01:04 Hey, welcome back to the show today. I'm so stoked to have with us our good friend, Derrick, who is a new friend, but Derrick does some cool stuff. And I want to dive in Derrick, tell us who you are first and what kind of stuff do you do?  

01:16 Well, first and foremost, Todd, thanks for having me. Um, so I am the process fixer. That is the, uh, that is my, my moniker, my nickname now for about 15 years. I came out of a background working for investors, fixing companies. And that was usually a company that was performing poorly that the traditional fixers came into. And that would be a hatchet job. They call it in the fixing business, but I had a little different philosophy.I was a, I came from very blue collar background. I did not go to college. I worked to dig in ditches in my early twenties. So for me, when I went into fix companies, uh, I didn't go to the boardroom. I went and got in the truck with the folks doing the work and I asked them what the problems were and was fortunate enough to find that in about 80 percent of the instances that just sitting in the truck after a day, at the end of the day, they, they would tell me exactly what it was that was going on that was causing all the problems in the organization. And usually those problems weren't brand balance sheet budget. They weren't resources. They were things like, yeah, they weren't, they were things like the paperwork's messed up. Like if we had better paperwork, if, if I, if somebody told me that there was a change before I got to the job site, if I had the right tools to do the work, very, very simple block and tackle things that we could stop into, we could fix very quickly. And, uh, so I got a reputation in doing that kind of work, did it for investors for a long time. And now we do that as a practice. And that's what we do for organizations, help them fix. Um, The areas where the bottom line, where there's a leak in the, in the fish bowl and the water's leaking out, trying to find those things and plug those problems. 

02:51 I love it. I love it. And how fast are you are at solving those things?I mean, how do you, how do you identify these problems as they, as they start to kind of surface to you? 

03:00 Yeah, usually within a day we can figure it out. And I'm really serious about that. I mean, it is not that difficult to do. What it requires is the visualization of the process. It requires standing shoulder to shoulder, not face to face in a zoom format. If you think about how humans in the history of humanity, only five years, we've been using zoom, but our entire history is humanity face to face. Speaking is negotiation. It is getting feedback from the other person and, and changing the way you're thinking and talking based upon that feedback. So what we've got to do is get people in a room shoulder to shoulder. You can't build things face to face. You have to build things shoulder to shoulder. We need to get people in a room, shoulder to shoulder, ask them what their process is. We call this class of employees, the believables, because I don't believe. Anything an executive tells me about how work gets done because they don't know how any work gets done. They know the inputs and the outputs and maybe the outcome, but they know nothing about the throughput of the business, their hands don't get dirty on a daily basis, so they don't know these things. So when we bring people together, we, we explain to them that we're going to map out the process. We work with a blank wall, mapping it out with bubbles and circles and lines. And we do the whole entire thing. And then we stand back at the end and we say, where does it hurt?  And the pain that comes from the people in the trucks, the pain that comes from the people writing the code is radically different than anything that the executives ever dreamed possible. And then we look at those problems and we work to solve those problems. We rank them out. Hey, look, we've got 25 issues here. If there was one, if we only had one. What would it be if we could only do two? What would they be? And then I always ask employees at the end of the session. Great. Now that we've said that, now that you've told me these three problems are the biggest problems that are stopping you from doing high quality, high value, good work from having pride and joy in your work. Um, what will you give me if I get you those things? And 90 percent of the time they say something like, well, we could do 20 percent more work. If you could just. Get the ERP system to connect. If we could just access it on our phone, if we could just get the right tools, 

05:09 It's the saddest thing. You got people willing to do the work. They want to do the work, but you can't feed them fast enough or to even know when they're still hungry. 

05:19 You're so right. You're so right that we do not understand that the barrier to growth, the barrier to profitability is actually tied up in our people because our people spend most of their time. And I'm very serious when I say this, they're in meetings a lot. We just worked with a company. They just achieved a billion dollar mark. 48% of all employees time is spent in meetings every single week. 48% think about  20 hours a week in a meeting. Then you got to go to the restroom. You got to get to the meeting. You got to prepare for the meeting. You got, I actually asked him. I'm like, if you guys are in the business of creating meetings, you're doing the right job, but that's all you do. Serious 48%. Think about that. That means 48 percent of their full time head count is in a meeting. 

