168: Scaling Up Insights — Coach Panel with Judy Guido and Daniel Marcos

This episode of the Scaling Up Business podcast will be another of our panel conversations with a number of high level coaches about the news and the developments in the world of scaling up. This is a little bit longer show covering a whole variety of topics and I'm sure you'll find something interesting and engaging in this conversation. So join me now and listen in as I talk with Judy and Daniel Marcos about all things scaling up for the last month.

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Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today, a couple other notable coaches. We're going to talk through the insights of the last month in the world of scaling up and all things to do with growth. Daniel Marcos joins us from Toronto. Daniel's also, in addition to being a longtime coach, a graduate of the old Birthing Giants program and all that, he is the founder and CEO of the Growth Institute, our online learning platform which we'll talk more about. And Daniel coaches all over the world, but particularly in Latin America, right, Daniel?

Correct. I have clients in many other countries, but yes, 90% of my business in Latin America.

And Daniel's a CEO with a great past in a number of things in particular financial sector and what else? What am I missing?

Financial sector, Internet, housing, real estate and then coaching for 10 years. So you get deep with your clients on their other businesses.

Lovely family. Daniel's another one who's always on the move, traveling. I feel kinship with Daniel as a coach. So many coaches just work in their own area. Some of us are on the road nonstop.

But not like you. You're flying to Bahrain today?

Yeah, I fly to Bahrain by Istanbul today, just for a couple of days of work and then I'm back home again. Wow.

Hop, skip and jump to Bahrain.

Just a hop, skip. It's funny, it's only a five day trip, which is not that long in the scheme of things. Most of my trips are like three days, but a five day trip. But it's so far. Right. That it feels like something I do about 16 cities a quarter on average.

You do more than me now.

Yeah. So more than a city a week on average. But then I have some times when I'm home a lot, you know.

So I want you to take a picture of your luggage with all your stickers from around the world.

Yeah, that's the old school luggage. Right. Where we sticker everything up and. Yeah, not as much anymore.

Sports with all the security things on the back.

That's our new business. We'll bring back the old fashioned sticker luggage. How cool will that be?

There you go.

You heard it here live, everybody.

I think I've had 10 passports so far, you know, starting from a very young age all the way through life. And one of my cooler paths, two of my coolest passports with more stamps have been lost, stolen or lost to time, which is sort of tragic because it is such a. Like a record of something. I've been to 65 countries now, and my goal is to get to 100 in the next couple of years.

So it's a piece of your printed history. I know I had them on passport.

I'll ask about the map behind me. And those dots are many of the places I've worked. And so very cool, very cool nickname, the travel coach. Yeah, I've been trying. I've been really putting out in the world. I'd like two clients in the Bay Area that I could just drive to, so I spent a little more time at home. It'd be nice to have like half my clients in the same city. But Judy took a company public. She's done dozens of mergers and acquisitions. She's worked in particular in the whole green sector. So she's an all around badass. Judy and Daniel also members of the advisory board and kind of the core team of the coaches and stuff in Vern's world. So welcome to the show. Judy, what am I missing about your background?

Did I forget the hall of Fame? My favorite hall of fame, The Green History hall of Fame I was inducted into last year. Yes.

Wow, that was fun. That's awesome. And Judy's in Los Angeles. Yeah. Yeah, Nice. Where I'm originally from. Born in west la.

That's right, dude. West la.

West la. West side. All right, so we're going to talk through some of the news and that kind of thing. I'm so glad to have you guys on the show. First up, the notion that customers, not technologies, disrupt markets and that the companies that attack particular activities that customers do and find those that are ripe for disruption are the one and then deploy. Of course, technology is often against that. But Vern talks about, he's super excited about an HBR article unlocking the customer value chain and the notion that they steal a few select activities from their competitors. And I was thinking a lot about this, but he points that even Michael Porter talks about that differentiation also happens at the activity level. And what are the activities that are driving people crazy. And if you go and fix those, there's some opportunity for disruption. I was thinking in particular about how I haven't owned a car for more than a year now. I gave up. We used to have four vehicles in the driveway and around the house. And we got rid of all but one. My wife has one. And I now take Uber and Lyft. And every now and then I rent a car. But it's pretty rare. And I think that notion, I mean, it's certainly taken away from any taxis, but I didn't really use taxis that much. It's taken away from my car use, but I noticed we weren't even driving the cars. And it's certainly taken away from car renting. But sometimes I still rent a car. Right. Like, it is in many ways an ad.

I rent a car more now than before.

You what?

I rent a car more now than before because of time. You don't have a car. Yeah, but I travel so much that whenever I'm traveling, I'm with my clients or whatever. I go in an Uber if there's a city. I like to drive. I usually rent a car. If I could even know where to move myself.

I like to drive.

Yeah, I like to drive. And I rent a car because I like to drive.

Yeah.

Since we moved to Toronto, I sold my car in Austin before moving. Haven't bought a car.

All different kind of cool cars, too. Right.

Toronto has pretty good transport. Right.

But, hey, Judy, what you said is true. I was exploring this. Mercedes has this and Toyota has it. A monthly fee to Mercedes and you can use whatever car you want. They have all these cars in their. Should be whatever car you want. They have, of course, cars for this program. But you said, hey, this weekend I'm gonna go away with family. I want a bigger car. And this week I'm gonna be going to downtown a lot. I just need a smaller car. And you just change cars whenever you want.

Yeah. How fun is it? And, you know, I had a similar experience. And in the article, it referenced the hospitality industry. Right. Four season was kind of like a benchmark. And then, you know, Airbnb and, you know, I was thinking about it, not only did it affect that hospitality, but really the real estate market. A couple of years ago, we were going to buy a vacation home up in the. Up in the Big Bear area of California. And we looked at. We had actually put offers on three different homes. And ironically enough, each time a fire, right after we put our offer in, fires happened. So we're like, oh, my gosh, is this a sign? And we pulled out. But what we started to do as a result was going to the Airbnb. And we got all these incredible homes all over the mountains, tried different types. And all of a sudden I was like, how much cooler is this? We realized how much time we'd actually be spending had we bought the home and got neater, better houses, different areas that we probably would have never gone. It's the same kind of like very similar to the car. Now we get to try all these awesome houses on the mountain at a fraction, at a price because of that Airbnb model.

I like the article for two things that I thought it was interesting. The first one was people, not technologies, disrupt market. And I love the old Netflix formula. I don't know if you guys remember, we used to rent Netflix in a mail and they came in an envelope. Like the mail in the envelope has been in existence for 200 years. And that's how they begin doing a big, big disruption. And then from there, going to digital was just a logical next step.

I remember in the 90s, going to a computer show in Las Vegas and I walked by the Sony booth and this was in the early days of the Internet or the web. I mean, the Internet was around for quite a bit more, but the explosion of the Web. And I walked by the Sony booth and they had taken Sony artists and put them in a demonstration. And I clicked on a link in a browser and up came video. And that was like mind blowing that I could see video over the network. Instantaneous. Of course, now it's like laughable. I've got it on my smart TV and like I could put virtually anything on the monitor behind me in a blink of an eye. But when I saw it the first time, it was magic. It was disrupting that immediate access to everything. We think about how like cable TV changed the way we watched broadcast tv. And then now the on demand services and things like Netflix and Prime and so on are changing even than the cable industry in turn, click around that. And still we complain that there's nothing to watch.

Only 4,000 channels.

Actually, that's a really good idea, right for the next disruption. I'm total idea monkey. Is the problem of finding what to watch because there's infinite things. It's just you get so frustrated paging through stuff that you're like, is this.

