You Can’t Scale Chaos: The Systems Required to Reach $100M with Jeb Blount

Most companies don’t stall before $100M because of strategy — they stall because the founder can’t see the business at $100M, and the team feels that ceiling.

In this episode of The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast, Brad Sugars sits down with Jeb Blount to break down what it really takes to scale: building momentum, moving fast, and replacing “sales heroes” with a repeatable sales system (recruiting, onboarding, ramp time, comp, playbooks, and leadership). They also dig into when growth requires acquisition — and why you can’t scale chaos.

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About Jeb Blount:
Jeb Blount is the Founder and CEO of Sales Gravy, a global sales training and coaching organization. He’s a bestselling author of 17+ books on sales and sales leadership, including Fanatical Prospecting, Sales EQ, Objections, The AI Edge, and The LinkedIn Edge. He’s also a keynote speaker and the host of the Sales Gravy podcast.

About Brad Sugars
Internationally known as one of the most influential entrepreneurs, Brad Sugars is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and the #1 business coach in the world. Over the course of his 30-year career as an entrepreneur, Brad has become the CEO of 9+ companies and is the owner of the multimillion-dollar franchise ActionCOACH®. As a husband and father of five, Brad is equally as passionate about his family as he is about business. That’s why, Brad is a strong advocate for building a business that works without you – so you can spend more time doing what really matters to you. Over the years of starting, scaling and selling many businesses, Brad has earned his fair share of scars. Being an entrepreneur is not an easy road. But if you can learn from those who have gone before you, it becomes a lot easier than going at it alone.

Please click here to learn more about Brad Sugars: https://bradsugars.com/

Build a Business That Gives You More Time, Money & Life:
Get The $100M Playbook: https://go.bradsugars.com/100m-playbook-ebook

Transcript

The $100M Mindset Shift

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The work that you do to get from 10 to 25 can carry you to 100 million, but if you don't believe that you're a 100 million dollar company, you're gonna hit a wall, you're gonna stall, it's gonna drown your momentum, and you're gonna get super frustrated and you'll never make it. With salespeople in particular, sales team, you gotta move fast. By the way, the pace because of things like GPT and all of the AI, everything is moving so much faster. But scale is about momentum.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

So, Jeff, get into 100 million mindset, attitude, what got you there, what gets your clients there?

SPEAKER_00 0:32

So the the biggest problem for people who want to move from where they are now to cross $100 million is being able to see themselves as a $100 million company. And that sounds weird, but I'll go back to when I was in my early 20s and I was working in a big company, big fortune driver company. One of the best bosses I ever worked with said, I because I said, I want to be this, I want to be a vice president of sales. He goes, you need to be able to see in your head and in your heart that you can be the vice president of sales. Like you need to start experiencing before you get there. Yeah, I think that what happens is people say, I want to be a $100 million company, but they do not have the ability at that moment to accept themselves as a $100 million company. So this once you get like past $25 million, you can get to $100 million. It's a lot,

Vision Casting And Leader Belief

SPEAKER_00 1:20

I'd argue it's a lot easier to get to $100 million from $25 million than it is to get to $10 million from $2 million.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Yeah, I think that the professionalization that has to happen from $10 to $55 will carry you to $100, as long as you got market size, market presence, that's sort of like.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

But the problem is that if I can't look at my company in the boardroom at the strategic level and see it as a $100 million company, as the leader, right? As the CEO, the owner, the founder, what have you, and then draw that picture for everyone else, they don't know how to get there.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Um, and so the the biggest issue is having someone, the owner who says, leader who says, we're gonna get there. That's the mountain we're gonna climb. Um, because once you can get people emotionally connected to that future state, the next step is to actually say step one, step two, step three, step four. Yeah. Sometimes you need a coach to get you there, and a lot of times you do. You need outside business people as a consultant. That's when we'll often get caught pulled into a company when they're saying, okay, we've we know the vision, we need to get all the pieces in place. And so in our world, like as consultants to help people get there, we're more of an extra set of hands. So we're we we we don't have a dog in the hunt, so we don't get emotionally connected to the current stake and you hold them back, right? When people say, Well, we've always done that way. We're saying, like, you want to get to $100 million, this is what you have to do. But um, but you need some help to get there. So, but I think that the biggest thing is my this is my opinion, but I think you have to be able to say, I want to be a hundred million dollar company. It's so different than clients that I work with now that are $500 million companies say we're gonna be a billion-dollar company. And that is a really hard leap. Like

