What If ROI Meant Customers And Employees

Profit talk usually gets framed as cold math, but we’ve learned it’s often the fastest way to uncover what a business truly values. We’re joined by Jonny Havey, founder of eLearning Partners and a former PricewaterhouseCoopers consultant and CPA, to dig into the hidden “profit leaks” that drain organizations even when revenue looks fine and the team feels busy. We pull apart why leaders keep funding sunk costs, how waste hides inside reports no one reads and systems no one uses, and where education can create measurable returns without burning people out. 

Jonny introduces his ROI Pie concept, a stakeholder-based way to think about return on investment across purchasers, ideal customers, and employees. That shift changes the questions leaders ask: Are we creating real wins for the customers we can serve best? Do employees feel supported, connected, and able to grow in a world of AI and automation? We also get into the messy realities of remote work, hybrid teams, and why isolation and mental health show up as productivity and retention problems. 

From there we connect the dots to customer loyalty. If employees drive customer experience, and education drives capability, then learning becomes a competitive advantage, not a “nice to have.” Jonny shares a sharp example from Apple Stores as a “free university,” with workshops that teach customers to succeed and staff trained to serve well, and we debate the difference between getting information and actually learning. We close with adaptive learning, diagnostic assessment, and a bigger question about what employability and society look like by 2030. 

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Transcript

Welcome And New Contributor

SPEAKER_04 0:19

Aloha. And welcome to another candid conversation. Today we're bringing a new contributor to the table, and I'm really pleased to have him. Uh Johnny Henry, I think, right?

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Johnny Hazy.

SPEAKER_04 0:34

Johnny Hazy. See how how new he is? I don't even know the man that well. So how about we start that way, Johnny? If you could give me and the group behind me um an idea of who you are, what you do, why you do it, and what you'd like to accomplish. Just a short question.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Yeah, thank you very much, Ron. My name is Johnny Havey. I'm the founder of eLearning Partners. And really why I even created e-learning partners in the first place came out of being a really a business consultant and CPA at Pricewaterhouse Cooper's. I out of college went and explored the world of accounting, learned a lot

From PwC To Profit Leaks

SPEAKER_01 1:24

about how businesses work, and even more so learned about how education fits into the puzzle of running a business, ranging from small businesses all the way to SP 500 companies. So today I really work with both. I partner with small businesses and business owners all the way up to SP 500 company leaders and teams to really identify and eliminate any hidden profit leaks that may exist in the organization. And really how we do this is by leveraging education as a competitive advantage. It's really, for me, I've always been passionate about empowering people and empowering companies to create impact in the world. And for me, my skill set has really been a combination of finances, accounting, business consulting, and education to support organizations in doing that.

SPEAKER_04 2:37

So one of the things that your background with Price, Price Waterhouse, I mean it's a long name now after all the merges in those that area, isn't it? It is. It is.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Yeah, I mean, what I see in general is I think that businesses and uh leaders are used to doing things a certain way. And one thing we talk about in accounting is something called sunk costs. And sunk costs are much more than

Sunk Costs And Breaking Status Quo

SPEAKER_01 3:24

just a monetary cost. They are a cost that it could be money, it could be time, it could be resources that a person, an organization, a leader may invest in and may not see results, but continues to invest in to almost prove that they can get the result. So in accounting, we call it a sunk cost because it's a cost that you're not going to get back, and it's really a cost that you need to stop pouring into and uh move in another direction. But that that's really what I've seen in my work as a consultant over the years is we as people, as leaders and as organizations tend to continue to invest in things longer than we should. Yeah, I I call that the status quo.

SPEAKER_04 4:21

Yeah, you're right on Ron. You know, it it's it's remarkable. Um business sisters suppliers, you know, and we can talk about any of them. They rarely have a report that says how much of the system is used. Similarly, very rarely do people understand of the reports that are generated, whether it's computer or other. How many of them actually read them? And a long time ago I took over a data processing shop. And after I got my feet down a little bit and was a little bit more comfortable, I didn't produce any reports for anybody. And of course the monthly financial accounting people were on my butt really quickly because they needed it to do their work. But the operating departments it could have gone four, five, six, seven weeks before you know, I don't seem to have that report from last month. It was probably when they were gonna file it. And and that that's that's the problem. So learning and and business. What do you think is the most important measure for an owner or a shareholder of an SP, a large company, what's the thing that they focus on the most?

SPEAKER_01 5:49

What do they focus on the most or what should they focus on the most?

