Why Leadership Teams Fail To Change (And How To Fix It)

AI won't replace most leadership jobs, but it will expose those who are not pulling their weight by adding real value. And if they don't know how to use AI, they are going to fall. There's too many people spending hours trying to put the data together just to put into a report, valuable that it is, and it's right to do. We can automate that, saving a leader probably 2 or 3 or 4 hours a week. Now all you need is somebody to oversee the agent that produces that for you and to tick off and validate.

Yeah.

But I don't need lots of humans to do that. That is saving so many man-hours.

At a leadership team level, I'm intrigued. Are you working with some clients at the minute on some experiments where you are making the leaders more efficient?

The first thing is— hi, I'm Gerry Toombs. I'm founder, and I scaled a company called Clearvision from effectively a garage startup to a tech consultancy company with about 100 people across the UK and USA. We supported development teams, IT teams, mostly using Atlassian and GitHub and GitLab tools. We hit about $77 million in annual revenue before we became acquired about 3 years ago. Since then, I've shifted gears. I'm now a coach. I'm an investor in a number of other businesses who I also occasionally mentor. And I also have founded a brand new business called Agentimize. And AgendaWise, very quickly, is all about 3 parts. It's about educating leadership teams. It's about enabling the business after the education. And it's about something we call embedding agents into the leadership team. And if that sounds interesting, effectively, this is a bit like taking you, Dom, taking your expertise, taking all your expertise and knowledge and experience, putting that into an agent, and then sitting that alongside the CEO or the CFO, the CMO. And the last part of it is over the top of everything, we then wrap an operating system, if you like, all run by AI such that it helps. And I should always say, it's not there to replace. We believe it's there to assist because the people are still accountable, responsible, but it assists the business to run. But, uh, you know, we can get AI agents to do anything nowadays, but that's the difference. It's about having a subject matter expert like you coaching an agent day in, day out for your clients.

Okay. Very good. Um, congratulations on your, uh, your growth and your exit. That was fab.

Well done. Yeah. Thank you. It was 25 years from starting to last, uh, to the last day.

Yeah. Very good. So before we dive into some of that and unpick some of that, love to understand what things you think other people might think you're mad to believe or things that you think other people are mental to believe. What are some of those top things that make you stand out from the crowd?

There's quite a few things that I could go through that I've learned over that 25 years of running Clearvision. But I think some of the things I'm quite keen to get across now is is business is going to be very different now and going forward. So historically, we've had businesses have operated quite in a similar way, perhaps for the last 100-odd years. But I think it's quite interesting to look at what's going to be controversial about going forward. Uh-huh. Okay. So I think maybe typical businesses claim that they are too busy today to take advantage of AI. And I think that is crazy. And I think people are slightly scared at the leadership level, right? So that's the first thing. And I'm seeing that. That's why we have the educate part.

Okay.

Second thing, the UK productivity crisis won't be solved by working harder. You know, AI is about Less manual input and being smarter with AI. Third thing, too many leadership teams are bloated and possibly ineffective and they work in silos. And so again, when we look at the age groups of up-and-coming potential leaders and the generation, Especially in the AI world. Well, with the average age, I think we're gonna be looking at the millennials being more relevant in the new AI era.

Yes.

But yeah, so it's about having very effective leadership teams and it's gonna be controversial about the right age of those and coming into the leadership teams.

Okay.

And AI won't replace most leadership jobs, but it will expose those who are not either pulling their weight or don't know how to use AI again. Okay.

And do you think that's true across the board? So, well, we can dig into that. Go on. And what's the last one?

Managers will manage a hybrid of both humans and AI agents. It would look very different. At the moment, managers always manage humans below them.

Yes.

But we will literally see roles disappearing, replaced by agents. And those managers, it won't be IT teams that look after the tech. That's a different part of the solution. It'll be managers who historically had Fred, John, or Julie doing an activity, who now has an AI agent performing elements of that role. So a manager's role will look very different. They look after some humans and they're gonna look after a mixture of AI agents. Again, very important, those managers will be accountable and responsible for the output of those agents, but it will just look different.

I'm gonna start there because—

Okay.

I feel, well, because manager is one of those words where I just go, I can't.

I use that word because most people understand actually what it means.

Yeah, no, actually. And so here's, I'm going to sort of flip this round on you and see whether it still works, right? Which is, if you think the best managers aren't actually managing, they're coaching, right? And so, you know, and the manager's job is to make themselves redundant and drive succession. Now, the managing agents thing does feel like I'm being directive. There's no— like, the managing agents feels like an old-school manager.

Yeah.

And not what I would expect in terms of managing human resources in 2026, which is as a coach, you know, making sure that you build succession and you make yourself redundant, particularly in a fast-growing business, because otherwise you're not able to help us scale. You become part of the problem. And that feels at odds with managing the agents, which feels like an old-school job.

