Peter: Hey everybody, I’m with the Jeff Jackson who, according to his Twitter page, is a top-50 daddy blogger, husband, a daddy, a speaker, published author and – this part I love – a superhero in training. But, more than that, he is also an accountant. So first and foremost, Jeff, thanks for taking time out of your very busy day to spend some time with me on my podcast.

Jeff: Well, thank you for inviting me Peter. I’m glad to be here.

Peter: Jeff and I, this is the first time we are actually meeting. We have been communicating back and forth via email. We were introduced by a mutual friend, Judy Carter, and for those of you who don’t know Judy Carter, I interviewed her in episode number 19. So go back and listen. It was an absolute blast. So I’ve come to find out that Jeff and I have a lot in common. Jeff, why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

Jeff: Oh boy, where should I start?

Peter: [laughs]

Jeff: Yeah, there’s a lot that’s going on. I moved to New York in 96. I’m originally from Ohio. That’s when I pursued my professional acting career. At that time, I had a MBA in accounting. I was working as a temp account and I worked for a bunch of different companies. My acting career didn’t work out after a couple years, so I went into account full time. We moved just north of New York City and now my wife and I have a couple of 8-year-old twin boys and they’re fabulous. One thing led to another to keep my creative spark going. I’ve been working on my daddy blog called Daddy is Best.

Peter: It’s a very interesting blog. I read this morning one of your recent postings about your son being fired by his friends and how memories are short with kids and they forgot they were mad at him or fired and he said he wasn’t going to tell them.

Jeff: [laughs]

Peter: I thought that was cute. You say that you are from Ohio, you’re from the Dayton, Ohio, area and you went the Wright State University?

Jeff: That’s correct.

Peter: Did you study accounting at Wright State?

Jeff: I did.

Peter: Did you ever have Maggie Houston as a professor?

Jeff: Oh yeah, Maggie is one of my best friends.

Peter: [laughs] The world just got smaller. I’ve known Maggie for a number years with her volunteer work for the Ohio Society of CPAs and I haven’t spoken to her in a couple years but Maggie was always one of my favorite Ohio Society of CPA members.

Jeff: Oh, how about that. Yeah, she was an adjunct professor and we became friends and then we actually shared some dinners together, I think. I was married to my first wife at the time and going to graduate school.

Peter: Oh wow. I’ll have to find her. I haven’t talked to her for a few years but I’ll have to reach out to her and tell her she has to listen to this episode because… man. You are a contributing author to the book Go Ask Your Dad, and that’s why I realized that you were at Wright State. How did you get into this book? How did this come about?

Jeff: Well, what’s interesting is that, since I’ve been writing my blog, which will be a little over two years in January, and I’ve also been on Facebook and Twitter, and I’ve really grown in my social media existence and participation. One of the things I came across was a daddy last year, about this time, who was looking to put together a book. He asked if I would be interested and I said sure I’m interested and I’ll write you something. One thing led to another and I got including in the book and here it is. I’m very excited about it. I’ve been passing it out to people and trying to get them to leave reviews on Amazon. So, if you get a chance, please do that.

Peter: I most certainly will. When we get done with this interview, I’ll certainly do that for you. So, this Daddy is Best, give me the essence of that. What is that message that you’re trying to spread?

Jeff: Well… it’s multifaceted. One of the facets that I’ve talked about before was that I want to keep my creative spark going and, since I’ve read my whole life and acted my whole life and told jokes my whole life, and so this has allowed me to funnel all that activity into one thing, Daddy is Best. I want to come up with a unique name for being with Daddy now that I’m a little older as a daddy, and I I thought it’d be a nice place to share my daddy experiences. We live in a dynamic environment just north of New York City, and by dynamic I mean New York is unlike any other place because there’s so many people here.

Peter: Right.

Jeff: And the people are not shy. The other thing is that my wife is african-american, which is cool. And I’m not, which is cool. We have a biracial kids and we’re just exploring everything that we’ve gone through while raising kids. It’s an incredible process. I highly recommend it. But the conspiracy is that, through history, people said “yeah I have kids, you’ll love it, it’ll be fun,” and it is all those things but it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done and you don’t know you’re doing it right. You’re second guessing yourself all the time, when you make mistakes you feel bad, and still somehow the kids get raised. [laughs]

Peter: [laughs]

Jeff: and you don’t know how they do, but they do.

Peter: I have a sixteen-year-old son and I’m 55, I had a child later in life, and you’re right. It’s the hardest job I’ve ever had but it’s the best job I’ve ever had.

Jeff: Oh, yes. Absolutely.

Peter: But there’s something about children. My son’s dr jekyll and mr. hyde. When he’s outside of the house, in school, he’s got a job, he is an angel. He’s an absolute angel. And then he comes home and you can just tell by the tone of my voice that, a lot of times, that angel leaves and the devil comes out. It’s like, how could people say such nice things about you and you come home and now all you want to do is give me grief.

Jeff: Exactly. In fact, I just had that talk last night with one of my sons, and my sons are interesting because they’re not identical, they’re fraternal twins, and their personalities are diametrically opposed to each other. I mean, one’s left brain and one’s right brain. It’s incredible to see how they develop considering they both came from the same place and I’ve heard the same thing from their teachers. Their teachers just adore them and the last time my son was giving me a hard time I was like, what are you doing this for? You’re nice at school and you come home to me and give me a hard time. I’m your dad, be nice to dad. That’s who a young person should be nicest to. And mommy too, but mommy wasn’t here at the time. You should be nicest to mommy and daddy.

Peter: I love how you reference your wife in the book as SMM.

Jeff: SMM.

Peter: And it stands for?

Jeff: Sergeant Major Mommy.

Peter: [laughs] I read that and I started laughing hysterically. That’s good. I think I may have my son started calling my wife SMM, sergeant-major mommy.

Jeff: [laughs]

Peter: I think, in today’s day and age with dual incomes, I think the father’s role has changed dramatically since the days of our our fathers.

Jeff: Oh absolutely. That’s something that I address all the time with my daddy friends on social media: how much the daddy role has changed and how much daddies have stepped up to embrace their role. I went to a school function a couple weeks ago and there were easily half daddies. Half mommies and half daddies. Daddies and taking a much greater participation in their kids’ lives than they used to do. You know when I grew up my dad didn’t take care of me. God bless him, I’m not pointing fingers or anything like that, but he did come up in a different generation. Things were different in their time. I understand completely. And now that we are being asked to contribute more, I believe we are contributing more. And yet, the hard part about that, the flip side of that, is that you don’t always get the support we need from wives or schools or the general public or society or culture or whatever, and that makes it hard for us. I see a lot of daddies being discouraged and frustrated about our roles as daddies, and it’s been a very interesting experience for me too, especially being an older daddy, and I’m older than you are.

Peter: [laughs] You don’t look it.

Jeff: Well, thank you. That’s nice. But, being an older daddy, I’m a baby boomers, and our daddies were typically the silent generation of WWII.

Peter: Right.

Jeff: Now I’m being asked to participate more and it’s a whole new side of you that I’ve never experienced before. Daddying is such a difficult thing to do, but I’m asked to explore parts of myself that I’ve never had to explore before. How do I deal with that and where do I get the support? Fortunately, mommy is great and she’s there for me every step of the way. Not that we agree on everything all the time, nobody does that. No two humans do that. But, she was supportive of me. And so it’s been a very interesting process: raising kids, becoming a daddy, experiencing what it means to be a daddy and experiencing my own personal growth in the process.

Peter: You also mentioned in the book that, between you and your wife, it’s a 50-50 relationship with parenting, with household, with all that stuff that goes on. My wife and I share that same kind of a ratio. It’s a 50-50 split. I gotta carry my weight, she’s gotta carry her weight, and all the way. It’s not just on one person.

Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. I was doing laundry this morning. I do almost all the laundry in the house. I do the bulk of the dishes. I do some cleaning. Plus, I do homework with the kids and and read and put them to bed every night. My nights are alternating nights for that. She’s home probably a little bit more than I am because I work nights and weekends, and so it’s probably more like 60-40 for her, but you know I definitely have to hold my share of the bargain. And that’s the way I look at it: it’s a bargain, it is a partnership, we’re in this together. She didn’t have the kids by herself. I was definitely there, at least in the procreation portion of it.

Peter: [laughs]

Jeff: I should be here for the relationship part too.

Peter: Well put. My wife and I have a deal: she’s a cleaner, she loves to clean. She’s borderline a clean freak. So I do all the cooking and she does all the cleaning. Because I am Greek, I was raised in a restaurant. Well my wife’s greek, she spent some time in a restaurant, but she doesn’t like to cook, which is almost a sin in the Greek community.

Jeff: [laughs]

Peter: But growing up in restaurants, I find cooking to be extremely relaxing because it also allows me to use that right brain side, that creative side, through that vehicle. And this is my second wife and this has kind of worked out really well. We found that middle ground and you’re right: we do not agree all the time, but we sure find a way to make it work and, just like you said as you started off, we must be doing something right because the kid seems to be well-adjusted and doing well.

Jeff: It’s amazing how that happens, isn’t it? When they first went to school, we didn’t know how they were going to be. You think oh my god I hope they’re OK. I hope they get along with people and they listen to teacher and all everything that goes with that and then, ultimately, after four years, they’re doing ok. In fact, one of my son’s is above his reading level in third grade. He’s reading at a fourth or fifth-grade reading level. The other son we’ve had a lot of problems with only because he has learning disability. He was diagnosed with a ADD and so it’s been a major major challenge working with him nightly, daily to get him to progress, but he’s progressing. And so somehow it all comes together, it all works out, they’re progressing, and meanwhile I’m getting more gray hair (because I didn’t have gray before they were born) and we’re surviving.

Peter: I feel your struggle with with the son with with ADHD because my son is the same way. He was diagnosed in fifth grade and it answered a lot of questions up to that point, but it does require a lot of extra work and discipline and working with that disability. It just adds a little more to the plate, but you know? In the long run, it’s all worth it.

Jeff: It’s all worth it. Nothing like it.

Peter: So let’s switch gears here for a second: I heard the word accountant and I heard the word actor and you’ve done stand-up, so you’re an accidental accountant as well.

Jeff: [laughs] Well you know, I got my undergraduate degree in marketing. In Dayton, Ohio, it was very difficult finding meaningful, reasonable work in marketing, and so I went back to my college advisor and I said, what do I do? He said we’ll get you an MBA in accountant, and like a fool I listened to him!

Peter: [laughs]

Jeff: and I’m good at math so I said that’s fine, and so I did. I did pretty good at accounting and I was fortunate enough to get hired by a big company out of graduate school. But I don’t really have the accountant je ne sais quoi. I don’t have an account mindset overall. I mean, I can do the work, but it’s just not there for me.

