The Dirty Little Secrets of Scaling to a Billion with Ben Hobson at JobNimbus

In this episode, Ben Hodson shares how AI is helping the engineering team deliver customer-facing work four times faster than six months ago. Ranked No. 1,884 on the 2026 Inc. 5000, JobNimbus continues to accelerate growth through technology, leadership, and innovation. He also discusses evolving company processes, strengthening cross-department communication, and building clearer documentation as the organization scales. Hodson reflects on his leadership journey from personally solving problems to empowering employees to take ownership, learn from mistakes, and embrace accountability. He also shares how JobNimbus's annual leadership training program helps develop stronger leaders and a more accountable culture. Episode Highlights & Time Stamps 1:08 The Journey to a Billion 4:19 JobNimbus and Its Rapid Growth 6:04 Adopting AI at Scale 10:10 When Growth Breaks What Works 13:01 Fixing Communication Between Teams 16:35 Escaping the Founder Hero Complex 19:29 Developing More MVPs 21:52 Leading Through Accountability 26:21 Closing Reflections on Leadership What You'll Learn ✅Why business systems that work at one stage of growth eventually stop working. ✅How AI can accelerate productivity, improve customer value, and support business growth. ✅Why communication breakdowns between departments become more common as companies scale. ✅How founders can overcome the hero complex and develop independent, capable leaders. ✅Why accountability and employee empowerment are essential for sustainable growth. Key Takeaways ✅Build systems for your current stage: Continuously evaluate and improve processes as the business grows. ✅Fix problems before they become bottlenecks: Watch for early signs of declining efficiency and performance. ✅Strengthen departmental handoffs: Clearly define expectations, responsibilities, and deliverables between teams. ✅Stop being the company's problem-solver: Shift from providing answers to helping employees develop their own solutions. ✅Use AI to increase value: Focus on measurable productivity gains and better customer outcomes, not simply reducing headcount. ✅Create leaders, not dependents: Build a culture where employees take ownership and hold themselves accountable. Connect With Today's Guest Ben Hodson is the founder of JobNimbus, a software company that helps roofing and home-exterior contractors manage their businesses more efficiently. Under his leadership, JobNimbus has grown significantly, scaling its team, improving its systems, and embracing new technologies like AI. Ben shares valuable insights on business growth, leadership, team development, and the challenges founders face as their companies expand. His experience highlights the importance of building strong teams, empowering employees, and creating a business that can thrive without depending on the founder for every decision. How to Connect With Ben To learn more about Ben and his work at JobNimbus, visit the company's website and connect through its official channels. Website: https://www.jobnimbus.com/ LinkedIn: Search for Ben and JobNimbus on https://www.linkedin.com/in/benlanehodson/ to find his professional profile and connect with him. Follow Ben's journey to learn more about scaling a business, developing effective leaders, and building systems that support sustainable growth. Resources & Next Steps Ready to take your leadership energy to the next level? Explore free training and resources at training.coreelevation.com to help you identify energy leaks, strengthen your leadership presence, and elevate your team's performance. 🌐 Explore More: training.coreelevation.com 🎧 Listen to the Full Episode: Growth Think Tank Podcast

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So then your team comes to you and says, hey, we have this problem. You're like, oh, I know we solve it this way. Oh, I know we solve it this way. And you start training your people. Because every time that you get to do that, they're like, oh, that was brilliant. So then you're stroking your ego, you're constantly going, I'm so important and I have to be in everything. And your brain is creating pathways of like, yes, yes, yes, dopamine, dopamine, nope, this is so feels so good. And all you're doing is teaching your people to be babysat by you. And then you're like, damn, I can't get anybody to do anything on their own. It's like you created the exact problem and your brain didn't even know it. So for me, it was like learning to break out of the hero role and go, how could I teach?

