Join us on the MFGMonkey Podcast as we sit down with Ryan Retcher to uncover the secrets of entrepreneurial success. In this episode, Ryan offers a fresh perspective on the entrepreneurial landscape, sharing his journey and the lessons learned along the way. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to refine your business strategies, Ryan’s insights provide the guidance and inspiration needed to thrive in the competitive world of entrepreneurship.
How to Get in Touch with Ryan Retcher
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- https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-retcher/
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Unveiling Entrepreneurial Insight with Ryan Retcher
This week, Dustin sits down with Ryan Retcher to unravel his journey from a decade in banking to becoming an investor and venture capitalist. They explore entrepreneurship nuances, failures, and resilience. The episode emphasizes the importance of team culture, transparency, and appreciation in handling business challenges. Ryan’s analogy comparing a business to a ship adds a unique perspective. Tune in for valuable insights into the entrepreneurial journey.
Ryan, welcome. Thank you for joining us on MFG Monkey today.
Absolutely, glad to be here, and thanks for having me.
You and I’ve known each other for a few years. I forget how long it’s been since we met, but it’s been a number of years, hasn’t it?
It has. It makes me feel old thinking about it, but I think it’s been probably about 10 years or so.
Is it really? I wouldn’t have guessed.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure, probably the 2013-2014 timeframe.
That makes sense. Let’s move on from that because I feel old now. I follow you on, LinkedIn and you posted a couple of cool things, I thought this is a good subject for us to talk about on the podcast and reconnect. I think the last time we saw each other was at Panera. We’ve always had good conversations together. This should be fun.
I’ve only grown a few gray hairs since the last time we spoke, but I can tell stories about each one of them, probably.
As you can see, I’m graying up quite a bit myself. I haven’t shaved clean for probably 20 years, normally just trim. I was looking in the mirror today and man, that thing’s looking gray. Let’s cut the majority of that off.
Exactly. I’m the same way. I started clean-shaven again just because my whole beard is white now and it makes me look 10 years older. You must stay young at heart.
Absolutely. I still feel young, that’s a good thing, right? I guess that’s what matters, looks will change a little bit. Tell us about what you’re doing now, and a little summary over the last 10 years that we have not connected.
I’ll give a little bit of context for your viewers’ sake. I started my career in business and commercial banking at JPMorgan Chase and spent almost a decade there. Late in my career there, I started really meeting a lot of entrepreneurs that inspired me. I knew that I wanted to support them and be one in ways that I couldn’t do through the bank. I started Angel Investing and got into those companies and worked with those entrepreneurs that way. When we first met, I had transitioned from being an Angel Investor to being an actual former venture capitalist. I had started a film with some people I knew and dove into that headfirst. I realized quickly that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. I wasn’t quite as resilient as I thought I was, coming from an environment at the bank where I never failed at anything.
When we first met, I was in this period of investing in entrepreneurs. I am an entrepreneur. It was a time of learning and I call that time my million-dollar MBA. It was a period where I invested in a lot of companies and saw a lot of ups and downs, really became a student of human beings at that point. You can invest in a company, or you can start a company and build a company. You can look at in a particular context, what their LinkedIn says, what your LinkedIn says, and what your resume says. Oftentimes the success of an organization comes down to the people that are behind it, not just who they are on paper, but who they are inside. I was going through that journey and started an accelerator, started consulting after I left that initial venture capital firm. I was consulting for a little bit, mostly in the small and medium enterprise space. Then got pulled back into venture in 2017 with some people that I admired and were friends with who were doing some pretty cool things. I’ve been there ever since and have been investing again in companies. In total, I have invested in and funded probably 120-plus companies at this point throughout my career. A lot of learning experiences ultimately culminated in that LinkedIn post that you read a couple of weeks ago.
That’s great. I think that’s how you and I met there’s one of many companies that I’ve started. I pitched the idea to you guys. Isn’t that correct?
I think so.
