Flying Through Business Turbulence: Strategy, Pricing, and Teamwork

Auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly cleaned up. Expect the odd misheard word.

1. 0:00
   Brian Doyle

   If you're asking a young person to put their life at stake for their country or for their team, there is a lot of getting by in there. There's a lot of training, there's a lot of practice, there's just a lot of getting somebody's head into that right space. And a lot of that applies to business too. So how do you motivate people? How do you get them to believe in their team? How do you help them feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves? That totally applies.

   Now, there's a thing as a pilot, it's called a cross check. And so you're looking at your airspeed and you're looking at your altitude and you're looking at your attitude, you know, left, right, whatever. You're looking at your navigation and you're sort of like, you know, cross checking around to make sure that all these things are there. And I find that this plays a major role in a small business, because if you take your eyes off of something for too long,

2. 0:54
   Wes Mathews

   all of a sudden you're upside down. This is the unfiltered truth about entrepreneurship, raw, no BS, no sugarcoating. Welcome to Entrepreneur Intel. I'm your host, Wes Mathews. Each episode, we'll learn from experienced founders and uncover the top 5% learnings that led to their success in all things personal, family and business. This show is sponsored by Stealth Consulting, delivering clear marketing strategies, ROI, and no surprises. I am really excited for today's guest. I want to introduce the guest today, because there's some really cool things here. Number one, you've been married for 32 years.

   That's amazing. Your business with back-to-back Inc. 5000, which is no easy feed. I think one of the coolest things is the 31 combat missions as an Air Force pilot. And you've also written a book. So super excited to introduce the guest today, Brian Doyle. Welcome. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. So I want to start because you have a really interesting business. So I think it makes the most sense for you to talk about holding advisors and the market you serve.

   I just want to set the stage there and then go from there if that's okay. Absolutely.

3. 2:04
   Brian Doyle

   So we improve the profitability of our B2B clients by improving their pricing power. And when I say pricing power, I mean two things. One is the value-based pricing strategy that enables them to get paid for the value that they create for their customers. That's number one. Number two is price implementation. So how do you take that pricing strategy to market in a way that your sales team believes in it? They can validate it with your customers, and you don't lose any customers as you go roll out this new pricing strategy.

   That's what we call pricing power. So walk me through.

4. 2:45
   Wes Mathews

   Talk to me like I'm in eighth grade. And I'm like, that sounds amazing. But what does that actually mean? Is it manufacturing? I'm in Detroit, Michigan, outside of Detroit, big manufacturing auto town, right? Is it suppliers? What type of manufacturing specifically? Yeah.

5. 3:02
   Brian Doyle

   And we work across the B2B landscape. Your example of manufacturing is a great one. On the price setting side, the price strategy side, what we're doing is we're figuring out, okay, you do certain things when you sell your product and service to your customers. And at its highest level, that means you're helping them increase their revenue, you're helping them decrease their costs, and or you're helping minimize their risk. And so what we're going to do is get under the covers and help you figure out what is that true value?

   So if you're selling parts into an automaker, how do those parts enable them to sell more cars? How do you do it in a manner that makes them more efficient, and they say they save money in their process? And maybe thirdly, how is it that your supply chain is so reliable, and you keep maybe all of those parts and deliver them just in time when the automaker needs them, so that there's like almost no risk in the supply chain? And so those are maybe three elements in that scenario, where we could quantify and say, Wes, when we sell these things to you, and then you in turn, sell them to your customers, you make a ton more money and a ton more profit because of what we do.

   We're going to share some of that value with you. So we're going to charge this much, you're going to make that much. And so that's how that pricing strategy comes into play.

6. 4:37
   Wes Mathews

   Follow up to that. So how do you stand out? How does Holden advisors stand out in the crowd? It sounds to me like that could be a crowded space. There's a lot of companies trying to get that same business. How are you guys able to get in there and capitalize and provide your offering? It's the two elements.

