Five Years From Now, What Will You Have Built?

Five years from now, your business will be somewhere. So will you. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Not simply how much revenue a company will generate or how many employees it will have. Those things matter.

But there are bigger questions. What will you have built?

Will the company be stronger?

Will your leaders be more capable?

Will decisions happen without you?

Will the organization be able to grow without requiring more and more of your time?

Will you have created something with real enterprise value?

And perhaps the most interesting question of all: Will the business still need you in the same way it does today?

There is something fascinating about entrepreneurship. We spend enormous amounts of time thinking about the next month, the next quarter, the next hire, the next customer, the next problem. But rarely do we stop long enough to ask: Where is all of this actually going?

I don’t believe most entrepreneurs set out simply to become busier. We set out to build something successful and meaningful. And for some of us, something extraordinary. But extraordinary companies aren’t built accidentally. At some point, there has to be a deliberate decision about what you’re actually trying to create.

A business? An organization? An institution? Those are three very different things.

A business makes money.

An organization runs without you.

An institution outlives you.

And each requires a different way of thinking about leadership, people, systems, culture, organizational design—and ultimately, scale. That’s the conversation I want to have with 30 founders on October 29th at the LARGER THAN LIFE Business Summit in Chicago.

Not simply: How do we grow? But: What are we actually building—and what would have to become true for it to reach $100 million and beyond? We’ll spend the day looking at the organization from the inside out.

The principles guiding decisions.

The people carrying the mission.

The systems creating repeatability.

The culture defining how the organization behaves.

The organizational design required for the next level.

And the leadership required to bring it all together. Five years from now is coming, whether we deliberately design for it or not. We’re now just over five weeks away from the LARGER THAN LIFE Business Summit. If you’ve been following this series and something in these conversations has made you think differently about your business, I’d encourage you not to simply keep reading.

Come into the room. Thirty founders. One room.

One of the keys to the explosive growth of Chiro One Wellness Centers was our intentionally scheduled working sessions where we stepped away from the day-to-day and worked “ON” the business rather than being consumed “IN” it.

I can’t stress enough how critical those sessions were to our growth. They gave us the space to think, challenge one another, identify what wasn’t working, and make decisions about what needed to change to reach the next level.

That’s exactly what I want this day to be for you.

One day away from the noise of running your business to seriously consider what you’re building—and what needs to change to get where you want to go.

Because five years from now, I don’t want the only difference to be that your business is bigger. I want you to have built something better. Something that scales. Something that matters. Something capable of continuing without you. Maybe even something that can outlive you.