Peter: I understand. [laughs]

Jeff: When the opportunity came up to pursue my professional acting career, and I’ve been acting my whole life too, so I thought what the heck. I was lucky enough to actually start making some money at it for a while, for a couple years anyway, and so I took my show on the road to New York. I moved to new york city and I was over there for a couple years. And then fortunately I was able to support myself as I pursued my professional acting career as a temp accountant and I worked with a very big company. It was great, I got a lot of jobs doing that, so, again, my heart wasn’t in it at that time. I was doing temp work for a while. But then, after a while, the money started running out from the acting so I thought well I gotta do it full time. I did, which led to another series of changes and moves. It was difficult in this area to find accounting work. A sales job came up very very close by to where we live. I thought well let me try that. I’m a friendly guy. I can do this. After so many years in accounting… it’s really hard being an accountant, which nobody tells you about graduate school, because you sit at a computer for 8-10 hours a day, nobody likes you in corporate America because no matter what you do, you’re always counterproductive to what they’re trying to do. The numbers don’t say this but we want that, bla bla bla, so I said let me try sales. I went into sales and I actually enjoyed it a lot, but now I’m just looking to expand my creative horizons by going into writing and speaking professionally.

Peter: So you’re an accountant but you didn’t possess that ability to sit in front of a computer and be extremely… I guess the word is introverted. From a Myers-Briggs perspective, you’re very much an extrovert. You get your energy from other people, where accountants can generate that introverted energy. So you’re in sales. What type of sales?

Jeff: It’s retail. I sell appliances and TVs and work with a big company on the East Coast. They’re only on the east coast, but it’s a very big company, very well known in the appliance industry throughout the nation and they’ve given me some sales training and I’ve picked up some things on my own. That’s been growth process too because I was more introverted than I am now, even though I’ve never been a true classic introvert. It’s allowed me to grow, as well as with my parenting at the same time, and parenting is also about sales.

Peter: Oh yeah.

Jeff: And so it’s allowed me to grow as a person and as a salesperson and so now I thought I would integrate those concepts because there seems to be an opportunity there, and then I came across a statistic the other day that’s like three forty-three percent more small businesses in a short period of time, 5-10 years, than there are today. That means that those people are going to want CPAs or accounting people helping them with their books and managing their businesses. This is a perfect time because accounts are typically not good at sales, not good at marketing or selling themselves, and I think there will come a time when, as you mentioned, when the computer is doing most of the work. So accountants will need to be able to to market and sell and differentiate themselves and tailor their products to specific businesses or markets so that they can ultimately survive too. And so I thought that would be a great opportunity, and so all of this is coming out at the same time. I’m ongoing as a salesperson and a speaker.

Peter: That’s a very good point that you make. Traditionally, accountants have not been known to be the best sales, marketing people, but it’s not the seventies and eighties and nineties anymore. I talk to audiences about this as well. They gotta become better at building relationships and the ability to sell themselves, their firm, their services in order to grow their businesses. If they’re not going to end up ultimately growing, the way things looking and if there is no succession plan in place, then they will ultimately get bought by another farm and gobbled up. And even the larger firms. I think sales training for accountants is a must now, and they should be taking some type of sales training courses.

Jeff: Thank you, I think so too, and you know it’s not a mysterious process. I don’t do anything in my sales that is pulling magic words out of the hat to get people to buy. It’s more of just establishing a personal relationship and fulfilling the customer’s needs, and then closing the sale. It’s a very simple process but there are steps that you have to go through to be able to satisfy the customer. It’s all about satisfying the customers so that you can get the repeat business and people will come back and and spread the word because that will also provide more word of mouth advertising, which is the best advertising that you can get. So I think it’s really valuable for accountants to learn how to to market and sell themselves.

Peter: Yeah, and I think the big piece in sales. Those who are extremely successful at it have one key skill that they possess: the ability to listen in order to ascertain what the needs and want of the customer or client is so that they can match them up to the right service or the right product. I think, a lot of times, people when they’re in front of a client and they’ve got a service they’re trying to sell, that is the main part of their mind. That’s their “agenda” so they’re not truly listening to their client talk about what their needs and wants are, and then they’re not making that match. So I think listening is probably the key skill in sales.

Jeff: I think so too. I agree with that. Listening comes as part of asking the right questions.

Peter: Right

Jeff: And when you ask that question and you listen to the answers, and then you proceed from there because ultimately we want the product or service to match with the customer’s problem or need. Listening is extremely important because you have to make the customer feel like they are being listened to.

Peter: Exactly. That listening skill is not just sitting there, not saying a word, nodding your head, or just repeating back what the customer or client said. That listening, that’s part of it, but it’s also asking the right questions. So asking the statement, probing more, because I don’t know who it was… I got this back when I was a banker in my sales training. You gotta peel back the onion. You have about seven no’s or seven roadblocks along the way in order to find out what the true want or need or issue is, and you just gotta keep coming at it with different angles, with different questions.

Jeff: Absolutely. You have to do that. The difficulty for accountants is that accountants have the numbers. They have the reports. They say here you need this, and realistically a business or a custom may need those things, but you have to convince them that they need those things. You have to say okay, I think we need these things because this will satisfy this need. This will help you do this. It’s establishing a relationship, either inside of business or outside the business. Inside business and corporate America’s is equally important too because, as I mentioned before, nobody likes accountants.

Peter: [laughs]

Jeff: An accountant will say “hey I’m from Jeff from accounting, you have a problem,” and nobody wants to go through that process where they feel they have a problem. So you have to establish a relationship. You have to match what you can do with what the customer needs.

Peter: Exactly, and in corporate America I’ve heard the CFO be referred to as the CFno.

Jeff: [laughs]

Peter: We do have a stereotype, and you brought that up. Accountants have a stereotype in corporate America that, when we show up, we’re coming with a problem versus getting to know those other individuals within the organization, not just at a professional level but as a personal level, and when you show up have them look at you as Pete coming or Jeff coming up, not the guy from accounting. That changes that whole relationship. You’ve created, to some degree, a friendship, and you’re more likely going to be able to accomplish what you’re going to do if you’ve got that friendship role versus a perceived adversarial role.

Jeff: Absolutely, absolutely. That changes everything. the relationship… it’s a process, and once you reach your customer or a business partner and they understand that you’re a person and you’re trying to not only do your job but relate to them on a personal and business level so that you can satisfy the needs, it changes the whole context and dynamic of the relationship so that it’s not me versus them or here comes Jeff from accounting to tell me what I’m doing wrong. It’s like, Jeff is here too because he understands my problems and he’s trying to help me fix the problems, whether it’s in operations or sales or marketing or whatever.

Peter: Exactly, exactly. And the other challenge you will have in in this area is they might agree and say yeah we need it, but not right now.

Jeff: [laughs]

Peter: And I think the challenge is to bring the urgency to it. That, actually, they needed it then, they need it now and then they need it tomorrow.

Jeff: It’s a process, we keep going back to that word. It’s a whole process. Getting their need in front of them so that they understand the way that they needed it. That this is useful information for them. That’s true for CPA’s, the outside CPAs too, because the issue will come up. Not only in providing specific reports for whatever business they’re working with but the issue will come up about price, and they will have to be able to justify the value of the reports that they provide to the business so that the business can operate and still maintain viability or profitability of the business.

Peter: We, as accountants, need to be looked at as a part of the business, not the cost of doing business. We talk about the profession, that trusted business advisor, that we we are cog. We support everybody within. We’re part of the bigger picture. We’re not just a cost of doing business, and that’s the other stereotype that that needs to be broken.

Jeff: Absolutely. I hear that all the time. I’m more of a liability than an asset, and I don’t want to do that. I want to be an asset to you. Ultimately it’s all about the business.

Peter: Right.

Jeff: You want to run the business. We have to give the business what they need to be able to run, but there’s a good way and a bad way to do that. You can do that as a business partner or you can do that by banging heads and saying you need you need this this, it will help you, but I’m not really interested and I have no more vested interest in how your business turns. That’s where accountants need to turn the corner.

Peter: Right. It’s not about me the accountant. It’s about my client. What’s the best for the business? The more than I understand their business – not just the financials but understand their business – then, when I do have these reports, I can say you need this and this is why, and as you know in sales, to have that benefit. What’s the benefit for them? What’s in it for them? In order to get by, you have to be able to articulate that in a way that the person sitting across the table from, who might not be an accountant, understands.

Jeff: Right, absolutely. When I was in corporate America I trained a lot of people on accounting concepts and you can see the light bulbs go off when they understand. I mean, because ultimately accountants talk about debits and credits, which is confusing as heck, and nobody wants to understand that. It’s too technical, it’s too much math, blah blah blah. If you talk to non accountants about when you do this then it means this as it relates to the business. They’re like, oh, so that’s how that happens. You see the light bulbs go off in their head and then they start realizing oh ok, so that’s what accounting can do for me.

Peter: You basically described… you’re a translator. Because accounting is the language of business and not everybody understands that language, and you’re able to take the technical pieces of it and put it in context that the other person can understand, without using the accounting jargon.

Jeff: Because its technical and it’s complex and it’s boring and all that stuff. But it’s meaningful. It does have meaning and it’s important for accountants to be able to convey to their business partners and customers that it is meaningful for them.

Peter: Exactly, and I wish you all the best on this journey. Part of the conversation we were having on email about this, and I was giving you some ideas, and you were using the term sales accounting and I think I added onto it: sales accounting, it’s not an oxymoron.

Jeff: It’s not an oxymoron. It’s maybe two words that should go together.

Peter: Right. They’re two words that should go together, need to go together, and I hope that, in your speaking venues and you’re speaking business, that you’re able to convey that to your audience and have them connect with you on that and realize that I need to become a better salesperson, in order to help my business, my company, grow.

Jeff: Right. Function and grow, because ultimately it’s all about growth. If you don’t grow, you die, because who knows what’s going to happen to the economy… not only in four years but five to 10 years or 20 years. You want to be able to lay the groundwork for it now with technology and information and partnerships to be able to do grow.

Peter: Exactly. Jeff, it’s been a pleasure meeting you. I’m finally glad we got a chance to talk one-on-one. I was just completely fascinated by the the Daddy is Best part of your background and the accounting peace and how your weaving, really, all of this together into one, I think, sustainable speaking career. Hopefully, our paths will cross and we’ll meet person to person but I wish you all the best in your business, your family and everything you’re doing. Once again, thank you for taking time to be part of my podcast.

Jeff: Oh, thank you so much for inviting me here. I’ve enjoyed it so much. It’s been a pleasure and I’m looking forward to seeing you too, in person.

Welcome to episode 35 of the Improv is no Joke podcast, where it’s all about becoming a more effective communicator by embracing the principles of improvisation. I’m your host Peter Margaritis, the self-proclaimed chief edutainment officer of my business The Accidental Accountant. My goal is to provide you with thought-provoking interviews with business leaders so you can become an effective improviser, which will lead to building stronger relationships with clients, customers, colleagues and even your family.

