173: Client Feature — Steve Conine: 174% Growth in Three Years with Scaling Up

Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. So on the show with me today, Steve Conine. Steve, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Bill. Glad to be here.

Yeah. So Steve is a former client. He's the owner and CEO of Talent Framework. They're in the business of workforce planning, temp, staffing, search retention, you know, things like that in the world of people. And people's been a regular topic. This particular show will probably focus more on the success that Steve had in applying some of the aspects of the Scaling Up Framework to his business. And I thought it was really great that he was willing to come on and talk about what they did. So Steve is the owner and CEO of the company. He's a regular contributor to the Northern Nevada Business Weekly. He's been a co host on a local TV program, Starting Over, Starting Up. He's a former chapter president of the Entrepreneurs organization EO in Reno. He was also the US west communication director and the regional director for the Western region for the Entrepreneurs, the EO organization. Steve and I met some time ago. We're talking today about the work that we did that put his company on the ink list and the growth. So we're going to talk about how they did some of the work that would take you to 174% growth in three years. So that's kind of the core of the story. Along the way you'll hear some of Steve's other experiences, but really excited to share a client case study with a real client who's willing to share with you all. So Steve and I first met at one of the regional. Well, I don't know if that was the first time he met, but we met. But I was leading a session on leadership skills within the world of Scaling up for one of our regional conferences. Steve was there and he contacted me and said I think you might have the right vibe and scaling up might be our thing. So I'm really excited to hear about it because there's some unique things about your story. So before we get into that, would you tell us a little of your background before you bought the business and all that? Talk about that for a little bit.

Yeah, well, I really started out, you know, kind of as a climbing the ladder, the big corporate ladder type guy. I worked for Walmart originally right out of college and was in their management program and transitioned on and went up to some other companies. I worked for Amazon.com for a while when they were just first startup, wishing that I still had my Stock options from those days now, but carved a different path. I ended up going to work for a third party, a national third party logistics company. I was in that industry for about 10 years in distribution and during that time we were a heavy consumer of temporary staffing services. So I had an opportunity to work with a local staffing company quite a bit, Got to know the ownership fairly well, in fact, used them so much that we had had internal discussions about should we buy or start our own staffing company and save a few points on the margin and we'll run it as an internal business and then seek some outside clients as well as servicing ourselves. The IGA never really went anywhere with our management team beyond that kind of discussion, but I was the one that was kind of negotiating that with the previous owner. So years and years went by and the phone rings one day and they said, hey, are you guys still interested in buying our business? We're ready to retire. And I happened to just get notification of the closure of the company, buyout and closure of the company that I was working for. And I said, you know what, I don't think so. I've moved on jobs twice since we had first talked and I don't think that's really going to be a possibility. I'm going through this closure of a facility right now and had tons of other things going on. And a week or two goes by and they called back again and said, what if we helped you finance it? Would that be interesting? I don't know. Thanks, but I'm really kind of busy. Another week or two goes by and they called again and said, well, what if we stayed on and helped you for six months and got your feet underneath you? And they just kept doing everything possible to make the deal happen. After some negotiations, it was my leap into entrepreneurship. So I left the corporate world, purchased this mom and pop staffing shop in Reno, Nevada that was relatively small at that time. I think they were doing about 1.8 million in annual sales. So they stayed on, agreed to stay on for six months that lasted for about six years and various forms of contracts with the previous owner. And I was able to buy this franchise business at that time and keep it running for, oh, about 12 years. And then my franchise, or at that time one of the world's largest staffing agencies, employment companies in the world, had made some acquisitions in my particular neighborhood. And I had a contractual stipulation in there that said that they couldn't invade in my territory in any way, shape or form. So it created a window Opportunity for me to pursue some legal action and actually exit the franchise system, which was a trial in and of itself. So there are lots of things that a franchisor can do for you in order to help kind of keep your business going. You know, they have a lot of resources, they had a ton of money and legal and risk and all sorts of human resources professionals in the hundreds that, as a local, small owner, don't usually have access to those kinds of resources. So it was another leap of faith to leave that protective safety net and go 100% out on my own in 2013. And that's when the Talent Framework name came into play and I really became a sole survivor, so to speak, in the entrepreneurial world and started the Talent Framework from scratch again. Basically had to change the name and change my systems and operations and everything else. So it was just like starting all over again.

