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Introduction
Well. Hey, everybody. Good to have you again. This is Doug Thorpe, and you’re on another episode of leadership powered by Common Sense. Today, my guest is a gentleman who is a keynote speaker and a leadership coach advisor, thought leader. His name is Larry. Made us. Larry, you go by the leadership, Larry. So we’ll talk about that. But welcome to the show.
Doug. Thank you so much. My pleasure to be here.
Yeah, it’s a little bit of a tradition on the show. Larry, I’d like to ask my guest to give us a quick story arc of your background and your journey to get to where you are right now. And, you know, how did you formulate and inspire what you’re doing right now?
Larry’s Journey: From College Dropout to Leadership Expert
Sure. Well, I consider myself to be very fortunate when I look over my shoulder of all the jobs I’ve had in my life. There were probably only two that I absolutely hated and lasted three days and quit.
but I’ve always been intrigued by, marketing and advertising, and I’d like to think I’m an extrovert and good with people. And, I was a junior in college at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Clearly. Remember sitting at the kitchen table one night doing my homework, miserable and ready to drop out of school. And my mom looked at me that night and said, well, for the rest of your life, what do you want to get paid to do? And I said, you know what? If I could get paid to talk, like, sign me up, I am there. So, I went back and, I went to another university in town that had a formal media journalism program, and they actually said, don’t come to school here, which I was shocked. They said, look, we graduated 300 people a year with with a degree. Most of them don’t get jobs. Go back to go back to UB, find a counselor, tell them you’ve got two and a half years under your belt.
You want to customize your degree. So the year I graduated with close to 30,000 students, I was the only person who had my my degree. I did a bachelor’s in, communication. I called it sports communication, and I did a minor in advertising and public relations. But to to get through college without student loans, I worked in restaurants and bars, supper clubs, not crazy party bars, because those people don’t tip well. And I paid my way through school, but it was sort of at that point in my life, I really think where I realized in my own DNA, I had a mentality for servant leadership, and I wanted to serve people clearly, and I wanted to connect people, and I wanted to help people find their place and their meaning and be happier and be successful. So, you know, that was like the beginning of the for me. And I worked in media for a number of years. I worked in radio sales on air. I worked in newsprint, I worked in outdoor billboard advertising, trying to crack into television.
The Pivot to Higher Education and Consulting
Couldn’t do it, didn’t do it, set a timeline for it, and literally walked away. And I’ve been involved in higher education now for 29 years, and one of the best jobs I ever had in corporate America was at a college system called Bryant Stratton College, and I was there ten years, phenomenal people, and went back to school for my master’s in organizational leadership first cohort that that university produced. So we were 001. The good news is we were the guinea pigs. The bad news is we were the guinea pigs. and then walked away from, from Brian and Stratton and said, I’m going to go into this consulting world. So I was fortunate. I have a cousin who’s, maybe 13, 14 years older than I am. He had a local, consulting business here in Western New York. So I worked for him for four years. And then just one day he said, you know what? I’m just going to hang my shingle up and go out and do my own thing. And that was 15 years ago.
So, really wanted to. My boys were in high school at the time, and I realized, kind of like the cat’s in the cradle, there’s going to come a point in life where they’re not going to have time for me, and I’m going to wish I had time for them, or I’ve given them more time. So being an independent, business consultant, author, speaker allowed me to do all that. my oldest child, quite honestly, my daughter was born with down syndrome. And when she was very young, we needed a lot of time to understand and learn the therapies and be the best parents we could be. So I glue all that together and fast forward. That’s that’s where we are today. When my mom was alive, she told me I did not have a real job. And she she couldn’t explain to her girlfriends what I did. I said, look, mom, just tell him I go into businesses, make them better. They’re either already healthy and they want to get better, or they’re broken and they’re trying to get fixed.
That’s what I do. Travel around the country speak a lot about leadership and motivation, obviously. and, my book came out, would be five years in October and still still promoting that and touring with regard to that. So that’s kind of the cliff notes version of, of of how we got here.
The Consulting Journey and Leadership Challenges
Yeah. You know, I, I find it fascinating, fascinating when you talk about the consulting game. as most of my audience knows, my journey also, there was a chapter in consulting. And that is ultimately what led me directly into the executive coaching, because what I found my consulting clients, while they wanted to execute on the project they commissioned for my me or my team to come do, there was inevitably a leadership challenge. Either. Either they were feeling it or they needed help with the the team around them and and things needed to be looked at from a pure leadership standpoint. And often the common thread was people had gotten thrust into their leadership roles somewhat by accident, and they were no more prepared to take that charge than than anything.
