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Hello everyone and welcome to The Upstream Leader. I am excited for the conversation today. You all know I love a good book recommendation, and today we’re straight up talking about a book with the authors and we are going to be talking about the new book Scale with Purpose. With me, I’ve got Jason Blumer and Ian Vacin. Guys, welcome to the show.
What’s up?
Thanks for having us!
Absolutely.
Thanks for having us, Jeremy. You’ve been on our show, man, we have known you for so long, this is a treat. We really appreciate this.
I am looking forward to it. I am getting my way through the book. I’m not a hundred percent done, but I’m absolutely loving it, so I’m excited to talk to you guys about this. Before we do though, I’m going to start the show the same way I start every episode, and that is how did you become the leader that you are today? Jason, I’ve known you the longest, so I’m going to put you on the spot first.
Okay, yeah. I guess how most leaders become leaders is through a lot of ups and downs, man. I was in a firm, a regional firm about 25 years ago, started leading the firm I’m in now with my dad, and then started growing it. Tried all kinds of consulting advisory, and screwed up half of what I was trying to do, broke a bunch of stuff then started a community since I thought, well, I know how to break stuff. I’ll just see if anybody wants to break things with me. Some people did join Thriveal, our community, which is pretty cool. So 25 years running a firm, 15 years Thriveal. A lot of coaching, consulting, and man, leadership happens. I became the leader through just gut wrenching practice over and over, just a million times up at bat, and man, you break so many things and you have some wins too, and it teaches you so much if you don’t fold underneath some of that pressure.
I’m making it sound negative, but it really does, it really has made me the person that I wanted to become which is a little bit more mellow, a lot more mature, and you end up with some scars, and you can use those to help other people. So, yeah. Hope that wasn’t too dark of a introduction to my leadership journey.
Hey, I like breaking things, and then find other people that want to break things and build community. I mean, we’re in an industry that doesn’t always like to break stuff, so somebody being willing to go out there and do it and learn, that’s great. Ian, what about you?
Mine was similar. We talk about it a little bit in the book too, but it was a roller coaster. So I was a young buck 25 years ago, put into a leadership role running a tech company with a bunch of other folks. And it went completely upside down when our placed CFO from the investor, embezzled $3 million, ran off, and I had to learn about how to shut down a company over the course of nine months and have my credit cards on a table and walk away, because that was the only thing I could do.
And then I spent the next essentially 15 years trying to get my legs back underneath me, because I was way too cocky, way too young, and I ended up taking a route through multiple established tech companies to really get my footing again before I started my own back 12 years ago. And it was one of those ones where Jason talked about it: it was a route for maturity. I think the funny thing is about being an entrepreneur or a leader is you have a good day and this next day you have a bad day, that’s just how it is. Someone comes around the corner, punches you in the gut, and you’re like, alright, I’ve got to get back into this.
So yeah, it’s been a good journey, but it hasn’t been necessarily an easy journey. I think that, I think anybody that’s in a leadership position will probably tell you that’s the true when, when you get to the age that we’re at.
Absolutely. Well, and sounds like those journeys would lend themselves nicely toward a book, which is what brings us here together today, Scale with Purpose. The Service Entrepreneur’s Guide to Intentional Growth launched to the world December 9th. If I have my date’s correct?
That’s right.
We’re recording this, you’re a week in, I’ve seen all kinds of activity launches and stuff on social media. What led you guys to decide, great journey, lots of excitement, you live on opposite coasts. Jason, you’re out in South Carolina. Ian, I think you’re in California, so let’s get together and write a book. Talk me through it.
Well, we figured when we both failed at parenting, maybe a book writing would be a better route to go.
Oh dude! You’ve never slammed my parenting. You’re right, but man, you’ve not slammed my parenting yet, but that was a good move. That’s a good call.
Fair enough, right?
