Accelerating Revenue Globally with Ken Stearns

Well, cool. Maybe this helps a little bit. Yeah, just give you a quick overview of how I do this thing on my side. So I'd like to keep it tight, probably around 30 minutes, give or take, and just keep it focused on, I think one of the angles that's really interesting is revenue acceleration globally.

Yes.

And the work you've done in the past there and some of the insights and learnings you've Sort of figured out over many years. And then at the end, we can get into incentives. And then I think at the very end, it's sort of like, well, if you were gonna do this again, how would you, how would you do it? And would you use the same process and things and tactics or would you do something a little different?

Yeah.

And then in terms of format, I'm just recording via Zoom. I don't do any like bells or whistles because I want people to feel like they're listening into just a conversation, like a business conversation. They're part of the team. You know, and yeah, and so it just ends up creating a lot of trust and understanding about the people, getting a feel for them. And then I typically just extract audio and I'll do it as audio and then I'll have the video file as well. I played with both in the past. I actually am seeing some early indications that audio is gonna start taking back over from video. Simply because of multitasking. So people put the listening track in the background on their phone while they're doing other stuff on the phone.

So, I, I agree. I totally agree on that, Sean. I think people will come back and you have to be less focused, right? You can just have it in the background while you're cooking, while you're cleaning the house, while you're, you know, in the shower. Just, just run those conversations. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. I love the revenue side about, you know, this compensation piece and incentives. Be, it'd be fun conversation.

Okay. Yeah. So we can, we can get started. I'll just chop out the front and the end or whatever. And yeah, I think we'll start with just intro on some of your background as well, just to give people context.

Yeah.

And then my audience, just to give you a perspective.

Yeah.

At least on LinkedIn, I mean, it's probably now it's about 13,000 business owners, executives, investors, And practitioners, primarily the technology space, kind of all over the map. And then, you know, open internet, just who knows, right? Like all over the place, but mostly people interested in growth, technology, product development, strategy. That's really the thing, diligence, right? Like, is there a there there? So that's really the context of the folk that listen in. So it's a pretty—

Okay.

experienced intellectual crowd. So yeah, any nuggets or insights? I mean, nobody knows everything. So yeah, here.

One fun fact on the side is I did run sales for a SaaS company in Asia. So from Japan down to India, down to New Zealand. And we, it was an actuarial, if you don't know much about insurance, but actuarial. So this was an actuarial cash flow pricing valuation system, integral to insurance companies. And so fantastic couple of years diving into that space.

Yeah, let's start there because I started my career. We could just start before this. So I like the fluid approach. So I started my career with Watson Wyatt, which became Towers Watson Watson, which is now WTW. And I was formally trained as an actuary and I worked on the retirement side, not the insurance side, though I interviewed with some of the big Cignas, right, of the world. So I'm very familiar with valuation software because my first thing as an intern was like creating actuarial valuation software.

Okay, that's all. We can jump off from there and go any direction or circle into that from the insurance Either way, it's great.

Yeah. Let's, let's start there and, you know, maybe a little bit more background on yourself first and then jump into that as the first thing. And yeah, super. I mean, the internet is so random, isn't it? Like, what are the odds of that? Very small.

I did a bunch of real, real side, quick side story. I did a reach out. I was sending all my, all my contacts and you'll, if you haven't got one, you'll get one that says, hey, I'm, you know, really leaning into my speaking career. You know, et cetera. Do you know somebody and pass my name on? And you know any ideas? And this one guy replied. I never had a chat with him. Not sure how we connected. Some guy living in in Cognac connected from somebody. So we're talking, and he goes, "We don't by chance know a guy named Mark Saunders, do you?" I'm like, absolutely. Worked with him for two years on on some killer projects. He was he's like a project genius. I learned so much, Baba. And I was he's like. Best mate. Get outta here.

That's funny.

Yeah. 2 days later, he sends me a message and says, you interviewed one of these guys I work with on your jar. So it turns out this other guy I interviewed on my travels, one of the 330, is, is a guy he collaborates with who's an American. So this is a completely also random, like the other one I could see 'cause they're both British. You know, but I met him in, I met him in Malaysia, really. So anyway, it's funny. So it's that random. It's that random.

