Kevin Dieny: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Close The Loop podcast.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:03

Today, we have a very special guest with us.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:04

His name is Martin Strong, and we're going to be talking about Conquering

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:08

Growing Pains from Your Business.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:10

Martin is a retired Navy Seal Officer and combat veteran.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:15

He is a novelist, really awesome making that transition, a practicing

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:19

CEO and Chief Strategy Officer.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:22

And he's the author of the book called Be Nimble, How The Creative Navy Seal mindset

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:27

wins on the battlefield and in business.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:29

And the second book Be Visionary, Strategic Leadership in the Age

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:33

of Optimization, set for release in December 22 of this year.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:38

Marty spent a lifetime meeting challenges head on, succeeding in

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:41

three professions, anticipating crisis and leading through crisis and chaos.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:46

He's an amazing person to dive into, how do you conquer growing pains here.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:51

So welcome Martin, welcome to the podcast.

Marty Strong: 00:00:54

Thanks for having me, Kevin, I'll try to be amazing.

Kevin Dieny: 00:00:58

Haha we'd love to pick your brain on a lot of these

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:02

subjects, but the one that we're really here for that we really want

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:05

to get into is on growing pains.

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:07

Just To ground us here, what do you think of when we say growing

Kevin Dieny: 00:01:10

pains and why do businesses struggle when they're trying to grow?

Marty Strong: 00:01:15

Well, I think it, I think it would print up to two tracks.

Marty Strong: 00:01:18

One is personal individual, you know, professional.

Marty Strong: 00:01:21

And the second one is organizational and they're intertwined obviously

Marty Strong: 00:01:25

because organizations are, are contrived and populated by individuals.

Marty Strong: 00:01:29

So can't really study or try to influence one without affecting the other.

Marty Strong: 00:01:35

So.

Marty Strong: 00:01:36

I spent a lot of time focusing on ways to motivate individuals, help

Marty Strong: 00:01:41

them see the future, their own future.

Marty Strong: 00:01:43

And sometimes their future.

Marty Strong: 00:01:45

Once they see it, doesn't align with the organizations are in, which is okay.

Marty Strong: 00:01:50

If it's healthy for them to understand what they want to be, where they want to

Marty Strong: 00:01:53

go, what kind of, what defines success for them, then they're going to go,

Marty Strong: 00:01:57

you know, where that path leads them and they may leave the organization,

Marty Strong: 00:02:00

or they may find that an organization.

Marty Strong: 00:02:02

I don't care what it is.

Marty Strong: 00:02:03

It can be a profit, a nonprofit, it could be a church, could be

Marty Strong: 00:02:06

the military could be anything.

Marty Strong: 00:02:08

Then they're going to be better aligned with the organization.

Marty Strong: 00:02:11

The second part of that is if you're interacting with leaders, organizations,

Marty Strong: 00:02:15

and they're trying to figure out why the organization is, is staggering

Marty Strong: 00:02:19

or, or it's failing to pivot or, or anticipate, usually you're,

Marty Strong: 00:02:24

you're going to sit down and point to the same kind of introspection.

Marty Strong: 00:02:28

What do you think the organization looks like in the future?

Marty Strong: 00:02:31

Have you ever defined that path?

Marty Strong: 00:02:33

Have you ever kind of sat down on paper on a whiteboard and put the profile

Marty Strong: 00:02:37

of what you are, what you want to be, and then draw, draw the line between

Marty Strong: 00:02:40

those two and say, are we on that path?

Marty Strong: 00:02:43

So that's kind of how I look at, you know, the growing pains is not knowing

Marty Strong: 00:02:48

where, where you want to be, what you are, who you are, or where you want

Marty Strong: 00:02:51

to go as a person in his organization.

Marty Strong: 00:02:54

That's part of it.

Marty Strong: 00:02:55

That's experiencing it when there's a disconnect and then recognizing

Marty Strong: 00:02:58

the disconnect and figuring out a way to align yourself with your own

Marty Strong: 00:03:03

universe and with the organization.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:06

Yeah, I liked how there's two parts to that.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:08

You've, you've laid out there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:09

At its core, a lot of times there's maybe a way of doing business up to that point

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:14

or a way of thriving up to that point that maybe has worked, but all of a sudden,

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:20

You know, to keep growing or to continue growing near the pace you had or to grow

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:23

at a higher or more accelerated pace.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:26

There's some sort of hindrance to that.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:29

As a small business emerging and getting bigger and bigger, it might

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:32

be you did everything yourself.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:33

A small group of people did everything.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:35

And I think in a lot of cases that ends up as, well, a few people can't

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:40

do everything as the company scales up.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:42

At some point, something has to change.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:45

And that changes that point where it's like, can they handle the change?

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:49

What got them there, that process, the people, everything that got them to that

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:54

point is what they want to hold onto.

Kevin Dieny: 00:03:58

But something about that has to change and that visionary aspect you've

Kevin Dieny: 00:04:01

described, where do we want to go?

Kevin Dieny: 00:04:03

Do we want to be a huge company, but everything running on

Kevin Dieny: 00:04:05

just a few people's shoulders?

Kevin Dieny: 00:04:07

I don't think that that's necessarily sustainable.

Kevin Dieny: 00:04:09

So when you're trying to grow your company, you're looking at it like,

Kevin Dieny: 00:04:14

what is the least amount I have to change to get that to happen.

Kevin Dieny: 00:04:17

So do you have any thoughts on change itself, like transformative?

Kevin Dieny: 00:04:21

If you realize your vision has to pivot, has to change, how do you do that?

Kevin Dieny: 00:04:27

I think that is a struggle.

Marty Strong: 00:04:29

Well, staying with your theme of small business and you know,

Marty Strong: 00:04:33

the different class of individuals, one class is the leadership class

Marty Strong: 00:04:38

and a founder business owner.

Marty Strong: 00:04:41

Finds themselves a lot of times facing the fact that, or the, or the truth that

Marty Strong: 00:04:46

they can't, whatever got them there.

Marty Strong: 00:04:47

It's not going to get them there.

Marty Strong: 00:04:49

And as you stated, and what you're asking them to do, if you're an

Marty Strong: 00:04:53

outside advisor consultant or a fear, somebody writes a book, you're asking

Marty Strong: 00:04:57

them to basically dismantle what they.

Marty Strong: 00:05:00

And it's completely contrary to human nature.

Marty Strong: 00:05:03

You, you may have struggled, you know, in a garage or in a, in a bedroom assigned to

Marty Strong: 00:05:08

the, to the new business in home business.

Marty Strong: 00:05:11

And now you've got a building and now you've got some employees and

Marty Strong: 00:05:13

everything, but you're stagnated.

Marty Strong: 00:05:16

Or you're doing great, but you realize when you look out on the horizon

Marty Strong: 00:05:21

that your competition is, has made some move shifted in some way, that's

Marty Strong: 00:05:25

going to make you your products, your way of doing business obsolete.

Marty Strong: 00:05:28

And you come to that cold, hard reality that if I do

Marty Strong: 00:05:32

nothing, this is all gonna fade.

Marty Strong: 00:05:35

And if I don't do something smart, I'll miss the opportunity.

Marty Strong: 00:05:40

And if I don't do anything at all, well, I'm just going, gonna fail.

Marty Strong: 00:05:44

So.

Marty Strong: 00:05:46

Facing that fact is, is that's one of your growing pains facing that

Marty Strong: 00:05:49

back to, as a leader, especially a founder leader, who's got, you know,

Marty Strong: 00:05:53

sweat equity and a lot of pride and self-esteem baked in to the organization.

Marty Strong: 00:05:59

The second thing is when you're small, You don't want to add a lot

Marty Strong: 00:06:03

of people cause it's expensive.

Marty Strong: 00:06:05

So maybe part of your growing is, is a reluctant to, to scale.

Marty Strong: 00:06:10

And if you don't scale, let's say you're doing great.

Marty Strong: 00:06:12

Let's say that there's so much opportunity.

Marty Strong: 00:06:14

You know, the world's beating a path to your door, but you got where you

Marty Strong: 00:06:18

are right now by being in very tight.

Marty Strong: 00:06:22

So now you're not going to delegate any responsibility to anybody else.

Marty Strong: 00:06:26

You don't want to increase your labor costs.

Marty Strong: 00:06:28

You don't want to maybe, maybe change the hours of your, of your workplace.

Marty Strong: 00:06:32

You want to open up another store.

Marty Strong: 00:06:34

You want to stay contained and controlled and safe.

