Loading summary
Transcript76 lines
- [00:00]
A
We built the company from the grave up. In 2020, the week of our wedding at Crash, she jumped in and we built it from. From the grave up. I mean, where did it go from there, Cindy?
- [00:11]
B
Yeah, it has definitely been a journey from there. I think up front it was us learning how to work together. I think we are blessed in that we are very complementary. Meaning Tim is very visionary marketing, sales genius, and I am very much operations. And I think with any good partnership, you need a combination of both.
- [00:32]
C
Today I'm joined by Tim and Cindy Dodd, co founders of Pima, an award winning LinkedIn marketing and lead generation agency based in Miami that served over 1,000 clients across more than 10,000 campaigns. But today, we're not just talking about LinkedIn, we're pulling back the curtain on what it actually takes to build a winning team, shape a culture worth being part of, and grow as leaders through every season of the journey.
- [00:56]
B
It's definitely been a journey since 2020. We have not only just redeveloped our culture and what it looks like to run a winning team, but as you mentioned, a team that is really bought into the mission and the vision and is aligned on values. That was one of the elements of the initial business, Pima 1.0, that was missing. They had the expertise in marketing, they had the sales, they had the ability to scale. But operationally, that culture and the foundation is the core part that was missing. So you can have all the good things, but if you don't have culture, you don't have anything.
- [01:44]
C
Welcome to Beyond Blind Blaming. This is the place where we explore how easily hidden truths can hold us back, trapping us in cycles of frustration and blame, often without even realizing what's truly stopping us. Each week I'm joined by experts and professionals who share their journey of taking back control of their story, overcoming hidden challenges, and discovering how to stop blind blaming from dictating their outcomes. The insights you're about to gain will help you see beyond your current limitations, find the courage to seek new perspectives, and ultimately live a life that's both purposeful and and powerful. So if you're ready to break free from blind blaming and discover what's possible, you'll definitely want to listen to my next guests. I'm your host, Kevin St. Clergy, and today I'm joined by Tim and Cindy Dodd, co founders of Pima, an award winning LinkedIn marketing and lead generation agency based in Miami that served over a thousand clients across more than 10,000 campaigns. But today, we're not just talking about LinkedIn, we're pulling back the curtain on what it actually takes to build a winning team, shape a culture worth being part of, and grow as leaders. Through every season of the journ, Tim and Cindy have done more than just build a successful agency. They've built something harder to find and even harder to sustain. A team that operates with trust, clarity, and shared purpose. And like any real growth story, it hasn't always been pretty. Today, they're sharing their lessons, the hard moments, and the mindset shifts that have shaped them, their team, and the culture. Tim and Cindy, welcome to the show.
- [03:11]
B
Thank you for having us. Excited to be here.
- [03:13]
A
Very excited to be here. And wow, what an intro. I need to like, I need to bring you when we go do speaking engagements. I need to have you intro was. That was. That was phenomenal.
- [03:22]
C
Thanks. Yeah, we get into that part of it. So I don't do it as well as one podcast I was on who actually sung. She turned it into a poem and a song. My intro, it was, it blew me away. She's like, I do this for everybody. It's my thing. And I'm like, that's not to be mindset thing. But I'll never do that. I can never do. I'm not that talented, so. But I'm glad you guys like.
- [03:41]
A
So if you're expecting that, you're going to be disappointed. Sorry, Kevin.
- [03:45]
C
I do expect you guys to sing. No pressure. So let's start at the beginning. Tell us about your journey and I'll let you guys decide who talks and answers that. But tell us about your journey and how'd you get where you are today?
- [03:56]
A
Well, so long story short. And we can dive into any area you want. I had started pima back in 2018. 2018, we had trained 10,000 people online how to use LinkedIn. And this was at the time when I'd been using LinkedIn since 2015. And everybody was like, what do you mean LinkedIn for clients? This was back in the day, like I thought it was just like a job resume site. And I was using LinkedIn to get clients for a marketing agency that I owned back in 2015. And people started asking like, how do you do this? And then we ended up just starting a training program. 2018 trained 10,000 companies and they all started asking us to do it for them. And we essentially, like, I grew it from 0 managed clients to 243 managed clients in 18 months. So super fast scale. And operationally, which there's a lot in your book that resonates for sure operationally, I didn't Do a great job. And it ended up crashing the week of Cindy and I's wedding. Like literally the week of the wedding, it was like, hey, babe, there's no more money coming in. What do you mean? And so Cindy jumped in. She has a background in ultra high net worth operations and. And she jumped in and we built the company from the grave up in 2020, the. The Week of our wedding at Crash, she jumped in and we built it from. From the grave up. I mean, where did it go from there, Cindy?
