From Entrepreneurial Grit to Visionary Giant with Scott Ritzheimer

Join us on the Catalytic Leadership Podcast with Dr. William Attaway as we sit down with Scott Ritzheimer, a seasoned entrepreneur who has co-founded nearly 20,000 businesses and nonprofits. With over 10 years of experience leading a multi-million dollar business through exceptional growth phases, Scott now helps founders and CEOs identify and implement essential strategies for success.

Scott shares his journey and insights, including the creation of the Founders Evolution, a roadmap outlining the seven stages every founder must navigate. Discover how Scott's own experiences, along with those of successful founders, have shaped his approach to leadership and growth.

If you're a visionary entrepreneur seeking clarity and direction to achieve predictable success, this episode is for you. Listen now to gain valuable insights and strategies to accelerate your business growth.


Grab a free copy of Scott's book, The Founder's Evolution:
Sign up at www.scalearchitects.com/founders to get your free copy of The Founder’s Evolution and discover how to take your leadership skills and abilities to the next level!

Transcript

Intro: 0:02

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host author and leadership and executive coach, dr William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway: 0:20

I'm so excited today to have Scott Rittheimer on the podcast. Scott has helped start nearly 20,000 new businesses and nonprofits and, with his business partner, has started and led their multi-million dollar business through an exceptional and extended growth phase over 10 years of double digit growth all before he turned 35. He founded Scale Architects to help founders and CEOs to identify and implement the one essential strategy they need right now to get them on the fast track to predictable success. Scott has used what he's learned from his own journey and those of the incredibly successful founders he worked with to create a map of the seven stages in the journey every founder must face, called the Founders Evolution. It gives founders the language, understanding and clarity to finally understand where they are, choose where they want to go and identify their essential strategy for success right now. Scott, I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for being on the show.

Scott Ritzheimer: 1:28

Hey, I am so thrilled to be here. I always tell folks a podcast completely changed the trajectory of my personal and business life, and so I get a little goosebumps every time I get an opportunity to jump on a show and share.

Dr. William Attaway: 1:41

Well, I have been looking forward to this, and I'm going to have to hear about how a podcast did that at some point. But before we do, I'd love for you to share a little bit of your story with our listeners, particularly around your journey and your development as a leader?

Scott Ritzheimer: 1:56

Yeah, absolutely. So. Those are one and the same story, so we can kind of weave both of those answers together here all of a sudden so I was a bit of an accidental entrepreneur ended up co-founding a business at the age of 21, without a clue what I was doing or actually even realized I was co-founding a business. It just literally just kind of happened. And that's a long story, but the short version is I got a part-time job working in the mail room for a company for a friend of mine. He sold it a few months later. 18 months after that, it was systematically but unintentionally destroyed. So he got it back, and in the process of getting it back in the U-Haul, on the way to go pick up the equipment and everything for the company, he called me and said Scott, you've been working there, I'm getting it back. Will you come and take over with me and let's build this thing together? So this is September 2008,. Not a great time to start a business, but we made it work. And so it was there that I really had the opportunity to work with so many thousands of different founders, as they were launching both businesses and nonprofits Fascinating opportunity, especially early in my career and while I was there, we're kind of leading this thing and it was like being strapped to a rocket ship man and it didn't feel like it at the time. As a founder, you're always wanting to like everything can go faster, but looking back at it now, like no idea what I was doing.

Scott Ritzheimer: 3:22

Funny example of this I was scheduling our first executive offsite and we decided we're going to go down to the Panhandle of Florida, which was an easy drive for us from Atlanta, georgia, and I had to rent a route for us to stay in. And so we got a condo and I went to sign it and they wouldn't let me sign it because I wasn't 25 years old, right, and just like. What's you know like, and so I was like. You know this is bad news because I'm the most responsible of all of us here, so, but anyway, it's just funny stuff like that and just challenging times, like it's easy to jump in and say it was you know, it was wonderful, we were so successful and you got the highlight reel in the intro there the reality of all. There are a lot of painful lessons in that process. I mean nearly killed me. My blood pressure was 150 when I was 27 years old and and just, it was just tough, you know.

Scott Ritzheimer: 4:16

So, from the outside everything looks good. From the inside, I feel like we're falling apart, right, I feel like I'm falling apart. I'm mid, like mid twenties, no idea what I'm doing. First executive team meeting I was in, I let you know. It's just I had no idea what I was doing. And so this is where the podcast comes in.

