The Power of Clarity and Simplicity| VP Of Operations, SMB Team, Brandon Bowers (Podcast 275)

That direction is what the team is actually looking for so that they can choose where they want to go and what they need to get done. And so him giving that, when Bill gives that very clear vision for everybody, it really helps set them in their motion because otherwise people would get too scattered. Right. And so one of Bill's unique abilities is really we can have a bunch of high level priorities and he can zero in on just the one little component that is going to make the biggest impact in the company or for our clients or for our team. And so he does that in priority setting towards the end of every quarter for the next quarter. And that's really helped us keep things simple because if you have too much going on, you're never going to get it all done.

So, Brandon, welcome to the Second in Command podcast.

Thank you. Cameron, great to be here.

Great to see you as well.

Yeah.

You are also one of the old school, I guess, not quite old old school, but one of the COO alliance members. So it's nice to be able to have you on the show and also to hear some of your experience. Why don't you just tell me, tell me why you joined the CEO alliance even to start. And you know there were this, this global community of second in commands. What was it that had you join?

Actually, I don't know if you remember this, but it. Mine's an interesting story because when I had first become, I was kind of half my role as a COO at my previous company when I was in the custom suit industry for the. It was a company that I had sold to and I was a part of another COO forum, you know, organization and it was, you know, great. We had a, a monthly call. My local, there was like chapters and I didn't have one. And so I was starting to seek out some other opportunities and I came across CEO alliance and I applied, I reached out and you had responded to me and said, you know, I'd like you to, to build a little bit more background in this role and reapply. And lo and behold, when I joined SMB and Bill shared that you were his coach, I was just like, this has got to be, you know, meant to be here for me. So that was really exciting. So I instantly, you know, told you I wanted to join that and here we are today.

That was easy. All right. That's a cool path. I like that. I'd forgotten that actually. That's really neat. So. Well, let's. You mentioned SMB team. Why don't you tell us what the SMB team is what you guys do as your kind of core products and services and then we'll build out from there.

Sure. So SMB Team, we started as just a PPC company specialized for attorneys, small law firm owners. Now we are actually a full service digital marketing company for small law firm owners. And then we also have a dual coaching program which helps them scale their business. We teach them business management skills as well as a component that's more marketing focused. And then we also are a partner in another company called Attorney Assistant and that helps with the intake or the sales function for our law firm owners. Which kind of makes it a really a true 360. Right. Because we help bring in the leads for the law firm owners, the intake, Attorney Assistant, virtual assistants essentially help close those leads and then we help coach them on scaling their business once they have that revenue in the door.

So I don't know this to be true and I'm more curious, but I'm going to make a comment and see if I'm right or if I'm wrong. Doctors are horrible business owners. Dentists are horrible business owners. But my guess is that lawyers would be better business owners than both of them. But, but less good, less, less strong than entrepreneurs might be. I don't know why.

I think that's a great question. I, I don't know if I know the answer because we haven't branched any other verticals yet. I would suspect you may be right. However, in general I would say most attorneys are not great business owners because you know, obviously they're not taught that either. So they're, they're very focused on the law. But what we've found is the people who are, who gravitate to us because we consider ourselves a growth partner. We don't like to be considered a vendor or just a marketing company or a coaching company. We're a growth partner. So that's why we had the holistic approach. And the people that really start following Bill and Andy, who are the, the founders of the companies, you know, know they are really interested in being that entrepreneur and that CEO. So they kind of don't enjoy being the lawyer as much.

Right.

And they really want to focus on CEO. So those individuals are more business savvy. They are going to be better CEOs than your average attorney.

Was Bill a lawyer as well?

He was not. Okay.

So interesting that your company now does, you know, you're a full service marketing company. I know you mentioned ppc, which is pay per click and that's kind of paid search for Marketing. So, so you're now a full service marketing agency and then you also do business coaching and marketing coaching for law firms. Why have you decided to stay in the legal space as a niche?

