Is An Entrepreneur Forum Right For You?

Oh, there it is again. Our theme music. Oh, hello, everyone. Hello, hello, hello. Bill Gallagher, your favorite neighborhood scaling coach, joining you once again with Mike Matic.

Hey.

We're talking today about forum and in a new kind of forum, but forum in general and the opportunity to get support and help each other deal with accomplishments and all of the things that affect us along the way. Way.

Like mix master Bill, the way you bring the sound up and down, I like it.

I need to actually work it out here so I have like a better slider situation. It's a little. Well, there you go. Hi, everyone. I'm Bill Gallagher, host of the show Scaling Coach and all around passionate about growth. Our show is all about how to scale up and grow in the world of scaling up. We've got hundreds of episodes now Mike returns to the show. We've had Mike on before a couple of times to talk about innovation and other things. You can find all those episodes and more@scalingcoach.com Also, all the downloads, the tools embedded in the show notes for each of the shows. At some point, I just had a suggestion from one of our clients that we pull out all the tools and create one central place to find them as well. It's not a bad idea, but I haven't done it yet, so that's to come. Maybe. So listen in as we talk to Mike Matic about forums and about a new kind of forum that he's been at work on. Mike, welcome to the show.

Nice to be back, Bill. Thank you.

Folks should know a little bit about Mike. He's outside. He's in the Chicago area. North side. Where are you exactly?

West suburbs.

West suburbs. There you go. So Mike is founder CEO of a company called Matic Douglas. They do innovation work with Fortune 100 companies and others. He's an idea monkey. Like many of us in this realm, he's passionate, wakes up and breathes ideas all day long and he's figured out how to turn that into a business to help others. A lot of other things that Mike does, he's a speaker, author, etc. He's a doodler, a cartoon. Tunist so many different things. Mike's been a past president of both the eo, the entrepreneurs organization as well as YPO chapters in Chicago. And he's helped to chair the annual gathering of Titans group at mit, which is where we're connected that I've never been to, but my wife goes every year, so I feel at least tertiarily connected to.

Lori. And you know something else, Bill? I am a. I'M good at starting. I'm a great starter and a lousy finisher. So I've started a number of businesses that have. What they have in common is they grew really quickly, you know, 3 million, 5 million, 8 million, 15 million. And then they flattened out and stalled. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, the entrepreneurial paradox, which is that what makes you good at starting businesses often makes you really bad at scaling them, which is a good reason for me to be on the show. I've written about it, I've thought about it, it's kept me up at night, and it has a lot to do with balance. And it goes right to the reason I jumped into Forum was to have a peer to peer experience and to, you know, to understand my blind spots. But what I found was that whether my forum was my executive team or the forum that I was involved in with YP or eo, they tended to be out of balance.

Out of balance, yeah.

So, yeah, I think what forums have in common is if you get in a good one, you got lucky because the, there's a kind of a lack of intentionality. It's almost like chop up a bunch of ingredients, throw it in a pot of water and hope it tastes good. But usually the soup is a little bit too salty or sweet. And that's been my experience. And to be clear, the second best decision I ever made in my life after marrying my wife, Ruth, was joining YPO EO because of Forum, my best friends in the world, the most jarring personal and business moments have all been attached to having this peer to peer group of, of, you know, people that are willing to call you on your. And shine lights on things that you might not have seen. But in, you know, one of my more embarrassing moments was just after writing the book Free the Idea Monkey, which is about the tension between idea monkeys and ringleaders or visionaries and integrators or whatever you want to call them, the operator and the, the idea person. I went and tested our own executive team here on the Colby, you know, which essentially measures what you do when you're under pressure or in flow, only to find I'd surrounded myself with a bunch of idea monkeys. Like everyone on our executive team was a quick start, except for our cfo, which is good, or we would have all been in prison. But I was shocked. And I think that's what happens. We tend to surround ourselves with people like us, we, we attract people like us. And that happens on your executive team and it happens in forum. Too. So, you know, you know, it's interesting.

