How to Develop Managers and Executives in the Trades

If you're smart enough, you can you're not stuck in your own head as much

and you can see a world exists outside you. But if you're just doing the day-to-day grind, you're not as clever, you're just going from task to task to task, you don't see there's another world outside.

Why do people let that fear drive their decisions and it's very true and it's very apparent. You can see that so much easier to see in someone else.

It's so much you can be so much less sympathetic to the power of that when it's someone else.

So if I'm driven by family, I'm not going to work hard. Nothing wrong with that, but I just won't do the extra hours. But if I'm driven by growth, um I want to get driven by ambition. I will work the hours I need to work and I'll sacrifice other parts of my life to suit. Running a business can feel lonely, especially when the decisions get heavy. Welcome to CEO Rispro by Sora Jane. Practical insights from [music] the boardroom and the meditation cushion. I'm sorry. I've done 10,000 hours in three major parts of my life. I spent 10,000 hours being a CEO, 10,000 hours being a [music] board member, and 10,000 hours meditating. What we're going to do in each episode [music] is really unpack a real business challenge that a CEO is facing and see if we can work through it together.

Enjoy.

Hi, good day guys. I've got Ben from JSA Roofing with us today. Ben, do you want to introduce yourself?

Sure. Thanks, Or. Uh, so my name is Ben Tindal. I'm from JSJ Roofing. So we're a roof and maintenance company in Sydney and we specialize in helping stratas managers, strata owners and just making their life simpler.

Yeah. Perfect. So the way we run these sessions, we're going to uh get a problem that you're facing today. We'll try to workshop it together. So do you do you have something at top of mind that's causing you some grief?

Yeah, absolutely. So what I'd like to talk about is how do you take people from individual contributors to managers to executives and just to level set right? So an individual contributor is someone who has no direct reports. A manager is someone who manages individual contributors and then an executive is someone who manages managers if that makes sense.

Yeah. Perfect.

And the little wrinkle on it is I've actually got a corporate background. So I had kind of developed this muscle in the corporate space and I'm finding that it's different in the trades business.

And the individual contributors in your world, they're physical roofers that are physically on the roof doing doing tasks.

Yeah. So for every 10 employees

um you know we'll have seven roofers and we'll have kind of one and a half admin staff.

Yeah.

Okay. Perfect.

So three admin staff. Yeah.

Well I mean what did you give us some background? How did you get into this into this roofing uh game? [laughter]

Uh not linearly. Um so I actually bought JSJ in May 2023. Before that I was at a property services company called uh JLL Jones Lang and I'd been with them for 17 years. So I was lucky enough to move around the world with them. They um I lived in San Francisco and then Cambodia. I joined JLL in Shanghai and then they moved me to Singapore after 5 years, London after 5 years and then back to Australia. So I ended up as the managing director for one of our divisions there with about 1400 staff in six countries or something. Um so very much corporate career. Uh and then I wanted to take some time off after co and also wanted to shift direction in life and

and why did you want to shift direction in life?

What makes anyone want to change? Um

partly it was cuz I'd been there for 17 years.

Yeah.

And I needed a new challenge where my wife and I and the kids were at. I didn't necessarily want to move over again, which was kind of the next logical thing.

There wasn't a more senior domestic gig for you that would have been available.

Not really. you know and you know we we just wasn't the right time to move basically from a personal point of view and then I wanted to accelerate so I wanted a couple things I wanted to increase my autonomy right so as you get more senior in these big organizations you have more stakeholders not less and that can take a lot of time and energy to manage so I wanted to increase my autonomy but I wanted to increase my learning and I wanted to do something very different so

but that all sounds like stuff you could do within a large corporate is it not

in my experience experience given the constraints and the opportunity set that I had I couldn't see a way of doing it.

In the past, I'd seen ways of doing it for sure, but for whatever reason, I just couldn't see it then, if that makes sense.

So, often people will make a change. It's it's usually two things. One will be uh they're unhappy with something in the current situation, which it might have been those couple of things. The other one is there's an allure of a future situation that will give them something they're not getting today. What What was that what were you getting in your role that you were looking for in your next one? So I think it was the that growth, right? So even though I'd had, you know, a really successful career up to that point, I wanted Yeah. I wanted more autonomy. I wanted more control. I wanted to really test my skills as an individual, if that makes sense.

Kind of reset to zero and see where I get to starting over again.

Yeah. But then so so okay, so you finish up a J level. How much time did you take off before you started working again?

Until I started working. Yeah.

Roughly a year. Yeah. So, so you had kind 12 months off to figure out what you want to do and and figure out the next plan.

Traveled with the kids, you know, did a lot of that stuff.

So, why not just go for a CEO gig instead of an MD of division gig? Cuz then in the CEO gig, you'll get your autonomy. You get to do what you want. You get to choose a direction.

Yep.

You'll get paid fairly.

Yep. So, I don't think in the CEO role you have the same level of autonomy. So, that was one. Two, I thought I could make more.

And what makes you say that?

Because inevitably you got more stakeholders, right?

You'll have a board. What do you like?

Shareholders.

Exactly.

Okay.

Um I think frankly I'll make more money doing it this way as well.

I keep coming back to that wanting to personally grow and develop thing and I felt a little bit like I'd done some of that CEO role before and it was really just time for something that I hadn't done before.

Explain to me that first one autonomy a bit more. Is was it a scenario where when you were JL someone was saying you couldn't do something which logically made sense that frustrated you? It's a percentage of time that I was spending needing to workshop decisions and drive change in areas that I didn't think it was quite as useful as I would have liked to. Driving change is part of anyone's job nowadays for sure. Um, and super important, but there's yeah, there's internally focused, there's externally, there's transitional, there's

and is that because the change that you saw was not the same change the rest of the organization saw or other people in the organization saw?

Yeah, absolutely. Um, so it's partly that and then trying to get your vision across takes a lot of energy and time

and I didn't want to be spending that much time on a plane or whatever.

Yeah. Okay. So you finished up you got your time off.

Um, did you ever consider another CEO role for a large corporate with you know thousand employees that kind of size again?

Yeah. So I didn't for that. What I did consider was working with private equity instead. Um, so I talked with maybe 60 or 70 different PE firms across odds and that was one option and that was good. But again, it kind of came back to just constraints and autonomy and I thought I had enough cash squirreled away that I could kind of buy a platform business and start doing a roll up that way and I didn't necessarily need a PE department to do that.

Okay. And with the private equity firm, did you get to the stage where they were ready to offer you a role or did you kind of pull back early or

I pulled back early? Yeah. So I ran both pursuits in parallel and I looked at maybe two or 300 small businesses to buy in detail and JSJ popped before anything else did.

