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Billion-Dollar Heart-Led Strategies with Roy Osing · The Heart-Led Business Show

• 0:01
  Speaker: Welcome to the Heart-Led Business Show, where compassion meets commerce and leaders lead with love.
• 0:09
  Speaker: Join your host, Tom Jackobs, as he delves into the insightful conversations with visionary business leaders who defy the status quo, putting humanity first and profit second.
• 0:20
  Speaker: From heartfelt strategies to inspiring stories, this podcast is your compass in the world of conscious capitalism.
• 0:29
  Speaker: So buckle up and let's go.
• 0:31
  Speaker: Let your heart guide your business journey.
• 0:39
  Tom Jackobs: Latch on to your laughter belt.
• 0:41
  Tom Jackobs: We have a lion hearted luminary lined up today.
• 0:44
  Tom Jackobs: Meet Roy Osing, a business beacon who braved the tidal waves of tech and brought a startup internet company to a breathtaking billion in sales.
• 0:55
  Tom Jackobs: This audacious author and mentor rocking the world with his be different or be dead mantra is here on the Heart-Led Business Show.
• 1:03
  Tom Jackobs: Ready and rearing to spill his secrets to success.
• 1:05
  Tom Jackobs: So buckle up, it's going to be a ballistic bonanza.
• 1:09
  Tom Jackobs: Roy, welcome to the show.
• 1:10
  Roy Osing: Thanks very much, Tom.
• 1:11
  Roy Osing: I really appreciate the invitation and yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
• 1:15
  Tom Jackobs: I'm really looking forward to this conversation as well.
• 1:17
  Tom Jackobs: And especially, you know, with the numbers that you're talking about in terms of your business success and how that all relates to, you know, being Heart-Led as well.
• 1:25
  Tom Jackobs: Want to dive into that.
• 1:26
  Tom Jackobs: But before we do, what's your definition of a Heart-Led business?
• 1:30
  Roy Osing: Yeah.
• 1:30
  Roy Osing: So, it's kind of like has two dimensions, right?
• 1:34
  Roy Osing: At the strategic level.
• 1:35
  Roy Osing: Because I believe in, you have to have context to drive activity.
• 1:38
  Roy Osing: It's not a matter of driving tactics, right?
• 1:41
  Roy Osing: And so why a heart led business is critical for me is, first of all, you have a strategy that defines customer caring is an outcome, right?
• 1:49
  Roy Osing: And the reason for that is you actually believe that customer caring drives loyalty, drives growth, drives profitability.
• 1:56
  Roy Osing: Okay?
• 1:56
  Roy Osing: So it's a means to an end, right?
• 1:58
  Roy Osing: So there's a strategic component to it, but the second piece is executional.
• 2:02
  Roy Osing: And so it's all very well to have an aspiration or an intent and to declare an intent that you want to be heart-led.
• 2:07
  Roy Osing: It's quite a different thing to actually put that into action, right?
• 2:11
  Roy Osing: And so you may as well save your breath.
• 2:13
  Roy Osing: If all you have is an aspiration, that's worthless to me.
• 2:16
  Roy Osing: You need to follow it up with very specifics.
• 2:18
  Roy Osing: And so, for me, Heart-Led businesses believe, okay, that customer caring is a source of competitive advantage, a source of growth, and also is kind of like an umbrella within which activities of the organization and actions in the organization are driven.
• 2:35
  Roy Osing: Okay.
• 2:36
  Roy Osing: For example, in my particular case we did this.
• 2:39
  Roy Osing: And we had some sort of actions around things like you have to have servers, you're not pushers.
• 2:44
  Roy Osing: So we had this whole thing about leadership by serving around, not leadership by managing around.
• 2:50
  Roy Osing: We had activities around hiring for goosebumps, which was really fun because what it, what that says is, you know, recruitment in a customer caring environment is hugely important.
• 2:59
  Roy Osing: Right.
• 2:59
  Roy Osing: And if you don't have people who have this innate desire to serve human beings, you're in deep trouble.
• 3:05
  Roy Osing: You will never be Heart-Led It will be simply in your mind and that's about it.
• 3:10
  Roy Osing: And so we had a number of programs like this in the execution area.
• 3:14
  Roy Osing: And so when I look at businesses that aspire to be you know, provisioners, if you will of gas for the customer experiences, but don't have anything to back it up in terms of, And I go, yeah, you're not really serious.
• 3:26
  Roy Osing: So you have to have a customer caring strategy.
• 3:28
  Roy Osing: You have to have a certain elements of execution to drive that home.
• 3:33
  Roy Osing: And if you're not prepared to do that, then you shouldn't be talking about yourself in terms of this category of business.
• 3:39
  Roy Osing: You just shouldn't.
• 3:39
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah, so what are some examples of that customer caring strategy?
• 3:43
  Roy Osing: Well, first of all, you just have to say.
• 3:45
  Roy Osing: All right, that this business is going to, is going on a journey to care for customers.
• 3:50
  Roy Osing: A lot of people think that sounds corny, right?
• 3:52
  Roy Osing: And that's because it doesn't conform to modern textbook pedantics, Tom.
• 3:57
  Roy Osing: That's why, I mean, the MBAs out there who've never run a billion dollar a year business, they don't talk about caregiving as a strategic imperative.
• 4:05
  Roy Osing: Well, I come from a world of practicality because that's what I had to do to build this business.
• 4:10
  Roy Osing: And people get what caregiving is like, if I were to ask you, okay, if you think you're a caregiver, the next question is going to be, well, show me, tell me a story that would prove to me that you're a caregiver and if that story gave me goosebumps, Tom, I'm going to hire you and then teach you the business.
