and start optimizing for the right answer to the right question at the right time.

Ryan makes the case that the dashboard era is ending. Not because dashboards are useless, but because they push interpretive load back onto the operator. Ten dashboards, nine ignored. The dashboard shows you the numbers; it doesn’t tell you which ones changed, why they matter this week, or what decision is now on the table. For a leader whose scarcest resource is attention, that’s a broken system.

The shift is from reporting to decision surfacing. From a wall of graphs to a short list of things that require action. From averages that describe the past to segmented views that inform what to do next.

This is a decision-making framework more than a software category. It reframes what “knowing your numbers” means for an operator running a real business.

Execution in Practice

Three insights from the conversation translate directly into execution systems any operator-led business can adopt.

Segment before you decide. A single blended LTV, cap rate, or margin figure hides the decisions worth making. The move is to isolate cohorts — first-time buyers, a specific acquisition channel, a specific asset class, a specific vintage — and track how value accumulates over a defined window. Ryan’s example: pull the last twelve months of first-time-buyer transactions and measure how revenue per customer grows at day 30, 60, 90. The math is simple. The discipline is doing it. The same logic applies to a real estate portfolio measured by acquisition year, market, or property manager. Segmentation is what turns interesting numbers into actionable ones.

Replace dashboards with anomaly surfacing. Ryan describes a supplement brand whose average order value silently dropped from $200 to $50 for three days because an upsell path broke. Nobody noticed. On a business of scale, that’s a five- or six-figure leak per day. The execution system isn’t a prettier dashboard — it’s a mechanism (a person, a rule, an alert, an analyst) whose job is to tell you when something has moved outside its normal range. This is how leadership bandwidth gets protected: the operator doesn’t scan, the system flags.

Ownership transfer, not task delegation. The reason most operators can’t get to LTV segmentation, anomaly review, or cohort tracking isn’t skill. It’s that the work never gets owned by anyone. Assigning a report to “the team” produces nothing. Transferring ownership of the visibility function — pulling the data on a defined cadence, flagging what’s off, surfacing the decision — is what converts the principle into execution. This is where structured executive support earns its keep.

Underneath all three is the same operating principle: reduce the number of re-decisions leadership has to make. Every re-decision is a tax on capacity.

Leverage Outcome

Ryan’s supplement brand case makes the point sharper than any framework. A nine-figure business that couldn’t see its own LTV curve discovered that customer value declined after acquisition because of refund and fulfillment friction in the first seven days. Once they saw it, they rebuilt the customer journey. Same volume in. Roughly double the profit out.

That’s the shape of real operational leverage. Not more hours, not more headcount, not more effort at the top. The same inputs, restructured around visibility and decision speed, produce a materially different result. This is what capital efficiency looks like in practice: better decisions on the same book of business.

For operator-led firms, real estate investors managing multiple properties, and allocators weighing where capital goes next, the constraint is almost never work ethic. It’s leadership bandwidth, and the compounding cost of decisions made without clear signal. Scaling discipline is what closes that gap.

Connect With the Guest

To learn more about Tyler Ryan and their work:
Website: https://datadrivenos.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerjryan/ 

The Immediate Move

The real constraint on a growing operator-led business is not effort, headcount, or ambition. It is leadership bandwidth, and the number of low-signal decisions that quietly consume it. Visibility into the metrics that actually drive outcomes, anomaly surfacing that eliminates silent leaks, and clean ownership transfer of the recurring analytical work are what convert a busy operator into a decisive one. The shift is structural, not motivational. Fewer re-decisions, tighter cognitive load, cleaner risk management, and capital allocated against segmented reality rather than blended averages. That is how scaling discipline compounds.

Watch this before you hire your next support role.
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Adrienne Green (00:00)
most founders don’t have a data problem. They have a which number actually matters problem. Now, welcome listeners. You’re on another episode of Scale Smart Grow Fast, where we solve problems like that for entrepreneurs. Now, Worker Genix, our full-time ultimate executive assistants, help business owners stay consistent with execution so they can focus on what matters most. And today I am joined by Tyler Ryan.

He’s the founder and CEO of Data Driven, and he’s a former NASA JPL engineer whose platform has analyzed over three billion dollars in sales data. And now he’s building Auto, an autonomous analyst, and he’ll tell you that the dashboard is dead. There’s a lot that I’m excited to speak about with Tyler here, so let’s get into it. Welcome to the show, Tyler.

Tyler Ryan (00:47)
Thank you so much. Really, really excited to be here.

Adrienne Green (00:50)
Now, Tyler, I know I want to start off with what should businesses know, what data should they be seeing that they don’t even realize they’re missing?

Tyler Ryan (00:58)
Well, it’s it’s really perfect how you set it up because you said most businesses don’t necessarily have a data problem. They have a which numbers actually matter problem. And there is one number, one metric that to me is the most fundamental decision-making metric in business, but almost ninety to ninety-five percent of businesses can’t see it. And that is customer lifetime value. Literally wearing a shirt that says LTV, because that’s just how important it is. So I’ll I’ll tell you a quick story to illustrate this and then we’ll get into to why it matters.

So about eight or so years ago, I was at an event listening to a guy get on stage give a talk titled How to Scale Your Business 10 Times Bigger, 10 Times Faster. Guy named Joel Marion started a company called Biotrust. It went from zero to 150 million in 18 months. Incredible scaling. So he gets up on the front of the stage and he goes, All right, how many of you know your average customer lifetime value? And of the room of 400 entrepreneurs, there was maybe 50 hands. And he goes, Okay, not bad. Now

How many of you know your customer lifetime value at days 0, 30, 60, 90, and 180? Look around the room, maybe 25 hands. Okay, not bad. Now, how many of you know your average customer lifetime value at days zero, thirty, sixty, ninety, and one eighty for every product, funnel, traffic source, and affiliate?

And he looks around the room and this burned into my brain. There were four hands. The room literally went from 400 down to four, one percent of the room. And he asked each of them, How big’s your business? 15 million, 25 million, 35 million, 50 million. And he just goes, I’m not surprised. And he goes on to give this whole talk, or the punchline of that talk.

Was the reason he was able to scale as fast as he did was because he knew the answer to that question, and none of his competition did. How much are my cus how much are my customers worth at day zero, thirty, sixty, ninety to one eighty for every product, funnel, traffic source, and affiliate? If you know that, it gives you the ability to make decisions that most businesses can’t, because you can see what most businesses can’t. And that right there, to me, is the single biggest leveraged metric in business, and yet the

The vast majority of companies can’t actually see it. And so they can’t actually use it.

Adrienne Green (03:06)
Right. I will say I do a lot in, you know, let’s say the entrepreneur and business space. And I can think of two times I’ve heard people speak on customer lifetime value. So that I think aligns very well with what you’re sharing here.

Tyler Ryan (03:20)
I’m not surprised by that either. Makes sense.

Adrienne Green (03:22)
So what is you’ve got a whole, you know, inequality, as the former math teacher and me would say on your shirt. So we talked about the lifetime value piece. let’s talk about the other piece and how they how they inter.

Tyler Ryan (03:34)
Okay, so the reason why lifetime value matters so much and it’s such a critical metric is it is the metric that tells you how much you can actually afford to spend to acquire a customer. And I would argue one of the most fundamental questions a business has is how much does it cost to acquire a customer and how much are those customers worth? And I’m arguing that most businesses can’t see how much they’re actually worth.

So half of that equation is invisible, right? And so if you don’t know this side, the question is how can you make intelligent decisions about the cost to acquire side?

Okay? So ultimately, customer acquisition costs, that’s just how much it’s how much you spend on ads, for example, to acquire a new customer. That number, you ultimately need to make more than that over the lifetime of the customer. Some businesses need to make it back right away. Some businesses can wait 30 days to make that money back, some can wait 90 days. Every business is different. But no matter what, one thing is always constant. If you don’t know how much the customers are worth, you don’t know how much you can afford afford to spend.

Know how much you can afford to spend, you get in this difficult decision-making challenge where you’re seeing your ads go up and down, you’re seeing your ROAS go up and down, your customer acquisition cost goes up and down, and you don’t actually know if it’s okay or not. And a lot of that comes from that limited visibility when you can’t actually see your customer lifetime value. So usually the decision making around LTV and CAC and ad spend decisions comes down to a visibility constraint on the LTV side.

If you could see LTV the way that we just talked about it earlier, LTV at every day for every product, funnel, traffic source, and affiliate, you won’t have a visibility problem, and the decisions will come very easy from that point.

Adrienne Green (05:14)
That I I’m I’m tracking. I am intrigued by what you’re saying here. I think our listeners are as well. And the next question I have based off of that, which I’m sure you have a a ready answer, because it it’s your jam here, is okay, I’ve heard of lifetime value before, and I’ve heard of it as like one discrete number, right? On average, our clients’ lifetime value is X, right? Or maybe for people who I’ve heard who are a little more advanced, maybe they do know.

You know, our coaching clients are worth X, our courses clients are worth Y, our community clients are worth Z, something like that. Kind of like you said, they might know some different people who fall in a product, how much they typically make from that product line or or leg of the business, but not to the level that you’re describing it. So how would for you know these entrepreneurs, business owners who are listening, where would you recommend they start to start to figure out these specific lifetime value figures that you’re speaking of?

Tyler Ryan (06:05)
Okay, so first I want to make the point that I I always say averages kill insights. Okay, and what that phrase is alluding to is if you just know that your LTV is, let’s say, $300, the context that you’re missing there is at what day in the journey do they reach $300? Okay. And if you have a five-year-old business and you just take all the revenue you’ve ever made and divide it by the total number of customers that you have, when you say your LTV is three hundred dollars, there are

Some customers that took five years to get to that number. So from a decision making perspective, that number is completely useless. You can’t do anything without information. It’s just interesting, but it’s not actionable, right? So averages

Adrienne Green (06:44)
Right. Mm-hmm.

Tyler Ryan (06:46)
kill insights, what’s the solution? The solution is you need to take all of your sales and transaction history. So imagine, for example, you take the last year’s worth of sales data, export it out of your shopping cart, and you know, for for example, having an executive

Executive assistant that can pull this data on a regular basis, by the way. Amazing way to start solving this visibility problem. So you get your last year’s worth of transactions, and what you need to do is isolate the customers who are first-time buyers, okay? So only the sales from first-time buyers, and then you just need to look at only their sales activity over, let’s say, the next 90 days. And what you need to do is you need to focus on how does revenue accumulate starting from the day of first purchase.

Okay, that’s your starting line. And then we look at, okay, we started with let’s say $1,000 across this handful of customers from that first purchase. By the time we hit 30 days later, how many more dollars did those same customers spend? Maybe went from a thousand to fifteen hundred. You look another 30 days later. Now we went from 1,500 to 1750. That right there is the accumulation of value. And to turn that into LTV, it’s just a matter of it of dividing it by how many customers are we talking about?

So if your total revenue goes from $1,000 to $17.50 and you had like a hundred customers, then that means your LTV went from ten dollars to seventeen dollars and fifty cents. Right? So if we can do that

Adrienne Green (08:08)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Tyler Ryan (08:09)
math, it’s not hard math.

It’s really just a matter of doing the process, right? Of getting the sales data, lining up the starting lines of all your customers, and just counting the revenue as it grows over time. Then you can start attaching value to days. And once you have an LTV at a day, like day 30 or 60 or 90, that’s a version of lifetime value you can make decisions off of. Not the my LTV is $300 just global average that is interesting, but not actionable. So that’s the distinction.

Adrienne Green (08:39)
Right. I love that. And where my mind is going, as a business owner is thinking of where people could by kind of digging into this data, also be able to say, I’m sure there’s a significant it depending on the business, but there could be a significant difference in lifetime value between what you might say is like your your A clients, right, and your C clients, right? And maybe there’s difference in lifetime value between different product lines. I know one

Doing a lot the real estate space myself. I remember one project property manager who would manage properties remotely. And when she looked at some data like this, she actually cut that entire arm of her business entirely and focused only on managing properties locally because it was so much more lucrative for her. Doing the long distance stuff was just, you know, when she actually looked at the profitability specifically, it was just not worth it because

She it just took a lot more work and a lot more cost to service those long distance clients. So I think there’s a lot of value and people can get into and subdivide the data like what you’re speaking to.

Tyler Ryan (09:37)
See, that that’s such a great point. It speaks to the average of kill insights point, right? Because when you blend all that together, you lose that level of nuance. And the same exact phenomenon

Adrienne Green (09:46)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler Ryan (09:47)
happens across different product lines, the same phenomenon will happen against different traffic sources. So you might acquire customers, let’s say, from Meta, but then you also acquire customers from Google search. It’s a very common occurrence that those customers could be 2x the value of another, right? Like a meta customer

Adrienne Green (10:04)
Right.

Tyler Ryan (10:05)
might be higher.

Or lower in LTV than a Google search customer, the real reality is you won’t know unless you actually look at it and track it. But the point that I want to really drive home here is: wouldn’t you approach Meta differently or Google search differently if you knew that those customers were worth two times as much as the rest of your customers? Right? You’d be willing to spend

Adrienne Green (10:25)
Exactly.

Tyler Ryan (10:26)
more. You’d probably spend more in terms of total ad spend budget. You would take that traffic source more seriously. And if you do this for

For

long enough, what happens is you keep honing in your efforts to stop putting effort into the lower value, lower profitability customers, the lower LTV customers, and more of it into the higher LTV customers. And if you keep doing this and you keep doubling down where do my highest LTV customers come from, which products, which funnels, which traffic sources, this is how you build a business that can be very, very profitable and also sustain high levels of scale. The businesses that struggle are the ones that

Are chasing all of the customers everywhere because they don’t have a metric to tell them where to focus. All they look at,

Adrienne Green (11:08)
Right.

Tyler Ryan (11:08)
for example, is just revenue and total number of customers, but really the relationship between LTV and customer acquisition cost is the one that’s gonna drive your decision making the most, provided that you can see it.

Adrienne Green (11:19)
Right. And as you’re as you’re explaining all this, it reminds me, and I I don’t know if you have read it, Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s book, The Science of Scaling, where he speaks to how so often business owners i think that they’re gonna do five different things. And the truth is when you set a big goal, you’re gonna realize only a couple of those five different strategies are actually gonna be able to scale to reach that goal. And so I think the challenge when people go into something like reading the science of scaling and figuring out how to apply it to their business, is they don’t have

they don’t they they can’t always know which of the potential strategies is going to be able to get to their goal. And yet with the data like you’re suggesting looking at it, it kind of allows them to maybe be like, okay, we’re gonna do the five different strategies for let’s say 90 days, one quarter, see what we’re getting there. And then we can know which one to lean into. Like with your suggesting with the different,

Tyler Ryan (12:05)
absolutely, absolutely.

Adrienne Green (12:06)
you know, meta, Google, things like that.

Tyler Ryan (12:09)
Yep. I mean i in in reality for most businesses, and this is kind of why I got into doing what I do, oftentimes visibility is their constraint more so than strategy. Because they may have a good strategy, but if they don’t have the visibility into the data to actually see what’s going on.

It becomes very difficult to make decisions. Even if you’re a great marketer, you’re a great business person, you’re you’re very much constrained by how good is your visibility into your data. And there’s no more fundamental metric to a business than LTV. Because the reality is, lifetime value represents the value of a customer over their entire relationship with you. So however you acquire customers, whatever you do to retain them, whatever you sell to them after they buy, all those things make up.

Up the customer journey, all of that is rolled up into LTV. So, in a very real way, when we’re strategizing, like what is our business, what are our products, what’s the experience that we give our customers, we’re designing the journey that is represented by LTV. And so if that’s going on and you’re putting so much time and attention into the products you sell and how you service your clients, and you want to keep them around for a long time.

Doesn’t it make sense to be able to actually see a number that gives you feedback on how good of a job you’re doing in that very particular thing, which is the core function of the business? And if you don’t have that visibility,

There are so many different areas of the business that you’re being constrained, right? You don’t know how good of a job you’re doing at

retaining

Adrienne Green (13:36)
Right.

Tyler Ryan (13:36)
your customers. You don’t know how good of a job your back-end course that you sell after you acquire a customer is actually doing. You don’t know how much you can actually afford to spend to acquire a customer. All of these things share a common root, which is visibility into lifetime value. And so that’s why I just keep coming back around to that and hammering that point home. Because LTV is as fundamental as it gets. It is like the

heart and soul of the business and yet also most businesses can’t see it. And it really is such a shame because it really holds them back from operating at a much higher level.

Adrienne Green (14:08)
Now when I start we’re talking a lot about data and often a word that comes up when we’re looking talking about like data and being able to see it is dashboard. But Tyler, you say the dashboard is dead. What do you mean by that?

Tyler Ryan (14:20)
Great question. Where this comes from is the recognition that

Every every business owner has a million different dashboards that are available to them at all times. Right? They go into their shopping cart, whole bunch of dashboards. They go into their merchant processing, whole bunch of dashboards. Inventory management, whole bunch of dashboards. Stripe, whole bunch of dashboards. There’s just like dashboard, dashboard, dashboard, dashboard. It’s dashboard overload, right? And we

Adrienne Green (14:45)
Yeah.

Tyler Ryan (14:46)
get to the point where there are so many dashboards that you don’t even really look at any of them.

And and many business owners are just like, they’re dashboard numb, right? Maybe they’ve put in the work to like really build out one that they really like. But in my experience talking to hundreds and thousands of business owners, there’s maybe one or two things that they look at. But if they have ten dashboards at their disposal, nine of them are probably never getting used.

And so, what this is really to me a symptom of is the fact that most dashboards don’t actually show you what matters. They give you a bunch of information and then place the burden on you to try and interpret, analyze, and make decisions. And so I would use the analogy of: let’s say that you hired me to come into your business and I’m a world-class analyst, okay?

You wouldn’t come to me and start telling me exactly how to do my job, what dashboards I should put together, what reports I should put together. Because you would say, hey, look, you’re the world-class analyst. You tell me what questions I should be asking. You tell me the things that I’m missing. You tell me the things that I should be looking at every day. Because you are all the way down in the weeds and you understand all those little nuances and details.

So with that in mind, the purpose that a dashboard has been historically meant to serve is making better decisions, right? Like that’s the end goal that everyone’s working towards. Better decisions. But the reality is it’s very, very bad at that.

This world-class analyst that you bring onto your team wouldn’t be showing you a bunch of dashboards. They would be like, hey, here’s the things that you need to know right now and the decisions that need to be made. Sometimes it’s gonna be a report, sometimes it’s gonna be a hey, did you realize that historically you bill $10,000 a week in recurring revenue, but last week you only billed $1,000? Something’s probably wrong there. It’s hey, you have 250 ads that are running in your ad account right now.

These 75 used to perform well and they’re not performing well anymore. You should probably kill those. Those are not things that a dashboard shows you. Dashboards cannot get down into those weeds and that level of detail unless

You have enough expertise to do all of that digging. But then it comes back around to the reality.

Adrienne Green (16:53)
Right.

Tyler Ryan (16:54)
No one has time for that. There’s too many things going on right now. So, what does all this mean? What it means is we need to start optimizing for systems that tell us what we need to know to make better decisions when we need to know it. And sometimes that can be

Adrienne Green (17:08)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler Ryan (17:09)
as simple as a message that pops up to let us know when something bad is happening or that something that we need to take action on is occurring.

That we might have otherwise missed. And I think if we optimize more for decision making and knowing the right things at the right time, that’s actually gonna accomplish far

Adrienne Green (17:26)
Right.

Tyler Ryan (17:26)
more for our decision making, which is the outcome that we want, than me having yet another dashboard to look at with yet another card on it that I have to know how to interpret, which I probably don’t, anyways.

Right, so I think it’s this new chapter we’re moving into, which is fewer dashboards, more things that drive decision making. And those might not look like dashboards at all.

Adrienne Green (17:46)
Right, right. Especially with AI and everything that we’re it’s it’s a brave new world where things are changing very quickly.

Tyler Ryan (17:52)
It is, it is. And and this to me is more of a recognition of the reality that because these new tools are emerging, what they’re gonna be really good at are things like pattern recognition, anomaly detection, finding a fire that you might have missed for three days and telling you about it sooner.

And those things are actually far higher leverage if you can build systems that optimize for those than just having more reports and graphs and tables that you need to sift through on a daily basis. Because at a certain point, you just glaze over those. You don’t really do much with that information other than go, okay, cool, then move on with your day. So we gotta move to a new style of operation that’s all about decision making and quick action, because the speed is way more possible

Adrienne Green (18:34)
That makes sense.

Tyler Ryan (18:35)
now, and dashboards are

not really conducive to speed. They’re conducive to when I get around to taking a look at it and I have three hours to deep dive. It’s just antithetical, I think, to the direction that things are moving.

Adrienne Green (18:46)
Yeah. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And it seems like you have a pretty unique background that you’re bringing to make these observations. You didn’t come from, you know, the corporate world or being an analyst. You came from NASA and JPL and now you’re building the software for e-commerce brands. How did how did that transition happen?

Tyler Ryan (19:04)
Man, well, when I when I got to college, I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur and start companies. What I didn’t know is what I was gonna build, how I was gonna build it, and where I was gonna work along the way. And to me

Being able to learn and build software, this was back in like, you know, 2010, right? Being able to learn and build software really appealed to me because I wanted to be able to build things. And so I got into software engineering like a self-taught programmer, just watching YouTube videos and things like that. And I was studying physics and mechanical engineering. Ultimately was fortunate enough to get an internship at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And long story short,

I did internships every summer while I was in college and ultimately got hired there. And what really, really hooked me about that environment was just how incredibly detail oriented and rigorous you have to be to be able to put spacecraft on Mars. It was just like, I gotta know what these people are doing to be able to pull that off because this seems impossible, right?

And so being in that environment, it really showed me, funny enough, like what it means to know your numbers. Because I want

Adrienne Green (20:11)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler Ryan (20:11)
you to just imagine for a second, how well do you think you have to know your numbers to be able to land a rover on Mars, a trip that takes seven to fourteen months of flying through space just to even get there, and then to land on Mars within like a mile of your target landing spot.

Like the degree to which you need to know your numbers is impossible for most people to comprehend. And so having seen that, having seen the Curiosity rover the size of an SUV, touchdown on the surface of Mars, see the first pictures come back, and see five thousand people in the auditorium all crying because this project took 10 years and they actually pulled it off, it just left this mark on me of man, if we can do that.

Like I think we can figure out our L T V for an e commerce store. So when I

Adrienne Green (20:59)
Right, right. Mm-hmm.

Tyler Ryan (21:00)
got into the world of of online business and trying to find my place in it, I just naturally gravitated towards analytics and data because of that background.

And once I got into enough of these companies to see that they were struggling with data problems, and their number one question was, I’m trying to figure out how much I can afford to spend to acquire a customer. Once I heard

Adrienne Green (21:19)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler Ryan (21:20)
that like four or five times, then I was at that talk and saw Joel Marion give that speech. That talk was actually the epiphany moment that led to the company that I started LTV Numbers. Because at the end of that talk, my thought was, my.

If I could have just built the software that he said he used to answer that question, he would have had everybody in the room going to sign up.

And so after

Adrienne Green (21:43)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler Ryan (21:44)
enough of those exposures, I was just committed to solving the data analytics visibility problem around LTV for online businesses. And I tried to bring that rigor of my background to do what is very hard in the business world and most businesses struggle with, and be able to lean on that background because it’s not hard for me, right? If coming from that world. So it was like this huge opportunity where I saw I could solve something that most businesses struggle with and was.

arguably one of the most fundamental things in business. So here we are eight years later. LTV numbers is now data driven and three plus billion dollars worth of data analyzed. It’s been quite a wild journey, to say the least.

