← Confessions of an Implementer
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- [00:00]
A
The very first thing I learned in all of these businesses, because they were all in a business I didn't know, was that I couldn't tell anybody what to do. And that was a huge gift because all I could do was ask them. And if I don't understand the answers, I'll Q and A you to answers I understand. Right. And that's actually not that hard. It's kind of fun, and it lets you own the whole thing, and I learn a whole bunch, and it works really well.
- [00:30]
B
Welcome to Confessions An Implementer. I'm your host, Ryan Hogan. We share unique stories of EOS implementers and the companies they've transformed to give you a rare glimpse into the successes and challenges of the system in action. Let's jump in. All right, so there's. There's a lot of, like, really interesting things. One, Love the. Love the chicken. Love that. Like, you pulled it into the View because it was out of view, but you've pulled it into the View.
- [00:53]
A
Yeah, we got to go for the important stuff here.
- [00:56]
B
Yes, exactly. I was. So I was chatting with this gentleman this morning, and we. We won't say names here, but I will say his name's George and it's spelled a little funny. And when he was like, hey, who have you had? Yes.
- [01:12]
A
Yeah. Okay, got it. Yeah, yeah. He.
- [01:15]
B
He. He was like, what type of guests have you had on the show? And this and that. You know, I was giving him some names and. And he was like, you ever had Dan Wallace? And I was like, dan's coming on in in, like, five hours. And he was floored. And he was like, you. You gotta be kidding me. And so this gentleman named George spelled Georges. Got me nervous about this, because I think between that and the text messages, JBS reached out to me and was like, how are you doing this? You are. You're a legend inside of this ecosystem.
- [01:47]
A
Well, you're very kind to say that. And, you know, now I'm. I'm intimidated. I'm sitting here wondering if I have an hour's worth of stuff to say. I don't think I do, but we'll. We'll find out.
- [01:57]
B
We're. We're just going to. We're just going to shoot it for. For an hour and see. See where the conversation takes us. And it's not scripted. We'll take it wherever. Wherever it. Wherever it goes. And the first thing I wanted to start with was this, because here's my whole spiel with. With EOS implementers is like. It's like, I'm always like, you guys are different. And when we started running EOS at Hunt a Killer, it, I had vetted quite a few implementers. And by the way, you know Tom Leonard. I know Tom Leonard. And I think we pieced together in the last conversation that you are the reason that EOS entered my life, because you were a guest speaker in my group and I've never connected those dots. And like, you changed my life. And so this is going to be a great conversation there as well.
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A
And remind me who your implementer was. I know you told me, but tell me again.
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B
Margaret Dixon out of Boulder, Colorado.
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A
That's right.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we went through this vetting process and I was interviewing some implementers and we were having good conversations. And the thing that struck me is, you know, we had looked for consultants and vendors and we run a typical process, but the stories and the backgrounds and the experience that EOS implementers have is like, is second to none. It's operators, it's, it's business owners, it's entrepreneurs, and it's just incredible. And so I have this running joke where I'm like, you know, it's not like you came out of Harvard Business School and went right into, you know, BCG and then decided you want to become an EOS implementer. Well, you did, you did that. So let's, let's start there. Like, what you, you've got quite the credentials. What did that look like early on?
- [03:31]
A
Well, so I did, I didn't come out of the Harvard Business School and go straight to bcg. I'm originally from the West Coast. I'm originally from Seattle. I moved back to the west coast to the Bay Area, and I spent four years, five years working for a small investment bank that did mostly sell side M and A. And the reason that I did that was that when I was in business school, I came into, to the Harvard Business School from, from a government background and a political background. I'd done some campaign work, and then I was a member of a senator staff for a while, which, by the way, gives me a whole kind of interesting perspective on some of the nonsense going on now. But that's a, you know, story for another day. But when I was in business school, private equity, what we now call private equity, was just getting going. The mid-80s, you know, was called there. It was leverage, buyouts, LBOs, and, you know, private equity had not become institutionalized, but it looked to me like people who were doing interesting things with companies were buying them first. And I thought, you know, I'M learning lots of stuff about how to do the interesting stuff with companies and I want to learn more about that. But the buying and selling, you know, it's not like buying a house. A company is this intangible. It's got some physical assets, but it's this intangible thing. And I don't get that. And so I went and found a small bank where I could get my hands on deals pretty early and just learn how these transactions take place. And I spent a few years doing that and a couple things happened. One is that I learned that it's a process, especially on this, on the sell side. The sell side is actually quite easy. It's just, you know, you, you have to be willing to look buyers in the eye and say, well, Ryan, we appreciate your offer, but it's a lot less than other people are willing to pay. And if you can do that, basically you can be a sell side investment banker. Buy side I think is very hard because, you know, valuing a company is not easy anyway, so I learned it's a process. I learned that not surprising to me that I was far more interested in the companies than I was in the transactions. For me, a deal was always an opportunity to get to know a company and a leadership team. And for my colleagues, getting to know a company and a leadership team was a chance to find a deal. And it was just difference in perspective. So a few years in, I decided to make the jump to something that would have me working on performance improvement opportunities. And companies consulting made a lot of sense. I looked around BCG I thought was probably the best fit for me. I was in San Francisco where it is incredibly hard to get hired into a consulting firm because everybody wants to live. At least it was 40 years ago. I assume that's still the case. And so I, I opened up the, the geography and they wound up having, having an opportunity in Chicago. And I moved here now 33 years ago and I'm still here. So that's how I got to bcg.
- [06:29]
B
Well, I heard one quote and I'd be curious in your perspective about this. It was like 80% of the deals, the 80% of like M and A activity actually results in failure. And I don't know if that statistic was just pulled from thin air, but the thing that struck me most about, about that is like all we hear about Wall Street Journal, you know, any, any business rag, it's always celebrating M and A activity. And so the, the surprising thing. Let's just say the statistic is high. Maybe it's not 80, but, but it's higher than, than 20 or 30%. Like one, I didn't realize that and two, like what, what have you seen or what were you seeing in those days? Like where in an LBO activity, like they were just getting it, they were just getting it wrong.
- [07:12]
A
So I certainly saw some that went, went very well. I'm thinking of one that this little firm I worked for did just before I got there, which was a shame because if I'd been there early enough to throw $5 into it, I would have been financially set for life. It just, it went extraordinarily well and it was a classic case of being owned by a large corporate parent for sort of community and political reasons kept them from doing some things, not bad things, but just things that for historical reasons the parent company just couldn't do. And freed from that, the management team was able to make some changes in the business that resulted in about a 40, 40 to 1 return in about two years, which is, you know, not bad. Again, I missed that one. So, you know, we certainly would see them go. Well, it's interesting what you say about the Wall Street Journal. I think a lot of that has to do with that. The excitement for them is all about the, the transaction itself and not that often, unless there's some drama that they go back and talk about what happened post deal. My experience, you know, we're working on smaller deals. These weren't things that were being written up in the, in the Journal by any stretch. First thing is that the transactions themselves go awry for all kinds of reasons. And I didn't do enough to know Statistically, is it 50% that failed to close? Is it 80%? I never really knew. I wasn't at it long enough to, to have any sense of real quantification. But right up to the last minute, you know, I had stuff that I, I had deals that cratered when we're within probably a week of, of close and just crossing T's dotting I's in the purchase agreement and you know, some issue came up that a buyer couldn't get over. So I've seen that and you know, it's funny you mention it, I'm actually working right now. One of my EOS clients sold themselves to a private equity owned platform company right before the, before I started with them. And that's been an interesting thing. I'm not in touch with the, with the owning company so I only hear about them through my client. It's not going well and there is you know, as a strategist, kind of by training, there is nothing I'm hearing that makes me think this deal would ever, is ever going to work. The way the owner, the buying company, they have some picture in their head about how these pieces are going to fit together and I'm pretty good at this and I can't find any way to convince myself that it's, it's ever going to work so.
