The 4 Forces that Drive Business Growth with Kevin Lawrence

There is a moment in every business where everything looks fine on the surface. Revenue steady. The team is busy. Meetings are happening. Everyone's working hard. And yet somehow, growth has quietly packed its bag and left its building. And that's what we're talking about today on Experience Leadership.

Welcome to Experience Leadership, A podcast that challenges small business owners and entrepreneurs just like you to dare to be the exception. Join our host, customer experience expert Marc Haine, as he uncovers relevant and timely content to help you script and direct your business and teams to create jaw-dropping experiences your customers and staff deserve. Here is the host of Experience Leadership, author of Lights! Camera! Action!, customer experience expert Marc Haine.

Welcome to this episode of Experience Leadership. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. And today, my guest is Kevin Lorentz. And today, we are going to be unpacking why companies stall, drift, and quietly lose their growth edge. And what it takes to build a business that actually scales upwards. So, stick around with us. If this is your first time with us, I'd like to say welcome. If you find this episode valuable, please check out our past episodes. We have 295 other episodes all centered on making sure we are of service to you. And if you haven't done so yet, please make sure you're subscribed to this podcast. That way, you'll get the notification when we bring you fresh new content each and every week. Thanks so much for investing your time with us. You know, I know that you've got a solid business. You have good people, decent systems. Customers aren't running away screaming, which in today's economy really feels like a win. But something feels off, doesn't it? You're busy, but you're not growing. You're improving, but you're not scaling. You're working harder, but not getting ahead. What most leaders in this situation don't think is that they have a problem. They don't think they have a problem. They're thinking we just need to tweak a few things and now we'll be fine. Meanwhile, the business is slowly drifting off course like a shopping cart with a broken wheel. And that brings us to our Question of the Day. So where in your business are you mistaking activity for growth? And what is that actually costing you right now? I'd love for you to be part of this conversation. If you'd like, you can share a link to this episode, hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership, share it on your favorite social media platform, put down your comments and become part of this conversation. If you're tuning in live, feel free to go to the comment section on this YouTube broadcast and put in your questions and your comments, and we can answer your questions live with our guest. As I mentioned today, he is— Marc Haine. Kevin Lawrence. And he is a growth advisor who spent over 30 years helping companies do something most businesses never quite figured out. And that is how to keep on growing. He's worked alongside CEOs and leadership teams across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, helping organizations scale from tens of millions to hundreds of millions in revenue. Kevin was also a key contributor to the best-selling book Scaling Up. Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 2.0, which if you have never tried to grow a business and keep your sanity at the same time, this is basically required reading. And, and he's also the author of Your Oxygen Mask First and his latest book, The Four Forces of Growth, where he dives into what it really takes to scale sustainably without burning you and your team out. So Kevin, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you. Thank you for making time.

Yeah, Marc, I'm super excited to be here today. This is a lot of fun talking about the growth of ourselves and our companies. And yeah, I'm, I'm looking forward to it.

So maybe you could start off just maybe telling us a little bit about who you serve and how you serve them.

Yeah, basically most of our clients, and we have over 100 of them around the world, are CEOs or founders of growth companies. And they get to a point in their growth where they want to keep it going and they want someone to partner with them and help them navigate it and help them get to the next level. So, CEOs, founders, they could be family-owned or they could still individually own the business. Some, a bunch of 'em are private equity backed and they want to build a great enduring organization. These are not people who want a quick win and let's exit tomorrow. These are people that want to build a business that will endure for decades.

Lovely. And so, our topic today, why do so many companies really seem like they stall even when they're doing or thinking they're doing everything right?

Because it's complex. There's this concept I talk about in The Four Forces called spatial disorientation.

Mm-hmm.

It's where everything in their being tells them they're doing the right things, but they're actually doing the wrong things. It feels intrinsically good. It seems common sense, but really they might be making their business better, but they stop doing the things that actually fuel the growth engine and they don't even see it.

Yeah. So as I was introducing our segment today, I, I mentioned this idea of growth drift. And I've seen this. I've seen it in my 30 years working in hospitality. I've seen this constantly go off is that we start focusing on different things. What does growth drift really look like in real life? I mean, if the metrics are on point and everything is pointing that we're being successful, what are the signs that our business is drifting?

