Our guest today is COO Alliance member and Vice President of Operations for SMB Team, Brandon Bowers.
Brandon is an operational leader with a history of scaling small businesses. His past experience has included sales, sales leadership, and entrepreneurship. In his current role, Brandon works to establish the best small law firm growth company in existence. Their goal in 2022 was to double 240 small law firms. SMB Team’s mission is to have the biggest positive impact on the legal industry (and eventually other industries) through their one-of-a-kind full-service marketing, review generation software and business management and marketing coaching for attorneys.
In This Episode You’ll Learn:
- Why Brandon made the choice to join the COO Alliance.
- The various communications systems SMB Team have put in place as they’ve scaled their business.
- How Brandon and the SMB Team have created 200% growth year over year over the last 5-6 years.
- The different meeting rhythms that are critical to scale, as well as how they deal with priority management to scale the organization.
Resources:
Connect with Brandon: Website | LinkedIn
Connect with Cameron: Website | LinkedIn
Get Cameron’s latest book “Second in Command: Unleash the Power of your COO”
Subscribe to our YouTube channel – Second in Command Podcast on YouTube
Get Cameron’s online course: Invest In Your Leaders
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I did a great interview that you are going to love with Brandon Bowers. He is going to be talking to us about all the different communication profiles or communication systems that they have in place as they’ve been scaling their company and they’re scaling fast with 200% growth year over year over the last few years. It’s a very rapid growth. He’s going to talk about the different meeting rhythms that are critical to scale, how they deal with priorities, and priority management to scale the organization.
Their quarterly planning meetings and quarterly retrospectives, and as he put it, their quarterly meetings are more like annuals because they’re growing so quickly, also, about redoing their KPIs as they scale and redoing their top metrics. You’re going to love this episode. Share and like the episode. We’ll see you on the inside.
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Brandon, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Cameron. It’s great to be here.
It’s great to see you as well. You are also one of the old schools, or not quite old, old school, but one of the COO Alliance members. It’s nice to be able to have you on the show and also, to hear some of your experience. Why don’t you tell me why you joined the CO Alliance, even to start? They were this global community of second-in-command. What was it that had you join?
I don’t know if you remember this, but mine’s an interesting story because I was in half my role as a COO at my previous company when I was in the custom suit industry. It was a company that I had sold to. I was a part of another COO forum or organization. It was great. We had a monthly call. There were chapters and I didn’t have one. I was starting to seek other opportunities and came across COO Alliance.
I applied. I reached out, and you responded to me. You said, “I’d like you to build a little bit more background in this role and reapply.” Lo and behold, when I joined SMB and Bill shared that you were his coach, I was like, “This has got to be meant to be here for me.” That was exciting. I instantly told you I wanted to join that and here we are now.
That was easy. That’s a cool path. I like that. I’d forgotten that. That’s neat. You mentioned the SMB Team. Why don’t you tell us what the SMB Team is? What do you guys do as your core products and services, and then we’ll build out from there?
We started as a PPC company specialized for attorneys and small law firm owners. Now, we are a full-service digital marketing company for small law firm owners. We also have a dual coaching program, which helps them scale their business. We teach them business management skills as well as a component that’s more marketing focused.
We also are a partner in another company called Attorney Assistant, and that helps with the intake or the sales function for our law firm owners, which makes it a true 360. It’s because we help bring in the leads for the law firm owners. The intake virtual assistants essentially help close those leads and then we help coach them on scaling their business once they have that revenue in the door.
I don’t know this to be true and I’m more curious, but I’m going to comment and see if I’m right or wrong. Doctors are horrible business owners. Dentists are horrible business owners, but my guess is that lawyers would be better business owners than both of them, but less good and less strong than entrepreneurs might be. I don’t know why I think that.
