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Our guest today is COO Alliance Member and Chief Operating Officer for Vintory, Randy Bonds. Since grade school Randy has had a passion for entrepreneurship. For more than 30 years he has been building his skills by owning and operating eight companies all focused on travel and tourism. Founding, scaling, and selling five companies taught him a lot about operations. Each company Randy has been involved in has helped him to understand a variety of operational processes – some of which work, and others, not so much. Over the last 16 years, his focus has been on the vacation rental industry, including owning three property management companies (one international), a digital marketing company for VR’s, and helping other VRM’s grow inventory with Vintory.
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In This Episode You’ll Learn:
- What it was about Vintory that made Randy want to shift from entrepreneur team member in the company.
- Navigating the CEO/COO relationship.
- The importance of having a balance between work and personal life.
- How to balance the need to say “no” to great ideas with not discouraging employees.
Resources:
Connect with Randy: Website | LinkedIn
Connect with Cameron: Website | LinkedIn
Get Cameron’s latest book: The 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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We’ve got COO Alliance member Randy Bonds from Vintory. He is on the show and he is going to be talking to us about moving from the CEO role into the COO role. He’s played the entrepreneur role before and is now the COO of his company. Also, changing his focus as an adult and what he’s now really focused on more in life as he’s gained the wisdom of time and how he works on work-life balance, talking about clear metrics inside the organization and keeping focused. Also, how he’s had to grow as a leader and stay fairly operational as they’ve scaled up the company. You’re going to love the show. See you on the inside. You can also check it out on our YouTube channel as well.
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Randy, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Cameron. It’s absolutely wonderful to meet you and I appreciate this opportunity, for sure.
I’m looking forward to learning from you and then also to hanging out with you over the next few days as well. You’re actually attending our COO Connect event, which is one of our COO Alliance events. We’re going to get to hang out in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is going to be fun.
Absolutely great timing. This property’s beautiful. I just arrived, so I look forward to meeting you in person and some of the other members.
Mountain Shadow’s a great property. Wait until you hear where we’re doing the September event. We’re hosting it at an MIT offsite in Boston, Massachusetts, called Endicott House. It’s where I’ve taught there seventeen times. I’ll tell you about that later. Let’s start. Why don’t you actually tell me what was it about the COO Alliance that had you join? What was it you were looking for and hoping to continue to grow in your career?
It goes back years ago. I started tuning in to your show and I found it pretty fascinating. A few years ago, I was presented with the opportunity to work for the company that I’m with now. I’m actually a partner at the company of Vintory, and it was not a position that I was used to having. I have always been the CEO and COO in other companies that I have founded and started. When I was approached to take on this role, I didn’t know a lot about it. I was searching the internet and found the COO Alliance and some of the shows and started tuning in to it a lot. I said, “This is awesome.”
Fast forward a few years, we took this business and we were able to get it to what the threshold was for becoming a member. It was a pretty big long path for me to accomplish. Just to give you the background, I tuned in to the show, loved what you were teaching and how you were teaching it, and we were able to hit those threshold revenue paths that you set and here we are.
Glad to have you. By the way, if you haven’t read it yet, take a look at the book that I just launched called The Second in Command. You got a copy already. It’s got some really interesting insights. Once you’re a COO already, it’s about building a relationship and working and collaborating with the CEO. Why don’t you talk about that? How do you and the CEO work together and collaborate and stay on the same page?
The Second in Command: Unleash the Power of Your COO by Cameron Herold
Brooke Pfauts is the CEO. He started the company. I was able to meet him and join the company right away. It was brand new from the visionary standpoint. We had both built a number of companies in our previous work life. We also knew certain parameters of foundational operations that we wanted to stay and agreed upon, and one of those was EOS. We initially knew that both of us agreed and appreciated that business model. We also knew our strengths, where we would excel, and where our roles would fall in place. We were able to get that clarity from day one, which I think was such a tremendous help. I have tremendous respect for him. Hopefully, he to me. We get along really well and we have a great relationship in the business and out of the business as well.
For those who don’t know, EOS is the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It was Gino Wickman who wrote the book Traction where he rolled that out. What was it in EOS that you both tended to resonate with? What were parts of the systems in there that you really liked?
Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman
I think just having that operating system for business, there are so many that don’t, and the cadences of certain aspects made a lot of sense to both of us. We used it in the past, having that organizational structure because we’re 100% virtual as well. It’s so critically important that we knew if we set that tone and standard from the get-go, we would be able to scale it a lot quicker, more efficiently, and build a better team. There are a few things that I probably would never build a business without. At least in my mind, an EOS would definitely be one of them. We find a lot of value in it.