That company failed and went away. It was a solely philanthropic company that, I thought because we had that philanthropic backbone people would jump all over it. It was in the oil and gas industry, and I thought it was a great idea. I got my million-dollar MBA, with that company. I learned a lot and spent a lot of money. Those things are fun. All those failures have led me personally to where I am at, with MCMILLANCO. We have reinvented ourselves at least twice now in the last 10 years, which is cool. You must be just unbelievably resilient, if you get rattled too easily, you quit. You probably know this statistic better than I do, but 1 % of all companies survive more than five years. And then 1 % of those do a million dollars of revenue or more. Is that a good statistic?
That’s pretty close. You’re not far off. It’s a slim margin of error for companies to squeeze through and win. It is kind of that space that we play in. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a business owner, or someone who’s investing, that’s what you’re trying to find.
It can be heartbreaking. You can have the best day of your life and then later that day, you can have the worst day of your life. However, you must wake up the next day and just go back to it. Personally, that’s my drug. That is what gets me out of bed every day and gets my juices going. Some of the folks that work for me now are like, “What in the hell are we doing?” It’ll work out. Just, you know and that plays into your posts as well. It’s having your team on board, that culture and, having a very transparent goal and a clear path. It is not always extremely clear because it could change at any given moment. If your team knows where you’re going or where you want to go, they trust you and everyone feels appreciated, then you can do anything you want.
Absolutely. It is so critical, and you can’t undervalue that. It’s one of those things where it’s a compounding effect over time as well. That a little bit here and there starts to compound. If you’re doing things right, you’re investing in that culture, you’re building and you’re listening as a leader or a business owner, then you’re going to compound those gains of performance and outcomes. If you don’t, it starts to compound the other way. You start seeing your business, thinking of it as a ship, and start seeing these holes just starting to rust through the whole of your company. You don’t know where they’re coming from, but that compounding effect goes both ways.
Yes, and I loved that analogy. When you and I caught up a week or so ago, you used that analogy, and I thought it was a great one. Walk everyone through it, you told the whole story about that analogy when we were on the phone the other day and I thought it was awesome.
I’ve gone on a couple of cruises in the last year and when you’re on a vacation and you’re trying to get your mind off of things, you tend to notice things that you probably wouldn’t notice otherwise. I’d never been on a cruise before and ironically just decided to go on two in a year. What I noticed was that there were, probably a thousand-plus crew members on the ship. They all must be coordinated and work in the same direction. I tend to notice with businesses that you can have a team of any size and the team tends to end up focusing on the engine room. The captain of the ship is like, “Hey, we’ve got to keep this engine going. It must go as fast as possible. Let’s improve this engine so we can go faster, faster, faster, and do more and more and more”. You can have that engine room in perfect condition and at the end of the day, if everyone is focused on fueling that engine and making it work well those crew members aren’t around the ship noticing things that are starting to happen. Like, a paint chip here or there. Every morning I’d be walking out on the deck, and I would notice that there were crew members always painting something. They notice something and they start patching. So, visually it looks good. Functionally, if there is a rust spot on the ship, if you don’t address that cosmetic blemish, eventually starts developing into a hole in your ship. If everyone’s focused on driving that ship forward and no one’s focusing on the little things that keep the deck clean, making sure water isn’t building up, what’s the issue here? Eventually, your engine’s going to be running full bore and your ship is going to start sinking. The captain’s going to be like, “What the heck is happening? Why is my ship sinking? My engines are going full bore.” It is so relevant and true in our business and how we treat it. We must have a culture that focuses on the little things because those little things tend to create pain points, not only for our customers but for our team members themselves. Then they don’t feel the empowerment and the ability to address the little things that are slowing them down, driving them crazy, and driving their colleagues crazy. Those are the compounding effects that start to add up and create those holes in your ship.
