Ep. 96: The 40% Error That Nearly Killed a $100 Million Company with Kendley Davenport

Episode Links:

LinkedIn: Kendley Davenport - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kendleydavenport/

Website: Kendley Davenport - https://kendleydavenport.com/

Leadership for Success - https://leadership4success.co/

Execution-Driven Leadership Course -https://saleshub.titancorex.com/courses/offers/6d6ab55d-493d-41cb-a652-cb7ad0ffe82e

Summary:

In this episode of The Corvus Effect, I sit down with Kendley Davenport, a transformational CEO with over 30 years leading PE-backed and founder-led companies. Kendley shares how he scaled ESS from $100 million to $300 million in revenue while fixing a devastating 40% billing error rate that was strangling cash flow. He breaks down his framework of clarity, collaboration, and accountability, and explains why most senior leaders working 70-hour weeks are usually the problem, not their teams. Kendley also reveals what he learned from conversations with Boeing's CEO about focus and work-life balance, why a heart surgeon's approach to planning applies directly to business, and how technology is transforming recruiting. He closes with advice for the next generation of leaders on curiosity, humility, and aligning personal values with professional ambitions.

Chapters:

03:34 The ESS Challenge: Growing Too Fast

06:16 The 40% Billing Error Crisis

07:49 Collaboration, Clarity, and Accountability

10:52 Reducing Owner Dependency

12:14 The Four Areas Where Companies Struggle

14:08 Productive Conflict and Team Cohesion

18:13 Right People in the Right Seats

20:08 Fixing Broken Recruiting Processes

23:28 The Southwest Airlines Hiring Story

28:54 Finding Leaders Ready to Change

29:52 Lessons from Boeing's CEO

32:23 Why Teams Win Together

33:17 The Heart Surgeon's Secret to Zero Deaths

36:10 Giving Back to Virginia Tech

41:56 The Head Fake: Advice for the Next Generation

Transcript

Intro

Scott Raven: Welcome to The Corvus Effect, where we explore what it takes to succeed professionally and truly enhance all parts of your life. I'm Scott Raven, Fractional COO and your host. Each episode we go behind the scenes with leaders who've mastered the delicate harmony of growing their professional endeavors while protecting what matters most. Ready to transform from Chief Everything Officer to achieving integration in all facets of your life? Let's soar!

Meet Kendley Davenport

Scott Raven: Hello everyone. Welcome back to The Corvus Effect. I'm Scott. I am honored to be speaking with Kendley Davenport, transformational CEO. With over 30 years leading PE-backed and founder-led companies as CEO of ESS, an organization leading 28,000 employees across 15 states, he scaled their revenue from 100 million to 300 million and quadrupled their EBITDA. Leading to the company being one of the Forbes Top 200 Best Large Employers and Top 50 in their region, as well as number one in their segment. Nowadays, he heads up Leadership for Success, which he started in 2017, helping companies grow revenue and profitability faster by assisting them in building proven and repeatable processes. Leveraging the talent of their current teams and enabling owners and senior leaders to spend more of their time on their business versus in their business. He holds an MBA from the University of Tennessee, a Bachelor of Science from Virginia Tech, and he also chairs the Hospitality and Tourism Advisory Board. And he says, companies scale because they lead better, execute faster, and build teams that win together. So Kendley, welcome to the podcast, man.

Kendley Davenport: Hey Scott, so glad to be here. I appreciate the kind introduction and excited about chatting with you today about some of the things that I think matter in the world and matter in growing people and businesses.

Scott Raven: Absolutely. And let's go ahead and start with that introductory lead. Back in 2015, you were recruited to become the CEO of ESS. During the education space you have 28,000 folks who are under your charge, and you were given the missive to scale this PE-backed staffing company for the purposes of positioning it for sale. I gotta imagine day one, you walk in and you're like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

Kendley Davenport: Yeah, it's true. And to be honest too, also after coming off a 24-year corporate career in the education space, I knew the marketplace pretty well and had worked in pretty large scale business enterprises across many functions. But when you become the CEO for the first time, it's a whole new experience, I'll assure you. All of a sudden I had a legal counsel that reported to me. I had to immediately let go of a CFO and I'm not a CFO, so I've gotta figure out how do I replace that person and keep that organization humming forward? So yes, it was quite challenging, but at the same time it was exciting and fun, and there was a lot going on at the time.

The ESS Challenge: Growing Too Fast

Scott Raven: So you said it was exciting and fun and there is a lot to what we talk about here within the confines of The Corvus Effect. Of embracing the opportunity of the challenge, not looking at things as obstacles to overcome, but opportunities to potentially acquire. What was the opportunity that you saw when you said, yes, I'm gonna take this challenge?

Kendley Davenport: Well, first off, I saw that from a marketplace perspective, they were hitting on their staffing in the education space, which is a great shortage. Think of nurses at a great shortage. Well, teachers are a great shortage. And it's becoming more and more acute. It wasn't something that was even planned to get better. It's actually gotten worse over the last 10 years.

