The Alimond Show
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The Alimond Show
Joshua Schlotterbeck of Summit Strategic Partners - From Military Service to Business Consulting Visionary: Harnessing Data-Driven Strategies, Embracing Change, and Bridging Personal Passion with Professional Growth
Joshua (Josh) Schlotterbeck, the inspiring founder of Summit Strategic Partners, shares his remarkable transition from military service to a thriving career in business consulting. His unique journey is filled with lessons on leveraging data-driven strategies to navigate the complexities of marketing across diverse industries, from pharmacies to government contractors. Josh emphasizes the power of embracing change and aligning marketing with organizational goals to help businesses break through growth barriers.
Josh also opens up about his personal life as a single dad and passionate mountain climber, revealing how these experiences shape his approach to consulting. He draws fascinating parallels between the challenges of climbing and the intricacies of business, highlighting the necessity of mastering transitions and welcoming change. With riveting tales of summiting peaks with his children, Josh underscores the importance of fresh perspectives and external viewpoints in driving effective business adaptation and change management.
Our conversation further explores the intriguing intersection of technology and business, particularly the role of AI in enhancing efficiency. Josh shares insights into innovative AI applications, like a chatbot for tree-related queries, and the importance of crafting precise data prompts. He advocates for the inevitability of change and the significance of regular reviews and goal setting. By the end, listeners are left with a compelling message: embracing change is a powerful catalyst for both personal growth and professional success.
My name is Josh Slaughterbeck and I'm the president and founder of Summit Strategic Partners, and we are an end-to-end business consulting firm.
Speaker 2:I love that. Can you tell me some of the industries that you help with your consulting and what the typical client looks like?
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah, we've helped industries all across the spectrum, from small independent pharmacies to arborists, and we also offer services to government contractors and have even partnered in the past with Amerisource Bergen, which is the largest distributor of pharmaceuticals in the nation. The work we did with them was to help these local mom and pops enhance their local marketing, because when you're competing against organizations like CVS or Walgreens big names it's sometimes hard to edge yourself into that space.
Speaker 2:Oh, for sure. And then, on top of that, what are some of the I guess issues that people are coming to you like these smaller businesses, and how are you helping them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, great. One of the ways that I like to talk about what I do is change management. Most people in the small to medium business space, or people who start small businesses and grow to become medium businesses, generally find themselves struggling and reach a plateau. A lot of small business owners start a business because they're passionate about something For instance, an arborist passionate about tree care and maintenance and they grow to a certain point where the systems and processes that they've had in place for years all of a sudden aren't scalable. So I like to come into an organization and help them change, because what we've done in the past to get us here can't necessarily get us to the next level. And so I will come into the organization, look at systems, operations, staffing, leadership, strategy and marketing to see how either they're efficient or inefficient, and kind of work through some processes strategically with the leadership team and employees to figure out ways to move forward to hit their new goals.
Speaker 2:Yeah, love that. And then tell me a little bit of a background about yourself and how you got involved in the industry that you currently are, and was this always like a plan?
Speaker 1:for you? Oh great, no, that's a great question. No. So growing up, my dream was to be a soldier, and I'm fortunate to have done that. I joined the Army September 10th 2001.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow the day before the terrorist attacks oh my goodness. So you know, that picture was my life. Unfortunately, I got injured while in service and changed the trajectory. It took me a few years to figure out what I wanted to do and I ended up landing a marketing job quite by accident, had a growing family and needed to move away from retail management. Um, and it turned out, I had a passion and an act for it. So 16 years later, 16 years later, I've been in marketing and, uh, increased my skillset by going to college, getting a degree a master's in management and leadership, uh, and organizational behavior, and then, during COVID, got a degree a master's in management and leadership and organizational behavior. And then, during COVID, got a degree in MBA. And so I found myself kind of while working full-time professionally as a marketing employee.
