The Exit Engine Podcast Epsiode 46: Meet Steve Curran

Welcome to the Exit Engine Podcast, episode 46. Steve, when we, uh, when we talked about before, what, what I love about what you're doing is that, that there is a— it's kind of come out of this, your military experience. And, and you know that that to me is like something that I've always been fascinated by. That my my my I was not in the armed forces, but first of all, thank you for your service. The the I was not in in the military. My my dad was, my grandfather was. It was a there was a long tradition of it in my family, and so I kind of grew up with it, even though because of the aftereffect. But what I loved about it. And I think this is the— it's so process-oriented, the military, right? It's, it's very operationally focused, very— it's obviously about, about coordination and about— there's so much logistics and, you know, all that kind of— the organization of it itself is obviously a huge factor. And, uh, you know, in terms of its operations, right? That's obviously something that you are bringing to, you know, to the mindset that you, that you're curating, right, uh, in your work.

Yeah, absolutely. So, right, I did 23 years in the Navy. So, uh, thanks for your support of that. Like, I appreciate it. Uh, I always say when someone says thanks for your service, my response is always like, well, you're worth it. Like, I really think you're worth it.

And so— And by the way, I should just shout out, go Navy!

That's right, go Navy!

We are, we are huge Navy supporters.

There you go. So it's, it's interesting how the different services grew up. So my business partner is a retired Army guy, and in the Army, it's, uh, so if you think about in the days of wooden ships and muskets, right, in the Army, it was very important that we're all in a line, we all move together, it's all delegated down, communication happens before anybody moves. You know, we've got drum calls and bugle calls and all that kind of stuff. So the Army is very much about everybody's being— everybody needs to know what's happening, everybody needs to know the plan, we need to move forward. In the Navy, in the days of wooden ships, like you were given what was called a charter, and it was like, go fight pirates or go fight the English. And communication didn't happen in seconds, it happened in months. And so you had to make decisions and then report back to higher command. So it's been interesting for he and I just in our different styles of leadership, where he's much more about like, hey, we need to be communicating, doing all of these things, making sure we know what the What the choices are before we move forward, and I'm much more like I'm just going to make a call and go, and I'll let you know the results after we got through that because that maybe trains us to do leadership. But all of it is about how do we delegate leadership through you know hundreds of thousands of people, make sure everybody's leading in the same way, doing the same things, and so that's a big part of what we get to do with our organization is is help. leaders figure out how to multiply leadership through their organization and get everybody on that same page.

And Steve, with that sort of dichotomy, right, the different sort of components from you coming at it from the Navy, which is sort of more entrepreneurial, if I can use that term, and then Army being more process-oriented, how does that translate into like the leader toolkit? Like what parts of the Navy and what parts of the Army do you use for your Army background and use for For the leader toolkit.

Sure. Well, so yeah, we call it entrepreneurial and organizational leadership, right? Army, much more organizational. Navy, much more entrepreneurial. You need both. You need both in different aspects of a business or an operation, right? Sometimes we need to make a call, move forward. The leader needs to own that and, and, and move and then deal with the aftereffects. And other times we want to make sure that the whole organization is ready to move forward and, and, and do it in a very orchestrated, deliberate way to make progress and make sure that we're not causing all kinds of chaos. You know, there's an old adage— I used to hear this all the time— like, you know, you can't turn a battleship on a dime. And more often than not, when leaders say that, what they're really saying is, we don't want to make this decision, and so we just say you can't turn a battleship on a dime and say that it takes a long time to make a decision. It's my response, right?

It's an excuse, right?

Yeah. My response being a Navy guy is no, you absolutely can when there's torpedoes in the water. It's gonna cause a lot of damage. You're gonna do a lot of trauma to a lot of things in the ship and to the people. But if you have to make it, you can. And so if you're just pushing off the decision, you're, you're setting yourself up to cause all kinds of damage and problems and trauma because eventually you're gonna have to make that decision. And why not make it when you can slowly turn rather than waiting until you have to turn real fast?

So key, key, key thing to know, exactly right, is that, you know, make sure you— if you can plan the turns, if you can know where you're gonna go, and you can make sure that you have enough berth and enough, you know, enough, enough room to be able to make the turn and all that stuff in the right, in the right way at the right time, right? I mean, that's, that's obviously a key to the whole thing. Um, so, uh, guys, uh, welcome to the Exit Engine Podcast. Uh, my name is Joe Stapleton. This is John Kniff. Hi, John, how are you?

Good morning, Joe.

Excellent. John, we're really excited today because we're gonna— we're talking with a guy who I had a great conversation with, Steve, a couple of weeks ago when we first met. Steve's got a very interesting background, and Steve is in the— is really in the kind of the leadership consulting space. More importantly than that, you know, basically he brings a unique combination of practical leadership wisdom and high-level strategic insight, right? So this whole— all this rooted in one kind of goal, which is building healthy, scalable organizations at last, which fits in nicely, obviously, with the exit planning process.

Yeah.

But Steve Kern is the managing partner of Kaki Consulting, where he helps leaders grow themselves first and then intentionally multiply that growth throughout their teams and companies. So think about this, right? The idea here behind what Steve does is— and he'll talk about it in depth— but is first place you got to start is you, right? Because the rest of it— and the rest of it will follow. But we talk about this on the podcast all the time. There are so many— so many companies take on the personality of their founders, right?

It's kind of like—

Absolutely.

Right? But there are upsides to that and there are downsides to that, right? But what Steve is doing is basically combining visual tools, real-world frameworks, data-backed strategies to tackle the biggest leadership and growth challenges of the 21st century. I would like to introduce to our podcast guest Steve Curran. Steve, thank you so much for being on the ExitEngine podcast today.

Oh, well, I appreciate it. It's an honor to be here with you guys. I'm excited to talk about this and especially talking about exiting and how to multiply leadership through your organization so that when you exit, the organization doesn't disappear, right? We all want to build things that last beyond us, and you do that by multiplying leadership through those. Our mission is to unlock the leadership potential of 100,000 leaders. So we work with teams. We do that by helping them figure out how to build a leadership pipeline and create a common language and then have a leadership toolkit that can continue on and on and on from there. Yeah. So that's a little bit about what we do.

Well, Steve, so can you— that term multiply leadership, I love that. Can you just delve into that and sort of what that means on a, in one of your engagements or with one of your clients?

Sure. So like Jo mentioned, it all starts with self-awareness, right? So the, the best leaders in the world, any personality test you take, any system you use, we use a system called the 5 Voices, which again is just a way of looking at different aspects of our personality. And more often than not, the question comes up, OK, which one of these voices is the best leadership voice, right? Which one of these personality types is the best leadership, you know, best person for leadership? We always say the most self-aware person is the best leader for— best person for leadership.

I love it.

It doesn't matter what your personality is. The best leaders in the world are the most self-aware. And it doesn't stop with self-awareness. It's about self-improvement, right? So We start with learning who we are and then make decisions and progress based upon that. And we do the same things with teams where it starts with team dynamics, understanding how the team works together, all of those individual personalities. Then we can worry about improving team performance. If you don't address team dynamics, you can't address team performance.

Wow. That's a, that's a, that's a really good— sorry to interrupt you there, but Steve, just for a second, I think that's a really, really, really important thing. And I love this aspect of you do. We've talked to a lot of leadership people. We have advisory partners in this space kind of all over the map in terms of their approach and their price points, everything, right? But something that you're saying there really strikes a chord with me. And I think that the fact that you have a systematized approach that is looking and examining we've all taken these personality tests, right? We've been in corporate situations where it was, whether it's DiSC or, or whatever.

Myers-Briggs.

Yeah, all those things, right? And so, you know, I'm an LLFNJ or whatever the heck. I don't even know what they are, you know, but those things. And that, and that's really interesting, right, to understand that about yourself. But I think that what you're— but what, what is, is less common is your approach of looking at not just the leader, the top leader, the top dog, but everybody on the management team, right, in terms of their own individual things and then first figuring out who they are and how they want and how they are naturally going to interact with each other.