And that's about the time that we started working together or shortly after that.

Shortly thereafter, a couple years after that, figured out how to kind of put things together and keep things running and started to learn from a business owner's aspect some of the insurance aspects and risk and contracts and things like that that had been done for me the prior 12 years. My focus kind of shifted towards some really heavy, more heavily operations function things that I was spared being a franchisee. So I've had a couple of learning curves to go through for having already been in the business for 12 years. I had to learn a lot of things over again and certainly things of like learning how to grow as an independent and building a framework outside of a franchise organization where they do all your advertising for you and send you national clients and, you know, you're kind of spoiled in some respects. So that's where scaling up, you know, provided some framework for me to kind of start to the point, find some of those systems that I didn't have in place for myself on my own.

So when I first spoke to you, there are a couple things that I can remember that I liked, I think are useful for others to hear. So, one, you were definitely on the smaller side in terms of total employee count and revenues and that kind of thing from a lot of the companies. You also didn't have a huge goal that you want to achieve. It was a more modest goal. But you like, laid out all the stuff you. We had an easy conversational style. You're really open and some people are really cagey with me in the beginning, and I'm like, wow, this is a lot of hard work to do this Communication, like, I don't want to be selling so much. I'd rather start coaching than selling. And so that was easy. And you were pretty open, like, you know, let's try things and do things. And even though you've done some similar work and had experience with it, you were willing to collaborate, like have somebody be your coach, which I think made it really a good fit. And I looked at your stuff and I thought we definitely can do that.

Yeah. And I think that's, it's been super helpful for, you know, I'm a build a better mousetrap kind of a guy. And so if I can collaborate with you in order to make that happen, I think it helps me in the process and help my company in the process. If I show that I'm willing, then my staff was also a little more willing to kind of follow along. I think if I'd have sat there being cagey or resistant in some way, they'd have gone, so we're really not doing this. We're just going to promote.

Yeah. What is the message that you're sending there? Right? Yeah, I think it's interesting. So we came in and we started in with some basic stuff, right. We started all the kind of core things. We laid out and built out most of the elements of the one page plan in particular. We did the purpose and the values and we created a BHAG and we created a kind of a three year picture of the things that you wanted to accomplish so that we would have it. Then we started doing all of the execution habits, the quarterly meetings, the annual planning, the weekly, the daily huddles, things like that, Dashboards, metrics, job score. Like there's a, you know, we began to implement that stuff in with your team and we began to impact the culture there. Right. The first. What was that like in that early period? What did you notice?

You know, I think really early on it's always exciting, right? You're learning something new. And I think we went through a couple of different tool dashboard tools over the last couple of years. So. Right. You're trying to learn another piece of technology that keep track of things. So it's good and it's bad. And I think within management teams, right, there are people who really jive on that sort of tools and metrics. And then there are those who are like, they just hate it. They bite it tooth and nail. And we certainly experienced that where some people really bought into it and others really struggled with it.

Okay, wait, hold that, hold that thought. Let's go there. Because that's important. But before we get off the Dashboards and Metrics piece, I remember one session in particular. We came in and we're having a conversation. We're like, okay, we have this whiteboard here in the meeting room. And like most of this shit doesn't matter. Like, we don't like. And so we just started erasing everything, right. And we got down to just a couple things. It was like filled with numbers, this big whiteboard, and we erased most of it. Then we said, okay, what is now needed in there? Is there anything else needed? And we did a couple of tweaks, but mostly we ended up with fewer numbers.

