The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show 197 Les Cowie, Author, Consultant & Coach

Episode Date: May 2, 2018

Les Cowie, Author, Consultant & Coach [powerpress_playlist]

Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, coming here with another podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. You guys are the best audience in the world, especially those of you who watch this to the end. Be sure to refer us to your friends, neighbors, dogs, cats, mistresses, pool boys. Get them all listening to Chris Voss Show. We certainly appreciate you guys doing that. Tell them to go to iTunes, Google Play, youtube.com ford's chris foster subscribe there plus at youtube you can now

see all the cool videos of rocky raccoon our new husky puppy so if you love puppies and who doesn't go take and subscribe to the youtube channel so you can see that as well uh also if you get a chance please review the show we certainly appreciate that and it helps us get more distribution. I've got a most excellent guest as we always do here on the Chris Voss Show to compliment our most excellent audience, Les Cowie. And Les has enjoyed a distinguished career working with venture capital groups and corporations in the USA over the last 27 years. He's been involved in the acquisition and development of medium to large businesses, including manufacturing, commercial, and service enterprises.

In many cases, he was involved in the successful sale of those businesses or helped in their public offering on one of the U.S. stock exchanges. Les identified the profit pillar that applies to every organization, business, or government. Les has also provided consultancy in a variety of organizations, including food processing, textiles, airports, stadiums, and healthcare facilities, automotive 3D design and modeling, integration of component design through the Tier 1, tier two, and tier three supply chains, and integrated manufacturing and business software, chemical processing, refining, vacation resort property development, and hospitality. Welcome to the show, Les. How are you doing, buddy?

Hey, doing great. It's nice to be with you. Thanks for the invitation. Pleasure to be with you, too. Jesus, is there anything you haven't done? Well, I've been very lucky since we immigrated here from South Africa just over 27 years ago. Oh, wow. America's been just so awesome to us. Our kids have done well. They don't have the funny southern accent that I have.

Yeah, you still have your South African accent, huh? Yeah. But, oh, gosh, you know, all my kids had a bite at the American dream. Elder's son is a movie producer these days. Wow. At 24, his first movie was The Blair Witch Project. Oh, your son did The Blair Witch Project? Yep, with four partners, ex-UCF students. America is still the land of opportunity, which, oh gosh, it's why I just so believe in the entrepreneurial spirit in this country and the way people just develop businesses and have a capitalist mindset and make money.

Just like you do. I remember the Blair Witch Project. That movie, the way the camera was swirling around, it made me want to puke. I had to close my eyes for about five minutes because the way the camera was swirling around and stuff. I forget what get I forget what's called a stuff video games do that to me as well they would make me they give me motion sickness yeah so yeah but that was a hell of a movie I remember when it went really big at Sundance and everything

else so let's talk about you you're an author accomplished author you've got I believe three books is that correct that correct? That's correct, yes. Cool. Give us some of the plugs, websites, people can look up your books and some of your consulting websites or whatever you want to take a plug so people can look those up as we do the show. The quickest, quickest way is to go to lescoweyconsulting.com, and that's where they can find out about this book called getting

more with less I didn't intend that to be a pun but a lot of people take it that way but it's really about when CEOs get squeezed and the board start getting tough you know a lot of companies just go to look to cut staff but there many other ways where you can actually get more money out before you cut staff. I think I'm going to buy that book for my next wife so that she can have a handbook for dealing with me,

getting more with less. The other two are New Job, Fast Start. I'm getting that one for my future wife, too. I'm not sure what that means. Seven Steps to be Seen, Mastering Your New Job Quickly, or Your New Marriage Quickly for You. Well, once you're married, I think the jobs go out the window, but that's what I've heard.

So you've got those two books you published, and you're working on a new one this is the in-company mentor version that helps corporations coach new job entrants you know um it's just amazing to me even the large corporations in this country and worldwide it's not only the usa but they do such a great job of the sign-on process and you know then they do the sexual harassment thing and they do the company policy and they you know the the benefits thing sometimes even on on you know sophisticated videos but still 80 of the companies after that walk the new job entrant across to their workstation, introduce them to whomever may be there at the time, and

then dump them. Yep. They leave them to learn the job by trial and error. And so I just discovered that the way for HR people, because you're training people can't do every job and all the job content. But if you have a policy where you expect job entrants to be proactive, give them the things to do and the questions to ask, I provide the seven X-ray views of a job that allows them to get that information real fast and be successful.