Going to be just watching previews and previews and previews. There's so much to see. You spend an hour just watching previews.

You should be able to say, look, I want to watch a quirky, dark satire featuring Simon Pegg.

I was gonna say with a specific.

Group of or maybe not. Cause I know all those comedies, right? But something that would appeal to somebody like that and they start to show some of the stuff. But like, what does that even mean? Netflix shows me like my 98% match, but I have no idea what the hell that means.

Bill, just. Just wait. Give it three years and artificial intelligence will get into your head about what you're thinking of watching as you're thinking saying, hey, I'd like to watch, you know, a rom com with so and so. Next thing you know, on your screen comes up nine possibilities of the romantic comedies you like to be watching, right?

Which ones are good and which ones are quirky enough for me and like that kind of thing. But, you know, then there's also the danger of the other thing, right? Now that we look at our social feeds and our news feeds and that kind of thing, and we're being shown the things that are only aligned with what we already think and like. And so we get this sort of reinforcement loop hall of mirrors where we aren't exposed to and don't try on new ideas.

The thing that I loved in that article, I thought they were so spot on. It's really. Right. It's the customers that aren't being served adequately that really disrupt businesses and think about the activities that kind of tick us off, right? Whether it's first of all, like, you know, finding. Figuring out how to contact somebody, right? Just getting the information to talk to somebody. I recently had a problem with our Internet and I won't name the carrier, but it took me forever to get the right number just to identify what the problem was, right? So I'm thinking, who the heck can. Just like if you have a problem, like, boom, here's your sources, right? You know, an ordering process, you know, you want to order it. You know, making an appointment for something, right? Getting. Getting stuff delivery. One of the things I remember thinking years ago, and I was actually helped to kind of alter that industry a little bit, was hair cutting, right? Getting. Getting your hair done. One of the. There you go. Bill got his hair. Look at him. He got his haircut yesterday. And one of the things that always drove me crazy was what? Why don't particularly. And not just women, but I guess everybody. Because most activities, if you think big activities happen on the weekend, right? Big parties, weddings, anniversaries, birthday parties. Most things happen on the weekend. And yet for getting your hair done, all salons were closed on Sundays. And I'm like, what? That's crazy. Like 50% of the weekend is Sunday. So I worked with a couple of gals. This has gone back like 15, 16 years ago. And I said, you know, if you really want to disrupt, I said, you know, open on Sunday. And the first comment was, nobody's open on Sunday. And I'm like, bingo. But 50% of the weekend is Sunday. So guess what? Open on Sunday. So one of my colleagues, you know, gal who had a couple of storefronts said, rhonda, try it. Well, she couldn't fill those spots up. Next thing I know, she's like, Judy, I've got 16 different locations, yada, yada, yada. But it was just. It was something that really bothered me. And I talked to my other friends. I'm like, would you get your hair done on Sunday? They're like, yeah, but where do you get your hair done on Sunday? So just a little simple.

That notion of thinking from the customer mindset is so not. I mean, we all see continually the CEOs that tell us, well, you don't understand my industry. Exactly. That's my value. I'm here to challenge all that nonsense. That is the water that you swim in. There's a funny old story about a marketing breakthrough where a retailer in a mall of similar retailers, the guy to the left of them put a sale sign banner out in front of his store, and the guy to the right of him put a everything must go sign on in front of his store. And he's like, what the heck do I do? So he went and got a banner and he said, enter here.

It's not rocket science, is it?

What is going on in the mind of the customer?

And then you connect that with the second thing I got about the article. It said, focus in the things that drive customers crazy.

Yeah, that's it.

So you got it completely right. Yeah, crazy. If you want to go to a birthday party or something on a Sunday, like a family event, no one to cut your hair or do your hair. You got it.

Perfect.

So here is an exercise I do when I work on strategic planning. We're looking to expand the business. That's part of the exercise I do. I say everybody, and this is everyone does it separately in the room. I said, get your sticky notes out.

Right?

Our favorite sticky notes. I go list both from an internal perspective and an external. And we do a 10 for internal, a 10 for external. They can the 10 things that, as an employee, drive you crazy. Right. In your company. And what are the 10 things that drive you here all the time? And we kind of put those 20 things together. And we start prioritizing and then we go, great, let's start brainstorming these ideas. What are the possibilities to solve those problems? Again, not rocket science. And it's amazing the things that come out of it. And you know, Porter was spot on. It's just those. Look at Southwest Airline, right? Think about the boarding process of the plane, right? What happened was, it's right. It's the cattle call. Everybody's like, like physically jockeying position to get in the right. What do they put in an A line, a B line, you know, a 1 through 20, 22. Oh, my God. Now we have orderly border, you know, boarding the plane. Just really simple, simple things. Just again, you list the 10 things that drive you crazy as an employee. 10 things that drive your customer or your supply, you know, your suppliers, right? Your value chain. Go down the whole value chain and just do that exercise. If you could prioritize and chip away at those, boy, have you infinitely improved and made everybody, everybody happy and differentiated yourself.

Daniel, what are the courses and online offerings that you have at Growth Institute along this topic?

So the one that I have, there's two that I like a lot about. This one is Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations. And it teaches you the 11 attributes. And it just shows you how the companies have been going from linear to exponential and what change they've done to the structure. And going back to what you said, some of them are technology, some of them are not, are the way you see your business. And the other one is Kaihan's class. And Kaikhan is amazing. He gives you 36 strategies to do a strategy or 36 tools to do a strategy. And it's crazy on how to learn and observe and everything. So you go through a process of strategic planning with all 36 tools. Very, very powerful. So I think those are the two that most apply to this.

So Kaihan Krippendorf on the outthinker and looking for that fourth option, right? And then silly miss Mail and the exponential organizations, exponential scaling.

And then let's add in, right? Let's add in our face and our pace, right? Think about if you can just identify the functions and the things that don't work well and drive everybody crazy in those key functions and then drill it down right to the process level and you add all those up and boy, have you got a great business.

So not everyone that we work with has an opportunity to work with a coach. And that's why. Or does it suit them to have the coach coach everyone? And that's why we have the Growth Institute. So Growth Institute has online courses, video courses, the Master of Business Dynamics program, a whole range of things that you can use to educate yourself and your team in all things scaling. How many courses do you have now?

120, I think.

120. Yeah. So there's just like the podcast that we do every week. There's something there on every subject that you could look for. And by adding rich online learning methods in a great lms, you've got a learning management system, you've got an opportunity to really train your team. There's video content, there's worksheets, there's online groups. If you're in the mbd, where you can work through with a cohort and a coach online entirely to get through it. Maybe you're one of our listeners in a remote area and there aren't a lot of coaches near you. The Growth Institute programs are a great way to do that. And you're continually adding to it. With each new summit that we have, each new thought leader that comes in, you're adding in long and short courses to that platform.

And it was done precisely for that. How can it take? If I go to a conference and I see Vern Speak or Salim Speak or something and I want to drive that and that learning to the rest of my team, that's a perfect tool. The price and the format is done precisely for mid market companies all around the world for them to take it to the rest of the team.

Yeah, it's really great. Moving on. Vern talks about the soul of the scale up and the heart and soul of things, which I think is really, really great. I got into a passionate discussion with my wife Lori this morning about what is the soul and what matters most. In this July HBR article, Harvard professor Ranjay Gulati talks about the soul of an organization. And he identifies kind of three areas. The first is business intent and that's the notion of like, how do you plan to make history? What's your purpose? What's your bhag? The things in that realm that have people feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves. The next one is the customer connection. How do you get that loop, that connection? What's the customer experience like? The last one is the employee experience. He posits here that it's less about just fun and play and the quirky stuff as it is about giving them a voice in the organization, really hearing them and giving them some choice within parameters. Not like a free for all anarchy kind of thing, but with that which is really interesting.