SPEAKER_04 5:53

No, what do they what do you realize after your experience, what do they focus on? It it's not gonna be what they should. We both know that.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's it's really interesting because over the years I've had to really change how I consult organizations, especially S ⁇ P 500, because just how large companies are structured, and really it makes sense why companies are structured in this way, because in order to keep doing business, in order to keep shareholders

Profit, Impact, And ROI Pie

SPEAKER_01 6:29

and all the stakeholders in a business happy, you have to keep making money. So profit becomes extremely important. And I think I resisted this for a long time because, like I said, I've always been about how do we impact lives? How do we change lives and change them for the better? Well, I had all this resistance for a long time about profit and money. And the the reality is when we're looking at a business, a business is able to serve more people and change more lives when they have more profit. The challenge, though, with this is that some businesses and some strategies can go awry when the sole focus is on profit. So what I see in how I consult organizations now is we really need to look at the return on investment that we're getting in a couple of different ways. So return on investment being you invest your money, your energy, your time in one thing as a business or as a business owner, a leader, and you get a specific return. And I think traditionally this is looked at as investing just money, but really there is time and energy as well. Well, when business owners and leaders look at what is the return on investment for my business, it isn't the whole picture. And a lot of times that is the only return on investment ROI metric that these businesses and leaders are looking at. What I then, and I'm jumping ahead a little bit here, Ron.

SPEAKER_04 8:25

What I then this is this is just a conversation, and and it you know, you you bring a different perspective because of your pricewaterhouse background. And and that for my audience, I hope they pay attention to, because your view is different than a lot of the operational people.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

Yeah, yeah. So what I found is in business school I learned a ton about ROI return on investment. Uh Price Waterhouse, we talked about that a ton. And really, when I started consulting, that was really my focus, my focus for my company and my focus for my clients. But what I learned after, you know, I've been an entrepreneur for more than a decade now. I think I'm going on year 12. And what I learned is yes, ROI is the most important piece for a business to look at. The problem is, most businesses only look at one group that ROI affects, which is themselves, their businesses. And what they really need to be doing is embracing a concept that I call ROI Pi. So ROI and then P-I-E. And what ROI Pi is, is it's this concept of the focusing and identifying the ROI of the different stakeholders that we affect as a business. So that means our customers, that means our employees, that means really anybody's lives who we touch as a business, we need to focus on. Now, I tried to make it simple for my clients to really understand. So what I've done is come up with this concept of ROI Pi. So the P stands for purchasers. These are the buyers that purchase from your organization. The I stands for ideal customers. These are the customers that businesses serve that are the ideal ones. We serve a lot of customers, but when a business really looks at who are the ideal customers, who do I create the most value for, and really who do I create the biggest wins for? And then the last letter E is for employees. I think a lot of times organizations will forget to focus on employees. And especially nowadays, I think that the shift towards AI and robots and organizations has made employees feel more expendable when it's when they're not. When you're really looking at a business, a business is made up of customers and employees. Without customers and without employees, you don't have a business. And what we do, Ron, when we do that is we create a win-win-win. We create a win for the organization, a win for the customers that an organization is serving, and a win for the employees who are serving the organization. So this is a very different way to look at ROI than traditionally when we look at ROI in accounting, where it's all about what does my business, well, what is the return that my business is getting on the investments that I'm doing. Instead, we're looking at all the groups and finding that overlap so that everyone wins.

SPEAKER_04 12:33

That's a subject for your next blog, you know that, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:37

I would love to write that for you, Ron.

SPEAKER_04 12:40

No, please, please do. Um We Harvard created the balance scorecard. Which does a similar thing. Um customers, employees' processes, and then the results. Um there's a thing called the profitability pyramid, which does a similar thing. Um I don't look at ROI as the most important measure. And I do that because I'm trying to get people to consider turnover drive. And that causes a lot of people a lot of trouble because I don't think about that. So imagine I have an asset turnover of two to make it simple. And I have a forty percent gross margin. If I make my turnover four I can operate with a twenty percent gross margin.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

And because you're you're not holding as much th there's a cost to keeping uh the assets on hand.

SPEAKER_04 14:06

Yep. And and at the beginning you talked about sunk cost or fixed cost, I call them. Um that have been there forever. So a lot of fixed assets. Space in a warehouse. Space in an office. Wonderful discussions about working from home, for instance, versus going to an office. We're at a time now where we need as many good minds as possible. There's an awful lot of benefit to having everybody in the office. The synergies and the learning and the mentoring and everything else. There's a hell of a lot of benefit to being able to work from home. How do you how do you bridge that with the leadership we're talking to in most cases is going to be over the age of 50? And I've seen in the last ten years a delay of the transition of leadership in almost every industry in America. We've got guys that are now running businesses in their 60s and 70s and some in their eighties. And the guys, the pretenders, the successors, they're leaving because they don't see a future. Does that resonate with you at all?

