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[Music] foreign [Music]
is proudly sponsored by the rising tide Mastermind the term Mastermind was
originally written in Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich before that the
earliest documentation that we have of a mastermind group was Ben Franklin’s
group that he used to meet every single week in a Tavern that he called huntus
Nation there’s no doubt about it life is too short to do it alone and it’s not
very much fun to do it alone in nation I urge you to go to scalingup h2o.com and
find out if the rising tide Mastermind is right for you I’d love to have a 15-minute call with you to explain all
things Rising tide Mastermind and see if this is a group that’s right for you and
you are right for the group go to scalinguph2o.com forward slash Mastermind
welcome to scaling up H2O the podcast where we scale up on knowledge so we
don’t scale up our systems I’m Trace Blackmore the host of the scaling up H2O
podcast a nation it seemed like just yesterday we were welcoming in the new
year and now we have almost gone an entire month yes it’s the end of January
how the heck did that happen time flies there is just so much that we want to do
and if you’re in the South you say well I’ll get around to it and I think I told
this on the podcast somebody actually made me a little wooden chip that said it was a wrap it was called a to it and
it was round so it was around to it I’m sure that’s funny to somebody out there listening anyway somebody actually gave
this to me and I had it somewhere I think I gave it away but that used to remind me that there is no getting
around to it to use falafel Philosophy from the great Yoda there is no try
there is only do or do not and the year will get out from under us if we do not
plan to do what we want to do now let’s talk about planning planning comes very
easily for me because I am a red and for those of you that don’t know what I am
talking about we are talking about I said this you heard that we have had the
great Kathleen Edelman on the show three times most recently Kathleen was on the
scamin up H2O podcast on episode 281 so feel free to go back and listen to that
and of course reference the times that she was on before in that show but she
explains what the four different temperaments are and my temperament is very easily we set up for tasks but not
everybody is that’s okay what do we want to do and if
we’re not task oriented who do we want to do it for and that’s a different way
of looking at that feel free to go back and listen to episode 281 and we talk a
little bit more about that but what I’m saying is we are 1 12 down of the year
so it’s my hope that you have started in your plan hopefully you already had a
plan and now you’re working out what you want to do if you do not have a plan
what I would love for you to do is start one and a great way to do that is the 12
week year and you’ve heard me talk about this on the show before the 12-week year is all about planning and getting more
done in a quarter than most people get done every year and we have an affiliate
link for the 12-week year and you can go to scalingup h2o.com com forward slash the number 12 week year all one word
again that slash the number 12 week year all one word and you can get a copy of
that book as you’ve heard on this podcast before I don’t think there is a better planning book out there but let’s
face it there’s a ton of planning books out there I will say by far this is the
absolute best execution book out there it tells you both how to plan and how to
execute and even better what to do if you get off track so again scaling up
h2o.com forward slash the number 12 week year and that is available on Audible
and we’re going to talk to our guests today and audible comes up and I’ll tell
you a little bit more about that conversation after the interview but I have changed my mind about how I read I
now read everything thing on Audible because of this conversation and I want
to come back to that I’m going to leave you hanging on that comment for a slight moment while we do all of the other
things we do in the introduction as well as the interview but I promise I’m going to come back to it as you know one of
the new things we are doing this year is we are doing periodic water table with James so here is today’s installment
hello and welcome to the periodic water table with James where we think and learn about water chemistry drop by drop
please use your week to search online ask your colleagues or even pick up a
book to learn more about each week’s periodic water table topic if you do at
the end of the year you’ll be 52 water chemistry smarter so let’s raise the water table of
knowledge together and get started today’s topic is [Music]
to Lil triazol now I know some people pronounce Italy triasol but there is a
second l in there I was taught to pronounce it to Lil triazol it’s also often shortened to TTA
or just TT what is turtle triazole used for what is this chemical formula and what
concentrations is Toledo triazole effective what is the impact of oxidizing biocytes upon it how does it
react with metal surfaces how does one test fertility are there challenges with blending a
product with telotrazole in it remember knowledge is power and taking
the time to learn more about water chemistry each week will help make you a force to be reckoned with
be sure to post what you learn to social media and tag it with hashtag water table23 and hashtag scalingup H2O I look
forward to learning more from you James as always thank you for getting us
to think a little bit more each and every week I hear so many people say
they love all the weekly installments that James McDonald helps out with us
James thank you for doing them and thank you for all of the people that let us know that it helps you become a better
industrial water treater speaking of industrial water treatment
speaking of the Year getting away from you and by the way
only 338 days remain in the year so what are
you going to do in those 338 days well you might want to go to a
conference so you can bolster your knowledge in your specific area of
industrial water treatment so perhaps you want to go to the association of
Metropolitan water agencies and then also the American Water Works
Association so they’re combining forces in Knoxville Tennessee for their
technology conference and that is taking place February 20th through 23rd so this
is all about membrane technology and exploring the latest developments in
membrane technology so if this is the type of water treatment that you practice go to our events page and we’ll
have everything there for you you might also want to check out the International
Institute of ammonia Refrigeration so for all of you people that are in Big
Industry where they are cooling using ammonia that’s going to be in Long Beach
California March 12th through 15th it is the largest Exposition dedicated to the
Natural Refrigeration industry we’ll have all of that information on our
events page and then you might also want to check out on March 28th through 31st
in Sacramento California the American Water Works Association and the water
environment Federation is having their utility management conference so this is
for professionals and managers to get together to talk about all things water
we’ll have information about this on our events page and this next one I’m going
to talk about is one of my favorite things each and every year its favorite times 2 because we do it twice a year
I’m talking about the association of water Technologies Technical Training seminars you’ve got two opportunities
for this you have one that’s going to be February 21st through 24th in San Diego
California the next opportunity is going to be March 29th through April 1st in
Pittsburgh Pennsylvania folks this is where if you practice the same type of
water treatment that I do that you get so much information power packed within
a week you are just going to be super charged with all the things that one
you’re going to be refreshed on as far as your knowledge and two all of the learning opportunities that you’re going
to get from this you are not going to go to this Technical Training seminar and say I’ve heard all this I know all of
this you are going to come back with things that you are reinforcing and things that you need to brush up on as
well as things that you’ve never heard of before it is a fantastic opportunity
it’s one that I am so humbled to be a part of and I would love to see you
there more information about that go to our events page and we will take you right to the site so you have everything
that you need and as I mentioned before our great staff on our events page they have made it so you simply click and it
takes you to where you need to go you can even click and it puts a calendar invite right into your calendar
so easy thank you to the great staff at scaling up H2O but I’m not done yet we
still have some other things to talk about so also the 2023 sustainable Water Management conference is taking place in
Minneapolis Minnesota April 16th through 19th this is where solutions for
balancing the benefits of conservation and the cost of managing Water Resources
sustainable utilities infrastructure urban planning and all things the like
are discussed as you know I’m going to say more information about this on our
events page and then the last one that I have is the 2023 water quality
association’s convention and Exposition that’s going to be April 18th through
20th in Las Vegas the wqa has this Convention and Expo every year and it is
one of the most comprehensive Gathering of water treatment professionals and so
many Industries this is one that you definitely want to go to if you have
never been before it’s very interesting how they do their papers they are very
strict on how they do their papers and it’s a different format especially if you’ve gone to the association of water
Technologies but all that information everything that I mentioned today and more for the entire year go to
scalinguph2o.com and go over to our events page and all of that is going to be there and all of this because I am
asking you what are you going to do with the balance of the year what are you
going to do with the remaining 338 days how are you going to enhance
what you already know about your craft well folks I am so excited to get to
this interview I know you are going to love it as much as I enjoyed giving the
interview so here it is [Music]
my lab partner today is Scott Wozniak of suas Consulting Scott welcome to the
scaling up H2O podcast today’s awesome to be here man thanks for having me absolutely of course you and I share a
good friend together Tim Fulton I’m curious how did you meet Tim you know I think honestly one of my
clients introduced me to him so I work with a bunch of different businesses and we happen to be in the same Atlanta metro area so yeah I I think it was a
