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Unbound is a weekly podcast, created to help you achieve more as a leader. Join Chris DuBois as he shares his growth journey and interviews others on their path to becoming unbound. Delivered weekly on Thursdays.
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Learn how you can tackle goals through audacious execution with today's guest are you leader trying to get more from your business in life? Me too. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois. Roy Oh Singh is a guy who took a startup to a billion in sales annually. Roy is a former president cmo and entrepreneur with over 40 years of successful and unmatched executive leadership experience in every aspect of business. He is the only author, entrepreneur and executive leader who delivers practical and proven audacious unheard of ways to produce high performing businesses and successful careers. Right, the latest installment of the book series be different or be dead, titled the audacious unheard of ways I took a startup to a billion in sales is out now. And today, we're going to hear about how we can follow some of the same strategies that he used in his own company, Roy, welcome to on man.
1:04
Hey, thanks for having me, Chris. I really appreciate it.
1:08
Yeah, I'm glad you're here. This, this episode has been a long time coming. And so let's, let's just jump right into your your origin story.
1:19
Yeah, so look at I'm a really simple, practical guy. I learned really, really young and early that success seemed to follow people who stood out in a meaningful way in a crowd. And so I decided that that I was going to follow that sort of seemingly workable prescription. And not just like in business in my career, but in my personal life as well. So, so I'm the kind of guy that looks at how things are being done, you know, by rote, generally, tradition, normal practices, and will always ask the question, you know, how can I do this differently. And I call that my might be different lens. So I'm driven by this notion to always look for other ways to do things always look for ways to, to stand out in a way that people care about. And I want to make that point, that my whole be different mantra isn't about just being different for the sake of being different. Okay, it's not like, I don't care about the color of your hair, I don't care about your sexual preferences, okay? What I care about is how you are going to be unique in the people that that you serve, and what they care about. And so it's kind of like the ultimate sort of marketing lens, if you will, that's driven by, by by what people care about in their lives, and how you can be unique in that respect. And so I basically was following my nose around the organization and meandering up the organization and gradually, was asked to take on this really neat responsibility of taking an early stage data company and internet company. And, and, you know, I get goosebumps when I think about it, we didn't start out with the objective of having a billion, we started out with the objective of doing something meaningful, that people cared about in a way that nobody else did. Right. And, and we would reap the performance in the growth from that. And so what I discovered was, the things that made a difference weren't really complicated. They were not theoretical. They were how to practical things, that lit fires, and people got them to execute wonderfully well. And that drove the performance of the business, which gradually got us to a billion in annual sales, which is really the metric I use to evaluate market performance in any event. So I'm gonna be different guy, and I've been doing this for way too long, probably.
3:50
So, alright, I've got our list of questions that I was gonna run through. Usually, I make it to the first question before going off script on them already. So okay, so we're looking at being different and you're thinking different, right? The first question, you propose, what, how can I do this differently? I work a lot with business owners on just the decision making process and being able to make sure that we're making good decisions, if we're looking to be different in order to essentially make a better decision, right, something that's going to bring us a better result. How do you not get bogged down and the number of options that that question can, you know, potentially just put in front of you?
4:31
Well, okay, it depends on perspective, okay. Like when I say to be different in a way people care about what that is, is a really a marketing statement about who's your target market, and what do they care about. They know what they need. Everybody has their needs satisfied. If you want to play that game, you're going to be in a commodity or where price competition ends up killing. The interesting thing is if you've want to play in the market of caring, and secrets, and desires and what people lust for and what they covet it, one of the things, you're going to find two things, first of all, is nobody else playing in that space. Okay? Secondly, it's not very price sensitive. Because when people buy on emotion, right, they're not thinking about the onesies and twosies sense, right? They tend to say, Okay, I've got this desire that I need to satisfy, I just need to satisfy. And I'm going to, I'm going to basically go to the, to the organization in this case that, that supplies that. And so you don't really, if you're really clear and precise on first of all, who do you want to serve? And I named my lexicon because I had to create my own strategic game planning process. The second question is all about who do you intend to serve? Right, you want to keep customer group numbers to a minimum, to limit the amount of resources that you have to have to spend to get to them. And secondly, you have to understand what they care about. And so if you understand what they care about, you will be led in the right way. It's not about what you think, Chris, it's not about what anybody in the audience thinks their customers care about. It's what the customers tell you they care about. Now, I understand that, you know, you got to have a conversation to kind of draw that out sometimes. But if you can be really focused there, as as opposed to getting bound up in it and bogged down. I mean, it is just gives you like Greased Lightning, you can go through this really, really quickly. And so what I find is that people are spending so much time doing a kind of textbook target marketing thing, it ends up to be narcissistic, in a way because they end up declaring what they think they are. And that's not the point. The point is, what do your customers care about? And how can you be unique in terms of serving that requirement?
