Latest / The Breakout CEO / 48 - The Leadership Shift That Took This CEO From Survival to Scale

Transcript

48 - The Leadership Shift That Took This CEO From Survival to Scale · The Breakout CEO

• 0:00
  If you focus on your inner game, the outer game solves itself.
• 0:03
  If you want people to reach their economic potential, well,
• 0:06
  the first thing you got to do is to get them to stop thinking about economics.
• 0:09
  If your goal is to stay the same, there's no vision.
• 0:13
  You're not really leading anywhere where you're leading people to what be the same.
• 0:17
  Welcome back, everybody, to the breakout CEO podcast.
• 0:20
  I'm your host, Jeff Holeman.
• 0:21
  I'm here with Mike Chaput.
• 0:23
  Mike, welcome to the show.
• 0:25
  Thank you Jeff. Pleasure to be here.
• 0:26
  Yeah.
• 0:27
  It's so good to have you.
• 0:28
  Mike, you are the CEO of insight.
• 0:30
  You've been doing that for a while.
• 0:32
  It's a managed service provider, right? And,
• 0:36
  Well, I want to ask now, because we were just talking on
• 0:38
  the icebreaker questions earlier about, family stuff you've been, doing.
• 0:45
  I have to do the math that you've been doing, and,
• 0:48
  insight for about as long as you've been married.
• 0:51
  Now like it? They're competing, aren't they?
• 0:54
  Not quite so.
• 0:56
  So the the the rough outline is,
• 1:00
  I actually had a company that
• 1:02
  I was the CEO of before insight that was called PXE networks.
• 1:06
  That was four and a half years, and I ended up going bankrupt.
• 1:10
  So insight was started in 2004.
• 1:14
  My company, the first company
• 1:15
  that I did, which was an IT systems integrator,
• 1:19
  that we ran from, from basically from 2000 to 2004.
• 1:23
  And I was married in 2002.
• 1:25
  So, you know, you can kind of put the pieces together
• 1:28
  there, but I, I was I was a partner, not married with my wife.
• 1:32
  You know, we were, in a serious relationship since, like, what was it?
• 1:37
  Probably 98, I think was when we started.
• 1:39
  Okay. To date. Seriously.
• 1:40
  So that's fantastic.
• 1:43
  I've been married supercedes all of the business stuff,
• 1:45
  but the marriage kind of intersects in there.
• 1:47
  I mean, she's she's still around. She's.
• 1:49
  And she's been through, I'm sure, the good and the bad.
• 1:52
  You know, you mentioned a, failed business or a bankruptcy.
• 1:55
  That's that's a tough time.
• 1:56
  And she's still, you know, so that's the good, the bad.
• 1:58
  That's the bankruptcy.
• 2:00
  That's the ugly. Yeah.
• 2:02
  Well, you're not the only one to go through it.
• 2:04
  So we'll talk today and maybe, maybe hear some of your thoughts about,
• 2:07
  what you've learned along the way.
• 2:08
  But, as we get into this, give, give the audience a little flavor
• 2:12
  about where insight is today, what you've you know,
• 2:17
  what you're running, what you're managing, and what it looks like.
• 2:20
  So insights in the IT managed services space.
• 2:24
  So if anybody knows doesn't know about that
• 2:27
  it's a super highly competitive space.
• 2:30
  So I think there are maybe a thousand different companies
• 2:32
  that do what we do in every major urban area.
• 2:35
  You know, like in the Bay area, it's one of our areas.
• 2:38
  There might be, you know, a thousand different options.
• 2:41
  Most of them are incredibly small.
• 2:43
  You know, there's a lot of five men in my shop, tons of ten
• 2:46
  men in LA shop and and a handful of 20 people or less shop.
• 2:51
  It's it's dominated by small people.
• 2:53
  You can you can see this and there's, you know, at
• 2:55
  one point in time, one of the major software companies went public.
• 2:58
  And so they shared their data in a public report.
• 3:00
  You could just see this is like
• 3:01
  really weird curve where it's just like, everybody's really small.
• 3:05
  In the last five years, the private equity people have come into the space.
• 3:08
  And so now what you have is this really strange?
• 3:11
  Dynamic where you have tons and tons of really small companies
• 3:14
  and a handful of really large national companies, which
• 3:18
  are really kind of, acquisitions of, you know, they're
• 3:22
  just basically a bunch of the small ones kind of compiled up into one.
• 3:25
  Yeah.
• 3:26
  And say, this is quite rare.
• 3:29
  We're not we're not totally unique, but we're probably there.
• 3:33
  Maybe if I, you know, I'm pretty.
• 3:35
  I've been in the industry for more than 20 years, and,
• 3:38
  but there's maybe like 20 or 30 of us,
• 3:41
  so we're 140 employees.
• 3:44
  Which is not big for a normal company, but for an independently owned managed
• 3:47
  services company, we're one of the largest in the in the nation.
• 3:51
  So, that's really strange, but it's hard to grow in this space
• 3:55
  because, again, there's no competitive barriers to entry in it.
• 3:58
  It's, unregulated.
• 3:59
  There's no capital barrier.
• 4:00
  So anybody can enter it.
• 4:02
  That makes it very difficult to scale.
• 4:05
  And so, we're about 35 million
• 4:07
  in total revenues, 400 customers.
• 4:12
  And, so, yeah,
• 4:14
  it's unique to be able to have and we own our own capital table.
• 4:17
  So it's basically my business partner and I, my co-founder and I pretty much we,
• 4:22
  we own the whole company between the two of us.
• 4:24
  So that's the
• 4:27
  a little bit of a skeleton story on that.
• 4:29
  You've been bootstrapping since, since before bootstrapping
• 4:32
  was in in style, out of style and coming back in style now.
• 4:36
  Yeah, exactly.
• 4:37
  So, like, bell bottom jeans, you know, it's coming exact.
• 4:41
  Exactly. Back in style again?
• 4:43
  Yes. Well. That's fantastic. So.
• 4:46
  So why is it so rare in the industry that that your size of business exists?
• 4:49
  Is it just too easy for people to split off once they feel
• 4:52
  like they can do what they, you know, what the company they work for is doing?
• 4:56
  Or is it because the acquisitions have been sucking up
• 4:59
  people, you know, past this point of operation?
• 5:02
  Like what? What makes it so unique?
• 5:05
  So, you know, I think it's I think it's
• 5:08
  Michael Gerber who wrote the book, about the entrepreneur seizures.
• 5:12
  Did you ever read that book is a part of MF?
• 5:14
  I don't remember the phrase. That's it. That's okay. Yeah.
• 5:17
  So that when I read that, it was like, oh yeah, that's that's our industry.
• 5:20
  So it's basically a bunch of technicians,
• 5:24
  you know, who one day decided that they needed to run their own companies
• 5:28
  and have these people with technical skills
• 5:30
  who are the founder CEOs of these companies, but they they don't
• 5:33
  actually have all the disciplines necessary to run a great business.
• 5:37
  They don't understand finance, marketing, sales, operations, management.
• 5:41
  They basically know technology.
• 5:43
  And so, and
• 5:46
  and candidly, I, you know, I don't want to insult anyone.
• 5:49
  Sometimes they don't even know that very well.
• 5:51
  And, yeah.
• 5:52
  And so and a lot of them don't want to know.
• 5:53
  They don't necessarily want to spend their time on the on running the business.
• 5:56
  Right. That's not what they've done that they're familiar with.
• 5:59
  I think the, the legal industry that I'm in.
• 6:02
  Lawyers are a lot the same way.
• 6:04
  You know you become a legal expert, but you're expected someday to be
• 6:08
  you know, do business development if you're going to become a partner
• 6:12
  or whatever, if you start your own law firm.
• 6:13
  But until then, you get you get to just do the work, be the technical expert.
• 6:18
  So there's so there's even a problem on that dimension.
• 6:21
  So there's literally no regulatory barrier.
• 6:25
  There's no legal bar, there's no law school.
• 6:27
  So I'd like to do what we do is just complete utter wild West.
• 6:32
  There's no code.
• 6:33
  You know, if you think about like, everything else, like,
• 6:34
  you know, if somebody is going to set up a firewall,
• 6:38
  they there's
• 6:39
  nobody's checking to make sure they're certified on that technology.
• 6:42
  Yeah.
• 6:43
  There's there's no code
• 6:44
  or somebody that comes in and inspects that is properly done.
• 6:47
  It's just total wild West and the consumer is
• 6:50
  a bad proxy for quality.
• 6:53
  So what that means is that they choose on price way too often, which means that the
• 6:58
  the lowest, the low cost leaders who are doing poor quality don't just die
• 7:02
  like you know, you'd expect.
• 7:03
  Well, if there were if capitalism were working,
• 7:06
  then the poor quality people would just go out of business.
• 7:08
  But the it's very, very difficult.
• 7:11
  And even when things go wrong, the consumer doesn't understand why.
• 7:14
  So, you know, it's it's just it's a,
• 7:17
  it's a gnarly place to, to compete on, on a lot of dimensions.
• 7:20
  And so to do it well and to do it right and to build a brand
• 7:24
  and to build a reputation and to scale customers
• 7:26
  and to scale employees and all that is, it's a
• 7:29
  it's a it's an incredibly difficult market with which to do it.
• 7:32
  And, and so that's why so few people have done it well.
• 7:36
  So let's go back to 2004 then.
• 7:38
  I mean,
• 7:39
  what was your story to get into if there's there's not really a barrier to entry?
• 7:42
  And I think we
• 7:43
  might be talking about barriers to entry later on in your story too.
• 7:46
  But but if there's not a barrier to entry, what kind of tell me
• 7:49
  what was what prompted you to go into this industry?
• 7:52
  Was it something you'd been working in or was it.
• 7:54
  Yeah. So opportunity
• 7:57
  the there's a crazy lead up
• 7:59
  which I don't want to consume the whole podcast on, but I when I was 24,
• 8:04
  I took an SBA loan and I bought a company
• 8:07
  with a partner, the same partner, by the way, that I run and site with now.
• 8:11
  And that was a technology integrator.
• 8:14
  So the kind of the the idea, the revenue model was you would,
• 8:18
  take other people's technology, I think Lotus Notes, for example.
• 8:21
  Then you would deploy it or integrate it into the customer's business.
• 8:25
  So it was
• 8:27
  the other name for these companies were value added reseller.
• 8:29
  So you had to sell the technology and implement the technology
• 8:34
  and integrated in the into the business.
• 8:35
  And the for a bunch of structural reasons, it didn't survive.
• 8:39
  But we were we learned a lot about it and we learned a lot about sales.
• 8:43
  So when the when the company didn't survive,
• 8:46
  you know, we were kind of left without work and anything to do.
• 8:49
  But we kind of knew it and we kind of had technology
• 8:52
  vendor relationships and we kind of knew the Bay area marketplace.
• 8:56
  We were we are members of EO San Francisco.
• 8:58
  So we had kind of a pretty decent business social network with which to kind of
• 9:02
  scrounge up customers.
• 9:04
  And we had the failed companies carcass, which were
• 9:07
  which had left some unmet demands to that we might be able
• 9:10
  to figure out if they still needed help on certain demands.
• 9:13
  And so we figured out how to fashion a business together.
• 9:17
  It was
• 9:18
  super meager, you know, it was like five of us and,
• 9:22
  and we were basically just doing work
• 9:23
  for free, you know, was what it what it turned out,
• 9:27
  we were doing at that point in time, but, very shortly after I met,
• 9:32
  I met a guy, out of Philadelphia
• 9:35
  who was just an incredibly early pioneer in this.