So I've been in a lot of forums over the years. I'm actually forum chair for my local chapter here and president elect for the next year. And I've been forum chair in past years, many 20 years ago. And it's true, it's a very powerful thing. And yet I've been cruising along in a forum only to have it sort of self destruct at some point or, or dissolve because it ceased to be relevant for people. So everybody wanted different things and we weren't leaning into our differences in a meaningful way. So I, I can remember in fact in the last forum that I had, we had a couple members came in that, that definitely looked at the world in a really, really different way. Yeah, for me and I found that really valuable and stimulating. What I didn't notice though is that some of our values and things were off about the forum experience in general. So, you know, these are not people who that like the open hearted, like go deep thing. No, they wanted business tips and I, and I fixated at first on that like business tip piece. But if my marriage had been in trouble, they would not have been there.

Yeah, that's interesting. I remember.

Winnie shouts us, calls us rock stars. God bless you.

Hey Winnie.

That's all we can get.

Speaking of rock star, I remember the first day in my forum. I remember subconsciously going, yes, yes. No, no, yes, yes. What I was doing was I was going through a checklist of who was going to bring me value. And you know, because this business is kind of like mine and that person's really growing and that person knows something about something that I, you know, I really want to know about. And 10 years later I can look back and to a person I was wrong. Because the value comes from people that see the world differently than you do. The ones who ask the questions that piss you off. I mean the ones that the people that are like, have you considered or you want to strangle them? Like, are you a heartless robot? Why would you ask that question? Well, that's the question. That's your blind spot spot. That's your Achilles heel. And what happens, what I've seen happen in forum is we tend to, well, let's get a couple new members and you go looking for more people that you resonate with when it's exactly the opposite of it'd be fun to hang.

Out with or yeah, yeah, right.

I could party with that guy or that woman. So, so that was shocking to me. The other thing though, and you touched on it. The. I think the measure of a great forum is the ability to get vulnerable. And with entrepreneurs, it's like we put all of our stuff in a blender and just put it on full. So separating what's happening with your marriage and what's happening with your P and L gets a little bit murky. But at a young age, I think many business people are like, well, screw the personal stuff. I'm here to grow my business. And so that's a value thing that you got to get right in the beginning. And it goes to the intentionality of what a forum is for.

I think looking at that comprehensively makes a big difference. I'm suddenly echoing all over the place in your world, echo cancellation.

What's going on?

Like, suddenly. Well, I guess it stopped now, but there was a weird audio thing. I could just hear myself coming back. It was, oh, that's scary. I don't know if it was going out to the audience or not. Anyway, I. I can remember being in a forum for 11 years, one of the longer ones that I've been in, and there were two incidents that really stood out. One of them was somebody was going through a divorce, right. Their marriage is on the rocks, and it's been a long time now, but. And I. I was struck by how nobody could give a crap. Like, wasn't about the business, so they were going to just treat it really surface and then move on. But everything about this leader impacted and absorbed with this personal drama, right? And there wasn't any attention to that. Another time, somebody was going through a. Like, a restructuring. Maybe it was going to be bankruptcy. There was a major lawsuit and that, like, they were totally on the ropes, and it was kind of like, well, try some of these things, and good luck with that. And I was like, wow, why aren't we, like, camping out in this person's business and giving them a shoulder and, like, being there around the clock for this person, right? Like, together to get through the whole thing. And it struck me, like, it occurred for me, like, this is wrong. This shouldn't be this way. We need. We. Like, we're missing something here.

Yeah. I actually left a forum because I felt like there was too much salt and too little sweet. In other words, there were a lot of high analytics in the room, and they were amazing people, wonderfully gifted business people and friends. But every problem was. It was like a hammer looking for a nail. And so every problem was a system or a KPI. I'm like, you can't KPI a Marriage. So I think there's a, there's a couple things there.

Number one, lawsuit or any. Right there.