Well, I think this is what we're going to have to face. So when you look at the different age groups, What are we? We are Gen X, I think is the predominant age group, 45 to 60 at the leadership level and perhaps some of them lower or next management level down. The way this is going to change, and so millennials, Gen Y, which I think are like the 29 to 44 years of age, they have the expertise to be technical. They have some of the management skills that we've seen how to run businesses. And it's that age group, which I think is gonna have more effect. Forget the ones that are just coming into this AI world as youngsters. Their time is a long way off. But you are right that traditionally, humans, knowledge workers, managers have been here and we manage people. We do their one-to-ones and we get to productivity and we challenge people. As to why they're not being productive or there are better ways of doing things. But that's not what agents are gonna be like. They can think for themselves because we are gonna coach them and they are gonna perform something very— and they don't go sick and they don't need one-to-ones. So lots of things are gonna change.

And so where, what's a good example? Do you have a good example of where you've got somebody you're working with or have worked with where they've got that mix live today, or is this—

I can give you an example of where effectively we've helped a company save from recruiting what was a scarce resource and therefore got better productivity. So we're all probably familiar with having to go to planning offices if we want to extend our house or build a new house, or if a supermarket's gonna be constructed somewhere. And those planning officers are actually very hard to come by, the people with the skills to understand how to construct a planning document and submit it to the councils.

Yeah.

Well, if you've got the last 50 examples of successful and some, maybe some failure, and you feed that into an AI agent, And all of this used to be done manually. You know, the green pastures, where you can build, what you can't build, floodplains. There's documents everywhere. And to put that proposal together to hand over to the council is a very manual process. So now all you need is somebody to oversee the agent that produces that for you and to tick off and validate As I always say, accountable and responsible at the end of it. But I don't need lots of humans to do that. That is saving so many man hours, and the accuracy can be improved every time because again, you feed the last document in, you give it a reward. It's like rewarding a dog. If you make it sit and you give it a treat, it remembers it next time, and that's what it does.

And then you might be in a position that you are putting together a planning application that hasn't that you feel won't succeed or isn't going to tick. And so then you've got the human doing that. How do I create an argument for something which is new as opposed to just ticking the box on stuff? We know we're going to get planning permission for the extension. The plan just needs to get drawn up, put together, put in, submitted, tick.

Correct.

I get that. And then you say to the human, right, do the more interesting thing, which is now we want to We want to build a block of flats and there's no precedent for this. So how are we going to sell this to the council?

Yeah, it's the typical delegate to elevate. We all have that quadrant. There are things that we love doing, and there are things that we don't necessarily love doing and we're not necessarily good at. And there are things we just hate doing and are rubbish at. Well, we absolutely should be delegating that bottom section to AI. Why would we want to do things that we're not good at and we don't enjoy doing? Perfect. And that's part of our conversations that we always have with leadership teams. That's the starting point. And we don't actually talk about ever scaling down a company in terms of the resources. We think companies that are introducing AI should grow into their skin. So delegate to AI the things that people don't wanna do, giving them the opportunity to elevate themselves into far more interesting things. Yeah, which will have an effect on recruitment.

I had, uh, I was chatting to Anakin from Jotform a couple of episodes ago, and, and, you know, they, they had, uh, massively transformed their customer responsiveness by putting in, uh, a customer service agent at the front end.

Yes.

Um, and, and they'd also realized, interestingly, in teaching the customer service agent, because out of the box he could answer about 25% of the first-line questions First time.

Yeah.

And they realized that that meant that their human onboarding had always been rubbish because if they hired somebody to be on the frontline in the past, the human could not have been able to access more than 25% of the knowledge to answer the first question. So now they've got it to 75%, but until they put the AI in, they didn't realize how crap their documentation was.

Yeah. Well, look, we're all impatient. We all expect our Amazon orders to arrive tomorrow. And when we go searching for information, and we're going to a support site of some kind, it's very impressive now with AI, if you do it right, where it can go search your history much quicker than a human could ever do, especially some of these very large complex companies with lots of products. And you can get the data. Retrieve it. Obviously, you've got to validate the data in the first place, but let's assume you do that. It's much quicker and far more reliable than a human can be.

There are countless examples where in the past I would know, I don't know, I've sent Gerry Toombs an email. I know I've sent Gerry Toombs an email. I can't remember what it was called. I don't know when I did it.

Can't find it.

I can't find it. You know, it might be— now I just, I've got Gmail plugged into GPT or Claude or Manus or whatever. Or all of them. And I just go, there's an email. I think I sent it to Jerry Toombs. I think it's about this. Go and find it. Go and make a cup of tea, come back and it's done. It's there.

But this is why we have this educate part, Dom. Are you at all surprised at how many leadership levels, how many people at leadership level don't even understand that is available?

What I've just said? No, no. What you've just said. Let me ask you, and let me dig into some of this before we do that.