Adrienne Green (22:24)
Well, and from a an entrepreneurial, you know, business standpoint, what I love is that you first went in and like found a problem that people have that you had a unique skill set to solve, right?

Tyler Ryan (22:35)
Yes.

Adrienne Green (22:36)
I see that. And then what I also see is the power of like I remember when back when I got my undergrad degree in business, we talked about like synergy, right? And when one plus one can equal three.

When you bring in somebody who has a different background, a different skill set that can complement yours, you can actually get a sum greater than the parts. And so it’s like when you can come in and bring in your unique skill set and expertise that a lot of entrepreneurs, I mean, across the board in all industries, it’s funny because entrepreneurs, you know, you’re in a business to make money, typically, money is a number, and yet a lot struggle with numbers, with data, with analyzing it, because they typically got in because they had a passion for something or

you know, unique skill in providing a certain service, not because they were good with data and numbers. so I love

Tyler Ryan (23:21)
Right.

Adrienne Green (23:21)
how you’re coming in and helping people do what they do best, because they’re able to have better numbers for it.

Tyler Ryan (23:28)
Absolutely. And just to put a fine point on that, one of the things that I noticed is there are so many cases where the let’s call it the skill of the business person is lower, but their visibility and grasp on the numbers is higher. And they end up performing better.

Than a business owner that has tremendous business skill, but very limited data visibility. So, in a very real way, like whatever your level of skill in business, up-leveling your data visibility and awareness will make you perform at a far higher level than your skill may otherwise suggest. Because that often, like I said earlier, is the constraint of most companies. Without the visibility,

Adrienne Green (24:06)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler Ryan (24:06)
no matter how good you are, you’re just gonna make bad decisions.

But if you’re not as skilled, but you can just make better decisions because you can see reality better, then you’re gonna ultimately perform at a far higher level. And I think that’s actually really empowering because for so many entrepreneurs, like when you get started, your skill may not be that high. But one of your greatest superpowers can be: I can see the things that other people can’t because I took the data seriously from the beginning. It’s just gonna give you a far higher.

Adrienne Green (24:38)
That makes a lot of sense. And I’m thinking along those lines, I’m intrigued to discuss auto, this autonomous analyst. Because I’m thinking auto is probably a part of that solution. So what does auto do that people aren’t getting from all those those dashboards that just give you a bunch of numbers?

Tyler Ryan (24:55)
So Otto, I want you to picture like an actual cute little otter character, okay? Otto

Adrienne Green (24:59)
Okay.

Tyler Ryan (25:00)
is an autonomous analyst, and what he does, he’s meant to be, going back to the earlier discussion that we had, he’s meant to be that world class analyst that you bring onto your team who proactively answers the question, Hey data, what do I need to know? Right now. And the key thing about Otto is

Just like bringing that world-class analyst onto your team, you don’t necessarily need to know what questions you must be asking. You don’t necessarily need to tell him what to do. Because he is leaning on our almost decade of experience.

On our $3 billion worth of data analyzed, on our having worked with hundreds of companies, we know the questions that you should be asking, right? And a lot of people came to us for a long time because we weren’t just like a pure analytics company, you know, faceless. You just kind of use the software and never talk to anybody.

We’ve always had a relationship with our clients where we’re helping you analyze your data, we’re in the trenches with you, we’re helping you build out reports and answer questions. So because we had built all that expertise, we wanted to take that and package it up and we put it inside of Otto’s brain, right? And so when Otto joins your team and we bring in all your data, you can essentially just kind of let him run wild.

Because he will go figure out the questions that you should be asking and proactively serve you those answers. And this is where we come full circle on the dashboards being dead thing, is that auto is not about he just builds you one dashboard and then another dashboard and then another dashboard and then another dashboard. And pretty soon you’ve got 75 dashboards that your team needs to look at. No. He’s more about giving you the right answer to the right question at the right time without you having to ask.

And that really

Adrienne Green (26:40)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler Ryan (26:41)
is the key because I I I’m just consistently stunned in business by how much waste happens because it just takes you a while to notice things. Right?

If you, if you have, for example, like all of a sudden your your average order value is normally $200. It’s been $50 for the last three days, but like nobody noticed it. It’s because all of your upsells broke, right? In those three days, depending on how big of a business you are, that can literally be a thousand to like a hundred thousand dollars, like right there. And so in a very real way, the speed to catching these things is one of the most powerful levers that a business has.

Because it’s not complicated, really, right? It’s about knowing what to look for, where to look for those things, and just being like, hey, you should know this right now, right? And not

Adrienne Green (27:29)
Right.

Tyler Ryan (27:29)
wait three days for you to discover it because you’re looking at a report, you’re like, wait, that doesn’t look right. What happened? Three-hour-long investigation, teams got their hair on fire. To come to that same conclusion, what if Otto could just tell you within a few minutes of it happening, right? Or the very next day rather than three days later.

And many teams hours and pain and suffering to get to that point, right? So that’s what auto’s

Adrienne Green (27:53)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler Ryan (27:54)
meant to do. Proactively answer the questions that you should be asking. And to do so leaning on all the experience of our team, about a decade and three billion dollars in data analyzed.

Adrienne Green (28:04)
That makes a lot of sense. I I mean, I feel like any business owner who actually has a business has had some time. They’re thinking about in their head where they’re like, yeah, I didn’t find out about something until much later and it was where I was losing money or not making as much as I could have or something like that. So I think that resonates. Now, Tyler, as we wrap up, I would love for you to tell me about a brand or a company that changed direction because of something you showed them and what did that unlock for the business?

Tyler Ryan (28:28)
Ooh, that’s a good one. We’re we’re very careful about anonymity, so I’m gonna I’ll I’ll use you know an anonymous name. But and th this is representative re representative of a pretty common trend, I would say. So there is a a supplement company we were working with and they were doing

Really, really high volume. And I I’m gonna use this high volume example not because it only applies to a high volume example, but because it can show you how big the impact can be. So they were doing well over a hundred million dollars a year in sales. Okay. Huge business. They had like 12 sub-brands underneath them, but they never could see their lifetime value. They were profitable, they were making money, but it was just one of those blind spots that 95% of businesses have.

So they came to us, they said, hey, we want to get our arms around our LTV. So we brought in all their data, we looked at their LTV, and it was one of those, my gosh, sort of moments. Because we saw their LTV curve, and what it looked like was, well, let me say this first. You want your LTV to go up and to the right. Right? That means as the customer

Adrienne Green (29:29)
Yeah.

Tyler Ryan (29:31)
journey goes on, it’s getting higher over time, right? Theirs looked like it looked like

A slide. So it was just going down and to the right.

And the reason why this was happening was because they had so many refunds that would happen within the first seven days or so of the customer journey because of order related issues, because people were getting charged for things they didn’t think they were paying for, because when the shipment arrived, it took longer than expected.

It was surfacing all these customer service and customer experience problems. And their LTV just went down, down, down and to the right. And it did come back up a little bit, but it took a very long time and it never even got back to where it started. So I want you to imagine you’re a hundred million dollar a year business and you realize that after you acquire a customer, all you do from that point on is actually lose money. When they saw that.

As you might imagine, they’re like, we have to change everything about our customer journey. Right? Because

Adrienne Green (30:30)
Right.

Tyler Ryan (30:30)
they’re bringing hundreds of thousands of customers in the door. And instead of enjoying a a growth in value, a growth in profit over time, they were actually fighting this wave of losses that they were constantly having to try to offset by acquiring more customers.

Adrienne Green (30:45)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler Ryan (30:45)
And so

that business, when they saw the realities of their LTV curve, and this is what I love about LTV, it’s just a visual representation of your customer journey. If it goes down, it means customers are refunding, and that’s not good. If it goes up just a little bit, it means some people are buying, but not a lot. If it takes a big leap up, that means that promo that you’re doing 30 days after they buy is really, really working, right? You can see

Adrienne Green (31:09)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler Ryan (31:09)
your whole marketing and customer journey strategy in an LTV curve.

And so that business completely flipped their focus around. They got really serious about their customer journey. They got really serious about their refunds. They got really serious about how they were marketing and presenting things in the funnel to eliminate confusion. And long story short, without actually changing their volume, they were able to more than double their profits. Same customers.

Adrienne Green (31:34)
Right.

Tyler Ryan (31:35)
Better LTV twice as profitable. And that outcome right there, I want to just put a point on, is very common actually. Because if a business is operating with like 8% margins or something like that, you know, kind of cutting it close, a better LTV absolutely can double your margin. 100%. And so

Adrienne Green (31:52)
Right. Right.

Tyler Ryan (31:53)
that’s why it’s one of those big levers for not just like scaling your business, but just making more profit.

Because on

Adrienne Green (32:00)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler Ryan (32:00)
the same volume coming in the front, you could actually have twice as much money going into the bank at the end of the month. There’s very few things that can provide that kind of leverage. But it all comes back to if you don’t have the visibility in the first place, you’re never gonna make those kinds of decisions because you would never have the information in front of you to prompt you to make those decisions. So that’s why sometimes you just need somebody to tell you proactively, hey data, here’s what you need to know right now.

Adrienne Green (32:26)
Right. That makes a lot of sense. Well, Tyler, I love our conversations. It’s been super helpful. Thank you for sharing what you do at Data Driven. Now, if people would like to connect with you and start getting clearer numbers in their own business, what’s the best way for them to do so?

Tyler Ryan (32:39)
Best place to go would be data drivenos.com, like data driven operating system.com. And you can find me on Instagram at Tyler underscore data driven. Always making posts there. And either place will get you to where you need to go.

Adrienne Green (32:54)
I love it. Thank you, Tyler. And for our listeners, what I love about Ta Tyler’s approach is that clarity isn’t about having more data. It’s about knowing what numbers actually matter. And once you know that, the next question is who’s gonna act on it? And that could be where things slip in your business. Big ideas are great, and follow-through is what turns them into results. So if you ever need an ultimate executive assistant to help get things moving behind the scenes and execute on that data, talk to me over at Workogenics and we’ll make it happen.

And then join me again next week for another episode of Scale Smart Grow Fast.

Tyler Ryan (33:25)
Thank you.

The post The Metric Most Operators Can’t See — And Why It’s Quietly Capping Their Business first appeared on Workergenix.

Opening Scaling Tension

Every owner carries a project that never ships. A book. A framework. A signature offer. The idea is clear, the market is real, the person has the credibility. And still, nothing leaves the desk. The reason is rarely talent. It is the operational weight sitting between the concept and the finished asset, and the founder is the only person available to carry it.

That weight quietly caps growth. Leadership bandwidth gets absorbed by the coordination, editing, formatting, follow-up, and vendor management that no one else on the team owns. The idea stays a Google Doc. The impact never compounds.

The Hidden Constraint

On this episode of Scale Smart Grow Fast, publisher and multi-author book creator Kathy Dirksen surfaced a truth that applies far beyond publishing. Most people who never share their message assume the problem is confidence or content. Kathy has helped over two hundred authors reach print, and the pattern is different. The real block is infrastructure.

A solo book means an owner has to source editors, manage a publishing timeline, understand Amazon’s launch mechanics, coordinate cover design, and hold the calendar accountable. That is not a writing problem. That is a systems problem. And it is the same shape as every stalled initiative inside a growing business: a new service line, a hiring push, a repositioned website, a partner outreach program. The founder can generate the substance. The execution scaffolding is missing.

When execution systems do not exist, the founder becomes the execution system. That is where scaling discipline breaks down.

The Operating Shift

Kathy’s model reframes the problem. Instead of asking an author to build a publishing operation, she gives them a single, contained deliverable: one chapter, roughly 2,500 words. Everything around that chapter, from the editing team to the launch campaign to the Amazon mechanics to the community coordination, is already built and staffed.

That is the operating shift. Compress the founder’s contribution to the zone only they can occupy. Transfer ownership of everything else to a structured system with people accountable for the outcome.

This is how operational leverage actually works. It is not about pushing harder or extending the workday. It is about narrowing what the leader touches so their input carries more weight, and building a repeatable execution layer underneath so the surrounding work does not disappear, it moves to someone whose job it is to own it.

The parallel to running a business is direct. Every owner has a version of the 2,500 words. It is the strategic work, the client relationships, the judgment calls, the vision. Everything else is scaffolding, and scaffolding is where founders quietly bleed hours they should be spending on capital allocation, positioning, and growth decisions.

Execution in Practice

A few mechanics from Kathy’s process translate cleanly into any operating model.

Contain the founder’s scope. She sets a firm word count. Not a preference, a boundary. That is a decision-making framework in disguise. It removes the endless calibration of “how much should I write” and replaces it with a fixed input. The same principle applies to project scoping inside a business. Leaders who define the ceiling remove the drag of re-deciding what the deliverable should be every time.

Standardize the coordination layer. Monthly group calls, a persistent chat channel, a known publishing sequence. Authors are not inventing the process. They are stepping into one. When execution systems are documented and repeated, the founder stops being the coordination hub. Contributors self-orient.

Match the support to the person. Kathy does not force one workflow on every author. Seasoned writers get less hand-holding. First-time authors get more structure. That is risk management applied to delegation. Support flexes to the actual gap, so no capacity is wasted managing people who do not need managing, and no one falls through the cracks because the process assumed too much.

Distribute the launch. Twenty authors, twenty communities, one coordinated push. The founder is not the only megaphone. This is the same reason a business with a functional referral engine outperforms a business relying solely on the owner’s outbound reach. Distributed activation compounds. Solo activation caps at the founder’s calendar.

Leverage Outcome

The result of this model is not that authors work less. It is that their work counts for more. The 2,500 words they produced were the highest-leverage version of their contribution. Everything else was owned by people whose job it was to own it.

For a business owner, the same shift protects leadership bandwidth. When the founder stops absorbing coordination, formatting, follow-up, and vendor management, the hours that come back are not general hours. They are decision hours. They move revenue, close deals, and set direction. That is what operational leverage buys. Not a lighter workload, a higher-value one.

Ideas do not scale on effort. They scale on structure. The owners who ship the projects that matter are the ones who stop trying to be the publishing house and start being the author.

Connect With the Guest

To learn more about Kathy Dirksen and her work: Website: https://inspiredtenacity.com LinkedIn: Search “Kathy Dirksen” on LinkedIn

The Immediate Move

Leadership bandwidth is the constraint, not effort. The owners who ship the work that matters are the ones who stop absorbing coordination and start transferring ownership. Structure beats hustle. A clear deliverable, a documented process, and a person accountable for the outcome will always outperform a founder trying to hold every thread alone.

The move is not to add more to the calendar. The move is to narrow what the founder touches and route everything else through a system built to carry it. That is how execution stops slipping. That is how leadership bandwidth stops leaking into work that no one else was going to catch.

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Full Podcast Transcript

Do you ever feel like you’re working hard every day, but your biggest impact never gets out into the world? Well, today on Scales Today on Scale Smart Grow Fast, we’re gonna talk about how to solve problems like that. Now, here at Worker Genics, our full-time ultimate executive assistants help busy owners stay consistent with execution so they can focus on what matters most. Kinda like what gonna talk about today, where I am joined by Kathy Dirksen, who’s the founder of Inspired Tenacity. She’s an international speaker and a 25-time number one best-selling author who’s helping people turn their stories into lasting impact. Thank you so much for being with me today, Kathy. thank you so much for having me. I am excited to get into this and I’d like to start with a little bit of your own story here, Kathy. I understand that you made a big life shift in your 50s. What was the moment when you realized I’m not done yet? Yes, well my my first shift I made around twenty ten and I I would say that was in response to a a fatal car accident that my family was involved in that really got me on this, you know, that that shakeup of thinking, okay, what am I supposed to be doing with my life and recognizing that my my marriage, my workplace were both very toxic. And I think that was really what got me started. And I made a one big career change. I went from medical genetics to financial planning, thinking this is how I could really help big people change their life in a big way. And but after a decade in that field, I recognized that that wasn’t the right answer. I needed to really come up with it myself, knowing, like you say, that there’s something bigger I’m supposed to be doing. There’s something that’s really creating a different impact in a broader way. And so it’s been about five years since I became an entrepreneur and set out on my own to figure that out. And yes, creating the multi-author books is where I landed and I know that this is this is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. I am so excited to to dive into these multi-author books and learn more about it from our time together, Kathy. Now, I I am passionate about people and their stories, right? And I love, I kind of figure like talking to people and hearing from them is like the original Google, right? To learn about different things in the world. And so a lot of people have these stories, ideas, or lessons, but they never make it out into the world. Why do you think that happens? In my experience, what I found is the most common reason is that they feel that their story’s not important enough. And or it’s that feeling that of that imposter syndrome that they they might want to get their story out there, but it’s like, well, I’m not an author. No one’s gonna want to read my story. So I I find it’s a combination of those things, feeling it’s not big enough and that I’m not an author, I can’t do that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I know when I first I was actually in a small group about book writing, about being an author, that I kind of was part of a mastermind I was in. So I just kind of joined it to be like, hey, here’s a place I can learn about something I might do later. And I remember in like that first call saying, well, you know, I could write about this, but there’s already a really well known book on this topic, by this guy that everybody knows. And the person facilitating the call was immediately like, Yes. And there’s space for another person’s perspective because your insights and your thoughts and your wisdom on this topic are not gonna be the same as that guys. which I thought was really helpful in motivating me to get started. Yes. And I often get that with my the people that that are in my books as well, that feeling, well, well what if somebody else writes a similar kind of thing? It’s like, well, everybody’s story is different. I mean the the the one little point might be in common, but the bigger story is always unique. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Now, when somebody comes to you, they say, I think I have a book in me. They’re thinking about writing some of their story. Where do you usually start? Yes, and all of the books that I do are all multi-author books. And so if if someone does come and they’re determined to do a solo book, then I can get them started and then I send them to my my contacts that focus on solo books. But but I always really start with a conversation, a conversation around, you know, what is that one message you really want to get out in the world? And what parts of your story feed into that message? And and I find that that really helps clarify. You know, because for most of us there’s all kinds of different parts of our life that we could talk about in a book. But really narrowing it down to what’s that impact discussion and topic that you really want to have out there. Mm-hmm. Yes, right. And that’s I think part of the challenge people have is they feel like there there’s so many things they may be passionate about, especially I think with women, we can have so many aspects and so many places we feel good. And it’s like, where’s the book? But I’d like to also, Kathy, let’s talk about a little bit with these multi-author books. How did how did what it for listeners who aren’t familiar with them, can we start with maybe a what is a multi-author book? Yes, so so basically the books that I create, I aim for having twenty people per book. Each book has its own theme and title, so everyone is writing in the direction of that, but sharing their own personal journey, what they’ve come through, what they’ve learned along the way. And for those that are entrepreneurs, that often leads to what they’re doing now. So it kind of becomes a taste of what they’re up to and what their business is. But but yes, so basically 20 people each write one chapter. So really each chapter is a standalone story. With the books that I do, I don’t look for weaving them together in a way that makes them one big story. I like each one to be completely independent and really reflecting the voice of the person who wrote that chapter. So so we take these 20 people, these 20 stories, we bring them all together under that title, and we publish that, and we do the whole. bestseller campaign through Amazon. We create all kinds of opportunities to get into speaking and to learn how to use the book to really build your business for those people who are entrepreneurs. Mm-hmm. And it seems like it would be a little bit easier of a give me one second here. There’s some children we need to pause in the background. You will see one child is having to be separated and move in the background. We just came where I’m I’m in Antigua, Guatemala. We just came to a new location like yesterday. So we are still figuring out the dynamics of this house and getting our work done and doing our homeschool without harassing our siblings. So yes. Yeah. Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, that’s any any move is can throw you into that kind of thing. But but yes, definitely so were you always in Guatemala? I guess we should go back to right. We we travel internationally full time. So we were in Guatemala back in July and then we went to the US for weeks and now we’re we’re back here again. But overall we go to a lot of different places. So Cool. yes. okay, now we’ll get back to the topic. I want to dive into the multiauthor books a little bit. So Kathy, I know when I first ran across this idea of multi-author books. I thought it was really cool because it it kind of makes it less intimidating to write an entire book and it kind of makes it something that you can do with your friends. I’m curious, you know, what attracts people or what you find are big motivations for people to come do these multi-author books. There’s definitely a couple different angles that people often come to it from. When I did the first book that I ever participated in, my only goal goal really was to share my story with the feeling that it could help other women. So at that point I’d gone through that first career change. I went through a divorce at the same time, had two teenagers with me for the ride, and and it literally was like this calling that my story needs to help somebody else. And so that’s I think a one big thing. So and the other side is for entrepreneurs. These days I would say it’s almost a requirement for entrepreneurs to have the word author in your profile. I I find that quite often if you don’t have it, it’s almost like that feeling of, well, why aren’t you an author yet? And and especially for people that want to get into speaking, to have the word author in your profile and a book you can talk about. takes you into speaking opportunities that you wouldn’t be invited to if you weren’t an author. So so Mm-hmm. I would say those are the most common reasons why people decide to get published. And then from the angle of a multi-author book versus a solo book, I would definitely say it’s like you said, that combination of it’s a great way to get started in the publishing world because you only have to write one chapter. Everything else is done for you. You don’t have to find editors, you don’t need to figure out the system, you don’t need to figure out Amazon. It’s all done for you. And then the other side, like you’re saying, when you’re working together with a group, there’s a whole different energy about creating something together. And especially most of my books are women only. And a lot of the themes are ones that are really about inspiring, motivating, lifting as a community. And and so to come together with a group of women and create something like that that you know is gonna create impact in the world, there’s a whole different energy about it. Right. Now I’m sure you run into some some limiting beliefs that hold first time authors back. Maybe some thoughts about fear, clarity, confidence. What do those conversations look like to help people get past that? to I guess realize the impact and and the point of getting their voice out there. I think part of it is helping them reflect on that side of understanding the impact that their story can have on other people and realizing that and I I always like to look at it from the ripple effect point that as each of us share our story and put it out in the world and we’re impacting different people along the way, then that’s also impacting the other people that they’re interacting with. And to me a story and how it impacts just ripples out further and further and further and really to the point that you have no idea who will Right. be impacted and how you will change lives with your story. So I think really helping people understand that part helps them get through those nerves and you know reminding them too that all authors had to start somewhere. Like Stephen King did not start out as, you know, the the best writer in the world. you know, he obviously had to start with one book and then move out from there. So reminding them that that we all have to start somewhere. And of course reflecting it back on the point that everything else is done for you. You’re in a group that is supported. You’re you know, your the chapter development, the editing, everything. You are supported the whole way through and the complicated things are done for you. Yes, I know that most, you know, business owners and entrepreneurs, the last thing they need is another job or a project, like figuring out how to publish a book. Now, so much of this story, like you said, with the ripple effect is is, you know, connection Hold on one second. Let’s redo that. All right. So you so much of the story, the reason to get your story author is the effect it can have on society, right? It’s about that connection and that community. And I’m curious, the great thing about these multi-author books is that you’re part of a community while you’re writing the book. So how does that Yeah. change the writing and publishing process as well? I think when people are are working on a solo book, it is a very lonely job. That’s, you know, you spend hours locked away by yourself, plugging away. Whereas with a multi-author Yes. book, when you’re only writing one chapter, in my books I focus on 2,500 words. And so that’s roughly four to five pages in a paperback. And for most people that do, you know, quite a bit of writing and content and things in their business. That’s probably something that they could put at least the first draft together in an afternoon. And so kind of knowing that the rest of it you don’t have to worry about. Right. It just makes that workload a lot less because yes, as somebody who’s written a solo book, there were a lot of solo hours grinding away, getting that content done, thinking about it and writing it and providing. Yes. And part of what I part of what I bring into the process too, we do group Zoom meetings roughly once a month so everyone can introduce themselves, get to know each other as a group. We always have a group chat, usually on LinkedIn. So again, everyone can see who else is in the book, they can connect with each other. And then of course when it gets to the time of launching the book, now you’ve got twenty communities around the world that are promoting the same thing at the same time. So it’s not just you out there tooting your own horn going, Go buy my book, go buy my book. You know, it’s twenty people, twenty communities all amplifying each other. So a whole different energy from that point too. Right. And speaking of that and and kind of thinking about the promotion part of the book, you’ve helped create a lot of best-selling authors and in addition to being a best-selling author yourself a lot. What what leads to that success? Mm-hmm. Yes, yes. And and you mentioned in the intro that it was that I’ve been involved with twenty-five published books. It’s actually twenty-six now. And of wow. those, eleven of them are my books, so ones that I’ve brought people together. Others are other people’s books that I’ve contributed to. And so so in that yeah, four and a half years, eleven books out there. And so that’s over two hundred people, mostly women, who have become published authors through my books. And what is the what is the secret sauce that makes these books successful? What makes a story actually connect with people where they are buying the book, maybe buying it as gifts for others, recommending it to other people? I would say a big part of it is, you know, as I mentioned, so each one has a different theme. Different people really kind of connect with different words. Like one of the ones that we’ve got coming out soon is inspired metamorphosis. So really that whole idea of transformation, and especially with women through various ages and just the transitions we go through. So I find some people are just really drawn to that transformation. one of my other books is Ripple Effective Impact. So some people are drawn to that idea of how are we creating impact. One of the books will be coming out later this year is called Rooted in Resilience. And so again, resilience is kind of a theme that people are connected to or not. So I find that the books kind of draw the right people to them. And I I love too that they’re quite an easy read because each chapter is a standalone piece. You can sit down. Read one chapter, close the book, put it down for tomorrow. So it’s not like a a a full book where you feel like, I’ve got to get through that next chapter. I’ve got to like, what’s gonna happen next? You know, that kind of thing. It’s really like, okay, I finished that one. I can go come back to it later. So I think that makes it a an easy read that way too, which Mm-hmm. kind of encourages people to want to to pick it up. Mm. Yeah. I will say as as an avid reader, I have read some of these types of of multiauthor books, or even I recently read a book where each chapter was like a biography of a different woman in history. And I do I do enjoy, I find that with my busy life it is really easy to read a book where each chapter is kind of like its own self contained story, like that resonates a lot with me. So now you’ve mentioned it you put a lot of books out there and and you’ve mentioned some systems, some processes you have, right? Like the groups on LinkedIn for all the authors and things like this. As your work grew and you now do more of these books, what had to become more systemized behind the scenes? Hmm. Yes, and there’s definitely a lot of systems that I still need to put in place. And but things around communication with the group is really important to have that systematized. even at the very beginning of the process when I am just putting out the information of, you know, here’s the next book that’s gonna be available, who wants to participate, even that whole process of getting it out there, having a like marketing campaign, having a follow-up, and how do people get registered, so all of those really do create places in the process where a system would be very helpful. Mm-hmm. Right. Yes, cause so much of it is you’re doing the same thing again and again. And now you have systems so the individual authors don’t have to think about that. Yeah, exactly. Now it’s always that balancing act between having systems, having a you know, guiding people, and then also letting people do their own thing. Where have you learned to let go of control while still maintaining some the quality that you expect from your books? Mm-hmm. Yes, yes. And and and like I mentioned too, I really it’s really important to me that each chapter reflects the voice of that that author and looking at it from I I give them a lot of flexibility around like what format or what style they like to write in. You know, some people like to use a lot of subtitles, some people like to use a lot of bullet points and you know, kind of really allowing them to choose what’s gonna work for them in that way. And one of the other things is I have a a publishing team that I work with. So I do the front end, they do all the professional publishing end. And so really I I trust that my publishing team knows what they’re doing. So once we hand over the chapters, I I really leave it to them. So I don’t oversee all those other parts along the way. I just know that they’ll send to me that next piece and it will come together. Right. I love that. It’s like you’re staying in your lane and your zone of genius and you’ve figured out the other team members to do their part. Yes, yes. And I also love that you mentioned that the bullet points. I’m a huge bullet points numbered list person. So love that. okay. Now that actually leads conversation about, you know, you have your zone of genius and you have some team members. Let’s talk about that support a little bit more, you know. What does that look like if somebody comes in and starts working with you? You know, where are they working with you? Where does it go to your team? How do you work as a part of a community within your business to get this book from idea to bestseller? Yes, so so at the beginning when they are clarifying what they’re going to write about, developing their chapter, I work directly with each author in a way that works best for them. So I find that some people are obviously very seasoned writers, so they don’t need so much of that kind of support. Whereas other people, this is the first time they’ve done something like this. So to really to have a few meetings where we are talking about the ideas, then bringing it together as an outline, then reviewing different chapters. So I’ve really learned to leave that up to the authors to tell me what level of support they need. But I’m here for all of that, whatever support they need. And then what when it does go over to the publishing team, there’s a whole team of editors that they work with over there. So that team works directly with one of the authors, each author. So I don’t get involved in that part unless there’s some kind of issue, then they bring me into it. But generally speaking, the editors work directly with the authors to finalize their chapter and then the whole thing moves forward with the rest of the the publishing process and marketing. Okay, that makes sense. And we’re gonna continue to ignore the children running around in the background. Theo, please don’t come downstairs again. The this is like the most they’ve inter ever interrupted any video. So my goodness gracious. okay. So, Kathy, if somebody’s listening and they’re intrigued, can they come and reach out to you to work with you as like an individual author within a book that you already have underway? Or what if somebody has an idea for an entire book project? I imagine there’s a couple different paths there. What does that look like? Yes, yeah. So really there’s kind of three options. The majority of my books is just individuals coming to me to that join into the group as I build it. So definitely, yes, if if one person wants to jump in, then definitely connect with me, let me know, we’ll find the right book. I always have a few different books on the go at any given time, and that’s really one of the reasons why. So I’ve got a selection of themes so that individual can choose which one of those themes really fits. what they want to be putting out there in the world. The other one is, yes, when I when some of my books get published, I’m obviously starting new ones. So I’m open to new ideas that people might come to me as you know, I’d love to have a book about this theme or that theme. And so always open to those kind of ideas. And then the third thing that I do, I create books inside a community. And so it can be branded and titled around the organization and then filled with members from that organization. So it really becomes a great way of marketing the group at the same time as, you know, shining the spotlight on each one of those authors in the group. So so it’s kind of a a great kind of multi-marketing asset. Right, I love that. And the good thing is that we are actually going to produce this episode in about a week and a half. So I’m curious if you wanted to share any themes for anybody who is listening, you know, in the first week or so that it comes out, where you might still have some availability in these books. What are some of the themes you have available right now? Yes, so one of the ones we’ve got right now that’s about half filled is called Intentional Perspective, Finding Joy When Life Gets Messy. And that one is for women and men. One of the other ones is called When Women Rise, the World Follows. So that one obviously is all women. And the another one is called The Leader Within, which is also all women, and that will be, you know, each individual sharing their own journey around leadership. how they’ve grown into leadership, what their leadership looks like, and then also sharing some tips or strategies for other women that that want to step you know more into a leadership role. So so those are three of the options that I’ve got right now. I love that because one of the great things about stories is how we can inspire other people to maybe get past limits or fears that they have because they hear our story and they see what we were able to do and that gives them the confidence that they can do it themselves. Yes. Now, for somebody listening who feels like they’re sitting on a story, a message, or a next chapter, what’s one small step they can take this week? Well, definitely connecting with me is a great next step. one of the other next steps they could take is really kind of narrowing down and fine-tuning what is that core message, like I mentioned before. And another step would be to get started writing. That the writing really is often can become a habit, you know, something we do regularly. And obviously, the more we do something, the more comfortable we are with it, the more confident we are with it. And and generally create more of a flow with what we’re working on. So so those are you know a few of the ways I’d suggest getting started. Perfect. And that feeds for that feeds so well into what I was going to ask next, which is Kathy, where can people connect with you, learn more about your work, and start taking that first step toward sharing their own story? Yeah, so the best social media to connect with me on is LinkedIn. That’s where I’m the most active. I’m also on Facebook and Instagram. You can also find me there. And my website is inspiredtenacity.com. And on there you’ll find the list of the current projects that are open to jump into. You’ll find another page that has my previous books where you can link to Amazon to get them. And then I also have a gift section where you can get onto that page and get free PDF downloads of several of my books. Amazing. That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Kathy. And for our listeners, what I love about Kathy’s work is the reminder that your story still matters. And sometimes the next chapter is the one with the most impact. And that’s true in business too. And so often as entrepreneurs, we’ve got these big ideas that could be very impactful. Yet follow through can be where things slip. And that’s why at Worker Genics, we have full-time, ultimate executive assistants. that help you with that follow through so that your big ideas can be out there in the world. You can learn more at workergenics.com and then join me next week for another episode of Scale Smart Grow Fast.

