Your Values Are To Live, Not Laminate.

I hope you’re having a grand week? How was your first month of 2025? It’s been a busy January over here at Simple Scaling from launching the waitlist for our ScaleX Elevate Programme, to kicking off Season 15 of the podcast with some brilliant guest speakers (including Daniel Priestley and David Coulthard) to launching our first ScaleX Accelerator 2025 cohort (with our second cohort launching in June!)

3 Scaling Tactics

2 Leadership Lessons

1 Reflection Question

This is just under 4 minutes of a read but could give you insights capable of changing your day!

3 Scaling Tactics

1) Are Your People Represented?

In my early days of business leadership, I attended a talk presented by Jack Welch. He entered the room and instantly and asked 3 simple questions: Question 1: Put your hands up if you think your people are the most important asset to your business? Question 2: Keep your hand up if you have a HR department in your business. Question 3: Now out of you with your hands up, who has ‘People’, the most important asset in your business you’ve just told me, represented on the Board with a talent director? By the end of all these questions, 99% of the room (including myself) had put their hands down. It just highlights how so many business & business leaders say that their people are the core of their business, yet very few have taken steps to make that a reality. So after that speech, we hired our first Talent Director to ensure that our people where represented properly within the business. It’s something that is so obvious, yet so many business leaders overlook it.

2) Innovation Requires Discipline

Innovation is a crucial part of scaling a business. However, most business leaders fail to innovate with discipline & purpose. I think this quote from Walt Disney sums it up perfectly:

“You don’t build it for yourself. You know what the people want and you build it for them.”

For those who want to scale successfully, innovation is all about enabling the needs of your customers and widening the gap between you & your competitors. Any innovation that falls outside of this is wasted time & energy. Ensure that you remain disciplined and focused on your core objectives when it comes to innovating because it can be the fuel for your success, or the fuel that burns you down.

3) Culture Is Created Through Values

Every business has a culture. Yet many people think that culture is a quote on the wall that magically makes people act differently and it’s something that can’t be changed. However, both of those statements are wrong.

Culture is something that can be moulded and cultivated through values. But it all starts with the leader. If you want to create a culture, you need to establish values. Once you have those values, you need to act on them day in & day out.

Once you start to do this, these values that you adhere to will start to spread across the entire business. In turn, creating a culture centred around the core values of you and your business. So, if you want to change or cultivate a good company culture, you need to take a long hard look at the values that you & your business holds.

2 Leadership Lessons

1) Leaders Are Not Born, They Are Made

There’s a common misconception that the best leaders are born with the skills to be a great leader. However, the truth is, leaders are not born but made. Jeff Bezos wasn’t born a leader, he took the steps required to become one.

This was proven when a Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson led studies on expertise and performance across a wide range of disciplines such as: surgery, acting, chess, writing, computer programming, ballet, music, aviation, firefighting, and many others. He concluded that expert leaders are not a natural phenomenon.

He stated that a particular kind of deliberate practice could be used to develop expertise. His research showed that working with deliberation at what you can’t do, delivers the skill you need. He said that, “Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.”

This is a profound message that I think all leaders with scaling ambitions need to hear. If you can push yourself to do what you aren’t good at, you will continuously grow into a better & better leader.

2) Inspiration Is Key & Perishable

The universe doesn’t reward desperation in business. Being desperate to make loads of money or build the biggest business won’t get you anywhere in the world of business.

Because time & time again, I see the universe rewarding those who are inspired to serve other. All the greatest business leaders in the world are inspired to serve others by:

Solving people problems.

Getting to know the people they serve.

Exploring what opportunities excite them.

Those are the people in business who succeed. So, if you’re inspired to serve others through your business, it’s essential that you act now. Because inspiration is perishable. It won’t stick around forever if you fail to act on it. So, make sure you take that inspiration to serve others and run with it.

This was something I spoke about at our recent ScaleX Summit, I’ll leave the link here for you if you’re interested in giving this a watch:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Uat6SLvFuTg

1 Reflection Question

For todays reflective question, I’d like to refer back to Scaling Tactic 3 as I think every business leader needs to think about this in depth from time to time:

What are the values that drive your culture? Do those values align with you & your business? Are you accurately representing those values? Are you regularly going back to your core values to make sure they align with your business goals & vision?

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I hope you have enjoyed this week’s 321 newsletter!

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And remember, complex fails. Simple scales.

Take Care,

Brendan