Right. Well, generally what happens is businesses grow and as they get to a high level of performance, more of the metrics are about keeping the existing business healthy customers happy, quality of service, efficiency, profitability, all of those things. And basically the metrics tend to drift towards the lower part of the income statement, operational excellence, quality, efficiency, et cetera. And the focus comes away. So they, they often have the wrong metric. They have great metrics for today and this week and this month, but they don't have metrics or things to be calibrated about next year or 2 years down the road.

Right.

So as a result, everyone swarms all the problems, swarms all the issues, And they do make the business better, but no one's putting any energy into the next year and the year after and laying the foundation for future growth.

So, are there any early warning signs that a company is veering off then? Like, because people tuning in might not understand when we talk about the metrics and such. Yeah. They're seeing the metrics are consistent and they're seeing, you know, that things are— so are there any early warning signs they should be aware of to just say, hey, wait a second, let's take a peek at this?

There is. It's how much of your time in your meetings are you talking about problems? Versus creating more customers in the future. And we break it down really simple. How much of your time as a CEO and executive team is focused on driving your core unit of your business, which we call your Xs, right? So if you're a consulting firm, it's number of clients. If you're a dentist, it's number of patients. If you're a hotel, it's number of room nights. If you're a restaurant, traffic, or same with a retail store. So whatever your core X is in your business, how much energy do you have into expanding it, which is the source of growth?

Yeah.

Versus optimizing it. And as most companies grow, most of the energy gets pulled down by problems. And they start focusing on optimizing the work that they're doing versus expanding the impact they're having.

This idea that we're looking at the wrong metrics is very interesting because I know that from an operation standpoint, you're probably looking— if you're a good operator, you're probably looking at your financials every week. And if you're not looking at your financials every month, Shame on you. But part of the challenge with getting in and getting the metrics that matter is now a question of who do I need to talk to to understand this? In past episodes, we've talked about things like cash flow that people aren't— they see that their money's coming into the bank and the money's going out, but they still seem to feel, oh, my cash flow is not good. I'm still not— it just doesn't seem like I have the money to do what I need to do. Even though when you look at your margins of individual product sales and that sort of thing, it seems like it's going okay. When you take a look at your customer attrition rates, maybe it looks like they're doing okay. But to what Kevin was just talking about, I wonder if as we go through this process, do we actually have an idea of what our 2-year and 5-year success strategy is going to be? So, it's really interesting. And I think that we can start checking out other metrics as we're going to uncover today. So, Kevin, I'm sorry about the fact you got popped out. I was just keeping the conversation going a little bit. So, we're thinking about this idea of all the different kinds of metrics that we get thrown with that say, hey, we're successful. But does it seem like companies are doubling down on the wrong things when Ultimately, that slows their growth sometimes.

I mean, at the end of the day, you need metrics that indicate your growth and where you're going to go, and you need metrics that indicate how you're performing and delivering on your promises to your customers or your employees today. You need both. It just, in the, in the, what we call spatial disorientation of it all, when there's so much going on, we get twisted around and sometimes we don't know which way is up. And what we focused on naturally is fixing problems. Because they make a lot of noise and we improve short-term performance and we feel good. Like solving problems is intoxicating. And I call it in the book, you know, the intoxication of improvement. Improving things feels good, but unfortunately what happens as businesses get more complex is people navigate towards improvement versus the things that actually drive future growth. And it's hard to do both. Like it's hard to grow and dial in or operate a business at the same time.

Yeah.

Because it's really 2 very different types of thinking.

Well, and we have the whole Japanese proverb of constant growth, right? This philosophy that we, we have to constantly look at making systems better.

Kaizen.

Yes. Yeah. And so, when, when is that too much?

