Asked for the one scaling insight he wishes he had known earlier, Stevan Popovich, President and Chief Retail Officer of Cycle Gear, a powersports omnichannel retailer running more than 160 brick-and-mortar locations as part of the Comoto Family of Brands, answered in three words: trust versus performance. Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, identifies that trade-off as the one most executives get backward, hiring for output and discovering later that output without trust breaks down under volume. When a business is adding stores, brands, and revenue faster than its communication can keep up, a leadership team that trusts each other will solve problems more efficiently than a stronger team that holds information close, which is why Popovich spent five years building a layer of VPs and directors at Cycle Gear who handle ten to fifteen store openings a year collaboratively rather than in isolation.
This episode is for executives whose leadership teams are technically strong but still route every cross-functional problem through the top.
Key Takeaways
- Volume exposes trust gaps before it exposes talent gaps. Stevan Popovich points to a founder-led business moving from one hundred million to three hundred million as the moment close-to-the-vest conversations start costing real time.
- Transparency is the mechanism, not the sentiment. At Cycle Gear, every leader’s goals are visible to every other leader, personal and professional, and Popovich shares the goals he sets with his own boss.
- Growth stalls on perception more often than on performance. Popovich’s finding across his own teams is that most people have a perception problem rather than a work problem, which changes what a development plan should contain.
- Development plans split evenly between personal and professional. Popovich rebuilt his employees’ plans at 50% personal and 50% professional, then added a slice for how that person could affect the organization in a different role.
- The jump from doing the work to leading it is longer than leaders expect. Popovich says he had to make a full 180 on how he managed, trusted, and held his team accountable as RevZilla scaled from $15 million to $150 million in five years.
Executives Choose Trust Over Raw Performance When the Business Doubles
Stevan Popovich, President and Chief Retail Officer of Cycle Gear, frames his answer against a distinction he first encountered years ago in a Simon Sinek talk about the military: the high performer with low trust set against the medium performer with high trust. His own experience sided with trust.
“If you have a team that trusts and works together, you can solve problems far more effectively and efficiently.”
The failure mode he describes is specific to companies growing past their original operating size. In a founder-led business that reaches scale, conversations stay close to the vest, people hold on to what they built, and leaders try to run a three-hundred-million-dollar business with the habits of a hundred-million-dollar one. The information never moves fast enough, and problems that a peer would have solved in a hallway become escalations.
Popovich’s response over his five years leading Cycle Gear was structural. He built a layer of VPs, senior directors, and directors positioned so that events which would normally happen in a vacuum happen collaboratively instead. The test case is store openings, ten or fifteen in a year, each one touching real estate, construction, inventory, staffing, and marketing at once. His description of the result is that the water stays under the bridge and nothing becomes a big deal, because the team will hand work off, trust it will get done, and trust the feedback that comes back.
Leaders Build Trust by Making Every Person’s Goals Visible to the Whole Team
Trust is the goal every executive names and almost none of them operationalize. Stevan Popovich, President and Chief Retail Officer of Cycle Gear, runs a mechanism rather than a value statement, and he admits his team does not always enjoy it.
Every goal is shared. “Everyone knows what everyone’s goals are.” Personal goals and professional goals both go on the board, so if one leader is working on Excel skills and another is working on presenting without nerves, the whole group sees it. Popovich shares the goals he sets with his own boss on the same terms.
He pairs that with a structure he distinguishes from hierarchy. “I’m not a big fan of chain of command, but I am a fan of railways.” A railway gives a leader a defined lane to accelerate in, built around the skill they are strongest at and want to grow. What it does not do is protect them from challenge. The team meets weekly, and anyone may argue with anyone outside their own function: the head of stores sales has standing to challenge the head of facilities, real estate, and construction, with egos taken out of the exchange.
| Practice | How it works at Cycle Gear | What it produces |
| Transparent goals | All personal and professional goals visible across the leadership team, written knowing everyone will read them | Removes the information asymmetry that lets people hold work close |
| Leader goes first | Popovich shares the goals he sets with his own boss with the team | Makes the exposure reciprocal rather than something imposed downward |
| Railways, not chain of command | Each leader runs a defined lane matched to their core skill and growth interest | Focus and acceleration without the permission-seeking of hierarchy |
| Weekly cross-functional challenge | Any leader may challenge any other, including outside their own area | Ideas get tested by people with different vantage points, and disagreements stay routine |
Leaders Stall Their Teams by Staying in the Weeds After the Company Scales
Stevan Popovich, President and Chief Retail Officer of Cycle Gear, is direct about his own version of this. Moving from purchasing manager to director of merchandising at RevZilla, he had managed people before in retail settings, and he says plainly that he knew nothing about leading at that scale.
RevZilla was a hypergrowth e-commerce business that went from $15 million to $150 million in five years, including a single stretch from roughly $50 million to $85 million. Popovich calls that thirty-five-million-dollar gap enormous in retail, and he is clear about what happens when the leadership structure does not keep pace: without trust and leadership capability at that volume, things break down quickly.
