Stop Starting. Start Finishing.

Foreign. Good morning and welcome to CFO Coffee Talk, brought to you by the Florida CFO Group. Today's episode is called Stop Starting, Start Finishing, because that happens to be the title of a book just launched on Amazon, just released on Amazon, written by our guest, Andrea Jones. Congrats on the book, Andrea.

Thank you, Phil. And thanks for having me.

Our pleasure. And I'm going to start off with a long intro like question that has a one word answer. I'm going to guess you know what the answer is. So what do you get when a brilliant engineer with two MIT degrees, process engineering and project management experience at blue chip companies like intel and Genentech and Honeywell, that individual focuses their brain power on creating a framework and a model that helps businesses get things done. Help businesses, business teams get important work to the finish line. What do you get? One word.

Execute Agility.

Good, I love that word. And by the way, that's a trademark word, so no one can steal it from Andrea. And if we have time, at the end of the show, we're gonna do a duet and sing the Execute Agility song, aren't we?

Oh goodness, here we go.

All right, well, but before we get into what executagility is easy for me to say, and before we start talking about your book, Stop Starting and Start finishing, I want to give our audience a chance to get to know you a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Yeah, well, thanks for the opportunity. So you already mentioned, I started my career at Intel. I was a process engineer in the factory. It was a great place to grow up. I learned a ton about growth projects. Because what you did as a process engineer was make the production of computer chips better, faster, stronger. The only downside was I carried a pager and the factories are open 24 7, which meant I was getting woken up in the middle of the night frequently. I thought to myself, if I'm going to get woken up in the middle of the night, it's going to be for a baby and not for a pager. Which is when I got engaged. I decided to go to business school and began my own business right after that.

Very good, Andrea. I thought one of the most powerful quotes in your book was ambiguity is the enemy of execution. Talk about where in small and mid sized businesses this ambiguity most creep in and why do leaders underestimate its impact?

Yeah, thanks for asking. I had a VP tell me once that CEOs love ambiguity because it allows them to keep their options open. And I thought about this one a little bit more because Phil, I know that you are a stand up comedian and you like funny stories. So tell me if this one lands. I remember when I was first married, I would walk into the kitchen and I tell my husband, oh, this kitchen is a mess. And he would say things like, yes, yes it is. That is not what I wanted him to respond with. What I of course wanted him to do is jump up and immediately start cleaning the place up. After a few years of going back and forth on this, he finally told me, if you want me to clean the kitchen, please tell me, honey, clean up the kitchen. Don't be ambiguous. I hope this lands. With many leaders it is very easy to be ambiguous. It is very hard to be specific. We are not raised that way. We like to be ambiguous. Maybe it keeps our options open, but it doesn't get anything done. We don't make a specific plan or we don't ask for exactly what we want. We're much less likely to get it.

Well, yeah, that lands with me and I'm glad it didn't turn out to be a husband bashing story because I get plenty of those.

I'm hopeful that people will recognize the other thing I feel like with leaders, if the CEO can imagine, imagine that you have a potential customer who's willing to spend $5 million on whatever it is that you sell. Your product, your service. And you know that this customer has the budget. You're talking to the CEO, the final decision maker, and that person says to you who's trying to sell to them, I definitely want to spend this money with you, but I want to keep my options open about what it is you deliver. Let's just wait. If you think about it from that perspective, I'm sure every leader would want to get the signature on the dotted line. They're going to get real specific and push for that close. So if you think about your employees who probably have some time and we'll talk, I know about this later in their workday, you're effectively paying them 25% of their paycheck to not do what you want them to do. It's the equivalent of leaving that money on the table. You might as well be specific and tell them what you want and get the value that you're already paying for.

Very good, Andrea. I actually read both of your books. The first one was called the Execute Agility Guidebook. And both books really drive home the four pillars of execute agility. Alignment, availability, time and confidence. Which pillar is usually the weakest in growing businesses?

