Rethinking Execution #4: Sean Sheppard (Co-founder GrowthX) on Learning & Change Management

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the new economy. I'm Scott Levy, CEO and founder of Result Maps, where we're on a mission to help the world be its inspired best. That means helping CEOs and leaders build healthy cultures of relentless execution so you hit your numbers and thrive no matter where your people are or what challenges come your way. One way we do that is bringing you these sessions with leaders who've learned to thrive even as they navigated uncharted territory and thorny challenges. The idea is to get you actionable, learning you can put into practice immediately to lead and navigate at your best as you thrive forward. Today's session is with Sean Shepard. Sean co founded and scaled sales at multiple companies by developing a repeatable system that helps companies learn fast and execute methodically at the same time. He used it to Co found GrowthX and GrowthX Academy, and it's been licensed to incubators from Canada to Asia. You can find him speaking at sales conferences or places like the London Business School and the Nasdaq, and helping established companies become disruptors by developing new markets. I'm excited to share this session with you today as we talk about building systems that learn and adapt in a disciplined way, even in rapidly changing environments. One of the things we've talked about in the past is how your life before sales and growth X and tech was in golf as a professional. And you have a really interesting story about how you became a big believer in spotting the core things that were really important to help someone or a system improve. Can you talk a little bit about that?

There was a time in my life, you know, I played college golf, and then there was a time where I wanted to play. And then there was a time where I found out that I was just as interested in teaching others how to play as I wasn't playing myself. And so I said, all right, if I want to be the best, I want to learn from the best. And who, who's the best? And I looked around, did my research, and I found out that this, there was this, this, this, this golf school, the world's largest golf school. It was a 4550 locations around the globe. And I learned what made them the best was number one, they had a. They had a systematic way of making the complex understandable and then getting others to learn that quickly and then be able to do it in a scalable way to where their students would have a similar experience and outcomes, no matter who they got their golf lessons from, at what school, in what location. And so I made it my mission to Go to work for these folks. And I found a way to do it. And I went to work to learn an apprentice at their largest golf school in the world in Scottsdale, Arizona, where all of their best people would concentrate every winter. And I'll ever forget, I made a very first winter working for them. I worked 122 straight days, and I did everything, you know, whether it was setting up range balls and picking range balls up and cleaning clubs and raking bunkers and just listening and watching and learning from these folks while also taking, you know, spending time with the best instructors before and after they would be before and after the lesson windows and sessions and having lunch with them and just sucking in as much as I could as a sponge. And they had this system that was developed called golf Simplified, that was based on physics. And it was the first time I'd ever seen anything like that. They really tried to bring the science to an art, or what people to that point had always considered just assumed to be an art. Because I've always felt like people just call things art because they don't understand it. And that's okay. It's not a knock on art. I just think that art is science that's yet to be fully understood in a lot of ways that make sense. And so we get, you know, eventually we start to understand how things work and how they operate, and then they usually come back to this physical world. And so it really made a lot of sense to me because when I was growing up, physics was one of my favorite subjects. Didn't love biology, Wasn't a big fan of math, big fan of history, big fan of physics, big fan of communications, anything to do with the spoken word, the written word, the expression of it, psychology, economics, how humans behave. Those things were always interesting to me. So when I recognized and understood that, look, the golf ball can only do nine things. It can only fly in nine different ways. They can start at your target, left of it or right of it, and then it can continue straight or it can curve right or left. And when you think about that, it's called a ball flight tree. So it can only do those nine things. And then when you understand that, you can reverse engineer what factors impact those nine things. And there are these five impact factors of what happens when the club meets the ball, the position of the face, the angle of attack, the path of that club coming in, the speed at which it arrives at it, and then the centeredness of contact, how close it is to what's called the sweet spot or the absolute center. Of the club where the force and the mass together meet and create the greatest rebound or what's called cor coefficient of restitution. I'm saying things I haven't said in 20 years. This is so funny. I'm having this conversation, it's awesome, it's cracking me up. But these were all the things that do it. So the ball can only do nine things. There's five impact factors that affect it. And now you've got the human body and its ability to manipulate that tool around those five things to affect it and get it to do what it does. And this is not, this isn't any different than any other sort of club ball sport, right? This is true in baseball to a degree. This is true in tennis to a degree. This is true with throwing a football or a baseball with your arm as the tool. So the whole point is that, is that there's physics, a physical answer that can be reverse engineered and understood quickly and then what do you do with that? So say you're the instructor. Now that you know these things, what's your methodology or your systematic approach towards, towards helping others? And they had a very simple three step methodology at the, at the John Jacobs golf schools, which was decided, diagnose, explain and correct. So the first thing you have to