06:03 Holy crap. And you're talking about internal meetings or are you talking about meetings with clients?

06:07 Internal meetings. Yeah. Internal meetings. Yeah. Why? Because they're waiting on things. So I'm waiting on Joe to get me this. So I need to meet with Joe twice a week to find out where he is. They're looking for things. I'm not sure where this is. Let me find out. They're trying to get the status on things. And because they're waiting, looking and checking and they're spending 25, 30, 40 percent of their time in meetings, searching for things or waiting on a, I'm just waiting on the client to send it over here. Once Todd finishes his part, I can start working on my, all of this adds up to what it means is when you have a culture like that, it means you don't trust the process.

06:40 Yeah. 

06:41 You can't trust the process to produce a repeatable, certain result. So you must constantly be, imagine trying to do this in a personal relationship and saying to your wife, I trust you, but I need to check your phone 16 times a day. Seriously, that would not be a relationship based on trust. So the fact that I cannot trust my process, I cannot trust my people. I do not trust my people because my process does not provide a result that is certain. I cannot guarantee that the client is going to get it on time. So I have to check in 15 times a day and I have to hover over you and I have to send you email. And then when I send you the email, I'll send you a Slack message. Then I'll text you, then I'll call you. And this is what we do. And most. Most of management is those things and all of those things are resolved. If you just make a process that provides a repeatable, certain result, all of those things go away. You go, you work a 20 hour work week, a 10 hour work week, if you want, but we don't because we would rather feel important or maybe we should just start mapping out the system.I don't, I don't know. It doesn't make any sense to me,  but this is what we've done. And it's because our ideology about management is fundamentally broken. As I talked about before we got on, right, we are currently using 19th century ideas that were created by Taylor in the late 1800s and that were refined and I w I cannot even use the word improved upon when I use Drucker's name, but you know, Drucker creates KPIs management by objective, okay.Ours, all these things in the 1950s with zero proof that any of these things work. Right. It was a theory when, when, and then 70 years later, we still have a 70 percent failure rate at our businesses. And we're like, we're not, we don't know what's the problem. We'll go back to the idea that started it all and ask yourself, does this make any sense? We forget. We don't remember because we haven't been around long enough that the ideas of Drucker about individual performance and KPIs were stolen from Taylor in the 1920s and Taylor abandoned those ideas because they did not work.  Listen about that. Individual performance bonuses were proven not to work. And Taylor was like, well, that was stupid. Let me throw it away. And Drucker found it in the trash heap and said, I'll write a best selling book on it and let's see if these dummies will believe it. And guess what? 70 years later, we still believe the same philosophy. Flawed idea that came out in the early 1950s. Maybe the problem isn't the people. Maybe the problem isn't the events and the customers and the psychoanalysis. Maybe the problem is the fundamental structure of the system is wrong. Right. The way that we manage is wrong. And if we just fix that, we would have a user friendly organization that our customers love, that our employees love. And people didn't. We're afraid of us. There wasn't, they weren't there just for the paycheck. They were there because they wanted to be there and work for us. And our customers wanted to be with us because they align with that value. But, but we've lost all that.  

09:32 So where's the error? Where, where is it? 

09:34  got to slap him across the face. Where's Drucker Ron? This is a really good point. I  think drunk. Let, let, let's talk a little bit about Drucker. So let's, first we have to understand what the era that Drucker was in 1951 is when his ideas formed. Um, America had just, just finished the war ex Yep. Just finished the war. During the war, we did not use that method of management at all. Because we had 8 million women and 3 million children in the workforce. And 17 million men went overseas. Yeah. So these women were not skilled labor,  and we needed to figure out how to beat German and Italian engineers. Right with unskilled labor. Now anybody that knows anything about engineer knows still 75 years later, German and Italian engineers are the best. So we've gotta figure out how to out engineer and outproduce these incredible superpowers. And the United States was not a superpower in 1939, right? We had the 39th largest military in the world, our 14th largest military in the world, and 13th largest army. We were not. A big superpower. Right. But during the war, we discovered a method and that method was statistical control of process coupled with employee empowerment because all of the frontline workers left, all of our best workers left.