• 4:25
  Roy Osing: That's exactly the opposite in terms of what goes on these days.
• 4:29
  Roy Osing: So that whole element.
• 4:30
  Roy Osing: Is exceedingly important declaration from a leadership point of view that customer caring is what we're here to do with the belief that will drive performance.
• 4:39
  Roy Osing: All right, like, the caring thing isn't an end result.
• 4:41
  Roy Osing: It's a means to an end.
• 4:43
  Roy Osing: You're doing it because you actually believe that it's going to result in growth and incredible performance.
• 4:48
  Roy Osing: And we bought into that really early on and so we were led by things that did that and we proved that in fact, it worked on the top line, right?
• 4:58
  Roy Osing: just worked and so in a simplistic terms, look at you guys, just say, we're going to have a customer caring strategy.
• 5:04
  Roy Osing: The difficult thing is now is to drill that down in terms of what it means.
• 5:08
  Roy Osing: It means hiring people that actually care about Homo sapiens.
• 5:12
  Roy Osing: They actually care about human beings, right?
• 5:14
  Roy Osing: It means having a culture of leadership by serving around.
• 5:18
  Roy Osing: It means creating a service strategy.
• 5:20
  Roy Osing: That emphasizes GASP worthy experiences and declares what that means and just defines it in a way it can be measured, etc.
• 5:29
  Roy Osing: All right.
• 5:29
  Roy Osing: It means having the leaders enter what I call bear pits on a regular basis with frontline people asking the simple question.
• 5:36
  Roy Osing: How can I help?
• 5:38
  Roy Osing: Because the execution element requires that.
• 5:41
  Roy Osing: Okay.
• 5:42
  Roy Osing: Like you don't just sort of say, well, we're in the customer caring business, walk back to your office and call the board and have a conversation.
• 5:48
  Roy Osing: No, it says the attention is supposed to be spent with the people actually doing the work.
• 5:53
  Roy Osing: It means cleaning the inside of your organization.
• 5:56
  Roy Osing: I call it improving the viscosity of the execution machine.
• 6:00
  Roy Osing: All right.
• 6:00
  Roy Osing: So that delivery of value is more easily done so that frontline people aren't fighting systems, Tom.
• 6:06
  Roy Osing: They're not fighting dumb rules.
• 6:08
  Roy Osing: They're not fighting crap and bureaucracy in the organization that prevents them from doing their job.
• 6:13
  Roy Osing: Okay.
• 6:13
  Roy Osing: That's a leadership issue.
• 6:15
  Roy Osing: And so leadership and that's where the tough work happens.
• 6:17
  Roy Osing: And I spent, I mean the declaration of intent was easy and anybody can do that.
• 6:22
  Roy Osing: The hard work, if you really want to be heart-led, is in the next level, which is unpacking that and degenerating that brave idea.
• 6:30
  Roy Osing: If I could use those terms right into a crude deed, brave ideas to crude deeds.
• 6:34
  Roy Osing: Crude deeds is all about execution and the interesting thing to me is when a leader enters that executional phase, That's when they light fires in people and when you light fires in people, that's when you get things done in commitment, right?
• 6:47
  Roy Osing: In terms of, I'm getting goosebumps just talking about this dude.
• 6:50
  Roy Osing: I mean, it's just like so powerful.
• 6:52
  Roy Osing: It was so powerful.
• 6:53
  Roy Osing: That's when you get the commitment to do it.
• 6:55
  Roy Osing: And so it starts really simple, but the hard work begins after the declaration.
• 6:59
  Roy Osing: And I find that so many people declare intent, declare aspirations and that's where they stop or they delegate it to the organization to make it happen, which is absolutely freaking insane because it never happens, right?
• 7:12
  Roy Osing: It never happens without the fingerprints of the leader on this puppy.
• 7:16
  Roy Osing: It will just never happen.
• 7:17
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah, I mean, there's one thing to talk about it.
• 7:20
  Tom Jackobs: There's a whole nother thing to actually live it and have it inside of you and in your bones almost.
• 7:26
  Roy Osing: That's a really excellent way to describe it because I believe so strongly, as you probably can tell already in the use of language.
• 7:33
  Roy Osing: Right, to talk about what you're trying to do and people would say, well, why was that?
• 7:37
  Roy Osing: How does that work?
• 7:38
  Roy Osing: How does that happen?
• 7:39
  Roy Osing: And I say, if you don't have this whole notion running through your veins, it won't happen because really strategy is just as much about passion and emotion as it is about anything else.
• 7:49
  Roy Osing: In fact, I would say that passion and emotion Okay, exceed the contribution that logic ever makes.
• 7:55
  Roy Osing: Alright, because the reality is planning never works, Tom.
• 7:58
  Roy Osing: You and I both know that.
• 7:59
  Roy Osing: Planning never works, not because we're stupid, because the world changes so rapidly.
• 8:05
  Roy Osing: How can it possibly succeed in the long run?
• 8:07
  Roy Osing: You have to have passion and emotion to adjust that strategy on the run.
• 8:13
  Roy Osing: I call it planning on the run to actually sort of earn the right to get to the finish line by actually enduring things along the way.
• 8:20
  Roy Osing: Planning never works, and that requires passion, not logic.
• 8:23
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah, well, and execution also, like strategy planning without execution and then else that you said as well is so important because I think a lot of people plan all day and then fail to like actually do what they were planning to do anyway, because things change and they're not prepared to make those shifts along the way.
• 8:41
  Roy Osing: Well, yeah, and I think, you know, my diagnosis of that, which is a major problem in business today, is people spend 80 percent of their time on planning.
• 8:49
  Roy Osing: And at most 20 percent on figuring out how you're going to execute the plan and the problem with that is, of course, nothing happens, right?
