3. Raise Your Floor

Part 2. Raise your floor. Chapter 3. Be more honest with yourself and quit the wrong stuff faster. For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny. Tony Shay, founder of Zappos, in Delivering Happiness. In 2019, leading up to the NBA draft, Zion Williamson was the clear and obvious number one pick. Expectations were sky high for Zion. He had features and characteristics you simply don't see in a single individual. Built like an NFL linebacker, he was 6 foot 6 inches tall and weighed 285 pounds. Yet he had the speed, agility, and vertical of a point guard. He was an absolute force to be reckoned with. Zion played high school basketball for Spartanburg Day School in South Carolina. He was dominant, the number two high school recruit in the nation heading into college. His senior year of high school, he averaged 36.4 points, 11.4 rebounds, 3.5 assists, three steals, and two blocks per game. At Duke University, Zion's power and dominance surged. He played only one year in college, and during that year, he was a unanimous first team all-American honors and the ACC player of the year and led Duke to the elite eight. He broke several college records during that single season, including averaging 22.6 points per game on 68% field goal shooting with 8.9 rebounds per game. Put simply, if you got Zion the ball, he was probably going to score. No one could guard him. He was a freight train of power. During one particular game, now an iconic meme, Zion destroyed his Nike shoe trying to pivot directions. The sole of his shoe literally exploded, exposing his full foot. The shoe couldn't withstand Zion's force. Nike's stock immediately plunged. Going into the NBA, people expected Zion to replace LeBron James as the face of the league. It was a clear progression. Michael Jordan passing the torch to Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal, who passed the torch to LeBron James and Stefan Curry. It was now Zion's time. Again, no one had seen anything like Zion coming into the league. There was just one nagging concern. Zion's Achilles heel. Could he stay healthy? With that much raw power and strength and Zion's insane vertical jumping ability, people were worried about the wear and tear on his body. A body that massive isn't meant to move that fast, pivot that hard, or go that high. The weight crashing down on the ground from six feet up seemed to defy logic and physics. It boggled the mind. Alas, by 2025, five years in Zion's NBA career, though he's produced record-breaking numbers, he's been largely a disappointment. He hasn't been able to stay healthy, playing only around 50% of his possible games as a pro. Put simply, he lacks consistent availability to play. There was even a clause in his 2022 contract extension with the New Orleans Pelicans that if he plays only 40 out of the 82 regular season games, he gets only 40% of his $197 million contract. Another clause therein was that if he ever weighs over £295, he can receive reductions in his guaranteed pay. There has never been a contract like this before. The reason for these stipulations in his contract is that Zion has made a habit of returning from the offseason weighing up to £330, 50 pounds over what he weighed at Duke, looking overweight and lethargic. It's been clear he hasn't taken his conditioning or his diet seriously. Regularly, when Zion is on the court, he looks incredibly out of shape for a professional athlete. Despite this, he still shows intense flashes of otherworldly talent, scoring at will and doing things no one else can do. But almost always, due to his lack of care and discipline, he naturally gets hurt way more than he should, sometimes requiring surgeries that put him out for several months, even a year at a time. For the first five years of Zion's NBA career, he's been a financial liability to the New Orleans Pelicans franchise, who have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into him only to have him play basically half of his games. It's clear to the franchise, his coaches and his teammates that Zion cannot be relied upon. He cannot be trusted. Whereas in the past, the team planned their team and season around Zion. Now they plan for him not to be on the court. The team stopped mapping their future projections or plans around him, let alone with him, and have publicly stated they're willing to trade him. The reason for Zion's lack of availability isn't his raw and intense power, though of course those are a factor. The dude literally explodes shoes. The problem and to the frustration of people who recognize Zion's rare and sky high ceiling is his low floor. It doesn't matter what your supposed potential is. If you don't raise your floor, it's all in vain. Zion hasn't been available because Zion hasn't been accountable to his team. He hasn't been accountable to winning in the pros. George Bernard Shaw famously said, "Euth is wasted on the young." Meaning when you're young and have the energy and drive, you're almost always too immature to maximize on it, saying yes to all sorts of distractions that derail your focus and commitment. Zion's plight isn't new. Going from college to pros exposes a lot of people. You can get away with a lot at the college level that you simply cannot at the professional level. At the professional level, everyone is talented. What separates those who succeed from those who don't at each successive