Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Independence by Design podcast, where we discuss what it means to be a business owner and ways to get unstuck from the day to day so we can design a business that gives us a life of independence.
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Using your assets to win in your marketplace so you can outbeat the competition by getting that high hill is what I'm going to be talking about today. I've got Greg Meredith on the show. He owns a company called Simply Strategic. He also owns a small manufacturing firm. I have done three strategic strategic planning sessions with him and clients over the years. And what we're going to be unpacking is his nine keystones of Simply Strategic. We're going to be screen sharing so you can actually follow along and see what does an actual strategic plan consist of? And how is a strategic plan different than a business operating system like eos? And then how does a strategic plan integrate into your ownership roadmap and your ownership operating system? Greg is going to unpack some of my favorite keystones, from his doctrines to the flywheel to his winning position that he's going to unpack in great detail. So you're gonna love it. I hope you enjoy. And without further ado, here's my episode with Greg.
Good morning, Greg. You got yourself all Dapper Dan up for me. So this is gonna. I mean, you must be ready to drop the nuggets today.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Wisdom is coming from. From me when I put a jacket on.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Excited to have you back on. We've got a couple other previous episodes from the past, but I wanted to reorient us. You've been working hard at Simply Strategic. You and I just got off a mutual client engagement that I thought went pretty well. The client gave us an A minus. You. I mean, what would differentiate between you, me, and the whole. The whole process. But the whole process gave it an A minus, and I gave. Gave him an A minus, B plus or whatever. And.
And I think it went fantastic, Greg. And before we jump in, I'll kind of. I'll continue to frame up how strategic planning fits in the ownership operating system as well as compared to the business operating system like eos. But let's start with your definition of strategic planning and then what you think most people get wrong about strategic planning.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Yeah, well, the big point that I always make, Ryan, is the difference between strategic planning, which is a formal process of. Of actually going through and creating a. A, A plan. A strategic plan. So you start at the beginning and you work your way through, and you. You get to the end, and at the end, you Have a plan. So I make a different, a differentiation between that and strategy. Because too often people think just because I go through.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: I have a strategy. And unfortunately that's not always the case. Right. You might have some of the elements of a strategy, but unless you intentionally set out with the goal being of having a real strategy, too often you'll have a nice plan that's very operational, it's very tactical. But you didn't answer some of those fundamental foundational questions about strategy. And so I always try to start there and say, hey, we're going to have both, right? We're going to start with a planning process. But the goal of that planning process is to end with a strategy. And so that's the first thing I would tell people that are thinking about this as a process.
Process is great. Everybody needs a plan. It's better to have a plan than not have a plan. But you better end with a strategy at the end or it's been a helpful exercise that you've left a lot on the table.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: Love the, love the bifurcation. What is. So then you have a specific definition of strategy. And, and there's a couple isms that I, that you've, I've gathered from you over the years. So like I, I'll throw up mine after you give yours. But like what, what is.
And maybe within that there's your, you go first because then I got a.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: So definition of strategy that I use. And this is always kind of one of those questions that I ask people up front is the executive team sitting around a table. And, and you know, if we talked about other terms in business, hey, what's marketing? Hey, what is what, what's on a balance sheet? What does the, the asset categories, what do each of those asset categories represent?
The people around the table would give you a very similar answer. But if you ask people their definition of strategy, you're going to hear six different things from six different people. And so we start with this core definition of strategy is using company assets to create a high impact winning position.
And that basically guides our process where we say, hey, we're going to talk about some, some of the fundamental keystones that are going to help us lay the foundation. We're going to talk about the essence of your strategy, which includes your company assets and your winning position. But we start with that definition so that all parties can say when we talk about strategy, this is what we mean.
Using company assets to create a high impact winning position.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: I love it. And some of the things, and I don't know where along our journey that I picked these up. But when I think about strategy, you know, because I've listened to a lot of podcasts now with like, you know, the Marine Corps and Navy seals, whether it's on Huberman or Rogan or whatever. And there's always like this, you know, things that they, that that come from them. And you talk about this. Is, is it the winning position that's on the top of the high hill?
[00:05:25] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: And, and, and let's talk about like what that means for a company. And I want to go straight there, Greg, because when you and I were sitting at dinner and you're like, okay, most of my people that go through this kind of get that, but like that's like, that's like where you're, I think that's the heart of everything that you're doing is coming up with that winning high hill. And you're like, I think Ryan, the thing that you want to die on is the three statement model. And I was like, yes, I want to jam that down everyone's throat. However, we know that we have to have incremental progress. And so like, there's like, I think, you know, but what we can get done with this is what is the ideal look like.
So that way we can help people picture it. And then as we go through the rest of this conversation, it's about making incremental progress to get to that. But like I said, why is it so important for you and why would you die on that hill? And what is the winning position?
[00:06:21] Speaker B: I think that the reason that I try to force everyone to that place of saying, how are we trying to win in our marketplace is because so often people especially that are running a small or a mid sized business, right? So anyone that's 2 million in revenue, up to 500 million in revenue kind of fits in that category, somewhere between a small business and a mid sized business.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: And you've worked with everybody in that. So for everybody's context, listening, and you have engagements that you've worked with on that.
[00:06:53] Speaker B: Absolutely. And, and you know, probably that 20 to 100 is a sweet spot, but I have clients that go a little smaller than that, clients that are, that are bigger than that. And when we get to this place where, you know, we've been building towards this idea of a winning position and, and it is that high heel, right? Because people understand the high ground. So I'll start with the analogy of a military operation.
The winner of that military operation is often going to control the high ground. And so what are you going to do? What is your. In your marketplace with the assets that you have and own and control, which high ground are you going to go for? And it forces people to say, oh, okay, so strategy is more than just deciding. We want to grow. Strategy is more than just deciding, hey, we want to increase our margin.
Those are, those are outcomes of a really good strategy. It's saying, looking at my, the, the battlefield that is my market, where's the high ground? And there's typically a limited number of hills on the battlefield. And this is the one that strategically we can win and we should go for. And so just getting people to think that way to say, hey, our strategy is about intentionally saying, we're going to go there, we're going to hold that ground, we're going to win from that place, is really, really important for people to think about.
And so, you know, when, when you talk about, like building a lot of the elements early on in my planning process, I tell people, hey, you've done exercises that look at opportunities, right? Everybody has some form of an analysis that looks at opportunities. And we do too, in our, in our, in our keystones of, of creating a strategic plan.
Not everybody gets to the place where they actually have thought through what are our company assets and how are we going to use them to get to a specified winning position. So, so, you know, it's partly educational and it's partly decision making, but it's forcing people to think through how do we actually win? You know, some, some people talk about it as a moat, a competitive moat. Some people talk about it. One of the best books on strategy is, is it's called the seven Powers. He talks about it as powers, but I'm looking and saying, what is that winning position? How are we in our business going to win and what hill is that going to look like for us?
[00:09:16] Speaker A: I love it. So we're going to unpack in our conversation the nine keystones. So we'll even do maybe some screen sharing and get. Because I want people to have like a working session to go, okay, what the hell is strategic planning and a strategy? And that's why I think how you open it up. And so let me, let me riff on this on like strategy or like, what why I love your winning position. And like, because, like, dude, I'm so competitive. And you and I have talked about this, like both of us when we were sitting down chatting, like, all of my fuel of competition goes through business.
And so it's just like when I think about where people missed the Boat. And then I want to explain what a strategy is compared where people miss it is high of a VTO from EOS and I want to hit 30 million.
Great, 30 million in revenue. And like people have been hearing me harp on okay, well what's the gross margins, what's the normalized ebitda? What's the free cash flow, what's the valuation? So hopefully we've gotten to the point where it's like it's not just revenue but it's a value valuation and cash flow. But then what are you doing to get there?
And then how do you protect that? And so how your strategy and strategic planning fits into the ownership operating system is let's say someone has a forecast and they just base you'll go okay, at least I have a three statement forecast. Or even worst case it's just an income statement. But let's hopefully they understand how to reinvest into their company. But you have, I'm just picturing Greg. I've got the annual 12 month budget then out your projections of 2 through 5 and you do some basic assumptions like okay well based on my I've got Kim Clark who's on the show a lot talking about ITR economics, you know, okay, well here's what's where I'm in the economic cycle. Here's like what my growth trends are for the different lines of business.
And you could like peg your forecast to the valuation that you want. But then the question is like how the hell are you going to get there? Like are you like do we believe the 8% growth? Do we believe the different revenue lines that you have just randomly put? Not randomly, but like how have you thought through protecting that battleground? So it's like this different layer of thought that goes on top of the financials.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: 100%.
It's a layer of thought that says how do we actually think we're going to win and be able to grow at rates that nobody else in our marketplace is growing at or keep it we've ever done.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: Right. And okay, so now like with, with the ownership operating system, how I think about strategy, it's in predict, it's in my predictable revenue module which is like we want to land revenue on the income statement every month based on what revenue lines and what GL codes And do we think that they're the right services and products in the right locations to get to that high ground and to win? And so when I think about you back to then when strategy and strategic planning different than an operating system which we Will talk about how an operating system fits hand in glove with what I'm talking about from the ownership operating system as well as strategy is it's that trade offs.
And so what I said when you asked the group a couple weeks ago, like, what do you think strategies? I'm like, you have to say no to shit. You have to say no because we have a finite amount of time, people and money, so we're going to do these things and not these things.
