The GTM Plateau Is a Leadership Problem. How to Break Through and Build a Winning Team with Mike Simmons

Most SaaS teams blame the market, the tool, the AI craziness, but they are overlooking one VERY IMPORTANT factor about why their company might be plateuign: Mindset - of the founder AND the team.

This Thursday, May 14th at 11AM ET, I'm going LIVE with Mike Simmons, consultant, operator, and someone who's helped companies from early-stage startups to enterprise giants like Walt Disney and Lockheed Martin break through growth plateaus.

Mike has a refreshingly simple framework that most leaders ignore: Mindset → Skillset → Toolset. Most companies do it backwards.

We're diving into:

• Why your leadership team might be the thing killing your growth
• How to identify and build the next generation of leaders from within
• The 5 core leadership skills every GTM team needs right now
• And why communication is silently destroying execution at your company

If you're a founder, CRO, or leader trying to scale past that next plateau.. or an IC trying to understand what separates good from great — you need to be in this conversation.

Elite Talent Recruiting helps B2B SaaS leaders hire high performing Pre Sales and Post Sales talent when speed and quality actually matter. 

We are on a mission to prove Pre Sales and Post Sales teams are just as crucial to revenue as offensive linemen are to quarterbacks. 

They accelerate sales, fuel growth, and help SaaS companies win bigger deals faster. 

We build SaaS GTM teams by headhunting top Pre Sales and Post Sales talent and delivering hires in 35 days or less, including Sales Engineers, Solutions Consultants, Solutions Architects, Customer Success, and Technical Account Managers. 

If your team is stretched thin, specialized roles are sitting open too long, or you are scaling fast and need reliable recruiting support that actually moves the needle, we help you hire the kind of talent that drives growth, innovation, and customer success without wasting months in interview chaos.

Check out our website: https://elitetalentrecruiting.io/

Connect with Arvi directly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arvi-carkanji/ 

All other resources: https://linktr.ee/elitetalentrecruiting

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Presales Unplug, the Leadership Playbook. I'm Arvi Kirkhengio. I'm the founder of Elite Talent and I mainly work with SaaS companies to hire top-tier presales and post-sales talent. But today is not about me. Today, the show is about leaders building the go-to-market teams, the strategies that actually work in today's market. And I have a very special guest that I'm super excited to announce. But before I do that, really quick, if this is your first time joining us, one quick note these conversations are live and intentionally unedited. So what you hear here today is real and exactly how it happened. We stream it live, but you can also catch a replay on all major platform podcasts, whether that's in Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever it is that you like to listen. My only ask is if you do enjoy the conversation today, make sure to follow, subscribe, leave us a review, especially for our guest. I personally read every single one of them, and I'll make sure to answer even after the live or tag the guest if needed to make sure that you get those responses. With that being said, I'm super excited today to have Mike Simmons join me today. He's the founder of Catalyst, and he has a really strong record in the space. And I'm super excited because today's gonna be a slightly different conversation. We typically go deep technically on like how to do things and what to do in certain cases, but we're gonna change a conversation a little bit today with Mike and talk a lot about mindset and building, you know, kind of behind the scenes. So, Mike, thank you so much for joining me. And obviously, you know, being able to come online with me today.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Sure. And and thanks and everybody, the birds in uh the birds in the background are a function of where I am. I was originally supposed to be home, but uh we're still out here in Hawaii. So hopefully this little kind of conversation in nature uh is helpful and helps add to the experience.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Oh, for sure. I was gonna say you're bringing us all to Hawaii today with you, and I think we're all jealous, starting with me. Absolutely. Uh and Mike, obviously, I I want to start with like just having everybody understand a little bit more about yourself, you know, where um your experience, you know, what led you to where you are today.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Yeah, so it's been kind of an interesting journey. I what um I I started my first the first big company I was a part of was the United Parcel Service. And that was really more on the operations side of things or running an air operations. If anybody has ever seen the movie Castaway, the first couple of minutes of that movie shows what it's like in that type of an operation, even though that was Federal Express. Um, but that's where I started my career. I partly because I didn't mean I like to work hard, I didn't really know exactly what I was gonna do. I knew I didn't want to get into sales. My dad um was in sales, I saw that around our uh in our house. There were some different things that I experienced around the house that were different from what I saw him with his team, and I just had a I I did not have a good view on what sales was. And then I, after a while, they had opened up a sales role at UPS, new logistics role. Um, and uh I interviewed for it and was denied the role because I didn't have the personality uh profile or someone who would be successful in the role. Well, fast forward to today, I've been running a consulting business where that started as the company Catalyst Sale, where it ultimately help teams build their go-to-market motions, specifically from a client acquis demand acquisition, retention, expansion perspective. And there's a lot of stuff that's happened in the middle to help get me here, which includes time as an enterprise sales rep working with some of the largest accounts that many of us know and recognize, including companies like the Walt Disney Company and Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics and Microsoft. The uh so very just an interesting arc across, and I'm happy to get into more detail around individual stepping stones in between, which included time and customer success before it was called customer success. So I think it's giving me an opportunity to have a very well-rounded perspective of the business and people and how they operate inside the business. And when people talk about business acumen, um, I think a lot of times they use the words, but they don't necessarily know exactly what those mean. Um, and one great way to get business acumen, build business acumen is to operate in multiple functions inside a business. So that's a little bit of the arc and helping go deeper.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