I do as well. I’ve told so many companies to use EOS. I think it’s an amazing starting point for anybody, as you put it, to have an operating system. It’s some way to actually build a business and control. You mentioned that you and Brooke have different strengths. Was that part of you coming in? Did he already know what his strengths and weaknesses were? Was he looking for that yin and yang, that counterpart to his weaknesses or did you start to uncover those after you were already there working with him?
We definitely had that clarity before. I actually had a different company. When I met Brooke, I had a digital marketing agency in the industry, and he was lacking the operational structure. Tremendous visionary guy, well-known and well-spoken in the industry. When we met, it clicked. He thought, “You need to come over and help me do the operations of the company.” He was seeing what I was doing in other companies. The clarity was set right from the get-go. He was going to be the visionary. I was going to be the integrator. We were able to stay the course \ so much easier with that from the ground up.
This was almost since we had one or maybe a few clients. Of course, we started this company right before COVID hit, so we took a huge hit there with the initial launch of this company. Thankfully it was short-lived and we were able to scale it up pretty quickly during those years of COVID. We did have that clarity from the get-go.
Why don’t you tell us about what Vintory is? This is going to be a three-part question. What is Vintory? How did you and Brooke meet? What about Vintory had you want to join them and leave being an entrepreneur and join them as a company? What was it about you that had Brooke want to bring you in as a Second in Command?
We both have been in the vacation rental business or industry for me about 18 years and Brooke for 15 to 16 years or so, so quite a while. We knew there was a need. His vision for starting the company was there was nobody that specialized in helping property management companies. Those that actually manage short-term rentals and we’re actually in long-term rentals a little bit now too, but there was nobody that helped them grow. One of the hardest parts about a vacation rental property manager is actually finding inventory to manage. He had this vision, and he had created a business in the past where he was able to scale a property management company from 0 all the way up to 500 units in 5 years.
That ended up being the title of a lot of the talks and the books that he did. It was a scalable business that he created, and he replicated that model. We took that vision, and we’ve created a business model to help them empower professional vacation rental companies with the technology, expertise, education, and community they need to grow their business and inventory. We started that out as a strictly marketing agency.
It was very manual, and we knew at the beginning that we wanted to build a SaaS platform for making that a little bit more automated. About after year one, we started building that SaaS platform model, and now we’ve launched it in, we just are releasing our third iteration of that. It’s proven extremely beneficial. Now we have a lot of these marketing processes that can be done with more scalable models where it’s not so manual any more.
For you, what was it that had you want to join them and what was it that had Brooke want to bring you on as a COO?
It was an interesting story. Going back a couple of years, I listened to Brooke speak at a conference thing, and I thought, “How did nobody think of this?” It’s one of those things like how I’ve been in this industry this long and how I did not think of this business model. He spoke at one of the big conferences called VRMA. I was friends with another gentleman called Matt Landau, and he was starting an educational program, and we were talking about having me come in and do a digital marketing class. He said, “Listen to my friend Brooke. He just did the first one. I want you to do the follow-up of this.” I listened to it. I said, “This guy’s smart.”
I reached out to him through LinkedIn and we talked and I said, this is a wonderful business model. We hit it off. I traveled down, met him in person in Florida onsite, and we were with each other for 48 hours. He said, “I want you to come on, be my business partner, my COO.” “I don’t know about that. I have my own company.” We kept in touch and over the next month, it just made sense. We really clicked.
I sold that digital marketing company and joined forces with him, and we have a third partner Brian Riggs as well, who leads up our BD department. It was very fast. It was probably a 1 to 2-month process. We just knew that we worked really well together shared the same vision, and we complimented each other’s weakness area. It was a match made in heaven if you will.
You’ve been an entrepreneur before, a CEO before. What do you see as the big differences between being an entrepreneur and being a second in command? How do you need to show up differently? How do you operate differently as that leader? What are the big differences there?
It’s quite a bit different. Just understanding the lanes, the strengths and weaknesses, and the reasons why each is in its place has opened my eyes in a big way. Of all the other companies I’ve been involved in, I founded most of them, which were much smaller. I realized those limitations were because I didn’t have this structure in place, so it opened my eyes. I wish I had known this earlier when I was doing some other businesses with big potential. It really just clicked with this one and we’ve been able to scale it a lot quicker than in previous businesses I’ve been involved in.
