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Have you ever noticed how most productivity advice doesn’t work for women?
That’s because you’re not a man who has a spouse at home who takes care of all the things. You’re juggling your business, your career, and your family. It’s a lot, and no wonder why things slip through the cracks despite your best intentions to get it all done.
When you treat everything as an urgent priority, you lose all sense of what truly matters. This podcast is here to help you change all of that. One week at a time.
Unlike other shows about productivity, only The Productivity Shift helps women in charge (in their biz, at work, at home, etc) take back their time and use it to make progress on what matters most to them.
Each week, Elise Enriquez, a productivity dork and certified life coach, guides you to redefine what productivity is to you. You’ll get strategies and insights you can implement right away. Lighten your load and focus on what’s most important so you can create a life and business that is meaningful to you.
Ep 131 - What Would Break If You Walked Away? - A Conversation with Andy Nunez
Elise: Hey everybody. Welcome to the Productivity Shift. I'm Elise Enriquez, and this show is for women running a business and a team who are sick of carrying the mental load everywhere they go. This is your peek behind the curtain at what's actually working, straight from the consultants, coaches, and strategists who help leaders get their shit together so you can finally build what you know is possible.
This week we are talking to Andy Nunez. Andy has spent 30 years helping businesses see what they're too close to see. He's built companies, taken one public, helped others exit, and now works with founders and operators to close the gap between how a business feels like it's running and how it's actually running.
In this episode we talk about the fact that data is great, but it just can't stand on its own. We talk about key person risk and what it actually means and why it probably applies to you. And we talk about the question that Andy asks every founder that most of them can't fully answer.
It's really fun for me to bring this conversation to you because I've been able to see Andy in action and the impact he has. We share a client. He works on the strategy, business development, sales, and scalability side of things with this client, and I work down at the ground level with them and their teams on having systems in place to support them as they go after all the big goals they're creating with Andy.
Okay. Without further ado, let's dive in.
Elise: Hey Andy, thanks for being here. I told everybody in the intro how we know each other already and that we get to work together. It's fun to be able to see the same work from different perspectives. A lot of people know my perspective already, but tell us what you do. What's your take on things?
Andy: I've been in the ERP software world for business productivity tools for 30 some odd years. I started some companies, brought one public on the Nasdaq, and helped a few exit with private equity. But what I basically do, especially these days, is help business owners, operators, and investors see how their businesses are actually running. Not just how it feels or how it's reported. I try to help them give direction to the data, and to do that I help them with their visibility problem.
Elise: I love that you're talking about how it feels. When we're getting something up off the ground, when we're getting something running in those first few years, there is a lot of feel to it. Yes, there are numbers, but we're usually doing our thing and creating our own thing because of how we want to feel about what we're doing.
Andy: It's certainly something that has evolved dramatically over the last 10 or 15 years. It's always easy when it's just a couple of people building a small business because the operating system is in the heads of the individuals who are starting it. Proximity is always an important thing. We could rely, 10 or 15 years ago, on the fact that everybody was in a communal space. Everybody was in an office or a group of offices. The interpretation of human intent was easy. It came naturally. The water cooler talk, the look over the cubicle, being together in a conference room. And now that we've separated more in the way that we do business and it's not as communal, we've lost some of that context.
Before COVID you had tools like Teams and Zoom that you could use, but no one used them because we didn't feel comfortable with them. Then we were forced to use them. And now, even though people are back in offices, they still do their meetings over Teams. They're still looking at their screens. There's comfort in that structure, but in doing so we really do lose the human intent and the content and context of what we want.
Elise: What you're getting at, to me, is this: how do we have intentional businesses and intentional lives? I have my own formula for that. It's clarity, communication, and consistency. How do we get clear about where we're at and what we want? How do we communicate that to who matters most? And then how do we have the simplest systems possible set up to support consistent action, consistent progress, and consistent reflection and check-in on the data?
