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Business, Bourbon & Cigars
How Do Top Business Leaders Solve Complex Issues in Hours Instead of Years?
00:20:56
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I want to tell you about a lunch conversation that eliminated a $9 million problem in the time it takes to finish a meal. There wasn't some kind of long, drawn out negotiation or a complex legal strategy that took months to execute. This was a conversation between two people who happened to be sitting at the same table and they both had a piece of something the other one needed. Neither of them knew this until the conversation started. I've been in rooms, you know, I've helped build the kind of environments where things like that happen with irregularity. And that used to surprise me. It doesn't anymore. What I've learned is that it's not luck and it's not coincidence. It's what happens when you deliberately put the right level of thinking around your biggest decisions. You know, when the people across the table from you have actually operated where you're trying to go, not just read about it, not just advised on it from the outside, but build it, lost on it, and figured it out. I believe most leaders are one conversation away from a decision that can change the trajectory of their business. The question is whether they've built the access that puts that conversation within reach. That's what today is about. By the time we're done today, you're going to think differently about how you approach your most important decisions. Not because I'm going to give you, you know, a framework to follow, but because I'm going to show you two real world situations where access to the right thinking produced outcomes that no amount of planning alone would have gener. I want to make sure that I give you something practical, a clear picture of what it looks like to build that kind of access deliberately and what starts to open up when you do. Welcome to business Bourbon and cigars. I'm your host, Scott Joseph. Three decades of building companies, scaling operations, and watching what actually moves the needle in high level business has given me a specific view of what separates operators who consistently make sharp decisions and from those who are, I'd say, equally capable. But they keep arriving at the right answer a be too late. This show is going to bring that conversation into the open. So let's get into it. Here's what we're going to cover. So I'm going to walk you through two situations from inside our mi plus ultra community. Both of them are real, somewhat recent, and they're both remarkable in a way that becomes completely understandable once you see the mechanism behind them. Then I'm going to lay out four things that any operator can do to start building this kind of access. Inside their own world. Claudio is the founder and CEO of GFG Solutions. It's a financial advisory firm. He was at one of our leadership retreats. I believe it was Scottsdale. And during lunch, you know, he's talking through a situation involving a client who had just sold a real estate asset. And the transaction had been extremely successful, but sitting on top of it was this $9 million capital gains tax liability. And Claudio, he'd been working through it, trying to minimize the tax impact. And listen, I want to make this very clear. Claudio has a powerful ecosystem. He had access to competent people, legitimately good options, you know, and he's looked at all these standard approaches, right? What he didn't have was the specific piece that would make the whole thing go away rather than just get smaller. So sitting across the table from him is John Garcia. He's the founder of Salico Capital. John's listening. He's asked a few questions, and then he mentions that one of the companies that Sulico had invested in owned a building that fit the criteria for a 1031 exchange perfectly. Now Claudio's client. Go ahead. Purchases the building. The entire $9 million liability was eliminated. Legally, cleanly, completely. You know, Claudio comes up to me after lunch. He's still kind of processing what happened because he knows his client's going to go forward with this be. It's a no brainer decision. He goes to me, he goes, we just saved a client $9 million. That's the sentence. But what's underneath it is what I want you to hear. John didn't do anything extraordinary in that conversation. All he did was ask a couple questions. He was smart enough to recognize a fit, and then he named it. That solution existed before they sat down together. What didn't exist until that lunch was the connection between Claudio's problem and John's world. Two people operating at a serious level, you know, they're in the same place at the same time. They didn't have an agenda, you know, other than having a real conversation. And the result was nine figures worth of value created over a meal. What I love about this is it didn't stop there. You know, Today GFG and SLICO have completed deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars and all of it flowing from one conversation. That happened because two people were deliberately put in proximity to each other. Now, let me tell you about Alex Griffiths. So Alex is the president of overfuel. This is a company that builds high quality digital solutions for their clients. Not long after he joined our group, he participated in one of our virtual breakthrough sessions, he came in with a decision that he'd been wrestling with, you know, and that's whether to make a six figure investment that he wasn't fully convinced on. But it was, you know, the deadline's coming up and he's got to make a choice. And he'd been going back and forth on it, and the longer it sat, the heavier it got. That's what unresolved decisions do. They don't wait quietly. They just accumulate all this weight. The session, it didn't give him more angles to consider. It did something different. The people in that setting, they started asking sharper questions, the kind that get underneath what a leader thinks the problem is and find out what it actually is. We call it peeling back the onion. It's where we dig deeper. It's where we slow down, dig deeper, because we want to make sure that we're solving the real issue or the real problem, the real