There'S. So, so if you have a form that's balanced in terms of just think about emotional EQ and iq, that's something. But then there's, you know, there's about, you know, values, what you care about in the world and there's also expertise and passion, you know, being good at different things.

Yeah.

So my thesis was what would happen if you were actually intentional about that and just taking a step back, if you think about what's great about form. And I'm assuming all your listeners know what a form is, but that's probably a bad assumption.

Let's say that. So yeah, let's talk about that. Why don't you tell us what it.

Is and okay, so whether you're in ypo, eo, Vistage, Strategic Coach, there are dozens of these types of organizations where a forum at its best is a peer to peer meeting once a month, typically, usually for about four hours of business people, that's the common thread they have. They run a business or run a P and L and they get together and they work on each other's toughest challenges. The top 5 or bottom 5% when.

It'S going really some other key executive. Right. That could be involved. Some other level of business leaders with peers. Sometimes, yes.

So some forms are not. Some are, you know, like Cameron Herald, his forums are around the COO or, you know, there are different types of forms. The ones that I've been involved in are, you know, you're running a business, you're in charge of the future of a business. You have a P and L responsibility. I think my rule for forums is no victims. You have to be able to take whatever said in that form. Actually, as an aside, the first forum I was ever involved in was an EO forum. And I, and I remember going, oh my gosh, I just can't wait to get into this because it's, it felt so great. And it turned out that not everybody was qualified. Some people were like in family businesses, but they didn't have the control. And when I became membership chair of EO in Chicago, the first thing I did was like everybody has to re qualify. Because I didn't think we were keeping the promise of peer to peer experience. What it came down to was no victims. If you have a challenge, if you bring a challenge, you have to be able to go and solve it. Then once you get that feedback, so you've got objectivity, confidentiality and empathy, expert feedback and lifelong relationships. My. One of my mentors has been in a YPO forum for over 40 years in Chicago. And in that forum, it's Chicago business royalty. So you have people like Duchessois, who, you know, like, the names that are on the sides of the hospitals that I'm going to with my right wife right now are all in this form. It's like, oh, my gosh, Craig gave this, so it's crazy. And I've been in that room. I've had the blessing of presenting to that group. And it was like a scene from Grumpy Old Men. It's like, teddy, you're full of shit. And here are these billionaires calling each other on their crap. And it was beautiful. It was so sweet, because these people really loved each other, and they'd been there through their whole lives when it was just like some of these guys were scraping out for pennies as kids, and they. They supported each other. And that meant they had worked through bankruptcies and divorces and bar mitzvahs and christenings, and like every major event in life, they'd been there to help each other be better humans and leaders. So that's the beauty of forum. And if anyone's listening to this and you're. You're in a business and running a business and you're not in a forum, please, for the love of God, the crown is heavy. Go get yourself a peer group that you can, you know, reveal your deepest fears and secrets. And that's the beauty of four.

Yeah. So. And so does a. Is a mastermind a forum in your mind or how.

No, I don't. I don't think so. I mean, I've been in. What do you think, Bill? Do you think a mastermind is a forum? Sometimes, yeah. So what is the. What's the mastermind?

Seems a fairly loose. Like it's a periodic gathering of people. Check. That's forum. Right. Who have something in common, common interest, but not necessarily peers, although often, I think. And then with a specific objective, often in mind, we're gonna hit this next milestone or something.

I think to be a. To be a true forum, the route, the rule. What's said in the room stays in the room, which means you can't talk about what happens. It's a sacred place.

Right.

And to your point earlier, when you have that. When you have that safety, then you can reveal why you're scared, what's keeping you up at night, why you think you're a lousy leader, parent, whatever, and you're opening yourself up. It's that vulnerability, the ability for someone in the room to fall on the sword, that allows you to open up. I'm seeing Karen Sates. Yeah. Karen cites the. The rules are different in Mastermind versus form, so. Thank you, Karen.

