Outliers Inn 20: The Benjamin and Joe Show — Benjamin Taylor and Joseph Paris (2017)

Welcome to The Outliers Inn, produced by the Operational Excellence Society and sponsored by Zontech Consulting Group International and Red Quadrant, with your hosts Joseph Paris and Benjamin Taylor.

Hello, good evening, and welcome to another episode of The Outliers Inn with myself, known to the internet as AntTheBoy, Benjamin Taylor of Red Quadrant, and my colleague in crime, JP, Also known as the leader of Zonitec Consulting. How are you doing, Joe?

I'm doing fine on this hot summer night here in Germany. How are you doing there, Benjamin? You on holiday yet or no?

No, not really. Never really on holiday. I've just got back from a week in Australia, which may or may not sound like a glamorous thing depending on your experiences of economy class long-haul flights. But I managed to miss the longest day and the hottest day of the year in London while I went to the middle of the winter in Sydney, New South Wales. I've got back and guess what? It's raining.

You know, it doesn't really ever get that cold in Australia, right? I've never seen the Australian ski team, for instance, at the Winter Olympics. So

no, you're right. It was— they were finding it very, very chilly and it went down as low as About 17 degrees Celsius, which felt quite warm and lovely for me.

Yeah, I was gonna say, that's cold? That's pretty funny. I, you know, Australians are funny folks. But, you know, they got some nasty critters down there in Australia. I mean, uh, yeah, snakes. At least snakes in the States are very, very polite. But, you know, the poisonous ones, they rattle before they, they strike at you.

Right.

And, you know, we have a couple of nasty nasty spiders, but hardly any that'll kill you. It seems like down there everything sneaks up on you and can make a meal out of you.

They do have a lot of deadly animals, and the lovely thing about the UK, which I've always said, is that none of the animals are likely to kill you, at least not directly by poison, and the weather is very, very unlikely to kill you. We don't tend to have hurricanes, we don't tend to have terrible storms. You have to work quite hard and be out in the wilds to be in much risk in the UK unless you count the slow seep of the cold and damp into your bones, which gets you in the end, I suppose.

I recently gave a lecture at a university and it was to these, you know how university students are, especially undergrads, they're wide-eyed and they want to hear all about the real world and everything, sheltered snowflakes that they are. And I'm speaking to them, and they're a bunch of industrial and systems engineers. And I said, listen, people, I really feel sorry for everybody in this room because you have picked a profession that is probably the single worst profession you could have possibly chosen in your entire life. Uh-huh. Of any profession that's available, you've probably chosen the worst. And they're looking at me like, oh my God, what happened? What did I get into? I said, listen, you know, if you're a carpenter and you're done building your house for the day, you put your tools away and you go home. Yeah. If you're a garbage man, at the end of the day, you've finished your garbage, you dumped your load, you go home and that's it. If you're an actor, after you're done acting, you go off the set and you're done. But industrial and systems engineers, We never turn off. Okay? We'll go to the grocery store and wonder, you know, why do they stock the shelves that way? Wouldn't it be more efficient if they did this? And the most perilous of things that we can do is to start rearranging the kitchen and telling our spouses how the kitchen would be more efficient if they did it this way.

Yeah, yep, absolutely, absolutely. And that's a problem.

It just never turns off.

Try being a general business consultant in public services. You see work out there everywhere you go.

So I got to ask you here, Benjamin, how did you get to be in the predicament that you're in today?

Interesting question. I started very naively really in my career. I went to a very prestigious university and did a very prestigious course. that something like 60% of the UK cabinet over several hundred years did my course, Philosophy, Politics and Economics. But I was very anti-things when I was younger. I think I was anti-business and anti-suits and anti-making money and things like that. I went into a charity. I was earning £10,000 a year in the heart of a very posh part of southwest London. And I did in total over a few first jobs about 3 years of real full-out Admin, operations, administration, and so on, and coordination of events and activities and all the rest of it, which I guess did me a lot of good. But I was earning so little money in my first job that I moonlighted as an admin assistant in a Citizens Advice Bureau, the kind of thing we have in the UK. It's a national organization. And it was not only a 50% salary increase on the bugger-all that I was getting at the charity, But it was also an incredibly easy job to kind of impress and do a really good job at, possibly because I was really overqualified. And I ended up applying for and getting a job at a local authority advice centre, running Shepherd's Bush Advice Centre in West London as the coordinator of a very small team with a manager, where we had 134 different languages and people coming in for housing, employment law, welfare rights advice, and I was the bottle washer, filing clerk, security guard— quite a serious proposition at times. I had to clean and empty the toilet, which was a very serious proposition very often. I had to order the stationery. I had to do the rota. I had to do basically everything that wasn't management or actually giving advice to people. I learned a hell of a lot there, but that started me off in the wonderful world of local public services. So I carried on working for the council for 7 years, and I've never really escaped from that, that world of looking at public services and thinking how to do them better. Wow. What about you? What was your first ever experience before we go further? How did you start your career?

Well, I started my career, if you will, when I was 13 years old. I was getting a 50 cents a week allowance at the time. 50 cents American, big money. This is probably 1972-ish, no, '75. And I asked my father for a raise because, you know, what can you buy for 75 cents, right? And my father's an IBMer. He's a manager at IBM. Oh, I see. Okay. And he said, okay, write me a paper as to why you deserve the raise. So I wrote a paper about, you know, the cost of this and the cost of that and the cost of the other thing, and 50 cents doesn't do anything but 75 will. And he reviewed it with me, and at the conclusion of that review he says, This is all well written, but I'm going to deny your raise. And I said, why? And he says, because you wrote why you needed it, not why you deserved it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, so life lessons from the, from, from the, from the boss.