That's fine.

You said companies say they're too busy for AI, and you don't think that's true. They're not even telling you the truth. They're terrified. And I think that might be connected to leadership teams are— when you mentioned about leadership teams being too big, you said there was this, you think there's potentially an age gap. So do you think there are, I mean, are some people terrified and therefore they're like, la, la, la, la, la?

It's a mixture, I think, from what we've seen. It is, some are terrified. So what we are seeing is leadership teams and A-star players and people with the employees, are looking up at the management team and saying, God, I hope these guys know what they're doing with AI. And the leadership teams are looking down thinking, Christ, I hope they don't ask me too many complex questions about AI. And that's where we're standing at the moment. And reality is, there are more A-players in a business who know more about what to do with AI, and they're doing more stuff at home than they are in the business, partly for a couple of reasons.

Yes.

Some of the tech in the companies is worse than what I can get at home. So that's one of the problems. So they're becoming educated externally using their own tools. And of course, sometimes then they're taking data because there's no policy. That's a different problem altogether again. But let's stick in with, it is some leadership teams, managers, again, sorry, leaders of businesses, because they are the dominant factor, are ruling the roost, and they don't understand enough. And some of them are just very naive about what actually AI can do. And I think the worst thing might be is a few of them have tried it and then got a negative result because they were not very good at prompting, didn't know how to use the tool, and gave up quickly. And they said, this AI stuff is rubbish. Yeah.

Do you know, I was talking to somebody earlier and I said, I'm as excited as I was when I joined Rackspace in 2001. Right. We had, I don't know, what do we have? 50 servers. We had 50 customers. We had basically no turnover. We had a couple of employees and a million people in the UK were online.

Right.

And then people would say, Dom, I don't understand. Why do I need a website? And I'm like, you are not my customer. I'm going to go and talk to somebody who needs one. And who wants one, and I'm going to build, we're going to host it for them. And so I was doing some work, I was doing, went to speak to a group of business owners recently. And I went to talk to them about recruitment because it's a perennial issue. And so to prep for it, what I'd done is a couple of months ago, I'd built a series of GPTs, you know, how to build a scorecard, how to write a job ad.

Oh yeah.

How to screen the CVs, how to screen the videos if you're using video, how to write interview questions. And I'll put a, like if somebody wants these things, I'll put a link to this in the show notes and to a Google Doc and you can have a play with them and give me some feedback. But what I'd done is because that meant there was a lot of cutting and pasting, I thought, well, let me build an app instead. So I reverse engineered all the logic and I built an app.

Okay.

And so I showed it to them in this app that I'd built. And people would, it's like I was from the future all over again, right? And because they've, as you say, they say, oh, I've thought of, or I think I know what this is. I mean, that's not even agentic. That's just, I've built an app.

Again, we got to remember, so we talk about age groups and I think it's probably still, I haven't got data that supports this. I would like to go and check it. But we talk about maybe the average age group of the leadership team. I think they're probably still Above 45. Yes.

All these guys would've been in that.

Yeah.

All these guys would've been in that space.

And let's face it, the older—

And none of them were tech firms.

Right. And that's, yes. Again, if you look at these, talk about the planning office, these guys are not techies. Sometimes you're lucky if they've got a spreadsheet that's working properly. And there are so many companies still behind. They are taking some piece of data out here, they're manipulating it in a spreadsheet, they're copying it to and Julie, and then they're going to— oh, it's a nightmare. But the average age of a leadership team is probably still 45, not necessarily very technical. And I think that's different with the millennials, that where their average age group, 29 to 41, they come through a tech world.

Yeah.

And they're coming into the management, and those individuals, are gonna be great, I think, at managing, as I say, these mixture of humans and agents because they're just at that prime. They've had exposure to businesses, how they operate, and we're gonna come into this new world and I think they're gonna adapt very well. But at the moment, with the average age 45 above, there is this reluctance and in the SME space, Lots of businesses say, so busy, or, you know, I've just got to find my next client. I've just got to do this, whatever it is. Like, they're so busy on that and they're not prepared to realize, or they just don't realize how AI can just make their lives so much simpler.

And their competitor is gonna do it.

Yeah.

And then that next customer's not gonna be there.

Once that competitor's on that curve, it's just exponential.

Well, you can't catch up.

And you won't catch up. No, you won't catch up.

No way. The leadership teams are too big. You don't think AI is going to take leadership team jobs, but it's going to make fewer people more Um, fewer people, more productive. And so at a leadership team level, I'm intrigued, what, what are the things— are you, are you working with some clients at the minute on some experiments where you are making the leaders more efficient? Which is different to make it— which is different to like the planning office thing is like doing the work of a pla— of a planner.