7. 4:57
   Brian Doyle

   So you're right. What I just described, value-based pricing strategy, there are other firms that do that. What those other firms, though, stop short of is helping you implement that pricing strategy. So in a common scenario, if I were somebody else, I would deliver you 100 slides in PowerPoint, and I'd say, Wes, this is your pricing strategy. Go execute this. And you'd say to yourself, well, shoot, if I raise price the way they're suggesting, am I going to lose customers? Can I get my salespeople to buy in?

   My sales leader's already mad at me for changing things in the home office. Now he's going to be even worse. How do I roll this out? And so the difference that we bring to the table is that we're going to help you go implement that. So value-based price messaging, what is your value? How's that going to resonate with customers? How do you overcome objections and negotiate with a procurement group that's probably going to throw this back in your face? So how do you handle that? And basically, how do you do it in a manner that if you want to retain those customers, you can retain them, but you still get that price that we figured out and helped you decide that this is, in fact, what I wouldn't go to market with.

8. 6:14
   Wes Mathews

   What's the timetable for that? There's a lot that you guys have to impact there. Impact change across the entire organization. You're talking about salespeople from all the way to leadership. What is a typical timeframe that you guys start to engage to? I mean, are you ever finished, I guess? Is that even a... To answer your question,

9. 6:38
   Brian Doyle

   generally speaking, it's three to four months. Things don't have to happen in sequence. We can start running some things in parallel to make this all work in a shorter timeframe. There are clients that ask us to stick around and, hey, can you do the next level of what we would refer to as capability building? Can you help our sales team get to the next level and then the next level and the next level? That absolutely happens. But Wes, I have no desire to set up a cubicle in my client's office space and live there for the rest of my life.

   I know some consultants, that's like the goal is to never leave. I have no desire to do that. Part of what makes my job cool is I get to work with lots of different clients. I want to set them up for success, share that knowledge. If they want us to continue, awesome, but they don't need us to. One space that we do potentially continue is you lay all this out and they go, that's fantastic. That's a 95% solution. But I got a big negotiation coming up with Amazon.

   Can you help me with Amazon? And it's like, yep, let's do that one together. And then it's a show one, do one, and then they can teach one on their own afterward.

10. 7:57
    Wes Mathews

    Help me understand where companies, why don't they do this internally? How do they even know to look at this externally versus bringing this internally to guide them through this? Because you're talking about large companies. What's an average size company that you're working with in terms of revenue?

11. 8:15
    Brian Doyle

    Our ideal client profile is $100 million and up. Sometimes if it's PE owned and funded, we'll go a little bit smaller than that and it still makes sense. Generally, in that space, we have clients right now that are $5 billion in revenue. So the reason that they don't do this in-house is for a few different reasons. One is there is lack of clarity around the value that they actually provide. There's some internal debate. They're not exactly sure. They feel like they're leaving money on the table, but they're not sure.

    And so one of the things we do that was remarkable to me every time we do it, is we go talk to their customers and we ask their customers about the value. And it's not like, hey, so how much extra would you pay for this product? That line of questioning doesn't work. But hey, if we were to invest in their value and make it better, where would we make it better? What works? What doesn't work? And I swear to you, it is like these customers are going to they lay down on the couch, they open up and they say, I love this, can't stand this.

    We had one, no kidding, three weeks ago, we had customers say, these guys charge a lot less than their competition. They just told us that. And it's that third party coming in asking the right questions that makes a huge difference in understanding how that value is perceived and that differentiated value is perceived by their customers. And then there's that whole rolling it out piece. So you've worked in other organizations, salespeople don't trust the home office. Home office people think salespeople just play golf all day and go to dinners.

    And there's that conflict. Whereas if we can bridge that gap and bring those two groups together and be part of that change, that makes a huge difference.

12. 10:19
    Wes Mathews

    Yeah, it always amazes me when I, and I'm in the consulting world too, on the marketing side, way, way smaller. And it always interests me like, why can't that company just go out and have the same conversation with their customers? Is it just because they have blinders on, or it's just not... Help me understand how you identified that problem at that scale to create your company. You obviously identified that there's this reoccurring problem and you can create a company to solve it. So when did you first discover that?

