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The Surprising Power of “No”: How Elite Leaders Multiply Profits by Doing Less

September 10, 2025• Vision

You don’t have a time management problem. 

You have a decision-making problem. 

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’re addicted to saying “yes.” Yes to new ideas. Yes to client requests. Yes to every opportunity that shows up at your door with a dollar sign. But here’s the hard truth: 

Every time you say yes to one thing, you’re saying no to something else—often, your profit. 

That’s not just an opinion. It’s math. And it’s the reason most businesses stay stuck in a loop of high activity and low return. 

In this post, we’re going to dismantle the myth of more and show you why mastering the discipline of strategic no is one of the most profitable moves you can make. 

You’ll see why elite organizations don’t just grow by doing more—but by doing less, better. 

 

The Hidden Cost of Saying Yes 

At first glance, saying yes feels like the right thing to do. It sounds like growth. Like opportunity. Like customer service. 

But in reality, every yes costs you three irreplaceable resources: time, attention, and capacity—and all three directly impact your profits and cash flow. 

Let me give you a real example from a client I’ve worked with for over five years—a large-format graphics company that started in a garage back in 2004. 

By the time we began working together, they had grown into a $10+ million operation with high-end production equipment capable of tackling massive projects—like full retail store refreshes and national rebranding campaigns. 

But they had a problem. 

They were stuck. 

Despite their growth, their profits had plateaued, and their operations were increasingly chaotic. The team was constantly overwhelmed, the machines underutilized, and the owners were working harder than ever with less to show for it. 

Why? 

Because they were still saying yes to every single order that came through the door—including tiny, one-off print jobs that barely covered costs. 

These low-margin jobs might have made sense in the early days, when survival meant keeping the machines running and the lights on. But now? They were clogging up production, burning out the team, and—most importantly—crowding out the very clients they wanted to be serving: multi-location retailers with recurring needs and real budgets. 

The turning point came when we mapped out their “ideal client” and overlaid it with a capacity analysis. What we discovered was eye-opening: 

Every time they said yes to a handful of small $500 banner orders, they were essentially saying no to a $50,000 national rollout that they didn’t have room to fulfill. 

They weren’t lacking opportunity. They were lacking capacity—and it was being eaten alive by the wrong work. 

Once they began to say no to those small, non-core jobs, everything changed. Production smoothed out. Morale improved. They freed up capacity to go after and win the big accounts they were built to serve. 

The result? Higher margins. Fewer headaches. And a growth trajectory that finally aligned with the business they actually wanted to run. 

 

The Essentialist Mindset: A Shortcut to Growing Profits 

The fifth of the Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations is Growing Profits and Cash Flow—and this obsession requires a mindset shift: 

Stop measuring your success by how much you’re doing. Start measuring it by the return on what you’re doing. 

That means you must: 

  • Protect your resources like they’re cash—because they are. 
  • Be ruthlessly selective about what you say yes to. 
  • Develop the confidence and clarity to say no—even when it hurts. 

This is what we call the Essentialist Mindset. It’s the discipline of focusing only on the highest-impact activities, clients, and opportunities—and letting everything else go. 

Sound extreme? It is. That’s why average organizations don’t do it. 

But elite ones do. 

 

3 Ways Saying No Will Grow Your Bottom Line

1. You Free Up Capacity for the Right Work 

When your team isn’t buried in low-margin chaos, they can focus on what matters most: your 90-Day Strategic Priorities. These are the few initiatives that actually drive profitability and momentum. Not busywork. Not distractions. Real, focused progress. 

Every hour you buy back with a “no” is an hour you can reinvest into growth. 

2. You Eliminate the Wrong Clients and Opportunities 

Not every dollar is a good dollar. Some clients cost more than they’re worth. They drain your team, erode your margins, and slow your growth. Elite organizations aren’t afraid to walk away from them. 

Your client list should be curated—not inherited. 

Saying no is how you shape a book of business that’s lean, profitable, and scalable. 

3. You Build a Culture That Honors Focus 

When leaders say yes to everything, they create a culture of overextension and distraction. 

When leaders say no strategically, they model focus, discipline, and clarity. Your team starts doing the same. Meetings get shorter. Execution gets sharper. And profits grow—not just by accident, but by design. 

The Real Reason Leaders Struggle to Say No 

If this is so powerful, why don’t more leaders do it? 

Because we tie our worth to our busyness. We fear that saying no will make us look lazy, or worse, cause us to miss out. FOMO is real—but so is burnout. 

