The CEO’s Real Role in Growth

Bonuses are more of a demotivator than a motivator. They're a very short term satisfier but over the course of most of the year they're not satisfied. So what ends up happening is your A players feel frustrated that you're dangling a carrot to incentivize them instead of actually satisfying them every single day that they're working their tail off already.

We just finished our second vivid vision, which by the way, thank you. It's, we did a pretty cool unveil with it with like a magazine looking format.

Amazing.

And the part I struggle the most with is I, I know what we're going to get. We're eight and a half, $9 million in sales right now. We're a restaurant marketing media firm. I know we'll get to 30 in three to four years. But I, I find myself always focusing. I don't say always, but just you. I get, I, I don't, I'm not in the business so I don't do anything. Like, I have no role in the company except for, I guess managing the sales team to some extent. I, but I find myself consistently focused on the negative daily. Like yesterday two stupid things happened and I, I, I'm trying to fit like I'm, I want to get where we're going to go in this vision in three years tomorrow. And I, I struggle with that mentally because I, I don't know, maybe it's impatience, not know how, not knowing how to wait. But we just hired a CFO two weeks ago who's going to do some great things. And I know it's going to take him two to three months to really fix some of our profit and other things by, I don't know, I just, I fight myself every day trying to not want to be where I should be in three years like today.

Okay, so I'm, I'll walk you through a couple key points on that. The first one is when every, I had a CEO and his COO was a member of the CEO alliance for a couple years. His name was Jason Hennessey, runs Hennessy Digital, had about 120 employees at the time and his CEO Scott Shrum. They're crushing it. Everything was growing really nicely. And Jason said, you know, I feel like everything's going so well right now. I got to go break some stuff. I'm like, stop, like, don't start getting involved in the business when it's going well. Like, step back, give your team some space, give your team some freedom. And then we need to reinvent what your role is in the company, because it's not now, is what's coming 4 to 6 years out or 4 to 5 years out or 4 to 10 years out that you can start thinking strategically about without involving the day to day of the business. But they need to know that you're thinking further. So it could be acquisitions, it could be selling the organization, it could be how are you going to go to the 100 million mark? But you need to be thinking about that. Getting mentors around that, meeting with companies that have done that, looking at different industries to see if you can take, I call it ideas. Having sex. Like can you pull from three different industries and bring it back into your space? But your time can be spent around that as number one. Have you got kids? Yep.

20 and 22.

Okay. When your 22 year old was four and when your 20 year old was two, was there something that you did with them on the, on the day to day? Like what did you do with your 4 year old and 2 year old day to day that turned them into the people they are today? Stupid.

Like I'm a, I'm a 10 year old at Hartnew on the trampoline kicking the crap out of them Angry Birds. Like my son used to take the. I went in and stole the wife's toilet paper and paper towels where she got pissed about and made this giant castle and he would throw Angry Birds at it. It's like just crap like that.

So you played with them. Yep. You hung out with them, did you, did you give them and show them where they were up when they were 4 and 2?

Probably not.

If you did, it was very specific. What did you do that was the exact opposite of that?

Yeah. Praised them.

You praised them, you showed them love. You show, you built their confidence. Right. You took them out on their bicycle and you're like, go for it, go for it. Meanwhile, they're teetering like crazy and they're falling over every seven feet. Or you're playing baseball with a three year old that can basically barely hit the ball across, they can't even hit the ball across the yard and you're cheering them on like they're Babe Ruth. So you're building their confidence, you're cheering them on, you're praising them, you're loving on them, you're having fun with them. That's your role as CEO. Your role as the CEO is to play with them, go for hikes with them, know what their hobbies are, know what their insecurity. Have you read the book The Dream Manager. Go read the book the Dream Manager by a guy named Matthew Kelly. I was introduced to this book 17 years ago by a guy named John Rulin. John introduced me to the book the Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly. I've had dinner with Matthew Kelly. The idea with the Dream Manager is that the CEO's job, when you get the company to the scale you're at, is to care more about your employees dreams, your employees insecurities, your employees passions, your employees bucket lists than you do about the company. And if you care more about that, and then you start putting systems and people in place to help them make their personal lives better, help them reconnect with their dad, help them learn how to play guitar and learn how to parachute and go on trips. And if you care about and help them lose weight and have a personal budget, if you can figure out how to care about your people and love bomb them, as John Rivlin used to say, how do we love bomb them? They'll go through brick walls for you to accelerate the growth of the company. So you spend time becoming the first dream manager for your company and then hiring a dream manager for your company. I was sitting in a strategic coach meeting years ago in Chicago at Dan's office and I was starting to tell the 65 top clients of Dan Sullivan's about the dream manager. And they all started laughing. And this woman puts her hand up and she goes, my name is Mary Miller. I'm like, oh my God. The book the Dream Manager is about Mary Miller and her company is how she took a janitorial business from 400% turnover down to a 20% turnover. So obsessing about the dream manager will be huge for you.

I just handed my sales team, we have 16 people and they all just bought Vivid Vision yesterday or Monday next week, myself and my assistant manager are meeting with them to start work with them because I want to understand where they want to go in life, where they want to accomplish.

Yeah. Have them write their personal vivid vision. Right. My personal vivid vision for me, for Cameron Herald. You can share it with them and show them what a personal vivid vision could look like. I talked about vacations and health and fitness and finance and vacations and use of substances and sexuality. I covered everything. Get them to write their three or four page personal vivid vision and if you can start helping them and get the company to help them make that come true, that's a big one. Secondly is have each of your leadership team members and then each of those people that it sounds like you're starting to work for. Have each of them write their bucket list and come up with at least 101 things that they want to do or try or learn or experience or places to go before they die. Years ago, we had every employee at 1-800-God-JUNK write what we called their 101 dream goals. It was a combination of the bucket list and the dream manager. One of the girls in our office had on her bucket list or on her dream goals, and she had 101. We gave them like an hour to sit down and come up with 101 things. And we'd Prof. Them. They'd be like, I don't have anything left. I'm like, what cities do you want to go to? And they'd come up with seven. What countries do you want to go to? What do you want to learn? What books do you want to read? Who do you want to rebuild a relationship with? What do you want to try? What sports do you want to get involved? Whatever. What bands do you want to go see? What movies do you want to check out? And one of hers was go to San Francisco. So I'm like, cool. I'd been to San Francisco 15 times by that point, and hers was go. She'd never been. I had another guy on his bucket list was buy a pair of trendy shoes. I'm like, what do you mean by that? And he goes, I have size 17ft. I'm like, oh, got it. Like, it's impossible to find shoes when you have size 17ft. I had three people that had on their bucket list get out of debt. He was actually one of them that wanted to get out of debt, too. I had about six people that wanted to go parachuting. The six people that wanted to go parachuting, I just told them about each other. They organized it, they paid, and they all went. And like, two weeks later, all six had checked off that bucket list. But they didn't know who to go to. None of their friends want. And all of a sudden, they went. The three guys that wanted to get out of debt, I took them for lunch one day to Cactus Club, and we sat and had lunch together for 90 minutes. I paid, and I helped them do their first personal budget, their first personal cash flow plan for their home. How much money do you make? How much is rent? How much do you spend? Like, nobody ever taught them this. The stuff that you and I take for granted. Their dad died. Their mom didn't care. Their uncle was an alcoholic. Nobody showed them this stuff. We were in Seattle and we were at a great game of business conference. I took my management team and Tyler, the guy that had the size 17ft. The course was run across the street from Nordstrom in Seattle. And I knew that Nordstrom were famous for selling shoes for all sizes. So I grabbed Tyler at lunch and I said, come with me. He goes, where are we going? I said, we're going to go cross off a bucket list. He goes, which one? I'm like, just shut up and come with me. So he comes, we walk into Nordstrom, we get to the shoe department. He goes, dude, you're killing me. I'm like, no, no, we're buying you a pair of trendy shoes. He goes, why? I said, it's on your list. So I paid from the company. 240 bucks bought Tyler his first pair of trendy dress shoes. He would go through brick walls for me. Jennifer Huffnagel, the girl who wanted to go to San Francisco. I sat with her one day and I said, I need you to do me a favor. I need you to go spend a couple days with a franchisee. She goes, yeah, I'll do it. The Vancouver one, no problem. Just like everybody else. I'm like, no, I need you to go on the road. I need you to go to a city for me and spend two days with the franchisee and report back what they're doing well, what they're not doing well, what we can do better, where they can be supported. The franchisee is going to let you stay at their home. They've got a guest room. I think you'll really love the franchisee. She goes, cool, where is it? I said, san Francisco. She literally lost it. Like, just started crying, she was so excited. What did it cost the company? 400 bucks for a flight. No, hotel costs like 500 bucks. And I made her dream come true. She would go. To this day, if I send Jennifer Huffnagel a message, she'd respond within 30 seconds. And if I said San Francisco, she'd probably say, thank you so much. Your job now is that stuff. And then lastly, I think you should sit down with the leadership team, your board, your investors, whoever, and say, what are the couple to two or three things that I can do in terms of like, skip level meetings, you know, where can I spend time? Inspecting, digging in, seeing where opportunities are. That might be one. Howard Behar, when he was the CEO of, of Starbucks, every single. And Starbucks had 13,000 locations this year. This was 2007. Howard Behar would spend two hours every single Friday. Handwriting thank you notes. To people and stores. He never knew who to thank. But on his desk Friday morning would be a spreadsheet and a stack of thank you notes. Item one would be store number 612, Frappuccino Record. He'd be like, hey, store number 612, congrats on the Frappuccino record. I'll see you when I'm in Seattle next. Howard. Kelly Smith. 18 years. Kelly, congrats for your 18 years at Starbucks. Looking forward to seeing you when I'm in San Francisco. Howard. He would spend two hours every single Friday. That's 4 to 5% of his week handwriting thank you notes. You could do that. You could send out loom videos to individuals, you could send out connection messages to customers. You could love on your customers. I think if you could figure out that, you could architect a pretty cool role for yourself. And then in addition to that, I think you and your wife and your two kids should each do your. Your bucket list and you should merge them together and realize that maybe what you should be doing isn't working anyway. Maybe what you should be doing is spending time with your 22 year old and 24 year old and your spouse and yourself, knocking off your bucket list item and acting more like a European instead of like a North American. I've been in the last three years in 54 countries. North Americans are up. We're the only country that I've been to, the U.S. canada, mostly U.S. but Canada as well. When the first time you meet somebody, they go, what do you do? If you're in Italy or Spain or Montenegro or Israel or anywhere else, nobody says, what do you do? They're like, what are you into? What have you been doing recently? Where are you going? Like, all they talk about is hobbies and fun and who they're connecting with and they, and they debate issues for the good of debate. It never becomes like a political adversarial thing. So maybe the stuff that you should be doing now is living life to its fullest and enjoying one of the three reasons we started a company in the first place, which is to allow us to have an unbelievable life. That's a mic drop too, by the way. Like, we could finish the call right now and all of us could get.

