Welcome to The Dashboard Effect Podcast. I'm Brick Thompson. Today we've got an interview with Jill Belconis. Jon Thompson, my co-founder and the Chief Strategy Officer at Blue Margin, will introduce Jill here at the beginning of the interview. So let's just get into it now.
Jon Thompson:Hi, folks. Welcome to our Blue Margin Expert Insights series. We're glad you joined us. This series was established for the benefit of mid-market executives and private equity firms who are looking to better understand how they can use data to put growth plans into action and create higher returns on investments. Today on our show, we welcome Jill Belconis. Jill is an accomplished business leader who has a passion for helping CEOs grow their companies and she has an impressive pedigree to fit that role. She was at Shelter Mortgage for 22 years, the vast majority of which she served as president and CEO, growing the company an average of 20% annually. She scaled it to 500 employees across 35 states before selling it in 2013. She also became a member of Young Presidents Organization in 1997. And in 2011, she became the first woman ever to be elected as YPO's International Chairman of the Board. She currently runs Jill Belconis Enterprises and her website is jillbelconis.com. Sidenote, she has some great leadership content on her blog. As a strategy business coach, Jill help CEOs and their leadership teams scale up and thrive while doing it. And we connected through a mutual friend, Jill, Scott Peterson of Carver Peterson, a sales consultancy that I can't say enough about. As a leader I have personally learned from Jill's coaching, and I believe our audience will too. And it's really an honor to have you here, Jill. Thanks for joining us,
Jill Belconis:Jon, thank you. I'm excited to be here.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, great. So Jill, what ignited your mission to help other leaders grow their companies?
Jill Belconis:Yeah, that's great question. I think I'm just at that point in my life, where it's time to, I've been there done that myself. And I really want to share what I've learned. I guess I didn't realize how much I have learned along the way. Experienced a lot, gotten a lot of wisdom. And the more that I find that I can share, the more I can impact and help other leaders, and then they can impact so many more people and that really is exciting, and it feels really good.
Jon Thompson:Well, we share that interest, different angles, but similar for sure. I wanted to talk about the effort to maintain momentum during economic challenges. If anyone is qualified to discuss this topic, it's got to be you. I think that interest rates hit an all time high of 16% when your were at Shelter Mortgage, and yet you quickly advanced to CEO. I don't know if it was a stand-in-a-line-and-who-wants-to-volunteer-to-be-CEO and everyone else took a step backwards? I'm sure it wasn't. But many of our listeners, I think are unsettled by some of the economic headwinds, and current conditions, particularly in the private equity world. There's a lot of buyers and sellers that are tightening the spigot as volatility spikes, and there's growing uncertainty around them related to inflation and interest rates and supply chain and so on. How did you find success in an economically unfavorable environment, and do you have any advice for our leaders as we navigate some of these headwinds?
Jill Belconis:Yeah, well, first of all, I think because I've been around for so long, I've seen, it's so incredibly cyclical. I mean, it just is. So you have to start with that premise. That it's going to come back and the glass is half full. And so, and I actually believe that it's times like this, that there may be the best opportunities. And so you know, a lot of other people will retreat or just kind of freeze at a standstill. And this is a time to kind of peek around the corners and to be really curious and to ask questions and look between the lines. And this is where maybe the best opportunities are and the best thinking that can go on and start and the best and actually, I'm doing this with my clients now doing the best strategic thinking you possibly can do. And, you know, it's and don't focus on what you don't have. I mean, focus on what you have, and, don't focus on all the, you know, what the unknowns and the scary part of it is, but focus on what you do have and you might be surprised.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, if you join the hype about we're in a recession and you you stopped doing business then you're part of the cause of the recession. Sort of self-fulfilling. I wanted to ask you also, you have an insightful blog, which I encourage our readers to check out. In January, perhaps as a nod to the new year, you wrote a blog about focusing on the one thing (reminds me of City Slickers). Can you talk more about that principle and the power that it has played or had in your success?
