HI 168: From Public Servant to Excelling in Your Business with Jack McGuinness

Welcome to the Heroic Investing Show. As first responders, we risk our lives every day. Our financial security is under attack. Our pensions are in a state of emergency. A single on duty incident can alter or erase our earning potential instantly and forever. We are the heroes of society. We are self reliant and we need to take care of our own financial future. The Heroic Investing show is our toolkit of business and investing tactics on our mission to financial freedom.

Well, everyone, thank you so much for joining us for another exciting hopefully episode of Heroic Investing. Just to show that I'm a team player, I decided to bring on a West Point graduate this time. John McGinnis is, I'm sure going to become a very close friend of mine. This is actually the first time we're meeting, but I had a chance to take a look at at his company and his website and was introduced through a friend. So very excited about what he can bring to our audience and he's equally excited about the ability to talk to first responders and as well as active duty and veterans. John, if you're okay with to kind of give a little bit of your own background and information. But first of all, thanks for joining us.

Well, thanks so much for having me. I really love the concept behind your podcast and you know, what a great body to be communicating to such a great group of people that give support our country every day. I really appreciate the forum for sure.

Yeah, it really inspires me just to, you know, to get feedback from people who are still out there serving and certainly people who are serving in frankly, much more dangerous places than I went. You might have seen a little more personal danger than I did, but the ocean was my big danger. The people who, you know, very close friends of mine who are out there, you know, standing in front of bullets for the rest of us or putting people back together after accidents is really inspiring to me.

I couldn't agree anymore. I couldn't agree anymore. So I appreciate the opportunity. Just a little bit on my background. As Gary mentioned, I'm West Point guy and served some time with the 10th Mountain Division as an infantry officer. Really a grunt and it was a great experience. I did not see any combat experience at all, but I have lots of friends that did and lots of folks that I know that, you know, as you said, you know, stood in front of bullets for all of us and you know, repaired people and you know, I can't appreciate that enough. I'll start my story really from an entrepreneurial perspective. After the military, I get out of the military, got my mba and then I got very lucky. At a very early age, I think I was 26, I helped start a consulting firm, Imagine consulting firm with a partner from Deloitte who was starting his own firm about 15 years older than me. And we built a boutique management consulting firm that really works with large companies, anywhere from electric utilities to the World bank to a large pharmaceutical company. And our niche was helping these organizations navigate large scale change initiatives like a restructuring and mergers and acquisition type of work, large scale system implementation. And we did that from the organizational development side of things or the. What's referred to as change management or the human side of managing large scale change. So an MBA with an engineer and very early on, even though I was the first hire, I was the youngest guy. The people that we hired in after us were masters in Organizational Behavior, PhDs in Psychology and psychology. So I sort of learned a new side of how the world works and particularly how the business world works from the whole concept of bringing people along in a large scale change environment. So I really got very fortunate to learn and lead at the same time. I wound up being the chief operating officer of that firm, grew to about 50 people. And after 13 years I decided that I needed a new challenge in life. So I cashed out of that firm and with a couple partners I bought a light manufacturing company in Harrisonburg, Pennsylvania. And so family company, we turned that firm around and built a really cool team, really gained some real experience on how to really lead and manage an organization. It's easy to give people advice as a consultant. It's a lot harder to actually be the CEO and run something yourself. So I learned that firsthand, which really set me up for. In 2009, I started this firm, Relationship Impact with a classmate of mine that I met when I was 17 at my plebe year at West Point. We built a firm that was initially going to be a leadership development firm, working with large organizations on how to build the capabilities of leaders. So our first project, for example, is when Roche bought Genentech in 2010. I think we, yeah, it was 2010. We did the integration of the managed care teams and really cool experience, similar to what I had done in the past, but much more focused on building the capabilities of leaders. And what we have morphed into is more probably more relevant to your audience is we've over the last six years or so we've morphed into a firm that really does one thing and we think we do it pretty well. We work with the leadership teams of growing companies anywhere from 10 to $150 million in sales to help them build the capabilities, both structurally as a team and relationally as a team, to be able to scale their companies and grow their companies as effectively as they can. That's what we do every day. It's just the two of us, and it's the most fulfilling and satisfying work we've done. And one of the things that's been interesting and something that we've learned is that most people don't really know how to put together and build a great team. And once a team that is resilient, a team that is laser focused on results, a team that has lots of synergy and works as a force multiplier and that learns and grows over time to address complex challenges. And so we think we have a unique perspective. We have a very developmental team coaching approach that helps CEOs really focus on building great leadership teams to help them scale their companies.