Speaker 1:I found that the way that I looked at marketing was very different than my peers and that when you make a change in marketing, it affects every other facet of the organization. Cause, let's say, if my marketing ideas work, we grow the lead pipeline, we grow the sales pipeline. It impacts how we sell our business, how many salespeople we need to sell our business, how many production, you know employees we need to produce the results of those sales. And so I began pivoting away from marketing just as a creative function of an organization, but really a creative and data driven function of an organization. And so when I look at marketing as a segment of my business or someone else's business, I like to approach it in any, really any, of those functions of the business. If we make a change in one area, how does it impact the rest of the organization? And so that's what I do when I come into an organization, realizing that you can't just change one piece and leave everything else the same.
Speaker 1:It has to be a whole holistic change.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like that. Speaking of marketing, I wanted to ask you, like, since you have background in that, what advice could you give to entrepreneurs who may be listening to this when it comes to marketing for themselves or for their business, and what do you find is working for you?
Speaker 1:Sure. Well, I think that the key is data right. Anybody, especially in the 21st century you've got things like Canva and everybody can create a pretty picture any day of the week, shoot my kids can go on and chat, GBT and generate an AI, an AI photograph, quickly to meet their needs. But I think the reality is is, every while everybody wants to create pretty and attractive marketing plans and strategies, they have to be data driven right, meaning you have to understand who your market is, where they're shopping and what their needs are, and so, really, the biggest piece of advice is is you create systems to understand the people you're trying to go after and how your product is important to them, because without that understanding, you're going to spend a lot of time and a lot of money trying to capture people the wrong way, and that's where I've seen most small business owners fail. They'll jump on the newest TikTok trend or Instagram trend or Facebook or LinkedIn without understanding how those tools reach their people.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, that's great insight, because it's always like such a learning curve or process and things are always changing, so you kind of have to be ahead of the game and, like you said, be data driven with it and know what those numbers mean and everything can sometimes be a challenge, but that's why you're here to help people. And they're looking for anybody to help them in that. In that sense, joshua's right here.
Speaker 1:I am.
Speaker 2:And then, what do you like to do in your free time and do you set boundaries for yourself?
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. The name of the company, summit strategic partners, is really kind of personal to me. Um, I'm a bit of an adventurer. Um, I've been climbing things literally since I was two years old. Um and um, I rock, climb, kayak. I take my children with me. I have five kids, I'm a single dad and two summers ago we went to Colorado and my then 13 year old and I summited the tallest mountain in all of the Rockies, which also happened to be the second tallest mountain in the lower 48 states love taking my children on those things and one of the reasons why that bled into the name of the company is that for me, you know, growing up, especially in the business world, people have always told me you know, it's not personal, it's business, and that never sat well with me because when I enter into a business transaction as an individual, those decisions affect my kids, they affect my family and very much, like people who run their own businesses, the decisions they make bleed into their personal lives, right, whether they're successful or not, or changes in the business impact their family.
Speaker 1:So for me, business is personal. I understand, and so bringing the tenacity and the discipline and the stick-to-itiveness to those adventure things that I love to do with my family, I bring that to the business and I always remember telling my kids like relevant to hiking and rock climbing and adventures, you never know what you're going to come up against, right? And so I tell my kids, and these are the things that I bring into the business world change is the only constant in life. If you can learn to master the transitions during a change, then you're going to be okay. Wow, you're going to be successful. And that's why I like to kind of position myself.
Speaker 1:While I offer marketing, management and creative services, we'll build your website. We'll do video services. We'll build your website. We'll do video production, we'll do graphic design, we'll do sales training and leadership training. But I like to sell myself as a change management expert because, again, change is constant in the business world and teaching people to manage that change is what I'm passionate about, um so that they can keep their head and their heart above water.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that is a good point. Change is like one of the hardest things Sometimes I find myself, sometimes I'm stuck in like my own way, I guess, and sometimes there's like a better way of doing it, but I'm like, no, I'm okay, this one's better, but it's like no, this one is faster and it's like it's their little bit of a learning curve. But if you're more open to it and can get past that hurdle, you're good. And I've learned that being more open to it and just doing it until it like sticks is so much better, but it's hard.