Yeah, I love this article. And, you know, in years ago, I. You know, I used to always refer to it as, you know, the pulse or the DNA of a company. Right. Like, you know, when you analyze companies, I remember being in my 20s and being invited to go interview with a. A very, very large company that I really had a lot of respect for until I started to meet some of the employees from the company. And there was this constant thing. It was about competition, right? And, you know, you're speaking to somebody who played sports from the time I was probably five up through college. I'm a highly competitive individual. But this was like a really. The word that they used to use in the organization was cutthroat competition. Right? And that's. That's different, you know, when you're willing to do anything to win, you know, including cutting somebody's throat, if you will. Not figuratively. But, you know, I started, you know, I started talking to these people and I was like, oh, my God. That was. That was kind of the soul of their company. It was such an intense, like, win or die kind of, you know, mentality that I was like, wow, here's this company that, you know, on the outside's got this great reputation, but on the inside, when you talk to the employees. Employees, it's really intense. And so, you know, I forced myself just to go to see if that was really the case. And it was. I mean, from the moment you walked in the door, one of the first things. And I think Pat Lencioni, when I was talking to him, once had mentioned this about his experience in one of his companies. I think it was Bain when he started out as a young guy, was that nobody was smiling, right? That was the first thing I saw. I mean, like, I went in. There was just like an intensity on everybody's face. I mean, brilliant work they were doing, but there was almost like this, like, uptight intensity. And everybody that I interviewed kind of have that. And I was like, wow, that's the soul of this organization. And it was just. It felt so wrong to me and, you know, went on to go talk to a couple of other companies, and again, smiles, different energy. It was all about the team. It was all about the focus on the customer, what they were doing. Everybody was excited. So. So there really is. I mean, and, you know, the soul is even deeper than that DNA of a company. But it is such an important element. You know, I think a lot of people have a tendency to say, oh, that's the, you know, the soft stuff. I'M like, no, the soft stuff is, you know, the hardest stuff to really get right and to make sure, you know, let's face it, we spend the majority of our life, our working hours right, with this community, if you will, and if you feel like you're just in with a big business unit or a division versus a community. And I think that was really a big difference. I think when you get in an organization that really has a soul, you have a sense of community as opposed to being in a strategic business unit or a division somewhere.

So here I love story that Patrick Lencioni teaches in one of his books, and he said he's in a session with the CEO of Southwest Airlines, and they're in this auditorium and all the teams from south, they're doing these plays and all these things, like a cultural day. And they were doing plays and doing all this crazy stuff. And they've been sitting there for two or three hours and they're talking that this is a secret sauce of what makes South Australians Southern and Padrexoni asked the CEO and said, hey, why you think your competitors don't do this? They've done the discount flights on the same planes and everything, but they haven't done this. Why they haven't done this? And the response was brilliant. Said because they feel it's beneath them. The CEO thinks that those kind of cultural things is beneath them and they cannot do it. And they said, if it's not a strategy that comes from Harvard, it's not my time. I don't have time to dedicate to that. That's beneath me.

Not hoarding total enough makes the soul.

That's correct. That's what makes the soul of the organization. You're sitting down for hours and doing all the shows and everything with your employees and go to dinner with them and give them a hug. That's the soul of an organization. If you take care of your employees, your employees will take care of your client, and your client's going to be happy. If you don't take care of your employees, it's impossible to take care of your client.

And why wouldn't. I guess that Pat's response that was. You mean it's beneath you to have fun and for your employees to actually enjoy themselves each day when they come to work, Right? And look at we, you know, the second. Second topic we're talking about, we brought Southwest up both times, right? About the differentiating activities and now about the soul. I mean, you know, Southwest is a great example of having an incredible soul. And again, those People love where they work, they love what they're doing. I mean, and again, a real sense of a community they have.

So Gulati talks about how the soul dies in the organization. And we know that as companies scale, things change. We add people, we add systems, we add disciplines, we add layers. And in the process of that, it's easy to forget these things. And what he says here is that you've got to return to these three elements in particular and restore these. So the first is that the. The why of the work, the business intent, what are we out to do? What dent are we going to make in the universe? And why does that matter? And that's why doing the purpose work matters so much. And people get so weirded out about that. One of the companies, one of my client success stories I'm going to feature soon, that made the ink list after being flat for a number of years, was a company that was like, I don't think purpose is for us. And we spent, I don't know, it was about 40, 45 minutes with their team coming up with purpose. And when they came up with it, everybody was like, that's who we are. Right. And it was their creation. It was so beautiful and elegant and it could probably apply to a lot of businesses. And I maybe could have told it to them, but it was their coming up with it that gave them the ownership of it and made them feel like that's who we are versus somebody else telling them something, a consultant coming in or whatever. But they came up with, we keep the world working. And that was their intent. Right. And it was a staffing firm and they do work with interesting things, but it was both the employee and the company that are kept working because they connect them up and that critical glue. And that just felt great. They ended up putting it on the back of T shirts that they wore around the office. And so they were people centered in that one. So that's the first one, the purpose, the whole reason for being. Yeah.

And let me give a note going back to Salim Ishmael and expression organizations, of the 11 attributes, that was the only attribute that it was in every company that grew exponentially. The other 10 had an average of four out of the other 10. MTP was in every company they found. And then you go back to good to great. 30 years ago with Jim Collins, going back to the B hat. Every good to great company had a bhag. So they used to be called bhag. Now it's a little bit of a transition of mtp. I Still believe there's a big difference between MTP and a bhag, but that's how it starts with your North Star of where you're going to go.

I sort of feel like the purpose, right, is that never ending. You could be at work on that purpose for the rest of your life and you would never finish it. But it is something that you care about, right? Then the BHAG is just something pretty specific. And at some time horizon, I have like a 10 year BHAG, I have a 30 year BHAG. They're both things that I didn't know how to do when I created them. And now a few years later, it starts to be clear how I'm going to accomplish those things. Right.

So, Bill, to your point, because we hear this all the time about your client, I don't know if purpose is for, for us, right?

It was for sure that purpose was not for them.

So here.

And again, we purpose is making money.

And so here's an exercise I do when we, you know, and sometimes people are as blatant as you just said, and it's like, I don't think purpose is for us or otherwise. You know, other times they'll just kind of, they'll tiptoe around it without saying it, right? You know, when I realized, like, that's the underlying, like, purpose isn't for them. Again, I have them. We do an exercise and I really, I just keep drilling it down until I get the question. So, you know, I said, there is a purpose here. What, what is it? And eventually is, you know, to make money, right? So we go, okay, great. To make money. To make money for who?

Right?

Well, and then there's like a little bill walking on. To make, you know, to make money for the, you know, for the owners. Okay. To make money for who else? Well, to make money for us, the employees. Okay. And then, you know, you know, or the purpose is, well, you know, to get our health benefits, right? So all of a sudden we get up and that's another one. That's another bit. Well, we need health. It says to make money, health benefits. So I say, is that a reason to get really excited to know, you know, you're coming and devoting, you know, 50, 60 hours of your life every week to make the owners more money and to get health benefits. Is that enough to wake up every day? And I say, well, we have to. And I say, what happened if there was something more other than just making the owner money and getting your health benefits? If there was something more, if There was a greater reason or a greater purpose to come to work, and you found out there was another company that filled that need. Would you want to go to work for that company? Well, absolutely. Right. So all of a sudden they realize that, you know, what this purpose, there really is something behind it. You know, I would like to get a lot more, you know, and we'll talk about this in a moment. Right. About happiness and being engaged. Boy, if I could really find a company that there really is a purpose that I could believe in, align with. I love that. And that's why you see a lot more companies, especially with the younger people, saying, you know, what purpose really is important to us?