- [09:52]
B
Well, let's, we'll get. Because I have so many follow up questions. It's so interesting because like you see, and I remember this from our first conversation I'm hearing it come out now is like you kind of can see the matrix like you, you can see things that other people can't see inside of businesses. And I think that that's, that's going to be a, a really fun, a really fun conversation. But I cut you off and we were, we were just moving past BCG and we were going to figure out how we landed where we're at today.
- [10:20]
A
So I worked for BCG for a couple of years and you know, I won't, I won't bore you with all the details. I will say I did not have a great experience there, which was very sad to me. I wound up eventually having a conversation with, with the guy who was the CEO of the firm when I, when I was there sometime after he retired and I happened to be in Boston and I went in to spend a little time with him and what I said to him was, you know, I just, I, it's, I just feel it's important for me to share this with you because you seem like a guy who would care that becoming part of the world famous Boston Consulting Group was one of the best things that ever happened to me. And being part of it turned out to be one of the worst that you know, we had partners, you know, sort of exercising their own agenda, not the client's agenda. We were making promises that were, you know, that were impossible to keep. We were making things complicated instead of simple. Never really solved the problem because you want them to come back and buy from you again. And those are all things that just run counter to how I, you know, how I think and work. So, you know, I only stayed for about three years and you know, we were pretty happy to see the last of each other. I went to work for a small firm that was started by a couple of ex Bain and company partners and did similar work there for a few years. I was a principal in that firm and then I became a principal in A Chicago based firm. That firm, I was living in Chicago, that firm was in Boston. I eventually became a principal in a Chicago based firm, so about a decade overall. And then I just decided, you know, I got to a point as a in consulting firm life where my job had ceased to be helping people solve problems and had become cell work and keep the baby birds in the nest fed and busy. And I missed the actual problem solving. And at some point, about 10 years in, I just decided to drop it all and just go off on my own and see what kind of trouble I could get into. And so I had a plan. Nothing in the plan happened. What did happen was that I had three owners ask me to come in and help them, you know, make their businesses better. And when I got into all three of them, really, I was just being asked to do turnarounds. And so I was the guy in the chair three times, turning companies around. And what's most interesting to me about that is, you know, I didn't have eos or the EOS language at the time. I wish now, you know, looking back, I certainly wish I had. But what I didn't realize at the time, the first time it happened, I thought, well, this is interesting. I'm here because the guy who owns this company, who's been running it day to day, has a massive case of addiction and he zigs and zags and changes directions all the time and everybody's demoralized and frustrated. And I'm really here to act as a shock absorber to buffer all of those changes in direction and give the team some stability so they can. I used to say, what do these people need? They need to be able to ask what their priorities are on Monday and ask again on Thursday and get roughly the same answer. And I'm really there to make that possible. Possible. The first time it happened, I thought it was interesting. The second time I thought it was a hell of a coincidence. And the third time it happened, I guess there's a thing here. I didn't have the visionary integrator language at the time, but looking back, it was quite clear that that was the case. The other thing, again looking back, is that what I realized in hindsight was that about 75% of my time as the guy running those three companies went in to try to figure out my own ways of doing this operating system level stuff. I didn't think of it as an operating system. I had no idea of the framework. But the stuff I was working on was, what are our goals? Where are we headed? Does everybody know where we're headed? How do we attach goals to that? How do we run meetings? The last of them. Every meeting devolved into chaos. You'll enjoy this. Every meeting devolved into chaos. And my IT guy came to me once and said, doesn't the fill in the blank elder son understand what he does to meetings and how he drives them into chaos? And I started laughing and he said, what's funny? And I said, he's never been in a meeting he wasn't in. So as far as he knows, this is what happens, because he's never been in a meeting where somebody didn't do that because he was always there and did it right. And this was kind of the norm. So, you know, in that company, there was a big fight among the owning family, father and two sons, about whether their original product lines, kind of a niche lending business, whether their original product line was profitable or not. Because the spreads on the loans were really high, but the cancellation rate was high. And. And the data system that we had was really antiquated. 1980s technology thing. We couldn't just push the button and get a report out of it that answered that question. I eventually figured out how to kind of spoof the data system and pull out of the data I could use to quantify whether or not this product line was actually profitable. And when I did, the answer is that it was so unprofitable, when I shared it with the family, the argument disappeared and we stopped making those loans the next day. We literally shut it down the next day. That's how bad it was. The interesting thing to me is that that issue was apparent the first day I got there. It took me about 18 months to free up the time to do the thinking, to figure out how I was going to extract the data from the system to do the analysis, which didn't take very long once I did it. Right. Because why? Because I was chasing around doing the stuff that EOS gives you tools to do, trying to. I was chasing around trying to find my own ways of doing those things, some of which I did and some of which I didn't at all. And so I had successes, and I had some, you know, at the full range of successes and failures.
- [16:20]
B
Was this coming from, like, the. The consultant background? Like, was it. Was it business school? Like, what gave you the. The skill sets or. Or the intuition where you could walk into an organization and within 48 hours you're like, that's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong. I can't get to now Because I'm like, I'm busy. But I know that once I can free up some capacity, I want to look at some of that.
