How Great COOs Lead Change and Develop High-Impact Teams | Tony Skowron (Podcast 468)

Do you have Attention deficit disorder?

I'm. I never officially tested, but I.

Do you. Do you think your. Your CEO is more ADD than you.

Are, or do you think you're on my. My CEO is 100% more ad than. And she knows that. She's. She. She anchors the extreme of that and it's. It's part of what makes her a genius.

Do you know where you are on.

The spectrum for add?

I don't. I've never done testing on that.

You are, then.

I. I don't know.

Okay. I mean, when you know, you know.

It's like.

In this episode, we have a conversation with a COO who brings a truly unique perspective to the world of luxury hospitality. Tony Scowron is the Chief Operating Officer at the Beyond Collection, a marketplace connecting independent luxury hotels with elite event planners, all while breaking the mold with a commission free model. Tony's journey to the COO role is anything but traditional. From navigating a challenging early life and entering the workforce at a young age to honing his unique leadership skills through diverse experiences and a deep commitment to development, Tony's story is one of resilience and continuous growth. Join us as we explore the innovative business model of the Beyond Collection and how they foster relationships over transactions. Tony's unconventional path into luxury hospitality and the valuable lessons learned along the way. His powerful insights into leadership at different organizational levels and. And the art of asking the right questions. The critical role of a COO in partnering with a visionary CEO and driving operational excellence and a look at the Beyond Collections exciting initiative to bring leadership training to the independent hotel sector. So without further ado, let's dive into my conversation with Tony.

So, Tony, welcome to the Second in Command podcast. Thank you.

Glad to be here, man.

Looking forward to it. I just realized that we are sitting together about two hours before our in Person CEO Alliance Connect event happens in Vancouver. We're filming another episode in person, which is kind of cool. And you are also a CEO alliance member. So I'm going to get to talk to you a little bit about why you joined the CEO alliance, what you loved about the CEO Alliance. But I really want to make this about your experience as a COO and building out your company called the Beyond Collection. So why don't we start with that. Tell us what the Beyond Collection is and kind of how you got there.

Oh, that's a great question.

So Beyond Collection, we are essentially a marketplace. We connect independent luxury hotels that are.

Specifically independent so they think of not like your Ritz Carlton St. Regis is Those large branded brands but those independent.

Super luxury awesome properties, resorts, hotels, both.

In city and really around the entire world. We connect them with event planners but.

Really the event planners that are not your average event planner because they're probably not booking places that charge $800 1200 a night for.

So it's some of your higher end corporations events.

And so we connect them. What makes us unique is we're commission free. So we're not unique in this space of connecting them.

But most companies that do that actually just charge a commission on the business that gets booked to the hotel. We don't do that. So we have a little bit a different way of doing it. We pride ourselves on connection and relationship over just a transaction.

What's your financial model? How do you make fun of financial.

Model is essentially charging the hotels different layers of access to detailed information that.

Gives them access to the best planners.

So the. Wow. Yeah.

So you're not actually charging a percentage of revenue at all. It's more of a subscription kind of model. Because those hotels want that recurring revenue and they want your database of planners.

Correct.

How do you continue to have that relationship with the planners when the hotels now know them and now they have that relationship with those planners? Why do they continue on with a subscription for you?

It's a great question.

So planners by their very nature are kind of almost immune to being spoiled.

They're immune to luxury. A better way of saying it is they're very spoiled and treated in a way that is just from everyone in the industry that is going after their business and rightfully so.

They've got great business.

They're responsible for a lot of really great programs.

And so we try to connect that and really foster that relationship. So technically, yes, a hotel can actually.

You know, maintain a relationship with a planner. But doing that through our community and continuing a planner may not go back to the same property.

Okay.

Right. They're going to bounce around a little bit or come back. Yeah.

They're not going to get enough business, one planner to make it a while. So they need the relationship with you guys. That's. Yep. And. And where do you find the. Is the harder part of your model finding the planners or is the harder find of your model finding because you're like a two sided marketplace.

That's right.

Or is the. Or is it finding the actual hotel properties?

It's a great question we have. It's probably. It's probably 50, 50. So there's quite a few properties that absolutely want business but they want an roi. So Rather a commission is easy. You sign up low cost to entry and you can immediately just whatever business.

Books you have to pay a commission on that. But if a lot of business books, you pay a lot of commission. So the non commission model is actually very attractive for properties that do a lot of group production business.

Yeah. And so finding the planners, making sure that we have the right planners, we're.

