Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The biggest shifts in a business often come from decisions no one else sees.
Future Proof is a show for business owners facing the pressure to grow and the weight of legacy, often at the same time.
Hosted by Scott Eckart, each episode features honest conversations with leaders who’ve made bold moves, stepped into succession, or redefined success altogether. You’ll hear what they were up against, what they chose, and what they’d do differently now.
If you're thinking about what's next and want to build a business that lasts, this is the show for you.
Scott Eckart (00:01):
I’m Scott Eckart, and this is Future Proof, A show for building something that lasts. Let's get into it. Hello everyone. Joining us today on Future Proof, we have Mike Lantz, the founder of trueU located here in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Mike Lantz (00:18):
We just ultimately believe that the greatest opportunity that a business has to succeed is through its people. Think about sports. If a team has the best players and the best coaches on their team, then they typically win in a seven game series and it's a win-win. If the business wins, then the business owner wins, the employees win as well.
Scott Eckart (00:35):
Mike is a master of developing culture and he will walk us through his story and how he became a highly regarded business owner and thought leader.
Mike Lantz (00:44):
One of the things I've learned raising five adult children now is that everybody's definition of what success is is very different. When I'm showing up to support somebody, I'm going to support them to the best of my ability that I can, but they'll either take it or they won't. You've got to put that kind of lens on it, I think, and it can't be my expectations. It has to be the things that they want.
Scott Eckart (01:07):
Welcome everybody to this episode of Future Proof. I am so excited to have my good friend Mike Lantz with me today. He is the founder and CEO of trueU here in Indianapolis, Indiana with nearly 30 years of experience starting and running a business. Welcome, Mike.
Mike Lantz (01:24):
Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this.
Scott Eckart (01:26):
Got your hair cut.
Mike Lantz (01:27):
Got a fresh cut over the weekend just for this
Scott Eckart (01:29):
Looking fabulous. So Mike believes in people and he believes that's the greatest strategic advantage to any company. Mike's also an example of what happens when you focus on culture first at the heart of his company. True you is a great phrase. Culture made simple, which I love that because it's three words and it says a lot of things I'm going to give my best effort at describing. True. You based here in Indy, it's really growing quickly has four main areas, custom HR solutions and operations, number one. Number two, talent and people strategies. Number three, culture, community, and number four, a leadership academy. So Mike, did I capture trueU all right? What did I miss?
Mike Lantz (02:11):
Yeah, I think that's great. Well, thanks again for having me. I mean, we just ultimately believe that the greatest opportunity that a business has to succeed is through its people. And so through a lot of different ways we help small to medium sized companies master the people part. We fundamentally believe that if you have the best people and the best coaches on your team, then you're going to be the most successful team. Think about sports. I love sports Baseball guy. If a team has the best players and the best coaches on their team, then they typically win in a seven game series. And so we just help companies accomplish that so that they can go out in the win in the game of business. And it's a win-win, right? If the business wins, then the business owner wins. And if the business wins, then the way we teach it is the employees win as well.
Scott Eckart (02:53):
Yeah. So I would describe you though as a person with this enormous amount of, an enormous amount of just capacity for both change and growth and vision. And where does all that energy come from being a serial entrepreneur? I mean, where does it come from?
Scott Eckart (03:10):
I guess the womb. I mean, I've been this way my whole life. I mean, I was the guy that riding in the back of a wood paneled station wagon heading to Florida on vacation, and I was asking where the next vacation was. So I've always had a lot of energy. I've always wanted to be involved in a lot of things. My mantra is I'll sleep when I'm dead. And so I've always had a high level of energy, high level of capacity for taking things on, and I think I was just, that's my natural being and I think I was raised that way and I've had great parents who saw that and wanted to create opportunities for me.
Scott Eckart (03:39):
So here's a tough question. If I ask you, Mike, grow a company from a hundred million to 500 million, three to five years, could you do it? Would you do it?
Mike Lantz (03:50):
Well, I actually got the opportunity a part of that. I owned a business from 2000 to 2009 and sold it, and I had a pretty extended non-compete. So a great friend of mine, Dave Lindsay, hired me to become the chief people officer at a company called Defender Direct, who later changed their name to Defenders. They were the largest authorized dealer for ADT security. And I remember meeting with him and with Marsha Barnes and they said, we want to grow this business from a hundred million, this is in 2009 from a hundred million to 500 million in five years. And I'm like, oh, wow, that sounds like a lot. And they go, but here's the key. We want to do it on a people strategy. We believe that our people are what can help us do that. Ultimately, it was about creating a strategy for how we could engage our people to help us grow the business as quickly as possible. So I've signed up for that. I mean, that was right down the heart of the plate.
