Scaling Success with George Leith!

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It's great being here. I'm excited to join you and your and your listeners.

Hell yeah, man. This is gonna be. This is gonna be fun. This is a topic near and dear to my heart because it's something that I don't think a lot of people fully grasp all the elements that go in to scaling. And so I'm pumped to dive into this with you, man. So let's get right into it. Right. So when it comes to scaling, because you have a large team right now that you've helped grow to this point and you've been there through all the processes, when it comes to scaling an org like yours, where do you see a lot of people go wrong? We'll get into what to do. Right. But when you look at how people generally approach scaling a team to 200, 300 plus people, where do you see a lot of people go wrong?

Well, you know, I made the mistakes, or maybe I'm in the middle of making some of them right now, so, you know, not really understanding what good looks like. And did you get it to be a repeatable model? And I think that over the course of the last, you know, I've been in this chair for nine years. I was the first sales hire in the building when we were 21 people. We're now over 500 people in the company. And, you know, I've been a career salesperson my entire life, so I've sold, I've led sales teams, I've owned companies. So arriving here, I definitely didn't want to be the CEO. I love the fact that that's not my job, but I did want to lead sales. And we just kind of grew it as we went, but there was a vision and a strategy to get this far. But what I found was where it really broke as we started to grow and scale was where we didn't really have a repeatable model. We felt we did. And I think that that's where you burn money like crazy and people get fired and it's not a good situation. So in the early days, I was probably a little reckless, and maybe we were able to be reckless at that point, but we're way less reckless now. When we think that we've got something that we can grow, we put it through the paces and we really try to get it to that repeatable model. And I don't mean 50. Like it's got to be 100 or 150 cycles on it, where you've been through what you think are all the objections and challenges and frequently asked questions and get it in a box where then you could start to put some people against it. The other thing that I found is that you got to be really careful of the fake news and fake news from a loud voice. We've got a famous line here that I think we heard at a convention. CEO Brendan King and myself, we might have heard a convention. I don't need a lot of data to know that my wife's mad at me. And in tech companies, I've found we have way too much data. And depending upon who the stakeholder is, that data could tell a story and they can come up with a very compelling reason that that story is right. But we always put ourselves in the shoes of the customer and we have customer obsession on a board on the wall. We're in the middle of moving into our new building, so hopefully it'll be on screen one day. But that doesn't mean that you're customer obsessed. You have to every day have that battle that you put the customer at the center of anything that you're trying to do. And if you do that and you really think about what the best experience is for that customer, then you've got a good shot. Oh, by the way, there's one other very important stakeholder. You can't scale without staff and without people. So I like to say our most precious resource is our customer, but our second most precious resource is our team members. And you have to have empathy for those folks too, because, you know, you got carrot and stick. But I think that a lot more, a lot of people like the carrot better. So you got to build a culture where they, you know, they can celebrate the wins and they feel like they're a part of a winning organization. And it can't just be feeling like it. You have to actually be winning a hell of a lot more than you're losing.

Oh, man. See, you just get we. This might be two hours. You already gave me so much stuff to go into here, so this is going to be great. And a few of it I wanted to touch on, but you said a phrase earlier. So I want to come back to one of the first things you said, which is what good looks like. Right. So if you're talking to an early vp, you know, someone who is, you know, they came in early and they're building up. Where are the places? Do you need to know what good looks like? Like, what are kind of the specific places? Like, you need to know what you. What good hires look like or a good demo looks like. So what should people be looking for? But then how do you help define what good looks like in those categories?

I've been doing this for a long time. As you can tell, I'm old. And a lot of the things that I take for granted are because of all the cycles that I've had over my career. And what I found, the biggest challenge was to put that into a way that other people could learn from those lessons. And so, you know, we spent a bunch of time around when we're hiring or recruiting, what scorecard are we going to use? And I just had one mentally that I used. It was in my head. And I found, well, that's not going to work because the people that you're adding aren't in your head. And it really comes down to how good of a communicator you are to get that message across the desk. Human beings learn two different ways, right? Trial and error. We're finding somebody who's found a methodology and adopting that that's faster if we can do that. So we put a scorecard together for each role, and that scorecard is constantly evolving based upon where the business is going. And then you have a. I'm not a big fan of ruling by committee, but I find that you get rid of the individual bias if you have some other people weigh in on that individual, and then you come back with your respective scorecards and you say, okay, this is it. So that is an outcome of having this desire to figure out what good looks like by. Okay, let's put a framework around that. Now, there are some components that I think you and I probably would agree on, that coachability is a really important thing to find. And if you can't find somebody in sales that can't. I would say probably in most roles, but especially in what we're talking about today, that's just. You have to have that integrity. That's another one. It just has to be there. When I was in the media business, I started in the radio business when I was 16 years old. I was selling ads at 17 and a half. Ask my sales managers back then, they probably would never hire somebody that young and dumb and full of piss and vinegar that I was. But I was just stupid. But when I remember back to those days, there was a lot of trial and error in there. There was a lot of just trying to figure it out. And you know, we took those lessons and we put it forward into this with our groups and we said, okay, you're going to come into these interviews, you're going to, you know, you're going to adjudicate the people, we're going to figure out what good looks like and then we're going to constantly evolve that thing. That's the other thing. I think people believe that there's some sort of a silver bullet. And that's only in, you know, the only time that silver is that effective is watching vampire movie, right? Like it just doesn't really exist. Where there's this give me the play that can. No, it's about figuring it out is where you really understand what good looks like. But then it's never done because the market, like how, how did face to face sales work for us in the last 12, 14, 18 months? Like, we had to learn new skills because it's just never done.

