Interview with Mark Schwartz

You're listening to One Sharp Sword Cutting through to what Matters Most with outfluencer Dr. Wayne Purnell. Welcome to One Sharp Sword Cutting through to what Matters Most. I'm your host, guide and coach on this journey. I'm Dr. Wayne Purnell. Dr. P. And with me today, Mark Schwarz, a private tech cfo, a, a, an ops executive and a, I love this. A former corporate lawyer. I've worked with many recovering attorneys. I don't think that this was, I think you're taking your, your former life into your current life and not like letting it all go.

I'm still recovering, Wayne.

Still recovering. Okay, well that's, well, excellent. Let's talk about what you're up to right now. Let's talk about how you got here because if I say, wow, cfo, a tech CFO to talk to, a lot of people will go, oh, like. But you know what, Your leadership journey is something that I found amazing and delightful and that is what I want to bring to our audience today. So again, Mark Schwartz, thank you for joining us. I appreciate you being here. Talk a little bit about what you're up to and talk a little bit about what got you here.

Yeah, well, thank you, Wayne. As, as you and I have have sort of developed a relationship over the last few months, I've really enjoyed getting to know you and what, and what your mission is and what you're all about. So I really appreciate and I'm honored frankly to that you asked me to, to be on your, on your podcast in this forum. So thank you for that. I am currently the, the chief financial officer of a private equity backed machine learning based company that is focused in the, in the retail supply chain space. So basically we work with, with, with CPG companies and helping them consumer packaged.

Goods for those who are not in.

The biz, CPG companies, consumer packaged goods, helping them optimize their revenue by reconciling the, the, the, the, the deductions, compliance and, and other sort of fees and fines, et cetera, that they are very often charged from large retailers. And our platform will help these folks not only to recover revenues that were improperly deducted, but also to learn from those issues and to create an opportunity to avoid doing some of those same activities in the future.

So I'm going to pause right there because, right. Because what you do is like, wow, Mark, good for you. Like some people are going to go, you stop these companies from spending too much or from, right. From getting fined or whatever. And the reason I want to stop is because that's really important because what you do means that we as consumers pay less. Like if, if companies are paying more for their supply chain, if companies are paying more in fines or in licensing or any of those things, then it's not the companies that pay. Right. It's, it's like each of us as individuals pay a little bit and a little bit more. So your role, you're like Superman to us, right?

Well, it's, it's an interesting collaboration between ourselves, the retailers and the, the consumer packaged goods companies because both the retailer and the consumer packaged goods companies have incentive to keep their prices as reasonable as possible for the consumer. And they both recognize that there are inefficiencies in their systems inherent in the myriad of deliveries and, and returns that, that we as consumers sort of run through the, the system. And rather than get bogged down by all of that, we help them become more efficient and to learn from those issues.

That's great. And so how do you do that? And yeah, how do like currently, how do you do that? How do you help them learn? Like what, what are some of the speed bumps that, that companies roll over that you go, hey, we can flatten that out and make it easier for you.

Yeah. At a high level, if you're a, if you're a very, very large, you know, sort of Fortune 100 consumer packaged goods company, Procter and Gamble, Unilever, those types, or you are a up and coming retailer with maybe one product, a new fuzzy drink that is selling on Amazon or in Walmart or in target, etc. In either case you are. Well, take the small retailer for example, the up and comer, maybe they're negotiating a first time deal with a large retailer and expecting to generate certain amount of profit from that relationship and, and six months a year in, they realize their profit isn't as, as great from that relationship as they expected it to be and can't figure out exactly why. We help them reconcile that and sort through delivering to a retailer on time and in full versus missing the amount, a small portion of the, of the amount that you're supposed to ship to that retailer, maybe you delivered it to different warehouses and there's 400 different reasons why you might think your actions are appropriate. But for the large retailer that requires system and process in order for them to function, given the thousands and thousands of suppliers they deal with on a regular basis and the hundreds of thousands or millions of different products that are on their shelves or online in their stores, if you fall outside of the procedures that they like to follow, then there's likely dollars that you're not, that you're missing and don't have an avenue to recover. We help you find those avenues to recover those dollars.

