Scale Up with Verne Harnish

Ask for help. People love to help and they want to, but you have to be willing to ask first. The role model for Yeo is Steve Jobs. Here he is age 12 calling up Mr. Hewlett or Packard and saying I need parts. That's the kind of guts that he exhibited through the entire part of his life all the way up until the end.

I am Jeff Duden and we are on the home front currently. Thank you listeners. Number 48 in entrepreneurship on Apple Podcasts in a matter of three months and as always, this podcast is brought to you by Homefront Brands. Simply building the world's most responsible franchise platform, encouraging entrepreneurs to take action, transform their lives, impact communities and enhance the lives of those they care the most about. All the while delivering enterprise level solutions to local business owners out there on the homefront. If this sounds like you, check us out@homefrontbrands.com today and start your next chapter of greatness. Building your dynasty on on the home front. I will be here looking for you. And today I am excited to have one of my business heroes on with us today, Mr. Verne Harnish. Welcome Jeff.

Hey, it's good to see you again.

Vern Harnish is the founder of the world renowned entrepreneurs organization with over 17,000 members worldwide and has chaired for 15 years EO's premier CEO program held at MIT, a program in which he still teaches today. Birthing the Giants. We could talk about that. Founder and CEO of Scaling Up, a global executive education and coaching company with over two hundred and 40 partners on six continents, Vern has spent the last four decades helping companies scale up. He's the author of the bestselling Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, authored the Greatest Business Decisions of All Time for which Jim Collins wrote the foreword and wrote Scaling up Rockefeller Habits 2.0, which has been translated into 26 languages and has won eight major international book awards including the prestigious International Book Award for Best General Business Book. His latest book, Scaling Up Compensation, rocketed to the number one spot on HR related books on Amazon. Verne serves on several boards including the Vice Chair of the Reorden Clinic, co founder and Chair of Geo Versity and board member of the social venture Million Dollar Women. A private investor in many scale ups, Vern enjoys piano, tennis and magic as a card carrying member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. Welcome Verne. Jeff.

It's good to be on. And hey, first of all, thank you for all that you're doing for entrepreneurs out there in the marketplace. I mean they are the unsung heroes driving you know, the innovation and the jobs and, and what makes economies interesting. So thank you.

Absolutely. The, the wealth gap is something that we care very much about. And creating entrepreneurship on Main Street USA and helping families create stability and freedom in their lives and create generational wealth is what Homefront Brands is all about. We get up every day thinking about it. It's our purpose and we're serious. So. Yeah, I appreciate that very much and excited to, to impart your wisdom on our listeners today. If you don't mind, just real quickly. I know first of all, I do have a Wichita State shocker story, but if you don't mind telling me a little bit about your, you know, kind of where you grew up and you know, how you got to school and all of that.

Yeah. Well, the short of it is born and raised in Colorado. I'm back in Boulder. The Niwok curse has brought me back for the fourth time. Grew up around entrepreneurship. My grandparents were entrepreneurs. My dad Jeff was a rocket engineer in the Titan program. And he and his three buddies, you know, we know a team that launches together versus the solopreneur tends to scale further, faster. So three, he and three of his friends launched a company called Higher Electronics. And Jeff, it was a rocket of a company. I got to ride along when I was starting at 5 and he'd bring me to the meetings, he'd sit me at the bar watching all the details going on. I'd go on the shoots there in the video business. And then he lost it all in the 73 recession. So it really was a riches to rag story. And we ended up moving from Colorado to kinsley, Kansas, literally 35 miles this side of Dodge. And I thought I'd died and gone to hell, honestly. And he and I started in business after becoming janitors and we became serious service repair contractors for the local catalog store that was there in Kinsley, Marvin Ryan. And that's when dad really kind of taught me business. Joined my wholesaler. I was supposed to, I was supposed to go back east but there was a mess up. So I ended up at Wichita State University, which was a blessing and helped scale a company of about 12 million. We, I was in college which then led to me founding the association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs and then what is today eo, the Entrepreneurs Organization. So that's a short but a richest rag story and ultimately I just hope we can keep any other entrepreneur from going through what my dad went through and what it did to our family.

It's a question for later, but I'll, I'll bring it up now. Why are some people more likely to become entrepreneurs? In all of your work, have you identified traits or life experiences that lead people to lean towards entrepreneurship?

You know, I think they're unemployable. You know, at the end of the day, they don't want to work for anybody else.

True. Guilty. Nobody really wants them to work for them.