10:42 Yeah. 

10:43 And 200,000 of our best managers were commissioned as officers without ever serving a day in the military. The federal government walked into businesses and said, who's your best manager. Ask your employees, don't ask you. They walked into your employees, Todd said, who's the best manager on it? Boy, that Bob, he's great. Good. We're going to take him with us. He's going to go fighting and they just pull them right out of the mix. So, so American businesses in chaos in 1942, and as these women enter the workforce, a woman working in a factory in 1942 is 20 times more likely to be killed or injured than her husband is fighting in the European theater. That's how dangerous it is. It's yeah, I mean, you look at the statistics, 1942 is a very bad year for women in the workplace and then something happened and that something was that in the void of middle management,  senior executives had no choice, but to go down and actually talk to these women that were doing the work.And one of the stories goes that Ford's on the line. He sees these women working. He's wagging his head about how terrible they are. A woman walks up. She says, hold up your hand, Mr. Ford. He does. She holds up hers and it's half the size of his. She says, why don't you go get us tools that fit our hands? Why are you making us work with things that don't work for us? And ford  walks away and realizes he's, he's not wrong. She's not wrong. Right. I mean, she's not wrong because there's only one person in my, at my home address that can open a pickle jar and it's me  every day. When I come home, my wife's like, can you do this? And it has nothing to do with superiority. It just has to do with my hands are  more than twice the size of my wife. So this changes everything about American management. All of a sudden, senior executives are forced to go and talk to the, the little, the little people. Right. We learned that the little people actually control the means of production, and we begin to empower the people that control the means of production. Right. These ideas take off, and they win the war. And then, unfortunately, by 1949, these ideas that Deming and Kaiser and a number of others had. By 49, these ideas are wiped out of American history because as soldiers come back from the war, Drucker realizes command and control. I can just tell you, Todd, what to do. And you'll salute, you'll click your heels together. And you'll that's not what women would do in the 1940s. So because of that Drucker sees this opportunity and he realizes command and control management. This is the future of managing 35 percent of the workforce that served in the military. I don't know what percentage of the workforce today served in the military, but it sure ain't 35 percent and we're still using the same idea. So these ideas that were created by 1950 are wiped out of American history because they are considered communist, right? Going and talking to the people that do the work. Right. Letting them have a voice. This sounds unionized. This sounds Bolshevik. This sounds Marxist. So these ideas get pushed under the rug. And fortunately for us, the Japanese took them and they used them to club us about the face and neck throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties and become the second largest economy in the world. So they use the idea that we came up with to literally humiliate us. This moment in time in, in Japanese history is called Uh, rising sun, fallen eagle.I mean, they literally look at it and say, Oh, you guys won the war. And then we decimated you economically. We literally took your idea and we beat you with it into submission to the point so much that the, the rust belt in the United States completely and totally collapsed using all your idea. Yeah, our idea that Drucker replaced. So listen, the Drucker's ideas work. There's no proof they did, but I mean, because American production, 

14:18 They didn't fail. 

14:19 They didn't fail. Well, I mean, 70 percent failure rate currently still of American businesses. You're right. 30 percent of businesses that works for them. Yeah, you're, you're right. If you went to Vegas and played those odds, you'd be a fool, but, but, but you're right, you've got, you've got, uh, you've got soldiers that are listening. And in 1952, when Drucker's ideas by 1954, when Drucker's ideas really take off in America, American auto workers produce 10 cars per employee. Right. 23 years later, we still produced 10 cars per employee. We had zero improvement in productivity. Japanese on the other hand, in 1952, produced four cars per employee. 23 years later, they produced 60 cars per employee. Wow. Not 1660. The average. Japanese worker in the 1970s was worth the equivalent of six American workers. And then Lee goes to Congress and says, we'll respond, we'll show you what America can do. And then they launched the Ford Pinto, which is like the biggest disaster in American automobile history. So did these ideas work? I mean, 30 percent of the time they do. Yeah. 30%. So, yeah, I would, I would agree. Drucker has a great, great track record there of 30%. No, no offense. And I mean, he's not even alive, so I can't, but, but listen, at that time, when you had soldiers coming back from the war, that might've worked.