Do you think that there are some day-to-day things? What specific things are so different?
I’m no longer the face of the company. I stay much more behind the scenes, and that took a while, still takes a little bit for me to get used to. I work heavily with teams, leadership growth within, I don’t do a lot of FaceTime in the industry. Every once in a while, I’ll speak and do some things, but not as much as I used to. I’m not as involved in just that bigger picture of the business and that’s fine. I’ve realized that he is much stronger than I am. It’s wonderful. It actually lets me focus on more operational efficiencies, SOPs. I love working with our directors where I can work with them in leadership roles. It’s much better in my opinion.
It’s interesting that when I was pulling the content together for the book, The Second in Command, I identified that about 30% of COOs are very outward-facing business development, might do speaking events and press for the company. I was one of those very outward-facing COOs, and 70% are not. In fact, the new COO for 1-800-GOT-JUNK? has been their COO for many years. He’s taken them from $100 million to $450 million. He never speaks to the media. He never does speaking events for the media. He is so inward facing, operationally focused, and professional. I’ve known him for many years. I had to beg Eric to contribute to my book, and I had to leverage our personal friendship. He did, which was amazing.
He’s a very inward-facing COO. It’s interesting that you’ve seen that Brooks is stronger in that area than you are or decided to take a back seat from that. That’s something that sounds like you guys have navigated really well. Are there any parts of the CEO/COO relationship that you’ve not navigated well, or that you’ve had a couple of hiccups over the years that you’ve been there?
There’s probably been a few little minor things. I mean extremely minor. I don’t know if it’s something to do with our age. If you were to ask me this many years ago, I would not have had the same wisdom and peace of mind to understand how to navigate that without certain barriers. We have learned to do that very well.
Even if we disagree on things, there’s never an elevation of tone. There’s never a major blowout fight. There’s respect. We understand that Brooke and I may have different opinions and we come to the best solutions. If we can’t, then I give him the respect that he does the final decision-making. After years of working together, it’s hard to believe that we’ve had a very minimal conflict, which is weird. I would not have been that way when I was younger.
Maybe you’ll get to have someone in the company who continues to grow.
Maybe.
There’s wisdom in that as well. Now you mentioned that you wouldn’t have had that when you were younger. You mentioned to me earlier, before we went live, that you, as a business leader, have had a priority shift in your life. Some of that is around work-life balance and youth. Can you walk us through where some of those shifts have occurred and what some of your focuses are now and why you’ve had them?
It goes back to when I was young. I grew up in a fairly lower-class income family, so I had an extreme drive for entrepreneurship when I was very young. It was almost ridiculous when I was working since I’ve probably been 7 or 8 years old on. I was able to have the opportunity to be involved in creating about six different companies. I was hyper-focused on only that, so I would neglect these other areas of my life. Thankfully, by the time I was in my mid-30s, I got married, I had three children that had a significant impact on my mid-30s, and I was able to have a couple of exits out of companies.
It set me up with a different focus. I still have a big passion for entrepreneurship, but the family unit has caused me to shift priorities and try to find a better balance of those priorities. I love creating memories with my family, with my children and my wife. I have found a better balance and focus, if that makes sense.
It’s funny. At the end of the day, none of this shit actually matters. We’re all going to die. We’re only doing this to make money. Have you brought that same mindset and healthy balance around work-life integration or work-life balance? Have you brought that into your team, your direct reports? Do you talk to them about that as well? Do you just exhibit that, do they notice it or do you talk about it with them as well?
I think they do notice it, and I bring it in in a big way because we start the hiring process with me wanting to know what they want to achieve in their 1, 3, and 5-year goals or beyond. Not work-related, but personally related. We speak about that all the time, and you can tell the difference so much in a company by bringing that into the mix. We spend a lot of time on our director’s meetings where we format that similar to a level ten meeting. We always start with, “How are you doing in your personal life compared to your work life?”
We score that every month and we see trends, and everybody’s able to understand how to utilize those trends to make them feel better. Maybe they need help over here or more help with educating themselves about work, but if their life balance is weak, it’s always coming into that work. We speak about that all the time.
I think you’re going to have your mind and heart blown open because I have a good friend of mine, Joe Polish, who runs an event called the Genius Network for entrepreneurs. He always says that you sell them what they want but give them what they need. I didn’t tell any of our members what we were covering for this event, but we’re going deep and inward. The three speakers, Dandapani is a former monk who is an incredible speaker. We have Chip Conley who built and sold the Joie de Vivre Hotel chain to Hilton and Chip runs the modern elder academy. Chip is a very heart-centered leader.