Very picky, we want them qualified. Just because you say you're a planner, you might not book business within our collection. Your budget might be a little bit different. So we are very picky about ensuring that the quality of our planners is above anything else.

Interesting. All right, so I want you to connect with me after we finish filming. Years ago, I used to coach a company called MCI Global. And MCI is based out of Geneva, Switzerland. They're the largest meeting and planning company I think of now in the world or maybe in the top two or three. Do you know mci? Do you heard of them? I've heard of them. So Sebastian Tonder is their CEO and I did their strategic planning meetings five years in a row. I led the strategic planning. They operated in like 25 countries. About a $900 million company in system wide sales. So I'll introduce you to them. They only do these high end events and they love your kind of properties. So that, that logically makes sense to me. All right. How did you get involved in the industry? Because I know you have an interesting path. So how do you get involved in the industry?

So I didn't start in luxury, which is in hospitality. Specifically luxury hospitality, which is unique. Most people, once they kind of get a taste of this business, they grow up in the business.

And it's not uncommon to have like I've met people who have been in the business 40, 50 years.

And so I started in a completely different business, kind of cut my teeth in leadership. Learned a lot of things the wrong way. School of hard knocks and grew up, was a VP and then a COO of a very large growing organization. Ended up exiting that business through a.

Variety of different reasons. It was the right time to kind of move in a different direction.

Did consulting for a while, which was really rewarding. But there I had gotten kind of a hook where there was an itch that I had attended the leadership, Leadership Academy that Ritz Carlton puts on. Carlton Leadership Academy, which is quite, really solid teaching. It's not that expensive, shameless plug for it.

Did you go outsider or was that from the inside the industry? You went as an outsider. You just signed up to go?

No, I went as part of the. My previous organization I was with and.

We actually ended up having them come to us and do in person training. And it was pretty deep.

Through that process, I became close with a lot of multiple people that were.

In the Ritz Carlton Leadership Academy. So when I exited, I actually wanted to get into that because I had a passion for leadership training. I had a passion for principles tied to white glove service, ladies and gentlemen. Serving ladies and gentlemen, that whole process.

And Marriott does such an incredible job as this behemoth of an organization of creating training programs for their industry, specifically for their collection of hotels.

Yeah. And Rich Carlton is part of their group. Yep. Gotcha. Okay.

And then I got. I got really intrigued by the Ritz Carlton yacht collection. Ended up applying for a job there and kind of made my way actually through it a little bit, which is interesting to see if that would have turned out. But during that process that I saw this position for the Beyond Collection and.

I was just on the new Ritz Carlton yacht in Portugal earlier this year. They did the Atlantic crossing. Were you? And I was on that. How was it? It was fantastically. Oh, my God. Beautiful. It honestly, it's like Tesla makes all other cars seem cheap. The Ritz Carlton boat makes all other cruise lines seem like holiday and hotels on the water. Yep. It's weird. Yeah. Restaurants are first class. There's no buffets. You're not lying up behind anybody who's unhealthy. The spa is incredible. The spa is world class. The jazz world. The gym's unbelievable. Yeah. The rooms were huge. Like, it was. It was actually kind of laughable how good it was.

That's.

Yeah. Yeah. It was a. And I've done a bunch of cruises over the years and the Ritz Carlton yacht was. Yeah. Next level.

That is with the COO alliance and specifically Cameron Herald.

So I applied. Absolutely.

Yep.

So that I would. I would say those were balanced.

I'm curious. One of the things that I learned back in my College Pro Painters days, which was very culty, was where I learned about company culture and to build a business a little bit more than a business, a little bit less than a religion in that zone of a cult. Yep. And they, they taught us at College Pro to blame yourself when something goes wrong instead of externalizing and blaming the rest of the world. And I would guess that growing up in a religious environment, everything was your fault. Right. Bear my. I grew up Roman Catholic and yeah. You know, you. You didn't blame what happened down the street. Like If I. Something went wrong, I took the blame.

Oh, guilt is a big, big thing.

Has guilt helped you in some ways in business?

Yeah, I think in a up way. In a up way, it absolutely has. Because you. That's so true. I. I actually never thought of that. But you internalize everything of what could I have done to actually change the outcome? Even if a couple prayers, even if it wasn't a hundred percent my. My fault. But it's. You always look through the lens of what can I do differently next time? Which absolutely translates well to leadership down the road.

