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Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
Ep. 567 - Contractor Foreman COO Marcus Hantla - How Top COOs Overcome Vulnerable Moments
00:46:08
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- [00:00]
Marcus Hantla
Imposter syndrome. That's a great one. I, I've seen a lot reading through LinkedIn and things like that, how to deal with imposter syndrome and things like that. And I mean, the truth of the matter is everybody is an imposter until you do it, you know, And I don't let that be any kind of stumbling block for me. Approaching something new. You just acknowledge it, you see it for what it is and then you just move on past it as if it's not even there. Because if you get stuck in that realm, you're in analysis paralysis and you're like, you know, well, chips could fall.
- [00:41]
Cameron Herold
Welcome to the Second in Command podcast produced by the COO alliance and brought to you by its founder, Cameron Herold. In the second in command podcast, we talk to top COOs who share the insights, strategies and tactics that made them the chief behind the chief. And now here's your co host, former COO of a multi eight figure remote company and alumni member of the COO Alliance, Savannah Brewer.
- [01:10]
Savannah Brewer
Today's guest brings more than 25 years of senior leadership across sales, operations and international expansion. And he has a track record of driving growth, building high performing teams and helping companies dominate their markets. He's currently the COO of Contractor Foreman, a fast growing construction project management platform where he's leading the operational, product and people engines behind the company's next stage of scale. Before stepping into this role, he spent years transforming sales and revenue operations including closing enterprise deals at Insear, such as a Fortune 100 win in his first seven months and driving a 120% sales surge as director of revenue operations at JV Knowledge. His background also spans global team leadership across South Africa and Argentina, multiple presidents, club level awards and two successful exits of his own companies, giving him the rare dual lens of both founder and operator. In today's conversation, we get into the AI tool that's completely changing the game for his sales team. Why appreciation and truly seeing your employees matters more than ever in remote environments. And the no nonsense advice he has for CEOs. After decades of building, scaling and selling companies, let's dive in. We are live with Marcus. Welcome to the show.
- [02:26]
Marcus Hantla
Thank you very much for having me.
- [02:28]
Savannah Brewer
Of course. Well, let's just go ahead and kick things off. Tell us about Contractor Foreman. What do you do and who are you guys serving?
- [02:36]
Marcus Hantla
Absolutely. We are a construction software management platform primarily focused on the SMB market and our ICP, I would say is probably like 0 to 20 million. It could be multifamily general contractors. We do have a large contingent of subcontractors as well inside of our network. But that's mainly who we target right now is the residential construction home builder. Whether that's single family run office or a larger scope tract builder organization that is fully built out.
- [03:15]
Savannah Brewer
Awesome. How did you get involved with this company?
- [03:19]
Marcus Hantla
That's a great question. So I've spent 25 plus years now in the construction space. I've owned a couple of companies primarily focused around the electrical side, but you know, full MEPs. So the mechanical, electrical and plumbing side of the business and built up two companies, sold those off and continued to work in the space while simultaneously being on the technology side. And the way I kind of achieved that was the first company that I built was a low voltage wiring business. So anything that wouldn't electrocute you if you touch the wires as you were pulling. But that means it was systems. And so through doing systems we had a large, a number of primarily home automation, audio systems, CCTV, access control, security, those type of things. And built an annual recurring revenue model based off of subscriptions to the security monitoring to ongoing maintenance contracts for the higher end systems. Things along those lines really where we focused. And so I've been on the technology side as well as construction side. And all of that lended itself itself really nicely and dovetailed into what I'm doing at contractor foreman today.
- [04:46]
Savannah Brewer
Did you apply for the role or were you friends with someone? How'd you get.
