The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Howard Shore, CEO, Founder, Coach and Consultant Activate Group, Inc.

Episode Date: March 20, 2022

Howard Shore, CEO, Founder, Coach and Consultant Activate Group, Inc. Activategroupinc.com

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founder and CEO of Activate Group Incorporated. He is also a bestselling author and serial entrepreneur specializing in liberating leadership teams from the barriers, holding them back personally and professionally. During his 35-plus year career, Howard has helped create over $1 billion worth of value and authored two best-selling books, The Leader Launchpad and Your Business is a Leaky bucket. Howard Cutta's teeth is the owner of several successful companies and executive for Fortune 500 companies. And welcome to the show. Howard, how are you? Man, I am so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. There you go. And so a couple of the 500 companies got cut off. Give us some of those

names if you would for me. Rider System, AutoNation, KPMG. There you go. We've all heard of those companies. Amazing stuff. Give us your.com so that people can find you on the interwebs, please. ActivateGroupInc.com. There you go. And so let's talk about what got you here. What got you to want to be up to CEO? Give us a bit of origin history, if you would, please. All of us have a different story. And mine starts back from working in my dad's business and learning everything you ought not to do as a leader. I love my dad to death.

But man, was that a tough experience. And his track record had a lot to show for it. And after going through that, I went through different journeys. And like everybody else, I wish I could say that I did everything super well. The reality was, is when I looked back in time, the reason I was successful was just because I worked three times harder than everybody else. And at some point, it started dawning to me, this is a fool's bet. So I'd start looking around and figuring out what other people were doing. And that kind of inspired me to raise my game to a whole nother level. And that's what got me here today. There you go. Well, awesome. So it sounds like you went through quite a journey when you

went through, I think you said Ryder and KPG and one of the KPMG and one of the, well, I knew them when they were KPG. No, I'm just kidding. I don knew them when they were KPG. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know if they were ever K. So anyway, it was before M came along. I don't know what that was about. But jokes aside, so what were some of the things you did for them that kind of led you to become your own CEO? So just to give everybody a story, I owned my first business when I was 18.

I sold it in 21. And I'd love a do-over for that one. I did sell well. but at the end of the day, it would have been a lot higher. When I went to Key, let's just take Rider System. When I went in there, I did everything from budgeting to I was the head of strategic planning, did mergers and acquisitions. Probably my biggest accomplishment there was redeveloping a strategy to take a division that had stalled. And in three years, we grew it from 400 million to 600 million, sold it for a billion dollars. It was probably one of the best exits Ryder had

ever seen. And all of us kind of looking at the market and seeing an opportunity and seeing what we were trying to do wasn't good. So what made you want to start Activate Group Incorporated? Well, what's funny is that, do you ever read that comic strip, Dilbert? Yeah, yeah. I swear to God, Scott Adams was following me around the buildings where I worked. I'd read the strip and I'm like, God, that happened last week. Oh my God, that happened last week. And I just knew along the way there was a better way.

There was just so much waste, which by the way, led to my book, Your Business is a Leaky Bucket, because I would just look around and there was this money disappearing before my eyes, opportunities missed, money just burned. And people didn't seem to care that much in those big companies. It just seemed like they'd cruise along. And once you had momentum, it was hard to screw it up, which as you've seen, some companies have. Then I worked with a few good middle market companies and saw even more craziness. And it just led me to believe there was a better way. So I was not only seeking a better way for myself, but I was like, this would be awesome if I could bring a better way to the owners that are running their companies. Yeah. I did that too, where I work for other

companies from time to time and are consulting with them. And you just see so much waste. And there's a lot of examples of that. Like you say, they reach a momentum. But then eventually it hits them and they hit a wall. Like there's lots of different examples of them. One of them is the company code where they're like, we own the world. BlackBerry might be another one where they're just like, yeah, we own cell phones.

There's nobody going to knock us off. And little Steve Jobs comes along. He was little, but you know what I mean? He was kind of little. No, he wasn't. I don't know. We'd have to Google that. Maybe he was tall.

I don't know. He had a little personality. Let's put it that way. So what do you guys do there at Activate Group? What's your target market, your client base, and what do you guys do for them? So our sweet spot is like the middle market. Companies typically start between 30 and 50 employees running up to thousands. And essentially what we do is we help them see because every business, every leader has a whole other level. And I don't know, Chris, have you ever used a personal trainer?