Elite leaders overcome this fear by anchoring to a clear purpose and set of strategic priorities. That’s why Obsession #2: An Inspiring Purpose and Obsession #4: A Culture of Performance are critical enablers of the fifth—Growing Profits and Cash Flow. 

 

So, What Do You Need to Say No To? 

Here are five high-cost “yeses” that may be killing your profitability: 

  • Accepting custom requests that break your playbooks 
  • Serving low-margin clients out of habit or guilt 
  • Pursuing every idea instead of committing to your priorities 
  • Attending meetings that should be emails 
  • Taking on work that could be delegated, automated, or deleted 

Ask yourself: What would happen if I said no to just one of these this week? 

What margin would it create? 

What stress would it eliminate? 

What profits could you finally unlock? 

Recap: Why No is Your New Profit Strategy 

Here’s what we’ve covered: 

  • Every “yes” has a hidden cost. In many cases, it’s your profits and cash flow. 
  • Elite organizations operate with an Essentialist Mindset: they focus only on what matters most. 
  • Strategic “no” builds capacity, clarity, and cultural alignment. 
  • Saying no isn’t a weakness—it’s the discipline of the elite. 

So, where do you go from here?  

 

Are You Ready to Say No to the Right Things? 

  • Are you ready to say “no” to low-margin work? 
  • Are you ready for your team to stop wasting capacity on the wrong priorities? 
  • Is your current approach to growth actually eroding your profits and cash flow? 

 

If you are a “yes” to anything above, then it’s time to act. 

✅ Buy Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations and learn the principles behind elite performance: Amazon | Audible | FiveObsessions.com 

✅ Take the free Elite Organizations Assessment to see how your business scores across all Five Obsessions: NextLevelGrowth.com/Assessment/me  

✅ Meet our team of Business Guides and explore IF and HOW we can help you build your elite, profit-rich organization: NextLevelGrowth.com/Team 

The future of your business—and your freedom—depends on what you say no to next, in order to say yes to the things that can take you from good, to great, to ELITE!. 

Note:  If you want to interact and ideate on ways to make your meetings better, visit AskMichaelErath.com and interact with my AI Clone for expert insights and guidance.

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The Six AI Superpowers Every Business Leader Needs to Master Right Now

June 12, 2025• Data, Issues, Process, Vision

Don’t Invest in AI, Lead With It: The Six TEAs Transforming Smart Companies

If you’re still asking, “Where are we investing in AI?” you’re asking the wrong question.

This isn’t 2017. AI is no longer some speculative R&D moonshot. It’s not a gadget you bolt on to your existing business. AI is the internet of this era, a platform shift so foundational, it’s reshaping how organizations operate, compete, and win.

So why are so many leaders still looking at it through the wrong lens?

It’s like asking in the late ’90s, “Where are we investing in using the internet?” Instead of asking where you’re investing in AI, the question should be: How are you leading with it?

Enter the Six TEAs of AI.

Time. Energy. Attention.

According to leadership expert Scott Thomas, these are the real currencies of transformation. And the Six TEAs of AI Leadership show exactly where to focus them. This isn’t theory. It’s a practical, high-leverage playbook for where to start integrating AI across your organization, and building a strategic edge that your competitors can’t catch.

Let’s break them down.

1. Enabling Solutions (Quick Wins)

Not every AI deployment needs to be moonshot-worthy. Some just need to move the needle first.

Dashboards that deliver smarter insights. Copilots that guide sales conversations. Automations that eliminate tedious, repetitive tasks.

These are the fast wins that build internal confidence and allow to start to experiment and get smart on the “over the counter” solutions on the market for relatively low cost. They remove friction, create ROI visibility, and lay the groundwork for broader adoption. Think of them as your AI training wheels, only they actually go somewhere.

2. Technical or Industry Specialization

The biggest AI breakthroughs won’t come from generic chatbots or off-the-shelf tools. They come from domain-native intelligence.

If you’re in healthcare, imagine AI that supports clinical decisions in real time. In manufacturing, you’re likely already considering systems that fine-tune production without human intervention. In finance, algorithms that anticipate risk before it materializes.

This isn’t automation. It’s strategic differentiation and hyper focused on your specific space. Leaders embed AI into the DNA of their domain, and this is one of the larger hurdles for organizations.

3. Data Strategy & Contextual Visibility

Here’s the hard truth: if your data is a mess, your AI strategy will struggle to really take flight.