It's, you know, you've seen it. It's, you know, when you sell your company to a PE firm or something like that, we all take bets how long the entrepreneur is going to last. They're working for somebody else. And I think the second is, it is accidental. There's something that you want to fix, you want to do or you're fired, or you lose something or you get fed up and you really want to be your own boss. The short of it is they actually did some research at Harvard and you have a high sense or need for independence, but you only have a median sense for power. So it's not a power thing. It's really an independence thing. But what caused me to found YEO is this idea. It's okay to be independent, but no reason to be alone. And that's really what EO and YPO and other organizations do for us.

The value of peer organizations. I'm a ypoer all the way through chapter chair. Then I rolled into an organization that I'm just now getting traction in, which is called CEO. It's Chief Executives Organization. I think you have to be a chair in YPO and then you can apply to being CEO. And then I'm also right now going through this strategic coach program to try to be more efficient and more effective with my time and the people around me. Yeah, you can ask anyone in the building. I had very little to do with the success that we've had as, as building organizations. It's always been the people around us. And until I got into YPO and I realized everybody there had sold a company, everybody there had sold a family business, everybody there had had done all these things that I knew was in the future, but I didn't know the bridge to get from where I was to where I could make that decision and make that call and feel good about it and do it with confidence. How did you structure EO originally to help that business owner, EOs and organization? You got a million dollars in sales to qualify for it. So it is attainable for many, many business owners. It's my highest recommendation is for people to get into eo, even our franchisees, to get into EO and get around a bigger table. How did you have the foresight to structure it in such a way that would be so helpful to entrepreneurs when they needed it the most?

Yeah, well, as you know, Jeff, good artists borrow, great artists steal. And so YEO was just YPO for pure entrepreneurs. Because, as you know, YPO is kind of a combination of hired guns, generational leaders, and then they've got about a third entrepreneurs. But when I launched, you guys had an employee requirement. You had to have at least 50 employees. And when I went to go meet the founder of ypo, Ray Hickok, to kind of seek his endorsement to support me launching yeo, I said, look, there needs to be an organization for this. This group of entrepreneurs that really don't want people. And he starts laughing. You know, we've always kidded entrepreneurs would love their business if they didn't have employees or customers interrupting their grand visions. And I didn't realize at the time I was describing Jeff, his daughter Kimberly. Kimberly had grown up in YPO because his dad founded it, but she was running a $12 million company with seven employees and was never going to qualify for her own dad's organization. And so that's why Ray Hickok ended up signing on as my honorary founder, and we ended up tapping his daughter to be the next international chair after me. And so that really also helped us cement the relationship between YEO and ypo. Now, EO and ypo, and I encourage. I get in trouble all the time as EO's founder, but I encourage every EO member, if they. If they can and will get into ypo, there's no doubt you guys are the most connected, powerful organization in the world, and you're only one phone call away from any head of state. And it's what you said. Your success is just the sum total of those people that you're surrounded by.

Yeah, it's. There's stories like you mentioned in ypl. I endorse it. It changed my life. And the people that are around my table now all come from ypo. We had a guy stuck at an airport in. In Mexico. He was a Canadian citizen. He was coming back to the US. He had lost his passport, and somehow within 30 minutes, we had him on the plane.

That's right.

There was a. There was a Mexican official. There was a. Somebody high up at American Airlines, and it took a couple of phone calls.

So.

But, yeah, it's very cool to do. So. How early is too early for people to get into an organization like that? You've said that, hey, when you first start a company, it's 80 hours. It's heads down, it's execution, it's, you know, it's, it's cash.

Right?

Cash is like oxygen. You don't know how bad you need it until you don't have any. So you're, you're worried about cash, you're worried about sales, and then you're moving towards, you know, the meeting routines and everything in the Rockefeller habits. How early, you know, what point does a startup try to create the structure from the Rockefeller habits? Or is it from day one?

Day one. And by the way, you didn't ask me to say this, but I share with a lot of student organizations. They invite me in to speak as the founder of ace. And I'm always suggesting I'd rather buy than build. And franchising is literally the best way to get into business. I'm sitting next to a young kid who was flying into Charleston as part of a government program. I said, look, I wouldn't start anything. I would start with the franchise because you've already got those systems and processes and all of those things in place so you can get hit the ground running. But Dave Rogan Moser, who today runs Jasper, they just had a $1.5 billion market cap. Dave had started two companies prior to that, Jeff, and it was, he felt too hard and so he wanted to do it easier his third round. And so he started day one with our tools over a weekend. And he credits that with why they've had such unbelievable growth since we built.

A franchise platform over a two year period where we've acquired six companies and we've gone from nine employees when we started to 28 at the end of last year to now we're sitting here in September with 54.

Yeah.