And deciding actually means to say no to everything. But then you talk about your inverse situation. So what are your thoughts on that?
[00:12:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And when you talk about saying no, what you're really doing is you're saying yes to the things that you've said are the most important.
And too often, you know, we'll do this exercise in my system, it's in Keystone 3, but everybody does it. They brainstorm what we could possibly do. Right? Here are all the things that we could go and invest our time and our talent and our treasure into. And they come back and they say, yeah, this is great, let's go do it. Without really saying, okay, can we do half of this? What we've scoped? And so we.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: As an outside consultant can look at them and say, guys, you are way too ambitious about this. Right?
One of these things is going to consume all of your talent in this area of the business. One of your things is going to consume, you know, all of the money that you've allocated for these types of endeavors for the next three years. And here you have 8, 10, 12 things that you're looking at and everybody's pet project is still on there and you haven't done the hard work of saying no.
So you really can't say yes until you do that first. And so one of the things that was great about having you and we were able to be in that planning together was you must have made that point three or four times over the three days that we spent together. Guys, it's about trade offs, right? Yes, we could do a lot of this, but you have to say no if you're really going to say yes to the things that are most important. And so for me, emphasizing to the groups that I'm talking to, it's not about saying, hey, we're missing all of these assets, let's go get them all in a year. It's about saying, here's the asset that we're missing that is the most strategic, the most important.
We're going to spend the next two or three years, turning that from something that's a gap today to something that's going to be a strength in two, three, four years down the road. And so that effort of prioritization is really, really important.
Now, on the other point that you were making, I think you were talking about what I call the opposite rule.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Which I stole unmercilessly from somebody who writes a lot about strategy. And I thought it was a brilliant framing device. Too often the other mistake, there are lots of mistakes that people make when they get to the point of saying, hey, here's our strategy.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: One of those mistakes people make is it's really generic and they say, oh, we're gonna do X, Y or Z. And everybody looks at it and is like, well, of course you're gonna do X, Y and Z. That's what every good business.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: We're gonna have integrity, we're gonna have.
[00:15:29] Speaker B: High integrity, we're gonna have great customer service. We're gonna really invest in our people.
And it's, it's, it's the, what I call the, the toothless decision.
You've not made a decision because the opposite of any of those is ridiculous. We're going to have terrible customer service. We're going to have, we're going to.
[00:15:50] Speaker A: We'Re going to lie in any of our people.
[00:15:53] Speaker B: We're going to hire the most incompetent, the, the least valuable folks we can find. And so you know, that opposite rule in strategy is saying, hey, can you define your strategy in such a way that a logical, savvy, even wise competitor would look at the opposite of your strategy and say, hey, that's viable. That's a good strategy. We could do that as well. And so you force yourself when you get to that point of defining what your strategy is going to be and you flip it around and you say, okay, what's the opposite of this? Ah, okay. Boy, that's really, that's, that's viable as well. And so finding out and figuring what the, what the opposite rule is, is, is, is really a good test when you're looking back at your strategy at the end to say, does the opposite rule hold? And if it does, then, then you've probably worked hard enough making trade offs and being specific enough in what you're going to try to go and do to where you've, you've developed a true strategy.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: Let's maybe give a couple examples. And then I want to pull up the nine keystones to, to help people figure out, how do we get here and what I like about what you're saying is that it a couple things. One is when we talk about it's forcing people to make decisions because you're saying this is, this is the high ground that we want because you could go to a couple high grounds. We can kind of like said, you know, you could have a high ground that you're going to go over to that has this kind of landscaping or versus this high ground and we believe it's going to win because insert thesis. But you could look at both to say hey, like that could make sense and like relevant to like my situation Greg. And like we can talk about other sample clients and you know, you got some case studies that we'll be able to go through with the Keystones is So I was on a, a call or podcast with my friend Nick Bradley who has a business similar to mine. He like literally has, he's been in Takimor's program. He like came from private equity. He has a coaching business for business owners. And we've just become friends over the years and we've just been like pushing against each other like trying to figure out like, you know, our markets and like it was like a month ago like 80% of our stuff is the same like from like build an operational business, get your financials put together, get out of your job, like figure out all these things. But what we landed on Greg after like literally we've been, we've been talking for so long. He loves the arena of doing deals because he came from private equity, like literally loves it. So 80% the same. But eventually you're gonna have to organize your company to a certain way to get the highest purchase price with the best terms to a third party sale. And like what I really love is like the small giants conscious capitalism, like keep your business for in internally, whether it's an esop, internal buyout, like a family business as much as humanly possible. So that that last part is slightly different and like it was just this aha. But I think that's hopefully relevant to the listeners going like it takes all of that effort refining to say like I can't serve everybody. And then not to mention like I got multiple deals going on right now. I'm just like, well I'd rather do these other things with the time that I have. So like any other examples that you want to give?
[00:19:09] Speaker B: Yeah, so Fidelity and Vanguard are a great example, right? Two different companies.
One has chosen a strategy that hey, we're going to run and operate at the absolute bare minimum Costs. We think the market's efficient, and we're not going to invest in people that can pick stocks and win in the market. We're actually going to just, hey, we're going to take market returns, but we're going to do it at such scale and with such low cost. You're actually going to do better with us because we're going to return more higher returns for you because we do it at such scale and with such efficiency. Whereas the other looks and says, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to hire the very best stock pickers in the business, and we're going to drive so much value because our people are the best. And they're going to put together winning portfolios that are way better than.
[00:20:01] Speaker A: Is Fidelity still pitching that?
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Yeah, that's. That's been their business model.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: Oh, boy. They're in. Rude awakening.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
I'm getting.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: I'm getting the com. I'm getting the concept of.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And so two different people that look at each other and say, hey, we're going. We're going at this in a very, very different way. And so, so the opposite of one strategy is basically the other. They both really, really winning viable businesses. And, and. And they've. They've made a successful place in the marketplace. I would tell you. Another that I've seen recently is, you know, when. When I think about one of my. One of my clients that I've been working with now for probably close to two years, they have realized in their marketplace, the winning position that they have have had in the past has always been a position of integration. And so a winning position of, hey, listen, our clients come to depend on us for the equipment that we sell them. And once we've sold them a piece of equipment, what we're going to do is we're going to go in and we're going to service it really, really well, and we're going to take care of them. The parts are going to be our fantastic parts, and we're just going to win over 30, 50, 100 years because these are long relationships, and we are going to be their outsourced vendor for this type of equipment, and we're basically going to become the ones that they depend on. What they've realized is that they've had competitors that have taken a completely different approach. And the competitors have said, you know what? That used to be, the way people win was to sell these pieces of equipment and then be there to service it for 30, 50 years. But their competitors have. Have taken an opposite Approach, we're going to be the low cost provider. These are big capital expenditures, and we're going to come in, we're going to undercut price. We know one of the things that you're probably going to do over the course of the life of this machine is you're going to find another vendor who can make your parts for you. So we're going to not provide a lot of service. We're not going to try to win the parts business. We're going to win on the initial sale by giving you a higher ROI upfront. And so my client had to really wrestle with that reality and, and figure out, okay, how do we win in this marketplace when the opposite of our strategy, hey, we're going to be here, we're going to be integrated, we're going to be here for the long haul, is now under threat by somebody who's coming in and saying, no, we're going to take an opposite position and say, we're going strictly ROI and we're going to come in and we're going to try to clean your clock on that initial sale and keep you from ever getting a chance to integrate with your clients.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: It's. So that example is very similar to my old industry, and I know Josh and Pat are probably listening in right now. And in my old industry.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Then I want to pull up the keystones, Greg, to help people and understand how we get here. But the question at hand was when we started with copiers, and then I get like, differentiation was colored copiers or duplication, which is obviously not a thing anymore, it became document management, managed IT services, full integrate, you know, VoIP, all that stuff. And we didn't go through a strategic planning process, which I really wish we would have. We would have. We listened to all the consultants who were slinging their shit so that we can hire them to do all this stuff, realized why, like, over time, like different business models, different compensation structures, different margins, different skill sets, like, oh my God, did I spend so much time, so many headaches, so much money learning that this was hard. I mean, the industry's gone this way. But I think, I mean, I know that most of the industry learned this all the hard way. And integration was the winning position thesis, essentially. Like when we sold, like, I mean, you people couldn't, I mean, you had locked and rolled and bundled and all this stuff. We could just hand our clients, you know, the customer contracts to the buyer.
However, 1. There was one industry or one competitor in our industry that was like, we don't care about IT services or any of this shit, we are going to sell copiers because they're copiers and we're going to fix them. And it was high operational execution. And so it was just like. And by the way, they kept making money. And Jerry, his name was, who owned the company, like Corey, my dad.
We don't have to do IT services. We just keep doing this stuff really well and we make a shitload of money.
And it was like a really good thesis. Everybody else had caught, you know, the flashy object to go. Now the industry is, you know, it's evolved a lot over the last 15 years. But I think what could maybe help is let's pull up your winning positions and talk about those few.
And I know I'm taking you out of order with your keystones, but then I think we go back and we cover each keystone. And so before you hit, before you screenshot and I'll let you screenshot here. And so people that are listening in, you can, we'll talk through it. But you could also pull up Spotify or YouTube. Greg, you know the last comment before pulling this up is it. I have been in, like, every time I look at a company executive team, what I really appreciated about the. The group a couple weeks ago is like, we have to fight over this.