How does this differ, Mark? How does this differ from like, forensic accounting?

It is a form of forensic accounting. Many of our team members are CPAs. Okay, yeah, yeah, I think it's exactly what we're doing.

That's awesome. So you're, you're also looking for areas of potential embezzlement. You're looking for anywhere that you've got this bucket of money and there are deliberate spouts where it's going, but there may be leaks that nobody actually knew about. And that's what you're looking at.

Yeah, we, we, we aren't mandated nor really in the business of looking for fraud, fraud detection and embezzlement, as you mentioned. But you do see as you reconcile areas that might cause further inquiry for that consumer packaged goods company. So yeah, it can highlight lots of things in their day to day that they were not aware of.

All right, so let's talk about you, the human. All right, Mark Schwarz, the human. You, you didn't wake up one day and go, I'm going to be a CFO and a tech firm. I'm going to help with ops. I'm going to focus on supply chain logistics and accounting. And like that is, you know, kind of a very specific niche slowly that you find yourself in. So what, like, let's wind back the clock to even where you grew up, then college, then like the jobs that got you here and what you learned along the way that made you want to go into this very specifically.

Yeah, sure. So I grew up in, in New York, on Long island, fairly far out east on the island. So I, I like to, to sort of talk about remembering growing up with duck farms and potato farms and so forth out on the island. It's a bit different today, obviously, like other places are, but it was a great place to grow up. I went to college on an academic scholarship to the University of Miami. I studied finance and, and really gravitated to that because my brain has always seemed to sort of work in numbers. You know, I'm driving down the street, Wayne, and I'm counting things on the side of the road. Like I can't turn off the number part of my brain. That's just how it, how it operates.

So you, like that's. That was you as a kid too, right? That you just saw patterns and you saw numbers and they just, all math.

Was Always my best subject.

That was your language. That's awesome.

That's good. But, but I always had a, at a sort of a voracious appetite for history and philosophy and I, when I went to college, I went to college intending to study philosophy and I think I just sort of realized over the course of my first year that I didn't know a lot of employed philosophers and, and, and I'm sure I was coached by how practical of you, family and friends and otherwise that given my sort of proficiency in math that maybe I should look at, at, you know, at, at other aptitude at other areas to sort of exploit those aptitudes. Sure. And so I, and so I did. I became a finance major and I was an accounting minority and spent a little bit of time post college playing rugby over in the UK and came back to the real world after a great experience and worked for Citibank as a, as a financial analyst for about a year.

Can I, can I pause you for a second? You don't just like go off to the UK to play rugby. Like what brought you there? And then, and then, and I had a good experience so I came back. What, let's go into specifics around that. Yeah, got you into rugby in the UK because that is, we had a.

Rugby rugby club team in school and that was sort of my first exposure to it. And, and, and I wanted to, to continue, I wanted to, to try to, to continue to play. I've always loved team sports and I played every sport growing up and so it was a sort of a great opportunity for me to, to continue participating in a team sport in a, in more than just a hobby, if you will. So I went over to the UK and through a friend of mine got connected into a local team in Ilford in the east side of London and, and tried out for their squad and I'm became a member of their, of their rugby club and worked my way up to a couple of, of their teams, never reaching the top team or even the second level team, but had a ball and made some friends and, and just really got to enjoy that sort of camaraderie that you get playing team sports. And really for me continuing to learn about a sport that I continue to love today and, and you know, the Rugby World cup is every four years and, and so I've been to a number of them over the years and, and I, and I do follow it still.

Amazing. That is amazing. And then what was the good experience that brought you back to work here and Citibank? I think Was.