It, you know, I heard this stat once, like, remember that old joke, like the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon? Yeah. Everyone in the world is 6 degrees away. Yeah. I think with the internet and social networks, the 6 got collapsed to 3. And so it doesn't surprise me that the world is smaller and getting smaller.

Look at, look at LinkedIn. LinkedIn measures your third connection. That's it. And you're probably on LinkedIn connected by a third to somebody. If you've got 12,000 people, there's nobody past 3 for you.

Yeah. Like, yeah. And you get a couple different networks or like past career or education and it's like, you know, one hop or 2 hops to anything, any company, any organization. Yeah. So anyways, tell me a little bit more about the background and yeah, let's get into it.

Yeah. So I was, you know, I was at The job of last resort when I was in, when I was in California, you know, went from this job to that job, sales jobs. I was an accountant to start and realized I was writing big commission checks to this goofy salesperson and thought, if he can do it, I can do it. So I quit, quit my accounting job with my wife was 3 months pregnant, lost my insurance, really, really boneheaded move and got fired from one sales job, then the next sales job, then the next sales job. The company went under. And so found myself, as we call it, the job of last resort, an insurance person. So I took a job as an insurance guy 'cause I had a car and commissions and trips overseas and all that great stuff that I thought I deserved as a 20-something-year-old just becoming a father. And that job led me to one job, which led me to another job. And I applied, I had a freaky weird skill, you know, one of those, I sold to companies insurance, the idea to let their employees buy insurance from me. for my company. So it was this kind of association thing and voluntary. I had that skill and it happened to be that AIG, the world's largest insurance company at the time, needed that skill in Asia. And so before I knew it, I was on a plane and put my family in Hong Kong, you know, in 2001. And so that started a 22-year adventure across Asia. I ended up living in 5 countries, Hong Kong, then they sent me to, eventually after 12 years, I finally got into the rotation. So we had, we had about 15 markets across the country, across Southeast Asia. Some of these big players like Sun Life, Generali, Prudential UK, and AIG. And ultimately ended up in, like I said, they spun me off to Vietnam. Then I went to Indonesia, Thailand, India, back to Vietnam, and then back home. So it was a 22-year journey. A little bit of a sidewind on my insurance career in there was, as we talked, I was in the tech space, SaaS space, doing running sales for, for APAC, which is a, you know, gigantic, nearly 20-country kind of definition for, for Asia, especially it's a Western way of looking at it. We call it Asia Pacific. And, you know, because we just, just lump all of Asia into one giant 2, 3, nearly 3 billion person population. And so I was running around with the SaaS operations on and basically product sales for actuarial software, valuation software into insurance companies. That was mostly my vertical. But it was a, you know, amazing career and ran some very large sales organizations. In Vietnam, my first one that I was in charge of, we had 100 offices, 100,000 agents. So 100,000 salespeople.

Wow.

My last recruitment year there, We had 100,000 people sit and listen to our presentation across the country. We ran these kind of, we call 'em financial literacy seminars, and they were recruitment seminars to get people into the insurance business and join as agents. But we educated 100,000 people on the basics of financial literacy in these. Then I went to Indonesia. We had 400 offices, 250,000 agents. across the Acapulco. It's just mind-boggling numbers of people that you would have.

Yeah.

And small, small meetings, small presentation meetings were 1,000, 500, you know, 250 was an office. But, you know, so it was normal for me to walk in and talk to 1,000 people. You know, that was a typical weekend. You know, somewhere somebody had a meeting with, you know, 200, 500, 1,000, 2,500 people. We ran those all the time just to, And, you know, the interesting thing is, Sean, what brought us together is talking about how to motivate them, how to get a piece of their mindshare, part-time people, and get them motivated with financial incentives. And, you know, to— how do you motivate someone to go talk to friends and family about insurance? You know, one of the most dreaded conversations anybody wants to have with their cousin or their uncle or their nephew.