level is not their ceiling, but their floor. The floor defines what you don't do. The level of discipline to consistently and continually perform at the highest level, rather than only sometimes, is what makes a professional. That's a core difference between an amateur and a pro. The amateur doesn't want to be held accountable. They're willing to let others down, miss deadlines, mispractice, make excuses for lack of performance, whatever the case. A pro is accountable at all levels and wants to be held accountable. The core element of jumping to a higher level of performance and results in any discipline is raising your floor, which means stripping out what no longer fits, even if it did before. To reach the highest levels in any discipline, field or craft, it becomes more about what you're not doing than what you are doing. To be exceptional, you can't engage in average anything. Keeping your floor low and therefore maintaining aspects of your life that conflict with your goal keeps you inconsistent and jumbled in your performance. With a lower floor, you have far too many bad days and off nights. Your best performances are fewer and farther between. You're not locked in at a super high baseline and able to see how high you can possibly go. As Sir Percy C. Buck, a prominent professor of music at the University of London wrote in his 1944 classic Psychology for Musicians, an amateur practices until he can do a thing right, a professional until he can't do it wrong. According to Garnet Morris, a near billionaire whose Canadian life insurance company does more business than any competitors by a factor of 10, the reason people don't scale is because they constantly lie to themselves. They lie to themselves about their own performance. They lie to themselves about the consequences of their actions. They lie to themselves about their trajectory. They justify not being accountable to themselves or to others. There's a story in the Old Testament about two brothers, Esau and Jacob. Esau is the older brother and rightful heir to his father's birthright, which in those days meant the larger inheritance and blessings of the father. One day Esau was exhausted from working in the fields. Famished, he asked his brother Jacob for some lentil stew. Jacob agreed to give it to him, but only if Esau traded his birthright with Jacob. This was obviously a crazy proposition, one only a madman would accept. Yet driven by his intense hunger, Esau agreed to trade his birthright for the stew. A famed term comes out of this story that Esau sold his birthright for a mess of potage. The moral and backbreaker of this biblical story is the brutal truth that all of us are like Esau, giving up what could be our highest destiny or birthright for something far less, a mess of potage. Until we realize we're being like Esau, we aren't learning the lesson. We've got to raise the floor and stop saying yes to whatever mess of potage we're accepting. Raising the floor means elevating the standard and therefore saying no to increasingly more. Only the highest signal is worthy of our time, energy and investment. For Zion, his mess of potage is bad friends, eating junk food, playing video games, and not taking his career or life seriously. The question you should be asking yourself is what is the mess of potage you're currently saying yes to that's stopping you from operating at the level you could? What are you still saying yes to that you know is below your floor and that is costing you far more than you're willing to admit. Remaining below your floor is extremely risky, though it feels the opposite. It feels risky to let go of stuff that's been important to us. whether friends, team members, clients, habits, and so on, because we've come to depend on these things. Always, getting to the next level of performance, impact, and growth means giving up much, if not most, of what got you where you now are. The truth is, most people won't raise their floor. Or if they do, they wait far too long and the opportunity cost is a heavy price. This, more than anything, is the reason people don't scale. Despite whatever potential they have, they're mired in the distractions of everything around them, and they haven't yet faced the truth that they can't have it both ways. They can't maintain the level of contradiction that is their life and go to new levels of scale and results. Raising your floor is tough, because it means exposing yourself. Exposing the sides of you that are good but not great. Exposing the chinks in your armor, exposing the sides of yourself, you'd rather keep hidden in private. This is what most people get wrong about growth. To elevate to a totally new level of results and performance, the immediate effect is exposure. It almost feels like you're naked. It's immediately obvious that you're not yet what the new level requires you to be. The question now becomes, are you willing to own that? Are you willing to be exposed where you currently are, rather than pretending you're where your ceiling is? The truth sets you free. It's not a weakness owning your current deficiencies. The weakness is in continuing to lie to yourself, in not being accountable, not raising your floor and normalizing a new level of performance, and not weeding out what no longer fits. Once you raise your floor and eliminate anything and everything, the contradicts the level of performance and results you