• 8:56
  Roy Osing: So I'm the contrarian in the room, and I will say to you, you should be spending 20 percent of your time on the plan.
• 9:02
  Roy Osing: Get it just about right.
• 9:03
  Roy Osing: Stop seeking perfection.
• 9:05
  Roy Osing: Dude, it doesn't exist and spend 80 percent of your time on the execution element, which is the planning on the run, the nimbleness, et cetera, et cetera.
• 9:13
  Roy Osing: So I can take a mediocre plan in somebody's, however that is defined, right in the world, which is another problem and execute it flawlessly and beat the pants off somebody that thinks they have a perfect plan, but are unable to move it along and I think the culprit, if I can be perfectly honest with you is our education system.
• 9:31
  Roy Osing: Our education system has taught people to be intellectually pristine, right?
• 9:35
  Roy Osing: Don't get your hands dirty.
• 9:37
  Roy Osing: Leaders shouldn't be micromanaging.
• 9:39
  Roy Osing: We are told and yet the biggest success I've ever had is what I call fingerprint leadership, strategic micromanagement, putting my fingerprints on the things of strategy that need leadership, right?
• 9:51
  Roy Osing: You can't delegate customer caring to the business development guys.
• 9:55
  Roy Osing: You can't do that, right?
• 9:57
  Roy Osing: You have to be all in.
• 9:59
  Tom Jackobs: Well, and the leader has to set the example as well, because, you know, you tell a frontline worker, you know, we, we need to make this goosebump worthy, I'm like," what the hell does that mean?" You need to actually describe it, show it, be it, and then it sinks into the rest of the organization.
• 10:14
  Tom Jackobs: So yeah, absolutely.
• 10:15
  Tom Jackobs: I think that's a good analogy.
• 10:17
  Tom Jackobs: Localized, is that what you said?
• 10:18
  Tom Jackobs: Localized micromanagement?
• 10:20
  Tom Jackobs: Or strategic micromanagement?
• 10:21
  Roy Osing: Strategic micromanagement or fingerprints.
• 10:24
  Roy Osing: I mean, people get fingerprints, right?
• 10:26
  Roy Osing: When we put our fingerprints on it we're actually designating a part of our biosphere on this.
• 10:31
  Roy Osing: And that, that basically commits us.
• 10:33
  Roy Osing: Holistically, as a human being, to that end result we're going after, we're all in.
• 10:38
  Roy Osing: It's not like, it's not like part of your left brain committing to the idea, because ideas are worthless, as you say, unless they actually degenerate into crude deeds.
• 10:47
  Roy Osing: And so we need, I'll look at, I'm the only one that talks about micromanagement and strategic micromanagement is a good thing, Tom.
• 10:54
  Roy Osing: I'm the only one out there doing it because everybody else thinks that you need to delegate.
• 10:59
  Roy Osing: Okay.
• 10:59
  Roy Osing: Well, I happen to come from a world that says, I think there's too much delegation.
• 11:02
  Roy Osing: There's certain things that can be delegated and should but people are delegating strategic things.
• 11:08
  Roy Osing: Which is crazy.
• 11:09
  Roy Osing: It's an abdication of a leader's responsibility to do that.
• 11:13
  Roy Osing: You mentioned this translation thing, which I call a line of sight leadership, I sort of created this sort of concept around it.
• 11:20
  Roy Osing: In my world, what we had to do around customer caring is we translated what that meant to every function and every human being in the organization.
• 11:28
  Roy Osing: And I got to tell you, that took a while, but the results, yeah, I mean, I had thousands of people in this organization, right?
• 11:35
  Roy Osing: But the results were just amazing because first of all, this was my army of advocates.
• 11:40
  Roy Osing: These people were advocates of the journey because they had a role in a conversation about what they had to do to execute.
• 11:47
  Roy Osing: And so they had a say in that.
• 11:49
  Roy Osing: And at the end of the day, dysfunction in the organization didn't exist for the most part.
• 11:53
  Roy Osing: I mean, it always exists to a degree.
• 11:55
  Roy Osing: But it's because when I asked the salesperson, what's your role?
• 11:59
  Roy Osing: Boom.
• 11:59
  Roy Osing: Marketing.
• 12:00
  Roy Osing: Boom.
• 12:00
  Roy Osing: Internal audit.
• 12:01
  Roy Osing: Boom.
• 12:02
  Roy Osing: Credit and collections.
• 12:03
  Roy Osing: Boom.
• 12:04
  Roy Osing: Advertising.
• 12:04
  Roy Osing: Everybody got it.
• 12:06
  Roy Osing: And so, when they got it, the execution piece flowed rather nicely and we scaled.
• 12:11
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 12:11
  Roy Osing: You want a secret to scaling?
• 12:12
  Roy Osing: That's it.
• 12:13
  Tom Jackobs: Get everybody on the boat, rowing in the same direction and knowing the language and yeah.
• 12:19
  Tom Jackobs: I like that concept of, you know, the customer caring well, how, give us a sense of how long it took for that idea to filter down to the rest of the organization.
• 12:29
  Roy Osing: Yeah.
• 12:29
  Roy Osing: It took a while.
• 12:30
  Roy Osing: I mean, we're talking cultural I mean, this business that, that I was asked to lead was actually sitting in a monopoly telephone company.
• 12:38
  Roy Osing: At a time when the internet just started coming, right?
• 12:42
  Roy Osing: So we were seeing this amazing technology coming in and I was asked to you know, get the rewards of this business.
• 12:48
  Roy Osing: Well, so it was basically, you're a monopoly.
• 12:52
  Roy Osing: You need to be a competitive powerhouse.
