Latest / Glovisor Podcast / EP 17: From Fortune 500 to Small Business: The Growth Secrets Nobody Talks About
Transcript
- Joe Abreu - Glovisor: So here's a question. What happens when a Fortune 500 systems builder decides to help small businesses? So here's a question. What happens when a Fortune 500 systems builder decides to help small businesses? Our guest is the founder of Dynamic Business Capabilities and brings over 25 years of technical and management experience across telecommunications, software development, government consulting, Fortune 500 environments. She helped build high performance systems that generated billions in revenue and later applied those same capabilities to help small businesses scale. She blends deep technical expertise with practical leadership to help companies optimize execution and reach the next level. Glovisor welcomes Gretchen Richards. Gretchen Richards: Hi, Joe, thank you for having me here today. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: ⁓ you're welcome. Looking forward to the conversation. Gretchen Richards: Yeah, course. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: All right, so let's begin. Tell us your story. What inspired you to create dynamic business capabilities and what problem were you determined to solve? Gretchen Richards: ⁓ The problem that I'm really like passionate about that I want to solve is improving the small business success rate. You know, when I started my business and I heard that 50 % of small businesses go out of business in the first five years, I was stunned and I thought that can't be true. It can't be that hard. Then I started my own business and I realized, ⁓ yeah, it is true. It is that hard. ⁓ I didn't think it would be hard. because I had worked most of my career in small businesses after, ⁓ like you had said, starting with some of the really big guys. But then when I was there, I looked up that corporate ladder and I decided that was just not somewhere I wanted to go. Too much perception management, too much inviting, too much politics. I wanted to actually get stuff done. So I went the small company route for the most part. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: But definitely with those bigger companies, a lot going on. Gretchen Richards: a lot of perception management. In small companies, there's nowhere to hide. I like that. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: That's right. So, enough, you talk about helping businesses become strong for growth and flexible for change. By the way, I love that. ⁓ What does that look like in practical terms? Gretchen Richards: In practical terms, when you're a small business, your structures have to be strong enough to support you. Otherwise, you can grow too quickly and just kind of crash down upon yourself. But on the other side that you have to balance is if your structures are too robust, it actually hampers your growth because your advantage as a small company is that you can turn on a dime, right? You're light, you're agile. And so you don't wanna overbuild your processes, but you want your processes to be ⁓ strong enough to support you. And once you kind of get them aligned, you grow, so they're no longer aligned. it's, I always tell my, my clients, you're never looking for perfection in the entrepreneurial world, you're just looking to optimize. Right. And so you're kind of like always chasing yourself as to ⁓ updating your processes to support the current level of growth with the current people you have in their current skill sets. Right. And as that changes, your processes have to change to support it. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Nothing's ever perfect. You're right about that. Gretchen Richards: Yeah, no, not in the entrepreneur world. I mean, we're risk takers and we act before we're ready. Otherwise we don't get anywhere. So perfection's out the window with those two criteria. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: That's right. Ha That's right. And that brings me to the next question, is many business owners grow revenue, but they are struggling operationally. What's the biggest mistakes companies make when scaling? Gretchen Richards: Well, I think there's a couple of different mistakes. So I think one is not doing enough market research. Right. I think a lot of times there's sort of ⁓ a desire to get everything in place and be ready. And so we'll build out the websites, we build out the product, we do all this, and then we show it to the customer. And the customer's like, well, that's not exactly what I wanted. And then you have to go back and revamp everything, right? ⁓ I think getting out in front of the customer, getting their feedback. I have had a couple clients where people are like, ⁓ yeah, that's a great idea. Everybody tells them it's a great idea and they build it. And then it's like, okay, it's a great idea to pay me. And they're like, ⁓ it's a great idea for somebody else. I don't want it, but I think it's a great idea, right? ⁓ So you really do have to kind of kick the tires and do that kind of minimal viable product that is kind of a popular term now ⁓ and make sure people are actually willing to pay. what you want ⁓ for your services and that you're adding the value that you think you're adding to your customers. And I think one of the other problems is ⁓ managing cash flow as you grow, right? Because as you grow, you need more and more cash flow to keep the business, right? You need a certain amount of money in the bank when you have to pay 10 people payroll, and you need a different amount of money in the bank when you have to pay 50 people payroll. And so you always have to be kind of adding to your cash reserves and managing that cash flow. There's a number of companies that are very ambitious and good what they do and they grow too quickly and they just run out of money because they haven't managed that. And not all companies are the same. Some companies actually get paid upfront and so they have less cash flow issues. Other companies, they have to pay for everything upfront, do all the work. pay all their people and then they build their customers and then they get paid. So there's a several month gap where they have to float the money. And those are the companies that really kind of have to be careful and really understand like how quickly can I grow with the cash reserves and the cash equity that I have. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Yes, in your latter example, definitely that can be really painful if you're floating cash for a really long time waiting to get paid. Gretchen Richards: Yeah, yeah, yeah, one of my customers is a construction company. They got to buy the materials, they got to pay their subcontractors, their employees, they've got to do everything, get everything inspected, then build them, then get paid. So they have very big upfront costs. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Sorry. Wow. So as I understand it, you focus very heavily on systems and processes. ⁓ Why do so many businesses resist building structure until it's too late? Gretchen Richards: ⁓ that's a good question. I think that you just don't really think of it. I mean, it sounds like a funny thing, but you know, we run our businesses, we kind of get into this day to day mode. And, you know, if it's sort of working, you know, if it's not broken, you don't fix it, but then then it breaks, right? So you always have to be a little proactive in setting the processes up. And it's not a one and done. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Yeah. Gretchen Richards: processes are going to evolve. And so you always have to be kind of evaluating them as a time to update them. You know, there's a there's a process maturity like hierarchy. And the the base process, which is where most start, is that it's not really repeatable, you just have a really skilled person doing something, and they just get it done. But every time they do it, it's slightly different. And Honestly, that's where a lot of processes start, but then you sort of see the pattern, you see the rhythms, and you can start making it a repeatable process. And then once it's a repeatable process, that key person ⁓ isn't as key. If it's a repeatable process, you should be able to bring in ⁓ multiple people and they should all be able to execute the process and come up with similar results at the end, right? And so to scale, you need that repeatable process. And then once it's repeatable, you can then improve it. If you're doing a process and it's different every time, you can't really optimize it because it's different every time. So those are kind of the natural steps that ⁓ you have to move your process through. And a lot of times, it's difficult. It's more difficult than it sounds. One of the problems that people run into is that key person likes being the key person. It feels good to be the key person, right? ⁓ But eventually there's too much work for the key person. I was working for one company ⁓ and the owner was like, yeah, I don't know what happened to my best employee. All of a sudden he's dropping the ball all over the place and the customers are upset and I don't know what's going on with him. He's not answering my phone calls. It's like, okay, I'll call him. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Yeah. Gretchen Richards: So I call him and the poor guy is like working nights, he's working weekends, he's tired, he's making mistakes, he's cutting corners. And he was just the bottleneck, he was the key person and the company grew to the point where he just couldn't handle it all anymore. And we had to like pull some stuff, write some procedures around some of the things. Because I mean, he was a top employee, he cared, he wanted to do it all because he wanted to make sure it was done right. Right? He didn't want to delegate to people he didn't think were going to do a good job. So we had to kind of like operationalize some things that he was doing, put it in a procedure, put the checkpoints in place and pull it off of his plate so he could do the higher end work. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Sure. And then how often do you review this process? Once you've set something up or you're like, okay, this is a repeatable best practices way of doing it, how often do you review it? Gretchen Richards: ⁓ it really depends on the process and how mature it is and, and how, how much change is in your environment. Right. So I think it's good to kind of review your processes just on a, ⁓ scheduled timeframe, like every six months to a year. But then there should also be like flags that come in that say, Hey, it's time to change your process. And one is when there starts being exceptions to the process and it's like, ⁓ I'm seeing this more and more. Like this is a new thing, this is a new type of customer and you request from a customer. We really need to think about how we're going to handle this going forward. ⁓ You do want to make sure it's not just a one-off though. You don't want to change your process for one-offs because then it just becomes this big behemoth thing that's hard to manage. But if you start seeing trends or you start seeing quality issues or you start seeing anything kind of pop up. then it's time to take a look at it. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: So the faster we deliver our products and services to our customers, the faster we get paid. So how can leaders improve customer delivery without dramatically increasing costs? Gretchen Richards: Well, it's kind of the funny thing, like ⁓ speeding up the process is usually the most cost effective thing to do, right? So a lot of times ⁓ you can get faster speed and quality at the same time. ⁓ It's really looking at it and making sure that things are running properly. And for things to run properly, everybody needs to know like their roles and responsibilities. They need to have the information that they need to do their jobs. ⁓ You know, they need to know what they're getting from the upstream people, what the downstream people need from them. You know, I think the job of management is just sort of to look down the road and see what the obstacles are and get them out of the road so that when the people come, they can just go smoothly down the road. ⁓ So management should always be a little more forward looking than their employees. and making sure that things are taken care of and out of the way for them. the process, people kind of eyes glaze over if come out of networking meeting and someone says, ⁓ you do process work. It's just like, shut down, right? Like, all right, nice to have met you, bye. But I think that's because a lot of people don't do it well and they just. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Yeah Gretchen Richards: produce huge amounts of documentation. And that's just not useful because nobody is going to update anything like that. too bulky. It's too heavy. Things change too quickly for that. I like to do process in a really light kind of way. ⁓ And one of the things I think people get wrong with process too is who should define what the process is. So the older model with the bigger companies is that management says this is what the process is. But then you hear people say, like, why do I have to do it this way? I have to jump through all these hoops. It doesn't make sense, right? And then for the smaller companies, see business owners tend to just let their people develop the process. But then you have people say, like, you know, I don't know who to go to. I don't know where to get the information. Nothing's the same. Everybody does it differently. Right. So you kind of need the big picture and then you need the expertise of the people doing the job. So The way I like to do process and procedures is I think management should say what the process is, which is really a roles and responsibility thing. And I like to do process just in one diagram. And it's all the different people and systems and how they interact. It's almost like a big interaction diagram. So like, what are the handoffs? What's the information that's going between them? How does it get there? What's the transport method? and just sort of how it all interacts. And I think management should define that because it's a roles and responsibility and accountability thing. But then once you get into what does the actual person do, the how to do the job, that should be left to the people on the front line and come up with like best practices on that. The only part that management should really be involved in that is the end product. So management should define the quality standards or what they want the customer experience to be that the procedures end up to. But how do you get there? That's where you have to let your people be creative and innovative and come up with clever ideas that you would never think of because you don't do what they do. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Sure. What I like about that is that everyone gets an opportunity to work on it and it's a buy-in on both ends. Not just management, not just the employees, but they work together. That's great. Gretchen Richards: Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, because people support what they create, right? And ⁓ it really is a very common problem with growing companies. They'll have one key person doing something. And then like we were talking about, that key person is hitting their Mac, so they bring in other people, right? But if management hasn't defined what they want that ⁓ end product or customer experience to be, well, then everybody's going to do it a little bit differently. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: That's right. Gretchen Richards: and then your brand can start to deviate, the quality can start to deviate, the consistency. And so... ⁓ You know, one of the things you have to kind of figure out when doing a process too is you can have really prescriptive processes and you can have kind of guidelines. Right. So if you have really prescriptive processes, says, you know, do this here, this there, you can just hire somebody off the street and say, here, go do this. Right. They don't need to be skilled necessarily. But if you have highly skilled people, you can give them guidelines. And you don't necessarily have to give them the breakdown. So there's a balance. People don't want to be cogs in the wheel. You have to give people room. But ⁓ where you do want to be prescriptive is in that quality user interface. And then based on their skill set and experience, you can be more guidelines on the other part. and let them develop their own best practices within their groups. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Now you emphasize data and measurement. What numbers should every business owner watch on a weekly basis? Gretchen Richards: ⁓ good question. Yeah, when it comes to ⁓ metrics, there's sort of your fixed set metrics that you're always going to want to pay attention to. And then there's the metrics you put around things that are like new or you're trying to stand up or issues that you're trying to manage away. And those metrics kind of like come and go. But the standard metrics, ⁓ you always want to know, you know, your revenue and your profit. ⁓ But when it comes to operational metrics, it usually comes down to your either managing cost, right, ⁓ or your managing schedule, like timeliness, or your measuring quality, or you're measuring volume. ⁓ And all of those will tell you something different. ⁓ Usually the volume ones can tell you like when you need to add resources or If the volume is going down, can give you kind of heads up something's wrong. ⁓ So for volume, sometimes it's good to set like a threshold and know if you're like red, yellow, or green and see which way you're trending. ⁓ Metrics over time are very useful for sort of things like that. But I think you always want to have your financial house in order. You always want to know. ⁓ your revenue from the different revenue sources, profit margins for your different services or products, and cash flow. You want to be measuring your cash flow. You want to be measuring your runway of how much cash you have and how far you can cover things. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: I like the way you break everything down. Gretchen Richards: ⁓ thank you. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: So you work. You work on organizational structure, roles, and accountability. Why is accountability such a challenge for growing companies? Gretchen Richards: ⁓ I think that there's a lot of lot of reasons. ⁓ I think one, there's a lot of small companies want to have sort of like a family feel to them. Right. And I think the people we are kind of the worst at holding accountable sometimes are our family or the people like we really care about. Because you're not going to be mean to them. So we don't hold them accountable. Right. And so like, so I think there's not a lot of ⁓ people teaching like how to hold people accountable in a way that is kind of kind and inspires them to do better. Kind of, it's almost like coaching them. Like, you know, I know you could do better than this, come on, right? ⁓ And I don't think that's really how management's viewed by a lot of people. I think management's more viewed like I'm gonna give you feedback because you were bad. Not the coaching ⁓ way, but. ⁓ You know, so I think part of it is that the family feel and not wanting to like be mean and then just not having the skills of being able to sit down and have those kind of honest conversations with people. you know, all of that is only after you have like a framework set up. So I think one of the ways accountability falls down is people don't define the roles clearly enough. Right? So like if we work together, you know, your role, maybe bump up against my role. And if we don't know where that line is, where your role ends and my role starts, then we're going to do one of two things. Either I'm going to not fully go to the edge of my role because I don't want to step on your toes. And then if you do the same thing, then there's a gap and then things fall between the gap. Or we've all worked with this person that says, Well, I don't know where the line is. I'm just going to keep going to someone tells me I'm going to stop. Right. They're like a bull in a china shop and they step on everybody's toes. And you don't want either of those. and again, sometimes I think people think that it's mean like, ⁓ I don't want to put someone in a box. I don't want to edge them in. But it's kind of empowering. Like, if you know, like, this is my this is your space and within that space, you're good to go. You know, it can it can be like empowering. So I think having those really clear lines and knowing especially between groups and what the handoffs are between people or groups is really important. Because I've seen like a dynamic where you have one group and it's got like a big personality and a lesser personality on two sides. And then they all interact with each other differently based on big personality and big personality or you know what mean? And it just all seems kind of chaotic because nobody's interacting with each other the same and different people get different responses and it just feels disorganized. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: So what separates those highly engaged groups from the ones that just show up for a paycheck? Gretchen Richards: I think the highly engaged groups feel empowered. ⁓ That's why I was kind of saying like, don't be overly prescriptive, right? Because I think, you know, we're human and we have knee jerk reactions, right? So I think I've seen people, you know, they hire the five people, they start getting the different results, and then they come in like a ton of bricks. And it's like, okay, now I'm going to tell you how to do everything. And they start being like, you know, micromanaging overly prescriptive and it just kills morale. ⁓ So knowing, you know, kind of like where you where you need to set things in detail and where to not. ⁓ But accountability is key because if you don't hold people accountable, it can completely demoralize your your key players. Right. So if you have you know, some A players, some B players and some C players. And you're letting your C players get away with, you know, doing