Wow, that's an amazing journey. So going back to when you were 26, just really quickly for that first company. So if I heard you right, you had kind of a mentor or a friend 16 years older than you, you said, who was a leader or manager at Deloitte, and the two of you, just the two of you decided to start a company. Right.

I wouldn't give myself that much credit. He decided to start the company and he decided that I would be a good person to hire to help him grow. So I was one of his first employees. And then I wound up really managing the operations of the company and, you know, all the project management, the back office stuff, you know, had a role in business development as well, but really great experience at a very young age.

Yeah. So I'm trying to kind of dig into exactly that. That you did some time in the military. Did you stay on as a reserve officer after that, or.

I couldn't because of the travel. We got it. Traveled three or four days a week. It was. It was pretty intense.

Got it. Got it. So. So this was like right after you left the military? Right.

I spent a year and a half, got my MBA and then got right into this.

That's awesome. Yeah. So as your first position out of the military. So, you know, I think the listeners out there, if you're thinking about taking a big leap, in my mind what he did, what Jack did, was a pretty big leap right there. Most people that I know were trying to transition to a government contracting position or somehow leverage what they did. Kind of more of a safe zone. Right. And so that's pretty awesome, in my opinion. But you were listening, obviously, looking at your history since then, that you were listening to what was speaking to you, where you thought that maybe your unique ability lied. That's pretty awesome. Now fast forward to the current company and I also like though there in the interim, I gained a lot of value out of your conversation about how I was working for a guy who was teaching people and I was participating in teaching people, led operations at a company, teaching people how to manage well, and then got my own company and learned how tough that was to manage.

Exactly, exactly. It's not that easy.

Right. I work kind of alongside a great friend and mentor of mine with a company called Paradigm Life. And his company is about 25, 30 people. It's smaller than my submarine was. And he comes to me all the time for advice and he's hired consulting firms to help as his company grows. And a company that size can double in size every year or two.

Sure.

And so some of the things that, like they put an operations manual in place and I was like, oh my gosh, Patrick, I told you this a couple of years ago. It tells people what their jobs are. Right. So I think when we come out of the military, we make from any first responders as well. We have very rigorous procedures for good reason, for safety, for making sure that we can answer the call when the public asks us to. But we take it for granted that every company out there is operating like that and most aren't. Right. I mean, is that your experience? I mean, maybe at the level you're talking to people with, you know, $10 million plus maybe they have those already and they've already figured that part out.

No, I would argue that you're right. I mean, no, they don't have that part figured out in most cases. Yeah, the larger big, you know, we still work with some large companies too, like over a billion dollar companies, and they seem to have those things maybe even too much worked out. But, you know, the smaller companies, definitely, they oftentimes I'm, you know, working with, I just came from lunch with a $25 million construction contractor that started from nothing eight years ago. And he's built a really cool, cool company here in the D.C. metro area. And, you know, he's just at the point where they're putting in procedures and putting in job descriptions and things like that and built. And you know, my role has been helping him build his new leadership team. And, you know, these are folks that did stuff, they got stuff done, and now they're having to manage others and figure out how collectively to scale a business. And it's not necessarily something that comes natural to folks. And even when you think it is natural, we'll just put a team of people. We'll put these five people together because they're good functionally at what they do, and we'll automatically have a great leadership team. In my experience, it just doesn't work like that. You actually have to step back and you have to think about, okay, what is it that we're trying to do collectively as a team? Are we just, you know, giving our CEO advice? Or are we trying to grow the enterprise? And is our role part of growing that enterprise? And if it is, how are we going to do that? How are we going to work together? How are our roles integrated with each other versus just functional? How are we going to coordinate and communicate with each other? In the military, we call it a management rhythm, right? Or the operating rhythm. What are behaviors are we expecting of each other? Is it okay not to show up in time to a meeting? Is it okay to bring your cell phone to me? Just simple, stupid things like that that happen to get in the way of the natural operation of a growing company. And then on the other side of that, you have all the structural stuff, right? And then on the other side of that, you have the relational dynamics that often are taken for granted, but are the things that, from our experience, are like taking a stick and putting in the spokes of a bicycle, if not managed correctly, Building the foundation for folks to be able to trust each other. That's, you know, it's an easy thing to say, but it's another thing to actually be vulnerable with each other and, you know, be able to be wrong and be able to admit when you made a mistake and to challenge each other. The other thing that we see is adults don't like to confront each other. They don't like to challenge each other, at least face to face.

And that lack of ability to have productive dialogue about the most important things that you're dealing with as a team can get in your way very quickly and hinder your ability to hold each other accountable. As a team, there's always a leader or there's always a boss. And the boss can play that accountability role and should in many respects. But the greatest teams we've worked with are those that are able to not just rely on the boss, leadership, or accountability, but those that are able to hold each other accountable. So it's two sides of that coin. The structural stuff and the relational stuff, and not stepping Back and really figuring out how is it we're going to build those capabilities. It can be very. Get out of control very quickly. Yeah, I agree.