Scott Raven: I agree.

Kendley Davenport: When I see turbulence in the marketplace like that, even though it's a mature industry, I see opportunity. And I knew, look, I wanna give the kudos where they deserve. When I got there, there was a very good team in place. I didn't walk in, I did have to make some changes, but I didn't walk into a broken process. The leaders before me had done a great job. But they had a great problem, Scott. Their problem was they were growing too fast.

Scott Raven: Hmm.

Kendley Davenport: So when I got there, it was just under a hundred million dollars. But just a year before that, they were like 60 or 55 million dollars. So they had already doubled their business. And so that's why PE bought them. That's why PE saw it like I saw it. But what happened was their operations could not keep up with their sales. They had some excellent salespeople. One of them was the founder that could go out and really sell the business. And so I was really tasked right away with trying to scale the infrastructure of the business. So my first, as you know, most of the time when you go into a business, it's about just gimme more sales, right? I got a lot of these other things under control here. It was opposite. I got sales under control. My problem is I'm burning customers and making upset customers and creating a negative brand image because I'm scaling too fast. This often happens. So I was fortunate to have a good board of directors who allowed me to really make some very strategic moves and spend some money to really think about what was going on. And like you were talking about earlier in your intro, every problem can be broken down. No matter, even if you wanna climb Mount Everest, you don't start day one and get to the top on day two. It's an evolution of a process. You move up to base camp, you do some test runs, you do some practicing. You just don't go to the top. So it's the same in business.

The 40% Billing Error Crisis

Kendley Davenport: So when you look at these big challenges, how do you break them down? And so I think one of the things and the skills that I bring and have honed over the years is how to take complex problems and how to collaborate with people, how to set priorities, and how to really think about breaking the problem down so you can solve it. And we were able to really solve a bunch of problems. They had a 40% billing error rate.

Scott Raven: Wow.

Kendley Davenport: Sending customers a bill and saying pay me when 40% of the bills had errors in them. And so what happened is the customers say there's an error. I'm not paying until we fix the error. Well, guess what? It takes 30 days to fix the error. Now I'm 90 days from getting my money, and businesses can't operate that way.

Scott Raven: I mean, accounts receivable looks great on an asset sheet, but cash is king, man. I'll put it that way. So I know that in the back you basically had this business utility system which helped identify, prioritize, and then reduce a lot of these processes with significant error rates, which ultimately led the company to where it was supposed to go. Let's talk about the buy-in for this, right, because I think that's oftentimes we talk about doing the work. We don't talk about the buy-in of the team that you inherited that they had to get on board with what you wanted. Talk to me about your approach to gain that buy-in.

Collaboration, Clarity, and Accountability

Kendley Davenport: Well, Scott, there's a lot to it, but I sort of keep it very simple and you'll probably hear me repeat this several times throughout this conversation. And I believe in what I call collaboration, clarity, and accountability. And so the first thing, and I also believe in diverse perspectives. So one of the first things we did was we wanted to focus on both our billing errors because that was slowing our money down. And we also had a number of payroll errors because it was a lot of manual systems. A lot of people are combining spreadsheets and putting stuff in, which is a lot of businesses are still doing today. There's a lot of room for error in that process, and when you have 300 customers and you have to send stuff out to them, there's still many more opportunities for error. So I pulled a bunch of diverse people together. You would think you'd pull the folks in accounts payable and accounts receivable and finance. They'd all get together. I pulled operational people from the field in. So we created a team of diverse thinkers. The people who had different perspectives of the problem. Some people like in human resources have nothing to do with the problem, but they're there.

Scott Raven: So this truly was not an ivory tower approach. This is, I wanna see every single touch point that is hit.

Kendley Davenport: I want all the perspectives, right? Everybody's got a brain, everybody's got an idea. And so we collaborated on what were the issues, what were the problems? What were the root causes? What were the five, 15 things that people were doing across the organization that were causing these problems to happen? And so once we got them on the whiteboard and we started breaking them down and put them in order, people started collaborating on solutions and we had a lot of solutions that were poor and a lot of solutions that were interesting and solutions that ended up winning. But what happens, Scott, is everybody believes they're a part of it. Everybody's got a seat at the table. Your job as the leader.

Scott Raven: Shared ownership.

Kendley Davenport: My job as the leader is to take the person who's being the most quiet in the room and engage them into the process. And so what happened over a series of a bunch of meetings and a bunch of tasks to sort of get ready is we were able to get this collaboration and then once that happens, we created clarity around that collaboration. Who does what, when? What are the stage gates? Are there things that have to be done before other things? It's all written down. It's not left to chance. It's very clear. We ask everyone in the room, does anyone not understand the exact what good looks like, what success looks like, and what all the steps towards success are. And when they all say, I get it.

Scott Raven: Which means it's repeatable.