6:50
And so I guess, would you say, that's the, like, key strategic difference that led to you being able to grow grow the business? or were there other pieces? As part of that?
6:59
I think, yeah, interesting question. First of all, in principle, there was luck. And I've never had a silver bullet ever worked for me. Okay, bad choice of words, probably. But I've never had one single thing work for me. In that respect, call it a Hail Mary, and just look at the organizations and markets and life are just way too complicated to have a single solution. And so my experience was that there were a number of things, small things that lit fires in people that we had to do to move up the growth curve. However, as I look upon those, I could categorize them, I guess, in a couple of ways. First of all, rather than spending a whole lot of time on the plan, I spent most of my time figuring out what the key actions I needed to take, were to execute it. Okay. Whereas today, and if you're looking for, like, what are the what are some audacious moves, one big one that I made was loosen up on planning, and tighten up on execution. Okay, be happy to get the plan just to vote. Right. Right, and be able to execute that mediocre imperfect plan, you know, incredibly flawlessly, you know, the interesting thing to me, Chris, is people actually expect to get a perfect plan in a world that's imperfect. helped me with that, you know, you're gonna spend so much time trying to perfect using all the strategic principles that are promulgated in textbooks to get that strategy, right. And yet, you never will, all you will do is burn bandwidth, and lose time. Because the people that have figured it out, take it just about right plan and execute it better than you and they're getting results. Okay. So this whole focus on execution, I guess, you could call it a strategic move. My strategic move was to not focus on the strategy. It was to focus on on execution. And the second piece is what you and I were just talking about differentiation. It's done really, really poorly these days. And we can, we could probably spend a whole a whole show just on that. But I got tons of evidence to show that really businesses in spite of the fact that the world has never been more competitive, customers have never had more power technology has never changed more dramatically. regulations have never been so restricted. Organizations are not doing a very good job answering the fundamental question, why should you do business with me and nobody else? Because that's the essence of differentiation. It's not about being better. It's not about being the best. I call that claptrap doesn't mean anything except the narcissists that are promulgating it, okay? The customer wants some help. Why should I buy from you and not your competitor? That's what differentiation needs to answer. And it's not being done very well. And so as I look upon my work, it really is based on the the conscious shift away from strategy towards execution, and we can end that Lee leads me into the operations guts of an organization, not the business development function. Right. And the second piece is differentiation in everything we do, not just at the strategic level, but at the customer service level, at the sales level, at the engineering level, at the internal audit level, every level of the company needs to think this kind of thing through. And as I reflect on, on going up the growth curve, those were major, major categories of activities, lots of stuff inside those categories. But if you wanted a couple of those to
10:32
it, so I love the less strategy more execution. Some one of the lessons that I teach a lot to my clients, and that we really work on strategically is a General Colin Powell had the 4070 principle where you should be able to make a decision once you have at least 40% of the information and not wait until you have more than 70. Because getting the plan going is more valuable than just making the perfect plan. Everything's gonna change anyways, once you actually get in there. But so the the fact that you were doing that was awesome.
11:07
Well, that, you know, just to that point, I mean, like I keep, I keep saying to people look at okay, so let's suppose we're sitting in Maine, and and we're putting together a strategy that requires us to kind of like, Go west, like, I'm the kind of guy that will say, that's good enough. We're gonna go west, okay, we will discover whether we're going to end up correctly in Los Angeles or Vancouver. But we don't know that right now. We don't have enough information. So why would I struggle to get more information? Let's just get it going. Figure out who you're going to serve, what they care about how you're different, get going, get executing, and I call it planning on the run, right? You sort of plan execute, learn, adjust, execute, learn, adjust, you get into this do loop. And you learn through execution where you deserve to be eventually. But to start out where it's simply not that smart. At least I'm not. There may be some, you know, Zhan mortals, that open up new me.