mutual client it’s like hey you need to talk to this guy and we ended up hanging out on it being come part of his small
business events and doing some cool stuff so great guy yeah Tim’s one of those guys that if I learn 10 of what
he’s forgotten about business I will be happy yes totally get that I think
that’s one of the keys to just life and growth man keep exposing yourself to
people who’ve played at the next level in fact one of my buddies says it well he’s like hey I want to spend about a
third of my time with peers about a third of my time with maybe I’m pouring into people but then I want to spend
about a third of my time with people who are doing what I’m dreaming of but they’re at 10x size or quality or time
or however you want to measure that but they’re not just a little like they’re they’re the whole order of magnitude up
and yeah I I could say Tim could be one of those dudes right like just hang around people like that and uh what do
you know things will rub off you’ll pick up their random comments or like whoa whoa what did you just say like hang on
that’s big so yeah it’s it’s a really fun deal Tim gave me a phrase that has just
changed how I look at everything it was maybe about 15 or 20 years ago he said
Trace how do you know what you don’t know and I have just grabbed on to that
and and exactly what you just said what rooms can I put myself in where I’m going to learn something I want to be
the dumbest guy in the room yes yes absolutely well Scott tell us a little
bit about swaz Consulting sure so we’re a consulting firm we work I was going to
say all over the country but really around the world we’ve won three continents this past year mostly us and
we work with companies that are looking to grow or in the middle of growing and trying to figure out how to do that I
mean this is kind of our our Jam is fast growth and some of this is I have had a passion for studying the best in the
world um just really inspired this whole 10x idea right some of them are 100x where
I’m at but I would also say some some of that is because my my growth as an individual leader and strategy guy and
all that was in fast growth companies and so I did a couple of smaller ones and then I spent about a decade as a
leader at the Chick-fil-A corporate headquarters um and so most people don’t know this because uh they’re probably
not shocked but Chick-fil-A is not public right so they don’t have to put all their stuff out like like say their competitors McDonald’s do but
Chick-fil-A has had at least 15 percent growth every year for 35 years and they
are on track for this year to be year number 36. I mean some years it’s 17 18 19 but at least 15 percent year after
year after year and if you do the math I mean every five or six years they double um it’s it’s just a constant growth
world so so okay that background meaning like when you’re in growth mode it’s a
whole different thing you can’t just maintain right you gotta just do what we used to do and it all works you’re
constantly rethinking and so how do you build it we call it an engine of
Excellence how do you build an engine that Wows your customers and engages your team and what’s that growth engine
look like and it’s not just how do I get more customers I mean that that is super important part of the engine but I mean
if that’s all you do and if you don’t upgrade the company along with it um I’ll give you one of the lessons
we’ve learned uh about any time you Triple A Part of your business in size the systems Break
um volume of customers Revenue locations product lines I mean pick a category
about any time that gets to three times bigger than it used to be somewhere right around that Mark it’s not working
right like it’s inefficient and breaking down messages are being lost balls are being dropped it’s the costs are scale
like what’s going on and people off and like why are we doing something wrong like no no you design systems at this
level and now you’re at a whole other level you got to upgrade your system so so this is what we do we
we teach on this um we do strategy assessments where we’ll get to know companies go inside
and kind of help with oh here’s where you’re at here’s the systems you need to upgrade and then once in a while people
say hey will you just run with us for a couple years and help us actually Implement all this so so we’re um we’re
a boutique firm that that kind of rolls up our sleeves goes inside companies and and gets a lot of cool stuff done oh and
we have an online program and books and some of that stuff for people who just want to just kind of get the concepts
but we’re going to talk about some of your books later sure I hear number four is in the works yes yes that’s that’s
been a journey learning a lot well let’s talk about what you just mentioned because most companies out there think
growth okay let’s just sell more what’s the issue with just thinking about sales
well listen if you just want cash in the next 90 days sales is the only thing you need to
care about but if you want a brand that we talk about building legendary Brands right even if you don’t want to be
legendary if you just want to be solid in your category then the First Fundamental you got to build this trust
I mean if they don’t trust you it doesn’t matter how good your marketing and sales engine will be word will get
around and so hey fair warning I’m gonna pick on McDonald’s a little bit here um I I actually really like McDonald’s I
grew up on it it was like we didn’t have a lot of money McDonald’s was a special treat and uh like a Big Mac still tastes
like childhood happiness to me however it’s an interesting comparison to Chick-fil-A because they have
world-class marketing and advertising I mean they’re constantly driving attention and awareness in the I mean
right like people finish that in their head right whether you like the food or
not they’ve got the sales engine going the problem is enough of us had a bad
experience at McDonald’s now that we don’t trust them anymore they’re famously um they’re ice cream machines
or I say maybe should say infamously broken right like they’re in fact if your listeners wanted something fun to
do I’d recommend checking out www.mcbroken.com there is an actual
website not by McDonald’s they hate this one of these their customers happen to be a software developer who’s so mad
that he kept showing up for broken ice cream machines that it’s a real-time map of the US that uses the Google Map
system and they can zoom in to your city zoom out and it will show you with pins on a map how many of the McDonald’s ice
cream machines are broken and it’s this whole like bad press bad rigmarole well
here’s the crazy thing I go on that app I look and the last time I looked it was 12 percent now McDonald’s hates this app for
multiple reasons right partly bad branding duh but but I’ve heard them like complain guys look look at the
numbers we’re up 88 of the time and and you guys say we’re famously
broken like well here it is it’s just enough that we don’t trust it
and that’s if you don’t have trust then then you can tell me how cool your ice
cream is all day long and I’ll be like yeah but it’ll probably be broken when I get there this is what happens to Brands
I see they sell they sell outsell their operational capacity to deliver with Excellence so then a whole bunch of
people come have a bad experience and they start losing trust Trace let me
tell you this is actually my this is not what what you’re probably looking for but this is the Scott Wozniak strategy
on how to run your brand into the ground and ruin your reputation forever right like here we go I would actually want
you to have world-class marketing and sales and bad operations okay you got you gotta explore that a
little bit more well because I want you what you do say listen I need as many people as possible to come find out that
we’re bad at our job like these guys aren’t good and then word will get around and and you’ll make cash for a
year tops and by the end of that first year everybody will know these guys can’t deliver on the stuff they say
don’t believe their promises it’s all bunk and then your trust is gone your brand is gone and nobody will buy from
you so now listen if I want you to be great it’s not the opposite I don’t want you to have bad marketing and great
operations I want you to have great both but but again it’s the long term versus the short-term perspective
um at the end of the day the the customer experience is by far the most
critical thing you can deliver and the first part of that experience is the sales part the the marketing the the get
them in the door get them excited get get them hyped up enough to give you their money but if it’s all downhill
from there then then man the customer experience goes out health and by the way and if you want to flip it like
what’s the biggest growth engine you can come up with a Chick-fil-A’s key A lot of these other companies we work with
it’s word of mouth man it’s having raving fans who tell others to buy from
you I nothing grows a business faster than that you know it’s exponential everyone talks about exponential growth
and all the exponential engines like this is literally exponential if your customers bring you customers who bring
you customers like that just stacks on itself so it’s a slower build sometimes
because I might have to deliberately restrain some of my sales opportunities
and say if I can’t do it brilliantly yeah it I’m not going to do it I’m not I’m not not forever but not now right I
might delay that a little bit say hey can we come back not this time we’ll reach out next year um I hate that I I’m an optimist who’s
always like ah we’ll figure it out it’ll ha we’ll make it work right and I’m always pushing that boundary but man I
have pushed it too far more than a couple times in my life and come back to regret it if you can’t do it with
Excellence don’t sell it now I will sometimes times say hey we just started
I it’s we’re going to require stretch we’re going to lean like right I I’ve got a prototype and I’ve never done it
at this scale before like oh yeah I’ve done that and I’ll do that again probably but it’s a totally different I was
talking to one of my my team this morning about it tell them a story new member of the team catching them up on a few of the values and one of the things
we talked about is like we deliver on our promises even when they cost us um and so so I’m not a software company
but several years back one of my clients we were doing this strategy and they’re like we really need a tool to help us
with this and like a custom tool well I know a bunch of software guys um some of my great friends and all this
stuff and I was like oh yeah man I could I could totally make that happen for you and then I I got to confess I was like
man I’ve got this whole relationship I mean this is a global Corporation right they’re Fortune 200 and all this fun