Back to work or just go home and play.

Or go home and play. Right? Because the reality is none of this matters. You know, Nick and I met because Lacy is a COO alliance member, Nick's coo. And then I told Lacey about an event happening over in Uganda. So Nick came over to Uganda to go hiking with 20 random CEOs and hang out with gorillas. And there was no business curriculum, There were no business courses, There was no business agenda. We barely didn't even talk about business. We had a pretty good time, though. Does anybody else have anything to share about what he should be doing when the business is operating at this level right now? Anyone to add to that?

Yeah, I'm kind of there. I got kind of forced there for a little while too. But the other thing you can do is ask your team, like, where. Where would be the best use of your time or what now that you kind of they performing and doing things like they need you or how do they need you to show up to your business and.

And when.

So, you know, not every day that you need to be there. Like, had some health issues. I got a brand new kidney in March. And so, you know, leading up to that and after that, I was missing a lot. But they said, hey, I need you there on the Tuesday meetings, executive meetings, we need, and the rest of the time we'll leave you alone. And so I could show up on the Tuesdays and, you know, do everything I needed to, to make sure I was those. Those days. And. And then the rest of the time they just executed and talks amongst themselves and solved problems amongst themselves. But one thing I noticed, and Sammy's on the, on the. She's my COO and it's on here, is by letting them do that, I was forced to do that for about, for about a year, year and a half almost. They. They didn't want to bother me because I was going through the healing process or I was, you know, doing dialysis is different things. So they actually had to solve their own problems. Any issues that came up with customers, they were the ones that had to manage that. Talk amongst themselves, figure it out. Now that I'm better and I'm spending more time in the office, there's a different sense of accomplishment, There's a different sense of pride. There's a different sense of, like, who they are and what they can do without constantly, like, checking in with me. Probably similar to you. They just, it's easy to step by your office and hey, I need, I need an answer. I need some help or solve this problem for me. But they've had to solve their own problems. And now that I'm coming back, I'm like, I. I don't want to say that I sound like I'm bored. I'm just, I have a different new role where I'm not Solving problems. I'm not getting involved with the customers or doing those types of things because my team has been able to do that. And Sanica probably adds some additional light, you know, information here too from her side of what happened those, you know, the past year and a half, couple years, but it is different. You spend more time with the family, more time with the dogs and you still get stuff done. And your team, like my team really kicked while I was gone too. So they really step up.

Sammy, can you kind of add some color to that? Cause I know when we were talking at the Steel alliance meeting, you were talking to me about Russ and this happening. How did the team handle the fact that he was moving himself out of more of the day to day and you know, we weren't quite sure what was going to be happening with him or roles. Can you walk us through some of that?

It was just constant. I, for me personally, I mean, obviously we, I have known about this and, and Russ's health for. Since I started at Titan 13 years ago. So we knew that this was eventually going to happen. Just didn't really know when. And you know, we have a lot of our team that's been part of this journey for that long as well. The it, it was communication. I mean that was the biggest thing with it was just keep, you know, Russ is still here, he was available, but we don't want to bother, you know. And then from an executive team level is just getting everybody on the same page and making sure everybody. Making sure everybody was aligned was probably the biggest thing. Like this is still Russ's vision. This is still, we're still operating as Titan and under what this vision is and just making sure all of that happened and just investing in the team and their growth and development to make sure that everybody was on board to do that and could do that, you know, without having having Russ there. It's like Russ said, it's been. It was good for everybody. It was really good for me. Forces a lot of things maybe a little quicker than. Than what we were expecting. But in all in all it's turned out great.

I like that a lot. Thank you. Sammy. Has anybody out there done skip level meetings and do they have a good system for what a skip level meeting is?

Yeah, I do pretty much regular skip level meetings like every quarter. But are you asking anything specific what I talk about?

Yeah. Tell us what a skip level meeting is from your perspective and then how you run them and then I'll kind of add some color on some additional types of Skip Level meetings then?

Yeah, basically pretty much anyone in the company who is not directly reporting to me, either two levels or three levels, four levels below. I spend about half an hour with them. I also hold skip level manager meetings as the company grows. I can't really talk to everyone one on one. So once a month I have a skip level manager meeting who are not reporting to me but managing people. So I meet with them, hear their problems and I also come up with an agenda to teach one thing every month about management in others in one on one settings. I try to hear directly from the frontline people, engineers, support people, anyone who are not really managing people, the problems or if I hear something, I dig into those details and then I ask anything in general, like how they feel, how they think the team is feeling. The morale is within the team. Are we working on the right things? Do you have any ideas that you didn't share with anyone that you think we should work on or do you want to, what do you want to do? What your career aspirations? So I tried to figure out who might be the next manager or who might be the next principal engineer. How do they want to grow? So I try to build the future team in my mind when I need to make these changes. I know pretty much everyone in the team so I can come up with quick ideas who to promote.