- [16:44]
A
So sometimes it's 48 hours, sometimes it's a little longer. You know, the best I can tell you is that, you know, the Myers Briggs assessment has sort of been debunked and it's maybe not the best thing in the world, but you can learn things from it. On Myers Briggs, I'm a very, very strong nt and I've run into a handful of other people whose brains kind of work the way mine does and they've also been very strong NTs that there is some pattern or profile. This isn't any, you know, this isn't some skill I developed or honed, certainly informed by what I learned in business school and by the, you know, several hundred companies I've been in and out of. Because a lot of what happens in my head is a sort of a pattern matching thing that, you know, with a certain, you see certain things, there's some other things you ought to see and if they're not there, they're out of alignment. There's some kind of an anomaly that's a string to start pulling on. So the times when I walk into a place and, you know, how long does it take? It depends on how long it takes for the anomaly to show up. So there's a company, I own a little piece of that, you know, the, the anomaly showed up the, the first day I visited long before the money went in to the company. And that was me getting a tour of the plant and having the guy who gave me the tour of the plant tell me, I asked him, who, who buys this stuff? And he told me about three different kinds of customers with different types of interests. And I asked him what, you know, three, three kinds of customers. I'm only seeing one kind of product. What's that story? There was no answer. And you know, behind me there's a notebook with a picture sketched out my bad drawing and handwriting. A good, better, best product strategy, which I came home and did that afternoon. And it took me about a year to get it in place in the company. And when I did, it doubled gross margins. And the company went from having its nose right around the waterline to make. It's been a phenomenal success story and lots of other super important stuff has been done. And you know, I was the idea architect of that. I was not at all the implementer. The really hard work was figuring out how to make it, make it happen. But that was a case where the anomaly showed up within the first couple of hours. There's certainly times when I don't feel that sort of, you know, I don't see that kind of anomaly. I never really know what I will or won't. The one that had the biggest impact was for a very large financial services company. And I think I'll go any deeper than that for confidentiality reasons, but they have a sales force that you could think of as franchisees. Technically they're not, but it functions as if they were. And one of the things that I found out about, and it took me a couple of months of being around them and asking questions and, you know, working on various aspects of this consulting project. And one day I asked a question that resulted in me finding out that they paid newly hired agents very, very large subsidies during their first few years. And I asked them why they did that, and they said, well, it takes a while in this business to build up enough of a client base that it will keep you going. So if we don't subsidize, nobody will make it. And I asked them a kind of a, you know, a couple of obvious questions. One was, who gets this? And the answer was, everybody. Second question was, you know, how much is it? And we listed them out and it turned out to be a lot. And the third question was, how do you think about this? What do you call it? And they said, we think of it as surplus compensation. Just juicing the compensation a little. So not a little bit, you know, it's a lot. So I asked them, would you mind it, how would you feel if I said I wanted to call it an investment? And they scratched their heads and said, why would you want to do that? It's pretty simple. You're putting this money out with the expectation that the things they, that they're going to do, will you bring more money back to you? It's that simple. Okay. Any chance we know the ROI on that investment didn't. Okay, these are not complicated questions. Right, but it's just the anomaly. If you're paying out a lot of money to everybody and there's no like, quantitative explanation. I'm not a super quant guy by any stretch, but there's no explanation about why we're doing this other than this very sort of amorphous, you know, everybody needs it. So long story short, or shorter, it turned out they had wonderful data on agent or representative performance. And I showed them how to build a little NPV model. I wanted them to do it, not, not Me. And what we discovered was that fully half of their sales force never did enough business to pay back the subsidies. And not only that, but within three months he had a pretty good idea who wouldn't, wouldn't. And by six months you knew to like a 95% level of, of certainty, the result of which was a one paragraph change in their agency agreement which had about a 2 billion dollar impact on shareholder value. Right. And you know, these things are just laying around. And I remember talking to a guy once who was sort of wired in a similar way and he, you know, his way of describing what happens in his head, he said, it's like if you took all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and you laid them out on a board and you shook it a few times and, and then all of a sudden the pieces would sort of just snap themselves together and form a picture. And that's a decent explanation of sort of what it's like. I'd say it's a bit, it's a gift and a curse. I mean, it's cool to be able to see these things. It is oftentimes hard to explain how you got there, which by the way caused me huge problems in the consulting business where you get paid for time. And you know, this is something that when it happens, doesn't take any, it doesn't take time. And so I would sometimes oftentimes be in the position of going, look, we know what the answer is. It's, the answer is going to have to turn out this way. And so we ought to just get about telling them what to do. It's like, no, we got eight weeks or 12 weeks left of proven everything out. No.
- [23:22]
B
The thing that I love about the story that you just shared is like one thing Tom Leonard used to talk to us about in the CE group was this idea of like when you have a problem, imagine that problem is sitting at the center of the table. And all too often when leadership teams get together, they're sitting across from each other and so everybody's looking at the problem almost like from an adversarial way. And so what he would talk about is this idea of like, get everybody on the same side and have everybody looking from the same perspective at the problem. That way it's not adversarial. And we all just acknowledge that like, yes, hey, there's a problem here, we're on the same team, we're on the same side here, but we do have to solve this problem. And that's, that's like, it's Reframing. It's reframing perspective. And what I loved about what you just said right there is your. Your reframing moment was, how about we call this an investment? And like, once you got the buy in on, like, oh, you know what we are, this is an investment. There was an aha moment after that.
- [24:22]
A
So thank you. Let me add a. Maybe a point to Tom's perspective. And, you know, I think I love Tom as. As, you know, as I know you do. He's such a wonderful guy. What I would add to that. Yes. You know, get everybody on the same side of the table, but then slowly move around the table so that you see it from everybody's perspective, because all of those different angles have legitimacy to them. And, you know, that gets to a, you know, sort of jumps ahead. You know, let me just settle this one for you. Going to want to know. I think when I was done with turning around the three businesses, I was feeling some burnout. I am naturally a bit more of a visionary than an integrator. I'm one of those people who can do both, but I think there are people who do the integrator job who do both jobs much better than I do. I'm over the bar, I think, on both, but I think there are people who do them certainly the integrator job much better than I do. I was feeling kind of burned out. I was trying to figure out what my next thing was going to be, and I was, frankly, I was a little bit lost for a while. And then a friend of mine who was a very, very early EOS implementer called me up one day and he said, hey, I found this thing you're going to love. It's perfect for guys like us. And, you know, what is it? And he tried to tell me, and it's like strategy in a box. Because there's a thing called strategy in a box. No, no, it's not that at all. It's like he couldn't really explain it. He said, I'll tell you what, I'm going to send you this guy's book. Read it, you'll understand. And he sent me a copy of the book, and I read it and said, well, this. This makes a lot of sense to me. It's not everything I do, but a huge chunk of what I'd done in these companies was in there, and it was packaged and designed much better than I ever could have done. And I looked at it, I said, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. So that's how I got into this business, I love it.
- [26:11]
B
And what year, just, just so we can set, we can set the bent. What year was that?
- [26:16]
A
He sent me the book in May of 2010. And I went to what EOS now calls boot camp, which at the time was just called go to Gino's office for two days in August of 2010. So I'm, I'm coming up next month is my 15 year anniversary. Some people have left. I, I'm. By order of Seniority, I'm number 12 on the list. And I, I know that because when I hit my tenure we were all. Everything was virtual and one of our virtually QCEs, or what we call a quarterly meetings, we do and they'll put some stuff up on, on the screen and they put up a slide showing a picture celebrating who's been with us for at least 10 years. And there were 12 of us on the slide, 11 of them who were up there, who were before me. So that's how I know that by order of Seniority, I'm number 12. What you said. I want to go back to what you said about Tom's perspective and this notion of, you know, my adder, of going around the table. One of the things that has become really clear to me and really important to me and I struggle with it personally, but it's part of what I try to teach and coach on is the notion that there are a couple of places we could jump into this. There was a business academic by the name of Chris argyrous, died about 10 years ago. A R G Y R I S I don't know if that name rings a bell. He was a kind of a business theoretician, taught at Harvard and Yale, I think. And he introduced the terms inquiry and advocacy, how we interact with others, and the balance between inquiry and advocacy. And the notion behind that is that when we're interacting with others, certainly in a kind of, you know, in a business or meeting context, we're really always doing one of those two things, gathering information or arguing for a point of view. And that what happens with most of us most of the time is we don't listen very much. We know what we think is the right answer and we just start arguing for our answer and that it works a whole lot better. And then when somebody disagrees, we start to get mad at them because they just aren't seeing it. Right. And I deal with this all the time. And by the way, I have caused this a lot. Right? No question. I've been the bad guy in the situation a ton One of the things I coach my clients on, I coined a phrase a few years ago. So the seven magic words assume good intent, then ask a question. When you start to feel the annoyance or the anger rise, first thing you gotta. You have to verbalize this in your head. Ryan's intentions are probably all for the best right now. He wants the best for the team, the company, just like I want would if I were in his situation. That's the assumption of good intent. And then ask a question. There's something going on in your head right now, Ryan, that I don't understand. And if I did, we'd be better off. And there's a damn good chance I might actually agree with you. And so the question is, can you help me understand? I'm confused. I don't. You know, I know you think this is really important. I know you think this is what we ought to do. And I can't connect the dots. Can you just help me connect the dots and see it the way you're seeing it? And that's how we. We walk around the table.
