We're tackling the tough questions around scaling your business infrastructure to not only handle but excel with an expanding customer base. From managing a hundred patrons to serving a thousand, we lay out the blueprint for success so your company doesn't just survive the growth spurt—it conquers it.
As the tides of business evolve, so should your approach to strategic planning and client growth. That's the core of our chat with Dave Nirchi, where we break down the shift from a location-centric to a talent-centric hiring philosophy. By looking beyond geography to secure the cream of the crop, we illuminate how to maintain—no, elevate—the caliber of your services as your client list multiplies. It's a masterclass in preempting system overload and positioning your team to thrive globally. So, tune in and arm yourself with the forward-thinking tactics that will ensure your business's future shines as brightly as its present.
We're tackling the tough questions around scaling your business infrastructure to not only handle but excel with an expanding customer base. From managing a hundred patrons to serving a thousand, we lay out the blueprint for success so your company doesn't just survive the growth spurt—it conquers it.
As the tides of business evolve, so should your approach to strategic planning and client growth. That's the core of our chat with Dave Nirchi, where we break down the shift from a location-centric to a talent-centric hiring philosophy. By looking beyond geography to secure the cream of the crop, we illuminate how to maintain—no, elevate—the caliber of your services as your client list multiplies. It's a masterclass in preempting system overload and positioning your team to thrive globally. So, tune in and arm yourself with the forward-thinking tactics that will ensure your business's future shines as brightly as its present.
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Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership. I'm your host, travis Moss, and we are with our season five special guest, dave Nurchi, as we get after the lessons learned from the book the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, and we are diving right in today with knowing what is needed is different than knowing what was needed. So the big difference there is knowing what is capital I-S needed is different than what was capital W-A-S needed. And this is brought to you by Cutthroat College Podcast, helping people avoid going broke because of the cost of college. Learn all about college, the game of college, the big business that college is how you can save some money. Help your young students out, make better college career. What do they call them? Degree program decisions? Yeah, avoid, maybe. I think there's a stat that they throw out. Sometimes it costs the average student $60,000 by the time they change majors once or twice and just avoid the major ramifications of going into college unprepared. So you can get more information on them at nqrmediacom. Click on the podcast button in the top right. Cutthroat College Planning is one of the dropdowns and from there you can stream on all major. I think Apple Podcasts is on there, buzzsprout, youtube wherever you're going to listen to Spotify. We can probably get there from there. So all right, dave. So back to our point.
Speaker 1:
Today, knowing what is needed is different than knowing what was needed. This is, I think, the role of the leader is to to think about it like driving the school bus you got to pay attention to the road, but you also got to pay attention to where you're going, right. So so you know, you're paying attention to where you are and what's going on around you, but you're also looking up and saying what's happening at that next intersection, right, and you know from a business standpoint and we talked about hiring for today, not hiring for tomorrow you build the organization to deal with what it is dealing with today because it has to in order to get to tomorrow, but at the same time, you've got one foot. The leader's got one foot in today and one foot in tomorrow because they've got to be looking at it and saying how do we start to ramp up and build so that we can handle what is actually coming? And we've talked about this with different initiatives we've had in the past and stuff.
Speaker 1:
And when I look at some of the confusion that I've had from other people that we've worked with in the past is like why are we doing that now? I thought we weren't going to do that for three years. Right, in three years we want to be doing it, which means we started now, right, right. So, as the leader. So you're going to do your day job. You go, do your thing. Don't worry about what I'm doing. You do what you need to do.
Speaker 1:
But if we are going to be doing XYZ in three years, I need to start building the infrastructure so that when we get to three years from now, we're not just starting the infrastructure, because for any major project, like we talk about flexing right, you're going to flex your business. If you flex without infrastructure, if you flex without the right people in the right positions, that type of things, you break it. So as you're preparing for it, you might say, look, we need to. Let's say, for instance, you have a small business and you have a hundred customers and you built a system that can handle a hundred customers. If your flex is going to create you to have a thousand customers, your system for a hundred customers will break. So let's say that between now and when you actually do that flex, you need to have a system in place that can handle a thousand customers and maybe because the finances, they can't come too far before it. Well, you need to be vetting the software. You need to be figuring out how you would transition information from one system to another. You need to work on workflows and all that kind of stuff. Workflows and all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of stuff you're going to fine tune and work on so that you can slide that little piece into place, so that when you do flex and get all that new business, you can actually handle the business.
