Peter Baumann's team hired consultant Bob London to break an internal deadlock on their strategic narrative. London conducted interviews and developed themes, but the Chief Revenue Officer Dean pushed back that they weren't ambitious enough, forcing another round that landed on something stronger.
What did make you reach out to— doesn't have to be me, but just say we need outside help because like I always think about what doesn't a company have that they need to get something done? What is the outside person going to add that the company can't do itself? Do you have a sense of how you would answer that one?
I've been the guy that's often thrown rocks at, we don't need to bring a third-party expert. Why are we going to waste our money doing that? And then I've been the guy sometimes it's too fast to say, I think we need to get somebody else in. This time it felt pretty natural. I knew it was going to be really hard to get team agreement. And I didn't actually know what the final agreement would look like. I knew I could paint a vision of what the box would look like, but I couldn't write the words in the box. And therefore, I thought this is going to be really tough. And then we got some very strong characters. I wanted everybody on side. The best way to do that sometimes is to bring a third-party expert in. Sometimes you just need that expert expertise. You just need it. And it's because you could be stuck, you could be stuck in a quagmire, you could be frozen, status quo limbo, because so many things are hitting you. You need something to come and break the impasse. And in our case, uh, you know, that was definitely part of it.
I'll chime in with something I heard both right after I was fortunate enough to be selected, and then I heard it during the process of working together, and I heard at the end, which was I said, look, I'm not a yes person. I'm not going to come in and just tell you what you want to hear. There may be some pushback, tension, whatever. And I was told right after the decision was made to hire me that that was important because of the dynamics of the team and because of where the company had been and wanted to go. And then at the end, I picked up some signs throughout the process that I had been hired because I'm not a yes person and the expectation had been set. And therefore that empowered me to do what I do. I wouldn't have done anything differently otherwise, but at least I knew that it wasn't going to be, uh, you know, a minefield right away. And then at the end, I found I got some of the same feedback was that it was, uh, it was helpful to have someone who just wasn't waiting for direction and wasn't waiting to just take orders or, you know, write the report you wanted amongst the many stages we went through. So just for the anyone watching this, You know, there's a process of listening. I talked to each of the team members one-on-one. I think I talked to some other folks one-on-one just to sort of map out what the different perspectives were. I looked at a lot of information that you guys provided. I looked at some independent information to formulate a perspective and to start to understand what is the company better at than anyone else. Even if it's just where we want to be versus where we are today. And it wasn't really about a competitive landscape, which I find is not it's never as important as we worry it's gonna be in these processes. I sort of went into the process of developing some themes. I liken it to playing, plucking strings on a harp. When I come back and this theme sounds like this and looks like this, this one looks like this. And you sort of looking for, you know, reactions, engaging reactions. And what happened at one of those theme meetings was that there was definitely some positive reaction But at some point, your Chief Revenue Officer, Dean, said, "You know, I like it. I sense that people like it. Bob, is it big enough?" And I will tell you, I don't think it was. And I think he made it better and whoever else agreed with him. So I think that speaks to the comfort and collaboration or the safety of being able to have that conversation. I am so happy that he said that. I'm not sure he had to, but he did. And he caused another round of activity that then got us where it seems like into this good place.
100%. And I remember when we were interviewing you, if you like, Bob, it was one of the requirements. I didn't want someone— I needed something more than someone just coming in and kind of whiteboarding strategy on how we get there. We actually need somebody to pick up the pen. And write stuff down. This was a strategic requirement that we couldn't fail on. And Bob, that's where that was fantastic with you. You were literally presenting stuff back to us before the meeting and then in the meeting. And as you say, there was a moment when we thought we were nearly there. It wasn't quite exciting big enough. And Dean felt comfortable saying it to you, and you felt comfortable him saying it to you. We've got to go another round. We would have ended. We would have said, 'Oh, that's good,' but we wouldn't have been quite excited enough.