Arturo. I like that. Matt, how many employees do you have system wide in the organization? 63. Okay. And R2. You guys are about 287 now. Yes. You're about the same size. Then I'll give you two different types of skip level meetings that happen and how we use them in scaling 1,800Gad junk to 100 million in six years. Number one is we had a mantra of inspect what you expect. So we called it kind of lifting up the covers and seeing what was underneath the covers. One day Brian and I decided as we were driving home from a two day off site, just the two of us, to go in and check in on the customer service center, our call center. We had 148 people in our call center. We thought, let's just go see how they're doing. And before we got there we said, you know what, let's phone them and just see how we do on a phone call. Let's expect or inspect what we expect. So we called the call center and the phone rang and it rang and it rang and it rang and we're like holy. And it rang and it rang six times. And then someone cooked it up. We're like, well that's not good. And I was like, hi, it's 100 Got Junk. I'm like, well, that wasn't so good. And then we, like, we kind of pretended we were wanting to get a couch picked up. And they said, yeah, it's 80 bucks. Do you want us to come? We're like, well, I didn't seem super happy or friendly or whatever. Like, the whole call sucked. So we said, no, you know, it's too expensive. They go, okay, bye. And they hung up. We're like, wow. They didn't try to handle the objection. They didn't wow us. They. They picked up the call late. That must have just been a horrible employee. Let's try again. We called again and the phone rang and it rang. We did three calls to the call center and all three sucked. And all three were different people. So then we're like, well, we got 15 minutes to get to the call center before we completely lose our kill each other. Let's call a company that could be a best company in Canada. Let's see how they do. Let's kind of see what the best of breed is. So we called the WestJet. WestJet would be Canada's Southwest Airlines. So we called a really happy airline in Canada. The phone rang and they picked it up. We're like, well, they picked up on one ring, like, and it was like, hey, it's Kelly caller. This is Kelly at WestJet Airlines. Hope you're having an awesome day today. How can I help you? And we're like, hey, Kelly, looking to book a flight from Vancouver to Calgary. Absolutely love to help you. Are you going to see family? You going on vacation? What are you doing? Calgary's a great place. We're like kind of blowing us away. We're just booking a flight. So she gives us the price. Like, yeah, you know, that's too expensive for me. She goes, you know what, if you hang on about 12 seconds, I can probably find a good. You know what? If you do this rate, I can get you $16 or $26, whatever. It was less on that ticket. Like, no, it's a little more than I thought. She goes, well, if you want to look around and call me back, I can honor any other rate you get on any airlines and I'll make sure that your bags are checked. But she just continued to handle the objections. Like, okay, we'll check around, we'll look. She goes, okay, well, thank you. She goes, before you hang up, can I just get your email address really quickly and I'll email you A coupon code so that anytime you ever use us in the future, you can get 10% off. We're like, we just must have like the employee of the year for WestJet Airlines. So we give her our email, we get off the phone. We got seven more minutes before you office. Let's call again. We phone WestJet, she picks up again. We're like, Jesus, three calls in a row. They blow us away. So we walk into the call center, we're like, we need to meet with the head of Quality Assurance. 148 people in our call center, four people in charge of listening to every phone call, screening phone calls and rating phone calls, and providing feedback to the 10 managers and the 148 people. We go, can you show us like what you rate on these phone calls that you're listening to? And they go, sure. There's an 86 point checklist. It was like, there's 86 points. It's a four minute phone call. Like, we're not even picking up on time. We're not handling objections, we're not wowing the customer, we're not hugging at the end and we're not showing any value. Like, what else are we measuring? So they showed us the 86 things and we go, this is ridiculous. So we went and met with the 12. We pulled all of the 12 team leads together and we're like, when you guys get these 86 point checklists, what do you do with them? You know what their answer was? Nothing. They're too overwhelming. There's too much there. We can't even really use them. For an entire eight months, four people had been working and no one had ever used any of the work that they were doing. And the most important five things and even being done. So we got rid of the 86 point checklist. We fired two of the people in quality assurance, we fired one of the managers, and we only measured five things on the phone calls for the next three months. And our call center changed overnight. But a week later, Brian, myself, the head of the call center and the head of Quality assurance, guess where we were sitting. We were at WestJet's head office in Calgary, Alberta for an entire two days, being mentored by their leadership team, their head of their call center and the head of quality assurance. Because we as the CEO had some time to inspect what we expect. We had some time to be mentored by Best in Breed. A year and a half later, in 2004, 2005, we won call center of the Year in North America by call Center Magazine and we weren't even a call center business, but we were one of the best rated call centers in North America because we decided to inspect what we expected. That's just one example of what a skip level is, is when you kind of skip over the head of the call center and you decide to inspect what you expect. The other way that you can do a skip level meeting is you can meet with the team and you go, hey, I'm just thinking about this stuff and thinking about where we're going in the future, thinking about what our company will look like in three years. What do you guys see? I'm thinking about this area of our vivid vision. What are the blind spots that I'm not seeing that you who report to my head of whatever are seeing? That's not trickling up to me? What do you not like? What are you worried about? What are you thinking about? What do you need? And then anytime they tell you something, you, thank you, that's amazing. You don't say, we'll fix it. You don't say, oh my gosh, that's horrible, I'll check on it. You just say, thank you, that's amazing. So you either go to them and you look at what you're doing or you go to them with ideas you're having and you get them to give you perspective. That's something you can also be doing that.

This is, it's culture related. We, I mentioned this on one of our previous calls that we have an unlimited PTO policy just for our attorneys and leadership and it's not working out and so we need to shift that. And I think you shared that you're anti unlimited pts. So talking about how to, how to shift ourselves over in addition to reviewing our bonus structures. Our bonus structures really aren't working. And so the project of overhauling bonuses is. It's just so delicate. And so I'm wondering if you could share philosophies around that.

When it comes down to core values, it's really important that you mean what you say and you say what you mean as an organization. Because anytime that we as a leadership team or a CEO say something and we don't mean, kind of underpins everything else that we ever say in the company. So if we say to someone, either verbally or in writing, unlimited vacation. If somebody comes to you tomorrow morning, August 15, and says, I'm going to take September off and the first two weeks of October off and I'm going to go on this, but you're like, what the. Well, like what? We have unlimited vacations. I'm taking six weeks off, we'll be fine, we'll cover it. I'm not going to check in, not going to check email. You're like, no, the. This is business critical, so you don't mean it. So figure out what you do mean and deliver that. So at 1 8, tender got junk. We went out and we tried to find out what would the best companies be doing. And we found that often the first two weeks of October off and I'm going to go on this picture, you're like, what the. Well, like what? We have unlimited vacations. I'm taking six weeks off, we'll be fine, we'll cover it. I'm not going to check in, not going to check email. You're like, no, this is business critical, so you don't mean it. So figure out what you do mean and deliver that. So at 1-800-got-JUNK, we went out and we tried to find out what would the best companies be doing. And we found that most of the European companies gave five to six weeks paid vacation, including your sick time, plus the government holidays. So we just did that and we made it a use it or lose it policy. So every year, most of the European companies gave five to six weeks paid vacation, including your sick time, plus the government, every employee has five weeks vacation. Every year, December 31st, any days that you have not used are gone. And every month we're going to be coaching you and tracking and pushing you to book more vacation time. Because on December 30, we want you to have no days, not like left. We're going to push you to take, we want you to relax. I want you to get away. I want you to find somebody to cover for you. I want you to decompress. I want you to be so busy on a, on a Wednesday because you're going to be gone Thursday, Friday and Monday that you get a whole bunch of stuff done. And I want you to go, wow, my boss actually cares about me and they care about my hobbies and they're helping me plan a staycation. Right. Vacation time doesn't mean going to Europe. Vacation time can mean I live in Miami and I'm going to spend a week in Miami hanging out with my kids and friends and going to parks and go hiking and go bicycle riding and spend no money. But I'm not going to come to work, I'm not going to read email, I'm not going to read a business book and I'm just going to decompress. And if you can care about your employees, where you push them to take vacation time and you encourage them to take vacation time and you help them to have good vacation time, they're not quitting, they're not going anywhere else, your retention goes up, your training cost goes down, your recruiting cost goes down, the amount of referrals that you get for other employees to come to you go up. Your employees are super happy, so they take care of your customers, which means you can charge more, and your gross margin goes up. So that's number one. Get rid of unlimited. Make it five weeks, Push it, manage it, and push people to take it. October 16th of 2004, I met with Jackie Logan, who is the head of our call center. Jackie had 17 days of unused vacation left, and she still was going to be accruing some before the end of the year. And Jackie was running our call center, which had about 80 employees at the time. And I said to Jackie, if you have any unused vacation time on December 31st, I'm firing you. And I know this is your dream job. I know you love this company, but I will fire you because you're stressed. You're not inspiring your team. You're a workaholic. They don't feel successful. They don't feel that you care about them. They don't feel trusted. They don't feel empowered. You're not delegating enough to them. You're not growing them. So I will fire you because you're a horrible leader. So that means right now, you and I are going to plan for when these 17 days are happening, and then we're going to plan for when the other ones you're accruing over the next two and a half months are happening. And on December 31, you will have used them all. And I'm going to turn you in. Better leader. Are you in? She had no, no, no. There was no decision but to be in. But at the end of about three months, she's like, you really care about me? I'm like, yeah. And your people and the company and our core values and our culture. Right? So that's number one when it comes to bonuses. And you're talking about, like, leadership team bonuses, right?

Well, we can start there, but we have bonuses down to frontline employees. And those, I think, are the more. The more challenging aspect right now because they're, you know, we have troubles with profitability, and so we're paying out bonuses even when the company isn't profitable. But they don't have control over profitability.

Right.

Because they're not profitability. What they've turned into is an expectation of people and then we feel bad and we don't know how to handle conflict and we don't have to say no or. So, yeah, it's a complete cluster. So here's the first thing. Pay people fairly. I like paying them at 85th percentile, the bell curve. So I figure out what they could be getting anywhere else in the. In other companies, and I'm going to pay them a little bit less than they could get paid somewhere else. But nobody else is going to pay them that high and give them five weeks vacation. So I'm going to pay them pretty darn well. I need to give them a ton of great vacation time. I need them a great company culture to work for. And I'm going to make sure that there's no bonuses, but I'm going to pay them really well throughout the year. And because I'm paying them throughout the year, every 52 weeks, they have enough money for food, water, warmth and rest.

We're paying out bonuses even when the company isn't profitable. But they don't have control over profitability.