Yeah, yeah, I knew that I wasn't certain what I wanted to do. I knew it would likely involve finance or math to some degree, but I wasn't certain. And I had ideas to go back to graduate school and I was thinking about getting an mba. I was thinking about getting a law degree. I think that, that the earlier sort of days of thinking about philosophy and history etc probably weighed into that decision around law school versus graduate school. But came back and worked for Citibank while I was thinking about sort of what was next for me. And at a really interesting role. I was a financial analyst for a company that they acquired called the international brokerage estimate service ibes. And our role was really reconciling and documenting this was in the early 90s. So at the time international data and international accounting was much more different from US GAAP accounting than it is today, where there's becoming a convergence of international standards and US GAAP standards. But our role as analysts was trying to help the US Investor understand what those international accounts really meant from a US GAAP perspective. So there was some reconciliation that we were involved in at ibis. And it was really interesting work. It was very technical and, and meaty from a, from an accounting and math perspective. So I really enjoyed that. But.

So pause for a second. Talk first for just a second about what? When you talk about the gap, like that's not a term that's sort of in day to day conversation in terms of, you know, the difference of whatever.

So it is in my world. Yes.

Bill.

Yeah. So when you're, when you're dealing with recognizing revenue, as an example, under international accounting standards versus US GAAP standards, there are different policies in place.

So US GAP standards is. Maybe I'm the only one, but I don't, I don't know that I've heard that term.

U.S. gAAP, U.S. generally accepted accounting Principles.

Sorry, that was good one. Okay, so that's a, that's an acronym that.

Okay, my apologies. Yeah. But no good. My world, that one's. We live in that every day. But U.S. generally Accepted Accounting Principles. U.S. gAP.

Got it. Okay.

Versus International Accounting Standards. And so there is, there is a gap one. A gap gap between those two. And the standards are converging. But there was a period of time where they were much more different than they are today. So reading an income statement generated under international accounting standards in 1990 could have looked significantly different than the same, the same income statement that had been generated under U.S. gAAP principles.

Got it. Okay.

So for the U.S. investor, you were looking at an International Accounting Standards income statement. If you're looking at the accounting for a gold mine in Australia and how do you compare that? What would that look like if it were under US GAAP standards?

Got it.

Thank you.

That's. I was thinking gap. What's the. Like, where's the gap? Like what, what, what gap do you need to bridge? Generally Accepted Principles of Accounting is great.

Generally Accepted Accounting Standards.

Okay.

Accounting Principles gaa. Okay.

Awesome.

Cool. Yeah. So. So I decided to go to law school and so I went to the University of San Diego in California. I. My intention was knowing that lawyers not always certainly but tend to work in the, in the state or the city where they go to law school. I decided to go to California and chase some good weather and, and did so so went to law law school in San Diego and then met my wife there in school and we moved up to San Francisco and that's where I began practicing law. So I did that for about six years. I was a corporate attorney focusing on mostly M and A transactions, corporate licensing, corporate partnerships, corporate entity formation and helping clients understand where to put entities in which geographies and the various arm's length transactions and arm's length agreements between entities so that you, you create a reasonable set of. Of policies under which those, those governments and in each of those countries can can. Can consider how your, how you are operating between entities and doing so in a way that is creating the appropriate amount of tax in each of those entities. So you, you can no longer. Long, long, long gone are the days where you might be able to. To, to, to pick an entity in a certain location and put all of your expenses in that entity and, and, and pay no tax in that entity or less tax on that entity because they had a lower tax rate. Governments are tax. Tax revenue generation organizations are are very sharp on that now certainly over the last 30 years. So that sort of entity shopping venue shopping if you will, is, is much more difficult. So you set up arm's length negotiations and transactions between those entities to make sure that you are doing so in a way that reasonably allocates revenue and expenses and provides those, those governments an opportunity to actually generate tax revenue as appropriate.

That's great. You. You love this, don't you?

I'm a math guy. My brain works that way. I just, I can't help it.

That's awesome. What would you say are some of the leadership lessons that you've learned along the way? You know, you've, you've had to struggle with various corporations. You've struggled. You've. I wouldn't maybe not say struggled, but you've wrestled with various organizations, various legislative issues, multiple government regulations. What are some of the, like, key leadership lessons along the way? Where have been your growth edges? You know, where have been your. Wow, you know, if I knew that before, this would have been so much easier. Where have been those kind of moments for you?