Nice. And you'll probably see a little more about that on www.lescowie.com. Cool. So they can take a look that up. And then I know that there was the pillars of success I was looking at here. Yeah. And it looks pretty cool, the different way you designed it and everything else. Oh, you're talking about the Prophet Pillar?

Yes. I hear your gorgeous dog. I saw that video on the dog, and you are just so lucky to have that husky but i think what you're referring to is is this and that's that's the part yeah you know um i was really very fortunate when i came into this country uh ibm helped place me with one of their top business partners and as it happened, a venture capital firm had just bought that company. We built it up and we were able to successfully sell it, and then I just, over the years,

have moved from one venture capital company to another, just repeating that formula so I was lucky as you listed I was lucky to be exposed to a lot of American organizations and then discovered that financially there's one commonality consistent with all of the organization's uh-huh and that's how the Profit Pillar was designed because all organizations start at the top with resource management, which is really their sources of funds and how you account for the money. And then the next layer is information and people and just the criticality of how that is structured and put together and then the next layer is customer management and the way you go about customer acquisition customer satisfaction and customer retention then the next layer of course is operations and of course as you know that's different from your kind of business. It's different in manufacturing. It's different in service.

It's different in hospitality or healthcare. The operations is what's unique about an organization. And then finally, it's the logistics because all organizations have to purchase things. They have to have supplies and components, and they have to deliver. They have to have transportation. But each one of those layers attracts cost and of course cost affects the bottom line and when you can when you can creatively look at the business and look at each of the components in each of those layers you can find ways to squeeze out more than you thought and so I had fun

just putting that down in the book and and encouraging CEOs to get their c-level execs together in creative meetings to take a deep dive and drill down in where to get more with less that's something the real key these now these days. You've always got to find new profit centers. You've got to find more profit among the revenue streams you currently have. And of course, there's a lot of waste when it comes to processes and stuff. And so being able to analyze those and complement them so that you can get more and more out

of them. I've always said in business, there's always a better way to do anything. So whatever the job is, whatever the task is, whatever you're trying to accomplish, there's always a better way. And then once you find that better way, there's always a better way. There's just an exponential better way after that. Oh, because you nailed it.

Thank you for that. Oh, because you nailed it. Thank you for that. You know, being involved with a venture capital company, obviously what we did was we found companies with a great technology or a great approach, but they were struggling. And so they needed cash and funds. That's how we got in and took a major stake. But in every case, we found that the primary issue was that the chief executive and his C-level execs were comfortable with the status quo. And they never actually took the time to drill down and see if there is in fact a safe way to turn the business

inside out, upside down. And then when we came in, we had lots of fun having these, in many cases, off-site creative meetings. And it's just amazing the talent people have in this country for coming up with innovative solutions. You know, why not do it this way? Why not do it that way? It's part of our education system here where kids are just, you know, encouraged to come up with their own ideas and be their own people.

And that is something in American business that is not typical worldwide. Really? It's interesting to me, you know, you can have employees in american business that is not typical worldwide it's interesting to me you know i you can you can have employees and you can treat them as just robots doing their job every day but you you can really a lot of genius of the Michigan top in their creative creativity or if you welcome their creativity I used to always study books uh... I think there was a book years ago called Fifth Discipline, How to Build a Learning Organization. And so I was interested in how to build a learning organization. One of my mantras that I had around the office that we always went by was the only stupid question is the unasked question. And I found out very much the hard way as an entrepreneur that the one employee who

didn't know either the aspects of his job or didn't know everything he was supposed to know was usually the one that would end up costing me a small fortune when he'd screw up and I'd find out that he didn't know what he should know. And so, and usually there, it was because he was too afraid to ask a question and go, you know, I don't really understand how this works exactly. And so by having a mechanism or having an environment in our office where it was okay to ask questions, no one looked at you and said, what, are you stupid? Because those sort of environments people won't speak up in.

And then, you know, and then something really gets broken. And so having an environment where people can speak up, they can offer ideas, having a learning environment where people will, you know, they'll be like, hey, what if we do it this way? That can be really important. Yeah. Well, I mean, I love getting in these creative meetings. As you say, the way people come up with ideas

is just remarkable. Our partner was a lady named Gert Garman, who was part of the Disney training sessions for Imagineers and getting engineers to be creative. That's quite a challenge. And she's got her own consultancy now. And if you've got a good facilitator for these creative meetings, they can be so much, so much fun.

