Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Welcome to the Victory Show.
Hey Victors, welcome to this week's Victory Show. If this is the first time you're joining us, I'm Travis Cody, bestselling author of 16 books and I've had the privilege of helping hundreds of business consultants, founders and entrepreneurs write and publish their own best selling books. And in my journey I've discovered a fascinating pattern. A lot of businesses hit a revenue plateau and they struggle to break through it. On this show I sit down with some of the world's most successful CEOs, leaders and business owners to uncover the strategies they use to overcome those plateaus and scale their business to new heights. So if you're looking to learn from the best and get actionable insights that can propel your business forward, you're in the right place. And today, my goodness, do we have a fantastic interview in place.
Puru Patel is an inspiring business leader with 25 plus years experience overseeing and leading organizations to increase revenue, drive innovation, improve control costs and enhance efficiencies. Just one of the things she's done. Has a track record of building 80 plus million dollar per year businesses. She's led digital innovation transformation programs. She's consistently delivered business results for hands on delivery coaching empowering teams as small as five to multiple hundreds of people helping them to leverage their strengths and passions to make impacts in business and communities. Now today Peru is currently the president of ATG Pilocity. It's a 20 year old Jacksonville based company providing talent solutions supporting the end to end employee life cycle where they use data and science to get to know the person behind the paper and that's very important. We're going to talk a lot about that today so that they can support individuals to open the aperture for career and job opportunities based on their knowledge, their skills, their abilities and interests. This is very specific to that particular person which is something that's really missing from the workspace today. Peru has worked with over 30 organizations, many leaders as a trusted executive advisor to CEOs, CTOs, CDOs to help them drive change and leadership development. Coach for teams and individuals. Now as a coach, Parule leverages science based insights and organizational behavior methodologies to provide one to one coaching for not just individuals to enhance their workplace performance, but also in team coaching to improve team dynamics and move towards higher performance. In addition to her corporate experience, Peru is also a passionate executive sponsoring and leading initiatives to advocate for diversity in corporate organizations with Accenture and Shalom and in the community through Score Chief, Dress for Success Upward and Alliance for Fertility preservation, Peru. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm so excited for our conversation.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. I'm excited.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: So what's fantastic about your career is that you've seen it all. Not only have you lived it yourself by starting at the bottom and working your way up to taking over these huge organizations and you continue to run large organizations today, but you're also an advisor to CEOs.
So it's not just your personal lens that you're bringing to it. It's the grand spectrum of seeing multiple CEOs across multiple organizations, across multiple industries, and how all of those things take take place for that. But so let's, before we get into that, let's talk about a little bit about your journey because leadership and especially C suite leadership and corporate leadership, that's a very specific kind of career path. So was that something that you set out intentionally to do or did that sort of just call you into it?
[00:03:44] Speaker B: No, I didn't intentionally set out. Like had you asked me, I'm an engineer by degree and I was in college as a biomedical engineer. Oh, like one day you're going to be, you know, running a company or being, you know, advising CEOs. I would say no, you're crazy. That's not what I'm going to do.
So I would say that, no, that's not what I set out to do.
But the path I've been on, I think just got me to this place in this journey and I do think it's a journey.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: Great journey. And that's, I think, the piece that we'll talk a little bit more about for sure.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: Well, it's fascinating then because that means. So your training is in engineering. Now when you came out of school, did you go into an engineering related job and then that sort of. Or did you get the engineering training and then like do a pivot when you got out of school?
[00:04:35] Speaker B: My hopes and dreams, I, I said, oh, like I'm going to work for an engineering startup and I'm going to discover the next. I was doing some cardiac research with the startup and I loved it. And, and then somebody looked me in the eye the some of the PhDs I was working with and they said if you really like writing grants, you're going to spend 80% of your time doing that and 20% of your time doing research, so rethink what you really want to do. And I went, oh no, like that's. That, that wasn't my vision. Right.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: You're like, I didn't Have a class on grant writing. What is this?
[00:05:07] Speaker B: That's right. Like that wasn't part of the deal. And so, so then someone said, you should look into this thing called consulting back in the day.
And so in 98, I ended up taking a job with an organization at the time called Anderson Consulting.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Then went on to become Accenture. And I spent the first 10 years of my career. Career doing engineering and manufacturing consulting. And so I felt like I was in this really great place because my passion was engineering. And here I was working with different organizations, helping them figure out how do I engineer products better, how do I bring them to market, how do I manufacture better, more efficiently. Right. Less quality issues, et cetera. And so I really enjoyed it.