The post The Execution Gap Between the Idea and the Impact first appeared on Workergenix.

Every scaling operator eventually hits the same wall. The numbers look defensible. Revenue is holding. The team is staffed. Deals are moving. And yet something underneath feels off, decisions get slower, follow-through slips, and the calendar keeps compressing around the founder. The drag isn’t in the P&L. It’s in the operator’s own cognitive load.

This is the pattern Ly Smith works on. In a recent conversation on Scale Smart Grow Fast, she framed a version of this problem that most execution frameworks miss: the operator’s internal narrative is itself an operating constraint. When the person at the top is running in reactive mode, the org runs in reactive mode. No amount of hiring fixes that until the pattern above it changes.

The Hidden Constraint

Most scaling conversations focus on process, headcount, and systems. Those matter. But there’s a constraint that sits earlier in the chain, the operator’s default response to volume. Smith describes it through a simple word inversion: reactor versus creator. Same letters, different sequence. The reactor sits inside the middle of every incoming demand, emails, meetings, KPIs, escalations, absorbing and responding. The creator moves themselves to the front of the sequence and works from intent outward.

The distinction sounds abstract until you map it to actual operator behavior. Reactor mode looks like inbox-driven days, calendar collisions, and constant re-decisions on things that were already decided. Creator mode looks like protected focus blocks, delegated ownership, and decisions that hold. The output difference between these two modes over 90 days is enormous, and it has almost nothing to do with hours worked.

This is the hidden constraint. Leadership bandwidth isn’t limited by time. It’s limited by how much of that time is consumed re-processing the same categories of input.

The Operating Shift

The core principle worth pulling from Smith’s framework is this: capacity expands when the operator stops being the default node for execution decisions.

That shift requires two moves most operators resist. First, an honest audit of what actually belongs on the leader’s plate, the zone-of-genius work that only the principal can do. Second, a disciplined handoff of everything else, accepting that a competent operator executing at roughly 80% of the founder’s approach is a full success, not a compromise. Smith is direct about the number: 80% match on execution style equals 100% on outcome, because the alternative, the founder doing it themselves, carries an opportunity cost that dwarfs the delta.

This is the operational leverage argument stated cleanly. Leverage isn’t working longer. It’s removing yourself as the required checkpoint for work that doesn’t need you.

Execution in Practice

Three specific mechanics from the conversation translate directly to operator practice.

Delegate, delay, delete as a triage frame. Every task on a leader’s plate falls into one of four buckets: do (genius zone), delegate (someone else’s genius zone), delay (real but not now), or delete (looked necessary, wasn’t). Most operators run this triage implicitly and inconsistently. Making it explicit, weekly, on paper, surfaces how much of the current load belongs in the bottom three buckets. This is a decision-making framework that reduces cognitive load by eliminating re-decisions on recurring work.

Energy management over time management. Smith reframes productivity around energy allocation rather than calendar allocation. The practical version: identify the two or three windows per day where cognitive capacity is highest, and protect them for the work that actually requires the principal. Everything else, coordination, follow-up, documentation, scheduling, either gets delegated or gets pushed to lower-energy windows. This is the same logic capital allocators use with attention: deploy the scarce resource where the marginal return is highest.

Evening close-out over morning scramble. The under-discussed routine is the evening one. Setting the top three priorities the night before removes the morning decision tax and prevents the sleep disruption of open loops. It’s a small intervention with an outsized effect on next-day execution quality.

The reframe from “I have to” to “I get to” as a diagnostic. This one reads soft but functions as a hard signal. Tasks that consistently produce “have to” language are candidates for delegation. They’re not producing energy, which means they’re consuming bandwidth that could be deployed elsewhere. Smith uses the language shift as an operator flag: it tells you where to look for handoff opportunities.

Leverage Outcome

The compounding effect of these shifts is straightforward. When the operator stops absorbing every incoming demand, three things happen. Decisions get faster because they’re made in protected windows with adequate context. Execution gets more consistent because ownership sits with the person doing the work, not the person reviewing it. And leadership bandwidth expands, not because the day got longer, but because it stopped being fragmented.

For founder-led firms and capital-allocating operators, this is the actual scaling variable. The firms that plateau aren’t the ones with weak strategy or thin teams. They’re the ones where the principal remains the required node for follow-through. Removing that dependency is what separates a business that scales from a job that pays well.

Connect With the Guest

To learn more about Ly Smith and her work:
Website: rewriteyourselftalk.com
LinkedIn: Search “Ly Smith Upcycle Coaching”

The Immediate Move

Leadership bandwidth is the real constraint, not hours, not headcount, not tooling. The operators who scale cleanly are the ones who install structure earlier than feels necessary, transfer ownership fully rather than partially, and stop re-deciding work that’s already been decided. Structure beats effort. Cognitive load reduction beats grinding. The move isn’t to work harder inside the current pattern; it’s to change the pattern so the current work stops requiring you.

Watch this before you hire your next support role.

Book a discovery call to see how the right executive support helps you scale with clarity, alignment, and control without burnout or chaos. Click here to subscribe.

Full Podcast Transcript

Thank you.

Sometimes there’s a countdown and sometimes there’s not. I have like different studios and so like the different studios do different things and I don’t know why. So like I wait for the countdown and then I’m like, okay. Anyway.

Yeah…sure.

All good.

Did you ever notice how a team can hit every number on paper and they still feel like it’s falling apart underneath? There can be a quiet drain or low morale. People might just be going through the motions and it’s costing more than anyone wants to admit. Now this is Scale Smart Grow Fast, and today we’re getting into exactly and today we’re getting into exactly that with someone who fixes it from the inside out.

Now, speaking of things running smoothly behind the scenes, that’s a big part of why I built Worker Genics, a full-time ultimate executive assistance company that keeps executives and business owners consistent so that you’re not the one holding everything together by hand. Now, my exciting guest today is Lee Smith. She is the founder of Upcycle Coaching and the creator of the G3 Collective.

She built the candy method, which my youngest son would be super excited by the name. And it helps learning and development leaders shift their inner dialogue that might be driving some team dysfunction so that the results can show up where it really counts in productive in productivity, efficiency, and of course the bottom line. Let’s get into it. So, Lee, thank you so much for being here today.

Okay.

Thank you, Adrienne. Happy to be here with you in the audience.

And I love the expertise you’re bringing here. And I’m curious as you get started, as an expert, when you’re starting to work with a company, what are some of those first signs that you can spot with your wise eyes that a team might look fine on paper, but everything isn’t as great under the hood?

Yes, well, definitely there’s an energy in the room or energy, you know, the vibe that’s coming off from the team. And I also look at their body language and are they comfortable around each other? Or can I sense that they’re they’re excited and happy to be working with one another? Or is there some distance in there like, OK, you can tell.

I’m just going to be professional. I’m here because I need to be here. I’m just going to do my thing and I’m ready to leave the room. Or are they openly communicating and wanting to work with one another? And even when we see introverted and extroverted personalities, there’s still a different energy and a body language that comes off of them, whether it’s the straight.

Posture the leaning in or the really stepping back you can look at that personal space between the persons and and see that that Difference there whether they’re like, yeah this team like really enjoys being around one another or mmm, okay They’re here for the status quo, right and then I want to break that

And as you kind of list what you are how you’re sensing that, what struck me is even if you were meeting with people virtually, like in something like we’re doing here, right? Like a Zoom or a Google Meet, you could tell a lot of that even in a virtual meeting.

Definitely, definitely. It’s kind of the same thing. they are they leaning in and they’re they’re ready to go or their their body is upright? Maybe there’s there’s some movement. I talk a lot with my hands. So is there energy and movement there or are they kind of leaning back a little bit, you know, or you can see their body positions like everything is compact and they’re OK or the eyes go overt, you know. And so, yes.

Right.

Definitely, there’s different science that can happen over Zoom as well. Though most of my work hasn’t been in person.

Love that. Now, thank you for that. That helps as I I’m sure for myself and the other listeners, we’re like, okay, evaluating our own meetings and when we walk in and start something, how our team is. so that’s really helpful. And what I’d like to do is think about as we get into your method and how we can apply it, let’s start at the beginning. What were you what were you experiencing? What was that moment that made you start to build something like the candy method in the first place?

Yeah, so my my story begins definitely with my personal journey when I was experiencing what looks like an amazing life on the outside, especially on on social media. And this is back when Facebook was very more much more around connecting with one another. So we’re displaying our lives in that direction. And I was showing images of my vacation in Hawaii.

And this was no ordinary vacation. This was 23 days across the four major islands with my husband of 15 years at that point, my daughter, my young teenage daughter, and then my my stepson, who was growing it out of the house, but he was there with his girlfriend. We were all experiencing Hawaii for the very first time in our lives. So this was no ordinary vacation. So you’re seeing images of the beautiful paradise, this extended trip that I’m having.

I’m living the life, right? And 23 days met 22 sunsets. And there was this one particular sunset where my husband is out with his camera because he loves photography. So he’s got the lens like the nose of Pinocchio extending from his face and he’s trying to capture the golden hour. And my daughter is at my side and we’re having one of our tender moments. My stepson is off to the side with his his girlfriend. I’m looking out at this.

Yeah.

Golden orb setting on this dual sapphire horizon. Absolutely beautiful. The breeze is caressing our face. I’m thinking I’m in this beautiful place. I’m thinking it’s 23 days. Who does that? I’m thinking I’m here with my family, the people that I love most. I’m thinking, I’m thinking, I’m thinking. And then Adrienne, I catch myself thinking.

Where is the feeling? Because I was not feeling the moment. There wasn’t happiness. There wasn’t joy. There wasn’t peace and calm. There wasn’t even frustration or sadness or disappointment. There was literally no feeling moving through my body, which led me to think, what is happening and who am I right now? And that became my awakening to, I don’t know who I am. I have been a stay at home mom.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

for all these years. My daughter, like I said, is a young teenager at this point. And while this was a chapter that I desired for so long in my heart and I was living it, I lost my presence with it. And in that, I got caught up in the day to day, the never ending cycles of dishes and laundry and meals and carpools and taking care of the house and

Mm-hmm.

And then I was no longer present in that. And now I can relate that now to executives and leaders because what is their never ending cycles, right? It’s the emails, it’s the text, it’s the meetings, it’s the communication and the KPIs. And it’s like there’s this never ending cycle. And if we’re not present in what we’re meant to be doing, we can get lost in that day to day. And then I stood there on that shore.

feeling like a woman covered in what I call just. And yes, that’s that’s a play on dust particles where I was just a stay at home mom. I was just a step mom. I was just a wife. I was just a daughter, just a sister, just a friend. And I was just this shell of a woman. And so for our leaders who are listening, are you covered in just I am just this title. I am just this role. I am just this if we strip away.

your labels and titles. Who are you really? And in that moment on that shore, I did not have an answer for that. And I thought, Whoa, I am definitely not happy with this. And I made a decision that day. Hey, there’s a new year coming just a few days away right around the corner. When I get home stateside, I am going on a quest.

Mm-hmm.

For myself, I don’t care how selfish it seems to anyone else. I’m going on a quest to figure out who is Lee and who is she meant to be in the world. And through that self-reflection, I already had years of personal development under my belt at this time in my life. And I took those skills, those concepts, and that self-reflection went through to figure out who I am. And I chose a word to anchor my journey and I chose the word laugh.

Mm-hmm.

because I realized I’ve been in a depression and I’ve been in it for over two years. That’s really not cool. So how do I pull myself out of it? And I thought, well, let me use a word to carry me through. And I chose the word laugh. And then I also chose activities that would move me to laugh. And admittedly, Adrienne, it’s centered around three things. One was watching reruns of Friends because it’s my favorite sitcom.

Mm-hmm.

Two, there happened to be a local comedy troupe at this time of year that was putting on improv shows. So almost every weekend down front and center, I was getting my laughter on. I was doing some networking and I knew the people who had an amazing sense of humor. And I thought if I could just get in their space, maybe some of that would rub off on me. And being diligent and intentional 30, 60, 90 days, I found my joy again.

And interestingly, when it showed up in my heart center, it whispered in my ear, now that I’m here, what do you want to do with me? And out of that came my purpose because my little eight-year-old inner child came through and she said, remember how we love public speaking? Let’s go doing that. And then in the process of thinking, right.

Public speaking, this is something that I’ve chased again and again and again and then I would forget and I put it on the back burner because like I said, I was a stay-at-home mom at this point and I thought, well, my daughter, she’s getting ready to exit high school. She’s going to be flying the proverbial nest and doing her thing. I’m going to be that empty nester. that’s right. What do I do with this chapter now? And so I really dug deep into my personal development studies, looked at my own journey.

Right.

those pieces together and that’s how I formed the candy method. If you want to go into that next.

Right. Yeah, and it’s you know, it’s such a a common issue, Lee, and so it’s great to you know, to speak to it and and be able to help other people when they face this same dilemma where you almost feel like you are a shell of of who you could be, right? And you lose that that humanity piece, right? Where somebody who’s going through the motions like a a robot or, you know, things like that. And so you have to go, you know, it’s not uncommon that people have to go

Yeah.

Right.

rediscover. I love you mentioned, you know, your eight year old self. Rediscover what brought you joy, what brings you your humanity. And for you it was that laughing. I love that. makes a huge, huge difference. as someone with young kids in home, yeah, like laughter is a big part of of who we are at the start. And it can definitely go by the wayside as we as life gets lifing, right? So

Yeah

Yes.

Right.

let’s break down the candy method. Now we gotta start with how you came up with the name. Is it that you love candy? Is it that it was a good fit? Because I’m not a huge candy person, but my youngest most definitely is.

Yeah, when I looked at, well, if I want to speak, what do I speak about? What is the message that I’m going to be taking out into the world? And I took a step back and I looked at, well, if I’m going to use my personal journey as an example, well, how did I move from that depression and really get myself out of it? Because I was on the brink, admittedly.

for getting professional help. I wasn’t sure if I could pull myself out of it, but fortunately I did. And then when I looked back at the steps in doing that, I thought, oh, well, is it that interesting? Because number one, in asking who is Lee, I was getting clear. I was bringing that clarity to who am I, what makes me happy, what makes me…

alive. My favorite quote comes from Howard Thurman, you know, don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Then go do that because what the world needs is more people to come alive, right? We don’t want the robots. don’t want, you know, the people, you know, breathing zombies that are just waiting for the graveyard day. It’s like, no, let’s not have that in the world. Let’s have people who are alive and excited and happy doing what they love doing.

Right.

Right.

And I thought, okay, well, I got clear on that for me. Let the dream come alive again. All right, fantastic. And then what else did I do? Well, I anchored myself with an affirmative word. I personally chose the word laugh, right? And I thought, okay, well, I use that as part of my journey so that that was my focus. If nothing else coming out of the depression, I had that one focus that I could use. And I thought, okay, I used affirmation. Wonderful. And I don’t…

The way that I teach affirmation because so many people can say, well, I think positively, I use positive statements. It’s not really working for me. And I’m like, and I know why, because you are using the now based on your past. And so your brain will question you. Well, who do you think you are to be saying that? That’s not true. Or it’s not really supporting you in that direction. Well, I take affirmation from the future successful self.