- [05:26]
B
Yeah, it has definitely been a journey from there. I think up front it was us learning how to work together. I think we are blessed in that we are very complimentary. Meaning Tim is very visionary marketing sales genius and I am very much operations. And I think with any good partnership you need a combination of both. You need a visionary and an integrator. If anybody's on eos, you kind of know those terms. But essentially the only reason why our marriage partnership and our business partnership works so well is because we are very complimentary. When people ask us like, how do you work with your spouse? I'm like, it's not for everyone and I don't recommend it. I. Unless you do have very complementary skills. But it's definitely been a journey. Since 2020, we have not only just redeveloped our culture and what it looks like to run a winning team, but as you mentioned, a team that is really bought into the mission and the vision and is aligned on values. That was one of the elements of the initial business, Pima 1.0 that was missing. They had the expertise in marketing, they had the sales, they had the ability to scale. But operationally, that culture and the foundation is the core part that was missing. So you can have all the good things, but if you don't have culture, you don't have anything. And I think that's a big reason why we've been able to scale and sustain our growth is because of culture. So we've just invested a lot of time, effort, energy, resources, learning, Right. How to become the kind of leaders that can sustain success. But what does it mean to be the kind of leader that people can follow after. Right. And the kind of leader that your employees are excited about coming to work, excited about pouring in their time, effort, energy into the business. We have implemented just so many operational nuances that we can definitely talk about, but that has been the core of our growth. Since then. We've worked with a lot of agencies and different business owners and yeah, it's been an exciting journey that's really cool.
- [07:28]
C
I love it. Well, it sounds like you guys for partnerships. Cause I had a very successful partnership for 17 years before we sold a couple of years ago. And what we did on day one, and I'll give Charlie credit for this, is he. We sat down and he's like, all right, what do you love to do? And then I told him and he's like, great, because all the. And then he said, what do you hate to do? And I told him all the stuff that I hated. He's like, great. That's the stuff I love to do. And I really believe that by clearly defining our roles and responsibilities and the time that we were going to dedicate towards those roles and responsibilities is what made our partnership very successful, very profitable and ended with a, like I said, a very much a life changing exit. It sounds like you guys have done something similar.
- [08:08]
A
Yeah, I mean I think the, the, when you, when you have two people that are both like the whiteboard entrepreneur just throwing out ideas, right. And, and they're good at sales, but you don't have the operations, you run into the same problem that I ran into, which is trying to scale a company without that operations component. And, and when I say we built it from the, it wasn't from the ground up, it was from the grave up. And it was literally right from the get go. We're big fans of the EOs, the book traction, Gino Wickman and how to build the structure. We, within three years we were able to be one of the 526 fastest growing company in the US but it was literally because we spent so much time, effort and energy and we said, what do we want the culture of this company to be like, what are our values? What did we want to show up every single day for? And what are the kind of people we want to attract? So we really built our culture to say, hey, we're going to make decisions by these, we're going to hire by these, we're going to fire by these. And then it's, you know, the, what is it? The third law of thermodynamics or second law of thermodynamics is that everything in a contained system will get worse and worse and worse without you putting in energy. And so it takes a lot of energy to build the culture, to maintain the culture. But we find, we found that over the years, the more that we are hiring, we're firing, we're reinforcing. Every Tuesday, one of our teammates rotates on going through all the values in mission. We just find that Literally everything is built around the culture. Then it actually becomes like this momentum that keeps pushing the company forward, and you have to make adjustments and corrections every now and then. But I would say, by far, that is the biggest game changer is just how do you get exceptional, exceptional talent and then just do a great job leading them?
- [09:52]
C
I love it. Well, as you just stated, building that high performance team doesn't happen by accident. But what were some of your. Do you have any specific examples of some early leadership lessons that shaped the culture that you have today? And maybe that's a better question for Cindy, if that's your, your role.
- [10:07]
B
So many. Oh, my gosh. So, so, so, so many. I think one that that stands out is like extreme ownership. So we have our five values. We call them Pima Power. So it's pioneer, it's ownership, it's winning, it's excellence, and it's results. So part of ownership, it's taking extreme ownership. I think early on, at least for me, as an, it was easy to see a team and to see a process and be like, this person didn't do their role. Why didn't you get it done? And Tim is actually the one that challenged me on that. He read. What is it called? Extreme ownership. Right. He had read that first, and he had recommended that to me. It was not that somebody else is to blame for anything. If you can take ownership of every mistake, good or bad, right. Over everything that happens in the company, you have control. And so that reframing for me was powerful because, one, I like control. I like to know that there's a certain outcome and what I could do about it. But I think also when you have a culture that everybody is taking extreme ownership, it really creates something very powerful. And in that, if there is a mistake or something bad happens, I know that I can look at it and say, okay, what could I have done better as a leader? Right. And what. Maybe there was an area that I didn't train the team correctly on, or maybe there's an area or there's a gap in our process that. That one employee, you know, didn't review this one thing. That's a gap in our process that we need to revisit. So I think extreme ownership has been one of the biggest lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur. And the moment that that switched for me, I saw my leadership skyrocket as a result. How about you, Tim?