Right? Yeah.

Whether it be for the planet, giving back to the community, expanding my knowledge, the network of people I'm going to be surrounded with. So, you know, that really, really plays to the kind of the depth and the importance of purpose, I think.

The what and the how you make that money. What are you going to do to make that money? How are you going to make that money? That's where we go to the cause. Okay, so fine, then if that's the. Then shouldn't you. If it really is just to make money, why don't you leave this industry and go to one? There's always an industry that's making more money than you. Go start a flipping hedge fund. Right. Or go work for one.

That's a great title for a hedge fund, Bill. The Flippin Hedge fund.

The flipping hedge fund. Go for some private equity. There's always a way to make more money. It's definitely not more money. There's a reason that you love lawns or you love whatever you do or staffing, or there's a reason, there's something about it that you cherish if you're any good at it. All right?

And you see that there, you know, and it will, you know, this is part of it, too. It's as much about the purpose as it is as, again, the connection for the customer and then the experience for the employee. And it's, you know, if you think about it, those three dots line up perfectly. It's like the purpose and then there's, you know, and part of that purpose is because it makes that customer so happy that they only want to work with you, they only want to buy with you, they only want to be involved with you. And then that dot connects to the employee who's delivering that extraordinary sense of connection and happiness to that employee. That again, that it drives them, right? And then that fuels into you Know, that creates that soul and they have that energy where it says, you know, I really want to wake up. I'm really, really excited about going to work, working with the team that I'm working with, you know, performing the activities and the surface or bringing the product I am and, you know, delivering it to these customers, like, who just can't. I mean, you really see that connectivity of all those dots.

This is the purpose or the key task of our leaders. Right? It's your job to communicate this. The fact that it's in there in your head, bouncing around or unconsciously or consciously. It's your job to get it out there. Especially if you want to scale when you articulate it and repeat it endlessly until the point where your employees can actually do a bit, can create an impersonation, a characterization. They can make fun of you delivering that message. You're beginning to do a good job. You want it to be that repetitive that kind of goes into the next one. The customer connection. Then your whole marketplace wants to know who you are and what you stand for and what makes you different and what you care about. These companies like Nike cited in the other, that has this great customer connection, but also is great at reminding people of what they're passionate about, is a great example of that. So we got to remind the customer about what we actually care about. But then we also have to accept back that feedback that hear from them on how it's resonating, where it's working like that.

So, Bill, you just prompted a recent memory that was. It's perfect. I'll bring it up. There's a company that I've been advising for years, and the name of the company is called Aquascape. And they're a company, they're based outside of Chicago, St. Charles, Illinois. This is a company that they develop, they design, they manufacture water features, all sorts of incredible water features, commercial consumer fountains and this community that has been built. I mean, when you hear that term, drink the Kool Aid, they would drink the Kool Aid, they would bring the koolaid, they bring the Kool Aid to other people. Then the name of the guy who created this all over the loveth, his turtle as a kid who started this business is a guy by the name of Greg Wittstock, who is incredible. And so two weeks ago, I was doing a keynote talk for them at their big event called Pandemonium.

And one of the opening sessions, Pandemonium, the branding of everything.

There were about 600 contractors, you know, retailers, designers there. And again, they drink The Kool Aid and the opening segment was, you know.

That'S a reminder of the Jonestown massacre.

Right, I know, I know. But where people die, we've used that term to say, you know, people will.

But like create a beneficial cult, not a bad cult. Have people be part of your cult, fully embrace it, right?

These people are zealots for all incredible anything. Anything to do with water feature design, installation and maintenance and protection. These people have it. Anyways, what you said that prompted the thought was the opening scene was about a six minute video that, I mean, there was gut laughing and crying. It was a spoof on Greg. Greg is this intense, crazy, kind, you know, wonderfully crazy person. And they had six or seven people, customers and employees imitate Greg, right? And they just had Greg spoofs and they just had the guy down pat to the point where they had everybody laughing. You know, this company owns a space in their industry. People live die by them. And one of the things that they do is their whole business. And I told Greg and Colleen and the team over there for years, I said, if you look at your business model, your business model is very biblical. Your business model is teach a person to fitch. What they really basically do is not only do they provide them with all the tools and everything, but they basically teach these people how do they grow, grow their business, give them all the tools and then just unleash their creativity. So that's their purpose. And again, their customers are zealots, their employees are zealots. But it's just a great example of really having that extraordinary soul of an organization and having that, you know, that intent, that customer connection and employee engagement. And again, when you said, you know, you can make fun of, you can spoof. They did a great spoof on Greg at their pandemonium event this year.

You know, this losing the customer connection that goes to. They clearly have a way to connect with them through a very like direct one on one or by creating a gathering like that. But as you think about the scaling and especially as I contemplate jumping on an airplane today, I had trouble checking in yesterday and I went to to make a phone call and I was preparing myself for spending like an hour waiting to connect to someone, right? And that recording that says your call is important to us, please. No, it's clearly not important to you. If it was important to you, you'd hire enough people at the right time to actually answer the thing instead of playing me that message. The fact that you have to play that message is an exact reminder that My call isn't really in your. Rather I didn't talk and write. But anyway, that's not what happened. What happened is somebody answered the phone right away and I was like, hello, Turkish Airlines? And I was like, wow, a person mind blown. Right? Now I count on having the like super inside bat phone connection to the key partners. You know, I have like a special connection at Marriott because I spend, you know, more than 100 nights a year at Marriott and I are in their related properties and I fly a jillion flights on Southwest and Alaska and some of the other airlines. So I get. But this is like a carrier that. I don't think I've ever flown Turkish Airlines in my life except today and this week. And they're partner airline, right? They had the deal on the business class for me. So. But I. And I wasn't even calling a special number. It was like the, like I literally was mind blown. And I think this is one of the places where we really lose it. As we scale. We've got so many things and so many, and we start to do the math on how many we can afford to lose. When you think about that, that's exactly how Rackspace, who went through the old birthing a giants program and who said to Vern on stage, look, here's how we grew and sold our company for over $8 billion, is we came to the program, we heard what you said as our coach, and we just went and did it. It's so revolutionary, right? Like actually do the things. And it's not, we're not sharing as coaches the things that we thought up or invented necessarily sometimes. But mostly it's things that we heard and observed in other places that make sense.

What I think that a coach is very important here is when you ask, clients are usually first in their purpose, what they're going to do. They usually see on their perspective. And it's our role to bring the questions for them to see the client perspective. And that's when it's magical. I tell the client, it doesn't matter what you think or what I think is what your client thinks. So let's go back to the data and then we get the data out like Judith said earlier, and the data tells you what the client really wants and what the client is asking for and just go back and fulfill that data.

You know, we have so customer connection, right? Most of us will implement Net Promoter score in most of the companies we work with or some variation on that, but it's usually around some kind of. But the companies that relate to that merely as a metric are missing the point of that. As a system of staying in touch with customers, Identifying the people who really love you and connecting with them to leverage them as promoters, Identifying the people who really hate you and figuring out what do you need to change and how can you save them or should you even not be dealing with them? Are they off target for you? Right. That whole kind of thing. And then tying into that things like 4Q conversations. So these are intimate, in depth, open ended conversations. Another like bane creation. Right.

