The second set of Questions by Leadership Team members of the Businesses we are coaching on reading Start to Scale by Verne Harnish as a warm-up to a deep-dive immersion with him as part of RYD Community EXPAND Event on 15-Jan-25:

Q1. How do I make people down the stream, understand the vision and have faith in this journey?
This would need you to grow in 3 ways:

a. Leadership Depth: Have unshakeable belief and faith in the shared Vision (Purpose) and the journey that every conversation you have with your people is alive with the passion for creating a. new future in alignment with this vision that leaves your people touched, moved and inspired. This requires strengthening of Communicating Powerfully in the World of Others leadership depth muscle. 

b. Business Excellence: 
i. Monthly Meetings with all the People Leaders month on month to transfer the DNA of the Founder and the senior leadership team to all people leaders in the business
ii. Vision Summary implementation for everyone that gives clarity to each team member in the business how what they are doing is contributing to fulfilling on the Purpose of the business.
iii. Gamifying the journey, one quarter at a time.

c. Craft Mastery: Deep commitment to learn and grow across Leadership Depth, Business Excellence and Domain Knowledge to be the world's best in your industry in order to make a massive difference to your customers and people.


Q2. How do we build the word called ownership within the team rather than a 9-6 job?
By infusing Purpose and Core Values through the whole organization that people bring their heart, soul and all of their limitless mind's potential instead of just body and part of their mind's intellectual capacity.

When people work for money, heart, soul and mind's full capacity is not engaged.

Make your organisation's Purpose so transformative that people are purpose-inspired and excited to come to work on Monday mornings and are energised by the contribution they are making to their country and all of humanity.

In fact, there's research that says that people live longer if they are purpose inspired. Give your people longer lives by giving them a Purpose that touches, moves and inspires them. For that, the Founder / CEO and the leadership team has to be touched, moved and inspired by the Purpose.


Q3. How should we run an effective 30 min weekly business update ? What should we do before, during and after this discussion?
For an effective weekly meeting, a minute by minute plan is given in Start to Scale - page 109 - as part of Meeting Rhythm chapter. Let's invest our creative energy in innovating products and services for our customers that make a massive difference to them, instead of spending time on re-inventing Business Excellence frameworks. 

Meeting Rhythm is the first Rockefeller that we want to implement.


Q4. How can we define our priorities effectively, how do we determine if the identified priorities are truly the ones that will drive our business scaling efforts?

Every quarter, it's important to have one priority from the People side and one priority on the Process side for balanced growth to scale the business.

Quarterly priorities are defined in alignment with Annual Business Priorities, which are defined in alignment with the 3 Years Goals, which are defined in alignment with the organisation's 10 to 25 years Big Hairy Audacious Goal which is a measurable milestone on the way to achieving the Organisation's Purpose.

​Q5. How can I make the Brand promise a way, without any fear of competition catching up?
Here's how:
i. By understanding what is the Job-To-Be-Done for the customers through customer conversations. What is your customers' greatest needs? What is the #1 job the customer needs you to do for them? And, making that your brand promise.

ii. Make a measurable promise to the customer: What's your measurable Brand Promise? 

iii. Then, tracking and evolving all business processes to deliver on the measurable promise made to the customer.

iv. Keeping a weekly eye on what's happening in the marketplace through a weekly rhythm of collecting and reviewing customer and employee data in the Weekly Strategy Execution Meeting (how to run this meeting is on page 109 in Start to Scale) so that you can respond quickly to the changing needs of the customer. Brand Promise will change in response to the changing needs of the customer.

v. It's important to decide who you want to serve - buyer personas - and, what is each of their measured 'job to be done'? This is THE critical strategy question that determines the rest of your business strategy and execution.


Q6. If a business is stuck at a growth plateau despite following your methodologies, what steps should the leadership team take to identify and overcome the bottleneck?
The scaling-up methodology is an integration of the work of thought leaders in the world of business. In my experience, if businesses don't get results after implementing the methodology, the implementation of the methodology has not been done correctly.

Therefore, the coach, the CEO and the leadership team work hand in hand for the implementation. 

