Dominic tells us about how he helps businesses accelerate their growth and productivity by improving leadership strategies, better organising staff, creating stronger team relations and improving overall company culture and working environment. He also tells us why he thinks sales commissions and annual appraisals qualify for the big bin of bullshit.

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Hello, and welcome to Business Without Bullshit.

I am Andy Orian, alongside me is my co host Pippa Sturt.

Hi, Andy.

And today we are joined by Dominic Monkhouse.

Hello, Dominic.

Hello.

Thank you for having a pronounceable name.

I'm always very, very happy to have one.

Oh, you could have, you could screw that up Monkhouse, one of the most famous entertainers.

Anyway, Dominic is a business coach focusing on the science of sports.

C e o or managing director, I guess we might like to say in the UK being so inclined and a leadership at Team Success.

He's also the host of the podcast, the Melting Pot and author of Fuck Plan B, how to scale Your Technology Business Faster and Achieve Plan A and Mind Your Fucking Business, uh, to excellent title books.

Congratulations.

So, Dominic, a pleasure and, uh, I hope, I hope all is going well.

We always like to s.

So let's start with a simple question, which is what's keeping you up at night?

Not very much.

I try really hard not to be awake at night, but if it is, it's because I've, something's occurred to me that it solves a problem for a client, which might seem really cheesy, but it's actually...

That is remarkably cheesy.

First off.

It does.

It does.

It's, that's what happens.

They say, this is the problem I've got.

And I just sort of start reading or listening to podcasts about the topic.

And then often four o'clock in the morning, I wake up and go.

That's interesting.

This is similar to tax, you know, similar to accountancy.

No, it is!

That's it, my dad would always talk about, you know, it's like, it's always the middle of the night.

Do you, uh, are you a sort of problem solver by nature, do you think?

Is that your...

Yes, I think so.

That's the, I'm inventive and have ideation.

Dyslexic?

Yes.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Sounds very dyslexic.

I can have a thousand ideas today, I don't care about any of them.

I'll have another thousand tomorrow.

If you don't like any of them, I don't care.

Yeah.

But I've come up with loads of ideas.

And is there a problem particularly you've solved recently that's worth sharing at all?

I worked with another group of 20 people the other day, and they were not a team when they arrived, and the brief was.

You've got two days, make us into a team.

And they went away delighted.

Why weren't they a team?

I had worked with the executive team of this company before, and this time this was the next 20 people down who are potentially the sort of C suite replacements of the future.

Right.

And so, biggest challenge was that their organization is in silos, and so this, these people knew each other mostly, but they saw their team as The department they were in rather than this cross functional group.

So they're sort of immediate reports and they're immediate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and so it was like, how do we, how do we get these people to think about the team?

Because the biggest challenge the organization has is we are in silos.

And therefore we either reinvent the wheel in every department or we just don't collaborate in any way, shape or form which destroys customer satisfaction.

So they basically said, you know, you don't have a high performance culture, we're not being challenged enough, go away and come up with some way to put us through our paces.

Uh, I started off with a session called Brutal Truths, where people write on a post it note the thing that they're thinking and nobody's saying.

Oh God, that would be terrible for me.

Jesus Christ.

You only get one, honey.

Only one.

It's only so much you can fit on a post it note.

I write quite small.

So we gathered, we gathered all these and it's like, these are the challenges that the business faces that they see in their position and it's like, okay, well, which of these things are you going to do something about?

That's great.

You know, I wonder whether this is a, a guy, a very, very clever Kiwi, who I met in Australia, whose sons have become very successful and still clients, but he told me this, he used to go into British business, it sounds not

a million miles away what you're doing now, but I'm sure yours is much developed, this is quite a while ago, and he says, you British have got the problem with the rumour of the tea and collective decision making, CEOs having

a nervous breakdown, the marketing person's leaving, I've told this story many times, but it strikes me, is that how you see the UK, that actually we're not very good at structuring businesses, or is this a global thing?

Most, most of the clients I work with are in fast growing businesses.

And most of the people I'm working with are entrepreneurial.

So, you know, dyslexic or, you know, disorganized.

Troublesome.

Visionary.

Uh, late for everything.

But what they don't want to do is they don't, well, it's counterproductive to make them more organized, right?

That's not what I do.

I'm one of them.

So I say, look, why don't we just work out where you're trying to go to.

