Ready, Set, Scale, with Stephen Adele and Zach Lewis

In this episode of the Entrepreneurship at DU podcast, host Joshua Ross interviews DU alumni and entrepreneurs Stephen Adele and Zach Lewis about their book “Ready, Set, Scale: Scaling Your Business Without Losing Your Soul.”  

The authors discuss their passion for helping entrepreneurs succeed through their framework of five essential pillars: strategy, structure, people, processes, and cash. Through their real-world experiences helping businesses scale from $1M to $50M in revenue, they emphasize the importance of building company culture by design rather than default and how entrepreneurs can create sustainable growth while maintaining their company’s values and mission.

 Transcript:

Joshua Ross:

My name is Joshua Ross, and welcome

Zach Lewis:

To the Entrepreneurship at DU podcast. If you were to ask 16-year-old Zach, if he would ever write a book, the chances of that were about zero. So it’s been a privilege to work on this project and every other project with Steven.

Joshua Ross:

On this episode, I sit down with two du alums who are also entrepreneurs and authors, Steven Ade and Zach Lewis. We discuss their book Ready, set Scale, scaling Your Business Without Losing Your Soul.

Stephen Adele:

Write it as if your best friend is sitting across the table from you and you’re just having a conversation.

Joshua Ross:

Our discussion focuses on their journey and experience writing the book. I wanted to understand what inspired them to put their knowledge and experience on paper with a goal to help fellow business owners and entrepreneurs.

Zach Lewis:

But I feel like what we did pretty well was thread the needle through a lot of complex topics and show how they’re all interconnected. And I think if you can get to 90% of solid execution on these fundamental pillars, then you’re going to be successful.

Joshua Ross:

Here’s my conversation with Steven and Zach. Zach and Steven welcome. I’ve been really looking forward to this discussion. Always a pleasure to host a couple of prestigious du alums who are also entrepreneurs and now accomplished authors. So I want to jump right in and talk about the book Ready Set Scale. So are you both ready?

Stephen Adele:

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. And we’re super excited to be here as well. Joshua, big fans of yours. We know how pro entrepreneur you are, so anything we can do to contribute,

Joshua Ross:

I appreciate it. So my first question to you is what inspired you to ride it and talk a little bit how it relates to your experience both as entrepreneurs and consultants?

Stephen Adele:

Well, there’s a little bit of a backstory there if you don’t mind. Quite an exciting journey getting to this point. Very excited too, because just last week we hit number one on Amazon in the business book. So thank you to everyone who supported us to get us there. And when I think back to a number of the companies that we have built and scaled and sold over that time, it helped to crystallize the ideas that were found in the book. And on the backdrop of our academics here at the University of Denver is actually where I met Zach. And we started working on some projects together and just found this incredible mutual respect for the way we looked at businesses from a different lens in that complimentary strength way. And we were actually here at the Daniels building and Zach and I and Charles Dage, we were working on something and I was at the whiteboard and I’ve never met a whiteboard that I can’t fill up.

And so we’re writing things and Charles looked at us and said, you guys just need to write a book. You need to put this all on paper. You have a lot of great things that you could teach people. And I think Zach and I just looked at each other and thought, okay, that’s a neat idea, but I also know what it takes to write a book. It’s a lot of work. I’ve written a few in my time and we started thinking about it a little more deeply. We put together an outline. We got together with Charles again, went through the outline, looked at answering some fundamental questions and said, you know what? Let’s do this. And so it took a little bit of time to get the engine running, so to speak, on the discipline to write, because it just takes time to get those thoughts organized.

And so Zach and I just went through a very collaborative process. We did try to engineer into one voice, so it just didn’t feel like it was just two different people talking. But we were very collaborative through the process of getting the ideas crystallized and formulated in a way that we’re deeply insightful based on our experiences and not just the good experiences, the bad ones, the failures is where we tend to learn the most obviously. And as we found and through that process, we really found that we had really crystallized those ideas. And as we got towards the end, and it’s sort of like a hockey stick curve at the end of writing a book, it’s just you’re really trying to get to the point of publishing. We started figuring out what can we take out of this because we want this to be deeply insightful, but also a way that you can translate it and implement it into your business, your entrepreneurial journey, but also in a way that had deep impact.