Overall. Yeah, I think we got down to about three or four key metrics, was it. And we were tracking probably upwards of 10 or 12, but we. That which were meaningless to most everybody except me, right?

They matter to you, right?

They matter to me, yeah. Yeah. Like driving any kind of performance or setting goals for people at a production line level, you know, a lot of that higher level stuff was lost on them and you could see them fade away in the meetings. Like they were just like, this doesn't mean anything to me. So, yes.

So I think with some teams and if you're pursuing, say a complete sort of open book management, you can educate people and give them even more numbers. But even still, you've got to focus down to a few numbers that are actually driving things that are part of your daily huddles, your weekly meetings. Not all the metrics, not the fullest understanding, but the key ones that really focus attention and action in the right places. Right?

Yeah. And they have to be in a place where, I mean, it's one thing to put them up on a board and then they're there, but they had to be numbers that they see in their world on a daily basis. So for us, it's when payroll gets run, it's either how many time cards were there, which is an indication of how many people do I have working out in the field, or how many hours did we actually log week over week. So they're easy numbers to follow and track, but it has a tangibility to it where people can kind of feel, hey, 100 people is a lot of people, but 300 people, people as a whole, lot of people. Right. It feels bigger and more substantial.

Absolutely. Okay, so there was tweaking of things like that. I remember quite a few iterations on daily huddles on weekly things. And I think that's important for people to recognize that these regular routines, habits and things like that they start to create your culture, the particular flavor you bring to them. I see behind you you've got your version of your manifesto on the back. So it's got purpose. It's got a bhag on that. It's got some core values in there, and that that creates a reference that you can do. But you went through quite a few iterations of some of that stuff before you found a piece that, like, worked for you.

Yes. And again, same thing. It's a struggle with some people. They really buy into it. And, I mean, we had to be. I always had to be a little silly about it. In the beginning, like, we would recite that, you know, like the Pledge of Allegiance. It was every daily meeting we would come in and somebody would have to recite the core values. Did it seem a little silly at first? Yes. Did it actually legitimately take hold in people's minds? I think it really did, because after we started talking about operational things, I would hear people reflecting those values back. One of our key ones is that relationships matter most. And that's both with the people that we employ and the clients that we send people to. And so people would tell a story about, oh, I was talking to XYZ client, and I told them, the relationship really matters to us. That's why I'm calling you. So it removed some of the fear of being salesy and turned it into just more of a relationship rather than a client, vendor, sort of a status, those sorts of things. Over the course of time, we were able to let go of the silliness of it because it had imprinted on everybody that, hey, relationships is something that's really important to us. So when you're interacting with people or you're making decisions, are you doing it in a sense that protects the relationship or furthers the relationship? Are we solving problems for people, or are we just selling watches and pens out of a trench coat? So it really kind of helped put a frame of reference around things for why we were doing what we were doing. And it helped people believe in it a little more, rather than just being some sort of a telemarketer saying, you need some temporary staff Today it was, hey, what sort of problems are you guys experiencing? Is there anything that we can help you with? And this is what we're seeing in the market. It helps my staff become experts in my little micro community in terms of what was going on in the labor market.

Yeah. So one of the other things, I think it's useful that I see there and is part of that Was the purpose conversation. I remember really well. And I think of this when I talk to other clients now, especially in the early stages is a lot of times people are like, oh, I don't know about this purpose. And you said roughly that. You said, I don't know about purpose stuff. We're not a cause driven company. We're providing business services, staffing. And I'm like, I think it'll be helpful. You might be surprised. Just give me a few minutes with your team. Let's see what we can come up with. And so we asked the typical questions that we ask and engage a little bit. And then I like to send people out in pairs for a walking exercise for this. And I sent people out in pairs, I said, all right, go out and walk and listen and entertain these questions, make some notes and come back. And we threw the stuff up on the wall and we started to move post its around and find the commonality of the ideas. And we came up with that phrase in a matter of less than an hour. We keep the world working. And you guys were like, oh, that's nice. That's it. Right? That was so validating for me as a coach to see that here's somebody who's skeptical, is not sure that that's useful or that they can get to that. And you did it so beautifully and naturally. And then I've seen since then in visits to your office where people have it on the back of their T shirts walking around the office, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny to say, you know, and I truly believe that we're not purpose driven, but you know, encapsulating it in just a few words or simple phrase, it actually became our purpose. Right. And it was easy to believe in. It was sort of hidden to us. It wasn't that we didn't have it. We just need a little help kind of uncovering it. So that's been super powerful.