• 9:38
  It managed services space.
• 9:40
  And, I met him at, kind of an industry kind of pure function.
• 9:46
  And, we actually shared
• 9:49
  financials, and I was just like, what is this?
• 9:52
  You know, like, how are you doing this?
• 9:54
  So he was ahead of you on the financial curve.
• 9:56
  Everything. Yeah. He had all this recurring revenue.
• 9:59
  And I was just like, what's going on here?
• 10:00
  So he, I, I begged him to let me come
• 10:03
  and do a site visit at his office, just outside of Philly.
• 10:07
  And my business partner, I flew there and we did a tour,
• 10:11
  and we just completely decided to, like, burn the ships on the classic
• 10:16
  IT consulting business, which was just kind of paying our bills
• 10:19
  and transform the business into the IT managed services space.
• 10:23
  And for a minute, it wasn't a high competitive business.
• 10:25
  You know, there wasn't
• 10:26
  there wasn't a lot of companies like this who were offering this model.
• 10:29
  So from like 2005, like 2009, we were doing things different enough
• 10:34
  where, the story was differentiating in and of itself.
• 10:38
  And then we started collecting customers and we started growing a nice little,
• 10:42
  little business.
• 10:43
  And we and we and we did a lot of the early learning.
• 10:46
  And then, you know, so, so by the time everybody entered that market,
• 10:50
  we were just a little bit better, you know, we had been doing it longer.
• 10:54
  We knew the tools better.
• 10:55
  We had we had a brand, we had some recurring revenue.
• 10:58
  And then we just built, kind of built the business,
• 11:01
  you know, from there.
• 11:02
  But, yeah, that's kind of how it got started.
• 11:05
  How big were you guys when when the industry started to really
• 11:08
  develop, when people started coming in, maybe in larger masses.
• 11:12
  So by 2008, 2009, we were we we had already grown the business.
• 11:18
  I want to say maybe somewhere in, in the like the 6 to 8
• 11:21
  million and annual revenues, almost like it was.
• 11:25
  It was all recurring.
• 11:27
  I mean, it wasn't all recurring.
• 11:29
  So you had these recurring contracts, but all of our project revenue came from
• 11:33
  the recurring service base is in a real, kind of predictable mathematical way.
• 11:38
  We knew we were going to get 20% hardware and software attachment.
• 11:43
  We make 20 points on that.
• 11:44
  We knew we were going to get 25% attachment on professional services.
• 11:48
  And we,
• 11:48
  you know, we can make a
• 11:50
  50 or 60% labor, a lot of gross margin on the professional services attachment.
• 11:54
  We could math it all out.
• 11:55
  And then the whole business came about not churning the base
• 11:58
  and finding new customers to to add
• 12:01
  on, which sounds simple, but, it's actually quite challenging
• 12:06
  because the the sales started to get really competitive.
• 12:10
  It was hard to differentiate.
• 12:12
  There was a lot of people coming in for, low prices
• 12:15
  and, and you're going to lose customers for, let's say,
• 12:20
  reasons that you can't control.
• 12:21
  They sell or, you know, they have their own
• 12:23
  financial issues and reasons you can't control.
• 12:25
  I mean, it's it's
• 12:27
  you have people who make mistakes and, and, and
• 12:30
  and you make and you make legitimate mistakes
• 12:32
  and the customer gets frustrated and leaves.
• 12:34
  And so, you know, you have to sort out your operations and constantly improve
• 12:38
  that while growing and accommodating and bringing on new people and training them.
• 12:42
  So, you know, it's just a typical business mess.
• 12:45
  And you got to organize it all and, and, and then to go to do that,
• 12:50
  you know, from five or 6 million to 8 million to 10 million to 12 million
• 12:54
  to 15 to 16, all the way to 35 million is, you know, it's a it's a grind.
• 12:59
  And, you got to be good at a lot of things.
• 13:03
  If you if you want to
• 13:04
  just kind of keep moving the, the ball forward
• 13:08
  and mostly you have to be great at creating customer value.
• 13:11
  And you have to also be great at making it valuable for the employee
• 13:14
  to want to want to work with you because you need the best people.
• 13:17
  And if you get the best people, you can create a lot of customer value.
• 13:20
  And if you can keep people motivated and keep customers happy, you can
• 13:23
  you can accomplish a lot.
• 13:25
  I want to dig into the the aspects of creating value for the customers
• 13:28
  and the and the employees that I think that's an area we should talk about.
• 13:32
  But before we get to that,
• 13:34
  as you look back, you know, I once had a, an employer
• 13:38
  when I was an intern coming out of engineering school, I worked at this firm
• 13:42
  where we designed, you know, power and lighting for buildings and places.
• 13:46
  And I talked to the owner frequently because it was a small firm.
• 13:49
  And he said, you know, Jeff, it was really easy to grow from, from 1 to 15 people.
• 13:53
  And it was really pretty easy to grow from 25 on.
• 13:58
  But 15 to 20, man, we started and restarted it
• 14:01
  and it like kicked our butts trying to grow from 15 to 20 people.
• 14:06
  Did you have some some times in there when you're like, man,
• 14:09
  it was so easy here.
• 14:11
  What what's keeping us from growing in this stage?
• 14:14
  Did that happen to you 100%?
• 14:16
  I couldn't tell you the exact number of people
• 14:21
  were where ceilings were hit, but there's there's definitely,
• 14:26
  Yeah,
• 14:26
  kind of like ceiling moments where you kind of get things organized
• 14:30
  for, for, for, let's say a certain volume of, of business
• 14:35
  and then to make it to the next volume requires
• 14:41
  changing your thinking, your philosophy, your identity.
• 14:45
  It requires taking risk, letting certain things go.
• 14:48
  You know, there was, there's a famous quote where it's like,
• 14:52
  and I don't remember the numbers, but it's like to go from 0 to 50 employees.
• 14:57
  You have to be willing to delegate all the stuff.
• 14:58
  You don't like, but to go to like 50 to 100,
• 15:01
  you have to start delegating the stuff you like.
• 15:03
  Oh, and, you know, that's like, you know,
• 15:06
  that was true for me because I,
• 15:10
  it wasn't hard for me to delegate the stuff I don't like, you know?
• 15:13
  But then what I was,
• 15:14
  I really did a lot of the sales, and I loved working with prospective clients.
• 15:18
  To me, it was just the problem solving exercise.
• 15:20
  I'd go in and I'd really identify what problems they were having,
• 15:24
  and I would know our solution set because, you know, as part of building it.
• 15:27
  And that would just
• 15:27
  kind of match them up and say, hey, look, we can all these things you describe,
• 15:31
  our customers don't experience those problems, and here's why.
• 15:34
  And we'd close a new deal. And that felt very rewarding.
• 15:37
  I enjoyed the work.
• 15:38
  I love making the new relationships, but I mean, eventually
• 15:42
  there's only so many, you know, there's a churn rate that you just can't avoid.
• 15:46
  And if there's a sales rate that you can't surpass,
• 15:48
  you're just going to hit a, you're going to hit a wall.
• 15:50
  So you have to essentially figure out how to build an organization
• 15:54
  that can do that same procedure successfully, so that you can scale.
• 15:59
  And that's, you know, that was, one of the things that I had to learn.
• 16:04
  But it wasn't just me, right?
• 16:05
  We had operations
• 16:06
  people who are really good at things, who had to give up things to other people.
• 16:09
  And, you know, you're doing this all across your organization.
• 16:13
  What do you think?
• 16:14
  What do you think were some of the biggest,
• 16:18
  I don't know, learning moments for you going through that where you're like,
• 16:21
  because you probably had this nail, you're like, I can do this.
• 16:24
  I'm working. And I and I got this down.
• 16:26
  I don't know where you went from delegating what you didn't like
• 16:29
  to delegating what you liked or what were some of the shifts where you're
• 16:32
  you're like, I never expected to have to do this,
• 16:34
  but once I did it, you started to sort of to see the results.
• 16:39
  Yeah. So,
• 16:42
  there's a lot of ways I can answer that question, but,
• 16:45
  I think the way I want to answer it is,
• 16:48
  I so I
• 16:51
  it being a member of eo San Francisco was interesting.
• 16:56
  So I remember in 2002, I met Vern Harnish.
• 17:00
  If you don't know who Vernon is, he runs a program called gazelles,
• 17:03
  and he has a book called Rockefeller's Have It.
• 17:05
  And most people nowadays they talk about Gino Workman's iOS.
• 17:10
  But my experience was like Vern Harnish
• 17:13
  was on all that stuff well before Gino Wickman was.
• 17:16
  And he came up with this program called the One Page Business Plan,
• 17:19
  which was basically the Vision Traction Organizer 1.0. No.
• 17:24
  And and I learned about that in 2002.
• 17:27
  But at that time in my life, I was like 26 and we were in survival
• 17:32
  mode, and I couldn't process how to do core values and all this stuff.
• 17:35
  So we just kind of set it aside.
• 17:37
  We took that up.
• 17:38
  You know, and, and we then site and we started having this discipline
• 17:42
  of filling out what ultimately people refer to as a vision traction organizer,
• 17:46
  or if they if they like Rockefeller habits, the, the one page business plan.
• 17:51
  And we had a set of core values
• 17:53
  and we had, you know, one year targets, five year targets and quarterly targets.
• 17:57
  And, and we had critical numbers.
• 17:59
  And, you know, it was kind of there was a discipline to it.
• 18:02
  We went off site regular, you know, every year to, to refill out this plan.
• 18:05
  And we did a quarterly regiment where we kind of like went off
• 18:10
  site, not like, not like travel to, but like, you know, for the for a day.
• 18:14
  And and we thought we were pretty like,
• 18:18
  we thought we were pretty smart, you know, like we would tell people about it.
• 18:21
  We were proud of it.
• 18:22
  We would, we'd promote the core values.
• 18:25
  I oriented everybody on.
• 18:29
  There was a point in time
• 18:30
  where I realized that the values are wrong.
• 18:35
  And, and I realized that there were
• 18:39
  elements of the plan that we just couldn't really conceive of very well.
• 18:42
  Like, for example, the big hairy, audacious goal, like, I like
• 18:46
  I was too young and immature to, like, properly understand that concept.
• 18:50
  But the, the values was particularly,
• 18:54
  important piece because,
• 18:57
  I remember reading,
• 18:59
  I think it was, Built to Last by Jim Collins
• 19:01
  and Jerry Porus and, and
• 19:05
  I just I don't remember exactly what he said, but
• 19:07
  what I took away was something like values
• 19:10
  should last the lifetime of the leader.
• 19:13
  And so in the to come up with these values, Jeff was really hard.
• 19:18
  Like we we would go off site and we'd spend days arguing about,
• 19:22
  and running these exercises, trying to come up with,
• 19:25
  and trying to like argue about the, the, the words.
• 19:27
  Should they be this long?
• 19:28
  Should they be this, should there be five, should there be four?
• 19:31
  You know,
• 19:31
  and by the time we finally came up with something that the founding team and,
• 19:36
  and the lieutenants all agreed to, it was like there was
• 19:40
  maybe nothing in the world I wanted to do less than go resort through that.
• 19:45
  Not to mention that I'd publicly,
• 19:47
  you know, promoted these things for to clients and to employees.
• 19:51
  And I had my reputation on the line.
• 19:54
  But there, there was a specific thing where I realized, like, this is wrong.
• 19:59
  This is like this. It isn't going to work this way.
• 20:01
  And it's and it's and it's in our way, the very values that we were so proud of,
• 20:06
  that we promoted were, were antithetical to our ultimate goal,
• 20:12
  which we hadn't even well articulated, but we kind of knew anyway.
