191: Steve McKee — Unstick Your Growth

Well, if you're feeling even a teensy bit stuck, stalled, or stale, this show is for you. It's an expert on what to do when growth stalls out, or even if you feel like it's starting to or at risk of stalling, listen to the show. I think it may surprise you the tips and the places to look to deal with stalled growth and someone who clearly has some background in this. Listen in. Okay. Hello. 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 is Steve McKee. Steve is president of McKee Wallwork and Company. So this is a marketing advisory firm that works in turnarounds. And a lot of times we think about management consulting and people who do restructuring and stuff. But how do we get you unstuck, unstalled, and revitalize a company that's otherwise stale? So that's the work of Steve. Steve, welcome to show.

Thanks. Great to be here.

Nice. And you're in Albuquerque, huh?

Beautiful Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Yes, beautiful Albuquerque, New Mexico. Yeah, I've been there a handful of times. I kind of love it. It's one of those places that New Mexico in general that we don't get to a lot of beautiful state. Surprisingly high altitude.

Surprisingly high. If you took. If you took the climate of Phoenix and Denver and merged them, you get Albuquerque. That's why we love it. It's perfect.

Yeah, it's awesome. And so we're in the middle of the holiday season, and I don't know when this particular recording come out, but this, we're for sure releasing the show in the beginning of the year and people are thinking about where to go. And there are many moments around and times I think that people feel stuck, stalled, or stale, even if it could be just in some area. So really grateful to have this topic on. You've got a lot of success. Why don't you tell us about your background and take us through a little bit of the arc of your career so people have a sense of you and your work. And then let's get into the core idea.

Sure. I'm an ad guy by trade. I answered a want ad in the newspaper. Some of your listeners won't know what that is.

A want ad in a newspaper? Yes, newspaper or want ad.

Yeah, either one. And I talked my way into a job with a really hot advertising agency in California. And, you know, you tend to like what you're good at and you're good at what you like, and I ended up being pretty Good at it. And one thing led to another and I worked at a handful of well respected international advertising agencies, really at the tail end of the Mad Men era, which was a great experience, really fabulous stuff. 23 years ago. Decided thought I was smart enough to start my own thing with a partner, Pat Wallwork. And we launched McKee Wallworking Company at that time as an advertising agency. That was the mid-1990s. We were just learning about this thing called the Internet and had no idea the kind of impact that it was going to make on us. We grew really fast. We are good at what we do. We were very successful. And after five years we looked up and found ourselves on the Inc. 500 list, the fastest growing private companies in America, which was pretty cool for sure. And you know, pat myself on the back for being a genius. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. They say we got notified about our, about our award. I think it was like in December of that year. And they had the gala in April of the following year. It was in Palm Springs. I actually went and bought a tuxedo for it. I was pretty excited. And between the time of the notification and the time of the show, our growth stopped, it stalled. And to make a long story short, we went on a 20 month drift, inexplicable drift and decline where we had as a professional service business, 94% turnover in our staff. Now, I don't know, you know that feeling you get when somebody comes into your office and closes the door? It's not a good, it's not a good feeling. And that happened to me, you know, one right after another. And the first few times you can fake your way through it, but when, when your staff starts seeing you not replace valuable people who leave work kind of gets out.

Yeah.

So as much credit as I had given myself on the way up unfairly, I really rode myself hard on the way down. You know, bleary eyes, late nights. What is wrong here? We are marketing experts and we can't even grow our own company. And it was really shocking. So not knowing what else to do. We were on the Inc 500 list, rightly or wrongly, fairly or unfairly. And we decided to take our own medicine and do some research. We didn't really know what we were looking for, but we thought, you know, these are the fastest growing companies in America. The list had been around for 20 years at that point. So there were several thousand of them. There are cousins now. So we screwed up all the courage we had and turned over all the cushions in the sofa and found all the money we could, which was not easy to do when you're going backwards. And we commissioned a study and we thought we were looking for the keys to success. And what we ended up filing finding were the keys to failure, which have been even more valuable. I do a lot of research for a living and I'm usually the objective outside third party critical eye, looking for patterns. In this case, I'm looking at reams of data and it was like I was staring into a mirror and it was shouting back at me, here's what's wrong with your company. And real briefly, what we discovered was most organizations, when they struggle, focus on the external dynamics, you know, whether it's competition or the recession or new technologies or what have you. But there are four destructive internal dynamics, all four of which my company was suffering from, that get and keep companies down. Now, mind you, what we found was about 40% of Inc. 500 companies kept growing in a rapid clip after they've made the list. About 40% kept growing but slowed down. And about 20% were in the position we were, which I have to tell you, was very comforting because it meant that maybe I'm not an idiot, you know, maybe there's something more to this. And we discovered.