Marty Strong: 00:06:37

Even when people are coming to you and saying, I want to

Marty Strong: 00:06:39

buy whatever you're selling.

Marty Strong: 00:06:41

And that's a really odd situation, but actually happens a lot because people

Marty Strong: 00:06:45

become less and less risk tolerance.

Marty Strong: 00:06:47

The more they succeed.

Marty Strong: 00:06:49

And, and that's usually when you have to open your eyes a little bit

Marty Strong: 00:06:52

and, and take some bigger calculated risks to continue and to scale up.

Kevin Dieny: 00:06:58

I think you've definitely hit home on that last statement there too.

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:00

The identifying of risk, because in some ways, and I know that this is

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:05

something you've said in your books or in your website, there's a balance

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:08

of risk and reward a lot of times.

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:10

And how strategically managing your risk is definitely a part of business.

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:15

The risk represents both the financial risk, but there could

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:18

also be an identity change too.

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:20

Cause I know that as businesses sometimes grow, they may go from well, the

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:26

CEO, the owner talks to every client, every customer that walks in the door.

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:31

And then, you know, if they grow to a point where they can't do

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:34

that, then maybe who are they?

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:35

I thought we were the company where, you know, you can reach out to the owner at

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:38

any time, any time anywhere you're always have us, like on a, on a direct dial.

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:43

And so you have this great relationship, but as the company grows, does that mean

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:47

you have to let go of that identity of, you know, you can always reach the owner.

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:51

So there's the financial, maybe the risk of, not growing as well, but

Kevin Dieny: 00:07:57

there's also maybe the risk of like our values having to change as well.

Kevin Dieny: 00:08:02

When you need to overcome a growing pain.

Kevin Dieny: 00:08:05

Do you have any thoughts on that?

Marty Strong: 00:08:08

Sure, if, if that culture, if that focus on the

Marty Strong: 00:08:12

personal touches that important to the owner, then stay the size you are.

Marty Strong: 00:08:19

Be happy.

Marty Strong: 00:08:20

That's where you want to be.

Marty Strong: 00:08:21

That's what makes you happy.

Marty Strong: 00:08:23

You can't stay that way and scale.

Marty Strong: 00:08:24

You can't grow you and you can't clone yourself.

Marty Strong: 00:08:28

And it's very difficult for most leaders that have started

Marty Strong: 00:08:31

companies and taking great risks.

Marty Strong: 00:08:33

They've, you know, they've hawked their house.

Marty Strong: 00:08:34

They did all kinds of things.

Marty Strong: 00:08:36

And now an advisor comes in and says, what you need to do is bring in somebody

Marty Strong: 00:08:39

else and split the leadership work.

Marty Strong: 00:08:41

And they're thinking, well, this person doesn't have any skin in the game.

Marty Strong: 00:08:43

They're coming in for a paycheck.

Marty Strong: 00:08:44

They're not going to care as much as I do when that phone rings.

Marty Strong: 00:08:47

And they're at home where I would pick it up in a second because it's

Marty Strong: 00:08:50

part of my, the culture I created.

Marty Strong: 00:08:52

They may not pick it up.

Marty Strong: 00:08:53

I that's, it so many anticipates anticipatory scenarios where

Marty Strong: 00:08:58

anybody they bring in, isn't going to be either as worked as hard as

Marty Strong: 00:09:03

them, or be as committed as them.

Marty Strong: 00:09:06

And so, okay.

Marty Strong: 00:09:07

So basically you're going to be miserable if you bring somebody in.

Marty Strong: 00:09:11

So, so you have two choices, keep it where it is and be happy with the size.

Marty Strong: 00:09:15

Yeah.

Marty Strong: 00:09:17

Or sell it and let somebody else scale it and it go start something new.

Marty Strong: 00:09:21

Maybe what you're really good at is creating, you know, the, the platform

Marty Strong: 00:09:24

in the initial, you know, genius of getting something out on the

Marty Strong: 00:09:27

street, getting a product or service developed and, and creating that,

Marty Strong: 00:09:31

that, that brand awareness and that brand commitment in the marketplace.

Marty Strong: 00:09:36

And then at that point, you can't exploit it because you're not willing to do

Marty Strong: 00:09:40

the things you have to do to scale.

Marty Strong: 00:09:41

And expand.

Marty Strong: 00:09:42

So sell it, move on, do something else.

Marty Strong: 00:09:44

So, so it doesn't always an either or, or it's, it's lots of choices back to

Marty Strong: 00:09:49

what I said before about individuals.

Marty Strong: 00:09:51

You know, you have to sit even as a, as a founder, you have to sit

Marty Strong: 00:09:54

down and say, am I happy doing this?

Marty Strong: 00:09:56

And will I be happy if I do all the things I need to do to go to the next level?

Marty Strong: 00:10:01

And many, many times the answer to that second question is no.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:05

Yeah, so what's really fascinating there is you laid out a

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:10

scenario where it's like, What is the purpose of this business and does it

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:15

have to strive for like the craziest growth possible, which may mean changing

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:20

who it is and what it looks like.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:22

And you've laid out a possibility of someone being like, you know,

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:24

this business has a purpose.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:26

It's not necessarily to grow beyond the reach of the capabilities I am.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:30

And being okay with that.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:31

This is the kind of business I want to have.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:33

Maybe we sell it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:34

Maybe the way I set it up as the way I want it to thrive day in and day out.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:39

Another part of this is being able to identify the growing pain itself.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:44

If you don't, I guess find the true symptom, right.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:48

You might be spending a lot of your time spinning your wheels, so to speak.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:52

You're not really finding the problem that you're actually facing.

Kevin Dieny: 00:10:56

So do you have any ideas, for a business who's like, I've been trying to grow.

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:00

But I've been unable to get past a certain growth rate or growth number.

Kevin Dieny: 00:11:05

So how do I figure out what's really holding me back?

Marty Strong: 00:11:09

Well, the first thing is to have that honest conversation

Marty Strong: 00:11:12

with yourself that we've been talking about so far, because you may be the

Marty Strong: 00:11:16

problem you may want on one hand.

Marty Strong: 00:11:20

To grow.

Marty Strong: 00:11:21

And you think that that's some symbol of success that, you know, the size,

Marty Strong: 00:11:25

the revenue number, the number of sales per month, whatever it is

Marty Strong: 00:11:29

that your metric is, you want to make that bigger because you think

Marty Strong: 00:11:32

that's, that's the scoreboard, right?

Marty Strong: 00:11:35

But in your heart of hearts, that's never mattered to you.

Marty Strong: 00:11:38

What's it mattered to you is delivering a great product or

Marty Strong: 00:11:40

a great service and getting the accolades from satisfied customer.

Marty Strong: 00:11:45

And knowing that you've made a difference in people's lives and

Marty Strong: 00:11:47

knowing that, you know, what you put together a solid it's sound and that

Marty Strong: 00:11:50

the people working for you are happy and you're happy being where you are.

Marty Strong: 00:11:54

So if you, if you believe that second piece, then stop

Marty Strong: 00:11:59

looking for the other answers.

Marty Strong: 00:12:01

However, if you're miserable, because you really, really believe that this

Marty Strong: 00:12:05

is something you want to take, you know, you want to take it to the, to

Marty Strong: 00:12:09

the New York stock exchange someday.

Marty Strong: 00:12:10

And that's, that's where you're heading.

Marty Strong: 00:12:12

All right.

Marty Strong: 00:12:12

So then, you know, Th you need to find out whatever you don't know,

Marty Strong: 00:12:16

you have taken inventory and say, I don't know how to hire people wisely.

Marty Strong: 00:12:19

I don't know how to create organizational structures

Marty Strong: 00:12:22

wisely beyond one or two people.

Marty Strong: 00:12:24

I don't understand everything about say remote work.

Marty Strong: 00:12:29

I don't understand exactly how you control people at remote work.

Marty Strong: 00:12:32

Anything that you're not doing, that you understand, you have to find people,

Marty Strong: 00:12:36

they don't have to be paid advisors.

Marty Strong: 00:12:37

They can also be, you know, people in, in a network that you know, are doing.

Marty Strong: 00:12:42

You know, Hey, fail.

Marty Strong: 00:12:43

Hey Suzy.

Marty Strong: 00:12:44

I know you're using all these people that are knowledge workers and you have

Marty Strong: 00:12:48

how many, oh, you have 60 employees.

Marty Strong: 00:12:50

How many actually sit with you in an office?

Marty Strong: 00:12:52

Oh five.

Marty Strong: 00:12:53

Well, how do you control all these other people?

