Decentralized Leadership - Fractional C-Suite Retreat - Episode # 010

Growing a business is hard, but it does not have to be.

Once a week, we take a break from the hustle and bustle in business to talk about innovations and what's new in the C-suite. This is the Fractional C-Suite Retreat, and I'm Joseph Frost. Pull up a seat at the fire, grab a drink, smoke a cigar, and just join me as we relax, learn, and get inspired. This retreat is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow with better marketing strategy.

All right, welcome today's guest, is MCSE, Microsoft Certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt, author of 5 publications, including The Wrong Way to Lead. He's founder and partner at IA Business Advisors. Welcome, Brian Smith. How are you, Brian?

I'm good, Joe. How are you? Good.

I always love reading off those, those, those things at the beginning, makes you sound all super cool. I'm glad you're here. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

So I've been looking forward to our conversation since we chatted earlier. And I know that one of the things that we want to start with was on the topic of, in your role, and even in your role the last 26 years of being in this arena, what are some of the major things you're seeing C-suite's opportunities that they might be missing out on today? From, from your perspective?

I'm going to assume you mean fractional C-suites, or do you mean the, the actual C-suites?

I mean the actual C-suites that you work with, the organizations, the owners, the other C-level people. That— where are you seeing some opportunities that they might not be seeing themselves?

Yeah, I think one of the biggest opportunities is, um, or the realizations is getting more in touch with what their company is and what it means to whatever area of influence they have. A lot of C-suite people have blinders on. They only see what's in their lane. And in the old days, we could almost do that. You stay in your lane, you put your head down, you get your job done. You have these direct reports and, you know, it's pretty black and white. But the way that society has grown, the way that we've become a three-dimensional society where, you know, we have to know more, we have to be more in touch, two or three steps away from ourselves. And that's a big challenge for the C-suite. It's a big challenge to have multi-dimensional thinking, to be able to communicate with different levels of your organization at the speed of business nowadays, which is very fast. And that's— and that speed of business is driven by the speed of the consumer, which is very fast. So I think that's really what we're seeing is this learning curve and this gap to catch up and actually redefine what each C-suite role is, what their areas of responsibility are, and how do they tackle this very fast change that is going through.

So do you think this is an opportunity that's different based on the size of an organization, whether it be people or revenue, or is it across the board, everybody's facing the same challenge here?

No, no, I think, you know, I think it's in layers. Small business who can't afford the C-suite, struggle to keep up with the different areas of responsibility that those of us at the C-suite level know exist. You know, what does a CMO do? What does a CFO do? What does a COO do? What does a CTO do, or a CIO, or a CEO? Or, you know, and can any of them do the same job? Or— and in small businesses, A lot of them just are blown away by the magnitude of what those things mean and how those areas of responsibility grow. And now that the speed of business is faster, it's creating a lot more opportunity for those of us that provide that on a fractional basis. At the bigger companies, it's the same problem, but, um, you may feel like you're butting heads with other C-suite people because We are three-dimensional and we are reaching across the aisle. You— we're now seeing culture conflicts or interpersonal conflicts between the C-suite because there are commingled responsibilities and there are gray areas where there's overlap and difficulties to deal with. And for us, it's great because we help unravel it from the small business side. To the medium business side, and we can address both of those from our position.

I think that's very astute, the differences between small and medium and large. Maybe give some context, so like, what do you consider a small business, just in the range, and then that medium and larger business?

Yeah, from a C-suite perspective, when we think companies really need to start thinking about you know, a CFO-level type of thought process. And of course, there's exceptions to this, but, you know, the $2 million to $25 million range to us is small business. And the exceptions are if you're a construction company and you do $25 million, there's some construction companies that do that with 2 jobs, you know, so Or they do it with 1 or 2 big giant sales. So there is some caveats to that. $25 to $50 million to us is medium size. And for us, over $50 million is just big. And again, there are exceptions, but predominantly over my career, that's held true all the time.

And that's kind of where my range is, where I think of the same thing, small, medium. But when you go to like the Small Business Association, like a small mid-sized business is up to $250 million in revenue, I think, or maybe $500 now. Like, that's kind of big. If you're in the, you know, $100, $250 million range, you're not dealing with the same challenges as a $2 to $50 million company.

No, and oftentimes, you know, I feel like the dollars don't matter, it's the number of employees that matter. And again, For us, we can redefine in those environments because the number of people can help determine your need for a C-suite type of person who is looking at business problems from that traditional C-suite perspective. You know, the deeper thoughts, the more strategic thinking that's more long-term. You know, not just what's going to happen in the next 30 days or 60 days or whatever your cycle is. You know, C-suites look beyond a current operational cycle. They're looking multiple cycles downline, whatever that might be.

Yeah. What, um, so the opportunity there is to get C-suites and executives to kind of think this new three-dimensional— I've heard it called decentralized leadership styles. Um, how do you do that? Like, what is the approach? What is it? And how long does it take?