• 0:42Speaker 00

  How could I enable? How could I give responsibility and control to team members? And how could I be okay with them making mistakes I wouldn't have made so that they get to a point? Where they're doing as good, if not better than what I did. And then now I have a team that every person in their role is better at that thing than me. And that was a huge accomplishment that took a lot of frankly rewriting my brain patterns to get to that point.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  If you're a founder who's built something real and now your business can't grow without you in the middle of everything, you're in the right place. I'm Gene Hammond. This is Growth Think Tank, where founders who are ready to stop being the ceiling of their own company, come to think differently, lead better, and build a company that doesn't need them. This is the longest running leadership podcast in the world. Hundreds of Inc. 5000 CEOs have told their stories here. Let's get to it. Today, we're going to talk about the secrets of scaling to a billion. In fact, the dirty little secrets that it takes to scale your business to a billion dollars and beyond value. Today, our special guest is the founder of Job Nimbus.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  They've been on the Inc. list many times before. I won't even account this, but he was a original guest many, many, many years ago. But Bob Jim Hobbes, Jim Hobson is going to talk about the dirty little secrets of scaling to a billion. Now, his company, Job Nimbus, is a financial platform for service-based businesses, exterior to the home. Think roofing companies and construction companies. And they do everything from payments to processing to processes and scheduling. But it just creates an incredible workflow for those businesses to scale themselves. And that's the reason why they've been so successful. Now, Ben and I get to talk about those dirty little secrets and scaling to a billion.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  So when he first was on the podcast, probably about six years ago, and I didn't look this up, but he was around $10 million in revenue. Big company, right? But how did he get to a billion? Well, he began to, to change the way he leads. Because when you have, you know, 10 or 30 employees, it's a much smaller community, a tribe, if you will. But as you grow bigger, now he's over 300 employees, communication rhythms change. There's different breakdowns that happen. We talked about the different processes inside the business that used to work and they don't work anymore. We talked about his leadership changes, the principles of leadership that have, that he had to rethink. One of them is the hero complex. You'll have to hear what that really means inside today's episode with Ben.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  My name is Gene Hammond. I love what I do. I work with a lot of founders who are stuck in the role of decision maker firefighter. They are running a founder dependent business. Now, it's not a bad thing, but if you want to break through that, you have to learn to let go of being the doer and become a better leader. And that's not always easy. And that's where we come in. We help you build a foundation of leadership inside your company. We take that beyond the CEO's suite to the executive team and beyond to directors and managers, whatever it takes to get leadership throughout your company. That leadership operating system is the core of how we serve our clients. We've worked with more Inc. 5000 companies than anyone else in business and leadership development.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  And very proud of the work we did. If you are curious about the work we do, you really want to jump in. Download our free book, Get Founder Freedom. You can get it for free right now. And if you qualify, we can have a call to talk about what's really going on in your business and it's absolutely free. Now, to qualify, you have to have the right number of employees. So go in and check out that getfounderfreedom.com. It's absolutely free today. Now here's the interview with Ben. Ben, how are you doing?

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Excellent. Glad to be here.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Well, I've got a big smile on my face. You've been here before. We just spent about 20 minutes catching up before we hit the record button. So before I go too far into this and really just tell everyone how much I'm excited about your growth. Tell us a little bit about your company, Job Nimbus.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  So Job Nimbus is construction software. We specifically try to solve this problem, which is that most contractors are good at the work they do, the trade, but they're not good at running the business. And so Job Nimbus, the software literally helps them run everything end to end. It helps them get their processes in place. They can collect payment, they can do their estimates, they can schedule out their crews. And we specifically are for home exterior people. So we're number one software in the world for roofer remodeling companies that work on the outside of homes. It's really fulfilling to help them change their business and then change their life.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  It's such a good niche to have. And I will tell you, I, I, I have a fascination with the blue collar entrepreneur.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  I guess you did too, because you created a solution.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. Yeah. In tech, they're the forgotten man. We feel like we're like, hey, we're going to care about them. I know nobody else does in tech, but we will.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  And it looks like they have taken you up on your offer because your growth, since you've been on the podcast before, is astronomical. Just catch us up on that.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. To put it in context, without getting into a lot of private information about the company, we were worth about $10 million six years ago in terms of total value of the business. And today we're approaching a billion. So should be there shortly. And so it's drastically different in terms of how much value we've created in six years. And that's probably the crux of what we can talk about today.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do want to look back and you mentioned something earlier because I think we have to address this at some level. But 18 months ago, you saw AIs being a transformational force in business in general. How has your company adapted to the AI era?