Yeah, there's, there's several of them. You know, following, following my stint as an attorney, how that ended is I had an opportunity to, to, to be assigned to work with a gentleman who was starting a company. And, and, and I had already decided as a lawyer that I didn't love the transactional nature of it. You know, I would work on a large M and a transaction, a corporate roll up of six or seven entities or whatever it was for six, eight months or more. And, and the day it closes, that company or companies are off to execute on their strategy. And as a lawyer, you're on to the next deal. And, and I didn't, I didn't love that. Good lawyers love that. They love the diversification they get in their practice. Different industries, different people, management teams, etc. I didn't like that. I felt like I knew so much about the transaction and the strategy and the structure and the people and the teams that I wanted to be a part of that maybe that gets back to my love of team sports, you know, so, so I remember having the discussion with my wife, Wayne and telling her like, gosh, I think I'm gonna, I don't have any ideas of my own to start a company. I think I'm gonna join one of these companies. And my thinking at the time was, look, if it, if it flops as as many startups do, or it's unsuccessful as lots of businesses can become, then it's still going to be an MBA on the fly for me and I could always go back to practicing law. That's kind of how I thought about it. And so I made the jump with this gentleman who was starting a business. We really hit it off and he and I and two other folks started this company and that became a company called Fabrinet. So I was the chief financial officer and head of HR and IT and a couple other.

Those are all such different roles. Those are all such different roles.

They are, but definitely today's cfo. And I was not a trendsetter or anything, maybe earlier adopter if you will, but those are fairly normal for CFOs to manage. Certainly it in my case, legal was easy you know, transition, because I had been a lawyer and, and so I, that's sort of my purview, was it hr finance and legal to begin with. And you know, we started by acquiring a factory just north of Bangkok, Thailand from a company called Seagate Technology, which is a, it still is a prominent hard disk drive manufacturer storage company. And so my partner, the founder of this business, had been one of the founders of Seagate and knew all the folks internally, even though he hadn't been there for eight or 10 years. And so we acquired a factory and the idea was to take these disciplines from the hard disk drive industry and apply them to, to a different industry, to, to the fiber optic component manufacturing industry. And, and so I, I knew really very little about either of these industries. I mean, I knew what a disk drive was and, and I knew what a fiber optic cable was, but I didn't really know much about these industries at all. And, and so Tom, Tom Mitchell was the founder, CEO. What he taught me over the years and really got me interested up front is the many of the, of the principles involved in building a hard disk drive from the electromechanical capabilities and the engineering requirements were absolutely needed in the manufacture of these, of these fiber optic components, these photonic devices. And many of the tests that are used to determine if a hard disk drive is functioning as it's supposed to are the same tests you would apply to the, to the fiber optic component. And so there were enough similarities where he felt like this was an industry that badly needed a manufacturer that had processes and controls that weren't existing in that industry at the time. And so basically we acquired a factory from Seagate and began to, to build sub assemblies for Seagate out of that factory because it was a factory they were using for their, for their own manufacturing. And then we very quickly started to spin up a sales team and an engineering team and a product team effectively in our engineering to go to the fiber optic community and convince those folks that we could do a better job manufacturing their products than they could themselves because we had the, these very principled set of processes and controls that were required over their industry and they were lacking in those areas. And so we, so the plan was to continue to grow the, to maintain the hard drive business that we had and to grow the fiber optic business. And, and we knew that the hard drive business was going to go away in about three years because we signed a three year contract with Seagate. And their plan was after three years they're going to move us to one of Their other factories that actually lasted about four and a half years ultimately. And our revenue was fairly flat for those first four and a half years. But if you looked under the hood, it was rapidly evolving from 100% hard disk drive manufacturing revenue down to, from, from about 160 million down to zero. And we replaced it with, with optical communications component revenue that went from 0 to 160 million in about the same time. Wow. Yeah, so, and then we were off.