So, you know, everybody goes at it with best efforts, I think most of the time. And and you it’s a trial by fire sort of thing. You, you know, you do a few things. You try a few things. They don’t work. You’re maybe not sure how to fix it, but, the bigger kind of tendency is they fall into some kind of rhythm, whether it’s really working or not. They they find a stride and that’s what they do. And then that’s their leadership style. And sure, I just. For for those on streaming on audio, I just did an air quotes for leadership style, you know to to call it that. But well let’s talk about some of your observations. And I know, well, tell people the title of your book, and I know you allude to it in the content of the book.
“We Tried That Once” – The Book Behind the Mission
Now the book is called, again, Air Quotes. We tried that once, and the subtitle is and Other Popular Excuses That Sabotage Business Success.
So I knew for a long time that I wanted to write a book, and I couldn’t get my head around it and literally danced around with that thought for a decade. And just like a hallmark movie, I woke up one night at 3:00 in the morning and it was right there. There was the title, and I woke up and I wrote it down. And the next day I thought, when I’m talking to prospects, business leaders, business owners or working with clients, what are these repetitive excuses that I hear? And I wrote them down, 13 of them, and I ranked them. And what I thought was the order of what I hear the most to the least. And then the whole premise of the book is, you know, you mentioned the word rhythm and stride. I thought, do people just get into these convenient patterns of somebody walks in and goes, yeah, we don’t have the right tools, we don’t have enough time yet. We don’t have enough money. We don’t have enough resources.
We don’t we don’t have the right location. We don’t have a, you know, and someone in charge goes, oh, okay. I talked to Doug about that. So take that off the list. And I believe what he’s telling me. So we’re just going to suffer And, you know, my whole thought was, can you slow that down for a second, probe a little bit deeper, really find out if this excuse is a convenient excuse that’s been bred into the culture sometimes created by ownership and leadership? Or is there really a challenge, a business challenge that we can peel back the layers of the onion? Do a root cause analysis. Find out what’s going on and figure out how to fix it moving forward. That’s really the premise of of the book. And it’s funny because no matter where I go, no matter who I talk to, as soon as I say to them, we tried that once. They burst out laughing and they say, well, yeah, welcome to my life.
Welcome to my company. Welcome to my world. I mean, it’s all of us, myself included. You know, we all make excuses, and then we have to step back and say, well, how much are we? Are we relying on them? And if we pared repair some of those things. Could we get a better result, a different result? you know, I toyed with the idea sometimes of writing a follow up book, because there certainly are more than 13 excuses in the world, but I think I’ve got a lot of mileage left in these 13 excuses. And the thing is, I think personally, professionally, we all know that we use these excuses on a regular basis, but we don’t take the time just to dissect them and try to figure out at least one of them. So, you know, that’s really where it, where it, where it came from, how the whole thing popped up. And, many of my presentations, when I’m out speaking around the country are somehow tied to the book.
some of them aren’t, but I I’ve yet to meet a person who said that doesn’t apply to me, or that doesn’t apply to my business.
Limiting Beliefs and Risk Aversion
Right? No, I think it’s a very common theme that does happen. And I think to the point of, you know, do we fall into a rhythm or a stride? Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a combination Asian of what might be your own personal comfort zone. For instance, I’ve run into a lot of entrepreneurs who learned and now understand it takes a certain amount of risk tolerance to be an entrepreneur. And so while they might have gotten comfortable with taking on a little more risk than the other average guy, maybe they’re still not comfortable taking the bigger risk that it truly takes to grow a private company. I mean, typically small businesses do not grow in that nice, smooth line that you see in business school that grow in giant stair step leaps, things like, I need to add a facility or I need to add a new machine, or I need to invest in a whole new process or team of people.
And and those are giant bumps in your PNL. And they don’t just smooth line out you. So when you’re analyzing that, you get into that risk aversion real fast. And you know that alone is just one, one element. But I think you sum it all up. And that’s where we as coaches get into the talking about limiting beliefs, you know, how are you? How are you programmed to think about the world around you? And do you have a certain limiting belief. Oh, that’ll never work, you know. And and it gets back to that. We tried it before, but it’ll never work. Well, that’s a statement of limiting belief.
Right. Yeah. And when people say that to me I’m like, okay, talk to me about that. There was a meeting or a series of meetings. Where are the notes from that meeting? Well, we didn’t keep those. Okay. How long ago was that? I said, you know, maybe it’s a brilliant idea that’s ahead of its time.