- [29:40]
B
I love that. Do you still create those situations or are you finally. Are you finally. You're saying that before you enter the danger zone?
- [29:48]
A
I do still create them, much less often than I used to, but I do still create them. I'm, you know, I'm a human being, and I am as flawed as any human being that has ever, you know, taken a breath. But I am better at it. I am certainly more aware. And there are certain habits you start to. You start to create. A friend of mine taught me this. I have a friend who coaches out of the framework, the Conscious Leadership framework. There's a book called the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, and one of the 15 is speak unarguably and unarguable speaking. And my friend Clay taught me this. Actually, we became friends. We were an immense personal growth group together where there was tons of learning about how to be authentic and open and honest. And I was, by the way, I did this one in My life was at a real low point. And I'm the most skeptical human being in the world. And I would be the first to say it was life saving for me. Not just life changing, but life saving. The notion of speaking unarguably is that it is impossible to not have your thoughts and feelings. You can't not have them. They occur. I've read they occur within 3/1000 of a second, just far faster than you can. You're going to ask me for a source on that, and I can't give you one. I know. I've seen that number. They occur, whatever the number is, far faster than you can consciously control because you can't not have them. Kind of by definition, it's perfectly okay to have them because all they are is your thoughts and feelings. It's also perfectly okay to tell somebody else what they are. What's not okay is to assume that they're true or to blame somebody else for them. That's not okay. Or to tell somebody else what, what their thoughts and feelings are. And these are things that we do all the time. And I'll think we ought to turn left and it'll be really obvious to me that we ought to turn left. And you are equally committed to turning right. And I may start getting mad with you about why you just can't see the turning left is the obvious thing to do. And that kind of emotionally freighted conversation happens in team meetings a lot. And, you know, so I did a talk on this at the last two EOS conferences that what happens is we speak to each other in ways that trigger the fight or flight mechanism in the limbic system of the brain. That I'll say something to you that, that will come across you as a psychological threat. That may not be what I intended, but it's. We do it all the time. And that your natural reaction is going to be to fight back. You have four choices. Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. You can't flee because it's socially unacceptable in meetings. I've had it happen a couple of times, but for the most part. So your alternative to flee is either fight back or oftentimes people will freeze in lieu of fleeing. They'll lock up or they'll fawn, which is you're going to flop on your back, expose your belly, and hope for the best. And those are your four, four choices. When that mechanism gets triggered, all of them will frankly piss off the person who said the thing that triggered it in the first place, which is going to trigger them back. And now we've got two people whose brains are lit up and now we got this going on. And when you watch that happen in a, in a meeting. Funny thing, you know, a couple months after I, I did this talk for the first time at the EOS conference, I got, I have four partners in my EOS practice and I got into it with one of them and I did everything I'm telling people not to do. And the funny thing is, like, I could see myself doing it. It's like there were two Versions of me. There's me that's behaving badly and, and the me that's watching me behave badly and go, you know, you're behaving badly and you should knock it off. Right. Shut up. Back to behaving badly. It's very much, you know, our, our, our biology works against us in this, but I've worked pretty hard and I've gotten pretty good at developing habit around not saying we should turn left here, but just simply saying, I wonder what would happen if we turn left here. Now, I'm not sure this is the right answer, but I just have the thought that maybe we should turn left. You know, I'm, I'm. We. I heard what you said and I'm won if I understand it right. I'm wondering if this consequence might occur. Have you thought about that? And finding a way to turn it into that kind of a, you know, maybe could be. Have you thought about question. And it comes from, and I say it to my clients all. I just have the thought that, you know, what just went through my head? Here's what went through my head. And it's disarming. It's funny because it sounds almost trivial. It's amazing how much of a difference it actually makes. That's what speaking unarguably, that I don't get to say to you, you attacked me just now. I do get to say to you, don't know if you meant to attack me just now. Do know that I felt attacked. And I want you to know that I felt attacked. And that little difference keeps the whole thing calm and rational.
- [35:08]
B
All right, quick break, friends. Do you find it impossible to hire and retain top sales talent or worse, are you paying insane recruiter fees who are all using outdated hiring processes? Yeah, I was too, at Hunt a Killer. We were spending hundreds of thousands on recruiter agency fees. And after I sold that company in 2025, I started Talent Harbor. And the whole vision here was to make sales recruiting accessible to small and medium sized businesses. Because the organizations that can hire and retain world class people are the ones that ultimately win. Most organizations rely on things like ZipRecruiter or LinkedIn and they get hundreds, if not thousands of resumes. But we find that the best salespeople are already perfectly placed somewhere else. And that's why our approach is to go after them. And we do that through a business model called recruiting As a service, we do not charge large commissions, we do not have success fees, we don't have contracts, we don't have long term engagements and we become an extension of your team as expert sales recruiters. If you're tired of the same old recruiters and want to actually grow your sales team, check us out@talent harbor.com that's Talent Harbor. T A L E N T H A R B O R dot com. Let's get your next sales superstar hired. Do you, do you find like, when you start asking these questions and because I, there are probably many times that you do know the answer and I have a whole line of questioning for that as well, because I'm deeply curious into how you, how you reconcile some of these things, especially when you're in the session room with, with all, with, with how long you've been doing this and with your background and with your experience. Like, you've got like this, this like really interesting and unique experience that, that brings a lot to the table when, when you ask a question and, and you're like, I know we need to go right. Everything we're like, this organization needs to go right. They think we need to go left. And so what you, what you're saying you do is you go in, you're like, well, tell me about, tell me about what it means to go left or, or tell me, you know, what your position is.
- [37:18]
A
Are.
- [37:18]
B
Are it's going to be a loaded. It's going to sound loaded. It's not loaded, I promise you. Like, are you saying that genuinely meaning that like, like you are. You are now curious to explore the path and understand their thinking, or are you trying to gather information to make sure that they understand that going right is the answer most of the time?