Speaker 1:Well, and sometimes we're married to the decisions we make right, and so sometimes why bringing on a consultant like me is important? Let's say you've been doing it, you're running your business for 15 years, you've been doing the same processes and systems for 15 years and you're married to that, and so so your point of view is very narrow, and sometimes it takes a third party to come in and look at things from an outsider's perspective and say, hey, you know. Just the same way, like when you're, when you're climbing a mountain, the more altitude you get away from the bottom, the more you can see. And I remember when we were climbing that 14,440-foot mountain, my daughter and I, we crested the tree line, as we call it. The point in the mountain where the trees stop growing is about between 10,000, 11,000 feet. So while you're hiking through the trees, you can't see anything but trees. Yeah, no, once you get above that tree line, we had to take a break because we were winded.
Speaker 1:We turned around and you could see the valley, you could see the lakes, you could see the rivers, you could see the town in the distance. And so sometimes it takes that fresh perspective, someone from outside of the organization who can bring all of the inputs by talking to all of your teams, looking at all your systems, to say, hey, maybe we could do this a little bit differently, more efficiently and more effective.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I like that analogy for it.
Speaker 1:So true.
Speaker 2:That's right and I trust you because you're the expert. I'd like to ask you would you mind sharing a pivotal moment in your career that shaped your consulting approach?
Speaker 1:Sure man, that's a tough one. There's so many. I was recently working for a nonprofit organization and it was going through a lot of changes. It was going through a lot of changes, and one of the things that I realized during that process was that we weren't. I'd taken the job and only been there for two or three months and I realized that a lot of the decisions weren't being made. They weren't data-driven decisions, they were almost emotional decisions. Yeah Right, and when we make emotional decisions based on how we feel or what we think is happening, that lack of quantifiable evidence we make poor decisions, I think right, or at least less effective decisions than we could be making. I'm not saying they're bad decisions, but we could be doing better. And so that experience really kind of helped solidify my philosophy that, while moving forward, we have to look at all of the things that we should know about our business and the market. That includes finances, that includes um, you know the effectiveness and return on investment, our marketing dollars, our sales training all of it is integrated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I feel like that when entrepreneurs don't own their business, like that's their baby, so there's a lot of emotion that goes into it, right? So sometimes, like you said, you need that, um, not third part of it. What do you? What did you call it? Like, um, an extra point of view that maybe coming from the outside, to help you, like, rationalize things and quantify them, as you said.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then um, what are the most common challenges businesses face today and how do you help them overcome these?
Speaker 1:I think one of the common challenges that I see. There are so many tools for businesses to use, whether it's accounting, marketing, production management, financial management. I mean just all sorts of tools, management, financial management I mean just all sorts of tools and in one particular case, one of my clients when I started working with them, they had nine separate software platforms to manage their business. That is from the time a customer came to their website or a lead came to the website to the time that they were signing contracts and having work done.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Nine separate systems. Now, the interesting part about it was that many of the systems would talk to each other, meaning they could share data back and forth, but they weren't. And some of the systems were redundant, meaning they had three systems for their financial and accounting processes, all doing the same thing. Right, they weren't communicating. They weren weren't communicating and they could, or they were, they were, just some of them were unnecessary, and so part of that process was taking a look at again how they did business and what made the most sense. And so, in the meantime, we've gone from nine systems to, I think we're down to four. Yeah, um, and so what does that translate to? Well, it translates to a cost savings we're no longer spending money on things we don't need. It translates into a better data accountability and flow. Right Now, we can see how much money we're spending on our marketing, digital advertising, website needs and how that actually translates into revenue coming in the door and we're creating fewer right're creating fewer places to go access data.
Speaker 1:If I'm trying to get a production report, a financial report, a marketing report, I had to go to these nine different programs.
Speaker 1:Now we've created an ecosystem where a business owner can go to one single source of what we call a truth and pull everything that they need.
Speaker 1:The other side of that is is um, marketing is probably the least understood piece of business, right, and um, especially, you know, as marketing changes so quickly. Um, when I got in the marketing industry, digital marketing was not a thing Like the most digital marketing you did was set up a Facebook page, right, and have a website. Now you've got Facebook advertising, linkedin advertising, instagram advertising, tiktok, everything, and so there's a lot of effort to try and understand those trends and try and market in a way that's effective, but that costs a lot of money, particularly to hire somebody to manage marketing. Right, there are a lot of tools out there that can automate those processes for you, and that's one of the things that I also specialize in. I'm a HubSpot partner, meaning that HubSpot is a customer relationship management tool and marketing automation tool that we can put onto your website and integrate all of those solutions into one and then automate email campaigns, which is probably those things that annoy a lot of people, right?