And the only way to do that, it was just to really not necessarily simplify the message, but take away some things that we felt were a little extraneous to the ideas. And we got to the finish line, and then we did everything ourselves here from Zach, put together the cover design with a crowdsourcing design, the self-publishing, and now you’ve got these great innovative print on demand. It just makes it so accessible. So the whole journey was just incredible, even to the point of putting together these tools that you actually get access to tools that we use with our clients. So in each of the principles of scaling, there’s a particular tool that we use to help translate and implement it into the client’s business. And so we are able to take those tools and make them so that they’re more friendly to any particular user, toggle friendly, if you will.

But there’s a lot of value in those tools because it really allows you to take what you’re learning in the book and the principles and applying them in an actionable way into your business. So it was a lot of fun. It was a little stressful getting through it. And we had a great editor, Sue Mobar. I’ve been with her for many years and she was just magnificent in working us through the process, but I think we created, I’d like to call it a masterpiece. I hope it’s around for a very long time. And honestly, for our course that we teach in scaling, we can use it as a textbook.

Joshua Ross:

Well, there’s a lot to unpack there. And first of all, shout out to Charles Donna. He was the chair of the management department here at the University of Denver in the Daniels College of Business, and now he’s at Georgia State. So I’m glad he was helpful along that journey and those tools that you have in there, it’s so interesting when you start to look at publishing now in terms of what you can do with the physical content and then lead people to the digital content, which is interesting because that’s dynamic content as well and can change as you all keep evolving and crafting your tool. So I appreciate it. And you know what, I think you did a heck of a job. I really enjoyed reading the book. So when you started this process, did you have a specific audience in mind? You needed an audience and a type of person that was in a certain point in the growth of their business, but was it a certain type of person you were looking at a certain industry, a certain vertical, or am I thinking too deeply into this?

Zach Lewis:

Yeah, I think that was obviously one of the things we tried to dial in when we were first writing our outlines was really identifying who we wanted to help with this book. Because obviously our time’s limited with our consulting services, we can’t help everyone, but we wanted to start broad. So really distilling, like Steven said, complex problems down to very digestible, simply communicated ideas that are approachable for anyone. So really at the broadest level, I think anyone who’s interested in entrepreneurship, even if you’re in a big company and you’re just interested in management and trying to figure out how you can help your company do better every day, and the people in it do better every day, I’d say that’s the most broad. But if we were to dial it down all the way to where we landed, we’re really hoping to help entrepreneurs, founders of companies or executives in companies in the million dollar to 50 million revenue range who either feel like they might not necessarily know what to do next or they’ve got a good feeling, but maybe they just want some warm and fuzzies and maybe they want to have a shared framework that they can distribute through their organization saying like, Hey, this is our game plan.

Everybody read this book. We’re all on the same page, we all have the same understanding, we’re all reading from the same sheet of music. And that can go a long ways to getting everyone on board.

Joshua Ross:

So how was the process writing this book? I know both of you, I know both of you well, and you’re both very easygoing, but you’re both entrepreneurs and very serious about your work. So you come together to write this and you’re very process oriented. Walk us through some of the experiences that you had in bringing in past experiences, because Steven, you said you’ve written a book before. Zach, I don’t believe you had written one before. No, I haven’t.

Stephen Adele:

Yeah, it was really interesting and like I said, very collaborative process, but it was based on some history of having a lot of experience in writing. So I had a sports nutrition company early on in my entrepreneurial journey. We used to publish a magazine, so did a lot of writing, learned how to write just through repetition, repetition, read all of Anne Rand, including her books on how to write. So learning how to write, and to be quite honest, it’s something that just always stuck with me was something that I learned from one of the very first companies I worked for, which was called EAS. There was the founder was Bill Phillips, and he wrote a magazine and published the magazine and ended up writing Body for Life, which became a New York Times bestseller for I think five years. And he told me very early on when I started writing an article that he asked me to for the magazine, and he said, just write it as if your best friend is sitting across the table from you and you’re just having a conversation.

If you do that, it will come across very personal. And that always stuck with me. But this process, I think was not unlike some of the others where start with an outline, and this may not necessarily be an uncommon way of writing, but this is the way we wrote the book was start with an outline and just really make sure you feel like you have your structure right. Do you have all the right ideas in there about what you want to get across? And again, sometimes the power of taking things away versus trying to have a message for everyone in all things related to scaling here in this particular book. And then from there, we went in and we just asked ourselves a bunch of questions. So we started writing questions inside there. And then when we went to write, it was just answer those questions and then start taking the answers to those questions and formulating those into particular ideas.

