Business Rehab: Detoxing from Addictive Patterns that Hinder Success (Part 2)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. Today we continue to ask the question, what patterns is your business addicted to that are toxic? Let us help you with some business rehab. I'm Stephen Sakach here again with Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher. Hey guys.

**Ash Maher** (0:35)
Hey, how's it going?

**Stephen Sakach** (0:37)
All right. Last episode in this series, we talked about the addiction to short-term profits. We talked about the ego-driven leadership, and we had a really fun segment on the dependence on consumer manipulation, marketing tactics, that kind of thing. So, Tullio, what toxic addiction do you want to focus on first today?

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:02)
I want to talk about those snorting, being obsessed with hyper growth, because that's what it's like. It's like snorting cocaine. Just expand, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, and that drives burnout culture, sacrificing quality for speed, and very aggressive marketing tactics. I think we've talked about some of these in the past and some of our bad systems. That is like one. Unfortunately, I'm a little more familiar with this one than others, because I was definitely one of those driven by hyper growth. And it's awful.

**Stephen Sakach** (1:43)
To me, this one really goes into the importance of our bliss philosophy. because when you're growing super fast, like this is when things get really stretched, and you just leave things at the roadside that might have been important to you, and really important to your culture, especially a lot of times. And so when you're really getting the stretched here, this is when just all kinds of things happen. If you don't just, hey, let's take a pause here, let's make sure we're on the right track. Tullio, what's the impact here?

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:18)
Well, let's talk about the symptoms first. Well, no, we did talk about the symptoms. The impact here is usually high employee turnover, brand dilution, poor customer experiences, and a very unsustainable business model. That's the impact. That's the bottom line of what it does.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:40)
A couple of those, I mean, like the poor customer experience, that's like what we're talking about, right? Where you're just suddenly, hey, how can we automate this? Or how can we just, that personal touch starts to get lost there in your business that you might have had previous to your hyper growth or you're putting in systems that are just trying to get you to point A, from point A to point B, and you lose a lot in between. So yeah, I can feel that one for sure. Employee turnover, I mean, that's always, that's just a big one, right? because you're just, the grind is just hitting you.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:11)
It's a kind of a thing, you know?

**Ash Maher** (3:14)
Not good.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:19)
So what are the root causes here, Tullio, to this addiction?

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:24)
You know, people don't, it's just kind of like any other addiction in real life. It doesn't just happen to people who haven't gone through some form of trauma that they haven't healed, right? So the trauma, as I like to call it, is just the need to create value, right? And usually it's someone who's been judged heavily by, you know, sales, growth that they can contribute.
And so there's this market expectations that are being put on someone, or putting them on themselves, that then they spread to the entire organization. There's a lot of fear of missing out, you know, FOMO that comes into this place. Like if we don't capitalize on the opportunity now, this will never come back. We have a window of right now, you know, there's not mindset. But mostly it's just internal pressure. It's like the need to be on top and compete and be the best at all costs. So it's usually driven by some insecurities, actually, quite frankly, you know, because if you're kind of securing yourself and your organization, you don't have to prove anything to anyone. So there's this desire to prove something. But also, you know, if you're a public company and you're driven by shareholder value, there's that, you know, there's the need to please the shareholders.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:44)
What does you mean? You mentioned the need to create values. Is that what you're talking about? The need for the shareholder value? Are you talking about someone within a position?

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:55)
It's tied to what you're measuring. I think we're going to talk about that a little bit later, right? It's organizations that are driven by revenue targets. So whether it's the public markets that are expecting growth, quarter over quarter, or a private equity that is expecting profitability, or a private investors who are giving money to a startup that are, again, wanting to see a return on the investment. So there's this need that you feel as a leader, that you're being judged on creating the value. And the value has been decided at its revenue and growth. And not just growth, but hyper growth, like how fast and how rapidly can you grow and what clip. So there's just this desire that's been thrown at you. And then you kind of judge whether you're an effective leader or not based on your ability to fulfill that desire.