Yeah, well, how long it takes really is dependent on each organization and the culture that you walk into. Very structured and definitive organizations that have very clearly defined current policies and procedures, and, you know, everything's working, but there might be a lot of conflict at the top. Doesn't mean that business is still not happening, but it's happening with some chaos or some conflict. Those tend to take longer. Getting them to engage, getting a champion who is willing to take on the challenge of getting your peers to think more 3-dimensional and think more about how their decisions may affect one of the other, your peers or your peers' areas of responsibility. Can do that at a different level can be challenging. Companies that are, you know, embracing maybe EOS or some of the other more foundational business process or business operation systems that are out there tend to, or that have been exposed to it, tend to do a little bit better. They've gone through a change process that has structure. They understand what that is going to be like, the difficulty and the easy parts of it. And so they approach those— for us, they approach them with a little bit more open mind or open eyes and ears. Then the brand new ones, I, you know, we do assessments of our clients, psychological assessments, a Kolbe and a DiSC, and we do that for one reason. It tells us what we think we're going to expect from the individuals and the culture itself when we start to implement change processes.

Yeah, yeah, you can— you know what you're getting into. Yeah. So it's really— we're talking then about it's a cultural, almost identity behavioral change the organization goes through more than a structural And that's a harder transition for some people to make. I mean, even our personal lives, those are big changes. So I can see how somebody who's open to that change and ready for it and wanting it is going to adapt more than others. Do you feel with the work that you've done, I know core values is a big— I'm a big believer that core values kind of sets that culture. Do you start picking away at certain values and say, you know what, we need to add a value that addresses this kind of 3D thinking that we're talking about, or we need to remove some of these values that are really constraining that opportunity. Do you go to that level of change in an organization?

Well, that always— again, you know, it's so individual, but we do take into account values, and we never go in and tell people to change values. What we do do, however, is help people to find what influenced them to develop their current values and then challenge them to think about how those values might be changed and let them help develop that. And we do that through a process of understanding, the process of finding their influence, not individually as either one of the C-suite leaders or wherever we were brought into the organization, and then expand that out on a global— global being for the company's perspective. And then see if that leads them to a value change. And then help them understand what that value change— what it might take to implement that value change so that their eyes are wide open and it's not just a surprise.

Yeah, that makes perfect good sense. Yeah, you can't go tell somebody to change their values. You've got to work through it with them. So I'm curious, how have you seen the landscape change in the last 26 years since you've been doing this work. It wasn't called fractional back then, but was it similar, you know, as a consultant when you got into this advising businesses? It just now has a different name, or is there actually really a different feel to the fractional executive?

Yeah, fractional, I, you know, it reminds me of the word influencer. Fractional C-suite is a nice buzzword that's been developed by the market to kind of, you know, give a more formal picture of what we do as consultants. Quite frankly, our team still uses the same phrase. We call it over-the-shoulder consulting. And that's how we sell it. You put us on the shelf, or we'll sit behind you, and you call us up and we'll look over your shoulder. And help you strategize, validate, make you feel good about a decision, be your devil's advocate. You know, every one of those things that goes into being a fractional executive for our clients. But at the end of the day, it's over the shoulder. And the biggest change has just been what, semantics? But the work itself has changed because of the speed of business. When I started, we were doing ERP systems and just starting to put desktop accounting and desktop management systems in front of small to medium-sized business people. We have literally watched that go from a big giant monitor on your desk to you know, the phone in your back pocket, and you can run a— we can run a quarter billion dollar company with a phone in our pocket. You know, we can communicate with every person in that organization, we can look at any piece of data. And we can just about make any decision in an organization with a phone. And that includes, you know, there's hardly any part of a business we touch that you can't make that statement for.

Yeah, and you're unique, at least in the, in the guests that I have, in the fact that you've got fractional or over-the-shoulder CEOs and COOs, CFOs, even CSOs. So you're looking at it from lots of different C-suite perspectives. Um, how did that evolve?

So, um, we were born out of the ERP world. And one of the challenges we had during ERP implementations was twofold. One, change management, not just from a technology perspective, but from the human behavior perspective. People were used to doing business a certain way as individuals, and we were changing that, and it had— and it caused behavioral issues. Secondly, we were heavily involved in ERP in merger and acquisition, so taking two different systems slamming them together. So not only the humans, but then the systems. As that process evolved and we got more and more involved in those projects, we started identifying business issues. And the business issues would stick out for us because as we're doing transition within those systems that are tracking the business, we would identify inefficiencies. And so Being entrepreneurial, you know, I would say to our team, well, we know what the solution is, or we think we know what the solution is. Let's propose it. And that's how it started. And we would see it sometimes in sales, we would see it sometimes in HR, we would see it sometimes in operations. Sometimes it was in finance, or sometimes it was at the very top. And we got a reputation for being able to identify fairly quickly because of the way we prepared our clients for change. Solutions to problems that would have high impact. And then, well, they trusted us and they started to rely on us to help further strategize, further develop business change, further discuss their future and how that might work in, you know, this new foundation that we were involved in setting up with them.

