172: Scaling Up Insights — Coach Panel with Roland Siebelink and Cheryl Biron

Foreign.

Welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. It's another panel show on the show with me today, Roland Seablake and Cheryl Byron.

Hi, Bill.

Did you say Byron or Barone?

Baron. You know, French Canadian.

French Canadian, sorry. So they're both awesome, beautiful human beings and fantastic coaches that I've gotten to know more over the last few years. So I'll start off with Roland because he's on my screen right there. So Roland's actually an award winning tech startup CEO. He was a former client, so he and I worked together. He was like an internal coach at a very large company that I coached for a while and then became a coach of his own because he's an all around badass, really smart guy. He focuses entirely on the tech sector. He's the author of a book, Scaling Silicon Valley Style Volume two is coming out later this year. And anyway, Roland, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Bill. Much appreciate the invitation. Yeah.

And Roland still speaks four languages, right?

Yeah, you know, I do business in four, but dabble in a few more.

I grew up speaking four languages and I'm barely understandable in English today.

Same here.

And Charl Barone is now living in South Florida, right? Or Sarasota area.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. On the west coast.

On the west coast. West coast. But is a got a mix of entrepreneurial and business background. So she's a Wharton mba. She worked for P and G and some others and then she became a CEO. And she's still a CEO of a company. One horn. But she used the rock habits to exit her regular operation of the business, her day to day stuff. Became a coach now and it's just doing fantastic. She wrote a book, Hot Tub Manifesto. She's named the 50 Best Women in Business by NJ Biz. And her business today is Lexagen. Anyway, we'll talk more about that later. Welcome to the show, Cheryl.

Thank you very much. And I speak French too. So just two languages over here. But.

The first two languages I spoke were Spanish and Swiss. German beyond English. Right. So I grew up, born in la and then I learned that. And then we lived in Barcelona for a while and then in Zurich, so we spoke that funny German, which Rowan knows all too well. And that's a language I can hardly understand today. Like I can barely do anything. But Spanish comes back when I need to order a beer in Mexico or I spend a couple weeks in Barcelona. And then Hebrew I learned later. And actually Hebrew is the strongest language for me today besides English.

Wow, that's interesting, right?

It's not what you expect from a guy named Bill Gallagher.

Bill, my theory is that all of this is buried deep down in your brain somewhere still. And when you need it, it'll come back to.

It does come back. Have you noticed though, do you ever mix up languages?

Oh, absolutely. That's why I was not that clear about how many, because for me, Spanish and Italian is actually one language in my head. And so when I'm in Italy it moves more to the Italian accent and when I'm in Spanish speaking countries moves more to the Spanish side and confusing for everyone, but they understand me.

It's funny you say that similar for me too with Italian and Spanish because I know kind of resort Spanish and opera and food Italian.

So what an interesting combination.

Over the years, I've done a lot of things for bragging rights that were uncomfortable and painful. One of the things I did is I read Dante's Inferno in Italian and I, you know, but so I found a book with side by side text and I would like force myself to read each page and like, yeah, I don't recommend that.

It's good to grow a little bit older and not have to do that stuff anymore, right?

You mean to be confident about who I am and not have to create stuff to puff up my own ego.

Excellent summary, Bill. I love it.

I don't think I'm that grown up yet. Oh, and Cheryl, you still haven't kicked the habit? You're CEO of another business while you're coaching still.

Yes, yes. And so our business, One Horn Transportation, is a freight brokerage. And so we have freight agents around the country. They do sales and dispatch and we run the back office using the software my husband, business partner Louis Biron wrote. And so because that software is so efficient, I get to work less on the business, less in and on the business and more on the coaching side and help to help other companies grow. We 10x and then 20x our business and now it's really fun to help other companies do the same.

That's super awesome. I think that's really great. My last company, what led to my being a coach was really aggressively implementing the habits. And the motivation for me was the fact that my kids were hitting an age where we said that we were going to travel more. And I just like at that time I couldn't get away for a whole week from the office. But I got really committed and then we took a month off and went all around Italy with the kids and.

I never went back you know, that's such an interesting story, Bill. And I know you told it to me before, and ever since, I've been asking the CEOs we coach, how long can you get away from the business without things imploding? Right.

And if they're French, the answer is months. Right.

The answer in the beginning is maybe five minutes. That is an amazing metric for them to start focusing on and say, okay, can we at least bring it up to an hour and then a day and then maybe after half a year, they get to a week where they can take their first holiday in years.

Yeah.

On our side, we decided to become entrepreneurs when our kids were 4 and 7. And I read a book called the Millionaire Next Door and discovered that I could get the freedom that I did not have in corporate life by becoming an entrepreneur. That's my Simon Sineguay freedom. And so we also read the Four Hour Work Week and several years later, packed our kids up and moved our business to North Carolina for two weeks and ran it out of there, which is really fun.

That's really interesting. You know, I look back, so I did a little bit of corporate work and then a lot of entrepreneurial work. And I look back on some of my friends who spent their whole lives as corporate execs, and I'm like, oh, your life looks so much easier than mine. And I would say in general that that is maybe true, but I had more control, so picking and choosing where I was going to throw and like, being able to, you know, I had to deal with all the breakdowns and I was always responsible, but. But there was a difference there. Right.

In the end, it may be. Appeals to different kinds of people, for sure.

Yeah.

Profiles or Myers Briggs profiles, whatever you want to call them.

Well, I. So I was an entrepreneur before. An entrepreneur. Right. I started a unit within another company and even before I had done that, I started like, special projects. I was, you know, I like starting stuff. If you look at my. Not Myers Briggs, but my, like, Gallop strengths activator is one of my. And command. Right. I like to be in charge.

Yes, sir.

Which has its pros and cons.

It's interesting you say that, Bill, because also as a product manager, brand manager, it's kind of like being an entrepreneur. You know, your brand is your company, and then you have all the resources within the company to grow that. So in retrospect, I realized I was quite entrepreneurial even back then, too.

Yeah, I worked for Sprint in those days is probably my biggest corporate thing. And we had product marketing and market groups and market segments. And I started a segment or a group because the products were then used by multiple groups. They weren't in that world as sexy like they are in a packaged goods business. It was better to be on the other side where you had budgets and more control. Money, follow the money. So that leads us actually to our first item. Raj Sisodia, past guest of the show. We've had him on talking about conscious capitalism and purpose led companies. He's co founder of conscious capitalism with Whole Foods founder John Mackey and he's co author of some great books on the topic. And he's got a new book out, the Healing Organization. Verne writes about it, who talks about aligning multiple stakeholders, customers, employees, community, shareholders in a purpose and values driven company. Something that we start with, I think every coach starts right in the first session. Purpose and value centered stuff. And of course you guys all begin there, don't you?

Yes, yes. The core purpose, core values. Because it really sets the foundation of intentionally creating the culture of the organization.

Yeah, I like it also as a bit of an opposite driver, if you will, to the shareholder value mindset where it's all about just profits and return on investment. Ultimately, we know that doesn't really motivate anyone below the executive team. And so especially when things get rough, as I think we'll talk about a little bit later, it's so good to be able to fall back on what's the true purpose of this business and how can we relate to that, to overcome these adversities.

So I had this come up actually just a couple of weeks ago with one of our clients who were like, no, the purpose of the business is making money. And I didn't choose to have that battle, but I'll be coming back to them because that's a common fallacy. I think the purpose of the business is not actually to make money. Make money is a scorecard and is an indicator of company health, shareholder value. And making money is a weak driver. Right. Is a weak purpose, a weak why statement?