I can’t agree more. Probably the biggest thing that I took out of that is just the employees and the appreciation. I truly believe if you could have the worst idea in the world and if your employees feel appreciated and they don’t feel like they’re a number you can make the shittiest idea work, I think. If not, everyone’s going to be happy doing it at least. It helps you shift very quickly, and people don’t get discouraged. We’re working on a deal right now. It’s probably one of the biggest deals that we’ll do to date. It’s significant, two-plus million-dollar revenue. Possibly warehousing batteries and we received some information that changed the whole structure yesterday. It’s in the beginning stages, we’re going through the contract. We were on the one-inch line, ready to push into the end zone to get this deal done when we got some news that there was some miscommunication. It changed the path of everything. It was cool to see my team just go, “OK, what do we need to do? How do we figure this out?” If we didn’t have the culture that we have, I think what we could have seen, is everyone just completely, implode and go, “Man, we just worked three weeks on this. Now we got to start over.” Then they could just check out. The cool part was everyone was just shifted and went to “How do we figure this out?” It is very new; nobody really knows how to do it. We will figure it out, it may take a year now instead of a few weeks. That’s the fun part for me as everyone is ready to go and we’ll get this figured out together. That was huge, I was proud of that, that moment. My operations manager is on vacation. She has emailed me every day. Ashley, stop emailing me! Enjoy, your vacation! That makes me feel good. She gets up in the morning, puts in a couple of hours of work on vacation, and then she goes and watches her son play baseball. They are going to Disney and all those fun things. Nothing that I could say that’s going to stop her from being engaged, even though she’s in Florida for a week or two.
Love it. Those are the things that you see when someone feels engaged, not only in your mission. There is a lot of content, a lot of books, and people out there that coach on developing that kind of mentality, Oftentimes we let it go and we don’t reinforce that. How do you truly get someone to feel ownership of the company? Whether they have actual ownership or equity in their company. There are a lot of companies that force their people, unfortunately, to do those types of things like work while they’re on vacation. That is one thing, but when someone feels so engaged and bought into a company, to a culture, to a mission that they’re checking in because they want to. It gives them peace of mind. As a business owner, that’s what gives me peace of mind. When I’m on vacation, there are days when I completely want to unplug and I don’t want to think about anything, but there are days when I wake up and I am excited to see how it is going. I will plug in because I want to and because it will help me relax and have a better day knowing what is going on. If you can, as a leader, get your team, again, not force them to do that, not expect them to do that in any way, but when they want to do that, that is a good problem to have.
I couldn’t be more fortunate with everyone on my team. There are people that we’ve had that haven’t taken any time off. Take some Friday, don’t come in, just take the day off. Those things are just invaluable, money can’t substitute that. There’s a saying that I learned yesterday in my Vistage meeting. Something to the effect of the higher five, pay them like eight but work them like 10. I guess that is one way to go about it, but what an asshole thing, to say, right? If that’s your mentality, you are doing great by paying them overmarket, but you just work them to the bone. There are plenty of companies out there that are doing that. Probably Amazon is an example of one of those giant companies that just works their people like that. They have a lot of people, and I don’t know what their turnover is, but I don’t know if they’re doing something right though.
I don’t know either, but it’s certainly one of those things where that mentality, you don’t exactly revel in the authority of those titans of industry back in those days. I think Henry Ford might have been the exception to that as far as how they treated their workers. Especially today when there’s so much choice. There’s a shortage in the workforce and finding and retaining great people is super hard. You cannot have a mentality like that or you’re going to sink quickly.
You are going to have a revolving door. I’ve worked at those companies and looking back on it sucked at the time. But now I look back on it and it was good for me to have that experience I was at a particular company, and they wanted everyone to feel empowered. The two owners and the president would say, you’re empowered to do this. When it came time to decide no matter what the dollar amount was, it could have been a $5 purchase or running to Staples to pick up a new keyboard, they wanted to approve it. You had to submit a purchase rec to buy anything. If you don’t trust me that my keyboard doesn’t work, I’m going to go buy a new keyboard where are we at here? I saw it on such a big level where guys that were general managers of other factories would come to work and be operations managers and they had to ask permission to buy everything and anything. You would just watch these guys walk with their heads down to the president’s office. Just to say, “Hey, can I buy some cutting oil for this machine because we need it.” How demoralizing is that? With my team, it’s like, if it’s not going to sink the ship, buy the damn thing. If you know we need it and I trust you to only buy what we need to get the job done, just buy it. You don’t have to call me or ask me permission. They feel guilty about buying stuff. I see it come across in the AMEX and I’ll still get a call, “Hey, I just spent $2,000 on this and you don’t have any questions?” No, should I? Finally, it got to the point where they just didn’t, and I don’t hear about it. I see it come through and I may occasionally question what something was for because it was a little expensive. For example, a motor went out on our air compressor, it was expensive, but we moved on.