13. 10:52
    Brian Doyle

    After my Air Force career, I went to General Electric, GE capital specifically, and then some of its offspring. And I saw it there. I was an individual contributor, salesperson. I was a sales leader. I led a marketing group. And I saw that, number one, salespeople are never going to come back and say, hey, you know, the reason we lost that deal is because I wasn't sharp enough. I didn't say the right things. I didn't quantify our value. No one's going to say that. They're going to say, ah, this price, man, we're too expensive.

    That's how we lost it. So you're not getting a straight story from them. Also, even if you have, say, a senior leader go talk to customers, a lot of times those customers don't want to badmouth the salesperson. So they repeat that same story. Ah, they're good people. They come by. Yeah, everything's fine. It's just, you know, we got other priorities right now. We can't do this deal with you. It's like, is that the truth? It could be. It's probably not. If you were really important, a senior leader at your customer would find the budget.

    So what's going on? And that's one of the things that we help uncover. And it starts with data. We do data analysis too. So we're doing that and we're saying, okay,

14. 12:08
    Wes Mathews

    there's a few different things going on. And that shapes the interview guide from when we go out and talk to those customers. I met a consultant years ago, and I've came across many consultants over my life. And one guy said to me, he's like, Wes, the one thing about business is the problems exist. The same problems exist. There's just more zeros after the number. I mean, do you find you're talking over a hundred million dollar company, right? Is it the same similar problems, just kind of a 10X problem?

    Or are they exponentially different problems that you see working with a hundred million, five billion dollar a year company versus a 10 million, $20 million company? There's definitely commonalities.

15. 12:48
    Brian Doyle

    I'll tell you some of the major differences between small and big. When we are working with PE-owned portfolio companies, there are some additional dynamics where a PE fund operating partner says, we bought this company to grow. This is my job that you help them grow. I'm managing 10 different companies. I got to get these guys going. And the company they bought, that portfolio company, is maybe led by a founder who's been successful for 20 years. He or she doesn't want to alienate customers who are their friends that they've worked with for years.

    They don't want to wreck their business. And so there's this disconnect between the PE fund, the operating partner, and the CEO or the founder. So that's a dynamic that typically doesn't play out at the big companies. At the big companies, there's oftentimes so much scale and so many products that now there's a challenge of where do I start? Shoot, it feels like I'm going to boil the ocean if I change pricing. Should I just do it in the US versus Asia? Should I just do it with these products and not those products?

    So that's that sort of different challenge there.

16. 14:08
    Wes Mathews

    You kind of mentioned something I want to touch on introducing you. You had 31 combat missions, which I'm sure there's a lot to unpack there, but I want to kind of keep it focused on how did you transition from that to becoming an entrepreneur and how much of that impacts your day-to-day and your life now? Ten years,

17. 14:27
    Brian Doyle

    active duty Air Force is a C-17 pilot. As you said, commanded 31 combat missions in Kosovo. So those who aren't familiar, Kosovo refugees, about a million or two million of them being shelled and attacked and genocide and so we were there to protect them and flying down every night to do that. So what's the windy road between there and what I'm doing now? The first step I took was I really wanted to apply some of those Air Force leadership lessons that I'd learned in business and it felt like General Electric was a good first step, big giant company, lots of process.

    If you're going to have a company that is similar to the military, that's probably a decent transition or a defense contractor would be the same way. That was kind of the first step to start learning business and where the pros and cons are and the differences and then move from there into the entrepreneurial space. To answer your question, Wes, in terms of what lessons to apply, there's a bunch. Number one is it's not an emergency unless lives are at stake and that's a phrase I use a lot because it is easy to think, oh my god, the world is ending.

    What are we going to do? This customer's complaining or we got something going on. There's five customers at the same time. How do we handle this? Having been shot at, I can tell you that that is an emergency or I've been on fire too. If the jet's on fire, that is an emergency. Trying to deliver something for the client is important, but it's not an emergency. I think there's things like that. I think another thing is this balance of mission and people. We've all watched everything from Full Metal Jacket to every other war movie where there's undoubtedly some person saying, and that's in order.

