Bryan Schielke 0:00

Earl, thanks again for joining. Really appreciate it. We'll jump right into the questions here and love to hear your uh your view and opinions. You've spent nearly 30 years building Nexus IT. What were some of the hardest seasons that shaped you into the leader you are today?

Earl Foote 0:13

Yeah, thanks for the invitation, by the way, Brian. Uh you know, glad to be on here with you today. Um look, uh over 30 years, nearly 30 years of you know building a business uh and other multiple businesses that I've built along the way, you certainly learned that entrepreneurship, you know, founding and building businesses is not for the week of constitution. And you generally start to learn that pretty early. I started the business in 1998. I think some of the biggest challenges, and granted, we've had you know a slew of those over nearly 30 years, right? But uh I would say the biggest challenges um were early on in the first few years, we had a pretty major fraud event on one of our e-commerce properties at that time. The fraud event ended up being a six-figure event and as an early company, you know, um the amount of uh fraud that was processed through one of our e-commerce websites was probably more than our annual revenue at the time. I mean, uh I may be off on that, but uh it took some time to, you know, to navigate through that and negotiate payback to the merchants. Credit cards were used fraudulently on one of our websites. And this was, you know, this was the early days of e-commerce before, you know, a lot of the the typical controls and you know preventative solutions that are in place today for e-commerce were in place. That was a very early one that was quite challenging for us. The second one was a uh missing the mark culturally and on leadership philosophy in an acquisition, and that uh you know, bringing a culture that was very disparate from ours, you know, under our own roof with employees and leaders, you know, from another organization, that it turned to a toxic environment pretty quick. And, you know, that caused a great amount of of discipline and effort and uh a lot of collaboration over time to kind of recover. You know, it it really only took a quarter for things to really get off the rails, but it took 18 to 24 months to to fix it all, right? So, you know, we had our culture undermined and it really caused some major issues. I mean, you know, I lost some good people in the process, we lost some clients in the process, which means we lost revenue, right? So that that one was uh certainly a challenging one to navigate. I would say otherwise, you know, COVID and kind of post-COVID era, you know, has presented us, you know, business operators and founders, with a lot of, I should say, a market that is adapting and changing at a pace that I've never seen happen, you know, in my 30 years of leadership. The last, you know, six years have been a wild ride. And it doesn't seem like you can really count on anything or predict anything from quarter to quarter, right? Things are changing very, very fast. And of course, a lot of disruption is happening, you know, uh right now with AI across industries and the market. COVID actually actually ended up being a force multiplier for us. Um, you know, when suddenly we had hundreds of clients that had to go remote, you know, fully remote. They need technological solutions to do that. So we actually grew a lot, you know, in 2020, 2021. But just kind of the um the fallout from you know COVID and post-COVID has presented a lot of interesting challenges within the business to uh continually assess and and to solve, right? I would say, Brian, by and large, in my career, key lessons come from adversity. They don't come from success, right? Um granted, there are those times where you really figure something out uh that creates a lot of success and uh it's fun, it's exciting, it's exciting, and you you have an opportunity once you've nailed something to learn how to scale it. But by and large, I would say adversity, I don't think it defines character. Adversity reveals character and then it presents you with an opportunity to make choices about how you want to deal with uh you know that adversity. And that can present you with choices around whether or not you want to lean into developing yourself and your team, right? Whether you compromise integrity or not. I would say 30 years of of growing a business for me has been a lot of commitment and discipline and being very, very committed to a growth mindset and viewing every challenge, you know, that comes across your plate as an opportunity to learn and grow and to become better, right? As a as a founder, as a leader, as an entrepreneur, and across your team and organization, right? Um and so um, yeah, those are some of the big ones. You know, I can always dig in, you know, if there's follow-up questions there.

Bryan Schielke 4:50

But no, those are fantastic. And yeah, you're you're spot on. I love it. I appreciate that. Well, and and yeah, speaking of of fraud and and cybersecurity, next question. Cybersecurity is often seen as a technical issue, but you talk a lot about leadership and mindset. Why do you think business growth and security are so deeply connected?

