Eric Crews 16:38
Yeah. So to your last point about the CFO thing, also, it’s going to sound weird. I built the company originally the finance company, because I was working with my clients. And, you know, our CFOs mostly came from our clients, first of all. So the companies that have exited, etc., they’ll come back and they’ll work with us, which because they know what, they know what we do.
And it’s a lot of it’s a great thing. It’s a great opportunity for us. What’s important to understand is I can take a CFO into a company that’s, you know, 4 or $5 million that may not need a CFO, but only ask the CFO maybe 6 to 10 hours of questions total in a year. But just by getting that ten hours I might not have had access to, I can get the company to the next level. So it’s sometimes it’s really just having access to super good resources for a short period of time, which you just wouldn’t be able to have without actually hiring the resource.
And that’s what we’ve tried to build in the finance function. So the growth method on turning the page on this. I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life. I’ve been a EO member for 20 years. I’ve owned, I think, five companies.
All kinds of ups and downs. And ultimately, I used to own a student painting company, of all things, a student painting company, which ultimately I sold and used to teach college students how to run painting businesses for the summer. And it was an entirely system based company. We’d hire a college kid and they’d go out there and they knock on doors and they’d hire painters. And we could take the average college kid and get them to do $60,000-$80,000 in business for the summer, have a great resume boost.
So I did that for many years for I sold that company and had I had a, I think I had 11,000 employees during the time I owned that company. So tremendous experience running lots of people, which was a gift. I became a volunteer in the accelerator program for EO, which is a wonderful thing to do. If any of you are yours and you have a chance to do that, it’s a gift to be able to do that. And then I became an EOS person for many years, which was a great system for us as well.
Great. I was, you know, it was a great, good system for me to learn, and I appreciated my time there. Ultimately, I built my own system because I wanted to not only have a system, I wanted to build a company that was willing to be accountable for the results of the businesses that they work with. And I get why our competitors, almost all of them don’t want to do that because it’s hard not that’s saying negative things about them. It’s not because it’s hard.
It’s just we’re we to lean into being a consulting firm rather than a system company. It’s a challenge. It’s a mission driven thing. But it felt right to myself and my leadership team that we wanted to be accountable for the results of our companies. And so to do that, we built a system that we thought had the Lincoln financial results.
So that was the finance portion of our system. We felt like it had to be able to drive alignment from top to bottom in a company. So we switched to OKRs because although we like the rocks and the myth and the methodologies around rocks, we needed something bigger for our scaling companies. And OKRs allowed us to set broader objectives and then set key results across an entire company. And the combination really of OKRs and the finance engine.
And then we layered in a strategy piece as well. So for us, when we’re working with a company, we got to make sure the strategy is actually scalable, that the financial engine shows it’s going to work. And then we use OKRs to operationalize the company. So we built a system that we thought not only is a good system for people to use, whether they’re using us or not. But it’s easier for us to help companies scale past a certain size.
And that’s what the growth method does. It’s designed to help companies achieve scalable, continuous growth.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 20:49
So you mentioned the financial results driving alignment with OKRs and the strategy. What are some mistakes people make when we’re talking about alignment and OKRs. And maybe just give a brief explanation of OKRs for people. I know there’s I think John Doe wrote a really good book about it.
Eric Crews 21:09
John Doe is the father of OKRs. He was. It’s all started with Google. OKRs are heavily used in the tech space. They’re very widely used in larger firms.
OKRs are very simply stating I have an objective of that’s broad usually. So you might say something like increase gross margin or increase my customer success function or achieve utilization, improve utilization amongst employees, or improve my go to market plan. So it gives you a broad, easy to broadcast lens to use for alignment for employees. So you can say to somebody, you can say to 50 employees, we’re trying to increase our gross margins or increase utilization, and they can get that without it being too specific. They get the concept.
So objectives allow you to do that. Key results are being more specific. So what that means is that for the senior leadership team, we’re going to focus on getting the following things done this quarter. And this year for the departments. We’re going to focus on getting these things done this year.