Yeah. But they're all like gatherings of people that you're learning from others, you're sharing and growing and supporting each other in some fashion together. So there are some common elements here.

For sure. For sure.

And that's also distinct from, like, an advisory board where you might be a collection of people all contributing to one.

Right, yeah. And I think that. But I think that the downside of an advisory board or an executive team and a forum can be quite similar. It goes to the. The ability to attract and have a balanced group of individuals. They have different expertise, they see the world differently, and you trust them deeply. And that's when, you know, I wrote about idea monkeys and ringleaders because I saw that companies that had really did well, had this almost like a love affair between the operator and visionary. They really leaned into what the other sucked at. In other words, like, you know, under pressure, the operator is like, let's do what we did yesterday, better today. And the visionary is under pressure, says, let's blow shit up, let's start over. And you need both of those skills. So being able to rely on those skills and lean into them is really important. Turns out, though, I think there are six different skills that an executive team really needs. And when I came up with Flourish Forum, the concept was, what if you engineered. What if you curated a forum around six different types of expertise and passion, which should be the same. So that instead of just a visionary and an operator, you had, if there are 12 seats or 12 people, I should say there are two visionaries and no more. There are two operators and no more. There are two strategists, there are two rainmakers, there are two orchestrators, there are two tech futurists. And so then, as you're taking on your toughest and most personal business challenges, you can rest assured that you're going to get a balanced perspective. And, you know, balance is what creates diversity. And there's all kinds of research that shows the more diverse your executive team, the more profitable your company. So my thought was, okay, I've, you know, I've managed to start four businesses, but they stalled. What would an executive team look like if I could put it together, that would have made get us over those humps. And that's why I came up with Flourish Forums. So that's what I've been working on for about six months and it's been so much fun.

So the key distinction here is you're engineering the forum to have a mix of types in there rather than having a bunch of like minded people who want to do the same kinds of things.

Exactly. It's like Tetris. You're trying to find similar size businesses and then six different types of expertise and fit them together. It's virtual. So that means I and I have a forum whose the average revenue is like 300 million and I have members from Vancouver and Florida and New York. But. And we meet for four hours a month. That's it. So bing bang. It's also about growth. It's about. Which is why we're talking because that's your expertise. It's about the type of personalities for these people are all doing great, but they want to do a little bit better. So balance business growth. So we do talk about personal stuff, but only in so much as it impacts the business growth.

Yeah. So it's a component, but not the. I definitely noticed that in some of the EO forums there's a great deal of personal. And if I think about the companies that I know and work with between EO and YPO globally, I work with a lot more YPO companies for a lot longer than the EO companies because there's a much more of an emphasis on growth in, in YPO and in EO there's much more of an emphasis on a lifestyle at some level. There's like, okay, I want to get this my business dialed in.

Yeah. And, and you know what happens is, is companies grow. They're usually started by a visionary and then scaled by an operator. And I've noticed that the two toughest seats, I'll let you guess. So I'll give you the seats again, Bill, and you can tell me the two toughest seats to find. You've got operator, visionary strategist, rainmaker, orchestrator and tech futurist. What do you think the two hardest seats to fill are?

Whoa, that was like too many rattled off. I definitely think it's hard for that visionary startup person to cede control and to find the right person and give that control. So integrator Orchestrator is the hardest to either develop or to recruit.

Yeah. So in my experience, the operator is the hardest one to get. You know why? Because they don't believe you. They're such high fact finders. Better than my, you know. So what I have to do is I have to have other operators who are in a Flourish forum call an operator and say, here's how I've measured my success. It's great, trust me. And then the rainmaker is difficult. Everyone's looking for a great rainmaker, and rainmakers are like, hey, man, I need to know how this is going to turn into money right now. Four hours a month. What's, you know, what's the return on my investment? Because I'm selling, man. So that's. Those have been the two hardest seats to. To find anyway.

