While each of these is critical to scaling up your business, if you don’t surround yourself with the right people – people you can trust to manage their departments and work together for the greater good – you’ll find yourself a prisoner of day-to-day operations. Forever stuck in the middle of things. Forever shackled to the business. And unless you can liberate yourself from this trap, the business can only grow so far. Scaling up will hit an unbreakable barrier, held back by your entrenchment.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Consider the story of Charlie Meyer:

Common Traps

Business owners commonly make three mistakes that cause them to believe they must – often by themselves alone – carry the load of growing their business. In the face of increasing complexity when scaling up, business owners, CEOs, and executive leaders tend to tolerate underperforming teams who often work at cross purposes. This creates confusion, toxic cultures, and inefficiencies that hold back business growth. Worst of all for business leaders, it keeps them shackled to the daily grind, unable to delegate or enjoy the feeling that the business is in capable hands without them.

Like most business owners, Charlie Meyer faced these issues. But unlike most business owners, Charlie faced them head-on and found a way to free himself while his business scaled up.

Charlie’s Story

Charlie Meyer is the cofounder of a private equity firm called Threefold, which, in turn, has interests in multiple businesses. Recently, Charlie, his wife Meredith, daughter Sabrina, and sons Tre and Crosby, started an around-the-world adventure. How could this middle-aged entrepreneur and family manage to take seven months off to embark on this journey?

The answer starts with three guiding principles that drives Charlie’s world view:

1. Be Purpose-driven: Charlie trusts his business partner, Mark Riggle, to cover for him while on this amazing adventure with his family. They co-founded Threefold, on a higher purpose, their “Why,” which is Empowering The Other. Operating from a position of strong leadership skills, Charlie and Mark empower their operating partners to have full entrepreneurial control of the businesses they operate. Thus, by empowering others, Charlie was free to “exit” from being sucked into the drama of daily operations.
2. Live Your Core Values: Charlie and Mark created an organizational climate to grow, by hiring staff according to their core values. Trust Beats Control builds respect between partners, teammates, and customers. Break It Better is about innovation and an environment of continuous improvement. Win Together is a team mentality that winning does NOT have to come at the cost of others. This values-driven culture liberates Charlie to be confident about leaders in his culture who know how to grow!
3. Scale Up. Charlie and Mark leverage the Scaling Up Growth Tools developed by Verne Harnish and his Scaling Up Coaching partners. Charlie can be free because he and Mark have grown an organizational climate where every partner is accountable to engage in Executive Coaching, grounded in the Emotional Social Intelligence, and Brain-Based Coaching from the NeuroLeadership Institute. Charlie is free because he and Mark have grown a coaching culture within our business’s teamwork, collaboration, and service based on the belief that the greatest investment we can make is in others.

The Bottom Line:

Even if your business is not a private equity firm, I challenge you to ask yourself and your executive team: What will it take for you to be free – like Charlie – from the common traps of entrepreneurs, mistakes that keep them shackled to their business?