Scott Eckart (04:37):
Then what happened? I mean you said yes, and here we go, and
Mike Lantz (04:42):
Yeah, in five years we had half a billion dollars in revenue and two years after that we hit 750 million in revenue, and that's when I bailed out. But yeah, I mean it was great. It was fast growth, it was a lot of work and got to work with some amazing people, but we were able to really bless the lives of so many employees that worked for defenders and who have gone on and done really great things since they left.
Scott Eckart (05:03):
And do I understand that it created enough of a stir that there might've been some other companies that while you were doing that said, is there any way we can kind of lab this and come in and see what's happening?
Mike Lantz (05:14):
Yeah, so Dave was in YPO and he's showing up at one meeting saying, Hey, we're X million in a hundred, we're at 150 million in revenue. And then two months later he is walking in going, we're at $250 million in revenue. And people were like, how are you doing this? And his favorite thing to do is to flip my business card and say, go talk to Mike. It was all through our people. Our mantra there was businesses don't grow, people do. And so our bet was if we just invest in our people, if treat them right, we see them as our greatest opportunity to succeed, which meant it was their greatest opportunity to succeed as well, not only in our business but also in any future businesses. If we just looked at it from that point of view and we just kept pumping those investment dollars into our people, we couldn't help but grow. And that's how it turned out.
Scott Eckart (06:02):
Doesn't every company say they work or invest in people just kind of on the surface, they just kind of say that?
Mike Lantz (06:08):
Yeah, I mean I think most of them do. And then the question is, do they really do?
Scott Eckart (06:13):
So then give me for an example, how did you guys do that then?
Mike Lantz (06:17):
Yeah, so number one is we were crystal clear on what we expected out of everybody that worked there, and there's lots of engagement data from the Gallup Research organization. In fact, they have this survey called the Q12. It's been around since the mid-nineties that companies can give to their employees to see how engaged their employees are. Question number one, I know what's expected of me at work, and Scott, you would be shocked at how many companies we go into from an initial engagement perspective. And if you just pulled an employee out of the hallway and said, what are the top four things you have to accomplish in your job to be successful? They don't know what they are. And so we wanted to unpack at Defenders, we wanted to unpack where we were going as an organization, what our vision was, the pathway to get there and make sure that all 4,000 employees, at least for the day I left, those 4,000 employees all were crystal clear on how their performance impacted that, their day-to-day, how that impacted the vision where we were going.
Scott Eckart (07:10):
So the a word you weren't afraid of accountability?
Mike Lantz (07:13):
No, not at all. I mean accountability, like we've talked a little bit about what are some of the key pillars that had to be in place for us to have that growth. And one of them was accountability for sure. And we probably over rotated from time to time. We subscribed a bit to the Jack Welch theory of topgrading, which was bottom 10%. If you're in the bottom 10% of our organization for an extended period of time, you probably weren't part of our organization anymore. And that's one of the ways that we leveled up performance. Another one of those things would've been the creation of Bulletproof Systems. We all were required, every employee that joined was required to read the E-Myth by Michael Gerber. And Michael talks about one of the main reasons why entrepreneurs don't turn their businesses into corporations or thriving companies is for the lack of systems.
(07:58):
So every employee had to have an SOP book that outlined how they do their job and that sort of thing. And so there were some people that we'd call into my office to make a promotion and we'd say, bring your SOP book. And they didn't have one or it wasn't updated and we passed on 'em from a promotion perspective until the next time we knew that was really important to the passing of the guard. And then I think the third area that we really excelled at was our culture. And it wasn't, culture isn't a soft thing. Culture isn't about ping pong tables and pool tables in the break room. Culture is about accountability and culture is about identifying who we wanted to be as an organization and holding everybody accountable to living that each and every day. And we were able to do that and attract people to our organization where that was what they wanted. Not everybody fit at Defenders. Everybody's culture is a little bit different and ours was one of high accountability and hard work and investing in people.
Scott Eckart (08:48):
So is it fair to say now as founder of trueU and CEO, that you took the best of your favorite things there and took them to trueU?
Mike Lantz (08:59):
The original trueU actually started out of Defenders and was a just really focused on the culture community and the leadership development side of things because we saw what was working and we wanted to share it with the world. And so that was the birth of the culture community and the leader development side of Tru You that started back in 2014 and we grew a culture community up to about 60 members, and then I purchased trueU, and we've grown that since then to over a hundred members who are all committed to growing their business in the right way. Again, every culture is going to be a little bit different. What works for one company isn't necessarily going to work for other companies, but it all starts with a vision of where you're going, a mission of why you're doing it, and then values, which are anybody who's going to be a part of this family or this company is going to line up with these values.
(09:51):
It's no different than, I mean we're pretty yoked in very similar ways from a faith perspective and all that, but just because somebody doesn't necessarily believe in all the same things I believe in doesn't make 'em a bad person and they have shaped their family culture for example, around that doesn't make them a bad parent or a bad husband or wife or it doesn't mean that their culture of their family is bad, but I may not fit into that culture of that family. You may not fit into the culture of my family or vice versa. And so we encourage everybody to get crystal clear on what they want that culture to look like and then we help them do that, and then we provide a lot of tools or frameworks or structures for how to go in and fill in the gaps behind that.