Scott Ritzheimer: 4:34

We had had a lot of growth and then by about year eight, nine, 10, we were still growing from a revenue perspective, but our bottom line, as a percentage especially, started shrinking each year. So it was, you know, in the high double digits down to the kind of lower double digit. We got down into single digits. And it wasn't for not trying to change things, right, like we tried, and we were reading all the books and it was like you name it. We tried it, yeah, and there was good stuff in there, right, we learned a lot of lessons, a lot of leadership principles, but those principles didn't move the needle. You know everything that we tried, you know it was, it just wasn't working.

Scott Ritzheimer: 5:14

And so I was on a way to a doctor's appointment actually for that 150 systolic blood pressure, and I'm listening to a podcast on the way and this guy with a funny Irish accent gets on and starts talking about the most interesting topic in the world, ready, and he's like I'm going to be on the life cycle stages, right, and it must have been his accent that kept me long enough, you know, because normally I wouldn't have the time for it. But you know, the Irish accent helped and and he got me in the first couple of minutes and by probably minute 14, 15, I was like this guy has a camera in my office, like what in the world is going on? It was before the zoom days, so I don't even know how that was possible. I guess you could make that argument now with like Facebook or something. But yeah, he's just reading my mail and it was the very first time as an entrepreneur that I actually felt like I was on a map.

Scott Ritzheimer: 6:03

You know, I would have said before that, like we had a map, but it was behind us and every day we're walking out into the unknown, and so I got a copy of his book it's this one here behind me. It's called Predictable Success and it showed us where we were, why we were having the problems that we're having, shows what stage we're in as an organization and, critically, it shows us what we needed to do to get out Implemented. Those the short story here is implemented, those the steps that he has in the book and we tripled our bottom line in a year Wow, and just totally transformed the trajectory of my business and I realized I love this stuff. Few years later I actually transitioned my leadership team to a new set of leaders, sold my stake in the company and now implement Predictable Success full time. So it literally changed the trajectory of both my life and my business. And it all started with a podcast. Here I don't have the Irish accent so I can't quite recreate this for your audience, but we can pretend, maybe for a moment.

Dr. William Attaway: 7:07

You know, it's so funny how often I find that a great leader can describe with such clarity, like you just did, a catalytic moment, a moment that just completely changed everything. It changed the trajectory, the course, the direction of their life, their leadership, thank you, and it sounds like that's what McHugh's book did for you. Predictable success is one of my favorite books. I love that. I love it, and you've commented before that You'll see articles from less up here in the things that I send out, because I'll refer back to that and say, hey, wow, this has made a difference. You should check this out. I had a similar experience hearing him speak and thought I've never heard this. Why have I never heard this? Everybody needs to hear this. I feel like this needs to happen.

Scott Ritzheimer: 7:57

I feel like less is the morphias of the business world or organizational world. It's just kind of like, once you see things, once you understand that there are life cycle stages, that every organization goes through some of those things, you can't unsee it. You're talking with someone, they're just beat up and you're like man, I feel so bad for you. You're in whitewater.

Scott Ritzheimer: 8:20

You're in the whitewater, or it's like you get a founder and he's just kind of phoning it in and you can just see the sparks gone from his eyes and his ears. There's not room for vision anymore. It's like, hey, buddy, this is hard, but it's not out of nowhere, you're in treadmill, and so what his work does and a big part of what I'm doing now for founders on a personal level is if you want to know where you're going, you got to know where you are, because if you don't know where you are, how are you going to know how to get there? Yes, kind of funny story about this. I was probably six, seven, eight years old, forgive me. I think you and I are old enough to remember what malls are. Do you remember?

Dr. William Attaway: 9:03

Oh yeah, back in the day, that's right.

Scott Ritzheimer: 9:06

So we used to shop inside, not inside your house, inside of a giant store, right, Actually?

Scott Ritzheimer: 9:11

there's a drive there, so anyway, we're at a mall or at the local mall, and my mom wants to go to JC Penney, which for any six, seven, eight-year-old is like prison, right yes. And so what else can I do? There's a foot locker nearby, so I'm like, let me go to foot locker. And she doesn't want to go to foot locker, she wants to go to JC Penney. We strike this grand bargain I can go to foot locker and then I have to go find her at JC Penney and all is well in the world, right, Win-win. I go into foot locker, get lost and probably the Air Jordans or something at the time, and I didn't have any money, so I just looked at them, but it was fun, right. I come out of there and it hits me like I have no idea where JC Penney is Actually, I have no idea where I am right. And this moment of dread for the little six, seven-year-old version of me. And do you remember those big triangle pylons they used to have by every other entrance? It wasn't every entrance.