We have Warren Rustand who, when you see him speak, will literally blow your mind. Warren and I have seen each other speak about 4 or 5 times. He is this 80-year-old former billionaire, who has built and sold $2 billion companies, was an advisor to a president, has 6 kids, and has been happily married for 60 years.
You’re going to walk in there thinking that you’ve got your act together and you’re going to walk out feeling like a shell of a human being. It’s so good. You’ll be inspired at the same time, which is really great. What’s interesting about this is none of the content that we’re going to cover is business, but it’s going to have massive impacts on our business because we’re going to show up as better leaders. Leading ourselves and others. What are your thoughts around leading teams and people and your direct reports? Do you have mindsets or focuses with them at all?
I don’t really think about myself. I’m just a guidance. We all participate, collaborate, we do a lot of team activities and drills, and we’ve become very good friends as well. There’s a tremendous amount of respect in my teams, and I don’t stop it at the director’s level. I get to know every single person on our team, which is about 50 now. That, to me, is where it’s all at. If we take care of them, we educate them, we’re helping them achieve their goals everything else is taking care of itself. That’s the business foundation model to me. Business operations, you can repeat those, but when it comes to people, that’s the toughest thing. If you treat them right, you build that team. Everything else will fall in place well for a team every time. To me, that’s where the focus is.
How about for yourself as a leader? Are there any areas that you’re focusing on growing, any areas that you’re focusing on getting better at?
Absolutely. I’m always doing that. Years ago, I was pushed into this role as a COO. It’s been almost a whole new learning experience for me. This COO Alliance group that we’re in now is critically important for my growth. I do not find myself a tremendous leader at all. I am learning at the same pace as everybody else in my company.
I read and listen to a lot of books. I need to be a part of these mastermind programs because I get so much. Since I’ve been here and the few people that I’ve met, I’m always blown away by how they operate companies, what they do. There’s a lot for me to learn. The older I get, the more I realize I don’t know hardly anything. It’s extremely important for me.
Talk about Vintory. How has the company changed in the years you’ve been there, and how have you had to adapt or has the company had to adapt?
We’ve had some pretty significant pivots, if you will. Going back to what we started with was a digital marketing agency. Very manual intensive, shifting from a digital marketing agency to a SaaS platform, I don’t think I would’ve ever realized the complexity of that. It has been through a few different iterations, and it’s very challenging because we’re always dealing with legacy processes and partners to new processes of partners. How you bring those up working together and still keep the team in a certain parameter of bandwidth has been very challenging.
Those types of pivots to me, and I ask a lot of the other COOs, the other members here, how they do that, how they handle those process changes, those big giant pivots because that’s where we have struggled with. We’re getting better at it, but it’s been really complicated moving from that managed service more digital marketing agency to a SaaS platform.
Were there a lot of layoffs in that pivot as well? That’s a pretty substantial change for the business.
No. We’ve had very few layoffs. COVID was the only time that we did a light one, and it was for such a short period of time because we were just all the uncertainties. We didn’t know what was going to happen. If we would’ve known it was going to come back with such fierce violence, we wouldn’t have had any layoffs. We’ve had to do very little work. We’re constantly hiring, even now. We’ve been thankfully blessed with the path upward and we haven’t had to go downward.
How is that to be a marketing agency to flip over to what you’re doing? It seems like it is a completely different business.
We still do have those managed service divisions, but with the growth, we’ve been able to hire with the new product needs, so hiring the developers and then teaching the product team how to manage that. We’ve been able to hire with the growth more so, and we haven’t had to remove some of those managed services or the expertise because we’ve been able to utilize their minds to integrate their expertise into the software. We still need to have them on for creating the scalable products that we have, if that makes sense. We have a lot of different layers that our product does, and we still need all those brilliant minds. We just need to figure out how to scale them through product.
You mentioned being involved in Masterminds like you’re involved in the COO Alliance. Is your CEO involved in any of the Mastermind communities, and if so, which ones and what others are you involved in?
He is in EO, and he was in YPO. We actually run with our company a number of different masterminds as well for our partners, which is interesting. It helps us stay aligned and get focused with our partners as well. We have probably a dozen masterminds that we run. I’m only in the COO Alliance mastermind program. Time-wise, it’s the one I want to stay focused on learning from. I have been in a number of different programs in the past, but I have never been in EO. Although I should have been, I have not.