• 12:54
  Roy Osing: You are technology driven.
• 12:55
  Roy Osing: You had to be customer driven.
• 12:57
  Roy Osing: Right.
• 12:57
  Roy Osing: You're engineering dominated.
• 12:59
  Roy Osing: You need to be customer service frontline dominated.
• 13:01
  Roy Osing: So it was a metamorphosis of huge proportions that had to be made here and so, that, that did not happen overnight.
• 13:09
  Roy Osing: Okay.
• 13:09
  Roy Osing: And it's like a series of nano inch.
• 13:11
  Roy Osing: Is basically and as a leader, I find it found it extremely exhausting and extremely painful.
• 13:19
  Roy Osing: That's when I actually learned that pain, Tom, is a strategic concept.
• 13:23
  Roy Osing: It just because if you can't tolerate the pain going through this kind of a change, get out of the room because nothing's going to happen.
• 13:29
  Roy Osing: And so I don't know exactly how it was almost like one of these things that like, you kind of know it when you're, when you feel like you're sort of there, like, I don't know how you define always all there and it didn't matter because I kept looking at the top line because I measure everything in top line.
• 13:45
  Roy Osing: I mean, not doing goosebumps because it's a cool thing to do.
• 13:48
  Roy Osing: I did boost goosebumps because it drove performance.
• 13:50
  Roy Osing: And so as long as the top line was kicking up and up, I'm thinking, okay.
• 13:55
  Roy Osing: We're doing the right things.
• 13:56
  Roy Osing: People are buying in.
• 13:57
  Roy Osing: The culture is changing.
• 13:59
  Roy Osing: Although I've been asked on podcasts, what were the metrics?
• 14:02
  Roy Osing: And I say, ah, come on, give me a break." I don't have metrics on goosebumps, but I can show you what the top of, by the way, that business today is 18 billion a year.
• 14:10
  Roy Osing: And I like to think that our team had a little bit of influence in that, just getting the run rate going, you know, but yeah, it was and it required a constant intervention.
• 14:20
  Roy Osing: Okay.
• 14:21
  Roy Osing: A leadership sort of quality in here that sort of comes through is intervention.
• 14:25
  Roy Osing: And to your point earlier, spotting things, right, that need to be dealt with.
• 14:31
  Roy Osing: And challenges on the moment, in the moment, that have to be dealt with.
• 14:34
  Roy Osing: You can't do that as a leader if you're not engaged, if you're not embedded.
• 14:39
  Roy Osing: In the workforce, you're going to be useless as a leader in this kind of a change, right?
• 14:45
  Roy Osing: You may get away from it in other kinds of businesses where you're just kind of managing momentum, but if you want to make a difference, right?
• 14:51
  Roy Osing: And you want to make huge changes, you got to be embedded.
• 14:54
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah, absolutely.
• 14:55
  Tom Jackobs: And about the customer carrying strategy, there also an employee's carrying strategy as well?
• 15:01
  Roy Osing: No, one was a function of the other.
• 15:02
  Roy Osing: I never led with, you see, this is the point I want to make with you is that it's not about developing a Heart-Led business.
• 15:08
  Roy Osing: It's about developing a growth machine.
• 15:10
  Roy Osing: Okay, employing the right tactics, the Heart-Led piece, the people piece was a means to an end.
• 15:16
  Roy Osing: Okay, it wasn't the end result.
• 15:18
  Roy Osing: And that's part of the issue that I have with some organizations today, because they declare that they want to be put people before profit.
• 15:25
  Roy Osing: I didn't come from that perspective.
• 15:26
  Roy Osing: I had this vision that said, our job, my job, okay, is to drive front line, is to drive top line revenue and the only way we could do it was to capture the hearts and minds and souls of people.
• 15:39
  Roy Osing: Okay, so it was a means to an end.
• 15:41
  Roy Osing: That defines Heart-Led business to me.
• 15:43
  Roy Osing: You're not being heart-led because it's a cool idea.
• 15:46
  Roy Osing: You're being heart-led because it's a means to an end.
• 15:49
  Roy Osing: We're not paid to pump hearts.
• 15:51
  Roy Osing: We're paid to drive results.
• 15:53
  Roy Osing: And the only way to do that, in my experience, was to have a customer caring strategy.
• 15:58
  Roy Osing: Again, it's customer focused that required human being lovers, right?
• 16:02
  Roy Osing: And leaders who serve those people and that was the culture of peace.
• 16:06
  Roy Osing: And so that's where the heart led kind of dimension starts to exude.
• 16:11
  Roy Osing: It's at that level, but I didn't start out saying, you know, I'm here to make people feel good.
• 16:15
  Roy Osing: No, that wasn't it.
• 16:16
  Roy Osing: But they did feel good.
• 16:17
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 16:18
  Tom Jackobs: Well, and that's an interesting perspective and quite contrarian.
• 16:22
  Tom Jackobs: So that's kind of your theme a lot of heart led business owners are empathetic usually in the health and wellness industry and they go into it because of a passion and a heart- led and it's that profit piece that is secondary and usually non-existent until they learn that Well, I need to make a profit.
• 16:41
  Tom Jackobs: I need to be able to help more people and I can't help more people if I'm not in business anymore.
• 16:45
  Tom Jackobs: And it becomes a challenge for them.
• 16:46
  Tom Jackobs: And I think if people have the thought process of, to drive top end growth and I'm going to do it with heart that's the best way of building that, that growth in the company.
• 16:55
  Tom Jackobs: I think that mindset shift do really well for people that are struggling with the heart led, just to be heart- led.
• 17:02
  Roy Osing: I love that.