Right. Because they're not profitability. What they've turned into is an expectation of people. And then we feel bad and we don't know how to handle conflict and we don't have to say no. So, yeah, it's a complete cluster of. So here's the first thing. Pay people fairly. I like paying them at 85th percent of the bell curve. So I figure out what they could be getting anywhere else in the. In other companies, enough money to pay their bills. The problem with bonuses, when they're quarterly or annual, they're frustrated for 11 or 12 of the 13 weeks or they're frustrated for 50 weeks and then they're happy for two. At the senior CEO level, like Matt, you wake enough, Kate makes enough. Our tube makes enough. Like, we all make enough money on our own that we don't need a bonus. But we forget that employees are scratching it together just to be able to go out for dinner on a Saturday. If I said to anybody on this call, hey, do you want to go for dinner at the best restaurant? You said he'd be like, yeah, let's go. That, that for them is something they save for for three weeks. So we're missing the point that they're not meeting the base level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That's number one. Number two is when you hire the right people, they're going to Work as hard as they've always worked, and I'm going to pay them a little bit less than they could get paid somewhere else. But nobody else is going to pay them that high. And give them Lacy when you're going to work Right now, how long have you been with mvp?

Eight and a half years.

Yeah. And in your five weeks vacation. So I'm going to pay them pretty darn well. I need to give them a ton of great vacation time. I need them a great company culture to work for. And I'm going to make sure that there's no bonuses, but I'm going to pay them really well throughout the year. And because I'm paying them throughout the year, every 52 weeks, they have enough money for food, water, warmth and rest. They have eight and a half years. You probably put in a really solid day's work all the time. Right. You're at every CEO alliance call, you come to all the meetings. You care, you work hard, you're always working to what level? On a scale of like 100%, 100 attendants?

Yeah.

You're all. And you're a mom of how many? Three. Right. A mother of three. And you're. And you're cranking out like. And if Nick said to you, hey, here's a bonus to incentive money to pay their bills. The problem with bonuses, when they're quarterly or annual, they're frustrated for 11 or 12 of the 13 weeks or they're frustrated for 50 weeks and then they're happy for two. At the senior CEO level, like, Matt, you wake enough, Kate makes enough. RT makes enough. Like, we all make enough money on our own that we don't need a bonus. But we forget that employees are scratching it together just to be able to go out for dinner on a Saturday. Advise you there's nothing else to give. You can't incentivize me. I'm already going 110%. Like, what are you going to drive me towards? I'm just. I'm already going. Right. What I'd rather do is I'd rather take all of that potential bonus money and I'd rather pay people really fairly throughout the year. I'd rather give them five weeks paid vacation throughout the year, which blows them all away and it doesn't cost us anymore. And I'd rather get rid of the bonuses completely. And then I would rather hire people that are accountable and driven. Like Fortune magazine asked me in 2003, how do you hold your employees accountable? And I said, I don't. I hire accountable people. So I think if you set people up for success, you hire the right people, you get the right people on the bus, you get the wrong people off the bus, you take care of every day. If I said to anybody on this call, hey, do you want to go for dinner at the best restaurant in your city? Be like, yeah, let's go. That, that for them is something they save for for three weeks. So we're missing the point that they're not meeting the base level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That's number one. Number two is when you hire the right people, they're going to work as hard as they've always worked. Buddy. The incentive programs and bonuses don't really matter. There's some data points around this as well. Dan Pink in a, a famous TED talk from about 15 years ago. So around the science of motivation real they, they did some research. Lacy, when you're going to work right now, how long have you been with mvp?

Eight and a half years.

Yeah. And in your and for most A players, bonuses are more of a demotivator than a motivator. They're a very short term satisfier. But over the course of most of the year they're not satisfied. So at eight and a half years, you probably put in a really solid day's work all the time. Right. You're at every CEO alliance call. What ends up happening is your A players feel frustrated that you're dangling a carrot to incentivize them instead of actually satisfying them every single day that they're working their tail off already. When you have a sale, come to all the meetings, you care, you work hard, you're, you're always working to what level? On a scale of like a hundred percent, 110%. Yeah. You're all. And you're a mom of how many? Three. Right person. That's not a bonus. That's an eat what you kill full commission environment. That's different. But you can't put a bonus in place for a payroll clerk or a head of op. Like a payroll clerk's just doing the same every day. What are you going to bonus them on? Or like ahead of operations. Is a head of operation ahead of operations. You can't bonus them on that. And here's the second part of the problem and you're identifying it right now. If the company's not doing well or we miss a goal or we, or if it's like profit sharing bonus, I can tell you for sure Nick doesn't need any more profit. So What Nick's keeps doing is other than buying more of this ridiculous clothing guy that he likes, that I think is what's, who's your guy? Nick?

I mean, I like it all, but.

Klein, that's what you. Yeah. So like Nick doesn't need any more profit. So what he does with his money is he builds a bigger business. He's building a bigger business so he'll hire more people, he'll invest more in marketing, he'll invest more in training, he'll invest more in his team, which leaves less profit to share. But the value of what he's building is a lot. A mother of three. And you're, and you're cranking out like, and if Nick said to you, hey, here's a bonus to incentivize you, there's nothing else to give. You can't incentivize me. I'm already going 110%. Like, what are you going to drive me towards? I'm just, I'm already going right. What I'd rather do is I'd rather take all of that potential bonus money and I'd rather pay people really fairly throughout the year and I'd rather give them five weeks paid vacation throughout the year, which blows them all away and it doesn't cost us anymore. And I'd rather get rid of the bonuses completely and then I would rather hire people that are accountable and driven. Like Fortune magazine asked me in 2003, how do you hold your employees accountable? And I said, I don't. I hire accountable people. So I think if you set people up for success, you hire the right people, you get the right people on the bus, you get the wrong people off the bus, you take care of everybody. The incentive programs and bonuses don't really matter. There's some data points around this as well. Dan Pink in a famous TED Talk from about 15 years ago was around the science of motivation. They did some research and for most A players, bonuses are more of a demotivator than a motivator. They're a very short term satisfier, but over the course of most of the year they're not satisfied. So what ends up happening is your A players feel frustrated that you're dangling a carrot to incentivize them instead of actually satisfying them every single day that they're working their tail off already. When you have a salesperson, that's not a bonus. That's an eat what you kill full commission environment. That's different. But you can't put a bonus in place for a payroll Clerk or ahead of like a payroll curse, just doing the same every day. What are you going to bonus them on? Or like a head of operations is ahead of operations. Ahead of operations. You can't bonus them on that. And bigger. I can tell you for sure that Matt Pop is the same thing. He's going to want to keep investing in building this much bigger business. And here's the second part of the problem and you're identifying it right now. If the company's not doing well or we miss a goal or we, or if it's like profit sharing bonus, I can tell you for sure Nick doesn't need any more profit. So what Nick keeps doing is other than buying more of this ridiculous clothing guy that he likes that I think is what's Hoosier guy Nick. I mean I like it all. But Klein, that's, that's what you. Yeah. So like Nick doesn't need any more profit. So what he does with his money is he, he builds a bigger business. He's building a bigger business. So he'll hire more people, he'll invest more in marketing, he'll invest more in training. He'll. There's not much profit left to share. But if you're going to have a profit sharing bonus, people start making short term decisions that are against the long term goals of the whole organization. They'll be like, you know, let's not hire those two VPs who will probably double the value of the company over two years. Because we hire those two VPs, that's $500,000 that we could be splitting over six of us. Let's not put half a million dollars into marketing which will dress more in his team, which leaves less profit to share. But the value of what he's building is a lot drive the business forward because we'd rather have some of that money for ourself. So what ends up happening is the disfigure. I can tell you for sure that Matt Popp is the same thing. He's going to want to keep investing and building this much bigger business so there's not much profit left to share. But if you're going to have a profit sharing bonus, people start making short decisions are not really aligned with the goal of the organization. What I would rather do is what one of my term decisions that are against the long term goals of the whole organization, they'll be like, you know, let's not hire clients from years ago. I coached a guy named Razor Suleiman for four years. Razor ended up 10 years later selling his company for about 150 million post tax he had about 80 million and he went to Florida and he took 50 employees with him to Florida. Some of the employees were ones that were with him the day that he sold those two VPs who will probably double the value of the company over two years because we hire those two BPs. That's fine the company. Some were employees that hadn't worked for him for three years. Some were employees that hadn't worked for Razor for 10 years that we could be splitting over. Six of us. Let's not put half a million dollars into marketing which will drive the business forward because we'd rather have some of that money for ourself. So what ends up happening is the just he took 50 people that we in his mind were the ones responsible for him getting this hundred and plus million dollar exit and he took them to Florida and he took $5 million and split it. And decisions are not really aligned with the goal of the organization. What I would rather do is what one of my gave every single one of them $100,000 check and said thank you. I'd rather do that. Like the random acts of thank yous that are meaningful, that wow people that are not aligned to anything. I'd rather have these discretionary bonuses. I remember at College Pro Painters 1989 I was only 24 years old and I was at my first executive retreat with College Bro's leadership team and the company had real clients from years ago. I coached a guy named Razor Suleiman for four years. Razor ended up 10 years later selling really done a great job with hitting some big numbers. And Greg Clark the CEO came in and handed all of us five his company for about 150 million post tax he had about 80 million and he went to $100 bills in in 1989. That was like getting three grand, probably five grand maybe I don't know what it would be worth today but it was a lot of money. And I was 24 like 5. I'd never seen a hundred dollar bill and but it wasn't tied to anything. It was just like hey thank you. I like doing that stuff but I don't like bonus to Florida. And he took 50 employees with him to Florida. Some of the employees were ones that were with him the day that he sold the company. Some were employees that hadn't worked for him for three years. Some were employees that hadn't worked for Razor for 10 years. He took 53 people that in his mind were the ones responsible for him getting this.