Siloed systems. Dirty datasets. Inaccessible knowledge. Or now digital data footprint for parts of your business will limit you now and into the future.

Elite organizations treat their data like a strategic asset, not a byproduct. If their data isn’t already in a state ready to be leveraged, then they have a plan to get there.

AI runs on context. And context lives in your data.

4. Institutional Intelligence Platforms (“Fenced” LLMs)

What if every employee had an AI assistant trained not just on general knowledge, but on your company’s workflows, processes, playbooks and unique cultural nuances?

Internal large language models (LLMs) do just that. They create a shared brain across your organization. A living system that reduces onboarding time, drives operational consistency, and scales institutional knowledge.

When done right, this isn’t just a tool. It’s your internal OS.  In the near term virtually all companies will have one.  Say good bye to shared drives, binders of SOPs and internal wikis.

5. Agentic AI

Most don’t start here, but as you get smarter on the above, you start to prioritize pain points within your organization and where you have the most opportunity tied to automation.

Agentic & Automated AI; helps you pursue outcomes, execute tasks, manage workflows and perform functions without constant human interaction.

The equivalent of junior team members for your team who are “always on”. 

6. Development Processes & Tools (for Tech Organizations)

If you’re in the business of building technology, integrating AI into your development lifecycle is no longer optional.

AI-assisted coding. Automated test generation. Faster release cycles. The goal isn’t 20% efficiency gains—it’s 5x output. Senior devs using AI right should look like productivity superstars.

In tech, this isn’t a luxury. It’s survival and if you’re a technology CEO this is already keeping you up at night.

The Real Playbook for AI Leadership

The Six TEAs aren’t a checklist. They’re a compass.

You don’t have to master all six overnight. But you do need to be investing in at least three and aligning them with your strategic objectives.

AI transformation must be led by executives, not by technical teams or junior employees.

If you’re in vertical market software, the clock is ticking. AI isn’t coming. It’s here. And the leaders who act now won’t just compete—they’ll dominate.

So ask yourself:

  • Would it be a terrible idea to see how your organization stacks up against the Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations?
  • Is it ridiculous to consider that your data strategy might be your biggest hidden asset or liability?
  • Would starting a conversation with a team of seasoned business guides be a waste of your time?

If the answer to any of those is “No,” then it’s time to move.

Next Steps

Because by the time others figure out where to start, you’ll already be leading the pack.

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An Inspiring Purpose - The second of the Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations®

An Inspiring Purpose – The second of the Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations®

October 17, 2023• People, Team Health, Vision

Steve Jobs once said that the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. Great stories capture our hearts and bring inspiration. When people are emotionally engaged and inspired, they will bring more discipline and passion to what they are doing. The power of the second obsession of elite organizations, an Inspiring Purpose, while often overlooked, is very real.

An Inspiring Purpose - The second of the Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations®

Right People, Right Seats: A Missing Piece

After nearly a decade of guiding elite entrepreneurs, and that following more than two decades of growing my own businesses, I’ve come to realize that if you are really obsessed about Great People in your organization, the “right people in the right seats” analogy from Jim Collins’ 2001 book, Good to Great, is missing one important thing. In order for people to truly be their best, they must also feel an emotional connection to an inspiring purpose behind what they do and what the organization stands for. Yes, we need our team members to share our behavioral core values. And yes, we need them to have the skillsets, experience, and desire to perform their roles at a high level. But when you add in the third element, that they form an emotional connection to their company’s Inspiring Purpose, that is when they will bring the greatest effort, drive, passion, and creativity to their role. That is when they will resist silos in the organization and collaborate best with others, because they no longer see what they do as a job, but rather as their contribution to a greater cause that inspires them.
There are literally thousands of books on external marketing, and tens of thousands of consultants to help with external marketing. That is, of course, very important. But for that reason, I’m not focusing this article on external marketing. There are already lots of resources for that. This article is about what very few organizations do, and even fewer do well: internal marketing and storytelling.