No. So I kind of liken myself to being the personal trainer, but for the CEO and their leadership teams, I've been working out since I was 13. And I can tell you that I even benched 400 when I was 18. So I was really into it, knew how to work out. And then I started hiring trainers and they started showing me that there was a different gear, a different way to work out. Actually, there was a way to work out and not hurt myself. I wish I would have learned that when I was younger. Well, the same thing for business. I've kind of figured out whether it's working out or in our businesses. When we think we're at max,

we're somewhere around 40% of our potential. And I see my job is to close from that 40% up to the 100%. And so we bring an operating system that helps leaders build out the operating system that runs companies. So they have an ecosystem that starts getting the momentum that the Goliaths did, but hopefully don't make the mistakes that the Goliaths did. And examples of those mistakes is having too many layers and believing that if we have more layers, those people are just going to bring more value to the customers than they don't. And I remember when I was talking to the new CEO at Rider when he came on board, and one of the first things I told him he could do is,

listen, you could just take out five layers in this company, and customers won't miss them, your employees aren't going to miss them, and all it's going to do is show to your bottom line, because they're not adding a stitch of value to anyone, but everyone believes they need to be here. Unfortunately, he didn't have the stomach to do that. And he kind of grew up in these monster machines, but I guarantee you they could have not had all those layers and they would have made customers happier and been more profitable. I really like the workout paradigm and how you're operating at 40%. I started working out about seven months ago for the first time in my life.

Every day I've been going to the gym for the past seven months. Well, not every day of the day. Recently, we started a thing where we take a rest day. But it's like a machine. Leg day, arm day, day off, leg day, arm. And so I've been going every single day sometimes i just go and do aerobics and we do a little ab work on the third day but for the most part just pushing it hard and you're right i've doubled or sometimes tripled the amount of weight i was initially doing

and that paradigm of the 40 percent of where you think you're 100 because a lot of times i was sitting here lifting going this is the most i'm ever going to be able to do. And now I look back on it and I took pictures and videos as I went through my journey. And now I'm like lifting the whole rack and I was barely at one or two on the steps. But yeah, the same thing is true. A lot of our business, we get locked in that paradigm and you're right. There's, is it sometimes that sometimes that people or CEOs feel that hiring more bodies, like you say, creates more value or maybe will create more revenue? And it really doesn't. It just bogs it down. Well, let's be honest here.

I just got off the phone with a CEO today, and he said, man, we hit a ceiling. We stopped growing. And the problem is the way their business model works is we need a lot more frontline workers, particularly in sales. They're essentially a sales and marketing company, and they have half the number of salespeople they should. So at the end of the day, yes, you're going to have a ceiling, but it's not a real ceiling. You just have to solve that people problem. And then all of a sudden you're going to hit the numbers, take that same company. And by the way, it's our mindsets that get in our own way, right? So that company came to me and they said, listen, we'll be really happy if we double this year.

And last year they tripled. And when we initially got together, I'm like, you're all sandbagging. A hundred sounds great, a hundred percent growth. But really, if we just do X, Y, and Z, we're going to triple. And they all looked at me like I was crazy. And then when we hit their annual goal like four months in, they were like, all right, maybe we should go after that tripling. But we had, obviously, I had them building the foundation. But going back to adding bodies. So typically when we hire wrong, we think we just need to add more management and it's going to solve the problem of the employees not doing what we want. And the reality is if we just did a better job of hiring right, and actually I believe

the number one measure, all of you are listening to this, the number one measure you should know at any given point in time is what are the percentage of people that are right people in your organization? And I know for a fact, when that number goes up, customers are happier, profits go up, management gets easier. Everything you look at in your business gets better. Now, we all know that, but when I go to a CEO and I ask them, what percentage of your people are right people? They don't know. They don't even know the definition of right people. Right people are the ones that live all your values. And they're actually hitting the performance metrics that you need that actually tell them and you they're doing

a good job. And so then you get there and they haven't defined the metrics. They're not really measuring everybody against core values. And then because of that, now they think they need to add management to make that go away. And if you solve that, you got the right people on, onboarded them correctly, focus them on what you want, you need less layers. Definitely. The more layers you have in a company, the more kind of extricated you become from the customer in a lot of ways. You mentioned, like I wrote about this in my book, one of the things I used to do is test call into my company as a customer and see what the workflow was through the processes of trying to get through a salesperson or get to customer service. And sometimes I couldn't get past my own secretary.

