Hi, this is George Samman.
I'm the founder and CEO of Growth Drive.
Growth Drive is the number one best -selling business advising platform, and
this is our podcast, The Business Advisor Hot Seat.
Now in the hot seat, you're going to hear from industry leaders, thought leaders,
your colleagues who are going to share tips, techniques, war stories about
building a thriving advisory business based on delivering client wins.
We're going to get into it.
We'll get into it about the Growth Drive methodology, the clarity software, what we
see out in the world.
so much more than just the system.
And I'm also the author of The Growth Driving Advisor, which is based on over a
decade of being an advisor to advisor, working with you and your colleagues,
helping them build their practices, helping them through client engagements.
And it's really proven strategies for leading businesses from stuck to best in
class.
Check it out.
So strap in.
We're going to light this up.
Here we go.
Our guest this week is my friend John Fulwiter, PhD.
And John is a certified exit planner with a fantastic background.
You know, he's been about 15 years in business coaching and strategic planning
and execution.
He's been one here in the VOS.
He's been most recently with Pinnacle Guides, both terrific programs.
And John and I are in fact collaborating on a CEO facing book.
about getting unstuck and growing a business.
So strap in, here we go.
This episode is brought to you by Growth Drive.
Growth Drive is the number one best -selling business advising platform with
training, technology, and support you need to get the success you want.
Find a way to engagements, expand your reach and impact, and build a thriving
advisory business based on delivering client wins.
Growth Drive, find out more at growthdrive .com.
Well, welcome ladies and gentlemen.
This is George and this week I'm really excited to welcome John Fullwiter.
John has a tremendous background in business advisory.
You've been doing this for a long, long time and you have a lot of specific
experience.
with using some of the top systems out there.
And we'll jump into that detail.
So welcome, John.
And why don't we start by you sharing a little bit of a better view of who you are
and why clients hire you.
Yeah, thanks for having me on, George.
It's an honor.
I'll start with where I come from in terms of my family.
That's where I always start.
So...
Happily married for 25 years.
My wife is a nursing professor.
We've got three cute kids living in the best city in the United States, Lincoln,
Nebraska.
Loving our life here.
In terms of my business background, yeah, I have been at business advising for quite
a few years, coming on 15 now.
Working as you say with the major systems, I was a professional EOS implementer
trained by Gino and his team.
And then some EOS implementers left and started their own business operating
system called Pinnacle.
So I was involved with Pinnacle for a number of years.
And now I'm delighted to have expanded my toolkit with your stuff, Growth Drive.
Awesome.
Thank you.
Yeah, that's terrific.
I mean, those are outstanding systems.
And honestly, it's a kick to have a guy with your depth of experience using our
tools, our methodology and your engagements.
And what type of companies do you work with, John?
Yeah, privately held companies employing anywhere from four people to several
hundred.
It's not so much the type of company that matters as it is the type of owner, right?
I work with business owners who are coachable, who are absolutely convinced
that there's a next level for themselves and for their businesses, and they want
help getting there.
Yeah.
And yeah, I love, you know, those guys, ladies and gentlemen, John has a
qualification process.
He has standards.
that his clients need to meet and that is a best practice, right?
And why do you qualify people so diligently?
Well, because they won't get the value out of the work if we don't.
If they're not coachable, they won't take the advice, they won't pursue the growth
initiatives.
If they don't...
want to grow, well, it's a little bit of a circular argument.
They won't want to grow.
Hey, there's a ton of business owners out there who have bitten, scraped, and clawed
their way to a stable business.
And it has been a long and hard road.
And they are reluctant to upset the Apple cart by
trying a growth initiative.
And so they stay where they are, right?
Barely beating inflation each year.
That's not the type of person that works well with me.
The person who works well with me has big dreams.
Yeah, I love that.
I love that.
Because if you want to see an ROI, you have to put the work in, right?
That's like everything in life.
You have to put the work in.
And yeah, outstanding.