These are decisions. And you mentioned multiple times thinking and like, there was such high trust in that room. There was some serious tension points where we're like, oh boy, here it goes. And the trust is what allowed the ideas to get rammed against each other to make a final decision.
[00:25:33] Speaker A: Because you can't do it all. And so it's the trust, it's the people, it's the intellect, and it's the process that's jamming this through. To make a final decision, the tension.
[00:25:41] Speaker B: Needs to be part of the process. And without the trust, you, the tension overwhelms the process because if you don't have the underlying trust, the natural tension that you need to create when you're making real and important decisions.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: You end up actually in a worse place because you don't have the trust to make it through those hard conversations. And so when you and I have experienced both, right, where we've been in rooms where the trust wasn't high enough and we never made it through the tension in this last client that we were working with together, there was a lot of tension and there were times where it. You could palpably feel it. But the team trusted each other, they liked each other, they wanted to get through to the other side and.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: The process was allowed to work.
[00:26:38] Speaker A: It's in the middle. I said, like, the middle is messy, man. And like, the other side is so worth it. And like, the. The big gotchas for people. Because, like, I want. I want to just make sure that I'm hammering this home because, like, we could pull up. We're gonna. We're gonna pull up, like, how to do all this stuff and like, the different components of this, but, like, this is where all the rail, it goes off the rails, because power dynamics of someone that pays the bills and pays payroll, like, that's going to be a massive factor in that room. And then whether people like each other or don't and whether they're willing to, like, because, like, at the end of the day, someone could just completely disengage and like, then their ideas are not working and then they're not bought in. Because, like, where this all shows up is like, when we're sitting in an L10 or a monthly or quarterly meeting, and people are frigging making decisions based on different.
Different beliefs and different things. And it's just like, what a colossal waste of opportunity and potential for a company where when you get everybody aligned, like back to Navy SEALs in the Marine Corps, you can't go a mission with two people thinking they have two different high grounds. Like, you're going. You're all going as a team to one. And so I think it's just. So I just. It's so important because if the trust and the power dynamics and everything are. Are put in its right place, the process is going to suck sometimes, but the outcome is worth it because it's the refinement that gets you there.
[00:27:58] Speaker B: I think the best engagements that I do are the ones where there is a lot of back and forth in the. In the process itself. When it feels a little bit messy, when it feels uncomfortable, those tend to produce the best results. And the ones where you're just kind of going along and everybody is agreeing with one another, head nodding, and it's a check mark, those tend to not produce nearly as good of. Of kind of that. That final product as. As the ones that are brought with tension because people are tied in. They're. They're passionate, they're. They're excited. They want to see their good ideas get sunlight.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: And.
[00:28:37] Speaker B: And then if they can say, hey, that was a good idea, that is a good idea, that doesn't fit, I understand.
I'm, you know, the rest I understand.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: But I'm still bought in. Like, yeah, like, I'm Going to get.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: I'm going to get on board and I'm going to do it.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:49] Speaker B: That's the absolute best outcome that you can have is when people feel heard, they know that their great ideas were listened to, some of them were accepted, some of them weren't. But everybody can walk away and say, man, that was, that was really fruitful and we all had an opportunity.
[00:29:06] Speaker A: Yeah. And like, at the end of the day, because the owner operator listening in, if you want to get out of your operations and run the company from the boardroom, you can't do all of this stuff. Like, you have, like, there's no checking the box.
[00:29:21] Speaker A: To where, like the executive team actually embodies and believes where they're gonna go. Like, it's a, it's, you know, you, you can't fake religion or your faith. Right. Like, I mean, like. And so I. And by the way, like, if you're thinking about it, put your investor hat on for a second. What company do you want to buy? You know, a bunch of C executives who are kind of bought in. Like, yeah, we do.
[00:29:41] Speaker B: Us.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: And we're kind of growing everybody. Like, but like, how are you getting there? Where are you going? And like, they're all just like, you can just feel that, like, it's just a wildly different.
[00:29:52] Speaker A: It's, it's just such a different situation. It's almost, it's almost binary.
[00:29:57] Speaker B: My business owners, the, the business owners that I work with, that, that, that can be both hands on the stuff where they're absolutely essential.
And, and don't, don't try to avoid responsibility. Right. They take ownership of the stuff that they cannot delegate, but they are really good at delegating everything else.
Ryan, you see it, I see it. They're the ones that are constantly growing. Their organizations are growing. Their people love working with them. And you just see this compounding positive effect.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: Right, Right.
[00:30:36] Speaker B: And then the owner tries to own things that they're either not the best at or that are slowing down the organization.
That's when you see frustration. Those talented other executives start to look.
[00:30:49] Speaker A: Around like, peace out. I'm out.
[00:30:51] Speaker B: Yeah. What am I doing? They either check out on the job or they check out. And man is so destructive. But, but when they, when that owner can say, hey, here are the three things that I cannot abdicate, I'm going to absolutely own them and I'm going to hold people's feet to the fire on X, Y and Z. But at the same time, I'm going to let these people have freedom to run and operate. It's a really powerful thing.
[00:31:14] Speaker A: It is. And I think it's, it's a opportunity to actually hand off the baton as that owner operator. We're going, okay, instead of having it all be in my head, it's through. We're going to extract my tribal knowledge, synthesize it against all the executives to get them completely bought in. And then now they've got the strategy agreed upon, we get the financials to say on track, off track in a very objective way, and then you execute with an operating system, and then you can actually step back and delegate without doing this. You're just wondering, so, like, let's pull up the winning positions first, walk through some of those. And then I, I want to go back to then, how do we agree upon this stuff and how some of the exercises that we have walked people through.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: Well, this is a winning positions, and it's a little bit busy, but I'm going to start here because I think it provides enough for, for people to look at and say, okay, what, what does he mean when he's talking about winning positions? So the first three listed all are trying to win through exclusivity, where we would look and say, there's something exclusive, there's an offering being made, and there's some level of exclusivity with that offering. And so those first three winning positions win through exclusivity. The last two win through efficiency. And so when you're thinking about this, you can typically say, hey, I can, I can have one of the exclusivities. And then I have maybe one or some portions of the efficiencies that are at work. But, but I like to think of them and explain them as separate hills. And if you're trying to win in your marketplace, which of these are going to provide you the best opportunity, the most margin, the best way to lock in your clients the highest percent of market share? Those things are the impacts that we're looking for. And so in everybody's market, it's a little bit differently, it's a little bit different. People are competing in different ways. And the other thing is, your company has assets, and you wouldn't be in business, you wouldn't have profit if you didn't have assets. And so the assets that you've accumulated also need to be taken into consideration.
[00:33:33] Speaker A: When you're thinking they're not just your cash in your life, not assets on a balance sheet. It's the people, it's the ip, it's the goodwill. I mean, like, like there's a lot of stuff involved in the assets.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: Right. All of that. You're. You're exactly right. It's all part of the. It's. It's all part of the plan. It's all essential when it comes to what we're trying to drive. So. So it's assets that include things like processes and procedures, it's systems, it's technology, it's the people that you have working for you and the expertise you've developed. It can be financial power, it could be physical assets. There are lots of different categories that you can look and say, hey, all of those assets play into creating this winning position. So let me just go through them really quick. Singular is. Hey, we're the only person.
[00:34:22] Speaker A: So you said singular. I interrupted you. Sorry. Yeah, go ahead.
[00:34:24] Speaker B: No, no, no, Singular. Singular is the only business with access to those rare and valuable assets.
So the great example of this is IP or talent. Right. There's a major arms race right now for the big tech companies. They're all trying to hire AI engineers and create as much talent as they can when it comes to this AI arms race. Right. And so if you are the only business.
For a while, Google owned 90% of the AI talent in the world. They had a really great head start when it comes to creating.
[00:35:01] Speaker A: It really is monopoly. Right?
[00:35:02] Speaker B: I mean, where they have a chance to be singular.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:35:05] Speaker B: It can come through IP in other ways. Where you have a patent, you have lots of different. Lots of different ways to get there.
[00:35:13] Speaker A: I got a good one for you. I just came to mind. Client, old client of mine, super good dude. He manufactured and sold solar panels up in the. The Yukon.
He just couldn't get them from anybody else. He's like. Because, like, we are the ones driving our trucks over the ice and like, in summer, we can't. No one, no one can deliver them. I'm like, there you go, here we go.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: We're going to win.
[00:35:36] Speaker B: Second one is integrated. This is where you basically are inflicting. And it can come across as negative, but it really is driven by this idea that it's going to be very expensive for my clients to switch away from me. Right? So the idea of switching costs, we're so integrated, either on a relational basis or on a system basis that for you to leave me is going to be so painful for you that you'll endure a lot because we are so well integrated. And so this, this can happen when you have a relationship, right? A lot of. A lot of small businesses are really going for this relational integration where Your financial planner, your financial advisor, they might not be the best at what they do. They're good. But man, oh, man, would it be really hard for me to say, I'm not going to work with this financial advisor anymore. I'm going to.
I see them three times a week because our kids play on the same sports teams, we go to church together, we have family members that overlap. Right. And so this, this idea of relational integration, there's a cost to switch even more so it comes out when it's systemic, right? When you've got a, a piece of software that runs your business, your ERP systems. And it's integrated. Yeah, your ERP system and it's integrated into all facets and they raise the price 25% or more likely, they raise it 200% and they say to you, we're going to bet that you can have some more, that you are not going to do what it takes. Well, I just went through one of. I have a small manufacturing business that I own. The accounting system that I chose, they put in a 200% price increase and they know, hey, I probably am not. It's not a huge cost still, but they're. I'm going to just live with it because it's like, oh, man, to rip.