12:07
No, I mean, that's a great approach. That was something we did a lot in the military, where we have decision points within our plans where we could plan stuff out generally. But there'll be a point like if we're, we're moving west, right? Hey, we're gonna hit New York City. And that's where we're going to decide do we kind of cross through Canada, right? Or do we go south in order to make a different path, we're gonna decide we need this information at this point, in order to make that decision. We're not gonna worry about it now. We'll take care of it when we get there.
12:33
And that's it. You know what, Chris, that's why I call my my planning process, a strategic game planning process. So I'm glad you use the word game plan, because that's exactly right. Because it's execution focused. It's like start doing stuff and learn what's working along the along the way. And when you're when you finally get to where you're okay, then you'll look back and say, Ah, that was my strategy. But you never knew that start. No. And so yeah, it's a game plan to use the word is incredibly powerful and rich, because it invokes execution and doing stuff. And to me, that's a huge element, quite frankly, it is lot missing in action, in terms of the traditional planning model. Like, like, you should be spending 20% of your time on the plan and 80% on execution. And yet, in the real world, it's exactly the opposite. You know, sit in a Patman a planning meeting, and and, you know, subject matter experts gets trotted in. And they talk about algorithms and models and predictive this and predictive that. And by the time we figured out what the paper version of success is, and that's all it is, we've run out of time to figure out how we're actually going to breathe life into this puppy. And yet, that's where success is. That's where performance is. That's where a billion
13:50
Yeah, that's another model that we've used in the military, the one thirds two thirds rule, or if you spent 1/3 of the amount of time planning than two thirds prepping and doing whatever you need in order to execute better rather than working on the plan. But dead right now to take another step. Because we're on like a military. I don't know if you serve in the Canadian military. No, no, you're pulling on I
14:13
am. I am an execution.
14:16
I am you're pulling a lot of thoughts from the US military's handbook. So this is good. So the we have something called the characteristics of the offense. The United States Army anyways is a very offensive army, right? We want to take the fight to the enemy. And so we use surprise, concentration, Audacity and tempo. The more I get into everything that you talk about, you cover everything in your books, I realized that you like live the characteristics of the offense, how can I get after this problem and actually get the result we're after? And so one of the things I wanted to go deeper with you on was around why make audacious moves and how do you go about planning these?
14:57
Yeah, so again, in my Hello Good. Just want to make a point for for your audience. Look, I am not an academic. Okay, what I write about what I've written seven books around is based in pretty decent business fundamentals. Okay, but not academic principles. Okay? They're based on how to do stuff, how to get stuff done. So they're how to man. So I'm a practical guy. And so when it comes to why what the heck's an audacious move required for? It's required to drive differentiation because you cannot drive differentiation, if you're not motivated to be courageous and bold and stand out in your thinking, okay, gargling Google is not going to make you different, and is not going to force differentiation. Okay? And so you need to understand that audacity, okay? Being outlandish. Okay, in in sort of the drive that you have, is required, first of all, to keep the B different train moving, because it's so painful, right to beat the inertia, as you know, out there that that doesn't want anything to change. It's required to do that. But fundamentally, if you want to have a meaningful differentiation strategy in the marketplace, you need to be audacious. You need to be creating, not copying. Okay, huge piece because everybody Google's everything, everybody copies everybody, everybody imitates best in class Best Practices pervade, the reality is 1%, okay, of the population sit in the audacious category, and 98% Sit in the standard, we're going to coffee category. And unfortunately, and by the way, studies have been done on that I don't have the references for you. But it's, it's pretty true plus or minus. And if you thought if you think about the power that's available, if we can only shift some of that huge bell curve of commonality into the audacious zone, just imagine, from a business point of view, the success that you would see the economics of the country, right, the happiness of people, the engagement of employees who don't want to work in a boring environment, Chris, they want to work in a vibrant, vibrant, audacious world, right where their passions I get goosebumps just thinking about this where their passions are played to not their mind, and they're not rewarded necessarily for their IQ. They're, they're rewarded for their EQ, what's your emotional quotient? That because I know that's going to drive performance, and it's going to drive results. So the other point I just want to make is all this stuff. I wouldn't be doing if it didn't relate to getting the billion this all is this conversation we're having is how to stuff to get the billion not what are the cool moves on Audacity, ROI did you do, they're not cool. They were required to drive different behavior, which drove performance, which got us towards a billion. So don't ever mistake this for just being cool. Being cool for the sake of being cool is worthless in my world, because it wouldn't have done anything. Right.