    We all think that in the military, all we have to do is leaders and say, and that's in order and the person goes to do something. If you're asking a young person to put their life at stake for their country or for their team, there is a lot of getting by in there. There's a lot of training. There's a lot of practice. There's just a lot of getting somebody's head into that right space. A lot of that applies to business too. How do you motivate people?

    How do you get them to believe in their team? How do you help them feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves? That totally applies. That's probably a couple places that

18. 17:14
    Wes Mathews

    transition helped me quite a bit. I have a good friend who was a commercial pilot for years, and now he's in the real estate doing really, really well. He flies a King Air plane. I went flying with him one day and he had a laminated sheet. He's one of the most intelligent people, I know. Very process-driven, just very calculated. We're in the plane and he's going through this sheet and checking stuff off. I said, you've done this a million times. You're one of the smartest guys I know.

    I'm a visionary entrepreneur. I would just get in and go. That's probably why I don't have a pilot's license, but he's like, this is my routine. I have to do this. There's certain dials and things he's doing. I found that fascinating because I'm like, I use this analogy in my business all the time. If the dials are just set off a little bit, you might not end up in Kosovo. It could be catastrophic. It's super important to check the dial, the process. Just out of curiosity, how important is process for you for holding advisors and how you approach business?

    We've got a lot of visionary entrepreneurs, a lot of entrepreneurs, but I think a lot of them are ideas and strategy. I want to talk a little bit about that execution piece because ChatGPT will give you the best idea. You can get 100 of them today from AI or in a visionary's brain. To me, it's all about that execution.

19. 18:43
    Brian Doyle

    Well, you need both. That definitely makes us successful is that I have people on my team who are those visionary types who are coming with 10 ideas before breakfast. I need that. Then what they need from me is what you were just suggesting is process. It's like, okay, we can do 10 things at once. We can maybe do one thing at once. How are we going to do that? Let's talk about the steps to go execute it. One, and then two, there's a thing as a pilot.

    It's called a crosscheck. You're looking at your airspeed and you're looking at your altitude and you're looking at your attitude, left, right, whatever. You're looking at your navigation and you're cross-checking around to make sure that all these things are there. I find that this plays a major role in a small business because if you take your eyes off of something for too long, all of a sudden, you're upside down. We're going after new logos, new sales, yeah. Then two weeks go by and you say, wait, if we had that conversation with an existing client about how we can help them grow into the next project, oh man, I was focused on this other thing.

    That crosscheck has to continue.

20. 20:01
    Wes Mathews

    Are there certain things you do or you do with your team from that crosscheck perspective that resets you or gets you in your mindset? Because I look at you and you come into a company and help them identify the blind spots, come in as this third party and kind of an unlicensed therapist. I love all that, but how do you now effectively do that within your organization that you created? Because it's, what do they call it? The Cobblestone Kids Has No Shoes. It's one of those how do you manage that, right?

21. 20:32
    Brian Doyle

    We run off of the Entrepreneurial Operating System or EOS. That's got a lot of process built in that helps us quite a bit. As a for instance, every Monday, we have a level 10 meeting, that's an EOS term, where the leadership team gets together and we have a set agenda. We talk about our scorecard, what are our numbers, what are our leads, what are our outreach, what proposals that we sent out. Let's talk about employees and customers. Let's talk about resourcing. All those things are set agenda items in the first half an hour of a 90 minute meeting.

    Then the second 60 minutes or the next 60 minutes is what we would call IDS or issue discuss solve. There are things that the team members bring up and they're like, hey, can we talk about resourcing a little bit at the beginning? We need to talk more about resourcing. We have a lot of projects. We have enough people. Let's discuss that for a little bit or whatever the topics are. That check-in every Monday for 90 minutes, if we're not on track, it puts us back on track and then we go there for the 7 days.

22. 21:48
    Wes Mathews

    To everybody listening, I probably mentioned traction EOS at least 5 to 10 times a week. That completely changed my perspective on business. We implemented in 2014, when did you always, when you started this company, did you start it EOS or did you bring EOS after the fact?

