On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Staci Gray, Founder and CEO of Organize To Scale, whose journey is nothing short of inspirational. Imagine graduating high school at 16, diving headfirst into the entrepreneurial world, and buying your first property at 18.

When her mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer, Staci leaped into action. Taking the reins of her family businesses, she transformed overwhelming challenges into streamlined successes. In just 36 months, Staci helped launch 36 syndication businesses that collectively raised over $300 million. 

Today, we'll dive into Staci's unique approach to scaling businesses through people and processes. We'll explore how she empowers leaders to build strong teams, streamline operations, and prepare for successful exits—all without losing their minds or their personal identities.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• You need to know yourself, whether you’re a visionary, an integrator, or more operationally minded. Getting that level of clarity is critical because the visionary role is externally focussed, thinking 5 moves ahead, caring about customers, interested in advancement and expansion. Whereas the integrator (COO) role is internally focussed on the team, fulfilment, operations. Sitting in both seats at the same time is fragmenting yourself, it’s important you choose which role you do and then employ opposite to that who also buys into your vision.
• As a business you should be continually adapting. The technology or the team you needed at 6-figures is not the same that you will need at 8-figures. Your job as a leadership team, in whatever seat you’re sitting in, is to get good at pushing to the next ceiling, hitting it, and then adapting to make sure you have your cash, tech and trained team aligned. Those things are critical to scaling.
• I’m a huge advocate of trying to scale businesses in a way that truly creates freedom: Tim freedom, financial freedom, and geographic freedom. That’s only our ‘eyes-open freedoms’, sometimes people also sacrifice their internal freedoms; Joy, love, peace, connection, belonging to scale their businesses. I think that’s a bigger sacrifice. It’s important to not attach my identity to my business, it’s not me, it’s something that I do.
• All building a business really is is taking an idea and turning it into a reality. It’s also people. People are doing the work, even if they’re using technology. And ideas and people sometimes create friction, we see it all over the world, and that friction can create bottlenecks. We have to be able to have conversations around what isn’t working, in a non-personal, objective way to see how we can improve communication, workflow, accountability, processes, documentation so the flow is smoother and we can all achieve and win by driving revenue, scale up the business, create operational efficiencies and improve gross profit.

BEST MOMENTS

‘The best integrators are ‘co-visionaries’, they can envision with you and also take the vision and sculpt it into tactics.’

‘Stay in your lane, if you try to get in someone else’s lane it can fragment operations.’

‘The moment I found out my Mum had stage 4 cancer was when I realised the importance of organising to scale your business before there was a crisis.’

‘Doing whatever it takes to build your business might look different than what you think it looks like.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Staci Gray is the Founder and CEO of Organize To Scale, a company dedicated to liberating mission-driven leaders from operational chaos and empowering them to scale their businesses effectively. With a passion for organizing businesses and building strong, high-performing teams, Staci envisions a world where entrepreneurs and leaders can grow their enterprises, fuel the economy, and make a tangible impact on people's lives without sacrificing their personal well-being.

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.

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