stuff so cool um and I I was like you know uh we can do that for you and what I did
was like I’ll pitch the project then I’ll once I get that signed I’ll go to my software buddies and I’ll Outsource
it to them and I’ll take a little money for being the guy who set the deal up and this will be great well here’s the
problem man 25 years ago I did a little bit of software development I mean basic
Pascal like nobody uses those languages anymore but so I’m like I think I get how this works we’ll set it up and I
price the deal sell the deal hire a guy he gets into the project and my software guy goes
yeah it’s this isn’t this isn’t doable on the budget you said man but in fact
let’s get into it in order for me to pull it off it’s going to cost X Y and Z and he I’m he explained enough and I I
trust him and I know enough of software he was not making it up like I messed up the Contracting process so here’s this
client that signs me up and we’re working on this cool deal for him and the bonus feature I can and it’s like
what do you do and I was like all right so I told my team member this morning well it was
gonna be twenty thousand dollars loss for me like it was cost me twenty thousand dollars more to deliver than
they were gonna pay me and I was like we do what we say we they need to know they
can trust us because if they can’t trust us nothing else is going to count uh I mean I could spin the story and I can do
all that but I I’m I mean dang it I said it so we did it we paid they don’t know they I’m not naming them because uh
we’re still with them five years later they’re still doing stuff with us I probably could have saved myself twenty
thousand dollars I was out over my skis trying stuff that I really was not equipped to do learned
that lesson we don’t do software development anymore but it’s not honestly because I couldn’t sell software stuff I’ve got a lot of my
clients I get in there we’re helping them build and the solution is software one of the tools they might need is software and I I have been tempted many
times to be like we can build that for you and nowadays I’m like you know I
don’t currently have the team or the time to stand up a team and to run all that like you’re gonna need to find
somebody else to take care of that for you wish I could help I can make some introductions because even if I could
make the sale it could sour the whole relationship if I can’t deliver on the sale the point is not short-term sales
at least that’s not my goal the point is a long-term brand the more it grows the more success it gets and the more
reputation and respect it gets which creates more growth which I’m trying to play this long-term engine not like how
much cash can I grab in the next 90 days you know that’s a huge lesson because so
many people out there they want to help the customer the customer says I know you don’t do this but can you help me
with X and because we want to help the customer we spend so much time doing
something that’s not in our core focus and we end up losing traction how do we
stop doing that how did you learn that lesson oh I am still learning this because listen this I can relate this is
the the very thing that makes us entrepreneurial and Leadership is this
this optimism and this stepping into the unknown and figuring I that’s I don’t
want to kill that right that’s how we got here but yeah it needs to be harnessed and directed so so I’ve got a
couple of different mechanisms to try to keep me on track so the first honestly
is I have a team of people who are not just allowed to but like assigned to
checking with me and challenge me and before I sign new contracts or pitch things like there’s one guy on my team
my right hand right my co-leader and he’s part of why I selected him to be my my VP of Ops and run all this stuff is
that he is more naturally cautious and precise on how he moves forward I’m the
crazy Let’s Go Nuts we’ll figure it out and between the two of us then the balance is there so so like even though
I’m I’m the CEO and own the company we don’t sign contracts unless he signs off on it so I’m like hey here’s what I
think I’m gonna do to these guys make sure this isn’t too crazy 90 of the time
95 of the time he’s like sounds great sounds great sounds great and he sends all the contracts out I said here’s what
I’m going to do I just negotiated this and he’ll send it out but five percent of the time he will come back and he’ll
be like Scott that that’s not in our wheelhouse we don’t have the team for that the time
or maybe it’s just the timeline like we can’t move that fast I mean I know they want to get started next month but
that’s two weeks from now and given all the other teams that we have we can’t pull the people you want off their
projects in two weeks like you’re gonna need to go back to them and talk about that and that
that balance like having somebody authorized to balance me that’s been really important once a month I have a
reminder pop up in my to-do system it’s kind of a recurring thing that pops up and it’s just this question am I getting
too distracted with shiny objects am I over committed I get love that I chased
the cool things but I and then I have a little list of here are the four things that are the big deals for me this year
uh what am I doing that’s getting in the way of these four things and so I go back and and I literally have a goal to
say no a minimum amount of time this year I am working so hard to try not to over commit which which means I’m only
mildly over committing right now this is not easy for me that’s great I love that
you’re asking the question and you’ve set up the question to automatically ask
you to ask the question that’s that’s brilliant thank you well I need all the help I can get and you know part of what
we do as a coaching right as an executive leadership coach guy I do this a lot the power of a great question but
even though I am a coach maybe another mechanism I have a coach myself I I know all the questions but having somebody
sit with me once a month and walk me through what are you doing how are you staying on what’s really behind that why
this what would success look like I mean they he asked me all the questions I I could ask myself the same questions but
there’s something in the human mechanism of one of us talking to the other and like like this right like what comes out
of a conversation is somehow more and better than than what happens even when I’m sitting alone and so yeah I do the
once a month self diagnosis and I scribble my answers down and see what I’m thinking but I still think there’s
value in humans talking to other humans and figuring things out so yeah we half joke that it takes three to four people
to kind of rein in all the chaos that I create and keep me from balancing that so yeah big effort there well I totally
agree that there is just something that happens when you connect with another individual especially when you’re trying
to build each other up the concern I have and this is way off the topics that we were supposed to talk about today but
I’m digging it so what are we doing in society that everything we’re putting
out there is bringing us for further and further apart from us connecting with
our fellow humans there’s a long Grant right but I’ve got passionate feelings about this I’ll try to do the short
version I think a huge part of it is when you say the stuff we’re putting out there well we’re putting it out there on
platforms that reward immediate reactions well what drives the most
immediate reactions fear and anger so the things that get me the most likes
and reposts and comments and shares and the things that that the platform I’m
playing on is rewarding me for is strongly skewed to how and it’s they’re
not trying to be punks I don’t think the platforms are Bad actors on purpose it’s just human right if you get me afraid
I’m gonna react very strongly if you encourage me high will react but the I I mean I I
have people who will tell me they love they love my stuff that I post online I mean I don’t actually click like every time but I love reading it but you put
something up there that’s about tragedy or fear or Injustice and and so purely
strategy we come back to our teams and we say hey which of our content is quote unquote performing the best well gosh
it’s this stuff and so so that’s one of the mechanisms that’s going on is we are being aggressively rewarded for the
things that are very short-term reaction that that guess what fear and anger causes me to pull back feel unsafe hang
on to my type Community the the US versus them enemy kind of shows up and so so that’s part of it the other part
ironically is that it’s more easy than ever to find your tribe and it used to
be like listen if unless you lived in a giant City most of us ran across a lot
of different people that were not like us um you just like well yeah there you are what are you going to do with it right it’s like Elementary School you’re
just stuck in the room with all the kids and they come from all over town and that’s how it works but by the time you get to our states like I’ve moved to the
city a lot of people just like I like the feeling of that City versus this city and I like I only go to websites
here I mean even Google like the the neutral search engine yeah when I Google a word I get a different response than
you Google the word because they looked at my past history and they know what I actually mean by it I think oh well you
typically have bought these things so we’re going to skew it this way for you and like we’re just not seeing the same
information and so if you don’t deliberately try to get into a an outer
bubble you get in this world of like everybody thinks and says the same things I do and most of those things
online are angry or fear-based so you get in this Loop and there’s something about Live Events where you bump up
against people you didn’t plan for that causes you to like oh wait those are humans they’re not actually trying to
destroy America they actually trying to do good things and maybe maybe even I disagree with them but but if I know
them as a human it’s a whole different level of knowing so I think kovid didn’t
help because we were scared for our lives and we didn’t have the live unplanned interactions we only lived
online and so I think there were some really beautiful things that came out of covet it forced us to learn a lot of
things and grow and my family got some marvelous times together those first few months but this is one of the downsides
I think has happened is we retreated more and more into our our bubble of people who who are quote unquote in our
tribe or like us okay so let’s Loop this back into business right right because because it always should be a society
rant what do we do about that well one of the things I challenge businesses to do is go get in the field and get to