And let me add something here, something I learned from Dan Sullivan's musical. Dan said, a lot of people come and tell you, hey, you should change this in your business and you should do this and you should do this. And then at the end, okay, great, I'll do it. Give me a check. I said, well, no, this is not for me. I just hear advice from people that write me checks. If you change this, I'll write you a check. Change, give me a check. If they give you a check, perfect. If not, don't hear to that person. So it's really, really important that you just hear the people that write you a check. Because I've heard a lot of my clients that they're hearing the haters. Everyone has haters online, everything. And they're doing that, but they're not giving you a check. They're just putting noise on the network. Just hear from the viewer, write your checks and do whatever they say. You're busy and do great.

Yeah. Actions speak louder than words.

Bill.

Two things you mentioned before prompted a couple of other things, ideas. You're talking about your experience with the getting to the Caroline Serious radio, which I love.

Right.

And so, you know, you, you know, you kind of pay an annual fee. Short story, apparently, you know, my card, the, the expiration date must have been off. And so I get this note saying, you know, it's time to renew, but you know, the expiration date. So the name of the name of the group is called Serious Listen Care. Right? So I call the Serious Listen Care number. So of course I call it. I'm on for 13 minutes. The first time, hang up, I'll get back to them again. Three times. A third time. So I'm like, obviously you're not listening. I have a very different definition of the word care. Right. And I just typed them this thing. And you know, five minutes later I get a call. I said, why does it take 3, 3 interactions of your listener care division to solve this problem? Right, yeah, that was one of those Activities that really drove me crazy. The other one you talked about our good friend Jeff Hoffman of Priceline.com, right? And talking to him, what did Jeff do? At one point, Jeff tells a story about when he was in line at the airport. Big line, you know, everybody was in line just trying to get their tickets. This is when, you know, everybody like had to go up to the counter, deal with the ticket. And all of a sudden, you know, it was getting later, people were getting angry and Jeff kind of yell from the line, is this really, you know, this is taking this long just to get our tickets processed? So what did Jeff do? He went and created those great little kiosks, right? He said we should be able to use, you know, something to solve this problem. Like, you shouldn't have to wait in line just for somebody to say, check here, you know, your tickets, okay? You're. You're checked in. And what did Jeff do? He created those simple little kiosks for now. You don't have to go there. Boom, boom, boom. You're this handle again.

One of those things that's an activity level pain point. Going back to our other.

Yeah.

And then the last one is the employee experience, right? What is it that makes. And what Galati here talks about is it's not like giving them massages and silly things like that, but finding a way to engage them with giving them a voice, having them feel a part of something, not simply a cog or a pawn in the process and some room to maneuver within their job, too. Add their contribution, right?

And I would add, I love that, giving them a voice and a choice, right? So, and that's, you know, that's such a big part, you know, about, about employees being happy and engaged. It's like, you know, tap into them, right? Tap into their head and heart. And I always like to say it's not only give them a voice, but, you know, allow them to show their heartbeat. What's really, you know what I mean? It's gotta be what's in their head and what's their heart that really make them passion and then give them the opportunity, right? The choice really comes down to that autonomy. Like, if you think it's really great for the organization, for all the stakeholders, the community. And I know we're going to be talking about this with the Business Roundtable, right? If it really has a positive impact and great value across our value chain, then do it. So I added to that voice and choice was also give them the beat. Allow them to show that. That heartbeat, that soul that's so much a part of the passion of who they are that's really going to make that employee engagement the ultimate experience.

So for me, that's all about culture. And culture is for me everything. And I heard this phrase the other day that I really, really liked is that culture is the second thing every company sells. You first sell your product or service. The second thing you sell is your culture. If people like to work with you, they will buy from you. They like working in the company with you, they will stay for longer. It's all about culture. Just to keep employees happy, clients happy. Every people around, we have the three groups of people that we talk on the one page. Customers, employees and stakeholders or shareholders. You have to have those three groups of people happy. And what puts them together, it's the core values, is the core purposes, what we do, what we do, all of those kind of things. And that's an experience. And as the article said, it's not about putting a ping pong table. A ping pong table could be a part of something, but it's not just putting a ping pong table. Like I've seen a lot of companies that there's a ping pong table and no one plays it. And I was like, why not? Because your boss gets mad. If you're playing ping pong, then why you have the won the medal, right?

If your boss isn't willing to get out there and play it with you, then there's no point.

That's great, right? And you're sponding.

Right?

That culture has everything to do with that. P the people side.

Right.

And what do we talk with Vern about all the time? And what does Vern say? Right? And he's so spot on. It's like people don't join or leave companies. They join or leave because of people. Right? It's all about the people side. They join, they leave, they buy, they engage or they don't. It's all, it's all because of the people side.

One of the ways that we align our long term things, the heart and soul, the why of the work with the people and with the key metrics that business intent is with software align today is the software that we've used purpose built now to integrate all of the strategy elements that we have, including that long term intent, with what the employees are doing on a regular basis. And we even have in there a feedback loop. So in the beginning we worked with paper and often when starting with a client, I start with paper to get some of the elements in and Then people started doing things like spreadsheets that they shared around. But a purpose built tool like Align Today that neatly dovetails with our platform of scaling up is the best way to do this by far. And we have companies with hundreds and even over a thousand users in Align Today where they get everybody integrated and we've got the feedback loop as well as what do the employees have to say about stuff and can we see what they're doing is connected to the oats. So Align Today, check it out online and you will find it there is the best way to do this. In addition, with Align Today you can activate a trial even after you've done that, which will open a sandbox account and you can go and see what does the one page plan and the rest of the tool look like populated with some existing information. So if you're again trying to self help, we've got tools like the Growth Institute and Align Today that help you integrate these things together. Aligntoday.com, my clients use Align Today. Do you guys have any of your folks, your teams on Align Now?

Several of my clients, absolutely. It's a great tool. It's obviously transparency. Everybody sees it's very efficient, it's easy to use, it's a great accountability tool. I mean it's a wonderful tool.

I usually tell clients if they're not willing to use a tool, any tool.

Align or anything, just use something.

We don't work with you because we know it's going to be ten times harder to do and it's much easier for you guys to run and for us to help you run with that.

Plays to the whole execution side, right. Those are those tools that it makes it so much more efficient and to execute on all these great ideas that we talk about. Right. So the ideation is wonderful but if you can't execute on it, you don't know where fast.

Well, I have a thousand person client right now that they don't necessarily know what's happening. They see the end results but they don't know if the plans are well aligned to the company plans and they don't have the leading indicators. So we're now beginning to to implement a line in that company and connect it to the other systems which I think is really useful. Vern shares another interesting factoid with us in the thing that at first he presents it as a random and amusing thing. Why is it that most Egyptian sculptures have their noses broken? And so I read this and I love all obscure facts and I can spend hours on Wikipedia lost Following one thread into another, which I guess is not a normal human thing to do. But it occurs to me as I read this that understanding the things, the little quirky things, that is revealing to a culture. In this case, it turns out that grave robbers would break off the nose of the sculpture to kill the spirit of the figure so that it wouldn't haunt them. Right. And if a left arm was broken off, that's to prevent the spirit form from giving. If the right hand was breaking off, that was to prevent them from receiving alms. And it's just kind of hilarious. And yet I think that there are lots of quirky things that your company does that might be useful to know and understand why they.

I'm curious what Washington, a big city, might look like in the future. My goodness. With all our statues and monuments.

But yeah, even the grave robbers go after it, right?

