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Every day you have a choice. You can wake up and choose to give in to mediocrity and complacency, you can choose bad habits and poor choices, and you can do the bare minimum to get by and fly under the radar. Or you can choose to make today the day that sets you apart from the crowd, you can choose to start doing the right things, the things that will set you up for success. You can choose to create a life that is worth living, worth waking up to, and worth sharing with the world around you. Today You can choose to start with a win.
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Speaker 2
I think first things matter a tremendous amount.
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Speaker 2
is that easy. Now, you got to have some discernment about what you respond to quickly and what you don't. Otherwise you're just going to be a slave to whatever's the urgent thing right in front of you.
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Speaker 1
that's good.
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Speaker 2
because we all think we're good at it.
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Speaker 1
There's there's some gold right here
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Unknown
Welcome to start with a win where we unpack franchising, leadership and business growth. Let's go.
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Speaker 1
and coming to you from start with the win headquarters at Area 15 Ventures. It's Adam Contos with Start With a Win. Today we have William Vander Blumen on the show. William is the CEO and founder of Vander Blumen Executive Search, a search firm that's got over 15 years and the 3000 searches under its belt in executive search.
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Speaker 1
William has written a book called Be the Unicorn 12 Data driven habits that separate the best leaders from the Rest. It was released by HarperCollins leadership in November of 2023 and has a ton of great game changing tips for job seekers, employees, hiring managers and really people who want to grow their leadership. Isn't that what we're here for is to grow our leadership.
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Speaker 1
So let's dive in today with William and start with a win.
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Speaker 2
Thanks so much, Adam. It's great to be with you.
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Speaker 1
Yeah.
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Speaker 2
Totally normal career progression, textbook not. what a weird career. You know, the entrepreneur's journey is never straight up and to the right. It's loopy, Right? So for about 15 years, I served as a pastor, and that's a whole long story. That's another podcast. But prior to that, I was the kid that was always an entrepreneur. I mean, just always had a bent for it.
00:02:00:22 - 00:02:23:12
Speaker 2
I remember starting a car wash when I was about 12 and then hiring my little brothers and, you know, it was not indentured servitude, but it was pretty close. And I remember buying out I was the paperboy in our neighborhood, and I bought out the other routes around me and reconfigured them and then chopped them back up. So, like, I'm just incessantly tinkering and building and trying out.
00:02:23:14 - 00:03:01:13
Speaker 2
And then that, combined with a pastoral move, was really interesting. I served great churches. I think I was probably always a little too entrepreneurial for the church and rock boat more than I probably should have. But yeah, I left the church that I was serving went through a divorce, which I would not recommend. It wasn't anything the it wasn't anything juicy enough for the tabloids, but it was just a tragic bad thing and ended up being a single dad of four kids and of needing to figure out what to do.
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Speaker 2
So I went to work for a big oil and gas company. Since we live in Houston, that's kind of what there is. And it was really fortunate to get a good job on a management rotation track, right? So you do this discipline one year and this another and this. You'll come out learn learning the business. First rotation was H.R., and during that year the CEO said, I've been CEO for nine and a half years, which in is a Fortune 200 company.
00:03:27:04 - 00:03:48:21
Speaker 2
That's that's a long time in that setting. And he said, it's time to find my successor. Yeah. So they hired this thing called a search firm. And 90 days later they had their new CEO. And I thought, what in the world did I just see? And I was kind of since I was in H.R., I was kind of the waterboy for that team.
00:03:49:00 - 00:04:11:16
Speaker 2
Right. Didn't didn't get to contribute much, but got to see what was going on of the church that I had served here in Houston, First Presbyterian. It's actually where Sam Houston went to church. I yeah, I was called to lead that when I was 31. What were they thinking? They did not use a search term. They should have, but they took almost three years to find me.
00:04:11:20 - 00:04:32:19
Speaker 2
And it's a great church. And then I stayed six years and then they took three years to find the next guy. So in 12 years they spent half their time looking for a leader and half their time with one. And I thought, Wow, the oil and gas company just did this in 90 days. There's got to be a way to build something better.
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Speaker 2
So I went home. Adrian and I had been married maybe two months, blended our families, six kids, a house we could barely afford. And I said, Adrian, I think I'm supposed to quit my job and start something new for churches. And she looked at me and said, That's because churches love new ideas, right? So no one's ever said that in the history of ever.
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Speaker 2
And and and it was the fall of 2008. Now, if you're too young to remember that just Google 2008 economy.
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Speaker 1
It a.
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Speaker 2
Really stupid time to quit your job and start something new. But here we are 15 years later, we've completed 3000 searches. We branched out. We started with how do we help a church find a pastor? And then it turned into heads of school for faith, these schools and C-suite for very large nonprofits and and now the values based businesses of the world, kind of the chick filets of the world are hires to help find their their leadership.
