You have built a successful business, and you've grown through referrals, relationships, and doing great work. And now you're looking to scale beyond where you are today. But growth has stalled, marketing feels inconsistent, and making the shift from doing the work to leading the business is easier said than done, leaving a lot of owners stuck in the same cycle. In this episode, we unpack the biggest mistakes founder-led businesses make when trying to scale, what it really takes to step out of day to day, and the critical piece most businesses overlook when chasing sustainable growth. If you are ready to build a business that grows with intention, this conversation will give you the clarity and direction to start making that shift. Thank you so much for taking the time
Join Tim Fitzpatrick and Mark Scrimenti from Business Warrior for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!
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Podcast Transcription
Why Most Founder-Led Firms Struggle to Scale and How to Finally Break Through
Tim Fitzpatrick
You have built a successful business, and you've grown through referrals, relationships, and doing great work. And now you're looking to scale beyond where you are today. But growth has stalled, marketing feels inconsistent, and making the shift from doing the work to leading the business is easier said than done, leaving a lot of owners stuck in the same cycle. In this episode, we unpack the biggest mistakes founder-led businesses make when trying to scale, what it really takes to step out of day to day, and the critical piece most businesses overlook when chasing sustainable growth. If you are ready to build a business that grows with intention, this conversation will give you the clarity and direction to start making that shift. Thank you so much for taking the time. I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult and it definitely shouldn't be guesswork. Appreciate you tuning in. I am super excited to have Mark Scrimenti with Vivid Path with me today. Mark, welcome and thanks for being here.
Mark Scrimenti
Thanks, Tim. It's great to be here. I'm excited to talk to you.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes, I'm excited to talk to you as well. Man, as we were talking before we hit record, and Mark and I could sit there and talk for hours, I think. Yes. Here we are. I am excited to dig into this with you today. Before we do that, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions if you are ready to jump in with both feet.
Mark Scrimenti
I'm ready. Let's do it.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. So when you are not working, how do you like to spend your time?
Mark Scrimenti
I garden. I play Bocce with some friends. I bike, I hike whenever possible. I play a little guitar, and as much as possible, I try to make time for my family. My wife Julia, we got two daughters and a dog Rufo.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. Rufo, what kinda dog?
Mark Scrimenti
It's a standard poodle. He's red. Rufo means red in Italian.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay.
Mark Scrimenti
Very cool. Great dog.
Tim Fitzpatrick
What's your hidden talent?
Mark Scrimenti
Yeah, I don't know if it's a talent or just a passion, but I love urban planning. And I regularly follow things like zoning battles and adaptive reuse projects and neighborhood development, the way that people often follow sports. And especially in Milwaukee, which is where I grew up, I haven't lived there in 40 years, but I know that town. And so I just follow the development scene there. I also have a professional writing degree, and I write fiction and creative non-conviction. Now, most people who know me already know that, so it's maybe not such a secret, but that's another thing that I do.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, interesting. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
Mark Scrimenti
I like murder your darlings or kill your darlings. It's a quote from a British critic. It's often misattributed to Dorothy Parker. But writers use it to mean you've got to cut your favorite sentences if they don't serve the story. I apply it, and this is hard, especially if you really love these things, but I apply in business all the time because visionary founders often fall in love with ideas that just don't fit their strategy. So knowing what to cut and being ruthless about it is just as important as knowing what to build.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Simplicity is one of my values. That's just... That is right up my alley, man, because it can be really hard to cut some of these things. And if it's not serving a purpose, it doesn't need to be there.
Mark Scrimenti
Right. Right.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So I love that. What's one thing about you that surprises people?
Mark Scrimenti
I think most people expect one version of me, either the strategic operations person or the creative writer, Bohemian. And sometimes they're surprised to find both. So I was pretty shy as a kid, so I can be quiet and measured at first. But I listen and observe a lot, but I can also be really direct and even opinionated, especially once I've grown comfortable with the situation or a team. So in general, I'm a big fan of both and thinking versus either or thinking, and I'm comfortable holding ambiguity. So if people are not used to that, it may be surprising to them.
Tim Fitzpatrick
What does success mean to you?