And that kind of evolved into your own operating system, if you will. I think, I think you referred to this, the Biz Vision psychology. Is that all that has rolled into, to this concept that you're—

it is. Biz Vision is a tool that we use as at the C-suite level to do a tremendous amount of work for us. So Biz Vision is our, uh, business operating system program that we use to run companies, and it transcends all— every part of the company, and it defines for us the people that are there, and it gives us a snapshot of what they do, who they do it with, how they communicate, what tools they use, what decisions they make. And it does it in a graphic way, and it does it in an intuitive way.. And it helps us to understand not only human conflict from the psychological or behavior side, but operational conflict, business process conflict, supply chain conflict, customer delivery conflict, customer service conflict. And we can see it visually and we can understand it more intuitively, and we can help create solutions through strategy and then tactics that follow up that strategy in a much more efficient way.

So do you lead an organization through that process as their strategic fractional strategic person, or do you lead them through as a CEO, a fractional COO or CFO, like, or kind of both all in one? Like, how do you— how does that work for you? Because you are, you are interesting, and I— you're not as siloed, and that's That's why you're talking about 3Ds as some of our traditional fractional service providers out there.

It's, Joe, it's all of the above. We have a client right now that we work with the CEO, and we also work with the CTO, the CIO, and the COO. But we started with the CEO, and our biz vision process started from him down, and he was our champion. However, we have another client where we started at the COO level, and then we have another client where we started at the sales manager level. And it all depends on the organization and how much autonomy maybe that champion has within their organization. BizVision can be used globally, so from an entire company perspective, but it can also be used departmentally or even individually. We have people that use it to understand what they do as a single person, and it helps them plan, uh, what they may do in the near future, how they may implement change or ideas of change to their areas of responsibility. And the value of Biz Vision is that you can add to it very quickly and you can build out an organizational model one-to-many in a very efficient way, in a, uh, in an in-depth way, all at the same time.

So when you're rolling out the Biz Vision software and book and all that for the, for the masses, are you keeping it in-house? It's just your, your proprietary approach?

Oh, you know what, thanks for asking. We're actually rolling out alpha of our operating system in the first quarter of this year. So, um, it is a very manual process for us to do the data collections today. Um, and it has been, and I actually prefer it that way. I'm kind of old school when it comes to one-on-one interviews through the organization, asking the questions we ask are very structured and The tools we use to put that data into are very structured, but it doesn't create a model for us like automatically. It doesn't just roll out a model. We have to build it by hand. And our new toolset will do that for us. It'll actually build out our business model by hand and it'll allow us to do automatically some of the things we do. For instance, what-if scenarios. What if I, as the CEO, was to put in— to add a CFO to my organization? What would it do? You know, what conflicts would it create? What, what type of person would be best? What added support people might I need? What, what communication funnels or conflicts might it create? And it helps. It'll do a what-if scenario and help. Strategize, and then take that into tactical implementation of that new position.

Oh, wow. I'm excited. That's, that's pretty impressive. I mean, that's the way everything you're talking about, and I get the joy of doing it one-on-one. There's also a lot more context that you as the CEO or the COO or the champion gets in those one-on-ones that you can't get from reading a report. But to not now to start building your software to make that even more efficient and scalable to you, it's gotta be exciting. Now you've got a large organization as it is today. I think I was very impressed, something like almost 50 employees and a couple hundred contractors out there that are all active and involved in providing these services to clients around the country, right? Do you have clients outside the US?

We do. So we have, 42 full-time employees, and then we have just under 200, uh, what we call dedicated contractors. And I think I, I told you, a dedicated contractor is a professional who we bill 1,000 hours or more a year through to our clients. And we do business in 33 countries right now, so we have clients in 33 countries that we actively do business with.

That's awesome. Wow. So what do you think, um, the future of fractional work is?

Yeah, I think the future is amazing, um, especially where we're headed with decentralized management. With the pandemic, um, verifying on one hand that we can work more remotely also verifying on one hand that humans need human interaction to maintain positive culture. And I think what we're going to see is more use of fractional people and more use, a clear understanding of how those fractional roles have value to us. In the past, A lot of people shied away from hiring a part-time person. They didn't feel like they were dedicated enough or committed enough, or they didn't know enough about us. But today we can get up to speed quickly and we can work in a fractional environment and be amazingly effective, not only from the operational side, but, you know, on the revenue side too. It's a lot more affordable for a lot of small companies to have fractional people than to have full-time people.. And I think people are going to be more cognizant of that also going forward.

Yeah. And I do see a lot of fractional name tags showing up all over the place, which is supply side. It's real. What guidance would you give a prospective client or business owner or C-suite on how would you recommend they go about vetting or what is the right criteria they should be looking for, for a fractional executive to join their organization?