Yeah, but it's gotten so much prominence in the last 20, 30 years, it's almost even driven, like our political storytelling. I think what this really chimes with me here is that it also points to dimension that we've lost a little bit, which is a dimension of community, of all being in it together, of society, if you will. Connection also in the political realm is now being brought up again as like that's what we're missing in this hugely divided, partisan society that we don't think of ourselves as communities anymore, just as individuals.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, so the head of our coaching organization today, Anna, a lovely human being, John Ratliff, was the CEO of Apple Tree Answers. And it's a case that we use a lot. And John didn't even, like, fully implement all of the rock habits, as he's glad to admit. But you could tell when you spend a few minutes with John. I spent most of a week with him this summer at a CEO summer camp. We did a summer camp in the Poconos for CEOs and entrepreneurs, and it was super fun. But you could tell when you hang with John that having a beer and talking with friends is what he cares about. And John. So it's a call center business, right? And their turnover rate super, super high. And John, by shifting his attention to caring about people, the human beings, and not just in a surface way, but in a way that they really, who they were, was able to turn their employee turnover to 18%, which was a whole different kind of thing than that. And then, of course, sell for a gajillion dollars. And John has a very nice, very fast airplane that he flies around. So tail number, that's the exit.

I have a couple of clients who say their purpose is, you know, one is to help others succeed and grow, and the other one who has a really good just belief, is that they want to make sure that people become better by working with them. And so it's really all about the community within the organization and helping people develop as individuals and not just making money for the company.

I also think it's related to how developed you are as an individual. I might use the word enlightened, but that sounds really over the top, pretentious. Well, let's just say if you think of the stages of development, typically people start by taking control of their own life, and then they start caring a lot about what do others think of me? Maybe a little bit too much, like in adolescence and in early adulthood. And then you have this like, really driver mentality. Okay, it's all around me, but I can make a huge impact here. And it's only the fewest. I would say that, then reach beyond that level and say, it's not about me anymore. It's about how can I help people succeed. Just like Cheryl was saying. I probably can say we should be proud of ourselves as coaches. Of course, we've all reached that last level. No, just kidding. The mindset change that I also see in some of our CEOs, are they still really focused on what am I doing? How am I impacting everything versus now? How do I care about the people around me and how can I make their impact optimal? Is a huge shift for many people.

I was thinking about that as we got ready for the show. The term consciousness is one that's bandied about and it can be pretty pretentious. Right. But if we pull it apart and it also can be kind of nebulous in meaning for people, they add to it whatever intention and meaning. But so if you deconstruct it for a minute. So conscious, well, what's the opposite of conscious is unconscious, unaware. And I think of the proposition there about caring for all the stakeholders. So if I just bring awareness of the needs of all of them and the balance where I and my company sit in relationship to all the people and stakeholders that we interact with, and then what you're speaking to, I think, is I'm aware of myself and my needs. Like, I spent a lot of my career pretending like or acting like I didn't care if you liked me. Like, that was a core thing. I would walk around like, oh, like you better respect me and you know, that kind of thing. And I midlife, I kind of had that insight that it was an act. And I really did want. I want people to like me. I want people to think I'm cool and attractive. Right. I want people to want to be my friends and I really want that attention. And I know, like when I give a talk or lead a session, like, I want the praise afterwards. I want to hear that I did good and that people liked me. Like, I really want that. Pretty straight about it.

I think deep down we all do.

But we act like we don't.

Well, you know, and that acting like we don't, I think is also that there is the healthy route to, oh.

I'm above all that.

Right. Moving, moving beyond that pure peer pressure mode that we're in in our adolescence and early early adulthood, where all that matters is what your friends think of you, right?

Yes.

I think it's healthy that we try to move beyond that. But probably in a first step, like, you go very black and white and you're like, oh, I don't care whatsoever. And that's also irrealistic, I would say.

So I think what you're pointing to is really cool in that Conscious capitalism, a conscious organization begins with a conscious leader, and a conscious leadership begins with self awareness. Take a look in the mirror.

Yeah, definitely.

Although that's usually not the way we would start coaching someone right?

You know, I usually let people know in the sales process that they will have to change and evolve, and if they don't, our thing will fail. And that my experience is at least one in five of you will quit the process because it's uncomfortable.

I do have something similar. Absolutely. And a big due diligence to see how coachable people really are.

Yeah, I like to see how coachable they are. It's a very good point, Rol. And also if they're learners. And I find, you know, like, my best relationships are with clients where we're sharing back and forth ideas and reading books together and, you know, that kind of thing. And so we're all growing together even too, at times. And they like the openness and the fact that I'm a lifelong learner, but I like it about them, too. And so, you know, really getting them to share their learnings with me, I share my learning with them, but then they also share it down the organization.

Yeah. And this is actually a great illustration of how with a different mindset, you can appreciate that your client brings you a book you haven't read because we're all growing together versus a coach who might be a little bit less sure of themselves might say, oh, no, the client read a book before I read it. How's that possible? That's my job, you know, to read the books. And you would feel you're insecure about it. And I think. I think that mindset of let's all grow together, let's be joyful about people developing themselves further than I could even have brought them is amazing.

You know, though, I don't dig when a CEO, like, challenges me on stuff and they're like, well, that's not what that said. If they want to debate or get into like a whole. I'm like, stop. I'm not trying to be right here. I shared something because it seemed relevant. Use it or don't. But I don't want to debate you.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Like, I found. I found sometimes you. I sometimes bring up this thing that actually comes more from, I guess, the area of marriage counseling than from coaching, which is, you know, it's more important to be kind than to be right.

Yeah. I've told my kids that even too, you know, like, in terms of winning and letting other people win or, you know, just if people make a mistake or say the wrong thing, you know, not to have to point it out and be the. Know it all. All the time. Yeah. And so being kind and not fighting the Correct battles too.

Yeah. I'm wondering, I keep running into this more like people wanting to be right and how that can be so destructive for team relationships in a scale up as well. Where do you think that comes from, that wanting to be right? Is that education or is it just our culture or inbred human?

I think it starts early in life. I think it starts well, there's dominance or not dominance. Right. And like you're much nicer human than me, Roland. Probably both are much nicer. I'm way more dominant and can be nastier, I think, than probably both of you.

Well, I think where it comes from also is, you know, if you're getting to people who are at the leadership team level, they had to be pretty dominant to get there. And so they're used to being right and they've kind of beat out everybody else that's below them to get to that position quite often. But the smartest CEOs, in my opinion, are the ones who don't have to be the smartest person in the room. And they surround themselves with people who are experts in the different areas. And those are the more enlightened types of people who are more self aware. And those are the ones that are much easier to work with than the ones that have to be the smartest.

Person in the room.

Well, we see that, Roland, in some of the companies that we coach, especially in, I think some of the tech cultures where the intellectual debate, like frustrated kids who were the smartest in their class who then find themselves in a culture of everybody else and like out of survival, desperately trying to see if they're smarter than everybody else or prove it or something like that. Like that gets a weird dynamic in some of these companies.

Yeah. I actually also think part of it comes from engineering school in particular, where they are very used to debating, like what's the right approach to do something which is important in engineering to have these core debates before you start building. But in management discussions, that enormous focus on being precisely right can just be so damaging because you lose months and months, if not years of trying to move forward with the decision just because you're not sure yet that you're absolutely right.

You know, the problem that I have with that right wrong thing.

Right.

That right wrong thing is that you're speaking to is it's binary and it's moralistic, it's absolutist.

You say right. It's absolutely about dominating someone else too.

Yeah. Versus optimal.

Right.