The truth of the matter is Jason ghosted me. I asked him, I was looking to write a book on capacity planning, and I was trying to find someone to help me write it because I didn’t think I actually had the ability to do it by myself. I pinged, we were on a call and it kind of came up in conversation and Jason says, I thought, I think I’m going to write a book on capacity planning. I said, well, maybe we should do it together. He’s like, I’ve got to think about it. Let’s schedule a meeting in a month, and I’ll come back to tell you whether or not I think it’s a good idea.
Jason, what’s your version of events?
Yeah, thank you Jeremy. Jeremy’s like, you each, you’re going to have your own version. Yeah, well, I had written. So I do a lot of writing and I had written a lot for Karbon and I do that for some of our sponsor partners, but Karbon’s a different kind of sponsor. They have actually funded Thriveal for a decade and you, and it’s become a good friend of mine and Julie. So I wanted to do something bigger and I thought, well, Karbon puts out some of the best content in the profession. I think that’s kind of known. So I thought, man, hey, will you do something more with me? And turns out Ian’s like, “Hey, let’s do it together.” I don’t remember me ghosting you like that, Ian. Maybe I did, but.
And then Jason learned that the content that Karbon does was not done by me, and then he had to go through the journey for the last two years.
Yeah. Yeah.
So how long did it take a book on capacity and scale? How long does something like that take? Overnight, right? Just a couple weeks.
Yeah. Well, it was interesting, so I had a different perspective on writing a book and e. In, we learned a lot from each other, and he came in as a he’s really a researcher, which I didn’t, I didn’t know and I knew he had an engineering background and runs a global software company for the accounting profession, but he is really a researcher and wanted to do a lot of interviews for the book, and I had no idea how to do that—I’d not done things like that. And so I probably started it as just a book we were going to write and I think we were both thinking it was going to be on capacity, and he started bringing in hundreds of interviews of case studies and man, it blew our mind what we learned.
I learned a lot through that process, and then I think the book expanded. So it really was a book on capacity and it really grew over time, we kept adding chapters, we both had additions to chapters that we didn’t know we were going to need to add, and it just became way more than just capacity, so it really became kind of a reference, like a field guide for scaling very specifically niched into service-based organizations, which we actually had to define in the book. So we. I don’t know, Ian, is it true? We started with with one perspective and it kind of grew even in ways we didn’t anticipate.
Yeah, I mean we both came in thinking we were going to write about capacity planning and then it just grew. We figured, we learned that the requirements were around strategy, organization, design and so forth. And then from there the book kind of evolved into the capacity, the planning, the revenue generation, those types of things. I think it’s interesting, Jeremy; we joke when we first started doing this, I’m like Jason, you got round glasses that makes you the creative one, and I’ve got these square ones, which makes me the analytical one. But the book really actually blends those two together really, really nicely.
It does.
And it builds a lot on fact because Jason and I wanted to put something out there that was based on what the industry from a collective in terms of professional services and thought leadership firms, but you know, the ultimately was able to represent what was actually happening on the ground, not only from what we saw in the consulting, and what we’ve been doing on training, but also in terms of hard facts. So this book is a good culmination of that.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, on that blend, it really does come through nicely, your voices: the blend of the two, the, there is the research, the analytical, but then the practical, kind of the reflective from time to time, and Jason, you’re right, you brought in a ton of case studies, firms of all sizes. So one of the stats I’ve seen recently numerous times, there’s 46,000 accounting firms in the US. I’m sure many of those may be sole proprietors, single shingle type of operations, but if there’s 46,000 accounting firms in the US, which firms is this book for?
That’s a—man, that’s a great question. So it’s not a book for every firm, and it is a little bit broader than the accounting profession. We did write it for service-based companies. Those that are going to try to scale, expand, and grow based upon some kind of technical knowledge that they sell to their specific market, and so could be consultancies, architectural firms, engineering firms, of course agencies. Mostly accounting firms follow Ian and I. So that’s really probably who’s going to mainly be, be reading it, but we say very clearly: It’s not for everybody. Scaling is not for everybody. That is the particular attempt to expand, get larger, and that is not right for everybody. We talk about lifestyle firms and sometimes that’s a right choice, but we do make a very clear statement in the book. This book is for people who want to scale their services organization. So that’s a pretty big, clear statement we made. I don’t know, Ian, if you had summarize the purpose differently than that or add something to that?