And that's just kind of where the journey starts.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: Well, what a, what a great way to kind of come out of it then too, because you are in engineering, but literally every month you're working on a new engineering program. You're not, you're not in one program for years and years and years where everything's the same. So.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: Okay, so.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: You'Re consulting there. So what, what was the sort of, I guess the, was there one particular experience where in your careers and consultant, you're a decade into it, that sort of pivoted you towards starting to become more of a leader in the business organizations themselves.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: So I think as I grew, it was about having impact.
And so for me.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: I'm very, I guess, mission driven and impact oriented is really important to me. So the journey and the path I followed was really around, okay, where can I have greater impact?
Where can I be mission oriented and focused? And so that journey led me to looking at end to end supply chain, looking at large organizations, operational efficiency across organizations that are billions of dollars, and how do we make these better? But then I got to a place in my career where I started to get into smaller businesses.
And that was my kind of flavor of true innovation. How do we think outside of the box, create new product or create a new business?
And I started to dabble and was like, oh, this is really.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: So you're consulting bigger businesses and your side hustle was like, let me try to start a new one and see what happens.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: Well, and that's. Well, when I moved from Accenture, So I spent 18 years at Accenture and then I went on to Slalom consulting and spent seven years there. And Slalom is where I had the opportunity to be with smaller organizations or big organizations that said, hey, I want to launch this new business. Is it possible? How would I do it can I use technology to enable it? And that was when I really dabbled in innovation and. And found out, like, oh, this is for me. This is what I love. And so.
So I'll tell you where the light bulb really clicked for me. So I've always led, like, so the journey had me leading bigger and bigger teams. Sure, right. Delivering bigger and bigger, which is funny.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: Because you're going bigger and bigger and bigger. And then you got to a point where now you're, like, starting back over at the beginning. Well, right.
[00:08:15] Speaker B: And then I got this place where I was like, oh, like, what I love is the small. Like, what I love is innovating and thinking of new ideas, and is it possible? Can we make it happen? And where it really clicked for me is I actually, when I was at Slalom, helped Fairing Pharmaceuticals launch a new business called Fertility House Calls. You can go out onto the web and you can find it today. Fertilityhousecalls.com and what we were trying. We have this hypothesis where we said, how can we make IVF and fertility treatment and consultation more accessible?
Why not be able to bring it into a home versus having people go to a clinic?
There's an executive, she had this idea, and she's brainstormed with me, and she goes, can we make it real? And I said, let's figure it out. So. So we did.
[00:09:02] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: We launched that new product. And that process, that project was probably my turning point where I said, this is what I want to do. I want to figure out how to launch new businesses, help people figure out how to.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: Well, and with something like that and talking about making an impact, like, you know, I've had friends that have been down the fertility route, and, you know, some of them are in really rural communities, and the nearest clinic is three, four hours away. Right, right. So even trying, like, it's such a sacrifice and so expensive when.
Especially if you got to keep going back to the lab and it's four hours away. So the. The fact that you've taken that now and made it accessible to homes, I mean, boy, what a game changer. Yeah.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: It was just so. That, to me, was awesome. Right. And that is what led me on this path. Like, so I, you know, I do a lot of work with nonprofits as well, which dress for success, success, et cetera, and the alliance for Fertility Preservation.
That's how I got introduced to that organization as well. Around. How do we help cancer patients still not worry about parenthood. Right.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: I'm.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: There's. It's enough to worry about. When it comes to cancer.
[00:10:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: But like let's, let's say, let's just figure out how, how do we preserve your ability to have children if that's something that you want to do in the future and let you focus on getting healthy again. Right. And beating the cancer. And so again, very passion driven.
But that's, I think what sparked me into big organizations are awesome and great.
What I think I really love are the small ones. And you know, I think it's great as you talk about this book that you want to write is the strategies for people get stuck in a business, right? Like I get to a place, I have this great idea, I get it to half a million dollars or I get it to $1 million and then it's not going anywhere from there. And, and so to me, that's an awesome challenge to sit down with the CEO and go, let's talk about what's really happening in your business, right? And, and when I say what's happening in your business, like I want to see your financials, I want to see your talent, right. And then I want to see your product.
Everything else, you know, I don't really need to look at that much more than those three things.
And then we can unpack the challenge and figure out how do we unlock.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: And get past the million dollars.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: Well, before we started the call today, you were also talking about how, and we'll get into this later, but a lot of what your technology is doing is helping find the right job for that person's specific skill set. And I find that really interesting because I've done sales copy and marketing consulting for, for some decent sized businesses in the eight to $10 million range.