- [11:50]
A
So, I mean, when the business crashed, it was like, okay, what did I do wrong? And how could I do it better next time? And so it's the same thing. I mean, I think it's also when leading by example, right? If you want too oftentimes leaders, they actually want their teammates to do something that they're not even willing to do. It's like they want them to take extreme ownership. They want them to do things with that. But it's like for some reason, well, at least people that don't go very far as leaders, it's like their expectation of their employees is like, beyond what they're willing to live in. And so I think just Sydney and I being willing to. I always say it's like, be willing to sweep the floors, but be smart enough to hire a janitor. Right. And so I think when the team sees that we're willing to sweep the floors, as it were, but we're also smart enough to like, hey, hire the right people for it, that's been huge. And I think also just getting the right people in the right seats, you know, it's. We might hire somebody on and we might find out they love and they're super good at something else in the business. And so we're always moving people towards where their greatest gifts are and their great. Where they get most excited. And we've had people come in that, like, there's one, One lady on our team that's now managing some of the operations, and she just came in as an appointment setter. But then we saw her gifts, we saw her skill set in certain areas, and we just like, just let her run with it. And she just proved herself out so well. And now, you know, if Cindy's off at a conference, speaking like she's running the company, like she's running the operations. And so that's been a big one, is just not just hiring somebody and keeping them there, but really allowing them to grow in their professional goals and helping them thrive. And Cindy's been a big part of, like, mentoring the operations team to really become great at what they do.
- [13:43]
C
When I think that responsibility is a big chunk of that because I used to be one of our core values. And it's. With a new company, it's. It's that as well. 100% responsibility is what we call our core value and still do to this day. Even Christina can, who, you know, well, my executive assistant has been with me 12 years. And when I say she royally screwed up on something this week, she did, but it was kind of fun. I didn't have to say a word. She's like, I'm going to handle this. I Just completely screwed up. We had a podcast and there was no communication with the podcast guests. There was no link, there was no interview set up for me like we normally do things. And she was on it already. She called the client, apologized already sent the client a thank you gift. Just other things that I didn't have to tell her to do. She took responsibility, admitted it and fixed it. So I love that you guys are doing that. And it's interesting because the. We always taught people there's two things you have to give up when you take 100% responsibility or radical ownership. Blaming and complaining. And it's hard.
- [14:41]
A
Yes, yes. And there's, there's man. When our culture is. There's zero complaints, zero gossip or just. And when, when. And you're so used to not having complaints, not having gossip. It, it's. And then you're around somebody who's. Now was around somebody the other day that were. They were helping us for with the move and it was constant complaints and. And you're just like, it's so interesting how draining and life sucking that is. And you become so aware of it when you, you kind of get free from it and then you're put around somebody that's like that. And unfortunately, a lot of companies have a lot of gossip and complaining. That's a big part of their culture. And so that's something we fought very, very hard on. And even people that were really high performers, if we saw that they're having a negative impact on the culture for, for long enough, we would, we would get rid of them kindly. Like we, we would part ways and on good terms as best we could. But that's something we've really, really fought for. It's just great, great culture for sure.
- [15:40]
C
Well, I like that because I had somebody on the podcast recently who said, you know, when somebody doesn't work out, we don't just fire them, we have a meeting with them. And I say, look, you're clearly not happy here, but we're not happy with the performance either. We're not saying you need to go right away, but let's talk about a transition plan so that we're both happier. And I really like that because I find that owners, they dread letting people go and then sometimes they just never do it. They never mfd. I don't know if you've gotten to that part in the book. I don't know how far you got. They don't make that effing decision to let them go when. And then when they finally do, they realize how much damage they've done between the time that they decided they probably should make that hard decision and the time they do. And there's so many things that they didn't do and so much damage that they did, and it's not.
- [16:24]
A
It's not fair to them because if they're not thriving in. In the role, then you're. You're holding them back for where their. Their best life or their best opportunity is too. So, you know, it's bad for the company. It's bad for the. It does. It doesn't help anybody. It just makes you not have to deal with a tough conversation.
