Executive Leadership for SMB with Brad Englert

all right hello everybody I am so sorry for those technical uh issues but we are here live now uh with another episode of Private Market insights this is our conversation Series where we discuss important topics related to the small business m&a industry so um please subscribe to our show through YouTube or anywhere where you get your podcast Spotify Apple podcast Etc um I am very excited for this episode because it coincides perfectly with a new book that just came out uh this book in particular I have it here on my desk uh my guest is Brad angler technologist leadership expert consultant and author of this book spheres of influence we are going to chat about Brad's high pressure management work uh much of which took place at times of great change within long-standing organizations and this is a topic that is especially relevant to our audience Brad welcome to the podcast we are so happy to have you thanks for inviting me excellent so um before we begin let us set the stage a little bit there are a few core principles of professional relationship building and change management that underpin a lot of your work so let's give the audience a brief introduction and I am getting a slight Echo if there's another stream another page open maybe on your browser or my browser um closing other Pages all right maybe that'll do it um cool all right let's get going um yeah please uh if a brief introduction let's do it so there are two spheres of influence the internal sphere are those business relationships that are closer closest to you where you have the most impact that would be your boss your direct reports executive leaders and all your staff the second sphere the external sphere of influence you don't have as much direct uh influence um that would be your customers peers and influencers and strategic vendor Partners on all the relationships there are three principles that apply first you need to understand their goals and aspirations whether a customer or your boss you need to set and manage their expectations whether that's a vendor or a customer and you need to genuinely care about their success if you follow those three principles in your business relationships you will be very successful perfect I I love it so um let's pull on that thread a little bit you've established a theory of leadership you know like you just said you know kind of an open honest and collaborative communication style is at the heart of a lot of your recommendations you know both you know when we've worked together and also in your book you know why did you make communication the central skill of your theory of leadership and management and uh how can leaders with different styles and personalities improve their communication well I found as I finished the manuscript that more than once I said if you're in a business relationship you need to use your word people are not mind readers and if you don't articulate what your goals and aspirations are no one's going to know if you don't set the expectations no one's going to know and you'll just be continually frustrated because you'll be missing missing each other and and so use your words and you're not a mind reader are kind of the ultimate goals you need to ask ask your what their goals and aspirations are ask your customers it's a lot of people like to be asked what their goals and aspirations are it's like thanks and then then you ask yourself how can you be helpful with that but a lot of people are nervous or scared or you know it takes courage to talk to the boss sometimes and often they'll just let it slide and that just turns into disaster over time yeah I I like that because it it sort of is really it doesn't require a lot of special skills besides mindfulness and bravery right you don't have to be particularly eloquent you don't have to you know use any magic words it's just hey let's be honest direct and ask people what they want it's it's simple and elegant which is which isett someone said it's it's just common sense it's just a lot of people don't have common sense so [Laughter] so true um so many of our listeners today are going to be people who are looking to acquire companies or have recently acquired a business um so in this case they'll be stepping in oftentimes those businesses are already successful they've been operating for for decades sometimes you know they have you know owners who have been there for a very long time established cultures you know what are some things that a new leader should do uh when stepping into a leadership position in this kind of a situation well you need to go on a listening tour and reach out and ask people your direct reports um uh your customers who long-standing customers of the organization and just ask them what's been going really well what are you happy about and then ask for what could we be doing differently and if budget wasn't an issue what would you like to see and I've seen situations where people assume there's no money and so ideas don't get raised and what I try to instill in my organization is any good idea that's customer facing and supported by data nine times out of 10 we're going to rep prioritize and do it so it's not that there's no money just out and because even a long-standing customer might have some suggestions on how things could improve so I think that initial Reach Out starts to build that relationship and that trust that you can build on going forward how do you prioritize where to reach out first so is it you know you're going from I think it there in you in your book you mentioned you know there are sometimes super connectors within an organization that aren't necessarily management is that where you focus do you focus sort of hierarchically like what's sort of your advice for that I uh discuss a a technique that's called Power mapping and power mapping you can Google it basically you look at an organization and you say okay who's in the leadership positions those are easy to find top of the chart but then who are influencers that may not be at the top of the chart that maybe it's a 30e employee