Thank you very much for downloading in this episode. Today’s guest is Greg Conderacci, who is the author of the book Getting Up!: Supercharging Your Energy along with being a marketing and energy consultant, speaker, facilitator, trainer and teacher. Greg and I spend time discussing the difference between time management and energy management. Greg believes that we’ve moved away from those old time management techniques into a new and more productive method of managing our energy. Now Greg knows energy. He is 66-years-old and has ridden his bicycle across the United States of America in 18 days averaging 150 miles a day. That’s right, you heard me. So let me rephrase my opening sentence to Greg is an expert on energy management. Anyone who can accomplish such a monumental undertaking is an expert in my book. If you’re a CPA, accountant or anyone that’s entering their peak revenue season, this podcast is a must-listen. Greg provides a number of tips and techniques on how to get the most energy out of us and how to generate more energy when we need it. I’ll give you a little hint on one of these tips and it’s as simple as getting enough sleep. I know it’s simpler said than done, but if you can get seven hours of sleep a night that will help increase your energy and productivity. After we finished this interview, I decided to make this a three-part series with this episode being titled physical and intellectual energy. The second part will be titled emotional energy and the final part will be titled spiritual energy. The other two parts will air in the spring and in the fall. Now, one of my goals with his podcast is that it will help you begin to make changes in your work and personal lives so you can better connect with others and create meaningful relationships. Many people have said it takes 21 days to start a habit – but it takes a lifetime to keep that pattern. That’s why I created the Yes, And… challenge: to help keep these principles in front of you so you can build up your improvisational muscle. To sign up, please go to my website PeterMargaritis.com and scroll down to the Yes, And… challenge call to action and click to register to begin building the productive habit of Yes, And… and the principles of improvisation and remember to show your experiences on twitter using the hashtag #yesandchallenge. Now, if you’re unsure of what the Yes, And… challenges is all about, I discuss this in detail in episodes 0. So go back and take a listen. Remember, you can subscribe to my podcast on itunes, stitcher and google play. You can also purchase my book Improv Is No Joke: Using Improvisation to Create Positive Results in Leadership and Life on Amazon.com. It’s available both in paperback and on kindle. With that said, let’s get to the interview with Greg Conderacci.

Peter: Hey everybody, my guest today is Greg Conderacci and I’ve known Greg oh… it’s been a number of years, through our relationship at the Business Learning Institute. First and foremost, Greg, thank you so very much for taking time out to be a guest on my podcast.

Greg: My pleasure to be here. Thank you, Peter.

Peter: Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about yourself because I could not do justice to your background, to your bio, so I’ll let you handle that.

Greg: Well, as you mentioned, I work with you and a bunch of other great folks at the Business Learning Institute. I also teach at the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins and I do all sorts of consulting and training and teaching. My favorite thing, though, is to write and talk about personal energy because I think that, essentially, we’re kinda missing the boat here in the 21st century by talking about time management time management time when, really, I think this is the century of energy management.

Peter: That’s a really good point. I like that. It’s all about energy management. And you should be the expert on energy management because you are the author of Getting Up!: Supercharging Your Energy.

Greg: Yes, people have been telling me for years that I ought to write a book because I’ve been doing energy training, both through the Business Learning Institute and other places, for more than a decade. It started as almost a hobby because I am an ultra long distance cyclist and people would always say “Greg Conderacci, where do you get the energy to… fill in the blank.”

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: and and I say well you know this and that and whatever. They say I should write a book, so I finally wrote a book! I wrote the book this year, after riding across America last year in just 18 days. That’s about 150 miles per day, which is pretty good for a 66 year-old. I was the oldest ever to complete that particular ride, which has been going on for decades. So that was kind of a feather in my cap. You know, old guy, Medicare card in the pocket. [laughs] It was a lot of fun.

Peter: So 150 a day.

Greg: On average. 200 somedays, closer to 100 some others.

Peter: I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

Greg: [laughs]

Peter: I need to pick up a chapter in your book right now get super charged! I know that you have been an ultra cyclist for for a long time and and you have inspired me to get on my bike and try to ride further than the end of the street and back to my house. At one point in time, I was always training to run a marathon. I used to be a runner and I got bad knees. Because of getting to know you just a little bit better and hearing a lot from Pam about your cycling adventures I think, this year, the longest ride I had was about 26, 27 miles. It would have been longer but I had a month of bronchitis, but you were my inspiration to get on the bike and then start that. Yes it does take a lot of energy and maybe some Red Bull to keep that going, but yeah.. that’s outstanding.

Greg: Thank you.

Peter: And I got my AARP card so I guess that helps me.

Greg: [laughs] You’re now officially old.

Peter: Yes, but when you can get a discount I’ll take being old for a while.

Greg: oh yeah yeah. Well, it’s only chronologically old. It’s not necessarily physically, mentally intellectually or spiritually old.

Peter: That’s true. I have a body of an 80 year old and the mind of a 35-year-old so I think I probably even everything out.

Greg: [laughs] But you’re way ahead of me because people say I have a the mind of a 12-year-old.

Peter: [laughs] I like the concept…. Everybody talks about time management time management time management and if we think about a large portion of my audience (who are CPAs), and they’re gonna be hearing this interview in the latter part of January, they’re gonna be really needing – I like how you put it – they’re gonna be needing more energy. So talk to me about this energy management and how we’re in the century of energy management versus time management.

Greg: Well, okay. It requires, actually, going back a couple of centuries because, in the United States, about 200 years ago maybe a little more people decided that we ought to get folks off the farm and onto assembly lines, because that was the whole industrial revolution and one of the revolutions there, truly, was a revolution about the way people thought about time. I mean, if you’re on a farm, you get up when the Sun comes up you go to bed when the Sun goes dow. You’re on a whole different scheme in terms of how you manage your time and manage your energy. You might think in terms of seasons and, indeed, most people thought circularly. They thought like the cycle of seasons or the cycle of year. That really is the way human beings have thought, and many still do, for as long as human beings been thinking. What happened, though, is on an assembly line we started to think laterally because that’s the way an assembly line works and on an assembly line time is money. If the line stops you’re losing money and if the line goes then you’re making money. And so what happened is we really have to retrain an entire population to think time in terms of minutes, in terms of eight hour days (or 12 in those days)

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: And so we developed an educational system of which we are all victims still today. It’s all time-based. I mean you have certain class periods, you’re supposed to learn things in those class periods. You’re supposed to show up on time, to pay attention, you’re not supposed to ask questions, you’re supposed to do what you’re told, you’re supposed to do your homework. And all those are good skills for people working on assembly lines. Do what you’re supposed to do what you’re supposed to do it and the assumption is, of course, that you’re supposed to be just as good at two o’clock in the afternoon as you are at nine o’clock in the morning because that’s the way the line move. And last century, the 20th century, we got even more sophisticated. We got into sophisticated methods of time management and motion study and all kinds of stuff. And indeed, many people, including myself, took those courses. But when I do my training, I always ask people the same question to begin, which is have and taken a time management course? And of course many people have. They’re CPAs, you know. And I said did it change your life?

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: No, and the reason is, if you think about it, once you’ve cleaned your desk and organized your files and made a list and done some of the other things that time management tells you to do, you’re done. You’re done and no matter what you do you can’t get more than 24 hours in the day. You’re done! But you can get way, way, way more energy. So what are we doing? We’re working on a scarce resource. We should manage our time carefully, there’s no question about that, but we keep thinking it’s going to give us more time – it’s not! So the idea is: can we just increase the amount energy? That’ll solve way more problems because we can do that. We definitely can do that and the example I like to give to folks is okay it’s Christmas time and you’re going to get gifts. You may want to write an old-fashioned thank you note and put a stamp on it and send it in snail mail. So I asked people how long does it take to write a thank you note. Maybe five minutes. How long does it take before you send the thank you note? Days, weeks.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: and the reason for that is, if you think about it, it’s not that you didn’t have the time to write the thank you note. You had five minutes. You didn’t have the energy, and so the idea is to start thinking about your energy and what it allows you to do or or not do if you don’t have it. What I’m trying to do is to convince people to change the paradigm. To shift to the idea that, really, it is about managing your energy and understanding their energy flows in and out. Both for themselves and, you know, it was worked for companies, it works for organizations, it works for teams. When is the energy good and when is the energy not-so-good? All football games last 60 minutes but, just by watching, you can watch the energy ebb and flow over the course of that time. That’s the way life is too. That’s my – haha – quick overview.

Peter: I agree. I’m thinking about, at times, I have a goal to write three thank you cards a day and that would take 15 minutes. I have the energy, but other stuff gets in the way. Are you saying that I just need to maintain that level of energy for a longer period of time in order to get certain things done? When I used to go to an office, I would always get there like an hour or so early. Let’s say the doors open or business begins at 9, I would like to get there about 7:30 because I got that hour-and-a-half that nobody’s really gonna be bothering me. Once the open sign goes up I can’t get anything done because you’ve got all these fires and people and these gnats coming and mosquitoes and you’re just trying to swat them away until it closes the door. Then I can focus. So talk to me about that energy and managing that type of of day.

Greg: Yeah. Peter, I think you’re asking the question just the right way because time managers look at that as you should just manage your time a little better. Energy managers would look at that and say that what you’ve got there, Peter, is you have energy sinks. You have things that happen over the course of the day that will drain your energy away. So the example you gave is a perfect one. 15 minutes to write three thank you notes. No matter how “busy” your day is, 15 minutes? You can do that. Except you have a legion of energy sinks and distractions that are sucking away your energy. In your case, frequently it’s intellectual energy. So your intellectual energy organizes our lives, it focuses, it helps us do what we need to do, and what happens is that there are going to be a million interruptions and every one of those interruptions is an intellectual energy sink, and some of them are interruptions that you create yourself and some of them are ones that come in. In the old old days, back before you and I had gray hair.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: The typical interruption was you were in your office, working away, and a colleague comes in and wants to talk and have an unscheduled meeting. That’s the classic interruption, or there’s a phone call. That’s the classic interruption. Now we have much worse energy sinks. We have technology, we have instant messaging, we have texting, we have constant interruptions and, if that’s not enough, then we’ll go to our cellphones ourselves.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: The time managers say the reason that checking mail is bad is that you’re gonna be gone for a long time and the reason that you’re gone for a long time, the energy managers would say, is that what happens is that that email or that peek into the computer is seductive. There are other things in there that are going to draw your energy away. Yes, your time, yes… but mostly your energy and what’s going on today is people are trading energy, willingly, and missing the whole time component as well. So what would you say the average amount of time a millennial spends on a cellphone, in a day?

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: We’re talking three, four, five hours and then we don’t have any time. Well, the reason you don’t have any time is that your energy is going that way. And notice that, when you look in the cell phone, it’s not just a matter of time. The smartphone and the computer are playing with your energy levels. So here it is, it’s tax season, and ugh another form… but look! There’s a sale on Amazon.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: and what they’re doing is that is stealing the intellectual energy away from working on that tax form and pulling it into the sale on Amazon, which is much more tempting.

Peter: Much more seductive, as you say.

Greg: Much more seductive. If you talk to the people who designed this stuff, it’s not just a bid for your time. It’s a bid for your attention. It’s a big for your energy. We’re living in a society where… the good example that you gave is tax season. I have a wonderful CPA and I would gladly pay her what she charges me if it took her an hour to do my tax returns instead of however many hours it takes her. I’ll gladly pay her the same amount because I’m not paying for her time, I’m paying to get the tax return done. So, if she has energy-saving technology that will cut the amount of processing time in half, I don’t care. I’m happy to do it because I’m buying her intellectual energy. I’m not buying time. I don’t care how much time it takes to do a tax return. So the value that she adds is well worth. Now I know that a lot of people saying “value accounting value accounting” but I can tell you that my accountant has added thousands of dollars worth of value by making a five-minute chance comment. [laughs] She can add more value in five minutes than she can in five hours of doing my tax return. [laughs] And that really is the way this century is going. I mean, if you look at people who are making fabulous amounts of money, they’re making fabulous amounts of money because of the value that they’re adding. Not because of the time they’re spending. So the old model of we’re working on an assembly line… I mean, nobody works on assembly lines anymore, at least not many people. So if we don’t have that kind of job, why do we have that kind of mentality? Let’s look at where we add value. We had value with our energy.