I mean, that's the magic question, Marc. And that's the piece because it's never gonna be good enough. And there's a balance. So, what we talk about, for example, just for a CEO or a business owner, is ideally they would have half of their energy on future growth of the organization, and then less than half, whether it's the ongoing improvement and dialing in the as-is business. Now, if you're a— so it'd say it's at least 50% of your time on growth for a CEO, but say you're the head of operations, maybe it's 15%, right? If you're the CFO, maybe it's 20%. So you constantly have to be conscious about how you're allocating time. Because if you don't, you'll get stuck in improving and fixing things all day, every day. So somehow you just have to protect. And that's the whole idea in this book is there's a framework for people to see and just making sure you have enough of your own time and enough of your company's resources allocated to growth. The business will consume the rest of it.

And I love that you just segued into my next question because I'd like to spotlight your 4 forces of growth and we'll get to that. Right after this. When the spotlight shines on your business, are customers applauding or yawning? In other words, how is your business performing? Make your business a star with a new book, Lights! Camera! Action!, Business Operational Excellence Through the Lens of Live Theater by Marc Haine. Marc uses his business and acting experience to help you see your business like a live show so you can create a performance your customers will never forget.

Buy Lights!

Camera action today at your favorite online retailer or directly at marchaine.com. Welcome back. I am speaking with Kevin Lawrence. Kevin, okay, I just shamelessly plugged my book. Why don't we shamelessly plug your book? Why don't you tell us a little bit about it?

Well, at the end of the day, The Four Forces of Growth is pretty straightforward. It takes the metaphor of flight and the 4 forces of flight and converts it to, to business. And just, just like to keep an airplane in the air for a long time and on course is difficult, The same thing is to lead a business to the destination that you want to. So it takes and breaks it down to very, very simple model to have you understand when you and your team are focused on activities that directly drive growth versus all the other stuff that you need to do. And the punchline is if you don't have enough of your energy as a CEO or for key executives focused on growth, you'll get less of it. But you get tricked. You get tricked into thinking if we just solve all these problems and make our business perfect, It'll grow more. No, you'll have a perfect business, or, well, closer to perfect business, but your growth engine will suffer and the growth will slow.

Can we dig a little bit into the 4 forces of growth just so the audience has some understanding of— Sure.

So if you look at what makes an airplane fly, it's the lift of the wings and the thrust of the engine pull the plane up into the air. And that is, that is the, the, the principles of flight. There's more to it, but that's the simple piece. So Lift and thrust gives you altitude. For a business, our lift is looking at opportunities and possibilities. And as a leader, if you don't pull your team up towards opportunities and possibilities, they will get pulled down by problems and they, they almost, they'll start focusing down and looking at their toes in the short term and fixing problems versus opportunities to have more impact on more great customers. The other axis Instead of the thrust of the engine that takes the plane forward and helps it to rise, we have courage. And the same thing as the CEO or senior leader, if you are not leading and bringing the courage, like the pilot hits the throttle to get thrust, if you're not leading the courage of the organization, it'll gradually naturally slow down and become more fearful by nature. Because that's what humans do, is that courage is hard and it's a muscle that has to be pushed. So, Just like the pilot is hard on the throttle and it adjusts the flaps to create altitude. As a leader and a CEO, we need to push towards opportunities and then have the courage to move ahead. And that's where growth comes from because growth is scary. It's doing new things, getting new customers. And one of the things I talk about in the book is it's much easier to farm an existing client base, like nurture and take care of existing clients than it is to go and hunt and get new ones. And every business starts out with that courage and does a lot of hunting. But over time, they become more insular and play safe. And that's not where the growth is. You have to take risks in order to grow.

Yeah, great. And so then, the other 2.

The other— so, the force, those are opportunities and courage. So, opportunities are pulled down by problems, right? They're fought by problems that pull you down. And courage is fought by fear. So if you, if you're basically, you're controlling opportunities or problems, Mother Nature will pull everything down to problems. You have to lift up towards opportunities, and then there's courage to go forward and then fear to slow down and, and, and be more conservative. So those are basically, those 2 levers help you manage those 4 forces and how much growth you're gonna have in your business.

So when you're thinking about these 4 forces, how does an operator know which of the forces he needs to focus on at any one time?