And I'm glad you touched on that because I. And the way you phrased it and then backed it up was perfect. Because the question is, right, what does good look like? When I think a lot of leaders and even reps are looking what is perfect look like? And then they just try to design this perfect plan or this perfect idea and they believe it's perfect. So they don't check on it, they don't evolve, they don't update, they don't keep making it better. Because if, like, we talk about it internally all the time, like if we're not better nine months, if we're literally doing the exact same thing nine months from now that we are right now we're letting each other down because there's no way we haven't learned something. So you talked about what good looks like in hiring. Are there other places where you've documented kind of like what good looks like?

I found a coaching methodology that I really like and it's super simple. And that's probably why I like it because I'm a super simple person. When we're teaching a new skill or when we're learning a new skill, it is much more effective if that's mandated. In fact, I got a grandson, he's great. And I found that in Those early. I'm reminded now because a long time ago my kids were young, but in those first little periods, you just making sure that that little bugger doesn't die, right? And he's trying his hardest to do crazy stuff like, let's stick this thing in this plugin over here and see what happens. So when we're teaching that new skill or we're learning a new skill, we should really be leaning upon the instructor to give us the things so we don't die. But then we kind of iterate it so that it becomes our own. Because nobody likes dealing with a robot. And I don't like being called on by somebody that's reading me a script like that. You got to make it your own. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a talk track of something that works. And then we start to develop. So now my grandson's walking a little bit, and as long as the carpet's pretty good and stuff and he's not going to fall against the coffee table, we can put cushioning on that now. That's pretty cool. Well, let him fall a couple of times and realize that, you know, on one foot, he's got to figure out balance and those kinds of things. So you let him get close to the burner to understand that it's hot and hot is dangerous, but you don't let him touch it. But then you've got to let him maybe fail a little bit, because that's where true learning comes from. So now we're into that developing stage where you're in there coaching and you. And the hardest thing for coaches to do is to shut up, especially when you know that they're going to go down. But you're like, no, this lesson would be really valuable for them. I'm not going to jump in. But you're there. You're still there. And then you get to master and you've arrived, right? You don't need to learn anything else. So that's the first thing we need to teach Masters is you never stop learning. But then we use that person that's at mastery to coach the other people to show them what good looks like. So it's just that four stages. But guess what? Masters need to learn new skills. And so now they got to go back to that whole teaching methodology again. And we're like, well, I can't really mandate the top seller, but you can if it's a new skill and they should want that. So, you know, it really four. Four very key components to. And what I found when we, we installed this into our organization and got rid of a bunch of other methodology, that was way harder. It's actually the way that you lead a customer too. When you're teaching them something new, you got to mandate it, you had to lay it out, you had to demo it step by step. And then as they start to use it, you see what good looks like on their side and see where they're struggling and then kind of lead them through the struggle. So what I like about that coaching methodology is it works with your teams, but it also works with your clientele as well.

Now we talk about that a lot with our managers. How much coaching is similar to selling, right? The what, the why, the how, the proof point, the touch, the feel, the impact of it, right? Coaching is very similar to selling, right. At the end of the day, coaching and selling are trying to change someone's behavior, right? Change their mind, change their behavior, whether that's buying something, learning a new skill, and that all pulls together, which I then think leads to the next part. So you'd mentioned scaling through headcount, right? You got to build a team. And I can't remember where I heard this phrase also probably very similar, like a conference, right? And you know, it just sinks in. You're like, oh, I'm so clever. There's no way I came up with this. But someone said recruiting without diluting, and it's stuck with me ever since, right? Of like, you know, everyone's like recruiting. But how do you recruit without diluting? That culture that you mentioned is so important, right? Especially going from 0 to 1, you to 200, 300, right? How do you scale out that culture to make sure that it's the right culture for your team, your org, your people, and obviously for your company?