Employee Engagement and an Inspiring Purpose

Think about it. What was your organization’s marketing budget last year? What percentage of it did you invest in marketing internally to your team members. What does that tell you about the value you place on inspiring and engaging your employees? What should you be investing to capture the hearts and passions of your teams?
At Next Level Growth, we use a combination of concepts from different thought leaders to help our clients articulate three key pillars of their Inspiring Purpose. They are a Just Cause, a Daily Purpose, and a Strategic Niche. When we incorporate this into Jim Collins’ hedgehog concept, by including an understanding of an organization’s Profit per X (what drives their economic engine), and then also overlay the business model as a flywheel, all of the components fall into place to help every employee in an organization understand how their specific role within their Next Level Accountability Chart™ is part of a bigger picture that advances the organization’s Just Cause. It also provides a strong framework for making better decisions.
From this, many of our clients will also go on to create what Collins referred to in his book, Great by Choice, as a SMaC Recipe. SMaC stands for Specific, Methodical, and Consistent, and is defined as, “a set of durable operating practices that creates a replicable, consistent success formula.” At Next Level Growth, our SMaC Recipe is something we call our 10 Promises and clarifies how we operationalize our strategic differentiating concepts in ways that are durable and replicable. If you would like to see ours as an example, just send us a message through our website and let us know.

Daily Purpose – Start with Why

In his 2009 best-selling book, Start with Why, Simon Sinek says that “Those who truly lead are able to create a following of people who act not because they were swayed, but because they were inspired.”
The second pillar of an Inspiring Purpose, but which I will speak to first, is what we call an organization’s Daily Purpose. It speaks to an organization’s “why,” it’s origin story. When working with clients, we start here because we find that the order in which we go through a discovery process matters in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. We start with Daily Purpose, then use the clarity of that Daily Purpose, or “why,” to uncover the Just Cause.
To begin to understand an organization’s Daily Purpose, we like to ask the founder why they started the company. The answer must be framed in terms of what you do with the company for the people you serve, not that you started it to make money. It should be about outcomes that you produce and that you focus on achieving every day. This often takes several rounds of questioning the answers we receive and asking “why” over and over again until we get there.
Then, we turn to the team and ask them to articulate why, beyond money, they choose to stay at the company. What is it about the work they do, what outcomes they accomplish, that brings them joy and keeps them committed to the organization.

Daily Purpose – An Example

As we work to get alignment among the answers, there is almost always an “a-ha” moment where the words become very clear. As an example, our “why,” or our Daily Purpose, at Next Level Growth is:

Helping Entrepreneurial Leaders Build Elite Organizations®.

In the video above, you will hear Nick Saban talking about what it takes to be elite. This is something we focus on with our clients at Next Level Growth, and explains well the mindset that is at the core of our approach to the Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations®.

As we see leadership teams come together and build something great, something that people want to be a part of, when we see them use the tools and concepts we teach them to overcome their biggest challenges, that is what brings us the greatest joy. This is the outcome we drive that inspires us on a daily basis.

In 2019, ten years after publishing Start with Why, Sinek published The Infinite Game. In this book, he introduced the idea of a Just Cause. As we began to understand and discuss the concept at Next Level Growth, we saw Just Cause as a key and missing piece to telling an inspiring story and one which would elevate Jim Collins’ Hedgehog Concept into what we call an Inspiring Purpose.

Just Cause

Simon Sinek describes a Just Cause as a “specific vision of a future state that does not yet exist; a future state so appealing that people are willing to make sacrifices in order to help advance toward that vision.” He goes on to say, “A Just Cause is not the same as our WHY. A WHY comes from the past. It is an origin story…A Just Cause is about the future and defines where we are going. It describes the world we hope to live in and will commit to help build.”

To summarize, it is a core belief around which an organization is built, and often starts with a phrase like, “We envision a world where…,” or, “We believe that…”

Just Cause – An Example

At Next Level Growth, our Just Cause stems from my own personal belief as its Founder. This belief was something that formed in me slowly over nearly 2 decades as the owner of a family manufacturing business in the hardwood veneer industry with 200 employees, and as a member in YPO and EO, with additional time spent in VISTAGE, where I got to know and observe hundreds of other entrepreneurs. What I realized during those years, is that most entrepreneurs achieve success, to some degree, at the expense of their relationships, their time with family, their physical health, or emotional health.

During my own entrepreneurial journey, I have experienced each of those things, and it almost cost me my marriage and family, something I wrote about in my 2017 best-selling book, RISE: The Reincarnation of an Entrepreneur. It was this understanding that helped me form and articulate the belief, or Just Cause, that drives us all at Next Level Growth:

We believe entrepreneurs deserve more than a return on investment from their business, they deserve to earn a meaningful return on life.