You're married, right?

Yeah.

I'm pretty sure she'll tell you you're an idiot.

So what we discovered was.

That's terrible.

I shouldn't say that these dynamics had got us down. We used that knowledge to turn ourselves around slowly, painfully, here and there. I started sharing it in an industry talk or two, and we couldn't help but start sharing it with our clients. One thing led to another five years later when gross stalls came out, how it happens, why you're stuck and what to do about it, which was my first book, and that was 15, 16 years ago. And since that time, I like to say we failed our way to success. We have become, you know, a leading expert in turning around struggling organizations by not only addressing the external strategic dynamics, which any good consulting firm can do, but by uncovering, revealing, confronting, and addressing the four internal dynamics that tend to cause companies to go down the tubes.

Well, a lot of times when you hire a consulting company, right, they just come in and they tell you, well, you guys, like, you just need to sell more at lower cost, higher price. Okay, thanks.

Yeah, well, I tell you, we knew we were onto something when I started having those initial conversations with clients and I would tell them about our research and the internal dynamics, and I kid you not, more Than one of them said to me, you've been spying on us. How do you know this is happening inside our company? And when. When they say something like that, you know you're onto something.

Yeah, yeah, let's. I'd love you. I know you have some good examples of this. Why don't you, though, before you do it, just kind of bullet or headline, the. The key.

Sure.

Dynamic. So that before we go into it.

Yeah. And I think a lot of people will recognize this. So the first most common and most insidious internal dynamic is what we call a lack of alignment among the management team. We see this the most often, and it's also the most insidious for a couple of reasons. One is many times it goes unnoticed and sometimes intentionally because companies don't want to confront that. And so what I'm talking about, the symptoms of it or the manifestations of it are the, know, the rolling of the eyes or the passive aggression or the hallway conversations or the being meetings or what have you.

Right.

Sometimes they just don't want to confront that. The other reason it's a problem is because it doesn't matter what your strategy is. If you're not in alignment, it's not going to get executed.

So this is Rockefeller habit number one in our world for our regular listeners. And also, like, if you're a follower of Pat Lunchioni, we're talking about the first couple rungs of. Of healthy teams.

Pat Lencioni is a great mentor of ours. He actually endorsed my second book and really respect what he does. And, yeah, he looks at, you know, the overall organizational health, and we come at the same sort of issue from, you know, through the marketing lens, but absolutely. So that's. That's dynamic. Number one is that lack of a line. Number two is a loss of focus. And this typically happens one of two ways. Either a company gets cocky because it's doing so well, and it starts extending. What we like to say is you can stretch a brand so far that it rips. It starts getting into business that it's kind of not really allowed by the marketplace to get into, and that can derail it. The other way a loss of focus happens is when you're hit with a, what we call a tectonic event, like a recession or a big new competitor or something. You start chasing business you probably shouldn't, or lowering your prices or doing those things that, you know, at first start out as sort of temporary, but they end up redefining your company, and that's very destructive. Number three, is a loss of nerve. When things start to go awry, you get scared. That manifests itself in a couple of different ways. One is what you do with your money. Typically, companies will cut back on the things that don't hurt immediately and drop to the bottom line like marketing or training or research and development. Um, and the other manifestation of a loss of nerve is when you get safe, when you don't want to stand out or what we call have sharp elbows in the marketplace. You kind of want to stand under the same tree as your competitor. And of course that's not going to differentiate you. And then the fourth dynamic that's so destructive is inconsistency. When companies start casting about looking for silver bullet solutions, the latest and greatest and that the most.

