IPPA Spring Summit 2024 Unveiled: Exclusive Insights & Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Experience

All right. So, Lee, you were sharing some stories with me before we jumped on that maybe are not safe for air. So let's talk about some that are a little safer for air of some of your favorite times that you remember from the IPPA summits out in Vegas throughout the years.

Yeah, I think, you know, any time you can get a roomful of people in the payroll business You know, standing up screaming, you know, clapping the old thunder sticks, if you remember when those became popular at sporting events. That would be probably one of my funnest events. I can't even remember the year, but you know, certainly we're all going through a very, very, very intense time. Deadlines, a lot of emotions, people working weekends, nights, trying to get W-2s and year-end compliance stuff out. And you know, probably just overall at the macro level, just the amount of fun that we have and bringing some energy back into it. I know this time of the year it can get a little bit low, I think, as far as morale goes for us as leaders, for our people. And it's just been a really good opportunity to just inject some energy. I think energy helps people just be better as a business. And, you know, that just the energy that happens in these rooms when you get all of us together, you see the power of the association. You get some professional speakers there that have great messages and are motivating and make you better. It's just, it's always been a breath of fresh air to have a lot of fun. There's been a number of fantastic memories from, you know, standing ovations of keynote speakers to, like I said, the loud clapping of the sticks. And if you have been, encourage you to come again this year. If you have not been, it is a great opportunity to reenergize your leaders. Get those team members that did great things, give them a little bit of an award. And it's just a great group of people that I promise you're going to learn one or two things and they're going to make your business better in '24.

Yeah, if you don't learn one or two things, you've been spending a little too much time at the tables and all the other dregs of Vegas. But you're right, the timing is incredible in the respect that, you know, we're going to be having this thing in, in early March to mid-March. And so by then, year ends over, you've cleaned up everything in February, all the, all the mess from the party, and things are finally starting to calm down where we can pick our heads up again. And man, if you're not ready to go out to Vegas by then, then I don't know, good for you because you must have a better-oiled machine than I do. But yeah, so let's talk about— I wanted to share and we're going to walk through in this episode, we're going to talk about some of our favorite speakers that we've heard throughout the years. We're going to cover some of the sessions that are coming up this year at the IPPA. And then at the end, we're going to hit on— and so make sure you stay in there for this— we're going to hit on some of the best practices to get the most out of the IPPA Spring Summit. So too often people go to an event, any event, without a plan. That's one of the biggest mistakes you can make, right? This is a huge investment of time, money, resources. Go in with a plan to make sure you get the most out of the event. And so I put together some best practices that are predominantly based on how I approach any event I go to, especially when I'm making this kind of commitment that I do to the IPPA Spring Summit. So I'll kick it off with some of my favorite speakers. I loved Jeb Blount. You remember Jeb?

Great. Fantastic. The sales roller coaster.

Oh man. And the thing that was so amazing about Jeb was the level. You don't realize this until you hear guys like Tony Robbins, guys like Jeb Blount, when you really start to listen a little bit more closely to how they tell stories when they're on stage. They put you in the story to a level like I can still picture the bakery he was talking about with the bread going through the wall, through the metal detector. Like he painted such a vivid picture of something that was relatively insignificant to the story as a whole, that he was out there helping them with their uniforms when he was a uniform salesman. But he did such a good job that I still remember that, right? He was a uniform salesman. He was diving in and out of some bin full of uniforms, but he told stories with such vivid detail that it puts you into it. And I think that's one of those things we all get a little bit hesitant around is we don't want to talk too much. So we tend to leave out a lot of details. But if you're going to give a keynote and you want to really leave an impact, you've got to paint a picture that's clear as day that somebody can insert themselves into the story. And that's one of those speakers that just jumped out. Not only did he deliver amazing content with things that help, I mean, I love, love, love his books. Fanatical Prospecting is one that we make everybody read. I think it's, you know, pipe is life, as he loves to say. But beyond that, he was just a master craftsman in delivering a wonderful keynote. Yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts on him and then some of your other favorites from throughout the years as well.

Yeah, Jeff and I get along very well, so he's speaking to me and what I believe when we talk about prospecting, getting up every day and getting after it. I think what's interesting with IPPA You know, I go to the Salesforce conference and I go to Oracle conferences and I also go to a lot of local things that are, you know, smaller in nature. And I feel like we're kind of in that nice sweet spot where we can get these big names, but it's still in an intimate enough venue where we get to talk to Jeb afterwards and Jeb spends time with us and they really, you know, when we try to recruit these speakers to come talk to us, we normally try to get them for a session and then maybe a little bit of a follow-up, or there's some sort of takeaway that we try to incorporate into the rest of the year and not just have it be a one-and-done entertaining thing. And that's what I've appreciated most about it over the years that I've been there. You know, I go— I'm going to go way, way back, but I remember the first year we had Jack Daly, you know, just a fiery little guy that was an accountant by trade, started companies, turned himself into a salesperson. And, you know, really just brought energy. And that was one of the first, you know, standing ovations I can remember with, you know, 200, 300 people actually watching him. And the ultimate acid test was we got him recruited or requested back the next year. So, I mean, that to me is something that I look at and we'll talk about that a little bit later. Later, one of my favorites also, I mean, he speaks alongside Jeb a lot, but is Anthony Annarino. He's just a very smart, I think, down-to-earth person. What I appreciate about both Jeb and him is they are practitioners, so they're not just performers. I mean, they literally do what they are talking about and they make their, their talks evergreen. And I know that's one of the things that's very important to the committees that put these conferences on is getting people that aren't just up there performing and saying the same thing time after time, but people that are credentialed, that are keeping up with the latest things because As you and I know, you go to some of these things and sometimes you're in 2024 hearing tactics that were talked about back in the early 2000s. And it's just a nonstarter for me. I want people that are living what we're doing every single day, and I think that's a unique opportunity. So it's very real. Jesse Itzler, obviously last year or 2 years ago, I mean, as far as just a general person that wakes up and kicks ass every day, that was probably one of the most motivational ones and I mean, the line was long, but the people that wanted a picture, I've got them up here on my wall. I try to get a picture with most of the people that have keynoted IPPA. So there's a little bit of a history up here. But, you know, people could talk to him, they could get his autograph, they could get a picture. And those are just some of the things that I certainly appreciate outside of, you know, just being entertained and learning some things.

