0154: Grow Like a Lobster | Plan and Prepare for Extraordinary Business Results with Joshua Dick

Ea interviews, episode 154 inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round.

Seven days a week. Join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority Effect interview. Have you ever wanted to grow your company?

Do you have a lot of great.

Ideas but you're trying to find that 1% idea? How would you like to learn what it takes to have distribution in three different continents and over 70 different countries? I, I am excited to have Joshua Dick here sharing what he has learned over the last 15 years of growing a successful family business into a global leader. And we're going to be talking about.

Ideas from his new book, Grow like a Lobster.

And I'm going to bring them up right after we thank our sponsor.

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Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Joshua Dick. Josh, how are you doing today?

I am doing great, Mario. Thanks so much for having me.

Oh, it's so great to have you. I know you're a wealth of wisdom and I can't wait for you to share with Expert Authority World. So tell me, why the coffee industry?

You know, the coffee industry was just one of a collection of different product lines that were available to me in a business that had been started by my great grandfather.

Oh, wow, that's awesome.

I ended up deciding to really focus intently the entire business on coffee, taking it a little bit away from where the family had been into helping people make better tasting coffee. That's how we like to talk about it.

How did you decide to focus on that aspect of it?

You know, for me, it was a combination of a little bit of an analytical process of looking at profitability and business size and potential. But more importantly, it was the excitement and the things that felt personal. And what I like to say is ownable, meaning this was a business that had the ability to have a brand identity created around it and a brand that I thought I could do something with and manage and develop.

When you were looking at everything, what was one of the first things you said? You know what, I'm going to focus here. When you took it and started changing it around because there's so many aspects to a business and I know there is, at least with mine, and sometimes it's hard to go, where should I focus my energy? I know I need to do something.

Yeah. I think there's a certain a group of things that you have to think about. One is what's important to you. I happen to, like, be a little bit of a mechanical guy. I like being around making things and building things and having a business in the coffee industry. We made cleaning products for coffee machines. Detergents meant that I could have a factory where we produce things that I could touch every day and see leave the building. So I shied away from sort of just customer service type businesses or things like that because that was important to me. I also looked at scalability. What were the things that this business might be able to achieve, not just in the market in which I started, but in other markets around the world. Because having an opportunity to be exposed to the world was something also important to me. I wanted to be in an international business and I ended up being fortunate enough to create one that became very international.

Is that one of the things that led you to move to Italy?

You know, the move to Italy really was nothing I had ever thought about until after I sold the business. Well after. And I knew that I had been traveling a lot to Italy and to Switzerland and to Europe and Asia because the business had grown the way it had and I enjoyed being around different cultures. But the move to Italy was one that came out of sort of a decision my wife and I made about what we wanted for ourselves and for our family to maybe make our kids more global citizens. And that's really how it started. And we haven't looked back. It's been a great move.

Well, I've always joked with people for years that you can't go wrong with Italian.

You can. It's a tough language. I have to say. As an American, I can speak the language where my accent is not pretty.

I'm not even going to attempt it either.

So when you were doing all the changes, was this something you saw as a couple of month goal, A long term goal? How did you have the mindset to go, here's what I want to do and then do it?

Yeah. So my goal was very, very long, long term. I never really imagined that I wanted to sell the business. All along I was trying to build an organization that could exist and operate without my presence. I had this idea that if I built something that was, you know, I imagined I was starting with maybe like a corner deli making sandwiches, doing fine, but I wanted sort of a chain of grocery stores or restaurants. And that's what I was aspiring to build. And because of that I knew that it was going to be a long haul, a marathon, very slow and steady. I had this sort of thing about growing consistently under control without ever overextending myself or my team.

I want to dive a little bit deeper there because there's so many companies that say, I want to scale, I want to exit, I want to do this, I want to do that. But what would you say is a bottleneck that keeps most businesses from getting to that point?