Earl Foote 5:08

Yeah, very good. I'd say first and foremost, and and one of the evolutions we've seen happen in the marketplace over the last couple of years is that cybersecurity really has now become uh an executive leadership uh, you know, level conversation and consideration and board level. It's part of governance now. And you know, cybersecurity programs are very tightly tied to GRC programs and you know, really they're they're morphing to become more one whole sort of consideration together. So, you know, I talk about leadership because prior to this sort of evolution that's happening, generally speaking, when we spoke to most senior level leaders, right? Anything that was technology related, you know, uh IT, cyber, cloud compliance, was all considered a cost center. It's a pain in our ass and it's gonna cost us money, right? Um fortunately, we are seeing that that begin to shift, right? Where leaders and organizations are now viewing more than ever before, you know, cybersecurity and compliance solutions as a necessity of doing business, right? And in many cases, and this is something that we we talk with our clients and prospects about, cybersecurity and compliance can be a significant competitive differentiator and advantage in the market. It's very hard to scale a company that isn't secure and that is reckless in the way that it builds, right? And this, I would say, not to pick on any industry or any one way of building a business, but uh venture-backed VC, right? Those are very fast businesses. They typically are, you know, you don't fix it until it breaks, type of uh type of organizations. You know, it's favor the growth over uh durability, right? And I can tell you as a as a three-decade sort of you know builder, we have favored durability over, you know, over growth. Now, we've also figured out how to grow quite quickly, right? Um organically, uh we grow at about 45% uh keger per year. And then depending on the year in our MA practice, you know, this year we'll probably end up at 250 to 300% growth uh with MA on top of about 45% organic growth. But I can tell you, and we've learned that lesson hard multiple times, not to divorce divert us, but I'll come back. We've favored at points growth over durability. And I can tell you unequivocally, there will be things that will break, right? Um if you do not build out the foundation correctly up front, and you don't uh bring in adequate uh considerations around systems, around culture, around people, you know, who you hire and how you hire, in the end, favoring growth over durability will absolutely test the business. And in some cases, it will tank a business, right? For us, you know, at this point, and in fact, having good cybersecurity and compliance programs within an organization builds trust with the market. It builds trust with your clients, and it it enables you to ultimately land bigger fish, bigger deals, longer-term deals, more profitable deals, right? Um if you want to grow your business and do so, you know, up market, right, which that's most businesses, that's part of the evolution path. I mean, there are those that somewhere along the way, they either find a product market fit, you know, um, or choose, you know, a segment of business uh, you know, to play in. But the reality is, you know, that can become a stagnant business, right? If you're not consistently up-leveling the type of clients, the size of the clients, right, the problems and pains and needs of that type of client that you can solve, right? It's harder to grow the business, um, to just kind of be in the status quo. And with today's modern data governance and vendor management programs, you'll struggle to get bigger opportunities and to have larger organizations trust you enough to do business with you if you aren't serious about how you manage their data. And so you've seen in in recent years these data governance and vendor management programs were far more prolific in enterprise sort of organizations, but enterprise organizations hire some mid-market organizations as partners and vendors, right? And therefore, that all gets pushed down into mid-market, and then from mid-market it's gotten pushed down into SMBs. And so in today's world, you know, the reality is if you're trying to do business with businesses that are probably greater than 50 employees, they will have real considerations around are we going to allow you to touch, to process, to access our data, to store our data, right, to transmit our data. Those are all real considerations because I I could recite for you, you know, many large, large breaches that happened by way of a an insecure vendor that was interfacing with a much larger, much larger organization who was not taking their own security and compliance seriously. So for me, yeah, growth and and you know cybersecure security, they are one consideration together. I really do believe that, you know, in today's world, that is the lens that you know senior leaders and boards have to have to take. I believe it's becoming more and more the norm that we're seeing in the market.

Bryan Schielke 10:21

Great answer. I appreciate that. That is awesome. All right. Jump into the next one here. You've built Nexus through long-term discipline, acquisitions, and steady expansion. What do most founders misunderstand about sustainable growth?

