158: Doug Walner — Scale Efficiently with Align

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. Doxatalent.com Bill G Check it out today. Well, let's talk about some of your likely and common problems. Problem number one is as you get bigger and bigger, you don't really have any idea what people are doing. Are they on track? Do their priorities align to the company? Priorities? Are they doing anything about them? You know, like that? So that's one problem. The next problem is that you do great off site plannings, however often you do them, whether it's annual, semiannual or every quarter. But then your actions are not tightly aligned to them in between. You just get distracted and pulled in different directions and you're not as much working on the business. So that's problem number two for both of these problems and then ultimately the fundability and the valuation of the company. How clear is it what you're doing? How well is the team self organizing? Is it obvious what's happening and are you central to it or is the team running for all these things? Implementing a system that tracks your execution week in and week out is the subject of today's show. We're going to talk with the CEO of Align Today about using Align Today. It's one of many systems, it's the official one that we use. But listen in and we talk about the application. We'll share some great stories of companies that need it and benefit from it and companies that didn't, with some surprising results. So listen in foreign. Welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Doug Walner, CEO of Align Today. And we're talking about using a tracking system, right? Using some kind of a system to implement and track your business results. Welcome to the show, Doug.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, and glad to have you on. You're down in New Orleans area.

Yep, New Orleans, Louisiana. That's where it is located.

Probably warm and sticky there.

It is. It is. It's a nice hot summer down here. We enjoy it. Kind of, kind of fits the city.

We were saying as we set up our recording and stuff that I love New Orleans and I spent years wanting to go there. Never went for like a long, long time. And then all of a sudden in like 14 months, I went six times. It's like pent up demand for New Orleans. So we're going to get into this. I'd like to give folks a little bit of background on your entrepreneurial journey because it really relates to the premise, the need. It validates why you're the CEO of Align today now and what it is. So before we get into what it is and what it does, we're going to share some great case studies. Talk to us about that. Give us, our listeners, a little bit of your backgr.