Peter: I’m at a loss for words because that’s profound.

Greg: I don’t know about profound. It’s pretty obvious.

Peter: Well it is, but you put it in a completely different context that I think most people have ever heard. I’ll go back to the time management and all those steps. I don’t think it’s really helped me, but when I sit to think about when do I get the most done it’s when I control those energy suckers or, as you like to say, vampires. Vampires suck the energy away from you.

Greg: Right. Exactly. So we’re looking for the vampires and sinks that suck the energy away. We’re also looking at things that give you more energy. Earlier in my career, I was head of marketing for an investment bank and one of the things that happened while I was head of marketing was Schwab and eTrade and all these online brokers. So, before, you were paying a lot of money to get your broker to execute trade and now it’s like five bucks. So people thought oh wow, that’s the end of brokers. We don’t need any brokers anymore because we can execute a trade in five minutes for five bucks. What do we need a broker for? And the answer is that Schwab and eTrade may have disintermediated a lot of pretty poor brokers… but good brokers? No, that’s somebody who is a friend. He or she understands me, they know what I’m doing, they give me good advice. I don’t mind paying more to do a trade. In fact, I’m happy to. In fact, where most brokers went, where most investment banks have gone, is saying you’ve got X number of dollars were gonna charge one percent a year to manage your money. People do that gladly and that turns out to be much more money than they were paying on a per trade basis. What they did is they shifted the the price to value. Instead of having the price be something people didn’t value. Who cares how long it takes a broker to do a trade? Five minutes? You know I can be there for five minutes, he can be there for five minutes, but where he adds value is in the interaction and he adds value on a number of different levels, but mostly in terms of intellectual energy. I’m working on something and I can’t figure out how to do it. For example, I just sent a note to my accountant. I sent her a quick note, she sent me a quick response. She saved me thousands of dollars. Took her, I don’t know, five minutes. She’s gonna bill me for 5 minutes, or whatever it took her

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: and that’s silly because she added way more value. This is what I’m always telling her but, you know, that the tradition in the industry is to go by the hour. The truth is that a lot of people are getting into an argument over time. Fighting about hours and time and how long did it take you to do this and why’d it take you so long, and that’s not even the point.

Peter: Well put. I mean, I’ve been on a kick that this whole charging a client by the hour is arcane and we need to move to something of a value billing. This is what I’m going to do, this is the scope of the work that we’re going to agree upon, and this is the price we can agree upon, and I’m not gonna charge you for calling me. I’m not gonna nickel and dime you through the whole process. As long as we come to this agreement and anything outside of this then will be a separate separate agreement. I know our friend Jodie Padar of Chicago, she moved long ago into that role, but there’s still some firms out there that still do it like the lawyers do it. You keep telling me you want to add value and the value in in the product that you provide. Like you said, you can get done five minutes or it may take you five days. What’s the difference?

Greg: Yeah, I think it’s good point. I mean you’re much better, and there are lots of people who I’m sure are online listening who are much better, at discussing the merits of a value building. That’s really not what my book is about. I’m not even a CPA. But, for example, Peter, you and I do public speaking gigs and so on and so forth. I understand why you and I don’t get the same amount of money for doing a luncheon speech as Malcolm Gladwell does.

Peter: I agree with you a 100% percent.

Greg: [laughs] because he gets 50 grand!

Peter: Yeah

Greg: So that’s a pretty good hourly rate [laughs]

Peter: Yes that is. I don’t mind that hourly rate. I think I think BLI needs to be booking us at that same price.

Greg: Exactly. But part of the question that you asked earlier, and it’s a question that is going to be on a lot of people’s minds, is okay right now I’m facing tax season. How do I get through this like an energy manager as opposed getting through this like a time manager? My hat goes off to to tax accountants because I think they’re some of the toughest people on earth. When you say to me, “Greg, I don’t know you could ride across the country in 18 days,” I say I don’t know how people get through tax season. That’s, I think, a lot rougher. So my hat comes off to all those who are facing tax season right after the holidays. But part of it is to understand that all hours are not created equal. There are times when you’re able to get a lot of work done and add a lot of value for clients and there are times when you’re not, and a couple of things just, quickly, and one of them is the value of sleep. And of course this makes a big impression on most of the people I talk. They say “What can I do to get more physical energy?” and I say there’s only two things that I suggest. I don’t go for crazy diets, I don’t go for you know Red Bull and Starbucks double espressos and all that. Just get good sleep and drink a fair amount of water. People say “That’s it? That’s it?” The average American sleeps a little more than six hours a night, which is an hour less than 50 years ago, which already was an hour less than a hundred years ago. So what we’re doing is we’re pushing back against the DNA that says you ought to go to bed when the Sun Goes Down, which is human DNA. We’re pushing back against thousands of years of evolution and we think we can do that for free, and the answer is you can’t. I used to think I was a night person.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: But I find that I’m much more efficient in the morning after a good night’s sleep. I get a lot more done than I can grinding away at eleven, twelve o’clock. So part of it is, if I was going to talk to people going into tax season, I would say notice your energy flows. When are you really good? When are you really strong? And I’m gonna argue an extra half an hour sleep is going to pay big dividends the next day. Often, because we’re so focused on time, and I am too because I was a product of the same educational system you were, we’re so focused on time that we think doing this is gonna waste time. Alright. If you’re doing something that recharges your battery, like sleep or anything else that’s enjoyable, you find when you come back that you’re much stronger, much more effective and you can get stuff done that otherwise would take a longer amount of time. Again, since clients just want you to get the return done, I would argue you shouldn’t get points for taking extra long to do the return. You should get points for getting it done effectively and efficiently and with as high a quality as possible. And I know that’s what people want to do and so, looking forward to the tax season, notice there are some times a day that you are more effective than others. None of us are you know at 100% peak all day long. None of us. None of us. So what I want to do is I want to schedule the most intellectually challenging stuff during the times when I’m at my peak. You know, intellectually, and if you look at over the course of the day most people are really good first thing in the morning, and you know most people, first thing in the morning, want to check email, which is a low-energy activity! So, if you’ve got a bunch of stuff to do, take it on first thing in the morning and park the email for a while. Then ,when it comes time for a coffee break, make it a texting break and an email break too, because that doesn’t take any energy at all. Many people are actually very good right before lunch because you’re trying to get stuff out of the way before you go to lunch and not so good after lunch, which is food coma time. If you have a business meeting with a client, it’s probably smarter to meet them at eleven-thirty, talk first, get that all out of the way, then have lunch, rather than trying to deal with a client in the afternoon when you’re both in a food coma. So understanding what are the good times the day, what are the most effective times of the day, and scheduling your work around when you’re most effective, as opposed to the time management type of thing where you just kind of throw the dice. I did spend some time working for an accounting for. I worked for Price Waterhouse for a while, before it was pricewaterhousecoopers. A long time ago.

Peter: So we’re alumni. I worked for Price Waterhouse before it was Coopers too, so we do go back a while.

Greg: Yeah except I was I was a marketing guy, I wasn’t a CPA. And you know, I walk in the door and the first thing they did was hand me a Franklin planner.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: And I soon realized that it took more energy to use the Franklin planner than to do the work that I was planning.

Peter: [Still laughing]

Greg: Don’t get me wrong. The Franklin Planner is a great tool and it’s great for scheduling meetings and other activities, but what a lot of people say is “well, what I do is I schedule my activities, I prioritize them, I rank them,” and if you can do that, if you have to discipline to do that by all means do that, but that takes intellectual energy. I just write stuff down. I just make lists and write stuff down because I don’t want to think about it. That takes intellectual energy, but I’ve got the point where I make lists just like time managers say but I don’t go through and prioritize and everything else consciously because I think that also takes energy and I find that I don’t have the energy to do that.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: And notice different times day different things on the list are more attractive. Like writing thank you notes might be much more attractive when you’re having kind of low-energy than tackling the next chapter of your book because that you’re going to need some high energy for.

Peter: I tell audiences that, at the end of your day, you sit down and you plan out your next day. But every time I come in the next day the fires will be going to different directions. Whatever I had planned out was actually useless because other things came up that it’s like I wasted all that energy the day before trying to prioritize my day in the future, when just making lists and saying okay I’ll take care of this tomorrow and then coming and going I need to do that because I got this fire over here and I’ve got that fire going with this client here. Yeah, I make lots of lists. I mean I’ve got lists everywhere and, as you were talking about prioritizing your day or doing the most intellectual things when you’re at your peak, so basically I should be writing because I have my best energy in the morning. So I should be doing all my writing in the morning and all the other stuff in the afternoon. However, I’ve got that flip-flopped because I’m all the energy suckers – the emails and booking flights and hotel rooms and stuff – and then by the time the afternoon comes I don’t want to write. I don’t have that energy level.

Greg: Yeah yeah yeah yeah that’s that’s exactly it. You put your finger exactly on it. It’s the type of thing where it’s not bad to plan your day – there’s nothing wrong with that. So the discipline of being able to do that is is great but I remember going to my boss and he said “Well, I’ve got 175 things to do, Greg, and you are number 86.”

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: How long did it take you to do that? Haha, how much energy did that take? And how did you decide I was 86 and not 97 or 84? So part of it is that those disciplines are not necessarily bad and it also depends what kind of what kind of work you’re doing, and also your personality. I mean some people are better at this than others but what you just described, for example, is the the life of an early chronotype. Early chronotypes are better in the morning than they are in the afternoon. Most people tend to be better in the morning. Most people, most groups, tend to be better in the morning than in the afternoon and it’s why, in many countries, they just sort of knock off and go to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, which is not a bad strategy. There’s been formal studies that show that a 15 to 20-minute nap will improve productivity thirty percent. When I was in graduate school, my professor had worked for Lyndon Johnson and he said that what Johnson would do is get out of bed at five, six o’clock in the morning, work into the afternoon, take an hour nap, get up and then work for several more hours. Essentially, almost two days in one all built around that recharge in the middle of the afternoon. People are not exactly sure why that is the case but it seems to be almost universal that we’re going to have a low-energy ebb in the middle of the afternoon. It’s actually kind of interesting, too, because those of us who have ridden a bicycle for 24 hours a day, which I’ve done many times, there’s also a low-energy ebb in in the wee hours of the morning, like three or four o’clock in the morning, just to let you know, and it’s almost biblical.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: You read the Bible they talk about how dark it is to watch before dawn and how difficult that is, and it seems that there’s sort of a cycle (no pun intended) where those hours, 3 o’clock to three or four o’clock, tend to be a little low and that’s why, for a lot of people, it make sense to take a nap. Now I’m not much of a napper myself but then that often will recharge the batteries, or at least do something that doesn’t require a lot of intellectual juice.

Peter: I was going to ask you about that, about a power nap. There’s a firm in the Baltimore area where I was doing a presentation and I walked back and I noticed the the nameplate on the door said relaxation room.