When you can take that clarity, what makes you come alive and what the dream is, envision yourself into that future state where you have done all the things and you’re living that life that you truly desire. How are you showing up then? Who is that person in the mirror you are looking at then? Borrow his or her belief and then bring that into the now. And that’s what makes the affirmation so much more powerful and effective.

And I thought, okay, so I did that. and then I looked at myself. Well, I’m a stay at home mom now and I want to be this professional speaker. There is a gap that is in between those two spaces. Well, there’s a necessary set of steps to move me from that transition. Right. well, as I see those steps, that becomes the roadmap or the blueprint. I got coaches and mentors.

to help guide me, how do I make this transition? How do I become successful? Success leaves clues. All right, so through books and mentors and coaching, I created that necessary step. And I’m like, all right. And then once I had that in place, it was, I know what to do. Am I actually doing it? And it was then looking at that I disciplined my thoughts when I woke up in the morning and.

What tone did I set for my day by the way that I spoke to myself? And then when I looked at my action plan, instead of sitting there in analysis paralysis and overthinking all of it or dealing with perfectionism or my fear of, what will people think of me? was no, discipline all those thoughts and feelings and the proper habits like my morning routine that then set you up for success or best success possible and go out and do the thing.

And this is where I love to use like Yoda says there is no try, right? There is only do or do not. So we can have the can, the clarity, the affirmation and the necessity. But if we don’t actually discipline ourselves to do the thing, nothing happens. So that I was like, OK, I had to discipline myself that to create what I call my icebreakers. I’m doing something for the first time. I’m getting that first interview or I’m getting that first stage.

Right.

or that first room to speak to and share my story message. And I thought, okay. And then the last part was being able to celebrate myself. I was high-fiving myself over my head or in the mirror before Mel Robbins made a book out of it and really taught the world that concept. And it was like, we do need that moment. And especially as leaders and executives, we’re always going and we’re doing, we’re go-getters. We’ve got the high drive or we’ve got so much pressure that we don’t.

Yeah.

get that moment of pause to go, wait a minute, what have I done? Where do I acknowledge my accomplishments? And even initially as that stay-at-home mom and I was overcoming that depression, I needed to celebrate that I got out of bed that day. I needed to celebrate that I took a shower a few days later. I needed to celebrate that I got myself out of the house and now it’s celebrating, well, where’s the next place that I can show up and serve? And so when I looked back at those…

pieces right? Pun intended. Adrian is like, okay, I had the clarity, the affirmation, the necessity, the discipline and you and it wasn’t that like, I love candy so much. It was I looked at the steps and I thought, these fall into work. that forms candy. Well, isn’t that exciting? And I thought, okay, I guess what I have put together is

the candy method and it’s healthy candy. So it’s not it’s not going to put more weight on you. Right. Or it’s not going to have a bad side effect later. It’s going to give you the best results possible. And I really dial it in to that self-talk because as a self-leadership strategist, I believe that leadership begins with you and then it comes down to what is the self-talk. And I like to position it as is is the inner critic.

Right.

The one who’s telling you you’re not good enough or who do you think you are or you’re you’re not ready and and is it the inner critic that is running as the CEO of the boardroom of your mind or is it really from your heart center your authentic self where you say wait, I may not know everything but I know enough or I am resourceful enough to take on this role and give it the best version of myself and that’s where.

We really step into that candy method and celebrate you so that you are shining into the person that you were meant to be.

The post The Quiet Cost of Being the Bottleneck: Why Operator Self-Talk Determines Execution Capacity first appeared on Workergenix.

Opening Scaling Tension

Every operator hits the same wall eventually. Revenue grows, headcount grows, decisions multiply, and somewhere in that expansion the founder becomes the rate-limiting factor. Not because they’re incapable. Because they’re still the node every decision routes through. Add enough volume to that system and even a sharp operator starts running in reactive mode: approving instead of deciding, absorbing instead of directing, present in every meeting but clear in almost none of them.

That’s the tension Shalin Desai, who has spent over 25 years advising leaders on resilience and execution capacity, gets at directly in his conversation on Scale Smart Grow Fast. His framing isn’t about motivation. It’s about where leaders quietly cap their own scaling discipline without realizing it.

The Hidden Constraint

Desai’s core observation cuts against the popular idea that delegation is a solved problem for most operators: leaders are good at delegating work. They are far worse at delegating the responsibility, the actual decision-making power, that comes attached to it.

This is the hidden constraint. A task can move off your calendar and still functionally sit on your desk if every decision tied to it still requires your sign-off. The org chart says the work has been handed off. The decision flow says otherwise. That gap is where operational drag lives, and it’s largely invisible until you map how many decisions in your business still route back to one person by default rather than by necessity.

This isn’t a people problem. It’s a systems design problem. If decision rights aren’t explicitly transferred alongside the task, you haven’t built leverage. You’ve built a longer approval chain with your name at the end of it.

The Operating Shift

The shift Desai describes has two parts, and both matter for anyone thinking about scaling discipline in a founder-led business.

First: separate the task from the authority, and delegate both. He’s explicit that partial delegation, work without power, creates a false sense of capacity. You feel lighter because a task is off your plate, but your cognitive load hasn’t actually dropped, because the underlying decisions are still yours to make. Real capacity expansion happens only when someone else can decide, not just execute.

Second: build the internal clarity that makes delegation possible in the first place. Desai draws a distinction that matters more than it sounds like it should: the difference between reaction and response. Reaction is acting first and evaluating afterward. Response is evaluating first and then acting. That distinction sounds almost trivial until you consider it at scale, across every decision a growing company generates in a day. A leader stuck in reaction mode can’t delegate decision-making cleanly, because their own decision quality is inconsistent. Clarity isn’t a soft skill here. It’s the prerequisite for structured delegation to actually hold.

Execution in Practice

A few specific mechanisms from the conversation translate directly into operating practice for founders, operators, and capital allocators managing multiple assets or business lines:

1. Trust as a performance input, not a personality trait. Desai notes that the more genuine trust leaders extend to their teams, the better those teams perform, not as a morale outcome, but as a direct driver of execution quality. This has a practical implication for risk management: withholding decision authority to reduce perceived risk often increases operational risk, because it keeps the bottleneck concentrated in one person’s bandwidth instead of distributing judgment across a trained team.

2. Purpose as a performance multiplier, not a soft add-on. Desai pushes back on the idea that mission and margin compete. In his framing, leaders with a defined purpose beyond the P&L consistently outperform under pressure, the same way the calmest quarterbacks perform best in the highest-leverage moments. For capital allocators evaluating founder-led teams, this is a durable signal: leadership grounded in something more specific than “grow the number” tends to correlate with steadier decision-making during stress events, which is precisely when capital is most exposed.

3. Preventive discipline over reactive correction. The analogy Desai uses is blunt and useful: you don’t skip brushing your teeth only when there’s a problem. Mental and operational hygiene work the same way. Applied to execution systems, this means the checklists, standing reviews, and decision protocols that feel unnecessary in calm periods are exactly what prevent the expensive breakdowns during volatile ones. Preventive structure is cheaper than crisis correction, every time.

4. Eliminating re-decisions through consistent practice. Once clarity and delegated authority are in place, Desai notes the effect compounds. Leaders stop re-litigating decisions they’ve already made, and teams stop waiting for confirmation on calls they’re already equipped to make. That’s the flywheel: trust extended, competence demonstrated, less oversight required, more capacity freed for the next tier of problems.

Leverage Outcome

None of this is about leaders working longer or pushing harder. It’s the opposite. Leverage, in Desai’s framing, is what happens when decision-making capacity is distributed correctly and the person at the top stops functioning as the default approver for everything beneath them. Leadership bandwidth is the actual constraint on scaling, not headcount, not capital, not market opportunity. Protecting that bandwidth by transferring real authority, not just tasks, is the operating shift that lets a business absorb more complexity without the founder absorbing more stress.

Connect With the Guest

To learn more about Shalin Desai and his work: Website: [Insert Website Link] LinkedIn: [Insert LinkedIn Link]

The Immediate Move

Leadership bandwidth, not effort, is the real ceiling on how far a founder-led business can scale. More hours don’t fix a bottleneck built into your decision structure. Structure does. That means an honest audit of where decision authority actually sits in your business, not where the org chart says it sits, and a deliberate transfer of that authority to the people already doing the work. Ownership transfer, disciplined decision protocols, and reduced cognitive load aren’t soft initiatives. They’re the mechanics of scaling without burning out the person the entire operation still depends on.

Watch this before you hire your next support role.

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Full Podcast Transcript

Do you ever feel like you’re doing everything right, but you’re still running on empty? On this episode of Scale Smart Grow Fast, we’re digging into a challenge a lot of leaders face: stress, mental overload, and the loss of clarity that can slow down even the best operators. And that’s why at Worker Genics we help business owners stay focused on what matters well most with full-time ultimate executive assistants who bring consistent execution behind the scenes.

So today I’m joined by Shalin Desai, who spent more than twenty-five years helping leaders build resilience, sharpen focus, and perform at a higher level through breathwork, meditation, and practical leadership school skills. Let’s get into it. So, Shalin, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you, Adrian. Thanks for having me.

Now I know you’ve spent a l you’ve a depth of experience here helping people build this focus, resilience, and clarity. When you look at leaders today, what’s the biggest thing that’s draining their energy that they might not even realize?

The biggest thing I’ve seen is trying to do too many things at the same time. And as a leader, I mean you have a lot of responsibilities. The Lord is riding on you. And you’re responsible for a lot of decisions you make. Not just it it affects you, it affects a lot of people, the decisions you make. So there’s this inherent sense of feeling responsible and at the same time trying to do too many things. And I think that’s where the stress kicks in, you know. I

Simply put, the simple definition of stress is too many things to do and too little time or energy. And that’s exactly what causes stress.

And as you say that, I’m thinking of like two aspects of the this too many things to do. There’s like the constant interruptions, right, in multitasking and how now science shows how multitasking fails. And then the other thing you really like hit on is the sense of responsibility and that that load, it’s not just a logistics thing, it’s an emotional load of like your decisions have impact.

Exactly, absolutely. And that you you kind of that that’s exactly what it is, you know, the decisions you make, it just not affecting you, it’s affecting so many other people. And so that brings that kind of causes some stress or load, whatever you want to call it. And there’s a there’s a healthier way of dealing with it.

I’m sure there is. So we’ll get into that. I know. So the thing is, if I was a a a business owner, an entrepreneur listening, I’d be like, the thing is, I’m always busy. I’m always having to like, I’m trying, I’m trying to get to the bottom of this to-do list and I never ever reach it. Why are people getting stuck in that cycle?

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s where the meditation and the breath work is so important. Mahatma Gandhi used to say, you know, he would say that today I’m so busy, I don’t have time to meditate for twenty minutes, I have so much work to do, I have to meditate for one hour. So the more the more busy you are, the more crazy your schedule is, the more is the need to have this mindfulness, this breath work, the meditation is more is the need for that. And that’s what I’ve seen.

Ha ha

I’ve been traveling around, I’ve been teaching, I’ve taught the art of living, that’s organization part of the art of living workshops. in around 64 cities around the country, working with leaders across the across the country. And that’s what I found that having these tools in your own in your toolbox is becomes so handy because at some point of time, you know, it’s not just the stress or the responsibility overload. What I’ve seen is that.

People keep being under that stress for so long and after some time they you even start having health concerns. You know, it because your body can only take so much for so long. And at some point of time you start seeing the cracks, you end up having, you know, anxiety, blood pressure and whatnot. So it’s not just you to become a better leader. I think for you to even become a better and healthier human being, this tools are very much needed.

I love everything you’re sharing here. you know, for our listeners who don’t know, I started I US business owner and over two years ago started traveling the world with our family. And I have told people it’s almost like it like an unbecoming or an unbecoming in so many ways to disconnect from all of these systems that do cause the stress and everything like that, like exactly what you’re saying, and realizing the power of things like meditation or these these other practices. So

I love this because I feel like I can personally see the difference in my life from doing things like this. Now for our our listeners who are like, I I don’t even know where to start, what where do you recommend they start? What’s one simple shift that can really help people get started and make a difference?

So a few things. of course you can I recommend taking a three-day course, start about nine hours, nine hours completely. It’s you can go to the website Art of Living, beautiful name, artofliving.org. And we have courses. the Art of Living Foundation is one of the world’s largest volunteer-based organizations. We have programs in about 184 countries. So wherever you are, you can tap into that. And to begin with, you can also just go to YouTube and

put up art put art of living meditations a bunch of kind of meditations there you can start even using that. And you know, it’s it’s nowadays meditation is no longer a luxury. It’s a necessity. You know, it’s something that you have to have in your routine. It’s I you know, you brush your teeth every day, that is dental hygiene, you take shower, that is bodily hygiene, and this is the mental hygiene. And it’s so important people realize that. Yeah.

I love framing it like that.

Yeah, very helpful. now, can you share a story of a business owner or leaner leader that made a meaningful change in their performance after they started focusing on this well being and mental clarity?

Absolutely. So, you know, I shared in incident actually, I was teaching a course in in New York at one of the largest banks in our country and huge finan like I won’t take the name but big financial institution and this we were doing this course under executive leadership and one of the participants who was on the course on the at the end of the three-day workshop, she shared, she came to me and she was like, you know, I want to share something very personal with you. I’m like, Yes, please.

And then she’s like, you know, last year has been so tough on me, you know. I went through such a bitter di such a bad divorce and it just went for so long and it took such a big toll on me. And after I got done with it, I’m like, you know, I need a break. So she’s like, I booked a trip to Hawaii and a solo trip to Hawaii just to get a break and to clear my mind out and everything. And she was sharing that one day she was sitting in this beautiful beach on Kawaii. She’s like it’s so such a pristine beach and

Like I was watching the sunset and it was so beautiful. And then she was like, But you know, Shalin, I was only able to enjoy that for five minutes. After that, my mind was again filled with the same thoughts of anger, anguish, worry, anxiety, and all that. And then and then she’s like, That’s when I realized that unless and until I take care of my mind, no matter how many comforts, what what beautiful scenery I have in front of me, I cannot enjoy that.

And she’s sharing that after taking this art of living program, and she’s yesterday I was driving home in a cab, and you know, this was about 10-15 years ago. And she’s like, and I was driving, and you know, New York people honk, it’s chaotic and everything. And she’s like, nothing bothered me. I was just calm and peaceful. And she’s like, That’s when I realized that unless and until I take care of my mind, everything else is kind of you know, use not not useful.

Okay.

And she’s like, you know, after taking this, I’m able to focus even much, I’m able to make my mind is becoming so more clear, so much clearer. Even the decisions I’m making are much better now. So it’s that’s what it is. It just affects all the aspects of life because even for leaders, it’s very important to know it’s not just that what you do professionally, professionally, or in your business, you know, it affects all the aspects of your life, you know, at the end of the day.

Right.

No matter how successful of a business person you are, you want to have a happy family life, you want to have a happy personal life. And both are intertwined. And these tools help both the aspects of your life.

Mm-hmm.

Yes, that’s a a great it reminds me of a a couple things. One is I have seen that like Americans who are used to the hustle culture, who are used to like grind, grind, grind, go on vacation and can’t relax. It’s the same thing of we’re got a packet full of activities, we’ve got to be like sightseeing all the time, we’ve got to go do these guided tours. And once you unplug from that, you’re like, dude, that’s exhausting. Let’s just relax.

Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. That’s what it is. You know, I often joke with people that you know after you come back from vacation, you need a day or two to recover from your vacation. It’s like you come back tired. And what if there was a vacation where you went and you came back so rejuvenated, so fresh? And that’s what this breath work and everything does for you.

Mm-hmm.

Right, yeah. I I’ve seen the difference, like I said, my own life with myself, my husband, our kids. doing some work like this, some meditation work. and yeah, even even with kids, you mentioned the family life. I’ve seen that that difference for us too there. Now

Okay, sorry, wanted to read the next question. So we’ll cut out that little pause there, John, for the editor. So one challenge a lot of leaders face is, you know, part of this process, I think, is recognizing what you really have to do and what you don’t have to do. But the challenge leaders have is letting go of control. So how do you help someone trust their team more without all the stress of like, I have to micromanage, I have to make those decisions?

No, I that’s that’s a very good question. I see that so often. And what I’ve seen is that leaders are able to delegate work, but somehow they’re not able to delegate the responsibility, the power. It’s very interesting, very interesting. You know, this whole thing about you have to delegate so you can do more, you have to delegate. I I the what I’ve observed is that people are able to delegate, but they’re only able to delegate the work. But the decision making power you’re not able to delegate.

And it’s this fine balance of not just delegating work, but also delegating the power, the responsibility that comes along with it. And that just gives you so much more freedom. And I’ve also found with people like the more trust you put in people, they actually perform better. And I’ve seen that with the you know, my inspiration is Gurudev.

Mm-hmm.

he’s a founder of Art of Living, Art of Living Foundation, Gurudev Shri Shri Ravish Shankar. He’s a world-renowned humanitarian and a peacemaker, and he’s been you know traveling around the globe and and his mission is to create a stress in a violent stress society. And what’s really inspired me is that his like his ability to trust people, like empower people and trust people. And I’ve seen that when you

Put that I’m not saying blindly trust trust everyone, but when you put that faith and trust in people, they actually go out and perform really well.

Right. Yeah.

And that yeah, that ability to let go, as you mentioned, has to come. And the more you’re able to let go, the more empowerment happens actually.

That’s a that’s a really good point. And it’s it’s almost like it’s tough because you have to do it with faith to see the results, right? well once you do, then you can then it then that starts the flywheel. Once you trust somebody and you have that successful experience, it becomes easier and easier to do it again and again.

Exactly, exactly.

Now let’s say that we have a business owner and they have gone through the three day program from Art of Living and they’re using these tools in their everyday life. What are the early signs that this person is starting to move from reactive mode into a more intentional and effective way of operating? How are they gonna be able to see the difference?

The very first thing you’ll see is a lot more mental clarity. You know, some of the best, best business leaders you see around the globe, they have such clarity. Even when they speak, it’s so clear they know exactly where they are, they know where they want to get, and they know how they’re going get there. So that clarity starts coming in, and that is a big, big, big deal. And then the other most important thing is your mind becomes more calm and more peaceful.

You know, what’s the difference between reaction and response? In in risk in in response, you know, when you respond to something, you think and you act. In reaction, you act and then you think afterwards. What did I do? So it’s like the difference and that that distinction comes when the mind is more calm, more peaceful, more at you know, you’re more at home wherever you are. Naturally that better decision making happens and those tools start kicking in after you start practicing right away from day when it starts working.

Ha ha ha.

That’s awesome. It’s awesome that it is so immediate. and that that’s really the foundation for everything, right? Like how you think about and respond to situations is the foundation for everything. So that one change can really have so much impact.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Now I know that you talk a lot about purpose alongside performance. And we’ve talked about the art of living and the purpose and nonprofit. How do these two things connect for leaders who are in our conventional Western business world where we’re focused on growth and results? How can that leader think about purpose alongside performance?

At the end of the day, any leader, you’re doing what you’re doing, you know, you’re making the sacrifices. I mean, all leaders they they they make sacrifices. If you’re not making sacrifices, you would not be a leader actually. So they make sacrifices, and you’re making those sacrifices because there’s a purpose that you really believe in. There’s something you’re not, you know, and that’s one thing I’ve seen with the leaders also. It’s yes, you want to make make more money, you want to make the business grow, but there’s something more to it in there. Like there’s something you

there’s a there’s a fire in the belly that you know I want to do something, I want to achieve something. And that is that is what drives the leaders. And again coming back to the you know having a purpose and focusing on something much bigger. It’s just if it’s not like okay, I want to make this much money and that’s there that you know you have to business has to make money. But when there’s something more to it also that you know I want to do so for the greater good. I want to do it because maybe I want to help the society, maybe I want to help my family. When there’s a bigger

purpose bigger something bigger a bigger goal that is in mind, naturally you’re more driven. And that comes again, that comes with I you know, I I I love watching football. I don’t know if you Adrian, if you watch football, but not the soccer but the football. And you know some of the best quarterbacks you see in the NFL are also the ones who can who can perform so calmly under so much pressure. And that’s that’s that’s such a beautiful

Yes, I

Right.

ability to have as a leader. And coming back to this breathing exercises, that’s what helped me when I started doing teaching all these things and started traveling and doing things. The breath work, it’s part of my crazy schedule, hours and hours of traveling across different time zones and all, it gave me such calmness and so much energy that you’re able to perform so much better. And it’s at the end of the day, it’s not just about working hard, it’s working smart. And that’s what it is.

I think you you shared so many like gems in that. And you know, one of the things is people often feel like purpose is going to decrease their performance. And you point out the exact opposite, right? That when you’ve got this strong purpose, it’s gonna increase your performance. Cause as you said, it gives you that fire in the belly. And that then how powerful somebody can be when they stay calm and then yes, the breath work. It’s so funny to me because we breathe all the time, right? It’s it’s what are they autonomic? And yet when you stop and you take

Yes, yes.

a w an intentional big breath, how differently you feel and how much you can see the impact of that. And it’s just so funny because you think you’re breathing all the time, but it’s different.

Exactly, that’s true. You know, and that’s very we know when I so I’m an engineer by profession and I’ve been doing this for about thirty years now. I’ve been practicing the Brightswork for thirty years. And when I first started doing it, I’m like, it is working, but I don’t know how it is working. I want to see the science behind it. So now you know for the sky breathing that we teach in the art of living, we have about hundred independent studies that have happened on that and one of the recent one

A study that happened was at Yale, Yale University in Connecticut. And they wanted it was, you know, they took a control group of students doing the sky breathing. Then they had a control group of students doing the mindfulness stuff. Then another control group of students doing Yale’s own emotional intelligence program. And they found that the sky breathing was the best performing thing across all the markers. You know, the stress hormone, the cortisol went down when you did the sky breathing.

your you know oxytocin, dopam dopamine, the all the good hormones all went up, the the negative hormones went down, and just that w started working from day one. And so it’s there’s lot of science behind how this thing works. And that’s what makes it even more credible, I believe.

Wow.

Yes, yes. And it’s interesting because you think y you know, you were an engineer by training. My husband also has an engineer by training who’s really honestly super diligent with breath work. And I think when you take these people who are really good at executing systems and you give them the system and they start to see the results of it, then they well, you don’t traditionally think of like an engineer as somebody who’s going to be into breath work and meditation and everything like this.

Yeah.

Honestly, they see the results and they become like great students and like users of the practice. It’s pretty cool.

Exactly. Yeah, I always tell people, Adrian, I mean not to be biased about engineers, but I’m like smart people do these things. You know, it it

Right. Well, and I feel like you have to say that because in like US culture, sometimes we may associate this with like hippies from the 70s or something like this, right? And so you have to be like, no, this is like a scientific thing that like you said, smart people do this and it makes a difference. And Fortune 500 CEOs are doing this and seeing the difference in their lives. I love that.

You know, I’ll share one more anecdote, Adrian. So this is I was teaching the this course, the Art of Living program at one of the largest consulting firms in the world, largest, and they had this whole their employee you know training thing that they had in in Dallas. And they had different workshops for their employees and part of one of the workshops that was the Art of Living course that was being offered there. And every single person in the course was either

Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Wharton graduate, super smart. They were in the late twenties. So it’s not like they’re the late twenties, early thirties. And these are like super high achievers and very smart intelligent people and all. And when I was teaching the course it was bit initially it was a bit interesting because they would challenge and they’ll question everything. I’ll share with them, I’ll ask them to do the challenge and question everything.