00:05:42:17 - 00:06:29:21
Speaker 2
So it's it's been a crazy, strange journey. I never could have done the job I'm doing now had I not done all the jobs leading up till now. So, you know, winds in things that didn't feel like a career led to a career that I love and would call a win. Right now.
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Speaker 1
But yeah.
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Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, John Maxwell's been a friend for a long, long time. Mentored me when I was a young leader. I'm not as smart as he is. He can sit down and say, Here are the ten things every leader, the 21 irrefutable laws. I mean, like he just it just comes out and I'm not that I'm not that smart.
00:07:07:14 - 00:07:31:14
Speaker 2
So I like to see patterns and see if I can name them. And I like data to drive things because you don't want my ruminations or my thoughts. That won't take long at all. So in the in the short lockdown of the pandemic, we had a little time on our hands. Every one of our clients was closed indefinitely, which I learned is really not good for your PNL.
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Speaker 2
But we we realize, you know, in our in our searches, the very best candidates at the toward the end of the search get a long format, face to face in-person interview. And we realize we've now done 30,000 of those. That's a lot of data you could probably find some pattern. So we said of the best of the best, how did they do in the interview?
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Speaker 2
How are they doing the job? How are they are they getting promoted? Have they added value of the best that we've ever seen? Are there common denominators? Do they have do they do they look the same? Do they act the same to what do they have in common? So we went and kind of scoured through things and what we realized was it wasn't the way they looked, it wasn't their IQ, it wasn't where they went to school or pedigree.
00:08:25:05 - 00:08:53:10
Speaker 2
It was how they treat other people. And we found 12 distinct habits that these best of the best, I call them the unicorns are 12 habits that were easily seen in the research, like these 12 stand out and they treat people in these ways. Very intentional, are up bent toward habits that most of us are unintentionally bent away from.
00:08:53:12 - 00:09:19:00
Speaker 2
And so when we realized this is no long, it started out as kind of a selfish project, like could we figure out how to spot unicorns better when we saw the common denominators? These habits, we realize we're not spotting unicorns now. We can train people to become one. And that's when I said, okay, this needs to be a book out because as you know, writing a book is not a lot of fun and you don't make any money doing it anyway.
00:09:19:01 - 00:09:40:14
Speaker 2
So it better be a message that you feel really needs to get out there to put the time and effort in. And that's kind of what led to the book. And, you know, if you if you open table of contents and look at the list, the 12 habits, the most common reaction is probably like, duh. William Who would guess that I kid people.
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Speaker 2
Adam and tell them the alternate title should have been, Well, I guess mom was right, because it all sounds like stuff that you get drilled in your head when you're a kid, you know? But, but, but what's different is this is not William's 21 irrefutable thoughts about leadership. This is here's what the data says about people who stand out in the crowd.
00:10:06:03 - 00:10:22:06
Speaker 2
It's simple interpersonal habits that if you will train these habits into who you are, you will stand out with a crowd and become a unicorn.
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Speaker 1
Yes, sure. Yeah.
00:11:00:09 - 00:11:16:18
Speaker 2
You know, funny, next time I write a book, I'm going to wait a year because I wrote that, you know, in publishing you write and it's about a year before the book actually gets out. Now that I've read the thing over and over a year, I think I know the material better than I did when I wrote it.
00:11:17:00 - 00:11:35:03
Speaker 2
I'll rewrite it and you know, what would the order be? What's my favorite habit of I So I'm kind of like, I'm a big believer that if you want to make a permanent life change, you need to start with a small, winnable change. You need to start with a win, for lack of a better way to say it.
00:11:35:05 - 00:12:00:01
Speaker 2
So I don't know if it's my favorite habit, but I think the easiest one to just grab hold of focus on and Master is the very first chapter and we call it the fast, which is a little misleading. That's a little bit of clickbait. It's not raw speed. I am not fast. I tell people I'm Dutch, We're built for wind resistance, not speed.
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Speaker 2
So, you.
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Speaker 1
Know, it's.
00:12:03:11 - 00:12:26:02
Speaker 2
It's if it were really accurately titled, it would be the responsive unicorns get back to people and they do it quickly and they do it intentionally. They're fast at getting back to people. They're fast to make it personal. And that is something that we as humans genuinely stink at.
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Speaker 1
So so I don't know. Yeah.
