Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Kirk Conole, Partner and Chief Operating Officer with DCI Solutions

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Kirk Conole serves as the Chief Operating Officer overseeing client relationships and business development activities for the company. Before joining DCI, Kirk was the principal of Independent Energy Services, providing utility rate and tariff analysis along with economic analysis for energy projects such as backup generation, co-generation, solar energy, and energy efficiency. Kirk’s deep expertise in the area of Energy Consumption and Strategic Use allows him to provide utility rate and tariff analysis and cost savings for DCI’s clients. In addition, Kirk oversees the marketing of the firm’s CORE and Tax Solutions to current and prospective clients. Kirk received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from San Diego State University.Learn more:https://www.dcisolutions.net/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-kirk-conole-partner-and-chief-operating-officer-with-dci-solutions

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with this Kirk Canole, who's a partner, chief operating officer with DCI Solutions. Kirk, welcome to the program. Mike, it's great to be here. year. So get us started with a little bit of your background and your story and what got you into

the industry and then we'll dive in and learn how you serve business owners and CEOs. Great. You know, I was doing utility work in the late 90s. I came across somebody who said, I showed this major movie theater chain how to save $400,000 a year on their energy bill. And all it took was a few strokes of the pen. And I thought, you mean like you bought the electricity? He goes, nope, we did a tariff analysis. And we changed the tariffs, and that's how they picked up all this money. Wow.

And that was the first time he even heard about this, right? I was like, wow, was my correct response. Well, then fast forward three years after that. And then I meet up with DCI solutions. And they say, yeah, Kirk, that's not just true of utilities. That's literally true of every type of overhead in a company. So then my world, which was opened by understanding how you utility tariffs work, they expanded that principle to every other type of service, every type of

product, every type of tax. And if you understood the route drivers, you could reverse engineer and reverse them and produce a dramatic savings for the client without changing vendors or wasting time. Now, that's a big mouthful right there without changing vendors. And of course, the most important asset we have is our time. I know that every time you hear things like, oh, look, switch to our thing and we're going to save you. It's like just the word switch just makes your stomach churn or, you know, oh, change your credit card.

Now you've got to go change you everywhere you pay. So I think that's such a huge proposition that you are able to come alongside these business owners and say, if we can find this opportunity, you don't need to do anything. It's which we're going to take care of this for you. Right. Exactly. So you want to have any solution that can avoid the five risks that all quote, unquote, solutions tend to involve, which is they usually end up saying it's a solution that risk the client's time,

his energy, his money, his freedom slash prerogative, and ultimately his reputation. So the goal is to devise solutions, which are significant in profit with minor amounts of effort, and zero amounts of those five risks that I just delineated. Yes. Well, that sounds pretty irresistible to at least get someone to listen to what you have to say. What else is it that when you're working with business owners and CEOs that makes them go, oh, now that's another light bulb moment. Right.

Usually you have to say, Mr. Client, you're the owner of business. I would like you to help me understand exactly how valuable your time is, or maybe I can help you. and help each other. I always hear people say, my time is valuable. So my only question is, yes, Mr. Business owner, but do you know exactly how valuable it is? I would like to make a suggestion. If your business earns you net, net take home pay of $1 million a year, and you put in just a measly 2,000 hours a year, that means you're taking, you are earning about $5,000 per hour spent, if I'm doing my math, excuse me, $500 per hour spent. Put another way, if you take home a million dollars a year,

you are every week taking home, oh, $20,000 to your bottom line, to your personal bottom line. So I would like to suggest this. Do not talk to Mike and do not talk to Kirk and do not talk to anybody who is unable to put on your desk your entire week's salary after you spend one hour of your focused attention interacting with them. So your week's salary, if it is $5,000 for that week or $10,000 or whatever the number is, if you can't get all that money back on your desk, clearly define, easy to measure,

easy to bank within one hour, then that person is wasting your time. Yes. You can apply that same benchmark, if you would, to be consistent, to everybody, both, internal and external to your company. So this means when they have a discussion about what color carpet they should have in the lobby, if you can't see the color of the carpet adding an extra your entire week's salary per the one hour of disgust time that you're there in the meeting, you should excuse yourself from the discussion.

Always push it down to someone whose weekly salary would be paid theoretically by that decision. And what you'll find is, Mr. Business Owner, about half of all the detritus in your calendar will disappear. That's really delineating what's the highest and best use of your time, isn't it? Yes, exactly. We want people to apply extremely high standards to us at DCI Solutions and then just be fair and consistent, apply them to everyone you interact with. Make it a habit.

Say, I'll talk with you. Where's my weak salary? Or you don't have to tell them what your week's salaries, but tell them I need to see $5,000. $10,000, $20,000, $50,000, whatever that weak amount is at the end of 60 minutes. So, Mr. Outside Person, Mr. Inside Person, can you do that for me? If you can, begin. You know, on your website, you say front and center right on the middle of the page, a company worth $50 million on Monday could be worth $55 million on Friday.