The Entrepreneur’s Organization was the very first mastermind community that I was ever in. I was a member from 1995 to 2000. While I was a member, one of the guys in my forum group had this rubbish removal company called the Rubbish Boys, and he was building it up and wanted to franchise it. I said, “You can never franchise junk removal. You’re crazy.” He said, “I’m going to do it anyway.” I helped him hire his first full-time employee, and that full-time employee became his first franchisee, and that Rubbish Boys changed the name to 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and I joined them as their COO.
Brian has done a very good job franchising it. It’s now a $450 million system, and that first employee, Paul Guy, was their very first franchisee. Paul does around $30 million or $40 million a year as a franchisee and makes around $10 million a year in profit, just crushing it. I’ve always felt that it’s never whether a business is a good idea or not. It’s about whether the team can stay focused and apply the right effort. Have you guys had to really grind it out and how do you get the team to stay focused and put the effort in?
There are a lot of challenges around that. It’s a funny story, though. When I was driving over to this property, I was behind a 1-800-GOT-JUNK? truck. It was coming down Lincoln right over to the property.
It’s funny how often people see it. They’ll meet me and talk to me and then all of a sudden 1-800-GOT-JUNK? trucks are everywhere. It’s part of the brand. When you’re building a business, one of the things to be focusing on is the metrics. One of our COO Alliance members said that they measure the metrics that matter. I thought that was a cool phrase. How do you guys decide what metrics matter for inventory and what to stay focused on and what metrics not to get distracted by?
It’s so funny you asked that because the custom dashboard that we’ve been trying to compile for years has been very challenging, in my opinion. One of the biggest things we have lacked in clarity is having metrics that we can pull. It’s not out of lack of effort. It’s more out of the complexity of getting all the different metrics that we need. We have shifted a bunch of different iterations of what we collect and what we find valuable. We track all those in our company CRM. We call all of our clients partners. If they are staying the course, we track all those metrics that they either follow or don’t follow in the specificity of whatever marketing strategy that we lay out for that partner.
If they don’t, we’re just starting to get more clarity where we can pull all kinds of different reports and take action proactively on that to try to mitigate that churn. Through this three-year process, we’ve been tracking personality types, culture index assessments on our partners, all these different metrics where we’re getting to this better place, if you will, where we can get that churn down to a respectable number.
It’s been painful. That’s been one of the biggest challenges that we’ve had, is to collect clear metrics. I definitely 100% agree that having those metrics is so important. I wish we would’ve had a lot more clarity on that from the get-go, but we’ve been diligently putting those together on a number of different levels over the last two years.
One of the things I noticed about scaling a company, and this is a tripping point often for entrepreneurial organizations, is most of the first-time managers or early skilled managers, their answer to every problem tends to be to hire more people. Hiring more people is rarely the actual answer to the problem.
As we gain more skills as a leader, we’re often able to say no more. We’re able to push off certain projects or initiatives based on the ROI, we’re able to optimize processes versus hiring people to work harder or we automate things. How do you, as a company, say no? How do you balance that with not discouraging employees when they come to you with great ideas? How do you balance the need to say no?
That’s always a challenge in any business, in my opinion, but we are an open book, thankfully. I definitely will meet with anybody on the team anytime with ideas. In fact, we highly encourage those. A lot of times, those ideas that come in, we’ve tested, tried, so we’re able to have an educated answer that’s the easiest path. If not and it makes sense. We may adopt those changes, but we highly encourage any type of collaboration and creativity to come to our table.
It’s definitely always a challenge for a lot of businesses to find that healthy balance and take any type of response, feedback and creativity from a team. I’ve noticed that the larger that we’ve got, which is still obviously a tiny company here, but 50 team members, it’s getting to the point now where we’re having to layer in more processes for such feedback.
Vintory: It’s definitely always a challenge for a lot of businesses to find that healthy balance and take any type of response, feedback, and creativity from the team.
One of the things that I did was I launched a course years ago called Invest in Your Leaders, and its purpose was to help those early first-time managers grow their skills around situational leadership, time management, project management, conflict coaching, delegation. All the soft skills of leadership that once you’ve been running companies for 10 or 20 years, you tend to get fairly good at or build your own systems. Maybe you’re still doing it the wrong way, but you’ve got some confidence around it. How are you growing people who are in their first-time management roles? How are you growing their skills and how are you growing their confidence? Do you have systems around that?
