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Speaker 1:
this is unleashing leadership and I'm your host, travis moss, with our season five co-host, dave nurchey, and this podcast is all about takeaways from good books that we read. This book happens to be about there happens to to be the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. But we don't just do takeaways from the book and run our mouths about that stuff. We actually talk about how we've taken those or possibly have already done some of those things, and our observations and experiences from those takeaways. Observations and experiences from those takeaways. And that would come from our day job, which is as C planning group. I'm the chief executive officer and Dave is our chief operating officer. So these are things that we're really pretty much dealing with all the time where we don't have experience on them. I think we talk a little bit more kind of conceptually about how we might be able to use this.
Speaker 1:
And if you go back to our last season, the ideal team, the Just Cause, which was Dave, what book was that? Simon Sinek, infinite Game. Infinite Game, that's what it is. So the Infinite Game, where we wrote our own Just Cause. We actually, in real time, implemented the main takeaway from the book and shared that with the audience as we went along. So we don't just talk, we actually do, and you get to hear about how we do. Maybe that'll inspire you. You can take some of this stuff, implement it into your own life or your own company. So, as always, do us a favor, like and subscribe to us, wherever you are listening or watching.
Speaker 1:
And our main takeaway today is if you want to build an important company, eventually you have to scale. You need experience and skills, and things that were easy when you were small are going to become difficult as you grow. And that is brought to us by NQR Media Inc. Where we unapologetically bring to light things that need to be talked about. Check it out at nqrmediacom or look for NQR wherever you find content Apple, spotify, you can go to LinkedIn, instagram, youtube, twitter, all that kind of stuff wherever you find content, and you'll probably find our productions there. All right, dave, let's talk about scale first. What do you mean by scale?
Speaker 2:
Well, scale, I think we're talking about being important, right. So the impact you have as a company that gets greater and you become more important, I guess, right If you can expand your reach right. So that's how I would think of scale, how we're going to talk about it, and I think of think of our industry, right, seeds industry, financial services. You have a lot of companies that kind of you know they service their clients. They kind of you know rinse, repeat type of thing, and they have their books of business and that's their, that's their reach, right. It's kind of limited to what they're doing there. When we're looking at seed right and we're looking to, we'll use scale here we're expanding our programs, we're improving the programs, we're trying to reach a larger audience right and larger client base. I think that will get us more reach and and become more important because we're doing more than just kind of going through the well, so like we see that the scale is your, our capacity, right?
Speaker 1:
how many people?
Speaker 1:
we can actually service, right for, for whatever um service that they're signing up for, but it it's our ability to touch more lives, to connect with more lives, right. So scale equals size, which equals well, which should equal reach. So hopefully that equals reach for for businesses, um, and but the importance part of it, I think. So the reach is is critical, right, how far can you reach? But the whole idea is is critical, right, how far can you reach? But the whole idea is if you want to be an important company, you need to scale. And I think what we could do is we could say the importance is along those lines. We just in the intro there we were talking about the just cause and the infinite game. So, if you want to do something other than just make money, if you want to change something, if you want to be the visionary, if you maybe you want to be remembered for bringing change to your industry or something like that, or changing the lives of hundreds or thousands or even millions of people, if you want to be important like that, you have to be able to scale, because you have to be able to reach those lives and you have to be able to live around the promise. So you're going to need scale. We can. You know, we can debate on a different day what can actually be scaled and what can't within that kind of within a business, meaning time and hours can't be scaled, but technology can, right, or production can, uh. But so we, we agree that scale, getting to scale, is going to be required in order to most, in order to take your vision and make it important to the world.
Speaker 1:
Now, and it doesn't. Scale doesn't necessarily mean you need a million employees, but it means the business is going to have to get to a certain size. And when it gets to a certain size, along the way, you're going to figure out okay, I need experience and skills to go along with this. And sometimes you figure out after the fact, you need better skills and experience, and sometimes you kind of see it coming. So we have some terminology that we've adopted from this book, I think, actually, and that's world-class. So let's reintroduce the concept of world-class employees.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, world-class is. It's like the game changer type of person, right, the person who's going to come in and, because of their skill set and abilities of you, know the role that they're going to fulfill at your company. It's going to, really, it's going to take you to the next level, right. It's going to help you if we're sticking to scale here and grow to another level. Right, and that person is unique. There's not every um, not every employee is going to come in and be world-class. They might have the skills and experience, but world-class is like you don't have that currently at your company, right? Or you have a uh, a need for that and it's gonna. It's gonna pretty much kind of raise the baseline for everybody and bring everybody up.
Speaker 1:
Yes, let me help out there. Let me help kind of round that off. World-class is this idea that when you're hiring, when you're recruiting, you handle a lot of our recruiting. What are we recruiting for? We are trying to find people as good or better than our best people Yep, and a lot of times people come back and like we have an open position, we found this person, we think they'd be okay, as good or better than our best people, yep, and a lot of times people come back and like we have an open position, we found this person, we think they'd be okay. We want to maybe offer them a job because we need to fill a position. Are they as good or better than our best people? No, don't hire them then. Right. So if they're as good as our best people, maybe our best people are world-class. If they're as good as our best people, maybe our best people are world class. If they're better than our best people, definitely world class. A lot of times we'll have people coming in and they'll say look, we found somebody and they're going to be pretty good. You know, it'll take a year or so to get them up to speed, but they're going to be pretty good. But they want more money than we're offering. How much better than our current people are they at the job they're going to be hired at on day one? Well, they're not. They're not world class then. Or they could be world class, but they're not worth paying more because your other world class people are already leaps and bounds above them.
