266: Scaling Up Insights — Coach Panel with Dominic Monkhouse and Daniel Marcos

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatant.com Bill G Again, that's doxatant.com BillG. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G Check it out today. Oh, hello again everyone. So we're talking today about what's on your summer reading list, your business summer reading list, not your Roman romance novels or whatever it is on your list. We'll talk a little bit about the Best Buy turnaround. You better Jolie's comments and stuff to us last week. Using customer and employee data to make smarter business decisions and and then inflation. Inflation is coming back again. We'll talk about flywheels, brand promises and guarantees if time allows. So hi everyone. I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. We're all about how to scale and grow business no matter what's happening in the economy or around the world. And it sure is different all around the world. I'm joined today by Dominic Monkhouse, Daniel Marcos. Dominic is over in the uk. Daniel was in Canada. He is now in. Oh, I've got new music coming in. Do you hear that one coming in? We're gonna get filtered out for that, but I like it. Power Station Bang and Gong. Updated version of the old T Rex classic by remnants of Duran Duran.

Bill, Bill, you know so many things about so many things that I know nothing about.

Clearly important to scaling your business. Getting the right groove in my world anyway.

Totally.

Actually, we'll share more about that. I was with a couple of teams this last week in Santa Barbara and it was fantastic experience, like the environment, the mood I think makes a big difference in scaling your business. Before we get into that and all that, we'll talk about what you've been doing and like that. Let me just shout out to talk about our sponsor and one of the key challenges that we all grapple with and that's choosing the right technology partner. If you're looking for a tech partner now, there are some important things to look for things like proven technology expertise. Right. They actually know how to do their jobs. And a delivery model that's tailored for businesses at your stage cost but balanced with the quality and agile development methods that make a difference. Being able to ramp it up or ramp it down to adapt to your changing business needs and a highly rigorous process. We've come across a lot of vendors doing this kind of digital transformation work. But one of our scaling up own, one of our scaling up clients, a venture incubator based in India, has a unique recipe for execution and their model is tailored for small and medium sized businesses like hours. So the benefit is double that of competitive vendors and I suggest you check them out, see if it's maybe a fit for your business. Clarion Technology is the company and we'll throw a link up here later. But Bit ly Clarion Tech will give you a little form to fill out. It's got my happy face on it but basically it's a contact form. They'll get in touch with you, talk about what it is that you think you need to do and all of that. So anyway, listening now as we talk with Daniel Dominic about all the things going on in the world of scaling up. Dominic, Daniel, welcome to the show.

Thank you for the invitation.

Thanks Bill, to our panel conversation. So Dominic, where are you today?

I'm on the farm in Wiltshire, near Salisbury in England. Sun is shining. It's five o'clock in the afternoon. I've just been topping the paddock.

Topping the paddock. What does that actually mean?

Well, it just means cutting the grass. Really? Cutting the grass out on the tractor. Cutting the grass, sure.

That's what I always say. We say mow the lawn. Mow the lawn. Cut the grass.

Top of the paddock. Yeah, paddock. It's about how big a grass bit of lawn you have, I guess.

Yes. And Daniel, you're now in Austin. Yes, I'm in Austin.

Yeah. Well, moving to Austin. In the process of.

In the process of getting set up in Austin. Nice, nice. Well, so we're getting into so much this week. You know, I think summer being in the country, traveling around is definitely on your mind. I was down in Southern California last week. We'll be back down the week after next. I'm curious what's on your summer reading list, what you guys are up to.

So I'm precisely reading the book of the Best Buy Turnaround based on the event that we had. And it's really good. It's really, really good. And by the way, let me tell this quick Story. So I to Austin, I'm having to put WI fi in the house and all these things. And I have an Amazon prime. But I said, hey, I want to be able to have things in a couple of hours. I need to install a WI Fi or something. Yes, I bought it in Best Buy to pick it up. Store.

Yeah.

So I get an email, five minutes. Yeah. Said, your, your. Your equipment is ready. Come to a store and bring this email. Yeah. You, when you park, there's like 10 spaces and they have a number. So you park, open the email and said, where are you parked? Space 10. What color is your car? And said like an SUV, white, whatever. Click a couple of buttons and I said, we'll be out in three minutes. Someone comes in, the phone has a number so they could clarify it's you. They give your merchandise in your. In your car. It took me since I parked until I left, less than five minutes.

Nice.

Brilliant.

The process, easy, immediate grab, immediate gratification.

It's funny, isn't it? Like just if without Covid, they probably wouldn't have done it. It's making a massive difference. It'll make a massive difference for them. Post Covid.

Yeah.

By the way, when you read the book, it's typical that everyone was blaming Amazon, said, hey, Best Buy has been destroyed because of Amazon. And the guy said, no, it's not Amazon. It's our lack of execution, it's our lack of. Or making the client happy. And that's how we started all. I thought it was brilliant.

I was in Best Buy recently. Shout out to Best Buy this time. Actually like three or four times in the last little bit, which is a little bit unusual, but we were helping our daughter move into a new apartment, so we needed things like an alarm system and WI fi and like that kind of thing. And we did the similar kind of thing, a new air conditioner, microwave, you know, lots of things like that. And we went into the Best Buy and it was super easy. The thing I was struck by was how helpful, helpful the staff were like really, really helpful. And they weren't like, make sure I get the commission kind of helpful. They were genuinely like, are you good? Let me get you a basket. And did you find everything you need and like, knowledgeable, helpful, friendly? It was dramatic.

Well, it's funny because when I had read the book before, before he was on with Verne last week because he's coming on the. He's coming on my podcast in a couple of weeks time and, and when he, when he started, he did some mystery Shopping. And what he realized is that was so inconsistent. He went into some Best Buys and they were amazing, and he went into others which were just a car crash. And so he knew it was. It was possible. And it was just about that consistency in every store. But it makes such a difference if you're dealing with. I was in a restaurant the other day, my wife and I went for breakfast. You know, some people should not be in hospitality because they hate. Because they hate human beings. And we sat down and we just said, look, we're just going to have a pastry and a cup of tea. And I heard her say to the other girl, no, if I'd known they weren't going to eat more than that, I wouldn't have given them a table. You know what? You should. Should get a different job, really. You shouldn't be in hospitality.

Yeah. Daniel, which. Which WI fi router did you go with?

So I got the WI fi nest thing.

The nest, yeah.

And the easiness of synchronizing it with your phone. You download an app, click a couple of buttons. Done.

Yeah.

Brilliant. Really, really brilliant. And by the way, I do have an issue. So first I bought one, and each of the hubs, these extenders, has. It needs to have like a QR code so you could just scan it and it gets automatically synced. And mine did not have QR codes.

Yes.

So I called and say it has no QR codes and said, please return it. Get a new one. And it was like going to a store. I gave the one bad, they gave me a new one. Five minutes left again. But that was a Google issue. And interestingly, I never thought Google was going to answer the phone. They answered the phone in two, three minutes. They did some troubleshooting and said, sorry, we made a mistake. Bring it back.

That group answers the phone. You know, for the most part, like your Google services, you can't get a phone answered. But that. That's great. That's great to hear. We upgraded recently, so we, you know, we've upgraded studio lights and cameras and microphones and things like that during the pandemic, as I think everybody should. You maybe don't need this mic in particular, but if you're doing any kind of remote work with people, you know, level up your game, get your. Get your game on, and don't tolerate bad wifi or bad. I can't believe, like a year and a half later, I'm still talking to people. They work the same place every day. They're working by zoom and phone, and they're like, yeah, the WI fi is not really good here. Get a new one. What the hell? It's like your core infrastructure. We went with the Eero Pro 6, which was an upgrade of the Eero. It's the mesh network from Amazon and I. Or that they bought or whatever. I couldn't be happier with it. 800 gig, you know, speeds up and down over WI Fi, like, that's awesome. And coverage all over the house.

I'm just. I was just thinking, Bill, when you were saying that about people putting up with crappy wifi, I'd be like you not having the right prescription glasses and just trying to get through life without the right. Just. Just crashing into stuff and not being able to read things. Nobody would do that be ridiculous.