There's a couple of secretaries that got fired because I called in way too many times. And they would either hang up on me, not knowing it was me. They just, they're like, oh, hold, we got a lot of calls. Or they'd really do the most awful handling job of me. And I'd just be like, okay, after enough of that, it's time to go. But I would, a lot of CEOs, it's time to go. But I would, a lot of CEOs, they don't even call into the front desk. It's really amazing what you'll find when you call on the front desk and your stuff. You talked about identity where, is that some of the

problems sometimes where companies get off of their identity? There's a famous film about McDonald's going, you're really a real estate company. I think there's a few other examples. I can't think of off the top of my mind in business books and business lessons where companies have gotten off their identity and they go, we need to get back to the core, the basics of who we really are. And we're too, like HP got like into everything. I think they were doing gardening at one point. I don't know. Printers and gardening. They were doing so many things. They were just all over the place. And I believe they eventually split the company into two things and tried to silo things better. But what do you think about those thoughts? So there's a couple of examples I think are in the market right now that I'm watching,

and I'm curious to see what happens. Starbucks is an example. Starbucks got created because Howard Schultz goes over to Europe and it's just like this coffee shop ideas, man, we need these in the US. We need a place that everybody can go to. You can't go and talk in a library. It's too noisy in a bar. We need a place where we can just sit, talk, chat, have a cup of coffee. And that was the idea of Starbucks. And I think now when you start buying Starbucks in supermarket and Starbucks everywhere, that's great for branding. But at the end of the day, have you been in a Starbucks store recently? And I hope I don't get shot by Starbucks lovers here. They're disgusting.

I personally haven't because I don't like the coffee, but I'm a real coffee aphidigio. All right. So but here's the thing, the whole idea of Starbucks was not the coffee, which is why they added all that other stuff in there. The idea was the place to be and hang out. And I go to a lot of places where I meet with people and coffee places is one of them. Starbucks is always my last choice these days. They're uncomfortable. They're dirty. They're dirty. It's just not inviting for me to want to hang out there, which gets away from what I think the identity was.

Another one is Southwest Airlines. I fly, as you can imagine, a lot. My firm, I'm a firm. We've got clients all over the US and I speak all over the country. And Southwest used to be one of their biggest, it was lots of fun, lots of choices and low fare. They're not low fare anymore. And if you compare them right now to all the other airlines, they're at or above the full service airlines. So now we're paying full service prices and we're not getting full service.

There's something wrong with that. I remember you used to pay less at Southwest because they had a frequent fire with them for a while or something like that with their car. But, you know, one of the downsides was you had to fight for your line to get on the plane. They didn't, like, assign seats or something. And so they still have that. So you're still getting self-service sort of? Correct. And so it still have that. So you're still getting self-service sort of. Correct. And so it's crazy.

And by the way, I'm going to go speak to Car Wash, this association, 8,500 people in a few months. And our local Car Wash lost his identity. They were the most expensive in the area, but they really took care of our cars, really had that extra, all the extra things you would want, like the details and all of that. And then their heads went up to what when COVID came and they never recovered. So now you're paying a premium price for a crappy product. Why would you, you're laughing, but, but, you know, so often I go to a business owner and I'm like, why should we choose you over anybody else? Right. And they're like, well, good service. Well, explain this. Right.

So if you ask anybody in their industry to be serviced, they don't really understand their difference. And then so imagine if I go to seven leaders on a team and I ask them, what makes you different? And I get different answers from every leader. How do you think that permeates the rest of the organization? We should be able to say in one phrase or one sentence, this is what makes us special. Our business model at Activate Group is our clients see very high perceived value and actually refer us to the next customers. So there are long-term clients that are seeing this value. They refer us and our business model feeds off of that. So everybody in the firm needs to understand everything we do drives. So the client wants

you at the table with them for a long time. It generates a crap load of value. And then because of that, they introduce us to other CEOs. Our business model is so much easier. Now, what's underneath that and how we deliver it, that's what makes us tick. And that's what makes us special. That's what allows us. We had a client, they're a franchise. They come to us and they're growing all across the country. They're opening up a new location every month.