It's actually the rainmaker. So I've been in. I've had fantastic rainmakers, and I've beat myself up trying to find the next one. And looking back at it, I think in finding a great rainmaker, there's a certain amount of luck to get that. And I found a couple over my career and I had one in place and then I brought in another one, and the clash was pretty disastrous. But in both cases, what I was missing that I've sort of since learned is the value in creating a playbook with a more consistent process instead of relying on a rock star is to get, like, you know, average production up, take the McDonald's approach to sales rather than going and finding that sort of key. And the best rainmakers I found were the ones who you were already doing something and they, like, spotted it and wanted to come in and jump on your party.

Yeah. Do you know your Colby, Bill? I'm just curious because.

No, I don't.

I should know it, because if you want, I'll send you a link, because if I saw your Colby, I would. I would tell you which seat felt comfiest for you around the Flourish forums table. So the challenge is that we can all do all those jobs usually. But as we grow as leaders, we tend to do what makes us feel strong. I agree with you on the rainmaker thing. You've seen the two by two, where it's value and expertise. So low values, low expertise, Fire em. High values, low expertise. Train them. High values, high expertise, love them. And then that top left quadrant is like where Satan lives. And that's where your head of sales winds up. Typically, it's the low values, super high expertise. So you wake up one day and you've got this jag who's got 60% of your revenue in their pocket, and you're like, oh, my gosh, this person is a complete disaster, values wise. But I can't fire him, I can't fire her. And you have to. And so what's so brilliant about what you said is if you can find someone who isn't about relationships and like, you know, crazy messy BMW car, the stereotypical salesperson, and more about the process, you can find someone that has really good values and is pragmatic. That's how you can scale a company. It's so hard. It's such a hard person to find.

It's a hard thing to do. It's all pretty hard. Right?

Yeah.

I. So here's. You said something earlier that I'm. Because I don't have exactly an idea here, but it occurs for me, like one of the mistakes that we make again and again is trying to put the companies of the same size. And I have learned some amazing things from some pretty small companies or different companies that I have employed for great profit. And I find again and again we want to like, oh, I want to put everybody in kind of the same level. And I'll get people who are like, oh, I'm Now I'm at 500 people and so I can't be in a forum with 50 people anymore.

Yeah.

And like, you might be forgetting some of the lessons that you learned at that point. And certainly if you want to improve your tennis game, go play with a tennis pro or somebody way above your level versus playing. But sometimes if you go play and you watch somebody else, you're reminded of something that you've left out or in teaching someone, sometimes you can up your game in some ways. And. And I think especially in business, looking at a broad range, I mean, one of the best ideas that I ever had when I was trying to grow a piece of Sprint's business years ago, I got from reading a Marketing Week article about Subway sandwiches selling cookies, and they were just using a mystery shopper program to both measure and re. Incentivize. And I'm like, oh, my God. Mystery shoppers in the telecom business. Brainstorm. And all I was doing was combining something, seeing something new in a new way. But that mix that we can sometimes get, I think we. Sometimes we miss, oh, I only want to play or I only want to be in a form with people who are like me, you know?

Yeah, I think that you're. It's a, It's a really. It's. It's. It's an astute observation that the. So kind of like the roles, right?

Like, why not be. And I saw, I saw somebody in one of our accelerated programs do something with their bookkeeping, and I'm like, holy shit, I should go do that with this other company.

So you've heard me say a hundred times, Bill, you can't read the label when you're sitting inside the jar. So I remember early in my business and my background is strategy branding. So I am a, you know, I'm always looking for the how to, the competitive advantage and positioning, etc. And I remember being in these meetings, yes, but have you ever worked with a toilet paper company before? I'm like, are you kidding me? Because they were, that's how you know the silos that well. We're B2B so if you're not B2B how can you. Anyway, so I think totally everybody will.

Discount something if they decide, well, you don't know about my industry. I'm like, yeah exactly. And that's my fucking value here.