• 20:16
  And so,
• 20:18
  so yeah, so
• 20:19
  that was, that was a, that was a big thing was like, like being willing to, to,
• 20:24
  to to to be humble enough
• 20:27
  to go back and retool that.
• 20:31
  And so one of the things I want to get across to maybe people
• 20:34
  who are, you know, in a different spot in their leadership
• 20:38
  journey is like, don't be so hubris about your about your values.
• 20:42
  Like they're like they're written on a stone tablet handed to you from God.
• 20:45
  Like, the way I look at it is as a as I see,
• 20:49
  I kind of break I kind of make things simple first before I make them complex.
• 20:52
  And I see the the job of the CEO is kind of
• 20:57
  two dimensions first, and they're both complex dimensions.
• 21:00
  But the first one is kind of your business strategy,
• 21:03
  which I think is synonymous with vision because, you know, your your,
• 21:06
  your vision is ultimately a description of the future state of your business.
• 21:09
  It's where you're going
• 21:11
  and your strategy describes your pathway, how you're going to get there.
• 21:14
  So that's your vision.
• 21:16
  That's one half,
• 21:18
  the other half are what are the philosophies, beliefs
• 21:22
  and kind of behavioral norms that,
• 21:25
  if followed perfectly, would manifest that vision.
• 21:30
  That's the domain of values.
• 21:32
  So like if that's off the table, like if you're not willing to like, you know,
• 21:37
  pivot to experiment with the philosophies and beliefs and behavioral norms,
• 21:42
  then all you can do is up your strategy a lot.
• 21:45
  All you can do then is try to make sure your strategy sandwich
• 21:49
  is in to the values.
• 21:50
  Like yeah, yeah, yeah, strategically we're stuck with these.
• 21:52
  So we got to pick a strategy
• 21:54
  that might work with the with the beliefs and philosophy.
• 21:58
  And the other thing about it is like you should have values.
• 22:02
  You should be willing to be wrong on them because you don't know any better.
• 22:04
  Like you don't know that they're wrong until,
• 22:06
  you know, like I didn't like it took me getting new philosophy.
• 22:10
  Like I
• 22:11
  the what changed for
• 22:12
  me specifically was I, I read Edwards Deming, I went to business
• 22:17
  school in 2008, and I took operations from, from a woman named Sarah Beckman.
• 22:22
  And and she introduced me to the the lean principles,
• 22:26
  you know, like the Toyota, Toyota way and all that kind of stuff.
• 22:29
  And I started reading Edwards Deming,
• 22:32
  and I just remember reading his 14 Points of Management,
• 22:35
  one of them, point eight, because I talk about this enough to know
• 22:38
  that it's actually point eight is to drive fear out of the workplace.
• 22:42
  It's it's basically psychological safety.
• 22:44
  Yeah.
• 22:44
  That means explain that, if you want to high quality organization,
• 22:49
  then employees have to be the eyes and ears
• 22:52
  for leaders, which means they have to surface the problems.
• 22:55
  But if they're worried about reputation, reputational risk,
• 22:59
  and if they're worried about, disciplinary action,
• 23:02
  they'll hide problems from leaders and leaders won't won't need to do it.
• 23:07
  So at the
• 23:09
  at the time,
• 23:10
  two of our core values, one of them sounds so innocent,
• 23:15
  is have a sense of humor and take enjoyment for the day.
• 23:18
  Like it sounds so innocent even now.
• 23:20
  As I say, it sounds like, well, how could that be a problem?
• 23:22
  Sounds really positive.
• 23:23
  Sounds like we we should all have positivity, right?
• 23:25
  I'll explain in a second.
• 23:26
  The second one that was a problem was was take pride in your work.
• 23:29
  Also like what?
• 23:31
  Well, it sounds intuitive, but here's how it manifested.
• 23:36
  It manifested in a rubber chicken that would hang on the cubicle.
• 23:40
  Somebody who made a mistake.
• 23:42
  That's okay.
• 23:43
  What do you oh, so you
• 23:44
  you would actually pass a chicken around and be like, like every time.
• 23:47
  It's like a mistake. It's kind of funny.
• 23:49
  One person saying it was like it was like, it was like a reverse trigger,
• 23:53
  a good humored way of, like, trying to, like, acknowledge that a mistake was made.
• 23:58
  And it was.
• 23:59
  But but underneath that was like
• 24:02
  a kind of a disdain for mistakes, you know,
• 24:05
  it was like we had like, that was a kind of to take pride in your work.
• 24:08
  And when we nobody wanted the chicken out
• 24:10
  in their cubicle, and the rubber chicken was like,
• 24:12
  humor was like at the it was at the apex of value.
• 24:16
  And, what I learned from Edwards Deming is if you want a high quality
• 24:20
  organization, by the way, which is managed services, if you want to scale it,
• 24:23
  you have to have, quality just because it's so competitive
• 24:26
  that if you can't produce a lot of customer value for the dollar,
• 24:30
  you just there's somebody else that's going to take that work.
• 24:33
  So what we needed was, we needed was respect.
• 24:37
  That was the and that's, you know, that's what Toyota
• 24:39
  figured out with respect for people.
• 24:41
  So when you look at it's okay to have humor, but
• 24:44
  it has to be subordinate to something higher, which in our case was respect.
• 24:48
  So the humor couldn't have humor if it was, you couldn't use humor
• 24:51
  if it was disrespectful. Period.
• 24:53
  Yeah, it was misaligned.
• 24:54
  Misaligned.
• 24:55
  And and so, you know, like, you know, taking pride in
• 24:58
  your work was was kind of also off off the mark.
• 25:01
  It was.
• 25:02
  And it became something like taking pride in how our work affects the people around
• 25:07
  us, our customers, our colleagues and and the and the societies we're part of.
• 25:12
  And we want to take pride in the impact of our work.
• 25:15
  And, and so, you know, but but the values were off enough
• 25:20
  that culturally, we weren't going to we weren't going to hit our milestone.
• 25:22
  We weren't going to hit our our highest, our highest potential.
• 25:26
  And so then, you know, go back and retool.
• 25:28
  That meant going to work and being like,
• 25:30
  you know, we still love humor, but it's not at the apex of value.
• 25:33
  It's not the it's not the philosophy and the beliefs and the behaviors
• 25:37
  that's going to take us where we need to go.
• 25:38
  And that meant a retool. Yeah.
• 25:41
  How long have you operated with these, with this set of values
• 25:43
  before you recognized more than a decade, more than a really.
• 25:48
  And and it probably at one point
• 25:49
  felt like it was working really well for it because having some
• 25:53
  the thing about it was like, we didn't we could
• 25:56
  we couldn't really figure out big hairy, audacious goal.
• 25:59
  Like I didn't understand it. Like we couldn't see that far.
• 26:01
  So what we did instead was we we set vision backwards.
• 26:05
  It's like, you know, based on, let's say, a best case
• 26:09
  trajectory of what we think we can do, where could we be in a year?
• 26:13
  And then we set those targets and we'd be like,
• 26:15
  and if we did that for five years, where might we could be?
• 26:17
  We'd set those targets.
• 26:18
  And it's like you just scaled up today's performance and yeah, that's wrong.
• 26:22
  Right. What you what you really want to do,
• 26:25
  what you really want to
• 26:26
  do is say, okay, if we could become anything
• 26:29
  we wanted to become and all we had to do is declare it, what would that be?
• 26:34
  What would be our most audacious ambition?
• 26:36
  That we would just love to see?
• 26:38
  That would be like something that would just be like,
• 26:40
  all we had to do is declare this thing.
• 26:42
  What would it be like?
• 26:43
  Forget about time.
• 26:44
  As a as a vehicle and what?
• 26:47
  And that thing must be something that we would be willing to sacrifice
• 26:51
  other idols on the on the marks to it.
• 26:53
  So, for example, if our if our ambition was like to become $1 billion firm,
• 26:59
  let's say, then we would probably have to sacrifice owning our own capital table.
• 27:03
  Right?
• 27:03
  You know, so but that wasn't what our ambition was.
• 27:07
  Our ambition was to be the highest quality managed services provider in the world.
• 27:10
  Like we wanted to out quality everybody.
• 27:12
  And we had a definition for what that what that meant.
• 27:16
  And it didn't matter big or small.
• 27:17
  We didn't care,
• 27:19
  we wanted to compete with the small guys and quality in the big guys and quality
• 27:22
  and we and we knew what metrics like if we could see everybody's metrics
• 27:26
  where we would have to win.
• 27:28
  And so that didn't require us to,
• 27:30
  to dilute our capital table, but it did require us to sacrifice other.
• 27:35
  Let's say, sacred cows.
• 27:37
  And now in this case, it was the values.
• 27:39
  Yeah.
• 27:39
  So, you know, like
• 27:41
  you have to be willing to sacrifice everything to this highest order goal.
• 27:45
  And that should be out.
• 27:46
  That should be out in time such that you're not,
• 27:49
  let's say, lost by the pragmatism of it.
• 27:51
  Like, oh, and there's no way it's like, well, don't worry about the way.
• 27:53
  The way will emerge.
• 27:55
  Just pick your target
• 27:56
  and then you start setting goals like, okay, if we were to get there,
• 28:00
  what would be a reasonable spot where we could become in five years?
• 28:04
  And if we were on track for the five years,
• 28:06
  what would we have to do in one?
• 28:07
  And then in order to be a one, what would we have to do next quarter
• 28:10
  and how would we deal with that?
• 28:12
  Start solving these problems over time.
• 28:13
  And so you back into the
• 28:15
  you back into the vision versus trying to look at where you are and be like, wow,
• 28:18
  if things went really well, where might we be in a year?
• 28:20
  It's like, that's not quite right. You know, you want to.
• 28:23
  And the thing about that, Jeff, is,
• 28:26
  what's like the,
• 28:28
  the ambition of the goal is what creates the energy to achieve it.
• 28:32
  You know, it's like small goals are are not really that exciting.
• 28:36
  Like people will spend energy on something that's exciting.
• 28:39
  So you want to you want your goal to be interesting enough
• 28:43
  where it'll it'll motivate cult.
• 28:46
  Yeah.
• 28:46
  Cultivate the energy to to manifest the goal.
• 28:49
  Well, yeah, I love that.
• 28:51
  I love that statement.
• 28:52
  But I'm curious though, because I think a lot of people in your shoes
• 28:57
  just, you know, projecting a little bit here,
• 28:59
  they would say to themselves, man, we were operating for a decade.
• 29:01
  We got, you know, we got this system, core values.
• 29:04
  We got some goals we're working towards.
• 29:06
  We're making, you know, millions of dollars, whatever that is.
• 29:09
  And in revenue, like, I think a lot of people would say themselves,
• 29:13
  well, I don't think we need to change.
• 29:15
  Like what was the signal you had that said, no, we got to reevaluate our values.
• 29:20
  We gotta rethink how we approach our goal because we're we're doing bottom up,
• 29:24
  not top down or whatever. Like what?
• 29:26
  What did you see differently that maybe other people wouldn't have seen?
• 29:31
  That's funny.
• 29:31
  I talk about a lot of the same things, but hopefully your
• 29:34
  your audience is different enough or they haven't heard this before, but,
• 29:38
  so I kind of one of the other
• 29:40
  little tools I use to describe leadership and goals is there's
• 29:44
  there's the animating spirit of a prey animal.
• 29:48
  That's the limbic system that stress, it's protect.
• 29:51
  Then there's the animating spirit of the predator animal.
