[Feature Friday] Capacity Architect Scott Ritzheimer on Stress-Free Growth: The ROI Online Podcast Ep. 75

Scott Ritzheimer: 0:03

We do a lot of work on the business, in the business, working with teams, helping structure all that, building systems and processes. But what I really want to hit on with founders is what's going on for them personally, right? Because the the entrepreneurs journey is probably the most personal business story out there. And for so many of us, you know, us in the business are wanting the same thing. And so I can't walk in and say, Hey, Here, let me help you do systems and processes and let me help you scale your business if we don't address the problems that you're facing individually.

Steve Brown: 0:41

Hi, everybody. Welcome to the ROI Online Podcast where we believe you, the courageous entrepreneurs of our day, are the invisible heroes of our economy, you not only improve our world with your ideas, your grit and your passion, but you make our world better. I'm Steve Brown and this is a place where we have great conversations with winners just like you while we laugh and learn together. Scott Ritzheimer, welcome to the ROI Online Podcast.

Scott Ritzheimer: 1:18

Steve, thanks for having me super excited about this conversation.

Steve Brown: 1:21

Yeah, me too. So you call yourself a capacity architect, your company is eightfigurefocused.com. The people that are listening to this they're entrepreneurs, they're business owners and right now we have to set the hook for why they want to lean in and listen to the rest of this conversation. Why Scott, are you the man that they need

Scott Ritzheimer: 1:46

Yeah, I want to rewind and we'll kind of get to hear from? to this in the story, but my story, I'm in my mid 20s, CEO of a multimillion dollar business, and making great money employing a bunch of people. Genuinely making a difference in the world by virtually anyone standard, I should have been jumping for joy but I was ready at any moment to walk away from the business at that point because, you know, what I love to talk about and what I think we don't talk about enough is the fact that success does not solve our problems. In fact, in my experience, and many people's experience that I work with now on a daily basis, success not only doesn't solve our problems, it actually makes them bigger, you know, it makes them harder. And you know that the question that I have for folks is, what are you going to do when you get what you want? Because when you get what you want, you realize it's got problems associated with it. Now, there's ways of solving those. But it takes a different mindset for sure.

Steve Brown: 2:47

Yeah. So that question, what is it that you want? If you were to ask everyone that you work with, what is it that you want? That's not well defined in what my experience is, what I wanted was what was kind of the default mantra from the peer companies that I was associated with. I would recognize that, oh, they're scaling the here, they're doing this, they're charging that. And I would mimic that because that was what I knew was the model of success. without really going, is this exactly what my team is perfect for? And is this really where we want to go?

Scott Ritzheimer: 3:27

Yeah, for sure. You know, I laugh, a mentor of mine, Matthew Pollard, you may have heard of him. But he says, you know, goals are a big thing for him. And he's like, you've got to set your goals. You know, because most of us where do we get our goals? We get our goals from like you're saying other businesses that we look up to, from mentors of ours, from our parents, from our drunk roommate, you know, like, we have everybody else's goals. But when's the last time we sat down and actually said, What do I want? You know, not what I've been taught to want, but what do I want?

Steve Brown: 3:59

Yeah. So you talk about systems as a key to success? And you talk about them, you know, three main things that every successful founder experiences. Yeah, that's not necessarily positive. But what is the system to start to identify, what is it that you really want?