Yeah, it's. I mean, it's remarkable. But I was working with a team a couple of weeks ago and they've been doing that and they're like, still backlighting themselves, you know, like sitting with a bright window behind themselves on a laptop or whatever, slumped down in the chair, you know, like this or off camera or what. I'm like, come on, get your game together here. Oh, yeah. So there's a lot to say there. You know the other thing that's interesting, you were talking about hospitality and what business we're in. We're talking about summer reading list. I loved the Hubert Jolie talk. But then you reminded me of actually of a movie from many, many years ago that we have a funny connection to. Stanley Tucci, who did a movie called Big Night. And Big Night is an old, old, old classic movie, but it's fantastic business movie. It's a story of two bro restaurant business with a failing restaurant. And one of them loves people and the other loves food. But they're both super, super passionate. Their restaurant is failing and it's all about, like, why they're failing and how they're failing and. And then they go into their last big night, right? They have one last celebration and it's the synthesis of, you know, great people and great food. Like everything comes together in that one night. And. And I'm reminded when I think of that movie. So it's such a good. You like, watch it. It's really old. Find it. I don't know where it is. It's somewhere. I'm sure you can get it somewhere. Netflix. Or maybe not Netflix, maybe Amazon. But. But it is great, great parable and highly entertaining. That synthesis of subject matter. Passion, people, passion. Service meets product quality. That kind of thing is. Is really a thing that we all grapple with in our businesses. Right.

So talking about movie, talking about turnarounds, I recently saw with my kids the movie Miracle. The US team hockey team.

Yes.

What a class of leadership. I thought it was brilliant, the leadership that the coach used to get the team to work together. He got the best players, but each one was playing for their team, their college team, and he, for leadership, got him to play together. And they had one of the few wins against the Russians that the US has had in hockey. And it was brilliant. Class on leadership.

Motivational talks.

Motivational.

Yeah, yeah.

What is it that makes it motivational? Right. I think it's not like, hey, get out of your, get up out of the couch and get out and do something. But it's like we see a different kind of future, one that we aspire to, one that we hunger for and then we reach for that. Right. We see something else possible and then we're compelled to start to act in new ways.

Also, I think it's like they're sort of a bigger purpose. Have you read Legend about the New Zealand All Blacks? So in there, in the 80s, you know, they were, in the 80s, they were, I mean, you look at it now and it's hard. The Rugby Union went professional and so the All Blacks got beaten and they got together and they sort of had a three day off site and they decided that they needed to reinvent the All Blacks. And what the, the New Zealand Prime Minister came down and said what he, what he felt the team didn't understand was the impact that the team had on the nation and that they, and that really when the All Blacks played, they weren't playing for themselves, they were playing for the country. And so then they went and, you know, they, they, they, you know, recommitted to doing the Hackers and they put some values together. So one of their values is no dickheads. And you know, they reaffirmed some of their ritual. So when they, when they're in the UK and they're playing Wales, they go over the Severn Bridge. And as they go over the Severn Bridge from England into Wales, they all jump on the chairs in the coach and they shout, we never lose to Wales. And it's just sort of that sort of, you know, there's all of that sort of history and tradition and core values and playing for the nation. And I think, I think great companies, the leaders of great companies get there, get their staff on that sort of mission and you know, we're on a bigger journey than just about us, but we all have to play our part. But.

But that's kind of motivation. I really like. I hate when someone like a motivational speaker shouts you and you have to move and. But telling you a story or going through core values and through the core and you get motivated. That's.

Yes.

I've had a couple of times that a CEO calls me and said, hey, can you give a motivational speak to my team? I was like, no. If you don't have people motivated, hire them motivated or give them a business that they will be excited of selling. Like, if you're selling crap. And then you just want me to give them pep talk for them to go and motivate. No, that's the wrong thing. Would you say, Dominic, I think there.

Has to be something, like, right underneath the pep talk. Something like core, like, real. Not just a lot of hoo ha, you know, making noise and shaking pom poms and saying, come on. But it's like reminding people of who they are and what they care about. And some years ago, I was working with a team in Hawaii, and they. They had big ambitions to dominate the whole state in their category. And they were at this point, a fairly small player. And in our beginning work with all teams, we created great, compelling core values, Right? And we updated and tweaked the things they already had and created this. And then they said, we're gonna teach everyone our core values till it's deeply ingrained, and that's. We're gonna get that done this quarter. And I. I smiled and I said, that's awesome. But inside, I didn't believe them. I'm like, yeah, good. It's important you start. But I didn't think they'll get it done because people don't do that right in one quarter anyway. And. But then the next quarter, I came back and we're going to go through the things. And I hadn't seen this yet, but they said, oh, yeah, yeah. So we're green on core values. Here's what we did. And they threw up a video. Well, actually, no, they didn't do that. They said, let's do it for Bill. And. And then together in unison, the assembled leaders commenced a haka like chant with hand motions for their core values. And I swear to God, I got chills. I was so, like, moved. I'm like, oh, my God, you guys are so awesome. And then they gave me a video showing some of their operational teams doing the haka in the morning. And they're like, we do this with all teams and leadership. Every single day, I was like, oh, that's so brilliant. And I show it now to teams from time to time because I've not seen anyone do something quite like that. But of course, it was instantly ingrained and people loved it. And it's short, punchy, and they're like, yeah, that's who we are. And interestingly enough, their quality measures, like actual observed behaviors as well as the observed negative behaviors, and their NPS scores all rose that quarter and then in subsequent quarters. So where they'd gone from being very spotty and in quality metrics, now it became baked into their culture.

And it. Well, it's also. It's created a culture that I bet. I bet repels as well as attracts. They've gone. They've gone, you know, like, because they will be now famous for this company that does this hacker every shift in the morning. And people were like, I'm not going to work there. I don't like the sound of that.

Sounds a bit weird, you know. I had a woman come interview for a critical position, a company, some years ago, and during the interview, she started talking about how she used to work for Lululemon and how they were weird and cult like. And she started. And I said, oh, tell me more. What do you mean by that? And I knew something about the company and people who'd worked there. And she started outlining all these things. And I thought immediately, yeah, you're not for us. You're not gonna be on our team. We have a lot of that cult, like, crap in our company.

She was complaining about it.

Yeah. She's like, yeah, hopefully you're not like them. I'm like, oh, this will be your last interview.

Anyway. First, things that they do at Lululemon, when you join as an employee, they ask you, right, your. Your priorities, your goals, your dreams.

Yes.

You have to write it and they have to put it on the. On the wall in every store when they have the. Like, the closets on the back. So every employee could see every other employee's dreams and. And.

And, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Help each other. I thought that was brilliant.

Yeah. Listen, if you don't have a coach, our guests here and I are all coaches, and you can reach out to any one of us directly. We'll give you the links and things at the end of the show. But We've got about 200 coaches in total around the world, and if we can help you find the right coach that's a personality fit for you and your business or in your area or has some particular focus, you Know we have coaches who are all about accountability and execution. We have ones who are deep on strategy. We have coaches who are really broad. I'm kind of silly and playful as you might guess. And then we have very numbers oriented coaches. But depending on the kind of coach you want, we can help you find us a coach. You can either go to our website scalingcoach.com or send us an email infocalingcoach.com just write need a coach and tell us like what you think you might need and I'll say, oh, Dominic's your man or Daniel and his team. Anyway, whatever it is, we can help you find somebody. We're definitely full right now in my world so it would be waiting list to work with us but we've got like 200 so there's somebody that can help you out in our world. So if we can, if we can do that. Let's talk about, we've been talking a little bit about employees and employee data, but also customer data, employee data. Hubert talked about getting, tapping into the people side of things a whole lot in his remarks. What's happening with your teams and in the world of employee customer data.

So, so it's interesting what he said. Usually in, in the typical scaling up methodology weekly meeting you talk about that probably 75% into the meeting. Yes. He said no, start talking about customer feedback and what are we hearing in.

The beginning up front?

That's how you start. Like we usually start with good news and I love the good news. I think it's a great way to get into, into rhythm and everyone align mentally and be positive. But he said he tried to get the customer data as much as you can front and possible. And he said financial data at the.