Dr. William Attaway: 10:01

Oh yeah, you know exactly where.

Scott Ritzheimer: 10:03

I'm going with this right. So on the big pylon, the whole side of one of these things is what? It's a map right. And what did the little sticker on the map say? Every single one of them had this sticker on it. You are here. It's exactly it. You are here. And I remember the relief that I felt. Right Again, little six, seven-year-old Scott. I was Scottie Little six, seven-year-old Scottie feels, and I knew where I was. And so once I knew where I was, I could start looking out further and further from the map. And then I found JC Penney and I knew exactly how to get there. No problem at all. To succeed in business, to succeed in life, we've got to have a map right and we have to know where we are, to know where we can get to.

Dr. William Attaway: 10:48

So good, so good. I read earlier that you have led the Founders Evolution movement, this idea of communicating this to founders. What exactly is the Founders Evolution, and why does it matter so much that founders grab onto this?

Scott Ritzheimer: 11:06

Yeah, something I'm so passionate about. So again I had this kind of weird opportunity to work with a lot, a lot of founders. And one thing that I found again business nonprofits, founders in both those spaces are cut from the same cloth. They're visionaries with big ideas and they're crazy enough to go after them. And one of the challenges with this kind of pioneering mindset is that we can get out there and feel like we're completely alone. We can get out there and feel like we're the only one who's ever done what we've done. Right, that whole experience that I had I could tell you what's behind me. I got no idea what's in front of me and if we're not careful we can buy the lie that no one knows what's in front of us. And so what Les did for us organizationally in his book Predictable Success was give us that map of what growth looks like for us as an organization. And as I've worked with him, he's a close friend and mentor and now colleague of mine.

Scott Ritzheimer: 12:01

One of the things as I started helping organizations get to Predictable Success, I realized there's this parallel journey happening for founders. When you look at founders who are very, very successful, it doesn't happen by chance and while it may look like, there's a whole bunch of roots. I went back and looked over all these thousands of organizations and founders that have helped and I realized there's just one story that's playing out again and again and again, and there are different variables, there's different contexts, but it's the same pattern that repeats itself and where you see a successful founder, if you look in the rearview mirror, that they followed this pattern. Now, they may not have known about it ahead of time In fact, most of us don't but they figured it out along the way.

Scott Ritzheimer: 12:45

Where folks fall off or fall short, where their growth individually or corporately stalls out, where their organization fails outright, it almost always happens because they didn't recognize where they were in the pattern. And so what I began to discover is that there are seven different stages that we go through as founders, and for those in your audience who are familiar with Predictable Success, it is the seven steps for a founder to get to Predictable Success in their own personal journey, and it was for me. It just unlocked so much clarity and understanding. As a coach and even looking back at my own struggles as a founder, the times when I was the most stuck is when I was hanging on to the skills of the stage behind me and hadn't yet recognized the skills needed in the stage I was in now.

Dr. William Attaway: 13:40

That's so good. You know. So often in working with founders, with entrepreneurs, you know there's a very real sense of exactly what you described that they're alone, that nobody else has ever done this. What you're describing is something that could overlay on any founder's journey, no matter what they do, no matter their field, no matter like it doesn't matter if they run a marketing agency or if they run a law firm or if they run a Fortune 50 company.

Scott Ritzheimer: 14:09

Absolutely, and you know every founder out there is looking for a way that they're exempt right, it's in their heads right now they're like, yeah, but you know, and before you kind of throw this away, the real point, when I recognize I was onto something, is it's actually the same journey of Jason Bourne, it's the same journey of Nelson Mandela. In the real world, it's the same journey of Jesus. There is this one pattern. It is a universal pattern that we all go through. It's the storyline of any great epic you know, story that you movie that you've seen. It all follows the same pattern. It's a universal pattern.

Scott Ritzheimer: 14:46

And so that's why I can say, not just by virtue of my experience I've worked with a lot of founders but also by virtue of the fact that this is a universal pattern that shows up all over the place, that I can say with confidence it is affecting you. You know now, whether you recognize it or not, whether you know where you are in there or not, whether you're succeeding at it or not. Those are all variables, right. Those are all things that vary from person to person, but I can tell you it's the journey that you're on, whether you know it or not.