Mark Scrimenti
Success means choosing to pursue something meaningful on purpose and sticking with it when things get hard and developing real mastery over time, ideally. And however, to me, I would say that everything happens within the context of community and human relationships. So if you achieve your goals at the at the expense of others, it doesn't count. For me, real success means making the world a better place for people who are not you. You're speaking my language, Mark. Where's your happy place?
Mark Scrimenti
I have a few. The garden, I mentioned gardening. I really enjoy shaping living space and all that that involves designing and pruning and nurturing, which also happens to be a lot like running a business. Lake Michigan in summer, when it's warm out, I love to just swim in the water, especially. I like to just skim the bottom of this, the sandy bottom like a manta ray, just really enjoying the feel of the water on my body. And then Bocce on the Bocce court. So we play in a league. It's mostly just an excuse for good company outdoors. But the game is fun, too, and it's to conceptively simple and infinitely variable. There's a lot of different ways a game can play out. So it's a lot of fun.
Tim Fitzpatrick
What qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?
Mark Scrimenti
I value honesty, curiosity, sense of humor, probably in that order. People who are comfortable with ambiguity, people who can laugh at themselves, and people who can really have a conversation about anything.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. So, Mark, tell us more about what you're doing at Vivid Path before we jump into our topic for the day.
Mark Scrimenti
Yeah. So I work with founder CEOs of professional services firms, law firms, creative services, health care. And I help them to get out from the day to day operation. It's usually where they stall out in terms of their scaling. So if these companies want to grow, if they want to scale, if they want to be a sellable asset, the founder needs to get out of the... Stop from being the bottleneck. And in order to do that, I work with them and their leadership team to create a strategic roadmap so they know where they're going to help transfer some of that knowledge that's still in the founder's head to the rest of the team to create an org structure that fits their business model and plays to people's strengths and the functions that they're going to need to be successful. And then we work on culture, too. We do all kinds of things like metrics and objectives and key results, but culture is a big part of it, too. So how do you core values and behavioral practices that are going to help create the culture that is going to sustain your business and make it a great place for people to work long term so you can keep them.
The Biggest Mistakes Founder-led Businesses Make When Trying to Scale
Tim Fitzpatrick
So you started to touch on this a little bit. What are some of the biggest mistakes founder led professional service firms make when trying to scale? And what do you do to help them break through that?
Mark Scrimenti
Yeah. So and typically, I don't think it's just one thing, and that's the point. It's a cluster of things that point to the same root cause, which is the founder has unintentionally become the de facto business operating system. And in the early days, that works. The founder is the strategy. It's the culture, the process, the decision maker. It's their talent, their relationships, their judgment, their hustle that gets the business off the ground. But then it grows. And instead of building systems to replace themselves, they just work harder. So they'll hire people, but our jobs are often shaped around what's falling through the cracks versus a clear functional structure that's aligned with the business model with the right people in the right seats. There's no published strategy. Assuming there is a strategy at all that's still in the founder's head, it hasn't been published so that the rest of the team can't make decisions against the plan. There may be no meaningful metrics, or if there are meaningful metrics, they're not necessarily looking at them on a regular basis. And then also the culture is evolving organically rather than being deliberately designed, and the founder is still in the middle of everything, which means business has a ceiling on scale, and it's the founder.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So let me make sure I've got this right because I want to make sure people get this. If I'm hearing you correctly, there's a lot A lot of symptoms, right? I see this a lot on the marketing side. I have a lead gen problem. Most people I talk to think they have a lead gen problem. That is a symptom. It is not the root cause of the issue, and we need to get to the root if we're going to solve it. In your case, that root cause is really that the founder is the constraint. Is that right?
Mark Scrimenti
Yeah, I think that's right. And again, it's not a character flaw. It's just that it's a structural issue. That's the main thing.
Tim Fitzpatrick
A lot of times I find, too, it is a natural thing because when you started the business, it was just you. And then you added one person, then you had another and another. And so the systems, if they exist, were initially built for smaller teams, and they never get to the point where they upgrade them, right? Because a system for five people can break when it's 15 or 20.