Scott Eckart (10:31):
So one of the early probably best leaders, Peter Drucker said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. We've talked about that. People throw that around a lot, and I know that's important to both of us. So how do you interpret that in your world and what you're doing?
Mike Lantz (10:45):
Well, jokingly, but kind of seriously, I highly disagree with Peter Drucker culture does not eat strategy for breakfast. Culture is the strategy. I make that little differentiation because it's not like you have strategy over here and then you have culture over here and they're in competition with each other. One's better than the other. I think the difference at Defenders was culture was our strategy. And so we would spend time in our executive team meetings talking about close rate or talking about how we can improve operational metrics, but we spent a lot of time talking about how can we shape this culture that attracts the very best people that are lined up with our core values? And we spent a lot of time talking about it and doing things about it. I saw senior level leaders at Defenders no longer be senior level leaders at Defenders because they were unwilling to walk model our culture or unwilling to hold people accountable to living our culture. And so I think that that's the strategy in my point, the point that I'm trying to make there.
Scott Eckart (11:45):
So would you say that's the heart of TrueU then is helping business leaders understand why culture needs to be strategy?
Mike Lantz (11:53):
The heart of we have trueU and underneath trueU. We have our HR and culture strategy division and our HR and culture operations division where companies hire us to actually run their HR departments to be their HR departments. And then we have our culture community and we have our leader development, our leadership academy, and it depends on where a company is, we meet them where they are. So if they already have an internal HR department, then we want to help influence and help them grow their culture and their HR capabilities. Some organizations come to us and they don't have anything in place, and we'll go in and not guide them through it. We will actually do it for them. We're not inserting our values and our culture into it, but what we will do is we will act as a chief people officer and provide all of the things that they need in order to grow a really great culture, but also to be operationally efficient to have in their HR department and developing their leaders and training their managers and all of those things.
Scott Eckart (12:48):
Mike, you have a phrase that I really like that you talk about on your team is helping others become the best version of themselves that could be looked at as a trite phrase, and I know it's not just a platitude. Talk to us and our listeners a little bit about what that looks like and what you've seen maybe some real life stories of how when you've come into an organization, let's say, that is asking you to do, we don't really have a full blown hr, we don't have all the systems and we're worried that we're going to lose some people. We really want people to become best version of themselves. How do you guys do that?
Mike Lantz (13:25):
Can I give you the origins of where that came from? First, I had some things go on in my mid twenties that caused me to just reevaluate why I was here, what my life was going to be all about. And I hired an executive coach and he was helping me work through this and all that. And one of the things that he asked me to come up with was a vision statement for my life. And at that point in time, I basically decided that everything that I was going to do in my life, it was going to be to motivate, to inspire, to coach, to teach others to do better. And I didn't have the phrase of become the best version of themselves at that time, but that was really the direction that I really wanted to go. And that's how it was after I kind of cast that vision that I found Julie to marry and we decided to have five kids, two of which are biological and three of which are adopted.
(14:11):
And it's why I started my first business and it's basically been my north star for how I operate my life. And then I read a great book called The Rhythm of Life by Matthew Kelly and I read this book once a year, every year I'll read it again. And one of the things he talked about was people becoming the best version of themselves possible. If you know who Matthew Kelly is, he has a very strong faith background, and so he really believes that we owe that to our creator to become the absolute best version of ourselves that we can. But what I found in my 35 year business career is most people don't, and I'm not sure all of us can get to exactly what God has put us here on this planet to do. I just don't think people really truly realize what they're capable of.
(14:51):
I think if you go ask probably some of the most successful people in the world and you say, is there more in there? They'll say, yes, there is. I do think people get beat up by the world and things like that. And so I think that impacts their view and sometimes they need people from the outside to come in and unlock a new view for them. And that was one of the things that really I was really excited about joining Defenders about because we attracted people to that company that had never made more than 7 58 bucks an hour, and within two years we're showing 'em how they can go and make 80 or $90,000 a year because we saw it in them, they just didn't see it in themselves. As most organizations that are founded by somebody, that organization takes on the culture of the founder.
(15:34):
And so that's why at TrueU, we are focused on helping people become the best version of themselves. And there's a lot of people that we do that for. If we're coming in and we're helping a organization run their HR department to enable the business to grow, then we're helping the founder, the owner, the C-suite, the employees there and the people that they serve out in the community, whether it's a service-based business, product-based business, whatever. If we're going in and putting somebody through one of our leadership programs, the people that are going through that leadership program are becoming a better version of themselves than they were the day they started and we're teaching them how to go and lead a team that then can become a better version of themselves before their leader went through that leadership program. The culture community that we have that people can be a member of companies can be a member of.
