077: Bahaa Moukadam - Balancing That Crazy Life of Yours

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing? But you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G Again, that's doxatallent.com Bill G One more time. Doxatallent.com Bill G Check it out today. All right, you're probably out of balance. If your results and relationships are not in balance, it's probably costing you at least $50,000 a month. If you're like many of our typical clients and if you're like one of our big clients, it might be costing you a lot more. Today's show is going to talk to you about how to get your relationships and your results in balance so you have healthy company with great results. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and growth coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is an awesome experienced fellow coach. You know, we have on the show authors, thought leaders, CEOs and other coaches sharing their experiences and their lessons from the front line of Scaling Up. I'm really excited to have on the show today Baha Muk Adam, who is one of our coaches from Southern California and a lovely human being and all around groovy guy. His message today about getting these things in balance will have a real and immediate impact on you and your business. Welcome to the show Baja.

Hey, thanks Bill. How are you? Good to see you.

Glad to see you again. Tell us a little bit before we get into the heart of this. Give us a little background. Your story. I know that you are a former executive tech executive. You grew and sold the business. You've had a lot of different experience when you were CEO. Used a variety of our tools before embracing the full framework. Give us a little bit of your history and background. I think it'll be relevant.

Yeah. So Bill, let's start with my corporate career. I spent over 25 years in the high tech industry and variety of different roles including product development, marketing. We've done mergers and acquisition. I've done business in 25 countries all over the world and my last corporate job I was Running a company in Silicon Valley as CEO, communication test equipment company where we had factories and factory in Taiwan. We had R and D center in the Bay Area, Atlanta and Beijing. Ended up selling this company and then moved back to Southern Cal. Took some time off and then thought about what do I want to do with the rest of page two of my life? And thought, hey, it'll be really cool. Was my background experience to work and support other CEO to help figuring out how to grow, avoid the mistake I've made, and learn from my experience while also enjoying the journey.

You know, it's a funny thing about business coaching in particular. Everybody wants to be coached by like Jack Welch or Steve Jobs or whatever. Right. So. And whether they're retired or passed on, that's not necessarily who to get coached by. You know, Michael Jordan. Right. Didn't get coached by another Michael Jordan. Primarily the coach's role is different. And sometimes some of the best things that I have to offer a client is what I did poor, not my successes, because my successes and the things I did might not apply as universally as my failures and shortcomings did. So I'm pretty open and liberal with sharing the things I screwed up, where I knew and I knew Vern for a long time and the rock habits for a long time. And I imperfectly and incompletely applied the framework. Each of the things that I applied, I can be like, this was really great. And then I didn't apply this one. And here's where it cost me millions of dollars.

Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. The role of a coach, absolutely. Like you said, is to really ask the deep question. You know, my assumption when I go in is really the domain expertise is with the management team was the company I'm working with. They know a lot of the answers. Sometimes they don't know the right questions.

Right.

It's really guiding them through a methodology and a framework and in some cases, expertise that they may need.

Yeah, a little bit of feedback. Right. But I think across most of the several hundred coaches around the world, we don't weigh in with our particular industry. I mean, sometimes I was working with tech execs recently who were new to the industry, had come from a finance background, and I was able to talk to them about the relationship of different technologies and stuff because I have deep expertise in tech and software, but that wasn't there. But that's not very common. That's not our primary role. Right. We're not a consultant, and we're not really primarily an advisor. We have a little bit of that.

But yeah, yeah. I mean a lot of the big impact I make was company. I work with Bill. In a lot of cases they're in industries that I know nothing about or in industries that I didn't even know existed. Right. So you're absolutely right. It's about really asking the questions, bringing fresh perspective without necessarily having domain expertise in their industry is very powerful.

Yeah. I was just talking with somebody who's looking at adopting our framework the other day and this is a person who works in medical education sector, so providing certain medical training and like I didn't know anything about this whole area of medicine in the world and the business that they're in, but what a great opportunity. And like, you know, instead I, I see the whole way that they operate as a business, the way their meetings are done, the way the leader shows up, the way their strategy is evolved, that kind of thing. And I think you have the same, right.

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you know, a lot of cases, like I said, for example, I worked early on with a company in the MRI machine service industry. So they go repair and maintain and fine tune an MRI machine. I never knew anything about mri. Still don't probably but added significant value to help that business or in that case grow significantly, but also be able to take vacations twice a year now where he hasn't taken any in like 10 years. So it's really pretty interesting.

So you're saying you worked with the CEO to get the team going together to get the company growing properly, but as a result the CEO also got to finally take vacations where he didn't take them before.

