7 Truths Every Business Founder Should Know and How to Navigate Them
Aug 05, 2024
Have you ever felt like you're navigating the difficulties of entrepreneurship all on your own? Do you wonder if the challenges you face are unique to you? In this episode of Leadership is Feminine, host Kris Plachy reveals the seven unavoidable truths that every female founder and entrepreneur encounters on their journey to success.
Kris starts by addressing the uncomfortable issues that every business leader must face. She emphasizes that whatever challenge or person you wish to avoid, your business will inevitably force you to confront it. Whether it's having difficult conversations, trusting your intuition, or working in partnerships, these challenges are inescapable.
Kris discusses the reality that as the founder, you hold the ultimate decision-making power. If you are the one taking all the risks, it is imperative that you make the final calls. This responsibility is a fundamental aspect of leadership that can’t be delegated.
Another key truth is the ever-changing nature of everyone involved in a business. Kris talks about the inevitability of change—people will leave, roles will evolve, and you, as a leader, will also grow and transform. She stresses the importance of adapting to these changes to maintain a thriving business.
Kris further explains that the people who helped you get to your current level might not be the same ones who will take you to the next stage of your journey. This truth emphasizes the need for continuous evaluation and evolution of your team and personal growth.
This episode of Leadership is Feminine is a discussion of leadership truths that every business runner faces. Tune in for a thoughtful exploration of these concepts to better understand and enhance your leadership journey.
“You are already born to lead. You just don't know it. If you struggle with leading, I believe it's not because you're not capable. It's because you don't believe in what you already know about yourself and you question it.”
Key Takeaways From This Episode
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Importance of Facing Challenges Head-On: Your business has a way of forcing you through whatever you don’t want to deal with.
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No One Thinks Like You: Establishing clarity on the outcomes and not expecting that things will be done the way you would do them.
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Responsibility of a Founder in Decision-Making: Ensure that you are not abdicating in areas of risk in your business.
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The Destructive Impact of Unaddressed Issues in a Business: Avoiding problems in your business won’t make them go away.
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The Inevitable Change of Your Team and You: Setting the expectation that people on your team will change, and so will you. Those who got you here won’t get you there. And the person you were when you started is not the same version of you that will get you to your goals.
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Delineation of Individual Successes Separate From the Overall Business Success: Your success is not their success, and ensuring that compensation is attached with performance and results, not based on how you feel.
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Transcript
Kris Plachy:
Well, hello. Welcome to the leadership is feminine podcast. It's been a while since I've recorded a new podcast. You guys have been listening to my interviews with all of the amazing women who sold their businesses, and I want to thank all of you who've sent me feedback that you really found that so useful. I've heard from a lot of you, but there were so many different examples, right? So many things for us to learn from one another. And I'm so grateful to each person for sharing their story and their experience and really their very unique and different experience. And I also am working with quite a few clients who are either in the process of selling or have sold, and 100%, no one has the exact same situation. And what I would just say just to kind of put a capstone on, uh, that series, is that it's just vital that you always remember, if you want to sell your business, that you
Kris Plachy:
you always remember to first have a reason that you love, and to believe in your reason and to trust yourself and have really good advisors who don't also share a vested interest in you selling. I trust that everybody listening understands that, that you, you have to have really good advisors who don't have skin in the game. But I also want you to be always really clear about what is the reason that you want to sell your business, and do you like your reason? And then whatever that reason is, get it. Just focus on that. If you just want the money and you want to go, get the money and go. If you want this to go to some organization that's going to care and tend for your vision and the thing that you created, then make sure that's the company that you get. If you don't want to work for someone else for very long, don't sign a deal that says you have to work for someone for a really long time. And if you don't care and you'd actually like to work for someone for a long time, then sign that deal, too. Okay, listen, there's lots of ways to make this work.