But what it allows us to do is by setting a broader objective and then setting what could be hundreds of key results across the company Against the broader objective. It allows us to not lose sight of the forest through the trees. And what we found out when we’ve used rocks or other systems is it becomes a series of many to-do lists that are being checked. And I’m not checking against a broader nugget that I’m trying to achieve. And what we found is when we go work with a company, there’s only two or 3 or 4 broad things they need to usually fix, ever.
So what we try and do is get those things distilled down, make it all simple from an objective standpoint, and then we can set hundreds of key results against those things. But they never lose ground. They never lose sight of what the ultimate end goal is for that objective which we’ve defined. So it allowed us to better operationalize things. Now mistakes that are made.
So one of the biggest issues that we’ve had as a company and that our clients have is not just with OKRs, but just running the business as a whole. And I was with a big SaaS firm this morning and we discussed this topic, the 200 employee SaaS firm using OKRs. Private equity owned, great company. They said they had the quote, the perfect quote. Eric, 20% of our company, the senior leadership is extremely well aligned.
The other 180, I don’t know what they’re doing. So what happens is they’re doing all the work. So senior level team leadership alignment, it’s a big deal. But the beauty of OKRs and the tools that go with it is that they require you to then align the rest of the company. And even in our consulting company, our commercial painting company, these are, you know, they’re not huge companies.
Commercial painting, 12 million. Consulting company. We’re about a $6 million company right now. We’ve hit ceilings on this topic. We have great leadership teams, but what we realized is we’re not properly rolling out these objectives to the entire company and it bit us in the butt this year.
And I’ve actually never seen a company hit a wall as hard as ours. Our three companies did. And they did. And then it’s funny, my team said, Eric, I think it’s because we’re not using we’re not eating our own dog food on this stuff. And we’re supposed to be doing all this other stuff.
And of course, like every other owner, I said, yeah, but there’s exceptions. The consulting model is different. And then what I realized is that was just crap. Like literally crap. And I got lucky, probably because I’m in the space that knows, you know, this is my expertise.
But I at least caught myself. And I’m like, even I don’t want to listen to me anymore. Like, this is just So I just said to team, I’m like, look. And I’m thankful my our consulting team is a gift to us. They’re transparent, they’re honest, and they’re like, look, we appreciate the candor that you have in our organization, but you need to start telling us what to do.
And they’re like, we think you have all the tools set because we do it for a living, and we just want you to align the departments and put leaders in charge, have full alignment. And we put in scorecards, we put in roadmaps and key accountabilities. We’ve dropped OKRs for every level of our company. And you know, we already do that for our clients. But even the ones we’re not doing it for, we’re starting to have a greater awareness that, look, we got to roll this stuff across the entire company.
You know, we start we do a state of the company every quarter. I learned that from EOS, actually. It was a great tool that I used. But the state of the company I used to think, okay, well, I’ll tell everybody what’s going on in the company. Now, I realize, no, the state of the company is to broadcast.
Here are our priorities as a senior level. And here’s what we are not doing right now. So don’t ask. Mask. Here’s what the departments need to do.
So pay attention. Now go do your meetings and get a line behind the vision. And also tell me where we get a right and wrong, but go to work. So instead of the state of the company or this town hall as people call it, being this like exciting update, it’s not. That is what I’ve known and just learned.
It’s not an update. It is a directive. It is. Here’s what we’re working on. Here’s what we’re not working on.
If you have questions, let us know. Here’s what we need the departments to be working on and not working on. Please fill in the blanks as needed. We trust all of you as leaders, but this is the direction. Unless you have questions about this.
This is the direction. That is what it is. You have 90 days go march and that has been a, you know, as a person that trains this stuff for a living. I don’t know why it took me so long to come to about that, but apparently it did and it’s changed everything. So now the company won’t come to the state of the company.