Kendley Davenport: That's right, and then what happens is accountability gets real easy. I don't have to say, Scott, you have to do this by Friday. They already know that. But my job as the leader is to make sure that they're off track of that accountability to go support them and find out why and help them achieve. Sometimes along the way, you're gonna learn that there might be people who don't have the capacity to do the work. And so then you have to figure that out. And yes, there could be casualties along the way in a big scheme of things, but for the most part, when people feel like they're a part of it, that's how they buy into it.

Reducing Owner Dependency

Scott Raven: It's so interesting that you're talking about this as we pivot towards Leadership for Success and one of the big tenets, which is the framework promises to reduce owner dependency in 90 days. And when you talk about these owners and these founders who feel like they are the business. They have to make every single decision. They have to be the face. They can't separate themselves from what they've created, and essentially they've ended up creating themselves a job at the end of the day. How are you getting them to realize, guys, there is a different way here. There is a different way through as you talk about collaboration, clarity, et cetera, that you don't have to go through this pain.

Kendley Davenport: Well, first off, I have to always say, one of the key areas for this is the founder or the leader. It doesn't always have to be a founder-led company. It could just be a CEO of an enterprise, whether it be a family-based or even just a private company that a bunch of people own. And they're the leader of it. They have to really, it's really four areas that I think about when I'm talking to those leaders and this is the things that usually are happening in their business. And I might be jumping ahead a little bit.

Scott Raven: That's fine.

The Four Areas Where Companies Struggle

Kendley Davenport: It's four areas. One is people don't plan very well. They think they're planning. They have a meeting. They might even write a few things down. They say they have a plan, but it's sort of superficial and it's sort of high level. And so that's a misnomer. They've gotta learn to plan better. The next big thing, and I probably should have said the first thing, is founders or senior leaders have to check their egos at the door.

Scott Raven: That's huge.

Kendley Davenport: They have to have humility.

Scott Raven: That is huge because they've invested so much to bring the baby to where it is right now. They don't wanna be told that their baby's ugly.

Kendley Davenport: Well, the fact of the matter is, unfortunately, most senior leaders who are having these troubles that are working 70 hours a week who can't get out of the grind is usually their problem, not their teams. And it's not that they're not capable, but they're having to do lots of different things and wear many hats that they don't enjoy, they don't like. And so if you don't like something, you don't do it well. It's just that simple. Now, some have learned to do it better, but ultimately they get to a place where they have to really understand that they don't have all the answers, and they gotta start letting their team participate because when they have all the answers, the team will wait on them. The team will not have ownership. The team waits for the founder or the leader to give the answer, and they only support that answer.

Scott Raven: And I would assume that a big part in terms of what you have to talk to them about is what are you willing to let go? What are you willing to say? I'm going to give it to John Q and he may only be able to do it 80% as well as I do, but that frees me up to go do other things.

Kendley Davenport: That's exactly right. So planning is one, ego, then planning.

Productive Conflict and Team Cohesion

Kendley Davenport: The third thing is what I call conflict resolution. A lot of cultures within a company, particularly smaller startups, but even midsize companies that are trying to scale and have an owner just being successful at some level, they really don't realize how much conflict they have within the organization that they're not addressing. They don't really allow for what I call productive conflict. You cannot grow a team and have a cohesive team without productive conflict, which means, Scott, if you're the CEO and I'm your subordinate operations guy and you're trying to tell me how to do something, but I think you're wrong. I've gotta not only have the guts to tell you you're wrong and give you a better solution, you've gotta have the humility to accept it. And to listen and to be open to something different. And so we've gotta always work with organizations to help them understand their conflict and how to solve it. It does not have to be personal, it does not have to be that way. But oftentimes, I sit on a company I was working with recently where they would say one thing in a meeting and then go outta the meeting and talk something else. Well, now they're having the meeting after the meeting. That is not productive conflict. That means they're not actually saying what they really believe. And so I go back to that original example when I was talking about the billing errors. I wanted as the leader in the room to make sure everyone could say that my ideas were idiotic. I would be okay with that. All I care about is the best ideas surfacing to the top and everybody aligning to that idea.

Scott Raven: But does part of that also involve how the founder or the leader presents that opportunity to speak up? You talked earlier in terms of, I always look for the quietest person in the room because the quietest person in the room may have the most profound thought in the room. That sometimes if that leader or that founder is too vocal, that they're drowning out all of the creativity that their team could come up with.

Kendley Davenport: That's exactly right. Oftentimes when I'm working with companies, Scott, I have to teach the owner or the founder or the CEO to sometimes, not all times, this is not in every situation, but can you just promise me that we'll wait till the end and we will write down all the things that are bothering you and we'll go back and address them. But you stay quiet. You be the person who's the listener.

Scott Raven: That's gotta be a tough ask for some people.