Yeah, yeah. So I got incredibly pissed off, and, uh, the next day I got off the bus stop a few stops early and I went to a nursery, um, you know, young plants, uh, Nanticoke Gardens was owned at the time by Donald Ferguson, and I asked him for a job. And he said, you know, what can you do? I said, whatever you ask me to do is what I can do. And he says, okay, you can start. And, you know, next thing you know, I'm getting off the bus stop, working a couple of 3 hours a day after school and on Saturdays. Right. It was closed on Sundays. And, you know, I'm making, you know, $50 a week. In the summertime. I was making $50 every 2 weeks in, in, in the non-summertime when school was on. And, uh, my father says, you know, who's going to cut the lawn? You got a job now. I said, well, my brother's going to be cutting the lawn because I got a job. You know, he could, he could have my 50 cents, you know. But, uh, you know, ever since that day, from that day to this day, I've never ever ever been without a job. You know, I've— Okay. I've, I've flipped burgers at McDonald's. I worked at a Sambo's as a midnight to early morning dishwasher. I did everything. Worked retail, etc., etc., etc. Yeah. And it wasn't, for me, mind you, I was not nearly as altruistic as you were in your younger days. I liked the thought of making some money. I never, you know, getting rich was never a goal, but what I found is that if you have money, money gives you a little bit of freedom. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, a 13 or 14-year-old, you don't have to worry about, you know, you're making $50 a week or $50 every other week, you don't have to worry about that $1 to go to the movies. You know, I was never a spendthrift. Right, yeah. I never, you know, I never spent You know, earned $50 and spent $200, you know what I mean? I've always viewed debt with a, we'll call it a Germanic eye.

Good old-fashioned values.

Yeah, old-fashioned values. It's like I am loath to have debt. So, you know, that was, that's what got me, you know, to the, we'll call it the work ethic that I have and the experiences that I've had. So how did you get from the transition of working for somebody— well, I guess this is a loaded business entrepreneur's question— but how did you go from working for somebody to working for yourself?

No really considered reasons. It was more frustration. I mean, I went— because in my early career I was always doing kind of process improvement and Yeah, improvement of the way things were done because I was a naturally frustrated administrator and I wanted to do myself out of a job. At Shepherd's Bush Advice Centre, we went from this incredibly pressurized, inefficient system of only being open a couple of hours each day and then people would flood in, they'd have 2 short appointments, we'd have to set up a private appointment for them at a different time and That often didn't work and we got into a failure cycle and all in all it was very stressful. We started opening 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, and it smoothed out the demand and it allowed much more efficient meeting of the demand and delivery and so on. And for me that was a great moment of excitement, as was an earlier moment at Rally International Youth Development Programme where we worked out a better way of getting people through training courses to go on international expeditions. So I always got turned on, if it's not too strong a word, by making improvements in organisations or in the way services were done. I was lucky enough then to get a job for the leader of the council. So it's a kind of, you know, £300 million a year organisation dealing with 180,000 households or families, something like that. But I got a good overview of the budget and the processes and the politics and the delivery and all of that. Went then to PwC, having realized that consultants actually had quite interesting jobs and weren't evil bloodsuckers. And then over time, I guess I realized that some of them were kind of evil. No, they were not quite that. But having worked for a big partner firm where I made a lot of friends, learned a hell of a lot, and left out of frustration when it kind of got taken over aggressively by a different bit of the firm, with very different ethos. I then worked for a bit of a business process outsourcer, and I kind of got in there on the basis of building a new practice, doing the kind of thing I'd been doing before, but bringing clients and bringing work to a part of the business that didn't already do that sort of thing. And when after 2 or 3 years that sort of started to collapse because of management pressures and the challenges of being in that particular business, I kind of thought, well, I can do this now. I know how to do this. I've built my own practice. We've got up to a reasonable amount of turnover. That would work, and why should I be giving anybody else a margin? My great friend at the time, Dennis Verne, who I'm still friendly with even though we've split off and separated our businesses a bit a year ago, had this idea about a network consultancy. And we were very inspired by the story of a taxi company. And this taxi company had the bright idea of not owning taxis and not distributing taxis and managing the direct delivery of them. It simply got a load of self-employed owner-operator taxi drivers, put a great big GPS computer in the boot of their cars, and then when you rang the call center, you were immediately automatically allocated to the nearest driver. And if that driver turned down the gig, as they could do, they just got knocked off the system for 30 minutes. So it was a very elegant self-organizing system. And we thought, hey, we could do that. We could be the Keen Cars of consultancies. It was actually Keen Cars in southwest London who were doing that. Not Appified, still with the contact center, but effectively Uber before Uber. So we were the Uber of consulting before Uber started. So, you know, I had the motivation. I had a business concept that kind of felt sexy. And there were some case studies of a similar strategy business in Harvard Business Review. And I kind of knew I could do it, so we threw ourselves into it. It was just, you know, 2 of us with laptops in Starbucks for a few months, but we hit the same networks, we offered the same things, we knew how to write bids, we had some relationships, and we had a network of consultants, more to the point, I suppose, who could, you know, get in and do the actual work with and for us. And we haven't looked back. It's been 8 years now, 8 really hard years, in fact, and the business has grown and then stalled and then grown massively and then slipped back, and all the challenges and all the growth opportunities of running my own business have kept me far too busy and sometimes quite exhausted. But it's kind of all been worth it. It's been a real great challenge. You've been running your business much longer, haven't you? How long have you been?