What breaks first well, you missed the fourth pillar actually, which is structure. Structure, alignment, competence, available time and structure. And structure by far is the weakest. So I have done research on this. I speak to Vistage groups and between September of 2024 and June of 25 conducted this research on 184 different companies. The average structure score is 46 out of 100. That was the lowest of all the four pillars. I believe it's because when you start hiring in a business, you typically hire functionally. Usually it's either another operations, you know, someone to deliver the cost of goods, or perhaps more salespeople, maybe accountants or finance people. Very important. Nobody, nobody that is a CEO really wants to do that. Sorry, but you don't hire overhead people that don't help you make money today. Really, that's often not the case. Which means you aren't hiring for the discipline of project management. People have the aptitude, I believe, if they're coached and trained in a specific framework that is flexible. But it's not something that most people randomly catalyze and do on their own. So I think it makes sense that structure is the weakest.

Okay, structure it is. So done. You have a talk a lot about getting things done in your book. And you have another great quote about how we should not focus on being liked, but be likable, relatable and decisive. Why is people pleasing a silent execution killer?

Yes, I had one of the takeaways from the Vistage meeting I spoke at this week. Be, be likable, not liked. We all want people to like us. And back to polite conversation. We might say something like, oh, let's go out for dinner sometime. And to which someone will be like, of course, that sounds like a great idea. It's polite conversation. It's ingrained in us. However, that might sound nice, but it's not specific enough. People need to get right down to the point. I had a customer one time. It was a big pharmaceutical plant. We were delivering a debottlenecking project is what it was called. And every day we'd have a huddle with the entire team. It was about 40 people and they were trying to get one specific system validated. Every day they'd come in and every day it would push by a day. Finally, I went to the number of validation tests and the number of signatures that needed to happen in order to get the whole thing done. There were more than 55. So as I was walking out of the meeting one day, and I was representing quality by the way, at the time, not I Want to be clear, I wasn't in the project management portion for this one. I went to the executive program manager, and I told him, hey, you know, we have 55 signatures. I don't believe we're getting this completed. I don't see even one of them getting done every day. And he said, there's no way we have 55. And I said, actually, you're probably right. We have more, because I forgot about the full system validation package at the very end. You know, he didn't want to be mean and be like, we got to get these five signatures today. We got to get these other five tomorrow. You know, he wanted to be nice, let people figure it out. Nice doesn't cut it. The kind truth cuts it. It's kinder to be specific and tell people your expectation and hold them accountable and make sure that it's reasonable for the company than to be too nice and never get things done.

Very good, Andrew. I love how your book talks about the importance of human psychology and how execution fails when systems ignore it. Talk about that.

Yeah. There's the concept of prefrontal cortex overload. This really ties in with the ambiguity theme. Phil. When people have so much going on in their prefrontal cortex, they become paralyzed and can't make decisions. If you think about your team, they often have their day job that's already occupying a good portion of their prefrontal cortex. Psychologically, they want to know specifically what to do. Most people really want to help their company. I do think there's a difference between leaders who are imaginative and out there and really see potential and want to do new things and people who want to get things done. Sometimes you think that everybody's like you and they just want to have their ideas and do those things. Back to being too nice, you're going to let them do it, but they're not the same as you. CEOs are different. And when you recognize that, you know that you can count on these people. It's not hurting their feelings to give them specificity to put their prefrontal cortexes at ease. And I know you wanted to ask a little bit about how this lands with teams. I feel like teams tell me all the time. They want to know what their leaders expect so they can meet their expectations. That is what they really want.

Because ambiguity is the enemy of execution, right?

Absolutely.

All right. Execute. Agility. I love that word. Capitalize is not on the time we wish we had, but the time we actually have. How should owners rethink capacity when everything feels urgent?