- [37:37]
A
Absolutely. Because I really have worked hard to try to have that place of curiosity and remind myself that these people are living it every day and that there's almost certainly, there's certainly information I don't have because I'm with them once a quarter and I'm looking through, through a keyhole. So I am very genuinely asking out of curiosity. There are times you're landing on. I mean, this is sort of, you know, one of my biggest, you know, biggest struggles because again, 40 years in and out of a couple hundred companies, you know, seen them. I've seen most of the movies my clients are living through. I've seen them, you know, multiple times. There are times when the answer is, you know, is really clear. And what I'll typically say in those situations is I've encountered this before. And here's what I've seen people do that's worked. I'll reference a. Reference a Pattern and say, you know, when this is. When I've seen something like this come up, I've seen people do the following. They've done, you know, this or they've done that. That's worked. When I've seen people try this other thing, it hasn't worked as well. I also, you know, I'm mindful that we, you know, we, we practically take an oath not to consult. You know, not quite literally, but practically. We take an oath not to consult. I also know that I cannot walk into a session room and not bring 40 years and a couple hundred companies worth of experience with me. It's in the room with me whether I want it to be or not. And so one of the things I tell my clients on Focus Day is we talk about being teachers, facilitators, and coaches. And I say, you notice I didn't say consultant. And I explained I'm not here to tell you how to run a widget. You know, things about the widget business I'll never know. And I don't need to know the widget business in order to do my job. That said, I will slide into sort of quasi consulting mode. I may do it occasionally. It won't be often if I do. I will always tell you and I'll do it for one of two reasons. One is because I see you stuck in. Stuck. Stuck going in circles around something where you don't know how the movie ends because you've never encountered it before, and I do, because I have encountered it. I won't let you waste time when I, when I actually know how that movie is going to end. I will tell you. The other is if I see you doing something that I actually think is dangerous or harmful to the business, I think I owe it to you to tell you there's risk here and here's, here's the risk. And so I do, you know, on occasion, it's not, it's not often, but I think most of my clients would tell you that, you know, now and then in our interactions, you know, they'll hear me say the words, I'm going to put the consultant hat on for 30 seconds and just tell you, here's how this tends to go.
- [40:27]
B
Got it. Okay. That, that makes a lot of sense. When, when you were, you've, you've spent a lot of time in, like, consulting, you talked about private equity. At any point, I feel like you did mention this, but were you leading? Well, it wouldn't have been maybe during the consulting, but you were definitely leading teams. When, when you were taking the pseudo integrator position that you couldn't even define at that point because we hadn't read the book yet. But you were taking kind of that, that CEO, president buffer position. Like, what was it like coming out of consulting, coming into businesses and being like, yep, here's your problem, here's a couple ways to solve it. Have fun. And then going in and being like, oh crap, I have to solve these problems now.
- [41:13]
A
I guess the first thing I would say is that for whatever I like teaching. And so when I was leading consulting teams, you know, this the firm where I spent the most time running project teams, I got a reputation as a good guy to work for because he'll teach you a lot, right? And I like that. That felt really good to me. So I sort of had that mindset. The you get into the company. It's funny what I brought with me and sort of what didn't, didn't, you know, didn't work. All three of these companies did things that I didn't know anything about. That turned out to be a huge gift because I couldn't tell anybody what to do because I didn't know. And, you know, and 12 of them did things. One was, you know, very complicated engineering stuff. I'm not an engineer. I was a, you know, humanities guy and college. And the other one did something, was very financially sophisticated. And, you know, there were a couple of gifts I absolutely brought with me from the consulting firm environment. The biggest one actually was a cultural thing, which was that in, in professional service firms, there's an upper out mentality. And 80% of people in strategy consulting firms leave before they become partners. So leaving is discussed very openly. People talk about it all the time. And the firm actually wants you to leave and go to work for a client or a company that can become a client. Then they want you to become a huge client. And that's part of how they grow. So there's no, there was, there was no hesitance about talking about how long do you think you're going to stay? And at what point might you leave? What do you want to do? And I sort of, I kind of got my head around this mostly. By the time I got to the last of the three companies, I'd gotten reasonably good at this. The day I introduced myself for about 75 people in the company, I got as many of them as I could in a room and did a little intro talk. And one of the things I said was, I'm standing here with the expectation that all of you are going to leave this company at some point. I'm starting with the expectation you're all going to leave. I want you to be here as long as this is the best place in the world for you to be. I don't know if that's going to be two years or 20 years. Whichever it is, I want the best two or the best 20 you have to give us. But the minute this ceases to be the best place in the world for you to be, I want you to come tell me so that I can help you figure out how to get where you ought to be, make a change internally, go somewhere else. And what that looks like is if you ever walk in my office and say, hey, I'm kind of thinking, I've played out the string here, it might be time to go. You know, people are always afraid to talk about leaving because they think if I mention I'll get fired and I can't afford to be without a job. So there's huge fear around it. You walk in and tell me, I think I played out the string. I saw a job that I want to interview for. I want to go explore something, you know, whatever it is, all you'll ever hear from me is, that's fantastic. How can I help you? You need a morning off to go interview. Terrific. Right? You got it. You want to work half time while you make you plot your next move, we'll figure out a way to do something that, that works for you. Any of that will always be fine. Because part of my duty to you is to make sure you're, you're in the right place for you. And. But if you really want to know what will piss me off, walk in my office and drop two weeks notice on my desk. That will get a negative response from me because now I'm stuck with uncovered work and having to hurry to find somebody. And we can't do it. Well, that's not good for anybody. So let's not play that game with each other. And nobody believes you. But the first time somebody does it, if you make good on your word, everybody knows. And, you know, one of my happier accomplishments was, you know, we had an operations floor where people were, you know, we had people who were heads down entering loan contract information into a computer system because this was long enough ago that they were still being faxed into us and people were doing this. And we had one young woman whose performance was terrible. She was, you know, her, her, you know, her output was about 30% slower than the next slowest person. And her accuracy wasn't any, any better. And I finally sat down with her people. We got to fire her, throw out, no severing, she's turning center. I sat down with her and I just, and I asked her, you know, how do you think it's going? I think it's going okay. And some of this by the way, I learned how to do for my ex wife who was a really good manager of people. You know. Did you know that the number of contracts you enter in a day is, is about a third less than the, than the next slowest. You're, you're the slowest person next slowest. Didn't know that. Did you know that you make as many mistakes or more? You know, that doesn't seem great. Can I ask you a question? Are you happy doing this? Right. Do you like what you're doing? No, I don't really. Good. Thank you for telling me what makes you, what makes you feel good about yourself. She said, I really like to interact with people and I really like to feel like I'm helping people. And I'm looking at her going, so you tell me what part of sitting in a bright white Sheetrocked in cubicle staring at a computer screen, doing this all day tags any of that? And this is somebody who's making about $27,000 a year, right? This is not like senior executive self actualization stuff. And she's looking at me, she's going, yeah, I can kind of see your place. So why don't you cut your time back to half. We're not losing much productivity anyway and start looking for jobs and see what she can do and let me know, let us know if we can help you. And a month later she lands a job as an intake clerk coordinator in a hospital where there are people in front of her in need. She still has to do this. So accuracy might still be a concern, although she's much more motivated. But she's face to face dealing with human beings, you know. And we went and hired a heads down, you know, the ten fingers of doom.
