The Structure of Success — Patrick Esposito

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 doxatalent.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. What does it take to be successful? What is the underlying structure for your success? Is a little bit the topic. Talk with an entrepreneur, attorney, entrepreneur advisor. That's our conversation today, everybody. I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of the Scaling up podcast. Our show comes to you every week with usually two shows a week, but something to do with growing, scaling your business. And we bring thought leaders, authors, entrepreneurs like all that to come and talk to you about it. We try to share the lessons from that. Been doing it for about 500 shows now, which I'm super excited about. And right now we've just launched a new coaching program making our Scaling up coaching more affordable, more accessible than ever before. It's good for pretty much anyone in North America. ScalingCoach.com is our website and we'll put a link there for information about the new program. It's called Growth Navigator and it's Scaling up coaching for just 1500 bucks a month, but with weekly touches, quarterly planning, annual strategy, guest speakers, learning, accountability, coaching like everything for you and your leadership team. All right, all right. I'm joined now by Patrick Esposito. Patrick is an accomplished entrepreneur, started out as a attorney, but don't hold that against him and transition that he's going to tell us some stories about the companies he's grown and run and some of those that he's advised. And so we're just going to get into that, distilling out his thoughts and what kind of all adds up to success. Patrick, welcome to the show.

Bill, thanks for having me. Again applaud you for everything you're doing. Scaling is one of those things that I'm passionate about and frankly that I think what you're doing to help others is much needed.

So thanks so much. Well, we're glad to have you on the show and appreciate you telling your story a little bit. Why don't you talk a little bit about what in God's name possessed you to become an attorney? No, I'm joking. I have just an enormous number of attorneys on all sides of my family, so I have a deep respect for attorneys. But it's always good for jokes.

No, no, it is. And you know, honestly, one of the reasons I became an attorney was because I wasn't quite sure where life would take and thought it was a good general degree while I, you know, tried to figure it out and to your point, had the opportunity during law school to explore a variety of business ventures and learn more about probably who I was, which quickly led me to believe that I was probably more entrepreneurial than, you know, solely being a legal counsel.

Yeah, it's, it's funny how, I mean, there's a lot of entrepreneurs who got their start as attorneys and they began to see how parties interact, how deals get done, how to structure things, employment agreements, intellectual property. Like there's a world of things to think about.

Exactly. You know, it's actually funny you say that. I was talking to Bo Burlingham who used to be the editor of Inc. Magazine, and you know, at one point we were at a conference and he said, you know, I'm going to ask you this question. I ask a lot of people this question. But just like you said, you know, he sort of similarly, why, why in God's name did you become a lawyer? But you know, literally, why did you decide to leave the practice of law as your primary focus when you spend all this time trying to become a lawyer? Right. And so he said he asked a lot of lawyers that, because he does see a lot of lawyers who, you know, make that change, make that decision to be more engaged in the hands on operation. Right. So yeah, it. There are many of us out there.

Right, so, so we talked about a bunch of different companies and examples. Maybe the place to start is the business that started as one thing and then ended up as Augusta Systems and talk about that journey. There's pivots, there's all kinds of issues in growing that business. So first of all, what is Augusta Systems today?

Right, so Augusta Systems. Well, and to your point, so Augusta Systems, the technology it built, and a good portion of the team are with Hexagon ab, which is publicly traded, based in Sweden, organization that focuses a lot on real time data management and automation applications. It was quite the circuitous route from when we started Augusta Systems to ending up there. Some very Valuable early startup lessons. Also some, I think pretty valuable adjustment, pivot and scale up lessons. Right. And so when we started the company, it was when I was making the transition from the full time practice of law to the entrepreneurial world. Worked briefly at a firm, worked for a state governor who had brought me in to help with kind of some entrepreneurial activities that he was looking to kick off in the state. I quickly realized that I may have lacked the temperament for public service and that the entrepreneurial world was, was, was a better place for me. So without a lot of proper training and probably just enough foolishness to dive in without thinking about it too much, you know, started with a team, Augusta Systems. We initially were doing consulting work for the U.S. department of Energy and some other, you know, some other Fortune 1000 companies in that space. Thought what we had was a very interesting opportunity to take some of the management consulting work we were doing and software fight. And we had this great idea for helping companies to manage their environmental risk and their environmental commodities, which back in 2001, 2002, there was the debate over will the US enter the Kyoto Protocol, will they not? Ultimately they didn't. And that market opportunity really pretty much looked like it was going to not be one that was ever going to develop. So you've kind of got this consulting business that continued to do some work for DOE and for a variety of energy companies. What we did was at the time did what any folks with a startup at that point should do and say, well, what we're doing is not working. How do we adjust that? So we decided to do some more consulting work. So we started doing some national security consulting work and realized that some of what we had built in our initial software platform around integrating and IP ifying non IP sensors and actuators had a real value, right. To customers in the national security space and in the energy space. So we sort of took a step back from this very.