That's right. So Napster moment is when someone with no business being in your business comes along and puts you out of business just like the 16 year old. The record industry. Why? Because they're outside the jar. They don't know what's legal, they don't know what the law, what, what you've tried in the past. They don't know what you can afford. So, so there's definitely gold in them Hill. So in my, but in a forum we've seen this happen where, I've seen it happen where you have one member who's perfectly happy with their million dollar business doesn't really, you know, they don't value growth. It's a lifestyle business. Meanwhile, someone's doing IPO in the same form and they desperately need some feedback on how to do an IPO or an ESOP or whatever. So the diversity I think needs the way I'm thinking about it. And Bill, this is an experiment. I mean I'm in rapid prototype. My goal is to have a thousand members in ten years. But, but first you gotta walk. And so I'm setting up these forums with the best people I know and I'm putting them in, you know, chunks. So 1 to 20 million dollar companies, you know, 20 to 50, 50 to a billion, you know, like so, so.

There'S, think about it, that's a huge range, right? 5 is, is maybe somewhat similar. 1 to 20, that's a big gap, right? It's like I'm a baby boomer. That's because it's 46 to 64 and I'm 64, but I'm really in a different headspace from somebody born in 46.

That's right, it's it there and you there. The diversity of thinking comes from different industries. You Know, there are many people that go to industry forums which are incredibly valuable, but you're. You're inside the jar.

You're all.

You all have the same paradigm.

You're hearing the same stuff. It's an echo chamber.

Yeah. So I'm looking at six different types of experience and 10 different industries. The other thing is, and this is fascinating, I have a couple members that have made, you know, with three employees, $12 million in revenue. That's crazy. That's an orchestrator. That's the orchestrator seat. The orchestrator knows how to get everyone to do the work for them without hiring anyone. There's value in that. So I think there are. You know, there are different flavors of diversity that you want in the same room. I also have a client that I love this. He has a millennial board. So he's in a sleepy old industry, so he put together a board of millennials. Similar thinking, but he just wanted to. He didn't want to be napstered by young people who saw the world completely differently. And he's a huge advocate of different bands of age. So what I'm trying for in terms of diversity is different ages, different businesses, and then the different six different levels of expertise.

Oh, I think the age is really interesting. I think Vern is actually, as we speak, on his way down to spend some time with Chip Conley, who has talked a lot about, Right. The modern elder movement and bringing wisdom and played the role of wisdom for the Airbnb team. And I think there's something in that, like, there's something really fantastic about. I'll see sometimes some fairly early career people come on, and they'll just be like, oh, we just did this and we did that. I'm like, how did you do that so fast? And what do you think you're doing? And are you not paying any attention? And sometimes, right, they are making some bizarre mistakes.

Sometimes they're right, you know, and sometimes.

They'Re making brilliant mistakes. Right.

And remember when we used to make 20 mistakes by in before a big company had made their first. And so that rapid prototyping, that the boldness of going, look, dude, let's go. And that's what. That's what the strategist does. A strategist high fact finder. And then low follow through. They don't want to mess around with the details. And then high, quick start. So they're like, okay, I've thought about it enough. I heard where you want to go. Visionary. Here's the straightest path. Go. And I'm going to jump in every two weeks and turn the knobs, but let's go. And so that's what you get from a strategist. And that balances off the visionary, because the visionary is just like, I don't need to hear anything. Let's just start doing stuff. Well, that's dangerous. So there's this balance of personalities that keep you out of jail sometimes, literally, that you don't find in typical forums, particularly if the business model behind that forum is you are a warm body, you have a checkbook, and you're a business leader. Come into my forum and honest to God, that is how unfortunately some of these business models work. So when you show up in that room and you're the best of the best or the top 5%, you're going to be disappointed. You're going to walk around and go, what the hell am I doing? That's not the forum for you. You need to be with people that are really, really good at what they do.

Well, that matchmaking process is missing from many groups, and sometimes it's. It's more about popularity or we. This person's cool. So we, we're going to bring them into our forum or whatever. And certainly some of those organizations that we mentioned did a lot of that in the past. Do less of that these days. But. And then some of the others would just bring in anybody. Right. Oh, you've got a check. You can pay the monthly fee. Come on in. Like you're. Yeah, you're going to be.