Well, the way we do it, make it even simpler, Marc, is that we get people to really look at how much of their resources are going into the growth quadrant. That, that is the simple hack. So for example, when we go and look at your calendar, we have CEOs and executives go and split their time between how much of your time is in growth and how much of time is in improvement. Where improvement's good, you need a whole bunch of it to run an organization well and take care of your customers and provide good service and what you promised. So we have them look at how much of their time is in the different quadrants, cuz it's really easy to look at. So for example, I got a CEO sends me a weekly report of his calendar and what percentage of his time is in each of those different quadrants. And he knows he needs to be more than 50 in growth to get where he wants to go. So that is, that is the simple, the second and the one where as a firm, and we do a lot of work, our, our firm is huge amount about working with a CEO. And coaching them one-on-one. And then secondly, driving the growth strategy of the firm to get them to their next major level they want to get to. And the acid test that we use on this is, let's go look at your strategic plan. Let's look at your 3-year growth strategy and how much of it is in each of the quadrants. And inadvertently, the companies that are growing like crazy and doing well have a whole bunch of their strategy is about growth. Usually what happens when we start to review this, especially when companies start to really get going, is their strategy converts almost all to improvement because they're surrounded by problems.

Right.

So, logic says, hey, if we fix all of our problems, we make our customers happy, make our employees happy, we get more efficiency, we get more quality, we'll win. And that's, that's not a growth strategy. That's an improvement strategy. And it's not bad. It's healthy for the short term. But that's where we look at the quadrants. Usually, there's not enough resources allocated to growth and then they don't grow.

Would it be fair to say that most operators, especially the ones tuning in today, maybe, and trying to understand what we're talking about today, would it be fair to say that a lot of them are saying right now, I'm just way too busy with dealing with the day-to-day that I'm really, I have no time to think about growth?

Yeah, exactly. And that's, and as the best operators should say, that's the way an operator is supposed to think. But that's why we need the strategic CEO to say, okay, great. But we need to zoom out and look at the opportunities and things. So I'll give you an example. One of my clients in the US that we work with as a firm, they're the number one in a market. We acquired number 2. The team was exhausted. I mean, doing acquisitions can be a lot of work and the team was exhausted and everyone's like saying, hey, we need to take a break. We need to take it easy. We need to focus on a whole bunch of internal things and stabilize things. And we'll just leave the acquisition alone for now. And that's great operational thinking. But the growth CEO is like, we need to do the opposite. Actually, we just spent, you know, X millions of dollars for this business. It's going to disrupt a lot of our clients. And if we don't proactively go and meet with every single client and talk to them about why this acquisition is beneficial to them, we're going to end up with a serious problem and we'll lose a bunch of clients and we'll lose all the opportunity we thought we were buying because These clients were underserved and we knew that we could bring them into our platform and serve them better. So at the end of the day, the, the good operator is we need to take a practical step, but the strategic growth CEO's like, no, no, no, we need to do the opposite. And that's the challenge with growth. It's often counterintuitive because it's messy because the operators are right. There's a whole bunch of problems we should clean up, but the CEO did the strategic math. Hey, fixing those problems is worth about $500 grand to the business. leveraging this opportunity with this acquisition and the upsells that we can do and the possibilities is worth about $10 million. So he had to do the math. So it's like operators aren't wrong, but you often need a strategic lens focused on opportunity to pressure test your thinking. And most people, when things are messy, feel nervous to grow. They don't want to push for some of that stuff. And the reality is it's always gonna be messy. So you have to be comfortable with growth and you have to be comfortable with operators being uncomfortable because they should take a stand for having things run well. That's their job. But it fights growth.

Yeah. I mean, this is fascinating. For the people tuning in who go, oh my goodness, this really resonates. Could you let everybody know how they can get in touch with you if they want to work with you?

Yeah, for sure. Just lawrenceandco.com. Lawrenceandco.com. And we've got a bunch of advisors that We do this work every week with different companies around the world that really are serious about growth. So yeah, there's all kinds of blogs, articles, case studies, all this stuff, just like you have on your website, Marc. We have all that stuff for the services we provide.

I love that.

We're happy to help. We love, we love this game.

Terrific. So Kevin, like you were talking about kind of, you know, people being kind of nailed down to today's issues. I mean, some of today's issues can be business-threatening. I mean, if you're Yeah. All of a sudden, if you have high attrition and now you have to make up for the shortcomings, your people are burnt out because you've been short-staffed.

