Episode 430: The Lazy CEO with Jim Schleckser

Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hammer, your host. On today's episode, we have Jim Slexer. He's the CEO and founder of The CEO Project, bestselling author and podcast host himself. He also wrote an awesome book called Great CEOs Are Lazy. I mean, first of all, it's a heck of a title, and I think he even had his podcast at the beginning called The Lazy CEO podcast, and obviously they've rebranded it for that, but from a book perspective, it's a really great title to say, what does that mean? Great CEOs are lazy. The first thing that I thought about before I actually interviewed Jim is just the walking that Steve Jobs used to do around the Apple campus. And I was wondering if, you know, is that what it actually means? And I think about the most important thing I think you can do as a business owner is actually spend time thinking. Having the discipline of thinking about the business. And I think that you're going to pick up a lot of different things of the lazy CEO concept in this interview with Jim on focused efforts and intentionality, uh, effective and efficient delegation in the business, etc. So I think if you're wanting to grow your small business going into 2025, this episode is really going to help you. I really enjoyed connecting with Jim as I was actually able to, to jump on his podcast. As well. So I think you're going to get a ton out of this episode. Without further ado, here's my interview with Jim Slexer.

We're good on that. Um, that's beautiful. Where's the doctor? Tell me about that before we get rolling.

I have a Doctorate of Business Administration. I got it from University of Maryland. Uh, during COVID after I'd done all the puzzles and cleaned all the closets, I'm like, what am I going to do with my time? And so I, I, and I had always wondered if I could complete a doctorate or not, if I had what it took. So I got involved in that and then COVID went and ended on me. So I, for 2 years or 18 months or so, I did it sort of post-COVID, but I finished up end of last year, got my doctorate.

So, so do, do, do people refer to you often, your clients refer to you as Jim or Dr. Jim or how do they?

Only when they're busting my chops, man.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, no, it's Jim. I don't do a thing. I, I do this just That's technically the title, but I don't—

uh, well, okay, I want to make sure.

It turns out you, you don't have to be, you don't have to be that smart to get a doctorate, it turns out.

Yeah, okay, right. I don't want to make sure if it's like Dr. Jim, you know.

No, no, well, people call me that sometimes.

It's fine.

I don't— you, you could totally play on that, you know that. You could totally play off of that a little bit, you know.

Dr. Phil, Dr. Jim.

Yeah, you totally could. You could, you could, no doubt about it.

Yeah.

Uh, anyway, you even said a DJ before.

Well, that was designated Jim, not Dr. Jim, but yeah, change it.

Uh, okay. All right, well, that's a, that's a playoff of both of those.

Yeah, that's fun.

All right, I'll record my intro and outro, um, afterwards. Okay, just so you know. All right, and that helps because then I can record the intro applicably to within the, uh, the series. Cool, love it. All right, here we go. Jim, welcome to the Above the Business podcast.

Thanks for having me, Bradley.

Excited to have you. I really enjoyed being on your podcast, The CEO Project. I'm curious, why don't you kind of take people back on your journey? So we always start with kind of around background and origin story, bring us to present day, but also let people know kind of around your podcast and what you guys do.

Yeah. So just picking on the podcast for the second, during COVID everybody, you know, they were at home, didn't know what to do. So I started Java with Jim on Thursday mornings at 10 o'clock and people would, I, I had like 60, 70 people showing up and we're just talking about business and ideas and, and it was great. And as COVID started coming off, you know, the attendance went down and down and down and down. You know, people were busy, they could get out and about and do stuff. So we turned it into a podcast at that point and that was called the Lazy CEO Podcast. And that's based on my first book, which is called Great CEOs Are Lazy. So we kind of riffed off of that. And we, we basically post weekly. Still Thursdays at 10 is when we record normally. All kinds of guests. Sometimes I speak, but it's, it's really designed to provide tools and techniques and ideas for people trying to grow their business for small, medium companies. And then we got to 100, and I had been hearing some noise from our, our listeners. They said, you know, Lazy CEO. I don't know if that's what I aspire to be. So we flipped it over to CEO Project Podcast, which is the name of the company. And it kind of makes sense. It's like you're working on yourself as a CEO. All CEOs are projects.

There's—

we can always learn. And that's the spirit, you know, of what we're trying to bring to the table and ideas to help people on their journey in that way. So that's, that's been the podcast, which has been great. I I enjoy it and met some really interesting people. So it's a lot of fun. It's the new radio, right? Yeah, it really is.