Let's get clear on the strategy and then what people we need to make that work.

That isn't, you know, you do what you do best.

Let's build a team to do everything else.

So would you say entrepreneurs aren't generally managers?

I think often they're awful managers.

And often when I say that to people, they go, Oh, that's okay then.

But HR will take up so much of their time, a lot of the time.

Don't bloody let it.

Have somebody else do that.

Managing is a very difficult skill.

You can learn bits of it, but, you know, ultimately, it's sort of, it but it almost falls into charm a lot of the time.

Because at the end of the day, you've got to get someone to do what you want them to do, haven't you?

You know, and charm gets you a long way.

I think there's a difference between leadership and management.

And I think CEOs, managing directors, leaders have to, they've got two things they need to do.

They need to create a vision and sell a vision.

Managers, on the other hand, have to try and make themselves redundant by developing their people to do the stuff that they do.

And what about look after the team?

Managers.

Managers got to look after the team.

Managers look after the team.

Because if you're the CEO, you've got a vision, where we're going, what we're doing, now I need to sell it to people, I need to sell it to the staff, I need to sell it to investors, I need to sell it to customers.

That's the CEO's job.

So the message being, if you're totally dysfunctional, get Dominic in, he will eventually sort it out.

If I like you.

Yeah, because it's hard work.

Do you ever say you are just, you know, you look at a company and go, yeah, you're too fucking dysfunctional.

It's never going to work.

I don't know.

Well, I did bring a CEO up a few years ago, having done a whole load of one to ones with people who were then due down on the farm the next day.

And I said, Don't come.

Well, I said your team fucking hate each other, and I don't know what's gonna happen.

And she said, oh.

Had she not noticed?

Oh yeah, no, she knew, but, but, and she thought People think that that's business.

People think, well, that's the way it is in business.

It's like, no, it's not.

You don't have to really like them.

They don't have to be on your Christmas card list, but hate, but hate is, that's tough.

I've stopped talking to him, why?

He's a c Yeah.

Okay.

Makes sense.

Okay.

And you're all here with my wife.

You're all here tomorrow.

This is going to be really good fun.

Do you use, um, you know, things like Miles Briggs and all that sort of, do you try and categorize people's personalities a little bit in under stress as it is?

I haven't used Myers Briggs.

The tool I use is Patrick Lencioni developed a new tool during COVID called Working Genius, which is the only tool I found that looks at teams.

Right.

And I find that useful because that says Is your mindset strategic or is your mindset more execution?

Like functional.

Yeah, and so like I get to split the room that way, and then what's your energy level?

Are you more lean in or are you sort of more passive?

And one of the things it talks about is galvanizing tenacity.

So where does your dopamine come from?

Do you get your dopamine from having an idea or finishing something?

That's useful to know.

Do you get your dopamine from getting people excited or putting the team together?

And I want to know what role, because sometimes there's a clash between the job title people have got And they're innate skill.

What their skill set is.

Yeah.

So I've had sales directors who are amazing execution, that job title sales director, their profile is enablement tenacity, and the market shifts, and they've got to do a new go to market strategy.

So that their executive team are looking at them going, you're the sales director, it's in your job spec, we're expecting you to come up with a plan.

He's going, it's in my job spec, they're expecting me to come up with a plan, six months later there's no plan.

Because he hasn't got a strategy.

He couldn't invent his way out of a wet paper bag.

But look, you've done really well.

You've taken some companies here and built them up.

So you obviously, you know, you know how to get to a teamwork together.

You know, you've come in and take companies and scaled them.

And it's okay to get a company functioning.

To get a company to go and do 30 million or something.

pretty difficult, actually, you know, we're not great at scaling businesses.

And you've mentioned one tool that you use.

So obviously you're a very capable person.

You could go in and be valuable to a business.

You know, any third party coming in with that kind of experience is invaluable because we're all so wood for trees.

How much do you get involved in things like emotional intelligence or telling people, you know, you should, you're going to need to put in some sort of HR system or that sort of stuff.

I probably have about 64, 64, 65 tools that I use all the time.

And some of them we use more or less.

But then there are lots of other, depends on the biggest challenge that they face.

Sometimes actually the thing that will unlock is an introduction to somebody who does something else that I can see that would be really beneficial.

Or maybe they need to hire somebody.

And it's like, well, we need to fill this role.