And then we looked at a particular format we wanted for each chapter and then designed that format. And then Zach and I were really good at bouncing the chapters back and forth, back and forth about just making sure we had the right flow inside there, the right amount of information, and just really making sure that it was always coming across as personable and relatable. And again, I think having a great editor goes along a long way as well. Sue was just excellent. And I think the process in all was one, that it allows for the best ideas to rise to the surface. And that’s again, going back to, and we talk about this in the book, one of the biggest and most important decisions that an entrepreneur makes if they go in as a solopreneur is their first hire. And that first hire, the way to strengthen that ability to succeed based on that first hire is based on complimentary strengths.

And I think because Zach and I have such complimentary strengths that allowed us to really go through this and look at it from different lens and be able to accept and respect each other’s viewpoints on how we wanted this message to come across, but also to come across as relatable because we were then able to inject our personal stories inside each one of the chapters. And I think that made it, again, a deeper level of personal, if you will. It always bothered me when people say it’s not personal, it’s just business. But for an entrepreneur it is personal because it’s with you all the time. It is very personal. And so we wanted to come across as personal, and those experiences really drove that home in telling stories of how things worked out really well in this experience and how things didn’t work out so well with some of these experiences.

Zach Lewis:

It was definitely great to have someone who’s written a book before at your side if you’re thinking about mentorship in anything is a key aspect of success. And it was really enjoyable if you were to ask 16-year-old Zach if he would ever write a book, the chances of that were about zero. So it’s been a privilege to work on this project and every other project with Steven. So now knowing what you know about

Joshua Ross:

Writing a book, would you write a second book?

Zach Lewis:

We’ll see.

Joshua Ross:

We’ll see.

Zach Lewis:

There were plenty of ideas we had to pull out of this book and say, that could be a whole book. Exactly. We’ll see where things go.

Joshua Ross:

So you discussed the five essential pillars of Scaling a business in the book, which I really appreciate, and I actually went and reread a couple times because you did a very nice job kind of weaving a thread through all of those. If you had to pick one, which one is the one that you find most entrepreneurs struggle with?

Zach Lewis:

I think most of the time when people come to us for advice, they think a symptom of the problem is the actual problem. So for those who haven’t read the book yet, the five pillars that we outline are strategy, structure, people, processes, and cash. And a lot of the times when people come to us, it’s because they are running out of cash. They think that raising money or taking out more debt is going to help solve their problems. But most of the time we have to go all the way back to the top of the framework and sequence matters with this framework. And generally most of the problems lie in the lack of strategy or a lack of clearly defined and clearly communicated strategy. But every business on its own has its own unique set of problems. Every entrepreneur has their own strengths and weaknesses. So it’s not across the board that it’s necessarily strategy, but I think that’s generally a lack of strategy leads to a lack of proper prioritization, which can lead to just entropy within the business, which leads to people problems, unclear processes, and ultimately unnecessarily

Joshua Ross:

Rapid burn of cash. You bring up a great point with strategy, and I get it because strategy is a long-term view of what you’re doing. And as an entrepreneur, so much of what we do is working in the business and we forget to work on the business, but a lot of time working in the business is what’s driving it forward at the end of the day, revenue or activity or whatever that is. And then you kind of look at a bigger picture. I mean, look at all these publicly traded companies, they’re judged on a quarter by quarter basis. Many of their CEOs are around for two to five years. And so to be put in an effective strategy, it doesn’t always make sense when you’re actually looking and having to report on the next three months. How do you get some of these entrepreneurs over that hump?

Stephen Adele:

Well, I can tell you firsthand from we took our company public back in 2012, and one of the things that nobody warned me of was just how stressful it is to live just quarter by quarter. There’s a saying on Wall Street, you’re only as good as your last quarterly earnings report. And what I mean by that is it forced us to make short-term decisions that I believe were at the detriment of long-term vision of the company. And I always despise that. And so when you think of strategy and I teach the students here at the University of Denver is just think about it as your game plan. A coach would never go into a game without a plan on how do they think they’re going to win. And again, it’s just an idea about how you think you’re going to win. But it’s better to have a strategy that could be wrong than no strategy at all, right?