15:40 Right. 

15:41 Let me tell you, do people click their heels together and salute you now, Todd, when you ask them to go retrieve something for you, 

15:52 I would say, uh, no. No, never, maybe 30%. 

15:53 So that's what I'm passionate about. I believe that the system is broken. I think we can see it in our society. I think if you look at the top 10 movies right now, I have no idea what they are, but I can guarantee you they're all sequels and prequels and a new Barbie movie. And right. Aren't they? Isn't it? It's what fast and the furious 78? 

16:11 Yeah. I think it's outta 78. Yeah.

16:14 We don't do rock. Yeah. Rocky. We don't do Rocky anymore. We just turned it into Creed. Now we're on like Creed 19. We don't have new ideas and we don't have new ideas because the system doesn't work. Right. It fundamentally is flawed, and if we want to improve, we're going to have to go back to those core tenants. Yeah. And we're going to have to ask ourselves, do those make sense in a. In the 21st century, 21st century technology with 19th century ideas. I'm not sure that lines up. 

16:43 Okay. I'm buying it. I'm buying what you're submitting. 

16:45 So, so you, you told me to stay into the 20 minute timeframe and we're not even out of the introductions and I'm at 16. I warned you, Todd, I warned you this is on you. It's not on me. 16:54  No, it's my fault. It's my fault today. We're doing a three hour Joe Rogan staff podcast and we are just bringing out the intros. I love it. 

17:04 I hopethat makes sense to your listeners, Todd, because listen, we don't question, these are not beliefs that we, you and I came up with, Todd, these are not our ideas. These are ideas that some old man wanted to write a book about. And he was like, let me think how I could best manage soldiers coming off the battlefield. And he created an ideology and listen, it got bought in by a lot. And some people can say, look at GE. I mean, GE was a wild success, right? No, actually, no, they don't even exist anymore. Oh, that's right. They adopted these ideas and used him as a consultant for many, many years. And, uh, and they robbed, they were robber barons. So I know I'm getting extreme with my point here on Drucker. There's a lot of great things that Drucker did, but we have to look at the sign of the times we are in 2025. We are not in 1951 post war United States went from a third world country to this major superpower. And  that's not the world that we live in. We can't even relate to that world. So why are we using their ideas? 

19:40 To manage business. 

19:41 So, so how do we fix it then? So what is the solution? That is, is it just the matter of talking to our frontline, talking to our people, delivering the service? Yeah. I mean, well, what does that actually look like? 