I mean, you know, at the time we're recording this, we're coming off of the election. Regardless of people's political affiliation, you can't deny that the podcasting, like with, with Rogan and Trump going on and like the impact of that those have had comparatively to, you know, traditional media sources. And so, yeah, I totally, totally agree with you. I mean, You think about it, you're— people are spending 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, an hour with you in their ears while working out, gardening, uh, doing whatever the case may be, driving to and from, from work. I mean, that's, that's intimate time. Um, and obviously I wanted to have you on. I was fortunate enough to go on your podcast, and I don't know, at the time of this recording, we've probably done 40 or 50, uh, this year. And, and, uh, I just connected with you in a sense of like, Jim really knows what he's talking about in business. And, you know, no offense to some of the other people, but they're maybe not as up to speed with just general business, certainly as you are. Now, take people back on your own journey in business, okay? And kind of bring us to present day. And then we're going to do a deep dive. Obviously, is this part of a series around leadership? And we're going to get into kind of a subcategory of that today. But before we get into that, Take people back.

Sure. So I was weird as a kid and read a huge amount, and I actually read Think and Grow Rich when I was like 12 or 13. And I said, man, this is really interesting. And it got me thinking about running a business, you know, as my goal in life, as something I'd want to do. And I've always said, you know, I really even then, I, it struck me that life is really, really short. And you want to maximize while you're here, meaning have a positive impact on the planet while you're here. Because if you, you know, you're here and you leave and nobody noticed, like, geez, that was kind of a life wasted. But if you made a difference in some way, that's interesting. So I, my way was through business. And I've got an engineering degree to get myself started. My dad was an engineer. That would, that was influential in that choice, as you might imagine. Then went into engineering. I'm a terrible engineer. But I got, I started an MBA very quickly and I'm a much better business person than I am an engineer. So, I kind of went over to sales and marketing and literally at 29 years old started running companies. I ran my first company at 29, made a bajillion mistakes. I mean, I was just horrible probably. I hesitate to even look back at some of the decisions I made because they were probably so bad. Ended up leaving that firm, jumped over and ran another company, grew that a bunch. Ended up with a cluster of companies through M&A, did business all over the planet. I've been in 62 countries now and sold that to an English parent company. We ultimately decided to sell that and a bunch of other companies to GE. They pulled me out and I did business, M&A for a while, and then moved down to Maryland where I live now to run a company we acquired at 11:59 of the telecom bubble. For a little over $1.5 billion. And I ran that company for a number of years before I exited and I got fired. I'll be clear, sort of occupational hazard at that level. And that's when I started The CEO Project for a whole bunch of reasons, personal and professional. And that has been the best thing that ever happened to me in my life. I love what I do. It's intellectually stimulating. I get to have incredible impact on people and the people that work for them. Its finances work out great. Yeah, I really should write a thank you note to the guy who fired me because it was literally one of the best things that ever happened in my life. So that sort of brings you to the present day. I love that.

Tell me the genesis around, and this will kind of dovetail nicely into kind of our topic du jour today, which is really going to be around leadership effectiveness, delegation, and leverage. But tell me the genesis behind Great CEOs Are Lazy, which is certainly a super catchy title of a book.