So you’re not just a ship at sail going by whichever way the wind blows. You’ve got a game plan. We call that in the book the rally cry. So you go through the five aspirational questions of developing your strategy, but then we’re a big believer in really simplifying it, making sure that it’s clear, that it’s compelling, that everyone believes in it. And also I’ve always felt it needs to be memorable. So you can go in these large Fortune 100 companies and you can see these placards on the wall that have these gigantic mission statements or strategies, and it’s just a bunch of business buzzwords that everybody got into a conference room and decided they wanted their word to be heard. And on that placard, and it doesn’t mean anything. You can walk around the company and ask people, what’s your strategy? How are you going to win?

And they don’t know they’re just doing their job. And instead, what we’re a big believer on, and what we talk about in the book is really developing a rally cry, developing a clear, compelling and memorable strategy that can be simplified in a way that you can walk around your company and ask anybody and they can recite what it is. And it also, when I think back to my last company Quick Box, our strategy, which was a third party fulfillment center was very simple. It was easy in impossible to get out, which was let’s make it as easy as possible for clients to get into the three PL and let’s add as many value added services. We called ’em tentacles into the client so that we were so valuable to them if they wanted to leave, it would be impossible for them to leave. So what that also does is, and it serves as a directive around the company, so when people are working on projects and they might step back and question themselves as their leader to say, is this project actually making it easier for the client to get in or harder to get out?

If it’s not, why are we doing it? Because staying focused is the key to that strategy, especially if you’re winning. And so we find it particularly important to help really take what is a somewhat complex subject, try to really distill it down into something that’s simple and digestible and that you can apply and coming up with that rally cry, one of the examples I always use in class is one of my favorite strategies is Southwest Airlines, which is two words, wheels up, wheels up. The most simple powerful strategy there is wheels up. If their wheels are up, they’re making money. So how do they do that? Well, they let you board yourself in no particular order. It’s like they have one fleet of planes, they have one set of mechanics, they have one type of fuel, they don’t fly hub and spoke. They fly the wreck, they don’t rest the planes, they keep ’em moving. So I think strategy doesn’t have to be complex. It can be very simple, and the power of it is in its simplicity and creating that rally cry that everyone in the company can get behind.

Joshua Ross:

So one of the areas in the book, you spend some time on it, and I love this as a young entrepreneur, is an area I really struggled with was around building culture and really building a team. And early on you don’t have a lot of money. So a lot of times you get C and B players and you really want the A players. And then as you start to grow, you start to have hopefully more revenue, a little bit more cashflow, and you can start to upgrade those. Can you explain how an entrepreneur can do what at times seems impossible when you are building your company? So you’re trying to build a team, you’re trying to meet the needs of a business, you’re trying to keep the culture, but at the same time as you’re growing, you’re trying to manage cash. Going back to one of those pillars we talked about, which is generally impacted during the growth of a business.

Stephen Adele:

If you don’t mind, I want to just say a quick story on that point because I go back to one of my earlier companies and I had a board of advisors and one of those advisors actually became my CEO coach. And he just incredible person, very wise. And I remember having coffee with him one time and I was just complaining about everything in the company, anything you could imagine, everything I was complaining about. And he stopped me and he said, Steven, first of all, who are you being right? How are you showing up every day? Because if you’re showing up like this, this is why people are acting like this and this is why things are happening like this. He said, secondly, have you ever thought about your culture? Are you building it by design? Are you letting it be built by default? And that was just one of those mind blow type moments of an epiphany of, well wait a second, you can actually build culture by design. And he’s like, yeah, I’m not talking about ping pong tables and bringing lunch in. I’m talking about the real stuff, how people act and behave when you’re not there.

I think that was my first realization about how important culture is, but also that you can consciously build it by design that it can in fact be done in a way that you want it to.

Zach Lewis:

I like to think of it a lot. I have a three-year-old son, and kids don’t learn because you’re telling them what to do. They can’t even understand what you’re saying. And I think a lot of times that holds true. We’re all just a bunch of grownup toddlers. We might think we know a lot more than we do, but a lot of people don’t necessarily. The way I say something might not resonate with everyone the way I intend it to, which speaks to the of leading by example and being mindful of how you show up every day, being really cognizant of how you react in the moment, taking that breath before you let your face even flinch and show that you’re angry or you’re frustrated by something.