So explain to me the I mean most executives when they leave an organization either voluntary involuntary obvious in your case it was voluntary. The first fear they have is I'm never going to get another job in my entire life. I'm completely unemployable and I'm going to be homeless on the side of the street with my kids.

Yes. But you made that jump by choice. You didn't go and find another job first or find that business first. You chose to resign first. Explain to me firstly, how do you explain that to your wife? That's probably the first question I asked.

How do I explain to Sushka? Uh, she was very supportive. I really didn't need to explain it much. Yeah, you know, we had money saved. She knew we'd be fine. She had a lot of confidence that we'd find something. So, let me give some context, right? You know, I worked for a startup in Sydney and San Francisco that went bust and then I traveled around the world for a year when I was, I don't know, 22, 23. Um then we moved to Cambodia. I didn't have a job there. I followed Sushka there when she was my fiance. Uh and found work there. We moved to China. Didn't have any work. Studied Chinese and then found work with JL.

So I had some reps in doing that.

So you've had some experience. And what did that experience give you? Does that give you the confidence that you can go find another job?

Yeah, absolutely. It's a process. It's a sales process.

Why do you think you have that confidence when the vast majority of executives don't?

What makes me different in that sense?

Yeah. Um,

were you born differently or or you built that confidence?

I definitely built it. Um, I mean, we were talking earlier, right? My dad passed away when I was 10 and after that a lot of things that make people afraid just look a lot less scary, I think. Um, so that was definitely part of it.

And just there's a logical part of me that just went,

of course, I'll find work 40 whatever. And yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's fascinating cuz like like it's one of the um greatest constraints most executives have is that imposter syndrome

that we're going to get found out. We're actually not that good at our job.

Someone's going to find us out if we get sacked. Um you know, we may never work again

or if we work again, we get a more junior role.

Yep.

Have you had a good firing before? Have you been thrown out the window before?

Uh

I'm trying to think about Have you been damaged by another exec?

No. I mean, look, I think the last time I got fired was when I was 15 at a cafe, [laughter] and I absolutely deserve to be fired.

Very useful. Um, trying to think of been fired since then. I mean, obviously, I've been laid off in the sense that the whole company went past, right?

That wasn't you,

but that doesn't feel personal. Um,

yeah. No, maybe not.

Have you Have you not felt that personal rejection then from an employer?

Yeah.

Cuz I wonder I wonder whether that's it. Um, obviously you've built a lot of reps yourselves, but um, getting fired can be damaging because it it's a hit to the ego. And I wonder whether if you were let go of jail instead of making your own decision,

if it would have been different,

it would have would have been different.

I'm sure it would have it would have been a very different experience. But I also think there's another angle to this, which is not so much why am I like this, but why do people take counsel of their fears, right? like why do people let that fear drive their decisions? And it's very true and it's very apparent. You can see that so much easier to see in someone else. It's so much you can be so much less sympathetic to the power of that when it's someone else. And I actually think moving all countries every time that's helped a lot with that because that is scary.

That is extreme.

New language, new scenario,

new reality. So I think that helped a lot too. When my experience to why people let fears drive it so much is when something horrendous like getting fired happens, right? That trauma gets stuck in a part of the mind that doesn't understand language anymore,

but it still constantly affects you.

So, it's one of those things you actually can't talk your way out of

and it's not a logical thing anymore. It's a deeply emotional thing where you don't understand why. And logically, it makes no sense. You you've done a good job. You've had, you know, great experiences. You've done really well at organizations. Logically, it makes sense. You're still employable. But because there's this deep rooted insecurity in a deep part of the mind, no matter what happens in reality, it doesn't actually uh fix that.

Mhm.

And it's it's it's insanely hard to pull that out of your mind. Um so probably a good gift for you is that you never got that inserted into your mind.

Oh, no. I've got it for sure.

Yeah.

But I think I have tried to learn how to keep moving anyway.

Yeah.

If that makes sense.

So just despite that, you you can still use your logical part of mind to override that.

Yeah. Um the direction is logic, the action is not though, right? There's a part of you inside that is waking up at 4 in the morning and is worrying and thinking that you've totally ruined it all. And then can you find the part to still keep going forward? Yeah.

And I think a big part of that's having the right people around you so they can calm you down and say, "No, actually this was the correct path anyway."

Okay, fair enough. Okay, so you're looking at two or 300 businesses.

Um why a roofing business? cuz it's not something you have historical competence in.

No, definitely not. Um, so I had what's called a buy box, right? So you you write out the constraints that you're working within and what you're trying to achieve. So it was service based, so not product, not distribution, uh, within Sydney. I didn't want to have to travel, so nothing with overseas. Um, certain financial size, um, with recurring customers so that I could use my kind of account sales skills from JL blah blah blah blah blah. Um, and so when you start putting those qualitative filters on, you can pretty

Why? Why wasn't domain expertise one of those filters?

It is. But my domain expertise is building a business, building teams, solving problems for customers. Yeah, that's it. So,

but then even a more narrow version of like, you know, understanding roofing or understanding because you're historically been property management,

facilities,

um, facilities management. So, understanding that, why why not buy a small facilities management company? I never worked as an FM in my life. I fell into it in China. I got moeded up to oversee teams that were doing this. And so really I felt that the skill that I had was finding good people, helping develop processes, um solving problems.

Yeah.

So I mean I've got no doubt you've got that skill, but I think you also would have developed a lot of skills in the facility space as well.

Why not find something you can combine them together?

Uh I would have been open to it. Um, I actually didn't like the idea of trying to compete with JL cuz I had a huge amount of respect for them as well.

They would have been in like the top end of town. You would have had smaller customers and

you would probably never come headto head against them. You wouldn't go after a big global like they would.

Yeah, absolutely. But I still wanted to be in a different space. Also, I think you got to think through the cost of narrowing down your search too soon, right? So, people overindex on their identity and their skill set in that way. So, I really tried to step away from that a little bit because It turns out in roofing the skill shortage is not necessarily in roofers if that makes sense.

It's on the management side, the building team side.

Yeah, I think so.

How many businesses did you offer before you bought uh JSJ?

Four.

Four. And they're all in roofing.

No. So, but the other industries?

One was a couple of tech firms. So, I did like an as an undergrad. So, I was comfortable and worked as a programmer for a bit. So, I was comfortable in that space. Um, various things. And if one of them had said yes, it would have been a completely different future.

Who knows?

Yeah. I'll tell you later on.

Yeah. It would have been very different.

But you would have gone down that path instead of down the roofing side.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Okay. So you bought a roofing company.

Y

um tell us a bit about it. Tell us the size scale, whatever metrics make sense.

So the journey we've been on. So purchased JSJ May 23. We're doing about 5 million revenue. We had I think 18 staff or so. Um, and then purchased another company in August last year. Uh, so we'll do 10 million in revenue and we're up to, I don't know, 30, 40 staff, something like that now. Um, and then we've got another acquisition try and close in July.