And in our meeting, they said to us, listen, Howard, there's no way we can change the way in which we price our business. And the reality was, is they didn't have enough of an open mind. And so I made them go out in the marketplace, look at the competition, see what the pricing was, the different tiers they had. And they realized there is a tier out there that our competitors are all charging for right now and we're not doing it. By making that one change, it was worth $3 million this year. So they're going to have $3 million and when you change price, 100% of it goes to your bottom line. They're going to make $3 million more because I pushed one issue. There you go. There you go. You mentioned earlier about the cleanliness of Starbucks.

And I remember I used to go in there initially in 2010, 2011. I was trying to write my first book at the time. And so I would go in there with my iPad, and they had comfortable chairs, and I'd sit in the loungers and stuff. And, yeah, you kind of feel like you're in people. It's kind of the same reason I go to the gym, but I have a bike machine here at the house and a treadmill here at the house and some weights. I know that I won't do them because I'm at the house.

I get on the treadmill, and I'm like, I got an email I got to go send. Oh, I got a YouTube video I got to watch on my computer. Oh, my gaming friends are on. Now, if I go to the gym, my gaming friends call me, hey, you want to play some Call of Duty? I'm like, I'm at the gym, man. So when I'm there, I'm stuck there. But now when you go to Starbucks, like you say, it's hard chairs that are – I always love when I go in a restaurant. I don't love it, but I'm being facetious.

I love when I go in a restaurant and they have those hard chairs that are designed to get you in and out of there quickly. We don't want you sitting around our place for too long, man. We got to get you turned. We got to turn a Bernie and get some other people in here. I remember watching an interview with the number one McDonald's in America, and they've been like the number one forever. I forget where it's at. Somebody can Google it.

And I remember they said, what's the secret to your success? And they go, clean bathrooms, cleanliness. And I was like, what? Do you, what? what cleanliness clean bathrooms and i mean i got thinking how long do i often do i go to mcdonald's bathroom but no it really is it really is uh a thing if you if it doesn't feel clean you're wondering what's going on with the food and i've been in a lot of places that are restaurants and gone in the bathroom and it's it's almost like a truck stop bathroom with all those little gas stations on the side of the road when you travel. You go in there, and you're just like, do I have a tetanus shot, or do I need to wear a hazmat suit to come in here?

Yeah, it's an indicator of how the rest of the thing feels and the comfort level there. So you make a really good point. So you've got two issues that you've mentioned along the way. I want to make sure the audience haven't missed this. So you mentioned a lot of leaders who never go out and touch the customer. Sam Walton was this great example of someone that on Mondays he'd meet with his team. And then the other four days a week forever, he shopped his competitors and he shopped his own stores. I can't tell you how many companies we've worked with where the CEO isn't regularly visiting their own locations and seeing what's actually going on

versus the BS that everybody is telling them or the delusion they have when they're telling them that X is happening and really Y is happening. You won't know unless you go walk around. The other thing that I'm seeing is too many companies too many leaders really don't know what their competitors are doing they know what they want to do they have this you know illusion of what they think their customer wants but they they do better than everybody else but i can't tell you how many times somebody say we are like the best

in the world at x and i'm like god we have two companies that are in your same space that are kicking your butts. And obviously we can't divulge, but I'm like, I think you've got a delusion. Get out in the market, go see what's going on out there because you've got a, there's two parts to business. There is operational effectiveness, which is, which is a necessity, but that's not strategy. That's not differentiation. And we've seen lots of industries. Like I grew up in the printing industry. That first business was in the printing industry. And you look at the big Goliaths that do billions of dollars and lose money. And the problem is because they're all doing the same thing. And then they do all of these efficiency things to get faster, better, cheaper. And the only two constituencies that are benefiting from that are the vendors

and the customers who haven't had a price increase in many years. So the only way you can charge different than your competition is having a business model that actually offers a unique mix of value that your competitors aren't doing. And then the last piece that you highlighted that I

want to make sure that everybody saw was you really have to know who your customer is because everybody's not the same and there's these different slices of the market. So some great case studies of why it's so important to segment a market and decide what piece you're going to own and then build around it is IKEA, which became this huge Goliath from most profitable in the industry that I know of. And they found this slice while everybody else was building furniture forever. Most of what we needed, we didn't want forever. And we're like, can we just get some cheaper stuff to right now I'm in college. I just need a few things here. And so they owned that. You look at Apple, they don't have the most

handsets out there, but they have 80% of the profit in the industry. When you go and you look at the market, first you got to figure out who your real who is and really understand them, talk to them, understand what their problems and challenges are that other people are frustrating them over and then build your model around that. And that allows you to now play on a different dimension. Very true. Very true. I agree. Yeah. Ikea, they also own the horse Swedish meatballs market. So there was that. Got to do the jokes. So, and you hit it right on the head. I mean, that was the reason that I used to do the call-ins to my office and play customer and see what was going on or if I got other people to do it. Sometimes I just sit there on a line in my own office.