Yeah, yeah. Right. But no, that was. Yeah, that was interesting. It was, you know, because so much of those statues were a reflection, right, as you said, of somebody who was either giving, wanting to give, wanting to receive, somebody with power. So if you could break the arm, the nose, the leg, whatever it was, and it could prevent that spirit from going after you. So interesting little tidbit there.

So going back to our people and our engagement as you scale up, right? Our clients added hundreds of employees last year across all different departments across the country. Well, mine anyway. And I know collectively our clients added many thousands of employees. But what is it that leads to engagement and retention? Is happiness actually important? And what are the practices that do? There's this thing. He cites an article here from the founder of Emplify about driving lasting results, creating a flexible, responsive, engaged culture, a collaborative culture, and writes about that. And he'll be a speaker at our Scale Up Summit. Right. Which is coming up in. We do two of these a year. The next one is in Anaheim in October. Now, here's a little tip for you, if you're not already. So whether you're working with a coach or not, you should register Two full days of great, engaging, thought provoking, inspiring thought leaders in the world of business. Plus a little bit of play, but a deep dive on growing your business with real takeaways. Our best teams will show up with at least two and usually a couple of people so they can bounce ideas and reflection off each other. Some of the best ones show up with like 10 leaders around the table and really look for what it is to apply that goes beyond the basics of scaling up and is part of what we all love about that so scaling up summit now. If you're already working with a coach, register, indicate your coach online there and that coach may have a discount for you. If you're not working with a coach right now, here's your secret insider tip for the listeners. List myself or Daniel or Judy as your coach and you'll get a little discount for whatever we have for our coaches. So there are some still tickets available and even I believe some hotel rooms left. So it's worth to register now. That's coming right up. What are we about six weeks away now by the time this comes out, maybe less by the time this podcast is released.

I was going to say not only use our names, but make sure you introduce yourselves to us and tap into.

So you could sit with, talk. If one of us seems a little more fun than the other to you, then put that person's name down. You could be seated at our table and spend some time with us. I think it's really important. I was talking with somebody yesterday who's looking at a coach in my city here, whether or not they should. And I'm like, they were asking who they should choose and why. And I said, well, I don't know if you should choose me or not, but you should really seriously think about do you like talking to me or do I drive you crazy? And there will be some people who love my sense of humor and style and other people who don't. And if you don't, you like, you should find the person. If you're going to spend a couple of years working with them and hearing their counsel on things, you really should find that you enjoy talking with them. Right.

It's one of my qualifiers with working with companies. Am I going to enjoy the team I'm working with?

Right. Or do they drive me 25% of.

My decision and vice versa, are they going to enjoy working with me?

Right.

Bill, you just said two words before. You talked about both being responsive and flexible in relation to this article. What does that go back to what we just talked about? Being responsive has everything to do with voice. Flexible has everything to do with choice. Again, here we continue to connect those dots. It's so important to be able to have a voice and to have that autonomy and choice. And here it is again in another follow up article.

We have such great things and one of the things you can do for your people is educate them, whether it's at our summits, whether it's with the Growth Institute or the weekly lunch and learn what is it that you're going to do to engage your people, to give them something where they're continuing to grow, grow and develop.

Let's talk a little bit about education of the team. There's a couple of very important things. The only way you could grow 10 as your company is you grow 10x your team. And it's not in quantity, it's in quality, mindset, tools, everything. And here, of course, I'm bios. I am in education. So let me start with that disclaimer. But when people said, well, if I train them, they're going to go. And I'm like, yeah, but what's the alternative that you don't train them and what's going to happen?

They will stick around More expensive.

So if you think hiring an expert is expensive, wait until you hire them a and that's going to be way more expensive. The same thing happens with your team. Keep them small, don't grow them. They're going to be ten times more expensive. It's like going to medicine after you get cancer or be treating before so you don't get cancer, whatever, right? The training before, it's 10 times less painful, cheaper. Everything after is just you don't care how much you have to pay after that same thing with training and the mistakes at the end cost you 10.

Times more and more. To your point, Daniel. And the bottleneck starts at the top. I always go to the executive team for I'm like, what are you guys and gals doing? What are you doing about getting 10x better? It's not just the people that work with you lead by example, right? And so I said, try to embrace this culture of being. I use the term learn a holic, right? That's what you need to be. You really need to become this learnaholic and it's got to start at the the top.

I went to Birding of Giants for the first time in 2000 and I think I've read one or two business books ever in my life before. And when I went to I was a really bad student in college, so I really didn't care books and I thought it was not important. Then I became entrepreneur and went to birthing of Giants and I realized, wow, I had to read like eight books in two weeks before going there and I just got hooked up and then all this happened. Probably a book a week for last 19 years and has significantly changed my life.

I tried to do two a month, but.

You do two a month. I do a lot of audio books on the phone. I travel so much every time I'm on the road, I go mountain biking or whatever.

Just yeah.

A combination of the audible and readers are leaders.

I probably lose 30% of the book because I'm distracted or something. I still get the 70 or 80% that is worth it. So it doesn't matter that I'm losing a small bit there.

One of the other ways to train your folks are with our scaling up workshops. So if you haven't taken your team, you haven't worked with a coach yet. If you're just a listener of the podcast, find a workshop and don't just go alone. Take one or two or more of your folks to the scaling up workshop and get started not only with the hands on experience of doing some of the basics of the scaling up work, but also seeing kind of some of the methods that the coaches use to facilitate and bring alignment to the team. So let me just rattle off some of the places that we've got scaling up workshops going on right now. Coming up, Adelaide, Scottsdale, Portland I'm leading one in San Francisco probably next week by the time you hear this. Atlanta, Los Angeles Sydney Woburn, Brisbane, Oklahoma City, Niagara, Boca, Boca Raton, Ann Arbor Costa Mesa Sydney, Waltham, Mass. Dallas, Lancaster, on and off Hartford, Connecticut, Louisiana, British Columbia Melbourne, Sydney, Scottsdale, San Diego. Like we have them all the time everywhere. You could also hire a coach to come do a private one or two day workshop. I usually recommend folks to do a two day workshop to really dig in a little bit and then you can get it really customized. But we have these public ones that are so cheap to attend, right for they range like 400 to 600 bucks a seat for the day. But you can get a very immediate return. Like we said, we've got one coming right up. You can register either at Scaling up and find links to them or scaling up.com or you can go to my website scalingcoach.com for ours in San Francisco September 12th. Vern told me just do three a year on the same date every year. So I committed at his urging and request. And so we do them and they're usually pretty intimate affairs. It's not a big group of people. We usually do them at a sponsor office most of the time at one of our banking partners or law firms and like a great chance to dive deep with your team for a day into it somewhere close to you. Right. Being in San Francisco though, I get a lot of people who come in. I have a guy coming into our next workshop from India. He's like, well it seemed like fun to go To San Francisco. I'm like, all right, come on down. Glad to please.

On the fly for a four day, four hour or like, how long is it?

He had another meeting as well that he was going to come to, but, you know, I'm flying to Bahrain, so things we do don't always make sense.

There you go.

You're flying for an EO thing.

Yeah. I'm leading one of the couple of meetings around our EO accelerator program. So we run an early stage program around the world in partnership with the EO Entrepreneurs Organization. Collectively, the coaches do work with EO was born of eo. We do a ton of work with YPO and Vistage and groups like that around the world. So for eo, we run an early stage thing getting people over their first million, and we do a subset of our work in that especially curated and applied to the early stage companies. And I think while my regular coaching clients are much bigger, I work with that program. What I love about it is the vitality and the enthusiasm and the creativity and the innovation that I see at that early stage. There's very frequent ideas that I get from those groups that we talk to that then can be applied back to the bigger companies in some ways. So I really enjoy working on it, even though it's different from the sort of the core of our listeners, our clients and so on, but room for a lot of passion.