You know, you and I have a lot of conversations.
We talk about you, actually one of our earliest conversations was about the
business as an engine and the engine as an analogy.
And in fact, you and I are collaborating on a book that'll go out that's a CEO
facing.
And you want to describe that a little bit from your perspective.
Yeah, I'm excited to collaborate with you on that.
You know, everybody watching listening, if you don't already know, George is a
talented guy.
And if you're a business advisor, like a lot of the people who watch the show, I
mean, you need to read his book, The Growth Driving Advisor, which presents
what I'll call a quantitative model of business growth.
as opposed to what you see in the business operating systems like Pinnacle, like
Traction, like Scaling Up, where it's more qualitative, right?
Set rocks, set annual goals that are aimed at growth, sure, but what kind of growth
and how much?
It tends to be, oh, a tad fuzzy.
right, with business operating systems left to their own devices.
You know, a business operating system is really an execution system for executing
on the owner's vision.
And what I found is that the owner's vision isn't often shared by or seen in
the same terms by.
the senior leadership team.
And George, your research has proven that out too.
You've done the comparison reports on the initial view of where the business is in
terms of the three dimensions of business growth that we're gonna talk about here in
a second.
And you found, what is it?
99 % of the time they're not aligned and 1 % they are.
That's right.
Yeah.
it's essentially, yeah, that's a good description.
Right.
And so, you know, with my experience in business operating systems, I've
encountered a lot of situations where the owner's priorities get kind of short
shrift, get not mentioned at all, get delegated to the leadership team.
You were going to say, George?
No, no, I'm been...
Sound agreement, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, they get delegated to the leadership team and leadership teams
often, in my experience, are that kind of in name only, right?
They're glorified doers who have been given a fancy title for the purpose of the
business operating systems accountability chart exercise.
And they end up,
setting rocks, setting annual goals that are pretty much just writing down on a
sheet of paper what they were gonna do anyway.
And those what they were gonna do anyway are not true move the needle initiatives
on what matter to business owners and those being predictable profit and
cashflow, predictable, sustainable revenue growth and...
predictable transferable value.
Yeah.
That's a lot of, I don't want to, I'm going to say, I'm going to use the term
navel gazing, but that's, that's not really fair, but, but my personal beef and
feel free to shoot me down, but my personal, I contend that those systems
promote internal conversations without considering the outside world.
What do we know and what do we think we're capable of?
How do we see the world?
And it's very much like people living on an island unaware that the rest of the
human race is around them.
And they live on that island and they have their mores and they're not really
considering that, for example, we're growing barely faster than inflation or
we're profitable.
You have X points of margin, but you know that your industry is double.
and you haven't really considered that.
Those are just, those are easy high level views.
I think you're right.
And...
Well, let's not call it navel gazing.
Let's call it looking right over the bumper at what is right in front of the
vehicle.
That's a better description.
You know, in our collaboration, we're kind of describing the business owners
business.
as a stock car, right?
Based on the analogy everybody's heard of, entrepreneurs will often say, I'm building
the plane as I fly it, right?
Or I'm packing the parachute after I've already jumped out of the plane.
And those are fine analogies and everybody gets it, right?
But not everybody has actually flown a plane or actually jumped out of an
airplane.
Everyone has driven a car.
Right?
And so we describe the business as a car that is speeding along toward a
destination, right?
And it's the business owner's job to decide what's the destination.
And what's that quote, you know, be careful if you don't know where you're
going because you might get there.
Or there's another quotation that says,
Be careful the road that you take, because any road will get you to somewhere, but
we've got to get you where you want to be as a business owner.
And George, your research with what, several thousand, tens of thousands, 50
,000 business owner respondents has shown that they want three things.
First, they want growth, and we want them to have sustainable growth.
Yeah.
62%.
Yep.
Second, they want the business to be easier and more fun to run, which comes
from predictable profit and cashflow.
And some of them are preparing to exit in some way, which means that they need a
company that's exitable.