Yes. Whereas leadership teams at a different level, like, so what, what are some of the things that The first thing is, how can a leadership team deciding on next year and their strategy, how can you set a 1-year plan, a 2-year plan, ignoring the potential of AI if you don't understand what it can do?

Right.

So, that's just at a design and planning level. If you don't understand it, you can't cater for it, and you'll be maybe allocating investments incorrectly. So that's at the fundamental level. Then there is, again, we talk about hiring, recruiting people. They'll be going ahead thinking that, okay, well, you know, to expand, and you've done this exercise when you were our coach, you want to expand and you want to add 30 people to your team. Well, that's not just expanding that department. You've got to hire HR people to do that. You've got to hire additional finance people to manage All right? So, you know, those hires have an exponential effect on the business. Once again, you know, without— it's really important when you look at hiring people, and we were doing this in Clearvision days, but we didn't have AI. But when you're hiring people to do the scorecard and to do a job description and to look at what's in the scorecard and job description to think, oh, do you know what? Those 2 things, 3 things that were in that new potential hire scorecard, they can be done by AI. Oh, I don't need 3 of them now. So, it's that process of making sure. This is why the processes of businesses are gonna change. And I just don't think people at the leadership level are ready for some of that. And we all have to do, by the way, again, good companies following something like EOS or scaling up, will come to a weekly management report and they'll have their data, whether it be sales data, marketing data, and so on. There's too many people spending hours trying to put the data together just to put into a report, valuable that it is and it's right to do. But we can automate that, saving a leader probably 2 or 3 or 4 hours a week.

Yes.

What could I do with 2 or 3 hours more? A lot more.

Well, so let me shift gears out of this and dive into your exit journey. So what were, looking back now, what were the things that only you— what were the things that were really high leverage for you? What were the things that only the founder CEO should be doing?

And how did you create space to So I think whilst you are growing, number one is I think leaders, founders, leaders, first, if you can get your values correct, truly not just put them on the wall and put them in the cupboard and all the rest of it, but if you can truly live them, then that is a massive advantage because when it comes to recruitment, I started to not be involved in recruitment probably about 2 years before the sale. And that was before a different piece of advice because I had to make myself invisible in the company so that I wasn't part of the acquisition unless so. But I, for many, many years—

Sorry, because I know the answer to this question, Did you get most of your money paid upfront?

I got 98% of my money paid upfront because somebody, thank you, Dom, gave me some great advice, which is to make myself completely disposable and go on a journey such that, uh, when it comes to the acquiring company saying, okay, so Jerry, we need you to stay. And I can say no. Every part of my responsibility is delegated out. I don't do anything. And that's true to say within the last 6 months of running the company before we actually did the deal, I wasn't doing anything. And that's exactly, it feels weird, but that's exactly the right thing to do.

So go back to the recruitment thing. What was the point of leverage for you around recruitment then?

Well, I think it's really important. If you hire a person who then goes on to interview other people, and that first person that you hired is just 10 degrees out from your values, from how you'd normally hire, how you'd normally interview, yeah, it gets— you miss the moon. All right? So I had no problems in being involved. I thought that that was— people might say, well, surely you trust your managers, and surely that's something you should delegate. And to be honest, I always found that very difficult as a counterargument. I agreed with it, but I also felt, oh, you know, letting go of that most valuable thing because those hires are the ones that grow the business.

Yeah.

So long as you delegate and so long as you allow them to prosper and you treat them well and the rest of it. But so I stayed involved in recruitment. It got less and less, but as I got closer to the acquisition, it got less and less. But that was probably the trigger.

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Yeah.

And for which there was no apparent— and this was a really interesting sort of dichotomy in the team. So the team are running BAU, You're inventing 20 new things, which is future revenue streams. And the team were like, well, what's the ROI? You're like, why can't we have that money? There are things here. And so maybe we could have a quick chat about how you drove that innovation and how you manage that conflict in the team.

Yeah. So my leadership team used to hate me going on holiday because it allowed me to switch off from the everyday and switch into complete innovation mode. And I would throw them emails all the way through my vacation, and they literally would hate me going away. They dreaded it because I'd have another idea, and then I would be challenging them on something as to why it wasn't efficient. Do you know what? I've almost forgotten what your question was. Go on.

Well, it was You had to own innovation because you tried to delegate innovation to other people.

Yes.

And that hadn't worked. And so, you took back control of innovation and resource allocation into those projects and sort of you had a ring-fenced team so that they could carry on with the day-to-day and you would stop talking to them about the new ideas. You had a team of people.

Yeah. And honestly, it was a challenge even when I took it back and I ran the innovation team. Because there is such a thing, and I think it's right now I'm back at the startup mode, which is to focus, be niche. But I do believe that companies should never stop innovating because I think that's quite dangerous because if you're not careful, the market, as we will see, those that have been very solid companies will get taken over by new startups. So I think it's really important to have that thread that runs through a business that's always constantly thinking about innovating. But I did, it was probably one of the hardest things within the company, which is to get a brand new idea and get it off the ground when there were so many other things in the business that were actually quite successful.