It is really one of those things I’ve noticed a lot in the last couple of years. At my venture firm, we decided after observing a lot of companies that in our portfolio we had invested in we saw some companies that were just going through the roof. The growth was just exponential, everything was going right and that led to them raising more money and getting more funding in big chunks. They would close these deals and would get this capital; they would mostly invest that capital in people. You saw these companies that were going from 10 to 15 people up to 80 to 100 people in a year. That’s significant growth and the revenue was growing, everything was growing and going well. They had great products, the product was well received by their customers, it was driving growth, and they hired great people. What was happening though was they oftentimes failed to set up a culture of trust and empowerment because simply they hadn’t needed to do that before. They had smaller teams and had a good dynamic that led to that success. It wasn’t an intentional thing for the most part. I’m sure there are always exceptions to the rule, but we try not to invest in a -holes as a rule of thumb. So, they weren’t treating their employees badly, but they were hiring mostly entrepreneurial-minded people in the sense that hey you’re coming into an earlier stage of a high-growth company. You must have a particular mindset, where you see a problem when you fix it, you’re empowered to fix it. When you hit that high growth, you’re hiring at such a high rate you’ve got all these people coming in at once and suddenly you have a completely different culture by design. A lot of people don’t know how to handle that. You hire great leaders even that have thrived in other environments, but maybe they haven’t built that culture themselves. You just see this culmination of little things. It could be something where they are under a strict budget, and they don’t intend to tell you that they don’t trust you. That is not what they mean and that is not what they intend. When operating on razor-thin budgets as they are growing, we are trying to get to profitability to a certain extent. It is not that they don’t trust you, but they need to approve these types of things. That tells the employee, even though that’s not the intent, but it sends mixed messages. It says, “We want you to come in and solve the problems, but we do not trust you to make a $20 purchase.” Those mixed messages, in my experience, have collectively seen a big pullback. You see these teams of highly capable, talented people pulling back. You see these companies hitting a ceiling. Boom, you hit that ceiling and you just start falling back down to earth. It is because these employees just became disengaged. In almost all the cases, it was not that the owners of the company or their leadership teams were treating them poorly. All these factors just led them to say, “You know what? I am going to focus on my job. My job is this and a client comes in and asks for X. I fulfill X and I move on to the next one. I see all these things popping up, but I haven’t had a good experience in trying to do these. This. over here annoys me because they send this thing to me, and it causes an issue. The widget falls off and I don’t want to work with them. I’m just going to focus and do my job and at the end of the day I’m going to get out of here as quickly as I can because I don’t like this.” When you have a good chunk of your team hitting that mentality, you’re in trouble.
Absolutely. I can’t agree more. Even with new folks coming on, I think that because of past experiences, it takes them a while to engage, at a high level. I have witnessed it, that we trust the folks that we bring on to make those decisions and make those $20 purchases. It takes a little bit for them to realize this is real and it isn’t a trick. Once they get to that point, you can almost see how their energy comes up, they’re just more relaxed and mesh into the culture of the company. It takes a little bit of a learning curve for them to get it and really to understand that they are a valued member of the team. I think that is an important thing for leaders to do is know and let the employees know that mistakes will happen. You’re operating at a very high level, there’s no way that you’re going to be perfect 100 % of the time. Just don’t make that same mistake again, learn from it and move on. When you make a mistake let’s brush it off and move on. I mean, If I dwelled on every mistake that I made, I sure the hell wouldn’t be sitting here. I have made some big mistakes even in the last year. I’ve made some mistakes, and my team looks at me, and I say “Hey, I screwed up. Let’s move on. Let’s forget it. Let’s fix that. Then move on and not make that mistake again.” It is interesting to see people get engaged at that point.
It is those types of things when your team sees you do that and sees you convey that and bounce back, it gives them the signal that they can do the same.
