01:19 Hey, welcome back to the show today. I have got an awesome, awesome leader in, in growth strategy and ahead. Will you just give us a low down? Who are you and what do you do? 

01:30 Yeah. Hey, Todd, thanks for having me. So basically I am an HR consultant who helps seven figure companies go to nine figure company, you know, nine figure ones. And I do that by helping them turn what I call HR into rocket fuel for their growth.  

01:52 I like rocket. I like rocket analogies. Get ready. 

01:53 Yeah, just because, and the reason, the reason I think that's, that's valid is because, you know, a lot of times there's really three main buckets that help companies grow, or he even have the possibility to grow. There's the product market fit, right? You need that for sure. Right. You need to have financial sustainability. In order to be able to grow. So, but those are things you can't control a hundred percent for the most part. There's some market dynamics you can control, economic situations, political, so forth. The final piece of the puzzle is the people front, which you have full control over. And typically the people front in HR is an enabler. It is the catalyst for growth. It is not the only factor that will help you grow. You need the other two. But without it, you hit a ceiling and that's where I come in pretty much.

And that's why I think that, Hey, HR is that rocket fuel. It is that catalyst, that enabler, right? If you pump diesel into a rocket, it's not going to take off, but you pour rocket fuel into it. It is going to reach its full potential. And that's kind of how, how I positioned what I do.  

02:51 Okay. So this is so relevant you guys, if any of you have listened to any of my episodes, like more than two or three, you're going to recognize right away. There is a pattern in growth and it repeats itself over and over in this podcast. And that is,  it's always one of three things, people, processes, and tools. And, and I would say that market fit, you know, yes, of course. But like the, the, the growth mechanisms are always. Right. People write roles, right? Positioning. Tell us what you see as the biggest problems, because one of the big reasons I wanted you on the show is I love people like you who identify this again. I think it's the number one growth prohibitor. Is people problems. So where do you see the most common issues that you solve for people when you come into their organizations? 

03:38 Yeah, definitely. I mean, you, you hit it right on the head in the beginning is when people, when, when founders and startups think of growth and scaling and so forth,  they think operations, they think, you know, products and so forth from an HR standpoint, I'm kind of aligned with what you just said earlier, people, processes and infrastructure. Are the key drivers there. And a lot of times when you think of HR, you don't think of it in the breadth, especially the process perspective and the infrastructure perspective. But usually when I come into organizations, those are the first things I look at. Like, Hey, how can we grow and scale with less people? Which is probably one of the most un HR things people, you know, you can think of an HR person saying, right. It's like, Hey, how can we do more with less? But. Scaling is that exactly is right. It's you want the exponential growth without having to match the head count with the growth or else you're not scaling in. Right. Uh, some of the biggest challenges I see in prohibiting some of these things from happening. One is the founders and startup leaders themselves, uh, which I kind of called it the hero mindset. Trying to do everything and hoarding everything and trying to do  everything from the beginning and then just yeah Just not letting go and not knowing when to let go What ends up happening is you limit the growth and you pretty much marry it to your capacity as an individual or a small team As opposed to trusting people to be able to leverage their capabilities and grow you as an organization something I see, almost all the time with companies that achieve a certain level of success in the beginning is they try to scale too fast and by scale too fast, I mean that, Hey, you know, we hit 5 million in annual recurring revenue. Let's, you know, put the pedal to the metal. Let's hire 50 more people. Let's introduce three more products and, you know, let's hope things keep going upwards, but they forget that. Scaling needs a base for it to be sustainable. You don't build a skyscraper on the foundation of a four story building. Uh, you need a strong foundation to build a company that stands the test of time. So, building foundations, taking a step back, and to your point, the processes, the infrastructure, the right people, and so forth. Without them, you cannot scale. You're actually gonna crash and burn. Um, I've seen companies who have actually bankrupt themselves with premature scaling.  Um,  it's, it's great. It's wild. There was this one company, which was a regional it services organization that I was working with, uh, as an employee, way before I went into the consulting space, it was one of the triggers that, that it was one of those light bulb moments for me, like, huh, you have all these things going for you and you shoot yourself in the foot. So what happened is that this company was growing triple digits for multiple years in a row.  A lot of cash, great financial, great product market fit, but the. On the people front, there were just so many lousy decisions where they managed to go bankrupt in four years from that. Wow. I left way before that.

