In this diagnostic episode, Scott Ritzheimer, Founder of Scale Architects, shares how being over-visioned creates unnecessary complexity and pulls you into Whitewater far too early. If you’re chasing too many ideas, struggling to manage operators, or hitting systemic problems at a small size, you won’t want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why too much vision multiplies complexity and forces premature Whitewater

- How to diagnose whether you’re over-visioned or simply over-operated

- What to do: rein in shiny objects and manage operators so you can stay in Fun longer

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stages 3,4,5 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Scott Ritzheimer is the founder of Scale Architects and a leading expert on organizational life cycle and founder leadership. He has helped launch nearly twenty thousand businesses and nonprofits and, before turning thirty-five, built and sold his own multimillion-dollar company after a decade of double-digit growth. Today he helps founders and CEOs who have people to lead but are still buried in the daily grind, giving them a clear next step instead of a theory. He is host of the Start Scale Succeed podcast and author of The Founder's Game.

Want to learn more about Scott Ritzheimer's work at Scale Architects? Check out his website at https://www.scalearchitects.com/

Connect with Scott through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottritzheimer/

Pre-order a copy of Scott Ritzheimer's book "The Founder’s Game" at https://www.scottritzheimer.com/book/pre-order

Hello, hello, and welcome, welcome once again

to the Start, Scale, and Succeed podcast-the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a

founder. I'm your host Scott Ritzheimer, and while we talk a

lot about those seven levels, we're actually here in part two

of our series. You're not in whitewater yet to talk not about

the levels that you go through as an individual, but through

the stages that your organization will go through

with you at the helm. Most notably, we're going to talk

about the whitewater stage. And if you were here in the previous

lesson, you know what whitewater means, and and you know that

more than ever, folks are finding themselves in this

whitewater stage prematurely, and when you do, you end up

having to deal with all the terrible parts of whitewater,

which we didn't go into a ton. But I just want to lay out here

to kind of set the stage for why this matters so much. And the

first thing that'll happen in whitewater for many

organizations is that you'll start making a bunch of

mistakes, there will be a bunch of errors, and you'll start to

recognize it's not just one or two people, it's not just one or

two things, it's just systemic problems all over the place.

Doesn't sound good, does it? No, not at all. Second thing that

you'll notice is because of those mistakes and errors,

oftentimes we start running into profitability issues again.

That's not fun either. The third thing that will happen is that

we will try to overcome those mistakes and errors. We will try

to redeem profitability, and we won't be able to. And so, what

happens is, as a leader, we'll start to doubt ourselves and

we'll start to lose confidence. Many of you may recognize this

is a big part of what can happen in level four, or if you ended

up in whitewater prematurely, actually back in level three of

your founder's evolution. the The thing that happens when you

start to lose confidence, when you start to lose confidence in

your leaders, is that you start to see some frustration and some

infighting on your leadership team, and a big part of that is

because you're trying to get visionaries, operators, and

processors together, and maybe synergists too, and and that's

just a messy problem. But if you got into whitewater prematurely,

that's actually part of the reason why you got into

whitewater prematurely is because of the composition of

your leadership team. And so, what we want to do is help you

to recognize that if you want to get to predictable success,

which many of you likely do, the way to get there isn't by doing

the things that you do in predictable success, namely

getting visionaries, operators, processors, and synergists to

work together and create high-quality decisions. Instead,

we have to do the things in fun that allow us to to grow as big

as possible in fun, so that we can be in this nasty whitewater

stage for as short as possible. There are a few things that get

in the way of that, and notably for this series, what I want to

talk about is the effect of leadership imbalances and how

they can unintentionally but very really pull you into

whitewater prematurely, and again, that's a big deal. We

don't want that to happen because then we end up having to

fight the the whitewater thing and a growth thing all at the

same time, and it's really really hard, and the three big

ways that we tend to get this wrong are that we tend to be

overvisioned, overprocessed, or over synergized, and we tend to

do so because we have too many visionaries, too many

processors, and/or too many synergists. In other words, the

only real way we want to end up in whitewater is because we were

so effective at leading through so many operators, the fourth

style, that we were necessarily thrust into whitewater because

of the complexity of us, the size and scope of the

organization, and that's really important because that tells us

what actually puts us into whitewater isn't so much that we

have too much of any one given thing; it's that too much of any

one given thing will create too much complexity.

