Transcript
You've made it through day one, through day two. You're back for day three. I think that we can safely say this is becoming a good habit now. We're getting some traction. Once again, we are back with Kyle Christensen, founder of K7 Leadership. Kyle, thank you so much for taking time again. I appreciate it. We're all old friends. Absolutely. I mean, you've led us through some serious deep thinking, some introspection, some hard hitting, deep thinking advice, some tactical advice that you gave us yesterday about taking high level kind of longer term plans, bringing them towards the present in terms of making them actionable and leading the team. And now day three, we're going to get into, you've got these great plans. How do we get everybody fully bought in? How do we hold people accountable to make sure that those plans don't go by the wayside? Well, and real quick, I want to say congratulations to everyone that's kind of doing this right now because this is not easy to do. I mean, just for context, it takes me 90 days, nine zero, an entire quarter with my clients to build out these plans, to have that discipline. I lock them in rooms that sometimes for eight hours at a time, throw away the key, no technologies to sometimes get this stuff done. So if you're struggling, you're just like everybody else. You are perfectly normal. The fact though that you are doing it, that is what matters. Yeah. So let's talk about that accountability. I mean, yeah, kudos for everybody for going through this process, really the leader taking charge here. But as you pointed out, leaders can't do this stuff on their own. They got to get help with it. So how does this come into play? I mean, how do you work with your clients in terms of making sure that the entire team is really involved and rowing in the same direction? So first and foremost, I'm going to give you homework right away. Oh, nice. There is a book, another book I know you can listen to it, just do it. It's called Who Not How by Dan Sullivan as well. I referenced earlier his other book called Gap in the Game. He's a little bit less of a known author, but his books are fantastic. You can listen to him on Audible as well. But Who Not How is a fantastic book because it talks a lot about delegation and us as owners having insecurities, and I want to use that word intentionally, insecurities with being vulnerable enough to allow people in our organization to truly own something. And when I mean own something to the effect of when we hear that there is something or we write something on the board or we see something that needs to be done, that we really think about who is going to be doing it, not how it's going to be done. Because it is that who that is going to figure out the how, because as the owner, I don't have any more time. And I have to be willing to let them succeed and let them fail. Because that's the only way we learn. I don't know about you, Jonathan, but half the things that I know is because I stubbed my toe, I got fired, I went down like a Led Zeppelin to quote Keith Moon, right? There's all those things that we do learn through trial and tribulations, and we need to respect our teams enough to have that same experience. Absolutely. And I mean, this is the opposite of micromanaging, right? I thrive in situations where I don't have someone walking me through step by step. I got to figure that stuff out on my own. It's not going to be perfect by any means the first time around. But yeah, I mean, that's how you learn. Well, and not only that, everyone... I see it sometimes on the social media... On the social media, I sound like I'm starting to get in trouble with my life. But you see it on social media where you do sometimes see people afraid of accountability and goals, and they're saying, hey, I'm being micromanaged, right? And I think there's a difference in accountability. And the difference in accountability, right, is first that vulnerability to say, hey, I'm okay if you fail as long as you learn something from it. But also, accountability isn't a way to micromanage somebody. Accountability is also a way to empower somebody. If you are accountable, like if you own this thing, whether it be a team, whether it be a process, whether it be a tool, then yes, of course, you're accountable for it. But also, I have enough trust in you to be accountable for it, right? It needs to be seen with a little bit different of a lens. And as us as owners or operators, we need to be comfortable enough having that messaging of like, hey, Jonathan, I know you are the best guy at using Ningo 1. You know how to use it better than anybody. So what I'm going to do is whatever happens in that tool, I'm going to allow you to own that process and everyone needs to come to you in order to utilize it better or make changes. Now, of course, right, in that messaging, I'm saying you're the best, right? But at the same time, if something breaks, of course, I'm going to come to you and be like, Jonathan, what is going on? Tickets aren't coming through, scripts aren't going out, reports didn't hit client desks. But why do we need to be overly sensitive to that? Now, there's the messaging, right? There's how you present it, that's getting into a different topic. But there has to be that level of transparency and commitment to getting that done. I walk a lot of my clients through Patrick Lincioni's Five Functions of a Team. I don't know if you've ever read that book. Absolutely. It's a pretty much a cornerstone at this point. I mean, all MBAs are going to have to read it. And I have an exercise where I facilitate for either new leadership teams, right? An owner hires me and says, hey, I need to build one team, or they have an existing team. And we really walk through those layers of the five dysfunctions. And that very bottom run, right at the bottom is transparency, right? And there's commitment and trust. I mean, trust is really the bottom, but that's through transparency. And having that trust goes so long, because we have to be committed to each other. We have to be working through the same processes. We have to have built the objectives for the next three years together. Because I can tell you right now, I've worked with a lot of technical people, we're stubborn. And the second someone comes to me and says, Kyle, you're going to do this because I said so, I can tell you right now, if I was on my