Scott Ritzheimer: 4:23

Yeah, I think it's taken a step back. This is a great time of year to do it, you know, we're all talking about our goals for 2021, you know, we're talking about the new normal, we're talking about all this. I think what it is for me, you know, I don't know if this is the best place to go, but I'll tell you what did it for me is in 2017, my wife was pregnant and we found out she was going to have to go on bedrest at 18 weeks, and so that's a very long time to be on bedrest. Fought through all of that ended up having the baby about four weeks early, she was about 36 weeks and we spent the next four weeks in the Nikki with her as a preemie before she passed away. And when something big like that happens, it really, it makes you stop, it makes you take a step back and say, hey, what in the world is going on? And, you know, so for a lot of us, especially for us hard charging entrepreneurs unfortunately, sometimes that's what it takes, it takes one of those life events to happen to say, Hey, hold on a second, it absolutely doesn't have to be that way. You know, and I would hope that, you know, from my story, someone would get, hey, you know, it can be different. But for me stepping back, what I realized just personally was I didn't have a passion for running a really big business, I had a passion for helping other people bridge the gap from the small business that's succeeding, but hitting some of those barriers to getting through that really being able to become successful stay successful scale. That's the challenge that I love, being in a room with a team working through some of those problems. And so again, it took that really, really difficult life circumstance for me to recognize, hey, something's gotta give, something's got to change. But when I did, it really opened up a new world to say, hey, it's not about being the big CEO, you know, it's about doing what I love every single day.

Steve Brown: 6:46

Yeah, I'm sorry for your loss Scott. So when we start a business, first of all, that's really scary. We wrestle with the even the idea of doing it and finally give ourselves permission, pull the trigger, we get going and really, the first part of that is just making it through each month. And where what we're doing is, actually justifying why we started it, we're actually starting to build a prototype of what we envisioned, whether it's a service or a product, and we're starting to learn from little successes or failures. And then we'll all of a sudden, we get an employee that buys into what we're doing and we get some good customers that buy into what we're doing. And we find ourselves later that we had to change from a mindset of just making it through the week, making it through the month through, what are we going to do this year? And already, your business has changed, and already what you need to be successful and the way you approach it has changed, because you're not necessarily you shouldn't be so much doing all the services, doing all the sales, doing all the collections, invoicing, you're trying to set up teams behind you to deliver those. And so you wake up one day, and you see yourself, hey, we're down the road a piece here, systems I have fell in place, just kind of fell into place, a culture we have just kind of fell into place. How do you kind of stop, and evaluate, and reset and start to go where you want to go now instead of just finding yourself somewhere along the road later?

Scott Ritzheimer: 8:36

I think part of it is recognizing that you've actually earned the right to do that, you know? In the beginning days, it's tough, like, starting up a business, even starting a nonprofit is immensely challenging. And to an extent, like you have to roll with the punches, you have to take what's given to you got to make lemonade out of lemons, you know, and you're right, like there's this climb, you know, the way we describe it, we call this stage early struggle, and we say it's an existential fight for survival from a business standpoint. And what happens for entrepreneurs is that there are synapsis that are formed in their brain during this time that this is how I succeed as a business owner is to do whatever it takes, whenever it takes, however it takes to win and because winning and survival are the same thing. Well, then what happens as the business grows is winning and survival start to separate and honestly it's actually easier for other people in the business to see that because, you know, they come on and that gap is already there a little bit and then it gets bigger and bigger. For entrepreneurs, you know, what I'd encourage the first thing to recognize is, what is necessary today? If you've had some measure of success, if you found a market, you're making progress in that market, you find someone like, you know, you and your firm to get the external marketing stuff done, you actually afford the ability to be more selective. And not only do you get the luxury of that, it actually becomes essential because if you're trying to with 50 people run in 50 directions, different directions, that's a lot harder than five people running in different directions. And so the trick in the beginning is saying yes to everything, even when it just about kills you. The trick, once you've achieved some measure of success is to actually start saying no to things. And that's really, really difficult for a visionary whose you know, whose threat response goes into overdrive, you know, amygdalas firing, hey, you can't say no to something we might not survive. It's like, no, we're actually going to make payroll, even if we say no to this, it's like we're okay. But the big part here is recognizing that you're, like you said earlier, your business has changed. You know, what you need to do to succeed has changed, and it affords this wonderful luxury. But we have to recognize that difference.

Steve Brown: 11:08

Yeah. And that's the hidden the headline there, I like that, winning and survival can feel like the same thing but actually, they're two different things. When did you recognize them? When did it start to become apparent to you, obviously, later, you can look back, but when did it like the light bulb go off for you for that?