That's the real problem: is that too much complexity is actually

what leads us into whitewater. Now we can do that because we

have to, because there's no other way, because we've

over-operated and we've done everything that we can in the

fun stage. We've won everything that we can win, and now it's

time to change the game. Great. However, if we end up there for

some other reason, like the one that we're going to talk about

in this episode, which is if you end up there because you are

overvisioned, that's going to be a really big deal. Because if

you end up there overvisioned, then now you have two problems

that you have to solve. First, you have to get appropriately

visioned. You have to have less vision, and. You also need to,

if you're going to solve for whitewater, you also need to add

systems and processes and how you make decisions. And really,

the third problem is, and you have to get enough operators to

pull you through all of it. And and so, what ends up happening

when we end up overdoing any one of these things is it it

multiplies our problems. Well, how do you know if you're

overvisioned? What does that actually look like? This one

used to be the most common of the three wrong ways to get into

whitewater, and and it might still be, but the others are

catching up very quickly, and and we tend to see this. The

best example that I can give is actually the high tech world,

the venture backed model. Many of these organizations are

overvisioned. There's this idea that we can be unprofitable for

decades because we have this big vision that's worth everything

one day. And what happens is because we we have so much

vision, we create so much complexity. I was just actually

in a meeting with a gentleman who was in the the early

struggle stage, and he was stuck there. And I believe that a big

part of why he was stuck there was because he was trying to

over engineer his vision to become, you know, not

necessarily even for the wrong reasons, but to become like a

billion dollar startup right away, and so because of that, he

was saying yes to all of these things, and he was he was

creating all kinds of complexity by being over vision, by being

too visionary, instead of recognizing, hey, here's a

problem, here's a solution, let's go and sell the blank out

of that solution. Let's get as many people on that solution as

possible. He thought, well, let's help as many people by

doing as many things as possible. And so, I think even

by his admission, he had like five businesses that all existed

inside of one. That's a classic example of someone being

overvisioned. Historically, if you were overvisioned, you

didn't really end up in whitewater because you never

made it that far. Most overvisioned organizations

actually fail in early struggle because most early struggle

organizations start with a visionary. This is true for

businesses and nonprofits. We'll get to nonprofits in a couple

episodes because they they tend to have their their struggle in

another area. So being overvisioned usually is that we

say yes to too much, we pursue too many shiny objects, and

again, usually that that there's a Darwinian effect to that. That

if you can't say yes to the right things and then stay

focused enough on those right things. You're usually going to

struggle with early struggle, and you're probably never going

to get out, or you're going to kind of be permanently stuck

there, thinking you're one idea away from a billion dollars. But

let's say you you you get enough of those operators around that

we're looking for, and they get to work doing this thing over

here, you can still get yourself into whitewater by being

overvisioned by tackling too many new things at once. If

you'll remember when I briefly went through the stages, the

goal of early struggle is to find a profitable, sustainable

market. The goal of fun is to sell so you can mine that

market, so you can make as much revenue from it.

One of the things that overvisioned organizations do is

they start too many things too quickly, and the result of that

is that they have too much of their organization stuck in

early struggle. Because everything that you start, no

matter what stage you're in right now, that new thing starts

in early struggle, and you can imagine how complicated that

makes things because you've got this kind of core business

that's that's that's not all that solid. Like it's doing all

right, but the core business starts to struggle under the

weight of all of these little new business ideas that are

sucking life and cash out of it. You see this happen a lot with

with with you know not necessarily franchise but like

multi location organizations like a multi site church or a a

new coffee store chain or anything a new restaurant

anything like that that has little locations, you'll see

that they can get over visioned where they grow faster than

their capacity. They they add a store. It works. They you know

they fight scroll fight fight and scroll. They fight claw

scratch and itch their way to success. And then they think,

hey, let's do another one. And they learn some things, and

they're able to get that other one up off the ground a little

bit faster. What they don't recognize is when they try that

again the third time, it's not that they don't know how to

start a restaurant; it's that they don't know how to lead

three restaurants. Again, it's another example of being

overvisioned, and so you can end up in whitewater by biting off

more than you can chew from a vision standpoint by saying yes

to things that your operators can't actually execute. And this

is the one that's probably the hardest to discern between you

know the the natural legitimate cause for whitewater and this

one. And so, how you can figure out if it's that you're over

visioned or that you're you're just over operated and you're

legitimately in whitewater. The first thing that I'll point to

is not perfect, but it's a pretty helpful guideline, and

that is, if you have more than 40, 5060, people, then there's a

good chance you've run the right place long enough that you're

actually in what we would call capital W Whitewater, because to

get to that point, it requires that you structure things pretty

well for operators, so that's the first one that we want to

look at. If if you're hitting whitewater, we're screwing up,

we're making mistakes. Your best people are spending all their

time firefighting. It may be because you said yes to too many

things too quickly, especially if that happens at five or 15 or

25 people. You don't want to be in Whitewater at 15 people.