I don’t know if I know the answer because we haven’t branched to any other verticals yet. I would suspect you may be right. However, in general, I would say most attorneys are not great business owners because they’re not taught that either. They’re very focused on the law, but we’ve found the people who gravitate to us because we consider ourselves a growth partner. We don’t like to be considered a vendor, marketing, or coaching company. We’re a growth partner. That’s why we had a holistic approach.
The people that start following Bill and Andy, who are the founders of the company, are interested in being that entrepreneur and that CEO. They don’t enjoy being the lawyer as much and they want to focus on CEOs. Those individuals are more business savvy. They are going to be better CEOs than your average attorney.
Was Bill a lawyer as well?
He was not.
It’s interesting that your company is now a full-service marketing company. I know you mentioned PPC, which is pay-per-collect, and that’s paid search for marketing. You’re now a full-service marketing agency and then you also do business coaching and marketing coaching for law firms. Why have you decided to stay in the legal space as a niche?
Originally, when Bill first launched the SMB Team, he was doing home services. I think he wanted to choose a path of having a clientele that was less resistant to economic changes on the world stage. Right now, with discussions of recessions looming, etc., it turned out to be a great decision. Right now, through our own learning, our discussions with you, and our coaching sessions, we’ve determined that we still have a little ways to go to kind of hone our model.
Also, there’s so much more opportunity still in this legal space that we’re not even close to capacity yet. We’re working to get our systems down. There are some things we need to work on the coaching side. We’ve come a long way in the marketing. We still have some things to iron out on the coaching side. I think, in a year or so, we could probably branch out to other verticals.
I’m not going to ask for your revenue figures because it’s large. What percentage of your revenues would be on the marketing side and what percentage of it would be on the coaching side and then maybe what percent would be on the events side?
It’s 60/40. Sixty percent is around the marketing and 40% on the coaching, and that’s only because we’re selling mainly a shared package. It’s the a la carte prices when you discount them down with a combined package. We give a little bit of an extra value there, and it’s a 60/40 split. However, we could open up the coaching and sell a lot more a la carte coaching if we wanted, which would probably get it to 50/50.
You have been in business for a few years. How many total employees do you have now?
We have 71 as of the moment. We’re hiring 4 right now, but we signed our 71st. We have another 8 or 9 full-time VAs that we treat more as real-time employees.
You’re roughly around the 80 mark when you include your VAs or fractionals. You’re a real company. Has it been an easy growth to get there?
I don’t think it’s ever easy. There’s a challenge every day. There’s something about working here. I don’t know if it’s the culture or just what we’re doing. We have a great team. I truly love coming to work every day. I come to the office every day because I love it. It’s usually me, Bill, and his EA Jen. The team will come in 1 or 2 days a week, the ones that are local. They still enjoy coming in from time to time, but the three of us are always here. I enjoy the challenge of growing a small business and all the things that come with it, good or bad.
I was doing a call with a group of COOs, and we were talking about communication as companies scale and the complications. Company communication gets more complicated as companies get bigger. Can you walk us through what you guys have done vis-a-vis top-down communication, bottom-up communication, and then laterally, communication like talking to your employees and customers and then listening to them as well?
I think this is one of the most difficult challenges companies face in scale. One of the things that adds to the complication for us is our extremely fast growth. We’re growing 200%, 300% year over year. You come across those scalability challenges much faster, so you don’t have the time to prepare or see them coming.
When I first joined with Bill, we were on a loose Traction EOS model and it talks about the same page once a month. However, when you’re scaling the way we are, we have to do them weekly. We had to figure out communication to even stay on the same page throughout the week because so many things would change from day to day.
SMB Team: When you’re scaling at a fast pace, you have to figure out communication to stay on the same page throughout the week because so many things would change day-to-day.
We took some of the things and we’ve incorporated different technologies. Voxer was a big one for us. A quick voice memo at the end of the day, updating on things I learned in my one-on-ones with my team. That helped us bridge the gap for a while. Now, we also utilize his EA Jen. She’s been a phenomenal addition to the team and she acts more so in a chief of staff operational role in that sense. She helps there, but technology’s been a big factor and that can be a blessing and a curse, I think.