(16:20):
We're teaching them how to become a better version of themselves, whether it's from a leadership perspective, a personal performance perspective, a company operations perspective. It's the thread that weaves through our entire organization and we expect the people that work inside of TrueU to do that as well. We have lots of examples where we eat our own dog food, where we've put somebody through one of our leadership programs who's one of our employees, and it's changed everything for them both personally and professionally. So that's kind of where that comes from and why we see it as being so important.
Scott Eckart (16:50):
Well, I hope that anybody listening to this would really take away from the value of not seeing mentoring or not seeing that as kind of a nice little extra thing. I know for me in my many years of business that mentoring is a passion project of mine. Anybody who calls me sets up an appointment will get time on my calendar no matter what. It doesn't matter if you're selling Cutco knives or whatever it is. I will always do that because I know how hard it is to kind of break through that and to ask for time, whether it's they just lost their job and they don't know what to do or where to go. And when I was 19 ish, yeah, 19, I had a mentor and didn't know it at the time, his name was Rick, and he saw something in me, Mike, that I didn't see in myself. And that was the absolute key. And I think that, correct me if I'm wrong, but we can do that in business. We can see things in people they don't see in themselves.
Mike Lantz (17:49):
When somebody shows up on day one to work for you, they are basically the sum total of all the experiences that they've had in their life. Life is hard. And so those haven't always been positive experiences and they haven't necessarily known to put positive the right people around them. It doesn't have to all be positive, right? Sometimes you got to deliver tough messages. And so I just hope that business leaders understand the position that they're in to be able to influence for the good or the not good these people's lives.
Scott Eckart (18:23):
Let me get personal for a little bit more personal. I happen to know that you were able to get pretty close to Jim Litten who was one of your early mentors. Do you mind sharing a little bit more about Jim and what you got to do with and for Jim?
Mike Lantz (18:36):
Yeah, so Jim Litten, for those that don't know, he's the owner of the F.C. Tucker company. He bought it from the second-generation Tuckers in 1986, and he still shows up every day and has ever since. And so he's brought on some partners and things like that. But I got the opportunity to sell residential real estate early in my twenties and did pretty well at it. And they had a new position open for vice president of training and development. And so Jim reached out to me and he said, how would you like to take on this position? And I told him no the first couple of times. Then I realized I grew up with a dad who was a very successful real estate agent, and at the time it was a lot of nights, a lot of weekends and things like that, and I didn't really want that for my life as much as that was there.
(19:20):
I wanted to make sure that I had time to have a baLantzd life or an integrated life. And so I decided to talk to Jim about the job, and he got me pretty excited about it. And so I decided to take it. And one of the reasons I was really excited to take it is Jim was going to be my boss, my leader, so I could talk to Jim every single day, and here's this massively successful man, but also did it in all the right ways. And so I became their vice president of training and development, and he taught me a ton over the course of five years for the time I held that role. And I learned so much from him. And right to the very day that I resigned, I remember going to him. I wanted to go start my own business in 2000.
(19:57):
And so I went to him and I said, Jim, I'm going to resign. And he shared that he was disappointed in that sort of thing and said, well, this could be your future. You've known this here. But he asked me one key question that I ask everybody whenever they're leaving a company, are you running to something or are you running away from something? I told him I was running to something and he said to me, he goes, great. I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. If you ever need my help, let me know. And he's always been on the other end of the phone whenever I've tried to call, ask advice and that sort of thing. My dad ended up finishing out his real estate career at the F.C. Tucker Company. And so my dad recently sold his home and I helped him do that.
(20:35):
And so I'd reached out to Jim and I said, any way you could come to the closing and in pure Jim Litten style, there he is waiting in the lobby of the title office to see my 87-year-old dad on the day he was selling the home that he and my mom lived in for many years before my mom passed. So it was, he's just a wonderful man, and he walks the talk. He's not soft, he doesn't let people get away with stuff. He holds people accountable. He's a great leader. He's built a very successful company, but he also has empathy and compassion and really cares about people.
Scott Eckart (21:03):
That's amazing. Any other mentors that you've had?
Mike Lantz (21:06):
I mean, I couldn't let a podcast go by without mentioning my dad. So my dad and I are very close. He was my best man in my wedding and he and I really great friends as well as having a father-son relationship. He and my mom taught me so much growing up. They taught me character. They taught me hard work ethic. They taught me how to care about stuff. There's a lot of people that go through life that just don't care about things, and they created opportunities for me. They didn't show up and say, oh, Mike, here's a job, or Here's 10 lawns you can go mow. They said, why don't you go start a lawn mowing business? And then encouraged me to do it. And I did that, started at 10 years old and ran a lawn mowing business until I was 18 and graduated high school and at one point had five of my friends working for me. And so they always said yes to things that I said I wanted to do. As long as they were constructive, they were positive, and that they would have a positive impact on me moving forward.