While the thought that one day every entrepreneur will experience a meaningful return on life is not realistic, a Just Cause is about a belief you hold so strongly, you will commit your career towards its advancement. I firmly believe that Next Level Growth has the opportunity to have a significant impact in advancing this Just Cause through at least the organizations we are able to work with and help. At the end of the day, it is the successes that our clients experience on their journey to what I like to call, “entrepreneurial freedom,” and sharing those stories among our team of elite Business Guides, that motivates and inspires us to do more, to dream bigger, and to push ourselves to learn, grow and evolve.

Connecting the dots between our Just Cause and our Daily Purpose in a clear way is very important internally to keep people focused on how they need to show up every day, and what, at the end of the day, matters most. When we put these two statements together, we have the foundation of our Inspiring Purpose:

We believe entrepreneurs deserve more than a return on investment from their business, they deserve to earn a meaningful return on life. This drives our Daily Purpose of Helping Entrepreneurial Leaders Build Elite Organizations®.

When we fully understand the interplay between these two statements, and when we both celebrate the wins we accomplish and use the failures as feedback from which we can learn and grow, we have a unifying and common focus that motivates our decisions and actions on a daily basis.


Our Just Cause and Daily Purpose, and the way we articulate them, is important because it ties directly to our Strategic Niche, which I will go into shortly. Our Daily Purpose is about an outcome, a result. Our focus is on helping build elite organizations, no matter what that takes. By maintaining a daily focus on how our clients are doing on their journey to build something elite, and not on how purely they are following a prescriptive system, our Guides are able to use their experience and our collective knowledge to improvise and seek out solutions, regardless of the source of those solutions.


When we “rope in” with a client, and this is something I repeat often inside our organization, we have to obsess about how they are performing and how they are doing at a deep level, and that is how we have to show up every day. When we do this well, and consistently, our clients win, and in turn, we win.

Strategic Niche

In Jim Collins’ “Hedgehog Concept,” he refers to an organization’s niche as “what you can be best in the world at.” While Collins was researching large, publicly traded companies who perhaps could be best in the world, most entrepreneurial organizations likely won’t achieve “best in the world” status. In our experience, when that is the underlying question an entrepreneur is faced with in clarifying their strategic niche, they often struggle. For that reason, we prefer to use Michael Porter’s definition of a strategic niche:  At what can you provide consistent, differentiated value in the marketplace?

When this answer becomes clear, and when you can show how it advances your Just Cause, it drives an incredibly powerful focus.

Strategic Niche – An Example

When we look at our own business, and survey the landscape of what exists in the world of business coaching and Business Operating Systems, the default is toward what we call, “one-size-fits-all” systems. While these systems often provide value for smaller companies and entrepreneurs who don’t have any systems or structures, they are usually more about the system than the user. Since breaking away from EOS® and Scaling Up, over the last few years we’ve talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs who feel that the Business Operating Systems they have tried are too rigid, or the business coaches they worked with were trying to force fit them into a system rather than making the systems fit their unique organizations.


We’ve also noticed that many Business Operating Systems have a relatively low bar for allowing people to become coaches within their system, and we think this is what drives their insistence on purity and a one-size-fits-all approach. At Next Level Growth, we only allow people who have been owners or C-Suite operators of businesses with at least ten million in revenue and fifty or more employees to apply to be a Business Guide. This level of real-world experience allows every one of our Business Guides to take a freestyle approach in working with their clients whenever it becomes necessary to achieve a desired outcome, and it protects our brand. Less capable coaches don’t have the experience to be highly flexible and meet clients where they are. They have to have a rigid system and structure, with well-defined guard rails, to fall back on.

To stand out and be different, we have formed our strategic niche around flipping this common frustration with Business Operating Systems on its head. At Next Level Growth, our Strategic Niche is:

An individualized, outcomes-based approach to customizable Business Operating & Scaling System implementation & ongoing guidance to the Summit.

Remember, a Strategic Niche should clearly define how you provide consistent, differentiated value in the marketplace. For us, there are four key differentiators.


One: Providing an individualized approach. To do this, we spend time in the discovery process getting to know and understand a potential client’s business, their ownership structure, and the unique challenges they face. We will often times pair them with a Next Level Growth Business Guide who has experience either in the same industry, or in a near-similar industry so that we can provide more unique insights and guidance.

Two: Taking an outcomes-based approach. While we have recommendations of best practices and offer key foundational concepts, not all tools and concepts work in all cases. If something we teach a client isn’t working for them, we seek out alternative solutions and work with them to achieve the outcome, not reteach the same tool or concept and hope they will get a different outcome.