And as I, as I reflected back upon, I think you know, the, the building crossing the chasm and how you outgrow people as you come to these chasms. I, I was studying, preparing and reading over the weekend and I realized that we had, we had done a good thing hiring the level of talent that we did, even though it was kind of ahead of revenue and it was hard on cash. But we had the money set aside within the forecast to do it. But I just realized we skipped a couple of chasms that we would have to have slowed down and then, and retooled in. So I agree, if you know what you're building from the beginning and if you have the cash, then build it to scale from day one.

Yeah. For sure. And it is like parenting. It's hard to skip any of those developmental stages. You just maybe go through them quicker than somebody else. And I might just. So the readers have got something or listeners have something to start immediately. You know the most powerful idea that Dave Rogen Moser started with that weekend that I was taught by Regis McKenna who coached Steve Jobs, Intel, Genentech and Jeff I co called Regis when I was a student at Wichita State University. You know, Steve Jobs has always said the single most important thing he did was just ask for help. You know, he was 12 when he called. I always forget whether it was Hewlett or Packard, but he called him up and said when you could look people up in the phone book, said I, I need some parts for something I'm working on. And you know, the co founder of Hewlett Packard was so impressed that he then brought the 13 year old Steve Jobs on as an intern. And it really allowed Steve to see what a large company was like and how to scale it. And so Steve's always been adamant, asked for help. So I'm a student at Wichita State and I just asked for Regis McKenna's help and he, he taught me probably the most single important idea that Steve Jobs used. Bill Gates considered the best question he had ever been asked. And that was all right, whatever you want to achieve next, take a piece of paper out and make a list of the top 25 people, influencers, relationships that you've got to get on board. And I, I don't care if you're launching an Italian restaurant in Boulder, Colorado. You want to sit down, get on the Internet and find out, all right, who are the critics who would write about it? Who are the three or four most influential people that if I invite them to the restaurant they're going to tell all their friends. You can find that out instantly. And by the way, the second question is what's the job to be done? Now what's nice about a franchise is they've already answered that question. But if you're launching your own company, you've got to be clear what is the job the customer needs me to do? Be the best Italian restaurant in Boulder maybe or to do search which is Google's or to be the safest car bulldoze. Once you've done that, Dave Rogue Moser said, all right, I want to provide social proof on your website. And so he made a list of the top 50 people in that kind of social media space. And Jeff, he didn't know one of them. I didn't know anyone on the 25 list that I made that Regis McKenna's team had me make. But then Dave found one person who knew a majority of those 50. He gave him 1% equity, which was, you know, worth nothing. Back when you were a startup today, at 1.5 billion, that was a pretty good deal. And that one guy got. Dave took 48 of the 50 within two months. By the way, we're talking about pre product. And Dave was sharing how all his friends were texting him. Dave, everybody in the industry is talking about you. And that's the key. If you want the best Italian restaurant in Boulder, you got to get all the right people talking about you saying, hey, check out this new Italian restaurant in Boulder. So whether you're launching something that's going to be worth a billion and a half or the best Italian restaurant, it starts with making that list, which is what Steve Jobs did. Jeff, when he wanted to launch itunes, he made a list of the top 25, starting with Sam Bronfman at the top. He did not know one of them. They wouldn't even return his phone call. But he found his buddy at the Eagles, the drummer for the Eagles, Don Henley. And he invited Don over to his place, and he said, all right, can you help me get to these folks on the list? And Don got him to the first. And 24 months later, Steve was the king of music distribution. That's how it's done, and that's why EO and YPO are so powerful, because they just make it easier to get to anybody on your list.

In scaling up, you really emphasize marketing. And I've heard you refer to this top 25 list as marketing. It's really the first step in launching a company is just sitting a beat, taking a moment, and figuring out who you need to help you. How has marketing changed? And for the people that you coach and the people that you counsel, what are some of the strategies today that people are employing in marketing that maybe they weren't five years ago?

Yeah. Well, first of all, you're right. All the functions matter inside of a company. But without marketing, it's hard to scale. And I want to be real simple in defining marketing's job. Marketing's job is to attract new relationships to the company. So it's not just attracting new clients. It's attracting talent, it's attracting advisors, it's attracting influencers, it's attracting investment, and ultimately, it's attracting attention. Because that's what you want, is you want attention out there in the marketplace and the first thing that Regis McKenna said I had to do, and it was his first advice to Steve Jobs is you have to have a separate marketing meeting separate from sales every week. And I remember he put his finger up like this. One hour Steve, by the way, when he came back to Apple, the only function he chaired was marketing. And it was a three hour meeting every Wednesday afternoon. So my marketing meeting now for four, this is the 40th anniversary of me meeting Regis McKenna has been 10:00am Eastern time every Monday for 40 years. And the first thing is working on the influencer list. And then the second is the standard four Ps of marketing, product, price, place and promotion. But the good news is it's been updated to the four E's of marketing, which is what Ogilvy, the great ad agency said is really the modern version. So if there's anything that's changed, it's we're really focused on the four E's versus the four P's and we can walk through those. But that's been one of the big innovations.

