Podcast: How The Founder at This Sleepaway Camp for Grownups Scaled Himself A simple system helped one entrepreneur step back so his staffers could step in.
By Jason Feifer •
This new podcast, Problem Solvers with Jason Feifer, features business owners and CEOs who went through a crippling business problem and came out the other side happy, wealthy, and growing. Feifer, Entrepreneur magazine's editor in chief, spotlights these stories so other business can avoid the same hardships. Listen below.
Every successful entrepreneur will face this problem: You have a vision, turn that vision into a company, and then at some point your company becomes so big that you can't be available to execute that vision the way you used to. In fact, if you keep trying, you'll make everything so inefficient that you'll literally harm your company.
Now what? How do you scale yourself?
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Leaders have developed all sorts of solutions to this. Gary Vaynerchuk, for example, created the Office of the CEO, a team of four VaynerMedia veterans who sit just outside his office and serve as his proxies throughout the company. "The goal is to build a bigger, scalable version of the chief of staff idea," he once explained to us, "to give me more operational eyes and ears in different pieces of the business."
Of course, the Office of the CEO won't work for everyone. That's why, in this episode of Problem Solvers, we explore this problem with a younger entrepreneur -- someone whose company is much smaller than Vaynerchuk's, but in at least one important way is more complex than Vaynerchuk's. His name is Adam Tichauer, and he created a summer camp for adults called Camp No Counselors.
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"We weren't able to scale up if I wasn't able to find the right people to trust," he says, "and give them the tools so that our product not only could be as successful as it was, but hopefully better then than when I was there."
How did Tichauer find the right people, learn to step back from the day-to-day operations, and build a thriving business that served roughly 8,000 campers this year? Listen to the new episode of Problem Solvers below.
Also, thanks to our sponsor, Best Self, maker of the Self Journal, a notebook that travels easily, and helps users set and achieve goals, make the most of their time, and more. Thank you to our other sponsor, FreshBooks, the invoice and accounting software for small businesses.