So hang, pause for one second there. What you're talking about there to translate the tech for folks, right, is you're talking about taking sensor data and then making it available on an Internet protocol type network, right? So sending analog or digital but not networked sensor data out to.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's exactly right. And Bill, thanks for translating. Sometimes I get a little overly technical, so feel free to, to make those, make those adjustments and color commentary notes.

You know, I always hear it and then. But I'm sensitive too, that there's people in my world who are like, what are you even talking about? There.

Yeah, yeah, well, and to your point, so, you know, that was something that we found where we initially started building tools for software developers. And we thought, you know, there's going to be all these applications that involve sensor data. Let's give software developers tools to build them. And what we found from exploring the market was that was not the right decision. But instead of a full pivot, a minor adjustment, what we had been asked to do was basically take what we had built and pivot, basically put a front end on the tools that looked like router software. And so what we started doing was basically creating very early Internet of things middleware applications. To your point around, you know, when I'm talking about IP ifying sensor data, what are we really doing? We're really creating really early Internet things applications now. Hindsight 2020 was not smart enough from a marketing standpoint or a sales standpoint to understand to call it an Internet of things application until that market had already taken off. Had we been more clever about it and seeing what we were actually building, we thought we were building intelligent sensor management applications. Turns out we were building Internet of things applications. But it was a great journey. We developed a lot of great partnerships with companies like Cisco and Microsoft and at that point Intergraph Corporation, which became part of Hexagon and ultimately became the company that was a home for our, our technologies and our team. You know, it's given an opportunity for, you know, the folks who, who started with us and who joined us along the way to, you know, see their technologies deployed globally and in a lot of really interesting settings. So, you know, it was a great outcome. We learned a lot, right? We, we did, you know, an angel round, we did a seed round, we did a proper series a venture round. We built a board of, you know, where it was previously just the founders. We built a board that had, you know, founder, managers, investors and an independent. And frankly, when it came to scaling up, right, getting the wisdom of an independent who knew how to scale a software company because we'd never done that before, was really one of the most beneficial aspects of, you know, our journey, right. And I think, you know, folks say, do you want smart venture money? Do you want just whoever's money? The reality was we took, we had great venture backers who knew what we didn't know, right, As a management team and knew how to supply us with some of that wisdom. But also bringing in a dependent who really could help us in a very hands on way.

Yeah, let me underscore something you said there for listeners, viewers you bring in dumb money, right? Oh, I don't care. I just want the money. I know what to do. But, but they won't let you do what you do. You bring in dumb money and you're going to chase down dumb ideas on a regular basis for people don't have any idea what they're talking about. It is possible to raise money for affinity things, ego things. It's possible to raise money from all kinds of people about stuff. But imagine if you had celebrities with no background in food investing in your restaurant, but wanting to bring each of their own personal recipes to your concept restaurant. Pretty soon you'd have this wackadoo menu that's all over the place, none of which you necessarily make well, and the same thing's true with a tech company or any other business you get a bunch of money in who doesn't understand the world you're in and the path that you're on. Now you've got to, you've got to entertain their ideas because they own you or some portion of you.

That's right. That's. That's exactly right. That's exactly well. And to your point, right, when you're looking at scaling up, the folks I've seen who've ended up in the most trouble have been the ones who took money that did not bring wisdom or connectivity with it. Yeah, right.

Then the other thing I think that you said there, that's worth underscoring is there's, I think there's at least two big categories of wisdom. One of them is like general business wisdom to do with growing a company. Right. And that's the kind of work that we do is scaling up. In scaling up, coaching is we're helping you to navigate general business growth. But I'm not coming in as an expert in real estate development, construction technology, health services, bio, like any of it, I'm bringing actually outside perspective about business growth. But you also need that other piece, the how do we get things done within our industry kind of thing. Right. You need, you need both parts of that.