And that'll take us up to just shy of 20 million, I think.

And tell me a bit about the orc structure. Like who reports to you? How heavily are you involved in day-to-day?

Yep. So we use EOS as our operating system, right? So entrepreneurs operating system which is a way of running a small business.

Why did you pick that not metronome?

So I've used three different models, right? So I've used metronomics, EOS and scaling up. This one just had the right kind of balance for this size business in this industry and da da. So they're all great. They all work. They all solve slightly different slightly different approaches that fit. But JL I use metronomics. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So you've implemented EOS and that set up your org structure to help you get that right.

Exactly. So what we've got now is we've got two branches. We've got a branch manager in each one and a third and an operations director who oversees those two and then we've got head of administration in the office side as well.

Okay. And how heavily are you involved? Like how many hours a week you do now? Is it crazy? Is it manageable?

No. So I start at seven and I finish by one each day.

Like 40 hours a week kind of thing.

Yeah, pretty much. That's um so it's where the load is different to what I expected is the fear thing, right? So as an employee, you just don't have that fear in the same way. You're not borrowing millions of dollars. You're not

payroll to pay. You don't you don't have any of that

personal super obligations.

Yeah. Exactly. So it's just a different game.

Okay. So you're doing 40 hours a week. You've done one acquisition. You got some another acquisition. Tell me about the talent in the team. Like why is this a problem? Why is it a problem to try to get individuals to managers to executives? Why is that something you need to solve? I don't have domain expertise, but we definitely need roofers in the roofing business, right? And so the the the problem we're trying to solve is growing people from being on the tools to leading a team of people on the tools to leading a branch and then given the size and our ambitions, it'll be state manager and blah blah blah, right? And so if you're trained as a roofer, it's very possible you've never used the basic tools like Outlook or Word or Excel and your computer skills are pretty crap.

Everything's on your phone.

Everything's on your phone. And a lot of the management routines that I'm used to using, right, they just kind of don't work in this environment. So I'll give you an example. So one of the first things I did, so the management trinity, right? One-on-one's feedback, coaching, and delegation. The very first time I went in, the day I went in, I tried to set up one-on- ones with two of my key roofers, uh, who were running the rest of the team.

Too busy.

Too busy. We're doing them while they're driving. We fell off after a couple of weeks and I've kind of come back to it again, but never really stuck. So, we do do them quarterly with everyone in the business, and that's good, but not sure it's all that scalable, right?

But going back to my question though, like why is this a problem that you need to solve? Why do you need to grow people from individuals to managers to execs?

Um because we're growing at reasonably quick speed. Um if I can't push down problem solving, then I will become the constraint for growth. And

but you aren't the constraint for growth today. If you're not if you're not doing crazy hours, you're not doing tactical problem solving.

Yep.

So someone somewhere is doing it.

Yep.

Is it is that not working today or not at the scale that you need it to be? It's working today, but I think if we roughly double the business in the next year, there's a big chance that it's going to break. And I want to be confident that it's not going to as much as possible.

Okay.

Why do we need to solve this?

Yeah. So, cuz you got two ways to solve this, right? One way is, as you said, you get your individuals to managers to execs. You upskill them internally.

Yeah.

The other option is you get that skill set externally.

Y have you chosen to solve this internally? Uh so I did try and hire a general manager last year uh who didn't work out.

Why didn't they work out?

Uh culture fit was wrong. Couldn't get along with the team. I'll leave it at that. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. And it wasn't necessarily the easiest situation in the world for him. But on the other hand, I needed him to be able to take the complexity and fix it. Um so I've had more luck with promoting internally. Thank you. Yeah. From everyone that I've spoken with to try and hire that senior leadership at this kind of small business level, you kind of got to give it three goes. That seems to be a pretty common experience.

It's hard to recruit, right?

Yep.

Um I mean, despite my best efforts, I still get it wrong half the time.

Yep.

So, you get really good at firing.

Yep.

Cuz it's easier to fire than to hire. Well,

y

So, then why not go hire again or hire? could do, but I think I got the tunnel in the team now for that. They've got the potential to grow. And then so my ops director, I've now got in a key group at Vistage, so he'll start getting exposure outside of the trades businesses and start learning that way.

But I'm not sure how scalable that is.

Yeah. But I still I still don't get why not just go external like why not just try one or two people cuz that will solve the problem much sooner, right? Cuz to go from individual manager to exec, it's fraught. It's hard. It might take you three or four goes. You might have burnouts. It might take you 5 years. you might invest in the wrong person. Why not not solve that problem and just get it done externally? Because I think the problem you want to solve is actually not how do you grow is how do I have that talent in the organization?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think the growth path is pretty clear, right? It's more

it's one of your options. Yeah.

One of your options is do I grow.

Yeah.

But the core thing is how do I get that executive talent?

Yep. Exactly.

I guess what I'm understanding is is why why not go external cuz that's what

I mean that's what you kind of did with JSJ, right? Like you came in as an external executive

with no roof in competence. You did a pretty good job. Crack a job.

Why not just do that again but layers down in the organization?

Maybe we should.

Have you considered that as an option?

Well, not since last October

when you had that bad experience with that prior GM.

Yeah. October 24. Partly. So, a couple of things. I think you're probably right. The other thing that I'm finding is as I do these acquisitions, there's almost always like a number two for the former owner and they tend to be very very strong from what I've seen so far. So that's kind of external internal and then I do think we're we've got some talent we can only promote. But you're right, maybe I've been too close to bringing in people from outside

and I should reook at that.

And that's completely normal, right? If you've had a bad experience,

you're like, "Oh my god, that's so hard." At least for the internal guys, they might not have the skill set or the competence, but they've got the culture and the work ethic and the work to do. So, you've had like a two-year job interview about their character. So, totally makes sense to look at that. But, but maybe it's both.

Maybe it is both. I think that there's probably a fourth thing too or a third thing which is identifying people in the industry working for competitors that I want to attract proactively.

That's the same as going external really, isn't it?

Yeah, I think so. But it's a little slightly different bent, right? It's more like I want to develop this capability. Who's the best in the industry for that?

It's a much more targeted approach.

Yeah.

Um and talk to me about like how does one get an individual to a manager level? Like what what what would be the persona of an individual contributor in your world?

Uh

is it a 20-year-old on a roof? Is it or

Yeah. So you'll be a roofer. You will we're looking for people who are in their mid to late 20s. Um which means they probably done their apprentichip since they were 16 or 17. So they're kind of 10 years into their work experience.

Yeah. um they are able to be left alone, interact with customers, they're obviously technically competent, they've got their self discipline in place, right? So they show up on time, they show up clean, they speak politely when appropriate, etc., etc. Uh and then they we go through our values with them and make sure they match.