Marty Strong: 00:12:55

And then you just, listen, you take notes.

Marty Strong: 00:12:57

I mean, It's out there.

Marty Strong: 00:12:59

The answers are there.

Marty Strong: 00:13:00

It's not, you don't have to pay any money.

Marty Strong: 00:13:01

You have to go to college to learn this stuff.

Marty Strong: 00:13:02

I don't think they teach it in college right now, by the way.

Marty Strong: 00:13:05

So you sit there and you all right.

Marty Strong: 00:13:07

I just did it.

Marty Strong: 00:13:07

I just did it recently for myself, or we're going to

Marty Strong: 00:13:09

move into a different space.

Marty Strong: 00:13:11

We're looking at how to use the floor space or do we want to do it, you know,

Marty Strong: 00:13:14

circa 2005 and, and have the landlord build walls and rooms and everything.

Marty Strong: 00:13:20

And so it's dead on, on a Lark.

Marty Strong: 00:13:23

I said, okay.

Marty Strong: 00:13:24

On a shark tank.

Marty Strong: 00:13:25

I saw this weird phone booth thing.

Marty Strong: 00:13:27

These guys were selling.

Marty Strong: 00:13:28

It's a three-year-old shark tank episode.

Marty Strong: 00:13:31

And this phone booth was to set up basically calls inside of an office.

Marty Strong: 00:13:35

They had these really nice phone booths with a little baffled doors.

Marty Strong: 00:13:39

And so I, this is three days ago, I just Googled zoom room.

Marty Strong: 00:13:45

Figured maybe there's something like that.

Marty Strong: 00:13:47

Anybody that Googles that you'll be stunned, there's hundreds and hundreds

Marty Strong: 00:13:50

of companies now making these things.

Marty Strong: 00:13:52

And then.

Marty Strong: 00:13:53

They've got little tables coming out of the wall with a screen

Marty Strong: 00:13:55

there and four little bar stools and all acoustically protected.

Marty Strong: 00:13:59

There's a podcast versions of them with super acoustics.

Marty Strong: 00:14:04

Yeah.

Marty Strong: 00:14:04

So instead of having walls, We're going to, we're getting an, a large and a medium

Marty Strong: 00:14:09

size, then they don't call it zoom rooms.

Marty Strong: 00:14:11

They're called all kinds of other things, but that's the way I Google it.

Marty Strong: 00:14:15

And that's the decision we made, plus a bunch of mobile walls that are two-sided

Marty Strong: 00:14:19

white whiteboard walls and walls that let sunlight through, but you can't

Marty Strong: 00:14:23

kind of frost it and we can reconfigure and shift and do all kinds of things.

Marty Strong: 00:14:27

And if we move from that space, it all goes with us.

Marty Strong: 00:14:30

As opposed to having a landlord build all the, the walls in the rooms we pay for it.

Marty Strong: 00:14:36

And then couple of years later, we leave and either it's demolished

Marty Strong: 00:14:39

by the next tenant or they use the stuff we built, you know?

Marty Strong: 00:14:43

And when, when I, when I Googled zoom room, I had no

Marty Strong: 00:14:48

clue what we were going to do.

Marty Strong: 00:14:49

And three days later we had a finished plan.

Marty Strong: 00:14:52

So you can get your inspiration from anywhere and you should.

Marty Strong: 00:14:58

Tasks.

Marty Strong: 00:14:58

What, what the kind of leading edge thinking is.

Marty Strong: 00:15:01

And a lot of these business topics, and, you know, none of this is

Marty Strong: 00:15:05

gonna be found in a business book that's based on history.

Marty Strong: 00:15:08

So you got to keep them open-minded and be very, uh, nimble, which is

Marty Strong: 00:15:12

why I named the book being nimble.

Marty Strong: 00:15:14

You have to, you have to think that way you have to ask people open-ended

Marty Strong: 00:15:18

questions and then shut up and start writing or taking notes or

Marty Strong: 00:15:21

recording, whatever you have to do.

Marty Strong: 00:15:22

And then think about it.

Marty Strong: 00:15:23

It's it's.

Marty Strong: 00:15:25

It's all out there.

Marty Strong: 00:15:25

The answers are out there.

Marty Strong: 00:15:26

You just have to be willing to ask the questions.

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:30

Yeah, that's really cool.

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:31

And because you've brought up the title of your book, Be Nimble there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:34

It kind of relates to another question I had, which was a business

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:36

has been around for a long time.

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:39

An old dog can, that can, that business.

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:42

Can a business that's been around for a long time?

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:44

Can it, can it change?

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:46

Can it learn new tricks?

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:47

Can, can it learn to be nimble?

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:49

Is this just for entrepreneurs in the early part, who everything is

Kevin Dieny: 00:15:53

sort of fluid anyway, or does this apply to businesses at all stages?

Marty Strong: 00:15:58

When you say business, I think of business models and platforms.

Marty Strong: 00:16:01

I don't think of products and services.

Marty Strong: 00:16:02

I think there's a lot of products and services that are stuck in the.

Marty Strong: 00:16:08

There are a lot of places in the economy.

Marty Strong: 00:16:10

One of the companies I'm I'm that I lead is a healthcare company.

Marty Strong: 00:16:13

So healthcare, it, you know, in general as much like the U S government or state

Marty Strong: 00:16:17

government or the DMV it's it's, it doesn't have a whole lot of competition.

Marty Strong: 00:16:20

Doesn't have a whole lot of reason to change.

Marty Strong: 00:16:22

And so it doesn't, you know, the, so the business model isn't that radically

Marty Strong: 00:16:26

different than it was five years ago or 10 years ago, they just kind of

Marty Strong: 00:16:29

tweak and do incremental adjustments.

Marty Strong: 00:16:31

The technology sounds like they're changing.

Marty Strong: 00:16:34

Not really, if you're still, if you can't just barge into your

Marty Strong: 00:16:37

doctor's office to say, Hey, I'm Fred, you know, see me right now.

Marty Strong: 00:16:41

And they go, okay, then nothing's changed.

Marty Strong: 00:16:43

So it could be that the product and the service or what's.

Marty Strong: 00:16:48

And stale.

Marty Strong: 00:16:49

And what you really have to do is say, do I have a, an old and stale business

Marty Strong: 00:16:53

model for delivering the product or developing the product or designing the

Marty Strong: 00:16:56

product or manufacturing the product and then delivering it, and distributing

Marty Strong: 00:17:01

it and, and is my service complete?

Marty Strong: 00:17:04

Does it cover everything it could cover?

Marty Strong: 00:17:06

Is there somebody else out there with a similar product that provides

Marty Strong: 00:17:09

a service attached to the product and they're doing something way

Marty Strong: 00:17:12

above and beyond what I'm doing?

Marty Strong: 00:17:14

And then can we do that?

Marty Strong: 00:17:16

So I would, I would address the way to rejuvenate a company is to first look at

Marty Strong: 00:17:22

the business model, which is the way you design develop, build, and then deliver.

Marty Strong: 00:17:29

And then also look at the market and whether the market cares

Marty Strong: 00:17:34

about your product or service, whether they're there's a demand

Marty Strong: 00:17:36

still out there or demand shifted.

Marty Strong: 00:17:38

I mean, Henry Ford built, the same color of black, model T for years.

Marty Strong: 00:17:43

And nobody complained until somebody else came along, came over, it was

Marty Strong: 00:17:45

general motors or people that worked for him quit and went and started another

Marty Strong: 00:17:49

company and had a colored vehicle.

Marty Strong: 00:17:52

Next thing you know, I was like, Hey, I didn't even know

Marty Strong: 00:17:54

they came in different colors.

Marty Strong: 00:17:56

So that's sometimes is all it takes.

Marty Strong: 00:17:58

You just have to look around and pay attention, see what models

Marty Strong: 00:18:03

are working and see which ones aren't and then look at yours.

Marty Strong: 00:18:07

And again, like I said before, you don't have to do this.

Marty Strong: 00:18:10

You know, in a vacuum, you should ask everybody that works with you and for you.

Marty Strong: 00:18:13

Cause a lot of those people probably have great ideas.

Marty Strong: 00:18:16

They're just afraid to upset you by bringing them up.

Marty Strong: 00:18:19

I mean, I mean, if you're not open to those ideas and you don't make yourself

Marty Strong: 00:18:24

available and, and approachable as a founder or a leader at any level,

Marty Strong: 00:18:30

those ideas level will never bubble up.

Marty Strong: 00:18:32

They'll never percolate because the fear either a failure or ridicule or, or worse.