Yeah, Jesse Ochsler was my next one. I mean, what an absolute rock star guy was, you know, started out as a white rapper, wrote the theme song for the Knicks, owned part part of the Hawks, married Sara Blakely from Spanx, had David Goggins live in his house for 30 days. Like, I wrote a book about it, New York Times bestseller. Like, he, he has put together, as he calls it, one heck of a life resume. And that's what I follow so much of his stuff now. I just watched a webinar with him recently of sort of planning your year. He has this great process for thinking about, hey, I want to do something adventurous every 8 weeks. If I start the year and I plan to do something adventurous every 2 months, then, you know, I've had a heck of a year. I got one big thing every year, a bunch of mini adventures throughout the year. And then, you know, so and it's interesting the way he talks about it in terms of how many, how many summers do you have left? How many summers do you have with your kids? How many like— and when you start to think about it in terms like that, it forces you to seize the day, right? And so I just love the guy's moxie. I love the way he thinks about life and And also he's a heck of a— I mean, look, you know, I'm always looking at these things. I'm in his funnel after I watch this webinar and I'm getting sucked in towards his coaching program. So, you know, I love watching it from a marketing perspective as well and to see how he goes about his business. But yeah, tremendous guy. You could check out— we have an episode where we actually broke down his storytelling and a lot of what he went through in his talk as well. I remember recording that right in my room while I was out there because it was so compelling and it was so dang He was an absolute rock star. Anybody else jump out to you?

Yeah, just the, just the way he cares about people. I know personally in my life, you know, it's everyone's busy. You know, you could run and do 100 different things. I mean, there's definitely more things to do than time. And, you know, at least for myself, you know, that's trying to operate a business and keep things moving. And you don't always have redundancies in place where you can be out. You know, one of the things that can get sacrificed is the personal relationship side, you know, whether it's immediate family, friends, old college friends of like. And I know one of the things that he preached was, you know, when it matters, show up. And I took that to heart this year. I was just doing some self-reflection. I was planning '24. And one of my college friends, he lost his mom and his dad in about 42 days. Very, very tough time. And, you know, it's like, here I was, you know, going to send the flowers and, you know, send a text message, maybe lob in a phone call. And it's like, no, no, this is, this is tough. You got to show up. And I ended up making the 3.5-hour drive one way and making sure I did that. And I know it was appreciated. And, you know, it's kind of a rejuvenation of a personal thing. And that has applicability to business relationships and the like. And I just think that he's such a genuine relationship builder and he uses it to push things forward. And that was certainly one of the messages that I know I put in my personal game that I'm going to commit to being better at because life is short. Like he said, we don't have a long, long runway and it's getting shorter for both you and I.

The day. All of us, man. Well, that's a great point too. And if you're like me and like you now with a young child, like the, what kind of example do you want to set? Because I was recently faced with a similar situation where it was wildly inconvenient for me to fly back to New York for a funeral of a loved one. You know, it would have been easy to just mail my respects and, you know, times are so busy. I just don't have the time. The family's got this side or the other going on. But I was like, Well, kind of example am I setting to my kids in that, in that world as well? Like, you know, am I showing up when it matters? Am I only showing up for the people closest to me and not anybody beyond that bubble? Like, I'm hyperprotective of our family time, which can be a blessing and a curse, right? Because I might not show up for those people the way that I should. Great message there all around. Yo, I'd love to hear about it because it's funny, he just came up again, his name. Somebody else had him as a keynote at an event I was talking to. I wasn't there, but the owner's retreat, Alan Stein, tell me about his message and some of the key takeaways from what he was bringing to the table.

Yeah, Alan Stein was fantastic. We need to have him back. So make sure you put him on the docket. You know, he gave a talk.

I wanted to because I wasn't there and I was selfish. I wanted to throw him on for the straight talk, but it was a little too close.