Greg: Mhm.

Peter: I went [dog sound]. The heck is a… what? I opened the door it was a la-z-boy recliner and some water going in the background and I asked about it. They said yeah, if you need to go take a 15-20 minute power nap, go in the room, close the door and you can do that. And I went wow that’s kind of revolutionary and my wife has aunt who still live in Athens, Greece, and that afternoon nap they swear by it. But they are are also eating dinner at ten o’clock at night. That means the day kind of shifts out when you take that siesta. I guess you still have that energy, they work until maybe seven or eight and then they have dinner and they’re up until the wee hours of the morning. It’s a weird cycle but they swear by taking that nap. Even if you can’t fall asleep, even if you just rest your mind, because my other question to you is we all have very busy lives, we all got a lot of stuff going on, and sometimes I have a hard time falling asleep when I’ve got too much going through my head and I’m thinking about stuff. How do you stop that? Outside of drinking yourself to sleep.

Greg: [laughs] I don’t recommend that.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: I actually don’t recommend it for a couple reasons because, as you know, and people who do that will tell you, that gets you to sleep but then in the middle of the night you wake up. Often there’s that kind of alcohol balance. Again, I’m not a physician, but there is a sort of phenomenon where, if you do that, you don’t sleep all that well all that long. But part of it is it is a discipline, but it’s not much of a discipline. But if I’ve had a busy day, when I’m going to go to bed, I try to come up with something that is not particularly intellectually challenging. That’s the time of day to watch the YouTube video. That’s the time of day to read a book or something that doesn’t take a lot of juice. The danger is, of course, a lot of people say “well I’ll just check Facebook.” Well, what happens is A) you’re going to see something on there that’s gonna give you a shot of energy, either positive or negative, and that’s gonna get you cranked, and then you’re into the night. And I mean there are lots and lots of people awake in the middle of the night and they check email. And boy I’ll tell you: what that does is it just sucks you into the machine for 30-45 minutes. It charges you up even more so it’s worthwhile having a little discipline about what you’re putting into your head just before you go to bed. Now part of it also is, as a writer and I know you are too, often times I will tell myself that I really need to work out how I’m going to say something and I can’t quite get there so I’m gonna just sleep on it.

Peter: Yeah.

Greg: And I’ll wake up in the morning with the answer. So the brain scientists tell us that the mind is it working on stuff all night long and so part of what I do an energy manager is I let my brain do a little bit of work for me when I’m asleep because that thing that I’m struggling to do at eleven o’clock at night – boy, if I if I just park it at ten, do something mindless that lets me go to sleep, then I’ll wake up in the morning with the answer and there’s solid brain science behind that. The story that I think is fascinating is they’ve done research with rats where they take the rat and they run it through the maze and the rat runs the maze, and then of course because it’s a rat they have these electrodes in his brain and they can see what maze behavior looks like in a rat’s brain on a functional MRI and what they discovered is, when the rat goes to sleep, it actually replays the maze over and over and over again in its head, hundreds of times, while it’s asleep and the next morning it knows how to do the maze. But, if you wake up the rat every time that pattern hits the head. You know, the equivalent of an all-nighter at tax season. When the rat tries to do the maze the next morning you can’t do. It hasn’t learned the maze. So a lot of the learning and a lot of the stuff that’s been enormously powerful to be smarter and better at our job comes out of sleep. The scariest stuff is they’ve discovered that a lot of the cleaning out of the waste products that the brain generates over the course of the day – doing tax returns – gets cleaned out while you sleep. So if you don’t sleep, you don’t clean that stuff out, which is why you’re so fuzzy after an all-nighter. You literally have not cleaned the waste products out of your brain and that only occurs while you sleep. The long-term scary thing is that lack of sleep, lack of clearing out those waste products, seems to be related in some way, shape or form to Alzheimer’s. So we want to know why are so many people getting Alzheimer’s, and we’re sleeping two hours less than we used to. I wonder if there’s any connection. So part of it is the main advice for tax season is, I know it seems weird, but if you get more sleep you get more done, and much more effectively. And this is from a guy who races bikes 200 or more miles a day and when you’re doing that, especially over several days, main thing you need is you need to get sleep and if you don’t get sleep then you’re not nearly as effective. I mean one time I was working to qualify for Race Across America, which is the equivalent of a marathon or qualifying for boston, and in order to do that you had to be able to ride 500 miles in two days.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: And so when I was doing that I had lots of friends saying Greg don’t sleep, you won’t have time to sleep, don’t sleep. You have to ride 250 miles a day, on average, I said that’s not gonna happen. I’m going to sleep. Now do I sleep eight hours? No, I mean it’s a race, but right in the middle of the race I’d stop, check in to a hotel, take a shower, go to bed, get a real real three four five hours worth of sleep and then race again. And, you know, even though I was an old fart I was still able to do 500 miles in 40 hours and a lot of guys who decided not to sleep didn’t make it because they absolutely just ran out of juice on the bike. So even on the long road you can learn stuff that you can use during tax season or during your day job.

Peter: Okay, so how long does it take to ride 150 miles a day? How many hours is that?

Greg: Well it depends on the terrain, how hot it is. To ride 150 miles in the mountains? You know, that’s going to take you 15 hours or so. To ride 150 miles across Kansas? Ten, maybe less. With a tail wind?

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: You’re asking the right question in the right way. It’s not a matter of time, it’s a matter of energy. Over that 100 miles, 150 miles, 200 miles, how are you going to spend your energy? What I like to say is that life imitates long-distance bike riding because know every morning you got to get up and do life and you have to make decisions about how hard you’re going to work, when you’re going to work, how much we’re going to eat, how much more sleep, who you’re gonna ride with and how you’re going to think and what jobs you’re going to do and so on. So you look at the ride you say is it desert? Mountains? Plains? Is the wind blowing? Is it raining? And those are the same things that you face everyday. Your point that you made earlier is a good one. How long does it take you to get something done? Well, in a day with no interruptions and no fire drills and no crises? Okay, I can get this all done in the morning. In a day with a lot else going on? Maybe a little longer. But then you’re watching where my energy flow is going. When I do a ride, I look at the profile of the ride. Where are the mountains? Is this gonna be all uphill for 75 miles and then all downhill for the rest? Well, hey, I know how to behave and I know what to do with my energy. I know when the demand is going to be and that at the end of the first 75 miles I’m gonna be pretty tired, but I know that the next 75 is downhill so I’m not worried about being tired halfway through. I’m not ready to quit because I know the terrain and I know the kind of demand and I’ve done this before. And same thing: people have gone through tax season many times before, so the question is how am I going to make it different this time through? How will I make it so that I’m really thinking about my energy and not just my time? I mean I’ve been in firms where managing partner stands up before tax season and says all right now just allow 60 hours a week. It’s just going to be 60 hours a week. How do you know? I mean. if I was on his staff doing returns I would have to be working 100 hours to get done what a good CPA can do in 30. So how do you decide that? And I think a lot of people go on into tax season just assuming it’s gonna take what it’s going to take because it will if you do it the way you’ve always done it, but maybe it’ll be different.

Peter: Wow, yeah. I really have enjoyed this conversation because it’s got me thinking about how I need to restructure my day. Obviously, for me, I’ve got a few gigs in January then my business tails off and that’s the time that I work on new programs. I’m going to start a new book. I’ve got I got a lot of different writing to do and I will get up and I will tackle that stuff first thing in the morning and just concentrate on that that until like 11-11:30, then worry about everything else in the other part of the day because that’s what I’m at my peak energy and being able to see that landscape out there and adjust to it… yeah. For those of you who are listening to this, put it to work! Put Greg’s words to work and share this podcast with anybody who you see needs a little extra boost in energy because I think these are these are real strong suggestions and it starts with sleep. When my wife listens to this episode she’s going to say, “Pete, you tell me all the time that sleep’s overrated. You can sleep when you’re dead.” Yeah, I’m gonna be eating serious crow now. Greg, I can’t thank you enough for taking time. Just so everybody knows, he is dressed right now in his cycling attire: bright, bright orange with some bright blue going through it. How many miles you ride today Greg? I don’t know. It’s gonna be a pretty nice day. It’s going to be in the 40s. Probably 30-40. You know, just to keep the legs loose.

Peter: [laughs] Just to keep the legs loose… wow. Greg, thank you so very much for taking time out of your day and sharing this wonderful knowledge with with my audience. It’s gonna make a huge impact on their productivity, it’s going to make a huge impact on my productivity and I look forward to a future conversation with you my friend.

Greg: Great, we have a lot to talk about. Talk to you soon.

Improv Is No Joke – Episode 34 – Matt Horan

Peter: Hey, welcome everybody. I’m with Matt Horan today. Matt and I go back six plus years and he’s a brother-in-law of a good friend of mine, who I started with in the banking business way back when: Chuck Flint. And if Chuck’s listening, we’re gonna have some fun at your expense, probably, at some point during this interview. So you better buckle up, buddy! It might get a little rough for ya. [laughs]

Matt: [laughs]

Peter: But first and foremost, Matt, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to have a conversation with me today.

Matt: You’re very welcome, and thanks for the invitation.

Peter: Just so the audience to get a better idea of who Matt is, can you give us a little bit about your background?

Matt: Sure. So the short and sweet: grew up in Florida, I went to my undergraduate degree at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, had an engineering degree, went to sea for six years (never used that engineering degree at all), I went back to school at University of Florida to get a law degree and practice law for six years, in Orlando, before jumping ship into the homebuilding business. I went to work for one of the big home building companies. I was a manager and then ultimately ran the division of Southeast Florida for Centex, before my wife’s job took us overseas. When I hit London, the shores of the United Kingdom, I had to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and I decided I wanted to go into coaching and professional training development. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Peter: And I know you worked for a number of different companies, and you still do work for The Mind Gym, based out of London but with an office in New York, and your LinkedIn page states that you’re a professional development consultant.

Matt: I try. That’s right.

Peter: Can you describe that, or put a definition around what that is?

Matt: Sure, so I guess the reason I call myself a professional development consultant is what brings me joy, the reason I do what I do, is I feel like I can help people develop in their professions. I do some work with people personally, some coaching touches on personal issues, but for the most part it’s working with people who look I can empathize with. They’re working long hours, hard jobs, and if they have 90 minutes in a day (or a couple of hours) to sit through a training session, my job is to help them identify some piece of information I picked up over the years through my reading or in conversations with great people like you and help them develop their careers, and so that’s what I do. I run different training programs on different topics: leadership development, communication skills, presentation skills, although I’m not even going to try and pretend that I’m in your camp.

Peter: [laughs]

Matt: You know, how to deal with change and how to deal with stress and and all those things that I think everybody deals with.

Peter: Well I think you just described a lot of my audience, the CPAs. Especially when this airs, it will just be at the beginning of busy season, when that stress level is gonna go through the roof. You go to work in the Sun hasn’t even peaked on the horizon, and when you go home you’re going “I never even saw the Sun at all.”

Matt: Right [laughs]

Peter: And you just pray that Spring comes a lot quicker. So, you’ve got an engineering, naval background, you spent time at sea, and I like how you said you did that and then you went to University of Florida for law school, and at some point you mentioned about jumping ship, which was a nice tie-in to your time in the Navy.