who knows everything knows the history and uh I know one time I was able to work with the new organization and this 30-year employee just had all the history that really helped me kind of get context of you know how things have changed over many many years and he was very helpful in in guiding so um and especially like when an organization has been really successful a lot of employees and people there you know may fear change like oh things are going so well now the boat is rocking right and how does something like that differ when you step into a position where it's you know people are generally happy with how things are going versus you're stepping into a situation where I think you called it a wounded organization a situation that needs a lot of help you know how do you sort of diagnose which situation you're in and then how does your approach change well the first thing I ask is what is the mission of the organization and it should be a short statement and then I asked what is the vision where do they want to be five years from now and Starbucks and Microsoft they all have mission and vision so I've found in a wounded organization they don't have a mission or Aion and they're reactive and uh kind of fire drill and um her heroics instead of really thinking strategically and after you have the vision what are the values of the organization and so even if you inherit an organization that has Mission Vision Values you need to reaffirm those with your team to make sure everyone's still bought into it or maybe they gaps so a gap so in the wounded organization they really didn't have a mission articulated or a vision um there was no money ever because they everything was a kind of equal fire drill and my first 90 days we documented Mission Vision and values and those values came from us me and my direct reports talking to our customers what did they want to see from our organization and number one was great customer service they don't like fire drills any more than anyone else does they don't want heroics they want the mayag my repair person watching the things spin um they want to trust us yeah they want to be trustworthy they wanted collaboration so the organization was always kind of telling what was going to happen instead of asking what should happen and seeking options for what should happen with their customers um and then a value that we didn't have that became the Top Value was family first and I was in a university setting in Austin Texas uh in a it group well this is a very hot it market in Austin Texas so how do I compete with that well money I don't I can't compete with that I can't do the dry cleaning for free I can't serve food 24 hours a day no massages um but I can offer a balance in life and I say work a solid8 hours and then leads and our Mantra was if you have a kid in school play go to the school play if you need to take yourself to the doctor go to the doctor if um any family member needs you we have 300 people here to back you up and so air on the side of your family that's number one it's our prime directive and uh the rest will we'll figure it out yeah I like that conception of like the term family you hear a lot of people in a corporate setting use the term term family in a sense of like well this is your corporate family and you know Therefore your obligation sort of implied is that your obligation to your corporate family exists 247 and in fact you're sort of you're using in the opposite way which which is so healthy which is hey you have a family you have this life and part of our responsibility as a corporation is to say we're creating a situation where we're going to get the work done and we're going to get the work done well and you have space to take care of what you need to in your life and for the leadership team to model the behavior so I don't I told my direct reports I don't expect you to be checking email 24 hours a day I'm not going to send you an email late at night yeah um it'll it'll be there in the morning um don't expect your people to do that unless you're on call you know if they're on call right then you're on call but um uh you know it's just um stay home when you're sick you know and before Co you know people always coming in sick it's like don't do that you're making us sick um and then but model those behavor take vacations it was really amazing to me um early in my career I was really bad at taking vacations because I was bad at setting and managing expectations so I help my direct reports I say I want want you to take vacations I'm going to take vacations and while you're while I'm away I'll have someone in charge but I'm not checking email from um Mongolia you know just not gonna do it and and so I would model those behaviors and then I asked them to do the same for their teams the other thing that helped Chang the culture from firefighting to more customer oriented was um a Blog I just wrote a Blog once a week and the blog would reinforce the mission the values the vision different weeks would be different themes uh often I would uh give kudos to staff who did a great job you know customer Kudos coming in all the time uh often I would apologize for we screwed up and how we would not do this in the future and you know we're going to make changes to avoid the situations from happening in the future and because I learned early on that if you give your message to your direct reports they all may not share that with their teams right in fact count on them not sharing it some people want to hoard the information some want to they don't even know it's important you know they just don't do it and it's like I cannot rely on the grape vine to change a culture so um just institutionalizing that communication what was really cool at the University had 330 staff that blog also went out to two 300 other people in the university and on other universities and interested in it at UT and it was a two-way communication and so I would hear from everybody and hey that was a great message oh you you said kudos to Sally but you forgot William oh okay well I'll mention William um but it uh you know thanks