Well, I think for me, the biggest place that I see businesses fall down and make mistakes is in the inability to say no. I think so many people and business leaders want to achieve that scale and grow that quickly that they take on too many responsibilities and they stretch their resources too thin. I think that if you can really have an objective and a target of where you're going and have a plan for how you're going to get there consistently with control, you're going to be much better off in the long run at building what I think of more as an extraordinary business. We can all build good businesses, successful businesses. That may be all we want. I always wanted to build something extraordinary that was that organization that existed independently of one leader or one person.

How important would you say the timeline is? Because you said you saw it as. When I asked you about the couple month goal or couple year goal, how important is the timeline when you're trying to achieve success to the level that you have?

So my goals and our timelines were always in three different groups. There was always a set of goals for between the next six and 24 months and then another set of goals from 24 to 60 months. And that was about how far we looked with the idea that we could keep moving along this, this pace that was comfortable. And setting these five year targets and goals were nice things to have for the team, for motivation, for team spirit. I don't think I ever set out to say I'm going to, I'm going to get to my goal in 50 years because I don't have the patience for that. But you know, I wanted to make sure that I was progressing along the track every, you know, two to five years.

And that is fantastic because.

Who was it?

Someone really smart said, most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10.

Huh, interesting.

And when you're saying the five year mark, you know, you, you can tear up that 12 to 24 month goal every year or two and always be working on the five year goal, but it gives you something to aim for down the road. Do you think too many people are short term in their thinking and that inhibits them also?

Oh, I mean, I think there's no question short term thinking is, is a huge problem for so many businesses. Forget the publicly traded companies, even the privately wants, you know, the publicly traded companies have a bit of an excuse, excuse for why they have short term thinking. But I think the privately held ones still get caught in the trap of trying to prove something too soon. And I'm all about building foundations, building layers, making investments that are going to pay dividends for longer term, whether that be developing your marketing material that you're going to use for a number of times. I'm a huge believer in the value of the mission statement and the value and visions articulating that and using that and using that as the foundation for decision making as the business grows and develops throughout time. Not short term, but spend the money and spend the time now to grow into things.

That is a really great expert authority insight and I'm glad you shared it because I love getting people on here like you that can speak from that point of here's what we did to be successful because so many people need to hear it. Because if you're still striving for it, you may or may not know. And sometimes even if you do know, you need a reminder.

You know, I have this thing or this concept in the book where I talk about thinking bigger, imagining yourself as the company that you aspire to become in the future. And because of that, we have to behave in a way that is in line with who we think we'll be, not necessarily who we are today. One of the big things that I did that really paid enormous dividends was very soon after I got involved with the business when sales of the product line that we eventually developed significantly were under a million dollars. I bought a very sophisticated ERP computer software system that was capable of a company 2, 300 times the size that we were. In fact, by the time I actually sold, that system was still in place with no changes. And it was something that I believed in. I believe that the tools, the investment that I might make in the early days were going to relieve me of the burden of having to change or step up or catch up later.

How long did it take for you to realize from the time you bought it to the time, how long was it in place, from the time you invested in it to the time you exited?

15 years. In fact, I think it's still being used and I've, you know, so it's. In fact, I know that it's still being used and I've been out officially almost a year, so.

So you're talking over conservatively over a decade. The investment was paying off a decade.

And a half, without question. The other place that it paid off, not just in the fact that we were consuming or using this asset, was that we didn't have the headache of retraining, of changeover of new capital. We just sort of maintain the software package. And I did that over and over with lots of other investments along the years, feeling that if we could come up with the capital or the cash or whatever was required to make that ground level foundational investment, it would benefit us long term. And, you know, we were very fortunate that it did lead to incredible increases in profitability.

I love talking about this because I love thinking down the road and long term. And there was stuff I did over a decade ago and it's still paying dividends. And then when I wrote my first book, I also developed a Software to build WordPress websites automatically and all of these things that was like, I had the ideas. I was like, 10 years from now, here's what I want it to be able to do. And I'm happy to say all this stuff is still, you know, just like your software you put the investment in, but it's so. I think it's hard for people to think five, 10 years down the road. Yeah.