Or workable. Like this feels like a more optimal solution. Not right or wrong. Not best, not even better.

Yeah.

Sometimes I say, look, we're not in a scientific study here. The standard is not scientific truth. The standard is plausible.

Right.

And with that we can already move ahead. You know, it's very, very uncomfortable for people with an engineering or a scientific background. I can see the PhDs in the room cringe. Typically.

Well, but even if you, if you, the PhDs and the folks who are scientists by nature or like more eggheady on the engineering spectrum, you can just go to a higher level and talk about observation and subjectivity and probability versus Right. Schrodinger.

Absolutely. They love those discussions. You have to be able to speak the language a little bit. You're right about that. That appeals to their level of intellectual discovery. You know, when we, I don't know if you guys apply the advanced insights tests in your business, sometimes the assessments, values assessment in there and almost always when I work with a tech company there's like a CTO person who's the big technical visionary. And almost always their value system is entirely focused on theory. I want to understand it better, I want to learn more. And so their value system drives them to keep researching, researching, researching, Never taking a decision.

Uh huh. Because it's always an analysis.

Typically crazy because they're like highly driven by results, economics, profits, revenues, whatever. They have just promised their VCs and the CTO doesn't want to take a decision. You know. So that co founder deep dive is something that really is necessary in many tech companies to try and bring them to a similar mindset.

Well, we're segueing into our next topic, next item in the news which is really the value of people with more and more economists and CFOs forecasting a recession to sometimes hit it is a matter of time. Things go up and down. The depth, the nature, the hardness of a recession, how it shows up, up, what industries get affected, what is exposed, things go up, things go down. There's a lot of talk about what do you do, do you clean house or do you not clean house? But in an article that Verne shares this week or a couple weeks ago actually with Detroit based DTE Energy, that what they did was go to their 10,000 employees and ask for help. Like lay it on the line and say look, this is what we got and we need your help to work more creatively differently to shift things up. And that company was able to create a substantial turnaround within a year. Right. And I don't know if you, what your guys experience has been with your Own and with client companies in recessions. But it's a topic that's coming up more and more, right?

Yeah. Last time before the Great Recession and when it started happening, one of my clients actually went to their team because it was a small to medium sized kind of business. It wasn't as large as that business, but they did not want to have to lay anybody off. And so they all agreed to take a certain amount of cut in salary for a certain period of time that they would ultimately get paid back when times got better. And then also people wanted to take like a longer than normal vacation. They could just take it without pay and that kind of help them. So they were all in it together and they just. It was a service company that, you know, it's in market research type of thing. So you know, they all have to. It's very intensive of people conducting focus groups or different kind of research. And so it was very people driven and it was a real team that came together and figured out how they could keep the company successful during and make it through the recession and keep everybody keep their jobs basically. But also the company healthy.

Yeah. In Europe that actually was something that was almost managed sometimes more at national level, especially in Germany by many of the trade unions when the financial Crisis hit in 2008 and all of these companies were facing the prospects of layoffs. But trade unions and the employers organizations often came up with that very same model that Cheryl just outlined. What if everyone has a slight pay cut and combination with fewer hours worked. But it's amazing how quickly that compounds to bringing the company back into profitability. People have a little bit more time to do some other stuff for a while, which is usually also a built up demand that they've had for many years. And then the big advantage was that all these people were still on the payroll when times started getting better. So you hadn't lost all that knowledge. And I know for a fact that between Boeing and Airbus, where Boeing really laid off a lot of people when the airline crisis hit, of course Airbus kept a lot of these people on the payroll with about maybe 20% less work for a while. But as the market started improving, guess what? Who was selling the most airplanes and had the best knowledge? Right. It's very hard to then rehire someone you've just laid off a year or two ago, if not impossible, I find.

I mean we all deal with people issues all the time. But whether you're laying someone off or letting someone go because of a fit or performance issue, if you have a lot of regard for their humanity. And you treat them with a great deal of dignity and respect. And you're not demeaning of them. Not like, you're fired, you're a loser. Get off my team. But, like, look, this isn't working out, or we just don't have the business right now. And I know that this is going to be hard and this is stressful. Like, with compassion for their world, you get sued a lot less. And some of those people come back to work with you. One woman that worked for me for a number of years and I laid her off in early 2009, approached me, took my hand and said, I'm gonna pray for you, and if you need me to come and work at night for free to help you get back on your feet, like, I will help you. Oh, wow. You know, that's such a beautiful human being. Now, that wasn't the only one. But the understanding, the partnership of people, even the people, like, in that time, I laid some people off, I asked other people to take some unpaid time. I asked people to take cuts, but I took the biggest cut. Right. I went without pay. But my landlord gave us huge concessions. Business partner suppliers gave us terms and things back. But because we were honest, we were humble, like, we said, look, we don't know what's going to happen. And that last business was highly recession sensitive. So every time things went up and down, we would feel it very hard. But we came sailing back out of that because we treated people with dignity and respect. And then we took all that savings and we focused on what was relevant, innovation. And in particular, we use the swt, the sweat tool that we have today. So we looked at what are we actually good at and bad at.

Our.

Core and what's happening in the world, where are things going? And those little indicators, not just from our industry, there were definitely some there, but globally gave us insights into what products to focus on. And because we were small and nimble, like, we introduced stuff that quickly became top sellers.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. Especially that you highlighted that your landlord and the stakeholders were flexible in their terms. Because that really connected back to me to the previous topic about the healing organization and being aware of all your stakeholders. It sounds like if you took care of all of them in the past, now they take care of you.

Absolutely. And there were some that could give us nothing and some that were indignant and for sure we took business away from them. You were a jerk then, you know, right? Like, fine, I'm going to shift it over to that guy. I mean, people did beautiful things with us that I will never forget. And it gave me a lot of faith in humanity right in that phase.

The other thing, if I may, Bill, what struck me when you said we were starting to focus on what we were really good at and where we saw potential for innovation in the tech world, it's typically not so much driven by the overall economy, but more by, okay, our next round is not coming through, so now we have to make pretty radical cuts. And my experience has been as soon as you do a layoff, that business is going to have a really hard time getting back on its feet. There's no such thing as tech turnarounds. Typically, what happens much better is when they indeed go in that route and say, what are we really good at? How can we focus on that? In terms of the money, of course, they do need to make cuts, but typically what happens in a better way, I think, is if they can make some of the compensation more variable. So along the lines. But Cheryl said, let's start with the lower base and maybe you get it back over time when times improve or even have more people get part of the success. But a lower base, in terms of what are we actually conquering in the marketplace, Is all the stuff that we're doing actually helping us sell? Is it helping us keep clients? And so not so much individual targets, but team and even company targets about everyone gets back more of their pay when we are doing well and even beyond what we were used to earn.

Well, one of the favorite stories of Pandora founder was early on they ran out of money. But people were so committed to this idea of the music genome and creating these services that helped you discover and enjoying music that they work then for free for. I forget the details now, but I want to say it was a couple of years and so his core team was working for free and then he got in a bunch of money. And so he. But people didn't know that they had. They got this big, big round and so they gathered people in the room and had a meeting and they handed them all checks with all their back pay. He's like, that was the most enjoyable moment of my life. He's like, yeah, I now have a lot of money. And that changes quite a few things in life. It does make a real difference. He said, but that's the satisfying thing when I was able to make those people right, you know, absolutely.