They need transferable value.
And we both know that in the
vast majority of companies, the value that you've created, the wealth that you've
generated isn't transferable.
Someone wouldn't buy it.
In the present state of your company, now that's fixable, of course.
Which is where you and your colleagues come in, which is where the three
dimensions of growth methodology, the growth drive platform comes in,
absolutely.
And supports, we have,
members, subscribers from all walks, former Vistage chairs, EOS implementers,
former EOS implementers, former Pinnacle.
I could go on and on, a lot of fractional CFO.
They're using their own, they're using their oar system.
And what we're doing is augmenting it, improving the efficiency of research and
bringing a diligence to the party that are a rigor to the...
to the understanding of the business that I think, I obviously think is needed.
Hey, you wanna talk for a sec?
You hit on something earlier that I'd love to pull the thread on.
When a business operating system is deployed, I believe you and I talked about
the average, you have a long, well over a decade, 15 years, right?
That is a long time experience.
About how long does the CEO and...
her or his senior team stay with that operating system.
Not very, right?
So, you know, EOS is designed to have the client graduate after two years, you know,
work with the EOS implementer for two years and then go off and do it on your
own.
The, man, the sad reality in my experience, right, and that of, you know,
many other professionals is that,
the business operating system never makes it all the way down to the ground, right?
It often stops at the senior leadership team, maybe makes it to the senior manager
level, but you know, the line managers, the line workers, it doesn't make it down
that far.
Now I'm a big fan of a push EOS Worldwide has been making lately.
You see it all over the socials.
They're doing the how to be a great boss workshops just all the time.
And I think and I hope, I'm obviously not on the inside anymore, but I hope that
that is part of their strategy to get the business operating system used by everyone
in the company.
But,
an inability to get the business operating system cascaded all the way down to every
employee is one of the reasons that it doesn't work.
And another is business operating system fatigue.
And that's where, well, I mean, like we were saying earlier,
they're basically just writing down what it is that they were going to do anyway,
not making exciting for the owner strides in the value of this company, in the
predictability and industry leading amount of its profit and cashflow, not leading to
sustainable revenue growth.
And then they just kind of...
drop off and lose the discipline.
And that is for, I'm gonna make two comments.
First of all, I love the fact that EOS is pushing.
This is a very important market that we all need to make better, improve.
And I'm happy to hear that EOS is doing things to push the system deeper into the
businesses.
And I wish them all success.
It's a huge market and we can all collaborate towards this common goal.
which is having businesses that are immortal, businesses that serve the
communities they enter.
I'm up on my stump.
But businesses that serve their stakeholders and their communities.
And that's really the name of the game.
And I know you and I see the world through that same lens.
Yeah, EOS fatigue.
I've heard that from several people.
I don't know if it's a term out there, but I don't think it's EOS fatigue so much as
it's...
It's, they get over the, something shiny.
It's easy to fall back.
We all do it.
Think about going to the gym, right?
It's easy to fall back into old habits.
Yeah.
And then suddenly think that going to the gym twice a week is going to have the same
impact as going to the gym five times a week.
And, and falling back into old habits, something shiny.
There's the, there's the expense, not really understanding the ROI, something
that we, we try to hammer home.
Yes.
And then there's the flip side of that, which is when you start doing EOS or any
other growth drive, doing something is exponentially better than doing nothing.
So when you start doing something, you start seeing results and it's maintaining
that doing something that is the challenge that we really, we're all working hard to
make sure that the market does.
All right, I'm off my stuff.
Yeah, so you actually came up with an analogy I love, and this is the genesis of
us deciding to work together to collaborate, is the concept of...
So we've been saying view your business as an engine and measure the gears inside
that engine and the health of each of the gears and their ability to mesh together
to generate an output.
And that output is profits and cash and value.
And you said, well, you have...
And I hand it over to you, where did you take it?
Well, so George, you invented the three dimensions of business growth, the profit
dimension, the revenue dimension and the value dimension.