I’m a big fan of stoicism, and one of my favorite quotes, and I’m going to butcher it here from Marcus Aurelius’s meditations, is that people don’t do things wrong on purpose. Generally. They do what they think is best, and as leaders, it’s our job to correct them and show them a better way. And then if they don’t do it, then that becomes another conversation if they’ve been coached and they continue down the same path. But that kind of leads into the importance of protecting your culture as you’re growing. And the way you do that is by holding people accountable, rewarding people who support and uphold your culture. And unfortunately, sometimes you have to punish people or remove people if they’re violating the values that you want to prioritize in your company.

Stephen Adele:

So cultural fit is just very, very important and it’s one of those criteria that’s most commonly overlooked in the hiring process. But as you’re scaling in your entrepreneurial journey, it becomes critically important to make sure you’re hiring on cultural fit. In fact, we’ve seen that over and over again where companies are scaling, they’re bringing in experts. They might be previous from large companies, they might’ve had a large staff underneath them and they’re not willing to play down or roll up their sleeves and do hard work that’s beneath them. You just can’t have that in an entrepreneurial venture where you’re scaling. You need people who are willing to get in there, roll up their sleeves, do whatever’s necessary, but most importantly that they are a part of that culture and they fit that box perfectly.

Joshua Ross:

Yeah, it’s interesting. Early on when I had my company, I used to think that all you had to do is give employees more money and they would be happy. And that was a very kind of poor view or approach to management. But when you’re a solopreneur, you really don’t have any other people to bounce it off of. But when you take a step back and you start to look at it, and most of our employees were at the office for eight, 10 hours a day just based on what we had to get accomplished as a young company. And so if you look at that, they’re there eight hours a day, and let’s say they sleep eight hours a day, so there’s 18 hours, so there’s six hours that they have their own free time, so they’re spending a majority of their waking hours at a company.

So you have to start to think about what are the other things that are important? And as I started to develop, and Zach was talking about this in so many words, my emotional intelligence, I started to realize there was other things that were important. One, they wanted to be valued. They wanted a responsibility. They wanted a place that every day they walked into, and it was, I don’t want to say maybe a happy place, but it was a place that they were comfortable in and they felt belonging to. And as I started to change, I realized it wasn’t all based on money, but to build a culture is actually a lot harder than just giving somebody an additional bump on their paycheck.

Stephen Adele:

Yeah, that’s a transformative idea for a company. And what a breakthrough that you saw that because it does really change the entire dynamic of the company. Two things I’ll say. One is when we talk about this in the book, but some of the early hires, we’ll take EQ over IQ any day, the grit, the willing to just pull up your sleeves, work hard, figure it out, I’ll get it done. That type of attitude, it just goes such a long way, especially in the beginning. But one of the things that I would like to add to this regarding culture and just creating a grander vision is always important, but creating a grander mission for the company can become critically important to enveloping a culture that really embodies that mission. And at Quick Box, this was something that we sat down in the very beginning and we set our strategy and we were very clear, but we didn’t necessarily have a mission that was driving what we were doing.

And that was found later because we realized that we had a problem that was very deeply concerning to me. So I had never been in the warehouse business, and these are entry level jobs and it’s not glamorous. And what I found was that we had almost a hundred percent turnover inside six months. So just imagine we have almost 500 employees and you’re turning them over that quickly, very expensive, very time consuming, and how do you scale through that? So I just started employing a practice that I had done for many, many years, which is just called Walk the Four Corners, which is just literally walk the four corners as the CEO of your company and stop and talk to people and lean in. And you’re not there to tell ’em how to do their job or micromanage. You’re just there to talk to them and get to know them as people.

And by doing that, I learned that there were a certain number of people that had been there much longer than everyone else, and it was because we had given them a second chance and we just didn’t know it. So these were recent immigrants, recently disabled veterans. It could be recent homeless battered shelters and the most unemployable group of all, which is recently incarcerated. And this was like an aha moment because I had went out to all the pundits in the industry and they all said, oh, just get used to it. Just add a little more money, throw a few more perks in there. That’s not the solution. That was very shortsighted. And so once we figured this out, we created this very strong outreach program around Denver, and we quickly turned the tide on that. It got to the point where we had almost 80% of our workforce was second chance employees, and our retention went from almost zero at six months to over 70% in six months.