We can go back for a moment. I mean, Bill, you mentioned about, you know, taking the sweat tool and looking at your strengths and your Weaknesses. And then Roland, also I think you mentioned something in that direction. Right before the last recession with our company, our transportation company, we made our first pivot from being a trucking company to being a brokerage by taking a look at what our strengths were. And our strengths were more back office business running strengths versus having trucks and being able to run out there and repair them if necessary and that kind of thing. And so we sold off all our equipment right before the Great Recession happened and pivoted to a brokerage model where we ended up just hiring carriers, trucking companies, to pull our loads only when we had loads. So it was a variable cost model versus a fixed cost model. And that was something that helped us to then really change the direction and the growth of the company because we were able to then outsource a lot of things and be able to make sure that we were profitable through the recession time and then moving forward to consider that business model to then get that hockey stick growth in the future with another pivot later on.

You were an early version of an Uber like platform, Sheryl. It sounds like.

In that time there's a lot to learn in looking back at something like that. One of the companies that I was on the advisory board of in those days was in one industry, heavy industry, and, and they saw their demand, like in our fashion jewelry line, plummet overnight. And what they did, they used a similar process to the sweat tool, not exactly, but roughly analogous, a little more informal. And they sort of, they capped their costs, they controlled their costs really, really rapidly. And they realized that that business would eventually come back, but it wasn't going to be. So they had to weather that transition. And then they pivoted to a whole other related industry, leveraging their core business capabilities and funding and things like that to move into a really different but complementary kind of business that they knew would also only last for a little while. And they made all kinds of money in that time frame because they looked at what's happening in the world, what is going on, and what piece of it could we take advantage of right now? Where could it create value for people? Right.

That's kind of like that curve ahead, the David Power thing, where we keep looking for where the next curve is going to be for your growth and where the pivot's going to be and the trend part of that is especially important.

So here's the thing that I like to tell folks is that after the recession hits, we're going to want to update the sweat tool. We're going to want to do at least a session or two where we deep dive on that. But there's not a lot of point in doing it now because the flavor of it, right, the where and how it hits is not going to be known until that's true. So the planning to do now is to create some scenarios for significant, like expense cuts. What could you do to trim your costs or to improve the cash position? Now is even better still, can you get cash? Because if you have cash or access to cash or when the economy tanks, you can go on a buying spree. You can buy up competitors and equipment and lines of business and things like that. John Ratliff did that and has talked about that. They used bank financing, bank debt, essentially an acquisition line of credit. Line of credit is normally for operating a stable business. They were instead using it to do acquisitions. And in 2009 and beyond, their bank came to them and said, you guys are awesome. We want to give you a line. We want you to buy more companies faster. And they went and they did quite a bit of their scaling in that time period, which is just genius, right, to think about. If you could scale with bank debt with confidence, the reason you wouldn't do that is because you're going into some unknown business. But they were essentially buying other call centers, applying their practices to them, bringing them into the fold of their way of operating and their culture, their values and their people practices and changing the results pretty rapidly. Right.

It's also a very, very known model in the commodities industry which always has huge swings based on the economic cycle and where the strategy is all about how do we keep our cash dry until the next recession hits and then we can easily consolidate and buy up all these distressed assets. Right?

Yeah.

That's why I think scenario planning really works. Really became big in a company like Shell.

So if you're listening right now for our listeners, right, and all of our client CEOs, the thing that you want to do is make sure that you're not highly leveraged in the next bit, like get some room to breathe, get some cash freed up, be ready, because there will be opportunities there for acqui hire, aqua growth, that kind of thing.

If I may be able to add to that. But be careful with the projects that you invest in now because the return on investment on something that may be there next year if a recession hits may be far bigger than the risky project that you think you need to invest in now because you need to keep driving your growth.

Right.

And the other area is also zero based budgeting. I Mean, apparently there's an industry where private equity was trying to get in and buy a larger corporation and they thought there was a lot of fat in those budgets. And so now a lot of the other competitors as well are gone to zero based budgeting.

Yeah, it's interesting. This, like get, this is the thing to do to get ready, know what the move is after, and get ready now by making sure that you're not being really wasteful in an up market. As things have been growing, it's easy to have a lot of, of wasteful expenditures and that kind of thing. So look at your subscriptions, look at where things have creeped up, look at all of that kind of all those growing expenses and figure out how to trim that back now. Pare down your inventories, get rid of underperforming equipment and things like that.

And that could go with the theme, you know, like a quarterly theme for a company. Have everybody try to figure out where they could cut 1%. You know, we have the power of one tool. We have the quarterly theme tools and stuff like that. And so to get everybody to pitch in, I've had a client, you know, do a quarter where everybody had to try to find some place to save some money. And everybody started getting really creative and made an impact.

Other story, if I may, Bill, comes actually from the media industry in London in particular, but I think New York adopted the model as well. Were also famously very, very sensitive to the economic cycle, right? The advertising cycle. And so they've basically made it a habit to pay people very, very little, but give them lavish expense accounts. So all these, you know, 20 somethings that join an advertising agency or a newspaper or whatever online project there is these days basically are proud to be able to take their friends to lunch. That's even encouraged because that's how they get more stories, right? More business. They can go drinking all the time. They can even expense trips that are partially business, partially private and all that stuff. But when the recession hits, it's so much easier to make a big fuss about expense accounts having gone out of hand. Okay, we need to cut everything down with 90% easy, right?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Versus the salaries you cannot even touch. 5%. Right. So they've really been adapting to the economic cycle that way. Very low base salaries, very lavish expense accounts because those you can control much more.

That's a really good, I think about this whole thing. So I have a buddy right now who by the time this airs is probably sailing back into San Francisco and he's been out sailing around the world. We did a show with Randall Reeves some months ago when he was down in the Southern Ocean sailing around Antarctica. And he embarked a year ago on a solo sailing journey around the world to circumnavigation. So around Antarctica and around the Americas.

Wow.

And not nonstop, but fairly continuous solo in a sailboat. Right. And as you follow his blog online and his posts and things like that, you can see him preparing for each storm. So if there's a storm expected which may or may not hit you hard, he gets ready. They batten down the hatches is the phrase which means you close up the vents and you tie things down and you secure things in the cabin because you're gonna get walloped in ways that you can't fully anticipate. Right. So you get ready for that and you rest up. You do extra like, you make sure you're dehydrated and underfed and under rested before that storm hits you because you want to be ready for it. And that is really the spirit of we're talking about, is getting a little bit ready now, and then there will be room to react in the middle of it. Right.

I love that analogy. That's a powerful story, Bill.

Yeah. It's funny how in sports invention, like, we can learn from other areas, industries, pursuits, things like that, ideas that apply to our own world in business and use them again and again.

Right.

Getting ready for it. So moving on, we talk about focus and that. So John Bancroft, president CEO of Charlotte, North Carolina. Morris Jenkins was mentored for years. Dewey Jenkins, and he wrote a book about it. Mr. Jenkins told me it's a great title, Right? It's so evocative. And he said there are these two questions that were at the heart of his mentor's lessons. How can we give our customers a better experience? And what could we eliminate or make easier? Let's remove the friction points so that doing business with us is effortless, happy and fun. So experience and friction. And that is a lot of what we talk about, right. In scaling up in the rock habits is how do we focus? And what are the questions that let us focus on what are the right priorities?

Yeah, on the first point, the better experience. I see a lot of companies adopting design thinking processes, which is all about that customer experience and trying to optimize it. A great story that came from Airbnb in their early years was starting to think of the experience of being in someone else's apartment and what, especially what the host would do to make you feel comfortable and so they said, you know, you arrive and the host gives you the key and says, where all the. All the utilities are and stuff like that. That's probably a three star experience, right? That's kind of what you expect. How can we make it a four star experience? They asked their teams, and then they said, well, maybe if the host gives you some tips where you can go. And also maybe there's a bottle of wine on the table.