Yeah, no, I appreciate you just explaining it overall. I was gonna say, I mean, honestly, I grew up with the same mentality that sales is not good, you know, it's sleazy, it's um, you know, it's people trying to rob you off of things, don't trust salespeople. And it's kind of crazy once you get into the world and you realize, okay, it doesn't have to be that way. Like, are there people that do that? Of course, but you know, you can choose to not be that person and do it the right way, the ethical way. Um, and I think now probably there's obviously a lot more information than when I grew up, or you know, when you grew up too, of like understanding the sales people. Um, but yeah, yeah, no, I grew up with the same mentality. And actually, of a fun fact is which I regret it now, but at the time obviously I didn't know. But I was offered a sales job right out of college, and my mom actually changed my mind. She was like, No, you don't want to do sales. That's you know sleazy, that's not for you. And I was like, Yeah, you're right. And then obviously now I wish I would have done it back then.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

Well, it's right, and it's one of the funny things, like when I'm speaking at events that one and the focus is on sales, like helping people think differently about this profession and how they work with customers and and what we functionally do. One of the questions I'll ask, and I'll ask everybody to raise their hand, I'll say, tell me, raise your hand, tell me who likes to be sold to.

SPEAKER_02 6:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

And everybody, it's just you know, people not shaking their head no, it's it's quiet. There's this tension that people push back. And I let that sit for a little bit, and I ask this question. I said, Okay, well, how many people like to buy things? And that's the reaction you get, is everybody starts nodding and they they laugh and they smile, and then that and there's this kind of shift in energy and transformation that happens in the room. So, okay, so let's just get this straight. You like to buy things, but you don't like to be sold to. Why, and it depending on who the audience is, I'll either ask the follow-up question, why do we not like to be sold to, or you know, why do we like to buy things depending on their their background? Yeah, and that will help kind of move this to the next point, which is look, when people are selling things to us or feel like we're being sold to, a lot of times it's about them, not about us. When we buy things, it is about us. We we want to solve a problem. And my definition of of sales is very simple. It's um problem solving at its core, it's about connecting the dots between a problem that is known or unknown. And some problems are unknown, so there needs to be an experience that helps them become known, and solutions that are known or unknown. And many solutions are unknown until you start going and looking. And this is where a sales professional, someone who operates in this in a professional manner, can help you understand the perspective around the problem, not just the symptom, the real problem that's happening, the root cause analysis, that kind of stuff, and can help you see a vision of the future where you actually can solve for that problem and move on to the things that you need to get done.

SPEAKER_02 8:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

And that so now we get to play a really important role, which is a role of guide. We're we're helping people overcome their challenges. So that's so for me, sales problem solving at its core.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I I agree. Once I learned it, you know, it was a mind shift of like you're helping get somebody to where they're actually already looking to go. You're just trying to find if you have the right solution or not. So um, I I love that perspective. I wanted to ask them. I mean, you've worked with companies ranging from early stage founders that maybe have never sold a thing in their life to all the way up to, you know, big companies like you mentioned, Walt Disney and Microsoft.

unknown 8:38

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

Can you tell me some insights that you've pulled from operating across across both ends, you know, of that spectrum when it comes to just as a founder plus sales, of course?

SPEAKER_01 8:49

Well, and I think this kind of connects back to that experience and just kind of being able to make that transition from UPS and then into a much smaller company, which was a company called Smart Force, EdTech, or so emerging technology enablement technology, emerging technology that helps humans do what humans want to do or need to do better, and then keep going into smaller organizations. And what you find um inside larger organizations, it's really easy to hide. Uh, the other thing that happened because there's just so much that's going on. Yeah, in addition to being easy to hide, it's also easy to be overlooked. So you can hide and you can be overlooked inside those organizations. Well, when you're potentially being overlooked, one of the best ways to help shine a bigger light on you is to help work people inside the organization solve business problems, problems that are getting in the way of the growth of their business, getting in the way of creating risk relative to potential loss in their business. So are we either we growing or are we trying to stabilize and help reduce risk inside the business? What's their perspective of risk? Well, as you go into those large organizations, what you find out is a number of people inside those companies don't know what other people inside the same company are doing. And they're not aware that there's somebody just like them doing trying to solve the same kind of thing in another group and they don't talk with each other. Well, when you're helping solve a similar problem and you start to know each of those people, you can do what some people out there will talk about is multi-threading, but I don't think they really explain to people or help people really connect the dots between what is multi-threading versus just pitching eight different people inside the same organization. No, you're actually threading that together. You're threading the needle, you're threading the needle through the problems that exist inside the business and how those connect across the company. So in large companies, large companies, um, you can hide, you can get overlooked. Uh, they still run into the same types of problems. People have goals that they need to accomplish, people have uh others that they report to, people have uh people on their teams. So functionally, they operate the same. It's it in in the interaction that you have with people. It's the scale at which you can make impact inside of those large companies that's a little bit different than what you can do inside the small company. Now, inside the small company, typically um you are gonna be more of a generalist and you might do a little bit of everything. You run your business, you do a little bit of everything. You gotta you're like a short order cook. You're just kind of going from different things to different things to different things. In the larger companies, you're much more specialized because your roles end up being much more defined. And uh the that's why large companies aren't a good place for me. I I went from UPS, a couple hundred thousand people, to uh Smart Force, which was 1,200 people, and then quickly became 900 people. There was a layoff that had a force that happened right after, to O'Reilly Media, the Safari Books Online group, where I was employee number 57 on that team, to launching this business and working with companies that span that group that we just discussed. But um, so there are similarities in the way that people interact with people. There are differences though, in the way that um in small companies you're gonna be more of a generalist, in larger companies, you're gonna be more specialized. In large companies, you're gonna have to do more to shine light on you. In with small companies, there's not really any place to hide. And if you perform well, then you'll get the credit, but somebody else isn't gonna take the credit from you. But um, I think the key piece for folks to take away, regardless of the size of organization that you're operating in and playing with, is at the core, you're still talking about people who are working with other people who happen to have misaligned goals and objectives, and now you're trying to help them prioritize those things as they work through and see if there's a way that you can actually help them accomplish the thing that they want to accomplish and that they need to accomplish.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