Since you were knee-high to a grasshopper. Yeah, it's been 1985 I started. You said something there about working for yourself. I love these people that, uh, uh, you know, tell me that, you know, hey, you work for yourself, you know, your, you know, your time's your own, blah blah blah. And it's like, you know what, I'm going to give every budding entrepreneur, somebody thinking about this as an alternative to being a, uh, an industrial or systems engineer, uh, this food for thought. An entrepreneur gets the leftovers. Okay?

Yeah, interesting.

You get the leftovers after whatever money you've paid, you've earned After you pay your vendors and your employees and the taxman, okay, you get the leftovers. And by the way, when there's a problem and it quickly escalates, guess whose time gets allocated, right? You know, and who gets called into it. Vacations? We learn how to do micro vacations. And we're on vacation, but we're still checking email. Funny that you couldn't do that, you know, in France even though they invented the word entrepreneur. I don't know, it was just— so, so yeah, since 1985. I started because at the time and where I was growing up in 1985, there was a gigantic recession in the area. It was a localized recession, but it was a recession. Nobody was hiring, so I started a business because nobody would hire me full-time. Uh-huh. But, you know, I could could do things part-time. And, and, um, and I started by, believe it or not, assembling PCs. I could have been a Dell. I could have been a Dell. Uh, started, started at the same time and pretty much under the same circumstances as Michael Dell. The only big difference is that I started my little clone-making company in the birthplace of IBM. The birthplace of IBM. Right. And of the 60,000 or 70,000 people that lived in this area at the time, 20,000 of them directly worked for IBM, and the rest of everybody else either was a direct beneficiary of IBM. Therefore, to buy an IBM clone was, well, it was politically incorrect, to say the least.

Right.

And I had 2 partners. I won't name their names, but one's nickname was Nonsense, a play on his real name. And we started, we had all of our, we pooled all of our money together and we started at about $2,500 in 1985, $2,500 in 1985. And after we paid for the incorporation and we paid for the letterhead and the phone, and we're the only computer company in the world that didn't have a computer, we're having this organizational dinner with our attorney at a Chinese restaurant. And the other partner, I knew he wasn't gonna be long my partner, He asks, you know, what his weekly salary is going to be. Now—

Nice.

We got about $325 left in the bank account. I asked him, how much do you want it to be? You know, this is it. We got $325. You know, when that's gone, we have nothing. You know, so, so how much do you want it to be? And, you know, it was a— the first couple years were really, really shoestring. I'll tell you, I could I'll tell you some real, real crazy stories. The craziest was that we were so close to being nonexistent. This is probably like 1989 now.

Okay.

We're moving away from PCs and getting into accounting systems. Okay. And we had this big opportunity, believe it or not, with a multibillion-dollar reinsurance company in Philadelphia. All right.

Right? Sounds good?

You know, a little tiny firm with no freaking money ever anywhere pitching an accounting system to a, you know, multi-multi-billion-dollar turnover reinsurance company. Okay. So it was so tight, it was about 2 and a half hours away, it was so tight, the money was so tight that we calculated how much gas we're going to need, how much we're going to need for tolls, how much we might need for a cheeseburger on the thruway going there, on the highway going there, Or coming back. I mean, we had it down to like the penny, all right? And we're down to—we're counting pennies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the one thing we didn't count on was parking. We had to pay for parking. Oh, we have to pay for parking. Oh my God!

You're not giving a great advert for your risk management capabilities here.

You know, just like oh my God. So while we're there.

Yeah.

You know, we gotta pitch it, we'll figure out something. So the meeting is going really, really well, okay? They're really jazzing on everything that we're doing. Um, you know, there's good rapport. I mean, there's just good, good, good vibes. And, uh, and they, they say, let's go out for lunch. And I'm expecting you to buy that. Oh my God, double fuck. You know, I don't have any money. I mean, I have nothing left on my credit cards. I'm maxed out. I mean, Nothing. There's no oil in this well. It's air. But then they volunteer to pay and it's like, oh, okay, that's okay. We'll go to lunch. Otherwise, I would have worked right through lunch because they were that dedicated. So we go to lunch and I give my partner all of my credit cards with all my PIN numbers and I said, listen, try to find $20 in one of my accounts someplace. Okay, I'm not worried about him stealing it. I mean, because there's if there's anything in there, it's nothing. You know, it's worth stealing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I said, "I don't care if there maybe there's a you know a check that hasn't cleared or whatever. Just get twenty bucks." So of course, the client is now wondering where this guy went. I said, "Oh yes, thinking fast." I say, "He's he's checking on another account." Which I guess isn't really a lie. He was checking on account, you know, my bank account, but he was checking. Anyway, so he comes back and he's— I said, you know, did everything work out? Everything okay? And he says, yep, everything's fine. So, you know, that was code for like, okay, we can get the car out of hock. And, um, Brilliant. We went home, we had enough money for a cheeseburger each, and we won the project.

Awesome. Nice. Nice.

Yeah.

It's interesting how these things happen in the early days. I mean, I went into it very smoothly. It was just a switchover of company name in a way, because I've been doing it for years. It sounds like you were much more pioneering. Have you ever— have you seen any episodes of Halt and Catch Fire, the series about PC cloning and the development of the tech industry?

No, no, I never saw it. Never saw it.

Ah, you've got to watch it. I'll be very interested to see if it's anything close to your your development experience. Did you actually explain the difference between you and Dell? I might have missed that. How come you never rose to world domination?

The big difference was, you know, he was in Austin, Texas at a university in a vibrant city that had no ties to IBM.

I see. Oh, of course.

And so there was no problem with everybody and his brother buying an IBM clone at half the price of IBM versus nobody wanting to buy it for fear of Of being found out and ostracized.

Losing their job and their social status. Yeah, that will deter your prospective buyer, won't it?