Additionally, it is important for all the people leaders to learn and understand the entire framework because little knowledge is dangerous. That is why we had the Scaling-up Learning Expedition. And, on 7-Aug-25 Thursday and 8-Aug-25 Friday, we are hosting Verne in Gurgaon for a Scaling-up in-person Masterclass to take the learning deeper into the businesses we are coaching.


Q7. Making a brand promise is a huge commitment which requires people, money and time to implement it. So is it ok for a new organisation to start without a brand promise and later figure out what brand promise it can sincerely offer to its customer with full commitment.
Going back to First Principles, 

Revenue is an expression of the difference a business is making to its customers. Greater a contribution a business makes to its customers, higher the customer is willing to pay and more repeat purchases will the customer make.

Profitability is an expression of the difference an organization makes to its employees because Operational Excellence, which results in increasing the profit margin, is a function of a learning, super-performing, nurturing culture. 

Strategy is an action plan to increase the contribution the business makes to its customer and employee communities as measured by Revenue and Profit.

Brand Promise is what the customer really needs, the Job-to-be-Done for the customer.

Research tell us that if we tell the customers what we are going to deliver to them (brand promise) and give a measure of what exactly (measurable brand promise), and go ahead and deliver that exactly as per the measure, that brand is more successful and profitable.

If a new business wants to be profitable and attract more customers, it would make sense for the business to deeply understand its customers and offer them what they really need instead of spraying and praying which is what I see most start-ups do.

As per a Harvard study, 75% of start-ups fail in the first year. As per another study, 90% of start-ups fail in the first five years of their existence. Venture Capitalists work with an assumption of 20% success in their portfolio.

We can make 100% of start-ups succeed if we apply the art, science and math of building a great business by learning with a Beginner's Mind, understanding and implementing across the 3 growth levers - Business Excellence, Craft Mastery and Leadership Depth.

So, it is OK for a new business to start without a brand promise because it didn't know any better but for it to be successful and grow exponentially, the leadership team must learn, understand and implement a measurable Brand Promise that it makes an effort to consistently deliver on. And, that would require learning, understanding and implementing the learnings across the 3 growth levers - Business Excellence, Craft Mastery and Leadership Depth.

It actually is more expensive or more risky to not do a measurable brand promise.


Q8. Understand the Right Things Right Model more deeply, how can we gauge if we are following it correctly?
If revenue and profits are not increasing, and the drama in the business continues, then we know there's a problem in implementation.

Usually, when there is a problem which means revenue and / or profits are not growing or declining, we have a tendency to blame people or the framework.

Whenever there's a problem, we need to take a Sacred Pause for reflection and do a 5-Whys Analysis with all the impacted people to uncover the root cause, followed by a 5-Hows Analysis to innovate a solution.

Problems are great to have because they are opportunities for creativity, innovation and growth.


Q9. How the Financial metrics mentioned will measure healthy cashflow apart from Cash Conversion Cycle which is a KPI?
There are several ways businesses can dramatically improve their Cash Conversion Cycle using Cash Acceleration Strategies, allowing them to fund growth with internally generated cash and freeing them from the grasp of banks and / or investors.

It is best to brainstorm ways to improve cash flow at every Quarterly Planning meeting and pick a related initiative as one of the Top 5 priorities for the quarter for the business to super focus on.

Here are 2 tools for such a brain-storming conversation with the leadership team:

The first set of Questions by Leadership Team members of the Businesses we are coaching on reading Start to Scale by Verne Harnish as a warm-up to a deep-dive immersion with him as part of RYD Community EXPAND Event on 15-Jan-25:

Q1. How do you take the whole organisation together on this journey of scaling up? 
Scaling-up Implementation is top-down, one leadership level at a time. Once the CEO and the Leadership Team are 100% committed and aligned to implement scaling-up, then each level of leadership learns the methodology and become partners in implementation.

Q2. How do we Fast-track the Scaling up process for an organisation?
CEO and the Leadership Team's alignment and commitment to implement Scaling-up; and learning and understanding the framework fully is key to fast-tracking.

Q3. How do you assimilate functional scale-up efforts to that of the organisations?
Based on the organisational annual and quarterly Business Priorities, the functional areas decide their priorities that would contribute to fulfilling on the organisational priorities.