End.

That'S a result of how happy your clients are and your employees are. So see first data of clients data and then financial data. It's a result of, it's not a objective.

It's an interesting thought about putting that up front and maybe it's in your metrics session during the discovery phase of your weekly meeting or your quarterly offset sites. But moving that way up front, of course, one of our own is really famous for producing an extraordinary growth story and fantastic exit. John Ratliff putting his attention on employee satisfaction, turned to customer satisfaction, changed all of the metrics of his business and upended his industry. Right.

Yeah, I, I tend to get clients to use a tool called Friday Pulse. Client Friday Pulse, yeah. Developed by guy Nick Marks who's a statistician. Great ted. Talk about, about how to use gross domestic happiness for infrastructure decisions in a country. So rather than trying. So basically instead of saying government should try and drive gdp, said governments should try and drive of gross domestic happiness because that would get. That's likely to get them reelected. But nonetheless, he looked at employee data and he felt compelled to create a tool because he felt the statistics behind many of the tools that people were using were a bit ropey. So basically what it does is it asks your staff one question on a Friday. How happy were you at work this week? Because that's a question that people can know the answer to. And he's got data from about 6,000 teams in 100 companies. Friday Pulse.com and Friday Pulse P U L S E.

A little bit like Tiny Pulse, which we also have heard a lot about. I don't know how they compare, but yeah.

So it's a weekly pulse. And what it does is it goes it down to team. And so you get a sense of the happier teams are 20% more productive based on his data. So it just is a really easy tool to use. Easy because cultures are teams. Cultures get built at a team level, not at a company level. So the company culture is that compilation. So you get to spot good managers or poor managers. There's also really quite, you know, they don't just leave you on your own. What I like about it is that. And we did a webinar with some clients who are using it and they all shared their data with each other, which was really, really powerful. But that's a great tool because then people are getting weekly feedback. I used to use the Gallup Q12 each quarter, but then it's every three months. And this is, you get, you know, you get that instantaneous. Every week you're getting some data about your organization, which is great.

Getting a rotating touch point. And we had a larger team do a thing like that. And who's the vendor? I don't remember one of our scaling up sponsors in the past, not for the show, but for our summits has HR tools amplify. Yeah. So this notion of rotating your sample. Right. Maybe I don't ask everyone something every week, but I ask a third of the people periodically going in, especially as the number of people grows. But just getting some regular feedback I think is lovely. And also rotating some of the questions that you asked.

What he finds is that actually a bit like Net promoter score, not worrying about the score. What he says is what people should look at is they should look at in the first instance, they should look at the response rate that they get before they look at the, how happy people are. Because that's the. If people don't respond, they're disengaged. And so that's, you know, like even before you start looking at the tool. It's like if you do a, if you do response rate and you get like 30 response rate in your organization, it's one question. I mean it literally takes two seconds. If people can't be bothered to do that, then you know, you've got a bigger issue than, you know, whether they think the snacks run out too fast on a Wednesday.

It's remarkable how petty those conversations can be when the purpose and values aren't alive and real in the organization. Right? Somebody said, what does it mean purpose and values are alive in the organization? I mean, and I said, well, if I read your purpose and values and then I go walk around your organization and those two don't feel connected and I can't see it obviously in some way, then we have a problem, right? If you tell me integrity is one of your values and then I walk around and I see cutthroat salespeople who are intent on making everyone that they talk to a loser and like, and they've got a whole win, lose, uber competitive thing, we might have an issue.

I used to work for a company that had a. Their value was excellent villains and, and I suggest, I suggested they changed it to mediocrity because that was. Because that's what it was. And, and actually maybe they didn't want that so they should have actually I said meanness but I suggested that maybe we use frugality because it didn't sound quite as bad. But definitely mediocrity and meanness should have been their two core values. It was a horrible place to work.

And they loved you. You worked there a long time.

I didn't. It was one of my shortest employment ever.

So I got engaged to work with a company some years ago and it was also a fairly short one and they had, they had this like cutting edge kind of quality as one of their values. And the founder really felt passionate about it. He thought of himself in a, in a kind of a bleeding edge kind of like I'm right at the, like, I do just the best quality work and like really like leading advance and that's how he thought of himself like right out of college and what he was. But when you walked around the business and when you looked at the work product, what you got was this is a volume and price leader. They just an expedience Right. You need something fast, cheap, lots of it. They're your. They're your shop and cutting edge. No, not even close. And you could tell it just by walking around the office. Because walking around the office, the office was messy and things were placed all over every which way. And like there wasn't any logic to the way things were organized in the business. I'm like, no, you guys are about volume production, so get real about who you are. Or. Or have a reckoning with the one in the mirror, by the way.

Says that in the book used to work for MacKenzie and he was one of the first or the youngest McKenzie partners in his 30s or whatever. And he got. And he thought he was like crushing the world, right? So young and being a partner of McKenzie. And when he got his first employer review, most of his partners grade him below average. And he got mad. Instead of being open and hearing, he got like offended it. And then he expressed how that went with him through his life. And when Marshall Goldsmith coach him, how he used with that coaching that to change our perspective. But it's interesting, he said, hey, I thought I was the top of the world. And I couldn't believe that someone had anything negative to say about me. And instead of accepting it and learning, I just attacked them and left me. I thought it was a great realization. So. So as an example, Bill and I question, what do you do when you're talking with a client that they believe something? And you said like, you're far away from that.

So I like, you know, Pat Lancione says, you know, deliver the gentle truth, right? Like be. You got to tell them the. The truth. Like honestly. But I think you have to have some compassion for how they might hear it, right? Like, because, you know, like, okay, listen, I got some good news, bad news for you. It's good news because we can work with this. Like, you can change this. It's. It's easy to do. It's bad news because it's your fault.

So the other day I was working with a client and yeah, in the meeting I was with the two owners of the company. One was majority compared to the other one and offended the younger partner in front of me.

Yeah.

Restaurant in a very high class restaurant.

Yeah.

And the partner just stand up and left. And the guy said, don't worry, he gets for another time. He'll be back. He needs me. And I was like, oh, he's not gonna come back. He's gone from the company. Not he's. Don't worry. And I was like, no, so the guy never came back. So this guy has to drive me and take me to my car. And on the way there said, don't worry, he'll come back begging tomorrow. That was the way he was speaking about his. Yes, yeah, Can I tell you something? And I was like. And the guy said, yeah. And I was like, your company is going to be successful because of you, in spite of you. Everyone hates to work for you.

Yes.

It's not that bad. And I was like, believe me, you're doing 300 million and you're paying double market salary. That's why you have people working for you. No one will work for you. And he got really mad. I got fired that day.

Oh, no.

It's really. He. I got fired that day. He called me next week and said, let's fix it.

Yes.

But he's disregarded.

So Huber Jolie spoke about 360 reviews. And I learned something that's kind of next level in that realm that I love. I'll tell you about it now from a guy named Fernando Flores. And Fernando Flores is a Chilean engineer, politician, you know, I don't know, futurist philosopher like that. He did work in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area. His work contributed to things at Apple and other places. But he suggests a practice called leadership assessments. And this is the thing that I use myself and found revolutionary. And I have people do, when they're doing our leadership flywheel work as they're going. So the leadership assessment is like a 360, except it's real, it's personal, it's interactive, and it's face to face, like, or phone to phone or like whatever. In the leadership assessment, you go to somebody else and I, you know, if, if you're on my team, I go, hey, Daniel, can I talk to you? And I need a few minutes. And you say, yeah. And I say, okay, good. I really need your honest opinion because I'm really committed to being a great leader in this business. And I realize that I don't know necessarily how I show up for other people and what my strengths and weaknesses are. So I'd really like you to help me and give some perspective. And you go, yeah. And then I say, okay, I want the honest truth. I want the whole truth. Like, really don't sugarcoat things. Don't be nice to me or, you know, play it safe, but really tell me honestly. And you could tell me what, you know, others say or think about me. Like, it's all. I'm going to use whatever you have to say. So anyway, that you create some context and permission, safety for the person to give you real feedback. But now instead of some anonymous form, I'm actually asking you. I'm like, daniel, talk to me. Tell me, how am I doing? What am I good at? What am I not good at? And you start in with all the good things first, like, tell me, what are my strengths? What am I good at? And that's nice. It's a good place to begin. You hear things, though, in the words of others. Not what you think you might be good at or whatever, but what they think you're good at in their words, in their. In their order and priority and that kind of thing, which is useful. But then you go into all the bad stuff, like, okay, what do I suck at? What am I unreliable for? What am I weaknesses? What's my nasty reputation? What messes have I left around the business? And you go and explore it and you address it, and then you have an opportunity to deal with it. But if you don't know your starting point as a leader, like how others hold you and relate to you, then you're speaking from here when you're actually over here, right? Like, it's like taking directions from your GPS based on one location and ending up in the water because it had the starting point wrong. Like, you know, you got to get who you are, and it's so powerful. But people do get a little afraid to do it in that way, to go in and hear it.