Starting at the clarity piece, because I feel like that's probably the first thing you're doing too -- creating clarity for the clients you're working with. So when you're coming into a business, what are founders not looking at that you immediately notice? What are the common themes, the things you see right away more often than not?
Andy: A lot of times they are looking at the right categories. They're looking at revenue, customers, their internal team, and the dependencies across those things. But they're looking at them in isolation. For example, they look at growth and it's strong, but they don't recognize that there's a concentration of that growth in just a few relationships. Maybe their salesperson has the key relationship with the key customer. You've got a hero dependency, and you're depending on that delivery person or salesperson to come through. That can be dangerous.
I'm a nerd, so it's all about the data systems and how we make the data work for each other. But a lot of times the system that works comes with hidden constraints because the system itself puts you in these partitions of information and you lose context. Those patterns aren't obvious in reports. But you can capture them. There are signal layers, and you can capture them objectively and systemically. If you put that context in the right way and allow the human to interpret, you can take what used to be something we just intuitively inferred and make it something people can look at, depend on, and act on.
Elise: I would love to hear how that plays out, because I love the idea of data and context. There's information, but what's the context of that information? That tells us a lot. What's an example that illustrates this?
Andy: I'm the old sales guy. We have pipeline reports in our CRM systems, and those pipeline reports tell us -- and this can happen whether you're a manufacturer or a nonprofit, just call it sales or development -- you have a pipeline of how you're going to grow the business. In a data system, we try to quantify that. We try to give it a percentage of success, whether we're going to close this business or secure this donation. And that's a very clean thing.
Then the CRM system tries to give us context. The salesperson says, I think it's about 80% and it's going to close on this date. And then what do we do? We have a sales meeting. Why? To try to interpret the dashboard. To play stump the chump with the salesperson. The sales manager says, you said it's 80% but it's been sitting on this pipeline for three months. So everybody questions and talks about how we could move that deal forward. All of those things are the reason why we have that pipeline meeting every week, even though we have all this great information in that partitioned little data world. What that meeting does is give us context. That's the human intent.
Elise: It's literally a standup meeting. A sales huddle.
Andy: And the funny part is we probably wouldn't go back and change the data pipeline. We wouldn't change 80 to 85 or 75. We just wouldn't know if it's a soft 80 or a hard 80. But today, that meeting is actually captured digitally and transcribed because it's done on Teams or Zoom. We actually have the ability technologically to capture that human intent. If you could somehow marry that with the hard data and have it for all time, because it's all captured forever now, you can start mapping out those trends. It doesn't solve for what the human brain can decipher, but it gives us a lot more context than we ever had before.
Elise: You also have the pattern of the conversation of that particular salesperson. Oh, their 80 is more like an 85. Whereas this person's 80 is more like a 70. It starts to allow a deeper knowledge for the person themselves and for leadership, so you can start making different choices. I love this blend of data and systems plus the context that gets added through discussion. You and I experienced that today in a meeting where we could go through bullet points and give updates, but once one discussion point started, all the ideas started popping and more possibilities became apparent. There's some things you just can't outsource to technology. The two humans together doing that -- now you can take that information and extrapolate beyond it with technology.
Andy: And that's where it becomes really powerful. The strength or weakness of a position, a business, or even a transaction has always been an opinion. It's always subjective. Internal belief does not equal external value, and it doesn't equal operational truth either.
Elise: If only.
Andy: But when you put two of those beliefs together, all of a sudden it starts having more weight. Three or four or five, even more so. That's what we try to do when we get together and talk -- suss out what the real operational truth is. It's never perfect and never will be. But today we really do have the ability to capture all of that. And AI allows us to go through that data in such a measurable and significant way that it can actually pull out the patterns. The human still needs to look at them, but the patterns are there.
Elise: That's what it's good at. And I think it's always about leveraging our tools for what they're best for, not being lazy. That's one of my rules around AI. I'm not allowed to be lazy. You have to have input. For me, the best way I use AI is I'm providing it input and letting it bounce off of me. It's more of a collaboration, which might sound scary to some people. But I do better in collaboration.