Yeah, we really focus on— so the assessment we use is all about what is it like on the other side of my leadership? Understand yourself, but think about it in terms of the folks that you are leading and what they're experiencing. Right? I think this, any person, MBTI, what color you are, what animal you are, whatever, all of those things give us great insight, but a lot of them lack the handle of, OK, now what do I do with that?

Yes.

We're really focused on, the whole goal of understanding yourself is so that you can understand what it's like to be on the other side of you, and how you actually multiply the best parts of you through your organization. So, you know, In sports, right? Just because you're a great player doesn't make you a great coach, doesn't make you a great leader. There are skills that you need in order to be able to do that. And that's what we focus on. When we talk about intentional multiplication, we talk about leadership tools, leadership skills, being able to do those. Just because you're great at sales or marketing or logistics or whatever it is in the business, and all of a sudden Now you're in charge and you've got a team. The skills that made you great at what you were doing aren't the skills you need to get to the next level. That's why we—

It's—

go ahead.

I'm not going to say it.

I'm not going to use the analogy of sales, right? Because it's like the same. You always hear about this analogy or this story of the salesperson who's the greatest salesperson, and then she becomes the sales manager and it's a nightmare, right? It's a nightmare because, again, what got— I will say it.

Sorry.

What got them here will not get you there. Thank you, Marshall Goldsmith, as Everyone knows, but, but it's one of those things where it's almost like a weird challenge to the person when you put them in management and if you haven't given them the skills to do that and expect them to thrive in the same way.

Yeah. Well, so, well, here, I'll share this story. I share it all the time. So the reason we call the company Khaki Consulting, right? Yeah. When you're in the Navy and you get selected for Chief Petty Officer, your uniform changes. It goes from the blue-white Cracker Jack uniform that you see to a khaki-colored uniform. You wear khakis. As your primary uniform. And when you're selected, you go through a 6 to 7 week intensive leadership development process. This is the way I will describe it. Now, intensive means something different in the Navy than it does in the civilian world, right? I can only imagine. Um, the 3 goals of that process: one is to, uh, help you, uh, deeply ingrain once you're a chief, you're always a chief. No one can take that away from you. Uh, 2 is to help you understand That your individual career is now over. You were a superstar. That's what got you here. Any success you have going forward wearing khakis is not because you're a superstar. Stop it. The only success you will have is the team that you are leading and the superstars that you are creating. And if you don't figure that out— and it takes some folks a really long time to figure that out— You will continue to struggle at that level. That's what we help leaders do. That's why we call it Khaki Consulting. We want to help you put on your khakis, stop being an individual performer, and start leading a team of superstars.

Which is so important, Steve, to the exit process. I mean, it's hard, Joe, right?

Like, it's important and it's hard because, again, the person's built a product or built a company and been super successful. And now They need to change, right? The CEO has been the spearhead of everything. And all of a sudden, okay, now you got to do other things. You got to be, you know, you have to, you have to make other people shine.

That's it. And it's necessary to your business, you know, to be able to understand how to do that and to be able to put everybody else in a position to succeed, which is again directly related to the value and salability of your organization.

Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, if, if you want to exit, right, you want to hand it off, you need to transfer ownership and responsibility, right?

Right.

And ownership and responsibility are inversely proportional to control and involvement. So the more involved you are, the more control you have. And especially for founders who built this amazing business and you know it inside and out, no one knows it as well as you do, and you've watched it grow and you've had success. There's this, I need to be in control, I need to be involved in these things because no one's going to do it as well as I can, no one knows it as well as I do. The problem is the more control and involvement you have, especially at the top levels, the less ownership and responsibility is available for your team.

Yeah.

If you want to increase that ownership and responsibility, you have to intentionally decrease control and involvement. You have to celebrate when something happens That you didn't know anything about.

Yeah, right.

That's amazing that my team took care of something and I didn't know anything. That's fantastic.

That's the day. Yeah. And you should celebrate that day, right? I mean, that's just—

You have to resist trying to add value all the time, right? You have to resist giving your 2 cents because what we found in talking to people is when the leader comes in with a suggestion or leader comes in with, oh, you should make that button blue or you should make that button green. That obviously it's very difficult to say, John, you don't know what you're talking about, or no, that's a bad idea when you get that feedback from a leader.

We used to call that a HIPPO, right? The highest paid person's opinion. That's what, in the advertising space, right? That was what you were always wary of was because generally speaking, no matter what, you may have gotten past the first level of stuff with your creative, right? But you know that that CEO is going to come on and want to basically put his mark on it somehow.

Yes.

Yeah, and that's where you have to, you have to, have to resist that.

Yeah, we had a client who kept burning through, uh, marketing folks, right? They bring in, we want to reach a younger target audience, right? So they bring in younger marketing people, they put together this marketing campaign, it gets presented up, and the CEO goes, well, I don't like it, it doesn't speak to me, you know, we need to change this, we need And they just kept burning through people. And it was like, why are we doing this? And I'm like, because you tell them you want to market to a younger audience, and then you're running it off your filter.

Your own filter, right? You're not the audience.

You're, you're running it through a 50-year-old CEO filter, and that's not your target audience. And it, you know, again, lack of self-awareness, lack of realizing that, oh, if it doesn't speak to me, if I don't get it, that's probably exactly what we need to be doing when it comes to marketing.

No question. There are some, obviously, some real practical challenges, right, with people getting people to, you know, I mean, first of all, obviously, in terms of when you go through your process and you've kind of first started engaging with people and the whole thing, how much of this get over yourself kind of thing has to happen? Or are they coming to you because they kind of already get it and that they are, they're at least, you know, kind of open to this notion of having to check themselves first?

It's a trust-building process, right? I always joke, I used to get in trouble for saying things that everybody else said in the passageway when I would say them in the meetings, right? Now I get paid a bunch of money to come in and say those things.

Exactly. That's your MO. That's what you have to get paid for. That's what you get paid for.

No one else says those things to them. The higher you go in an organization, the harder it is to hear truth. And it's, you don't have to be a bad boss. You could be a great boss, but everyone wants you to hear positive things. They want you to feel successful. They want to tell you good stories. So it's really hard for anyone to hold you accountable when you're writing the paychecks, when you're the senior person, right? Whatever you say, they're going to do, even if it's just a suggestion. And so part of what we do is come in and we're the voice of accountability that where it's like, Hey, we want— I just had this conversation with a client last week where they're going, we want our senior managers to be having a one-on-one with lower-level managers at least once a month. Great. That's a great process. I think that's amazing. My question was, okay, how often are you meeting one-on-one with those senior managers? Oh, never.

Yeah, right.

Who's holding you accountable? You're holding them accountable for these one-on-one meetings because you know the value. But you're not doing one-on-one meetings with them. Yeah, let's, let's talk about that. All right.

How'd that go over, Steve?

Um, well, this is a long-term client, so I've built up enough trust to be able to walk in the room and say those things. The other thing is being ex-Navy, right, I can be blunt in how I communicate. Um, I, you know, I had a, a while ago after I got out of the military, I was in some meetings, said something, right? that again, everyone's thinking, I'm just the guy who's going to say it out loud. And someone came after me afterwards and they go, wow, that was really risky to say that in the meeting. And I just went, I've got a different definition of risk than you do. Like, no one's shooting at me. No one's going to wind up dead after this. We're good. It's okay.

When you measure your stuff by how many people died, success is measured by how many people died, then yeah, you're in a whole other place.

Right.

A difficult conversation in a boardroom is, you know, It's every day.

So yeah, right, exactly.

So yeah, so we've got the ability to walk in and kind of say some of those things. And so thinking about growing in self-awareness, most, especially very successful people, think they're more self-aware than they are. And so what we do is we use visual tools where we're pulling out, we're putting something up on a screen or pulling out a piece of paper and and walking them through that tool and letting them use it as a mirror so that they can discover for themselves maybe where they are rather than me telling them. So I'll give you an example. We use one, we call it the support-challenge matrix, right? So it's a 4x4 or a 2x2. Everybody knows those things, right? Low support, high support, low challenge, high challenge, right? So low support, low challenge leader, these are what we call abdicators. These are folks who They go into the office, you don't see them. They come out when it's time to close. No real support, no real challenge. You know, my joke is always think of the post office. Like, the post office is where, where that is, right? So I'm sure there's great postal workers. No, no, you know, no negativity towards them.