And you had eight objectives and key results per growth dimension, total of 24.
And for some reason, what just popped into my head is three V8 engines.
And so I sketched out a stock car that, you know, kind of humorously has a
gigantic engine compartment with three different engines in there.
And the cool thing about the way the engines are connected with each other in
real life inside your business and also sort of conceptually is that there's no
bad place to start.
Right?
You can tune up your profit engine and leave your revenue and value engine alone
for the next 90 days.
You could tune up all three at the same time while you're still driving the car.
So I had AI draw for me an image that I showed you of a stock car.
with three engines and it's barreling down the track and the business owner is
simultaneously tuning up the engine, souping up the engine and driving the car.
And that's the promise of the system.
And what I really like about it is that you can do both.
Long ago, seven or more years ago,
I came up with this analogy that really resonated with my clients.
And I said, hey, doesn't it feel like this is a speeding freight train, right?
And it's going uphill.
It's going in the direction you want.
It's going uphill, kind of like a growth curve.
It's going up, but it's shaking really hard, right?
And you kind of wish that you could,
shore up the track bed, upgrade the locomotive and put guard rails on all at
the same time, all while you're still going up into the ride.
And people said, yeah, that really makes sense.
But like the thing about that analogy was it was hard to translate into print
because...
I would have to go like this.
I always struggled with how to write that.
You pretty much have to make the motion and do the
This episode is brought to you by Growth Drive.
Growth Drive is the number one best -selling business advising platform with
training, technology, and support you need to get the success you want.
Find a way to engagements, expand your reach and impact, and build a thriving
advisory business based on delivering client wins.
Growth Drive, find out more at growthdrive .com.
And so the idea of a custom stock car with three engines is way easier to explain in
print and in speech and everything.
And doesn't require me to...
embarrassed myself by going, well, you're, you're a journalist by training.
So not being able to write, I'm sure you could figure out how to, how to turn that
into a word.
Hey, don't talk about my sordid past, man.
There's a, it's like, Hey, I'm an attorney.
So I've got you beat.
Doesn't like the media.
Well, nobody likes attorneys.
So at least some of us do do in fact like the media.
Hey, you know what I like about your analogy of the three V8 engines is that
that actually carries through the concept of dimensions, right?
These are not the three phases of growth.
Yeah.
They're three dimensions of growth.
And I describe them as dimensions purposefully because you can move in all
three at the same time.
All three are impacted by and impacting the business.
And the three V8 analogy pushing, you know,
Powering the transmission, pushing power to the drivetrain is spot on.
And you can tune up one of the engines and you're going to push some more power.
I love the analogy.
Hey, you know, another, we have so many great conversations and this is, we'll
have another one, at least another, you know, let's do this again.
The concept, can you please describe what you mean by, do you mind describing what
you mean by exit?
Yeah, so I specialize in a certain kind of exit.
So George, I'm doing it, you should know as a collaborator with me on a book that
I'm doing a very unwise thing, which is pursuing multiple book projects
simultaneously.
So one of the other two I'm writing is grow, exit, repeat.
which says, Hey, let's help you as the business owner, grow your current
business.
Yes.
To the point that you can exit day -to -day management of it and repeat with
another venture that's going to grow bigger, better, faster, be more fun
because of all that you learned in business one.
Now here's the fun little wrinkle exit day -to -day management.
start the new venture and keep the old venture as a cash flowing asset after you
have installed what I call a true executive team that you can truly trust to
run and grow the business without you being involved in the day -to -day
management.
I absolutely love that for so many reasons.
So one, and I think I put this in a blog post giving you credit, exit does not mean
leave, right?
That's right.
You can exit the day -to -day accountabilities.
And for a lot of us as entrepreneurs, I'll put myself in that bucket.
That is a very sexy ring.
Mike, well, wait a second.
I can still be involved with this thing that is almost like a child to me, right?
It is my progeny.
It's intellectual progeny.
Now, I need to, I feel like I have to say this every time.