And my son Robin does that kind of thing as well. He right now is making movies for EA Sports, and one of his projects is the Madden football series. Oh, wow. He's in fact building in, and how's this for creativity, instead of just playing the game, you can actually play the career. There's movies inside the game called Long Shot and they're about some of the professional characters

and their children. And the movie arrives at a decision point stops and you have to make a decision out of one of four options you might pick the wrong decision and then you discover why it's the wrong decision and have to come around and learn what the right decision is under circumstances like that, you know. And so here you've got games that in the digital world that are so creative, even becoming more creative. I mean, I just love the spirit of people in the USA. And if you just put them in a room and you let them loose and encourage them to be creative.

Stunning what they come up with. Yeah, it definitely is. I noticed you said off-site creative series. One thing I learned was you get stuck so much in your own, I mean, when you're in your own business or companies, you're surrounded by everything and stuck with so many distractions and of course it's really hard to see from the outside in when it comes down to it oh yeah and then you sit in the meeting with your smartphone and ping-ping-ping

the emails no one of the best ways I used to get creative and be able to think outside the box is I'd take small – I never took big vacations. I'd take little vacations, and I'd steal away for a weekend or something. Yep. And usually I'd have one of my girlfriends drive or something, and I'd sit there in the car with a yellow pad, and and i take it throughout pretty much the whole vacation and i just i just take a look at the yellow pad and i just think about my business and from the outside and what improvements can be made and the question i always ask myself and i learned this a long time ago is why do we do it this way why do i do it this way and a lot of times i knew why i did it that way because i was the one who built it but i would question it its validity and going um why do we do it this

way and by doing that and challenging not only ideas but my ideas made it so i was very open to new things and and creative new things and so i would take things apart and sometimes I'd disassemble why I built something the way it was and go, okay, well that still works and that's fine. There's, you know, that's,

that's going to fine. But then sometimes I would look at something else and go, yeah, why do I do it? That doesn't, you know, here, here are some ways we can tweak this.

And so getting out of the office, taking a little day trips and sitting down, being in the car and, you know, here are some ways we can tweak this. And so getting out of the office, taking a little day trips, and sitting down, being in the car, you know, this was the days before the heavy cell phones, but just taking that tablet and sitting and writing down just ideas. And sometimes I just throw down a bunch of crap and just go, let's try this, let's try that, let's try this. And that really opened up a lot of creative juices for me.

Is that how you got into what you're doing today? I probably should do more of that today, but I kind of these days know everything I'm supposed to be doing. It's just a matter of whether I'm doing it or not. Well, you know, some of it is good luck as well. That's true. Not all creativity. You've got a little time for what most people think is a funny story.

Sure. And it's kind of an anecdote because before we came into this country, my wife and I were actually lounging at a resort in south africa and um we were sitting next to we were actually on a couch next to a guy named jody schecter who in 1990s 1979 or 1997 was the formula One world champion racing driver. And he said, what? You're immigrating to the USA? You are going to be sued in the first six months, I'll tell you that. Well, my wife and I choked on our gin and tonics,

and Jody should know because he had in fact invested some of his racing millions in an electronic digital company in Atlanta, Georgia, which is where we were headed. Well, we got to Atlanta, Georgia, and we stayed in a sort of yuppie community, and we didn't get sued. And then the fateful day came. Our neighbor, three doors down down happened to want to try out his new videotape recorder, there were still videotape recorders in those days, and he

was on his front doorstep, his daughter in a bikini, a blonde beautiful young girl, 16 year old, was dancing around with her little pup, and in the frame in the background you see this blue Honda Civic going past. And the young driver taps his friend, points to the girl. They both look at this girl prancing on the grass and drive the Civic directly into the brick mailbox. Oh, boy.

Terrible damage. And my eldest son, who was 16 then, runs up the street. He says, Ah, Mom, Dad, I've just smashed into the Anguero's house. And I said to Fran, there you go. Are we going to be sued? Well.

Welcome to America. Yeah. I get down there. I see the disaster. And I get to the door. I'm pushing the bell. People, loud peals of laughter from inside. And eventually, Richard Anguero comes to the door and

He says ah don't worry about the mailbox. I can have a just a wooden mailbox like everybody else Just get your son to clean it up But he was very nice you went on later Oh, he then said to me don't tell your insurance company because it'll cost you more than Paying for the repairs on the me, don't tell your insurance company because it'll cost you more than paying for the repairs on the car. And don't tell the police. It's on private property, so you don't have to report it. I got home to my wife and I said, it's a setup.