Scott Eckart (21:58):
Now is that nature? Nurture? A little of both. I mean, when think about all the people that you have come across your path and you see someone with enormous potential, is there a limit to how far somebody can go? Is it nature, nurture? I mean, what's your thought on that?
Mike Lantz (22:13):
Yeah, that's a great question. I have three adopted kids, and so my wife and I, we have this nature nurture conversation all the time. I believe it's both. I think there's a lot of people that have had they were born, you look at a set of siblings and one ends up over here on the left and one's up on the right. Not that either one of those are bad, but they're just very different. And so I think that there's both involved in it. I think my energy and my passion and my zest for life is nature. The fact that I'm actually doing it is a result of my parents' nurture. But at the same time, there are people that might have what I had growing up, but they didn't have the drive and the passion and to go actually do it,
Scott Eckart (22:57):
Who wouldn't? How do you deal with that when you see someone that has pure raw talent that you look at them and you're like, you could be amazing, but they won't take it. They won't do it. What do you do with that?
Mike Lantz (23:08):
Well, I think one thing on that is you're placing your definition of success on that person. One of the things I've learned raising five adult children now is that everybody's definition of what success is is very different. When I'm showing up to support somebody, I'm going to support them to the best of my ability that I can, but they'll either take it or they won't. And I remember once that executive coach I was telling you about when I started my own, my first business the first time in 2000, it was an executive coaching firm is how I started it. And I remember I had like 25 clients at one point, and I'm talking to my coach and I'm frustrated because some of my clients aren't making progress, and I'm like, rich, I'm literally laying awake at night worrying about it. And his phrase was, stop laying awake at night worrying about somebody else when they're not laying awake at night worrying about themselves.
(23:58):
And he said, lay awake at night worrying about the guys that if you picked up the phone at two o'clock in the morning, they would take it laying awake, stop worrying about the people that are sleeping just fine. And so that's kind of how I evaluate sometimes when I'm working with people is how much do they care? I mean, I'm always going to care. I think more than other people care, but you've got to put that kind of lens on it, I think, and it can't be my expectations. It has to be the things that they want.
Scott Eckart (24:24):
So in an organization though, when you've got roles to fill and that kind of thing, you've got to fill roles. And so you're pretty good at spotting talent. I see your organization, I know the people in your organization, one in particular named Amber, who's amazing spotting talent can be interesting because first impressions are what they are. And I know you use assessments and other tools, but let's talk about how you spot talent. What does that look like, especially in a people business, HR leadership Academy, all of that?
Mike Lantz (24:55):
Great question, and here's a place that I think organizations miss sometimes as well. First off, really important to get crystal clear upfront exactly what you're looking for, have a standard for it and don't waiver from it. I've been involved in hiring thousands of people, and you go meet with a hiring manager and I go, what are you looking for? And they'll list it out. It's probably longer list than it really should be, but they'll list it out. Six weeks will go by and they still haven't found the right one. So they start to minimize the expectations of what they want. And that never works, right? Because then they hire somebody that is, they have these big expectations. They consciously know they're hiring somebody that probably can't fill those expectations. And then a year from them, they're frustrated that the person isn't filling the big expectations.
(25:39):
So I think it's real important to get clear on what do we want them to do? And it's not the 25 things, it's the three to five to seven things that are most important. These are the things that will get them promoted or these are the things that will get them fired. And so a lot of organizations, when they create a, what do you want to go hire for? It's 22 things, and I try to coach them to narrow that down to three, to five to seven things of non-negotiables. These are the things I, I've got to make sure that they can do, and I need to evaluate them on those things. EOS has a really great model for thinking then about the non-technical things, the entrepreneur operating system, and they have a thing they call the People Analyzer. And the People Analyzer really talks about, if I think about Scott for our organization, do they line up with our core values?
(26:28):
We have five core values, do they line up with that and have I vetted them through a conversation around each one of them so that I can not just hear Scott say, yeah, service matters to me. I want to hear examples and I want to have a specific conversation around that. So I'm going to vet them through that, and then I'm going to ask them, do they get the job? Do they really understand what's expected of them? Those top three to seven things, do they want it? How bad do you want this job? And do you have the capability or really the capacity to do it? Not capacity, but capacity from a skillset perspective. And I think when you vet somebody through, these are the things I'm really looking for, and people line up with your core values and they get the job, they want the job, and they have the capacity to do it, it's easier than most people put into.
(27:13):
They just sometimes don't want to listen to the truth because they're desperate to fill a role or something like that. So we'll talk about Amber. I'm not saying something that I haven't said on a stage in front of her. When her resume came into me, it wasn't the typical resume I was looking for. It came with a very high recommendation. It wasn't the typical resume. There was really nothing on her background that convinced me to say, yeah, you should take on this particular role. But when I really got into our alignment with our core values, the translation of past experiences into what I needed her to do in the future, and she passed the GWC test, do they get it? Do they want it? And do they have the capacity to do it? And she's crushed it ever since.