That's a really, really big deal, and it's a really, really

bad sign. That is not a mark of accomplishment. That that's

usually not because you created so much success and fun,

although it can be. These aren't these aren't unequivocal. But

generally, if you're in Whitewater at 15, you've unless

you can figure out how to get back to fun, which we'll talk

about in a moment specifically for this problem, then again,

whitewater is going to be really, really hard because

you've got a long way to go and a lot of work to do to get to a

size that can sustain predictable success. So that's

the first one. Pay attention to the organization size. The

second one that you want to pay attention to, and this is a

little bit more qualitative over quantitative, and I'd encourage

you not to just ask it yourself, but to bring in a couple of

those trusty operators that you have around, and I want you to

ask if you have fully mined your market. If you offer some type

of service to the Northeast region, right? There, there's

probably a a very very big market that you can access, and

so let's assume that it's not all of the Northeast, but it's

in a drivable three-hour range, just to give ourselves some

parameters.

If you are not reaching that whole market, if you've not

mined that whole market, if you're not to the point where

you have so much market saturation that things are not

just slowing down because you're bored with what you're doing,

but slowing down because you are running out of clients to to

bring in, and that's usually going to be at a minimum 5% of

the market, right? The total market. So you can compete with

20 other people the same size as you or bigger. That's not a

scientific number. That's just a ballpark figure that we're not

talking about like a 10th of a 10th of a percent of the market.

If you haven't really saturated the market to that extent, then

you probably have a lot of mining left to do. And if so,

you want to find a way to get back to fun and mine that

market. Get to five or 10 or 20 or even 50% sometimes depending

on how good you are. Instead of again trying to fight whitewater

and this market problem at the same time. So, think about how

much of the market have you accessed. Now, if you're sitting

there saying, "Well, it's only a small percentage, then the

question, the next question is, "Well, why? And oftentimes, if

you're overvisioned, it's because you're too busy chasing

other things. You're too busy chasing other products or or

adding other locations somewhere else. You've artificially

created complexity. An example that I have of this: there's a

local business here, and they were thinking about. They were

sitting just under $5 million, I think. They were in fun. They're

having a great time, and they had an opportunity to open

another location about eight or nine hours away. And when I sat

down with the founder and we talked through this. I

recommended that he really strongly consider not doing

that. Ultimately, it was his decision, and and you know I

could show help him figure out how to build an organization

that could span that type of a distance. But I asked him. I

said, "Well, how much room do you have to grow here? He's

like, "I don't know, maybe 3x, maybe 4x. I'm not sure. And so I

encouraged him just consider it. And ultimately, he decided to

just stay here in Atlanta and double down on this location.

And so instead of what he thought he was going to do, have

a location sitting around 5 million and another location

hopefully getting to 3 million in a couple years, he was able

to create an organization that exceeded $20 million dollars.

Last time I checked, I think they were around 25. With one

location right here, didn't have to travel anywhere. Didn't have

to, you know, lead a whole nother team some in some other

state. He could do all of it right here. That's the power of

not overvisioning your organization of. Adequately

visioning it, but not too much. So, adding that other location

that far away would have dramatically increased

complexity, but it wasn't necessary-at least not yet. And

that's the really big deal with overvisioning an organization.

The last thing that I want to point to here, because this is a

really common factor, and it's going to be a little bit more of

a personal one. Most of the time, overvisioning is a pure

reaction from the founder, and this is kind of true for all

three of these problem problem approaches that we're going to

talk about. But this one in particular is pretty poignant

because a lot of founders are very strong visionaries. It's

kind of needed in the early part of the game. Very visionary

leaders often struggle to do the type of management that

operators need. They get bored with it. They get frustrated by

it, and they make the mistake of thinking, "Well, I wouldn't want

to be led that way, so I'm not going to lead them that way. And

the truth is, and the the best thing that I can give you right

now is that you have to recognize that you're not

managing you. You're not managing you. You're a

visionary. They're operators. Now operators don't want to and

can't be micromanaged. It's not going to work.