Right.

And, you know, so designing Long-term contests, medium-term, short-term, weekend, 24 hours, you know, contests. And, you know, as I told you, I think it was the last time we talked, we got so good at it in Vietnam, really felt like we were so good at it that we would literally toss gold in a corner. People, the whole army would run to that corner, you know, and then we would pack up, you know, the gold dust would disappear after 48 hours and we'd display it in another corner with a spotlight, and the whole army would run over to that corner and chase that. And whatever that design was, you know, whatever that design was. And, you know, sometimes it was to keep them entertained, and, and sometimes it was obviously part of a larger strategic operation, you know, trying to, um, to get them to go do some behavior. Uh, and money drives behavior, and we, we could absolutely shape the behavior of the organization in a good way Through incentives.

It's really interesting. Yeah, that's giant. I mean, how, I mean, you gave a couple of stats like 100,000, 250,000. If you added it all up, I mean, you're at any given time, it's what, like millions of people that you were impacting with incentives?

At a regional level. Yeah, at a regional level, I think we had something like 525,000 agents across Asia with Prudential. China, India, Indonesia. Indonesia was, was still the largest, half the, half the organization. Yeah. So we were communicating at a regional level. It's about 500,000 people. Crazy numbers, really, honestly, quite, quite crazy numbers. 1,200 or 1,500 sales offices at that level.

Yeah, that's to put that into perspective. I remember, I don't know exactly the stat, but Walmart, which is like a Fortune 1, Fortune 5 company, they have like a million employees total globally, maybe a little more now. Amazon's probably up there too. So basically you take the biggest company in the world, you cut it in half and that's how many people you were implementing incentives for to drive behavior in different countries and markets and cultures. And so I guess the big question was, Yeah. I mean, we talked about this last time. I know it as well too. It's like incentives turn people into computer programs. So you have to be careful. But like, did you, how did, how did you measure all of this? And did you do a lot of refinement and iteration over time? Or was it like you already knew the playbook and it was like, okay, just bang, bang and it was just rinse and repeat? Or how much iteration was in there?

Yeah, there were some core things we knew worked, right? So you have some core, you know, you have annual incentives, you have, you know, longer, you know, longer incentives, you know, maybe 4 5 years kind of programs, but annual were the big ones and then quarterly. And then we break it even down into, you know, a sales office might run their own incentive locally. So you have these, you know, very localized kind of cash incentives all the way up to larger trip, you know, first world-class trip stuff like renting out the London Museum of Science or the UK London Museum of Science and Industry and having a dinner under Hippie, you know, renting out the thing at night and doing cocktails and dinner. You know, just the Brazilian National Arts Center. You know, these places that were just, you would never even be able to get in there yourself. Something you couldn't even do by yourself if you were super, unless you were just ultra wealthy, but impossible for the regular person to ever achieve this sort of thing. So all kinds of different levels. But I, man, Sean, you never knew. You know, you just never knew. And communication, one of the biggest things was communication. How to make sure that what we wanted to have happen, what we were asking people to do in a larger, always in a larger scheme, you know, recognizing the impact of behavior all the way up is communication. Making sure that everything got down to the last person in the most remote location and they understood the what and the why. And then how, you know, making sure that skills and at the sales level, the support level was the how. But man, we measured stuff, the data, you know, we'd get in on a Monday morning if we ran something on Friday, launch, you know, we designed it, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, get it approved, you know, get all the numbers, budgeting. And, you know, because we also had actuaries checking our math, you know, we're gonna see the distribution, right?

Yeah.

We're saying, you know, we're, we're going to run this program and here's the number of people that get activated. Here's the premium, here's the cost, here's, you know, here's the margin that it eats and here's our budget. And, you know, the actuaries would run ding dong, ding dong and go to the CFO and, you know, we boom, we get approval at the last minute and launch it. And, you know, Monday morning we'd want to know the data.

Yeah.