And running, assuming that was by design. Right. So it's like you've got this decline, this rise that's, that's great.

The, the timing it took, the revenue level of optical communications equipment. We took advantage of, of a great time in, in the burgeoning Internet and in communications and applications like Facebook and others coming out Skype at the time and others that were driving bandwidth requirements and the need for more fiber optic equipment. But, but we didn't really know exactly how that would, would all come together. And, but we did know the one thing we knew for certain is the Seagate revenue was going away and so we had to replace it.

So talk about your decision making processes because the, the internal workings at Seagate, that makes sense. You did some, some predictive analysis and. Right. You saw this and you saw the potential for a climb and you happened to merge them. So it stayed relatively steady. What was your decision making? What were the sort of wow, smack you in the face kind of the leadership note that needs to be stated right now is what were those moments like for you?

Yeah, so there's, there's a few maybe to talk about here. One was I had been a lawyer and I had been a lawyer for about six years. So I wasn't managing anybody as a lawyer. I was an individual contributor effectively and a team contributor. Now suddenly I am the CFO and head of IT and the general counsel and head of HR at a 1600 person company. I think we started with 1400 people when we acquired the factory. And in the midst of, or in the beginnings of a transformation of that business from one industry to another, I will tell you, I had no idea what the heck I was doing, Wayne. And my personality and maybe you know, many others in the position at the time would have done something similar, but I started grabbing everything with both hands and I was very poor at delegating. I wanted to learn everything I could about the, about the, about the industry, our business, our customers. And because I was legal and finance, I was negotiating all of the customer contracts and then determining with my very strong accounting team how we were going to account for all of that. And so it took me years to sort of recognize that I was a very, very poor manager at the time. I was not delegating. I cared for my team, which I think is the single most important component of leadership. I really cared about their welfare and their families. Right. Because when you hire somebody, you're not only hiring that person, you are hiring their family and a very close circle around them. So, so that was always there for me. But I was a very, very poor manager. We never had discussions about their career growth and, and, and their development in their roles and what they wanted to do next. And I was very poor at delegating. You know, if something I, I knew I could teach somebody and it might take me an hour or two, but I could do it myself in 20 minutes. I always did it myself for the most part. And those were very, very poor decisions as I look back a few years later, thankfully, and I think it had a lot to do with the care I showed for my team. We got through that and it was hardly ever even recognizable to me that there was anybody that was sort of disgruntled or wanted to have deeper discussions than they were having with me about their place in the company. But, but we had a few things that, that, that really impacted us as a business that caused me to look differently at how I operated as a manager. Probably the most influential was about five years into the, into the company. We were now virtually 100% fiber optic. We were on a trajectory where I think we had just hit or near 300 million in revenues. For 2 or 3 quarters our revenue was fairly steady. It wasn't growing. That growth that we had experienced, that hyper growth that we had experienced was waning. I remember Tom, our CEO, you know, came to me and said, hey, we're going to bring in a outside consultant to sort of help us understand what's happening here. We're not growing like we're expecting to grow. And so I was a team player and I thought, okay, you know, great, well, you know, I'll go along with it and whatever you need me to do to be involved, I'm happy to do it internally. I was thinking what a complete waste of time this is going to be. Why in the world are we bringing somebody on the outside who doesn't know anything about our business? What's he going to tell us? I was dead wrong. You know, this. This gentleman interviewed about 120 people over the course of maybe six weeks, from every department from engineering to the Manufacturing operations to, to it, to the tech side everywhere and came back to the core group of us three or four or five sort of senior management and said, you guys have done a great job hiring. And he sort of, he looked at if you're familiar with what the old Jack Welch sort of model of maybe 10% of your team are sort of, you know, Type A as he called it, where that's your next generation of, of leadership and, and the engine of your business sort of Type B is about 80%, 85% of your company really, really critical to the success of the business. And then there's the 5 or 10% type C that either aren't fit for the role that they're in, aren't fit for the business or the industry for a variety of reasons, and often self select out before they're ever even terminated. And he said to us, you probably have 35 or 40% type A. You've done an amazing job hiring. The problem is you are not giving these folks your vision. You're not sharing the vision, you're not sharing the direction. They don't understand what the values of the company are, they don't understand what your long term goals are as a business. And that's when the light bulb went off for me and I thought, gosh, he is 100% correct. I had started seeing little pockets of almost the mini companies, if you will, that had surfaced within our company. I remember in one case we had a chief technical officer who really was running our technology but also managing our early customers. And then as we got bigger, we brought in a chief operating officer and all of our new customers had moved into the chief operating officer for the most part. And I remember at one point one of the Chief Operating officer's team members came to me and said we'd like to hire our own cto. And I thought, well, I said to him, well you have a CTO said yeah, but we don't get enough access to him. He's focused on his own customers and we'd like to bring in our own cto. And I remember having some really sarcastic answer like, oh sure, why don't we just have two of everything in the company? Let's get two CFOs and two CEOs, why not? And I realized going through this exercise with this consultant that was helping us, that we were not sharing our vision. We were not creating avenues for collaboration, we were not giving folks the direction. They didn't understand why we were making certain moves at a senior level that we were Making. And, and I realized that while I thought everybody must know what we're doing, that what is in your head as a manager isn't necessarily what. What those around you know and understand. And, and so it really became obvious to us that we needed to go back to square one and to build a mission and to build a vision and to. And to articulate and memorialize our values. They all existed, but we hadn't put it in, in any format. We haven't focused on sharing that.