I guess. I guess the best way to sort of describe my story is to start at the beginning where, you know, I grew up in an, you know, with an entrepreneurial father who had left the corporate world and got into the retail business. And I grew up in southern New York, actually just northwest of New York City. But he ran a business in New Jersey for most of my childhood. And just being exposed to sort of that retail world and seeing how he ran a small business, at one point he had a couple stores. You know, it was kind of a, it was an interesting experience. I was, I was his cheap labor, if you will, as I was growing up and playing stock boy and in the back, but kind of just learning about what it meant to be in business. I then probably got one of the greatest jobs in the world. I was truly a kid in a candy shop. I worked at a homemade chocolatier in northern New Jersey and I started that work when I was in ninth grade and I worked all through high school. And that really just exposed me to the idea of working for a living, understanding what it means to earn a paycheck and really how to market a small business and being involved in all aspects of that. By the time I was graduating high school, I was managing the, the chocolate shop. And it was just kind of an interesting experience, always working. And I think when I got to college, I continued to work. I held a couple jobs and I think just that sort of growing up with that allowed me to build my work ethic, focus on keeping myself busy on a regular basis with things that drove me and being passionate about business. That's where it kind of all came From I was, you know, with all that business and all that exposure, it's odd I didn't go to business school. I was more interested in college, of getting a liberal arts degree. And most specifically I found myself interested in history. And my dad would give me a hard time about that being a history major, but he thought maybe I would be a tour guide one day. That's what he thought I'd do with a history degree. But you know, look, I thought it was, I find the study of the past pretty interesting because I think it sort of predicts the future and kind of tells you where things are heading. So I always just was genuinely interested in history. And I graduated with a history degree and I think my dad was probably right, prepared to do not much except maybe go to law school or become a tour guide. And so I think really what was interesting for me when I graduated College, it was 1991 and there was a lot going on in the world of technology at the time. And I had a friend who I had graduated with who called me up and said, hey, I have a great job for you in technology in a technology firm in New York. I was intrigued and called him back and started to talk to him about it. He said, look, you don't really need to know anything. Just send me a resume and maybe you'll fit in here. We're young, we just need people who are smart and we just want to build this tech firm. And this was again in 1991. This was a wireless communications software company in New York, in Manhattan. It was intriguing and technology was interesting and at the time, it was still pretty early. We were still in the time of like, I guess Windows was out. It was Windows 3.1 at the time. And the Mac was making, Mac was, was out. And you know, Apple had, had owned the personal computer world and Windows was sort of trying to find its way in the world, but, you know, having done a pretty good job with, with their platform. But it was my first job in tech. And, and what was interesting about that job is I, I, I got involved and my job was to run what they call the developer program. And in a company like a tech company in those days, running the developer program meant I was going to be interfacing with developers at other companies who could use what we call the software development kit. We talk about things like integration of platforms today. That all started with companies linking their applications through what they called software development kits. These are sort of the application programming interfaces. Kind of a techy little job that I had sort of dealing with other companies. And it was a fun job, but it got me working very, very closely with software engineers in my company at the time. And I got to be an interface between our software team and other software teams at other companies. And for me, that was a great experience. And I think the other key point about my career in that time was that I was getting involved in tech when everything was changing. The world was moving very, very quickly. Technology changes every couple of years. There's major shifts in the industry, and you really didn't need to know a lot to get into the industry because it just kept changing. And so every two years with an industry that's reinventing yourself, you can enter. And I think even today, that is still true. I talk to young people all the time, and I encourage them to get into technology because there's multiple entry points almost every year, every two years, where what we thought we were going down a path a year ago is changing next year. It's just very easy for you to get into that industry. Anyway, that started my career in tech, and that led me to the west coast, where there was another opportunity with a pretty fast growing software company in Santa Monica, California. It was a business called CyberMedia, and they were developing Windows software utilities for the Windows platform. And they were sort of writing code that would help people configure their machines automatically to work with the multitude of devices that were out there. Anyway, I joined them, spent a couple years as the director of business development working for them and doing a very similar job where I was selling to other software companies, selling to hardware manufacturers, and working very closely with the technical side of that, of those businesses, with those customers, and working with our engineering staff to make sure that our software was compatible and helped consumers ultimately configure their Windows machines to work properly with Windows. And then in 1995, Windows 95 was released, and that changed everything. And we wrote a program called first Aid for Windows 95. It was back in the day when you could go into a compusa and buy software off the shelf. And it was really about how you packaged. It was sort of the procter and gamble world of software, where you packaged your software in an appealing way to get people to pick your product. Yeah, exactly.

Software built around fixing the ills of Windows, right?