I feel like number two and number four are really similar things, right?

Similar things, different reasons. Number two is, has more to do with your corporate identity, strategy, positioning in the marketplace. Whereas number four is Pontiac giving away cars on the Oprah Winfrey Show. You know, big news, splash for a day, Absolutely not strategic. And it, you know, it hastened the company's death. What's so crazy about these dynamics is they are not discreet. They operate together and they can start a vicious cycle where a lack of alignment fuels a loss of focus, which fuels a loss of nerve, which results in inconsistency, which strengthens the lack of alignment. And, and it kind of doesn't really matter where you start in that cycle. If you get in that cycle and you don't interrupt it, you're probably going to go down. And I've looked at, they're saying these.

Are kind of like a negative flywheel in this loop and you start like decelerating as a result of this.

Yeah, I've. When you understand the dynamics, you read the business press differently. Whenever I read a postmortem on a company, either after it's died or in, in the throes of death, I can see usually 1, 2, 3 or all 4 of the factors at work that, you know, the article or whatever it is doesn't describe them the way I just did. But I remember reading a 400 word article, 400 words, about the demise of Yahoo when it was going through its sort of death throes. And in 400 words, all four factors were there. I was stunned.

Yeah, it's interesting. I remember once being in a.

An.

Investment meeting with some hedge fund folks and some others, and we were talking about the prospects in the early Internet days about Yahoo, and I'm like, ah, this is a company that can do really well. They've got huge brand recognition, anybody could do this. But they'll lever this to be the thing of choice and they can do anything they want to do. And of course they like proceeded to make me look like a moron.

I said Amazon would fail. So I got you topped there, Amazon.

Yeah, a lot of people are still saying Amazon will fail.

How?

They're not making any money. You can always find somebody who will call the downfall of something. I mean Michael Dell's famous for calling for the downfall of Apple Computer. And look who's a trillion dollar company now, Michael.

Yeah, he was close. They almost went because belly up.

Really, really close. So we were getting ready for the show and we were talking about some example companies and you brought up Sears. Why don't we start with that one? Because there's a company that was so important 100 years ago and even as I grew up was a really dominant place where you would buy certain kinds of goods on a regular basis. Was that one stop for a huge amount of needs. And yet you know, they didn't find a way to do it. And so talk to us about that. Is it all strategic or what are the internal things?

Yeah, it's actually internal. Sears was 1% of GDP I read at one point, which is incredible. No, a lot of ink has been spilled over Sears especially you know, with their recent bankruptcy. And the story is well known, you know, that Sears was Amazon 120 years ago. Basically it was a mail order catalog. Right? Yeah. Then they, in the, I think it was in the 1920s they opened the stores and, and we all know the history of Sears. Well, along comes a loss of focus is really where it began in the 1980s. I don't know if you remember, but Sears bought Caldwell Banker and Dean Witter and they launched the Discover Card. And so this is an, an example of corporate hubris where Sears could do no wrong. So we're gonna start stocking and selling all of this stuff. Well, it wasn't too long, a decade or so before they kind of went that's a mistake. And in the meantime this thing called the Internet came along and E commerce began and Sears was really late to that party and I don't think respected the threat that it meant. So loss of focus manifests itself as it often does when you're at the peak in Sears's case and you know, they haven't really recovered from that. But the biggest issue that Sears has been facing is a lack of alignment and it, and that I don't know, I don't know if I want to say it began, but it really kicked up when Eddie Lampert, when they merged Kmart and Sears combined, the companies that call it Sears Holding. Eddie Lampert steps in as the chairman and a couple of things happened. One, apparently due to his unique management style, they haven't been able to keep a CEO in place for any real length of time. Which means you just can't achieve alignment. But most people don't really realize this, but back in 2008, he split the company into 30, actually 40 divisions, each of which had a separate P and L, each of which had to compete for resources, each of which had its own senior management team and their own boards of directors. And you just, you're going to get, it's balkanization within the company. So it's like lack of alignment on steroids.

We probably was thinking that he was going to add ownership, right? Increase accountability and ownership and business thinking.