Earl Foote 10:33

If I go back to, you know, uh some of my comments around growth versus durability, right? Um, or, you know, favoring growth at all costs, growth can and in many cases will, it will conceal or hide very fragile things in the business, right? And I'm telling you this from my own experience, right? Um, like we've made these mistakes. So we've we've been in these trenches, you know, of uh growth is sexy, right? Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's grow as fast as we can. But if you're not paying adequate attention to the operations, right? And consistently delivering, and that's what I teach our team, right? Like, by the way, and we're we are not a transactional type of solution. Our clients do not outsource, you know, technology, cyber compliance, cloud to us unless they implicitly trust us. And it's the same with prospects, and trust has to be built by consistently delivering a quality experience to your clients in every interaction. It does mean, you know, uh, which again is part of the the area where this is not so sexy, is that look, early stage startups are really fun, right? They they really are fun. You can go fast, you can do a lot of you know very creative, inventive things. The reality is as a business grows and scales, you do have to professionalize the business, right? You have to build systems, processes, hire the right people, and you really have to build an organization that can consistently, because it has adequate systems and processes, which I don't think you should overburden either. And we we can talk more about that. But um, you know, by building out adequate systems that you know you can deliver a quality experience for your clients at every interaction becomes paramount. Um and so I guess what I would say is that many founders kind of forget that piece until it becomes a problem to them. And again, I that's from my own experience, right? If that happens to you, you generally have to stop some of your growth engine so that you can focus adequate leadership attention and bandwidth on fixing what's wrong, right? Uh and and what's diminishing, you know, your client experience and your people experience, right? So growth rates generally have to decelerate. And that's it's actually a very expensive mistake because traction and momentum in a market are extremely, extremely hard to build. And if you have major traction and you have to slow the business down so you can fix problems in the business, building that traction, that momentum back up can take a long time, right? It can take 18 months, 24 months, 36 months to kind of get back to where you were, you know, after you've taken six to 12 to fix some things in the business. For me, I'd say the other real key piece that I would add into here is that culture can absolutely empower growth or it can undermine growth. What I mean by that is that you either have culture by default or you have culture by design within an organization, right? And that culture by design has to become something very, very intentional. You have to be very intentional about defining what you want the culture to be, how you're going to architect that throughout the organization, how that culture is going to be actually modeled and built on a day-to-day basis, right? Um and we can come back, I think we have another question about, you know, culture later on. We can come back and dig a little bit deeper into that. But uh, yeah, that that's kind of the second area where I'd say a lot of founders miss the mark is understanding the value of culture. Because if you don't have a culture that is ready to scale, it will absolutely bottleneck your growth and likely cause, again, some very significant issues in your business along the way. So over time, you know, we've we've learned a lot of hard lessons over three decades. So now we're we're far more methodical builders than we've ever been before and have built a really great executive team, right? A really great board who helped me and the organization be far more methodical and and really thinking through these next stages of evolution of the organization and growth and how we're going to build out foundation, you know, both in operations, you know, and in culture to empower the scalability of the organization, right?

Bryan Schielke 14:54

That makes a lot of sense. Absolutely. Great answer. I appreciate that. And yeah, we do have, I think the last question is about culture and still feeling human. So yeah, we'll you can dive into that when we get to it. Very good. Okay. You often speak about empathy, accountability, and trust in leadership. How do those values show up in a high pressure industry like IT and cybersecurity?