• 6:20Speaker 00

  It was really hard. I think it's going to be hard for every company to do. I have a general theory that I've been working on that I think is coming true right now. I'm seeing more and more evidence of it. Which is that you don't have to be the best in the world at AI. That's maybe obvious, but you don't. All you have to do is just be as good as your competition, if not better. And, and if you have market share right now and you're an established player and you are good at AI, you will actually stay at or outpace other entrants because of your go to market engine, which is actually where most AI companies are struggling right now. They can build stuff, but they don't know how to sell it. And so if you have an entrenched customer base, you can actually accelerate.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  So I use that theory to say, we must be the best in our market at AI. And it was like a little bit, damn the torpedoes over the last 18 months of we will figure this out. And now we're humming. The best stat I've got is that our engineering team right now is producing 400% faster than they were even six months ago with AI tools. And that's actual shift value to customers. And none of the competition is even close to that. And now even if they can start accelerating AI, we're way ahead in what we know. And I think we've got a real shot at winning the market because of that long term.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  I've got some theory too around this and it's really around people. Are you less people because of AI or are you keeping about the same?

• 7:44Speaker 00

  We've, we've grown our people. So here's what I don't understand. When I look at companies that are saying, oh yeah, we're, we're laying off all these people because we're going to use AI. And then you actually look under the hood, they're not really using AI. And so my theory is actually a lot of them just use it as a scapegoat to, to do a downsizing operation or a right sizing of whatever they overspent or something, had nothing to do with AI in most cases. Or they maybe thought they would use AI and haven't figured it out yet. Our experience is different. If you, if we use AI and it helps accelerate us, we're, we're growing so much more rapidly. We have to keep hiring. Maybe we're not hiring at the same pace we would be otherwise. I could see a case of we're a little more efficient.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  But I don't see any company that's killing with AI that's not also hiring massively right now. So it may be the opposite of what we've been told.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying too, is it's once you have the right leadership in place that can get that AI era moving within a company. It's not about saving jobs. It's about us being a, being faster, being able to create more and reach our clients, serve our clients better. I mean, I've got some clients in customer service and they're just building tools, small little things here and there that are really like literally this saves us 10 minutes. This saves us 15 minutes. We're not inputting data four times. We're doing it once and we're done all the things. And it's, it's, they're doing more with the same people.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  Yep. Yep. Yeah, I've definitely seen that. I, I do think our people are overall more productive. We have a lot of measures of that right now. And you know, sort of ethically, my opinion is that if you're, if you're an employee and suddenly you could do twice the work you used to be able to, the company's getting the benefit of that efficiency and that profit. I think that the company has an ethical obligation to share some of that benefit with the employee. So we've been doing that. As people got more efficient here, we've actually just been raising salaries on people to say thank you. And still we're getting a huge benefit because they're maybe doing twice the work and they're getting paid more and we're actually making more. So it's a win win for everybody. And I do think that'll equalize out over time, but we definitely are seeing efficiency gains.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  I haven't heard that very much. So it's good for you to have that approach and I agree with it. And it incentivizes them to do the right thing.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Yes. Why would they ever want to automate their job? They're going to get fired or lose.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, automated your job. I'd be like, cool. Let's see if you can do that in other places and keep, you know, you're, you're going to stay here, but we're going to just get more out of this. All right, Ben, we good to catch up with you. Glad to have you back on the podcast. Here's what I'm really curious about moving forward. You know, you're looking back over this. You, you, you're now over 300 employees. You've, you've gone through some inflection points. Culture has shifted. Communication is, is changes as you go through this. What are some of the things you can tell us about some of those inflection points that you've been through as a leader?

• 10:33Speaker 00

  One of the, I, I think head scratching things has been so true for me in all the businesses I've run, but especially here at Job Nimbus, um, cause I've been doing this one longer than any of the other ones. Now I'm running on my 14th year running this thing. And I, I've been shocked at how many times you dial in something and you get it really nailed. And then as you scale, it stops working or it starts falling apart. And it's not because the system was inherently bad. It's because every system only works for the period of time at that scale that it's designed for. And so it's like, whatever you're doing today will stop working. And that's why every company has a business cycle is because most people don't realize that something stopped working. They actually keep trying to do the same thing. Cause of like, this is our secret sauce and then they slowly die.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  So I'm really big at trying to find early signs that something stopped working. It's getting less efficient. It's not producing the same growth. There's lots of ways you can look at this and then try to zoom in and go do open heart surgery on that. Work the problem till we find out the new solution and then implement that. And that is a painful process because one, employees don't love change, especially at scale. We've got 300 employees here. Uh, two, a lot of times the person that was there that was perfect for that old role isn't the right person going forward in that role. So if they have our values, we'll try to move them to a different role in the company. Or there's just might not be the right match anymore. And that's okay. Give them a big hug and say, thank you, and, and then help them find their next job.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  And then three, we also have to change processes, which means systems get updated, which means we sort of slow down to speed up. It's like a retooling operation and that can be really hard in the org. We went through that in the end of 24 and 25, after we took our series B, we had to retool the company for the scale that we're at now.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  I, I'm trying to keep notes here and there's three core principles that you just highlighted. One of them is the old concept, and it seems like you're saying, don't wait for it to break, but try to anticipate those bottlenecks and fix it before it needs to be fixed.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  Or find early indicators that it's starting to go the wrong direction.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Second one is the people that got you here aren't the people that get you to the next level.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  And then the third one is you slow down to speed up. And like even all of my clients now, whenever I first take that first coaching client with them, we do have to slow down to some degree because they're probably working on the wrong things. They're probably not, they need a stronger foundation as the company continues to grow. And I'm sure you've been through these things too, like going back and looking at like even communication across your company. How has it changed as you were a smaller company through now you have three, 300 employees?