Those be engagement.

Well the first is, is what's replaced product is experience. Okay, what's the whole experience? You know, and that was the thing that Steve Jobs jumped onto. I mean even his box is a great experience. Reason he launched itunes is he thought that the customer was really having a bad experience ripping off artists of their music through Napster. And he said I need to fix that for both the artists and the consumer. He only launched retail stores because he thought the buying experience was terrible. We even emphasize if you want to get paid faster, a lot of you that sell B2B, you know, you're, there's payable clerks that are sitting on your cash. If your invoice is easier, a better experience to pay if you just put a happy face on it and put the person's name that you know is the payables clerk and put a thank you for paying. Look, it's humans at the end of the day that are making this final decision of when you get paid make that a great experience. So that's, that's the first and we can do the other three. But take a look at that Ogilvies for ease of marketing.

So for first time entrepreneurs, they've been in corporate America for 15 years, 20 years, and they've decided they want to make money for themselves, they want some financial freedom. What advice just right off the cuff would you have for these people if they got in front of you and you agreed to mentor them for 30 minutes, what would you tell Them?

Yeah. Well, you know, the good news, usually executives coming out of large companies is they already have a sense of discipline. And that is ultimately what you need to scale any business or franchise, as you know, is to have the discipline to follow the system. So if you don't have a system, you need to create one and then have the discipline to follow it. And so that's the key. And Scott at Atlassian, the ypoer who has scaled I checked his latest market cap, it's like 52 billion. He said the key to him scaling when he first was in my workshop in 2005 with 50 employees, today they have 10,000 is discipline and focus. And that's really the essence of the three Rockefeller Habits that were the foundation of my first book that really drove that executive program. They still let me teach at we hold on the campus of mit and maybe we could walk through those three disciplines.

I think that would be great. The one that made the biggest impression on me the first time I read Rockefeller habits years ago was meeting Pulse and how to organize your time. And I'm always intrigued as to how executives and business builders choose to invest their time and where I'd love for you to walk through those because it's simple and true.

Yeah. And by the way, people can go to the scalingup.com website and they'll see a picture of my books and next to it are some free chapters that you don't have to even buy my books. You don't have to spend a penny with us. And I'd encourage people to look at the download chapter the barriers and it details what are the three barriers to scaling. And I feature in there. Alan Rudy. You know, Alan was one of my students at that MIT program later a client, but it started with him working 80 hour weeks. And as you opened up with hey, you got to start there and we have this joke, an entrepreneur's rather is somebody who'd rather work 16 hours a day for themselves than eight hours for someone else. The problem is it quits being a joke. And you know, Alan was buried. And so the first thing that we do with this meeting rhythm is it gives you the first 10x return inside the business. And you're looking for Those kind of 10x advantages, the thing that Dan Sullivan teaches. And so if you do your meetings right, we were able to reduce from 80 hours that Alan was having to spend working on the business or in it to eight hours. So then he could spend the rest of the week doing the market facing activities that are necessary to scale so that's what we got to do. We got to get the entrepreneur out of the day to day and get them back focused on marketing activities. And so our three Rockefeller habits or disciplines are the ones that do that. And very quickly it's being clear what your priorities are. But that's only clear if you've got the right data feeding into what that decision should be. And then it does you no good to have that information if you don't get around table and talk about it, which is the power we've got in our EO and YPO forums, which is something that you can bring then internally.

To your own organization around the data piece. One thing is just gnawing at me. I had heard you say that accounting next to marketing accounting is often the weakest part of a business. And the ability to get a cash report every day or the ability to get timely numbers not a month after they, they close somewhere where it's actionable. That type of information, it's data, it helps you establish priorities and it comes from a healthy meeting routine. So it's all tied in there together. When a company goes from chaos to rolling into a program with you, what are the steps in going through that and establishing the priorities? How do you assess whether they have access to the right data or the systems that are going to give them the right data? I know how you get into the meeting routines but if can you, can you talk through it in that way?

