Optimizing Operations & Processes with Derrick Mains

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 to Doxatant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill g. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. You know if you're going to scale your company, you got to get some things right around processes and it's a job that's never ever done. So what is it that you need to look at today around the process in your company? What's not done? What needs revision? That's the subject of our conversation today. We refine the process that we do around this show on the regular making little adjustments to and repeatable things around getting a show out every week. How do you get a show out 550 plus times in a row and do a good job with it? Well, we hope we do a good job. That is the subject of our conversation today. You'll find all those shows and more around everything around your strategy, your execution and processes, getting the people right and even your Leadership style@scalingcoach.com ScalingCoach.com is where our monthly workshops are, where our free course is on the stages of scaling and growing your company. Scalingcoach.com you can go get our weekly newsletter, all that stuff and more right at that website, scalingcoach.com all right, listen, my name is Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of this fine show and we've got a great guest here today and we're talking with Derek Mains about getting processes right. And Derek is he hosts a show all in the world of Process Process Fixer with Derek Mains. And he's got a business, a process fixer business and they do all kinds of work around process. He worked with companies large and small for many years, got a whole team around this and so I'm glad to have welcome to the show, Derek.

Hey, thank you for having me, Bill. It's exciting to be here and talk about this. I'm a big fan of scaling businesses, growing businesses and think that process is one of probably the most overlooked things when it comes to business. I think we've gone through some times in American history in Western management where it was important particularly, and I love talking about what happened in the 400% GDP growth from 42 to 40, 47 during World War II and, and how we did things very differently at that time and how some of the things that we advanced as a business society got lost in the shuffle of the last seven years. So glad to be here talking about this and bringing more eyes to the concept of process improvement and critical thinking and analysis inside organizations.

You know, it's interesting. Comes up all the time, or it ought to around your business. We've done other episodes of topics. We've talked about software and things like that in the world of process. We've talked about checklists and making processes, consistent routine. This is a regular recurring topic with our clients, with our audience, that kind of thing. So it's really important and it comes up all the time. My wife this morning asked me. She's like, okay, what's the part of your business now that's just a pain in the ass that's taking too long, that needs a process revision? Right. We have processes, we set them up and then at some point they stop being relevant. We're going to get into the more of that later when we talk about how we got disrupted with COVID and what happened that. Before we get into all that, why don't you talk to us about when you first became a process geek? Where did you, like, how did you get into the world of process? Maybe it started at 5 or something, but.

Yeah, you know, the funny thing is, is my. One of my earliest memories that has a biggest impact on me, that I think my therapist has helped pull out of me over the years is this instance when I was probably four or five years old, I found a box of National Geographics in the basement of a friend's, a family friend's house. And I opened it up and it was about archeology. And I saw the. The grid right where they had the sticks in the ground and they had the lines across and they had them lettered and numbered and they were digging and extracting out a skull of a dinosaur. And as the pages progressed, you could see, oh, wait, if they go to a four, they're going to find more of the, of the snout. And if. And if they do. And that just fascinated me. And I began immediately from that point on thinking in grids. Literally. I'm looking around my office, every notebook I have is graph paper. Everything I have is graph paper. I am a firm. From that moment in time, I wanted to understand the interconnectedness of all things. I wanted to be an archeologist and extract out and dig from those areas to learn more and to find root cause. And that then turned into a career where I worked in sustainability. Early in my career I was an executive for an NGO that was working with some of the largest organizations on the planet in the early 2000s to try to determine end of life producer responsibility. And for the first time I'm sitting down with senior leaders in the biggest companies in the world and I'm saying, okay, so the customer buys it and then what? And they're like, well, they use it and it's like, okay, but what happens when they're done using it? I don't know. Well, where does it go? Do you return that they're going to. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And all of a sudden I realized that not everybody thinks in that abstraction. Systems thinking, root cause. And I really have been able to turn that into a career, you know, building organizations that have been able to do things differently, approach problems differently. And that has then turned into an illustrious career in helping hundreds of organizations do this and teaching my methodology to hundreds of consultants so they can go out and, and teach the systems thinking, critical thinking, root cause analysis. And then what? And then what? And then what kind of mentality, all of this.

We've done other shows, we've done shows with Chris Rons here with Michael Gerber, with.

I know both. Yeah, Chris is right down the street.