You know, and how it's— what did we do wrong? What did we miss? You know, who performed the best? What communication channels worked? So it is Data for us was incredibly important, especially in, like you said, modifying the next one, or if we had one ongoing to see if we could throw a change in there in the middle, swap out some ideas. But man, I— hours, just hours looking at PowerPoints and looking at the ideas, you know, this idea, that idea, how does that play into the longer-term schemes, you know, and also the corporate, you know, we also rolled up to UK, like, you know, for example, the, the, the Prudential UK, you know, we rolled up to UK. And so things we did had to line up to what we were kind of driven for, you know, what our promises were back to corporate. And even the regulatory, the regulatory aspect of it was also in there, making sure you don't go sideways with the regulator locally. And then also the UK regulator even a little bit more strict. But yeah, data was incredibly important to decision-making.

Interesting. I'm, I've been thinking recently about this because I mean, over time, especially with cryptocurrency blockchain, it's like a lot of incentive experiments. And to your point on behavior, I think it's almost like 2 things, right? It's the It's the very analytical behavior, like you do this, you get this.

Yes.

And that works to a certain point, but then there's also the human stuff involved, like ego, fear, risk, reward, like greed, envy, right? Like hunger. All of these things mean that what worked today may not work tomorrow. And especially as cultural dynamics, political dynamics change, interpersonal dynamics change, that incentive system that used to work may not work. And you can't just rely totally on just an economic incentive.

Oh, no.

And so I think it's like if you really wanted to design it really, really well, you have to take both things into account. It's like human behavior as well as the economic incentive and have enough, like, what do you call it? Almost like buffer zone margins of safety in and around that. I mean, how much How much variability— can you talk to any of that? Like, did you see any variability along this, or is that hypothesis I just presented accurate from your experience, or did you find something different?

Yeah, I, I, I'd articulate it like this. I think as you— there's a, there's a scale, right? I'm kind of holding up for people listening, you know, I'm holding up kind of this angled, you know, this kind of line on, you know, if you've got a bar graph, right? It's, it's your needs. And you're speaking to different, you know, the same audience in a way, a larger, especially like I think whatever your, whatever your program is you're designing for, you've got an audience. And some of those people at one end of the spectrum are in financial, are driven financially, right? They may not have that ego need, you know, the ego need may not be need to be filled yet because they gotta put a roof over their heads. They got college kids, you know, they have all kinds of things. So they're there for the incentive. Mostly. There's a lot of people who in our audience, incentives were no longer an issue. They were millionaires. They were well off and they were leaders. They had the car, they had the BMW, they had the house, they had everything. They had, you know, 5,000 people below them selling. So it wasn't the money, it was the ego and winning, you know, winning and getting and achieving. Mm-hmm. And recognition is so, so— I mean, at some point the money is absolutely irrelevant. It's what position am I standing on the stage? Am I number 3 or number 5? And if I'm not number 1, there's gonna be hell to pay and I'm gonna really go back with my team and we're gonna get the number 1 spot next year. So in designing, the recognition is almost equally important as the financial reward.

Yeah.

And, and having that out there as something people can get. as well. I just, uh, the fun, the recognition side, it was so much fun. We, we had, you know, that's a creative spot, especially for agents, because we can put 1,000 people in the room and I can bring you up on stage and say, you know, did you see Sean's numbers last month? You know, tell us, Sean, how did you achieve such great results? You know, tell us your secret. Tell us what you did. And, you know, for a chance for you to, you know, 4 months ago you were, you know, you could have been a janitor and now you're up on stage and you're sharing how you cultivated relationships as a janitor for 20 years and you went to every teacher and every principal and every mom and dad that, you know, and you sold like heck and now here you are. And so that recognition of people's stories, the hunger to tell your story, so powerful. And if, you know, and I think Incentive programs where you hide because you receive money, you know, like a super executive receives $30 million and they would rather not talk about it is one thing. Yeah. You know, that's one incentive program. And another one where you earn X and you get up on stage and you're gonna tell the world what you did is a beautiful, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing to see and to watch people's lives get changed.

Yeah, I love that. It's totally the social aspect, the social dynamic. And yeah, yeah, we're all apes in some way.