Yeah. And you know, that's a fair point because it's easy when we're talking about case studies like this to Monday morning quarterback them. And I don't mean to do that because business strategy is difficult, it's hard. And so it's easy to say what went wrong. But I also think there's lessons to be learned of the lack of alignment and loss of focus. And by that time the loss of nerve was almost axiomatic because Sears started discounting. Right. Because it's chasing business that's going away. So they started discounting and then spinning off its stores. And you know, so you're losing now and it makes the lack of alignment worse because you feel like you're losing. And then along comes the inconsistency where, you know, Sears decides to partner with Amazon selling or installing tires and then compete with Amazon. And the company has just been a, a mess from an internal dynamic standpoint for the last 20 or 30 years. It breaks my heart because as a marketing guy, Z A brand guy, the Sears brand is still revered and still extremely valuable. But it's like they're trying to run the thing out of business. And I honestly don't know why anybody would loan the company money anymore.

But it's been quite a few years of decline now and the, the brand is diminishing value. I mean, you have to really resurrect it, right? But when I hear you say that and I look at that and I think about like I once in another job did Sears was one of my accounts. I did business with Sears. I lived in Chicago The Sears Tower is and was an imposing structure. And if you were senior manager in that and had one of the top floor places there, you had a commanding view which would leave you feeling godlike. And they were Amazon like and undisputably powerful in terms of their leverage and their reach across the country. And they supplied everything for all parts, parts of our lives and had done so for a very long time. So it's easy to see how they would get that and forget that there are some things they do well and some things that they don't do well. Some things you're known for and some things you're not and to. And to end up unfocused, not aligned with different factions and so big that you're not, you're not really sure what your core is. Right.

And not recognizing that nothing lasts forever. And the, what we call the disruption cycle of business is picking up velocity ever, ever more quickly.

Right.

And so there's an interesting, I think it's called Parkinson's Law, that it's a professor that coined this term and made the observation that when a company erects its beautiful global corporate headquarters, it marks its decline.

Yeah.

Because what they've done is they've succeeded for so long, they're building a monument to their current structure and then they can't change. If that's true, watch out for Apple Computer because they just built the Death Star as I call it.

Right. So that would be one. The other one would be in our neighborhood is Salesforce. Right. They've built this huge. Well, they didn't really build it. Somebody else built it, but they essentially bought into it. And Salesforce Tower has become this very, very large symbol on the San Francisco waterfront skyline.

Keep an eye on them. Nothing lasts forever.

Nothing lasts forever. So I think that's a really useful thing. Why don't we take another example? You were, you mentioned something about a Fortune 500 company. These are both large companies, but this is a place to look at where things go wrong.

Yeah, this was so it's fascinating because most of our work is with. Is with mid market companies. In this case, we had occasion to meet a Fortune 500 company whose name I can't say it's actually a Fortune 100 company. And I'll never forget the initial meeting I had with the woman there. I thought it was kind of a dud. She didn't know what she was looking for. They just had some problems. I gave her a copy of One girl stalls and a couple of weeks later she called me and said we need to talk. This is a company that had gone through a five year strategic transformation again, wisely. Okay, so they're dealing with the external market dynamics, but got away, but lost its focus without even really knowing it. They woke up five years later and they said, well, our business is restructured correctly, but our internal dynamics are a mess because our people are adrift. They don't really know who we are. Which is a fascinating study of internal branding. So we, we came in and we met with them and the company was so big, I was kind of intimidated with are we going to be able to pull this thing off? But we followed our principles and our process of the first thing is to call out and recognize. And Patrick Lencioni would be all over this. The lack of alignment. Enter the danger, as he says, but in a polite and respectful way and have everybody recognize what has been happening. And they did, very emotionally, intelligently, if you will. Right then it was really a matter of finding their new focus. So they had already reoriented the company, but they hadn't articulated or unearthed what that really meant. And by helping them do that, which is, you know, a core competency of ours, it's remarkable. And this is what happens when you align around of focus. The loss of nerve problem evaporates because people get energized and excited once again. And when you're energized and excited, you want to invest and you want to engage and you want to tell the world. So those three things happened. And then the fourth one, of course, is consistency. And that can only be proven over time. But if you, if you do the heavy lifting of setting up the internal alignment around a core focus that evaporates the loss of nerve, it's simply a matter of keeping your eye on the stove, as this company has done. This was, it was 10 years ago that we embarked on this project and they've been rocking it ever since. The woman who hired us recently retired and she and I were having a conversation and she said that this experience was the highlight of her career, which, I mean, that's about as flattering as it gets. So this will work for a company like ours. We're a small, closely held business that had to turn ourselves around. Fortune 500 company. I think it's because truth is truth. Internal dynamics or internal dynamics. I was giving a speech once talking about the things we're talking about here, and somebody in the back of the room raised their hand and they said, I'm an independent contractor, can I have a lack of alignment? And I thought you know, sure, if you're, if you're of two minds, if you have a hard time making a decision about where you should go. Yeah. Even an independent contractor could, could suffer from these things and benefit from knowing how to address them.