Yeah, thanks for asking. I sat down with the team, helping them with their prioritization the other day. They had 55 initiatives for this quarter, Phil, this quarter that were in 55. And I asked them how many people they had available to handle all of those things. And they said, well, it's really maybe 10, but really it's just the two of us. And I said, interesting, and do you have your full time hours to do this growth project work? And they said, well, we're both billable. We go and see customers ourselves about 75% of our time. So I said, okay, that means you have, and I'm sure they're working overtime, 10 to 15 extra hours a week comfortably. A rule of thumb is it takes about five hours per project per week when you really focus on it, to give it the attention it deserves to make measurable progress and get it done. So if these people have 10 to 15 hours, they can handle two, possibly three things on top of their day job at the same time. And what we ended up doing is we took their 55, we had three high level categories of things they were trying to do, which was to be more scalable and efficient, to standardize all their processes and to land new customers. Those are the things they wanted to do. We scored each of their 55 against those things so that the things that hit the highest against all three of those higher level objectives were the top priorities. And then I said, consider two or three at the most. And one of the guys told me, he said, well, maybe we should only do one at a time. It was music to my ears, Phil, I tell you what. And I said, this is terrific. If you can do one at a time, the chances are you'll get that done faster than the end of the quarter and you can then move on to the next one. And you'll probably get that done too, then and now, because you have a prioritized list and you've been very clear about what done means to you. Very clear. There's no ambiguity there. You can get that one first thing done, two, three weeks, move on to the next one, move on to the next one. That's what we mean about stop starting new things, don't start them all at the same time. One at a time, get it finished. One at a time, get it finished.

You know, very good. It's all about.

Getting it done is my favorite word in the English language.

Yeah, well, that's what entrepreneurs do, they get things done. And by the way, it's a CFO's favorite word. Too. Because we all know that. That no matter how brilliant our strategic plans, financial plans are, they're not worth the screens they're displayed on unless stuff gets done. Right.

Right. You can't invoice the customer until it's done.

Yep. Done is better than perfect. So let's talk about your other pursuits. Having taken a road trip here to Sarasota, I got to know a little bit more about how rich and full your life is beyond the AJC company and beyond your book writing. We have time for you to tell us about one project that you're currently pursuing and why it matters right now.

Well, thanks for asking. I have four children. I have three daughters and one son. And the only one that is still playing basketball is my eighth grade son. Now I played basketball through high school. Our team won state in the state of Oregon my senior year. And fun fact, the wife of the Orlando Magic and I were on the same high school basketball team.

Okay.

So I love the sport of basketball. I use it in business analogies all the time. But the thing I'm doing right now is my son's eighth grade year. They do their season in the spring where he's at school. And we are doing twice a week training sessions with the team now. And I'm coaching them because I want them to have a great season feeling. There's so many parallels to life in having an experience of being on a great team. And it doesn't necessarily have to be the state championship winning team. What it feels like to be on a team where everyone trusts each other, they know each other's capabilities, they enjoy working hard together, they accomplish something meaningful. It's not a play date. It's real training and real work. I'm spending extra time right now doing that because this is it. If he doesn't play in high school, this is the last chance I get to coach basketball. Or at least for one of my own kids. Cause my daughter sadly don't love basketball like I do.

No, it's a great preparation for business because business is a team sport. So we had left so much ground uncovered. In your book, you talk about. A foundation of six things for driving performance. Talk about the done framework, things that we didn't scratch the surface on here. So I will put the Amazon link to your book in the show notes so our listeners can buy a copy. Great. Yep.

Thank you.

And wouldn't you know what? We ran out of time and won't be able to sing our executility song together at the end.

Maybe you can put a link to the YouTube video and tell people what to say and they can do it themselves.

All right, a story for another show. Anyway, it's our tradition on our CFO Coffee Talks to always end giving our guests the honor of leaving us with a one sentence key takeaway. What's yours?

Ambiguity is the enemy of execution.

Amen. Andrea, thanks for being a delightful guest and hope our audience comes back for another episode of CFO Coffee Talk.

Thanks, Bill. Appreciate it.