18:09
I think, interestingly, a majority of markets, industries, everything, probably moving away from audacity, and just purely by how they're using, like artificial intelligence to create all this content and everything rather than thinking what should I be doing that's actually different than what everyone else is doing? Right? And put in that era
18:30
who really you're no look at? You're absolutely right. It's it's, you know, what, it's in the old days, I'd call this they're being efficiency minded. The problem is, they're getting really good at doing the wrong thing. Okay, that's what artificial intelligence does, okay. It just makes make stuff quicker. And some people will tell you that it actually improves the decision making process, I would beg to differ. Okay, data, however you organize, it may be useful for perspective, okay, but it's not generally useful to make you audacious and stand out and be different from everybody else around you in a way that people care about. Because AI cannot predict what people care about. They can predict how you behave in terms of your purchase decision. Oh, that's fine for today, but not tomorrow. And if you assume Tomorrow's a mirror a mirror image of today, oh, man, you are really in a risky position. And so yeah, we got all these tools that people are just grabbing on to, because they're sexy and cool. And yet I keep looking for the business problem they're solving in a world that requires you to be different and satisfy what people care about in unique and meaningful way. And Chris, everything I'm seeing doesn't really help. Yeah, I think a lot of I know I'm being taught, but no,
19:49
I think a lot of people are looking at metrics that and viewing those as a target rather than as leading and lagging indicators for the actions that they're actually taking. And then prioritize think those actions and make sure they're doing the right thing?
20:03
Yeah, I mean, I mean, look at it's, I don't want to be I don't want to denigrate, you know, these kinds of tactics and these tools, the tools are important. But let's remember, they're only tools, you cannot substitute leadership by tools. And that's what unfortunately, is happening. And so leaders out there, you need to take a very strong position. Okay, on the kinds of tools your organizations are using, Are they helpful to differentiate you from your competition? Are they helpful, helpful for you to determine what you need to be doing to satisfy what people care about and be the only ones that do you that do what you do. And if they're not being helpful, trash them, go find the you know, use your own intellectual and emotional IQ for heaven's sakes, put the tools down, but to export down, put AI down, put it in its rightful place, which isn't at the strategy table, trying to figure out the future of your organization in an imperfect world where employees are expecting good leadership. Cheers. All right.
21:04
I enjoyed that. Right. So speaking more about leadership. How do you recommend I guess, the leaders kind of foster like a healthy culture of nonconformity, right? Where the rest of the market is doing this? Yeah. When we say hey, we're not going to be like that.