Dr. William Attaway: 15:13

But what are the seven stages of the Founder's Evolution?

Scott Ritzheimer: 15:17

So I get asked this on podcasts all the time and I've done it a few times where I've gone through all seven stages and it's like consuming seven meals all in one sitting when you're hoping for a bag of chips or, as Les would say, crisps. And so I wanna dial in on three really important kind of inflection points in the story. We'll show folks how they can find out what stage they're in and what all seven stages are. But let's just dial in on the three big spots. So the first one relatively early in the journey, and it's something that I call the star player paradox. Now, this is usually showing up for the person who's sitting there thinking like I can barely keep my head above water. I've got a couple of people around me and I realize the more people are higher, the more work I have to do. They're looking around, they're usually thinking what's wrong with these people and by these people they mean their employees, because they think differently than you, they talk differently, they act differently, they make decisions differently, and it's just really challenging. And the reason for this is this stage is about becoming a great manager, and you show me a founder who started their business to become a manager and I'll show you a liar. Like it's just, no one starts their own business to become a manager. In fact, many of them are trying to escape that.

Scott Ritzheimer: 16:35

And so what happens is, founders, we become reluctant managers. We're kind of forced into it, we have to do it and we can almost become resentful for it. Here's why this is so hard for founders in particular. One, there's a wiring thing. But two, they tend to be really high caliber individuals. When you look at a founder that's built enough success to start building a team around them, they're not a schmuck, right Like they're not. They can hold their own. They're an excellent star player.

Scott Ritzheimer: 17:04

But the better you are as a star player on the field, the harder it is to be an effective captain of the team. The more capable you are at whatever it is you do selling, doing, consulting, coaching, cutting hair, I don't care what it is the more effective you are. What you'll find is the harder it is to create that same success through others. And so what happens is we just hang on to everything and then we resent the people that we're supposed to be handing things off to and we just get stuck in this reluctant manager mode. So that's a really big one and there's a process of letting go is not the right framework, but there's a process for understanding why that's such a big challenge and then recognizing what are the parts that you actually should be handing off and what are the parts that are appropriate to be hanging on to. So that's a really big one. That's a really big one. It's stage three of the evolution and it's what I call being a reluctant manager.

Dr. William Attaway: 18:02

No, that resonates so deeply. One of the things that I have been working with executives and entrepreneurs. What I find is that they are really good at what they do and then when they move into a leadership role where they have to hire people to help them with fulfillment, with execution, there's a really difficult transition there and I know exactly what you're describing because their whole journey so far it's been about getting things done. When you become a leader, it's about getting things done through other people.

Scott Ritzheimer: 18:33

That's absolutely right. And it stops being about how fast you are. It stops being about how good your jazz hands are.

Scott Ritzheimer: 18:40

It doesn't matter how well you can close, you've got to teach somebody else to close and it's a real, real challenge. So anyone that's there, one, there's a way out and there's a normal way out. Everyone who's further down the road has been through where you are and they've got out to the other side, so you're gonna be okay. But two know that the very thing that created success in that earlier stage being that star player is the very thing that's gonna hold back your stage if you're not careful.

Dr. William Attaway: 19:11

That's so good. So the reluctant manager, the star player, that's one place. What's another place?

Scott Ritzheimer: 19:17

Yeah, so that star player paradox, yeah, that difficulty moving from star player to reluctant manager. Inflection point number two is what I call the chief executive shift, and this is the single biggest transformation from any one stage or another. It's not the finish line, we're far from over. But if you were to say any one stage shift, this is by far the biggest. Now folks are probably sitting and thinking like I am the CEO of my company and I would respond your business card says you're the CEO of the company.

Scott Ritzheimer: 19:50

But part of the problem for founders is we are founder and CEO from day one. But the reality of it is, if you don't have an executive team, if you don't have executive caliber players in executive level positions, you cannot be the chief executive. It just doesn't work in a name. And so what has to happen is we have to move from. Here's the biggest single transition.

Scott Ritzheimer: 20:13

We have to move from making policy decisions, exercising our superstar skill at this point in decision making. Making policy decisions, we're gonna do this for pricing, we're gonna start this product line, we're gonna open this location. We rely on our kind of internal magic eight ball as a founder. Just a go with our instincts. That's not wrong, but it's not reproducible either. It's not wrong, but it's not scalable. So if you wanna scale, if you wanna become CEO, you've gotta find a way of taking that magic eight ball, getting it on the outside of you and transitioning from being the superstar decision maker to building a team of superstar decision makers. That's what an executive team does, and so we shift from making policy decisions to people decisions. You see a problem in your business. You don't go in and change it or fix it. You figure out where it went wrong from a people standpoint and address it at the root.

