Building Scaling Systems; Doing Unscalable Things

In retrospect over my last 12 months, I might have made a huge mistake. One that I’m correcting now.

Building a company is a lot like playing Tetris (AI image)

After raising our Series A, I took the mindset of building our team full of passionate people who are aligned with our core business purpose: To leverage technology to help boutique gyms spread fitness and wellness to their communities.

What did that look like?

• I stepped back from a lot of day to day tactical and operational work. Work that needed to be handed off and trusted to our newly forming teams.

• I removed myself from dozens of Slack channels, meetings, and email threads. I needed to say less and empower our teams do more.

• I surrounded myself with my top executives. Creating what I felt was the right barrier between the “crazy CEO” and the entire organization, keeping my distracting thoughts and comments to only a select few.

• I immersed myself into learning and working with my executives and informally, their reports.

In my opinion, all of this is what scaling a company looked like. In fact, doing this is paramount to building a smoothly functioning company with more moving parts.

However, I missed one thing. Perhaps one of the most important things.

• I stopped being a CEO of the clients.

Let me clarify. I never stopped loving, caring for, or thinking about our clients. I simply stopped being among them as much as I now realize my job requires.

When you start to think about growing a company from a dozen people to one-hundred, everything starts to change in how you think.

Everything needs to scale. Everything needs to have a flywheel. Doing unscalable things cannot be something built into any process… except one.

Spending time with our clients and potential clients.

AI thinks this is an image of a CEO and client at lunch. Dreadful.

Do Unscalable Things

As I step back and look at this company we’ve build at PushPress - it’s been built to scale.

The team is in place. The culture is rock solid (and amazing). The mission and values are clear. The inertia is forming.

Now it’s time for me to step further back, let that team handle their end of this mission while I handle mine.

Being the unquestionable champion of boutique gyms and their members from start to finish.

Next week, I’m trying to drive across Los Angeles to workout with and have lunch with one client. 3 hours of a CEO’s time to talk to one client.

Unscalable.

And yet, this is everything I need to do.

I’m sure at some other inflection point of this company, my role will change again. However, today, I clearly see and understand where I missed recently and know what I need to do.

If you’re a gym owner.

Large or small.

PushPress client or not.

From any niche whatsoever.

If you’d like to chat - send me an email. dan@pushpress.com