06:47 So what was it? I mean, we, we can, we can point a finger to say people, what was it? People that were making decisions that shouldn't have been. Was it like, they just didn't have, was it a group of buddies and they all kind of like, Hey, yeah, dude, we can figure this out on our way or. Like, tell me about the specifics. Like what? 

07:07 Yes, it was, it was, it was a combination of many things. First off, it was the wrong people in the wrong roles,  right? There was an ultimate sin that I see in a lot of startups is the founding team that you start with, that gets you to the first milestone. You assume as the one that's going to take you to the end milestone, whereas they might not have the capabilities and know how to actually go there. But what ends up happening is that ownership. Puts too much stock into their abilities where we're  actually underqualified for doing that. And instead of helping the company keep growing, they actually make decisions that make it tank. The third thing was to piggyback a bit off of that. Sometimes that specific company, what happened is that sometimes, you know, success blinds you when you are, when you're hitting milestone after milestone year at like two, three years, and you're seeing this exponential growth, you assume you're untouchable to some point. And you can do no wrong and you stop listening to the feedback you're getting from your organization, from the people you hired with certain expertise to help you grow and that specific company stopped listening to their, to their teams, stop, stop trusting the folks that were giving them advice. And what ended up happening is they made wrong decision after wrong decision and compounded. And pretty much they hit the, you know, they hit the ground. A lot of it was due with that specific company. A lot of it was due to  expanding way more than they could. They over leveraged themselves in terms of finances. They went into debt. There was a lot of things they did with assuming that the growth trajectory was going to maintain. Like, yeah, triple digits is going to happen forever and let's keep going and keep, you know, our foot on the gas and then they wake up. 

08:52 That's a horrible assumption to make. 

08:53 It is. 

08:54 It's such a horrible assumption. 

08:55 I mean, it's, it's funny, but we see it a lot, right? If you look at, like, look at what happened in the COVID pandemic. Not, and you're not talking small companies here. You, some of the big companies we see in the news, the Amazons, the Googles and all that they hired like crazy in the pandemic, but here they are all laying people off just because like, oops, we overhired the demands that didn't sustain. So yeah, those are some of the things that were going on there. So it's a compounding effect for sure. You don't go from triple digit growth to bankruptcy in four years.  If there's an abdominal effect of sorts.  

09:28 Well, I, I would have to agree. And, and the very first thing you said in that response is something I want to, I want to anchor in on for a minute because, um, you mentioned,  right? People write roles. Will you walk us through how you visualize a role versus a people? Because I see people confuse these a lot. And, um, and how do you, how do you help people identify that there's a match, like that there is a role defined. And that there is a person as good as some stuff, but I need you to fill that role instead of just being the person you might've been in a previous company.

10:04 Yeah, that's, I love that question. And generally speaking, how I started the conversation with any founder is let's define what does the company need in terms of strategic capabilities that will help you achieve whatever goals you've mapped out.  Hey, you want to get from point A to point B, what do we need as an organization to be good at and be able to do  to able to achieve that? That's step number one, those capabilities are going to inform the actual separation of roles and positions you need right in the organization. Now, of course, I'm not talking job titles here. I'm talking, okay, what is the. Composition of a certain function or role. Like if one, if you want to place a person inside the organization, what are they going to be doing? What are they responsible for? What's their authority? What are the decisions they're making? So once you define that, then I advise looking at people and who's the best person to fill this. Because the reason I'm saying this a lot of times. Founders get this in reverse. They try to tailor a role to the people they have or the person they think needs to be in that role,  which is, which is not the way you think of it. The way you need to write, what is your business need? And who's the best person? Not, Hey, I have Joe here. How do I mold my organization's role to fit Joe's capabilities? That's thinking of it totally counterintuitively. So that's kind of the, I would say like the top level logic of how you approach this, um, and it's easier said than done. 