- [47:38]
B
Right.
- [47:39]
A
Which is what we needed for that job.
- [47:41]
B
So have you, I, I, I love that. Like there's a couple key points there. The, the first key point is like actions are, are louder than words and, and like being able to, being able to get that first person every, everybody talks about open door now nowadays I've got an open door policy, but the door, but once you get that one person that comes through the door, then you've got to line out your door and then you've got all other problems as a leader at that point.
- [48:03]
A
It lets. Just let so much of the pressure, like the thing about departures let so much of the pressure out of the balloon and people realize I don't have to be afraid to talk about it. And so then we start to find out people are unhappy and what they're unhappy about, and we can start working on fixing it rather than them not saying and not saying and not saying. We only find out when they leave. So that was a thing. I'll tell you what, though, and I'm sort of watching the clock. We're going to run out of time here. So I'll share with you the most profound lesson or lessons that I learned. And one thing I did learn was that the analytic tools and techniques I learned from consulting, the business model frameworks I learned in school and at BCG and et cetera, I used not very much in those businesses. They were there and every once in a while pull something out, the things that made the biggest difference. And it's part of what I talk with my clients about. You know, EOS has the Delegate and Elevate tool and the lma. And I try to push my clients to the extreme edge of both of these things. You know, the Delegate and Elevate tool is terrific. It is designed to optimize your use of your time by helping you get rid of stuff you shouldn't be doing without respect. I mean, we pay attention to the impact it has on other people because we may overload them. We may give work to somebody who's not equipped to do it. But if you flip this around and say, you know what should I be delegating everything? Right. It changes your perspective and what I learned. I'll tell you how I learned it. I'm gonna. I'm gonna backtrack for a second. The very first thing I learned in all of these businesses, because they were all in a business I didn't know, was that I couldn't tell anybody what to do. And that was a huge gift because all I could do was ask them. So, Ryan, I assume you're our fearless head of whatever, whatever, because you know what you're doing. So why don't you tell me what you think our priorities are for the next 90 days? And if I don't understand the answers, I'll Q and A you to answers. I understand.
- [50:12]
B
Right.
- [50:12]
A
And that's actually not that hard. It's kind of fun and it lets you own the whole thing. And I learn a whole bunch. And it works really well, in an EOS context I would be doing most of that. Not one on one. I'm not actually much of a believer in one on ones. I think they're mostly, they detract rather than, than add. In this case that's how I was, was doing them. And I just sort of set up a pattern or cycle for myself of ask those questions, get to agreement about, okay, so the next 90 days you're going to do the following things or the next X days, whatever it was, because I wasn't trying, wasn't putting people on a steady cadence the way we do in EOs. What do you need that you don't have in order to get that done? Q and A to get to a reasonable answer. I need a staff of 20 and a budget of two and a half million dollars. Yeah, we're not gonna, so 75 person company is not gonna do that. But you know, but Q and A to reasonable answers. And the answers by the way, usually were. And then you go, okay, we have a handshake. I'm gonna get you those resources, you're gonna do this thing. I'm here to help if you need. Let's check in periodically and on the due date we'll get together and we'll ask, did you get it done? The beauty of EOS is it gives you that cycle in weekly level 10s and quarterly rock setting. You don't have to invent the cycle. But the beauty of ignorance, the power of being ignorant was so great that even when I started to understand, I remained ignorant. The, you know, when I got to the lending company, the family said, first thing you got to do is you got to learn how, how to make a loan. Absolutely not. This, how can you possibly run this business if you don't know how we make a loan? And I said, it's really simple. If I'm ever in a position where I need to know how to make a loan in order to make a decision that's mine to make, I can put a blindfold on, stand at my door and horse collar the first person who walks past. And they'll know because everybody here does. If I learn how to do that, you're going to rope me into every decision about every individual loan and I will become just like you and useless to you. We have plenty of people who know how to make a loan. We're short on people who know how to run a business, so I'm going to focus on that. And again, anytime I'm in a position where that knowledge is necessary I'll go and get it. So the choice to remain ignorant, super powerful. My mantra, do ask, don't tell, just get it to come from them. And when I got really good at that and at running that cycle, all of a sudden the business is doing great and I can't fill up a 35 hour week. It's crazy, right? It's really powerful. The other thing that happened though, was that in the last one, business started performing pretty well and I could see the elder son, who's kind of the lead steer in the family, starting to reassert himself. And so I called him to my office one day and said, yeah, I think we ought to talk about this. It seems to me like you're starting to want to reassert control over the business. And he said, yeah, I kind of am. Well, here's the deal. This sidewalk isn't big enough for both of us. And the difference between us is you own the sidewalk. So I think we ought to start talking about me stepping aside. And we agreed that it was going to be a couple of months. And I started thinking about how that was going to play out and what I realized when I'd gotten into that company and all three of them, I got huge personal gratification from being the guy everybody depended on. I loved it when people brought things to me, even if all I did was ask him a question. I, I love the sense that I was giving them comfort, huge psychic gratification from that. I hadn't taught them anything. And I started to look around at them and realize a day is going to come a few months down the road where I'm not going to be here one day and they're all going to fall flat on their faces and that's going to be 100% my fault. And it was, it's hard for me to describe what it felt like. It was a genuine stomach dropping moment. It was a real honest to God, oh my God, what have I done? Kind of moment. And my mindset shifted in that instant to if I have an hour with Ryan, my job in that hour is not to get a right answer. My job is to help Ryan become better at getting right answers. Without me, what can I coach and teach and help him think about? How can I use that time to help elevate him? And so part of what I teach my clients now is when it comes to delegation, your job is to work yourself out of a job. The ultimate in delegate and elevate is you build a team that's so strong, it doesn't need you and that will free you up to then do the higher level work. And it's not a matter of giving away three things every quarter. You should. Right. But that's not enough and this company will always have more for you to do. And, and in the unlikely event it doesn't, if you're somebody who's established a track record of building, you know, kick ass teams that you know that can accomplish great things, you're not going to have any trouble finding a place that, that, that needs you. So that's become really core to, to my teaching.
- [55:25]
B
I love all of that. We, we share, we, we share a lot of philosophies. Like at, at. One thing that I like to talk about is this notion of I've been a part of three companies that found product market fit. Probably a thousand ideas. Out of the thousand ideas, maybe 100 have taken action. Out of the hundred, maybe 30. I've actually filed LLC paperwork and only 3ish have found product market fit. And one thing that I joke about is the three that have found product market fit, I didn't know anything about them. So one was a zombie infested obstacle course race. I, I didn't know how to build obstacles or put a race on like that. It wasn't my thing.
- [56:02]
A
Did you know anything about zombies?
- [56:04]
B
Not other than they don't die. That's, that was about it at the time.
- [56:07]
A
That's the most important thing.