00:12:47:14 - 00:13:14:20
Speaker 2
Yeah, it is that easy. It is that easy. Now, you got to have some discernment about what you respond to quickly and what you don't. Otherwise you're just going to be a slave to whatever's the urgent thing right in front of you. But somehow unicorns find a way. They figure out how to respond to people. Not in an auto respond, not with this chat bot, not with one of those automatic messages Apple tries to populate your text with when you're on the phone like a real human response in very quick time.
00:13:14:20 - 00:13:42:15
Speaker 2
And you know, we found that it really doesn't matter what part of humanity you look at. We're terrible at this. I don't know the why. I mean, you know, I was reminded when I was writing this book, I took a lot of Latin in college and the word in Latin, that means tomorrow is the word. Christina So when you procrastinate, you're literally putting it off for tomorrow.
00:13:42:17 - 00:14:02:13
Speaker 2
And we do that no matter what we found. Adam We found that of people who use inbound marketing, like fill out a form and somebody will get in touch with you. You know, the sales team should be sitting waiting on those forms, right? there's form. Got to get back to somebody. We found that that a massive study of companies that use email marketing.
00:14:02:15 - 00:14:27:01
Speaker 2
If you respond to a form when it gets sent in within a minute of receiving it, you have a 98% chance of being on a sales call with that person. 98% is slam dunk. You wait 20 minutes after the form comes in, you have a 60% chance. You've lost almost 40% chance just by waiting 19 minutes. If you wait 24 hours, I won't walk through all the stages.
00:14:27:01 - 00:14:53:14
Speaker 2
But at 24 hours, if you wait 24 hours after a forms filled out to respond to it, you have a less than 1% chance of having a sales call. And the average response time for all of the people taking this survey, 42 hours. So none. And they're paying money to have inbound marketing and they're paying marketers and then literally throwing away.
00:14:53:18 - 00:15:04:22
Speaker 2
We talked to I don't know your listeners may not remember this going back, but eHarmony, you remember that it's like the O.G. before people were swiping left and right or whatever. Whatever you.
00:15:05:02 - 00:15:07:10
Speaker 1
Do now.
00:15:07:12 - 00:15:45:10
Speaker 2
That's right. A database populated almost exclusively with lonely people who really want to meet somebody. So eHarmony sends an email, we found two people. We might be a match. The response time for this forms crazy, bad, terrible. Yeah. You get people in our work so we're executive search so usually we're going and finding somebody like you that's already got a great thing going on and we're going to introduce you a brand new destiny and but we do have people who are genuinely looking for a new setting, like whatever they're doing has run its course and it's time to make a change.
00:15:45:12 - 00:16:14:18
Speaker 2
People that really want to find their next career move, we send emails to them and they wait days to get back to us. We're if you want to make a quick change, if you want to start with a win in becoming a unicorn, it's pretty simple. Just get back to people. Now, remember, I was a young senior pastor, 27 or something like that, and I'd been asked to come help this church relocate.
00:16:14:20 - 00:16:39:11
Speaker 2
They'd sold their property, they bought some new property. They hadn't built anything yet. So I was kind of like with them in the wilderness, I guess would be the way you say it. And we were looking for somewhere we've outgrown the temporary facility that we had. So looking for a new place. And I'm riding around with a community leader who used to be on our board and had stepped away from the church and he said, you know, right down the road from our new property, there's that YMCA, and they're not even open on Sundays.
00:16:39:11 - 00:16:56:20
Speaker 2
I bet we could use that. I said, Cool. He said, You know, I know the board chair there. Mike Cool. And we were driving around, we get back to my office and he hand me the guy's number and said, You should give him a call. I said, I will. So we sat and visited for another ten or 15 minutes and I said, Anything else I can do for you?
00:16:56:20 - 00:17:16:03
Speaker 2
You said, Yeah, why haven't you called that guy yet? I said, Well, you just gave me the number and we're he said, William, let me tell you, a leadership principle is never fail me. Your first opportunity to get something done is almost always going to be the best opportunity You have to get something done. Call them now. Never forget.
00:17:16:03 - 00:17:24:15
Speaker 1
That. It's just well, it's like I mean, do.
00:17:24:17 - 00:18:03:10
Speaker 2
You ever pull out in the street you're waiting to turn left into traffic and you pull up to the intersection and there's a chance to go a pass on that sometimes. And I'll sit there and wait forever for the next one to come up.
00:18:03:12 - 00:18:43:04
Speaker 1
That's right. that's good. Yeah. Well.
00:18:43:06 - 00:19:10:14
Speaker 2
Yeah. So. Yeah. So you're calling people back. You're doing great. How about the the hardest one that yields the yields? The biggest result. Okay, Remember, you start with a win, you want to stack wins. Momentum is a leader's friend. Get a win, get another way and get another win. It will lead to more. I suppose you're familiar with this just a little bit, but when you want to win, you want to try a challenging one.