But we love our postal workers. Thank you.

There you go. So then you've got leaders who are high support but low challenge. These are the folks who we're going to feel like family. We're going to get along. We want everybody to know that they have value. We're probably going to struggle hitting deadlines. We're definitely not going to have very many hard conversations. And these are what we call protectors, where they're creating a protecting environment where you don't have to experience the consequences of actions, poor decisions, stuff like that. This winds up creating a culture of entitlement inside your organization or inside of an entire culture. As we think about entitlement being the word for all the people entering the workforce now, Maybe it's because they didn't experience a whole bunch of consequences for their actions when they were growing up.

When they're growing up, from their parents.

Yeah. Right.

That's our fault. So then you've got a high challenge, low support leader. We all know these leaders, right? Do more with less. You're only— the only value you have is what you provide to the organization. If you meet the deadline, you've got it done too late. You should have gotten it done sooner. You know, just because we were on budget means, well, we could have done it for less. All of those type of things, right? That winds up creating a culture of fear, manipulation, manipulation. So we lay all that out and then we ask them, where do you think you are? Where do you think your people would put you? The goal is to be high support and high challenge. These are what we call liberating leaders. So if you naturally lean into support, I want, I want my team to feel valued. I want them to feel like a family. The goal isn't to be less supportive. It's to raise the level of challenge and go, how do I bring challenge to them as well? How do I push them to achieve their potential? If you naturally lean into challenge, like, I'm going to push people, I'm going to get the best out of all of that, the goal isn't to be less challenging. It's to raise the level of support to go, no, I know their families' names, and they know that I care about them as well, and that this is coming from that place. So we lay that out. We ask them where they are. We ask them where they think their team would put them. If you really want to go in depth, we ask them where their spouse would put them and where their kids would put them. That really hurts some feelings.

Ouch!

Yeah. And then, and then we go, okay, so knowing all of that, what's an action you can take to move in the direction that you need to move to get you more into that liberator quadrant? And so that's a small example of 67 of those things that we walk them through. Part of that's what we call the Leader Toolkit. It's these visuals that allow you to walk through it and think through, okay, where am I? And that's how you build self-awareness. You don't build self-awareness by Steve telling you you need to be more of a liberator. You build it by looking at yourself in that tool.

Yeah, and you got to feel it, right? You've got to feel where you're lacking. And that's— I've always kind of felt like that whole thing. And in my own, you know, kind of journey, I've had various states and been various leadership roles and things like that. And, and, you know, one of the things I was, I, I was always told was that— and only by people who could felt like he could say this to me, um, because I, again, I was, you know, uh, you know, much of my career, you know, in charge of other people, um, was, uh, people either love you or they hate you.

Hmm.

Like, there is very little, like, and again, I say hate, it's probably a strong word, but I, I think that just to show that I, I think that that would, that actually, when I was told that the first time, it actually resonated with me because it was like, you know, I feel that way about other people too. Like, like, I don't think that's an unusual situation, frankly, right? To be there where some people just like, like my, my approach to life and whatever I— it is that I do, and other people are just like, no thanks, it's not for me. And I think that that's— that part of that learning and acceptance of that was part of like an important part of my journey. Yeah, right.

Yeah, absolutely. The, the challenge would be What do you do with the folks who hate you that are on your team and you need to get the best out of them too, right?

That's, that's exactly right. And how do I approach that? And how do I basically, again, and I didn't at the time, I had no idea what I should be, you know, there was no other, you know, there was no other, I wasn't working with Khaki Consulting at the time. But, but I think—

go ahead, Joe.

Sorry. No, I just got this to finish off the thought was just simply to say that I think that what many of us as leaders in any capacity on a team of any kind, whatever, often experience is that we have created our own feedback loop.

Mm-hmm.

Right? And that, again, there is what we're not taking into— I bring in like things like sexual harassment in the workplace just to demonstrate the fact that, you know, sexual harassment can often just come because I am a superior person in the organization. And that just the, the, the, I, the even just the, the, you know, the, the inkling that something could be, you know, that someone else's life or career trajectory could be changed because of something like that that happens inappropriate in the workplace. It's just as an example of showing you that being— it's the ability to be able to see yourself, but then be able, as you said, to make the change.

Right.

Is— can have major ramifications. And if we don't get ourselves out of these feedback loops, That's like, to me, the first, the first, like, step, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Create— there's always a power dynamic, right? There's— it's, it's never across the board, right? Even, even, even in peers, right? There's always a power dynamic in play. And the wider that gap, the more the power dynamic is in there. And the wider that gap, the harder it is for people to give you honest feedback.

Yeah.

And it takes a long time for leaders to go, hey, I want honest feedback. I want honest feedback. I want honest feedback for people to trust that.

Right.

And the way they lose it is when they get honest feedback, they defend or they dismiss. As soon as you do that, you'll never get honest feedback from that person again.

Right.

So, You have to practice going, thanks so much for that, and then following back up with them going, hey, I appreciate the feedback you gave me. Here's something I learned about myself, or here's a change I implemented, or here's something that I'm doing differently because of that feedback. That's how you ensure— that's how you break that feedback loop and actually ensure you're getting more and more honest feedback from your team.

And give people, like you said, and allowing the people who are underneath you, Right? The freedom, you know, and the, you know, and obviously the, what's it called, the, oh my God, I completely lost the word, confidence. Sorry. The confidence to be able to actually do that stuff for you, which is going to, again, propel the business forward in the best possible way, right? And so getting over ourselves is such a huge piece of all of this. Yeah.

When I hear, like, along in one job, I heard that feedback is a gift, right? And when you think of feedback as a gift, and that really changed my mindset because coming into a new job with this one particular case, I was taking over for somebody who had a low challenge and a high support level, right? And trying to move along that. And I didn't know these terms, but I was trying to move along. Look, a high challenge and high support. And people, some people appreciated it because they were high performers and they wanted that challenge. Other people did not appreciate that, and they were soon, you know, not with the organization anymore when they didn't get with the program in the sense of, we're here to support you, but we're also here to challenge you because we need to get more productivity and more work out of you. And that, that I found that to be a very difficult process because, again, not everyone's going to come with you on that journey.

Absolutely. Yeah, that's 100% true. And especially Changes in organizations as things turn over, as senior leaders change, right? You should expect some attrition. I mean, that's normal. At every growth plateau, you should expect some attrition. If you're not experiencing that, you're not challenging hard enough, right?

Well, let's jump into that. So in your experience, Steve, like when— I mean, you're talking about growth plateaus, but if you have a story or like an example where, where like either a high performer or someone where you didn't expect them to be gone from the organization and suffer those attrition, that attrition. What's an example of like when somebody has sort of burned out of the organization or left the organization and it was a surprise to you to, or the leader?

I don't know about surprise. Here's, here's the example I'll give you. We got someone who brought us in. It's a luxury clothing brand, right? They They've grown like crazy, um, grown to the point where it's like, oh, we need a leadership team, can't do all this by myself, right? So I need to bring in people. But the, the senior, right, the CEO is a creative person, created this brand, doing all this amazing stuff, brought in this team. And when we initially engaged, was like, I, I'm leading this team, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't have leadership stuff. Like, I'm an artist, I'm a creative, I don't How am I supposed to be doing this stuff? Well, as we've been working with them, it started to come out that, hey, some of the folks who are on this leadership team aren't ready to lead at the level that you need them to lead at.

Right.

And so, we've gone through and restructured the organization. Now, no one's left, but they have moved down the organizational chart a little bit. Like, we've reduced down their team that they're leading because they just aren't ready yet.

Sure.

Doesn't mean they won't ever be ready, but they're not ready to lead at that level yet, right? And so that's part of, again, team dynamics, understanding all the personalities and those things and going, hey, they're just not quite there yet. You can invest in them, you can pour into them, you can help them, but you've also got to make the right decisions for the business.

Yeah, you can't rely on them now, let's put it that way.

