I feel like I now spend my days doing what I am good at and am not engaged in activities I don’t enjoy and am not good at.
Based in Boulder, CO, Sounds True was founded in 1985 by Tami Simon with a clear mission: to disseminate spiritual wisdom. Since starting out as a project with one woman and her tape recorder, the company has grown into a multimedia publishing company with a library of more than 3,000 titles featuring some of the leading teachers and visionaries. In more than three decades of growth, change, and evolution, Sounds True has maintained its clear focus on its overriding purpose, which is summed up in its ambitious mission statement, “To wake up the world.” Tami engaged with Lex and Organizational Physics to conduct a strategic alignment and organizational redesign program in 2018.
At that time, the company was at $28.1M in sales and it had 145 employees. Three years later, at the time of publication of this book, Sounds True is at $47M in sales, it has a 13-member Leadership Team and 150 employees, and it has twice been included on the Inc 500 list of the fastest-growing private companies in North America. This is CAGR of 18%. Let’s hear from Tami.
I started Sounds True when I was 22 years old for the purpose of “disseminating spiritual wisdom.” Spiritual wisdom had been a “lifeline” to me in my own experience as an alienated teenager drawn to books by authors like Herman Hesse and Alan Watts. I wanted to provide that type of lifeline to others.
Also, I dropped out of college because I realized that the type of learning of most interest to me wasn’t going to happen in an academic setting. I wanted to learn about spiritual experience and understand my own inner life. As a college dropout who was waitressing to earn money, I was still super interested in LEARNING, so I volunteered to host a radio show for the community radio station where I could interview spiritual teachers. The show became somewhat popular and people liked it so much that they started purchasing cassette copies of the programs they really liked. I had a very small cottage business (me and my cassette dubbing deck).
My father died when I was 21 and I inherited $50K. I didn’t want to put that money in the bank. One of the people I was interviewing suggested to me that I put the money into myself. And quite honestly, when I walked out of his office, I had a strange experience and heard a voice (for real) that said “disseminate spiritual wisdom.” I knew that was what I was going to do.
I could write a book here … but will try to be brief.
We had a COO at the company who had lost favor with the staff. People felt that he was not a good organizational leader. He had a lot of vision but people felt like he was incapable of being the operational leader of the business. They “revolted” and said, “We want to report to you. You can keep the COO around if you want as a sidekick, but we won’t work for him.” I didn’t know how to properly organize the © Organizational Physics Inc. All rights reserved. 3 business. How could I have a role for myself that played to my strengths (which are not operational but involve speaking, writing, interviewing, inspiring people)? Should I hire a CEO? Slit my wrists? (Just kidding.) However, I did feel overwhelmed and at sea about how to structure the business so I could also enjoy my life.
At the time, we were also starting to grow a new digital direct-to-consumer business, creating and selling online courses. We built this business “on top of” our existing publishing business (books and audio programs) and quite honestly, WE WERE CLUELESS about how to organize ourselves properly. Which resources should be shared among which divisions?
And we had technology problems. We were doing our own development internally, it was expensive, and we didn’t have a clear technology roadmap forward.
We had QA problems, LOTS OF RE-WORK on projects, and a bunch of good people who were FRUSTRATED that it seemed so hard to get stuff done.
We also had a CFO that I was invested in keeping but we had some very real challenges when it came to keeping our payroll costs in check, analyzing our profitability by product line, and creating a strategic financial roadmap for the busines
Life is different in some key ways:
When you develop a new strategy (in our case starting to grow a digital course division), you can’t just shove the work into the old organization structure. The structure needs to change when the strategy changes.
Bring in an organizational wizard like Lex early when the pain starts. (Why wait until the pain is so terrible that it feels like you’ve been stuck for years?)
It is better to have a staff meeting once a week than 1:1 meetings with leadership. It allows for “shared consciousness” and gets me out of spending my days being the “middle person” in conversations.
People should work in their “genius zones” and I want to work in mine and am committed to this.
There are certain roles best suited for business drivers (my language) and certain roles best suited for the Stabilizing/Unifying types. Put people in the right roles that fit their PSIU type.
Know what your strategic imperatives are and stay focused on them like a drumbeat under © Organizational Physics Inc. All rights reserved. 5 everything. Have an offsite strategy meeting once per year to review the imperatives and keep them fresh.
Push authority down as much as possible.
I love the section in our Leadership Team meetings where we ask, “Is there anything under the table?” This has been a powerful part of the meeting for us!
I love the T1 process and people taking responsibility for being the implementers of their own proposals for change.
This case study was originally published in the book Designed to Scale by Lex Sisney.
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