• 29:54
  And that's the goal seeking system.
• 29:56
  That's the dopaminergic system.
• 29:58
  That's where our fuel good chemistry comes from.
• 30:00
  That's becoming that's vision.
• 30:02
  So if your
• 30:04
  goal is to stay the same,
• 30:08
  that's, you're definitely going to manifest
• 30:11
  the prey animal spirit because you're just going to protect what you have
• 30:16
  and know nobody's having any fun in that system.
• 30:19
  Nobody's nobody's challenge themselves to become something more
• 30:22
  the highest order, most love thing we discussed in the
• 30:26
  the nobody's challenged themselves to be more.
• 30:28
  You're not challenging yourself to be more.
• 30:30
  There's there's no vision.
• 30:31
  You're not really leading anywhere where you're leading people to what be the same
• 30:35
  like that.
• 30:36
  That's that's not going to inspire anybody's best life, best performance
• 30:40
  life, best work. Nothing like that.
• 30:42
  So is it a lack of energy or a lack of excitement in the team?
• 30:45
  And you're like, what's missing here? I mean,
• 30:49
  there's just
• 30:49
  something innately fun about building something.
• 30:53
  It's like playing with Legos or playing a video game
• 30:56
  where you're where you're building something.
• 30:58
  Everybody wants to be a part of it.
• 30:59
  Your best people are going to go somewhere where they're building something.
• 31:03
  So if your goal is like, I just want to be the same
• 31:06
  because this is a good life for me, it's like, maybe so for you,
• 31:09
  but if you're a leader, there's a lot of other people
• 31:12
  and they want to go somewhere, they want to build something.
• 31:14
  They want to be part of something fun, something interesting.
• 31:16
  And if you can provide them with that vision,
• 31:18
  then somebody else is going to provide them with,
• 31:21
  you know, and they will go somewhere else.
• 31:22
  And, and you'll just be turning customers and turning employees.
• 31:26
  You'll be doing the same amount of work.
• 31:27
  You'll be in your limbic system all the time.
• 31:29
  You'll be stressed about every customer loss.
• 31:31
  You know, if you go in a predator land, you're like, you're on the attack.
• 31:34
  You're in the dopaminergic system, you're doing something exciting.
• 31:37
  Everybody's having fun along the way, and you tolerate your setbacks a lot better
• 31:41
  because you know, you're you're in that, you're in that predator animal
• 31:45
  or we didn't get that zebra or, you know, I use a herd of lions chased zebras.
• 31:49
  But we're going to go we're going to go on the attack to the next one.
• 31:52
  And, and and everything's fine,
• 31:54
  you know, otherwise you're in that kick beehive land where everybody's going.
• 31:58
  Oh, you know, it's like chaos, like the prey animal
• 32:01
  land is, is is the is the land of, of chaos.
• 32:05
  And it's, it's when zebras get attacked, they, they zig and zag and try to confuse
• 32:11
  and everybody's confusion, trying to avoid the trying to avoid the angry,
• 32:16
  you know, whatever, whatever is attacking them.
• 32:19
  It could be the leader. It could be a customer.
• 32:22
  It could be a colleague.
• 32:23
  People will invent problems internally
• 32:27
  so that there's some drama because they're bored.
• 32:30
  I just I think it's,
• 32:33
  I just have a very strong opinion that that
• 32:36
  if you want to be a leader, then take people somewhere
• 32:39
  or you'll be a leader, you know, like, it's like, well, let somebody else lead.
• 32:43
  Like,
• 32:43
  if you want to stay in the same spot, then let somebody else be the leader.
• 32:47
  Yeah, but had you seen this, this chaos in your team and then,
• 32:51
  you know, once you sat down to figure out new values, new vision, new
• 32:55
  big hairy, audacious goal, like, like did it bring order?
• 32:58
  Did it bring alignment?
• 33:00
  Well, what was the impact?
• 33:01
  Just a quick note about our guest.
• 33:04
  I host the breakout CEO podcast to share behind
• 33:07
  the scenes insights from scaling businesses.
• 33:10
  As an attorney, I see the real challenges leaders
• 33:13
  face long before success becomes public.
• 33:16
  But client stories have to stay confidential,
• 33:19
  so we invite guest CEOs to share their own moments of struggle and success.
• 33:25
  I'm so grateful to our guest and MIT team
• 33:27
  at Intellectual Strategies for making this show possible.
• 33:31
  Now let's get back to the show.
• 33:33
  I see, I see chaos.
• 33:36
  Well, so let me take it a step back.
• 33:39
  So, you know, I like these vision Traction organizer,
• 33:44
  one page business plan is a tool, but I think a lot of people are,
• 33:48
  are using them without really understanding what they're doing.
• 33:51
  And because they're kind of useful and they're working there, they're like,
• 33:54
  they declare victory on it.
• 33:56
  But it's better to understand what's happening.
• 33:58
  So the your values and your vision are your uniting principles.
• 34:03
  They make they are what make your team a team, you know.
• 34:08
  But like because you can have people who have the same logo on their business card
• 34:13
  but are not a team, they're just you're just get paid from the same place.
• 34:17
  That's the goal function as a team.
• 34:19
  Patrick Lindsay on these five Dysfunctions of a team.
• 34:22
  Right?
• 34:22
  Yeah, exactly.
• 34:23
  If you I love Pat Lindsay only by the way, he's a local guy.
• 34:26
  He's here in Concord.
• 34:27
  My boys went to school.
• 34:29
  DeLaSalle were his boys when they played lacrosse with him.
• 34:32
  I also met him at Hawaii. Hawaii?
• 34:34
  Or an EO event at San Francisco, back in the early 2000.
• 34:38
  Brilliant guy.
• 34:38
  I've read almost all of his book. I think I've read all of his books.
• 34:41
  The motive is absolutely fantastic.
• 34:44
  That's a great book on servant leadership.
• 34:46
  But anyway, yeah, but and he also has one, by the way, called
• 34:49
  Silos and Politics, which is, a similar kind of vein.
• 34:52
  But back to what I, you know, back to my perspective on it,
• 34:56
  the uniting principles.
• 34:57
  You can disagree on things below, but like
• 35:00
  if you disagree on where you're going, like, like, you know,
• 35:03
  what's your bag if you disagree on that, you just need to be part
• 35:06
  of a different team.
• 35:07
  Like we can disagree about what we can disagree about.
• 35:10
  How the best way to achieve that bag is,
• 35:14
  but only to the extent that we're trying to get smarter
• 35:17
  about the strategic direction.
• 35:18
  And then we have to disagree and commit because it's all about
• 35:21
  he he's gonna be like lions, you know, and lions go after the zebras.
• 35:25
  They they don't go after the herd arbitrarily.
• 35:27
  They actually pick one of the zebras because they don't have hands.
• 35:31
  And tools, you know.
• 35:32
  So they yeah, they circle that zebra out, they like a target
• 35:36
  and they and they get that zebra away from the herd.
• 35:39
  And then they, then they go for the kill.
• 35:42
  I think workers do something similar. Not there.
• 35:44
  Yeah, yeah.
• 35:44
  And so if you're,
• 35:45
  you think about your team that way, like if your team is just chasing the herd,
• 35:50
  like I've got a better strategy, I want to go after the slower zebra.
• 35:53
  I want to go up to the older zebra.
• 35:55
  What about going after the funny looking zebra so we don't get lost?
• 35:57
  It's like if you have three different strategies
• 35:59
  you're applying, your team isn't going to win.
• 36:02
  Like, you're better off
• 36:03
  choosing a not perfect strategy that everybody agrees to like.
• 36:08
  I'd rather go after the a harder zebra.
• 36:10
  If everybody were going after it together,
• 36:12
  then, you know, three different strategies.
• 36:14
  But one of those strategies is the, let's say, the optimal one.
• 36:17
  It's like
• 36:19
  your team alignment is much more important
• 36:22
  than the, let's say, the optimal strategy.
• 36:25
  So what aligns the team, you know, what is it that aligns a team.
• 36:30
  It's it's a shared ideology. It's a shared vision.
• 36:32
  It's the shared values that make your team align.
• 36:35
  Now here's something very useful to know.
• 36:39
  We we
• 36:41
  perceive the world in relation to our goal.
• 36:45
  So we don't even know what things are until we know what we're trying to do.
• 36:48
  Like we determine what's a tool, what's an obstacle in relation
• 36:52
  to what we're trying to accomplish. And we do the same for people.
• 36:55
  So we we figure out whether somebody is a friend or foe
• 36:58
  on the basis of whether they can help us achieve the goal.
• 37:02
  So our targets are aligning,
• 37:04
  and if they're shared, we can perceive each other as friends.
• 37:07
  So the interesting thing about people is they they want community from work.
• 37:12
  Everybody thinks they want pay and they do because they need money,
• 37:15
  but they're going to be there all day. So they want to work with people they like.
• 37:18
  They want to find play and work.
• 37:20
  There's other things that they want also from work, and one of them is community.
• 37:23
  And you can't really get community.
• 37:25
  We just happy hours because if people go to a happy hour with people
• 37:28
  that they hate, they see is obstacles in their way.
• 37:31
  They're they're just not going to talk
• 37:32
  to them in a happy hour or they're just going to fight there.
• 37:35
  In my first company, the one that went under,
• 37:38
  I literally had to break up a physical fight between two employees.
• 37:43
  Wow. Like it was so dysfunctional.
• 37:45
  Yeah.
• 37:45
  So you you like a happy hour isn't going to solve that.
• 37:48
  You know, like, quality time only works if you perceive each other.
• 37:51
  If there's if there's a if there's if there's trust.
• 37:54
  That's kind of the baseline. That's Pat Lynchian.
• 37:57
  And then then on top of that you have shared ideology and that would
• 38:00
  that would include the target.
• 38:02
  And that shapes the very perception itself.
• 38:03
  So, so as a, as a leader, you know, this work of creating the vision
• 38:07
  and values, I mean, it's it's the it's the work.
• 38:11
  It's the leadership work. It's not it's different.
• 38:13
  The management, you know, it's it's it's it's the work of a leader.
• 38:17
  And that's what a leader needs to do.
• 38:19
  Well, so how do you achieve that with your teams then?
• 38:22
  I mean, is it a matter of going off and defining everything
• 38:26
  and then teaching people what you've you know, what values
• 38:29
  you've adopted as a leadership and helping them to align to those?
• 38:33
  Or is it more about, you know, finding people to bring on board
• 38:37
  that are already aligned so you don't have to realign them?
• 38:40
  Like, what are the what are the steps that you've taken after
• 38:44
  working for a decade under one value system?
• 38:47
  Changing it?
• 38:48
  I mean, did the team react to that and say, whoa, what are we doing?
• 38:52
  Like, I, I don't fit anymore?
• 38:55
  Or how did you manage that change?
• 38:58
  There's again, there's a lot there's a lot of
• 39:01
  depth below that question.
• 39:03
  So let me, let me hit a couple maybe a couple points
• 39:05
  and I'll see which one you want to dig into first.
• 39:08
  So the first question might be like how do you
• 39:12
  how do you come up with a good set of vision and values?
• 39:15
  I mean, that's like a really, really complicated question,
• 39:18
  but it's the tactics are reasonably understood.
• 39:21
  So the first thing you need to do is you need to understand
• 39:23
  who your most competent and loyal lieutenants are as a leader.
• 39:29
  Like you have to figure out, like, who's my first team,
• 39:33
  who's my my best group of people.
• 39:35
  The second thing you need to do, and this is this is totally Patrick Clancy.
