One answer loses the client

Thank you so much for having me.

So You could actually say both that I planned it and circumstances push me there. I knew since high school I wanted to start my own business. I just wasn't sure what that business was going to be. In part because no matter what you're doing, when it's your own, it's got to be something that you're gonna get up every day and feel motivated to do. So you you never know what is gonna happen that day. You never necessarily know where your clients are gonna come from, but you've got to feel a lot of passion for what you're doing and show up every day. And keep going to get through, to have the resiliency to get through the challenges and also to get those wins and to keep fueling your excitement and your passion for it. And so I had tried out a lot of different ideas at one point in my career and hadn't quite landed something. And I I wound up at Nomad Financial because I realized it's gonna be pretty hard to start a business if I haven't actually worked for a startup before. So I I was hired there as the COO. I was overseeing. They are an accounting CFO advisory and tax firm for startups, but they themselves were a startup as well. And it was really an incredible experience to get to see what it was like to take a company from one to 10, 1 to 50, as opposed to just the zero to one. I think the zero to one piece is really critical for someone obviously starting a business and wanting to become a consultant for themselves, but it's also how do you take that beyond just yourself? That I got to see while I was there. And the kinds of clients that they had and the contacts that I developed actually wound up setting the stage for me to then start growth ops because I started to get people asking me, Hey, how do you do that for Nomad? And how would you solve this problem? And as I had those conversations, because I'm a natural problem solver and I really enjoy doing that, it started to turn into, I would like to pay. You to do these things and for me and help me solve these problems. And when I officially left Nomad, I started to get referrals from people in my network. So that, like I said, it was both I knew that I wanted to start my own business, I just didn't know when. And leaving Nomad and having been there created the circumstances for growth ops to become a reality.

Yeah, absolutely. So Growth Ops, if you need a really short version, it would I would say we do outsourced HR. But the value that our clients get from their partnership with us is understanding how to get business performance through people performance. That's a very different angle on HR. I see what we do as being business strategists with a mechanism of human capital performance. So a little more nuanced than just traditional HR.

So clients the one of the I think lowest hanging fruit that I consistently find with clients that are lacking a structure or functional HR team or person is always on the compliance side. That's the lowest hanging fruit there is. There's so much that it's very hard to know what all the requirements are. And once you know them, it's not that difficult to stay in line with them and maintain them. But one of the challenges for employers in the US these days is that every single US state has different compliance requirements. So while you may just want to hire somebody in a different state, there's a lot of things you have to set up in order to be able to do that and do it compliantly. And the laws in every state are so different that you can't just assume that what you're doing in one place is going to work everywhere else. So it's often just an easy area that we can come in and assess where the gap is and then put structure in place that closes that gap pretty quickly. But in terms of other areas, there's a fundamental concept that I've been working on the last several years that I call the clarity framework. And the framework is meant to help uncover where you have hidden misalignment within the team that is sabotaging performance. I did a presentation on this last year to a CEO group. And what's interesting is that the framework names five different domains where you might have misalignment. The domains are direction, structure, communication, feedback, and enablement. And what's so fascinating is that every company has a different domain where they're struggling the most. There isn't uniformity where every single company is challenged in the same domain. Everyone has different flavors and nuances to the challenges that they're experiencing for a variety of reasons. But the one thing that unites it is this concept of the fish rots from the head. If leadership is struggling in any any of those areas or has weakness in any of those areas, you automatically know that's likely the most important culprit of domain that has to be looked at and has to be worked on. So For example, if a leader or the owner, the founder is not great at giving people feedback, well, then you're gonna lack a lot of clarity across the organization about what people should and shouldn't be doing or what great looks like. I'm always very frustrated when I hear a manager or leader say, Well, I'll know it when I see it. But an employees don't come into a job hoping they can figure out through trial and error how to do a great job. They come in wanting clarity so they can succeed. And if you as a leader don't have that clarity, you're really not setting up your human capital for success and by extension, your business success because you're trying to get things done through people. So the clarity framework is a really great diagnostic tool, but You also just look to leaders and you see where their weaknesses are, and you often then see that flow down through the rest of the organization within those domains.