Like you don’t have come to save the company. If you don’t want, then you’re just gonna do exactly what we tell you to do and don’t ask any questions, because that’s when the updates are coming out. And we’re going to work extremely hard as a senior leadership team to make sure that’s clear. And we’re going to tell you what you need to do in that update. And then we ask you if you have questions.
And it’s changed our entire company. So, you know, doing this for 12 years and apparently it works for everybody, including us.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 27:42
I’d love to hear Eric. Maybe an example with it could be see painting of like an OKR that when you say kind of rolling it out and dropping it to every level. And I just want to say before you answer that for me, I can often see things in other people that I am blind to in myself, and once I see it in them, it takes me. Maybe I’m a slow learner. I’m like, oh wait, I’m also doing the exact same thing that I’m seeing them do.
But I don’t know. For me, it seems sometimes obvious to see it in someone else than myself Personally, but how do you. Yeah go ahead.
Eric Crews 28:25
Yeah. So I’ll answer your question. So we have a couple things on this line. So I’ll go with the consulting business first. It’s funny, I’ve always for the last 12 months I’ve asked myself, I need a me to come in and tell me what to do.
But then I realize the reason I don’t have a me. Because I have a whole team of consultants, all of which I love. The reason I don’t have a me is because I’m just a pain in the ass client like I would never. I’m horrible because my teams like, we’ll work with you and I’m like, I’m not working with you. And I realize I’m just such a terrible client. But you’re right about the blind spots.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 29:01
I’ve seen you in Brendan’s dynamic, and I don’t know, I don’t know, Brendan, but it seems like he may. You may have that dynamic with Brendan at least watching the webinar.
Eric Crews 29:13
Yeah. It’s yeah, we have a lot of we have a, we have a lot of senior leaders in our company and it’s a fun it’s once again it’s a gift. So here’s an example of an objective that is going to be the theme of our year. So one alignment across every level of our company is going to be a theme this year. And it’s so stupid and basic.
But we’re using that as clear accountabilities through. We use a tool called a position agreement, which is clarity on everybody in the company having the right job description and key accountabilities. We need to make sure that everybody in our company is in the right seat, which may sound basic, but we’re realizing we have a lot of roles that we just don’t have defined, that we need to define this year. And by not defining them, it’s killing our language. We’re rolling out scorecards to our entire company this year, which is difficult but is proving to be very valuable.
But another big one for us is and this is another I had this year business model. So business model is a weird thing. And we finally came up with ours this year. We’ve been working on it for years too. And our business model is basically any service business is basically based on.
We need to get clients that stay with us for a certain period of months, that spend, on average, a certain amount of dollars and don’t cost more than a certain amount of money to acquire. That’s it. So one of the issues that entrepreneurs make have is that they don’t think about their company from a valuation perspective. And every company has got value. But our whole value if we ever go to sell our company, but even if we run it efficiently, is based on those three things.
So we have turned those three things into objectives that we’re focusing on across company and those objectives around increasing number of months per client that could live for, I’m betting that’s going to live for 18 to 24 months at a minimum, because it has to go from our current number to our bigger number. Now, once we figured that out. Which took us years to figure that out as a base number and a lot of data. We then put our whole team against that standard, and we looked at it and we said, what does the data show us? And it showed us that we have some people we need to move around in different seats.
And it also showed us we have some people that are destroying it. And ultimately that objective of retaining customers for a certain amount of months. And we’re very specific on how long that needs to be. And it populates into our financial model. Our financial business plan is linked to our financial model, for the record.
But our ability to create value in our company and that metric right there is going to link to, I would know that exaggerating, I would say close to 100 key results that will set up this year against that objective. That’ll be everything from company priorities, client community, better training for consulting team. But it’s all linked around that objective of increasing retention for x number of months. We have the same thing for average spend. People say why do you build all these other companies?
Well, one from a mission standpoint, we do it because we need to provide more services to our clients to make sure we increase their revenue, profit and valuation. That’s the mission of what we do. From a business model standpoint, we also need our average client to spend a certain amount of money, because if we’re going to spend a certain amount to acquire that client, we have to get them to spend a certain amount of money to increase our total lifetime value. Now, most companies don’t have that kind of business model. And I go in and then I see them spinning out clients, and I just keep getting more clients.