So, you know, number one, I am huge on people being credible, and it's hard to understand or to define that when you don't know somebody. So those of us that are consultants, I believe, you know, I do my due diligence And I have the right insurance from not just liability insurance, but E&O insurance or professional liability insurance. I have a good referral source of objective work that I've done that is not based on adjectives and, you know, fluff, that it's just facts, it's just metrics. And, you know, do a background check, make sure that that person is who they say they are. Nowadays, at least for us, we feel like there is an opportunity for people to be somebody else fairly quickly. And that you can, you know, almost manufacture who you are pretty quickly. So, you know, do some due diligence, align yourself with a company that can help you Check those things, the insurances, the credentials, the education, the work history. And that's a good place to start. If you want to go out and be a fractional person, set yourself up to be credible when you walk in the door and don't take offense to being asked to be credible. I think it's really important that You would want that, and you should, you know, that's part of the value that you bring when you walk through the door is that you can answer those questions quickly and you can establish credibility quickly. That shows your value, that you have thought about these things and that you know that they're important to a relationship.

Yeah, credibility is so important. The other criteria I hear quite a bit when I have guests on the show is cultural fit, you know. So, well, you're credible, yes, but then can you fit within that organization? And that— what you alluded to earlier was interesting. It's, it's that cross-C-suite potential conflict, and I haven't really heard or thought much about that in the past. How do you, how do you protect your team from going in and getting in a situation where it doesn't end up being a culture fit? Do you guys have any mechanisms for doing that? You say you do the Kolbe's and the DiSCs a lot. Does that help with that process?

Yeah, it's actually mandatory. And we don't do it to determine if we're going to do business with somebody. We do it to determine what we think that our approach is going to be. We are not proponents of screening people and hiring and firing based on screening. We are proponents of screening to determine how you approach your relationship with somebody. And if you understand somebody's Kolbe and their DiSC, because they're very different, you can set yourself up for an understanding of where you may have potential conflict and where you're going to have good alignment. And then you can address and create your scope of work and your communication plan, your strategy and your tactics around that understanding. And we teach our clients how to do that also in the hiring process, in the promotion process, in the partnership process. And it serves us very, very well. And secondly, don't be afraid to walk away from an engagement where you identify conflict that can't be overcome. One of the hardest things for an independent consultant or a smaller consulting firm is to walk away from a deal. And just, you know, and being honest with somebody and saying, you know, we're just not a good fit. What's nice is, is if you have relationships and you are credible, you might look at them and say, but I have a good referral for you of a peer. Who I think would be a better fit and be able to communicate and implement the changes you need in a positive way. And that's a credible statement. It establishes credibility not only with that client, but also with your peers.

Yeah, I got— that's so true. It's so hard to leave that client and that revenue as a fractional professional, you have— luckily, you should have a handful of clients, or a small handful at least. Um, but still, you give up one, it's your income, right?

So I—

we have a CMO that recently went through this challenge. Uh, actually, they're in the Chicago area. He, uh, just had a challenging client, and about a year into it, they re— he, he realized, and the client realized, it wasn't a fit. Fit. And so he said, let's, let's transition out. And in 30 days, he was— it was his biggest percentage of client, um, but he had to do it. And then within 30 days of that happening, he had 3 more clients come and just fill the bucket and overflow the bucket. So, you know, sometimes things happen for a reason, and it was the best thing he ever did. But it was hard. It's hard to make that decision.

Yeah, it's very hard. And You know, I like to say that one of the dangers of not pulling the trigger on that decision is everybody becomes emotional. And in our line of work, when emotions get in the way of making good decisions, it's when we create risk. Risk for ourselves, risk for our client. And that's one thing that can damage your credibility and, and get rid of those opportunities to have 3 more. If you would have just walked away. So, and I made plenty of those mistakes early on and ran our company sometimes with too much emotions on my sleeve. And unfortunately, didn't have a mentor that could teach me that emotions have a place, but that they need to be, they need to be understood. And you have to have emotional intelligence as well as you know, intellectual or intelligence about your task or what your area of responsibility is.

Yeah, um, yeah, emotions, you can learn that the hard way sometimes, how you need to keep those in check. And, and that's how we evolve, and that's why we're—

we're the—

the older we get, the more credible we get, at least if we're learning as we go.

Oh, go ahead.

I'll just go—

you first. I'll say some of the best stories in our first book, uh, Find the I in Team, are the mistakes I made with emotions in, in business in the early days of IA, um, and in the transition days from ERP to consulting, and how I reacted emotionally to certain situations and how those emotions affected my credibility at the moment and in those parts of our life, and what challenges they had later as we matured as an organization, as I matured as a business person.

Yeah, there's a book called— I think it's called Energy Leadership. I don't know if you came across it. It's 10, 15 years old, but it's about the 7 levels of energy and how we bring energy to relationships in our business and it impacts the entire business. And there's the concept is that there's catabolic or destructive energy and there's anabolic or constructive energy. And those emotions can trigger the catabolic destructive energy if you react a different way versus understanding, taking awareness and elevating your reaction, your response. You can you can control those situations better. And I just came across this book recently and I just found it fascinating because it helped me understand I do get triggered sometimes in conversations internally and externally. And I'm fairly good at keeping my emotions, but sometimes they just get me. But now I'm even more aware of that and how important it is to stay at a higher level because as soon as I go at a low level, everybody goes there with me and that's not healthy at all.