half-hearted work, not making deadlines. It's usually your A players that you go to to make up for it, right? But you're not treating them differently. And the A players and the B players see that. see the other ones getting away with it. And sometimes it'll actually lower the B players down to C players because they're like, well, they're getting away with it. Must be OK. I could probably get away with it too. And it can be very demoralizing. And then your A players get fed up and they leave. you've got to kind of set the bar and say, is the standards, these are the expectations. And if people aren't meeting it, you work with them to help them get up over the bar, right? I mean, we all have our bad days too. I mean, your A players can have a bad day, but you still have to say, hey, what's going on? You know, is everything okay? Is there something you need? ⁓ I think that's one of the... ⁓ one of the things is really understanding if someone is not performing well, why they're not performing well. Like I used to have this boss who was kind of a brash New Yorker. And if you messed up, he'd be like, what were you thinking? Right. And he'd just yell at you in the meeting in front of everybody. ⁓ And people complained about that. So they sent him to executive training. And he came back and instead of like, what were you thinking? He could very calmly say, Can you tell me what your thought process was when you made that decision? And we all were like looking at them like, wow, who's this guy? But it was really eye opening because it got to the root cause of the problem. Right? When they told you like, this was my thought process. He was like, ⁓ you didn't have this piece of information or ⁓ you thought this was a priority. Like, yeah, normally we care about costs, but in this situation, you know, with this customer, there was this extra thing going on and Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Ha ha ha ha. Gretchen Richards: customer relationship is more important. Do you know what I mean? So it can show where information or something is missing and actually fix the root cause problem so that you get better decisions going forward. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: So after the training and the boss came back and he had this new way about him, ⁓ was this his new way to well, I mean moving forward or did he revert back to his original self? Gretchen Richards: Mm-hmm. It was. No, no, because he saw it. He saw that it was it was producing good results. Do you know what I mean? He saw like, oh, I'm actually figuring out what's wrong. I'm getting to the root cause of this. I'm fixing things. And it did it did boost morale. So Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Yes. Gretchen Richards: which I think was your original question. So, you know, as humans, we evolved like in tribes, right? And the tribes, everybody kind of takes care of each other and feel safe within the tribe, right? ⁓ And I think that's that's our human nature. You're you're you're with a group of people you like, and you will go out of your way to support them, you take care of the ill or the elderly, right? But if it's not safe, like, let's say a lion comes into the tribe. then everybody runs and it's every man for himself, right? So when you're setting up your company culture, you have to think about, am I setting up a safe environment where people are gonna come together and be collaborative and support each other and be open with the fact that they made a mistake? Or are you setting up kind of a hostile environment where people are covering their selves? ⁓ I think one of the best things and... business owner can do is own up to the fact that they made a mistake. Because if they don't, like if everyone knows they made a mistake and they don't own up to it, it tells all of their staff that it's not safe to own up to mistakes and their staffs will start hiding things. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: I love that analogy because it gives you a really good visual of a system or a setup of a company. Love that. For business owners and key people wearing too many hats, what's the first operational system they should build? Gretchen Richards: there. Mm-hmm. Oh, God, that's that's, that depends on their is this for the business owner? Or is this just like anybody? Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Well, let's do the business owner. Gretchen Richards: Okay. ⁓ In general. I think the 80-20 rule applies to a lot of things. So in general, if like that key person, if you're that key person and you've got stuff, I think you should look to see like, am I doing? Is there an 80-20 rule? Like is 80 % of what I'm doing repeatable that I could give to somebody else? And I'll just keep the 20 that's part 20 % part that's hard, that isn't repeatable. Do you know what I mean? Because a lot of times people would be like, ⁓ I can't give up this process. I can't give up doing this because every now and then, there's this custom case, and I have to be the one that handles it. But is there a way to divide it and take the easy part and give it to somebody else while you keep the harder part? And that kind of applies to any position. ⁓ For business owners, they really do want to. delegate their operations away. Business owners really need to be very strategic, and they need to be external facing, whether that's with their customers, their business partners, working with competitors, or whatever. And they need to be defining what is the business. And so when they get too bogged down in the day-to-day operations, they lose the business