Why? They feel uncomfortable because they don't want.

To hear the things that they've been hoping had disappeared. They're afraid they're going to hear about messes that they need to clean up. They're afraid of opening things back up that, you know, people have died down. Like, people have forgotten, except really they haven't. If it's there, that's something to deal with.

You can then tend to get those people to. My experience is coaching clients who have. Who've taken that sort of approach is once you've asked those people for feedback and you've listened to it and they feel as though that their feedback has been listened to, they tend to be more forgiving of your failings because they now have some emotional commitment to you and your success as opposed to when you are further distant and not. And you know that and you're not engaged. You know what I mean? It's that there's some tension because that conversation isn't being had. Once you've had the conversation, they find it much easier to perhaps tell you in the moment, and then it's less frustrating for them. So the whole thing, it doesn't just benefit the person having the conversation. It benefits the person who'd found it difficult to have this conversation give you the feedback themselves. There's always that unsaid stuff. Stuff. The more of that you can get on the table, the better the richness.

But, but I think that's a good point. You're pulling out the connection. There's also, though, like, I did it years ago after coming in as CEO of a business, and I got a lot of feedback that you're not like the old CEO and they used to do things like this and you don't do things like that. And, and you know, I in with a couple of people in particular, I got that feedback and I said, you know what, Let me just be really honest. I think that's a fair criticism of me. I am not like them. I'm not going to do it like them. And to be honest, I don't see the CEO role that way. I'm never going to do that. So if that's important to you, you're always going to be disappointed because it's a valid criticism and I'm not taking it on. And interestingly enough, those two both left before too long, you know, because they really did want that kind of a CEO and that kind of a company where somebody work in that way. And I'm like, yeah, I just, I'm never doing that. I'm not here to be like that. We're going in a new direction and a new style and like, there's a reckoning and it's valuable. Right. It's not comfortable. But once those people left, then I could bring in other people who had a similar vision. We could get, you know, right. The number one, the number one rock habit is the executive team is healthy and aligned, the leadership team. And, and if you see the world fundamentally differently, if you can't communicate, if you're headed in like, different directions, it's not going to work out.

So what do you say to a CEO when you're implementing something new, like scaling up and stuff, and people begin resigning? Because every time I implemented scaling up, someone resigns. Oh, no, I'm being serious.

No, no, no. Yeah. People leave the team and that's good.

I tell them that's good. But I would love to hear your perspective.

I actually was working with one of our companies recently, and when I started working with them, like, I don't know, a year and a half ago or something, on the first day and the first visit to their office, there was a whole thing that had come up with the head of sales. And they dismissed them that afternoon because it became clear in our opening conversation. And I instantly thought, this is great. And I complimented him. I said, listen, you don't want to go. Just be mean and ruthless. But you acted decisively and compassionately. You gave that person a quick exit. But you were like, clearly, this isn't going to work out and we're doing this thing and it's time to go. And I'm like, that was really great. Humanity and compassion, some regard for the person. Like, you're not a bad person, but you got to go.

Do you. Daniel, did you mean on the executive team or do you mean in the whole company?

The whole company.

Because when I speak to a prospective client, I always say to them, tell me about your leadership team. A, B, C, tell me about the rest of the company. And I say, look, this comes with a health warning. Like, I'm not sure your leadership team are all going to make it, because one of the things you've said so often, people say, you know, people aren't accountable.

Yeah.

And it's like, well, we're going to put in systems that are going to make them accountable. So they're either going to change or they're going to be in hot water and you're either going to fire them or they're going to leave.

Yeah.

Let's not say that this is all. This isn't. This isn't a Disney movie.

Right.

You know, that's not what you want. It's not. It's not. You know, you want to have the ending, but there's going to be some trial and tribulation to get there. You know, if it all worked, you wouldn't be hiring me. Let's face it. So there's that health warning that.

And they said, no, no, my team is going to stay. I love my team, or whatever.

Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the other things I always say to them is, look, most organization of 10 million, the team that gets to 10 million is never the team that gets to 100 million. Or in the UK, if we're talking about soccer, we say, look, the team that gets promoted out Division 2, nobody's still on the field when that team's in the Premier League. Right. It's just a different team. Right. So that's just how life is. Right. So as long as you're. As long as that's the journey you want to go on, like you just got to be clear about it and you've got to give everybody the opportunity to step up. And some people will. And almost some of the, you know, somebody from left field often, you know, you know, it becomes more of a meritocracy. Somebody leaves, you know, or those. I was the, I don't know if you subscribe to Farnham street, the sort of weekend newsletter, but they've got a podcast as well called bear with me a sec, what's called the Knowledge Project. And, and Sarah Travel was on there last week talking about the, of intellectual rigor and the headline struck me. It said sevens, sevens, kill your business. And what she said was on a scale of 1 to 10, it's the like you get rid of employees who are 1:1 to 5, like they're dead easy to get rid of. And nines and tens, you love, it's sevens. She says kill your business because they do half the time they're doing enough for you to go ah. And the other half the time they're just feeling like you're letting, they're letting themselves or you down. And it's like she said, they're the ones that are really hard to get rid of because you, if you've worked with them for a while, you've got some emotional attachment to them and most of the time they're in. But you know, if you want to build a world class company that's so.

In the way it makes so much sense. So I had a team member in my team last week that he did something that we asked him to do but he didn't want it to do. So he did it half ass. It was, it was, but he did it and I told him hey, eating had any results. And the guy said, I told you it was not going to give results. And I said can you show me what you did? And he showed it to me and he was like terrible. And I was like, you were expecting that to give results? And he was like no, but because I knew it was not going to give results. I don't, I didn't did it well. And I was like, then that's why we didn't have results. If you have done something really, really high caliber, right quality, we have given the client value and we'll give them results. But because you first disregarded, you didn't like it and you didn't think it was going to give value, then you did the worst possible energy focus or whatever and then it proved to you that you were right, but the client got low value and it was interesting because I told him that he was not very happy with me at the moment.

Moment.

And then I overheard him in another conversation telling his team like we're executing but we need to up our game. I got called perfect message. So he did got it. But he was trying to prove to me that it was not going to work. So he did. The least possible.

What are you committed to? Are you committed to being right about this or you know, you're hearing these conversations and you're like, oh, I really. I've been thinking about it for a while, I want to get started. Or you've got new team members. We do workshops, we have online programs, things like that. Let's talk about that for just a minute before we move on with our topics. Dominic, do you have any workshops or anything coming up? We do.

We've got, we've got, we've got July. I'm just going to make sure what the right. I think it's July 6th. It is, it's July. July 6th. We've got an interest. We've got an in person workshop. We didn't go virtual during COVID we just stayed virtual. So sometimes we got down to half a dozen people but we're back at it. So in Wiltshire, in England on the farm the afternoon of the line.