23. 22:07
    Brian Doyle

    Yeah. Our founder started the company some time ago. Then when I moved into the president role, we started EOS, shoot, it might be like four years ago, something like that. Then when we bought the company from the founders and took over, that was absolutely how we did things. Started it a little bit before that, maybe four years ago and now it's just how we do things.

24. 22:33
    Wes Mathews

    Do you guys use an implementer or do you self-implement EOS?

25. 22:36
    Brian Doyle

    We started with an implementer, which was super important because there was varying degrees of acceptance as we started.

26. 22:45
    Wes Mathews

    Then we worked with him for probably 18 months and decided we could self-implement after that and it's been working pretty well. Well, I think it's interesting that your service offering that you deliver to your clients, sounds like you needed the same kickstart with EOS to get you guys to a point. So you see the value in bringing in trustee third-party resources to get the buy-in. For me, it's EOS or scaling up. There's a million different things out there. My experience here with entrepreneurs is just pick something and try it.

    I'm a visionary entrepreneur and you got to pick something. EOS changed my life in the sense of, you talk about, I would always joke in my previous company, we were in web and I would say, if something happened to a website, I would say, we're not heart surgeons. It's a website, calm down, we can get to it tomorrow. I love your lives are at stake. But EOS really took a lot of those wannabe fires and just contain those into healthy, productive meetings. So talk to me about Inc.

    5000 a little bit. You mentioned something, you guys made that back-to-back, but there was an asterisk next to that and some learning around that. I'd love for you to share a little bit about that. Yeah.

27. 23:59
    Brian Doyle

    So it was a fantastic experience that had an unfortunate edge to it. We grew rapidly. Two years in a row, like I said, Inc. 5000, two years in a row. Financial Times, fastest-growing companies, it was awesome. The thing that came along with it, though, is that we grew primarily because of one client. And so we're growing like crazy, we're going like crazy. And then you sort of look around, like, you know, you do the cross check again, and you're like, shoot, I got a client concentration problem.

    And like, this is super cool that I've grown, and I've got a ton of revenue. Now, what do I do? And I'll share something that lesson learned from me, for sure, was that we had so many projects that I took some business development resources, and I'm like, I don't really want to hire another person because I don't know how long this project is going to last. So I'll take some of my business development resources who had other skills and help, they will lead or participate on the projects.

    Okay, Superman, I save money, continue the revenue, awesome. Except I just created this pipeline bathtub for myself, because we weren't doing the outreach that we've been doing before to generate all these projects, because everybody was like an all hands on deck, you know, actually executing. And so it took us a while to, you know, basically, we were swimming upstream. So that giant client is interest rate sensitive. They're still around, but we're doing a lot less business with them. And as they come down, how do we grow this pipeline back up to get into a healthy situation?

    And we are in a healthy situation now. But it was not an easy couple of years to make that transition.

28. 25:53
    Wes Mathews

    Yeah, I kind of have this vision of you flying a plane, and then all of a sudden, that alarm starts going off, right? Like you're traveling, you're kind of cruising. I think a lot of businesses do that, right? It's like, well, this is the way it's always been. And it's fine. And then all of a sudden, you're cruising along and some things are flashing and an engine fails. And it's like, what do you do? I mean, my vision of my first company, I had met a guy who had five clients and then 09 happened, 08 or 09 happened.

    A lot of people thought I was crazy for starting a business, but I had a dirty little secret that nobody knew. I didn't have anything to lose. Like I didn't lose anything. So like, as everybody lost everything, I was, you know, I'm 43 now, but like, I didn't have a pot to piss in, right? So for me, it was like, let's go. But he had five clients and he lost four of them. And he lost his business and he was doing $5 million a year in revenue.

    And that kind of stuck with me because I'm like, I want to build a business where if you lose 25% or 40% of your clients, you can still sustain. That always scared me. And then I think kind of fast forward, I think the next big milestone in my life was COVID. You know, how did you guys handle that? You talked about the one client with interest rates. I mean, you're talking, how do you create that value and that stickiness as a consultant in these companies? Because for me, it's like, you know, sometimes I hear clients that have 50,000 employees and I'm like, I don't even know how you would keep track of that.