Yeah. For sure. Um, and I wanted to ask, do you feel like there's either certain, like if I'm a candidate and I'm looking for a job or I'm even trying to decide about whether getting into tech or just a sort of company, do you feel like there's either certain personality traits or experience that you know you can figure out where do I belong the best at? And I personally don't think there's a right or wrong answer. You know, like if you don't like small companies, that's fine, right? But like, how do I figure that out as a person?

SPEAKER_01 13:44

Yeah, the big thing is ask uh how much structure do you really need?

SPEAKER_00 13:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Right? Like it and and and be honest with yourself. Look in the mirror. If you're looking for leadership, start with a mirror. Like, let's lead ourselves well first. Let's look in the mirror and say, what do I what do I really need? How much structure do I need? Do I need everything to be fully baked? Uh, where I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna start pushing the button or moving the lever or turning the dial and doing those things, and and things are and I've got a lot of support, and there's even though I know some large companies won't have as much support, but I've got the structure of the organization. I mean, the organization, if I fail, the organization is not gonna fail. Um, if you need that kind of environment, then working inside a small company where you are one of maybe 50 people or 100 people, one of 50 people, you are 2% of that entire organization. If you're leading a team of five people, you now represent more than 10% of that entire organization. Fast forward into a larger company where there's 5,000 employees, you're leading a group of um a team of five and a group of 5,000, you're less than 1% of the total operating group inside the business. So where do I, what, what do I what do I what are my needs? Where do I fit? Because um I think there are too many times that we run around trying to stick our you know square peg into a round hole rather than finding the square poles that are out there that exist out there.

SPEAKER_00 15:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Now it's also important to test. So when I went backward, I say backward, when I went into a smaller organization, if I went into that smaller organization and I didn't do well with ambiguity, and it was this was a large company, it was 1200 people, didn't do well with ambiguity, didn't do well with uh some of the the um the lack of structure, the things are changing and all of that kind of stuff, then I probably wouldn't have gone to a smaller company. And if when I went to that smaller company, I didn't do well with all of those things, I probably wouldn't have started my company, which was much smaller than that. Like the so there's uh so I do think that the fit excuse me, fit absolutely matters. You cannot manufacture fit, and in large companies, you're gonna you're gonna have a little bit more structure there, things are gonna be more defined, people have been doing it for a while. So uh if you need that, then go that direction. If on the other hand, you're like, I just like to build and I like to and I like to create and I like to work into ambiguity, and I like the idea of things are constantly changing and I can figure these things out, and I like putting together puzzles and working through your games and game, you know, playing video games, like if I if you like to do all of that kind of stuff, then you might thrive in a smaller environment because you can move really, really fast in that environment.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

Yeah, I love that. And I I think that's a really good way of saying it. Um, I I guess I would add the word to it is like pressure, right? Like if you like pressure, and like you said, if you're if you feel like you know, if you make one bat move that could impact the entire company versus like you make one bat move and it's like, okay, it's just a mishap, like we can fix it. That's um, yeah, that's also a great indicator. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

That's a great one. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Yeah. Um, I wanted to shift a little bit to the mindset aspect. When we talked offline, you said that you had a very specific belief of mindset first, skill set second, and tools third. And you said that also most people do it backwards. Can you walk us through why that order matters that much? How did you even come about it? You know, obviously, just get us in your mind.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

