Ed Eppley: on breaking limits, creating environments to unleash potential and the power of curiosity on influencing customers.

Ed is a leading global expert in professional management, sales strategy, and performance management. He is a former principal consultant for the Table Group, a Patrick Lencioni Company, and operates The Eppley Group. He has worked with executive teams at multinational companies across the U.S., Europe, China, Japan, and Australia. His clients include a “Who’s Who” of business category leaders such as BMW, DSW, Sara Lee, Bloomberg, Battelle, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, Speedway, Steamboat Ski & Resort Company, Value City Furniture, PSA Airlines, Emerson Electric, NECCO, Safelite Auto Glass, and others. 

A life-long entrepreneur, Ed started an advertising agency and a manufacturer’s rep firm selling to the industrial and construction markets before creating Tyson Eppley Management, ProspeX, and The Eppley Group. 

If you want to benefit more from Ed’s wisdom, clarity and straight talking professional management advice you can get his book, “Let’s Be Clear” from Amazon and you can listen to his podcast, The Ed Eppley Experience wherever you listen to your podcasts. 

This is the 50th episode of CAREER-VIEW MIRROR and I wanted to celebrate this milestone by introducing you to a guest who is very special to me and who has had a significant impact on my own development, career and life journey. I first met Ed in 2006 in South Africa when he was facilitating an international leadership development programme that I was attending as part of my integration into my new region at BMW. Ever since meeting him he has been challenging me in his inimitable way to become the best version of myself. For that I am hugely grateful. It is an honour, a privilege and a huge pleasure to be able to introduce Ed to you in this way and to invite him to share his inspiring story. 

As always, I look forward to hearing what resonates with you. 
 

You can contact Ed via LinkedIn or via email: ed@theeppleygroup.com 

Why not follow us on Instagram @careerviewmirror where you can see a directory of all our episodes and comment on those you have enjoyed. 

To help you navigate the content we've separated it into chapters which work on Apple Podcasts and certain other streaming platforms. 

This episode of Career-view Mirror is brought to you by Aquilae.  

Aquilae is a boutique consultancy in the auto finance and mobility industry. We offer our Expertise as a Service to help you design and deliver projects that develop your business and the people within it. Contact cvm@aquilae.co.uk if you’d like to know more. 

If you enjoyed this podcast please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Your feedback helps us grow. 

For details of our forthcoming guests follow us on Instagram @careerviewmirror 

Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk 

Twitter: @andyfollows 

Episode recorded on 17 January 2022 

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

A couple of things are starting to become evident and they become really evident in 1987 to '93. But prior to that, I started to come to realisation I'm not supposed to work for somebody else.

Andy: 0:12

Welcome to Career-view Mirror, the automotive podcast that goes behind the scenes with key players in the industry looking back over their careers so far, sharing insights to help you with your own journey. I'm your host Andy Follows. Ed Eppley listeners. Ed is a leading global expert in professional management, sales strategy, and performance management. He's a former principal consultant for the Table Group, a Patrick Lencioni company and operates the Eppley Group. He's worked with executive teams at multinational companies across the US, Europe, China, Japan, and Australia. His clients include a who's who of business category leaders, such as BMW, DSW, Sara Lee, Bloomberg, Battel, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, Speedway, Steamboat Ski and Resort Company, Value City Furniture, PSA Airlines, Emerson Electric, Neko Safelite Autoglass and others. A lifelong entrepreneur, Ed started an advertising agency and a manufacturer's rep firm selling to the industrial and construction markets before creating Tyson Eppley Management, Prospects and the Eppley Group. During a professional career that has spanned more than 40 years, Ed has honed a skill for identifying talent, understanding executive challenges, and spotting and improving problematic management. If you want to benefit more from Ed's wisdom, clarity and straight talking professional management advice, you can get his book, Let's Be Clear from Amazon, and you can listen to his podcast the Ed Eppley Experience wherever you listen to your podcasts. This is the 50th episode of Career-view Mirror. And I wanted to celebrate this milestone by introducing you to a guest who is very special to me, and who has had a significant impact on my own development, career and life journey. I first met Ed in 2006 in South Africa, when he was facilitating an International Leadership Development Programme that I was attending as part of my integration into my new region at BMW. Ever since meeting him, he's been challenging me in his inimitable way to become the best version of myself. For that I'm hugely grateful. It's an honour, a privilege and a huge pleasure to be able to introduce Ed to you in this way, and to invite him to share his inspiring story. As always, I look forward to hearing what resonates with you.

Aquilae Academy: 3:01

This episode of Career-view Mirror is brought to you by the Aquilae Academy. At the Academy, we turn individual development into a team sport. We bring together small groups of leaders from non competing organisations to form their very own academy team. We build strong connection between team members and create a great environment for sharing and learning. We introduce the team to content that can help them tackle their current challenges. And we hold them accountable to take the actions that they decide at their priorities. We say we hold our team members feet to the fire of their best intentions. We do this internationally with teams across the world. If you'd like to learn more about the Academy, go to www.aquilae.co.uk.

Andy: 3:46

Hello Ed and welcome. Where are you coming to us from today?

Ed Eppley: 3:51

I am sitting in lovely Siesta Key Florida, which is a part of Sarasota Florida on the West Coast just below Tampa. And my wife and I have rented a place here last year. And we've rented again this year. So we're here for a couple of months, at least as home base. So I actually will have to get on a plane a couple of times Wednesday, I have to leave to go back to Ohio for some work. But we love it down here and really enjoy this weather.

Andy: 4:19

That sounds like a very sensible thing to do in the winter. And Where Where did your journey start Ed, where were you born? And where did you grow up?

Ed Eppley: 4:30

I was born in Ohio, near Broken Sword, Ohio. And people say where that where is that? And I'll say well, it's near Chatfield or Sycamore and they'll go where is that? And I'll say Well, that's near Deunquat and that that again gives them no indication of where I'm from in Ohio. But if you can picture a map of Ohio that has Cleveland in the northeast and Toledo in the northwest and Columbus in the centre of the state then I grew up in the middle of all three of those far, far away from Most anything or anybody, my former partner when he saw the farm where I grew up, he said, Oh, I get it. Now you were born in a manger. And I didn't particularly like the inference. But But yeah, I grew up in a rather rustic area, a wonderful place to grow up and get to practice my entrepreneurial skills.

Andy: 5:22

Yeah, we'll talk a little bit about that. So I'm lucky enough to have been to Ohio, I haven't heard of any of those places. Until we got to the bigger the bigger stuff out there. Yeah, I haven't heard of any of those

Ed Eppley: 5:35

Very few people have. That's the That's the fact. I was the youngest of four, I am the youngest of four, I have three older sisters, all all still living. And growing up on a farm at that particular time, it was like two different families, there was the outside farming animal livestock crops, stuff that I was involved with my dad, and then the, the ladies of the house, my sisters and my mom, they took care of the food and all the chores that went with running a household. And so being the youngest, by a couple of years, I had a lot of freedom to be outside and not necessarily always have to be doing something relative to farming. There were there were moments of idleness where I had a chance to go build things, get in trouble, go see friends down the street, half a mile away was the closest neighbour but but those kinds of things. So I was constantly thinking and finding ways to occupy myself, obviously, there were no laptops, or any of the conveniences. Today, we had a TV that got three stations, and there was nothing on that would be of interest, except on Saturday morning cartoons. So I was outside all the time.

Andy: 6:50

So with three older sisters, and them being inside with your mom, yeah, working on that side of the business in the household. I imagine your dad was quite pleased when you finally came along. And he had a pair of hands extra pair of hands to help.

Ed Eppley: 7:04

I think they think there was great satisfaction knowing that there was some cheap labour to be had there. But But I couldn't have had better parents growing up the amount of freedom they gave me to try things and do things and make mistakes. And oh, my goodness, I just can't imagine how I'd have gotten where I am today if I hadn't had that nurtured.

Andy: 7:27

Yeah. I'm really interested as I always love to see where people started out because we know what an incredible journey you've been on and some of the boardrooms you ended up in and the things you've built yourself. So I'm looking forward to talking about that. And you mentioned I was curious, your nearest friend, because it does sound very rural, where you were so your near his friend was like half a mile away?

Ed Eppley: 7:51

Yeah, yeah, we lived on a in that part of Ohio. It's relatively flat, and very few large rivers or streams. So there's nothing that you have to from an infrastructure standpoint that you had to build around. So all the roads were perpendicular, and they were one square mile, everything was one square mile and the mile of road that we lived on, there were four families. That's the extent of the the road and everybody knew everybody. And because back then we were on this is really dating myself. But our phone system, my first phone was a hand crank phone that we had in the house. And it was on a party line. So there were like eight or 10 families who shared that same phone line. And so to ring us, that was two long rings. That was two cranks and a short, which was one. So that was our first phone number. I mean, that's the kind of environment we grew up in people would listen to each other's conversations with other people on the phone, and we had milk delivered twice a week to our front porch by a milk route salesman, if you will. And yeah, it was quaint.

Andy: 8:55

Certainly sounds it Ed. So what about school? What did you do for school?