And, and what was really fascinating is going to some of these businesses is that especially in entrepreneurship, you know, we, we see someone like Elon Musk and it's just like don't sleep and hustle and grind and anybody can be a founder and do all this stuff. But nowhere in that conversation is there a thing of going, do you even have the skill set to be a leader?
So you're going to start the business and you can scale and get to a point. So like some of the guys that I, that I worked with, they were, they were phenomenal salespeople.
[00:12:21] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:12:22] Speaker A: They could make it rain money.
Managing a team, a nightmare. They did not have that skill.
So then they were like making all this money. But then the internally behind the scenes, like, you know, teams of 30 and everyone was stressed out and it was chaos, chaos because that person didn't have the skill of like, coaching and team leadership and whatever. So he was just. So I, I think that's really fascinating with what you're doing now is like, how do we help a person go, where are you? What are you ideally suited for? And let's go there and then let's find the people to support you in the areas that you may not be strong in.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: That's right. Well, and, you know, you bring up a great point. And I think this is, as we think about anyone who's running a business today and who is in this role of a CEO or a president or what it. What have you. Right? Like just leader of business, period, Whatever title it might be, is being able to look in the mirror, like, really objectively. And that's what assessments, really. Psychometric assessments. That's what they really help.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: No, don't make me go in the mirror.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Yeah, and.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: And like, and it can be, it can be painful sometimes to look in the mirror, but to look in the mirror and say, okay, this is really who I am.
And to be able to appreciate that and say, okay, like, I'm the CEO, I, I can make it rain, but I can't lead teams. Right. Like, that's not my strength.
So you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make sure I have a COO that can. That is the best people leader and of a business that I could ever find. Right? Because I can make it rain. And so. Or you're the CEO that goes, I love growing my talent. I, I can, I can run a project and run a business and be amazing at it, because I know the nuts and bolts of projects and execution and delivery. I can't. I'm not good at making it rain. Well, you know what? Then I'm gonna go, my head of sales is going to be in the head of business fund. It's gonna be the best person I could ever find on this earth. Because what you're now looking for is, I'm finding the right partnerships. And those assessments really.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: They really help me do that. They give me the insight, if I'm willing to listen to it, and then say, how do I build the right team? And the right team can do anything. That's my. I think if it was one thing I could tell somebody, like, tell any CEO or any leader.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: The right team can do anything if you, if you build them.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: And I saw a quote from someone one time, and he was, you know, he's talking about. He was like, he was, he's like, I'm not knocking on Steve Jobs. Genius. He's obviously was a genius and he's like, but without Tim Cook, who was the master of execution, Steve Jobs would have not been the name that we know today because Steve Jobs didn't know how to like get things executed and implemented. He was the idea guy. And Tim Cook has admittedly said, I'm not really the idea guy, but you give me the problem and he can go get it solved.
So those two guys together created the world's first trillion dollar company, which I think is interesting.
So this is fascinating because so you've got your foot in billion dollar companies and then you're starting to work with startups, so you're seeing the end result of where they want to get to. So from that lens, then let's go through with what are some of the phases that startups will go to? So let's say I'm a founder, I've got a good idea, maybe I'm bootstrapping and I've got $100,000 to launch my business.
Like, so what, what are the, what are the challenges in like year one through three? And then, and then where, where do those challenges then start shifting into bigger problems?
[00:16:02] Speaker B: Yeah, well, so I think there's different breaking points, right? And, and I will just do one reference to someone named Ichak Adizis and he has a book, like an author from years ago and he was a researcher, right. And around the, the life cycle of an organization.
So I love it. And I love it because the life cycle of an organization actually follows the life cycle of a human.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: And, and so birth, right, the idea and it's like a bell curve, right? And that birth, we birth a business, we feed it and we nourish it and we give it a lot of money and we give it a lot of attention, right? And we try to get it to grow and we let it grow, grow, grow. So this, there's a start and then you hit this half a million million dollar point, right? You've grown, you've invested your time and money into it and it, it's still an infant.
Well now when I have that infant, I have to start to put structure around it. So to go from like the million dollar mark to the 10 million dollar mark or the, you know, 1 to 2 million to 10 million is hard.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: To get. From 1 to 2 to 10 million requires structure, intent.
[00:17:20] Speaker B: And if you can't figure out the right structure, it's a balance of too much structure, you die.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: The baby is malnourished.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: And not enough structure, and all of a sudden, everybody's on their own doing their own thing, and everyone's going in 10 different directions, and there's chaos and you have no control. And so now you still can't hit your goals, right? And so there's this balance that you have to find. And so he talks about, you go from being an infant, like a baby infant adolescent, to being mature.