for mentioning the Service Awards but they don't get handed out for months I need to know that so it was really um part of the nervous system that we built to because we had 70,000 people on campus so you have to have that two-way communication the other thing is we built formal relationships with peers and influencers throughout the organization I would meet with my peers which um as an associate vice president I would meet with associate Deans in all the Colleges and Schools Deans are too busy to deal with us and the associate Deans were responsible for it in their college and school so they appreciated the help and getting the sounding board and me letting them know hey in six months we're going to replace all the phones so I just want to give you a heads up it'll reduce the cost of the phone because it's voice over IP but um you know there'll be a team they'll be reaching out to you you know but just want to let you know it's coming so we would plan our communication through our liazon program months and Advance because some of these projects took two years to happen and maybe a year to get started and uh all my direct reports had those networks built and every six to eight weeks like clockwork it's on the calendar uh you would meet and you never showed up empty-handed so so I always sent a draft agenda out first couple days before looking forward to seeing you hear the topics I want to discuss please add anything you'd like to discuss and that was a routine that we made sure um we were really thinking strategically in terms of our relationship building so it's not just having coffee it's it's informing them and getting feedback on some important initiatives that will affect their organization and maybe they can advise us in a way that make it better yeah I like it because it's all of it is just this very intentional structure of communication designed to increase trust within the organization and just because there's a hierarchical structure which is thereby necessity based on the number of employees and the size of your mission doesn't mean that you can't have direct communication with people via something like a Blog for example and doesn't mean that you you know you can't give give kudos all the way down the chain of someone's doing something well and then also giving them you know the the agency to to take their time all of it is sort of just creating this culture of we under we're we have all of our ducks in a row we know what's going on we're communicating clearly and consistently and you have as an employee visibility throughout the organization about how decisions are made what the values are what we reward and then you're able to reinforce the culture that you want yeah that transparency is very important well they asked me uh when I started how do you make decisions it's like well customer focus datadriven we'll re rep prioritize you know it's it's a fixed budget but what I what we spend on can be moved around sure um but it's harder when you you're you do have a troubled organization because it's also getting the right team on the field and if you have bad management I found that the good people they think the good people are really the bad people and the bad people are the good people so let's say you have a bad manager what I found was that the bad people were advocating um best practices it's like oh they were bad you know it's like oh they're saying the right thing so usually when you look at talk to your direct reports you know it's like you free up those who are bad or bad and and there's some self- selection there you know if they don't want to be honest and trustworthy and some people are not you know they'll self- select out and or sometimes you have to help them yeah and I you know I think that you know we in in a lot of these cases you know with our audience in particular they're stepping into organizations where they have to quickly sort of figure out right to exactly to your point right what do you look for when it comes to like evaluating this employee performance right so you have people who come in and say oh these are the top performers you know on the way out the seller says hey these are my top performers you're going to want to make sure that these people are happy and in reality the seller the sell's in impression of the top performer might be a manager who is a bottleneck and there's poor communication or you know there are people in key spots in the organization with a key skill but they may not necessarily be driving the mission and the vision of the organization forward like what do you look for how do you determine you know obviously we talk about like you know some employees are modeling the Mission Vision and values but maybe considering to be underperforming because they're not you know adhering to the expectations or the thief Dums established by their managers like what do you looking for to to determine to make these determinations when you're coming in you're unfamiliar with the organization well the first thing I look at is the the organization structure and usually in a troubled organization you have onetoone reporting relationships or one to two um many layers of management uh at the University we had my level then three associate vice presidents and then 11 directors so that's 14 people in upper management and the three associate vice presidents didn't agree with each other so they were fighting disagreeing like what method methodology we should use and one was using one other was using another it's like I just wanted to do The Three Stooges you know clunk so yeah just pick one yeah but then they were whipsawing the directors underneath them and so we actually got rid of the three the three headed monster and reduced the 11 to 7 which is a more uh correct uh span of control five plus or minus two is textbook and then we looked all throughout the whole it has never been designed before it just grew like Barnacles on a ship and so by doing that we actually found efficiencies freed up money that turned into a capital budget and then we looked at what are the expectations for all those people