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The More Necessary You Think You Are, The Smaller You’ll Stay
Two weeks ago, Ray ended up in the ER with a heart incident that knocked him completely out of commission.
No work.
No calls.
No involvement in the business.
And something surprising happened.
Nothing broke.
The team handled clients, operations kept moving, and the business even closed its best sales month in six years.
In this episode, Ray explains the decision he made last year that made this possible: building a team of true A-players and creating the systems and culture that allow them to operate without constant founder involvement.
It also led to a realization many founders struggle to accept — the more necessary you believe you are, the more you cap the growth of your business.
If your business can’t function without you, that belief might be the very thing keeping it small.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why believing you’re “necessary” is often the biggest growth constraint in a business
- How A-players create 10–20x impact compared to average hires
- The 3D framework (Direction, DNA, Drumbeat) Ray used to build the team and culture
- Why founders often stay stuck due to ignorance or ego about their role
- How stepping out of day-to-day operations unlocks higher-leverage work
- What happens when you design a business that can run even when you can’t
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This podcast is where Ray thinks through hard decisions — especially when the usual playbooks stop working.
If that approach resonates, that’s what you’ll find more of here.
New to the show? The “Start Here” playlist outlines what the podcast is about and how to approach it:
https://player.captivate.fm/collection/a7577a6f-15da-4521-b214-35e4e47f320b
Transcript
Two weeks ago and then again a few days ago, I ended up in the ER with a heart incident and got completely knocked out of commission from, from work for a few days.
Speaker A:And you know what happened in my business?
Speaker A:Nothing.
Speaker A:Well, nothing bad anyway.
Speaker A:Like the team stepped up, clients were taken care of, everything ran perfectly fine without me and that saved my ass.
Speaker A:Reality actually traces back to one core decision that I made early last year and that I'm going to share with you now.
Speaker A:If you get value from the podcast, I actually drop an email every week with frameworks and some things that I don't say on the podcast, you can join@rail.com for, for free.
Speaker A:So the decision that this traces back to was that I was going to stack my team with absolute badasses.
Speaker A:Like, I only wanted a players.
Speaker A:And I know from, from my corporate days of running eight figure businesses that when you get killers, when you get badasses in the right seat, it's not 10 to 20% improvements like it is 10 to 20x better like that.
Speaker A:And that's, I'm not exaggerating here.
Speaker A:Like that is the actual multiplier effect of an A player.
Speaker A:And as I made the strategic shift from solopreneur with, you know, some contractors helping with things like content and some execution and some tech stuff and into building like an actual business, that was like, that was the core of this, like the, the main decision was, all right, as I make this transition, I'm going to hire phenomenal people, I'm going to create a culture of ownership, I'm going to delegate and I'm going to get the, out of the way and let them work.
Speaker A:So as I, as I moved in that direction, like the first thing I did was I sat down and built out what I, what I call now our 3D framework.
Speaker A:It's our direction.
Speaker A:DNA drum beat right.
Speaker A:So it's, it's the strategy, it's the culture and the core values.
Speaker A:It's kind of like the operating system.
Speaker A:I built that out as the foundation and it's, you know, it, it shows what is the vision, how are we going to work together?
Speaker A:What are the, like I said, what, what are the core values?
Speaker A:And I got really clear on all that, documented it and then I built a recruiting system to start sourcing people globally.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Like I, I live in Cabo and you know, I've, I've worked with people globally.
Speaker A:I know that I want the actual best in the world for the seats that I'm hiring.
Speaker A:And, and so that's the, the system that we built and you know, for any one of the roles that we hired, we had hundreds and hundreds of applicants from, from all over the world.
Speaker A:If you're going to do that, you've got to create like some really aggressive screening mechanisms so that you can, you can handle the volume and then get really selective with, with the interview process and like for all intensive purposes it works.
Speaker A:Like right now we're up, we're operating with killers and I've got two fractional sales managers for our, our SDR program where we do fractional SDR sales management for, for msps.
Speaker A:And these are people that I would hire to run my own sales team, right?
Speaker A:Like that is the bar that we have in place.
Speaker A:And I've, I've got a customer success leader who's not just doing great work with, with our clients today, but he has deep experience in building out the teams and the systems and everything that's, that's necessary to build out a legit CS function with within a business.
Speaker A:I've got a genius ops guy, you know, running our tech, our automation.
Speaker A:He's now, you know, helping me build out some, some AI stuff.
Speaker A:And for all intents and purposes, like the system that we built to hire our own team has worked so well that we've kind of fallen into the recruiting business, right?
Speaker A:Using, using that exact same system to help MSPS and help IT businesses find their own A players, especially like in the, in the sales functions.
Speaker A:That was the decision last year.
Speaker A:Like, you know, so I make that decision, I start implementing it.
Speaker A:Fast forward to two weeks ago, first heart incident, go to the ER at a commission again a few days ago, similar situation.
Speaker A:And I'm, I'm doing fine now.
Speaker A:Like a lot of monitoring, testing, easing back into things.
Speaker A:But here's the real point.
Speaker A:I was completely knocked out of commission and unable to do anything for days at a time.
Speaker A:And the business didn't skip a beat, pun intended, but the business kept going.
Speaker A:The business did not skip a beat because the culture in the team that we designed is working the exact way that we designed it, right?