We're all apes. There is, um, uh, Rinaldi Mudahara. Mudahara is one of the greatest salespeople ever lived. Uh, he still are. He's, he's alive down, he's in Indonesia, and he built, he built the Prudential Indonesia, uh, army. I mean, those 250,000 are his people. Um, he started as the head salesperson and built it from nothing, uh, to that, the 400 offices he made. hundreds of people, literal US dollar millionaires, including rice farmers, stories of— and the people just— you could do, you could do a 4-part series around his career and what he's seen. Just amazing.

Wow.

When you, when you see how some people can impact and lead others, you know, into a great place, right? Just by motivation. And he had This one part, when you achieve this very high level of this leadership level within an independent sales network, he would have this thing. He would, you know, every year you'd get promoted and they'd only promote, you know, 20, 30 people out of this 200,000 army. And he would fly the family members, whoever could come, didn't matter who it was, grandma, great-grandma, fly 10 people secretly to the meeting and have them come in behind. And they would have these people walk to Celine Dion in a dark room with a candle to the front of the stage from the back, like a procession, like some sort of communion, right? Some religious event. And he'd have them standing there and they would play this, you know, super powerful videos, you know, of all these different montage of all the individuals who've been, you know, promoted. And then as they turned around to face the audience, their family was right in front of them. And, you know, and just tears and whoa, man, the photo just— and for the people in the audience, you know, imagine you're trying to imagine yourself being that person. And so I think, you know, financial motivation is an incredible component for day to day to keep us going, you know, to kind of keep you focused on the things that it can get you and everything. But some stuff money can't buy. And there are times when we need to be clever enough to recognize that. And, and I think a lot of corporates can learn from these kinds of human, you know, the human part, right? Sharing your success with people and how to do that in a, in an appropriate way based on whatever industry you're in. Obviously, that doesn't work for everybody, but you can imagine if you're an executive or a person who's, you know, head of sales, how would you do that in your organization? And there's, there's clever ways to think of it.

Yeah. Wow. I mean, that almost choked me up a little bit imagining that scenario of, I mean, what I love about that so much is just raising people up by their bootstraps and giving them the capabilities where they can transform their and their family's lives. Like, that's such a, I mean, business is one thing, but like that kind of transformation is That's one of the reasons I get out of bed every day is to have that kind of impact. That's amazing.

Yeah, it's special. I was pretty fortunate to see some of this stuff happen and to interview some of these people. You know, this guy that, you know, one of these guys in Indonesia, he was running, he had a full floor in a grade A office building in downtown Jakarta, the Bank of a, I think it was B of A building. I don't— his rent would've been, I don't know, $50,000 a month or $40,000 a month, whatever it was, whole office floor. And he was an— he was a leader. He had built his own distribution agency and he was a rice farmer. His parents were rice farmers in, and, and on an island. Banana story. And he, he started out as a gangster hustling, chasing down debt, black money debt.

Yeah.

On the streets of Jakarta. He flew into Jakarta, didn't have a job. He was a young kid and Gangster's wife was an agent with Perot, and she— and he, he did some job, got paid one day, and he walked by a bookstore and said, I'm gonna buy a book. And he walked in and got Think and Grow Rich.

Wow. That's the second time that book or that phrase has come up in the last 2 weeks. The other one was at a private equity event here in Nashville. Interesting.

This guy was driving, um, he had 2 Phantoms.

Jesus. I mean, 'cause you know, one is just not enough sometimes. You need one in different colors. He had a moment.

He told me one, he said, I bought a convertible, okay? 'Cause I always wanted a convertible. He says, actually, he goes, but now, you know, in Jakarta, in Indonesia, Jakarta convertible, not very good. It's too hot. I never drive the convertible. Yeah.

You need the AC. Wow, that's insane.

Crack up.

