If you don't define enough, your vision will spend everything you have. Four questions to ask before the next round of growth, from Benny Fisher.
It started at 250 dollars a month and grew to 30,000. Losing all of it in one month was the release that let me build what I was actually called to build.
The snow is not the problem. The shaking is. Why thirty minutes of silence a day is how founders find the vision that was already sitting there.
If you don't define enough, your vision will spend everything you have. Four questions to ask before the next round of growth, from Benny Fisher.
It started at 250 dollars a month and grew to 30,000. Losing all of it in one month was the release that let me build what I was actually called to build.
The snow is not the problem. The shaking is. Why thirty minutes of silence a day is how founders find the vision that was already sitting there.
Most founders only check cash when panic hits. Here's the weekly cash review I give home service owners: same day, same time, 13 weeks ahead.
March 2021, a Texas ranch, and six people from my leadership team. You cannot reheat a room. The conference is not the trip. The van is the trip.
You can delegate the P&L, the hiring, the whole calendar. The care comes back every time, and it moves up to you. The founder's real job.
The ten disciplines from Gino Wickman and Rob Dube, handed to a friend on a back porch in July. Where I argue with the order, and the one discipline a man can hide inside.
You never know what's going to happen at the intersection of one point in time and a few people willing to tell the truth.
I walked into a leadership meeting with a client's team about a year into working with them. Twelve people around the table. Everyone had a status update. Everyone gave their status update. An hour later, we had a shared understanding of what had already happened and nothing had been decided. That is not a meeting. That is a group status email that required everyone to show up in person. WHAT A REAL LEADERSHIP MEETING DOES There is a version of the weekly leadership meeting that most teams never experience. One where the issues that have been bouncing around in people's heads all week get named out loud, get owned by the right person, and get resolved before they become next week's bigger problem. That version requires three things that most teams skip. First , the issues have to be named honestly, not diplomatically. Diplomatic issue identification produces incomplete lists. What you are actually worried about has to be said in the room, not saved for the parking lot conversation after. Second , they have to be solved at the right level. Most of the time the founder is not the right person. A mature team asks who is actually closest to this problem, and puts the solve there. Third , the priorities have to stay honest. Most leadership teams do not need more ambition. They need fewer things on the list, held with more discipline. When every item is labeled important, people quietly stop believing anything actually is. WHAT CHANGED WHEN THEY CHANGED THE MEETING We rebuilt the format with that client. Same people, same time slot, different structure. A short pulse on the numbers, a review of what moved and what stalled on the real priorities, then time to identify and solve the actual issues, not report on them. Three things happened in the first month. The founder stopped carrying half the company's unresolved issues home over the weekend. The team started solving things without waiting to be told. And the leadership conversations shifted from status reporting to real decision-making. The meeting did not fix the business. It created the conditions for the team to fix the business themselves. THE QUESTION TO BRING TO YOUR NEXT MEETING Before your next leadership meeting, write down the three things you are most worried about in the business right now. Not the agenda items. The real things. Then ask: do these get named and solved in our weekly meeting, or do they stay in my head until they become a crisis? If the answer is your head, the meeting needs to change. A business that still depends on the founder's nervous system to hold its unresolved issues has not yet built a real leadership team. It has built a group that reports to a person. What is sitting in your head right now that belongs in a room with your team? Prepared by Benny Fisher | Visionary Navigator | bennyfisher.com
Do the exercise. Not in your head. On paper, this week. Pick the age. Write the five. Write the obituary your kid reads. Then extend it, and write what you would do with the extra time.