Consultants As Unbiased Catalysts

SPEAKER_00 3:00

going from a half billion dollar company to a billion-dollar company, it's it's it's almost in that in the the lead between you know a million and ten million, you're the you have to like almost remake the entire company. Yeah. The hundred million, like you said, the work that you do to get from 10 to 25 can carry you to 100 million. But if you don't believe that you're a hundred million dollar company, like you start acting like a hundred million dollar company, you you're you're gonna you're gonna hit a wall, you're gonna stall, it's gonna drown your momentum, and you're gonna get super frustrated, and um you'll never make it.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

I remember three years ago I said to the team, all right, hundreds of millions isn't good enough for us, we're gonna go for three billion. And they all looked at me like I was nuts. And now, 18 months later, the research is done, the planning's done, the IT systems are being rebuilt, the brand's rebuilt, all that sort of stuff. Now they're sitting there going, I think we can do this. It's like, you know, I had to believe it first, though, as you said. If you as the owner or CEO don't call the shot, you know, no one's gonna try and wrap with it.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

It truly is. It's Babe Ruth sitting at the plate, pointing in the stands, and says, that's where the home run's gonna go. Now, what you did though is you said, Okay, we're gonna be a $3 billion company, and you recognize that who you are today will not get you to $3 billion. So you have to say, I got to rebuild everything. Oh, yeah. And in my own business, that's what 2026 is gonna be about. We are I'm I'm stopping for a minute, and we are gonna spend 2026 re-engineering the entire organization so that we can make the next leap forward. Otherwise, we won't get there.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Yeah. I uh I told Jeffrey Gittimer I was gonna do it, and he turns to me and he says, you know, you're no longer in that book Good to Great, you're now in the book Shit to Okay. And it was like typical Jeffrey trying to boil it down to the basics, but you know, technically, everything that's great for a million will will stop you getting to ten. Everything that's great for ten will stop you getting to a hundred. And everything that's great for a hundred will stop you getting to a bill. Yes. You know, and and I think that yeah, that psychology though that when someone when you're coaching someone and they're not willing to see it yet, any particular things that help get them to see that they can go to that level?

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Yeah, I I think I don't I'm I I guess let me try to answer this the right way because I'm I'm trying to think the right way of saying this.

Leaping To $1B Versus $100M

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Just be one I cannot create that belief for someone. Like they have to be able to do that. So as a consultant, if someone says, Hey, we want to get to a hundred million dollars and we're working with them, and their actions aren't congruent with their words. Got it. In those situations, I can ask the question you say you want to be here, you're doing these things, is that what you really want? Yeah. Because your actions aren't demonstrating that. So I can create awareness that what they're actually doing isn't gonna get them where they're gonna go. But there is nothing that I can do to get, and and it's not my job as a consultant to get attached to someone else's future. In fact, that's a really bad thing for me to do. But if they don't actually believe it and I can see it, I can say, look, I think you can be a hundred million dollar company, I think you can be a billion-dollar company. But if they don't go, you're right, I think that's what we should do. I'm I'm not gonna be able to help them get there.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

I remember as a young man having to pay market research firms to sort of validate your thinking today, you know, agent mode or deep research mode on GPT, and they can start to see it. I had one client and they are a $40 million business in one location. I said, just do the research. How many cities in America are the same as the city you're in right now, doing 40 million? And uh it took them a month or so to do it. They used GPT, used other things, and they came back and said, Brad, there's 83 cities in America, the same size, structure. You know, there are the 600,000 people town. And I said, So technically you could be a 3.0 billion dollar company if that's what you chose. Um, and it and it takes a bit, though. I think that that you can build, and and tell me your thoughts on this. I see people building a one or a ten million dollar company. You don't really need much market research to do that. To go to a hundred or a bill, you need to go and you know do an analysis of how much gold is under the ground type thing.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

Yeah, I think um if what then that would be a great example of someone says, I want to get to a billion

Calling The Shot And Rebuilding

SPEAKER_00 7:25

dollars, and we want you to help us get there. And I'm looking at it going, okay, well, where's it gonna come from? Yeah. Um, that I think is important. I've got a a a customer that I work with out in West Texas, and we're looking at their marketplace and we know where they want to go, but there is a limit to where they're gonna grow there. So their ability to scale is gonna come from buying other businesses or moving into their markets or plugging in adjacent businesses in, because there's that they could if they want to get to a billion dollars, they're not.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