Well, your two most precious resources are the customer and the team and your staff, your players. So if we, again, if we put those folks at the center of this whole thing and we have this. The other thing is, does everybody understand why you want to grow and why you want to scale and what the goals of the organization is? That's on the CEO and the senior team of the company to make sure they over communicate that we struggle with that as an organization. I think a lot of people would say that they have as they've grown. You communicate the culture when you're small. And it's easy because it's a smaller group, but the more you add more people, the more you have to over communicate that vision. And you're like, well, why don't they just know that it's because they're not living in your shoes every day. And you need to over communicate that, stay true to your core values and be really, really careful as you add headcount that you run that scorecard and really stay true to that. Because what I've found a couple of times when we've added headcount, it's like the pressure's on. Why haven't you hired to the plan? But you're dealing with humans and you're dealing with your culture, which is so important. And if you put cancer in there, it's not going to work out for you. Just Google cancer. So you got to be careful. And it, it comes from weird places. I've had a couple of times where I look back at it, I'm like, why didn't you see that coming? But you're growing like crazy. You're not paying attention to the important pieces which are customer, how's the customer feeling? And then the team, how is the team feeling? And we have a, you know, we try to have that open door policy without upending the hierarchy because you know you're going to have to have management layers. But having an ear to the ground and trusting some of those people who've been with you for a while and remembering and you know, we started in the reputation management business nine years ago. We were a point solution company. So I always like to use this line. I've trained lots of businesses on this. Take your ego out of the equation. There's always a little truth in every negative review. So when somebody says something, don't just discount it and go, no, they don't believe in the culture. They're not following our core values, they are not aligned to our vision. There might be something in there that you're just not seeing. And sometimes you need those folks to give you the bad news that you're not looking at because that'll help you in protecting it as you grow. Now the people have been with you for a while, they're like, oh, you're adding 10 reps, that's going to hurt my leads. And what if they grow beyond me and everything else? So can you utilize the competitive nature that you've put in there? Like I like to say, we got a very competitive nature, but not slit your throat. You know, they can't steal a deal, I don't think, unless they've come up with some new way to do that. But it is competitive. And you know, we have two reps at the top right now. They've done very well for themselves, drive really nice cars nicer than mine, which is awesome. I love that. But I'm like, you guys must get together and just have a steak dinner every quarter and realize that you made another 20 grand because of how bloody competitive you are with each other. And then they joke and go, now we don't really even like each other, but I've heard a rumor that they have been out to the nice steakhouse together, sitting across the table with a bottle of champagne because they get it. That competitive culture helped them be successful 100%.

I think that's. Truthfully, it's something I think that's talked about a lot with salespeople that is, in my mind, a little bit of a myth. And I'd love your perspective on this. Like, people talk about salespeople being competitive. I actually don't believe the majority of salespeople are competitive. They like to win, but I don't think they're competitive. People that are competitive want to beat you.

They.

They do it for something far more than the paycheck. It's like. It's that inner desire of, like, they want to beat somebody. Right? Almost like that fear of losing is way more important to them for the desire to win. What's kind of your take on it?

I've been thinking about something here recently. Does the individual. If we're looking at any individual, do they like to win, or are they terrified to lose? Because I think that's two different things. Like, you're really competitive. You like winning? No, I lost a lot, and I just don't want to lose again. So I'm gonna do whatever it takes to figure out a way to win and learn from the. You know, so that's interesting. Now, if you just wanna win at all costs, then I think that integrity needs to be in there because you're gonna do crazy shit. And that is to get the win at all costs. And I don't necessarily think that that leads to a very productive culture.

I agree there as well. It's that fine line. Because also, the fear of losing sometimes can actually freeze people. Right? Because that fear of losing is the fear of rejection. Right? And then they're afraid. They're so afraid to lose, and then they don't win. So it's like this really fine line to walk there and go through things. And so I actually want to take one step back because, like, you were dropping something that I don't. I want to make sure we highlight and talk through is how important that hiring scorecard is because most people don't have one. They rarely evolve it, but they also don't look at it. I feel like, enough, right? Like, every time someone doesn't work out, you need to go back to that scorecard and look and like, what did we miss? Why did this person fail? And what did we miss? But then also the flip side, look at your best people. What are the commonalities? What do you see? And how they answered the questions. Right, Which I also think is something that people miss out on is like, do you have the questions to discover what you're looking for, or are you just looking for coachability? Do your managers know how to ask that question? Do they know how to dive into that? And so I wanted to pull back to that because that's something that I think most people glaze over, right? They, like you said, I got it in my head, figure it out, I'll be all right. Versus documenting it.

Well, years of failed hires. I look back at it now, my former self. I'm mad at my former self because I hired a lot of people that I didn't put the proper rigor into it. Plus, I fall in love. Yes.

Right?

Like you're sitting across the table and you're like, whoa, this is amazing.

I can help them. That was me like, oh, I can help. Oh, I got them. I'll save them. I'll bring them in and show them how. Like, I was the worst at that.

And. And I, you know, we. I had this happen with a manager the other day, brand new manager. They've got this candidate they really like and they're trying to help me remove some of the roadblocks to get the deal done, which I love doing that, that they know how to sell me, get me involved. But I'm like, whoa, you're really in love with this person. Yeah, they're going to be perfect.

They're.

They're going to solve all the problems that I have. And I'm like, get somebody else to interview them right away because you cannot objectively now move forward with this. And I, by the way, pot, kettle black, right? I've made this mistake so many times. I look back at it and when I bring. The other thing that is really dangerous is when we got bigger and the CEO or the CEO or myself would bring a candidate in. The team thought that we wanted them to hire them and all we wanted them to do is put them through the process and see if. Because they're going to have to work on their team. We're not going to be there. So then I'm like, so did you interview them? Well, you did. And I'm like, no, I just knew them. Like, I brought them in because I wanted you to take a good, hard look at them. Run them through the system, run them through the process, and don't hire them because I. So now I just don't even introduce anymore. I send them to human resources or people Ops or what do you want to call them and say, here's where you apply and everything else. And then if you get to stage three, then I'll come in and check into this.

I think that's really important. You have to stick with what you believe is right for your company, your culture, your role, and stick to that process. You just have to. When you start going off gut, like, I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's Talking to Strangers. Have you read that yet?

Yes, it's.

I just, like, after reading that book, I was like, why do we even interview people? Like, we have no real capability of reading people and understanding people at all. And so when we go off gut, our gut is wrong so often, and we have to have a process to keep us in check there.

I just.