• 17:03
  Roy Osing: I mean, you explained it very well, and I agree with you a hundred percent, but I think there's a reason for that, Tom.
• 17:09
  Roy Osing: I mean, people are caught up in the narratives of the day.
• 17:11
  Roy Osing: They're caught up in the gee whiz stuff of the day.
• 17:14
  Roy Osing: They're told you gotta use social media.
• 17:16
  Roy Osing: They're told that you gotta use AI.
• 17:19
  Roy Osing: They're told that you got to use all sorts of things.
• 17:21
  Roy Osing: And one of the things they're told because it satisfies the narrative is you need to put people before profit.
• 17:27
  Roy Osing: That's what they're told.
• 17:28
  Roy Osing: Okay.
• 17:28
  Roy Osing: Now I'm not making this up.
• 17:29
  Roy Osing: It's there.
• 17:30
  Roy Osing: You can see it and feel it.
• 17:31
  Roy Osing: And I've, you're my 105th podcast in the last 18 months.
• 17:35
  Roy Osing: So let me tell you, I hear a lot of that.
• 17:37
  Roy Osing: Okay.
• 17:37
  Roy Osing: I hear a lot of that.
• 17:38
  Roy Osing: And all I say is, You, it's a means to an end.
• 17:41
  Roy Osing: You have to do that as a way to perform.
• 17:44
  Roy Osing: And if you thought about taking care of people and caring for people and hiring caregivers, if you thought about it in that context, you will do a great job at achieving both.
• 17:53
  Roy Osing: Okay, because in my experience, the engagement of my teams went through the roof.
• 17:59
  Roy Osing: Now that didn't happen because we weren't heart led.
• 18:01
  Roy Osing: It happened because we had an army of advocates who believed in the journey, who were taken care of, who had leaders who actually cared what they have to say and measured their teams on how well we delivered into those frontline and employee aspirations and requirements.
• 18:19
  Roy Osing: And so, yeah, I mean, look at the end of the day, nobody's going to say, well done, Tom, your heart-led if you go broke.
• 18:25
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 18:25
  Roy Osing: Right?
• 18:26
  Roy Osing: Who's going to thank you?
• 18:27
  Roy Osing: Like get real, guys.
• 18:28
  Roy Osing: Come on, get real.
• 18:29
  Roy Osing: I mean, our job as leaders is to drive performance and growth.
• 18:34
  Roy Osing: What do you think economies will actually thrive?
• 18:37
  Roy Osing: On Heart-Led only, it won't, but it will thrive.
• 18:39
  Roy Osing: It will thrive if you do the right thing for people and the right thing for customers under a caring strategy.
• 18:46
  Roy Osing: It will drive loyalty.
• 18:47
  Roy Osing: It will drive growth and it will drive an army of advocates that pushes employee engagement through the roof.
• 18:53
  Roy Osing: Trust me.
• 18:54
  Roy Osing: I've done this.
• 18:54
  Roy Osing: It works.
• 18:55
  Roy Osing: This is not theoretical mumbo jumbo.
• 18:57
  Roy Osing: This is a real stuff.
• 18:58
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah.
• 18:59
  Tom Jackobs: And it's, and your message to be heard loud and clear as well, because, and that's the point of the podcast here too, is business side is a big part of it because you can't help people.
• 19:10
  Tom Jackobs: You can't have customers if you're not in business, if you're not taking care your business and your, and profit is part of that and people need to be okay with making a profit and charging what they're worth.
• 19:21
  Roy Osing: So let's change the conversation as of right now.
• 19:23
  Roy Osing: Let's not talk about profit, because to be honest with you, I was never driven by the bottom line, because I can take an income statement and I, just like you can, and I can manipulate it to give you what you want.
• 19:33
  Roy Osing: What I can't do is I cannot run and hide from top line revenue.
• 19:37
  Roy Osing: Top line is an expression of how people feel about the value you're delivering.
• 19:42
  Roy Osing: Let me repeat that.
• 19:43
  Roy Osing: Top line revenue, okay, is an expression of how your customers feel about the value you're providing.
• 19:50
  Roy Osing: It's exactly what we need to focus on.
• 19:52
  Roy Osing: So how do we grow top line revenue?
• 19:54
  Roy Osing: We need a customer caring strategy that creates gasp worthy experiences, loyal customers, referrals that will go through the roof.
• 20:03
  Roy Osing: How do we do that?
• 20:04
  Roy Osing: We need employees.
• 20:05
  Roy Osing: Who like human beings.
• 20:07
  Roy Osing: It breaks down to that.
• 20:09
  Roy Osing: All right, how do we do that?
• 20:10
  Roy Osing: Well, the recruitment piece is huge.
• 20:12
  Roy Osing: And all of these other sort of programs that I put in place.
• 20:16
  Roy Osing: Silly little things like hiring for Goosebumps.
• 20:18
  Roy Osing: All of those things come together and the fire starts to light.
• 20:22
  Roy Osing: The engagement goes up and guess what that results in?
• 20:25
  Roy Osing: Top line growth.
• 20:25
  Tom Jackobs: Not profit top growth, right?
• 20:27
  Tom Jackobs: Now that, that's good distinction.
• 20:29
  Tom Jackobs: And you know, my, my business experience at the very beginning of my fitness business, I was very focused on the top line growth almost to, well, not almost to a fault because I also wasn't looking at the outgoing as well and got into a lot of trouble, but also at the same time, I think I was so focused on money side of it and not the heart side of it.
• 20:52
  Tom Jackobs: And once I got into that little financial problem, then it clicked on click that I needed to have a better strategy and, you know, really put the people first and serve them because I was bringing in so much revenue that the business just looked chaotic almost.