Yeah, I mean, the beginning of it is there’s and when we’ve met with folks, there’s many different reasons why you, you’re, you’re running a firm or what you’re trying to accomplish. And so we wanted to give the pathways and understanding of how to do that. There’s this entrepreneurship mindset matrix that we put in there, and we wanted to educate folks around what does it take to actually grow a firm with intention, and why do firms hit certain barriers inherently that folks just aren’t aware of? Because once you have that understanding of where things lead to. You might make different decisions on that. The most profitable firm revenue for employee is a single person firm until you get to essentially pass that first scaling boundary, which is past 20 employees. And so we talked to many, many firm owners that said, you know what? I’m just going to be around 12 or 14, that’s the best spot for me. And having that awareness and understanding and having something that spells that out is really reassuring for a lot of firm owners.
Yeah. Well, and one of the things that you all said in there is, I may not get the words exactly right, but you have to want what it takes to scale. So it’s not that I want to scale, I have to want all the effort that it’s going to take as well, because if you only want the outcome, but not the process, it’s not going to work. And I think that’s a really important statement that was in the book, is it’s not just “do I want this future state and this desired outcome, but I’ve got to want all the stuff that comes with it too,” which I don’t know that we think about that a lot. I hear that when I have the independence conversation with firms. Oh, do you want to be independent? Almost everybody—not everybody, but almost everybody—they’ll say, oh yeah, I want to be independent. Like, great. Do you want to do what it takes to be independent? Like, hold on. That’s a different question? Wait a second. That’s not, can’t I just say yes?
And that’s kind of what you all laid out in this is you can say you want to scale, but unless you want what it takes to scale, it’s not going to work. Help differentiate. Ian, you mentioned the entrepreneur’s mindset matrix and it’s a really nice three by four grid that you’ve got in the book. And across the top you’ve got kind of three different mindsets: satisfied, calculated, and entrepreneurial. And I think that we all probably conceptually satisfied as self-explanatory. Help me differentiate calculated versus entrepreneurial. Is one, just more risk averse? Like what are we talking about?
Yeah, and there’s a fourth one, which is overwhelmed, which is a byproduct of the entrepreneurship one. But there are folks, when they run their businesses, they are very thoughtful about how much they’re going to grow, they are very thoughtful about how they want to drive the culture and the company, and their expectations are contained so that they can predictably get from each step of the journey as they go through that: That’s the calculated. And so generally they’re more satisfied with the business overall, and when you look at their actual last 12 months of revenue versus how they forecast their next 12. They’re predictable and they do that on purpose because they’re lowering the risk of the business overall through the thoughtfulness of how they want to run it.
Now for the entrepreneur, they’re more chaotic and there’s two different sides of that sort of pendulum. There’s those that have a good understanding of how to do it, and they’re, again, unsatisfied because they’re trying to drive to an excellence that they believe they should get. It’s the entrepreneur’s dilemma, and they’re trying to drive a team with them to do it. And it’s really a determination of whether or not they have the knowledge, the team, the wherewithal to do that, and that’s what really separates the overwhelmed, which is a very dangerous place to be, because that’ll usually lead to firm death, if not understood, or it leads them to really great heights. But they’re going to do that through what would be in terms of they calculate more of a linear path, they’re going to do it more exponentially. And that’s a bit of how that risk plays out.