Yeah.

And what is it? The video, Netflix and—

Well, it's Netflix. It was their video streaming and their CD business.

That's right. And they kind of came together and realized, well, blimey, the old business is just going to squash us. So they had to separate. And I just sympathize with that. It is never easy in an existing business that's having success, bringing another idea when the others are bringing money in, But when, as a visionary, you can see there's something that you've got to change or something better around the corner. I can't pretend I had great success at it. I don't think I had the best success.

But you had tried to delegate that and the delegating of that, just you delegated it to— I work with Taki Moore and he has this great phrase. There's either makers and managers. And you're a maker and you'd sort of delegated it to managers and then they—

Well, we did the Netflix thing. We spun up something completely separate and put it outside, even in a different building with different people and they reported. Never did we have to cross the streams. And that had success, but that was the only way. When we tried to mix people with 2 roles, doing their old job and do something new, Didn't work.

I think you— I think that— I think that resource allocation coming together at the CEO level and then splitting the 2 things and BAU and innovation are set. And like over here, you're still going to do small innovations on the BAU, but if you're going to do a new product, then you've got, you know, new lines, you've got to— you've got to have some isolation. Certainly that's my experience from when we built the Windows hosting, the Windows hosting inside Rackspace. We took 100 people and put them in a Put them in a different building and said, build the world's best Windows hosting business. And that's what they did.

As long as you give them budget, autonomy, a good direction to operate in, still got to have some numbers against it, but don't let that affect the original business.

And what, in terms of the leadership team over, certainly over the last few years as you were scaling, Did all of your leaders make the leap? Did you have to replace any along the way?

And what— Elements of replace, but also, so the journey looked like very typical, I think. Founder didn't want to give up control, didn't understand why in the beginning part of the journey, wondered why it wasn't scaling. Until you get some external expertise, some coaching that helps you realize you can't do it all, and you are the bottleneck, by the way, Mr. Founder. And when that realization comes through, and people, the strange thing is other people, you know, oh, this almost comes down to the trust thing, which I'm of great avid of, you know, 5 Dysfunctions of Team Trust. So clearly, I hadn't built up enough trust because people were kind of telling me, but in a soft tone, which means they may be scared of me, which is a deficiency in myself. But eventually, and you learn this, you go on a journey, you learn this. But as a founder, you start off and then your coach, for some reason, you listen to your coach and the coach says exactly the same thing as some of your employees or senior people. And you think, okay, yeah, I am the bottleneck. And when you realize that, great. It's like, oh my God, I wish I'd done this years ago. You get maybe the first person is your ops person. You know, I'm the visionary and then you get an integrator. Or the COO, depending on what title you like to use. But I realized that I'm great at visionary, I'm great at coming up with ideas, but my execution of them is not great. It's a bit like, so I built my house, you know, Dom, I've built a house. Catherine will still tell me, you got light switches hanging off the wall, you never finished the building. And that's me, that's typical of me. So, We get our first, the operations person was first, then we realized finance is important. We grew our team, we used the scaling up methodologies and approaches, run an L10. We eventually got up to, at our maximum number of leadership members, I think we got to at one point actually 8 people. And 8 is too many. I am gonna say that now.

Yeah.

many too many, but it is too many. We were eventually running when we sold at 6. Yeah. And that was a good number. I don't think, although these are very fine numbers, I don't think I would go above 7. 7, I think would have—

Was 6 include you or was it 6 plus you?

It was 6 including me.

Okay. So that you had 5, basically you had 5 people running the company and you stepping, you to one side.

Okay.

They're good numbers. Like the decisions get made, the meetings are quicker. Everybody can hold each other accountable. You can build trust.

And you said, did we survive with the same people?

Yeah.

So we lost—

yeah, you lost a few.

Pretty much we had the 6 that we ended up with, the 5 plus myself, the 5 of us, they were, 5 of them were all the way through the whole journey. The up and down of 2 or 3 or 2, effectively they changed it a little bit, but ultimately they didn't make the journey.

Yeah.

And I think that was one of the hardest things. We talk about, you know, hiring carefully and removing people promptly, all right? And we all hang on to people far too long. And when it's at the leadership level and you build up Not friend. I always strike a very careful balance between a friendship, you know, in your business and being your best friend versus a colleague. So they are colleagues, all right? And it's very dangerous to try and make it more than that because you have, it's difficult to have a tough conversation when they're more than just a colleague. You can have great colleague relationships, but don't cross the boundary and make them a good friend, right? Because it then is impossible to have those really hard conversations. So, but again, great coaching advice we had. It's not down to me as the founder leader. It was down to the group to hold each other accountable. And it's down to the leaders. To either help the individual that's not pulling their weight or help us all come to the conclusion, difficult it might be, somebody has to go. And again, leaders often think, oh, it's my job to do it. I don't want to do it. No, in actual fact, I think that's a measure of the success of the leadership team, whether they can step up and help the person that has to give the message. It shouldn't be one person's job to do it. I think it's a leadership team and it's called a leadership team so that we're helping each other.