We have had people make mistakes. We had an engineer at one time make a mistake that cost us $20,000. That $20,000 to us, well it might as well be a million dollars. He comes into my office, and he is almost in tears. We had a big project for Red Robin restaurants. We helped them design the product, had everything made, brought it in, repackaged it, and kitted it for them. We distributed it to 700 restaurants in around nine weeks. It was during COVID. We absolutely crushed it. We had one hiccup; it was because we didn’t use a box that UPS approved. The box was way overrated, we didn’t read what the UPS standard was. We had pictures of tires lying on top of our boxes and they were completely destroyed. It destroyed $20,000 worth of products. We had to turn quickly. We ended up sending a hot shot truck with brand-new products to a restaurant in Florida overnight. I think we paid $1800 bucks. They were overwhelmed by everything that we did, which was great. The engineer knew he didn’t read which box was needed for UPS. I said “Connor, it is what it is, man. Let’s move on. Yes, a mistake was made. Would I have caught that? Probably not. Will I catch it next time? Hell yeah.” We will never make that mistake again. He was shocked I was not mad. It stung, but you fix it and move on. We went to battle with UPS, which we lost, of course. Which was discouraging because we paid insurance on everything. UPS claimed the insurance was void since the box didn’t meet their rating. Connor came to us as a full-time engineer intern and then he got an offer with Owens Corning that I couldn’t even remotely touch. He came in, with tears in his eyes, and handed me his resignation letter. Both of us teared up, he didn’t really want to leave but could not turn down that offer. I thanked him for allowing me to be part of his success. I told him “When you’re tired of the corporate life, come back.” We still go to lunch and stay in contact. Those things are invaluable to me.
Absolutely. It is all about relationships and trust and the relationships that you build. Whether you have a smaller company or a smaller team within a larger company, it’s important to make those relationships. You know you have done well if they still want to go out and have lunch with you or grab coffee after they leave.
I feel when you empower people and are in front of a potential customer or an existing customer that energy level is a certain way. You’re going to win more business because everyone immediately likes everyone, they have trust in you, and it’s just a sense of relief. Even though we do so many video calls and things like that you cannot get a feel for somebody through a video call. I’m still old school and like to fly, meet people, and go to lunch. It is just life now though even if it would be better if we were in person. You can still get a good feel for the culture.
Transitioning from being an investor, and seeing these companies hit the ceiling. I started an internal consultancy a couple of years ago so that we could actively help companies that we were investing in avoid that ceiling. I started doing workshops for leaders and teams. They were intended to leverage some of the same workshop techniques and resources that top innovative companies have used for the last 10-15 years called human-centered design. If Google is coming out with a new product, they use this process and these workshops to figure it out. Where’s the need? What’s the problem? What do our customers actually want? What do they need to see? Figuring all of that out is what this process does. I have been doing that for our portfolio companies and others, consulting for several years in the sense of product development. A couple of years ago, we saw the ceiling, we saw that problem, and I said, “I think we can repurpose this.” You can then go in and help these companies solve the problems that are causing them to hit that. Focusing on the company, not the product itself, because they’re having so much success. The product is good. The customers are happy with it, but your employees aren’t happy. You’re having all these problems compound. You start to solve the problems and start chipping away at them. What we noticed through that process of engaging with these teams, engaging with leadership teams, engaging with teams at all levels of organizations, and digging again and solving the problems. The way we start is to get everyone’s feedback on what are the biggest problems that they see that are really capping this company’s potential. You ask the leader that, the CEO and founder of the company, even the lowest person in the organization, and get all the perspectives. These workshops get thousands of responses and data points anonymously. We were able to get all this feedback and all these thought patterns. Here’s what leadership’s seeing from the top, here’s what everyone else is seeing in the middle and other layers of the organization.
