How to Scale a Company Without Losing the Culture

What We Need to Grow, Episode 015: Scale Without Losing Your Soul. A Founder Talk conversation with Ramon Estrada, really great to meet you, and excited to hear more about what you are working on, who it helps, and why it matters. Take a couple of minutes to introduce yourself, and let's dive in. Ramon Estrada:. Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.

Caleb Pedosiuk: Ramon, really great to meet you, and excited to hear more about what you are working on, who it helps, and why it matters. Take a couple of minutes to introduce yourself, and let's dive in.

Ramon Estrada: Hey Caleb, and hey to your audience. I'm a Mexican Spanish founder, and also a coach. For the past nine years I've focused as an executive coach, but I've been an entrepreneur for more than fifteen years. What I'm building is a mix of three things. One is helping founders, in particular those who already have a company above five million euros in revenue and more than twenty employees, to scale their companies, so there's the strategy and tactics, the business side. There's also a component of inner work, going really deep in helping founders know themselves, their lights and their shadows, their talents, what makes them unique. And the third part is mixing these. I really value it when founders and entrepreneurs show themselves in the way only they can, because it gives a special quality. It creates a mood for the company, and it brings alignment between who the founder is and what they are doing. As an entrepreneur myself, and with my clients, I've seen that founders want three things. One is freedom, the freedom to choose and to do what they want. The second is to create something meaningful, something that makes a real impact, not only about the money, though the money matters because we need to give returns to investors and the company needs to generate revenue. The third, which is really important, is showing their authenticity, who they are. So I'm mostly focused on that, mostly through awareness on social media and my own podcast, leading people to a lead magnet called the Founder Energy Reset, and then, if they like it, through an email nurturing sequence to my high ticket offer, a ninety day program I call the High Frequency Founder, where I integrate those three things. It's a premium executive coaching firm, and that's my first step. The second is an online membership, for people who want to follow along and for others who may not be willing to pay for the high ticket offer but whom I still want to impact. My newsletter and podcast are called Business Is Art, because my philosophy is that founders and entrepreneurs are artists. They do something meaningful while solving problems and building a good company, but it should also make them passionate. That's a little bit of my madness.

Caleb: Can you share more about that transformation? You have that ninety day window to get to high frequency. What goes into it, so that someone listening would have an idea of what you offer?

Ramon: Sure. This ninety days is a journey. I work a lot with metaphors, like the Hero's Journey. If you look at Star Wars, the Matrix, all these films involve a journey. The hero, in this case, is not me, it's the founder, and the founder wants to achieve something meaningful. We start by looking deeply and honestly at who the founder is. I call this first stage the soul blueprint, S O U L. My claim for my company is, scale your business without losing your soul. Soul is metaphoric, even a little mystical, but what does it mean? When we lose our soul, we're not paying attention to our body, to what it needs, rest, food, exercise, and there's pain sometimes, cortisol, so there's a physical component. There's an emotional component, maybe we're angry, frustrated, sad, depressed, which is an energetic way of how we show up in the world. There's a mental part, how we think, whether we're confused or clear, whether we know the path. You focus a lot on technology and AI, and I think AI is wonderful, but now we're flooded with knowledge, and knowledge isn't wisdom. We need to be on a personal journey with this mental health aspect of soul too. And the fourth component has to do with spirit, understanding that we are part of a larger system. No one is a self made man or woman. Businesses are systems, we belong to something, and there's something inside of us as well. We need to work with all of that. So I start with the soul blueprint. I go really deep, into ancient wisdom too. I use astrology, human design, Gene Keys, components that could be a little woo woo for some people, but even my most rational clients have said, wow, this is deep, because I use it as conversation starters to see where the founder is. Then I move into leadership, how they behave, I apply 360 assessments to see how they show up with their team. Then I move into rituals, how they behave throughout their day, how they take care of their energy. I also look at the vision of the company. When all these pieces are aligned, I move into the leadership team, the key people for the founder. Something my clients value is this, they don't want to be in the business, they want to be on the business. They want the vision, and the right people helping them, while they do what they truly want, where they get the energy, the joy, the passion, and it all needs to make sense business wise. That's what I call high frequency. Where we lose a lot of our frequency, when we're low, sad, depressed, is because we don't know ourselves. When a founder starts, it's a startup, the founder does everything. But eventually we can't keep doing everything. If we want the company to grow and scale, we need to get out of the way. We need to build the systems and the team, and most founders need to change their identity, from builders to architects, and eventually to artists.

Caleb: If you had a CEO in front of you who was more skeptical, more spreadsheet driven, how would you present that alternative perspective? Going from builder to architect to artist, how would you help them understand it when they're saying, no, it's all about spreadsheets and numbers and the relationship between the data and results?

Ramon: Something all leaders face is that eventually we say something is wrong in the business, something external. I don't like my leadership team, or they're not doing what we said. Usually there's something outside of us that we don't like. So I start there. What's in the way of you scaling your company ten times, a hundred times, as many times as you want? Then the second question comes from one of my mentors and friends, the executive coach Jerry Colonna, who asks, how are you complicit in the conditions you say you don't like? So instead of focusing externally, what does it have to do with you and how you're behaving? At some stage, every CEO hired their key people. So this person is unable to do this or that, and who hired this person? Who hasn't given them the mentorship? Then I focus inside. For people working mostly on the spreadsheet, I think data is key, it gives us evidence, it's measurable, we can track and learn from it. But data, again, is not wisdom. It shows us some things. And it's also how I show up in my own way. Something I value a lot is that I don't sell. People buy if they like it, if they resonate. That's also why a high ticket offer makes sense, because I don't need many clients to make a really good living. But I have a message that's not for everybody. People who are too driven and focused on data, or hustlers, hustling all day long, I don't think we should be hustling all day long. We should be enhancing and becoming a larger version of ourselves and doing the thing that needs to be done to get the results. That's how Bill Gates works, in a way, hiring the people who find the most efficient path, the ones doing what matters, not hustling all day.

Caleb: So what I'm hearing is, if there's a founder leading a company who feels stuck, who's tried all the levers, worked the spreadsheet in every direction, and isn't sure how to move beyond that, or someone who is open and wants an alternative perspective on how to grow, those are the people who would want to reach out to you and ask about your ninety day program. And if you want to mention how they can get in touch, that would be helpful.

Ramon: Let me share something. The clients who work with me are extremely intelligent, brilliant, hardworking, but at one stage in the journey we stop finding answers outside, reading the books, going to the mastermind. We need to focus within, on our inner work. For me the starting point is downloading my lead magnet, my freebie, the Founder Energy Reset. It has five practices, for free, that let founders start clearing their mind, building their energy, and going in the right direction. They don't need to hire me to start. People need to focus on the experience of doing something by themselves.

Caleb: You've sent a very clear signal in terms of where you're positioned and how you can help. Where's the best place for people to come into your orbit and experience more?

Ramon: The easiest way is connecting with me on LinkedIn, Ramon Estrada T, and Instagram at ramonestradat. That's a really easy entry point, as well as my podcast, Business Is Art, which you can find on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. That's a way to start getting a sense of my way of thinking, my way of explaining things. I have a capability of explaining really complex things in an easy way, and inviting people to reflect in different directions and then find the next move forward.

Caleb: Ramon, really appreciate it. Business Is Art, the podcast. Ramon Estrada on LinkedIn and Instagram. Thank you so much. The ninety day program, the lead magnet, what a great opportunity for people to get that energy reset. Thank you.