- [04:49]
Marcus Hantla
Yeah, no, actually. So it's an interesting thing that a lot of people don't talk about early retirement. You know, as you're working day in and day out, you know, hair on fire. Obviously. I've gone through all of mine at this point, seven days a week, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, getting phone calls and things like that. I've got plenty of stories, you know, hiking with my family in Colorado and getting a phone call about one of the employees, you know, do we need to fire him? What do we need to do? Management, you know, going crazy and I'm like, I'm on vacation, you know. But yeah, what is not talked about a lot of times is when you sell and you're actually achieving what you think the ideal is in life, early retirement, things like that. It was literally one of the most uncomfortable experiences for me ever. I got done, I stepped back and I was like, wow, this is like jumping out of an airplane with no parachute. It was really, really uncomfortable to not have anything to do. And so I immediately started jumping back into the market, trying to find places to go and things that I could do with my time. Reached out initially to a former customer of mine who owned his own software company. And he brought me on as his revenue officer, head of sales, to build out his inbound and outbound sales team for a couple of products he had developed and did that for a number of years and then switched over and did an ergonomic SAS company where we use machine learning and AI to go through and take a live video recording of people doing various tasks and jobs. And the system would automatically calculate the angles of, you know, their body within 33 millimeters of resolution from the radius of any joint. And I know I'm getting way off in the weeds here. That's about an inch and a half. So if you think about like an inch and a half of movement for an ergonomic assessment, it's a rapid way to go through and do that without somebody having to stand there, you know, with a protractor or something, and measure those angles as they're sitting at a desk or doing any type of factory work that, you know, so many times people are injured in. And did that for a good while and then switched into. I actually reached out to the CEO of Contractor Foreman just because of my experience in construction, and we hit it off and here we are today.
- [07:34]
Savannah Brewer
So is this someone that you already knew about? Like, had you heard of the company? And you were like, that's something I would like to be a part of. Because I imagine going from sounds like you're retired.
- [07:43]
Marcus Hantla
So I actually that's. That's a really funny question. And you'll see why here in a second is. I've mentioned MEPs and still involved.
- [07:54]
Savannah Brewer
Involved.
- [07:54]
Marcus Hantla
I actually have a company that does both commercial and residential disaster recovery. And in that came across an electrician and a plumber who were both using Contractor Foreman here in the town that I live in. And I actually had one of them come out and do some service work at my house. And I just asked him, stand on the front door when he was done, you know, he's like, oh, give me a second. I'm gonna. Going to key in your information here. And it should fire off the invoice and then we can pay right here on the phone. I was like, that's cool. What software are you using? It was contractual format at that point. I was like, I need to give these guys a call and find out a little bit more about this. And so that was my first exposure to. It was from somebody standing on my own front porch and just kind of working backwards. It's the luxury of being able to go and find what you actually want to do in life versus, you know, something you have to do out of necessity.
- [08:53]
Savannah Brewer
So, yeah, I mean, for anyone who's listening that might be thinking about leaving their current role or they're looking for their next role, what's your thoughts on going into a space that maybe is a little outside of your lane, but to learn something new versus just staying on the same path? It sounds like you've kind of been in some ways the same industry, but in other ways you've played very different roles. What's your thoughts on that?
- [09:19]
Marcus Hantla
Yeah, I don't shy away from a challenge. That is not my personality type, but I know that bulk. My wife, other family members, you know, that's. That's very uncomfortable. And I think that's a lot about what sets apart CEO, CEO type of executive level functions is that you can't be unwilling to try something new. And I view those as growth opportunities. I get into a new opportunity that approaches or I see on the horizon, and I welcome it with open arms. And I'm like, let's go. Let's see what we can make happen here. In very much in terms of investments, I think one of the biggest advantages that I've had is the bulk of my investments have been in myself and betting on myself and knowing that I'm not going to let something fail because ultimately I am where everything boils down. At the end of the day, if something's going wrong, it ultimately is going to end up on me to fix it. And I've gotten really good at being a fireman. I guess. I just, I.
- [10:36]
Savannah Brewer
With those new challenges, have you experienced stepping into those and feeling any sort of imposter syndrome or like, man, can I really do this?