Mark Scrimenti
Exactly.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Founders don't intentionally do this. When operations is not your thing, it's just a natural evolution unless you take the time to address it.
Mark Scrimenti
Totally. It has to be designed to run without them. And until it is, everything, hiring, growth, margin improvement is just adding weight to a structure that wasn't meant to bear that load.
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What It Really Takes to Step Out Of Day to Day
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So that is a perfect lead into the next thing I want to ask you about, which is we've all heard about we should work on our business, not just in it, but very few actually make that shift, right? What does that transition look like in practice? What are the first steps? And how do they start going down that path?
Mark Scrimenti
Right. Yeah. Everybody's familiar with those terms, working on the business versus working in the business, but almost nobody knows what it actually means on any given Tuesday morning when you're sorting through your inbox and you've got a client waiting on Zoom and you're working on your 100th to do. So to clarify the concept working in the business is doing the day to day work. It's managing deliverables. It's meeting with clients, answering questions, filling gaps. And working on the business is stopping to ask, why does this gap keep appearing in the first place? And what can we do to design it out of existence? And then building out those longer term solutions to these problems in a systematic way. You might say it's the difference between a firefighter and a fire marshal. One puts out fires and one figures out why the fires are starting in the first place. Because in order to scale, you need to standardize. And you need repeatable processes and structures. It's standardization, modularization, templatization, in some cases, productization, which is often a goal. So you're building all these frequently recurring pieces like Lego blocks or kits and making them as interchangeable as possible so you can customize without constantly reinventing the wheel, which is a very common problem with professional services.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. There's a few ways I think about this that have always made it easy for me to make the distinction. It's the working on the business is focusing on the important things. Working in the business is taking care of the urgent. The stuff that just pops up every day. I was in a group for a while where they talked about being stuck on the treadmill. Stuck on the treadmill is in the business. You got to step off of it to really be working on it. But one One of my mentors said something that's always stuck with me where he said, As founders, if you are working at 100% capacity, you are never going to be able to pull yourself out of the business. He's like, You have to be working at 80 % so that you have the capacity to actually focus on these important things to pull yourself out of the business. What are your thoughts on that?
Mark Scrimenti
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely I think making that change requires two things, and which most founders haven't done yet. One is carving out dedicated time for project work that's protected from the day to day. And that's a separate to-do list, separate priorities and everything. And then practicing a proven method for doing project work because building something new requires a very different skillset than running something that already exists Now, most founders have done both, but a lot of time, first of all, they haven't been trained as organizational architects or designers. That's one thing. And secondly, their teams often, their leadership teams, don't know how to do project work. So that's something that we do together. It's like they're fine executing their function, but if you ask them to build out something new, well, we need to standardize this. I don't even know where to begin. So that's something that we work on together. I like to use Agile Scrum Sprint process, whether it's a two-week sprint or a one-month sprint or even quarterly sprint. But it requires a prioritized backlog of ideas, a process for reviewing them regularly, and clear objectives and key results with milestones so you can make sure that you're staying on track throughout and that projects get done according to plan. So that's a big... And that's something that people are missing, too, that how do The project methodology, how do I get this stuff done? And it requires a lot of discipline to stay on task and keep that time protected.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. But if you don't, you're just going to keep spending your wheels.