Because the moderator is being compensated by the number of bodies and the number of bodies.

Yeah, Rather than reading that.

Yeah, I want to. You mentioned Vern. I want to give a shout out because in every one of these meetings I have a TED Talk by. What I'll do is we have two presentations by members, and based on the theme, I'll go out and find a thought leader who will speak for 15 minutes on something. And in our last meeting with one of the forums, Vern, I called him and said, hey, listen, this feels like it's right in your wheelhouse. He goes, dude, I'll be there. And so he gave a talk in this forum. And he's an amazing thinker, you know, I mean, you know, he's getting better and better. I remember Vern 20 years ago. He was awesome then, and he just showed up. It was like, what about this? What about this? What about this?

And.

And in that room, he didn't know it, but there were four members who. He had absolutely changed their trajectory for the better he had and he didn't know it. So it was one of those moments where, you know, in a pool when you drop a pebble and eventually that wave comes back to you if you're really lucky. In that room, he got to hear some stories about how he had said something that made them go, you know, and they had. One Guy created a 25 million dollar company based on something he heard from Vern for teachers. And he made six of those six teachers multi millionaires within two years. And they didn't know it. He tells this story about how he called him up and go, remember that piece of paper you signed? Yeah, I just sold the company. I'm going to send you a check for $1.2 million. Crying on the phone. He credits Vern for that. And Vern showed up at this meeting and didn't know it was coming. It was like, it was amazing.

So I think it's so sweet to notice your impact beyond what you're regularly aware of. I think we walk through life doing stuff and we see only a tiny fraction of it. And as a consequence, we also act like jerks sometimes because we don't realize how big our impact is. And then every now and then you're reminded of how big an influence you have on other people, how much you touch people, and it's deeply humbling and gratifying to see, especially if you weren't a jerk in that moment, you did something generous.

Yeah.

There's a thing that I've been working on. I don't have this exactly tied in, but since we're, we're just talking conversationally about it for a long time. So, you know, I, my core work is as a scaling up coach, and I have helped a number of companies, including three with, with valuations over a billion dollars now. And, and I work without. Right. Yeah. And I've worked with thousands of companies a year now in a variety of different programs and a few more intimately. And I, I noticed something that I talk about right in the courtship phase before I begin working with a company again, what I've started. So 16 years ago, I started doing leadership and growth coaching and training and that kind of thing. And then eventually I sort of became more formal because a big body of the work was in the scaling up world. But I notice that there's this gap where leaders pull it back down again to their comfort level if they haven't also leveled up themselves. So I started to write this book about the fifth decision, which I say is leadership and the kind of leader that you are today is insufficient. It's all about survival. It's got you into this place. It's the Marshall Goldsmith idea that what you got you here won't get you there. And. And so people go and they try to work on different things. But what I don't think most people realize is that you could actually, if, if the thing that you've been so far is all about survival, then the next level is an invention of creation and you could actually consider your legacy and the end of your life and then begin to invent and create the kind of leader that you want to become. And that. That is the leveling up opportunity. And then within that, then go to work on the pieces. So there's aspects of leadership that we're naturally comfortable and spend time in, but there's kind of a flywheel of leadership. And I've identified four major areas in working with so many people over time that. And we'll be comfortable with one or more. But you got to kind of keep working a flywheel, if it's truly a flywheel. So people need to get inspired and then they need to get engaged and you've got some planning work to do and then coaching kind of keeps them moving back through things. But as you coach people, they forgot what they committed to. They forgot what they were inspired by. They're lost in their planning. Like there's a circle to do. There's. And I think what's cool about a forum like this is your particular flourish Forum as relates to my fifth decision work here is that when you see the different types of people, you're reminded of the importance of planning or of coaching or of engaging people and getting commitments firm and clear, versus if you just love to be the inspirational one or if you're just a planner. Right?