Yeah. And the overwhelmed piece, it’s not in that, that awesome matrix that Ian created, because it’s like a, it’s a byproduct of people trying to do a lot of different things. And in the book we make clear, we’re like, nobody’s going to fit perfectly into that matrix. The book is to help people to bring clarity to their thinking and their mind about helping them go, where am I? What am I doing? What am I choosing? What are the consequences of the choices that I’ve made? We’re trying to bring clarity to that too, and we say very clearly, scaling’s not for everybody, lifestyle firm is not for everybody. And even knowing where you are as an entrepreneur, super tough. So we just start the book with a lot of leadership, a lot of knowledge to help you get yourself into the right category. Because you, you have to have awareness about yourself as an entrepreneur, and when you operate without awareness in an entrepreneurial situation, you can get into a lot of trouble, because it takes a lot of clarity, a lot of strategy, a lot of planning, a lot of execution, decisions, hire, fire, these things you have to do on a very consistent basis. And so you’ve got to know a lot about yourself. And so we start off with pushing back going, are you even supposed to be reading this book? Are you supposed to be doing what you’re doing? And those are hard questions. But you actually need to be asking yourself those questions. And that’s kind of, I don’t know, Ian, that’s kind of where we started kind of pushing on where do you think you are or should be.
Yeah. And that was a bit of the journey that we had Jeremy on the book, which was, it starts with you as the entrepreneurial leader. And then it goes to how do you form your teams and your organization around the, the mission, the vision, the purpose and where you want to head to. And then you can talk about, well, what does that mean in terms of revenue planning, to then lead to capacity planning, to then lead to things like operations management and planning overall, and all those things come into determining the enterprise value of the firm. That is the entire way that the book is laid out. And that wasn’t the intention when we started, but that’s what, when we did the fact finding and we talked to firm owners and the journey that they went through, all those pieces had to be in play for you to have a successful organization, however you deemed it to be fit.
Yeah. I love the structure, the way that it’s laid out is incredibly logical and builds on itself throughout. One of the quotes that I have highlighted, and it’s one that I’ve seen it in a slightly different context, but I love the way that you guys laid this out, and I’d be curious, your take on if it’s just entrepreneurial leaders or if this would be beneficial for partners, really, in firms of any size. You said: “Your expectations of yourself as an entrepreneurial leader can’t be the same as your expectations of your team members. You signed up for something very different than your team for you. It’s your life savings, your livelihood, your ego, and pride. Your dreams and opportunities. For your team, it might be everything from just a job to my dream company.”
I mean, that to me immediately jumped out because I so often hear partners, for instance, in firms of all sizes, I don’t care if it’s $3 million or $300 million, “Well, my staff just doesn’t care as much as I do,” and this quote essentially says, “Duh.” And I don’t mean to be flippant with it, but no, they don’t, but they shouldn’t. And you talk about self-awareness: How important is that self-awareness? Because those three sentences to me are so absolutely critical for a leader of any organization when they’re trying to project their expectations of themself onto everybody else. You all articulated it beautifully. I’m curious your thoughts, is it broadly applicable?
Yeah, the book is for entrepreneurs too, because Ian and I are entrepreneurs. And so the entrepreneurs are a particular kind of people. They’re messy, they break stuff, they’re not always as ordered as they should be, and it turns out when you get to the book size 8 to 12 team, you have to start creating structure. So that quote speaks to the fact that entrepreneurs often don’t think clearly about things and they may perceive, wow, I love building this company, everybody loves building this company. Or entrepreneurs make claims to their team, we’re building the company, come on the journey with me. Well, it’s really important to know they’re not getting on your journey. They want a job, and what you can’t do as an entrepreneur, especially as you scale—that’s where you create complexity—you can’t make assumptions about what your team thinks, feels, believes. That’s why scaling is so hard. Because you have a bunch of humans with a bunch of different purposes, right?
You never know who’s sitting there in your team meeting every week and they’re, they’re about to resign. The next day they have a plan. You know you’re going to be meeting with them in your quarterly conversation and they’re about to resign. You don’t know that, because they have their own purpose in life, their own journey. And then you have other people who, younger people that work for you maybe, that say, “Hey, I want to be here forever. I want to be a leader, I want to be promoted. Help me do that.” And they may feel that now, but when they feel the weight of what leadership brings, they may back off a little bit.