do is diagnose the issues and you use the ball flight, tree and the impact factors that I just mentioned to diagnose those in a very physical way. Then you have to explain that back to the student in a way that they understand, which is the hardest thing to do. Because everybody learns differently. And part of the philosophy that they followed was everybody has three different components of learning styles, but one of them is always Donna dominant, kinesthetic, auditory and visual. It's what I feel, it's what I see and it's what I hear. And one of those three is typically dominant. And you can tell oftentimes in the best instructors in the world, I mean, they're almost like psychics in a certain way. When you're first watching them do this, it's very mystical because you don't know the science behind it, but they have a way of understanding somebody who is very kinesthetic versus somebody who's very auditory versus somebody who's very visual based on the type of work that they do, how they live their lives. I mean, they ask some questions. You're an engineer, okay? You're very analytical. So I need to walk you through this in a very analytical way. You have to see all the steps, you have to understand Them and until you do, until you understand step A, you won't move to step B. So I don't. There's no point in even talking to you about it versus somebody who's very visual, like me, where he says, hit it there, or says, make this move and manipulate the club this way and shows me. Right. Or somebody who's very feel and kinesthetic, which is, I need to put you in certain positions that you can, to allow you to, you know, understand what we're trying to accomplish. You can see me do it, but it's different if you can feel it yourself. Right? So everybody has their own way of learning. So when you apply that to the E in Dec, now you have to explain to people what you've noticed, what it is and why it matters. And then you have to explain to them the C correction, how to correct it, what we're going to do to actually correct what we've diagnosed. So it's diagnosed, explain and correct. So you put all that together and you're like, okay, this makes sense. But what's really crazy is the standard that you're upheld to if you are to be someone who is qualified to deliver this methodology at scale. When you want to become an instructor in the John Jacobs program, they have these levels. You start with simple things like rules and quality of life stuff that you teach to new golfers with the brand new people that come. Oftentimes it was the children of the spouses of avid golfers would come. They'd never played golf before. They never picked it up. Okay, so your entry level role, after slinging golf balls and washing clubs and moving bags back and forth and working for tips, was to do the Introduction to Golf etiquette class. The first thing you have to do, you teach them slow play, you teach them the rules of the road, you teach them all this stuff. Then after that, then you get to go into short game area, which means you can teach putting and you can teach chipping and you can teach pitching, and then eventually bunker. And then you go from bunker to full swing. And so you have these like six levels that you have to go through. It's like Bruce Lee in Game of Death.

Very much like the martial arts system I came up in. I mean, that's the funny thing about it.

Right? We've.

So I'll let you continue that.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And so, and I recognize that here we are 25 years later, that anything that's done well at scale is done in a very systematic way. And there's a methodology and there's a process, there's an approach for executing it, and then, you know, doing it for people, then doing it with them, and then eventually teaching them. Right? So you get to, you get to the top level, the ultimate, the ultimate goal in the John Jacobs environment, where you were actually considered there and one of the world's best was when you could teach the full swing. And in order to be able to teach the full swing, you had to, as part of your exam, if you will, you had to be able to demonstrate to your peers in a live setting with a golfer you've never seen, heard, or talked to before that you can diagnose, explain, and show improvement through correction in three swings of the club. So you have three swings to diagnose them, and then you have three swings for them to correct based on your explanation of that correction and show improvement. And you have to do that consistently over and over and over again. Because if you can't, you are not able to teach the full swing. Why? Because their customer base were people that came to have a good time and learned something. And there were a lot of them and they were only there for a couple of days. And when you are an Instructor, you have five students and you have one hour with five students, which means you only have 10 minutes, roughly 12 minutes per 12 minutes, 12 minutes with each student. And you basically had to break that up into two six minute increments. So you'd start with a person, spend six minutes with them, and then you go to the next and the next and the next, and before you know it, by the time you get back to the other person, 30 minutes are up, now you got to do it again and the whole hour is gone. So you only get 12 total minutes and two across two interactions with a student when you're in the full swing. And you have to give them an experience that keeps them coming back and telling other people how amazing it is, which means they have to like you, they have to understand you, and they have to get better, and they have to do it in that time frame. And if you think about that, that's nuts. If, if you don't know this world, and even when you're in it for the first time, you're like, there's no way I can do this. But once you understand the system, nine ball flight laws, five impact factors, how someone learns, how you use that to diagnose, explain, and correct. And then you repeat that over and over and over again, you find out that it doesn't matter who the golfer is, or what their skill level is, or what their experience is, or what their body type is, or what equipment they're using, or what they want to get out of it, et cetera, beyond what your job is. You can apply this and help everyone all the time. And that was the systematic, my first sort of experience with systematic approach towards solving a problem at scale.