21:22
You know, what? Okay, all I can tell you is what worked for me. Okay. Again, I'm not being prescriptive. I'm just saying, what this is what worked for Roy, because the problem with being prescriptive is when you try and tell people what to do, um, that that's kind of like, the manifestation of Eagle. And many respects, it's not fair to the people receiving it. So the I find the best thing to do is let me share with you what I did. Okay, the first thing I did is we had to redo our strategic game plan, which by the way, we haven't talked about this really simple can do it in 48 hours, Chris, by answering three questions. First question, how big do you want to be? That means what are your growth targets and top line revenue for the next 24 months? Not five years, because five year plans are useless. Why? Because they're not instructive to execute, right? Because you can always put stuff off to the fifth year and the fourth year never shows up. So what we do is say if you're at a million today, where do you want to be in 24 months, you want to be a 5 million want to be a 10 million, you want to be a 2 million? The reason we ask the question first is a numbers declare the profile and character of the strategy. That's why I Na, also drive innovation, because typically, somebody will say to me, Roy, I don't know how to get from one to five, is it good? Then it's the right number. Second question, right? Which by the way, numbers driving strategy is an audacious move. By the way, nobody else does that. Everybody else figures out their strategy, because it's Watson godson, Watson Hotz, and then they look they look at at the numbers. No, the numbers drive the strategy. That's an audacious move. The second thing is, who you're going to serve that needs where you're going to get the money from. We talked a little bit about that. And the third question is, how are you going to compete and win? That's all about differentiation. And I've got a huge process built on what I call the only statement that gets you at a clarity around how to answer the question, why do business with me and nobody else. And so the first thing you have to do is you need a strategic game plan. Because in the process of going through that, you will discover that the only way to achieve your your strategic game plan is you got to step out, man you got you can't be like everybody else, you gotta be audacious, you got to step out and be bold. And so the strategy leads the thought process in that direction. And then what I did is I said, Okay, we're going to create some values for this organization. Okay, whose market is likely to grow at 70% a year? And I want most of it, I want all of it right? I'm not going to sit back and take a 15% growth rate. I want it all. So how are we going to do that? So what we did is we baked a value proposition built around a date audaciousness stepping out doing things different contrarian ism. Okay, so the set of values that we created for this business, gave permission to everybody to be audacious. And so it wasn't a matter of trying to force audaciousness into an existing culture, it was to create a new culture, based on the values that were required to get us to the billion, you understand where I'm going with that. So this whole thing is driven by the billion, right if I thought we could get to a billion by copying by googling gargle, I may have had a conversation about that. But the conclusion was no, we had to be audacious. We had to be different. We had to be astonishing. We had to be gas worthy for people, if in fact, we were going to get to the billion and by giving people permission to do that, by giving them permission to try And, in fact, I had a little try sort of report card. It was part of the performance plans. Chris, how many tries have you? Have you done in the last 30 days? If you looked at me and said, Well, I haven't really I said, why? I mean, you have permission to try, in fact, as part of the strategy part of your performance plan, right? So I hardwired it down to behaviors that people were measured on. That's where you have to go to make a difference. It cannot be pronounced from the Oval Office, okay? If you want this to work, the leaders got to get the hell out of that office, get talking to people with emotion, like I am saying, it matters. Boldness, courageous audacity matters, it's part of our strategy, you need to do that. I'm expecting you to do that. I want at least 30 tries every month. And I'm not asking you how many are going to fail, because I know a lot of them well, that's okay, just don't make the same, make same mistake twice. That's the only issue I've got. keep private. And so it's really like that, and it's one foot in front of the other, you just keep hammer and hammer and hammer it away. Again, no one action can make this happen. Cultural change takes a while, you just need to persevere. And they need to know that you're serious as the leader. Okay?
26:18
Do you have some examples of what some of those like trials might look like, from your team? Like, how big or small Are you kind of expecting this? When you when you give that initial guidance, I
26:28
didn't give any guidelines, I didn't care. I said, just just get out there and try different things. Okay, everybody has their own sphere and sort of job role to try and try and be audacious in, in the environment that you can control. And by the way, if you have any suggestions, right as to what we can do, tell me, I'm a leader that serves around, okay, tell me how can I help? Right in the end, and I will make sure that we get your try idea to someplace in the organization where somebody will try it? And so no, I mean that, you know, that's how the quality it like a lot of people say, Yeah, let's take risks. Okay, but you know, what, we're only going to subject $250,000 per risk. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking to small subtle stuff in the trenches of the organization and the operations of the organization that affects performance. Because I'm the execution guy. Remember, everything I do is made to execute. And so what was important to me is okay, against a target of 30 tries this month, Chris, how many did you actually do? And tell me about a how you felt about doing it be what the results were? Three, how can I help next month, that's the process of leadership by serving around that it made a hell of a difference, right. And by
27:51
putting that on the people who are on the front lines, right, you're gonna see more innovation, because they're actually collecting that information right away and actioning it with their ideas, rather than needing to propose something, send it all the way up the chain, wait for decision to come back down. And then they can execute. So ideas awesome, salutely
28:11
it level the organization? I mean, you got you. I mean, the hierarchy actually works against execution, right? We all know that. I mean, execution is best done with an absolutely flat organization. So what I tried to do is get as close to that as practically possible. I mean, clearly, I couldn't do everything. And that would be silly anyways, but I had a pretty flat organization, I took out a lot of middle managers who were adding zero value to execution, again, execution. And so to your point, which is really good point, you know, the ability to make a quick decision informed as as much as possible, okay, in the heat of battle was important. And so we tried to create an environment that facilitated enable that as opposed to, to stop it
28:54
right. Now, I guess, for your, because you can't completely get rid of a hierarchy within most organizations, right? So did you just maximize the authority at each level? Or like, what were some of the things you were doing to make sure that it didn't need to go all the way up the chain, it could hit maybe one level up, get approval, and then they can run with it?