Yeah, yeah, no question. Look, this is all part of growth. It is a natural of growth of anything, right? Is that, look at, I mean, look at the way that the, you know, that bushes grow. I mean, the reality is, right, is that you're sprouting, you're coming out, you're flowering, whatever, you're pruning back, right? And now you're allowing it, you know, stuff to grow. So, part of the growth stage, of any growth stage, is going to be this. You're going to encounter these issues, right, at every stage along the way.

Yeah.

And it might be a different person, it might be a slightly different challenge or whatever, But these leadership things kind of never really go away, right? I mean, they're kind of omnipresent. And the question is, when you do get to a level at which you've seen yourself and you start to understand what your leadership style is and made steps towards changing it, you start to examine, again, bring that same examination now down to the next layer of people so that you can figure out how to interoperate and how to communicate effectively and all that stuff. But now you're at a growth stage where 5 new people come in, right? Yeah, right. And so now you've got a whole other challenge, which is to say, take this kind of like a— even, even the best-case scenario where I have done this cultural work, this now has to be baked into my, my process of onboarding people and everything else, right?

Right. Yeah. So I like Navy examples. I'm a Navy guy, right? Um, everyone in the Navy goes through boot camp.

Right.

Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what, you know, what your job is going to be, what you're going to— you go through boot camp, right?

Right.

Which, when I went through, was 12 weeks. I think it's 9 weeks now. Um, but that's designed to break down some of your individual stuff and rebuild you as a sailor or a soldier or a Marine or, or an airman. Um, and one of the— I truly believe one of the reasons veteran suicide rates are so high is because of boot camp. I think boot camp is important, but it's your identity becomes sailor, soldier, airman, Marine. And then when you get out of the military, you don't have that identity.

There's no training back the other way.

Right. And I think this, I think the same thing thinking about Exit Engine and exiting a business and going like, hey, you've been the CEO, founder, whatever, of the, of this highly successful business. And the day after you exit, you're not that anymore. And if you don't do the work around recognizing your identity separate from any context, right? So separate from husband, father, CEO, leader, founder, and just go, who am I?

It's—

As an individual unique creation, right?

Yeah.

Your struggle.

Well, you're so right.

I mean, because one of the things that we talk to our clients about is, yes, you have business goals. You want to sell your business for $40 million in 4 years. Okay, great. What are your personal goals? And personal goals, yeah, certainly, you know, it can be related. I'm going to learn the guitar. I can do those things like have an identity outside of the context of your business, or else when you do sell your business, it's going to be I don't have an identity outside of the co-founder or the CEO or the chief product officer. And we've seen it many times.

Yeah, it's so for me, right, I, I was in the Navy for 23 years, then I was in full-time ministry before we launched Khaki Consulting, right? So I've kind of been through this process twice. Yeah, leaving the military and then leaving full-time ministry are 2 huge deals, right? And so it's really identity, right? Knowing who you are as an individual being here on the planet, and that identity is for all of eternity, right? Then knowing your purpose or your calling, right? And so I'm a big believer in like you're here to fix something that's wrong in the world, right? Whatever that is. And for me, the easiest way I think for people to figure that out is to go, what drives you crazy when you see it done poorly? Especially at senior levels, right? So for me, it's around leadership, right? When I see leaders struggling to lead well is the nice way that I'll say it.

I was just about to say what you were gonna say.

Yeah. Well, you know, again, I'm a Navy guy, so I can use the F-word in every part of speech— noun, verb, adverb, adjective, conjunction.

That's part of basic training, right?

Right.

So, so I'm not gonna say it that way, but struggling to lead well. Um, it drives me crazy. So I know that that's part of my purpose here on the planet. And then you've got what I call assignments or seasons where you're living out that identity and that purpose through that, right?

Yeah.

So for you, like thinking about when you exit an organization, when you exit your company, your purpose doesn't go away. Your purpose is for your lifetime. And so how can you live out that purpose in other ways? It's great that you want to play the guitar or you want to go spend time on a beach or whatever, and that stuff will get you over a couple of months, but your purpose is still going to be there. It's baked into you. And so going, like for me, going, all right, how do I help leaders lead better? How do I help leaders grow in their self-awareness so that they can become better leaders and so that their teams can experience better leadership? Regardless of whether I'm doing that through Khaki Consulting or at some point when I decide I don't want to do this anymore, I can do it some other way.

Have you noticed a change in like the clients you're working with like since the pandemic? And specifically, I mean, um, like how some companies have leaned into, you know, remote work and doing those types of things, and some companies have leaned into having people back in the office? Or do you have an opinion or, or a thought about Not which one is better, but like how a company can sort of, can lean into either strategy that they've chosen.

I think either one of those has pros and cons, right? So remote work is great. You don't have to cover the overhead. You don't have to, you know, have a big building, all of those type of things. The struggle with remote work is it's all Business focused and intentional, right? So there's no hangout time. There's no oh we're sitting next to each other. We walk in together. We go to lunch. Any of that stuff, right? So that's that's the con. Now you can be very productive, right? You can be very productive, get a lot done, and if you've got high trust, high quality people, it it absolutely can work. The flip side of that, right, is the you know we're gonna we're gonna come in every day like we were doing pre pandemic, right? So now we've got overhead. We gotta have a building. We gotta have all that. But but there's some synergy that happens. Right. What I don't think works is a hybrid.

Okay.

And what I mean by that is it— I don't mean you can't have some remote days and some in-person days. That's fine. I think what you can't have is some in-person and some remote in the same meeting. So if we're going to be in a, in a, in a boardroom together and 2 people are on the computer, I go, everybody pull out your computer and get on the computer. Because otherwise you wind up with a group of people interacting in person and then 2 people kind of off to the side on the computer and they don't get any of the content. Yeah, meeting, right? So I'd rather we all be remote or all be in person. Now, I'm a big believer in analog. I— we lean into analog, right? So Yeah. We don't have a digital course, right? I'm not gonna send you through something that we're not actively talking with you because I don't believe you need more information. You need practical guidance on implementation and accountability for how you're doing that. That's the magic that we bring. Now, we do have a system. We're going to teach you some things, but it's all about how are you practically implementing this in real-world stuff, not just more theory and more information.

Interesting. Okay. And that's much easier to do, obviously, when every— like you said, I love the example you use because it's something that people don't think about, which is that, you know, it's one thing, you know, we've all in the back in the old days, right? Remember when we used to have before this video stuff, we used to have these giant conference call things, right? These like phones in the conference room or whatever. And you would be on the— your team would be there on one side of the phone, and then on the other side of the phone, without being able to see anybody, right, you'd have the client or whatever on there. And of course, what are we doing? Constantly hitting mute, talking to each other, blah blah, coming back on, right? The reality is that there's a whole like team dynamic of like— and that creates a weird, almost adversarial kind of relationship That you're not even necessarily aware of on a phone call. It's only— we only realize this now because John and I interact. John and I live in— are business partners and we live in different states. Now we're within driving distance of each other, but the reality is that we get together once a month, you know, in person, right? If that, right, John? I mean, the reality is that— and the reason I'm just bringing this up, just full transparency, is to know that we are a— we have decided to be a remote thing for our lifestyle reasons and things like that. And we found a lot of value in— we both have kids and we've got, you know, we've got some home things that we'd like to actually be attentive to if we can. And so that works out really great. But it actually makes it a little bit more difficult when we want to be in a situation where I want to talk to John, or, you know, I want to say something to him, you know, while we're on the phone with a client or whatever, and we can't do that because we're not in sync.

Right, right.

Like, it's like, it's infuriating that we actually can't get to that level sometimes.

Yeah, and it's weird not to break, like, to break bread, right?

To eat, to have lunch, or to like have to just have a cup of coffee literally around the water cooler, right? Like, I, you know, there's jokes about the water cooler, but the fact that my own, in my own, in old positions, I would like run it, really bump into people that were trying to use a microwave at the same time as I was, and they'd be like, oh, found out about a project that I'm sort of, you know, ancillary and, you know, involved in an ancillary way, it's like, oh, I wouldn't have found that if I didn't bump into, uh, you know, Dan at the water cooler.