Yeah, it's clarity and it's creation. Right. When you actually create it together and declare it, you bring it into and that feels focuses it and then you start to align more with it. So that's awesome. All right, so let's shift into the people. So one of the side stories here is so we had three years and 174% growth to do with this, but with almost net sane people. So there was a great deal of increase to be had from productivity and focus and alignment. But not everybody was down for the that kind of company in that. So talk to us a little bit about the people who didn't want to play and some of the mistakes or challenges in the world of people.

Yeah, I think it's. So there's an industry frame of reference that as a franchisee, I always had that. As you were growing, for every 40 people that I would have working in the field, I should have two people as internal staff to kind of manage that little miniature book of business, if you want to think of it that way. So that was always kind of my. My thumbnail sketch of, like, how many staff I should have.

You said for 40 in the field, two. So one per 20.

One per 20, yeah. Or a team of two, basically. You always wanted to build them in teams. Was there?

Yeah, yeah.

Their sort of strategy pairs. So when I was growing, I was adding people.

Yeah.

Internally for some period of time. And those people weren't, you know, utilized to their maximum capacity. And the more people that we added, the more time we spent kind of trying to get people up to speed. And, you know, they had a small manageable book of business, but I think as humans, they had a ton more capacity than we were actually tapping into. So when some of the recessionary times started to happen, you know, business scaled way back, and I scaled way back on people. As things recovered, I didn't really follow the same model anymore. I just asked more and kept adding more work to the existing staff that I had. So I kind of found that the people that I had hired had so much more capacity to produce than I was really giving them credit for. And so we really kind of utilized that. And I suppose the flip side of that is that you run the risk of maybe burning people out at some point, But I try to keep pretty close tabs on monitoring that, on how people are doing and how their workload is working. Everybody's an individual, and that's a little different, but.

Well, that's a key point. You've got to balance the productivity gains against the engagement of the people, the human side. So human and people and productivity are a counterbalancing thing. You can drive people too hard, and then you have to do something to make them feel great or to create breakthroughs in the way they're working so they're not carrying such a load.

Right. Or you lose them. And that's happened to me. You simply grind them into a nub or they implode and go away because they need some relief from that sort of pressure and workload. And I've had it happen both ways. And I think it's good to have experienced that because I'M a little more keen to some of those warning signs now where I need to pay more attention to them or I need to say maybe we should look at shifting the role a little bit. Maybe that's too heavy for you to carry, so let's teach someone else how to do that and you can pick up this new thing and then they re engage. Right. The learning process kicks back in again. It's something new and they feel a little relief at the same time. And I'm able to not only cross train and have a more well developed staff, but I sort of relieve a little bit of the pressure. I should shift it to a different place, I guess, in that case. But you know, I've been a model study for myself at this point of saying people are really capable of actually doing quite a bit. Bit. If you present it to them and organize it in such a way that they feel like they can handle it and absorb it. And once they kind of get their arms around it and they can get it into a routine or a system, then it becomes much more manageable for them and then they, you know, they're ready to accept new challenges or additional responsibilities as time goes on. Well, we use been able to stay.

Staffed net neutral, just to name the tools. Precisely. We use the Gallup strengths tools to identify talent themes and then try to align those to the job roles or to the approach to the particular job requirements. And then you. We also use a love loathe or love and hate exercise where we look at what things you love and what you hate and then we try to figure out how to either change up something, give something away, automate something on the hate side so that you can be effective in your role. Right. And we did plenty of that. But you had some people who just didn't want to play no matter what and needed to go.