[00:37:34] Speaker A: That was what you said. You're a client who had the machine machinery that he was fixing up and service contracts was the integrated 100%, 100% preferred.
[00:37:42] Speaker B: All is about. It's all about ROI.
So how do I ensure that my clients get the highest return on investment that they could possibly have? This is an example that I typically use, is the general, right, we'll keep you legal for less.
You might not ever want to be kept legal for less from a car insurance perspective, but there's a huge segment of the marketplace where that's what they want. They look and they say, give me the absolute lowest amount of coverage for the least price.
That's who I want to use. That's an ROI play, right? And so what's interesting about ROI is that you can play at both ends of the market, you can play in the middle, and there's room to, there's room to win in that place of saying, hey, we have preference for a really, really attractive segment of the population.
[00:38:29] Speaker A: And Greg, like my old industry, the example I was giving you, most of the industry went to integrated, were like, I mean, my God, with the Minnesota Wild that we, the contract we had, we had a coalition help desk where we had an integrated software help desk together. Like hosted people on Site like, I mean software it like everything was bundled together and it was fully integrated. Whereas in the other people that we were competing, competing with, it was as much efficiency on your copier service contract and as low of a price as you could possibly go. And they were winning and they were both good ideas.
[00:39:04] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:39:04] Speaker A: But like the, the ideal client profile actually ended up being different because someone that wanted a one number to call, that had wanted an IT part was different than someone that was the facilities manager buying a copier for the lowest price.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: Yep. Just getting it, just getting it through. So you guys ended up in a place where it was hard to move all parts of the organization in the same direction.
[00:39:27] Speaker A: And I didn't go through a formal process to figure that out.
[00:39:31] Speaker B: Those are, those are called strategic planning through the school of hard knocks. Right?
[00:39:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Right. Time and money.
[00:39:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You lose enough after a while you turn to, you turn to a different method, methodology. So hey, the last two are potent where you have deep operating excellence. This is where your people, your processes and your technology are so good that you're able to do things better than your competition. Right. So, so it is typically a cost play, but hey, there's a market price that's been set. We can't sell our, our corn for any more than the farm down the street is going to sell that same grade of corn. But man, can we get it in and out of the ground a whole lot more efficiently than they can.
That is a, that's a low cost play. Right, where, where you can, hey, we're all selling for the same price. There's really no, you know, there's no way to win in terms of exclusivity, but we have to win. We can win with, with deep operating excellence. And then a related but, but different play is scale where you say, hey, as we get bigger and our sales volume goes up, that, that our, our fixed costs become a lower and lower percentage of our total costs. And so we're driving down our overall cost. The per unit cost keep going down as the volume that we produce goes up.
[00:40:54] Speaker A: And so, and I've watched people were like, it's like bulk order discounts, cash with order discounts or like, I mean, you know, yeah, 100%.
[00:41:03] Speaker B: One of the clients that I helped sell his business maybe 10 years ago, he was in the building products business and he had locations in three major cities. But there was a roll up that was taking place and he knew that there is economies of scale by these national providers whereby what they're going to be able to buy their goods for was half of his profit margin.
So he knew that whoever came in and bought him, if they were one of the national players, they were going to instantly drop 50% more margin to the bottom line just because they were buying it three and a half, 4% better. And his total margins were 6, 7, 8%.
So just by buying at scale he could, he was having a hard time competing. And so we figured that out. He figured that out. I didn't have anything to do with him figuring it out, but he, he said, hey, I need to be one of the guys that sells because this market is not going to be a winning market going forward.
[00:42:03] Speaker A: And you talked about in our session that like you can kind of mix and match one of the, like these and like I want to like put a word of caution. I want your, the thoughts for the audience is like, I mean you're picking a hill, right? So you can't say, well I can kind of have all these. So at the end of the day, one of the decisions or the one of these winning, five winning positions is going to orient and supersede all of the other decisions. But you can drag along others, right?
[00:42:32] Speaker B: 100% and some of the principles that, that make one a winning position, make, make another just good business practice. Right?
You may not be able to have a winning position in scale in your market. Right. You're never going to be the scale player, but you know that as you get bigger, you're going to benefit from the impact of scale. And so I would look and say, you know, very few clients can win in a singular winning position. There are, there are exceptions outside of IP where you're going to be the only one that can, that can do it. But, but the other four are typically the ones that most clients go for, integrated, preferred, potent or scaled. And you look at those winning positions and you say, okay, I'm going to go for integrated and that's going to make a difference in how I make my primary investments. If I'm going for integrated, here's where I need to be trying to win and how I'm investing and the assets that I need to go for and how I'm going to leverage my existing assets.
And oh, at the same time I know that scale is going to help and as I get a little bigger that's going to be. And so it really is about that prioritization and saying, hey, as a small mid sized business I probably can win, have one winning position, but be helped by these others.
[00:43:53] Speaker A: And it Comes up in the executive meetings where someone says, we have to pick a rock for operations this quarter. Do we add a tool that allows someone to see, like I was talking to this. So this battery company that I'm a part of, I don't know if you and I talked much about that at all.
[00:44:14] Speaker B: No, I don't think I know much.
[00:44:15] Speaker A: Oh, dude. Yeah, we got a whole lot of conversations because I want to do this for the battery company. So I'm involved in this battery company and you know, we're in the process of picking our.
There's a mixer for this component that we're dealing with and then there's a 3 PL.
Well, the logistics company will buy the inventory, they will store the inventory and then what they, they actually have their own website and stuff like that. So that way, like, they fully integrate everything into. Like, we're like, it will never make sense to have our own warehouse and our own shit. So like it. But like, my point is, is like when you're sitting in an executive meeting and the company says, well, should we enhance our web portal for our clients to be more integrated or should we do something else with our staff on the customer service? I mean, like, it's a choice that you're going to have to have that trade off and you're going to look to your North Star and your winning position and say, well, what have we. What did we choose? What's the.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: We were working with a client that was in the health brokerage, health insurance brokerage business.
Everybody in their industry was going for integrated. They made the decision they were going to go for potent because one of their core, like insights through the process was, oh, we need to be different. We're not going to. This market is going to consolidate. It is. People are buying, the younger generation is buying in a different way.
Relationships matter less. You know, they went through their list and they said, oh, and we have some of the assets. We need to go and try to win with this, this process potency. It didn't mean that they were going to give up trying to develop good relationships with their, with their clients. What it meant was they were saying, we don't think that's how we're going to win long term. We're going to use our company assets to try to create this process potent winning position. Because we think in the long term, if we do that, that's where we can have the operational, the strategic high ground. And so they used it to make their decisions in a really insightful way, saying, competition's over. Here, we're going to go over here. That means we're going to invest differently. It doesn't mean, hey, we're not going to try to still have good relationships. It does mean we're not going to hire as many relationship managers as we would have otherwise. We're going to take that money and we're going to use it on technology and systems and other things that are going to really drive this operational excellence.
[00:46:45] Speaker A: I think that this is really important as we look at AI and I think there's a lot of, a lot of people out there that already think that their industry is being commoditized. You're going to, you're going to throw AI on top of it and the risk and acceleration behind that narrative is going to continue to grow, I think. And like, because, like, I've, you know, price is always going to be a bad issue or price is always going to be an issue across every single industry and every single company, unless you're Eli Lilly, like you said, and you're the only ones that have the GLP ones or whatever like you, like, it's going to be an issue. Throw on AI. And I think thinking about your business and your service in a way that can then help you market that way, like, hey, we're going to be your partner. It's not just a commodity. And like, it just helps people get confident in like the go to market approach instead of just racing to the bottom.
[00:47:38] Speaker B: Absolutely. And, and on top of that is when, when people start to think about this in the way that we're talking, it actually changes the con, the, the fundamental questions that they're asking each other. Right. It's not just how are we, it's not just how much are we going to grow or what are we going to do. It's, it's, oh, we're going back to more first principles of here's who we are and if we want to be here in the future, we've got to do, we've got to make investments, we've got to change and augment who we are rather than just saying, hey, do what we're doing, do it a little bit better, do it a little bit more, do it a little bit faster. Whatever the case may be. It is, it is putting, it is giving them a way to think. Yeah, it's giving them a way to think about their business differently.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: What I think we could do now is with that context that we want to be on the high ground and use our assets to have that winning position.
[00:48:36] Speaker A: I think the Other keystones. And we can kind of orient ourselves on the other keystones, Greg. And what I have seen through the experience and exposure is they're helping the process, is helping refine the decision or refine the beliefs to get agreement.
And like, because there's all this stuff that has to do with the process that I love because it's all that subtle, like the, the stuff in people's heads that are not discussed, that is what creates misalignment and friction all along the way of trying to get to that hill. So there's all these keystones that we, I want you to. And we can figure out which ones you want to spend a little bit more time on or less time on. But I think we've got it teed up to now, like go through to say in context now the goal is to get alignment and agreement to that winning position and then we'll talk about how that rolls into budgeting the operating system.
[00:49:34] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
I'm going to take one minute and just share.