What's fascinating to me about that is we met because I was listening to you speak and I was listening to you basically explain how I'd gotten a product market fit with a company where I just brute, forced and blundered my way through. And each of the principles you just talked about was on display. You were diagnosing it, you were charming the audience, you reduced it to the essentials in a way that made it easy for everybody to understand. You had the visuals, you had the explanations. It's really interesting to hear that because it sounds like the playbook you've used as you've built what's now the GrowthX methodology. Can you talk a little bit about how you applied this idea when you got into the sales world, how did you realize that you could use these same ideas, the same principles, to apply that to selling?

So in my younger years of moving out of golf and into selling, I didn't, I didn't have any sense of this. None of what I just shared with you could I articulate for years, maybe even a decade or longer, until later in life. What I applied immediately was a lot of the practices that I had learned around business and market acumen from my father, who was a very successful, and you know him, knew him, very successful Silicon Valley CEO in tech. And I watched how he behaved and I watched how he worked and I asked him questions and, and I tried to stay focused on understanding what someone's business is and who they are, who their customers are and what they care about and how they run their business and how they make money and what the impact is and how they're measured. And then I tried to really just focus my efforts on having conversations with them around the things that are related to that and then learning how to connect what I can do to help them. Right once again, to diagnose it, explain it together so that we gain mutual agreement on, yes, this is a thing. And I think mutual agreement is super critical across all these things. And I find myself saying more of that and reminding myself and other people of that more and more and more. The more I do this and the more I talk about it, because we get so focused on our own stuff and what we want to accomplish that sometimes we lose sight of what our customers see and believe and realize and understand and what they don't. And so I think it's really critical at every step of diagnose, explain and correct, gain mutual agreement and get the other person to explicitly acknowledge and state to you, yes, I understand and I agree. And if not, you don't get to an end, a mutually beneficial outcome. It just doesn't happen. So I applied a lot of business acumen, I applied a lot of trying to learn, I applied a lot of market acumen, which is, okay, can I pick up the language of an industry, which I think is super important. Where I see so many startups fail is in their inability to speak the same language as their customer. And I'm not talking about English. We all speak English, but it doesn't mean we speak the same language. There's a language of business in a particular domain that allows you to quickly ramp yourself up into talking to them the way that they understand and then putting yourself out there, the subject matter expert around that particular domain or use case. So starting with mindset, you know, am I a learner? Am I open to trying to figure things, you know, to new ways of doing things, you know, am I actively seeking to get better as a person, not just professional. Then business acumen, do I understand how my customer and market's businesses work and then how their customers and businesses work and how I can contribute to that then market? Can I talk to them in a way and show domain expertise and talk to them in a way that they understand and we understand, so we'd be more efficient with that communication. And then ultimately at the communication level, it's, can I actively listen on top of creating opportunities to listen? Because even the data shows now from conversational intelligence tools that the most effective sellers talk 25% of the time while their customers talk 75% of the time? So how do you create that environment to where you can tee them up to start going off on their particular issues or tangents in any direction they want so that you can do the things you need to do, which is build a rapport, establish trust, credibility, and then start to understand their problems, diagnose them, explain how you can correct them together, and then actually work towards that?