How does that work? Well, think about it. Most companies, if you were to draw a bell curve right now, Mike, I ask you people who are listening, draw a bell curve on a piece of paper somewhere and put one sigma on either side of the center line. So that's 70 some odd percent of all companies in the United States are in that center line. Now, there's some that are up to the left of it. And in that center line, we're going to put $10,000 to $40,000. That's the earnings per employee. Okay.

So the bulk of companies in the United States that are profitable are earning $10,000 to $40,000. times, whatever their full-time head count is. Some companies are earning less. Some companies are actually losing money per employee. So that's all companies that are to the far left of that. Then you've got very profitable companies that are earning much more than $40,000 per employee per year. There's maybe a 14% of all companies, 15% are in that category. So if we talk about the bulk of companies that are manufacturing, distribution, white collar, blue collar, no collar, for profit, not for profit, not making profit. They're typically seeing somewhere about 10,000, $10,000, $40,000 per employee per year. To get a 10% jump in profits against that $10,000 and $40,000,

that means necessarily, depending on the company, an extra $1,000 to $4,000 per employee of additional bottom line gain so that if they're at $20,000, which is where most companies are, adding $2,000 per employee per year to a company earning $20,000 is that 10% jumping cashful profit. and ultimately their equity values a function of their earnings. So if we've got a company that's got a decent valuation, let's say it's several hundred employees and it's got a valuation of 50 million, well, if we can add an extra $2,000 times, let's say, the 350 people in that company,

that's $700,000 per year might be an extra $7,000, $6 million, $8 million of incremental gain to their income. equity value. So if it's owned by one or so people, that's where that 10% jump means that a company towards 50 million on Mondays worth 55 on Friday. They literally were saying for the effort it takes to get there. For the owner, that would be a day. One day's work equals 10 full hours equals 600 combined minutes of his personal, her personal attention. Everything else has got to be delegated to trustworthy staff and, of course, the DCI solutions. So he gets to walk in the room and say, Hi, everybody, where's my money?

Which, by the way, I think is the best way to start a meeting. Hi, everyone, where's my money? Right. You get right to the point. You have a 20-minute huddle, like in football. Those aren't called meetings, right? So 20 minutes. Where's my money?

How soon will the rest of it be here? Who needs to do what? Meeting dismissed. Or break, if you like. So in that regard, with a series of 20-minute huddles before the client's halfway to a 600-minute commitment, money is already hitting the bottom line. And before he shows up at a 600 minute, he's got a report to show his board, his investors, or whomever he might report to or co-own the company with. Here's the cumulative amount of money that we've added to our market value

as a result of bringing in some experts who generated large amounts of gain without changing suppliers or wasting time. Yep, back to that without changing suppliers or wasting time. that's a spectacular mantra. You know, I know that you guys work on, you know, money savings, cost savings, healthcare savings, tax credits, all of these things. And you're not the only one to do it. So what do you guys do different that other advisory firms fall short of? Great.

So one of the things I point out is everybody already says, oh, but Kirk, we're in great shape. I feel like we're doing okay. I feel like we got it all taken care of, meaning we're meeting budget. So if you ask the typical company and go to the department heads, what's important to you? They'll say meeting or beating budget, but mainly just meeting budget and then getting on with all the other activities I have to do. So for the owner, the goal is to maximize ownership profits. For the department heads, the goal is meeting budget.

This is a first and foremost thing for owners to understand is that nobody else is on the owner's operating system. You can delegate to people. You can have trustworthy lieutenants, but nobody is on the same exact operating system you are in. So I talk with the owners and I say, you can find no, there's no limit to the number of companies that want to audit your phone bill, audit your freight bill. They'll say, hey, can we do cost segregation? Can we do the R&D tax credit? You can't swing a dead cat without hitting somebody who wants to talk about employee retention credits, right? They're everywhere.

But those are one-time hits. It's not a stream. It's not a flow of money that actually can be booked to your EBITA on an ongoing basis. So the question is not, can you cut my phone bill in half? The question is, can you give me a 10% jump in my earnings? The question is not, can you find savings on my freight bill? Big deal. Just about anybody can find some money?

The question is, can you give me a 1% jump in my equity value for every one hour I give you? And can we hold it to that ratio? So by the time I've given 10 full hours, of attention, I've got my 10% jump in equity value. The number of specialty firms that will assure the client of that at the outset is somewhere between zero and none, with the exception of the one you're talking to. You know, that's a mindset shift because I think that a lot of times people are just thinking about, let's just do this low-hanging fruit, you know, to get the cream off the top

and take the easy win. And you're coming in going, look, let's make sure that we are operating off of a whole different playbook. And, you know, in other words, meeting budget is almost like playing not to lose. You know, let's play to win. Exactly. And so what we have to keep in mind with the ownership again is the way you position this idea with your staff will determine whether or not you have friction and friction loss, whether you have a smooth success and a cash. and a cash flow. So I say, Mr. Klein, keep in mind that unless you take this money seriously, because it is your money,

if you say, well, I'm just going to have the CFO take the meeting. I have the CFO decide. I'll say, look, if you came to him and said, look, I'm not sure whether or not I want to have a 10% increase to my net worth. I'll let you decide. If you don't want enough to take it, why would he? Yep. Number two, the average staffer is going to think at some point, may not be the CFO, might not be a controller, might not be the CHA, but it's going to be somebody who has a bad enough.