Like somebody sat in a room one day and said, people are going to talk on phones that aren’t connected to the wall of the court. Someone said that somewhere in the meeting. All right. and I taught a college course one time, and it was organizational design and broke the group the room into three groups. I had the branches of US government written on the board, and I said, you have 30 minutes, 30 minutes to redesign the US government that’s been around for hundreds of years. Two of the groups. Not good. One of the groups I said, take these notes, roll them up, store them, rent a bank deposit box because this is an idea you could market and sell. This could actually work. They were, you know, 18, 19, 20 years old. And it was that that that whole, you know, could it really work? Maybe. But maybe it’s not going to work for 20 years. But yeah, you just don’t you just don’t throw it away.
The Power of Fresh Perspective
And I think to your point, you know, we’re all creatures of habit. We say what we’re used to saying. we do what we’re used to doing. We go where we’re used to going. I had a CEO one time who who would send people to trade shows, and then they’d come back. He’d look at the results and he would chastise them and say, well, you know, you know, nobody can know. Nobody can sell like I do. And I went in there and I said, I’ve got much less experience in this industry than you do. I’m going to go to the next trade show alone, and I’m going to see what I can sell. And, you know, not to pat myself on the back, but the results were were pretty impressive. And I said, people aren’t getting the results you want because you’ve intimidated them to the point of they don’t even want to try. I said, it’s not your style. That’s great. If they’re telling the truth and they understand the product and they know the pricing, just let them do it their way and stop telling them that they can’t do it as good as you.
The Number One Problem: Ego
So and you know, it’s funny. One time I was paying a property tax bill with one of my corporate checks And the clerk said to me. She looked at the name of my company, speaking of strategy, and she asked me what I what I do, and she looked at me and it was great. And she said, out of all the businesses and all the leaders you’ve worked with, what do you think the number one problem is that trips these people up? And I didn’t hesitate and I don’t hesitate today. I said, I think it’s ego. I said, when when you wake up and tell yourself you know it all and you don’t need help to do some of it, and no one can prove you wrong and you’ve got all the ideas. It’s it’s more than the beginning of the end. And the best leaders and the best companies I’ve ever been a consultant to a customer of. They have that servant leadership mentality. They empower the people around them. They trust the talented people that they hired, and they get out of their way.
And their job as a leader is just to move the barriers that are slowing Doug up, but not doing Doug’s job for him. and a lot of people can’t get their arms around that.
Founder-itis: The Invisible Wall
I totally agree. And sometimes it’s it’s, comically called founder itis. You, you know, you created the business. This was your baby. Your idea. Nobody knows it better than you do. And you know, all these ideas that are coming at you can’t be right because, you know, they weren’t your idea. And and I, I saw that in my early banking days, I, I used to be so frustrated by it as a young banker because I would see these owners that would come to the bank and they had this business that was, you know, it was going okay. And then all of a sudden it caught fire. And, you know, market share started increasing and opportunities started growing. And, you know, that may last for a couple of years. And then all of a sudden there was this mystical, invisible wall that they would hit, and the wheels started coming off of what was otherwise a really good business.
You had a good client list, you had a good, you know, order pipeline, and yet the business couldn’t execute, they couldn’t deliver. And then later in my banking career and then turning into consulting, I’ve really started analyzing that because it just bugged me, you know, how can this happen? What you know, the very thing that you wanted to do as a startup, you wanted to be successful. You wanted to have the the big top side revenue number. Why why doesn’t it keep going? Well, inevitably the common denominator was the owner founder. They weren’t willing to delegate. They weren’t willing to admit their own limitations. And, you know, some of the most brilliant business moves I’ve observed over the years is the founder that says, you know what this company is now in, you know, healthy seven digit maybe or early eight digit revenue. I don’t think I’m the CEO anymore. I need to hire a CEO, somebody that can really help me take this to the next level.
And, you know, that’s a huge ego challenge and.
Sure.
To step away and and get comfortable with saying, you know, owner, founder versus CEO or president or whatever else you want to call it. But again, some of the best moves I’ve ever seen in business is when the owner founder does just that.
Exactly.
At a minimum.
Delegation and Trust
I challenge a lot of the CEOs that I’ve worked with, including during the pandemic, and I’ll say to them, pick a day of the week, try to keep the same day of the week and work from home. I what’s wrong? You’ve got a team. They’ve been with you a long time. They know what to do. They know how to open the door. Turn on the lights and transact business. This. You would get so much more done if people weren’t coming up to you for five minutes. So stay home and work from home. And most of them can’t do it or or won’t do it. And you’re right. I mean, you know, I’m preaching to the choir and as well as, you know, your viewers and listeners, if you’re a startup versus growing versus mature versus stagnant versus declining, those businesses all need different skill sets and different mentalities.