own YouTube series right now, I'd be saying some words that would be a little discolorful. Right, in knowing that, right, like being able to find a mechanism to where you trust people to succeed, but you also trust them to fail, but fail gracefully. So right, the initial topic right at the end of the day is how do you start to plan on keeping these things accountable? How to keep people disciplined? And how do you make sure you delegate and have that transparency with your team? I can tell you one of the things I did with my MSP, one of the MSP I operated, we had about 75, 80 employees at the time that I instated this. I walked every, and I'm not saying, I learned this through obviously my own failures. I started to develop a process where I onboard a new employee. I walked every single employee. I don't care what your title, what your rank, how much you make, I walked them all through two things. One, the business plan. Day one, hour two, because hour one was HR, on, hey, here's our objective. Here's what we're marching towards. Here's what we are relentless about. And also that that relentlessness needs to be a quality that you have. Because if you don't, right, you might not be successful on this team or you may not like the culture here. And that's okay. At the end of the day, that is okay. The second thing, I actually taught them the MSP business model. I walked them through how we got clients, how we went to events, how much we charged, what our margins were, what profitability we needed, what profitability was spent on. Because I didn't want, when my service managers were going to an employee and saying, hey, our margins are suffering, we need to figure out how to fix this, for everyone to be like, you're making more money, right? I wanted to break down those barriers. And that is so important, right? Because in a business, obviously, we need to make a profit, right? Everyone's heard the saying, if you're not growing, you're dying. So that we could always be committed to the same goal of the company. And I'm not going to lie, I had some employees where I went through the business model, they would roll their eyes and in the back of my mind, I'm like, you're not going to last longer than 120 days. Because, right, we were transparent about the messaging, they would have their own team meetings about guys, last month, we had four clients that we lost money on. And then rather than having the, why do I care sentiment, right? It was the, oh, crap, what can we do to fix this? Yeah. Because everyone needs to be on the bus with marching forward. Well, I think to your point, it helps people feel like they are more invested, they can be more involved, they're part of this thing. And it also, I would imagine removes some tendency for arguments or anything you can point to, this is why we're making this decision. It's clear and transparent to everyone. And so this is why it's not, yeah. And you're not afraid of conflict, right? That second tier of Patrick Lencioni's five dysfunctions is conflict is good. And if someone's going to challenge an idea, a construct, status quo, whatever, I can respect that it's probably because you have a passion to positively affect something. I don't need to take it personally. Most of my clients, I set the expectation for two things. And this might be hard for some to hear, because when you're going through this process, it's not easy, especially for you as an owner, because you may feel like your business is maturing and maturity can be scary, because it might be not all rainbows and flowers. First, right, and I've said it already, perfection is the enemy of progress. And we need to adopt that into a culture, because like we said, right, I need to trust people to fail. I think we said that both video, the last video and the last one, Jonathan, well, if I'm giving permission for people to fail, then obviously, that's not perfection. So right, they're almost they go hand in hand of as an owner, if I'm really afraid to bring on a leadership team or bring in another manager or director or whatever your size is, I got to be comfortable with them sometimes making decisions without having all of the knowledge, without having all the education or all of the data, right, you don't need to go on sometimes to Reddit and pick a post of what should I do next, right? You can have the ability of let's just let's just try this, if it doesn't work, we'll try something else. And that's to me kind of the root of this practice almost being handcuffs going back to our first video, because best practice sometimes just tells you someone else's good idea, right? There's good ideas, but it was for their business model. That didn't mean it was your business model. So you may adopt their best practice. And next thing you know, wonder why all your margins on because it required a totally different organizational structure, right, right product or an offering. The second expectation I set with my clients, expect 15 to 20% of your team today, and your clients today to not make it to the future with you. I'm gonna say that again, 15 to 20% of your employees and customers will churn during this process. That's gotta be painful to hear. That's gotta get like send some heart rates up a little bit. Totally. Right? Because what do you hear complaints about right now recruitment hard. Maintaining clients is hard. Maintaining employees is difficult. But the first time you try to hold somebody accountable, because right, you're committed, we're disciplined, we've written this business plan, I want to get an ROI from all the hours I sunk into this process. The first time you try to hold someone accountable, I guarantee you, right, they're gonna be a brick wall. And I don't want to do that boss. Stop managing me. For clients to go, oh, that's too expensive. I don't want to do that. And I think we use the example in the first video, Jonathan, right? Next thing you know, you knee jerk, you change all that process back. Yep. But how are you going to change? How are you going to improve if we're not willing to hold these things accountable? Accountability is tough. I'm gonna be the very first to admit, I mean, there is a level to where holding someone accountable is a level of discipline that isn't fun. Especially when it's in a negative context, whether that means a client relationship now is on the rungs, or an employee potentially needs to leave