And kind of bringing it back to this audience, it could very easily with people who have the military or the more rigorous, you know, first responder perspective, governmental kind of bureaucracy, sometimes perspective. You know, they could take from this that, that we're saying, man, business world out there is just all messed up, like they don't have any plan at all. And obviously that's not true. But what I really want them to get from my questions to you about all those, you know, about how, how many things aren't there that we take for granted, the structure, the accountability. Right. It's that they should take confidence from, you know, they're gonna be able to walk out there and they don't have to go to a subcon, continue in kind of their old role if they're being, you know, if their heart is speaking to them to start their own business or to go completely at a right angle and go be the best car salesman in their, in their town or you know, go to theology, whatever it is, that's a right turn from where they currently are. They should have the confidence that the stuff that they take for granted, what they've been doing, the organization, what they've learned in their organizations all this time is really going to set them up very well.

I couldn't agree anymore. I mean, particularly in the structural side of things. I mean the military, the first responder community, that sense of process, that sense of procedure, that sense of structure and hierarchy are really embedded in, you know, the world that, you know, you live in or you know, you and I lived in. And that, you know, that's just such an invaluable asset to organizations. For sure.

Yeah. In the nuclear Navy that I spent 26 years in, you know, Rickover was kind of the head of that organization. Well, obviously not kind of. He was for 50 years. And there was this, I worked in kind of the main, the headquarters of that for two or three years and there was this picture of him with a subtitle on it. And then it says, if you don't have someone that you can point your finger at that was accountable for the mistake, then you've never really had anyone responsible for it. And I've always kind of thought of that as, you know, in the military of man, we are so focused, especially nuclear Navy, on accountability and obviously the.

Military, everyone's accountable for their actions.

Right.

And so I guess my point is that People take that negatively. But when I've been out in the civilian world, like, living vicariously through my buddy's company and other companies, I've come across, oh, my gosh, if we just had somebody accountable, you know, like somebody who knew it was their job would help in a lot of situations.

No question about it. It's often unintentional, right? I mean, it's often because you don't set up the right structure to begin with. And the structure could be just as simple as, these are your roles functionally. But then as a leadership team, you also have enterprise focused roles. And that's where we see a lot of the challenges come in. Because those enterprise roles aren't necessarily as clearly defined, and the integration points and the overlap among those roles are not as clearly defined. Or talk. You don't even have to write them down on a piece of paper. You just have to talk about them. And when they're not clearly defined, people start pointing fingers when something happens. That's where the benefit of coming from an environment where structure is king really can be beneficial.

Another big lesson I learned that my buddy Patrick has learned as well. Now, recently, I learned this in command as one of the processes of taking command. They made us write and rewrite and present our command vision, our culture. And then you had to post it in several places around the ship, right? And it was in everybody's face. And the good leaders, the successful leaders, had always taken an opportunity and it was in the culture of their ship, to point out when somebody was demonstrating one of the values of the command, like this person, this petty officer did this. And, man, that really represents team spirit, which is one of our values. Right? And so my buddies had great success with that as well. And I'm always bugging him about getting it out there in front of people and making it live. And the reason I do this and the lesson I learn is that you're not gonna be able to write everything down. There's not an answer to every. When this happens, what do I do? But if the people understand the culture and the background, like, you can always go back to that basic, you know, and deduce from there what the right answer is. Right? Like, if the most important value is always watching out for each other, for example, then when this challenge comes along, well, there's no right answer. There's no written down answer for this. But I know that I need to look out for the other guys. And so what they would expect me to do is rewrite this portion or make sure I'M here early tomorrow to make sure this happens or whatever it is, they have something to fall back on. And I'm sure at the Kerry School, when you are teaching individual companies, I'm sure vision and culture comes up as well.

Oh, my God. Yeah. No, it's critical because a lot of the companies, particularly the larger companies we work with, they'll have a culture defined or a set of values defined. And then, you know, you start asking people in the lunchroom or coffee line.

And they don't know what they are.

No idea. And so, you know, and so, you know, we have one hammer and we use it pretty well. It's the executive team. Right. The executive team plays a. Or leadership team plays a critical role in many facets of growing a company. But perhaps the most important one is cascading the values that they expect from each other and from the rest of the organization. And, you know, that goes well beyond writing a script for the, you know, the reception room, although that's important as well. It really goes to what you said is, you know, how do we recognize and reinforce the types of behaviors that we're expecting? And most importantly, as a leadership team, are we modeling those behaviors that. Not as big of a challenge in the military? In my limited experience, much bigger challenges outside the military.