    Like my brain can't even comprehend that. So like, how do you build that stickiness when things get a little turbulent? Right.

29. 27:21
    Brian Doyle

    And for me, I was named in the president role February 1st of 2020. Perfect timing. So I had about 30 weeks before I'm like, I think this sickness in China is like, that might be a bigger deal. Right. So Wes, the one thing that we did that turned out to be really smart was that we pivoted to virtual as fast as anybody and faster than our competition. And so what I mean by that is we were able to transition those projects that we were doing in person into Zoom or whatever.

    And then the other thing is that we do a lot of training courses. So our founder wrote a book called Negotiating with Backbone. And we do a lot of negotiation training courses, different levels of them. And so we made the decision in mid-February to go virtual. And in mid-April was our first virtual class with a client. And it was really good. And those people were still hungry to keep doing their jobs and get better, but like it couldn't be together. And like, where are we going with this thing?

    And we hopped into that gap and that kept us going and continue to grow really in that time frame.

30. 28:41
    Wes Mathews

    Have you guys still maintained that right? Or have you gone back to pre-COVID? Or what does that look like for you guys? So we still do plenty of virtual courses.

31. 28:50
    Brian Doyle

    And what we're finding is, it sort of depends on the client. So some clients, nobody really wants you there like all the time. I think everybody's grown out of that. But a project we talked about before, three or four months, we might be in front of the client three or four times over the course of that, a kickoff, a steering committee, closing up the project, that sort of thing. We're in front of them. The rest we do remotely. And then in terms of the workshops, there are some folks that say, Oh, this is awesome.

    I got people all over the world. Can you do it virtually? We say totally. And then there's definitely people who say, I think our folks are better in person and I'm willing to fly them all in.

32. 29:34
    Wes Mathews

    Can we do it that way? And of course, we're happy to do that as well. Yeah, it's really interesting to me. I have an office, I'm kind of looking out now and it's mainly empty. And everybody loves virtual. And we see our clients every so often, the ones that are close that could take advantage. But do you mix that into the recipe of success when working with these size of clients? We need to touch them and physically see them four times a year. How important is that in the overall relationship?

    Or does that not matter? It matters.

33. 30:03
    Brian Doyle

    I think it's important. And I think it's important that I go out too. Typically, I'm not executing a project as CEO. I might do a little bit or something with the client, but the opportunity for me to go see them, talk about what their overall strategy is, get feedback on our performance, all those things can be super important. And so I like to get in front of the senior leaders of our clients from time to time for sure.

34. 30:30
    Wes Mathews

    So as a CEO, I got to ask you, how do you balance the, Hey, Mr. Client, how's it going? How's my team going? I know from experience and just keeping on the EOS theme of visionary, how do you approach that? Whether a client's like, hey, 100% they love you, or maybe this relationship's a little bit rocky. How as CEO do you approach that where your team's pretty much 100% executing? You're coming in and adding value, obviously, but you've got to now understand, translate that back to the team.

    How do you approach those conversations with a challenging client?

35. 31:06
    Brian Doyle

    You just got to be in the mindset of helping them be successful. So really, why we're doing what we're doing is to create outcomes and results for them in terms of them making more profit, more revenue without losing customers. And so I try to frame it in that, hey, are we helping you do that? What are your plans to grow? Let's talk about how this fits into your grander vision and have conversations in that regard. To be honest with you, our team is very strong. And so I don't have to have a ton of conversations where people are saying, you guys are falling down the job.

    I would say that is actually very rare. So you have an easy job. I get it. I have an easy, yes, that's what I'm trying to say is that aspect of my job is easy. Put it that way. That's great.

36. 32:01
    Wes Mathews

    That's probably the best side to be on that for sure. So talk to me a little bit. You wrote a book called Grey Goldfish. Is that correct? Talk a little bit about that. Why write a book?