I mean, here's what I hear from this and maybe this gets into the last piece, which is if you're gonna do it all over again or start now and build something like that or somebody just listening in, how do you go from zero to 2 Phantoms, you know, for lack of a better word? I mean, how do you How do you do this? I mean, sales and revenue acceleration is one thing, but that assumes there's a value exchange there, right? Like you can't sell nothing. Somebody on the other side of that sale has to have something, desire or need that you fill. And so what have you found is like, I don't know, secret sauce or how would you do it again if you were starting from scratch or what would you do today like with all the knowledge and stories and— incentives and everything else?

The first thing I always remember was you can never— we had lots and lots of discussions about how to choose people, you know, recruiting people and bringing people into an insurance industry. Um, and, and I think this, this goes across— I think it was unique in us finding it just because of the high volume of people we would recruit and bring in, you know. But I think it's true across humanity, right? Whatever industry you're in, you can never tell how hungry somebody is by the way they look, by the way they interview. You don't know the burning part of somebody inside that, you know, there were people we put on stage, you would never ever in a million years stop and look at that person and think they were a sales machine or a leader. And, you know, by the looks of them on the outside. And Now they, they do, when you meet them later, you're like, yeah, wow. You know, of course they're that good. And you're like, yeah, but you didn't see the recruitment video. What you didn't see there when they, when we interviewed 'em, right? You know, you should have seen that person.

Yeah.

'Cause that's not that person. But what the difference was, that was just the outs, the inside coming out, right? They had money now. They could get a hairdresser, they could buy makeup, they could, you know, they could, they could, a guy, you know, we used to laugh and say, you know, men, the men get fat and, and the, the women get beautiful. In the insurance industry in Asia. You know, the men enjoy all the stuff, right? They go out and they eat nice restaurants, they eat great food, and the ladies, you know, take care of themselves. You know, they look better and better. So the women look younger and the men look fatter, and that's how you can tell they're successful. But you can't tell on the inside. And so I think one of the things, you know, if I was to do this differently, whatever the industry, you know, I would always rec— there are, Those questions you ask people, that burning desire, you mentioned it, getting out of bed. That's what gets you out of bed is to find that next story, right? To find that next, or to have a conversation where you impact somebody enough, Sean, where you change their business. One of these conversations hits somebody and they go, oh, that's it. I should pursue this angle. Let me get into this more. And so you're, you get up outta bed and We don't know what gets people out of bed and what gets them focused in the morning. And so I think, you know, that prejudgment, dismiss that from yourself. You know, try to ask those other questions about personal motivation, the money and all of that. That's on that linear scale I talked about, right? People will run for the money, they'll run for that. But as soon as they cross some meridian, meridian, it's not about the money anymore.

Right. Yeah.

The money's nice and they demand the money and they're gonna be, you know, they're gonna be, they're gonna remind you, you know, what you owe them. They'll know that stuff backwards and forwards. That's already, that's a skill they've got. They're now onto another one, which is how to get on stage, how to move from this number 5 spot on stage to number 1. So, you know, recognition, it would be the thing also I would spend a lot more time. It took me a long time to understand that part of it. To how important and how graceful and masterful the recognition can be and the impact it has on people.

Yeah.

It's an art. It's an art. It's not a science. The math part is, you know, it's both. We saw that the— that part is a science. The cash part was talking about sitting in front of a PowerPoint modeling if these agents move or those agents move or, you know, what agents are we going to get to go, you know, who are the ones that aren't active? How do you motivate those? You know, that's science data and then art. And, and that was fun because it was both. But definitely the people part is pure art, man. It's really beautiful.

Yeah, it's, it's interesting. It is the yin and the yang. It's the, the numbers and the emotion. It's— we're a wave and a particle at the exact same time. Yeah, that's really, it's really fascinating. Yeah, it's the recognition. The leaderboard has some of that aspect in it for competition and the financial incentive. But at the end of the day, it's like, do you have— what drives you? What's your mission? What's your vision?

Where are you at?

Like, what— yeah, what is that thing deep, deep down that, that, um, is your reason? We talked about it, like your fascination or your purpose, 2 sides of the same coin. Interesting. Well, what's, what's yours? We didn't get into that last time. Do you, do you know what yours is?