Yeah, Yep. And that's what we did. I mean, this, this product was it really, what it was designed to do was to help, you know, you Upgrade from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. If you upgraded, what would happen is nothing would work on your machine. You know, the hardware drivers that were on Windows 3.1 weren't compatible with 95. Your software registry would get screwed up and this software would basically go into your machine and read it and configure everything automatically and get you working again. Well, that product just flew off the shelf and it was pretty amazing. We were at the time the fastest growing software company in the US and it was a very, very fast growing business. We ultimately sold off to McAfee at the time who was building antivirus software in the market. And they were a big player in the utility software space and they acquired the business and it was just a fast and furious time. It was fun. That led me into several other endeavors in the tech and ultimately I landed at one of the earlier Internet businesses in 1998, a business called stamps.com, which was founded by three young graduates of UCLA Business School. And they were looking for management team members to come on board. I was recruited by the CEO who's recruited by the board at that time and had a really great, you know, great experience building that. I came on as the VP of business development, again running the business development activities of the business. I ultimately ended up taking over as one of co CEOs in that business towards the end of my tenure with Stamps. And that was an interesting experience. That was going through the full.com bubble. That was a fun time and I learned a lot. I learned a lot about fast growth systems and scaling and what it takes to scale a business. We raised about a half a billion dollars there at stamps before 2001, before the Internet bubble. And it was a very fast paced, fast growth environment where the money we were raising was really how we were fueling our growth. And we obviously needed revenue to sustain that. And that was a longer term business. It was a business that had an association with the United States Postal. It had a lot of validity. We were essentially printing money. We were printing US postage, which is legal tender money. So we had high levels of security and it was a fun experience. And then that ultimately, you know, after the dot com bubble, it was an interesting time to say the least. I learned a lot from a management perspective, from a people perspective, and then moved on to another business in California. It was sort of an old line business that was doing testing and assessing and they were literally in printing tests, you know, like they print paper tests for different types of activities, whether it was in the corporate space or in the government licensing space, whether they were servicing a certification organization and they were doing paper based testing. And when I had got there, they were dabbling with a little bit of technology. I think they were building their future on FoxPro at the time, which didn't sound like a very, very promising future to me. So I came on board as a CEO and immediately scrapped the FoxPro initiative and at the time focused our energies on Java, which was brand new at the time. It was sort of the beginnings of SaaS software, building an online platform that would satisfy all aspects of the business. And it was a challenging experience. We had both a corporate business and a government side to our business and then an association side. We were selling to certification associations and selling to government entities that were doing licensing in various jobs and construction and insurance and real estate, those types of trades. And then we had the corporate side which was doing pre employment assessments. So, you know, doing cognitive abilities testing, personality testing. And what we had to do was deliver this all online. We had to replicate the paper and pencil world and bring it online. And it was an enormous platform that we had to build to do that. But that was probably my first foray into really setting what I had been reading about at the time and had practiced a little bit, this sort of concept of, you know, setting clear priorities, setting goals and priorities inside an organization. And that's sort of where I started to dabble. And I think we'll, we'll talk a little bit more about that today. But I've had, since then I built that business. We scaled it very, very quickly. We grew from what was maybe about a little over five and a half million in revenue. I grew it to about a little over 28 million in revenue, sold it for about 100, a little over 100 million to a private equity firm. And it was a pretty successful business. Where we really scaled was in our EBITDA, we were doing on about 28 million, we were doing about 10.4 million in EBITDA. So the key was scaling people.

Frickin awesome multiple.

It was a pretty good multiple. And it was a combination of several things. We had the trajectory, we had the growth, we had the people process scaling and we had the technology scaling. And it was the technology that really propelled us. And it propelled us, but it was also about making sure that we could scale people, but scale with fewer people. We could do more with fewer people through the use of technology. And that really was how we pulled that margin, that EBITDA margin off. And we did that and sold the business in 2006, which was really right before all the craziness of 2008. So it was a good time. Timing is everything also. Yeah. And so, you know, it was a good market for what the category that we were in, we were thrown into the category of really, I guess you'd call it education or corporate learning. And at the time there was a lot of investment going into education, a lot of private equity looking at that market and you know, really paying good multiples for businesses in that space. And, you know, we had a very nice business model. The bigger side of our business was the government licensing and certification testing. We were, in addition to building the platform, we were, we had rolled out a nationwide network of testing centers where we would go into a state and sell our services, build out computer based testing services like a prometric or somebody like that, and then deliver the tests in those states. We were doing online proctored exams for high stakes testing. And it was a pretty interesting business model. I found myself really feeling the business model was actually about putting butts in seats because we would have these fixed assets and computer testing centers. And I was like an airline, right? It was the more butts we could put in the seat, more we would maximize profit out of those particular testing centers. Right. And so that, that airline analogy is actually interesting because I later ultimately got into the aviation business several years after that experience. But so it had, but, you know, anyway, it was, it was an interesting.

But this is a key thing. You built your whole, you built the business, sold it huge. And you did it by organizing and aligning, getting the good execution that gave you efficiency and then, and then with the other aspect of the business created a big win. But you did a ton of the Rock Habits type work without the aligned system, right?