- [10:46]
Marcus Hantla
Yeah, imposter syndrome. That's a great one. I. I've seen a lot reading through LinkedIn and things like that, how to deal with imposter syndrome and things like that. And I mean, the truth of the matter is everybody is an imposter until you do it, you know, And I don't let that be any kind of stumbling block for me. Approaching something new. You just acknowledge it, you see it for what it is, and then you just move on past it as if it's not even there. Because if you get stuck in that realm, you're in analysis paralysis. And you're like, you know, well, chips could fall. You've got to understand that that absolutely is everything in life. I Could walk out to go check my mailbox and I live in a cul de sac and get run over by a vehicle. There's all kinds of catastrophic stuff that can occur at any given moment, any day, and you can't live your life like that. So if somebody is in that mode, my advice would be just don't get hung up on that and move, you know, the best way. The old adage, a waterfall starts with a single drop of water. Just take the next step. I mean, that's really all you can do, because there's ultimately no other. You can only control what you can control in life and in work situations.
- [12:05]
Savannah Brewer
And it sounds like you own both of your. The last companies that you were working in and you sold those and now you're CEO. Has it been difficult transitioning from owner to operator?
- [12:17]
Marcus Hantla
There were a couple companies in between where I cut my teeth. And at first, yes, because I very much had carte blanche in my own businesses where I could make a decision. And that was the decision. And we didn't talk about it anymore. It was just done. You know, there's much more finessing and selling that goes into being a COO on why this is actually a good idea, why this is the direction we need to go. Using KPIs to your advantage and making a informed, I don't want to say decision. It's making an informed recommendation to the CEO because you have to be willing to walk in somebody else's shoes. And you've got to understand from their perspective, you know, that's. That's their baby. Just like my companies were my baby, this is their baby. And so now I can't just go off and, you know, execute. And I still do have days where, where I, I do make decisions and execute. And then I'm like, oh, I probably should have checked first before I did that. And then kind of unwind a little bit of what I've done. But it hasn't presented to be too big of a problem because again, making those decisions, I mean, when I do make a decision and just execute, it's something I've seen before and is a known quantity. I'm not just shooting off into the wind. I do get much more consultative with the leadership team, board, whatever I'm answering to when it gets to the larger decisions. But on things that I, I've dealt with in the past and are known quantities, I definitely just do automatically kind of answer on that front.
- [14:09]
Savannah Brewer
You mentioned stepping into each other's shoes. I'm curious, as being an owner and then being an operator, do you have a lens or any kind of lessons that you could share for anyone that hasn't been an owner, where you're like, hey, if you're a coo, this is what you need to realize about working with a CEO or owner who is actually in charge of all of the weight and responsibility of what actually happens versus, I think we feel sometimes the CEOs, you know, may have a piece, but it's. It's a different game that you're playing when you have all that responsibility on your shoulders entirely. What advice or lessons have you learned from being in both positions that a CEO could take now?
- [14:53]
Marcus Hantla
Yeah, I would say empathy. It does give you the ability to walk in their shoes because you've been there, right? I mean, you've done that. You know, the pressures of, you know, meeting payroll at the end of the week, when you're signing the other side of a check, it gets real in a hurry. And so being able to separate a lot of times what I may emotionally want versus what the CEO is walking through mentally in a process, as far as making a decision from his perspective, her perspective, it's given me patience, I guess, like I said, empathy, where I have the ability to get in there and really kind of remove my own biases from the equation and really let the process work its way out naturally. You know, that I think would be the best fit there for what you.
- [15:55]
Savannah Brewer
You said use the KPIs to your advantage kind of in the finesse. What does that mean?
- [16:01]
Marcus Hantla
I don't want to give away all the secrets here on how I'm selling all of my ideas to my current CEO,
- [16:08]
Savannah Brewer
if you're listening.