do we have documented um goals and and responsibilities for the coming year sometimes you don't and if you don't have those metrics benchmarks set at the beginning of a year how do you know what success really is so for us it was Network needs to be up 99.9 9999 it's easy to measure that um you know there especially in Information Technology it's a lot of Quantified measures but if you don't have any of those then how do you know what's a good performer or a bad performer is if you do have that then you're you know you're get a leg up um and then it's just a matter of uh reporting progress throughout the year you don't have to wait once a year you can have progress checkpoints quarterly with your team um and then I'm a big fan for immediate feedback so if someone was in a meeting with the customer and they knocked it out of the park it's like Sally that was the best presentation I ever heard thank you you don't have to wait for it and then model that behavior where giving immediate feedback um I think it's really important ER on the side of giving the feedback people want to know if they're doing a good job or not not in the formal session but informally too yeah but you need both you I think there is a a Common Thread through some of this this concept of like and you and I have talked a lot about strategic planning and sort of putting together Frameworks that allow sort of these open communication to live within a framework which aligns expectations with everybody how does a new leader a new business owner step in and kind of initiate that process how quickly should they be doing it how do they do how do they sort of gain understanding through that process about what the organization's priorities need to be I think that the timing of it and maybe the slight awkwardness of being new and yet leading a strategic planning effort can be challenging for some new business owners I'm curious sort of how you approach that or have approached this when stepping in uh throughout your career well sometimes being new is an advantage you know you got the fro eyes um you're just seeking to learn so you're asking questions um uh you know it's it's you don't have to know all the answers you're discovering the answers there's a dirty little secret that a lot of organizations don't have a strategy it's shocking how many don't and over the years I've helped probably 14 different organizations develop strategies whether it's for information technology or the whole organization and the principles to develop a strategy are well defined so you can Google it and come up with the methodology for strategic planning and one of them is the SWAT analysis so what is your strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats that's simp you know that's a great framework great place to start and then that forms you know the data input then what are your peers doing yeah you know what's your who are your peers and how what are they doing how do you compare to your peers and then you interview people your executive leadership um you could have focus groups with staff um customers um vendors and just get all this input and then like milk or cream Rising into the top of a milk bottle the priorities kind of Bubble Up and whenever I start one of these strategies I'm nervous because I have no idea how it's going to turn out but it always turns out that the organization knows what the priority should be they just Bubble Up they were perhaps hidden but and you're un uncovering them but once you uncover them it's like yeah that's what we should that's what we should be doing and I did a strategy for a large University system and we went to every campus talked to every president all the provos faculty staff students and number one priority was the network you know out in rural parts of the state they were swinging lanterns to get the network to work and so top recommendation was the Board needs invest Millions to fix you know improve the network and put it on a Glide path to keep improving over time they did that they funded that second priority was everyone was trying to buy digital assets from Publishers who were just chopping yeah chopping them apart because there was no uh buying power so the recommendation and this actually came from the Librarians was can we bundle all our buy and centralize it put it on our new network so all the campuses can access that dig those digital assets and all the students so 125,000 faculty and staff 250,000 students access to that and you don't have to shlep to the library to do your research so that was in 1996 I went and did a strategy for one of the campuses 20 years later and everyone students and faculty loveed the digital library I don't don't have to go from home to the library I can sit at home in my bunny slippers and do my research and what an impact yeah so so um but it's I've seen uh where a new president comes in and says I'm going to do a strategy and then they don't do it right and a year goes by another year goes by I had one president five years went by and he left I mean basically rudderless yeah next president comes in I'm gonna do a strategy and within a year we had a strategy he just did it there you go you know so it's um surprising how many people don't take advantage of that you need to know where you're going it's interesting there's a degree of and I've you know I you see examples of this over time it's been interesting to see how much sort of humility it can take to just be like hey these ideas don't have to be mine like I'm coming in I'm not the Savior right these don't have to I'm not coming in and my ideas are going to guide us to a new era of prosperity oftentimes the people who are doing the work have the best ideas and you know having the they're closest to it yeah having the foresight to listen and not not be precious about everything needs to come from you is is really important well and you have to set the expectation that you're not going to solve all the problems and had a situation where in the trouble organization my direct report for bringing me issues about other direct reports and it's like what