And I see so many businesses that go, well, you know, we hired Larry 30 years ago. He did the big lift. You know, we can’t let him go.
Right?
Well, maybe we can find him a different role in the organization. Or maybe it’s time to part ways. You know, Jim Collins always talked about the the right people in the right seats on the bus. And I’ve always added on to that. And I’ve said, sometimes we have to pull the bus over, open the door, look over our shoulder and say. Larry. Doug, it’s time for you to get off. Oh, and Sally and Jim standing on the corner. It’s time for you to get out. And then close the door and drive away on that journey of the business. And it’s tough. you know, people just become so ingrained in their in their habits. I worked one time with a very large national, financial firm, and they got all their regionals together in one part of the state.
Breaking Habitual Patterns: The Monday Night Football Story
And I went in with one mindset of talking about one thing and over lunch, just listening to them. I threw all that out, and I stood up and I said, you might fire me on the spot in the next five minutes. But here’s what I’m hearing that’s not being addressed. And we’re going to solve it right now and address it. And it was just it was just habitual. They were sort of running old school. We all, we all, every single one of us get on the phone every Monday from 6 to 8 and cold Conquer for business, for clients. And so I said, okay, let’s just do basic assumption here. What day of the week our most employees the most miserable. Well Monday. Well why is that. Because they went back to work and they don’t like their jobs so they go home miserable. Okay. And what sport what event is telecast on Monday nights to millions of people all over the country for ten months of the year. Oh Monday Night Football.
And when does pregame coverage start? Oh around seven, 730, I said, so you’re calling the most miserable people in the world who don’t want to talk to anybody because they’re frustrated and you’re almost impinging on their Monday Night Football time. And they’re asking you’re asking them to trust a total stranger with their money. Let’s let’s talk about that. Why? Maybe it’s not working and you can see it like poof. But all the VP said, well, that’s what we’ve always done. Right? So you know, Doug, I know you know, the beauty of what we do is, you know, I always tell my prospects and clients, I’m flying over. I’m circling the forest in a helicopter. I’m yelling down to Doug, stop walking. You’re going to walk into a tree, but you don’t know what’s a tree anymore because you’ve lived in the forest so long, you just don’t know. And when those eyes come in like yours that are fresh from the outside world, and those ears come in from the outside world, it’s not always rocket science that that can move them in a different direction.
It’s just getting out of their own way.
Culture: The Foundation of Success
Well it is. And so much of this is rooted in, you alluded to it earlier, the the culture that has been developed at the company, the, the habits. And, you know, I’m going to use the example to start this. I’m going to use the example of one of the big, you know, global brands that I’ve dealt with. You know, they as a company, they’ve got a, you know, a hundred year legacy. And you start talking to some of the leadership team and what you realize is their definition of success is having watched the guy before them and how they operated and what they did, and that wasn’t necessarily warm and fuzzy. It wasn’t human centered. It was certainly wasn’t servant leadership. It was more of a command and control style. And when I had the chance to work with them, I was actually embedded there for about three years, working with various leaders and taking the company through some organizational realignment. They were doing, I challenged those ideas.
Well, wait a minute. You say you do that? Well, why? You know why. Why do you respond that way? Why do you act that way? And inevitably, nine times out of ten, it was like, well, that’s how the guy before me did it. And that was deemed Successful. And the whole purpose of this shift that was going on at the company, they had a new chairman and CEO who had moved in. I mean, he was a he was a homegrown product, but he had been elevated up to chairman and CEO, and he did a two year study and said, you know, our culture is not going to position us to support the new generations of talent coming up. They’re not going to want to work for us if we keep operating the way we do. Plain and simple. They’re not going to want to work for us. We need to change these things. So they did a you know, kudos to this guy’s leader. He did a huge mandate on culture shift.
Defining What Values Really Mean
But it had to start with. It’s one thing to put some vision and values on a piece of paper, but then you got to start permeating it through the organization. And one of the big things we had to do as a team of coaches, we had to challenge each leader. What do these words mean to you? Do you have the same translation in your mind right about where these align and and classic example. There was a notion of empowerment in there. Well, you know, this was a big oil and gas company. And the guy out at the refinery sitting there in the control room monitoring the dials, how much empowerment do you want to give that guy? Is he supposed to play with the dials and do something? No.
Yeah.
You don’t want to do that, you know, so that, you know, that opened up a much deeper discussion about what it what these values really meant. And they had to do that work before they could really, you know, turn it on if you will.
