In steps one, two, and three we've been figuring out how to get a product market fit, how to scale our sales effort, how to scale our marketing effort, but we've all been doing it with the same kind of organization. The lean startup organization, the learning organization, the organization where the founders are doing a lot of the leg work because they have to, because they have to be the ones who refine the vision. In step four, scaling the organization or company building as Steven Blank calls it, you begin to transform the kind of organization you have into a mainstream organization. The bad old way of scaling organizations was to go with the founder until they run out of steam. And then replace them, you bring in professional management. And when you make that transformation you replace the organic company culture, whatever it is, what grew up with the founder and the original team with stock or canned company culture and processes. It's not a good approach. One of two bad things happens. Either the founder does not go out gently kicks up a fuss and manages to sabotage the work of the new executive or the new executive comes in and tramples over the culture of the company, wrecks everything that's been achieved. And tries to impose a sort of stock processes on the company in, in a way that's harmful. This is sort of what happened to Apple in the Scully years after Jobs was was kicked out and Jobs had to reverse that when he came back in. What's wrong with the approach is that it delegates scaling the organization to a suit. You're bringing in somebody to be an executive who doesn't necessarily understand anything about your company's values, its products, its business model. They throw out everything that was learned in customer discovery, validation and creation and end up with something that may or may not work but usually doesn't work very well. The elements of company building, but we're not going to go into much detail about this part, but what you're after in company building is building a mainstream customer base, which is different from an early adopter customer base, which is what you've mainly been concerned with up until now. So you're talking about how to reach mainstream customers, you're talking about how to get product to them, how to build a product they're satisfied with. How to reproduce the process over and over again. You're also looking to change the management into a mission-centric organization. You're looking to bring in new managers and inculcate them with the values and operating principles that the company's built up over its lean phase. In a way that they will manage their groups in a professional manner, but they'll know how to do it with the spirit of the company. You're also transitioning at this time from a customer development team into functional departments. So you've got a marketing department, you've got a sales department, you've got people. They have to run those departments with the interest of the company as a whole in mind. You read a book like Five Dysfunctions of a Team and it talks a lot about what happens when the people in the department say, well my department's running fine. You don't want that attitude. You want an attitude of we all need to do what we can to to implement this business plan and this business model. Finally you need fast response departments. Fast response department is a a Blankian concept that is a department that in itself is kind of lean in its, in its methods and procedures. They too listen to their customers. They too learn from their customers. They too iterate and pivot. They, they try to find out what works with facts and and hypotheses. And even though their department's doing a departmental function within a big organization, they're doing it in a lean fashion. These, if you do these four things, then you will be able to scale a company into maturity with a lot of the elements that made it a successful lean startup. So, those are the main takeaways. Company building does not mean replacing anarchy with bureaucracy. That, that's not the answer to to, to a company building problem. The four phases or tasks all have to be done and they transition the company, but they transition it in a way that it preserves its heritage. Very important. Thank you.
