This is the difference between growth and expansion

Some of the brightest people I know are executives. They are super intelligent, they observe a situation, and generally they are spot on. Then they issue the order: do this. And here is the shortcoming I see over and over. It ends right there. The bright idea is not enough.

Let me show you what I mean with what I am doing right now. I am in Italy, working in a brand new call center, with brand new people. I mean brand new. I have to teach them to become salespeople. I have to teach them to pick up the phone, reach a stranger anywhere in the country, and take control of that call. One of the hardest jobs on the face of this earth. And by the way, I have to do it in a language I do not speak.

So what is my advantage over most business people? Simple. I know that a bright idea does not establish an area. I have to establish it.

Establish the area

Establishing means every piece of the training material goes in writing. If you showed up here during the day, you would see that everything I do in training is recorded. I am miked up. The audio is running. Someone is in the background filming me. Documenting it is the key element, because the test is not whether it works today. Will it still work next week? Next month? Next year?

It has to, because I move around. I am busy. I cannot lock myself down in this one department. I suppose I could, but that would be foolish. I am trying to empower my training officer so he can do the job, and that means handing him the whole thing laid out, so he can go do what it says and get a result. In other words, I am working my way out of a job. That might sound stupid. It is the whole point. I never want to have to do this again.

Thirty years forward

I will be honest with you: it is a tremendous amount of work. My head hurt. I kept asking myself, I did this decades ago in Florida, how did I do it? So I pulled all of it forward. I asked for all the documents, all the videos, all the training materials. I had it all in writing back then too. Then the question became, how do I apply that here in Italy? What is the same? What is different? How do I morph it?

You want to know something? What worked in Florida worked here to the comma. No different. People are people. They speak different languages, but humans are humans, so you get them on the same runway. I took something I built thirty years ago and brought it all the way forward to Italy, in a foreign language, and it works exactly the same way.

Yes, the objections here are a little different, so I tweaked certain little things. But those are adjustments. I did not reinvent a whole science. I did that thirty years ago. That is establishment.

What expansion actually is

Now, people get this idea that expansion is a statistic. Income is growing, we are selling more, there is a stat on the wall pointing up, so we must be expanding. Fine, maybe that is how you measure it. But that is not how you do it.

You do it by getting to the point where you are no longer doing the work. There is a competent person on the post, the work is getting done, and because of that, you get to do more. You move up to the next step, because this is handled here. That is what expansion is. It is the growing of competent people inside your organization who can hold a space and actually run it.

Your job as an executive is to put competent people underneath you. And the only way that happens is the hard-headed process of asking, how does this work, how do we get this done, and then writing it up. Get the policies known. Push the policy in, push it in again, train them, and get them working. There are a lot of moving parts, but eventually somebody looks at you and says, I got this. And you can tell they mean it. You know how? You do not need to be there anymore. That position in your organization is doing its job well. Now you can go, good, I need more of this. I can hire another person, because I know I can train them, or I can put more pressure on that point.

Why companies stay small

I will tell you something, guys. If you try to expand any other way, you will not expand. You know why? It is too painful. If running the company hurts this much and is this frustrating at this size, some part of you does the math on being three times bigger, and it quietly refuses. You will unwittingly prevent your own expansion.

That is why companies stay small. Not for lack of bright ideas. For lack of establishment. Write it up, document it, build the person who can hold the space, and move up. Do not be one of those companies. I will see you down the road.