Kris Plachy:
Just get the one that you want and then believe in it hard enough. I have another announcement that I'm so excited about. So I think that most of you know, if you've listened to me for a while, I love merch. I'm a big merch fan. I think it's because I've had kids who are athletes. I love athletic wear. I'm just that girl. And so we now have an entire Leadership Is Feminine merchandise line.
Kris Plachy:
Not just like a shirt, but I am telling you all the things. So if you happen to see this video, I have this really cute t shirt on says Leadership Is Feminine. I have my super cute hat that says Leadership Is Feminine. We have sweatshirts and water bottles and coffee mugs and all of it is at thevisionary.CEO/merch. I'm so delighted to be able to make this invitation to you. I think the timing is perfect. I think that it is an incredible message to have in the world that leadership is feminine, that we all can hold space for all of us to know that we can lead in a different way, that we can be honest about how we want to lead in a different way than maybe we've thought. So much of the conversations I have with my clients are rooted in feeling like the way they want to do something doesn't seem right because it's not the way that they've seen other people do it.
Kris Plachy:
And I want to assure you that we have such powerful wisdom as women. And the more we all galvanize our ability to tune in to that intuitive knowing, that collective wisdom, that collective feminine wisdom. And not in like a kumbaya, let's all sit around stone circles. Listen, if you want to do that, I love that. I'm really talking about just the practical knowing that I know that you have, that so many women just don't trust. All of the skill that most of us say are the skills that leaders have that attract us to them. Empathy. Listening.
Kris Plachy:
Support. Coaching. Training. Developing. Communicating. Collaborating. Motivating. Inspiring.
Kris Plachy:
These are what the traditional leadership space calls soft skills. They're not soft. It is very hard to get good at listening, especially for some people. But those are also the skills that we align with feminine quality. You are already born to lead. You just don't know it. If you struggle with leading, I believe it's not because you're not capable. It's because you don't believe in what you already know about yourself and you question it.
Kris Plachy:
So I want all of us to be wearing Leadership Is Feminine merch. I want the world to change. I want the world to hear and know how powerful we are, how capable we are, and how much we believe in one another. So go to thevisionary.CEO/merch and get yourself some Leadership Is Feminine gear. Let's go buy it for a girlfriend or four. Anyway, I'm super excited. So as you all know, I coach a lot of people. I'm super excited.
Kris Plachy:
Just as a side note for my little world that I love to have here.I started the Sage CEO program, I think it'll be three years ago this coming January. And when we started, we had five women in Sage. It was at the time, and still is kind of an exclusive program. You had to be invited, same case now. Need to be a seven figure female entrepreneur or running a multimillion dollar business. And these women were such, they were so trusting to say, 'yeah, I'm going to do that with you'. And I'm super excited because really four of the five are still around.
Kris Plachy:
One pops in and out when she has time because her life is so amazingly crazy. But as of this morning, we have 21 women in my Sage program. And I'm so proud of that. I'm so proud of my clients who are investing in themselves and are saying yes to, I think, a unique experience that isn't what you see everywhere else. It's much more personal. It's much more provocative in terms of that, because I know all of them. And so we do pretty powerful work together personally, and we have really wonderful gatherings. We were together in Boston in June, which was incredible.
Kris Plachy:
We'll be together again in August, in Sonoma, Hawaii in September, San Diego in December, Hawaii again January, Turks and Caicos in February. We might throw a little pickleball in some of these days. We're going to do something out here by me in the spring, and then probably then we're looking at Martha's Vineyard in the early summer next year. Now, Sage, we don't do all of those. You don't come to all of them. But I have planned enough events this year that hopefully everybody can come to the four that are included. And then we're working on some really interesting content, and I'm super excited about that as well. So it's, there's just a lot of really great work that's going into Sage and a lot of incredible women.