So the the um let's lay out a couple of definitions. Um, mindset A, B, C, D. If you're at home writing, taking notes, write A, B, C, D. Attitude is first one, believe, and then clarity of definition. So attitude, belief, clarity of definition. So when it comes to leadership, as an example, my mindset, so attitude, belief, clarity of definition is leaders build leaders, leadership starts with self. So attitude, leaders build leaders, belief, leadership starts with self. Definition, leadership is how we move forward, and you can apply that to anything that you're working on. This is not the Carol DeWick stuff on growth mindset or fixed mindset and that kind of stuff. That's really good stuff. This is this is business application from my perspective. Like, how do you actually apply it tangent practically inside the business? So let's make sure we have clarity around what our attitude is, what our beliefs, attitudes, and beliefs are. Um, beliefs are going to be different. Attitudes are gonna be different depending on who you're working with. Well, then you move into clarity of definition so that we all know that we're working on the same thing, right? If I if we don't have the a clear definition around what is customer success or what is or what is revenue, or what is execution, or what is culture, it's gonna be really hard for us to get to then determine hey, what skills are necessary in order for us to actually go through and execute on delivering that thing. So when it comes to skill set, skills are those things that you do, the specific capabilities that you have. So capability is knowledge and skill. So you know some things, but you and you can do some things. So skills are the things you can do, which could be include communication or problem solving. Um, we talked about that from a sales perspective, could be design. There's a couple of different skills. We'll get into those a little bit later about the five core leadership skills. But there's this um, you when you know what you're doing and you are aligned on your attitude and belief around it, then you can determine, okay, what are the necessary skills to do it? And then the last one is our tools. Because if you have the right skills, you can use tools to create leverage. And Archimedes said, give me a lever long enough I can move the world. You can use that leverage to change things, to move things along. But if I give you a tool or somebody gives me a um uh tool that somebody could give me that I would know nothing to do, have not be able to do anything with it. Well, a wood router, you know, so like be able to route and would do woodworking and that kind of stuff. Like when I was junior high or high school, I took woodworking, so I could do some cool things and I created a clock and I did all of that kind of stuff. But that is not my, I don't have the skills to leverage a tool in the same way that someone who's a craftsman would be able to leverage their tools. Yet today, the big challenge, actually, you know, let me pause there. So mindset, skill set, tool set in that order, always mindset, attitude, belief, clarity, definition, skills, skills necessary to achieve the objective relative to that definition, and then tools that you can use to create leverage using those skills.

SPEAKER_00 20:57

Yeah, yeah. No, I I love all of that. And there's so much AI noise right now. Everybody, I feel like, is rushing to buy the next enablement tool, you know, the next AI tool, and how it's gonna replace everybody, you know, and all that stuff because it can do all of it in one. What do you think our company is like losing right now when they skip that foundation and just go straight into tech?

SPEAKER_01 21:19

Yeah, though, I mean, uh is one of the one of the problems with skills, and again, operated in emerging and enablement technology, working with learning and development professionals to help get education technology uh inside their organizations, adopted inside their organizations and rolled out across organizations. Uh, so that's was my first kind of entry in emerging and enablement technology. And what we're seeing today in AI uh and the evolution of the tools, I think is very similar to what we did and experienced back in the 2000s with ed tech and the way that it kind of flattened. Access to the to content as an example. So when you think about tools though, as an executive or as a leader, it's really easy to check the box and say, I bought this can of element, and uh we invested in that can of element, we spent money, we got something tangible, we rolled it out inside the organization, and ultimately it just didn't work because it didn't work or it was not the right time, or the tool wasn't very good. So it's really easy to check the boxes, buy the thing, and then blame the thing for not working. Like you could look in my office. If I'm at home, I could show you 40 different putters that I have. Now I've got a collection of these things because I like the engineering behind it. For me, my putting challenges are not the tool, it's the skill that the that the player has. So when you get into the it's much easier to get to authorize buying a tool, to make a choice to buy a tool, to share with your board that you purchased the tool. Yeah, it is hard to go back in and say we're gonna invest in building the skills of people when we think or have this perception that because we hired them, they must have already had those skills, and those skills don't need to be developed. Or we think that when we hired them, they were gonna go continue to build out their skills, and it doesn't make sense for us to invest in them, they should invest in it themselves. And that's a that is a failure of leadership to not realize that inside organizations. So with the with the speed, the other thing that's cool about this new emerging and enablement technology, AI, is um it can do so much, and it can do so much so fast, and it is evolving so quickly. I think that the mindset skill set tool set approach, in that order always, is more important today than it's ever been because tools are going to change every couple of weeks. There's gonna be some new tool thing, and are you gonna spend a bunch of time training people how to onboard on this tool? Or are you going to build the skills so that when they see the tool, they know how to use the tool effectively and work with in partnership with the AI tool to achieve much more than they could have achieved if they didn't have access to that resource? It is an emerging and enablement technology, it is not a replacement technology. It is you can it's being sold as that though, right?