Yeah. So that was a major learning about marketing.

So what has your business developed to, Joe? What do you offer these days? What's your day job apart from when you're not podcasting with me?

Well, we went through a couple of evolutions. The first one was selling ERP systems. Accounting systems begat ERP systems. We were systems integrators and whatnot. But then I really started not liking ERP systems and I started not liking the whole ecosystem, the whole technology ecosystem.

I was going to say, you were really the bad guys who we were always in consultancy against.

Oh yeah, honest to God. But the thing is that first technology gets commoditized. I mean, when technology is new, you could command a premium. Back in the day, if you were Microsoft NT certified or Microsoft certified reseller, man, you could, you know, like people would swoon over you and pay top dollar. Now nobody even asks because nobody cares. It doesn't matter. So first the technology becomes a commodity, then the services do. The clients stopped looking at us as— we call it value-add— they looked at us as a cost. How much is it going to cost to do this? Not how much it's going to make or how much it's going to save, etc., etc., but how much is it going to cost? Mm-hmm. The tipping point— there was a Waterloo moment. I remember this like it was yesterday. We had just won a very, very nice ERP project. Very nice. I mean, it was like, this is going to be, you know, one that sets us up for the year. You know, everything else is going to be really, really on top of that.

Right.

But at the signing, the CFO says to me, do you know why you guys are getting the job? And I'm thinking, wow, because we did a great job, you know, doing the demo, the due diligence, you know, all the, all the needs analysis, blah, blah, blah. And he says, nope. He says, I know that I'm going to be fucked in this job. This is his words.

You're very sweary this evening, Jacob.

Carry on. These are his words. I'm going to be like The Economist magazine. If the guy says fuck, he writes fuck. What are you going to say? And Chuck, of course, will probably bleep things or whatever Chuck does in the background there.

Now we're going mainstream. We should talk about that later.

Carry on.

So he said he's gonna get fucked in the job.

Yeah, he says, I know I'm gonna get fucked in this job, he says, but I think you guys are gonna fuck me the least.

Nice.

Okay, and like, what a hollow victory that is, right? So I'm going, I'm driving home, and I should be like really happy, you know, and I'm not. By the way, they're still a client. This is like, uh, I don't know, 20 years ago. They're still a client. But, um, nice. Yeah, uh, but it was a hollow victory, and I got home and I started thinking, you know, it's like Geez, you know, the clients don't respect what we do, okay? They know that it's a big game and there's no way that anybody's ever going to commit to what they do on the contract, either whether you're the user, you always think you're going to be able to do more than you can, and that leads to dissatisfaction. And of course the technology people are doing their thing and it's a big open lie. And there's no respect. It's a relationship built on an open lie. And I said, you know what? Between that and the technology companies at this point not caring about us anymore, once they sell you the license, they got you. They don't care about anything other than the annuity. But you know how painful it is to switch ERP systems? People are not going to do it unless they really have to or somebody else is paying for it. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I heard on this brilliant I listen to a podcast on kind of investing and Wall Street and things like that called Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz. And he had somebody on who was either involved in Salesforce or talking about investment in Salesforce. And they were literally saying with no hint of self-consciousness that the great thing about Salesforce, and by the way, we have a crappy system on the Salesforce platform in Red Quadrant, is that it's so integrated in people's business systems and processes, everything that they do, that once they're in, they can increase the price by a 3-time multiple. Nobody's going to be able to pull out. So great. That's your business success model.

Nice. Yeah. So here I am. Now I hate everything. You know it's a bad day in business when you wake up and you hate your customers, you hate your vendors, and you hate your employees. That's a bad day.

And you probably hate yourself as well.

Yeah. Well, now I'm getting deep into self-loathing. And I said, okay, I've got to go on a dream walk here. I've got to try to figure out what's next. I've transformed the company a couple of times. What's next? And the answer was actually in what I loathed. I loathed the technology, but I liked helping companies.

Yep.

Okay? So I said, you know what? I'm looking at these people and they're struggling. Their faces are in the computer screen all the time, and they should be out there working the floor and doing their job, using their gray matter, not feeding this insatiable beast of information technology.

Yeah.

And, you know, this is like early 2000s, 2003, 2004 now. And I started looking at industrial and systems engineering. I happened to be asked to be on the board of the Systems Science and Industrial Engineering Department at Binghamton University. And that was really like, you know, eye-opening for me. And I ended up re-engineering the company to be about improving company performance. So it was all Lean and Six Sigma at the time because that's what it was.

I was going to say, it doesn't sound like— because I associate systems science and systems engineering as a very different discipline from Lean and indeed from Six Sigma, although clearly there's connections. Is that what they were teaching at the time or did you get into it?

Well, they had 2 tracks there. They had industrial engineering, which was a lot of, you know, they used to call it mechanical engineering and then they hived off a piece and they just talked about processes and eliminating waste. And, you know, the Lean and Six Sigma is really in that camp. And then they have attached to that a system sciences degree also. Yeah. Which sort of, you know, adapts or humanizes and expands on the processes and looks at systems, of course. But these were the things that I started looking at. And of the two, I'm sure you would agree because you live in this world too, that Lean and Six Sigma being about processes is easier to get your head around than systems engineering.

Yeah, sure.

Systems engineering, there's a lot of fuzzy logic in systems engineering. There's a lot of variables. We had an episode earlier on about wicked problems.