- [16:10]
Marcus Hantla
Oh, I know. And it's something he's used to by this point, where you do have to. It's a little bit, I don't want to say justifying your existence, but justifying your position. And I think it's a good exercise. Even when I was CEO, I would have to justify that to myself. I just did it a lot faster because I was the one going through the data. Now I'm actually having to go through and put together an executive summary. And this is what other companies are doing. This is what I suggest we do. This is why I think we should do it. And using the metrics, you know, that are being tracked internally through the marketing team, to the sales team, to the customer success team, to the training team, to our. To my advantage for a given item and then. And then being able to present that in a cohesive, well Thought out format that makes good sense and you don't win every time. That, that's another side of the equation. I mean, it's just reality, this one. It's a little close to home because it's been a thing. And if the CEO of my current company ever gets around to listening to this, he will laugh to himself. Because I did bring an idea. I mean, you know, and it was to do. We've got integrations with various accounting software platforms and things like that. And I'm like, well, we should just build out our own ledger. And he was like, I mean, I went through every kind of scenario under the sun to make that work. And he goes, it's just not exciting to me. I do not want to do that. Okay, fair enough. I'm done, I'm out. You know? Yeah, sometimes you're just not gonna win. Yeah, you gotta be okay with that. So I don't lose often though.
- [17:59]
Savannah Brewer
I was, I would say, what is, what's something? I tried to not ask example questions on the spot. But I'm curious on the flip side, what's been something that you've brought to him? And you guys both were like, yes, this feels exciting. And you were able to run with it and saw big results from.
- [18:16]
Marcus Hantla
Yeah, there have been a lot of positives in that regard, honestly. And we've got a lot of initiatives. The market is changing. Most recently, the things that come to mind, we are doing AI, SDR and BDR outreach. Originally, there's a number of different tools out there that will call a phone and go straight to voicemail and leave a voicemail. That's great. We actually were able to identify a artificial intelligence platform that will also talk to people if they pick up. And I'm like, why just settle for leaving a voicemail when you could actually have a coherent question with trained responses that sounds fully human. And we have the ability. They get dumped into our CRM and we have the ability to go back and listen to every phone call. And I mean, it's amazing to me in comparison to some of my salespeople how good it is. And I'm not sales people also point. But I'm like going, guys, yeah, listen to this over here. Yeah, this is how you need to answer that question. Because a lot of the times computers very much garbage in, garbage out. We did a very, and it was not overnight. We did a very concerted effort to feed the correct responses into the system, make sure that it had accurate access to our knowledge base and things like that for reference. But Once you get a large language model set up and trained, I mean it's, it's beautiful.
- [19:59]
Savannah Brewer
What tool is that?
- [20:01]
Marcus Hantla
So we use a company called setdigit just C E T D I G I T and they do a really good job. It did take some time to get set up, but we've seen a lot of success from that and I think that was something we both thought was really cool initially. We have another AI offering that's actually built into our software. You know, being contractor foreman, we've got a Ask the Foreman button where you can click in there and all of that is loaded in as a LLM and they can actually live query the database using natural language. So if you think about how humans interact with software and software companies, traditionally it's been about the name of the game has been your user interface or your user experience. That's changing. I mean, I hate to break the news to anybody who's in a SaaS company out there that you know the world is changing and UI UX is no longer really moving forward. Going to be all that important when you have the ability to just put a search bar in there. Think about Google, think about Google. Do they have a beautiful user interface? It is a search bar.
- [21:18]
Savannah Brewer
Yeah, that's all it is.
- [21:19]
Marcus Hantla
Type your garbage into our box and we will give you back what you want. That's where software is going. And so we, in a sense we call it Ask the Foreman but in a sense we put in that Google search bar where if you want to query the system and ask it how many invoices you have or how many past due payments are out there and what the total is, it will query the database without you ever clicking through anything. You, there's no clicking from one field to the next in the user experience and making sure that people are fully trained on how to use all that. And the world is changing in the sense that you never got trained or a user manual. Think about how important user manuals used to be. You never got a user manual from your iPhone or from Samsung. You just opened it up and started flipping around with your thumb. That's the expectation nowadays. And so for software companies, how do you put the cookies on a lower shelf and let a kid be able to access the data that they need? They don't want to take, they don't have time to go through your training, go through your learning management system and we've got all of that. You know, we've got a beautiful LMS platform set up. Yeah, we have people going through it. But at the end of the day, these are all professionals doing their own. They don't come into work learning or expecting to learn how to use my software. They go into work expecting to install a, you know, H vac system or electrical or whatever they do for a living. They're not looking to spend a day or a month or week training themselves on how to use my software. And so I've got to meet them, where they're at and we're really starting to see things change and flip around on that paradigm. Regarding the user interface, user experience and.