• 39:39
  Only straight from Five Dysfunctions of a team
• 39:41
  is you have to build trust amongst those people, and that comes from vulnerability.
• 39:46
  So you
• 39:47
  know that that means that you have to be incredibly vulnerable.
• 39:50
  There's exercises we use, exercise called the lifeline.
• 39:53
  Stole that from the EO or the Ypo playbook,
• 39:56
  where we share the highest and the highest and lowest moments of our life.
• 40:01
  By the way, most people think vulnerability
• 40:04
  comes from sharing the lowest moments of your life, and that's true.
• 40:07
  But a lot of people don't share their wins
• 40:09
  because they don't want to be judged as being egotistical or arrogant.
• 40:12
  And so that's also a risky, place to share.
• 40:15
  So when you do a lifeline and you share the peaks and valleys of your life
• 40:18
  with with other people, and you do it in a real sincere way,
• 40:22
  it can be the basis of people really understanding
• 40:24
  how you think and why you are what you are.
• 40:26
  And so you do an exercise where you can establish
• 40:30
  some basic human trust, where you come together, you drop rank, leader
• 40:35
  goes first and you and you get vulnerable and you and you develop trust.
• 40:39
  Once you
• 40:39
  cultivate trust, you know, you kind of have to establish
• 40:43
  this, this idea of like, what could we become at our best?
• 40:46
  This is that be how it's going to guide everything else.
• 40:48
  Then you need to understand what are the philosophical principles
• 40:51
  and ideas that are going to that are going to help us get there.
• 40:54
  Now, to do this.
• 40:55
  Well, you might nobody will like this very well.
• 40:58
  But you have to have good philosophy.
• 41:01
  That means you have to be well read.
• 41:04
  Like I said, I didn't have the philosophy of Edwards Deming
• 41:06
  when I first set the values, and that's why my values weren't good.
• 41:09
  So but I've read probably at least
• 41:12
  a thousand books, on business leadership.
• 41:16
  And I've been to business school.
• 41:18
  So like the philosophy that's in our core value code
• 41:22
  isn't like it isn't shallow stuff like, oh, you know, my dad was a hard worker.
• 41:27
  So hard work. It's like, you know, it's like
• 41:30
  there's Kim Scott in there.
• 41:32
  And her radical candor about connection.
• 41:34
  There's respect from the Toyota Lee, and there's there's,
• 41:38
  there's all these principles from,
• 41:41
  from Lean Thinking by James Womack and there's principles.
• 41:45
  I mean, there's there's so many Patrick Quincy O'Neill and service leadership.
• 41:49
  So there's a library of probably 30 or 40 books
• 41:53
  that unpack the principles of our core values.
• 41:57
  So you need to read a bunch of books, and you need to figure out
• 41:59
  what principles are going to help manifest your vision.
• 42:02
  And then you then it's an effort to just distillation.
• 42:05
  So you have a library, then you have principles
• 42:10
  and then you have values, and values have to be a too.
• 42:14
  So like just as a as an example of how this works at Insight,
• 42:19
  the first extraction, which is really easy to remember but not meaningful is RSVP.
• 42:24
  So like you won't forget that, but it doesn't mean a lot.
• 42:26
  But our stands for Respect and connect.
• 42:29
  Okay,
• 42:31
  our S stands for servant's heart,
• 42:35
  V stands for value value
• 42:37
  and P stands for progress over comfort.
• 42:40
  Okay, so now they're starting to get a little bit of
• 42:43
  like now it's like now it's like a stick figure drawing.
• 42:46
  You kind of know what it means.
• 42:47
  You know it's a human, but you don't really know a lot under each one of those,
• 42:52
  values.
• 42:53
  Respect and connect has like 5 or 6,
• 42:55
  we believe, statements that describe specifically what it means.
• 42:59
  And then each of the bullets, there might be
• 43:01
  1 or 2 books even that are the making of that book.
• 43:05
  So, for example, in Servant's Heart, there's a bullet that says
• 43:08
  a leader's purpose is to serve their team so the team members can serve the clients
• 43:12
  and each other.
• 43:13
  That servant leadership that's illustrated by Patrick on his book The Motive.
• 43:18
  So if you really want to understand that bullet, it's
• 43:21
  really a distillation of an idea that's illustrated in an entire book.
• 43:25
  So as you grow in the leadership rank
• 43:27
  and insight, your expectation for fluency in the library,
• 43:32
  the canon of literature that makes up our philosophical underpinnings,
• 43:36
  that our our behavior values, you know, you have to get deeper
• 43:39
  and deeper into understanding the thought leadership behind them.
• 43:42
  So values aren't
• 43:45
  they're not for the meek, you know,
• 43:47
  they're not like, I like you can't just be like integrity.
• 43:51
  It's like, that's not that's not going to do it.
• 43:53
  You know, it needs to you need to really understand,
• 43:56
  what the best business philosophy is and how to align them with your strategy.
• 44:00
  So we knew, for example, at inside, because we're in a competitive market,
• 44:05
  that it was going to be customer value and quality.
• 44:08
  We're going to be the ways that we were going to differentiate,
• 44:10
  which means that we had to take playbooks from people who had operated in
• 44:13
  in that kind of environment and run those playbooks.
• 44:16
  Excellent.
• 44:17
  And that there was cultural elements to the success of those plays, you know.
• 44:21
  And so,
• 44:22
  yeah.
• 44:23
  So it's difficult like it's, you know, there's there's no easy way
• 44:27
  to, to victory.
• 44:28
  It's it's just like anything like Steph Curry works really, really hard.
• 44:32
  And if you want to be a great leader, there's just no way around it.
• 44:35
  You're going to have to be really good.
• 44:37
  That means you're going to have to.
• 44:41
  Learn and dedicate yourself and
• 44:44
  and you know and set the tone that way.
• 44:48
  How did you get on the same page with your team about this?
• 44:50
  Was it easy?
• 44:51
  They just said, yeah, this makes sense.
• 44:53
  Let's let's do this.
• 44:54
  Are they all readers?
• 44:55
  And so, you know, or are you kind of leading the charge by saying, hey, I'm,
• 45:00
  I'm reading some books and I'm going to share with my team.
• 45:02
  And, you know, because at that level, you've got a lot of team members
• 45:07
  and just making sure you're all in alignment on those goals is,
• 45:12
  is probably a, you know, an achievement in and of itself.
• 45:16
  So, yeah, you know, it's funny,
• 45:19
  because I started out as a CEO so young.
• 45:21
  And when I say young, that's not really even what I really mean.
• 45:25
  What I mean is, like, totally incompetent and ignorant.
• 45:28
  Like, I didn't know I hadn't I hadn't closed the sales deal,
• 45:33
  I hadn't, I hadn't negotiated anything, I hadn't managed anybody.
• 45:37
  I didn't understand how to read a financial statement.
• 45:39
  I was just completely ill prepared. So,
• 45:42
  I but I had this hour long commute to work
• 45:46
  and an hour long commute home, so I started just taking in audiobooks.
• 45:50
  Yeah.
• 45:51
  And I just took in every audiobook that was available, and Barnes and Noble
• 45:55
  just one by one.
• 45:56
  And I would get reading lists from people from OEO,
• 45:59
  and I would just read them and, I would be like, I would scrape the world.
• 46:03
  And when I would find a good one, I would, I'd be like, you need to read this.
• 46:08
  And I, you know, get my, my business partner
• 46:09
  the book and then I'd get my managers and then they would read it
• 46:12
  and then we'd book club it, you know, like,
• 46:14
  okay, what's there to learn from this?
• 46:15
  Is there anything to do about this?
• 46:17
  How can we use this idea?
• 46:19
  And and is there action to take?
• 46:22
  Sometimes I'd get the paperback book and I'd go through the highlighter.
• 46:25
  And it just kind of became part of my life, you know, I was on the road.
• 46:29
  There was a ton of windshield time back in the, you know, 2000 to 2010.
• 46:34
  And in 2010 to 2020, I mean, two decades, basically,
• 46:37
  it was just an enormous amount of windshield white time to sales calls.
• 46:41
  And I would just multitask, you know, I'd be on these audiobooks
• 46:45
  and, and, and I would share them out and, and would talk to people about them.
• 46:50
  And of course, you know, business school didn't hurt either.
• 46:52
  That was kind of a lot of dedicated learning time.
• 46:54
  And I so anyway, so the bottom line was time plus effort.
• 47:02
  Means getting good.
• 47:03
  It's like, yeah, if you if you eventually you get to 10,000 hours or whatever.
• 47:08
  Malcolm Gladwell's idea where you become a become a true expert and, and,
• 47:13
  you know, it's helpful while
• 47:15
  if you have a lab, you know, if you're if you're a company and you're, you're,
• 47:18
  you're a team, you're trying to lead and you're
• 47:20
  and you're seriously paying attention to the signals that's happening there
• 47:24
  because, like, stuff is going wrong and you're what's going wrong.
• 47:27
  Like, you know, I went a long time where it's like, what's going wrong?
• 47:32
  And I, you know, that's when I'd ask a question.
• 47:34
  I'd say, well,
• 47:36
  are we executing the values
• 47:39
  exactly as they as we believe that they are?
• 47:43
  Should me and if the answer is no, then we have either.
• 47:46
  We have,
• 47:48
  you know, okay.
• 47:48
  Well, we haven't either selected right oriented right or operationalize
• 47:53
  these values properly.
• 47:54
  Because if we were executing the values, the problem goes away.
• 47:57
  Yeah.
• 47:58
  Or maybe it's like no, we're executing the values perfectly.
• 48:00
  It's like well then the and the and we're not manifesting your strategy.
• 48:03
  It's like, well maybe the values aren't right
• 48:06
  or they're not clear or they're not comprehensive enough.
• 48:09
  And we need different philosophy.
• 48:11
  And it would be like, well, who could we talk to?
• 48:13
  It's like, well, who's doing what you're trying to do?
• 48:15
  And they're doing it better than you.
• 48:16
  They might know the answer.
• 48:18
  So you go and you try to find them.
• 48:19
  You say, what books mentors did you have?
• 48:21
  And and you try to sort that stuff out and, and you just grind.
• 48:25
  And eventually the solution emerges
• 48:28
  up, you know, going back to goals, when you have targets
• 48:32
  like this is another thing that's that's very useful to understand if
• 48:35
  if you your life is different
• 48:38
  when you have a target like like like what?
• 48:41
  You'll pause on different things in your in your social feed, for example,
• 48:45
  like what will catch your eye?
• 48:47
  Well be things that might help you with your target.
• 48:50
  So if you have a target like your social feed will change.
• 48:53
  Your conversations will change with other people.
• 48:55
  Yeah, it really changes what you pay attention to.
• 48:59
  So your your targets are ultimately,
• 49:03
  a force function of attention.
• 49:04
  They and they the other thing is kind of weird is they,
• 49:08
  they kind of control your conscious like like,
• 49:11
  like when you're feeling like that nagging feeling like I should be
• 49:14
  doing something different.
• 49:15
  What that is, is that your
• 49:17
  your current action is at odds with your long term, your proximal goals
• 49:22
  or your proximal intentions at odds with your long term term vision.
• 49:26
  And that's what that that's what it's you know, that's a Jiminy Cricket
• 49:29
  kind of thing.
• 49:30
  It's like telling you, you you should be doing something different,
• 49:32
  but you won't even get that signal if you don't have the targets.
• 49:35
  Yeah. What's the what's the name of.
• 49:37
  I'm blanking on the name where, you know, you you
• 49:40
  you don't notice something, but once you speak it, you start.
• 49:43
  What's that?