Yeah, dude, there's only a billion total gross value in your market, so I know we ain't getting there in this. You get you know, you got four competitors, you gotta you're not getting 100 points of the must.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

So you can't be delusional and successful at the same time. So you need to wipe that away. So, but but I go back to if I said this is what I want to get, I want to be a hundred million dollar company, then I can work backward from that vision to get there. But if I don't believe that I can do that in the first place, I'll never take the steps to work backward. I'll just keep keeping the plate spinning in the air that I'm already keeping going.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

I was trying to work with someone the other day, and uh I was trying to show him that look, you can do organic growth all you want. We gotta buy some companies. He's like, but Brad, I can do the marketing. I said, Yeah, and the marketing takes how long? And he showed me, and I said, So it's a two-year growth plan. Acquisition, we find it, we buy it, we've got the 10,000 customers in that marketplace on day one. Why do we want to go organic? Strategy for going big. I think that, and I'd love to see how your thoughts are. I think that when we try and get people to understand there's a different strategy to go 100 and Bill, what how do you get people through that? Or what is your thoughts? Do you ask them a couple of questions? Where do you go with that?

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Well, I think exactly what you said. Look, you're you we're gonna do some research on this. We could do this organically if we set up businesses in these different cities, or could we find do the same research

Researching Total Addressable Market

SPEAKER_00 9:30

and find businesses that are like ours that are in those cities that we could take a look at that we either buy and plug in, or maybe they're broken in some way, and we've got a better system that can fix them. In those cases, when I'm working with clients and I'm working with one right now that wants to grow through acquisition, the first thing we have to do is fix the inside of that business with a system that they can, when they when they buy something like the board from Star Trek, they can immediately assimilate it. That's a good analogy. Because the worst situations I've ever seen, and I've and I actually have been involved in companies who did this, is you go buy this business and then it floats out there because you don't have systems to plug it in, and they either destroy your culture or you destroy their culture, but it takes forever and all the all of the growth potential just dissipates because you didn't have a good plan.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

So I think that what just on that, why do companies not why do they still call things a merger rather than a takeover? You you can't merge, you have to take them over.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Take them over. It is it is you're now in our system, here's how we run our system, and we're plugging into your system because we're better than you. Yeah. And if I'm that's a different than a strategic, I could I could do a strategic acquisition because they have some knowledge base or a group of employees or something that I'll vote a guy, a different sort of strategic buy 100%, but if it's the same industry. If I'm buying to grow, it is it is we come in, here's the here's the book. This is how we run the business, and here are the choices. You can leave or you can do it our way.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Well, let's go back to that thing on systems, because you can't scale chaos. So um obviously you're the master of sales. What's the distinction between how do you how do you help someone realize they don't have a sales system, they just got salespeople?

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Oh well, that's pretty much most businesses.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

Yeah, yeah, it's like why do you have a salesperson? That's how. But yeah, what then okay, give us the distinction between salespeople and a sales system?

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Well, let's let's maybe let's be let's be kinder than that. Everybody has some sales system. Yeah, whether the sales system is complete chaos or it's something that they've dialed in. Um the question really is do they have a system that allows them to maximize the ROI on every sales head? In other words, that sales head is producing at a level that is higher than what I've got now, and the ability to add more sales heads in as I grow without losing that ROI. Right. So I'm not going to cannibalize the other salespeople. So so when we talk about sales system, we're talking about a lot of pieces, right? Your recruiting system is part of your sales system, your onboarding system is part of your sales system, how you go to market, like what type of a cell are you in, is part of the sell