We are definitely going to get sued. There's a bigger lawsuit coming. We weren't sued. But Richard went on to say that the investment in the wooden mailbox was the best investment of his life. And here's why. When my son came out of college and he needed money, he got the opportunity to visit with Siskel and Ebert, who were the great critics in Chicago in those days. And they looked at the Blair Witch and said, you don't know what you've got in your hand kid uh you've got to

change the ending and you need to convert it from 16 millimeter film to 35 millimeter and get it to the Sundance Film Festival and we'll help you with that well suddenly Robin needed 120 000 over and above the 35 000 that it cost them to make the movie. Oh, yeah. The first person he called on was Richard Anguero, who put up $25,000. It was the beer which hit, made $490 million worldwide. Oh, yeah. Guinness Book of Records is the most profitable independent movie of the time.

Yeah. And, of course, I just can't tell you on this network how many millions Richard made out of that 25,000 that's a great story I mean but he went on for a few mailboxes yeah he went on to build companies like Burger King, Wendy's, Blockbuster Video, and then the eastern half of the USA for Starbucks. Oh, wow. And he did me the honor of writing the foreword in my book. Oh, awesome.

You Drive Fast Start. And he said that if these two books had been available at the time that he was running those companies they'd have been compulsory reading now how about that for good luck that's awesome i'm gonna run over some mailboxes in my neighborhood but um he's just been awesome in you, now introducing me to a number of companies who are honest about saying, oh, look, you know, we've got these great videos

on sexual harassment and company policy, but yes, we walk people across to their workstation and dump them. How do we fix that? Yeah. So I know you mentioned early on seven steps, I think, of the stuff. Tell us more about that. Oh, thanks for that. You know, I discovered, once again, because I bumped into such a variety of jobs in these companies we were buying and selling,

I always look for what's the commonality, what's the same thing about these things? And I stumbled onto the fact that every job has seven components. It doesn't matter what the job is, even your job. Every job has an environment, and that's an internal environment, which is the space immediately where you work, the things in your workstation, the software you use at your workstation, it's your internal environment, which is the space immediately where you work, the things in your workstation, the software you use at your workstation, it's your internal environment. But you have an external environment. In your case, it's people that you're interviewing on this site of yours. But every job, especially if you think of salespeople, they interact with a lot of people

outside of their company. Financial people do. You know, purchasing people do. Every job has an internal and an external environment. So somebody coming new into the job, the first thing they need to know is, what's the environment I'm going to live in? Next thing, every job has a process flow. It has a beginning point and then things that move in sequence to an end point where it starts again oh the things that go in parallel and something start a little later but there's a process flow so anybody new in a job should learn how to plot the process flow in the job next thing there's frequencies and I'm sure you and most

of your listeners have heard of the Pareto principle where which says that in any activity 20 percent of it occurs 80 percent of the time so if you look at any job the things that you would normally do in the job, 20% of the raw materials you use, or parts, or components, or paperwork, 20% of it is used 80% of the time. The processes that you apply, 20% of the things you have to do are done 80% of the time in order to produce the results. So if you can have a new job entrant identify those 20 percenters and get them done you know be proficient in them real quick they they they get to being

productive in the job at least 80 of the time in an electric amount of time yeah it always it always amazes me how the 80 2020 rule is such a consistent thing. I'm like, I remember testing the math on it and noting my businesses over the years, and I'm just like, wow, this just always works. Oh, yeah. The converse of that is that 80% of the job happens only 20% of the time. And I ask myself the question, well, what's experience? And if you think of it, experience is being around long enough

for that 80% that happens only 20% of the time to have happened enough times for you to remember how to handle them. That's experience. So get a job entrant moving real fast on the 20%ers, and then over time, they're going to pick up the experience. Then every process has ins and outs. To apply the process, you've got to have things coming in, raw materials, components, supply, computer system. You can identify what those inputs are. Then you apply the process steps to them and you produce the output.

But what I find in most American companies is they don't have the control track on it because everything has feedbacks. Okay? I mean, even when you drive your car, you've got a GPS system, right? So you set where you're going to go. Well the GPS shows you where you are, it's giving you feedback. And then sometimes it gives you that irritating message, in a thousand feet make a legal U-turn. That's feedback.