Ed Eppley: 9:00

Our elementary school was a couple of miles away. Sometimes we'd ride bikes. We had school bus that would pick us up but again my class I went to a school for elementary from first where there was no kindergarten. So from first to fifth grade, I went to the school with the same 24 other kids. We all had two parents. I think there might have been one child that moved in and was there maybe for a year and moved out but we were with the same people every day that we also went to church with majority of we went to church with so again the intimacy there the the connection, the sense of community that came even though we weren't we weren't in a town together. We were all rural folk, but because we went to school or went to church together that was our that was the fibre that connected us.

Andy: 9:47

So just so I understand were there 24 kids in your year or 24 kids in the school?

Ed Eppley: 9:52

In my class. There were about somewhere between 20 and 30 kids in every class one through five and then ironically, we consolidated with two or three other schools at that point in time. And so when we had a middle school that doubled, and my high school class when I graduated high school, there were 105 of us in our graduating class.

Andy: 10:15

And by that time, what had you learned about yourself in terms of the subjects that you enjoyed?

Ed Eppley: 10:21

I learned, by the time I graduated high school that I was extremely bored with high school, I should have graduated much earlier, probably my junior year, I should have gotten out of high school and gone on to do something else. I ironically scratched the entrepreneurial itch two times before I graduated from high school, one was raising livestock, I had a forage project, when I was probably 11, or 12. It was a female hog that was bred. So she was pregnant, and she ended up having a litter of nine little pigs. And we then had to make a decision what to do with those, and she was a purebred, Hampshire hog. And my dad explained to me that if I castrated the male pigs, that they would be sold for food for eating, but if I didn't, I could possibly sell them as breeding stock. And I said, Well, what would be the difference in price, he said, Well, they'd sell for three to four times what they would as, as something you would eat, I said, I think I like the breeding stock idea. And so very quickly, I found out that there were farmers in the area who wanted purebred stock that they could mix with other breeds to create crossbreds, which were more prolific in terms of their growth and return on investment. So I became a source of breeding stock to the farmers in the area. And when I was 16, I had 300, head of purebred hogs that I raised and sold. And by that time, I also learned that I didn't want to do that for my living after school, it was a lifestyle. It's, you know, every day, twice a day, you had to be with them feed and take care of them. There was plenty of work that went with that. But I just came to conclusion that was not a way I wanted to make my living. And then also in school, in my high school, the local radio station that served our area, they also covered all of the high school sports teams basketball, football, baseball track, and things of that nature. And the sports director came to our high school and asked the speech teacher, English teacher, if there were any students that she thought would be good to help him doing these broadcasts, and Francis Schaffer was her name. And she was kind enough to mention my name to him. And so they set up a meeting for myself and one other student, Doug Swinehart, was his name, to meet with Doyle Weaver, the sports information director for this station. And we met on Tuesday or Wednesday. And that Friday night, we started broadcasting high school basketball, and that unlocked a whole new world for me, I'm not sure what I would have done post high school for a uni if I hadn't had this experience. But once I got that taste of doing radio, and there were no do overs, you know, it's live. And thank God, there are no recordings of those first games in memory anywhere. They don't exist, because it had to be the worst, absolute worst job of commentary. But every weekend, then for probably the next six, seven years, I was either calling if you will, doing the play by play of either football or basketball games for high schools in that part of the state of Ohio.

Andy: 13:26

That really is good to hear. Because I, I've listened, you have a wonderful voice. You have a wonderful voice live and you have a wonderful voice through this medium as well. And I've listened to your podcasts and you have a good sporting knowledge. There's obviously a big passion for football and sounds like basketball as well. So a few things are making sense to me now. So is that leaving school, then? Let's talk a little bit about that. And what you came to do once you did leave high school.

Ed Eppley: 14:00

Well, I went to university, I had two choices that I had gotten myself down to one was a university called Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, which is a very large university at the time there were over 20,000 students. And then I also looked at Tiny Capital University in Columbus, which is, you know, it was an hour south of us hour and a half south of where where I grew up. And that had a enrollment of 2300. And I went to both campuses, and I just could not see myself in a 20,000 plus. I mean, that was bigger than the nearest town that I grew up was 12,000 people so it just didn't register as a place where I thought I would fit in. So I went to Capital University and I studied business. But knowing that I wanted to keep doing the radio thing, which meant I had to go home on weekends. I set up my class schedule. So I went to class Monday through Friday morning and then I would drive back to my hometown and do Play By Play Sports on Friday and Saturday nights. And then I would go back to Columbus on Sunday and then repeat, you know, rinse and repeat. So that that was the game. And so what I didn't understand at the time I was an entrepreneur. I don't think I knew that though even the word. But I was pursuing this vocation, that really was an avocation, and loving it, and learning about it, and learning that the money was not made being on the air, but was made by the people who sold the advertising. And also coming to the conclusion after two and a half years of that, that this liberal arts degree was not of value. So I quit University and went to work full time in the radio business. And by that time, I'd also got another job in a local large radio station in Columbus, the biggest, if you will, the number one most listened to station in the in the town, I had a friend who worked there, and she was kind enough to give me an interview. And so I started working there on late nights. So I was just immersed in following that I ended up you know, quitting after two and a half years. That would have been in 74. And did not go back to school until 78. I started going back to school, part time at a business university that was not liberal arts, where the professors were avocational. So they, they would work full time in accounting, or marketing or sales, or whatever. And those conversations were highly productive for me.

Andy: 16:29

So I'm always curious what people had visibility of when they were growing up, you grew up on a farm, and you saw what your father was doing. There, you, you had this opportunity with the hogs to get into business. Yeah, and it doesn't sound though you're also very positive about the parenting that you had and the support you had the opportunities you have from your parents. So I'm not imagining much pressure to go in a particular direction or to stay in farming,

Ed Eppley: 16:55

there was there, there was not only no pressure, there were no conversations about it. But in truth to help your audience, appreciate this, I've probably talked more in this conversation so far than my father would have talked in a full day or maybe a week in some weeks. So we were very different in our communication levels. My dad would have been 99 this month, he died six, I'm sorry 96. He died six years ago. So he had my love of life in these competitive and a fun way. And he loved people, but he just never talked. So there was no conversation. My mom certainly really didn't talk to me about what you're going to do. They never visited my university, they never came, even though was an hour and a half away, they never came to Columbus to never, they never dropped me off, there was none of that. I said goodbye at the front door and drove away. And that by the way, that was normal. That felt completely natural. I think they probably knew I would have resented it if they didn't serve themselves. And you know, I just had clarity from from the time I was 16, about where I wanted to put my energies and efforts. And they were kind enough and I think comfortable enough and probably tired at that point after four kids to just say, yeah, see you.

Andy: 18:14

Yeah, they got rid of all their parenting needs on the first three?

Ed Eppley: 18:20

I think so. I think so.

Andy: 18:22

So were you do you have any role models at that age Ed or were you really just following? You know, this feels good. This is the direction I'm going in.

Ed Eppley: 18:32

I don't think I had role models outside of my father and my mother for you know, just about the way you conduct yourselves. There's a gentleness in them that I tried to emulate. I think in I don't do it always. Well, their capacity to put others first was really remarkable. But in terms of business and career, no, I didn't really have a model. I had people that I viewed as I think had I knew had expertise in different things that I thought would be valuable. And ironically, I was fortunate when I quit University, I ended up going back to that station that where I started and became their sports director, and a salesman. And I went through Dale Carnegie trainings, sales course. And that was a 22 and I won the competition that existed in that that time in that programme where you sold against all the others and in the class voted for who they thought that the best job and so at 22 to go through that training when I had no habits to get them instilled from the beginning. And then to be to get confirmation that I was good at it was really I think it was a rocket booster to my career.

Andy: 19:48

Now, it sounds very good timing, carry on.

Ed Eppley: 19:51

Oh yeah, it was so powerful because the confidence that I gained, I was never I didn't lack confidence before but you know my confidence now about what I was capable of just the idea of doing more going further, literally, I thought I could do anything I wanted to at that point. And that replaced probably any role models as such, that you know that I didn't need a role model because the I didn't know yet for sure what I was going to do, I just knew I could do virtually anything I wanted to then.

Andy: 20:26

So you saw some very good behaviours in your parents that were worth emulating, from how to interact with other people to behave with other people how to be do you know, be good people. And you followed your own intuition or internal compass for the things that you wanted to be interested in? And the radio station when you went back to the radio station, when you dropped out of university? Were you still broadcasting then or was that.... Okay, but sports director,

Ed Eppley: 20:57

yeah, I was half and half, I was riding two horses, if you will. But the broadcast work was fun. And not unlike my podcasts didn't require huge amounts of preparation, because I knew all the teams and there was enough familiarity, you could talk to the coaches and get updates. And this is not professional, this, you know, high school stuff. So it was not no way getting paid other than the coaches and they weren't getting paid anything. So there was not a lot of pressure in that regard. So nobody expected perfection from anybody. So that was always fun. But the money was going to be made selling advertising. So half of my time or more was spent selling advertising to clients who would be wanting the listeners of our radio station to know about them. And so that's where though, there was work there. But it was also, you know, there, I had to think there, I had to plan there, I had to actually think strategically in some cases for my clients. And that actually opened up the next chapter in my career.