I hope people understand how important that is in this process. Because we've talked about scaling, like, what looks good, then scaling the head count, but now let's take the next step of, like, all right, helping your team be good at what they do. Right. Scaling skills. So what are some of the things that you do within your orgs to help continuously level people up? You gave us a little bit of a coaching methodology earlier. Like, how do you build it into the culture so that your skill set continues to scale?

There's factions inside every organization that are going to push you hard to get people to productivity fast, and you have to push back against that based upon what they need to know to be effective. Because what's going to happen is, okay, it takes us 90 days to get a wrap to productivity. Can you get it to three weeks? And I'm like, have you been in our platform?

Right.

There's 300 things in our marketplace, and you're going to add another hundred in the next quarter. Quarter. So once we got over that bridge of what good looks like and how long you need to learn to be effective and that there are stages in that that got to be pretty interesting for us. We look back at, oh, well, there's where we probably burnt through half a million dollars that we shouldn't have. So what we have now is everybody comes in as a sales professional Regardless of the role. So if you're going to touch a customer, you go to sales professional school where you learn for a month about us, the core values, the leadership principles, what we are as a company, where we fit in the industry. And that is, you know, you made it through the interview process, you signed the offer, but now we're starting. And in that starting again, don't fall in love, don't be focused on hitting the headcount number. If they are not a fit in that first four weeks, let's help them find something else that'll work for them and not try to push a bad agenda through thinking that it's going to get, you know, there's got to be as much of a. Of a tight window on that first four weeks as anything. Then we move them into their discipline, where they're going to work for another four weeks of training, and that's where they learn that specific role. Because it's everything. There's a layer in there. And for some of our roles, like dealing with enterprise customers, you might be a year now you'll be doing the job and if you come in with some experience, you might be doing it quicker, but you're really not going to understand everything and you never will get it all but to be effective for a book. But now we have those numbers and we. And we also have very segmented roles. In the early days, it was, you know, 10 salespeople. They did everything. And then we started to, oh, we need SDRs. Wouldn't that be great? It's like a dream. Oh, we need a testing team.

Whoa.

That was. That took seven years to get to that point where we just had a testing team and then we need customer success. Well, they'll do everything. No, there's a certain role and then you still need technical support and you need account management and you need sales engineers. So as you build out that larger. Oh, and now they're going to report to a general manager who has P and L responsibilities. So to come back, I didn't forget your comment about Sales Guild. Sales Guild. I don't have any headcount, but they all are in the Sales Guild. And I'm responsible for leading that group and from servant leadership. Right. Leading that group in how we deal with our customers. That's the Sales Guild. So anybody that touches a customer is a part of the Sales Guild. They may have a general manager, they get their what from. But the how they do it as a vendastian comes from the Sales Guild, which is led by the investors and the senior team. Not something George just comes up with on the side of his desk. If you don't have that buy in, by the way, it was like when the CEO came and said, hey, I want you to be chief customer officer. And I'm like, what the heck is that? So I started to talk to other chief customer officers and a lot of times it's on the retention and net promoter score. And his vision was, nobody knows the customer better than you. So I want you to be the voice of the customer and I want you to figure out what we're saying to customers, what we're hearing. So it's all about that customer obsession component. And when I looked at it, it's a couple things, right? You're the chief storyteller, you are a politician because you have to work with these other functions in the organization. And I almost think that not having a headcount is a good thing because I have to get people from all sorts of different parts of the organization to buy into some initiative or some goal or some strategy. And that then keeps us from that siloed thing that comes into larger organizations. That is the thing we're fighting against.

And so I gotta, I gotta ask a question here because it's a dream of mine. Talk to me about this testing team. Is this what I think it is? Like you have a small segment within your guild that tests new processes or messaging or scripting or products or markets. Is that like. Talk to me about that a little bit.

Well, I thought KD that I was the testing and I can't do anything anymore. And that's hard for me because I like doing.

Yes, yes.

And I, you know my Carissa, who's on my team and she's the general manager of George in the building. That's her title. Her job is to protect me from myself. And that. So that was my first epiphany because I was like, no, nobody can test like I can. It's just ego. And then who should test? Should it be your top performing rep? Well, how's that going to work out for you next month when you lose that production? The other thing is the top performing rep is a master. And you're going to come up with tests that you want to see if it works without that mastery of that rep weighing in on it. You want to maybe see if product led growth works from the product team or you want to see if this new talk track is going to resonate with this ideal customer profile. So I like to choose somebody that is, you know, A rising star that has quite a bit of capability, but they're not quite at the top of the game yet. So there may be three or four in the pecking order of performance, last six months and then get them to run the plays and it's. That's been a game changer for us because then you don't have 30 years of sales experience in there like that. That's not going to be fair to the new rep that just came out of their second month of training in their discipline as a business development representative and they're starting to deal with this. That's just not going to work. Then the other piece is you need to have a data scientist on that and not just somebody that runs numbers. Like just gets me the. I want somebody that runs the numbers and does the analysis. Right. And that's different than any analysis that I could do. Like, so having that business operations layer, if I ever do this again, the first role I would hire is Rev Ops.

Yes.

Because we tried to build that later and I wish I would have built it a hell of a lot earlier. The processes around the actual data and constantly iterating on it, constant improvement. And have it live somewhere.