29:15
Well, I mean, in concept, and this isn't a new one, it's just that I did it. I tried to put the people closest to the customer on the top of the organization, people say invert the pyramid. That's the kind of way they thought about it. I didn't even know about the term. It just occurred to me that in order to create gas for the customer experiences, and hat and reduce friction on the inside of the organization caused by stupid rules and policies, I had to put the frontline person in a decision making process in the decision making role. And the only way I could do that is to empower them. But again, inform the rest of the organization that this is the plan and strategy and if you don't like it, find somewhere else to go because you don't fit in. This is a new world, right? And people were given me this Yeah, but we didn't do this. And you know, we might, but I don't care. All I care about are putting in place the right behaviors that drive performance. And the neat thing about it is frontline people, as you know, they love this stuff. I mean, they love it, because they've been telling management leadership for years, what was wrong, but we never listened. We didn't listen, because they were only frontline people, they were only service reps, they were only receptionist. Okay, the credentials and currency of that job role, I completely changed and said, There's nothing more important than a frontline person engaging with a customer, the rest of us are simply here to help that. And that, again, was part of this cultural transformation away from what I would say an inside out view, towards an outside in view. And it was extremely rewarding, man, I gotta tell you, so emotional to see these people. I mean, you would never think that they were capable of doing the stuff that they did, only because we said it's okay. And we're going to hear and you know what, we'll clean up the odd mess, we will, because we know there's going to be some you can't make progress with all the mess. Right? Right.
31:15
But I'm sure they surprise themselves with what they were able to accomplish as well. So because most organizations don't operate that way. So what were some of the things you were doing in order to first establish that as your your culture and get people actually thinking that way? Because they probably weren't. Right? Well,
31:35
okay, so from a practical point of view, there was one one little little tactic that I use that we ended up having an awful lot of fun with. And I call it vaporizing dumb rules. Actually, I didn't I call it killing dumb rules, but I've more thought that somewhat. Okay, so the idea behind it was look at how can you provide a gasp or the experience for a customer? When you're saying no? Pretty hard right? Now, why would you say no? Typically, you're saying no, because a rule or policy prevents you from doing what the customer wants to do. And so the customer goes away angry, they tell a bunch of people how crummy you are. And you know, generally, you know, who decrement customer loyalty. Let's put it to you that way. So it seemed reasonable to me that we need to have some sort of program that was based on getting rid of those rules that did nothing but piss customers off and replacing them with rules and procedures that enabled the customer transaction as opposed to disable it. Most rule systems are made out of the need to control the customer transaction. So I took the opposite contrarian point of view audaciously to say, No, we're not going to do that, we're going to create a rule system that is there to enable customers to do business with us the way they want. Now, I realize that there are and we found that there were rules that we couldn't change, right, for legal reasons, etc, etc. And so but what we did is try and make them as customer friendly as we could took extra time with the customer to make sure they understood. But you know, a lot of people would say, See, I told you, we couldn't do it, the reality is if you can eliminate 10% of the stupid things that you do, to chase customers off, imagine, okay, the bandwidth that opens up to delight people, right, and create positive moments for them, positive feelings for you. So we had dumb rules, committees set up throughout my operations, right. And the role of the committee was to identify and recommend rules that we need to kill. Okay, and so management would, you know, my management team were responsible for receiving these, and we would make decisions to execute, you know, on those recommendations. My role was, I mean, I would show up in workplaces with a great big white, long sleeve t shirt with dumb rules written on the front, dumb rules written on the back and big X's through. And the classic was, here comes Roy, the President, again, on his horse, through through the workplace, tried to tell us to get rid of those stupid rules and policies. But I gotta tell you, and I was the only one doing it. You talked about being an audacious leader. That's an example. Nobody else would do that. Why? Well, it's not it's not befitting, Chris, it's not the fitting of a leader to do that. And see what they do is they they, they're ill informed, they don't understand that their role is to create unbelievable performance in the organization. And if that's the way you have to behave to do it, that's what you do. Right? Here's an example. Yeah, it's so much fun.