And I’m like, you’re on a hamster wheel, and that hamster wheel you’re on doesn’t grow like you think it does. There’s stuff that’s creating it, things to shoot out the back. And what can we do to actually prevent that? So these are big topics for us that we’re going to have to wrestle with at every level of our company. So we’re going to go to our consulting team and have a meeting about this.
And there’s going to be some things they need to own to fix to do better. There’s just as many things at a senior level we need to do to also work against this to do better on our end as well. So the clarity of what that is though, is really important to us.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 33:33
Yeah that’s helpful. There’s a lot to digest. So I’m gonna have to relisten to this after it goes live. But I appreciate you going through that because there’s a lot of gems in there. Just how you talked about, you know, the state of the company every quarter.
What things you do there. I, you know, you had some incredible results with Mission. I’d love to have you talk about and walk through what you did there and what happened.
Eric Crews 33:59
Yeah. So I’m glad you asked that. That Mission. Because I talk about too much. The clients, they get sick of hearing about Mission.
But I never I never get to talk about them, about a podcast or anything else. Nobody ever asks about them. So Mission is one of my earliest clients from, you know, many, many years ago, I think maybe 12 years ago at this point. And it started by a guy named Glen Grant, fellow EO guy, fellow Boston guy. Great guy, smart entrepreneur, great tech entrepreneur.
Now, now also a very dear friend. But he hired me as he was an accelerator and we helped. I helped him work with him and his team, helped build his team, grow his team. We grabbed the company to about 5 or 6 million, and we sold it to a tech company, to a PE company called Great Hill. Great Hill, by the way.
We’re looking to have a company acquire you. Great Hills been great PE firm for us to work with great people over there. So they acquired Mission about seven years ago and Glenn had a good first exit, but we’d always had a goal to sell to a PE firm that would help take the company to the next level, the next size. And they kept me around and we took three companies, and that one, there was a roll up of three purchases and they kept me around to smash these companies together, helped get them all on the same page and work with the new leadership team at mission, which I did. Mission then became used to be G2.
Then it became Mission. And Mission grew up to about. I won’t go too in the details, but 80 and 100 million. And we sold them after about seven years. They were a phenomenal student. So it’s interesting when you look at mission, they’re in the right space certainly. Their premier.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 35:32
Mission — what did they do?
Eric Crews 35:34
Cloud services AWS they’re an AWS partner and their whole metric is around, you know, AWS and cloud and everything to do with AWS and cloud. I don’t want anyone to I don’t want to pigeonhole them because if it’s AWS and cloud and anything to a small, small business, even enterprise, at this point, they’re going to they’re going to help you with that, get you in the cloud, keep you in the cloud, all that kind of stuff. So it’s the right space. But they’re just a good student. They eat their broccoli.
They do the planning. They do it across all levels of the company. They do the state of the company. They do OKRs at every level of the business. And then ultimately they got purchased by CDW and CDW is a fortune 200 company.
And you know, we just kicked off annual planning with CDW in Park City last month. Now Mission is part of this. You know, billions of dollars company and mission will be the biggest part of their AI and dev arm of the company. And. And a lot of that was because we were bought.
I was really proud of the fact that we didn’t know what was gonna happen when we got bought. We got bought for a big number for us. Wasn’t probably much, wasn’t much for CDW. It was a big number for the company is a big, big number. And you know, when you sell your company and they bought the whole thing, you know, you never know what’s going to happen.
But CDW basically said, you guys just run it as you’ve been running it, at least for the first year, and we’ll see how that goes. And I was proud of the fact that we did a planning session with them, wonderful people over there. And we said, what do you we should be doing differently? And they said, nothing. You should just be doing exactly what you’re doing and we’ll help you finance it, the three year plan and just keep doing exactly what you’re doing.