- [16:42]
C
Well, on the show, as you know, we talk about blind blaming. Where have you seen leaders, including yourselves? And I know as an agency owner, I have my. So I will talk about customers in a minute, but I want to talk about how you guys have initially blamed something like circumstances, possibly team members, market conditions, before realizing the real shift that needed to happen internally. Or did the book kind of trigger some things you've done in the past that you may have handled better? I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on that.
- [17:08]
B
Yeah, I was. I was reflecting on this one while reading the book. I think back to when we really started seeing scale in our agency. So onboarding 10, 20 new clients every week. There was a point where I would see certain clients were, like, really happy with us, you know, and then there were certain clients that were just not. And my initial blame was on our client success team. Right. Why aren't they doing their jobs? Why are clients unhappy? Shouldn't you be client success, Right. Like, that is your only job is to, like, make our clients happy. And I had to take a step back because, like, firing a client success manager who I know is doing their job and doing well in other areas is not the solution. So looked under the hood a little bit more, and we realized that there was a gap in expectations. So what the sales team was selling and they were setting really good expectations on the front end. Clients forget once they're onboarded and they're getting through the process, clients forget what was said a month or two ago on a sales call. Right. So we identified that the gap is expectations and expectation management with clients. So it's not that the clients were necessarily unhappy is that there was a mismatch in expectations. So what we did to fix it is we went back, looked at our client journey like, okay, where are the key points in our process that we have to set and reset expectations throughout the process to keep these clients happy? Right. So that they're aware of how soon they should be getting results and what the process looks like and how we do check ins and just adjusting that where we have an expectation management call up front and we reiterate those expectations throughout the client journey. That fixed our client happiness goals. It fixed retention. And so it wasn't, you know, a client success issue, it was a process issue. And that's, I think, just one of the several examples of this happening in our lives. But I think about that one specifically in operations. And, you know, I find myself, even since reading the book, constantly asking that question, like, are there any areas that I'm blind to? The fact that I'm trying to solve for the wrong problem.
- [19:17]
A
That's great, Tim. I think I've seen a lot of that just blind blaming, which I. I'm like, we're really against this, what I'm about to tell you in our company now, because I've just seen it in my company and other companies where there's this blind blending between cells and operations.
- [19:36]
C
Right.
- [19:36]
A
And it's like what Cindy just said there, it's not even that cells set the wrong expectations, but if, but if, you know, they sell them and then, you know, a month in, there's. There's a mismatched expectation like Cindy was talking about. And they said, well, I'm pretty sure, you know, the sales guy said this. And now the operations team is just taking that and going, okay, now the sales is doing a bad job. And then the sales is like, we're closing deals. Why is the operations complaining like, we're following the SOPs. And really it comes down to it wasn't sales or marketing or operations that was wrong. It was just a process. The sop. Are we looking at the client journey and reinforcing the important expectations at every single point? What is it, the chief repeating officer or are we repeating the important things enough? And so that's been a big one for me, is just seeing that blind blaming. Even as a sales manager and an operations manager, it's like, you know, blaming either of those pieces versus pulling back and looking at like, okay, what's really to blame here? So we can. It's. It's like, you know, solving problems is not that hard. The hard part is finding out what's the right problem to solve. Like, what are, what are we actually trying to solve here?
- [20:46]
C
Yeah, that is the hard part. I know when we. To fix that problem. When I had my agency, we. We didn't have a separate, like, sales versus customer support or Client success team, however you want to call it, or production is what we used to call it internally. So we had the salespeople were the account managers, and it completely eliminated the overselling part that we had a problem a little while. Same what you just described. Overselling over promising or what they thought was over promising. But we were listening to the calls because we recorded all of our calls anyway. So we knew. So we went to a new model where each person, they signed them up and then they're the ones who had to walk them through the service. And it completely eliminated that particular issue for us. But it sounds like you guys fix it in a different way too.
- [21:31]
A
So with that, that's interesting because those generally are pretty different personality types. So how did you structure that? What kind of person, like personality type tests or assessments were you hiring that could both convert sales calls well. And manage a client well?
- [21:49]
C
Well, we. We thought that with an agency that it's not two separate job skills. It's the same. Because if you think about it, in an agency, it's very transactional, as you know, every month. What have you done for me today? And so we felt that they needed to be resold every month. And so we wanted a salesperson in that position. We knew we could teach them the coaching aspect and the account management aspect of what they did, because we had a really good business assessment that we did that we built that would. Would turn any salesperson into a coach. And that's actually what we're doing now for agencies, coaches, and consultants. We're helping them develop that skill set so they could do something similar.
- [22:27]
B
Very interesting.
- [22:28]
C
Very interesting to watch. But, yeah, it was cool and it works. And they're still using it today, the company that purchased us.