know their customers when you know somebody from a distance like you just know facts about them one of the things
we talk about in our engine the fuel that drives this engine is customer Insight do you really know your
customers well man I’ll tell you most of the companies we’ve worked with have customer data not customer Insight we
know facts about them what they buy when they bought it right where they live even their zip code but do we really
know the difference uh and I actually play a little game with them so I’ll play it with you trace I’m thinking of a
famous man and we’ll see if you can guess the same famous man I’m certain you know this person so I’m going to
give you just the facts right we’ll give you data and we’ll see if we can get to the same spot so it’s a British dude it
is a man right a male it’s a British dude English guy um he lives in a castle so pretty nice
house he has two famous grown children anyone who you think of that that comes
to mind that fits that bill I’m thinking Prince Charles are now King Charles yeah that’s right would have
said Prince Charles not long ago recently King Charles yeah dude that’s what everybody says
unfortunately I was thinking of Ozzy Osbourne um
you know he does oh man so and you know he’s a
prince right Prince of Darkness uh same thing right it’s okay my joke is like that’s fine because because Ozzy and
Charlie they’re pretty much the same guy right like I would mix them up all the time yeah heck no man like I can’t think
of one thing if you’re trying to make like a raving fan out of these guys I can’t think of one thing Charlie would love that Ozzy wouldn’t hate and vice
versa but they look the same on the surface if all you’re getting is this
distant virtual report driven data you should have those numbers I’m not saying
they’re bad you got to go past the surface down into why who are they what
do they care about maybe make real relationships and what I have found with a lot of leaders to talk about fast scaling this is one of the problems of
growth well man in the early days maybe 50 of the customers you personally
interacted with you were just doing it you’re on the field maybe you were entry level or maybe the company was small
right and it as you grow you get promoted you hire people under you you got more and more clients and you went
from like 50 of the customers you’d see every year at a five percent and these leaders still think they’re connected
and know what’s going on but they’re running on old data or they’re running on indirect data and one of the
disciplines of great companies who want to really like stay tuned in and wow their customers and do all this is you
got to get out of this this sitting in your office bubble and you got to go physically to where the customers are
and watch them interact with your stuff I mean even for a software company we went they do software for big Healthcare
systems and they did all the software you can track the clicks they use and see exactly where ports and how long how
many minutes they spend on it and all this beautiful data and I was like well when do you go to their site and watch
them use it and they’re like yeah we we’ve never done that let’s just try a couple visits and man we found some
interesting things quick one for example so the Physicians are supposed to use this enter the bunch of data and then
you you can track like hey man Scott hasn’t picked up his prescription for two months somebody better check on it
it helps people not follow through the cracks it’s a really cool system but it all assumes the doctors entering good data right so so we go do this deal
and what we find is a significant percent not majority but a significant minority of the Physicians were like
having their nurse and physicians assistant enter the data on the side like they and they’re sitting there
doing pen and paper data capture and you’re like what what’s the deal like uh and they’d asked them hey folk surveys
focus groups right all the user group meetings they’ve done all this this formal stuff away from the the field to
say tell me the input and the input was well you know we need this extra report or can you make this faster or add this
extra button for me like cool cool and they had this whole road map of all the stuff they’re going to build and improve and and the thing they really needed
wasn’t anything anyone was asking for they needed to move to tablet because
see what we found was the computers were stuck in the back corner and this is why the Physicians didn’t want they didn’t
want to sit there the fact it was the best physicians who didn’t want to do this because they want a great patient
experience they want to get up and interact and put their hand on their back and look scoot their chair close
and look them in the eye and they can’t do that sitting up in the corner typing on the computer so moving to tablet
making it a one-hand thing where they can just swipe touch and they can you know have this stethoscope and do all
that other stuff while they’re doing it nobody was asking for it and it was the thing they needed and you couldn’t get
that from a survey because you only you only get answers to questions you ask and you can say like what else should we
do they don’t know one of the the famous quotes of history for this is Henry Ford he said man if I would ask my customers
what they wanted they would have told me a faster horse like we we can describe problems well
but we really can’t give you all the answers in these indirect reports and so
I’m not anti-surveys there’s a way to do those well but but man there’s nothing
that substitutes for getting out of our little private bubble and going into their world and seeing them really
interact with our stuff their space seeing their environment the the relationships you build the insights you
get um and and yeah the best coolest software platform in the world and I use
a lot of them they can’t substitute for it there’s something humans need about rubbing up against other humans and just
learning and reacting from each other you’ve brought up several times the customer experience engine can you
describe that to our listeners oh sure sure yeah okay so the fuel that pours in
the engine is customer Insight do we really know our customers right and then it goes through this three-year process
so imagine really big gear and two small gears so the really big gear is is the
stuff we talked about earlier it’s not what most people think I’m gonna talk about like wait customer experience this
is going to be parties and and handwritten notes and yeah yeah yeah we get to that but the biggest gear in the
engine is operational excellence like if you don’t earn trust Through Your Excellence Nothing Else Matters uh it’s
McDonald’s ice cream machine problem it doesn’t matter that the ice cream can taste really really good if I don’t
count on it to be up and running I’m just not even going to try anymore so operational excellence there’s a whole
bunch of things you do to make that better from how you hire the single biggest factors hiring with Excellence I
mean you can’t get somebody who doesn’t want to be in your company to work really hard there’s no amount of systems
for that so get great people then you want to put cool measures on it and put leaders over your important things and
focus on stuff there’s all sorts of tactical things you do it’s not it’s not motivational hype speeches but you get
operational excellence if you’ve earned that trust now you earn the right to do personalized service this is where you
make personal custom connections small touches this is a little gear so I
just read reread for the first time I reread it but Jim Collins’s book good to
great so I don’t know if you’ve read that one it’s one of my all-time favorites so in that book he talked
about the flywheel if you remember this metaphors this big heavy Stone pre-combustion engine this was the engine right you might take three four
hours to get one revolution and then a second and third and eventually you have this huge momentum well once that
thing’s going the way it would actually work is you would get the big wheel going and then you drop these other little gears into it that run off the
momentum of the big gear that’s how these little gears are the big momentum
is operational excellence deliver the fundamentals well and just the greats never stop pushing on the flywheel right
and now I drop in little touches so once or twice a year you make a personal
reach out and say hey Trace how are you doing hey what’s going on in your world and there’s there’s High touch things to
do from Human to human there’s high-tech ways to do it personalized messages and personalized screens and all this stuff
that just says like yeah that’s for me they get me because see the question your customers asking if they trust you
is do you see me do you care about me do I matter as a real person to you and you
don’t have to do a lot I find a lot of companies over compensating for bad operations with this epic service man if
you’ve got good operations you can just do one or two small things and be like I see you man that’s awesome what a great
touch these guys are the best and then the next and last gear in this process is what I call memorable moments so if
you do all this and stop before memorable moments they might love you and they’re not telling anyone about you and that’s we talked about that that’s
the ultimate Behavior we want it’s not just they like us but they bring other people say man you gotta you gotta check
this guy out these people are awesome right so how do you get them to do that you don’t cross your fingers and hope they
talk you give them a story to tell you create a memorable moment that’s like oh this is awesome and man these guys are
the best and the key to that is counterintuitive most people think that I’m going to make a memorable moment by
talking about how awesome my company is well I want to be the hero of the story right the metaphor I’m going to use is
Star Wars I I love this partly because I think it works okay maybe partly because I have a Jedi robe and lightsaber in the
closet um it’s it’s for the kids it’s for the kids of course of course mine too I may have been a Jedi like for the
10th Halloween in a row here so um yeah it’s like what else am I gonna be so okay so I want to be Luke Skywalker
right I’m gonna be the guy that saves the day and I I’m hang hang on young
Luke not depressed deadbeat dad Luke like what is what did they do to that guy like he was a hero who like always
saw the best in people even Vader and now now okay Star Wars rant over they
ruined that guy I’m young Luke I’m the hero and I keep thinking if I could just show them how awesome a Jedi I am
they’ll be like check that guy out he’s a Jedi they’re not gonna do it man I mean they might even believe I’m a Jedi
they don’t want to tell my story they want to tell their story so the key to getting them to talk about you is create