But that is an example of a company that’s aligned from top to bottom that has made many difficult decisions. And, you know, they just eat their broccoli. They’re in the right space. They have a good strategy. All those things are super important.
They have a great financial arm, all those things we care about. But they’re great people. But, you know, that’s an example of what you can do. We have a lot of stories like that. But that’s just a really big one I think.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 37:59
Eric, they started off maybe a little bit over a half a million and then grew to, you know, like you were saying to $80 to $100 million. That’s pretty incredible.
Eric Crews 38:11
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And then they, you know, they sold for a much bigger number than that. So it’s incredible.
Yeah. It’s a great story. And it was difficult. And now I’m working with Mission in the new version of Mission, which is now part of CDW. But ultimately we do the same boring stuff.
We meet every 90 days. We set priorities. We — our team helps to align the whole organization from top to bottom. They work very hard. And we keep questioning the strategy to make sure it’s the right one.
And we stick to the basics and it’s funny. People think, well you hundred million dollar company. Things are different. No, things are just worse. Things are actually simpler in grander magnification.
So it’s kind of this like the only difference is that what was once a problem of a 5% gross margin issue that cost us, you know, 500 grand a year now costs us $50 million in a year. That’s the difference. But it’s the same problem. And the problem is the companies grow. They’re like, oh, it’s so much more complex.
No it’s not, it’s not more complex. We need to make sure we have the right people in the right seats that are following the right stuff, and they need to be showing up to work 40 hours a week. That’s really it. And when you trick yourself into something’s different, when your company grows, that’s when you get stuck in bloat and inefficiency and everything else. And I’m proud of Mission because it’s never done that. So it’s not been easy, but it’s been fun.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 39:39
Talk about eating broccoli for a second. You mentioned a couple things about, you know, doing the state of the company, right? People in right seats. What are some other things that you consider that they did that you would consider, you know, making sure they just always ate their broccoli?
Eric Crews 39:56
Yeah. So one, when people ask me what we really do for a living, it’s figure out what vegetable to eat and make sure people eat it. That’s really what we do. And we’re very that is what we’re really good at. We’re good at people saying, what should I be doing?
Well, we can work with you to help you figure that out. We can try and use external resources to figure that out, but ultimately we can figure out which vegetable to eat. And then we’re pretty good at making you say, you got to eat it, or we need to be having a different conversation. So in their case, they did a lot of stuff. They leaned in on a lot of things which were really exceptional that they did routinely.
They certainly did quarterly meetings every quarter, no matter what. They did something very interesting. We have always done team trust. Once again, part of my hangover from iOS, we’ve always done team trust exercises at a high level, but mission has done these team trust exercises for 12 years straight on an annual basis, and in some years we’ve missed them because we’ve had so many hard topics going on, but they’ve always committed to we must always talk openly and honestly, even when it’s extremely, painfully Awfully difficult, and they always relying on me to step in where I can to make sure that continues to happen. And it is never — it’s funny, they’re the same humans that have been there for seven years with some changes.
The conversations have never gotten easier. We just keep forcing ourselves to have them. People don’t change. It’s just the same people that are just getting better at talking. So they do a lot of that.
They do a lot of analyzing the strategy on an annual basis to make sure it’s the right strategy. It’s actually working and they test it. We’ve had to do heavy cost cutting, very unpopular, but we’ve had to do cost cutting in times when it was required, when it was miserable and almost counterproductive. But the model wouldn’t have worked otherwise. And we sometimes weathered the storm, but sometimes we just couldn’t afford it.
And we made tough decisions. We also made key hires in that company that we’re risky. And they’re risky for big companies too, because they’re trying to, you know, hit their numbers. We made some key hires that took some convincing of the leadership team. And those key hires made a huge difference.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 42:18
So what would be an example of like a position that’s risky. That was a key hire.