And, and then once you're mature, you now have to run the organization and continue to innovate, continue to grow, grow. If you don't, you go down this death spiral. If you too much process, too many people too, right? Like, you grow too big, too fast, your OPEX is gonna. Is gonna weigh you down, your margins go down, and you die as an organization. Right? And so I, I think it's really fascinating that there's these points of birth. 1 to 2 million, 2 million to 10 million, 10 million to 100 million.
And then I think once you start to get past 100 million, you can really ex.
You really can accelerate your engines.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: And, and you be. You get into a really good mode. So I hope that it sounds like.
[00:18:51] Speaker A: That 2 to 10 million is like the bratty teenager phase.
Most of my clients never get out of that.
[00:19:01] Speaker A: You're just like, what is going on here? Every day it's a different person.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: Yes, yes, this is exactly. That is what happens in organizations. This is.
If you think of it through that lens, it's quite fascinating.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: So, okay, so that's great on the business front, but now let's pivot a little bit and talk about your work as an advisor and as a coach, especially to leaders.
Because.
[00:19:26] Speaker A: You know, a lot of times the, the founders and the leaders end up being the bottlenecks in the business growth.
So what are, what are challenges that you see as. As. As an outside observer working with, with leaders? What are. Is there two or three sort of common things that will kind of prevent someone from, you know, reaching the success that they could have otherwise?
[00:19:50] Speaker B: There are. And so some of the things that I see in leadership.
[00:19:56] Speaker B: As we, as we move up a leadership ladder or we take on the role of a leader, right? And I have an idea, and I turn it into a business, and I'm a new CEO.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: I always struggle with letting go, trusting other people to do some of the work, and this vicious cycle that I see CEOs go through all of the time and that I like to have very real conversations about.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: Is, is that they.
They say, okay, you know what, you're right. I have to let go. I can't do all this work myself because I'm the bottleneck, right? So I'm gonna get someone else to do the work. So they give the work to somebody else. The person does the work. They don't do it to the quality that they. Or by the. In the timeline that the CE CEO expects, they get disappointed, they take the work back, and, well, I'll just do.
[00:20:53] Speaker A: It faster and easier and cost me.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: Less to just do myself easier, right? Like, I like. And I know what I'm looking for. I'll just do it myself. They take it back. They do it themselves. They're up all night, and then they're exhausted the next day and that. And then they. And then, you know, a couple weeks go by, they go, oh, my gosh, I got to give the work to somebody else. They give it to a different person.
Same thing happens.
And so I see that vicious cycle over and over.
And for CEOs, I would say, should you be doing the work or not? Ask yourself, you have something come across your desk. Are you like, you could do the work. We know you can, because you've gotten the business to where it is. You could do it, but should you do it? Ask yourself that question number one.
Nine times out of ten, the answer should be no.
So then the next question is, then who should do the work?
Find the person who should do the work.
Most people, if you've hired people in your. On your teams, most people will be able to do the work.
So you find, okay, this person should do the work.
Step two and step three, and this is where people. This is the piece that people forget to do is then you clearly say, here is when what I need you to do. Here is when I need you to do it. By here is what good looks like?
And I expect you to come back to me when you are done and give me the update of where you're at.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Wait, you mean by giving someone clear parameters, we get a better result?
[00:22:27] Speaker B: Yes, clear expectations, number one.
And number two, the accountability is on you to come back to me. I will not chase you.
Right. And CEO is, what do we do? Like, we. Okay, like, I give somebody a task, and then I'm like, oh, did you do this? Did you do this? Like, you got to keep following up, right? And then all of a sudden, you're not a CEO. You're a project manager, and you're a very highly paid project, right at that point. And you get frustrated because you're like, why do I have to keep following up with this person. Person.
[00:23:00] Speaker B: So the last piece of I expect you to come back to me and tell me how you are doing and when you are done, what's the accountability on a person, the other person that they have to give you the status update. You are not going to go ask for that. And you've got to close that loop. And that is the exercise, actually that I spend a lot of time with.
CEOs, CIOs, etc, I was coaching a CIO. He's great, he's brilliant.
So good at what he does in his space.
But he was getting so frustrated because he would give his team something, it would come back late, it would not come back looking right. He could just do it himself. So he's like, I'll just do it myself. And his CEO said to me, can you please coach him? Like, I can't have him doing all the work. He's got a department 100 people.
And I said, okay. And we walked through this and we just talked about how do you let go, right? But letting go means being really clear with people on what you expect.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: You know, this is kind of. This is going to be a bad analogy, but it's just like for what the work that I do with. When you're. When someone's working on a book, like, it's really easy to get caught up in like, it's got to be perfect. I get perfection, right? And about by my. And my first couple of books were that way. They probably took me twice as long because of that. And then my third book, I actually had a publisher and I remember that they had a team of editors that went through it. And I'm like, it's got to be perfect. So then I hired my own editors to go through it. And then I gave it to like, you know, 18 beta readers to go through it all. And I'm like, this is it. And we publish it and I get the physical copy, copy in. And in the first six pages, I caught three typos.