Absolutely. Yes. Well, I mean, it's more or less my progression path. I went from doing changes in organizational processes and systems for the better, which for some reason, I blame my philosophy reading, I was intuitively quite good at, or at least I had enough early successes to excite me and make me think, hey, this is a fulfilling thing to do. I kind of then went into service and process improvement, particularly focused on Lean, and I kind of tapped very lightly on Six Sigma because I got my Six Sigma black belt just to say I had done it. But then more and more I have been delving beyond, I think, systems engineering into systems thinking. And soft systems and thinking about human systems in organizations. So yeah, there's a— what's the word? It's like there's a gateway drug there, isn't there? And then there's a downward spiral.

Yeah. And I found over time that I actually enjoy systems more than processes. I'm a conceptual thinker. I don't like to get down into the nitty-gritty and the weeds. However, I absolutely know that the systems are not going to work without people that love the weeds. There's people that are very, very process-focused and they excel at that, and that's where they should be. And we rely on them as systems people to help make our systems stable and successful. Yeah, absolutely. But that's how I grew the firm to what it is today. Where, you know, it's not just about Lean and Six Sigma, but it's about the systems, it's about the organization, it's about, you know, stem-to-stern operational excellence, you know, everybody working cohesively as one.

Nice.

And so yourself, how did you get, you know, to the point you are right now over the last couple of years? You say you had some ups and downs, like, you know, everybody that owns a business has ups and downs, right?

Yeah.

But, you know, you've recently evolved to a point where you seem to have gelled your message.

Yeah, something has clicked. It's taken about 7 or 8 years to do it. I mean, I guess everybody who runs a business knows that. I have a little shtick that I call reaching escape velocity, and it's kind of like getting orbital versus getting out of orbit. A lot of people can launch a business, right? A lot of people have that capability, and a lot of them fail, just crash and burn immediately. But if you've got a basic combination of, I guess, basic competence, being the kind of person who people can actually do business with and generally trust, and being willing to put in the hard work, including the kind of crappy admin and get the knockbacks. then, you know, actually it's not that hard to be in business. But what that means is, you know, whatever the prevailing market is, you're gonna get a 7 to 10% return on capital. And it's really, really hard to break out of that because if there were bigger opportunities for return on investment and for profit, then they— it's a market, right? Then they'd be filled and people would take those on and then competition would increase and then the margins would go down. So, you know, there's something about business which means that you get to orbit, and if you're good enough and you work hard enough, you can stay in orbit. But to really blast off, and I'm not saying I'm really there yet, but to actually get to something that feels more like what people envisage a business to be, you've got to disassemble your rocket mid-flight and repower it and reboost it to break out of the atmosphere. In consultancy, the natural form of that is Is it ever— are you ever in a position where you're making more money from a business that's an ethical business, that's not stacked with lots and lots of margin and so on, than you would being out there as a sole trader, as a contractor doing the day-to-day work? Or another way of looking at it is, you know, I've known big consultancies, really big partner consultancies, where they've realized possibly with a sigh that the biggest— the best way to maximize their income and profit is to get the partners out on as many chargeable days as possible. And that's really difficult because as you get into a business of this nature, there's an enormous amount of learning in moving from the complexity of being nose to the floor delivering projects, which God knows is hard enough, dealing with the complexities of people and scope and budget and understanding a new business every time you go in and orienting yourself to a new context, to moving up a step to project managing and actually not being in the detail but getting other people to do the work and how can you trust them and how can you QA them and are you really understanding what you are doing and are you exposed now because you are going to the final review meeting and you didn't do all the work. And then there are a couple more steps up, managing a bunch of project managers who do the work and then what the hell role do you have. Right, right, right. And I have been trying and I have been sure as hell learning a lot about how not to do it and therefore learning something To step up that kind of value chain while still being really conscious of not wanting to be a freeloader partner who just kind of swans in for the pitch and then swans back in for the final delivery meeting and doesn't really add any value. It's a hard thing to do.

That's interesting that you say, because sometimes the people that are making the pitch and therefore the— I'll call it the status meeting— to come in and leave and then just go and pick up the trophy at the end of the gig is Is not very value-add. However, you know, something— and getting— this is almost systems versus processes. Some of these people, you know, they snap a vision of the future together and they point everybody to that, and then their value-add is really done. You know, they've set the direction, their value-add is really done. I mean, I don't know if you sail, but you set the sails, and if the wind doesn't change, there's no need to do anything except kick back and have a cigar, right?

Interesting, interesting. Yeah.

So, is there value, the ability, and is it of considerable value, the ability to snap that vision into focus quickly?

Yeah, I think there are a few people like that. I probably see business more as a metaphor of struggle and mess and trying to work things out, which might be a bit of a giveaway about some of my strengths and weaknesses. I don't think there are many people like that. And I think there are a load of people, even if they do have that ability to add value in that way, who are doing it from a deep veil of imposter syndrome and not really feeling that— I mean, one of my big jobs in Red Quadrant, and I've come to acknowledge this over the years with some regret, is to be the person who everybody picks up the phone and has a moan to. And it took me about 2 years to realize that I didn't necessarily need to help, but that actually listening to people telling me how impossible it all was and how terrible the client was and how the budget wasn't enough and how people were letting them down and whatever else, actually just listening is part of adding the value, is part of helping, if you see what I mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, I think— but what's interesting is that there's a certain maturity, and maybe it is just hanging around in the industry for 17 or 20 years as I've done, maybe it's running the business for 8 years, and you start to realize where you can add value, where you can hang back. You start to build a load of people you can trust to kind of do the work, and you start to realize that you're having more conversations with chief execs, fewer opportunities to do, you know, process mapping on the ground, but you're probably a bit bored of that. And things start to kind of make sense. I guess partly though, it's been the opportunity of working with this thing called the Commissioning Academy. And taking on the delivery of that through a joint venture, a social enterprise called the Public Service Transformation Academy. That's allowed me a bit more time, sometimes paid, often unpaid, to kind of shape my thinking and come up with something that seems to be very important to me, which is— and I'm not a neat and complete kind of systems thinker, which I think some engineers are. I always think it's more about having a toolkit, a grab bag of different methods and different ways of understanding. But for me, my thought leadership, such as it is, is about ways of seeing and ways of thinking about services, public services, organisations. And I've pulled that together now in a way which is good enough for me to be able to communicate. I was just at the Public Sector Show today and I had a bunch of people who seemed to be listening and seemed to find it valuable. Somebody took a photo of my slide, which is always a moment of, oh, that's great. So yeah, I've kind of got some shit together that meets my needs, that might meet other people's needs. That's not what I've put in the book. I'd love to do a book about my kind of philosophy, as you've kind of put your Gospel According to JP out there. But you kind of— I've kind of got to a point now where I don't need to feel that I've got lots of gaps in my learning. I know I've got lots of gaps in my learning. But I know I'm never going to fill them all. I know that I've got enough that helps to deliver projects, that helps people to think, and that kind of makes the business make more sense in my mind in a