We also challenge our clients to be accountable and do the work. If, over time, we feel that a client is not as committed to their own success as we are, and that they are not doing the work, we will call the end of an engagement and free up our capacity to work with someone who will be more committed and accountable. In my eight years as a Business Guide, I have personally fired four clients simply because they were not willing to do the work and were satisfied with being average to good rather than excellent or elite.

Three: As a result of our outcomes-based approach, our clients do end up with a Business Operating System, but one that is custom tailored to them and to their unique needs and circumstances. Everything fits better when it is custom-tailored.


Four: Because of our own experiences scaling our own businesses, for the clients who want us to remain roped in with them long-term, we are equipped to grow and evolve with them, continuing to provide significant value to them much longer than a typical business coach who can only teach them a certain set of tools and then runs out of value to add. As a testament to this, we have clients that are now in their 8th consecutive year of working with a Next Level Growth Business Guide, and we’ve only been in business for eight years. If we were not providing significant value, they would not be staying with us.

Inspiring Purpose – Pulling it All Together

So, when we put it all together, and frame it as a short message to not only clarify how we are unique to the marketplace, but also what we must focus on internally and why it matters, we have the statement that:

At Next Level Growth, we believe entrepreneurs deserve more than a return on investment from their business, they deserve to earn a meaningful return on life. This drives our Daily Purpose of Helping Entrepreneurial Leaders Build Elite Organizations® by providing an individualized, outcomes-based approach to customizable Business Operating & Scaling System implementation & ongoing guidance to the Summit.

This short paragraph defines the foundation of our unique business model and value proposition, and for those who are the right fit to be part of our organization, it provides inspiration and speaks to the essence of what incites passion in us all. As we make strategic decisions, we always weigh them against this Inspiring Purpose and ask ourselves, “If we choose A versus B, or it we move forward with something or choose not to, will it accelerate our momentum towards advancing our Inspiring Purpose, or might it distract us and cause us to dilute our focus?”

Please don’t overlook the importance of an Inspiring Purpose for your organization. Follow the steps above to discover and wordsmith your own, and if you would like help, we’re just a phone call or email away.

Click to read the next article in this series, Optimized Playbooks.

Next Steps

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The Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations™

Unlocking Greatness: The Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations®

September 19, 2023• Entrepreneurial Freedom, People, Process, Team Health, Vision

Jim Collins opens his 2001 best-selling book, Good to Great, by stating that, “Good is the enemy of great.” Having spent more than 20 years growing my own businesses, followed by more than 10,000 hours across well over 1,000 days guiding strategic meetings with the leadership teams of more than 100 entrepreneurial organizations, I could not agree more.

The Trap of Contentment

So many entrepreneurial leaders become content with good as being good enough and end up trapped in their own businesses. I was fortunate to spend  fifteen of the first twenty years of my career as a member of the peer groups YPO and EO, with a short time also spent in VISTAGE. From my time with each of those organizations,  one thing became very clear to me. Most entrepreneurs, to some degree, achieve success at the expense of their relationships, their time with family, their physical health, or their emotional health.

I created Next Level Growth because I believe it doesn’t have to be that way.

Build an Elite Organization

At Next Level Growth, we focus on Helping Entrepreneurial Leaders Build Elite Organizations®. What Collins refers to as “great.” In his book, Collins shares from the findings of his research, that the organizations who made the leap from good to great had something in common. They were all lead by a team of disciplined people, engaged in disciplined thought, taking disciplined action. It’s important to break this concept down if you are going to be able to apply and operationalize it in your own organization, and it is from this concept that the Next Level Growth Approach was formed.

The Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations®

This is the first post in a series of six, which will walk you through each of the Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations and how to use them to create a custom-tailored system from which you can build your own elite organization. We call this the Next Level Growth Approach, and it is not a prescriptive system, but rather a principled approach. When you follow a prescriptive system, you are bound by the system and forced to make tradeoffs to fit within its constraints. When you embrace a principled approach, primacy is placed on outcomes relative to your goals and vision, within the flexible framework of a set of principles. This unlocks tremendous freedom and creativity, and allows the user to design a custom-tailored system in which to operate relative to the principled approach – the essence of greatness. But first, let me clarify why building an elite organization is worth the effort.