We did, we did. And that was a bear, I'll tell you. I mean, the concepts of Rock Habits, they've been around in the business world, whether you call it MBOs or you call it, they now call them OKRs are very similar to it. But the setting the goals and setting priorities was a core tenet of what we did at that business. I called it the priority objective program. I put a label on it, I rolled it out. I documented everybody's priority in Word documents. And I'd make managers sign off on them, the employees would sign off on them. There'd be a lot of emailing back and forth. We track it all in an Excel spreadsheet. Every quarter I would visit each particular location. I think we had four locations at the time. And I did go and present each quarter to the, to the different staff at the different locations with a PowerPoint. The problem I was having at the time was I could only report at the highest level of what we were doing at both the company priorities and the divisional priorities. And I could only give sort of a health report to the organization each quarter based on how we were doing at the highest level. But what we did was we took these priorities and aligned them all the way down to every employee. And I couldn't report on how each employee was doing at the time, but I could report how the company and the division was doing in order to make up for the fact that I couldn't really share each employee's performance against their key priorities with everybody. It would simply just be too much to have done that. What I did was I tied a compensation program to the priority program. And I think that's a really effective tool that you can use when building one of these sort of initiatives internally. And it worked really, really well because an employee knew that if they were working on the key priorities on a quarterly basis and they'd achieve those each quarter and get to the end of the year, it was pretty easy to measure how did they do and they would get a bonus. In our case, we just took a company bonus pool and allocated it it across the employee base based on how they did as employees on an individual basis, how their division did and then how the company did overall. So there were three components to that comp program. But I think that's a powerful notion, is sort of not just putting in place a Rockefeller habits program, but looking at how do you comp based on employees really achieving what you set out out for them to achieve.

Yeah. So you've put that thing in manually. NAT kind of laid the groundwork for you. Then let's talk about another one. At our summit, right. We had a legal tech company from Nashville, I believe, get up and talk about their use of the Align Today tool. And we've had companies use. So there's a handful of other tools besides Align Today. This is not merely a show for alignment to promote it, although it's the one I'm using now and recommending it's the official scaling up tool. So obviously it has some merit, but there's others. And we've seen companies create spreadsheet versions and we've had them put them in Atlassian tools. There are other ways of doing the same thing. This one's an easy one. So let's talk about that story. Can you recap a little bit?

Sure, yeah. I think that's an interesting story because. And it gets to A little bit from my own personal experience, having had all that manual doing all that manual work, to run a program like this. Well, when this opportunity came up to run Align, this is sort of what got me excited about Align. Right. Like everything I was doing in that program was now in a SaaS platform that was available 24. 7 to the business. Every employee could see how everybody else is doing. And one of the greatest things about that platform is that the best feature in the platform is the transparency and accountability. That isn't even a software feature, but it is a feature, if you will, because everybody can see how everybody's performing, and it sort of exposes that. But a tool like this is pretty powerful. One of the things that was very hard for me when I was selling the business to a private equity firm was I had to demonstrate everything I had put into that program and I'd have to show a lot of documentation. And we went through a long diligence process and I had to describe this program and I would share the PowerPoints that I was sharing with my employees on a regular basis. It was just there was a lot of documentation associated with what I had put in place. And it was not an easy transition to take all the work we had done and just easily discuss it with a PE firm during a diligence process as to how I was doing. And I think that's what was amazing about this legal tech firm out of Nashville. They stood on stage and the CEO tells the story of his process in selling the business to a pe. Also sold the business to a PE firm. But he was an aligned customer at the time. And what was nice about having all this data and this whole process in a software platform was that that when his diligence process began, the PE firm was able to come in and literally just log into a line and he'd be able to show them exactly all the priorities for the business and the historical priorities. He could go back five, six, seven periods, seven quarters and show how the business changed over time. All this data is being collected in the platform and all the priorities that are outlined. What you're really demonstrating to a PE firm is, is you really have all this data. You have the structure in place, and it's a process. And what it showed to that PE firm, according to the CEOs, that they had processes around people priorities, and they could really scale that process. And so that's what PE firms are looking for. They're looking for businesses that are scalable. And align gives you that visibility into seeing all that in an organization, even the daily huddles and the weekly huddles, where there's communication cadences and rhythms that are going on, helps somebody like a PE firm understand how this company operates. So that, you know, you have the full one page strategic plan is in there. It was really useful to this business and they got, they, they mentioned on stage that they got, you know, higher than normal multiples simply because they were able to demonstrate through the Align platform that this existed in the business. So, you know, I did a local conference down here as well where about this concept and several people came up to me after interested in it. I think it's a very compelling concept that it's not just about doing this work, it's about having the data and then being able to use that and leverage that data in some other part or some other period of your business. And so preparing today and using a tool like Align today could pay dividends in the future.