19:53 Yeah, I think first and foremost, we have to get back to understanding that we have become a digital society, and there's many things that have to be done. Analog, for instance, we, we, we, we have remote workforces, which is okay, right? I mean, there is some value in a remote workforce, but I have to. Get them together at regular intervals. When I talk to regular intervals, like not once a year, like this is four times a year, 10 times a year. And I need to do that because human beings operate in an environment. We operate where only 7% of communication is with words. Right. Intonation is a big part of that, but body language is a big part of that Pheromones. There's been recent surveys, studies, Simon Sinek just did a podcast about ceremonies about eight weeks ago. That'll blow your mind. Most emotional bonds in the human brain are most closely associated with the sense of smell. Meaning that you love your wife, not as much because of the ways that she looks in the way that she talks to you, but the way that she smells, there is a tribal sense that sort of happens in these environments and, and, you know. We, we do, and I'm not talking about body odor here, right? I'm talking about, we, we have to understand that our, you know, our systems are beyond that. So how, if emotional bonds are created with smell, how, how do you and I ever create an emotional bond via Zoom? We can't do that. We can't be part of a tribe. We can't truly be part of a team unless we can get together. So we first got to start with getting people in the room together. The second thing is, is we have to stop blaming each other. We have to start blaming the system. We have to look at the system. Like I just did with Drucker. And we have to say, does this make any freaking sense? Does it make any sense that we deliver this product this way and do this? Let's put it all up on the wall and let's stand back together and cross our arms and abstract and say, huh. That that's dumb. Why are we do who, who came up with this? I have done it. We've done hundreds of workshops with people and almost everyone. There's somebody that goes, well, that's stupid. Why in the world are we doing this? Why do we just did a workshop the other week? Why do we have a department that works on procuring equipment and materials 12 months before we need it? And I asked this question in the workshop, they have a whole department. It does this. And I said, why do we do that? And they said, well, because of COVID. And I said, it's 2025, my friend, COVID has been over for years. You still, how long does it take you to get your materials now? Oh, about seven days. And you still have a department. That is trying to figure out a year from now, those, that environment doesn't need to occur. So, so many times things get put into the process because we need them at that moment in time, but they're not necessary. So we've got to get people in the room, visualizing the process, working shoulder to shoulder, not blaming each other. We never allow blame for each other. It is always the system. That's the problem. Something about this system caused Todd to not do a good job. Can't be Todd's fault. It has to be my fault. Cause I control the system when I did consulting years ago with one of the biggest retailers in the world. Everybody knows who they are. there's a story about their founder, Sam Walton, who says, used to say, if you have a problem on our four today, you have an employee problem. If you have a problem on our four tomorrow, you've got a management problem. If that problem is there a week from today, go into the restroom, place your hands flat on the counter, lean into the mirror and say it out loud with me. I am the problem. It can't be them. If it still happens a week later, right?

23:18 Right. Right. 

23:19 I mean, I'm in charge. I'm in control of the system. So improving the system, placing all blame on the system. We as tribal people, we need to have an enemy, the enemy in every one of the businesses that I work with is the system. We're going to wrangle this thing. We're going to get it under control. We are going to be the intelligent designers of this system. We are not mutation and variation to creep in and take over and do whatever at once. Absolutely not. We'll put our foot down. We're going to make sure the system works for everybody and produces the best result. 

23:53 Right. You know, and, and truthfully in, in, uh, while we have been raised in the Drucker type management style, I will say that in, in over 500 interviews with CEOs in this podcast, I have found that the most common challenges every CEO faces in, in growing and scaling anyway. Are the three, the three killers that you've talked about, people, processes, and tools. And the fact that you're a process, uh, engineer or that you are a process breaker, um, says a lot about that problem being one of the most significant because people are a problem if you got the wrong person there. But I would say more often than not,  it's because there's no process that even a good person doesn't even know what to do. Right? 

24:34 Do you know what, you want to know what the statistics are? So there is a global for  50 years. This was tracked. So during world war II, W Edwards Deming, who created statistical control that ran every factory in the United States, the methodology that we use to manage during that time, W Edwards Deming at the end of the war. He, the greatest statistician in the last 2000 years created census, created all of these things. Every measurement that you see on the, on the nightly news about GDP, all that stuff came out of one guy's mind. He looked at the American economy and said, 85 percent of all problems are processing systems problems. Stop badgering people and start improving the system. Then he went to Japan for 30 years, created six Sigma lean, the Toyota production system, agile waterfall in every method we use to this day. And in the 1980s he was interviewed and they said, was it true? Was it 85%? He said, no, sadly, I was terribly wrong. 94 percent of all problems we ever saw  was system problems. So that means that, yes, people can, we should be spending at least 6 percent of our time managing the people and the other 94%. And listen, this isn't to say that people don't make mistakes in Japan. They call it pokey. Okay. To idiot proof, your system, you want to make things so simple and so easy in your organization that you can hire that dumb brother in law of yours, you can hire, you know, people that aren't the best because your system is so good. The talk I gave this morning, we talk about the Oakland athletics in the 1990s into the two thousands and how this is a team, the most rag tag, minimum wage team in major league baseball history, and they win 20 games in a row and completely overthrow the New York Yankees, Mickey Mantle record of win streak, and they didn't do it. With the best players in major league baseball, most of the players, other teams paid them to take away from them. They were like, I will give you money to take this loser. And they took those losers and they put them into a system where they empowered them to learn about their strengths. And they use statistical controls to understand what those strengths were. And then they just let those players loose. And when they first let them lose management, manage them poorly. So they eventually just said, stop managing them. Just let them, we'll just figure it out on our own. And they did. And they, they, they change the face of baseball. So this is what I'm talking about is we've got to understand that we couldn't, McDonald's does not hire PhDs. They don't have to, the system always produces crispy, delicious French fries because it's designed that way. It doesn't matter. The variable of. People is irrelevant now at the leadership level. Do I want the right people around me? Of course, of course, but Jim Collins, right? People, right. Seats does not apply to anybody outside of the executive team because I can create systems that make people work better.

