Grow or Die

This is my 24th year as an entrepreneur, with eight of those coaching leadership teams. During that time, I’ve seen hundreds of leaders move through what I have come to call the 4D’s of Entrepreneurial Growth. And that reminds me of the story of Lem Motlow.

Lem was a smart, motivated young man. At the age of 14 he took over the accounting for his uncle’s business and did such a great job that he earned the right to fix other parts of the business. He was in the first stage: The Doer.

Lem’s uncle responded by giving him the responsibility of managing those areas he had helped fix. Lem was on the ground, guiding the efforts of his teams and equipping them for success. He had moved onto the second stage: The Director.

When Lem’s uncle got sick and neared the end of his life, he turned the entire business over to Lem. Lem no longer had the time to direct the day-to-day efforts of his employees. He delegated that responsibility and moved to the third stage: The Decider. He was now a full-time “what” man: What business will we be in? What products will we sell? What kind of culture do we want? He decided and others executed.

And right when Lem hit his stride as a leader and decider, his business’s only product became illegal, and he was forced to move to the fourth stage: The Deployer. He redeployed the company’s assets to a new line of business to keep the company afloat and he redeployed his time to politics to lobby for the re-legalization of his core product, which he eventually succeeded in doing.

You’ve probably never heard of Lem Motlow, but I bet you have heard of (and maybe had an unpleasant encounter with) his uncle: Jack Daniel.

What about you? Are you intentionally progressing through one of these stages and preparing for the next? If not, then you’ve implicitly decided to spend the rest of your career in the stage you’re in. And that might be fine if it was an intentional decision, and you are progressively growing your capabilities within that stage. Either way, you must be intentional, because if you’re not growing, you’re dying.