a moment where they feel like the Jedi hero where the story is about how awesome
they are they really are the kind of father they want to be or the kind of creative that they always dreamed of I
mean this is Apple’s ethos Apple just doesn’t make you feel like Apple’s cool Apple makes you feel like I’m creative
and cool because I use apple like it’s just the way I prove to myself and the world I’m awesome Harley-Davidson’s
another good example right hey Pro tip when they tattoo your logo on their body right they might be a raving fan like
you got something figured out Harley’s got folks that go nuts for them it’s not because of Harley per se it’s because
how they feel when they’re on the bike it’s how they feel about themselves and so so how do we create something where
they feel so awesome about themselves that they will then want to tell this story because guess what it’s a way to
prove to myself and everyone else I really am that kind of awesome so creating these little moments that that
again once or twice a year little gear not a lot of money not a lot of time and you just just give them a little taste
of like I really you do get to be awesome thanks to these guys and the story gets to spread so okay you put all
this together and then I finally I didn’t used to have this but I had to add one last piece to the engine and that was a belt that wrapped around all
of the pieces because I kept running into companies where it’s like it’s sort of working but we’re getting no results like what’s going on and it came down to
being a healthy leadership team like if you don’t if your team your whole team doesn’t buy into this it doesn’t work
the idea of a healthy team is they truly all together on a shared goal and have a shared win versus like I mean good luck
with you but man I don’t care if you win or lose I’m going to get my stuff done um that kind of isolated separate I mean
might be nice people but they’re not a true team if that doesn’t work it’s because what I found is if you don’t run
the whole engine you don’t get any of the benefit um you get a little bit of benefit from good operational excellence but they’re
not talking about you sales don’t grow you’re just solid it you got to put all the pieces in place without that trust
they don’t want to see your party right but if you just have fundamentals and you don’t give them a story to tell they’re not going to tell anybody when
you put it all together though there’s some Synergy that happens and so so the leadership team kind of wraps around it
all and keeps us going and the other thing I like about it is is it’s the continual loop it’s not a one-time event
you know do your one-time memorable event or you don’t work on operations the once check the box and then go back
to normal like you just continually upgrading a little better a little better a little better and that’s the
team’s job is just keep running through another loop and say how do we do it this time how do we do it this time how do we do it this time can we get five
percent better this year and that that five percent of improvement that’s Stacks man over time you get epic I
gotta joke on myself a little bit I’ll finish up with this so I actually knew Chick-fil-A for a long long time I
actually went to high school with uh some of the folks in the family that own Chick-fil-A I’m the current CEO is a
high school buddy of mine and so I’ve known them for 25 30 years like great folks right they’re just really really
good people having said that man back then a bunch of my high school buddies
went College in Chick-fil-A right away and I was like yeah you know good luck with your little Mall company I I hope
you guys make it uh yeah I think I think they’re gonna make it uh they’re doing they’re doing pretty
well uh so why did I blow them off partly I was a business idiot right I had at 18 I had no idea how to evaluate
what was a good business and what was it but in my defense part of why I blew him
off is because Chick-fil-A 25 years ago was not the Chick-fil-A we all know and love today I mean it was Chick-fil-A and
there were some beautiful the sandwich was always a sandwich that’s good chicken however they didn’t they’re just starting to
experiment with drive-throughs they mostly were a mall company they had a few outstanding freestanding restaurants
that so they’re famous for their drive through these days when they didn’t have one the cow campaign the eat more chicken hadn’t been invented the waffle
fries had just like that was a brand new thing um breakfast products were great I mean half the menu didn’t exist on and on and
on the things that they’re famous for today didn’t exist 25 years ago but what they did have was this engine
of continuous Improvement five percent better five percent better five percent better that I now with my my painfully
acquired wisdoms like that’s more valuable than any one activity they did is they just keep playing with new
things new things new things and a company that can get that any organization that can get this
continuous loop of improvement man those exponential engines they look slow 25 years ago they weren’t they weren’t
looking that big but you just keep that up long enough it gets huge man I mean your problem
becomes how do we manage our growth not how do we grow a mutual friend of ours Cliff Robinson
yeah he was talking to us uh at one of our Mastermind Live Events and one of
the questions it was all about Chick-fil-A it was all about customer service it was fantastic and uh and he
took a little over an hour’s worth of our questions and they were they were all about customer service one of the
questions that came up was how did they get the drive through just so perfect
during covid when everybody else was struggling yeah and he shared oh we
didn’t start working on that when covet happened we’ve been working on that for years now maybe we rolled it out a
little bit quicker but we knew what we were going to do but they redefined
drive through during the pandemic yes and I’ll tell you 12 years ago fit no 15
years ago I was part of a project team to help them think about what is we called it the drive-through play and we
use the football analogy like how do we manage this so we looked at lean manufacturing kanban techniques in a
drive-through like what what are you talking about and there was no pandemic on the horizon we were just said you know a big part of our business is the
drive-through what does it look like to just improve it and there was no one day where the
drive-through went from bad to this currently awesome outdoor delivery you know interpersonal model we literally
like well let’s try this one tweak well let’s try this one we tried an outdoor cash like we put some money into this
made these little like booths outside with cash and a machine and all this pre-ipad stuff so if you look in your
drive through your drive you’ll probably pass a little black box if you were in one of the early ones you’ll you’ll know
it was one of the early test sites because it’ll be like this almost like a black Podium that’s now like locked up
and closed and has nothing inside of it but it was like a safe and all this stuff because they’re thinking well I guess we have to take what’s inside and
put it outside and I mean all sorts of stuff that that they’re like well let’s try this well let’s try that well let’s
try this it used to be just one person now there’s like three people outside I mean so again Inch by Inch by Inch let’s
just run the experiment let’s just see what it looks like and then covet hits and it’s like dude a lot of things like
this a lot of growth like this is we call it an overnight success it’s been 10 years in the making and then it
finally all comes together and the last year is all the Epic results and everyone’s like oh how do I copy those
start your engine man yeah if you just start building now you never know when your next opportunity will come and
you’ll be the guy who’s been working on it and getting ready so let me ask you a question I think a lot of people have about the engine
metaphor right now we are working at a time where we just can’t find people to
work and customer service is suffering and people understand to a point but you
can’t go anywhere today I mean if we went to McDonald’s today we would expect bad customer service because they have
maybe the third of the people that they need to run that restaurant so how do we how do we bypass that how
do we repair the engine while we’re dealing with that man uh you’re talking about what I think
is the single biggest thing that is upstream and drives most of the downstream stuff I mean I honestly don’t
have an easy answer I think I have a a useful answer but part of the answer is you have to put more time and effort
into hiring than ever um and it used to be that you could get away with not putting a ton of time and
strategy and thought into how you hire and how you where you find your people and because there were good people
around and you’d find them the fact that it’s harder means we need to work harder now what do I mean by that some of that
is is thought and strategy so for example we help people think about hiring for three C’s character chemistry
and competence most people are only looking at competence in their hiring process but we want to say no no
character chemistry competence character what kind of person are they and I don’t just mean generically nice Integrity we
all want somebody with intact nobody’s like I love Liars right like of course we want Integrity I mean like what are
the unique character qualities for your organization man we’re a passion for details or we’re really like boundary
pushers or we’re super people oriented what are the character qualities that make you fit your culture right then
chemistry do we like this person what are their people skills like do we enjoy talking and hanging out and work we’re
going to spend a lot of our lives together with these people if we don’t enjoy each other at least on a basic
level it has real operational implications I listen if I’m about to make an idiot mistake right and and I’ve
been a jerk to you or we just don’t click and it’s weird dude sometimes the temptation’s like
yeah Scott’s about to hit the wall let’s get some popcorn and watch this is gonna be awesome right like soccer burn you
we saw this come versus if we’re best buddies and you see me about to do something that’s gonna cost me a lot
you’ll be like dude you you really need to rethink this and if I’m your friend I
will listen at a whole other level like I mean if Trace thinks so maybe I should really think about this
so chemistry matters and then yes confidence all the stuff we learned job spill and experience and resume and all
that stuff and here’s here’s the tragedy when you can’t I would obviously love to have perfect in all three but when you