Andy: 21:56

So before, just before we go there, to recap, if you're like at a very early stage in your career, you are exposed to the Dale Carnegie material, the programme and found to excel at it in your peer group there. And that gave you a huge boost of confidence that here was something and once you knew that, there was no as far as you're concerned, there's nothing I can't do with this. Is that a good segue then into what happened next?

Ed Eppley: 22:25

Yeah, yeah. Because the work I was doing with my clients, I probably had 30 clients that advertised on the on the station. But there were two or three of them, where they didn't just view me as the person who sold the radio advertising they we would have conversations about what they were trying to do with their business. And they had choices to make about who to hire and whether they should add product lines or do an expansion or open a second store. So they were trusting me with, you know, pretty intimate conversations at a very young age about what was going on. And most of it was rooted in just curiosity from me, well, why are you doing that? Why do you think that's important? And you know, I read the Wall Street Journal, I tried to make sure I was thinking at a high level, I didn't always understand what I was reading, but I was exposing myself to it, you know, I was trying to prepare myself in in some way to have some meaningful conversations with these folks. And one of them had a large budget that was spent also besides radio, there was newspaper, there was direct mail, and there were billboards, you know, signage on the on the highways. And so they started asking me, Well, how should I spend that money? I say, I have$100,000 to spend, how do I divvy it up? And so we'd have some conversations about it. And sometimes the amount that he was going to spend on radio, I would say that's probably a little high, you should probably change the ratios here and here. And then I would drive away feeling good that I had the conversation but bad recognising that I just cost myself some money, let alone the station. So I had this happen with two other clients. And so by now I'm going I got to have a conversation with my station boss, my owner, the owner of the station, so wonderful man, Tom Moore, and Tom's the fellow who hired me to be the salesperson and the sports director. And so we had a good relationship. And Tom was also the reason I got into the Dale Carnegie's sales course was Tom was an instructor for the original Dale Carnegie course and effective speaking and human relations. And he was a button down black suit, tie, horn rimmed glasses, and head balder than mind if you can imagine and really intense, but a wonderfully decent human being. So I go into Tom and I said, Tom, I, I got a problem. He said, well tell me about it. And I explained it to him and what was going on with my clients? And he said back at me he said, Ed what you have is an ethical dilemma. And I said, Well, what's that? And he says, Well, you got to decide if you're working for me or if you're working for the people that are spending the advertising dollars. they're asking you to be their advertising agency. And I said, yeah, yeah, I guess you're right. I said, What do you think I should do? He says, You're 22. He says, Tell you what, if you want to do this, I'll recognise you as an advertising agency. And I'll pay you 15% commission on anything that you place with us. So you'd still get paid for that. And he said, Look, I'd love for you to stay. But he said, you know, if you're going to do this is a great time to do it. If you screw it up, you can come back. And I mean, what a what a wonderful gesture, and how fortunate he was giving me a chance to go play this game with a net, you know, a protective net, if it didn't work out, I could come back. And so that's what I did. I started my own advertising agency not having any idea really what that meant.

Andy: 25:44

Let's come to that. But first of all, I mean, unheard of isn't it 22 year old guy comes in who's supposed to be selling your advertising space on the radio or whatever, in your case, it was on the radio, you don't generally expect to get into a conversation with them about some of the business decisions that you're making. So you were clearly demonstrating through your questions. And through that, as you mentioned, you were reading the Wall Street Journal, you wanted to be having conversations at the right level. have you any idea where that came from?

Ed Eppley: 26:19

Zero. It just seemed it seemed like the right thing to do. Plus, I mean, you know, me well enough to know, I am curious, I ask a lot of questions. I learned the Dale Carnegie sales course, one of the requirements, I became certified to teach that at age 22. By the way, I went ahead and dove all the way into that. I'm sorry, at 25, I got certified, fully certified, I started teaching assistant as 22 I got became fully certified at 25. But one of the requirements they have for instruction, at least at the time was you couldn't lecture you could only elicit information from the class by asking questions. So that socratic method that you've watched me use over the years was embedded in my my mindset then, but it was a vehicle that served me so well, for my curiosity.

Andy: 27:05

Yeah, I can see that really working. Yeah. So you set up and what a wonderful, as you say, having a safety net, and a wonderful boss who recognises the opportunity for you here and realises you've got skills beyond the role that you're doing. And you've got an opportunity sitting there with people wanting to use you as an agent. So you set up your own agency. And how did that go?

Ed Eppley: 27:26

I think like you would expect with somebody who really didn't have any idea what they were doing. I was able to sell a lot of work. I wasn't making any money. I actually enlisted a band of disturbed followers. Early on, I got other people sold on being part of this business. So I started with a I found a guy who was tremendous at art and he became a partner. And then we added somebody to help us with the production of the we did a lot of collateral materials, brochures and whatnot for clients. And so we added a person, a wonderful gal to really do that work so that we could keep either selling or creating it. That's the way we divided it. I was the sales side, my partner was a creative. And then this this wonderful lady Nancy Bar, she was the production person who got the work, then we added another artist, then we added a copywriter, then we added a salesperson, then we added another partner. And after five plus years of doing that everybody was making money but me. Yeah. Everybody was getting paid but me. And so I came to realisation I really didn't know what I was doing. And I had a client who had been pestering me, I'd been beating them up that they needed to have distribution to sell their mobile maintenance vehicle and industrial factories, I just said, You're not going to sell this thing with an individual salesperson to these large companies like Caterpillar and General Motors and Ford. I said, you need distribution, you need to get me to sell through somebody else who's already in those places. And they gave me a path that said, Look, why don't you come to work for us. So that's what I did. I shut down the agency, closed it down and went to work for this client now becoming their VP of sales. But there was just by title only I was really the only salesperson, but then I set up distribution for them. And that that started the next phase of my career, which is learning about manufacturing and distribution and understanding how these factories work and what makes them either profitable or not profitable. So that was a tremendous education and 12 months of just seeing literally every kind of factory you could see of any size or scale, basically, east of the Mississippi, and west of Philadelphia I was in all those places. And to this day, I love the smell of a factory. I love the smell of cutting oil and grease and hydraulic fluid and the noise and all that stuff that just it's I get jazzed every time I get to see how a factory works,

Andy: 30:02

I can understand that. When, you said it 25 You were already certified to deliver the Dale Carnegie programme

Ed Eppley: 30:12

Sales course, sales course, yes

Andy: 30:13

sales course. Okay, so we had the curiosity, that natural, innate curiosity. You had that early exposure to Dale Carnegie, the Socratic method and elicit information by asking questions. What was it though, that meant you wanted to actually be certified in that?

Ed Eppley: 30:33

I knew I saw a direct correlation every time I went through that programme, either taking the course initially, or then assisting to instruct it between the age of 22 and 25, I probably assisted in instructing 15 of those programmes. Every time I went through that programme, in any fashion, my sales went up, there was a correlation to my results in business got better. So I said, Well, I don't want that to stop. So I also found out that I loved loved is not too strong a word, watching adults learn and grow, I loved seeing individuals come to the realisation that they could do something that they doubted that they could do. I loved helping them understand that most of the limits that they had in their performance, were more their own limits than they were something else. And when when people come to recognise that and tackle those things, they never feel bad about, they may not achieve what they always want. But they you know, there's a an appreciation they have for the fact that if they're not succeeding, it's not for lack of effort. And what I came to appreciate is that you don't do this for people you don't do you don't grow them, you have what you do is create a set of circumstances where they can unleash what's already inside of them. And so as I said, or you've heard me say before, is when the students ready, the teacher appears. And I was fortunate that for a number of number scenarios in that programme, when the, when the student was ready, I was in front of them. There's a gentleman in central Ohio, that's the CEO of a very successful bank regional bank. And when he was in my sales course, probably in 1979, or 80, 81, he had his own home security system. He would sell security systems to individual homeowners. And today, he's the CEO of a bank, that's a $2 billion asset in a holding bank. And he still talks about how that changed his life being in that programme. And, again, I just happened to be the vehicle. Anybody else who had been in that same situation, as the instructor, I think could have helped him get the value that that he got, but I was just fortunate to be that one that was at the front of the room there. But that's the kind of stuff that I got, you would see people over the course of 12 weeks change their expectations for themselves, Andy and that, I know you you see that in your work, you know, with your, your Academy, you see that with certain people out of the eight or 10 people that grew but it's like, they all say they want to do it, but certain ones, you help help them figure out how to open the doors and crash through there and go to that next level. And that's just what a wonderful way to spend time.

Andy: 33:26

Yeah, nothing, nothing better. What I'm smiling about, though, is the huge impact that you've had on me. So we met just over 15 years ago. And I would struggle to think of a single individual who has impacted my course. As much as you have the conversations we've had the ways you've caused me to think the way you've caused me to believe in myself at key points.

Ed Eppley: 33:56

You mean the way I've berated you

Andy: 34:01

I'm putting a nice spin on it

Ed Eppley: 34:08

beat you like a rented mule. When are you going to start this business?

Andy: 34:15

Yes, that is the tone that is exactly the tone, that's coming rushing back.