It’s incredible oftentimes where the disconnect is, but it also brings out things about engagement. That is the process that helped me. I always knew the culture was important. You read the books, you listen to the gurus, culture is important. Employee engagement is important. What you just said a little bit ago about the face-to-face thing, COVID, changed everything. It changed how people think, it changed how people interact with other people, it changed their preferences on that, and how they think they naturally want to communicate. These teams, whether they were remote or not, were defaulting to these different patterns that were very much limiting their ability to engage beyond their day-to-day jobs. When we offered that opportunity to give feedback and what was ailing them. We needed everyone’s feedback, honest, open, and completely anonymous so they could say what they think and get those concerns out. Then it was clear what the problems were. They need to get some ideas or what are their ideas? Sometimes when you do that and you head into a meeting, whether it’s in person, via Zoom, or a phone call, what happens is the loudest person in the room takes over with their ideas, and then meetings over. Everyone else is sitting around the room like this person doesn’t have a clue as to what they’re doing. The others are saying they do not want to do that, and it will not work, or they didn’t ask anyone else’s opinion. That slowly starts chipping away at that individual’s confidence, at their morale. Then you start to delve into this mode of people not wanting to collaborate, not feeling trusted or valued. That their opinions and ideas are not valued at that company. That default is probably 10 to 20 % of the potential of that employee that you’re paying a full salary for.
It creates negative chatter. It creates some toxic environments. People are talking behind that individual’s back about how they do not like what Suzie is doing because they think we should do something different. Now instead of working and trying to solve a problem together, they are standing around the drinking fountain bitching. Productivity goes down along with other things. When you do these workshops, you’re doing them before they’re having issues, or have you done workshops with companies that you’ve identified that they’ve hit a ceiling and how have you helped them get past that?
Honestly, it’s both. I didn’t think that way coming into it, we designed it initially to be for that company that has hit a ceiling, they realize there are challenges and issues and they just don’t know exactly what to do about it. They just feel stuck. Over the last couple of years, we started expanding that and working with companies before they hit that. Whether it’s a company we are investing in or an outside company. We can go in and help. Not that what they are doing is not working, but maybe they could get more output from their people, more ideas that could take them from this plateau that they hit. Some businesses or owners are okay with that plateau, just in the sense that they are making good margins and profits, they are happy and don’t necessarily feel like they need more. Maybe the people working there want more fulfillment out of their jobs than the status quo they are in. You may have people hungry for more, not hungry for more work necessarily, but hungry for more. If they have an idea and see it in motion, see it work or if it doesn’t work, they learn from it. Then they can figure out another idea to move forward. That brings so much more energy and fulfillment that you don’t even necessarily have to do a lot more to get out of that plateau. Your team starts growing and that starts pushing this envelope up. That is what we’ve seen, we do it through workshops, but there are other ways certainly leaders of companies can do this.
What it boils down to is ultimately listening and showing your employees that not only do you listen, but you give them the opportunity. You listen to not just their problems, you listen to their ideas, and you look at them and you honestly work through a process, and you don’t have to take all their ideas. You can’t do everything necessarily, but when they legitimately feel heard, that is the biggest differentiator. Honestly, it’s a big side effect. When we went into this, to help these companies, that’s not what I had in mind. I had in mind that we’re going to go through this process, we’re going to create a plan and we’re going to get people on board with accountability to that plan. We were going to define success just like you traditionally do when you have a goal, but then going out there the process kind of landed. The unexpected positive side effect was that engagement. That lifted everything else, and they became hungrier and had the tools and processes to now go and figure out other problems. It is those little things that start to compound because, wow, I felt empowered. I was permitted to fail a little bit here. I’m going to try other things that start making things a little bit better and things that are taking double the time because we are making these little mistakes, and we have to go back and do this thing over again. That costs the company money, time, energy, and frustration that chip away. What if these employees are empowered and feel like I am legitimately empowered and valued and heard to do this? It starts really by adding that air pressure that pushes everything up. It pushes up that plateau and eventually you start seeing that grow.