My comments on hers because I've been.

Through both of those.

We hired a CFO that started last Monday and I had asked Cameron, I think two months ago about bonuses. And it's funny, I'm talking to this CFO who I've known hundred and plus.

Million dollar exit and he took them to Florida and he took $5 million.

And split it for five years. And very, you know, he's got the accolades we need. And he goes, matt, I don't need a bonus.

Just gave every single one of them a hundred thousand dollar check and said thank you, I'd rather do that.

Like the random pay me what you believe you should pay me. Cause I told him I got a number in mind, you're going to cost as much. And he's like, I've got a thumb.

Max of thank yous that are meaningful, that wow people that are not aligned to anything. I'd rather have these discretionary bonuses. I remember at College Pro Painters 1989, I was only thirty thousand dollar bonus.

Due to me December 31st. Matt, I'm quitting to come work for you. The bonus doesn't mean anything. He's like, it's not keeping me to retention. Just pay me what you're gonna get. What I, what I get, you're gonna get out of me what you're gonna get. I'm a performer. The other part is the unlimited vacation part. We had that about four years ago and nobody used it. And I found out like most of our employees don't, can't afford a vacation and they don't under, like not that level. But they can't also comprehend a staycation. I remember when Lisa Bailey, one of our employees, finally, I forced her to take a week off.

Mom of two, 24 years old, and I was at my first executive retreat with College Bro's leadership team and the company had really done a great job with hitting some big numbers. And Greg Clark, the CEO, came in and handed all of us five $100 bills in 1989. That was like getting three grand, probably five grand.

And she's like, man, I didn't know what I was going to do all week because we actually put a thing in place that if she checked email or our chat, it was $40 fine. It was. She saw that I find my director of office the month before and she's like, I know it's serious.

Maybe I don't know what it would be worth today, but it was a lot of money. And I was 24, like 5. I'd never seen $100 bill.

And, and so she took five days off and she. Next week she came back. She's like, holy. Like, I had no. I went and got my oil change, went to the park. I caught up with some friends. Like, I took a week off and it was cool. But what we found was unlimited vacation was so unheard of that they couldn't comprehend it. So we changed it to, we're closed Christmas, we're closed Thanksgiving, and then everybody.

But it wasn't tied to anything. It was just like, hey, thank you. I, I like doing that stuff, but I don't like bonuses.

My comments on hers, because I've been.

Through both of those.

We hired a CFO that started last Monday. And I had asked Cameron, I think two months ago about bonuses. And it's funny, I'm talking to this CFO who I've known. He gets three. Two weeks personal time and three weeks vacation. And we, we slot the three. The two weeks. There are three of those weeks are slotted in quarters. They have to take them. And we force it. We have mandatory weeks off him for five years. And very, you know, he's got the accolades we need. And he goes, matt, I don't need a bonus, just. Or split up. But another thing to keep in mind, a friend of mine just got in trouble with this. He had an employee that took six months vacation. Pay me what you believe you should pay me. Because I told him, I got a number in mind. You're going to cost as much. He's like, I've got a third. Because he was quitting. The company didn't like it. So there. And because theirs was framed as vacation and PTO in Florida is the same thing. It's a, it's a benefit. The dude took six months and they tried to fix it. And the courts or whatever they went through said, no, your policy. This guy could, this guy could be off for next year. So, like, he has his $30,000 bonus due to me December 31st. Matt, I'm quitting to come work for you. The bonus doesn't mean anything. He's like, it's not keeping me to retention. Just pay me what you're going to get. What I, what I get, you're going to get out of me. What you're going to get. I'm. I'm a performer. His HR company was like, hey, get rid of it. Put a limit on it. Because you're going to. If you found one person that took. The other part is the unlimited vacation part. We had that about four years ago. Nobody used it. And I found out like six months off, probably somebody else out there. Now this guy will say this guy is a dick when it comes to being a boss. So he deserved it. Most of our employees don't can't afford a vacation and they don't under like not that level but they can't also comprehend. But it is a liability.

I love that. Thank you. I got my finger up for the quick side Note again at 1-800-got junk. We were 5 weeks paid vacation that included people's sick time. I got an email from Brian or text message, staycation.

I remember when Lisa Bailey, one of our employees, finally I forced her to take a week off.

Mom of two from Brian, early May this year. And I was like, you know, could we talk all the time? I'm like, how's it going? It was good. We're just doing something for the summer.

And she's like, man, I didn't know what I was going to do all week because we actually put a thing in place that if, if she checked email or our chat, it was $40 fine. It was. She saw that I find my director of office the month before and she's like, I know it's serious.

We gave all of our employees every Friday afternoon off this summer. What are you talking about?

And so she took five days off and she, next week she came back, she's like, holy. Like I had no. I went and got my oil change, went to the park, I caught up with some friends. Like I took a week off and it was cool. But what we found was unlimited vacation was so unheard of that they couldn't comprehend it. So we changed it to work closed Christmas, we're closed Thanksgiving. And then everybody gets three, two weeks personal time and three weeks vacation. And we, we slot the three, the two weeks. There are three.

There's 13 Fridays over 17 Fridays over the next, you know, four months. You're giving them every Friday afternoon. And he goes, nobody wants to be at the office Friday afternoon in the summer. So they're not going to freaking do anything anyway. They're all going to be like low productivity. They don't want to be here. Our salary is our salary is our salary. It costs us anyway. And if I give them the afternoon off, they're going to be really productive in the morning. So we set expectations, get your done. Take every Friday afternoon off.

Those weeks are slotted in quarters. They have to take them and we force it. We have mandatory weeks off on top.

Of your five weeks vacation time. He basically gave Everybody another eight days vacation for free. And he literally blew everybody's mind. It's no wonder they're consistently ranked in the top five companies in Canada to work for. Right? It's no wonder people will come and they can pay a little bit less than market. So what happens is because their culture is so strong, they can pay less than Facebook and less than Google and less than Microsoft. All the Canadian offices in Vancouver, people are split up.

But another thing to keep in mind, a friend of mine just got in trouble with this. He had an employee that took six months vacation because he was quitting the company, didn't like it, so there. And because theirs was framed as vacation and pto, they can pay less than.

Lululemon because they've blown everybody away and they've wowed them all.

This is funny. I was shying this real quick. My bookkeeper just brought it in. We also give our employees a thousand bucks every year for vacation. So Tom just got back from Colorado, turned in his expense record, his rental car and his thing. And my dad one time was like, what, are you on drugs? I'm like 50 grand a year, dad. Like 50. The productivity I get from a guy that wouldn't go on vacation.

Yep, I love it. We had a client that I coached years ago, in fact, the very first COO alliance member, Zach Morrison. They built a company called Tinuity. It used to be called the lead SEM. They've got 1800 employees right now. And I started coaching them, they had about 40. They use all of their frequent flyer points, all their airline miles, all their AMEX miles because they run an ad agency and they buy all their clients ads. They've got millions and millions and millions of air miles. They use all of those points to pay for all of their employees, flights or hotels for a vacation every year. Imagine if you could turn to all of your employees and go, yeah, wherever you want to stay, like as long as it's a five star hotel or like an airline within, wherever. It doesn't cost you anything. You got all these freaking points sitting there anyway. And again, what it does is it blows them away. It drives word of mouth. You can get press coverage because of it. Retention goes up, turnover goes down, training cost goes down. Everybody has fun. Life gets super easy. And because you care about them more than their parents ever did, they'll go through brick walls for you to build the company right. When you're holding them accountable and managing them, they're pushing back. But when all you're doing is caring about them and Love bombing them and blowing them away. You don't even have to talk about goals. They're just working hard because they don't want to be anywhere else but with you. And it's not work anymore because they're like, this guy loves me, man. I'm just going to do more.

So last time I think we were talking, we were, Lacy and I were discussing potentially, I think there was maybe 15 to 17 people we were going to terminate and we decided to do it all in one day. I mean, you don't even notice around the office, to be honest, whether or not it even happened. But it did. It was a long day. We got through it. Everybody seems to be going well. You know, the other hundred plus employees are acting as though they're just happier than ever, which is great. But like, what the do I do next to make sure we keep that momentum up and keep it going?