Yeah, have you, um, read Leadership and Self-Deception?

No, I've not read that one.

So it talks about how, you know, one person's action will trigger another person's action will trigger another person's action, and how we live in these, uh, response boxes, if you will, and justify those actions, and we continue to justify And it's that justification that moves us in the wrong direction instead of the right direction. And it's a book that I read about once a year. In fact, our entire company is going through the exercise of having to read that book right now. And it's, it's very important because it re-centers us on self-justification and how we communicate through conflict and Every organization, as soon as you have more than one person, is going to have conflict.

Yeah.

You know, so, and how we deal with that is really important. So I use it as an exercise. And we then— I dole that out, or I assign that to our team, so that they at least understand when I start to talk to them about conflict and about self-justification, that they understand where I'm coming from and have some context to it.

That's great. I need to pick up that book. And I love the idea that you're having everyone in the organization read a book. It's such an easy way to help get that mindset the same, you know, in these decentralized organizations, it's so hard. Not everybody's in the same room, the same building. But getting everybody to read the same book, books just have a way of imprinting a way of thinking. One of my entrepreneur buddies, I remember he said he's got an affliction. Every time he reads a book, he changes.

So it's just like the book molds him into a different person. It's so—

it's true, very true.

You know, one of the challenges we have in our coaching practice is that somebody— excuse me— somebody goes off and goes to a conference And, you know, I love thought leaders. I think they have a lot of value for us. They also have a habit of getting everybody riled up at that time. And that energy level is this high as they leave. And then people get back to their offices and they start to crash. And they feel that crash. So they feel like they have to implement whatever got them up here really fast and get everybody moving in the right direction really fast. And that creates chaos. So while I love what a lot of thought leaders do, the biggest chapter in our, in our first book is called Slow Down. And it's to get ourselves recentered and get back into the moment and to understand the reasons why we're doing things and ask ourselves, you know, Does this immediate change I'm demanding at the moment, what's the residual influence it's going to have? What are the ripples that are going to happen? It's like throwing that stone in the water. And so, but we have clients that go off and read books and they're like a ping pong ball back and forth and up and down and all around. And they, that just creates chaos, not just for themselves, but for everybody that they influence when they're making those pivots.

Yeah. And the visionary is usually the most guilty party there. And I'm one of those. I will read, I'll bring an idea and, you know, I'm aware enough now I don't try to rush into everything, but I want to, you know, I've got the urge, like, let's implement this. But it does, it disrupts everybody else and it can be exhausting to everybody else.

Yeah, you can quickly go from being a visionary to a disruptor just like that. And we don't see it because we think that we're being visionary through our change. And we think we're being visionary through our demands of not just strategy development, but tactic application. And we forget that, you know, not only are we directly affecting our direct reports who have a tremendous amount of change, but then what happens to everybody that's downline from them? We just become disruptors. Before we know it, we've created chaos, and we go from being a visionary to a disruptor.

Yeah, I've realized recently I've been focusing on innovation more than creation. From a visionary standpoint. So what that means to me is I'm taking that excitement that I get and that energy from creating new things, and I'm just going back to what we've been doing for a while and having conversations like, how could we make this a little bit better? Just optimization. It's, but it's a chance to think outside the box and get that energy and then settling back in and like, well, let's just pick one thing of that. We just had an hour-long discussion, 10 different ideas we could do. Let's pick one we can execute on. It gets me the juice I need from being a visionary, and I do believe it adds value to get everybody feeling that energy for a while, but then they're not shifted. They're just optimizing what's already on their plates.

Yeah, that's good. And you know, there's a different— there's semantics and words that go for that. Like the EOS version of that would be their rocks, right? You know, they They identify their rocks and then they prioritize them and they're— each person might have their own rocks and there might be organizational rocks. And I love that you can apply a term to it because it helps people as a team, uh, have similar context and be moving in the same direction using the same words and not all over the place. So, um, for us, we don't care what the system is as long as it's consistent and that everybody is swimming in the same direction.

Yeah, yeah, it's important to have a system. It doesn't matter which one it is. Right. And they're all, I mean, they're all fairly the same. From a core, you have a big vision, you break it down, you got 3-year and you got a year and you got 90 days and you got weekly and I think they all do that. You got scorecards, you got metrics, you got KPIs, you got whatever you want to, OKRs. And then it's about cadence of meetings, whether it's a weekly check-in or a daily huddle or a quarterly sprint, whatever you wanna call it. It's very strict, the frameworks are the same, the language is different. I like EOS, I like what EOS did a few years back. I mean, it's what, 10 or 15 years old now. I mean, it's almost, there's a new one coming up right behind it. VisVision, or VisVision. What was nice about the US is they really simplified it from some of the other strategic stuff platforms that I saw out in the marketplace earlier on were just kind of heavy and complex. US simplified it, so a lot more adoption. But now I feel like it's almost too simple. People that get into US for a couple of years, they're on that cadence and that wheel of learning and growth. But now they need that complex, more complex, sophisticated work that some of the other platforms provide.