I think the other part of that is the leader frees themselves up, right? If your team always brings you a problem and you’re answering those problems, you’re not doing what you’re talking about. You’re not building them up, coaching them to figure the problem out. What you’re doing is you’re telling them every problem that you have, bring it to me and I’m going to solve it. There may be some people out there smart enough to solve every problem, good for them. I’m not that person. What it also does is demoralize them because now they feel every problem that they have, they must bring it to somebody to figure it out. We just talked about this in Vistage yesterday. It was basically a card. On one side, what is the problem, and on the other side what is your solution to the problem? It was really challenging. You know, if somebody brings me a problem, how do you think we should solve this? What do you think about this? What are your ideas? If you don’t have any, then come back when you do, and then we’ll talk through those ideas. I’ve had people say, “What do you want me to do?” I want you to come up with some solutions and the first couple of times they don’t know what to do. They can figure it out or we can figure it out together but bring some ideas to the table. Don’t just bring up the problem.
One of my buddies, won’t even talk to you if you bring him a problem without some sort of solution and they love the guy. The first couple of times they will go away and think what the hell was that? They think they will just be told what to do and move on. Yesterday, I thought, as a kid, I was a horrible speller, I would ask my dad, “How do you spell this word?” His response was to look it up and this was obviously before the internet. Then you’re flipping through the dictionary, thinking that guy’s such a jerk why won’t he just tell me the answer? Now that I’m 44, reflecting on when I was eight, I understand he had a method, and it took me this long to realize that. Then you just stop asking, maybe not for help but rephrase it. You have an idea, and you want to run it by someone else, “What do you think, is it a good idea or bad idea?” And at the end of the day, neither person may know if it’s a good idea or a bad idea. You’re like, okay, well, let’s, let’s try it. Both people may not know if it’s a good or bad idea but want to try it. It may seem like a good idea, and they may fail together, or they may succeed together. It frees up that leader to do more things.
There’s a great book out there that I started, that I need to finish. It is called Change Your Questions, Change Your Life. It’s a wonderful book, it’s a real-life story and it’s about this leader that was struggling in his home life, he was struggling at work. He just had hit a plateau. He didn’t have trust in his folks. His family life was going to hell, and he hired a coach. The coach started walking him through it. Instead of always having an opinion about everything and telling people everything that you think, ask some questions. Get to the bottom of it with questions instead of dictating. You are going to take your work week from an 80-hour work week, probably down to a 40-hour work week. It is a cool book and can apply a lot of those things to leadership and your home life.
Yeah, I love it. That’s the thing, asking questions. So many times, leaders and business owners feel like we must have the answers. We must be the smartest person in the room, even though oftentimes we say we do not want to be the smartest person in the room. I want to hire smarter people than me. Sometimes our actions really tell a different story in the sense that you must be the strong one and not show them up. I think this goes to the ’80s and ’90s business culture that a lot of us came up with. That is what I grew up in. I grew up in a small farm town with a lot of blue-collar workers and you must be a manly man and a man acts and looks a certain way. So many misnomers. I think that we must as a society get past in the sense. You can be a man and still admit that you don’t have all the answers. Before Google Maps, there’s always that joke, the man would get lost and refuse to admit that they were lost and stop at the gas station and get directions. It’s that same thing oftentimes in business that we refuse to either admit that we’re lost or that we’re wrong. It becomes so much easier and there’s so much trust that’s built up with the people around you when you do the opposite. Outcomes are so much better for everyone when we as humans can just psychologically get past ourselves.
Well, it humanizes you. I did a podcast with Emily Joann Wilkins last week and she’s a marketing wizard. Her company is called Marketing Metal. She has a metal theme behind it. She is our age and her biggest thing with marketing is just humanizing the company and putting a personality with the company. Because people want to deal with people, they don’t want to deal with a website. I think that is a powerful marketing idea. With leadership, you want to be personalized. There’s a guy that I worked for once who says a leader can never have a bad day. You are going to be perfect every day? Your mood is never going to be a little off, always going to be happy and never anxious. Who the hell is he kidding? That was a long time ago. I believe that when an authority figure, can humanize themselves and tell a story about failure, failure, or admit failure it does build trust. I think there is a lot of ego that goes into that and people, especially guys, don’t want to ask directions.