You can incorporate different things. We have meeting cadences. We have our L10s weekly. We have our daily huddles, which I think are huge for celebrating wins and getting the energy. If there are also any important updates, you could throw them in there to make sure everyone’s aware of them. We have many Slack channels. We use Slack, but if not used properly, it can make you less efficient and cause communication gaps.
One of the things that we did was we called our standard operating procedures EOPs, Excellence Operating Procedures. Bill has a lot of his own terminology that he loves to use because we don’t do anything standard. We have an EOP on communication guidelines for each technology we use as well as each type of meeting. I think that’s helped because otherwise, people were using Slack for assignments and there’s no way to track your task or things you need to do, so it gets lost. That was a big challenge. Giving people clear guidelines on how to use each communication tool has helped us.
A tool is like a shovel. A shovel doesn’t dig a hole. A person with a shovel digs a hole. The tool doesn’t necessarily scale a company. It can destroy or scale a company depending on how you use the tool and if you train people on how to use the different tools as well. I can take my iPhone and I can use it as a great hammer. I can bash in nails with it perfectly, but it’s not meant to be a hammer.
I know you use Voxer for voice memos at the end of the day. Take a look at an app called Marco Polo. It’s like Voxer, but it’s video instead of audio. What I love about it is that you get a bit of the human interaction with people and when you see the person’s face, it takes the message to the next level. It builds the connection, especially when you’re a remote or a hybrid team.
It can be you driving down the highway leaving a quick memo even over video, but it’s cool because then they’re like, “There’s Brandon. There’s this smile. He’s a happy guy.” It’s nice to be able to have that connection. It’s one of the reasons why our YouTube channel for the Second in Command show is doing so well as people like to see the human who’s sharing the ideas as well.
You mentioned that you’ve got a couple of CEOs. You’ve only got one CEO in the company and that’s Bill, but then you have a couple of other acquisitions that you’ve done and you’ve brought the CEOs from those companies in now as senior people. What’s it like working with those senior people and how do you create the alignment, the communication protocols, and the org chart when you have that, or was that part of the acquisition and setting those expectations?
It was part of the initial setup. However, just like anything with scalability, we need to be able to reassess every quarter because that’s one of the challenges I think of any senior leader, and particularly maybe a COO because it’s such a misunderstood role, as you always talk about. Also, it can be many different things depending on the industry or the company. That role is going to change drastically depending on how we are scaling and which way we are going.
SMB Team: With scalability, we need to be able to reassess every quarter because that’s one of the challenges of any senior leader.
We set up the initial responsibilities and roles when we did the acquisitions and mergers. Every quarter when we do our quarterly planning, we always go back as a leadership team and look at, “What do we see our responsibilities at? Is there anything that we need to be taken off of our plate or change or add?” We’re always keeping it top of mind and rejoining our accountability and org charts.
It does start with the expectations at the beginning, but then redoing stuff as you scale too. It’s because as the company goes from 30 people to 100 people, the old org chart, the old communication protocols, and the old systems do change.
You don’t know what you don’t know, so you can’t predict everything that’s going to happen or how you’re going in the direction of the company. You have to kind of mold to that.
You mentioned the 200% growth. Can you walk us through what that 200% growth is like and how you’ve had to adapt as a company to be able to manage that kind of growth?
I would say every quarter for us is almost like a year at other companies that I’ve been a part of. We accomplished so much. One of the things that we’ve had to learn is priority setting. Before we do any of our quarterly planning, some systems like EOS and Scaling Up and others have a hodgepodge of our own. We’ve taken in components of Traction and Scaling Up. We incorporate some of our own philosophies and modify them to fit us.
One of the things that Traction had done before was you got to choose your quarterly goals in that planning session, but we feel that it should come from the top down from the visionary because that’s the person setting the direction of the company. That direction is what the team is looking for so that they can choose where they want to go and what they need to get done.