- [23:30]
Cameron Herold
Hey, it's Cameron Herold, your high energy leadership group guru, here to pump you up on the second Command podcast. If you get frustrated because your managers aren't leading like you want them to be, check out my game changing leadership course@investinyourleaders.com that's investinyourleaders.com for just 347 per leader. You get 30 years. My proven experience straight from taking 1,800-got junk from 2 million to 106 million as COO. And it's packed with 12 easy modules. Learn situational leadership coaching, delegation, conflict management and more all in under six hours. @investinyourleaders.com with straight to the point videos, worksheets and real life scenarios. Your team will master time management, be able to hire a players and get aligned with your vision. It's all backed by a 30 day money back guarantee and raved about by hundreds of CEOs and thousands of managers already learning from the content. Grab this now and watch your business soar.
- [24:31]
Savannah Brewer
Very cool. Yeah. This is also applicable to internal teams as well. I recently interviewed the COO of I can't remember the name of the company off the top of my head, which I feel bad, but it's been around for a long time. And they sell like all sorts of gourmet foods and everything's like in cartoon graphics on their website. I was like, is this even a real company? And they're like, yes, this is a real company and they do really, really well. But most of their sales come around Christmas and so they go from, I think he said 50 employees through the year and then they have to hire 800. Six weeks. He's like, so I don't have six weeks to ramp someone up and educate them on all of my product knowledge. I've got to get them being able to know everything about the product and be able to properly package it and label it within 30 minutes of me onboarding them and they gotta be good to go. Yeah, And I asked them like, well, how do you do that? And they basically built their own Google for every product and just built this internal database of all of the information with different search functions. And this was, you know, it sounded like a decade ago or so they were doing this. And so I'm excited to see how AI can make that so much easier for people to implement for their teams and for their clients. And I know before we started this, it sounds like you have some maybe polarizing or just different thoughts around AI and what that means. Everyone's got a different take, but what is your take outside of this specific scenario? What do you think about AI?
- [26:08]
Marcus Hantla
Yeah, I mean, great question. To me, AI is a modern day calculator and you know, obviously you can run mathematical problems through it, but I would consider it to be a word problem calculator. So everybody went through, had like the SAT and act where it was asking you all kinds of word problems and things like that. That's where large language models excel. They get grammar, they understand flow, they understand, you know, all of the breakdowns needed to arrive at the correct answer. And they have access to all knowledge where they've been fed. And when I say all knowledge, I heard yesterday, here's how you shut off chat GPT from crawling through your Gmail account. If you've got Gmail, please go through and shut off these privacy settings because they're crawling your attachments, your emails, your everything. I mean, when I say everything, Reddit, you know, all of these different things that have just given access to the large language models to go in and train on. Which is a little concerning if you think about some of the sources. Yeah, like are we really doing the best for humanity crawling Facebook? Is that really the best we can come up with? But, but that's what they're doing. And so you do have access to the book libraries and things like that through, you know, all of time, I guess. But you've got some weird social media influences jumping in there as well and there's some really unique things coming to light. And if you take a step back and look at really what is going on with AI and extrapolate it out, 5, 10, 15 years, you know, where will we be? We're going to have a lot more consensus as to what the truth. Truth, Truthiness. I love the phrase the word truthiness if you're old enough to remember the reference. But yeah, I think we'll have a lot more consensus on where things stand. But is that actually going to be good for humanity? Because a Lot of what we do is sometimes we make mistakes which lead to the greatest discoveries. A human thinking about something the wrong way can actually leapfrog us forward as a society better than everybody agreeing on what the truth is and not challenging it. And one of the great, you know, obvious example is penicillin. Why in the world would you inject mold into your vein, you crazy person? You're already sick and dying. You've got a massive infection. Yeah, go ahead and inject mold in there, idiot. Like, no. Completely goes against everything that we know. And, you know, nobody would do that in their right mind, including the scientists who are studying better ways to come up with new antibiotics. However, one of the greatest discoveries of mankind was directly a result of that very thing happening. So just because we can agree does not mean we're in a better place. So I look at AI and I go, it still very much is a mirror. What you are prompting AI to do is highly determinant on the results you will be given back. And it is, it is reflecting you in a sense. And so it is going to be as smart as you are, or in a lot of cases, as dumb as you are, where you, you can do a lot of dumb stuff with AI. And we see it, and I laugh at a lot of it. I mean, I see the memes and the videos and like, there's not really wild stuff out there that we are. I'm not sitting around, make a video of a guy jumping in a big jello vat or whatever, you know, his backyard. But there's people doing that. And I laugh at it and I think it's funny, but that is a reflection of them and I laugh at it and it gets clicks and all of the things that they're going for. But I like to think my, my searches are a little bit more, you know, complex and thought out. And I'm. I'm looking for very targeted metrics or formulas or calculations and things like that. And when I'm spending my time working with a large language model.