That's exactly right. And, and you know, look, one of the things that, you know, I've started doing lately with small and medium sized businesses is supporting some of their scale up through to your point. The fact that it's not just about money and it's not just about execution. Right. That ecosystem that you need to have. It took us a long time with the Augusta Systems journey or with some of the other startups I've led, like Resilient Technologies, which was a Non pneumatic or airless tire manufacturing company, you know, finding those channel partners to go to market. If we had found them earlier or had the connectivity sooner, we probably could have generated much more growth earlier as opposed to feeling like we were really fighting through markets that were developing as we tried to develop them. Right.

So non pneumatic tires are interesting one. Let's just understand that product category and what happened there a little bit. Right. So a non pneumatic tire is like, like on a kid's bike that is a solid rubber tire. Or they're actually starting to bring them other bikes now that have like a spring or some other thing in them, but it's not air filled in the same way. And every now and then we see a report about a possible automotive one that there really isn't commercially right now. But, but so what are the applications for this? Where, where do these things go?

Yeah, so, so with that venture, and again, it was a little different in the Augusta Systems journey. Right. Augusta Systems was, you know, involved, you know, a serious pivot, you know, a couple of adjustments, venture money and a formal board. Resilient Technologies was one that we actually got brought into initially because of the Augusta Systems technology. And ultimately we had to spin off the Augusta Systems holding when we, when it came time to look at the right acquisition trajectory for Augusta Systems, the, the investors we had in Augusta asked the management team to take Resilient out of Augusta to clean up to your point, from a scaling perspective, the Augusta, you know, business model. So we were initially focused on the production line. Right. And instrumenting the production line in a way that could, you know, better assess the manufacturing defects and manufacturing accuracy in these early non pneumatic or airless tires that were ultimately initially focused on all terrain vehicles. Right. You know, as the business grew and developed, you know, I started assisting more with sort of general management and operational advice, but as a board member and a consultant rather than, you know, a full time management team member. You know, after the initial launch to, to your point, when that technology started to look viable. Right. We had relationships with tire companies, we had relationships with vehicle manufacturers. And you know, what we found is that while we would love to have seen them on larger vehicles, right. And ultimately we were looking at larger industrial scale vehicles. The best use at that point with the technology we had was to put them on these all terrain vehicles. And so Polaris actually became the acquirer so that they could own that intellectual property and differentiate their all terrain vehicle products for, you know, certain ultra rugged environments.

Yeah, you can Think about the value in something like that. I'm in a super rugged environment and I get a puncture. I can't just get to a shop. I've got to get back to base camp or whatever it is. Back to the ranch. Yeah. I don't know, like I can't repair out there.

Right, that's right. That's right. And so to your point, in, you know, in a lot of environments that could be the difference. Right. Between someone being able to get out or needing to be rescued. Right. And so, you know, that was something where we, you know, took pride both in sort of the, you know, I guess rugged sporting nature. Right. Of the product. But also there is, you know, this protecting human life aspect that, that, you know, I think does have some real value.

It's funny, the ultimate, perhaps remote destination. The first airless tire I can remember was on the moon buggy. Right. That was big spring wheels.

Indeed.

On the vehicle we sent to the moon.

Yeah, indeed, indeed. And to your point, it's something where, you know, I, I was driving my, well, my, my oldest child has now started to drive to school and the other day I, I saw a bubble on her tire that had occurred and thought, oh, you know, obviously need to go get new tires. To your point, you know, if it was a non pneumatic or airless tire on the passenger vehicle, I'm not sure that we would have ended up there.

Right.

It would have just been a little, little notch on the side and certainly would not have been something you needed to replace. So eventually there'll be a day, I think, when, when those are probably appropriate for, for full scale passenger vehicles.

But yeah, we're seeing them more and more and some other mountain bikes are seeing them more often and, and yeah, it's an interesting, it's an interesting realm. So let's talk about how did things go there? What did you do? What did you learn at Resilient?