I was just thinking of a story that was a couple of weeks ago. I was driving up to the lake and it was raining, it was nasty, it was cold. I had my dog with me. I pulled into the fuel station to get diesel and I jumped out of my truck. I locked my truck and immediately I didn’t remember the code to get back in my truck. My truck is running, my dog’s inside, my phone’s inside with my code. I hadn’t used my code in forever. I fill up my truck and now I must go into the gas station attendant and admit that I locked my truck, while it’s running and my dog’s inside. It’s like a country song. I’m out in the middle of the boonies and they said “Well the sheriff is awesome. Call the sheriff and he’ll come, and they’ll get you in your truck.” I am not calling the sheriff to get in my truck. I’m not a good thief, I called my son and my girlfriend trying to get my code. At least an hour goes by and finally, I walk in and ask for the sheriff’s number. She just starts laughing. He came in about fifteen minutes, it’s a younger guy from the Toledo area and he got out and he says, “Could you pick the shittiest evening to lock your keys in your truck?” I totally get it. I went back and told Ashley and the team this story, and they were like you’re an idiot. But everyone had a good laugh at my expense.
That’s good, I love it.
Let’s go back. I want to touch on your post here quickly before we end. We’re kind of getting to that time. I know that you’re, you’re busy today and have kids to pick up. Did we touch on everything? Your post on LinkedIn was awesome. I wanted to make sure that we touched on everything, we brought up multiple great points I think we covered it all.
I think the summary of the post was, in my judgment, as I’ve seen a lot of different things, all sorts of different industries, and different companies I’ve worked with. Those small companies that are just getting started that are going through high growth, large middle market companies, I’ve seen a lot, not only through my career, but over the last couple of years, and we’re in this different world now and I truly believe that employee engagement and culture are going to be the biggest factors of business success and organizational success in the coming decade or decades.
Can’t agree more.
More so than anything else, you can hire the most talented people in the world who have incredible resumes. However, if you don’t create a culture every day of collaboration and engagement with employees and empowering them to solve problems within your company, and create that additional margin, then that is going to be a massive competitive disadvantage. So, it’s always been one of those things where you read the books, you hear the podcast, you hear the guru saying, culture, culture, culture. The response often is we have a ping-pong table, we have casual Friday, we have a happy hour every couple of weeks, and we send out the surveys This just is not enough in this post-pandemic world of different mindsets, it’s a different world, with technology, and everything that’s changing. If you have happy, engaged employees who feel empowered to help solve those problems, you’re either going to compound up or you’re going to compound down. If you compound down, that’s your competitive disadvantage. I don’t care how good your product is. I don’t care how well your customers like you today. Eventually, that is going to change, and it’ll probably happen sooner than you think.
I can’t agree with that more. There are so many examples of companies that don’t have a good culture but have a great product. What is the hostess company that just went down? Maybe it was before COVID, but who the hell doesn’t like little Debbie and the company goes bankrupt? Maybe it wasn’t little Debbie, a hostess company. I think it was Twinkie.
I remember that. I knew there was a Twinkie craze there for a while. People were going crazy trying to get their hands on Twinkies because they thought you’d never be able to again. Then someone ended up buying them and they still make them, but there was a big scare there for a while.
If you dug into that, it was probably very, very culture-driven. I just love the subject. I could probably talk about it for another two hours.
Yeah, but that’s a hundred-year-plus company. Twinkies have been around forever. I’m sure maybe their sales went down some because we’re all a little bit more health-conscious overall as a society, but still, it’s a staple. You’d never imagine that a company like that is going to go under, they hit that problem, and eventually, your employees just give up and your margins start slipping. Everything starts slipping. They start making more mistakes. Those mistakes are compounded, it slows things down, your customers are unhappy because the packaging is bad it looks bad sitting on the shelf, and the product doesn’t taste quite right. People stop buying it. Then the 100-year company is gone; the legacy is gone.
Just compounds
All of that value gets bought up by some private equity company or another company for a penny on the dollar. If they’re better at that, then they’re going to take your assets and make it theirs.
Absolutely. Well, Ryan, tell everyone how they can get in touch with you. Email website, LinkedIn, Twitter.
Yeah, absolutely. Find me on LinkedIn. I think I’m the only Ryan Retcher on LinkedIn. That’s the best way to connect and engage with me. But my email is Ryan@LoudX.VC.
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