Yep.

Something changes in the economy and because of that, you're losing customers. How does one prioritize being able to deal with the day-to-day crisis? At the same token, make sure that they have an eye kind of what, what that growth would be.

Yeah, exactly. And that's the hard part. You've gotta do some strategic mathematics.

Mm-hmm.

The challenge is if you don't do what I call strategic math, You know, every problem looks, every burning fire looks like it should be put out.

Yeah.

And most of them don't need to. There are some that are life-threatening.

Yeah.

They are serious ones.

Yeah.

But not as many as people think. And the undisciplined mind and the non-strategic thinker will swoop into all the problems. And, you know, I had one client once that, that had, um, a big issue that I thought, and it was a, it was a, a massive business. He'd built a massive enterprise. And I said, look, in this one part of the business, we're burning $1 million a year. And he's like, okay, anything else? And what I learned for him to pay attention, it needed to be closer to $5 or $10 million before it was worth him getting involved. Now that seems crazy to a lot of people, but at the scale of his business, $1 million wasn't worth paying attention to because he had these multimillion-dollar opportunities that were begging for his attention. Saving $1 million a year was good. It just wasn't, it didn't meet the filter. So that's where people need strategic filters based on obviously the scale and, and their business.

And so, but you gotta apply math.

And for some reason, a lot of people aren't good at doing strategic math.

Right.

And they weight all things equal because their resources are limited.

And they think, because my resources are limited today, uh, when I do the planning, I can't really think beyond that.

Yes. And because problems make a lot of noise and because our egos love solving problems. And by the way, that's our job and we get awards and accolades. So it's wired into our operating systems to nav— pull towards problems because of all the drama and the intrinsic rewards we get.

Yes.

And that's hard. So having the— just like the best CEOs are very good at discerning what we pay attention to and what we ignore.

Yeah. Is there ever a situation where a business in their planning might be scaling too fast? Like even though they might have a 5-year growth span, maybe they're not ready for it. How do they know?

Well, you're never ready for it. I mean, the thing that we look at, usually the thing that breaks is the people, is you don't have enough strong leaders. So if you don't, if your leadership team doesn't have— they'll call it the leadership muscle to manage the business, that's where it'll crack. And we watch for that. Thing is, nobody's ready. Nobody's ever ready for the growth they want to do. It's always messy. It's just, are you going to put the business at risk? So one is if you're creating too much risk in terms of your leadership strength to be able to handle it, or geographic expansion can get people into, or in a capital-intensive business, are you putting too much risk on the balance sheet, like more than you can bounce from? So yes, and that's, again, that's discernment. But usually like in a, in a people-intensive business at scale, like 30, at, at a reasonable size, it seems to be people-intensive, non-software business, like traditional business. Yeah. Like beyond 30, 30% a year compounded, it tends to become an issue. Software is different, or SaaS, you, you can grow faster than that.

Yeah.

But it, it usually we run out of people talent or leadership talent to hold it together. That's the big risk. That's right. And it happens all the time. But if you're constantly recalibrating, you can catch it and adjust.

Yeah. So, is it fair to say that a lot of what we're talking about really today is leadership mindset? We're looking at the wrong things. Because of that, we're handicapping ourselves. So, what does it mean to kind of think around or assume the mindset of like a growth CEO?

Yeah. So, the simplest way that I can put that is to be fixated and locked on where do we want to be in 10 or 20 years down the road. Like the long-term vision. And then locked and loaded and committed to where we're gonna get, whether it's 3 years or 4 years or 5 years, and what the organization looks like. Like, that's what a growth CEO does. And whether there's good weather, bad weather, you know, whatever it happens to be, they're locked and lo— now look at, maybe it takes 4 years, maybe it takes 5 years, but what we look at is normally it's doubling the Xs of the business, doubling that core unit. So if their core unit, and let's say they are I was talking to a charity down in the US yesterday and they, they help provide beds for children that sleep on the floor. And it's called Sleep in Heavenly Peace. Amazing, amazing organization. So if you were gonna say, and, and I forget the exact number of how many kids they put into beds, I think it was more than 70,000, and I apologize if I have the number wrong. But so they say they did 70,000 as an organization, as they want to expand, you know, in theory it would be, let's get it to 140,000 kids that we support on an annual basis. And by providing beds for those kids, to take that concept. So normally the growth CEO has the target on when they're gonna double the enterprise and everything is about getting to that and, and doing it well.