And you and I were riffing right before we even started recording around, like how so many companies have so much data, right? And what I work, what I'd say to my ops team, my biz systems team, is like, I don't want the data. I want the diamonds in the data. I can get the data. What do you see and what do you see from your eyes? Because what I'm gonna see is different, right? Because I'm probably looking for something to confirm a story, right? I'm looking for something that supports what I believe versus like what does the data actually say. And having someone that supports you in that I think is so important. Like, I love this because I've done this at a much smaller scale of like reps. Like I've paid a rep full ote for a month to try something. I'm going to take money off the table. I'm going to take the risk of not making money off the table. Go try this for me for a month. And if it works, great. If it doesn't work, hey, like you didn't have to pay for it, right? I don't like my reps paying to test something out. And so I love that you have a testing team. We're probably have to talk about that more offline because I think that's just a genius idea.

Well, you have to make Them whole, like, you're. You're. You're very right. They can't have any risk. And then the other thing is that we're going to do this if it works, and you're probably going to lead it. So that tester has to really be bought into. So here's what. When I hear experiment, we're not really committed to this, or when I hear pilot, we're going to try it, see if it works, I like to put it out that, no, we've done enough research to know that we should take you and pay you an average of what you made in the last 12 months. So you have zero risk. Your family and you are not risked by doing this. And the reason I'm choosing you is because you're two layers away from being a top performer, and this is where you make your mark in the organization. If it works, you get to lead it. And then they're all in. They're 14, 16 hours a day. They're losing sleep over it. They've been waiting for this opportunity. So you're like, oh, George, why would you do that? You found a perfect tester. I don't know if I want to be the tester forever. Like, when you interviewed them, did they say, oh, I just like testing stuff.

I love it. I love that. And I hope. I hope I want everyone listening. I want you to rewind about 30 seconds and listen to the passion that he sells the idea of the test. I want y' all to go listen to it, because he couldn't help but get into mode there. It's just fun to watch a pro do what they do. Like that this is gonna be for you, your family. It's taken care of. Like, I know this is right for you. Like, this is identified. You're gonna grow with the org. You're probably gonna get to lead this. Like, I want y' all to listen to that, because that is how you have to convey something versus, hey, I'm thinking about doing this thing. Will you. Will you try this? Like, that's gonna inspire no passion, no confidence, no energy into the idea. So go back and listen to that. Cause you're listening to a pro right now. Get into mode a little bit. And that's one of my favorite things with doing these interviews. I get to watch people go into it for a second and then come back out, which is just amazing. Amazing to do. And so now I want to flip this just a little bit. We've been talking a lot about scaling, you know, the. On the B2, B side and kind of in the SaaS tech space. But I really love talking to people with range. Right where this isn't the only world that, you know, you've done radio broadcasting, pr, you've done local businesses. And so I love talking with people with range because you've probably learned things from outside of tech and SaaS that you've been able to apply into tech and SaaS. And so one of the things, especially with your podcast, Conquer Local, what are some things that, like B2B tech and SaaS companies could learn from some of the small local mom and pop companies that you would think that would be advantageous for them to learn and implement?