When I do some of our public workshops and our early stage accelerator programs, I'll tell people who are solopreneurs or close to solopreneurs. Yeah, you can have a lack of alignment with yourself. If you find yourself arguing with the person in the mirror. Yeah, right. Then it's going to be hard to proceed. I took over a company shortly after I learned the Rockefeller habits are about the same time. And the company was at risk. There was stress in the marketplace and for the company operationally, it was at a crossroads. And I think, well, they just need a little leadership and they need to reinvest some energy into this business. And I came in and after a year or so, it got worse. It became critical. And one of the things that I drove up and it was not very conscious, it was a little more accidental, but I really drove up the lack of alignment at the leadership team level. And what I discovered is we had certain changes to make structurally, operationally, which we would discover in the next year and a half. But the lack of alignment at the leadership level about what to address, both internally and externally was profound. And the other leaders who had actually been with the company longer had been there before me, just had a fundamentally different perspective about the opportunities that companies should pursue and why. And, you know, I don't. We could argue about that even today, the particulars of them, but it didn't really matter. One way had to win out and somebody had to go. And I, you know, I essentially drove them until they quit, Said, you know, you're going to toe the line. This is the way we're going to go. And they, they said, screw you, Bill, and we're out of here. And we ultimately grew that and turned that ship around and it went through successive ways of growth and like that kind of thing from there. But it didn't shift until we got rid of the folks who wouldn't align. Right. They wouldn't. And you could disagree, but then commit. And they weren't doing it. They were doing that thing where they'd roll their eyes and they'd, you know, talk about each other and me and like all that behind.

Yeah. You know, and that's a misnomer in some cases about the alignment. Sometimes we'll use the word consensus, that the difficulty with that is people think management by committee. There's, there's a. There's a handful of different ways to be aligned. Right. You can work for a dictator like a Steve Jobs. And I don't say that in a pejorative way, but it's like he just makes you be aligned. And then there are other companies. Well, you take a Herb Callaher at Southwest Airlines who was not a dictator, but by sheer force of personality, or Howard Schultz. And then there are other companies where you don't have that. That force of personality, that iconic leader, and it is more collaborative and you need to get to a management consensus. It's not management by committee, but what it is is recognizing that if you're not. If you're not in alignment, nothing's going to happen. That is so common. Fortunately, there's a very elegant way around that, which we have discovered, which is what the marketing lens brings to it. And that is when a company is not aligned, the first thing we do is we surface the issue and we try to articulate with them the vectors of that, if you will. And it's usually an argument over strategy. As you were saying, somebody says we should do this and somebody else says we should do that. So we, instead of taking sides, what we do is we leave the building, figuratively and literally, and go study the market, which is what the marketing philosophy would suggest you do. And typically what happens is if we study the market in the proper depth and breadth and dimension, and that's any form of market research, the picture will begin to resolve itself and the strategy will become apparent, or at least the broad strategic direction will become apparent, and you don't have to fight about it. People tend to. To circle around it. Now, in, in many cases, that's not true of everyone. And yes, in many cases, you get to alignment by having one or two or three people decide that there's a better place for them in the world. But that doesn't. It doesn't have to be through conflict necessarily.