Oh, that's a great, great. So we have workshops coming up all the time. You can find them all@scalingup.com we have a couple. I've got a two day deep dive if you want to do like not the one day, not the half day but two days deep dive we're doing. This one is virtual 7-19-20. It'll be on Zoom and in a private Facebook group. And we have tickets from special team tickets with a lot of special extras and coaching and that kind of thing too, you know, levels of it. Anyway, so July 19th, 20th in US West coast time. All day, two full days, all day deep dive. We also then if you want in person, I'm co leading with Vern in December in Dallas. We'll be doing a large event. Vern will lead the bulk of it. I'll provide some help with the exercises and in fun and color and that kind of thing. The I will definitely play some music for the assembled folks. Should be a great event in Dallas if you want the in person like that and like any good event, all both these things, early registrations and bigger teams makes a big difference for better seating. You want to get up front and. And be in person. Register early. Register now. Don't Wait for that, for the Dallas event. And if you do our virtual one coming up this, this next month, then you probably also want to do that if possible early so that you get your, your private prep session and your work. We've got digital tools and things like that that we'll get people started with in this deep dive. Then of course there's also the online courses that you can run at your own pace from group programs to hybrid to private implementations all through the Growth Institute and can be combined with, with coaching from myself, from the others around. Daniel, talk a little bit about those options.

So we've been running the Growth Institute for the last nine years and we did a hybrid between coaching and learning. So it's a three month intensive on how to implement scaling Up Top grading. Great game of business by the way. We're finishing great game of business for the first time with Jack Stack. Amazing results. People are happy. We have Alan Milt if you want to get Deep dive on cash, Jack Daly on sales of all the disciplines that go well with scaling up. And is this three month intensives that you get videos directly with the thought leader and then you get coaching calls to guide you through the process of implementation. We have some masterminds that the, that the members of the class or the exams that go through the class help each other other and people said hey the videos with Vernon or toddlers are amazing. The coaching call really give me some guidance and process of how to do it. But the conversations of the community like you could not do coaching with other companies and all helping each other is that this is an amazing process that we take 50, 100 companies together and they help each other say hey this is my big hack, what do you think? And then people begin interacting and relating to that and helping each other implement correctly and the results have been through the roof because of the hybrid method of learning.

Yeah, it's really I think a great thing for people who have some self management who can step through the things and who want to do it kind of on their own schedule. You can do the online learning and then add some support from a coach like any one of us who will look at your work product, give you some feedback, share some examples. Well okay, that could work. And here are some things that we've seen when people have taken the approach you're taking. You know, just giving you experience, sharing about not just our own backgrounds as CEOs but also the many, many companies now that we work with as coaches so greatly in improves that talk about then inflation, inflation and Investment, where the money's moving. That's a thing that we're thinking about, about more. We're seeing rising costs on labor costs on services, on goods. What are you guys seeing? What moves are you making with clients now?

Well, I, it's interesting. I. I've been. I read Greg Crabtree's new book, simple numbers 2.0, and I watched some of his stuff on YouTube and he's, he's saying, certainly in the United States, from his perspective of there's more money than ever, because client, you know, the hundred companies that he tracks went, they were suffering a labor shortage in 2019, which was restricting their growth. They went into Covid, there's been economic stimulus which meant that they got their businesses right size, got rid of people they didn't need in, you know, those people who weren't in travel and hospitality, obviously, and then there's just a wall of money. And he said they've all got more money on their balance sheets than ever in his memory. I think that's interesting. In the uk, I'm not sure we see the same wave of money, but we definitely see, as a result of Brexit and so reduction in movement of people from the EU into the UK without a visa, all of our clients are experiencing growth and all of our clients are experiencing difficulty in recruiting talent. And because of COVID London companies that would historically have only been able to hire, you know, within maybe their, you know, their maximum time to the office would have been 90 minutes, sort of, you know, out, you know, on, on the Tube or what have you. They're now saying, well, you know, you only have to come in the office maybe two or three days a week. So they're, they've gone broader. So all of, all of our clients who aren't in central London are now, their staff are now under attack from London companies who are sort of spreading the net broader. So think, you know, it goes back to our conversation about purpose and culture. Look, you know, if you've got a great company and a great culture and you say, look, let's get back to the office, people will come back to the office. If you've got a crappy culture and a crappy purpose, people will say, I hate my job. Why would I want to commute as well? I'm just going to sod you, I'm going to work from home. And so I do think that that commute tax is going to be really interesting to see whether people are prepared to pay it.

Yeah, I, yeah, the people aren't anxious to come back to the office necessarily, or to begin commuting again. But they might want to connect with other human beings. They might want to get away from their spouse or their kids.

Might, might.

They might want to get out of their spare bedroom.

Yep.

And return to something cool. Connect with people and do great work. Right.

At the Growth Institute, we had a session this week. We had teams in the US teams in Mexico mostly. We have people in Salvador, Argentina and other places. And we had discussions that, hey, do you guys want to go back to an office? All that? And they said, no, we would love to meet once a week for half a day for some meetings, but that's it. So if we could use a conference room one day or half a day a week, it'll be more than enough so we could have that interaction, that connection. We're probably going to have dinner one day together as a team. And then everyone working from home.

I think we see a big range of things in that work from home, return to work thing. And in fact, one of our companies provides indoor intelligence and they are focused on shout out to inpiction. They provide the systems and infrastructure to help people figure out who's where and allocate things and, and desks and turn systems on and off and keep people safe and like all the whole world of what you would do if you knew where and how people were moving around your facilities, which has been really critical as folks move back. But I see the big range right now. So I have a couple companies where everybody, it's like everybody come back. It's all back all the time now. A couple that are mixed and then a couple where they're like, come back part time and, and then a few like Daniel, who are now like, we really want to be 90% out of the office and we want to come back for specific meetings and connection time.

See, I, I think, I think all in the office works because we've done it. We've done it for all. We've all done it for a long time. That works. And remote first definitely works because we've all done it for. We've all just done it for a year. I think my experience of Hybrid has always been awful, you know, because I've often been the guy, I've been the guy in Europe on the end of the conference phone into the US meeting room, you know, and five minutes in, everybody's forgotten I'm there.

That's like, everybody's there, but you're out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, but you see so, so many People are talking about hybrid where, you know, I don't know, the team, six people, five of them are in the office.

Yeah.

Somebody's. Somebody hasn't come in. And so it's like, oh, well, we'll all go and do our. We'll all do zoom and we'll all go on our laptops. It's like, no, we've. We've all come in, like, why would we do that? That would make no sense. And so, you know, so often the person who was not in the office was, I don't know, discriminated against, forgotten about.

Yeah.

Whether it's intentional or, or not, I think, I think that's really hard.

Right. For sure. Well, so that is the mixed thing and I think that. So one of the areas people have been saving money is on their rent and reusing their offices differently and seeing cost reductions and their need to expand the real estate. But I think also shifting real estate. I've been having people back to this notion of things moving and costs and things like that shifting. I've been having people think carefully about the baseline expenses, the cost of goods or cost of sales, services side as well as should they do any adjustments to their pricing. Don't sit idly by and just keep offering the same pricing. If everybody else is increasing pricing, think about the things that are most popular. We have some clients now that they're sold out of their services, they're sold out of, they're at capacity on their product. I'm like, then raise prices on those sectors. Right. You can drop them on others, but if you're got all the business you can handle right now, then raise the price until you lose a bit. Little, little.

It's funny because I, the. I think price as coaches, I think getting clients to think about their pricing is like, is one of the easiest ways for them to get a really fast return on us walking through the door. And you know, I was, I was running, I was running a company a few years ago and we only had three months cash left. And one of the things we had to do to save the company was we had to put the prices up 50%. And until I had done that, I would never have thought that it was, you know, when I went out to visit the clients to tell them their price was going at 50%, I thought they would all leave. We had, we had three months until we were out of business and I went to see them and only one of them, only one of them cancelled their service on us. The rest of them gave us 12 months. To prove that we were worth the increase. And some of them said, you've been so cheap for so long, like, at least now it's reasonable. But I say to clients all the time, are you charging enough? And we had one client, I got them to do. I said, look, would you do 1% price increase? Do you think you could get away with that? And they said, yeah, all right. Yeah, just like to make you. To shut you up and make you go away. We'll do one. We'll put up the prices 1%. So they put up the price 1%. I saw them the next month and they went, well, the sales guys noticed because it's not a round number anymore. But you're right, nobody else noticed. I said, okay, well do it again for me then. So they did it again. 12 months later. They've done 1% a month for 12 months. So it's like 13.6% compounded. And now the conversation is very. Now it's like, well, should we do 5% a quarter? Because then there'd be less admin. Oh, no, people might notice that. You know what, let's do one and a half percent though. Because still nobody's noticed. And so here they are three years later, and they put their price up every single month for three years.

