The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Exploring Corporate Culture and M&A with Matthew Person

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

Exploring Corporate Culture and M&A with Matthew Person Townsquare-advisors.com About the Guest(s): Matthew Person is the founder and managing director of Town Square Advisors, a firm dedicated to serving the needs of small and medium-sized businesses. He is a certified M&A advisor with extensive experience in buy-side mergers and acquisitions, having led private equity-backed global corporate development departments for firms like IDG, Blackstone, Vista, and TA Associates. Additionally, Matthew has experience as a Vice President at Capstone Partners and has worked with startups and growth-stage companies, exemplified by his tenure at Breakaway Innovation and Hybrid VC. Episode Summary: In this enlightening episode of The Chris Voss Show, Chris dives into the multifaceted world of corporate culture and organizational alignment with his guest, Matthew Person. Matthew, an expert in mergers and acquisitions, introduces his innovative Square Management System, a comprehensive framework designed to help businesses understand and intentionally cultivate corporate culture to achieve optimal staff alignment and business success. Matthew discusses the often overlooked but critical role of culture in the business environment, especially during mergers and acquisitions. Using his Square Management System, he highlights the importance of understanding corporate culture and the individual work preferences of employees to create a harmonious and productive workplace. This episode emphasizes that successful mergers often hinge on cultural fit more so than financial metrics and that understanding the preferences for independence or constraint can lead to better job satisfaction and performance. Chris and Matthew explore how culture isn’t just about perks like ping-pong tables but is deeply tied to identity, instruction, intercommunication, and feedback within a company. Key Takeaways: The Square Management System emphasizes four elements—identity, instruction, intercommunication, and information feedback—as crucial for understanding and shaping corporate culture. Employers and employees benefit significantly from cultural alignment, impacting individual job satisfaction and overall business success. Cultural fit in mergers and acquisitions can often predict the success or failure of such ventures, as seen in both infamous and successful M&A cases. Matthew’s approach underscores that there is no universally right or wrong culture; it's about finding the fit that aligns the company’s processes with employees’ natural work styles. Taking self-assessment quizzes can help both employees and executives understand their ideal work environments, ensuring better placement and higher retention. Notable Quotes: "Culture isn't just the ping-pong tables or Thursday beers; it's about identity, instruction, intercommunication, and feedback." "There's no wrong culture, just your culture, and it's crucial for executives to understand what aligns best with their organizational goals." "Successful mergers often hinge on cultural fit more than any financial metric; it's about bringing together compatible systems and people." "Great culture is alignment between the employee and the company. We've often focused too much on broad appeal instead of individual fit." "Our goal is to let people make decisions and own them within a framework that respects their independence and contributes to a high-performing team."

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gentlemen, our ladies and gentlemen, our says Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Ford says Chris Voss. Chris Voss won on the Tik Tokity and all those crazy places on the internet. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Voss show. Some guests to the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today, we have an amazing young man on the show with us today. Matthew Pearson joins us. He's the founder and managing director of Town Square Advisors, who works to better serve the needs of small and medium sized businesses.

He's a certified M&A advisor and M&A professional. His tenure includes buy-side M&A experience leading multiple private equity-backed global corporate development departments including IDG, Blackstone, Vista and TA Associates. Additionally, he worked on a sell-side middle market focused investment banker as vice president with Capstone Partners and boutique advisor to Tullian Holland. He also worked with startups, growth stage companies like Breakaway Innovation and hybrid VC, VC strategy firm, a hybrid VC strategy firm. Got a camera right there, so fighting around it.

Welcome to the show. How are you, Matthew? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find out more about you on the interwebs? You can go to townsquaredashadvisors.com. And so give us a 30,000 overview of what you do there.

Yeah, really the whole entire business is framed around a construct that I've developed called the Square Management System, which is an effort to help both individuals and executives better understand corporate culture. A lot of people define culture as a more amorphous construct. It's kind of obtuse. It's the general ways of doing. But for whatever reason, I felt like there's probably a better way to approach how you actually can construct intentionally corporate culture so that we all have places that we enjoy working. Some people, new employees don't start

their first day disgruntled, some of them become that way. How does that happen? You want employees to be happy at work? That doesn't seem right. He was a person probably want to be happy at work. When you go hire for a new job, everyone's told, this is a great culture.

I don't think anyone's done an interview where the hiring manager told them that the company was terrible. Everyone says it is a great culture, right? I don't think anyone's done an interview where the hiring manager told them that the company was terrible, right? Everyone says it's a great culture. But it doesn't always work out that way. What I put together was a system, kind of a four-sided square that I call constrained independence.