way. Yeah, yeah. With my organization, where I have evolved it to is our primary deliverable now is helping companies build their own programs. Where we used to go in and do improvement projects, oh, you want to optimize the process, you know, hire us and we'll do that for you or with you. Yeah, yeah. It was 50/50, you know, sometimes we would do it for them and sometimes we would do it with them. But, you know, I tried to get a bit out of that aspect of the market and help companies. You know, we see companies having continuous improvement programs and OpEx programs, and, you know, there's a rumor that a lot of them fail. And, you know, It's because they don't do the upfront work. Nobody sits down and says, what does success look like? What's it going to really take? If we win, how do we know? What are the waypoints? They don't sit down and do that work. They immediately start building belts, getting a bunch of people certified. Oh sure, that's what they all do. It's like, now I've built inventory. You say don't build inventory. You've built inventory of belts. You've got these people and you don't have any use for them. And by the way, every minute they're sitting there, they're forgetting everything you invested in them. And it just gets to a point where their organizations fail because they've failed to plan. What is it? Fail to plan, plan to fail? I think that's the saying.

Yeah, that's about right.

So what we do now is we walk them right from ground one. You know, or, or ground zero. It's like, what do you want to be when you grow up? How are you going to get there? What do you got around you? What are you going to need? Uh, you want to do it in 6 months? It's going to take 3 years. You know, set those kind of expectations. People don't like to hear that often, but guess what? Interesting. You know, I'm not— yeah, I'm not there to make people feel good. You know, I'm there to, to set a realistic expectation, deliver on that expectation.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah. If they want to feel good, buy a dog. I got a new dog. It's a Wheaten Terrier. The thing is just a cuddle bunny. He just wants to cuddle all the time. Guess what? If you want love, get a dog.

Well, isn't that interesting? I mean, we are 2 hoary old journeymen now. When I was a young consultant, I believed in process consulting, and I'll come back to it in a minute. I really thought that context-specific experience was just leading you down the expert path and just telling people a prescription from a manual, and that what was really needed was just neutral process analysis, and that was the level I was at at the time, and that kind of work just by somebody who knew processes really well but didn't know anything about the industry or the service. Or all those kind of things. And I have come to realize that not only does real contextual knowledge really make a difference, you know, we work in children's services, in social care. You want people who've not been brain damaged by the pain and the challenges of working there, but who know it, you know. But at the same time, I think I'm adding value because I've been there and done that, not just by telling people, this is the path that you're on and this is how it's going to work.

Right.

But by still being able to— which is valuable in a sense, and I think some of what you're describing— but still being able to try and think innovatively and encourage them to rethink what they're doing and see if there's a better way to do it. Doesn't always work, but that's the pleasure for me if I can get people actually to see something differently and innovate, whether it's at a process level or a whole business, I don't care. That's the satisfaction I get.

Well, you know, it gets to— with age comes a certain amount of freedom, right? I'm not ancient, but I find that— I

look forward to your elevated degree of freedom, JP. In good time, in good time, no rush.

But that freedom, it's like to speak your mind. I had this vendor, Yeah. They, they used to call me CJ. I could never figure out why they called me CJ. My brother's Christopher John. I could figure out, you know, Christopher John Paris. I could figure out why they, they would call him CJ, but me, I couldn't figure it out. And until one confided in me, it stands for Crazy Joe.

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

And, and, you know, when people think you're, you're crazy, there's a little bit of freedom that comes along with that. Um, yeah. You know, and if you say something really stupid, they'd say, oh, I, I'm sorry, I misspoke. Oh, he was just being crazy. Um, so, so who knows? Who knows? So, you know, how did you and I get to meet? Because obviously we met before this podcast.

You're asking me, JP? Oh, is that a device for the benefit of our multitudinous audience?

No, I, I, you know, I, I, I'm trying to get to, um, to the exact point. I know that you had the Lean group, and I think Steve Bonaccorsi had the Six Sigma group.

I had Lean Six Sigma Professionals, I think.

Okay.

And he had Lean Six Sigma. Yeah. I just happened to get in at the right time when LinkedIn was setting up groups, and I set up a group, you set up a group, Steve set up a group, et cetera, et cetera. I've still got some of them, but that one I agreed to merge into Steve's at at a certain point to give more power to our elbow, and he's definitely run with it. And he's talking to me about how I can build the same kind of presence from his experience and his learning by way of recompense for my share. So I guess we noticed each other that way, is that right?