Eric Crews 42:24
Yeah. Well, I’ll give him credit in case you ever listened to this thing. They hired Glenn Beck, who was the original founder, and put him in a service delivery capacity. And Glenn is he’s a great tech leader. Like, he’s always call me Angry Hoodie guy because that’s what he is.
And I love him. We’re big Star Wars fans together. But the company just needed some more alignment. You know, the tech, the tech leadership team, the tech, the whole tech team is awesome. Like the tech team over there.
And there’s a couple hundred of them are all I’ve met a lot of them. They’re amazing people. But they needed somebody as a tech leader who was kind of tech ey, who got it and who can hold them, you know, help them, help them hold themselves more accountable to productivity. Glenn comes in. He’d been gone.
He’d exited. They brought him back. It was a risky hire. Tough to bring a founder back. But he took that thing seriously.
Drove it to success. I don’t know how many points he’s picked up in margin, but it’s probably $3 to $5 million in one year. Minimum net. He’s picked up and off the gross margin simply because he’s just like, look, I may not be able to run hundreds of millions of dollars in a company, but I can tell you what a service delivery team needs look like. And he nailed it.
So that’s an example of a hire that was needle moving. Not ridiculously expensive, by the way. Glenn’s not cheap as a resource for certain. But it’s — he was a resource that was the best bang for the buck.
And man, he made a big difference. Mission’s had other key hires like that as well. But those are risky hires that you’re just like, you know, they’ve also done a lot of heavy investment in selling and marketing. You can look at it and say, well, they should cut back in sales and marketing. Mission doesn’t do that.
They everybody cuts sales and marketing when things are tough. They have not. And they’ve built some tremendous conferences and everything else because they did not cut that budget. So very difficult decisions. But they did a good job of it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 44:23
Eric, I know we have a few minutes left, and I’d love to hear some of your mentors throughout in your business journey that have helped you. I do want to just point people to check out crewsandco.com. We’ve pulled it up. Actually, they have some great webinars there.
You touched on one of the eat your broccoli things situations with the you have Difficult Conversations webinar which is great. You talk in there about speed to candor. So I would encourage anyone to check out that resource on their page. But I’d love to hear mentors throughout the years.
Eric Crews 45:00
So I’ll tell you, I have a couple of those. I will say on the speed to candor thing, I get the question a lot in these. What kills the company? I can tell you what kills the company, and what prevents the company from growing more than anything else is lack of trust. And that sounds weird, because I even have high trust companies where my answer is always the same.
This happened to me recently. I sat in a leadership team of a fast growth company and as a super valuable executive there. And at the end I said, you know, how’d it go? He said, it went great. And I asked him later.
I said, how do you think it went? He’s like, it went great, but we got to focus on X, Y and Z. And I’m like, next time in the room, please. That was incredibly valuable. What you just said.
Even if you piss off the entire room, just say it, because we may lose time because you didn’t say that. So that speed to being able to say things without worrying about what everybody else is going to think, even if you’re wrong, is often the biggest difference I see in companies at scale and those that don’t. So just a comment on that. Thank you. I got to, I got to give, always give credit I always.
He’s probably sick of hearing it because I know he’s heard some of these. But I got to credit to Mark Moses, CEO coaching. You know, I’m very close to Mark. I was Mark’s third client, and he’s also from the student painting industry. But Mark is a great coach.
He was a coach to me for almost six years. He rings in my ears all the time. If you ever want to, we have clients that we’ll send to him sometimes. Any coaching in certain areas. And I always tell him, like, if you wanna know what Mark’s gonna tell you, any topic I can pretty much tell you.
But he taught me the basics. Mark was a funny guy and still is this way because he’s, like, literally one of the smartest dumb guys that I know. And he would know what that means. Like, sometimes you look at him, he’s like, he’s like a caveman. Like he says things that are just, like, so stupidly basic.
And it’s. And I’m just like, Mark, there’s more context to my question. He’s like, Eric, the context is not necessary. The answer is Is this and you know that. That’s what he’ll say.