And I was like, 40 people looked at this manuscript.
[00:24:53] Speaker A: And I realized I was like, you know what?
There comes a point with a book, as an author, you just have to say, this is good enough. And I have to go. And you know, a lot of people say, how do you have 16 books? And I was like. Because I got to the point where I'm like, this is good enough. And I have to go.
And I think to your point there too, right? As a leader, getting comfortable with the fact that like no one's going to do it. As, as good as you are. But can they do it good enough that you can go, right. And that, that is. That's a really. That's really hard for. Because we live in a perfectionist society. Like, oh, if I, If I. It's not perfect, I'm gonna get dinged or I'm gonna get a red check mark on my paper. Right. Or it's gonna make me. That means that I'm, I'm. I'm.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: That.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: That's a personal thing to me of like, oh, that was wrong. So that reflects that I'm wrong. Right. I think that sometimes the psychology people have.
Yeah.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: And there's some professions, right. And some jobs out there that you do got to be good at because there's. There's.
[00:25:48] Speaker A: Yeah. You don't want surgeons doing good enough surgery. That's a good point.
[00:25:51] Speaker B: Like, I need you to have it. Get it perfect 100 of the time. Right. But. But there's a majority of. Of what we do out in the world and how we live that doesn't have to be perfect, and it's okay. But I do think that the thing that becomes really important for people and you don't have to be a CEO to follow this. Right. The. This works with my kids too, by the way. Right. Is being really clear on here's what I expect.
And. Because then they know what to like. They know what good looks like. They know what they want me to like, what they have to come back with or what what I'm hoping to see. And sometimes we forget that part and we just guess, like, oh, I think she's going to want this, this, and this. So I'm going to try. Like, that's what I think she wants, so that's what I'll give her.
But, you know, like. And so.
[00:26:43] Speaker A: So I'm not clear.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: You're not clear. And the more clear we get, the happier everybody is and the better outcome you're going to get.
[00:26:51] Speaker A: Well, from my own childhood, my parents had very clear guidelines, right? And so for me, like, my friends all the time would be getting grounded because they were doing, breaking rules and doing. And I would get confused because I. None of my friends could go do stuff because they were grounded for something. And they're like, they're like, your parents give you so much freedom. I was like, yeah, they gave me, like, these five conditions, and as long as I meet those five conditions, like, my freedom expands. I can do more.
Right? So, like, when you're giving somebody clear boundaries, again from my work, when you, like, here's the expectation.
Now that they know what the baseline is, then you usually start seeing people's creativity coming out where they're going, okay, this is the base, but how can I surpass the base expectation? Right. And you end up starting getting really out of the box thinking and work. Because I've met this, but now what else can I do to improve it?
[00:27:40] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: So what are some of the challenges then for, you know, so you're doing one on one work, but what are some of the challenges when we get into a team dynamic and how do we, how do we work with. With, with teams especially, again, right, as we're scaling, let's say you like most of the clients that are in like the, the million dollar range, five to ten employees maybe. And so, right. So when you scale to say 5 or 10 million, suddenly you go from 5 employees to 25 or 30. Like that's a, that's a quite a bit different of a dynamic.
[00:28:09] Speaker B: Yeah, it.
[00:28:12] Speaker B: The number one.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: Challenge, right, and opportunity with any team is communication.
[00:28:20] Speaker B: Period. And, and so when I work with teams, it is about communicating with each other, communicating who I am, what I'm thinking, what I'm expecting and then stopping.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: And so I always. There's also another saying that I like to use with people and I use it with my kids all the time. God gave us one mouth and two ears because we were intended to listen twice as much as we are to speak.
So share your thoughts and your perspective. Perspective and then, and just listen and listen to the other people on the team, right? Understand who they are and how you can communicate with them and how you all can collaborate together. And so again, like the work we do today, when I coach with teams, I start from data and science of. I use psychometric assessments, right? Emotional intelligence assessments. Understand, here's who all these different people are.
All of these people can work together no matter what. It doesn't matter who you are. We can find a way for you to work together. It's a matter of us understanding how you work and who you are. And if I can help you understand each other, then you're going to work better together.
[00:29:38] Speaker B: That's what breaks it all down. This is why I love this concept of assessments and getting to know the person behind the paper.