Yeah. And of course you hang on to them for too long. Yeah. Right. I think inherently in my DNA, I'm a rescuer of sorts. Coupled with being a problem solver means I think that I can fix anybody and their issues. And the older more experience that I get, the more quickly. Now I realize neither of those things are probably as true as I'd like to believe. And I should make decisions to move on from people that don't want to play in the game that I'm playing more quickly. For certain, I spent the better part of a year with a business development person who didn't make a single sale. But, you know, I like the guy. Yeah, yeah. But you know, because of that personal relationship. I just kept hoping and thinking that we could fix it. And, you know, that he felt the same way that I felt, and it was just clearly not. Yeah, he was a. He was a good actor in that regard. And I just kept it going on far too long for my own good.

When I look at our clients that make really the most rapid gains and the ones who struggle to make as fast gain, and I definitely have clients who grew faster than you did. And one of the things that I notice commonly is they make really rapid changes to their staff. When somebody isn't playing the game or getting the religion and getting on board and driving things and they can't make a couple of adjustments within a very few months, they just move them out. Say, listen, you need to go be an A player somewhere else because you're not going to be it here.

Yeah.

And there's compassion involved. So they don't generate lawsuits.

Yeah, yeah. There's certainly a smart way to do it.

Right. Office attacks and that kind of thing, but they send them on their way and they try to stay friendly in the world, Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think there's a right way to do that. It's a personal struggle for me because I feel like I've committed to their success and their livelihood, and I want to make sure that I've owned my end of that responsibility. And that times blinds me from seeing where they're just simply not wanting to reciprocate that kind of commitment. When I first get that gut feeling of that, I should be able to validate that and move on sooner. So I'm working on that piece still.

Well, it's funny because as a coach, I feel like it's not my job. It's my job to be pulling for everyone to win. And there are times when I think I should move on from a client that I'm also slow at, and times where I'm really pulling for a key executive to move on or to develop. And I really ought to be telling you or somebody else, look, they're not. I don't see that they're going to make it. You know, I mean, that's not truly my role as a coach, but there is an aspect of advisory that's needed there to say, listen, I don't see it here like it's time to do it. I probably hold on too long there too, trying to help people. And I think in part because when you see somebody have a breakthrough and move through to a new level of performance and discover a personal boundary or whatever. It's intensely gratifying. It's just not necessarily the business of scaling.

Right, right, right. And then you believe, well, certainly if they were capable of that, they're capable of even more. So let's turn up the heat and go to the next step. Everybody has their limits.

So over time, your team got better and better at becoming aligned, more aligned. And on focus, we did job scorecards, we did quarterly priorities. You created games and things like that tell a little bit of the ups and downs of that piece.

Yeah, it was similar to sort of, you know, the next phase of what are you doing with your core values and your purpose and everything else? How do we incorporate stuff deeper into the culture and make it fun? And, you know, it comes with its bumps too. We tried, again, a little bit of silliness, you know, and game playing and a variety of different things to just engage people and have them want to participate in it more. And we tried hardcore numbers and incentive bonuses and, hey, if you get this, you get that type of a thing. I think we ended up somewhere with kind of a healthy mix. I think the game playing and whatnot, though, that sort of dissipated. The idea was set in that we want to have fun with this.

Yeah.

Not necessarily just to play games and be silly as the sake of it, but it's okay to have fun at work, and you can have fun with the work that you do. And so I think it gave people permission to kind of relax a little bit and be a little more vulnerable and honest and be able to poke fun at themselves and a little bit, you know, at each other is healthy to a certain extent.

Absolutely.