Mm. Yeah. It's interesting that, like just exposing it, surfacing it, driving it up, and then going for the. The disagree, but commit to the thing or look, you should go work somewhere else. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. If you're not able to disagree and commit, then, you know, face facts. And I think getting back to Sears, I think it's a fundamentally broken company because ultimately, if the CEO is the problem, you know, what are you going to do? I've had a lot of senior managers or mid managers come to me and say, I agree with everything you're saying. It's happening within my company. But my CEO is in denial. And unfortunately, I don't have a lot of good advice for them. I mean, if the CEO is in denial, he or she is in denial. And we can try, we can take a swing at, at getting their attention, but ultimately it's their call.

Well, you know, we see a lot of things on a regular basis. People who talk about engaging us or begin working with us and then sort of fail the process. It's not the majority, thank God, but there are people that fail the process. And one of the things is. Well, I think most of them, the CEO plays a big role in the failure of the initiative, and they do any number of things. But number one is they don't realize that this company is perfectly matched to all their strengths and weaknesses. That the way the company exists, it's all. Unless they just been walked in the door. But it's an amplification of who they are and who they've been. And as much as we might want to work on new frameworks and things like that within a company, the CEO has to evolve or they will undo them, subvert them quite naturally.

Quite naturally, yeah. It's interesting.

So you have to look in the mirror and recognize. And I think part of the problem there is what you might have with Sears and others is that if you're a particularly affluent, successful person, you have a lot of money, maybe you even got a private jet, you're flying around. The hubris and the. And the perspective is so altered by that. And you start to say to yourself, I must be doing something right. I must be smart on some level, because I got here. Look, I live in the big house now, and I've got this and I've got that. And I think that can just wreck a lot of humility and openness when you say, I'm not done yet.

We recently did an analysis of our most successful engagements. And the common thread that we found was a humility in the CEO. Really remarkable that they know. They do have a lot of confidence in what they know, but they know they don't know everything. And sometimes it takes an external event to humble them. Unfortunately, sometimes the event could be so destructive that they're too far gone. Some people are just more humble than others. But if you are a brilliant CEO with a sense of humility, you can do anything. These issues can be addressed because you're willing to look at them honestly.

Well, it's the difference between leading in service of something, a virtue, a mission, a company, a team, a Cause or leading for your own ego kind of thing, right?

Yep. Completely. Yeah.

Interesting. So Sears struggles. Nobody's betting on that one anymore. And your Fortune 500 or 100 company has turned around and is doing better as a result of looking at these things. So the lack of alignment is the first one. But you say people can enter anywhere on this cycle of decline. Right. So we're not aligned, we can't connect. We become unfocused, we start doing too many things, the wrong things, then we lose our nerve, and then we start taking wild shots at stuff. Right?

That's right. Or if you want to lose your nerve, if you're doing okay in the. You get a deep recession in 2009, or a new competitor comes along and starts eating your lunch, you might enter in the loss of nerve where you're like, oh, my God, we got to do something. And so the debate starts around the table. And now you enter into a lack of a problem alignment. So it really can start anywhere.

You know, I'd argue that we're probably all doing and touching on these things from time to time at different degrees. And this cycle of deceleration, and many of us will pull out of it before we realize that we were ever there and then. And not move on to the next stake will something will rescue us consciously or unconsciously, and we'll yank out of it. And if your company's doing that, but you're probably always flirting with the potential for entering this cycle.

Yeah. Here's the best way I've found to explain that. It's, you know, health. Physical health is the successful battle against things that are trying to kill you at any given time. There's bacteria in our bodies that would kill us, but for our immune system, defeating them. These four factors, I believe, are present in every company at all times. It's just that a healthy company that's growing has a strong immune system and can keep them tamped down. And it's when you get hit with. In your personal life, you know, a death in the family or a blizzard or something that causes your immune system to be depressed, you get sick and can die. In the corporate world, the analogy is you get hit with a blizzard or some significant event that you didn't plan on, your immune system gets depressed, and these issues can rise up and kill you. When we, I mentioned we turned our company around in the mid, around 2004, 05, using these principles, here comes a recession. And it really hit us hard, you know, in 2009, 2010, every Monday morning in Our management meeting, we, we brought up the four factors and we said, how we doing guys? We're scared, right? Business is tough, but are we staying aligned? Are we keeping our focus? Are we having courage to do that? And just having those conversations helped us to walk through the recession when a lot of our peers were not doing it.