We should hire somebody.

Let's go, let me help you hire somebody great to do this.

So you will actually kind of present them with the solutions to things, rather than encouraging them to work out what the solution is.

You mean coach versus consult?

Yeah.

That sort of self centered coaching thing.

It's all just questioning.

Yeah, that's great, isn't it?

Except they don't know what they're doing.

So, they're never gonna get there.

Don't, don't hold back.

Are you meaning, are you meaning when people don't give you advice?

I, I get very frustrated with psychology when they just listen.

It's like, tell me what the fuck to do.

I have an opinion.

Yeah.

And often, I'll be asking people questions to, it's much more powerful if people come up with their own answers.

Right?

Yeah.

But sometimes I'll go.

Just want me to tell you what I think.

And I go, yeah, please do, shut up.

Stop asking me questions, just tell me what the answer is.

It's gone 7.

Okay, so, and these tools, these 60 65 tools, they could be just a technique, or some are software, or some are sort of...

Uh, no, these are all just sort of ways to approach a problem.

For example, say, if you've got a big group of people and you want to go really quickly...

One of the things often we do is we get a team to build a behavioral charter.

And so I could sit there in front of a team and say, okay, what do we think should be in a behavioral charter?

And you get two people talk for half an hour and the other people don't talk and you don't get anything.

So you might say, okay, well, we're going to do one, two, four, all.

And you go, okay, write down your own thing, five things, which you need to, what behaviors would this team need to have to be a high performing team?

Write down your list of five.

Now, next two minutes to compile it, put it together with the next person.

So we do two.

Then you go, okay, now two twos come together as a four and then feedback or do it as eight.

And so you can very quickly make sure that you get everybody's input and it doesn't get lost.

The introverts don't get buried by the extroverts.

It's that can very real problem.

I've seen it.

I mean, the last place I worked was very like that.

There was sort of quite a strong, uh, a number of strong characters.

In the partnership group, and they would be the ones that answered all the questions and did everything and everybody else would say nothing.

And I can remember we still laugh about it, one of my best friends who I used to work with, I passed him a piece of paper during a meeting that said, feel free to join in at any time.

Because he was just like, he had said, fuck all for the whole meeting.

And normally he would phone in sick just before the meetings anyway, but he actually turned up.

And he still laughs about it, but, like, if people have really...

Like, frankly, scared of the really strong characters.

Yeah.

Which they can often be, particularly if they're absolute arseholes.

Yeah.

Then, it must be quite hard to get those introverts to actually come out and participate.

Yeah, so then we might do, one of the things we might do is a talent assessment.

Because if they're an arsehole, then their teams are probably arseholes.

And if they're a bully, their teams are probably bullies.

Yeah, yeah.

And...

It's not just them, it's their entire function we probably don't like.

How do you assess everyone as a bully?

Well, you know, you can You meet them for a minute.

Yeah, you talk to them on the phone.

Or you talk to their peers and the peers go, He's a bully.

What is a bully in a workplace?

Well, it's like, you know, they don't let anybody speak.

They think they have the right answer.

They shut up, they shut people down.

They won't take criticism.

So it tends to be the whole, I'm the only one that does anything in this place.

Yes, a strong opinion of their own importance and self worth, indeed.

There's a very interesting conversation around remote working.

We had a very interesting interview, a guy who's worth a lot of money in Canada, very clever, and he runs the biggest remote working conference.

And we were saying, yeah, but in person it's better.

But exactly this problem, he said, in person meetings favour the strong characters.

And there's a whole bunch of people that...

before much better and successfully with asynchronous information working from home that they digest the analytical type people.

So an office environment, he was saying, I'm sure it's great for you, Andy.

I'm sure you have a great time in the meetings, but there's all sorts of people suffering.

What do you feel about that?

That specifically or remote work more generally?

Well, does that mean that we're being a remote only business may have some interesting arguments may get all these remote businesses run by introverts and all these non remote business by extroverts.

If I look at the clients that I work with who.

were, we've got one client who was remote first before the pandemic and remains remote first, although they are putting in hubs where people can cry, meet up, have a cup of tea, have a beer, have a biscuit.

But if I then look at the clients who are back full time and the clients who remain more or less remote, it was the introvert CEO.

So, was the CEO prepared to run his company from his back bedroom in his pants or did he want to go and speak to human beings again?