Organic Growth Versus Acquisition

SPEAKER_00 12:20

system. And the the problem that we have is in some cases, especially with founder-led companies that are scaling up, is that the founder is the Savat that has the ability to close anything, and the founder has a system, but he can't explain it to anybody else because no one else can figure it out. And it usually sounds like this hey, this is really easy, just go do it. That's how they that's a system.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Well, I remember as a young man, uh I there was a point in time where I realized I didn't have a sales system, I had a sales idiot. Me. Yeah. You know, I did them all, and it it took me several months to start documenting what I did, why I did it, how I did it, all of that sort of stuff, and building that. You said something interesting there, though, that I I hadn't heard it put that way before. They're not gonna reduce other people by adding salespeople.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Um, tell me more about that. Well, let's like an example. So um one of my clients, sort of 12 years ago, brought us in because they wanted to scale up. They wanted more. And their average salesperson was selling about $300,000 a year. Okay. Today, their average salesperson sells about $450,000 a month. Think about the difference there. Okay. The the difference was that the ability to sell $450,000 a month was already there. The market would carry it. They just didn't have a system to get there. And that was little things, right? Okay, so it was recruiting. So my recruiting the right people, their training program was non-existent. So you bring people in, plug them in, sit them next to someone else. So it's taking you a really long time to ramp that person. Uh, you're you don't have a process for um knowing whether the person is good or not in a very short period of time. They didn't have a good sales compensation program, so they were incentivizing the wrong things. Their salespeople really didn't have a good process of taking an inbound call because it's an inbound sales team, vetting the customer, doing qualification, moving them through the process, closing the deal in the first shot, or following up going down the road. And we can go from there. They did have a good leadership team, and they had leaders who were selling and were leading, which is a really bad thing. Uh, so it took a while. I mean, it took a couple of three years of work to get all those pieces in place because there was no way you're gonna boil the ocean all at one time. And by the way, making that shift, we couldn't we couldn't lose the sales that we have while we were getting to the new model. So these days, like if you're if you're selling $300,000 a month, they think that you're terrible, like you're art. You know, they'll you're fire. And uh, and they've got some some people in the team are selling, you know, $500,000, $600,000. So that's

Post‑Acquisition Integration Systems

SPEAKER_00 15:00

one set of that, one, one type of system. I'm another client. When I met them, they were doing about $800 million a year in sales. Their biggest problem in their system, good company, great company, great product, was it was taking 18 months to ramp a new rep. Damn. Yeah. Long time. Now, um, we looked at them and said, you can do this in 90 days. And they looked at us and said, There's no way you've lost your mind. And so we started working with them and we run like a six sigma process on on their ramp time, take out all the variables, and a lot of it was just these embedded, you have to do this here, here, and here. My thought was all we need to do is teach them how to sell as fast as possible, and then we can start filling in the other other pieces. What does it make a difference if I teach them something on day two, right? Yeah, that they can't use until six months from now. And by the time they get to six months from now, they won't remember it anymore. So, what we did was create a system for bringing a new person on and get that person selling faster. Now, for a business that wants to move to $100 million, this is important because when you ramp sales people faster, not only do you create revenue at the top line, but you also draw profit to the bottom line because you're not wasting time with people and you start moving people way fast out of your system that are making it. So firing people is a system. So when you start thinking about the like this whole process, there's all of these bolt ones to system with the sales team. But the biggest thing you got to think about, like as a founder, is can the sales organization run if I didn't show up to work for a year? Yeah. Because you've got good leaders who have a set of SOPs, you have playbooks for your salespeople, and you've got playbooks for everything that you do. You've got an HR team that is completely dialed in, and then you can plug people into your team and you can scale to the market's ability to let you scale without taking sales away from other people. So that that system has to tie directly into marketing. Yeah. Because your marketing team at some level has to be able to create leads. You may not be able to create leads that'll cover everything, but if you're scaling up, it suddenly your leads didn't keep up with your salespeople. Hard to bring on new people, drop them in that slot

You Can’t Scale Chaos

SPEAKER_00 17:20

if you can't feed them a little bit. So um, so as you start thinking about scaling your, you're not gonna get $100 million without a sales team unless you're in some sort of a retail program where you're just doing e-commerce. So, but you could you can't think, oh, we have a sales process. You've got to think, how have we got this entire team organized? And by the way, what's the mechanism that allows us to iterate really quickly as market conditions change on things like compensation and how we even do like the the you know the span of control with your leaders?

SPEAKER_01 17:55

Does that make sense? It makes a lot of sense, but you touched on something that I think very few people hit on with scale, and that is speed. Because people don't realize scale requires speed. Take take me more into that comment.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

Yeah, so the thing about sales organizations is they have to move fast. And by the way, the pace, because of things like GPT and and it's all of the AI, everything is is moving so much faster. But but scale is about momentum. Like as soon as you start stalling out, think about let's go back to just a mindset piece. You still as soon as you start stalling out, you get frustrated, your people stop believing that they can get there, and uh and the whole thing starts to collapse. Yeah. And the worst thing you can do when you're trying to scale is stall. Now you will stall, everybody will, everything stalls, but I want to know when it's gonna stall. So I want to predict the stall so that as the leadership team, this it's stalling here, the people who run the company, we're already here thinking about the the next hundred million dollars guy, and we're in the boardroom figuring out what the strategies