37. 32:10
    Brian Doyle

    I had two things going on at the same time. I was leading a large organization, so a different company from Holden Advisors, was leading a large organization. And I just could not find myself communicating effectively with younger generations. I was trying to do the right thing. I thought I was a good leader. And it was falling flat, and it didn't work. And then at the same time, I was an admissions officer for the Air Force Academy. So I was interviewing students who wanted to go to the school.

    Everybody's on scholarship, that whole thing. And so I'm interviewing high school students that I also didn't understand. And I'll give you an example. So I asked a student if he had a resume that I could look at, because I just use that as a framework for a conversation. And he hands it over and he says, hey, here's my resume. It should be pretty good. My parents worked on it last night. I mean, like, the first thing is like, why in the world would his parents work on his resume with him?

    And then my second thought was like, why in the world would he tell me? And the reason he told me is because he was raised as his parents' friend, and they just work on stuff together. And that's how it goes. So to make the longer story short, those two things came together. And I'm like, I got to figure this out. As a leader, if I'm going to be better at my job and as a human, I got to figure this out. And so I started doing a lot of research.

    And I started helping people because they had the same problems. And then occasionally I'd give some talks like, this is awesome. And I said, well, shoot, why don't I put this together in a book? And so I had a friend, Stan Phelps, who had written several other books. And he was a mentor and co-author for me that said, basically, this is how you write a book. And we worked together to put together great goldfish. And it's been received very well. No, that's awesome yesterday.

38. 34:15
    Wes Mathews

    We were fortunate enough to make it on Inc 5000. My partner and I sold the business. We started in 2009, we sold it in 21. And I think we've been on Inc 5000 every year outside of one, because I forgot to put it in the application. And I screwed that up. But I think we've been in like 13 times or something crazy. And somebody running the program called me years ago and I'm like a guest judge. I go to U of M and talk in front of a group of aspiring young entrepreneurs.

    And yesterday I judged a mini shark tank thing. These kids are in 10th grade, 11th grade. I had a couple of realizations. One, I guess I'm a lot older than I thought I was, because some of the stuff they were talking about, I had no idea. But it's interesting how the great goldfish concept of connecting with them, just even listening to their conversations. I was like, holy cow, I'm so far away. And you think about that as a business. We need to start paying attention to this because they're growing up really quick and they're going to start taking over the company.

    So what was a really big aha moment for you? How does a business prepare themselves or start to embrace this? Because some might say, I'm selling the company before that happens. I want no part of it. But there's going to be this big transition. I look at my kids and they're shopping off TikTok. They're not going to websites. I mean, they're not doing the traditional buying habits or cycles that I'm used to. It's completely different.

39. 35:46
    Brian Doyle

    I think the biggest thing is we spend a lot of time thinking about that other generation. And typically in the context of the other generation is screwed up. Here's all the things that's wrong with them. We don't spend enough time looking at our own generation and thinking about the pros and cons of us. And so as an example, I'm Generation X. This is a group of folks who our parents had the highest divorce rates in history. Our parents got laid off. And so we have this natural distrust of institution.

    And so we're self-starters. We're used to doing things by ourselves. If you gave me an assignment, Wes, the best way you could manage me is to tell me what to do and then leave me alone and I'll go do it. That's what I would prefer. And so when I lead other people, that's my bias. But if I'm leading a millennial or a Gen Z person, if nothing else, their academic experience is all teams. I mean, think about when your kids go to school, it's all these group projects.

    Nobody does anything on their own hardly anymore. It's like everybody's working together. And so if I bring them into business and I say, here's your assignment. I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to leave you alone for a week and then come back when you're done. You as a younger person who has not been trained in that environment is going to think like, this sucks. I'm not getting any feedback. The person's not helping me. My parents used to help me all the time. This guy's not helping me at all.

    At least it's a bad environment. And so we have to understand our own biases in order to be better leaders one direction and then more accepting in the other direction.