Kendley Davenport: It's often hard. Because what I've said recently to a CEO that I'm working with is, you have so much to give. You are so smart and everybody wants to hear from you. They really wanna learn from you. The problem is your delivery, the way you approach it, you actually intimidate. You use humor the wrong way. You use sarcasm the wrong way. And what happens is you actually shut your team down and so they all of a sudden aren't listening to the nuggets of information you're trying to give them. Because you've cussed a whole bunch. You've done a bunch of things within the organization that shuts people down.

Scott Raven: And I gotta assume that part of what you've gotta develop up front is you gotta develop the rapport with that person to be able to say, I'm gonna show you what your blind spots are. I'm gonna show you what you don't know about yourself, and I hope that you will be vulnerable enough to tell me what masks you are wearing that other people don't know that you carry every single day.

Kendley Davenport: Well, that's exactly right. And sometimes I have to have permission and I usually gain it to be able to say, let's talk about this out loud to others in the organization so they understand sometimes where you're coming from. Because it's not that you have a bad thought. It's actually pretty good. And you're very protective of something because of your past experiences. But your impact and your intent don't equal. So what happens is the people hearing it don't hear it the way you intend. And so you really need to step back.

Right People in the Right Seats

Kendley Davenport: There's another part of this, the fourth part of what you asked about. This is the other thing that organizations struggle with, and that is what we call right seats on the bus. The person in the right seat. What happens in emerging companies and companies have been going for a while is the leadership team or the founder has surrounded himself with people that got them to this point. And they're very loyal to those people.

Scott Raven: Yes.

Kendley Davenport: And we have to find a way to assess, are they the same people that you were growing 10% the last three years, and that's a good thing, but now you're tasked with growing 50%. Can this person who's only grown 10% for three years have the capacity, the will, the want to get to the 50%? And if they don't, you have to recognize this. And so it doesn't mean we get rid of this person. It means we find the position in the organization, the seat that gives them the best chance to contribute to the overall success. But maybe if they were the sales leader the last three years, they can't be the sales leader the next three years. I'm just using sales as an example. It could be operations, it could be finance. Like I'm in a company right now where the finance person, very adequate, very good. Does a super job. Unfortunately, this person could not be put in front of a PE firm as the next CFO of the company because a PE firm's gonna come in and go, I'm getting ready to give you $15 million, and I don't trust this person managing the money. It's not that they're not smart, they're not strategic enough.

Scott Raven: Yep. Now, part of that when we talk about the people is that one of the biggest challenges that you have when you work with these firms is the recruiting processes that they have. That for the positions where they need to bring new talent in, their outdated systems bring in the wrong level of talent. Why?

Fixing Broken Recruiting Processes

Kendley Davenport: Well, first off, I wanna come back to the core of it before I talk about how technology can help you. But it goes back to the basics. And I also see this all the time. I recently sat in an interview for a salesperson and saw the sales leader. And they're asking some of your typical behavioral questions and things of that nature, but what I found is they didn't start with, the company has six core values. So what are the questions you're asking this person that helps you evaluate? Do they live these core values? It doesn't matter about what the skills of this person are yet, it's do they live the core values that we need in this organization to make the organization stronger and better. The second thing I noticed was they didn't ask questions about what I call, do they get it? Meaning, do they understand enough about the business and the job criteria? Do they want it? This is will, how do they have the desire to really wanna be successful and how have they demonstrated that in other things before this position? And then do they have the capacity to do it? Meaning, now we're talking about skills and behaviors that matter to the position, and can they demonstrate them in their past, is it part of their core, how they operate? And so then you can get, once you get the capacity, then you can start talking about do you have the specific skill sets? Because I believe this, if they have will, they get it, they want it, and they have some capacity, I can teach them the rest of the capacity, and if they already have the core values, we're gonna stay aligned anyway. So that's that part of it. Those are the things that have to be fundamental early on in the process. But now you're out looking. You're an organization that has to turn over. You're a facilities management company and you need custodians. You go, hey, custodians are custodians. No they're not. You gotta look at them differently. And so, how do I get custodians that not only don't turn over on me, that retain when I hire them and train them? We know that a custodian job might not be the highest paying job in the world, but how do I create this? So again, part of the process is you need to use technology to help you. Because when you put that ad on Indeed, or in the newspaper or wherever you put it, you're gonna get a lot of response. In today's world, what has happened is LinkedIn and Indeed and all of these systems have made it very easy to apply for a job.

Scott Raven: They have. But then there is the flip side of this, which is trying to cultivate your message in terms of gating exactly the person that you want in terms of will, capacity, fit, et cetera. A very human aspect, but at the same time, particularly with some of the PE-backed companies that you are working with, hit the damn numbers.

Kendley Davenport: Yeah, you've gotta balance it all. But again, how technology can help you instead of... Here's an example we saw at Lead Line, a company that I've been working with. They've built up and doing most of their own thing now, but I was an early person there. And so we saw, here's an example that we saw clearly.