Yeah. And have you tried this with any of your individual guys today?

Which

that try to take them on this journey from an individual to a manager?

Yep. So how's that gone? We've had one success, I'd say three failures, and then we've had one guy who's stepped up as part of the acquisition as well who's done quite well.

And from the success and failures, were the differences in what you did in that scenario?

No, I don't think so. I actually think it was about maturity, hunger. It was a it was an individual decision.

And could you have seen that before you chose them?

Yes, but also you don't necessarily always get the choice, right? So, everyone looks up at their boss and thinks that what their boss does is much easier than what they're doing. Um,

universal.

Universal. Absolutely. And underestimates how difficult it is and wants that opportunity. And if they're any good individual contributors, they'll ask for it, right? And then you get they either step up or they don't.

Um, and you can try and help people, but it's Yeah. It's far from a certain thing.

Yeah. out of um the four people that you um that you tried in this role and perhaps one external or one from acquisition.

Um how many people did you say no you're not suitable for?

Uh

you're not suitable to be a manager. You need another couple of years as a roofer.

Yeah.

Or I'm missing these competences and not seeing them come back when you can demonstrate them.

We have those career conversations every quarter or so. So it's almost everyone, right? So everyone wants to know where am I going? So we've got one guy at the moment who wants to get off the tools more. So, we've said to him, "Right, we're going to get you to do more of a sales role, more of a quoting role. Here's the timeline for that, da da da." And that we have that conversation with almost everyone. Yeah.

And and what did you see in the character of the person that succeeded that you didn't see in the other ones post them moving into this role?

So, their ability to see problems outside of the day-to-day and anticipate what the business might need, clear communication, obviously value just in getting stuff done, right? like Dale, they say they're going to do something, they get it done in a timely manner, and then they report back to status. Like a lot of the basic business skills, nothing too different from anywhere else, I don't think.

Wouldn't that be a super easy thing to screen for if they're an existing employee? Like, why were there three failures?

Because people get overwhelmed by the complexity of it and they retreat back into managing themsel and the pull factor. So remember how I said everyone asks for the next level up even when they're not necessarily ready. They're often people who are actually quite good at their job and you don't want to lose them and say you're right. We'll give you a trial. Uh and then you give them feedback after a month or two. You're not able to make this. You're not doing it. Um and that's a difficult conversation but it's kind of the reality.

But did you know that those three guys were not going to succeed in that role?

Uh yes, pretty sure.

Then why did you give them a shot?

Because they would have left otherwise. And also because I wanted to force the crisis because it'd be much better to be in control of the timing than to let it um let someone else.

And did they leave after they were unsuccessful?

Uh and so we reapproved. Yeah.

Well, was that the right decision for you?

Yeah. So what became clear was the values didn't align, right? So

no, not in terms of them leaving that that I'm sure was a good thing. Yeah.

But was the right decision to put them into that management role if you kind of knew they weren't going to succeed? Yeah, actually I think it was.

Yeah. Why is that?

Because we need people who are able to step up to the next level. We got to find them if we're going to keep growing. We got to find the next layer of talent, right? And I can sit back and leave things as they are and avoid difficult conversation. But that's not how you go forward.

But there's a nuance though to what I'm asking. Not so much whether you need the management or whether you got to, you know, bring it together. But an alternative world would have been you actually said to them, "Hey, you're actually not suitable for this. Here's what I'm missing." Yep.

Stay in your current role and you go to get someone external or you find someone else and promote them up, but you actually don't offer them that transition up. There's a risk of them leaving, but they all left anyway. Are they all left after they cost you a lot of mind space?

Uh, my branch managers a lot of mind space. Yeah, me too. Yes. Isn't that a good thing to be spending mind space on?

Spending mind space on this guy's I've promoted him up. I actually don't think he can do the job well. If it's 50/50, give it a shot, right? But if you think it's probably not the right person, that will create more work than it will solve. And if they're going to kind of leave anyway, which if someone thinks they can do better than they actually can, they will probably leave anyway.

Yep.

You need to either get them to tether back to reality, but some people will, some people won't,

or if someone goes into a management role, does a crappy job, and experiences failure

and is not happy to step back into a lower lower grade job, they will probably leave anyway.

Yep. Which is pretty much

which is what happened. Yeah.

So I guess my question is should they have been pushed into that management role?

While it was painful, it freed us up to go out and recruit new people and we've got that potential now and some of them I think will prove out.

Yeah, I don't think I regret that. Yeah, it cost us Yeah, it was disturbing and it was changed but it kind of cleared the decks

and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

Yeah. Again, I'm not I guess concerned about clearing clearing the decks, getting the right people that that that makes perfect sense. Yeah. It's just the little nuance decision of do you put them into that role or you just leave them where they are?

Yeah, I get and I guess

cuz it's a common problem like everyone has someone in their team that you actually know you'll be a manager. You're actually not ready for this.

Y

I can kind of say yes, but you'll just call in work afterwards and you'll be upset. I'll be upset.

Yeah.

How do I convince you to sustain your current role and get better at that and come talk to me in a year's time?

Yep. So, I'm not the one having these day-to-day conversations, right? which kind of gets back to the problem I brought is how do I help my branch managers have these conversations? Um, and it is a judgment call. Yeah, I think we got to the right place, but they definitely sweated it all up.

Will the branch manager have the competence to see that in

an employee, an individual, and the branch manager kind of knew this is probably the wrong thing to do, but we're going to give this guy a shot.

A shot anyway. Um, so one of the wonderful things about working in the trades as opposed to white collar is performance. you can't hide. Everyone's on the roof together. Everyone's working and you can see it like within half a day or a day.

Um the attitude is from how they show up in the morning to when they leave at the end of the day. There's very little places to hide. So yeah, they could see it.

Okay.

Could they see it before they were managers?

The branch manager could see the individual was not suitable to be a manager.

Maybe not as clearly for sure.

Cuz that might be one of those nuance things that you're probably got the experience because you've just seen a bit more. um you've had more executive experience, you've had more coaching experience, you've been coached, you've coached others, I'm sure. So, you would probably see that, but maybe a branch manager wouldn't.

So, how do I help them move up that that chain faster?

Well, there's probably there's two layers of the question, right? How do I get the individuals to managers? How do I get the managers to execs? That's probably that's probably the second half.

Yeah.

That we probably need to cover.

Y

um one way to not do it is to um abdicate.

Yep.

Um and let them do it. And because that's the and let them fail.

And in fact, it's an extremely expensive way to learn

and they only learn sometimes.

And certainly they can learn a lot faster and more cheaply with the right resources. Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so maybe the first one is let's just really zone in on the individual. Let's assume you've got the external option.