I can. So I'm going to take you up to Calgary, Canada to a company called Altagas. And I remember David Clark called me and it was chaos and he, he didn't even look good. I mean he was, he didn't look healthy. He was stressed out to the max like Alan Rudy. And I said what's the issue David? And he goes look, I have no visibility in, into how we're doing. It's like, it's like playing a sport and not knowing the score. You know we're going to find out the score of the CU Buffs game. Go see you Buffs prime time, you know, a month from now. And so I said David, and here's the first thing you start with. What are the two pieces of information that if you knew those every day and every week would calm you down, that you would know everything was fine. Now obviously it's revenue, gross margin, profit, but those are outcomes. What are the activities, the KPIs key performance indicators. And he goes very simply, you know, if I knew the giga joules of energy that we were Producing every day. And I knew the variance to our maintenance budget every week. I could tell you whether we've had a good day and a good week or not. And that's really ultimately what you're trying to get at, at your gut. Let's me say it another way. I assume you're a fan of the book and movie Moneyball.

I am.

The first thing we do is help an entrepreneur figure out what's the money ball stat. I mean, look, baseball was measuring all of this stuff. Recruiting based on it, compensating based on it. And then some guy came along, Billy Bean, and actually crunched the numbers and found out none of that stuff mattered. And that. That's our bigger concern is that you're looking at a bunch of numbers that don't really matter and are clouding the picture. And so the first thing we have to do is find the Moneyball stat on base percentage, which it was for baseball. Once you're clear about that, then everything else falls into place. And so we were able to, within a week to get David those two numbers. And we didn't need big fancy systems. We didn't need big fancy technology. The key is to actually get the people doing the work to report it out. Because what's happened in our companies is we have disconnected people working from their stats. And that would be like disconnecting any professional player from their stats. They know their stats instantly and ongoing. So what is the stats for each of the five or five hundred people within your own organization that tie back to the Moneyball stat? And now you've got alignment.

I don't know if you've seen a book called Fake Work. I just did a speak to the troops. When you go from nine people to 54 people over the course of a year, there's fake work going on everywhere. And it's. And it's. And people are killing themselves to do it because, you know, the strategy of the company has evolved. The new people might not have been connected properly to the KPIs and to the outcomes. Yeah, so there's things going on kind of in the eddy, you know. You know, when a river bends and it has that little eddy? Well, a lot of times that's where the big trout are, but a lot of times that's where things are just swirling in a circle, but they're really not contributing, you know, candor inside of a. Inside of a nice, tight meeting routine. Pulse with effective meetings and communication and constantly putting the most important things front and center is a way to keep the Fake work to a minimum. It's never going to go to zero because we're dealing with people. But that's incumbent upon us as leadership and management to create that kind of clarity. And to your point, if you don't ever stop and make sure that everybody's got the ladder up on the right building, then you lose effectiveness and opportunity. And I think, you know, I've heard you say, man, you missed three or four big opportunities and you missed the whole thing. So it's really, really important for leaders to take time to really think and really listen to what's going on in the organization.