But, you know, we. The pendulum did swing back towards where it was a little more serious and looked at, hey, here's where our goals are at. Where are you? How come you're not getting there? What can we do to help kind of foster you continuing to strive for this? Or I see, like, you've kind of lost interest in this altogether, what's going on? So it's helped kind of set some boundaries, and then we've been able to refine them a little bit as time went on, if that makes sense. I think when I first got into it, it was, okay, so pick a program. These are the rules. Follow the rules, do that. And that rigidity is sort of what started to kind of alienate people. They're like, okay, I'm really not into all this silly stuff. I'd rather just kind of be a little more business focused. Silly people are like, hey, this is a Little too business focused. Like, why can't we have any fun with this? So I think, like, all things moderation and variation helped us kind of establish that where we could kind of bring a whole group along together rather than people kind of retreating back to their silos. Right. We all like to do what we like to do in our own way. And in my particular environment, everybody has a private office, so they have a tendency to sort of retreat and just do the things that they like to do the way that they like to do them, and that's protected. So this coming together and the strategic planning and the kind of forcing everyone into a room, into a funnel to say these are the three or four main things that you want to work on. We can make them as fun as you want to make them, or we can take some of them seriously or a little bit of whatever really kind of helps get the team involved in picking what they wanted to do and even comfortable, but a little challenged at the same time.

Yeah. So there are two big factors that have helped your growth as well. And you've worked with some big accounts. You have hundreds of accounts. How many do you have?

Well, over the course of a year, yeah, we'll approach 100 accounts or so. Some things are, you know, a few hours worth of assignment, and other things are, you know, I've had clients for 18 years, so, yeah, it's been a mix.

So a mix. And I think that's really healthy. But there are a couple of things. Your work with the state of Nevada and then the work in the ecosphere of Tesla, who came and built something called a gigafactory in your backyard. You both figured out how to jump on and you saw the opportunity, and then we kept the focus on it with the core quarterly themes. Right. I remember Hot Love. We don't have to explain where that came from and what that represented, but that was a thing that really helped that focus on that and making a game of it. Right. Focus and playfulness.

Well, I think when you're small and you kind of tend to think that way. Right. And I'm a local operation, I'm a sole owner and small team. Like, we cater to the small guy. And when we had the opportunity to bid for a big government contract, the entire state of Nevada, we really felt like we were elephant hunting at that time. And it was exciting. And to have a couple of those come to fruition where it sort of proves we do have the capability and we do have the capacity and we can compete on that level. And now we've been successful with it for several years. Super gratifying and rewarding. And you know, financially it has increased revenue and profits and it enables us to do a lot of different things. But it's been eye opening in terms of what other sort of clients or businesses should we be looking at that we previously would have thought that's just out of my league. Right, right. I don't look at it that way at all now. I think keeping an eye open for a little bit of big client hunting is super healthy because I do feel like you're certainly able to compete with any of the big players out there just as well as anybody else can now. And I don't think we believed that five years ago.

That's really great. And you guys are not even consistently doing and using everything in the scaling up framework yet. We've picked and chosen the pieces and done them in the way that works for you and your company.

Yeah, and I kind of, I think I rethink that all the time. I go, ah, what if we just done the whole thing? Done it right. But you know, there's a saying in my household, I'm an amateur remodeler and we say it's not a conine job unless you do it twice. So maybe we're ready for our next iteration of going back and doing scaling upright for a change.

Well, so some clients will use a great deal of acquisition. We'll invest in marketing efforts, will hire on salespeople. You didn't do any of those things. It was more about being efficient. Right. And I mean I encourage you to do some of that, but it's not kind of your nature. You're a more of a refiner and improver of things.

Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't recommend it, but I mean we've achieved our growth over two of the last three years without any sales efforts at all. So there is something to, you know, rising tide lifts all boats, but we honed internal operations so that as growth came in, the internal staff could process that. I think if I'd have had, you know, a really heavy marketing and sales effort, probably could have swamped my boat, so to speak. I would have had more than I could have handled and dealt with at that time. So.

Well, you did pursue.