Okay, so. So starting young, getting the work experience young, having some of those core lessons that came out of the. Out of the church or the cult and kind of growing from there, and then you get into some of the leadership. What were some of the big leadership lessons that you learned over the years? If you were to impart a couple of those to the people that report to you today. And then I want to go into your last role that you were into.

So some of the biggest ones is there's a lot of assumptions that people will look at you differently when. When your title changes, and they do in a way, but not the way you think you. You. A lot of people think that, like, okay, I'm going up the rung. There's. I'm gonna have these throngs of admirers. I'm exaggerating, but it's just like, people are gonna be like, okay, what do you want me to do? But it's more of a. More of a disdain. There's more of a loneliness. Leadership is lonely. Being at the top of an org chart is lonely because there's. You don't have those relationships to the degree you do with your peers. And I think that's one of the reasons you created the COO alliance, is to give people a community.

It's interesting. I did and I didn't. I did it because I felt coos were lonely in. They didn't have anyone else to talk to about their role. Yeah, but you're the first person to actually show me what I was feeling back in all of those days where, yes, I didn't feel like I had the friends inside the company because I was their boss, you know, And I did always feel removed from that. I was always very envious of all these cohorts and co workers, of people who I hired and trained and got them to like each other, and then I felt like they liked each other more than me. But, yeah, I guess that makes sense.

It's. You're you have to be the bad guy because you're, you're, you're the filter.

You really are their boss.

You argue up and you argue down. And so it's a. There's argues, the wrong word but in terms of debate and kind of wrestle. Because the one thing a CEO does, good one is you're always passionately debating.

To get to truth.

You're trying to get to actually what really matters. Because in the, in the swirl of vision and ideas and creativity and this, you have to distill that down to does this align? And even if it does align, is it the right time? And even if it's the right time and it does align, but do we have the resources and the right things to actually ensure that a successful execution? And during those I learned a lot of doing it the wrong way for in two ways. One, I observed, you know, working with the companies, I became very, very observant. That was another probably skill set or attribute from how I was raised that translated well today is being incredibly observant and picking up little micro details on things observant around.

Yeah, just around everything around the day to day around the customer probably fitting metrics.

I'm.

I'm referring more to social awareness. I'm referring to a recognition.

Okay.

That idea didn't land right.

Do you have attention deficit disorder?

I'm. I never officially tested, but do you.

Do you think your, your CEO is more ADD than you are or do.

You think you're on my. My CEO is 100 more ADA than. And she knows that. She's. She, she anchors the extreme of that and it's, it's part of what makes her a genius.

Do you know where you are on.

The spectrum or add? I don't. I've never done a testing of that. I. I don't know.

Okay. I mean when you know, you know.

It'S like, it's like when you.

Yeah. You know. Yeah, I've known. I've had ADD since I was 7 years old. Yeah. Like I, I have a history of. And I can tell you 20 different times where I knew I had it over the years. So. Yeah, you probably don't but it. One of the skills or strengths that comes out of ADD is the ability to observe because we can't not notice everything. So it's not actually a disorder. It's the. We're hyper observant of everything around us. But it's so hard to keep you all organized. We need people like you to get it done.

Right.

Right. To delegate to such it off our plate. I want you to talk a little bit about, though, the kind of leadership that comes in and the art of saying no or not now, or understanding the resources into things. Can you explain when an employee or a leader comes to you with an idea, how do you say no to them? When it's the wrong time or the wrong project, or what do you notice to say no? And how do you approach that?

The thing I learned probably 12, 10, 12, 15 years ago was specifically start converting everything into a question. Why is this important to you? And that is just an anchoring question to dig deep of. Like, oh, I just thought of it. It's like, okay, it's not important then. Or that goes, go to your head. Why is this important to you? And they'll either tie it back to a core business tenant, they'll tie it back to a part of their vision that is actually not being executed to the level that they want it, or let's say it's an employee surfacing an idea. Why is this important to you? And it's like, oh, I don't know. I was just frustrated about it last week. Okay, that's an answer.

So it's not a big deal.

Or I, I've been. This is something I've thought about for a year and I've. And then my next question is, tell me more. Let's just break it down. And so there's, I break. It's all questions. And at the finally, at the end of it, if they've really made a good point. Let's talk about employee for just a second. The next question is if I, I'm not saying I will, but if I made you in charge of this project, what would you need to actually make it happen? And it's simultaneously trying to teach them.

How to think, which I think is one of the most undersold skills or underpraised skills that there is, is people knowing how to think.

Sure.