Yeah, it's, it's been a fun journey. Um, I'm now— I think I lived a lot of my purpose. Uh, I, I achieved a big chunk of my purpose, and I think the next one is kind of unfolding. You know, I've— filling the jar. So, you know, I quit corporate, um, 2 years ago, almost 2 years ago. Well, 2 years plus. But 2 years ago, I started a journey across the US and, you know, went to 96 cities and interviewed about 330 people in their home. And, you know, real people, real conversations was that the kind of the tagline. And the jar got filled for me and for other people. You know, it really giving people's stories a platform and lifting up regular people's voices. It's just a fantastic experience. And, you know, I, at the end of that, I was like, I think I've— man, I've lived my— that was a purpose, you know, that was a purpose.

Yeah.

And I feel like it was setting, you know, setting me up for the next one, right? It's giving more like maybe giving me the tools, Sean. It's giving me that bedrock to kind of get to the next one. And I think it's gonna be speaking, honestly, public speaking. And I don't know what the genre's gonna ultimately be. You know, I know I have some business topics. I have what I lovingly called Ken's Rules, And it has been turned into a business book called Dear Leaders, you know, letters to leaders about strategy, vision, mission. You know, I've got some funny Asian— a storyteller is what I am. You know, I've got one called Leader— about team building called Tom Yum Soup. It's around tom yum. If you know Thai food, if you know Thai food, there's a hot sour seafood soup called tom yum and it has all these crazy ingredients in it. And it, I blend the story into team building, you know, that each, you know, each piece of that soup has its importance. And when you're building a team, you know, they all have character, right? They all bring something to the table and too much of one and too much of the other, you know, spoils the soup. But it's up to the chef, you know, in Thailand, the soup is made from north to south. It's made differently. It's got a little different accents, but they're all amazing. And, you know, you know, you go into a home and it's beautiful. And the right restaurant, it's beautiful. But each one's unique to the chef or to the chef's, you know, what's available that day. And, you know, team building is that same way, right? You have to build a balanced, complementary team and it can't be dominated by chilies or ginger or lemongrass, you know, because then it spoils it. So don't be too homogeneous. And it's not about color or about, you know, sex.

Yeah.

It's, it's about skills and attributes is what you're looking for. Nobody cares what color the chili is. It's about how it adds value to the soup.

Yeah. How's it taste overall?

How's it taste? How, how does it complement the lemongrass and the mushrooms and the, and the, the soup base? So yeah, it, it's, I'm, I'm in that middle of the, I think I finished one purp— something I did was the jar and it was, had its purpose. If you will. It was single-purpose built, but it's, you know, it's permeating my, my who I am now for sure. It's changed me interviewing, interviewing 300 people and being in that room. You talked about particle and wave, right? It's when our, you know, our, our, our wave was interacting. You know, I was that close to people using the jar as a, as a conduit. Um, so I'm a different person now. And so I think that's still uncovering it.

Well, what's interesting, I agree with everything you said, and I love the perspective. I think as I— I mean, we don't know each other like for 20 years, but as listening to you and hearing your journey just in this tiny 30 minutes, um, all other things aside, I hear a couple things. It's that path from Money to helping other people get money on incentives and then understanding the value of that weird human behavior thing that doesn't have an equation.

Yeah.

And then in a business setting and then in a personal setting and a couple of points. One, I did my own sort of cursory review in the fall with a number of people and Work was like 1/30th of the things on their mind and every person was struggling with one particular personal thing and they were different all over the place.

Interesting.

Didn't matter, didn't matter race, creed, sex, color, age, whatever. It was like work was 1/30th, but there was a bigger thing that every single one of them was contending with and like life-changing things, not just like, oh, I gotta find a new person to mow the lawn, you know. And then the other thing I'll say is, well, 2 more things. The private equity industry now, which is traditionally just financiers, right? Which is, I'll buy a company, number of companies, put them together, create a lot of value in a short period of time and then exit the company.

Yeah.