We did it the right way. Right.

You bid and courted the state. Some people would call that a sales effort. You bid and courted subcontractors in the Tesla world. Some people call that a sales effort, but just not like somebody blanketing everybody and working the territor.

Yeah. We didn't just start knocking on doors and, you know, telemarketing everybody. And I got what you need. We've been very conservative and very targeted about who we wanted to go after and why. So.

Before we go on a little bit, I just want to let folks know that although I only start, I don't know, two to four new clients a year, it's a really small number and I can only work with about 10 at a time comfortably. We do have a lot of coaches in our group and I'm happy to recommend someone if somebody is listening and thinking that maybe they're a candidate for the coaching work. I want to just invite you to go to scalingcoach.com coaching. I'll say it again, scalingcoach.com coaching. There's kind of an overview there and like an application like, hey, I'd like to be coached. Here's why I think I'd be a good client. And then if I think that I can help you, I'll have a conversation with you one way or the other. If I think you should talk to one of the other coaches who's in your area or specialize in your industry or whatever, then I'll connect you with that. So if you think and you'd like to begin the conversation to do some of the kind of work that Steve does, go to scalingcoach.com coaching and fill that out. Of course, all of these episodes over 175 now are there. We do one new one a week. We have free tool downloads. I'll even give you a copy of the Scaling up book for free if you pay the shipping and handling. So all of that stuff is there@scalingcoach.com Back to your thing a little bit. Here are the things that I think that I'm hearing. So one, we've got over a three year period, 174% growth and without a lot of sales, without any focus. Sales and marketing effort. It comes from building a culture and getting alignment and focus. And that shift is really where the ability to grow with almost the same or maybe the same. We haven't looked at the exact number, but maybe the same number of people. No. Appreciable. Yeah, we're at the same state now. Some change. Some people come, some people go. Right. But the same total number. So it's really interesting story and I think illustrative of a lot of our work and it's where people are kind of surprised when I talk to them. I'm like, look, it takes time and money to work with me or any of our coaches on growing the business. But I will guarantee that you'll be happy with the results and offer really an open ended guarantee, whatever discount you want if it's not producing results, but it is an investment of time and money to do the work, not just with me, but to translate that into real results in your business. It's not a going through the motions kind of a thing. Right. You really have to have to engage that. But it has these enormous payoffs. So if you want to talk to Steve more about it, his business or you have a staffing need in the area or you'd like to sell your business to him or you'd like to buy him out or like, you know, whatever you'd like to have a business conversation with Steve Conine, you can find him@talentframework.com so I'll put that in the show notes as well so that you can connect with Steve in there as well. So I think it's really great story of solid growth, applying the habits, building the right kind of culture on the right components, shifting and aligning the people and then getting the business payoff as a result. Yeah. Did we miss anything in there?

Sounds like a lot to me. I feel pretty accomplished when you put it like that. Yeah.

Well, when I look back at that first email that you sent, what you wanted to accomplish and we sailed through all of that stuff. So I feel really good about the work and I'm so glad to count you as a success story as a friend and a former client. So I'm really honored and I really appreciate that you come and share the story because not everyone really wants to be so publicly outed for their whole like have the whole thing out. It's nice when it's good results, right? Steve Conine, Talent Framework. Thanks again for joining us on the show. I want to thank the creator of All Things Scaling up and the Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnish. Also. The show is produced by Lucy Summers. Audio production is done at Podfly Productions and audio edited by Albert Burge. The show notes are compiled by Ayn Kudina and proofread by Tim McGowan. If you love this show, please like it, subscribe it. Give us a review right there. That helps us to grow the show and we're growing so strongly in the recent this year and we really appreciate what you're doing to help us. We also would love to hear from you. We don't hear nearly enough and I would love to hear any parts that you love, what you want to hear more of or anything like that. Send a Note to info scalingcoach.com thanks again for listening everyone. We'll talk to you next week. Keep scaling up.

Sa.