Earl Foote 15:14

Yeah, very good. Uh this is a great question. And I don't want to jump too far ahead in culture, but culture is part of the answer here. Um first and foremost, look, in our industry, pressure is the status quo. Granted, we are far more about, you know, taking preventative measures than reacting to crises, right? Um, that's what a managed IT and managed cybersecurity services provider, you know, that is our intent. We engage with our clients to build proactive technology and systems and security and compliance so that those organizations don't have crises come up, right? But the reality is technology is technology. Um, and with through millions of lines of code, you know, throughout all the pieces of software that you use uh, you know, in a computing environment, through hardware, you know, that that's part of those computing environments, through people error, right? Uh, you know, there are a lot of considerations around where crises are going to come up, right? Um, and look, software and hardware are also not impervious to security risks, right? Almost all of them have bugs, loopholes, backdoors, right, um, that haven't been discovered yet and haven't been passed or fixed yet. And so regardless of how much you know uh an internal or outside sourced IT and cyber team does to prevent major crises, they are going to happen. Just over the last couple of months, for example, our security operations center is dealing with right now on the order of about 250 security incidents a month, with 10 to 15 of those being real world security incidents or breaches. The others are smaller things that are not like full breach, but they're, you know, um they're security considerations and challenges. We've absolutely seen a significant increase in the amount of you know security incidents and breaches that are happening on the order of, you know, literally today we're probably two times more than we were processing uh or working in a month than we were 24 months ago. I guess first and foremost, you know, if we come back to uh building out the right systems with you know people, technology, and processes and building accountability into those into those systems is part of the you know the recipe here to building more resilient organization that faces less high pressure and can operate in a smoother way, right, uh uh on a day-to-day basis. And I would say on the accountability side, high standards are a form of respect, right? They're they're a form of respect for your clients, for the market, and for a, you know, I call it a championship team. At Nexus, we're not building a team that is satisfied with mediocre or satisfied with subpar, most definitely not. Our aim is to consistently be world class, right? Not just, you know, nationwide or statewide, right? World class type of organization, holding a high standard within the organization is a form of respect for the people that you've hired. You've hired a lot of A players, hopefully, right? And granted, we all know there are there are places for B's and C's sometimes, you know, in certain types of roles, but predominantly you're, you know, you're building a championship team of A players. And that championship team does not expect to have to carry the weight for underperformers, right? For people who are not committed, who aren't dedicated day in and day out to the mission and the vision that you're building. And so, you know, holding a high standard within the organization uh helps reinforce a culture of empowerment, right? A culture where people can do the best work of their career because they're supported by their teammates. You know, you know, teammates are very collaborative. It's not a toxic environment where people are trying to throw each other under the bus and those types of things. You know, it it's a and look, I I really I tend to hesitate in using the word family within a business because I think it can lead to manipulative sort of you know um terms and behaviors. And also look, most families have a measure of dysfunction, again, by by way of experience, right? Um, and you know, businesses, it's a lot harder to exist with dysfunction in a business, right, than a family. Um and so, but coming back to it, you're building this environment where you want, you know, your top performers to consistently have an environment that supports them uh in delivering whatever it is you deliver to your clients or customers, right? Um, having accountability within, you know, within an organization by way of the culture, by way of what you measure, by way of what you manage to write, uh is all super important. I'm gonna save the correlation of empathy here, actually, for our culture question later, because um I think that's where I really want to develop that topic a little bit more.

Bryan Schielke 20:00

Gotcha. Makes sense. No, that's terrific. I appreciate that. Cool. All right. Question number five here. You said that valuation is something you build years before an exit. What should founders be doing right now if they want to create long-term enterprise value?