27:27  Right.  I love it. I love it. And that is, that is at the crux of it all. I mean, it really is. And I've said this over and over again, the more and more I heard this from, you know, it's funny because I, I went from a position where I've always built my own businesses. I've grown and I've had, I've had some really awesome success stories. I've had some really stupid failures. I had a lot of things that everyone feels like they're going through out there. And when COVID hit and I decided to turn on this podcast and started interviewing CEOs, I interviewed 250 in 13 weeks and 250 CEOs. That is nine interviews a day, three days a week. The other two days a week, I was trying to figure out what I was going to be when I grew up again. And it was like,  You know, I kept hearing this theme and the theme was always people processes, tools, people, processes, tools. And, and I, I agree with you that the people problem solves itself when you can plug them into a system that actually helps them achieve what you want them to do for you. And then the, what, the other thing that the process does now though, in the 21st century, Is that a process sometimes will eliminate the need for people. If you can just function that thing through automation and through different AI tools and things like that. Don't be stupid. If you have a process, you can plug in technology and actually enhance people or let one person do the 60 cars, like you're talking about versus one guy doing four cars, 

28:54 The Japanese figured this out. See, the Japanese took this idea from us and then they made it way better. And one of the things that Japanese did, and I just recently met a Japanese executive that came from that era. Sure. And he said, told me, he said, Derrick, you need to preach this message in Japan because we forgot about these ideas. We have adopted Western management philosophy in the last 35 years. And it took us from the second biggest economy in the world to the fourth, which will probably be the fifth next year and will be the 10th in the next decade because Yeah. And it's really true. But one of the things that the Japanese did, and this is shocking to Americans, guaranteed lifetime employment. When you hired somebody in Japan in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, you had to pay them until they retired, right? Even if they didn't. So you could never blame the people. You had to make the system better. So Japanese employees in the seventies and eighties. Yeah. There's great interviews online with some of these after Americans began starting to understand what we had lost in the 80s. We started going to Japan and watching this and there's a really cool, I think it was an interview that I saw, but I'd read about this too, that employees look at their job in Japan is trying to figure out how to automate everything and make it so easy that they're no longer needed  because they're guaranteed their salary. So if I can find a way to automate my job and eliminate my job and my entire department, I get to go home and collect my paycheck until such a time. The company can find another use for me. And there's one interview I saw years ago and it was this Japanese woman. And she said three times now, I have completely eliminated my position. The company continues to pay me. And she said, finally, they brought me and my team in and they said, look, we don't know what to have you do. So we're going to open a new division of the company. Should we make oil wells? Should we make sewing machines? What do you guys want to do? You're so good at automating things and eliminating the need for you. And we're never going to let you go. So what would you like to work on next? Now, listen, people only work for one of three reasons, fear, finance, or cause they want to, right? Those people want to. That's, they're not afraid of ever losing their job. They can never lose their paycheck. And all of a sudden now, instead of just lying around and eating bonbons and not caring, they're like, look, I'm in this thing, right? I want this to succeed because every time I make it succeed, the company's more profitable and I get a chunk of that thing at the end of the day. So I can live off my salary. I can do all these things. But it's beneficial to me and my country and my countrymen and the people that work here. If I find ways to do the work better, if you did that, Todd, in a business here in the United States, if I walked in and three days after my third day on the job, I walked into the CEO and I said, I discovered a way to eliminate my entire department by Friday. We can all be unemployed. Isn't it wonderful. He would give me pink slips. Seriously. Great. Get the heck out of here. So instead I do the opposite. 