Yeah. Focus on the software behind some process work but. And the learning and ingraining. Well, so we. Paul Akers talking about regular lean practices. So you know, it's a, it's a recurring topic about a recurring issue. Right. About making things repeatable.

Yeah, I think there is a piece though that's. And I love all of those folks work. I'm influenced by all of their work. I've known, I've met Chris, I think in 2008 when he had organizing chaos long before the train you all days. But my philosophy is a little bit different and sometimes I think it's more of trying to get to the root of an idea and. Oh, I saw you trying to get to a root of an idea. Yeah. And one of the things that I think that they all like to talk about is how we have to document process, how we have to revisit that, how it shouldn't be an archeological dig. But I don't believe that process in and of itself is. Is there to document the process. I think there's another step that we all tend to forget. What we have learned in our practice is, number one, never have an executive document a process. Never. And I really mean that. It will be the worst.

Tell us more about that. But I totally support what you're saying here.

Yeah, let me tell you, the funniest joke you'll ever tell to your employees is rolling out a process map that was created by executives. They will laugh and laugh and point and they'll say, this is a joke. Right? You guys are kidding. So my problem with a lot of the ways that those folks approach it is because their audience is executives. They're saying to the executives, you need to be the master of your domain and map these processes. And listen, there's a purpose for that. Process comes from only two forms. It comes from evolution, mutation, or it comes via intelligent design. If it is not intelligently designed, you have variation in your process that will likely kill you at about the five year mark. I mean, it's just the way that it works. The problem is, is that executives want to interject themselves and try to do process analysis at a boardroom level. When the truth of the matter is where process is, where value is created, where quality is created, where competitive advantage is created, is at the front line of the organization on the person that is ringing the cash register. And they're the ones that are doing the tasks. We call them the believables. These are the folks that I can actually trust and believe that they know what is happening in the organization. When I get into a workshop with them and I have them show me the process, usually afterwards, when I show it to the CEO, they cry for a little bit because they're like, how in the world did I not know? But then the second thing is, is once that process is abstracted on the wall, and I'll talk about my caveman philosophy here in a moment, but once that is abstracted on the wall, the next piece to say, the most important piece of process, once it's up, is being able to say, now tell me about what is happening in this process that should not be happening. And all of a sudden you get stories like, we had 16 mechanical folks that go out and do work on these towers. And we said, what's the. What slows you down the most? And they said, oh, it's the sharing of tools. And I said, what do you mean? And they said, yeah, for the six of us, we only have one socket set, and we have to share it between all of us. And I said, why don't you. Do you want. And they're like, no, no, no, we hate this. We just stand around all day. It's so boring. We're like, well, why don't you ask for new tools? Well, we did, but management said that they're being incentivized right now on improving profit margins. So they want to defer that payment. They want to defer that out until next quarter. And then we asked the next quarter, and they said, yeah, you know, we're trying to work on our bonuses and trying to improve incent. Have to push. And now it's been two years, and we're only doing about 20% of the work that we could be doing, but, you know, budget cuts. And I go, holy crap. Like, somebody run to the Home Depot and get these guys the tools that they need. So to me, process, yes, it's important. It's easier to follow. Process is something in which people can hang their pain on, and then from that, we can resolve those problems in order to improve that process so that it is a continuous cycle of identifying the problems, extracting them from the people, abstracting on the solutions, analyzing, designing a solution, and then training and enforcing that until such a time where we can abstract once again. And that, to me, is the thing that everybody is missing. And I can tell you, in 2,500 workshops, 500,000 pain points from frontline employees that we have gotten out of them over the years, it is shocking when I show people stuff. Like 80% of the time, the paperwork prints out wrong, and we have to go back into the system and do this. 40% of the time, the wrong materials were loaded on my truck, and I get to the job site and I have to turn around and go back. And I'm not talking about companies doing two, three million dollars a year. I'm talking about best places to work, reach a billion dollars in revenue, and there's 30, 40, 50% in efficiency in the front line. And unfortunately, the pain that we deal with as executives, as brand, balance sheet, budget, the pain that we hear about from our managers is. Is, oh, I need more resources. The pain of frontline people is, yeah, that that machine hasn't worked in 16 years, and nobody's ever been able to get the damn thing fixed. Can you please help me? And that's the piece I think they all miss. Because I came from the front lines. I am. I was. I did not go to College. I never, I, I didn't even. I got my first real job when I was 28 years old. You know, I was digging ditches before then, so I was there with those folks. So, so I experienced that and that has given me a perspective. I think that's very different from what most process people talk about.

