Dan Bubniak’s Post

I'm teaching an agenda and framework to run more effective leadership team meetings on July 16th... I have a couple open seats if anyone is interested... DM me and I'll also drop the registration link in the comments

A leadership team can’t come close to reaching their full potential if they don’t trust eachother. Teams that don’t trust eachother don’t keep it real in meetings. They beat around the bush. The same issues take atleast 10x as long to solve. Teams that trust eachother can enter into dangerous conversations everyday and address real issues without fear of hurting peoples feelings. I don’t think it is understood how much of a competitive advantage this is for any business. Your actually gaining traction every week while your competitors are spending quarters, if not years, dealing with drama, politics, and surface level issues. This is a basic concept but few leadership teams are willing to invest the time or money into getting together, in person, outside of work. Make big investments in your leadership team building deep relationships. I’ll scream it from the mountain tops. Your team will go 10x further faster.

Calling on Connecticut Business Owners + CEOs... Putting together a gathering on July 31st in Stamford to get like minds together. DM me if you're a CEO/Biz Owner here in the area and are interested.

There is an inflection point for all entrepreneurs when their job radically changes. It moves from building the best damn product/service...... to building a vision, system, and organizing people. Which is a dramatically different skillset. This inflection point tends to happen around $5-$15M in revenue. What the entrepreneur does determines if the company keeps scaling or gets stuck. Many times, the entrepreneur is unaware they need to make a seismic shift in how they operate the company. And they get stuck in limbo for a year or two. That period of time is painful, chaotic, and feels like you're on a hamster wheel. Everyone goes through it. The big shifts to move from a "startup" to "scaling up" are: - Hire a leadership team and delegate down - Pull a clear vision for the future into focus - Use a framework to organize and hold accountable people - Spend most of the time out of the weeds and in unique ability This is way easier said than done as it's generally a 180 on how an entrepreneur is currently operating. If you can't do this on your own, look into using a Business Operating System to facilitate the transition and thank me later.

Talking to a ton of PE shops and investment banks. Everyone is saying the same thing. There is a tidal wave of M&A activity coming. The market is waiting for the first interest rate cut. Because it signals the end of the tightening cycle. That’s all the confidence needed to get active in the market. I'd suspect we'll see that first rate cut within the next quarter. Get ready.

In coaching CEOs, this framing has been really helpful in identifying gaps and breaking through plateaus. Look at the functions of your business as machines. Each should function to produce an output. For example: 1) Marketing Machine: Produce target market leads 2) Sales Machine: Convert leads to contracts 3) Operations Machine: Run at full capacity producing high quality outputs 4) Finance Machine: Enough cash to grow business at intended rate 5) HR Machine: Right people in the right seats with constant funnel The question then becomes what machines are functioning as expected vs what machines aren't producing what is needed. When you look at your business this way, it becomes painfully obvious where your business is stuck or underperfoming. Fix your broken machines.

In trying to scale a company, you can't be dealing with unnecessary drama. It takes your eye off the ball and kills momentum. Although emotionally draining, the faster you deal with your people problems, the faster you grow.

Not a bad day at the office yesterday. I love what I do and where it takes me.

When a company plateaus, the first place I look is the structure of the leadership team. Do we have the right seats on the bus and the right people in them? Often we’re either missing a critical function that is now needed or we have someone in the wrong seat resulting in the function stalling out. The result of either issue is the CEO working down in the weeds rather than thinking about how to grow the business … hence the plateau. If you’re feeling stuck, objectively assess the structure of your business/teams and the answer is most likely there