Here's the thing that I hear in it too, right? So making your company salable and financeable, right, Is ultimately just good business. And companies that remember that do really well and there are a couple things that are bad business or that make it less fundable, less salable. One of them is an owner who's completely in everything and it's all of their energy that's required to run the business effectively. It's really hard to sell. And so anybody buying it, whether PE strategic or an individual, is going to come in and go, okay, I need to put you on an employment contract and some painful earnout so that I can make sure I'm not buying something that I can't run, that we can't run or that doesn't run itself. So that's the first thing. Now when you've got a system like Align and the rock habits, the scaling up framework, the business increasingly can run itself, right? The team is running it. It's not your meeting, it's not your tool, it's not your dashboard, it's not your habits. It's the teams and they learn to run on priorities and so on. That's the first one, right?

Yeah, I agree with that 100%. Because I think what you're really getting at with Align and what we tell our customers is that it's, it's not just capturing the data or doing the work. It's creating a culture that adopts these processes, adopts these habits. It's the adoption of the habits and the rhythms that really help you scale the business. It does, it takes this out of it creates a system, it makes one person less important. In an organization, the CEO is not the most important thing. Obviously you're important because you got a set vision and you want to motivate and be a leader. But the reality is that if you can get the business executing and adopting these habits, that's really where the processes and everything scales. It's repeatable and that's what you want to create. The machine that does that and the software, it doesn't do the work for you, but it helps you adopt the habits. It gives you a place to capture the data, it gives you a place to visualize the data. And to me, that's the powerful part of a platform like this.

So number two then is the due diligence process. How do I know that what I'm buying is the real deal? Well, if you're into a tool over time that you're using, where we're tracking, we're looking at your one page plan, your performance on priorities for all levels of the team then, or at least, you know, all supervisory or managerial levels, perhaps not necessarily your front line, depending on the kind of business you're in. But if I've got that over time now I can open that up to a buyer and they can see, yes, this team's performing consistently well. Or they started rocky, but now they've gotten good for a while and it's very clear you can wade through it.

That's exactly right. I think just having that historical perspective from a due diligence view is really, really, you know, this is not something you're going to fake, right, to go back and you're not going to go fill in all this data. You know, it's, it just, it shows how the company has performed over time. It's really valuable data. In fact, we're, you know, we feel the data is so valuable that we're looking at. All right, how do we leverage this data? How do we take the data that's in there for a client and start to provide insights about the future, about their current business based on their historical performance? So you're going to see a lot more from us as we look forward in our product plan that is in the cards for us. Towards the end of this year, we'll be starting to release some tools around insights using the data that's in the platform. But that, that is a good point. It's just, you know, for a PE firm or somebody doing diligence, it's all right there laid out the whole past of performance of the business So I.