Kris Plachy:
So to my Sage clients, who I know are avid podcast listeners, hi to you. I know and hope you know that I just adore and love each one of you so much and I'm so grateful for the work that we all get to do together, and for how each of you keeps pushing me to become a better version of myself as well. So I pull a lot of the coaching that I do directly from these one on one conversations that I have with my clients through my on demand coaching approach, which is through Voxer. So what I prepared for you today are what ended up being seven truths that we have to acknowledge and find. I don't want to say peace. I think that's dramatic and maybe unreal reasonable, but we have to be willing to accept that these are the truth. This isn't everybody's story is different. I can tell you that every single client that I have worked with has gone through all seven of these and some are still stuck in them and I might even include myself.
Kris Plachy:
So I'm going to just go through what these seven truths are. Of course I would love to know and hear what you have to say, but this is what I've written down to address anyway for today.The first one is whatever it is that you dread, whatever topic it is that you don't want to talk about, whatever issue it is that you don't want to face, whatever problem it is that makes you uncomfortable, whatever kind of person it is that you want to avoid, whatever subject it is that you wish you didn't have to think about, whatever action it is that you don't want to have to take, your business will force you through it. If you don't know how to have difficult conversations, your business will give you them until you learn. If you are uncomfortable with managing your money, your business will force you to learn. If you don't trust your own intuition with people and knowing whether or not they would be a good fit for you to hire, you will keep having to learn that lesson. If you don't know how to clarify agreements and get the results you want through partnership, through other people, your business will force you to keep learning it. If you don't trust people, your business will continue to force you into environments where you're either going to have to trust or you won't trust, and you'll keep losing relationships.
Kris Plachy:
If you don't know how to explain yourself, your business will continue to show you that you need to learn how to be more clear. If you don't know how to be inclusive, your business will keep showing you that you aren't. It doesn't matter what it is. A lot of us I know who have become parents have had similar conversations, right? Like raising kids, man. Anything you don't want to deal with, there it is, right in front of you. Your kids will present to you all the things that you don't want to have to deal with 100%. So that's just the truth. So here's what I would do if I were you.
Kris Plachy:
Based off of me just telling that I would write down what are the things that you know you hate dealing with, right? Just in the past three weeks, I've coached women on not wanting to have to deal with difficult conversations, not wanting to have to fire someone that they worked with for a long time, not wanting to have to even be in charge. Like, why do I have to make all the decisions? Not wanting to look at their money, wanting someone else to be in charge of their money, not wanting to follow through with the guesses that they committed to, even though they are the ones who said yes. So people pleasing, we all do it. Our business will put us through these gauntlets. The question is, are you willing to learn so that this doesn't have to be like ripping teeth out of your face every time you have to do the thing that you don't want to do, because the thing that you don't want to do is not the same as the thing that she doesn't want to do, which is not the same that that she wants doesn't want to do. We all have our little triggery things. What's the things? Make the list and then think about, okay, what can I do to help myself get stronger, right? Like build those muscles.
Kris Plachy:
How do I build my strength so that when I do have to have a difficult conversation, when I do have to hold somebody accountable, when I do have to address and fire somebody that I really care about, when I do have to talk about money, when I do have to understand my money, how do I do this now so I don't have to keep banging into this lesson unprepared, hunting it. Okay, truth two, no one is ever going to think like you. So stop hoping for it. Stop waiting for people to get it like you do. It's not going to happen. Your job as the leader of your team in business is to make sure they understand you, not that they could just start to be you. There has to be a willingness to realize that your frustration, that they don't solve problems like you, that they don't figure it out like you. I get it.
Kris Plachy:
I. Listen to me. There's nothing I'm sharing with you that doesn't make me- but that doesn't mean it's not true. Right? So for as long as we wait for people to think like we do, guess what's not happening. People aren't thinking. So what I would rather do is make sure people are really clear about the results they need to achieve instead of arriving at all the ways that I do it. It's not going to happen.