want. Your growth will explode. Please refer to the image and description of raising the floor in the PDF. Raising your floor equals raising your character and maturity. Commitment is key to consciousness. Not more commitment, clear commitment. You can tell what you're committed to by the results you are producing. Everyone is 100% committed. You can't get any more committed. Your committed and the evidence of your commitment is the results you're producing. This is both unnerving and liberating. It's unnerving because we're confronted with the reality of our results and it's liberating because we can clarify and change our commitments. We are empowered. Jim Dethmer, Coach, Speaker, and Author. While writing this book, I interviewed a man who is regularly hired by government leaders throughout the world to analyze and help them with their economic systems. Because of his position, I'll simply call him Quinn. Quinn's been involved in the development and change of economic systems for entire countries, both developed and underdeveloped. When I asked Quinn, what's the primary difference between countries that are thriving economically and those that aren't, he replied with one word, accountability. He then elaborated, "The wealthy countries have much higher levels of accountability and transparency in the system as well as by the leaders of those systems. The struggling countries don't have high accountability from the system or their leaders." This trickles down to the culture of the people. In underdeveloped countries, there's far less accountability, less productivity, and more crime. A client of mine is the founder of a successful private equity firm that invests in mid-size technology companies. They regularly buy companies doing between $20 and $50 million in revenue and then aggressively scaling them 10x to build them into category leaders. He told me that when they purchase a new company, the leadership team has to also scale and increase their capabilities to run a larger enterprise. And in looking to put the best players on the field in every game, not everyone in the original C-suite may be able to keep up. Not because the former team members aren't capable, but because they aren't capable enough to reach the next level and largely because they are too committed to the past. One of the businesses they purchased is a digital communication compliance and surveillance company called SMARSH. At the time of acquisition, this software as a service or SaaS company was generating almost $40 million in annual revenue. The reason for its success was largely based on the founder, Steve Marsh's relentless focus on the quality and innovation of the product. In 2001, when Steve started the company, he helped clients comply with new and important regulatory requirements for financial service companies to archive, store, and monitor their electronic communications. Back then, the communications data primarily consisted of email. Steve worked tirelessly to make the software the absolute best-in-class offering for the company's clients. He long dreamed of one day being the leader in the communications and surveillance software market for the biggest banks in the world. In 2012, Steve sold the majority stake in SMARSH to a publicly traded company called Quest Software, which in turn was then purchased by Dell Computers, which was also publicly traded at the time. Over the years and under corporate ownership, the SMARSH management team brought in their reach beyond the financial services industry, horizontally marketing their services to a wide range of other sectors. While this diversification increased the total addressable market or TAM, it also diluted the differentiation and impact of SMARSH's offerings, which are custom tailored for regulated markets. When the private equity firm later carved out SMARSH in 2016, they refocused its commitment to the financial services industry. They knew that with increased focus and innovation in regulated markets, SMARSH could organically and rapidly scale by selling a broader array of products and services that are purpose-built for this vertical market. The go-to market motion was simplified and customer acquisition costs were much more favorable with a narrower focus. They also made strategic acquisitions to boost SMARSH's technological capabilities, acquiring leading technologies funded by other venture capital firms. In 2018, the company acquired Actions, which allowed SMARSH to expand its enterprise-grade offerings to some of the largest banks in the world. Today, 18 out of the top 20 global banks, excluding China, are clients of SMARSH. In 2020, SMARSH acquired digital reasoning, which enhanced the company's ability to apply artificial intelligence to actively surveil the communications data captured and stored in its archives. Both of these venture-backed acquisition targets were posting substantial operating losses at the time of acquisition and required significant effort to integrate. In six years, SMARSH went from less than $40 million in revenue to over $300 million in revenue. About half of the growth was organic based on laser-focusing on the financial services industry. The other half was through acquisition. Management worked hard to profitably integrate these acquisitions while continuing to build on their cutting-edge technologies. As the company neared a 10x growth in revenue, SMARSH needed