Yeah. That is like, wow, that evokes a lot of very specific memories for me. And I remember one time I came in and I was really frustrated because we'd come back from a major selling trade show and we had record orders and I know that we needed to get them in purchasing and production to get the goods made in time for the deliveries and things like that. And I didn't have the final numbers and, and that kind of thing. And I'm like, what is the problem? God damn it. Like, give me my numbers. And, and the team's like, well, this person still has to work on that. Like, they're still got it and they're working as fast as they can. And, and I, and my first thought was like anger and frustration. What is matter with them? Why are they so slow? And then. So before. Because I have some self, not a lot of self control, but some self control. I, I stopped and I looked over at where they were working and I just observed that. I'm like, well, they, they're working at a reasonable place. You know, they're not like, they're not like tapping their thumbs or fingers or whatever. They're, they're like, they're working on the thing and it's not molasses or sloth. Like. So I'm like, wait, what? So why is that the hold up with them? Why don't you. And they're like, well, this is like, it's a copy. And then we tried to copy these, but they don't copy very well. And I'm like, okay, so we have a holdup because we're using a two part NCR form and we got four people who need to work on this thing at the same time.

Yeah, like, just doesn't make sense, right?

And then they were like, yeah, but that's not all, Bill. Like, there's also this problem. There's always errors around these three things on the field. And it was like the V code was missing or something on the credit card or some other things. And I'm like, okay, timeout. So we stopped, we were like, what are all the problems? Where are the hang ups and the delays? And people talked about all their frustrations and some of them didn't occur for them like a problem because they were just working through it and it was normal. But I could see. So tell me what happens, right? So then they kind of. So then we're like, oh, the fix is really simple. We did some small redesigns on the form, and we created our forms, had them printed in four part NCR forms. The next trade show that all we had to do is say, right, clearly, and press hard.

Yeah. And so, Bill, this is such a. And I'm going to get really passionate and animated here because it. To me, you know, I go out and do a lot of CEO roundtables. I'm doing about eight or nine a month right now. So I'm sitting in front of CEOs for three hours and I'm talking to them and I'm watching what hits with them. And what I'm always looking for is the things that they push themselves back from the chair and they put their hands in their head and they go, my God, what am I doing? And some of these. Yeah, some of these things. I want to jump back to that caveman piece, but first I want to make a point on Hustle, because Hustle culture is bullshit. I'm sorry, but if you see your people hustling around, all that means is you suck at management, right? You suck at management, you suck at layout and design, you suck at making things easy to do. And that, for the most part, you probably are wasting massive amounts of labor, though. I can show case study after case study of us going into a place and reducing labor by 70% by just moving the items around to get them closer to the people doing the work. We spend about 40% of our time at work looking for stuff, looking in emails, looking for files. What's the status update on this? Can you verify this? Can we double check this? Can you quality check this? Every time you hear a word like that, it means I don't trust my people and I do not trust my process. Because if you did, you wouldn't have to spend 40% of your time administering and checking and double checking and rechecking. I mean, if you did that to your kid and stood over their shoulder and checked every little thing they did, they grow up to have mental issues. And we've literally made this the ideology of modern management. And it's completely nonsense. Every time I hear Gary Vee. I mean, no offense, Gary, but I would do an MMA fight with you just to get one punch in. In the nose to be able to say, shut up. You have no idea what you're talking about you've run online wine stores. Like, yeah, come on, man. You've never been in the trenches. You don't know. And I want to make this. I said I want to tell the caveman story. Because to me, it simulates what we need. Please. Yeah.

Hustle and grind. There's a time and a place for it in a moment in time. But if hustle and grind is your everyday, regular thing, then you're missing flow. You're missing zone of genius. You're missing the intelligent design. You're missing up leveling.

Right.

Hustle and grind is exhausting. It's not sustainable.