- [30:57]
Savannah Brewer
Yeah, well, that's so true. The point that you made about the reflection, like a mirror, that's. It's allowing people to reflect things much bigger and much faster. You know, content, especially content creators. I mean, wow, the ability to produce content at lightning speed, it's. It's wild, the power that that has. And also I'm curious to see what, in terms of the information space, what happens with it just becoming so saturated and like, I mean, I've seen videos that look so real or like the Data, the way that it's describing some scientific finding sounds so legit. And I'm like, wow, I cannot believe this is true. Like, if this could be true. And then I start scrolling in the comments and they'll be like real scientists and other people coming in and they're like, hey, you're misusing this piece. You know, this has already been happening with like news and media misconstruing things, but it's happening so much more now, at least in my little tiny blip of reality on, on my socials. But I like that idea of the. I don't know if I like it as much as it's just an observation
- [32:09]
Marcus Hantla
of the reflection they actually have. I don't think they're calling them counseling apps, but the voice mode on chat GPT, you know, somebody having a bad day, having a friend, having an online buddy, even the romantic side where it's like your AI girlfriend or something along those lines, oh, you know, he or she will do anything you want to do because again, it's a reflection of you. You're not actually talking to another entity, you're talking to yourself. And you're immediately getting the response that you are prompting because the system is just giving you what you are asking it for. That's why she's the perfect woman or he's the perfect guy is because you're literally, I mean literally reflecting your own desires back in your face going, oh, yeah, right. You know, and so you're, you're not interacting with another being or another entity. But it's highly misleading. And there's no love, like self love, right?
- [33:15]
Savannah Brewer
Yeah. I mean, I think more than I was having conversation with one of my mentors yesterday about, we believe that there's going to be this increasing need for, especially in business, there to be like chief energy officers, people that are really able to just like bring us back to our bodies and our hearts and our humanity. And it'll be really interesting to see how all of this starts to shift us even more. I mean, we're so isolated and disconnected. The health issues and obesity, I mean, it's just insane. But we could probably talk about this for hours. I want to ask you specifically around what have been some of the harder parts? And I'm asking you specifically this because you seem like a tough guy. You're in the contractor space. I mean, maybe it's the outs, the background for anyone that is not on, is not on YouTube. He's got a, like a house being built behind him. Imagine you like you could Also probably hammer and build a house too. What, what have been some of those like, vulnerable, hard moments as a CEO for you? Oh,
- [34:26]
Marcus Hantla
you've always got the obvious one, which is, you know, having to part ways, having to release employees back into the wild. You've always got that one. So I don't want to give that answer, but it very much is a the Game of Thrones reference to Hand of the King, right where you're, you're the counselor, you know, you're not going to be able to carve out the CEO's time a lot of times to get on a call. We're, we're going through the process right now of scheduling our end of the year zoom session where we're going to have everybody throughout the world log in. And I was actually, this was something I came up with as part of organization building. And the CEO or the CEO was like, I've actually never talked to some of these people on a zoom meeting ever before. You know, fully remote office. And so when you have that realization, like you were saying earlier, the human aspect, you know, meeting people where they're at and things like that, imagine working out of your bedroom and never seeing anybody else from your company as a, you know, seven year long employee, let alone having never spoken a word directly to the CEO of the company. And so that's what we're putting together, a big zoom session. Everybody's going to jump on, you know, give out awards, gift cards, make everybody feel good, have, you know, happy holidays, Merry Christmas, all that good stuff and really just meeting their needs, where they're at, understanding what makes customer or not customers but employees tick. It's a huge responsibility in, you know, in larger organizations and it can be daunting. You know, when you start getting teams upwards, you know, 80 to 100 people and beyond, you go, okay, the average family is two and a half people, three people as a family unit. Well, now you're responsible for feeding 300 people, you know, 600 people, thousand, whatever, like that can be, that can be a lot of pressure if not acknowledged and dealt with in the right way. And, and so taking time to get to know people on an individual level, assure them that they're doing a good job. Not just the biggest metric that is sobering in my world is The it takes 20 compliments to undo one critique or criticism.