Absolutely. That's part of enjoying the journey along the way.

Peace of mind. You know the interesting thing, I think you'll know this, but not all of our listeners will recognize that when your company is organized so that the leader or the owner can take a vacation, it's actually a better, more valuable company. Your leadership team is stronger, your team is self executing. That's a more fundable or saleable business that has a higher value than others. When your whole team, when the company is totally dependent on the CEO or owner or founder, that's a weaker company, that's a less fundable, less saleable company.

In a lot of cases it's not sellable at all. Right. Because when somebody sells a business, in most cases they have a bunch of money, they're distracted or they're going to leave. And if the company can't run without the owner or the top leader, most potential buyer will shy away or even if they Buy it. They'll buy it at a much smaller multiples. It's not very attractive. Absolutely.

That's a common thing. At least a third of the companies that I work with have some kind of sale exit strategy in mind. Very often in the majority of those, we have to work on getting the leader to change their role in the business, to elevate their leadership style and not to be the same, all hands on, driving everything kind of leader. It keeps a lid on the performance of the team. It keeps a lid on the performance of the other leaders. It compromises the saleability of all of that. And it's one that I knew and learned kind of by. Well, for sure, by accident. Right? When I got married years ago, before we had a family, we were like, when our kids hit this certain age, then we're going to take a lot of time off, because that's the magic time, right? As a family, as parents. So we made that pledge and then we forgot all about it. And then suddenly it was 2009. 2009, our kids are at that age and we're like, oh, crap, this is the time. Except I think everyone remembers what the world was like in 2009. It was like, where is the bottom? And will we still have a house, a business, a life, any income at all? The world is falling, right? So the economy was in free fall in early 2009. And we looked at this thing and we're like, okay. But we said, we made a promise, so we're going to go ahead and do it. We're going to take this big time off. Originally it started like we were going to take a year off, right? And then it was like, we're going to take a summer off. And then we ended up taking a month off. But that was pretty powerful. So a year out, we started to ask the question, what do we need to do change? How do we need to operate? What processes? What do we need to do so that we can be completely away for a month and the team can thrive, the results continue to grow, and we may have no business in a year, or we may be doing fine or somewhere in between. So at that point, we are like, we could have no company and we could lose our house. So if that happened, we were prepared to take a backpacking vacation and reexamine our world and our life. And then if that didn't happen, and in fact it didn't happen, we had a huge breakthrough in the next couple of years and really ramped up the business. But I kept that in the background. The whole year long. So I started learning to ask more questions instead of giving answers. I started pointing to values and saying, how would you say solve or decide this using our values and people Learn to step up. I pulled back and I never went fully back hands on. It changed the way I operated and we had a fabulous month in Italy with our kids. We had a month in Italy at a time that will never be back again. I changed how I was as CEO in the company in the process. I think of that frequently.

Totally. That's really cool. That ties back directly to this really big idea about having this balance between results and relationships. Right. A lot, a lot of business owners or CEOs are really good at one of those two things. I'm going to give you a couple example. They're either driven purely by results and in the process they could damage or not pay attention to relationships or they run their business as a country club who's focused on relationship and they keep their eye off the ball on results. And neither approach is really sustainable.

So you're going to tell us about two examples of these of companies that you've worked with. And I feel like from when I heard your stories at first, I feel like there's versions of that in everyone. People either have a lot of attention on one or the other and maybe a natural inclination to one or the other. Right? Absolutely. But then you've got to figure out how to balance it. Right. So, and I use a variety of tools to do that. But tell us, why don't you start with the husband and wife team?

Yeah. So this is a team I met about a year ago, husband and wife team. They have a company that they build, started about 14 years ago, about 125 employees in the logistics. They have location, three locations around the country. And when I start talking to them all of their business, I say, hey, how are you going to end up the year that was last year? They said probably do about $12 million of revenue. I say, well, this is pretty good. How about your net income? They say we'll probably lose 200,000.

So stop, pause, pause. Let me underscore this for our listeners.

Right.

You got 1, 2, 5, 120 person company. It's been in business for how long?

About 14 years.

14 years in business. Husband and wife own $12 million. Logistics, multiple locations. And they're about to lose money again.

