In this transformative episode, Joe Patneaude, Owner of JP Coaching, shares how to break through the silent ceiling and scale without chaos in stage 2. If you struggle with growth stalling despite effort and feeling trapped doing everything yourself, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why founder heroics create invisible ceilings that block sustainable scaling.

- How to shift from operator to leader by building repeatable systems early.

- What mindset and structure changes turn daily firefighting into strategic freedom.

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 4 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

Joe Patneaude is an executive coach and business scalability strategist who helps founders break through the “silent ceiling” that stalls growth after early success. With more than 25 years in financial services, Joe built his career from the mailroom to the C-suite, serving as Director of Technology, COO, and Chief Compliance Officer before building and selling multiple businesses of his own. He is the creator of the STAR Scalability℠ Method. This framework aligns Strategy, Team, Assets, and Rewards to eliminate operational drag and help leaders reclaim time, restore clarity, and scale with confidence.

Want to learn more about Joe Patneaude's work at JP Coaching? Check out his website at https://jpcoachingnow.com/

Connect with Joe through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/joepatneaude/

Follow him on his Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jpcoachingnow

Follow him on his Facebook at https://www.instagram.com/star_scalability_expert/

Check out his YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/@JPCoachingNow

Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again

to the start, scale and succeed podcast, the only podcast that

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

founder, I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and I've been in

this seat that I think many of you are in today. I've been

there as the founder. I've had success, and I've come to the

wonderful No, the terrible realization that businesses and

nonprofits get bigger, but they don't necessarily get better.

And it's so frustrating, because you feel like you've did not,

maybe not everything right, but enough, right? And the business

grew, and with it comes this complexity that you just never

expected, and you start spending more and more of your time

babysitting instead of believing in the future of the

organization, and there's just this wave after wave after wave

of frustration that comes that ultimately feels like it stalls

us out, and it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, I believe

that folks are in this stage are actually just one step away from

the biggest transformation that's available to them, but it

won't happen by chance. So here to help us figure out what we

need to do next to get out of this and break through what I

believe he calls the invisible, the silent ceiling, awesome

phrase. I'm excited to explore that with him, but here to help

us out is Joe Patneaude, who's an executive coach and a

business scalability strategist who helps founders break through

the silent ceiling. There it is that stalls growth after early

success. With more than 25 years of experience in financial

services, Joe has built his career from the mailroom all the

way to the C suite, serving as Director of Technology, COO and

Chief Compliance Officer, before building and selling multiple

businesses of his own, he's created the star scalability

method, a framework that aligns strategy, team, assets and

rewards to eliminate operational Drag and help leaders reclaim

their time, restore their clarity and scale with

confidence. He's here with us today, Joe, I'm excited to have

you on the show. Welcome. You've coined this term and this idea

of silent sealing. What is it and why might it be affecting

some of our listeners here today?

Well, thanks for having me, Scott. And yeah, the

silent ceiling really refers to that, that combination of a

leadership gap and how leaders are perceiving the growth of

their business versus how the reality and how the staff are

seeing it is going and what's really happening is they're

capping themselves out. Now we've all heard of the glass

ceiling, right where, you know, we can only get so far in

somebody else's organization before we sort of cap out at our

career. The silent ceiling is when a leadership is doing it to

themselves, when an owner or a founder has gotten to that point

where they can't grow anymore, or they feel like they can't

grow anymore because they're, as you said, doing all the right

things, but things just don't seem to be clicking. They may

even be getting some growth, but it's more inflation than growth,

and that's where the silent ceiling comes into play. And we

have to break through that to actually make something that's

scalable and sustainable.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. Why? Why does the

silent ceiling happen? Like, what is it that causes it to

come into into place? Is it higher for some people, or is it

lower for some people? How do we know when we're there?

The the way you're going to know that you're

there? Because to answer your question, Scott, yes, it's

different for everybody, depending on your industry, that

you're in your own personal experiences and so on. But the

way you know you're there is when you find yourself at that

point of frustration where you feel like you're putting in more

and more and getting less and less out of your business, or,

you know, maybe not even less, but you're putting in more and

you're not seeing the benefits of it. Because when you're

investing, whether it's your time, your money, your energy,

if you're doing it the right way, you should see an

exponential return, not a one for one or less than a one for

long term. And when you start seeing that and you start

feeling that frustration and saying, why can't I get past

this point, that's when you know you're there.