Yeah, he's just another one of those guys that hangs out almost all the time with the tip of the spear. So not just the top 1%, but the top like 0.001%. And for those of you that don't know him, he is the psychological coach for Kevin Durant, works a lot with Steph Curry and professional athletes, primarily in the basketball realm. And he studies what the good performers, the good coaches and the good leaders do. So what does that have to do with business? Well, a lot of people don't fail to— or fail to understand when you are a Division I college coach, I mean, you are an executive, you are a CEO of an organization. Your coaching is actually a small, like 10 to 20% of what you actually do. You're running a recruiting division, you're running a, you know, a planning division, you're running your assistant coaches, you're running all of the ticket sales and all the things that go with it. And there are just so many applicabilities to the business world. And really what he does, I mean, he just tells fantastic stories. About the difference between basic and easy. And what he really broke down that I took away is it's easy to say provide great client service. It's hard to do. It's easy to say set proper expectations so that Matt isn't surprised by a bill or frustrated that an implementation isn't done or surprised that we're off track. It's hard to do. And he really goes through his message and gives a bunch of examples of how to do that. And that's just something that I bring into every leadership team meeting now when someone clichés it. We're all guilty of clichéing it. We cliché it all the time. It's like, guys, I'm not going to let you cliché this. I understand it's very basic, but it is not easy. One of the things that we're really got to focus on is how do we educate clients on additional things that we offer that they're not taking advantage of? In a very educational, non-salesy way. Well, they should just be buying this because that's what XYZ vendor who provides that offering says. Well, of course they maybe should be buying it, but how do you get them there? You know, people don't just buy things all the time. And just that message of basic and easy, I think as a leader was certainly one of them. Very motivational, you know, great storyteller, talked a lot about that. And then he shares a lot about, just the things to pay attention to. And he'll do a better job than me at telling the stories. But he talks about a successful D2 program that won many national championships. And, you know, it's basically how many offensive rebounds and how many possessions are two of the things that led to them winning 95% plus of their games. And what do you think that that coach preached and trained on every single day? So he talks a lot about practice. We joke, we've joked in IPPA about a lot of 7th grade basketball teams are ran better than many companies in the United States. And we all smile and laugh about that. It's absolutely true. They all work from the same playbook. They practice, they have games, and they watch film. We don't do many of those things very well in business. And when he kind of goes through that, it's just a fantastic conversation. And I mean, those are the types of things, all this stuff that I'm saying, I mean, I'm not an expert. Of this. I am very much operating from a place of practice, just like Jesse Itzler is, just like Jeb is, just like Anthony Anarino is, just like Alan Stein is. But when you get to be exposed to these ideas and you actually train on them, they generally stick better than when you just go attend that 1-hour motivational session and everyone walks out of the doors and no one changes their behavior. My repetition of being part of this since, I don't early to mid-2000s, uh, and hearing all of these things and adding one or two things to the game, uh, it's made a massive difference. And that would be my plea to anyone that has not attended this: come check it out. We have a ton of fun, meet some great people, and, uh, we'll talk a little bit more about the playbook on that later in the show.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more on all fronts there. So there's just, you know, you talk about the personal improvement thing, it's just been a time of year where you hear a lot of lip service around how I, you know, value being a positive individual. I value investing in myself. But then as soon as the stuff hits the fan, you know, all of a sudden I'm not a positive individual and all of a sudden I don't lead by example and all of a sudden I, you know, stop investing in myself because I don't have the time. And so just to— I said a little bit, I say this all the time, it's a little bit similar to what you said. Maybe tangential, is like the things I share with other people, whether it be in this podcast or online or whatever, are usually the things I need to hear in that moment. And so it's a reminder to myself whether I just consume some great content from Jesse or somebody else and inspired me to kind of course correct them when I was working on a day and then re-verbalizing that, sharing it online, sharing it on a podcast is like my way of holding myself accountable to that as well. And so I give you guys that challenge of like find your outlet to hold yourself accountable, whether even if that's just writing in your own journal, your own leadership journal, your own, you know, the company blog, whatever it is, like find a way to hold yourself accountable publicly in a way that also helps to create engagement, create content that can ultimately benefit you and the company by getting that exposure. Those things can both serve the same purpose. All right, let's talk about this year's agenda. First, I'm going to talk about a couple of like structural updates for the pros who have been to the IPPA Spring Summit before. I'll let you share a little bit about the keynotes since those will be probably what will attract some of you that are on the fence about whether or not you should come. If you've listened to any episodes of this before, you know my story. Like, I had never been to the IPPA before. I'd come across it when we started the company. You know, we had maybe been around 5 or 6 years before I went to a summit and I was just like, no, man, these people are not innovative. This is sort of your old crusty guy up the road from me who's been doing payroll for 30 years and has 400 clients and is going to stay at the same rate he's at and just grow incrementally. Like, I don't want to be with those people. They're the antithesis of what I'm trying to be. I'm trying to be innovative and unique and go past these guys. And what I found is when I went, I found people like Lee, I found people like Matt Onhold, I found people like Lori Brown, I found people that were my tribe that I wanted to be like and that I wanted to learn from and that I wanted to be around and grow with. And tons of other people that you've either heard on the podcast mentioned or even not. But beyond that, I found just like immediate ability to just being around a bunch of people that were giving first, right? Like the first thing people want to do is help you. And that's, that's very refreshing when you get around and finding those people who want to help. So let's talk about the structure here first. So we made a big update that the people— you're either going to love this or you're going to hate this. And either way, That's kind of my thing. People either love me or hate me. So we have started the content Wednesday afternoon. So instead of normally all day Thursday, some Friday morning stuff that goes till about lunch, that's sparsely attended, we do have one session Friday morning. It's an Ask the Board sort of town hall, but we're starting the content at 2 p.m. Wednesday afternoon. Let's face it, most of us are already there Wednesday afternoon visiting with vendors, doing something, you know, just getting there early to get our bearings about us. So we're diving right in. We've got a sales session, a leadership session, another sales session, another leadership session, all before that welcome and exhibitor hours that we have that evening. So I'm super excited about this because I'm already going to be there for a couple of days before for some meetings. But I know just even in the past when I wasn't there, I get in there Wednesday, I've got nothing to do besides sit and twiddle my thumbs and wait for that happy hour and everything, all that. And so I'm excited to get things kicked off early. What are your thoughts, Lee? I know you've been somebody who's been coming around for a while. You're coming from a different geo than me. What was your initial reaction when you heard about the Wednesday kickoff?