Yeah. Codify it. Yeah. Not.

Not at all. And so for me, I took that a couple of steps further and realized that part of, of any confusion or disruption we were creating as a senior management team was not only not articulating all of these things that we then went and articulated, but for each of us personally and me personally, we needed to make sure we were getting our message through to our team members and we needed to make sure that they understood the importance in our view of collaboration and the importance in our view of any of these other values or objectives that were getting us close to our mandate and where we wanted to take the company in the future.

This is great. I want to pause you for a second. You've said some amazing stuff that actually lights me up because that's my specialty area as a consultant. I do consulting and coaching. And this was, this was interesting. I just. I'm going to read. You'll see me looking down. I'm. I'm reading from some notes I took as you were talking. As you entered this, this role, you were used to being a team contributor and became a CFO. Over 1600 people, all in transition because the company was in transition. You took on everything. And even though you cared for the team, you noted in retrospect that trying to handle everything and juggle everything made you a bad manager, a poor manager is what you said. And that it's. I just wanted to highlight that, that, that management, like the difference between leadership and management. Management comes from the Latin for manos, which is hands on and being there and having the discussions about bench and career development and career growth, like where do you want to be? And actually putting yourself into. You care about their families and you care about them. And part of caring is saying, okay, and this is how we're going to develop you. Right. This is so. I love that you had that insight and that you really focused on, so what is next for the, for the people that I'm responsible for, what's next and putting yourself there. I love that you had the realization that an outside consultant was not a waste of time, but actually brought you outside perspective. You know, one of the things I say is that, you know, as a consultant, I've got a perspective you don't have. You can't ask a fish what water is like, because there's no sense of not water by the fish. And so I come in and I go, hey, this is what it looks like over here. And this is what it looks like over here. So I love that you actually realized, oh, right, an outside consultant that can have conversations, that each individual couldn't actually have that many, but one person from the outside could go to all the different sections, build the bridges between. You know, it's. It's interesting because I find that almost every chief executive officer, every or CXO chief, right? So every executive team member, they're like, yeah, we can't stand it when there are silos. And yet there are silos, right? So it's like, so how do you build the bridges? And that's where an outside agent can really do the thing. And then you talked about something else that lit me up, which I'm very excited about, Mark, because it's like, it does start with values. And does everybody know what those values are? Oh, wait, those values feed the vision. And does everybody know what those. What the vision is? And the vision feeds the strategy. And not everybody thinks that way, but if you do, if you wind it back and go, okay, even in my personal life, for my personal goals, I have these values and I have this desire, and the dream looks like this. That's called a vision, Right? The dream that looks like this. And then how many people around you actually know it so that they can support you in that. That's. That's huge. And without conveying it, you said, one of the last things you said was the senior management team created confusion by not actually sharing it. And so, you know, confused mind can't actually focus in and give its best, right? So, like, the. These are the leadership lessons that I really wanted to massage out of the entire story. Because where you've been and what you've grown and. And, you know, yes, you're a math guy, yes, you're a finance guy. Yes, you're all that. You're also human. And there's that very warm part of you that it's like, and I want the best for everybody. And you didn't say it that way, but that's really what comes out of you. And I appreciate that about you.