One Page Strategic Plan tool becomes the single source of truth that has the entire organisation row in the same direction.

Q4. When people and execution, both require attention, what do you prioritise?
Here's the order of implementation I have found to be most effective - Core Ideology (Core Values, Purpose, BHAG) (to scale People) ➡️ Meeting Rhythms  (to scale Execution) ➡️ One Page Strategic Plan (to strengthen strategy alignment and execution) ➡️ Process Accountability Chart (for scaling up processes and people) ➡️ SWT (for scaling Strategy) ➡️ 7-Strata (for scaling Strategy) ➡️ and the cycle continues endlessly across People, Strategy, Execution, Cash; one quarter at a time

Therefore, it's not about choosing Execution over People, or vice-versa. It's more about choosing your Top 5 quarterly business priorities in alignment with your annual business priorities in alignment with your 3 Years Goals in alignment with you 10 to 25 years Big Hairy Audacious Goal to transform the world through your Business.

You could implement one execution scaling-up tool and one people scaling-up tool based on what would most support you to fulfil on your organisational business priorities for the quarter.

Q5. How to determine the 5-9 processes that run the organisation?
A good question to ask is - How do we make money? - and trace what the business does to make money. 

Draw it visually and you will be able to extract 5 to 9 critical processes.

Q6. While working to shorten the cash conversion cycle, we face challenges due to clients being used to our previous processes. Our team finds it difficult to initiate these conversations of advance money etc, as we’ve not addressed such matters with clients before. Also, clients often push back, stating that this isn’t how we’ve operated in the past. How do we overcome this problem?
By nurturing deeper relationships with the clients.

​Q7. I do understand that this is a business structure approach. But one of our key functions is creativity. And, creativity truly thrives in chaos. It needs you to go taste everything, see everything, do nothing till it comes to you. It needs indiscipline. If you want ideas that will change the fortunes of the brand and make the world take a pause – you need it to flourish and thrive. You have to create a space of security for someone to bring their best idea fearlessly to you. With such a structured approach, how do you keep the spontaneity of creative process alive? How do you avoid stifling it?
Here's another perspective:
Creativity can be sourced in Chaos; yet Creativity and Spontaneity can flow from Mindfulness, Heartfulness and Soulfulness which can only be accessed through Discipline.

Based on what we understand from Psychology, 
Higher the Anxiety, lower the spontaneity. Lower the spontaneity, lower the creativity.
Lower the Anxiety, higher the spontaneity. Higher the spontaneity, higher the creativity.

Chaos inside or outside results in higher anxiety.

Q8. Adoption of processes is typically top down, in an organisation that fundamentally believes in the power of hustle. Often leadership becomes the first to abandon them when they need to choose between following a process vs anything else (typically more short term). How do we overcome this collectively? 
The culture needs to change from Hustle to a commitment to Greatness. It's a choice that the leadership team needs to collectively make and commit to. Once the Leadership Team is aligned and committed to Greatness, 90% of the job is done.

Q9. What can I do, in my role, to support this? How to create more belief or motivation? 
Learn and be the master of the Scaling-up methodology. More you learn, greater belief and motivation you will access.
Have you finished reading Start to Scale?

Q10. In a company with dominant mid and early talent being young millennials or GenZ, they see processes as rigid. How do we still embed these processes and Rockefeller habits?
The employees mirror the leadership team, the way children mirror their parent's behaviour. If you are seeing resistance to processes at lower levels of the organisation, it's a good idea to assess the resistance to processes in the Leadership Team.

Q11. What level of rigidity does one need to maintain for people to adhere to? Execution requires discipline, how do u set consequences for non adherence which are assertive yet empathetic?
When people play cricket, for example, the players don't question the rules. In fact, the rules makes the game more exciting. 

Gamification is the answer, not giving consequences for non-adherence.

Building a great business is a Team Sport and it's a fun game with rules like all games have.

Q12. How much time should we be spending outside of the day-to-day operations of the business on implementing the scaling-up processes?
The day to day operations of the business need to follow the Scaling-up process.

What is needed is time for learning, which is a fundamental skill to building a great organization.

Trust the above answers serve in some way to progress each one of you on your good to great journey 💜

Love and Light,
j.