I love it. I love getting into things, you know, when people get there, might as well get after it, might as well start learning and might as well get into the structure. So I think it's a welcome change. Yeah, that's what we're out there for. So let's get to it. We don't need to delay. So super excited about that. You know, and then as I look at it, I'm also, proud. You know, we used to not have scale, so everything was kind of a combined general, and just really the specialization and the focus of having a leadership track, a sales track, and the other different disciplines that we want to cover, I think is an absolute double thumbs up, grand slam, home run. And then with attendance and with revenue, we can get better speakers. I mean, the names that we've talked about historically, 15 years ago, we weren't getting those people. We would have not been able to afford Jesse Itzler. Jesse Itzler was a 10-year dream that I had on a napkin, and we were never able to make it happen. And finally we were. So that's something that I'm very proud about. But if I may, I'll just cover kind of two of the keynotes that I think people are there. It's interesting what's going on from my perspective in this particular world. You know, we are called a payroll service for a reason. We provide a service. We need to support people. We need to take care of people. Yet big software continues to try to take that human element out of it every chance they get. Big tech companies are also trying to split the sales function, split the support function into 8 different pieces and trying to specialize people around that. And there's just some really interesting things going on as far as what types of clients you want. But I will butcher the saying of the last name, but Horst, the former leader of Ritz-Carlton. I mean, you want to talk about white glove service, you want to talk about someone that developed the process. You mentioned Lori Brown and Matt Umholtz and certain individuals that you've met. It didn't start there. Okay. When I started going to IPPA, we were barely $1 million in revenue. And, you know, today I've grown the organization to be $140 million in annual sales. It's, it's hanging around with people like you. I think we become like those we hang around with a lot oftentimes. And this is a service business that is one of our competitive differentiators. And Horst is going to go through and give an excellent talk on how do you develop a process. Many of us are getting into multi-state. There are no clients that don't have people in multi-states, I don't think anymore in the United States. Many of us are getting in different locations. You know, how do you develop a process when everyone isn't in the same building and provide that world-class customer care? I know of all the things coming from a sales guy, that is the one that I'm most excited about because I believe that's going to be our biggest gain. And then the other one that I'm very excited about, I was at two meetings last week with about 16 different CEOs, and they all brought up technology as an opportunity and a concern. And none of them brought up help desk or their computer breaking or, you know, any of the things we think about in terms of technology. What they all brought up is, how do I know what I should pay attention to regarding AI and things that can help automate the business? And who should I follow or who should I pick as the person that's going to guide me over the next 5 to 10 years on this? Are My software vendor is going to just give it to me and I just start using it and I don't need to pay attention to it. Do I need to be creative and innovative like you were talking about, about what you aspire to be? So one of the folks that I enjoy, I love the they ask, you answer theology that kind of got him on the map is Marcus Sheridan. We of course had him last year for a session. He's fantastic. And he's going to give us certainly a presentation on that as well as a general keynote. So again, big names. We got Ritz-Carlton founder, one of the greatest hotel chains, hospitality chains ever created on the planet. And then you've got Marcus Sheridan, who is someone that's really leading the charge on how to market, how to run a sales organization, how to develop revenue. I think both of those are going to be absolute home runs.

They are. And Marcus Sheridan last year did a marketing session on his, his bestselling book, They Ask, You Answer. And I knew he was a home run to bring back because the number of operations people that went in there and were thoroughly entertained, enjoyed it, learn from it, and we're able to apply the things that he teaches in there. And in our industry, one of the first things he talks about is like, hey, you got to have your pricing on your website, which I know a bunch of butts just puckered listening as I said that. And you know what, if you go to our website right now, what are you going to find? You're going to find our pricing. This is something that we believed in for a long time. It's something that as a consumer, what I want. And so that's the thing that's important to me is I'm the owner of about a 15-employee company, and that's my target audience, right? My, my typical audience are 17-employee companies that need HR benefits, payroll, etc. And so what do they, you know, what do I want? Probably the same thing they want. They want, they want transparency. They want their questions answered. They want that all there and available to them without necessarily having to talk to one of our salespeople before they get that information. So, and Horst Schulz, man, we've been studying this guy for Wow. We're going to celebrate our 10-year anniversary this year. And we have been studying him since we had employees that, you know, Ritz-Carlton, Chick-fil-A, those are the places we go when we're looking for inspiration as it relates to the customer experience. A couple of things we've stolen from, from Horst and his world is like, look, ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. That's one of the philosophies of Ritz-Carlton. And I'm saying all this because I think each of you, before you come to the event, if you do a little bit of research, you do a little bit of learning, maybe read Marcus's book, maybe, you know, watch some of Horst's keynotes on YouTube, you'll be all that more in tune to ask some better questions or to take home some better nuggets and that you're not kind of hung up at the surface level and what they're talking about, which is another one of these things of preparing for the event, which we're going to talk about here shortly. But so, ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen, this is critical. Now, we also utilize their warm welcome, resolution, fond farewell, and inviting someone back methodology when we talk about our customer interface. So at the Ritz-Carlton, whenever they're within, I want to say it's like 15 feet of somebody, they're required to address them by name. If they don't know their name, they have to ask their name and they're not allowed to forget it the rest of the time they're there. And they welcome them. They resolve whatever issue they have. We have put a plus one in there. We want to do a resolution plus one, try to identify what the next actionable step is past that resolution. And then a fond farewell where we invite them to return. Thank you so much for your time. Can't wait to speak to you again. That's hard to do, to Lee's point, in a virtual world, but it's really not when you think about it. Like, we have email templates that plug that in so that we can just— all right, you don't have to type out a warm welcome and a bonjour. Well, that's great. We also, when we answer the phone, we say, welcome to Guru, welcome. You're coming into our service state. We want you to feel like that. So, so many great nuggets from those guys. I couldn't be more excited. As you can tell, I'm going to geek out entirely.