Speaker 1:I sign up for a 10% discount on a coupon for some store that I like. Now I'm getting an email every week. That's automated marketing. Somebody isn't there actually sitting there typing and sending an email, and so one of the other things that is very important is to take a look at that business process and say what can we do to maximize our team members' time. If I have one person on my marketing team which is very common, and I want them to send emails and create content and do videos and do advertising, well, what can we automate? And so I kind of come in and I take a look at all their tools and say can we shift some of this manual labor and put it into an automated fashion? Yeah, so yeah.
Speaker 2:Wow, no, that's incredible. I feel like I need help with that. Let me think about this.
Speaker 1:I know somebody, I know a guy, I think I may just know a guy too.
Speaker 2:No, I know a guy. I think I may just know a guy too. No, that's incredible. If you weren't doing this, what career would you have gotten? Because I kind of can't see something else for you, maybe a mountain climber.
Speaker 1:I love this, I love this, and one of the things that I'm really exploring now, too, is so much of. For several years, I worked in the Department of Defense as a government contractor in the artificial intelligence and machine learning space, yeah, and so one of the things I'm also helping companies do is try and integrate that into their workflows as well, to create again an ecosystem where we're maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of a team. The only thing that I could see myself doing otherwise, if you gave me a million dollars and said, go, do whatever you want to do, I would go become a certified rock climbing instructor.
Speaker 2:That's what I said. A mountain climber.
Speaker 1:And I would take people out to adventure because, like, there's something about when you reach the summit of a mountain, something magical I don't know, I think it's magical happens, but you turn around and you look at what you just did and you realize that you have more strength than you thought and the problems you were facing aren't really that as big as you think. They are. Yeah, right. And so you know again, many business owners, I think, come to a place right when they, they escalate their business, they grow their business and they hit, they hit a summit and they turn around and go, wow, that's awesome, wow, that's great. And then they look forward and they're like, where do I go from here? Well, it's my job to come in and say, hey, let's figure that out and let's make a plan to get there.
Speaker 2:That is awesome.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:I've climbed. I want to say that quickly. I did climb a mountain once, but I don't know if it's like any. It's definitely not anything crazy like you, but I think it was the shenandoah mountain over there, whatever it was called, I don't know so down in northern virginia shenandoah national park yeah, that one. There was like one mountain. I was like, oh my gosh, I did it old rag.
Speaker 1:No, that's a good one if if you're looking for a local hike yeah, anyway, I climbed a mountain, but it wasn't crazy like that.
Speaker 2:but since I'm not as fit as like rock climbing people, I was out of breath, but I but I did it and I did feel not magical, but well, I wouldn't call it magical for me, but I felt like whoa, I did that, like, I'm proud of myself Absolutely. So I agree with what you said there. And then, how do you see the role of AI and technology evolving in the consultant industry and how does it, I guess, help you or maybe not help you in some ways?
Speaker 1:Well, ai is such an interesting, interesting tool and it's been around for years. In fact, we've been training AI for years and didn't even know it. You know how, when you fill out a form on a website and it brings up those pictures and they're saying identify a bike, or, what you're doing is you're training an AI model, a bike or a? Yeah, what you're doing is you're training an AI model. You're training the computer to recognize that those pixels in a picture that it sees is, in fact, the object.
Speaker 2:They're saying that it is oh my gosh, I thought it was to prove I'm not a robot.
Speaker 1:It is to prove you're not a robot, but you're also training a computer algorithm. Same thing when you had before that. It wasn't pictures, it was just those letters in that box.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so hard sometimes.
