In this clarifying episode, Scott Ritzheimer, Founder of Scale Architects, shares why many founders enter Whitewater too early and how to stay in the Fun stage longer. If you’re implementing systems to avoid complexity or feel stuck between growth and process, you won’t want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why trying to prevent Whitewater often pushes you into it prematurely

- How to recognize the only right reason to enter Whitewater—when operators hit their limit

- What style mix lets you maximize Fun before complexity forces the next stage

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 I wanted to take

a moment here before things got really busy, as we're looking to

launch my new book, The Founder's Game, which is coming

out in February, to talk about a conversation I've been having a

lot with my clients, and specifically, we're going to do

a little mini series here called "You're Not in Whitewater Yet.

Now, many of you will know what that means. You know that

Whitewater is a stage in Les McEwen, a dear friend and mentor

of mine, and in his model called the Predictable Success model,

and it's a tough stage. It's the thing that separates us from

when we could grow in the fun stage to when we can scale in

the predictable success stage, and it's a really, really hard

stage. And for that reason, a lot of people like me have gone

into the business of coaching, consulting, and writing about

the things that you need to do to get out of whitewater.

However, that's created a problem that a lot of people

didn't have before, and that problem is that trying to

prevent whitewater by doing several things we'll talk about

throughout this series-very common things, things that you

probably have done yourself-trying to prevent

whitewater is actually one of the fastest ways to land

yourself there prematurely. And to explain what I mean, I want

to tell a quick story, a funny story about one of my sons,

Liam. And this was when he was in elementary school, and they

have this thing at their school called the Businesses of

Tomorrow, and it's this cool little job. It's not a job fair,

but it's like a business fair where all of the, I believe it's

fourth graders, get together, and they set up a stand and they

they create a business and they pitch it to all of the parents

and the other kids from the elementary school who come

through. It's this really cool entrepreneurial endeavor in

elementary school, and it's a big deal to them because whoever

gets the most tickets, you you you award the best businesses

with tickets, and whoever gets the best ticket ticket, whoever

gets the most tickets gets bragging rights. They they get

to be the one who's got the business of tomorrow, and so

they do all kinds of fun stuff. They're pretty much all about

video games and sports, and every once in a while, some food

in there smattered in. But it's a lot of fun. So the day comes.

It's businesses of tomorrow day. It's pitch day, and Liam has

worked for months on you know his presentation, his little

booth. He's got all of his talking points. He's got it

already, and he's nervous as I'll get out. And so, what that

looks like for us is five a.m. The door to my bedroom comes

flailing open. I think it actually dented the wall, and so

that's the way to wake up, right? And Liam comes bursting

through our room, runs straight through our room to the

bathroom, and then into the big master closet, where you know

all of our clothes are, and he's like crashing around in there

for five or 10 minutes. And again, I'm like half groggy

because it's five a.m. I'm not really awake yet. I don't know

what's going on, and I just figure I'm going to ride it out.

Yeah, let's just see what happens. And again, about 510

minutes later, I don't remember exactly what it was. He comes

out of the bathroom. Every light is on now, and he's again. He's

in fourth grade, and he's he's a little guy. He's wearing one of

my suits, and I'm not the tallest person in the world, but

I'm taller than a fourth grader. We'll put it that way. And he he

looked really funny, and and in the cutest possible way, but he

thought that putting on my suit made him a businessman. But the

reality of it is that that wasn't going to help him in his

presentation because it didn't fit. It wasn't the right suit

for him, and so instead we we walked over to his room.

We we found his you know his uniform and his nice button up

shirt and everything that fit. We got him all suited up and and

sent him off. And he did a great job. He had a lot of fun with

it. And I I will never forget that story because it

illustrates something that I see my clients, especially my new

clients, folks that I meet for the first time, many of them

come to me because of Whitewater. It is a huge part of

what we do. It's a huge part of what we talk about, and so you

know, along with Les and our other scale architects, we're

known for helping folks get out of this Whitewater stage. But

the thing that's changed, even in just the five years that I've

done that, or the 10 years since I first learned about the model.