Yeah, you're going into that process word which most entrepreneurs hate, but you're exactly right. I mean, he had a class process, I think two things. You gotta come to hear him, just to hear him tell the bank story. Yeah. When you talk about the hello and goodbye, you gotta come to hear him tell the bank story. Then the other thing that's fascinating about that is, you know, how do you get to ladies and gentlemen? When we sit and whine as business leaders about we can't get our people up to speed, you know, our people are not providing great client service. And it's like, you think about the folks that he is taking into that training program who were not were not high school educated, were not college educated, you know, had little to no training. And I mean, they just grew and taught them the process of how to be world class. As you said, ladies and gentlemen taking care of ladies and gentlemen. I just think that is just a, it's just a fantastic leadership lesson on showing them where it ends up and then putting them through a process and training. And that's like you say, I think he, He talks about, you know, what are the 20 things that our clients want from us? And you know, that's what that whole training program was about. It was about the hello, it was about being called by name. It was about all those little things. And he said the competitive differentiation took care of itself by just making sure that happened in however many insane amount of countries that they had properties.

And yeah, I'm looking forward to it. That's a celebrity that's not on too many people's list, but he's on mine. So yeah, All right, so let's talk about— so leadership track is still forming. We've got 3 leadership sessions that will be happening, but I know Sean has a big focus and Sean is over this and a lot of these other sessions, y'all. The cool thing is, so we'll bring in some of these paid keynotes who are amazing, who are people that are, you know, going to bring some cachet, going to bring some energy, going to motivate you, going to inspire you and give you some great ideas and actionable nuggets. But then we also have some of your peers and/or people you aspire to be like who are going to be in the room that are going to share like, hey, this is exactly what I do at my bureau as it relates to X. And so that to me is the real goal, right? Where it's just like I remember once talking to someone in the hall, they gave me a nugget on how they were compensating their customer service people. Somebody else was talking about something 20 minutes later. I was like, oh, hey, you know, Mike Ritzema over here just told me he's doing this program. You should that might be something to consider for you. And he was like, oh, that's amazing. I didn't even do it. I just was able to pass the information from one person to another, literally in hallway conversations, and benefit multiple people, myself included, at the same time. So those are the types of best practices we're sharing because let's face it, there's, there's this element of, you know, if you're too worried about competition, you've got the wrong mindset. There are so many small businesses and mid-sized businesses out there for all of us to serve. You're going about it all the wrong way. Yeah, you may bump into some of these people as you get larger locally, regionally, nationally, but that's few and far between. So leadership, big focus is going to be on culture and situational leadership, right? So how do we develop— Lee and I, right before we got on the podcast and talking about, man, sitting here, it's January 22nd. So the bullets are still flying. It is still year-end. You know, year-end, we're starting to turn the corner and everybody's still on a little bit of relief that we're down to the last couple of weeks. But let's face it, then we got the cleanup of year-end that's going to occur. For the next 4 weeks after that plus. And so, you know, it's a tense time creating a culture that actually people can still manage and not just survive through this time of year is a very tricky thing. And a lot of people spew a lot of clichés like, see, like Lee mentioned earlier, you know, set the right expectations and do that. It's like, yeah, dude, I told it, it was going to be hard. Until you've been in it, you don't know how hard it is, right? And so it's a hard thing to prepare somebody for by just telling them it's going to be hard. Oh yeah, but there are hard stuff. No, you can't look at that. Okay, just wait. It's stressful. It's not even— I remember once somebody came in our office and they're like, it doesn't really look like anybody's doing anything. And it's because we're just sitting at desks, you know, like they don't see— even if you're on the phone, it doesn't look like a lot. It's not physical labor, but it's taxing. And when they got all those tickets coming in, all the W-2s, you're worried about, oh, are these taxes going to get filed on time? We can't get these logins to work with this entity and this isn't getting where it needs to go. That's it. It's chaos. So the culture thing matters. And I'm so excited to hear we're going to be bringing in some great leaders of the bureaus that we all want to be like to help to speak to that. And then the situational leadership. We got tired of the same old, like, you know, one person standing up with a PowerPoint talking about how you should treat millennials. We're going to talk about, you know, how a millennial can manage a boomer or a Gen Xer and how you manage cross-functional teams and what some of those opportunities things are. So I'm really excited for that because that's the type of stuff that gets me geeked up as a leader, is trying to get better and trying to learn from guys like Lee. Lee's a guy I look to all the time. When, you know, Sean asked me, what are 3 names of leaders in this industry that you aspire to be like? Lee, you're one of those guys that I want to be as cool and calm as you under pressure. So looking forward to hearing from you out there and from all the other great leaders that we're going to get to crowdsource some of that information as well. So Leadership Track should be good. Now, has Leadership Track not always existed? Is that what you were saying earlier?