Ed Eppley: 34:21

You're trying to you're trying to forget that it happened but for the audience's benefit, I need to explain that there were there were a couple of conversations where I don't want to talk to you if you haven't started the business. I don't want to have this conversation. I'm tired of this talking about it when are you got to do it. And I didn't think that through to say it I just know that's what I felt so anyways,

Andy: 34:43

yeah, no, it's safe to say it must have been like trying to get a barnacle off the bottom of a boat or something, getting me to let go of one life and embrace another one.

Ed Eppley: 34:56

Well, you've you've had the benefit of being parts of companies that do make it easy to stay where they keep with the status quo. I've never had that.

Andy: 35:05

So let's stay with you. But I did want to point out to my listeners that we are talking to someone who's probably had the single biggest impact on my journey

Ed Eppley: 35:14

thank you for saying that. That's very, very kind,

Andy: 35:17

very grateful. And but I do remember, it got to the point where, when I'd ring you, you just say what? So there you went, then into this industrial environment, different from what you'd experienced before, loved the production I love that. I mean, I've worked in factories, and it's just so good. My first job was in a printing factory, and we made books from start to finish and smell the paper and the ink. And just like you said, it's very evocative. So what were you learning from that then Ed,

Ed Eppley: 36:03

I learned that every one of these plants that you know, employed, probably anywhere from 500 to 5000 people, they're essentially an organism. And their job is to stay alive and do that as productively as they can. And that they need fuel, right, they need energy they need in the literal and figurative figurative sense, they need these things to operate. So they need this set of organisations and individuals around them, to support them to keep the organism operating optimally. And once they find somebody who plays a role for them, that's crucial. Again, you're no longer an entity, an outside entity, you become part of it, the good ones bring you in, and they make you in somewhat cliche term, but they make you a partner, they make you a collaborator with them, and whatever it is they're trying to achieve. And I loved working with organisations in such a way that they would invite you in so that you became that trusted advisor, you became that indispensable tool to them getting done what they wanted to get done. And then the added kicker, besides being able to get paid to do that was learning what they did. And understanding, you know, they were just a, they were part of the organisation, they were the manufacturing aspect to an organisation. So they were a component within this greater organisation that had a strategy. And so understanding how they contributed and whether they were on the beginning of the lifecycle of a product that was, you know, on its ascendancy or if they were in the mature and ageing and the downward trend, and it was only a matter of time till that factory got sold or shuttered or had to be repurposed. All of that became fascinated. So the more I could talk with the plant manager, and preferably the owner, or the CEO, or the president or the COO, the person who was responsible for that, the more I could get exposure to them, the more fun I had. And so that became part of my goal was anytime I worked with those manufacturing plants was to talk to the people who supervised ran the, the the organisation for that particular manufacturing entity, didn't always get it done didn't always make it happen. But boy, when you did, it was, you know, you differentiate yourself, you are no longer a peddler, you're no longer a industrial salesperson, you were a somebody who thought and talk like they did. And they appreciated that in most cases.

Andy: 38:26

So what first showed up when you were selling radio advertising those behaviours, that curiosity that caused your customer to ask you more questions about their business. This was now just next level, and you were having the sense of punching above your weight, if you like in terms of your position, but getting exposure and being treated as a partner. And that was motivating.

Ed Eppley: 38:52

Yeah, and by 1981, I had gotten to the point where I was now becoming an independent manufacturer's rep. So no longer was I working for that client as their employee, I now started representing several different companies calling on distributors who sold in these industrial factories. So now I was getting other sales people to sell for me, or for the companies that I represented. And so I was working entirely through distribution. So it gave me a whole nother layer of how this world works, that there's so many people who don't make the products they sell, they're a distributor, and represent 50 companies and inventory their products, you get the idea. So that became another dimension that got added into the conversations and the thinking that I had and understanding how stuff gets from where it's made to how we end up consuming it. And I know it's fairly convoluted but for me, it all made sense. It was just another piece of the puzzle to understanding how business works and operates and I became somewhat of an expert about distribution not just manufacturing.

Andy: 40:03

Yeah, it's making sense. It's almost a repeat of what happened with the radio. It's,

Ed Eppley: 40:08

it was very much. Yeah. In a different area.

Andy: 40:11

Yeah. And at a level up, yes, yeah. So you were briefly an employee in that environment,

Ed Eppley: 40:19

11 months.

Andy: 40:24

But then this innate entrepreneurialism and the way you gravitated towards being in a certain way, having conversations in a certain way, making sure you're talking to certain people that did its magic, and you end up in a situation where I need to be representing more brands.

Ed Eppley: 40:42

Well, and it was, again, it was this combination of still not fully appreciating that I was, I'm hard wired to operate my own business, what a couple of things are starting to become evident. And they become really evident in 1987 to 93. But prior to that, I started to come to realisation I will, I'm not supposed to work for somebody else, I can be a decent employee, but I'm never going to be a great employee, because I'm going to have too many questions. I'm going to have too many opinions, and thoughts, and I'll voice them. So I'm not, it's funny, I can be a great team member. I just don't think I'm ever designed to be a great employee. I'm starting to understand that it didn't become crystal clear for a few more years. But so that's going on. But I'm also teaching the Dale Carnegie sales course that night, after my normal job. And I have a guy in one of my classes that said, Would you consider being a manufacturer's rep? And I said, What is that he says, Well, you sell for us, but you don't work for us, you're an independent contractor, and you can sell other people's products too. And essentially, you know, this was probably 10 months into this journey with this particular client where I was basically I'd leave on Monday and come home on Thursday night, I think I drove over 45, 50,000 miles in that time period, and set up all these distributors to sell these machines. So I'd been delivering what I was asked to do, but but all of a sudden, this new organisation approaches me and says we'll turn over a territory to you. And essentially, I was going to get paid, and go, instead of being paid $35,000, they'd pay me$50,000. Financially, the only difference was, I was working for myself, and my paychecks would be based upon what you know, purely based upon what was sold into the market. But they they knew that the territory that had sold them million dollars a year before and that was 5% commission. So you know, if you maintain what started that, that you probably are going to earn in that vicinity. And so I took that opportunity when it came and I just said goodbye to the previous company, thank them for the chance to do it and said, if you need me to keep selling for you, I will because I could as a manufacturer's rep they said no you've done, you did what you said you would do. And so we can take it from here. So it worked out well for both parties. But that very quickly, I added contractors in the construction world into this portfolio of products. And now I'm selling materials and pumps that go into construction, besides products that go into the manufacturing factories. And so now again, it's the portfolio and the conversations I'm having just gets wider, and adding another dimension to these, understanding how the world works and business works. And and again, that was part of this thirst to understand and learn and know more.

Andy: 43:30

So did you have any aspirations that you are aiming for Ed, like whether it was, you know, monetary, or anything really that was driving, or were you just following what was was happening.

Ed Eppley: 43:44

I met Fran and my bride now it'll be 40 years in May. I met her as a blind date here in Florida in March of 1981. And this was about the time I had just started being the manufacturer's rep. And we got married in May of 82. And I felt a responsibility to have a predictable lifestyle, let's put it that way. I was never motivated purely by money. But I wanted I wanted us to be able to have a house and you know home and when we started a family to the friend didn't have to worry if we were going to be able to put food on the table. So that's what motivated me. I wanted to have a sustainable business. It's funny because the manufacturers world, the lifecycle of you being the rep for a particular product can be fairly mecurial, you know, it can be here today gone tomorrow. And you basically have a somewhere between a 30 and a 90 day cancellation clause that either you or they can cancel in the relationship if you want to. But I was quite fortunate that I ended up with good lines and that didn't happen very often. But 1987 My biggest line did decide to go from using a Up until that point Ed then had you really been just focused on manufacturer's rep like myself to having their own employees, I had built up the line to the point where it was more economical financially, it made more sense for them to not pay me what they were paying me, but to have an employee do it instead. And so they said, Ed we're going to make that change. And they gave me six months notice or whatever. And so I went into my largest distributor who I sold to for them, which was a company called Ohio Transmission and Pump. And I announced to them that I would no longer be calling on them. And the president of the company said, well, then we'd like to talk to you about coming to work for us. And in 1987, I had a two year old son and Fran was pregnant, or had just probably given birth to our daughter Tess. So we knew, we're gonna have two kids, whether whether they were there or not, I don't remember if both of them were there then but so I got to work for them as the as a salesperson with the intent that I would be their VP of sales in a year. And it happened in nine months. And now I'm managing 12 salespeople. And as I write about in my book, Let's Be Clear, that's where I really understood for the first time what a manager does, what leadership means, and how you have to integrate that into, we were an organisation of probably 50, 60 people, probably bigger now to think about, we were probably 75 or 80 people, but understanding how you support others in that setting. And everybody is somebody's customer, even if it's not an external one. And understanding the way you manage and lead, salesperson A is probably not the way you need to manage and lead salesperson be. yourself and your own production. Yeah, and the way I viewed myself as a manager was really managing people who didn't formally work for me as a manufacturer's rep, I managed salespeople who worked for other companies. So I had no authority. So all my ability to get something done was done by influence. You know, that involved entertainment that involved calling them up and reminding them of things that they could or should do that would make them money. And it's not that you don't do that with your own employees. But there's more to it when somebody is an employee versus a third party. So now I've got I mean, I had to do performance reviews, I had to hire I had to fire I had to, I also had to make sure people fit the culture of the organisation and be accountable for 12 $15 million of revenue and$4,000,000, 3 and a half million dollars worth of gross margin. I never worried about gross margin, as a manufacturer's rep. All I worried about was top line because I got paid off of that.