Salespeople Versus A Sales System

SPEAKER_00 19:00

is gonna be there. But with salespeople in particular, sales teams, you gotta move fast. And moving fast means with new salespeople, I need to get them ramp fast. And if they're not gonna ramp fast, I need to get them out fast. And then when, especially when you're when you know you can capture market share because your system's working, the marketing's working, the branding's working, everybody's energized, your competitors are caught flat footed. You've got to be able to plug new salespeople in as fast as possible and have them selling as fast as possible. So when the sun is shining, you're making A.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Uh, you said something in the middle of one of those comments there where you talked about the owner being a savant.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 19:41

And uh I I hate to put it bluntly to owners, but there are a lot of owners who let's just say they stop their own company growing, they they become the limiting factor. Uh I've just agreed with my team to hire a CEO and step into the chairman role because it's like I need to hire a professional CEO. Yeah. Um, where do you see that happening most, or how do you see that? And how do you see owners actually getting to the point of yes, I'm I'm going to admit and I'm gonna hire or grow?

SPEAKER_00 20:14

It is so hard. Like, um I know. Trust me. Because because we work with a lot of family-owned companies, we run into this a good bit. And sometimes people can tell this owner that has built this massive business. I mean, you're a hundred million dollar business, that is a massive business. You started someplace, blood, sweat, and teared this thing all the way to 100 million, however, they got there, and then you got to go sit in their office and go, You're you're holding your company back. And and I know those folks, and hopefully my clients are watching this. I know who you are. Um, they know who they are. And and you know, and the problem is that you know, if I'm the consultant telling them to do that, I mean, they may hear me, but that's probably the last day I'm gonna be their consultants. Um so I think that I think that the what we all need is we need people around us who are telling us the truth that we'll listen to. Um, I know that you know we've got, I mean, we we we're I'm a business that runs the same stuff. Um, and I've probably got um about three to four more years where I'm gonna be able to be the person that's leading our company. But at some point, and I'm

Maximizing ROI Per Sales Head

SPEAKER_00 21:30

already thinking, you know, I've gonna I'm gonna have to hand the reins over to someone who full time can think about where we're gonna go um and think about bigger things than I can think about because you know I'm stuck in yeah, I've built this thing from the ground up. I was the guy that was, you know, sitting in my office all by myself, one person making cold calls, calling everybody I knew. So, you know, do you need some sales training? Yeah, we weren't even a million dollar you dumped me when I was there. Yes. So I think um I think that the It it's it's the awareness factor. Now, um sometimes it happens because the owner decides to sell to someone else, right? And then they're still in the business. Well, you you're gonna make an exit, right?

SPEAKER_01 22:12

Yeah, every one of us is gonna make an exit. We choose to either pine box it, shut it down, or go the two positive routes of hand it over to someone that'll run it for us, or sell it on to someone. And I I think you're right, the selling it to someone makes us understand that if it can't run without me, I can't sell it for decent money.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

That's exactly right. So that so sometimes you get that wake-up call. The problem is that founders are crazy.

unknown 22:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:40

Nah. I mean, yeah, they're there. I mean, they're just a lot of them are just nutjobs. Yeah. And uh, and I'm a founder. That's what makes us successful in those cases. I know, but it's the thing that when you start thinking, I want to get to $100 million, $200 million, $300 million. Okay. Let's say that you're gonna grow your business that way. You're not you're not selling it off to a PE. You're not gonna be a platform company, you're gonna plug other people in, use other people's money, you're gonna actually build your business to that level. Yeah. Uh it does take a certain level of crazy to get there. The problem is, and you said the word chaos, the problem is that crazy people have a tendency to create chaos because kicking over ant piles is how they they grew the business in the first place. Um, if you don't have the ability to dial that back, like to like to to change that, um, then your your company's gonna suffer. Um, and my um my litmus test for crazy um is is this. So we work with a lot of private private equity companies that come in to help us like solve sales problems. And when the the founder of the company who is still working there uh hops on the first call and they're on their phone walking down the street, or they're in the back of a car, or they're on the beach, or they're someplace else on the phone, that's my litmus test for OMG. This is gonna be a struggle. Yeah. Um, because that's how they've always done things, like just completely on the fly. Um, and it's always like it's always the same outcome. And then when you when you get the one that they're on, they're professional, they got their team around them, and they're like, okay, we're ready to figure this out, it's a little bit different outcome for those individuals. And I know that's a weird general generalization, but if you're that person who says, I can be this different than everyone else, um, that's who I am, that's what I'm gonna be. And you wanna you want to scale that big, um, you're you're gonna struggle getting there because you at some point we start talking about

Case Study: 18‑Month To 90‑Day Ramp

SPEAKER_00 24:40

systems and processes, there has to be some conformity to that.