So with that, Jeff, let me drill down to a couple of very key specifics we just hosted up at Harvard. Hubert Jolie, who's the CEO of the Turnaround Best Buy, you know, took their stock, 11 to $110 in a. In a crazy time when Amazon was coming on Circuit City, died. And Hubert said something really important. He said, you don't have a strategy if you haven't named it. And so the first, and that's why it's the first Rockefeller habit is setting the priority. Not the five, not the three, but the one. And I know you have a thousand things to do, but when you wake up in the morning, what's your theme for today? What's the one thing, and that's what Ivy Lee taught, John D. Rockefeller, Charles Schwab, and all of the great titans is be clear. What is the most important thing you need to do today with everything else going on? So I wake up every morning with a theme in my mind of what has to get accomplished? By the way, I just. I then set the sprint on our weekly meeting for the team. I just told the team on our Monday call, just before this. Our theme this week, CEO boot camps. It's like we're all in on the CEO boot camps. It's then important for you to set a theme for the quarter or the year. And what I find interesting, Mark Zuckerberg had actually been in my course when I was teaching for a moment at Babson. I was doing a workshop there, and he'd come over from Harvard. I got to tell you, I'd never bet against that kid. At the beginning of this year, he set the theme. He called it the Year of Efficiency. Everybody knows it. All the analysts know it, everybody in the company knows it. Every quarterly meeting, he updates. And the whole idea is, hey, whatever else you're working on threads, all the other things that we're launching, I want you to get more efficient by the way they did. And their Stock popped another 200 billion when they had their analyst call at the end. At the end of July. So the first question I'd have to the listeners, what's your theme for the balance of 2023? Or what's the title of your strategy for 2024? And the analogy I use is writing a book without a title or producing a movie without a title. It would. It's. It's crazy. So give it a thing. The second is something that Jim Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, said. And they've been, as you know, Jeff, surveying 100 million employees every year for 50 years, looking at the question of engagement, the word that you used earlier, and empowerment and productivity, all the things that we want from our team. You know what? They figured out three things. First, nobody wants managed. So this is the year to get rid of the term manager, right? They want lead. Or actually what Hubert Jolie said is, let's get rid of the term leadership as well. It's careship. The only job of a leader is to care for their people, so they'll care for your customers, you and the company. Second, he said, what they do want, though, is to be coached. So they don't want a manager, but they want to be coached. Look, I don't think any professional sports player wants managed, but they want coached. So then he said, all you have to do is ask every employee one question every week. And I'm like, really? It's that simple? All your 100 million. And the question is this. What are you working on and what's in your way of achieving it? I'll say it again. What are you working on and what's your in your way of achieving it? Now, that is actually, Jeff, at the heart of our daily huddle. For eight minutes a day, you're going to ask the team on that call, what, what are you working on? What's your priority today and what's in your way of achieving it? And it takes six data points to see a trend. So in a week, I can make this decision. Is that person working on is Gene. Is Donna talking about people in my team that was on my call, Cameron, Are they working on the right thing, if not particularly focused on CEO boot camp this week? And then what's in their way of achieving it? That's my job to get those constraints, or their job too, to get those constraints out of our way. So in some sense, without knowing the research, we had intuited that our three questions that you ask every employee every day on A daily what's up? What's your priority? What's your KPI? What's your Moneyball stat? Do you know your stats and what you're stuck or what's in the way of you achieving it is the single most important question that Jim Clifton's team has found leads then to the coachable moments. And then he found one other interesting thing Jeff. He said nobody believes us but the research is clear. You really want engaged, productive, excited employees make sure each one of them has a best friend at work. John Ratliff who we were Talking about John's 550 call center reps were brothers, sisters, sister in laws, friends, friends he wanted it which the key is the best source of new talent is referrals from your existing people. Now you got to have a good interview process to make sure you're bringing in quality. Quality begets quality but it's about friendship. So I, I'll mention one last thing I I consider the most important five minutes of your 168 hours a week to be the opening question we ask at every weekly meeting which I asked today which is all right let's share a piece of good news personally and professionally. And so personally I found out that Gene who is my EA in the Philippines got to spend the weekend with her sister and without going to the details what they did it's, it's important that I know that and that Donna is had a chance to bring her 89 year old father down from Pennsylvania to celebrate his birthday and meet his great grandchild. Do you know those things about your people? And it's important and that's what connects us as humans and by the way it is what is at the heart. When Google asked what's the key to effective teams that was one of the two most important thing so that five minutes of sharing good news personally connects us and professionally good news begets good news is the most important five minutes of your entire week. If you do nothing else with your.

Team makes a huge difference. One of our values is respect and in a speak to the troops 3 weeks ago I did, I talked about it and I said you know you really have to take an interest in the people around you. People are new. We, we've got, we got sales and operations of course have the healthy conflict because we're putting 170 new franchise owners into our business this year. We're at one point as far as I could tell we're one of the fastest growing franchise platforms in the country if not the world over a 90 day, period. But people are coming so fast. I said you have to take time to get to know people because you can't respect them and you can't care for them if you don't know them. I had no less than three people that I had not spent any time with come up to me and stop by my office and just tell me a personal story for five or 10 minutes. And it was fantastic. And now I, I look at those people differently. I know I know something more personal about them. And, and it's, yeah, it's absolutely critically important. We're talking about meeting routines and I know that people struggle to time slice a little bit and, and it's, you know, sometimes it gets easier when our businesses get a little bit bigger because we, where we've done a good job with delegating and we've got good measurements in place. Can you share just a little bit about your disciplines of your weekly routine and how you slice that?