Yeah, I think that's where I became aware of you, because you guys were co-owners at the time and you were working a lot together. And then you and I started speaking. I believe I had a conference in London that I organized at the EIT, the English Engineering Institute of Technology or something like that.

That's right. Lovely place, lovely place. Right looking at the Thames, as I recall.

Yeah, absolutely. And it was a lovely place, and they really organized a pretty nice venue and luncheon and everything else for us. But you're one of the speakers. I asked you to speak there. And I remember a lot of your talk. I remember that you were kind of loose with the language a little bit. And I said, wow, this guy really could drive a message to an audience in a way that they want to listen. Oh, thank you. Very nice. So it was like, wow, I got to stay in this guy's orbit because he's pretty cool. And I think that's how I came to meet you. Do you have a—

Yeah, that's right. That's the first time we met.

Because I didn't know if you had an alternative reality, or as they say in the States, alternative news, or alternative facts. No,

but I mean, it was very intriguing because I turned up to that event and you had your gang of Zonotek people, of Americans with you. You had a pretty drastic haircut in those days, if I remember rightly.

That's right, high and tight.

Yeah, it was kind of like a helmet shape, I think.

Well, yeah, more marine, you know. Where I grew up, there was a lot of old-style barbers, you know what I mean? There was straight razors, and, uh, and they all were ex— you know, ex— it seemed like they're all ex-Marines, some ex-Navy, and they really just knew how to do a good high and tight. And that had to leave once I moved to Germany. This is 8 years ago.

Okay.

Because the German idea of a high and tight is skinhead, okay? Like, with, with my, with, with my, uh, high and tight, you know, it had a flat top, you know what I mean? You could land a helicopter on it. And, you know, it had some contours. Their idea is to take the old number 1 and just go, you know, map of the earth. They just shave you down like you're a sheep in springtime.

Or a new entry to prison.

Yeah, either or. Fortunately, that jailhouse tattoo is almost completely gone. But I

didn't realize we had the German social mores to thank for the new hairier version of JP.

So yeah, I just gave up. That was it. I was like, you know what, if you can't beat them, join them. It took a while to find somebody that knew how to cut hair. And that, you know, there's 2 types of German hairstyles. I don't know if you ever noticed this, but like, there's most German in the north anyway It's nice, tight, you know what I mean? It's well kept, you know, Dutch, you know, Amer— uh, German. You get down to the south, you know, in Bavaria, and especially if you get into like Austria— I know Austria is not Germany, but it's, you know, they're closely related— Austrian hair, dude, those guys all look crazy. They all look like Einstein, you know what I mean? Like, the hair is, is shocked, you know? It's, it's, it's not, it's not combable. It's just crazy. Um, So it took me a while to find somebody to cut hair that didn't do it like that. Okay.

Perennial challenge for the busy businessman, finding the haircut. How did we get into this territory? I just looked you up on— I just got you on LinkedIn, and by a strange coincidence, it's almost precisely 9 years since we connected on June 25th, 2008.

9 years.

9 years.

I thought it was longer than that. I thought it was longer than that because I've been here in Germany almost, uh, 10 years. So I thought we would have connected longer than— no, sorry, 8 years. I thought we would have connected sooner than that. But hey, LinkedIn doesn't lie, you know. Maybe, maybe I was aware of you and then you said something witty and I said, hey, I have to connect with this guy because he sounds witty.

That sounds good. That must be— I'm well known for my wits.

So, so, uh, yeah, so How do people get— if somebody wanted to hire you for your infinite portfolio of professionalism and deliverables, how would they do that? How would they get in touch with you?

The easiest way is to look me up at redquadrant.com. That's all one word with no space. R-E-D-Q-U-A-D-R-A-N-T.com. So that's the business that I run. It's a network consultancy, mostly in public services, but I do leadership training and stuff internationally and cross-sector as well. We run an interim business, which is a spin-off business called Quadrant Resourcing, which puts people to deliver change into mostly public services. And then if you want to type a really long URL, you can go to publicservicetransformation.org. which is the not-for-profit partnership that I talked about building capability. But everywhere on social media— Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, probably anything else that I could find— I am Antlerboy for historic reasons, not to do with any kind of public school hunting accident, as I have to constantly say, but because I'm now Benjamin Taylor. I prefer Benjamin. I used to be Ben Taylor. When you're called either of those names, there's a lot of you about, and so you can't get your So Antlerboy is an anagram and a convenient but mildly amusing alternative. What about you, JP? How do people find you and engage with you for humour and operational excellence?

You know, it's funny, I was having a conversation today and it was a follow-up from a conference and the woman says, geez, I wish you did workshops on this. Stuff. And I, I said, by the way, I do do workshops on this stuff. And she's like, oh really? I thought you just lectured and, and, uh, delivered, uh, um, talks at conferences. It's like, no, no, I don't, I don't just do that. So even delivery work at times, it's like, you know, so I, I, I'm really actually, you know, concerned a little bit about, you know, maybe I'm doing too much of that, or maybe, maybe I'm uh, um, over soft selling, you know what I mean? You know, it's like, I, I— Yeah. When I lecture, I don't talk about, you know, my business or how I could, you know, sell to you or whatever. I talk about it, you know what I mean? Whatever it is, that's what I'm talking about and how it might help you. Um, not that I might be involved in selling it or, or implementing it. It, you know, it's— it is what it is. So, um, uh, yeah, I, I actually own, believe it or not, a consultancy. It's called Xonatech Consulting Group International, LLC. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, Xonatech. The URL is www.xonatech.com. It's been there forever. You know, people ever want to get in touch with me, I've had the same email address for like since email existed. It's parisjf, P-A-R-I-S, Paris like the city in France, J as in Joe, F as in Frank, @xonatech.com. Of course, I'm on LinkedIn, and you can see my musings on LinkedIn, you know, under my posts and what have you.