When Bill gives that very clear vision for everybody, it helps set them in their motion because otherwise, people would get too scattered. One of Bill’s unique abilities is we can have a bunch of high-level priorities and he can zero in on the one little component that will make the biggest impact in the company, our clients, or our team. He does that in priority setting towards the end of every quarter for the next quarter and that’s helped us keep things simple because if you have too much going on, you’re never going to get it all done.
I like that you said that you got a hodgepodge of the EOS’ Traction, Scaling up, and other people’s systems. I think that’s the best approach. I think it’s very dangerous whether it’s a Traction implementer, Scaling Up coach, or other business coaches, “You have to follow this exact system. You have to use this exact worksheet.” I’m sorry, but that’s not the way every company runs. Can you explain your hodgepodge and how you iterate or change or tweak the system so that they fit the SMB Team?
That priority segment was one big change that we implemented because we started seeing that when we get into a little bit of a quarter, we’d realize that people, when they’re doing the goal setting, their goals were not aligned with what was going to make the big impact on the business. They were focused on the minutiae that maybe, for them, was important, but it wasn’t going to have an overall impact. That was a big change.
Even the way we run our quarterly planning meetings, we’re doing them earlier now because we want to start the quarter fresh as opposed to waiting until after. It used to be, “We have to wait until after to see our end results.” We know enough, and we’ve talked about this before with you where you have a good idea where you’re going to end up when you’re a few weeks towards the end of the quarter. Let’s go ahead and start planning for that next quarter.
What we do is, part of my role is after each quarter, we take what worked this last planning session and what didn’t, and we make changes for the next one. Literally, almost every quarter, we’re working on getting better and better and dialing it in because when we do that, a quarter or two ago, we had all but one of our goals, which we call boulders, not rocks, was hit.
We could have maybe counted that one as one, but one of the things we incorporated was pivot. In Traction, if it didn’t get a hit, it wasn’t done. It was incomplete. However, sometimes when you choose that goal at the beginning of the quarter, something may happen three weeks in that makes that goal completely pointless. I don’t want to penalize somebody because we didn’t know what was going to come down the road.
If you had done that during COVID, nobody could have foreseen what was going to happen. You planned all these goals and then all of a sudden COVID hits and you didn’t adapt. You were going to die as a business. We’re all about doing what makes sense for the business. One of our core values is a three-way winner. It’s what makes sense for the client, the team, and the business. It always has to fit all three. If it’s not going to fit one of those things, I don’t care if we choose a goal and we’re four weeks in. We’re going to kill it. We’re going to make a pivot and do whatever we need to do. We’re not going to penalize the team for that.
SMB Team: Our core values are three-way winners: it’s what makes sense for the client, the team, and the business.
That’s strong that you identify that sometimes the goal is to not hit it because we’re choosing to pivot instead. It’s like a miss, but it’s a good miss. It’s like, “We missed on purpose.”
We have protocols on what constitutes it. How do you get that approval process? It’s not only people saying, “I’m pivoting.” That could get a little bit careless.
It gets a little bit dangerous a little fast. When you talked about using EOS’s Traction and then using Scaling Up, was there a stage at which Traction started to break down for you as a company, or is Traction still working even though you’re scaling to 70 to 80 employee zone or are you just tweaking it and iterating it a little bit?
We broke it pretty quickly, to be honest. When you’re at this fast of a pace in your growth, you start to see the weaknesses of it. For example, that pivot. That was something we identified very quickly because we were going through so many things in a short period of time. I think the basic foundations have still served us well in terms of the L10 meetings and the quarterly plan. That foundational component has led us to where we are now.
I’m starting to see where now we’re starting to put some stress on some of those. Maybe we need to restructure the way we do our weekly meetings. Our departments have become fully built out now. When I joined, we had a young management team, which we called our leadership team and we now have an exec team that we just hired another executive on.