can’t get that when you’re in current markets and you’re like ah the only one that I would say okay you get to fudge
on this one like it’s not perfect but it’s close enough the only one I would fudge on is confidence and by that I
mean if they don’t have enough job experience or they don’t have the technical skill they’ve never done it before
you know what it might take three to six months but we can train them on that now they have to have enough of the the raw
competence like hey the the capability physical intellectual whatever it is that okay they can learn it but they’ve
never done it like I can that’s where I can fudge and most people’s selection process only looks at competence which
is the only the least important of the three and and it’s this do they care about the job I mean you trying to make
somebody care is intense and exhausting and uncertain find people who already care and give them technical skills that
is that’s the way we’ve been helping a lot of our clients say okay you can’t find your purpose so find Young Bucks
who are hungry but don’t have any skills or find people who are in related spaces
and they never really played in your skill or never at your level like be good at developing your team and there’s
hope tools and ways to do that we help people put all those in place and then then you can take raw talent and shape
it and that’s far more more valuable the mistake to take though the thing I’d actually hate is get somebody who’s got
a lot of job experience but they’ve kind of become jaded and bitter and they don’t care anymore but I mean they can
get it done and you slot them in the role and you just they start depressing the performance of everybody around them so the last comment I’ll say is there’s
more thought that goes into this I think it’s more time I don’t know how to do this in in one interview we’ve
been trying for years to figure out how do we and there’s ways to get lots done in a single interview you have multiple people at once interview them and it’s
like four of us on one person and lots of the ways to but I still I’ve never seen it at least three interviews at
least for entry level positions my job so I had a really unique job doing high-end strategy for the whole company
it was five months and 17 interviews before they offered me the job uh no I
that’s not the goal right the goal is to be a lot faster and more efficient but I was going to work across the company I
interviewed multiple VPS and entry levels and teams and I hear this they’ll
say man Scott okay that’s cool and all but I don’t have time to do this and Trace like I I’ve got hard news for
everybody you don’t really have a choice you’re gonna put in the time you’re either gonna put in the time to hire
with Excellence or you’re going to put in the time managing Misfit employees but you’re gonna put in time you just
get to pick which side of the equation you put it in on that’s a brutal fact I
don’t like it but I have hit that wall enough times like I’m going to acknowledge there’s a brick wall right
there if I’m sloppy with my hiring everything else gets harder Scott if somebody just tuned in right
now and you could only get one message out to them what do you want that message to be
man growth and and amazing customer experiences they’re not magic it’s not
luck you don’t happen to invent a brilliant product and somehow it works you don’t stumble across an amazing
person and that will happen luck will come to us good and bad and and maximize when that happens but that is not how
the great brands have done it that is not how the great teams great leaders great lives have turned out it is a long
steady system of continuous Improvement you can build an engine to get little
better and a little better and the hype and you’ll be motivated some days and not the other days and your engine will
just keep rolling and you don’t have to kill yourself and you don’t have to grind like nuts yes you’re gonna have to
show up and do some work but honestly if you get your engine going you can settle and just say hey we just keep moving and
what do you know you can have overnight success you can be one of the legendary Brands just by putting the engine together and staying with it long enough
it’s not magic it’s a system there are a set of things that this stacks on this
stacks on this and their minds are blown and you might even being worked Less hours now than when you were grinding on
just hoping it happens to you without a plan so you can be intentional you can be systematic you really can be great no
none of the greats started that way I mean even the brands we all love now there was a time when they weren’t and
they just steadily figured it out you can too this is a lot of fun and I feel like
there’s probably three hours more that we can spend together but I I know you’ve got something you’ve got to get
to so let me move to the lightning round questions if you’re ready for those let’s do it man all right so uh so you
now have the ability to talk to your former self on your first day as a consultant what
advice would you give yourself man I would say pick one thing and
really start building a reputation around that one thing when I first launched honestly a large
part fear-based I I had done a wide variety of things had a lot of things I
could talk about from lean manufacturing to HR to storytelling for marketing to
leadership development and I I started telling everybody I could do everything if you asked me what I could speak on I literally I think I still I should
probably find that document I think I listed like 19 different talks that I could give from Innovation to lean
Health Care like man what I have learned is people if you’re trying to build a reputation
build trust build a brand people need to know the main thing you are good at
and like so this is the metaphor one of my mentors gave me is it’s still like it’s beautiful he said it’s like trying
to get a brand build and reputation build is about being like an icebreaker ship in the northern shipping lanes and
you got to break through this is the beautiful phrase you have to break through the icy indifference of the world and get them to pay attention to
you so how do you do that you narrow your presence down to one key Point as a
narrow tipped front vote and the mistake I make is I was loading everything to the front of the boat I had this really flat fronted boat that like doesn’t plow
through ice very well because like all 19 things he’s great at and I might have been good at all 19 but when I picked
this one like the customer experience engine that’s the one I ended up picking took me two years to do it and now like
that’s my jam and oh by the way it’s nice to have a lot of things on the back of the boat now that I’m in and we’re doing stuff we can talk about this other
stuff and there’s lots of long-term side projects we can do but but man pick one and I had the hardest time being like
but I can do that I know which one are you going to pick and so it took me two years to finally have the guts I mean
it’s a little bit scary to say I’m gonna stop telling him I’m just going to say the talk you want me to give is this
now if you don’t like that one let’s talk about other things but just consider this one first
um and that’s when the company really started taking off and we had Clarity and my team knew what to do and our
clients our growth started taking off I tried to do everything and nobody knew what to kind of hook their handle on so
yeah narrow my focus pick one thing build around that one thing such a great metaphor
yes it’s so good that that guy’s given me a dozen great metaphors well I want
to change this next question a little bit because I know you read a lot now I
try to read 50 books a year that’s about a book a week but I know you try to read
over 200 books a year how do you do that okay so there’s a couple of things by
far the single biggest factor is this happened 10 or 12 years ago but I read an article I was listening to podcasts
and I had some books on CD and I read an article that said we can listen faster than we can speak it’s the human brain
thing and I was like huh and they’re like so look at your podcast player and you have an increased playback speed
button and I was like huh so I wonder how fast I can get well let me tell you like I when I first started seven
minutes at one time speed my brain would zone out I try to do on the commute to work 10 minutes in I’m like I have no
idea what the guy’s saying I’m like lost right I’ve stopped listening her a long time ago well eventually I got used to
being on a whole commute and then I read this article and I was like all right let’s go to 1.25 speed and honestly at
first I couldn’t keep up but then I was like I’m gonna just work at it and then I would slow it down and eventually I
made the whole commute at 1.25 speed and then I pushed it and pushed it and igsf
kept playing with that and so honestly I listened at 3.5 times speed now oh come
on it’s true it’s true it’s like I’m pulling up my phone right now and I’m gonna show you the book I’m in the
middle of listening to and you can uh hear what it sounds like here we go
and so really you’re getting stuff out of that that’s how my brain processes that now that’s amazing so okay so now
add that to that alone huge and listen if you can’t get to three five quickly that it took me seven years to get the
three time speed so like most people could probably go one two five maybe one point five right away and add 50 to your
reading done now this is the other magic of audiobooks I do it during my commute
I happen to travel for work so I’m sitting in the airport line I got nothing else to do I’m playing an
audiobook there are some chores that I absolutely hate they’re mindlessly and above all else boredom kills me so like
the lawn the laundry right did the dishes like ah for the love audiobook
saves my life man um no the book I just played for you is a fiction book I’m about 50 50 fiction
nonfiction partly for fun partly because I think really good fiction I do like sci-fi and fantasy and this some that’s
not all but mostly and I think that pushes my creativity and there’s there’s emotional intelligence gets developed
through fiction I think so so anyway sometimes it’s like I’m just gonna load up a novel uh go through an adventure
while I gotta do the dadgum dishes so between filling in dead time with
audiobooks and cranking up the speed that’s probably 75 of my books read right there oh then yeah occasionally I
got a hard copy book somebody gives me and I’ll flip through it at night time or I got books on Kindle app and I’ll
I’ll flip through some of those but dude audiobooks it’s been a life-changing piece so I don’t think everyone should
read as much as I do unless you have a job that contents your job and that’s a big part of me is I’m constantly coming
up with cool new ideas for my clients and if you don’t travel like I do and have all these these four hour zones