- [22:34]
A
But you probably get a lot more upsells and referrals by having.
- [22:38]
C
Well, that's my next sec. So second benefit. I was going there. You're stealing my thunder.
- [22:42]
A
Oh, sorry, brother.
- [22:43]
C
You're the guest man. I'm. But yeah, that's what happened, though. Our upsells went through the roof because once we had the trust, the salesperson sold them on that. Then they reiterated, look, it's, you know, slow growth takes time, blah, blah, blah. And then once they had that trust, they were already the salespeople. Because I've struggled in the past with having account managers who could upsell and then getting the account manager to get them back on the phone with a salesperson so they could upsell them into a different service. Never worked that well because the trust was transferred to the Account manager then. So we just had to be consistent. Now there's good and bad with every decision you make in life. We all know that. The bad thing is there's only about 150 accounts that each client, success manager, whatever you want to call them, could handle. So once we got to about 150, we knew that we needed to per account. We account manager, salesperson, we knew we needed to add additional staff.
- [23:35]
A
Interesting. I love that. It's always cool to hear those little tweaks in business. Those little. It doesn't take. This massive big idea could be like, hey, what if we made this little shift? And it's always those little shifts, those like 1% differences that sometimes can just skyrocket things. So that's a really something incendiary and I definitely have to talk about.
- [23:57]
C
Cool. Yeah. Small hinges swing big doors is what I've always said. And I totally stole that from my business partners. I mean I ethically swiped and redeployed it. That's what we say now.
- [24:07]
A
Small rudder steers a big ship.
- [24:09]
C
There you go. Either way. So what are some of the hard moments that forced you to grow as leaders rather than just push harder as operators?
- [24:16]
A
I mean, you mean like this week
- [24:18]
C
or just in general like today? No, like this morning. It's an open ended question. I mean I loved what you said before, by the way, because my first book was actually called the Death of Audiology, my first field that we had our business in. So from the Grave up really hit home for me. That's why in our, in my talk, the keynote for For Beyond Blind Blaming, we have the, the three fatal flaws. But I love how to Grow from the Grave up. That was really good. But that was one of your hard moments. But what's something that pops into your mad? Like what's a recent really difficult moment that you both had in your business that you had to sit back and say, wow, we really need to fix this?
- [24:55]
A
Well, probably from the enterprise selling.
- [24:59]
B
Yeah, that's the first thing that came to mind too. Yeah.
- [25:01]
A
Did you say that?
- [25:02]
B
Yeah. So we made, we made a pretty significant pivot, I want to say it was 2024, going into 2025, we decided that we were going to swim upstream, meaning we were going to take on more mid market enterprise clientele. We had previously serviced majority small business and a very small percentage was that larger client, quote unquote. And so we made the shift and I think a few things right, assumptions, what we assumed was going to happen versus the reality of what happened. One, it just Took us a lot longer to make the pivot and transition than we anticipated. There was so much that had to change in our sales process in, of course, operations. I think these things were like we were thinking, you just sign on bigger clients, right? Larger clients, larger contracts, larger retainers, all the things. But there was so much nuance to making such a massive transition that it really set us back quite a bit. And so I think us as leaders, we had to just be humble. You know, we had to say that we don't know everything and we don't know especially what we don't know. And it was a season of learning new process, new systems. There was a lot that we had to learn in the enterprise sales game that Tim can talk about in a second as well. But I think any time that you make a pivot or a transition in business, it comes with new complexities, new things that you have to learn, new ways of doing things right, new mindsets. It all comes with the transitional pivot that I think sometimes we don't anticipate. So like my philosophy is anytime there's any kind of pivot, just anticipate it's going to be 10 times harder, 10 times more difficult than you initially thought it was going to be.
- [26:46]
C
For sure, we could be sister agencies because we did the same thing. And it was a completely different language, it was a completely different outcome that you had to sell, a completely different decision making process. And even billing was a pia, you know, pain in the butt. It's like, well, gosh, you know, I'm used to getting my cash now, right. And so, you know, as soon as somebody signs up small businesses, we, we rolled with it. Now we ended up going back to our core client. We did not continue along the enterprise level. However, we, we did have four enterprise level partners, slash referral sources, which drove our business 20 to 30% growth for five years in a row without having to do any ads or any marketing whatsoever. And so that is how we pivoted and we just stopped serving those. But we partnered with them and found some people that would benefit from us helping their clients.
- [27:38]
B
Mm, powerful. Yeah, I mean there's so much that goes into an enterprise sell when you are used to, as you mentioned, like getting cash upfront. Right. In the enterprise sale. I mean you can speak to it and there's so much complexity that it is, it's just completely different.