did they say when you talk to them about it right they hadn't talked to him and I said well why don't you go talk to him and then come back and after about three times they learned uh I need to go talk to someone if I've got a problem and not try to have Brad solve it you know be the hero and uh you know kind of corner me into some hero yeah role that is totally inappropriate and the better even the better um variation of that is uh called triangulation where you're talking about that other person to this other person but you never talk to the person so you're these two are talking and that can go on for months you know it's like stop it your role as a leader is you see triangulation squash it you know same thing I had this one person who was into gossip and it's like I want you to cease and desist gossiping get to work yeah we just we don't do that anymore yeah that's great um I'm GNA change gear slightly um a lot of Searchers you know people who are buying small businesses worry about taking on an acquisition that has key customer concentration you know so especially when there are strong relationships between the customer and the retiring business owner so how would you suggest someone handle that situation when they have to form a new relationship with a key customer that's been there for a while with the old leader well if you can do it it would be nice to have an introduction from the person you're buying the business from to the client and The Trusted relation at least broker the first meeting to ensure and let the customer know it's going to be a smooth hand off because they're probably nervous too yeah and but I would hope you could get the help of the older it would be in their self-interest to make sure it's a smooth transition um but it's it's your part of your listening tour you you got to get set in that first meeting how often would you like me to meet with you what would you like to talk about how do you see the relationship ship going you know what can we do better to help you and kind of set those benchmarks and then every time you're kind of assessing how we doing yeah with with when I was dealing with vendors I would identify who am I spending the most money with and are they good or are they bad meaning do they care about themselves or do they care about us and I tried to be the best customer they ever had because you get more with honey than vinegar but um quarterly even so once I identified the largest vendor relationships we would be quarterly with my purchasing director and their account rep in our U liaison and we'd talk about the relationship you know what were the sales this quartered um do you see any Trends do you have new product coming that we should be aware of uh any research you can help us think ahead in the future um or you might have problems you know we had this issue um I had one rep accuse us of buying the wrong thing and it was our fault for some reason it's like what are you talking about yeah I sold equipment when I was with Accenture I never sold something I knew wouldn't work right and I know you got the commission on it and I had to get a new rep I mean that was ridiculous yeah don't blame the customer and then uh sometimes we were slow paying you know it's like I don't want to be a slow paying you know customer I want to follow the whatever the agreement is but those quarterly check-ins help with you know the account reps boss so you're up moving up the food chain you know I think it really helps so when we built the new data center we had budgeted a certain line of network here well the company came out with a new and improved line of network here that would last many years longer but we didn't have the budget for it yeah and I said is there any way you can discount it so we can have this for much longer and will be the best reference you ever had and having one of the biggest networks on the planet helped yeah and but they came through they came through and now that same partner had a video conferencing product two of them and they were selling those in different parts of the university and it's like we already had one centrally supported would you please stop that you know stop selling that you know we'll buy all your other stuff but don't sell that because we only need one of those so um you know it's mutually holding people accountable um yeah and I can imagine that that works even when um you know let's say the seller handoff isn't perfect or the you know the customer is skeptical right even just saying hey I'm going to just do this extremely professionally in an extremely organized way and demonstrate through your actions that you know you have the capacity to live up and exceed the prior the prior owner's experience yeah it's it's um building that track record your your best customers are ones that you've had for a long time because and they're coming back to you because you deliver and you're trusted right and the cost of sale to a brand new customer is much higher than selling to an existing customer and the percentage of um sales is much lower to an existing customer than with the new customer so you you save a ton of money yeah by doing that and you know at the firm about 80% of our customers are returning returning customers um because they knew we deliver and you know would not let them down yeah so I have a few additional questions for you I want to open it up to the audience we have a good number of people streaming live um no matter where you're streaming There's an opportunity to put some information into the chat so if we have questions now as your chance um I have you know maybe two more questions for Brad and then if there are questions from the audience we can uh address those as well so um you know you've mentioned you know in your book that it can be sometimes challenging to form meaningful non-transactional relationships through networking events and and social media and what's been very interesting in terms of my experience in this sort of small business buying Community is there is a Vibrant Community that is online but it really only really works best when people