The Southwest Airlines Hiring Story

Kendley Davenport: I met with the head of talent acquisition for Southwest Airlines, a pretty big company, right?

Scott Raven: Pretty big company.

Kendley Davenport: Pretty big company. He had a situation at Love Field where he needed to hire 25 to 30 ramp agents. People that moved bags around. He needed to hire them in the month of November to be ready for December. Because this was the year right after the year that they had that big blow up in December and Southwest had a big problem and all that kind of stuff. They were worried about repeating that problem. And so he's like, I placed all these ads and I got 500 applications for 25 jobs. So I said, so how did you go through the 500 applications? I'm gonna try to be brief with this story. But he said, look, my team started calling through these applications and this information. And I said, did you find your 25? And how long did it take you? He goes, it took about 10 days or so, and we got through about 200 of the 500 applications. And in that we found about 60 people that we thought met the minimum criteria. So we brought those 60 people in for like a big bunch of interviews and they do it in group sessions, et cetera. And basically we hired the 25 people out of those 60, 70, 80 applications. I said, well, what about the other 300 you didn't get to? He goes, we never got to them. I go, so that meant all these people applied. You never even looked. He goes, nope.

Scott Raven: And you wonder why people have a bad taste in their mouth with these automated placement services and whatnot. In terms of, I got ghosted. I never heard anything.

Kendley Davenport: And that's what's killing, that's why this job market is crazy like it is because there's two sides to the coin. It's not only these companies like LinkedIn or Indeed, remember they get paid by the companies, not the applicants. So they want a lot of people to apply because that's how they get paid by clicks. And so they don't care if they get hired, they don't really care. Whereas on the other side, you want only good candidates, not bad candidates to weed through and be able to pick and get it done quickly. And so it's a problem and that's why I say technology can help. But let me get back to the story. So I said, okay, let us run those same 500 applications through our software. We're gonna answer some of the questions for them. But what happened is he found that in the last 100, so how these applications come in basically by rank order, by when they came in, right? And so what happened is the last hundred had a whole bunch of candidates, like 16 or 17 candidates that were so highly qualified. That they were the kind of people they would wanna hire long term, but never got hired for these jobs because, and so also, this is another element. Those 25 people were mostly without any experience. They all had to go through two weeks worth of training that cost them a ton of money. He went, if I could have known about those other 16, they would've only had one week of training and I'd have had them in the field and I'd have saved X number of dollars.

Scott Raven: Right. And there is something to be said in terms of it was a right now situation versus a I want a right answer situation. I'm not gonna be naive to that. But your point is very valid in terms of did you really do the task to its fullest that you were supposed to do?

Kendley Davenport: So again, how technology can help staffing and recruiting is that it can help you take every application and communicate with everybody so everybody feels important. And it engages the people that meet your criteria. And by the way, the AI can do that until your recruiter can physically. It doesn't eliminate, look, AI is not gonna hire somebody. All it does is, remember how you when you hire people, you put them in stack A, stack B, and stack C, and all you go focus on is stack A. Think of that. That way your technology's helping you create your stack A. And by the way, if you go back and look at the studies that LinkedIn and Indeed do, most really highly qualified, good candidates get hired in the first 48 hours.

Scott Raven: Mm-hmm.

Kendley Davenport: Or at least they get really engaged to get hired. The company has identified them and they hold them engaged so no one else hires them because what do people do when they're looking for jobs? They're looking for a lot of jobs until they have a few hits where they're going, well, I might have a job here. They stop looking for jobs because it's hard work to apply for jobs.

Scott Raven: Yeah. And it is the byproduct of what is a progressively more efficient electronic system that we have. But I think that part of what you bring to the table, and we haven't even talked about, you got the EOS certification as an integrator, et cetera, right? That you have all of these disciplines that you can now help the companies that you work with truly bring their vision and their strategy to life through action. But I also know the flip side that you often have to deal with, which is, I don't have the time to talk to you. I don't have the time in order to have you help guide me and provide your wisdom. In some cases, because these people are working 70, 80 hour weeks, right? How do you get them to make that investment, which is clearly necessary for them?

Finding Leaders Ready to Change

Kendley Davenport: That really is not something that I focus on. And I'll tell you why. I cannot get someone to change who doesn't wanna change.

Scott Raven: Amen.

Kendley Davenport: So I'm looking for those types of leaders who've come to the point in their journey that they start to recognize that they have to invest in themselves and invest in the team around them. And so that means they have to do things a little bit differently. And I always say this in corporate America, and I say it with founder-led companies, the founders, the rainmaker does all the troubleshooting, goes home at night and does the books. Hey, I get that you're still gonna work 60 hours a week making some of that stuff happen. But I always say every hour over 45 for the CEO of Boeing company. I actually didn't go to college with him, but he went to my same college. I've had lots of opportunity to have lots of conversations with David Calhoun, he's now retired, was the CEO of Boeing.

Scott Raven: Good person to know.