Marty Strong: 00:18:40

Invoicing those ideas will prevent those ideas from ever coming up internally.

Marty Strong: 00:18:45

And if you can't get that environmental culture established, then do it.

Marty Strong: 00:18:50

I said before, go outside, open your mind and ask every network contact.

Marty Strong: 00:18:55

You have open-ended questions and try to discover where you are in

Marty Strong: 00:19:00

relation to the rest of the world.

Marty Strong: 00:19:02

Size pace, quality, speed of speed of, a business, all those things.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:08

Yeah, yeah wow.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:10

So then you, you've put a couple of questions in my head and already

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:14

two of them flew out of my head.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:15

So one of them that's still in there was...

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:18

one growing pain I've found that seems to be pretty common out there is people

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:21

saying, well, I have a talent shortage.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:23

I have people leaving my company.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:25

I bring in people, I train them, I get them great.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:27

And then they leave and I feel like I'm just always hiring.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:30

There's always this problem.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:32

The talent shortage growing pain is out there.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:35

It's been out there for the last, I think year or two since, the pandemic hit.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:39

People are still figuring out what kind of companies they want to come back to.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:43

So in terms of the talent shortage growing pain, how do you assess

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:47

that and how do you navigate that?

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:48

Cause a little bit of that is retention and a lot of that is also

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:53

attracting the right talent, making sure there's a good process for hiring.

Kevin Dieny: 00:19:57

So there's a lot there, but was there anything you could speak of in regards

Kevin Dieny: 00:20:01

to the talent shortage growing pain?

Marty Strong: 00:20:04

You first have to establish a profile for the kind of participant you

Marty Strong: 00:20:09

would like to have in your business model.

Marty Strong: 00:20:12

I'll give you a quick idea.

Marty Strong: 00:20:14

I think I talk about this in Be Nimble.

Marty Strong: 00:20:17

I use some simplicity in explaining this.

Marty Strong: 00:20:20

There's 50 mile an hour people and a 100 mile an hour people.

Marty Strong: 00:20:23

If you have a business model, that's a hundred mile an hour business.

Marty Strong: 00:20:27

Everything's moving volume, velocity, complexity, boom, boom, boom, every day.

Marty Strong: 00:20:31

You can't hire 50 mile an hour people.

Marty Strong: 00:20:33

I don't care if their resume is exactly the same as a 100 mile, an hour expert

Marty Strong: 00:20:38

technical expert leader, whatever.

Marty Strong: 00:20:40

By personality, by level of energy, you're just going to have a problem.

Marty Strong: 00:20:47

Now think of this.

Marty Strong: 00:20:48

Let's say you have a 50 mile an hour organization because it has to be.

Marty Strong: 00:20:52

Because there's a safe safety related or something, or the

Marty Strong: 00:20:54

way the quality is maintained.

Marty Strong: 00:20:56

Bringing in a bunch of 100 mile an hour employees, it's just going to cause a

Marty Strong: 00:20:59

bunch of they're going to be, they're going to be constantly frustrated.

Marty Strong: 00:21:03

They're going to be banging their heads against the wall.

Marty Strong: 00:21:05

Wondering why we're going so slow, why we're not, why we're

Marty Strong: 00:21:07

not doing things differently.

Marty Strong: 00:21:09

So that's a disconnect.

Marty Strong: 00:21:10

So you have to figure out what kind of organization do I have or if it's

Marty Strong: 00:21:13

too slow and I want to ramp this thing up, maybe the reason it's too

Marty Strong: 00:21:16

slow is what I've done over time.

Marty Strong: 00:21:18

I've just hired people in based on their resume, their technical quals.

Marty Strong: 00:21:22

And I never thought about the other part of the.

Marty Strong: 00:21:25

I mean, could you imagine if you were professional basketball team

Marty Strong: 00:21:28

and you said, okay, all I want on the resume is their ability to dribble.

Marty Strong: 00:21:32

And then HR tells you, yeah, I've hired five people and you go in the

Marty Strong: 00:21:34

room and they're all five foot one, but they can all dribble, you know?

Marty Strong: 00:21:39

Oh man, there was another dimension there you forgot to put down

Marty Strong: 00:21:42

on your set of requirements.

Marty Strong: 00:21:43

So one of those other things you can, you can note in the profile

Marty Strong: 00:21:48

is creativity, imagination.

Marty Strong: 00:21:51

Uh, the willingness to share ideas a little bit of self-confidence because

Marty Strong: 00:21:57

if you don't have self-confidence they'll, they'll clam up.

Marty Strong: 00:21:59

The second you hire them, it'll all be about job, you know, job safety.

Marty Strong: 00:22:03

So you don't want that.

Marty Strong: 00:22:05

And here's another thing you have to be willing to.

Marty Strong: 00:22:08

One, you have to be willing to overpay for the, for that kind of person.

Marty Strong: 00:22:12

If you're going to, if you're going to get a a hundred mile an hour

Marty Strong: 00:22:13

person that's open, imaginative and is willing to communicate and has

Marty Strong: 00:22:18

self-confidence this isn't the, you don't, you don't go to, Salesforce or any

Marty Strong: 00:22:23

place else and say, what's the median.

Marty Strong: 00:22:24

And then go back 10 to 10% and, and hire at that level because you're

Marty Strong: 00:22:28

never going to be one, you'll have a hard time attracting them,

Marty Strong: 00:22:30

then you'll never retain them.

Marty Strong: 00:22:32

So you have to figure out what's the premium for.

Marty Strong: 00:22:35

Those kinds of people are also very trainable and cross trainable.

Marty Strong: 00:22:38

So you can start building, I talk about this and Be Nimble more than Be Visionary,

Marty Strong: 00:22:42

but you can build bench strength.

Marty Strong: 00:22:44

You can build redundancy, you can build competencies in a lot of different areas.

Marty Strong: 00:22:48

You can attract people in by saying, we're going to cross train you.

Marty Strong: 00:22:52

And then once you're cross train, we're going to cross project utilize you.

Marty Strong: 00:22:55

And that's exciting for a 100 mile an hour people that's exciting for

Marty Strong: 00:22:58

people with imagination and creativity.

Marty Strong: 00:23:00

So that's.

Marty Strong: 00:23:02

That's one big disconnect.

Marty Strong: 00:23:04

I was with a company one time where we had all that and it was all going great.

Marty Strong: 00:23:08

And as soon as all of us got senior removing up and the organization got

Marty Strong: 00:23:11

bigger and bigger went from like 175 to 900 people, we hired in human resources

Marty Strong: 00:23:17

professionals, and they just started hiring people based on the resume.

Marty Strong: 00:23:21

The interview was a confirmation of what was in the resume.

Marty Strong: 00:23:25

It wasn't anything about how to, how could they work in the business model

Marty Strong: 00:23:28

and the business model was dynamic.

Marty Strong: 00:23:30

I mean, it was really dynamic.

Marty Strong: 00:23:32

So we had people being hired, and their doing, all skill sets, accountants.

Marty Strong: 00:23:36

There are, um, people that are by technical skill, meticulously focused

Marty Strong: 00:23:42

on details, and they don't want to interact with a lot of other things.

Marty Strong: 00:23:45

Again, their focus is important to them.

Marty Strong: 00:23:48

But you, if you need an accountant that can work on three different projects.

Marty Strong: 00:23:51

They have to have at least that flexibility.

Marty Strong: 00:23:54

Right?

Marty Strong: 00:23:55

And these HR people were hiring in accountants that were, this is my stack.

Marty Strong: 00:24:00

This is my cubicle.

Marty Strong: 00:24:01

Don't come near me.

Marty Strong: 00:24:03

And I'm talking about like 10, 20, 30 accountants.

Marty Strong: 00:24:05

And then we realized, uh oh we lost control of the culture.

Marty Strong: 00:24:10

And then we said, we never defined the culture and handed the HR department.

Marty Strong: 00:24:13

We all live the culture in our heads because we are all very entrepreneurial.

Marty Strong: 00:24:17

And that's where we screwed up.

Marty Strong: 00:24:18

So we had to sit down and redefine the culture, redefined the profile

Marty Strong: 00:24:22

of the perfect fill in the blank, senior leader, middle leader,

Marty Strong: 00:24:25

supervisor, technical expert.

Marty Strong: 00:24:28

Reissue that guidance and then try training with who we had.

Marty Strong: 00:24:31

And yeah, so, you know, you learn this stuff by, by making mistakes.

Marty Strong: 00:24:38

I made lots of mistakes.