34:48
So I guess one of my last questions before we get into the big three that I wrap every episode with, what what kind of, I guess, backlash or just pushback from being trying To be so audacious right investors are probably going to have issues with that maybe even some of your, like senior team members who have done things differently, like, what types of things did you have to overcome?
35:10
Well, it was interesting, because you have to realize the context, the organizational context that I was asked to take over a data company was in a telecom space. So so this data company actually sat in a communications company. So at a time when it was still struggling to get deregulated, it was still struggling to be more, more customer oriented and less engineering oriented. So I was trying to do this, in this microcosm that existed in his overall culture, that didn't have anything to want to have anything to do with it. So I mean, the classic responses I would get was, Well, that'll never work. We never classic right. Yeah. Why are you doing that? That's dumb, Roy, I mean, you're just trying to, you know, shake things up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, and quite honestly, there was a lot of subversion, by my colleagues, to the sorts of things we were trying to do. I mean, there was one person that did everything in his power to kill every idea that we had. Right? He sat in the monopoly side of the business, in a network job, and he tried to kill everything. And so it was extremely, you talk about, you know, we had a new CEO talking about trying to build a new culture that was extremely eventually got fired. But that was eventually really a really difficult thing to do. So that was tough. And what it did for me was, was it drew on this reservoir of strength that I had to have to keep pushing, okay, because this stuff is so difficult. And it's so emotional, that if you don't have to have a reservoir to draw on it, you never make any, you never make any progress at all. So personally, I had to do that. I chose to try and develop what I called an army of advocates, because within the company, there were still people that says, hey, Roy, that's right. That's really good. We like what you're doing. And so I ended up recruiting an army of advocates. Okay, that would help me. Okay, as I go, that would be my sounding board. That would be my board of directors. As we marched through this, this this battle zone of competition just coming in, and customers having new powers, it's, et cetera, et cetera. And I guess the word undeniable resonates with me, because I decided that I was going to be undeniable in what we had, and it wasn't a personal egotistical thing. It's what it's what the company needed to do to survive and perform in this new world, right? So it was not narcissistic. And I people have criticized me for it. I said, Hang on isn't about me. Right? Hell, if it was about me, I'd be sitting in the Caribbean sucking on a margarita, I wouldn't be here, right, incurring all this pain, trying to push up a concept through and change through a way of life through a new organization. And so just deciding that, hey, listen, I'm Norwegian, my grandparents, you know, they, they, they knew what it was, like, right in the day to have to be toughen and fight for everything that they got. And I just said, Hey, you know what, nobody's going to deny us of actually achieving what we intend to achieve. And I hope that the rewards are there. And it turns out again, looking back, a billion is pretty good payoff. For the pain. In my view. I'd do it again, Chris, I'd do it again. Awesome.
38:36
Roy, lots of really good nuggets in this episode. I mean, this has been a great conversation. So I want to hit you with three more questions. The first one besides your own books, because because I recommend people they will go pick up any books in the series. So reading through those lots of great points, things that you should be doing within your business. But what book do you think everyone should read?