Look, to me, that's the whole transition from playing basketball where you're the pivotal player on the field to playing football where you get off the field and the team are playing. You might be spectating, you might have coached them, but they've got to do it all without you.

Again, the strange thing is it doesn't matter what role. When somebody doesn't fit in, you're doing them a favor to help them go and find somewhere else, like a jigsaw puzzle piece. The moment you're trying to force it into a wrong shape, let's go and find a puzzle where they fit perfectly, and they will just fly when they do. And not every company is right for every other person.

The one other thing that We were chatting before we were recording that I remember when I met you, you told me about this phrase, tour of duty. And at the point where you mentioned it to me, I hadn't come across it before. Subsequently, I've read the book. I think it's Advantage, Chris Yeo and Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn.

That's right.

But you had implemented that in your business, which I thought was fab because it's the Sort of adult way to hire and discuss.

So it works very well with A-players because A-players are often pushing the business and the leaders to do more. And that's how you kind of, one of the things that, you know, is a good A-player. And the idea is, first of all, you know, you've gotta have other things in place, monthly, sorry, monthly one-to-ones and, you know, just be a good practical company and Maybe we'll talk about Times 100 Best Employer in a second. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the tour of duty, for those that have never come across it, goes back to the principles of, you know, in the army, what we do is we agree we're going to take a bunch of people and we're going to go on a tour. And we have just agreements, adult mature agreements. So, the company has an agreement with the employee That you will do these kind of things and we will do these kind of things. And if we achieve this, here's the compensation. It doesn't always have to be, by the way, financial compensation. It can be recognition in a variety of ways or moving sideways, whatever. And that's the beautiful thing about when you read the tour of duty, it's not always about finance. But we are setting expectations on both sides of the ladder so that we're both climbing and we are achieving things. And you just keep in very regular contact and you just tick, done that? Yes. And again, the devil's in the detail on the definition of done. All too often we write things which are a bit sloppy. But when we are clear, nobody's upset. Quite the opposite. We're all happy about it.

Well, and then instead of saying it 3 years, it's a secret. The employee's got this secret desire to move on after 2 years or 3 years. It's not a secret. You know they're moving on. So, you can do the succession planning, or maybe they've achieved what they wanted to achieve and you can keep them for another tour of duty. It's just—

We had many tour of duties go into the next tour of duty as well. And that is, by the way, yes, you're right in reminding me. That's part of the important thing about a tour of duty, which is, again, let's just have adult conversations and agree that when we come close to the end of the tour of duty, this is what it looks like as we get close to it. And if you have had enough and you want to go and expand your career somewhere else, let's just have that. But let's have that conversation 2 months before you want to leave. Don't tell me, I think I've used the expression with you, the little white envelope. And most leaders or managers will know the little white envelope on the desk and it says, sorry, but I'm resigning. And then we go as businesses into, oh, panic mode. Oh God, I've got a month to find somebody, cross-train.

Yeah.

That tour of duty does away with all of that. It's amazing, folks. It's so obvious.

Sunday Times Best Place to Work.

Yes. So we— thank you for that. I think actually above everything, I am more proud of that than growing a business and selling it, far more proud because we got to— we did it the first year, we did 2 years build up to it. And we did it for about 4 years. It might be 5. I can't remember now. 4 years, because I know COVID got in the way somewhere. So, it depends on how you count it. But we got first, the first time we entered, we got to position 96. We gradually improved. Remember, this is Times 100 Best Employers. 96.

Yeah, we said 96.

But I was proud even of that. I had an ambition as a measure of a way of measuring success. it's not about counting pounds, you know, how many, how much profit you make, whatever. I wanted to build something that ideally had a legacy and people were proud to be part of. And yeah, position 96, I can't remember the X ones, but they gradually improved. And on our last year of acquisition, we got to position 1. Wow. And do you know, do you know the worst thing is, the worst thing, Is we go to this event where it's kept very secret and we have, we, you know, hired a table. We're all sat around and getting to the venue. I said to my wife, I said, do you know what? I've got one of my migraines coming on. So I sit down at the table, I started to eat and my migraine is just throbbing away. So I go, I go to the hotel. I missed everything. There's no pictures of me in the Times 100, position 1. My wife, all the other leaders are there, but not me.

That's fun. I never got to number 1. I got to say we were the best tech firm in the country, but I never got to number 1. Well done. That's absolutely fab.