Marty Strong: 00:24:40

I've been, I've been there and watched lots of mistakes made and I've,

Marty Strong: 00:24:43

I've chimed in and raised my hand.

Marty Strong: 00:24:45

Yeah, that's a good plan.

Marty Strong: 00:24:46

And then watch it fall apart.

Marty Strong: 00:24:48

With all good intentions, I mean, it's not like a bunch of people sat in the room

Marty Strong: 00:24:50

and say, let's do something stupid today.

Marty Strong: 00:24:52

You know, everybody thinks they're making a good, a good decision, but that all

Marty Strong: 00:24:57

that experience and all those, those failures and the successes I tried to

Marty Strong: 00:25:01

bake into Be Nimble because it's all.

Marty Strong: 00:25:04

The mechanics of leading and hiring and talent selection across training,

Marty Strong: 00:25:08

and a lot of the normal blocking and tackling in businesses Be Visionary is

Marty Strong: 00:25:12

more about dreaming and trying to figure out how to turn a dream into a strategy.

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:18

So then here's a question for you that I think may fit more into

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:22

your second book, your Be Visionary book.

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:24

This was another growing pain I found that was very popular.

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:27

The one that I, in fact, I have experienced and part of the production

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:30

side of marketing, which is.

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:33

Everyone every day feels like you're putting out fires.

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:36

You really don't feel like you're being very strategic.

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:38

In fact, you don't really feel like you're doing anything of any visionary value.

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:41

Because you just day after day, tactically, just putting out a fire here

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:44

next day, putting out a fire there, you don't really get to feel like you're

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:48

looking beyond a few days ahead of time.

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:50

You're just trying to thinking.

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:52

You know, in a few days, works out.

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:53

And then in other times, I've, I've come out of that or been on different roles

Kevin Dieny: 00:25:58

and been like, wow, this role is so much more strategic than it was before, because

Kevin Dieny: 00:26:02

before I was just putting out fires, uh, it felt like everything's an emergency.

Kevin Dieny: 00:26:06

Everything has to roll up to me.

Kevin Dieny: 00:26:07

Everything has to be solved by me.

Kevin Dieny: 00:26:08

Everything has to be in my decision.

Kevin Dieny: 00:26:09

We didn't really plan, and then we solve it, but then it feels like more

Kevin Dieny: 00:26:14

problems are just right behind it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:26:15

And so nothing ever feels like it gets to that point of, I get to be strategic

Kevin Dieny: 00:26:20

and I get to improve what I'm doing.

Kevin Dieny: 00:26:22

I'm just literally making sure the water isn't going through the cracks.

Kevin Dieny: 00:26:25

So that was one pain, one growing pain that I found that I was like,

Kevin Dieny: 00:26:31

Ooh, that's an interesting one.

Kevin Dieny: 00:26:33

How do you move from a firefighter, putting out the fires and plugging

Kevin Dieny: 00:26:37

the holes, to getting back to being more strategic in a leadership role?

Marty Strong: 00:26:42

That's a great question, Kevin.

Marty Strong: 00:26:46

It really is it's so the subtitle of be visionary is strategic

Marty Strong: 00:26:50

leadership in the age of optimization.

Marty Strong: 00:26:53

And what you described is actually always been around, but it's getting

Marty Strong: 00:26:57

worse because business schools and corporations that are first

Marty Strong: 00:27:04

technology enabled and now AI enabled.

Marty Strong: 00:27:07

Are starting to get really comfortable, demanding a high granularity of short

Marty Strong: 00:27:14

range measurement KPIs, which causes everybody to focus on the grains

Marty Strong: 00:27:20

of sand and the tips of their toes.

Marty Strong: 00:27:22

Every day.

Marty Strong: 00:27:23

I guarantee you, if you are that focused on every single thing that

Marty Strong: 00:27:28

happens every hour of every day, you know, one, you know, it's frantic.

Marty Strong: 00:27:33

So it's going to feel frantic.

Marty Strong: 00:27:36

You won't be able to solve everything because things don't get solved in a day.

Marty Strong: 00:27:40

Somethings actually go away in three days and some things get better

Marty Strong: 00:27:45

once in a while they get worse.

Marty Strong: 00:27:46

So not everything is solvable in a day.

Marty Strong: 00:27:50

And your to-do list of, of houses that are on fire, you know, to put out never

Marty Strong: 00:27:55

will never, ever, ever be resolved.

Marty Strong: 00:27:58

You'll just keep adding.

Marty Strong: 00:28:01

But now that, unfortunately, there's this kind of mantra out there that

Marty Strong: 00:28:06

because you can measure and because you can measure so frequently and so

Marty Strong: 00:28:11

intimately, and so tightly that's, that's now expected of leadership.

Marty Strong: 00:28:16

That's now strategy, you know, what did you do last week?

Marty Strong: 00:28:19

What did you do last Tuesday?

Marty Strong: 00:28:20

What did you do yesterday?

Marty Strong: 00:28:22

Thank you.

Marty Strong: 00:28:22

I'll call you tomorrow and you can tell me how you did today,

Marty Strong: 00:28:25

you know, and then nobody wants to talk about not even next week.

Marty Strong: 00:28:30

Let alone six months from now or whatever.

Marty Strong: 00:28:33

So I'll tell you the only thing I've been able to do.

Marty Strong: 00:28:37

And I started, I read someplace probably a decade ago.

Marty Strong: 00:28:41

Somebody in a book took Sunday and they would get up, they set

Marty Strong: 00:28:46

their alarm and get up really early in the morning on a Sunday.

Marty Strong: 00:28:48

And they would sit down with a blank piece of paper and a cup of coffee and

Marty Strong: 00:28:52

all they would do is think big thoughts.

Marty Strong: 00:28:55

They wouldn't let one single short range to do problem

Marty Strong: 00:28:58

that they're trying to solve.

Marty Strong: 00:29:00

Be entertained.

Marty Strong: 00:29:01

They only said, what do I think the world's going to

Marty Strong: 00:29:04

look like a year from now?

Marty Strong: 00:29:05

Where do I want to be?

Marty Strong: 00:29:06

What do I want to have?

Marty Strong: 00:29:07

You know, personally, what do I want professionally?

Marty Strong: 00:29:09

What do I want if I'm running an organization, what I want that

Marty Strong: 00:29:11

organization to be doing to look like a year from now two years from now, what's

Marty Strong: 00:29:16

going to prevent me from doing that.

Marty Strong: 00:29:18

Is there anything out there that could help me?

Marty Strong: 00:29:19

Is there a target of opportunity that I should start looking at and start

Marty Strong: 00:29:23

steering the ship in that direction?

Marty Strong: 00:29:24

So to speak over time, if you do it as a discipline, Every Sunday morning

Marty Strong: 00:29:31

before you get interrupted with kids or life or whatever, you find that

Marty Strong: 00:29:34

you've, it's like a muscle, you start to exercise it and pretty soon it's okay.

Marty Strong: 00:29:38

You start to think that way.

Marty Strong: 00:29:40

Even during the week after about two or three months, I found

Marty Strong: 00:29:43

myself seeing an immediate problem.

Marty Strong: 00:29:46

And then most of my brain jumped to, is this going to be a problem?

Marty Strong: 00:29:49

If I want to go down this path of starting to connect current issues with future, you

Marty Strong: 00:29:55

know, opportunities or, or future threat.

Marty Strong: 00:29:59

What I do now is I do it for about 20 minutes every day.

Marty Strong: 00:30:03

And I do that because I like that idea and I like doing it, but the

Marty Strong: 00:30:10

second I go into the office and I'm the CEO and I put that hat on.

Marty Strong: 00:30:15

I'm basically, it's a lot like when I was a seal officer, we S we used to joke that

Marty Strong: 00:30:20

in modern, in the modern days of seals, the officers were just telephone poles.

Marty Strong: 00:30:24

We had.

Marty Strong: 00:30:25

Well, you know, radios and headsets and little, little switches to

Marty Strong: 00:30:29

switch between different frequencies.

Marty Strong: 00:30:30

You're talking to planes and helicopters and our killery and Naval gunships,

Marty Strong: 00:30:33

and the sniper team off to the left and the guys inside the house.

Marty Strong: 00:30:36

That's what you were and your, your like whole place, you're shifting all

Marty Strong: 00:30:39

these little switches around, well, that's kind of how it is being a CEO.

Marty Strong: 00:30:43

You, you walk in.