So, you know, originally when Bill first launched SMB team, he was doing home services and I think he wanted to choose a path of having a clientele that was less resistant to economic changes in the, the, the world stage. So obviously right now with things, you know, discussions of recessions looming, etc, turned out to be a great decision. And so, you know, right now, through just our own learning, through our discussions with you and our coaching sessions, we've determined that we still have a little ways to go to kind of hone in our model. And there's so much more opportunity still just in this legal space that we're not even close to capacity yet. So. So, you know, we're working to get our systems down. There's some things we need to work on the coaching side. We've come a long way in the marketing. We still have some things to iron out on the coaching side and I think, you know, in a year or so we could probably branch out to other verticals.

And I'm not going to ask you your dollar, your revenue figures because it's large. What percentage of your revenues would be on the marketing side and what percentage of it would be on the coaching side and then maybe what percent would be on the event side.

So it's 60, 40. 60% is around the marketing and 40% on the coaching.

Oh, interesting. Okay.

And that's only because we're selling mainly a shared package. So just the a la carte prices, when you discount them down with a combined package, we give a little bit of extra value there and it's just a 60, 40 split. But we could really open up the coaching and sell a lot more a la carte coaching if we wanted, which would probably get it to 50. 50.

It makes sense. Now you guys have been in business for what, seven or eight years?

So SMB team alone, we're in our sixth year.

Okay, so sixth year in business. And how many total employees do you have now?

We have 71. We have four actively we're hiring for right now, but we just signed our 71st and we have another eight or nine full time VAs that we treat more as real time employees.

Okay, so you're roughly around the 80 mark when you, when you include your VAs or fractionals, you're a real company. And has it been an easy growth to get there?

You know, I don't think it's ever easy. There's always a challenge every day. There's something about working here. I don't know if it's just the culture or just what we're doing. We're all. We have a great team. I truly love coming to work every day. I come in the office actually every day because I just, I love it. And Bill's. It's usually me, Bill and his EA Jen. And you know the team will come in one or two days a week. The ones that are local, they still enjoy coming in from time to time, but us three are always here and you know, I just kind of enjoy that challenge of growing a small business and all the things that come with it, good or bad.

So I was doing a call this morning with a group of COOs, about a dozen and we were talking, talking about communication as companies scale and how the complications just company communication gets more complicated as companies get bigger. Can you walk us through what you guys have done? Vis a vis, top down communication, bottom up communication and then laterally communication. So talking to your employees and customers and then listening to them as well.

A hundred percent. I think this is one of the most difficult challenges companies face and scale. You know, one of the things that adds to, I think the complication for us is we're extremely fast growth. So you know, we're growing 200, 300% year over year. So it you come across those scalability challenges much faster and so you don't have really the time to prepare or see them coming. When I first joined with, with Bill, you know, we were kind of on a loose traction EOS model and you know it talks about the same page once a month but when you're scaling the way we are, we have to do them weekly and really we had to figure out communication to even stay on the same page throughout the week because so many things would change, you know, day to day. And so we kind of took some of the things that, you know, we've incorporated different technologies. Voxer was a big one for us. Just quick voice members at the end of the day kind of updating on things I Learned in my 1 on ones with my team and that really helped us bridge a gap for a while. Now we actually kind of also utilize his EA gen. She's been a phenomenal addition to the team and you know, she kind of acts I guess more so in a kind of chief of staff operational role in that sense. So she helps there. But technology's been a big factor and that can be a Blessing and a curse. I think you can incorporate different things. We obviously have meeting cadences, right? So we have our L10s weekly. We have our daily huddles, which I think is huge for celebrating wins, getting the energy. But, you know, there's also any important updates, you could throw it in there to make sure everyone's aware of it. We have a Slack. Many Slack channels we use Slack. But that can really, if not used properly, I think, actually make you less efficient and cause communication gaps. So one of the things that we did was we call our standard operating procedures EOPS Excellence operating procedures. Bill has a lot of his own terminology that he loves to use because we don't do anything standard. So we have an EOP on communication guidelines for each technology we use, as well as each type of meeting. And I think that's really helped because otherwise, people, we're using Slack for assignments, and then there's no way to track, you know, your task or things that you need to get done. So it just gets lost. And so that was a big challenge. So giving people clear guidelines on how to use each communication tool has really helped us.