Yeah, thanks. It's designed to sort of make you stop, right? And that book sold right around 100,000 copies now, which is kind of a big deal for a business book. Most business books don't sell more than a few thousand. A good one sells 8,000 or 10,000. So we're up in some fairly thin air on that book. It goes all the way back to literally when I was an engineer and a book came out. By a guy named Eli Goldratt. Eli Goldratt was an Israeli physicist. He wrote a book called The Goal, and he had this sort of general systems theory called theory of constraints, which he applied to a manufacturing operation. And you can imagine a manufacturing operation with multiple machines that sort of touch the product, that one of those machines, if you're pushing capacity, is going to limit the throughput of the entire plant. In other words, the, the, the painting cell is at full capacity. Everywhere else we've got capacity. We would— we don't in painting. And so therefore the painting process controls the output of the entire plant. So his idea was when that's happening, figure out where that point of constraint is, open it up, and you increase the capacity of the plant. In other words, for a very focused, limited amount of work, you get this massive improvement in the overall business. Well, it turns out that that idea is applicable to almost any system you can name. You know, everything from a garden hose that has a kink in it. We need to go find the kink and open it up to get the water out the end to your business generally, not manufacturing, any business. So any, every business you can name has a point of constraint that limits its ability to grow revenue, make profit, serve clients, depends on the objective you have. Even nonprofits, by the way, you know, we're gonna try to feed a certain number of people. There's a point of constraint that's stopping you from doing that. It might be fundraising, it might be logistics, it might be people. You never know. Flash forward, as I was working on the CEO Project, I started interviewing CEOs and the really good CEOs were working normal numbers of hours, 50, 55, sometimes 60, but 50 to 60. And because it's not a 40-hour-a-week job, let's agree that. And they would say, well, I'd say, well, where do you focus your time? I said, well, right now I'm really focused on sales processes because they're not delivering the results I want. And so I'm spending a lot of time in sales processes. If I came back 3 months later and say, what are you working on? They go, you know, sales has kind of busted that open. Now we got an operations problem. So I'm spending a lot of time on supply chain trying to help get that opened up for capacity so we can handle all the orders we've got. And then he might— then the next one might be, where, what are you working on now? He goes, well, recruiting. I just don't have enough people to work on the orders that I now have materials for that. And so what you— they didn't say it, but what they're doing is they're going to the point of constraint and they're spending time on it. 30%, 40% of their time on the point of constraint and kind of ignoring everything else or minimize everything else. And that's unusual because less good CEOs, do what we call they peanut butter their time across the business. So think about smearing peanut butter across a piece of toast, nice and even. Everybody gets a little bit of my time. And all that does is ensures that you're never gonna get anything interesting done. The really good ones are willing to mal-distribute their time to get a great result. And so that's, it's sort of a combination of a theory that I learned a long time ago when I was interviewing these CEOs, this light bulb came off. Came on, I go, oh my gosh, they're not saying it, but they're using Goldratt's theory. And so that was the genesis of the book is let me be explicit. Hey, y'all, you're using a theory that's been around for a really long time to drive your work, and I can make this explicit so it can be recreated and other people can learn how to do it.

Well, first of all, peanut buttering their time. That is awesome. I love that.

Isn't that a good little phrase? Yeah.

I'm totally stealing that one, and I will give you credit for that one. That is awesome. That's great.

That is such a nickel every time you say it. We'll be good.

That, that is, uh, that is— there's something about the imagery of that and the relatability to that where I'm like, wow, that is absolutely, uh, a really good mental model, uh, right, to get into. Okay, looking back reflectively yourself since you've held a lot of leadership and CEO positions. Can you reflect back on the times that you had the most success and be able to point to and say, yeah, I was, without knowing it, I was doing exactly that, contrasted with the times that you struggled and you were peanut buttering your time in your own experience, not just in the experience that you've witnessed with others?

Yeah, I can. When I ran, it was an instrumentation controls business in, in Boston area. I had a really good team. We were very focused on growing the business and we were pretty clear on where the point of constraint is. And we, we spent large amounts of time on the points of constraint, whether it's product development to drive revenue or acquisition of technologies we needed that would actually open up, you know, the clients we could serve in our particular domain. And we made a lot of progress on both revenue and profitability, which is ultimately why the business was acquired by this English company because we really owned the, the look, that part of the market in a very big way. So great team, really focused, worked hard. Contrast that when I was in the, my last company I was at, I was more telecom software oriented. And it just had a lot of overhead and time in things that didn't add a lot of value to the business as, as part of the leadership team. And it inhibited my ability to improve the business, my business, the way I wanted to directly. And so the obligations of being part of a larger organization that didn't contribute to moving the needle forward on any particular element of the business was kind of on top of it. Yeah, I was really ineffective and I was very frustrated during that time frame. And I kept saying, look, let me just back out of these couple of meetings. I don't need to go to them. No, no, no, you need to be there. Oh, killing me, dude. So it was, it was not my most productive period of my career because there were so many obligations that were created by leadership. And I blame I blame the MBA programs for this, and I've got one, so I can say this, I guess. We have this concept of stakeholders and your employees and your shareholders and your supply chain and the environment and the local community and so forth. And see, we think like, oh geez, if I just satisfy all these interest groups, these constituencies, I'll be good, which causes us to do this peanut buttering of our time. And, and I was fully in that mode in that comp, like I'm just touching all the bases, but not going deep enough in any of them to make an interesting result happen. So that was a, a frustrating and, ineffective period of my career as opposed to the other one where we were just rocking and rolling, super focused. We didn't waste time on anything that didn't make sense.

For those of you that have not read Eli's book, The Goal, I did read it, but even if you haven't, the concept is what I wrote down: easy to understand, hard to implement.

Amen.