- [27:53]
A
Yeah, I think the, the mistake that we made was doing a hard cut off of because we, we were doing really good revenue selling to small businesses. But we Were selling like a, an implementation program. So they'd hire us for 90 days. We'd build out their LinkedIn systems, we'd hire an employment center from the Philippines, train them up, get whole thing running and pass it off. And then you know, it'd be. So every month was we had to constantly bring in new leads, close new deals. And then of course we had back end upsells and clients we had clients would say for us for you know, 12 months and then another 12 months with our back end program. But what was the mistake we made is because we had a couple early wins and you know how the, how deceptive an early win can be. It's like we closed a couple of deals that were like these six figure contracts and we were like excited like okay, this is going to be easy because the first few ones were. And then we did a hard cut off of the old product which was a mistake because we had leads still coming in. We were literally turning away business that we could have closed and kept the revenue going. And then when it wasn't as easy as those first couple cells and we ended up biggest mistake was I was trying to sell these big contracts because I figured oh, they're big companies, big budgets, they're not going to flinch it, you know, 100k or 250k or 300k or whatever. And then the biggest realization was to change the game. And we started closing really, really high. I mean we got our close rate up to 70% on one of our offers and that was when we switched to a land and expand where we're just like hey, let's start. And we had, we've talked about this before Kevin. Like let's start at a low price where you know, VP of Sales or CMOs and they don't need much approval to get this financially. We start low and then show them the results over a three or four month pilot and then from there we'll expand and grow. So that was the two biggest things was not cutting off our revenue stream until we have the new one come fully running. That's the mist, that's what I would do next time. And then I think just doesn't matter what audience you're selling to, when you can sell just a no brainer, here's a three, four month pilot. Very, very low cost to get results and then give them a taste and see. I think that that's the two biggest lessons that came out of that year. And that year was most months were, were we were, we were at a loss financially we were like, no, some months were profit, but most months were loss. And so, you know, we were smart enough to have money in the bank, so we were able to make that transition, but we didn't have to spend that much, much of it to. To make the transition.
- [30:29]
C
Painful lesson, but it sounds like it was a good one and you pivoted and you did well.
- [30:33]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's. It was definitely a good lesson. Very good lesson.
- [30:37]
C
Cool. Well, you've definitely built a team that operates with trust and clarity. From what we've discussed, what practical systems or habits ensure that trust isn't just a word on the wall, but something that you live daily.
- [30:49]
B
I think your. When we go back to values and meet, and I grew talking about this a lot, but it's just been such a cool part of how our team operates. When you have people on the team where you are all aligned in values, right? Where you hire and fire based on these values. I know when my team shows up, we have those values in mind. We shout people out for the values in our team meetings. Like this person lived up to a pioneer or this person took extreme ownership. So you have a culture where teammates are already in alignment. Right? We're speaking the same language. We know what the vision is. And I think that constant reinforcing of values where it's not just, you know, a placard on the wall that we say, hey, Pima Power, it's living, breathing day to day in how we run our business. I think that shows up in, like, I trust my employees to make decisions because I know that they're doing it from a place of value, alignment. Right? And I think too, trust, trust is built over time, right? I think the level of team that we have now, where we do trust each other, we can trust them to make decisions, trust him to manage clients. It's built over time. And I think the same thing with us, right? Our team trusts us because we've proven ourselves as leaders again and again and again, right? We say, hey, we're going to make this pivot or we're going to make this move, and then they trust us and it's. There's success on the other side. You do that enough times and an employee is like, hey, anytime Tim says we're going to do this and we come out on the other side winning. Like, I've seen that repetition over and over. So I think that builds trust among like, employees and their leaders as well.
- [32:25]
C
That's great. And I love that you use pioneer because that's in the book. If you caught it. I don't know if you remember that part on the insight implementation matrix Pioneer.
- [32:33]
B
I don't have to remind me, people do.
- [32:34]
C
It's in the beginning of the book. It's just, it talks about when people sometimes they have a lot of insights but they don't execute. And so we have a four quadrant little thing that they go through and it's kind of a journey from where they go beyond blind blaming to where they're really succeeding. And our top tier is called Pioneer. Yeah, there you go.