Kris Plachy:
And more people lose their minds on what it is that people do all day rather than the results that they produce. If there was one thing I wish I could give my clients, it's to drop your need for it to be like you see it in your brain, like that control, because you're missing the result that you want. If we said the result that we want for this baby is for them to be happy and healthy, I bet if we got twelve women in a room, we would have twelve ideas for how to make sure that baby would be happy and healthy. Now, who's going to hate all the ideas? The mom. Because the only way she wants her baby to be happy and healthy is this way, right? Cloth diapers, handmade food, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whereas there might be another mom who's like, no, listen, regular diapers are fine. Formulas, fine. Put them on baby food from Gerber, it's all fine, right? So we get so tangled up in the how that we lose the sight of the result.
Kris Plachy:
We think that our way is the only way. And if people can't think like us, then we're just, we're just exhausted, frustrated, burdened, resentful. It never ends, and then we miss the opportunity to focus on the outcome and the result that really matters.I know that this is kind of how I've parented because I just wanted my kids to graduate high school. And I know so many other people who are like, 'my kids have to have straight A's', 'my kids have to be in AP classes', 'my kids have to do this', 'my kids kids have to do this'. 'The only way they're going to get ahead is if they do-'.
Kris Plachy:
And I just never fell into that. It's, I'm not saying that's good or bad - I'm really not - because I think probably I could have been better at it. But my kids all did graduate high school and they are all doing their own things and they're all finding their way. So for me, the result I wanted was to align with a husband who had a similar goals, not how to's. I think if I had been married to someone who was like hyper rigid about their grades and all, I think I would have just been so uncomfortable at the time. So anyway, this is just to say that I, I think we over control because we want things to be exactly like we would do them.
Kris Plachy:
And we make ourselves miserable because no one is ever going to think like you. But you can paint a picture of a result that you would like, and that's why we hire people. Third truth. At the end of the day, the founder of the business is the final decision. This is for the founder and this is for the people listening who might not be founders, but work for one. Ultimately, if I am assuming all the risks, then I get to make the final decision. And I want you to hear that also founders. If you're assuming all the risk, then you need to be sure that you are making the final decisions.
Kris Plachy:
If you abdicate things in your business, it doesn't matter because you're assuming the risk. You're still going to have to account for the decision. So my opinion is, any decisions that are significant enough to impact your risk, you need to have a hand in. That takes us back to the first truth I just told, which is the stuff that you don't want to deal with is the stuff that your business will make you deal with. If you don't like dealing with money and you're not involved in your money, doesn't matter. If you're not involved, you're still going to have to answer to it. If you're not involved in how people are held accountable because you don't want to deal with it, it doesn't matter because you're going to have to deal with it because you're the one holding the bag. You're the one assuming the risk.
Kris Plachy:
So at the end of the day, you are the final decider. And that's also true when you're listening to your team and everybody has ideas. At the end of the day, you make the decision and everyone on that team needs to understand that. And if they don't, we have to work through that because that's a communication issue and it's probably a presence issue for you.Truth four. Not addressing an issue is exactly how to make it a huge problem. The answer to 99% of the issues that you face with people in your company stem from a gap in communication when it could have been addressed. The longer something goes without being addressed, the bigger it becomes.
Kris Plachy:
The more people get involved, the more it goes from just a factual something to a gossip swirl of birds, nesty mess. As the leader of a business, your job is to cut those things off so that you find the shortest route to a solution. Avoiding it, not talking about it, not addressing it is not how it gets solved, it's how it grows. So if you're uncomfortable with honest conversations, with addressing facts, with redirecting people, with bringing something up that other people don't want to talk about, it's time to get comfortable. Because when I meet with my clients who have challenges in their team, I can tell you I can always hear, like, where the gap was, and it's oftentimes months, if not years in the making. Truth number five, no one stays the same, including you. A lot of founders literally grow up in a business with a few people, and over the course of that growth, everybody changes.
Kris Plachy:
Of course you change. And even the people who may not feel like they're changing, they still have changed. Your relationship changes. Their expectations of you change. Their expectations of the business change. Your expectations of them change. Your expectations of the business change. Everybody changes.
Kris Plachy:
So what does that mean? That means that if you aren't having regular check ins, how's it going? What do you love? What do you loathe? What should we change? What is different? How are you feeling? What do you love about what we're doing right now? Would you like to be doing something different? Is this your skillset? Do we need to develop your skillset? There are people that have been working with you for a long time. Are you making the money that you think you want to make? I think again, everything on the table, please. It's not up to me to solve all those problems, but it is certainly up to me to understand if they're going to come slinging out at me.The, the idea that you could hire people and they would stay with you forever is a falsehood. The idea that someone should be able to come and work for you and stay with you forever is false. Which brings me to truth six, which is, who got you here won't get you there. You've heard me say that.
Kris Plachy:
Now, I want to be very clear what I say here. Who got you here won't get you there. Sometimes I'm talking about physical people. The people you start with will not be the people to get you to that next level. And that is oftentimes totally true. But there's another truth, which is the people you start with grow, change, and transform, and you grow and change and transform. And so the who got you here will get you there.
Kris Plachy:
But they're totally different people. They've done the work, they've changed, they've grown with you, they've grown into their role. They've learned more, they've innovated, they've studied, they've become more experienced in the thing that it is that, that they are paid to do for your business. So they are not the same who that you had five years ago, eight years ago, 14 years ago. Some people don't do that. Some people do not change. They do not go forward.
Kris Plachy:
They do not move in the direction that the business needs them to move. And so, as the founder, this, I know, this is one of the hardest parts of you, what you do is you build a community of people that you start your business with. And then you reach these points and these milestones. And what I've been saying lately as an inflection point, and you recognize we're going to have to recalibrate this and make sure everybody's clear about what we're doing or it's not, we're not going to get there together. Those are hard decisions. Those are hard things to figure out. Those are hard conversations to have.
Kris Plachy:
But they're vital. They have to be done. Otherwise we bootstrap the business. We bottleneck things we can't grow. And sometimes it's you first a lot of times. And the last truth, especially for those people who have sort of started with you, your success is not their success. And their success has to be because of their work and results, not yours or the company's. I have coached a lot of founders who have had people work with them for a long time.
Kris Plachy:
Founders tend to feel very, very loyal to people who help them build their business. Founders tend to reward that loyalty financially. It doesn't surprise me. It's not bad. Where it becomes a problem is when that is not attached to actual performance and results. And it's just more of a like, thank you for being here. Thank you for doing this with me. And then what can happen is people who work for and with you feel like the success of the company belongs to them just as much as it does to you.
Kris Plachy:
But they've been a team member the whole time. They're not owners. It's confusing. And so it's very important that the roles that everybody plays in a business are very clear. Everybody's really understanding of what it is that they have to do in order for the business to be successful. And that's what they're paid for, that not everybody makes money when the whole company makes money, that there's something specifically all of us have to do in order for us to make money or make more money. Their success is not your success and your success is not their success.
Kris Plachy:
But you can both be successful because you both have roles in your company. And I don't think that has to be really formal and really structured and really rigid. But I think the lack of clarity and the lack of structure causes a lot of people headaches. Maybe I'm right. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. What do you think of these truths? I'd love to know. You can always email me.
Kris Plachy:
[email protected]. You should absolutely go buy some merch immediately. At thevisionary.CEO/merch. Thank you for tuning in and I'll talk to you in another week, I think. All right, bye.
Kris Plachy:
Remember that I asked you to be a part of my Catalyst podcast event where I'm inviting you to become a visionary catalyst. Share the podcast link with women that you know. And as soon as you hit 20 shared links, clicks on those, we can measure that. I'm going to give you one of my bonus digital courses. Go to thevisionary CEO catalyst. Get yourself registered, grab the podcast link super easy and please share it with women that you know that are leading in the world. Because I love to be able to impact 20 million women, I know that when women feel more confident in who they are as leaders, it changes who they are in their lives. Let's help women live and lead on their own terms.
Kris Plachy:
I can't wait to see how many clicks we get.
Kris Plachy:
Let's get it.
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