I love that. Yeah. And you're right that a tool, it's kind of like a shovel. A shovel doesn't dig a hole, Right. A person with a shovel digs a hole. The tool doesn't necessarily scale a company. It can really destroy a company or scale a company, depending on how you use the tool and depending on how if you train people on how to use the different tools as well. Right. Like, I can take my iPhone and I can use it as a great hammer. I can really bash in nails with it perfectly. But it's really not meant to be a hammer. Right. By the way, another great tool, I know you use Voxer for voice memos. At the end of the day, take a look at an app called Marco Polo. It's like Voxer, but it's video instead of audio. And what I love about it is that you actually get a bit of the human interaction with people, and when you see the person's face, it takes the message to the next level. Right. It actually builds the connection, especially when you're a remote or a hybrid team. And it can be you just driving down the highway, leaving a quick memo, even over video. But it's cool because then like, oh, yeah, there's Brandon. There's a smile. He's a happy guy. Right. And it's nice to be able to have that connection. It's one of the reasons why our YouTube channel for the Second in Command podcast is doing so well, is people like to see the human who's sharing the ideas as well. So, yeah, take a look at the Marco Polo Apple.

I love that.

So you mentioned that you've got kind of a couple of CEOs now. You've only got one CEO in the company, and that's Bill. But then you have a couple of other acquisitions that you've done, and you've brought the CEOs from those company in. Now, as senior people, what's it like working with those senior people? And how do you create the alignment and the communication protocols and the kind of the org chart, you know, when you have that, or was that just part of the acquisition and setting those expectations?

It was. It was part of the initial setup. However, it's, you know, just like anything with scalability. We need to be able to reassess every quarter because that's one of the challenges, I think, of any senior leader, and particularly maybe coo, because it's such a, you know, misunderstood rule, as you always talk about. And it can be many different things depending on the industry or the company. Right. So that role is going to change drastically depending on how we are scaling, which way we are going. So we set up the initial responsibilities and roles when we did the acquisitions and mergers. And then every quarter when we do our quarterly planning, we go back always as a leadership team, and look at, okay, what do we see our responsibilities at? Are there anything that we need to be taken off of our plate or changing or adding? And so we're always keeping it top of mind and redoing our accountability and org charts.

I like it. Yeah. And it does start with the expectations at the beginning, but then kind of redoing stuff as you scale, too. Right. Because as the company goes from, you know, 30 people to 100 people, and then from, like, the. The old org chart does change and the old communication protocols do change and the old systems do change, and you.

Don'T know what you don't know. So you can't predict everything that's going to happen or the way you're going to go in the direction of the company. So you have to kind of mold to that.

You, you mentioned the 200% growth. Can you walk us through what that 200% growth is like and how you've had to adapt as a company to be able to manage that kind of growth?

So I would say every quarter for us is almost like a year. At other companies that I've been a part of, we accomplished so Much. One of the things that we've really had to learn is priority setting before we do any of our quarterly planning. You know, some of the systems like, you know, EOS and Scaling up and some other systems, you know, we kind of have like a hodgepodge of our own. So we've taken components of Traction Scaling up, incorporated some of our own philosophies and modify it to fit us. And one of the things that, you know, Traction had done before was you kind of choose your, your quarterly goals in that, that planning session. But we feel that really it should come from the top down, from the visionary, because that's the person really setting the direction of the company. And, and that direction is what the team is actually looking for so that they can choose where they want to go and what they need to get done. And so him giving that, when Bill gives that very clear vision for everybody, it really helps set them in their motion because otherwise people would get too scattered. Right. And so one of Bill's unique abilities is really we can have a bunch of high level priorities and he can zero in on just the one little component that is going to make the biggest impact in the company or for our clients or for our team. And so he does that in priority setting towards the end of every quarter, for the next quarter. And that's really helped us keep things simple. Because if you have too much going on, you're never going to get it all done.

Yeah. And it just stresses everybody out. I like that you said that you kind of got a hodgepodge of, you know, the eos, Traction and scaling up and other people's systems. And I think, I think that's actually the best approach. I think it's very dangerous when, you know, whether it's a traction implementer or a scaling up coach or, you know, other business coaches. Oh, no, you have to follow this exact system. You have to use this exact worksheet. You have to follow this like, sorry, but that's not the way every company runs. Right. So I think, can you explain your hodgepodge and how do you, how do you iterate or change or tweak the system so that they fit SMB team?