Earl Foote 20:14

Yeah, very good. So, first and foremost, I would say uh a mistake that I see happen very often is that people decide it's time to transact, right? Um, but they haven't built this durable business with a strong foundation that can scale. And look, sophisticated buyers are going to sniff that out all day long, all day long, right? And it doesn't mean that they're they won't be interested in your business, but it does mean they will likely pay less for your business, right? If they see that, you know, there's something fragile and that they're going to have to invest money. And look, as an acquirer, as a buyer, you know, we we look at businesses that we acquire, we look at you know how how well they're operating, how well they are performing to you know uh target financial metrics. If they're not where we want them to be, again, we at times might still have interest in in acquiring that business, but we have to discount out of the, you know, out of the um the enterprise value, right, that you're going to pay for the organization, you have to discount out the investments you're going to have to make into that organization to bring it up to your standard, right? Absolutely. For entrepreneurs and founders out there, business builders, operators, whatever your role might be, my recommendation is you really need to start to think about how you position for your organization for exit, at minimum three to five years before exit. But the truth is, the way I like to talk about it more is just build a business today that is ready to sell. So you always have the optionality. Because, you know, more than ever before, buyers are knocking at your door. I think any founder in any industry every week is getting, you know, on the order of five to ten to fifteen organizations reaching out. And some of those are strategic, some are PE, some are family office. But uh, you know, the buying volume with MA, you know, over the past you know decade or two has really. Increased, you never know when that right partner might come knocking at your door. And if you're not poised and ready with a high quality business to hand over to an acquirer, whether you're staying with the business or not, right? It really can be a large mistake. And so I always recommend building a business that is positioned well to sell is something that you're intentionally doing on a day-to-day basis, right? You're consistently assessing all of your functions across the organization, right? Whether it's something in your back office, in finance, HR, you know, accounting, or if it's, you know, your operations, your client service delivery, you know, in marketing and sales, your go-to-market functions. You're consistently assessing, you know, where there's opportunity for improvement and where you can continue to evolve the business, right? And continue to meet or to drive better financial outcomes. Now, look, I'm I'm not only in business for financial outcomes. Uh, so I don't want to sound like, you know, a shrewd uh, you know, guy here who's all about give me more profit and you know, give our shareholders more profit. That isn't the way we build, you know, here at Nexus IT. We're a client and people first organization, but a client and people first organization has to be very healthy financially to be able to deliver for your client and your people, right? Um, for your clients and your people, I should say. Building out recurring revenue models early, reducing, you know, dependency on owners, executives, founders, right? You need to build an organization that you know can run and manage itself with the right systems and people in place. Your financials have got to be clean. And a lot of this, for me, you know, you need to engage advisors or you need to get a network of people around you that can help you understand, you know, how to build a more durable, attractive business for a later potential acquisition, right? Or merger or whatever it might be. And those advisors, you know, on the legal front, you know, on the finance front, if you do plan to go to market, right, speaking with investment bankers or brokers very early on and getting their opinion on how you build an attractive business, you know, that's positioned, ready to sell, uh, particularly, you know, bankers and brokers that specialize in your industry. And that's where I would recommend that you go. And granted, again, building a leadership team, a board, um, you know, if that's applicable, that can really help you as an organization understand, you know, how you build a business that is ultimately going to command attention and command a high multiple, right? If that multiple is either a multiple of EBITDA or a multiple of revenue, depending on the industry that you're in, you want to be able to command top dollar, but you have to be able to deliver a world-class business in order to do that. And so that also means that, you know, your systems, your processes all need to be well documented and need to be the truth that's lived within the organization on a day-to-day day-to-day basis. Because you can write 83,000 pages of process. And I promise you, not one person is going to ever look at that and read any of it, you know, in the middle of their day, right? You have to keep processes thin. You know, for me, the real value driver is culture and people. Like when you hire the right people and empower them correctly, they manage the process the right way. You know, and granted, during training, they may, you know, need to refer to processes here and there. But um, you know, you can write process till you're blue in the face and it will not change anything in your business, right? It really is around the behavior of people in the organization, which is the culture. Yeah, those for me are major considerations, you know, early on. And for you know, budding founders who are just getting started, you know, I totally recommend like slow down enough to understand what's required to build a business that will command, you know, uh a good uh a good exit and begin building that today. And it doesn't mean that it all needs to be done tomorrow. Like, you know, um, these are things that happen over quarters, over years of building, right? And again, that you consistently and constantly evolve because the market is always changing, right? The needs of your clients are always changing, the needs of your people are always changing. And so you again, you just have to stay really um in contact with what those needs are, continually assess and continually improve the business. You know, that's why in our organization we have three pillars, plus our mission and vision. Those are our decision-making framework, right? Every leader in this organization carries quarterly initiatives that I should call them quarterly improvement initiatives that within their function or their role are consistently leveling the business up all the time, right? That's a requirement for all leaders here. And it's a requirement of something they report on at a regular cadence, depending on the level of leadership within the organization, because you know, we have executives, we have mid-level managers, we have you know some team leads, so kind of three tiers of of leadership within the organization right now. We absolutely try to stay as flat as possible. Um, but as you grow, you know, in size as an organization, you do have to build out more tiers of leadership, really making sure that what you intend to be the culture, right? And what and the the behavior and the the targets that you intend to um uh to reach, you know, that they are lived on a day-to-day basis with that, you know, throughout the entire organization. Like I said earlier, run the business today like you're going to sell it tomorrow, right? Um and you'll you'll always have optionality for your options for uh for exit.

Bryan Schielke 27:28

That makes sense. Yeah. Great lesson. Start with the end in mind. Love it. Okay. Well, the uh the grand finale, you can wrap it all together here. So this will this will be great. For leaders trying to scale without losing their culture, what have you learned about building a high performance team that still feels human?