So again, we're talking about growth, we're talking about future plans. You know, one thing in our recent history, we didn't see COVID coming. How flexible is this line of thinking and how inflexible is some of this line of thinking?

Great question. Yes, that would— that COVID thing was why.

It was just a little thing, right?

So for our— so the goals don't change, right? The time frame sometimes changes, just no different than if you're a real estate developer right now in a soft real estate market in Canada anyways. Your goals might not change, but the time frame has to because the market isn't there today. So during COVID for all of our clients, the goal— nothing changed except for we had to expand the time frame, or in some cases contract the time frame If COVID gave them a big lift. So all those external things, you're locked and loaded that you're gonna get there no matter what, but you obviously have to be flexible based on the conditions.

So a lot of, a lot of the success that we saw during COVID was we saw a lot of new businesses launch because of COVID because they were already— they launched within the constraint. But a lot of successful businesses were able to do little pivots. They were able to change their business model a little bit. in order to secure kind of their future. And because of that, they actually created brand new businesses or brand new arms to their businesses.

Yep.

That to me seems like, oh, we're going this way. Oh, now we're going to go this way. And you create this new branch. How do we create that flexibility that in changing markets, in changing political systems, in goodness knows geo situations around the world, how are we able to maintain that level of flexibility to be able to be open enough that we might have to do major pivots?

That's a great question. Um, and most businesses don't, right? Most businesses, once they have a solid model, they don't need to pivot like that. Actually, the challenge is to not do too much of it because that gets 'em in trouble. Another chapter in The Four Forces is called The Impulse to Improvise.

Mm-hmm.

And the reason most companies don't scale is they improvise too much. They can't stay in their lane. They have what What one of my friends calls an idea monkey CEO, which I can be sometimes.

Yep.

That has too many ideas and they take their business wide and dilute it.

Yep.

Versus staying focused and crush it. So the risk is actually too much. Once you understand your core principles and you know where your customers are and where your market is, the hard part is keeping it on the rails and, and not doing the, the innovation. To innovate is, is human. It's easy, but to—

And it's fun, right? The innovation and creative side is fun.

It is. It's way more fun. It's not disciplined. And it usually, when people get too excited about it, it hurts their business. So to be able to stick to your strategy actually is the hardest thing. The improvising, it'll happen everywhere. And, but that is normally the problem. Too much of that.

Too much.

Yeah.

I'd like to get into some more pitfalls and cautionaries and we'll get to those right after this.

Attention meeting and event planners! Is your company or association planning a live or virtual conference, seminar, or staff retreat? Are you looking for a fresh, energetic perspective on what it takes to put on a jaw-dropping experience for your customers or staff? Book customer experience expert Marc Haine for your next group event. Past participants have said, Marc kept us in stitches while teaching us how important and powerful actually designing our customer experience can be. Read more testimonials and find out how Marc can serve you and your group at marchaine.com. That's M-A-R-C-H-A-I-N-E dot com.

Welcome back! I hope you're getting tons of value from today's episode. As you could tell, Kevin and I are passionate about today's topic. So, if you belong to an organization that could use our help, or you might be planning a leadership retreat, an industry conference, a leadership conference, whatever it looks like, drop us a line. We'd love to explore how we can be of service to you and your people. So, Kevin, let's talk cautionaries and pitfalls. We've mentioned a few of them as we're going forward because I mean, let's face it, when we're thinking about long-term strategies, there's going to be a lot of tripping hazards. Tons.