SPEAKER_00 24:32

Which is crazy.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

It's it's it's actually it's being it's being sold and it's being implemented, and um, it's being promoted like that, which is crazy, ridiculous. Throw any other word around it. Um it will absolutely by increasing the capacity of people, it will absolutely create risk that you're you won't need certain people inside your organization. It but given their domain expertise inside your business, there's an opportunity to re repurpose or move them into other areas to create more leverage inside the business as another resource that can do other things. Like you now you can grow. And I what I'm what I think is really dangerous, and it happened the other day with Zoom Info, um, they they clipped 20% of their workforce, at least that's what that's what they were saying. At least that's what the vibe was publicly. Uh you don't cut your way to growth. It just never worked. You you can cut your way to demonstrated profit for a short period of time, but you do not cut your way to growth. You you continue to invest. Uh so anyhow, that's the I think the risk is people are buying tools and they're trying to use the they've got this vision of what the tool can do because someone's telling them, imagine if you will. And what they're really clear on is what are they actually, what is the specific job to be done inside their business? And that's especially with small business owners and these companies between like 50 and 200. If you've not clearly written out the jobs that need to be done in your business, like how you make money, what are the functional things that need to happen in order for you to continue to make money? What are the things that happen in a repetitive manner that impact your ability to keep find new customers or keep existing customers? If you don't have that stuff written down, then just throwing an AI tool at your business is just going to help you suck at scale.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. And I see that on the recruiting side. Um, definitely a lot of leaders that come to me and they'll say, yeah, you know, we have these AI tools and I need somebody senior to be able to, you know, make sure that they can handle those tools and they know how to use them. And like you said, I mean, the tools are changing like constantly. So it's so hard finding somebody that has that entire tool stack already under their belt and senior at the same time. And, you know, you as a leader, you don't want to manage them because you just wanted to like plug them in there and then move on to whatever the rest of your responsibilities are. And I can see how this gap just keeps getting bigger of like, you know, not investing into your team. So now they have junior people or so they claim to be junior people that don't know how to use these tools and they're just frustrated and they don't want them on their team anymore. So then, you know, the layoffs start happening and all this craziness. So yeah, it's pretty wild. And I'm glad that you explained that very well. And hopefully, this, you know, maybe some leaders are listening to this and really rethinking their way. Um, and I will say at least one thing that I've heard on my end too is like leaders are scared to invest in their people because you know, what if they leave one day? And the best rebuttal I've ever heard to this one that I use to this day is but what if they don't and they stay? And then you're dealing with a much bigger problem in your company.

SPEAKER_01 27:59

It's one, it's one of those things, again, being in that ed tech space where you would use that that uh today it would be a meme. Back then it was just like a comic script, but it was uh or like a yeah, it was a comic, but uh it was basically the CEO and the CFO having a conversation uh about it. And it it is I think the question that you have to ask in that environment is what are you building? Like what what are you really building? Like, are you building a business that's going to significantly impact the lives of your family and the lives of others and the and their families and your customers and the people inside your customers' organization and their families? That's what you're building, then your approach for the long term is going to be much different. If what you're building is, I want to just flip this thing, so I'm gonna go get the cheap paint and throw it up on the wall so that the house is good, and I'm gonna go um move some things around and make sure the color is a little bit better. And that's all I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna flip this thing, then that's a different game that you're playing, and I can tell you I don't want to be a part of that game. And there are a lot of people who don't want to be a part of that game, but don't tell somebody in the fit process that you're building something different, and then when they come in, they realize, ooh, that's not yeah, that's not what you tell me. Yeah, that's not what we agreed to, which happens.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

Yeah, yeah, yeah, very true. Is there any tips you can give a Kiv? Because I I'm thinking kind of on the devil's advocate side, right? Like leaders are like, I understand you, Mike, I know exactly what you're talking about. I really want to do that. How do I bring this to my board? How do I convince my whatever founders, C levels or like the actual decision makers that are just pressuring me to invest into AI?