Unknown:Yeah, well, I think the timing of it was in January, because people like to come out with, let's come out with a brand new plan with lots of meat behind it for the new year and change our strategy and our plan and have a huge laundry list of all these goals we're going to accomplish. And I listen and let everybody get it out. And I say, what is that most important thing? What is the main thing that has to happen to push the company forward and to focus in on that, and I think it's really important. And I'll tell you, I think that's where you know you ask in terms of with the mortgage company, is that we continued year after year to focus on what we did best. And that was partnering up with big real estate companies and residential builders, and became their in house mortgage company. And when subprime came along, subprime loans, as you might remember, those were the high interest rate. But you know, you could take any kind of credit. We kind of looked and said, that's not our thing. We're not putting it on our list. When the home equities came out, and the second mortgages and tacking on, we kind of looked and said not really our thing. And again, and then when values plummeted, and all those companies got in trouble, and, again, we stuck to what our main thing was, and we didn't keep switching. And I think that that's, it's really important. And it's, I'm also a believer in, if you're familiar at all, or the listeners with Jim Collins flywheel concept of sticking to what's in your flywheel, and that's how you gain momentum. The minute you start going off of your flywheel and start pulling other things in, you lose momentum. And so yeah, I'm just a big believer in that.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, that's great. It's sort of that adage, it's been credited to I don't know how many pundits, that it's more about saying no, then about saying yes, being successful. Do you find that a lot of the companies that you coach, a big part is getting them to say no, and to focus on the flywheel? Is that common mistake?
Unknown:You know, it's so funny. Before this call with, with you, I actually had a call with one of my clients who we've worked so hard on their flywheel. And there was an opportunity that came their way. And it was, you know, it was kind of a gray area, whether it was in the flywheel, but there were some real advantages. And so they started exploring it. And we were going through their priorities, a handful of priorities for the next quarter. And I said, Gosh, I just noticed that this one opportunity's not on that. And the CEO, he said to me, Oh, we turned that down. And I said, Oh, interesting, you said, No. And he explained to me why, and he actually said, this is why we realize it's not on our flywheel as we got into it. And so yeah, it's just it's not that main thing. It's not that thing that's going to drive the momentum of the business. And it's hard because you know, it's a shiny quarter that looks really good.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, as an entrepreneur, part of the characteristic is that you cast a wide net. You see opportunity in everything. And that ability to say no, rears its head or demands that it rears itself consistently. It seems to never end. You have to dig deep. So we continue to learn that lesson. I'm sure that's true for your folks as well. So a subject near and dear to my heart. One of your recent blogs asserts that job scorecards are the key to creating a an A team, A player's What's the role in your view of business intelligence, i.e. data analytics, dashboards, etc, for leaders to be successful?
Jill Belconis:Yeah, so, you know, when I think about that, it all comes down to accountability. And, you know, one of the questions I ask CEOs when I start, if I start working with them, I ask them if they have a culture of accountability in their company. They say, well, not so much. We wish we did. I say well, do you have, how do you how do you measure? Do you have KPIs? Do you have metrics? Yeah, sort of, you know, I don't get really a straight answer. Do you have any kind of dashboard that's visible to people? Do they know if they're having a good day or having a good week? Or, how do they know? Well, they really don't. You know, that gets into this whole thing about accountability. And it's really hard to hold people accountable. It's hard for people to hold themselves accountable, hold each other accountable. If you don't have those measurements in place,
Jon Thompson:How do you keep accountability from becoming a bad word? I mean, it sounds like a bummer. Either way.