another floor raise to maximize its full potential. The company needed to redefine its culture and its North Star as a unified business. The owners of SMARSH recognized its potential to become a billion-dollar company, but achieving this goal required making difficult changes. It didn't matter how cutting-edge and innovative the technology was. SMARSH needed a level of leadership it hadn't seen before, one that raised the focus, commitment, and accountability of the entire system and culture. A rigorous and intensive search to find the right leader began. It ultimately came down to two people and Kim Crawford Goodman was chosen. Kim had a successful executive track record but never as a CEO. Yet the private equity firm believed she could lead SMARSH to a more profitable and undisputed category-leading position. Kim became CEO of SMARSH in June 2022. She and the private equity firm were in complete alignment of the vision regarding SMARSH to make it a high growth and profitable business as well as the undisputed global leader in advanced communication surveillance with a multi-billion-dollar valuation. To realize that vision, Kim knew she needed a world-class team with a culture of high performance and accountability throughout the organization, not just within the leadership team. Kim noticed that the culture was based too much on legacy and not enough on performance. Many within the company had come to expect large bonuses and raises regardless of the metrics. Eight weeks into being CEO, Kim cut SMARSH's workforce by nearly 20% laying off hundreds of employees. This wasn't a popular decision. The company's financial performance was not communicated to the broader staff. Most remaining team members had no information about SMARSH's financial position and felt Kim had acted too hastily in her decision. While some new SMARSH wasn't efficient, they didn't know how to fix it. It was a difficult time for the company. Kim also eliminated many cloud-based vendors SMARSH had been using. She closed several of the company's satellite offices letting go of leases in real estate where the company wasn't producing excellence. A few months later, Kim made another round of aggressive cuts to hundreds more employees. Kim wasn't cutting for the sake of cutting. She was very methodical and rigorous in remodeling SMARSH, removing all aspects that couldn't become a billion-dollar company. The team not only had to be world-class, operating as the global leader in its space, but also have the product as the focus. Sure, smarts' technology and services were strong, but they needed to continually innovate and get better if they wanted to be both high growth and profitable. In addition to raising the culture and excellence within Smarsh, it was clear to Kim she needed to raise the floor and maturity in how they approached their clients, especially their biggest clients. Too often, some of Smarsh's biggest clients tended to call the shots, pushing Smarsh around and asking for all sorts of services that weren't commercially viable for the enterprise software vendor. In the past, Smarsh approached client relationships with the mindset of just being grateful to work with them. Kim had several open and uncomfortable conversations with these clients, renegotiating the terms of their relationship. Kim wanted to make sure that the clients understood the value of Smarsh they received and that if the company was expected to stay ahead of their requirements, the deal would need to be fair. Smarsh had historically given away much of their product for free and that would hurt the partnership in the long run. Though some of the clients were initially frustrated and upset, Kim helped them understand that by operating in a more systematic and clear way, the service Smarsh provided them would improve, not lessen. The company now handles over 100 different types of communication, from email to mobile text to WhatsApp to chats and voice to name just a few. Kim was willing to lose some clients if that was required to elevate the maturity and position of both the company and the services they provided. She was willing to disappoint or upset both clients and team members, not to be difficult, but to be clear, professional, and world class. She knew Smarsh could never be a global leader if it didn't have a clear and high floor in how it operated all around. Without a clear and high floor, no one wins. With an 18 months of Kim becoming CEO from June of 2022 to December of 2023, Smarsh went from less than breaking even to over $100 million in annual profits and $400 million in revenue. It is now forecasted to reach over $500 million in annual revenue and $200 million in profits in 2025. Kim Goodman is now one of the top CEOs and leaser of one of the largest privately held technology companies in the United States. By the end of 2024, Smarsh was valued as a multi-billion dollar company just two and a half years after Kim became CEO. Smarsh was recently recognized with the first ever Legacy Award for ranking among the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies for record 17 years in a row. Routinely recognized as the leader in its space in Gartner's Magic Quadrant Research, Smarsh has been strong for a long time, but its most explosive growth and profitability came with an intensive raising of the floor. Raising of the floor in the maturity, accountability, and capability was the