Earl Foote 27:44

First and foremost, uh, you know, yeah, if if you're going to plan to scale and to scale rapidly, probably the first failure point that you're going to face is culture. The second will be systems, uh, you know, processes, operations, right? But uh first and foremost, it will be culture because people's behavior without, you know, within the organization determines the culture. If you're scaling quickly and you have a team who doesn't have a growth mindset, who isn't willing to consistently accept change, right, um, and consistently evolve as an organization, the culture will start to come apart, um, you know, at the seams. I guess first and foremost, let me um let me start kind of with some foundational principles, right? On how you build a really constructive, productive culture. And we talk about it, you know, here at Nexus IT as we're building a culture, an environment where we empower people to do the best work of their career. And that has to happen in a way, um, you know, if you're empowering people, it's not micromanaging people. It's not being over their shoulders all the time, right? And just even taking another step back. I I hear a lot of leaders, it's become a very popular sort of phrase, you know, that gets uh pontificated from a lot of different stages. And a lot of leaders will say, Cult, you know, culture is what you tolerate. Um and I say yes, to an extent that is true, right? However, that's a very punitive lens to look through. It's a lens that uh you will absolutely build a culture that is based in fear, not an empowerment within your organization. And I can tell you, like if you study psychology, right, if people are in fight or flight, if they're in fear, they do not produce the best work. If people are empowered, right? If they feel like they're in a constructive environment, you begin to get discretionary effort. You begin to get creativity and innovation, right? People begin to see the problems on the front lines and they begin surfacing those problems to, you know, managers or leaders, and they begin to surface those with solutions to those problems. And so I like to say, look, culture is a space between what you motivate, inspire, and celebrate and what you tolerate. Because if you just lead from here, from the tolerate, um, you're not going to build an extraordinary organization. You're going to build an organization where people are acting out of fear all the time. If you lean, and we lean towards the top end of that spectrum, right? We we default to empowering people through motivation, inspiration, and celebration. In that type of environment, more often than not, you don't have to go to the far end of the, you know, that bottom end of the spectrum of what you tolerate, right? You hire the right people, the right fit, the right values, you know, the right intrinsic personal values that fit your core values of the organization. And you give them an environment with us, you know, supportive peers and supportive leaders and managers. In the end, they're in a place where they want to do good work. They feel aligned with the mission and vision of the organization. They've joined you because they want to help you build a big vision. Very rarely do you have to default to, hey, you're missing the mark and you're not hitting your KPIs, and you know, we're gonna have to have a disciplinary discussion, right? Um, or you know, put you on a pip or something like that, right? Um, for me, uh, and then I guess, you know, uh the other really foundational principle here that is generally missed in most organizations, and even very experienced leaders, this is kind of a major trap that I see people get caught in. And that is that very often, you know, leaders and contributors within an organization think that culture is built by the ping pong tables and the all-you-can-eat buffet and the cafeteria, you know, and the daycare and the gym, you know, uh in the office building, right? Let me tell you, that is not culture. Culture is behavior of people at scale within the organization. And more specifically, it is the behavior of leaders at scale throughout the entire organization. So uh with that fundamental understanding, you have to know that starting at the executive team, right, the level of function or dysfunction that exists in that team will exist throughout the entire organization, right? And what you model in terms of behavior and what's important to the organization will absolutely exist throughout the entire organization. So accountability starts at the top, right? Uh it starts on the executive leadership team. You know, executive leadership team has to make sure that mid-level managers are managing uh the organization according to, you know, the values of the organization uh and the mission, the vision, and the culture that you intend to build. And I should go back and mention really quick look, really quality cultures are built on psychological safety and trust. And you do not build trust or psychological safety within an organization if leaders do not live the values of the organization, right? If you have expressed core values that are hanging, you know, on the walls in your office in your constant conference rooms, but you know, it's a sign that, you know, a poster or something that, you know, uh people look at once every couple of years, but it is not the lived reality within the organization. The culture will constantly suffer, right? Um when leaders, starting executives, mid-level managers, then you know, frontline leaders, right, when they live on a day-to-day basis the values of the uh the organization as the expectation of standard of behavior within the organization, and they reinforce that on a day-to-day