Dr. William Attaway: 21:14

How easy is that for a founder to make that shift your experience? It's really hard.

Scott Ritzheimer: 21:22

Yeah, it's really hard if you don't have a map right. This is that point where we get stuck here, and it's a really hard place to get stuck in because it's kind of like again, imagine your biggest, most epic movie. This is like 10 minutes before the end, when everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. Yes, and so we're just in a tough place as founders. When we reach the need for this transition. We're left with this big question like is this it? Yeah, I built a $10 million company. I realize it's just bigger. It's not better, right, and if I keep this going, I'm just going to have more problems. That's the only thing that's accelerating here is the speed of problem.

Scott Ritzheimer: 22:01

Yes, and so it's a really hard shift to make because it pushes all the buttons for us right as founders all the control things, all the ego things, all the synapses that were formed in all those previous stages that said that if it needs to get done, you have to do it right. There's this trust that has to be built. There's a lot of things that have to happen, but remember, what makes it worth it is that fact that it's the single biggest transformation that you can make. I work with folks in this stage all the time. It's probably the core of what I do as a scale architect on an individual basis. And there's this problem I have every single time is that if I told you what it's actually like to be a CEO, a real CEO who's done the work to create an environment for them to actually be CEO, to be founder CEO, if I told you what that was really like, you would fire me because you'd call me a liar, right? You wouldn't believe me. You'd never hire me in the first place because you'd think, oh, selling snake oil, it's that good. And you ask anyone who's on the other side of it and they'll tell you that's true. Here's why. It's because when you can do the hard work of transitioning from stage four to stage five and it's the process it's not a magic wand, it's not, you know, poof, I'm in stage five.

Scott Ritzheimer: 23:24

But when you do it, what it does is it puts you back in the visionary seat.

Scott Ritzheimer: 23:30

You know you have more time to be a visionary than you've actually had the entire time you've been in business. Right, you spend as much time being a visionary as you did before you even launched the thing, and you remember how much you loved your business before you launched it, right. And so if you don't love your business just as much now, that's because you're not in the right seat anymore. And so by putting you back in the visionary seat, by getting back to that skill set that you've actually you have in spades but has largely lain dormant for good reason, right Stuff has to get done, but when we can put you back in that and we surround you with an executive team that can help you avoid taking the thing totally off the rails but can also execute on that dream, it is borderline magical, right. And it's like what have we tapped into here? Because it is like scary awesome. And so that's the second big inflection point. It's what I call the chief executive shift.

Dr. William Attaway: 24:34

You know that one shift alone is worth the whole episode, because I think so many of the people who are listening are founders, are entrepreneurs, are people who started their own thing, and that is a point where they're at. They haven't been able to make that shift and they're stuck and they're circling the same drains again and again and again, and they don't know how to break free.

Scott Ritzheimer: 24:56

Yeah, absolutely true, absolutely true. And if you're there, don't be hard on yourself. We've all been there, right and without something like the founders evolution model. It's so hard because you don't have something to point to right. Every single person sitting in that stage right now is saying I either want to get to the next level or I want to get out right, that's basically right down to you, but you ask any of them what is the next level?

Scott Ritzheimer: 25:20

How do you define it? No one has a clue, right? But by naming these stages. Naming the stage that folks are in right now is called the disillusioned leader. Naming the stage they're actually trying to get to, the chief executive. Yeah, it unlocks something, right, it's that you are here moment. It gives us the both the vision and confidence that we can get there.

Dr. William Attaway: 25:41

Why do you think so many founders become disillusioned leaders? Because that's not an uncommon thing that I see they can't break free of that.

Scott Ritzheimer: 25:51

We've got about two hours right. Absolutely, it's another version of the Star Player paradox, but what happens is there's just a fundamental shift in how you have to lead, right, most founders and they've got a bias to action right. Most founders, again, are really high caliber people. Most founders, by this point, have a highly tuned, got, instinctual decision making. Yes, the example I like to use we take it out of the world of founders for a second and go to the world of aviation. Right, and I'm not going to get too technical, this is pretty straightforward, but there are two basic licenses for pilots. The first license is the one that anyone can start on, right, and it's basically allows you to fly during the day. Now, why is that important? Because during the day, you can look out the window and see where you are. You navigate by like am I going to hit the mountain, yes or no? I'm good, right, it's below me, so we fly by sight. It's basically a visual certification. You stay below the clouds. You fly during the day. You don't fly in the rain. Why? Because you need to be able to see around you. Well, the same thing happens for our business early on. You don't need a fancy set of instruments. Right. You don't need all the technical stuff that you see in the front of a 747, right, the thousands of switches in there. You'd never get off the ground if you were waiting for all of those switches. And so we learn to fly by sight. And that's wonderful. You can get from Atlanta to New York City flying by sight. It's not a big problem.