crux of Smarsh's explosive innovation and profitability. The level of scaling Smarsh experienced could not have happened without the commitment and leadership of Kim Goodman. She raised the floor all around in Smarsh from the team and culture to the quality of the product to the systems and processes of how they serve their clients. Everything Kim did was filtered by the frame of Smarsh being the unquestioned global leader in its space, valued at billions of dollars. Nothing less was acceptable. In order to get Smarsh where it could be, Kim had to face the absolute truth and reality of where Smarsh then was when she became CEO. Facing and owning the truth of where Smarsh was, the good and the bad gave Kim the power to make hard decisions others weren't willing to make. In the book, The 50th Law, the strategy author Robert Green details the life of rapper 50 Cent, who grew up in the streets, got shot, and chose a better life. He ultimately became one of the top rappers in the world, and even now is among the top businessmen in his industry. One of the core lessons Green drew from 50 was fully accepting, even embracing the harshest and the rawest truth possible. As 50 Cent stated, "Reality is my drug. The more I have of it, the more power I get and the higher I feel." Green summed it up this way. If I could simplify the whole game of power and strategy in one equation, it would all hinge on the capacity to see events around you exactly as they are. The closer your mind is to reality, the better your strategies, your responses in life. Scaling a system, whether an entire country, a business, or even your own life, requires raising the floor as Kim Crawford did at Smarsh. Raising the floor ultimately means raising transparency and accountability. Again, as stated by Kim, most of Smarsh's remaining team after her first round of aggressive cuts didn't realize how inefficient Smarsh then was, hard filtering every aspect of the system and being radically honest about what couldn't scale was part of Kim's superpower. She embraced reality and then transformed it. For a system to scale, that system must have extremely high transparency and accountability. Often, people won't want a higher degree of accountability for their performance or transparency in what they're doing. Those are the types of people who get eliminated when the floor is being raised. In an organization, the culture and floor are ultimately one and the same. The culture is the agreed upon level of transparency and accountability in the system. When you raise the floor, you raise the culture, who is in the organization, what the expected performance is, and what the consistent results are. To scale, you'll need people who want to be held accountable who are willing to fully expose themselves, especially in their mistakes. Are you willing to raise your floor? Are you willing to cut everything from your system that can't or won't reach the vision you're committed to? Filter faster. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. Cherie Scott Carter in If Life Is a Game, These are the rules. In her book, Quit, the power of knowing when to walk away, Annie Duke, a professional poker player and expert in decision making, explains that professional poker players play far fewer hands than amateurs do. Whereas amateurs play lots of hands that are doomed to fail from the beginning, the pros are fast folders. They filter out far more bad hands than the amateurs. Because their floor is much higher, when they do play, they hit the bullseye much more often. Hence, they make far more money while the amateurs lose more money. Duke explains the escalation of commitment that occurs for amateurs who once invested even in a bad hand can't let it go. They keep piling more into it, even after they become aware, they're better off folding. Escalation of commitment is a byproduct of sunk cost bias, and it keeps you on a course of action far longer than helpful. The phrase to describe this is throwing good money after bad. If you're ready to scale, sunk cost bias can't be your game. You can't keep holding onto what was just because you're invested. Maybe even heavily invested. The question isn't whether you're previously holding a winning hand. The question is, is it still a winning hand? In order to scale, you've got to become a pro at letting go. This can't be a long and delayed process. Like professional poker players, you've got to fold fast when it's time to move on. You've also got to filter faster and skip the bad hands that distract or delay your growth. Blake Erickson, the co-author of this book, is a master of high filtering and fast folding. As a young missionary in Lima, Peru, Blake started his two-year mission with the personal and impossible goal of baptizing over 100 people into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The average missionary in Lima at that time baptized approximately 10 people during their two-year mission. Nearly one year in, Blake had baptized four people. He had a decision to make, keep doing what he was doing, or raise his floor. He decided to filter much more aggressively every person he talked to. He created three filtering questions to determine whether someone was even capable of being baptized let alone wanted to. One, do you work on Sunday? Two, are you married? Three, will you attend church this Sunday? These filtering questions were essential because