That's. And you think about the value of getting those things done early. Right? Putting them up early, the compounding, it's rule of 78s there applying. Right. I get an increase in that first month is worth a lot more than the 1% I had in the last month.

Yep. Well. And what was funny is the US CEO, because it was a UK sub of a US business, rang them up and said, how are you guys making so much profit? And they went, well, we just put the prices up. And he went, no, no, no, really, really, what do you do? And they're like, no, really. We just keep putting the price up and it's just staring people in the face. But it's the. There's a. Clients have a mental block.

You know, I think the thing. It's not even just pricing, it's all changes. And when I think back to my own time as CEO and a couple, one of them stands out similar to yours. Where I was facing the failure of the business, I was contemplating losing my house. I was really stressing about the impact on the family, all of those kinds of things. And in that moment, then I finally made the moves that I just couldn't. I thought they would put us out of business. But now, faced with that I was going to go out of business. I finally made the changes that I needed to do a long time before. And what we did is really simple. And I do it again and again when somebody's in a crisis or there's a. A turnaround situation. I said, okay, make two lists. On one list goes easy and winning, like all the things that are working easy, not bad, winning, and then make me another list of everything that's hard and losing, not working. Right? All the bad stuff. And then we just start jettisoning. We're like, okay, we're going to just shut down everything over here. If it's hard, if it's not been working, if it's not winning, close it, shut it, turn it off. And then let's just put all our effort and emphasis over here on what is working, what is winning. And what you see again and again is that that adds up to way more than you realize. And that focus and emphasis pays huge. In fact, in that time that I had the business like that, over the next year, we more than doubled the business. We had a dramatic improvement in profit and cash and, and. And we didn't go out of business. Right. It was a huge breakthrough because you.

Had very little to lose.

You accepted the truth because I was right. And so when you do that, what do you. What are you? You're courageous and bold, right? In that time, I was courageous and bold in my actions as a leader. I was honest and vulnerable with people, and people were inspired by my stand. They were inspired by the courage to go in front of them and say, I'm failing. We're going to go out of business. If something doesn't happen and I don't have a plan, people are like, right? I could never say that. I'm like, no, that took a lot of courage to say that. And I don't have a plan. But here's the deal. Deal. I'm not going to quit. I'm going to fight. People love that. That was like the Braveheart moment, right? People are like, yeah, come on, I'll face paint and I'll charge against the enemy. Nobody quit. In spite of there being real risk to their own livelihoods, nobody quit. Everybody helped solve the problem because they loved it.

Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think inflation's interesting though, isn't it? Because it's insidious. So it's going to catch people up if they don't take action and it'll over. Just like boiling a frog, isn't it? It's just going to take them. Take the margin away in an insidious way.

Well, you know, it's funny.

Don't get ahead of it.

Yeah. You've got to pay attention. Right. You don't want to get boiled and cooked up. But at contrast, now is a great time to buy stuff. So while all of your costs and labor might be difficult, you want to go buy another. Buy out a competitor is a great time to do it. Go buy a customer list, go buy a product or some technology. Go buy a team out. I've got multiple of my client companies have raised or hoarded cash in the last year and now we're quite a few are doing acquisitions. And what a great time to buy up somebody who doesn't have the resources, who can't do it, but who has something key that you need is a fantastic time. Great.

Is that your dog or is it Daniel's dog?

My dog. Oh, no, my dog is yelping up. I've got the doors closed and stuff. But you can still hear, right? My wife is away with her family. The dog is here alone and he's losing his mind. Little dogs make a lot of noise.

Yeah. No dogs in this house.

Yeah. Daniel, you were saying about acquisition strategy.

Yeah. So. So don't just think about acquiring other companies. You can acquire a book of clients. You could acquire traffic to yourself.

Yeah.

There's a lot of assets out there.

Yeah.

Somebody's not monetizing them correctly. That you can give them much better monetization, inflation. And with interest rates as low as you could there today and inflation being out, if you could buy something in today's dollars and paid with tomorrow's dollars, it's an amazing deal today.

Yes. Did you guys read the this paradigm flywheel post? I'm all big fan of flywheels and but one of our coaches, Trey House, talked about making some changes and this building paradigm group worked on building their flywheel over a period of time and their their brand promise love 100% of your home was about doing things. And you know, it's a really a perfect time because people are doing home improvement there. I'm about to redo a bathroom that has bothered us forever and ever and ever. And we're finally getting all the parts in and about to do that. But you know, many of us have done a ton of that kind of thing, so it's a great time to tighten that up. But building that flywheel, figuring out what's the sequence of things that build our business and that reinforce so not just, you know, know, adding people into your Funnel. But then how do you get that business to repeat and keep building on itself and refer and. And so on? Are you doing any work on flywheels or refining them with your teams? How are you using that?

I usually use what I call. What's the. The secret recipe that creates. Okay, give me the areas that make your business successful. Five or ten or whatever areas. And then we kind of start playing with them and putting them on the flywheel. And really they click in their mind when they realize how one thing add to the other and kind of play together. They get super excited when they.

Sequence.

Yeah, sequence, exactly. But they've never gone through an exercise of the sequence, and they've never thought about kind of the piece of the puzzle to have to put them together. And once you put them on a flywheel, it just makes a lot of sense. So their understanding of their business goes to the next level. And that's when you could start doing a lot of interesting things.

Yeah, it's different than just looking for that one, like, breakthrough that creates an inflection. Everybody wants to have that. But you could go 25 years before you have your inflection, come up with your iPhone or whatever it is, and start. Start to break out. Right. Like, you could struggle a long time before you dial it in. But if you focus on that flywheel, you'll keep building and reinforcing.

You go to HubSpot as an example. We all see the sales funnel, right? The typical sales funnel that goes like this. Yeah. Hospital said no, the sales funnels are not like that, are circular. I'll give you some data that it's interesting. We just did a class that we, we. That we promoted at the Growth Institute. We got a lot of new people that we did marketing that came in. But the people that were in our list, the average months, they've been our list when they bought, 15 months. So they've been our list for a year and a half. Like seeing webinars and talking to people and getting our content and getting the blog post. And now they felt comfortable in buying. So we saw a big chunk of people that have been since COVID or at the beginning of COVID kind of going to our database for some promotion. And today they now starting to buy and being clients. So if you have a funnel that is a typical linear funnel, we would have missed them completely. We have a, like a flywheel funnel that we're all the time making an offer and then adding more value and content and then an offer and then rest and just continue to make the flywheel bigger and bigger. And it's interesting that sometimes has someone wants to be seven months, 15 months indeed. The other day we got a payment of a number that we don't sell any product in that number in the last four or five years. And I was like, so I call Alex, my head of operations, hey, Alex, where this charge came from? And he said, someone click in a link link that we sent them on the email like five years ago. And we like, the product doesn't even exist. And the first one had like saved the email and five years later he clicked on the link.

Finally they act on it. Now is my time.

Crazy. Not anymore. And we figure out how to serve the client.

We. We've got a client in technology. Most all of our clients really are in technology, but we've got one in Spain and they two bits of their business. And when we looked at the flywheel, they had a hypothesis that if a customer bought this thing, it would then lead to this thing and then they'd be on the flywheel. And that was the hypothesis when we started working with them in about month six, six months in, it was like it was. We got the data and it was obvious that that wasn't happening. So what they did is they took 95% of their revenue for this product product and they parked it over here and they said, we're going to double down on the 5% because that's the thing that we've got the flywheel. This is a thing where we've got competitive advantage.

Yeah.