13:11 No, it is funny to say that. Cause you know, I recently, I would say in the last four years, I watched a company who, who is kind of local to where I'm at, they, they received a massive, um, uh, there was kind of a big distribution, a big buyout. They, they went public and a huge, uh, company came in and invested a ton of money in them. And the first thing they did was they went out and they got a new CFO. They got, they added like seven C level positions  that,  that I don't think they needed to get to where they were at, but somehow they thought bringing in these high dollar people is going to somehow make all the difference in the world. The problem is they didn't have roles for these people. Like they had titles and they had experience in that title, but what they did at their previous place was very different than what they needed in the roles and the seats that they needed in their company. Cause their organization is very different than a typical product based business.  So how do you like, how do you help people understand the role and role assignments and what do you do as a consultant to help them see what do they actually need versus what do they think they need based off what other big companies are doing? 

14:24 Yeah, I love that question. And the example you gave is something I see very frequently. It is more common than one would think. And a lot of it has to do with a singular problem problem that I see all the time.  And I'll preface it with this when I'm working with customers and organizations, when it comes to hiring and making decisions of giving green light, go, no, go. I'm one of the most hated individuals, just because I like to challenge any person to do a few things before a higher hiring decision is given the green light. One, what is the business case for that role to exist? And by business case, let's deep dive a bit into what that means. Yeah. What is the value that this role is going to add that you're not getting today? Like. If a founder or a leader cannot pinpoint exactly what is the set of things that this role, not, we're not talking people here. We're talking the role itself. What is this role going to bring to your organization that you don't have today? That's the first thing. The second thing I'm like, what I usually  follow up with is that, okay, let's assume for a second. We don't even fill that role. What is that going to, how is that going to impact your organization?  Is that going to, is that going to impact your ability to achieve any of these goals that you've set?  If yes, how, and if no, why? So,  if these two questions are answered, and they're answered very clearly, and they're well defined, then you have a strong case for exploring, filling a role, or creating a role, because you're identifying a business need for that position, right? And position is not, and something you mentioned, that I think is also critical, and plays a factor here, is The assumption that a role as it exists in the market is exactly what I need is a big, big misstep because a CFO, I'll give you an example, right?  There was a point in time when I was the head of people at culture at a company and I was also handling the IT stuff in the organization. That's not something in someone's HR job description, right? But it's so it's so happened that that organization needed someone who has a know how to do basic. Um, basic it administration and provisioning and deprovisioning of accounts on a very basic level. In addition to that, I happen to be someone who had that skillset, right? But speaking, that is not what an HR person does. So if you try and go to get any HR person, you plug them in. They're missing a part of what the business needs. Then you need to add more headcount and so forth. So I think a lot of it is just taking a step back and reassessing and  not assuming there's, there's always this false sense of urgency that growing companies fall into is that if I don't hire 10 people in the next month, the sky is going to fall. Well, no, it's not, you know, it's not, um, It's going to fall if you hire 10 people and five of them, you don't need then. Well, your burn rate's going to accelerate and you're going to be in layoff territory pretty soon. 

17:33 For sure. Yeah, for sure. Interesting. Well, how, so, so as you look back at, at some of these companies that you've either been a part of, or you've been consulting with them and helping them grow, like,  are there key things that, that help you like in your description and what, what you, how you introduced yourself? You help take seven figure businesses and turn them into nine figure businesses. Like that's a bold statement. I know it can happen, but what is it that you do specific, like  with, with the last few clients that you've had, what are some of the key things that they needed to change in regards to their people problems that did change and help bring about that growth?

18:16  No, yeah, that's a very good point. Uh, and a very valid question that I get asked all the time, like, Hey, you know, what's this HR person going to do with our business to help us accelerate? Like, this is just HR, right? Right. Right. Something which I think is very critical that is missed a lot of times is  I can't do my job if I don't understand the business as well or even better than the people running that company. What do I mean by that? If I'm looking at things from the HR lens, there's a superpower that HR has that not the entire organization has except for the CEO. Maybe is that.  If you are a C level HR person, right, at the level that I operate in, you have access  to all the data that the organization, all the levers that help an organization grow or not. You're talking about business financials. You're talking about people financials. You're talking about all the data that comes with it. When, if you're in operations, you're missing a piece of that puzzle. If you're in finance, you're looking at numbers, but you're probably not looking at, Hey, for a product team to release XYZ features, I need four feature teams, a scrum team made up of eight people. This is their velocity. And so on and so forth as metrics that people in people functions, we look at. So  the way I help an organization do this is that one, I make sure that I understand the business so well to the point where  if you put me in a room with any one of these people in the business, right, they will think that I've come from that industry and I've been in it my whole life, even if I've never worked in it a day in my life. 

19:55 Right. Right. 

19:56 The second thing is you need to understand how dependencies work in the organization. Meaning, for sure, if the organization wants to release two new products this year, you need to understand what are the levers that you need to pull to make that happen? Is it head count? Is it more efficiency? Do you need to localize in certain locations? You need to open a branch somewhere. What does that include? Do you have the capabilities and skills to even release that product that you want versus not? And, uh, I'll end this with an example, like an actual example that happened just to show you how all this ties together. So yeah, I was, I was sitting in a board of directors meeting. This was a couple of years ago, approximately with a SAS company. And this organization had. Like a 40 percent increase in revenues from the previous year from one flagship product. So as part of the board meeting, I was an external advisor. So I was sitting on and on that meeting and basically the executive team was presenting a strategy for the next year that included releasing three new products in addition to The progress that they wanted to make with their flagship product. Now, I had access to their financials. I had a lot of data and metrics that I created around their velocity and speed and their head count and their productivity and so forth. Um,  and once they were, they were presenting that and there was a sense of excitement, there was cheer and the board of directors, you know, is high fiving each other and all that kind of stuff. So I raised my hand. And  once they asked me, like, Hey, what's, what's the question? I, I made a statement, which a lot of people looked at me as if I was  crazy or something, I said, well, I don't want to be the party pooper here, but what you're presenting  is not financially possible based on the data I'm seeing. And I explained why, right? What I explained at the time is I looked at the head count. They have the velocity on an individual level based on how they were going to separate the feature teams. Right. Historically, how long it's taken them to build similar features based on the story points that they had per, uh, per feature.  And I looked at the marketing and I looked even at the sales cycle on average. And how much that is, I'm like, Hey guys, you can't do this. First off, you don't have enough money to build all these things because we can't hire enough people based on our current velocity. So one, there's two things that can happen here. Either we need to increase head count to a point where we keep our current velocity, but we're going to, we don't have the finances. We need to get external funding or we need to improve our internal processes to the point where we meet a velocity of X to meet those projections. So sure.  I got the funny eye from a lot of people, but then once we talked about it a little bit more, like, you know what, this makes sense. There's we're missing a few pieces here to put this all together. And we, we, we ended up rehashing some of the strategy and it was a hybrid between, okay, we need to fine tune the manpower planning because we can't achieve the amount of velocity and efficiency that. The numbers were saying in a 12 month period, it wasn't really possible. So it was a hybrid that actually worked towards the end of the day. And it was just from a little observation just because of the people data that was there and the understanding of how to tie it all together. So that's a good example of how you can do something like this. 

23:25 That's a great example. And I think that, you know, a lot of people listening to this, if they're, if they're say sub,  let's say you're sub 10 million in revenue,  you just don't know that like you're, you're nimble. You can be so nimble as sub seven, sub 10 million. And when you're, when you're still in those seven digit areas, you can be much more nimble because your team's not as huge. It doesn't take as much to direct the ship, but, but the minute you start to scaling above 10 million, It is a very different animal altogether. You've got, you've got, you know, potentially 10 times the amount of team you had at a million dollars in revenue. And so at that point, you're like, okay, steering the ship is much harder. I don't have my hand on every single rain. I can't tug and it, and it just jerks. It's it's positioning as easily. So how do you coach people through this? And, and what that example you just said was, was a perfect case study of, of that particular thing, but. How do you help them, especially with modern day, uh, tools with AI, with, um, you know, I, I had a guy on my show recently who, who develops bots to do processes that humans might actually do. If it's, you know, his theory is if there's four people doing the same thing, I can train a bot to do that and have it cost you, you know, an eighth of what it might cost you to have four people doing that.You know, how do you incorporate the modern tech with the people problem with the. How do you, how are you coaching through that? Cause they can enhance their ability to scale. 

25:01 Yeah, definitely. So  one thing I always coach on, and especially with to your point, the, the, the sub 10 million, uh, and typically a lot of companies I work with are really sub 10 million, there were them, the seven figures, seven figures and so forth. They're starting to accelerate. They're starting to, you know, to gallop a little bit, but they're not there yet. Um, one thing I always preach is  build your operation and your business. With the anticipation that you are going to scale and grow. Think from day one, whatever I'm building today, is this something that I'll have to break down and rebuild in a year or is this something that I can incrementally scale with up until, you know, the Nth degree, you're giving some, some great examples here, right? Um,  if for example, that I need a recruiter who's going to manually review five, 600 resumes that come in every time I need to hire, well, how can I introduce some more automated screening or introduce maybe like an assessment or something that can cut down the time and the effort from day one? Yeah. Because  the problem with that is. What a lot of, especially I see this mostly with first time founders, people who are serial entrepreneurs, they sort of get this after the first second, they're like, you know what? Yeah, I need to do things differently now, but especially for some entrepreneurs, what happens is that they're trying to be cautious. They're trying to do, Hey, let's, let's do. Whatever we can to get by, keep our heads above water. But as soon as soon as they start getting some type of success, they look back at the operation, like, Oh my God, there's a lot of operational debts that we need to fix, and it ends up slowing their ability to scale and grow even sometimes it caps it off for them. Um, yeah, so for me, it's all about rewiring your brain. And the culture and how you operate internally to think like anytime you want to implement a new process, a procedure, build something, it could be something as basic as writing code and documentation. Well, am I writing code in a way that if someone else comes in as opposed to Joe here, are they gonna know what's going on in that code? Or gonna, are they gonna have to spend a week just to understand what the hell's going on here? Totally. Um, so, totally, so, so build from day one.  With the mindset that it's not a matter of, of, of, if it's a matter of when you scale. So if you're ready and you have the building blocks in place, then you are ready to scale when the time is right.

But if you wait until the time is right to start thinking of scaling, you're already behind and it's actually going to take you a step back. 

27:41 You know, I can appreciate this so much because, you know, I've spent a lot of years doing marketing and. And even in roles as a fractional CMO with several different groups in that right around the, between eight and 20 million is kind of my, my, where I pigeonhole myself a lot of the time. And, and I will say, uh, there have been times where  in marketing, it's like, try this doesn't work, try this doesn't work, try this doesn't work. All of a sudden it connects, it connects and, and leads start pouring in and.  The company does get overwhelmed because they don't have the right roles to find for what if we scaled, what if, what if the magic recipe does all of a sudden clicked, could we take this much, you know, a 300 percent increase in sales  in three months? Well, if you can't, then that's going to be a big deal. And so I appreciate you saying that. And I think that, you know, probably right along with what you're saying is. You know, understanding those roles, understanding that there are different hats that you may like to wear as a founder, as a partner, as a As a C level exec in one of these types of companies, but should you be wearing those hats and should you be, how quick can you deploy someone to take on those roles that you just don't have time to do every day?