Yeah. So there's this challenge that I

see folks have in this space, and they they might recognize

that they're at a ceiling, but they almost always look outside

for the ceiling, like, oh, I don't know if the market's big

enough, or, you know, the economy, or some other factor

that exists outside of themselves and their

organization. Is that usually the cause?

No, it's usually those, those things that you're

talking about there these outside factors tend to be

reasons that are just more convenient and easier for us to

point at, because sometimes it's hard to look in the mirror. You

know you you as a business owner and a founder, you may have done

a tremendous amount of work to start your business, build your

firm, to whatever level it's at now, and it's hard to start

letting go of some of that. So what happens is you start

building in a lot of invisible bottlenecks. And typically it's

the leader getting in their own way. They they are struggling to

do things in a new way, or to trust others to do things for

them. It's kind of a kind of a balance there, and when they hit

that point, it's easier to start looking outside instead of

looking internally to say, Am I growing in a way that aligns

with my value system? Do I have a team that's helping me grow

that way, and am I the one that's actually slowing things

down now, because I can't let go, that's a big part of it.

Yeah, that brings up what I think is a

pretty hotly debated topic, and that is, can they do it? In your

experience, folks that are asking that question, many of

them will will kind of jump to the conclusion, especially

because it's some external factor that's driving it, and

think, Oh, I've got to get someone else to run this. For

me, is that the best way to move forward?

Well, that really depends on where the bottlenecks

are, and that's the sort of the problem I have with the entire

concept, really, of of people coming in saying, there is a

solution. And here's what it is. You know, anybody who's heard me

talk before knows that I have this issue with what I call

catchphrase coaching and just coming in and saying, Oh,

everybody needs to do this a certain way. Is, in fact, a part

of the problem. What I would challenge everyone to do is

really look at yourself and your business and say, Why did I do

this in the first place? And what are the values beyond money

that you're doing it for? And then are those decisions you're

making aligning with those values? Sometimes it means you

just have to be more efficient in the way you do things in your

processes. Sometimes it's more of a updating tools and things

like that, and sometimes it is a delegation factor. So there's no

shortcut answer, and all of us as business owners know this.

Every time we try a shortcut, it ends up getting us mediocre

results. Right? We have to put in the work to actually make it

work.

We also don't have to just completely guess or

make things up out of the Wild. You've got something you call

the STAR method. And walk us through a little bit about what

are the different components of that method, and how can folks

use it to break through the silent ceiling.

Yeah. So one thing that's makes star

scalability a little bit more unique is just the idea that

there is no one size fits all solution for every business. So

it really goes back to the core, and it says, Hey, before you

build a house here, you got to have the foundation, right? And

it starts with the s, which is your strategy. And we want to

have your strategic vision for your company and your life

really centered around your value system. Okay? We all have

different priorities and values. And again, I always challenge

everybody to say, beyond money, money is just a byproduct of

what you do. Why do you do it? And that's what you really have

to ask, even if money is part of the answer, what's the money

for? And then once you've got that, we start building the

vision for your firm, and then we get the team in place, which

is, of course, the T of star. We get the team in place, and we

start figuring out, how do we get people who are on board with

the same vision, and then get them trained to where we need to

be so that we can delegate effectively. And then the A is

for assets. That's all of your assets, for your firm, your

operational assets, your IP, your technology, tools, you name

it, your buildings, your machines, whatever you have.

It's anything that you can use to leverage your process better.

And then the one thing that's really unique about the star

scalability method is the R. We don't want to focus on results.

We want to focus on rewards. And the difference is, as humans,

when we focus on something, we tend to get more of it. So if

you're focusing on a result you don't want it's actually harder

to achieve a positive result. If you focus on something that's

negative, you're going to get more negative. So what you want

to do is change your perspective and how you reward yourself and

your team to a reward system that rewards the decisions that

generate profitability and scalability. And it's a slight

mind shift difference that makes an enormous impact in everybody

that we work. That's how you design the template for your own

business for scalability.

Yeah, I really like that. I want to dive into

something that I think is very subtle but very important about

the first two elements of that. So with the strategy, the

essence star, this idea that we're going after your vision,

singular for the founder, there's so many who try and pick

like, the right vision, because somebody else has it, or

somebody else thinks it's important, or they want the

right thing for their team. But if they're not behind it from

the start, it's dead on arrival. What is it? How do you help

someone go about finding their vision beyond money.