No. And for some reason, we have these damn signs all the place, and every time I see one, I just want to take it out and burn it. I like that scene from Office Space where they took the printer out and they hit it with the baseball bats. It's like that word hustle is such. There is a time you're right when you're first getting started, when you're launching a new product. There are times, but the capacity of human beings cannot operate at 120% all the time. You got to get smarter and not work harder. And I'm very passionate about it because it pisses me off. It really does. When I hear this stuff on TikTok and I hear it on LinkedIn, and I say, these people are influencing others to burn out and fail. And that is not the objective. If we want to grow, really grow our economy and come up with great new ideas, we need more businesses to be successful. They need a methodology and a model to do that. One that is not based in clicks and likes and views, but one that's based on real world experience from hundreds of companies, thousands of processes to say, hey, look, here's a path that's going to get you there and improve the probability of success. And so I want to jump to this caveman story because I love talking about this idea that for hundreds of thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, every time, Bill, that we ran into a saber toothed tiger in the wild, it was a bad day. Listen, I'm a. I'm a fat dude. I'm going to lose every time, right? Everybody runs. I'm the slowest runner. You know, I go home, but I go home as the meal of the saber tooth tiger. And we lived like that as our society for a long time, thousands of.

Years, until one day I just have to beat you.

Yes, Right. But until one day when someone reached down into the fire and took a piece of Charcoal and stood up against the cave wall and they drew a picture of a tiger. And all of a sudden we could look at it and we could go, that isn't scary. And then dad could grab his stick and he could walk up to the wall and say, boys, this is the part of the tiger you want to avoid. This is the sharp claws. Let's dig a pit. You know, OG over here is great at big smashing things with big rocks. You know, Job's the fastest runner. We're all good with our pointy sticks. Let's run past the cave. The saber toothed tiger falls into the pit. We throw the rocks down, we jab it with the spears. And now we're not afraid anymore. And when we look at ancient cave art, when we look at it, we think it's art. It is. Dad or mom, cave person standing at the wall pointing and teaching lessons and saying, here's the soft part. Here's where you need to hit it with the arrow. Here's the strategy. Let's try up around this place. This is what made us human beings, it separated us from animals. And listen, when I walk into a business and I say, let's look at the map and let's abstract against the map so we can strategize. And they go, oh, I got a document here, I got a financial statement. I'm like, did the cave people have financial statement? None of that builds structure or process. We have to be able to abstract against something that's visually represented that we can look at and we can. And I've got, I've got multiple pictures of doing this with companies where we roll this map out and people stand there and their mouths are like a get. Wow. Oh, that's how I'm going to. Oh, I understand now that when I do this, it causes this. It's the first time ever they've been able to actually use. Well, for the most part here in the US we hire people from the neck down. We even call them the hands. We say, oh, it's an all hands meeting. It's the most derogatory term I've ever heard. It literally says, I'm the head, you're the hands. Come and listen to me now. I want people working the full. If I'm paying for the whole body, I want that whole thing firing on all cylinders. I want them thinking and processing and abstracting. But we don't get that anymore. And unfortunately, it's a result of our education system. It's the result of, you know, write books that are. That work for 10 or. I love the fact that most of my books are irrelevant within a year because my new ideas replace those old ideas. Everybody's trying to productize things and it's like, no, no, no, let's get new, fresh ideas. Let's analyze how we resolve these problems in our business. Let us poke yoke our business, which in Japanese means idiot proof. And the truth of the matter is, Bill, if you make your business idiot proof, you can do something that is really unheard of and that is you can hire idiots. And idiots are cheap and plentiful. They're all over the place. I mean, listen, look at our political system. You could, you could make your system so good. You could hire senators and congressmen, the bottom of the barrel on the intellectual market. You could hire those freaking morons to work inside your organization. That's how good you can make it. And when you systematize an organization and when you make work easy to do, you automatically give people this bandwidth, this capacity to be able to think outside, inside the box and say, hey, what if we did this? What if we did this? When you're not just shoved with your head down, trying to push paper out through the door, all of a sudden things get really different and you can become an innovator. So there's my three stories combined into one. Bill, you told me to tell stories. I'm going to do it. Don't ever tell a professional storyteller to just tell stories, because that's what I'll do all day.

You know, I think you pointed to something really good in there. There's like, there's design, thoughtful design of a process, and then there's the iteration and documenting existing things. And it feels to me like it's both that you're doing all the time. So you create something, you design it, or it evolves from something and then you design it again and then it evolves a little bit more and then you go back and redesign.