Speaker A:Because we, we have badasses that are in the right seat with the right culture, with the right systems empowered to do their thing.
Speaker A:And that means when I get knocked out, the business runs perfectly fine with me.
Speaker A:Without me.
Speaker A:It's actually because I've had some time to reflect on this.
Speaker A:You know, being knocked out of commission and staring at a wall for a minute.
Speaker A:I've started thinking like reconsidering where I actually add the most value, right?
Speaker A:Like where is the highest leverage work for me as a CEO?
Speaker A:And honestly, like, it's, it's got me thinking about pulling myself further out of the day to day, right?
Speaker A:And like, instead of being involved in the operations, you know, I could be scaling up our marketing, right?
Speaker A:Like, which we've done next to none of, like all of our sales in the past, you know, 14 months or so are word of mouth, you know, so scaling up marketing, that'd be one thing I could do.
Speaker A:Or I could take the fractional SDR sales management program that we have, and that's crushing it really well, and build out the, the same or similar program for the outside sales function and do fractional sales management there and scale up that program.
Speaker A:Or, you know, I could scale up the recruiting side.
Speaker A:This as, as basically its own business and all of those things would have way more impact than me being in the weeds.
Speaker A:And as I, as I zoom out on this whole experience and I think about the decisions that I made and the impact that they had, it kind of begs the question, why don't we do more of this as, as business owners, as, as founders, why do we get stuck at certain plateaus and certain caps and, and meanwhile other people like, scale way beyond themselves and oftentimes like in the same business model, like, what leads us to get stuck and watch other people scale well beyond themselves?
Speaker A:And you know, I think it comes down to one core thing.
Speaker A:We believe we are necessary for more than we really are.
Speaker A:And there's a direct relationship between how much you believe you're necessary in the business and how big your business can actually grow.
Speaker A:And, and that belief system creates the cap on your business.
Speaker A:And for some people, that cap's going to like, happen at 100k a year.
Speaker A:Some people it's going to happen at a million, some people at 10 million, some at 100 million.
Speaker A:But it comes down to that core belief.
Speaker A:How much does this business truly require?
Speaker A:Me.
Speaker A:And the more that you believe you're necessary, the lower your cap is going to be.
Speaker A:Like, I can only speak for myself and I, I think that that belief that we have kind of stems from two things.
Speaker A:One is ignorance, right?
Speaker A:Like sometimes we just, we just genuinely don't know what's possible without us.
Speaker A:Like, we believe that we have to write that copy, we've got to approve that, that picture or that, that project, we've got to push that button.
Speaker A:We, we have to be the ones to do that.
Speaker A:And if that's you, like, the best thing that you can do is get around entrepreneurs who have scaled well beyond themselves.
Speaker A:Like, listen to how they think and you're, you'll, you will hear a very different paradigm about their belief system and what they believe they are necessary for in the business and it'll reframe the, the whole thing for you.
Speaker A:I've, I've spent a lot of time over the past year or two with people who have built 50, 100, $200 million businesses.
Speaker A:And I tell you what, like when they talk about what they are necessary to do in their business, it is fundamentally different than what other people, including myself, have, have thought, right?
Speaker A:And it's not one lead.
Speaker A:Like we think that they, they believe that way because they're in a $200 million business and it's wrong.
Speaker A:Like they have a $200 million business because that's what they think.
Speaker A:So that's one thing is just like ignorance leads to that belief system.
Speaker A:The second one is ego.
Speaker A:And like, I'm not saying that negatively.
Speaker A:You know, like it's just, it's, it's just us like not wanting the truth to be real.
Speaker A:You know, like deep down we have this desire for the business to rely on us.
Speaker A:Like there's some, some self importance involved in that.
Speaker A:And if that's the source of your limiting belief, then like you just got to ask yourself the same thing.
Speaker A:I asked myself, like, what would you rather have a bigger business and more money or feeling more important, right.
Speaker A:And have more demands on you?
Speaker A:And for me, I would say between ignorance and ego, it was candidly with some little combination of both.
Speaker A:Like I've, I've built bigger businesses in the corporate world, you know, eight, eight figure businesses, but I haven't from zero, right?
Speaker A:Like, not that I owned outright and, and so there was some ignorance there and there was, there was definitely some ego.
Speaker A:I'm not afraid to admit that.
Speaker A:But when I, when I recognize that and I address it head on, it's opened up opportunities for me and I can see it happening again because I decided I wanted and needed a business that didn't depend on me, right?
Speaker A:And I made that decision last year.
Speaker A:I started building it and I'm, I'm fucking glad that I did.
Speaker A:Like, not just because of the results, but um, you know, we had, you know, our, our best month in sales in the six years that I've been on my own happened this past December, right?
Speaker A:So the results have been great.
Speaker A:But also because when the unexpected happened and it knocked me out of commission, the business could keep going when I temporarily couldn't.
Speaker A:And that's been a huge lesson, like a huge validation.
Speaker A:And as I've.
Speaker A:I've had time to reflect on this, I've thought, you know, this.
Speaker A:This is worth sharing for.
Speaker A:For anybody else that's in a similar position.
Speaker A:So I hope my learning, my experience is helpful for you.
Speaker A:Adios.