Matt: Right.

Peter: But, obviously, spending as much time as you did with the naval academy and out to sea for six years, that in itself lends it to some great leadership skills that you were able to learn and develop, even at that point time.

Matt: Well, you know, I hope so, but I always say leadership is a journey. I know that may sound like one of those hokey phrases, but I do believe that becoming a great leader or just developing as a leader is a never-ending process, so if I look back on the kind of leader that I was when I was 21 to 27… I tried to do all the right things, everybody does, but I wish I knew the things I knew today. I would have done things differently.

Peter: I agree with you: it is a journey. Life experiences, over time, turn you into a great leader. Most of us don’t wake up one day, unless you’re Kennedy, and go “I’m going to be a leader today.”

Matt: Right.

Peter: And I think leadership starts with raising your hand and going I want to learn or let me do that. I can still remember, back at the University of Kentucky, during my freshman year, we had the dorm president, dorm counsel or whatever. I raised my hand and said I want to be dorm president. Why? Maybe I thought that pickup girls or something would be a lot easier, but, as you can see, I have a face for radio.

Matt: [laughs]

Peter: Some of us it is this innate want to be a leader. I think, for others, it may take a little bit more work, but I think it’s just stepping outside your comfort zone and putting yourself into these leadership positions.

Matt: Yeah, I agree. I’ve certainly come across people who have been thrust into leadership positions, and I don’t know about you but there have been certain point in my career where maybe I raised my hand and I said I wanted to take charge, but at some point I was asked to do something that was beyond what I had imagined I would be responsible for.

Peter: Okay.

Matt: Similar to when I got tapped to run the division crew, for Centex. I wasn’t ready for that, in my mind, and I think, a lot of times, the first time someone becomes a leader they have that exact same experience. I work with a lot of people in professional services to people who have succeeded very well in large multinational corporations because they’re technically excellent, and then they tap them on the children and say “You know what? Now we want to run this department,” and then it’s like, okay, well what is that?

Peter: [laughs] Right.

Matt: And they don’t put them through any training. They don’t talk to them about it. I think you and I might even have had this conversation at some point. People will say let’s go to school to be a really good engineer or let’s go to school to be a really good account, but I’ll just maybe figure out how to be a leader along the way, while you’re managing the lives of these 30 people who are looking at you every day.

Peter: Right. We have had that conversation. I’ll even pull a Peter Drucker phrase: are we providing the Peter Principle to them? Are we promoting him to the level of incompetence because they’re technically sound, and we spend the first years to ensure that they’re technically sound, and then say, okay, now go manage people.

Matt: Right.

Peter: Uhh…. what does that mean?

Matt: Right.

Peter: And how do I do that? And I think a lot of times, in like accounting firms, there’s this up and out mentality. I think a lot of people get to that management level and they don’t have the skills necessary to be successful at that level.

Matt: Right.

Peter: We should be providing those skills earlier, and in this conversation, versus the way that the baby boomers, back in their day, had to learn it on the job. I think you would agree that the job is moving a heck of alot faster these days than it did then.

Matt: Yeah, and you’re right: For a lot of people, it’s just not offered out there and you have to find time to read a book, to listen to podcasts, to watch TED Talks. Anything where you can pick up any tips about what it means to manage people because, going back to what you said, I think some people naturally have that pull. They want to raise their hand and so I think they have some sort of natural talent or gift, but even they need to develop. And if that’s not anything you’ve ever felt the desire to do, where do you start?

Peter: And that’s a good question. I’ll ask this in maybe a little bit of a different way: what do you think is the number one key quality that someone needs when they want to start thinking about becoming a leader? That they might need to work on that they haven’t fully developed?

Matt: This is a broad answer, but the first thing that comes to mind when I talk to people is, to be honest, self-awareness. It’s understanding your own strengths, understanding your own skills, understanding your priorities, your values, your expectations. I think, if you know yourself, then you can start to lead other people because to lead people you need to set expectations with those people. The minute you’ve taken a group of 10 people and you say this one person is gonna be responsible for the other nine, the other nine are going to start looking at that tenth person and they’re going to say, “So what does she or he want from me? What do I need to do to impress that person or to make them happy, so my life is easier?” And that’s gonna happen immediately, and so it needs to be clear in your mind what you can then tell those other nine people. This is what I want to view this is what I expected these this is what’s important to me. So I think that’s a key step.

Peter: Along those lines, you said that the self-awareness is to know yourself, and I think it’s also be completely honest with yourself.

Matt: Yeah.

Peter: I might be self-aware that I can do this and maybe a piece I might not be because it could be a weakness of mine…

Matt: Yup.

Peter: But I’m not gonna pay attention to it because I really want this opportunity.

Matt: Right.

Peter: But I think we need to be honest with ourselves and communicate that, okay, this is a weakness. I’ll take the role, but how can you help me straighten that weakness? The other thing that you said, with self-awareness… what’s my emotional intelligence at that point in my life? Because I’ve seen the equation IQ + EQ = Success.

Matt: Right.

Peter: And how would you define emotional intelligence?

Matt: Well, I mean there’s whole books on the topic, but for me it’s, number one, being aware, and it’s a great point that you said about the blind spots. And it’s an appreciation of people. Empathizing with people. You know, it’s funny. In business, you and I probably have a lot of clients who are in human resources. That’s the department that they run, but I struggle with that because I don’t think of people as resources. People are really special, and so I think it’s empathizing with people. Cueing in on body language, tone of voice when I’m interacting with people. What do people want for me? Recognizing that, if I want to build trust with people, and a lot of research shows that building strong trusting relationships is the core ability that people need as a good leader. So, if I want to build strong trusting relationships with people, I need to be able to connect with them. I need to be curious about them. I need to understand what they’re looking for and realize that not everyone in the world is exactly like me.

Peter: Right. Would you also say that failure is an option, and we can’t be perfect?

Matt: Oh yeah, that’s great. Absolutely true.

Peter: As a leader, if my people see when I make a mistake and I’m accountable for that, that says a lot. Versus I didn’t make a mistake. That was everybody else’s fault. It wasn’t about me.

Matt: Agreed, and I think you’ve probably heard of the window and the mirror parable, or analogy: a good leader, when he sees or she sees that something is done well by the team, looks at a window and says “look outside the window at my team. They’re the ones that did it.” And when something goes wrong they flip around to mirror and say “look, it’s me, it’s my responsibility.” Not just taking responsibility for it but, as you say, owning up to it because, you’re right, people can see through it. You lose credibility and you lose trust right away.

Peter: People can read body language a lot better, sometimes, than they can read the words coming out of somebody’s mouth and I think you can tell when people are genuine in their response because it really comes through the body language. You mentioned about working with those in human resources.

Matt: Right.

Peter: A friend of mine, who I’m going to be interviewing here a few weeks, named John Kelly is the chief people officer for White Castle Systems.

Matt: Yeah.

Peter: And I thought that was a nice twist that they put on that role of I’m in charge of the workforce, I’m in charge of the people. I think resource becomes almost a buzzword,

Matt: Yeah, and I’ve seen some companies shifting to the the people officer terminology. I think a good move.

Peter: Yeah, it just humanizes it all.

Matt: Right.

Peter: Whether it’s an audience of Engineers or an audience of creative people, I ask the question “what business are you in?” And I’ll get, you know, from accounting to auditing and whatever. I’m an artist. No. The main line of business you’re in is the people business, first and foremost. Because if you’re an artist and you have no one to sell to, you’re still going to be starving.

Matt: Right, right.

Peter: If you’re an accountant and you have no clients to sell, you’re going to be out of business. So we’re all in the people business and I think the more that we can recognize our emotional intelligence… but let’s take this: you’re an engineer, I’m an accountant. We’re on on that right, very linear side of the brain. You know… feelings? At work?!

Matt: Right, right.

Peter: Nothing personal, just business.

Matt: Right.

Peter: The Mark Cubans of the world.

Matt: Right, there’s no crying in baseball.

Peter: Yeah, there’s no crying in baseball. There’s no crying in the office but we know that it happens, and we need to empathize more with the people around us and create a different type of work atmosphere.

Matt: Yeah, I agree. And something just occurred to me, when you said failure is an option, if I can revisit that for a second because this just occurred to me. We’re saying it’s a really good idea to hold your hand up and say “look I made a mistake” and to expect that a great leader will do that, but also it’s worth recognizing that that’s not easy to do. When you’ve been put into a leadership position for the first time, it’s not easy to do. The other thing that I think is really important, other than being able to raise your hand and say I made a mistake, one of the key learnings I had early on is to admit when you don’t know, because I don’t know about you but I know I never wanted to admit that I didn’t know the answer to something if someone came. But I still remember the first time I was in a meeting with someone who I respected as a leader two levels up, and as we’re going around something came up and I didn’t understand what was being said. I thought, well, it’s because I’m the new guy, and she raised her hand and said “Can we start over again? I have no idea what we’re talking here. This doesn’t make any sense to me,” and it wasn’t that the person wasn’t communicating it really well. It was a new concept, and I thought I didn’t lose any respect for her. In fact, I gained respect for her and so I started doing that. Maybe the people that work for might say that Matt certainly didn’t know what was going on most of the time.

Peter: [laughs]

Matt: But I was happy to admit it.

Peter: That is a good point. Some people say fake it till you make, but no. It’s not that. If you don’t know something, you don’t understand something, then you gotta ask the question. People are afraid to raise their hand say could you repeat that because we don’t want to look stupid. We don’t want to ask that stupid question but I always say the stupid question is the one that’s never asked.

Matt: Right

Peter: And also the stupid question is the one that you keep asking over and over and over and over and over. That becomes a stupid question because you ask the question, you learn from it and you move on, and hopefully don’t run into that same issue again. But I think there’s that fear of failure, and to the failure part would you agree with this: that if I went to my boss and say that I screwed up, I did something wrong, I had an error somewhere. That should be followed up with, “but here’s how I think we could fix it.”

Matt: Oh, absolutely. Versus just bringing the problem, right. I absolutely agree and I think there was a lesson that I learned from from a gentleman that I had a chance work with for a while, he was a great guy. West Point graduate, former professor at West Point, teaches leadership experiences at Gettysburg. He tells the story of an army officer in the civil, whose name I can’t recall, who sent a note up to his commander to say this is what I intend to do, unless I hear differently from you, and I tell people to do that all the time. When you’re in charge of something, decide what you want to do, make it clear to your boss and your people this is what you’re doing, and do it. Say this is what I’m gonna do unless you think I should do otherwise, and if they disagree they’ll let you know but at least they know you’re taking the initiative. You’re doing it, and they’ll stop you if you’re going to make a mistake. They’ll jump in. One of the things I think is leading people is how you coach the people that work for you around that same dilemma, and that is now you’re the boss and everybody’s coming to you to take up your time right. What I used to do and what I coach people to do is start asking them. “Help me understand this problem, what do you want to do about it?” And maybe after five or six times, depending upon that person, they will now start coming to you saying “Hey, Peter, this is my problem and this is what I think I’m gonna do about it because I know you’re just gonna ask me anyway.”

Peter: [laughs]

Matt: Skip that step and let’s say this is what I’m going to do. It helps them grow and it makes your life a little bit easier.