External option of strategically go snipe or find somebody. Y

um on the individuals, if I was to summarize kind of what you said, look, I mean, is it is it just someone that can kind of see problems in the longer archetype? It's not the roof they're on right now. They can actually see there's a much bigger problem that I'm trying to solve. There's I've got to schedule my guys right. I've got to get my customers sorted out. I'm not just seeing what's in front of me right now.

Yep. That's definitely one trait. A big a big aspect is that personal self-control and self-discipline, right? You got to have they got to have their life together. They got to be able to shop to work on time.

Yeah. They can't have a hangover and come to the office.

Any of that stuff, right? They can't just have a bad day and throw their toys out of the cot.

Yeah.

Is that something that you can teach?

I'm going to have a couple of answers. So, remember we have apprentices. So, I think you can teach it to your 16 or 17 year olds when they start coming in. You can set your standard. And

but by the time they're 26 and they're ready to have this transition,

they're probably set, right?

Yeah. They're probably more or less set. I think you could probably teach the looking around, right, and anticipating the complexities of the job in advance and who's going to do what and thinking through who should be doing what and when. I think that piece is more teachable.

How do you you pick which person you can teach that to and which person you can't.

We try a lot and because we're doing it every day, we can see a lot and it's not even as clear as who can and who can't, but it's also who can in which areas and which kinds of problems and not the others.

Wonder whether it's simpler. It's just um it's the one with enough intellect.

I'm extremely skeptical of intellect as a

differentiator. Yeah.

I'm a big fan of intellect as a differentiator.

Okay. Why is that?

Tell you why. Cuz if if you're smart enough

Yep.

you can you're not stuck in your own head as much and you can see a world exists outside you. But if you're just doing the day-to-day grind, you're not as clever, you're just going from task to task to task, you don't see there's another world outside. And it's not the only factor cuz it can go very bad as well. But without intellect, it's very hard to be a manager. You can process AP invoices. That's fine. Um but you can't strategically think about problems over multiple days, multiple months, multiple years.

Yeah. I wonder.

Yeah. Well, which part do you not agree with or which part unsure about?

So you're kind of leading the question to that definition of intellect, right? If your definition of intellect is the ability to see the whole job, then yeah, I obviously agree.

Um,

which I think everybody with intellect, that's that's been my experience. That's what they tend to have in common.

Like I know there might be shitty at math that's not intellect. They might be crap at reading. That's not intellect.

They might not be able to concentrate for a very long time. That might be in that in my mind is not intellect.

The universal thing I've seen is they can see things over a longer time scale. That that's been my experience. There's an emotional side here which is about like the willingness to keep showing up and solving problems. That's super super important.

So the grit to it as well.

There's the grit and there's kind of like an excitement that comes from solving one problem and moving on to the next. Like that one I definitely can't teach but some people have it. That's really valuable.

Yeah. I don't know. There's a lot here, right?

Yeah. But look, if you if you're kind of So it might be the insight, might be the grit, might be the getting joy from solving problems, might be um pleasing others. Like you want someone who's happy to please others. You don't want someone who's too doesn't care about other people.

Yep.

And if they're in a customer service role,

they got they got to make customers happy. Got to make they got to make customers happy. Got to make their team happy. Got to make management happy.

I don't know any of those that you can actually teach in a reasonable time scale.

Uh [groaning]

I think they teach a bull over a longer time scale like over a five or 10 year period. Yeah.

One can grow and learn those things. Y

but if you're a 27 year old and you're about to become 28 and you got to go into this management role.

Y

you might not be skilled at that till you're 38.

Yeah, that's maybe true. But we all know people who have done it. So if then it becomes a selection problem rather than a coaching problem.

I think it might be. That's what I'm getting at. Maybe it's not about what infrastructure how do I coach? How do I just pick the people that are most likely going to succeed and they're the guys that I promote from individual to manager?

How does that kind of sit with you? Yeah, I think there's something to that. Is that as simple as just your nine box like hypo process like your you know potential and current skill level

kind of but um the nuance is I think you want to figure out what skills make that person what skills makes a good manager and might be those four might be five other things and that's what you actually want to rank them against. So

I think that's r I think we'd do that as a leadership team, right? I think then you get all the different viewpoints

cuz yeah, for example, if they everything but a custom service, well that's probably not going to work.

Yeah. But it might work for someone who's just running teams and

internal or something. Yeah.

Yeah. But for for sure for different skills, different roles.

And then maybe it's a case that I don't know only five or 10% of individuals are ready to to become managers and or will ever be

and you've just got to increase your gene pool. Y

you've got to have a choice over more and more people internal external acquisitions.

Y

that might be something you look for when you do an acquisition which there's never a shortity of employees but that might be a factor you have in the back of your mind

for sure. I mean if I had my perfect world I'd have a database of every roofer in Australia.

I would have talked to each of them once I would have made assessments. I would have talked to people they worked with you know maybe in the future but today I don't have that. But it's probably doable right? It's only two maybe 6,000 roofers in OS. So you can probably do it

and even in Sydney there can be what more than 500 I'm

guess 500,000 like order of magnitude roughly something like that.

So yeah I reckon that's a doable task.

So there's a solution there then that it's really about um

how do I select the right person

internal external how do I find that person that's actually going to succeed?

It's less about how do you coach everybody

because if you if you've got a one out of four success rate that's probably right. 25% of people will do all and 75% of people won't ever make that transition.

So you see you're probably with the numbers there

and pretty much a bang on average, right?

Yeah. Like you're with the numbers there.

Yeah.

And I think the game that you want to figure out how do you play is how do I knock out the three that are not going to succeed

faster at less cost

ideally even before you start.

Yeah, I do. If I try and get my long list of potential leaders pre-screened internal

and so so why don't write down what would be the screening criteria? What do you reckon? What are what are we looking for?

So, first one is personal discipline or personal performance, right?

So, that's that they'll show up on time. They won't have a hangover. They'll be there on time. Y

they care about themselves.

Yep. Um we need some basic like technical skills, but those are super easy to screen for if they pass apprentichip cuz the rest we can teach a lot of it. Then there's something about the longer time horizons and the wider vision say that specifically, but

they they see problems in a longer arc of time. So just like a longer arc of time thinking

I would love excited by change change agent whatever whatever you want to call it but that's

if you're growing as so if the plan works as we've got at the moment we'll roughly triple the size of business in about 3 years we started out as a fully paperbased office we've now gone digital we'll have to rip out that work management system and replace it with one that can accommodate larger scale in the next 12 months. We'll need to build a marketing and sales team. Um, yada yada yada. Right. So, the ability to that's tiring for people if they're not excited by it. Does that make sense?

I wonder. Yeah, it does. But I wonder whether it's not so much excited by change, but excited by excellence. They just want to do things really well.

Yep.

Um cuz people can be excited about change for the wrong stuff. But I think it's more excited by excellence.