So, yeah, one of the biggest challenges I have with our team is they always want to flip people. They want to— they walk into an organization that's on whatever system they're on, and the first thing they— the initial first thing that they feel like they should do is, well, we should move them. Currently we have, it's like 350, 400 of our 1,300 clients are on an EOS program, either formally or informally. And by informally, I mean they used to have an EOS implementer, they used to have an EOS champion from one of the franchises. And we oftentimes will take that over and, and guide our client in being self-sufficient in that process. Apply some Biz Vision, uh, uh, tools to it, but we still use the EOS terminology so that we don't become a disruptor ourselves because it has value. And there's no value on us owning a brand. While I love it, you know, we have our brand and, uh, we're happy with it. I don't— I have an ego, but it stops right there. Our client's ability to be whole and positive and continue to move forward with as little disruption as possible is way more important than my own ego and calling it EOS or Biz Vision or Predictive Index or, or E-Myth or whatever it is.

Yeah, yeah, I've, I feel like we, I've read as many of them as I could and experienced as many as I could, and we've taken a lot of all of them and we put them into our process but on purpose, we're a framework and we're agnostic when it comes to tools and technology and other solutions in a business. And, but we follow that cadence of quarterly meetings and weekly check-ins and scorecards. And so it aligns with everybody's system. It doesn't matter what it is. It's a great bolt-on. And I'm glad we approached it that way. I know other marketing firms can align themselves with a HubSpot or with a Salesforce or Pardot, or, you know, be very technology driven. And that's great because you get in a vertical and you can own that vertical, but you can't get out of it or you're converting everybody over to your way of doing things. And that's that disruption that isn't always the best thing to do. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about what you do outside of work. What are some of your fun hobbies or things you like to do?

Yeah. So in the summer, I ride a Sea-Doo.

A lot.

So I live on a river and I spend a lot of time on a Sea-Doo. There's a lot of people that like to build, you know, cars or fast cars. I built a Sea-Doo. It's pretty fast and I like to ride on rivers more than I do lakes. I like the challenges and I used to ride motorcycles. So riding in canyons and going back and forth is more exciting for me. And I like the water. So I like to cook just about anything. And then my wife and I travel, I travel for work a lot. And we're empty nesters. So our youngest is going to graduate this coming May from college. And so we like to travel a lot. And she tags along, business trips, Not all of them, but a good number of them. She tags along and we just immerse ourselves in culture and just, you know, learn as much as we can about where we are in that moment and, you know, take that away with us.

Isn't travel just such a great learning experience? I mean, you just immerse yourself in another place And it's so different and so similar in my experience. It's just, it's a great refreshing eye-opening aha moment whenever I get a chance to travel, especially out of the country in different parts of the world. Where are some of your, what do you got planned upcoming trips the next 6 to 12 months?

I know it's a little hard with COVID Oh, it's not hard. It's funny. I'm gonna fly 143,000 miles before June. Okay, I'm going to Guam in 2 weeks with a stopover in Hawaii. I'm going to Costa Rica in about 5 weeks. I'm going to Spain, Italy, Montenegro, and Greece in May. I'll be in Phoenix and in Houston in April. I'll be back in Spain again over the summer, and intermingled in that are trips across, zigzagging across the US to our clients.

That's terrific. So I have, I made it a goal to get traveling a couple years back right before the COVID and I've managed to get a good amount done the last couple years, but This year I've got an equally busy schedule. I'll be going to Cabo. Buddy of mine's turning 50 and 7, 8 guys are going down for a Cabo trip, then heading over to Barcelona for a work trip. Then I'm going to Dominican Republic for a work-related trip and then going back to Barcelona. So I too am blessed with some travel in my future. My only complaint is my wife's a school teacher and we've got one last child and she's a junior. And we're, we're already planning to be empty nesters. Cause I, you know, want to have her come when she can't get away during the school year. So we do travel during the summer, but it's hard, you know, semester to semester to take that time away from the house.

So have you been to Barcelona before, Joe?

Nope. It'll be my first trip.

So I've been there 32 times. Holy cow. I just got back. I was there in late October. But I go to Barcelona 2 or 3 times a year. And that's where we'll be in Spain in May and in June. So I go there quite a bit. And it's an amazing city. And it's probably up there, one of my top 3 cities in the entire world. It's just Spain itself is a fascinating country. Barcelona is a fascinating city.

Well, good. I was excited to go. Now I'm even more excited, and I'll be, I'll be able to go twice in a couple months, which is, which is rare. You know, you don't usually get two stops in a year or two, at least I don't. So whatever I get a sense of that first trip, I'll be able to make sure I can double down on it the second trip.