Well, it's interesting when I saw this in the show notes, by the way, you're way better than I am because I don't have show notes for my guests. So now I'm going to have to do that. But when I saw the question there, I gave it some thought rather than what George 1.0 would do, just pull something out of his ass. But I think that it's interesting, Kevin, that you bring it up because SaaS companies can be really cold and very focused on the data. And another thing that's not in the notes, I have the privilege of mentoring startup SaaS Companies at a tech incubator here in our province in Canada. And I like that because I miss startup. I love what we're doing right now. By the way, if you're listening and you're Bendassa senior person, I love it. But I miss startup because that passion. And they're going to solve the world's problems and they're into it. But what I find is as we mature as an organization, the numbers start to run the show and that push to hit the number and those things, and then what happens is we forget about the customer and we forget about our second most precious resource, the team members. So let's go back to mom and pop and what Conquer Local is, is, you know, we have five and a half million businesses on our platform through our 50,000 channel partners that tell us that they have about 87,000 salespeople. So really, I look at the sales guild, I lead those 87,000 salespeople. And that's what ConquerLocal was built to do, was a scalable way for me to not have to do the same training over and over again. That's how it started. But what it evolved into was every business on the planet that is repeatable and is growing or, you know, maybe they're growing a little bit or they're growing a lot. They have some key tenants and they have some learnings that they need to have. And I don't care if you're a SaaS company or you're a hardware store or whatever it is, you've got to treat the customers well. You've got to help them with their journey that they're on. Whether they're there to get something that they bought from you previously serviced, or they're there to buy something new, or they've had a great experience with you and they're there to buy another thing upsell. But they won't do it if they don't believe in you and your organization and the people and the product and the services. Like the brand promise has to come true. So you know that if we could learn anything from mom and Pop, it is keeping the customer at the center of everything that we do. Even the products that we choose to put in, you know, into our stores gotta have customers that want those, gotta have problems that they're trying to solve with them. But then the next thing is, is that everything is changing so fast that we need to recognize that we have to keep learning and we have to keep evolving. And we're about to go through one of the most major changes in business ownership that we've ever had. Because the baby boomer generation that created all these new jobs coming out of the Second World War, they're my parents, age 72, 73, 74, and there's not enough of us 50 year olds. So there's a younger group of people that are taking those things over and they see things completely different. So when we started Conquer Local, George is a radio guy. He could do podcasts, he likes talking, he can do a podcast. And all I'm trying to do is not do the same training 200 times in a month. So it was all about scalability, but it's become way more than that. And then Covid hit and I think all of us are missing some local business that we lost because of COVID They either folded up tent because they don't have a market anymore, or they folded up tent because they were ready to retire. And they're like, oh, this is a sign. I'm just going to retire. Or maybe there was a worse outcome for them, but we miss those local businesses. So I'm very passionate about that economy and helping those folks. So we position it to help local businesses, but we also position it to help the 87,000 salespeople that are serving those businesses you mentioned earlier. They Come from the media business. And those were our first customers. So our CEO is like, who speaks media? Oh, George, that guy who sold me a whole bunch of radio when I had my chain of computer stores. So that's why he phoned me and we kept in touch. But when I was talking to those media companies, I remember I went out with this now famous. We changed the name, by the way, to protect her identity. Her name is Marilyn in my story. And Marilyn was a, you know, 30 year media sales rep who sold boxes on paper. She sold quarter page, full page ads. Sometimes they had color, maybe a flyer sometimes. And when I went out with her on that call, of course she was told by her salesperson, take the digital guy and hopefully learn something. Like just shittiest training program on earth, right? That somehow by osmosis, watching me sell to that mattress store in Bradenton, Florida, she was going to become a digital expert. No chance. But I remember riding with her and I was like, you know, if you wouldn't have been an early adopter of technology. I begged my parents to get me a Vic 20 and then I used all of the memory in 45 minutes. And then they had to spend the exact same money on a computer for the extender to get more ram. But I was always an early adopter of technology. That helped me getting into digital. Marilyn wasn't and she was scared because her industry was passing her by. The industry was changing. The ownership of that group was looking to change their business because they had to. It was feast or famine and Maryland was going to get left behind. So I really bought into that. I'm like, I'm going to help all the Marylands because if I wasn't an early tech adopter, I could have been a Maryland. And that was the piece where we really started to. And I talked to a radio general manager today. He's got five sales reps. They're never going to sell digital. They're really good at selling radio ads, by the way. But it's just. So that was where this whole conquer local concept came from. I'm very pleased to say that we're winning the odd award for it. It's good content and you know, we're 20,000 uniques a month constantly get messages back that, you know, we're, we're bringing great guests onto the show that are teaching people some things. So it's a, it's a real scalable way to have that conversation.

I love that. I'm glad that was your answer of like, what big businesses can learn? Because As a small business, the customer is everything, right? Like if you're not delivering what they're coming to you for, they never come back. Whereas in B2B, especially in tech, they've. They've masked that with the word churn. They're not saying no impact. They're not saying we let them down. We're not saying we didn't deliver, just churn. And there's an acceptable range of churn that you can be in versus like these were customers that gave money that didn't get what they wanted overall, generally. And that's a problem. We're so I'm so glad you keep bringing it back to the customer. And obviously you are living up to your title very, very well as the chief Customer officer. So I got two, actually got three more questions. I got to ask this real quick just because I'm curious, how are you measured? So you're a chief Customer officer. You earlier said you don't technically have headcounts. Are you measured on anything directly or is it more so because you touch so many things? Like it can be seen but not measured? Like, how does that work?

Well, that's hard. And that's the thing that keeps me awake at night is am I winning or losing? And my measuring stick is total revenue and did we hit the plan? Now I'm also super optimistic and I like to stretch. And I don't mean yoga. I mean I want to shoot and do big things. So I don't know if we've ever hit a number because of that stretch. But I'll tell you what, happy customers and the fact that we are resolving unhappy customers quicker and that we have less of the same problems that we had. So if we identify an issue and we're able to reverse engineer it. So that's why I can bring in the VP of acquisition and have a conversation with him as directors of sales and his sales managers. But I bring the call recording the film, review the game tape, whatever you want to call it. We're going to do some tape today and we're going to watch it and we're going to see where the problem is. And now you tell me. So I actually ask a lot more questions in my role than I used to. It's a lot less telling and it's a lot more asking and trying to figure out how that individual got to the point that they're at. And is this a systematic problem or is it an individual problem that they didn't quite understand? You know, where we were going with this? So I find it to be some troubleshooting, but more along the lines of a function. Is there a problem with the function? Also, I talk to every low net promoter score customer. So anything under a six, I talk to them hard. Especially when you have 53,000 customers. But the good news is we don't have a lot of those. And I agree with you. I got to tell you this, you and I are aligned. How many letters in Churn? It's like a four letter word to me.

It feels like one. Yes.

But it doesn't quite encompass how big the problem is. So in the media business, we called it a cancel or a cancellation. So how many cancellation? Four syllables. You know how I started hitting my numbers in radio? I stopped selling spots because what's that? It's a spot. And I started selling announcements. So here's the problem with Churn. You're right, it's just a number. And finance will go, yes, Churn is below the acceptable. And I'm like, no, we let a bunch of customers down. We either didn't have product market fit when we poured gas on that fire and went after it, or we've got some fundamental problem in the way we're treating that customer. Either the product's broken or we've got bugs in the way our service delivery is happening. And let's dig into that. The hardest thing that I have had, Katie, in the last couple of years, I would be the last person to say anything negative about product service. Right? Cause I got to sell it. I've got to inspire people to sell it. But now I'm the person arriving at the S team meeting, our executive meeting, talking about all the problems. And they're like, what the hell happened to the head of sales? I'm like, why don't I play this tape? Why don't I play this tape? And you're going to have to bleep a bunch of stuff from my show anyways. I call it sitting in our shit. And that's just do the anal. It's not pleasant. But listening to a customer lament over a problem and then showing that there's 400 others that look like that, that is what I call voice of the customer. And I lead a squad across our various divisions where we meet weekly around the voice of the customer. It's the reputation of the company. It's what clients are saying. It's call review, it's keyword tracking. It's what's being said about our competitors. We analyze it all. What are customers saying to us and what Are we saying back to the customers?