Okay. Specifically, you and I typically serve a little bit different parts of the market. I'm in the 300, really small, $300,000 to $3 million range. You're probably 8 figures and above anyway. That said, even though those are different business sizes, the challenge is still there. If you are surrounded with other people with a C-suite title, okay, these are typically very well-educated, depth of experience, and certainly very well compensated for that. Uh, you have a $25 million company, you have the ability to afford a half a million dollar, you know, executive. A business that is doing $750,000 is absolutely not, uh, uh, affording a half a million dollar, um, COO, as an example. Okay, in either scenario, you were the one leader, sole founder, small business owner doing $2 million. Okay, and you're attempting to find the theory of the constraint in the business versus a business doing $25 million and still has a C-suite. They still have to find the exact same— the theory of constraint. How do you know that the thing that you have settled on is the actual theory of constraint? Because I think it's Keith Cunningham says there's nothing worse than working on the problem that isn't, okay? Like, oh, this is what it is, let's just go about and put all of our time and resources to this thing, only to realize, oh wait a minute, that was not actually not the problem at all, it's actually this over here. We just wasted 6 months and all this, this money.

Yeah. Yeah. A perfect solution to an irrelevant problem, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

A nightmare. You know, maybe one way to think about that is the question you ask yourself, why am I working on $50 an hour problems when there are $1,000 an hour or $10,000 an hour problems that I could be solving? That's really the question. And so it's really about economic impact on the business. And, and we, some, one of the questions I'll ask is, if I had, you had a magic wand and you could change one thing about your business, it would make a massive difference in the business. What is the one thing? And some CEOs get it. They go, man, if I could just figure out a way to add twice clients at twice the rate that I add them right now, my, I can, I can handle the capacity. I've got the people. I've got the ca— I just, I can't add clients fast enough. You go, okay, what would happen if you could double the rate of client acquisition? Well, geez, I'd grow, you know, $1 million a year if that happened. All right. We may have— is there anything else that you could do that could add $1 million a year to your business? Geez, no, there's nothing that looked that big. Okay. We may have our point of constraint then. Let's, let's go figure out how to double the rate of client acquisition. What do we have to do to bust that one open? And, and it's— but what's funny is it's like, you ever see those guys that have spinning plates on sticks on a stage and they get one? Well, once you get one spinning, another one starts to wobble. Right? And I gotta go spin that one. It, and I don't mean like kind of the, the frenetic activity, but once I open up a point of constraint, what happens is the point of constraint moves. It never goes away. It just goes somewhere else. And so our job is to then figure out where did it move to and what do I need to do to bust that one open, right? So for example, I open up the sales faucet and it really starts to come. And now I got a recruiting problem on my hands. I just can't get the people I need to do the work. So that's what I mean by it might move from one, or now I figure out I don't have enough capital to fund the, the receivables for all these brand new clients I've got, right? Because growth consumes cash. So now I got a cash problem that I created by solving my growth problem. So that's my point. It, there's always a point of constraint. It's not like we're gonna work ourselves out of a job here. There's always a point of constraint. And so highest economic use, that is usually a really good place. The other thing to think about is where errors are being introduced into the business. Like, we used to be able to perform when we were small, and now we're struggling to perform whether it's on time or on quality or keeping customers happy. There's a good chance there's a point of constraint in there. I'll give you a third way to think about it. If you are constantly diving down into other people's jobs as CEO, like, ah, I'll give you an example. We had one CEO and he had a CFO, so it was a decent-sized company. And he said, well, geez, every month I've gotta go in and look at his numbers because he makes a lot of mistakes. And I'm, I've gotta help close the books every month. And you go, huh, so you're paying for a CFO and you are also doing the CFO job. Does that strike you as a problem on any level? And the reality is he had the wrong person in the job, right? So as a leader, when we're diving in and backstopping people in their job, that's probably a talent point of constraint. And maybe you need to deal with the talent problem. So those would be a couple of ways to think about highest economic use, where are problems, troubles, defects being introduced, or where am I having to dive in all the time? Those are all kind of smoke, and there might be fire as to where the point of constraint might be.

What is another way to test that the point of constraint that you've identified— and I love, I love the thought, really did, I wrote that one down and circled that one around— the point of constraint moves? I was like, okay, yeah. And, and that's an example of why business is so difficult, just business in general, because it's, it's a constantly moving target, right? I mean, we hear things like find out what works and do more of that. Well, it will work up until the point that it will stop working, and then you have to begin to change, which is why companies like Amazon— probably one of the better examples— was constantly innovating along the way to be able to find that point of constraint Fix that one, go to the next one, go to the next one, next one. But we never talk about the litany of failures that Amazon has. You know, devices is the easy one to think about, but they, they, they— but they were willing to try. They were willing to try. Right. So, but how— back to my really original question is, how do you know that the one that you're working on currently or that you, you have identified or your leadership team has identified is the right one? Do you, do you go to your advisor, your coach, somebody outside to to be able to get insight into this is the thing that I gotta be working on?