• 49:44
  The reticular.
• 49:45
  The reticular activation system.
• 49:47
  It's called the raz. Yes. Yeah.
• 49:49
  And you're so you're talking about that,
• 49:50
  but you're also talking about the reverse of it.
• 49:51
  Like if you're once you once you have felt alignment,
• 49:57
  it's almost like you can feel when it's not there, I guess.
• 50:00
  Right. You can say something's off.
• 50:03
  I, I like my raises, I'm un raised
• 50:06
  right now or whatever, but you're not you're not noticing what you need to do.
• 50:10
  You're not seeing the pathway forward like the pathway like the pathways are there.
• 50:16
  You know,
• 50:18
  and you
• 50:18
  know, like, sure, there's like a, there's like,
• 50:22
  you know, you might be like, oh, there's a genetic potential thing.
• 50:25
  It's like most that's like hardly anybody's problem, you know, like that's
• 50:30
  maybe a problem if you're trying to be the world's best basketball player.
• 50:34
  But like the the vast majority of people,
• 50:37
  it's hardly the, it's hardly their issue that they've,
• 50:40
  that they're doing everything right
• 50:42
  and they've just run into their genetic potential.
• 50:44
  Like how many people do you know
• 50:45
  who are who are doing everything right, but they just ran
• 50:48
  into their genetic potential.
• 50:49
  Like it's almost it's almost a limiting factor for.
• 50:52
  No. Yeah.
• 50:53
  We use 10% of our brain.
• 50:54
  Right.
• 50:54
  And, so we're not I don't want to give you that very much.
• 50:58
  It's like you're capable of a lot more and you know it.
• 51:00
  You know, I don't even need a I don't even need that argument.
• 51:02
  It's like, you know, that you're capable of more.
• 51:04
  So like like, let's not let's not talk about
• 51:07
  let's not talk about your let's say, your genetic potential
• 51:10
  as being the limiter of why you're you're facing your problems.
• 51:13
  It's almost certainly not.
• 51:15
  Well, I'm curious to to take this in a slightly different direction.
• 51:18
  You know, you mentioned
• 51:19
  there are probably only like
• 51:20
  a dozen companies out there like you who who aren't, you know,
• 51:24
  the really small ones or the ones that are, you know,
• 51:27
  P back gobbling up the really small ones, like
• 51:31
  is there
• 51:33
  is there a reason that like, is this where you want to be,
• 51:35
  you want to stand out in this, in this,
• 51:39
  in this place kind of between the small and the and the really large.
• 51:43
  Is that the right place to be or does it just depend, you know, another
• 51:47
  I guess what I'm really asking is, should other people who are who have,
• 51:51
  you know, 10 or 20 people on their team, should they be looking at p,
• 51:57
  you know, an acquisition someday as an option
• 52:01
  versus looking at growing into something like what you've grown it into?
• 52:05
  Or is it just, you know, how do they how do they approach
• 52:08
  that type of decision?
• 52:11
  Well, I mean, I guess I, I could never presume to decide
• 52:15
  for anybody something like, like what their, you know, what's best for them.
• 52:20
  Sure.
• 52:20
  But then the question is like, what should your capital strategy be?
• 52:23
  Should you own your own table? Should you bootstrap it?
• 52:25
  Should you VC it?
• 52:26
  Should you find a family office to partner with you?
• 52:28
  Should you get friends and family?
• 52:30
  It's like like I think it you know, the thing I'd like to say
• 52:33
  is your capital strategy starts in service to whatever your goal is.
• 52:38
  You know, you should you should set a compelling goal
• 52:41
  that first puts juice in, you know, like, puts juice in your own tank.
• 52:44
  Like it should be something that you're excited about.
• 52:47
  You know, our our quality
• 52:48
  mission has really driven our company for the last, let's call it eight years.
• 52:53
  And it was meant to be a ten year, you know, ten year vision.
• 52:55
  Like, now what I'm thinking about is like, what's next for us?
• 52:59
  You know, like, you know, we've we are an incredibly high quality organization.
• 53:04
  And, you know, the next goal has to go through that dot, you know, it can't.
• 53:09
  It's like, okay, what goes through that dot to something to something else.
• 53:13
  And interestingly, like for me, I'm what I'm thinking about now
• 53:17
  for, for our company is something like
• 53:21
  when I was first in this business, I was a technology integrator.
• 53:25
  I kind of mentioned that we were brought
• 53:26
  technology, put it in the people's business.
• 53:28
  And then for the last decade and a half, let's say
• 53:31
  I've been managing tech, I've been managing the technical tech stack,
• 53:34
  and it's been like making it secure, making it reliable, troubleshooting.
• 53:38
  We've been doing integration, but it's like, you know, replacing computers
• 53:42
  and replacing access points is like, not not that much tech.
• 53:45
  Like the volume of new tech that we've implemented
• 53:48
  has been slow and steady, such that the predominant value we do for
• 53:51
  our customers is manage what's there.
• 53:53
  Yeah, I think that I think that's shifting and.
• 53:56
  Right. Yeah, I think AI is shifting it.
• 53:59
  I think there's going to be a bunch of new agents out the lamb.
• 54:03
  And I think what customers really need is, a partner that
• 54:08
  is helping
• 54:08
  them translate their business problems
• 54:12
  in a way that the, the newest technology can, can solve it
• 54:16
  and, and can really, really manifest the next generation business.
• 54:21
  And I and, and the interesting part about that is like,
• 54:25
  don't do that with somebody who doesn't know support really well,
• 54:27
  because if you put a bunch of a genetic AI in there and we don't know how to
• 54:30
  when the lamb changes models and it breaks and you don't know what to do in the, in
• 54:35
  the company who put it in, has it mastered service.
• 54:38
  You're hosed. So the service
• 54:41
  element, the managed services element becomes just as important.
• 54:44
  But it doesn't become the central differentiating factor.
• 54:48
  That means a customer is going to get to come to us.
• 54:50
  It's going to be because of our skill at at integrating tech.
• 54:54
  And so we we've had a business intelligence practice and insight for,
• 54:58
  you know, the last ten years where we were really good with data.
• 55:02
  And it turns out that like, what a great skill to have with the AI because with AI,
• 55:06
  the first thing any kind of agent needs is it needs to have information.
• 55:10
  And it
• 55:10
  the universe of information is too much, you know,
• 55:12
  it needs to have your information such that it can do
• 55:14
  what you need it to do, and it needs to be restricted.
• 55:17
  It needs to be safe and needs to be secure, needs to be reliable.
• 55:20
  And you create an engine below.
• 55:21
  And so we launched an AI, practice,
• 55:25
  this last year to go along with our business intelligence practice.
• 55:28
  And I think
• 55:28
  that there's going to be a lot of business transformation that's going to occur.
• 55:32
  And so what am I excited about?
• 55:34
  Well, I'm excited about solving real market problems.
• 55:39
  It's like and I think about them as really human problems like,
• 55:44
  maybe this will hit home, maybe it won't.
• 55:46
  But 200 years ago, the average life expectancy for a male was 35 years old.
• 55:52
  So, you know, if you don't know, it's like 76 now.
• 55:55
  So we've doubled that and more.
• 55:58
  And the only way, the only way you can answer
• 56:02
  how is it's through technology and markets.
• 56:05
  Yeah. That's how we did it.
• 56:07
  It's you know, it's it's technology and markets. And
• 56:11
  and everybody's worried about AI and they should be
• 56:14
  there's going to be dislocations.
• 56:15
  I'm not saying there won't be, but we don't want to go back to a world
• 56:19
  where 80% of our workforce is is spending time trying to make sure we eat right.
• 56:25
  And I think as we figure out how to deploy the next generation technology
• 56:29
  to humanity's problems, we're going to create more and more abundance.
• 56:33
  And so what what's really exciting is to try to figure out how do we use
• 56:38
  what's there that use machines and tools and tech to solve human problems.
• 56:43
  So that we can have longer lifespans and richer lives.
• 56:46
  And, and we could do
• 56:47
  more interesting things and we can build more interesting stuff.
• 56:50
  And so, you know, that's what that's what excites me.
• 56:53
  And I think at, if, if I were
• 56:57
  speaking to leaders, it's like, what real problem could you solve?
• 57:00
  You know, like pick a real problem that like, the market needs like pick,
• 57:03
  you know, go after something that would make things better if you
• 57:06
  if you succeeded, like, hey, look like society would be better.
• 57:11
  You know, if I solve this problem, like, right now, this problem is annoying
• 57:15
  for a lot of people.
• 57:16
  And if we solved it, it would be a big win for a lot of people.
• 57:20
  And, you know, yeah, you got to figure out the modernization strategy.
• 57:23
  But it's like find something exciting to go off and, and and work on that.
• 57:27
  That's, that's human oriented.
• 57:29
  It's a human problem underneath.
• 57:31
  Will there be a market there?
• 57:32
  Will you will make money,
• 57:33
  will provide a return to your capital tables
• 57:35
  and put food on the plates of your employees.
• 57:37
  It's got to it's got to pass that test.
• 57:39
  But ultimately it should be.
• 57:41
  It should be a real social problem because,
• 57:45
  you know, like roofie like that's a real social problem.
• 57:48
  It's a commercial business.
• 57:49
  But man, I'm glad my house is dry when it rains and so, you know, so every,
• 57:53
  every one of these businesses are solving some kind of serious commercial problem.
• 57:57
  And, and there's, there's social simultaneously.
• 58:00
  So there.
• 58:02
  And that's how I look at it.
• 58:04
  Yeah.
• 58:04
  And that's, that's really interesting cuz I think what I, what I've seen
• 58:07
  is a lot of people,
• 58:09
  especially in the, you know, when you're talking
• 58:11
  about innovation and people inventing new things that I deal with
• 58:15
  there, there's been this shift almost to, you know, bootstraps
• 58:19
  so heavily that you only build small things, a tool
• 58:23
  that's so niche that it solves a problem so that you can, you know, use it
• 58:26
  and scale it fast and sell it off for a little bit of money.
• 58:30
  It's it's not, you know, it's not humanity focused.
• 58:33
  It's it's almost like Project focused.
• 58:35
  And I wonder, you know, as we, as we get into this, as the real,
• 58:40
  the real learning is what you're saying where AI comes in
• 58:44
  and it it is the tool to make things faster.
• 58:47
  But the real value is going to be, when we
• 58:50
  get past these small project,
• 58:54
  orientations and we get into
• 58:57
  who's going to who's going to make sure the human element is still there.
• 59:02
  In in the midst of AI and how that works, that's going to be the key.
• 59:06
  AI, at least, I think.
• 59:08
  Is that consistent with what you're saying?
• 59:10
  Yeah. I think there's another thing.
• 59:11
  And you're, you're, you're talking about to which is that like,
• 59:15
  there's we're the business is, economic game.
• 59:19
  You know, it's like it, it's
• 59:22
  it's an economic game all the way around.
• 59:23
  Everybody who who's playing it is the score is, is denominated
• 59:28
  and it's denominated in dollars, but dollars on their own
• 59:32
  is a that's a there's a big distance between dollars.
• 59:35
  And I say a good life.
• 59:37
  And you would have to say, well what's what's the difference.
• 59:40
  It's like, well I think what makes a good life is,
• 59:45
  I mean, there might be some degree of like, comfort
• 59:47
  which, you know, and safety, but ultimately comfort and safety
• 59:52
  that it actually doesn't really make for, for a good life.
• 59:55
  Like,
• 59:57
  I think there's a lot of great philosophy around why,
• 59:59
  but so then what does it something more like meaning and purpose?