But most of them are obvious and known. Most businesses that don't do what they want, it's not because Most of the stuff the CEOs or the executives know, they just don't want to deal with it. And like one of the biggest ones is what I call the loyalty liability. It might sound a bit cheesy, but it's true. It's that most CEOs and founders in particular are very loyal to people. That's why they've built great teams and they're not the monsters that we see on TV. But that becomes a liability because when they've had someone with them for a decade who is a wonderful human being but no longer can be a high performer in their job, If they hold onto those people, they end up slowing the business down and putting more pressure on themselves. Basically, they end up with a bunch of part-time jobs backfilling for these weak people. And interesting, when we go into organizations, we normally have to make a lot of people adjustments or moves to different roles or different structures because the team isn't strong enough to do it. Like one of our case studies is, uh, Amish Shah from down in the US, and he had an amazing, he built a spectacular business, a big business. But when I started working with him, he hated his business. But he had basically outgrown a whole bunch of his team. And, but he was stuck in that loyalty liability. It happens all the time. So that, that is one of the big pitfalls that it's so easy to slip into because you want to be good to people and you appreciate people that have helped you.

Yeah. Well, you know, and part of that loyalty component is, you know, they helped me get to where I am today, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But they might not be for tomorrow. And also when people start to slip in their roles, it's not fair to them because they have to go home. at the end of the day, not feeling great.

Yeah.

The other major one is complexity. Like, business is simple. The game is really simple. And when people don't— like, I can tell how well, uh, the people know their business by how complex their plans are. And when there's a lot of complexity, that means you don't have masters. You have people that are trying to figure it out. It takes, you know, one of my favorite quotes, and I haven't been able to source whether it's truly from Mark Twain or not, but I give him credit. But it might be somebody else. It's, it's hard to confirm. But the quote is, I would've written you a shorter letter.

Yeah.

But I didn't have the time. I love it. And if you look at the most beautiful strategy work we do with companies, it's insultingly simple. Like, it is so— like, the best strategy is so basic. Like, you would, as a consultant, you need a lot of courage and confidence to put that out as the final product because it's so simple, so obvious. And so, the best things in business and the things that work are So simple that a 12-year-old could understand it in a minute. And where people want to come up with this complex stuff because it makes them feel good about themselves.

I was just going to say, is that the complexity, the ego part of their build?

It is.

Yeah.

I even think as an author, as you know, like as an author, like how hard it is to write a very simple, to-the-point book. Like I had to fight myself on The Four Forces of Growth because it's like I made it so simple that it was nothing. And then brought it up one notch. Literally, it's so insanely simple. But that's hard because I'm supposedly a smart guy with 30 years experience and I know a lot of stuff and I want to tell people everything I know, but that's not good for the customer.

Yeah.

That's not what the customer needs. That's what my ego wants.

Yes.

So, keeping it insanely simple on the— and we, you know, one of the chapters I talk about is, you know, just what are the 3 big moves to double the business? Maybe it's 4, but it's like, it's really, really simple. And that's a trap people fall into all the time. And when they hire more experienced executives from bigger organizations, usually they bring in a lot of complexity. So to keep it distilled and simple is another huge trap.

Yeah. And again, because people will look at it and go, that's just way too simple. It's like, it can't be that simple. Any other traps?

Yeah. The final one is the numbers in a business. And where organizations get in trouble when they build systems and they build reporting dashboards and they build them for the executive suite instead of for the operators.

Right.

All of the information systems should be built for the person doing the work and then happen to be witnessed by the executive team and CEO. But people usually do the opposite.

Mm-hmm.

They build it for the executive team and CEO as a control mechanism, and then the operators have to deal with all this junk and, and their job just became harder. So our belief is, is that ideally, you know, the, the goals and the reporting mechanisms and the KPIs should be built around the teams. And we call it like 60-second insights so they can understand how they're performing and they can recalibrate really, really quickly. And if you build systems in that way, usually they're much more effective. But generally people have— it takes half an hour to get the insights and they're built for the wrong internal customer.

How do we test against that? Like, how do we test that? You know, if we're running multi-departmental operations and organizations, how do we test that we're actually sending down the right information?

Go sit down with that team. There you go. Right? Go sit with the accounts payable team. Talk to 'em. Go sit with the, you know, the quality assurance team. Just sit down with 'em. Hey, show me, show me. Let's take a look at your dashboard. How does that work?

I don't know.

You know, one of the great, I think it was, is it Drucker or one of the great management thinkers? It might've been Tom Peters. One of them said management by walking around.

Yes.