Andy: 47:40

So how long did it take you to notice this was going to be a bit different

Ed Eppley: 47:44

1991 was a downturn in the economy. There was a recession, at least industrial in 91, 92. This is also about the time then a lot of jobs were being offshored. So a lot of our clients, were not going to spend more money next year than they did this year. And as a distributor, one of the things you come to realise pretty quickly is you are, the only thing that differentiates you from your competitors is not what you sell, it's the way you sell it and what what do you bundle with that. And I didn't really appreciate how much emotionally you had to be invested in your people to be successful as a manager and leader. And I was, but I also sold as I didn't, I wasn't a full time manager I managed plus I had responsibility for, I don't know, five $600,000 of sales at that time, which would probably equate to an excess of a million today. So I would work six, seven hours a day on my own. And then I would do my management after that. So I would find myself a lot of evenings on the phone until eight or nine talking to one of these 12 You know, one or more of these 12 salespeople about their day and what was working and where they needed help and all those things. And I came to realisation I wasn't having a lot of fun. This was really work. And not only that it was in a business where I was essentially competing with myself in virtually all the products I sold, the clients could choose to buy what I sold, we had six different product lines. They could get those same products from other distributors locally and outside of our areas. So it was a reverse auction, oftentimes, how will how low Are you willing to sell this for? And then I was still teaching the Dale Carnegie programmes I added the Dale Carnegie leadership training for managers programme to my arsenal. And so I was teaching that in addition to Salesforce and I realised how much more fun I had doing that than I did actually doing management of people. So in 93, actually 92 I did the analysis if I was going to leave what was I going to leave for? I created a matrix of what I would absolutely have to have. And the vertical column was possible jobs that I could have and the horizontal column were the characteristics of what I wanted from whatever job I took. And I always came back to doing something in this Carnegie world this training and development.

Andy: 50:16

Could you give me a sorry Ed, just to interrupt, but some examples of those characteristics.

Ed Eppley: 50:23

I don't want to compete with myself, I want no limits to what I can earn, I would like to not have to report to anybody or minimally, I want to believe in what I sell. Those were the things like four or five of them that mattered to me. I wanted, I didn't want to travel as much because I was gone a lot in this role that I was in. So I didn't mind travel. But I didn't want it to be as much as I was. By then we had kids that were five and three. And no, they were they were eight and six forgive me. But in any event, I just, I just knew that if I was going to make the jump, I wanted to jump for the right reasons to the right kind of thing. So January 2, I announced to the President and CEO of the organisation, I said, I'm going to leave. And he knew when I joined that, that this was a possibility. I told him when we when he interviewed me that I only wanted to probably do this, but I didn't know when or for sure. And he said, well, great, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. So joined him in at 87, 93 I asked to leave and I stayed around till March he to help with the transition. So you know, as all those things coming together in 91, 92, just it just became clear that I wasn't built to be an employee, and I wasn't built to really want to be a great manager.

Andy: 51:47

I love the I'm just thinking there's gonna be people listening to this who are frustrated, who might think yeah, that's me. I'm not, I don't want to be an employee. And I think the starting point of identifying the characteristics, not necessarily if you you know, even if you're going to move to another company to be an employee somewhere else, but identify what do I want my life to be like? It was really important characteristics for whatever I do next. It's not about it's got to be a certain brand, or, you know, job title or any of that stuff. It's, it's the things you mentioned those that's really good way of looking at it. Okay, so had you decided, when you said on the second of January, you were going to, to move on? Did you know, then what you were going to do?

Ed Eppley: 52:34

Yeah, I said, I'm going to go to work full time in this Carnegie world. So I mentioned Fran, and how fortunate she's, I've been that she's been this part of my life. I went to her said, Look, I'm I want to leave Ohio Transmission Pump. And I want to sell full time for Carnegie. And she said, Well, what's that mean? I said, Well, it means I'm going to give up a six figure compensation package a company car employee stock ownership, and I'm going to go to work as an independent contractor where I'm guaranteed$1,500 a month for the next three months. Well, I know you're still together. So what did she say? She said, to her credit, she said, Well, we've never missed a house payment yet. There's always been food on the table, you seem to know what you're doing. So if that's gonna make you happy, let's do it. And that's what we did. So I'm really fortunate that she's always had faith in me to figure out the right way for us to get to where we want to go personally, while we're while I do what I do professionally. So.

Andy: 53:36

So you have been in a situation where it would have been easier to stay from a financial point of view.

Ed Eppley: 53:44

Yeah, I mean, certainly there was that there was that opportunity. But you and I both know, once I knew in my mind, that wasn't the place for me, I was going to find out. You know, I was like a teenage boy making doing something so that their parents want them out of the house. There's a reason adolescents behave the way they do and part of its they don't know how to leave and so they become rebellious and do those things. And I'm sure that's what would have happened if I stayed at Ohio Transmission and Pump. I was going to leave one way or the other. I just didn't want to leave in a way that made them feel bad about me and they regret having hired me, right.

Andy: 54:17

So you find yourself then now as a independent, Dale Carnegie contractor, and and what have you got a territory or?

Ed Eppley: 54:28

Yeah, essentially, Carnegie Carnegie, one of the reasons I liked it is because they had exclusive territories, and nobody could sell their programmes in that territory but you. so that meant one of those criteria that I'd come up with. I wasn't going to compete with myself. And I had I was working for a guy who owned the rights for central and west central Ohio. So Dayton, Columbus, Ohio, and he was very small and basically him and one other person and so they the Dayton Ohio area was really neglected. So they said, Go sell there and that's what I did and I set out to become. My goal was a year after I started there that I could go into a restaurant and somebody would say, Hey, Ed, how you doing? And then they would know me. And I, it probably took 18 months, but I became not the mayor of Dayton, Ohio. But But I was well known. And I and people knew who I was. And I was very fortunate, I got to go to a place that really wanted and needed what what Carnegie was offering.

Andy: 55:25

That's really interesting. So were you aiming to just be known at that stage, or did they know you because they'd been on a programme? Or were you thinking, No, first of all, these people have got to get to know me, and then we'll start selling them some programmes.

Ed Eppley: 55:39

All of the above, it was literally just I knew that would be an indicator that I was spending enough time there. It would be an indicator that I was getting people in programmes, I knew that that would be a way that I could track that I was having influence and impact in the market.

Andy: 55:58

And when you sold the programmes, were you delivering them.

Ed Eppley: 56:01

In many cases I was selling and delivering. Yeah, I didn't do all of the delivery in there. I was fortunate that the core programme, the effective speaking and human relations programme, I was less comfortable instructing that, because again, you had to really invest emotionally a lot in what each class member was trying to deal with, because a lot of them had stuff going on in their personal lives that stress and worry that because of a family member a bad situation, you know me well enough to know I care about that. But I don't want to, I don't want to take that burden on and so I was not really effective in teaching that programme, in my opinion. So I did the I did the professional ones I did the sales programme and the management and leadership and formal presenting skills.

Andy: 56:43

So was that one of the was the presenting and delivery, one of the characteristics you wanted to include,

Ed Eppley: 56:49

you know, Andy, I, I had already started doing keynote addresses. I'd been asked to do that for some period of time and did a number of them. And so I never was afraid of them. But professional speaking training, once you've been formally taught how to do a lot of that stuff. It just seemed like the logical thing to do. It just seemed like, you know, I I'm going to be asked to speak the if I'm going to be in this business people at that time knew Dale Carnegie was communication and presentation kind of stuff, at least part of their repertoire was teaching people how to do that effectively. So I thought, well, I should be a good role model for that. I should I should embrace that I should I should be a walking talking advertisement for what what that could look like. So I worked at that. And, you know, it's interesting of all the skills that somebody can be exposed to or be asked to get better at, the one that's easiest to help somebody improve in the fastest is formal presenting, I can I can help somebody get better at formal presenting skills in two days, in an exponential way. And that's almost impossible in any in sales training or management or leadership stuff. That's nuts. You can dramatically change somebody in two days, you can add attitudinal change it but their behaviour won't change that much. Would you agree? In two days? I mean, I think I think we'll start them on that journey. But that's

Andy: 58:15

no, I would not want to be given that task. I'd really argue against that as being a sensible use of a client's money.

Ed Eppley: 58:23

Right. But but but if you give me a person, a CEO, and I work with them for two days with videotaping, they'll look dramatically different 48 hours later, to the point that they'll they'll not bore people to the point that people will actually listen to them to the point that people go, you did a good job.

Andy: 58:42

Yeah. So I'm thinking you had these characteristics. But it wasn't a burning desire to be on your feet delivering. It was running a business that had that you weren't competing with yourself. And those those came, it was the entrepreneurial side, it was the running a successful business came first, the product, you had a lot of familiarity with the Dale Carnegie over the years, but it wasn't I want to be spending most of my time delivering this but I'm going to have to sell some first.

Ed Eppley: 59:14

I got to the point that if I never taught another programme, I was fine. Yeah, I love selling them. I love the competitive nature of sales of winning the order. But I didn't have to be in the classroom for me to feel like I was being fulfilled.