Well, we'll have to, uh layer up our calendars to see if there's any crossover, because I have a lot of knowledge of Barcelona, and I'd be happy to share what I have about that place. And it's just spectacular.

Yeah, well, for sure, we'll do that. Well, I, I'm going to be in Berlin too. No, I'm not for sure. I want to go to Berlin, I should say. A buddy of mine just found out he got in the Berlin Marathon lottery and he's turning 40. He's doing like a— he's going to run the marathon. I said, well, can I just go celebrate your 40th birthday and watch you run in Berlin? So that would be my first time to Germany if I can make that work this year. Oh, that's cool.

September. Yeah. That's very cool. Yeah. Well, good. So what's— I mean, What's on the horizon for you guys for business?

Well, our, our business is growing. We decided to franchise our organization, I think, at the beginning, kind of in the early COVID days, we decided to take on that challenge. And so we're excited. And the reason we did that is not because we want to be a franchise, but because our business model is all about supporting the fractional CMO. And the amount of support we were giving and the kind of our controlled process that we provide that framework, we were in the gray area of whether we can have an independent contractor relationship or have a franchise relationship. So we just, we went to our CMOs, and we asked what they wanted, what they, what they would like. And every one of them said, we'd rather keep all the support you're giving us and everything the same and become franchisees. So we went through that process. So I spent the last year and a half learning about what it takes to become a franchisor. And so our future is continue to grow our organization by adding new CMOs and supporting them as franchisees. So that's interesting. We've really invested heavily in the fractional professional association, the concept of when we got into this business, there weren't— there was no place for all fractional executives to go, one place that kind of united everybody. And so we built the Fractional Professionals Association for that reason. And so as part of that effort, this podcast started where we can have conversations with fractionals. And I'm really excited to see where that goes this year. Now we're continuing to grow that, that organization and trying to find ways to add values to other fractional members out there.. So those are kind of the, the two big things that we're focused on. Of course, you can't forget about the clients and making sure that they're happy and successful. So one of our big efforts this year is to revisit all of our client deliverables so that we can develop— we recognize that that first 60 days is really important from an experience standpoint. And so we're kind of revisiting everything we do in that first 60 days, take it to another level, and just ensure that we're providing that experience for our clients. And our service is month to month. So we have to provide value every month, but we want to continue to figure out how we can provide more of that so that our CMOs can grow their clients and keep them happy. And I guess last but not least, we've identified a big opportunity in the marketplace for remote workers. We've got team members that work for us currently in Mexico and the Philippines.. And so we've realized that there's a lot of businesses that need access to marketing execution at the tactical level. And it's generally, they need about 10 to 20 hours of that. They need social media help or email help, or, you know, you name it, just a little bit. But it's the hardest job in marketing to find, to fill, is a good part-time marketing specialist. Because if you get a good one part-time, they're going to get full-time work like that. Or if they want to stay part-time, they're, they're doing that for a reason. They're not really necessarily gonna be around 6 months from now. So what we realized is for the cost of a part-time freelancer, you can get a full-time remote person. And then our CMOs oversee that person to make sure that we can fill the other 20 hours of their day with productive, proactive marketing. That's something we're just now launching this year. We call it the marketing MVP, managed virtual professional. And we're excited about that. Because it's, it's a, I think it's a hole in the marketplace that hasn't been filled well yet. It's equally agnostic. So we're not going to be pushing anybody to a product or service. It's not an agency offering. It's that doer in your organization that you just need that extra bandwidth and A lot of organizations need that, they don't have it, they can't fill it very easily.

I'm glad you added that at the end. My next question to you was, so how do you guys go from the CMO strategy role to the tactical role? We, we're similar to you, we have a tactical group that just applies, and we only do it in two fields. We do it in marketing, and we do it in accounting and finance. And we just have a room full of fractional tactical marketers and fractional tactical accounting people. And, you know, we might have a bookkeeper that does 13, 14, 15 different clients because those clients only need, you know, a handful of hours per week or even a handful of hours per month. And we provide that fractional service to our clients because those are our smaller clients that are emerging, you know, and someday they're going to go to where they need a full-time bookkeeper or maybe even a full-time marketing or an agency, or they can afford those things. But you're right, there's a huge gap between— there's not just a gap at the fractional C-suite, there's a gap at the fractional deliverable level.