Jill Belconis:Yes. So, you know, that's one of the things that we talked about early on, and Patrick Lencioni, his famous book of Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and he talks about you have to have trust, you have to have healthy conflict, you have to have people to buy in and commit. And if you have all that, then it leads to accountability. And people want to have that accountability. And then finally, you get the results. So you can't just skip to accountability, you first have to have that trust in place. And you have to have that healthy conflict and commitment. So it's kind of a stepping stone, you can't just jump to the accountability, other things, you have to have that healthy environment first, before you can get to the accountability. And then people want it. They don't want to work in an environment. And in a place where you know, anything goes or how do you. And it really gets back to that. As I said before, how does somebody know? If they're having doing a good job? Are they hitting the targets? And it also gets into, I want to be a part of the success of the company? If I know what I'm doing is driving the success of the company? That's really important. That's meaningful.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, at least the right employees want that? Right.
Jill Belconis:Absolutely. And those are the ones you want. Yeah, kind of gets back to the job scorecard. Design the scorecard and the right way you're gonna attract the A players that you want.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, I mean, you're speaking my language. We talk to companies about if you don't have that, then you have managers, you also don't know what's going on. And you end up with this vague and constant pressure to do better, and "what have you done for me lately?" And it's not firm footing for the employee. It's micromanagement, it's miserable on both sides, and it's ineffective. So I really appreciate that. That's great to hear. Okay, so let's see moving on. At the end of the day, our company, we're serving leaders who are under incredible pressure for growing their companies, they have a value creation plan and growth plan. They've got, in a lot of cases, private equity backers. They've got a five to seven year window to get it done. If you had to give just one piece of leadership, (I'm putting you on the spot) advice to leaders in general, if you had a chance to say, you know, here's, here's the one thing from from Jill, that I would keep an eye on if you are in a fast growth, high pressure scenario. What might that be?
Jill Belconis:What I've seen is helping that CEO/person that now they're not in it alone. Build a strong team around them. I think that's really important, that are sharing those core values, that culture of accountability, what we just talked about, I mean, that, that I think is the most important thing is I see those who try to do it alone, and be the heroes. It doesn't
Jon Thompson:I love that answer. I think if you perceive work. that in the same 24 hours you have, everyone else has that your job is to carry the full weight of that value creation plan, and to evangelize it, and to keep the bad flywheel spinning, instead of democratizing it finding some way to get people to own their piece of it. I'm angling towards dashboards here, you can tell, then it's a burnout. I mean, you can't get...you can't get it done. That's great. I appreciate that. Good advice. Let's see. So as a data analytics company, Blue Margin, we're focused on getting timely insights, in dashboards, to leaders to help them make better decisions, navigate their companies, etc. And virtually everyone we talked to knows they need better visibility. I mean, if business isn't about seeing what's happening, I don't know what it is. I mean, you could say it's about sales. But if you can't see that, and you can't hold people accountable, it doesn't work. Or it could be about manufacturing, but if you can't see your points of constraint, etc. Research says that company culture is the biggest hurdle to becoming data driven. And that something like 90% of companies are investing in data increasingly, and only 20% have succeeded in creating a data driven culture. What advice can you give to leaders who want to better use data but face cultural resistance or other hurdles you might want to speak to?
Jill Belconis:Yeah, I think it's the validity of the data. I mean, that's the, you know, when I hear the comments, it's well they start making excuses why the data isn't accurate, or is inconsistent, or they don't believe the data. So I think first you've got to get people(and it gets back to that trust) that you've got to believe that the data is worthy of itself. And so I think that for starters, is really important. And I also would engage people in the process of thinking about how they want to be measured, and how. So that, you know, when they're part of it, I think that it's, it goes a long way, because I think then they're also holding... you want them to hold themselves accountable. And so I think that helps in terms of the culture. It's not something (you know, as you said before) how does accountability not be a negative thing? How do you look at it as a positive thing? You know, what, if I'm an A player, I want to know how I'm doing. I don't want to be walking around going "Am I doing anything that's positively impacting the company. I think I am the cash. I would love to be able to prove that and see that."