- [37:02]
Savannah Brewer
Well, I've never heard that.
- [37:03]
Marcus Hantla
And you think about the math on that. Like the only time anybody ever really wants to reach out is when they're, you know, wrapping somebody's hand. Across with a ruler for doing something wrong. You know, how, how much concerted effort from the executive level branch is coming and thanking employees for the work that they're doing and giving them, hey, good job, good this, you know, and that has created this really awkward haves and have not attitude in, you know, business throughout the world where, you know, oh, I'm just working for the man and he's making money off of my back and everything like that. And I, and I think the large reason for that is that we just don't take time to appreciate people and give them a voice, you know, speak up and say something is, you know, people can have a bad day. It's real.
- [38:03]
Savannah Brewer
Yeah.
- [38:03]
Marcus Hantla
I love so much. It's a reflection of you.
- [38:07]
Savannah Brewer
I love that you're sharing this though, because it's so true. And in a time when we're mostly remote, being able to feel connected and seen and appreciated is so important. And I know, I've heard that even in terms of coaching, being able to acknowledge the things that someone's doing, well, they will step into that so much more than telling them what they're not doing and telling them to step it up. And it's. People respond better to positive feedback. I got this from one of the videos when I joined Cameron's COO alliance was like creating a form when your employees onboard where you ask them very simple things like, what are your favorite hobbies, what do you like to do with your family? What are your favorite candies? And then there's one question that says like, if you. Something like if you could only have one indulgence for the rest of your life that was under $20, what would it be? I started using that for every new person that came on. And what we would do is I would tie that into our core values. So every month we had a channel with core values in Slack and everyone was required to do at least one shout out for someone else on the team who did something in alignment with the core value. And what we do is we would take all of those, which is because it'd be so much easier with ChatGPT now than like back in the day. I had to manually count them. But whoever, like if you got one vote, you got one ticket of entry. If you had five shout outs, you get five tickets of entry. And we did a drawing and we would go and gift that someone something. And whoever was in charge of gifting on my team, they would go and look at those forms and send them something. So personalized, which there's a book by John Rulin called Giftology, which is all about how to use gifting in a way that is the most meaningful to people. And it's not just sending a Christmas gift, you know, at the time that people are expecting it and a broad one that you're sending to everybody, but really being custom and focused on what that person needs and what their life is and allowing them to feel really seen and special. It was so cool hearing the feedback from different people on the team when they would get their gifts and things. So that's what that made me think of. But this has been so amazing. I would love to just ask to kind of tie us in here. What are you most excited about? It sounds like there's a lot of cool things happening in the company with some of the AI rollouts. Is there anything specific you are really looking forward to in the next six months?