So I think one of the things that is incredibly valuable about assisting multiple companies with scaling, in this case, both Augusta Systems and resilient were zero to, you know, 25 plus employees. And so, you know, there's obviously a lot of growing pains. You know, when you're, when you're 0 to 10, a lot of things are verbal. Right. Not as many things are written down.

And so, you know, even that gets you in trouble. Right. I know many companies like, well, we have this agreement. Yeah, show me the agreement. It's not written anywhere.

Exactly, that's exactly right. And to your point, when you have new team Members join, even if they're employee number five. Right. Or employee number 10. There are many things that if they are not written down, you're going to take far more time explaining them. And in some instances, you will see folks trying to reinvent the wheel of something that you know, you already have done. And to your point, whether it's not written down or you have really, you know, not great systems for managing knowledge, so it can't be found. Yeah, right. You're going to end up wasting a lot of time and resources. And so, you know, with Resilient, one of the great parts of that journey was understanding how when you are doing a lot of trial and error right, on a product, how to make sure that you are adequately updating your overall roadmap so that the various pieces of the R and D process can align to each other. And as changes get made somewhere, other changes may need to be made. And how do you create those reactions? The other thing that was really interesting from a scaling perspective was customer feedback. When you're small, you can get customer feedback, soak in that data through a phone call, zoom through hot jar on a website when you start to scale and you have multiple sub teams within a product team, getting the accurate data captured through good feedback and evaluation and input systems is really critical. And so Resilient was a lot of fun from the perspective of really understanding how do you scale an R and D organization at the same time that has multiple types of product teams? Because we had a, you know, a polymers team, we had an engineering team, we had a production team and you know, one thing changes in the polymer and all of a sudden things need to change in engineering and they need to change in production. Whereas, you know, with Augusta Systems, which was software, it was sort of one software team creating tools and another team supporting the use of those tools. So it was much easier to keep that in sync.

Simpler.

Yeah, that was a great, great learning experience. Right. In terms of scaling and how you create those communications capabilities between the various.

Parts of your organization, that's a really useful leadership lesson. Because if you think about it like anything really significant, you're not going to do on your own. Right. We're building this new coaching program to dramatically scale our coaching impact. And it's really great. But one of the things I realized is I just can't coach one company one on one all the time. I need associate coaches, I need specialists, I need to organize us in a way that we can deliver consistent value to people. And I have something to provide. But there's coordination to do there. And you think about like I think about one of my earliest career moves running a new group within the Sprint organization. And I like had to coordinate and engage thousands of people in different parts of the organization. Right. Getting them not to do things that fought against each other. Right. Keep them pulling in the same direction. Very challenging kind of a thing to do, like.

Indeed, indeed. Well, and to your point, look, you know, when, when you were working in Sprint or I was working at Gusta Systems and resilient, you know, normally it was at least, at least my experience, right. It was, it was email, it was shared drives and it was, you know, verbal communication. You know. Now what I find is you have so many systems in a lot of organizations, right. You have, you know, you have slack, you have email, you have conflic, you have, you have tools, right.

You have all these tools and they're all cloud based and even access to them and, and, and connecting them is a challenge in itself.

Right, exactly. And, and so, you know, one of the, you know, sort of pieces of advice that I tend to give folks is communications is incredibly important, but make sure that you have a way that folks know where that communication should be taking place related to what the conversation is about. Right. So you know, the number of times where I've seen, you know, in a JIRA platform, right. Communications about customer feedback that is coming from test and evaluation of an, of a software product that is like, you know, fourth generation, but guess who's not there. Sales.

Yeah, service.

So those folks aren't either providing the inputs or seeing that data that's coming from the test side. And, and really when you've got these sort of three parts of the organization, right. And a software company, development, delivery and sales, they need to be communicating effectively and need to be sharing data or else you're probably going to end up with products that don't deliver the full prompts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we talked about some other companies as well and we've been talking about sort of tech related, of one kind of high and sort of tire tech. What about financial services? You did some work there with a company, you don't have to name it, but talk about sometimes not naming these companies is helpful to let you share. But talk a little bit about the experience there.

Yeah. And this one it's easy to name because I'm on all kinds of SEC filings so I have a great opportunity to come in with.

Just be careful what you say then.