SPEAKER_01 29:48

Yeah, I think the I think uh first drop that word. Forget the word convince. Because if you're gonna sit there and you're gonna try to convince someone to do something, you're back in that category of I'm gonna go out and sell people on this whole thing. Like you're now you're now your people will feel like they're being sold to. They won't necessarily look at it as this problem-solving thing that we've that we've talked about, this act of service, this act of leadership, this act in service of others. So um, one, let's remove that word. It's just new, it's nuanced. Let's shift it and use the word compel. How do we compel someone to lean in? How do we compel someone to take action? Well, the best way to have somebody compel, feel compelled to take action is to help them kind of see the gaps that exist. So we have a current challenge. This is our challenge. We have been struggling with X, Y, or Z. As a board, you've said this is what we need to do. So, okay, we're all aligned. We've got this challenge that we need to do, we need, we need to accomplish. Here's what we've been doing today, and here's what we've done in the past. And ultimately, it hasn't solved the challenge. We've not been able to solve for it. So, do we agree on that, right? So we understand what we're trying to accomplish, we understand um what we've done in the past, why the problem persists, what we were, and I I've got a if we were, if I had the whiteboard behind me, I would draw up a hexagon. At the top of the hexagon, I would write what? What problem are we trying to solve? What challenge are we trying to solve? On the um on one side of the hexagon, I would write who? The people. So who has it, who's impacted by it, and then who cares about the people who have or impacted by it? The board should care about the people who have the problem or impacted by the problem. The customers might be impacted by the problem. The people who have the problem are leadership inside the business. So now you've got three different perspectives. So it's not just you saying, I think we need to do this, we should do that, or any of those other kinds of things. So, what you're doing is you're starting to say, you're painting a picture that provides a view of a perspective that's different than the single perspective of any one of those individuals. So you're actually helping deliver some insight, information, and insight. And then on the why side of it, what we want to understand is why is that problem persist? Why is the challenge persist? And then why is it important to solve? What's the impact of actually solving the challenge? And I will joke about it and call it my Mary Poppins approach to problem solving, but then you can put like a little umbrella underneath there and say, hey, this is if we haven't been able to cover those things, then we're not really going to be able to get into the how discussion around how the future might look. And I can share a link with you and we can point people to what that looks like through the whiteboard thing at some point. But there's um, so if I gain perspective, then I go in and I show current state versus desire state. Now I get people leaning in and I get people engaged in the conversation. And it's not just my idea where I want to justify an investment of a couple hundred thousand dollars here or whatever the thing is. It's we've all agreed as a team, this is a problem we really need to solve for. What we've been doing in the past hasn't worked. We've got an opportunity to do something a little bit different, and we can either go and keep doing it the same way and hope for different results, or we can make a shift and make a change. Here's the three the next two pieces that people miss on this. Now, the next piece is when does the when does it need to happen? Like, when do we need to do it by? What's the time length? Like, can we do we need to do it in tomorrow? And now we've got to spin something up really, really quick, and it might not be very good and or be really expensive, whatever that thing is, or do we have to do it over a certain time period? And then how can we then build out our short-term, medium-term, long-term plan, or what's next? 30, 60, 90, three months, six months, nine months to actually go in and start testing. We did this, we started to see build these skills. Are we actually seeing change in the business? If not, then maybe the skill thing wouldn't work and it wasn't for us. But if you didn't try it, you won't know. And if you tried to do it all at once, you probably won't know because we a lot of times leaders suck at change management. They think they communicate everything and they ultimately don't. People don't see the design aspect of what that looks like. That's that's how I would help somebody compel compel somebody to get engaged in the conversation and potentially invest. And that framework is an account plan framework that I use to sell into companies like the Walt Disney Company, um, clients that I work with today, people helping their team sell better. It's it is a it's a problem-solving toolkit that started as an account um plan tool, and ultimately it works both for internal customers as you're looking to get funding and external customers as you're looking to help them justify funding.

SPEAKER_00 34:57

Yeah, that is that's such an awesome framework. Um, and it's so good. I think the problem that you know these leaders are facing is like it's not sexy enough to the board, right? You're telling me it's gonna take 90 days to see some sort of change minimum, but AI can potentially help us implement this in two weeks, according to them. So um I do believe though that right now the companies that are winning and will continue to win are the ones applying that type of framework. They're not just, you know, running away with the times just because there's this sexy new AI tool or because your board is saying, oh, we just invested in this AI company. You need to implement it in your business, making like sound-minded decisions. And I know we're moving crazy fast, but I think, and I'd love your opinion on this, but I think it's okay to still move, not slow, maybe slow is not the right word, but still move, you know, at a steady pace. I don't think that really puts you behind in that sense. I I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. What do you think of that?

SPEAKER_01 35:57

Yeah, so um one of the cool things about that framework that we just talked about, it's not um the short-term, medium-term, long-term can be broken out into three days, six days, nine days, yeah, three minutes, six minutes, nine minutes, three months, six months, nine months, three years, six years, nine years. It all it's it's all perspective. It's a matter of how are you going to be able to move through the process and what feedback loops are you gonna use to demonstrate is one, did we do the work? And two, is did the work actually work? On this piece around um, on this piece around um, and I just I've had one of those moments where I just got myself distracted. Oh no, you're good. Oh, it's it's not sexy.

SPEAKER_00 36:47

Yeah, we're move, you know, like it's companies are moving so fast, but it's okay to move ideally at a steady pace. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

So so yeah, thank you. And thanks for the reminder. So the um there's a special ops uh a quote or phrase that's used, at least I've heard that they use it. I've not operated in that environment and been fortunate enough to work with a couple of people in the in it who have operated in that environment. One of the uh phrases that they use is slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Um if you've ever gotten yourself into a chaotic situation where you're just running really, really fast to task, to task, to task, to task, to task, but you're not getting anything done. You feel really busy, but you've just and you've checked up a bunch of things on your checklist, but you've not actually made progress to your goal, then you understand um speed to impact is more important than going fast. Yes, you can go fast, but speed to impact is more important than going fast. And my view is you accelerate speed to impact by simplifying, reducing complexity, breaking things down into smaller pieces, identifying next logical steps, and then helping people take those. Everybody wants to go, people like the shiny thing. They like to be able to tell people they bought the shiny thing, they like to be able to show off that they bought the shiny thing. Everybody's using gong or everybody's using whatever, whatever, you know, whatever is out there. Um, it's easy to be able to share with others, oh yeah, my team is using that kind of stuff. So those are simple things, but the reality is that's presenting a uh uh a narrative rather than actually demonstrating impact. So you might be able to present the narrative about what all you did or what all you're doing, but is it actually changing the numbers inside your business? And it's as a senior leader inside the business, it's our obligation to ask those questions of people. Here's the thing don't do it in a public environment. Like, don't in the board challenge everybody on the board. Like, that's not good. Isolate variables, talk to one person, ask questions. You learn more through the questions you ask, not the answers you give. So you just ask those questions you will get better answers, and then you'll be able to align with those individuals. You figure out what are people's perspectives, and what you might actually find out is hey, you're no longer the right fit inside this company anymore because their view is something different. Maybe they're not giving you all of the information, but um slow, smooth or slow, smooth, smooth is fast is a good way, good reminder on um that fast is not really everything that is that it's cooked up to be. It's let's actually get work done, perform, uh performance, impact is more important than that.