You know, it's funny, one of the things that I did right in line with what you're talking about is I always had an organizational chart with who the members of the team were. And I had two charts. I had one. Well, it became one, but it was one organizational chart with blue squares for the employees that were on staff at the time. But the chart also had all these green squares that were for positions that we hoped one day to fill this vision and it became sort of encouragement for someone that, hey, maybe one day I will be able to hire these people to work for me if we get to that level. We always talked as a team about our org chart of today and our org chart of the future. And that really became very opportunistic because there were times that we would encounter another person.

In the business, in industry, and say, wow, they'd be perfect for that job. We've been talking about wanting sometime in the future. And that's not the ideal way to do recruiting, but there were definitely times when someone was able to be plugged in because we knew what we were looking for. Having done the Work early on.

Well, it sounds like you have incorporated a lot of great things and it all starts with your mindset because of what you've incorporated. Share with me one of your greatest success stories.

I think my greatest success story in business, I have a personal one, but in business, do share both. Yeah, yeah. I think in business, the thing that I'm most proud of was the collaborative teamwork that the organization was able to develop and the consistency of thinking and alignment. And I really do believe that came back to having a well articulated mission statement and not just sitting it in a desk drawer somewhere, but actually using it on a regular basis as an organization, talking about it, referring it when we had to make, referring to it when we had to make big decisions and asking ourselves if this path that we were choosing fit with what we had said was important to us. So that really led to incredible team alignment. And with that came a really exciting sort of technique that we developed as a team of communication where it was everyone was open in a way in a system that I developed how everybody shared their thoughts and their ideas with other members of the team, not just with me as the CEO. And that really was a wonderful, wonderful thing.

So the open communication gave you a lot of leverage and made a huge difference, it sounds like.

And efficiency, I think being able to way to encourage my senior leadership team across all disciplines to share information with each other collectively and not only with me. Because there was a point in time in the business where marketing would tell me as the CEO something that I had to go tell sales or operations would tell me something as the CEO that I had to go tell.

Finance. And getting it to a way where everyone was communicating efficiently saved me and the organization incredible bandwidth.

That's inspiring because it sounds like you basically turned into a project manager before you fixed all of this.

Yeah, I think that's what running a business is sometimes it is project management prioritization, keeping your team aligned and making sure the people that you are, your human resources are your people are not distracted or not spending their time and energy that you're paying them for working on the wrong things. So if you can get everyone aligned, you get a whole lot more efficient and you can get where you're going more clearly, more quickly, more efficiently.

And that's one of the things I love about leadership because I've also heard, I think it was John Maxwell, companies rise and fall on link leadership. And so many organizations, it's like they're afraid to say the right things or say even what needs to be said. And get people on the same page. So I'm glad you're sharing about the open communication. And I mean, even if it's just a day, that's a lot of time, especially times how many people are on your team, let alone a week, a month, a year. And it's like, oh, we should have changed this a year ago. Well, you know, that could be 5 or 10 or 20 or 30 years worth of productivity Gone. Gone.

Exactly. You're saying it exactly right there. And, you know, if there's a way to make things better for everyone, I'm a big believer in never making the same mistake twice. So if you make a mistake, it's okay. Let's figure out how we're never going to do it again and also improve the whole organization so that we continue to move forward on our path.

Well, I love the business success story. You said you have a personal one, too.

Oh, I mean, it has to do with, you know, I'm extremely proud of what I've been able to give my children in terms of living here in Italy and what I see in them in terms of the language skills and cultural understanding and awareness that they have as global citizens. So it's really probably not a perfect fit with the conversation, but it's really something that came out of the business success that allowed me to be able to do these things for my kids. And I'm just in awe of what they suck up as little sponges and absorb and process.

Well, I think it does fit, and I appreciate you for sharing it because family is very important to me, and I think it should be for everyone. And, you know, our life isn't just business. And if you can't enjoy it and do what you want, I mean, I believe we all got in business for the freedom and the flexibility so we can spend the time with the family and friends we love in. Too many people, I think, get caught in the glorification of busy without question.

