The Bellwether March 1, 2024

With the New Year and its lofty resolutions quickly fading in the rearview mirror of our minds and the end of Q1 rapidly approaching, it's an opportune moment to pause and reflect on goals and aspirations. While dreaming big is absolutely required to achieve the extraordinary, the true magic is in being able to break down those wild goals into actionable, quantifiable components so they can coalesce from idea to action and be progressed. Equally truly understanding the ‘ingredients’ of the ‘success’ you so deeply desire. important is Case in point: if you have a business, you likely set growth goals, perhaps even some metrics for various departments or individuals to achieve on the path to a target revenue, target margin, new markets, new customers, enhanced offerings, etc… But have you stopped to think about your own growth’s role in the process? Inconvenient Truth: You don’t become a great leader just because your business gets bigger.

the business and don’t develop the leadership capabilities to work ON it.

In my 15 years consulting some of the biggest companies in the world, cofounding, growing, and selling startups, and now advising founders and leaders around the world, I’ve had the privilege to see many paths to success and failure. While there are many ways to successfully scale a business, in the ever-evolving landscape of entrepreneurship and business, leadership serves as the cornerstone for success and sustained growth. You can work on your business from dawn till dusk (sound familiar?), and if you succeed in growing the revenue-generating components of your business without growing your leadership and defining scalable team and operating processes, your business will outgrow you. That, well, let’s just say that is Risky Business (both internally and externally). Put simply, there is a cap on your bandwidth, both time and focus. If left unchecked, you’ll quickly become a bottleneck within your own business.

Volcano Summit

visionary and strategic thinking that defines the future of the organization, foresees the opportunities and pitfalls, and empowers and inspires the team. In addition, entrepreneurship will, as I like to say, ‘bring up all your shit.’ Constantly facing new challenges, big decisions, unforeseen events, managing people, managing cash flow, and the multitude of other stresses that are par for the course in leading a business, it’s no wonder entrepreneurs and leaders have a reputation for high stress levels. Yet, we’ve all encountered those mythical beings who are doing it all, achieving the growth goals, beloved by their teams, making

In fact, you can’t scale a business if you spend all your time working IN

Leaders need to be able to step out of the day-to-day to engage in the

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