Marty Strong: 00:30:45

And the sun comes up and boom, your phone lights up, your, your computer lights up,

Marty Strong: 00:30:49

your cell phone, lights up, people start, start, dive, bombing you, it random.

Marty Strong: 00:30:54

These are leaders for the most part and they just swing by and they have

Marty Strong: 00:30:58

sometimes a fairly shallow question, but that's rare in my experience.

Marty Strong: 00:31:04

So they combine, they give you a deep question and then you're like, wow.

Marty Strong: 00:31:08

Okay.

Marty Strong: 00:31:10

You either start talking about it right in the moment with me Elvis, grab him

Marty Strong: 00:31:14

and go into a room with a dry erase board and we'll try to diagram out

Marty Strong: 00:31:18

what they say the problem is or think the problem is, or the opportunity.

Marty Strong: 00:31:21

And we'll think about, is there anything we can do right now or do we need to

Marty Strong: 00:31:24

get some smarter people involved in it?

Marty Strong: 00:31:25

But that's what I do for the next eight hours, but I I'm comfortable doing that.

Marty Strong: 00:31:31

Cause I spent 20 minutes of that morning thinking about

Marty Strong: 00:31:34

the strategy of the company.

Marty Strong: 00:31:35

But I manage thinking about the individuals, thinking about the

Marty Strong: 00:31:38

professional development of my senior leaders, thinking about the

Marty Strong: 00:31:41

way things are being communicated, thinking about the relationship and

Marty Strong: 00:31:45

the communication with my board and the outside, outside investors and things.

Marty Strong: 00:31:50

Yeah.

Marty Strong: 00:31:50

It's only 20 minutes is more than enough.

Marty Strong: 00:31:52

It's not meditation.

Marty Strong: 00:31:53

I just sit there and, you know, I have a piece of paper if I want to write on

Marty Strong: 00:31:57

it, but that's something anybody can do.

Marty Strong: 00:32:00

You just have to commit a block of time.

Marty Strong: 00:32:02

I would suggest either Sunday morning, if you just want to do it once a week

Marty Strong: 00:32:07

to try it out or early in the morning, I get up at 5:15 to write, but you know,

Marty Strong: 00:32:12

usually by around 6:15, I'm done writing and that's when I do my 20 minutes.

Kevin Dieny: 00:32:16

Wow that is some really good advice.

Kevin Dieny: 00:32:18

I've heard this from a couple different books and leaders and

Kevin Dieny: 00:32:24

conferences and people talking about the concept of, block your schedule.

Kevin Dieny: 00:32:29

You have to make time for your priorities.

Kevin Dieny: 00:32:32

And priorities is just something that you've heard a million times, but equating

Kevin Dieny: 00:32:36

it to like, okay, In my business or I'm running my team and managing whatever

Kevin Dieny: 00:32:41

it is I'm doing, what is a priority?

Kevin Dieny: 00:32:44

And is it always going, obviously the emergencies are, they, they inherently

Kevin Dieny: 00:32:49

feel like they're the most, the highest priority at any given moment, but

Kevin Dieny: 00:32:53

there's things that you kind of have to step back for and plan like, okay,

Kevin Dieny: 00:32:56

I'm going to put half hour or hour or whatever it is like you've discussed.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:00

And because the strategic element of my business is a big priority to me,

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:06

like amidst all the other things that are going on and figuring out your

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:10

priorities in your business or in how you want to organize your time.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:13

Even it is something I've equated with.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:17

As you a matured thing, a matured leadership concept, because you're,

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:23

you're, you're not necessarily like blocking out and telling people no, never

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:26

talk to me, but you're just like making special time for certain things to happen.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:30

And if you organize your day in a certain way, You do get your time.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:34

You do set priorities for things that are important for strategic wise.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:37

And then there's other times for obviously, open office hours

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:40

or whatever it is like you've worked, you've talked about.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:42

I think that's really important.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:43

I think that's a really cool answer for someone who is in the midst of

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:48

being a firefighter all the time and a really fascinating take on it and how

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:52

you've described, you know, the CEO, the owner is basically, it's like a.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:57

Joked about it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:33:59

The person in charge and the seal team is like a telephone pole.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:01

Cause I've seen that.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:02

I've seen that where it's like, man, that office door is just like

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:05

swinging and moving all the time and that, you know, leader's office.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:09

And do they have any time for anything else?

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:12

So I think it's, yeah, it's crazy.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:14

So going off that you did your part of your book.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:17

Your first book was how the creative Navy seal mindset

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:22

wins on the battlefield, right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:24

When I saw that, I was like, I got to ask you, right.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:27

I haven't read the book, but obviously the book is about that.

Kevin Dieny: 00:34:30

But in its essence, what is the creative Navy Seal mindset?

Marty Strong: 00:34:37

So the, the book really is about business leadership, organizational

Marty Strong: 00:34:41

leadership, but I can't help, but give a nod to the, to where I learned a

Marty Strong: 00:34:48

lot of the creative leadership that I exercise and I talk about in the book.

Marty Strong: 00:34:52

And the seal teams are, are probably misunderstood because of

Marty Strong: 00:34:56

the, the media and in Hollywood.

Marty Strong: 00:34:58

So one way of answering it, just to give you a short description of what a seal is.

Marty Strong: 00:35:04

So a seal is from the beginning is, is, probably a college level.

Marty Strong: 00:35:09

Then Munich played college level sports, but that's how good an athlete they are.

Marty Strong: 00:35:14

And they're screened for high intelligence.

Marty Strong: 00:35:16

And that's my opinion.

Marty Strong: 00:35:17

They actually do that during the screening process and for creativity and resilience.

Marty Strong: 00:35:23

So when you get through the first basic course and you show up at an actual

Marty Strong: 00:35:27

seal team, you've already been selected on a couple of different levels.

Marty Strong: 00:35:31

And one of them is your imagination and creativity, your drive, and

Marty Strong: 00:35:35

your willingness to both lead in.

Marty Strong: 00:35:38

A room full of seals is a very difficult thing to lead in my experience.

Marty Strong: 00:35:45

Because you walk in there and I used to joke with somebody, you

Marty Strong: 00:35:50

know, when you want to say hi to everybody, when you walk in to talk

Marty Strong: 00:35:52

to the seal, platoon, you start.

Marty Strong: 00:35:54

Good morning to pull in the Polian Alexander, the great

Marty Strong: 00:35:56

Napoleon deployed everywhere.

Marty Strong: 00:35:58

Everybody knows that they're smart.

Marty Strong: 00:36:00

Everybody knows their, they know their, their job and they know your job and

Marty Strong: 00:36:03

they know your job better than you do.

Marty Strong: 00:36:05

And, and so it's an interesting dynamic, but if you don't.

Marty Strong: 00:36:10

Inhibited by that as an officer and you figured out a way to tap

Marty Strong: 00:36:14

into all of all that brain power, all that imagination, break it up.

Marty Strong: 00:36:18

I used to break people up into little think tank groups and going imagine

Marty Strong: 00:36:23

four different ways to do the mission.

Marty Strong: 00:36:24

Four different ways to get to the, to the target site, four different ways to

Marty Strong: 00:36:28

do it, where we had to do on the target.

Marty Strong: 00:36:30

And they thrived on that.

Marty Strong: 00:36:31

They loved that and they'd come back and we have to pick something.

Marty Strong: 00:36:33

And at some point I'd have to say.

Marty Strong: 00:36:35

This is what we're going to do.

Marty Strong: 00:36:36

And it might, it might be a hybrid, but it was never a compromise.

Marty Strong: 00:36:39

It was never, it was never like consensus or compromise.

Marty Strong: 00:36:41

It was what was the best element generated from that process, that creative process.

Marty Strong: 00:36:47

And as an officer, you do a lot of bigger picture, mission planning

Marty Strong: 00:36:53

besides leading people every day.

Marty Strong: 00:36:56

So what I found out when I got out of the Navy was the first thing is

Marty Strong: 00:37:01

nobody was pre-screening spending millions of dollars to pre-screen.

Marty Strong: 00:37:04

This, this type of person to show up at my company.

Marty Strong: 00:37:09

So that was a shock because, you know, we just went down the hallway and asked

Marty Strong: 00:37:13

the operations officer for an extra guy when one of our guys got hurt and they

Marty Strong: 00:37:16

give us exactly the fully qualified, super motivated creative guy, same, same guy.

Marty Strong: 00:37:21

You know, here you go.

Marty Strong: 00:37:22

This guy's name is Bob.

Marty Strong: 00:37:23

He's just like, he's just like Tony, but Bob's gonna take Tony's place.