It's all around ensuring that every business area and you don't have to do it, you just have to make sure that it's happening. But between you and Lacy, make sure that every business area and every person has their top three goals or the top three projects, whatever they're going to be doing for the quarter and the month in writing and ranked from highest impact to lowest impact. So what are the top three things marketing is going to do this quarter and this month ranked one through three. What are the top three for finance, top three for ops, top three for sales, top three for customer engagement, whatever. And what are the top three Bob's going to do this quarter and month? And what are the top three salaries going to do this quarter and month in order? And then the two of you signing off, Nick signing off on two layers below you, Lacy signing off on two layers below you,. Making sure that anyone who reports to you and anyone who reports to them, you're okay with the stuff that they're working on. And it's the highest impact stuff. If you do those things, you'll know that people are working on the critical few things versus the important many. That kind of. We took that level down to every week and every day. So at one point, I had a checklist on the corner of my desk and people had to come by my desk and tick off their name, meaning they had their top three for the day set. I didn't even care what they were as long as they'd set them. But if at 10:30, because at 10:30 my alarm went off right before daily huddle, I would look down the list. And if three or Four of the people didn't have their top three. I'd go and meet with them and I'd be like, what the are you working on right now? Where's your top? And they'd shut the email like, you're right, I got busy. I got sucked into the day to day whatever. I didn't care what they were working on as long as they were working on the high impact areas. And the idea Is you've got 250 operating days per year. If you can make sure that each person is focusing on three high impact things a day, that's 750 high impact items per person per year. That is way more impactful than almost anything else you'll do at Lacy's level. She needs to then make sure that people have the skills and the commitment, right? Using situational leadership and coaching and delegation, that they have the skills and the commitment to do the top three that are on their plate. And as long as our job is not to manage them and hold them accountable, it's to make sure they have the skills and the commitment to do what's on their plate. And we can help them, we can remove obstacles, we can make sure we align them and they're working on the right stuff. That's where the real fast growth starts to come from.

So we fired all of those people and it's half of them were managers, which is leaving all of our directors covering down, which leaves me covering down, like supporting the directors in their director seats and manager seats. And so it's really hard to make sure that we're like running operationally and making sure that we're like setting our priorities for the day and the week to keep moving forward.

So for you, and this is where like it's a brainstorming thing for you or brainstorming for you and I, or brainstorming for you and Nick. It's really you sitting down right now and saying, what are the critical hires you need over the next 90 days, over the next 30 days, over the next two weeks? Maybe there's five hires, maybe there's eight hires, maybe there's three hires. And then I would rank them which are the ones to bring in first.

We have like done all of our priority hiring. Like, we've given all of the jobs we need to, to the recruiters. We've got all of our job descriptions. Like, we've done all of that. Like, we're. We have a really great hiring strategy.

Okay.

And I've seen all of that to make sure that it's like Rock solid moving forward every day.

So here's the second part of that. You're sitting on cash right now because I know you're pet your p. L. I know you guys do well and you make money and Nick doesn't need any more fancy clothes. So what I want you to do is, is instead of predatory pricing, I want you to do predatory hiring. I want you just to go out and take a look at what you're paying for people right now and buy them. You're at a stage right now where inflation is real. And it won't, it'll, it'll hurt a little bit. But to back pay all the people that you've got and pay them a little bit more so they can go to the grocery store and they can buy properly and they can get ahead again, I would try to start repaying everybody. So you kind of catch everybody up with inflation pretty nicely. And then I would go out and look at what you're willing to pay right now and see if you can raise that bar a little bit. Because if you can offer 10, 12% more than you're paying or than you used to pay, you'll be able to buy some of those people up. I would make sure that the compensation that you're willing to pay is in the top two sentences of every job posting and that the five weeks vacation is in the top two sentences of every job posting. Because you will use those two things are how you're going to bait people. Everybody else's job postings are boring. The third thing I would do so it's pay people, bait them with those two. The third thing I always do is run all the job postings through chat GPT and I would say rewrite this job posting so that it sounds more like a sales letter. It's a marketing piece that pops up. I want it to be real. I want you to embed neuro linguistic programming so that it attracts people. I want you to polarize that it pushes the wrong people away. I want you to really write this job posting so that it's more like a marketing piece so that it's like a landing page. Like I want you to treat it like it's the most important sales letter or marketing piece that you've ever designed so that you push away half the candidates. And so the right people are like holy, this is the only place they ever want to work. And then I would put a couple of small little incentives in place for the recruiters to let them know that if they bring you the right people Quickly, like I would light some gas because if the pain is that heavy, there's not a single problem that exists that writing a check can't solve. I remember we were building a house back in 2003 in Vancouver, and I really was struggling. There was nothing wrong with the timeline that our contractor was on, but I just wanted to see the cabinets going in and the floors. Like, I was so tired of the framing and the plumbing and the electrical. I just wanted to see some drywall. I don't remember what it was, but I went in and I. I nailed $200 in $20 bills to the wall. I just went and nailed it to the wall and I put a note up and I'm like, if you get this done By Friday, the 200 bucks is yours. It wasn't even a lot of money considering I was building like a million dollar house. But the, the employees like worked their ass off and took the $200 in beer money and they got her done. The second part of it is in terms of like the. What are we working on? I think you gotta go back now and look at some of the critical few things versus the important many. You supply playground equipment. There's no brain surgery, there's no rocket science. There's no planes in the air, there's no bodies gonna die. You supply playgrounds?

Yeah, for God's sakes, we sell playground equipment.

Right? Like, so I think we have to remember that and we have to remind our team that. And we have to look at what are the critical few things we need to get done in this busy time and then remind ourselves to not take ourselves so seriously because no one's going to die if you don't get this stuff done before you hire these people.

We're a professional services firm that provides complicated, complex solutions for supply chain organizations. Not software specifically, but we help organizations maximize the software they have to get real business outcomes. And we often guarantee these outcomes to these organizations. So it's a pretty unique model use methodology, all kind of things to get there. Highly paid people just built up of just a very professional level of caliber. Now our clients are typically 1 billion and higher organizations, right? Companies that are willing to spend that kind of money and also deal with obviously challenging supply chains. The thing that I hate hearing all the time is, man, you guys are like the best kept secret out there. I don't want to be the best kept secret anymore. We want to double, triple whatever we want to do as a business. And we're just struggling to figure out, short of speaking at conferences, doing webinars and bootcamps and masterclasses and how we put ourselves out there. Are there other ways for us to have companies just be aware of us? You know, obviously there's many supply chain issues out there, so it's not.

Martin, are your customers, do they have to be the billion dollar companies? Like if you could reinvent yourself, could you help couple? Like when you said what you were doing, I was like fully like, there's so many pieces of software that we have and nobody knows how to use any of it. Nobody. Could you. Could you help the $10 million companies and the $50 million companies similarly?

Yeah.

So in reality.

Yes.

Now what did. Well, we did do because of the methodology and approach we can apply to any technology. What we did is over the. We picked one to start with because it's the largest market out there and it is SAP if you know much about it.

Yeah.

And so there are a hundred thousand companies that run this technology and they're usually the large ones. So the market opportunity is massive. But we could apply that somewhere else. But I would have to recapitalize Reskill re. Yeah. Because most of our people are tech. Yeah. SAP knowledgeable.

So I'd like you to think strategically for a second. I'm going to answer your first question. Second. Strategically I'd like you to think about is there a market out there that you could do this for that are easier to get from idea to a signed contract? Because all of these companies that use SAP, it's like a 90 day to 180 day to a one year sales cycle. Right.

From assessment to actually doing the work. Yep.

Right. I would kill myself if I had to sell to somebody who takes more than like a day to make a decision for real. My first company when I was 20 years old, I was painting houses and I was standing at this company and the woman said, your competitor Andre from Student Painters is coming in a half an hour after he leaves, I'll call you and let you know if we're going to be going with you. I'm like, you know what, here's Andre's pager. We're friends. This was 1989. Page him and tell him you've gone with College Pro Painters because I'm going to take care of you way better than he ever will. And I'm not leaving your property till you sign with me because I know we can nail it. Like, you're wasting his time and my time and your time. Call him right now. And she started laughing. She goes Okay. I would rather run that kind of a business because then I can go from problem to solution to sign contract very quickly. What's the revenue of your company right now?

12 million.

Yeah. You could probably do 12 million in revenue in a, in a weekend.

If Florida is the same thing. It's a, it's a benefit. The dude took six months and they tried to fix it and the courts or whatever they went through said, no, your policy. This guy could be off for next year. So I keep his, his, the, his HR company was like, hey, get rid of it. Put a limit on it because you're gonna. If you found one person that took six months off, probably somebody else out there. Now this guy will say, this guy is a dick when it comes to being a boss. So he deserved it. But it is a liability.