basis, you begin to build a culture where people are empowered to do their the best work of their career, right? And again, for me, this isn't about being punitive, right? Um it's about being empathetic. It's about being human, right? Human as uh as a leader and human understanding that you're working with other humans, whether those are your team within your organization or clients, right? Um, business only gets done because people interface with each other, at least right now. You know, it might be AI interfacing with AI in a few years, but uh, you know, for right now, you know, business gets done because people do business with people. Business is a very human endeavor. And if you don't come to the table with empathy, right, for where your clients are at, for where your people are at, for how your organization is affecting, you know, their current psychological safety and trust, then you're going to struggle to build a culture that can really perform, right? Um, when you're an empathetic leader, and empathy does not mean that you enable poor behavior or poor performance, right? Empathy means that, you know, um, that you're human, that you're vulnerable, that you're not perfect, but that every day you strive to show up, to build something meaningful together, and every day you model the core values of the organization, right? And it means that you're empathetic to your clients because that's you know how you create revenue, right? That is the first priority, right? You're empathetic to your clients, you're empathetic to, you know, the the people within your organization and how the organization operates on a day-to-day basis and how that affects them directly, right? But you're you also have to be empathetic to the whole, because a place where culture can come off the wheels is if you're empathetic to specific contributors. And I'm not saying you can't extend empathy to everybody individually within the organization, but if you've got, you know, 60% of your organization that are A players, and you've got some C players, you know, that you're being very empathetic towards, but it's undermining, you know, the performance and the workload for the A players, you're going to break down the culture, right? And so empathy in that, in that situation, and look, business is business, right? And you do have to produce real-world financial outcomes to pay your people, you know, to pay your vendors and your partners and you know, all of your overhead and all the expenses within the business, right? And so um, in the end, you know, you have to be empathetic to the whole. Are clients receiving the experience they should be experiencing? Are the the team members within our organization, particularly top performers, are they experiencing the experience that they want to have? And if not, then you know, empathy has to be extended by helping to move, you know, B players into A players and C players into B players, right? Um and at times, you know, if somebody's misaligned with the mission and vision of the organization and the values, which are the you know the standard of behavior, right, within the organization, then you you have to, you know, ask them to go play on a different bus, right? They're there very often you can't find the right seat on the bus for them. You just gotta ask them to go play on a different bus. Um and that that is a real world reality of business, but it's also very human. It doesn't have to be demeaning, it doesn't have to be demoralizing um to anybody, right? Even somebody who you're in the process of helping exit the organization, right? And and by and large, we try to help people, you know, find their next thing, right? We try to, you know, help them mentoring them around where they might fit, you know, in their career. And then if we have contacts, you know, that uh make sense, we'll make intros, right? And try to help them, you know, land the next thing. Sometimes two factors, right? One is you miss the mark on a higher, and it just happens. Like, you know, you miss something, whether it was, you know, capabilities, skills, knowledge, or whether it was behavior related, right? You miss the mark sometimes. And you bring somebody onto the bus that really doesn't belong on the bus. And you got to help them, you know, find a different bus to ride on. But then, you know, the other factor that happens here is particularly in a scaling, you know, high growth organization, some people can't make the transition with you fast enough, right? And so at times, you know, uh, and it's one of our core values here is growth mindset, right? Uh, and we hire for growth mindset and we manage to grow to growth mindset. But at times you you're going to outpace individual people on uh you know within the organization. And that's where the discipline of leaders you know has to come into play. Um, and very often, you know, we again, this is where we become empathetic, right? We sit down with a person, we understand what, you know, we try to understand what their career goals and objectives and and you know preferences are, and we try to, you know, figure out if there's a different seat on the bus where they may be able to contribute and that might be better suited for them, right? At times, you know, there's just not a seat that that's appropriate for the person. And again, you're, you know, you help them, you know, find a different bus to ride on, right? Um, so I I think those are you know kind of my major you know comments and learnings over three decades of uh building cultures and what works and what doesn't work.

Bryan Schielke 38:22

Absolutely. Well, thank you, Earl. That is unbelievable wisdom and insight and experience. And yeah, completely appreciate it. Awesome.