- [40:28]
Marcus Hantla
I'm actually speaking at the International Builder Show. They brought us in. They've got a new AI and innovation booth. I don't know. Booth. I'm not sure what they're actually calling it. It's not a booth, but it's a training series or session there. This year it's in Orlando. That is a really big expo. Lots of attendees, super excited about some of our future rollouts and things that we'll be doing there. Always a good time. Talking about me personally, I very much grew up shaking hands, kissing babies, doing sales, you know, cold calling, the whole thing. Never shied away from that. And I consider myself a very outgoing, gregarious personality type and my CEO. You work out of a home office, how do you avoid going crazy? I said it's the trade shows.
- [41:25]
Savannah Brewer
That's a whole. That's all the extra version you need for a while.
- [41:30]
Marcus Hantla
Yeah, yeah. Get a good fill. Just got back from Las Vegas at the association of General Contractors out there, Construction Financial Management Association. Say that five times fast. And that was. That was a super great experience. Learned about how much I just don't know about being a CFO in construction, so that's always humbling. But spending time at trade shows and being excited about the product and being able as humans, we sense other humans excitement and that feeds into positive things which ultimately turn into business. I think it's an important piece that I try to never neglect. There is very much the human aspect still in buying decisions. And I mean, especially when you're making something in a decision as important as what construction software platform you're going to be using for your business. I mean, we stop working, guess what? They stop working because they can't invoice people, they can't create estimates, they can't do any of the daily tasks, including their calendar. So it's important for them to make a good, informed decision. And I do feel like being there in front of people a lot of the times is really the best for making that come across.
- [42:53]
Savannah Brewer
Yeah. So fun. I love going to events and meeting people and like you said, kissing babies. It's fun. I meant to ask you. This will actually be my last question. It'll be a little bit of a different ending, but you have a weekly calibration exercise. I meant to ask about that earlier. What is your weekly calibration exercise?
- [43:16]
Marcus Hantla
So, yeah, I. On Monday I go through and I put together the things I've got to do for that week, you know, before I even jump into stuff on Monday morning, prioritizing my entire day. And then it gets shorter. Right, you prioritize. You prioritize what you're going to do for the week. And then on Tuesday, okay, what was it I was going to do today to make sure. And then you have things that happen, like today where you launch two factor authentication and all of your perfect plans get blown into the stratosphere and all you're doing is making sure employees can log in to use our software. So the last planning sometimes does not do anything for you. But yeah, that is something I'm very concerted about. Making sure that I've lined out my week correctly and then each day going through and ticking off the boxes as to what those important items are on any given day.
- [44:15]
Savannah Brewer
Well, do you pick like a top three each day?
- [44:17]
Marcus Hantla
Yeah. Yes. And they're typically the ones I least want to do because I always do the least fun activities first because then the rest of the day is just great. If you get those great.
- [44:31]
Savannah Brewer
Yeah.
- [44:32]
Marcus Hantla
All the garbage out of the way, then you're just enjoying yourself doing your work, you know. So I, I definitely do prioritize broken down by that. Yeah.
- [44:42]
Savannah Brewer
Amazing. Well, awesome. Thank you, Marcus. This was so awesome. If anyone wants to reach out to you, where's the best place for them to do that?
- [44:49]
Marcus Hantla
So, yeah, LinkedIn is obvious choice. It's just slash. Marcus Hantla is my name and love to connect with people there. I, I've kind of abandoned all other social media at this point. Not, you know, it's good for some people, but you know, if I'm connecting, I, I do like the LinkedIn platform for the professional aspect of it still keeps me in the realm of work without having to go off into these silly AI generated videos. We. We haven't reached that yet on the LinkedIn channel. I'm sure they're coming, but they're starting to come.
- [45:27]
Savannah Brewer
That's awesome. Today that's TikTok.
- [45:29]
Marcus Hantla
I'm going to not open that app
- [45:31]
Savannah Brewer
because then you are stuck, sucked into the funnel. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for this. Really appreciate you being here.
- [45:38]
Marcus Hantla
Likewise. Thank you. Have a great one.
- [45:42]
Cameron Herold
You've been listening to Second in Command brought to you by COO alliance founder Cameron Herald. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, share and subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and our other podcast streaming platforms. For more best practices from industry industry leading COOs, visit cooalliance.com.