I love that. Thank you. I got my finger up for the quick side Note again at 1-800-got junk. We were 5 weeks paid vacation that included people's sick time. I got an email from Brian or text message from Brian early May this year. And I was like, you know, could we talk all the time? I'm like, how's it going? It was good. We're just doing something for the summer. We gave all of our employees every Friday afternoon off this summer. I'm like, what are you talking about? There's 13 Fridays over, 17 Fridays over the next four months. You're giving them every Friday afternoon. And he goes, nobody wants to be at the office Friday afternoon in the summer, so they're not going to freaking do anything anyway. They're all going to be like low productivity. They don't want to be here. Our salary is our salary is our salary. It costs us anyway. And if I give them the afternoon off, they're going to be really productive in the morning. So he said, expectations, get your done. Take every Friday afternoon off on top of your five weeks vacation time. He basically gave everybody another eight days vacation for free. And he literally blew everybody's mind. It's no wonder they're consistently ranked in the top five companies in Canada to work for. Right? It's no wonder people will come and they can pay a little bit less than market. So what happens is because their culture is so strong, they can pay less than Facebook and less than Google and less than Microsoft. All the Canadian offices in Vancouver, they can pay less than Lululemon because they've blown everybody away and they've wowed them all.

This is funny. I was shying this real quick. My bookkeeper just brought it in we also give our employees a thousand bucks every year for vacation. So Tom just got back from Colorado, turned in his expense record, his rental car and his thing. And my dad one time was like, what, are you on drugs? I'm like 50 grand a year, dad. Like 50. The productivity I get from a guy that wouldn't go on vacation.

Yeah, I love it. We had a client that I coached years ago, in fact, the very first CEO alliance member, Zach Morrison. They built a company called Tinuity. It used to be called the lead SCM. They've got 1800 employees right now. And I started coaching them, they had about 40. They use all of their frequent flyer points, all their airline miles, all their Amex miles because they run an ad agency and they buy all their clients ads. They, they've got millions and millions and millions of air miles. They use all of those points to pay for all of their employees, flights or hotels for a vacation every year. Imagine if you could turn to all of your employees and go, yeah, wherever you want to stay, like as long as it's a five star hotel or like an airline within north, like wherever. It doesn't cost you anything. You got all these freaking points sitting there anyway. And again, what it does is it blows them away. It drives word of mouth. You can get press coverage because of it. Retention goes up, turnover goes down, training cost goes down. Everybody has fun. Life gets super easy. And because you care about them more than their parents ever did, they'll go through brick walls for you to build the company right. When you're holding them accountable and managing them, they're pushing back. But when all you're doing is caring about them and love bombing them and blowing them away, you don't even have to talk about goals. They're just working hard because they don't want to be anywhere else but with you. And it's not work anymore because they're like, this guy loves me, man. I'm just gonna do more.

So last time I think we were talking, we were, Lacy and I were discussing potentially, I think there was maybe 15 to 17 people we were gonna terminate and we decided to do it all in one day. I mean, you don't even notice around the office, to be honest, whether or not it even happened.

But you could market to the small to medium sized enterprise if you could think about how could you reinvent to help companies deploy now? Because I'll tell you, if you can help companies get more done with slack or with infusionsoft or with pipedrive or with, you know, the Simpler software too. Like you don't need these $300,000 people who like my, my wife was the head of engineering for Salesforce at Ticket.

But it did, it was a long day. We got through it. Everybody seems to be going well. You know, the other a hundred plus employees are acting as though they're just happier than ever. Which is great.

Master, like I understand like the big company bull. So much big company bull that costs time and money.

But like what the do I do next to make sure we keep that momentum up and keep it going.

It's all around ensuring that every business area and you don't have to do it, you just have to make sure that it's happening. You might be actually selling the right solution to the wrong people. So I'd love for you to strategically think about what could you do to build a $10 million business by the way, in two years? How could you go from 0 to 10 million in two years or in one year selling to companies that have no more than 300 people in them or two. But between you and Lacy, make sure that every business area and every person has their top three goals or the top three projects, whatever they're going to be doing for the quarter and the month and 50 because it's an easier number. How could you target Companies that are 250 people or less and then in writing and rank from highest impact to lowest impact. So what are the top three things? Marketing's in your social media, your pr, your sales, you're speaking at conferences. Literally becomes like because I, I can get clients right now. If I speak at an event, I can get clients to sign up within 24 hours to 48 hours. Going to do this quarter and this month ranked 1 through 3. What are the top three for finance? Top. Now I'm not landing half million dollar contracts or $300,000 contracts, but if I was targeting the right customers who have the right money with the right pain point, you can do that very quickly. When we were building three for ops, top three for sales, top three for customer engagement, whatever. And what are the top three Bob's going to do this quarter and month and what are the top three sallies going to do this quarter and month in order and then the two of you signing 1, 800 got junk. Our average franchise fee and licensing fee was about $30,000. This was 20 years ago, 17 years ago. So it was a pretty amount, good amount of fee. And the lifetime value from that customer was more like 500,000. Okay. It was a lifetime value that we were selling into. So our cut off. Nick signing off on two layers below you. Lacy signing off on two layers below you. Making sure that anyone who reports to you and anyone who reports to them, you're okay with the stuff that they're working on. And it's the highest impact. Cost of acquisition, lifetime value, cash conversion cycle. We could figure it all out. We would go out and land what we landed one story on CNBC, Squawk Box, and we got 21 new franchisees to join. That's $6 million in lifetime value. That's $1.2 million in upfront fees. No, 525,000 in upfront fees. We just was like, let's get more pr. But we. We got rid of all the complexity of, like, stuff. If you do those things, you'll know that people are working on the critical few things versus the important many. That kind of. We took that level down to every week and every day. So at one point, I had a checklist on the all the. So. So I want you to think about that because you might be. You might have the right solution for the wrong audience. Maybe if you're married to that and that is your audience, that's the only way to go. And you gotta burn your boats. And this is the whole place. You gotta be focus. Have you ever heard of the rule of 27?

No.

In the old days in marketing, it was said that a client needed to see our marketing nine times before they took action. Corner of my desk, and people had to come by my desk and tick off their name, meaning they had their top three for the day set. I didn't even care what they were as long as they'd set them. But if at 10:30, because at 10:30, my alarm went off right before daily huddle, I would look down the list, and if three or four of the people didn't have their top three, I'd go and meet with them. And I'd be like, what the are you working on right now? But because we're getting bombarded with marketing now, this is something I created 17 years ago. I call it the Rule of 27. It's probably more like the rule of a hundred now, right? But the rule of 27 was they only see one at every three things we put in front of them. Like, if I do three emails to you, you only read one out of the three, and then I need to hit you 27, where's your top three? And they'd shut the email. They're like, you're right. I Got busy. I got sucked into the day to day, whatever, I didn't care what in time. So that you see nine so that you take action. Like I need to hit you with three emails and three Facebook and three social they were working on. As long as they were working on the high impact areas. And the idea Is you've got 250 operating days per year. If you can make sure that each person is focusing on three high impact things a day, that's 750 high impact items per person, three speaking events. So that you see me 27 times, so that you listen nine times. So you take action once person per year. That is way more impactful than almost anything else you'll do at Lacy's level. She needs to then make sure that people have the skills and the commitment. You're so sick of your marketing and your team is so sick of your marketing that you think your customers are sick of your marketing and your customers have never seen your marketing.

But also our consumer. The consumer is not our market, right? You're trying to deal with groups like these CEOs. CEOs, you know, so.

So the executives at these companies, the decision makers at your companies, they're not sick of your marketing. They don't even see your marketing. Your team is sick of your marketing. Your team thinks that they're seeing your marketing. But I assure you that the best is like the top 500 decision makers you're targeting have not seen you four times, let alone 27 times. So it's more of like an omnipresent focus sales strategy where you're literally bashing them over the head because the market is so big, it's okay if they tell you to off and go away. I had a client one time when I was building what's called Gerber Auto collision in the U.S. boyd Auto Body in Canada. I was in Toronto. I was trying to get a guy to sell me his auto body shop. It's called Forest Hill Auto Body. And the owner of Forest Hill Auto Body walked me from his lobby to my car out in the parking lot and said, if you ever come here again, I'm phoning the police. And I turned around, I started laughing. I'm like, do you think maybe I can call you next month to sell? He's like, dude, get the off my property. Like, I just wasn't done until he told me to get lost. But I had other people where that kind of approach worked enough that like, fine, talk to me. What. What do you sell? Like, explain that we wanted to land Home Depot as a referral program for 1, 800 got junk. So we realized that at the leadership team of Home Depot cfo, coo, CEO, head of sales, head of ops, whenever they all lived in Atlanta, Georgia, where Home Depot's head office was. And we needed them to know of 1,800got junk we only had 20 million in revenue at the time, maybe 30 million revenue. We weren't that big yet, right? Using situational leadership and coaching and delegation that they have the skills and the commitment to do the top three that are on their plate. And as long as our job is not to manage them and hold them accountable, it's to make sure they that we certainly weren't that big in Atlanta yet. So we found out where the executives lived, we knew where their office was. Skills and the commitment to do what's on their plate. And we can help them. We can remove obstacles, we can make sure we align them and they're working on the right stuff. That's where the real fast growth starts to come from.

So we fired all of those people and it's half of them were managers, which is leaving all of our directors covering down, which leaves me covering down, like supporting the directors and their director seats and manager seats. And so it's really hard to make sure that we're like running operationally and making sure that we're like setting our priorities.