So it completely transformed the company, but it did something more important than that. It created this underlying mission to what we were doing. So Jessica, our marketing person, she said, Steven, I think we really need to put a loudspeaker on this. This is incredible. I’m going to put a calculator on the front of our website so when people come to look at who we are, it asks how many orders per day you are doing. And by doing that, it would show if you brought those orders to us, we would be able to hire X amount of more new Second Chance employees building our community. That then became a ticker inside the company where we could watch that. So it became this rally around, let’s hire, let’s get more clients so we can hire more Second chance employees, give more people a second chance. And as we continued to just feed into this, it created this just overwhelming mission and it actually became our tagline. It was fulfillment on a mission, and it just became this incredible sort of thing that just developed organically, but it became this huge competitive advantage for us as well.

Joshua Ross:

I love that example because your business was very straightforward, not sexy, but you were able to drive a social mission out of that which actually really created the culture within the company and also all this outside exposure that kind of galvanized the community around you to give you more business to help more people.

Stephen Adele:

We would call clients after they would board with us and ask, how did it go? And one of the questions I would always ask is, why did you choose us? And they would oftentimes say, well, it was table stakes. Three PL is kind of a commodity. You were priced the same, you had the same locations. But you know what? When I saw what you were doing, I wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to be a part of that mission. And then you could tell that that just created a competitive advantage for us in many ways. But yeah, very, very important to have something that everyone can believe in. And it also proved to me, which was just fantastic, that you can do well and do good. You can have financial success and you can have massive social impact. They’re not binary. You can do them both. And it proved to me once and for all that that’s possible,

Zach Lewis:

I think what you did Steven, was you gave all those people in your company a sense of agency over their own lives and a sense of responsibility and that they can affect the outcomes of their future. And if you have that within a company, you have to ask yourself, if you’re hiring people, why are you hiring them? Are you hiring them so you can micromanage ’em and watch them and make sure they’re doing everything? Or are you hiring because you trust them? One of my favorite, personal favorite two by twos is performance versus trust. And I would much rather have a low performing high trust individual because that can be coached up than someone you can’t trust to follow through on what they’re going to say they’re going to do.

Joshua Ross:

So for the target audience that reads your book for the business owner is trying to figure out, alright, I’ve read Ready, set, scale, love the book, what’s their next step? Do they take what they learned in the book and just apply it? Do they go hire a consultant to do that? Walk me through how you feel that this book should be used as a tool or as an add-on or strategically what’s the next step?

Stephen Adele:

Yeah, there’s a number of ways you can approach that and it’s a great question. And first I think we have to consider where are we meeting the person in their entrepreneurial journey? Where are they at in that journey? How are we intercepting and converging our paths? Are you at the first million and now you’re putting your head up and saying, okay, now what? What’s next? What do I do? I’m unfamiliar with even what the next steps are to scale. Or you could be in this stage of I think I’m doing things well, but I really want to scale to let’s say a hundred million dollars company, but I’m unsure what that takes. Or one of the ones that we find quite commonly is the business hits a proverbial ceiling in their growth potential. So they hit 25, somewhere between 25 and 50 million, they just hit the ceiling and you just keep trying, keep trying, and it’s 12 months, 18, 24 months and they haven’t moved the needle.

And they say, we don’t know what’s blocking us or preventing us from scaling, but we were doing really well. And then it just stopped. And so again, that’s where that tool comes in to look at an audit. What are they actual constraints? What do we need to unlock? If you read the book, I think it does a very excellent job if I may, of providing a right that playbook that says, here’s all the questions you need to be answering. And then from a DIY sort of perspective, the tools you can have access to digitally to help you in your business. And that can be sort of a la carte menu, maybe I just need to understand how to manage cash. I mean, Zach developed this incredible tool, the Seven Levers cash navigator, and it really just looks at the impact of different variables on your cashflow.