But McDonald's actually has someone who goes around. They drive around, and they go visit the McDonald's, and they do random orders, anonymous orders. So they go through the drive-thru. They check it. They go through the walk-thru. They check it. And these guys are, like, anonymous, but they work for McDonald's's and their job is to go around all the franchises, all the places and make sure that the taste is the same, the quality is the same, that it's continuum across

the board. So it's really interesting. Let's get into touching on some of your books too, as well. Have we, have we, is there anything more we want to plug on activate group? So let's first talk about your business is a leaky bucket. Where did that come from? One of the things that I saw in my own businesses, because I've owned and founded nine of them along the way, and then I've been in these big lie outs. One thing that I saw is every business has these same 15 leaks, but they don't realize it. And that's where the most money is what doesn't show up on your financial statement. See, the problem with generally accepted accounting principles,

it only captures transactions. What it doesn't capture and what all leadership teams should be doing is identifying and quantifying leaks. I believe the main reason people don't really address the leaks completely is they've never quantified the problem. So if you go into most companies, and let's go to that number one measure, percentage of non-performers, all right, well, what does it cost you when you hire the wrong person? It's going to be anywhere between two and 25 times their salary, depending on how high up the totem pole they are and what they're doing. So we're so worried about what we pay them and the hourly rate that we're paying them that we're not really focusing on how much does it cost to hire wrong. And so I challenge anyone, I want you to open up

your financial statements right now. And I want you to go try to find that line item that said, this is what it cost me because I hired a dumbass. I am pretty certain you don't have that line item. We all have processes that we know are not functioning well. And those processes, some of them are crucial. And when we don't fix them, what happens? We turn over clients. We make less money.

We have to do rework. Everybody winds up frustrated. less money. We have to do rework. Everybody wants to first trade it. But have you quantified what that leak, that process break is costing you? So the reason I'm plugging this book first over the other one is I guarantee you the bigger your business, the bigger those leaks are, and the more you quantify them, many times those numbers are bigger than what's showing up on your financials. I remember that when I worked at Rider, I think we were making like $200 million net. And we did the leaky bucket. I mean, I was doing it all the way back then, that whole leaky bucket idea.

And we were like, look, that really should be $800 million. And this is why. And it wasn't like a ton of stuff we had to do. It's, listen, our largest clients, we actually lose money on. And by the way, this is how much money we lose on them. So it's great. You could say you do business with GM, but this is what it's costing you to do business with GM. If we just cut that bottom 5% of customers, they represent a lot of dollars in revenue, but you're actually

destroying the company with them. So you start looking at how do I make these moves and all of a sudden a lot more money shows up. So that book gives you a calculator so you can start calculating around these 15 leaks and what they cost you. The second book, your leader launchpad, what that does is it gives you an operating system to really address it long-term. Because here's the thing, we're all, our businesses are ecosystem. And whether you realize it or not, as a CEO, as a leader, you're managing six pieces to this ecosystem at all times, culture, team cohesiveness, human capital management, strategy execution, and cash. And at any given time, one of those six systems is probably where your biggest problems are, but you're having issues in all of them. And so your job is to figure out which one of

those systems is holding us back from scaling faster and further and more profitably. And then you double down on those, but you also need an operating system so that we're working on all of them at the same time. And the better, oops, I almost knocked over my water. The better the ecosystem works, the easier you grow and the more profitable that growth is. Yeah, the one thing we discovered the hard way,

that's how we did it in business, was in investing in like what you say, better people, investing in the hiring process. Back when we started, we used to, it's like, yeah, they can fog a mirror, hire them sort of thing. And we found that when we started all sorts of hiring, I mean, if you really put the investment in the front to hire well, put them through two, three, four interviews, put them through multiple sort of different interview phases, it makes all the difference in the world. Just all the difference in the world and the quality of people you're going to get. And a lot of people do that. And like you say,