I love that. I think that's just so, so important, that voice of the customer. Right? Because again.

Right.

You even gave another example, right. That call. Right. Of sitting in the shit is also labeled nps. Right? Like, like, you know, you nailed it. You know, we talked about mom and pop versus the big business and you said big business starts to get cold. They have found ways to take the human elements out of so many of these metrics. Right. You know, oh, how many customers are angry at us and we are disservicing nps? How many customers did we not deliver on Churn? Like, and, you know, it's masked in that. So I'm really glad you know that. Like, this is fun because I was like chief customer. What is, what does that mean? Right? And like, now I get it. And it's been amazing to listen to this and I wish we could keep going, but really we're already at. We went past this. I got two final questions for you here. And then I'm sure we'll be staying in touch over this or there'll be a part two because we still got things to touch on. The first one is, I mean, we've been going for 45 minutes already. Like, that flew by. We've covered a lot. We've covered the scaling, headcount, skill set, the voice of the customer, hiring, like, all these different things. If there were three key takeaways that you wanted people to remember from our conversation today, what would those three things be?

Keep looking for folks. Like, hopefully you found some value from this. Keep looking for folks that have been there, done that, have the T shirt and learn from them. And don't take any of it as gospel because there are no silver bullets. Your solution to your issue might be in four or five different groups. And when I'm mentoring these CEOs of these startups, I'm like, I'm going to tell you some things, but I want you to interrogate all of it and see if it's going to work inside your organization. I can give you my lens and my hard earned punches that I've taken over my career, but it doesn't mean that it completely solves your problem. You need multiple sources to that. The second piece is I've found that sometimes along the line, I lose my belief in people being good. And I always want to defer. It's going to hurt you a few times, but I always want to defer to give people. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. That you had the best intentions and have that empathy, that it's probably on you, it's probably on the company and the leadership, that you didn't give them the skills to be successful. It comes back to that whole there's a little bit of truth in that negative review. And I find we're like, you know, Susie, John, it's them. And I'm like, okay, well, let's take a step back from that and let's really dig into it. How much time do you spend with them in the last month? Well, I've skipped their one on ones for the whole quarter. Okay, good. Did you tell them that that was an expectation? Well, they should just know. And I'm like, okay, this isn't Susie and John. This is you.

Right?

You have forgotten the fact that leadership, it's servant leadership. And when's the last time you got on a call with them and didn't try to take it over and tried to add value and really coach them? Oh, yeah, Yeah. I guess I got to get back at that. So, you know, that's number two. And then the final piece is Enjoy the ride. There are so many times I look back at it and I'm like, I wish I would have just taken a little bit more time to be grateful for that moment. And it isn't, you know, you're in Prague and you're doing a keynote speech or you're. It's not that. It's when sales rep, insert name here, overcame a massive challenge that they had because of maybe not all your coaching, but because of some of your coaching. Like those turn out to be the really exciting moments. And you're going to get challenges along the line and you can go back to those items and pull them up in the register. And it keeps you motivated around what you're really trying to accomplish in the organization.

I love that. I'm glad you hit on that last one because it's a good kind of segue to the final question of the show. The name of the show is Live Better Sell Better. You have this weird idea that if we lived better, we had more energy, more joy, more fun in our lives, that the sales also would improve. Right. What would your live better advice be for everybody listening?

Whoa. So this is where I get to go back to all the mistakes that I made. Well, I'll let you in on something. KD and I haven't done this on a podcast yet and I've been on lots of. I used to tip the Toledos at £365. And I just registered at my. I'm in the best shape of my life at £176 today. So by the way, those decisions that I made to get to 365 cost me my actual human hips. And now I have titanium hips because I ruined those. And about 10 years of my life where I was medicated by drinking too much because I was in pain. I also like drinking, but for the wrong reasons. So I've done sales and not been healthy and not lived better. Like not good relationships with my family, not good relationships with my partners. So all of that has to work. And it's okay if it's not perfect and it's not even close to perfect, but if you're moving in the right direction to a constant improvement, great stuff just seems to happen. And when I look back at where I was struggling, I'm like, oh, okay, well, you weren't doing the right things. And I've got my day completely dialed in. So learned from a lot of great folks that have that dialed in. If you go to my calendar, it shows the wake up time at 3:30. It shows what that first hour looks like. It shows there's an hour every morning of podcasts and books right after yoga and riding a bike or doing a little bit of weightlifting. So this is not self help thing. It's just my experience of getting into that living better component and you know, not telling lies because it's hard to remember them all. So just like having that level of integrity, being brutally honest with people, but doing it in an empathetic way. Like rather than just I don't really want to tell John that thing that I should tell him and do my job. Nip it in the buddy, do it right now, get it done. Because the longer you let it sit. So you're absolutely right. I love that theme of live better because, you know, I'd listen to the Tony Robbins cassettes. That's how old I am. That was my sales training, by the way, when I started the radio station, general manager gave me Tony Robbins Zig Ziglar and said, you will be a salesperson.