It's rigorous thinking, how to break things down, how to understand, how to argue the pros and the cons, and how to effectively articulate how to overcome those cons.

And if they can do that to.

Me, their stock value skyrockets in my eyes.

I also just love your approach with them. I wrote down a note and I'm going to ask you tomorrow if you wouldn't mind presenting to the entire COO alliance membership that's here just a short five minutes around. Why does this matter to you? And that follow on question. I think there's some really good insight that you could bring to the. Sure. It's really insightful and it's a really beautiful way to. To kind of understand. Now, do you use that same approach with the CEO?

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

So it works both ways.

It works both ways. And why is this important to you is.

I love it. Because it's.

Yeah.

It's like, oh, I just thought of it. It's like, yeah, but again. And you're letting them throw that on the table versus.

Yeah.

Think about it a while. I think it's important because of this. I thought it will get roi. Like, you can get a lot more out of them too.

You could get a lot more out of them. And oftentimes the idea is actually the first stated idea is really not the idea.

Right. It's. It's a potential solution for something that they want to do, but there might be other ways to get.

And what I really am waiting for is for them to backtrack away from the solution and articulate the problem or their frustration that they actually have.

Yeah. In the kind of first principles, thinking. Right. What is it that really. That's interesting. Yeah. Like that a lot. All right. So your skill development or skill kind of area, one of your focuses is around leadership training.

Yeah. And I. That was personal to me because I realized this is probably 2015, 2016 range. Ten years ago, I was like, I need to get way better at this. I'm starting to be. At this point, I was a director, senior director. I'm having conversations with people that report to me, and I don't know how.

To handle these conversations.

I'm kind of out in front of my skids a little bit. I feel a little bit like I don't know what I'm doing in these type of conversations. And I dove just head first into.

Leadership and emotional intelligence and self awareness and learning, self regulation and learning questions and learning how to. Susan Scott wrote an amazing book called Fierce Conversations, which is the art of.

Asking 30 questions before you respond a statement. You know, you say something, it's like, why is that a big deal? Okay, what. What solution do you have? Why do you like this solution? Do you have any other solutions that you just vetoed? Do you have. And you really worked. And I learned so much through that that by the time we got to 2019, I think I had. In the company that I was working for, we didn't really have an HR department and we were skyrocketing.

We were growing by 30, 40%, in some cases, 100% every year, and massive, massive growth, Massive Geographic, geographic growth. Geographical, geographic, whatever it is, from one.

State to seven states to just, you know, massive expansion. And I realized I got to do.

Something without like a department.

And so I, I actually spooled up a multi day leadership camp for all of my managers.

We, we flew him down to Orlando, Florida and we met for multiple days.

And I was the, the best way to learn something is you got to figure out how to teach it. And it's just a skill set that I was like, I, in order for, if I'm going to be expected to teach this, I have to become an expert in it. And I was teaching myself and applying.

It to myself at the same time making mistakes along the way.

But during that journey of developing that and seeing it work and seeing everyone.

Start to rise, it validated my efforts.

Enormously because I didn't, I didn't learn. I learned through necessity but also a self awareness of recognition of I am not an expert. You know Jim Collins when he was like, in order for a company to go from good to great, they first have to recognize that they're good. And so in order for me to go from mediocre to good, I first had to recognize that I was mediocre and have a self awareness to personally invest, to grow.

When I was working on my first.

Book, Double Double, the working title was From Zero to Good. Oh, because then you go to good to great. Right. And I wanted companies to recognize you're.

Like I'm writing the pre, I'm writing the prequel for Colony.

Because the reality is most companies are not even that good.

Yeah, that's true.

Right. You're not as a readership to you, not zero. I want to ask you a little bit about the leadership training and something you said around, around it, but I'm curious for a second, have you done your Colby profile?

I have.

Do you remember what your four numbers are from your Colby?

Oh gosh. 88381 maybe.

Yeah, that would make sense. So you're a high fact finder, which means you'd like to ask a lot of questions.

I ask a lot of questions.

Start a project. But you're also a bit of a quick start. So you're an entrepreneurial COO very much that you can start things but before you do, you have a preference to ask a lot or you'll ask a lot of questions while you're running. Like you can, you can do a walk and talk and learn as much as you need to a hundred percent.

And then just.

And that makes sense to me why you're able to ask those 30 questions before you'll make a statement. But if you're a low fact finder, that's very hard to do.

Right.

So how do you teach Susan, your CEO. No, Danielle. Danielle. How do you teach Danielle, your CEO to slow down and ask a lot of questions? Or do you try to do you just let her do her thing?