as a CEO, I used to walk around my office and I knew who my great employees were. I would keep track. I knew what their names were. In fact, in one case, we had the insurance company reps come to us for a policy we were buying for all the employees. And they said, hey, this one employee has a lot of problems, shingles, and just a lot of stuff on her thing. I think there was two employees. They wanted us to kind of see if we can move off the policy or move out of the company, which is really unethical. And I was like, fuck you people. And I knew who my best employees were. I knew who my employees were, who were in that track

and field run position where they're getting ready to do the sprint at 4.45 PM. The lights are turned off in their office and they're just like ready to punch out and go out the door. And then I knew who my people were that they cared and went the extra mile and stuff. It's not like I expected people to be slaves or I expect you to work past the show up early and leave late. But no, I knew who those people were and I valued them because they put in the extra effort. And then I knew people that were just phoning it in and stuff. And you mentioned the 5%, getting rid of the 5%. I believe Microsoft and a few other companies had this mantra where they would turn over the lowest 10% every year based upon value at performance reports and stuff like that. So it was funny. When I shared that 5%, that was clients. And I can give

you another example of a client where 10% of their revenue actually came from 60% of their clients and they lost money in that 60%. Wow. It was sold off that piece of the business and got them to focus on the profitable piece and tripled the size of the company pretty quickly.

But it was a lot more profitable and a lot easier to deal with. You had far less customers. But going back to the employees, you always have at a minimum, 10% of your people are the wrong people. Most of the time we've done the analysis, it's 40%. Now, some of them can be coached to performance. It's actually bad management that's caused that to happen. But at least 10 to 20% of your people at all times are wrong people for what you need them to do. They may be right somewhere else and in a different culture, but not right in your

organization. And so addressing that is crucial. The number one reason companies perennially keep wrong people is they've never resolved that front-end process and they have never invested properly in the front end process. So it causes them to have to keep these people around because they're afraid that they're not gonna be able to replace them and they're not gonna, and even when they do,

they're not gonna upgrade them. So one of the things, and one of our clients on the West Coast, I called them up recently and he says, listen, I was just bragging about one of the things your firm beat us up on that we were resistant. And one of them was they had no full-time recruiter. So everybody was trying to do this part time. They all sucked at it. And then meanwhile, they're surprised when the

wrong people are coming in the door, they have all these open positions. It was costing them a ton of money because of the open positions. And I'm like, listen, just one full-time person that really knows what they're doing is going to change this whole thing. So fast forward, they were stuck at 30 to 40 employees for four years. They had enough business out there, but they never had enough people. Fast forward one year later, they had 120 people. It never would have happened. And that's what he was bragging about. Had they not gotten somebody, that's what they love. That's what they did. That's what they focused on all the time. And the person was not just placing ads. They were really recruiting and stealing people from know we have a leak, we don't have enough people and we haven't solved that, but are you investing enough? Do you have enough people working on filling seats full time to meet your needs? And then are you investing

as much money as you should? And normally when I go to a company and say, all right, so what is your budget for filling all these seats? We're going to add 50 people this year, 20 people this year. Oh, I don't have a budget for it. I don't have a budget. And if you ask every single employer today, everyone is going to say their number one problem is finding enough people and retaining those people. And then if you ask them how much that costs, they don't know.

And if they didn't know, they would be investing a hell of a lot more money because the cost would be easily paid for if they just put the right investment in place. Yeah. I mean, I've been guilty of looking at my companies where it's, it's okay, let's fill up the middle management and let's get a few more managers and fill up that middle a and let's get a few more managers and fill up that middle a little bit more. But then one of the things I realized early on with our mortgage company was we weren't a mortgage company. We were a sales organization.

So I was one of the first people to pioneer, at least in my locale, the telemarketing units back in the day. So we got a dialer, built telemarketing. Eventually, the DNC came along. So you had to follow the rules of the DNC. That was pretty easy to do with the computerization we had. We were one of the first and only at the time, probably in our whole region, companies that were doing the telemarketing. And I'd learned that from running Cincinnati Bell's local office for Matrix Marketing. And in doing that, we became really a sales organization. There were times where we kind of got off that and we got lost and we thought we were a mortgage company. We really weren't. We were a sales organization. We were selling mortgages, get your mortgage, blah, blah,

blah. And being able to provide leads to salespeople that other mortgage companies weren't able to do. They just hire people and go, hey, go on and call some people, meet some realtors and try and scramble up a couple of deals. We made it so guys can make $10,000, $20,000 off me and just kill it. And these guys would just be salespeople. They'd come in and within two or three months, they'd be making killer dollars. And part of it was their lead system and everything else. I mean, they could literally go to other places, get paid twice the amount of commission.