But on the last day when their HR team also the HR leadership came during the experience sharing and all. And they started sharing that, you know, I won’t take the name of the company, but like, you know, you give us everything best, you give us the best salaries, we travel first class, we stay in the best hotels, I travel so much, and they’re like, you know, this is the fur this is the first time you gave us the best training because these are the actual life schools, skills that help us thrive in our careers.

Right.

So it’s people are recognizing this now.

Yeah.

Well, and I think of when you s shared that, the immediate thing I thought of is and the company is going to benefit because people aren’t gonna get burned out and quit. ‘Cause that’s what you see is just so much so so common these days.

Yes, exactly. And companies I think now they’re becoming more aware of this because they’re realizing just that monetary incentives and other incentives will only get you so far, but you have to start giving these kind of tools to your employees to perform better.

Mm-hmm. So along those lines, let’s say we’ve we’ve got a listener like the people who were in that course, right? Somebody who wants to scale successfully without burning themselves out. They should take the three day program, right? Are there any specific mindset shifts or any other recommendations you’d give to people who are like, How can I not burn out in my job?

You know, one thing that I found the best ever shared is breath work and meditation. Just start doing some of it every day. As I mentioned, like you know, we don’t brush our teeth every day because you know, if you don’t brush your teeth one day something bad is going to happen. But when you start doing it every day, it prevents tooth decay and all those things. So a lot of these things are preventive. It’s not like things have to break down and you have to learn something. You know, you do it so you don’t break down. So

Right. Right. And we think about it for so many other things. Like with the breakdown terminology I think of of cars, right? And oil changes. And you know, nearly everybody goes and gets their car, the oil change at you know, however many thousand miles your car needs it, and you don’t think twice about it. And yet how often are you doing that preventative mindset or prevent preventative work for your mindset and mental clarity?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Awesome. Now I as we wrap up here, Shalin, you said you you had an activity you wanted to do with with me, correct?

Yes, yeah, I’ve been meditating for some time and lately I’ve been I’ve been initiated into this thing where I am able to do able to do this intuitive scanning where I connect with people and then I’m able to tell them a bit about their past, present and future. And it’s very beautiful. It’s not like you’re able to read people’s minds or anything like that. It’s more about it’s more conducive to their personal growth, anywhere they have any questions they can ask and be able to answer those things.

So we can do that exercise and see how that goes. Yes? So I’ll just close my eyes for a few seconds, Adrienne, and then I’ll share a few things and you can ask me any questions you have.

Sure. All right. Let’s do it.

Vitriane, along with all this the stuff, that amazing stuff that you’re doing with leadership and all, you’re actually an amazingly amazingly daunting mother. You’re very, very you’re very good like with what your kids do, what the kids want. You’re very aligned with that. It’s not like you’re busy with what you’re doing, you’re very much involved. Is that true? Is that accurate? Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yes, yes. yeah, we typically homeschool. Right now the kids are in a school program while we’re here in Lima for a couple of months, but typically we homeschool and and the kids’ interests are part of our lives. Like my youngest loves penguins and we specifically go to places in our travels. we plan trips around seeing penguins because he loves penguins. So yeah, things like that.

Yeah. Yeah. No, you’re very good. Like you’re very much in tune with what your kids want. And not just that, you make sure that you be with them, you provide them what they want. And and it’s not in a way where you you know, sometimes parents can spoil kids with giving them everything they want. You have this very good balance where you provide them that’s something that’s going to help them when they grow up as kids with their education and everything. At the same time you are

Good at discipline also, yeah. It’s a very disciplined approach that you take with them. It’s very nice.

That is true. Thank you.

Yeah. Does one of your kids have any food allergies or anything like that?

we have a a child who’s a picky eater, yes.

Yes, yes, yes. And it’s very, very interesting with with the kid is that no matter what you do, I mean they’ll just eat what they want. I mean, you have to work around them. So and it will get better, but for now, you’ll just need to be more patient with them. Otherwise, this kid has a very good ability of testing your patience. So it’s so you’ll just need to be patient when they grow up, they’re going to do fantastic. All your three three kids.

Yes.

Yeah.

are going to grow up to be very in independent and very actually successful in what they do. And so just more patience with this particular kid and give cut cut them some slack.

All right. I can do that.

Yes.

And this next part of what I’m going to share, you can edit that out if you would like. This can be just no keep an eye on your gut health.

Yeah, it can be Go ahead, you’re saying something.

Well, it’s funny because we have been focusing on that, while we’re staying here in Lima. We’ve been focusing on diet and things to really promote overall health, including gut health, yeah.

Yes, and especially for you, more than your husband for you, just keep an eye on that. there, you know, certain foods you can avoid later in the evening and having more fibrous food and all that, you can put some more attention on that part for you, especially. Yeah.

Awesome. Yeah. Thank you.

Do you have any plans to go to Europe and stay in Europe for some time?

it is not on the calendar. It is something that is on our our bucket list of we will do that in in the future, yes.

It’s good it’s going to happen. You’ll be spending you’ll be spending maybe year, maybe even a couple of years in in Europe. And somewhere I don’t see you spending time somewhere around in coastal Europe, like may not be Spain or Italy, maybe more like Switzerland and Germany, those kind of places where it’s a bit more cooler. And but you will be sending spending some time there.

Yeah.

Exciting.

Any questions you want to ask?

I I I don’t think so ’cause I think we had the conversation as as we went along. But that’s that’s really I’m very much a fan of one of our like phrases in our family is everything is energy, right? And in the the potency and and I think the not fully realized and in in Western culture idea of the power of of intuition and energy in in the messages like that. So thank you.

Yeah.

Sure, sure, it’s wonderful connecting. In fact, we even have our Art of Living programs in in Lima. And yeah, we have local Peruvian teachers, Latin American teachers who teach the programs there. So I’ll check it out, check out the website there.

Awesome. Yeah, I’ll go to the website for sure. Okay, so we will wrap up and I’ll give you a chance to share all the websites again. We’ll have all those, or if there’s a specific like lead magnet or something you want to share, and we’ll have everything in the show notes as well. So okay. Shaolin, for anybody who wants to learn more about your work or experience some of these practices for themselves, what’s the best way to connect with you?

So they can ping me on my Instagram. You know, I I have a team who checks messages there and response promptly. So they can ping me on my Instagram. My handle is my first name Shalin, last name Desai. So they can ping me on there. And also they can check out our website, artofliving.org, regardless of what part of world you are in, because I know your audiences are global. So regardless, regardless of what part of the world you are in, we have our programs there, you can go and check it out.

I love this. Well, thank you, Shalin, for such a great conversation. I think that one of the biggest takeaways is that better leadership doesn’t always come from doing more. Sometimes it comes from creating the clarity, the focus, and the resilience to do the right things consistently by getting in that right, that might right headspace with things like meditation and breath work.

Now, the challenge for many leaders is that even when they know what needs to happen, execution can still get buried under emails, follow-ups, scheduling, and everything else that competes for their attention. And that’s why at Worgenics we do provide ultimate executive assistants who help keep the wheels turning behind the scenes so leaders can stay focused on what matters most. If you’d like to learn more, head over to workergenics.com and then join me again next week for another episode of Scale Smart Grow Fast.

The post You Delegated the Work. You Kept the Weight. first appeared on Workergenix.

Opening Scaling Tension

Most founder-led businesses don’t stall because of a lack of strategy. They stall because the leadership team becomes the operating system.

Every approval routes through the founder. Every decision waits for executive input. Every process depends on institutional knowledge sitting inside one person’s head.

At first, this feels efficient. The business grows because the founder is involved in everything. Eventually, that same involvement becomes the bottleneck.

Decision fatigue increases. Execution slows. Teams wait for direction. Opportunities sit idle because leadership bandwidth is consumed by tasks that should have been removed, automated, or delegated months ago.

The result isn’t just operational drag. It’s a capital allocation problem. Leadership attention is one of the most expensive resources in any business. When it’s spent on low-leverage work, growth becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

That challenge sat at the center of a recent conversation with Diane Shelton, founder of Passion Breakthrough, whose work focuses on helping business owners close the gap between vision and execution.

The Hidden Constraint

Many operators assume their constraint is headcount.

Others assume it’s technology.

In reality, the deeper issue is often decision ownership.

Shelton identified two common failure patterns.

The first is over-control. Leaders hold onto responsibilities because they believe quality will decline if someone else takes over. The second is indiscriminate delegation—what she described as “dumping instead of delegating.” In this scenario, work gets transferred without context, systems, or clarity around expected outcomes.

Both approaches create the same result: leadership remains the bottleneck.

One founder is doing too much.

The other is managing unnecessary cleanup from poorly delegated work.

Neither creates operational leverage.

The hidden constraint is not capacity. It’s the absence of a repeatable decision-making framework that allows ownership to move through the organization without sacrificing quality.

The Operating Shift

One of the most practical frameworks discussed was Shelton’s adaptation of the Eisenhower Matrix: the DAD Framework.

Delete. Automate. Delegate. Do.

Most business owners instinctively operate in reverse. They do the work first, then look for ways to improve efficiency later.

The DAD framework forces a different sequence.

Before touching a task, leaders should ask:

1. Can this be deleted?
2. Can this be automated?
3. Can this be delegated?
4. Only then: Should I do it myself?

This shift matters because scaling discipline requires eliminating unnecessary decisions.

Every recurring task that remains unresolved creates future cognitive load. Every repetitive process that lacks ownership requires another leadership touchpoint.

Over time, these small decisions accumulate into execution friction.

Operators who scale effectively are rarely working longer hours. They are reducing the number of decisions that require their involvement.

That distinction is critical.

Leverage is not effort multiplication.

Leverage is decision reduction.

Execution in Practice

1. Visibility Exposes Bottlenecks

One of the simplest indicators of organizational drag is responsibility mapping.

Shelton referenced the use of responsibility frameworks similar to RACI models used within larger organizations. When founders review major initiatives and consistently see their name attached to every responsibility category, the bottleneck becomes obvious.

The exercise is straightforward:

• Identify key business objectives.
• Assign ownership.
• Link deliverables to timelines.
• Connect activities to expected ROI.

If every critical path routes through leadership, execution speed will eventually decline regardless of team size.

Scaling requires ownership transfer—not merely task transfer.

2. Tie Activity to ROI

Many organizations unintentionally build systems around activity rather than outcomes.

Tasks multiply.

Meetings expand.

Projects continue because they have always existed.

Shelton emphasized connecting responsibilities directly to measurable business outcomes. If an initiative cannot be linked to revenue generation, client retention, operational efficiency, or risk management, it deserves scrutiny.

This approach strengthens capital allocation decisions as well.

Every software subscription, hire, contractor, or automation should be evaluated through the same lens:

• What does it cost?
• What capacity does it create?
• What outcome does it improve?

The goal is not cost reduction.

The goal is return on leadership attention.

3. Systems Protect Client Retention

Growth receives most of the attention in founder-led businesses.

Retention often receives less.

Yet recurring revenue, referral generation, and long-term enterprise value are typically built through consistent execution systems.

Shelton highlighted structured onboarding, early client wins, and 30-60-90 day review frameworks as examples of simple systems that improve retention and reduce delivery risk.

These aren’t administrative exercises.

They are risk management tools.

A structured onboarding process reduces uncertainty.

A documented review cadence eliminates preventable client issues.

A repeatable client experience decreases dependency on individual team members.

In each case, systems reduce cognitive load while improving consistency.

4. Technology Is Not a Strategy

AI emerged as another important topic during the conversation.

Shelton offered a useful distinction: organizations often make the same mistake with AI that they make with delegation.

They dump work into it and expect outcomes.

The result is predictable.

Generic output.

Poor adoption.

Additional complexity.

Instead, successful implementation starts with process clarity. Organizations should first identify where decisions, communication, or documentation create friction. Then technology can support those workflows.

The objective is not automation for its own sake.

The objective is operational leverage.

The best execution systems use technology to remove repetitive work while preserving human judgment where it creates the greatest value.

Leverage Outcome

The businesses that scale most effectively rarely win because they have more talented founders.

They win because they create systems that protect leadership bandwidth.

They remove unnecessary decisions.

They clarify ownership.

They automate predictable workflows.

They delegate with structure instead of hope.

And they continuously evaluate whether leadership attention is being invested where it generates the highest return.

Operational leverage is not about squeezing more work into the day.

It’s about creating an organization that can execute without requiring constant executive intervention.

When that happens, decision speed increases.

Execution becomes more predictable.

Risk management improves.

And leadership can return to the work that actually drives enterprise value: strategy, relationships, capital allocation, and growth.

Connect With the Guest

To learn more about Diane Shelton and her work:

Website: https://passionb.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/passion-breakthrough

The Immediate Move

If you’re still seeing your name attached to every major decision, every approval path, and every recurring task, the issue is not effort.

It’s structure.

Leadership bandwidth becomes constrained long before calendar capacity runs out. The operators who scale effectively are the ones who build decision-making frameworks, transfer ownership with clarity, and reduce cognitive load through documented execution systems.

Start by identifying one recurring responsibility that consistently pulls you into the weeds. Determine whether it should be deleted, automated, delegated, or retained. Then create the process necessary to transfer ownership permanently.

Scaling discipline comes from eliminating re-decisions—not from becoming better at managing chaos.

The objective is a business that executes with consistency even when leadership is focused elsewhere.

Watch this before you hire your next support role.

Like what you read? Get weekly insights on scaling, efficiency, and profitability—straight to your inbox. Click here to subscribe.

Full Podcast Transcript

Do you ever notice how leaders with the biggest vision are usually the ones drowning in the smallest tasks? Strategy is sharp, the offer’s there, and then the week disappears into follow-ups and inbox cleanup. That’s the gap we keep coming back to on Scale Smart Grow Fast. It’s why Worker Genics puts full-time ultimate executive assistants alongside leaders so the follow-through actually happens. Today’s guest lives in that gap. Diane Shelton helps mission-driven leaders turn big vision

into everyday execution. Founder of Passion Breakthrough with an MBA and CS background, a decade scaling work for Fortune five hundreds and small businesses, now supporting clients in over a hundred and seventy countries. Let’s get into it. Dan, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

I’m doing really well. I’m excited to be here.

Diane, I’d love to hear a little bit more about your background. What brought you to what you’re doing today?

Yeah, so I started out over a decade serving Fortune 500 companies and then helping their ex their leadership team and executives to really get those IT projects into fruition. And then at some point I’m just like, okay, like why is this not something that small business owners have access to? So I shifted gears, started my own business, and now I help mostly small business owners, service providers and professional services to really get their systems in place for more sales.

Awesome. And now, Diane, in the intro, we talked about how leaders are drowning in the small stuff, even while they have that big vision. And you’ve been on kind of both sides of that both with the Fortune 500 work and now your own business. What made you want to go and build passion breakthrough?

if I’m being honest with myself, looking back, it was burnout that made me decide that it’s just like is there is this all there is is you know, like someone else’s vision and the cubes and all that stuff. But

Now that I’m thinking about it more holistically, it really is that again, like my own passion breakthrough of wanting to make sure that I’m helping others to pursue their passion breakthrough. Cause I feel like we get to have more fun and find more joy in life and that free and enjoy that freedom that we crave when we’re working alongside others that’s also doing the work and focus in their zone of genius.

Yeah, having that passion definitely shines through and is a good motivator for getting up and and helping people every day. Now, when you’re working with these leaders who are stuck in that gap that we talked about between vision and execution, what’s usually the real problem you find once you start digging in?

Yes that one? Yes.

No, no, no. I think there’s two things. So I actually was just working with a leader about this. because it feels like when you first start, right? Like in when you have a smaller team and whatnot, the control aspect is real where it’s just like, okay, I’ve been doing this really well. it’s hard to let go of certain tasks because quality might go down. You don’t already have time to train someone else and start from scratch and all those different things, I think from a being in the weeds perspective.

I think the other side of that though is like people that just want to delegate and without a plan and being strategic about it and expect those people, no matter how much of an expert they are, they do not know your vision. So I think those are the two gaps that I see is like either you care too much or you care a little too little.

Yeah, we call that dumping instead of delegating, right? What what often helps in conversations with people give them the confidence to understand that they can delegate, maybe if they’re in that first camp where they’re worried about the quality and you know someone not doing it as well as they can.

Yes, exactly.

so I call it so the Heisenhower matrix, which is like way back when, so I call it the dad matrix, which is like delete, automate, delegate, and then do. Like if like mo the reason I call it the dad is because like if you ask like most most moms asking dads to take the garbage out, they’d rather delete it off their heads, try to automate it or delegate it to one of their kids before they’re the ones that gets to do it. So I feel like it’s really

Yeah.

applicable also for business owners because it’s just like we tend to do it the reverse. We try to do it first and try to see if we can do it. but again like you can only have so much time in your day. So it’s really nice to really hyper prioritize, delete things that are not prior n important andor priorities and then delegate as you see fit and automate as well.

So that’s a great framework. I love the acronym DAD. Okay. So walk me through some of the first things that start changing for clients you work with. Like what’s early on that moves the needle to really unlock momentum for them?

Thanks.

I think the biggest part that I’ve noticed is that when you have clarity on your goals and that is linked to timeline and who’s responsible, right? Like it if you look at like the bigger corporations again, like when I was doing the Fortune 500 stuff, like they have teams and there’s always like a racy chart, is what we like to call it in terms of who’s responsible, accountable, and all those different things. And then in if you are always the one that you’re always seeing your name on that spreadsheet, it’s just like okay, you’re

the bottleneck. So having that clarity and visibility to be not just for you but for your team too, if you have a team to make sure that everyone’s on the same page and that the ROI is tied into like

the task that is leading into the goals because sometimes we end up working with things that’s just like, where did this task even come from? so again, like in in those kinds of nuances, maybe it is still important to follow up. So you do an automation, set up like a CRM or something to make sure that every couple of weeks, couple of months that you’re following up with certain people, but a human doesn’t have to do that. So just understanding what can be automated, delegated, and then being clear on that.

Now, Diana, a lot of small business owners early on, they’re likely saying their name in all those different slots like you mentioned. How do you help walk them through prioritizing, you know, what to automate, what to delegate, and bringing in some some help to actually allow them to delegate if they don’t already have a team?

Yes.

Yeah. so again, like I think if it’s just you, there’s you know, like AI options, but I feel like you’re still managing that and you have to be really good at the prompt engineering side of things. So the way I look at it is twofold. Like if you can focus on you doing the strategic relational stuff, because people work with people, and also making sure that there’s ROI. So if you’re hiring somebody or using a tool.

You’re looking at how much is that costing you, your time versus the cost of the tool or the person that you’re hiring, versus how much is that really bringing in your bottom line. So if you’re gonna start hiring people, is that really translating to sales? So just making sure ROI is tied into that. and the other thing I just want to add in is like making sure when you hire or look for tools that you’re looking at the value system, because there’s tools out there that’s like collecting your data and feeding it to like third party.

advertisers and stuff like that and same with the humans. Like if you look through their profile and it’s just like, well, that’s not the kind of people I want serving my clients. So making sure your value aligned as well.

That’s a really good point. What about the like opportunity costs? If someone who’s a founder wants their time to be worth $300 an hour and there’s a lot of tasks on that list that, you know, might be low value, someone would do for $10, $12 an hour, how do they maybe compare that when there’s not necessarily like revenue directly tied to that task, but they’re still doing it?

Yeah, to your point, like there’s some costs and opportunity costs and all of these sort of different things. so from that perspective, really again, like you’re looking at it with if like I just had the person that Mows or lawn to come this morning and just thinking about okay, like I don’t want to first I don’t wanna do it. And secondly, like if I’m have if I’m paying someone else to do a certain task, what am I doing with my time? Am I just like sitting and watching TV?

Or am I actually being productive? And then even if you don’t see a really close ROI, there’s the long-term effect, right? Like so you’re you’re planting seeds in the relationships, you’re moving along your team and all the these different things in terms of creating more pathway for you and then building a very highly the system in place that is going to be long-term nurture and all those things.

And one thing you help a lot of your clients with is building recurring revenue streams. a lot of founders come in and their world is just in this like one-off chaos. They just go from one sale to the next. What are some of the shifts you help people make to get into that recurring sales model?

so there’s a again, like I feel like there’s a few things when it comes to this and these are topics I can talk about all day, but some nuances and some high level points is that you know like I feel like when people are getting those one-off sales, it’s like a drive-thru McDonald’s business where it’s just like, okay, like one transaction after the next

And you never know what kind of individual is gonna walk through the drive-thru. Versus like if you have an ecosystem of recurring revenue, you can easily more track that and get in front of the right people because you know holistically, like, okay, here’s the kinds of individuals I prefer to work with and you have more fun with again. so making sure you have your ecosystem in place from that perspective that feels in alignment with you. And the other side of it too is like if you already have multiple offers.

But it feels like, okay, like I don’t know the relationship between the two and you’re trying to delegate that to a team member and they’re getting confused. So again, having that streamlined approach and having that more systematic kind of helps everybody to be on the same page and make it faster to convert as well.

When a business has a lot of offers, how do you help them kind of sort through what they really should be focusing on and maybe applying that same principle of like maybe we cut some, maybe we delegate or you know, focus on others?

Yeah. so I run into that. There’s some clients I have that are multi-passionate. So they have like different offers and trying to figure out how that all come together. So the way that I kind of look at it is again like everything comes back to relationship and revenue. So if you are having revenue from certain types of offers, you want to keep those or revise it so that they’re more just one type of a bundle.

if you are working with like relationship driven, because again, like people work with people, you can automate certain things or delegate certain tasks, but at the end of the day, like having the strategy calls, you know, like maybe they your clients are hiring you for making sure you have FaceTime with them. So making sure you have those certain offers because that’s where people can relate and refer and continue to return back for more working with you because they like your personality and stuff.

I’m glad you brought that up, you know, having those clients return because client retention is something that’s really important. A lot of business owners say they want to have their dream clients and have that retention, but very few can execute it well. What does keeping the right clients around actually look like in the day-to-day for people you work with?

Mm-hmm.

I think there’s two sides again to that one is retention and actually being okay to fire clients that are not a fit. So, so the retention part again, like it goes back to relationship, having the systems in place to be like, okay, like doing the first week of if you’re doing like professional service type things, the first week of making sure they have quick wins and then the 30, 60, 90 day check-in at a minimum.

and then also having your onboarding and offboarding journey all tied together. from a, you know, like if you are an e-commerce or product, like making sure that it’s not just a transaction when they buy from you, either connecting with you on social media or on on your email list for newsletters, and then again, nurturing them because again, if they like the product, they’ll tell friends about it. So tell give them an opportunity to do that.

in terms of firing clients that, you know, like if you have a product and they’re just returning all the time, making sure you have the process in place for that as well. And or for services, like making sure that if they are eating more of your time, know how to delegate those certain tasks and or be willing to have a hard conversation with people to be like, Hey, this isn’t working, this isn’t what we agreed on. and making sure you deliver contractually and then just making sure you are

being intentional and providing the value that you said you were going to as well.

Those some great tips. And one thing you mentioned was the check-ins at the 30, 60, 90 points. we found in our business helping business owners onboard executive assistants, having the 30, 60, 90 plan, both with the check-in as well as the you know clear plan to help both the EA and the business owner know what to delegate has been super helpful. And one of the tools we leverage.

to help generate those based on our consult calls and information that the client has shared is AI. And so I wanted to talk about AI briefly with you and hear how are some ways that you’re using AI in your business to really genuinely move the needle in your business and the clients that you serve.

yeah, so there’s so many different tools. productivity is a big part, right? Like making sure that I stay on top of emails and stuff like that. So I leverage some tools there. Claude, Chat GPT, all that stuff are also helpful in terms of making sure that, you know, like if you’re creating an SOP, let’s say, for certain tasks, so you don’t even have to do those things manually anymore. You can screen record and then pass that on. Like I use Fathom for my meetings and then I can feed that into Claude as well. And then

just have it to go through it and then find the information based on my prompt for it. and then again, like there’s other tools, like there’s a video tool where I can create like for e-commerce clients and stuff like that. So that we can instead of hiring like influencers to just have an AI in terms of the videos and stuff like that showcasing the product. So there’s so many different uses of AI. It’s just making sure that you are aware of what is again the end result and what

task are you looking for assistance rather than saying that, hey, like I heard about this cool new tool, let me play with it. And then pretty soon you spent five hours and not knowing what the goal was to begin with.

