I just wrapped up twelve weeks in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, (also known as the Goldman Sachs 10kSB) and I learned so much. Every participant picked a growth strategy for their business, and then we went deep. Financial forecasting. What it actually means to be “bankable.” Building real processes for every part of the business. Recruiting. Legal. We covered all of it — the stuff every one of us knew we should have done but never quite made the time for. Fifteen to twenty hours a week for twelve weeks, and we finally got it done.
Here are the lessons that genuinely changed how I think about running The Village Workspace and that I hope you can glean for your own business.
Step out of the day-to-day, and the growth plan appears
This was the biggest one for me. By pulling myself out of daily operations, I could finally step back far enough to see a real growth plan — and start building it.
Showing up and hoping the business keeps growing is a fantasy. Growth happens when you plan for it. (And as I’m already discovering, it is then in showing up and taking consistent action after you have the plan.) You pick an area to expand or a new vertical to create, and then you build a complete growth plan around it: a financial forecast model, a risk analysis, and scenarios that tell you exactly what to do when things go sideways. With a focus like that, you can’t help but grow.
But that kind of plan never develops when you’re buried in today’s agenda. Today’s tasks and tomorrow’s strategy don’t fit in the same headspace — at least not in mine.
The flip side of that lesson is just as important: I discovered the business can truly run without me, because of the strong team we’ve built. That’s not a small thing to admit, and it’s a little humbling. But it’s also freeing.
Document like you’re leaving tomorrow
The Goldman Sachs 10kSB program reminded me how much documentation matters. So ask the uncomfortable questions. If you were gone tomorrow, would the business keep running? If you wanted to sell it, could a new owner step in and know what to do?
I beefed up our employee playbook and built a crisis management plan for whatever emergency might come our way. These are exactly the things we never sit down to do as small business owners, because we’re running too fast to stop and get it down. But doing them is what turns a business that depends on you into a business that’s actually worth something.
Blocking my calendar for five to seven Zoom calls a week — plus the time to finish every assignment — also taught me I get far more done when I pull myself out of the business. We tell ourselves the business needs us to do and oversee everything. But when you have the right people in the right seats, you finally get to sit in the seat you’re supposed to be in.
The best advice from the Goldman Sachs execs
A few nuggets from the executives landed deep.
Don’t let today’s tasks eat your business’s future. It’s so much easier to go fix the lock on someone’s office door, water a wilting plant, or move a class to a bigger room than to sit with the hard work of growing revenue. Easier — and a trap. Throughout the entire 12-week Goldman Sachs 10kSB program, we were reminded and pretty much forced to stay focused on this future plan.
Delegate everything until only your genius is left. Hand off every task on your daily schedule and everything that lands on your desk until the only things remaining are the things only you can do. That’s where your time belongs. It’s the Zone of Genius idea. In his book The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks warns us not to camp out in our zone of competence or even our zone of expertise — he pushes us to live in our Zone of Genius. Mine is spotting and creating opportunities for the business to grow. My job is to watch the numbers, protect the future, and trust my team to run the day.
Hire A-players, and look for curiosity first. Adrian Jones, Chairman of Global Private Equity at Goldman Sachs, shared how he builds a winning team. When he evaluates a company to acquire, he checks whether they’ve hired A-players — because, as he said, “A-players hire other A-players, while B-players tend to hire C-players. Don’t settle.” And when someone asked how he spots an A-player, he said it’s not on the résumé — it’s curiosity. Just ask a candidate what they read and what they listen to, and their answer tells you almost everything. (There’s a whole separate blog post hiding in that one.) After that, he looks for high energy and a great attitude, because those are what build a team.
Stay a learn-it-all
One last thing. Signing up for an intense mini-MBA at 62-years-young had a few people asking me, “Why? What are you hoping to do with this? Why add so much to an already full plate?”
Here’s what I believe: we all need to put ourselves in rooms where we can connect with and learn from others — regardless of our age or how full our plate feels. The older we get, the easier it is to start to feel like a “know-it-all.” The goal is to stay a “learn-it-all” until the day we die. This is one of main reasons we hold weekly “Lunch-n-Learn” events. Not only do I want to learn something new, but I feel that it is so important for us to offer this to our members.
I signed up for Google’s AI certification before I even got home from New York.
So — what’s the next thing you want to learn?