31:46 Right. How do I make that's why we hear. So I make everything more dependent on me. Yeah.  

31:49 That's why the most, the most dreadful words to ever hear in a business is here she comes, right? When people see you and they go, here he comes, look busy because we don't have anything to do. We could have eliminated all of our roles months ago, but instead we just got, uh, you know, what is it? I think it's Parkinson's law that says work always expands to fit the time allotted for it. If I say it's going to take 15 minutes, it takes 15. If I say it takes 15 days. Magically for 59 and the 15th day, everybody's going, we need more time. 

32:22 Okay, so Derrick, I get, I get the principles and I get what you're saying and I agree with it, but, but help us. 

32:31 Don't say, but then if you agree with it, just agreed. 

32:32 Okay. So, so here, here's the, here's the, here's the big, uh, crux. So this audience on this podcast are the people that are trying to create those systems and those processes. They're the ones that want to eliminate. overhead if they can, and they want to build more efficiencies. So, so as I'm looking down at my organization, I'm saying, okay, um, I want to, I want to do everything Derrick just talked about. I really want to lead with that style. Where do they start? And what are some practical things that they can do today, uh, that will help them start to visualize that strategy and map that, that path. To get them where you're talking about. 

33:10 Yeah. First and foremost, by, uh, industrial grade, sticky notes, as many as you can possibly get off Amazon, don't buy these cheap ones. You have to get the super sticky post it note. There is no other, and I have, we have, I have a palette of my own custom ones. I had made, and you have to have the super sticky because the other ones fall off the wall too quickly. That's the first and foremost thing. Start finding pain in the process and fixing it.  What you will quickly determine is that all of a sudden your people will have more capacity. Yeah, because when they're not waiting, looking and checking, right. When they're not stuck in meetings all day, when they're not dealing with the struggles of the system, we had a workshop here two weeks ago with a company that they said, internal communication is our biggest problem. We mapped out the mall. And I said, what do we use for project management? Simultaneously, five voices spoke up and all said something different. And I said, well, there's our problem. Oh, we use Reich for marketing. We use Trello for sales. We use Microsoft project. Nobody's communicating. Get one system and it solves it. There's going to be a 10 or 15 or 20 percent improvement in the capability of the organization. So put your, make your people, turn your people from soldiers. Defending the position  to scouts out, trying to figure out how to improve the work and then what you will soon find. And I had this happen with a company here. We use it as a case study. They had a hundred people working there. They had 32 open positions. When we were done, we realized 85 was the right number for that business. They didn't need one 32. They needed 85. We still had a hundred. So what did we put those other 15 people on improving the system full time, walking around, figuring out how to make it better. Then eventually somebody quits and eventually somebody quits. And then we stabilize at the 85 and all of the sudden 50 people are no longer there that we would have hired. And now that 50 salaries gets folded back in, listen, I talked about the Japanese and I said that they produced six times more per American employee. Yeah. Coca went to Congress and said, it's tariffs, it's cheap Asian labor. It's all these things. The Japanese were paying 20 percent more than the UAW. Right. How, how is it cheap Asian labor when the Japanese pay more than you do? So, and they could afford to pay more. If I get six times the productivity out of you, can I pay you 20 percent more? I can pay you double. It doesn't matter. So at that point.  Instead of blaming each other, we blame the system. We attack the system as if it's an enemy and we constantly work on continuous improvement of the system over and over and over. I don't want 10 percent improvement. Don't even talk to me about stuff. That's 10%. I want half a percent, quarter percent, because that stuff, that's just cheap. 

35:49  Right. 