Speaker 1:
So you're going to have a standard as a company and it's like the 80-20 rule and stuff. 20% of people are going to do the work of 80% Unless well, probably even in this structure as well. But think about it If you took a random company with a random sampling, 20% of people are doing 80% of work or something like that, right, and the other 80% is doing the last 20% of work. The 80-20 rule. I think that's how it goes. And what if you said I'm going to get rid of the other 80% and I'm going to hire people, just like that, top 20%? So you have people who are more in the top 20% productive and then you hire more people that are all in the top 20% productive at wherever they are respectively, and they come in and they do as much work as that 20% you had. In fact, they're so good they actually do more or higher quality or whatever your metric is.
Speaker 1:
To figure out the 80-20, right, you now have a new 80-20. Figure out the 80-20, right, you now have a new 80-20. You now have 20% of people performing probably still 80% of work. But even the ones in the 80th percentile right, the ones down there who are only they're still contributing dramatically more than the last crew that you had. So you keep raising the bar. You keep raising the bar and before you know it, you could have an organization of world-class people. Right, because every time you bring in a world-class person at the current job not at the future job, not at the past job, but at what's going on right now, today the really good people in your organization are going to be motivated and the really bad people in your organization are going to feel like they want to leave because it shows them up Right. And so you raise those standards over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:
So when you're hiring somebody, you should be thinking is this world-class? When you're looking at employer reviews, is this person performing world-class? Now you introduce us at first. Not everybody's going to be there. In fact, most people aren't going to be there. It's hard to be world class, but that's where the pursuit of it is and that's where some of these other skills like talking about personal and professional development going to be able to get to the world-class level. And how do I properly push them and promote them and move them through the ranks? How interested are they in personal and professional development? But you're going to have to as the business grows. Everybody's got to upscale or upskill or you've got to bring in people that bring the skills, because otherwise that business can't actually deliver. It's not going to be important, it's not going to be able to have the reach. You'll just have a big, expensive company, but it's never going to be able to really execute on the vision.
Speaker 2:
When you create, then you kind of create this environment that self-polices itself, right, Like the development is going to happen between your world-class people. They're going to keep kind of developing each other themselves and there's going to be like natural exiting, right Like you said, the people who aren't kind of keeping up or who who didn't either step up or just aren't capable of being world-class, are going to find find their way out. So you're going to continue this process of getting better and better people.
Speaker 1:
Well, and that's why the second part of this was things that were easy when you were small are going to become difficult as you grow, because when you're small and you have 10 people in your company it's a startup or even 50 or 100 people, management is very, very close to every single person. You get to 500, 1,000, you get more and more employees. What's going to happen is management's. You know the top leadership is going to get further and further away from the person entering the front door. In fact, they may never even meet some of these people. Yep, right. And so leadership has to be developed all the way down through the ranks. That, I think, really buys into some of this stuff.
Speaker 1:
It's not just the people when you're talking to get to scale, it's the systems, the processes, that kind of thing. You know you have our journey. You come in and you're a brand new financial planner and you have 20 clients assigned to you. You can remember everything just out of memory. You have 100 clients assigned to you. You can remember everything just out of memory. You have a hundred clients assigned to you. You can't remember anything.
Speaker 1:
You know you've got to take very, very good notes because you know you're constantly talking about somebody about their family and talking to somebody else about their family, and you're getting emails all over the place about all these things going on. You have to be very, very invested and interested in in, in you know again, upskilling, but also just the way you go about doing your job and improving that over and over and over again. It never stopped. You never stopped improving, and I think that that's a lot of times like that. The second half of this is why things that seem so easy become game breakers as you grow is because you, you go from being able to wing it to. I got to have systems and structures and processes because I got to make sure we're getting the right experience and skills and and we're developing that as we go so that they're there when we need them.
Speaker 2:
Yep, yeah, I mean the in the. The growing itself becomes challenging. I like the communication when you you got six people at a company and they're all in one location. Yeah, you just talk.
Speaker 1:
Hey, here's what's going on over there? Yeah?
Speaker 2:
right and everyone's on the same page understands. Now you got, you know, five times that the amount of people and you got multiple locations. You need you need that, um, you know, like a change management, you need to people to that. You know, like a change management, you need to people to understand what's happening and communicate it correctly, right and not and it you know, be the facts, and here's, here's what's happening, here's why, and it gets executed correctly, right. So I think, just in general, as you're doing that, like the, the growth and communication itself becomes, becomes challenging yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:
So if you want to be important, you got to be able to grow, you got to be able to expand that reach and you got to focus on world class if you're trying to really execute on that. And yet you you have to be aware of you guys spend a lot more time focusing on systems, processes, training and education, so that that skill stuff just keeps happening and happening and the recruiting keeps happening and happening and you keep focused on that whole world class concept.