But they do like to be managed well, even if they wouldn't use

that language, what I mean by managing well, most operators

will thrive in that kind of an environment. What is managing

well? It's giving clarity on the vision and expectations. It's

delegating authority, staying out of their way is a better way

of putting it, and it's holding them accountable when the job is

done to the results that you expect. When you learn to do

that effectively, you can generally get the most out of

your operators and create an environment for them to thrive.

And when you do, you can do like this gentleman here in Atlanta

did and grow to four and 5x what you are right now without ever

leaving the fun stage, without ever having to overcome

Whitewater. Imagine like he could have hit Whitewater at 5

million and hit it really hard, but instead he's going to get to

hit Whitewater at 25, 30 million. Who knows? That's a

huge difference. You have so many more resources. You have so

many more opportunities. You have so many more great leaders.

You have the ability to pay even better leaders. When you can get

big in fun, it really really helps. Now, how do you do that?

So let's say you you're recognizing, hey, I I either

haven't managed my operators well, or I've said yes to too

many new visionary ideas, and I need to I need to unwind that so

that I can get back to fun, get a lot bigger before we hit

whitewater. That's that's what you do. And what's hard about

this is that it's not actually hard to understand what you need

to do. What's hard about this process is that it's not

glamorous. That's really it. When I when I help a team, and

we recognize, hey, we're over visioned. We've been chasing too

many things. It's it's causing us to to be in trouble. What do

we need to do? The answer is, you need to mine your

profitable, sustainable market. You need to find a handful of

operators, either inside your organization or a combination of

inside and outside, or you have to bring a couple in, and you

need to give them clarity, delegate them authority, stay

out of their way, and then you know help them see whether

they're winning or not with accountability. That's not that

hard to understand intuitively. If you're sitting there, you

probably already know what you've done to make things too

complicated, but here's what's uncomfortable about it: it means

you have to say no to some shiny objects, you have to say no to

some good ideas, or at least not yet. You have to exercise some

discipline that maybe you thought you had graduated from

because you were so successful, and I'm not trying to be hard on

you, but but I do want to help you see that a big part of the

reason why you ended up in Whitewater prematurely is

because of the way that you're showing up. Now that's bad news

because it means that you're a big part of the problem, but

it's actually really good news because it means that you're

part of the solution, and that's actually fantastic news because

it means that it's actually going to be relatively easy for

you to do something about it, and and so that's what I would

encourage you to do. I would encourage you to take inventory

of what's going on and how you're making decisions, and

say, am I managing my operators well, or making sure they're

managed well, and are we being disciplined in what we say yes

to, so that we can really focus on mining our profitable,

sustainable market by getting as big while staying as simple as

possible for as long as possible? And so, as we wrap up

this one, I just want to reiterate that being

overvisioned can look really great. Right, like being this

guy with a super big vision, and you might even be able to

attract really great people by having this super great vision

and being super visionary. But if you don't find a way to to to

harness that vision into a usable energy and infrastructure

for your operators, you're going to end up in whitewater way

before you should.

You're going to end up like Liam, my son, wearing you know

an adult's clothes in a kid's body, pretending to be a bigger

visionary than you are, and being frustrated by how

inadequate your team is to achieve that vision. It's not

just their fault. It's that you are overvisioned as an

organization, and so rather than fight against that, rather than

trying to de like to to minimize your vision, increase your

operator, and build systems and processes for Whitewater all at

the same time, we can split those out. We can lessen vision

a little bit, increase operator a little bit, get those back

into balance, and then drive that thing for as long as it'll

run. And then when the time comes, we can address bringing

the processes in, bringing the process soars in, and ultimately

getting to predictable success. But the best thing that you can

do is to stay in fun for as long as you can while still growing

like you want, and that's very cool. Now, what that brings us

to is the second reason why folks end up whitewater when

they shouldn't, and it has to do with those systems and processes

that I just talked about as being the key to getting out of

whitewater. And we'll talk about those in the next episode in

this series, it's going to be really important because the

fastest rising wrong way for a business to end up in whitewater

is exactly what we're going to talk about in that episode. I

hope to see you there. Hey everyone, Scotty Timer here.

Thank you so much for listening to the Start Scale and Succeed

podcast. I hope this episode gave you exactly what you need

for the level you're in right now. If you want to discover

what level you're in, take our 10 question Founders Evolution

Quiz for free at foundersquiz.com. That's

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you tailored tips to move forward and reach that next

level in your journey as a founder. If you got something

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review. It helps us reach more founders like you, and let's be

honest, it means a ton to me, my team, and all our incredible

guests. So keep starting, scaling, and succeeding, and

I'll see you in the next episode.