I want to make sure I talk through this idea of these principles applied in larger organizations that are going through changes, which everybody is now. But I know you've done a lot of work in the innovation space in companies that are really a little Older, and they're trying to bring in different aspects of Silicon Valley culture. This relentless focus on how you scale and execute. What are some of the challenges you've seen and some of the ways you've seen the effective at overcoming those challenges, or when a company's trying to make this change of really focusing in a more agile way to learn faster and adapt to a changing market?

Well, the first thing I've noticed, especially now with what's going on, is there's the famous quote of the only constant in life is change. I would add to that and say that there's a second constant and that is the resistance to it. But it's a basic. Once again, back to science. Homeostasis and equilibrium prove that we are physically biased towards right where we are right now. We don't want to move, we don't want to change. And what I've learned about change is that the resistance to change isn't associated. The resistance or lack of resistance is not associated with the amount benefit that one person or one team or one organization or group can get from that change. The amount of resistance is tied to the frequency and scope of that change.

Interesting.

So how much change you introduce and how often is what really matters, not the value of it. You and I can say you have to change because if you don't, you're going to die. But that's not. That doesn't work the way we think it should. Right. What works is small amounts of change in a frequent way, smaller wins that create momentum and new habits that get you to more smaller wins and that eventually build up. That's where successful change happens. And so knowing that, the biggest challenge I've seen from people is they try to take on too much change at once. So it's about creating once again a methodology or framework for small incremental learning that leads to change, that leads to transformation. I hate the word transformation. Right. Because it just implies that you've got to tomorrow go from 50 pounds overweight to a perfect body. That doesn't happen.

Right.

You know that as well as I do. In order to get there, you've got to walk the journey. You've got to engage in a process and you've got to be consistent with that. And it happens in small bits. You know, the journey to lose 50 pounds begins with the first ounce and the first calorie and the first pound. If you try to, you know the old Jewish proverb, how to eat an elephant one bite at a time, you can't eat the whole damn thing. Even if you eat large amounts, you're going to get indigestion and it's going to discourage you from doing it again. So don't try to take on too much change at once. I don't call it, you know, digital transformation or cultural transformation. Instead of cultural transformation, I call it functional learning organization. Like, how do you start to function in a way that allows you to learn quickly about, you know, the things, the feedback from the change attempts that you're making, and then use that in a way that allows you to communicate that back out to your larger group organization or community to show them that progress is being made, even if it's really tiny incremental progress. And I think that's really important. And the other problem I see is people have not made any of this stuff a priority because they've got their core business and that's how they usually run it. And I get it, and I respect that. But now, today, they are forced to accept this change. Digital transformation is accelerated by five to 10 years in some instances, depending on your perspective and where it was on the. On the agenda in the C suite. And now they all have to do it. And so because they have to do it, they're going to accept a certain degree of it. The next big challenge I keep getting asked about is, okay, now how do we actually do this and do it well, because the other challenges stand in our way is we've got a core team that's really good at core stuff, that has a fixed mindset, that's focused on core. How do we get them to change? Well, they're being forced to accept change immediately now by society. It's no longer their choice. And humans do have the capacity to accept big change when they're forced to. That's also a known scientific fact. And we are forced to do it right. This is easy for you and me. We've been doing this digital work from home thing and flex thing for years. But for a lot of people, it's new, but they're adapting and they will, it'll be okay. But they have to now get the right mindset, and then they have to organize around this opportunity to identify how do they now serve their customers in this new normal? How do they take analog businesses and turn them into digital ones or augment them with digital, with the new digital reality to support it. The people they have in their organization typically don't have the knowledge, skills and experience necessary to make the transformation from the analog to the digital service or product. So where do they get that help. I'm a good resource for that, by the way. Shameless. Plug. And then how do they pick what to work on first and how do they prioritize that? So now you need a framework again. You need a methodology, you need a way to execute. Because the biggest problem I see is in corporates, it's the same one we see in startups because it's not about the corporation and startup, it's about taking something someplace new, taking a product to a new place for the first time. It's either, I call it either taking a, a new product to a new place, an existing product to a new place, or a new product to an existing place. And in every instance you still have that same dynamic of taking something someplace new, which is very different than taking something to a familiar place with familiar people and familiar surroundings and familiar support. I like to make the joke, especially the startups in a room is you're a stranger with a strange thing, going to a strange place, talking to other strangers, asking them to do strange things with you. And if you, if you think about it that way, it requires more than just the methodology. It requires a style and an approach that should be focused on constructing a hypothesis that, I think I can help you in this way and I'd like to know if that's true. And here's how we learn together. And if we learn together, we can grow together. If we grow together, we can profit together. And that's the concept of how you get there faster. You know, I grew up doing this in startups with limited time, money and resources and we can take. And now I've learned how to apply that same framework to corporations that have a lot more resources and time and money, but what they don't have is that mindset and the knowledge, skills and experiences necessary on their team to move quickly and break things and learn together and profit together the way that we've learned in startups. So now it's about building that startup inside of a company that's a venture builder that says, this is what we do, right? We accelerate the path to product market fit for new products for, you know, for our current customers. And big companies never had a better opportunity to leverage their current relationships to, to learn how they can continue to serve them in, in the new normal. And the time is now. It's a great time to think about those things and start to reinvent and restructure how you go after that.