You know, first of all, by having the meetings at a set time and we're talking about 10% of your 40, 50, 60, 80 hour workweek. You know, in many cases we're talking about a restroom break by having it at a fixed time. I don't have to spend a lot of time trying to track people down. You know, I've got three companies and so our council meeting is our three CEOs, our president and myself. So the five of us. What's nice is something came up on our HubSpot account and Kevin and I knew we were going to be on a call this morning. It wasn't urgent that it got decided today or tomorrow or the next day, but we didn't have to track each other down. We didn't have to try to share 27 emails to try to solve that problem. Three minute conversation replaced 30 minutes of emailing and setting up another meeting. So first, it's a beautiful placeholder. And because by the way, I know weekly I have the CEOs of my companies on a call. We've got a company that wants to do a strategic partnership with us. What do I do? I invite them to that meeting so I don't have to try to coordinate five other people's schedules. I just say, hey, you want to do a strategic partnership with us? Here's the time when we're all together every week. Call in then. So first of all, it's an absolute timesaver when it comes to the daily. I'll tell you a quick story back with John Radliff. So John exited his company, Apple Tree. And he decided to want to remodel this famous bank that's in Westchester, Pennsylvania, to make it kind of a workspace for CEOs for entrepreneurs. Has anyone done a construction project that's listening to this or even a remodel or. I'm just getting my deck refinished. All right, out here, the new place I just bought. These things quickly go off the rails. Over budget, over time. John is more than twice over budget. It's five months late. He's ready to sue, take to court the owner of the building, who's also leading the renovation. And then it dawned on him on one of our council calls. Wait a second. I wouldn't have thought to run Apple Tree without every employee in some kind of a daily. Why am I doing that with this project? And look, you think it's hard to get your own employees to do it? Hey, at least they're your. Your people. He calls the owner of the building said, look, we're either going to court or for eight minutes at 7:58 every morning for eight minutes, I want you, my team, and every sub that's going to be working the plumber, the electrician, whatever, on that job. I want to be on a call for eight minutes. By the way, the guy wanted to kill him. He's like, this is impossible. My schedule, you know. You know, everybody has their excuses. John said, then I'll see you in court. And the guy said, all right, let's give it a try. That project got delivered in the next five weeks. Now, that guy who runs projects all over Westchester, Pennsylvania, he won't run a project involving various people that aren't his employees if they're not on a quick daily in order to get a line of what needs to get done today. T boom Pickens, by the way, used a daily when he went broke. He was down to his last 3 million. After being worth 300 million, he used a daily to turn that back into 4 billion in 72 months. The first thing Nate and the boys did at Airbnb when they lost a billion dollars worth of bookings on that March 13, went into a daily seven days a week, not just five. And the first thing Steve Jobs did when he came back to save Apple was set up a daily with the four people he said are going to be key to turning around Apple. So I only bring up those other guys because, look, they're still doing it. Billion of dollar companies, and, you know, they're busy. They wouldn't do it if this wasn't vital to being able to if you want to move faster, you pulse faster. So I hope I've made the case, if nothing else, the power of doing an eight minute daily. It's all detailed in Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. So anyway, Jeff, thanks for asking.

I've heard you talk about the importance of building a studio so you have somewhere to go out of the office to get away and just to get your think time in.

You bet.

And I know that in Strategic Coach, they have buffer days. We've got focus days and we've got free days. And when I first started the program, I'm like a free day, really, where I don't, I don't pick up my phone or look at an email. How does that possibly work? But as they continue to beat me over the head with the manuals, I'm starting to see how this, how this can actually work. Do you schedule your days in any particular way where you've got a certain set of meetings on the same day each week and then other days where you do other activities?

I do because we're running these various companies and I've got eight passion projects, including putting together a musical that we were going, we're going to release in 2028. I'm working on ending the death penalty in Georgia. So I've got some meetings there September 26, a lot of other kind of projects. I really have theme days. But, but I want to come back to the studio that you mentioned. You know, there's a term running around called visionary that I hope nobody ever goes to their team and tells them they're the visionary. I think that's either a little creepy or I think it's egotistical. All right, Even Steve Jobs resisted being called a visionary.

All right, maybe they just don't want to. They just don't want to do the work. Yeah, yeah, Like I'm doing this. You do the work.

Yeah, but, but, but even the term, even the term is like, I'm a visionary. That is just. All right, you know, let somebody else call you that, but don't call yourself that technically what you are. And the term we use is strategist. Michael Porter at Harvard, the great father of strategy, said the number one job of the entrepreneur, the CEO, is to set strategy. And by the way, marketing strategy, pricing strategy, compensation strategy, you own strategy. Hubert Jolie said, the number one job of a CEO is strategy. You're the strategist. So if your job's to design strategy, you need a design studio. And that's what you've heard me talk about. And and it comes back to that idea, which is where. Where do your best ideas come to you? I'll tell you one thing no one's ever said the office. You need this second place, this other place that you can go hide out. So John D. Rockefeller designed the most beautiful home office overlooking the Hudson Valley. If you ever have a chance to tour it, it is inspiring. He worked from home every morning till noon. He didn't even go into his offices, Standard Oil headquarters, till noon, where then he had a daily luncheon, just like Steve Jobs had a daily luncheon with Jonathan. I've. There's that daily meeting again. And then he'd go fight the fires in the afternoon. And so I hope everyone has that other place that inspires you. Right here. Where I am is over. Over a river. I'm six minutes up the canyon in the mountains above Boulder, Colorado. I am inspired by this place. And this is my hideaway away from everybody else that's running the company. So find that design studio. Looks like you got a cool spot.