Andy: AI is not about speed, it's about clarity. It allows you to manage by exception. It allows you to see things more clearly. Things start finally making sense and then you can start evaluating on a higher level. That's the leverage it brings.
Elise: So speaking of other people -- I imagine with where you are and the people you serve, they've already built something and now they're like, how do I scale this thing? That involves so many people already on their team, and possibly more people coming. When you're looking at scaling a business, what do you see happening at the leadership level that creates drag?
Andy: I'm going to say something you're going to absolutely love. It all starts, ends, and begins with communication. It's about that fabric of how we connect the dots. When it's just the founder or co-founders or a small group of people, the operating system is in everybody's head. Everybody's wearing lots of different hats, so communication is forced and therefore easy. As you get larger, it gets more fragmented. And as it gets more fragmented, it becomes inconsistent. Even though people might think they're doing something in line with the goals of the company, they might not be. That's where communication breaks down. It's not that we're not talking. It's that we're not talking consistently. And consistent business language doesn't help you actually communicate intent. That context is what gets lost between meetings, teams, and even data systems.
Elise: As much as I use the word systems broadly -- to me a weekly meeting is a system -- it still has to be structured well, asking the right questions with the right people there. But yes, that dispersal of communication is real. And I think this pulls into a phrase I hadn't heard before. Is it key person risk?
Andy: Yeah. Key person risk.
Elise: It makes me think of how much is locked into either the founder's head or a subject matter expert's head on the team. I remember watching this when I was in the online sales division at Microsoft. We were building the plan as we were flying it. I was one of the first full-time hires in that space. Very much building the plane while flying it. The hard part was getting past that level where you had this core group that knew how to get stuff done, and then you just kept growing. How do you start to disperse that knowledge across an entire organization?
Andy: That's exactly where a business starts relying on people remembering things instead of the business knowing things. That can actually work for companies, but you have to acknowledge that it's a hero dependency. That person has the key relationship with the revenue source. This is our best support person -- if you need an answer, go to them. This is our best salesperson -- if you want it sold, go to them. That kind of thing will always exist, but when it becomes part of the fabric of how you operate, that's a dangerous thing. A very dangerous thing.
Elise: That's probably one of the awarenesses you bring into an organization. This is great that this person has this key relationship, and what happens when that person goes? Because they're going to go at some point, some way, somehow. This is where I get to see our work connect in an interesting way. You're looking at things at the higher organizational, strategic, and marketplace level, and I'm going, okay, now that they've decided that, how do we make sure people are following along and implementing things at the ground level? What do you wish leaders understood about what their teams need as they are shifting and scaling?
Andy: I honestly believe it's rarely truly a people problem. To use the word system more broadly, it's a system and signal problem. It's okay to rely on great people. It's not okay to rely only on those people. We still have to understand where the business needs to go. That's where the drag comes. The delays in decisions, the misalignment, the rework that no one can track. Individually small, but collectively very expensive. It simmers underneath the waterline. Your business can still be good at that point, but you're not achieving what you want.
So you either settle in as a business owner and say this is fine, this is my lifestyle. Or you double down and say let's do better. It's also where a lot of business leaders say it's so hard to get to the next level. They lie to themselves. They think they'll never replace that person, but it's not about replacing them. It's about not being completely dependent on them. And that also makes that person more effective, because believe it or not, most people don't want to be the single point of failure in the organization. They don't want to be the only person called on a Saturday night because there's no one else.
It doesn't mean they have to hand over all their knowledge. The new hire doesn't need 30 years of experience. The point is that there can be someone who can work with that person, be effectively part of the team. These days, we have much more opportunity to capture that knowledge in a passive way.
Elise: In the ways we're already communicating. We're already having these discussions -- let's pull that out and see what we can do with it.