where I’m doing nothing else then that’s how I get to reading so much I actually don’t set a goal to say I got to get
through 200. I just listen to audiobooks and read a little bit in the evenings at
bedtime it’s kind of a good way to chill my brain out and what do you know I happen to get to 200 used to be 100 and
then I just kept increasing my audio speed and then well you know it’s 200 plus something so yeah man
um the goal is just give me a steady flow of good content and the happenstance outcome is it’s a lot of
books I’m just so impressed 3.5 speed I’ve gotten up to two but I can’t do
that with all authors well well yeah okay now there are a few that I slow down for like they got an accent where
it’s really Technical and I gotta back off a little bit but more and more a
three five speed these days because I was at three for a while they didn’t have more than three and there was only I think last year they upped it to 3.5
so I had to retrain my brain to be comfortable at 3.5 again so yeah I would
just say just nudge it to 2.1 and sit there for six months and then you can go to 2.2 but you might be surprised maybe
you don’t go all the way to three five maybe you don’t like it but you just might be surprised at what you’re actually capable of most of us are way
underestimating our actual capability well I want to take the challenge 1.5 is my preferred speed and then if the
author it has a lot of pauses I I’ve gotten up to two but I am not consistently at two but I’m gonna take
the challenge yeah buddy hey that’s an extra 25 reading every year you go so 50
to what like 67 or something like that without what’s your retention like on that when you’re listing at 3.5 so
pretty good um now I’ll be transparent I have a really good memory for ideas I have a
terrible memory for physical stuff where’s my car where did I put my shoes all the time like I have wandered the
Atlanta airport parking lot for 45 minutes like I don’t remember where I parked I got a totally wrong parking lot
of times but my brain does remember ideas now part of that is because I spend so much of my time thinking so
ironic the more you read actually the easier it is to remember because you get these mental models become like frames
to hang your ideas on and so if you drop a new book on leadership or customer strategy or insights and Tech man I
already have like seven other oh that’s kind of like this and that relates to this and it’s easier for me not harder
so that’s part of it part of it is I I’m on Goodreads 90 because of me I has a
few people who like I love following you like by making myself write a review of every book I read and it forces me to
have some sort of capture mechanism I’m done remember what the big things are pop them out if I looked it up if it was
audio I don’t have notes but if it’s Kindle I’ll go back and look through the notes I highlighted and write a little
review I’ve got four questions I always make myself answer and so that becomes
another processing tool and then sometimes for the very very good books that are deep or complex or profound I
will then go buy a hard copy because I want to flip through it slowly or reference it again or there’s really
cool diagrams and so so it’s like I know I’m gonna need more retention than I can get out of audio from this one and we’ll
go back so I’ve got a few systems to keep it going I would say it’s good I’m
always kind of fiddling with it but yeah the point is not to read books the point is to have more better ideas that you
actually Implement and so if I read 10 more books at the cost of I don’t remember any of that stuff I just was
talking to a buddy of mine about this I I got my own podcast and we literally yesterday recorded an episode where we
were talking about this exact process how do you read your book because he reads a lot too he’s kind of like you
and we swapped systems and he goes man I do not have an idea Instinct right like I have to work harder than you do with
that and so he was talking through this system where he even does like a once a month review all the things he read last
month and make himself revisit it and once a year review the whole year and he’s got all these review Systems to try
to keep the Big Ideas in his head but yeah I can get away with being a little sloppier than probably most can because
that’s my and it’s cause problems the the lack of physical memory has uh caused life disruption more than a few
times but yes it does mean that man ideas are my jam well you did mention the podcast
so tell us about that oh yeah yeah so it’s called upgrade engines with Scott Wozniak and it’s like these systems of
upgrading so not just company but also us as individuals what does that look like so yeah we’ll talk about customer
experience stuff but I also talk about things like self-awareness and how to learn how to learn I mean this whole con
that’s why we talked about how do you read so much well learning how to learn if you if you get good at learning then
guess what all the other stuff gets easier and so there’s a handful of these fundamental systems that I think drive
all the the outcomes they’re kind of the behind the scenes engine and so so
that’s my jam you can find you can find anything about me and my website and all that at Scott wozniak.com that’s uh
s-c-o-t-t-w-o-z-n-i-a-k.com we’ll be sure to put that on the show notes page so if anybody’s driving they can get
there so question number three when somebody makes a movie about your life
who do you want playing you oh okay so let’s be honest right who do I
want playing me versus who would most accurately be the guy to play me like I
mean dude Matt Damon would be really cool to have play me Bruce Willis I mean these guys are studs right I don’t know
if that’s the most accurate um yeah I’ll go if I get to pick my favorite let’s go Matt Damon I think
that might hey Mark Wahlberg right these are super cool dudes that that I think you know if they they shave their heads
and look look like a little bit like me we might be able to squint and be like I guess that’s kind of looks like Scott’s
better looking older brother um yeah that how about that I’d go with those two guys there you go great answer
last question if you could talk with anybody throughout history who to be with and why gosh man there’s a long
list of I so one of the categories of books I read a lot of is biographies it’s a little hack for reading that a
lot of people ought to lean into because it feels like you’re reading a novel the good ones it’s exciting
um but dude there’s a ton of really interesting insights on how they handled things so gosh two people come to mind
um Alexander the Great he did some bananas cool things and all the reports
we have from him are second hand you know two generations off written by people who weren’t in his inner circle
and so there’s all these rumor Mills about why and how and I read a biography on him that like debunked the whole idea
that he was kind of a wild drunk crazy guy is like actually think about everyone who said that was actually his
enemies at home so what are the people who love him none of them said that about him so it’s really interesting so Alexander the Great I’d love to get
through that but on a totally alternate example a William Wilberforce
um he’s a little known figure historic but he had huge impact on the world he’s
the first guy ever to successfully lead a movement and have slavery be ended by a people in power the English Empire
canceled slavery while they were still on top of the world nobody in the history of there’s been slavery since
there’s been humans it’s a terrible tragedy an indictment of our species and the only the first time ever a group
in power canceled their own slavery practices was the England and Wilberforce made it his life mission to
turn that around it took him like 60 plus years to do this and there’s some
really good books one of the books is Amazing Grace the life of William Wilberforce by Eric mataxis and the
reason Amazing Grace is because one of the guys in his Circle ended up being the guy who wrote the famous Christian song Amazing Grace and Wilberforce
himself started as a kind of a wild Playboy who kind of had his life radically turned around and said I need
a great cause and picked this as his great purpose of his life the guy changed the world and so how do you
actually change something from the inside like that is fascinating to me as somebody who’s
trying to figure out how to make lasting change um so there you go two totally different dudes Alexander the Great and William
Wilberforce would love to talk to those guys great answers well I want to add a bonus question just for you so I just
learned this fact the other day so if you are at a Kentucky Fried Chicken and
you were to bring up to the counter an empty bucket and ask for a chicken refill they will do it no just learned
it I verified it I didn’t actually do it but I saw it on the Internet it’s got to be true right that’s right that’s right
let’s go with it that’s so here’s my question you are in the Chick-fil-A no
so what are some Secrets around Chick-fil-A is there a secret menu is
there a code word you can say and get a free chicken sandwich what do you know that we now can know so I the only way I
know that you can get a free chicken sandwich on the regular is they have a little algorithm and every so often the
receipt prints out if you ever get a super long receipt from them the second half that makes it super long is a code
in an online site where you can go on answer like seven to ten questions and they give you a little code and you
write it down and it’s a free chicken sandwich so check your receipts you may have been throwing away free chicken sandwiches that’s the first thing that’s
the only way I know how to get free gosh and then yes there’s sort of a secret menu because what happens is the staff
are constantly mix and matching products that aren’t typically together and doing it like quick example they have bacon
for their breakfast products well it sits around all day you know you can add bacon to any sandwich you want add bacon
to your salad and let’s just be real you can add bacon to everything I have yeah you should the food product that isn’t
improved with bacon added from salads to Donuts to sandwiches like bacon makes
the world better right so just ask for hey can I add bacon to that and they’re like yeah you can add cheese to that
that’s a cheese goes on almost everything so there’s easy ads but man there’s some creative stuff so I’ll give
you an example one that people now all know about if you’ve ever had the Frosted lemonade it’s this uh lemon
flavored milkshakey kind of ice cream drink they have that is the lemonade
poured into the ice dream with a little bit of the milkshake base that’s the employees would just make that on their