That's my favorite thing, get to know the person because we can really.
You change a lot of dynamics that way. And so I, when I work with teams, it's about, hey, let's just like if, if my hair's on fire, if if my hair's on fire, what do I look like, right? And like, right what? What? Like, if you're looking at me and my hair's on fire, here's what you're gonna see. And. And I tell people, like, if I'm stressed, I am talking fast. I am moving fast. I like. I like, I look like a tornado running around in a room right then.
[00:30:25] Speaker A: As meaning devil cartoon.
[00:30:27] Speaker B: Yeah, like, she's stressed, right? And we did this exercise actually with atg, plasti, the organization I'm with, and every person, we drew these pictures and made people draw pictures of. What do you look like, like, when you're stressed and what do you do, right? And one person on team's like, I just get quiet, say nothing, right? And I'm the tornado.
And another person's like, I start email.
[00:30:51] Speaker B: And so it was. We all laughed, right? We laughed at our pictures.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: We laughed at who also having that. So it's just having that understanding that we're human right there. We're people. You know, I'm working with a client last year, and she has a process. It's all communication.
But she. She had this concept of.
[00:31:08] Speaker B: She.
[00:31:08] Speaker A: She called them thought clouds.
She's like, everybody's got thought clouds. And so she's like, you. You come into a boardroom and there's eight people there, and it ends up not being a great meeting, right? But if you could actually, like, in the cartoons had the thought cloud out there, right? One person's like, in their thought cloud is like, my God, I didn't sleep good last night, and I feel like garbage. And that's what's going through their mind is one person's talking and the next person's over their brain's going like, I just had a fight with my boyfriend. And the replaying the. And you know, and this person's like, man, my dog had to go to the vet this morning is sick.
And then we're trying to communicate in all of that. And so. And so what you were saying there, like, she did a kind of a version of. That is before they'd start a meeting, they were like, okay, what's your thought cloud today? And so, you know, so the person could acknowledge like, I slept like garbage last night. I feel awful. Okay, great. So we can support you. And. But just by the fact of sharing, like, this is what's in my head right now, it cleared it out. And then people could be present for the meeting, but then they also were able to support everybody of like, oh, we're not Just like working robots here. Everybody has stuff going on that and that and, and that's also another layer of the communication. Right. Having the empathy and, and, and communicating with people that they are. So like, for you, when you're, when you're running around and talking a million miles an hour, it's probably not a good idea to come to you and be like, I have an idea. That's right. Yeah.
[00:32:24] Speaker B: It's not, it's not going to land for sure.
[00:32:26] Speaker A: It's going to hit the tornado and go flying off into the ether.
[00:32:29] Speaker B: That's right. I love the thought cloud, actually. I'm going to. Whoever gave that reference.
[00:32:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Carrie Lishen, thank you very much. It's called the CQFI process, if you want to look it up.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, I, I'm taking that idea for sure. I love it.
[00:32:41] Speaker A: I'll, I'll connect you to. You guys can have a conversation.
So let's talk about now what you're doing, which is, you know, we talked about this earlier, but we are in this, this.
The phrase I gave it was we're in the age of algorithms and AI, right? And everybody now every. Like you. So you're talking like in the hiring process, like all of the resumes getting submitted are going into an AI algorithm that sends, sorting everything and giving a score. And you know, I'm writing my, my resume by AI that's going into it. So people now are becoming chunks of data and there's like this, like, we're, we're removing the humanity from this process.
So how now do we embrace technology and data in a way that like, keeps the humanity in everything that we're doing and that, that's what you're doing now with your company. So let's talk about some of the processes you're developing of, of being able to use technology, but to do that in a way that allows me to see behind just that like paper resume that I'm looking at and actually seeing the person that's behind that.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we like to start. So I keep referencing data and science, right? And so to me, like, we're using technology to administer an assessment, a psychometric assessment that is research science based. Right. Decades and decades, Peter Saville, one of the fathers of assessments, created assessments, right. To help us understand how people.
According to six key workplace behaviors. Right. In dimensions.
How do you, how do you expect a person to perform and behave? So it's, you use the technology for a person to get insight into who they are, to put that mirror up and go, this is who I am and how I behave. And, and now I'm going to accept that. Right. Or I do an emotional intelligence test to understand here's where I am from an emotional intelligence standpoint. Here's how I deal with stress or my confidence level or how I like to show up as a leader. And so those data points, we start there.
And those data points give me a lot of insight into who you are as a person when you.
[00:34:50] Speaker A: Right.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: And so that's a great way to leverage technology.