So as an entrepreneur leader, that’s who your team is, and you’ve got to really understand they’re just not going to give their lives to this work in the same way that you do. Some might, but that can be rare. It’s really entrepreneurs and owners who give their kind of their life and go through a lot of hard things, but employees, they don’t have to do that. So that speaks to not assuming people are where you think they are, it’s really being self-aware of who you are, what your path is, and also, not expecting your team to be close to what you’re, what you’re doing. I don’t know. Ian, there’s a lot to that quote, man.
Yeah. I think the one, the one thing to add on it is, when working with folks that are signing up to work in your business, again, you’ve got an understanding of what you want out of it and what you want to get, but they have to have their own attachment to that. And that’s where we went back down to, well, that’s where, we talk about mission, values, purpose, and all those components, they’re so critical for the fact of being able to give ownership and guardrails and ultimately underlying purpose. Because if they don’t sign up for that, then you can’t expect them to go an extra mile if you need to. And the expectation that someone coming in your firm is going to behave like you do is completely false. It’s just not going to be possible because again, they signed up for something different.
And as an entrepreneurial leader, I mean, you work every day of the week, you think about the business all the time. I would say that when you, you may mention Jeremy on Partners and Firms, the book also relates to just teams and how teams form and how they behave because that can also be, for lack of better words, a fiefdom, and that can be something that can grow and mature and have its own ownership. And so again, the same things apply and the same rules apply in terms of expansive control and how to both basically able to grow those and nurture them. And so it doesn’t just apply to that one particular case of sure, spanning an organization of 20 can also be for a team.
Yeah. Just a really good lesson for leaders to keep in mind is nobody is required to match your passion because they’re not you, they don’t have your mindset, they don’t have your circumstance.
Yeah, I like “nobody’s required to match your passion.” That’s really good.
Yeah. We hope they care. Obviously. We hope they want to give it their all right. But they’re not us, so we can’t expect them to be us. And Jason, you mentioned, I mean it’s a book on scaling here and you talked about the complexity and people, one of my other quotes that I like, “Most humans want the freedom to be inefficient.” That’s just such a fun quote. That’s got to drive you nuts though. Ian, you’ve got a degree in engineering, so that, I would imagine, it’s just a battle every day. And from what I know about everybody that uses Karbon, they love the efficiency of it. So help me understand, how do we scale? How do we get people on board with being efficient when all they want is the freedom to not be efficient?
I’ll go first. Jason. That was Jason’s quote, by the way, it was fantastic. But I’m an industrial engineer by trade, so I am all about making things go faster, smoother, more efficient, and I worked in manufacturing environment where there was machines, and that was one of the things that brought Jason and I together on the book, which was a really fascinating problem. I’ve done a lot of research at the university level, and there’s lots of books about how to scale manufacturing environments, but humans are really messy. They suck, right? When you’re an entrepreneur, it’s really tough. Like we, we talk about a lot. They have good days and bad days that they’ll be in the office. They’re like, peace, I’m out. And they just walk out the door. You can’t have that in a manufacturing environment. And that was one of the things that was super fascinating, like how do you deal with capacity planning, resource management, how do you deal with getting alignment and efficient systems when you know, at any given moment someone says, I’m out. And that was the beauty of the book, was to try to give sense and, and understand things like how do you deal with Six Sigma and Lean? And people use Lean Manufacturing and I’ve always had a hard time with that because Lean is something that you use with machines because they’re very predictable, but humans are just not predictable, right, Jason?
Yeah, so basically the foundation of that is that manufacturing organizations can grow if the machines are efficient. It’s true for service-based companies too. We want our team being efficient and that’s how a service-based company grows. It just so happens the machines and service-based companies, are people. And people are very emotional. Entrepreneurs totally are off the rails sometimes these people are crazy. Like Ian and I, I mean these people are a little bit unstable. Sorry, Jeremy. That’s the thing.
Kind of required a little bit.