• 1:00:03
  It's a community and connection.
• 1:00:05
  It those are those are what make for for a good life.
• 1:00:09
  And and there's no reason you can't have it all.
• 1:00:11
  Like there's no reason why you can't get economic returns
• 1:00:16
  and simultaneously get community relationships, meaning and purpose.
• 1:00:22
  And in fact, my whole ethos is it's actually easier to make money
• 1:00:27
  when you consider and put forth first
• 1:00:30
  those more idealistic things like you're.
• 1:00:33
  And of course it is like it's really obvious if you think about it.
• 1:00:36
  So when I was a younger CEO,
• 1:00:40
  my motives were
• 1:00:42
  immature, you know, I was like, they were they were.
• 1:00:45
  They can be a caricature of something like financial safety and security.
• 1:00:50
  So I can take care of my family.
• 1:00:52
  You're very me centric, right? Yeah.
• 1:00:53
  Or maybe worse.
• 1:00:55
  It would be like,
• 1:00:55
  I don't want to be dominated by a hierarchical power structure.
• 1:01:00
  Like.
• 1:01:00
  And my, my family childhood of origin or like in the corporate world
• 1:01:04
  where I worked before or or third, like maybe I want to prove something
• 1:01:07
  to my dad, you know, like these kind of immature motives, like.
• 1:01:10
  But just think about what you like.
• 1:01:12
  Are you excited about those things?
• 1:01:14
  Like, no, nobody would be like, so like, for me to lead a group of people
• 1:01:18
  so that I can fulfill those really selfish, self-centered motives,
• 1:01:23
  all I'm doing is cultivating a bunch of self-centered motives for
• 1:01:26
  everybody below me,
• 1:01:28
  and that's putting everybody in Limbic Clan, because I'm in Limbic Clan.
• 1:01:32
  I'm in that prey animal land.
• 1:01:34
  I got safety good protect.
• 1:01:36
  So if I can transcend as a leader
• 1:01:39
  into something more idealistic, more mission oriented, more social
• 1:01:43
  oriented, more community and connection centered, then what I do is I.
• 1:01:49
  I disrupt all of the cynical reasons why people don't want to follow
• 1:01:55
  because they like their, you know, it's like all those things are
• 1:01:58
  is they're signaling off of off of the self-centered leader.
• 1:02:01
  So so it actually makes it easier to scale team when you're when you're less,
• 1:02:07
  when you're less focused.
• 1:02:08
  And this is the ironic part too.
• 1:02:09
  It's like economics. Okay.
• 1:02:12
  So let's take the people, the boots on the ground,
• 1:02:14
  people who are doing the day in, day out work at insight.
• 1:02:18
  How are they going to make the best career, make the most money possible?
• 1:02:22
  The answer is their performance.
• 1:02:24
  If they have a great performance, they create a bunch of customer value.
• 1:02:27
  It's going to be easier to pay them more.
• 1:02:29
  So are they going to get better performance if they're economically driven
• 1:02:33
  or if they love the job, they find purpose in it.
• 1:02:35
  They find playing it
• 1:02:37
  well.
• 1:02:37
  You think it's economics, but it's not.
• 1:02:39
  At least in my experience where we we it's not experienced, by the way.
• 1:02:44
  Now it's actually science.
• 1:02:45
  So and it was Doshi McGregor in their book Prime to perform
• 1:02:48
  where they studied this.
• 1:02:49
  They set out experiments and they determined that the play motive
• 1:02:53
  and the purpose motive were correlated to very high performance.
• 1:02:57
  And the next one was was potential.
• 1:02:59
  That's like the becoming I want to I'm doing this as a stepping stone.
• 1:03:02
  And the three that were correlated to terrible performance were emotional
• 1:03:05
  pressure, economic pressure and inertia.
• 1:03:08
  So we know that economic pressure and emotional pressure are correlated to
• 1:03:12
  negative performance, and play and purpose are correlated to high performance.
• 1:03:16
  So in a grand irony, if you want people to reach their economic potential,
• 1:03:20
  you have to you have to cultivate motive that transcends economic
• 1:03:24
  and emotional pressure into something like play and potential and purpose.
• 1:03:28
  So that's the
• 1:03:30
  you want your people to do better economically?
• 1:03:32
  Well, the first thing you got to do
• 1:03:33
  is to get them to stop thinking about economics.
• 1:03:35
  The economics come to them and you can see this, by the way, in
• 1:03:39
  sports, you know, like the best players, like they're they love the game.
• 1:03:44
  They make the most money too.
• 1:03:45
  But they love the game.
• 1:03:46
  The ones that are there who are there for the money.
• 1:03:49
  You could smell it and they might be really, really talented,
• 1:03:53
  but they're
• 1:03:53
  they're never going
• 1:03:54
  to be the best of the best, even if they have the best genetics.
• 1:03:57
  So it's very difficult, by the way,
• 1:03:59
  to, to to to perform well over time.
• 1:04:03
  If you don't have a play as a source of motive, because
• 1:04:06
  it's just draining, everything you're doing is draining
• 1:04:09
  and you're constantly seeking to do something else.
• 1:04:13
  But it's also in a grand irony, you can make more money, but
• 1:04:17
  you're going to spend it trying to make up for the fact that you hate your job.
• 1:04:21
  Yes, I see that in my field quite a bit.
• 1:04:23
  So if you love your job, you know you can actually you can actually afford
• 1:04:28
  to spend like
• 1:04:28
  you can afford to have less money, but you end up having more
• 1:04:31
  because you love your job and that makes your performance.
• 1:04:33
  So it's it's, you know, it's a little bit of a it's a mind, it's a mind trip.
• 1:04:37
  But you really as a leader, you if you can transcend your own immature
• 1:04:43
  sources of motive, you're gonna make it a lot easier
• 1:04:44
  for your team to achieve their best potential.
• 1:04:47
  And that's going to.
• 1:04:48
  And that's going to help everybody.
• 1:04:50
  Well, you've got my mind spinning a little bit here thinking
• 1:04:52
  and thinking through all this stuff you're saying. And I wonder
• 1:04:54
  if some of our audience members will say, man, that it makes sense.
• 1:04:58
  Where do I start?
• 1:05:00
  How do I I mean, Mike's way ahead of me in terms of reading and,
• 1:05:04
  you know, business.
• 1:05:05
  And I'm like, like, where would they start to
• 1:05:08
  come down to, to, you know, get onto the path that you're on?
• 1:05:12
  Is it read more books?
• 1:05:14
  Is it, you know, reevaluate your your vision and values?
• 1:05:19
  What's the what are the steps?
• 1:05:22
  Somebody should think about the major milestones to say, I want to follow this.
• 1:05:26
  I want to be a better leader.
• 1:05:28
  I want to create better culture.
• 1:05:30
  Where do I start?
• 1:05:32
  I'm writing a book right now, where I'm kind of putting together
• 1:05:35
  all these ideas in some kind of coherent with a bunch of other things.
• 1:05:39
  But one of the concepts I, I talk about in the book
• 1:05:44
  is this there's a, I don't know if you know this.
• 1:05:46
  Probably you don't.
• 1:05:47
  This is like a real subtle part of marine,
• 1:05:52
  nautical things.
• 1:05:53
  But inside of a big ship,
• 1:05:56
  the course is a rudder.
• 1:05:58
  And if you turn the rudder, the ship turns right.
• 1:06:00
  Right.
• 1:06:01
  But inside the rudder, there's something called a Becker rudder.
• 1:06:05
  Okay.
• 1:06:05
  And a Becker rudder is inside the rudder.
• 1:06:08
  And it opens up one way such that the water flows so that the rudder turns,
• 1:06:13
  so that the rudder itself and the Becker rudder are hacking fluid dynamics
• 1:06:19
  so that you can with
• 1:06:20
  a steering wheel, you're not actually controlling the rudder.
• 1:06:22
  You're controlling that back Becker rudder.
• 1:06:24
  And so what you want to really understand is like,
• 1:06:27
  what's the littlest thing I can do to move this entire tire ship?
• 1:06:33
  Like, what's the what's the most effortless, effortless way?
• 1:06:37
  What's the Becker rudder version of this?
• 1:06:40
  And it's a great place to close because it's, also where we started.
• 1:06:45
  That's what you yourself,
• 1:06:46
  you know, you want to become a better, a better human being.
• 1:06:50
  And and you can put a lot of attention.
• 1:06:53
  You can put a lot of attention to that
• 1:06:55
  because you're you're essentially you're patterns in your habits.
• 1:06:59
  I mean, and and if you change your patterns
• 1:07:01
  and your habits to something more productive,
• 1:07:04
  everything else is going to start falling around around that.
• 1:07:08
  And so you've got to have an idea
• 1:07:12
  of what you want to be and what you want to become.
• 1:07:16
  And if you don't know that that's a problem,
• 1:07:19
  like, you're you're you're what?
• 1:07:22
  What my kids call an NPC, you're a non-player character. Yep.
• 1:07:26
  You're a character.
• 1:07:27
  And somebody else, somebody who knows what they're trying to do. Yeah.
• 1:07:30
  So how do you know?
• 1:07:32
  How do you add intentionality?
• 1:07:34
  Well, you need to create an individual vision statement.
• 1:07:38
  You need to start there. You need to start with something.
• 1:07:40
  It's like, what do I think the best version of myself?
• 1:07:43
  Who do I think the best version of myself is? What am I? Am I best
• 1:07:47
  and and then where am I trying to go?
• 1:07:50
  What am I trying to become?
• 1:07:52
  And that's that.
• 1:07:54
  That's the basis for your own individual affirmations and visualizations.
• 1:07:59
  And the other thing that I would put out there is just like,
• 1:08:03
  you know, control your body, control your mind.
• 1:08:05
  You know, most people, they're like, yeah, I know what I need to do.
• 1:08:08
  I just I can't get motivated to do it.
• 1:08:11
  It's like, okay, well, like
• 1:08:14
  you probably you could start with something really simple.
• 1:08:17
  You could just choose to move more than you're moving.
• 1:08:20
  Most people need to move more.
• 1:08:22
  And if they if they could get if they could get a win
• 1:08:25
  by having the discipline to move a little more,
• 1:08:29
  they start getting confidence in other elements of their life.
• 1:08:32
  This is like
• 1:08:33
  there's a bunch of science around this too,
• 1:08:35
  because if you make your bed in
• 1:08:36
  the morning or get your steps in or one of those things
• 1:08:40
  where you're you're putting more motion and routine into your life.
• 1:08:45
  And then and
• 1:08:46
  there's just like habit stacking on that two, you could stack one,
• 1:08:50
  but but the other but the other big one here is like shrink the change.
• 1:08:55
  Like I hear people like,
• 1:08:56
  I, I know I should read more, but I, I just, I'm not motivated to do it.
• 1:09:00
  So like, well, could you sit in a chair holding a book?
• 1:09:03
  Yeah.
• 1:09:03
  Yeah,
• 1:09:05
  yeah.
• 1:09:07
  Like, I'd be dead serious about that,
• 1:09:09
  if that's all that you're capable of doing right now.
• 1:09:12
  That.
• 1:09:12
  Go sit in a chair for two minutes and hold a book
• 1:09:15
  and do that for as many days in a row until you start opening the darn thing.
• 1:09:19
  I was going to say maybe read a paragraph, but you're starting even more basic
• 1:09:22
  whole like like like hold the book.
• 1:09:26
  You know, when I went to business school, I used had these big giant case readers
• 1:09:29
  full of stuff, and it was like I was.