break as part of their their snack and it was like Hey That’s dad gum pretty good so so like there’s a ton of mix and
match I want to add this I don’t want that I want a hot version of this fried version of that grilled version of this
let me throw one out there that that this this is dangerous right like do this responsibly don’t don’t eat and
drive this but they’re mac and cheese it’s very good they’re mac and cheese
with bacon I’m just saying get the bacon drop it on the mac and cheese might
double that bacon it’s dangerous right like you don’t don’t do that on the daily that will wreck you but uh as a
treat that’s the kind of stuff that you can do at Chick-fil-A we gotta end on that because that’s just the best piece
of advice we’ve heard so far that’s right how do you top that right like once we’ve gone bacon you’re done that’s
right that’s right Scott this has been fantastic thank you so much for sharing all this information with the scaling up
H2O audience and uh I’m pretty sure we’re gonna have you back so be on the
lookout for our call this has been super fun man thanks for hanging
[Music] Scott once again thank you for coming on
the scaling up H2O podcast I have to tell you that was a fun interview Scott
and I met through my mentor as you heard Tim Fulton Tim Fulton’s one of those
guys that I just want to know 10 of what he’s forgotten about business and I
would be happy with that well he of course introduced us and if you are not
asking people you know who you should know what an opportunity you are missing
out on because I would have never met Scott had it not been for a conversation
that I had with Tim Fulton and I asked him that very question hey who is it you think I need to meet and Tim always has
a huge list for me it’s always a great time when I meet with Tim and I urge all
of you to meet with some sort of Coach because I tell you when you’ve got somebody that is pouring into you and is
holding you accountable and is allowing you to understand the things that you do
not know and more importantly shed light on the things you don’t know you don’t
know that is where you really pick up speed and you start to develop every
aspect of your life so it seems like all roads lead back to Tim Fulton I’m just
such a fan of his and of course we’ve had him on the show several times in fact Tim and I are working on a project
together that I can’t wait to tell you about but it’s not quite ready yet so you’ll have to wait a little bit for
that and speaking of Roads leading back to places it seems like all roads lead
back to Chick-fil-A Scott was a Chick-fil-A executive and for you fans
of Chick-fil-A out there hopefully you learned a few things that you didn’t know about Chick-fil-A with that
interview and I always use Chick-fil-A when I coach other people specifically leadership teams and I help them come up
with their core values now I say I help them come up with their core values they’re doing all the heavy lifting
there I’m just providing a framework so they can determine what their core
values are and I’ll also say every company knows what their core values are
they just might not have defined them yet and when you can Define them and when you talk about them on a regular
basis that’s when the magic starts to happen and if you’ve ever been to a Chick-fil-A you can see that there is a
culture there so Chick-fil-A is always the company that I use as an example to
core values and I did that one day and I had one lady get really mad with me and
they said they don’t like Chick-fil-A they don’t like what they stand for they
had all this big grief with Chick-fil-A and to be honest that was right around
the time that Dan Kathy had said something about the lgbtq community and
a couple of things I want to address with that one is that I know lots of people within the Chick-fil-A community
and I think that was taken out of context one and also Chick-fil-A learned
a lot from that because even if those views were Dan Kathy’s they were not
Chick-fil-As so here’s the lesson from that we represent the company we work
for and are we representing that to their core values and he will tell you
according to all the people that I know in Chick-fil-A that he did not represent the company well he had his personal hat
on or he was misquoted whatever it was the things that he said he didn’t say in
the light of the company so that’s what I want to focus on with this whole introduction to this is how are you
representing your company and what I told this young lady was even if she did
not like the example that I was giving she understood that there was a culture
there and even if you don’t like the culture to whatever company it is if a
company decides that it is going to have a particular culture and they stick to
it and that’s what they train to and that’s what everybody lives by that’s
what they hire fire reward and recognize to that’s pretty impressive and if you
as a consumer don’t like what they particularly stand for and I say they as
any generic company you just don’t go there so anyway that happened several
years ago and I think there’s this stigma around Chick-fil-A that they
stand for things that are is not true and I know so many people within the
Chick-fil-A organization and they have spoken out about that but I don’t think it is as sexy for somebody to explain a
comment than it was just to get the sound bite of that original comment so I
say all that because people ask me this all the time hey Trace you’re a big Chick-fil-A fan why because of this and
I think what I just shared with you and because we talked Chick-fil-A I just
wanted to share that with the scaling of nation but with anything I encourage you
don’t ever just take a sound bite don’t ever just take for granted what somebody
is telling you and I’m not saying don’t trust the media but I am saying verify
things especially if you are going to have a strong feeling a strong opinion
on it because is it the right information are you truly crediting the
people with what they did or did not do so I urge you to research everything
before you form an opinion and I am sure that you have had a disagreement with
somebody and they have their version and you have your version and once
everything settled down and you were able to talk through you found that not
only what you thought was correct but what they were thinking was correct and it wasn’t until you had the conversation
you were able to realize that well with all that being said I am going to invite
you to just think a little bit more give a little bit of Grace the next time that
you have either an argument or you feel very strongly about what’s being reported to you because there’s always
more to the story there’s always more why that is isn’t being reported or you
don’t know about and trying to understand what that is I think is the
success for us being kind with each other and of course that’s another
illusion back to Kathleen edelman’s book I said this you heard that and again you
can hear her on episode 281. well something Scott and I also talked about during this interview was
Audible and Audible has become the only way that I read well Trace that isn’t
reading if you’re listening well your brain does not care and I used to have a stigma about that I’m not really reading
books I’m listening to books but let’s face it we are busy driving from account to account so what I’ve learned is
audible allows me to read while I am driving and folks I am so productive in
my car I spend so much more time in the office now and I’m not able to multitask
drive and listen like I used to so I really take advantage of when I’m
driving that is my learning capsule and if I’m not listening to the scaling up H2O podcast I’m listening to an audible
book and I was really intrigued with what Scott challenged me to do he said
he listens to all of his books at three plus speed
wow that is super quick and as you learned on this episode I Would by
default listen at a 1.5 speed I never really thought about going any faster
and when Scott challenged me and by the way I challenged Scott that he could not
have any retention at a three plus speed and let me tell you he has proved that
he does have that uh retention so I started I started inching up and here
here’s the key you can’t go from a 1.0 speed all the way up to a 3.0 speed but
what you can do is you can jump from a 1.0 speed to a 1.1 or depending on the
author maybe you can go all the way up to a 1.5 when you get used to that your
brain’s not really going to tell the difference from a 1.5 to a 1.6 once you
get used to that it’s not going to tell the difference between a 1.6 to a 1.7 so
I took that challenge and depending on the author I am listening at a 2.5 speed
folks that means I am devouring content and I try to I try to think about what
I’m learning and one of the problems I have especially when it’s going so fast is I’ll kind of get lost in a thought I’m like oh that’s a great point I
wonder if I do this I wonder if I do that and then there’ll be six chapters that go by I’m exaggerating but a lot of
the authors speaking will go by what I’ve learned is to pause that when that happens and then get back to that and I
tell you my retention has been pretty good so that is what I’m going to try to do this year is listen two books faster
and with the rising tide Mastermind I always give book assignments that are on
Audible that’s one of the rules because I know how busy we are so I’m challenging all the Mastermind members
to do that as well you can play along with that challenge and at the end of
the year I’ll give you a report back and we’ll see how I do I did 62 books last
year so we’ll see what I do this year and I get a lot of information from
Reading it’s one of the ways that I figure out what I don’t know I don’t know so I hope that motivates you to
maybe read more and to maybe use Audible and if you don’t have Audible we have an affiliate link set up you can go to
scalinguph2o.com forward slash audible that will give you a free month and a free book to try it out and I think you
will love it again that scalingup h2o.com forward slash Audible and for
those of you that don’t know about affiliate links affiliate links are where the product manufacturer the
people that are responsible for it say if you can get people to come to our site and try something out or buy
something we are going to give you a commission but here’s the deal it doesn’t cost you anything extra so if
you pay five dollars for something you’re still going to pay five dollars for that it just allows a commission of
that five dollars to come to us and that allows us to pay the great staff that we
have here at scaling up H2O folks I am so glad that you are fans of the scaling
up H2O podcast I cannot wait to bring next week’s brand new episode to you so
until then take care of yourselves take care of each other and have a great week folks
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