Scott Eckart (27:53):
I'm a quote guy, as you know, and Jade Simmons, who may or may not know her, is actually a concert pianist of all things and spoke at one of our big national meetings, and she said, the more you can be yourself, the more uncommon you become. At first you think about that and you're like, okay, but the more you can be yourself. And I think in organizations, people are like, well, we have a mic. We have a Drew, we have a Scott. What we need is you to be you. Instead of looking around and saying, well, there's all the cool kids. I'm going to be that. No, the more you can be yourself, the more uncommon you become.
Mike Lantz (28:31):
And think that's a great company culture, isn't it?
Scott Eckart (28:35):
Right? Yeah. So don't be afraid to then stand up and say, but I think of things this way, and I know Mike likes baseball, but I like cricket, but people don't necessarily want to stand up and be uncommon. And the other thing I tell people, especially young advisors who come in, people need to meet you. They just don't know it yet.
Mike Lantz (28:55):
Yeah, for sure.
Scott Eckart (28:56):
So get out in front of them because nobody can tell your story. You can tell your story.
Mike Lantz (29:02):
So a story you don't even know about me that I want to share. So I was raised at 79th and Ville Road and I went to North Central High School. I was raised in an upper middle class family, most of my upbringing and everybody I spent time around, they were all like me. I had a lot of friends that weren't like me in high school, but the friendships that just naturally got created, they were all like me. And I had the opportunity between high school and college do. Have you ever heard of the group up with people? So I played trumpet in their band, traveled all over the world, and the biggest thing that came out of that was cultural understanding. And I look back on that experience with such regard because I got to travel for one full year with 185 other people from 48 and from 37 different countries, and none of them, for the most part believed the way I believe I was the only one from the state of Indiana.
(29:49):
So I think that one of the things that I try to trumpet with organizations is not everybody's going to be like you. And a lot of organizations, they have this philosophy of hires, and so they only want to hire people that are exactly like them. On some levels that can be a good thing, especially if they're like you in a lot of good ways. But what blind spots are you missing? What part of the diversity part of your organization are you missing? Other people have varying points of view of how things should be done, and maybe they're right or maybe their ideas are better.
Scott Eckart (30:21):
So up with people, the original gap year, and I think I was 10 when my mom drug me to go see up with people. I grew up in St. Louis, so I don't know, it was at the big auditorium there. And I thought, wow, but singing, dancing, and it was all positiveness, right?
Mike Lantz (30:39):
Well, no. Whenever you put a hundred and eighty six, eighteen to 25 year olds together on the road for an entire year, oh my.
Scott Eckart (30:47):
Yeah.
Mike Lantz (30:47):
It's not all positiveness.
Scott Eckart (30:48):
Yeah, we'll talk about that after the mic’s off.
Mike Lantz (30:51):
But you learn how to work through conflict. I learned more in that one year than I learned in college. I've learned more in that one year than I learned in probably the first 10 years of being a professional.
Scott Eckart (31:00):
A hundred percent. Assessments. Do you like them, use them? Are they helpful, not helpful?
Mike Lantz (31:05):
I like them. I use them. They are an input. They don't define exactly who you are. I don't encourage people to make hiring decisions based solely off them. I mean, that's a dangerous thing in many, many cases. But things like DiSC Predictive Index, Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, what I like recently is Working Genius. Working Genius really measures the work that somebody likes to do. It was produced by Patrick Lencioni with the Table Group, wrote tons and tons of books about this. And I think it's a helpful thing for leadership teams to look around their table when they're hiring somebody new and saying, what work needs to be done? And let's go hire somebody that really likes to do that work. So for example, I'm an innovator and a galvanizer. So the innovator is the person that loves to come up with new ideas to problems. And the galvanizer is the one that's swinging the hype towel at the party.
(31:52):
And so that's the role that I play in the organization. But there is one role called Tenacity that is the person that gets things across the finish line, and that's not me. And if we didn't have people with Tenacity on the Tru You team, then all that would ever happen is Mike would come up with a bunch of ideas that would never get finished. And so I think it's important. If we didn't have anybody with Tenacity on our team, that should be a spot. Next time we're going to fill a role that we ought to think about.
Scott Eckart (32:16):
Very good. Mike, tell me a little bit more about your team. You and I share the visionary Gene love Rocket fuel because I stopped feeling bad about myself being a visionary. I had been on teams where I had basically just felt bad for being something that was actually my chief skill, and that was seeing the future and helping other people see the, and it wasn't until I really dove into that book that I understood some of my unique ability in being a visionary, but I did drive people a little crazy with that. I didn't have a good integrator and they weren't willing to embrace my particular unique ability. But Rocket Fuel was a game changer for me, that book, because when you can bring visionary and integration together, it is like a rocket taking off because when you bring those two fuels together, then there's really nothing you can't do. So tell me about your team today.