SPEAKER_01 15:30

I mean I see definitely the discrepancy in what do employees have to look forward to if there's never gonna be that role that opens up. And I think a lot of knowledge that these organizations are cultivating are is leaving because of that. And the really interesting part about it is they're either leaving to go to other companies or they're leaving to go and become a business owner and do it on their own. And a lot of people, when they do that, see, oh, there's like a whole nother set of challenges. So I think it it's

Turnover Thinking And Hybrid Work

SPEAKER_01 16:24

hurting the businesses that are keeping the leadership in place the most because of the knowledge going out the door. But overall, I think that it in some ways is promoting more people to be entrepreneurs, which I, as an entrepreneur myself, don't think that's a bad thing.

SPEAKER_04 16:50

Well, I think it's a great thing. I really do. Yeah. The the um the largest employers in America are companies that are less than 50 employees without any question at all. It's huge. Yeah. And the other thing that strikes me, and maybe you've seen this too, have how many businesses that you've worked with actually have an effective performance review on any regularity with each employee?

SPEAKER_01 17:17

I mean, my SP 500 company clients have the usual performance reviews yearly. Uh, if not more, I don't really check in with them that much. I know the smaller organizations that I work with, uh, and I'm bad at this as well. I probably only touch base in that sort of a way when it comes up. I have over the years had processes in place of meeting with contractors and employees on a quarterly and even on a monthly basis. But uh as an entrepreneur, the ebbs and flows of business kind of energy and time goes to whatever is most important in that moment, and that kind of falls on the wayside. Now, for my business, I do interact with my team members every single day, and I see that as a really a positive for smaller businesses. And my business, all my team members are all over the world, which is amazing. So, this whole work from home piece that we are able to do because of, you know, I I'm pretty sure Ron, you're in Hawaii, I'm in Colorado. Uh, we're able to do this because of the technology we have. Now, what that creates, though, is a need for employers and even in our personal lives to put even more effort into connecting with people and cultivating relationships. And I do think that larger organizations struggle with figuring out what they need to do. My I'd like to think that the SP 500 organizations I work with, I've heard from friends who work there, because I become very good friends with my clients, that they really enjoy working there. So, does that mean that they have the best performance review situation? I don't know, but they're at least doing something right in cultivating connection in other ways. But in general, as you were bringing this topic up, I think the hardest part for businesses when it comes to remote versus in-office versus probably the the best solution is hybrid, is that people start feeling isolated. So when people start feeling isolated and mental health gets impacted, there is a lot of data out there, a lot of research out there showing that productivity wanes. And if productivity wanes because people are having to take mental health days and all these other different um effects of mental health challenges, the bottom line is affected as well. One of my best clients that I've been working with for a couple years now, this organization in Australia called Cellisol, which means well-being for all. What Mario, the founder of Cellisol, has really been working on, starting in Australia, is working on halving the global suicide rate in the next three years. And how he's been doing this is creating behavioral change through education by partnering with organizations and helping them equipped and empower their employees to be there for themselves and for one another. So I've seen that the work that he's done and the work that we've been able to do together really help the organizations that he's worked with. But I do think that this is part of it, and part of what he really consults on with companies is really keeping this personal connection piece. Where, yes, we can look at all the metrics of there's data showing that employees are more productive when they're in an office. And then there's a whole nother set of metrics that show that employees are more productive at home. For me, I like to think that I'm much better at working at home than in an office, but I'm also very good at cultivating personal connection and cultivating friendships and all of these things. There's a lot of people that work is their social life. Work is their way of connecting with others. And I think that that's where this whole situation, Ron, becomes more complicated than is work from home better or is working remote better or is hybrid better? It could really be it's a subjective thing. It's an individualistic thing. And maybe hybrid is the answer. I don't know. For me, I don't know if I'd want to be feel like I'd have to go into work more than I need to, but I do have friends of mine who they have been told, hey, you're going to be remote forever, and they were not happy about it because they liked getting out of the house and getting to interact with other people. So it's really interesting because from a productivity standpoint, it depends on the person. From a socialization standpoint, I do think that working together with team members in person is has major benefits, especially from a mental health perspective.

SPEAKER_04 23:27

One of the interesting things that the Australian company and you've been talking about relative to mental health, only since COVID have our societies really started thinking about that. And the the metaphor I use an awful lot is the electric engine in 1870-something replacing the steam engine. And it everybody did it very easily and voluntarily because it was cheaper. But it took twenty years before the electric engine interfered with how business was operated. In other words, to change the process, the methods, the procedures, the systems. It took a generation before it happened. And then I I transport ourselves to now and think in terms of that metaphor and how long it took to make the change into society. And started nineteen fifty with the computer, nineteen sixty with the database, nineteen seventy with the internet, nineteen eighty with global physician, and nineteen ninety with AI or whatever. And we got a stack of things that are yet to be implemented. And they'll freeze frame on that and come down another path.