It was good. It actually, I have full, I think it's fantastic because what it does is it really pushes you And they give lots of suggestions about how to improve your business, lots of data and lots of feedback. And had we not done that, we wouldn't have been the better company for it. So it's not just a tick in the box. They really do provide you with lots of good information.

They do. And I say to people all the time, like Mike over in the Philippines has just won HR Asia's award 5th time in a row. And so, wow, they instead of getting the silver one, he's got a gold one because they call it getting the Grand Slam if you do win it 5 years on the trot. But, but you know, when I said to him, you should enter, he's like, oh yeah, but we're not very good, we should wait. And I hear that all the time. I'm like, no, like even if you don't get in the top 100 and you do the program, you're going to get some feedback from the outside to benchmark you that you don't have. And so it's not about winning the award, it's about getting the feedback. It's about always seeking criticism. Because you want to get better. But it's a bit addictive, isn't it?

It is. It is. But it's addictive because actually you start to see results. You see longevity of service. We had A-players staying for a long time.

Well, and I think—

When there was plenty of temptation to move from other companies, technology companies with far deeper pockets than we ever had.

Well, and I remember spending some time with Simon Lafosse at Lafosse Associates who have been, certainly I haven't looked this year, but historically they were the number one recruitment company in the Times Top 100. And so that was their recruitment thing. They didn't do advertising. It's just recruiters from elsewhere in the industry would send in CVs to them all of the time because it's like, oh, I'm in the space. Who's the best employer? I should go and see if they have any jobs.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's when you know that you've done something well, when other people, when people are definitely trying to, you know, have you got any vacancy? And they're not desperate people. These are people employed and looking to come to you. They're happy in their job, but they're still looking for something slightly better. Maybe their current employer isn't quite right for them. But yeah, that's when you know you're doing okay.

And so we talked a bit about the exit. Um, you said you got all your cash up front, which was great. Um, you, um, you went and had a job for a bit. You went and worked there as well. Um, well, and you survived, like you left on your own terms. You didn't, I, you know, a lot of people, um, more, more than it, that doesn't work out for more people than it works out for. So.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I, So I didn't have to stay. It was one quarter, I feel like, and we hit the numbers and I could have gone after one quarter. So '98, the 2% kind of neither here nor there, and it was only over one quarter. But I chose to stay on, in hindsight, only for personal reasons, because I could have done with an extra year now in the new business, if I think about it, because AI just started getting going then.

Yeah. So if you had your time again, you wouldn't have stayed?

I wouldn't have stayed if I knew what I knew. Correct. I wouldn't have stayed. But that's the only reason. And I felt a degree, having just won the Times 100 Best Award, I felt a bit crappy, kind of thinking, Christ, we sell the company and then I leave having just— So although I couldn't really do any influencing, I'd lost all my power, I felt a degree of responsibility that I should stay on. And I stayed on for a year. And in fairness, the company that acquired us, they didn't do anything naughty. They honored their agreements. And that's really what I wanted to see and shine a light on them if they did something wrong, not that I could have done much about it.

Yeah. But in hindsight, you'd have— you had your time again, you'd have gone after the quarter.

Correct. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Because, you know, that's one of the conundrums that I speak to founders about all the time is what am I planning? What am I going in? Can I extricate myself before we sell? You know, and for some people it's worked out like Rob Belgrave, Wirehive got acquired by Pax8. Now he's the COO and he's moved over to Denver. So for some people it's fab, but it also depends on what you're after.

Yeah, I agree.

What do you want?

You know, we are all different. Retirement was not what I was after. And in fairness, I think that that year did help me understand that because I didn't like— I'm lucky enough I could retire, but I've realized that's not where I want to be. And yes, I still travel a fair bit, but for personal reasons, but it helped me in that 12 months probably realize, okay, yeah, I'm not going to just spend my time on a golf course now.

I've got another thing that came up in conversation today that— so if I think about your US adventures over various years, how successful do you reckon they were on a scale of 1 to 10?

Minus 5.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay. If you, knowing what you know now, is there What would you have done differently in terms of people, resources? What would you have had to have done to make it work?

To make the USA work, because I know that 2 of our competitors in the same world and space of us did this and they did it successfully, you have to take a senior person who lives and breathes the company from the UK and put them out in the office in the location. And we might speak the same language, but they are very different people. Not in a negative way, we're just different.

Yeah.

And we had cross-Atlantic battles, which just shouldn't take place. And having somebody that lives and breathes the values again and interviews And we were scaling and we scaled well and we did okay. I just, I lost all my hair through that USA relationship. Great people, honestly. Again, the blame is here, not with them. The blame is with me because we should have done it better and differently. So I do not blame any of them in the USA, far from it. They're all great people.

And along the way, I know you're a student of standing on the shoulders of giants. What books have you read along the way that you think other people should pick up that have had a big impact on you?