Now I can take that and I can like what some of our clients do. A lot of our clients will say, okay, well, I have a job, posting a job description. People have given me a bunch of resumes. I'm going to go through interviews. All of those things are great and they're great data points. But I can now say, okay, why don't you take an assessment for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, I can look at a job description and understand here are the key competencies and skills needed to be successful in this job.
Right. I can look at, I can bump up your psych, your assessment results up against. Do you have the competencies and skills? How do yours compare to what's needed to be successful in the job? You may have a set of competencies and skills that might not fit, or they might be a perfect fit. And then you, you're a better fit for this job, but some of your competencies might be better actually for a different job. And so one of the easiest examples, we had a client who was trying to hire a sales executive, right? They said, I need somebody who's going to get out there and hunt.
We ran the assessments, we looked at the results. We said they had three candidates.
Candidate number one. Candidate number one was a great hunter.
Candidate number two would be a great farmer. Right? Because in the sales world, you have hunters and farmers.
[00:36:18] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:36:19] Speaker B: Number one was a great hunter. Number two was a great farmer. And number three was a great project manager.
Would not be a good hunter or.
[00:36:26] Speaker A: But they were all applying for the same job.
[00:36:28] Speaker B: They were all applying for the same job, had the exact same job description, gave us resumes that were fabulous about all the sales accomplishments that they had, had like agalist resumes. Your resume can say anything. You can tell people the right things and answer every interview question correctly.
We looked at their assessment results and we, I looked at it and I said, these are the skills and competencies needed to be successful in this specific job in your company.
We looked at each assessment result and we said, this is the right match. The person they hired, the hunter, he's, he's doing phenomenal. Like he is really going after it, right? And they, and the conversation with the other folks was.
[00:37:13] Speaker B: It, it's not that you don't have great skills and competencies. You have great skills and competencies. We just don't need a farmer right now.
When I need a farmer, I'll pick up the phone and give you a call, right? It's just not an alignment and a fit. And that's to me understanding the human, right? So when we say like get to know the person behind the paper, it's understanding the human and keeping the human piece in all of this age of algorithms and AI is.
And I can still use technology, right? Like, so we've automated this concept of I have a job description, I can go through a process to understand key skills and competencies and then I can run an assessment and use technology to understand how good of a fit you are. But that fit is never going to say yes or no. There's no binary.
Because humans are not binary. We are.
[00:38:03] Speaker A: It's good, better or best, right?
[00:38:05] Speaker B: That's right. And so it's about how much of a fit. And then the conversation that when you're hiring somebody is how much investment do you want to make in this person, right? If they're a fit, they could be an 80% fit.
Are you going to make the investment and set the right expectations for this role for the other 20% that they've got to work on?
And that's a decision you have to make when you hire.
[00:38:28] Speaker A: That's an interesting way to look at that of like you're an 80% fit. Do we, do we have the time and energy and money to invest to get that the rest of the 20% there, I've never heard that explained that way. That's a.
[00:38:40] Speaker B: Well, and so I, you know, I, I worked with, I'll give you a different example, right? A CEO of, you know, she's a CEO of a almost billion dollar company, right? She's trying to hire her chief, people, offices, new role in the organization, on the leadership team. We run the assessments. They tell us one piece of data. She says, let's go through the interview process.
She does all that. Her entire leadership team interviews the different candidates. They narrow it down to a set of candidates. I said let's go through a process we call an assessment center. And that is basically simulations, four hours of simulations. And every minute of that is looking at different behavior and you both are different exercises going in. She had A notion of, here's my rank order. These candidates coming out of it, she was like, holy cow. The one that she thought was the right one.
[00:39:37] Speaker B: And 30 minutes in, she was like, no way. This is not going to work. And one of the things that her and I talked a lot about, when we looked at each of the candidates, they went through the process. But I said, the number one thing I want you to figure out, and as you look at these, tell me which of these candidates are going to take work off of your plate.
Because if you hire somebody, that's number one thing. As a CEO, you don't want more work on your plate. You need to give work to somebody else.
Otherwise, don't hire the person as a leader.
Like, right. It's. So that's.
[00:40:14] Speaker A: Then that's probably an interesting habit, too, depending on where they were at in the founding process. Because if you're a solopreneur like, you get used to, I'm going to hire somebody, and I'm going to have to take two to three months to train them into what I need.
Right. But eventually when you. You reach a point, you can't do that anymore. But that habit is still there.
[00:40:33] Speaker B: Yeah. And we have to, like, let. We have to let go. And so we use again, right.
[00:40:38] Speaker A: The.
[00:40:39] Speaker B: We try to leverage the technology to give us better insight.
At the end of the day, we're. We're all human.