Our exec team has gotten built out over the course of time. Now, we had this leadership, and there was also another layer of management meetings in each department. There was a lot of redundancy. I nixed the leadership one because they were having the same type of meeting two hours later, which seemed redundant and unnecessary.
I say that when a company goes from 30 to 100 employees, they have a management team and a leadership team. The leadership team is setting strategy, setting priorities, focusing on culture, and growing people. The management team is focused on getting things done exactly right. There’s an old joke about the two managers who were in the forest and they said, “What’s the difference between a manager and a leader?” They said, “The two managers are in the forest.” They’re both in charge of clear-cutting a forest and cutting down as many trees as possible. This one guy climbs to the tallest tree and looks around and says, “We’re in the wrong forest.
That’s the difference between leadership and management. Often, management hasn’t built that. They don’t have the wisdom. They haven’t been around long enough. They haven’t been doing it. They haven’t got enough seasons behind them to be able to bring that to the table. It’s good that you’re identifying that. Can you walk us through your quarterly planning? What your meetings and system are like around quarterly planning?
We do our priority setting about two weeks out before the end of the quarter. Bill will meet with each department head and talk about what’s working and what’s not working. We brought some of that SWOT analysis into that part so that we could talk about the direction and the priorities for that department so that they could prepare for the quarterly planning.
One of the things we’ve tried to do is prepare and come in with as much already built out before that session where we all get together, so we’re not figuring it out in that session. Everybody comes prepared to our actual quarterly planning meeting with all their working networking ideas on priorities. They already have our goal ideas. We have all the data from the last quarter, and then we sit and we work through what are the highest priorities going into this next quarter and tying all the departments together to make sure we’re aligned with the overall vision.
We’re always going back to that annual plan that we did. At the end of the year, we’re going to build our annual plan, mainly for Bill, myself, and some of the exec members. We are building our projections and our high-level goals for the entire year. We’re always making sure that those quarterly goals are still going back to that end-of-year plan.
You mentioned looking at all of the data. I had a COO Alliance call with a bunch of our COO Alliance members and one of them mentioned metrics that matter. I was like, “That’s so good.” She said, “At the leadership team, they only look at the metrics that matter because there are a thousand metrics we could be looking at.” We could have 30 marketing metrics and 20 on customer service. How do you decide for the SMB Team? What metrics matter for each of the different business areas you’re running and for the operation as a whole?
One thing we realized we were making a mistake and is when it came to goal setting, in terms of the boulders, which are the rocks in the US, we were taking our big vision from Bill and the end-of-the-year plans. We were making sure they aligned to that, but we weren’t doing that with KPIs. People were picking KPIs and departments and we were allowing managers to pick. We realized, “We have our guiding light numbers, which for us is Net New ARR.”
We take new sales plus upgrades minus loss revenue. That’s our net new number. That’s what our guiding light is. It lets us know how we’re doing overall. Are we bringing in new sales? Are we retaining clients? We redid every KPI. Every person in our company has three KPIs that they’re bonused on every quarter and we reset everyone. We did it from that top metric down so that they all leveled up to that guiding light number because our goal is we’d rather have fewer numbers that go deeper.
For instance, the renewal rate. We track renewal rates in six different ways. We’d rather know everything about the renewal rate than has twenty other different numbers that we could be tracking that don’t tell us anything. We tried to simplify it and were guilty of having too many numbers in the past, but this is what I’ve been taking on as my job. Me and Bill are constantly trying to work on the business and figure out where we can get better.
I almost get the feeling that with your growth, as you said, one quarter is like a new year that you’ll probably have renewals nailed in the next 1 or 2 quarters. You’ll have all the right systems and processes. You’ll have the whole methodologies that will all be working. Will you then come up with a couple of additional metrics that matter and switch off of a focus? Does that happen with SMB as well?
Each quarter we reevaluate as part of our quarterly plan. Here are the metrics that we’ve been tracking. Do these still make sense? Based on the priorities that we’re choosing or our goals for next quarter, are there any other KPIs we’re not tracking that are more important than these? Those might be substituted for the ones that get bonused.