So we plugged into MapQuest, which would now be Google Maps address from and we knew the map they would take. So we literally figured out the roads that they would drive from their house to their office. And it's all. It's the same map, right. It's pretty easy. So what we did for a period of six weeks is we put signs up along the road for the day.

And the week to keep moving forward.

So for, for you. And this is where like it's a brainstorming foods that they would be driving from their home to their office illegally just planted about on roadways. And then we sing for you or brainstorming for you and I or brainstorming for you and Nick. It's, it's really you sitting down right now and saying what good on the on ramp that they would all take to the highway to their office or the off ramp by their office every morning from 8 o' clock until 9 o' clock or from 7:30 till 9 o'.

Clock.

And we paid guys to stand with a truck and blue wigs and 1-800-got-JUNK signs and wave at cars. Now we didn't know which car are the critical hires you need over the next 90 days, over the next 30 days, over the next two weeks. Maybe there's five hires, maybe there's eight hires, maybe there's three hires. And then I would rank them which are the ones to bring in. First car was the head of operations. We didn't know which car was the cfo, but we knew that if we did it every morning for six weeks, they would be sick of seeing.

We have, like, done all of our priority hiring. Like, we've given all of the jobs we need to. To the recruiters. We've got all of our job descriptions. Like, we've done all of that. Like, we're. We have a really great hiring strategy.

Seeing us six weeks later, we started phoning them and emailing them. And you know what the response we got was? You guys are everywhere. We want to talk to you. We're not everywhere. We're just on your road where no one else in the city's ever seen us. But you guys are sick of us. Yeah, we knew who we were going after, and we were omnipresent, and we were kind of monomaniacs.

And I seen all of that to make sure that it's, like, rock solid moving forward every day.

So here's the second part of that. You're sitting on cash right now, because I know you're. You're pnl. I know you guys do well and you make money and Nick. So if you're going after these companies, you have to identify the decision makers. There's going to be, you know that in the strategic cell, there's going to be three or four decision makers in a company. You've got to figure out which ones and hit them and hit them and hit them and hit them. It doesn't need any more fancy clothes. So what I want you to do is instead of predatory pricing, I want you to hit them. When we were landing press for 1-800-got junk, I'd been landing PR. I wrote a book called Free PR. One of the things I learned about press, you know, when you see, like, a newspaper article or a podcast that somebody's on or these predatory hiring, I want you just to go out and take a look at what you're paying for people right now and buy them a blog that somebody's written up in or, you know, even if you're on Oprah, being we were on Oprah, you're at a stage right now where inflation is real. And it won't. It'll. It'll hurt a little bit, but to back pay all the people that you've got and pay them a little bit more so they can go to the grocery store and they can buy properly and they can get ahead again. Thousand three that doesn't change the company. What changes? The company was pushing that episode in front of everybody or telling everybody for 21 years that we were on Oprah. So I think of every press piece that we get because you guys have gotten pressed about your product and your service, I would imagine, right? Think of every piece of press that you've got. I would try to start repaying everybody so that they're. You kind of catch everybody up with inflation pretty nicely. And then I would go out and look at what you're willing to pay right now and see if you can raise that bar a little bit. Because if you can offer 10, 12% in every type of outlet, you've got it in as a log, every newspaper article, every podcast, every more than you're paying or than you used to pay, you'll be able to buy some of those people up. I would make sure that the compensation that you're willing to pay is in the top two sentences of every job posting and that the five weeks vacation magazine, every, whatever. You got 20 pieces of press. You got 20 logs. You want to light the logs on fire. You want to put those press articles on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter. You want to put them on your email list and send them out to your target clients. You want to put them on your press page. You want to have your sales people send it out. You want to have pss on people's emails, like links to your press pages. That's L is in the top two sentences of every job posting because you will you. Those two things are how you're going to bait people. Everybody else's job postings are boring. The third thing that's. That's lighting the logs on fire. But remember Nick, when you were like 14 years old and you had some kids that lit a fire? What did you like to do with the fire? Throw a frog on there. I don't know. I would do. So it's pay people. Bait them with those two. The third thing I always do is run all the job postings through. Here's. I would throw gas on the fire and there's a frog on it. Yeah. ChatGPT. And I would say rewrite this job posting so that it sounds more like a sales letter. It's a. I would. I would throw gas on the fire. I'd really want to spark this Thing, Right. So once we've got these 20 stories and they're on Facebook, it's a marketing piece that pops. I want it to be real. I want you to embed neuro linguistic programming so that it attracts people. I want you to polarize that it pushes the wrong people away. I want you to really write this job post book. And they're on LinkedIn, they're on Twitter, we're emailing them out. They're on our press page. I want to share it five times a year on Facebook because nobody saw it the first three or four times anyway. So I'm going to share the same story multiple times. I'm going to email it to my list multiple times. I'm also going to buy traffic and I'm going to push it in front of people. Do you know the reason Simon Sinek's first TEDxing. So that it's more like a marketing piece. So that it's like a landing page. Like I want you to treat it like it's the most important sales X talk in Puget Sound on start with why went viral was because he drove traffic. He pushed the letter or marketing piece that you've ever designed so that you push away half the candidates and so that the right people are like, holy, this is the only place they ever want to work. And then I would put a couple of small little incentives in place for the recruiters to let them know that if they bring you the right people quickly, like I would light some gas that link on the TED homepage to hundreds of thousands of people. So they went to it. So it became viral. Nobody was stumbling out on their own. That's how you get more exposure from what you've got is you force feed it in front of your target clients until they're like, dude, I've seen your Forbes article six times. I got it. Do you have any press or have you received any press about any of your customers? Like a customer using. Because if it's, if the pain is that heavy, there's not a single problem that exists that writing a check can't solve. Your tool and benefiting from it.

Yeah, I mean many awards actually.

Okay.

But not, not necessarily like TV press.

Or anything like that. No, but, but magazine or newspaper or blow up or I want you to go after like how many customers do you have?

Well, that's a sad thing too because.

They don't like I remember we were building a house back in 2003 in Vancouver and I really was struggling. Like there was nothing wrong with the timeline that Our contractor was. Was on. But I just wanted to see the cabinets going in and the floors like I was so t framing and the plumbing and the electrical. I just wanted to see some drywall. I don't remember what it was, but I went in and I, I nailed $200 in $20 bills to the wall.

That's more than three years.

Right.

Because we sold all the problems when they go away on average. I mean we deal probably about 12 customers a year. We've probably had over 200 over the last 15 years. Yeah.

So out of the 200 customers, you can probably find 15 to 20 that are raving fan customers that have amazing testimonials or they're just like great case studies.

Right.

Yeah.

I want you to take company ABC, that's in Dallas and get the newspaper mag all. I just went in, nailed it to the wall and I put a note up and I'm like, if you get this done By Friday, the 200 bucks is yours. It wasn't even a lot of money considering I was building like a million dollar house. But the employees like worked their ass off and took the $200 in beer money and they got her done. The second part of it is magazine bloggers, whatever to do a story, preferably print, about how that terms of like the. What are we working on? I think you got to go back now and look at some of the critical few things versus the important business benefited using your software. So the stories about them and the benefit they got from using the software and empowering your teams, it has to be something that transfers so that all businesses understand the value of leveraging their software. Right. There's an old. And I would, I would have a title or a subtitle of every press article that is something like this. A shovel doesn't many. You supply playground equipment. There's no brain surgery, doesn't dig a hole. A shovel is merely a tool. If you don't know what to do with the tool, it's useless. There's no rocket science. There's no planes in the air. There's no bodies going to die. You supply playgrounds.

Yeah. For God's sakes, we sell playground equipment.

Right. Like so I think we have to remember software is useless unless people know how to get the most value from your software. So our tool, here's how our software helped these companies get the most value. And the lesson is your company can get more value from your software. Okay? So you got to get company ABC Press about them in Dallas and the stories how that for that and we have to remind our team that and we have to look at what are the critical few things we need to get done in this busy time. Company got value from software and how your company can too. You can take that same story and get it about company 1, 2, 3 in Chicago. You can do that same story about company XYZ in Boston. It's f Cking. And then remind ourselves to not take ourselves so seriously because no one's going to die if you don't get this stuff done before you hire these people.

We're a professional services firm that provides complicated, complex solutions for supply chain organizations. Not software.

Different day. We got 5200 individual unique stories at 1, 800 got junk. They were all the same five stories. One was the genesis story how Brian started the company Saw specifically.

But we help organizations maximize the stuff that they have to get real business outcomes.

And we offer dolls drive through, saw a truck, started company. We had the overcoming adversity or the hero's journey. How he struggled, how he failed, how he almost lost the business, quit his job, whatever. How we overcame that adversity. It inspires, it educates.

We guarantee these outcomes to these organizations. So it's. It's a pretty unique model use methodology, all kind of things to get there highly paid people. So just built up of a, you.

Know, just a very professional stories about our customers. We had our leveraging of technology stories and we had our culture stories. That's it. We had five stories and we landed 5,200 individuals.