I love my kids and I do not view my business in the same way as I view any of
my children, nor does any entrepreneur, but man, this is our intellectual progeny
and we invest that level of emotion in it.
You know, George, you've just come up with another great analogy and another great
concept.
And we've got a quickly patent and copyright this.
So when,
your child successfully leaves the nest.
You have exited day -to -day management of your child.
Hadn't thought of it that way.
And you're still, for the lifetime, the parent.
Yes, you will.
And analogous to a business that you still own, you can still be the mentor.
Yes.
You can still be an idea person.
You can still be...
chairperson of the board.
You know, you kind of think about family councils, right?
The parents are the chairpeople of the board.
Yes, they are.
You know, it's fascinating because if we take this analogy, first of all, it
scratches an emotional itch for a business owner.
Second, you know, exit is used.
But ladies and gentlemen, exit means so many different things.
And we knee jerk, our assumption is exit means I'm gonna sell out to someone else.
Well, not necessarily.
John, you're saying, what we help people do is graduate from being the president to
being the CEO.
And what you're saying is why don't you graduate from being the CEO to being the
chairman of this business and maybe the president CEO and then chairman of another
and another.
And if you think in terms of building a proto family office, of building something
truly meaningful with diversified,
You diversified revenue streams inside each business and diversified revenue
streams from the various businesses, which may be related.
This is a very, very powerful.
And you and do I recall correctly that you use this as one of your ultimate
qualifiers.
If you can find people who want those results, they are.
Yeah.
I mean, my earlier talk about the ideal client, coachable, big dream wants help.
And then there's like even above that, someone who does want to grow, exit and
repeat.
Man, that's even more fun.
I would argue for the business owner and it's more fun for me as well.
And when we think in terms of, so I put yourself, ladies and gentlemen, imagine
yourself in that person's, so she has just become the chairman of her business.
She is looking out and saying, I'm going to start another business or acquire
another business and grow it or et cetera, et cetera, or split part of my previous
business off that doesn't make sense and grow that as a separate but related
entity.
Lots of different ways to do this.
The dog food manufacturer that buys the packaging company, you know.
But do you think that she cares about predictable profits and cashflow?
Do you think she is the chairman running a new venture cares about predictable,
sustainable growth?
You bet she does probably more than the person who has sold it to a third party is
like, not my problem anymore.
You know, this, the level of caring that you're going to get the level of focus and
dedication to, to maintaining a best in class business so that she can, I'm
pointing out the word.
So there's an interpretive dance that comes with this podcast, ladies and
gentlemen.
So that she can.
she is free, right, to run, build, and excel in the new business, that's the name
of the game.
Yeah.
And I've seen that happen.
I've seen best in class business practices be implemented in preparation for the exit
from day -to -day management or the exit from the accountability chart.
And then,
You know, business one is stronger as a result because it's no longer, you know,
owner, operator kind of really loosey goosey make this stuff up as we go along.
But it is a well run, well oiled machine.
And a machine that is immortal.
A machine that goes on to greater glory.
pardon the religious analogy, but a business that is immortal and goes on to
greater glory without the founder or the current owner at the helm.
Once we get that light bulb to go off, I mean, what's the impact when you get them
to realize that this is within the realm of the possible, in fact, a well
understood and actionable goal?
Yeah, I mean, one thing that's possible, I'll just tell the story.
Summit Contracting, a small town in Pierre, South Dakota.
The founder, Tyler Samuelson, hired me to get him off the accountability chart at
Summit Contracting.
He said so explicitly.
And then what he did is he created a holding company of businesses that are
either Summit's best customer,
or their best supplier.
So for instance, Summit Contracting is the leading builder of commercial agriculture
facilities on the farm for farmers.
Grain bins, that sort of thing, grain systems in the Great Plains.
And they buy a lot of trailers to haul that equipment around to the various job
sites.
So Tyler said, well, why am I buying these trailers from somebody else?