Yes.

And this is like a forever process of iterate, improve, refine, reimagine. Right. And if you don't stop from time to time and reimagine, like I, I came into a business once and they had this elaborate process that had evolved for ticketing and reticketing their products to use in different places. And so I spent some time to understand how all the different parts of the business worked. And I, I looked at this one, I'm like, this just seems bizarre, like, why is this a whole job for someone? This should be once and never again and it shouldn't happen in the United. And so I, I told the person, I'm like, listen, I need your help. We're going to eliminate your job.

Yeah.

And I promise you a job. So you're going to have a new job. I know what it is yet, but it'll be something that really fits you, that you have some say in and that kind of thing. But first, help me get rid of this one. And so we went through and we redesigned the whole thing because it had iterated all around something that at its core shouldn't be. And we got rid of it, and we had to make all kinds of changes all around. But it was dramatic, right? Like, and people like, well, this is why we do it like that. I'm like, yeah, enough. You could push back on that. Like, well, this customer needs it that way. Yeah, I bet they don't. Because I know if they didn't need.

It that way, I mean, asking that question, what if they didn't need it that way? Right. What could we do that would. That would make it better? Well, we could do this. Well, then let's go back to the customer. Do you really need that one? No, we don't. We could, we could reduce the price by 10% if you didn't need it that way.

In our case, we didn't even really renegotiate with this particular customer. I just knew by looking that everybody else didn't play that game with them, even though they asked for it. And so I went to them and I just said, what do you actually need?

Right.

And then they said, because, like, you give us this compliance document, but really, do you really need all that? And they're like, no, we just need these. Like, okay, we'll give you those three things. And we figured out a way to do that that worked for everybody else as well. And now we took everybody and we got one thing, one design, one. And done like, boom. Eliminated a whole bunch of time and energy.

Bill, I think there's, there's a, there's a lack in our society of critical thinking skills. Yeah. There's a lack of new ideas. I think that, you know, we just had a presidential debate. I didn't hear a single new idea. I just heard people yelling at each other and screaming at the sky. Well, there was no idea in there that I can say, oh, that's a great idea. So that should be implemented in our society. And we talk about this a lot in our, in our work. There are four. Four things that will resolve all problems in your organization. Every Problem either needs to be analyzed. It needs to be designed. It needs training or enforcement. And that is a loop. Analyze, design, training, enforce. Analyze, design, training, enforce. Keep going through this cycle. There is an experiment that occurred in the United States in a very short period of time that shows us exactly how to run an incredibly successful organization and scale it to almost infinite potential. And we forget about it because we weren't old enough to remember it. But when the Japanese attacked Pearl harbor in 1941. In 1942, the American War Standards, which were created by W. Edwards Deming, got rolled into place. And from 1942 to 1946, we had a 400% increase in production in this country. And listen to me. It didn't happen through managers because they got all shipped off as captains and sergeants and lieutenants. It didn't happen through skilled frontline workers. They were all shipped off as privates and corporals. Eight million women joined the force. Children, starting at the age of 12, you could drop out of school and go work. And old fat guys. So women, children, and old fat guys produced 400% more than the best skilled managers with PhDs and all the. Why? Because there's a great story about Ford where Ford wanted to send a memo out during this time, and he couldn't find any mental management to go deliver this message to the front line. So Ford had to physically think about how awful this is. He had to remove his ass from his seat and walk downstairs to where people were working. These people don't even know how to play golf, right? I mean, this is, like, really belittling to him to have to walk out there. But he goes out to the front line, and one of the first things he sees is multiple women struggling to move tools and wrenches and tighten things up. And he says, why is that? And one of the women holds up her hand, and he holds up his hand, and he sees that her hands are half the size of his. And he goes back to his engineering department, and he says, we need to make tools that fit in women's hands. So he does that. And as the story goes, and I'm sure I'll exaggerate it a bit, he rolls the card out to the floor, expecting great applause. And these women to all say, oh, Mr. Ford, you're such a. You're so brilliant. They literally took the tools, began working, turned around to him, gave him a list of 10 more things, and they said, go fetch Mr. Ford. Right now we need this. Now we need this. And what Ford found in that four years is what? Most plant managers found that by going to the front line and asking the people about the process that they're in and saying, how would you improve this? All of the sudden they started handing them off lists and notes and saying, what if you did this? What if we did this? What if we did this? Step over here. 400% increase of production without any middle management. And for some reason, When World War II was over, the Japanese copied that model and kicked our ever loving ass in the 80s and 90s. And yet we completely forgot about it as our entire society. It's like we're the authors of the solution and yet we handed it off to the world and said, nah, we prefer bureaucracy. It's like, oh my God, what is wrong with us? So replicating that, finding a way to teach critical thinking to frontline people, ask them for their ideas and suggestions, vet that through a process, analyze those solutions, design better practices, then train them on those better practices, reinforce that training while still asking them to analyze the new solution and find a better one. And let me tell you, it works. People forget that Boeing turned around the C17 project, that Boeing, Boeing had this same problem 30 years ago, exactly the same problem. And you know what they did? They told managers, middle managers, stop. No more communication with middle managers. Only frontline communicate with executive. Middle managers, go play fetch for us. And they solved the problem in like two months. So even Boeing is the case study on how you solve a problem like Boeing. I just don't understand why our short, our short term focus has made us forget the historical lessons that made this country for a period of time, actually pretty freaking great. During that period of time, there was a lot of diversity in the workforce. There was a lot. We forget that we took anybody who could work, worked, and we used those people and we created this incredibly successful society that was so successful when the Japanese surrendered to McCarthy and McCarthy said to them, what do you need? They said, give us Edward Deming. Give us the guy that beat us on the manufacturing floor. We don't care about your weapons. We need to rebuild our country. We need those women, children and old fat guys to come over here and show us how it gets done.