vision. They lose the ability to spend time with the customers, finding out like what's the next thing the customer needs. I we're in a really fast changing world right now, right? So you could be doing gangbusters in the current situation, but a year from now, your customers might not need what you have anymore, right? So you have to be. constantly like in front of your customers. mean, like look at COVID. All these companies had to shift their business models around when COVID hit. Because the world changed so suddenly, right? I mean, we had ⁓ a kind of a funny example. had ⁓ a, when my son was young, he would go to an after school karate school, right? And they would come pick him up from school and take him to the karate school and. feed them a snack, let them do homework, give them a karate lesson, and then the parents would come pick them up after work. Beautiful. Child care and karate all in one. So COVID hit, and their business was like, gone. But they pivoted because now the kids were at home with the working parents. Everybody was at home, and the kids had to be like online. And so they opened up their... dojos for the whole day and they would take a limited number of kids and they would like watch the kids all day and make sure that they were online with the courses and make sure they had lunch and everything. Right? Because they realized the value they were adding was not just karate, it was childcare. And that the person's childcare needs flipped. So they flipped their business model to match it. Right? Otherwise they would have gotten under. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Well, let's stay with that. Now that we have AI, we have automation, and changing the customer expectations, it's always changing, right? And reshaping business. What capabilities must companies build to stay competitive? They must build. Gretchen Richards: Mm-hmm. Well, I think everybody has to start ⁓ using the different AI tools that are out there and seeing how they can help them in their business. There's a lot that they can do that's time savings. And if you're not using them, your competitors are, and you will kind of get left behind. I think it's one of those things where if you, AI is still very much at the beginning stages. So if you kind of like, get on the bandwagon now and you grow with it, it's not as intimidating. Where like if you resist it and you wait and you try to jump in a year and a half from now, everybody else is a year and a half ahead of you and your learning curve is way bigger, right? So, you know, I mean, at a minimum people should be using AI for context sensitive searches so much better than like Google search engine. ⁓ you can give it things to review and give you feedback. You have to tell it to give you honest feedback. Otherwise, it'll tell you you're wonderful. But, you know, it can summarize things. You can you can just give it like a ton of documents and have it say, you know, summarize this or organize this. So it can actually like do work kind of for you. have to double check it. But there's a lot of people. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: You Gretchen Richards: using it in a lot of different ways. So I would definitely, if you're not using AI, invest in an AI engine, do some research, figure out which one is good for what you're doing. Some are good for picture generation. Some are good for written languages if you're doing copywriting or if you want it for marketing. Research which ones are better for which and. and really like dive in and sign up for some classes or look for what kind of training is out there. I'm sure there's YouTube videos, there's a YouTube video for everything. ⁓ But you have to keep abreast on that or you're gonna get too far behind and it's gonna be too hard to catch up or it'd be harder to catch up, not too hard. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Sure. Now, in your experience, ⁓ you're having these AI conversations, I guess, very often. Are your clients immediately embracing it, or are they pulling back a little and just waiting to see what happens? Gretchen Richards: ⁓ Different clients are embracing it at different levels. I have one client who is using it for some custom software that they're wanting to, well, they are deploying. ⁓ So they went from having two developers down to just one, and now they're using AI. They have to... give it chunks, but it's like, develop this piece of code for me, develop that piece of code, and then they merge it in, and it's ⁓ sped up how quickly they're rolling it out, and it's improved the number of bugs and stuff in it even. So they're using it pretty effectively. I have other ones that are using it just more for marketing and social media. ⁓ But I think there's there's ability to use it. some are using it for like meeting notes and summaries and stuff like that just to help keep them organized. ⁓ But I think everybody's trying to dip their toe in in some way. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Good. If listeners only took one action this week to improve their business, what would you tell them to do? Gretchen Richards: I would tell them to make sure that they know what their priorities are. I think it's way too easy to get on that daily treadmill and ⁓ lose sight of the big picture. So I would say step back, take an hour, block an hour of their time to just step back and look at the big picture, review their priorities and to see is there something that they should like check in on. So a lot of times we'll start a process or we'll start a project and we should shift but we're kind of like committed to going a certain way and we don't we don't pull back and look and say should we shift. And so I would say just take an hour and like look at the big picture, reaffirm what your short term and near term priorities are. and look at the process of the things that are going on and see if there's anything that needs to be shifted. I think that kind of review is easy, easy to miss if you're not disciplined about it and have it scheduled. I would recommend they do it every week, kind of a weekly review of where they are. Yeah, and things shift so quickly. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: That's a great advice. Great. Yes. And who should be contacting you? Gretchen Richards: ⁓ A lot of people reach out to me when they want to scale, but they know they have a number of operational issues and that if they scale, their issues are going to scale with them. So, you know, those are definitely people that I can help. ⁓ And then other people reach out to me because, you know, they're having operational issues, like, you know, they have fires that they need to put out. and they feel like they can't even get to do the strategy because it's just one fire after another. And, ⁓ you know, that's just kind of helping them get the operations tight so that they then can pull back and do the longer term strategy stuff. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: And this is across all industries. You look at processes in every industry. Gretchen Richards: ⁓ Most industries. So I would say any service-based or even product-based. ⁓ I can't really help a lot like retail stores ⁓ or restaurants wouldn't be probably the best clients for me because it's very kind of like transactional. I think retail stores need like supply side management and stuff like that. Mine's more like you've got a series of steps to go through to deliver your product or service. And you've got a team that's got to work together to do it or just yourself. ⁓ you know, and my focus is really companies like under 100 people, because that's where you're really building everything out. You've got to build all the systems, the structures. You got to manage your information. You've got to put your metrics in place. And it's not a one and done, you can't just do it once it all changes as you grow. There's there's kind of common issues as you grow. ⁓ You you start with a group of less than 10. And then as you go to like 20 and 30, those some of those people want to leave because they don't want structure. And then some of those people don't necessarily fit in the organizational boxes that you you want to build your company on. So there's, you know, there's different challenges at different ⁓ places as you grow. ⁓ So it just kind of depends on where they are in their life cycle. But that under 100 is a fun spot to me because it's, you know, it's where you're building that airplane while you're flying it. you know, entrepreneurship, it's not easy. have to be, you know, you got to take care of the legal, you got to take care of the finances, you got to do HR, you have to... do the operations, you got to deal with technology, plus you have to do whatever it is that your business is. It's a lot and you can be doing 90 % of it really well and just that last little 10 % is bogging you down. I think most of my clients are doing 90 % really, really well. They're successful, they're profitable, but they have that little piece that's holding them back. And sometimes you just need someone from the outside to... give you that different perspective. Sometimes you just can't see it because it's too close. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Absolutely. And you can help them unlock that last 10%. So Gretchen, where can listeners connect with you? Learn more about dynamic business capabilities and continue this conversation. Gretchen Richards: Yes. ⁓ They can reach out to me at email, is ⁓ gretchen at dynamicbc.com. So Gretchen is G-R-E-T-C-H-E-N at dynamic and then B-C, B as in boy, C as in Charlie for dynamicbusinesscapabilities.com. They can also go to my website to get information and to reach out. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: So the website's dynamic business capabilities. Gretchen Richards: It's just dynamicbc.com. So my marketing guy told me don't make someone type all that out. Especially not in your email. He's like, trust me, that's just going to annoy people. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Great. So can we start one more second? What I want to do is I want to redo that question again. ⁓ What do you think about this, if you're OK with this, just offering the website? ⁓ Because we're going to make this video evergreen, so it's going to stick around for quite some time. At some point, you may not want people to email you directly. So maybe if you send them to the website. So let me start again. So Gretchen, where can listeners connect with you? Gretchen Richards: Okay. Okay. Email me. Okay. Perfect. Okay. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Learn more about dynamic business capabilities and continue this conversation. Gretchen Richards: They can go to my website. It's dynamicbc.com and the BC stands for Business Capabilities, Dynamic Business Capabilities, but I don't make you type all that out. You can just do dynamicbc.com. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: Excellent. Gretchen, thank you so much for the conversation today. It's been very, very informational. Gretchen Richards: Thank you, Joe. Appreciate you having me on. Joe Abreu - Glovisor: pleasure. Till the next time.