Exactly, exactly. So Larry Maza and Don Robinson were leading and still leading MVB Financial Corp. Through a lot of growth. And one of the great opportunities from a scaling perspective that I had was to come in and use my jack of all trades, master of none capabilities to support a lot of the scaling they were looking to do. So at that stage they were a regional bank that was aspiring to be more than a regional bank. So they acquired a mortgage company, launched and built up an insurance capability, later started getting into more investment activities in the fintech space. And so it was really fascinating to help support the MVV financial diversification and growth and look at the infrastructure. Right. And in that particular market. Right. The financial services sector is obviously very heavily regulated. So as much as you want to make operational improvements, you have to make operational improvements in a way that is both compliant with laws and regulations, but also where you're communicating a lot with the regulatory folks to make sure that they, that they're comfortable with everything you're doing right. On a growth plan and also to support that you've built the right infrastructure and to support scaling. And so one of the great things about that experience was heavily regulated business with high growth aspirations and a lot of scaling. What was really a great learning experience that I had firsthand was recognizing the growth activities and the requirements and compliance regulations for building the infrastructure. So whether it's managing third party risk, you're looking at bringing in a software vendor, what type of data is on there, what can be exposed and in this case, what do you need to do to protect customers and broadly the financial system from having problems with those third party vendors. And a lot of those things that at the time were a lot of sort of like overhead on execution. Those are actually really good principles even for companies that aren't heavily regulated to think about.

Yeah, I totally get that. How has that evolved today? And do you have any like, like, oh, I wish we could do that differently.

I think, you know, there's obviously so many things right. In every venture that I wish I had done slightly differently. I think when it comes to scaling. Right. The one thing that I've definitely seen, you know, as a continual stumble over time is a lot of folks like me tend to be focused on revenue growth and profitability. Right. If we can sustain profitability, we while we grow revenue, that's the best outcome. You know, I always hate to see it, see anything dipping into the red. You know, there's a lot of folks who do have very, you know, fast moving models where things dip into the red and that works. You know, I have tended to you know, sort of prefer steady growth, right. That is profitable along the way. But what I have seen is my own tendency to not want to make the investments in infrastructure. And this is something that I have to train myself all the time, right? How do you make the right scaling investments to benefit the growth and not undermine the profitability? And you know, one of the things that I tend to look at is the management team, right? If there are folks on the management team who feel like they are working harder than they ought to work if they had a modest investment that could be made to support doing their job better, that to me is the type of input that I think always look at that you need to, you know, sort of make those investments, right? So, you know, obviously very early on it's, you know, you need to roll out a CRM in all likelihood may not need to be super sophisticated, but it needs to allow your folks who are doing sales and support work to communicate effectively. You know, when I, you know, talk to folks who are in the HR world, there's obviously no shortage of HR platforms, there's no shortage of benefit programs. Finding the right model to help with a company at the scale that it is and where it wants to be in a year or two, you know, making those investments around, whether it's software, whether it's third party platforms to help you organize the benefits packages and even save a little money, you know, those are the types of investments I think that go a long way. So, you know, I think there's, you know, no shortage of things I would want to do differently. Right. But what I've found is the great most valuable lesson from a scaling perspective is to make investments right, to support the growth, both revenue and profit. But make sure that it's investments that make sense and that you're not over investing for a tomorrow that may never come. Right? So do it in a reasonable way, but do it at sort of the request of your team to help them do better for you in the organization.

Yeah, it's really valuable. We're going to talk about an environmental services company in just a moment. Before we do that, I just want to remind our listeners, viewers that we just launched recently just the highest value coaching program and scaling up that we've ever done. And we have a cohort filling right now. If you want to be a part of that, if you know a company that should be a part of that info. ScalingCoach.com is a good email for us. Or you can go to the website and just email us from there and say Hey, I want to recommend my friend Judy, and she's got this or that or my buddy John or I think this might be a thing for us. You should talk to us about it and see if it's a fit for you. Weekly touches, quarterly planning, annual strategy, work in person, off site, like virtual online. You, your leadership team, accountability, coaching, learning, guest speakers. Like, it's a tools and templates, software. There's a whole bunch of stuff in there. It's 1500amonth now. It's not for everyone. That's not our most elite coaching, that kind of thing. This is the program for, like, really getting started. So if you got a business that's now ready to scale, you should check us out. Scalingcoach.com info@scaling coach. Now, the cohorts are forming like as this is being released this week, video in audio. It's going out so enough to say about that, but let's talk about the environmental services company and then. And then we want to talk about your book and like that.