They didn't have lead systems. And they'd call us up and be like, hey, can I get my job back? Because I really enjoyed those. But we knew we were a sales organization and not a mortgage company. There was a whole bunch of processing departments to take care of that. But you had to make sure

that you had plenty of salespeople. So you were always hiring salespeople to expand what was incoming and then you can manage the rest from there. But I think a lot of people, they get successful and they start building out that center and it just becomes a monolith of just money that you're just throwing into,

what do you say, a leaky bucket? Well, at that point, you're just throwing it into a fire pit. There you go. What's interesting is if I asked any owner to, listen, I just want you to go put in this bucket over here. I want you to just put a million dollars in there and let's light it up. Let's have some fun. You'd be like, no way, I'm not doing that. But, and I'm telling you, million dollar revenue businesses are burning a million bucks every year, but they can't see it. And so for me, it's first of all, getting awareness like you did. Listen, we're a sales and marketing company that happens to offer mortgages. And then we can take that same core competency, move it somewhere else, be in another business. But we know how to build sales forces and we know how to generate leads for that sales force. That was your core competency. Now, you still had to be able to back it up. But

realistically, you could have taken your front end and somebody else be the back end of, we'll be the mortgage company and you're the one that's going to make all the money. Yeah. It's really interesting. Let's touch on your other book before we go out and talk about the leadership book. So what I realized was, and I don't know how much people are readers here, growing up, I was dyslexic, ADHD. Reading a book was tough for me. But after I started stumbling in business and watching all the madness around me, I just started devouring books. And my biggest problem was, is I'd read a book and I'm like, that's great. I'd run back to the team, I'd implement it. Then I read another book,

I'd run back to the team and implement it. And what I started seeing is none of this stuff came together. It didn't blend well. And then it kind of looked like to my employees that, oh God, what's the flavor this week? Oh God, we're going to go and do this. Didn't come together. So I wrote, I basically took the best practices over a hundred of the best business books and I've weaved them into a system and in a thought process. So you can go to one book and actually see what you need to do to build your company. And it gives you how to's, it gives you examples. And then obviously there's a system around it. Good. Leadership is a really important thing that a lot of people overlook. And so do you want to tease us on the five steps or one or two of them at least so so so what's

interesting is that i'll admit the marketing firm had me put the five steps on the front i'm just like they're not really steps they all interact but but the reality is for us to kind of win in business we need a strategy right and so one of the steps in there is so what is strategy and then how do you build one human capital management to me To me, first who, like Jim Collins said, then what? So we talk about how to win the game of who. And it's not looking at people as human resources. We use resources and then we throw them away. But assets are very different. So we look to people as human capital management. So when you want assets, you find the very, very best assets, you get them on board, and then you take care of them. And then you want to get a return on your asset as well. So we talk about that whole cycle.

And then how does it work? So those are two of the systems. And so there are five of those systems in there that they need to worry about and how to address them. There you go. Anything more you want to touch on before we go out? Listen, since we mentioned the books, I promise anybody who buys my book and implements either one of those books, it'll be a million dollar read at least. I've never met a business that it can't produce a million dollars for them, but what you have to do is be willing to sit down, read it, and do it. So I just want to challenge everybody, buy the damn book. Don't hire us. Just buy the book.

Implement what the damn thing says, and it's worth seven figures to you at least. There you go. That could be your next book. Implement the damn thing already. Just make a Nike and do it. Just do it. Implement the damn thing. What's that other book that the Star Trek guy put out?

It was like, it's that thing he does when he says engage or something like that. I don't remember. Yeah, that'd be a great book. I mean, that might be a hot topic. We've had some people on the show that they've written some four-letter word titles in their things just to have that action sort of thing. Well, it's been a wonderful discussion that we've had here, Howard. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and get to know you guys more.

So our website is activategroupinc.com, just like what's on my shirt. Whoop, this side. What's on my shirt. And you just go there and that's how you contact us. There you go. And thanks for coming by the show. We certainly appreciate it. I am so thankful for being here and an opportunity to share with the audience.

Yeah, brilliant discussion. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing. Also go to all the groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those crazy places the kids are playing except for Snapchat. We don't have an account. I have an account there,

but not the business. Anyway, guys, be sure to follow the LinkedIn newsletter too and LinkedIn group as well. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.