You're a pretentious writer, I have to say.

You know, and, you know, my book has really taken off. I'm very, very pleased with the way it's been received in the marketplace, State of Readiness. I saw another review on Amazon today, which was, geez, you know, People are going to think I have too many relatives. I mean, you know, these people are like, you know, my mom should be writing some of these. You know, she wouldn't even write some of the reviews that I've been reading. But, you know, I'm very thankful for that.

Tell me about it. Nice. Very nice. And is that driving loads of sales or is it driving opportunities to speak? What response are you getting? All these gratifying responses.

It's actually hitting right across Right across all cylinders. I've got to tell you, it's actually been gaining more traction faster than I thought it would. Uh-huh. Part of that has to do with me being a little critical of my own work. A little? I'm pretty hypercritical of my own work. But people are really digging the message in the book. And in the strongest terms possible. So, you know, it's precipitating out a lot of initial conversations. It's only been out since May, so it's like, you know, even eggs take 2 minutes, right? But it's gaining traction, it's opening doors, we're having conversations, you know. The workshops that are based on the book are going— those conversations are going very, very well. I've actually created a couple of different versions of the workshop depending on how much time you have. Yes. One big oil and gas company has actually picked it up as a series of webinars for all of their people worldwide. So where a workshop would usually take like 1 day or 2 days, they're splitting it up into, you know, 12 different parts, each one an hour and a half or so, broadcast and recorded to their people. And so, yeah.

Very good.

Yeah, and I have a big leadership project in a couple of weeks, a training session with Lockheed Martin. And each one of the 180 students are going to get a copy of the book. So, you know, yeah, it's—

All good.

Yeah.

All good. I'm pretty pleased. Excellent. So what's next for you, JP, and what's next for the Outliers Inn?

Oh geez, you know, we got a couple of good things going with the outliers in, and one of them, I guess I'm going to open up the kimono here, let's do that for the audience, what do you say? It's a disturbing

metaphor,

but let's do it. An organization called iHeartMedia, which is a media conglomerate based in the States, infinite number of radio and internet channels, is picking up The Outliers Inn for general distribution in their media empire. They're going to pick up another one of mine that I'm going to be starting off, based on the book, State of Readiness. It'll be another podcast, different one.

Exciting stuff.

Yeah, it'll have a more serious, you know, call it theme, if Interesting. Than the outliers in. But yeah, that's going to be good stuff for us. And I could tell that you're getting prepared because you actually have a really darn good microphone. You sound like a rock star tonight, I tell you.

I've got a lot of expensive microphones, JP, as you well know.

He has.

And a lot of expensive headphones. And I'm not allowed to buy anything more. My wife mustn't know about this new one. But yeah, readers, listeners, I finally caved in and got the one that JP and Chuck, who's our technical assistant, have been advising me to buy for some time. And guess what? Much to my chagrin, it really bloody works. So the Rode NT-USB microphone gets the Outliers in thumbs up. Thumbs up. Rode, if you want to, you know, give us some sponsorship or some money that I can pay for the other microphones with that I've wasted, I'd really appreciate it.

And you know, the greatest part about this microphone is that you're able to plug it in and guess what? It worked. It just worked.

I know, I know. Nice story indeed, isn't it? So all the echoes and the feedback loops and the bleed that you've heard on previous podcasts, just think of those now as Collector's items because it's not going to be happening anymore.

That's it. That's it. Came to the 21st century kicking and screaming, but you're here. Well, I guess I guess we should bring it on home. What do you think?

I think so. Yeah, I think you know what we didn't explain at the start, did we? We thought it was about time we talked about ourselves and interviewed each other since we have been doing this. Have we been doing this for nearly two years?

Nearly two years. I think this is like episode number nineteen or twenty. It's, uh, yeah, and, and we— Mind-blowing. Yeah, and, and we all owe it to, uh, to Car Talk. Um, they inspired us, uh, to, to do this, the Click and Clack brothers. Uh, and, um, yeah, uh, it's been a lot of fun, you know, for the 2 years, almost 2 years that we've been doing this. We've had some very, very interesting people on, on the show. Yeah, I don't think any of the conversations ever, ever really been boring. Some of them haven't been as outlier-y, if that's a word. It is now, I just made it up, right? Outlier-y as they should have been or could have been. But, you know, it's good smart people with good smart conversations. I've had a good run. I had a good time at it. Yep.

Me too. Me too. Well, here's to many more. We've got some exciting people lined up for the next couple of months. So we keep getting these out regularly on schedule. And I tell you what, JP, it's maybe a good idea to make a request. We would love to be inundated by one or more pieces of feedback from our audience. So if anybody has comments about the Outliers Inn, requests, suggestions for speakers, wants to put themselves forward as a speaker—

You guys suck!

You guys suck! We would absolutely love to hear. We would love to hear. Any kind of feedback, even if it's that. Nice.

Well, I guess everybody here has— wow, we got 40 seconds. Everybody here has squandered another hour listening to us, our drivel on the, on the outliers. And I want to thank everybody. I want to thank Benjamin Taylor, Antler Boy, for his undying support and investment in making This a success. In my choice, primarily. Yeah, mostly, mostly.

I thank you too, JP, JF Paris on all social media and of Zonatec Consulting. And really only remains for us both to say, don't drive like my brother.

And don't drive like my brother.

Thank you for listening to this edition of The Outliers Inn, produced by the Operational Excellence Society and sponsored by Zonatech Consulting Group International and Red Quadrant, with your hosts Joseph Paris and Benjamin Taylor.