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Guest: Greg Solomon, a coach at CEO Coaching International. Greg is a former CEO who led McDonald’s South Africa for 14 years. He quadrupled the size of the business and added 300-plus new restaurants while navigating three ownership transitions, a flat economy, riots, and a global pandemic.
Quick Background: Scaling a business isn’t just about growth. It’s about evolving your systems, your people, and yourself as a leader so that you can keep pace with the opportunities in front of you and create some new opportunities along the way.
On today’s show, Greg Solomon explains his four-stage model for scaling a business 10X. We also discuss how leaders can reinvent themselves and their companies to stay relevant, keep growing, and Make BIG Happen.
The Four Stages of 10X Growth from Greg Solomon
Stage 1: The Concept
When Ray Kroc became the franchise agent for the McDonald’s Brothers, he had a Concept: replicating the brothers’ streamlined cooking and service system at 1,000 restaurants across the United States.
At the Concept Stage, the founder’s vision and energy are the company’s primary fuel. The CEO has to model confident creativity and risk tolerance to keep the team inspired and on point.
“ It’s a founder-driven phase,” says Greg Solomon. “It’s a phase where the focus is on solving clear problems. It’s a phase where we are finding product-to-market fit, where we are generating early revenue, where speed and learning matters more than efficiency. The founder, the hero, the rainmaker is front and center in the team.”
At latter stages of Greg’s process, this “hero mentality” can put a ceiling on the company’s growth. And it’s important that, even as they’re funneling so much of themselves into their start-up, the CEO doesn’t also commit their entire identity to running the company.
But for now, put on your cape, point to BIG, and the people who will be with you for the long haul will leap with you.
Stage 2: Duplication
“Once the model works with one — with one founder, with one point of distribution, with one restaurant — then the challenge becomes how do you transfer that skill into other people, into other organizations, into other type of skill sets,” Greg says. “The success must be replicated and it must be replicated across new people. It must be replicated across new locations and even new channels. This often requires some sort of decoding of the customer, the production of playbooks, and moving beyond just the founder’s dependency.”
Duplication is where the rush of stage 1 meets with the reality of scaling a business. Greg says an entrepreneur with a 10X in 10 Years growth goal might spend the first five years just perfecting their model and test driving a handful of Duplications.
That’s generally how McDonald’s franchise model works now. Franchisees are building off the work that the parent company and other franchise owners have perfected over decades. If they can keep Duplicating that success, they’ll grow their revenue, and potentially add more restaurants to their portfolios.
“When a franchisee starts off at a McDonald’s, they generally start off in a mature business because the business is many, many years old with very, very strong systems, and store operating manuals, and products and brands and purpose in place,” Greg explains. “A franchisee would start off with one, they would learn the basics, and they would understand their trading area. And within their trading area, they’ll start to build their top-line revenue. And as they mature and as they get to understand their business, they duplicate as well, and we give them multiple locations. So what works in a particular trade area now can be slightly modified. But at the end of the day, there’s certain things that you do not change: the world-famous French fries, the Big Mac, the Oreo McFlurry. There’s certain ways that we can flex on how we execute that, which state, which country, which area of the world. And that’s the superpower.”
The CEO’s “superpower” at this stage might be learning to delegate. You can’t be behind the counter at every brick-and-mortar location, and you can’t be present at every on-site service call. If you feel like you have to be, then you don’t have the right people working for you, or a model that’s truly ready for Duplication.
Stage 3: Growth
One you’ve proven your Concept and successfully Duplicated it, it’s time to aim for BIG.
Greg Solomon emphasizes that you cannot enter this stage without building a more robust corporate structure. “Here the business needs to professionalize,” Greg says. “This is your Growth phase. It needs to scale quickly. It needs to go from 10 to 100. And it needs governance. It needs operational cadence. It needs a smarter way of deploying your capital. It needs to tap into debt. It needs to understand data Without those big, bold corporate structures, you can’t get into stage three.”
In other words, it’s time for the CEO to hang up their cape and invest in systems and people who will be the day-to-day heroes at every level of the business.
Unlike at the start-up phase, where jobs and individual responsibilities may have overlapped, Growth requires clearly defined roles, activities, metrics, and accountability.
If you’ve made it this far with one chair in the c-suite, it’s time to round out your executive team with at least a CFO, COO, and a Chief AI Officer.