Lessons from Boeing's CEO

Kendley Davenport: How in the heck do you do all that you do? And run this big company and still exercise, still read books all the time, still do all these other things, still be with your family, but still somehow run this hundred billion dollar enterprise. And he goes, and a lot of us think, well, they have tons of assistants and they have all that stuff. And yeah, they have a little of that. They do have a little of that. What they really do is they learn how to focus. And they'll tell you that every hour over 45 of me physically doing work at my business is an hour that I'm investing readily in myself, readily in projects that I'm excited about. And I have good work-life balance and I'm gonna stop and read that book or go exercise what I need to. I'm gonna keep that in my schedule. So they time block, they're very focused and that's why it's hard to get in to see a CEO because they go in 30 minute blocks. You got 30 minutes. Get to the point. And that's why you hear about these big scale CEOs. They want it fast because they're very focused. They don't wanna get sidetracked. They wanna stay on what they do well. And so I just break that down for the owner trying to get outta 70 hour weeks. You've gotta figure this out for you. I'm at a client today where that owner's really starting to figure it out. He does three things extremely well. He loves doing them. Now after a couple of five or six months of being around, he's now doing those things. In fact, he's out skiing, he's been skiing for two weeks and just called in yesterday and said, I'm gonna ski for another week.

Scott Raven: Rough life. I'll take it.

Kendley Davenport: Yep. He's still doing some work out there. He's still taking some time to get some stuff done, but he's working on stuff he loves to work on. Other people in his business are taking care of his business.

Scott Raven: There you go. Well, it's interesting you say that because we talk about this rockstar lifestyle, and I put that in quotes. But you see it with some of the comical ads that are out there, the rock stars of business, if you will. And if you know anything about music, there are 1,000,001 different vocals and styles and whatnot. And you can be yourself. In fact, you have to be yourself in order to be distinct. But everybody needs somebody who's gonna help guide their voice to the promised land. What is the best thing that you get out of being that shepherd to the voices who you help turn into rock stars?

Why Teams Win Together

Kendley Davenport: For me personally, I think the reason I work, we all want to have some financial reward for work. Who doesn't? Fortunately for me, Scott, it's not my main goal. Yes. Do I wanna be paid what I'm worth? Sure I do, but it's not my main focus in life. I love seeing teams win. Think about teams that we see it in sports easily, very quickly. We see it in certain areas. I like to see it in business. I like to see it in industry. A good example I have is I have a good friend who's a heart surgeon. He does all things, but what he specializes in is heart transplants. And in the heyday of his career, he did two transplants a day, two days a week. Four a week. They're in Denver. They were what they call a heart mill. They're just cranking them through. And so what, but

The Heart Surgeon's Secret to Zero Deaths

Kendley Davenport: He takes a lot of pride in doing thousands of heart transplants to have no one die.

Scott Raven: That's impressive. That's very impressive.

Kendley Davenport: So I go, how do you do that? It turns out all the things we've been talking about. Great planning and alignment with the team.

Scott Raven: Right.

Kendley Davenport: Planning, thinking through what could go wrong. So not only have they spent four or five hours preparation for this transplant surgery with the entire surgical team in a conference room, going over all the blood work, all the video, all the catheterizations, everything. He'll tell you they can plan it out, but 99% of the time when they open a person's chest and start the process, something goes wrong. Something doesn't go to plan. He told me one time they got in there and they noticed that the aorta that goes into the top of the heart was not gonna be strong and good enough for the new heart. They've gotta repair an aorta before they can put a new heart in. So he's gotta be ready for that. So he's got another surgeon in the room who goes right to the leg and gets the big artery in the middle of your leg as part of your aorta out, going up your stomach, cuts a piece of it out and brings it up to the neck to put it in there. And this guy's chest is open on a heart lung machine. The heart's out.

Scott Raven: But that only comes with the experience of having seen so many different things that nothing is that drastically new. And I know in one of the ways that you give back to your alma mater, it's through your experience in terms of being able to give back to the next generation and say, I'm telling you these stories because I don't need you to have lived this experience the same way that I did. I'm gonna give you this wisdom so you can accelerate your own growth.

Kendley Davenport: That's exactly right. Look, experience does matter. You just commented on it that he had done enough surgeries to be ready. But you think of Mike Krzyzewski and Duke basketball, this is before NIL, he's turning over players every year or two years. I mean, he's changing his whole team out because they're all going to the NBA. But how does he keep winning? How does he just keep that up? You could argue he gets the best players. Well, he's created a culture where the best players do wanna come. But each time, he's gotta get these best players to work together and keep winning. And so his system, his process. So I go back and say, collaboration, clarity, and accountability is my system and process. That drives that culture of I can change out players, I can do hard things, I can be pushed up against the wall, I can have crisis hit me. I can lose a game or two, but bounce back and I can basically go ahead and win the championship anyway. So I just apply that to everyday life and everyday business.