Scott Ritzheimer: 27:21

But you try and fly across the Atlantic, right. You try and scale something. You try and lead an organization where you can't see any given part, every given part, at any given time. You've got to learn to fly by instrument. Right. If you want to fly above the clouds, you have to learn to fly by instrument. You have to learn to fly by system and process.

Scott Ritzheimer: 27:42

You have to learn to build a structure outside of yourself. That, let's be honest, if you're doing it right, makes you mostly irrelevant, and that's a hard thing to do. Right, that's just a. There's ego stuff tied into that. There's trust stuff tied into that. There's nuts and bolts, blocking and tackling of like, how do you actually build the systems and structure that you need? You know folks will say like you mean processes. Like we beat people who have processes every single day. We run circles around them. We pivot on a dime right. All of that is true, but can you scale any of it? You need to have the right systems and processes, not for your frontline workers, that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the right systems and processes for you and your executive team, specifically on how you make decisions. You can't fly by site anymore. You can't just go by your golden gut anymore. You've got to learn to build a decision making team, and that's hard to do.

Dr. William Attaway: 28:40

That's so helpful, Scott.

Intro: 28:42

This whole model is so helpful.

Dr. William Attaway: 28:45

I mean each one of these points that you've described. I think people can see themselves and say, oh, I'm there. Oh, when you hear it, when you see it described like this, it's like that map you described yeah, oh, you're here. Yeah, that's where I am, that's exactly where I am. Now what?

Scott Ritzheimer: 29:04

Yeah. So last and inflection point we'll just hit this briefly and we'll kind of leave it out there for folks to really run with is we've done these first two transitions. We were captain in the field, we figured that out. We're chief executive we figured that out. And now what we're looking at is legacy. What are we going to leave behind?

Scott Ritzheimer: 29:25

And the difference between founders and some private equity group, or, quite frankly, founders versus Gen IIs or Gen IIIs from a leadership perspective, is founders are driven by legacy. They want to leave something behind, at least the clients that I work with. There's folks who flip. That's fine. That's not what I'm talking about. But the folks who are willing to go through this whole journey as a founder, they want to do it because it's something bigger than them. But to get this right. It's not an exit strategy that we're talking about. That's just one piece of the puzzle. What we're really talking about is succession, and here's the big.

Scott Ritzheimer: 30:00

This is what I call the secret to succession, or the big mistake that folks make when they're thinking about succession, and that is that when you're looking for a successor, you are not looking for someone to fulfill your vision for the company. You are looking for someone who can build on your vision and create a compelling vision for the future. Yeah, makes sense. In other words, you want to find another visionary. And again, this is hard. This is a new skill.

Scott Ritzheimer: 30:29

Leading visionaries is tough because you were the visionary. Let's just be real. You surround yourself with a bunch of other people who leaned on your visionary strengths, but that's exactly what they need from a CEO. And so that last big inflection point is you're not just handing it off to a number two. You're not just handing it off to someone who can execute on your vision for the company. You've got to not only hand off the company, but the ability to create its vision moving forward. There's right ways to do that. There's wrong ways to do that. That's a whole bag of tricks right there, but it's just helpful to know when you're looking for someone. Find another visionary.

Dr. William Attaway: 31:06

That's so good. I've watched too many founders leave their organizations and they didn't do what you're describing. They didn't follow that path and the organization suffers when they leave and in some cases they even close their doors. Do you see?

Scott Ritzheimer: 31:23

that I do. Here's what makes this really tricky, though it doesn't happen in the first couple of years. They leave it in capable hands and, let's say, you get someone who's very operations oriented, they're sound strategist. You'll see, the organization will jump up. In the first couple of years It'll look like we did all the right things Because we got rid of that pesky visionary. We kept lighting things on fire.