Speaker 1:What you're doing is you're training the computer to understand the data that it sees right, and so AI has been around. We've been training AI models for years Don't tell me that and so AI has been helpful and you can use it in like, for instance, in the arborist industry. One of the things that we're doing is we're creating an AI model to be kind of a quick service. Hey, I've got a poplar tree in my yard and there's some sort of thing on it, some sort of fungus on it. Help me understand what I can do about this. And so you can create a chat bot on your website using artificial intelligence. Now you have to build the library of data right.
Speaker 1:That's the most important piece about artificial intelligence and machine learning is that you create a data store of the data information, the data set you want, and then you have to train it and cultivate it, and it's a growing thing, and so we're going to use it as a way to capture some low hanging fruit opportunities by creating a chat bot, so somebody can come to the website and say, hey, I've got this problem with my trees, help me figure it out.
Speaker 1:And then the goal is to pipe them to an arborist who can come out and do an estimate, and so that's one way we're leveraging AI in the consulting space. The other way is if you're trying to tackle some very technical challenges. Ai is a great research tool. You can use it to find demographic data. You can use it to parse that data and produce spreadsheets or graphics to help you understand a challenge or problem. So it can be very helpful, but it is only as good as the prompts that you give it, so meaning you have to very specifically understand what you're trying to get out of it for it to be relatively useful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I guess that's on our end to figure out those prompts and like making sure that we clarify that.
Speaker 1:Right and again, it's only as good as the information in the data store, so you can't this is the caveat you can't trust it to be a hundred percent accurate or right all of the time, and so it does require a human element to double check the data and research to make sure that what comes out of it is is is truthful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, no, yeah, you're right, just thinking about some stuff. But anyway, what's one piece of advice you give to every entrepreneur or business leader you meet? Or maybe you don't, or what would you say?
Speaker 1:Um, I think what I, what I, what I constantly tell people, is change is the only constant in life. Yeah, and if you can learn to master those transitions, um, and I learned this being a dad, um and it's. I have this project that I do with my family and it could easily translate into the business world. But transitions for me started a couple, about seven years ago, about six years ago, difficult year for my family and my kids, and knowing how hard it had been, I also. I didn't want them to look back at that year and only focus on how hard it had been, and I didn't want them moving forward without an understanding of where we're at. So I took my kids into my living room and I got a big whiteboard I love that and we wrote the year on and I said, okay, let's talk about the good, bad, the ugly, the fun. What did we do? And so we sat for like an hour. Oh, this was hard, this was hard, this was great, this was fun, this was terrible, you know. And we talked about the feelings that came along with it. We talked about the struggles that came along with it, we talked about how we feel about that. What do we want the next season of our life to be. What are the things we want to focus on? And so we did that, we wrote down. You know these are the things we want to see happen in the next year.
Speaker 1:And every year since then, in between Christmas and New Year's, we have this transition meeting in our house where we very specifically intentionally look at all the things we set out to be and do and whether or not we were successful in that and figure out how we could hit those marks the next year. And so you look at taking that into your business. You know we call this strategic planning. You know some, some companies have staff retreats or some some are like, you know, 21st century and call them staff advances because we don't retreat Right.
Speaker 1:But the idea is like every year you set a goal, you're trying to reach a summit and you just don't like get out of your car and hike a mountain. You plan, you prepare, you make sure you have, you know, contingency plans and cell phones, battery charge and all that. So mastering those transition part of that is sitting down, taking stock of what you've lost and what you've gained and understanding where you want to go and then making a plan to get there and that's where I come in. That's what I love doing. I love hearing people's passions and dreams and saying, okay, that's a great dream, let's make it happen. Yeah, you know this is incredible.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad that you're here today and giving this insight, because I think you've inspired me, because I mean, I would like to do a chart like that and I never thought of that to do that like at home with, like your family and talk about these things, and it's not just like how to improve yourself, but you can also talk about maybe some issues like it can just bring up a whole bunch of stuff.
Speaker 1:It could. It could reveal to you as a leader or as as a family member, uh, blind spots right Like if, like, for instance, my case, my kids were feeling a way about something that I didn't know and say, oh, we should talk about that. The same thing is true with your organization. By having these open forums for discussion, you can be like oh, I had no idea my team was feeling this way about that part of the business. Or, in recent, I had a recent strategic planning session and we had some sales individuals who spoke up and when I left the meeting the CEO was like Josh, in the X number of years we've run this business, those guys have never spoken up in a meeting. So when they're number two there, he was like I had no idea they had such good ideas. And for me it was about creating that safe space, creating a space where there's this security in knowing that every individual at the table is valued and that their input is important to moving our family, our organization, together and in a good, healthy way.