challenge. Within 20 minutes, Alex's thinking completely shifted. By the time the session ended, you know, he's made the decision that call put more than $100,000 back in his pocket. But think of the weight that came off his shoulders. But here's what made it matter at a different scale during that same conversation, and I love this part. Alex explained, you know, the structural challenge that had been limiting, at least at that point, over Fuel's ability to grow. And the problem real quick, many of the target clients, they operate under a preferred vendor list. And if you're not on that preferred vendor list, you're competing uphill regardless of how good your product is. It's one of those problems, you know, that a great sales team and a great product they can't fully solve because the obstacle structural. It's not performance based. You know, sitting in that session with Craig Mezak, you know, he had built similar software for a large client group. That software had already, you know, held preferred vendor status. So Craig's teams, you know, they're looking to sell it because it become a distraction to them. It wasn't, you know, their core focus. Within six months of that conversation, I'm talking about Alex's initial virtual breakthrough session over, Fuel acquired the software, prefer vendor status came with it overnight. And what had been a structural ceiling became a wide open door. Alex's opportunities literally multiplied almost overnight. And all of a sudden his client count is, you know, it's growing fast. The company's valuation climbed in a way that years of competing the hard way hadn't produced. You know, after a few months, I Remember getting a text from him that said, God, we're crushing it out here, sj. That's two situations involving real people, big money with real outcomes. What made both of them possible wasn't some strategy session or consultants report or longer deliberation period. It was proximity to the right people with the right experience, and that's key. And it was done in a setting designed for honest, high level conversation. In both of these cases, the answer was already in the building. It just needed the right configuration of people to surface it. The answer to your most expensive problem is probably already in someone's head. You know, the only question is whether you're in a position to have that conversation. I want to be direct about, you know something before I get into this. What I'm describing isn't a luxury for leaders who've already figured everything else out. This is a practical operating advantage. One that if you're a serious operator, you know, you can build deliberately at any stage of growth. The first thing is to get, you gotta get honest about the actual level of the inputs that you're currently working with. You know, most leaders have a circle of trusted people they rely on for major decisions. If you don't, that's a problem. You know, the question worth asking about that circle, right, Honestly, without defending the answer, is whether the people in IT have personally navigated decisions at the scale and stakes that you're currently operating at. You know, people in your circle. I'm not talking about advisors. I don't talk about people that were in some corporate role where the risk belonged to somebody else as operators with their own capital, their own teams, with their own outcomes on the line. When your inner circle has that experience in it, you know, the input you get has equality to it. That's just different. I don't care how well intentioned the advice is, if it's from someone who hasn't carried that weight of their ass on the line, it's different. It's not even close to being as good. It's not about intelligence. It's about the specific judgment that only comes, you know, when you have built and lost and rebuilt at a level that matches where you're trying to go. The upgrade isn't about replacing the people who know you well. It's about adding a layer of input that can only come from a different kind of peer. You know, someone who's operating now at your level or above it. And the key, they gotta be willing to be brutally honest. And then the second is you have to pursue the kind of conversations that reframe the problem, not just address it. Alex didn't walk into that session knowing that his real constraint was vendor status. He walked in thinking the decision in front of him was an investment question. What changed his outcome wasn't a better answer to the question he brought. It was the surfacing of a more important question he hadn't named yet. That kind of reframe is almost impossible to generate by yourself. It's very difficult to generate when you're surrounded by a circle of people who all share your existing assumptions about the business. This is key. The right reframe happens when someone with a genuinely different operating background looks at your situation and asks something you weren't set up to ask yourself. Think of it this way. The conversation. I should say the conversations really worth seeking out. They're not the ones that confirm your current thinking. You don't want people that will just validate what you're thinking. When your inner circle shares your you know, all those existing assumptions you've already made about the business, right? Validation is all you're going to get. The conversations you want are the ones that make you consider something you weren't considering before. Those conversations are worth building towards intentionally, right? Not waiting for them to happen accidentally. The most valuable conversation you'll have this you know, year probably starts with a question you haven't been asked yet.
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If this episode is hitting home, you're probably already asking where this kind of thinking actually happens. That is exactly what Me plus Ultra sessions are built for. They're small, virtual, structured working sessions for
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experienced business leaders and leaders.
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Each month includes breakthrough sessions, process sessions, and expert forums. And each one has a very specific purpose in a session. You know, one leader brings a real challenge or decision they're facing.