Oh, it's a. It's a great spot. We're. We're in an old NASCAR building, and this is a. This used to be where they painted the race cars, and we converted the paint booth into the podcast studio. So, yeah, a little bit of history. I got some cool people up on the wall there. Jobs is not up there. I was hoping you didn't notice, but, yeah, it's inspiring. People that did it their way.

And so, anyway, get a design studio. And then our. Our rule is find a meeting morning or afternoon. Have all of your meetings lined up, not spread across the week so that you can stay in the flow. And I learned it from the late Rick, who built a company called. Oh, I just went blank on the name of it. They sold it EMC for a billion, too. Rick was able to show me that lining up all the meetings. He was done by noon on Monday so they could be out in the market doing the market, facing activities that are critical. So that's probably the most important decision. Jeff.

Yeah, I've always been a proponent of aligning business and personal meaning. The things that I learned in business management, building companies, I also took what applied to my family.

Yeah.

And. And used it that way. And then I was listening to something on the Rockefellers this morning, and, you know, they still have an $11 billion family fortune. They have a $5 billion endowment. Charity has been their main focus. And they haven't had a family business in Standard Oil. They get together and they meet at the Homesteads that they've had in their family for generations. They have regular meetings and when somebody turns 21, they bring them into the family and they, they talk about their values. And so they've managed their family using the Rockefeller habits that, that were originally built to build the company. I found that to be fascinating. And I was wondering, what do you see in transition? I think you have four children, is that correct?

I do.

What have, what have you borrowed from your business career? Where have you seen the similarities that have helped you maybe speak into your kids lives?

Yeah. So we had this psychiatrist of Harvard Business School, Dr. Barry Greif, come in every year that I was running that program at MIT and teach. And he would always start with three circles, Jeff. He would draw self, work and family. And he said as an entrepreneur, which one would get most of the attention? And we're all like work, right? He said, if you have any gas left in the tank, it's probably going to be given to family, but specifically to the children at the expense of the spouse. And I was married 28 years, but she ended up leaving me. And the track record for relationships is pretty rough for entrepreneurs. Maybe if I had learned that sooner, I could have kept it together. And then when it comes to self, we're last. And at some point self ends up resenting family and work and that's the mess. So it ended up leading us to create this one page personal plan. And our view is it's not about balance. There's never going to be a balance. It's a blend. It's a blend. And so how do you blend work, family and self? And so our one page personal plan says let's bring the same tools. And look, we did some things right, my ex and I, we had the family meeting every Sunday and the children loved it. And it really let us communicate, set agendas and schedules for the week. And we even had, and we had vision boards for all of the kids and they continue to use those as saying, all right, what are the, what's the one thing particularly I want to achieve this year? Applying what we've learned to the family is critical. And that's why we have the one page personal plan.

Yep. Well, you know what? They're only on loan to us, sir. And we, we pull, we pour into them and teach them how to think, not what to think, and teach them right from wrong. And then off they go. And we hope the best for them. Well, fantastic. Is there anything else that you would care to share? Any words of encouragement for entrepreneurs at the at the early stage of growth that we haven't covered yet today.

Ask for help.

Ask for help.

Yeah. And people love to help and they want to, but you have to be willing to ask first. And again, our role model, the role model for Yeo is Steve Jobs, the late Steve Jobs. And I still think Steve is a great role model for that idea. Here he is age 12, calling up Mr. Hewlett or Packard and saying I need parts. That's the kind of guts that he exhibited through the entire part of his life all the way up until the end.

Fantastic. Well, Vern, I really appreciate this. This has been an incredible honor and a pleasure to have you on here today. So much gold in this for everybody out there and I look forward to catching you at one of your events soon. I will be there. I just got to pick. Pick which one if you'll have me, of course. And, and it's great. So thank you so much for, for being on with us today.

You bet. Jeff, thank you so much. And again for all you're doing for entrepreneurs.

Absolutely. How can people reach out to you?

You know, one of the things we teach is own a word or two. So we even change the name of our company. All you have to remember is scalingup.com so go to scalingup.com my email is vern scalingup.com and we have also site called scaleups.com that have couple hundred case studies of companies using these tools from startups to billion dollar firms outstanding.

We will go there. And thank you again for investing the time with us today. I am Jeff Duden and we have been on the home front with Vern Harnish. We are simply building at Homefront Brands, the world's most responsible franchise platform delivering enterprise level solutions to local business owners out there on the homefront where accounts. So if this does sound like you today, check us out@homefrontbranch.com and start your next chapter of greatness on the homefront. We will be looking for you right here. Thanks.