Yeah, I was gonna say, sorry, the one thing I really lament, Steve, is not— is that I can't right now, and I'm not sure if it will happen one day or not, but I can't walk into John's office, close the door, sit down for a second and say blah blah blah, right? It's like it's got to be on a phone call, it's got to be a thing. It's like maybe he's not there. It's like, you know, it's like it is kind of like in that weird way, like I miss that stuff.

You know, but so you can, you just have to be intentional about it, right? So my business partner and I, we're 45 minutes away, right? Um, we've got a standing meeting every week, and sometimes there's an agenda, sometimes it's we're just going to get on the computer and just chat with each other and see what comes out of it, because it's about relationship building, right? We've got remote clients that, that aren't aren't in our area, right, that we work with. But we're gonna meet in person at least once or twice a year, and then we're— it's all gonna be face-to-face, right? It's not ever gonna be like, go watch this video, and then, you know, the, the trainings are video-based, but we're gonna meet face-to-face and actually talk about it on a regular basis.

So it's so important. I, I think the reality is that, again, and that, that, you know, the pandemic, for what it was, whatever, you know, a lot of kind of good kind of soul-searching, I think, potentially kind of came out of that, right? And Just in terms of people. A lot of bad stuff came out of it too. But regardless of— I think that what we're feeling here is a— and we see this too at ExitEngine. I mean, the reality is, you know, we've got live events coming up, not live virtual, but live in-person things, because we are realizing that the, you know, quickly kind of realizing that there's a— people are starved for this. You know, there are so many people out there that are working by themselves and working in this place, you know, whatever. And again, it's efficient as hell. You know, there's no more commutes, right? I used to spend— how much time I used to spend in the car.

Yeah.

I mean, I, I can't— I don't even— I don't even— I don't even— like, I, I almost never need to drive a car now. I mean, it's insane, right? Um, things like that have changed tremendously. But I, I think that again, we missed the The camaraderie, we miss the energy. That's another thing. The energy on a phone call is just, even on a chat, is not just not exactly the same as being in a room with somebody else.

Yeah, yeah, it's, um, so it's interesting. The pandemic did it, but I also think as we move more and more into the AI world, right, into the AI reality, we're quickly going to get to the place where this whole interaction could happen and, and you not know that the that the thing on the other end of the phone call is an AI, right? There'd be no way to tell the difference. And so I think in that world, the value of face-to-face human interaction, some way of connecting with each other on a human level goes up. Well, there's more value to that, right?

You're so right, because we were just literally just talking about this earlier in the week, is as AI sort of permeates itself, or not permeates, but it sort of flows through an organization, And it figures out, people figure out what AI can do. The flip side of that will be maybe it's 80% of work, maybe it's 75%. The other 25% where it's done by a human becomes so much more valuable because no one ever would know. Imagine jumping on this call and all 3 of us would have these, you know, Fathom note-takers and none of us are participating like, oh, I'll catch up with that meeting later. And maybe there's situations where you can do that, right? If you want to hear listen to a meeting. But if you want to participate, that's not, that's not realistic, right? So it's— let me sort of link to that. What do you think the future, like in your work recently and what you think about like how AI is going to affect things, what do you think is the future sort of things that a leadership team or leader needs to do in order to thrive in the world that's sort of coming 2, 3, 4 years down the road? Mm-hmm.

So I thought about it quite a bit, right? One, I think AI is great. I'm not like, you know, AI is gonna take over everything or all of that stuff. I just don't believe that, right? I think it's a great thought partner. I think it's great at helping to clarify thoughts, things like that. What AI can't do is come up with something original, right? And that's just That's the human side of things, right? And so thinking through and going, all right, what do humans bring? It's one, it's original thought. 2, like Joe said, it's energy. I was just, uh, I volunteer with middle schoolers, right? So I was just at a middle school camp and the energy in the room with a whole bunch of middle schoolers is tangible, right?

Oh my God.

And you just can't create that, uh, any other way than being in the room with each other, right? There's no way to create that. And so that's the other piece that I think AI can't do. It can't create energy. It can reflect energy back. It can, you know, help you organize thoughts. I think it's great at all of those things. It can handle, you know, probably some customer service stuff. A lot of that stuff AI can do. But we've all experienced the phone call, right? I, I do this all the time, right? But especially with IT, right? I'm having an IT issue. I'm calling customer service. I just want to start with, I've turned it off, I've turned it back on, I've waited a minute, I've done all of the things. Like, can we skip to page 2 of the script that you're gonna walk me through of all of the stuff that, that I've already done? Because I know what to do. I think that's gonna be the part of AI that, that's gonna be, uh, challenging because it's gonna follow this script, right? And so if, uh, if you want to get outside of that script, What are you going to do? And the value of that goes up.

Yep.

I think the same— there's a— so if, if you fly on one airline for a long period of time, right, you earn miles or whatever and you get status or whatever those things are, right? So if you reach a certain status, they give you a phone number to call if you ever have an issue, right? If you ever have a problem. And it's a— it's— you only get that phone number if you have whatever, whatever, super platinum diamond sapphire status, right?

Special concierge service, whatever it is. Right.

But the value of that phone number is there's a human being on the other end of that phone. Right? So it actually is more valuable to talk to a human being than it is to talk to an AI who can probably get you scheduled faster. But talking to a human to go, here's the issue, let's walk through this together.

Everyone understands that, right? The airlines have determined that a human being that Steve can call or Joe can call whoever is way more valuable than the AI, which is a great point about, and what they're saying about human interaction.

And John, you brought up the example the other day of these, I think we've seen this, I've seen at least one, you know, person that I'm kind of following just because I think it's fascinating, you know, where she is a travel agent, but she is doing an elite-like travel agent thing, and she is, and everything she shows on TikTok is her interacting with clients who are being absolutely entitled and ridiculous. And she is showing this. And again, she's showing how much she loves her job a bit because, you know, lots of people are really happy, right?

Right.

But the interesting thing about, about what she's doing is the fact is that, that is that she is— like you said, you can go on, you know, you can go out into whatever, Travelocity and all these things, and probably directly into AI right now, and, and they— and tell AI to set you up a trip to Portugal where you're gonna do these 5 things, and this is the stuff I'm interested in. They'll come back with a bunch of stuff. But the, the fact that these— what these people like is that there's a human being on the end who are listening to them bitch and moan about how their high-priced hotel room, you know, uh, has artwork on the wall they don't like. Yeah, she's accepting this, taking it. Okay, let me see what I can do to help you.

The weather in London was bad when I got there. Like, you know what?

Yeah.

Stuff like that.

And she takes it. Now look, AI would take it too, right? Like, to your point, like, that would be the perfect situation for AI because AI would feed back and say, oh man, I'm so sorry that you went through this, and oh my God, and I know that I once was caught. And they can— you can make it up, right? There is something that they know that is about that they're getting her on the phone and whatever, and that they can bitch and moan about the stupid stuff and she will listen to them, you know?

Right.

And then Taking that into the leadership space and going, okay, so as a leader, sometimes you need to just listen to your team bitch and moan about things, right?

Right.

But the goal again is self-improvement and to move forward. And so as a leader, it's taking that and going, okay, where's the truth about what they're complaining about? Where is it that I can, that I can apply some of my influence, some of my something to to fix it for them, right? I can't fix the weather in London as a leader, right? But is there some aspect that I can go, well, here's an umbrella, whatever, whatever that looks like?

Right, right. The idea of kind of servant leadership, right, in a way, it's like this notion of that, as the, as you mentioned this before, I mean, as the best-performing leaders, you know, are the ones that are basically, you know, they realize that their main job is to remove obstacles Right. Not put more process in the way, not put more whatever layers of things, but to remove obstacles. And then the other thing is to be able to, is to provide, you know, you know, support. Like, and I think, frankly, like emotional support in some, on some level, right?

Yeah.

The ability just to sympathize.

Yeah, we just, we describe, so we describe it this way. We say great leaders are those who fight for the highest possible good of the people they get to lead. Sometimes that means, right, you're in— I can't tell you how many of these conversations I've had where it's like, I'm not sure I want to invest all this capital in these folks. I'm not sure I want to invest all this thing because what if they leave, right? My snarky response to that is, well, what if you don't invest in them and they stay? That might be worse, right? But, but great leaders are the ones who go, no, I want to invest in you. I actually want you to outgrow this organization because I'm fighting for your highest possible good, not just for the success of my organization. Because if you get to that level and you're still here, man, we're going to take over the world, right? That's exactly what we're trying to build.