You know, it's interesting, one of our clients a little over a year, a little over a year ago, realized that one of their new key execs was not aligned and seemed to have just a whole like values, mood, style difference with the rest of the team. And we called it out in the annual off site and it was really, really clear. And so there was a particular focus over the next quarter in developing relationship and understanding and connection and getting on the same page. But three months later, when they thought they'd sort of done it, they discovered they in fact hadn't. There was still a fundamental like vision value disconnect with this member of the leadership team. And so I said, okay, well we're going to try a different approach this time. We're going to go well. By the next quarter it was clear that it hadn't shifted. And I had a side conversation with the CEO. I'm like, you gotta make a change here. It's not me who's saying, you see this, you see, but you have to act on it. And they drug that out for almost 12 months and now the company still continued to grow. They did lots of good things. But I would say when I look at them and at other clients, that that failure to resolve it, and ultimately they did resolve it and that like greatly accelerated their ability to work together as a team. But wow, you know, over nine months of dragging their heels on taking action in this area. And I think that CEO will have learned that deeply now and not let that because as they've looked back, they can see that a lot of energy was wasted on that. And you know, that's missing market energy, that's not catering to the investors, that's not addressing, you know, it's so defocusing and then also destabilizing. It has a ripple across all of the operational teams as well. People not working in an aligned, coherent, cohesive, synergistic fashion. We all have to odds with each other. That's profoundly unproductive. Right.

We all have to learn that lesson. And I think what we're talking about here, not only experience but these principles can give you sort of the internal lexicon to be able to think through those issues. If you see that someone's not aligning. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're a bad person or they're wrong. It just means that they're not fitting. And you're right. That huge opportunity cost to that and perhaps worse.

One of the other coaches shared with me and we started working with another company in the last quarter and. And the coach shared these two questions. They said, you know, what would you do if this person. How would you feel if this person quit tomorrow? And if the answer is something like relief, yes, then liberation, I could breathe again. Whatever it is, Right. That's your first indication that maybe you should just go ahead and make the call and help them out the door. It doesn't mean you have to be mean or like that kind of thing. I fundamentally believe somebody can be an A player somewhere, maybe just never in your environment or in your job that you have available. And then the next one is, that really ought to bring it on home is what if you had 10 people like that? And I think a lot of times we think, well, I'd be relieved. But I think I can bring them around, I think I can work them. They have industry experience, experience. So they really. They're really smart or what? It doesn't matter. Whatever it is that has you, like, hoping that somehow you can pull it out and save them and save the situation, and you might even be getting board pressure to give them a couple more months or something like that for them to finally produce results or total line or whatever it is. But then if you ask that second question, what if you had 10 people like that? That's usually like, oh, my God, it's lose my mind. Okay, well, you should lose them sooner or maybe send them to a place where they can kick ass.

Maybe you're the problem.

Well, for sure, if you're the one who can't make the change. So the second thing, right, looking in the mirror that we see a lot is you've got the wrong people still hanging around, and you know they're wrong. It's not your coach or consultant or somebody who told you that person's the wrong person. You know, in your heart they're the wrong person, but you're unwilling, afraid to make the change to. To call it right.

Yep. And the stakes get ever higher, as we said, with this, with the speed of. Of change moving ever faster. You just can't lose the time to that. And you know, again, Monday morning quarterbacking, when do you pull the trigger? When do you. When do you bench your starting quarterback? Right. When do you fire Your coach. Not easy questions to answer at all.

Well, doubling down on a bad investment, right, is never going to make it better.

That's right, that's right. But I sold Apple stock just before it shot up.

Well, it's interesting we're talking with you with a marketing firm about things that are so much about the operational and leadership DNA, right? All of the. It's far more internal conversation than the external things.

