Stuart Friedman - The Company is Only as Strong as Its Culture

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Text family to 442-22 for this free information today. Welcome to the Exit Coach radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned and. Don't miss our one minute exit coach tip of the day on Exitcoachradio.com. And now here's your host, the exit coach Bill Black. Welcome everyone. Thanks so much for listening today. I'm very pleased to introduce my next guest. We're going to talk about aligning your culture and your people to your strategic outcomes. You know, companies need to pay attention to this. We've been talking about this earlier today. We talk about it all the time. You really need to make sure that your company is in a straight line from uh from the what you from your why down to how your people talk about your business, how they execute on your plans, and Stuart Friedman is joining us from Progressive Management Associates, and we're going to talk about that so. Get ready. We're going to talk about how owners and CEOs reach out to Stewart when people aren't aligned to strategic outcomes, and we're going to talk about the the company is only as strong as its culture and the strength of the culture is based on the people's ability to communicate effectively from the top down. And Stewart's solution is called the relevance factor. So we'll talk about that in a second. Stewart, welcome to the show and thanks so much for joining us today. You're welcome and thank you for the opportunity. Um, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to meet somebody new, and I'd love to hear more about your background and how you started Progressive Management Associates. Uh, my corporate experience, um, was with some fairly major sized companies and in fact my last corporate stint I was a VP, uh, in, in a Fortune 500 publicly traded company, and I was brought in to build, um, a, a very cohesive, uh, strategically oriented, uh, business division that was very fragmented. And um I was given a budget, a time frame, and I was given a 5 year time frame, and after I figured out what the issues were after 3 years I had built a $750 million division, 5500 employees, 140 offices across the country and It in the specific area was was in the area of small businesses and when I started doing research, small, medium sized businesses, there are over 10 million companies with one employee to size 99 employees, and I figured, you know what, this country needs a lot more of these companies to grow than it needs this Fortune 500. I mean, Fortune 500 is doing some great things, but the future rests in these small to medium sized companies. One. We get them growing that means more families get employed and I figured look if I could get just a small percent of that 10 million, I I think I'm doing OK and so and so I I achieved the goal and it was time to move on they didn't have another job for me um and I said you know what, and then I I also uh married a wonderful woman who uh supported me and uh what I did and uh she was awesome she looked at me and she said, OK. I'm giving you 2 years to turn a profit and then you're back to the corporate world and you know what corporate world was great training, but I, but I had a passion and I had a vision and um quite frankly it wasn't that difficult to get past those two years and um. Number one, for anybody and you know, baby boomers and anybody with with a business, you got to have the right people around you and they got to be aligned. If my lovely wife said no, I'm not supporting this, I don't know that I would be as successful as I am today, and that's not just personal, that's in the business as well. Yeah, absolutely, everybody needs to be as as Jim Collins put it years ago, on the in the right seats on the bus face in the right way, I guess. So it makes a lot of sense. What's an effective way for a team to get aligned to strategic outcomes? So listening to, you know, some other shows that you've done that have really brought enlightenment to the future for uh for business owners and, you know, even today, with some, with some of the speakers, first of all, let me be really clear about something. I don't care you're the boss, you're the owner on some level people don't really care what you have to say. And I don't mean that like with a personal attack or with any sort of maliciousness. We are so bombarded today with information coming at every angle. It is virtually impossible to get somebody's focus on you for a period of time that you think is worthy of your message. And so if you have a strategic outcome and a heartfelt desire, then you've got to be very, very clear in your communication and how you set up the culture of your business around. That strategy and those outcomes has to be very, very clear, and the only way you can do that is through communication. You can't just look at people and they're supposed to guess. What I tell people when I speak around the world, I say, look, when I was going to grade school, they were teaching us how to read minds. I said that curriculum's over. They don't do that anymore. They, they don't teach people how to sense and feel and and read a body we're we're done doing that we we're we we stopped and I'm, I'm trying to get it back into the curriculums. So you have to be really effective as a communicator because people don't care and it's not because they don't want to, it's cause they just have so much else going on, you know, US productivity is, is pretty low right now because of the distraction at work, the number one distraction at work, the internet. So if you don't put in controls or you don't put in um ways to protect your productivity, you're paying people to read the on the internet. I have clients. That we put in sort of a monitoring system whereby the system itself, if you click on a particular website and it's not registered with IT, that means it's a business related website, they get a little notice on the screen that says, you know, this is not registered, please contact your your supervisor for approval. So and it's automated. It's