Yep. Excited by excellence. Excited by growth.

Yeah,

that's a good point.

Okay. So, personal discipline, technical skills, long arc time, excited by excellence.

I think that's a good list.

Yeah. Anything else that we're missing? What else would there be?

If you had to rank them, is technical skills important at the manager level? I mean, you don't have technical skill, but you're the exact level.

Yeah, it's I think it's a ticket to ride, right? Like, it's it's required. It's not the key differentiator.

Yeah. Cuz otherwise, you wouldn't have respect of your workers. They couldn't ask you complex questions.

Yeah. can't talk to customers because you can't explain what's going on.

Yeah.

I mean, and all these four like you can totally screen for your existing people, right?

Yes.

You could have a 30-minute chat and you could pull out all of them.

Yep.

So, I wonder whether it's less about the people asking for the promotions, more about you putting these into your quarterly catchups and trying to actually tease that out. Does this person have it? Does that not person have it?

Yep.

Okay.

Very doable.

That's easy. Is is that it for the individual to manage? Is that all we need to do? It's increase the gene for bit internal but external. It's maybe more about selection.

So look in white collar land going from individual contributor to team manager. You got to learn knowing your people, talking about performance, talking about the future and pushing work down. I haven't got the equivalent for that in um the trades businesses yet. But there is something there about leading people. There's something about assessing and firing people who aren't working out. So there is a people component we need to they need to learn.

Yeah. Maybe there's actually a fifth just further to that. I mean, I find people that are good at managing staff don't mind being hated.

That's true.

Yeah. Like, they're okay to tell you that was a horrible job, just leave and never come back.

Yep.

Is that a fifth one? Don't mind being hated. There must be a better way to say it.

There's got to be a better way to say it. Yeah. But it's that that ability to have difficult conversations.

Difficult conversations. Yeah.

Y

cuz most the main reason we don't is we don't want to upset people.

Yep.

We want to be friends. We want to be liked. We want to maintain the harmony. Yeah, it

we do that. I'm sure we all do with our partners all the time. It's like it's just not worth the argument right now.

Yep. For sure.

Loved the lovely Adam Smith said. Um Yep.

I think it's a good list.

Okay.

So,

just out of curiosity for the three guys that didn't succeed. We go through these. Well, what were they missing?

So, one of them in the end we couldn't trust.

Yeah, that's foundational.

Foundational. One of them's they were unable to see they were unable to work with other people on the roof, give advice, ask for something to be done, give coaching, wait for it to come back, da da da.

And why were they not able to? What were they missing?

Everyone they worked with, they just had friction with.

Okay.

Yeah.

Just just low people's skills.

Yeah. Low people's skills or however you put it.

Uh and then the last guy, he ultimately went, I'm going to do something entirely different.

So yeah, he went he wanted to try something totally different. But was he good at the management job? Like what was he missing in the management job if anything?

I actually think he would have been all right at it. Yeah. Um but his heart wasn't in it. He wanted to write something different.

Yeah.

And why was his heart in it? Like again, was that something we could have screamed for?

I don't know that he was moving away from us as so much as he was moving to something else like he wanted to do. It was totally totally different.

Yeah.

Okay.

All of these guys early 20s as well, right? And it's probably a good time in your life to try different stuff too. Yeah.

So, I don't I don't begrudge them. I think it's a good idea

in terms of age without being too agist. Is cuz they're early 20. You kind of mentioned late 20s. Late 20s feels righter to me.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah.

Cuz you're a bit more stable. You might have a partner, you might have a mortgage,

kids a mortgage, all that stuff, right? You've kind of gone through the crazy early 20s.

You already had your fun in life.

Yeah. That all all of us men tend to do for whatever reason. Yep. Okay.

Cool. So, let's talk about the next one. So, the next one was how to go manager to executive. How's that change different to individual to manager?

So feedback loops between what's reality and what you perceive reality lengthen. Yeah. So you don't know what the customers have said cuz you're listening to someone report to you what someone else heard and you don't know what actually happened on the roof because same thing. So feedbacks get longer. Goals also get longer and harder to impact and suddenly you have to work through people a lot more. And so it makes the job it's a wicked problem, right?

Does that make sense?

Yep. Yep. Yep. Do you have any executives in the team today except for you?

Yep. So I've got one ops director who manages other managers, the two branch managers.

And and what do they do well today?

So very resultsoriented, excellent with customers, getting better at delegating but could do more. Good feedback. Yep. So both good at taking and good at giving feedback. Yep. A lot of strength.

Yeah. And did did that person start in that role? You promoted them internally.

I'm into it.

And what what made you choose them as someone to promote into?

A lot of those characteristics. Yeah. Um basically trustworthy. Um yeah, a lot of the stuff over.

Okay. So I wonder whether it's different the individual to manager is a lot more about selection. Y

I wonder whether the manager to executive is a lot more about building skills and competences.

That feels like it might be right

cuz I reckon

why do you say that? So reckon any good manager you can probably make an executive rarely will you make a good individual person a good manager.

That's interesting. See my instinct is executive life is much more ambiguous and difficult to navigate. Suddenly your time becomes really variable uh and critical. Um, it's so easy when you're an executive to fall into working on a problem that you're comfortable with, that you know you can solve, but isn't the real problem. And even finding out what the real problem is, you you've never had to do that skill before, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I wonder whether with like a manager like you've got all your people skills sorted out, otherwise you wouldn't succeed at that. You've got all your competencies, you're smart enough, you work hard enough, you got your personal life sorted out,

but now you've got to learn stuff that you haven't been able to learn before. Let's assume they're still kind of youngish, like still like early 30s because if it's a someone becoming an executive in their 60s, they're probably too late to learn like a new skill. So, let's just give make that a postulate that they can already learn new stuff. I wonder whether it's all about training at that stage.

I hope you're right cuz if it is, then that's easy. That's a much easier problem to solve, right? That's time and a little money.

I think so. I think I think it's actually Is there any reason it wouldn't be?

Uh, yeah. Because the way the world exists at the moment, there's way fewer effective executives than there are effective managers. So, I think we might be missing something.

Yeah. If look, if you look at the people historically that have been in your team that you've had to move up.

Yeah.

Um what are the ones that succeeded in the exec role?

So, for sure the the they excelled at the manager role. So, let I'll back up. So, the way we've tried to select in the past at JLL, we used to do the 150% rule. So if you wanted to promote me to your role when you went on the the standard was I had to be able to do 100% of my job and 50% of your job and you had to proactively delegate to me 50% of your job over time. Um you know and then you'd go away for 2 3 week holiday and I would step into your shoes then you come back what did I fail at da da da. Um, so what are the trends between people who've succeeded?

People that started that program,

what was the percentage of success?

Pretty low.

Oh, so a lot of people didn't actually meet make it to exactly. Okay.