Mental Health, Connection, And Culture

SPEAKER_04 24:55

And we need to start considering because when people were home, they had an opportunity to think a little differently. And all of a sudden work-life balance became something that was more important. And that's split into three pieces: your job, your family, and yourself. And the one that we pay the least attention to is ourselves. What I found is every 20 years the people that are working within a supply chain goes down by 50%. Really? Yep. Now in Canada, when I started, there were 10 dealers. Let me call it 1970. Today there's two. In the States, Caterpillar had 50 dealers, they're aiming for 18. This has caused a hell of a lot of trouble. Because owners who rely on financial statements continue to see revenue okay. And then you know, when I call up and I talk to a lot of people as you do, I say it's say, How are things going? Well, not bad. How sales, sales are good. They're going up? Yeah. Well, I would hope so. What do you mean? Well, you're competing with half as many people. What do you expect? That's not true. Well, you better go check because it is true. And when they go check and say, Holy crap. So I try to get people to think about customer attention as one of the critical drivers. And that takes us back to your pie, which is why I'd be interested in the blog. Customer attention is driven entirely by employees. And yet companies as we started with are aiming for their profit in your life. And in the last I'm gonna say ten years for sure, but I think it's longer. Business has put profit over people. Transaction volumes haven't gone down, but the number of people performing the process has.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

I do. I mean, the whole reason why I meet companies at the profit conversation is because this is how people think. And I mean, it's it's what I studied, it's what I worked on at PWEC. But really what I've learned over the years, Ron, is what what our job is, is it's really to change people's beliefs. And the only way to do that is by starting where they are, and that's what I find with my clients, is I start with, okay, we're gonna look at what profit leaks may exist in your company. And we look at some things, and typically, you know, I start with the you know, the simplest equation that there is in business: profit equals revenue minus expenses. And from there And then and stop there for a second.

SPEAKER_04 28:29

If I ask a thousand employees what profit is, they will not give me that simple description.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

I don't I I don't know if anyone would give that description, period. Um but it's the right description.

SPEAKER_01 28:44

Yeah. Yeah. And well the the interesting thing about it, Ron, is I I was curious what AI would say about the definition. So I certainly was like, tell me a definition for profit, definition for revenue, definition for expenses. The most interesting one was the definition for expenses. And what I think I was talking to Chat GPT and it said expenses are costs that a business spends money on to operate. And I said, wow, I mean, that's cor that is correct from the standpoint of it is that's what it should be. But a lot of times businesses are spending money on a bunch of different things that have nothing to do with operating. And uh I thought that was very interesting. And uh that's really where I'm able to go in and help businesses, is because businesses are wasting a lot of money. And instead of spending it on high ROI activities or investing in their people, they're investing in all sorts of things that are really a waste of time, energy, and money.

SPEAKER_04 30:08

But let me take you down a different path. I agree with all of that, and and it it's it in management. I had a partner in a company called Insight where we did dealer 20 groups, if you're familiar with that, and the on-highway business is where it started. Mac Ferries was his name. He was a hell of a guy. He uh he was an Annapolis graduate, uh, he got an MBA from Stanford, he ran the lunar landing program for Boeing, pretty talented guy. And he broke management down into three steps. Everybody has to understand what we're trying to do. Everybody has to accept that what we're trying to do is the right thing to do, and then everybody will be committed to things. And the piece of that puzzle that I say is missing is the argument to get to agreement that what we're trying to do is the right thing to do. And there's such a gap between what leaders think their business is and the people that are doing the work. Patrick Lencionia, it's a one I'm sure you're familiar with him, he's one of the most prominent, in my view, business authors in the last 20 years. His first book was The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. And the first sign is anonymity. The employees don't think anybody cares about them. They don't know anything about them. Married, sick, children going to school, education, whatever it is. And I see that all over the place. Do you?

SPEAKER_01 31:43

In my clients, not as much. Um, but I do see it in organizations that come to me that I decide not to work with.

SPEAKER_04 31:56

Um there's a there's a beautiful point

Profit Equation, Waste, And Alignment

SPEAKER_04 31:59

right there. There's a beautiful point right there. The ones that you're interested in dealing with that are interested in dealing with you, are in the same place thinking wise. You're both trying to make something better. Yeah. The ones that you don't want to work with, quite frankly, you don't have time to work with, and the ones that don't recognize systems, they're not thinking about anything. They're just continuing to do what they've always done. Am I being too harsh?