Sure. So like that priority setting was one big change that we implemented because we started seeing that we would get into a little bit of a quarter. We realized that people were choosing goal set. You know, when they're doing the goal setting, their goals were not really aligned with what was going to make the big impact on the business. They were focused on maybe the minutia that was just like, maybe for them it was important, but it wasn't going to have an overall impact. So that was a big change. And even the way we run our quarterly planning meetings, we're doing them earlier now because we want to start the quarter fresh as opposed to waiting till after. You know, it used to be, well, we have. Have to wait till after to see our end results. We know enough. And we've talked about this before with you, where you have a good idea where you're going to end up when you're a few weeks towards the end of the quarter. So let's go ahead and start planning for that next quarter. And what we do is, part of my role actually is after each quarter we take what. What worked this last planning session, what didn't, and we make changes for the next one. So literally almost every quarter we're just working on getting better and better and dialing it in. Because when we do that, I mean, a quarter or two ago, we had all but one, you know, of our goals, which we call boulders, not rocks, was hit. And really we could have maybe counted that one as on, but we. One of the things we incorporated was pivots. So in traction, it's like if you didn't get a hit, it wasn't done right and it was incomplete. But sometimes when you choose that goal in the beginning of the quarter, something may happen three weeks in that makes that goal completely pointless.

Right.

I don't want to penalize somebody because we didn't know what was going to come down the road. Right. If you had done that during COVID nobody could have foreseen what was going to happen. So you planned all these goals and then all of a sudden Covid hits and you didn't adapt. You were going to die as a business.

Yeah.

So we're all about doing what makes sense for the business. Well, actually, one of our core values is three way winners. So it's what makes sense for the client, the team. And the business always has to fit all three. Right. So if it's not going to fit one of those things, I don't care if we chose a goal and we're four weeks in, we're going to kill it. We're going to make a pivot, whatever we need to do. And we're not going to penalize the team for that.

That's actually really strong that you identify that sometimes the goal, it's like we're choosing not to hit it because we're choosing to pivot instead. So it's like a miss, but. Right, and it's a good miss. Like we missed on purpose.

Exactly. And we have protocols on what constitutes how you get that approval process. So it's not just people saying, I'm pivoting, I'm pivoting. You know, that, that could get a little bit careless, but yeah, it gets.

A little bit dangerous a little fast. So when you talked about using EOS Traction and then using scaling up, was there a stage at which Traction started to break down for you as a company? Or is Traction still working even though you're scaling to kind of the 70, 80 employee zone? And are you just tweaking it and iterating it a little bit?

I think it's really, we kind of broke it pretty quickly, to be honest. I think when you're in this fast of pace in your growth, you start to see the weaknesses of it. Like for example, that pivot. Right. That was something we identified very quickly because we were doing so many things in a short period of time. And so I think the basic foundations have, have still served us well in terms of like the L10 meetings and the quarterly plan. That foundational component is really led us to where we are now. I'm starting to see where now we're starting to put some stress on some of those. And so maybe we need to restructure the way we do our weekly meetings. You know, our departments have really become fully built out now. I just, actually we had, when I joined, we had a young management team which we called our leadership team. And we now have an exec team that we just hired our, you know, another executive on. So our exec team has, you know, really gotten built out over the course of time. So now we had this, this leadership and then there were also, you know, another layer of management meetings in each department. And so there was a lot of redundancy. And so recently I kind of nixed the leadership one because they were having the same type of meeting, you know, two hours later, and it just seemed redundant, not necessary.

I, I, I say that when a company goes from 30 to 100 employees, they have a management team and a leadership team. The leadership team is setting strategy, setting priorities, you know, focusing on culture, focusing on growing people. And the management team is focusing on getting shit done.

Exactly.

There's an old, there's an old joke about the two managers who were in the forest and they said, you know, what's the difference between a manager and a leader? And they said, well, the two managers are in the forest and they're Both in charge of clear cutting a forest and cutting down as many trees as possible. And this one guy climbs to the tallest tree and looks around and says, holy shit, we're in the wrong forest. You know, that that's, that's the difference between leadership and management. And often management hasn't built that. They don't have the wisdom. They haven't been around long enough, they haven't been doing it. They haven't got the enough seasons behind them to be able to, you know, to bring that to the table. So it's good that you're identifying that. Can you walk us through your quarterly planning? You know what your quarterly planning meetings are like, what your system is like around quarterly planning?