And if you’ve made it this far without an AI Roadmap, you’re not going to make it much further. But, at the same time, CEOs have to understand AI is just a tool to serve a strategy, and not a strategy in and of itself.
“In the next 24 to 36 months, there’ll be two type of businesses in the world: AI businesses and non-AI businesses,” Greg Solomon says. “I think in organizations we need to understand what this means. It’s as big, if not bigger, than the cell phone revolution. It’s as big, if not bigger, than the internet revolution. It’s a tool within a strategy. At McDonald’s or the smaller businesses that I’ve run, I never really had an operation strategy, or a finance strategy, or a marketing strategy. We’ve got a coffee strategy, or a burger strategy, or a people strategy. This is how we build a cross-functional team in order to be able to tackle a particular product, a particular process, or a particular profit margin that we’re trying to achieve. So AI needs to sit in human capital. AI needs to sit in supply chain, in customer service, in product. It sits throughout the business.”
Stage 4: Reinvention
“I didn’t know what we would be selling in the year 2000, but whatever it was we would be selling the most of it.” — Ray Kroc
Amazon used to sell books, and only books.
Microsoft used to sell Windows and Office.
Google was once just a search bar with a funny name.
Netflix mailed DVDs.
And McDonald’s started with burgers and fries. Today, as Kroc predicted, it’s also one of the BIGGEST coffee, breakfast, dessert, and real estate businesses in the world. And it’s poised to become a leader in data and AI as it builds a global customer database.
Greg believes that a great company like McDonald’s is permanently in a state of Reinvention. Eventually, the Concept that you Duplicated can only sustain so much sustainable Growth. Once you’ve hit your 10X goal, the next 10X is going to require a little bit of that old start-up mentality as the CEO tries to figure out what customers will want next, what new Concepts can be Duplicated, and what the next evolution of BIG looks like.
Reinvention is also the first stage in Greg’s framework that doesn’t lead directly from the one before it.
And that’s the danger.
“This is the tough phase,” warns Greg Solomon. “This is the phase where your business is BIG. This is maybe where you’ve become a little too fat to swing. Maybe there’s some inefficiencies that have crept into the business, the competition that you’ve got, brands that are fast followers and can skip certain mistakes and errors that you’ve had and get to scaling very quickly. So I think that Reinvention is when you slip back into a little bit of where the entrepreneur was 20 years ago. Back into not losing your culture. Back into not losing your values. Those are all the nuances and all the risks of BIG businesses that have lost their way.”
If a company is complacent at the Growth stage, or too afraid to make a key pivot, then it will never achieve that next level that only the best companies get to.
On the other hand, if a company chases after too many shiny objects it might spread its resources too thin.
To solve this challenge, CEOs need to be willing to challenge the company’s core identity while staying true to purpose and values. McDonald’s hasn’t always been a coffee business. But as it evolved, it remained committed to Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value. Find your own version of “QSCV” and your next Reinvention will bring you that much closer to BIG.
“You and your business are going to go through stages,” Greg Solomon says. “And if you cannot, or are not prepared to, evolve with your business, if your business outgrows you, then your business may just find its end path. You might be the limiting factor. Seek resources. Seek coaching, which I’ve always had. Find your blind spots and be able to unlock those next levels. We can change as leaders. I’ve had to change probably three or four times as a CEO to operate in a different climate. I’ve changed my executive teams many, many times. I’ve changed our revenue channels, changed our profitability many times. There are many tactics, but the key point is: be prepared for change. And when in doubt, know that your culture, your talent, and your purpose are your competitive advantage.”
Top Takeaways
1. Change is inevitable. Are you going to drive that change, or allow your business to be disrupted?
2. Assemble the talent you need to professionalize your operation and sustain BIG growth.
3. Rally your team around purpose and values.
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, the firm has coached more than 1,500+ CEOs and entrepreneurs across 100+ industries and 60 countries. Its coaches—former CEOs, presidents, and executives—have led businesses ranging from startups to over $10 billion, driving double-digit sales and profit growth, many culminating in eight, nine, or ten-figure exits.
Companies that have worked with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have achieved an average revenue CAGR of 25.9%, nearly 3X the U.S. average, and an average EBITDA CAGR of 39.2%, more than 4X the national benchmark.
Discover how coaching can transform your leadership journey at ceocoachinginternational.com.
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