35:50 And it adds up over time. And listen, here's the best part about it. When you empower your people to do this work,  those who write the plan do not fight the plan. Right. Do you really think they're going to argue with you when you, when you say, Hey, I've got the new system that you guys wanted me to get and improve to make your lives better, to make your work easier. Do you think they're going to resist you? There is no need for change. Management only exists because people don't want to do it. When people want to do it. Push change, man. And my wife used to run a big CMO change management office for one of the biggest companies in the world. And I'm like, we can eliminate you, babe. We can get rid of you. If people want to do it, if it's their ideas that get implemented, they want to see those things improve. They don't want to leave the company. They want the company to be more profitable. So you've got to start with getting shoulder friction. You can't do it on Miro. You can't do it on lucid. It's gotta be sticky notes on a wall. I'm sorry. It's the only way it works. It's the only way our limbic resonance kicks in and we all start to think tribally, we've got to do it that way. We've got to form a team and we've got to start right there.  

36:53 I love it. Okay. Well, for those that heard this, start now, go buy those sticky notes and make it happen.  

37:03 Well, there's all sorts of holiday specials right now, get industrial sticky notes or listen or come to me and I'll train your people and you can use our cool custom sticky notes. I just have them out of reach. I don't want to step out of the game, but  we use these tools and build these things. 

37:15  Okay, that is the solution.  

37:16 Just come to Tempe, Arizona in the middle of winter and I'll train you on it. 

37:20 Well, that is, uh, not a far fetched idea. 

37:23 I know  I've got a whole group from Idaho coming in January. I've got a whole group from Iowa coming in March. As soon as I said Tempe, like what's the temperature like? I'm like, ah, I don't know, maybe like 75 degrees and sunny. They're like, yeah, we'll get on a plane, come down to you. You don't need to come to Iowa in November, December or something. So thanks for having me. I really do appreciate you allowing me to bring this message because I really do feel it's a message. Like I'm, I'm not. Self-serving in the sense of like, oh, you gotta buy this for me, right? 

37:57 No, go, just go do it. Get off your it, go do it. Yes. But, but you and I both know that most people hear the idea that re it resonates in their head. They're not gonna go do it because sticky notes are probably going out of style right now. And, uh, but, but the bottom line is. If you're listening to this thinking, I should be doing something like this. You need to, you need to get ahold of Derrick or someone like Derrick. I would prefer Derrick because he, he is bringing the love. There's no like him. And my guess is, my guess is that Derrick has a system and a process for how he facilitates what he does. And my guess is there's probably other people in his organization that do what he does in the way he does it. So, am I wrong there? 

38:35 We've got 60 certified facilitators in my methodology. About half of those are either EOS implementers. Interestingly enough, if you use the EOS system, or they are internal to a company, they're director of operations. They're a team inside of a company that we have trained on this method. They are going out and harvesting this information from employees and creating lists. Banking those lists and sharing them with executives and saying, look, here's the three things that people in this organization need, and they think they can do 20 percent more work and usually be a CEO goes to me, they'll never do 20 percent more work. They'll be lucky to get 10 percent more. And I go, and when you still, and they go, Oh yeah, I would still do that. Let's take action because the truth of the matter is top line growth is wonderful. 

39:18 Yep. Yep. Yep. 

39:19 But in the end, profitability is particularly right now. Try to go raise money right now. Yeah. It isn't what it was two years ago where everybody's like, how much revenue, how much revenue? They're like, well, what's your profitability? Right. What's your EBITDA? Most founders don't know how to spell EBITDA  and that's a problem because they didn't need to for the last 20 years, but the environment's changed. So you've got to start to systemize the process. 

39:41 Derrick, thank you.Thank you. Thank you for taking the time. And for those listening, do check it out, understand what he's talking about and, and really rethink the way you're managing and the way you're listening to the feedback from your, from the people doing the work that you're selling, you know, and, and that is so hugely important for every business leader out there. Derrick, thank you so much for taking the time. And for those listening, do catch up with him wherever he he's available, which is. Kind of all over the place, so check them out and we'll catch up with the rest of you later. Thanks, Derrick. 

40:09  Thanks, Todd. That was great. Hey, I hope you enjoyed this episode with Derrick.