And some people, you might be an example of someone who loves to work in a unconstrained environment, lot of freedom to act and make independent decisions. Some people though, don't like that. They really want to, they need to be told how to execute and what to do. Some executives, correspondingly, they want the same thing. They want to have a more constrained environment. You can actually, through systems and processes and procedures, construct the type of corporate culture you want as an executive. And moreover, as an person, you can take the survey and you can understand the type of environment where you perform at your best. And you can use this across

interviews or even in your current environment to help you understand how to navigate your corporate culture a little bit better. Yeah. Well, somebody needs to define it better because we always hear these terms kicked around, culture this, culture that. And when I ask CEOs and stuff, what is your culture? What have you done to, what have you curated with your culture, your environment? And like, same thing when I ask them, you know, what's their leadership style? They're like, I don't know, I just lead. So it's kind of funny the lack of intention on some of it. Well, I think part of it too, the genesis of a lot of this was someone's self reflection

and conversations with friends over the years when I was in my early stages as a young professional. A lot of stories of people in bad working environments and things that happened to them along the way. At some point, I started realizing that some of those bad working cultures had executives who had been there for 20 plus years and loved it, thought it was great. How does that happen? How do you have two people in the same environment? One loves it and the other person can't survive?

There is a method to that madness and you can use the system, what I call the four I's, there's four pillars. One is identity, that's the starting point. Who is this company? The other is instruction. How do you actually receive information around how you're supposed to work in a company?

Third is inner communication. How do you communicate with people? When, how, and where do you actually communicate? How often do meetings happen? Do you have to be in person? Some people don't want to go to an office at all anymore. Especially post-COVID, they like working at home. Other people are forced back in. That changes the culture. And last, information feedback. How do you actually then learn about who you are, how you're actually working? That creates the square. How tight that square is, is the degree of constraint on your independence,

your ability to action your own independent thoughts, right? In a world, you know, you can't go to work someday and just do whatever you want. You have rules and regulations around what you can do that prevents you from walking around and being difficult or doing the wrong things. Yeah, the rule that I can't walk around naked in my underwear anymore in the office.

You can do that at home. And I'm the CEO. So, what's going on there? That could be a new policy that you put in there. Hey, George says I can't do that anymore. But no, I mean, we do, we have had a kind of constraint system in our office for years. We just chain people to the desk

and we don't let them loose in the environment. Most everyone's chained to the cubicle, right? That's legal, right? Isn't it? I think, I don't know. I'll check with the attorneys. Anyway, we don't give them phones either, so they can't call 911 and get help, but that's just how we roll. So this is really interesting. You know, I, you're right. I've seen this with leadership where there are people who they need more leadership and I hate to sound negative, but kind of almost babysitting. They need more. I think you've said it better than I did in my choice of words there. But then there are

people that you can basically let them be serial or entrepreneurs in IN, entrepreneurs in your company, and you can let them run around, do things, make improvements, et cetera, et cetera. People need to know what decisions they can make. They need that freedom to express themselves, to be creative, to feel like they're part of the equation, but they can't make endless decisions. Then that would make the company go sideways in terms of whatever you're producing, delivery standards have to be met, product quality has to be achieved.

And you can't walk around naked in your office either. So you gotta have some level of constraint. I know, crazy thought. But in order for culture to work really well, the person has to be almost aligned to the company, right? Your way of doing, my way of doing have to map to the company. And that's how great culture exists.

It's really that simple. When you are, for example, the person who wants to sit in a bean bag and have your laptop on your chair, you wouldn't really survive in an environment where you had to go in an office wearing a suit. That might be a high level example, pretty simple. But if you really step back and look at all the process and procedures, all the ways of work that people do, if you take this 40 element survey and you actually pick the different choices around how you choose to operate your business, you will put together a construct that allows

this natural culture to evolve. But you're intentionally designing, you're choosing to constrain the people in the way you as an executive team or a CEO would want your company to operate. And then if you intentionally hire people and onboard them in alignment with all those policies and procedures, you're bringing in people who are actually going to fit the culture that you want. if you intentionally hire people and onboard them in alignment with all those policies and procedures, you're bringing in people who are actually going to fit the culture that you want. Right now, the common practice is best of places to work, right?

And that's a broad, generic term, and the general thesis is, hey, this is the best place to work. You know, Chris, you should be, you should succeed here. This is such a good place to work. It should work for anybody. But that belief sidesteps what you, Chris, think is a good place to work, it should work for anybody. But that belief sidesteps what you Chris think is a good place to work. Right? You're out of the equation at that point. And if you don't succeed there, are you a bad person? Probably not. You're a great

guy. So, you know, that's, it's not on you, right? You just didn't quite fit. But how did you know you didn't know? And if there was a way to know better, the working environment that you would succeed in by taking the survey web, walking through the questionnaire, you would say, Hey, maybe this isn't a place I'm going to be successful in. You'd self-select out correspondingly hiring managers and say, Hey, maybe Chris isn't the guy. He's not going to work here. He doesn't want to go wear a suit and sit in an office every day.