Scott Ritzheimer: 11:28

Yeah, that light bulb went off for me. So what ended up happening for us was we had a significant portion of our business came from events that we did across the country, we would do somewhere between 30 and 50 events. And at one point in time, that was about 60% of our income, they were really tough to do, it was really tough to get people there, events, especially small events were kind of dying slowly. And so you know, what, 5-10 years after we start this, we're saying like, conferences is what we called them, conferences are essential to our survival. But there was something nagging me about it, it's like, there's just something not quite right. And when I looked at it, our conferences were, there was about a million and a half dollar business line, at that point, had shrunk quite a bit over time. But when I looked at it, we were netting negative $300,000 a year on our conference sales. So it was costing us more to do the event and to do their services we sold at the events that we're actually making. And that was really an eye opening, finding for me, for us as an entire team, because we had never questioned like, of course conferences, they're bringing in over a million dollars a year, of course we need them. So when we find out, we're losing money, we're like, okay, we've either got to fix it, or kill it, and tried several things to fix it, realize the writing was on the wall, decided to kill it, which was terrifying. You know, like, we're going into the next year, we're starting to write goals, we love growth, you know, like, we're used to this kind of up into the right thing. And we're talking about cutting a seven figure business line. We wouldn't have been able to make that decision alone, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs are in this place where they kind of trust their magic eight ball. And, you know, it's like, they go with their gut, what their gut says wins, when the business is getting larger, you know, my gut was telling me, we could never afford that. But when we looked at as a team, when we looked at the data, when we looked at it from different perspectives, we figured, hey, not only do we think we can cut this, we can actually make up all of that income and if we do, you know, our profitability is going to go through the roof. And so what in hindsight looks like an obvious decision, you know, after we did that we did a handful of other changes internally, that were made possible by that move, we tripled our net income. And we made up every single dollar that we lost from those sales the year before, but again, it wasn't until for us, like we had to be taking a $300,000 lawsuit. So I'm a thick headed guy, you know and so I learned a lot of these things the hard way, and it's really my mission to help my thick headed friends, you know, to learn from my mistakes, because it doesn't have to go that far, that deep for us to recognize, hey, there's actually a better way of doing this.

Steve Brown: 14:37

We're talking with Scott Ritzheimer. He's a capacity architect, his company is eightfigurefocus.com. So Scott, you like to help business founders and their leadership teams scale their business, but what are the three main issues faced by every successful founder?

Scott Ritzheimer: 14:58

Yeah, when I work with with Folks, we do a lot of work on the business, in the business, working with teams, helping structure all that, building systems and processes. But what I really want to hit on with founders is what's going on for them personally, right? Because the entrepreneurs journey is probably the most personal business story out there. And for so many of us, you know, us and the business are one in the same thing. And so I can't walk in and say, Hey, Here, let me help you do systems and processes and let me help you scale your business if we don't address the problems that you're facing individually. And so like you're saying, there's three of those, I'm going to introduce them real quick. if folks want to learn more about it, we can talk about that at the end, there's a free resource I have, which is awesome. But basically, the first one is they're playing Jenga with their business and so, you know, I've got my little Jenga set back here. What they're doing, every time they go to grow, they're pulling it from somewhere else and sticking it up on top, we never really like look and say, hey, are we playing the right game? You know, it's just pulling from the top. So every time our top line goes up, our foundations getting weaker. And so what that does for us, as founders, we start feeling that and then we start spending a bunch of energy holding the bottom of the Jenga stack up, instead of taking a step back and saying, hey, how do we actually build a stronger business? Second one, you know, you have a question?