Yeah, I agree with you. And even in the military. So my. My executive officer had this great idea for me to announce one time when I was new, like, if you don't see me or, you know, here's. There's this piece of paper listed on one of the bulletin boards near my office. Right. And so it was kind of private, but if you see, you see me not doing something that's one of my values or being inconsistent, ask the question, like, how is what you just did here consistent with this thing?

Right.

That was painful.

It was painful. Very painful.

But I'll tell you what it made people study my what, the culture, what the vision, the values of the. And it helped me to walk that walk.

Right, Absolutely. And the first time the leader shuts that down, they might as well not have even created anything. I can say. Yeah. I was just mentioning before I went out to lunch with a client, the CEO of this construction contractor. And I mean, man, he is just. He's probably my favorite client I ever had. And he just. Because he's so full of humility and is not afraid to be wrong. Right. And is not afraid to be challenged and accountable to those that work for him. I just think there's so much in that.

Yeah. Incredible stuff. What other piece of advice do you have? You know, thinking of the audience that we have here, what you've learned over time, what you've seen happen in companies, you know, or even just about your own transition.

The one thing I would caution is that, not even a caution, it's just one thing I would encourage, is don't assume that structure will be there. Just don't assume it. And on the back of that, don't get too frustrated when it's not. And thirdly, don't assume that putting in the same structure or a similar structure as you had in the military is going to work 100% in the new environment you're in. Be curious, be adaptable, push your agenda, but listen and hear and adapt to the environment that you're working in. Because what happens, and I've seen this to lots of military folks who have the right construct in mind, they become a bull in a china shop, they become the pariah who thinks they knew everything and it really was not their intention to begin with. But it becomes that because they're pushing what they know will work and they know is quote correct. But when you're pushing up a rope, sometimes it's hard.

I agree. And I'm sure the same thing for firefighters and police officers and anyone who's listening to this, because we're all type A people who are working very, very hard in various challenging situations and those drive a different set of structural requirements then make many companies successful. Google's not going to operate very well with the operational manual for my submarine.

It could, it could probably, yeah.

The open, inviting, everyone has a voice thing is not exactly perfect for a lot of, you know, where a lot of the members of our audience currently are.

Exactly, yeah.

Amazing stuff. My gosh, Jack, that time just flew by. I don't feel like I left you a lot of time to talk, but.

Any subjects that we didn't talk about, I would just. Also in the same vein as what I just said is that one of the things I learned very early on in my military career was how to build a team. And I learned from non commissioned officers to help me do that. So it's sort of what you do in the military and that is not necessarily how the business world operates outside of that. And so be patient, recognize that building teams is a really important skill, but there are different requirements and patience is required in the civilian world, unfortunately.

Yeah, that's a great point. You know, you don't want to surround yourself with yes. People, which is not all that you said, but that was one great point. I always knew that I was going to have a very educational moment. When my chief of the boat asked me, my senior command master chief said, hey, do you got a moment in your stateroom? And then he's like, do you mind if I shut the door? I'm like, oh, boy, get my.

Yeah, I remember that moment, too. I was a lot lower down in the totem pole than you, but I remember hearing, sir, do you got a minute?

Yeah.

I was like, yeah, of course I got a minute. And then.

Yeah.

But those are the lessons that were just invaluable.

Absolutely. When you have people around you that have the fortitude to do that and care enough to do that, man, you've got great team players.

And you know why? You know why they did it? Because they cared about their. Exactly.

Exactly.

It wasn't so much that they cared about you, although they probably did, too.

They really got their. Yeah.

And they didn't want to have some lieutenant come in and screw it up.

Exactly. Oh, my gosh, Jack, this has been great. I hope the audience got as much out of it. How can they contact you or find out more?

Yeah. So our website is relationship impact.com and we have a whole host of webinars, podcasts, blogs, articles, or writers for Chief Executive magazine. So a lot of cool information and very focused on how do you build a great leadership team. So I would encourage your and those that do have budding leadership teams or even established leadership teams. Right on. As you open up our homepage, there is a quiz you can take on there that gives you a sense for how quickly, how effective is your team based on our experience and a bunch of questions we ask.

Yeah, thanks for that. I was just on there earlier and it was fascinating. There's a lot of really good videos like you said on there. Very helpful. So, Jack, thanks so much for sharing with our audience. I look forward to connecting in person next time I'm down in D.C. please do.

Gary. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for the opportunity to speak. Perfect.

Thanks again. Bye. Bye.

Bye.

Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out this show's specific website and our general website, hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own, and if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to itunes or stitcher radio or whatever platform you're using and write a review for the show. We would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.