And so don't let the. Don't let the technology give you the right answer. You got to use the human.
The human.
[00:40:55] Speaker A: I heard the phrase along a while ago with somebody. He actually has an AI app in the marketing space, and people, you know, artificial artist, artificial. He's like, no, no, no. He's like, we don't use artificial intelligence. He's like, we use augmented intelligence.
He's like, the foundation of everything we've built has been based upon humans, and then we augment it, and then humans check.
And ever since I just thought about that, I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. I'm using augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence. And so you're able to keep humanity in the process. And that sounds like what you're doing. You've got the data sets, but it's just to assist you to be able to go deeper into the humanity. And ultimately, it sounds like you're finding people that are better fits for better roles so that everybody's happy, you know, the company's happy, Somebody gets a job that they're like, this is the perfect fit for me. I feel appreciated. I Feel recognized.
I mean, what a win win. Because 80% of the time it's probably the opposite. I don't know what I'm doing. They hired me for something completely different than what now I am doing, right?
[00:41:54] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:41:56] Speaker A: Well, this has been fantastic. So let's talk just a little bit quickly a little bit about your philanthropic work especially. I want to talk a little bit about score.
So how did you get involved in score? And first off, explain what SCORE is for people who don't know what that is, because I think it's a fantastic organization.
[00:42:14] Speaker B: Yes.
So SCORE is a nonprofit affiliated with the United States Small Business Administration.
And I was part of the Jacksonville chapter here.
And I actually got involved with SCORE because almost three years ago we decided to move from New Jersey, where I had resided for, you know, 16 plus years, down to Jacksonville and my entire, my entire business network. But a majority of my business network was up in the northeast of the United States. And so here I was faced with a situation, you know, amazing move to Jacksonville. The weather is certainly better than New Jersey.
But we, you know, I didn't have the same business foundation and network here. And so I said, well, I'm passionate about giving into the community. And I said, let me take my business skills and abilities, my passion for small businesses and ideas and see if I can put that to some good. And volunteers. So I volunteer with score. SCORE provides people who have an idea for a business, small business owners, lots of free webinars, resources to manage your business, grow your business, launch your business, etc.
[00:43:32] Speaker A: Right.
[00:43:32] Speaker B: And so, so I started volunteering here in Jacksonville with SCORE to just help people figure out, like some people I, I mentored and, and they said, I said, sorry to tell you this, but this idea, like, not a good one. It's not going to launch for you. All right. I don't want to break the news you. Before you spend hundreds and thousands of dollars and go into debt, let's talk about this, right? Can we make some changes so that this idea does work? Right. Or small business, you know, CEO drowning. And what are some things I can do to not drown anymore? Right? How to. Like, like. And so I just, I did a lot of mentoring. We actually also in Jacksonville, some of the chapters around the country. So they're around all the United States, almost in every, every state. Some states have multiple chapters. But here in Jacksonville, we ran a monthly CEO forum for some of our small business owners at a very, very small cost. But we would bring these folks together and just talk about, well, what's keeping you up at night today, like this week, Right. Or this month. And they would share their lessons and the challenges with each other and then share how they've been overcoming them and learn from each other. And so that's been really powerful, too. Like, just a neat way to get people together. But I would score great, you know, resource and asset that I think a lot of people, especially newer businesses, don't take advantage of. And there's so much great things out there that they should.
[00:45:14] Speaker A: So you've, you've had a fantastic career so far. What's it. What excites you about this next 20 years of your career and where things are going.
[00:45:24] Speaker B: The next 20 years?
So I think I shared. I'm mission driven.
And as I look to me, the next 20 years of talent in the workplace, I think that at the end of the day, there's a job for everybody in this world.
And it's not that we have a labor shortage. We just have a labor misalignment.
And we have an opportunity to leverage our AI, our augmented intelligence, our algorithms, all, all of those things with some humans to realign the workforce and get people to a place where they can love what they're doing and be happy in their communities. And so that, to me, is my movement to bring skills and competencies back.
[00:46:17] Speaker B: Into the talent conversation, into the workforce conversation. And we don't have to get rid of all of the AI and the technology, but it's not replacing everything.
[00:46:31] Speaker A: So if someone's listening to this conversation and they're interested in engaging either with what you do with your current company or they want to follow you, like, how can people find you? LinkedIn? Did you have a website?
[00:46:43] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:46:44] Speaker A: All right, Peru. Thank you so much for your time today. It's been fantastic. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be here.
[00:46:51] Speaker B: Oh, thank you. And I'm delighted and excited to, to see more of the podcast and the book.
[00:46:58] Speaker A: All right, thanks. Cheers.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: Take care.
