What We Heard at Inc. 5000

By Jessica Louw

As you may already know, our founder and CEO Les McKeown keynoted this year’s Inc. 5000 conference in San Antonio. What you may not be aware of is that our entire team was there! In addition to the keynote on the first day, together we delivered:

two additional ‘deep dive’ sessions; (We were originally slated to do only one, but after that session was filled to overflowing, Inc. asked us to run it again the next day to another packed room!)
a book signing where the line was literally ’round the block’;
over 50 free 20-minute consulting sessions;
and literally hundreds of side conversations in and around the whole conference.

For those of you who didn’t attend (and those who did), here’s a peek into the three main themes we heard in all those interactions: 1. Fast growth is wonderful, exciting, great…but… The ‘but’? How do we ensure this growth is sustainable? What happens next? How do we make sure our organization will be back next year and the year after that? As we pointed out in this recent article, even high-flying former #1s at the Inc. 5000 can crash and burn. 2. We’re not the only ones going through what we’re going through. Over and over again, we had participants come up to us and share their sense of relief at hearing the Predictable Success model – and realizing that the growth challenges they are facing aren’t unique to them. We heard some version of, “It was like you had a webcam right inside my office” over and over again. As the President and Editor-in-chief of Inc., Eric Shurenberg said to Les, “Somehow everyone who hears your model seems to feel like it applies precisely to their company, as if it were tailor-made.” 3. Shared vocabulary is incredibly powerful in overcoming growth challenges. Again and again we heard business owners and leaders share with us the power of not only agreeing together where in the Predictable Success lifecycle their business is, but also learning a vocabulary to frame and resolve the conflicts they’ve been having. They realize that most of this conflict is due to leadership styles rather than individual personalities, and the increased friction they’ve been experiencing is a direct result of where their organization is on the lifecycle – they’re directly linked, and thankfully the Predictable Success model provides a way out. The bottom line? For everyone who made the Inc. 5000 list (and for those of you experiencing fast growth, irrespective of whether or not you made the list or not), congratulations! Now it’s time to make that growth sustainable, and there’s no more robust, intuitive or effective way to do that than by using the Predictable Success model.