Then so they doubled down on that and they came back the next quarter and they're like, we're just really frustrated. It's like not going yet. So we did a value proposition canvas workshop and I spoke to the CEO the other week and he said, well, what he did is he took that value prop and he went and he sat with the sales team team and he spent two days a week with the sales team on the phone talking to customers. Right. Because that so often clients have got are really crap at knowing like what's the job to be done. You know, like, you know, the sales people are talking to the sales manager, the sales manager is talking to the sales vp. The VP is telling the CEO and it's just like, get in the trenches with the team. Let's find out what's really going on. So he realized there were some tweaks to the value prop, but they tweaked it. And he said, since we've made those tweaks, we're growing 20% a week. We'll grow 100% in June and we're going to go 100% in July. And now the flywheel's connected. Now we're going. So just, I just think it's that looking at it differently, you know, that was, it was just, you know, it would have been so easy to have just said, well that's 95% of our revenue and we're growing it. But when it was only stepping back and saying, look, does that, if you were a customer of that product, is it, do you have competitive advantage? Is it sustainable? Is there a flywheel? And they went, no, not for that, so we've got to do this one instead. And that take huge courage, I think.

Took a little time to focus in and work on that. I can hear it. You know, one of the things that we noticed, we've touched on it in today's conversation, but you've got your four decision areas of scaling up people, strategy, execution, cash. One of those people is the leader. And leadership we see matters again and again. How are you doing? What are you doing? For years I've worked with people on a set of leadership exercises and things like that, distilled from all the things that I've learned over the years. And more recently what I've identified and described is a leadership flywheel. And all of those different tools and things I've distilled down into four major disciplines that are part of this leadership flywheel. And I noticed that when people embrace this and begin to build it, it is a leadership flywheel that helps the leadership scale so you don't get kicked out of a growing business. But if you think about it, the first phase of this leadership flywheel is inspirational, emotional. As a leader, we get people excited about the future. So whether it's a bold stand, like I did when my was on the rocks, right, and I displayed some courage and, and, and I took a stand saying we wouldn't quit and that kind of thing. Or it's creating a vision, you know, Elon Musk saying we're going to become a multi planetary species or right? Or a, or the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King standing in front of the nations and saying I have a direct dream and articulating a dream for a better future where people live together in harmony and without hatred and bias. And. But there's some collection of tools and that first bit is actually emotional. We also know this from Simon Sinek, the start with why thing, right? We're out to produce an emotional outcome and yet that still doesn't drive the rest of it. It's the first piece, but it doesn't connect anything. That next piece of our flywheel is Engage. And in Engage, I want people to see their part in it. I want people to say yes to something. I want people to begin to act. So in the Engage piece, there's a collection of tools, but basically all selling, all negotiating, all hiring comes down to. I see my role in something and I see what there is for me to do as part of this big vision that you've laid out or this future that you've created. Right. So that's that, that whole next piece and then, right. There's the whole world of planning that we do. And we should talk actually about our software tools for planning, the scaling up scoreboard. But with planning, we don't always consider where things could go wrong, are most likely to go wrong. We don't often think about the human piece of where plans go wrong and people's expectations that aren't articulated in the plan and that kind of thing, the final piece than for that. So we've got people who are lit up. They see their role in it. They're taking action against a plan you're revising. The plan is coaching. People's plans don't go according to plan. Right. Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the face. Mike Tyson is famous for saying, but our plans go off almost immediately. And then we want to quit. We want to take our toys and go home. And the coaching is what keeps people back in the game. So the coaching, then you remind people of the vision and the inspiration you have to take them back to why they're playing and what they're doing. And you have to replan things. Right. And that's our leadership flywheel that I've been sharing and talking about more and more. It makes such a difference to think about it in that sequence and to drive and connect it together.

Have you got that written up anywhere, Bill, that you can?

Yeah, we do. We've been taking a lot of people through it and I've been talking about it on more podcasts. And so I'm taking a minute to talk about it. We'll be doing it, doing a class on it at the Growth Institute before too long. But we have a group of people going through it more formally in that right now, through our first pilot program with it. But it makes a difference to connect the dots in that way, in sequence. Right.

I like that.

The leadership flywheel. So in the planning piece we mentioned, and it's critical not just that you have a plan because that is immediately obsolete, but as Winston Churchill and Eisenhower taught us, it's the act of planning that's really useful. We have this scaling up scoreboard software that we use for many of our clients. Some others will use different project planning software. But whatever it is, whether it's our scaling up scoreboard that you can go to scalingup.com software to use that. But that is really critical that you have a regular recurring process to update plans, to review plan progress because it's that ongoing thing that's valuable, not the plan itself. The plan never turns out as initially conceived. Right.

So here's the question that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. So I got a call from the CEO YPR in Latin America and the guy hey, I want you to help me with my one pitch plan and my strategy. And he sends me his plan. I said is this correct? And I was like I don't know. And he said how do you know? And I was like I need to go through the process of strategy. We have to go through a process and have a discussion with the team. Yeah, in the outside sounds well, but we really don't know. And the guy said no, but I wrote it. And I was like but you're missing the plan, you're missing the point. The process of the questions and the discussion with the team is what makes the strategy right. Right. And the buy in right to execute it. If you come to your team and say hey, this is a strategy, there will be no buy in, there will be no discussion, there'll be no definition of implementation. It could be right, but most likely the execution of it is going to be wrong.

Which is why we use the software. Right. It's not a one page PDF doc that you create one time and then it's done. It's that ongoing thing, create it together, update it together there.

And that's what makes the difference. The buying the process that you mentioned, that's what makes things different. And that's when companies really get results if they, if they accept going through the full process. So get getting the right answer or believing you have a right answer is not the right thing. Is going through the process of discussion and agreeing and have being convinced that that's right and answer that has the team aligned and move towards that correctly.

Yes, sometimes there's a bit before that we it some of our clients have got some particularly because they haven't been spending social time together for the last 12 months. They've got some sort of, I don't know, leadership debt. So we do an exercise called Stinky Fish that I got from Gustavo Rosette. These stinky fish.

Right.

So basically it, well, it's good because it helps them. It helps them, right? Yeah, it's part of the mural onboarding process. But basically what you do is you get people to anonymously answer the four questions on mural before they come to the meeting. And it's like, it's like, what are people thinking? But not saying, you know, what for me, up at night, what is it that happened in the past that we can't forgive, give or can't forget? And so they go through these questions and then we get, we consolidate them and then the team comes together and there's it, there is it all, there's all of their. The elephants in the room, the stinky fish are all there on the board and we vote on it. And then we spend enough time so that we, people feel that we. They've been heard or it's been discussed and we can move on. And with some teams it takes 20 minutes, half an hour. But we did, we did a two day kickoff with a client the other day and it, it took half a day until they wrestled them all to the ground and they're like. And then it was like, okay, everybody feels like there's nothing else that's bugging them. And it was only after that that they could get on to have a conversation about the strategy. Because otherwise, a bit like Daniel's thing, you know, where people say, you know, I'm, I'm committing, but I'm not committing. Yeah, right. You know, you've got to get people to that point where they can actually, they're all in it and it's a ticket and we can have some conflict, disagree and commit. And until that other stuff is taken care of, often, you know, that there's, you know, you don't have that, you don't have the team in the room.

Well, we talk about clearing the space, right? Like you, you've got stuff going on in the background and conscious or unconscious, it's really hard to develop our plans and things on top of that when, you know, fundamentally we don't trust each other. And I'm like, yeah, if Dominic promises that again, like, forget it. I'm not playing. I know that criminal. And I remember last time what he did, and he's gonna screw me over. You know, we have all kinds of things like that with each other all the time. And, and it's not like you could do it Once and it's done, you like have to keep doing it, keep clearing it out. Because we just build up garbage as human beings all the time. And mostly about each other.

Yeah. Because we're people.

Yeah. God bless us.

Yeah.

