Why Your Business Will Never Escape This Stage, Unless . . .

Does running your business ever feel a little bit like herding cats? Like trying to nail jello to a tree? Maybe you've hired some thoroughbreds to work on your team, and you've finally gotten some help, but you just can't seem to get everyone running in the same direction. When my son Daniel was a little guy, five years old, he decided he was gonna start playing ice hockey, and I had played, so dad gets to be the coach. Let me tell you what's more fun. Nothing is more fun at all on the planet than a whole bunch of five year olds with pads and helmets and skates on, rolling around the ice chasing the puck. They were so disorganized, like a little beehive chasing something around. And so what we had to do as quickly as we could was to teach them to stay in their lanes and pass the puck back and forth across the ice instead of everybody just following it. So we had to convert chaos into a system, and as soon as we did that, we started winning hockey games, if that's what you call it with five year olds. If you can relate to that, then it probably means you're in the second stage that all businesses go through, which we call the pathfinder stage. And today, John Falcons from EntreLeadership is going to show you how how to move past the Pathfinder stage. You'll learn how to align your team around a clear mission to get everyone to chase the same goals without chasing the puck all at once. In the Pathfinder stage, your business starts to feel, well, a little messy. You're no longer stuck doing everything yourself, and you've given your team a lot of tools they need to succeed with good hiring and delegation. But, ultimately, your business lacks the clear direction it needs to keep growing and getting better. It can feel like you're running in circles or worse, like you're the only one who cares. That's because Pathfinders run into three major issues. For starters, team member turnover is too high. Your business has grown past the small family feeling, but hasn't yet built the systems and culture and clarity that make people want to stay long term. Early hires may feel like they've outgrown their roles while newer hires struggle to connect to a bigger purpose without that shared sense of why. Next, you have unreliable results. When you were doing everything yourself, you could make sure it was done the right way. But now you've got a team, and so things start to get a little bit varied. Results lack consistency when you don't have repeatable processes in place. Instead of a system, the business runs on individual people and their moods, their personalities, their best guesses. And the problem with that is results aren't reliable. You don't know what to expect and you're always having to respond just in the moment. Sometimes it'll …