Well, I think I arrived at reading books and gaining knowledge from books quite late. And it all comes from coaching. It comes from the programs that I went on with you and then curiosity. But I've got some books here because I knew that this question comes up and I'm gonna go with my number one. And of course, I don't know whether this is gonna reverse it when I hold it up to the camera, but The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Patrick Lencioni. Fantastic.

Patrick Lencioni. The bottom layer of trust is the most valuable thing in a leadership you can have. Even if you've got rid of the other 4 above it, if you just executed correctly trust, and I think this is fundamental to the success of Clearvision, then it makes for a much more harmonious, You can have challenging conversations at the leadership level and not fall out because you've got trust with everybody.

Well, and I was just laughing to myself because I remember when we first met, you said, look, I don't need any coaching, but if you're any good at this, here's a test. Come and do a 5 Dysfunctions of a Team session with my executive team. We've done it before and it was shit. So, They've got pretty low expectations, but come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. So that was—

That's an interesting exercise to take people through.

Yeah.

But without trust, people are not prepared to challenge the leader in a constructive way. And you don't bring out the dirty washing. You don't air it. And some of those things that you need to air are the things that you need to go after.

Oh man. We are so crap as a country. It's like one of the things that holds us back is we're just too polite. And we're not having the conflict in the meeting, we're having it going home and moaning to our wives about it. And it's like, yes, I mean, I spend— it's always been a large chunk of the work that I do. In fact, sometimes it's the only— there are some multi-billion-dollar businesses that I've worked with in the UK, some of Britain's biggest privately held businesses, subsidiaries of large multinationals. And all I've done is gone in and done sessions with the CEO and the leadership team around trust. That's it. That's why I'm not fixing anything. I'm just trying to fix that. So that's great. I love that book. Yeah. What else you got?

I love Excellence.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hirst. He's magic.

So again, your podcast, I think, I'm not sure which one came first, whether I happened to know about it first or whether again your podcast, but I have listened to this book multiple times. Again, you know, we talk about people in a company. Well, number one thing must be happy customers and quality of work.

Yes.

And when you get that right, when people are passionate about what they do, And they deliver amazing service and you put the other things around it, you don't have to go and find new customers because the existing ones just keep coming back and they give you loyalty. Yes, you do have to find new customers, but in principle, you can keep on earning off existing ones if you get this right. And it's just some of the basics is so simple. I love it.

Excellent. Excellence wins for those people who are watching, not who are listening and not watching. Yes.

Then I've got a bunch of others. How much time have I got? I don't know. So—

You've got time. You've got time. Go on.

Coaching for performance.

Yes.

Okay. So again, I coaching as a leader, not managing. You know, the age-old expression is, you know, you are leading people and you measure leadership by people, the number of people that voluntarily want to follow you, not press-ganged into following you, but they just want to come on the journey with you. And that book is, I love this book because it teaches you how to, the language to use. Like I said at the beginning, I was crap. I really was. I wasn't a leader by any chance. But over the years, I've managed to hopefully, you know, gain some knowledge from some of these books and my mentors and improve my coaching skills. But that's a good book. I'm going to change the tone. I'm going to go to Breath.

Oh, yeah.

Have you ever read that one?

I have. That's very good. I now mouth tape.

Yeah. So I'm not as good as you at doing that, but there's a— I love the science in it and I can be better. So I probably— that's going to have to come back into my reading, back onto my reading pile and reread it again. But then I've got, you know, Drive, of course. Yeah. World's bestseller book, I think it is. Rocket Fuel. Yeah. And then Flourish. And I could give you, if you looked at my bookshelf, it's a bit like yours. I've got loads and loads of books.

What's Flourish?

Flourish by Martin Seligman. It's about, again, just well-being within yourself.

Okay.

Not fighting yourself. It's a good book actually. Although I bought the physical book, I actually listened to it more. I'm more of a podcast listener, sorry, an Audible listener than I am a reader. I fall asleep very quickly if I read the book.

Gerry, they're fab. I haven't read Flourish. I'll go and order that immediately.

Good.

Thank you very much for coming on and Sharing some war stories with us.

It's been a pleasure. And Dom, always thank you for your years of support. It's been— thank you for helping me get to where I was as well.

Brilliant. Thank you very much. Next time.

I do firmly believe that AI will change everything. Never underestimate how long human beings will take to adapt to the change. But The direction of travel, I think, is pretty clear.

As an entrepreneur, you have to be good at delegating.

Well, you don't have to be, but if you want to be more than a one-man band, you have to be good at delegating, right? So if you want to create a scale-up, you have to be great at going, I'll let go of this stuff. What we did do was create this amazing culture.

And I mean, half the people were— ended up living together in houses near the office and working together all the time.

And that really propelled the business for the next probably 3, 4 years.

Does that mean that you are thinking, can AI do this? Do we need a human? Or are you looking to change particular work practices or departments?

What I would like to have is an