Andy: 59:30

Glad you used that word. Yeah, that wasn't necessary for your fulfilment.

Ed Eppley: 59:35

What I also learned Andy by 94, 95, I also came to realisation I'd rather if I was going to be in the classroom, I'd rather be in a classroom with managers than salespeople. Okay, because what I learned was that when with salespeople are there for their own benefit managers were in there primarily for their people's benefit. The good ones, you know, it was It was it was more about I want to help my people be successful if you had a chance to work with that person that was an entirely different attitude than a salesperson who said, I want to make more money. Hmm. So yeah, that selfishness. Yeah, I guess you'd say it's an arithmetic or to leverage that you get with a manager that you don't get with a salesperson.

Andy: 1:00:19

Yeah, I can relate to that. But you carried on doing that Ed even though that wasn't your, I know you ended up and I think my first exposure, first opportunity to meet you 2006. In South Africa, there was some Dale Carnegie content there. So you stayed with that brand?

Ed Eppley: 1:00:40

Yeah. Because in 2003, I actually bought a franchise. I was went from being the independent contractor to now owning a territory along with my partner. And by 2006, we probably owned four territories. We had Ohio, central and western Ohio. We had Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, we had Cleveland and Akron and Youngstown we so we had basically all of Ohio minus Toledo and Youngstown. And then we had almost all of Indiana, and the majority of the population in Kentucky, and we became the largest Dale Carnegie training franchise organisation, both through acquisition, but also we grew 250%, organically those territories. And we were selling over $4 million a year of training with the average invoice being $1,500, which gives you an idea of how many

Andy: 1:01:32

That's a lot of deals.

Ed Eppley: 1:01:33

Yeah, there were a lot of transactions to do that. So when you and I met, yeah, we were fully invested in the

Andy: 1:01:39

Why was that? Carnegie brand and model and we were trying to build this thing up and sell it. But only came to the realisation it didn't scale.

Ed Eppley: 1:01:50

The margins weren't there. Because essentially 20% of every dollar went to Carnegie either for royalties or for materials. So there just wasn't enough to make it attractive to somebody else to come in and buy it. The model is if that they operate under Is these are lifestyle businesses, somebody who's going to buy it and operate and make a good living, but it's, it's not going to be something that's easily scaled.

Andy: 1:02:13

So what conclusion did you come to

Ed Eppley: 1:02:16

we, we sold the businesses in 2010. And also at that time, it started my my partner, Lance Tyson, is 16 years younger than me. And the goal always for the beginning was that I was going to leave before him. And so we started in my exit from the business, we were still doing consulting work and development of people, but it wasn't using the Carnegie stuff material. And I had always had my own by then consulting practice this questioning and curiosity and this exposure that I've had to literally 1000s of businesses, and I know all the different business models at this point there. There's not an organisation, I can go into that I can't say, Okay, I understand how you make your money and what you do that loses money for you. So by 2013, then I was on my own completely, and just now totally immersed in working with executive teams trying to help them become better. So that happened between 2010 2013.

Andy: 1:03:14

So you work with executives, it was you talked earlier in the conversation about being a trusted advisor Ed. It was you that was the role model is the role model for me. And you are sorry, get the grammar right. You are the role model for me, when it comes to being that trusted advisor, I didn't know those things existed, you know, and I saw you being the trusted advisor in our organisation. And that just was, you know, I was blown away by that.

Ed Eppley: 1:03:47

I'm shocked to hear you say that. I didn't know you had line of sight to that. Explain that to me. Was that what you saw me doing with Alan?

Andy: 1:03:57

Yeah, I knew that you were party to lots of conversations about what was going on in the region, people, you know, potential moves. Definitely an advisor around the people, topics, maybe not around, you know, retail financial services, or, you know, those things, but around the people, topics and leadership. And I thought, I want to do that.

Ed Eppley: 1:04:23

Well, and you were you were already doing some of that with Alan. I mean, he he he came to very quickly value your opinion, but I guess I I never realised that. I guess I never appreciated that y ou saw that going on and understood that that was a good place to be.

Andy: 1:04:46

Yeah. So that was eye opening for me and gave me something to because sometimes if you haven't seen something, if you don't know the role exists, right. And maybe it was naive of me not to think that that was a possibility but anyway, that was the moment when I started to think, oh, that's what I wanted to do. And you've done that.

Ed Eppley: 1:05:05

I was gonna say, I, I also think that Alan's very unique in that he wants outside advice. Okay? Now, I don't think all executives in a role like Alan's are open or willing to make themselves vulnerable enough to have that.

Andy: 1:05:24

And I was planning to ask you what you think they get out of it, those who do? What have you seen them get out of having that relationship?

Ed Eppley: 1:05:33

Are you saying what do the CEOs

Andy: 1:05:35

Yeah, get from having a trusted adviser?

Ed Eppley: 1:05:38

Well, essentially, what they get is, I think the ones who do it for the right reasons get unvarnished opinion, they get perspective, that's, at least with me, that is not worried at all about if it's going to be popular, easy, or politically expedient. So when Alan and I would talk, and in vast majority of cases, it was about talent, it was about who's the right person to move where, I didn't offer up my inputs or suggestions based upon what would be palatable with Munich. And I didn't offer any of my opinions based upon whether the person would like it or not. It was just knowing, knowing the market and knowing who was there, and knowing what was going to be the the reality, that person was going to be confronting, that if I was going to move the chess piece, this is why I would move that that particular chess piece at that particular time. The other thing, you know, with the model that BMW followed, the rotation of the expats, every three years, created this weird situation that after after three years of working in a market, I would know more about the culture, then lots of members of the executive team. And so I think that was the other reason Alan wanted somebody who had that line of sight to what was going on in that marketplace, because I would get intimate views that he couldn't always get from his position.

Andy: 1:07:10

Yeah, I I just think it's incredibly valuable. Obviously, I thought it was so valuable that I wanted to go in that direction myself. And I can certainly vouch that you did not worry about whether it was polished or politically correct or any of those other things. And we all benefited from that,

Ed Eppley: 1:07:35

Well, I hope you did, I have to believe there's some people that that I made suggestions about to Alan that it probably wasn't the best thing in the world for them, because I can't be perfect, but I, it was still the best I could offer.

Andy: 1:07:49

Fair enough. I'm conscious that you've worked with, that was a multinational company, but you also do a lot of work with owners, as well. And I wondered, what's different? And whether you prefer whether you know, you have a preference?

Ed Eppley: 1:08:07

I'm sure I must.

Andy: 1:08:09

Well to put it if I if I because I haven't given you any of these questions in advance. So let me also perhaps put it in terms of what can they learn from each other? What can the owners learn from, from the multinationals and vice versa?

Ed Eppley: 1:08:23

You know, I think that, I'll try to answer your first question. Make sure I come back to it about what whether I prefer one over the other. What can they learn from each other, I think simpler. i Today, I tend to use the filter of smart and healthy as the mechanism to look at an organisation about where they are and what they need. And so big companies generally don't need a lot more structure, strategy, finance, technology, they need the right culture, they need minimal politics, they need to be tapping into the hearts not just the minds of their people, they need to have a purpose that unites them and helps them break down petty politics and competing agendas. And so smaller companies, privately held companies tend to do that much better than large ones. And I suspect it's because the owner's thinking about the business in a much longer horizon than a multinational or publicly traded organisation. I think they, you know, if any one quarter isn't that great, they're not, t hey're disappointed, but they're not wringing their hands over it. And people's compensation probably isn't drastically altered by it. So I would love for publicly traded or multinational companies to be able to think longer term and care more about the air that they create that their people breathe. I know they say it and they try to spend time on it but inertia and the momentum behind the numbers and the stock price just overwhelms all the good intentions that they have. So I think that would be important. I think that the closely held companies, the smaller businesses can learn a lot about the discipline for planning and executing that larger companies have is something that smaller companies often need. They need to be smarter in many cases. I also think, you know, larger companies really understand that structure makes a difference. They understand the org chart, the way they deploy their resources, they, I think larger companies are much more comfortable with the whole idea that who's reporting to who today might need to be different based upon how the strategy the business has changed. So maybe we should not be geographically aligned anymore. Maybe we need to be functionally business unit aligned, you know, stuff like that. And smaller companies, it's really hard for them to envision that.

Andy: 1:10:54

Thanks, Ed. And did you have a preference?

Ed Eppley: 1:10:58

Yeah, I think I think I'm much more comfortable ultimately, in the smaller closely held companies, when I can have the executives for the entire company in the same room at the same time.

Andy: 1:11:12

Yeah, I can imagine that doesn't surprise me. And I imagine you appreciating the impact you can have and, you know, not appreciating the inertia in, in large organisations where their hands are tied, compared to a privately owned business. There's a few you mentioned, healthy and smart. I think that comes from Patrick Lencioni originally, doesn't it that

Ed Eppley: 1:11:38

it does

Andy: 1:11:39

the organisational health?

Ed Eppley: 1:11:41

The book The Advantage? Yeah.

Andy: 1:11:43

And you worked with Pat Lencioni.