• 13:10Speaker 00

  You know, when you're a small, let's say 10 people, and especially if you work in the same office or you're on the phone all day with each other, you kind of just naturally are a hive mind. And a lot of stuff is shared context. Plus everybody's usually wearing more than one hat and doing more than one role. So then they have a lot of knowledge of each other's areas. Then if you fast forward to 300 people, you're like, well, you have people that have no idea how sales works or don't interact with the sales team at all in this company. But then they're making a decision that may affect our sales engine and they don't know. And so you actually, it, where I find the biggest breakdown as you scale is the linkages between teams. It's like the handoffs or where everything falls apart.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  It's when sales sells somebody and hands it to the implementation team to get that customer set up. Every, all hell breaks loose because it's like, well, what did they say here? And how do we get that context there and what was promised and what wasn't? And do we have the right match and all this kind of stuff? And so we work a lot on linkages. I mean, I wouldn't say we're perfect at it, but it's an area that I know is a problem. We work a lot on that here.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Can you share one or two tactical things that you've done to improve those linkages between departments?

• 14:18Speaker 00

  One of the things, and, and people will hate this in general, because people hate writing up an SLA or a service license agreement or whatever is what we call it. But it's like, if you're handing off something to another department, let's just take that example of sales and then the implementation team that has to set the customer up after they bought. What exactly is the output? What, what are we supposed to have? What's the checklist when it leaves sales? And then what is the acceptance criteria from implementation and say, thank you? And we, we tell everybody, here's a tip that I think works really well. We tell everybody to think of themselves as a machine on the factory floor and we're in series. And so sales is this machine and then we take the raw materials that we created. We put them into sales. We get this transform material.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Then we got to put it in the next machine to transform it this way. What exactly are we willing to take as the material? And what exactly are we promising will be the output on the other side? And we make them write it down. Sometimes you can just do it in a whiteboard session, but you document it and then you hold each other to it. And I found what we call the same page meeting where the leaders of those organizations get together and I wouldn't say bitch each, bitch at each other, but that's kind of what happens is like, I am not happy with this and this, and we've got this data showing this and I'm not either. Let's get on the same page. Like let's make sure we're working together. And then of course the CEO needs a tiebreaker on those, but if you get the right team members, they'll just hash out and debate and find solutions together on things.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  That combined with the agreement seems to solve a lot of the issues.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  A lot of the detail that you shared with us there, Ben. If you're listening to this show, chances are you're a founder who's built something significant, but you're still too deep in the day to day to see the path forward. That's exactly what the founder freedom strategy call is for. It's free. It's 30 minutes with me personally. And we'll pinpoint exactly what's keeping you stuck and what you need to do about it. Book your time with me at my personal URL, schedulewithgene.com. Now back to the podcast. I want to turn our conversation to you. You, you have been leading this, you said for 14 years. You've, you've been there from a handful of employees to over 300. We're approaching a billion dollars in value of the company. Congratulations.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  But no, it hasn't been easy. Looking back, what are some of the mistakes you made as a leader? That you're, you, you kind of like maybe cringe about it at this point?