Yeah. And it’s amazing the assumptions that are made. And again, this is where fresh eyes and ears from the outside world can help out. I had an international manufacturing client one time and they called me up and they said, okay, we’re going to elevate. We have two guys, two VP’s. We’re high on both of them. We’re going to elevate only one of them to executive vice president. But we’re so close to this we can’t figure it out. We want you to help us figure it out. Fine. I go in there, sat him down separately in a room conference room, spend ten minutes with each one, went to HR, said Fred’s your guy. Joe’s not your guy. They said you were in there ten minutes, 20 minutes tops, I said. They said, we’re paying you for this. I said, I said, Fred’s your guy. Why are you so sure? I said, because I asked Joe one simple question. Does he want the position? And he said no.
And then he looked at me and said, that’s funny, Larry, you don’t even work here. And you’re the first person to ask me that. He said, I don’t want the position. I don’t need the extra stress. I don’t want the extra money. I’m happy where I am. But no one ever asked me until you walked in. And so sometimes they’re just so in their own way, which is understandable. We’re human beings, but I’m like, wow. Give me more opportunities like that. but yeah, it’s just, you know, we’re humans and there’s a lot of concern. Panic, uncertainty about AI. I’ve been saying I’ve been writing articles and I say, yeah, AI means always interested. Are you the leader who’s always interested? Not just when it’s convenient. Not just when times are good. Not just because you haven’t circled the floor, the plant in a few days and talk to people. Are you always genuinely interested in the people that are working with you and around you? And a laptop can’t fake that ChatGPT can tell you what to say, but once you say it the wrong way, because it’s not coming from your heart and your brain, people are going to take a step back from you.
Gen Z’s Demands for Better Leadership
and it was funny, you mentioned, you know, generation is coming up. I read an article last night. Same thing. Gen Z is clearly saying we refuse to work for incompetent leadership. Well, we’ll we’ll jump jobs every month if we have to. We want to learn from talented people. We want exposure to talented leaders on day one, not six months in. And if I can’t find that in this company, I’m leaving. Yeah, and they are.
The AI Debate: Can Technology Replace Middle Management?
And on that point, combining those two thoughts you just shared, you know, the whole advent of AI coming in, I have run into a whole wave of young entrepreneurs that believe they can build an entire company with AI, and they can have these agents that, you know, do the cold calling and do the texting and do the lead gen and, and do the work. And, the, the central theme I’m getting from a lot of these guys is I can wipe out my middle management. I might still need some front end people to actually take the final call, close the deal and sign the papers.
But I don’t need all this middle management stuff. And I did my own very informal survey. I’ve got five kids, and we were having a big dinner one night, and I threw that out there. I said, hey, you know, posit me this. what if the company you worked for announced they were eliminating all the middle managers because they were replacing it with AI? So it would be you and the owner at the top, you know, what do you think about that? And they all my my crew, all without exception, said I’d quit. And I and I asked them why, why, why would that not be a good deal? They said, because there’s nobody to learn from. There’s nobody to model, there’s nobody to above me that has deeper understanding of the business or the industry. And I, you know, I want an opportunity to learn and grow myself. And if you’re telling me you’re going to wipe out all the middle and upper managers. That could give me that.
I don’t want to work there.
Where the Magic Still Happens
Yeah, I’ve always said and it was difficult to understand, you know, when we worked our way through the pandemic. But I’m still saying, I say to my, my, my, my children are 32, 30 and 25. And when I’m out in the world, I say to people, look, the magic still happens. On the way to the car, in the parking lot, at the water cooler, in the men’s room. That’s where the magic still happens. When somebody says, hey, I like what you just said. Here’s my card. Call me. Or could I ask you this? But I didn’t want to ask you in front of 300 other people. And you know, one of my concerns not to paint the younger generations millennials and Gen Z’s with a broad brush stroke. But one of my concerns is they don’t see that it’s either all on their phone or it’s going to be an AI, and their ability to network, granted, was severely impacted by the pandemic, but we’ve got to teach them those skills.
You know how to build someone’s trust before they sign your your your contract or hire you or purchase your products or services. And sometimes some of that happens after 5 p.m. and it might be 7 p.m., you know, heaven forbid. And that doesn’t mean the whole generation thinks that way. But when I compare how I built my business, how I how I was raised to do business, the leaders I emulated, the leaders I ran from. And you filter that over 30, 40 years, you start to see this pattern of the most successful companies with the best consistent results have this type of leadership mindset. And the other ones don’t. And it’s clearly evident. I mean, you talked about Doug, you know, habits and strides and routines. I mean, let’s look at Southwest Airlines. They’re breaking a 50 year tradition when it comes to their seating pattern. But 80% of the fliers they surveyed who did not fly their airlines airline said this is the only reason I’m not flying your airline. You fix that, you get my business.