You know, it's fast.

It frustrates me.

We lost that years ago. I remember essentially being taught about Deming by Toyota, right? Like American business, like had to learn about Deming from Toyota and other Japanese companies that worshiped what he had done. And we forget these things again. One of our very favorite business books is the Goal by Ellie Goldratt, who's since passed away. And who taught us about looking for the cause of things and what is the key constraint in your business? It's essential to all of our thinking. Of course, in the case of him, don't smoke cigars is maybe the lesson to learn from him.

Well, I love Goldratt. I think he's probably one of the most brilliant think our time. He was heavily influenced by Deming and really expanded a lot of Deming's philosophy. I love one of the things that Goldrat used to talk about, and this is a piece that I talk with CEOs about that upsets them sometimes. But I He talks about incentives and he says, first tell me how you'll measure me and then I will tell you how I perform. Tell me what the incentive is and then I will tell you what the outcome will be. And there are multiple stories. The story of the British rule of India is a great example. In the early 1900s, the British wanted to get rid of cobras in India. So they created a financial incentive and they told all the locals, go kill cobras, bring them back in, we'll give you cash. So the locals started large scale breeding operations for cobras in their villages to breed thousands of cobras so that they could turn them in and get them, you know, get their, get their, their fee. The British realized this and they eliminated the incentive. And what did the natives do? What did the locals do? They released all their cobras into the wild. And by some accounts there are twice as many cobras in India today than there was before the British started killing them to eliminate cobras in the country. So the incentive was in the wrong place. I can tell you time and time again, I don't know why it is. I just did it yesterday in a workshop where I was with a CEO and I said, show me how you incentivize your salespeople. And he said, I incentivize them off revenue. And then we start talking to all the problems in the company are the pass off between sales and operations because the salespeople have not properly sold the product. They didn't sell the right products. They didn't tell the customer the expectations, they lied about the milestones. And now all of a sudden everything is screwed up. And I said, when? When do they get paid? And he said, when they get the contract signed, they get paid. I'm like, change when they get paid to after the handoff of the operations, give the operations team a checklist. Here's the 10 things you need from sales. Move that informal process And I love talking about the informal to formal and that maturation with organizations, the only way to succeed is to become formal. Change that so that there's a checklist. The operations checks off and then if 80% of the things get checked off, the salesperson gets 80% of their commission. If 10% of the things get checked off, they get 10% of the commission. So. So move the incentive from contract value to customer success and making sure the organization is going to be a success. We have comp. Competition kills businesses, but it's not competition with other businesses. It's competition between managers and departments. We're all supposed to be on the same freaking team and for some reason we compete. And you can resolve this. I mean there's an actual solution and it's something that we go out and teach. And this is this concept that when you're young and you're early in your organization, your pass offs between departments are informal. Right? I got a bunch of leads, I'm sending them your way. Every successful organization I've ever worked with, without exception over about a billion dollars, has a formal handoff process. Meaning there is a contractual relationship between marketing and sales, between sales and operations, between operations and service, or fulfillment and procurement. There are written contracts and they treat each other like customers. They get together once a year, they do discovery. How many leads do you need? At what time do you need those? What are the quality of the leads? They sign a contract and then every month or quarter they sit down, the marketing goes and gives a presentation to sales. Here's what we presented you. Did that provide the outcome you wanted? Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, we're only at 90% and listen. And if those departments can't work together and can't deliver the contractual obligation to each other, you fire the freaking department. You just outsource marketing. You just tell them, look, you're here because you. But treating them like separate entities and separate companies that are working together towards a common goal. Oh my God. You will transform your organization overnight. The problem is to do that the first time those people don't trust each other, they're going to tear each other's face off. So somebody's got to facilitate that dialogue. Sit across the table and say you talk first, then you talk. What are your needs? When do those things need to be? There's got to be a contract negotiator in there, almost a hostage negotiator, let's be honest, that can help facilitate that process. Until you do that, you're limited. You will never hit A billion dollars until you do, till you make that change. I've never seen a company that's ever successfully gotten past the billion dollar mark without formality in process.