Yeah. And, you know, agencies have traditionally filled that gap, but they're great in their own way for the right clients. But now, with the digital experience and the freelancers and the sheer amount of different things that need to be done, there's not a good agency that can do everything well. We didn't want to— we heard from day one, we decided we were never going to be an agency. We thought that that put that challenge the ability to be a fiduciary when it came to strategy and laying it out. So we didn't want to be there. So it's really hard to figure out, okay, how can we tactically get engaged then with our clients if we're not going to do the copy, the design, the AdWords, the, you name it, and the stuff that you do is, I mean, it fits really well, because you don't have a CMO, that's all you're not currently, you know, you're not selling that kind of, it's not a competing service offering. But for us, it would be. But we thought this marketing MVP role fit because we're still not doing any agency work. We're giving you a body. And we, we customize that person for exactly what that client needs. So we do about a 60-day process to get the right person on your team. So we go through all the— what probably a traditional recruiter would do. And then we go find a specialist that has exactly what your organization needs to do. It needs a little bit of video editing and a little bit of, of copywriting and a little bit of email. And that's the person we go find and then we fit them in. So we felt that worked for us. But that's awesome. It's, it's a whole— like we've got— there's a lot of demand up there now. We're trying to figure out how we can find the supply.

Yeah, and it's difficult, you know, with the Fiverr of the world and things like that. And, you know, the problem with that is goes back to credibility. Not that there's a lot of uncredible people on Fiverr, but it's hard to choose somebody out of Fiverr when, or one of those service providers when, you know, you get in it. When we put a posting out there and we will use services like that sometimes for one-offs.

Yeah.

We can get 40 or 50 people that respond to that now. We do animation work sometimes and, you know, we can get 30, 40 people respond to a scope of work that is posted and it's overwhelming. I can only imagine what that's like for somebody who's not used to dealing with 30 or 40 different people pitching you at the same time.

Yeah, I always get a chuckle when I hear someone else say, Oh, you should just go to Fiverr. You can find that social media person you're looking for. I've just stopped every single time I've gone to Fiverr looking for a social media person and weeding through and finding a really good one and they're great for 45 days and then they go take another job or they just disappear and you invested so much energy and time getting trained to do it the right way. That's the problem. And so with our solution, it's Go get a full-time person because a full-time person wants full-time work for you, will stay there and will not leave. Now you're going to have a 2 to 3 year window when you got to think about either giving that person some sort of a development opportunity within your organization or they will leave.

That will happen, but they're not leaving in 3 months, which is hard to do. Yeah, there's a, there's a lot of people that live in that world of, you know, they want to offer fractional work. They don't want to work for the same person over and over and over again. There's value to them as an individual to take a job with you for 45 days, but then they don't want that relationship to get any deeper. And that's a different mentality in business than what probably you and I were raised with and what is intuitive to us, whereas I have clients that I do business with today that I started with before I even had IA. They were clients of our ERP company and they're still clients today. We don't do their ERP anymore, but we provide fractional services to them where they're needed. And those relationships, you know, are— I measure myself sometimes and look in the mirror sometimes in, in give myself, you know, I look at myself and say, yeah, you're valid because of those types of relationships.

Yeah, yeah. I got a call yesterday from a guy who's— he bought a new company. He said, I know we needed marketing, and I thought of you and one other person, and it was someone I'd worked with 12 years ago. That's just a very validating feeling, is that I haven't talked to him for 10 years, and I was one of the first 2 people he thought of.

He didn't call the other person, by the way, so I was the only one he called. But it is, and it's funny how those relationships make you keep moving forward. I have a similar story. We did a succession plan a few years ago, and from a father to a son, and we used our Biz Vision process, and the son hated it. He hated the structure. He hated the organization and he hated the process. And within one month of him being the boss, um, he basically kicked us out and stopped the succession process. And it was okay. I don't take things like that personally and neither does our team. And, you know, we went on and his father and I have maintained a relationship. Just this past August, out of the blue, we got a telephone call from that son and said, you know, we've been following what you were teaching. We just did it our own way. And we, we chose two things to do our way, and both of them failed. So we'd like to rehire you and engage with you to solve those two things. And I was like, wow, you know, that's the second generation. And it tells me that, that consistency and that foundation that we've built and how we are doing things, it gave me that validity. It made— it showed me that, yeah, you know what, we are doing it in a way that's effective and has value because we're now transcending generations.

Yeah, that's great. Good for you. Well, I've really enjoyed our conversation. I know this won't be the last, but I want to thank you for your time and, and Everything you shared today is super valuable, so I thank you very much.

Well, thank you, Joe, and I've enjoyed it too.

We appreciate it. Yeah, um, and I know our listeners out there will, will pick and take what they can from it. There's just so much— we covered so many different things. So thanks for the listeners, and I'm looking forward to us talking about Barcelona, uh, in the future. So we'll hop on a call for that pretty soon. That sounds good, Joe. Thank you. Great. And thanks for everybody else. We'll have some show notes, ways to get ahold of Brian. And if you got any questions about his biz vision process, I think he'd gladly take those. And we'll make sure that's all in the show notes so people can get ahold of you, Brian. Okay, thanks.

All right, have a great day.

Yeah, you too. Thank you. And that's a wrap.

There's another successful episode of the Fractional C-Suite Retreat. See our show notes and more episodes at FractionalC-SuiteRetreat.com. This podcast is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow, save time and money with better marketing strategy and fractional execution. Visit them at Y-O-R-C-M-O dot com. Your CMO dot com.

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