- [32:52]
A
It's a Pioneer is. It sounds cool but it's like, it's messy man. It's, you know, it's like. But I think that's another big thing is we review all of our team's personal professional financial goals one on one. So one on one meetings. Hey, what's your three one, three five year goals for your personal, for your professional, for your financial. And so there's also a sense of like hey, these people are also care about me, they care about my life, they care about my career, they care about all my goals. And so we have a lot of people on, on the team that never had an emergency fund before and then through our mentorship meetings with them then now they have six month emergency fund. They bought this house, they bought this investment property. And so I think that's a big part is we're very, very interested in them reaching all their personal, professional and financial goals. And we see Pima as the vision for Pima is actually for Pima to be a vehicle for everybody on the team to hit their personal, professional and financial goals. And I see, I think it's like when you show you know, somebody how interested you are in helping them achieve all their personal, professional financial goals and then you associate the 3, 3, 4 or 5 KPIs in their role with, with their goals. You just create a culture where everybody is like obsessed about helping each other win because everybody's, you know, when we had meetings, hey I have a win. I just bought my, bought a, bought a car for my mom, you know, da da. Like I want to thank Pima for helping me like be able to think through that and do that. I think that's where the, probably the biggest trust is built is just people realizing like we actually care. And like now we don't just say we care but we, we're helping them achieve goals that some, some people say I, I achieved my five year goal in like six months with Pima.
- [34:36]
C
Yeah, that's gotta feel good.
- [34:38]
A
Yeah, it feels Great if that would
- [34:40]
C
make me tear up and cry sometimes.
- [34:42]
A
So, you know, you start business to make money. It's like Andrew Carnegie said, you start a business to, to make money, but then you realize like your reward is building people and seeing other people winning and having results.
- [34:54]
C
Yeah, that's what drove me every morning. I had a lot of. I really got off on people saying, you know, you've helped me make another half a million dollars this year and I can't. You've changed my life. And we heard it from our employees too. Even on the first day sometimes we always. There's an article that I'll send you guys. It's the first chapter of Jack Canfield's book, the Success Principles. And it's called 100% responsibility. And we had them read that first on day one. That basically goes into, look, if you take 100% respons for everything in your life and you give up blaming, complaining, it'll change your life. And I can't tell you how many stories I have of people when we have that, you know, I get back with them and I'm like, we go over our core values, we go over that article, they're like, listen, I, I hope this is okay to share, but I've really struggled with my mother in law for many years. And after reading that article, my husband came up to me on Sunday after my mother in law left and said, what's going on with you? That's the like the best weekend we've ever had since we were married. And so we were starting to change people's lives and it felt really good. It sounds like you guys are doing the same, so kudos to you for that.
- [35:48]
A
Yeah, well, it's, it's interesting. It's right like, because Kevin, we don't build the company. Right. We build people and the people build the company. And so yeah, absolutely. It's, that's, that's. And that's what I didn't do version one of Pima and that's why it crashed. And then this time around it's just, it's there. I like, literally I could be in a meeting with anybody on our team, one on one or in a group. And I'm like excited to see every single person, you know, so it's. But that's been through a lot of hard work. 99% of that work has been Sydney building great culture and then kind and then me just, you know, supporting it. But you know, like, we work together. But Cindy is just, she's got that operational brain like it's both, both the talent and again and something she, a skill that she's developed like insanely well.
- [36:34]
C
Amazing. Well, you said it, Cindy. Every company goes through seasons, rapid growth plateaus, pivots. Tim, you've talked about them too. How do you lead differently depending on the season you're in?
- [36:44]
A
It's wild, right? Because we made a transition where we were primarily selling coaching services essentially but for a slight implementation or three month programs to doing a full managed service as our primary offer. But also we built out a development team. So we've got a software and a development team that's building a lot of our backend stuff because I mean it just, just good luck competing these days if you don't have a really good software, you know, backing your stuff up. And that was a big shift for, for me. And the team is like okay, what does it look like from being a high ticket or like CEO of a regular agency to like okay, now what does a CEO of a software company look like? And really seeing ourselves as like hey, we're a managed service. But that is fueled by our backend of processes, software and execution. Like we have a, we have a lot of marketing agencies that hire us. They do like LinkedIn or they do everything but LinkedIn. It's like Instagram, Facebook, Google. They're like, we don't even touch LinkedIn. We've tried to post there, can't get any results from it. And so we actually have marketing agencies that outsource to us for their clients and for their companies. I mean we're talking about some, some big agencies that are, and doing $15 million a year. And they're like, I could do everything but I don't, we don't know how to do LinkedIn. And so we've had a lot of people come to that, but to pull that off, to give them a white label price, that makes sense. There's so much technology that we had to build to make our systems efficient and operational so we could sell it to them at a price that they'd have good margins reselling. And so that was been the biggest shift besides what I mean we mentioned before of switching the enterprise. And I think like how do you do that with a team is you communicate where, where you're going, you communicate it's not going to be perfect. You communicate like hey everybody here, like I want you to see, see problems and be like oh awesome. I, I come up with ideas to fix it. Right? Because when you have a company that when problems come up, they Complain. Now you have a company that just gets worse and worse and worse. Whereas if people start saying, we have a saying in our company, problems are opportunities. So having that philosophy through all the changes and then the team actually seeing us turn problems into opportunities over and over and over again, that's been probably the most effective tool for change. And then just overall, just people seeing that on the other side, no matter how hard it is, how long it takes, we as a team, we always win. We always get it working, we always figure it out. And I think just having that cycle and over and over again is just built a confidence in our team that wasn't there when we first started.