Well, I’m glad you brought that up at the end there because that was my next question, which was where do you see leaders misusing AI and treating it like just like a magic button instead of a real tool to help them in their business?

Yeah, again, like you mentioned earlier, dumping, right? So nowadays it’s not just dumping to people, it’s also dumping the into AI in terms of like, I need to create a report for the executive leadership team or something like that. And then AI is just like, I am gonna give you something generic. because again, they don’t have your voice or your vision. and same with not just that, but I feel like sometimes executives can get the shiny object syndrome.

And then now the rest of the company is because they’re passing it down to their staff to be like, hey, like look at this tool and let me know and use it for your work. Sometimes it can just be more distracting and it could just take more time off the staff rather than just, okay, like how are you optimizing it? Is there is there gaps that can be filled? And then looking at it from that lens of like the goal setting rather than because there is a tool that was brought up to you.

Yeah, that’s interesting point of, you know, just telling people to use AI is not going to get the results you want. Maybe do you have an example or a situation you could share that you’ve observed where there was a successful rollout of deploying AI tools in an organization that you’ve worked with?

yeah, so there’s a couple that come to mind. So one of the clients that I have, again, like from a content social media stuff, so rolling that out based on like the meetings that we’ve been having and then like getting those information out. and so that’s like a smaller project. The bigger project, again, like I’ve I’ve noticed some people that you know, like they want to use let’s say copilot and just trying to figure out like how do you sequence that so it’s not necessarily the whole organization.

and then when a certain number of people can start to talk positively about it, because it’s rolling out AI is really more change management and then having your entire staff to have a buy-in. So just again, like making sure that you’re focused on the people and then the auditing the ROI, auditing the metrics, and keeping on top of that rather than just like, hey, did it work or did that not work? So you can save some time and money in the long term.

Well, speaking of AI and people and a lot of the things we’ve discussed so far have been about like the follow-through and taking that vision and and executing on it. How do you help leaders make the decision of whether a role is something that needs to have another team member brought on, maybe a virtual executive assistant, an in-person sales team member, or whether it’s something that can be handed off through automations or technology with AI?

yes, it is a great question. I personally like to make sure that people are leveraging the tools and hiring experts that can leverage the tools. So for example, like if you are looking at just creating content again, like sure you can have a VA to use Canva and look at all of the different designs, but again, like you can automate the process first.

for you getting your voice into a platform, creating like an airtable or something that can be easily handed off to delegate. So I always look at it from what can I remove? What can I automate? And then how can I have someone else to take over that automation because it makes their life easier from that perspective.

Yeah. And automation is something a lot of people are considering, especially in marketing. And I’m curious, you know, kind of as a looking ahead, if you had a crystal ball to share with the audience today, what are some shifts in marketing or other business systems that you think leaders should be paying attention to right now?

everything is going faster. Like the website this website can be done in minutes. right now the tool that I’m using has like an AI receptionist that you can also bring on your staff. so just having all of those resources available and easily created. So if you are not looking at leveraging those kinds of features, tools, your

competitor might be and they might be able to reach your client faster. So if you’re kind of in doing the dot com boom and still doing like, you know, like the back in the day type of programming and whatnot, that might be slowing you down. So again, like hiring an expert that can do the work for you and they might they’ll be on top of these types of new features and new tools. So because they’re the expert in it. So that you can be

More less in the weeds again and then more doing just the CEO visionary role.

And for the audience that is listening now and they know they’re in the weeds, they did the goal setting and mapping the responsibilities and they see their name on every single line item. What’s one thing that they could do this week to start getting out of their own way?

looking at it from a prioritization perspective and again like doing what you can like I look at it from a do you have 10 minutes, right? Like what can you actually be productive with those 10 minute blocks? And looking at what can you do like this week that you can start to handoff, whether it’s just one thing that is just been on your to-do list forever.

Or something that you’re just like every time it comes up, it’s like, I don’t really want to do this. So those are the telling signs of like what you can automate or delegate that would help you to get out of the weeds and make make you feel like you’re having fun in your business again.

Awesome. Well Diane, where can people connect with you to start exploring your work and following your latest systems ideas?

Yeah. thank you for asking. So I’m passionb.com is the website and I have a free quiz that you can take there. Like it’s a ninety-second audit to see what the gaps are in your revenue leaks. And then also I’m at Passion Breakthrough on all the different social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, and all those places. So I would love to for you to come say hi and that you’ve listened to our podcast episode.

Awesome. Thank you, Diane.

What a great conversation today. Diane dropped some real gems on simplifying the path to recurring sales, keeping dream clients around, and using smart systems and AI to actually move the needle instead of just adding more noise. And if there’s one thing that keeps coming up in this show, it’s that most leaders don’t have a vision problem. They have the follow-through problem, and they may have a good strategy, and the plan makes sense, it’s just that day-to-day execution that quietly falls apart. And that’s exactly the reason we built Worker Genics the way we did. Full-time, ultimate executive assistants.

sit us alongside you and keep the work moving behind the scenes so that big stuff actually gets done. If this sounds like something your week could use, head over to workergenics.com and take a look. Huge thank you to Diane for joining us today. Thanks to you for listening and we’ll catch you all on the next one.

e right, I cut off mid-sentence. Let me redo the full transcript properly.

Do you ever notice how leaders with the biggest vision are usually the ones drowning in the smallest tasks? Strategy is sharp, the offer’s there, and then the week disappears into follow-ups and inbox cleanup. That’s the gap we keep coming back to on Scale Smart Grow Fast. It’s why Worker Genics puts full-time ultimate executive assistants alongside leaders so the follow-through actually happens. Today’s guest lives in that gap. Diane Shelton helps mission-driven leaders turn big vision

into everyday execution. Founder of Passion Breakthrough with an MBA and CS background, a decade scaling work for Fortune five hundreds and small businesses, now supporting clients in over a hundred and seventy countries. Let’s get into it. Dan, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

I’m doing really well. I’m excited to be here.

Diane, I’d love to hear a little bit more about your background. What brought you to what you’re doing today?

Yeah, so I started out over a decade serving Fortune 500 companies and then helping their ex their leadership team and executives to really get those IT projects into fruition. And then at some point I’m just like, okay, like why is this not something that small business owners have access to? So I shifted gears, started my own business, and now I help mostly small business owners, service providers and professional services to really get their systems in place for more sales.

Awesome. And now, Diane, in the intro, we talked about how leaders are drowning in the small stuff, even while they have that big vision. And you’ve been on kind of both sides of that both with the Fortune 500 work and now your own business. What made you want to go and build passion breakthrough?

if I’m being honest with myself, looking back, it was burnout that made me decide that it’s just like is there is this all there is is you know, like someone else’s vision and the cubes and all that stuff. But

Now that I’m thinking about it more holistically, it really is that again, like my own passion breakthrough of wanting to make sure that I’m helping others to pursue their passion breakthrough. Cause I feel like we get to have more fun and find more joy in life and that free and enjoy that freedom that we crave when we’re working alongside others that’s also doing the work and focus in their zone of genius.

Yeah, having that passion definitely shines through and is a good motivator for getting up and and helping people every day. Now, when you’re working with these leaders who are stuck in that gap that we talked about between vision and execution, what’s usually the real problem you find once you start digging in?

Yes that one? Yes.

No, no, no. I think there’s two things. So I actually was just working with a leader about this. because it feels like when you first start, right? Like in when you have a smaller team and whatnot, the control aspect is real where it’s just like, okay, I’ve been doing this really well. it’s hard to let go of certain tasks because quality might go down. You don’t already have time to train someone else and start from scratch and all those different things, I think from a being in the weeds perspective.

I think the other side of that though is like people that just want to delegate and without a plan and being strategic about it and expect those people, no matter how much of an expert they are, they do not know your vision. So I think those are the two gaps that I see is like either you care too much or you care a little too little.

Yeah, we call that dumping instead of delegating, right? What what often helps in conversations with people give them the confidence to understand that they can delegate, maybe if they’re in that first camp where they’re worried about the quality and you know someone not doing it as well as they can.

Yes, exactly.

so I call it so the Heisenhower matrix, which is like way back when, so I call it the dad matrix, which is like delete, automate, delegate, and then do. Like if like mo the reason I call it the dad is because like if you ask like most most moms asking dads to take the garbage out, they’d rather delete it off their heads, try to automate it or delegate it to one of their kids before they’re the ones that gets to do it. So I feel like it’s really

Yeah.

applicable also for business owners because it’s just like we tend to do it the reverse. We try to do it first and try to see if we can do it. but again like you can only have so much time in your day. So it’s really nice to really hyper prioritize, delete things that are not prior n important andor priorities and then delegate as you see fit and automate as well.

So that’s a great framework. I love the acronym DAD. Okay. So walk me through some of the first things that start changing for clients you work with. Like what’s early on that moves the needle to really unlock momentum for them?

Thanks.

I think the biggest part that I’ve noticed is that when you have clarity on your goals and that is linked to timeline and who’s responsible, right? Like it if you look at like the bigger corporations again, like when I was doing the Fortune 500 stuff, like they have teams and there’s always like a racy chart, is what we like to call it in terms of who’s responsible, accountable, and all those different things. And then in if you are always the one that you’re always seeing your name on that spreadsheet, it’s just like okay, you’re

the bottleneck. So having that clarity and visibility to be not just for you but for your team too, if you have a team to make sure that everyone’s on the same page and that the ROI is tied into like

the task that is leading into the goals because sometimes we end up working with things that’s just like, where did this task even come from? so again, like in in those kinds of nuances, maybe it is still important to follow up. So you do an automation, set up like a CRM or something to make sure that every couple of weeks, couple of months that you’re following up with certain people, but a human doesn’t have to do that. So just understanding what can be automated, delegated, and then being clear on that.

Now, Diana, a lot of small business owners early on, they’re likely saying their name in all those different slots like you mentioned. How do you help walk them through prioritizing, you know, what to automate, what to delegate, and bringing in some some help to actually allow them to delegate if they don’t already have a team?

Yes.

Yeah. so again, like I think if it’s just you, there’s you know, like AI options, but I feel like you’re still managing that and you have to be really good at the prompt engineering side of things. So the way I look at it is twofold. Like if you can focus on you doing the strategic relational stuff, because people work with people, and also making sure that there’s ROI. So if you’re hiring somebody or using a tool.

You’re looking at how much is that costing you, your time versus the cost of the tool or the person that you’re hiring, versus how much is that really bringing in your bottom line. So if you’re gonna start hiring people, is that really translating to sales? So just making sure ROI is tied into that. and the other thing I just want to add in is like making sure when you hire or look for tools that you’re looking at the value system, because there’s tools out there that’s like collecting your data and feeding it to like third party.

advertisers and stuff like that and same with the humans. Like if you look through their profile and it’s just like, well, that’s not the kind of people I want serving my clients. So making sure your value aligned as well.

That’s a really good point. What about the like opportunity costs? If someone who’s a founder wants their time to be worth $300 an hour and there’s a lot of tasks on that list that, you know, might be low value, someone would do for $10, $12 an hour, how do they maybe compare that when there’s not necessarily like revenue directly tied to that task, but they’re still doing it?

Yeah, to your point, like there’s some costs and opportunity costs and all of these sort of different things. so from that perspective, really again, like you’re looking at it with if like I just had the person that Mows or lawn to come this morning and just thinking about okay, like I don’t want to first I don’t wanna do it. And secondly, like if I’m have if I’m paying someone else to do a certain task, what am I doing with my time? Am I just like sitting and watching TV?

Or am I actually being productive? And then even if you don’t see a really close ROI, there’s the long-term effect, right? Like so you’re you’re planting seeds in the relationships, you’re moving along your team and all the these different things in terms of creating more pathway for you and then building a very highly the system in place that is going to be long-term nurture and all those things.

And one thing you help a lot of your clients with is building recurring revenue streams. a lot of founders come in and their world is just in this like one-off chaos. They just go from one sale to the next. What are some of the shifts you help people make to get into that recurring sales model?

so there’s a again, like I feel like there’s a few things when it comes to this and these are topics I can talk about all day, but some nuances and some high level points is that you know like I feel like when people are getting those one-off sales, it’s like a drive-thru McDonald’s business where it’s just like, okay, like one transaction after the next

And you never know what kind of individual is gonna walk through the drive-thru. Versus like if you have an ecosystem of recurring revenue, you can easily more track that and get in front of the right people because you know holistically, like, okay, here’s the kinds of individuals I prefer to work with and you have more fun with again. so making sure you have your ecosystem in place from that perspective that feels in alignment with you. And the other side of it too is like if you already have multiple offers.

But it feels like, okay, like I don’t know the relationship between the two and you’re trying to delegate that to a team member and they’re getting confused. So again, having that streamlined approach and having that more systematic kind of helps everybody to be on the same page and make it faster to convert as well.

When a business has a lot of offers, how do you help them kind of sort through what they really should be focusing on and maybe applying that same principle of like maybe we cut some, maybe we delegate or you know, focus on others?

Yeah. so I run into that. There’s some clients I have that are multi-passionate. So they have like different offers and trying to figure out how that all come together. So the way that I kind of look at it is again like everything comes back to relationship and revenue. So if you are having revenue from certain types of offers, you want to keep those or revise it so that they’re more just one type of a bundle.

if you are working with like relationship driven, because again, like people work with people, you can automate certain things or delegate certain tasks, but at the end of the day, like having the strategy calls, you know, like maybe they your clients are hiring you for making sure you have FaceTime with them. So making sure you have those certain offers because that’s where people can relate and refer and continue to return back for more working with you because they like your personality and stuff.

I’m glad you brought that up, you know, having those clients return because client retention is something that’s really important. A lot of business owners say they want to have their dream clients and have that retention, but very few can execute it well. What does keeping the right clients around actually look like in the day-to-day for people you work with?

Mm-hmm.

I think there’s two sides again to that one is retention and actually being okay to fire clients that are not a fit. So, so the retention part again, like it goes back to relationship, having the systems in place to be like, okay, like doing the first week of if you’re doing like professional service type things, the first week of making sure they have quick wins and then the 30, 60, 90 day check-in at a minimum.

and then also having your onboarding and offboarding journey all tied together. from a, you know, like if you are an e-commerce or product, like making sure that it’s not just a transaction when they buy from you, either connecting with you on social media or on on your email list for newsletters, and then again, nurturing them because again, if they like the product, they’ll tell friends about it. So tell give them an opportunity to do that.

in terms of firing clients that, you know, like if you have a product and they’re just returning all the time, making sure you have the process in place for that as well. And or for services, like making sure that if they are eating more of your time, know how to delegate those certain tasks and or be willing to have a hard conversation with people to be like, Hey, this isn’t working, this isn’t what we agreed on. and making sure you deliver contractually and then just making sure you are

being intentional and providing the value that you said you were going to as well.

Those some great tips. And one thing you mentioned was the check-ins at the 30, 60, 90 points. we found in our business helping business owners onboard executive assistants, having the 30, 60, 90 plan, both with the check-in as well as the you know clear plan to help both the EA and the business owner know what to delegate has been super helpful. And one of the tools we leverage.

to help generate those based on our consult calls and information that the client has shared is AI. And so I wanted to talk about AI briefly with you and hear how are some ways that you’re using AI in your business to really genuinely move the needle in your business and the clients that you serve.

yeah, so there’s so many different tools. productivity is a big part, right? Like making sure that I stay on top of emails and stuff like that. So I leverage some tools there. Claude, Chat GPT, all that stuff are also helpful in terms of making sure that, you know, like if you’re creating an SOP, let’s say, for certain tasks, so you don’t even have to do those things manually anymore. You can screen record and then pass that on. Like I use Fathom for my meetings and then I can feed that into Claude as well. And then

just have it to go through it and then find the information based on my prompt for it. and then again, like there’s other tools, like there’s a video tool where I can create like for e-commerce clients and stuff like that. So that we can instead of hiring like influencers to just have an AI in terms of the videos and stuff like that showcasing the product. So there’s so many different uses of AI. It’s just making sure that you are aware of what is again the end result and what

task are you looking for assistance rather than saying that, hey, like I heard about this cool new tool, let me play with it. And then pretty soon you spent five hours and not knowing what the goal was to begin with.

Well, I’m glad you brought that up at the end there because that was my next question, which was where do you see leaders misusing AI and treating it like just like a magic button instead of a real tool to help them in their business?

Yeah, again, like you mentioned earlier, dumping, right? So nowadays it’s not just dumping to people, it’s also dumping the into AI in terms of like, I need to create a report for the executive leadership team or something like that. And then AI is just like, I am gonna give you something generic. because again, they don’t have your voice or your vision. and same with not just that, but I feel like sometimes executives can get the shiny object syndrome.

And then now the rest of the company is because they’re passing it down to their staff to be like, hey, like look at this tool and let me know and use it for your work. Sometimes it can just be more distracting and it could just take more time off the staff rather than just, okay, like how are you optimizing it? Is there is there gaps that can be filled? And then looking at it from that lens of like the goal setting rather than because there is a tool that was brought up to you.

Yeah, that’s interesting point of, you know, just telling people to use AI is not going to get the results you want. Maybe do you have an example or a situation you could share that you’ve observed where there was a successful rollout of deploying AI tools in an organization that you’ve worked with?

yeah, so there’s a couple that come to mind. So one of the clients that I have, again, like from a content social media stuff, so rolling that out based on like the meetings that we’ve been having and then like getting those information out. and so that’s like a smaller project. The bigger project, again, like I’ve I’ve noticed some people that you know, like they want to use let’s say copilot and just trying to figure out like how do you sequence that so it’s not necessarily the whole organization.

and then when a certain number of people can start to talk positively about it, because it’s rolling out AI is really more change management and then having your entire staff to have a buy-in. So just again, like making sure that you’re focused on the people and then the auditing the ROI, auditing the metrics, and keeping on top of that rather than just like, hey, did it work or did that not work? So you can save some time and money in the long term.

Well, speaking of AI and people and a lot of the things we’ve discussed so far have been about like the follow-through and taking that vision and and executing on it. How do you help leaders make the decision of whether a role is something that needs to have another team member brought on, maybe a virtual executive assistant, an in-person sales team member, or whether it’s something that can be handed off through automations or technology with AI?

yes, it is a great question. I personally like to make sure that people are leveraging the tools and hiring experts that can leverage the tools. So for example, like if you are looking at just creating content again, like sure you can have a VA to use Canva and look at all of the different designs, but again, like you can automate the process first.

for you getting your voice into a platform, creating like an airtable or something that can be easily handed off to delegate. So I always look at it from what can I remove? What can I automate? And then how can I have someone else to take over that automation because it makes their life easier from that perspective.

Yeah. And automation is something a lot of people are considering, especially in marketing. And I’m curious, you know, kind of as a looking ahead, if you had a crystal ball to share with the audience today, what are some shifts in marketing or other business systems that you think leaders should be paying attention to right now?

everything is going faster. Like the website this website can be done in minutes. right now the tool that I’m using has like an AI receptionist that you can also bring on your staff. so just having all of those resources available and easily created. So if you are not looking at leveraging those kinds of features, tools, your

competitor might be and they might be able to reach your client faster. So if you’re kind of in doing the dot com boom and still doing like, you know, like the back in the day type of programming and whatnot, that might be slowing you down. So again, like hiring an expert that can do the work for you and they might they’ll be on top of these types of new features and new tools. So because they’re the expert in it. So that you can be

More less in the weeds again and then more doing just the CEO visionary role.

And for the audience that is listening now and they know they’re in the weeds, they did the goal setting and mapping the responsibilities and they see their name on every single line item. What’s one thing that they could do this week to start getting out of their own way?

looking at it from a prioritization perspective and again like doing what you can like I look at it from a do you have 10 minutes, right? Like what can you actually be productive with those 10 minute blocks? And looking at what can you do like this week that you can start to handoff, whether it’s just one thing that is just been on your to-do list forever.

Or something that you’re just like every time it comes up, it’s like, I don’t really want to do this. So those are the telling signs of like what you can automate or delegate that would help you to get out of the weeds and make make you feel like you’re having fun in your business again.

Awesome. Well Diane, where can people connect with you to start exploring your work and following your latest systems ideas?

Yeah. thank you for asking. So I’m passionb.com is the website and I have a free quiz that you can take there. Like it’s a ninety-second audit to see what the gaps are in your revenue leaks. And then also I’m at Passion Breakthrough on all the different social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, and all those places. So I would love to for you to come say hi and that you’ve listened to our podcast episode.

Awesome. Thank you, Diane.

What a great conversation today. Diane dropped some real gems on simplifying the path to recurring sales, keeping dream clients around, and using smart systems and AI to actually move the needle instead of just adding more noise. And if there’s one thing that keeps coming up in this show, it’s that most leaders don’t have a vision problem. They have the follow-through problem, and they may have a good strategy, and the plan makes sense, it’s just that day-to-day execution that quietly falls apart. And that’s exactly the reason we built Worker Genics the way we did. Full-time, ultimate executive assistants.

sit us alongside you and keep the work moving behind the scenes so that big stuff actually gets done. If this sounds like something your week could use, head over to workergenics.com and take a look. Huge thank you to Diane for joining us today. Thanks to you for listening and we’ll catch you all on the next one.

The post Why Capable Hires Still Miss Your Vision  first appeared on Workergenix.

Opening Scaling Tension

Most businesses do not hit a growth ceiling because of a lack of demand.

They hit it because too much still depends on one person.

Revenue grows. Headcount grows. Complexity grows. Yet decisions continue routing through the founder. Follow-ups stall without their involvement. The team waits for approvals. Small questions become interruptions. Strategic thinking gets replaced by operational triage.

At first, this feels like leadership.

Eventually, it becomes operational drag.

The challenge is not usually effort. Most founders are already working hard. The challenge is that the business has not changed what it depends on to execute.

And that creates a leadership bandwidth problem.

The Hidden Constraint

One of the most important ideas from this discussion is that founder burnout is rarely a time-management issue.

It is usually an operating system issue.

As companies grow, founders often become the default execution hub. Decisions loop back. Accountability routes upward. Teams adapt to the founder instead of operating independently.

The result is predictable:

• More meetings
• More follow-up
• More context switching
• More decision fatigue
• Less strategic capacity

The business appears larger from the outside, but internally it still functions through the same bottleneck.

This creates a dangerous illusion. Growth continues for a while, so the system appears to be working.

In reality, the company has simply increased the volume flowing through the founder.

Operational leverage remains limited because ownership has not actually transferred.

The organization has learned how to execute around the founder instead of beyond the founder.

The Operating Shift

The shift is not delegation alone.

The shift is redesigning execution systems so ownership can move without constant intervention.

Many leaders assume the solution is hiring more people.

In practice, hiring often amplifies the problem.

More people create more communication pathways. More decisions. More coordination requirements.

Without clear execution systems, additional capacity simply increases the number of questions flowing back to leadership.

This is where scaling discipline becomes critical.

Instead of asking:

“How do I get more done?”

Operators start asking:

“Why does this still require me?”

That question changes everything.

Every recurring interruption becomes a signal.

Every repeated approval becomes a system issue.

Every decision that returns unnecessarily identifies a gap in clarity, capability, trust, or accountability.

The goal is not eliminating involvement.

The goal is eliminating unnecessary involvement.

Execution in Practice

Several practical frameworks emerged throughout the conversation.