Ziggy, Zig and Tony.

I got to go see Tony finally three years ago in San Jose. And you know, that was it. That moment. I was already on the way to improving a number of components. But you know, surrounding yourself with Kevin Dorsey and watching those, you know, you're LinkedIn. I'm in there liking that stuff. I'm screenshot and sharing it because you're and then find others and it doesn't have to be KD and Tony Robbins and Grant Cardone. It could be some person on your sales floor, it could be your neighbor, it could be somebody that is getting it right. And you just take a couple components from them and that now becomes you. And there's that line of we're competing against us yesterday.

Right?

Right. I manufactured this shit. I also manufactured 365 pound George. I call that George 1.0. This is like George 8.0 or I don't know what I am, I'm like 8.75 or something like that. And I'm going to be George 10 and 11 and 12 hopefully. Right. Like so you're constantly evolving and growing. I love giving back. And that's not just lip service. You have to like you could, oh, I'm on this charity and I go to two meetings. No, legitimately giving back to people, it's. It really helps for sure. It helps you in your day to day and it helps by the way they're all watching. Right. So if you say things are going to be a certain way and you don't live it that way, that's the thing I'm most petrified. So please, as you and I get to know each other better when I'm a hypocrite, call me out for it because I just don't want to be a hypocrite so badly.

Man. Man 1 We are going to stay connected because this was phenomenal and you've touched on so many things that I think are core and there's things that you've said and there's other things that I hope people heard. Right. Like your ability to be vulnerable, your ability to admit mistakes, your ability to not even admit is the wrong word, but to evolve. Right. George 1.023478 and knowing you're going to continue like I hope those are some underlying things that people picked up here on top of just the super tactical stuff that we covered here. I mean where can people find more of you if they want more of your content, more of what you're dropping? Where can they find you, connect with you, interact with you? Where's the best place to get more George Leaf in somebody's life?

Yeah, I appreciate the shout out. So LinkedIn is, you know, I live on that bloody thing and it's important we're in B2B so you have to live on LinkedIn but that's a great conduit. I can't take any more followers. I guess they got some limit on there they wanted me to delete my hard earned followers. I'm not doing that. I want to, I want more. I want to talk more.

LinkedIn, if you're listening. And I know a lot of your reps do get rid of the 30,000 connection limit.

Geez.

Anyway, back to it.

I've talked to Tiffany from LinkedIn Canada, my rep, and I'm like, tiffany, please help. The second piece is the podcast. So it's a labor of love and it's because of my radio background. But I really believe that we've got a really good formula there now. We do some things called master series, which are. I don't like the term soft skills. It's almost like they're not important because they're soft. I'm like, boy, I want salespeople that know all these soft skills. That'd be great. So we do some master items that are around those soft skills and then we try to bring guests in that speak to those learnings. And because we're funded by our company, I have to, you know, I have to make the boss happy. We do some guests around our use cases of our platform, but we try not to. It's not an ad, it's more around what we're learning around this concept of conquering local and making sales, you know, great. Like I grew up with wkrp, I love using that analogy. Cause then I get a bunch of young people that have to Google it and figure out who Herb Tarlek was. Right. Or insert salesperson. It doesn't have to be the usual, you know, the usual Persona of sleazy, whatever, salesperson. That's not what sales is. Sales is around helping the individual solve their problem. And if you have that lens of helping and you can't help, then you owe it to yourself to not sell to them.

Right, right.

Because then it turns out in that thing we call churn. But you know what I mean? So sales is a noble profession. I have zero problem going to sleep at night. I have zero problem putting our best customers that, that I've known for years on the phone because hopefully they'll say, yeah, that George swears a lot, drinks a little bit too much bourbon every once in a while. But if there's a problem, he always comes through on it and owns it and tries to make it better and tells me if there's a problem, you know, that level of, that's what people are looking for. And for 10 years of my life, I own businesses and I sat on the other side of the desk and I think that that really helped craft this new iteration of George, because I know what I hate from a salesperson, and I've really been working with reps to not do that. Like, don't come in and just dump product all over me without trying to understand what I'm all about. You know, just basic stuff. So, you know, those. Those are some items that we try to get across on the podcast and that those are my two places that if you want to reach out, LinkedIn and the Conquer Local podcast, wherever you get your podcast, I love it, man.

Now, I can't let you go because you mentioned it. What's your favorite? Bourbon. Then I can let you go. Go to Bourbon.

I really like Woodford, but that's probably because it's on Delta flights. But Woodford's good. Buffalo Trace, Angels, Envy. Like, I like all that stuff.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'm definitely into Noah's Mills right now. And old Forester, the 1920 prohibition style is another really good one.

So I'm Canadian, right? And we invented rye.

That's true. Yeah.

But I can't have rye because then I end up fighting. But I can have corn. Bourbon, like, it just. Happy. Like, I just. Awesome. Makes me happy. Thank you so much.

Hell, yeah. Well, this. This made me happy too, so I appreciate you, man. We will be in touch. This was amazing. Thank you so much.