- [39:32]
C
I love it. Well, one of my favorite questions to ask at the end of every podcast recording, actually we're going to shoot a video of this with everybody's answers. But you've both clearly invested in yourself. I know you like to read and thank you so much for reading the book before the podcast. I'm glad you guys are enjoying it. But what are your favorite, I'd like to hear from both of you, what are your favorite ways to invest in yourself? Reading podcasts, masterminds, coaching. What do you like to do to invest in yourself to keep going?
- [39:57]
B
Yeah, I think, I think this has looked different across the years. When I was early on as an entrepreneur, I would do a lot of coaching, masterminds, groups. I was in any group you could think of a lot of reading and I still read today. But I think my how I learn and what that looks like at this stage for us is masterminds for sure. So I'm a part of a mastermind and we will have like retreats and different events that we go to, but in person events too has been really, really big. I think the connection that you make with people, not only do you just learn from them in person, I think it's really, really powerful what you can gauge from and get from conversations or people that you meet one on one know in person. So yeah, I still read, still do podcasts, but I think masterminds and then the in person events have been game changers for me at this stage.
- [40:52]
C
Great. How about you, Tim?
- [40:55]
A
There was one year, Kevin, we spent like $500,000 on like programs and self development and retreats and man, it was a great year. You know, we got to hang out with like Richard Branson and I ended up making friends that I, that I still talk to this day that are, you know, like they exited their company for 600 million and you know, like some really Cool, top level people. And it was exciting, but it was like after that year it was like, okay. Our world was like, okay, we've got enough. We like, we've had enough training and equipping and now it's time for us to go out and interact. And so I think like when like Cindy does a lot of speaking events and I think one of the best thing about being an event is if you are a speaker, even if it's not a paid speaking engagement, you're in the same room of all the other speakers. And I think like just that's the biggest lesson for me over the years is, you know, the, the most important thing to pay for is to be in the room.
- [41:48]
C
Right?
- [41:48]
A
Because if you're in the room with the right people, a lot of stuff can shift. It only takes one new connection, one new relationship that brings you one new idea or one new something to change it all. And I think even chatting with you, Kevin, the idea of doing your client success manager also a sell so they could do the upsells. If we go implement that one idea, that could be that one thing that shifts the growth of our business. And you and I both know where growth really comes from isn't front end sales. Of course you need front end sales. It's from retention, upsell referrals. And so I think that's just the biggest investment to make is how can I be in the room with the right people. Like if you're going to an event or a conference, don't get the back seats. You know, don't try to save money by getting in general admission pay for those VIP seats because yeah, sure it might be 10,000 versus a thousand to get those seats per person, but if you're sitting next to a group of everybody else who paid $10,000, then you're just automatically in a group of people that are playing on a different level. And then it also takes that one connection, that one relationship. You don't have to have a thousand of them. You just need to just get a couple good ones out of every event you go to.
- [43:02]
C
I love it. Well, thank you guys and congrats on the Inc. 5000 by the way. I understand you've been there for a while, so nice work there. If people want to get in touch with you, what is the best way for them to get in touch? And we'll put this all in the show notes and everything else below.
- [43:15]
B
Yes, Connect on our absolute favorite platform, LinkedIn. We are active on there, post regularly on there. But it's Tim and Cindy Dodd on LinkedIn.
- [43:25]
C
That's great. Well, thank you, guys. Anything else you want to leave the team with, go ahead.
- [43:28]
A
And if anybody messages me, connect with me, message me. I'll chat with you, and I'll actually send you free resources on how to get clients on LinkedIn. So for sure, connect with Cindy Dodd. My name is Tim S. Dodd. And find us on the platform. Message me or Cindy and say, hey, I heard you on Kevin's podcast. And I'll send you over some really cool free resources that are going to help you scale your business on LinkedIn.
- [43:56]
C
That's great. Well, guys, bottom of my heart, thank you for being here. I'm a client of theirs, just so you know, so I highly recommend them. I've had nothing but great success with them since we started. So thank you guys for being here, and thanks for what you do. You're making a hell of a difference in my life, and I know the lives of others.
- [44:11]
B
Thanks for having us.