Marty Strong: 00:37:26

Ping, just like a Pez dispenser.

Marty Strong: 00:37:28

They go in there.

Marty Strong: 00:37:29

You don't even miss a beat.

Marty Strong: 00:37:31

And the outside world, that's not the way it is.

Marty Strong: 00:37:33

So I found that I really liked leading that way.

Marty Strong: 00:37:37

And I think organizations could be very powerful that way.

Marty Strong: 00:37:40

And with a few number of people applying their brain cells, their

Marty Strong: 00:37:44

imagination and being cross-trained the way we were always cross-trained

Marty Strong: 00:37:47

you had so much redundancy and so much cross understanding of everybody

Marty Strong: 00:37:50

else's technical area of expertise.

Marty Strong: 00:37:54

Which allowed us to collaborate collectively even more

Marty Strong: 00:37:57

and into a deeper level.

Marty Strong: 00:37:59

I said, well, how hard is that to do in the commercial world?

Marty Strong: 00:38:02

How hard is that to do in a civilian company?

Marty Strong: 00:38:04

You just have to, beside that, that's what you want to build.

Marty Strong: 00:38:07

And so you'll get whatever you get coming in through, human resources.

Marty Strong: 00:38:11

You try to set the profile.

Marty Strong: 00:38:12

Like I said before, to get people to come in with at least the DNA.

Marty Strong: 00:38:16

And then you have to try to forge and create that kind of idea of creative team.

Marty Strong: 00:38:23

And, and also show them that you're, you're okay with

Marty Strong: 00:38:26

everybody throwing ideas out.

Marty Strong: 00:38:27

Even if those ideas are either contrary to yours or maybe ideas

Marty Strong: 00:38:32

that lead to the destruction of something you built personally.

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:36

Right, yeah.

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:36

I've, I've found that too.

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:37

Sometimes a new process makes the new tasks, the new things you're

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:41

working on way better, the way your direction you want to go.

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:44

But it also, everything has like a give and take, right?

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:47

This new process may make what we did before a lot harder to do, or may destroy

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:51

things that we were used to doing make that, old process or task irrelevant.

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:55

It's really fascinating.

Kevin Dieny: 00:38:57

Some of the things I figured a lot of your experience and learned wisdom

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:01

from being in the seals would come across, into the business world.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:04

And it was just a curiosity thing that I'd had was like, well, other things you've

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:09

gotten in the business world, you would take back to the, the, the seal side.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:12

I don't know if you've ever been asked that, but I was just curious, I thought,

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:14

well, what about the other direction?

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:15

Which if you went back there with anything, is there anything you

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:18

would you found out in the business world that you'd be like, wow,

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:21

this is interesting, you know?

Marty Strong: 00:39:22

No.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:25

No.

Kevin Dieny: 00:39:27

It's very honed.

Marty Strong: 00:39:28

No, because almost every, almost everything in the business world

Marty Strong: 00:39:33

is so restrictive and it's so well here, here's the, here's an example.

Marty Strong: 00:39:38

Why, why it's in.

Marty Strong: 00:39:40

Again, misconception about seals, green Berets Marine Raiders.

Marty Strong: 00:39:46

These are special units that are supposed to go into a special task.

Marty Strong: 00:39:50

Now special doesn't mean better.

Marty Strong: 00:39:52

It just means different than conventional.

Marty Strong: 00:39:54

So the conventional forces you wouldn't send.

Marty Strong: 00:39:57

15 or 20 seals to go take a hill or a fortress.

Marty Strong: 00:40:01

You'd send the Marines or army Rangers.

Marty Strong: 00:40:03

You sent 200 bad-ass is not, you know, and maybe prepare, prepare

Marty Strong: 00:40:07

the target with artillery and airstrikes and then send the bad-ass.

Marty Strong: 00:40:10

As in you wouldn't send a little handful of guys in that could do a lot

Marty Strong: 00:40:13

of pushups and you'd get wiped out.

Marty Strong: 00:40:15

So what you're really looking at is every time a job comes up, every

Marty Strong: 00:40:19

time a mission comes up and they do this in training on purpose to

Marty Strong: 00:40:23

constantly keep you on your toes.

Marty Strong: 00:40:25

Look at and plan for the same scenarios.

Marty Strong: 00:40:28

They're all unique.

Marty Strong: 00:40:28

They're all special.

Marty Strong: 00:40:29

They're all different.

Marty Strong: 00:40:30

So that idea of a business model, you basically build the business.

Marty Strong: 00:40:35

When you're building the mission plan, it's unique, it's different.

Marty Strong: 00:40:39

You may configure differently.

Marty Strong: 00:40:40

You may not have used people the same way.

Marty Strong: 00:40:42

You may not have got in the same way.

Marty Strong: 00:40:44

I've gone into places in the back of dump trucks and, and jumped out into

Marty Strong: 00:40:48

dumpsters and waited until it got dark.

Marty Strong: 00:40:49

I mean, you could think of all kinds of crazy ways to do it,

Marty Strong: 00:40:53

and you may never use again in business, in the commercial business.

Marty Strong: 00:40:56

It's, that's almost impossible to do you have a point.

Marty Strong: 00:40:59

You're selling widgets.

Marty Strong: 00:41:01

You can't come in everyday and go, now let's sell shoes today.

Marty Strong: 00:41:03

Yeah, you know, heck with that, we're giving swim lessons for a week.

Marty Strong: 00:41:07

You know, you can't keep flipping around.

Marty Strong: 00:41:09

So I would not want that lock into one conventional task

Marty Strong: 00:41:14

business model in business and the commercial side, in the seal teams.

Marty Strong: 00:41:18

Because then that would erase the whole value of having a special, special unit.

Kevin Dieny: 00:41:23

Wow, that is so fascinating and so interesting and absolutely

Kevin Dieny: 00:41:27

answers what I was curious about.

Kevin Dieny: 00:41:29

Maybe it's just the way I, I think of it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:41:30

A good amount that involves the armed forces to be sort of static.

Kevin Dieny: 00:41:35

And then, a small piece of it, which is really, really important.

Kevin Dieny: 00:41:39

To be highly dynamic, but it's such a cool idea that you've brought up.

Kevin Dieny: 00:41:44

That no, every single mission we're doing we're coming up with a totally

Kevin Dieny: 00:41:47

new company, a totally new business objective, new business thing.

Marty Strong: 00:41:50

How many times did we go after Bin Laden.

Marty Strong: 00:41:53

One time, there was one Bin Laden.

Kevin Dieny: 00:41:56

Right, that's so interesting.

Kevin Dieny: 00:41:58

Wow.

Marty Strong: 00:41:59

I'll tell you the conventional forces train to take certain

Marty Strong: 00:42:03

kinds of targets, beaches, whatever it is in, in big ways, big forces.

Marty Strong: 00:42:10

And it has to be set up and structured everything.

Marty Strong: 00:42:11

Cause there's a lot of complex parts.

Marty Strong: 00:42:13

A lot of people involved, a lot of different machines involved and the

Marty Strong: 00:42:18

time is all those things is a different job then than what it's like a factory

Marty Strong: 00:42:23

it's like pumping out cars at a factory, as opposed to a seal team is probably

Marty Strong: 00:42:29

more like a group of creatives at a, at a advertising company that, you

Marty Strong: 00:42:35

know, every, every couple of weeks somebody comes in and says, Hey, we

Marty Strong: 00:42:39

just got this, request for proposal.

Marty Strong: 00:42:41

And then they want to figure out a way to make Apple sexy?

Marty Strong: 00:42:44

Can you guys figure out a way?

Marty Strong: 00:42:45

And then all of a sudden that's what you're doing, you know.

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:46

Yeah, that's cool.

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:47

I love that.

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:48

I love that metaphor.

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:49

I love that way of describing it.

Marty Strong: 00:42:50

What sexy, sexy, Apple?

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:54

In the advertising group, yeah.

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:55

That makes a lot of sense.

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:56

So let's say a business is really on the precipice right now today.

Kevin Dieny: 00:42:59

It would be like one of the main, last questions here for you.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:02

Uh, Their right now thinking....

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:04

Okay, we've had a growing pain we're facing, and we're going

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:06

to do something about it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:07

They have a plan, they're on the precipice of going through their

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:10

plan to make a change, to grow.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:13

In a way that they haven't before.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:14

So is there any, let's say in the next 90 days that they're looking

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:18

at here, any tips or suggestions you'd have for managing that pivot?

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:24

The next couple of steps they are going to take of unfolding

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:27

their plan and making it real.