• 1:09:31
  So I was running a company at the time, and I had two small kids, and
• 1:09:35
  it was like more than I could think of to go through.
• 1:09:37
  I knew I had to read these case readers.
• 1:09:38
  It was going to make the classes way more interesting.
• 1:09:41
  So I would literally do this.
• 1:09:43
  I'd go, I'd say,
• 1:09:45
  you know, have to read the case, but you do have to go make yourself a
• 1:09:48
  cup of tea and go sit in the chair with that case reader and nothing else.
• 1:09:53
  I'd go get tea.
• 1:09:55
  I'd go sit there with the case reader, with the chair,
• 1:09:57
  and I would literally do nothing else.
• 1:09:59
  And then all of a sudden I would be like, oh, I could just open it up and read.
• 1:10:02
  You start.
• 1:10:03
  Then the next thing you know, I'd read it and then I'd be reading and then,
• 1:10:06
  you know, then you're engaged
• 1:10:08
  and then I'd be engaged, and then and then things, things
• 1:10:10
  that happened on the on the run.
• 1:10:11
  But you got to shrink the change.
• 1:10:13
  You got to shrink the change to what, what you're willing to do.
• 1:10:15
  And, you're you are your own backer rudder.
• 1:10:20
  You know, it's
• 1:10:20
  the it's an inner game, not an outer game like everybody's looking for.
• 1:10:24
  Oh, I got to figure out the new market and the new.
• 1:10:28
  You know, I'm in the wrong market.
• 1:10:29
  I've got the wrong product fit. It's like,
• 1:10:33
  you know, you're probably where you really need to.
• 1:10:37
  Yeah. You're the Becker rudder.
• 1:10:38
  You know,
• 1:10:39
  you probably need to get a little bit more movement in
• 1:10:41
  you probably need to do a little bit more mindfulness.
• 1:10:43
  Do you have a gratitude practice?
• 1:10:44
  Do you know, do you have affirmations that you're doing?
• 1:10:47
  Are you visualizing your future?
• 1:10:49
  Like if you if you focus on your inner game, the outer game solves itself.
• 1:10:53
  And so the the the best advice I could give anybody on
• 1:10:57
  this thing is think of themselves as the Becker rudder of their life
• 1:11:01
  and focus on their inner game and let the outer game,
• 1:11:06
  you know, let it emerge like you'll
• 1:11:08
  if you start reading, you're going to get better philosophy.
• 1:11:10
  And if you get better philosophy, you're going to have better values
• 1:11:13
  because you're they're just a derivative of your of your values.
• 1:11:16
  And, you know, it's like and and you'll have a better strategy
• 1:11:20
  because you'll, you'll be able to you'll, you'll start getting a better network
• 1:11:23
  of all kinds of things will change.
• 1:11:25
  But I would start I would start with the inner game.
• 1:11:28
  I love this Mike.
• 1:11:29
  It's you've given you've given us so much to to parse through and think about.
• 1:11:34
  It's it's clear that you've been thinking about these things for decades, and, I'm
• 1:11:40
  excited to see the book come out and, read a copy of it when it's when it's ready.
• 1:11:44
  What's the book called? The title for you?
• 1:11:47
  My working title is, Broken to Built.
• 1:11:50
  Right.
• 1:11:51
  And the idea there is, you know, kind of
• 1:11:54
  kind of the story, the, the life of every entrepreneur, right?
• 1:11:57
  Yeah, yeah, that's the working title I'm, I'm doing.
• 1:12:00
  I don't know if I'm going to keep it all the way to the end.
• 1:12:02
  I got to finish the book and then figure it out.
• 1:12:04
  But the concept is kind of neat.
• 1:12:05
  I'm I'm telling like, really like narrative rich,
• 1:12:09
  you know, sensory detail stories about my career.
• 1:12:13
  So it's going to be like, you're going to follow me as a main character in a story.
• 1:12:17
  And some of them will go back to childhood, early career.
• 1:12:20
  But each after each one of those chapters is,
• 1:12:23
  a diagnosis of a principle.
• 1:12:25
  So what would what did the principle be?
• 1:12:27
  So, like, you know, I talk about childhood of origin story.
• 1:12:31
  Then I might, you know, my second
• 1:12:32
  chapter would be something like, how do you transcend childhood of
• 1:12:36
  or origin kind of trauma or motive, like, you know,
• 1:12:40
  so would be things like we talk about there. It's like you can't
• 1:12:43
  the, you know, your, your, your behaviors are a product
• 1:12:47
  of your of the narrative structure you put about your life.
• 1:12:50
  And if you want to change your, your behaviors, you need to kind of
• 1:12:54
  go back and really think about what the meaning is behind
• 1:12:57
  things that happened to you and, and,
• 1:12:58
  and take some ownership of that and, and look at it more holistically.
• 1:13:03
  And, and so, you know, then I'll tell a story about my career, a tie,
• 1:13:07
  and I'll talk about kind of bureaucracy and politics and.
• 1:13:11
  Yeah, and how that informed, you know, some of my, my, my beliefs as a later
• 1:13:16
  leader, you know, and I'll so I'll, I'll, I'll basically,
• 1:13:20
  kind of walk through some stories and some principles
• 1:13:22
  and hopefully people will be entertained and they'll also kind of learn something.
• 1:13:26
  It'll be like part, part story, part lesson.
• 1:13:29
  And and that'll be a nice balance.
• 1:13:32
  I'm also, launching a podcast.
• 1:13:34
  So if you like these ideas or if they, if they appeal to you
• 1:13:37
  and you're interested in, my podcast, you can find it at Mike chop it dot net.
• 1:13:44
  Okay.
• 1:13:44
  Now that will take you to a page where you can subscribe.
• 1:13:47
  My podcast is going to be, it's all in person, high production
• 1:13:52
  and just in my it's my 25
• 1:13:54
  years of being a member of Ypo 400 customers business school.
• 1:13:59
  There's just a I just the professional network is is really, really,
• 1:14:04
  humbling. Good.
• 1:14:05
  Like the people who are willing to come
• 1:14:07
  and spend time with me to, to talk about this stuff is amazing.
• 1:14:10
  And we're coming on, we're unpacking all kinds of leadership stuff.
• 1:14:13
  You know, we're talking about iOS, but we're also talking about lean,
• 1:14:18
  but we're also talking about people
• 1:14:20
  stories or entrepreneur stories that we're finding out there lessons.
• 1:14:24
  And then I present some of my ideas.
• 1:14:26
  And so I get real time feedback.
• 1:14:27
  So a lot of the ideas that I have are I'm working,
• 1:14:31
  I'm actively with my guests and yeah, and that's a lot of fun.
• 1:14:34
  And that's how you can catch that there.
• 1:14:36
  That Mike chap at Dot net, you said yes. Yes.
• 1:14:39
  Oh fantastic. We'll put that in the show notes.
• 1:14:41
  Well, and Jeff, one last thing before,
• 1:14:46
  I want to first thank you.
• 1:14:48
  I mean, this this has been an hour and some time here.
• 1:14:51
  Oh, I don't know. It's it's been a good conversation.
• 1:14:54
  It has been.
• 1:14:55
  I've gone over your time.
• 1:14:56
  I think so, yeah, well, I just if people made it to the end of this,
• 1:15:01
  I just want to first of all, thank them for their time and attention.
• 1:15:04
  I think, you know, if you haven't gathered,
• 1:15:06
  I think, you know, the attention was actually was,
• 1:15:10
  like an Egyptian god, like they, they built they built a sanctity around
• 1:15:14
  attention that was there was symbolized by the AI
• 1:15:16
  because the AI is actually kind of approximate.
• 1:15:19
  Like you look at things that you're
• 1:15:20
  you're giving them attention to because it's so important.
• 1:15:22
  So if somebody has given the show,
• 1:15:25
  attention, you know,
• 1:15:27
  I think, or giving me personally attention,
• 1:15:30
  I, I really want to express gratitude for that.
• 1:15:35
  But then there's always this ask and it's,
• 1:15:38
  I been on maybe 15 podcast and it's it always feels a little uncomfortable,
• 1:15:43
  but I want to do it instead of the host because I'm the guest.
• 1:15:46
  And it gets tiresome to do as a host.
• 1:15:48
  But like, if you watched all the way to the end of this episode
• 1:15:50
  and you haven't liked or subscribe to this content
• 1:15:53
  or shared it with somebody, or commented or engaged, you have to know
• 1:15:57
  that the the way that the internet and everybody else
• 1:16:00
  figures out what's good and bad is by the early consumers of this.
• 1:16:05
  So it needs that affirmation.
• 1:16:08
  And so it's like a duty.
• 1:16:09
  It's it's a duty to be like, hey, I endorse content.
• 1:16:14
  That's good. Yeah.
• 1:16:15
  And so if you thought this was good and you haven't endorsed
• 1:16:17
  it, you're kind of like not even doing your your duty.
• 1:16:19
  Like, you really have to do this, and you're worried.
• 1:16:21
  I know why.
• 1:16:22
  All the reasons why you're worried about doing it, like,
• 1:16:23
  oh, I don't want to be, like, bombarded with a million.
• 1:16:25
  It's like, but it's kind of like the price you pay this.
• 1:16:29
  We don't get paid for this.
• 1:16:30
  It's basically free and we're trying to pay things forward.
• 1:16:33
  So the the prices, you know, like the content.
• 1:16:37
  Share it. Comment.
• 1:16:39
  Super frustrating to always have to to do that.
• 1:16:42
  But that's really what's necessary.
• 1:16:44
  And if we don't want our entire social feeds to be just like littered with,
• 1:16:49
  littered with
• 1:16:49
  content that's designed to, manipulate us through.
• 1:16:54
  Yeah, like manipulate us through,
• 1:16:57
  arousal based, you know, algorithms.
• 1:17:01
  Then then we have to fight against that as a community and,
• 1:17:04
  and try to try to get great content out there.
• 1:17:07
  And so, anyway, I just want to make that appeal.
• 1:17:10
  And I also want to thank you for having me on and for your time.
• 1:17:13
  Well, you're such a gracious guest. I really appreciate that.
• 1:17:16
  And liking and giving your views, that's all.
• 1:17:18
  That's all very much appreciated.
• 1:17:20
  And we do appreciate
• 1:17:21
  also the attention that the, that our, that our listeners have given to this.
• 1:17:25
  It's, it's, but it's probably been, it's been easy for me to give attention to it
• 1:17:30
  because you've got so many good concepts that I think apply to people that are
• 1:17:34
  either looking to build a business or,
• 1:17:36
  have been building a business for a while, and they're taking it to the next level.
• 1:17:40
  Like, I think there's a lot to take away from this episode. So.
• 1:17:42
  So, Mike, I really want to thank you for taking the time and energy
• 1:17:46
  and bringing all of your insights from the last several decades
• 1:17:49
  into this conversation.
• 1:17:51
  Well, thank you, Jeff.
• 1:17:52
  Appreciate it.
• 1:17:53
  Yeah. Thank you.
• 1:17:54
  And to our audience,
• 1:17:55
  thanks for joining us one more time on the breakout SEO podcast.
• 1:18:00
  Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.
• 1:18:04
  And if you enjoy the show, a rating or a review goes a long way.
• 1:18:09
  Our mission is to promote the stories of breakout CEOs
• 1:18:13
  in scaling SaaS, e-commerce, and tech companies
• 1:18:16
  to equip peer CEOs with valuable perspectives and confidence.
• 1:18:22
  Thanks again for joining us on this episode of The Breakout CEO.
• 1:18:26
  I'm Jeff Holeman, and I'll see you next time.