Yeah, no, that's. That's great. So, you know, Bill, as you and I were talking a little bit before, before the podcast kicked off, you know, one of the other valuable scaling lessons, right. That exists is if it's you and a partner.

Yeah.

You often need somebody to help you and your partner occasionally make decisions about what are the right investments, what are the right strategies if you're not always seeing eye to eye. And I had a really great opportunity, you know, one friend and another person who became a friend. Right. They had started an environmental services company. They were occasionally not in full agreement around the investments they ought to make, or so.

So common in every industry. And so many companies, partners, or maybe not even partners, but. But key people who don't see eye to eye on things, right?

Yeah, exactly. And to your point, what. You know, there's a couple ways they could have gone, right? They could have said, let's get a board of directors in place. Let's add some people who really understand the industry, and, you know, let's have them help us make decisions. Yeah, they took a slightly different approach, which I thought was actually a really great approach for. For them. And. And really it's a great approach for a lot of others, too. They didn't want to have anybody else making the decision. What they wanted was somebody who would agree to provide, you know, sort of a reflective conversation to try to draw out, you know, considerations that they ought to look at. And essentially not really arbitrator, mediate, but just literally be another voice in the.

Room to attempt to help expand thinking.

Sometimes are, you know, the bring their minds closer together or bring up topics that they hadn't considered, right? And so, you know, that was a really great journey. They, you know, as two founders, did not lose any control by having someone else in the room. What they did was they brought on a sounding board and you know, some advice which I think, you know, in an ideal world, right. I think that's what a lot of folks who are, you know, occasionally disagreeing with their partner or partners would do. Bring in, you know, one, maybe two other people. No power, no authority other than, you know, physical presence and a desire to help facilitate good conversations and outcomes.

I love this so much. This is a great story to share in here because I can think of many, many examples. One immediately comes to mind. But what I hear in here is let's not bring a board that we're going to lobby in politics to try to win over our way or their way or like that kind of thing. Let's not bring in an arbitrator, mediator because that's still fundamentally conflict oriented, right? Trying to, to win. But let's instead bring an additional perspective, an advisor, somebody to help expand our perspective so we could start to see that. I am reminded I worked with a company some years ago for a little while, that food, specialty foods company, right. And we had an owner who controlled most of the company. And then we had a minority owner, a majority owner who hadn't run the company. We had a minority owner who really had done most of the growth and running things, right? And it's a great kind of situation, except they totally didn't see eye to eye on the growth and the pathways for growth for the future. And the key challenge for us was like, how do we get them to see, like to come together and to integrate their points of view, not have one win out over the other. And really like, I wish they did more of this in the Middle east and in other like intractable world problems, we had to look way out to the future and say, what's the future that we both imagine and where do we find the commonality there? So when we figured out a place in the future that they could agree, right, and then we could peel back to the present and get aligned on things. And so the concerns of each person, right, get expressed out in the future and they're somewhat past based. But ultimately in this case, this company, really the person who'd been running things just wanted to make sure that the leadership team and the employees Participated in the success that they made some money off the win, not just the majority owner, right?

Yep, yep. Exactly. Exactly. And to your point, there's a lot of great lessons, right, that can be learned where you don't have to give up control and you can end up with a better team environment just by having, you know, to what you do. Having a coach in the room. Right.

Somebody to expand the, the particular perspectives. Now I have a, I have definitely a bias to growth.

Right, Right. As almost all of us do, my.

Name there, scaling coach. Right. I'm, I'm focused on the growth of the business and, and it, and it's not necessarily like you could run a, just a beautiful little business in a small town for the rest of your life and be a craftsperson person, be a passionate small business person. But if you want to grow, that's the game that we play. Right. And that you do too. Let's talk about the book for a minute before we run out of time here. It's the structure for success and you can hear about the parts like the structure of the business, the partners, boards, things like that. Why did you write this book? And, and you know, where were you going with this?