move things offline and are able to sort of that trust builds the more supplemental engagement happens in addition to like the online community so like how have so is that first I guess two-part question is that also been your experience that moving things offline enhances online relationships and second how have the last few years of remote work informed the way you think about building external relationships well you need to be intentional and just at the end of a month having a stack of business cards is not intentional right and I I actually find traditional networking superficial and you know the happy hours and all that stuff I I never in 30 years I've never got a business relationship out of that so why bother you know why not step back and look at your customer base you know your people in Industry you want to emulate you know people love sharing their stories and um often and I don't know what the community is like there but they want to help each other you know kind of get let help everyone grow the pie bigger is uh you know that's what that's fun that's what people like to do but you have to be intentional about it and and make it part of your uh way you work you know it's it's just more fun um I had someone say that they were actually I a networking event a week ago and she said yeah I got a card from someone and then they called me up the next day and asked me for donations so they're not for profit it's like I don't even know you right and I had a guy who out of the blue called me he was a fellow um graduate at our graduate school and he's trying to sell me life insurance it's like I didn't even I didn't even like you at school why would I give you all my financial information you know it's like was the worst lunch ever you know I'm sure they said go network with people you went to school with you know like oh my God so you know be intentional yeah I I like that that's a that's a good a good sort of Northstar for uh for for that part of the process um uh again U chat is open for for questions oftentimes we usually get like half of the you know maybe a third thir of the time to half of the time we won't have questions because you know we'll have the conversation will be moving and people like oh I'm just going to listen and sometimes we'll get people coming in with questions so you know if you have questions please post in the chat my last question for you Brad that I've planned for is you know obviously you've collected you know a series of Stories the book that you've just published is sort of uh sharing of a lot of these stories with the public in a way that helps people manage their own business relationships do you have any particular stories that are some of your favorites that you haven't shared yet uh that you'd like to share with the audience well I had a a client a very large research one University and they wanted me to help them transform all their administrative systems multi M you know multi-million dollar project transformational going from 70s processes to the new world great project great client and I was meeting with the CFO and provos and we're at The Faculty Club having lunch and I said you know we can be successful you have all the elements of success here and really you know would be thrilled to come work with you but this was October but next summer I have a vacation plan and it's to Australia for three weeks and we were supposed to go last year but I had to cancel it because of business and so my wife and I bought the plane tickets already we got the passports for the our boys and it I was an exchange student there was my 25th High School reunion so I missed that so I really want to go see people I sure was in high school and so they said okay yeah well that sounds okay and so um by April we hit our first major Milestone yay and we meet monthly with the president and it got to be May and it's like uh Mr President I just want to remind you as I have the past three months that I will be in Australia for three weeks in h June and his hand started shaking and I'm like canceling my vacation paying us a lot of money and and I loved them I mean best client ever and the CFO goes hold on Brad wait a minute just um Mr President the provos and I agreed that in October that when Brad started with us that he could go on this vacation is very important to him and his family we should uphold our commitment and Diane's going to be in charge and he says it's the best time for him to go which it was and uh yeah we should let that happen and the president no okay all right so um Diane did a great job no yeah everything click clack clicky CL yeah it was great I didn't check my email didn't check voicemail and 10 years later I'm having dinner with the CFO and his wife and uh my my wife and I and we talked about that story and he goes Brad we were scared to death but it was my client because I set and managed expectations defending my vacation I mean how awesome is that yeah that's great and it's a it's a great lesson I think and it kind of encapsulates a lot of the lessons from from today that we've discussed which is really you know managing your managing expectations up up down you know left right you know all throughout the entire organization you know setting setting standards boundaries and and really creating a team structure that allows for people to cover for each other that allows for life to happen which generates better performance and better relationships across the board so I you know and celebrate celebrate success celebrate success it's perfect all right well I I think that's a perfect note to uh to end the conversation on today but this has been fantastic thank you so much for for jumping on I I'm going to hold the book up again because it's on my desk spheres of influence by Brad angler this is great book I've read it you should read it um fantastic nuggets of wisdom and uh thank you so much for for joining me this has been fun thank you

Channel: Private Market Insights

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Length: 47min 48sec (2868 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2024