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The room starts by slowing the thinking
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down, asking, clarifying questions, challenging assumptions, and making sure everyone is actually solving the right problem. From there, members are sharing insights, their experiences, and they're giving advice. But they but it's grounded, relevant, and it's built on what's actually already been pressure tested. If you've been in rooms where advice comes fast, the clarity never sticks. This is a different standard. You can request access right now at me+untra.com sessions. Once again, go to me +untra.com sessions.
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The third is to treat proximity as a strategic investment, not a social expense. There's a version of professional connection that most business leaders are familiar with, right? We've all done the conferences, networking events, LinkedIn interactions, the occasional coffee, meetups with someone. That's not what I'M talking about the situations with Claudio and Alex didn't happen because they attended a large event and handed out business cards. Most which would they'd never see again, right? They happened because they were in a deliberately structured small setting with a specific group of people. All of them operating at a serious level, all of them there to work through real problems together. That kind of proximity doesn't happen by accident. You have to build towards that and invest in it the same way you'd invest in any other asset that compounds over time. The leaders who get the most out of it treat it as a non negotiable part of how they operate, not something they get when the calendar permits. Think about it like compounding in financial terms, right? The return usually isn't dramatic in any single period. It's in the accumulation, the deal that surfaces six months in because of a connection that was made early. Maybe it's the decision that becomes more clear because of a conversation three months ago that built, you know, the trust that was required for someone to be fully honest with you. Proximity compounds. The earlier you build it, the more it returns. The fourth is you gotta show up to those conversations ready to give, not to just get. I'm attracted to people that give, not transactional people. You have to pour into others. This is the part that separates the leaders who get sustained value from peer level settings, you know, from those who extract from them once and then wonder why the returns start diminishing. I pay attention to people's actions because they speak for themselves. There's a lot of people who talk about wanting to be surrounded by like minded people and they say they want to level up, but a lot, you know, they're just transactional people. They show up to just get something and rarely show up to help others. The situations I described, they worked because everyone in them, you know, was operating with something to contribute. John Garcia wasn't sitting at that table hoping someone would hand him an opportunity. He was there to be useful. Craig Mezak wasn't looking for a way to unload a, you know, software product. He was genuinely engaged in Alex's challenge, you know, and that connection, that opportunity just surfaced. High level rooms function well because of the law of reciprocation. Not transactional shit, but real people helping each other sincerely, with no expectation of getting anything in return. You know, when people show up willing to challenge each other honestly and they share what they've actually learned rather than what sounds impressive, and they invest genuine attention in each other's decisions, the whole setting operates differently. That's what produces the kind of, you know, outcomes that Claudio and Alex experienced, not the structure of the meeting, the quality of the people in it and what they brought to the table. The leaders who get the most from the right prayer group are almost never the ones who came looking for what they could take out of it. The $9 million that Claudio's clients saved and the strategic door that opened for Alex. Those outcomes weren't inevitable. They happened because specific people were in the right setting at a specific moment, and they were there intentionally. Neither of those conversations was the result of a lucky coincidence. They were the result of a deliberate investment in the kind of access that most operators know they need, but they haven't built a clear path towards yet. What I've seen over and over inside the businesses that I've been a part of and inside the circles that. That we've built at Me plus Ultra is that leaders who make consistently sharp decisions aren't the ones with the most information or the sharpest analytical process. They're the ones who have built access to the right thinking at the right moments. They've invested in proximity to people who can reframe a problem, name an answer they didn't know to look for, and challenge an assumption before it becomes expensive. That's buildable. It's not reserved for people at, you know, certain revenue levels or a certain stage of growth. It's a choice about how you operate and who you operate alongside. If you walked away from today, you know, thinking about one thing, I think I'd want it to be this. The access you have right now around your biggest decisions shapes the quality of every one of those decisions. Building better access isn't an upgrade, you know, to how you work. It's one of the most direct investments that you can make in the outcomes your business produces. If you're thinking about a decision that you're working through right now, or maybe there's an opportunity you haven't been able to fully see yet. This is worth knowing. The Me plus Ultra sessions, these are virtual, so you can do them online. They're built exactly for this. They're small, structured. They're working sessions that we do virtually for experienced business owners and operators. Each one is built around a real challenge that one leader brings to the table. The group starts peeling back that onion by asking clarifying questions, and we pressure test the assumptions underneath the problem, and then we bring real operating experience to what that leader's facing. Theory. It's not general advice. I'm talking about the kind of input that comes from people who've built, lost and figured things out at a level that matches where you're working. If you've been solving things primarily on your own, and you're ready to see what changes when the right people you know are around your decisions, come take a look at what we're doing. Request Access now at me+Ultra.com sessions. I'm Scott Joseph. This is business. Bourbon and cigars. Until next time. Go build something worth talking about. Cheers, everyone. Sam.