And then somebody else will do it and they've been searching for growth levers, very fast growth levers. And so obviously there's things like financial engineering, like sales acceleration, And the thing that the biggest, baddest ones are working on now, human capital. It's how do we give incentives like profit sharing, for instance, to a manufacturing company and all employees to get them all thinking like owners and they literally can change their lives in the course of a 5 to 7 year hold period and their families. And then that leads me into, well, this thing where we both started, this actuarial thing is the essence of human capital. And HR has never traditionally had a seat, quote unquote, at the executive table. And what people are finally starting to internally understand, especially after COVID, the rise of Gen Z now, is that no company exists without people and humans and the talent and the human capital that you have. Is the critical differentiator. And because we didn't have good ways to measure it, understand it, design incentives, motivations, the recognition pieces, we have these loose words called culture. And you hear very, yes, like very good business people that have been through the trenches in a number of companies point to culture as the number one thing. And then everyone else in the world is like scratching their head and it goes, on with their day because it's such a cloudy, fluffy word. What do you mean culture? Like, what is culture? And I think what, where you're going is you've, what I hear from you is that you've almost started to unlock the secrets of culture on a human-to-human interaction basis and then how we can overlay a business setting on that to help both the individuals, their families, the companies and create more value as a product or service for the rest of the market that then creates a compounding engine for the economy in the world as a collective whole. And you just so happen to be doing it with a large number of people across Asia Pacific and now you're back in Americas. And so, you know, maybe you were early in APAC and now you're perfectly suited to do it in the Americas because sometimes we are slower on the touchy-feely stuff, quote unquote, the culture stuff. But we're good at the like number efficiency stuff.

Absolutely.

And it's absolutely bringing those 2 things together.

Yeah.

So I think you're in an interesting spot and I think the next 1 to 2 years are gonna be pretty interesting for you. I think your growth curve is probably gonna be pretty steep.

I am a little bit, I am a little bit worried when it starts, it's gonna start. Um, it's gonna be, it's gonna happen. And, uh, yeah, it's just keep, you know, keep hitting the, the little edges and making sure I know where the edges are and then starting to slowly get into the, to the center.

Yeah. So for people, um, about to wrap up, but for people who wanna get in touch with you, what's the best place, like a website or something that they should go to?

Yeah.

In order to reach out to you and have some further conversation?

Yeah, the, the, you know, I've got my own website, kensterns.com, and that's there. The Jar is also a good one to go to, thejar.live, uh, you know. And then I'm, I'm also on LinkedIn, and I'm, I'm, you know, not shy. I'd say I'm shy about it in a way, or surprised, or I don't know, it's unusual for me. But you can, you can Google me, honestly, because I've done so many— I have so much, uh, content up now with The Jar And Mental Health Today podcasts, right? Those 2 podcasts have got my name on the internet. So, you know, you could— I'm Googleable, especially if you put in the, you know, Ken Stern's The Jar or Ken Stern's Mental Health, you know, you'll find, you'll see my, my lovely face.

Love it. Cool. Well, great, Ken. This has been an eye-opening conversation and obviously you're a wonderful human being and a pretty experienced practitioner in the world of revenue acceleration at scale. Internationally. So it's been fun to talk and yeah, let's, let's stay in touch, man. I think, I think there's gonna be a lot of interesting things coming up in the, in the coming years as the world is evolving ever so rapidly.

Absolutely. Sean, really appreciate the giving me a platform and great to go down a little bit of memory lane and, and some great questions to get my, to get my brain thinking about some of the, you know, why we did what we did and, and some of those memories.

I love it. Cool. Well, let's do some stuff together in '24, '25 and on, on the way into the future.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

I'm just starting my 3rd chapter now.

Oh, great. The best one is yet to come.

Yeah, the best. Oh, this is the, yeah, the other 2 were for all, for, you know, the first 2 chapters for this, honestly.

Yeah, I love it.

Okay.

Well, great. Well, have a great rest of your week and Pleasure chatting and enjoy some beautiful weather outside.

Thanks, Sean. Have a great day.

Alrighty. We'll talk to you later.

Bye. Cheers. Bye-bye. Bye.