- [56:11]
B
But like between that and then we, you know, we did the, the hunt a killer thing. And, and I am not a game designer. I don't know how to design a game. I don't, I don't know anything about those, those things. And then today with recruiting, like I am not an expert recruiter. Like my kind of superpower I believe in this world is like being able to identify opportunities and then bring world class people together to help solve hard problems. And so I agree with you on that and I loved your perspective because I had never thought about that before is like you're always built, you're building everybody inside of the organization. I think all too often folks get, folks get like building tomorrow's leaders or like building we, we need to develop our leaders. And what I just heard from you is like we need to develop everybody, everybody inside of the organization. We need to be constantly developing. And so anyhow, long, long winded. This is great.
- [57:06]
A
There's. Let me tie a ribbon around that for a sec. There's a book called Turn, Turn that Ship Around. David Marquette, you're familiar and yeah. And his model is that leaders. Leaders don't give orders. They ask for intent at every level. Everybody says, boss, I intend to do the following. And the boss's job is to check everybody's intent, make sure it's consistent with the mission and not in conflict with each other. Right. And what you're describing is that's what you do. What. What you did. My experience in the lending company, when I started to really get, you know, to get better at this, was that 80, you know, sort of the 80, 20 thing. 80% of the people in the company surprised and delighted me with what they knew, what they could figure out, what they wanted to do, what they could, you know, just far better than I might have hoped. 20% ran the other way. And they. And it became really clear really quickly when you say, what do you think the priorities are? I don't know. Have you thought about it? Not really. You know, second or third time you have that conversation, you go, not sure you're a player here. And that's okay. But it's amazing how quickly that reveals itself.
- [58:24]
B
We get afraid about, like, hey, somebody's not working out. And now I have to go have that conversation. And I've made this mistake many, many, many, many times where, like, I've tolerated something for so long that now I'm in a place of frustration, and so the only option is to terminate employment. And what I heard from you today is like, there are other ways to go about that, like having candid conversations, like, hey, did you know this? This actually isn't working. And it's not working because of these reasons. And, like, once you can start kind of bringing them into that decision and then supporting them through. Through that journey, I never considered that before.
- [59:01]
A
So there were a couple of people who worked for me in that company who I would have had a very hard time having that conversation with because I didn't think that they were accountable human beings. So, you know, one of the. There's. I mentioned it before we started that there are a handful of places where I've just, you know, something has occurred to me that I inject into my teaching. That's not an EOS thing, but I always make clear that it's not that it's mine. And one of them is that, you know, we use the word accountability all the time and that we toss it around kind of carelessly. And what got me thinking about this is that one day in a session, I had to. All the stuff that I think about and come up with comes from somebody doing Something in a session, something didn't work, and it's, you know, it's all situational. I had two people use the word accountability in consecutive sentences and mean completely different things by it. And I heard that and had a little whiplash. I got to go home and think about what just happened there. And I thought about it and talked to people a little bit and thought about stuff I'd learned in various places and concluded that there are really three definitions of accountability, all three of which are valid and in play and all three of which reflect conditions that have to be true for an organization to be accountable. The first one I call individual accountability, which is owning the consequences of your decisions and actions, whether they are good or bad. Got that definition from Dr. Dino Signore, who's the facilitation coach at the Edward Lowe foundation in Michigan. And some of us have had the benefit of getting some facilitation coaching from Dr. Dino. That's the first one. So accountable human beings own the consequences of their decisions and actions. Non accountable human beings don't. My experience is vast majority of people do. But when you have somebody who doesn't, it's like trying to catch a grease pig. They're so elusive. And I had a couple people, I can picture them in my head. Their first names are right there. This, this stuff doesn't, you know, doesn't leave you who were like that. And if the owner had let me outright terminate them, he wouldn't. The owner wouldn't let me just fire them. I would have because they did damage every day. The second layer of accountability I call structural. It's the accountability chart version. We say, what are you accountable for? It means having the responsibility of. To make sure a certain body of work gets done. You may or may not be the one who does it. To be accountable for it means it's your job to make sure it gets done. So two layers. We have to have accountable human beings. They have to be 100% clear exactly what they're accountable for. And then there's a third layer. And I, you know, the term I use for dysfunctional accountability, which is really the answer to two simple questions. The first is, who's going to do how much of what by when? That's a smart goal. And the second question is really simple, which is, did you do it? And so what do we need? We need accountable human beings. We're clear what they're accountable for for. And they need the opportunity to answer both of those questions. What can I count on or expect you to do? By a certain date, like our next quarterly meeting and at our next quarterly meeting, done or not done. And again, the beauty of EOS is it gives you a structure for that with weekly and quarterly. That's what accountability actually looks like. My view inside an organization. So how did I get there? I got there by thinking about the lack of individual accountability and are we building everybody up. I'm not a believer that you can fix people, you can give people opportunities and hope they rise and you can support them and do all that. But I don't think the two people I'm thinking of who were fundamentally non accountable, they had stuff going on that was beyond my power to address. You know, I'm not a psychiatrist or psychologist. You know, I have no idea what happened in their respective childhoods, etc. I know that they damaged the company daily. But everybody else, you know, we talk about training programs and you know, career pathing and this and that. Man, if you just go, what do you think the priorities are? You tell me what you think the priorities are. It's 80% of the battle.
- [63:43]
B
Just 30 seconds on right person, right seat is because we talked about, here's what's interesting about what you just said. I got really excited because I'm like anytime there's going to be an issue now, now there can be like a soft, a soft off boarding kind of campaign that happens because of that. The one thing that I don't think I picked up on that now in reflection I am, is kind of what you described was like right person, wrong seat. Meaning like they, they operated at 30% of everybody else. And there was a lot of mistakes which meant they, who, whoever that human was, was not in the right seat. It, it also sounds like you were able to have that conversation maybe because they were the right person, meaning that they would be more accepting of the conversation that you were going to have and the transition that that would have to happen as a result.
- [64:35]
A
That's a really absolute, it's a really interesting and good thought. I appreciate your bringing it up. It's not a thought that, that I've had. We did not have formalized core values in any of those businesses. So I didn't have a structure in hand for thinking about culture. I would say about, you know, the young woman I described to you who had to leave. I think two things helped there. One is that I think she was fundamentally, I think it's just fundamentally a good person in a job that didn't feel fit her at all. And so she was behaving now, she wasn't even behaving poorly, she was performing poorly. But, you know, if we'd had core values, my guess is she would have fit them. Where the two guys I'm thinking of, who I would describe as non accountable for the most part, I think of that first layer of individual accountability as a permission to play core value. And neither one of these guys had it. They would be absolute negatives. I love, by the way, the simplicity of do you or do you not have our core values? Do you fit the culture? Do you. Do you not fit the job? I love that. It just. It just creates so much clarity. But in both cases, with those, with those guys, and there was somebody else in the company, there's somebody whose behavior was so damaging to the. To the company, more than half of the employees reported to her. And there's no org chart when I got there. There's no structure. And, you know, I went to work trying to create one. I just got to figure out who's doing what and reporting to who and can I turn this into team so I can visualize it? And I realized she had joined the company as the receptionist 10 or 12 years before, and, you know, they'd hired people underneath her, and they would just say, you go talk to her. She knows what to do. And all of a sudden she's the head of operations and it's a lending company. She's got a couple hundred million dollars a year passing through her hands. And this was not right. I mean, she was not equipped to do that. But her behavior there was a really bad vibe. They were on a separate floor. They would yell at customers and at each other and treat each other badly and do bad. It's just awful. I started to get a suspicion that she was the maypole around which all of this was dancing. And she came to me one day and announced that she was pregnant and about to go on maternity leave. And, you know, I am not. I'm not somebody who's particularly oriented toward prayer, but I'm looking up at the sky and going, thank you.