No, we haven't missed something. We haven't missed something.

A lot of people don't like it because uh they discover actually the next level up is 100% more complicated, not 10%. Um, and they would decide they didn't want to pay that price. Um, things come at you from so many more angles. Um,

so tell me about the people that that succeeded. What do they have?

It's a really good question, isn't it? It was an age and it wasn't necessarily experience in the task. They were definitely curious and wanted to grow. Definitely curiosity in growth mindset. I actually think that might be the biggest thing that whole loving to grow challenge solving problem thing. I wonder whether that's a symptom and maybe there's a root cause that they've um I think I think everybody's driven by something.

It might be family, it might be money, it might be fame, fortune, belonging, love, whatever it is, right? Everybody is driven by something.

Y

but if they're driven by something that's aligned to the organization.

So if I'm driven by family,

I'm not going to work hard.

Nothing wrong with that, but I just won't do the extra hours. But if I'm driven by growth, um I want to get driven by ambition, I will work the hours I need to work and I'll sacrifice other parts of my life to suit. So I'll I'll chew through any wall that I find to solve that problem

the other side.

Yeah, that feels pretty true.

And then once someone has got that, if you put the resources in front of them, they'll use them.

So if let's just use a real simple one. They're driven by ambition. They want to get to the most senior job, bro. They will work hard. they'll naturally have the grit cuz I think even if you don't have grit when you have enough ambition you'll develop that grit

like in despite failure you just know that's going to happen one day or you want it so hard that you'll try again. Could that be one of the factors then?

They've got um a motivator that's aligned to the organization.

Yep. Yep. I agree with that actually. Definitely cuz thinking back one of the big things in a lot of my roles at JL were very international, right? So it had to be someone who wanted who perceived that as being of value right they wanted to have that international experience in some way shape or form and all the prices that come you know that you paid

if I look at the ones that have succeeded in in my experience it's the ones that really wanted it

they are the ones with the more money they wanted to be the most senior person

and the ones that haven't succeeded it's the ones that I've kind of plucked out and pushed up

because I saw a lot of competence a lot of skills in them

but they didn't want it for a deeply internal reason. Deeply internally, they wanted to do something else, right? They wanted to spend more time at the beach. Actually, most mean family.

Yeah.

They wanted to spend more time with their wife and kids, which is fantastic.

Which is not a bad trade-off for

Yeah. Which is fantastic,

but it's not always completely congruous to being an executive.

Yeah. And it's not what you need always.

Yeah. So, it's not what you need always.

Yeah. Have you heard the phrase life in the box?

No. No. Tell me.

Executive life is life in a box. Like you you stop being who you are. You put your life on hold. You live inside the box of what the organization expects from you and that's your role to deliver what your customers need

etc. And that's it basically.

Yeah.

And that's what it feels like a lot.

I think so. Yeah.

I mean the other thing that makes that box harder is you know how guys get pat leave now

which is amazing. I'm very close to my kids.

Yeah.

But my experience has been my mates have gone on pat leave.

Yeah.

Um they don't care about their work as much

cuz they actually love their family.

Yeah. Yeah, they actually enjoy spending time with their kids. They actually want to get out of work at 5:30 so go, you know, put their kids to bed.

Yeah. I wonder if that'll sustain or if that, you know, as the kids get older, they'll refine

and then they want to get out. I don't know. But my experience has only been for because Pat's been very new. So for people with very very young kids,

but the ones with young kids that have taken pat on average, they're actually a lot happier. They're a lot more content with their lives,

but they don't push as hard in the corporate world anymore. So, I got to be honest. I mean, part of the way I restructured my life is because of that, right? So, I can pick up my daughter at 3:00 or my son or whatever. And that was to be around more was an explicit goal. I just didn't give up on the ambition thing at the same time.

So, that probably just means that family is a driver, but there's another driver inside you which is still kind of kind of pushing you forward.

So, then we need to select for ambition or growth or whatever.

Well, so let's write that as the first quality, right? So the first quality for manager to executive is they've got um an aligned motivator.

Yep.

And is it on motivation and is it just ambition and growth? Is it?

Yeah.

They're the big ones, right? Yeah.

They're the ones that are very easy to see.

Yep.

Is it growth or just ambition?

No, it's growth as well because you can sit at the top of the tree and that's distinct from wanting a bigger tree.

Yeah. Okay. So ambition, growth. What What else have you seen in common? I mean that growth mindset, right? The the willingness to learn,

right? What your your job today will be different in six months and different again in six months from that. So they need to proactively go out and seek that out.

So we'll bund that all into the motivation of growth ambition.

Yep. Okay.

Um

what else? [snorts] The best have a bit of a killer instinct. Hate to lose.

They've got the bastard in them.

Yeah. That's a little different to ambition, right? Little Yeah. Maybe it's just a deeper version of the, you know, we spoke about difficult conversations before.

Y

um and this is they actually don't mind at all to be hated.

Yeah.

Like it is proper. I'm okay if you hate my guts,

but I'm going to succeed at this.

Yeah.

And maybe there's something about their internal their internal validation doesn't always come externally.

Yeah.

The best people will, you know, if they need to get rid of a whole team because they're not performing, they'll go and do it.

Yeah.

Or a customer that's not worth it or whatever. Um, so I don't know if that's distinct from ambition, but the best of them have that.

I think I think it is distinct because you'll meet lots of ambitious people.

Yeah.

And perhaps one of the reasons they don't succeed is they don't have that killer instinct.

Yeah. Maybe killer instinct. That's a good one.

Yep.

Although the first two that we've written, um, very hard to teach motivation. I think you can kind of edge around killer instinct, but it's hard to get that deep in someone if they don't have it.

Yeah. So far we've got two that are not really teachable. What else? What else would there be?

There's a bunch of technical skills which we already talked about, right? And they're teachable. So they need to be able to do change management. They need to be able to

manage a project

to find a vision or manage a project, right? You know, there's a bunch of

HR stuff, legal stuff,

all that. There's a lot of technical skills. Um but they're coachable.

Yeah.

Yeah. And again, that's a problem of money basically.

Well, maybe it's that and then that they can be was is the difference with the first individual manager? It's more about stuff you can't teach. With manager executive, well, there's maybe only a couple of things that they already have to have in them and the rest of it you can supplement.

Yeah. To even to get to be considered for an executive, they've demonstrated a lot of the ability to learn and take on stuff and Yeah. So, they kind of have solved that problem already. There's more to do,

but they've shown they can do it.

Yeah. They they can do the basic foundational stuff. They can make things work. Y

um if I think about like the people that have been managed that have not gone any higher often they've lacked that ambition.

They're happy. They're content. They don't want any more stress. They don't want to travel. They've got family at home. They don't want to you know do extra long phone calls at night because of whatever reason they want their personal life balance or whatever whatever it is they're searching for in life.