You know, a great example of this that we talk about from time to time is higher about how they have thousands of employees, but they have them organized in little business units. And they are essentially doing business with each other as customer, client, vendor, kinds of relationships. And it's a powerful way to do it.

Yeah. My wife worked for an 80,000 employee tech company for about 15 years and they followed the Roman Legion model. 150 is a max. You can't have more than 150 people in an organization. There has to be a. You have to almost look at his division at that point. And they just broke it down to the Roman model. You know, they just were like, look, let's look at the way the Romans did it. They conquered the whole freaking world. Obviously that method worked for communication without. So without. They didn't have slack. Did you know that the Romans didn't have email or slack? And they were still able to communicate all around the world and accomplish all these things and send orders from Rome that would make it there. You know, even the length of their divisions, it's very. When they marched, there's actually a science to how long it would take a horse to ride from the front to the back so that they could make sure they could get instructions through. And they would time that out and then they would reform their divisions based upon how fast they could communicate messages, you know, along these lines. So the message, the lessons are there. We have just forgotten these ideas. It's like they've been buried in an archeological dig. And one day we're going to wake up and somebody's going to go, did you ever hear Edward Deming, Edwards Deming, oh, my God, who is Gold rat? And all of a sudden when we do that, see. Are you familiar with Neri Oxman at all and her work at MIT Media Lab? Probably one of the smartest individuals on the planet. She talks about this concept that science becomes engineering through knowledge, engineering becomes utility. And then design forces it into behavior, behavior forces it into art. And all of these things sort of work together. We have to get beyond the utility of our business and get into the active design of our business. Choreograph the work like it is art. If you've never seen the movie the Founder, that scene in the Founder on the tennis court, Ray Crock, that scene.

And also the one where Ray first sees their early version in the kitchen and realizes they've create a little custom apparatus. And that's brilliant, right?

And listen. Yeah, watch Undercover Boss sometime about every third episode, there is a realization by a CEO that sees a tool being used that says, where did that come from? And somebody goes, oh, Joan's husband manufactures those in his garage and sells them to all the locations all across the world. They're like, that's a brilliant tool. Because no one ever asked Joan, does anybody have an idea? Nobody ever saw Joan's husband and said, oh, wait, you're a mechanical engineer. Do you have a solution for this? We just don't communicate well. All of these freaking communication tools. And the thing that's lacking the most inside our organization is freaking is communication. We're not having good conversation with the frontline troops. You know, you can't be a general and just sit in an office in the Pentagon and manage troops. Eventually you got to get on top of the tank and you got to ride out there. You got to hear from the greatest generals actually led their troops into battle. And we as CEOs need to lead our troops into battle, get battlefield real time intelligence, make battlefield plans so that we can change them on the fly, allow some flexibility to our SOPs and process so that we can make improvement and analyze and design solutions. But unfortunately, I don't know if we can do it. I've been beating my head against the wall for 25 years, and it seems like I've, you know, acquired some disciples, but not enough.