So when you want to explore that, you really do

have to sit down and have a conversation. It's it's

difficult to have the conversation with yourself,

right? Because having that outside perspective can ask you

the tough questions. You know, I can sit there, for example, and

ask a business owner, well, why? Well, why? And keep pushing one

level further and another level further, but it is difficult to

do on your own, not impossible, but more difficult. Now, the

reason it is so important exactly as you said, if you're

picking a vision out of thin air that seems like it's either

popular or will be popular with your customer base, for example,

or the people you think you're going to be working with, it's

never going to truly connect with you, and then everything

you do is going to feel like work. And most of us, who are

business owners, picked the businesses we did because we

found something enjoyable or exciting or rewarding about

being in that line of business, if we don't do our vision the

same way for the business, then it just becomes work, and at

that point, you might as well go work for somebody else on a job

that you hate, because you're going to create a job that you

hate.

It's so true and and on the flip side of

that, it we're not quite out of the woods yet, because you find

something that's super motivating to you, you really

unpack like, what's that why? And then you you realize you've

actually got to motivate the whole team around it. How do you

then interpret that into something that the whole team

can rally around, especially if it's something that's very, very

personal to you.

That's an excellent question, and one that

I really always find an interesting challenge in

addressing, because part of that is going to change a little bit

based on whether you are trying to go back in time and put this

into an existing business and with an existing team, it's

obviously a little bit more challenging, right? And that's

where the reward system helps to do that, because if we generate

rewards around the behaviors we want that align with the values,

that kind of helps to motivate in the right direction, I guess

is the word I'm looking for. But it's a little bit easier if you

just start from scratch. So for those people who are in the

earlier stages, even if you're not at like stage four or what

have you yet, and you're listening to this, I would say

that is something you want to think about right off the bat,

because the earlier you can address it, then when you get to

a point where you are hiring staff or expanding your team,

you can look for the people that share the same value systems.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Joe, there's this question

that I have that ask everyone. I'm interested to see what you

have to say. But the question is this, what is the biggest secret

you wish wasn't a secret at all? What's that one thing you wish

everybody watching or listening today knew?

You know, a lot of businesses don't need to

actually grow faster. They need to grow cleaner and more

efficiently, because it's really not about size. It's about

sustainability.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting, because that's

not nearly as romantic, right? It's, it's, you know, no one

ever brags like I grew my business cleaner. And even if

they were to try, it's actually difficult to explain sometimes

what it looks like. And so it's such an interesting dynamic,

because it's true. And if you were to show a business owner,

hey, here's what this looks like, almost all of them would

take it. Why do you think we're so reluctant to jump there

first?

I think as business owners, one of the

problems that we have is the fact that we've put our heart

and our souls and so much time from our personal lives into our

business, and a lot of us have invested everything we have

financially too, right into our businesses, in startup mode, and

it feels so personal that it's really hard to let go of the way

we built it, to keep pace with what's happening in the world,

And to let go enough to let others help us, because we feel

like we're, you know, you know, for those of you who are

parents, it's like, it's like letting your kid go to school

the first time. You know, you're terrified of seeing him get on

the bus the first time. It's the same thing with your business

and and we have those mental blocks internally of, because I

did it, I'm the only one that can do it, and that's really

hard to let go of, but we end up holding ourselves back and

making decisions that hold our business back.

Yeah, Joe, I know there's some folks

listening that would love to hear more about the work that

you do and connect with you. Where can they find out about

you, your your work, and where can they link up with you?

Absolutely. So the best way to get in touch

with me is through my website. My website is JP coaching

now.com and then from there, you can connect with me on all the

different social media platforms, whether it be

LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, all of those things. You've got my

email and phone there, and even links out there to buy the book

about the star scalability method called fall of the star.

Fantastic. We'll get all that in the show

notes for you. Do check it out. This is fantastic material, and

we've only scratched the surface, Joe, thank you for

being on it really was a privilege and honor. Having you

here with us today. I love this conversation. I know someone

needed to hear it, and for those of you who are listening and

watching today, you know your time and attention mean the

world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation.

As I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take

care.