Well, you know, that question of is there anything that could be more valuable that I might be able to work on is certainly one. But I think we are limited by our own thinking and our own experience. And so using a CEO peer group like we build or an advisor who, who has a clean set of eyeballs on your problem. And we see this all the time in, in CEO advisory boards, our CEO peer groups. People come in and go, alright, here's the problem. And they, and you'll hear somebody in the group go, hey, Bradley, I think you're solving the wrong problem, man. You really should be solving this other problem first. And bang, you know, they go, oh my gosh, you're right. That's what, that's really the root cause. It's not what I'm trying to solve. It's this other thing. And if I solve that, this just goes away.

Yep.

So I think you can ask yourself questions, but I think having a fresh set of eyes You know, it's always easier to solve someone else's problems, right? But whether it's an advisor or a peer group or whoever, have them just pressure test your thinking. Like, here's what I think it is. And, and if you get a couple of people going, yeah, that sounds about right, then you, then you probably got the right one.

You know, I'll use this analogy, but it's actually kind of a true, true story in a way, is that my very first job out of college, I sold Yellow Page ads. And of course, you, you know, that, that that, uh, world. And that was the thing, that was way before Google. And so, yeah, uh, when I graduated from Auburn, that was my very first job. And, and did that for a little less than a year and a half. And it was great, it was exactly what I needed. I mean, door-to-door sales, truly door-to-door sales. Uh, got kicked out of my first two doors, you know. Uh, anyway, so that, that was a great experience. My point is, is that, uh, the person I work for, they just opened a sandwich shop Okay. In, uh, close to where we live. And, uh, they spent a lot of money on the buildout. I mean, a lot of money to sell $10 sandwiches.

Okay.

And I didn't know this at the time. So I walked in, I was like, oh my gosh, hey, what are you, you know, what are you doing? Is this your shop? You know, and all this kind of things. And they, you know, they just launched and he's going to be open in 2 more locations. And, you know, I mean, it's probably $400,000 buildout or something.

Well, as I said in the intro, Look, there's just a lot of things to be able to pick up in that interview with Jim. I think one of the biggest things is we— he and I agree so heavily on things like having high-caliber peers that you're around in a community of other people, having an advisory group of people with decades of experience and experience trying to do exactly what you do. And typically his business owners that they work with are a level a little bit above what I typically do. I typically love to and do focus on businesses in that $300,000 to $3 million, and he's more in the $5 million to even $10 million and beyond. And I think that, uh, even after the recording, we had some conversations and exchanged some notes, and I do plan to stay in touch with Jim a lot because I think that there's, there's a lot of similarities, but then there's also very distinct differences. And even though, like, I, I would refer somebody that's in the $25 million range to go work with Jim, I've never been there. I've never been in the 8 figures before, and I would never express or pretend to know that, uh, what that exactly looks like. But when you get around someone like Jim who has been there, if you're wanting to take a company from $10 million to $25 million, he, he knows that playbook, so to speak. So I really enjoyed that conversation with Jim. Definitely go and check out his book, Great CEOs Are Lazy. Big shout out to our podcast sponsors, Club Capital. If you want to be able to get a handle on your financials for your small business going into 2024, $125, book a demo call with Club.Capital. One of the best assets and biggest assets that you can have is, of course, with your team. I think if you, you know, I fundamentally believe that business is a team sport, and there's none better that can help you to be able to, in your recruiting efforts, to recruit A-players than Autopilot Recruiting. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com and let them know that you heard about them on the Above the Business podcast. I have a number of coaches that I personally work with, and if you want specific help to be able to help grow your insurance agency, David Peterson can help you to do that. And what's unique about David's program also is he also brings team members in. I personally don't, don't do work with employees, but David's program does that. You get the best of both worlds, a community for you to be in and for your team. So go to coachpconsulting.com and let David know that you heard about him on the Above the Business podcast. And last and certainly not least, I think the tech that you use in your business matters a ton. It's both for your team and for yourself. An affordable, flat monthly subscription fee to be able to help you to manage your word tracks and your bonus and your compensation plans, and obviously is going to sync with your corporate-approved CRM. TodayApp Pro. Go to todayapppro.com. TodayAppPro.com. All right, everyone, till next episode, lead well and go be great.