And what I’ve learned is, as people, we talk ourselves into so much context around topics because we don’t like to deal with things or we don’t have an answer. And what Mark is really good at is he’ll say, Eric, I don’t know the solution. I just know what you’re doing is wrong. So we have to figure out from here to get from here to here. And that I catch myself all the time because he rings in my rings in my ear.
There are certainly others, though. There are yours, honestly, that I’ve met. That I’m extremely. That I love — honestly a great deal. I think some specifically.
Oh, I can’t remember his name right now. The Priceline guy. I can’t remember his name. I know who you’re talking about. Yeah. Wait. Hoffman. Hoffman. Jeff. Hoffman. Wayne. Wayne. Hoff. I think it’s Wayne Hoffman. Was his name not read? Although it reads good.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 47:58
To Jeff Hoff. Jeff.
Eric Crews 48:00
Jeff. Thank you. Jeff. That guy’s phenomenal. He’s phenomenal.
He’s a phenomenal human. And he’s a phenomenal business leader. And he’s the most understated person you could ever meet. You’d think he was worth like, you know, a million bucks if you talk to him, maybe, and you start talking and you realize, man, this guy is sharp. So Jeff Hoffman, super smart, admire that guy.
Rick Scorpio unfortunately just passed. Wonderful guy, wonderful leader, wonderful mentor, extremely intelligent guy to listen to. I’m a big believer, by the way in EMP, if you have any on here who have done EMP or not, my.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 48:40
Business partner, John Corcoran is going through it now.
Eric Crews 48:43
Yeah, so I graduated EMP. Now I’m in return to masterminds. I’ve done that for ten years now, I think maybe even 11 years straight. So a lot of people that speak to us inside that circle. I’m very passionate about, I give.
I give big props to Vern. Honestly, Vern is he’s had his hiccups along the way and, you know, scaling up and traction all the systems crap that we all come up with. That guy’s freaking smart. Like, he’s smart. And I’ve learned a lot from him.
I learned a lot from Gino. Honestly, Gino Wickman. Interestingly, I learned a lot. A lot from Gino talking to him directly. More so than I ever did as an implementer.
Like talking to him. He had a great quote. Two phenomenal Gino quotes. I give him 100% credit for it, and I’ll give one to Vern too. Phenomenal.
Gino. Quote. Number one, that’s not in any of his books. He says if you keep anybody on your team, if you keep 5% of your team, that’s in the wrong seats. 5 to 10% of people in the wrong seats.
You’ve eaten up all of your profit, period. At least all of the money you would have ever had to have any growth of any kind to invest in your company. So even keeping the extra 5 or 10% of fat, he says, which almost all companies do because they don’t want to deal with that extra 5 or 10%. It eats up their entire ability to invest in their company permanently. That was the number one thing, he said.
Second thing he said, which I’ve never forgotten, is that case, in the US case, we believe this in our system. He said, the value of us is not. It’s in the leadership team, but 90% of the value is in all levels below the leadership team. And I believe wholeheartedly in that. So those are the two nuggets from him from Vern.
The biggest I got was he said once he said so eye-opening for me. He said he said the definition of a senior leader is somebody who does not need to be managed. I’ve never forgotten that. And by definition, what he’s saying is if you, if the person is truly a senior leader, you shouldn’t have to manage them. And then also, by definition, everybody else does need to be managed in some way, shape or form.
And then he also said that he went on to then say every, every goal you set with everybody else needs a follow-up loop. Any goal does not have a follow-up loop of some kind. You can expect it won’t get done. So that really helped summarize to me the whole difference between micromanagement and just management. Was that quote and further conversations with Vern.
So I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by lots of people that are good mentors. And I tried to listen to them as much as I possibly could and share with as many people as I can.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 51:16
Eric, I know you have to hop on another meeting, but this has been incredibly insightful and valuable. I encourage everyone to check out Crewsandco.com to learn more. We’ll see everyone next time. Eric, thanks so much I appreciate it.
Eric Crews 51:30
Thank you Jeremy. Appreciate it.