Right.

For you to enjoy. And so the fact that now in almost every Airbnb there's a bottle of wine waiting for you actually came out of that process. But it went all the way to. Okay, what would a five star experience look like? Well, maybe the host would take you on a tour and then a six star experience, maybe the host would have organized a party in your name and they went all the way to seven and eight stars, I believe. And obviously that's not realistic to actually build that. But the point was, by stretching people's thinking into an ever better experience, it was much easier to get them to accept, yes, we can do that. Bottle of wine. And now they've launched this whole business of organizing little excursions when you're on your trip, which came out of that design thinking exercise.

Yeah, well, I hear in that, could you systematize something, too? And I'm reminded years ago of visiting a Ritz Carlton property that I'd never been to before. And I arrived and I was welcomed in. And as I arrived upstairs, they were like, welcome, Mr. Gallagher, would you like a glass of Merlot? Or whatever it was, Right. But it was like they knew that I liked red wine. Right. And they welcomed me with that. And we've got a great room with a view for you. They know I like a view. You know, like that kind of thoughtful touches. And then as I arrived back, and then I was there for a couple days, I came back a little bit later, and now the valet, like, greeted me with the car and remembered my name.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Wow, that's. How did they do that? Like, you know, but you could. You know, it's funny, like, all these call centers today that we call up for and they. They all repeat the lie. Your call is important to us.

Yeah, not really.

Clearly not. Because you'd be answering with effing person if it was important, not a machine.

You're back to your Ritz Carlton story. It wasn't the Ritz Carlton, but sometimes when you check into a hotel, often they want to see your id And I have to be checking in on My birthday all alone. And soon thereafter, they sent me a bottle of wine and some fruit and cheese and had the whole front desk staff sign a card for me for my birthday.

That's amazing.

And it just made me so happy because I was all al and, you know, just getting that extra, extra mile there, going the extra mile. And so we try to do that also in our, you know, our transportation business, thinking of our customers as being both our agents and then also the shippers, the people who are our customers in terms of we need to ship the goods. And so being able to make doing business with us easy so that the customers can have freedom. You know, my Simon Sinekwia, like I said earlier, was freedom. The customers have freedom to not have to worry about the loads, but they can just do all the other work that they need to do. But then the agents also have the freedom to live the life of their dreams by being able to work from anywhere. And so trying to have that agent experience be so seamless that they can book their loads from the soccer field or from their phones from the beach and move like we moved to North Carolina for two weeks. And so really trying to make that experience wonderful. And then the agents then turn around and do the same thing for their customers. And then the carriers, who are the trucking companies that they hire to do the loads. And so all this customer experience thing and making it easy is definitely something that helps to build. And also it goes back to that whole thing about the stakeholders, too, making sure all your stakeholders are satisfied when working with you.

You know, in the Rockefeller habits, there's two pieces of input we're looking for regularly, right? Customer input and employees employee input. And while most companies have a little bit of customer input, a little bit of employee input, it's usually ad hoc and accidental, and it's rarely systematic. And so we end up focusing on the noisy people and not necessarily the most valuable people or the most important. And yet, one of my favorite speakers ever at a conference was a former ER doc who used to talk around, and he said, you know, the thing I learned from being a doctor in an emergency room is that the noisiest one is not the one you need to pay attention to. The noisy one has good vitals. Now, they're in pain and they're noisy, but they clearly have okay vitals. It's the person dying quietly in the corner that you need to be worried about whose blood pressure is dropping, whose respiration is challenged. Right? They can't make a lot of noise.

That's Right, Yeah, that's an interesting analogy. That's really interesting.

Time and again we come into companies and all their time is being sucked up with noisy people that might include customers, employees who are important and critical, but very often ones who are sort of lower tier, who maybe they shouldn't even be focused on that much. And if you'll just figure out a way to prioritize the piece that really counts and get systematic or holistic, like get a whole view of all customers, all clients, and in particular the most valuable, profitable ones you may find. You pick different priorities, right?

Yeah. And sometimes the ones that are really important but you don't hear from, they could have some kind of dissatisfaction and then just leave and you won't even know why. And so if you don't have that communication back and forth. We learned that a hard lesson once where someone kind of an interloper came and dealt with one of our customers in a different way, who liked to communicate in a different way. But she never told us that. And so she started giving the business to the other people. But by talking to her, I was the person that is the one who reaches out to talk to people. And learning kind of how her communication, she preferred it that way, kind of helped give us a wake up call that we needed to really ask everybody. Because when you're not hearing from somebody, they could be unhappy and not telling you or they could be happy. And you need to really figure that out.

It reminds me of how important it is to do that a player analysis or team gauge or whatever you want to call it on a regular basis. Because very often the loudest complainers are not actually people who we would consider a players. It's often an indicator of people not quite being aligned with the values of the company. And two more thoughts on that. First, for me, it really links back to what we discussed before and your Ritz Carlton story, which is amazing, Bill. But imagine trying to have employees take that care of their customers. When you don't take care of employees, it's impossible. Right. They need to feel you have that same caring for them before they're ready to go that extra mile. And second, actually, I've had one or two experiments where we actually did an A player type analysis for customers, not for employees, where we said actually which customer is the most aligned with our actual brand promise what we promise. And is the loud one just complaining? Because really they want a different brand promise and might we be better off at referring them to a competitor?

That's a really good point. I've never done that analysis. But we have fired customers in the past that did not live up to our core values and treated our employees really badly and were very high maintenance and low profit. And that didn't align with our business. But I like what you said, Roland, about doing the ABC talent assessment on customers. That's a really great idea, actually.

Your high maintenance, low profit matrix is actually one, Cheryl, that I've heard hotels really apply internally. You're in a bucket when you arrive. And so you know, Bill and you probably both were in the low maintenance and high profit bucket if they went the extra mile for you. Because it's like with a bank. If you feel like your bank wants you to leave, they probably do. And hotels definitely also have a bucket for that where they try to get rid of those customers that are very high maintenance and very low profits. They will not try to get your loyalty.

Well, that's also a good point because you know, when you look at the talent assessment that Bill was talking about earlier, if you pay attention to those C players and they suck up your energy, maybe like we recommend as coaches, they should be exited instead. And the A players are the ones who should get the attention and be developed. And so that kind of goes along with that too. It's really, it's all coming together in this conversation nicely.

You know, if you are a listener of the podcast and if you have read the book Scaling up or the Rockefeller Habits and you it's just a little bit overwhelming, you're not sure where to begin. It's maybe time to bring yourself and a couple of members of your team to one of our workshops. We do workshops all over the world all the time to help you get started to see which of these tools should you do first and how do you actually do them. It sounds pretty simple until you try to write down your values. It sounds pretty simple until you try to create a purpose statement. How and what do you do and what we get you started in our scaling up workshop. Cheryl, you've got one coming up, don't you?

Yeah, I do. My workshop is on October 29th and it's in the Sarasota area. A half day where I'll be doing just what Bill said, taking you through a couple of the tools that are the really foundational ones and giving you a taste of how to start applying the scaling up principles in your company.