Yeah. And then the key question, I said, wow, this is amazing. I said, like what were you at your peak? They said, well, about four years ago, we're like 20. I said, wow, you must have made a lot of money at 20 mil. They said, no, no, we were like break even at 20 mil. So like in 14 years, in their 50s. So they're starting to wonder like we're working so hard, the company is almost worthless. Right. We're kind of on the break even line all this time. And they said, hey, it's time to figure this out. And I start working with them. I've been working with them for a year now. We're going into year number two. And what I discovered early on is they have a really great environment. People got along, they like each other. So this is an example where they put a lot of focus on relationships internally and externally. Actually they contributed to the community, but they weren't paying any attention to the results.

So for our listeners who have that like family like culture or some quality of like that, like there's a rich that's deep in the relationship and ours was like family. We thought of ourselves, we accepted kids and that kind of thing around the business. Right. And those kinds of businesses can sometimes forget to have their attention on the results and to be driving. And we did that. And then one day I woke up and I was like, oh, they're not my family. They're not going to. They're here because I pay them. And we like to have good relations. But if I stop paying them, they won't show up. It's not like my parents or my siblings who might come for a little bit even if I couldn't pay them.

Yeah, yeah. So in this case it was like really a good environment, nothing wrong with it. But again, that's back to the balance. You got to also pay attention to results. So we went through a whole process of really looking at the P and L, looking at their profit per customer, revenue per customer, and put a process in place, a plan where now fast forward like we're about 12 months into it. Last year they lost 200,000 year to date they're in the plus 600,000 of profit year to date and their top line is up 45%. And they maintain the culture. The beautiful thing is not like they damage the relationship part. It's just like bringing the results and balance and keeping paying attention to both simultaneously.

That's really right. But it's, and it is the balance. We talk about balance metrics, right? When we develop things. And if we go to work on labor efficiency ratio, you'll hear us. We've had show on that before. We talk about driving up the performance of the team and using a metric to see are you getting a good return on your labor dollar. Right. It's not about revenue or margin per employee, it's about revenue or margin per direct labor cost. Right. So when we look at that payroll dollar and how that we can put so much attention on that, then that employee satisfaction goes down. People can feel driven. I saw feedback on a client's monthly employee survey recently. Like all the attention is on the numbers and that kind of thing. And I realized with that team, they had gotten too much focused on the metrics in their meetings and that kind of thing and they forgot to tie it back to purpose and BHAG and that kind of thing. So why does that matter? Well, because we're solving people's problems or we're building a better world or like whatever it is that you do, the purpose, the why of your work, you can tie those metrics back to values and purpose. But if you drive solely on the performance without paying any attention to the satisfaction, the relationships, you'll also have a problem, right?

Totally. Totally. And in this particular relationship, I'm glad you brought up LER because in this particular company we did pick LER labor efficiency ratio as a key metrics because they have high number of employees and when we first measured that was 1.86. Fast forward till now, it's 2.6 across the company and that's to a large extent drove the profitability of the company in a big way.

Really nice.

Absolutely Right. We tied it back to core purpose, we revisited the core value, we re enhanced the relationship, make it still family oriented, but at the same time focus on the results and what they're trying to do as a business.

Yeah. So I'm someone who doesn't put enough attention on the relationships.

Right.

Just as a leader I tend to. I mean I have a deep love for people and a deep appreciation of people, but I tend to take for granted the relationship. If you look at my strengths finder.

Right.

If you're familiar familiar with the Gallup strengths finder tools in the relationship grouping of strengths, I have nothing there in my top five. I tend to empower others around me. Like our client coordinator is very relationship minded. My wife is very. So I put people around me that are relationship minded and I give them the room to do their work in managing the relationships. But I know that by my own nature I don't tend to do it. I don't put enough please and thank yous and things. I get right to the point in my emails. I'M like, hey, could you do this? I don't do enough of hi, how are you?

Yeah, which is really, I mean, being aware of this is really cool, Bill. Because what I like, I work with some client. They say, they say, hey, you know, I wish I could hire five people like me so I could grow the business. And I tell them, no, no, this is the worst thing you could do. You want to hire more people that are different from you to complement how you are and have a more collectively much stronger team rather than just copy of you. That's what I tell a lot of the business owners I work with.

You can hire people who are moved by the same purpose and people who share some of your business values, but it doesn't mean all of their personal strengths and traits and things like that. I have activator and command. If you have a company full of activators, you will not scale, you will not have stable operations. That's a getting started kind of thing. If you have everybody who's command, right. You'll have arguments over who's in charge, right?

Totally. You got to have complementary styles and capabilities.