I don't know. Go walk. Get out of your damn office. Go walk around, talk to people, ask them what's good. I have this thing is I started my career working in factories and industrial jobs. So, where you wear steel-toed boots. And I call it, I just need to throw my steel toes back on. Go connect with where the work actually happens. The answers are right there. Unfortunately, when people become senior leaders and executives, They'd like to play office.

Yeah.

There's no answers in your office.

Yeah.

There's a bunch of information, but no, no truth. The truth's in the market, whether it's on the, on the factory floor or in the customer's boardrooms or the industry comp. That's where all the answers are.

Yeah.

Like, get outta your damn office and go get the, go get the— so to answer your question, just go talk to the people and see what they say.

It's interesting because that of course was the whole premise behind Undercover Boss and what made that such a compelling show. It's like every single one of them had these aha moments by actually working next to their people.

Yes.

And them, and them not pre-showing up on there. I was talking to, uh, uh, one of our CEOs yesterday. They're having a, they've got an amazing business, but the, the customer experience is fading.

Yes.

And I'm like, okay, when's the last time you had a mystery shopper in? And she's like, no, I go in all the time. I said, yeah, you don't count. They know who you are. Absolutely.

It's like a state visit.

Going and getting—

it is.

And it's like, it's a performance. I mean, you're, you're, you've got a background in theater.

It's, it's a performance.

When they know you're coming.

Yeah.

And like they, they clean the place and organize it and they do all the stuff and everyone's standing ready to go. Like, that's not real.

No.

And so like, how, how do you get the real experience that the real customer has?

Yeah.

And that's hard, right? But you need, you need mechanisms for that.

Yeah.

I love that. Hey, uh, Kevin, as we wrap up, do you have any last thoughts about what we've been talking about today?

I just think that like growth is a choice. Every organization can continue to grow. Every human can continue to grow. But you have to continue to push it. And it is not natural if you don't push for it and you don't focus. And again, the growth quadrant in the book, whether it's you or your org, if you're not consciously putting resources in the growth quadrant, it won't happen. And you will probably have a good life and a good business, but you won't get the growth that you're doing. And you know that you're on the right track for growth if you're really uncomfortable. And you know you're going to make mistakes and you know there's risks and it can hurt. So, I think the core is that it's a choice. And if you continue to choose it, it happens. And if you let nature take over, you're going to be focused on all kinds of problems and you'll be really busy and you'll probably feel good about yourself in a different way because you're solving problems, which is easy versus pushing for growth, which is harder.

I love that. Kevin, could you remind everybody one more time how they can get a hold of you?

lawrenceandco.com. Just search for it. We're a Vancouver-based firm. And yeah, you can find us there or just search for the books on Amazon and reach out.

And so, can people book time with you? Are you open to discovery calls with people if they want to pick your brain?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, myself or my team, whether we offer CEO coaching. I usually talk to the CEOs for driving growth strategy and strategic planning using things like scaling and others. You know, our team. And then for speaking like you, I love to speak. I love sharing this with people and seeing how they can see something they didn't even know existed and then they're more likely to be successful. So yeah, I love any of those types of things. I love that we're here to help. This is why we exist.

I love it. Kevin, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge, your passion, your expertise, and your book. The link to the book is in the show notes, so feel free to reach out. Thank you very much, Kevin.

Yeah, thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun. I appreciate how well you put this show together.

It's great. Thank you so much. Hey, if you have any questions about today's episode or you'd like a complimentary 30-minute brainstorming session with you or your team, feel free to book yourself on my online calendar. The link is in the show notes as is the link for Kevin. So, make sure you reach out if you need help. As always, I am at your service. And if you haven't done so yet, why don't you go ahead and make sure you're subscribed to this podcast? That way, you'll get the notifications. We do the notifications to let you know that we have another great expert like Kevin coming along and sharing their Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for investing your time with us today. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception. See you next week.

Thank you for joining us this week on Experience Leadership. Make sure you visit marchaine.com. For a full directory of available episodes. While you're at it, if you found today's content invaluable, please share it and tell your friends about the show. As Marc says, knowledge is power, but only if you share it. Be sure to tune in each week for the newest episode. Please stay safe, stay healthy, and—

Be well.

Dare to be the exception.