Giving Back to Virginia Tech

Kendley Davenport: But you asked about Virginia Tech and my giving back and I give back for three reasons. First off, outside of the three reasons, I had a great personal experience there. I wasn't the best student in the beginning, and I had some mentors that helped me really realize my potential while I was in college, which I think set my whole life up. That's why one of the reasons I give back. But the three reasons is I give back because of that experience. So I give my time, my talent, and some of my treasure. I want them to feel all parts of it. And by doing all three, I have a voice at the table. So I'm on the board at Tech. I have a voice at the table because I'm doing all three. I'm not just given time. I'm putting my money where my mouth is. The second thing is I think listening to students as they explore is an unbelievable, it's not about me giving to them. You made the comment of how do I give wisdom to them? It's actually they're giving wisdom to me. And you go, wait a minute. Those little kids, they don't have any experience. They never had a job. They're in college, they're partying, they're going to class, they're in clubs. No, they have a perspective on life. They're in their area of desire, expertise they wanna develop, and they have a whole different viewpoint on the world. It's like when you see a 4-year-old, they have such curiosity.

Scott Raven: Yep. They don't know what not to do, and that makes them the best learners possible because they can ask the questions that we wouldn't ask.

Kendley Davenport: And they have a perspective because we're not, society and the industry we're in have already stigmatized or put a box around how we think. So they don't have that box around them. But then what I do is I then try to give them some of these lessons learned. Things to think about. I don't tell them what to do or how to do. I just say, here's the kind of things you wanna consider in the process of your own development. Be curious. And one of the things I always tell them, I don't care what it is, go be a leader in something. Go get in a club. Work your way up to be the president of that club. Because you're gonna gain so much skill that you're not even gonna know you're gaining, that you'll be able to apply right away in your first job outta school. Because I'm gonna tell you something. Being in Fortune 500 and being in a lot of private equity firms, we hire leaders. You get somebody who can lead, who's curious about the world, who isn't afraid to work a little bit. I also tell them they have to be a little humble. When you come out, you can't expect to get a raise in the first four months. You can't expect to get a promotion in the first year if you work hard enough.

Scott Raven: It's tough coming outta college because that college environment is telling you, we're gonna set you up and we're gonna make you shine when you enter the real world whatnot. And you're right, you do have to get knocked on your heels a little bit, and that's an entry.

Kendley Davenport: If you don't, look, there's no shortcut and there's no silver bullet, and the only way to gain experience, they call it, you gotta get the 10,000 hours to be a subject matter expert. So if you're not willing to put in the 10,000 hours, you don't care about yourself. So that's how I interpret it. So it doesn't mean that I need you to work 80 hours a week. I think that's wrong. I hear about Accenture and all these companies that everybody says, well, I had to work 80 hours. Well, no wonder they burn people out. No wonder people don't stay that long. Actually, if you go look at their turnover rate after the first three years, it's pretty high. So is that good for their business? I don't know that. I'll let them decide, but still worry about that. But the third other reason that I think I like to give back and stay close to the colleges, and I just don't work at Tech. I do stay close to others, is the research that you get exposed to because the professors, the researchers that are actually teaching the kids are also on the side doing lots of other things with industry and other people. And so what happens is they're not business people. They're not. And so they have this other approach to problem solving, this other inquisitive approach to learning about things. And what that does is they see data different than we see it. So what happens is they start seeing trends before the industry sees trends.

Scott Raven: Correct.

Kendley Davenport: Because they're doing something. It doesn't mean there aren't smart people in the industry that see the trends, but they actually go do the data to support that trend. Marriott doesn't have enough time to go do a bunch of data trends for the future. They rely on professors in schools to point them in the right direction, or they see something and they give it to the professor and say, go do this for us. Go figure it out. Go do the data models on it to tell me if it makes sense. That's what's been happening in the last 10 years or more. It started 10 years ago, but how has the internet or social media perfected itself? Me and you both know that if we just speak of going to Target right now, I just did. My guess is when I go to my social media tonight, sitting in front of the TV, scrolling through my social media. I'll get a Target ad. You know it does. But they figured out how all these algorithms and how things work. And that's because universities were looking at this data a long time ago. Now the big companies are doing it themselves. You hear them hiring all these people and they're getting AI to do it, so it's even going faster.

Scott Raven: Yeah. You basically have talent wars going on for this. But as we move towards the close of this episode, and we could have gone on for hours, but I know my listening audience. I promised them 45 or less. So I always do a traditional close by doing a tip of the cap to Randy Pausch's book, The Last Lecture with the final head fake. This book was for my kids, right? This podcast that you just recorded, this is for all your kids that you are helping at Virginia Tech and others. What do you want them to take away from having listened to this?

Kendley Davenport: Wow, you didn't prepare me for that question, Scott.

Scott Raven: Of course I didn't. I gotta keep you on your toes a little bit.