I think if I can cut you off a Little bit. Wayne. I think that was. I agree. And I think that that's the only reason I was able to continue to build my team and keep that team cohesive and in the midst of poor management on my part was because I think I was a, a pretty good leader of those folks in that they knew I cared about them and they knew that, that, that if they had made a mistake based on the best available information at the time, later we learned something and it, it negated anything that they had put in place. Previously on that topic. They could come to me and say, hey, this has changed. We didn't know this before, we now know it. And I'd like to change our strategy as a result. And I would have their back 100% of the time and not focus on why didn't we know that earlier.

Oh yeah.

And focus on okay, great, that we know that now. What does that change for us? There is always an element of closing the loop on that, on that, on that failure, if you will. That's a sort of a manufacturing term on a closed loop failure analysis. But, but you do need to go back and say, okay, why didn't we know that before? But you can't do that in a defensive way. And it can't be the first discussion. The first discussion has to be great, okay, what we know now, how does that change our strategy? How does it change what we wanted to implement? And then you go and you make those changes. You know, I always tell folks, the second that we laminate our business plan is the day that our business begins to deteriorate. You always have to be looking for how new information is going to impact your decision making and decisions you've already made. But the first step can't be why didn't we know this before? The first step needs to be okay with what we know. How do we advance that? How do we change our agenda? How do we change our strategy? And then there's a time to go back and say what have we learned here? How can we figure this out earlier than we, than we now know it?

I love that this is, this is so, so important. It's not why, which is blameful, but it's how. Right? You know, So I love that you've like that is part of the culture build. So that is, you know, there are a lot of cultures that are built on blamestorming. Whose fault is this? We'll get to the bottom of it, girl. Right? And there's a lot of that what's. And that doesn't move the Company forward. What moves the company forward is this culture of if it was a mistake, what did we learn? Like, what did we learn? So we as an organization are learning and growing. How much did it cost us all to learn that? And there's this curiosity that's embedded versus this gotcha mentality. Oh, you're where you were out of place.

Gotcha.

Which is terrible. You know, instead of okay, we found out with new information, we found out this wasn't the path. Excellent. What did we learn? Love that. Closed loop failure analysis is a great term that I think we could all incorporate into our lives. In terms of now that we're beyond it, let's take a look at what happened. Right? We can look, we can all do that about our, our adolescence. If we think about it. Now that we're beyond it, did we learn anything? Yeah. So none of us have to repeat that. And we probably, you know, have done that anyway. I just want to come back to. It's not about why, it's about how you know. So why is such a blameful word unless you just relax with it and go, okay, what, what really? Like use different language around it. What really happened? What can we learn? How do we move forward? Those are so empowering and so important.

Yeah, I, I agree, I agree. And, and circling back to, to post this, this consultant and what we learned from that as a group, I, I think, you know, a small, a small senior executive team. I think there were four or five of us at the time and, and we all committed to, to greater visibility and, and promoting what we already believed was a real key to our success in, in collaborating cross departmentally. And, and so I think at the time we probably had Wayne, maybe six or 7,000 employees. And so we determined how we were going to cascade messages down to the VP level and down to the director level. We.

Communication plan is so important. I worked with a company that had over 3,000 employees and their communication plan was at the time that they were doing a massive initiative, their communication plan was the managers will know what to say.