Yeah. I mean, I thrive better in organizations where I was a leader, where I was a manager, where I could innovate, where I had some, uh, carte blanche and being able to do that. a manager, where I could innovate, where I had some carte blanche to be able to do that. My last big company I worked for, I had a title of an entrepreneur, I-N, entrepreneur, instead of entrepreneur. And I had carte blanche to wander around the company and look for inefficiencies and adjust

those inefficiencies, carte blanche too. And so it worked really well for me, but I remember when I was young, I went, you know, I was an aspiring young man. I wanted to own a company. I wanted to be a CEO someday. I had already started a few small companies, but they hadn't hit this success yet. And I remember I went to work for, or I went to apply for a job at, I think a company called Rent-A-Center.

And the CEO was doing all the interviews. It was funny. He handpicked his interviews at least at that time. And I believe it was Rent-A-Center. It was one of those rent and furniture joints. And so I was in there doing the interview with him and he told me about all of his success and how he built the company and yada, yada, yada. And he goes, so what does

your future look like? What do you want to do? And I was really impressed with his story. And he was the guy, he was the type of guy that I always dreamed of becoming when I grew up. And so I said, well, I want to be like you. I want to start my own companies. I want to do my own things and all this stuff. And he looked at me and he said, he said, well, that's great. He goes, go for it. But he goes, you're not going to fit our culture of our company because we need people who are going to, you know, be preferably lifers here. They're going to come to work for a long time. You know, they're, they're going to be those constraint people that you reference. And he could identify that I was that free bird who had to go fight

free. I mean, that's why I've worked for myself since I was 18 because I don't play well with others, I guess, or something. I don't know. They don't, they don't let me in the rooms. That's all I know. So I knock and knock and they go, stay away, go away. So, and then there's restraining orders from that too. So anyway, great example though of he didn't bring that was an environment where he didn't want free thinkers. He wanted that. Right. Yeah. I had a similar story where it didn't happen to me, but it was in an office where I was, there was a junior staffer would come in and he was getting yelled at by the CEO

and the CEO just said to him, I don't pay you to think I pay you to do. Wow. That's a very clear example of a scenario where someone really isn't a free bird at all. Like they are, they are chained to that desk. Sounds like, sounds like the, it sounds like the slavery office set up we have here where we have people chained to our desk. We pay you to do, do more.

Exactly. But it's a great example though of just trying to, you know, being aware of someone's not succeed in that environment. It happens more often than I think in business that people realize because they do try to get, when you get down to it, most people in hiring right now, it's kind of commoditized. At the end of the level, you've got maybe three or four people, they all have the same level of skills, they're all smart, they're all going to be able to do that job well. And people kind of double down and they say, okay, we're going to pick this guy based on culture fit.

They never actually assess their own culture at the company. They're making a gut check. Yeah, I like that guy. He's going to work her. She's great. She's smart. She'll do well here. They've never really taken the effort to quantify what that means and actually write down, well,

what is our culture? What are all the pieces? What are the component parts? What do you expect of this person? Do we even ask them? That doesn't happen. And you bring up a good point too about this, because one thing I found is salespeople, great salespeople don't make great managers, at least not in my experience. It's two different skill sets, especially when you've got salespeople,

you know, when they're your top salespeople, they have a certain amount of carte blanche and freedom and they've got some wiggle room, they can get away with shit. You know, you're like, you know, he does do cocaine in the evenings, but he sells the shit out of everything in the daytime. So, uh, I guess we'll let that slide a little bit, you know, you know, stuff like that. Jokes, but, uh, you know, you put them in an environment where they, it's very rigid, they've got to babysit other people, it doesn't always work well. And so there's that difference between, like you say, the constraint and that kind of freedom. And most great salespeople that I've ever worked with, they're used to having a lot of freedom and carte blanche to be able to do what they need to do. It kind of reminds me of, it kind of reminds me of, in fact, maybe all the characters, but it kind of reminds me

of Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross. If you remember, Al Pacino was the top salesman. He had the freedom to take people out to bars and probably an expense account for it. He's out there hustling and drinking. Meanwhile, maybe the men who really need a constraint job, they're sitting in the office bitching and then you know, and then Alec Baldwin comes and yells at them and the classic scenes and all that stuff. And so that might be a good example of, you know, where some people, they need

that constraint. Some people don't. Exactly. And it's not just how you're instructed or what decision rights you have in terms of it's other things too. It's, it's the nature of where you work. A lot of people confuse culture for, you know, the ping pong table, the, you know, years on Thursdays, right? That's other things too. It's the nature of where you work. A lot of people confuse culture for the ping pong table, the years on Thursdays. That's part of it. That's inner communication. That's how you interact with people.