We do Invest in Your Leaders. We already had one. I’m in the middle of it as well, but we’re about to launch that program for all of our directors. I got good feedback from one director. I had actually gone through the whole process, and I’ve done about 30%, 40% of it so far. It’s great. We’re doing programs like that. It’s also dependent on the department. In our product department, I found a lot of value in Scrum Methodology. I’m actually really good friends with the CEO of Scrum, so I sent them all through that program. Those are so beneficial to me. It creates these organizational and operational models that you can see work.
To answer your question, we open up our door for any type of education, depending on the department for further educating them, but also, as far as the leadership, Invest in Your Leaders is a perfect program launching path for them. Every month, we’ll take that program in the future and we’ll actually have open discussions that focus on each one of those sessions that you’re creating. That’s what we’re going to be implementing right after here. We’ve already had it approved and agreed, so we’re going to use that for our diving board.
I know one of our third or fourth-year members of the COO Alliance, Lindsay from Title Alliance, they’ve got 27 of their managers going through the course content now, and that’s exactly what they’re doing. They have their managers learn it, then they sit and talk about it for a couple of weeks, try it out internally, practice it, and use it, and then go through another couple of modules. They’re using those modules as discussion points and growth. I think that at the end of the day, a leader’s core job is to grow people. The more that we grow their skills and grow their confidence, the more they can succeed.
I just did a call with a group of CEOs and COOs. We were talking a lot about energy and bringing positive energy and fun into the organization. What do you guys do at Vintory to bring in that sense of energy, enthusiasm and excitement? Are you good at that? Are you struggling with it? Where are you as a company with that?
I think we’re decent at it. We’re working towards improving it, though. It was much easier when we were smaller 10, 20 people in the company. What’s the gentleman’s name that you had on the guest one that did some of the fun games with all of us?
Rob from work, from Jam does a bunch.
I know him. There was another one you did that did impromptu activities. Is it Brian?
I’m bad at names. I don’t remember his name.
I am too. I enjoyed that. We do stuff like that once in a while. I formed an internal culture committee. There are always those onesie or twosies that will stand out. They are amazing with people. We asked, in this case, Jade, to run up that culture committee, so they form and meet about every 2 to 4 weeks to put together programs, whether it’s company-wide or a departmental game structure.
We definitely focus on those cultural aspects a ton. In fact, that’s one of the things that we tout probably more than anything at hiring, as our culture is pretty stellar. We do focus, but that can get lackadaisical pretty easily. At least stale pretty easily if we don’t stay focused on it. We decided to go and form that culture committee and hopefully, we’ll be able to continue improving and growing with that. It’s such a key part of our company.
It’s interesting. We did a culture committee at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?. We called it the, It’s All About People, so the IAAP. What’s your culture committee? How does it run? How did you choose who was going to be on the committee? Who chairs it? Do you have any goals and objectives for it overall?
Jade Wolff on our team is the one who chairs that. The reason why is she’s been with us from day one and she’s just got that magnetic personality. You could tell it’s her off the core in life, outside, inside work. She is all about relationships, culture, and the biggest smile on her face all the time. She was where I went to and I asked her to run that up and she runs with it.
She is good about finding games that our company can play, all these different drills she’ll bring in, meditations and all these different things. Not everything’s a home run, but she definitely pays a lot of attention and she’s asked anybody on the team that’s interested to be a part of that meeting and together, I let them run with it. They collaborate, find things to do, and they’re really good about doing that.
Do you give them a budget as well?
We haven’t set any particular budget, but they’re usually pretty good about that. We have not set a budget.
Let’s go back to the 21, 22-year-old Randy. If you were going to give Randy Bonds some advice, what advice would you give yourself back 21 or 22, that you know to be true now?
I think about that a lot. If I went back to 21, 22, that was when I was starting my first company here in Phoenix. We brought in the Hummer tours, the off-road tours. We launch that whole industry back in the ‘90s. If I was to go back then, and I spend a lot of time teaching this to my children, I would teach myself about finding more focus. I had more all-over-the-board visions. I wanted to chase the shiny thing all the time. I was notorious for that. I would definitely find methods to create focus.
I’m pretty good about doing this, but I would focus even more so on creating scalable, efficient systems. If I was to go back 21, 22. I would definitely teach myself how to do systems. I would have developed a core subset of tools, EOS being a foundational component or something like that. I would’ve found those. I think with that toolbox, you have such a better chance for success in whatever you do go into.
Randy Bonds, thanks very much for sharing with us on this show.
Yes, sir. Thank you, Cameron. I’m looking forward to seeing you.
I appreciate the time.
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