It's true. I wonder though, again, you must encounter this all the time, and maybe in your new business development or whatever, when you're talking to people early on, maybe you're able to kind of weed them out because it seems to me that there's an awful lot of people out there And, and what we see too is, again, that it cuts also very close to gender lines, that there are men out there that refuse. I used to be one of them, and I know this to be a fact. I, I, I lost businesses because I refused to raise my hand and ask for help.

Hmm.

Right? I have— I come up across, and I'm much better at this now, right, John? I mean, the reality is that I've, I've, I have grown as a person to the point at which I, I have— I am, I am able to say I don't know, and it's okay that I don't know.

Yeah.

Right? But again, that took some soul-searching and some real internal, like, purposeful work I had to do. And my concern is always, when we talk to people, is that it's so difficult for people to be able to admit that they've got, you know, things to be able to change and that they're willing to commit time and money to do it, especially when they are coming from the place, I've built this for 30 years. I've already gotten here. I, I have this style. This is how I do it, and no one can tell me anything. And then we walk in there and tell them yes, and you're not going to be able to sell your business as a result. Right, right.

It's, it's so built around your personality. It's so built around you that it's, it's not a sellable asset. Right. And if you're not investing in your team, if you're not building something that's going to outlast you, so we describe it as earning the thank you phone calls. This is one of the One of the, you know, the the legends of how we started Kaki Consulting was I got a phone call. The name popped up on my phone, said Dario. Dario was a sailor that worked for me like fifteen years before I got this phone call. And so one that tells you I never take anybody's number out of my phone. But two, right? Dario calls me up and goes, "Hey, Chief, I just wanted to call." And you know, I go, "No, you can call me Steve. I've been retired for like eight years." Like, okay, Chief. Um, I just want to call and say, you know, I got out of the military, stayed in the reserves. I'm a New York City police officer, and I just got selected for chief petty officer today. And I just want to call and say thank you to you. It's because you believed in me, you pushed me, you supported me, right? Support, challenge. You pushed me, and I'm here today because of your belief in me 15 years ago, right? One, that makes my whole year, right? Like, that's amazing.

Yeah.

Everybody wants that kind of legacy, but it takes intentionally fighting for the highest possible good of people, not your good, their good. And that's how you earn a thank you phone call. So that's, that's what I want for every leader, right? I want every leader to experience that. I want everybody, when they, when they exit their business, to get calls 15 years later from the people at that business who go, hey, I just wanted to call and say thank you because I'm launching my own thing, or I'm now the CEO, or I've gotten whatever. And it's because of your belief in me, because of the way you invested in me, because of how you poured into me. That's what I want for every leader. So that's what we do. I love that.

And I think, look, as a business owner, right, you don't necessarily think of yourself in that capacity. And I could name people on a list as long as my arm who's first thought would say, it's not my job to make, you know, to, you know, to, to support you. It's your job. I'm paying you to support what I'm doing.

Mm-hmm.

Right?

Like the exact inverse opposite of that is so often the case from the get-go. How can you move people? Is it possible to move people from that kind of point into a place at which they can actually like see the light? And, and start to get the thing? Because it seems like we come up with them from the— with these people like very often.

Yeah, we do too. Like, it's like the more common, right, is no, it's their job to support me, it's their job to support them. Is like you said, this is just who I am and everybody needs to deal with it because I'm the senior person, I built this, it's all great, all that's great. Do you want this to live beyond you? Do you want to be able to sell it? If that's your vision, then something's got to change, right? Because you're setting yourself up to not be able to do that, right? So we use again another tool, the change equation. This isn't original to us, like it's, it's a whole bunch of people have done this, but in order for change to overcome the status quo, you need 3 things, right? So you need a vision for the future, you need a natural next step, but the biggest piece you need is actually a level of dissatisfaction with the status quo. So really, to say dissatisfaction times vision times the natural next step have to overcome the resistance. If any of those is zero, the change—you won't make the change. Right? So we all know we should eat better. We all know we should move more. Right? But either we're not dissatisfied with where we currently are, or we don't have a vision for what it looks like. Nobody, nobody's missing the natural next step when it comes to living a healthier life. We all know what to do. So it's level of dissatisfaction. So when it comes to leaders who, you know, this is just the way I am, this is who I am, all of that, I go, okay, great. Do you want to build a great organization? Do you want to build a team? Do you want thank you phone calls? Do you want a legacy? Then we need to build dissatisfaction with the current reality. And we do that by going, hey, what is it like to be on the other side of you? Would you want to work for you?

That's a great question. Great question, because I can imagine the answer to that. Either it's, it's, of course I would, or there's a big pause to say, you know, and they, right, and they know the answer. They don't want to verbalize it, you know.

Right. They know the answer. Don't— well, you know, different, whatever, whatever, whatever.

I pay okay, and I give them vacation, and I drive them hard, and, you know.

Right. But all we're doing with that question is helping build their dissatisfaction with the current reality. If we can build dissatisfaction with the current reality, then we can implement change. But that's the first step that has to happen. And the same is true with a team. As a leader, when you understand that, you know, okay, if I want my team to whatever, we're changing our CRM, right? We're changing our customer relationship management system. If I want that to be successful, the best thing I can do as a leader is point out all the issues with the current system. Build dissatisfaction with our current reality, then it's much more likely that the team will be like, yes, we definitely need to do something about that, versus, hey, we're changing it because I said we're changing it. And now everybody is going to be focused on all the things that are wrong with the new system rather than all the things that were wrong with the old system.

And Steve, what's the— you've had obviously an incredible amount of experience in working with teams What's the thing you've learned? What's the greatest learning you've had throughout all of the Navy and consulting and frankly ministry too? What's the greatest learning you've done and, or you've had?

Yeah, I think the 2 things that have stuck with me for a really long time, right? So the first is that challenge is good, right? We all pursue comfort. We're all looking for our comfort zone. But the reality is growth happens in challenge. Success happens in challenge. If you want to continue moving forward, you need to step into and embrace the challenge. Embrace challenge. All right. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Actually pursue the harder road. Pursue challenging things. Do those things. I think the second is you can learn a lot from bad leaders. And so, you know, when I was very junior in the Navy, I had a leader It was time for my evaluation, right? And so he gave me marks that I disagreed with, right? I thought they were lower than they should have been. And he was honest with me and said, yeah, these marks are lower than they should have been, but I want to be able to show growth for you. So your next evaluation, the numbers will go up, and then that will show growth, right? Great plan, except for he got transferred and never wrote me another evaluation. So it set my career back probably a year, right? Based upon that.

Because the new leader comes in and says like, oh, this person needs to, you know, has terrible marks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the lesson I learned from that is I never evaluate based upon potential. I never evaluate going, hey, we're going to set something up for the future, because none of us knows what the future holds. All of us have experienced in our lifetime, hey, guess what? 2020 happened. Nobody knew that crap was coming. So if you think you know what the future is, all you got to do is look back 5 years and you know you have no idea what tomorrow holds.

It is uncertain, that's for sure. Yeah, right.

So the lesson I learned from that is evaluate based upon today, make decisions based upon today with an eye to the future, but you really don't know what the future is going to hold.

So make the best decision you can with the flexibility to adjust and to set the, you know, and then to set goals with that stuff. Right? So I mean, the one, the one thing you can do for the future, right, is to set yourself up for what you want to achieve next.

Absolutely.

But you've got to— but you have to be honest about where you are right now, right? And giving you low again was a good plan to, to, to, to game the system, to game the algorithm, right? You were— I'll give you a low mark now, and then when you come back, I'll give you high marks. It'll show this up, which is a really nice thing for them to do. But like you said, executionally, when it doesn't work out, it's not— you're better off just being like, let's just be in the moment now and say this is what this is. And then let's set the plan for where you're going to get to next time and see if we can measure how you move from, you know, how you, how you, how you achieve that success.