Hmm. Well, I the first place they lose credibility is when they overcomplicate things or they tell them they have to do something. The important thing about being a consultant is that you are presenting options. You should never present a single answer as the only one. you have to show your clients that there is a spectrum of approaches that they can take. You can advocate for one over the others, but being able to present options helps someone feel as though they have some control over the decision as opposed to being forced into any specific lane. And founders do not like being forced into lanes. They don't want boundaries. That's the reason why they're entrepreneurs, they like the spaciousness to challenge the status quo and do things differently. And so HR professionals need to not just HR consultants. But HR professionals in general would do well to think in terms of optionality. Now, I get that there are some compliance requirements that you have to do this, you have to check these boxes. But I don't always agree with that necessarily. What I tell my clients is, I'm here to tell you what's required. It's your job as my client to determine your appetite for risk. If you have a high appetite for it, don't follow these things. If you have a low appetite for it, let's do it. But again, that's optionality. It's know thyself. And a lot of times when it comes to some of the day-to-day or the compliance-related HR of things. Founders and business owners won't want to go in that direction until they actually experience the pain of not doing it. Whether it is being sued or having a very complex termination or some other failure that occurs from them not heeding that advice. That's one of the best ways they learn. But they sometimes have to get there on their own, and you're not going to convince them by beating them over the head about the idea. or making it seem as though there are no other options. that's that's how you lose credibility.

Yeah. Most of those conversations are human driven. I don't use an AI recorder. And then feed the notes in. A lot of the topics that we're discussing are very private, and the risk of that information being accessible on the internet, you know, I would be concerned about. So I've shied away from using those kind of tools. Much of it is it's it's leaning in and listening, it's showing up with curiosity. And it's interesting to use the word judgment because, yes, you have to have really good judgment about the direction you take conversations or the recommendations you. you make, as well as reading the other person to know how much you can push them on something. How uncomfortable do they want to get? What's their tolerance for that? Do you have the trust of that person to do those things? You've got to have really good judgment there. And I have found that your typical LLMs don't have that level of judgment at all. If I'm trying to process something that I'm working on with an LLM, it falls pretty flat in terms of the judgment side of things. I have to already have a very good sense of the judgment behind it, and then it does a great job of building any of the artifacts that I need to support the work. But it isn't great at that judgment piece. but I do use AI to automate, you know, repetitive tasks on the back end of my business and to process and deliver certain artifacts, you know, much more efficiently than I would on my own. but it's always gotta be seated with a lot of context and you know, judgment that I have.

One day.

Well, it really depends on the context within which we met. So if we were introduced, then I already have a sense of what pain point they're experiencing that the person recommended they talk to me about. If I've just met them through networking or other events, again, it's showing up with curiosity about their business. What what is their business about? What are their goals? What are they trying to accomplish? And where are they feeling the pain of people? You know, one of the biggest challenges with running a business is having employees. It it is aligning humans. It is working through all the messiness that is the human condition. And then taking a group of them together, you have a lot more complexity. So it's really understanding where they're feeling the most pain and being able to speak to what you know I, my team and I can do to alleviate that. But I really try to to hone in on what hurts before I tell them what I can do. In fact, I actually like to spend time giving them suggestions of things they can do as opposed to saying we will do that for you. Because I enjoy the problem solving aspect of it and the ideation around that so much. And I think that that's very infectious for, you know, my my clients. When they see the joy that it brings me to be helping them, they really feel like they're in good hands, you know, coming to work with us.

You know, I don't know if I would do much differently. I think things unfolded the way that they were meant to. And I'm I feel just incredibly grateful with the people that I've had the chance to work with, whether it's clients or team members or contractors, all the businesses that we've touched and worked with, like dozens and dozens of businesses over a decade that we've helped stand up some piece of their HR function or their people function. I don't, you know, I try to live my life not looking back with regret, but instead looking back to say, what did I learn? What, you know, where was this lesson? Because failing is one of the easiest places to learn great lessons. that's where, you know, where the series comes from is what are mistakes that I've learned from that I can teach others about? And I think in a sense, I've been somewhat lucky that I haven't had any mistakes that I've ever considered fatal. You know, I've I I think I have a very positive outlook on what those things have taught me, even if there was a lot of hardship in the moment that I experienced those things.

I think the biggest lesson for someone who's looking to Start or to grow a consulting practice is figure out the kind of problem that you are exceptional at solving and that you love you love doing. Sometimes there's a mismatch between what you're great at and what you want to do. And that mismatch will make it very challenging for you to stay in it. Find the thing where those two things overlap because every day you got to show up. You know, you're you're ultimately trading your time for money your expertise for money so while it's it can be easy to start the business it can be very hard to keep it going and when you find that overlap and you show up with authenticity to your prospective clients or your existing clients I think that's what builds really long-term relationships that help you know you develop a a truly sustainable business

Probably LinkedIn. Send me a message. Send me a customized message with your connection request. Don't just send a connection request. Give me a reason why we should connect and I will very likely accept.

Thank you.