When entrepreneurs follow the Next Level Growth Approach and begin building elite organizations, they are more able to begin delegating to a capable team, aligned around a common set of values and a common purpose, in a systemized and scalable business, where expectations are clear, performance is measured and reported on, and leadership constantly invests in coaching and developing people, while providing them an environment where they can perform at their natural best.

When this happens, entrepreneurial leaders begin to experience a sense of freedom. Their organizations become more efficient, more self-managing, and less dependent on the founder and the leadership team to be deep in the minutiae of the day-to-day.

Hear from long-time Next Level Growth client about his experiencing Return on Life.

We find that these elite organizations bring a special discipline, commitment, drive, and passion to consistently excel to a very high standard in each of the Five Obsessions. Simply put, the Five Obsessions are: Great People, aligned and driven by an Inspiring Purpose, consistently training on, executing, and improving Optimized Playbooks, in a Culture of Performance, while proactively Growing Profit and Cash Flow.

The Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations
Most people are familiar with the “Right People, Right Seats,” analogy made popular by Collins in Good to Great. While I absolutely agree that you need Right People, those who share your values and whose behaviors consistently align with those values, in the Right Seats, meaning they have the skills and desire to perform their roles to a high level, I have discovered a 3rd leg to this stool that is missing if you truly want to build an elite organization: an Inspiring Purpose. When you have the right people, in the right seats, and they are inspired by and emotionally connected to your purpose, they will bring an even greater level of creativity, passion, ingenuity, and effort to the work that they do and will ultimately be even greater ambassadors for your organization.

1. Great People

In the first of the Five Obsessions, Great People, we teach what we refer to as an “A-Player System.” It consists of five foundational concepts to help organizations excel at Right People in the Right Seats: Behavioral Core Values, The Next Level Accountability Chart™, an Onboarding System, Quarterly Calibrations, and a Performance Solutions System designed to either coach up, or coach out, the under performers. I will expand on three of these five here. The Next Level Accountability Chart™ is an evolved and advanced version of both an Organizational Chart as well as the EOS® Accountability Chart™, that we have created over several years of refinement with hundreds of clients ranging in size from just a few million in revenue to organizations nearing $1 billion, and from every industry segment imaginable. What specifically makes it unique and valuable is the inclusion of what we call MMOs™, an acronym for the 3 critical components of a seat on the Next Level Accountability Chart:  Mission, Most Critical Outcome®, and Obsessions™. With this foundation in place, team members from the CEO to the front lines will have absolute clarity of expectations for success in their roles. What’s more is that you can also use this concept to clarify expectations of Board seats, which can be helpful especially in the early days of forming a Board of Directors. When the Next Level Accountability Chart is in place, it is used to feed quarterly coaching conversations, or what we call Quarterly Calibrations, which utilize the second concept for Great People, the A-Player Talent Assessment. Our next blog post will dive deeper into this obsession. The tools around these two concepts help create exceptional alignment around expectations and consistent communication to drive alignment throughout the organization and provide coaching on a continuous basis. W. Edwards Deming once said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” If you want a better result, you need a better system. The Performance Solutions System was specifically designed to help leaders and managers overcome the two most significant barriers to a Culture of Performance:  The emotional cost, and the story-telling trap. Most leaders and managers tolerate mediocrity far too long because they are either resisting difficult conversations with team members because such conversations come with an emotional cost to the leader of manager, so they naturally avoid what they know will be difficult, or, they fall into the story-telling trap, believing the excuses and reasons they are given as to why a team member consistently misses their goals and fails the meet expectations. Having a well designed system that helps overcome these barriers is crucial if you want a Culture of Performance, and at Next Level Growth, we believe that our A-Player System is the most comprehensive approach to building a high-performing and values aligned culture.

2. Inspiring Purpose

The second of the Five Obsessions, Inspiring Purpose, is about storytelling. As humans, we are all storytellers. Most organizations make significant investments in PR and marketing, but it is almost always externally focused. Elite organizations also make investments in understanding, articulating, and in fact, marketing things like their Just Cause, Daily Purpose, their vision, their strategic initiatives, and their Flywheel internally. This provides team members something that they can emotionally connect with, and when you bring an emotional connection to what you do and why you do it, you get better, more consistent performance, and you can accomplish even more and at a higher level.

3. Optimized Playbooks

Optimized Playbooks is the third of the Five Obsessions. Outside of the business world, every professional has playbooks and a practice schedule. Whether it is an athlete with a playbook to study, or an actor with a script, they have playbooks and they are consistently practicing so that when it is gametime, or time for the performance, they are ready to execute flawlessly. Only in the business world do most professionals operate without playbooks and without any meaningful practice. Our fourth blog post in this series will dive into playbooks and practice schedules.