So we're talking about the role that Special Forces veterans have played in our lives. For myself, it's a grandmaster in taekwondo who I'm very close with. For Sean, it was his father. How have these people enriched our lives and brought their experiences back to our world to help us?

Yeah, I was just reading this book I just finished by a gentleman named Jonah Berger, professor, specialist in change management in human behavior called. It's called the how to Change Anyone's Mind. And it's really fascinating because he talks about, you know, Why we're not good generally at changing people's minds as humans and then the ways in which we can do it. And he's a Wharton School guy, by the way. But he realized that in his work with big organizations and a whole bunch of other people that they all had something in common. And that was they all wanted to change something. And as somebody who's always helped, trying to help, like I said, take a product to market. When you're selling, when you're introducing something, what you're really doing is, is you're asking people to change. And these people are listening to you because they want to change, but most of them don't. And most of us aren't successful at getting them to change. And so, you know, we want, as sellers, we want to get people to buy something from must actually change marketers. As marketers, we want people to shift how they think so that they can move closer towards that sale. And change leaders want to transform their organizations. Employees want to change their boss's minds. The parents want to change their children's behavior. Startups want to change industries and disrupt things. Nonprofits want to change the world. I mean, everybody's got this thing that they want to do, but they've not figured out and recognize that what they're really asking people for is to change something and to change their behavior. And one thing I have learned is that the number one competitor, the number one barrier that we all have as marketers and sellers and entrepreneurs is that resistance to change that we talked about a little earlier. People just don't want to do it naturally. So the question is, what do you get? How do you get these folks to change? And so what Berger realized from his analysis and looking and talking to people of all different shapes and sizes, from big B2B sellers to B2C people, the marketers to gurus, to even Hash's negotiators, is that the most successful change agents, they don't push. They don't push anything on anyone. They don't push people into a corner. They don't. They don't push them with ideas. They don't just. It's almost like when you go to a foreign country and you're trying to speak to somebody and they don't speak English and you tend to just speak louder even though you're still speaking English. And you think that somehow those people are going to understand you because you're noisier than you were the first time you said it. That's what pushing is, right? We don't change our behavior. We just get more aggressive or more assertive. What he's saying is that these people don't push what they do. They don't add more facts and reasons and provide more information. Like, they don't just keep doing that constantly. That's what I'm saying we're doing, right? Like, I don't understand what you're saying, sir, because I don't speak English well, I just say it louder. That doesn't make it easier for me to understand. What they do is they take barriers away rather than adding pressure. They reduce friction and lower hurdles for action. And so when I read that, I was like, oh, my God. This is exactly what we've been doing in the GrowthX methodology since the beginning was how do we make it as easy as possible for people to say, yes? How do we remove steps? And so you think about design thinking and you think about customer experience. And I've may, I may have said this to you before, right? Amazon is the most valuable company in the world, but they don't make anything except all of us happy and satisfied. And they make it easy, right? To do that one button order, boom, you're done, right? The Apple experience, that's now the standard by which everyone needs to be and should be measured. And that comes from design thinking. How do we remove friction? How do we remove barriers? How do we bring down walls and hurdles to make it really easy for people to act? And we haven't traditionally done that. We tend to, once again, not think about how hard we make it for people to do business with us. I can't tell you the number of startups, although you probably understand because you know me well enough that when we do a customer experience review of how hard or easy they make it for customers to do business with them. They have so many unnecessary hurdles that they put in a customer's face. And that's hard enough as it is when you're a product that's already established and you're a known brand and you're in demand. But when you're a startup, when you're that stranger taking something Strange to some stranger somewhere else and ask them to do strange things with them. And you're putting up all these hurdles in order for them to do it. It's no surprise that you're not converting. And so that message immediately resonated with me. And so he put the, he put this, you know, these five key barriers up that he's kind of cut five roadblocks that often get in everybody's way. And he calls them reactants. Endowment, distance, uncertainty and corroborating evidence. When you take all those together. And he's got an acronym he calls reduce. And it's sort. So when I read it, I was like, this could be kind of a new approach, a new sales methodology. This, this reduce conversation. I still think it's a little thick academically. I don't know if I love it, but I think there's so much in there about the science behind each of these barriers and why they prevent people from changing and how you as a seller or marketer or an influencer trying to get somebody to make change, what you can do to mitigate those things and reduce someone's likelihood, their natural state of reacting with putting up more objections than more barriers. Right. It's sort of like how I always say sellers don't or buyers don't create objections. Sellers do. And they do that usually by offering up solutions way too early in the sales process because there's not mutual agreement between both parties yet to where there's an understanding of what the current situation is and the problems and how that's affecting them and then what they might need to do to make that change. So it's a really interesting book. I highly recommend it. And I think that sellers and marketers and change agents generally should do everything in their power to minimize the barriers and make it stupid, easy for people to adopt the change that they're looking to ask them to, to make you. And I've talked about like the 40% rule recently.