The feed forward is the route that you're supposed to be following. And that's what's so often missing in companies. They don't provide the feed forward of standards, the quality standards, the throughput rates that are needed, and the standards of things that have to be done to produce the correct output. So ins and outs are really important and for critical processes you need checklists nobody understands a checklist better than a pilot an astronaut a doctor you know just a few checklists just help a new job entrant very rapidly

become successful and now the two things that I never found even in major corporations and you go back to the 2080 theory because most people teach how to do the job correctly but as you know and I know jobs don't always go right things go wrong and guess what faults go wrong 20% of the faults go wrong 80% of the time. So if you can at least identify those 20%ers, teach those to new job entrants, they are going to nail it each time. something going wrong and then the possible causes of that symptomatic fault so that they apply the correct action for the correct cause so that fault analysis thing that study is very critical if companies that have and a lot of major corporations have great sometimes even video based training but I always found that's missing. There's nothing teaching fault diagnosis and correction.

Last thing, number seven, is what I call the patrol pattern and inspection sequence. So now if you know that things might go wrong, then don't sit on your butt all the time in the job. Make time to get up, move around, patrol that territory. That's what the police do, that's what military folk do. They've learnt it if they want to survive. Patrol anticipating where problems might occur. Recognise the symptoms and nail them before they become a costly error.

Patrol pattern and inspection sequence. Even accountant who spends his time on a computer looking at accounting systems has a patrol pattern and inspection sequence. When that screen comes up, his eye goes to there, goes to there, goes to there, looking for check, check, check, check, everything's okay, move on on the minute he sees that something doesn't look right digs down you know so patrol pattern

inspection speak those seven things if you can teach job entrance if you can give them those seven x-ray views of a job and in the book at the back of the book I provide the capture sheets and on the front is the capture sheet and they are given at the back they are given the things to do and the questions to ask in order to capture the right information. Just seven simple sheets. And if a job entrant, a college graduate, or someone out of the military, or anybody just moving into a new job, or even a baby boomer who's getting tired of retirement and wants to get back into maybe a less stressful job,

if you teach them the things to do and the questions to ask they'll nail that job real fast and you'll see it you'll just see you'll see success happening in 20 of the time which is why i always have the picture with my hands up like this my son gets embarrassed about that because he says people might get the wrong interpretation of that. Donald Trump airs my hands. I used to patrol my office, but I got in trouble with HR when I started tasering employees. I had to go back to the

Billy Club so that's it you know I invite people people who will go to www.lescoweyconsulting.com if they put their name in there in the email you know people have become just so sensitive these days because of there's so many internet things or putting in an email, you know, and a name, and they avoid doing that. I make a promise on my site that people are not going to be pounded with, you know, broadcast email after broadcast email. But if they put their name in there, I'll send them a free copy of the book.

That's a good deal. Free copy of the book, folks. And what's that website again? www.lescoweyconsulting.com There we go. LesCoweyConsulting.com And he's got a lot of great graphics on his website as well. What other websites can we find you on? Let's get those plugs in. Okay. Well, the one I've just mentioned, www.lezcoweyconsulting.com, is where you get the information on getting more with less effort, is what I mean there.

And the Profit Pilli illustrations are they they are videos they I've got a video series Which like you as I followed your pattern is As a video and then it's also available as a podcast and I call it in less than three minutes so it's real quick for people and then the second site is www.lescowie.com. And that's the one for the seven steps. And on the landing page of that one,

there's actually a humorous little five-minute animated video with a character called Fuzz because it's a very fuzzy area in most companies. And Fuzz explains the seven steps much better than I did a little while ago for some people that are baby boomers the fuzz means something entirely different but yeah that was a 60s thing so anyway we appreciate you being on the show less than sharing some of your wonderful stuff be Be sure to check out his books. I'm sure you can find these on Amazon.

Is that correct, Les? Oh, yes, on Amazon and on Kindle. Cool. The thing with Amazon, you need to search by the book name because if you search by Les Cowey, there are so many Cowey's rugby people and international people with that name that you don't find me there yet easily.

Well, hopefully they'll take and find you based on the titles of the book. Anyway, thanks, Celeste, for coming by. We certainly appreciate him sharing some of the knowledge. Be sure to check out his website so you can take and learn more. And be sure to tell your friends, neighbors, relatives to subscribe to the Chris Voss show. Go to youtube.com for just Chris Voss.

See the videos of the puppy and reviews of products, that too. You can go to iTunes or Google Play as well. Thanks for tuning in, everyone. You guys are the best audience, and we'll look forward to seeing you guys next time.