Mark Scrimenti
Right. Oh, absolutely. Right. And I think the other thing is, with the organizational redesign part of it, in practice, it's often messy. It's nonlinear. It's very human. I can think of an example. I have a client, Paul, who's an attorney. And one of the first things that we had to do was actually build a formal leadership team because he didn't really have one. He had a few people who took on lead roles, but they weren't a formal leadership team. So we had to test it out. And one aspect of this was he had a lawyer on his team we thought of as his potential number two. So he wanted to put him in that operator's seat, so, which means running the day to day business, so Paul wouldn't have to do that. And so this move made sense on paper, but because the other lawyer was really the only other full-time lawyer on staff, and he was very qualified as a lawyer. But within two or three months, it became clear that the operator's role just wasn't a good fit for him. It's a very different set of skills and aptitudes. And the lawyer knew this as well. But until then, he'd assumed that that was his only path to advancement in the company. And so, of course, he wasn't going to pass up that opportunity. But there's always other options. So we figured out that the other lawyer was really good at casework. And if we gave him the right process and structured process process that was efficient, he would really bang out casework effectively. And the firm needed that. They really needed that. So it was a good role for him. And then Paul just talked to him about different compensation options and structures that would make that motivating and viable for him long term. Then once that was resolved, he was able to promote a paralegal into the… Somebody that he had suspected would be a really good operator, but it didn't necessarily fit because she was a paralegal and not a lawyer. Given the opportunity, she's been thriving in the role. His instincts were right on that. The lawyer is happier, too. Even though it was uncomfortable at times, we learned fast and adapted. I think that's what working on the business looks like in reality. It typically involves some trial and error, some learning, making difficult human decisions, organizations, just being intentional and careful about that, and building an organization that's structured to scale versus one that just grows hafhazardly and stalls out.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Thank you for bringing this up because I think this is where a lot of people get stuck. Because a lot of people think, Well, I'm small. I don't need a leadership team or I can't afford a leadership team. And I was just at an Apple Consultants conference that I spoke at, and I talked to one of the MSPs that was there, not based in the US, based overseas. But 10 people in his company, he has an entire leadership team made up of fractionals or part-time executives. This is self-serving for us, but I thought it was interesting that he brought it up because here he is, he has 10 people, and I can't remember exactly how many he had. I think he had four or five fractional executives in his company. It was costing him a fair amount for that, but here's the owner. He travels all the time. He is not stuck in his business because he has four or five fractionals that are helping lead his business. And he's paying a fraction of what it would cost to hire any of those people full-time. So I know he had a chief operations officer, he had a chief financial officer, a chief marketing officer, and then I think he had a chief growth officer, something like that. But this can be done. But so many business owners overlook it or feel like, Oh, I've got to hire somebody full-time. And what ends up happening in that case is if you are too small for a full-time executive, you post for a full-time, whatever, a chief operations officer, and you're not paying what a chief operations officer gets paid. So guess what happens? You hire somebody in that role that is not qualified for that role. It doesn't work well.
Mark Scrimenti
Yeah. That's a great example. Yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Go There are baby steps to this. It can be hiring fractionals. It can be, in your example, building somebody up internally within the organization who's going to continually step up and up and up in the organization. It's not just one thing, it's multiple things. But I think as an owner, you got to look at where you're at and where your needs are and then start to fill some of those gaps. But as owners, we're not great at everything. We need to hire fractional leaders until we're ready to hire full-time that fill those gaps that we have.
Mark Scrimenti
Yeah. I think you make a great case for hiring fractionals. I know other businesses that are structured that way as well, where they really have a fractional C-suite. And I'm really interested, too. I'd love to learn more about this business, just like how they're structured, how much time for each person, because I can imagine, but it's going to be a little bit different for each business. And like a CFO probably doesn't need to be there as much as the operations person, typically. A marketing person would be there pretty regularly or be involved, I think, depending on where they're at. But there's all these considerations. And I do think that's a way to go. Again, it's an unconventional model. Still, even though it's been adopted for a few years, people are getting used to the idea, it's still something different. So it might feel a little bit risky, but it's a lot less risky than paying full salary for somebody who's not qualified or somebody who's going to realize this operation is not going anywhere. I'm going to move on.
Tim Fitzpatrick
It takes... It depends on the position and the company, but I've heard numbers. To hire a full-time executive and start to really get them up to speed can be a six-month process. Whereas a fractional, you can hire... I mean, as fast as you can find a qualified one, and they can jump in and start rocking and rolling very quickly. So you take something that could be a six plus month process and be rock and rolling in less than a month.
Mark Scrimenti
Yeah. I think you need to bring a playbook, though. I mean, in playbook may be too generic, but you need to be able to come in, like you said, and jump in right away and make things happen. And it can't be just like, well, I'm going to figure stuff out for three months. I mean, there is a learning curve, but it's a balance. You have to bring some framework, I think, with you.