I have found it's actually far more likely to get into

whitewater than it ever was before, but not for the right

reasons, and that's what I really want to explore in this

series. Because there's a good chance that many of you watching

or listening to this will recognize and resonate with a

lot of the things that we talk about when I describe the

whitewater stage here in a minute or two, and you'll think,

"Gosh, I'm in whitewater, but you might not be, or at least

you probably aren't for the right reasons, and to understand

why that is, one of the biggest factors is that the whitewater

stage is a really hard stage. And again, we'll talk about it

in a moment. But because it's such a hard stage, there's lots

of people like me over the last 3040, 50 years who have entered

into this coaching consulting space, which almost didn't exist

50 years ago, and we've done it either intentionally or

intuitively with this intent of kind of helping people with this

whitewater stage. However, you can only help someone in

whitewater if they're actually in whitewater, and

unfortunately, the craziest thing happens. But what happens

is we start to teach people how to get out of whitewater by

getting them into whitewater. That's right. We we what's

happening now more than ever before is that folks are getting

into whitewater for the wrong reasons. They're not actually

being pushed into whitewater. They're pushing themselves into

whitewater, and that's just about crazy. But it'll make

sense why it's happening. We're going to unpack what's

happening, and we're going to help you to avoid that. and And

for those of you who are there right now, we're going to help

you to unwind it and really start to succeed. So to do this,

we've got to spend a little bit of time. We're in this first

episode here. I'm going to unpack the least you need to

know about a couple of models and frameworks that are relevant

here, so that you can understand the language that I'm going to

use. And the first thing that we have to address is we have to

address what these different stages are. Now, on this show,

we talk a lot about levels, and those levels are the individual

levels that you go through as a founder, and those run to some

extent in parallel with, or a better way of saying it is

alongside the stages that your organization goes through, or

your team, or your group. Any group of two or more goes

through these seven stages. And again, I know this is a little

confusing. There's levels and stages, so just bear with me.

What we're talking about here are the seven stages that

organizations go through from launch to death and at the end,

and the first of those stages is the early struggle stage. An

early struggle is it's just a fight for survival. We're trying

to find a profitable, sustainable market. It's very

rare that folks will confuse early struggle with whitewater.

Some do. I've actually had that happen, but the reason for that

is not because they're both easy or hard, or is that early

struggle makes sense for why it's hard because it's you're

creating something from nothing. And so those first few years of

just trying to make this thing profitable were in early

struggle. The second stage, very technical name. It's called fun.

Les named it fun. It's just brilliant name.

Unfortunately, most of us don't recognize that it's fun until we

lose it. However, the fun stage is a stage where we sell, sell,

sell. We just go and get it done. We we found our

profitable, sustainable market in early struggle, and because

of that, we're just mining that market, and less accurately

describes that the key here is to make sure that you're mining

that market, you're driving revenue, you're getting things

done, and fun really if you let it can be a whole lot of fun,

and then there's this whitewater stage, and and what whitewater

is is where the complexity in the organization causes us to

cause problems. We create so much success in fun that it

necessarily thrusts us to a new level of complexity in which our

mo, our modus operandi from fun doesn't work anymore, and that's

really important. That is the only reason why we should end up

in whitewater is because the complexity that comes from our

success, from the size and scope of what we're doing, pushes us

into whitewater. Now, there's three other ways that we can do

this unintentionally, and we don't want to do that because

when we do, we actually end up hitting whitewater way too soon,

way prematurely, and we end up looking like Liam dressed in

someone else's clothes. It's not pretty, so that's the whitewater

stage. And whitewater is what keeps us from really scaling. We

have to learn to build a decision-making machine by fully

adopting systems and processes. And you might want to pay

attention to that because it's an important part later in the

series. From there, we end up with the the fourth stage, which

is a pretty cool stage. Again, it's the predictable success

stage where you can scale to whatever size your market will

allow or that you want. And we do that by you know leveraging

the systems and processes we learned in Whitewater, and also

leveraging the innovate. And ingenuity and creativity and

drive that helped us get out of early struggle and into fun. We

put all those together, and that's what allows us to not

only achieve but sustain predictable success. However,

there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and what

happens is that we start to push too much system in process

because it got us out of whitewater and we end up in

treadmill where we're over processed for the first time.