Which one's better?

The one who wants to go out?

The CEO needs to be extrovert.

It doesn't sound like it's better or worse, it's just different modes of being.

I think it's meant that those introvert CEOs, it's given them a rationale for selling their office and not hanging out with their teams.

Because they didn't want to.

They never really wanted to do that in the first place.

Yeah, it's interesting.

But.

I do think that if you do have a dysfunctional team, then you need to fix that.

And I'm sure, I know you can have dysfunctional remote only teams.

Easily.

What would you say to businesses just to, to round up for your career?

You give, give us your, like, you know, top things.

I'm in a business right now, I'm running a business company and I assume I'm struggling, I guess, in some kind of way, or maybe I think I could always do better.

Here's a, here's a quick things that people turn up and don't know the answer to.

Why do people buy from you and not from one of your competitors?

Nobody knows.

Alright, so, so they have no real sense of who their core customer is.

They go, well, we've got lots of core customers.

No, you don't.

You've got one customer persona that probably buys from you at maximum profit.

Who is it?

And why did they buy from you?

And why would they buy from you in the future versus your competitors?

I've yet to meet anybody, a client, a prospective client, who can answer that in any cogent way.

So however successful they're being, they're leaving so much more opportunity on the table.

They're wasting their time.

Do you find your clients that come to you generally aren't?

In their first 10 years anymore, maybe they've been invested, sold on a bit, and the manage, the original dreamers have gone.

And it's sort of that, that the company becomes a bit lost as a kind of, they're not my preference.

My preference is entrepreneurial CEOs, not professional CEOs, right at the start.

They smash it outta part and they, and they might still be, you know, they might be 10 years in, 15 years in and work the client we're working with tomorrow, you know, started the business 20 years ago.

Don't tell that to entrepreneurs.

They get very depressed when they realize that they're in it for the long haul.

Because they all think they're getting out in five years.

What do we, I always say, I said it to someone yesterday, it's ten years, whenever I, a class, suddenly doing really well, I always look up when we set the company up or whatever, it's always ten years.

Like when they're suddenly like, they got the big deal, you know?

It's uh, it's an overnight success ten years ago.

Yeah, totally, always.

Always.

And now, a quick word from our sponsor.

Business Without Bullshit is brought to you by Uri Clark.

Straight talking financial and legal advice since 1935.

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com Is there something that you think is bullshit in your industry, and why?

Yes.

You shouldn't pay salespeople commission.

That's bullshit.

Why?

Because it, all the evidence suggests that paying people to do stuff doesn't drive the right behaviors or increase performance.

I mean, we can do another one if you want, because I hate annual appraisals as well.

No, no, let's just finish, let's just finish.

What makes a good salesperson in terms of their motivation?

Does that matter?

Yeah, so you can, and you can interview for that.

So the question you ask, which I got from the lady, Jill Garrett, who used to run Gallup in the UK.

She said, just ask him one question.

Tell me about your best deal.

And the money motivated people will tell you about their biggest commission check.

And the best salesperson that you want to hire will say, tells you about a deal where they had a great impact on the customer.

And they got great satisfaction out of being able to solve a problem for a customer.

That's the salesperson you go hire.

Not the guy who said, look at my commission check.

Because then all the time you're trying to work out how to stop them selling something you don't want them to sell.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and the problem is, you know, the problem is, I'm a lawyer and I think about this from a law point of view.

You know, I've had people in the past who are just like, I want to bill this client as much as I possibly can.

for the work I'm doing for them.

But if you rape and pillage a client, they're not going to come back.

You know, they want a service where they feel happy.

Yeah, if you can create great value, they'll pay loads of money for it.

Why not annual appraisals?

Is it, are you gonna, like, go, you should be appraising people every day?

No, no, it's, I like to read books where, you know, people go, here's a myth, bust a myth, right?

And so I say to people all the time.

Can you find me any evidence of anybody ever having their employee engagement improved, their happiness at work improved, or their productivity enhanced?

by doing them an annual appraisal.

So, if you can't find me any evidence, it's just wasting everybody's time.

Evidence is hard to produce, sir.

If we're going to start asking for evidence, I can't run my business that way.

Don't.

Ah, do that.

It's a good idea.

Oh, well, if we haven't got any evidence, it's like...

I was chatting to a CEO the other day, and he was telling me how much he hated doing appraisals.