SPEAKER_01 32:29

You're right on. I mean, I throughout my years as being uh throughout my years as a business owner, I early on, and when I say early on, I mean for the first like five to seven years, I took on every client. I think most businesses do it this way, maybe not for as long as I did it, maybe for longer than I did it. But there was a time when I was just like, there's too many headaches being created by working with organizations that really look at me as the vendor as dispensable as well. And that's really why I made the shift, is because as a consultant, I'm not an employee, but I am a vendor that I don't want to be treated poorly. And if I'm treated poorly, then it starts seeping down into my culture and how I treat my people. And as a consultant, I'm not always the only person interacting with my clients. I have team members that also interact with my clients. So in order to protect them, I also stop working with these types of organizations. With that being said, they still seep through here and there. But then what I do is I focus on the opposite, Ron, when that occurs. Instead of customer retention, I try and get rid of them by either pricing them out or some other some other way. But when it comes to customer retention, you're right on employees or team members drive that. They drive it. Yep. And it's one of the really focuses of my organization is really helping organizations with customer retention. And we really do that by not only empowering employees, so my clients' employees, to be able to best serve customers, but also we make sure leveraging the power of education. So we're leveraging it twofold here, internally to best serve employees of my clients' organization, team members, but we also leverage it externally to make sure that customers understand the value that they're getting interacting with my clients. So either by understanding the value of their products, by educating them how to get the best results out of their products, or educating them how to get the best results out of their services. And then educating them on what the next step is to continue to work with my clients. But you can you really have to deal with this twofold by empowering employees to better serve and uh empowering customers to really understand what you do and how to get the most out of it. And a big part of that is making sure that you understand what is important to both of these groups. For employees, for example, you we were talking about how employees don't know the R the We were talking about how employees don't know the profit equation. Well, why should they? Like, like, and and and what I mean by that is if I'm an employee, I'm working for an organization, like I just I want to be treated well, I want to enjoy what I do, I want to have some ability to grow, and uh I don't want to be stressed out. Like I want to actually enjoy my job, and when I'm not at my job, not have to think about it. So that's what profit is to an employee, to a team member. Like that's profit in their minds. And if a business can provide these things to them, then they're gonna serve the business and more importantly, the business's customers, even more powerfully.

SPEAKER_04 36:36

What becomes really intriguing with that is when people retire. So instead I I I know clients who've been with companies basically their whole lives, 20, 30, 40 years. And it works for younger people in shorter terms as well. When they're retired, they they lose their identity. They don't know who they are anymore. They haven't got a purpose in life. And that's a really interesting statement. The other thing, okay, so go back to Lindsay, only the three signs. The first one is anonymity, the second one is irrelevance. Most employees don't understand where their job fits in the overall picture. And then finally, is immeasurability, a a term he created because it's not a word. If you're a technician or a tradesman, you know what you did each day. But you take those trades away and you go into an office, there's no metrics that the employee has for their own performance. And I think that's a critical element. You know, end of the day, geez, you know, I could have done better with this or that. And end of the day, this was a good day. It's it's people make the difference. We talk about customer attention. I changed that term because it's customer loyalty that causes customer attention. And if you read anything in America the last 20, 30 years, everybody's going to tell you customer loyalty's gone. What the hell happened to these customers? I think I say we forced them away because we stopped giving them customer service.

SPEAKER_01 38:23

We stopped giving them a reason to continue to work with our company.

SPEAKER_04 38:29

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 38:30

Yeah. I mean, very interesting. So I recorded a podcast episode yesterday for my podcast, uh Learning Transformed. And what I did is I looked at the five largest companies in the world by market cap. And it's very interesting because all five are actually education companies.

SPEAKER_04 38:58

By market capitalization?

SPEAKER_01 39:00

Yeah, which is fascinating. You know, and and and I'm teasing it out here.

SPEAKER_04 39:04

So I I find that surprising. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:07

So so as of yesterday, at least, the biggest market cap uh organization is NVIDIA at 4.7 trillion.

SPEAKER_04 39:19

Okay, so you're calling that education.