Typically what we talk about is there's three phases of strategic planning. You do a prep phase, you do a plan phase, and you do a persist phase. And so that persist phase is what you were just describing, a business operating system. And it's taking whatever comes out of the strategic plan and implementing it. And too often, including with me in my early part of my career in doing strategic planning, you would get, I would get to phase two and then that phase three would, would fail. And, and I would see my clients have a really nice plan that they didn't execute. And so we paused and said, no, let's go back. Let's make sure we're beginning with the end in mind. You need to have a system in place, a business operating system in place so that you can have success with the plan. So we're driving towards having a really nice plan, which is phase two that we implement and persist in, which is phase three. And so that kind of a mindset is there's a little bit of prep that takes place where you've got to think through what are the key issues, what do we have, what are we lacking? You know, analyze the business in a pretty high level, build the plan and then execute the plan. And so those three phases are consistently what we're trying to do.
[00:50:56] Speaker A: And what I like about this is, you know, for context, for the listeners, when I think about the ownership operating system, where you as an individual and your partners have to come up with what is the timeline of the valuation that I want, what Is the cash flow from salary and distributions that I want on the way there and what capital access do we have?
So that becomes like the first primary constraint. Because if you have all these ideas and you have to raise a bunch of equity and you're like, this is what we're going through with the battery company, Greg. It's like, okay, we're having a conversation tomorrow with a guy that could potentially scale us internationally. And I don't know if I want to give up equity.
And I'm sitting there going, okay, well what's the timeline? What's the cash flow and the equity from the ownership objectives?
Once we lock that in, then we can go zoom in and say, okay, now what's the strategy between distribution, you know, are we going to service providers, are we going to retail? I mean, like, there's a lot of big decisions we have to make and then we have to execute with an operating system. And almost everybody I have ever come across goes straight to execution of like, like think about how much talk, how much things we're talking about before we go execute. And it's like people running through the forest having no idea whether they're running in deeper or out.
[00:52:08] Speaker B: It's just stop and orient yourself first. Before you, before you.
[00:52:14] Speaker B: Okay, so three phases of strategic planning. Prepare, plan and persist. I'll talk just briefly about the prep phase. I always talk about the nine signals of a thriving business.
Three that, that kind of fall under the operations category. Are you strategic? Are you dynamic? Are you efficient?
Under the performance category, are you profitable, Are you growing, Are you sustainable? And then under culture, we talk about engaged, aligned and accountable. And so those areas are what we spend time thinking about, evaluating, and then reflecting back to our clients that we work with just so that they have an understanding of perception, reality, what's working, what's not, and try to do a holistic view of the, of the business. We don't go deep into that holistic view, but we do go pretty broad. And so that is in the prep phase, what, what we spend our time on, where we spend our time and.
[00:53:13] Speaker A: What I saw from a couple weeks ago is these nine signals. It's like a 360 degree view of the business, not necessarily of a individual. And what I liked about what you kept saying is it's not, you're not putting your consulting lens on it. You're just synthesizing what Everybody's saying. And 90% of it is just what you heard. And like what I watch is so important behind this phase is like, what are the beliefs that everybody has, you know, because, like, and I just constantly go back to my wife, Greg, because, like, she's a manager at a fairly large company.
She has a lot of opinions that don't get hurt. And what a freaking, like, huge missed opportunity. So you're, you, you're able to, like, go through the most important people and the key influencers and say, what is it? What are the beliefs about the business, about the strategy, about the operations, about the culture? So you could have it, like at least a realistic foundation to orient ourselves on.
[00:54:14] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Right. I, that, that orientation and foundation is really important. I put it all into the complete business, what I call the complete business assessment, and I give it to the team. When we start the planning process, right, when we move into phase two, it's after we've read it and we've talked about, hey, what were the insights? What were the surprises? And then most importantly, what did you disagree with? Right. Because all opinions of all employees are not facts. And I put direct quotes in, I put evaluations in. And so the executive team has a chance to say, okay, I understand why they might think that way, but that's not true. And, and they have facts, they have data, they have, they have other rationale for why that perception, why that, why.
[00:54:59] Speaker A: This person sucks in his reality is not reality.
[00:55:04] Speaker A: Sucks. And it's crabby. And like, we do, like, yeah, like, it's.
[00:55:07] Speaker B: And.
[00:55:07] Speaker A: But it's, yeah, it's. It's just, it, like, it's just like you said, it's the mirror. Whether you like it or not. Like, here's what you're seeing. And you can take, you know. Yeah, you can take it for a grain of salt, but, yeah.
[00:55:18] Speaker B: Yep. Now, this is the plan part, right? This is when we, when we actually start building out that plan, this is where we come and we say, all right, let's talk about nine keystones of strategic planning. And. And let's actually build out your strategy. So the foundation of the strategy is those first three keystones, your doctrine, your bullseye, and your opportunities. The essence of your strategy we've talked about so far, but it's company assets, it's your flywheel, and it's your winning position. And then we talk about the enabling keystones, what actually enables your strategy to be successful strategic initiatives? What are you going to go do over the next one to two years? What are your resources that you're going to allocate to this? And how are you going to budget those resources? And then how are you going to Plan this. What is every plan?
What are you going to actually do to ensure that you're successful? And so those are those nine keystones of the strategic plan. So when we're done with a building out a strategic plan, you have an understanding of your foundation, the essence of your strategy, and then how you're going.
[00:56:24] Speaker A: To go and implement what I saw the times that we, I've had exposure to this is like, it, it has a very natural energy arc where like, you're. The foundation is. And I want to spend some time talking about through this, but maybe we can do it within the context of my energy arc that I'm talking about where the foundation is.
What do we all agree upon?
Like, so, like you're throwing everything out. Like, it's like the brainstorming, right? Don't, don't have any judgment. Throw it all out there.
And then the middle is the essence of like, okay, now we're having to then start saying no to which becomes. That's the messy middle.
Then get a agreement. So that way we can then put. And then the enabling. It's like, now we're, we're going to insert this into the forecast and the operating system. So it's kind of this natural art that I have found that, you know, it's a process, man. And what, what's our mutual client. It's a process, not an event. It's a process, not an event. And it's always going to be that way.
[00:57:24] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And so I really enjoy this, that energy flow that goes through.
Right. Where sometimes people in the first foundation keystones were throwing a lot against the wall. We're having ideas, we're making some decisions, but we're not making the decisions. Right. And so we're, we're out there and we're saying, hey, what do you believe to be true about your market and your business? Those are your doctrines. And, and too often those are left implicit rather than explicit.
[00:57:55] Speaker A: Let's double click on that, man. Like, like, like, we can. Maybe we can go through these. Sorry. Like, as, as we're going through this now. That, like that.
Do you want to list them out first or how do you want to do this? Because, like, I know we don't have to go to every single slide, but like, I think we can talk through them within the context and the, the container we put in here. Do you want to list them out first and then we can double click. I just, I think some of them are so important.
[00:58:16] Speaker B: You know your audience more than I do. I, I could talk about this for nine hours and do often when I'm doing a planning day. And so I just get going and I, I roll. I'm trying to keep it relatively high level. But maybe what I could ask you, Ryan, is when we did this exercise and we just went through it, which of these keystones do you think that the team found the most valuable?
[00:58:41] Speaker A: Well, I'll start with. You know, there's a real reason that I started with Winning Positions, Greg, because I think, you know, with, with how long I've been trying to communicate ideas to business owners, starting with like, what the hell are we trying to accomplish?
Is really important. So the reason I started with Winning Positions is I think that actually we took too long to get to what is it that we're doing here.
So I actually think that like, you know, like we're gonna have to pick a winning position. So I think we, that's why I started there. Like, that's the outcome that we're gonna have. We're gonna integrate that into the forecast and the operating system.
And then when I. So I think that that was, that is one of the, I mean, like you, you even said while we were at dinner, like, I'm. I want to die on this hill, just like I want to die on the, the, the forecast. Because it becomes the foundation for everything else. Like all, all the other things that we want to do, which is just enhanced decision making, you know, is springboard off of the winning positions. When I look at SO doctrines, the bullseye opportunities, company assets, and the flywheel that lead up to Keystone 6 are all the refinement of forcing that, arguing with the team to get alignment for that winning position. So if I were to, you know, to answer your question, I think they're all important. I mean, like, I think the doctrines and the flywheel, I mean, it's hard for me to pick which one because they're all, all of those five are doing are, are satisfying the refinement of agreement.
[01:00:08] Speaker B: Oh, and they're in their interrelated to, you know, there, there is a natural progression.
[01:00:13] Speaker A: Right.
[01:00:13] Speaker B: I think we've spoken about the fact that this list of Keystones has been honed over 10 plus years, right. Where not all of them were here when I started, I had others that were there and have been cut out. And some have been tweaked and changed and reordered. And so after doing 75 of these engagements with clients, I really do feel like, okay, this is the right order. It's the right, it's the right number. It's it. These are the right keystones. And so there is an energy that flows from beginning to end. And so I, I was curious what you thought was the most valuable, because some, sometimes people really get into the doctrines and we spend a lot of time wordsmithing and perfecting and saying, yeah, what does, what do we believe to be true that maybe other people don't? And sometimes they look at that bullseye and they say, okay, we need to really think about where we're going.
In this case, they, they had a really good picture of what they wanted the future to be. Right. They had a, they had a good definition of success already in place and opportunities galore. Where I thought they found a lot of traction was when we got to the flywheel and they actually started to have that exercise of four good flywheels to start down to a flywheel that they all agreed with and were integrating all of their individual flywheels into to one. I thought that was a powerful.