One of my earlier jobs I had, I transitioned in to a company and I was moving. I moved from Colorado where I was working to a job in New Hampshire. It was cold, obviously. It's cold up in New Hampshire. The CEO at the time said to me, hey, we're trying to save money. Turn on the heat in the morning and let the employees kind of hear the heater go on and the air trickle through the heater. But around like noon, shut it off.

By about three o'clock in the afternoon, people are sitting with blankets on, they had gloves, it was freezing, and you couldn't work. He's like, yeah, we'll just save money that way. And every other light in the hallways was turned off, so it was kind of dark, you know, as you walk in the bathroom. And so that's part of that inner communication. People didn't really talk to each other,

it was a very kind of quiet office, because there wasn't really a fostering environment of that inner communication. People didn't really talk to each other. It was a very kind of quiet office because there wasn't really a fostering environment of communication and connection. It was just very dark and separate. Yeah, and so for me, we're just mean. We're like Johnny Carson and Dave Letterman. We keep the audience in the theater freezing cold so people stay awake.

Yeah, and take the heat off at the same time. Yeah, the chattering, and I have a secret room too, that's a Letterman joke. Anyway, I'm not sure what goes on in it, but I love David. He's awesome. One of my idols. But the chattering of teeth helps people keep awake, we found in the office. And the staff are still there though. They must love it. Well, they're chained to their desk. Thanks for setting me up down the walk on that one. I appreciate that one. You led me right down the path I was heading towards. So tell us about some of the services you do there. What are some of the things that you help people

understand what you call the square management system, some of the M&A advisory you do in business consulting. Yeah, happy to. So the whole business is framed around square management system because, depending on what you're coming in for, which a lot of it is just general boutique consulting for middle market businesses, whether you need sales and marketing support,

you're going through organizational change, or you need to understand why your business isn't operating to the full degree. The score management system is framed around those four sides, those four eyes. Each side has 10 elements. And a lot of the work there is to have identification of where maybe your operating procedures are misaligned in the company. We usually have an executive team will take it, the middle layer will take it, the junior

staff will take the survey. When you aggregate the scores, you can very clearly tell where the variances are and where you might have a problem. If the executive team thinks that they've done a great job with branding and mission and setting up the identity of the business, but a lot of the middle staff think you've gone off strategy and you've launched a product that doesn't align to what you are as a business, you can kind of start to tell where things might fall apart. Or maybe you're not onboarding people the right way and people are lost, they haven't

been instructed properly, and so you need to make some changes there. That's a great way to identify. And then usually services would fall out from there. So people, once you get the identification of the problem, then we can go work to solve that and figure out how to do that. When it comes to M&A, it's usually prep for the sales side where we use the system to then get their business set up. One of the biggest things in M&A that small

or medium sized businesses don't really get as part of the process is that they have to do a lot of prep work to make sure that they're a sellable asset. This helps them set up for scale. The biggest thing a buyer would want is a business that is intrinsically ready to go. It's got its own processes and procedures. Everyone's aligned. You can count on it to produce the growth that it said it would in the sale process.

This system gets everything aligned and organized in a cohesive way so you've got a better presented company at the time of sale. Moreover, one of the biggest things that causes failure in M&A is culture, culture misfits. If you're on the buy side and you're looking to buy a company, you can use this name survey to score yourself as the Square Manager system does produce a company score or a square score. You can use it on your target entity and see where the variances are. I've definitely been in circumstances when I was a banker where we had companies that use culture fit as a way to say yes or no to a transaction. Oftentimes we had companies that had a fixed office space looking at a business where it

was all remote and they realized along the way they just weren't going to be able to get those staff to commit to a working environment. It wasn't worth it for them to risk the investment if the staff weren't gonna enjoy working there. So a lot of work we do around the buy side is helping identify whether or not this transaction, not just from a financial perspective, but from like an operating and a cultural perspective is gonna be something that works.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people that do mergers and acquisitions that they don't fit well. I think the Time Warner is the infamous one, isn't it? Yeah, there are a lot of failed M&A. I think because people like the... A lot of times it happens, having been around the Spurged Acquisitions for a long time, people get a deal fever. They're all so excited about the deal. Let's get the deal done. And then you start losing sense for what drove the interest in the first place. And culture post-close, all the financials, you can put any number on paper, it's not hard to do.