The Head Fake: Advice for the Next Generation

Kendley Davenport: I appreciate it. I would say three things. Let me first off, be a leader. Learn how to be a leader, and start honing that skill. You can do that on a club team. You can do that on a sports team. You can do that in a church organization. You do not have to do this in your business setting. The more you do it in your major business setting, the better. But it doesn't have to be. The second thing is to continue to want to be curious. Go into every situation with an open mind, with what I call no pre-judgment. Work hard to remove your bias because we all have them. When you go into situations and start asking lots of questions, don't be afraid to ask lots of questions. I think that's one of the big ones that I would say. And then I think the third thing is I always tell people, make sure you're aligning your personal values and your personal ambitions with whatever journey you wanna go on in the world. Because if you are really enjoying what you do and you have a passion for learning more about it, it will not seem as much like work and it will get you through the days and even weeks that are very hard. But you'll have this personal inner drive, this vision for the outcome. It's sort of like a great person who exercises, who's trying to maybe be a bodybuilder. They have to have this vision that I need to just do one more pushup tomorrow. I need to do 10 more. I just need to do one more. If I can do that every day and be consistent and persistent about it, because I'm passionate to be this bodybuilder, then you're gonna get there. So that's a simple analogy that can be applied to anything you do in life.

Scott Raven: That's a beautiful close.

Final Thoughts

Scott Raven: And for people who are hearing this, who are like, look, I need Kendley. I need to talk to this man because there's places that I want to go. How can they get ahold of you? What are ways that they can get in contact with you?

Kendley Davenport: Yeah, I have a really great active LinkedIn page and obviously it's Kendley Davenport. But I also have a website called, it's at www leadership with the number 4 the word success. And it's dot co not dot com. So that also gives you a way to contact me and see some of the work that I do. I do mentor a lot of students. I mentor a lot of executives, some of them for nothing. We just stay in good contact. And then I have a number of key clients in private equity and others where, here's an example. I have a client today that promoted a salesperson to be the chief growth officer of a division. Pretty big deal. But this is the first time being a chief growth officer and now they've got five direct reports. The CEO wants me to make sure that they accelerate their learning, their experiences faster by having a mentor. It doesn't take a lot of time, call it an hour every couple of weeks or whatever the timeframe they wanna do. The idea is that they're getting an outside opinion, an objective opinion, and one that's not judging them because the boss is asking. I'm not the boss.

Scott Raven: That's better than trial and error. I'll put it that way.

Kendley Davenport: Well, and that's why the CEO wants to do it. He goes, I don't want him to spend a year figuring it out. I want him to spend six months figuring it out faster with you. So the next six months are very productive.

Scott Raven: Speaking of being able to help people figure it out faster. I understand you have a special offer in terms of an execution driven leadership course. Is that right?

Kendley Davenport: Yeah, I do have it. It's a pretty inexpensive way to hear all about my Growth Accelerator framework. You get a lot of tools. You get step by step instruction. It's on demand, it's at your own pace. It allows you to sort of get all the tools that I talk about in all these different aspects of aligning the business, of setting goals for execution driven down in the organization, all of the above. And it allows you to go at your own pace and it gives you workshops, it gives you tools to actually use. And then of course you can implement on your own and it gives you a way that if you sign up for the course, you get a little bit of coaching from me, no additional charge to help guide you a little bit. And certainly that's the plan. But most people can execute against the tools and stuff pretty much on their own and they can go back and listen to the recordings over and over if they need help.

Scott Raven: And we'll put all of those into the episode notes in terms of the LinkedIn, your website, Leadership for Success. That's the number four success.co as well as the link for the special offer. Kendley, this has been a pleasure. Like I said, we could have gone on for hours, but I like to keep them 45 or less. Any final words before we close out this episode?

Kendley Davenport: No, I appreciate you and I always say in my tagline, rockstar leaders aren't born, they're mentored.

Scott Raven: There you go. And hopefully all y'all who were listening to this go out and find that mentor to become the rockstar that you're meant to be. Maybe it will be Kendley. You never know. So Kendley, thank you so much for your time and to my listening audience, thank you so much for investing your time in taking this wisdom. Your mission is now to go apply it and share it. Be able to give this to the people who need this. We love it when you subscribe and give us feedback because we want this podcast to be all about the impact and how we can make that impact better. But until next time, I'm Scott. We'll see you on The Corvus Effect. Take care.

Outro

Scott Raven: Thank you for joining me on The Corvus Effect. If today's conversation sparked ideas about how to free yourself from overwhelm, visit TheCorvusEffect.com for show notes, resources, and our free Six Dimensions Assessment, showing you exactly where you're trapped and how to architect your freedom. While you're there, check out the Corvus Learning Platform, where we turn insights into implementation. If this episode helped you see a new path forward, please subscribe and share it with others who are ready to pursue their definition of professional freedom. Join me next time as we continue exploring how to enhance your life through what you do professionally. It's time to make that your reality!