And right around this time is coming out, we've got our summit and we'll talk more about summits in a minute, but we've got workshops Let me just rattle off some of it. In Massachusetts, in Australia, in Oklahoma, in Ontario, Florida, Ann Arbor, California, Southern California, Northern California. I've got one coming up, but not until January. We just had one recently. Mid January in San Francisco. Registration is now open for that. Dallas, Texas Lancaster, Pennsylvania Hartford, Connecticut Sarasota in October, Louisiana Vancouver, Franklin, Tennessee Sydney, Australia several there Scottsdale, Arizona, San Diego like on and on. So we've got them all the time. More opening up, the ones going into next year, just opening up. But there are plenty of fall ones to get yourself to and they're valuable enough that it's worth traveling. You get a discount if you bring a few people to them. You can find a list of all of them at. So if you want to get to Cheryl's, you can go to alexagen.net, we'll put that link in the up in the show notes. And if you want to get to mine in January, you can go to scalingcoach.com but if you want to see the whole list, go to scalingup.com and then look at either the ecosystem or the workshops. Link at the top and find a workshop near you. Bring a handful. I recommend you bring at least another person. Don't just go by yourself unless you're a startup solopreneur. You're just trying to start out right? But bring a couple of people so you can bounce the ideas off. The people that have two to six folks from a team at one of our workshops do much better. But that's how to get started, how to learn some of the techniques that the coaches use, how to pick what order to do some of the work in and focus and get feedback from an experienced coach doing so. All the people doing these workshops are experienced, certified scaling up coaches who are very familiar with our tools and are part of this community where, as you can hear, we share ideas and approaches all the time, which is not like every other kind of business growth organization or framework. Right?

Yeah.

Can I just stress that point that Bill just made about how important it is to bring at least two people or be two people. Bill and I have been doing some of these workshops together. Yes, it was always a great experience. And the ones that come by themselves, yes, they learn a lot and it's an opening of their mind. But then you see them come back three months later with two or three people and in the meanwhile they haven't made much progress because then the burden is all on you and trying to explain everything. Why not just bring them along and have everyone learn at the same time.

And also to reinforce Bill's point too, it is actually a workshop. And so it's not just us standing there presenting to you. We introduce a tool, then you get to work on it. You introduce another tool, and then you get to work on it. So working on it with your team makes the most sense.

Yeah, it's that doing the work right in that session, it's the work you do that's the most useful. You can download our podcasts and things like that and cover all of the subjects. It's not the same as getting some guidance and having time to work on it with a coach present who can help you grapple with whatever it is that seems elusive to you. Right?

Yeah. The key question we always ask there, Bill and Cheryl, you'll remember, is like, how much of what we talked about did you already know and how much were you actually doing? And that's the big gap that we're trying to close.

Usually a lot. Right. We know a lot of things and yet we're not always doing.

Usually a gap of 80% something between 90% knowing and 10% doing.

I would say yes, yes, yes. What is it that would propel you into action? It's actually, I would say when you see the world differently and the tools that we apply in the perspective and the examples that we share will help you see the world differently, will give you new questions to ask about your own business, and that'll drive a change in your perception of your business and the world around you, and then cause your action, the action of your team to shift and therefore your performance. Right.

Yeah. And it's also for those people who feel a little bit uncertain of all the new questions that will be asked. And when you don't like people telling you what to do, I think we're all convinced entrepreneurs have all the answers. It's the new questions that they need. Right. Those questions come out of that workshop, but you have all the answers with your team. You just need to get some new questions to maybe discover a blind spot or that has been holding you back, probably.

Right. So one of the tools that we use again and again and that makes sense to implement almost right away is the Daily Hyper. One of my teams just did the Daily Huddle. And this is what I love about a client like this thousand person firm. We introduced the Daily Huddle early in the process with the leadership team. They're like. And we're like, yeah, we want you to do this everywhere. And, you know, some would start it and then slowly roll it out in like six weeks. These guys had it rolled out to all teams and the teams are like, oh my God, this is amazing. And I spend less time on email and I'm doing less email because I know that I'll see them that person or we already talked about that or I'll touch base with them tomorrow. I know what people are doing. I have an appreciation of other teams now because I'm getting input from the huddle. It's amazing. Vern writes about a company, Quick Box that scaled to over 60 million 300 employees in just a few years. Name to an Inc. Top 10% Fastest Growing Private companies. And the daily huddle, huddle across multiple business units is really what made the difference in them. Connecting all of those people.

Yeah. When I try to start get clients started on the daily huddle, some of them don't want to do it and they're resistant and I say just do it. Leadership team only for 30 days. And I give them little tips and tricks of how to spice it up if they feel like it's getting boring. And at the end of the 30 days, I would say most of the groups say they didn't know how they did things before that. It's just such a valuable tool.

We all encounter some resistance when teams first get to this concept. What, another daily meeting? I already have so many. Until you start comparing it as Bill did, to the time you save on email or with tech companies, particularly slack. Like the most played game in Silicon Valley these days is slack a molecule. You know, like you haven't even answered one chat and then the other one is already back there. And it is amazing when you ask people how many hours per day do you actually just spend on catching up with email and slack? And most people say six to seven hours every day. And compare that to just knowing when you will talk to the key people around you, quickly taking off some action items and not having to be literally chained to those tools for hours and hours in a day. Be able to concentrate on the work that actually needs to get done and get rid of that fear of missing out that's driving so much of that distraction that you were also mentioning in the prep notes before. Right.

Bill, you know, Vern and others are famous for talking about how Silicon Valley wouldn't exist without the daily huddle. But I think as you and I know, Roland, coaching some companies in this area and I'm not as exclusive to tech as you are, but I do a fair amount. It's true that agile Scrum type stuff, that development Teams do is not universally practiced by the leadership teams. The management leadership teams aren't all doing daily huddles. Some of the good ones are and some of them can learn it, but they don't all do it the same way the developer teams do. Right?

Yeah, no, absolutely right. There's a love of technology in tech firms because guess what, why people join these firms so they think that tools like Slack Email in a previous generation will automatically make them more productive. And there's very little questioning of does this actually make sense? I'm not against these tools, I'm just saying you need to put them in the right bucket in your overall productivity strategy, if you will. Even on the technical teams though, Bill, I think people that are not coming from the tech background look up to concepts like Agile and Scrum and think that that's the best way to manage entire companies. But frankly, the latest news about Agile is that it's to going really off track and that it's become almost like its own religion in many ways. So you will hear Silicon Valley companies talk very little about agile these days because they are already agile by nature. Why would they need a concept or a frame? Right?

Well, but yes, and I totally agree that they get lost in the jargon, it becomes like a religion and the same thing. True. Like some of the ideas about self organizing teams and stuff that we get from Holacracy, which we're hearing very little about today, are interesting. But they get so lost in a minutiae of jargon and rigid application of principles that they lose sometimes the point.

Of the whole thing. Yeah, and I think that's actually often driven by, you know, people who get excited, they study it, they typically become consultants in that field and now they are the person with the hammer who sees everything look like a nail. Right. And so the Agile coaches and consultants are typical examples of. That's not to say that Agile is bad and especially if you go back to early principles, I think it's great organizing principles both for development teams and broader business teams. But this over specialization and becoming almost like a priesthood of a religion is completely over the top. And so I think especially if you're in a growing business and you do realize you need some expertise, it's often important to not try to hire specialists that only know one thing very well and think that that's going to solve your entire problem. What you need is often more generalist approaches, people that can talk, through sales issues, through people issues, through execution issues, through finance issues, all in the same person. They may not be the best specialists at every one of those topics, but what they can help you understand is the holistic vision behind it, which is what you, as a general manager should have the best grip on. And then afterwards, you can always find specialists that can help you execute certain parts of those blind spots better.