Speaker 2:I love that. Oh my goodness, like people are listening. Definitely hit up, joshua. Where can everybody find you?
Speaker 1:like people are listening. Definitely hit up, joshua. Where can everybody find you? So, summit strategic partnerscom uh, we'll be live and and uh, fill out a form, shoot me an email schedule. A? Uh, a free discovery. Call 30 minutes and we'll talk about your dreams and we'll figure out how we can get you there.
Speaker 2:Amazing, and is there anything that maybe I have not touched on, perhaps that you wanted to get out there or share? Maybe let people know whether it's about yourself, your business, your family, rock climbing. You have the floor.
Speaker 1:Well, you know that I'm just passionate about people reaching their goals. It's one of the reasons why I pursued a degree in leadership and management is because I understand that business is more than cogs and wheels and systems and processes, but it's about the people who work in the organization. And I actually cut my teeth in leadership. I spent 13 years as a bivocational pastor and so while I was doing my career stuff, I was also serving on church ministries as a youth leader and a musician and all these types of things.
Speaker 2:It was like 100 lives.
Speaker 1:I feel like four scumps sometimes I've done a little bit of everything and that for me, I think, gives me a certain I guess human approach to everything that I do, like I've slept in the dirt and in the cold and in the rain and I've been at the top of mountains and I've led organizations and I've been at the bottom of organizations and I realized that, you know, the CEO is rarely the smartest person in the room. There are people, and good CEOs will surround themselves with people who are smarter than them in particular areas and seek that advice. And so creating that environment where it's about people, their personalities, their heart and their passions. And my personal philosophy on leadership is this it is seeing potential in somebody else, calling it out, and what that means is like, hey, I see this in you, and speaking to it and constantly saying, hey, you've got this, you've got this, you've got this, and then finally creating or revealing opportunities to develop it.
Speaker 1:So you know, in my space, years ago, years ago, when I was in a church ministry, there was this young guy who was going to school for graphic design and we were making some graphic design, we were making a new ministry and I tapped him to do all the work. And when we went to pitch the idea to a marketing firm who was going to produce all of the artwork and posters and T-shirts and stuff like that, I took him with me. He's like 19, 20. He's a young guy, maybe even that. I took him with me. He's like 19, 20. He's a young guy, maybe even that. But when we got there I threw him under the bus and I said, hey, you're making the pitch.
Speaker 2:He was like okay, my boss has done that to me before.
Speaker 1:And by the time we left that job, he had an interview, got an internship and now, about 13 years later or so, he's the creative director at that organization. Look at that organization, right. And so I think that what it boils down to for me, it isn't just about the systems and your business and your goals, but it's also about helping you look at the people you've surrounded yourself with and how to elevate them. If you can make them successful, they're going to make you successful as a CEO, right.
Speaker 2:That's a great way to look at it, cause every time I'm like my boss just threw me under the bus, wow. But then I learned a new skill and I just keep growing and growing, so I'm just like that's such a great way to look at it she, she right, your boss. Yeah.
Speaker 1:She sees something in you and she's just kind of like pushing you closer to that summit. She really is, but I see that now before I was like but, I, get it.
Speaker 2:So thank you so much. This conversation has been so amazing. I learned a lot, even just a little bit about myself that I didn't realize in a different way to look at stuff.
Speaker 1:So this is so cool.
Speaker 2:I feel like people will listen to this and they'll also resonate with, so thank you so much. I usually ask everybody if they have like a last, like a mantra or anything, but I feel like the the underlying thread of everything has just been like being open to change and, um, if you wanted to just end it one more time with change, or maybe another quote that has inspired you.
Speaker 1:Oh man, I don't know if I mean there's so many quotes that have inspired me, but, um, yeah, I mean we're just here to get you closer to that summit. Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thank you.