if a person wasn't willing or able to come to church, they weren't a good candidate to make a commitment like baptism. If they wouldn't come this week, they probably weren't ready to commit. If they weren't married but living with a partner, they weren't a good candidate for baptism unless they were willing to get married. Living with a partner, you're not married to, goes against the teachings of the Church. Because Blake was committed to his impossible goal of baptizing over 100 people during his mission, he realized he had to filter the people he taught more aggressively so he could actually find people who not only wanted to be baptized, but who were also ready to be. Admittedly, for the first year of his mission, like the amateur poker players, Blake was spending lots of his time teaching people who enjoyed his visits, but were never going to get baptized. He'd often spend weeks, sometimes months, visiting and teaching people he loved, but who weren't ready for commitments to God. missionaries. become satisfied being busy doing service and teaching, but Blake, like Tom Brady referenced in chapter 1, reached a level of commitment that has a singular objective. He wanted to baptize. He didn't want to broaden his focus or metrics of success. By establishing this unconventional, yet effective filtering process during the second year of his mission, Blake did not teach anyone who wasn't both capable of and desirous of being baptized. He spoke to literally hundreds of people daily on the busy streets of Lima Peru. During the first 30 seconds, he hard filtered the people with his filtering questions. If they didn't pass the three questions, he moved on. No harm, no foul. This wasn't about convincing people to join, but instead about finding the people ready and wanting to join. 30 seconds or less is how fast Blake could filter a person while other missionaries continued investing days, weeks, and sometimes months, teaching people who are never going to be baptized, playing bad hands, not raising the floor fast enough. The result was that Blake ended his mission with 118 baptisms, 18 over his impossible goal. To get there, he had to raise his floor, because until he did that, he wasn't ready or committed to realizing his impossible goal. Until he raised his floor, his commitment was to the activities and the results he got during the first year of his mission. Raising the floor meant truly learning the lesson, such that Blake could walk away from his former way of doing things. The chess prodigy anti-chi world champion, Josh Wateskin, wrote in the art of learning, quoted previously in chapter 1, "I have long believed that if a student of virtually any discipline could avoid ever repeating the same mistake twice, both technical and psychological, he or she would skyrocket to the top of their field." Raising the floor is the crux of scaling. It's the hardest part and until you do it, you're fooling yourself. But once you do it, your growth literally explodes. The faster you raise your floor, the less you'll be caught up in the noise that will ultimately pull you down. When you're operating below the floor, it's psychologically stressful creating tension. You know intuitively you're saying yes to something holding you back. Especially if you're a caring and empathetic person, it can create feelings of guilt holding the floor and saying no to people, whether team members, friends, clients, etc. Yet your floor represents your level of accountability, honesty, and transparency. Thus, by being honest and clear, you may disappoint people, but they will ultimately respect you because they know you're being honest. Here's what will happen for you as you actively eliminate what's below the floor or say no faster to the things that somewhat scare you to say no to. When you do it, the tension will dissipate. Almost immediately you'll experience relief and a jolt of energy. This is the natural byproduct of increasing your accountability and honesty, especially with yourself. No matter how successful you get, this lesson won't go away. You'll have to continuously raise your floor if you want to keep growing. Otherwise you'll stagnate. And the risk of stagnation isn't just remaining where you are. Actually, raising your floor becomes increasingly important the more successful you become. As you become more successful, the yeses become more expensive. One wrong yes, such as taking on the wrong client or project, could put at risk everything you're now doing. It might even cost you your health or family. If you don't raise your floor, the risk isn't just missing your potential. The risk is complete failure. We've all seen this. People who said yes to the wrong things and it ultimately sank their lives. The powerful and beautiful thing is that raising your floor not only increases your maturity and character as a person, but also literally elevates everything you're doing. It makes you a better person, a better partner, a better leader. Please refer to the image and description on raising the floor in the PDF. Journal prompts and applications. What in your life or business do you already know is below your floor? What do you feel the biggest risk of eliminating this is? What have you delayed eliminating for far too long? What conversation have you delayed for far too long? Go to scaling.com/book1 and complete the form to evaluate your current readiness to scale.