So thank goodness they put their egos on the shelf and said, okay, we’re going to alter the model a little bit and see. See what happens. Yeah. We’re living in exciting times. You know, my, my my humble opinion is I always say to people, how do we get here? In today’s version of leadership. And I go back to, unfortunately, the tragic events of September 11th. The day after organizational psychologists all over the world said the ripple effect of this from management leadership, building bench strength inside of organizations is going to be for decades, 40 years of people going, I don’t want management, I don’t want fast track. I don’t want ownership or leadership. I want to go to work, get paid and go home and enjoy my community and my family, which is fine. But then we fast forwarded to 070809 and families, especially with children, saw mom and dad and grandma and grandpa almost lose everything or lose everything when the market crash. So they said, well, this loyalty to work idea and then putting money in a 401 K that that doesn’t seem like the smartest thing to do.
So I don’t want leadership, ownership and management. And you know, then fast forward we you know, had the pandemic and we’re still coming out of that. My favorite question to ask people now is, is your business performing better than the same as or less than your pre-pandemic level? And pretty much everyone says to me less than, and we can’t figure out how to get back on track. So, you know, the challenges we have of, to your point, raising leaders and teaching leaders and grooming folks for that type of responsibility and stress, quite honestly, it’s a huge challenge. It’s a big, big lift. And to to wipe out an entire section to your point of management, I don’t think is going to be the answer, right?
No. And, you know, related to what you were saying there and that that trajectory of of history. I’ve done a lot of work in the entrepreneur through acquisition space where, you know, on the one side there’s this. Some are calling it the silver tsunami.
The Silver Tsunami: Business Succession Challenges
All the boomers that have built businesses that want to exit. There is no generational handoff to consider for whatever reason. And therefore, either they just simply close the business or they try to position it to be acquired. And if you look just at the numbers, you know, the government tells us there’s trillions of dollars tied up in that segment of the economy. So you could argue there’s some amazing opportunity for the right person. And the those that are clamoring to come into that market are the classic, you know, corporate person who has worked maybe the eight, ten, 12, maybe up to 15 years and decided I don’t want the corporate trajectory that’s before me. You know, I don’t want those headaches. I do have a little nest egg that I could invest, and so maybe I will go buy one of these businesses. But the the interesting dynamic that I’ve observed is that it’s it’s way more than a financial analysis. You know, you can look at the business, you can get the numbers and you can say, oh, this business is generating 500,000 cash every year.
What a deal. If I’m the owner of that, look at me. You know, I just three x to my take home, you know, and and be able to do that for fairly minimal investment based on all the financing options that are out there. But there’s it immediately derails when you start getting into the emotional side of it. in one dimension is the buyer has to be incredibly sensitive to the legacy the seller thinks they’ve got, because the sellers have literally invested their whole life building this business. So it’s it’s it’s almost like the child that’s grown up. But now you’re if you’re the seller, you’re putting it up for adoption. And, you know, what do I do with that? Sure. There’s there’s a notion I won’t have control anymore. And what about this? What about that? So on and so on. And if the buyer can’t adequately address that from a pure psycho emotional standpoint, the deal is not going to happen. The seller is not going to get comfortable, and they literally would rather close it down than give it to you, because you haven’t made me comfortable with any of this.
Right? So it’s a it’s a strange and interesting phenomenon that’s just fraught with all of these leadership issues we’ve been talking about, really interesting stuff.
The Family Business Dilemma
Yeah. You know, it’s there’s there’s a family business in my wife’s family. And depending on what you read. 80 to 85% of the companies in the United States are family businesses, including some behemoths like Ford Motor Company and Hershey Chocolate and Little Caesars Pizza. Still technically family businesses. And in her family, there might be a string of seven eight grandchildren. And all of them said to grandpa, the owner and his son. Oh, we don’t want any part of this. And when they were flabbergasted at first, they thought, well, probability and statistics, there’s got to be one out of the seven that want it. Nope. And they all said the same thing they said when we watched how hard you worked, when you worked on holidays, when you worked till midnight, when you had to jump through a hoop because someone’s so called. We don’t want any part of that.