Yeah, I mean, we've, we've played around with a number of things, but no, normally it'd be one leadership session. And then of course you Daly and Eight folks that didn't really have as much energy around being in that. So I just, I just love, you know, trying to provide content. Again, it's a big focus within IPPA. We want to be an educational arm for all levels of our service bureaus, from recruiting and talent all the way to executing on client deliverables. And I just love how we've broken that up and done that. And I think leadership is important. I think most things break in the middle. And I think one of the things that I've experienced in my journey is when you're in startup and revenue mode of, you know, getting to, you know, that $5 million or $3 million or whatever that million dollar is, you can control a lot of that stuff because you are the person that, you know, is running the communication and you're doing the coaching and you're doing the enablement. Eventually, when you get up to about that $2 million mark, you have to start entrusting leaders, you know, to be able to do that. And I see it time and time again where I go and meet with leadership teams and the leadership team cares about people. They're strategic, they're thoughtful, they're smart. They've got all those things going on. And then you go down to the frontline employees and they say, this place sucks. It's like, well, what happened between there and here? And it's middle. Most things break in the middle. And I personally believe it's one of the things that we're focused on as an organization into 2024. Middle management, in my opinion, as small to mid-sized businesses, the hardest job on planet Earth. And we— people rise to those jobs because they are good consultants. When you're not in that middle management, you just do your job. You try to do it well. You've done it better than most of your peers, and you've entrusted generally that founder to put you in that position. But we put them in that position and we don't provide any training and all the other stuff that you talked about that goes into it. And then we get frustrated, we blame it on generational classes or we blame it on, you know, anything that we want. And it's, we gotta stop pointing the fingers, it's our thumbs, it's on us, we created it. And people need training and coaching. And it's one of the biggest opportunities that I think also affects everything around any problem that you have in your company. And it's getting people into those positions. As I say it in our organization, I want people in those positions that get more energy out of getting Matt on stage than Matt being on stage themselves. And that is something that is a mindset shift for a lot of people. We've all talked about for many years taking the best sales producer and making them a sales manager. Does that work? It can work, but it doesn't work that often. They are different roles and getting people in those positions that are focused on how do I create more revenue-producing people not producing more revenue is a minor shift, but it's a massive difference in results when you get that. And I know that'll be some of the stuff that's talked about and there'll be a lot of good ideas and insight that you can take from others who are doing this better than you and put them into play. It's one of the reasons I'm going.

Yeah, yeah. I noticed you mentioned a lot of big breakdowns for me over that. Like once we, you know, once we started to put a leadership team in place, like then I got disconnected from my team and tried to not step on my leader's toes and then lost those relationships. Then you got to go back and mend those. There's a whole— so much nuance there, especially, uh, like you said, we're in that messy middle phase.

So I feel that outside of that data that, you know, everyone wants to think data, right? Data, data, you got to look at data, you got to look at KPIs. It's like, well, that's one management tool, but there's a whole other art side of this business that you got to be good at, or you're not gonna fly.