Right, exactly. And that's how we operated previous to this. So. But we even did in all hands. We went to the stadium, we got all six or seven thousand people together. We did a, a series of off off sites, director level and above, for two or three days at a time. You know, packed agenda on all of these things that were really important to us that we had never.

You are shared singing my song. This is so good.

And you know what happened? Shockingly, within two or three quarters, we Saw that growth come back over the course of 10 years. I guess 12 years, because I was at the company for 12 years, we reached a billion in revenue and, you know, we took the company public on the New York stock exchange in 2010 and all sorts of lessons learned and around that whole exercise, but a very, very positive experience for everyone. Fabrinet is still a public and independent company. Today it's, I think it's about a 14 billion market cap business, about a three and a half billion annual revenue business, you know, all started with the four of us back in. Back in 2000 and really accelerated through that exercise of deciding we needed to be more. To have to give greater visibility and promote these things that are really important to us in growing our business. And that really enabled us to continue to grow.

That's amazing.

All right, one more story. I'll give you on that.

Yeah, we're coming up on the. On our time. So quick story.

Yeah, yeah. So me personally, so I'm a golfer when I. When I can. And so I remember taking a golf lesson about 2008 or 9. So years after we had already sort of transformed how we were speaking to our team and messaging and creating visibility, et cetera, and the golf instructor was trying to get me to do this one move, and I couldn't do it. And this went on for six or seven weeks of these hourly lessons. And finally she said it to me in a different way and what she wanted me to do, and immediately I was able to do it, and I could see it on video screens. And I said to her, how did that happen? Like, how did you do that? And she said, my job as a coach is to figure out as many different ways to tell you the same thing as I possibly can, knowing that one of them is going to resonate with you. And that for me was sort of the second sort of transformational leadership lesson for me. Because taking that with everything else that I had learned over the years at Fabrinet, I realized at that moment that, yeah, she's 100% correct in that. How many times do you leave a meeting and two or three days later you're chatting with someone who was in the meeting and they're regurgitating back to you something that happened in the meeting. And you're thinking, well, that's not what I said. That's not what we're off to do. And so the idea of really communicating with your audience by trying to connect them to the message, by saying it as many different ways as you can, and I use that to this day, 15, 15 years later, I continually try to figure out new ways to say what I'm. What I'm off to do or what we're doing as a company.

Yeah.

Because it takes those different ways to connect with everybody.

It does. And all too often what I've seen is the leaders will just be louder. It's like, it's this, it's this ra. You know, and it's like it's this. Just do it. And it's like, well, if it's not translating for whatever reason to the people that need to be doing it, it does need to be said differently. That is a. That is a great story. Great story. And yeah, that's the. That's worth leveraging forever. That's awesome. All right, so anything we haven't talked about that you were hoping we'd cover and if people wanted to find you, how would they do that?

Yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, look, after I left Fabrinet, I've for the most part have been an operator at other businesses. I was a CFO at a company called Markforged, which we took public on the New York stock exchange in 2021. I've spent most of my time in the last 10 or 12 years in software, currently at a software and software and services, really business. And if anybody wants to reach me, they're welcome to reach me at, at my current company, Stat Recovery. So Mark M A R K at S t a t recovery.com Very simple. I'd love to hear from anybody.

That's awesome. Good, Mark. @StatRecovery.com and on LinkedIn, Mark Schwarz. This was great. Thank you so much. I, I appreciate the time and the, the insights, the story, the. You and I had talked before and I didn't know three quarters of what you shared today. This was really great. So thank you. Alrighty, our guest.

You're very welcome, Wayne. I've really enjoyed talking with you as well.

I've enjoyed having you. Thank you. Thanks, Mark. Our guest today, Mark Schwartz. This is one sharp sword cutting through to what matters most. Again, our guest, Mark Schwartz and I am Dr. P. Dr. Wayne Purnell, your host, guide and coach on this journey. We'll see you again next time. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for listening to one sharp sword cutting through to what matters Most with outfluencer Dr. Wayne Purnell. For more information, please go to onesharpsword.com.