You know the thing I think that's interesting about our framework that I love, it's a best of framework and it's continually evolving. And although we share ideas and approaches as a coaching group, we all bring a little different flavor to it. When I'm working with clients, I'm like, here's a recommended structure for a daily huddle. Here are some good practice tips. But this is not orthodoxy. This is not needed. We can make this your version of a huddle. And at our summit. So we hold a couple of summits a year in the United States, and these are fairly big events with fantastic speakers and keynotes. In fact, the May Summit, Raj Sisodia, Conscious Capitalism we were talking about at the top of the show will be a speaker at that summit. And who else is coming at the next summit? There's another speaker I was thinking about who was going to Ben Horowitz. Yeah. We'll be speaking about at the next summit. And then of course, about this time this is coming out or just before, we'll be at Anaheim for a summit. For some reason, I don't know when this actually airs or is released, but if you can get yourself to Anaheim, it's fantastic. Those hotel rooms are about cut off now, as we're recording. They did extend them for actually, I think it's now. I think we're now even past that cutoff. But you can find rooms in the area or that kind of thing if for some reason you can get to our Anaheim summit. But we bring all these keynoters. And on the subject of huddles, a couple of years ago we had General Stanley McChrystal who headed up all of the special operations stuff, and he talked about altering the tempo and productivity of special ops in our recent conflicts and how they were just really losing against the terrorist and other sort of agitative forces until they implemented the daily huddle. Now, their version of a daily huddle was like 2,000 people and there were only a few speakers. But they were all connected globally via satellite and they could share intel and stuff around for I think their huddle was particularly long. Also, I want to say it was 2,000 people in 90 minutes, if my recollection is correct. But they say it was transformative because they were able to give principals and stuff. And now each operation didn't have to go all the way up to the White House for approval. And they could go from like an op a week to like 10 ops a day kind of a tempo. And that, that really altered things.

It also speaks to the point, Bill, that I think we often highlight when we talk about daily huddles. It's one thing to read someone's information. It's a very different thing to actually hear someone say it. And that's why just the technology doesn't work, because you could easily have spread all that information with Slack or blog posts or email on their secure Pentagon servers. Of course. Right. But that still wouldn't get the same impact as actually listening into that call and. Or seeing someone tell you the story in person. That's somehow getting into our brain much more easily than the written word.

Yeah, I like to echo that, Roland, because what they said was, because I was at that McChrystal presentation too, that you were actually getting intelligence from the actual analysts live versus reading it or versus hearing it thirdhand. And so if they were about to do an op somewhere, maybe somebody had some kind of information that they shared at the huddle that might impact an operation that was going to be happening soon thereafter. And so I'm echoing kind of Roland was saying that being able to hear firsthand and empowering people lower down in the organization to be able to communicate with the higher ups and with different POD leaders in different areas was very helpful.

This is the problem with chat group chat, text messaging, all of the rest. And you find people want to do this more and more for expediency to avoid, but you lose the real time thing, you lose the facial connection, you lose the body language, you lose the emphasis, whatever it is. Right. And if you think about the one I like to throw out to teams is I didn't say you were smart. Right. And so you just could read that with a different emphasis on each word. 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. And I didn't say you were smart. All have slightly different connotations. Right? There's a. Older. You may be familiar with the older, more sexist version of that. But that little demonstration. But the. But it's very effective with a team. Right. And it really highlights the gap in it. And I think it's important people get in there. But I have clients all the time who invite me to join their Slack channel. I'm like, I'm not joining your damn Slack channel. Way too much. I'd like to talk to you about once a month or when you have a crisis, not minute by minute.

I'm not sure you don't have that luxury working with tech companies. I do have to be on their Slack channels, of course, but I typically only do one specific Slack channel for the implementation of scaling up, and that's the one I follow.

Yeah, that could be okay.

And the other? Actually, I draw a blank. Keep going.

So summits, workshops. Get to one of our summits, really valuable. If you're working with a coach, then select the coach. You'll get a coach discount if they have one available. If you're working with one or if you're just, you know, fond of one of us, select one of us as a coach. Then you can sit next to us at the summit and chat with us and get to know us. So we're happy to do that even if you don't yet have a coach.

I was just going to echo that. Also, Bill, when we're at the summit and we're with a couple of people from an organization, then after a keynote like McCrystal, I went back with one of my clients and we did a team of teams type of thing, which was his talk. So you get a common language. And if you bring your team, like Bill was saying earlier too, you know, for the workshops, you bring a team people to the summit, then instead of the leader having to go back and say, oh, I learned all these things, the team can actually talk about it right away at the summit and figure out what they want to apply. And you know, we say the difference. I think Roland was saying it at the end of the workshops too. You know, what you learn and what you apply, that makes the application come a lot more quickly.

Yeah, it's a huge momentum driver. When you bring a team, even if it's just two, three key decision makers that you know will bring the rest of the team along. If these two, three people agree, that's already a huge momentum drive for people joining individually learn a lot, but then they have this entire burden on them to try and bring the learning back into the office. And that just gets lost in the day to day whirlwind.

Right.

If you can't get to one of our summits or you because the dates don't work, the location doesn't work, or you just want to add learning to it, of course we have the Growth Institute. All of our online learning, online courses, short and long, are available@growthinstitute.com they have a Master Business Dynamics program which is like an MBA but for scaling Organizations online. And they package together all the key things that you'd want to do to get that course. We have a Scaling Up Master business course there, the Exponential Organizations Master course and a class in top grading so that you can learn the things that we do to get the people side of things right. So all of that growthinstitute.com, the summits and the workshops at Scaling Up. I want to talk broadly for a minute about our attention, managing our attention. So there's the vision aspect of it. There's the actual metrics and the dashboards that tells us how we're doing and then there's a vision of where we're going right with the whole thing. We see time and again people developing dashboards that work really well. And I found now that it's a few too many things. But on scallops.com, doug Wick, coach Doug Wick, who's been a panelist with us before, talks about dashboarding, using a dashboard to save his own life. As he battled cancer. He tracked his actions and things like that to stay, to work, his plan to survive and thrive.

It's a powerful story.

Yeah, really. Right. But what are you going to put your attention on? How are you doing? What's going on? What are the metrics and how do you keep them alive and visible? Of course we have a tool that we provide some of our clients will use online. Like they'll use what's the shared worksheet thing? So they'll use Google Docs but they'll also use.

Is it Google Sheets?

Google Sheets, yeah. And then there's another one out there, a spreadsheet thing. I forget that I had and then I've had people build stuff in Asana and other tools. But the main that we have now today there's a scale up branded version that's just being launched now. Align Today is the official tool and part of that. So if you want to do Align Today and see that you can go open a sandbox account there and get a trial of it and do all that. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well for line today. But it's really powerful to get some system where we can see how everybody's doing together on one platform. Do you have folks all or some using an online platform of some kind?

Most of my clients use an online platform. There's one that insists on doing everything, including Google sheets. But the extra time they spend on trying to mimic all they need to track, I keep challenging them on it. You know, some people, people are in their own control, right?

So, yeah, as I say, most of them prefer the online because then they can also have it on their mobile devices too. And it's just, you know, in an organized fashion so that they can update and see things while on the go as well.

So let's talk about the visualization, right, And Vern shares a few things for it. He talks about one of the companies Rob Dankervis wrote in about one of their clients in Australia that created a visualization. So they staged a whole thing where dressed in formal things with dim lights, they walked up to a lectern and they accepted an award for, for a leading company. And they did this internally. And then a year later, they actually were on stage getting a real award.

Right.

They created that picture. We've done several shows on painted picture, vivid vision type techniques to create a real picture. What does success really look like? What is it that you're aiming for? You want to create a really rich and vivid picture for your clients. Vern also shares about Bianca Andreescu beating Serena Williams and that she created. She wrote herself a huge $3.25 million check when she was 15, and she kept updating that every year, and then eventually she received a $3.85 million check. And that visualization, write the check, think about it, imagine it. But if you're a leader, you want to create that picture for the employees, paint a real picture for it, and allow themselves to see themselves in it as well.