Speaker 1:
And a lot of people you know in business or in leadership don't understand that. It's like we're just going to do this and away we go. And it's like look, man, you should have been preparing one, two, three years ago for what you want to do today. Because the hard thing is, let's say that I say in three years I want to do X, y, z, because that's the trend, that's the big thing. If I build my infrastructure in three years, I can actually hit it. That's awesome. Build my infrastructure in three years, I can actually hit it, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:
But if I don't build any infrastructure, so three years from now, say, okay, we're ready to do the big thing and we look at it and go, okay, it's going to take three years now to put the pieces together and do the big thing. By the time I get six years out from today, guess what's not going to be the big thing anymore. Whatever, I think the big thing is Right. So the leader's job, I think, is to be being fully aware of the fact that we're fighting the war today, but we really need to be thinking about what the battlefield could be like in the future. Today, but we really need to be thinking about what. You know what the battlefield could be like in the future, and how do we prepare ourselves to be able to stay in the field.
Speaker 2:
Basically, Yep, yeah, it's preparing for the flux right. If you don't prepare for the flux, then it's just kind of empty. You don't, you're not going to be able to sustain it. The uh, the example that I related to really with this point that Ben makes, is directly with Seed, and when I joined, seed was about a 10-person company, really one location that clients were going to, and now we're three locations and, just you know, just under 30 people.
Speaker 2:
What are the differences there? You know so, like, what was needed when it was a 10 person company? One location was very different infrastructure, wise, communication, you know, client related type of requirements to now multiple locations. Like you know, what's something we've been working on continuously is communication right, how are we? And with that, project management right? Like, how are we handling initiatives? How do we make sure we have the right people on the right page and have the information they need? And we have goals and timelines.
Speaker 2:
So that changed a lot right With they need and we have goals set and timelines. So that changed a lot right With with the amount of people we have now and what happened with our, our clients and our meetings. You have these different locations. We had to completely revamp our conference rooms and our setups, to be, you know, have a very good virtual setup so the clients could come in and have a great experience, their advisors in a different location, right? So I think about that directly and it's it's a great example for this of like what was needed before, very, very different than how we're planning now and then in the future, like you mentioned yeah, and the time frame isn't.
Speaker 1:
That isn't that far off when we're saying, you know, like you prepared now because of the things I I mean that growth that you're talking about happened, where we tripled in size really over a two or three year time period. It was a very quick pop. And you know, we're kind of, as it looks like now, loading up for another pop, basically Right, because it kind of comes in waves, you know, and along the way we figure out all the mistakes that we've made. So back to the don't take it personal, you're going to make mistakes. It's like project management for one. What the heck is project management? Well, when I'm running every single project or when you're running every single project, you know we have just communication between the two of us. Project management is pretty easy. But now, when you got 30 people and 30 different people on different projects and leading different projects and stuff, all of a sudden you realize, oh crap, we need to find project management Because for a while there we couldn't get anything done and we're like, why can't we get anything done? And then you look at it and go, oh, we didn't teach the skills, or consistent skills across the organization, of how to actually manage a project. You don't think about that when you have 10 people. You think about it when you have 30 people and then you go, oh shit, right, well, now we build that and now we're a little bit more aware of it and some of the things that go around that. So you say, you know, look, as we are growing more and more, we need to have standardized training now because, yes, we train some people in project management. What happens when the next set of managers come in? How do we train them on how we do project management and those types of things? So you start looking at infrastructure and start saying, before I hire somebody, maybe I should have the training program instead of after I hire somebody. And these are things that you learn along the way. But I think it's you know, you were mentioning some of the like with the different locations and clients and stuff.