Have, I have a larger client right now. I'll not name them because it's fresh and in the middle of it. I don't have the permission, but let me just, let me talk around it little bit. So this is a larger firm in terms of people, really maybe 1,000 people all told, including their contract staff and like that. And they've started doing planning and daily huddles and sporadically the meetings in between. And they got through their first quarter and they said, yeah, we did really good. The huddles are amazing. Some of the other practices are amazing. People have their plans now we did planning, now we're doing planning again. But did we consistently do the work on the plan in between the quarter? And the truth is they produced a lot of results. There was a lot of good movement. However, when they looked honestly about it, they were like we didn't consistently review and touch back to the quarterly plan and that's an up step. I know some companies that do annual or twice a year type plans and then that sucker sits on a file of physical or computer based for the rest of the year and it doesn't really get looked at. Maybe it gets looked at once in a year and then the actions are not consistent with the overall plan. So they achieve some of the things just because they thought about it in advance, but they're not looking back regularly and saying, okay, what did we say we're doing? What aren't we even touching? What's stuck? What's like not working well, where do we need to pivot? And it's that look back and that reference that would typically happen in a weekly or bi weekly meeting where a team gets together. It's the team meeting, not so much the daily huddle where we're going to look at the priorities and we're going to say how are we doing? And the stunning thing that I see on this is that those key priorities, the most strategic, most valuable one, get waylaid by the day to day emergencies and breakdowns and opportunities, things like that. And in reality the teams that manage to put in an extra 15 minutes or half an hour or something on these key strategic things actually move them forward. Some of the biggest things don't actually need that much time. A little nudge every now and then is what's needed. And that's what a regular use of a software tool does. So we can do that. Plus if I'm running a thousand person firm, I hear from my five to eight direct reports and they tell me how things are going and Some are silent, so I'm suspicious and some are always good news. And so I'm suspicious and then I'm angry at the one who tells me the truth, but I'm being a little bit funny, but there's a certain level of visibility and then maybe I walk around and I visit and I fly around and I look at my offices and teams so I get a sporadic view of some of the others, but I don't have that regular day to day visibility. Well, if you've got any kind of a system running and you're seeing this and it's ingrained and locked to a weekly, bi weekly meeting, now we've got huge visibility into what's actually happening, what teams are working or not. And if it looks too rosy, I can inspect like how, how significant are the, the goals and the priorities of a team. And if there's no touches, I can see that too.

Yeah. And look, I just to add to that, I'll say that we encourage our customers to, you know, look at their business in two ways. There's the working on your business. Right. The daily things that get in your way. The ops, the stuff that, that, that boils up or you might have an emergency and you got to deal with. Right. That's the working in, that's the working. Sorry, in your business, I should say that's the working in your business on a daily basis and it working on your business. The stuff that you do with Align and the stuff that you do with the key priorities, that's the stuff that you have to stay focused on while all this other stuff is going on. Tools like Align, they're specifically focused on working on your business. You're not going to be spending all day in the Align product. We tell our customers to have their employees update the system, spend about six to eight minutes a day, do your daily huddle on a daily basis, write that, input it, and then update your KPIs, update your priorities, keep the system up to date. That way everybody has visibility into the big things that are going on. It's not going to mean that you're not going to work in a project management tool or a CRM tool. You're going to continue to do those things, but it's just as important to work on your business as it is to work in your business. So that's exactly I think the point you were getting to. You have to, you have to spend the time doing this and you have to provide that visibility on the important things in the business.

Yeah. And here's Another interest. So I'm going to tell you that a lot of people object. They object to doing this. They object to another tool, at least the ones that I do. And maybe it's because I'm a crappy coach, but.

I don't believe that's the case. But they object because it's just another tool. It's another tool, it's another platform to do.

And I'm like, yes, it is. It is a chore. You do need to go on it. It's not an onerous amount. It's. You think it's way more than it actually is, but it is. We are changing your habits. You know, in the beginning, our work was called the Rockefeller Habits. We are changing your habits. And, and if you're honest with yourself, if you look in the mirror, you have a lot of crappy habits. Even if you're a longtime user of our stuff. Like as a human being, we have crappy habits. And changing our habits is hard, uncomfortable work.

It is, it is. It really is. And we get, we get that a lot from people. But again, we're looking at our product plan and saying, how do we help people engage on the platform and feel good about using this? And you'll start to see features from us where there'll be, if you will, a feed that might call out, you know, folks who are achieving their priorities on a regular basis. You got to want people to participate in this and get something out of this. So that's where I had mentioned I tied a compensation program to something like the Rockefeller Habits and achieving that. That's a great way to sort of reward people for staying focused on this and developing these habits and spending the time inputting the data, There should be some sort of reward. Whether it's just, you know, call outs and just being identified as an achiever in the organization or actually getting compensated based on how you're doing against it. This is about performance. And you can use the tool to do things like one on ones in a weekly one on one. And the more you use it in that way, the more the employee is going to recognize that, hey, I got to keep this thing up to date. I got to work in this tool because I'm going to be doing my one on one on a weekly basis. I'm going to be going to be reviewed based on the information that's in this platform. This is real time performance data for everybody in the organization.