00:19:10:16 - 00:19:31:18
Speaker 2
I'll read the chapter called The Self-aware. Okay? And every chapter is pretty simple. It's a case study of a unicorn in that particular trait. It's what we learned interviewing the unicorns that we've identified, and then it's how you can apply it. You're not going to read this book and say, William is going to cure cancer. That's that's not going to happen.
00:19:31:20 - 00:19:56:04
Speaker 2
It's pretty simple. Go to the chapter on the self where y. Okay, so we surveyed all these unicorns that we found and we pretty long survey. One of the things in that survey was force rank. These habits tell us what you're best at what you're worst hit the clear winner for last place was self-awareness. Everyone's like, I'm terrible.
00:19:56:04 - 00:20:24:22
Speaker 2
I've got to get better at that. Okay, let's turn it around. We also surveyed a quarter million normal people like you and me, Right? Ask them some similar questions, including would you rank yourself below average? Above average, average. You know, at each of these 12 traits, 93% of all of the general survey that we did, 93% of respondents said that they are above average.
00:20:25:03 - 00:21:12:18
Speaker 2
And self-awareness, I'm not a mathematician. 93% of a group is not above average. So so on the one hand, the unicorn said, Man, this needs more work than anything else and on the other hand is the biggest blind spot we normal people have because we all think we're good at it.
00:21:12:19 - 00:21:56:07
Speaker 1
And 100%. That's right.
00:21:56:09 - 00:22:15:23
Speaker 2
Yeah, but, but we but that's a tough one to swallow, man. I remember when I was 22 or three and and going through grad school at Princeton, preparing to be a pastor and in the Presbyterian Church, I said, you have to go through all these tests and personality things to figure out if you're you know, not crazy and if you know what you're getting into.
00:22:16:04 - 00:22:42:13
Speaker 2
And I've taken one of these, where's Myers-Briggs and the Brickman and the Strength Finders and all these things, the counselor said, Wow, it says, You're really good at this and you get strengths here and man, you're good at that. You just got a lot going on. That's great. The results show that on occasion you might have trouble receiving criticism and tell you the straight truth.
00:22:42:15 - 00:23:09:15
Speaker 2
You might have trouble receiving criticism. I immediately said, I do not. And the counselor just kind of leaned back. I said, Is that right? We don't like hearing this. Well, and that's why we that's why we decided when we started to see just how unaware people are of what they're good at or not, we built a software assessment tool that you can take to show how you measure up the unicorn factors.
00:23:09:17 - 00:23:55:15
Speaker 2
We built it as a36 so teams can take it together, even families, so people can try and develop some self-awareness with just some some really raw data about here's how I see myself and here's how my friends and coworkers see me. Yeah, so I hated my name growing up, but it's my best asset right now. If you go to Amazon and just try spelling Vanderbilt, I and it's such a messed up name, it will you will get where you're supposed to be.
00:23:55:17 - 00:24:47:10
Speaker 2
Same on the internet and you know if you just go to Vanderbilt Omnicom, you'll find you'll actually find about 4000 totally free resources for leaders on how you build and run and keep a great team. But but you'll also see the book so Amazon or now if you want a one stop shop, a website with everything and some bonus content the unicorn book dot com the unicorn book dot com and I hope that's helpful.
00:24:47:12 - 00:25:10:23
Speaker 2
I don't know that I'm a unicorn. Does anybody ever say by hitting the snooze button? No, it's not really a win. Yeah. I make my kids put their alarm clock on the other side of the room so they can't do that. Are you going to get out of bed to turn it off? You know, on my best days, which I hope are most days.
00:25:10:23 - 00:25:35:04
Speaker 2
But, you know, we're humans. I screw up all the time. I have a rule of first in, first out. I think first things matter a tremendous amount. And so the first thing out of my mouth is always gratitude. Gratitude. And I'm a spiritual guy and so, like, for me, it's thanking God for all the great things in my life.
00:25:35:04 - 00:25:56:18
Speaker 2
And what's interesting is it's not just a spiritual thing. Probably the most read column I've ever written for Forbes was how successful people start their day. And it's amazing across all faiths and non faith bandwidths, how much, how many people start their day that are really successful with a moment of gratitude. And so that's that's the first out the first in for me.
00:25:56:20 - 00:26:17:20
Speaker 2
I want to read eternal principles. So that it's a step into a temporal day. I'm undergirded with something that's more permanent. And I don't I'm not trying to proselytize or anything, but for me that is a faith reading, right? For others it might be wisdom or something, just something that's a little higher altitude than what you're about to jump into for the day.
00:26:17:22 - 00:26:21:01
Speaker 2
I think the first things matter. So first thing out of me