not like someone's actually watching it. We put it in the system to keep people on on the path, so. Even though the message was delivered, this is the process, people, you know, look, people drive to work in the morning, they listen to Pandora, they're listening to the radio, they're listening to an FM station. Bill, they're listening to an FM station WIIFM. A station was there before radio waves were ever invented and it's going to be there after they eliminate the radio. It's called What's in it for me and that station is so freaking loud right now that that it's almost impossible to get your message clear to everyone in your business all hearing the same thing. So, so because people are being bombarded with, with all this information, there's another aspect as well. Today you can turn on a radio station to listen to the music you want to hear, and I can listen on to a station to the music I want to hear. Well, it's the same thing with data. And the internet you you might tune into Microsoft for your daily news. I might turn into the website for the Wall Street Journal. They might be delivering the same news but with a whole different spin, and how you see an item may be completely different than me. That's what goes on in business. The owner delivers a message. You got 12 direct reports you got 12 people hearing 12 different messages. There's no way you're gonna hit your outcomes. So what do you need to do? You need to apply the relevance factor. What's the relevance factor? You can no longer just speak from your point of view. With the language you want to use and expect people to hear the message and not only that I'll even go back to some of your other um um guests that talk about psychometric tools, trait behavior tools those are awesome because what they do is they tell you how people listen, for example. Um, somebody who works for me needs to be very detail oriented because I'm not, and if I don't speak in in a in a detailed enough fashion, they're just gonna keep listening for the detail they're gonna miss my big picture message and vice versa if they're big picture and you talk too much into the detail they're gonna fall asleep their head's gonna hit the table and everyone's gonna, you know, get embarrassed. So the key is, number one, the biggest mistake owners today make is they think that because they're the boss, because they speak English to an English listening audience, that they're being heard, listened to, and people will respond. That that just isn't the case. Yeah yeah yeah it's, yeah, right, communication, culture top down. And what have we learned from in the last few years when I mean what's the average number of words on a billboard these days?most none. It's, it's 1 or 2 or 3 people need you walk into these businesses and you see their, their mission, vision, values and goals statement basically it's about 6 paragraphs and when's the last time anybody looked at that? Well, you know, that's a great point because the first thing I do when I get called in by a you know, by a prospective client, the CEO will say you have these people aren't aligned, you know, they have a great environment here. We do some great things, and the first question, one of the first questions I'll ask is, so, um, Pat, I'm just curious, do your people really know what your vision is, your mission, and by the way, do they know the key outcomes? Oh yeah, they know. The key outcomes they better know those key outcomes. That's how they get paid. OK, I'll talk to the very first. I'll say, Well, who's your, who's, you know, your number 2? I go to the number 2. I ask them what are your key results, and they look at me like a deer in headlights or I'll get, well, I think, I think it's this very few owners, very few owners really know how to communicate effectively to get 100% of their message heard. And if you're going to sell your business, if you're going to, let's say um move your business on to um an heir apparent and you have legacy revenue coming from that, don't think it's just gonna come because you said so if you don't apply the relevance factor and figure out how what you're doing is relevant to the person that you're speaking to, all bets are off. It's just not gonna happen. It's like the game of telephone though it's like. Right, I start with you. It's our big rainy day and I go, oh my God, telephone game, Noah's ark and the rules in in in the game of telephone are I say something once you hear it once that's it and by the time we go around the room, I guarantee you we'll hear something like dogs bark right right because we delivered the message once and we think oh I just spoke English and I'm the boss. So you want to build a culture, then you've got to be able to communicate that culture. You want to get strategic outcomes and heartfelt desires from that culture, then you have to, you have to communicate like you've never done before. You have to, you know, I'll be, I just spoke to a group of CEOs in Louisville, about 60 or 70. And, and, um, you know, as I'm speaking to them and I'm asking them, OK, what do you want for it, you know, to happen down the road, and the first question I'll ask them, OK, so, um. How many times you've delivered your message about what you want, and they all look at me like, well, do we have to deliver it more than once? Not only do you have to deliver it more than once, you have to reinforce it and reinforce it and reinforce it just like I, I don't know if you have kids, but I have 3 boys. You never stop reinforcing the message. You got to get that kind of clarity, that kind of commitment if you really want to make it happen. And unless you make it relevant, all bets are off because what do they care if it's not relevant to them. Well, that's a great point, and I was just gonna say, so is the preaching from the pulpit to the to the employee congregation is pretty much the wrong way to approach this. It sounds like you need to be down on the floor with them communicating with everybody, helping them get their input into it so it becomes relevant. That seems like a tall order. Um, how do you go about