[01:01:39] Speaker A: I agree with you on that.
[01:01:40] Speaker B: And, and then even in the language, when we got to strategic initiatives, we got to budgeting, I thought they kept coming back to this interplay between the flywheel and the winning position.
[01:01:50] Speaker A: Yep.
[01:01:51] Speaker B: I thought that's where they, they, they kind of found their footing and said, wow, okay, I get this flywheel. How this is our strategy repeated and compounded over time.
They, they, I thought they found that traction and, and kind of that interplay between Keystone 5 and Keystone 6.
[01:02:10] Speaker A: 100 agree with you. And you know what? It's kind of like, I'm trying. Okay, I'm gonna, I'm thinking a lot here. It's like.
[01:02:17] Speaker A: You know, I was telling you at dinner, like, you know, you're like, maybe your three statement model is like, because I got nine modules now in my ownership operating system, and finance is only one of them, but it enables all of the decision making.
And so, like, it's not that I just, it's not that I freaking love finance, but, like, what I love is information. Like, I would. I sat at dinner with a client talking about, okay, well, if we grow at 10% versus, like, do we want to hold our margins? Do we want to overpay people because we got a skilled labor issue? How does all of these decision makings or these constraints allow us to get to the $30 million valuation? And like, so it's like, we can't do any of that unless we got the numbers. And so, like, when I look at the flywheel and the winning position. Agreed. Like, that is like the funnest but what I have seen Greg most often, no one has had a freaking conversation around, what do we believe? So like all of that messy middle for the first two days, like, I, like, you got to go through it in order to have fun. Because like, if we would have jumped straight to the five wheeler winning positions, we wouldn't have been able to. Like, no one would have said, well, I believe this. And so maybe I'll give it, like, maybe we can jump into the doctrines and some of these ideas. Like it's the idea smashing against each other. Like my old business, like the copier business.
I believe that copiers are becoming a commodity. My dad was like, it's still color. We could duplicate. I'm like, this is absurd. Like we should fire half our sales reps and put all of the copier pricing online instead of having, you know, like, you know, anything below a 20. I mean, I'm making something up right now. But like we never sat down within our executive team to have that conversation to say, I believe that we are getting commoditized really fast. The margins, the equipment disappeared. If we don't start building out IT services and document management, becoming a tech provider, we're screwed. And like, my dad was like, more salespeople.
[01:04:15] Speaker A: And like, and so like, like we never. And like every one of those fights along, like the six years was because we never reconciled what direction we're going to go. And then it, you know, it spawned into our executives where I'm, I'm getting people on my side in the exact, you know, in, in the hallway conversations. He's getting his people on his side and like, and I love him, you know, I mean like dad and I. So it was like, like that doctrine part becomes so important because like, I mean, I. Who was I talking to recently? It's like, oh, it was, it was, it was someone about their kids because like they grew up.
[01:04:49] Speaker B: 1.
[01:04:50] Speaker A: It was one of my clients, like, he's Jewish, his wife is not.
[01:04:55] Speaker B: It's like, how do you, how do.
[01:04:57] Speaker A: You raise your kids now? Now, yeah, we should probably have a conversation around that. So.
[01:05:01] Speaker B: Right.
I, and it's funny that you go there because you, you know, one of the examples I use when I talk about doctrines is you could have Catholics and you could have Baptists and they might agree on 80, 85% of what it means to be a Christian. And yet you won't find a Catholic at a Baptist church or a Baptist at a Catholic church. And it's like, it's the differences that really, really make the soup, right. If you want to talk about, hey, what's the difference in these couple? It's, it's the special ingredients that you put in at the end that make it taste totally different, right? You may have the same base, you may have some of the same ingredients, but it's the two or three differences that really define what it is. And so same thing with doctrines. And we push people to think through, what do you believe to be true about your markets and your business? What are the ones that are conventional? Right? Hey, this is what everybody would believe. And this is what I, us, we, our company, what we uniquely believe or what we uniquely know.
And so those insights that they can get to, to say, ah, everybody in our marketplace thinks this way, we think this way. Oh boy, that is a difference that does allow us to, you know, capitalize on opportunities that they're not going to see.
Or it puts us at risk because we see it this way. And oh man, what are we exposed to that maybe others aren't? And so having those core beliefs explicitly stated and agreed to, where you can come back and pressure test it every three months, right? And one of the things that we do in this process is when we are in that business operating system, we come back and we talk about these things, we talk about the doctrines and we say, hey, do we still believe this? You know, do we still think that this is the way that we, you know, are going to win in the marketplace? Do we still believe that this is a growing market that's robust and thriving? Or do we believe this is becoming a commodity market and we are going to increasingly be, be dependent on price? And so, so having those doctrines defining what we believe versus what the conventions in the market are, is really, really important as a, as an initial exercise, yes.
[01:07:17] Speaker A: And getting agreement on the team. And I think about Greg, like, what I would have done differently had we gone through a process like this. And as I reflect, it's like.
[01:07:29] Speaker A: I pushed us too fast into the IT place in this space. Like, we weren't ready for it, man. Like, financially, like, and I didn't have the, I didn't have, like, so if I would have had my dad and I's valuation and net worth goals, if I would have had both of our understanding of our salary and distribution goals and said, here's our constraints.
Now what do we believe? It's like, okay, well, we do believe that the industry is getting commoditized. Well, guess What, Greg, I'm 15 years removed from this shit.
It didn't happen as Fast as I thought.
Had we said, okay, we kind of believe this, but we have a lot more time and like, and so like having that like, thoughtful, caring process would have gotten agreement on me saying, hey, you know what, I'm okay spending three years operate, you know, if we had the winning position, say we want to be, we want to be potent right now and you know, optimize our margins. So that way we have enough margins to add different services to become integrated over time. Like, it was just no thoughtful process. And by the way, like, when I think about this is where the power dynamics come in versus, like my dad would say, this is what we're doing, this is what we believe. And like, why disagree with you?
And it's like, well, like. And he actually wanted out of his job. And I think a lot of people listening and that's what you want. It's like, okay, well we need to hand off the baton.
So it's this process of care. I don't know, I just get that's why. So maybe to directly answer your question, that's one of my favorites because it's such a, it was so lacking in my family business and it was almost the downfall of the situation. And probably one of the main reasons, if I were to look at why we sold, it's like, because we just had no agreement on how everything was working, Ryan.
[01:09:12] Speaker B: And that's a, that's a shame, right? That's, that's one of those things that humility comes with age. And you just confessed to having acquired more humility as you've gotten older and you've seen it and you've realized, hey, maybe I was moving too fast. Maybe, maybe I had a little bit of a misunderstanding of the speed that, that, that, that of the market and what we were up against. And so I think that's a great thing. And as a, as a guy who's done a lot of strategic planning engagements, I can tell you my longest term client is one that when we first started working together, he told me after day one, I said, man, you've got a guy on your team that is a really tough personality. I don't think that he is a good fit. And the owner said, I agree completely, and he will be retiring in three years. And I said, oh my gosh, you know, in my mind I would have said, get rid of him tomorrow. Right? But what I didn't realize was even though he was a tough personality, he was a, he was a valuable member of their team. They had a culture that told people if you give your best and you, and you're driving towards success.
You're going to have a place on this team. And so what has come with me is some humility over those seven years to see the wisdom and the pace that my client moves, especially in his industry where he has not lost a single executive, he's got a talented team. He's not, not one person has left him in seven years. Right. Not one person has found a new job. Not one person has gotten mad and quit.
They have naturally retired, but nobody has has left for greener pastures because of the culture that he's created. And so I was looking and saying take hasty action and may have been right on some elements of it, but in the bigger picture he was right. And so part of this process and part of doing strategic planning is having. And that's where I've gotten and that's where you know, where we were talking about the hills you're willing to die on.
What I've come to realize about strategic planning is you go through it the first time and you might not get the perfect version of strategy and strategic plan.
What I've come to realize is 70% is really good and if you can get 70% the first time through, that's great. And then let's keep working together and let's get you to 80% and then let's keep working and refining and let's get you to 90. And and so just that, that view of this is a process. It's a one time thing. It's gravity, it's not earthquakes. Right. I talk about that when it comes to, you know, this idea of what are we doing together. Well, it's gravity. We want to put in that consistent pull. Here's where we are, here's what we're working on. Not we're going to have this one time event that's going to shake everything up. And boy, it's got a lot of energy to it.
But you don't know what you're going to get on the other side.
[01:12:16] Speaker A: So yeah, and it's not like summer camp where then it's like you're on this high and then you go back and it's this, it's a.
[01:12:22] Speaker A: It'S a discipline to say I am now someone that goes to the gym every day.
[01:12:28] Speaker B: That's right.
[01:12:28] Speaker A: Even if I have a sprained ankle. But I am now a person that goes to the gym every day so that way I can be ready for getting her. You know, like I like it's the habits and the Discipline that provide the framework for when something happens. Like, I mean over the weekend, like I ate like because it was my girl's birthday and I had a lot of stuff that I don't normally do. I just know it's all going to work itself out this week. And so it's kind of the same thing with, you know, with a business. And what I want to, what I want to do, Greg, is if we could, you know, figure out like 10, 15 minutes of wrapping up and we can quit screen sharing here. But before you do, what I wanted to highlight is like the bullseye opportunities, company assets in the flywheel and contextualize those. And then what I want to do is then roll into how does this fit inside of my ownership operating system as well as the business operating system. So like the flywheel, which is Keystone 5, like that's Jim Collins flywheel. So like we can put a link to that book in there. And I love that part as well.