SPEAKER_01 24:45

Yeah, I I look at, and one of the best examples of this in my mind is the Microsoft example of you know, Bill Gates had that visionary thing, tried to get other managers until they bought in a professional CEO as such and the dough. Like you had to bring in a professional CEO to do that. And I think it sometimes is hard. I like to teach founders that one day you get to be promoted to chair. And chair means you get once a month to come in and see it, and once a month on a board meeting, and once at that. I I think by giving them the word promotion, I can sometimes convince them to that thing. Um, flip it over just one sec. Top two or three things that stop a company scaling to ten hundred plus.

SPEAKER_00 25:32

Um, you do not understand your finances. So you can't scale if you're not making money. Yeah. Unless you're using someone else's money to get there. And that's a completely different ammonia. You got some VC that's throwing a bunch of money at you and just says burn it. That's fine. I those days feel like they they've been over for a while. But I think I would say the number one thing is you want to scale up, and then but you don't have a really good understanding of your PL, and you wake up one day and you're dealing with negative cash flow, it is gonna put the brakes on very, very quickly. Number two is the inability to pick a lane and then iterate inside that lane. And what I mean by that is okay, your company, you want to scale up. And let me give you an example from a sales standpoint. You have a marketing organization that's spending a lot of money to generate leads, but in order to scale, there's no way you're gonna be able to pour that much money in the lead generation without your salespeople doing some of the heavy lifting on their own. So you realize that you say, okay, well, we're gonna have to start doing some outbound prospecting, cool calling, very, very hard. Nobody likes it. And so you put in an outbound team and you put in the worst salespeople on that team because you're like, hey, I want to take my good closers and put them on an outbound team, and you put them on the outbound team and they crash and burn.

SPEAKER_01 26:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

And then you feel burned, and so you go, well, we're not gonna do that again. And so instead of saying we know if that's the right place to go, because that's the only possibility for getting the the amount of opportunities in our pipeline that we need. So let's try it again, but let's do it differently this time. You abandon it, go away because you're you're hurt, or as we sit down south, your butt hurt over the path

Speed, AI, And Momentum

SPEAKER_00 27:10

didn't work, right? And and then and then eight months later, you go, hey, we really need to do this because we're not gonna be able to scale if we get there. And then you do it again and you do it badly again because eight months is a long time, and you already forgot why you screwed up the first time. That's that's the second thing, the the failure to iterate. And the third thing, and this is crucial, is that even if your founder is an absolute nut job savant, okay? And and I'm I'm a nut job savant, like I've I've got the same problems everybody else has. Um, I'm that person, so it's it's so much easier to look at the spec in someone else's eye, trust me. So um, you don't get professional leaders on your team that can at least fill in the cracks that you create. So you got to start there. And I would say that you know, our company's scale really began when we bit the bullet, really worked at it, and brought in good leaders. Um, and uh that that's made all the difference. And then building and investing in those leaders, and then once you get a good group of leaders in, it's really easy to plug new leaders in because you got a good group of people who understand how the the game is played, and it begins to take the pressure off the savant to always be the smartest person in the room, always have all the right ideas. And my bonus fourth is if you are the savant and you have all those really good people and they're coming up with ideas, even though they're coming with ideas that are not your ideas and they don't feel like your ideas, and and you feel sometimes um offended because other people are thinking for you and you didn't think about it, or you don't think it's gonna work, the only way that you're gonna get your people to believe in your vision and scale up is that you have to let them have those ideas. You

Founder As Bottleneck And Succession

SPEAKER_00 29:00

have to let it go, and you've got to give them some opportunities to fail without breaking the business, but to fail, and you will be so surprised that you're gonna wake up one day and there are things happening in your company you don't know anything about, and they're good.

SPEAKER_01 29:14

Yeah. And that's how you make a hundred million. Thanks, Jeb Blunt. Thanks for joining me on the $100 million podcast. If you've got value from today's episode, make sure you've subscribed and share this with all of your friends. Never miss a strategy that could change your business and your life. And remember, the fastest way to scale is to learn from those who've done it. That's what this show is all about. See you on the next episode.