SPEAKER_01 39:22

The so NVIDIA empowers AI. Empowers

Education Drives Loyalty At Scale

SPEAKER_01 39:30

all of these softwares and systems that people use to really learn from. So actually, the rest of the companies on the list are involved in AI in different ways. You look at Google, you look at Amazon, you look at Microsoft. Well, NVIDIA supports a lot of these companies. Anyway, what I wanted to share is Apple is on the list. I think right now they're number three. Apple and Google slash Alphabet play uh a really fun chess match of who's better on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. But Apple has done something very interesting from a customer loyalty perspective. And I would say that out of all the large companies out there, they have done the best with customer loyalty for the longest. And one thing that I experienced firsthand in the past couple of months that I didn't realize before. Maybe it's because I haven't been to Apple stores that frequently, but I was at an Apple store, and uh what I realized is Apple stores are actually a free university. And uh it's a free university in two ways. One is every single employee that works there is knowledgeable in how to best serve their customers, and they're very and they treat their customers very well. And if you talk to an Apple employee, they are treated very well as well. The second thing, and this is something I'd never noticed before, that they have free workshops every day throughout the day, teaching people how to use their products. And all you have to do is show up, sit down. You could have a product or not. If you have a product, do you use your product, your phone, your computer, your tablet, your air pods, whatever. If you don't have a product, then they will even, in some cases, let you borrow a product for the workshop. And then you have workshops on different topics throughout the day. You don't have to ever buy anything from them. But they do this because they know that if you know how to use their product and you know how to get the most value out of their product, then you're gonna buy more. And for me, I've been investing in Apple products since 2009, so 17 years of customer loyalty. And I would say that most of my friends who are Apple users are very similar, where it's buying products for 10, 20 years because of what they've been able to do. Now, some may argue that since Steve Jobs passed away, that things have changed and all these different things related to Apple. And I know sometimes people shift because you know Apple is more expensive for technology that is technically not as good as these other organizations. But that is so interesting when it comes to technology and the largest companies in the world. Apple, as of yesterday, I think being listed at number two, they're really an education company. And they're an education company because they know that customers want to know how to interact with their products. And they know that customers are going to interact with their employees. And if their employees are happy about their work that they're doing, and they're happy about their products, like this was the coolest thing is talking to a I wasn't even going in to buy anything. I was going in to recycle old computers, and uh the customers were talking about how, oh yeah, I really haven't I haven't bought the new AirPods yet, but I'm gonna get them next week. Or I haven't got the new iPhone yet, but I'm gonna get it next week with my discount. Like everyone is invested in the product as they believe in the product. And part of the reason why they believe in the product, because they believe in the well, the biggest reason why they believe in the product is they believe in the company, and the company treats them well.

SPEAKER_04 43:58

Yeah, I I I look at I was surprised when you say education. Now I understand why the top seven companies in the world are all technology.

SPEAKER_01 44:10

Yes. Yeah, I mean Google's number three, but if you look at Google, even Google has a lot of different facets, a lot. Of different products and services. But the three big ones are Google Search, YouTube, and Gemini. And all three are used heavily as education sources for businesses and for you know you and me, just outside of business. People go to Google, go to YouTube, go to Gemini to learn, to take in educational knowledge.

SPEAKER_04 44:49

So Google is really I answered that a different way. People go to those search engines, all of them, to get information. They don't go to learn. Getting information is not learning. Accept that?

SPEAKER_01 45:11

I'd say that learning is multi-stepped. There's multiple steps. So you're right. This is where a challenge comes with having access to all these things.

SPEAKER_04 45:28

So stop there before going too far. As people, I believe we've been taught to be obedient. As parents, we try and protect our children. Don't touch the stove, look both ways. When they go to school, the same thing. This is how you learn to read, to write, to do arithmetic. And then at some point we go out to a job and somebody shows us how to do it the company way. Where does it ask us to be curious? Where does this ask us to ask why? Who answers the question, why? And just philosophically, what's the answer? There there used to be on I think it was Harvard on the MBA program that you had a philosophy, or it's MIT, they had a philosophy class that you had to take to get a degree. There was no through the semester testing. So the whole thing came down to the final exam. The final exam had one question that was worth 50%. And then multiplicity as normal for the other 50. But the answer to the question, the there were three answers. One that was worth 100%, one that was worth 50%, and one that was zero. So you're ready? And I'm not trying to make you look funny or anything, but the question was why? What's the hundred percent answer?

SPEAKER_01 47:05

Well, I mean what were I mean what were what what were the the options?

SPEAKER_04 47:08

It's just an open no options.

SPEAKER_01 47:10

Oh, it was open. It was open.

SPEAKER_04 47:13

Just write it down.

Information, Curiosity, And Adaptive Learning

SPEAKER_04 47:14

Tell me what it is. Why? Intriguing, isn't it? There were three answers. The first answer is why not? Second answer is because. And the third answer is whatever the hell you're right, because it's wrong. Most people will give you a reason for for why they do what they do. Do you believe that?

SPEAKER_01 47:43

I think they have a I'm a weird guy, Johnny.