Without question. You know, for me, business, in fact, I open the book talking about all I ever wanted to do on one level was to create my own dream job. I wanted to create the job working with people I really enjoyed that were challenging and stimulating and to make. Make money enough to support a lifestyle I aspired to. But I wanted to have a place that I went every day that was really exciting and thrilling. And what I found out later in the process was that because I love my job so much, it gave me incredible power to make the right decisions about when it was right to exit. I never really was under any pressure to accept an offer to react to something when it came to exit scenario. Because if it didn't work out, I love my job. I was going back there and more than happy to keep doing it.

Well, that's a great outlook because I think there's too many people that do what they don't love, they don't enjoy, and they're only doing it for the money. And it's like it's not really an inspired life.

Agree completely.

So you were mentioning some of the things from your book, and I want to dive in and pull some of the book out for Expert Authority World.

But I got to ask, why grow like a lobster?

So if you were one of the members of my team, you would have been tired out of your head hearing me talk about the lobster. I had been exposed to the story of how a lobster grows and molts. And when a lobster grows, it has to literally rip its body out from inside of its shell. And it has to do it in a certain amount of time or it'll die trying. And when it is successful, it lays on the ocean floor as this fleshy, vulnerable mess. And I, I'm learning about this and I'm saying, oh my God, that's me. That's what it feels like to try and run a business sometimes when things go wrong and you feel vulnerable and you feel weak. And I came back to the office after reading that and started talking to my team and say, hey, let's think about the lobster. Right now our shells are super hard and strong and things are going well, but let's not forget that the molts come and I would talk about it all the time. If we can plan and prepare for the time when the malt's going to come, we can be in a better place and better able to deal with it when it arrives, knowing that it's coming, not being surprised. And that became the whole premise of how I ran the business from a. I was. I'm a big metaphor guy. I used a lot of kind of annoying metaphors my staff would tell you, but kept it entertaining. And as I sat down to write the book, the idea of growing like a lobster just fit incredibly well with what I had done as a business leader. I learned, aside from the molt situation, that every time a lobster grows, it grows 15%, which by coincidence was exactly the pace of growth that my business had every year for 15 consecutive years. So it sort of had this sort of perfect fit for storytelling and trying to take business concepts, synthesize them in a approachable way and add a little bit of a nuance or energy to the story of business. So that's how you got Grow Like a Lobster.

That is a great story and I love the title. It caught my, caught my attention when I saw it and I was like, this is going to be good.

So we have a few more minutes before the second half. But what are two or three points you can pull out from the book that you'd like to share with Expert Authority World?

I think probably one of the big ones is I believe strongly in the idea of never building a business to sell it. I believe that you should be thinking about your business to make a great, great business, a terrific business that's successful and productive and leave the thoughts of sale out of it until you really have a great business. So I think that's one really important thing. And the other important thing for me that runs throughout the book is to the importance of humility and recognizing that to be successful in business we have to recognize and drive toward what's important, important for the business and forget about our own egos. And the better able we are to prioritize what's right for the business.

The more successful I believe the business is going to be. And we have to just get over ourselves and get out there and do what's right for the business.

I am not disagreeing with either of those. But I do have to ask, how do you just so casually drop your ego and forget about yourself in your experience?

So for me and you know, your ego and your humility also comes to issues with dealing with employees and hiring and firing and emotions and things like that. And I think somewhere along the way I found the ability to think about the business as not only a person working within it, but also an investor and an owner. And I started to say what's right for the business and for the investor as well as me and my egocentric role in the business. And then all of a sudden, if you'd make do the right decision, that, let's face it, is going to make the business more money. It's the right decision. Decision. Get over the fact about how you look. I mean, I used to joke, I don't care if I'm the CEO, the president, the janitor, whatever you want to call me. It's a business achieving its goal goals. Are we reaching our profitability targets? And if so, then it's working and I don't really care. And I, I just sort of. Maybe it came natural me after a point or maybe it's driven by that ambition and motivation to see the business be profitable.

Well, I appreciate you for sharing those insights because myself included need the reminder. So many people at least need the reminder and a lot of people need to hear it for the the first time because they just never have. And clearly you've demonstrated it. So thank you for that.