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. One in particular that is really interesting for me or that I think about often is this hero complex you develop as a founder. And what I mean by that is in the early days of the company, if, if you're doing the business right, you've probably done every role because you kind of had to figure it out. In general, most people don't know how to take something from zero to one. So as a founder, you go like, okay, well, let me go do the sales myself. And okay, now here's the process. Now I can hire salespeople and teach them what I'm doing. And then they can go and operate that process and they might even be better at selling than me, but they don't know how to make it from nothing. And so then you're suddenly the keeper of all the contacts, keeper of all the information. So then your team comes to you and says, hey, we have this problem. You're like, oh, I know. We solve it this way.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Oh, I know. We solve it this way. And you start training your people because every time that you get to do that, they're like, oh, that was brilliant. So then you're stroking your ego. You're constantly going like, I'm so important and I have to be in everything. And your brain is creating pathways of like, yes, yes, yes. Dopamine, dopamine, nope. This is so, feels so good. And all you're doing is teaching your people to be babysat by you. And then you're like, damn, I can't get anybody to do anything on their own. It's like you created the exact problem and your brain didn't even know it. So for me, it was like learning to break out of the hero role and go, how could I teach? How could I enable? How could I give responsibility and control to team members?

• 18:12Speaker 00

  And how could I be okay with them making mistakes I wouldn't have made so that they get to a point where they're doing as good, if not better than what I did? And then now I have a team that every person in their role is better at that thing than me. And that was a huge accomplishment that took a lot of frankly rewriting my brain patterns to get to that point.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  That's one of the things I specialize in and it, I don't know, I don't call it the hero complex, but when you are the most valuable player in your company, if your company's not that valuable. I had a, um, I want to talk about leadership development because now you have a bunch of leaders now. But I, I mean, put this in context of we had, uh, one of the things we do is teach young managers how to be better leaders. And I remember this one came to me, it was a few years ago, his name's Evan. And he goes, I finally get it. He was a rock star, right? It's very good. MVP of his team. He goes, now that I'm a leader of this team, my job is not to be the MVP, it's to create more MVPs.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  And that is a very big shift for a young kid to have. Now he still had to, you know, do work and do quality work and, you know, all the stuff, but he also had to empower this next team and, and he is done and he's still with the company. Checked in with the CEO, uh, a few months ago. And that's what we as CEO should be doing is not be the MVP anymore, but to create more MVPs. Ben, how do you create more MVPs on your team?

• 19:33Speaker 00

  There's a lot of elements of just the daily coaching and mentoring of how you approach a conversation. Somebody walks in my office, hey, we got a problem with this boss. First thing I think is like, okay, how do I make sure I maintain my emotional control as they deliver bad news? Cause I always want to make sure that I'm a safe place to deliver bad news to, otherwise I don't hear about things, you know, until it's too late. And then second thing I think about is how can I help this person come to the answer without me telling it to them? What questions could I be asking? What could I whiteboard out right now about a model about how to think about this problem? That might help them have an aha moment so that I cannot be quote unquote, the hero that gets to save the day. I'm actually the mentor that creates a new hero, like you're talking about.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  That for me is the starting point, the daily interactions. The other thing is I've started to do a leadership training program annually here for the last few years. We're going on our third year of this now and I'm really proud of what I've built. It's basically an executive MBA class that we do internally that we, I teach with my head of people. And it's something that you, I just don't know a lot of other companies that are scale and size doing that is really making impact. It's unlocking people in a really special way.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  That's what we try to do for smaller companies is be that, that partner is to create sort of the executive MBA of leadership. And when you think about the leadership training, I love that when you were walking through, remain emotionally in control. And then secondly, How do you ask questions to allow them to think for themselves, let them to solve the problem? When I say this to you, I've just had so many conversations, I will say, when you, when you finally get to this place, it will take longer, it will require you to be patient. It may not be the way you would do it, and I use the 80% rule, like, is it 80% going to get you there? And is it not going to cause any catastrophic problems for them to do it their way?

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Because I will be honest with you, we learn through failure as entrepreneurs. Everyone agrees to that. But if we protect our employees, just like if we protect our kids from failure, they don't learn those lessons.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  So you have to be willing to not just, to not make the decision, that's the hardest part. Because that's the fastest and easiest thing to do. I think we both agree to that, Ben, but that puts you in the hero complex again.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Yep. Yeah, that's well said. Yeah, I totally agree.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  We've been doing this for years and I appreciate you being on the show. Let's wrap this up with an insight. If you were sitting down with a CEO, say they're climbing to 20 million, maybe they're even climbing to 50 million. What would you tell them about leadership that you feel like you wish someone would have told you?