Yeah. So, you know, look, I've been sort of looking at these topics right around. How do you look at creating, you know, basically the outcomes that I would deem to be success? Right. To your point, growth, right. Is generally one of those things. Successful exits, maybe generational succession, whatever it is that you view success to be, how do you get there? Right. And so I had spent a couple of decades now working in and around the space, leading companies, advising others. Had a hunch of sort of what I thought the core principles were that allowed success to be created and ultimately did not create failures. Right. And so decided to spend some time talking to. Basically picked a group of 100 business leaders who, you know, by peers had been deemed to have to be experts, right. In their, in their fields and successful in business surveyed them to find out what was it that they thought created success for them, what caused failure for them. Right. And some of these folks had run a number of businesses over decades. Others were, you know, five to 10 years of experience. And so were relatively new. The eight structures that, you know, sort of I suspected might be the ones that they would point to that ultimately determine success or failure. You know, governance team, management team. And for both of those, right, composition operations and those types of things, and especially with management team, you know, diversification of views, you know, those were two of the big pieces Right. At the end of the day, a lot of things come down to team. Two of the other core pillars were, you know, how you make adjustments and pivots and how you monitor on when you need to make them. And having been through, you know, business that made a whole bunch of them. Right. Right out of the gate, I felt like that was one of the things that if we'd stayed the course of the Gusta systems, it would never have done. Right, exactly. And then, you know, the fourth piece that kind of accompanies that is the infrastructure for growth. Right. If you're set on growth, you got to lay the infrastructure or else you're not going to create the outcomes. You're going to wear your team out, you're going to wear yourself out, and ultimately you're not going to have a success. You know, then the relationship dynamics. Right. Those are another big piece. And when I say relationship dynamics, some of that is between the partners. Right. So what are the governing documents that we're going to agree to? You know, LLC operating agreements, corporate bylaws and shareholder agreements, partnership agreements, those types of things. What does that tell us about how we're going to both engage in conversations, especially when we disagree? And if we need to break up, how are we going to break up without breaking up the business? Right. And then, you know, how you look at your relationship as a business with the rest of the world. Right. So M and A opportunities, you know, channel partnership opportunities. And how do you have the structures to examine those opportunities either as they present themselves or as you need to create them? And then. And the other two categories are the things that no one likes to talk about. Right. It's disaster preparedness and secession planning. Right. Those are things that, as entrepreneurs, nobody likes to think disasters are going to happen, and nobody likes to think about getting hit by a bus.

I almost think almost everybody is more willing to talk about other disasters than succession planning. And like, oh, I just heard one just the other day. Look, I'm 45. I don't want to think about that yet. I'm too young to think about, why are you going to wait to think about this when you're 60 and then it's too late and you haven't planned for it, you haven't developed it. I was working with another guy about a month ago and that I've done a little bit of work with, and he's like, he's very proud of his company. He doesn't want to sell it to private equity. But I'm like, we've got to develop your leadership and you've got to begin to like if you want to do that, we've got to start to create that, that handoff or you're going to get too old and, and you're going to leave it to a spouse or a kid to manage and they're not going to do it the way that you would do it. Right. So we got to think about that succession and we got to think about the exit whether yet whether it's it's forced or whatever at some point like makes a massive difference. The book Structures for Success. You want to show it, you have it.

There's sure actually I can do just that. You spotted it well on the shelf. So structure of success October 3, 2023 is when it launched. So you know, definitely love you to pick one up.

So get out now. Patrick, thanks so much for coming on the show and talking with us today. Patrick's address will be in the show notes and it's right there on the screen. Patrick Esposito.com and you'll find about Patrick work and his help advising companies himself and the book and I'm sure you put everything right there on your thanks so much, Bill. Thanks for coming on. Let me give a big shout out to my friend and mentor, Verne Harnish, who I'll be with all next week leading one of our CEO boot camps. We got CEOs and CEOs, typically about 18 total, somewhere 12 to 18 that we have. We'll be meeting up at Lake Tahoe. We do that twice a year and take people through all the basics of scaling up in an intimate resort setting. It's fantastic experience to dive deep, not just with us but with other entrepreneurs going through the same kind of thing. Really smart people. And then to our show producer, Wanda Mitchell, who gets our show ready. Our guests, our things all prepped every week. It's definitely a challenging part of her job. And then the folks at Poply Productions who edit and put us out and all that. So thanks again everyone for watching. Watching for listening until we talk to you again next time. 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 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.