Yeah. Um, all right, so marketing. So we've got leadership track, we've got marketing and sales and operations track. And then so the If we look at the marketing and sales side, we— I've been very involved with this team. That's my background. So we have one session with CJ Moore, who used to be with the Payroll Bureau as their marketing director, Complete Payroll out of New York. He's since launched his own agency, still works with a bunch of folks in the space, but he's going to be working with Marty Gambi from KABU HCM, and they're going to be kind of going through a case study of what they've done to grow and expand their business and some of his other clients. Really going to segment this by— and a lot of this, y'all. All right. So you're either going to love me again or hate me for this. My edict to a lot of the folks organizing, because I am— I guess never did mention that disclaimer. I am helping to organize this thing. Thank you. Is, is that I said, look, these panels tend to be a waste of time. I don't like to sit on panels. I don't like to listen to panels. I don't like to organize panels. Again, sometimes they have their place and that's a broad sweeping statement, but most of the time they're a waste of everybody's time. We want prepared speakers who are going to come and speak to people kind of where they're at. So there's going to be a lot of audience segmentation happening too, where I can either, you know, decide to go with the group of folks that are in the stage that I'm at or maybe the next stage up. And so CJ and Marty are going to be really focusing on actionable, like, all right, you have no marketing strategy today. Here's where you should start. All right, you have these things in place. Here's what you should do next. All right, you have those things in place. Here's where you should go from there. Because I mean, if you look at the scope of the organizations, and I'll put myself, you know, on the bottom and Lee at the top, right? If, you know, a few million dollars to $140 million, like we've got just a broad swath of organizations. So it can be hard to plan and to speak at these events when everybody in the room, you don't know. I remember actually sitting on a marketing panel once and Marty, which is when he and I met, he's asking advanced questions from the back of the room when we're just you know, barely scratching the surface because we don't know where anybody's at in a marketing journey. And so it's so hard to kind of hit everybody. But when we start to segment things and we have people prepared knowing that their audience looks like that, it makes for much more engaging content. So that's one thing. Sonia is going to lead a session on upselling and account management. This is one we did a post— excuse me, a podcast on a few months back. I mean, I remember when I was at ADP, our client reps carried a minimum of a half a million dollar quota to just upsell clients. And they typically have 200 to 300 listed clients and that's it. And they're just upselling the accounts, other things they have in the bag, booking meetings with them, do an account review. Hey, here's your usage, here's this, here's that, here's the other stuff we have available to you. And just purely selling based on that. It's something that most of us in that sort of middle ground, really struggle with because you want to go out and get new business reps and you oftentimes forget about, all right, well, should this person be upselling? Who's going to upsell? Do we have a dedicated account manager? Sonya and her team have turned the corner, put an account manager in place, and also have an amazing employee referral plan that I just spent half an hour with. Their number one source of leads last year was from an employee referral program, which is crazy. So I'm so excited to hear Gonna be great. Yep. And then so we got one other marketing and sales one we haven't pinned down yet. Thinking it's gonna probably be some sort of workshop by size and stage as well, like we talked about. Operations, they got a few pinned down. Biggest one I think you're gonna be excited about is offering and producing and how do you manage HR services. So this is a hot topic in the market. Are you thinking about offering HR services? Do you offer HR services? What's your production level look like? What are your expectations? What's your team look like? Again, that peek behind the curtain, you literally can't get anywhere else. That's the beauty of this event. Like, you're never going to— there's no other event in the country you can go to and get this kind of peek behind the curtain of your peers and what they're doing for HR services. So that's exciting to me because that's something near and dear to our heart. We've always led with HR services from day one. Does not mean we're any good at it. It just means it's what we do. So I'm excited to learn from people who are better at it. Than us because, you know, kind of going back to Lee's— this is before we jumped out. We talked about training people from the ground up, not taking industry people. Well, we just brought in— everybody here is not from the industry. And so we're making it up from what I remember and what we can find, what we can research and what we can do. So I always love hearing from others in the industry. All right. We're getting up on time, but let's hear, Lee, your like process when you go. I'm going to use a very like I think we talked about when I wrote this article, I wrote this article for IPPA. I did it off of how I normally would prepare for an event, one of this magnitude. I'm trying to get better about doing it for even when I'm going to that one that's right here in Columbia, that's only 4 hours, and I'm trying to be better prepared. So this is a little bit of a call to action to me. I'm like, hey, you can't only be engaged and prepared for events when they're all the way across the country and cost thousands of dollars. You've got to, you know, there's something right down the street that costs you, you know, half a day of time and a few hundred bucks. That's still an expensive event. And in a lot of ways, right, when I take time away from one thing to do another thing. So if I'm not prepared, if I'm not following up, I'm not present when I'm there, which is my biggest dang fault, usually on the phone, you know, sometimes you just might not have the laptop open, you know, answer an email. So talk to me a little bit about how you prepare for an event, some of the tips and tricks you have when you're getting How do you do something like this?

Yeah, so usually, obviously in our world we're sending multiple people. So we review the agenda just as you went through so eloquently and, you know, figure out what are our biggest opportunities or items of intrigue that we want to learn more about. I think HR services, you're exactly right. I mean, that is a whole— you could spend a whole day talking about that topic. And do you lead with the consulting? Do you lead with the software? Why is it that we get into an implementation and we say, hey Matt, how should we set up performance management, everyone looks at each other like they've never talked about it before. I mean, it's just a whole messy, very interesting world that you are exactly right. Everyone's trying to do that. So create a plan with your team. We have wonderful allied members, AKA vendors, that support this conference. We could not do it without them. It's a lot of time for me to try to schedule meetings with them all throughout the year. That's one of the things that I appreciate about the most. Do we get into deep conversations about things? No, not always. But I do believe relationships matter. And each of you know, throughout the year when you may have to call that particular vendor and get some prioritization or try to work through a very challenging issue. And I can tell you that that is what goes into their thought process as far as the people that they deal with. I can move you up ahead of Matt. So Matt's calling about something and I'm calling about something, but Matt hung out with them at the conference. Matt's probably going to get the nod to the front of the support line to get that particular thing solved. So I like to work with the vendors and then, you know, I balance, of course, I go there to get my ROI, I go there to learn, I go there for the experience and to get motivated and all those things. But, you know, I'll let you go into a little bit more of the micro, but have some fun with your team if you're bringing anyone else and then have some fun with the vendors because the vendors put on good events and those types of things. And then I thought it was fantastic last year. You didn't talk about the celebration, in the evening. I thought last year with the costumes and all that stuff was fantastic. And I know you've got some things going on, so you better come.