Steve Brown: 16:27

Well, I was curious. So give me an example, a Jenga example, I think is a great image and I played Jenga. And it makes perfect sense. But give me, let's connect a dot

Scott Ritzheimer: 16:39

Yeah, so story, I was working with, it here, give me an example. was actually a couple who were in business together in a marketing space, had a similar challenge to a lot of marketing companies, as you start getting up into the seven figure range. And it's a very different business, it's a very different game. And for them, what they did was they sold like a co-op marketing space, so they would get a distributor, and then all of a sudden, they get 100 clients all at once. So these guys are taking these big leaps, they had a couple of them were doing awesome and when I first met them, I met john, he told me in a rare moment of honesty, you know, between two basic strangers, he's like, I'm ready to quit. And it's like, What do you mean, you're ready to quit? Like I just heard you talking about how all these wonderful things are happening, your sales are going through the roof, your team is growing, like what's going on? And he's like, Rachel and I are exhausted, like, we're working 80 to 100 hours every single week on a light week, you know, and what was happening for them, you know, what Jenga looked like for them is they were constantly, them and their key leaders were constantly caught in this cycle, of pushing everything forward themselves. So if something had to get done, they were the ones to do it and they had other people, and they were trying to train them but at the end of the day, what they found when we were working together, was they were carrying forward, so many old practices, so many of those old yeses, you know, every website was different, it didn't need to be different, like they had a working model that worked, you know, they needed to start streamlining that. And so we looked at it, we looked at just the tasks of the leadership team and we realized about 40% of them were tasks that none of them should have been doing, I mean 40% of their workload. And so they're sitting there stressed out of their mind, because they're not getting to these really important issues, you know, they had some things around their budget that they really had to work through, they were wanting to pursue growth with some new distributors, and they just couldn't even touch it, because they were so overwhelmed by keeping up with the day to day, but then they realize, like, Hey, we don't actually need to be doing this. Some of it didn't have to be done at all, but a lot of it could go to employees on their team who are actually looking for work. And so, you know, I remember sitting in the meeting, and we kind of talk through this and then there's just this LOL and no one said anything. And, you know, I looked up at John and Rachel, they're sitting on my right and I still remember the look in their eyes. You know, to me, it was like this look of relief that I hadn't seen the entire time we'd been working together. And, you know, for them, they were able to walk out of that meeting, recognizing, hey, we not only have the capacity to keep up, we actually were way closer to being ready to expand than before and it's not going to take us working more hours to do it. It was huge, I mean, life changing moment for them genuinely.

Steve Brown: 19:48

Hey, I wanted to pause right here and tell you about a book that you need to get today. It's the funniest book on marketing. It's called The Golden Toilet, stop flushing your marketing budget into your website and build a system that grows your business. And guess who wrote it? That's right. I wrote it. And I wrote it just for you because I want to help you get past the last hurdles of setting up your business and getting it squared away. I wrote it so that you can avoid time wasting time, wasting money, wasting frustration, get the book on Audible, you can get it on Kindle, you can get it on Amazon, but get the book, take advantage of the insights in there and let me know what you think. And now back to this excellent episode. Excellent, excellent example it illustrates, I was shocked by this statistic what's the number here? I'll just go to the punch line is 1 out of 40 startups, only 1 out of 40 startups will ever make it to over a million dollars in annual revenue in a year, 1 out of 40. Those are extreme odds and it's because the requirement of having to change the way that you manage, the way that you, your business admin has to level up to make it past that point. So what's the second issue Scott?