And then there's a few other stages that aren't really

relevant to this journey. There's the big rut and death

rattle, and and we're not really going to talk about those too

much in this series. So I'm just going to leave those for another

time. If you want to know more about it, check out the

Predictable Success book behind me. It's fantastic, easy read.

It's a lot of fun. There's an audiobook too for those of you

who like to listen to stuff. What I want to dial in on then

is this whitewater stage, and namely the stage that happens

before, which is the fun stage. One of the common misconceptions

when I first teach fun is that fun we we misinterpret fun as

easy, and we think, well, if it's not easy, it must be

whitewater, and that couldn't be further from the truth. Fun is

this, you know, breathless sprint across the finish line

each and every day. The reason that it's fun is because we're

doing that and we're winning, right? It's the reason why

sports are fun for a lot of folks. Because if you look at

what you're doing in sports, especially in like something

like tackle football, you're getting obliterated most of the

time, but it's fun, especially if you win. That's kind of what

fun is like. It's a full contact sport, and it's not easy. And

so, in this fun stage, one of the things that you'll

recognize, and those of you who are familiar with the

predictable success model, will know that there are some people

who are very well suited to the predictable success to this fun

stage, and there are some folks who who aren't, and that's a

really really big deal because there are four different

leadership styles. There's four ways that we show up for work.

There's four ways that an individual can help lead a team

to success, and it's important that we understand these styles

as well because it's the intersection between these two

worlds that's going to help us explain what we get, what we're

getting wrong, and how to correct it. So, of these four

styles, quickly: visionary idea people, operators, get stuff

done, people, processors, process people, and

synergists-people, people. We have these four different

styles. We have other episodes on this, and there's a bunch of

stuff on the website. We'll link it in the show notes, but you

can check out all of those different styles. You can even

take the assessment for free if you'd like. However, one of the

things that we have to recognize is that there's an ideal style

combination, not just for a person, but for a team and for

an organization. And the the only two that I'm really going

to talk about now are the predictable success stage, that

one up at the top where we can scale. Well, the ideal

combination there is visionaries, operators,

processors, and synergists. We need all four styles for a bunch

of reasons. We're not going to go into here, but just suffice

it to say, there's a place for everyone, and the reason why I

want to start there is because I want to make it really clear

that none of the four styles is like worse than the other. It's

not like there are good styles and bad styles, but there are

stage appropriate and stage inappropriate styles, and that's

really important because that's most of what we're going to talk

is how stage inappropriate style biases and

skews will push us out of the fun stage prematurely, and that

stinks because I mean even if you don't know what they are,

but you're just given the opportunity to grow in fun or

fight against whitewater, which one do you want? It's not a hard

choice, and so it's pretty obvious that what we want to do

here is to not have to fuss with whitewater if we don't have to.

In fact, I can say this even more concretely, and that is

that while you're trying to grow, even if you're trying to

get to predictable success, no one should ever want to get to

Whitewater. No one should ever implement a process to try and

get to Whitewater. In fact, we want just the opposite. We want

to keep Whitewater away for as long as we can, while we still

grow in in order with our vision and what we're trying to

accomplish. And again, that's really important because the

goal again is not to implement something that gets us to

whitewater so we can get to predictable success faster.

Instead, the goal is to implement things that allow us

to succeed in fun and run those plays into the ground. I mean,

run them again and again and again until we can't run them

anymore. And the reason we can't run them anymore is whitewater.