Peter: Yeah, a similar experience happened to me years ago. I went to my boss without a huge error that I made in a spreadsheet to about half a million, 3/4 million dollars. My boss at the time, you know most people kind of feared her, but I could make her laugh. Long story short, when I went in and told her of the problem I thought she was gonna chew me up and spit me out, but she was calm, cool and collected and said everything was fine, and then she said these words: “What’s your solution?” And then she saw the panic come about me and then she did all tasmanian devil on me. I walked in with a 36-inch waist and I walked out with a 32-inch waist.

Matt: [laughs]

Peter: But I never came back to her, or anybody, after that point, when I had a problem. I would have some idea of how we could fix it. It might be right, it’s probably going to be wrong, but, as we say in improv: bad ideas are just bridges to good ideas. No ideas, in this case, almost got me killed.

Matt: Right.

Peter: The idea that you bring or the solution that you come to might not be the correct solution, but it starts the conversation.

Matt: Right, it shows that you’re adding value. I think the first partner that I ever worked for, when I started practicing law, my first mentor, said, “Here’s my advice to you: don’t have two things open on your desk at any one time. Open a file, work on it, close it before you move to the next one.” I don’t know if, in today’s world, that’s possible. But the second piece of advice he said “Anything you touch, add value to it.” It’s not enough that you’re just building time while you’re working on something. Once it’s left your possession, you need to have added value to the client with what you did. That really resonated with me because they don’t teach you that in law school.

Peter: [laughs]

Matt: So to me, if I’m handed a problem, what value can I add? Even if it’s just I’m gonna start asking questions about it.

Peter: So you’re working on a client, you’re working on a file, and you you’re in process mode. When you’re done, what have you done to that file to enhance it to “add value” to it?

Matt: Right.

Peter: Because I like how you put it. When you’re coming in and you’re asking questions and you’re doing and you’re probing, you’re actually adding value to that process. So how do you do that if it’s in somewhat of a vacuum? You might be working on a client file and you’re finished with it and you close that file. What’s inside of that file that adds value, prior even any discussion?

Matt: I don’t know. I don’t think there was ever a time when I could just open the file and close it and not have to document, somewhere, what I was doing. So it was either a memorandum, and you had to try and do it while it was fresh in your mind, or drafting a document. Something that captured what you thought because, as you’re starting off, that a value that you bring. And if I try to think even outside of law, these days it’s here’s something I’ve seen, let me put an email together to summarize my thoughts or questions and moving it along so that we’re closer to achieving whatever the goal is. Not just sitting back and saying I’ll come back to this later, which that never happens.

Peter: Right, and the term adding value, in a lot of ways, I think it’s been viewed as a buzzword because it’s so overused. Except now I thought, I think for the first time, I’ve actually heard somebody put a definition or describe what true adding value is, especially in this situation. I just wrote it down: adding value is basically your thoughts, your perception of how you think this should go, and being able to communicate that in a manner that somebody else can understand. I think that might be, in my mind, the new definition of what adding value really is.

Matt: Mm. Sounds okay to me.

Peter: How are we gonna brand this? The Matt Horan view of adding value?

Matt: [laughs]

Peter: I think we should get that trademarked.

Matt: Yeah, let’s timestamp that.

Peter: Let’s think this through a little more. You are an attorney, you can probably file the proper paperwork.

Matt: [laughs]

Peter: I don’t think you have to call LegalZoom or anything like that.

Matt: Right.

Peter: And you can get that done. To your point, as I move forward from this podcast, whether it’s seminars or conferences or things that I work on, I’m gonna ask who has the definition of adding value? And it goes back to my one point: I think it’s an overused buzzwords that we haven’t really thought about what it means, but we use it a lot. I think you put some meat on that bone, my friend.

Matt: Okay, well let me know if you pick up any traction and I’m happy to give you credit for it because you summarized what I rambled.

Peter: It wasn’t rambling. it really makes sense and it really resonated because, if you remember in my in the book, I wrote a chapter on corporate buzzwords and how it’s overused. And the more we hear these buzzwords, the more we quit listening.

Matt: Right

Peter: But now you put some meat on the bone. We say add value, but tell me how you added that value. Most people go uhhhh.. but it’s the memo, it’s maybe the call to the client. It’s something that we’ve done that we’ve been able to document to move that process forward, because adding value would be moving the process ahead versus, as you said, I’ll get to this later.

Matt: Right. Let me take a look at it and I’ll come back to that. I need to sit and think on it, which is fine if that turns out to create something at the end.

Peter: Yeah, so your point is, if we think about it now while it’s still fresh in my mind because, as we were talking about earlier, before we started the podcast, we were talking about how much we can forget walking from one room to the next.

Matt: I can’t believe you outed me in front of all your listeners.

Peter: Well, no, I’m out all of us because. I’ll out myself and I’ll tell you this: I could get out of the shower and dry off and I’ll forget a great idea I had in the shower, so actually I went on Amazon and bought this thing called Aqua Notes.

Matt: Yeah.

Peter: I hang it in my shower and it has waterproof pencil so I have to write stuff down in the shower. Next I gotta buy a new pack because I keep burning through them.

Matt: [laughs]

Peter: But to your point, you know, especially in today’s hectic lives, whether you’re an engineer or an attorney or an accountant or a salesperson, we’re running at such a high speed that, if we don’t take the time and focus for a moment to get those thoughts out so we can add value, if we come back later, we’re not going to remember everything that we had when it was fresh in our minds.

Matt: No, I agree and I think you have to create space. When you commit to adding value to clients work, or anything you’re working on, you need to create space for yourself to do it. I’m sure you’re familiar, but there’s research out there about how long it takes us to refocus once our email alert comes on, even if we just hear it, and then if we glance up at it how long does it take for our physiology to reset to where it was before that happened? I want to say… you know this like 60% of statistics are made up in the moment? I’m gonna say, though, if I remember correctly, it’s about eight or nine seconds for us to refocus our our vision, but it takes maybe two-and-a-half to three minutes for our body to resettle to where it was before. You know, if that email makes us anxious or excited or angry. The bottom line is to create value for what you’re working on and remove all those distractions.

Peter: What did you just say? No, just kidding. [laughs]

Matt: [laughs]

Peter: I was at a conference and somebody made a comment that the average attention span is about six seconds. He pauses for a moment and I raised my hand and I said, “What did you say?” And he started to say it again and I was like, just making a point. But, if we have a hard time with our attention span, what if you’re an ADHD / dyslexic accountant? You can imagine how hard it is to maintain focus.

Matt: Yeah.

Peter: So welcome to my world.

Matt: [laughs]

Peter: Squirrels are running everywhere.

Matt: Right, right. I saw the the coolest contraption today and it’s a six-sided cube and it has little things, like little buttons or knobs or different things that you can click on all six sides, so you can just get some of that energy out while you’re trying to focus on something else.

Peter: I play with poker chips.

Matt: Ohh

Peter: When I’m sitting there in the times, if I have energy and I’m talking, I just like fiddle around with some poker chips. Do you think we can truly multitask?

Matt: So that is such a great question, right? Because, for years, my response has always been no. I’ll say this: there is no research out there that I’m aware of that proves that you can effectively multitask. All any research that I’ve seen says that you really do lose a lot of focus when you move from one thing to another and try to do them at the same time, and that’s what I’ve been saying to groups for years. But I tell you what, as younger people are coming to my workshops and I’m meeting them and seeing them, they will fight me vehemently on that one. They’re like, I’ve grown up multitasking and I can do all these things. So I don’t know. I’m open to the possibility but, personally, I have not been convinced yet that you can.

Peter: I’m convinced that you can’t. I think the situation that they think they can multitask is when they’re on the phone in a seminar, but if you just wait a few seconds and say excuse me can you tell me what I just said? And they won’t be able to.

Matt: Mmm.

Peter: John Barlow was on an earlier episode and his theory was you can’t multitask with the same side of your brain.

Matt: Hm.

Peter: He’s a drummer and he said that’s the only way he’s been able to multitask because he’s using both sides of his brain when he’s playing the drums.

Matt: Hm.

Peter: He can be successful at that but he can’t drive a car and text.

Matt: Oh yeah.

Peter: Or multitasking, and we’ll talk about leadership and attributes. So, if I’m the boss and somebody comes in and asks to take a few minutes of your time, sure, come on have a seat across the table, but I’ve got my desktop right here or I have my laptop and I’m not completely focused on this conversation because I’m looking over here.

Matt: Right.

Peter: I become distracted with the dings and I’m not hearing everything you’re saying, and you start to wonder if I’m even hearing anything that you’re saying.

Matt: Yeah, yeah. So now you’re not doing anything really well. You’re not doing anything 100% because whatever email is coming through you’re not focused on, you’re losing trust with that person, you’re potentially dealing with management issues and leadership issues that you’re going to have in the future because this person will want to go work for someone else who pays attention, or you missed what they said. There’s such a power to being present, in the moment, and I know that has kind of new agey sound to it but I totally agree that, in leadership, you need to be present – and people will appreciate it.

Peter: Being present, being in the moment and being focused are also some of the principles of improvisation. So it’s not it’s not new agey, per se.

Matt: [laughs] right

Peter: Because you have to be you have to be really listening to that person and, in my workshops when I’m demonstrating this point, we’ll play this game called Last Words Spoken. I will start off a sentence and, whatever conversation is, when I stop it that last word becomes your first word, and we’re trying to make this cohesive sentence. Then you carry that off and then your last word becomes my first word.

Matt: Right.

Peter: And it demonstrates that, a lot of times, if we’re not listening all the way through that sentence – if we’re for interrupting or we’ve already formed own agenda – we may be missing the biggest piece there, from them, and the more that we can listen to what they’re saying, the better the leader that we will become.

Matt: Yeah, so that’s a really interesting lesson. It’s so funny. I think it’s pretty universal. It’s a lesson I learned in coaching too. As a coach, as human beings, we’re listening to our clients tell us our problems. It’s the same thing I did as a manager. I’m trying to help them come up with solutions and what do we? We get in solution mode, someone starts talking, “I’ve got this problem,” we listen listen listen and then oh wait there it is. I have the solution. Now I’m not listening anymore. I’m just waiting for them to finish speaking so I can share my solution with them and then I miss all the other stuff. So I tell people don’t worry about being clever when you’re coaching an employee. Don’t worry about being clever and having a solution. Just be curious. Just continue listening until they finish that last sentence and then trust yourself to come up with where you need to go from there – and it makes a lot easier, to be honest.

Peter: It does. Studies have shown that when you’re finished talking, and if I pause for just a brief moment, the the person that you’re conversing with the level of respect is now notched up because they’re going he or she is now listening to me. That pause also allows you to formulate your next thought, whether it’s a question or statement or comment. All the while, I say you just park that agenda that you came in there with.

Matt: right

Peter: And explore those ideas. I love another terminology in Improv: it’s don’t bring a cathedral, bring a prick.

Matt: Hmm

Peter: We see, a lot of times, we’ve got a problem and I want everybody to meet. We get together and I’m asking everyone their opinion and then I go well no, I came up with the idea. This is what we’re gonna do.