I'm like dog who just would like somebody to come home, open the door and take him for a walk. Right. Which can be interesting. Oh, I think there's so much for it. Also a good reminder, touching on the intersection of people and technology. Reminder about our sponsor. If you're looking for a great general technology partner, I suggest you check out Clarion Technologies. They're a scaling up company just like us. They've worked with a coach for a long time. See if they're a match for your business. If you wanted a company that would offshore your technology development but do it with the rigor and values of a scaling up business, it might be useful. They have a model tailored just for small and medium enterprises like ours so they can, you know, produce a lot better value than competitive vendors doing the same kind of thing. Bit ly Clarion Tech. We'll put the link in the show notes and that kind of thing later so that you can check it out. But Bit ly clarianttech is the way I want to segue to one of our last topics for the show today and that's this idea of brand promise and brand promise guarantees. We hear a story shared Herb Cogliano, one of the coaches in our world, working with one of his teams, Valor Home Services. Articulate, go through all their whole thing and then come up with their brand promises and with a focus on a stress free experience and then a guarantee of 250 bucks on the spot if they didn't deliver that. And that seems appropriate to that level of thing. But hey, if we didn't do that, we pay up for that. Talk about brand promises in your world with your clients, things like that and then how to lock them in and, and, and, and you know, make them real by putting some money or something behind him, some pain.

So I tell my clients, the more painful that you do it for you, the more you're going to make sure you give client, the client the value. So as an example in workshops before I was saying, hey, come to the workshop. That's your problem. If you don't like it or you don't learn anything and then that's your doing. Yeah, no, that was, that was in the past.

If you come to the workshop and you learn nothing, it's your fault.

That was 10 years ago.

Ten years ago, that was, that was the common.

Right.

Yeah.

I would say, hey, if you come to the workshop, you don't like it, we'll give your money back. And the most aggressive course as an example, they said, hey, we'll pay you your plane ticket, 500 or whatever if you came and you didn't like it. So, so you, you were, you came from for free. If you have to fly to Vegas or Austin or whatever, take the course, they even pay your plane ticket back. It's not just not paying me or I'm stopped making money, I have to put 500 my pocket. And that proves how strong you feel on the course and the content on the value they're going to receive. So I tell people the stronger that you put the pace paint for you, the more you're going to make sure you execute with a lot of value.

Yeah, we've, we've client in the UK called Sapphire Balcony. So they, they, they manufacture slide on balcony so they can do like 120 in a day. So rather than build the balcony as you're building the building, you build a building with holes and you just slot the balcony into the, into the slots.

Interesting.

It's a much, much, you know, very, very quick. But they, they studied scaling up and came up with their brand promise, which is rapid ready, right. And they said 10 pounds per defect and, and they told the staff they were doing it and then the first thing they had to do is they have to write a check for £40,000 because they delivered some balconies that weren't right. And so what they did is they got like one of those, they got like one of those supermarket checks.

Yeah.

And they wrote it out and he took, and he took it to the team and he said we didn't get it right. We let the client down. I'm gonna go and give them this check for £40,000. And he went to see the guy and the guy said, I don't want your money, I just want to order more balconies from you. And I had a, had a, hadn't we had a new client here for.

Two days because of their integrity and.

Commitment or because of their integrity and commitment. So we had a new client here Thursday, Friday. And I was chatting to this then you chief Product Officer. And he used to work for, used to work for another company who, when I was at Rackspace, was a client of mine. And we, you know, we dropped the ball on them and we managed to mangle one of their databases and I gave a goodwill gesture to the CTO there of £5,000. And he refused to take my goodwill gesture because he said, look like the way in which you've responded, your teams did this, you know, you doubled our hardware. You've done everything you can. I couldn't possibly. It was an accident. I don't want your money. I do want you to come to see the customer because the. Our customer is going to give us the kicking and I'd like you to come and take the kicking with me. Which I, which I did. But it's just so often that brand comes with a guarantee. But yeah, people, people won't take the money off you.

Yeah, yeah. I think there's a value in that. You know, I. It's funny, applied back to our work world. I used to promise the sustainable growth, right. As a scaling up coach, and then I noticed that not all clients were growing all the time. And then I wanted to qualify it, saying, well, if you do the work like we talk about things. And I had this insight that I think has actually helped me a great deal. The promise of scaling up might be sustainable growth. Growth. But as a scaling up coach, that's not my promise. My promise is to make scaling up easy, to save you time, to make it more fun. The scaling up tools will give you sustainable growth if you do them consistently. But my promise as the coach is to make it easy, fast and fun. And that's really different than the core. Right. Getting clear on it over time makes such a difference.

It's hard, though.

I think it's really hard. Right. And I think it's really hard because there's a favorite quote that I like about that I think applies to coaching, but to apply all of our business that we'll never know who first discovered water, but you can be pretty sure it wasn't a fish. So it's funny, right? Because we all can't see the water we're swimming in. Right. Which is why a coach isn't necessarily smarter than you and your customer isn't necessarily smarter than you about your business. But the outsider, the coach, the customer, suppliers even, can tell you things that you can't see for yourself because you're just in it.

Yeah, well, it's. And the best ones, I think there's. There's a US guy wrote, Jay Bear, wrote a book called. Oh, God, I can't remember his name. I can't remember the name of the book. It'll come back to me. But it's really about brand promises. Talk triggers. Talk triggers.

That's what it's Called triggers.

Yeah. And so what he says is, is, and like now we all know that the, if the R number is more than one, something spreads, you know, exponentially. Right? So. Right. So what he says is, look, you've got to have a talk trigger. You've got to have a brand promise. Right. Because the purpose of the brand promise is that people will talk about it. It'll drive your word of mouth marketing. Right? And so, you know, he said, you want a talk trigger that three, that somebody, somebody does business with you experiences it and then they tell three people because on that basis you will get exponential growth in your business. And so he's got some fantastic stories in his book. There was a Canadian company that makes construction gloves. And what they did is they put a maple leaf on the back of the glove and it was scratch and sniff. You could smell maple syrup. And because they were, they were under pressure from Chinese gloves. And so all of these construction workers are going around like, and they go, what are you doing? Oh, I'm supporting, you know, made in Canada gloves. Right. And so this whole thing then became, became all of the construction workers wanted to, wanted to wear these gloves, scratch and sniff maple syrup gloves because they were made in Canada. And it was, you know, I really.

Want some bacon and pancakes right now.

Oh. So just so some. And then he's talking about Doubletree at Hilton because he said, look, all the Hilton, all the Doubletree hotels in Hilton are all of the oddball hotels that don't fit a cash category. So they do the, they do the, bake the cookies on reception.

Yeah.

And the receptionist bakes the cookies. And when you go, they hand the cookies over and you know, they get covered on social media. They don't do any advertising. It's all social. And then I went, I was in, I was in Colorado year before last and I went to stay in a hotel and the guy said, oh, we've got cookies. They're over there, help yourself. And it's like, you know, they've copied it, but they've completely missed it. The point, and I love, I love those where somebody would take something you're doing that's working for you and they copied the wrong bit of it.

Yeah.

And they lose money. It's great. I mean, that's the Southwest Airlines, Continental light thing.

It's, it's really hilarious. Let me give our listeners some and viewers some information about Dominic. Where to find out more about you. Get in touch with, with you.

Yeah. Monkhouse and company.commoncompany.com there in the crawl.

If you're watching the video, we of course have video. Go to YouTube, Facebook, etc to find the video and Daniel so growthinstitute.com or danielmarcus.co danielmarcos co growthinstitute.com we of course talked about the the workshops that you've got coming up and your online classes like that. If our show was helpful for you, share it like it subscribe. You'll get them every week. You can do it wherever you want, but you can also go to our website scalingcoach.com to get that whole back catalog. I want to give big shout out to Vern Harnish, author and creator of the whole Scaling up framework, the original Rockefeller Habits and to the one who gets our show ready and prepared and out the door and in and scheduled and all that every week, Lucy Summers. Our audio is edited by Albert Burge at Podfly Productions, our podcast production partner and our show notes are written up by Ein Kadina. Proofread by Tim McGowan. Thanks everyone for listening and watching. Keep Scaling Up. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align. It's the official software for scaling Scaling Up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our Scaling up client team. Teams unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday. Com Bill G One more time aligntoday. Com Bill G That's aligntoday. Com Bill G Check it out and try it now.