We have an incredible relationship. And to the degree that pains me, even speaking with other CEOs and other businesses that don't have that level of just extremely transparent relationship.

We have a phenomenal relationship.

And you know, she's, she speaks quick, she comes up with new ideas quick. But she is honestly actually extraordinarily self aware and recognizing that, hey, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna come in this way and. And she invites that feedback. Please tell me if, you know, stop me, pause me, interrupt me, shape me, push me, point me in the right direction if I start going off.

And so it's you with her?

Yeah.

Does she interact with the rest of the team or does she let you do that? Does she remove herself?

She. Both, both. She's her. What, what we love to do is I, I can be the bad guy. I want her to, to celebrate the team. And so a lot of her communication with the team is very celebratory in nature. In a good way.

Yeah. And one of the core roles of the CEO is to make the CEO iconic.

Right.

Is to make them look good. It's to shine the spotlight on them. How does she shine the spotlight on you internally? To make sure people know, oh yeah, Tony just needs to be the bad cop. Tony needs to roll. Tony needs to say no. What does she do internally to shine the spotlight on you?

She does a great job of that. And in recognizing what I'm doing, describing.

What I'm doing, even if it's not visible to the entire team.

I came on at a very interesting time. The company was growing. They lost a few beloved members of the team. Great people that were fantastic individuals, great rapport with the team, but maybe not the perfect fit for. To help scale the company and so just kind of merge into that type of environment is not a super easy, just seamless, instant fit. So it took a lot of open, transparent, developmental type conversations to help elevate the team at the same time.

What Was your first 90 days like? Like, how did you onboard yourself in the organization? How many people were there when you got there?

We've, I think, let's see, 15. We're up to 17 now.

Okay, so Small team, but an established team. People had been there, there'd been some transition, and you came in as us, as the coo. Yeah. How did you come in over top of everybody and help them feel safe? How did you come in in your first 90 days and show up and behave and act? And when did you start making big decisions? Can you kind of walk us through that?

Yeah, that's a great question.

In any new position, I've learned, the first thing you do is you just.

Ask questions and you learn.

So my first 30 days was this enormous just ingestion of learning. And during that process, you learn real issues. You also learn, you know, here's the new guy in charge. Let me just tell him everything that's going on. And you have to filter through some of that, of what maybe is a legitimate thing to focus on.

And so it's just spending an immense amount of time talking individuals, people. I talk to key customers. I talk to employees. I spend a ton of time with the CEO and just learning.

And so then my second 30 days was starting to help shape a little prioritization of, okay, we're, we're off here. We have core values, but we don't really follow them. We should relook at this. Let's, let's. Let's get alignment on the vision, because one vision says we're going this way, another vision says we're going this way. Some people's interpretation is going this way. And so that.

That became a significant priorities that we started working on.

That sounds a lot like how I describe it in my book, the Second Command, too, that in that second 90 days, you start putting the plan together in the hypothesis a little bit. But. Yep. But you don't really make a lot of those decisions earlier than the first 90 or 30 days, which makes sense. No. So you, you mentioned earlier that the leadership training is really key. And I know that you're bringing the Beyond Collection is bringing leadership training into some of these hotels. So.

Yeah.

Can you talk to us about that big initiative and why you're doing that?

Yeah, absolutely. So, Danielle, what's incredible about this is how aligned the CEO and myself are on this. So when she first hired me, she. She asked what makes you tick? And, you know, what do you want to be? What are your dreams? And at the time, coming from my history of what I've done over the last 10 years is I was like.

I love and I feel empowered and validated developing leaders.

Like, I want to protect people from going through what I went through, and I want to invest into others. And I just, I really enjoy doing that. She didn't forget that. And what's interesting is she'd gone through this, her own self aware journey of recognizing how she showed up that was combative or didn't land right. Although her intentions absolutely were always pure. It was sometimes the social awareness wasn't.

Recognizing how things would land different with.

Different types of people. And learned that massive progress. She hires a COO who's passionate about it. She's like, you know what? This, this is destiny of the making. Simultaneously recognizing that these big box brand, Ritz Carlton, Marriott, they've got multimillion dollar internal organizations that are leading leadership initiatives.

Within their own company.

Right.

And these independent properties don't.

Oh, fascinating.

And so they, there is when people go into hospitality, they grow up in that business. And oftentimes, and this is true in any business, people get promoted because most of the time you're just best at.