40. 37:30
    Wes Mathews

    You also with your experience in the Air Force, my assumption, I could be very, very wrong. I'm familiar with certain behavioral analysis. There's Colby. There's other indexes on there. We use one here. The client has one. Do you have to be wired a specific way? And whom we're talking about here, do you and your business run assessments to understand who they are, how to communicate with that generation, or is it more of a blanket? For example, this group, you need to approach them and really hold their hand through this issue versus there's that other type.

    I'm the type of leave me alone and let me get it done. I'm more of the Rambo.

41. 38:13
    Brian Doyle

    Do you use any of that in your business to be successful or do you just wing it? So I think that the first cut is let's learn this person as an individual, let's learn them as a human being. So I think that's the most important thing. Then the second overlay to that is certainly there's this generational aspect that I was talking about. Another one I'll introduce is five voices. So Myers-Briggs and Disc, there's a main of them. I sort of like the five voices one because there's five of them, not 16 with letters that I have to keep track of.

    And I found it to be pretty true in terms of folks who are pioneers. So that's like a visionary and not detail oriented, but sort of out there, there's connectors, there's guardians who are really detail oriented. And I find that it helps when you're dealing with somebody, like if I want to brainstorm with a guardian, I basically have to start that conversation with, look, I just want to brainstorm. I don't want you to judge. Can we brainstorm? And then they're like, Oh yeah, not second nature to me, but yes, I'll give it a shot.

    So that's sort of how I think about it. Yeah, that's interesting.

42. 39:32
    Wes Mathews

    I've been kind of using that lately. Like here's my approach before we even get started because they look at me as a visionary, like, Oh, what are we going to talk about now? Like, yeah, going with this idea, you know, it's pretty fun. Exactly. Yeah.

43. 39:44
    Brian Doyle

    Sometimes I ask like, what do you want from me? And do you want me to just listen? Do you want me to empathize? Do you want me to critique? Do you want me to celebrate this?

44. 39:55
    Wes Mathews

    And then, you know, that usually keeps conflict from happening at least a little bit. I love that. I mean, I honestly think like that's such a great experience share. I do the same. At first, I kind of felt weird doing that. But I think it, number one, I think regardless of your pioneer, guardian, etc. It kind of gives that, you know, invitation of like, Oh, this person's actually listening. They care. I say it all the time. Like, how do you want me to show up as a dad, as a crazy person, as you know, like, there's so many different variations.

    And I feel it sets the tone down. And it kind of allows the team member to be like empowered with what the experience that they're about to go through versus what I've learned early on is it's still in an entrepreneurial company. What I had to come to grips with, like as the visionary, you get a lot of yes people around you because your name's typically on the check. And a lot of people tend to agree with you because they sort of work for the company. So I think, you know, kind of having some humility as a leader and putting yourself out there like that is a huge, important thing.

    But how can people find your book? It's interesting. I grade goldfish. Is it on Amazon or they go?

45. 41:03
    Brian Doyle

    Yep, yep. Great goldfish by Stan Phelps and Brian Doyle. Yeah, that's a good place to get that. And then if you're interested in a book from Holden advisors, I would say pricing with confidence. And that's written by Jeet Mukherjee. And read Holden.

46. 41:23
    Wes Mathews

    That's a good website. You guys have a lot of that stuff on your website at Holden, H-O-L-D-E-N, advisors.com. That's right. And then how, Brian, if, how can people get a hold of you if there's something there or they need, you know, they need some cost plus valuation based pricing. And they're kind of running into some situations. What's the easiest way for people to get in contact with you? Two ways.

47. 41:48
    Brian Doyle

    LinkedIn, just Brian Doyle, the Holden advisors guy in LinkedIn. And then I'm cool with people emailing me too. So [email removed].

48. 42:00
    Wes Mathews

    Awesome. Brian, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate the conversation. Good luck. And I'm sure I'll talk to you soon. All right.

49. 42:07
    Brian Doyle

    Thanks. Thanks for having me, Wes. This has been great. I appreciate it.

50. 42:10
    Wes Mathews

    This has been another episode of Entrepreneur Intel. Thank you for joining us. For show notes or other episodes, please visit us at entrepreneurintel.com. Until next time.