• 21:08
  Tom Jackobs: And so for a lot of people they, well, this is really busy here, but, you know, it seems chaotic.
• 21:13
  Tom Jackobs: And once I simplified the business, the top line came down a little bit, but the profit got a lot better as well.
• 21:18
  Tom Jackobs: And then people got happier and then, you know, the top line started to grow again.
• 21:22
  Roy Osing: Well, I mean, there's mechanics have to be dealt with.
• 21:25
  Roy Osing: I'll call them mechanics.
• 21:26
  Roy Osing: Okay.
• 21:26
  Roy Osing: You know, for every dollars worth of growth and the top line, I mean, our job is to make sure that we preserve the amount that gets to the bottom.
• 21:34
  Roy Osing: I mean, that's going to happen, but you don't lead your business with maximizing EBITDA.
• 21:39
  Roy Osing: You just don't.
• 21:40
  Roy Osing: Right?
• 21:40
  Roy Osing: You just don't.
• 21:41
  Roy Osing: But it's, it is a consideration.
• 21:42
  Roy Osing: And so if you had five hours of the day, where would you spend the five hours?
• 21:46
  Roy Osing: I'd say you spend four of them, okay, on the customer caring strategy, and you take 60 minutes and make sure that 80 cents out of every dollar with the top line is getting to you.
• 21:55
  Roy Osing: I mean, you just do that, but that's not a strategy.
• 21:57
  Roy Osing: That's business mechanics, right?
• 21:59
  Roy Osing: I mean, one of the things I had to do is throw away traditional strategic planning 101 because it wasn't working for me.
• 22:06
  Roy Osing: I had to create my own, what I call, strategic game planning process that literally can be done in 48 hours.
• 22:13
  Roy Osing: In fact, I work with generally small to medium sized businesses to do this, right?
• 22:17
  Roy Osing: Because they don't think they have time to work on their business.
• 22:20
  Roy Osing: They're so busy working day to day in it.
• 22:22
  Roy Osing: And so the process is really simple.
• 22:24
  Roy Osing: It answers 3 questions.
• 22:25
  Roy Osing: How big do you want to be in terms of top line in 24 months?
• 22:28
  Roy Osing: Not 5 years.
• 22:29
  Roy Osing: 5 year plans don't exist because the 4th year, you know, never shows up, right?
• 22:33
  Roy Osing: It just a hockey stick prevails.
• 22:35
  Roy Osing: The second question, who do you want to serve?
• 22:37
  Roy Osing: Okay.
• 22:37
  Roy Osing: We're not in mass markets.
• 22:39
  Roy Osing: Pick the customer group, right?
• 22:40
  Roy Osing: That you think has the potential to deliver your growth goals and then take the next step and figure out what they crave, not what they need.
• 22:48
  Roy Osing: Needs are, you know, they're chased by everybody and it leads to price competition and it's a silly place.
• 22:54
  Roy Osing: Cravings.
• 22:55
  Roy Osing: Yeah.
• 22:55
  Roy Osing: On the other hand, or what does Tom desire?
• 22:58
  Roy Osing: What is he lust for?
• 22:59
  Roy Osing: What is, you know, what is he at that level?
• 23:02
  Roy Osing: And then the fourth thing is how are you going to compete and win that customer group.
• 23:05
  Roy Osing: And that's all about differential advantage.
• 23:07
  Roy Osing: And I had to create my own process called the only statement, because there's too many people claiming to be better and best and leaders.
• 23:13
  Roy Osing: And that's what I call claptrap.
• 23:15
  Roy Osing: What you need to be is the only one who does what you do.
• 23:18
  Roy Osing: The only one who does what you do.
• 23:20
  Roy Osing: So to make a long story short, we delivered a strategy built around that model and it was brilliant.
• 23:25
  Roy Osing: It didn't take long to do.
• 23:27
  Roy Osing: We looked at it every four months.
• 23:29
  Roy Osing: Right?
• 23:29
  Roy Osing: Because you had to keep execution in mind all the time and, you know, your pulse on the metrics, etc.
• 23:35
  Roy Osing: And so that's how we breathe life into this.
• 23:37
  Roy Osing: I mean, we tripped up on the service strategy and we missed things, etc.
• 23:41
  Roy Osing: But because we were kind of like hands on, we were able to catch it, re vector it, you know, and sort of then move on.
• 23:48
  Roy Osing: Correct the missteps because in this world, missteps are a part of the bargain you have as a leader.
• 23:54
  Roy Osing: You're going to make missteps and the only thing that you have to make sure of, you don't make the same misstep twice.
• 24:00
  Roy Osing: That's all, you know, other than I don't go for it.
• 24:02
  Roy Osing: And so I think organizations today are so tied up in that intellectual exercise that they're not able to get to the heartfelt thing.
• 24:10
  Roy Osing: They're too busy trying to perfect the plan.
• 24:12
  Roy Osing: So simplify the plan to your point.
• 24:13
  Tom Jackobs: Analysis.
• 24:14
  Tom Jackobs: Paralysis at a grand scale, almost.
• 24:17
  Roy Osing: It is.
• 24:17
  Tom Jackobs: That's great.
• 24:18
  Tom Jackobs: And again, going back to that customer your customer carrying strategy, I love that.
• 24:23
  Tom Jackobs: And I think that's really the main point.
• 24:26
  Tom Jackobs: I'd love to drive home on this episode for the listeners is that, that type of strategy is going to take people along and especially the crave finding out what people are really craving and yeah that's great.
• 24:38
  Tom Jackobs: That's some really good golden nuggets.
• 24:39
  Roy Osing: Let me give you a quick story.