Jon Thompson:Yeah, that's, I mean, great. We think same way about accountability you want. It's not that old, sort of boss/employee, dynamic of overlord and underling, but rather getting them to own here's what I want to do. Here's how I can be successful. I think that's, that's fantastic. Okay, a couple of things. One is you have a great TED Talk. In it you talk about women in leadership. Can you tell us more about what you call the "daughter phenomenon"? And also talk about how women can uniquely lead organizations?
Jill Belconis:So yeah, so I think I made up the the"daughter phenomen." And I think that came out of so when I was elected International Chairman, I traveled around the world and met with all these CEOs and presidents of organizations. And, you know, again, being the first woman in that position and the spec in 2011. And, you know, I wasn't sure what kind of reaction I was gonna get. YPO a very small percentage of the membership are women, and especially in some countries that you would think that they saw there were countries that didn't have any women members. But there was... they wanted to go home and tell their daughters that they had met the first woman, International Chairman. There was something about maybe in their generation, they said this wasn't/hadn't quite happened. But if it came to their daughters, that was a whole different story. And what they wanted for their daughters, they wanted to hear the story. They wanted to be able to say, in the next generation, there's going to be lots of women and leadership and opportunities. And, I also reflected my TED talk about the influence I had over there that my dad had on me and giving me all the opportunities that my brother had, and never made me feel that I was any different. But it was really, it was YPO and the reaction that how many people that I met, were excited to tell their daughters.
Jon Thompson:That's beautiful.
Jill Belconis:That's pretty cool. And I think just in terms of, you know, your second part of your question about "women uniquely...", I just think that, you know, women (I don't, I am not really separating "men""women", I think it's an individual in terms of, you know, who make the person that makes a good leader), but, you know, I think that women kind of come into it maybe with a little bit more. You know, they want to care a little bit more, and they may not be afraid to show that side. And I think sometimes men are afraid that you know what, it's all business and we can't show the softer side. And it's so interesting because I've gone into I just actually what was it about two weeks ago, actually a new client I had not worked with their team very fast growing team or fast growing company, their entire leadership team all men wasn't (I'm not gonna say the type of business even) but I just I thought I'm doing some do some exercises around building trust and healthy team and I wasn't sure what kind of reaction... I never know what kind of reaction I'm gonna get. They loved it. But, you know, you just you don't know. But I I could get away with that. I think if a man went in there and was trying to do all that I'm not sure if they would have been able to get them to do it, but they loved it. The CEO called me he's just afterwards he's like"This the best meeting that we've ever had!"
Jon Thompson:I love to hear that. Especially as a father of five daughters. I love to hear it.
Jill Belconis:Yeah. So I think there's lots and lots of opportunities for women leaders going forward.
Jon Thompson:I hope so. So wrapping up, what's next on the horizon for you? And I'll throw in an extra question, any books, podcasts, etc you're keeping an eye on her that you recommend?
Jill Belconis:Yeah, so actually, I just, I just read an email before I came on with you. Patrick Lencioni, is launching his next book called The Working Genius in September. And I've actually, since I'm part of that organization as well, I've been using that assessment with a lot of my clients. And it's about that we all have six geniuses, and it's really about team productivity. You talk about when I say that a CEO shouldn't go in it alone. And it's because you know what, you need the one that is the invention, that is great at coming up with ideas. You need the person that has tenacity, that's always going to get it to the finish line. You need the galvanizer, you need that... And so it's that's kind of what the book is about. And that's his premise, because I've read some of the, his first couple chapters, so it's gonna be really good. It's gonna be really good. So definitely watch for that. And yeah, I'm, you know, what I loving what I'm doing. Impacting clients and mid-market companies that I can really make a difference with the leaders and help them scale their businesses.
Jon Thompson:That's great. And for those looking to connect further with you what's the best way
Jill Belconis:they can email me at jill@jillbelconis.com. Or check out my website, jillbelconis.com
Jon Thompson:That's perfect. Thanks very much, Jill. It's a pleasure speaking with you.
Jill Belconis:Thank you so much. All right. Take care.