Ed Eppley: 1:11:46

I was fortunate. Yeah, I was fortunate to have a run of about five years with them. Yeah.

Andy: 1:11:51

And so I was curious about how, you know, he comes across on video as kind of genuine and very passionate guy, obviously, you know, not asking you to tell any tales or anything, but just curious what was, you know, he's been remarkably successful at creating that business and, and the books, you know, he's written a whole load of very accessible books on the topic, and it's a great prolific speaker. Have you got any thoughts or comments worth sharing?

Ed Eppley: 1:12:22

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I, first of all, he is very much what you see him to be on videos, he is that genuine. And he's that passionate about wanting organisations to create environments where people can have dignity and can love going to their jobs every day. That's it. He's so committed to that. And I give him lots of credit for, I think, I think Pat's personally responsible for creating a mechanism by which that can be done predictably. And at a scale, a level of scale, that would be hard to replicate. So I, all the credit in the world to him for being able to do that. I tend to be agnostic, with my clients about smart versus healthy. So what I mean by that is, I will help them on either side of that equation, or that if you will, the teeter totter effect of a balance that you're trying to strike between the right amount of smart versus the right amount of healthy, Pat only wants to work on organisational health. And so my job is to help my clients advance. So from where they wherever they are, today, my job is to help them get to a better state than they otherwise would be. And for some of my clients, they need to have stuff as simple as performance management, they need to have job descriptions and performance reviews of some sort. I'll help them do that if they want.

Andy: 1:13:46

Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Especially given you know what you were saying earlier about it's the the owner operator companies, the privately owned ones tend to be better at the culture side, they're naturally healthier. Right? They're the ones that you enjoy working with, as well. So their need is often not the organisational health as much as the rigour around professional management. And that seems to be a good you know, good point to talk about. I think we'll take a look at Aileron first and then I want to talk about your book Ed but you know, Aileron, something you introduced me to I'd heard you talk about it quite a lot over the years and my, one my curiosity, my desire to emulate you in whatever way possible brought me then to to Ohio to Aileron to experience it. And so do you want to say a little bit about what it is and about what Clay Mathile's done there, who he is and what he's done and what a wonderful initiative it is.

Ed Eppley: 1:14:49

Clay for our audience, Clay was the owner of IAMS Dog and Cat Food or pet food business. So IAMS is probably the first pet food company who was focused on high nutrition and brilliant capacity to see what was visible that others weren't seeing. And Clay was the individual that said, we're going to help people who have dogs and cats be able to have pets that will live longer, healthier lives. And he was there as the journey as he says, The dog went from being in the barn to the garage, to the kitchen to the bedroom. And along the way, the margins of what they were making went up, which is very unusual as demand went up margin went up because the people who have these pets care about them in different ways than they certainly did when I was growing up as a as a kid on the farm. I can't tell you how many dogs we had. It came and went frequently. One day, Polly was there and the next day she wasn't. Dad wouldn't always tell us the story about why Polly was no longer there. But she was just gone and some other dog had replaced her. And our dogs,

Andy: 1:16:03

I suppose they wouldn't work. I mean, the cliche is they go off to live on a farm. You're already living on a farm

Ed Eppley: 1:16:09

Yeah. In hindsight, I'd share some got run over some ran away some whatever it might be, but our dogs, this is a long way of telling you what Clay was able to make happen. Our dogs we Terina dog food that was dry. And every once in a while they would get table scraps, that was mixed in with that, and it kept them alive. And our dogs were utilitarian creatures, they were there for protection and and then also to announce when somebody who was not supposed to be there was in the in the vicinity. And so that's why we had them. And so they never came in the house. It was never it never thought of that they would come in the house, and they were not part of the family. As such, they were like a tractor that needed to be fed. So Clay Clay recognise that people cared about their dogs and pets at a level that was going to keep evolving. And so he created this pet food company that was really focused on nutrition before other companies were aware of the importance of that. And he created this organisation that went from a million dollars in sales to almost a billion dollars of sales over a 30 year period of time. He sold it to Procter and Gamble in 1999 for$2.3 billion or in EBIT terms, oh 30 times EBIT, which is really hard for me to still get my head around knowing what multiples can be, you know, 12, 14 would be just tremendous. And he more than double that. So that tells you how wonderful a business he created. But all that said Clay attributes his ability to instil professional management into his organisation as the thing that allowed that to happen. And professional management became six disciplines for them. And those were in a particular order. There's leadership strategy, there's people development, there's organisational performance, there's structure, and there's culture. And those six professional disciplines when an organisation understands them, and uses them will allow them to produce more results more quickly working through others, more profitably than they otherwise would. When I got exposed to those six disciplines, Andy, that was kind of like the final piece of the puzzle, or the final tumbler falling into place for me about all this work that I've learned and all this knowledge that I've gained about way organisations perform about the means for that to be replicated predictably from one organisation to the next. And so the Aileron was really crucial to my development at the right place at the right time when the student was ready, which was me that's the teacher appeared, which was Aileron that I was so fortunate to get that exposure.

Andy: 1:19:01

So Clay when he sold the business to Proctor and Gamble, he invested hundreds of millions of his own money

Ed Eppley: 1:19:13

Yeah, built this wonderful campus, in the middle of nowhere, intentionally, so that when you visit there, you as you enter the campus, it's a leisurely drive of about a mile. And you find yourself moving from thinking about being in the business to wanting to work on the business. And everything in that campus is designed to help entrepreneurs, business owners, be able to become a better version of themselves and to help their businesses be more successful than they otherwise would. So that these organisations can employ more people and make the places where they operate better places to live.

Andy: 1:19:50

Yeah, it's a wonderful place with a wonderful mission and executing it extremely well and you were part of the team, are part of the team

Ed Eppley: 1:20:02

I think I would say more was, I don't think I'll probably be doing much, if anything for them in the future, it's just gotten to the point where my schedule doesn't really fit well with theirs. And it's fine. And I'm so blessed to have spent the time I did helping them. I'm still a fan. I'm still a huge fan of them. I'm still a huge fan of Carnegie, I'm still a huge fan of Pat Lencioni.

Andy: 1:20:23

And so more recently though you published your own book, Let's Be Clear. And that talks about the principle, it talks about professional management. And it's it's aiming to give those who read it, whether they're business owners, or even managers in multinationals, it's aiming to give them the skills they need to get to to leverage the teams that they work with. create those environments that you talk about where people can, can thrive.

Ed Eppley: 1:20:51

Yeah, it, I think, number one, it was written to be a place to memorialise all the things that I've learned, and in some cases, to pay homage to certain individuals who've been crucial to what I've learned. So I mentioned Alan Crookes. I mentioned George Baviak, who was the President, best boss I ever worked for at Ohio Transmission and Pump. There's there's a number of people that I I hold up there is walking, talking role models, for what it looks like to be good at different aspects of professional management in general overall, I also wanted a place to be able to explain to my kids or my kids kids, what the hell I do, because they really don't know, they know, I work with businesses, and they know I do podcasts and but I'm, you know, to them, I'm still dad, and goofball. And then the other thing I wanted to do was to try to take as much theory about professional management and express it in real life examples of what it looks like to do it either well or poorly. And I got the idea from Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. So I tried to I tried to model it with telling stories, probably not as well, as Dale told his but in a similar fashion, so that it would make it somewhat enjoyable to read about, there's a bit too much of lecture in it for my tastes. But in some cases, I just needed a, I needed to be able to tell you or tell a reader, okay, this is what it means to me, this is why I think it's important. And at the end of every note, you know, if anybody spent any time with me, they know I love to ask questions. So at the end of every chapter, there's a series of questions that really get you to the essence of why that chapter is there. And if you're doing if you're, if you can answer yes to these questions, or if you can answer them, it means you're probably doing that that particular discipline in a way that's meaningful or probably helpful. And if you have to say no, or if you don't know how to answer it, that means there's probably something for you to learn.

Andy: 1:22:47

Yep. Well, hopefully it will help others to understand like family members understand what you do Ed. And hopefully this will as well, if they choose to listen to it at some point, you also touched on the podcast. And again, that was something you did before me. And were part of my inspiration to start these podcasts. Why did you start it? What was the the influence to start doing it? Obviously, you had your broadcasting back in the day, so it was more of a coming home than a starting something from scratch. But how did it begin?

Ed Eppley: 1:23:21

The book, and the podcasts have always been part of a plan to remain relevant? You know, I'm 68. I'll be 69 in March. And so part of the challenge when you're not affiliated with an organisation like Pat Lencioni or Aileron is okay, well, you know, who are you? And why should I pay any attention to you? So part of the reason that I wanted to write the book and do the podcast was to be able to articulate thinking or share information or ideas that others might find valuable. So that if they had occasion to talk to me, or were considering whether or not they should do business with me that they could know, okay, you're a person of substance, you're not some Johnny Come Lately, and you know, you're not somebody that's in between jobs, trying to figure out how to make a buck that, okay, you have some legitimacy to be there. And Andy, I'd be doing the audience a disfavour, I would not be doing them justice, if I didn't tell them that something that's come pretty late in life, to me is the understanding that, you know, the questions I ask, usually create insight, awareness or understanding in the person with whom I'm having conversation that they didn't have previously. So the questions lead to thinking or learning about their situation that they might not have had clarity on prior to me asking those questions. And so my goal with the book and the podcast is to create an environment where if I'm not talking to you, personally, it would still cause you to gain insight, awareness or understanding that you might not have had otherwise,

Andy: 1:25:05

it's scaling it, isn't it, it's a way of scaling the impact that you have and the value that you bring, and you have wonderful guests on your podcast who many of whom, know you and know your work and have worked with you and benefited from you? And there's a lot of really, yeah, senior people on there in different organisations, who you can tell share their enthusiasm, you know, that feel the same way about you that I do, that you've done for them, their businesses, great things, and that comes across very well, and just so many different guests and wonderful stories they have. And I really enjoy listening to that. And it's called the Ed Eppley Experience, isn't it?