So if we use these filters and build a team that matches these what's the impact on our customers and the and the business. So if we've got individual contributors who are disciplined, technically competent, think through things with a longer arc of time, excited by growth,

they would be the ones that are managers. So your individual contributors would stay the same.

Yep.

So the manager would have those five uh competences y

of those five qualities and you just picked out those individuals and pop them into the manager role.

Yep. Okay. And then at the exact level, if you've got a leadership team who are aligned with your growth goals and ambitions and a killer instinct and able to learn the other stuff, it's good business.

I don't know what could go wrong. I mean, cuz on the manager level, those five qualities, they'll push down to their team, right?

Yep.

Um, and they'll hopefully build a team that will somewhat self- select.

And if you don't have personal discipline and the other eight guys do, you'll kind of feel like, I don't fit here, and you'll go do something else. Anyway, and then for the executive with the managers,

so I don't think the exec's qualities of like ambition and killer instinct. Killer instinct you could teach teach bits of. So they'll see the exec having to fire someone for them, right? Cuz a manager will come up to them and be like, "Oh, this is guy not really working out, you know, we're we're good friends and and the exec will be like, "No, we're cutting him."

And they'll probably be able to demonstrate some of those skills and they might see some of that stuff happening and you might rub off on that a bit. Growth ambition, you probably won't push that down. No,

it's one of those things I think that I think you're born with or or you're not.

Yeah. Or you pick up somehow, but

yeah, it somehow gets embedded into you in Young Life and then all the other skills like EOS and all that stuff, you just coach people and you just coach your exact ethics.

Yeah. Just use the standard tools.

And how would you do that? Like how would you systematically make sure you coach your let's say let's say you got 10 managers,

you've here the two that have the growth, ambition, killer, instinct. They're the two that I want to coach. How does one go about coaching them? Um, so there's the day-to-day and there's longer term. So dayto-day the classic thing is in your one-on-one say here's the problem we're going to figure out. You go find all the resources and then every week report back to me on how you're going consuming all those resources. And the standard that for learning it is that you can do ABC without error or whatever. Right? What I really like is actually the cascade of coaches. So you get people into a coaching program.

I really like Vistage or EO whatever. Right? But sitting with peers in similar situations, not in their industry but similar leadership roles, that's I found the most effective actually because there's something about the personal interaction. I mean that's how we met, right? Like and you run a group like that, it's very effective.

Yeah.

Um Yeah.

Is that sold or is any other lenses we haven't considered?

So I'm a shareholder. I own this business. If I sent this to me as a shareholder, would I be happy with this conversation? Yeah, I think so. If I was a customer, yeah, I think I would be as well, right? And if I was one of the staff, yeah, it's kind of Yeah, I think we've solved it.

Kind of fits because if you have a manager with those qualities, the individual be will be happy. We got an executive with those qualities. The manager will be happy and exec with that quality shareholders will will hopefully do well.

Yep. And then every customer should be able to say, you know, it's a well-run business. They got a killer instinct to get the right thing done for it. M yeah

and I think with managers it's that one thing we touched about so executives coaching takes a long time.

Mhm.

It can be like a multi-year process.

Yes. But it's also the most satisfying part I think. Like when you see someone's career develop, it's fantastic. Right. So yeah.

Do you have that kind of time scale? I would have thought you wouldn't cuz you're kind of acquiring. Did one last year going to do another one this year, probably another one the year after. I'm I'm assuming.

Yep. that maybe for your executive that's actually one of the ones you want to go external for sooner.

Maybe or they'll step up but we'll solve the problem one way or another.

But even stepping up it's going to take a long time.

I don't think so.

No.

Yeah. In my own experience I went from

It might just take more of your time, right? More of your time coaching and spending time with them.

Yeah. So I went

Yeah. So I've seen it done basically. So I went from individual contributor at 25 to team of 300 by 30.

Okay.

So I it's definitely doable. Yeah, that's still five years.

Yeah, sure.

Five years. But then you had the manager there for a couple of years and then you did that.

Okay.

And if it doesn't, then we'll solve the problem another way, right?

Any any other lenses we haven't considered?

I'm resisting asking about AI because it seems like it comes up everywhere. Should I be using AI to assess people?

If you ask me, I know I think it's people thing.

Yeah.

I think I think you go with your gut.

With the gut. Yeah.

Cuz you need literally hundreds of data points to figure out any of these things.

Yeah. You need so many conversations and nuances to figure out does this guy actually have growth and ambition? He just told me what I want to hear. Is he actually demonstrating that in in his actions? Cuz a lot of people have growth and ambition desires but then will never do the hard work to get there.

So you want that that I don't think you can AI yet?

When or should I bring in HR to help?

Do I do I because this is the strategic stuff, the people development is the strategy stuff and then you got compliance and you got process and all of that. How do you think about that?

So my experience with HR is assume the compliance stuff like they they can do that better. They're skilled. They can help you hire, fire, do employment contracts, all that kind of stuff. I find in my experience, HR managers have not been CEOs and you have to be a CEO to coach this stuff effectively. You've got to have lived it yourself. I'm sure you've been in presentations in your Vigage group. I've been in ones where someone's presenting something, the content's fantastic, but when you ask them a probing question, you get this spidey sense, this guy actually doesn't know.

And I get that with HR that it's not a people, culture, values thing that you need an external person for. I think it's someone of your level of competence.

Um, it's someone of your level of competence spending time with them because you've lived this life, right? You've been an MD of a large organization with,400 employees. Yep.

So, I wouldn't actually use anyone external for this thing.

Maybe they'll help you with the framework as to what you want to do or how you want to assess, but EOS, I'm sure, will probably have enough of that.

Yeah, a lot of it you can just buy from vendors, right?

Yeah, it's very straightforward.

Okay. No, I think we're good.

Yeah. Perfect.

Thanks.

Sounds good. So, last thing I always finish up with. Um, so tell me, what is something that you've um always known to be true? Yep.

That later on you found out wasn't? [laughter] something that I've always known to be true and that I later found out wasn't. I don't know how to say it exactly, but it's something around how much age puts you in a different chair and you see the world differently depending on like if you cut your life up into each decade, you have so much confidence about the way the world is and then you go 10 years later and you look back at yourself and go, "Whoa, I did not understand that." And I'm butting makes what makes me think of that today is my 15-year-old son, right? And I'm just that confidence that teenagers have and that exploration of the world which I love, but at the same time there's just a part of me that's always biting back a little bit going quite like that.

But you keep looking but it's not quite like that. So yeah.

Does that answer the question?

Yeah. Perfect. Awesome. Great. Thank you very much.

Cheers.

Thanks guys.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you do want to be a guest, make [music] sure you hit me up and do follow me on socials and make sure you check