From the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, this is the Entry Leadership Podcast where I take calls from real business leaders like you.

I'm Dave Ramsey your host with over 30 years of experience in the trenches right alongside you.

If you got a question and you want to call in on this show and talk business with a guy who really actually does business every day.

The phone number is 844-944-1070 or you can leave a message on montrailitership.com slash ask and we'll line you up in order to help you become a caller.

The Entry Leadership System is what the Ramsey Solutions Group has used. It is the playbook for our Super Bowl playbook for getting us from a card table in my living room to where we are today with over a thousand team members and a major national brand 32 years later.

We went through the five stages of business. Most businesses do by the way and that's how we were able to identify the five stages of business.

Your first stage is your treadmill operator. Feel like you're on a treadmill right. You're all by yourself, you're the CEO of the chief everything officer.

The problem that you've got to overcome there is too much of the business relies on you. You kind of own your job rather than on a business.

Usually it's a pretty small company usually it's at the beginning but it's very often it's a one or a two person show that kind of deal.

If you get the business to where with delegation and time management proper hiring and budgeting to where it doesn't all rely on you then you move up to the next stage which is the path finder stage.

The thing holding you back at the path finder stage is a lack of clear direction. You've just been stepping in fetching and throwing and it's a lot of chaos.

And that lack of direction means you need to put in place some mission vision some core values some role clarity lots of communication.

You'd start doing things like weekly team meetings you develop KRAs and you everybody starts to realize oh this train is going in this direction.

When you get that happening then you move to the third stage of business the trailblazer stage.

And trailblazer stage is where you've got other people helping you get stuff done but you're the only leader in the place.

This is where you start developing your first layer of real leadership you like the leaders and the plan to scale your business.

Because here's the deal there's all kinds of indications Moses when he was managing the children of Israel after the party of the Red Sea they're wandering in the desert.

His brother in law Jethro comes to him and there's a whole or chart that comes out of this because Moses trying to the whole thing by himself is a million people a million to a million to.

Or chart comes out of that on how to govern people that size and it ends up with about a one to five one to seven ratio management by the way the military will tell you it's very difficult to manage more than one to five or one to seven.

And so when you got 40 people and you're the only leader in the place you are definitely in the trailblazer stage you be stuck baby.

You need to rise up some raise up some other leaders higher in some other leaders get some other people that are doing things with other teams while you're not there and that enables you level up and move to the fourth stage the peak performer stage now this stage is really fun because there's usually a lot of money involved here.

You hit the peak performer stage it's peak and you're you're making bank usually making it and you can make good money at the other but this starts to be like serious scale money.

...