I love those small companies because of that energy and because of that soul. And they don't often say, they don't have the experience to say that's not possible, that's not possible.

Right.

To them, everything's possible when they're small and young, which is wonderful.

Well, and sometimes the guys in that program, gals are like, well, why do we want to hear about Rackspace? That's a multi billion dollar company. Like, dude, they were just like you. They came up through eo, they launched, they qualified for el, then they got in the birthing giants. Then it took this framework to get them there. You want to be that? Yes.

They were a blank piece of paper.

Yeah.

Let's not just study the company that's running at 5 million. If you want to get to 1 million, let's study the company at 8 billion and see what they did every step of the way. Right.

And the nice thing, going back to that choice, you take the same steps whether you want to get to the 5 million or billion. It's just you decide how many people and how much revenue and profit you want to create. But I mean, the methodology, the Steps are going to be the same. I always tell people it doesn't matter if you're big or little, you still focus on the same things to grow your company. Just how big you decide, you decide the choice that you have, how big or small you want to remain.

Well, in partnership with eo, we have these things that get you to your first million and then we have the coaching and stuff that helps you get to 10 million, 100 million or even a billion and beyond. We have the Growth Institute that complements that. Along the way, we've got our coaching, our scaling up summits. We've got a whole range of these things to help you. Because it's not just one tool that you want to build. Whatever, pick your monument. Right.

For me, scaling up is a framework.

Yes.

And then you add everything on top if you really want to scale your company. But first you have to have like this, like. How do you call it? You're a sailor, Bill. Sorry, with my English. What's the thing of the boat?

The hull. The hull, yeah.

Like scaling up is the hull, right? And then you have a sail and an engine and everything on top to really take it to the next level. But if the hull has holes, then you can move really fast.

Well, it's the hull structure, right? You've got the rigging, the standing rigging, the running rigging, you've got the sails. They all have different names and parts because they play different roles. And we can't just say, pull on that string, right? You wouldn't want your neurosurgeon to get in there and say, just cut that little fleshy bit. You want to have very precise language to control and shape the world that you're operating in. And scaling it gives you that. But it's also cool in that it's not just the wisdom of Vern Harnish or any one guru, but it's a living framework that gets added to by all of our thought leaders, the coaches, even. The beginning of it, the Rockefeller habits that Verne penned in the beginning was his distillation of what he learned reading Chernow's book on John D. Rockefeller, Titan. So he read that 800 page book so that you don't have to. And then he distilled it down into the 10 Rockefeller habits that began the work and went into. I have our binder from the birthing of giants here, when our business went through with my business partner and lovely wife all those years ago and has evolved and continues to evolve to this day. And that goes to connecting with Our customers articulating massively transformative purpose. Getting our why down, creating the bhag and engaging our employees.

Intent, customer connection, employee engagement. There you go.

All right, moving on. Something that kills us all on a regular basis. Email. Was it a mistake?

Depends on what day you ask me, Bill.

I like love, hate. Sovern cites a New Yorker magazine article by one of our past summit keynotes. The past speaker at the summit, Cal Newport. Tracing the history of this asynchronous kind of communication to the tubes at the CIA headquarters. You know, companies used to have, if you're old enough or you watch some old videos, tubes that would go around and we would see them in like hospital environments. So they put something in and they'd get routed around the company and there'd be a place where they do them. But that notion of that I'm going to send you a message and you're going to send me a message is kind of crazy in this day and age. It has its benefits, but it gets in the way of an awful lot of things. Right.

It's funny, you still see those tubes, right, when you go to some of the pharmacies, right? The drive up pharmacies or even like banking.

Right.

So they still have the tubes where you put it in.

Yeah, I don't know of any anymore that I did go to that have the tubes, but I can't say that I've done a drive up bank in years.

I had to do something a couple of weeks ago and I was shocked.

Right.

But yeah, they still have the exist if it was a big bank too.

Big bank, drive up, put your paper in the tube and the teller's sitting over there and it goes away. Yeah, I used to remember going to the hospital, pharmacy, things like that. They would have that. I remember some government buildings having that kind of thing. But then we do that today, we shoot off things. You can't retrieve it once it's gone and there's no real time things and the amount of energy back in the forth, which goes to one of the key things that we do, and I just started it in the last six months with a newer client and they were blown away by the power of the daily huddle.

Right.

Cutting through all that real time face to face, just for a few minutes a day. The daily huddle is something that's transformed more teams. It's interesting, Vern, and many people talk about how it's transformed Silicon Valley, but you know, working here with lots of companies, one of the things that strikes me is that. But what works well for developers is not always embraced by the management. So sometimes I bring the daily huddle to the leadership teams and if they didn't start as developers, if they started on the business side, they don't immediately get the daily huddle until they try.

And again, there's the old adage again, the bottleneck starts at the top. Same thing. When I start working with clients, I'm like the management, you guys have got to start the huddles first to see how they work, leave them, get excited and then, and then pass it down to the company.

This newer client I have has got daily huddles now running throughout the company across all locations. All across the US Most of a thousand people are now engaged in daily huddles. And they're like, oh my God. What's transpired is that we actually hear little tidbits of things that people are dealing with and then organically we find ways to work together better and to help each other. It's just really exciting and outstanding. The difference of that 10, 15 minutes.

Makes it provides transparency, focusing on what's important, eliminating obstacles, right, boom. And moving on. I love the daily huddle and Quite honestly say 15 minutes. I think the average daily huddle that I get involved somewhere actually between 8 and 10 minutes. It's amazing what you can accomplish in 8 or 10 minutes in a day. And again, it takes out all the excuses. I didn't know, I didn't understand, et cetera.

Hey, here, let me give a. How do we see communication internally in the company? We rarely use email internally. We use Slack or we use WhatsApp or Daily Huddle. Of course, we always have a daily huddle and the real meetings of the weekly, monthly and everything. So internally, we rarely use emails. We use all the collaborative tools, so the Google on the cloud, on all the Google sheets and documents and everything. And then with clients, we use email a lot. I think the client doesn't want to be bothered during the day. They want to be able to do it on their time. Like the best time for me to respond to email for clients and all that, it's at night. Sometimes I put my kids to bed at 8, 9 and then I get into my computer for a couple of hours and that's when I like to do it. Or I wake up early morning, go and do my exercise or whatever and then at 6, 7am sit down my computer for a couple of hours, just respond to emails. So I think email, it's really, really powerful. I think it was a great invention. But I Think now it's getting into everyone's life. The amount of emails I have in my inbox, we are responding is just crazy.

Now, do you have clients? I have clients ask me to join their Slack channel and I'm like, oh, no.

Internal stuff.

Yes.

Yeah, but not for clients. Like, there are people that have been putting groups of people in Slack. Don't do it. I don't do it. I use WhatsApp for groups.

Right.

With clients or networks. I just like. Just for internal stuff.

Yeah.

Daniel, talking about the number 128 billion business emails on a daily basis. That's insane. And the average user gets about 126.

Right.

So think about it. Think if it only took two minutes to respond. Right. Do the math. It's a big chunk. So, Bill, back to your question. Email, do you like it? Like it or not?

Yeah.

With parameters.

Right.