But if you can't achieve any of the revenue projections, if you can't get the synergy cost synergies to work, the deal is going to fall apart. And culture is a big reason about whether or not you'll actually be able to realize what you put on paper. And that's kind of why a lot of those big mergers, and I imagine medium and small, fails because the cultures don't fit maybe. That's right. Yeah.

That's right. You need to go through a change management process and figure out where the differences are and the commonalities are. But again, most people don't do that. And this system will help you draw out where those differences are and that'll aid your diligence work and it'll aid your integration work and set you up for a little more success. So both buy side planning and sell side assessment is kind of where I sit from the M&A side.

On sales and marketing, it's really just around alignment. It's making sure that your team is all structured properly around what you're selling, why you're selling, getting the story right. It's a system that helps you kind of get alignment across department, across function. What are some examples of successful M&A you've seen and I don't know, maybe the Time Warner is a good example

of what not to do. Yeah, you know, I think of successful M&A you've seen? I don't know, maybe the Time Warner is a good example of what not to do. Yeah. I think the best M&A that you can have is a scenario where you're actually able to affect scale. You're actually able to help grow that company and retain the original staff that you brought in as part of that acquisition. There's a lot of examples. Actually, more M&A is more successful than people.

If it was so terrible, if M&A was such a bad thing, then companies wouldn't do it. If you look at the publicly traded companies out there, if you look at the Fortune 500, most of them grow through acquisition. If you look at small, medium-sized businesses, private equity, they all leverage acquisitions to do it, to grow, and to scale, and to provide value for shareholders. So across the board, even though we always hear those horror stories of M&A gone wrong, it was that bad. Finance, there's finance guys on Wall Street, they're smart. They wouldn't do it if it didn't work.

But you can definitely make it better if you get that culture fit right. Culture fit is everything. Now you have a forthcoming book you're probably working on. Tell us about that. I am. The book's called The Culture Alignment. Thanks for mentioning it. I appreciate it.

The book details really how we got culture wrong to start. This whole best places to work theory and this common size approach to culture, just forgot one thing, you and I, the individual, the employee, it's really taken a back seat. This book then refocuses what true culture is, which is alignment between the employee and the company

and then guides you through an understanding of what the Square Management culture is, which is alignment between the employee and the company, and then guides you through an understanding of what the Square Management System is, that concept of constrained independence. Again, that's the box that employees get to play in, the amount of freedom they have to action ideas. And then it lays out the four sides and the 40 elements and actually helps you, the reader, determine, hey, based on this,

this is a high level of constraint or maybe a light level of constraint, by element to help you basically build the company that you think will operate best for you. It is not intended to be common-sized. The whole theory here is that there is actually no wrong culture. There's no wrong square, just your square. And I think people need to start realizing that, hey, it's really okay to have your view of culture for your company. That's what's going to work best.

And then you align your staff and your people to those process and procedures and you got a home run. I like this thinking. You really changed my paradigm on a lot of this because I've always thought there's a right culture, healthy. I've talked about this before on the show. I'm a big Peter Senge fan, the learning organization. And I've always tried to build learning organization, an organization that can learn, grow and adapt

and isn't afraid to ask questions, isn't afraid to learn, doesn't have an environment that makes people fearful to say, hey, I might need some more help or some more information. I didn't quite get it the first time. And that's kind's important too, but understanding the constraint system is a really big deal. Because as a leader, do I have to apply that to certain individuals? Because I know there are sometimes, like I talked about, some of my top salespeople, they don't have a leash, man. They're just off doing whatever. All you know is they bring in, it's the 80-20 rule, they bring in 80% of, they're the 20% of bringing 80% of your results. But then the other 80% that bring in the 20% of your results of your people, sometimes they

need a little more babysitting, even if they're salespeople. You kind of have to ride them a little bit more. Yeah. It's a great question. There's variances. The answer is really no. You're either in the box, you're in that kind of square, or you're out. And companies do need to have the constitution to go, hey, this person's probably not a fit. Now, the whole point of the box is to allow people to bounce around,

let those salespeople go do what they gotta do. But they gotta be able to do what they wanna do within some guideline, right? They can't just do everything right? Otherwise, you got chaos. But I think that's the goal. And so some people really like that freedom, right? They wanna have a really big box.