Right. We’d rather go to school, take on debt, try to figure out our own careers. We’re not going to do that. And, you know, in 070809, my banking contacts and friends were honest enough to say to me when portfolios were were crashing and they were closing businesses, they said, you know, we’re guilty as bankers of being seduced and enamored with the passion of the entrepreneurs. But Doug comes in on Monday and he’s all excited about the paperclip business, and we loan him money. And on Wednesday, Doug’s excited about the next great opportunity, sort of forgetting that he’s got a paperclip company to try to run and make profitable. And you know, I I’ve always said I’ve said for decades, I think the future of our country is entrepreneurship, but the passion doesn’t always translate into the skill set needed for running a business. And you mentioned it earlier that that’s tough for somebody to say, I own this, but I don’t necessarily run this, nor do I have to. yeah, it’s, it’s definitely challenging times, and some people are adapting really well.
The Market Research Gap
I’m always amazed I got to know about you, but I sort of call it the lack of market research where somebody has that moment and goes, no one in the world is doing this. I’m going to do that. And then five minutes later I pull up my laptop and go, well, what about these ten companies? They do that and they’re like, oh, I’m amazed by how many people still see their business in like a five mile radius around it. And they don’t think about the rest of the planet.
Right? Well, I’ve got an interesting story along that line in the, right around late 90s, early 2000. I was still heavily involved out of my old banking roots. I was involved in mortgage banking and, and, real estate finance. And there was a phenomenon that emerged that had to do with outsourcing a mortgage company back office, because we were back at that time period, we were still very paper intensive. to finance a mortgage loan, you go to your local mortgage broker, Ajax Mortgage, and they do your deal well.
The Cautionary Tale: A Solution Without a Problem
They are relying on the ability to package that loan and sell it to some upstream secondary market player like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, one of those government agencies or some private investor institutions that were out there. But you had to transfer that paper. It had to get reviewed. If if the buyer didn’t like the paper, you had to fix the piece that was missing or incorrect. And it was a very laborious exercise. Anyway, long story short, there was this whole wave of of business process outsourcing that sprung up, and there were about five companies that emerged doing that in pretty good order and with great result, and mine was one of them. I built my own company to do it, and, we started in applying image technology. We were scanning those documents and transferring the images, not the paper. And we cut a 45 day process down to three days. and, you know, great success. But none of the five of us that were operating there, and we informally talked amongst ourselves, none of us could get the scale we really thought was warranted.
And, you know, when we compared our collective volume of activity versus a whole market of what was going on, we weren’t getting there. You know, none of us were having the wild success we had hoped for. And when the crash of zero eight happened, all five companies cratered, as did much of the mortgage finance world. I mean, mortgage financing just stopped for 45 days. It did not happen. You could not finance a home for a period of time there. And. Months later, even years later, some of us got back together and we said, you know, is there a chance that we invented a solution that had no problem to solve? You know, was the industry really looking for that solution at the time? And in our collective postmortem on it was, no, not really. You know, the the originators of all that mortgage paper felt like they were giving up too much control over their own destiny by outsourcing to players like us, even though we were producing great results for them.
Nobody could get over that psychology of giving up the control of it. And, so a cautionary tale when for those that are out there percolating big ideas, just, you know, be careful that you to your point, do your market research and really understand whether or not the market really wants the great idea that you think you have.
Yeah, we make a lot of assumptions, myself included, as creators, business owners. And I look at my people, I said, you know what? Back in the day, in the 80s, there were all these focus groups, two way mirrors, cushy chairs. You know, a lot of dollars generated. I said, go on to the streets, get on the phone, call your customers and say, what do you wish our product did? What do you wish our service did that we don’t currently do? They know I mean, the the Genesis. I’m sure you know this of the whole boarding pass thing with Southwest Airlines four plus decades ago was they went to the airport and said to people, what would you do? How early would you come here to get a seat that you want? And it wasn’t the board of directors that came up with that.
A a group B group C group. It was air travelers and you know, I think even like the iPhone, I think the public got to the point where they said, okay, the next iteration really isn’t that much different than the one I have. So I’m going to start backing away. I’m going to I’m not going to get a new phone every four months. And sometimes it’s as simple as saying, what do you, you know, and I when I work with companies, I say, you know, ask yourself these four questions today. What do we have to stop doing? There’s something going on here that we know has to stop. What is it today before 5 p.m.? What do we have to start doing? Because we’ve been avoiding it and we know it. Pick one thing and start doing it. One of my favorites is what do we have to keep doing? Because it’s easy to beat yourself up and think we’re not doing anything right. But then I like to say, what do we have to get back to doing? Because there’s always somebody in a company that can say, we used to do this, or when our policy was this, and I’ll say, what happened to that? We don’t know.