And that's why I love that, you know, five, five, you know, five sentences, one mail, you know, per topic, right. Be fast, clear, concise, transparent, boom. Don't be all over the place. So it's easy to process, you know, Daniel, to your time. Don't be on there all the time. Kind of set up times during the day, like what it might be that I'm going to spend, you know, 10 minutes in the morning at this time, in the afternoon, at night. Right. So, you know, I'm going to do a total of, you know, whatever, 15 or 30 minutes in an entire day, but it's going to be on my time and my dime. And again, train, you know, and train the people, your community too. Say, you know, one of the greatest questions you can ask anybody is, you know, how do you best want to be communicated to, you know, what medium do you want to use? How do you like to be communicated? And again, whether it's a Slack or an email or a text, Right. That's one of the great questions we ask because somebody might say, you know, you want to get to me, I'm a text person, Send me an email, leave me a voicemail. But, you know, as it relates, if, you know, if it is email or text, what are the parameters that you want to use? And when you can kind of understand that, you know, with the key people in your lives, their communication strategy, you know, it really simplifies things and makes things much more efficient. But I find too, people are constantly checking their email every, you know, every. Every 10 minutes. It's crazy. Pick times, be, you know, be precise. There's not too many things that you can't say in Five seconds or five sentences. And as it says in the article, if you need, you know, if you need more, then that may warrant the call. And if it's always warranting a quote, there's something you must be doing that's not really efficient. So think about the process that you're, you know, you're using.

So I do some informal equivalent of this Tim Ferriss five sentence kind of thing. But I find that not everybody, that some people find it off putting because my emails can occur as curt or terse, like, please do this, please send this. I'm doing this, FYI. And they're not, hey, how are you? I miss talking. It's like, look, I'm not managing our relationship by email. And so sometimes my assistant will send emails on my behalf and add in that language. And I'm a little torn about it. But I'm also weak in the whole relationship management quadrant, right? Like, I'm good with persuasion and influence and dominance and strategy, but the relationship stuff, I'm a little weak on.

Bill, you're spot on. I remember working for a big company back in 1998, being selected as a chief marketing officer, part of my team, this one woman who was a brilliant, you know, she was our data compilation person and she was incredible. But every single email she wrote was a storybook, right? So I'd have to like read this narrative to get to like the two.

Or three long thing. And I want to reply tl Dr. Right?

And so, and so I would shoot these like one, two or three sentences. And I remember she found me after a couple of days. She was like, Judy, like, you know, why don't you like me? And I said, where did this come from? She's like, well, your emails are so short. And I said, I said, and I told her, I said, your emails are stories, they're storybooks. I said, you need to. I said, I said, we're all time star, right? I said, you need to synthesize it to the essence of what you're asking. I said, when I read through your stories, there were three questions you asked, right? And so we talked about it and I kind of pulled it up and I said, what did you want? You know, I said, here's what I thought you wanted the answers to three questions. And she's like, yes. I said, did I answer your question? She said, yes. I said, but I. So I didn't need to fill in all the other things. And I said, that's what eventually you need to get as well. And eventually she did. But it was, you know, to her it came across as being, I didn't like her, I was being curt, I was being short with her. And I was like, that's exactly what I'm trying to get to you. I said, I'm trying to get you to be concise, stop thinking short, meaning I'm sliding you, meaning concise and efficient. And it really kind of changed the communication style for the better.

It is transactional, right? It is very transactional. And, and maybe it's that the person has a need for the connection and communication that's different and that is less transactional. You might think of it as more feminine as well. And maybe that's better served not in email. Maybe that's where you have a lunch or a reception.

Bingo. We had that discussion. When is it a face to face, when is it phone call?

Right?

When is it a text, when is it an email? And understanding that, understanding the application of the communication.

I think the other thing is that's really useful to do, and I've seen people do this a few times, but is that with each form of communication they're give and take, their pros and cons, that kind of thing. So when I send off an email, there's very little inflection, flavor, tone, facial expression like that. When I talk to you, there's a whole world more that you can hear in my tone, my volume, my cadence, everything like that that I'm not going to hear. And it's real time. So there's give and take. Text or email can be so misunderstood like that. And I see people trying to solve things by text and you can kind of get a pattern of it, but it's so easy to misread. And the best demonstration that I know of is some version of this where you write a sentence on. You ask people to read it out in their mind, emphasizing each word at a time. So you emphasize the first word and the first read, and then you emphasize the second word and then you read it again, you emphasize the third world only. And then the fourth. And the sentence is some variation of I didn't say you were smart.

The game of telephone, right? The old game of telephone, the sexist.

Version of it is I didn't say you were beautiful, right. Which I probably heard more. So I didn't say you were smart. I didn't say you were smart. I didn't say you were smart. I didn't say you were smart. I didn't say you were smart. I didn't say you were smart. Each of them Has a slightly different thing with the emphasis move. Right. And there's such mischief and upset potentially with all of them. And especially because everything that we hear and read and receive as communication we perceive as being about us and we think entirely. And firstly about what does this mean to me, for me and for my concern, my survival, my success. Right.

I was going to write a book a couple of years ago called Birthing of the Emojis. Because my theory is this is why emojis were created, because of inefficient communication systems that we have where add a.

Smile or a wink.

Exactly. To that point it's like, but if I put that wink right, like that emoji just.

Oh no, he means poking around or.

You know, or the. I don't know how I think about this or the happy face. So I'm a firm believer that, you know, the emoji was birthed as a result of people not being able to communicate as great. And so that's kind of the visual solidifier. Just like in case you didn't understand what I was communicating, there's that little emoji to put it in place for you.

It's funny. And yet that also can go far. Like, I get emojis today from younger team members that I work with and even from my adult kids. I'm like, what does that emoji mean?

I don't know what that one is.

They're doing something. Something's coming out of their eyes. I'm like, I'm not clear. Are they laughing, crying?

So that's the sequel. That's the sequel. Misunderstood emojis.

Misunderstood emojis. There should be emoji translation tool. You could spell them out.

I think we created like three or four new companies to, you know, because the activities that aren't. That aren't being that are frustrating all of us.

Last item up for our show this time around is really great, brings it all back around. But it's been gotten quite a bit of coverage lately. And that's the Business Roundtable 101. CEOs and members of the Business Roundtable signed a joint statement saying that corporations should no longer value shareholder profit above everything else. And a Fortune article details this 300 word statement. In essence, it says that we've got to balance the needs of customers, employees, suppliers and communities. And it's funny, this whole thing has been pooh poohed in the past. Eco, sustainability, balance, stakeholders. And yet if you think about it, it's the conservative approach, right? That addressing and thinking about all of the different people that your company touches, preserves and protects the value of whatever it is that you're creating. If you do something out of balance, you set yourself up for a risky proposition in service of some short term objective, putting something else. So it's like grabbing something, but then you end up screwed in its simplest form.

And we've been talking about this today, right? It's about the community, right? Identifying the community within your business and your organization and take care of all of the members of the community versus taking care of one member of your community, right? If you were publicly traded, it was all about the stockholder, right? If it was privately, it was about the owners or the principals and the customers only. And again, to me, this is the perfect, the perfect solution, right? Identify who's a part of your community, how does each and every member benefit, and when you can do that, everybody wins. And again, and this is going back decades and I remember being in my 20s and two specific incidents with two different. One was a publicly traded company that I worked with and one was a privately traded. And I remember that really bothering me, right? And just being like, it's all about the stockholder. And then I remember, you know, kind of walking back to my office and being like, well, what about the employees? Like, what about our value chain? You know, what about, what about everybody else? And you know, and having like spirited discussions around it. And the way I finally got around it was I just used the word stakeholder to kind of include, include everybody kind of internally.