39:01
So you know, we'll probably be surprised, because it'll be a different answer. Probably. The book I recommend is called the marketing lessons from the Grateful Dead. Grateful Dead was a was a rock and roll band out of the 60s that had a mantra, you don't want to be merely merely to be the best of the best. You want to be the only ones that do what you do. Interestingly, I started my work around the only statement before I even knew about the his business history of the Grateful Dead. But when I found that the lead guitar player Jerry Garcia, this was his head. This was his business mindset, his entity, education mindset. His entertainment mindset was the about about being the only I thought, wow, I got to learn more about these guys. They were contrarians. They were contrarian entrepreneurs in a world with no technology. So for example, they decided to allow fans to vote chord their music and share their music. Now I know today that doesn't sound like a big deal. But in the late 60s, it was a big deal because the concern for copyrights and copyright law were very, very stringent and most bands, they would never, ever allow anybody to record their music. The Grateful Dead said, Now we're going to do it. Not only are we going to do it, because I guess they logically concluded that while somebody's recording the music, they're sharing the music, maybe somewhere down that value chain, somebody's going to buy a record, boom, right? Anyways, they built stance, and they how at their expense, and they house those stands with recording equipment. So they're very best fans, and they knew who they were, even though they didn't have social media, they knew who they were invited those fans in, gave allowed them to use the equipment to record their own music. I mean, people thought they were absolutely insane to do this, they would also show up, this isn't such a big deal. But at the time it was and Garcia would look at his band say well, what are you guys saying? What do you want to play tonight? They had no idea. It was absolutely spontaneous. They decided and they just went ahead and did it and fans went nuts and and today as a business to go and check out dead heads on the internet, they are still making tons of money my friend from just like hanging on to that I mean, the icon of the Grateful Dead is in and of itself. Just like outlandish, right that that skull and it's just great. They've there's a guy that's written a book, On the marketing lessons you can get from them, I've read it probably a 10 times. And every time I look at it, it just swells up in practical value. Okay, you won't find a blue ocean monologue in there, Chris, what you find is gold nuggets around how to actually get stuff done, particularly in a world that didn't have a lot of help. And I found that really instructive to me. And so I would recommend that book to anybody who's listening. So
42:09
I had to just pull it up. Because I was going to say, you know, you should really talk to Brian Halligan, he brings up brings up the Grateful Dead in every presentation. Of course, he's the author of the book with David Meerman. Scott. Really funny. But, uh, alright,
42:29
I knew you'd check me out.
42:32
So, next question is what's next for you professionally,
42:37
I'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing. I am not really all that altruistic. But my, my sort of high level goal is to keep having a conversation like this with you about being different. To try and change the conversation out there. To try and get people to view the copycat phenomenon that's going on out there is something that you want to observe, you want to understand that then you want to move away from, and there's cool ways of doing that. And I can help them with that. I love working with young professionals in their business, they want to be a CEO of a startup, they're having difficulty don't have a clue, as they start off without really thinking through this be different thing. And so I'm having fun with them. And also people in their careers, like all of this be different differentiation stuff, works just as well with careers as it does with businesses. And so I love working with young people to try and I don't know, I'll share a bit of what the stuff I learned is and and yeah, I'm just going to keep going ahead and doing that. And maybe you and I'll have another show. Who knows. Now, I'm up for it.
43:48
Last question, Where can people find you
43:51
be different or be dead.com. I blog every week, every week since 2009, when I worked when I wrote my first book, their business survival guide. And so there's lots of material there on content. And there's the odd rant, you know, sprinkled in there. So you can do that. My books are on there. And my email, anybody can get a hold of me at Roy Dotto. sing@gmail.com anytime and I'm happy Chris to have a conversation with somebody on this. And you know, it's kind of cool because I get emails these days on people that have heard the podcasts or whatever I've done, then on the website and said, Well, hey, this is my only statement. What do you think Roy? Why that wonderful question. And so we have an opportunity to dialogue and create a relationship and and hopefully they walk away and spread the word of it.
44:41
Awesome. All right, Roy, thanks for joining me.
44:46
So welcome. Thank you very much, Chris for having I appreciate it.
44:52
If you enjoyed today's episode, I would love a rating and review on your favorite podcast player. And for more information on how to build facts In efficient teams through your leadership, is it leading for effect.com As always deserve it
Transcribed by https://otter.ai