Yeah, right. It goes to, right, you want to have a vision for the future. Like you said, hey, I want to sell my business for $40 million in 4 years. Great. Let's work our way back and go, what decision do you need to make today In order to do that. In order to do that, right? And not go, well, I'm gonna do this in 6 months, or I'm gonna do this in 8 months, I'm gonna do this in 10 months. All that's great, but recognize all that's written in pencil, you can write today in pen and actually, you know, take some action on it today.

So that's what I would say is one of the big learnings. That's really good. What, uh, wait, let's just go back a little bit. I know we're kind of at— we're, we're getting close on time here, but But I love, um, I want to, I want to hear about your journey specifically from the Navy through the ministry stuff all the way up to today, because I, I, I, I, you have taken me through it once and it's fascinating. And I want, I think it's an important part of what you're bringing to the table is your experience in the ministry world. And again, it's not about religion, just to be clear. This is about your ability to, your learning of all this. Part of it came from the Navy, but I think a lot, a lot of it actually came from your work in the ministry. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, so, uh, so my journey, right? So, uh, uh, I joined the Navy in 1991, right? So kind of the Top Gun era, right? I thought that's what I want to do. I want to go fly jets around the world. Um, turns out I, I, uh, I'm colorblind, so I can't do anything in aviation according to the military. So, uh, I went into the medical community because I like to say my recruiter kind of half-truthed me. Uh, he said, uh, hey, if you go into medical, then you can, you know, do search and rescue. You'll still get to jump out of helicopters, do all that kind of high-speed stuff, right? Uh, which is true except for you have to qualify for aviation, so you can't be colorblind and do that. So, um, so, uh, wound up going— I was a surgical tech for a few years, and then I got promoted to the place where The only patients I saw were really, really angry ones. And my job was leader development, right? The, you know, investing in the future warriors of our country, helping develop teams, helping leaders lead better. Loved what I got to do. Got to do that in lots of different places. Got to do some of the stuff you see on commercials. Got to do some of the stuff some movies have been made about, you know, got to do some of those fun high-speed things, right? So. Loved that. But more than that, I love watching the success of sailors that I got to invest in, right? Like, like Dario and that, and that thank you phone call. Like, that is— I love that. That is— it lights me up like nothing else to see the success of somebody else going, you know. I had another sailor going, hey Chief, I told this story that you tell all the time. And I'm like, that's not my story anymore, that's your story. You tell that story, right? We—

You can own it now.

Yeah, right, right. I'm not going to talk about the story. I'll, I'll leave it there. So Navy for 23 years. A couple of years before I was supposed to get out of the Navy, I was stationed in DC. Um, you know, I— that's one of those— when you're in the military, you avoid trying to go to DC if at all possible, right? Because that's where all the policy guys are and all the guys who don't know what's going on out here in the military.

Right.

So I had a buddy who was like, hey, I need you to come up to DC. I was like, yeah, I don't, I don't really want to come to DC. And he goes, you know, this is the Navy. I'm not really asking. I was just Giving you a heads up phone call. And of course, my response: Oh, great opportunity! I'm so excited to be there. Can't wait to to come up there. So, but got to be around some amazing people in DC who really really are doing incredible things. That's where kind of it was coming up time for me to finish my run in the military, and I knew like I had. Someone call me in and go, hey, you know, you've got what it takes to get promoted to the next level, but it's going to take you going back out to sea. And my response was, yeah, I don't think that's the right next step for me. I think the next step for me is to get out and go into full-time ministry. And so got out, did that, got my master's degree. And the one thing that ministry and the military have in common is you have to motivate and lead people without affecting their paycheck. Right, I can't pay you anymore in the military. Your, your pay is set by Congress and by senior-level leaders. It doesn't matter how good or poorly you perform, you get paid the same amount. And the same is true in ministry because it's all volunteer-run, right? So I can't affect any money you're getting. Well, you know what makes you great at leadership? Trying to motivate people without being able to say, well, I'm writing the checks.

Absolutely.

So in ministry, came to a multi-site church, and what I was doing was helping volunteer teams develop, helping them figure out how to build communities that help propel one another forward. Again, bring support and challenge to each other to help us be better followers of what we believe in. And, uh, and loved what I was doing there. The church went through a reorganization, a restructure. My role changed. It went from a leadership team investment type of role to an execution type of role. Hey, check stuff off the list, follow the game plan, stuff like that. That's just not how I'm built, not how I believe God created me. Lots of conversations with the leadership of the church, and it was like, okay, it's just time for me to move on. And, um, I'm about, you know, a big believer in prayer, and so lots of prayer. Lots of okay, so what am I supposed to do next? What's my purpose? How do I help leaders? And kind of felt like God going, all right, I'm releasing you from working in the church and calling you into starting this thing. And had a buddy that I was working with, and he's like, hey, I'll be your first client. Come on, let's go. And then another client came on, another client came on, and it's just gone like gangbusters since then. So when it comes to Kaki Consulting. After the first year, my calendar was so full I couldn't take on anymore. So brought on a business partner, we've added an admin, we're probably going to add another consultant by the end of the year. It just keeps growing because—

Great news.

People need this stuff, right? And, and we're helping everyone we possibly can. Uh, we're big believers in help first, help always, one of our mantras as a company, which means if you're a leader and you want help, we're going to help. I don't care if you become a client or not, right? I'm here, I'm here to change the leadership culture. I'm here to liberate 100,000 leaders. I don't— it doesn't matter to me if you're a client or not. I want to help you.

That's so awesome. We have, we are, I mean, we have the exact same kind of view of the world, right? Which is that, you know, we've— our goal maybe isn't as, as stretched as yours is, but the re— but the— but it's similar. And we are willing to do that in any way we can. Right. I have coaching clients that I coach outside of all of this absolutely for free, right? Yeah. People that we— this podcast is absolutely for free. We are giving this information away and the whole thing. And we are talking about— we talk about our Total Exit Value System and the way that we approach this stuff. And at Exit Engine, we literally are giving it to everyone.

Yeah. And there's other ways to do it, right? We are not the only business brokers, are we? Not the only exit planners and help, uh, you know, consultants out there that can do this for for you. It's like, usually we're saying that you should do this because it's good for your business. Sure, you can call us and get in touch with us, but like, here's some information, here's a podcast, here's a way to do it. Come to us, but also just get the help.

Here's the stuff, here's the stuff you need to know that you probably don't know, and we're giving you this heads up to start looking at this now wherever you are, because we know, we've been On the other side, we have sat there representing buyers, cold calling, outreaching people all over the, all over the world, calling 100 IT companies in a day trying to find someone to buy and getting them. And, and at the, at the, at best, they get to due diligence and completely crap out because, you know, they hadn't paid their taxes in 2 years.

Yeah.

Or, you know, or stuff like that, you know what I mean? Stuff that was just like, you know, even simple stuff that made them not attractive. And, and to be able to see people lose and just close the doors of their company after 30 years because they're like, I had one bad year and this just goes away. Yeah. And no one will wanna— and I have no— when this asset's just gone, I mean, it's heartbreaking. And we have been those people, right?

Yeah.

You have seen, Steve, you have seen firsthand, you've seen good leaders, you've seen bad leaders, right? Because the military is full of both.

Yes, right. Yeah, absolutely.

And that— it has been a thing you brought that up. What resonated with me was that the first, you know, my first boss taught me everything I needed to know about how to not run a business.

Yeah, you know. Yeah, we learned a ton from bad leaders. And I'm sure you guys experienced this where you're like, man, I wish you would have come to me 10 years ago, right, when we could have helped you. Or yeah, The illustration for me when it comes to like building a sellable business is you think about selling your house, right? So if you're gonna sell your house, you paint it, you clean up the yard, you fix the hole that's been in the wall for 5 years, you do all that stuff. And then you're like, I mean, it's a pretty nice house. Why are we selling this house?

Yeah.

Right. And the same is true in business, right? So if you build a business that's a sellable asset that, you know, you've gotten rid of the detractors, it's not— there's You know, all this stuff. I'm not, I'm not going to list all of the things, but you actually start to realize that like, oh, maybe I actually want to keep doing this. This is actually fun again, and it doesn't feel like I need to get out of this in the same way that it feels like maybe we should just stay in this house that we were going to sell now that we fixed it all up.