1. Identify Functions Before You Delegate Tasks

Many founders delegate activities.

Fewer delegate ownership.

One practical approach discussed was listing every major function inside the company:

• Sales
• Marketing
• Finance
• Operations
• Delivery
• Technology

Then identifying who is truly accountable for each function.

This creates visibility around where leadership bandwidth is being consumed.

Operational leverage increases when functions become independently managed rather than founder-managed.

2. Replace Advice with Decision-Making Frameworks

One of the fastest ways to create dependency is solving every problem yourself.

When team members repeatedly bring issues to leadership and receive immediate answers, leaders unintentionally train dependency.

Execution systems improve when leaders coach thinking instead of supplying solutions.

Good decision-making frameworks reduce re-decisions.

They increase execution speed while reducing founder involvement.

The objective is not simply answering questions faster.

It is ensuring the same question never needs to be answered twice.

3. Reduce Cognitive Load Through Structure

Another important insight involved cognitive overload.

Many founders operate inside constant context switching.

Small decisions consume leadership attention throughout the day.

Over time, decision fatigue compounds.

Structured processes, documented expectations, recurring operating rhythms, and clear ownership reduce the mental burden on leadership.

The benefit is not efficiency alone.

It is preserving executive judgment for higher-value decisions.

4. Trust Is Often the Real Constraint

Several examples highlighted a deeper issue.

Many founders know what should be delegated.

They simply struggle to release control.

This is often framed as perfectionism.

More accurately, it is a trust issue.

Trust in people.

Trust in systems.

Trust that progress does not require personal involvement.

Without addressing this constraint, even strong execution systems eventually collapse back into founder dependency.

Leverage Outcome

Operational leverage is often misunderstood.

Many people define leverage as doing more work.

Operators understand leverage differently.

Leverage expands capacity.

It creates more output without requiring proportional increases in leadership attention.

When execution systems mature:

• Decisions move faster
• Teams operate with greater autonomy
• Accountability improves
• Follow-up burden decreases
• Strategic capacity expands

Most importantly, leadership bandwidth returns.

That bandwidth becomes available for capital allocation, risk management, strategic planning, talent development, client relationships, and long-term value creation.

The goal is not simply avoiding burnout.

The goal is building a company that performs well when leadership is not actively pushing every piece forward.

Connect With the Guests

To learn more about our guests and their work:

Kim Giddens

Website: https://personology.com

Paul Salter

Website: https://paulsaltercoaching.com

Mike Goldman

Website: https://mike-goldman.com

The Immediate Move

Leadership bandwidth is often the scarcest resource inside a growing company.

Most founders attempt to solve scaling challenges with additional effort.

The stronger move is reducing unnecessary decisions, transferring ownership, clarifying accountability, and building execution systems that operate without constant intervention.

Growth becomes sustainable when leaders stop serving as the routing point for every action.

Structure outperforms effort.

Ownership outperforms oversight.

Disciplined decision-making outperforms reactive management.

The businesses that scale most effectively are not the ones working harder.

They are the ones systematically reducing cognitive load while increasing execution capacity.

Watch this before you hire your next support role.

Like what you read? Get weekly insights on scaling, efficiency, and profitability—straight to your inbox. Click here to subscribe.

Full Podcast Transcript

Welcome to Executive Edge Live. I’m Harley Green, founder and CEO of WorkGenics. At Workogenics, we help high performing leaders reclaim their time and stay focused on what actually matters, supported by our ultimate executive assistants. Executive Edge Live is one way we support the broader business community, bringing together operators and advisors to talk through what is actually working inside growing companies. Today’s conversation is how founders scale without burning out.

Most founders build their businesses by staying close to everything, every follow-up, every decision, every moving part. That approach works early on, but as the business grows, it becomes the constraint. The calendar fills up. The inbox never empties, work only moves when the founder pushes it. And the cost is not just time. It’s energy, clarity, and the ability to actually lead. So today we’re going to dig into what it takes to move out of the middle of daily execution, how to keep the business moving.

Without grinding yourself down to actually lead it. So today we’re going to dig in with these panel of experts. And a quick note I want to share before we jump in: this session is also going to be featured on our podcast, Scale Smart Grow Fast. So if something resonates with you today, you’ll be able to revisit it once it’s published. Let’s get into it and meet our panel. Kim, let’s start with you. Go ahead and introduce yourself, let everyone know where you’re coming from and what your business is.

Sure. I’m Kim Giddens. I’m the founder of Personology. I’m a leadership performance advisor and an organizational diagnostician. I work with founders and CEOs and leadership teams when something’s slowing and they can’t quite name why. Decisions are looping, execution is stalling, too much rooting back to one person. My background is leading organizations of 3,000 people.

for brands like anthropology banana republic kohan at high grade high growth stages and transformational pivots. and yeah that’s that’s me from Hoboken, New Jersey.

Welcome Kim. Thanks for joining us today. All right, Paul, how about you?

Yes, hello everybody. My name is Paul Salter. I am a high performance hypnotherapist and mindset coach. And I specifically work with CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, ambitious professionals who know what to do to either achieve next level success or sustain the current success they have, but they’re struggling to do it. So I specifically use hypnosis to help them unlearn.

the destructive patterns of believing, feeling, thinking, and behaving that keep them stuck and hold them back from achieving their potential. And I work with all of my clients virtually, but I’m happily based in Tampa, Florida.

Awesome. Thanks for joining us today, Paul. I’m excited to hear your insights and ideas. All right, Mike.

I am the second New Jersey person on the on the panel. my name is Mike Goldman. I help build great leadership teams, and I do that through my keynote speaking. I coach leadership teams, and I’ve written three books. the second book is called Breakthrough Leadership Team, and wrote the my last book launched in October called The Strength of Talent. Happy to say it made the USA Today.

bestseller list and I work with leadership teams because what I have seen over my thirty-five years coaching and consulting is that as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company.

Thanks for joining us, Mike. All right, everyone, we’re just going to jump right in with an open question to the whole panel and let’s get started. When you hear a founder say, I’m burning out trying to keep this thing moving, what is usually really going on underneath?

I’ll dive in first. What I’ve observed in my 17 years of coaching is there’s typically a point in the growth process, specifically the rapid growth phase, where a founder starts to get disconnected or out of alignment with their fundamentals. And I’m not just talking the business strategy. I mean, all of us here know there’s no shortage of information available in a matter of milliseconds. There’s incredible coaches like Mike, consultants and advisors like him available to fill those knowledge gaps.

But as we continue to go and grow and we taste that next level success, we’re rewarded for that ambition, that hustle, that grind, we start to put the original priorities that gifted us that opportunity in the first place on the back burner. We neglect self-care, we neglect sleep, diet, exercise, we neglect those important relationships in our life that were originally our foundation for success. And more often than not, founders are aware of this.

But they wear that ambition like a badge of honor. They think it’s their separating factor, their superpower. And in fact, it really is until it inevitably becomes their kryptonite. So a lot of my coaching, first and foremost, is reconnecting those individuals to their foundational fundamentals that allow them to have the energy to sustain that rapid ascension of success.

I’ll dive in in addition to agree with everything Paul said is when, you know, when when leaders are kind of burning out trying to get things moving, I feel like, you know, number one, most of the time it’s because they are, or at least feel like they are, the smartest person in the room. And when you are the smartest person on your team, whether that’s true or you just feel that way, we have a tendency to think we’ve got to do it all.

ourselves. And that’s not a scalable model. That’s a model which is going to lead to not only mediocrity, but a whole lot of lack of sleep. The other thing that I see is missing, especially in entrepreneurs that have founded a company, it’s now growing and they feel like they’re just trying to hold on, is there’s no real operating system for the business. Everybody, including them, is just trying to work real hard, get a lot of stuff done, and they’re really smart and that’s all great.

But there needs to be an operating system, some rhythm of planning and execution and holding each other accountable and long-term strategy and short-term execution. And without implementing a real operating system, everything could feel chaotic. And between I’ve got to be the smartest person in the room and everything feels chaotic, that’s a pretty good recipe for getting burnt out.

Yeah, I I absolutely agree with with both of you. And what I have found, especially helping founders who have managed a lot of growth, is that they’ve become the system. So similar to what what Mike shared, but and maybe not intentionally. it happened because they felt like they were the fastest to getting things done, fastest route to getting things done. And now the org has learned how to root around

Mm.

And loop everything back into the founder. And what I’ve also found that this is happening at the highest levels on large companies, it’s something I’ve seen through my career 27 plus years of my leadership journey. And this is a very similar thing that happens when people take on additional responsibility and start growing responsibility. And unless they have that architecture, unless they have systems built.

that work for that company, it will root always root back and create burnout.

Mike, I wanted to touch on something you said about feeling like you’re the smartest person in the room and you know, there’s a whole discussion on like hiring and stuff. Do you have like a quick recommendation of, you know, maybe a a founder’s not gonna be able to like replace themselves as the sm smartest person in every aspect? Are there other approaches they might take to start lifting that burden from their plate?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s a it’s a great question because it’s an easy thing to say. It’s a harder thing to execute on. And one of the things I do when I work with a leadership team, it’s one of the first exercises I do. And it sounds very simple and it’s not, but it’s listing out for your organization what are all the functions? Head of company is a function. Finance, sales, marketing, what are all the functions? And there’s probably 10 to 15 critical functions. And then

Today, who is accountable for that function? And if you’re a very early on founder, your name might go right next to all 15 of those functions. And that’s okay. That’s part of what we do when we get things started, but but you’ve got to quickly start getting proactive about your team and saying, hey, which of these 15 functions? Maybe it’s finance, maybe it’s marketing, maybe it’s technology, which of these functions is one that I’m not great at?

It’s taken a whole lot of my time and taking me away from building the business. What is that function? And if if it’s if that’s finance, then my priority to build a great team, my number one priority’s got to be all right, who can I bring on the team that could be accountable for that finance function? Don’t try to build a great team all at once. You can’t afford it. Your head will explode. But step by step, what are the functions?

Mm.

Who’s accountable? How do we measure success of those functions? And what’s the first one I oughta go get at so I could start pulling back and leading versus having to get my my my my hands dirty with everything?

Thanks, Mike, for clearing that up and giving some good practical advice there. the next question I had was directed for you, Kim. You know, you diagnose where leadership execution breaks down in founder-led companies. What patterns do you see most often when growth is making the founder the bottleneck?

so typically I see three patterns that come up most often. The first one I like to call return loop or liken it to like a game of tennis. And that’s when decisions just keep landing back on the founder side. and you know, the idea with tennis is, you know, a really good game. It should be going back and forth. the second the second one is accountability.

And that’s when everyone in theory knows who’s responsible for what, but in practice, it’s still going routing back to the founder. And then the third one is the compensating team. And this is generally what we what we see after a while of the founder bottleneck. And that team is very good at working around the founder. and they are working around the gap.

Mm.

Okay.

Yeah.

instead of actually naming the gap. And so instead of using their own strengths or using what they know best, they’re starting to hold back and compensating for what the system is actually requiring them to do.

Curious if any of the other panelists have seen similar patterns or anything that they’ve observed when they see the founders becoming the bottleneck.

I mean, I think it comes back to the root of what we’ve already begun discussing as this inability to delegate, which sometimes may show up or feel like it’s perfectionism or it’s indecision. But I think at the core of it all is just a lack of trust in others, because logically one might know that if you’re able to delegate task A, B, and C, you can scale and go significantly faster. But if the person you delegate to is only going to do 80% of the job that you would be able to do, that feels threatening. You might see it as a

threat to your role, your standards, and you can get so lost in that little problem, you forget to see that your big vision requires you to scale and have other individuals working with you to go after the collective goal.

The other thing that that I’ve seen is a total misunderstanding of the job of a CEO. You know, I was with one leadership team, and the CEO said to to his team, Hey, my job is to help all of you. Just tell me what you need. And I said, My God, that’s not your job. Your job is not to do everybody else’s job. That is not scalable. There is a job of a CEO. The CEO is the the chief visionary.

Is is in charge of strategy. I believe the CEO owns culture. The CEO is an ambassador internal in the organization, ambassador external to the organization. CEO’s job is to build a great leadership team. There’s a specific job of a CEO. And I think for a lot of early on founders and and and CEOs, they don’t quite understand what their job is. So they have a tendency to help everybody else and dig into everybody else’s job.

And that’s just not scalable and that drives, you know, just being real tired and burnt out at the end of the day.

I wonder, Kim, if that goes back to kind of what you said, one of the one of the patterns you observed of you’ve got a team, they know the responsibilities, but things keep coming back to the CEO. I wonder if what Paul mentioned too of you know, the trust of getting something done eighty percent, maybe that’s good enough, impacts that I’d love to hear your thoughts more on, you know, that specific pattern and maybe some strategies that you share to help people get out of that.

I d I definitely think that’s part of it. I also think the the flip side, I think the founder can think, well, it’s just faster if I do it this time. It will take me too long to train somebody to do it, when in reality, sometimes you need to slow down a little bit to train somebody to do it. one of the things that that I have somebody do is think about what’s one decision recently.

them you know this week yesterday today that came back that shouldn’t have come back to you and what would have what would have had to be true for that to be that decision to be made without you and within that is your is the gap and that’s the best place to start because it’s always going to come down to clarity capability or trust so somebody wasn’t clear on what they needed to do they aren’t capable

you know, there’s a skill gap perhaps, or they’re simply not trusting that they’ll be able to do it without them.

Harley, I’ll add something too, based on what Mike said. You know, sometimes I’ve had to ask my clients point blank, are you the best person to be the CEO? Because the skill set required to get a company off the ground and running is night and day different versus just like Mike described, the skill set required to paint the picture, build the culture, and set everybody else up for success. And more often than not, it becomes an ego issue, an identity threat when someone has founded and started this great company, this great movement.

And they’re not the best person to keep it moving in that direction because maybe, for example, they love being in the weeds of the tactical hands-on building that they’re neglecting the vision, the culture building, and the leadership. So sometimes it’s an honest conversation that’s required with a mentor, a coach, somebody you trust. And it’s really putting the right person in that seat. And maybe that role changes to president, director of X, Y, and Z. But if you can let go of the ego or that need for validation and attention that typically comes

with that CEO label, you can actually get the movement or the business to scale well beyond the original intention.

That reminds me of an article that I’ve have sent to multiple founders and I’ll have to remember I think it where it came from. But do you want to be a founder or do you want to be the king? And there’s usually, you know, if if really if ego and status, if that’s the most important thing, then then those are, you know, you you can make the choice. It’s your company.

Mm.

Glad you brought that example up of sometimes the best role for the founder is not necessarily CEO. And so this kind of leads into the next question that I had for Mike originally: is you know, your work with CEOs and founders, as they’re building the leadership teams that can actually carry the business. Where do the founders often go wrong when they’re trying to step back?

Well, in addition to stepping back and not knowing what their role is, right, which we’ve said it’s easy to say, I’m gonna step back, but if you don’t understand what you should be doing as a CEO, you’re not gonna step back for long. And then the other mistake I see CEOs make when they step back is in in how they pick their team. You know, there’s a question I ask a lot of my clients er early on when I work with them.

is I say, if you had a chance to do it all over again, would you enthusiastically rehire everyone on your team? And and very often I get kind of, you know, they start to turn green and they don’t feel too well or nervous laughter. And and what I realized it’s not because they’ve got a lot of low performers running around. It’s because they’ve got a lot of folks on their team, including the senior leadership team. They’ve got a lot of folks that are fine. You know, they’re good enough.

So they’re not doing so bad that I would fire them, but would I hire would I rehire them all over again? No, I’d probably want more of a superstar. And, you know, that that leadership team, the first people you surround yourself, the people that are really helping you drive and scale the company, I believe everyone on your leadership team needs to be a high performer. And when I say high performer, I mean a great culture fit and highly productive, you know.

Culture fit and results. Everyone on your senior leadership needs to be high performing or have the ability to get there in the next three to six months, or they don’t belong on your team. There’s just too big an impact they have down and out from the organization. So the mistake I see them make is they believe good enough is good enough. And especially on that leadership team, good enough doesn’t get you very far.

When we see oftentimes too with clients that come to Worker Genics, they’ve got these all-star leadership team members, but they’re bogged down in low level admin work. And so making a decision to bring on like a virtual executive assistant can have a real quick productivity boost for those executive leadership team and keep them really highly focused so they are able to be productive and and hit those goals that are needed. And Paul, this something I wanted to talk to you about next is, you know, why do so many high performing founders know exactly

What to delegate, but still can’t let go. Maybe they have that executive assistant and they really are not letting go of the things that executive assistant should be doing.

Yeah, it comes down to a core belief around trust in other people. And you know, a good example I can share is I have a client of mine, he’s a serial entrepreneur, and his latest endeavor is this, you know, virtual legal software for for lawyers and and whatnot. And what’s interesting is a lot of my work is deep identity level work, going back to childhood to understand when, why, and how some of these perpetuating destructive patterns came to be. And

Whether we’re talking about, you know, lack of trust in others, perfectionism, procrastination, performance anxiety, everything I just mentioned is learned, which it can which means it can be unlearned. So for this particular client, as he hit the seven figure mark, he was starting to realize that beyond him and his wife and his one VA, the only three people in the company, if he wanted to get to that next level, he would have to bring on more talent.

And he had a history of cycling through VAs. He had a history of cycling through bringing people on, not only in this business, but as other businesses previously. And as we began to unpack that, it was very clear he did not trust other people. And my job, of course, is to go much deeper. And what we uncovered in our time together was he was raised in a very perfectionistic household. If he didn’t bring home the straight A report card, there were consequences. His dad ran a very tight ship.

With incredibly high expectations. And there were several moments in his younger years when he was tasked with participating in group projects. And he noticed early on, I mean, we’re talking nine, 10 years old, where he’d be assigned a group project, and all of the other kids just took a haphazard approach. They didn’t care nearly as much as he did. But he knew if he didn’t do well on this on this group project, there were consequences at home.

So as a result of trying to avoid consequence, get his childhood needs met of acceptance and love by dad, he would do all the work himself. He would get the good grade and everything would be fine and safe at home. But this pattern carried on into college and into his adult years with the core belief being it’s not safe to trust people.

So we had to do the work necessary to create that safety, re really revisit and reframe those pivotal moments from his life. So he felt more at ease, more patient and diligent in the hiring process and doing his role to not only set that individual up for success, also to give them the space, time, and resources to have success. And through that work together, the team is now at eight or nine individuals and they’ve hit that next milestone and are now in the process of getting ready to sell the company.

Love that story. And speaking of milestones, I love that you mentioned that. You know, one thing we often hear when speaking to leaders is they’ve got a problem, things are flowing through them, and they are saying, you know what, we’ll we’ll focus on that when we hit the next milestone. What usually happens when they keep pushing off, getting out of the bot being the bottleneck in their business? And this is an open question to the group.

Well, something I see is the is the system hardens and the team just gets better at working around what has become the DNA of the company. And the founder and off the CEO gets more gets more and more isolated. And the longer this this runs, you you’re the the founder isn’t really getting any direct feedback or information.

And it’s just continuing to spiral. And the longer it runs, it just gets more expensive to interrupt because now you’re not just having to fix structure, you’re really having to rebuild trust and helping people understand, you know, what what ownership is real and what isn’t.

What I hear more often than, you know, we’ll we’ll fix it when we hit the next milestone. The the companion kind of mistaken statement, you know, i is, you know, yeah, I know I’ve got to do that, but I have to wait until things calm down. As soon as things calm down, and then my question is, when have everything when is when is anything ever calmed down? And by the way, do you want things to calm down?

That’s a dangerous time if things calm down. So it’s an easy way for a leader to push things off. I’m going to wait until things calm down, but that time never happens. And then to Kim’s point, as you push it off, as your company grows, let’s assume it is growing. As your company grows, things get more complex. Things get even harder. You dig yourself a deeper and deeper hole.

So the best time to solve the problem is typically now and not waiting until some magical day that things calm down.

Most founders aren’t addicted to winning and success like they’ll tell you they are. They’re addicted to stress. They’re addicted to the cocktail of anxiety, fear, worry, this need to prove myself. And that literally transpires as physical, emotional, psychological stress. That is a powerful, potent recipe for burnout. But it also really bleeds into not only the business, but it’s their personal relationships, their marriage, their relationship with their children. And

Just like Kim mentioned, the longer they get stuck in that pattern, you know, neuro neurologically speaking, like the neural pathways responsible for feeling all of those things, they just become easier and easier to run. They become so efficient, effective operating on autopilot that it feels safe to continue to stay stuck in a pattern of whether it be emotional avoidance, anxiety, burnout, overwhelm, or exhaustion. So it really begins understanding how we can learn to not only create safety.

But also detach your self-worth from this success or hitting one milestone after the next. And it really instating a core belief that you are a wonderful person, a leader, X, Y, and Z, regardless of a good month or a bad month.

Love the different perspectives and tie how they tie together on answering that question. Let’s make it really practical now. If someone’s listening and thinking, my business runs through me and I’m just completely wiped out, where should they actually start this week?

Biased, but hire a coach. Like every single high-performing individual should have one or multiple coaches. And you know, it needs to be business strategy, it needs to be life mindset. You need to have a trusted mentor and advisor where you can go to to get honest, real-time feedback about what you’re doing that’s working well, and to shine a bright light on some of the blind spots that are holding you back. So

I’m a big fan of asking for help accelerates results. So if you’re listening right now and you’re feeling what Harley just described and you don’t have a mentor in your corner, that should be your next first step.

I would I would first, of course, being a coach, of course I would agree with that. I’ve got I’ve had a coach consistently probably for the last twenty five years. But but I think a a an additional part of it is the idea of if you believe the whole business is running through you, then that’s kind of a, you know, that’s gonna self-perpetuate. And and if you believe the only way I’m gonna be successful is kind of through my team and through my people.

I think one of the things that that’s helpful to start putting in place right now is start to learn how to be a better coach. Stop giving advice. Stop answering every question. Because what we’re doing when our team comes to us and says, How do I do this? Or I don’t know how to do this, or we’ve got this problem. When you solve the problem, you are training your team to come back to you again and again and again. And you are not helping your team by

Modeling a way of thinking so they could solve the problem next time. So it doesn’t all have to go through you. So become a better coach. And being a better coach means asking better questions. Questions that help model a way of thinking, questions that help come help the individual come up with the right action for them versus just grabbing every problem and trying to solve it yourself. Because then you’re just perpetuating the exact thing.

You say you don’t want to happen.

Yeah. Well Mike, I really appreciate you bringing up that specific example of how people can change. And I think that’s a good segue to the next question I had for everyone, which is just a quick, easy one. Like what is one habit, mindset shift, or operational change that every founder should make if they want to scale without the burnout?

Harley, I lost you for a minute. What is one habit that what?

sorry. What is one habit or mindset shift or operational change that every founder should make if they want to scale without the burnout?

Your calendar is a reflection of what’s important to you. And I understand for everybody listening, their business is incredibly important, but their business success is not sustainable if they show up every day operating with an empty fuel tank. So the quick, easy action step here is open up your calendar. It’s going to quickly show you how important self-care is, family time, opportunities to rest, recharge, play, and experience life.

And you need to put those on your calendar first before you schedule your team meetings, your client calls, your relationship building, whatever it may be, because you can always make time for those. You’ve likely, if you’re listening, found it very easy to push off family and to neglect self-care, but that is what’s going to allow you to sustain the success that you aspire to achieve.

I only heard the tail the tail end because I’ve got kicked off, but I’m back on. But I love that. And what I what I find, what I have found a lot with with busy founders and and the fact that it has become a habit is that’s why coaching and or hiring somebody or hiring even a VA becomes so helpful because you can really almost delegate that process to help you get into the habit.