It is, but that's the marketing lens. But because, you know, people think of Mark we distinguished in big end marketing and small end marketing. Small and marketing is like the marketing department, you know, or marketing plan. Big end marketing is a worldview that says the way other people think and how they operate and what motivates them, whether they're your consumers or your staff is what matters. You have to have empathy and humility to understand how to move people. And that's why our skill set transferred so well from strictly. If you want to look at it this way, focusing on the promotion P Of the marketing, four Ps to all four product price, place, promotion. Some people extend it to people, to the whole enterprise. It's a way of thinking, of having empathy and understanding who you're dealing with that makes the difference. And that's what makes us unique. Because I often say many, many, any consultant worth their salt can help you deal with external strategic dynamics. I mean that's what we all do. It's the internal soft stuff that a hard charging CEO might dismiss as frothy. Where really the rubber meets the road, that's where it happens. I'm fond of saying your mother was right. It's what's inside that counts.

Well, in the world of scaling up, right, we're talking about people first and then strategy. So people is the way that you work together and the alignment and who's on the team and who's doing what in the right seats and all that kind of thing. And then we get into the external stuff of strategy. But even that is internal, external. It's about the match of your core competencies with the opportunities in the world and the focus against particular market segments. But if the people aren't aligned, it's still going to get undermined. And then we've got execution, right, which is about staying onto a few priorities and tracking them and managing them over time. All of which can be undone by these people issues. And then of course there's the cash tools and managing the cash well, which is all undone if the rest of that stuff is. So the, I think the, the ideas that you've got here. So to recap for our listeners, the first is if you're feeling like you're stuck, stalled or stale in some way, look at who's not aligned with your approach to solving it or even the problem itself. Where are you? Have you lost your focus? Are you too broad? Where are you have if you've lost your nerve, where are you being inconsistent? Those four areas that you align, you outline in the book. When growth Stalls I think is really a useful thing for folks to do right now if they're looking at that. And even if you don't see it so plainly, take a minute to examine and look where it might be. Because we're probably touching these all the time, right?

Yeah. Or ask your spouse, as you alluded to earlier, they'll tell you the truth. Right.

I think there's like the truth is our foreign mates, our family mates, our spouses, our parents know what's wrong with us. They know how to fix our lives. They always have, they always will. And it doesn't make a whole lot of difference for us because we're not really listening or open when we see something for ourself. When you apply the tools and you self examine, you discover it. Then you're usually propelled into action. Right. You cease it and grab it when you finally see something for yourself. So look for it yourself. They probably do know. You're probably not willing to listen. That's not going to make a difference. Was my joke. It's not about male or female spouse. Right. It could be either way. It's our partners who know us maybe more and accept us. Anyway.

Yeah.

Mckeewallwork.com is the website if you want to go check out Steve's firm and see their work and what they do and that kind of thing. We'll put the spelling and all that in the show notes as well. But mckeewallwork.com and has got links to both the books When Gross Stalls and Power Branding. You can check them both out. Read about Steve and the firm and all that there. We're here with you every week. We love bringing and talking to interesting folks in the world of scaling up, scaling your business, scaling your leadership, developing yourself along the way and growing and accomplishing your stuff is what I care most about. So I love bringing this. We've got all of these shows, the notes, the tools, the downloads, all the things like that. I'll even give you a copy of the book Scaling up for free if you just pay the shipping and handling all that@scalingcoach.com so just go to scalingcoach.com you can also subscribe there to get our regular updates including these shows. Thanks again Steve for joining us. We'll talk to everybody again next week. Our thanks to the author of the original Rockefeller Habits book and the evolution of our whole framework into scaling up and beyond Vern Harnish, the Growth Guy. This show is produced by Lucy Summers. Audio production is handled by Podfly Productions. The audio editing is done by Albert Burge and the show notes are compiled by Ayn Kodina and proofread by Tim McGowan. If you love the show please give us a review on itunes or wherever Stitcher, wherever you got it and you can like it. Subscribe it to get them every week in your feeds. You can also let us know what you want more of or what parts you really loved. We love hearing from listeners with an email to info scalingcoach.com thanks again for listening and keep scaling up. Sam.