We do our priority setting about a week or two out, I guess two weeks out before the end of the quarter and Bill will meet with each department head and you know, talk about kind of what's working and what's not working. We kind of brought some of that SWOT analysis into that part so that we could really talk about the direction and the priorities for that department so that they could prepare for the quarterly planning. So one of the things we've tried to do is prepare and come in with as much already built out before that session where we all get together. So we're not just figuring it out in that session. So everybody comes prepared to our actual quarterly planning meeting with all their working, not working ideas on priorities. They already have, you know, our goal ideas. We have all the data from the last quarter and, and then we kind of sit and we work through what are the highest priorities going into this next quarter and tying all the departments kind of together to make sure we're aligned for the overall vision. And we're always going back to that annual plan that we did. You know, at the end of the year we're going to build our annual plan, mainly Bill and myself and some of the exec members building our projections and our high level goals for the entire year. And so we're always making sure those quarterly goals are still going back to that end of year plan.

I got it. Love it. You know, one of the, you mentioned looking at all of the data, I just had a COO alliance call this morning with a bunch of our CEO alliance members. And one of them mentioned they call it metrics that matter. I was like, oh fuck, that's so good. Like she said, at the leadership team, they only look at the metrics that matter because there's, you know, a thousand metrics we could be looking at, right for Every different. You know, we could have 30 marketing metrics and 20 on customer service. So how do you decide for the SMB team? What are the metrics that matter for each of the different business areas that you're running and for the operation as a whole?

So, you know, one thing we realized we were making a mistake in is when it came to like the goal setting, like in terms of like the boulders, which is the rocks in the US we were taking our big vision, you know, from Bill and the end of the year plans, and we were making sure they aligned to that. But we really weren't doing that with KPIs. We're kind of just. People are kind of picking KPIs and departments and we're allowing managers to pick. And we realized, wait a second, we have our guiding light numbers, which for us is net new ARR take, you know, new sales plus upgrades minus lost revenue. That's our net new number. And that's kind of our guideline, lets us know how we're doing overall. Are we bringing in new sales? Are we retaining clients? So what we, we just redid actually every KPI. Every person in our company has three KPI's that they're bonus on every quarter. And we just reset everyone's and we did it from that top metric down, right. So that they all leveled up to that guiding light number. Because our goal is we'd rather have fewer numbers that go deeper. So for instance, like renewal rate, we track renewal rate in six different ways. Right. Because we'd rather really know everything about renewal rate than have 20 other different numbers that we could be tracking. Said that really don't tell us anything. So we try to simplify it. And we were definitely guilty in the past of having way too many numbers. But this is kind of what I've been taking on as my job is me and Bill, we're constantly trying to work on the business and figure out, you know, where can we get better.

I almost get the feeling like with. With your growth, like you said, that one quarter is like a new year, that you'll probably have renewals nailed in the next one or two quarters. You'll have all the right systems and processes. You'll have the whole methodologies. It'll all be working. Will you then come up with a couple of additional metrics that matter and switch off of a focus? Does that kind of happen with SMD as well?

Yeah, each quarter we reevaluate here that, you know, as part of our quarterly plan. Okay, here are the metrics that we've been tracking. Do they still make sense based on our priorities that we're choosing or based on our goals for this next quarter? Are there any other KPIs that we're not tracking that are more important than these ones and then those might actually be substituted in for the ones that get bonused?

Yeah, it makes sense. You, you mentioned your, you know, the third business that you kind of acquired is this attorney assist. What's that business do? What's the core focus of that business?

Yeah, attorney assistant. So it's a virtual assistant business. And right now we hire virtual assistants for the law firm owners mainly focused around intake, which is sales. So they call sales in a law firm they can also double as reception. And then there's another type of assistant that kind of does what they call matter management. So maybe medical record retrieval and other administrative tasks that will help. The law firm owners are scaling. You know, it's particularly important for a, a solopreneur or somebody who only has one or two staff members trying to get to that next level. They can't necessarily afford a full time staff in house and so they can hire our team. The other side of it is we have law firms that we're bringing a lot of leads to, but if they don't have a great intake system or somebody to actually close those leads, they're not capturing the revenue they should be. And so they're not able to scale at the rate they should.