Tim Fitzpatrick
They have to have some type of process. What is the process you are going to help my business work through so that we can get to this outcome that we want? Because any higher level executive that comes in is going to have to get a baseline, whether they're part-time or full-time. They've got to get a baseline of where things are at to really create a solid plan. But they shouldn't be winging it. The The process they follow should be a standardized process that they know works.
Mark Scrimenti
Right. With some built-in milestones and metrics, too.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. Milestones, waypoints, Something that says, Hey, at this point, here's where we are going to be.
Mark Scrimenti
Yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Right? And that as an owner, that's a really good point, Mark, because as an owner, that's how you can help keep that person accountable.
Mark Scrimenti
Absolutely. Now, the thing is that the owner may not know necessarily what the metric should be or what the paste should be. I think it's incumbent on the fractional to provide that. At the same time, it's a dialog, I think, too. It needs to be. If it's going to work well anyway, mutual expectations need to be clear.
The Critical Piece Most Businesses Overlook When Chasing Sustainable Growth
Tim Fitzpatrick
What's one thing that small businesses consistently overlook? That's essential for that sustainable growth, right? Most of us are looking for sustainable growth, but a lot of people are finding it very hard to find.
Mark Scrimenti
Yeah. I think one thing I see missing is what I would call organizational intelligence and adaptability. And by that, I mean, deliberate, systematic, capturing what's actually happening in your business, consistently analyzing it with some rigor and intellectual honesty, and letting the data and the results drive decision making. Because most small businesses run on instinct and habit. The founder has a gut feeling about what's working and what the clients want, and which services are profitable. They don't really know. And in the early days, that may work. But as the business grows, your gut feeling doesn't scale. And so you need real data, you need closed feedback loops, ways to digest this information and then put it to strategic use. A lot of people capture the data, but they don't do anything with it. So again, it comes to having a process, having cycles where you're putting this information to use in a structured way. And then the willingness and flexibility to change Change direction or change course, if the evidence points that way, even if it's uncomfortable, and it's often uncomfortable. But that's what a growth mindset looks like in a business context.
Conclusion
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, absolutely. This has been a great conversation, Mark. Do you have any last minute thoughts, words of wisdom that you want to want to leave us with today?
Mark Scrimenti
Well, I think just that the issues that founders face when they're stuck or when things are stagnant is it's structural, again. If you're exhausted, if you're overwhelmed, and you can't seem to get ahead no matter how hard you work. It's not because of you. That's not unique to you, but it's really a design problem. And the business was built around you, and it was never deliberately designed to run without you. And so that is fixable, but you have to stop adding to a structure that wasn't meant to bear that load. And I have a founder readiness assessment that I'd like to share as a tool It'll help you figure out if you're ready to scale, and it looks at a few different dimensions. It's need. How founder dependent is your business right now, and are the conditions ready to scale? Are you and your leadership team truly ready to change how the business runs? Are you open and flexible to changing? And then do you have the people, margin, and infrastructure to support it? Those are essentially the three dimensions. But it's a five minute, 20 question assessment that you can take and it'll give you results. It's free, but it should give you some insight. And if you want to talk about it, I'd be happy to talk to you about it or anybody who takes the assessment as well.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. And so we'll make sure that gets in the show notes. That's founder-assessment.vercel.app. So we'll put that in the show notes, where else can people connect with you?
Mark Scrimenti
Yeah, LinkedIn is good. Just under my name, Mark Scrimenti. And my website is vividpathconsulting.com. And there's a contact us form there. There's a lot of information about my services and about me. But you'll be able to contact me from there as well.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. Thank you so much for taking the time, Mark. I really appreciate it. You're welcome. If anybody watching, listening, you're stuck in your business and you need help getting out, reach out to Mark. We'll make sure that all his contacts are info and everything is in the show notes for you. And yeah, again, thank you for being here, Mark. For those of you listening, thank you. I appreciate you tuning in. I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. If you are stuck in the marketing maze, you're not sure what's working or what to focus on next, take our free marketing engine scorecard at marketingenginescorecard.com. In less than two minutes, we'll help you evaluate the nine areas of a supercharged marketing engine so that you get clear direction on exactly what to fix first. You can also always connect with us over at rialto-marketing. Com. Thank you again. Until next time. Take care.