You want to have complementary styles and capabilities. Right. So if you use the disk world, I'm very high d and I, I'm dominant, influencing nonstop. I'm selling and persuading and taking charge of things. Right. So it's that balance of things. And I think that you're naturally going to be drawn to one or the other. So it's about bringing presencing or empowering or putting some resources and attention on the other side. So if you're all about results, bring something to the relationship. If you're all about relationship, bring something to the other side. So this company that you worked with, right, 12 million company, $12 million is now taking home more than 50, sometimes over $100,000 a month in profit now, right?

Absolutely, absolutely. And we're just warming up. I mean, the trend, we could see the trend looking so beautiful moving forward as we roll into 2018. Absolutely.

That's brilliant. Great success story. It's funny, often working with people, if they've not worked with a high level coach before, they're like, oh my God, it's so expensive. I'm like, yeah, don't stress about it. I promise you the return is there in the first year. It is a big investment of time and money. But if you'll do the work, it pays off huge, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean this is more than 10x return, right? Absolutely. Over the first year. Even so. Absolutely.

So let's take a flip side example. Let's go to somebody who is all about the results but wasn't paying attention. I know you've got at least a couple stories in that world.

Yeah, absolutely. So the flip side, there's a lot of people that are driven by result. And a company I've been working with, it's a defense contractor, it's a $250 million division, part of a multi billion dollar company. And I was working with the president of that division and he was totally the opposite. He was driven, focused totally on results and performance and metrics. And as he was merging two division, his weakness or lack of awareness about the people side of it start really creating a lot of issues. We dove in. So he was totally results, not even paying attention to relationships at all. And it becomes, even if people, before the merger people got used to him and now he's merging two divisions. So that weakness is like amplified 10x because there's a new player. And then I worked with him one on one and then with the management team to really figure out strategic plan. But a lot of it was working one on one to give him the feedback and move him toward becoming more aware of the importance of being somewhat sensitive and coming across and building a cohesive team. And you know, it's harder to do people that are over 50, that's not an easy transition. It took some time, but he became a lot better and feedback from his team reflected that improvement.

Totally get it. And how are they going now? Where is that?

They're doing pretty well. They just finished all the integration. They consolidated the management team into one cohesive team. Some people ended up leaving, which always happened when you have big mergers like this within the same company. Some of them got reassigned, but it's starting to run like a well oiled machine.

Yeah, mergers are a tough deal and rollups are a tough thing. We see a lot of this in the tech world where people want to just buy. They want to buy up teams and bits of technology and then mash them all up together. One of the key things that can go really wrong in that is the culture. It can take a long time to start to balance that. You can also end up with with questions about who's really in charge at the end of the day. I worked for one company that went through a merger in two dramatically different cultures. And over time it emerged. But it took 10 years of shifting before sort of a new common culture emerged. And there were still people who were like, yeah, I was part of that team. Or I was part of that team. And one team did sort of become dominant in the end. Another group company that I was a senior person and equity partner in went through a series of things and we were looking at a big merger acquisition. Right. And each of the. So the lie of it is that it's a merger, right. So somebody's buying somebody in the end of the day and somebody is on top and somebody's in control at the end of it. I remember how this whole deal fell apart after a great deal of time and energy went into it because the elderly CEO of the other company forgot to hang up the phone properly. And he left a long rant to his attorney on the voicemail of our other equity partners and big investors. Right. So this whole rant about what he really thought about everything was left on somebody's voicemail.

Acquisitions are really tough. I worked for a tech company for a nine year run and we made nine acquisitions over nine years. The biggest one was 1.5 billion acquisitions before the bubble. Right. And there's always this dynamic that you talk about, Dell, where there's create always, almost always just us and them mindset and who's in charge and who's on top. And so they're very tough to do. A lot of them fail, some of them succeed. Right. But they take a lot of work. They take a lot of assessment before the merger about alignment with culture and value. But it's pretty tough doing acquisitions. Absolutely. It's the integration part that's really tough.

Right. Well, so this is super valuable. And the key thing here is for people to remember, remember to keep the results and the focus on results balanced with a focus on relationship, the relationships between human beings. Right. The easiest part of the business are the systems and the production, things like that. The hardest part of the people. But you can be good at one or the other. You could be really great on the people side and then be poor on the results, or vice versa. So you want to look at the relationships between the employees, employees and the leadership, between the leaders themselves. The whole internal thing, relationships with clients, relationships with business partners, your vendors, bankers, your other members of the community, the town that you're trying to build an extension onto, your building in the town that you're in, the community that you want to buy and renovate a building in, all of these people and these humans. Even relationships will have an impact. And you've got to stop and take time to pay attention to the relationships and attend to that. Then there's the result side of things. What Are the numbers? What's the top line, what's the profit, what's the cash position? Where are we moving on our BHAG metrics? What are we actually doing? In real, concrete, measurable terms, specific, objective, real, bringing reality to the whole thing. Both of those things really matter at the end of the day, right?