Mike Lantz (33:15):
Oh man. My team is awesome. There are various times where I just scan the roster of people that we have with us, and I just start smiling because we've created this amazing team, and I think everybody probably says that, but our team is really solid. When people just randomly reach out to you for no particular reason and tell you a great success story about one of your team members, it's awesome. We have a management team that consists of me. I play the visionary role. Chris Mills is our president and she plays the integrator role. And then we have Amber, who ultimately is our Chief revenue officer. Her title's a little different than that. We have a chief of staff and then we have a chief learning officer, so somebody that keeps us on all of our organizations on pace with our learning initiatives and things like that.
(33:57):
And so we're all very different and we recognize that in the room. Quick. Funny story. We are doing some planning a couple of years ago, and there's this EOS activity that they do where they pass out these cards and they say, everybody write down about each person what you need more of and what you need less of. They said to me that they need less innovating. And at first I took it like a gut punch. I was like, that's who I'm, and they're like, but then when I started talking to them about it, they were like, you can innovate, but what you can't do is change priorities all the time, innovate, put it in your remarkable and at the right time, let's talk about it. But I've been one that's been guilty of coming in on a Monday morning and saying, I got a couple new ideas that I want to move forward with. And they're like, well, they're going to trump the ideas that we said at the beginning of the year that we're moving forward with. If Chris Mills does a great job of keeping me in the right place as a visionary, we work together at Defenders and we've worked together here. So we've been together for over 10 years, and we know how each other operates. And that's why I was so excited that she joined our team. She's able to play that role.
Scott Eckart (35:00):
So do the visionaries out there who are listening don't do idea du jour is what you're saying?
Mike Lantz (35:04):
That's right. Yeah, that's right.
Scott Eckart (35:05):
Because you'll drive your team crazy.
Mike Lantz (35:07):
Absolutely. And they'll start to question, what did I say about one of the most important things is people knowing what's expected of them. And if that changes frequently, then they don't know the true direction. And so not saying you don't innovate and try new things, but you just can't be changing it all the time.
Scott Eckart (35:22):
Yeah, you don't want to have a bunch of frustrated people because that never works well. And I've heard recently that with plans for expansion on trueU, that was one of the things that the team had to kind of at first were like, Mike, I don't know. We've got all this other stuff. But then they rallied, right? And now we're looking at St. Louis and Pittsburgh and Birmingham, Alabama and Dallas maybe. I mean, so talk about that process.
Mike Lantz (35:48):
So the HR side of our business, the HR strategy and the HR operations, that's already national. We serve those clients. And then we also have a lot of partners through our sister company SRVHR that we will send business out to, or they find business on their own. But the culture community side is the piece we really wanted to expand. We've got lightning in a bottle here in central Indiana with the culture community. These members are so vibrant, they run great companies. They're all coming together, helping each other grow and develop and share ideas. And we wanted to kind of let the genie out of the bottle, if you will. And so we've found in several cities an affiliate, a person that wants to build a trueU chapter. So we just kicked off last week, the Cincinnati chapter. We're going to St. Louis in January. We're going to go to Pittsburgh in February and Birmingham in March. And then we've also got an affiliate in Dallas that wants to get involved with us. And the goal there is just to grow these vibrant communities in those marketplaces so they can all benefit from each other.
Scott Eckart (36:45):
That's exciting. So one of the things that Future Proof is becoming known for is the idea of pivots and talking to entrepreneurs, business leaders about pivots. So in your career, let's talk about maybe one or two big pivots for my gLantz, either personally, professionally, and maybe it worked out, maybe it didn't.
Mike Lantz (37:02):
Well, one of them that was personal was my wife and I before we got married, we talked about having a big family and that sort of thing. And so right after we got married, we started having to trying to have kids, and we had our daughter pretty quickly a year after we got married. And we made the decision at that point in time that it's great to have a biological child, but we also felt really called to look outside of traditional means of having children. And so I remember the call I got from my wife and she says to me, there's a seminar at this adoption agency, and I'd like to go and just check it out. And I'm like, when is it? She goes Tomorrow. And I was like, okay. So we went and we sat through this whole day seminar about what it was all about.
(37:43):
And at the end, they pass out this application and they say, if you want to apply to be adoptive parent. And so we filled it out and they were like, what do you want to adopt? And we're like, yeah, whatever comes first baby born. And literally eight days later, our phone rang and they said, we have a baby boy for you to adopt. And that was our son, Jackson. And he's grown up to be a very fine young adult, and he has taught us more about life and about raising kids than we've taught him. And then we had another one, and then we adopted two more. And so it's been great, but that was a pivot moment. We wanted to have this kind of messy family a bit and an integrated family and a diverse family and that sort of thing. And it's been so great for all of us from a professional standpoint.