And I said, well, how long does it take?

And da da, we worked it out.

It takes him a month, a year, to do his appraisals.

And I went, a month?

Like, aren't you busy?

And he's like, I'm gonna scrap it now.

I'm busy doing appraisals, man.

Oh, it takes ages.

That's a nightmare.

Also, if you're anything like me, you can have a glowing appraisal, but there'll be one thing somebody says that's slightly critical, and you then mull over it for the next...

Yeah.

Mmm.

Building up a massive amount of anger.

Did you employ people?

I do.

A team of five.

A team of five.

Okay.

All do the same thing as you or they support you?

They all do what I don't do.

So that I can turn up and do what I like to do and what I'm good at and just do that.

Oh, you lucky bastards.

He's managed to get it.

So you've got, you've got, you've got, um...

It's like an India.

If only I could work out what I like to do.

That would really help.

Yeah.

Uh, read books and have baths.

But I can't get paid for that.

That's the Discuss that.

Very wrinkly work, too.

You can test bath oil products, like one a day.

You'd be an excellent bath oil tester.

Uh, so this is the five second rule, Dominic.

Uh, we are gonna say a list of questions to get to know you a little better really quickly.

And you've got five seconds to answer each question.

Uh, DQ the music, please.

What was your first job?

Sweeping floors in a garage.

What was your worst job?

Working for an IT company in Glasgow.

Really?

Bloody glaswegians.

Eh?

Favorite subject at school?

Woodwork.

Oh, me too.

I shitted it though.

I thought I was good at the time, but anyway.

Sorry, I've gotta move on.

What's your special skill spotting patterns.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

No idea.

Still don't.

A blind deer?

A blind deer.

A blind deer.

Uh, what did your parents want you to be?

I've got no idea what they wanted me to be.

Happy, probably.

That's what everyone says.

That answer makes me want to throw up.

What's your go to karaoke song?

I have no karaoke song I don't sing.

If you made me sing, I'd sing the Bladen Races Tone Deaf.

But it's only useful if I'm drunk.

Okay.

That happy answer, I'm sure the person's screaming at the thing, I want you to be rich!

So I'd be all fucking right.

Which place do you think You wanted, you thought, I wanted you to be happy anyway.

Um, that's where they went wrong.

Mom and dad.

You didn't make that clear enough as you should as a c e O of your family.

You should make it fucking clear that they need to earn a lot of money.

Who's the c e o?

The mom or the dad?

I'm not saying You say, you gonna say just curious.

It was my mother.

Depends, yeah, it depends.

Depends on the family quite.

It's always always the mum almost always because it is my wife.

She's definitely boss.

Really.

I'm the strategic advisor and sales

Office dogs business or bullshit business.

Thank you, man.

Thank you for that.

Have you ever been fired multiple times?

Right, we'll have to have one of them.

And what's your vice?

Learning.

Oh, come on!

I really am going to throw up if you say things like that.

You've got to have a bad thing that you do, you know?

Like, I'll give you this.

Bread.

Bread.

Bread.

Love bread.

My wife's one is bread.

Yeah, well, whatever.

Many.

So this is where we give you 30 seconds to pitch whatever you want to pitch.

Off you go.

I do a weekly podcast called The Melting Pot.

I chat to CEOs of successful companies and I chat to authors of management books that I thought were great when I read them, some of whom have been heroes of mine, like Fred Reichelt.

And I've got a website, monkhouseandcompany.

com, so if you're after some coaching.

One of the things that really brings me joy is when people, it happens quite a lot, people ring me up or send me an email.

Message me and they say, take my business from X to Y.

Sold it for 20 million.

Never spoken to you before, but all of the stuff you produce has been really, really helpful.

So I thought I'd just ring you and say thank you.

Oh, that's nice.

So that's great.

That happens all the time.

That was lovely, but it was way over 30 seconds, so we're gonna have to penalize you now.

I got that whole thing.

In fact, I'm not even a guest.

I'm don't.

So there you have it.

And that was this week's episode of Business Without Bullshit.

I'm Andrew Uri.

It's been a fantastic pleasure.

Bit of steps.

My co host, Dee, our producer, who's already fed up and doing a pretty bad job this week.

And Dominic!

Uh, we'll be back with BWB Extra on Thursday.

Until then, it's ciao.