I like it. It makes a lot of sense. All right, let's talk about you for a second. So you mentioned that you and I met originally when you wanted to join the CEO alliance. And I said you weren't quite ready. And then all of a sudden, you know, you've scaled, you've grown in your career. You are ready. You're now you've been a member for over a year. What do you think? Or not, what do you think? But what have you done to grow your capacity, your skill sets, to be a second in command, especially of a company that's growing this quickly and so strong?

Yeah, you know, I don't know if you can ever be fully prepared if you've never had that experience before. I think I've heard you even talk about that where it's, you know, you kind of learn as you go to some degree. But everyone in our company is a voracious learner. I mean we. Another core value is growth is a minimum requirement. Right. So we are always learning and growing. We obviously we are a coaching business and we believe that you should also have a coaching. If you're in the coaching business. So you're our coach. Bill is a part of other masterminds. Andy, who's the other owner, is also a part of multiple masterminds. I'm in the CEO alliance, obviously, and I also do other things to learn, whether it's through podcast, speaking with other CEOs, just, you know, a couple of individuals I met in the CEO alliance that I've become close with, and we've just met offline and shared wins and struggles and what's working and not working and then many books. And I think one of the things that I took away from our coaching sessions is reading books that you know are pertaining to what you're working on at the moment. So I try to stick to that rule because otherwise you're going to forget certain things, you know, when you actually need it. So that's really been helpful.

Yeah. Where that really came from for me was years ago, I was coaching a client based in Switzerland, and he said, you know, there's an inordinate number of business books that I'm supposed to read. You know, if. If we go out and listen to all of our friends on social Media, we get 10 a day that we should be reading. And then if we ask people for opinions on what to read, God forbid there's a hundred now we should read. And, you know, then we listen to a podcast, and every podcast mentions another book that we're supposed to read. And Sebastian's lesson was, I take a look at the core projects that I'm working on over the next quarter, and I try to read books or listen to podcasts that the content will help me on those three projects that I'm working on, it just made so much sense versus, you know, reading a book about strategy. If you don't have a strategy meeting coming up, why are you worried about strategy right now? Or why worried about meetings if you don't. If your meetings aren't broken? So I think that's really smart to tailor your learning around that stuff as well. How about more specific on. Are there specific areas that you used to be or feel that you were more broken in that you've worked on? Are there areas of you as a leader that you focused on getting better at that maybe you felt either insecure about or worried about before?

I. I think two things where I've grown more. One is what we call minimum viable product. And I think this was something that Bill has actually helped me with, which, you know, I'm. I Can be a fact finder. I can be a quick start at times, but I can also be a fact finder. And, you know, I'm an eight. I believe in the fact finder. So on the Colby scale, so it's, you know, you can get that paralysis by analysis type. Right? And when you're in this type of company and this fast growth, you don't have time to figure it out and get it perfect. So we always say done is better than perfect, and we want to get, like, 80% out the door. So I've gotten more okay with, I guess, being comfortable with that concept and realizing that we're going to figure it out as we go and we'll make it better later. And the other component is I really wanted to grow as a leader, and I. I wanted to be able to be there as. As somebody who could coach and grow our leadership team. That was like, I always get joy out of growing others. And so I really have been trying to step back from either doing or telling them what to do and. And trying to coach them there through questions and just helping in situations. Right. If I. Obviously, if I need to make a decision for them, I can, but I help them kind of figure out the process or figure out their own solutions if they're stuck. And that's helped me because then I'm able to actually delegate things off my plate once they really have that skill developed.

I like it. All right, I want to ask a question about Bill for a second. So Bill is amazing. Love him. Wonderful guy, ridiculously smart, hyper focused, but, dude, he is, like, crazy manic energy wrapped up in massive add. He is all over the place.

Oh, yeah.

How do you. How do you deal with that? As a. As a COO who tends to be more systems focused and process focused, how do you deal with the crazy, frenetic, massive energy of that kind of a leader?