His diagnosis applies past his own case. “A lot of leaders don’t realize how far that bridge is they have to cross to transition from doing the job to being a leader.” The pull is toward comfort. A leader who is good at the tactical work will drop back into the reporting, back into the detail, and back into the job they were promoted out of, precisely because they will succeed at it.
Popovich’s wake-up call was that his team was not scaling as fast as the business needed, which forced him to re-architect his whole approach: how he managed the team, how much he trusted them, and how he held them accountable rather than doing the work himself. He describes it as a full 180. That is the conversation I have with executives constantly, because the skill that earned the promotion is the skill you must now stop using yourself.
Managers Unlock Growth by Fixing How the Organization Perceives Their People
Stevan Popovich, President and Chief Retail Officer of Cycle Gear, credits a professional development mentor early in his career with moving him further, faster, and he built his own approach from that starting point. The finding that shaped it is blunt: “Most people have a perception problem, not a work problem.”
That changes what a development plan is for. Popovich rebuilt his employees’ plans at 50% personal and 50% professional, with an additional slice for how that person might affect the organization in a different way, since Comoto’s five brands allow him to move people between businesses. He is also explicit that a single growth template will not fit everyone, because a quantitative personality and a qualitative personality need different conversations.
His example is a leader running facilities and fulfillment operations whose tools were excellent for the job he had and insufficient for the job he wanted. Popovich asked him a question: “Do you want to wear boots or loafers?” Half the goals stayed in boots, covering the construction and facilities work he already owned. The other half became loafers: learning to present, integrating across functions, and influencing the business strategically so colleagues stopped filing him under one function. Popovich’s description of the trap is a crayon box, where the red crayon paints fire engines and the blue one paints skies, and nobody thinks to ask for anything else.
He puts the timeline at 12 to 24 months to re-architect someone’s growth curve that way. Finding the right people is the first job of a leader. Making them better in the role is the second, and perception is usually the part standing in the way.
Executives Apply Four Principles to Scale Teams Through Rapid Growth
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Trust beats performance under volume | Weight collaboration and candor above raw individual output when selecting and structuring leaders | Popovich built a VP and senior director layer across five years at Cycle Gear that absorbs ten to fifteen store openings a year collaboratively, where the same work would otherwise sit in departmental vacuums |
| Transparency is a system, not a value | Publish every leader’s personal and professional goals to the whole team, and publish your own first | Popovich shares the goals he sets with his own boss with his Cycle Gear leadership team, which he credits with keeping disagreements routine across a business running more than 160 locations |
| Cross the bridge from doing to leading | Rebuild how you manage, trust, and hold people accountable instead of returning to the work you were promoted out of | Popovich made a full 180 on his approach at RevZilla as the business scaled from $15 million to $150 million in five years, including a stretch from roughly $50 million to $85 million |
| Solve perception, not output | Structure development plans to change how the organization sees a person, not only what they deliver | Popovich rebuilt plans at 50% personal and 50% professional and puts the re-architecture of a growth curve at 12 to 24 months, with his facilities leader moving from boots to loafers as the example |
Quotes from This Episode
- “You never know who you’re talking to.” — Stevan Popovich, President and Chief Retail Officer, Cycle Gear
- “Make no judgments on consumers.” — Stevan Popovich, President and Chief Retail Officer, Cycle Gear
- “I live in the future 99% of the time.” — Stevan Popovich, President and Chief Retail Officer, Cycle Gear
- “There’s the caution of the death by a thousand pilots.” — Stevan Popovich, President and Chief Retail Officer, Cycle Gear
- “I tell my team we’re not that special.” — Stevan Popovich, President and Chief Retail Officer, Cycle Gear
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you build trust between members of a leadership team?
Stevan Popovich, President and Chief Retail Officer of Cycle Gear, makes every leader’s goals visible to every other leader, personal and professional, and shares the goals he sets with his own boss on the same terms. He pairs that transparency with what he calls railways rather than chain of command, giving each leader a defined lane while allowing anyone to challenge anyone outside their own function in a weekly team meeting with egos removed. Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, notes how rare that level of transparency is among executive teams, and Popovich acknowledges his own team does not always enjoy it.
Is trust or performance more important when a company is scaling fast?
Stevan Popovich answers trust, drawing on the high-performer-with-low-trust comparison he encountered in a Simon Sinek talk about the military, and says a team that trusts and works together will solve problems far more effectively and efficiently. His reasoning is about what volume does to a founder-led company: as the business grows, close-to-the-vest conversations and reluctance to let go slow everything down at exactly the point the organization needs speed. At Cycle Gear, Popovich credits the trust inside his VP and director layer with making ten to fifteen store openings a year a collaborative process rather than a series of isolated fire drills.
Why do good employees stop progressing even when their work is strong?
Stevan Popovich’s finding across his own teams is that most people have a perception problem rather than a work problem, and that how colleagues perceive someone is usually the largest gap standing between them and their next role. His fix is a development plan split 50% personal and 50% professional, adding presentation skills and cross-functional work to the technical strengths the person already has, which he illustrates with the facilities leader he asked whether he wanted to wear boots or loafers. Popovich puts the timeline for re-architecting someone’s growth curve that way at 12 to 24 months.
Executives Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies by Scaling Themselves First
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach. He coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