It feels like it goes to this basic premise that people, I think we all want to reach a point where we've moved beyond something, where something is handled and one of our company values is never finished. And I realized, like, I'll be at work on myself and my abilities and my business or whatever I'm working on for the rest of my life until I die, right? So I'm working on and getting better at something, including things that I got good at at one point and then fel practice with or whatever. Like, I was. I was out with a group of CEOs sailing yesterday, and. And I'm like, yeah, I've come out here a thousand times, you know, with different CEOs and family and friends and that kind of thing. And, you know, I'm good at this. And then we were talking about other things, and I'm like, yeah, I could swim three miles. And. And then I thought, well, actually not right now.

You know what? It may challenge you throwing off the boat, right?

I could spend three miles, 10 years ago, maybe eight years ago. I'm not sure how far I'd get right now. Maybe I'd get far hour. If I could strip down and then survive the cold out here, I might get a little while. I might, though, die after a mile.

That's when you get that cramp where you're like, damn it. You know? And then all of a sudden you sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Yeah, yeah, this is really true, this miles. But maybe not. And so, like, at some point you could do something and then. But maybe not now in the same conditions. Like, we saw that in your debate last night. We saw people who could do something once and. And can't do it anymore.

And I have been tempted all morning. My CMOS in the other room going, do not record a video, Derek. Do not do it. But listen, let me tell you that the problem is, and this is really true, and I mentioned this when we were talking earlier before we started recording, we are currently living in the year 2001 and we have 21st or 22nd century technology. There have been no new ideas in almost 20 years. Look, look at Taylor Swift's eras tour. No new music. It stalls. Just remixes. Eminem's new album, you know, the guest rapper is Slim Shady. It's an earlier version of Eminem. Nostalgia has taken over our.

Our world.

We have become nostalgic. Super Marios, Fallout Movie. All of these things are based upon Star Wars. I mean, my God, how many Star wars are there now? Like 640 of them. I don't even follow. You can't follow Marvel. Everything is just trying to remix the old. There's not been a new. Listen, I said this earlier. Like the clothes that you wore to a nightclub in 1987, if you wore those in 1988 or 89, everybody would call you a square and be like, what the hell is this guy from the. What is this a Back to the Future kind of thing? Things changed quickly. I was a musician in 1990, when, you know, we're doing hair band stuff and the next thing you know, Nirvana comes out and we went from selling out clubs to crickets. It'd be one old guy with a beer and no teeth out front. You know, it's like all of this. But see, today we're not experiencing those changes. Think about what has changed in music in the last 20 years. Everything. You could pick up any song and put it any place. So we're lacking new ideas. Last night was a great example. There was no new ideas. I haven't heard a new political idea since Obamacare. Like it or leave it. That was a new political idea. That actually was Mitt Romney's idea from 1996. But I mean, but there's not been new ideas and we need new ideas in management. The ideology that we hold on management right now may have worked 30 years ago, but let me tell you something friends. The world's freaking different than it was 30 years ago. So if we think the same ideology is still works now. No, there's no possible way it could.

We need new ideas. But and somebody who I share the first name with said there's nothing new under the sun. Right. Like everything really is a remix. So. But a thoughtful remix, an update of your process is really, really essential. We should probably call that our big idea for the show and because we're getting long.

We are. Yeah. I've done three hour podcasts so that's the problem with me is I'm good. Right.

You know we've done them up to two hours and but, but we'll lose our audience. The process.com is where to go here and learn more about Derek. There it is on the screen. It'll be in the show notes as well. The process fixer.com not hard to remember. You can finish your workout, finish your car drive and go look up the process fixer.com and you will find Derek. You got to know he is the process fixer. He and his team so so that's the place to go to find us. Scalingcoach.com scalingcoach.com is where our monthly workshops, where our free course is, where our our coaching programs are all that and more and the 550 plus back catalog of these shows on all these topics and they are very very revelant. Go even show number one which is maybe a little cringy for me. Some really great ideas in it about finding your core customer and your brand promises. So all that and more@scalingcoach.com thanks again to the fol storon productions who get our show ready in and out each week and Cameron, Seth, Christelle, Tom and company. Thanks again guys. And then to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish who created the whole scaling up framework that led to all this mess and helps us grow. Help companies scale and grow. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling. 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 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 teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Aligned. 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.