Andy: This is, to me, a watershed in the way we will run businesses, organize ourselves, and develop whatever it is we want to develop organizationally. We have the opportunity to leverage the leap forward we've just had in technology and in the human equation. I think we'll look back on COVID and realize it really was a key change in the way we think about how we relate to each other. Only because of the magnitude and because of the technology we could put in place to subsidize what we lost. Now that we can do that, we've adopted it. It's part of us. That boulder is rolling down the mountain and there's no stopping it.
Elise: It was a catalytic event. That's always how I think about those things. We can't go back to who we were before. Those happen personally, professionally, and across the world. COVID, the leap forward in technology and AI -- these are all catalytic events that change forever who we are and how we do things.
I want to make sure we put an exclamation point under something here. If you heard that discussion about the one person who has the key relationship, the one person holding all the information -- if you're recognizing that in your organization, it's time to think about whether you're okay accepting that risk, or whether you want to develop beyond it and manage around it. How would you phrase it, Andy? What can they do if they know this is happening?
Andy: First thing I'd say: it's not mutually exclusive. It's not about diminishing that person's role in any way. Even if you accept it and say this is just how our business is going to operate, you should still want to capture that institutional knowledge and enhance that person's ability to do their job by allowing others to help them do it.
The first thing I ask is: if you stepped away from your business for 30 days, would it break? And more importantly, do you know why?
Elise: That is exactly what I want to leave people with. Let's say it again. I know I interrupted you, but it's so true. The founder, the leader -- they are often that person. They're the one holding all the institutional knowledge, all the connections.
Andy: Typically as the founder, you are that point of failure and success. You're the operating knowledge of the business. And if you were to step away and truly disconnect, would the business break? Most people will say no, it wouldn't break. Maybe some things wouldn't get done, some invoices wouldn't get made, maybe a customer or two might leave. But the second part of the question is the more important one. Why? If you understand those answers, you can address those things. And those are actually easier to address than most people think. Business owners assume they're massive problems, but they're usually the easiest things to fix. Typically it's those single human dependencies, and those are not that hard to address. You can take baby steps, and as long as you're diligent, you can have a much more effective business.
And there are a lot of people -- you hear about the silver tsunami -- all these people who want to sell their business and can't because when they're gone, the business is gone. They feel trapped. I would tell them that even people at that stage, who have been running a business the same way for 20 or 30 years, can still ask that question and solve for it. It can actually be solved for better today than it ever has been because we can capture that knowledge, capture that intent, and help the business take corrective action.
Elise: You landed the plane. What I love about that answer is that it applies whether you're trying to make your business scalable, sellable, or retirable.
Andy: It's all the same.
Elise: And those solutions usually aren't as scary as they appear to be. But sometimes it's hard to see it for yourself, which is why people like you and I exist. We're the dorks who are good at this stuff. So if someone is going, oh crap, I am that person and I need to make this scalable or sellable -- how should they reach out to you?
Andy: You can find me on LinkedIn, and my email is anunez@balmvillecapitalpartners.com. We're developing tools to help people with their businesses. That's the best path to start the discussion. It's a simple discussion.
Elise: I have adored getting to work with you on the things we get to work on together. I'm excited about what you're building. I've got the tiniest little sneak peek at what you shared with me and I was like, oh, this is so cool. I love how you think about these things -- that there is the data, but there is the human component and the context, and there's so much possibility in all of that. That's probably why you and I get along. We're all about possibility.
Andy: So true.
Elise: Possibility and problem solving. Bringing those two worlds together. Andy, thank you so much for being here.
Andy: Thank you, Elise. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you.
Elise: Okay, y'all, I'm still hanging onto that question. If you stepped away from your business for 30 days, would it break? And more importantly, do you know why? Sit with that one for sure. Brainstorm on it, journal on it, talk about it with your friends, whatever you need to do. And if you're like, uh, maybe I need to talk to Andy about that -- don't worry. His contact information is in the show notes.
Okay, that's all for this episode. If something we talked about today resonated, I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an email or find me on LinkedIn. I actually read and respond to all of my messages. And if you know someone who needs to hear this conversation, send it their way. See you next time.