Scott Ritzheimer: 31:46

And so there's this deception that happens that we've got it all figured out, we did it all right, and we start to think this is why we're successful, because we're not making those big mistakes anymore, we're not investing in stupid ideas anymore. But the reality of it is, the reason we got to where we are today is because we did do that. Messing up is an essential part of creating predictable success. It sounds completely crazy, but it's absolutely true. And so what happens is organizations start dying the moment that their founder leaves, all too often. But you don't see it from the outside world for two or three years. You don't see it from the top of the org chart for 20 or 30.

Dr. William Attaway: 32:33

They're still calling the same place they were calling before, without the mess, which feels smoother and easier. That's absolutely right, but you've also got a critical ingredient.

Scott Ritzheimer: 32:43

That's exactly right. I was taking my dog for a walk the other day, and at Lanna we get these like crazy windstorms that come from nowhere, right, everything short of a tornado and so I was taking her for a walk. Back behind our house, where these woods is beautiful, there's a river, the whole deal and we walked past this tree. I could not fit, like three of me couldn't fit our arms around it. This is the giant giant. I'm not going to pretend to know what kind of tree it was, someone would correct me, but it's this giant. It's a big one, right? What kind of car do you want? A red one? That's for me. This tree. This is a big one.

Scott Ritzheimer: 33:12

It's this huge tree, one of those trees that you look at and think it's probably been here for a thousand years. It's going to be here for a thousand years, right? And I walk past it and it's completely fallen over and you think how is that possible? Well, as we keep walking, we come around to the base of the tree to look at where it broke, and inside it was completely hollow. All but the last inch or so of the outside had been eaten up ants and termites, and it looked fine on the outside.

Scott Ritzheimer: 33:42

It was big enough, it was strong enough that it could look like it was thriving, even though it only had about an inch of itself left. And so what happens is we judge it by its leaves right, we judge the company by its leaves, by its fruit. We don't judge it by its roots. And when you're looking at what's going to create a legacy, what's going to create lasting success, how are we going to get the groundedness that we need to adapt and change in the future? That comes from the roots, it comes from the core of the tree, and we lose that as organizations when we lose the founder, if we're not careful.

Dr. William Attaway: 34:18

What a great picture. What a great picture of what that can look like. You are not the same leader that you were five years ago and you're not the same leader you're going to be five years from now. Your company is going to need you to lead from a different place, at a different level. How do you level up your game? How do you continue to grow and develop the leadership skill that you're going to need, that your company is going to need five years from now?

Scott Ritzheimer: 34:51

Yeah, it's a fascinating question because in my journey I went all the way to stage six. I owned my company and didn't run it, and then I had a decision that we all have to make, and that is now what do I do? Like the best years of my life left, and so I intentionally chose to go and start over again. I intentionally went back to stage one and now I'm in stage two, knocking on the door of stage three. I'm not quite there yet, but the interesting thing is and this is really helpful for stage two people it's not actually about leadership. That's going to be absolutely liberating for some folks, because there's so much about leadership, but when it's you and maybe one or two other people, you don't get a huge return on leadership. You just don't.

Scott Ritzheimer: 35:36

And I've been in the place where I've been in stages three, four and five, when you start to have to develop those skills. But for me, the best way for me to be a leader is to go and do and execute. That's the very best thing that I can do in my stage. So I've had to unlearn some of the lessons of the past. I've had to unlearn some of the later stages so that I can focus in on what I need to do now in stage two, and I know with clarity, I know exactly what the next level looks like.

Scott Ritzheimer: 36:01

I'm going to have to become a manager again, right, I'm going to have to start getting out of my own way. I'm going to have to start leveling up the people around me and that's tough to do in the consulting world, right, because it's very much about me as a star player and not celebrating me. But it's just organizationally designed. First call. They don't ask for scale architects, they ask for Scott or one of our other scale architects by name. And so continuing to build that up and remove myself where it's appropriate, scale myself where it's appropriate, that's going to be the next level for me.

Dr. William Attaway: 36:35

But that actually is what my next question was going to be like. What are some of the challenges? You see in front of you, and it seems like it's almost like you have a map and you know what's next.

Scott Ritzheimer: 36:46

It's a cheat code. You know what I mean it really is. It's funny because and you've hit this very thing I ask a similar question on my podcast and you get all these good but random answers right, we all want to get to the next level. Here's what most folks who want to get to the next level. Here's the truth. You don't want to get to the next level, you want to have more success in your current level. Wow, and that's not a bad thing. Here's why this is so important. That's good.