doing that? So, uh, first things first, um, in a, in a big general sort of perspective, number one, if people are hiring and I'm going to, and I'm just going to reinforce what some of your other guests have said, you got to hire the right people into the culture. If you have a safety, a culture that's a culture of safety because you're manufacturing. One of the questions you you ought to be asking anybody coming into that company is, you know, you're coming to our company. What are your top three work values that you would, you would want in this culture? And if yours is safe, if they, if one of the top 3 is not safety, they are not aligned with you. They can't be. If that's not top of their brain coming into your culture, a manufacturing organization, and safety is your one of your top values but it's not one of theirs, that's not it's somewhere along down the line you're, it's not gonna work so that's number one you got to bring them in because they, they have the same value system um and, and, uh, relative to the to the culture. So once you get the right people then you deliver your message and then here's where the rubber meets the road. You want to be relevant then any time you have a general message to a group of people, then you get to do something. You get because you're the owner or the message deliverer, even if you're not the owner, you're a step down or two. You get to then go around to each individual and ensure that they heard the message. You get to have that one on one intimate discussion that number one builds a rapport, gets the loyalty, gets commitment, and gets them to ask questions around it. Let me make sure I heard you correctly. Is this what you meant? And now you have a chance that they heard your message and will execute on that. Because without that, you, you know, flawless execution doesn't occur. I mean if you play the game of telephone top down, you go down 4 levels after a message is delivered by the boss. I guarantee you less than 10% of the message is heard. And if people want to know why they're not, they're not, um, getting things done on time, right time, within budget, it's because you have this huge gap between what was said and what was heard. So and the steps before that it seems like if you're if you're going to deliver a relevant message that's relevant to those individuals you have to have first received and heard them and gotten their feedback and input and assured that they know that you have received that because if they that that's the big problem today is that a lot of employees are like everything I say nobody listens to what I say so right right so so here's what I learned when I started uh I I got a speaking coach and here's here's what I'll never forget. They said, Stuart, people won't hear you until they until you get to know them or I'm sorry, they said people won't hear you until they get to know you, but they won't get to know you until you get to know them first. And so when we go walking around this earth, I, it, there's been a, there's been a huge shift. Everything is about what's in it for me, huge shift that that's gotten away from worrying about the other person first. That's why customer service is down. That's why people job hop. It's because we're worried, we really are worried about ourselves first. We need to start teaching future this generation and future generations to start worrying about the other people first, and you want to know which companies are doing the best. The first thing they'll tell you is that their culture is all about. Customer service, but what it's really about is, is, um, really it's about customer interest and customer accommodation. That's what it's about now if we can shift the planet, I'm just, I'm, I'm certain I want to live to be past my hundreds right now it's tough out there. So if you're gonna, if you want succession in your business, that's what you got to put in it. You can have a great product, but if you don't think about the other person first with the relevance factor, you know what you're gonna have it's going to be a struggle. It's gonna be a struggle and this and right now I'm also going to say this is not a time for the faint of heart. This is for people who want to work hard and make a difference. That's what today is about. Yeah, it's fascinating as you're saying that it's dawning on me that, you know, one of the reasons is that we had a whole generation of people that were loyal to the company. It got them absolutely nowhere or they feel, they feel that way, so. If the company, you know, if caring about the company didn't matter any to the company as much as it mattered to me, then I'm not going to care about the company anymore but I still care about what I'm doing, what my, what my, what impact my work is having on other people out there. It's just I'm not going to give so much back to that particular company and that's the whole millennial workforce that's coming up saying. We're not going to be loyal to a company. We're going to be loyal to the mission, the purpose, the values. We want our life to be worth something, but not so much that we are blind to who's leading us. Yeah, and, and you make a great point because your other speakers in past shows as well have said people have to get passionate and they've got to find the environment and the culture that that's going to feed that passion. And I'm a believer, you know, you take care of the people at home, you take care of your people first, they'll take care of the clients. It's top down, you know what you want people to pick up garbage off the floor. Well then you've got to do it first. You want these millennials to shift, and by the way, the, the workforce is going to be a majority is going to be the millennials in about 2 years. And if we're going to make a difference, then we have to start making a difference with this generation because then they can teach it to the next generation so that we can show them how it makes a difference in their lives as well. That's it, look at. I'm, I'm, I'm at a client today. I'm at home tomorrow. I'm not any different. We get to practice