Painting that picture. When I work with my clients, first we do the painted picture like you mentioned, so we can see how the business fits into their life. But then once you do the visualization of where you want to go with your bhag and where you know, it's kind of your core purpose and your bhag and all that kind of thing so that they can look through that lens and visualize getting there. And is what I'm doing today going to help us get there or not? And getting that line of sight is something that a lot of people in the lower levels of the organization find. Being able to visualize, you know, getting to that bhag and being able to really achieve that and tying their day to day to that really helps them out.

Yeah, we did with often when I meet with clients for their quarterly session, we will Have a dinner the night before, which I think I learned from you, Bill. Actually, that was a great technique.

I love doing that. Not everybody's open to that, but.

No, I know, I know. I feel the same.

I love it too.

It's better than the night after the workshop, I find, because then people are really tired and they just want to get home, as understood. But we often do a little fun exercise. And so with one client in Chicago, we did mock press interviews like, okay, you are on cnbc being interviewed 10 years down the road about the success of your company and how did you get there? And they just even had one of the other team members play the interviewer. A few small teams all repeating after each other. And that was one and a half years ago. And they talked about the huge investment they got and how it made all of their shareholders whole and how they were set up to become a part of a bigger company. And guess what? They just signed that investment like a month ago.

That's fantastic.

One of the things that I do personally and in the business is I will, after I sort of describe it, I'll create a visualization of it like a vision board and I'll go grab images off Google and I'll put them on like a page layout or a slide template and I'll arrange this visualization of what I want myself and my business to look like like at the end of the year and I noticed and then I'll just post it around by the end of the year. Most of that stuff has happened, always all of it, and not in the exact way. And sometimes I miss some key things, but a ton of it has happened by creating a really rich picture of what it looks like. And I can see sometimes if it's too much or too little what the right balance is for me.

Right. And then even personally you can do that on a day to day basis. When I'm about to meet with the client for a whole day or if I'm meeting with a prospective client or just anything that I'm doing in the morning, I'll just visualize how it's going to go and how wonderful it's going to go. And then I find that it changes my energy. And so when I come in, then I'm really received well by the clients. I visualize positivity and openness and a successful outcome. And then it just comes together so nicely if you start your day off that way.

So I just was doing a little bit of this yesterday. I just got booked to lead or facilitate two and A half day session with a couple hundred members of the entrepreneurs organization next year in Santorini. And I went and I grabbed images of the hotel that I'll be staying at and the venue that I'll be facilitating in and the stakes of this thing. So these are all entrepreneurs growing their businesses and of all different sizes and some of them quite large, but all over the place. But passion. The theme of this particular event is creating the rest of your life, right? Creating, fulfilling the rest of your life. So I started to think about that. Well, I created it for myself and what's it going to look like and where am I going to be and what are these people doing and what's the vibe and how is it different from anything else that I do? And you know, but now that's in May of 2020 and I already am developing a rich picture of how it'll go. Right. You can bet that'll be way more successful than the last minute thing that you throw together and that you like. You know, it's fully created and envisioned. Right. And then of course I'll have to just be with whatever shows up, which may be a little bit different, of.

Course, but it's also like related to what they say, measure twice, cut once. Right. So to visualize first and think it through in a rich picture, like what's going to happen, that you feel prepared and only then you actually start executing.

Then all that stuff and then the specifics and the metrics goes into your one page plan, your vision summary, your dashboard system, and we start to track on the fulfillment of it and make adjustments to our approaches over time with the team using the daily huddles, the weekly meetings and the other kind of kinds of things that we do. Right?

Yeah. And I want to highlight too that some people feel like that process and that structure doesn't feel like a growth company. But I would say the most successful growth companies are able to balance this like empowerment, freedom, action orientation with enough of a process, but just enough, not too much structure either, so that they can put that energy to good use. And so all of that initiative, all of these new ideas can actually come to much better fruition if you then prioritize as a team, really put the resources behind it where they are needed and not be distracted by a hundred different new squirrels that you see every day.

That's a great point, Roland, because I was with somebody who said now that we know what our vision is, we could have had 86 ideas, but we're not going to execute on any but two of them because it doesn't fit into getting us where we want to be. The other ones are good ideas, but they're not the ideas that are going to get us where we want to get to.

And if you link that back to what we were talking about before that company that asked all of their employees, how can we do better and be more efficient, I will bet you that one of the first things those employees came up with like, okay, here were the 20 or 100 ideas that you. You guys once launched as executives and wanted us to work on and it never paid off or that we were not very sure about what was supposed to pay off.

Yeah, well, this has been a great conversation. We've covered a lot of territory. I think we probably talked everybody out. There's only so much you can think about. I want to go back to what Roland said earlier that you'll hear from coaches all the time. And that's how much of what we talked about did you already know. And it's probably a lot. But what are you actually doing? What is your big takeaway? So is there one thing from this show that you could do that would make a difference for you, an action you could take? So if you're on an airplane or driving in a car right now, you might want to just make a note to take action on it later, put it in your calendar so that you can remember to do it. But I would invite and challenge everyone to think of just one thing that you're actually going to do as a result of whatever you heard today that seemed relevant to you. Thanks again, Roland, for joining us. You'll find roland@scaleupallies.com and around the bay area. Roland specializes in funded tech sector businesses, right?

Absolutely. All over the world, but all tech companies and all having or seeking venture capital investments.

And you will. A lot of coaches work pretty much in the area. Roland and I do tend to work all over the world. So I don't know. It's a blessing and a curse. I do like to travel and sometimes you get a little tired.

You know, Bill, I'm starting to work now more with remote only companies who don't even have a headquarters anymore. Everyone works from wherever they want to be in the world and that's a big challenge in itself. But I'm really excited to be exploring how that new model of company organization is starting to work out for people.

That's maybe a subject for a special show in itself. Cheryl, Byron, you've got a workshop coming up again. What are the dates again for your.

Workshop October 29th in the Sarasota area, Florida.

October 29th, Sarasota area lexagen.net we'll put that if you want to get in touch with Cheryl, of course. I'll be leading workshop in January in San Francisco and then private events and stuff. Until then, you'll find me@scalingcoach.com where we've got all of these episodes and more so loads and over 170 of the the episodes. Now you can get them all downloads, their tools, their offers, their links, that kind of thing. On any of these subjects I've mentioned, like we had Raj Sisodian, we've done Brian Scudamore, we've done Cameron Herrel, like Tom Peters, you pick your subject and go search for it. We've probably got a show on it with lots of notes and downloads and that kind of thing. Scalingcoach.com I'll also give you a copy of the book Scaling up for free. You just pay the shipping and handling there. @scalingcoach.com I want to give special thanks shout out to Vern Harnish, all right, our guru, creator of all things Scaling up in the Rockefeller habits and to Lucy Summers, our show producer who produced this show and organized stuff and got us ready for the recording today. And we'll get it out to everyone. The audio production is done at Podfly Productions. It's edited by Albert Burge. The show notes are compiled by Ein Codena and proofread by Tim McGowan. If you love the show, then like it, subscribe it. Give us a positive review there. We appreciate that that helps us spread the word. Share it with somebody else. Subscribe to get them every week. We also love to hear the parts that you loved or what you'd like to hear more of. Drop us a note. Infocalingcoach.com thanks again for listening for watching everyone. Keep scaling up.

Sa.