4. Culture of Performance

The fourth of the Five Obsessions is a Culture of Performance. When you have a team of A-Players, and they are inspired by the purpose behind what they are doing, they want to know how they are doing – if they are winning or if they are falling behind. It is important that they know the score and the key details, in real time, to know how to adjust the way they are playing the game. Imagine watching a basketball game with no scoreboard and no stats. It would be like watching practice. But when you add a scoreboard, and everyone knows the score, the time remaining, the team fouls, and the teams are tracking statistics and checking in at every time out so they can review the data and make real-time adjustments, that is not only more interesting, but it drives our competitive human nature and leads to higher level of performance. To build an elite organization, you must obsess about a Culture of Performance.

5. Growing Profits and Cash Flow

The last of the Five Obsessions is something that, unfortunately, most Business Operating Systems and many entrepreneurs view as a byproduct of everything else…Growing Profits and Cash Flow. While in theory one could argue that this mindset is correct, you live in the world of reality, and in reality, to be a truly elite organization, you must consistently obsess about Growing Profits and Cash Flow. The best organizations are constantly fine tuning and evolving their pricing strategy, their cash conversion cycle, and improving the financial literacy of their teams and leaders. They understand what drives their economic engine, have identified what Jim Collins calls their “Profit per X,” and are analyzing their decisions and strategies through that lens. You have to think of both profit and, even more importantly, net cash flow, as the fuel that feeds the engine you are building in your business, and that engine is what drives your Inspiring Purpose. No profit, no purpose. Over the next 3 months, we will be releasing blog posts diving deep into each of these Five Obsessions, unpacking the specific tools and concepts we share with the organizations who are members of the Next Level Growth ecosystem and working with an elite Next Level Growth Business Guide on their journey to the summits of their business mountains.

Click to read the next article in this series, Great People.i

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Clear the Fog for Better Decision Making

August 15, 2023• Entrepreneurial Freedom, Process, Vision

How often do you pay “Dumb Taxes” in your business?

I just finished the Audio Book The Road Less Stupid by Keith J. Cunningham and, spoiler alert, the book is about why smart people do dumb things. The author asks the reader, “how much money would you have right now if I gave you the ability to unwind any three financial decisions you have ever made?” Cunningham calls this “paying a dumb tax”. He says, “we don’t need to do more smart things, we just need to make fewer dumb mistakes. Every one of those three decisions you would love to unwind was an avoidable mistake.” The vast majority of our dumb tax is a direct result of emotional, overly optimistic, and poorly thought-out decisions. The solution to paying these types of taxes is allowing yourself thinking time.  

When we run ourselves to the ground by constantly “doing”, we are not thinking at our highest level. We are much smarter than we allow ourselves to be at times. True wisdom is tapped into during dedicated moments of deep reflection, what we at Next Level Growth call a “Clear the Fog” Break.

What is a Clear the Fog Break?

Keeping your head clear and your focus strong is what this tool is all about. Great leaders have the habit of taking quiet time to think. That means escaping the office on a regular basis for 30 minutes or more. By working on yourself and the business, you will rise above feeling frustrated and overwhelmed, to a clear-headed and confident state. As a result, when you come back into the business, you will be laser-focused and in the right leadership frame of mind. 

During your next break, use any one of the Clear the Fog Questions to get started:

  1. What is one thing my business, my team or I should start doing that we’re not?  
  2. What is one thing my business, my team or I should stop doing?  
  3. What is one thing my business, my team or I are doing that is going well?
  4. What is a major hassle (for our team members, for our customers/clients, or for our vendors) that needs to be resolved?
  5. What can we do to be more proactive versus reactive?

So, instead of paying avoidable “dumb tax”, choose the road less stupid by scheduling regular Clear the Fog breaks for better solutions than what your emotional, untamed brain will come up with in a reactive moment.

Free Clear the Fog Worksheet

Use these questions to help to see clearly in your business and gain the confidence to simplify procedures and efficiencies.

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Getting Rocks Right

December 2, 2020• Entrepreneurial Freedom, Issues, Process, Vision

Setting great Rocks is one of the most difficult and misunderstood elements of the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS®), but getting them right is the difference maker to ensure you achieve your business goals. 

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