Scott Ritzheimer: 37:14

It's a good thing to have a weapon. When you find out there's seven stages, it can almost become a weapon against you, because you will become so, if you're not careful, obsessed with getting to the next stage, that you'll miss out on the joy of the stage that you're in. It's the biggest tragedy of all. So we had our first child when I was 25 years old, and we had our third child when I was 35 years old, and can I tell you I was a completely different dad from 25 to 35. Ten years will change you, right, and a couple of kids along the way will change you too. And I can sum up the difference in this when my boys, who were about two years apart were born the first couple of years of their life. I was like I don't really know what to do with you. I love you, but come back when you can kick a ball right and we'll have a blast right, and it wasn't that I loved them any less.

Scott Ritzheimer: 38:07

I was not equipped to help them at all and I just kind of waited, right. I just kind of waited until they could kind of enter my world a little bit more. And we're having a blast now. Don't get me wrong, but I missed out on so much joy in that process. Ten years later I get the opportunity to do it again and I was no more equipped than I was the first time around, right as I still like. Mom's got me beat in every category, but I set myself to enjoy every minute of our daughter's life, especially the first couple of years, and the joy that I experienced in that process was night and day. And for me, one of the biggest things that founders need to hear is it's not actually about getting to the next level Nine times out of 10, it's actually about enjoying the level you're in more.

Dr. William Attaway: 39:01

That's a lesson that can be applied in so many areas of life. You talked about it. As a father, as a parent, I've met way too many people in my life who are wishing away their current season because they can't wait for the next or the next or the next, and they just wish it away and they lose out on what they could be learning, what the joy they could be experiencing, because they can't wait for the next one. Absolutely, man, that's so powerful. You're a continual learner, scott. That's obvious from this conversation and others that we've had. You are always learning. I'm curious is there a book that you would recommend to the listeners that if they don't have this on their TREAD list, they should put it there?

Scott Ritzheimer: 39:46

Yeah, I mean the first one's an easy one. We talked about at the beginning of this predictable success by Les McHugh, and you and I are both big fans. It is literally the matrix of the business world. Check that out slightly selfishly, I would say the Founder's Evolution. If any of this has run true for you, this is everything that we talk about in that book, the Founder's Evolution book. Folks who want it can actually get it for free on the website scalearchitectscom. Founders. There are eight chapters for the seven stages. It is intentionally written in a very short, concise way because founders, leaders or readers are skimmers. Let's just be honest with that. It's a book really written for founders. That's the least I need to say. To get the most you need to know, I encourage folks to head over there and grab a copy of that. Get a copy of Les's book the Predictable Success and you will find yourself in a brand new world.

Dr. William Attaway: 40:51

You can't beat free. I'm going to be getting a copy of this. This resonates so deeply with my own experience in leadership and as a founder myself. Often people walk away from an episode like this, Scott, with one big idea. If you could define what you want that one big idea to be for people to walk away with, what would you want it to be?

Scott Ritzheimer: 41:16

Folks walk away, and podcasts are notorious for this. They have something that everyone should be doing. Every founder should do this. If you go by what we've talked about so far, the should do is different for every single stage. In the spirit of what's the one thing we should all do, you got to figure out what stage you're in. Once you know what stage you're in, then you'll be able to have absolute clarity, just generally absolute clarity, not certainty, but clarity on what your one thing is right now.

Dr. William Attaway: 41:47

The best way to figure out where you are on the map is to read Scott's book. I highly recommend that. I'll have a link to that in the show notes. Scott, I know our listeners are going to want to stay connected with you and continue to learn from you. What is the best way for them to do that?

Scott Ritzheimer: 42:02

You can find me all over social media. I wish it was as easy. It should be as easy as looking up Scott Ritzheimer. That should be a pretty unique name. Unfortunately, I'm a junior. Take the better looking Scott. No, I'm just kidding.

Scott Ritzheimer: 42:15

Take the one who looks like he's about 14 years old. That's me. The other one will entertain you a lot more. But if you like what you found here, go find the one who looks like he's 14 and you'll have the right guy. Then, on the same page, that Founders Evolution book download page, there's also an opportunity to grab some time with me there. We make it simple. It's all in one place.

Dr. William Attaway: 42:40

Love that, scott, you have been so generous today with the insights and the wisdom that you have shared. Thank you, thank you, thank you for that I'm so privileged.

Intro: 42:52

Thanks for listening to Catalytic Leadership with Dr William Attaway. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode. Want more? Go to catalyticaleadershipnet.