To to try and keep this from being too academic, I want to

show you the real reason why you should end in whitewater and

what that looks like inside of an organization. So the real

reason that you should run into whitewater is. Because you have

you've mastered the style combination that works best in

fun, which is effectively a visionary or two surrounded by a

whole bunch of operators, namely, processors and

synergists are missing from the equation. Now you might have

them inside your organization, but preferably they're in a

supporting role, or they're just a blend with some of the other

styles. But really, what we want to to have the ideal, right? Not

actual, but ideal balance inside of the fun stage to to get as

big as we can in fun, to have as much fun as we can, to stay in

fun as long as possible. The ideal balance is a visionary

quarterbacking a bunch of operators, and that's really

important because that is actually the description for

when fun is over is when that play stops working. What that

generally looks like is again we have a visionary. They've got a

bunch of operators, and they're just they're just getting stuff

done all over the place. Now it's a little haphazard because

there aren't a whole bunch of systems and processes.

Maybe some like SOPs at the front line, but like the minimum

system and process that we need. It's highly effective. It's very

effortful, and the best way I can describe it is is that it's

like we're making diving catches on every play, and we've started

to drop the ball. If you're making diving catches on every

play or almost every play, if you're relying on heroes and

it's worked for a long time, right, or it's worked to to grow

your organization, and that's not working anymore. What we've

what we've reached is the point where we are over operated. Does

that make sense? Where we've moved to the place where we have

too much operator because we've we've grown so big, we've

created so much complexity that just the operator style enough

isn't enough to do it anymore. We have too many operators to

just keep trying to operate. And the best kind of indication is

that your best operators, the folks that you rely on the most,

the ones blood, sweat, and tears inside the organization, you

know, godfather to your children, kind of a thing, when

they start screwing up, when they start dropping the ball,

that's a great sign that you've you you could be in the actual

whitewater stage. If you get to whitewater for any other reason

than your operators have been given free rein to drive it as

far as they can and they have hit their limit, you're probably

in whitewater for the wrong reasons, and we can boil down

those wrong reasons into three different categories. So the

first one is that we are over visionaryed; we have too much

vision or too many visionaries, and I'll tell you what that

looks like in the next episode. The next one we're going to

explore is where we are too processed. The real irony here

is that you can get to whitewater too soon by adding

system and process. And you might be thinking, "But Scott,

didn't you say we need systems and processes to get out of

whitewater? Yes, exactly. But I'll tell you why that doesn't

work in the the third episode of this series, and then the fourth

episode of the series, we're going to explore how being over

synergized or being too people centric in the fun stage will

prematurely put you in whitewater. In any of these

cases, being over visionary, over processored, or over

synergized, we can look like we're doing the right things. We

can talk like we're doing the right things. We can actually

follow what's in the book of some really intelligent people,

but end up making things a heck of a lot worse. And the real

problem with all three of those is not just that they land us in

whitewater, but they make whitewater two times as hard to

get out of, and takes two times as long to do it, and we don't

want to do that. And so, what I want to explore in this is what

we can do to make sure we don't end up in whitewater

prematurely. How to get out if you have ended up in white water

prematurely, and what the right way is to navigate all of this.

We'll do this throughout the rest of this series, and it's

going to be a whole lot of fun. So I'm glad you stayed with me.

I know this is a little long. I know it's a little academic. I

just needed to give you some of the language. I needed to give

you some of these styles. I needed to set the stage so we

can really dial in on one of these problems. And what I'll

help you do over the next three is identify whether or not this

is something you're falling into, and if so, what you can do

about it. I'll see you there. Hey everyone, Scott Ritzheimer

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

foundersquiz.com.

It'll pinpoint exactly where you are and give you tailored tips

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founder. If you got something out of today's episode, don't

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founders like you, and let's be honest, it means a ton to me, my

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episode.