They gotta go find a company that lets the salespeople have that big box. Other companies say, hey, sales guys, we're gonna give you the borders on what you can and can't do. And that might not be a fit, right? You might not be a coffee for closers. You might need a different environment. can't do and that might not be a fit right you might not be coffee for closers you know for environment coffee is for closers folks always be closing always to close exactly I love that movie however they played that's that

soul scene for us when we were like I was like a 20 year old kid or something in a dealership and they they know they played that scene I was just like holy shit and so you know it's a scene I was just like holy shit and so You know, it's a great movie great movie about probably the best movie about sales ever I don't know maybe mid-death of a salesman might be better I mean always be closing ABC's, you know and all that stuff, you know, that's something you learn from the great Zig Ziglar and other people. What haven't we touched? And on the book, now how can people find out about this book?

It's not on Amazon yet, so we haven't, we didn't start off with it. You can go on townsquare-advisors.com and learn more about the Square Management System and take a free quiz actually, and get a little bit of a taste for what your preferred working environment may or may not be, or if you're an executive, learn a little bit of a taste for what your preferred working environment may or may not be. Or if you're an executive, learn a little bit more about maybe how you'd like to preferably construct your organization and you can sign up for an advanced copy of the book when it's, when it actually works through publication.

There is a process to do that on the platform as well. So you don't want a beachfront containment style. I want to be contained on a beach in the Bahamas and do nothing except drink margaritas. Is that in your book? It's not. You could definitely put the margarita on the book as a coaster. Oh, as I read it. As you read it, yes.

That's really what I want to do. That's what I'm after. But they haven't fired me from this job yet, probably because I'm the guy who does all the firing. So I'll get around to me eventually. I'll eventually run out of firing people and have to turn on myself. That's usually how it goes, I think, doesn't it? There's no one left here to fire. Damn it. I guess I'm fired. So what else, who's your prospective clients? Who are the people that you, who can do business

with you? Or, you know, some people, they only work with Fortune 500 companies or high level C-suite executives who make X amount of dollars. What are your prospective clients if they're out there listening? How do they know if they fit your models so they can call you in? Yeah, I think that's a great question. The most people I work with and I prefer to work around are is that lower middle market, the small medium sized business, the company was designed for that level of business that needs maybe a different style than maybe you get at enterprise. I'm not as applicable there.

Enjoy working with the companies that probably haven't thought around how to organize and operate their business the right way on a very simple, actionable, easy to digest way of doing it. The book is not full of research. I don't boast taking a startup public. I haven't invented a widget. It's really an exercise in getting,

I even call it a pocket guide on a book because I wanna make it easy to read. It's something you can action digest and follow, implement really quickly, and kind of learn maybe a little bit more about yourself. So the book is written from the perspective of an executive and people who lead organizations, but honestly this is great for employees to want to learn a little more about themselves and maybe where they

can actually perform at their best. And so it is dual purpose in that sense. And I see on your website you have a short quiz where people can figure out their individual self-assessment quiz or their corporate self-assessment quiz. That's right, yeah. If you're curious about, hey, I've never really thought about the kind of environment that I actually perform best in and you want to take a free quiz, go on the website. You can answer 10 questions. If you're curious and you want to actually do the whole 40 element questionnaire, you could do that too. If you're an executive and you've never thought about

that processes and systems actually create the culture, you can be really intentional about designing a high trust and high performing organization. Take the corporate self-assessment and learn a little bit more about how you'd want your organization to be constructed. And you can also take the same survey and actually start to implement an action

against those ideas and learn more about maybe how you can create a better scalable, faster growing business. That's the whole point, right? Oh, yeah. In fact, I took the test and it said I should quit bothering everyone, go get an island and just go live in Dalton. Oh, you got to go buy an island. It said don't just give up.

No, that's what it told me. So I didn't score very well. I might take it again and see how it goes. One thing I do see on your website is experience the Square management system. So I can see a graph of this. There's the 15, 10, 10, 12. Those of you need to go to townsquare-advisors.com to understand what I'm talking about at the bottom of the page.

But do you want to tell us a little bit about how this works? I see information feedback on one angle of the square, one side of the square, identify, instruction, and communication. Yeah, that is those are the four sides of the square. And that's an example of someone's output who took the test just to give it some level of okay. So the first element in the four sides of the square is identity. And that is who you are as a company, and some people as a person if you were taking it, they really need to be engaged in mission.