Company assets, like Ansop's Matrix swat, like company assets and opportunities, SWOT analysis, kind of ansoft matrix type stuff, right?
[01:13:37] Speaker B: Yep, yep, absolutely. And when we talk about company assets, I, you know, when I learned strategy originally, I learned it through this asset based view of the firm. And so when I'm in business school and I'm taking these strategy courses and I'm trying to apply it, there is this idea about, you know, the, the, the professor that I had had written the book and it was all about this, what he called the VRIO framework around company assets. And it's what's valuable, what's rare, what's hard to imitate. And then are you organized to exploit it? And so part of that view of company assets is what assets are the most rare or unmatchable. Right.
Inimitable is a hard word to say and very few people know what it means.
[01:14:23] Speaker A: I can't spell it. Don't ask.
[01:14:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I say unmatchable. Like what assets do you have that would be, you know, even if Amazon wanted to come into your market and spend $1 billion, what assets would be unmatchable for them for a time period? And so most small mid sized businesses don't have a lot of unmatchable assets, but they have a lot of rare assets. And then when you put a bunch of rare assets together, it functions almost as unmatchable. And so we're looking for those assets that make you, you. It's not your trucks, right? Trucks are valuable, but they're not rare. And so if you're running a really, really successful business on, you know, one of my recent clients is running a really large H VAC company. Their trucks are valuable and they needed them. And during the pandemic, there were months where, hey, it was hard, it was rare to be able to get new equipment, but most of the time it's just valuable. But the team that they'd assembled, right, 300 really, really skilled H VAC professionals and 30 of them, the best team in multiple states.
That is a rare asset, almost unmatchable in terms of what they were able to marshal together. And so that's what we're looking for. And we're saying, okay, when you have those assets, that then allows you to create a winning position.
[01:15:43] Speaker A: And you're going to take those assets, make sure that you're making decisions within the flywheel context to get that momentum, pointing all of that towards that winning position. Right. So you're, you're, I, I love it so much. And it's not just like you said, the, it's not just the balance sheet assets, it's going through a process.
[01:16:01] Speaker B: Yeah, it's the ip, it's the process.
And we have really great processes. Right.
[01:16:07] Speaker A: I, I work with industry knowledge or pricing, you know, pricing exposure, or I.
[01:16:13] Speaker B: Work with an $8 billion company. I don't do a lot on their, on, on, on the strategy side on a day to day basis. But when we talk about their strategic initiatives and what they do, a big part of it is driven. They are super process oriented. They know what works and they have a playbook that they implement every time they launch a new location.
They know what works and they know the playbook and they run the play. And so those processes that they've defined over 50 years is a company asset and it helps them create that winning position. And so yeah, that's what we're talking about, right. We're looking and we're saying, what are some of those assets? Opportunities.
[01:16:53] Speaker A: That's right. Like before we move to opportunities and this is where they're all integrated. Like once you agree upon those company assets, you're synthesizing them against your winning position, against the flywheel and how you make decisions. So I keep going back to strategic planning and then having that strategy is greasing the wheels for, for decision making 100%.
[01:17:15] Speaker B: And you can either make a decision that we're going to use all of our time and money and other resources to leverage our existing assets or wow, we've got all these assets but the ones that we're missing are Actually keeping us from leveraging it. We've got to go and buy them, we've got to go and partner for them, we've got to build them or some mixture of the two. Right. And so that, that idea that we have assets and we're missing assets. Okay, what are we going to do and how are we going to spend those limited resources that we have to get to our winning position and we know we can get to that hill, but man, we're missing five big ladders. We've got the men, we've got the guns, we've got the, you know, the butter. Yeah. Everything else we need. We are missing the ladders. Let's go build, let's go build the, the, you know, the, the, the, the jets, whatever it is. But we need to get here, we've got 80%. Let's go get the 20. So we can take that hill or hey, we've got everything we need.
We just need to organize this differently. And, and, and our strategy then becomes about how do we actually organize those so that we can implement them more effectively. So, so yeah, that's, that's really what company assets are, are looking at the bullseye, Ryan. And, and this is right, just a picture of success. Right. So many people start down this path where they don't know how they're gonna, how they're gonna determine if their strategy is successful. Well, your strategy is successful if you get to the bullseye, if you hit the mark. And so it's that picture of success in, into the future. We want to have this kind of revenue. We want to have this be true of the way we serve our customers. Do you pull up the bullseye division is.
[01:19:00] Speaker A: Sorry to interrupt, Greg. I think, I think it's worth pulling up that slide the bullseye. And that's what I wanted to do before we jumped into the. How to integrate this stuff. Because.
[01:19:09] Speaker A: I think that like outside of all of the keystones, that is a strategic plan that helps us identify a strategy. The bullseye being multi dimensional, I like, I want to make sure that people really understand that this is different than an EOS VTO for the most part, because it's multi dimensional, making sure that it is.
[01:19:31] Speaker A: Not just revenue, you know, the financial lens. I'm going to force people to think about their cash flow and their valuation, but there's other dimensions of like in five years, what the success look like. You want to explain that?
[01:19:44] Speaker B: Yeah. So these are, these are clients, these are actual clients changed. But, but, but real, real things that people have decided they wanted to do. When you look at this, you know, let's take the, the, the one example, number one, Munich Machines, they were in the industrial machine manufacturing business and they said, hey, we want our cultural success to be that we have our employee satisfaction at 84%. Our operational metric was that they have a, a project based business. And they said, we have this target of, of project score being at 90 doesn't mean anything to people outside of their business. But to them that was, man, if we're operating at a 90 on average, that means we are having a lot of success.
Client focus was that they were at a percentage of service retained at 80%. So they had all of these contractors, all of these contracts out there that they were serving where they would go and work with them for 3, 5, 10, 20 years. And so they would say, hey, what have the, what's our percentage of contracts retained? And then on the financial side they said, what is our EBIT as a percentage of sales? So they wanted that those earnings before taxes to be at least at 28%. And so they looked at their strategy and they said the reason that we are doing this plan, the reason we are looking at our strategic initiatives that we're ultimately going to be launched, it's going to be launched so that we hit these cultural, operational, client or financial targets.
[01:21:23] Speaker A: I love it. Yeah, it's multi dimensional. I mean it's in, I can't remember how you worded it, but it can't just be about the company, right?
[01:21:32] Speaker A: The client, where you're delivering the value to the client has to be, there has to be a client focused one. I mean, I just love it because it's, this is what private equity firms are not doing, right? Because they're just like, they're just looking straight at the financials and every single person that ends up selling to someone like that, that only looks at the financials, they know that the whole company is a house of cards because you're not looking at the cultural stuff and you're not looking at the client stuff and you're not reinvesting into the operational stuff. So it has to be, I think four dimensions like this.
[01:22:03] Speaker B: We think it's really important. And when you tell people, hey, let's just define what success looks like, this exercise is really good because it forces them to put a number, put a target and say, hey, in five years this is where we want to be. Okay? Now our strategy is designed against getting to this bullseye.
[01:22:26] Speaker A: The bullseye gives us insight. We agree upon our doctrines without even looking at it. See, let's see if I can do this. Our doctrines that we agree upon help us identify our bullseye. Then we've got our opportunities, our company assets, flywheel that all orient us around the winning position. I mean, we're synthesizing all of this stuff to say, okay, when I look at a company from the board, how are we going to hit those numbers and why and what does the company look like? I mean like, and how are decisions getting made on a day to day basis?
[01:23:00] Speaker B: And by the time you get to winning, when you get through the winning position and you say, okay, now what are we going to go and do? And you define your strategic initiatives. Even when it's been a hard road and you know, we just went through our planning together, they really wrestled and they really pushed and they, you know, they had those moments of tension. But when we got to the place where we were deciding what they were going to go and do, it wasn't too difficult. Right?
[01:23:27] Speaker A: Right.
[01:23:27] Speaker B: There wasn't a lot of fighting or arguing because we walked from belief through bullseye. Hey, this is where we're headed to. These are all the things we could do. This is our strategy to now. Okay, it's pretty clear by the time they actually say, what are we going to go and do for the next one to two years? Pretty clear on, on, on what they're actually going to go and do.
[01:23:50] Speaker A: And that that's where you have your strategic initiatives. Right. Where like you're saying, okay, it's not totally the five year, the five years a little hazy, which is okay, the one to three or one to two years is like, okay, here are the big things that we're going to have to think about, you know, that are going to be connected to all the other, you know, exercises we went through. But then like, all right, well we got to go build some sales teams. We have to go implement a software, we have to go talk to this vendor. Like no one's arguing about the why and like 99 of the arguments are like, why are we doing that?
[01:24:22] Speaker B: And now you've got to tie back to your strategy. You know that you've looked at all the opportunities that you could do and you've made a choice on this is what we're actually going to go and do.
[01:24:33] Speaker A: As we slide into home here.
I think there's, there's some assumptions I want to take for the people listening in is.
[01:24:42] Speaker A: Some assumptions on ownership goals of like cash flow from ownership distributions or valuation.
You can go listen to, I'll put some Links and then also the, the budgeting of the financials with some of the PAT hobby, which, by the way, for whatever it's worth, I met Greg through Pat because they worked at the same PE firm together years ago. So like there's this ownership goals financial model that helps bring into light. And then we went through this whole strategy and the predictable revenue. That's why it's the, it's the four, I'm sorry, the fifth module in my playbook.