You mentioned the third business that you’ve acquired that’s Attorney Assist. What’s that business do? What’s the core focus of that business?
It’s the Attorney Assistant. It’s a virtual assistant business. Right now, we hire virtual assistants for the law firm owners mainly focused on intake, which is sales. They call it sales in a law firm. They can also double as reception. There’s another type of assistant that does what they call matter management. Maybe medical record retrieval and other administrative tasks will help the law firm owners with scaling.
It’s particularly important for a solopreneur or somebody who only has 1 or 2 staff members trying to get to that next level. They can’t necessarily afford a full-time staff in-house, so they can hire our team. The other side of it is we have law firms that we’re bringing a lot of leads to, but if they don’t have a great intake system or somebody to close those leads. They’re not capturing the revenue they should be. And so they’re not able to scale at the rate they should.
Let’s talk about you for a second. You mentioned that you and I met originally when you wanted to join the COO Alliance and I said you weren’t quite ready. All of a sudden, you’ve scaled. You’ve grown in your career. You are ready. You’ve been a member for over a year, but what have you done to grow your capacity and skillsets to be a second in command, especially of a company growing this quickly and so strong?
I don’t know if you can ever be fully prepared if you’ve never had that experience before. I’ve heard you even talk about that where you learn as you go to some degree, but everyone in our company is a voracious learner. Another core value is growth is a minimum requirement. We are always learning and growing. We are a coaching business and we believe that you should also have a coaching if you’re in the coaching business.
Growth is a minimum requirement.
You’re our coach. Bill’s a part of other masterminds. Andy, who’s the other owner, is also a part of multiple masterminds. I’m in the COO Alliance and do other things to learn, whether through podcasts or speaking with other COOs. A couple of individuals I met in the COO Alliance that I’ve become close with.
We’ve met offline and shared wins and struggles and what’s working and not working and then many books. One of the things that I took away from our coaching sessions is reading books that pertain to what you’re working on at the moment. I try to stick to that rule because otherwise, you’re going to forget certain things when you need them. That’s been helpful.
Where that came from years ago, I was coaching a client based in Switzerland and he said, “There’s an inordinate number of business books that I’m supposed to read. If we go out and listen to all of our friends on social media, we get ten a day that we should be reading. If we ask people for opinions on what to read, God forbid, there are 100 now we should read.”
We then listen to a podcast and every podcast mentions other books that we’re supposed to read. Sebastian’s lesson was, “I take a look at the core projects that I’m working on over the next quarter and I try to read books or listen to podcasts that the content will help me on those three projects that I’m working on.” It made so much sense versus reading a book about strategy. If you don’t have a strategy meeting coming up, why are you worried about strategy right now?
Why worry about meetings if your meetings aren’t broken? I think it’s smart to tailor your learning around that stuff as well. Are there specific areas you used to be or feel you were more broken in than you’ve worked on? Are there areas of you as a leader that you focused on getting better at that maybe you felt either insecure about or worried about before?
I think there are two things where I’ve grown more. One is what we call a minimum viable product. This was something that Bill had helped me with, which I can be a fact finder. I can be a quick start at times, but I can also be a fact-finder. I’m an eight in the fact finder on the Kolbe scale. You can get that paralysis by analysis type. When you’re in this type of company and this fast growth, you don’t have time to figure it out and get it perfect. We always say done is better than perfect and we want to get 80% out the door.
I’ve gotten more okay with being comfortable with that concept and realizing that we’re going to figure it out as we go and we’ll make it better later. The other component is I wanted to grow as a leader and I wanted to be able to be there as somebody who could coach and grow our leadership team. I always get joy out of growing others.
I have been trying to step back from either doing or telling them what to do and trying to coach them there through questions and helping in situations. If I need to make a decision for them, I can, but I help them figure out the process or figure out their own solutions if they’re stuck. That’s helped me because then I’m able to delegate things off my plate once they have that skill developed.