on their own volition or the one that I, you know, told them. But you got to think, the company I want to be tomorrow is not the company I was yesterday. That employee signed up with the company from yesterday. That client signed up for the company of yesterday. It's 100% human and okay if they don't like the company you want to be tomorrow. But don't take it personally. Make it amicable. Hey, Mr. Customer, unfortunately, that's just the route we're going. These are the margins we need to sustain the growth we're looking to achieve. We will find a way to amicably work this together. Right? Same with the employee. I had employees and I've worked with plenty of clients where we help them find jobs. We write them letters of recommendation. We don't want to make it like weird and heated now that I got to like secretly find a way to either one of the employee to quiet quit or if I had fired them. Right. Right. Those exist a lot of times because our maturity isn't enough to hold them accountable. And to me, a lot of times I call bullshit with the stuff because it means you're not intentional in running your business. And then there's a cool thing that you can do. Have you ever heard of CliftonStrengths? I love this concept. I know a lot of us like DISC and a lot of us like Myers-Briggs. But what's cool about CliftonStrengths is it simply goes, what are five traits you have as a person that are your strengths? If you have a gut check and you have these five qualities, what are you just like, I don't need to think about it. It's a reflex. And when you think about it in those terms, and what I love how they kind of walk you through this exercise is it also allows you to think of what you're not good at. And if you're not good at it, you're probably not disciplined at it. You're probably not motivated by it. So why try to be macho and work on your weaknesses rather than leverage your strengths? So if you're not good at managing people, and this is my example for this. If your service manager was your tier three engineer, and he's never managed people before, if you truly gave him a job description that is managing services, profitability, budgets, people, client satisfaction, are his strengths those four things? So if he's failing at managing services, is it because one, he was the easy person to put in that seat? Not any detriment to him, right? He's a smart human being that's great at technical evaluation. But two, was that the right objective for us to hit our goals? So sometimes you even see in this process, you start to evaluate and go, hey, if my goal is to really increase the margins of my services, and I need really good budget management, and people management, again, I'll reference that video for this example for my profitability topic. Then maybe they need to go back to like a tier three or an internal sysadmin seat because that's their skill. That's their strength. Same with accountability. I know many owners of MSPs that get into that $15, $20, $25 million mark, where they are now 150, 200, 300 employees. They are not the CEO of a company that large. They don't have strengths to hold that accountable. So they even have to do their own soul searching to go, do I need to hire a second in command to do a lot of this accountability and growth, right? I think you said the word traction earlier, right? Entrepreneurial operating system, I was a coach for that for years. The integrator idea was someone that is skilled at keeping the rubber on the road. That's not you, and you're the entrepreneur with all these ideas and tasks. The last thing you want to do is be in a company that needs to farm. So to me, right, and a lot of this goes into structured accountability, structured means, structured KPIs that allow someone to know that they are doing what they're expected to do so that they can decide to pivot if they need to, not you having to dictate the thing to pivot. It seems like a lot of this too, just to kind of round the corner here and start to take us home, you brought up that word intentional. And you also pointed out, you want to get ROI from this whole process. I mean, as we pointed out, these are not easy things. If you're expecting to start Reboot Camp, this is a bootcamp, right? These things are tough, but they're necessary. And I think you would probably argue, right? If you're not being serious about this, I mean, this is your business. What else are you going to be doing with it? So having that intentionality, putting the time into it. I like that idea of that it forces you, then I do want ROI from this. I put in a lot of time, I'm serious about this. And so I need to get something out of it. I need to take it seriously. Honestly, it's why for me, right? As a business coach, I can guarantee my clients 20% year over year growth. I can guarantee my clients if they really want to, two, three extra growth, because I've done it four times myself. I've been a turnaround guy the last 20 years. But it's that intentionality and that discipline. So when my clients come on board, I can guarantee that ROI because I'm like, hey, as long as we have this intention, we have this plan, we have this accountability, as long as we put fuel in the tank and we respect the plan and we're committed, right? Let's go to the top tier of that five dysfunctions of a team, that it's going to happen. Now it may not be the same people, it may not be the same look and feel, you may not have the same product or pricing, but you're going to get there. It's just being intentionality, discipline, they kind of go hand in hand, because that is what is going to change your business and grow you. Kyle, I can't think of a better way to kick this off, to kick off the year, to kick off your bootcamp. Thank you so much for doing this. And thank you everyone watching this. That was day three. We're really in it now. Hopefully you've enjoyed what you've been watching. We got a lot more good stuff for us coming down the pipe. But Kyle, thank you so much again. No problem. And if anyone needs any help, I'm sure we'll put some links down there on how to get in touch with me. I'm always up for hopping on a quick Zoom call and just walking through these things. Yeah, man, thank you for being the real deal, sir. And thank you for sharing all of your insight with us. No problem, Jonathan. Everybody, thank you very much for your time and thanks for listening to me banter.