an influence on this outcome. They're going to say, great, I get all the work and the boss gets all the money. What's wrong with this picture? Or worse yet, he'll say, great, boss will get all the money, and I won't just get all the work. I'll get all the blame because the boss is sure to turn his finger and pointed in my direction and say, hey, how come this $5 million increase in equity value, how come I had to have the outsiders do it when my insiders, who've been here for years, couldn't do it? What's wrong with those guys? Now, the owner may not think that. But just because the owner doesn't think that doesn't mean the staff won't suspect he might possibly think that. We have to look at it now.

The employee, the staff leadership, the seed suite level, and ask, how do we remove all the fear? You know, perfect love, cast out all fear. So if you really want to love your employees, have them fear the right things and not have them fear needlessly, uselessly, stupidly, the money that would benefit the owner, the intellectual property, the IP that DCI brings, the, insights that make that money possible should not be something that their staff should be forced to dread or wonder about. So when the owner is asking, why isn't my staff doing more, he needs to look in the mirror to find his first answer. I love it. So I also know that you work with other financial professionals and advisors to help them get a leg up over their competition and get new clients. How does that work? If you could draw two circles under the same imaginary

piece of paper, I had you pull out to do the bell graph, flip a side to the other side, draw two circles or two wheels. The first wheel will call family business. Now imagine that wheel is a water wheel so it turns and it cascades water into the second wheel, which will call family office. Most of the people who are financial advisors, CPAs, so forth, they're often working. They could be estate planning attorneys, whatever it might be. They are in the family office. If the family office is worth 50 million, it's because typically all that money is coming from the family business worth the same amount, perhaps more. What we're suggesting is this. While you focus in on protecting the client's money after it comes home from the business, you need an

ally to protect your client's money before it leaves the business and comes home to the client, because that business is paying business taxes unnecessarily, either property tax unnecessarily, use tax, sales tax, excise tax, property tax, payroll tax. There are innumerable ways that tax in the company can be reduced. And that overhead in the company can be reduced. Again, without changing suppliers, cutting corners, capaxings, taking risk or wasting time. And then that money, that surplus, can go flowing from that water wheel on the left, which is the family office into the family office.

That liquidity, that overflow is then going to give the financial advisor an extra problem. How do I help my client manage this extra money? This extra six, seven figures of income each year. How do I create and produce even more financial instruments, whether it be life insurance policies or any number of other solutions that that advisor has? So the advisor who can not only think in his lane, but who can see the whole field. There was a famous German soccer player, played for the New York Cosmos. He ended up becoming the captain of the German team, Franz Beckenbauer.

So that name is recognized by many people who grew up in the 60s, and so forth, is one of the best players in league. But he said when he was at the height of his career, that he always knew at any given time where every other player, both on his team and on the opposing team, he knew where every other player was. at any given moment. You talk about a wide field. That's not even visual. That's just sensing.

It's like three-dimensional radar, picking up on every movement, every player, and then being able to command the game from whatever position he was in. That's what your financial advisors ideally should aspire to is a Beck and Bauer-like command of the field.

You can't be everywhere, but you need to know where everyone should be and where the ball is going and how to position yourself so that your team, your client, wins. I love it. Well, Kirk, it's been such a pleasure learning about what you do and how you serve your clients in the industry. If someone is interested in learning more, what's the best way that they can do that and reach out and connect with you?

Well, a couple things. They can always look up DCI Solutions, Delta Charlie India, Solutions, Plural.net, NET. You'll know you're at DCIS Solutions.net when you see the words, increased cash flow at the landing page. You can scroll down and look at examples of DCI's work. There is a dashboard with nine dials, which represent the nine dials that all. All companies have to have just to be in business. And every time you hover over one of those dials, you see an example of DCS work pop out. If you have additional questions, you can always look at, one, the clients that we've done this for, and you can also look at the questions that at the very bottom of the page. But call us at some point, if you're interested in actually taking a presentation,

and I can share what works for restaurant chains, what works for hotel groups, what works for manufacturing, what works for white collar professional service firms, blue collar, white collar, no collar, doesn't make a difference. my number is 888-395-0809. You can also contact us at info at DCIS Solutions.net, but the contact information is also there at the very bottom of the website DCIS Solutions.net. I look forward to hearing from anyone who is open to a new way of thinking about proven ideas that have already established themselves very well for the handful of business owners

who've had the curiosity to listen and take advantage. I love it. Well, Kirk, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Mike, I've had a pleasure to interact with you and you're a great interviewer. Thanks so much. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders.

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