They're going to be more interested in the mission and the vision of the company. They're going to be more attracted to that component. Instruction is the nature of how you communicate the processes, the systems, the procedures, onboarding practices, things like that. Intercommunication is how you enjoy interacting with your colleagues. Some people really want a formal environment, other people want a loose environment, a deskless

environment where you just go sit down, other people need a desk, you go to a meeting every day or do you go to a meeting once a week. So that's how the nature of intercommunication, that's the aforementioned ping pong ball and the beer on Thursday, happy hour on Thursday, as people usually associate that with culture, that is one element in communication. And then you have information feedback, that's your reviews processes and how the company learns and employees learn about how they've been doing to keep everything aligned. Those four elements each have a score and each

of them can be highly constrained or lightly constrained or even just in the middle as moderate level of constraint. In some they produce a score and that score is your independent score. That is the degree of independence you prefer your company would prefer to have. Let me ask you this, how does this work with remote or how do you see this working with remote? Because with remote you kind of even if you like working in a constrained environment, you know, there's, there's some challenges there cause you're not really constrained at home. You know, I'm sitting around in my underwear half the time, uh,

wandering around, uh, I don't know, eating cereal half naked. We all do. Yeah. Right. I mean working at home allows you to, you know, wear shorts and flip flops behind your desk. Right. Yeah. Uh, you know, there's a degree to which the remote person who prefers the remote environment is probably more in unconstrained view than person who, I think if you were really enjoyed a constrained environment,

you wanted to be in a desk job, you probably wouldn't take a remote job. You'd probably find a way to get around that, you wouldn't like it. I think that's part of that assessment. One of the things in internet communication is whether you go into office or not. The degree to which you interact with your colleagues post work or during work, you know, do you go to social hours at your company? Do you go with friends in your office to get

drinks after work? That's all part of intercommunication. Some people, they're more introverted, they don't want to see their employees after work. They just want to go home, they have their own friends. That's part of it. All that is contained in the survey. You make an interesting point there. Do you find that sometimes the containment is more beneficial or adherent to people who are more introverted? Because top salespeople that get freedom, they're pretty big extroverts. They're only friends with everybody. That's how I know. Well, that's the way they act, right? But all salespeople still need borders on what they can and can't sell.

How big of a discount they can give, how much they can put together in a package, how they have to create it, right? They still need that. And actually, you'll find a lot of salespeople as gregarious and outgoing as they may be and all over the place related to how they get stuff done, what they actually sell.

Sometimes the best guys just need someone to tell them how to negotiate for them. So they might get, usually when I manage salespeople back in the day, I would say, hey, listen, this is what you can do from a discount here, and this is what you can and can't include. And you can do whatever you want. And that's kind of how you'd use the box, that box of preference, again, that square. You give the salespeople a square. This is the min and max and what you can negotiate. And you can navigate that box. And it's yours to do what you want in there. So you can navigate that box and it's yours to do what

you want in there so you can own that discussion but you can't go outside the box. You need to go outside the box and you got to come and see someone and ask for a special permission and that's how you can kind of control that behavior. I've constantly tried to keep them in some sort of box and sometimes this is the challenge. It's like, okay, well you did the weekend with the hookers and the blow and the limo, but it's time to come back to the office and do your thing. You know how those top salespeople are. They're those Al Pacino types.

They're out of the bar all the time, up to something. But they kick ass and take names. They earn a lot of the freedom they get, so I shouldn't bash them. But those are the guys who will you like tons of money at your stuff But you do have to keep an item like, you know sometimes they would get out of hand and you know, they wouldn't fill out the paperwork right or get details right that were really important like well, great you wrote a loan for a guy for a mortgage and But does he want a 30 or 15 like Like we, we can't process the paperwork

unless you collect the data and, you know, stuff like that. But yeah, it's interesting to me. I'd be, I'd be kind of curious what the, if there's a psychology to the containment people and the, and the people that don't work well in containment. I haven't studied it, but I bet you there is. I mean, to a degree, that's kind of the point, right? It's the, it's the personal ways of, the personal philosophy, the personal beliefs of the individual

employee and then the way the company operates. And those two things have to have to map. If I really wanted to give you a little bit of a deeper dive of what you'd read in the book, The Culture of Lyman, it digs into a little bit on what one problem new hires always have and you probably experience. This is when you start a new job, you kind of feel like you have to chameleon yourself. You have to fit in. You've got to start to, you're nice to everyone, you're doing everything under the sun to be

liked and be seen as a team player, and you're almost compromising, maybe to a degree, a small degree, your own personal beliefs, your own morals, your own values, because you want to be fit in that company. The argument here is we've got to stop doing that. People just, they're at their best when they're on their own values, right? Because you want to be fit into that company. The argument here is we got to stop doing that. People just, they're at their best when they're on their own. They are who they are and it's okay for you to be who you are. You just have to find the home that best fits who you are. And if you knew that in advance, you would succeed.