And it’s one of those tools where I thought, oh my gosh, when I was early as an entrepreneur, I would’ve loved to have had a tool like that to help me understand how I could develop maybe a negative cash conversion cycle or better manage my cash. So it can be very DIY. And then we do have however you want to put ’em together. We have these packages of these hour growth power sessions of like, Hey, just come and ask us all the questions you want in advance and we’ll try to get through as much as we can. And then we do offer full engagement to a select number of clients. We only have so many hours in the day. We also do respect and appreciate our free time as well. So we do working with companies that are ambitious and really want to listen and are coachable to the ideas, but want to work in a collaborative way to really help them scale their enterprise wherever they’re at in their journey.

Joshua Ross:

So there is a direct tie with this book to your consulting services, and it’s a way for potential customers to get additional access and perhaps you come and take a holistic look at some of these companies and see how you can help.

Zach Lewis:

Yeah, I think going back to why we wrote the book is limited hours, but there’s so many books out there that, or podcasts, YouTube videos on hacky methods on how to grow. And to me that feels like you’re trying to capture the last 10% of optimization when you’re going to get diminishing returns on that. But I feel like what we did pretty well was thread the needle through a lot of complex topics and show how they’re all interconnected. And I think if you can get to 90% of solid execution on these fundamental pillars, then you’re going to be successful.

Joshua Ross:

Alright, so you’re entrepreneurs, you’re authors, your consultants. I look at all everything you’ve done and I start to look at my own life and be like, what have I been doing with my life? So what I want to ask you is what’s next on the journey?

Stephen Adele:

Well, first of all, you certainly shouldn’t say that about yourself. You do a ton. You are extremely pro entrepreneur. You’re one of the few people on this campus that Zach and I really enjoy getting to talk to and think through ideas and talk about entrepreneurial ventures or ideas or concepts. You do a lot for the community and the students here, so you should be awfully proud of what you’ve been doing and are doing. So writing a book may not be for everyone, but I always said there’s a book inside of everyone, but I think for Zach and I, it’s really, we’ve come to this sort of crux in trying to figure out how do we take what I believe in its traditional sense of consulting is a little bit of a old stodgy business model and apply our principles of scaling to it and figure out how to modernize it.

And I do firmly believe, and we’ve had a lot of discussions and actually we’re becoming obsessed about this, figuring this out, is that it can be done. And so we’re in that journey right now. There’s a lot of things behind the scenes we’re doing to try to figure out how to make that happen. We’re not entirely sure what that looks like. Just like anything, you build a working hypothesis and you just try to figure out if this is the way it’s going to work and you feel it out and sometimes you feel like you’re in a dark room feeling your way around. Sometimes you feel like the light is bright and you’ve got it all figured out, but the reality is you’re probably somewhere in between there. So we’re working on really just trying to right now get as much exposure as we can for the book, get as many readers because we genuinely feel that the impact of this book four entrepreneurs, if they will read it and listen and apply, like Zach said, just get 90% of it right and you’re going to just have such a high likelihood for success in scaling your company.

That impact to us means the world because that’s nothing more than we like to see as entrepreneurs win in whatever way that looks like. And then I think from there, it’s really us working in the backend right now to figure out how to transform this business model to be more scalable. And the fun part about it is it allows us to use our own principles in a new way.

Zach Lewis:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think if at the end of my life I helped a bunch of people build companies and provide opportunities for other people to be employed and provide society things that benefit it in the long run, then I’ll be happy. Alright, I got a couple more

Joshua Ross:

Questions.

Stephen Adele:

So these are the bonus questions. Are these the ones,

Joshua Ross:

These are the bonus questions, the tough ones? Yeah. Yeah. These are the

Stephen Adele:

Tough ones. The professor’s coming out of Joshua here. Here you go.

Joshua Ross:

First of all, thank for the kind words. What is your Go-to business book and why? And I’ll start mine. When I was starting my company and growing my company, someone recommended this book called the E-Myth Revisited. And I read it and it, I reread it and then I would read chapters. What it was so impactful for me is for so much of the time I just wanted to work in the business. We were a technology service company. I love technology, that’s why I started it. But if you do, you’re just creating a job for yourself. It was so clear that you had to also be the manager and the entrepreneur as well. And over time, all the percentages of where you focused, your time changed. So much of often of the time I would catch myself working in the business instead of on, and I would go back and read the chapters to recenter what I was supposed to be doing.