You should see him in the office just riding around his electric scooter going crazy because he's just bored. No, I think, you know, yeah, he's a mile a minute. And, you know, it was refreshing. It was fun to come in and having somebody that I truly had to hold back. Right. Because he wanted to do a million things. And, you know, the communication piece, it was. It was tough because when I first joined, he would go directly to some of the managers. If he had an idea, he'd go to the managers and the different departments. Hey, we should do that. We should be doing. And I had to go to him and, you know, really put my foot down a Couple times until it set in where it's like, hey, you can't do that anymore. Like, that's what I'm here for. You got to come to me. Because you're confusing people. Because now they don't understand if you're just ideating or if you're actually giving a direction. And people, then they come to me like, well, am I supposed to start this? And I'm like, I don't know, I don't even know what you're talking about. So we really had to get that system where, you know, hey, look, the process needs to be. You bring these to me. I try to limit it to mainly just the same pages. So he does a good, he's done a great job at evolving as a CEO and especially for being so young. And now he documents these throughout the week and tries to limit them to there unless it's something urgent. And then for me, you know, I will take all those ideas. I'll, I'll ask, start asking a few questions. And usually if it's just a spur of the moment thing he's not really caring about, he'll give up quickly and I'll be like, okay, nevermind, let's just move on. If he's setting it a little bit, he'll push back and be stubborn. And so I'll go, okay, okay. And then I'll know when to kind of back off. And then I just let it sit and marinate for a day or two and then if he comes back to me again, then I know he's for real. And so that's when I'll start taking it seriously. And all right, let's sit down and start strategizing and talking about what, you know, if we need to move anything off our plates, what this, where we place or is this going to become a priority, et cetera.

I love that you just let it sit for a day or so and then see what happens with it too. It's amazing. All right, I want to go Back to the 2122 year old Brandon Bowers and give him some advice. What advice would you give yourself, you know, at 21 or 22 that you know to be true today, but you wish you'd known back then.

Definitely the minimum viable product. I wish I had really gotten comfortable with that. I, you know, my whole life, I think when you're younger and you're, you're good at certain things and, you know, I've learned that I'm definitely ocd and I think that so I kind of prided Myself on being the perfectionist. Right. But it definitely hindered me in certain areas and I think I could have advanced faster if I had understood that concept at an early age. The other thing is, you know, I think you're a proponent as well for assessments like Colby and predictive index and whatnot. And I wish I had really understood that and taken one of those earlier. Not one that was just geared around. I think when you're in college and some of the younger ones, it's more so focused on, oh, here's the career you should have or here's what you should be. That's a component, but it's really understanding what I'm great at, what are my tendencies, what's going to get in my way of success and not a job, but what are the roles, like responsibilities of the things that I'm going to enjoy doing and be really good at. Right. Because we're always trying to get to that quadrant where it's like the things you're great at and the things you love doing. And I was in sales for many years and, you know, I think I considered myself an extrovert. And I would get tired, though, of doing like, the same type of sales process over and over. And I was tired of meeting with clients. And I didn't understand until I really understood my predictive index type assessment that I'm actually slightly introverted and I'll pull that up to be successful because I want to win so I can do it. And everyone thinks I'm an extrovert. And so I was successful for many years, but it was draining my energy. At the end of the day, I come home and I just had to sit in a dark room for a while to get my energy back. So I feel like I'm now in the role that I was meant for.

I do, too. Something about personality profiles, it's interesting. I don't think there's one personality profile that is right. I think the idea is to get your leadership team to do a personality profile one year and learn about each other, and then a year from now, do another personality profile, a different one, and learn more about each other, and then do another one in the third year. Like, keep learning about each other and ourselves, and I think that's what's helped us scale.

Agreed.

Brandon Bowers, the EVP of Operations and Integrator for the SMB team. Thanks very much for sharing with us on the Second Command podcast.

Thank you, Cameron.

It puts a monetary value on something oftentimes that's valued.

There are.

There's a higher order value. So people are willing to make an economic payoff on something that they see as being like, oh, well, there's these other things I value more. So what are those other things? Well, typically, they're about, like, people pursuing the fullest version of themselves.