Doing what you do well. This is why. So I launched an online training three years ago called Invest in your leader. Yes. And the entire Invest in your Leaders program is 12 core modules that basically every big company has these 12 modules. Starbucks and General Electric and Microsoft, they're training their teams on what I cover. But if you're in a zone of like 10 employees to 500 employees, you don't have any of these training programs in place. So it's the same kind of idea.

It's the same kind of idea.

How are you going to monetize it? What are you going to charge these small groups? What's your business model to sell this in and how do you. Third second part is how do you make it not a distraction from your core business?

It's a great question.

We, we've recognized, we have people joined up now that range from people in sales all the way up to VPs that are joined and passionate about learning where they have in their career path have been promoted. Being the most tenured or most knowledgeable person, but maybe not the most skilled on leadership. And so they're very excited about it. They, they're their leaders are investing into helping them grow. What do you do? And so we've monetized. There's a couple different layers. And so we're actually still kind of figuring that out. One of the ways we, we've done it, we, we just started in Q4 last year is every month we meet and then we did at the end of last year we had in Dominican.

Republic in one of our gorgeous properties, we had as many as could make it that were part of the leadership forum.

Come a day early and we did an in person forum, an amazing dinner. The next morning we got up, walked. We ended up going down into this underground cenote and had this natural waterfall and doing ice cold plunges. And there was multiple people that were like, there's no way I'm doing that. But when you, you walk through that and you could see him in the cold plunge and you saw the emotion, you saw the bravery and then realizing, you know, what I'm able to accomplish and do something I never thought I.

Was able to do. And that translates.

So that translates directly into life leadership, management, working with people.

So it sounds like it's more of a value add that you're bringing your clients.

It's a massive value add. This is a revenue stream right now. It's absolutely a value add. Eventually it, it, there's a monetization path there. But it is something that Danielle and.

I both are extremely passionate about. Giving back and investing in these people and seeing an elevated rise.

I called it invest in your leaders.

It was so good.

And by the way, mine is paid. You have to pay to put your people through the. But it's irresponsible not to. For the amount that I'm charging, it's only $650 per liter.

I pay it.

I signed up. I signed up.

It's good.

I'm walking through it.

So. And I think when you put people that content, by the way, like if you're a company not willing to spend 650 to grow somebody, you should fire that somebody and hire someone you are willing to invest in for real. Right. Because as the company continues to scale the skills the people have to continue to scale. So I like, I like that you guys see that and you're doing that.

Yeah.

I want you to talk to me a little bit about your last role. You said you were in a CEO role, VP role before. Why did you leave that, that organization and what were your kind of key lessons from being there? That's great.

There is key lessons.

Was.

Absolutely learning how a role changes.

With the size of a company and.

A company will outgrow an employee or.

Employee will outgrow a company.

And sometimes I had, I had employees that were incredible when the company was this size.

Sure.

And the company did this and all of a sudden they're failing and it's like, did they change? No, they didn't. It's just the demands on the job are they just. They outpace them. Another giant lesson I learned is really just understanding. I was explaining at lunch with a few of the alliance members today of the difference, and it took me a while to learn this, of kind of when you started a company, you're at base level, you only need to know what to do and how to do it.

Yeah.

And managers is where. When comes in. They really work on prioritization. So what to do, how to do it, they prioritize when and then above a manager at a director level and up. You should not be talking about what.

To do, how to do it, or when to do it. You should be teaching people how to think. And so that entire mindset philosophy shifts.

And I've worked with directors and even VPs who are like, this is happening and we need to prioritize this and move this in front of me. And my first statement to them is, tell me, tell me about your team. Because the way you're describing to me, it sounds like what I'm hearing from you is that there's a gap below you, because what you're doing is I.

Need you to be working here.

So you're growing the company then in. No, I wouldn't say that. I think there was a. It was a. It was a perfect opportunity for an. For an exit based on a variety.

Of different circumstances happening in the company that, you know, alignment of values and a lot of different things were going in a different direction. And I learned a lot, have nothing but incredible memories of many of the people I worked with. And, you know, I still get multiple.

Messages and calls a week from former people that I used to coach and.

Mentor and work with, you know, who have questions or want to reach out about something.

So it's interesting, your insights into the layer of. Of learning and the layer of the way that we show up as leaders at different layers in the organization. And I think it's where sometimes title inflation has gotten in the way. So I want to ask a little bit about that.

Yeah.

If you were to describe what a COO is versus a VP versus a director versus a manager, how would you kind of describe those different title ranges in your kind of.