It takes a little bit of no, we take, it takes a little bit of craziness to do it. But the concepts are still the same. Because really, basically what we’re doing is we’re selling stuff to a market and we’ve got to produce the revenue as efficiently as possible. That’s what we’re trying to do in all of our companies, right? If a restaurant owner packs out the front of the house and the back of the house, and it turns out not a lot of people come to eat, maybe a manager sends a couple people home because they’re going, “we don’t need all this capacity to produce the revenue, so let’s lower the capacity.” Of course we can’t do that in a service-based company, but we’re still, we’re trying to efficiently produce our revenue, and if we can efficiently produce our revenue, profit becomes a result, because we’re applying our labor more appropriately to produce the revenue. It just so happens our machines are human.
And I mean, Ian did a great job. He really analyzed Six Sigma and Lean and really made points that it doesn’t apply to service, but he did kind of rewrite it for service-based companies. But we also have to recognize these are humans, and people are generally not efficient by nature, and that’s because we’re creative, we’re distracted, we’re sad, we’re happy. These things go up and down. We’re having babies, we’re going through a divorce, we’re moving across the country—all the things we go through as people, which none of those are wrong, it produces inefficiency. We feel the weight of having to be efficient, which is go into Karbon, check off your task, did you do it? A project manager’s showing up? Why didn’t you do it? What’s behind? And people can push against that: I just need a freaking break, man. I need a vacation. So humans have to rest, so humans by nature are very inefficient people, and here we are trying to run an efficient organization with humans and that, we get in trouble when we don’t recognize that fact.
I think the one thing to note on top of that is there’s difficulties but humans are also magical, so they can actually overproduce true the one you might think they want. And one of the things that was really cool was Jason had developed the melt to capacity planning and again, I get the beauty of working with professors at UC, Berkeley in the industrial engineering department. And it was one of the only models that actually works for how to deal with a human-based system versus a machine-based system, because you have to calculate all the different factors of being human. And so that was one of the really cool things about the book is being able to have a capacity model that actually works with the environments that we’re all in.
Yeah, and that’s what I love about this is it’s got so many systems and just approaches to solving some of these problems that nobody can figure out how to solve. I’ve got one more quote that I want to tackle in our time together here, and it’s a leadership podcast, so we tend to speak to leaders. We just talked about efficiency. One of the other things that you all said, so I don’t know whose quote this was. I’ll be curious to see. Please stop seeking permission from a group of people you have hired to fulfill your mission. And it was in the context of leaders asking everybody else for their input and their decision when the leaders should just go make the decision. It was in the context of entrepreneurial leadership. Why is that so important for leaders? We keep trying to, we, we want to be nice, we want to how’s everybody feel? What would you do? And in the sake of efficiency and leadership, you’re saying, just go make the decision. It’s your mission, it’s your passion. Make the decision. Why is that so important to scale?
So I think it was Jason’s quote. And, and one of the things that I’m impressed with and I learned with Jason over the years through the Thriveal community and, and what he’s been able to drive is as an, as a leader, as an entrepreneurial leader, or let’s say you’re a partner and a leader in an organization, you signed up and you have the weight on your shoulders of that particular organization or team. And with that sort of responsibility comes the weight of the decision making. And you have to be able to take inputs if you so choose, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to make that call. And sometimes a lot of the entrepreneurial leaders out there are trying to drive these things from the bottom up, and the reality is, you’ve got to take the reins of that. And sometimes, and many times, the decisions aren’t pretty decisions. There aren’t good answers that make everybody happy, but your job is to make sure that the team is well taken care of. The organization’s able to meet its purpose, that customers are able, or clients get what they need and sometimes. Those decisions are really hard and it takes a person to make that. Jason, you want to expound?