It’s very hard for human beings to change a habit without some level of accountability or partnership with somebody else. So so and and morning rituals, things like that are are huge, huge, hugely important.

Awesome. Well, I appreciate you guys sharing those insights, those specific action items. Before we wrap up, if someone wants to reach out or continue the conversation with you, what’s the best way for them to connect with you? Feel free to share your website, LinkedIn, whatever is you prefer.

We’ll start with you, Kim.

I’ll happily.

How did that come through? Kim, are you able to share how people can best connect with you?

yes. best con best way to connect with me is either through LinkedIn or my website, personology.com, and it’s personology with IE.

Awesome, thank you, Kim. Paul, we’ll go to you next.

Yeah, if you’ve enjoyed this conversation, what I’ve shared, you’ll likely enjoy the podcast I’m the host of, which is called the Unstuck High Performer Podcast. And then on Instagram, TikTok, TikTok, and YouTube at the Paul Salter, S-A-L-T-E-P-E.

Thank you, Paul. All right, and Mike.

For me, my website is mike-goldman.com. My newest book is The Strength of Talent, How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Profit. and also as Paul said, if you enjoy this conversation, I have a podcast called The Better Leadership Team Show that I’m super proud of.

Awesome. Appreciate you all. This was a strong conversation. And if there’s one takeaway, it’s scaling without burnout is not about working harder or finding more time. It’s about changing what the business depends on you for.

Who owns what, and how work the how work moves. What happens when you step away? And if you want help putting this into practice, we created the Executive Efficiency Blueprint to help you turn conversations like this into clear execution and better use of your time. Those of you listening can access it here at workergenics.com/slash EEB Live. Thanks again for joining us. We’ll see you next time on Executive Edge Live and on the Scale Smart Grow Fast podcast.

The post Your Business Is Growing, But Everything Still Runs Through You first appeared on Workergenix.

Opening Scaling Tension

Most founder-led firms hit a familiar plateau. Revenue climbs, the team expands, and yet the operator’s calendar gets heavier rather than lighter. Every meaningful decision still routes through them. Client relationships, deal judgment, hiring calls, and execution follow-through all sit in one head. The business looks healthy from the outside. Inside, the constraint is obvious: nothing moves without the operator moving it.

This is the structural cost of scaling without delegation discipline. And in the lower middle market, it is the single biggest reason that businesses generating real cash flow still struggle to attract clean offers when the owner decides to exit.

The Hidden Constraint

Cameron Bishop has spent 40 years inside this problem. He scaled a $7M business into a $400M operation throwing off $100M in EBITDA, closed 70+ M&A deals, and now sells lower middle market companies as an investment banker at Raincatcher. The pattern he sees across founder-led firms is consistent enough to name: extreme owner dependency.

The mechanism is straightforward. A founder builds a business around a specific skill, talent, or relationship advantage. That advantage carries the company through its early growth. But the founder never trains a successor, never transfers ownership of execution, and never builds a layer of judgment beneath them. The company keeps producing revenue, but every critical function is tethered to one person.

When that founder goes to market, buyers price the risk. A company with extreme owner dependency is either unsellable, sells at a significant valuation discount, or sells with deal terms that lock the operator in for years post-close. Buyers are willing to take on risk, but they are deeply risk-averse about acquiring a business that disappears the moment the founder walks out the door.

The hidden cost is not just exit optionality. It is the cumulative drag of being the bottleneck for a decade before the exit conversation ever begins.

The Operating Shift

The operating principle Bishop returns to throughout the conversation is deliberate: be the dumbest person in the room.

This is not false humility. It is a deliberate architecture choice. The operator who insists on being the most knowledgeable person in every function is, by definition, capping the company’s intelligence at their own ceiling. The operator who hires specialists in HR, finance, technology, and operations and then actively seeks their disagreement is building a company that can outperform any single decision-maker.

Bishop describes asking every senior hire one question at the end of the interview: if you disagree with me, are you willing to disagree openly? The startled reaction was the point. He was screening for the structural input the business needed, not the comfort he wanted.

This is operational leverage in its truest form. It is not about working longer hours or compressing more output from the same hours. It is about expanding the cognitive and executional surface area of the company so the operator stops being the rate limiter.

Execution in Practice

Three frameworks from the conversation translate directly into how this principle gets executed.

Start, Stop, Keep. During diligence on acquisitions, Bishop ran 15-minute one-on-ones with key employees, no managers in the room, asking three questions. What should the company keep doing? What should it start doing? What should it stop doing? The framework surfaced operational intelligence that no executive summary could produce. He applied the same approach to a $60M turnaround where he met individually with all 220 employees. His initial assumptions about what was broken were almost entirely wrong. Without the structured listening process, his first wave of decisions would have damaged the business.

The lesson for operators is structural. Most leaders make decisions on incomplete information because they trust their pattern recognition more than they trust the people closest to the work. A simple, repeatable framework forces better inputs into the decision-making process and reduces the cost of premature action.

Diligence as a parallel function, not a serial one. When Bishop built out his acquisition model, he stopped treating diligence as a single owner’s responsibility. The lead manager, VP of HR, CFO, head of production, and CIO each owned their domain and reported back in the same room. Cross-functional conflicts surfaced before they became post-close disasters. The model only worked because each specialist had the authority to flag issues without escalating through the operator.

Integration is where deals die. Buyers spend 90 to 95 percent of their attention on the front-end transaction: pricing, contracts, negotiation. Almost none of it goes to the integration plan. That asymmetry is where culture fractures, key personnel leave, and value evaporates. The same logic applies to internal scaling. Operators spend disproportionate energy on hiring decisions and almost none on the integration of new senior hires into the actual decision-making architecture of the business.

Leverage Outcome

The compounding effect of these practices is not a busier operator with a bigger team. It is a quieter operator with a more capable team. When specialists own their domains, when decisions get made closer to the work, and when structured frameworks replace ad-hoc judgment, the business gains something rare: predictable execution that does not require founder rescue.

This is what real capital efficiency looks like in a services or operator-led business. Every hour the founder spends on low-leverage execution is an hour not spent on capital allocation, client relationships, or strategic positioning. Every decision the founder makes that a competent specialist could have made better is a small but real tax on the company’s intelligence.

The exit case makes the math concrete. A business with distributed execution authority, documented systems, and a second layer of judgment trades at a premium. A business that runs on the founder’s nervous system trades at a discount, if it trades at all. The work to close that gap is the same work that makes the business better to operate in the meantime.

Connect With the Guest

To learn more about Cameron Bishop and his work:

Website: http://www.raincatcher.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-bishop-19b6804

The Immediate Move

Leadership bandwidth is the real constraint, not effort. The operators who scale cleanly are the ones who treat their own attention as the scarcest asset in the business and build structure around protecting it. That means transferring ownership of execution, not just tasks. It means installing frameworks that reduce re-decisions, surface better information, and put authority closer to the work. It means hiring specialists who will disagree and then actually listening when they do.

The structural shift is not about getting more done. It is about removing yourself from the path of work that no longer requires your judgment so the work that does require it gets your full attention.

Watch this before you hire your next support role.

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Full Podcast Transcript

Most leaders think scaling is about doing more, but at some point the real bottleneck isn’t strategy, it’s execution. Welcome to the Scale Smart Grow Fast podcast, where we talk about what it actually takes to build something that runs without you. At Workergenics, we pair leaders with full-time ultimate executive assistants who bring the consistent execution that keeps everything moving. Today’s guest knows this better than most. Cameron Bishop has spent 40 years building, buying, and scaling companies from 7 million copywriting shop to a 400 million operation and 70 plus M &A deals in between. Cameron, great to have you on the podcast. How are you doing today? All right, that did fantastic. Thanks so much for having me on. It’s our pleasure. So you started as a copywriter at a $7 million company and eventually worked your way up to a CEO and took it to 400 million. What was the moment when you realized you were thinking like an operator and not just someone doing their job? Well, it’s interesting. have kind of a theory. There are those who manage and those who do. And obviously as a copywriter, I started out as a doer. And the transition from doer to manager is often difficult one because there aren’t any real courses, at least that I’m aware of, on how to learn how to delegate. because you can always defer back to your comfort zone, which is writing the copy yourself or whatever the individual skill set was. So it’s difficult in order to kind of get out of the doer mindset. Well, we all still have to be doers to an extent, but if your primary role is to manage, you have to learn how to manage, how to delegate and… I’ve always been a big believer in trying to identify what motivates an individual and work with them in that capacity rather than a cookie cutter mold in order to grow and scale a business. What were some of the mindset shifts or resources that you found helpful in shifting that mindset to being able to delegate more and keeping yourself from just doing it yourself? Well, you know, I think we all learn a lot of these things the hard way. And sometimes it’s better to be lucky than be good. So I would say that I have had a lot of luck in terms of where I went to work and how that company evolved and the types of corporate owners we had that. encouraged us and incentivized us to scale the business primarily through acquisition, although there certainly was a substantial amount of organic growth and new business startup. but nobody can do these things alone. Today I’m an investment banker. I specialize in selling lower middle market, privately owned or family owned companies. And one of the primary things I see that is a real negative factor for buyers in these companies is that many of these business owners became successful because they had a certain skill or expertise or talent or knowledge. But they continued to exploit that without training anyone to work with them or to replace them. So they just really don’t delegate. And in the world I grew up in scaling business, I was in that first company for 23 years and definitely moved up through the food chain to finally become the CEO. But you don’t do these things without having a team of experts. our mindset was always to be a highly collaborative environment, which is something I’m still an ardent believer in today. No one has all the answers and for the best interest of the company, it’s always the key focus should always be on getting it right, not who had the last best idea. How do you help operators and these business owners that you work with today understand that collaboration and the importance of getting things delegated so they can scale and be valuable and understand that while they may be the one who does it best now, it is possible to get to a point where someone else might be able to do it for them as good, if not better. Unfortunately, Harley, oftentimes it’s a difficult wake up call for these owners who have the term we use is extreme owner dependency. And that could come in many ways, but oftentimes they don’t realize that their company either won’t be sellable at all. or will sell for a substantial discount on valuation, or the buyer is going to require them to stay on after they sell their company for an extended period of time because buyers of companies, interestingly, are open to taking on risk, but at the same time, they’re very risk averse. and heavy owner dependency is at least a yellow flag, oftentimes a red flag for these business buyers. And until you tell a business owner his options aren’t good, if he’s wanting to exit the company in a fairly short period of time or the business is going to sell for less, or there may also be fairly unattractive deal terms and deal structure for that owner. That’s when they suddenly wake up and realize that, I should have been delegating all this time. Now when you look back at your personal growth and professional growth through your career, what is one time or thing that almost broke everything and that you had to learn to get past? That’s an easy one for me. I’m also a big believer in we almost always learn the most from our mistakes as opposed to our successes. So the company that acquired the business I was working in, which was a small technical magazine publishing company. the previous owner sold us, were acquired by a Fortune 100 company on the New York Stock Exchange. And they said, hey, we kind of like this business, we want you to go buy companies. And ultimately, as luck would have it, I was assigned to do the first deal, because I ran the technology division of technical titles. And the acquiring business was in the technology sector. Nobody told us how to do it. It’s kind of uncomfortable to take in a six month old baby and drop it in the pool and say swim. So we just went out and did it. Then we thought we were being extremely efficient, dotting all the I’s, crossing all the T’s, auditing all the financials and all the kind of typical factual things. But at the end of the day, the significant mistake we made, and particularly me since I was leading that deal, was we didn’t get to understand the people well enough and understand their culture. It’s a common fallacy that when one company’s acquiring another, they say, well, I’m buying you, therefore I’m right and you’re wrong. It’s my way or the highway. And frankly, we were a little bit of that. And at the end of the day, thankfully, it was a small deal. But because we didn’t read key management or key personnel correctly, we lost those people. And they were key stakeholders and knowledge holders in the business. And that small deal ultimately died. and that is a very difficult way to learn. But it’s going to be sink or swim if you’ve got a parent company who’s financing these deals. If you start having multiple deals that die because you don’t diligence them properly, it’s probably not going to be good for your career path. You’re really motivated to learn and not make those mistakes any further. That’s when we really began to develop this collaborative model, utilizing all the special skills managers we had on our team. So it’s more about this model and kind of how it came out of this experience where you had to learn the hard way of looking for those key people and taking into account personalities and the actual roles and interests of the people that are already in this business. Sure. Well, we essentially assembled the team. Again, it was sort of an iterative learning experiences we were along, but a diligent team would include the lead manager. some cases it was me, in some cases it was one or the other of my counterparts. It would include our vice president of HR, our chief financial officer, our head of production, our head of our CIO for technology at a minimum. And then there might be other specialized managers who would all be responsible for diligencing the company we were. assessing to acquire in their specialized area. Then we would get together all at the same time in the same room and each of these specialized area managers would have to report on their findings. And it became fascinating because a lot of times we would see this quite often if the head of production would say, well, we’re going to need this kind of a piece of equipment. not realizing that the chief information officer would then have to interface that piece of equipment with the rest of the technology system. And that’s where a lot of things can fall apart if everybody doesn’t know what everybody else is doing. And it became tremendously efficient over time. And with the help of our VP of HR, we began to more thoroughly assess key talent in the companies we were acquiring and to really get to understand their corporate culture and the things that they were doing well. I was fortunate enough to work for 15 years for a brilliant man who was the chairman of our Fortune 100 company. And he would always remind us when we were doing a deal, remember, there’s a reason and you’re buying this company. Figure out first what they’re doing right and protect that. And if you don’t have a big ego, you can realize that oftentimes the acquired business is doing something better than your existing organization. So you can adapt to best practices. And in our case, it was fantastic because it injected so many efficiencies and allowed us to grow so much more. more, our company on 400 million in revenue, the end in my CEO period there, was throwing off $100 million in EBITDA profit, which was at the top of the food chain for companies like that in terms of its profit margin. But a lot of that is because we adopted and adapted ideas from the companies we were acquiring. I love that. Now, as you’ve built this career and have so many &A deals behind you, what’s one of the things that many owners that you’ve worked with just don’t see coming until they’re already in the middle of it? One of the key things that I’ve lectured on this a number of times, especially for CFO type organizations, one of the key mistakes that business owners make when they are acquiring another business, besides what I mentioned earlier, that they think they’re doing everything right and the acquired company is doing everything wrong. So they’re going to force total change on the company that’s being acquired. But if they really get to know that company and focus on critical factors that are going to come into play post acquisition during the integration period, which by the way is where the vast majority of deals die is in integration because buyers spend 90, 95 % of their time focused on the front end transaction process, whether it’s pricing, negotiations, contracts, etc. and very little time on how things are going to be integrated and to also be respectful of the corporate culture of the acquired organization because that can fracture and cause a deal to fall apart if you again have a very unhappy new workforce. Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really important thing. I’m sure many people in the audience who have been employees at one point in their life and have been in organizations, been acquired can certainly relate to that challenge of merging culture as well. When you are doing these executions, where do you see the execution usually break down and how do you address that? Much of it is, evolves around communication and generally either no communication or poor communication or not frequent enough communication. You almost can’t communicate too much and it also involves with a lot of managers they want to do all the talking and none of the listening. And one of the techniques that we developed that was tremendously successful for us, again, around understanding people, is during our diligence process, we did what we call start, stop, keep. So we would set up appointments with key employees, generally around 15 minutes per meeting, with no other employees or managers there. and we would just simply ask them, all right, what would you like to see the company continue to do? What would you like to see the company start doing? And by the time you got to the third room, which is actually a negative response, what would you like to see the company stop doing? You actually already knew those answers. And it’s amazing how many tremendously productive and insightful ideas come from employees, many of whom have been there for long periods of time, but aren’t high level people. They could be a bookkeeper or a controller or a salesperson. Didn’t really matter what’s the title. A lot of them had very good ideas if we were willing to listen. And oftentimes it was the first time anybody ever asked them anything and then listened to what they had they had to say and then they were really gratified when we would actually take their ideas and implement them in the company. Yeah, you know they felt like they were really heard so it’s far better to listen than to talk but if you’re in a lead role If you do not communicate effectively, rumor mills fill a vacuum very rapidly. And once they’re out there, they’re almost impossible to extinguish. Yeah, I love that framework of start, stop, keep. That might be a lesson that operators can apply even to their business today and have that as something they can ask their employees even outside of a context of &A to improve their business as well. Absolutely. I’ll share a little case study in this regard, which is a really solid proof of concept. Before I moved into investment banking, I was recruited on a management contract to do a very, very complex turnaround, both organizationally and from a technology standpoint. of a $60 million 501c3 charitable business. And when I first took on the assignment, I made some immediate assumptions about what was going to have to change, where I saw inefficiencies or areas that could be exploited for growth, just based on my historical experience level. But thankfully, I went through the start stop keep process. And believe it or not, there were 220 employees in the company, and I met with every one of those employees. individually and I pretty quickly learned that my initial assumptions were not only wrong but if I had executed on the changes I thought I was going to make when I first stepped into the organization it probably would have blown the company up. because what I thought was a waste, the employee population as part of their corporate culture looked at those as essential parts of their business. So I made a complete pivot. We made a lot of changes based on the input I got. But the other interesting thing was the area of the company that I thought was most dysfunctional. That actually wasn’t the area of the company that was most dysfunctional. It was in a telemarketing sales organization. and we had to go through some radical changes at that part of the business, which I would not have figured out for quite some time after I took the job running that company. several of the employees I met with, ironically, one guy from the IT department was the first one that kind of caused the light bulbs to go on for me in that regard. So you never know where that valuable information could come from. That’s a really important insight and great story you shared there. Now, if you are coming into an organization and there may appear to be a lot of things that need to be changed, such as strategy, the brand, systems, and maybe even people, where do you even start and what strategies do you employ to help someone navigate all those changes? Well, again, in a situation where I was placed to do a turnaround, especially once the light bulb came on for me relative to the inaccuracy of some of my early observations and assumptions, I wanted to make sure I took time to really get to know the business better and particularly the key managers. And over time, I was able to make far more accurate assessments and take the actions necessary. I had a very wise board of directors that I reported to who knew that we have a very concerning situation in this business. And they gave me carte blanche to make the changes that we needed to make. And those changes quite often were very difficult. I actually had to change out. think it was eight of the nine top managers in the company in order to begin to create a far more collaborative, communicative, open corporate culture. And there was a lot of spending waste and inefficient analysis of financial information. And we ultimately carved $6 million in costs out of a $50, $60 million company. And those were difficult things to do, but. It’s not, there’s that, what’s that old expression, ready, shoot, aim. You can’t do that. We had to really kind of dig deep in the weeds and understand the business before we could make any of those fairly radical decisions that really had to be made for that company to survive. And when you are doing this analysis and really getting to know the managers and leaders in the business, when it becomes obvious that some of them may be bottlenecks for the business, how do you bring that up without it turning into a defensive conversation? Well, in some cases, even as diplomatic or subtle as you could be in an ingrained organization like we had, like I inherited in this case, the individuals you’re talking with are by nature going to be defensive. because their first interpretation is gonna be that you’re looking for very significant change from the way they’ve been doing things. Some of the senior managers have been there for like 25 years. So, know, change is a scary thing for people and it can be threatening for people. And if you’re going to tell them we’re not gonna do it your way anymore, we’re gonna do it this way. And here’s why. A lot of times you’re just not going to get a good response from that. They may accept it, but they’re not going to be happy about it because it’s not the way they’re used to doing things. And you’ve worked across so many different organizations, had these difficult conversations with leaders and managers of all the different kinds of company sizes. Has there been a pattern you’ve noticed in leaders who actually scale well versus the ones who stay stuck or maintain that defensive position? Yeah, yes, there absolutely is. So if they have no experience in any kind of really aggressive scaling, whether it’s organic, whether it’s a new product development or whether it is through acquisitions, they’ve never been taught how to do these things. And if it’s on the acquisition, it’s almost always what I described earlier, they’re going to go at it. hey I’m right you’re wrong it’s my way or the highway and we have a corporate culture you’re gonna have to figure out how to adapt to our culture and those very often either don’t work out well at all or it doesn’t allow the acquired business to truly perform at peak efficiency and to deliver what you hoped for when you decide to make that acquisition. In my case, with my senior management teams, I always believe in being the dumbest person in the room. I always wanted all of my specialized professionals, whether it was HR, marketing, IT, finance, to be experts in their field. And the key would be always to seek their input. And when I would hire these individuals, one of the last questions I would ask them is, okay, if you don’t agree with me, are you going to be willing to disagree with me openly? And usually you get kind of a startled look and I would say, well, if you just want to agree with me all the time, then you’re not going to be of value to me because I don’t get it right all the time. The goal is to get it right. You’re an expert in your area. I want to see and hear your perspective on this. So I may not always change my decision, but at least I’ll know where you’re coming from. But most of the time I would either adjust the decision to be made. Sometimes I do a full 180 on it based on new information I learned. But if you allow those individuals to do their job, and know that their knowledge is valued, it’s amazing the level of responsibility they will take on and own as part of any process, again, whether it’s assessing concepts for a new product startup or some kind of an &A function. And when you are working with these leaders that you have around you, making sure that you’re not the smartest person in the room, what are some good delegation strategies that you help them with to make sure that they’re able to stay in their top 20 % and delegating the rest to the right people? Yeah, well, I’m a big believer in the concept of servant leadership. So the key with all of these individuals is basically, sometimes you have to give a directive. There’s no way around that. But other than that, if we are trying to achieve a specific goal, then it’s more about asking them what resources they need in order to execute to achieve that goal. And if they see you working in that kind of a management manner, you are far more likely to have those managers function in the same way with their own teams that are reporting to them. And we would often have conversations about who are your successors. And we would oftentimes bring them in on senior management meetings to deliver some kind of presentation or report on results just to give them exposure to that environment. And then it was a great opportunity to recognize them as individuals for the contribution they’re making to the company. Well, as we wrap up here, what’s one piece of advice you would give leaders today that they can start implementing this week to help make their business more of a salable asset? I’ll give you two quick ones. One is spend more time listening than talking. So your employees or team members or managers will feel heard. And two, learn about what motivates those individuals. You know, in the old school military style, it was my way or the highway, you’re going to do this. But in this day and age, with multiple generations of employees in the workforce and very unique individuals, if you do have a diverse workforce, which I’m a big believer in. you need to understand what motivates them. In the media world, I would always say if I motivated by salespeople, like I motivate my artists, I’d have no sales. And if I motivated my artists like I motivate my salespeople, I wouldn’t have a single artist in the company. understanding what works for each individual, you have to be a little bit of a chameleon and adapt to a certain extent to their needs in order to maximize performance and make those employees feel appreciated. Yeah, very valuable insights, Cameron. Thank you so much. If people want to connect with you and start exploring your work, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you? You bet. Yes, so our investment banking firm is called Raincatcher. We’re at raincatcher.com. My company email address is cameron.bishop at raincatcher.com or I’m also easily accessible on LinkedIn. Thank you so much, Cameron. This was a great conversation. 40 years of building, scaling, and getting deals across the finish line. There’s a lot in here that people can take and actually use from this conversation today. I think the through line has definitely been the importance of communication, communication, communication with the people. And I really appreciate you sharing those strategies and experiences that you’ve had so that everyone else can learn from them today. And I want to encourage everyone, if you feel like you’re the bottleneck still, having a full-time ultimate executive assistant can help you handle the execution so you have You bet. more time to communicate with your team members and your leaders and make a real difference in how everyone in the organization shows up. And that’s exactly what we’ve built at Workergenics to help people get those right executive assistants in there so leaders are no longer the bottleneck. Appreciate everyone for tuning into the episode today. Thank you again Cameron for coming on Scale Smart Grow Fast and for everyone listening we’ll see you on the next one. Thank you, Harley.

The post 40 Years of M&A Taught Him One Thing About Founders first appeared on Workergenix.