SPEAKER_04 47:52

Oh, I yeah, I mean I mean I'm a very weird guy.

SPEAKER_01 47:57

Oh, you're not. You um think about things very mindfully. And I think people I feel like what people say isn't always their answer. It's just an answer they've come up with. Because they feel it's important to give an answer.

SPEAKER_04 48:18

Yes. Yeah. They don't really think things through a lot, and and and therein is a lot of problem. We don't ask them to. Let's think of somebody who d has been doing a job for ten years. And it it could be anything. Salesperson in a grocery store, uh, somebody who stocks the shelves at Costco, whatever. How do they determine how to do the job?

SPEAKER_01 48:49

I mean, someone shows them. Or, yeah, I mean, for me, if I was doing that job, someone would have to show me. I'm a show and do person where people have to show me and then I have to do it.

SPEAKER_04 49:04

There's a teaching technique on that. It's called show tell, show try. I'm gonna show you. Then I'm gonna tell you what I just showed you, then I'm gonna show you again, and then you're gonna try it. And and that's a pretty common thing in school. So, yeah, you're you're following normal, but I don't think that's where you're gonna end up. You've been doing the job now for two or three years, you know how to do it. How did you determine what you're gonna do every day? What's the motivator there?

SPEAKER_01 49:37

You talking to me?

unknown 49:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:40

Yeah, I hope so. Yeah, yeah. I mean, for me, it's the impact I see with my clients or I hear about. So one of my clients, uh SP 500.

SPEAKER_04 49:55

How does that into influence your activities?

SPEAKER_01 50:03

I'm a big believer in uh the 80-20 rule. Okay. The Pareto principle.

SPEAKER_04 50:10

Okay, tell me what that is.

SPEAKER_01 50:12

Yeah, so Pareto Principle is 80% of results come from 20% of efforts.

SPEAKER_04 50:19

Okay, and the reason I'm just gonna describe it is I'm not sure everybody in the audience out there knows what these things are because jargon gets in our way many times.

SPEAKER_01 50:28

Agreed. And and vice versa, 80% of efforts create 20% of results. So when we're looking at a goal or something that we're pushing towards, what I invite my clients to do, I do the same thing myself in my business, in my life, is I look at what is actually creating the result. So with my clients, I know that if they're getting a result which is impacting lives. So one of my S P 500 clients, they help students get better jobs when they graduate. They also help professors empower students to get better jobs when they graduate, and then they help industry professionals maintain better jobs and get raises. And really how they do this is through education.

SPEAKER_04 51:30

Okay, well, for me, when I see number for a second. How do they measure what they need to do for each of those things? How do they determine what they need to do? Is is I guess the better question.

SPEAKER_01 51:46

Yeah, I mean, it comes back to creating a win-win-win. The my my client, they work with universities on providing programs that give students certifications that are looked at highly in the industry. And uh the metric to show that this is working is the students that earn these certifications versus that don't earn the certifications are getting are being hired more often.

SPEAKER_04 52:20

Okay, so freeze frame again, because I want to make sure everybody out there gets gets the idea. So certifications. Is there any certification for an electrician?

SPEAKER_01 52:34

I believe there is. At least there's safety training that electricians have to take.

SPEAKER_04 52:39

Perfect. Within a job function, there are critical elements, safety being one of them, thankfully, and that's only recently, by the way. The certification for electrician is the age-old circumstance that you're an apprentice for five years, which is the 10,000-hour rule. That's been around for probably a hundred years. Is there any certification for people to deliver in on highway trucks in America?

SPEAKER_01 53:11

I mean, there's gotta be.

SPEAKER_04 53:13

Only thing is it's commercial driver's license.

SPEAKER_01 53:16

Okay, commercial driver's license. There you go.

SPEAKER_04 53:20

There's no such thing as if it's a container or if it's a refrigerated shipment, or if it's rolled steel or flat steel. Get even more complicated. Who's the adjudicator of that? Who who runs tests on these vehicles on the road?

SPEAKER_01 53:37

Uh the state, the highway patrol.

SPEAKER_04 53:41

And they're not allowed to tell the driver what's wrong. Hmm. There's and and and that's why when you say medical, um food, nursing, accounting, there's certifications that are really good. So go to your are you're a CPA, I assume?

SPEAKER_01 54:02

I am inactive now, but yes, I I held my license for about a decade.

SPEAKER_04 54:07

So when you were there, there were certification requirements in order to continue to be a certified CPA. What is it?

SPEAKER_01 54:16

Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 54:19

Did you choose the courses or did the industry tell you which ones to take?

SPEAKER_01 54:24

There are course buckets or themes. So you have ethics, audit, managerial accounting.