Why don't I start my own trailer dealership, you know, source my own
trailers and then sell trailers to other people as well.
And then another thing was, you know, his customers want monument signs on their
operations and everything.
So he said, you know, why are they buying monument signs from somebody else?
Why don't I?
buy a sign company and fix that up and sell monument signs.
And at the same time, I'll be a great sign provider for main street businesses in
small towns, South Dakota, small town, Nebraska that I really care about.
And so Tyler is really doing a fantastic thing where he is pursuing his
entrepreneurial energy in new ventures.
He's genuinely benefiting the original company Summit Contracting, and he's also
pursuing a passion project of promoting strong economies and strong quality of
life in small town South Dakota.
I mean, his hometown has like 1200 people or something like that and is thriving.
in part because Tyler spearheaded the start of a daycare in Peer.
He's also building workforce housing.
And so, you know, what's possible, what's exciting about this is I'll reference Dan
Sullivan from Strategic Coach and his four freedoms of an entrepreneur, freedom of
time, money, relationship, and...
purpose.
And I'll dive deep on the freedom of purpose.
The cool thing about being an entrepreneur, and Tyler has lived this
out, is you don't have to have charitable Tyler and business Tyler.
You can do both simultaneously, right?
Everything he's doing is promoting the cause that he cares about, which is the
success of
small South Dakota communities.
He doesn't have to do some separate charitable life, right?
Growing his businesses pursues that purpose, which is pretty darn cool.
That is incredibly cool.
I love that story.
And I'd love to meet that man.
You know, it's because he's fulfilling.
We have a...
I'm not gonna go down that rabbit hole.
He's fulfilling, but he's doing right and he's doing good and he's making a lot of
money in the process and that is also equitable.
That's the name of the game.
Do you have any insights?
Are you able to share insights on how his success, I'm gonna make an assumption that
that permeates the culture of the businesses he runs.
Well, I mean, absolutely.
Every client that I work with has a strong behavior -based culture.
We clarify the core values of each company that I work with where core values are not
something generated by HR or generated by a committee, right?
But they come from the business owner's core, right?
They're the way people behave,
on a day -to -day basis, right?
That really resonates with and energizes the owner.
It's the people, the owners want to surround themselves with.
And so yeah, they absolutely have a strong culture where everyone is pulling in the
same direction.
Yeah, and benefiting at a micro and macro level, at a personal and interpersonal
level.
You know, it's interesting, I'm gonna make a, I just make a, if those of you out
there want to understand what a strong culture might look like, now, vision is
critical, core values are what I call guiding principles, need to be principled,
look up the word.
And don't show up with words like integrity or hard work because those are
table landing.
Okay.
Now, if you want to understand what a strong culture looks like, get a copy of a
clarity level one discovery report.
It's very easy.
You can go onto our website and generate one yourself.
Email me, I'll send it to you and read through the bottom of that report.
And the bottom of that report says, imagine if your business could say yes.
Imagine how it would feel if your business could say yes.
to the following, and it lists out these eight eight cylinder engines, the 24
growth driving objectives of a best in class business.
And if you read those and answer yes to them and think about what it would take
the culture, the behaviors it would take to create that and what you would need to
the vessel in which this can all operate.
you'll understand, you'll get started understanding, boil the voodoo out of the
concept of culture.
Culture is created and nurtured and it is created to align up with the principles
and it is nurtured to ensure that over time it adheres to the principles.
And guys, if you don't understand what a principle is, thou shalt not kill is a
principle, right?
George, those are principles.
So when you were doing your interpretive dance and you were drawing the vessel,
that contains the people at your company.
I was thinking about how business owners in early days of putting in place core
values will often almost create a sidecar over here for what Greg Cleary and Steve
Prada.
in their book, Pinnacle, call the cranks, right?
That's somebody who is productive in their role.
It's usually a salesperson, right?
Who, you know, continually blows past quota, but is doing it in a way contrary
to the values, right?