That's it. Now it's, now it's exactly what we wanted it to be and whatever. And we thought it was going to be easier to do the other thing, and now it's like we had to go through this in order to get top dollar, and now here we are. We got a healthy, sustainable business. Like John always says, exit planning is just good business planning, right?

Yeah.

And by the way, it's also how we kind of envision our entire model is, is built around this exact concept, which is that, you know, what people need is the right thing to do right now, okay, on their journey to exit. And one of the things that we do is put people like Steve Curran in front of them at the right time, right? Because this is where you need this now. Right. You may not be receptive to it later or earlier. Right. You need it now because this is the part of your exit planning process where you are thinking, where we're instructing you to think about this, you know, and your leadership ability and your exit mindset come very early on in the process.

Yeah. Because it's not going to be, as you know, Steve, it's not going to take— this isn't something that's done in a week. Right. It's not something that's done in a month. It can be quarters. And these things can be measured in years of when you You know, you need to implement something and to realize that change happens, it can be a long, long period of time.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll give you one last tool we use, right? We call it the efficiency equation. And this is, this is especially early on in the process when I'm talking to somebody about what we do or how we can help or those type of things. This is, this is, this is the one that kind of resonates the most, right? To go, okay, you've got a team wherever you are in your business, right? Because we, we only do teamwork now. We don't do one-on-one executive coaching anymore. We only, we focus on teams, right? So you've got a leadership team. Let's say your team's operating at whatever capacity. Now the reality is most teams are operating at 60% or less, but let's say your team's above average. Let's, let's say you're at 80. You're operating 80% efficiency, right? So if, if Tackett Consulting can come in and we can increase The leadership effectiveness of your team by 10%. Let's just say 10%, right? Okay, so here's the efficiency equation: multiply that 10% by your revenue last year. So we got a client; they did 330 million the year we came on board, right? So okay, 33 million dollars—that's what you left on the table last year based upon the inefficiency of your leadership team. Want to do something about that right now? Right. That's that. It's, it's really hard to go, how do we quantify leadership? How do we do any of that stuff? Well, that's how you do it. That's just how we go. How do we measure leadership efficiency? We have a way to measure it. Right. And then you take that and apply it to your revenue and go, this is what we're leaving on the table just based upon the effectiveness of our leadership. Not anything else. We're not having to generate any new income. We're not having to create new products. Just getting better at leadership actually impacts the bottom line.

That's exactly it. And by the way, we do a similar thing in that vein from basically from the other side, right? This is to say, look, we are, if you want to get to this place, we can measure your salability, right? Your value is your value and your value can change and we can do that. There's lots of ways to do that. But the reality is, is that it doesn't matter what the value is. if nobody's willing to pay it, right? So the ability to be able to get yourself sellable is what we're really all about. And because the value kind of comes on the heels, is a natural consequence of getting yourself healthy and sustainable. So, but you're absolutely correct. I mean, the way that we were very aligned that way, I mean, the reality is that you've got to be able to understand where you are now, where you want to head, and then you can— only then can you develop a plan to get there. And along the way, you're going to change your mind. You're going to, right, you're going to come up with new challenges. You're going to— stuff we talked about, the growth stages and the ability to be able to, you know, bring on board people on when you do have yourself kind of set up from a leadership standpoint. But we're always growing, right? We're always changing kind of as human beings. And what we want to give people, whether it's from a leadership-specific standpoint or from an exit You know, standpoint. And again, you can see today, guys, how inextricably linked these 2 things are. And so, if you take away anything from today's podcast besides Steve Curran's contact info, please also take away the fact that, that in order to— in order for you to manifest or engineer a successful exit, you're going to need to develop your leadership skills and the leadership skills of your team to the point at which it can run without you. Right? And that is a critical piece of being able to sell your business. And, and in terms of the measurability of it, you know, we give very high marks for people who have been able to separate themselves. The big question we ask, Steve, people, our owners, from the very beginning is, can you take a week, 5 days off work and not contact the office?

Mm-hmm.

Forget about not, not be, not be contact.

Right.

Can you stop yourself?

Oh, oh, it's so hard for leaders to do that. It's so hard for leaders to do that. Right. And then the follow-up question is, OK, so what stops when you're gone? What's the first thing that breaks when you're gone?

What's not getting done?

That's when you need to be thinking about, who do I need to get to own that piece? Yeah.

Absolutely. Steve, really, really great advice. Thank you so much, you know, for being here, Steve. How can people, uh, how can, uh, our listeners contact you if they want to get a hold of you?

Sure. Well, it's right, khakiconsulting.com is the easiest place to do it. My email address, right, and I, I actually read these, right, it's steve@khakiconsulting.com. It's S-T-E-V-E, right, at khakiconsulting.com. If, if you email me, I guarantee you I will read it. Now, if you're trying to sell me something, that might get caught, right? The ad— my admin assistant might catch that. But if you're looking for help, we're here to help. And so that's how— that's the best way to get in touch.

That's awesome. Steve Current from Khaki Consulting, thank you so much for being here. Again, guys, your leadership has a— and your ability to lead, okay? And how you arrange your leadership from yourself all the way through your strategic— through your kind of, you know, management team is essential to being able to raise your value and saleability, right? You, you hear us say this all the time, right, John? We are, we are constantly talking about what got you here, as John said earlier, won't get you there. And so the fact is, is that you will not be able to— mark my words, okay? There are people that get lucky, okay? But most people will not be able to sell their businesses unless they have developed this, this, this leadership stuff and they developed a leadership team that can run this this enterprise without you.

Yeah. And on an individual level, the thing, one of the, I mean, I took away a lot from this conversation, but self-awareness and self-improvement, right? You can't do self-improvement unless you're self-aware. So like, that's one of the things that I took out, took away and say like, look, become self-aware. There's ways to do that. And then look to, look to improve yourself. There's always room for improvement.

Always, always, always. And again, and that's in everything you do in your business, right? And that's why at Exit Engine we give you the Total Exit Value System. We give you 12 areas of your business to be able to examine in detail, in depth, so that you know what you're looking for. And that iceberg that is your business, where everything above the waterline looks great, okay, but below the waterline, that's where the buyers are looking, right? That's what they want to see inside. And one of those things is your leadership and the way that you've built a leadership team that can run the organization in an effective, efficient manner. And that's something that's repeatable and something that actually makes it sellable. Steve, thank you again so much. Guys, when you are looking to talk to us, just like Steve— and again, this is why we have these, these, as you notice, you're seeing a theme here, right? With the, with the guests that we have on this. These are not just guests that we're pulling out randomly out of thin air. Okay. These are people that we are learning, getting to know and learning, and that they have, as you can see, a, a very similar mindset, okay, to the way that we, that we view things. And I think the way that, that you as the, as the owner of your company should view things as well. So just like Steve, if you want to, if you've got questions about where your business is, what your salability is, what your value is, how you can move your needle and what you need to know, you can Obviously listen to this podcast, subscribe to this, like this podcast wherever you can, share it with somebody, a business owner you know and love. But more importantly, you can email us directly at any time, okay? And just like Steve, we will, we will do— we would not use AI. We will personally respond back to your email, give you questions. We might even get you on a call to talk about it and the whole thing gratis and just give you this, okay? This is, this is our mission. Just like Steve's on that mission, we are on a mission to help 1,000 different business owners successfully transition out of their businesses on their own terms by 2030. So email us jo@myexitengine.com, no E. Same thing with John, joh@myexitengine.com. Email us anytime. Find us on LinkedIn, find us on YouTube, find us on all the social media channels. Please, guys, just All I can say is that your leadership and the way that you are leading needs to be examined. You could be the best leader in the world, there's going to be room for improvement, and it's going to be critical to your success from an exit standpoint. Steve, again, thanks so much. Steve Curran from Khakis Consulting for being here. John, great, another great conversation, another great advisory partner here at ExitEngine. So we hope that there's a lot lot more to come with Steve down the line too.

Absolutely. Thanks, Joe.

All right.

Thanks, Steve.

Thank you guys. It's been a, it's been a privilege. I appreciate it.

Awesome. Thank you, sir.