You wouldn't have to be that chameleon on your first couple of months in the job. You'd just fit right in. You'd be a lot easier. What everyone's told people is that culture, that best place to work designation, well, everyone should be able to work here. It's the best place to work. And that isn't true. You got to step back and look at your ways of working and hold tight and believe, hey, I'm Chris. I want to work on an island and drink margaritas and I'll go to work when I want to. And if you can find an employer, he'll give you that freedom. Then you're going to really do well. If you don't, if you find, if you need to communicate with yourself, it's not going

to be good, right? You're not going to have fun. That's true. Yeah. You got to find what fits. But I love this because I just kind of, one of my problems that I had early on in business was I thought everyone was like me and they're go-getters and they're wake up and they got a dream and they're chasing it.

And they got a big vision for life and stuff. And, and I would hit this wall of, you know, what'd you call the containment people? And there's nothing wrong with those folks. You know, everyone's got different roles and different things they like. Some people love being a janitor. You know, I mean, it's, it's a nightmare being a entrepreneur. Is it fun? Is there benefits? Yeah. But it's a whole lot of freaking work. And some people just aren't up for it. Some people, they just, you know, hey man, I mean,

I remember working, there was a time where I left Utah and moved to Vegas and I bumped into some Chinese investors and they wanted to start a mortgage company. And it was kind of nice that we're in a place where at five o'clock you could punch out. And I, you know, I worried about profitability, but I was like worried about it like it was my money. And so, and so yeah, the, you know, sometimes those places are just more comfortable and that's okay, you know, you know,

not everyone's gotta be, you know, hustle culture, go get them, all that sort of stuff, you know? Yeah. It's okay to, there are some people who want it to your point. You walk in, I want to be you, I want to be the CEO. There's some people who that's all they want in life. That's what they want to go do. And there's other people who are just fine staying at a certain level.

I got a great friend of mine lives out in the Midwest. He's like, Matt, I don't want to manage people. I'll do whatever you want me to do. I don't want to manage people. I'll do whatever you want me to do. I don't want to manage them. And okay, and so he's kind of just floating along and he's very happy. He's got a great family. He's a great guy.

He's telling you, he's kind of floating along. And that's okay. That's what he wants to do. You know, why should we try to change that? Yeah, I mean, you want people that are gonna fit your organization. This kind of comes into inclusivity, DEI a little bit, finding what works for them, what brings out the best in them, because that's what you want. You hire people, you invest in them, you want the best out of them, because you don't want the worst out

of them. I've seen that movie. Exactly. worst out of them. I've seen that movie. Exactly. So yeah, yeah. Good. The whole point of the book is that if you're if you're a C Suite executive, you're a CEO, and you want to create a high trust, high performing organization, you got to let people make decisions, right? You got to let people action

their own things be innovative, right? That gives them a sense of belong sense of ownership in the process. If you control too much, then to your point, they're not going to go out there and create and they're not going to go out there and effort. They're just going to float along and wait to be told. That's slow. That's kludgy. That's not going to get high-scale high-performing team done. When you're allowed to make your own independent decisions within that, again, those borders, what do you trust? Especially if everyone's been trained the same way, you trust everyone else to make the same decisions alongside you. You don't have to ask anymore for permission. And that gets

you to a faster, higher-performing team. So the whole point of this book is to create culture to give people that sense of belonging, the sense of trust, the sense of ownership, you know, that business move along. You know, you bring up a good point. People are more satisfied in the organization and more comfortable. And so by, you know, having these systems that can identify them, then you're just not looking at like, hey, let's kick people out and hey, let's do this and that. And so there's that. So fun is fun. So as we go out, give us your final pitch and what you think.

Well, I appreciate the time to chat about it. Listen, I think everyone should go on the website and take the quiz. You do yourself a lot of favor to learn more about the environment that you do well in, and I bet you'd be surprised if you take the quiz. It's probably not going to be what you think. And most people I know have taken this test, have been a little surprised about where their preferred working environment is. If you're an executive listening to the show and you're trying to figure out why we have so much churn or why are we not scaling, take the corporate self-assessment, figure out a little bit more about your preferred working corporate structure and see if it really maps

to who you are now. What are your true operating characteristics? I guarantee you it's probably different than you want it to be and this system will help you fix that. And that's the point is to get everyone back aligned, get that employee and that company aligned so we can all have more fun at work and do well together. Well we certainly appreciate it. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Give us your dot coms as we go out Matthew. Yeah it's townsquared-advisors.com. You can find all the information there. Thanks for having me. It's been a blast. Appreciate it. Thank you and thanks

to Ronnettes for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, Chris Voss 1 on the TikTokity and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other, stay safe, we'll see you guys next time.