SPEAKER_04 54:36

But they did they tell you what to take? So many hours of each of these things?

SPEAKER_01 54:41

They tell you how many hours of each course you do get to select the courses yourself.

SPEAKER_04 54:47

Perfect.

SPEAKER_01 54:48

Perfect.

SPEAKER_04 54:49

So now come into my crazy world, and I I warned you, I'm weird. We're all 10 years old. We're all going into grade three. Today you go in opening day of school, you're assigned a class. Some of the kids are bored like hell because they're way ahead of the group. Some of the board are are way behind because they haven't matured enough to get there. That's what we do. There's standardized testing in about 30 countries in the world. Grade 4, grade 8, grade 12. American students, plus or minus two points, are at grade level in English and in arithmetic. 30%. That's disgraceful. Plus, we spend more per student than any other country in the world. That's even more disgraceful. That's education. That's learning. So what I want the kids to do when they go the first day, I want the day to be spent doing evaluations, filling in tests, multiple choice, having interviews, and then they go home. And the following week they come in, and I'm going to assign them a grade from grade one to grade five. The only difference will be age. But everybody in the classroom will be at the same place in a learning position. They'll still have the same gaps in learning. Now we can teach properly.

SPEAKER_01 56:26

Yeah, it's adaptive learning. Yeah, adaptive learning. I think uh a lot of organizations are trying to do this harnessing AI now, where it's like if you answer an assessment, it organizations will customize the actually learn the actual learning paths that they assign to you. But the interesting thing about all of this is learning is a multi-step process. And no question. We don't learn how to learn before we're expected to learn.

SPEAKER_04 57:11

Yeah. Well, let me because we're running out of time, Johnny, and and I've really enjoyed this. I hope you have too. I have. What what we try and do with learning without scars is everything is dependent on what we call a diagnostic assessment, a skills and knowledge assessment. And they run from 90 questions to 180, depending on what the subject is and and the degree of difficulty. And from that, we do exactly what you just said. We give you a specific learning

Investing In Yourself And 2030

SPEAKER_04 57:39

path, and each of our classes is eight hours. And the reason I wanted to close with this is I want everybody to invest an hour and a half of their time each week on professional or personal development. It's unbelievably difficult to do.

SPEAKER_01 57:59

Oh, I bet it is.

SPEAKER_04 58:00

I do it because I read like a whole book every week.

unknown 58:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 58:05

Yeah, no, no. But I understand. I'm with you. That 78 hours a year out of 2080 that everybody works or paid for, it's I mean, isn't that ridiculous? I want to do another of these things. You're you're you you can make a really serious contribution in in the in the world. And and the one of the things that strikes me is we're doing this for other people so that other people have a better life. And and your Australia example right at the beginning is perfect. Suicide rates under 25 are obscenely high, never been high. The number of people that are wanting to work under the age of 25 because of how we treated them with COVID is as low as it's ever been. So many people are still living at home. I mean, this society has changed. So let me close with a question. One of my contributors who's got a couple of PhDs, taught at Northwestern, written 20 bestsellers, his name is Edwards. He said he wrote a book called Job Shop about 10 years ago. It said that by the year 2030, 50% of the American workforce will not be employable. So my question is: who's thinking about what society looks like 10 or 20 years from now?

SPEAKER_01 59:34

I don't know, man.

SPEAKER_04 59:37

That's that's a big one, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 59:39

It's definitely been something I've thought about deeply. And really why I think education is so powerful, because the more we educate ourselves and uh as you put it, invest in ourselves with personal development, professional development, we're able to continuously grow and figure out how to continuously impact the world. But I think that a lot of people are just uh dissatisfied and disillusioned with how things are and discouraged. And I think that that is what's preventing a lot of people from doing this really 90 minutes a week should be a simple investment, but it's not because people don't feel motivate uh people don't feel motivated to do it, they don't see a future that is worth investing in. Yep. And I think that this is really why organizations like my client that I shared, Cellisol, are doing amazing work because really the the key here is to change behavior and to change beliefs and really to install beliefs that create motivation for people to continuously invest. And someone has to think about these questions because a lot of times I do think as business owners and as enterprise leaders, we get stuck in the numbers of how do we in this moment appease all of our stakeholders versus what does this look like 10 or 20 years from now?

SPEAKER_04 1:01:33

That's a perfect way to close. I appreciate it. I've really enjoyed this time. I hope you have too. And to the audience out there, this doesn't provoke some thinking. You haven't been paying attention. I look forward to doing this more with you, Johnny, and getting some more blogs from you. And to everybody out there, I look forward to seeing you the next time. Mahallo.