Scott Ritzheimer: 21:23

Second one, and I actually referenced this one before when I was sharing my story, but it's that magic eight ball start seeming like it's a little faulty. And you know, I shared my story on it so just kind of practically what's going on there. So what you have happening is, you know, in the beginning, you have a small organization, fill in the blank for what that is, is different for different people. But, you know, you got a handful of folks running around as an entrepreneur, as a founder, you're touching everything, you know, you're the center hub, and all the spokes are there. And so just naturally, all the information is coming through your world. And so it's pret y easy, It's actually right to m ke gut based decisions at that point, because going and chas ng data, the data doesn't even exist, you know, so, you know great entrepreneurs are the nes who can make those gut leve decisions. Well, what happ ns again, we're talking abou , you know, earlier, the busi ess changes, and what it take to win changes, well, as the usiness is getting bigger, you tart delegating, you know, even something as simple as who buys the toilet paper, you know, like and you start delegating thin s, what happens is less and less of that information comes back to you. And that's right, like that's exactly what we want But the problem is your magi eight ball depended on all of t ose things. You know, your magi eight ball depended on the last three conversations that you ad with clients now that you h ve a sales team, you're not t lking with all those clien s all the time, and the way t at you got information befor is going away. And like I said, rightly it should, becaus if you were still trying to pro ess all the information, like y u're sitting in a million dollar business, that's exhausting, like no one has the time or ene gy to do that. And so, what ne ds to happen is what how that sh ws up for folks, they come t me, and they say, hey, I want to make better decisions, ou know, I want to make faster decisions. And the truth of it is, it's not about making bett r decisions or making fast r decisions, it's about actua ly defining, or building wh t I would call a decision ma ing machine. It's about creat ng a leadership team, creat ng a decision making culture in our organization, where decis ons can be made across the rganization at the lowest leve possible, and still be of you k ow, the utmost quality. An that's when you recognize, ey, the eight ball, you know, i can rest, you know, like, th re's still an element of that. B t what we do is we reserve that for those few issues that are th most important for the usiness. And you get back to th t place where the information th t you need to make those gut lev l decisions is commensurate wi h the information that y u have.

Steve Brown: 24:04

Wow, that means as a leader, you need to be able to deliberately create a culture that facilitates safety, to be able to help people start to make decisions, because that's risky. In an organization that safety doesn't exist I'm not gonna chip in and give some ideas when I could be blamed or it's not safe, or this would be a political moment to put myself at risk. And then someone go around me or submarine me.

Scott Ritzheimer: 24:34

Yeah, it's a hard transition because, you know, it's difficult for us as founders to let that go. But it's also, we've trained everyone to every time a big decision comes up, you know, I see this when I work with a team. So your first couple of times we work together we'll have a discussion, then a decision making moment happens and what happens? Everyone turns and looks at the leader. It's like what's he gonna do? Or What's she gonna do? And so we actually train everybody to depend on us to make the decisions. So you're right like not only do we have to work on ourselves taking that step out for a second and empowering others, but we also have to continuously and repeatedly again and again and again, make sure people understand that not only is it expected, but it's safe to contribute.

Steve Brown: 25:22

Yeah, here's the flip side. And I've been noticing this with my team, they're, you know, they're in that place where they can converse and help make decisions. I feel like I'm being lazy but I deliberately stay quiet during those conversations because I want them to do that. I'm excited because I'm getting fresh ideas. But there's this nagging thing that you're supposed to lead, you're supposed to speak up, you're supposed to have an opinion. But I'm like forcing myself to be this bump on a log in the background and I'm concerned, or I have these concerns that, are you being a good leader here, Steve? Or, is this healthy?

Scott Ritzheimer: 26:07

Absolutely healthy, you know, what I'm going for, the big win for me when I'm working with a team is I want to see largely equal contributions from everybody in the room. But I want to see debate happening all over the room, you know, because what happens when the leader steps up, they carry the big stick, whether or not you know, it has nothing to do with personality, or, you know, anything like that. It's just when, it's their company, so when they speak, everyone stops. And so what I do with the team is we will actively work to achieve what you're talking about where everyone else is contributing, and a lot of times it's the leader being quiet. Now the kind of boundary, if you will, like, Am I being a bad leader? The boundary on that is, Are you being quiet because you're afraid? Or are you being quiet because you're allowing them to space to, to learn how to make great decisions? Because if you're doing it because you're afraid, you know, the team seems to be going in one direction and you think it's another and you're afraid to say it, then you're modeling the worst possible behavior, right? You're telling everyone it's not okay to go against what the group says, you get into groupthink and it's awful for an organization. If you're sitting back and being quiet because you believe that the team can come to the right decision and you're going to help lead them there, then yes, absolutely. Do that again, and again, and again.

Steve Brown: 27:40

So what's the third issue that every successful leader faces?