Is behaving in a way that is alienating at least to the coworkers.
and could also be alienated into customers, vendors, suppliers, other
stakeholders in the community.
And we often create these like crazy contraptions that kind of make room for
somebody that we think we can't afford to lose.
And that makes our vehicle less aerodynamic, right?
as we're racing down the highway, there's all these projections and protuberances to
make room for the cranks.
And what we really need is a sleek, well -designed stock car with three V8 engines.
With three V8 engines.
Well, and two, it's hard to get rid of a crank.
And there are cranks,
And there are also, there's the corollary, which is, well, George came on board as
our bookkeeper, then we made George our controller.
He kept working hard, he's doing his job well.
He's been here for 17 years.
He kind of needed a raise and a promotion, so we made him the CFO.
And I pick on the CFO because that is very, see, in finance and sales, this is
where I see this behavior the most, right?
You have a salesperson, you hired a salesperson, then you make them a sales
manager, then you make them the chief revenue officer, and what they really are
is a gifted salesperson.
and maybe George has no business, doesn't even really understand what the role of
CFO is.
And now you're stuck with them, right?
And they become, it's very different than a crank, but it's almost the same.
I'm gonna tolerate these behaviors.
I'm gonna tolerate these things because I really am an interpretive dance day.
I'm gonna tolerate these two people because this getting rid of George rocks
the boat and I feel bad and getting rid of Jane.
the misbehaving salesperson who crushes her quota is also like, who else is gonna
sell this stuff?
And let me tell you, the answer is in sales process, accountability, guiding
principles.
Anyway, love that, thank you.
What have we not hit on?
It's hard to believe we've been chatting for about a half hour, a little more.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, we wouldn't want to go past your regularly scheduled time.
What final questions do you have for me?
You know, I'll ask one final question, and I guess it's kind of a hot seat question.
What is one...
piece of advice or admonition, warning that you would give to your fellow
business advisors and or to CEOs.
What is the one thing you think they should know?
About...
About creating a best in class business, I'll make it easy.
Things to do or not do.
To do, hire and develop a true executive team.
In order to be able to grow, exit, repeat, you need to have in each function in your
business, sales, operations, finance.
what we call a mini CEO.
Actually, it was Greg Cleary and Steve Prada in the book Pinnacle that first
described this mini CEO.
That is a chief executive officer of their function.
Imagine the marketing and sales function was its own company.
The operations function was its own company.
The finance function was its own company.
You need at the head of that function, a chief executive officer who can...
completely owns that function, is not just a glorified doer, but is a true leader who
achieves results by developing talent underneath them, rather than by doing the
work themselves.
And if you don't have that, it's gonna be harder, if not impossible, to exit day -to
-day management of
the company.
That is a wonderful, wonderful answer.
Thank you.
I let you know, ladies and gentlemen, you, if you haven't checked it out, the first
growth driving objective of the first dimension of the three dimensions of
business growth is senior leadership team, senior leadership team, leadership, not
senior management, right leadership.
And I'm going to just, I'll close out with something you don't know, but I'll, I'll,
I'll tease it out, you know, in the, in the next and.
final module that we are releasing in the clarity strategic capacity analysis is a
CEO insights.
And in CEO insights, there is taking the 25, 24 OKRs plus one, which is time to
market and we won't get into that, but taking these growth driving objectives and
assigning primary accountability amongst the chief executive,
the chief operating, the chief financial and the chief revenue and saying, okay,
you have primary accountability for these and you have collaborative accountability
on some of these others.
They all have collaborative accountability to the whole, so that is actually coming
soon to a software near you.
I love that answer.
The effective senior leadership team, it is the game changer.
It really is.
Yeah.
So, I tell you man, what a fun conversation.
Thank you.
It has been fun, George.
Thank you.
And we'll definitely have to have you back soon.
Looking forward to it.
Thanks.
I'm going to kill the recording and say to everyone, ciao for now.
Thanks for tuning in.
Hi this is George, thanks for listening.
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