Yeah, really helpful and useful. Just to be clear, whatever kind of system you're using, the thing that I recommend Is, and I don't correct me, what you would do is I would say plan on about five minutes a day before your daily huddle, thinking about yesterday and today, putting in your notes, getting ready. That's the daily huddle use. And the more critical use even is the weekly or bi weekly meeting. So if you do, if you do a team meeting once a week or if you do a team meeting every other week, as some of our teams do before that meeting I probably want to spend about 10 minutes and I'm going to go and I'm going to update my metrics manually, I'm going to update my priorities manually. I'm going to check off my tasks and to do I items, stocks, things like that that I might have. I'm going to go and sweep through that thing and update that somewhere between an hour to a day before my team meeting, depending on when it occurs, and my own habits and things like that. Then I get in the team meeting and we look at the performance of the company according to the agenda of the meeting and we look at the status and our priorities and our key numbers and then we pick a couple, one or two of the priorities at a team level that we're going to drill into the deeper dive I might do in a one on one with somebody that I work for, that works for me, but the high level I'm going to do with the high level priorities for the team or for the company at that team meeting and that's where we're going to look in it and we're, you know, in the course of our wins and review, we're going to give a quick nod to the green items, we're going to put an eye on or call out the yellow things but it's the red ones that going to look at and focus in on. And too often without a tool like this, what you do is you go one by one from the priorities in either ranked order or alphabetical order and then you wander off on side conversation and you're like, oh, we didn't get, we never can get through everything. You don't need to talk about everything, stop talking about everything, just talk about the ones that are stuck after you celebrate some wins so you don't have a bummer of a meeting. Right.

I think you outlined a great process. The key is if more companies embraced this kind of work or this kind of process, I think there'd be a lot more success out there. I don't think it's a large investment to make. Again, it's an important investment to work on your business. And so many companies are just not spending the time. They get caught up in too many details of the business and they're not stepping back and focusing on this. And it's not that big of an investment to make and it's a worthwhile investment to make.

So this investment of time, and it's a fairly minimal amount of money, but of time really gets you to connect between your annual and quarterly planning sessions, whatever cycle you're on with your planning sessions, to what you're doing week in and week out. And that's the critical connection where we actually start to align the action with the intended results of the plan. And we don't merely get sucked into the day to day emergencies and breakdowns and noise of running a business.