Scott Ritzheimer: 27:45

Yeah. Third issue. So we actually talked about this a little bit in our pre call here. And you described it so eloquently. But basically, what happens is the culture in the organization starts to change. And there's, in the early days, there's a passion, that it really starts with you, but it touches everybody. And so there's just this enthusiasm, there's an all hands on deck all the time, it's not even questioned, well, you start bringing in more and more people, you have to hire them quickly. And just by virtue of their being more of them, things get a little complicated, little awkward politics can creep up. And what ends up happening is founder will find themselves in what I call a, you know, an organization that it has a state of self inflicted apathy. And even if you hire great people, if you don't change the way that you lead a large organization or a large group of people, because you still small businesses, in many cases, but if you don't change the way that you lead them, not everyone has access to you like they used to. And so just by virtue of you doing the same thing, you're actually changing the way you're leading your organization. Because there's, you know, there's 14 or 40 or 400 people, they don't all have the same access to you that the first four did. And so where the organization could get by on your personality, your ethos, your work ethic, well, while you're not working with most of your company, most days, what happens is, you know, the culture stops reflecting who you are and starts reflecting some kind of a default pattern inside the organization. And more often than not, because we're missing that concrete "why", It becomes a state of apathy, you know, so I was working with a guy named Jeff and he was founder and CEO of a multinational nonprofit, actually, they're operating on I think, five continents at the time. It's just really successful organization. But every time I met with him and his team, like they were just like, maxed it like was just like, any like new idea that he brought it made everyone just like start shaking in the corner kind of a thing. And so what we found when we were working together is that, because they were all close to him, they could all move together very quickly, you know, it was within his sphere of direct control and so, anytime a new initiative would come out, it came down to five people out of over 50 to make it happen. Well, you're giving up on 90% of your organizational capability at that point. And so what they realized was, they had to sit down and actually take a step back and create what I call it decision making playbook. One that defined the culture of the organization, the mission, the vision, the values of goals, strategies, tactics, actions, all of those things, you actually write those down, and distribute those, start talking about them. And what it does is it actually frees up the entire organization to engage again, in the way that people used to just by virtue of proximity to you. And so in doing that, for him, you know, they were actually struggling, struggling, struggling, they put this into place, ended up merging with another organization and absorbing it, tripled in size, and, you know, three years before that would have killed them. Like literally, I think somebody would have, you know, not died, but they wouldn't be with the organization anymore for health reasons, basically. But what happened instead is I watched them triple in size with unbelievable grace, you know, I kept like waiting for the ball to drop, you know, I kept waiting for like, something like for, Jeff to come and be like, hey, like, no, like, this isn't working at all, but it didn't like every time I talked to him, he was just over the moon was like, I can't believe this is working, but it's working so well. And a significant portion of that was because they'd learned how to make that decision making playbook and keep it up to date and keep rolling with it.

Steve Brown: 32:00

Excellent. We're talking with Scott Ritzheimer. He's calls himself a capacity architect, his company as eightfigurefocus.com. And he likes to help business founders and their leadership teams scale their business. So Scott, I always like to ask, what's the one question you wish you can answer that no one ever asks?

Scott Ritzheimer: 32:22

What's the one question? I think the question would be I don't even know if it's a question but, we've heard of Simon Sinek Start With Why, we talked a lot about what we do, we talk about how we do it. But the question I think we need to be asking more than anything is when. And so much of what I do when I work with founders and leaders is to help them to recognize that the game is changing around them, and to adapt to that. And so while it's not necessarily a question for me, what I would encourage folks to ask is when, you know, when do we we execute on the strategy? That's important. But how does today, compared to a year ago, two years ago, what's different about two years ago, that was right for what we were doing then, but we need to change now?

Steve Brown: 33:19

Yeah, that's always to me, anytime I start to recognize patterns or signs, and realize I need to inject some change here and we need to iterate in some way. The problem is there's always these downstream impacts that are unpredictable of what that will be. And so I have a little hesitation on a) that you said the example and I giggled, because when that one leader always would bring an idea, everyone else would like, Oh, crap, here we go again, you know, but you can't stay the same so the win is always like, I have anxiety on when to pull the trigger, when to make the call, because you're injecting change and you don't necessarily know all the outcomes that's going to happen from that.