Yeah, I mean, I’ll just back up some of the things you’re saying, I think all empathetic, great leaders care about their team. That is a sign. I mean, Jeremy, you teach so much about leadership. So, we are meant to care for people. I mean, we’re not in this to just be buttholes and just crush people as we get all of the money. And we find in the accounting profession, accounting profession leaders are very, very service oriented. That is just, that’s kind of across the board. I don’t know why that is, about the profession. And so with a lot of those propensities, you, we find ourselves dipping into permission-based leadership a lot of times. But there’s a lot of different situations. Sometimes we command and direct and we go, sometimes we go, I can’t make this without my leadership team’s input, so now I got three months where I’ve got to really work through retreats with them, but then I have to decide. And then there are times where the whole team gets to decide. There’s a little bit more leaning towards consensus.
Those are all different situations and a leader’s going to really need to know when those are. But one thing, one fault, we do find in very probably unpracticed and immature entrepreneurs, is they really do want everybody to agree that the thing they think they need to do next, everybody’s going to agree with it. And that is a fallacy. That really can get you in trouble. There are times when you have to go, this is one, I need your input, and then I’m going to decide. And you have to be okay that people are not going to like you sometimes, they’re not going to like the decision you made, and so, it really can get you in trouble when you’re trying to go around and please everybody. That’s very dangerous. You can’t grow a company that way. But also, if you are of a certain size, you do need input. The company’s too complex for you to know all of the moving parts to actually be able to make the decision without input. So there’s time you need to do that.
So this decision making that is on all of our plates, it turns out that’s pretty complicated and not very clear about when to switch into one mode, than the other. But we do find by default, a lot of people going, I’m scared. I’m not worried, and trying to get a team to give you some kind of clarity is never going to happen because their clarity is within their individual contributor role, right? They’re there to do a job, go home, get the salary. That’s a different perspective than an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur, their capacity is very expansive. There’s really not walls to an entrepreneur’s capacity, unfortunately. But it is the job, right? It’s just you’re always solving problems and sometimes it expands and you’re Ian’s writing the book while he is on vacation in Hawaii. This is what this stuff takes, and he’s got to talk to his wife about that. I talk to my wife and partner about those things too. But that’s what it comes with. Yeah. So we just, we’re not going to get people signing off on our vision. Sometimes we have to move forward. That’s hard on us. I think it, it’s why we said that in the books, don’t do that. That is a fallacy and it’s going to hurt you and your organization.
Yeah. So you don’t need consensus to scale. You need definitive action.
That’s, I like how you said it. That’s good.
Yeah. And, and the add to that is as the organization grows inside, the scaffolding is there to help support the decision making and be able to get the inputs in reasonable timeframes at a reasonable level. And that’s where the scaffolding’s so important.
Yeah. And I like Jeremy, “you can’t scale through consensus.” That is super good. I love that.
Thank you.
I’ve got to add that in the, into the book.
Volume two. Volume two.
That’s right.
I like you, you use the word scaffolding, Ian, you use that a lot in, in the book, and I think that’s such a great way to think about it. It’s not that there’s this perfect, rigid thing that’s there forever, but it’s something that can be. Built, expanded. It’s there to support, but it’s also adaptable and flexible, which is sometimes what’s required. I like using that the way that you did.
Well guys, I have really enjoyed the conversation. We could talk for hours on end, but we do try to keep the shows a little shorter than that, unfortunately. If folks want to find the book, if they want to connect with the two of you, where can they do that?
Probably ScaleWithPurpose.info. That’s our book’s website. And Ian and I are always tinkering with it, we’re always playing with it, and we’re going to have, we’re going to put resources up and have webinars to kind of release resources and things like that. And Ian and I are pretty active on our LinkedIn profiles (Jason, Ian) too.
Yeah, you can find our information if you search us. I think you’ll get our emails too, that’s not a problem. But yeah, we’ve got all the information up there. There’s a a book mailing list that you can go in and sign up to, as well as if you want to buy the book. But yeah, we’re always around, always supportive, always answering questions, and feel free to reach out.
Outstanding. Well guys, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate you joining me on the show. Congratulations on the book and can’t wait to talk again soon.
Cool. Thanks, Jeremy.
Thanks, Jeremy. Appreciate it.
