Your Nine Keys result
Growing Leaders is your weakest Key. You have senior people with senior titles, and the hard calls still find their way back to you. Until a leadership layer can decide without you, the firm is capped at the hours in your week and worth less than its numbers say.
150+ IT services founders coached. 6 exits worth a combined $230M.
Weakest Key
Growing Leaders
A leadership bench, equity sharing and a senior team that makes the calls you used to make
You have probably said this: "They are great technically, they just do not step up." They are not stepping up because the system still routes every decision to you, and they have learned that stepping up means being overruled.
Investors do not invest in firms as much as they invest in management teams. A buyer, a bank or a new partner looks straight past the revenue to one question: who runs this when the founder steps back? Every escalation you take is evidence that the answer is nobody.
When Growing Leaders scores lowest, it usually means there are no written leadership roles, no guardrails inside which leaders can decide and fail, nobody has made a significant call against your instinct recently, and you and your leaders spend most of your time in the business rather than on it.
The three levers below are the Role Reset Framework in its first 90 days.
These come from the Growing Leaders Key of the Loading Growth Wheel. Each one has an action you can complete this week.
Before you can hand decisions over you need to know which ones you are making. Six months of calendar, priced, shows what the firm could do without you and what it costs to have you doing it.
This week: export the last six months of your calendar. Tag every meeting: only I can do this, a leader could do this, nobody should be doing this. Add up the hours in the second and third columns. That number is the first conversation with your leadership team.
A leadership layer exists when roles are written, with the decisions each one owns, and when there are defined guardrails inside which a leader can decide and fail without asking. Without the guardrails, delegation is a hope.
This week: for each senior person, write one page: the decisions they own, the limits (spend, hiring, pricing, client commitments) inside which they do not need you, and what they report back. Sign it together this week.
The test of a leadership layer is not whether people agree with you. It is whether someone can make a significant call you would not have made, and keep your trust afterwards. Until that has happened, the escalations will keep coming.
This week: pick one live decision you would normally make. Hand it to the leader who owns that area, with the guardrails, and do not touch it. Debrief the outcome, not the choice, two weeks later.
Leadership compensation that rides on the firm's result, equity and phantom equity for key people, and spending more time on the business than in it come next.
Tick the ones that are true of your firm this quarter. The count tells you how much of the firm's capacity is capped by your diary.
Signature tool for this Key: The Role Reset Framework.
Nothing you tick here is stored or sent anywhere. It stays in your browser.
Growing Leaders
The real reason your senior leaders keep escalating to youThe routing problem behind every escalation, and how to change it.
Growing Leaders
The one hire that changes everything in an IT services firmThe hire that gives you weekly financial visibility.
Growing Leaders
Releasing equity to key staffHow to keep the people who make the firm valuable.
Growing Leaders is the heart of Ascent and the whole of Summit, because a leadership layer is what the founder is actually buying with every other Key.
Up to 10 staff
Run the calendar audit, write the first leadership roles and set the guardrails, with the Nine Keys basics alongside.
$150 per month, capped at 100 firms
Talk to Ian about Basecamp10 to 40 staff
Regular group sessions and one to one time with Ian on the Role Reset Framework, leadership compensation and the equity conversation, with the 90 Day Sprint keeping the handover honest.
Pricing on the call
Talk to Ian about Ascent
I am Ian Markram. I built and sold an IT services firm, and for the last decade I have coached founders of IT services and systems integrator firms who compete with the global consultancies every week.
Ian has coached our executive team for the past 18 months and has helped us transition from our roles as technical leads within the business to acting as business owners to focus on growth. This has helped us to exceed our growth and profitability targets.
He and his team help drive continuous improvements in my business in practical steps of a manageable size. His advice has been invaluable in helping me mature as a business leader.
Five short emails over two weeks: the three levers with a seven day action each, what they looked like for one founder, and a 45 minute call with Ian if you want to work through them together. Then take the six minute scorecard for your scores across all nine Keys.
Bring your Growing Leaders result to a 45 minute strategy call with Ian.
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