SPEAKER_00 39:41

Yeah, yeah. No, I couldn't agree more. And I guess thank you for uh validating my thought process there. Um, one thing I wanted to ask earlier you mentioned that leadership starts with a mirror for leaders listening, whether they're at like 50 or 100 or you know, 200 employees, and maybe their their company has hit a wall. Like, what does that actually mean for them? Do you have any actionable steps that they can look themselves in the mirror and see if they're the problem?

SPEAKER_01 40:09

Yeah, and it's and they may they may be the problem or they may not be the problem. Um, it all depends, right? And some of that's gonna be perspective, and some of it's gonna be definition of what the specific problem is you're looking to solve for, so you get into that hexagon thing. But the you know, um, if you go through that that mindset piece around leadership, leaders build leaders. So if you as a leader are not building the future leaders, then what are you doing? What kind of risk are you creating for your business? Do you think you're just gonna go out there and hire some new leader and bring them into the organization and all of a sudden things are gonna change immediately? It might happen. I mean, there are I'm a fan of the New York Jets, lifelong, lifelong fan of the Jets. They continue to change coaches and quarterbacks, coaches and quarterbacks, everything keeps changing inside that there's a complete lack of leadership inside that organization at the top at an ownership level. Yet they continue to try to do the same, do repeat the model, which is oh, we need a new coach, oh, we need a new quarterback, oh, we need a new coach, and just go back and forth. So when you look in the mirror, ask yourself, what am I what can I do today to build up the leadership capabilities across my team, individual contributors? Because if you uh buy into that view, leaders build leaders, leadership starts with self, and leadership is how we move forward, then you've got a bunch of leaders inside your organization who are leaders of self. How are you helping them build that personal capability inside their functional area, knowledge and skill, so that they have got the opportunity and are motivated to help change things inside the business? So look in that mirror, ask yourself this question How have I invested in building leadership skills across my team? Not leadership skills of others, but leadership skills of self. If you build strong leaders of self, then the ones who are compelled to do it or called to do it will start to lead other people. And when they get that the the start to feel good about that, they get bitten by the excitement that happens when they see somebody else perform in a way that they could may have never performed before or never even thought was possible, then they get excited, they get excited about it, and then they're compelled, they want to do that more. And then now they get a chance potentially to lead a team. So they so you lead self, you lead another, you lead teams, and then you lead teams of teams. And if you build that capability from your front line, people skills, problem solving, decision making, goal setting and execution, design, communication, you build those skills, you will build future leaders in your team, and you won't have to go out and look for others outside of your business to come in who might present a very good story, but don't have the same capabilities that you know people have in Central. But you start it now. So that's how that's how I would that's how I would help them kind of work through it. What are you doing today to help build the future leaders of tomorrow? If you're not doing that thing today, then some of the change up.

SPEAKER_00 43:33

Yeah, no, I agree. I think leadership is a big problem because people become leaders, I feel like most of the time, right now, everything is 100%, but the wrong way. It's like you're a top performer. You know what sounds good. You can be a leader. Why don't you become a manager now? And it's like, well, I don't have any training. I just was a top performer for myself, and it's so different doing it for yourself than telling people to do it for you.

SPEAKER_01 43:59

Five more minutes.

unknown 44:00

Thanks.

SPEAKER_01 44:02

Sorry, I'm getting I I uh I am in breaking the law in uh in in the area where I found myself in. So again, this is live. Like you live, birds, all kinds of stuff. I asked her if I could have five more minutes.

SPEAKER_00 44:18

So um okay, we'll make it quite we'll have to do a part two for sure.

SPEAKER_01 44:22

We'll have to do a part two. I I thank you for dealing with me being in a different environment. And hopefully has has worked the way that you that you that you wanted it to.

SPEAKER_00 44:33

It's been awesome. No, I was just uh yeah, we're definitely gonna need to have a part two, but um I was just kind of adding more to your point that most leaders become leaders the wrong way. You know, nobody's teaching them, nobody's training them, they are just a top performer, then the company decides that, you know what, you could be a good leader, we'll throw you into it. And if you ask, I feel like most leaders, they'll say that they became a leader because they were thrown into it. And now they have to figure out this whole other world, um, you know, in order to become that good leader and push the company forward.