Scott Ritzheimer: 34:13

Yeah. This is another conversation for another time but it's included in the E-book that I share and some of the training that comes with it, but I don't think that anyone can answer the one question by themselves. You know, going back to that magic eight ball thing, it actually requires different types of people with different perspectives and the tension in between those to really nail the when question. And so for you, for any other founder, you can't answer the one question by yourself, that's why you have a team around you. And when we can get the whole team working together, everyone bring their strengths. That's where we start getting when right more and more and more often, it's never going to be perfect, but the track record improves significantly when you do that as a team.

Steve Brown: 34:57

Awesome. So Scott tell us how it looks, you know, you've mentioned this information, tell us what it looks like working with you, and how people should contact you?

Scott Ritzheimer: 35:11

Yeah, yeah. So if you feel like you're experiencing some of these problems, you know, you don't actually have to buy anything from me, you don't have to pay me for it, what you do need to do is go to capacityarchitect.com/ROI. So capacityarchitect.com/ROI. And there, you can download my free interactive E-Book. And basically what it does, it goes through all three of the problems that we talked today, and also will give you the five step process that I use for all of my clients. And it's the same one that I used in my business before I transitioned out and started doing this full time. And, you know, I'm so passionate about helping you succeed. So yeah, so passionate about helping folks get through these problems that I've made all of them available free of charge, but also it comes with basically, there's video content in there that walks you through all five different strategies. And my goal is, when you get to the end of that process, you recognize how easy it is for you to actually enjoy the success that you've worked so hard to achieve. And to recognize that, you know, you can build the team that can take a lot of the weight, they're actually probably asking to help, and I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. Because you can do it wrong, it can be really painful, or you can do it right, you know, learn from a proven process. And, you know, the win for me, especially after I've worked with with a client for a while, is that they can go on vacation for a month and come back and the business is not only, you know, still in one piece, but it's actually been made better than it was before. And you know, that's what you'll be able to do with this course.

Steve Brown: 36:47

Excellent. So here's a bonus question. You read my book?

Scott Ritzheimer: 36:52

Yeah.

Steve Brown: 36:53

So here we are live. And sug to me, what did you like? And, what did I need to improve on?

Scott Ritzheimer: 37:00

My favorite thing, and I don't know that it's any one point, even though you make the point in there, but it's that great systems are what create great success over time. And so the way that you approach marketing is, it's not about a website, you know, it's never about one thing. It's always about a system and a way of thinking and doing and your rinse and repeat that brings success for us as founders as a whole. Things that can be improved. You got me on that one. I enjoyed it, I enjoyed the stories. You know, I'm a fellow story brand guy like you I could hear some of that in there. And, you know, I think the only thing and it wouldn't even be in the book, but it's just about what do we do when we do succeed? You know, like, if you go and follow the information that you give in that book, you're going to create a ton of success, just recognize that that's also going to bring some problems but that those problems pale in comparison to the the joy that you'll get from that that level of success.

Steve Brown: 38:06

So true. Scott, you made a excellent guest, we've had a great conversation. I appreciate you being on ROI Online Podcast.

Scott Ritzheimer: 38:14

Yeah, absolutely. appreciate you having me on. And it's been great.

Steve Brown: 38:18

So everybody reach out. Scott, again, tell us the place to go download that information.

Scott Ritzheimer: 38:24

Yeah, head over to capacityarchitect.com/ROI.

Steve Brown: 38:29

Excellent. That's good, ROI, nice little tie in there. All right and that's a wrap. Thanks for listening to another fun episode of the ROI Online Podcast. For more, be sure to check out the show notes of this episode and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn where we can chat, and I can help direct you to the resources you're searching for. To learn more about how you can grow your business better be sure to pick up your copy of my book, The Golden Toilet at surprise, thegoldentoilet.com I'm Steve Brown, and we'll see you next week on another fun episode of the ROI Online Podcast.