”Live your legacy while you're building it.” – Lady Jen Du Plessis

I had the pleasure of speaking with Lady Jen Du Plessis—aka The Scaling Architect—the leading expert in building world-class teams, a bestselling author, and the host of two top-ranking podcasts. 

Through her masterminds and private mentorship, she helps people hyper-scale their revenue and improve leadership skills to build powerful teams that enable multiplied results in record time while designing a balanced and exciting personal life.

We discuss: 

• The critical mindset shift from me to we
• Letting go to grow: the importance of delegation
• The challenges of leadership and management

The critical mindset shift from me to we

It’s tempting for leaders to run their own show and try to go it alone. Founders are especially susceptible to this mindset. It’s easy to convince themselves that they’re the only ones who can provide the correct type of experience for customers or clients. 

But that method won’t earn the growth they’re looking for. They must build a process that reaches above and beyond themselves and their business, and that means building a solid team. And to do that, they have to take a leap of faith.

“‘Beyond’ is different for everyone,” says Jen. “For me, it's traveling and spending time with my grandkids. That's success to me. To others, it might be having another business—which I have as well—or multiple businesses.”

The mindset shift from “me to we” means freeing ourselves from the weeds and embracing a visionary, voice-of-the-company role, allowing us to focus on what is important to us. 

“We can never get to that big dream, that big vision of the beyond, if we're constantly stuck and everything's on us,” she continues. “You have to hire a team. You have to have the mindset of being a leader and amplifying your influence so that you can save time.”

Creating that “we” can be daunting, but Jen has seen the exponential growth and abundance that comes from taking the time to expand countless times across her career—it’s worth the growing pains. 

Letting go to grow: the importance of delegation

If leaders build a strong experience, anyone can deliver it. Think of franchises like KFC, Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, Nordstrom, and so on—all operate with unique and memorable experiences crafted by their leaders and distributed to a wide branching team.

If the founder of KFC had kept the recipe to themselves, there would be no franchise or growth. The legacy would have begun and ended with them. 

Letting go, more often than not, leads to growth. When we free up our minds by delegating and loosening the reins, we allow room for the above and beyond.

“Having that mindset of saying, ‘How long can I work 80 hours a week and still not make six figures?’ The reason that you're not exceeding beyond that is because of the mindset that you have. It's holding you back, it's anchoring you down, and you are losing productivity,” she says.

We all have limited time and energy. We all hit a wall eventually. That is where delegation becomes a lifeline. Passing the baton can feel intimidating, but it’s necessary to take those next steps.

“We don't have infinite time, but we can buy infinite time by hiring people. Even if you hire someone for 10 hours a week, that's 10 hours of productivity that you can dedicate to the activity that brings in more business,” she continues. “We have to write down our systems so that we can share them with others so that they can implement them on our behalf. We don't have to do it all.”

The challenges of leadership and management (plus a peek into the LEAP program)

Jen developed a unique program that goes by LEAP, designed to guide entrepreneurs to those above and beyond heights they’ve struggled to reach, giving them the tools to overcome common challenges of leadership and management.

LEAP stands for: 

• Leadership Skills
• Expanding Your Team
• Amplifying Your Influence
• Increasing Profits

Leadership Skills 

Leadership is a skill. Yes, some are born with more innate leadership qualities than others, but that does not mean we can’t hone and curate them. Like any skill, it takes dedicated study and intention to master. 

As a founder, you’re leading partners, clients, the people who work with you, etc. Being a leader means, at its core, that you’re going first. You initiate. You act. You’re the first to call and the first to schedule a meeting. That’s leading.

Expanding Your Team

Determining who to add to your team takes recognizing the proper mix of ability and willingness, as that mixture determines how you’re going to work together. You’d have a different approach with someone able but lacking willingness than you would with someone willing who lacks ability. 

You must also understand who the person is—their personality, their values, why they do what they do—in order to lead them and build a successful team.

Amplifying Your Influence

Client attraction takes priority over client chasing. And to attract, you must amplify your influence through networking, guest appearances, and more. Even a picture with a well-known influencer in your space can open the door to higher traffic and interest.

“It's important that you're not that person standing in the corner. If nobody knows who you are, it's hard to hire. It's hard to get clients,” Jen says. “And so you need to make sure that you're out creating influence and creating your expertise and doing that through presentations and speaking events, even just locally.”

Look for opportunities over leads. 

Increasing Profits

Increasing profits comes down to taking action. Jen—sometimes known as Mrs. Action—has this down to a science. She considers four levels of growth: 

• Formulation
• Concentration
• Momentum
• Stability

“Formulation is planning. Concentration is recording and doing, and then that creates those opportunities for momentum, and stability will only happen if you continue to reformulate, reconcentrate, and bring yourself up to speed,” she says. 

Which challenges in the LEAP program do you resonate with the most? What is something you can do today to work towards the above and beyond in your life?

Be sure to check out Jen’s full episode for further insight into letting go to grow and learn more at JenDuPlessis.com!