• 24:41
  Roy Osing: You want stories about, about the craving, So I'm doing a strategic game plan process with his boat selling company in Toronto, Canada.
• 24:50
  Roy Osing: And the CEO gives me a call and says, Roy, I got to take my business to another level.
• 24:54
  Roy Osing: I'm not growing.
• 24:55
  Roy Osing: See, most people will come to me because they're not growing their business, right?
• 24:59
  Roy Osing: Not because they want a particular strategy.
• 25:01
  Roy Osing: Underneath it at the top line, they're not growing.
• 25:03
  Roy Osing: So I said, fine.
• 25:04
  Roy Osing: So we took a look at their business.
• 25:05
  Roy Osing: So, so their business is selling boats to boat dealers.
• 25:09
  Roy Osing: So they're using dealers as a way to get to the end user mark, right?
• 25:12
  Roy Osing: And he's not growing fast.
• 25:13
  Roy Osing: So we went through my process.
• 25:14
  Roy Osing: How big do you want to be?
• 25:16
  Roy Osing: Who do you want to serve?
• 25:17
  Roy Osing: And we actually focused.
• 25:19
  Roy Osing: All right, on the boat dealers that actually had pretty good potential.
• 25:22
  Roy Osing: Well, that reduced the market they were busy in considerably.
• 25:26
  Roy Osing: And then we looked at the question, what do those boat dealers crave?
• 25:29
  Roy Osing: Well, the conversation at first was all about what they crave.
• 25:33
  Roy Osing: In terms of boats, and they were having a hard time because I said to them, look it, the boat dealer doesn't crave boats that don't stay afloat.
• 25:40
  Roy Osing: They kind of expect that the boats will float and they expect that the electronics will work.
• 25:45
  Roy Osing: I said, okay, I want to know about that.
• 25:46
  Roy Osing: What kept it, what kept them awake at night was the fact that they were afraid.
• 25:50
  Roy Osing: That they would go out of business because they would lose the ability to grow their business.
• 25:55
  Roy Osing: Right?
• 25:55
  Roy Osing: So I said, okay, why don't we work with that?
• 25:58
  Roy Osing: Right?
• 25:59
  Roy Osing: What if we said we're the only ones?
• 26:01
  Roy Osing: Who provided, we are the only customer service partner who were able to help boat dealers grow their business.
• 26:10
  Roy Osing: And at first they looked at that and they go, yeah, but we sell boats.
• 26:12
  Roy Osing: I said, no, because that's not a source of advantage for you.
• 26:15
  Roy Osing: The craving piece has got nothing to do with boats.
• 26:18
  Roy Osing: And so we reframed their business.
• 26:20
  Roy Osing: And so now they're in the business development business, Tom, with these boat dealers.
• 26:25
  Roy Osing: Their job is to grow top line and solve inventory problems, etc.
• 26:30
  Roy Osing: Things that you wouldn't expect a boat seller to do.
• 26:33
  Roy Osing: And in fact, quite frankly, they're the only ones that are doing that.
• 26:36
  Roy Osing: They have an amazing competitive advantage and the other boat dealers are going, huh?
• 26:40
  Roy Osing: Huh?
• 26:42
  Roy Osing: What's going on over there?
• 26:43
  Roy Osing: And so it's a good example of actually our minds get trapped into thinking about our business a certain way.
• 26:49
  Roy Osing: I mean, I got a landscaper who thought that they were doing, they were mowing lawns for a business.
• 26:54
  Roy Osing: They now believe they're in the property development business.
• 26:57
  Roy Osing: And the reason that works for them, right, is they know other sort of trades and contractors that actually work on buildings.
• 27:04
  Roy Osing: They know painters, they know plumbers.
• 27:06
  Roy Osing: They, so I, we simply said, look at let's craft the business a different way, right?
• 27:10
  Roy Osing: And build it around cravings.
• 27:12
  Roy Osing: So that you're absolutely right and thank you for catching that.
• 27:15
  Roy Osing: cravings piece is a huge trigger that people simply, aren't being taught quite frankly, other than this kind of conversation and it's so important for business success.
• 27:24
  Tom Jackobs: If listeners want to check out episode 45 of the show, I had a guest Lori Werner to that point her first job was actually a medical device sales.
• 27:34
  Tom Jackobs: So she would be in the operating room with the doctors.
• 27:36
  Tom Jackobs: And one way for her to sell more of the devices was to do marketing.
• 27:43
  Tom Jackobs: And social media management for the doctors so that they got more patients into the operating room.
• 27:48
  Tom Jackobs: and that's exactly, that's what they craved.
• 27:50
  Tom Jackobs: It was more patients.
• 27:51
  Tom Jackobs: That's what kept them up at night, the doctors.
• 27:54
  Tom Jackobs: And so her solution to sell more of what she had was to do the marketing for the doctor, which then blossomed into her starting a marketing agency.
• 28:02
  Tom Jackobs: So it's, when people do that, it's so brilliant and so, that business from kind of the core business.
• 28:09
  Roy Osing: That's.
• 28:09
  Roy Osing: That's, yeah, that's, I mean, at the end of the day, the differentiation piece is key because generally businesses do not do a good job.
• 28:16
  Roy Osing: As I said, I had to create the only statement is my mechanism to sort of drive away this whole tendency to get to claim things that are ridiculous, like you're better and best, because I don't know what that even means and it's claptrap, right?
• 28:28
  Roy Osing: And so when people talk about what they do, I'm always listening for, okay.
• 28:34
  Roy Osing: How does it answer the question?
• 28:35
  Roy Osing: Why should I do business with you and nobody else?
• 28:38
  Roy Osing: And normally the, and nobody else piece is missing.