Speaker 1:
We expand. And one of the reasons behind the expansion not the driving reason, but one of the reasons, one of the benefits is in upstate New York it's very hard to recruit. So expanding our geographic footprint allows us to recruit in different markets. It has allowed us to bring in very, very good talent that we otherwise couldn't have brought in because we couldn't get people to relocate to Binghamton, new York. And so now we've recruited really good talent, and you and I still talk about this all the time, the fact that I think we do really really good work. I can give you somebody virtual to work with you, or I can give you nobody at all, right. And so the question is, do we want really really good work or do we I could hire somebody just to sit there who doesn't know what they're doing, because somebody will eventually take the job, or I can get somebody really good. He does a really good job, and we have to figure out how to deliver that from a virtual perspective.
Speaker 1:
And then, of course, covid hits. And then you know, covid changes everything too. Covid basically says, hey, everything's going to be virtual for a while, and so we had already been kind of progressing in that direction. And then all of a sudden you're forced to amplify that and so you make those adjustments. But that's one of those things about having the flexibility and kind of foresight to say, look, we're going to need to be not so geographic centric, because we can't get the resources that we need just out of one community, and it gives you kind of a lot more flexibility. And you know we talk about capacity, and so this is a little bit of knowing you know what is needed, which is different than knowing what was needed when we talk about capacity if we take our financial advisors and we look at them and say, you know, there's really two levels of capacity.
Speaker 1:
So capacity is how much time you have to actually work on clients. So, therefore, how many clients could you actually work on? The first part of that is well, how many clients do you have and what's the average time per client that you have to spend? So the first part of it is your, your kind of onboarded capacity. These are the people that I have ongoing responsibility for. So how many of those people can I actually manage? And when a client has been fully onboarded, the workload is actually down from what it took, let's say, over the first year or two to actually onboard them. So when somebody comes in on their brand new client, at least for our firm, there's a lot of extra time that goes into getting them onboarded, going through all the material, building the plans, doing the projections, explaining things. We might spend eight, nine, 10 meetings with somebody in the first year versus, you know, in the second year they're going to get somewhere between one and three, probably, depending on their situation. So the time commitment is very different.
Speaker 1:
So there's there's a client management capacity and then there's an onboarding capacity. So let's say that the client management capacity eats up. Let's say that you have 30 hours a week that you could spend with clients. Let's say that that eats up 10 or 20 hours a week. So now you have 10 hours left. Well, if it takes 30 hours to onboard a client, right, you can do the math you have. Let's say you take two weeks vacation, you have 50 weeks divided by you know, three. Essentially that's how many clients that somebody could reasonably onboard at a maximum level without being over capacity.
Speaker 1:
And the reason why that's important is because when you are managing firms where you have to manage capacity whether it's client management, customer management, database management or something like that you have to understand the incremental cost to your staff. So you have to look at it and say when do I need more staff? And it used to be. We'd say well, we need another planner for every hundred clients. We don't need a planner for every hundred clients. We need a planner for if we are not going to be bringing on any new clients, then we need a planner for every 100 clients.
Speaker 1:
But if we're bringing on new clients, then we need a planner maybe for every 30 new clients, right? And so there's two ways that we have to measure that. And we have to look forward into the future and say, look, if we're bringing on X amount of new clients every month, in six months we're going to need another planner because we've maxed out our capacity for the entire year already, and, and so it becomes a little bit. It's really easy to look at. Well, this is the way that we've been doing it. Why can't we just do it like this? But then you look at growth curves and you go, oh crap, if we keep doing it, what what we were doing we're going to get to a point where it's the whole system's going to seize up and, um, you know. So just, I think it's a good example.
Speaker 2:
Basically, yeah, and I think the the last part of that. So then, when we make the decision to bring on a planner, what was needed was the thought, old thought process was we need a planner in binghamton for whatever reason right, that was, you know, because that's, you know, foot traffic, or we just need another body in binghamton, right, yep? And now what is needed is the new thought process that we've talked about. Is we just, we just need the best available talent that's out there, because that's that's what we do and that's our, that's our service, and we don't necessarily care where that person is. We're going to figure out how to bring that person on because they're the best available and that's how we're going to operate and service our clients. You