caring about other people all the time, but we got to show people how to do it, and it starts the easiest way is just by communication, just by what we say to people. That's where it starts. The terrific input um terrific advice Stuart you speak to uh groups like business leaders I take it all the time is that is that a big part of what you do? OK so you're. Yeah, CEOs and owners correct. OK, so you're available for anyone who wants to come in and talk about this, which is a fascinating topic, but you also have a book called is it called Break Free from Job jail? Correct. I love it. Tell us about that. So, um, so when I left the corporate world, um, you know, it isn't easy to to just jump into something. There, there's fear. We all have it. It's innate in human nature and, um, but, but finally after that building that $750 million business, it dawned on me I I had a message out there and I was just going to follow my my truth and follow my heart's desire. And, um, you know, you go through all these gyrations in your brain is why you can't, and then you realize it's because it's all these messages that you've heard from people that are all perceptions about what you think you're supposed to do. Um, and so what I did was I, I, the book is basically about 7 or 8 steps how to get past that barrier so you're pursuing what you want to pursue. Now the whole title of the book is Break free from Job jail, and you don't have to quit your job. Look, not everybody wants to be a business owner. OK, so how do you break out of your current job so that you can make it really what it is for you? And it might mean leaving a business, but not necessarily. Sometimes it's just a 2 millimeter shift in what you're currently doing or how you're doing it. Most of the time, guess what it comes down to? You got to have a conversation with somebody to tell them what you're feeling or thinking so they can go, oh well, that makes sense. I think we can accommodate that, but that's what breaking free from job jail is, is making it so it works for you just so you know, 80% of the workforce has an aspect of their job they don't like, and then they say my job sucks and then they want to leave and that's, that's not the truth. The truth is. Oh unfortunately I think we lost it. I'm sorry we lost the the we lost you there where you said the truth is, so tell us, tell us that part so we have that in recording. Thank you. So the truth is, yeah, 87% of the people in, in a job. Um, have aspects of the job that don't work for them. What they have to do is they have to break free and have a conversation, communicate what it is that's not working for them, and see if they can accommodate it. And if the employer can, great, and if they can't, this is where you have to get ownership and responsibility. Then then find what works for you. But if we're open in dialogue, you know what, there's a better chance things are going to happen. But if you just sit there and let it fester, then everybody gets, then, you know, everybody's upset. Nothing gets resolved, and the worst case scenario is somebody leaves and they leave disgruntled and and that's and it doesn't have to be that way. OK, so if I were to restate that back to you, 80% of people have aspects of their jobs that they don't like, so don't be surprised as the owner that somebody is talking is thinking negatively about their job, but find that that doesn't mean they want to leave, but you have to go in with that recognition that what is that something that people don't like about their jobs because it should not be any surprise to you. That is absolutely correct. And so it's something for business owners to work on making your employees feel that they're not in job jail, that they're basically there as part of a culture to help customers and, and really get them in line with what the overall culture is. I love the topic. I love the concept and the relevance factors, um, uh, the relevance factor. So, uh, how do our listeners get in touch with you and find out more, Stuart? The easiest way where most if uh most of the information uh that's relevant is uh is at www.pmma-co.com. Peter Mary Apple charlie Oscar.com and phone numbers are there and um. I don't sleep much, so if you're on the east coast or West Coast or, you know, the Barbary Coast, it doesn't matter. I'm fairly accessible. Terrific. And again, if you're a leader of a business group and you're looking for an interesting speaker, give Stewart a call and talk to him about what he can do because obviously we, as we've heard in the last 20 minutes, he can bring a lot to a meeting. knows what he's talking about and I think your your business owners would walk away charged up and ready to tackle what's probably a relevant problem for all of them. So Stuart, thanks very much for joining us today. It's been a real pleasure to have you and I'd love to have you back and we can talk more about some of these other details as is usual in our first interview, we just scratched the surface here, so please come back and join us again. You're welcome for having me and thank you for having me. I would love that opportunity, would love it. That'd be awesome. All right, well, thank you. We're gonna take a short break and we'll be right back after this. So please stay with us. Just thinking about what will happen to your business if you're gone keep you awake at night? Will you get the price you need from your business to carry you through retirement? The BEI Network of Exit Planning Professions is the world's leading advisor network with the power to help business owners transition out of business on their own timeline and terms. Ask your most trusted advisor to create a BEI plan for you, or visit us at exitplanning.com. That's exitplanning.com. You're listening to Exitoachradio.com, the information station for age 50 plus business owners, where we're interviewing top advisors for their best tips, ideas, and precautions so you can be well planned. We upload new one minute tips every day. Exitcoachradio.com. Come listen for a minute. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio.