8 out of 10 barriers are in your head

Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be on as well.

Yeah. it's a good question. I feel like to to maybe better answer the question, I almost have to start at the beginning a little bit. so hopefully this won't be too too verbose an answer. But I I started my career. I'm a I'm a organizational psychologist. but I would say I very kind of quickly fell out of that population or sort of pool of professionals in the sense that I very quickly went to go work for a turnaround firm. And in the turnaround world, oftentimes your clients, you know, all they really care about is did the did you save us a hundred million bucks or not? I found that the work was very financially focused, which was good. I care deeply about results, but I also care deeply about people. And I had this, I guess, career epiphany moment. Where we were helping to lead a forty billion dollar MA deal for a big pharma company. They had a new CEO at the time and he had asked our team to help deliver three billion dollars in organic cost and revenue and enhancement. So the whole idea of an MA deal, one plus one should equal three or four. And he said, You've got two years to hit that. And so fast forward to the end of that engagement, we exceeded his financial target ahead of schedule. And he was ecstatic with our work, our team was ecstatic with the work. And I just felt like something was missing. And for me, what was missing was you know, they had 80,000 employees worldwide. I bet you there weren't 300 people at that company who even knew the name of our firm. And so when I think about it from an organizational psychology perspective, when I think about transforming companies, yes, I want to transform their PL. That was about the dollars and cents. But for me, transformation is about like how do you fundamentally change the DNA of a company? So it's not only about PL, but it's also about people and it's about culture. How do we create many more leaders at every level in an organization? And how do you intentionally shape a culture that's meant to support or sustain some fundamentally new level of performance? And so that I would say, period precipitated a really deep. kind of learning period for me, but I'd also say unlearning period. And when I was in graduate school, I read a lot of a fellow named Dr. John Cotter's work. He's a famous Harvard Business School professor, at that time, you know, youngest tenured professor. And John had been writing and researching what do the best leaders and organizations do time and time again to almost create this unfair competitive advantage. And it was really the heart of his work for decades. And I had this hypothesis: like, what if I could marry my turnaround experience with a more programmatic and deeper focus on leadership and culture? I just thought the combination would be lethal. And so I went to go work for Dr. John Cotter for about 10 years, which is where I overlapped and met my co-founder, Jimmy Leppard. And so coming into the present, you know, we launched Impactful Advisors almost five years ago. And I would say our mission was to do something that we hadn't seen done before, which was to create a consulting firm that held an equal regard, the ability to drive an eight, nine, sometimes 10-figure improvement in PL with the same rigor and focus that we would place on building better leaders and on intentionally shaping culture. And so we launched January first, 2020. So our our five year anniversary is coming up. We were we made the Inc. five thousand list of fastest growing private companies here in the US, which came out about a a month or two ago. So it's been a really exciting ride. I would say probably my only regret is we didn't do it sooner.

Yeah. Well, we're a strategy and strategy execution firm, and I always underscore the word execution as opposed to strategy, because sometimes when we think strategy development, we think, at least here in the states, we think McKinsey, BCG, and Bain. the heart of our work is really if we're doing strategy development, it has to be execution ready. and so we're all about kind of rolling up our sleeves and actually realizing performance gains. So to date, we've got ten billion dollars in CFO validated cost and revenue enhancement. So that measurement piece and partnering with our CFOs is really, really important. I would say the clients that we serve, we actually grew up industry agnostic. so for some of your listeners that may be Counterintuitive because a a lot of consultants will specialize very, very deeply in an industry. But even though we've been industry agnostic, you know, most of our whole careers, the majority of our team, it's not to say that you don't develop some specializations over the years. And being industry agnostic, I'd say is a double-edged sword as a founder, especially when it comes to marketing. where you can't be all things to all industries and to all you know ideal client profiles. And so we placed a very intentional bet when we opened the doors on impactful, spelled with an E for empathy, so misspelled on purpose, although when it comes to spell check, it can be a hassle. but it's mostly large organizations are are those two areas of I'd say intentional marketing strategies been around energy. We should be define as oil and gas, public utilities, mining, so extractive businesses. And then also we're we're very deep on the healthcare side too. Particularly the provider side, large hospital systems, non-for-profit, faith-based hospital systems here in the US. but ironically, I've probably done more work in pharmaceuticals and financial services. So we, I would say from a marketing perspective, we intentionally focus on those two verticals, and then we remain more kind of opportunistic around other opportunities, be it high-tech or semiconductors or you name it. Our our buyer is typically the C suite of one of those organizations. I'd say our smallest organizations are about two hundred and fifty million dollars in annual revenue. our largest is a Fortune 15 company, you know, making almost a billion dollars every day. So there's a pretty wide spectrum in there. And so if we're not directly supporting the C-suite, we're likely supporting the business unit head for someone who might have a multi-billion dollar P<unk>L, but they're in a very, very large enterprise.

What's the sauce? Yeah. Yeah, what's the secret sauce? I think there's there's a couple of really important ingredients and I'll I'll give a a plug. We Jimmy and I, my co-founder, we have a our first book coming out in February of twenty twenty-seven, published by McMillan. And it's called Thaw, Unfreezing Middle Management to Unlock Strategy, innovation, and growth. And So when I think of ingredients, I'd say one central ingredient is we believe so much more is possible. And when we go in an organization and save help them save $150 million, you know, part of the secret sauce is actually our clients' people. It's this belief that there's this incredible resource that is in a stray jacket. It's this human potential that part of our jobs is to unleash it or in our case, unfreeze what's oftentimes stuck people. And so for example, we just finished up some work last week with a smaller mining company. They launched a handful of enterprise teams, which we designed and coached them through through execution. They delivered $25 million in impact. That's not $25 million of new ideas that our team brought to that organization. Those were $25 million of ideas that that company had been sitting on for sometimes decades. And part of what we do is almost create this crucible of accountability of like how do you marry up senior leader priorities? with folks who are stuck in the middle or even at the bottom to be able to actually operate a company at like its full potential. one of my favorite, I guess maybe analogies to this is we have a colleague, Chris, who's amateur car racer. And he he'd gone to a Porsche racing track for a couple days. And on day one, he's sitting in the driver's seat and he's got a coach sitting in shotgun. And he says, All right, you know, take it for a couple laps, let me see what you got. And Chris does. And he feels like he's he is absolutely crushing these couple of laps, impressing this coach beyond belief because he's been in this, you know, space for a long, long time. And he says, All right, let's pull over and let's switch seats. So They pull over, he switched seats. Chris is now riding in the passenger seat, and the professional race car driver is is driving that same 9-11, the same equipment that he'd just taken around the lap, taken around the track a couple times. And he said, the first thing he was struck by was just how cool, calm, and collected he was. And, you know, he repositioned his mirrors and then off they went. And he said, in those few laps around the track. That driver did some things with that car that redefined a dimension of performance he didn't know existed. So Chris thought he'd maxed out the car, and yet this driver did things with the car that he didn't think was possible. And I actually think that's perhaps the best analogy for our work with companies where, you know, we haven't gone into a company where we couldn't take their thorniest issue and drive at least a 25% improvement. whether that's in profitability or EBITDA or throughput or production or quality. And the reality is like that that latent potential has always been sitting there. But part of the secret sauce is like, how do you show up as leaders? What we say to define the what and the why, but never the how. And then invite your people in, the people who are closest to the work, to bring their best ideas and You know, of those $10 billion of CFO validated results we've driven, you know, buried in those statistics are thousands of examples of people who I think of as like they're often people who are anonymous to their organizations. And for every $10 million idea that somebody has put on the wins board, our favorite thing is to go ask that person, hey Mick, how long have you been sitting on that $10 million idea? And rarely do I hear an answer less than 10 years. So the next, you know, appropriate question would be, Mick, how come you've been sitting on that idea for 10 years? And you hear things like, I haven't, I've shared this with management, or I think of it as like an idea grenade. I lobbed my grenade over the wall, but no one ever did anything with it or followed through. So a big part of our secret sauce is like imagine if you can actually create an organization. Where everyone feels heard and seen. And you can marry up that innovation with whatever strategic priorities are most important to the company. So it's not about like innovation anarchy, like we want everyone's best ideas about anything. Like it has to be on strategy. But if you do, if you can kind of marry up the art and science with like how can we inspire and engage people in a way that they've never experienced before at work and then actually back it up as leaders because they see us busting barriers, they see us making expedited decisions, they see us modeling urgency, they see us allocating the resources to this thing that's never been allocated against. Really, really special things can happen.

gosh, the it's such a long list. I mean, I would say institutional barriers exist at every organization you walk into. And oftentimes they initially manifest themselves as policies and procedures. And so some policies and procedures or systems or ways of working or communicated were once upon a time erected in a way that was actually serving the business, but eventually. Ten years later, we're no longer thinking about the way in which that policy may now be either helping or hindering our performance. And I would say eight out of ten perceived barriers to driving increased growth, profitability, innovation, you name it, it's in our heads. You know, a policies and procedures, we made those. Those are fictitious. So if they're no longer serving us, we need to change them. And so what's really interesting, I think, about our work is we also do a lot of leadership development with executive leaders. And as leaders are moving up the ranks in companies that often have, you know, 50, 100,000 employees, is for the first 20 years of their career, they've been told no. And now they're in this. you know, exciting special leadership development program, which they've been nominated for because they've been deemed a high potential. And the initial, I would say, reaction and frustration that all of them have is they all start like pointing up at the the people at the top and they start bitching about the ways in which they're getting in the way of driving better performance, faster execution, whatever the issue is. And at some point they almost have this realization that We are now them and we need to actually start to operate as leaders. And what that means, it's all up here. It's a mindset. And so sometimes the institutional barriers are real. There's compliance or regulatory issues, or we work in energy and healthcare. So lots of safety issues. So obviously when we're driving performance, it's it's operations first safety always. So we're not suggesting our clients are cutting corners and finding ways to do things differently that are not compliant or not safe. But almost always the things that they hope to do or wish to do or imagine they could do, but don't, are things that are in their heads. They think that there's some sort of law or policy or procedure that's not enabling them to do something, but no one's ever stopped long enough to actually question is that thing actually serving us anymore?

Yeah. Maybe I'll answer I'll answer as both a parent and a business owner. As a parent of a teenager and a young child, I I'm actually a little scared about what AI is gonna do to the workforce because it it is so powerful. And what I try to remind myself of is here in the States, in 1900, 98% of the US population that was working. Was in some way connected to agriculture. So 98% of our population was focused just on feeding the country. Fast forward to 2026, about 2% of the US population is focused on feeding the country. And so, you know, think about how much innovation that that has brought on that's allowed people to focus on other things. that was probably the most relevant and recent example of like workforce transformation here. but now I feel like the the magnitude of this change I think is so much bigger than than I think any of us can fully absorb. And we're only just starting to talk about, you know, regulation here in the US. and I know that the the maturity of those conversations are different across the world. but then jumping into a business owner hat. You know, it it really does have the ability to disrupt organizations in a very significant way. What I'm finding is I think it feels more powerful to be fast and small than big and slow. And you need not look beyond the headlines to see the ten thousands, the tens of thousands of layoffs at the big consulting firms across the world. I think whether you have it or not, that highly leveraged old school pyramid, like the your days are numbered because consulting firms simply don't need that kind of leverage. The reality is you can leverage AI. To do a lot of things that you had those early associates doing. I think humans still have to be in the loop. And so that insight, that judgment, that intuition that's only developed through pattern recognition and years and years of just doing the work, that human in the loop is gonna be essential. And I think the the importance of that will only grow over time. But I think if you're a consulting firm that's still billing, you know, by the hour with a traditional rate card. I think if you're a consulting firm that's not distinguishing between whether I'm I'm delivering activities versus actual business outcomes. I think if you're an organization or a consulting firm that's not beginning to contract outcomes versus just time and materials, I think your days are numbered. And I don't know how long it's gonna take to fully disrupt the professional services world. But we see it happening in accounting, we see it happening in law firms, we certainly see it happening in consulting and strategy consulting. so in some ways, although we weren't really thinking about AI as a firm four and a half years ago, there were a lot of AI native sorts of characteristics that we had already, I would say, imbued in our business model and how we operate the company. so that makes me feel good, but Yeah, it's hard to not feel like in any given day you're not falling behind.

That's right. Well, I and I just j I'm sorry to cut you off. The one thing that I heard that I think is just a a brilliant kind of parallel for where AI is is like if we think about it as the smartest intern you've ever hired, and you have the ability to give them a PhD in any topic under the sun, but they don't have one day of working experience. So like you know, you have to you know, you have to prompt it in a way that builds context that it just doesn't have. And for a business that, you know, subscribes to the importance of empathy, you know, you're you you can't I I guess you can find synthetic ways to engineer empathy through AI, but the reality is like this is a people-driven business. And from a strategy perspective, you know, we always talk about increased engagement leads to increased commitment. So if you're outsourcing your strategy to a consulting firm already. you've already reduced the probability that it's gonna be sticky because you've just hired a bunch of really smart people who supposedly know their business your business better than you do to actually build a strategy which we believe that's fundamentally flawed. Like someone who tells you they know your business better than you do, I think is selling snake oil. And the empathy piece is like if the strategy is both execution ready, which means it's pragmatic, it's practical, like my people can actually implemented it takes into consideration all the institutional barriers, culture, egos, politics, like all the things that'll either help or hinder or or or be the difference between a strategy either working or not. Like you can't you can't farm that out to AI.

So sorry, I cut you off. I think you were about to pivot to a different question.

Yeah. I mean, of course, you know, continuing to grow at a nice clip I think is important. I think we're in a really stable place where, you know, our MPS scores are very high. Our just the our overall sort of client satisfaction, the kind of results that we're driving, has has just been has been proven out to be very scalable. Th I think the way I've been thinking about AI more and more is is there work that we can displace internally that frees up our people to spend even more human time? connecting with our clients and really making the difference because I think that's so much of where our secret sauce is. So can we display some things that may take up a bunch of time? You know, we do this work internally with clients where they'll often say, like help us. Every company might think they're good at prioritizing. They're terrible at deprioritizing. They're terrible at taking stuff off their plates. And there tends to be some very predictable places where time gets wasted. It's reports, its approvals, meetings, metrics, policies, procedures, initiatives that aren't driving the right results. And so part of the lens I've been thinking about AI is like how can we start to make that stuff more seamless, easier, more efficient, so our people are spending more time with our clients, which is where the results really start to, I think, be realized. So I'm I'm trying to think of it, how can we get more human capacity out of displacing some of the stuff that is maybe not mission critical or high priority for our people to be working on?

Totally. Totally. And AI, I think, has just been addition, addition, addition, addition for most of our clients right now. Where they're not pausing long enough to ask the question, like what's the return on investment? So you may have an AI strategy, you may have people starting to experiment with different tools. But if you're not able to articulate how has this saved us time, how has this saved us money? How is this allowing us to go faster from the business's perspective? Like if I'm a pharma company and I've just cut off six months from my clinical trial recruitment of phase two B, it's like that's material. allows me to take a you know take a product to market quicker. I find that's that last step is missing in most of all of our clients. It's like let's just do it and try it and figure it out, but no one's really pausing long enough to say like what's the ROI in AI? I think we'll get there, but I think most are not there yet.

Thank you so much. I didn't know you were gonna ask that question. So I actually don't know the answer to where they can find the book. I I think the pre-orders are gonna be available soon. so it's Thaw, Unfreeze Middle Management to Unlock Strategy, Innovation, and Growth. I don't think it's on Amazon yet, but I know that our publisher is kind of starting to move in place a marketing strategy in the next couple of weeks here. And in terms of impactful, we're at impactful advisors dot com. yeah, I hope I hope this was helpful. I hope there were maybe some unique insights, nuggets that folks can apply to their own firm. So really appreciate the invite, Mick, and had a lot of fun hanging out with you this afternoon.