Stephen Adele:

Yeah, I would like to add two parts to that answer if I may. So the first part is when I think back to when I was a young, eager, rugged, individualistic entrepreneur, there were three books that really changed my whole trajectory and thinking and life for that matter. And honestly, I think every student in college should read them. One is Think and Grow Rich, which sounds unlike what it is when you read it. The second is How to Win Friends and Influence People. And the first one is Napoleon Hill, the second one is Carnegie, the third one is Take Your Pick of any Anne Rand book. It’s so different, but it’s so applicable. Those three books I think are very powerful. And were, for me, my one single, if I had to pick one business Go-to book, and I know a lot of the quote experts out there have said It’s becoming outdated, is Good to Great from Jim Collins.

The companies in there might be a bit outdated, but the principles, oh my gosh, there is so much about what’s in there that is so applicable today, now more than ever before. But the principles in there are so powerful, it just had a huge impact. And I will never forget, I went to a small conference in Broomfield with Vern Harnish and he had a small guest speaker that day there, and his name was Jim Collins and he was literally opening up the box from when Good to Great had just been shipped to him. And he’s like, you guys are getting fresh copies. And he handed me that book and he said a few words that day and he wasn’t nearly as big as he is now. I mean, this was a room full of probably 30, 40 people. And I remember I went home and I just devoured that book and it has never left my desktop. It just sits there and I reference it all the time. Just extremely powerful book.

Zach Lewis:

Steven, you went with four. So we’re going to have some overlap here. And I think the book that changed my life was Ann Rand’s Fountainhead. The message in that that I pulled away from it specifically was the difference between Howard Roarke and Peter Keating was generally what drives you. And Peter Keating wanted to be successful and he took the traditional route of doing what he was told, doing what was expected by society. And Howard Rourke just followed his passions. It’s about architecture for anyone who hasn’t read it. But he was deeply passionate about architecture, understanding the principles of the materials that he was working with, and to the point where he would work in a quarry or he would weld. And then eventually when he did finally get an opportunity to start building buildings after 10, 15 years, something like that, after getting kicked out of college, his designs were so revolutionary because he understood the materials he was working with and building for the future. And he’d walk around the job sites and he would see people doing things in a way that he might not do it. And he would be able to, because of his depth of understanding, go up to the welders or the plumbers and recommend a different way of doing it. And that garnered so much respect from the people that worked for him and so much loyalty and just going back to culture on the job site, I thought that was an excellent book and highly recommend.

Joshua Ross:

That’s a great one. And I’ll add one other thing. He believed in himself and he believed in his vision and he didn’t care what anybody else thought. He’s like, this is the right way to do it. And he kept pursuing until other people started to align with that. So great

Zach Lewis:

Example. Unfortunately, I think there’s a lot of, Anne Rand wrote into that character.

Joshua Ross:

She

Zach Lewis:

Wrote a lot of herself into that character. And I think one of the things we talk about in the book is the importance of timing. I think she just might’ve been a little ahead of her time.

Joshua Ross:

She was very much ahead of her time. But like Collin’s book, it’s a book that is always applicable and relatable. It doesn’t matter when.

Zach Lewis:

Absolutely.

Joshua Ross:

So my final question is where can we find ReadySet scale besides on my bookshelf?

Zach Lewis:

We sell it on our website ready for scaling.com. It’s also available on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and ebook. We’re still fighting over who’s going to do the Voice.

Joshua Ross:

Well, Zach and Steven, thank you for being on the podcast today, and thank you for making me a little bit smarter.

Stephen Adele:

Oh man, absolute pleasure. Our pleasure. Love what you’re doing here, and thank you for the opportunity to get to talk to everybody about ReadySet scale, but also just want to give a shout out to everybody listening to say, if you’re thinking about making that entrepreneurial jump, there’s no better time than now. And we’re here with you through the Climb if you need us.

Zach Lewis:

Thank you, Josh. Appreciate you.

Joshua Ross:

The entrepreneurship at DU podcast was recorded in Marjorie Reed Hall on the University of Denver campus. You can find us on Instagram at du Entrepreneur on Twitter, X at DU entrepreneur, and on Facebook at entrepreneurship at du. This episode was engineered, edited, and produced by Sophia Holt. Entrepreneurship at DU is part of the Daniels College of Business, which has its own podcast. Check out Voices of Experience wherever you get your podcasts.