• 22:08Speaker 00

  I had a, I had a really cool moment with my CTO, five years ago, six years, something like that, where I was in a team meeting, he wasn't there, but it was with his team and they had a problem. And I was like, hold on, hold on, no, no, guys, we do it this way. And I solved the problem and everybody was like, yes, you know, we're all high fiving on the way out. And then he came into my office the next day in my 101, and he was very direct with me. And he said, hey, I heard about this problem you solved, great, you nailed it. Why'd you take that away from me? I'm here to kick ass for you and for this company, for this team. Like, at what point do, are you okay with me taking the lead? I was like, oh damn, this, I said, thank you for the feedback. This is a really good point. You're right, that was the wrong approach to it, and thank you for sharing that with me.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  And I really made a commitment at that point to stop being the one to get in the middle of everything and start letting my team leaders lead. So suddenly now my brain changes to, how do I solve problems? To, how do I make sure people know what they're accountable for? And take their own drive and initiative to be accountable for that, so I don't have to babysit all the time. And that was my new management leadership problem. So I would say that's the tip is like, how can you transform your leadership from managing people to inspiring people to hold themselves accountable to what they need to do?

• 23:28Speaker 01

  You're not familiar with the work that we've developed, because we've been friends, we talked, you know, for years. You know, every six months or so, but it's been a while. And I have created the five levels of leadership. I'll share it with you, but I'll just tell it right here. It really walks you through this. Level one is about control, it's an anti-leader. Level two is about the transactional leader, which is the doer, right? I'm going to solve the problem, I'm going to say, I'm going to close the deal. The strategic leader in level three is bigger picture thinking, but all three of those levels are work focused. Then when you get to level four, you've crossed the chasm, I call this the leadership ravine. But level four is a people leader, when you spend more than 50% of your time on just people.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  The one-on-ones, the confidence, the decision-making, not the work, not the firefighting, not the decision-making. But really developing the people. And then level five, and there's only been a few people in my experience, and I've interviewed over 1,300 people through this podcast. Only a handful have ever reached level five, which is compound leader, which is basically the chairman of the board. I get very few chairmen come through here.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Sure, yeah, right, right.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  But they're like, I'm not involved with the day-to-day at all. I go to a board meeting whenever it's called. I take a call from an executive team member about whatever it is, but I don't know, I'm not involved in, in any part of the business. They're, they're compound leader, their, their whole thing is doing this. I'll share it with you and hopefully people put this in context.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's great.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  You're probably right smack dab in that level four, would you say, that people leader?

• 24:58Speaker 00

  That's, that's where I felt like, that's what I think I've gotten my brain to over time here.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  But it took you many years to get there.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, here's why, like, Gene, the problem is when you start a business, you can't actually operate like that early on. Or it won't work. So you do have to kind of like hook and crack control and just get something going. And then once you start scaling, damn, everything I learned, I gotta relearn if I want to be a scaling leader. Which is, I think, why a lot of founders try to get out of their company once it starts scaling, because they're like, I don't want to do that, you know?

• 25:32Speaker 01

  And that's exactly the reason I created it. And it's okay, wherever you are, if you're in level two, you're transactional leader, great. How do you get yourself to level three? How do you get yourself to start thinking about level four?

• 25:41Speaker 00

  That's a beautiful thought, yeah.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  The leadership ravine is, represents the difficulty of that person bringing you the problem, or team, in your case. And you're going, I know I probably shouldn't solve this, but it's just right there, and I enjoy doing it. And you solve problems, your identity becomes in that, so you get pulled back into the work. Whereas now you know, my job is not to solve the problem, my job is to build the person up that should be solving the problem.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  And sometimes the problem is that CTO may have just needed their team to solve the problem, not him.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Uh huh. Now, he was trying to do that with his team, and that was kind of getting in the way of it.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  So, Ben, thank you for being here, talking about leadership and growth, I really appreciate it.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  Happy to be here.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Wow, what another great episode. I just love his energy, I love the clarity he had. He walked through some of the challenges he had as leaders. Hopefully you really understood that, because you're not alone. But you can accelerate through these faster with support, and I'd love to support you. If I can help you in any way, make sure you reach out to me, [email protected]. Download our book, Get Founder Freedom, whenever you want to truly create the freedom in your business. And you can't do it when you want the freedom, you have to be willing to do the work to create freedom and create a team around you. And that's what we share with you, the path in that book. So, getfounderfreedom.com. When you think of growth and you think of leadership, think of growth, think tank. As always, the courage, we'll see you next time.