Oh geez, I better. Lori will kill me if I talk about the evening event. Good grief. All right. So we are doing a gala-style evening event. And don't let me scare you off with the gala style, because if anybody of y'all know me beyond just listening here, like I'm a t-shirt. It came up on the most recent board call. I was like, man, I already have a tuxedo t-shirt for some reason. I wore it to an IPP event a while ago. I think it was prom-themed and I wore a tuxedo t-shirt. That's how I prefer to dress up is t-shirts. Yeah, I'll wear a blazer on occasion, but I'm really trying not to. And so the gala was maybe not my first choice, but Laurie made a very, very convincing claim for it, and I'm 100% on board now. So it's going to be an Oscar-style event. It is going to be awesome. Like, there'll be surprises for this thing that y'all are going to love. We're going to honor the rich history of the IPPA. Which I think is most important. So we're 20-plus years at this thing. We were, we were pretty close to the 24th or 25th anniversary. I don't remember exactly where we are there. I forget where we landed on that. It was like 24, 24, 25 year. I don't know. I thought we had—

we're decent data people, but historians, we're not.

Yeah. Plus I have a terrible memory and I don't know, that's probably— but there, there was something there. So, so that's going to be awesome. It is going to be exactly what you want. It's going to be fun. It's going to be funny. It's going to be honoring those that have been with us for a while and introducing a lot of the new people. So my big emphasis beyond just getting rid of panels and starting a day earlier has been, hey, let's start to make comfortable, honor, and recognize the newer folks in the group that are starting to want to contribute more. And I want to open the door to you. If you're listening to this right now and you want to know how you can get more involved, please drop me a note. It's Matt at Guru.co. Don't hesitate, drop Leah a note. You can— we'll put our contact info in the description, but we need new leaders to step up. We've had amazing leadership over the years and we continue to have amazing leadership, but we want to see that new wave and we want to see more diversity on the stages as well. So we want to make sure people are represented, you feel comfortable, and that it's an environment that's, you know, we're going to emphasize that experience for people that are less than 2 years and you're just getting used to the ITBA, just learning it. And so make sure that you're doing— if you fit that group of folks like me and Lee, I don't even put myself in that group, but like, you know, people have been around for a little while, make sure that you're encouraging the people that are just getting started and reaching out to them ahead of time and at the event. You know what, dude, based on time, I'm going to do a whole other episode on this, getting the most out of the events, a step-by-step guide thing here. I think there's a lot there. It's too much to bastardize it into 4 minutes. But the, you know, the reality is like, hey, Have some clear objectives for the event. Prioritize who you're going to network with, what you want to learn from this thing. I always have, you know, we sit down as a team before we go and we say, what do we want to get out of this event? Exactly. You talked about based on the agenda, but also what are some gaps in our organization that we can fill and who are some people there that could potentially help us to fill them from a learning perspective and then be active, man. It's like so many people just show up and be a fly on the wall. I was joking last year, if you sit next to me at this conference, you are super annoyed because I am just hammering away on my phone or my laptop, just notes the whole way. Like, I almost should just bring a voice recorder and just record the sessions verbatim because I, I type pages and pages and pages of notes and then I do a long postmortem afterwards where I turn it into, you know, either a long-form guide that I can refer back to. And I know if I search IPPA in my Drive, I'm going to find it. Or I do, you know, the last couple of years I've just recorded a podcast so I can go back and listen to it. I've listened to some of these, which is, you know, can be difficult, as you all know, to listen to your own voice. But it's nice to hear the recap because I'm doing exactly what I gained from that event. I'm able to go back and listen to it. So you don't have to record a podcast for other people or record a podcast for yourself if you have to and just have it there so you can come back and refer to your notes in a written form. Hopefully that helps some of y'all. And, you know, Lee, anything else you want to share? Kind of closing thoughts here as we wrap this one up.

Well, I think just putting a bow on it, you know, I focused on the support and probably a little bit too negative on the issues side of the vendors. But, you know, these vendors are also constantly thinking about ways that we can all make more money in this business and solve really important problems for our clients. So it's another great way for you to go there. When you talked about account managers and you talked about client support and upselling, it's just a great way for you to find 5 to 10 pretty darn easy integrated options that you can add to your stack of services that are going to help you get on that revenue train. I know that's been one of the things over the years. I look back at the things we didn't offer when we first started and the things we offer today. And I mean, it's just, it's massive. And that's part of what goes into it. It creates a whole bunch of other challenges, being able to support it and how you're going to handle it and the like. But just, just there's a lot of insightfulness on what problems clients have in our space. We have deep relationships with these clients. They trust us to do a very crucial part of their business, and we've got influence to be able to solve more problems for them. And that would be one of the commitment objectives that I would add to that list is certainly what are some opportunities from a revenue standpoint, because that's going to give you your most tangible, again, using that data component, the most tangible ROI that you could attribute back to the conference would be what's some additional revenue we've drove as a result of going there. So it's going to be fantastic. I'm excited about it. And it's been very cold up here in Minnesota. So it's always, I guess the last couple of years have been a little cold out in Vegas. So hopefully I'm not jinxing us, but with it being mid-March, I think we're going to see some nice weather as well. So that's not a bad thing to those of us that hang up here over the north side of the parallel in the United States.

Oh man. Yeah, last year it snowed, didn't it?

I think darn near. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think the mountains were white. I believe that was true.

That's not what I was expecting, but awesome, man. Thanks for your time. Appreciate you as always. That's the pod.

Appreciate you. Yep.

Sounds good.

See you guys.