Right, right, right.

Which my father taught me about, which was a Navy SEAL axiom that you know, when you think you've reached your limit, that's your brain protecting you. And the reality is you, you've only achieved 40% of your full potential mentally, physically, emotionally. And if you can break through that 40% barrier, your potential is limitless. I think a wonderful example of this in modern, sort of, let's say modern pop culture of great self improvement gurus is David Goggins. He was an absolute maniac. I love him, but he's one of those guys that Went from a very overweight, sloven, you know, sort of depressed individual into this madman Navy Seal who runs these ultra marathons and pushes himself to limits that most people have never even considered because that part of his brain, he's been able to work and manipulate his way through and achieve those things. Which reminds me of this woman in Colorado and I can't remember her name, But I think 60 Minutes or 2020 is a feature on her. She was in an accident and she was just a normal person. And she liked to run and do 5Ks and that sort of stuff. And it's pretty active as a runner, on top of being a mom and a professional and a wife, she had an accident where a part of her brain, the part that regulates that survival, that survival mechanism, the thing that. The very thing that prevents most of us from getting beyond the 40% point, that was completely shut off. And this woman is now the world's. She holds every world record for long distance running because she doesn't know, she has no concept of when to stop. And that there is an off button, that protection that the brain gave us for fight or flight, you know, in human nature, in her brain doesn't work. And so she just goes. She goes to the point to where people have to stop her. Make sure she drinks some water, gets some food or takes. That takes a break, because that doesn't happen for her. But that certainly was triggered by the experiences I've had around my father and Special Forces, just generally. But I would like to say something about that with respect to this whole conversation. Organizations create their own Special Forces unit dedicated specifically to change digital transformation, innovation, commercializing new products, testing new ideas with a specific kind of individual that possesses the right mindset, the ability to embrace ambiguity, change on the fly, learn quickly, communicate effectively, influence others, and execute like mad men and women. And do that on behalf of the broader organization for the greater good. The same way that we've done that in Special Forces in our military.

Yeah, it's interesting. So one of the things Grandmaster Villarreal explained to me was that's really the reason Special Forces came about. You've got to have these small, mobile, relentless groups that can go into places where you can't send the big administrative body. Yeah. So this has been really great. Sean, thank you. Really have enjoyed this.

You bet, Scott. Anytime.