(38:27):
I've left corporate jobs twice to start a business, and when I left those corporate jobs, I didn't think I would ever leave those corporate jobs. So the first time it was leaving FC Tucker and I just had this thing put on my mind about starting this business. That was a pretty significant pivot. And there were times early on in that that I'm like, what the heck have I really done? Same thing at Defender Direct. I thought I would be at Defenders my entire career. But then having seen this need for small to medium sized business owners to have some strategic talent consulting caused me to do that. We haven't failed at those things because I have a tradition that whenever I resign a job, I do it. My last day is always March 17th, St. Patrick's Day. I'm not Irish and I didn't go to Notre Dame, but I'll take the look at the Irish on my side when I'm starting something.
(39:11):
So those were a couple of pivots that were meaningful. And I think the last one that I'll share is when I started trueU HR back in 2017, we kind of were going down a very different path than where it is today. And Chris Mills came in and really helped me see some and open up my mind to some new ways of doing business that really have paid off for us over the past seven or eight years. And if it hadn't been Chris and I already had the trust in her, I kind of wonder whether I would've been open to the pivot.
Scott Eckart (39:40):
Well, I know in my advanced age, I've worked really hard, Mike to remain open for feedback. Feedback is a gift, and to not remain teachable is a very dangerous thing. A hundred percent I've crossed the 60 threshold, but when I intentionally do it, it's the most freeing wonderful thing I could ever do. When I created a new series of educational workshops that I do for business owners and I decided to workshop it, I'd never done that before. And I think because I was too insecure to do that, so I decided to workshop it. So I got some people in the room that I know well and some that I don't, and I said, Hey, I'm workshopping this. And so possibly for the first time in my career, I actually steered into and not away from feedback. And when I went into the room knowing that people are going to tell me things they don't like, and I was totally okay with it probably for the first time in my career. And it was amazing the things that I learned. And one of those people was Marcus that we work with, and he came up with something that just absolutely was a small thing, but in a different circumstance, I've gotten my little feelings hurt.
(40:56):
And so I really tried to keep that mindset. And I think as a leader, sometimes we think we're at least I'll speak for myself, not you above that, or I have it all figured out, that kind of thing. And so I'm trying to find other ways to do that, steer into it. And if feedback is a gift from people that care about you, not just haters or whatever, it is one of the most freeing things that I could ever do, and I wish I had done it sooner. So on that note, are there things that you would've done differently or that you would've done sooner, maybe in your career as we finish up here?
Mike Lantz (41:35):
While I don't regret leaving the FC Tucker Company and starting my own business, I believe everything has a purpose and a journey and all of that, I was way more confident in what I knew than what I really knew. So that was in, I was 30 years old and I thought I knew a lot more. And so I wonder sometimes, and candidly, I don't think I realized how much I didn't know until I ended up going to Defenders and it was a bigger company and that sort of thing. And so candidly, I wonder sometimes it all worked out, but I wonder what could have been different if I had not been so impatient and wanted to go and do this business. Yet I always knew. But when I get something stuck in my head, I have a hard time. My parents used to say, I have sand in my shoes.
(42:18):
I gave the example of me going, where are we going next year on vacation when we hadn't even finished the first one? That's just kind of been a thing that I always have to look out for. And there've been a few times in my life where that's kind of burned me a bit, and I don't know that it burned me that time, but I often wonder if I'd stuck around the Tucker Company for another five years, what could I have learned that had been a catalyst for faster growth and opportunity in my life? That's one I think about quite a bit.
Scott Eckart (42:42):
Okay. Very good. Mike, this has been a really fun conversation. You and I get to spend a fair bit of time together in our meetings, but not like this. So I appreciate you sharing your heart and learning more about this incredible company that you've built, and I just appreciate you and your time.
Mike Lantz (42:56):
Oh, thanks for having me, and I'm excited about what your podcast is doing and the impact it can have on other people.
Scott Eckart (43:02):
Great. Thank you.
Mike Lantz (43:03):
You bet.
Scott Eckart (43:04):
Our conversation really speaks to what the show's all about: the actions, moments, and mindset that it takes to keep moving a business forward. Here are three things that really stood out to me for my conversation with Mike Lantz of trueU. number one, culture is strategy. Don't separate them out. Keep culture in the forefront and your team will thrive. Number two, when hiring a new team member, remember the initials GWC, do they get it? Do they want it? And do they have the capacity for it? Be very clear in your expectations. Get it, want it, do they have the capacity for it?
Scott Eckart (43:45):
Number three, if you're a visionary, make sure you have a great integrator on your team to complete that vision in the way that you really see it. Get the book Rocket Fuel and see how working with an integrator will make that vision a reality. Thank you for listening today. If you like what you've heard, please join us in the Velocity Network and sign up@www.velocoaches.com, which is a gathering of entrepreneurs, business owners, and people who desire to learn more about running and owning a business. Also, you can subscribe to Future Proof on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.