Absolutely.

So I think underscoring from what you said first is to figure out which one do you naturally gravitate to? Right.

I mean as, as we, we begin work, as I begin working with companies, that's kind of the first radar I'm trying to assess. Are they more results oriented or are they relationship? Because it's almost never the case where they have it in balance. So that allowed me to really focus in and highlight the area that they need improvement and how to bring it into balance.

So then if you're good at one or the other, you've got to figure out what's your strategy to develop yourself in the other one. Now it might not be. So I'm not naturally a relationship oriented person. So one, I just acknowledge it, I let some other people work on it, I invest some money in it, and I add some metrics to it to make sure we're taking care of that side of it because it's not my natural tendency. So I create a whole set of workaround things rather than just try to get better at relationships. Now in the process, I end up getting better at it, right?

Yeah. You got to stay with your strengths. Right. Be aware of your weaknesses. On relationship. What I really. Another kind of interesting thing that I tell people about is to be very careful when you select relationships. Like before you enter into a relationship, be very careful whether it's a client or an employee or a banker. So assess that first carefully. And then you enter into a relationship, you gotta grow it and maintain it and develop it and focus on it to make it successful. That's important part. Also on the front end and also on the back end, if you have toxic relationship, you know, move them out as soon as possible. Right. Because that will drag everything down. So that other side of assessment of your current relationship, which one do you develop, which one you prune out? And as you enter a new relationship, be very careful about assessing are those the right relationships.

And on the results side, right there are the obvious results like cash profit, revenue growth, all of those kinds of things matter. But also product quality, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, key metrics like your bhag, your profit per X, whatever you're measuring your X is all of those kinds of things matter, keeping them visible on display, known, keeping your numbers current, that's the result side of things. And having the attention to results be a group or a communal conversation rather than something that one or two people are worried about, right?

Absolutely. On result, I tell people, measure it and it'll improve. Measure it and report on it. It'll improve faster. Right. So you got to decide who, what are those key metrics you're going to focus on? And you got to measure those frequently and make them visible so you have time to make adjustment if you're, if you're not on track, and if you're on track or above, celebrate along the way. So measuring the result, making them visible and transparent is really a key way to keep attention on them.

So I worked with a large supply chain type company doing supply work to a local industry here in Northern California. And he had put whiteboards in each department or functional area around the business. Fairly sizable business. And it's certainly the kind where somebody might automate everything and create software tools. But he just had whiteboards. And then they had their daily huddles and their weekly meetings around the whiteboard, and each person picked up whichever pen was appropriate, black or red. And I think some of the teams may have had green and other colors in there as well. And they went and they updated their metrics and their progress on priorities on their whiteboard dashboard on a regular basis. I think that probably is more effective than anything else in putting group attention on results that they each have to pick up a pen and update their own numbers.

Right. I love that idea. It's the same concept as writing things down by hand is better than typing and people participating at the huddle. That's really a cool idea.

It's a different thing. I've seen other companies where they try to automate all their dashboards and display them. They're like, oh, it's great. I'm like, yeah, you've created like nice wallpaper. It looks great in a movie, but it doesn't actually drive behavior and the group thing in the same way. So I want to direct people to your website if you'd like to learn more about Baha's work and see information, get his links, take his assessments, that kind of thing. You'll go to cmetrics partners, semetricspartners.com and that's where you can find more about Baha and his work. And of course, we'll put that in the show notes for the show, as we always do. So go there and check out Baha and Then every week we come back here with a new show, another thought leader, a client, a coach, somebody with something to share about the whole process and journey of scaling up a business. So that's what we're all about here at Scale Scaling Up Business Podcast. And please come back. You'll find us every week on itunes, Stitcher. Wherever you get your podcast from, you can of course also find us on our blog. And on the blog you'll also find tools. We've got a download there that has the overview of scaling up. So if you're new to scaling up, you've got that. But then even if you're not new to scaling up, it's got a whole outline on how to run your team meetings, how to do quarterly and annual planning with your team, how to run the agenda, a typical agenda, and a whole bunch of worksheets so that you can get started leading your team through the scaling up process even before you've engaged a coach in the process. So that'll get you started and you'll find that@scalingupbusiness.com as always, thanks Baja for joining us and we'll see everybody again next week.

Thanks Bill.

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