- [66:53]
B
Right.
- [66:54]
A
I've never been so happy in my life to hear that somebody was expecting. And magically, the minute she walked out that floor, the bad behavior all went away. Your observation, I think, is right. The other thing I think made it pop possible for me to have that conversation with the young woman whose performance was low was that I worked very hard to be in front of the people in the company, to be someone that they felt had their best interest at heart and was somebody they could Trust somebody who would tell them the truth and would look out for them. And some of that is, you know, simple, dopey stuff. The women's restroom on the, the upper floor, the door faced a parking lot across the street, across the. An alley. And it didn't have a door on it. There was a Hefty bag taped up. And so I went to Home Depot and bought a door and had them deliver it. And I went home and I got my toolkit and I am like the last person you want doing this stuff. And I was in full view of all, and I hung the door, right. And you know, it's because I wanted them to see, like, you know, you think I got all the sort of big picture stuff in my head. I don't want you pulling your pants down with the parking lot across, you know, view the parking lot across the alley, right? We're going to start there. So anyhow, I'll, I'll share this other thing with you. You know, I've got a handful of these things that have sort of worked their way in. I mentioned trust before and it's another place where I think we toss a word around without understanding it as well as we might. And this one, this is a combination of some stuff I've read in various places and some stuff that some, some various kinds of education and training I've had in putting his pieces together. My conclusion is that there are three tests or prerequisites for trust. We start with the Lincioni pyramid and we just assume we all understand what trust is. Lencioni puts the vulnerability, color on it. For any of that stuff to work, you have to have, you have to at least get to the starting line. And the starting line for me, I think is three conditions that have to be met. And I believe that we are all subconsciously scanning the horizon, scanning the people around us to see if they meet these three conditions. There is a guy. Let's see this guy I heard speak at a conference a few years ago, wrote this book which I think is very good. Although the Trust Edge, which he very kindly signed for me. He's got an eight, an eight piece model. I can't remember eight of anything. If I had eight kids, I couldn't remember their names. A three is as much as I can do. We're looking for three things. Intent, reliability and competence. Intent, I'll borrow his phrase. I wish I had come up with this. We're looking for a sense, a reason to believe that the other person has an intent beyond themselves. David Horsager's language. I think it's perfect. We expect people to have their own interests in mind, but we're looking for a sense that if their interest and our interest were in conflict, that they'd be willing to subordinate their interest to ours. Because if you don't believe that, then you have to believe. They throw you under the bus for any, you know, for any reason. We're looking for a sense that they're reliable. When we ask people what trust means, this is the most common definition we get is reliability. Do I believe that you will do what you say you're going to do? And the third is competence, which is do I believe you can do what you say you're going to do? My take, my sense is that we are all constantly scanning the people around us for signs and signals whether those conditions are met. I have a client that does research on things like this and they've told me that there's actually decent empirical support for this, that it's not, you know, just a totally made up thing. And when I share this with clients, I ask them to think about two things. The first is that when you have that funny feeling which I experience right here, like right below the solar plexus, get this little funny feeling that I, I don't think I can trust this person. See, stop and ask yourself, which test are they failing? Which test or tests are they, Are they failing? Just like the People Analyzer, it will help you focus on what your issue is. And it may also help you focus on, is there something I can do to fix this? Because reliability and competence, you may be able to, to fix intent, odds are very low of being able to fix that. I, I think. But the other thing is to remember that if you seek to be trusted, remember that while you're scanning the rest of the world, the rest of the world is scanning you. And so it's good to ask yourself, am I showing up making it very clear that my intent is for a greater good beyond myself? Do I do what I say I'm going to do? And do I only commit to doing things that I have the capability? I'm clear about my capabilities, let's put it that way. I set appropriate expectations. I don't write checks I can't cash. And if there's a risk of that, I tell people, you know, I've never done this before, I'm going to give it my very best shot. But I need free. No, I've never. Right, you're at least transparent about it. But those basic three things Intent, reliability and competence. I didn't have that in my hand when I was running the lending company, but the family had, had, had kept all of their cards right up against their vest. They, they showed nothing to anybody. So everybody's running around in the dark and. Well, one thing I did was, you know, I didn't violate any family comp. Confidences, but I just started to disclose more and you know, I'm willing to invest trust in you that I can give you this information. I think you'll be able to do, to help us more if you know it.
- [73:45]
B
I love it. I mean, my biggest question at this point is, are you willing to come on for a, for a part two? I feel like, like every time you drop like a, a vignette or like a theory or an idea or like something kind of in your, in your toolkit, I'm like, we could, like, we could literally just spend an hour on, on the, on the idea of trust. Like, what is trust? Because like, what you've just done is you said, I believe trust are these things. And we're, we're all scanning and I have so many follow up questions and I'm not going to ask you now. So the only question I have is, will you come on and do a.
- [74:18]
A
Part two on, on one condition. Which is you have to ask me about the chicken.
- [74:21]
B
Yeah, what, what's, what's up with that chicken up there?
- [74:24]
A
You don't have to ask me now, you have to ask me next time.
- [74:28]
B
I love it.
- [74:28]
A
Talk to some other people and, you know, make me a return guest sometime after you've done a few more episodes. I'd love to. This is great fun.
- [74:36]
B
You did not at all disappoint. You lived up to the hype and the expectations. I'm gonna text JBS and, and George after this and let them know how amazing this was. You were concerned in the beginning about am I going to be able to go 50 minutes? But we just went like an hour and a half, which is, which is a first too.
- [74:58]
A
People who know me will tell you that I'm not shy about being comfortable with the sound of my own voice. So the truth is, it's not a total surprise.
- [75:08]
B
So just for people that don't know you that might be listening to this, and they just listen to this thing and they're like, holy moly, I need to talk to Dan. I need Dan in my life. I've got this thing. I need whatever it is, they want to get a hold of you. How can they find you?
- [75:22]
A
They can email me. That would probably be best. They can email me this, you know, same EOS email format we all have. Dan.wallace osworldwide.com awesome.
- [75:33]
B
Well, that's. That's all I got. I just want to say thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate your time. We still have three three watchers right now, and it's been cycling, so I think we've had, like, 15 that have, like, come in and going out. This is. This is incredible.
- [75:46]
A
Which shows you my. My issue. Which shows you how sticky I am because nobody's staying.
- [75:50]
B
I love it. Thanks so much, Dan. I appreciate it. And. And we'll definitely do this again.
- [75:54]
A
It's great fun. R. Thank you. Appreciate it. Great questions.