No, thank you.

One fun question before we thank our sponsor.

What is your favorite movie and why?

Oh, that is easy. And it also was it almost made the book City Slickers. I don't know if you ever saw.

I don't know, It's Billy Crystal.

Yeah. And it all came back down, down to the idea of Jack Palance's character who was Curly. And Billy Crystal found out that Jack Plant Curley had knew the secret to life. And he kept asking what's the secret to life? And the secret to life was was one thing. And to me that is what it all comes down to. Remembering being great at one thing in a business, in life. I mean in life, hopefully more than one thing. But in business, get one thing right. You got Jack Palance Curly's advice at heart. And it's also a fun movie to hear to see the baby cows and see the whole coming of age, middle, middle age man type moment.

You must be marketing too because I noticed you mentioned it's one thing but you didn't say it.

Well, you don't need to. You can leave everyone in suspense. It's called an open loop in marketing. But.

That was awesome.

All right, we're going to thank our sponsor. Come back for the imperfect action round.

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We are back with the imperfect action round.

Josh, are you ready to take imperfect action?

I will try. Let's see how I do.

First question, I got 60 second rapid fire answers. The first one is what is the.

Fastest path to the cash?

The fastest path to the cash is patience. I think taking your time to get there and to build it because you can get a little bit of cash now. But if you take your time and you build it, that's really the way you're going to achieve the big, the big number, I think.

Awesome. I love that. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making in the fastest way they can fix it?

I think the biggest problem I see in businesses in general is lack of focus and being distracted, allowing yourself to be distracted. And that all comes down to not taking the time in the beginning to define and articulate who you are and who you want to be. Once you've done those things, you're way better off.

Awesome. Number three, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

Making sure that that they never ever have to talk to you about a problem. Only use those times that you interact with the customers to talk about the next sale and the next productive experience. I was famous for talking to my customer service team in shipping and production saying everything is good with our customers. Just don't mess it up guys. Because I don't ever want to have those conversations with the customer trying to fix problems that didn't have to happen. We can get our energy focused on keeping them happy. They're never going to leave.

I love this personally. You're saying what I was thinking years ago when I had no clue what I was doing and when I opened my support desk, you know how most people say, you know, let us know your questions, comments and concerns. I have joked for years, I'm like, I don't even like dealing with my own problems. So I switch, I changed the signature at the bottom to questions, comments and great ideas. And magically people started going, hey, have you ever considered such and such, hey, what about this? We'd really like that. Complaints went down, didn't need to deal with.

Makes perfect sense. Keep it positive. Don't make the little mistakes that annoy people. Keep them with you.

Love that. Thank you so much for that. I'm going to make a clip of that part just to watch every day. That's awesome. All right. What is a book that has helped your business?

A book that has helped my business is a book. There's quite a few that have helped my business, but I think it's really going back in the past. But it's the goal. I don't know if you are familiar with the goal and the author's name escapes me. I believe it's Goldthreat. But it personalizes operations and throughput and business and production and manufacturing. And I firmly believe that there are important things we have to think about even if we're not a manufacturing business about lean and touches and waste and efficiency and communication. And I think you can take all of those things out of the goal and apply it to any type of business. So really, really a special learning for me read over the years and given to most of my employees over the years as well.

Excellent. I will make sure that is on the eainterviews.com show notes page for your episode.

Perfect.

I have enjoyed this thoroughly. Where can people get get your book and learn more about you?

Absolutely. So the book Grow Like a Lobster has its own website, grow like a lobster.com and I have a website personally that is joshua-dick.com again Joshua hyphen dick.com it still kills me that I had to go with the hyphen, but it's in there and on there. You can subscribe to my blog and it's very short little ideas and thoughts and then also there's a way to contact me through there as well.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much. I've enjoyed this and I appreciate you for sharing.

It was a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Really great time.

All right, Expert Authority World, we have another great episode here for you today. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a great day and God bless. Why every Business needs a book, including yours.

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