Yeah. You know, as you were saying that one thing I would encourage people listening to is, you know, this is a little bit of a journey. It's not going to happen overnight, I think. And you probably encourage your clients when you're coaching them to not take on too much at once. I think, you know, you really want to start, start slow and adopt these habits, these good business habits in a methodical way. And so yeah, you mentioned the brewery. I happen to have many years ago invested in a brewery down here in New Orleans. It's called New Orleans Lagernale. I was an investor for a long time and I had the opportunity to swap places with the majority owner. Last year I was the minority owner and we swapped places and now I'm the majority owner of it. It's not the most ideal situation as I am the CEO of a line and I have a business ready. But I have great management in place over at the brewery. But it is a business that I am also involved in. But one of the first things I wanted to do is because it's not typically a tech oriented environment, I wanted to get the Align tool into that work environment and get them working on the scaling up habits. And seeing the success that I've had with them and understanding the success that I've had with them and that being involved with this business, I thought, hey, this is a great thing, let's get the brewery on scaling up. And what I was taking was a very operational business and introducing concepts that they had really never implemented there at all. So what I did is I started off slow. I took this business over last year and really what I wanted to do with is just get him talking. They didn't have daily standups, they didn't have weekly meetings and What I really wanted them to do, they had weekly meetings, but they weren't weekly meetings around sort of the big priorities in the business. They were, were just weekly status meetings, if you will. And so what we did was we got them talking and we got them communicating with the daily huddle and it's at the point where they can't live without it. Now this is like I always ask them, I'd say if I took the tool away from you, would you be able to continue? They said, well, we might be able to continue it, but it's just a lot easier just to have a place to put our daily huddles in and track this stuff. And so they're really hooked on the communication cadences that we've created there. I then introduced the concept of tracking key numbers in a business like that. We're interested in a couple things in that business. It's how much beer is moving out the door and how much beer is moving out in retail. We don't control the distribution to retail, but we do look at the sell through. So we track critical numbers and the critical numbers tell us how well we're doing. And so we put those numbers in a line and. And the management team is tracking the critical numbers for the business. We've outlined the priorities for the quarter. We have to do a little bit more work around sort of the planning and the priorities. I haven't quite got them there yet. We're going to be introducing that shortly and going through that planning process to do a more methodical build out of every priority. We take some key things we're working on right now. But again, it's a slow roll. It's getting them focused on adopting processes and letting them do it on their natural pace. This is a very manufacturing type organization that wasn't using a lot of daily tech tools to run their business. But one of the great things for me being a remote, I'm a remote owner. I'm literally about two miles away from the brewery on a daily basis here at the Align office, but I'm not at the brewery. But what's great is I log into Align at the end of every day into the brewery account and I can see the daily huddle for the management team and I could see exactly what went on today and what each manager's focused on there. And it's just fantastic for me because I can actually shoot off a slack to one of them or hit them with a text or make a quick phone call about a topic that I see in a daily huddle and it keeps me informed of what's going on, what are the important things going on in the business on a daily basis and I can track that. So for me, it's actually just a great tool for me personally. But for them, they're getting more out of that tool, more out of these habits than they. They've ever got. They didn't have these processes in place. And, you know, the good news is it's growing over there and it's working. So it's been a, it's been a real boon for them.

That's awesome. That's a great. Well, we've given people a lot of things to think about. Let's tell folks to go to aligntoday.com and check out this tool. I've said you could use a spreadsheet or you could use some of the other tools out there, but Align today is our official tool. It makes it easy, it's purpose built and it's super cost effective for getting started. You can go to aligntoday.com or click the link, which will give us some tracking in the show notes itself. And if you go there, use promo code Gallagher for me, Bill Gallagher. Use promo code Gallagher when you sign up and you'll get taken care of and we'll take care of it. You can get started right away. I want to remind, thank Doug for coming on the show and remind our listeners that we're here every week with a topic. We're over 150 episodes now of great content for over three years running. And so we've got loads of great material on scaling it for you and we bring a new one every week like that. So you can go back now and look through those 150 episodes. Maybe you want to create your painted picture. Maybe you want to figure out your company purpose. Maybe you're figuring out how to run the team better. Maybe you'd like to run with a lighter staff load, you'd like to scale without adding as many people on any of these things. We've got a huge backlog of these podcasts@scalingcoach.com plus free downloads of our tools for Scaling up and a free copy of the book Scaling Up. If you just pay the shipping and handling, we'll give you a copy for free. I don't know, it goes for 20 bucks or something now. So scalingcoach.com is where to find all that like and subscribe. Get these in your mailbox every week or however you get them wherever you get your podcast. Thanks again, Doug, for coming on the show and for talking with us about Alon and tracking the tool. Upgrading your habits today?

Sure. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

I want to give special thanks once again to the original growth guru Verne Harnish for starting this whole world we love called Scaling up the Rock Filler Habits. This show is produced by Lucy Summers. Audio production is done at Podfly Productions. Audio editing by Albert Burge. The show notes are compiled by Ian Kudina and proofread by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of the show Tim today, please share it with somebody right now. Like it? Subscribe to it to get them every week and you can let us know the parts that you loved or what you want more of with an email to info scalingcoach.com thanks again for listening. Keep Scaling Up. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters more most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our Scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com build one more time aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G check it out and try it now.