Ed Eppley: 1:25:50

Yeah, it's a ripoff of Joe Rogan, the Joe Rogan Experience. So I just I didn't know what else to call it. And it's it's never been about monetizing it. It was just okay. We'll, we got a call, I don't know. And a lot of my golfing buddy buddies called me E squared at Eppley. And so I thought, well, we might eventually get to e cubed for the Ed Eppley Experience, but another day

Andy: 1:26:10

very good, very good. And it's it's available wherever people stream podcasts. Yeah. And the book, Let's Be Clear, is on Amazon. Yeah. And you were telling me recently that you there's another venture that you've got involved with as well.

Ed Eppley: 1:26:27

Yeah. I've Colin Crotty has become he's been a client for a number of years. And I got to know Colin before well, not before when he was still a part of his family's business, which was Van Dyne Crotty they're in the uniform and mat rental business, or were, they got bought out by Cintas, who's one of the largest suppliers of uniforms, mats and safety and stuff like that equipment in the United States. I don't know if they're international, but they're certainly dominant in the United States. Colin's created his own businesses along the way in advertising and branding. And so he's been exposed to everything I've ever done in this world. And one thing we haven't talked about Andy is Perth Leadership, and Dr. Ted Prince, and the business acumen and financial acumen that people possess that allows them to make or lose money. And so Colin is the I think the only client that I've worked with, that's actually seen everything I've ever done. So he's seen the full Carnegie Experience, he's seen professional management stuff, he's seen Perth Leadership, and he's seen the Pat Lencioni stuff at the Table Group. And he said to me a couple of different times, I want to do what you do, at some point in my career, and about a year ago, he began conversations with me and, and said, Look, I am ready to to act on this. And he's got a company called Hyperquake that's become extremely successful in helping organisations not only think about the brand that they want, but also the experience that they want their customers to have. And lastly, the stories that they need to tell their customers for the brand to become real. And likewise, the communication that companies need to tell their employees so that they can create these brand experiences for their clients. So it's a fairly sophisticated approach to this whole brand, area of marketing. So Colin's created this new company called Several Thousand Alliance, and it's making reference to the several 1000 attempts that Edison went through to figure out the right filament makeup for the light bulb to become viable. And the premise being that most organisations have to do a lot of trial and error to figure out what's going to work for their organisation to allow it to become more successful. But if you get the right people around you, you can reduce that challenge dramatically to maybe a few 100. Or, or less than 100, if you're doing it well. And so there's a group of us that are going to be collaborating together. And the Several Thousand Alliance, that will be trying to help organisations not only in the areas that I work, but some other ones that are aligned, or you could say tangential to it, but connected to the whole concept of advancing businesses. So this is an organisation that's in the infancy of its existence, but I think it's going to have legs, I think it's going to be something that I certainly want to give my full effort and energy to over the next few years and figure out how long I can keep doing this work. It will be a way for me to transition my clients. It's a way for me to help develop other people to do what I do, because that's part of the reason that Colin wants me involved is to train him and others to do some version of the consulting that I do, so that I'm very excited about it. It's my next journey to learning and growing. And I, I've been so fortunate God has put me in the position to do what I do and recognise that I'm supposed I'm built for this. And I just want to do it as long as I can. So I can be with people like you.

Andy: 1:29:51

Yeah, that sounds wonderful. And that was a good closing speech really. However, you also mentioned Dr. Ted Prince and I think we should just mention a little bit about Behavioural Finance and and that topic because this is again your curiosity taking you into places and uncovering amazing things really.

Ed Eppley: 1:30:19

Yeah. And and for people who are listening that don't know about Perth, Perth Leadership, the best way to describe Dr. Te d Prince, the founder of the organisation is for you to think about Christopher Lloyd, who is Doc Brown in Back to the Future. The flux capacitor that is Ted Prince, and I say that with all respect and affection that I can for somebody that I hold in such high regard, I've met some brilliant people in my life. I've met some MIT doctorates. And I've been around some really smart people, I've never been around anybody who's as smart in a meaningful way to what's going on in businesses, Dr. Ted Pri nce. So Perth Leadership has reminded me over and over again, of the consequence of behaviour on the results that a business is trying to produce. And our behaviour is a function of the cognitive bias or filters that we have, in that way, the way it causes us to look at whatever we're looking at in the business environment. And there's also the biases that we have about our willingness to try to control an outcome or a willingness to create a new reality. So something different can happen than what's currently happening. So I love doing that work. I just got done doing a series of assessments with a client. And the implications for that $500 million business for them to understand this are so great. And it's so powerful, and so disruptive that I'm, I get jazzed. I hope the audience can tell. I'm just geek talking about it.

Andy: 1:32:09

It comes across Ed . And yeah, that was another another thing you introduced me to that led me on another journey over to Jacksonville, in Florida to spend a week with Dr. Ted Prince in a room in a small group getting to really understand that I became equally curious about it and huge amount of respect for Ted. So sorry, I messed the order up a little bit there. But it's my show. So I can do that

Ed Eppley: 1:32:42

I just am so thankful that you think I've been beneficial to your career, Andy, and I know you're operating with your organisation, and with your Academies of executives, I know you're doing work that is so valuable. And I'm just I hope this doesn't come across in any way patronising, but I'm very proud of where you've gotten to and how you've done your, your work and the the passion that you bring to it. And the quality of what you do is it's impeccable. I wish I could do work at the level you do. The detail that you pay attention to because I have not not had the discipline to do that right. I know I'd be better off if I had more of it. So

Andy: 1:33:31

I think you're doing just fine Ed but thank you very much.

Ed Eppley: 1:33:34

Well I may have enjoyed some success, but your model of quality is one that I need to emulate. So thank you for setting that example for us.

Andy: 1:33:43

Thank you and you absolutely have influenced me and it's an honour for me to have you as my guest today for this episode. Is there anything else I should have asked you Ed? It's my final catch all question. Call it lazy. But is there anything else I should have asked you?

Ed Eppley: 1:34:00

Well, one, I hope your editor does a good job of reducing this conversation down to something that people will want to listen to because you've you've got me to share stories and talk much longer than I should have. But I've just enjoyed this. I can't think of a thing that we should have talked about that we didn't.

Andy: 1:34:18

Very good. Well, thank you again, Ed. It's been a huge pleasure. And I will be staying in touch with you. However you answer the phone to me, I'll still be coming to you for ideas and support as I have done. So thanks very much.

Ed Eppley: 1:34:35

I look forward to our next conversation. Very, very much, Andy. Thank you.

Andy: 1:34:40

You've been listening to Career-view Mirror with me Andy Follows I hope you found some helpful points to reflect on in Ed's story that can help you with your own career journey or that of those who lead parent or mentor. You are unique and During my conversation with Ed, you'll have picked up on topics that resonate with you. A few elements stood out for me, curiosity, asking questions and the impact it had, in giving Ed credibility with customers at an early age that and the exposure to Dale Carnegie training at 22 had a significant impact in accelerating Ed's entrepreneurial career. The same scenario repeated itself with Ed creating value above and beyond what might have been expected in the role and it leading to an expansion of his impact. The realisation that working with managers had a leverage effect, also creating benefit for the people they were responsible for. That curiosity leading to Perth Leadership Institute, or the Table Group or Aileron, and finding the right balance of content for your clients. For example, professional management skills for privately owned businesses, and organisational health for multinational companies. Finally, the sense that Ed keeps moving forward writing Let's Be Clear, creating the Ed Eppley Experience podcast and now working on Several Thousand Alliance. You can contact Ed via LinkedIn, or email Ed @ The Eppley Group.com. And there are links in the show notes to this episode. We publish these episodes to celebrate my guests careers, listen to their stories, learn from their experiences. And I'm genuinely interested in what resonated with you. If you have any comments or feedback for us. If you have any questions, or if Ed's insights have helped you, please let us know. By leaving a review your feedback helps us grow. You can leave a review on Apple podcasts or pod chaser. Or you can find the episode on our Instagram at Career-view Mirror and comment there. Thank you to all of you for sharing your feedback. Thanks also to Hannah, our producer. This episode of Career-view Mirror is brought to you by Aquilae. Aquilae is a boutique consultancy in the auto finance a mobility industry. We offer our expertise as a service to help you design and deliver projects that develop your business and the people within it. Contact me if you'd like to know more. To be among the first to know about upcoming guests. Follow us on Instagram at Career-view Mirror and remember folks if you know people who would benefit from hearing these stories, please show them how to find it. Thanks for listening