Now we have to roll this in to an operating system. And so like, yeah, it's not that complicated, right, Greg? I'm like, I just, no, this is.
[01:25:24] Speaker B: The part that I under, I, I, I, so I underestimated how few people have an operating system.
I thought everybody would and, and fortunately they don't. Right. And so I underestimated that. But companies overestimate how hard it is going to be to put it in. Right? It's really not, we're not talking about rocket science here. I went through an exercise with a small but rapidly growing company in.
[01:26:00] Speaker B: Let'S see, we put in their operating system in six weeks and they had what I would call a B or a B plus operating system within six weeks. And they weren't spending tens of hours every week on it, they were spending a couple of hours. And when I talk to the owner of the business about it and I say, hey, you know, it's been three weeks ago. And I have a conversation with him and I say, how's it been? He's looking at me and like, this is exactly what we needed. Because now when we're having one off conversations, we're not just losing that dialogue. We're actually, we have a framework that we say, okay, this is an issue. They've got wording, they've got knowledge of what they're talking about. They put it into the software they're using to run their operating system. They know it's translating back to work, that they're going to do, conversations they're going to have and, and now it just gives them a framework that all the other stuff that they've been doing, they now have a process and some tools to support that process whereby they can make decisions, implement change, manage the numbers, do what they need to do in order to actually see those strategic initiatives get implemented successfully. So common language, common tools, accountability for time. That's really what we're talking about. And in my naivete business, you know, business school, kind of a mindset, I'm like, oh, this is easy stuff, right? This isn't the strategy. The strategy is the hard stuff, but this is the stuff that gets missed. It's the stuff that people don't have. They. They just. They.
The business has grown and they have never taken the time to say, how are we going to operate it from a holistic view? And that's what the business system does. That's what the business operating system does.
[01:27:53] Speaker A: It's. It never ceases to fascinate me about.
Because, like, then the opposite. The counter to, not the counter opposite, I don't know, is like, you have an operating system but no strategy and no ownership goals. Like, the whole thing, the whole thing just is so fascinating to me because, like, I've lived how, when. When you don't have any stuff. Like, I go back to the family, business is a total chaotic nightmare. Like, emotionally, financially, like, just all of the shit that's going on. And so, like, when I think of, okay, I'm going to relate to this, to health, because I can't not. It's like, okay, the ownership goals are like, what are the actual goals? Like, from cash flow and wealth in the timeline. You have to start at the first principle. So are we running an ironman, or are we trying to be able to bend down and pick up our grandkids and be able to get. We could trip and not break our hip. Those are two wildly different goals that will orient what you do every day, right? So the goal, then you go, okay, well, the strategy is like, are we doing CrossFit? Are we doing hit? Or are we doing, like, like the big, you know, muscle groups? I mean, like, all of that will. And when people don't have a freaking plan, Greg. I mean, I've been going to the gym now for 20 years. And like.
[01:29:08] Speaker A: Like. But there's so many good reels and memes about this. Someone that goes to the gym and has no workout plan is like the most hilarious shit ever. Like, they're just doing stuff and you're just laundering.
They're at the gym.
What are they doing? And why? Are the two questions that I have. And that's like having an operating system is you're going to the gym. You're choosing to have a weekly meeting, a monthly meeting, a quarterly meeting. But just because you're there doesn't mean you know what the hell you're doing and why you're doing it. So you have to stack these things on. But you can't just have a diet plan and a goal without choosing to go every day.
[01:29:46] Speaker B: Well, I like that analogy because we could Extend it one step further and say, you know, as a guide, I consider myself really important and essential at the beginning. And then what I'm doing is I'm checking in and I'm helping and I'm holding you accountable, and I'm tweaking and changing. But you need somebody, you know, you need me a lot through phase one and through phase two and at the beginning of phase three. But then I'm there helping you persist, right? I'm the guy that's working with you, and as the consultant, right? You use podcasts, you use friends, you use people on your health journey that are. That are part of your process, Right? And so for me, what I would often do is I would get somebody. I would help them lose weight or run the marathon or whatever it was. I'd shake their hand and say, they've got it. Good luck.
We've done it together. We put. And then I would watch them sputter and not. Not really have a system, not really know, okay, what are the next two weeks? What are the next six weeks? What are the next 12 months?
And so that's where phase three, this idea of persisting, where, as a guide, it's my great joy. Now I'm working with many clients who I've been working with for multiple years, where they know what they're doing, and I'm working with them, and I'm. I'm running different parts of the process because they look and they say, we really love the accountability. We love that Greg brings different perspectives, but they've got the basics. They've got 96%, and it's working well. And so that is a real joy for me is to say, yeah, I'm not here with you at the gym all the time. I'm the guy you call when the machine breaks, or I'm the guy that, hey, I want to. I. We're changing our goal slightly. What do you think about this? Or that? And so it's really, really fun to get to work with folks that have successfully implemented that business operating system. And they can now.
[01:31:46] Speaker B: You know, I can watch them kind of with that idea, succeed.
[01:31:49] Speaker A: Yeah, look how well they're.
[01:31:52] Speaker B: They're implementing. It's. It's just a blast.
[01:31:54] Speaker A: And as we wrap up here, I think, like, just to give the listeners a specific of, like, how I see these different components fit together. Even you, like, as you're training other strategic planning, simply strategic guys, like, you're doing some implementation. So, like, where I see this going, like, the decision that this mutual client of ours we're like, what I said, and I'll say it to everybody like, I don't care what strategic planning process people use. I found yours to be the most actionable and the most digestible, but you still need one. I don't care what operating system you use, but you still need one. And so like, where I see you fitting in and the decision that our mutual client is going through is like, we, like, this is an ownership coaching client of mine. I have monthly meetings looking on track, off track. We've clarified the ownership goals. They're very clear. We're having quarterly board meetings where we're looking at it from the investment perspective, like, what's the working capital, the cap cash flow, how are the ownership goals projecting and how is the operation satisfying ownership goals as if we're a private equity firm even though we're not.
And then they have to have this operating system. So they could choose to help or to engage with you to have to be the implementer in the EOS terms, or they can hire another implementer. But it's like, again, there's a benefit to having the strategy as well as the person that's in, you know, managing those implementation meetings. But when I think about like, as people are self implementing at some point, having someone that help through the strategic plan, like, I see a world where we'll zoom you in to come into a board meeting once or twice a year to say, okay, we're going to reorient ourselves on the strategy. But like you're having another brain at the table to say, okay, are we on track or off track? Have things in the market changed? But it's really just a board.
I don't know, man. I got you to see that ownership operating system, the strategy and then the business operating system working hand in glove very well together.
[01:33:47] Speaker B: I think it does. And you've worked with enough owners to know that there are a lot of demands on that owner's time and energy. And so when I think about the business operating system and, and what that, what that should, and how that should be functioning, it really should be their team, right? They should be the accountability piece for their team executing the business operating system in a way that's healthy and functioning. And so, you know, whether it's you partnering with that owner, I do a lot of the same with some of the clients that I'm working with where with the team. I'm that owner sounding board, right. His or her team is out there implementing and they're running and they're doing. But I'M the coach, I'm the, I'm the person that's there with that, with that owner saying, hey, what about this? How are you doing here? And so you're playing, you're playing that role with your clients and it's really, really helpful when you can help your owners understand you should not be in the day to day of this business operating system, but you need to have a business operating system founded on a strong strategy as part of what you're doing. I think, you know, the work that you're doing, the material that you've put together, helping owners get to the place where they're thinking about strategy and business operating system is really, really important.
[01:35:09] Speaker A: Capital allocation, right? I mean like that's what we all like, hopefully many people are still listening and being a decision making machine doesn't require a lot of time actually. Like, I mean like we can make decisions if we have a good strategy, we have a clear picture, we have the good financials. Do we do A, B or C?
And then who's going to do it is really what we're constantly doing. And it doesn't require someone sitting in an office and it doesn't require eight hours a day. It's making sure that the people implementing and the, and the strategies that's being executed is the right, the right one, right.
[01:35:41] Speaker B: 100%. You, you want to make sure that your time and energy is being optimized and in this process.
[01:35:50] Speaker B: Bringing in someone to help with strategy and, and building out a business operating system that's going to work for your business is absolutely something the owner should be focused on running that business operating system, ensuring that all the eyes are T's are crossed. That should not be them. Right? And so that's a big part of, of what you're talking about, dude. So anybody still listening after an hour and 46 minutes, they like, man, I know how to hear every word that's coming out of Greg and Ryan's mouth.
[01:36:21] Speaker A: Or I wanted to make it comprehensive, man. You know, like we've got a couple of the old ones out there. This is going to be something where like, you know, I think about like the amount of meetings that we had prior to this, you know, other client and I know there's multiple other people thinking about this topic right now. So I know that quite a few of my, my coaching clients are going to be listening to this. So thank you for your time, man. We'll put the links to everything I.
[01:36:40] Speaker B: Can do to support you. If you ever need me to jump on with an owner just to. You need another voice in their ear saying, hey, you need strategy. You need a business operating system. I'm always there to help.
[01:36:52] Speaker A: Thank you, my friend. So fun.
[01:36:54] Speaker B: Have a great one.
[01:37:01] Speaker A: Sam.