I want to ask a question about Bill. Bill is amazing. I love him. He is a wonderful guy. He is ridiculously smart and hyper-focused but has crazy manic energy wrapped up in massive ADD. He is all over the place. How do you deal with that as a COO who tends to be more systems- and process-focused? How do you deal with the crazy, frenetic, and massive energy of that kind of a leader?
You should see him in the office right around his electric scooter, going crazy during the day because he’s bored. He’s a mile a minute and it was refreshing. It was fun to come in and have somebody that I truly had to hold back because he wanted to do a million things. The communication piece was tough because he would go directly to some of the managers when I first joined. If he had an idea, he’d go to the managers in the different departments. He is like, “We should do this.”
I had to go to him and put my foot down a couple of times until it set in where it was like, “You can’t do that anymore. That’s what I’m here for. You got to come to me because you’re confusing people. Now, they don’t understand if you’re just ideating or if you’re giving them direction.” People come to me like, “Am I supposed to start this?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
You had to get that system where you are like, “The process needs to be that you bring these to me.” I try to limit it to mainly the same pages. He’s done a great job evolving as a CEO, especially for being so young. Now, he documents these throughout the week and tries to limit them to there unless it’s something urgent. For me, I will take all those ideas. I’ll start asking a few questions and usually, if it’s a spur-of-the-moment thing he’s not caring about, he’ll give up quickly. I’ll be like, “Nevermind. Let’s move on.”
If he’s setting a little bit, he’ll push back and be stubborn. I’ll go, “Okay.” I’ll know when to back off and then I let it sit and marinate for 1 day or 2. If he comes back to me again, then I know he is for real. That’s when I’ll start taking it seriously. “Let’s sit down and start strategizing. If we need to move anything off our plates, what is it that we replace or is this going to become a priority, etc.?”
I love that you let it sit for a day or so and then see what happens with it too. I want to go back to the 21, 22-year-old Brandon Bowers and give him some advice. What advice would you give yourself at 21 or 22 that you know to be true now but wish you’d known back then?
It’s the minimum viable product. I wish I had gotten comfortable with that. My whole life, I think when you’re younger and you’re good at certain things. I’ve learned that I’m OCD, so I prided myself on being a perfectionist, but it hindered me in certain areas. I think I could have advanced faster if I had understood that concept at an early age.
The other thing is and I think you’re a proponent as well for assessments like Kolbe, Predictive Index, and whatnot. I wish I had understood that and taken one of those earlier. When you’re in college and some of the younger ones, it’s more focused on, “Here’s the career you should have or Here’s what you should be in.”
That’s a component, but it’s understanding what I’m great at, what my tendencies are, and what’s going to get in my way of success. Also, what are the roles and responsibilities of the things that I’m going to enjoy doing and be good at? It’s because we’re always trying to get to that quadrant where it’s the things you’re great at and the things you love doing. I was in sales for many years and I think I considered myself an extrovert. I would get tired of doing the same type of sales process over and over.
I was tired of meeting with clients and didn’t understand until I understood my Predictive Index Assessment that I’m slightly introverted, but I’ll pull that up to succeed because I want to win. I can do it and everyone thinks I’m an extrovert. I was successful for many years, but it was draining my energy. At the end of the day, I come home and I had to sit in a dark room for a while to get my energy back. I feel like I’m now in the role that I was meant for.
Something about personality profiles is interesting. I don’t think there’s one personality profile that is right. I think the idea is to get your leadership team to do a personality profile for one year and learn about each other. Also, a year from now, do another personality profile, a different one, and learn more about each other and then do another one in the third year. Keep learning about each other and ourselves and I think that’s what’s helped us scale. Brandon Bowers is the EVP of Operations and an integrator for the SMB Team. Thanks very much for sharing with us on the show.
Thank you, Cameron.
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