28:57 Yeah, not exactly. You, you've been, you've been talking about a few things related to speed. And I think that's, that's an element that a lot of startups forget is one of their key competitive advantages, right? Regardless of, you know, forget your product or service for a second and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. When you're a small organization still, you know, you're, you're that sub 50 people, sub a hundred people, you're still, you have the. Superpower of speed. You're  nimble to your point when you pivot, you can do it very quickly. You can do it violently and you'll see the impact fairly quickly as well. Um, and that's something that founders need to leverage because to your point, and I think marketing is an amazing example because a lot of times in marketing. Right? You don't know which campaign is going to hit. You don't know which strategy is going to, you have a good idea based on experience and practices, but you can't tell for sure. But what you do in marketing, right? Is that if something doesn't work, you stop it, you pivot, you do something else. You don't write it out knowing that it's, you know, you don't, you don't, you don't keep investing and sinking costs in something that's not working. Um,  the same thing happens across an organization's life cycle as a startup. When you're going to experiment, you're going to try things. You might have a process one day that, you know, doesn't work. Hey, break it down, build it back up in another way. That's fine. Because when you can leverage that speed. The amount of learning that a startup can gain during a small period of time  is amazing and tremendous because by the time they get to the scaling readiness phase, they have learned and experimented so much where they know what works and what doesn't for their own company, and they can start running with it. 

30:37 Totally. No, dude, I get it. And I, I think that, I think that we've hit on some amazing, like this conversation could go for another hour, I think. But, uh, but what I feel like the, the biggest takeaways I feel like I want people to have from this is a  understand roles versus people. Because it's great to get a nice hire better to have a nice hire that fits a role  that they can come in and actually deploy and, and, and exercise their skill sets in, um, secondly, understand your growth propensity, like where, if this thing did go, right, how would I be prepared to handle that kind of growth? Because again, let's get real. It happens and you've seen it where it tanked a company because they weren't prepared for the influx of what they were building. Yep. And then thirdly, you know, just, just make sure that you align yourselves with people like you. Who can help advise them and these pivotal transition points. I, you mentioned 50 to a hundred employees.  Hello. Yes. That is such a huge difference. Hiring after a hundred employees. It's I've done it. It is crazy, crazy different stuff than me going and interviewing or, or my right hand person interviewing. Now you're into the realm of, Hey, ahead. Can you help me figure this out? Because I don't have time to deal with that. I've got all these other fires over here. So, so those are three big takeaways for me. What did I miss Nahed? 

32:09 No, I think you hit it right on the head. Something I'll just add to that, uh, not just a recommendation. It's just, I would say a mindset around all these things together. Um, And this, this is one of the reasons why I even do what I do is that  I like companies to have a shortcut, a cheat code for getting to success without, again, the people portion of success is one of those rare elements that you can control from A to Z. You have full control over it. There aren't any external dynamics at play here. You have the A to Z control over it and in business. It's anyone's pipe dream. If you can control a certain lever or dynamic from A to Z, that is very rare to come by, so why not take a shortcut and do things in a way that are going to give you a better chance of success because at the end of the day, right, whatever you, sometimes an argument I hear from a lot of early stage founders, especially again, first time founders is, well, we can't afford to invest in something like this or in, let's say an enhanced operation or process this early. Well, the counter to that is, well, think of the opportunity cost you're losing by not doing that. 

33:21 Amen. 

33:22 It's, it is, it is a rounding error. Sometimes if you dig into the numbers, really, it's one of those things where like, yeah, that's fine. You know, you don't care about it. Um.  Everything you said, plus it's, it's really a mindset shift. And again, you need to operate with the mindset that yes, we are going to succeed and we are going to scale. And you build from day one to get to that faster and sooner, but when you get there, you're ready. Yes, exactly. A hundred percent.

33:50 I love it.  I love it. And I had, I really appreciate this conversation and I think it's going to add a lot of value to my audience. And I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. So, so thank you so much for being a part of the show. And, and I really hope people will look out to you in terms of, uh, thought leadership. I know you've got a fun podcast. You've got lots of ways. You're messaging this stuff links below in, in the notes here. Do take some time to understand what he's got going on and think about your business. Think about your people and the head. Thank you for being here. 

34:19 Thank you, Todd. Thank you. This was amazing. Thanks for having me. And again, love the conversation.  And, uh, yeah. And anyone who needs  more information on how this stuff works and just wants to, you know, go through, uh, the journey that I take people on to your point, you know, follow the content, the podcast, reach out, happy to help folks and, uh, yeah, let's, let's help you grow. 

34:39 Love it. Love it. Thanks again.