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:29

Any sort of, I don't know, things to look out for or, or things to remember

Kevin Dieny: 00:43:34

as they enter that, conquering their growing pains plan as it unfolds?

Marty Strong: 00:43:39

Well, I can either assume that you've already thought through the

Marty Strong: 00:43:43

strategic visionary aspects of this.

Marty Strong: 00:43:46

And Be Visionary actually, there's, there's some mechanical advice for,

Marty Strong: 00:43:50

I think, two or three chapters.

Marty Strong: 00:43:52

And what I put in there is, there are people that are very visionary and

Marty Strong: 00:43:55

very open to all kinds of crazy ideas.

Marty Strong: 00:43:57

And there are people that are very good at cross checking other people's work.

Marty Strong: 00:44:02

There are two different kinds of human beings and you're going to have both.

Marty Strong: 00:44:05

So I said in the book, go ahead and deputize both groups.

Marty Strong: 00:44:11

Create a dream, have them work on the vision and turn it into some

Marty Strong: 00:44:15

professional strategic concept.

Marty Strong: 00:44:19

And then when you get it down to where you think it's solid,

Marty Strong: 00:44:22

hand it to the other group.

Marty Strong: 00:44:23

And let them try to blow holes in it.

Marty Strong: 00:44:24

Let them try to figure out what, what could be possibly wrong with it.

Marty Strong: 00:44:27

And the friction between those two groups, one you're taking in human

Marty Strong: 00:44:31

behavior and the fact that there are different kinds of people in

Marty Strong: 00:44:33

organizations, but the friction of those two groups, if you do that upfront,

Marty Strong: 00:44:38

should create a strategy for that pivot.

Marty Strong: 00:44:42

With, timelines and resource demands, expectations, milestones, you know,

Marty Strong: 00:44:49

that are reasonable and you've kind of battled back between two different

Marty Strong: 00:44:53

kinds of advocates until it came out to be a practical, achievable plan.

Marty Strong: 00:45:00

Now that's not necessarily a hyper detailed operational plan, but if

Marty Strong: 00:45:04

everybody in the leadership team on day one, sees it, hears it,

Marty Strong: 00:45:09

and says, got it, conceptually.

Marty Strong: 00:45:12

Then the next thing is to, to create the, the smaller hyper detail

Marty Strong: 00:45:15

operational plans, assign people project leads, people to the project teams.

Marty Strong: 00:45:19

And try to do as much as possible in parallel, because that way you can

Marty Strong: 00:45:23

take advantage of the time you have.

Marty Strong: 00:45:24

You've got 90 days.

Marty Strong: 00:45:26

One team is going to work for 90 days.

Marty Strong: 00:45:28

If you have 90 days and you have seven teams, you're going to have

Marty Strong: 00:45:31

seven times 90 days worth of, brainpower working in parallel.

Marty Strong: 00:45:37

So as much as you can try to work it in parallel with multiple groups,

Marty Strong: 00:45:40

even if the group has only a group of one, you know, try to break it up.

Marty Strong: 00:45:44

So that it's achievable.

Marty Strong: 00:45:46

The other thing is if you run into snags, you'll need that extra time and,

Marty Strong: 00:45:51

and you can also kind of dogpile and resource focus, which parallel team

Marty Strong: 00:45:56

project team is running into a problem.

Marty Strong: 00:45:58

So they've actually found something that.

Marty Strong: 00:46:01

Was glossed over or argued over and the dream team won and all of a sudden

Marty Strong: 00:46:04

it turns out now that for practical purposes, this really can't happen.

Marty Strong: 00:46:08

So as a leader, you might have to jump in and, and decide, is this a showstopper?

Marty Strong: 00:46:13

Is this something that is a resource problem?

Marty Strong: 00:46:15

We need to get an expert from out of town to come in and, and figure it out.

Marty Strong: 00:46:19

But yeah, that's what I would do.

Marty Strong: 00:46:20

I mean, 90 days, 90 days, a 100 days.

Marty Strong: 00:46:22

If you had a year, I would do the same approach.

Marty Strong: 00:46:26

And from time to time to revisit the original concept to keep everybody, on

Marty Strong: 00:46:31

track because if you don't do that, if especially if it's a longer one, like

Marty Strong: 00:46:34

a years project, if you don't bring them in about every month, the reset,

Marty Strong: 00:46:37

the concept, um, just like strategy.

Marty Strong: 00:46:40

We have a five-year strategy and I heard it five years ago in a conference room.

Marty Strong: 00:46:44

But after that, I mean, so we've been wandering all over the desert since then.

Marty Strong: 00:46:49

Doing what we think might kind of be aiming towards the strategic

Marty Strong: 00:46:52

goals, but we're not sure because nobody's said anything about the

Marty Strong: 00:46:53

strategy since five years ago.

Marty Strong: 00:46:55

And here's the dusty document.

Marty Strong: 00:46:57

You know, from five years ago.

Marty Strong: 00:46:58

Yeah, you have to kind of re reinvigorate that, that long, long view, big picture,

Marty Strong: 00:47:05

strategic conceptual point of view and plan with your leaders and have them do it

Marty Strong: 00:47:11

with the people that are in the projects.

Marty Strong: 00:47:13

Because, you know, people are people that need to focus and they need to

Marty Strong: 00:47:16

see what the course in bearing is they can't just be left to wander.

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:21

Wow, you've given some amazing insights here, Martin, and to kind

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:25

of recap a little bit, we've talked about, what growing pains are for businesses.

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:28

We've talked about a few examples of growing pains.

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:31

You've given some really great insights and how to overcome

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:33

some of the talent ones.

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:34

Some of the emergencies, visionary, strategic parts of it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:38

How to, open up and involve more team members in the creative side of it.

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:43

How to organize different teams for accomplishing projects

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:46

when they are accomplishing a strategic growth initiative.

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:50

These are all really great things, did we miss anything?

Kevin Dieny: 00:47:53

And is there anything else in this topic that you've wanted to add?

Marty Strong: 00:47:56

Only that I'm a big believer in intellectual humility and that's

Marty Strong: 00:48:01

something you should start with every day, whether you're a leader or not because the

Marty Strong: 00:48:04

world's changing too fast for you to do.

Marty Strong: 00:48:09

Stick to your guns and believe whatever you were taught yesterday a

Marty Strong: 00:48:13

year ago in college is still valid.

Marty Strong: 00:48:18

Test that validity every day with an open mind.

Marty Strong: 00:48:20

And that intellectual humility will protect you from taking old ideas

Marty Strong: 00:48:24

and, and then stepping into bear traps because you didn't keep your eyes and

Marty Strong: 00:48:28

ears open as you're moving forward.

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:30

Yeah, that is a great lesson to take away.

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:33

And as far as let's say, someone wants to reach out to you, connect with you,

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:38

find you, uh, check out your books.

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:40

Is there a resource?

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:42

Is there a website?

Kevin Dieny: 00:48:43

Is there any way people can find you and connect with you?

Marty Strong: 00:48:46

Sure, I write my novels all written under M L strong.

Marty Strong: 00:48:50

And that website is mlstrongauthor.com.

Marty Strong: 00:48:54

All my novels, uh, all the proceeds go to the Seal Veterans Foundation.

Marty Strong: 00:48:58

There's a program there for PTSD and traumatic brain injury.

Marty Strong: 00:49:02

My business books are all on my website.

Marty Strong: 00:49:05

martystrongbenimble.com along with all my articles and the books.

Marty Strong: 00:49:10

And I write under Marty Strong for my business books.

Marty Strong: 00:49:13

And there's a way to reach me through that website.

Marty Strong: 00:49:16

And of course the books are all on Amazon.com.

Kevin Dieny: 00:49:19

Awesome, yeah.

Kevin Dieny: 00:49:20

I didn't know about your, charitable part of what you're doing.

Kevin Dieny: 00:49:23

That's great, I didn't know about that.

Kevin Dieny: 00:49:24

So that's really awesome.

Kevin Dieny: 00:49:25

If anyone wants to check that out.

Kevin Dieny: 00:49:27

And again, Martin, thank you for coming on.

Kevin Dieny: 00:49:29

Thank you for tagging in and giving us these amazing wisdom and

Kevin Dieny: 00:49:33

knowledge and some of your experience in the Seals and in business.

Kevin Dieny: 00:49:37

And it's been fantastic, for anyone who's learning to conquer their growing pains.

Kevin Dieny: 00:49:40

So really appreciate you coming on!

Marty Strong: 00:49:42

Thanks for having me, Kevin.