SPEAKER_01 45:06

Well, and it's and it's hard. Like you think about um, I mean, this happens from um this happens across families, it happens across businesses, it happens uh for people where we um repeat a lot of the same cycles. Like if addiction is part of is something that is in your family history, there's uh you have a higher likelihood that you can be susceptible to these to to these things. And the the thing that you've got to ask yourself uh when you're in that role is uh yeah, you know, when I hired somebody and I expect I they did really good at their job, and I expected that they would be able, it's gonna be tough, but they'll figure it out because I figured it out. Are you kidding me? Like you know how tough it was. And here's the thing your brain has shut out some of the really, really painful stuff, and you didn't figure it out as well as you would have liked to have figured it out as quickly as you want to figure it out. Why not help them? And let's actually help them before they before you ask them to move into the role or force them to move into the role because that's the that's the only upward progression. I mean, there are some people who are really, really, really good leaders of self and will be awesome individual contributors throughout their entire career, and that's where we want them. Yeah, take them and put them in the wrong place inside your business. Now you're hurting one other area of the business and you're gonna hurt another area of the business. But if you ask the question, why are you called to leave? Why are you compelled? Why do you want to test and get an understanding of what they what their objectives are, then you can help design, help lay out some stepping stones to help them get there, build out a plan. And here's the big one that I think a lot of people miss. When they fail, or when things get really hard and they want to quit, they want to give up, and they just they want to go back into the individual contributor role. Create space for that to happen. Remember, they were a higher performer in that role. Let's create an opportunity for them to exit. But before you have them exit backward, work through it and make sure that the exiting is not just tension that's happening because things are hard, it's tension that's happening because it's just not the right fit for them. They tried it. So another one of my things, and again, you know, just like pull my string back and I'll read out my little fortune cookie quotes. But you can't reflect on what you're going to do. You have to go do it first. So go out there, do the thing, give people a chance to do the thing, and then from there they'll be able to say, Do I want to do more of the thing or not? But just because you figured it out on your own, you're self-made, you're whatever you are, doesn't mean that the next one you said has to go through that same kind of tension. Like you're a jerk, you're gonna let them go through that. So build the next the future leader before you need it. Um, there's a there's a quote on networking book around this, which is like build your well before you need to drink. Like build your well. So let's build that capability.

SPEAKER_00 48:08

Yeah, you know, Mike, I'm gonna be transparent here and vulnerable for a second, but I was definitely one of those people before it's you know, things have changed now that I just thought, you know what, exactly. Like that, if I figured it out, they should be able to. And then, you know, seeing it from this position now, it's obviously like you're right, like we do shut down on our mind, you know, all the pain and all the troubles that you went through. And it is so true. Like, you didn't figure it out as well as you thought you did. So I guess I can attest to that for sure. But same thing, I failed.

SPEAKER_01 48:44

Like, I so I had uh when I was at UPS, and the first time I had an opportunity to manage um uh individual contributors distributors and some supervisors, uh I had a leader give me a book managing from the heart because I was a joke, like that was I they gave me the book to say, hey, you need to figure this out. And I was like, what are you talking about? I know I'm just a leader. I'm I'm helping us get the operation going through like yeah, I I was fortunate to have that leader invest in me at that point in time. I wasn't ready for that investment. Yeah, she was ready to invest in me, and I looked at it, I was like, Well, okay, I'll read the book and give you. Um, so anyhow, that if you're looking for a cool book early stage to see, um read managing from the heart, and it's an act, it's like here and understand me. Um, something to get to that, but anyway, that it's uh it's uh it's maybe now I need to read it.

SPEAKER_00 49:43

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I appreciate that. And Mike, I don't want to get you arrested or anything, so I think I'm gonna have to let you go and we'll have to do a part two.

SPEAKER_01 49:51

I am happy to do a part two. Is there anything that you wanted to hit on that we didn't that you want to wrap up in the next minute or so?

SPEAKER_00 49:58

Yeah, I mean, if there's anything that you can maybe end in terms of advice of like, if I'm a leader now just based on what we were talking about, and maybe I'm starting to realize that I can be or I am the bottleneck. Yeah. Besides the book, maybe any two to three things that you can suggest that they can do to implement it.

SPEAKER_01 50:17

Yeah, there well, there's a there's a better book than that one that I would at most suggest that a leader read. Read The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. Um, it's a very good book. The foreword to the effective executive, which is written by Jim Collins, is really powerful. Uh, it lays out a couple of lessons that I apply in the business, which one of them is stop what you would not start. So, you know, if there's ever anything that I'm doing inside the business that I would not start again, I stop it, I eliminate it. I I start to outsource it, move it to somebody else because it's not the thing for me. So um learn from others, ask better questions like we talked about inside this conversation. Take a look in the mirror and be honest with yourself about what it is that what it is that you want, what is it that you need, what is it that you do well, that you can't be replaced. There are a lot of leaders who think they're the only one who can do it. Yeah, you're not that special. Like you're like I mean, you are special, but you're not that special. Like, yeah, if you were the only one who could do it, um, customers would be banging down your door to get whatever that is. So to work through that piece. Um, all right. I've got uh my friend here again. So let's go, let's uh we'll wrap this up. So if you ask better questions, you'll get better answers. And thank you very much for dealing with me getting just absolutely Mike.

SPEAKER_00 51:43

Last thing, where do you want people to follow up with you? I know you also have a YouTube channel, so let us know what that looks like, and I want people to go find it.

SPEAKER_01 51:50

Hit up the YouTube channel, please. It's the catalyst acts YouTube channel. You can find your catalyst at findmycatalyst.com. And if you want to work with me directly, go to catalystsale.com. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 52:00

Thank you, Mike.