Yeah, I think there's. I think there's a couple things there. Number one, I had this moment. I went back to school to Kellogg, Northwestern. They had a program where you couldn't apply to it until you've been out of college for like 12 years. Actually, on the look back, it was a recruiting tool for them because they wanted to get people that were running divisions or companies to send their employees there. So they had all the deans of the colleges speak, you know, do you know management, accounting, strategy. Vicki Medvick was a partner of mine. She's my professor for negotiation at the time. And the biggest impact it had on me was during strategy and marketing. I was on fire. Like, this is unbelievable because I was in my wheelhouse. But during Managing accounting. I wanted to crawl under a chair and one of my friends, Bob Wallace, who was the CEO of topgolf, and like, he's a smart guy, and he was under his chair during the marketing and strategy. And then when we got to accounting, he was trying to talk me off the ledge. And it taught me something like, Mother Teresa said, grow where you're planted. And I think that too much of us work on our weaknesses rather than going, man, I'm really good at this. And being in a room where you can have people ask the right questions that might be like, you're blind to them. Like, there's this bridge, Bill, between we've all gone to a conference or all gone to a forum and gone, I've got it. I've got the. I've got the answer. And you go back to your executive team and you plop it down in the middle of the table, and it's like a fart in church. Everyone's like, oh, my God. Every fricking month you're going to come with a new idea. But if you come back to them and say, hey, Bill, you're my head of sales, you're my head rainmaker, I've been thinking about something. I think there's a kind of a stalker. Maybe I'm imagining it, but here are three questions I think we need to answer about sales. And you can go, hey, Bill, are those. Do you think those are the right questions? Are there any other questions? Can you help me answer those questions? Well, those questions were informed by the two rainmakers in your flourish form. So they're the right questions even if you didn't come up with them. And as soon as you start to engage with them now, you're a better leader because you're admitting that you don't know the answer. And that's your strategy, not mine. So that's the bridge between having to do everything yourself and heroics. And let me just try to figure out some questions that will help you do your job better. That's what leadership is, empowering the people around you. And I think I'll speak for myself. I mean, I created drama with ideas. People would come to me and go, hey, what do you think? Do you have any idea? I'm like, what about this? What about this? What about this? And all I was trying to do was play to my strength, but what I was doing was I was rescuing with my strength rather than stepping back and asking a question or being a good coach or challenger. So I think eventually leaders need to have some kind of format that allows them to grow where they're planted and let the people around them who were given some other gift by God rise around them. And it's a really hard thing to do.

Well, hopefully we're about out of time. Hopefully our conversation, if you're in a forum already, has helped you to think about how to upgrade it. And if you're not in a forum, you should check out free Flourish Forums. We'll put the link in the crawl here. Flourish Forums is where to go. Mike is@matic douglas.com and you'll find all the information more both in the show notes and so on in Flourish Forums. Mike, thanks so much for joining us today. I want to give big thanks. We've shouted out a little bit Vern Harnish in the course of the Thing, author and creator of the Scaling Up Framework and the old Birthing of Giants program, the Rockefeller Habits that that connects us brings us all to this point. If our show helped you, please go ahead and subscribe. So you get them every week. We do three shows a week now. A Getting Real episode, a deep dive on leadership with one of our somebody who's grown a company and gone through a range of things. A quick tip every Tuesday and then one of these conversations on Wednesday where we dive into a core idea of some thing. I want to also give thanks to Lucy Summers who's in the background producing and organizing and scheduling our shows and all that. Big thanks, Lucy. Also to Albert Burge at poplight Productions who edits the audio every week. And our show notes are compiled by Ein Kudina and written up by Tim McGowan. Our proofread by Tim McGowan. Thanks again everyone. Keep listening. Keep scaling. Talk to you next time, Mike. Much love to you and the family. Talk to you all soon.

Thanks buddy. See you. Thank you.