As Elvis once sang,

“We’re caught in a trap, I can’t walk out, Because I love you so much, baby.”

Sure, he was talking about love, but did he perhaps sum up how you feel about your business today? Do you feel trapped in this business you love and you are just not seeing the progress, the growth or the results that you imagined the business would deliver in your life? You are caught because you are pouring your time and energy into the business, but there is this constant up and down in revenue, activity, customers, employees – and you just feel you are indeed living the Groundhog Day.

The Founder’s Trap

Dr. Ichak Adzizes coined the term “Founder’s Trap” in his well-known and well-researched Corporate Lifecycle Model. Every person or persons that start a business starts a quest that must face the Founder’s Trap. A business is born (birth stage) on the vision, talent, and energy of one or more entrepreneurs. A business goes through the infancy stage where the initial ideas, initial customers, and still the primary energy of the entrepreneurs find initial growth and a taste of success. With that success, the usual progress is that the entrepreneurs start adding employees to meet demand and a beehive of activity erupts in all directions. This stage is called the “Go-Go stage” and the general picture is:

  • Generally, any and every sale is a good sale, and your prospect pipeline is constantly up and down
  • You may be relying to heavily on a few good customers – and stress about finding new ones
  • Everything is a priority – everything is urgent and must get done
  • Feels like that everything you do is a project – general lack of true processes and structure
  • You struggle with any financial forecasting
  • Employees are willing, but a little frustrated and overwhelmed

What’s the root cause?

Difference in growing and scaling your business

Part of the root cause may lie in the fact you may struggle to fully embrace the true differences between growing and scaling your business. Of course you want to grow your business. You must grow your business to find the success you want. Growth is basically about selling more products and/or services to more customers. Growth = Growing Sales.

Scaling your business is about building the “machine” or “system” that fosters, supports, and accelerates that growth. You can fill up your car’s gas tank, but if the engine won’t run, you don’t get anywhere! What are some of the priorities you need to focus on to scale your business?

  • Building marketing and sales processes and structure that repeatedly fills your prospect pipeline (not just you!)
  • Creating, documenting, and communicating effective messaging that engages prospects and leads to sales conversions
  • Leading sales instead of closing all the business yourself (not all but a bigger portion at least)
  • Building processes and structure to get the mundane tasks off your plate
  • Building processes and structure to ensure every day business operations (financial, product/service delivery, project management, etc.) can thrive successfully
  • Creating and communicating a clear vision, direction, and key objectives that your team understands and embraces
  • Aligning all team activities around your objectives (e.g., priorities, performance measurement)
  • Planning your next five hires as how that will contribute to scaling your business

Those are core activities you should prioritize to start scaling your business. Does that look like a list of things you focus on each day? If not, then likely you are caught in the Founder’s Trap and while you experience some growth and success, it’s more like a yo-yo (up and down) and leaves you feeling stressed and unfulfilled as a business owner. Are you ready to do the work to scale your business? Let’s talk about what is getting in your way.