• 28:42
  Roy Osing: It's because the comparative relative to competitors is missing because it's not taught, right?
• 28:47
  Roy Osing: If you go, you will check out any USP and I guarantee you, it will not relate to how they compare to the competition.
• 28:54
  Roy Osing: They just don't and yet business success is all about standing out, breaking away, not fitting in, not being part of the herd.
• 29:01
  Roy Osing: And so that huge, that's a huge piece.
• 29:03
  Roy Osing: That when people start to think about a caring strategy, you need to keep that in mind.
• 29:07
  Roy Osing: Because there's a lot of people who will who will declare that they're in the business of exceeding customer expectations.
• 29:13
  Roy Osing: Well, that's hogwash anyways.
• 29:15
  Roy Osing: I mean, it's so ethereal.
• 29:16
  Roy Osing: It's just like unbelievable.
• 29:18
  Roy Osing: You got to find a way to give it a little more substance, right?
• 29:21
  Roy Osing: It's a challenge.
• 29:21
  Tom Jackobs: Well, Roy, this has been an awesome conversation.
• 29:24
  Tom Jackobs: I think we could go on for hours as well, but our time is coming up.
• 29:28
  Tom Jackobs: How can people learn more about what you're doing and the great work that you have and get some more goosebumps coming their way?
• 29:34
  Roy Osing: Well, I don't know that they'll get goosebumps.
• 29:35
  Roy Osing: That's my hope maybe.
• 29:37
  Roy Osing: But I have a website, it's www.bedifferentorbedead.com.
• 29:40
  Roy Osing: So you can go there.
• 29:41
  Roy Osing: Look at, I've been kicking this stuff around since I wrote my first book in 2009, Tom.
• 29:45
  Roy Osing: So this, a lot of people think this is new and I think that's kind of like my failure that they think it's new because I haven't done a good job spreading my word and having conversations like this to make people more aware.
• 29:55
  Roy Osing: So I've been blogging since 09.
• 29:57
  Roy Osing: So the content on Be Different or Be Dead and the sort of things that we're talking about now, service strategies, caring strategies, you know, strategic game plan.
• 30:06
  Roy Osing: It's all on my blog, so you can just go in there and search on a name and you'll get lots of content.
• 30:10
  Roy Osing: I've written seven books.
• 30:11
  Roy Osing: My latest is called Be Different or Be Dead, The Audacious Unheard of Ways I Took a Startup to a Billion in Sales.
• 30:17
  Roy Osing: That book is there and that six other ones, some ebooks, if you wanted to check those out, but look at the end of the day, I've also got an email address.
• 30:24
  Roy Osing: It's roy.osing@gmail.com.
• 30:27
  Roy Osing: And I love to have people give me a, send me an email and have a personal conversation with what's going on for them.
• 30:34
  Roy Osing: I have people who send me an email and they say, Hey, Roy, I've just created my only statement.
• 30:38
  Roy Osing: What do you think about this?
• 30:40
  Roy Osing: And it's.
• 30:40
  Roy Osing: Awesome.
• 30:41
  Roy Osing: It's a great way to to actually coach and hopefully add one to the army of be different or be dead advocates that, that I'm so intent of creating.
• 30:50
  Roy Osing: You know, at the end of the day, I want to be able to take that glut of humans in the Bell distribution curve, right in the middle, right?
• 30:57
  Roy Osing: And move them two points, Tom, just two points to the right.
• 31:00
  Roy Osing: Imagine towards more differentiation, more customer caring.
• 31:04
  Roy Osing: Imagine what would happen in the world if we were able to do that.
• 31:08
  Tom Jackobs: That would be amazing.
• 31:09
  Tom Jackobs: There would be a lot of great companies out there.
• 31:12
  Roy Osing: Oh, would there ever be?
• 31:13
  Roy Osing: There would be more Lady Gagas out there, right?
• 31:16
  Roy Osing: You know, with websites for their little monsters.
• 31:19
  Roy Osing: They would have all sorts of fun and caring and people would be engaged.
• 31:23
  Roy Osing: There would be less unemployment.
• 31:25
  Roy Osing: There would be more GDP because performance would be going through.
• 31:28
  Roy Osing: I mean, see, why can't we do this?
• 31:30
  Tom Jackobs: That's interesting.
• 31:31
  Tom Jackobs: Yeah, I think we can.
• 31:32
  Tom Jackobs: And they're going to help us get there, but Roy, thank so for sharing your wisdom with us.
• 31:36
  Tom Jackobs: I really appreciate it.
• 31:37
  Tom Jackobs: And I know our listeners as well.
• 31:39
  Roy Osing: You're very welcome.
• 31:40
  Roy Osing: My pleasure.
• 31:41
  Tom Jackobs: And listeners, thank you for watching or listening to the show today.
• 31:44
  Tom Jackobs: I certainly appreciate it.
• 31:45
  Tom Jackobs: I know Roy appreciates it as well, but make sure that you're checking out everything that Roy is doing.
• 31:50
  Tom Jackobs: And all that's going to be linked up into the show notes.
• 31:53
  Tom Jackobs: We'll put links to his website as well as the book and make sure you check that out and send him an email.
• 31:59
  Tom Jackobs: I mean, he just offered that.
• 32:00
  Tom Jackobs: So, take a mop on that for sure.
• 32:02
  Tom Jackobs: And then if you could, while you're on the computer, if you could do me a solid favor and give the show a rating and review that helps spread the word about The Heart Led Business Show and help some people that could use the advice shared on today's show.
• 32:13
  Tom Jackobs: And until next time, lead with your heart.
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: You've been listening to the Heart Led Business Show, hosted by Tom Jackobs.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: Join us next time for another inspiring journey into the heart of business.