Why You Need an Integrator

What if growing your business isn’t as much about taking on more as it is about letting go of more? 

That’s essentially the conversation I had with Corey when we were exploring the inner workings of her business and how to help it grow. After more than a decade of running her small firm, she was ready to “take it to the next level.” We started exploring what that next level would look like and possibilities for moving in the right direction. 

After spending a few hours learning about the inner workings of the business, a clear image began to emerge from me. So here’s what I created for Corey: 

See what’s happening here? She’s wisely structured her staff to be implementers for her clients. They’re talented and deliver high quality work, which keeps the clients very happy. But what about all that other pesky “stuff?” The administrative stuff like invoicing, time tracking, payroll, vendor relationships? Corey was doing it all. She had been doing it all from the beginning and after more than 10 years, it hadn’t occurred to her she should be doing it any other way. 

This makes perfect sense. When you bootstrap a business, you start out doing all the things. You’re everyone in the company. Eventually there’s too much work and you start to expand. There’s different ways to expand - start by hiring an assistant, an implementer, or a sales person. But ultimately, you can only afford to hire on a limited amount of help and then you just keep on doing the rest yourself. This will work just fine for quite some time. But when you’re ready to grow, here’s what happens - you can’t. 

In the book Rocket Fuel, authors Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters lay out a simple structural formula for successful entrepreneurships: Visionary + Integrator. We’re used to the term “visionary” in business. Even when a business owner feels self-conscious to describe themselves as visionary, I find they’re still clear that it’s an important part of their role. But what is this integrator? 

“An Integrator is a person who has the Unique Ability® to harmoniously integrate the major functions of the business, run the organization, and manage the day-to-day issues that arise. The integrator is the glue that holds the people, processes, systems, priorities, and strategy of the company together.” 

We often hear about the visionary leaders but don’t often hear about their integrators. It turns out, what makes the visionary possible is the integrator. Because a leader of a dynamic growing organization cannot dream the wild dreams it takes to grow without someone else worrying about the administrative details. Or as my former colleague and I used to say to each other:  

“You can’t be up in the air and down on the ground at the same time.”

Corey and I figured out pretty quickly that she had grown to her own capacity. If she was going to take her company to the next level, she was going to have let some things go. Easier said than done. These are sensitive tasks and they leave you vulnerable to show the inner workings of a business to someone new — all the good stuff and the bad stuff too. As much as most business owners hate the administrative tasks, it can still be really hard to let them go. 

Soon after talking about this new model, Corey hired herself the company’s first administrative assistant. We checked in about how to onboard this new person and Corey’s whole demeanor was different. She was lighter, more energetic, and optimistic about the future. She hadn’t even let go of the tasks yet, but making the mental shift to realizing that she was about to had changed her whole perspective on what was coming next and how she would start to seek out new clients. She suddenly had the mental space to start envisioning again. She was letting go of what was “on the ground” and allowing herself to go “up in the air.”