It disappeared. It fell into the crack of the table. We don’t know where it went. We can’t get it out. Maybe it should be revived. Real simple questions to evoke. Hopefully some some some meaningful dialogue. a lot of them. Quite honestly, the answers to me, at least in my travels, circle around culture. You mentioned culture before. I have like a running debate with some people, including on LinkedIn, and I’m always going to be the guy that says culture trumps strategy every single day. Give me an a culture and a key strategy. We’re going to get farther down the football field. Give me an A strategy and a C culture. And we’re not going to make first downs. And I get some people pounding the table going, that’s wrong, blah blah blah. Well, the truth of the matter is what I want, what I end up saying is a very strong, defined, understood and and utilized culture should be a part of your strategy. Not that they’re on separate islands.
Culture vs. Strategy: The Great Debate
It should be part of your operational strategy. And again, when you look at the companies that, do the best in their own words, and I always joke and I say to people, the women and men who drive for UPS, Fedex, Amazon, whatever delivery service they know the most about mission and vision because they see a thousand frames statements every day in lobbies of businesses. But when you walk into that building and ask the employees in your own words, tell me, what’s the mission? What’s the vision? They don’t know. The scarier thing is they might not care. But if you build a culture where the words aren’t that significant, but the mindset and the process and the filter is. And then some people said, well, you know, if you hire to your culture, a cultural fit, you’re just going to get more of the same thing. And I’m like, no, you don’t do that. You hire to raise the bar on your culture. You don’t want an army of everyone that things like Doug and everyone that thinks like Larry, you want someone to come in and go.
Doug and Larry, I understand, but what about this? And I think that’s what the youngest generations in the workforce are looking for. They want input. They want it early on. They want respect. It doesn’t mean you’re going to agree with them, but they want to be heard. We all want to be heard. Humans want to be heard. so, you know, that’s where I land on culture versus strategy. And again, I saw a post on LinkedIn the other night and I thought it was brilliant. And the gentleman said, anybody who’s got a strategic plan in a binder that’s five years old or more, pull it out, go through every page, call me up and let me know where you saw the pandemic in that plan.
Yeah.
Right. Yeah, yeah.
Nobody nobody saw that one coming.
Right?
Closing Thoughts
Well, Larry, this has been great. tell people the best way to get Ahold of you. If they’re interested in knowing more about your work.
you know what?
I’m.
I’m pretty heavy on social media. If you just Google, leadership, Larry or, chief excuse obliterated. I actually own that trademark now. you’ll find me, Or find me on LinkedIn. My, my email is Larry at gmail.com. my book is available on on Amazon and Barnes and Noble if you like one better than the other. But I’m pretty confident that if anybody just Googles Larry Midas or leadership Larry, I’m going to come up on the first page and and they’ll find find a way to connect me. My promise to people I speak in front of, I consult, I meet on programs like yours is, you know, if you need an outside opinion, you need a sounding board. You need someone to scream at. Call me. As long as I’m alive, I promise I will get back to you. It might not be the same day and we’ll chat and go from there.
That’s great. Well, as always, folks, we’re going to have that in the show notes. So, when you get a minute, hop down, check that out and check out Larry’s other information.
But, Larry, one last time. Thank you man. This has been really good. I appreciate you being here.
Doug.
My pleasure. I appreciate your time.
Well, folks, this is the point of the show. I like to remind you, we do have a YouTube version of this show. it same title leadership powered by common sense. Hop over there. Check out the archives and, leave us a comment and let us know if you’ve got an idea or a theme that you would like to hear that we haven’t covered, or you’ve got a recommendation on somebody that should be a guest. Would love to hear from you. If you need to get Ahold of me, just go to my website at Doug Thorpe. Com that’s t h o r p e. And I’ve got a lot of information there. An opportunity for a free discovery call if you’d like to chat about your situation. But with that, we’re going to say goodbye. Go out there and make it a great day.
Meet Larry Mietus
Larry Mietus (Chief Excuse Obliterator) is the Founder of Speaking of Strategy. He is an engaging speaker, business consultant, author, podcaster, and educator with a wealth of practical, hands-on experience. His expertise encompasses leadership development, organizational design, employee engagement, and sales and marketing strategies. His clients run the gamut from “Mom and Pop” businesses to international enterprises. He is a frequent contributor on LinkedIn. Larry has also been quoted in HR Magazine, the most widely read and respected Human Resources publication in the world. He is a guest speaker for Vistage International, the world’s largest executive coaching organization. Larry is the author of “We Tried That Once” And Other Popular Excuses That Sabotage Business Success!
www.speakingofstrategy.org
www.wetriedthatonce.com
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