Matt: right

Peter: and we’re sitting there like just wasted 45 minutes of my life because you should have just come in said this is what we’re going to do because you had already made up your mind. You brought the cathedral and… now we want to throw our bricks at you.

Matt: Right right right [laughs] and thank you for, you know, not honoring this brick that I spent all this time making by hand, too, right?

Peter: Right

Matt: I was just talking to some leaders this week about making decisions and not letting our unconscious minds creep into our decisions, and as a leader not anchoring the decisions of your team. So coming in and saying “hey this is what I think we should do. What does everybody else think?” Let’s brainstorm, you know, what does everybody else think? Well of course there are already thinking about what you just told them.

Peter: Good point.

Matt: So don’t show them the picture of the cathedral.

Peter: [laughs] But that is a good point. If he truly wants to solicit their ideas he should come in and say here’s our problem.

Matt: Right

Peter: Tell me what you think. A lot of times, to your point, we might be intimidated about what we say because we don’t want to say something stupid or be perceived as wrong. I’ll have a bad idea. So I challenged those leaders to be one of the first ones to throw out a bad idea, just to set the set the mood in the room a little better. If he can do it maybe I can start throwing stuff out and it’s creating that culture for it.

Matt: Right. I don’t know if you’ve seen this quote, I just saw it this week and I introduced it already in a creativity session I was doing. It is “if you are afraid to share a bad idea, just remember that at some point in time some people sat around a table and said ‘let’s make a movie about a tornado full of sharks.’”

Peter: [laughs] I’ve heard that one, and that’s a great point. One of my newest quotes, and I’m just pulling it up here. I have a cousin of mine who lives in New Haven, Connecticut. He is a graduate of Yale and he teaches at a school there, an arts school, and he showed me the campus, and above one of the doors was this quote that says “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” It is by Maya Angelou.

Matt: Hm.

Peter: It’s a great quote.

Matt: I haven’t heard it before but I absolutely agree with it.

Peter: I took a picture of it once – because we already talked about memory –

Matt: [laughs]

Peter: and I thought was a great quote as it relates to creativity. You can never use it up.

Matt: Right.

Peter: I love asking CPAs are you creative and they go no, and I’m like not Enron creative.

Matt: Right [laughs]

Peter: Are you creative? And they still go no and I say okay let me ask a question differently. Do you have ideas? And they’ll go yes. Then you’re all creative. Creativity comes from the idea: a tornado and a shark. Somebody had to have that idea or somebody had the idea of New Coke. That wasn’t a really good idea.

Matt: Right, right

Peter: and somebody had to have the idea let’s put three frogs on lily pads in a swamp and have them say bud- wei- ser-.

Matt: [laughs] Right, right

Peter: So we all have ideas. This ability to get the idea out on the table, not feeling intimidated and not feeling judged, and, as I said this panel discussion yesterday, I don’t like the word innovation. It kinda goes back to something that I learned when we were at The Mind Gym, because innovation is the word creativity.

Matt: yeah

Peter: and I’ve separated the two. In order to be creative you have to get the quantity of ideas out and then once you look at innovation then we could put on the the devil’s advocate or the critic or the judgment piece, but I see that when we put it together there’s a lot of judgment being placed on generating those ideas, and that just stifles creativity.

Matt: Absolutely. It’s recognizing that innovation is the full cycle and the creative, the brainstorming, all that piece is part of it. And leaving the critical thinking to the tail end, you know when we decide which of these ideas we want to put forward, we want to evaluate, do we want to market and see if we can win some people onto our side to push the idea forward. That’s the whole cycle, but it’s really interesting to me (and I’m sure you’ve had the same experience) how easy it is for people to start evaluating and judging creative ideas early. Like it’s a human need…

Peter: Mhm.

Matt: to want to start saying “okay so that’s a great idea, but… that’s a great idea, but…”

Peter: [laughs]

Matt: instead of… you know, some of The Mind Gym work on creativity is teaching people the Yes And tool, during creative thinking, and it’s so funny to see how much people struggle with it.

Peter: it really is, because we’ve put No Because in our conversations. Another thing that is in the workshops that I do is I pair people up and I say I want you to have a conversation. Some person pitch an idea and the other person will start to say “no because” and then we’ll have that little bit and then we’ll do the same conversation with “yes but” and same conversation with “yes and,” and then it becomes clear to everybody that it’s very negative, the No Because. The Yes But is maybe a little bit better but I still feel like I’m getting lip service, or as one person said “I’m used to saying that. It’s comfortable for me.”

Matt: yeah

Peter: But then when we do the yes and it’s much more collaborative. As long as we keep that piece in that creative process, it’ll take us a down a longer, more productive path – and also be inspiring and motivating to the staff and the people we work with.

Matt: Yes… and I think that’s a great idea.

Peter: [laughs]

Peter: A couple years ago, it was in Fast Company I believe, they did a whole piece on creativity and they did a survey. I don’t remember the population of the survey but they said 73% of those who were surveyed, and these were at leaders within industries, said that 73% felt that creativity was the number one attribute needed today in leadership. However, only 23% were utilizing it.

Matt: I mean, I’m not surprised. Mind Gym came up with the seven skills of a good manager and I believe they nailed it, and one of those is innovation. The ability to be creative. It’s a skill that people need to be an effective leader today, and it’s not creating New Coke, right?

Peter: [laughs]

Matt: It’s not creating the new electric car. It’s just thinking about a new way to do things and using that brain that you have. How many people have a half-an-hour carved out on their calendar 15 minutes every week that’s dedicated to creative space. You don’t, right?

Peter: Uhh.. no.

Matt: But you probably have time for meetings and you probably work through your to-do list every week, but it’s a critical thing. So I’m not surprised when you say 23%.

Peter: Yeah about 23%. Then I think, has big corporate America stifled creativity amongst the workforce? I think the larger organization its do this do this do this and don’t be creative in what you’re doing. I just need to get the job done. And that could be the death of a company.

Matt: Sure. So I think it’s always just doing those incremental things, on your own individual basis. What are the incremental things that I can use my creativity to do this thing smarter?

Peter: It’s about finding. It’s not always coming up with new Coke or the ads, like you said, but if someone said this is the way we’ve always done it.

Matt: [laughs] right

Peter: I go that’s a sign that we need to fix it.

Matt: right

Peter: Because it’s outdated. But now I’m going down this path of managing change because now… to change it, okay, I’m in a comfort zone. I like repetition. I feel comfortable. Now I’m going to upset the apple cart and do something different, and that just opens a whole new basket of of issues that could arise in that, but it needs to be done.

Matt: Right, and you’re right you need to be aware of that basket that you’re opening because human beings are all resistant to change. You’ve probably done workshops on change. I have too. You do exercises where you get people to try and make little miniscule changes, and as soon as you free them up they go right back to where they were. And I’m the same way. We all like the way things are and so you have to be aware of that and manage that process and guide people through that change. Otherwise you’re pushing the river, as they say.

Peter: [laughs] pushing the river. Yeah, in the other direction.

Matt: right

Peter: Yeah and to get people to buy into change takes a lot. It’s a whole other conversation that we could have probably, for an hour so, but the one thing I’ve always said is that there’s some people for whom it doesn’t matter. Any type of change is negative.

Matt sure

Peter: I’ve always tried to look at change as an opportunity. If we’re changing something then maybe there’s something better for me, maybe something I could do, and sometimes that change could maybe displace us out of a job. In 1999, I was laid off, restructured, re-engineered, fired, whatever, from Victoria’s Secret catalog and it was devastating.

Matt: Yeah

Peter: But if that hadn’t happened, because someone told me after that first week that “this time off will be the best thing that could ever happen to you.” And for a moment I’m thinking all I heard was wah wah wah wah wah.

Matt: [laughs] Mhm

Peter: But, you know, within a couple weeks I was like that person was right, this is the best thing that could happen because now I got a chance to reflect, figure out what I want to do when I grow up, starting to figure it out but what I want to do when I grow up, maybe there’s a different angle I want to take. I wouldn’t have had that opportunity had that change not occurred.

Matt: Right, right. I’ve worked with a lot of people who have been in that position. When my wife came to me and said Matt I know you just got a promotion and you are enjoying your work but I really want to live overseas, that’s the journey I want to take.

Peter: [laughs]

Matt: I wasn’t expecting that. But you have to embrace that and say, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be where I am today, which is much richer. I think you have to be open to those. You have to look to those opportunities. I don’t know… life is a journey.

Peter: So how does a 24, 25 year-old, 30 year old who’s working for a law firm, engineering firm, accounting firm, whatever, where do they begin? I’ll take it from the accounting profession. So when you say you need to go out and learn these skills on your own. They go “do I get a continuing education credit for it?”

Matt: Right

Peter: Learning this different than compliance.

Matt: [laughs] right

Peter: and I would say, from the aspect of compliance, you need to be technically sound. Get your 40 hours and that, but find different ways. You can read a book, you can read Lincoln’s Leadership. You’re not going to be a leader like Lincoln but you can learn from it. You can read Giuliani’s book, you can listen to podcasts like this. You can explore and volunteer, take leadership roles. But you just have to get out there and… just go ask your boss, you know, can you put me on a committee or is there a presentation coming up that I could do? That I could be a part of? I think that, from the the millennial generation, which is one thing I do really enjoy about them, is they can be assertive.

Matt: right

Peter: Just be assertive and and ask for the work and ask for the opportunities, and I think that’s the best place to start in developing your overall leadership abilities.

Matt: I agree. Do a hard look in the mirror saying what do I want and why do I want it, why do I want to be a leader, or what’s in it for me? Understanding what I want and then being really clear about setting goals to get it, whether it’s shadowing other leaders, whether it’s doing some research, reading. I mean there are so many great books on leadership and just some of the biographies of some of the great leaders throughout time. You can learn so many of the same lessons that people are learning over and over and over again reading books, listening to podcasts. Anything like that, but setting goals based on what you want to achieve. Why you’re doing it, I think, is really important. And then, if you can find a mentor, and not being afraid to find a mentor and not being afraid to ask for it. That’s something I recommend to everybody.

Peter: And to that point, what’s in it for me but once what’s in that leadership role, that focus change. What’s in it for them?

Matt: Sure

Peter: And some leaders don’t look at it that way. It’s still about them. But once you are in that leadership role and you’re managing people it’s not about you. It’s about them or making your people look the best that they can and, as you said earlier, the mirror and the window approach. Give them the accolades and you take the responsibility. When something doesn’t go right, don’t throw your team under the bus.

Matt: Absolutely. You just reminded me: one of the things that was always in my mind when was a naval officer. So I guess I was still at the academy, but one of my highschool friends who had gone straight from high school with enlisted with the Marine Corp. So I’m learning how to be an officer. I’m going to be leading troops and he’s already an enlisted marine. Coming out of the Navy you can be a Marine Corps officer too. I saw him at some christmas party or something and he said “Hey you know I’ve been doing this for 2-3 years now. Can I give you some advice?” I said absolutely, please, and he said “Just remember that these guys, these men (it was all men at the time, men and women now) they’re looking to you. They need you to have their best interests in mind. You’re their guy.” It was fate. I don’t know… I always remembered his face because he was a friend of mine. He was one of these guys that you show up on the ship and you’ve got a division of twelve-thirteen people and you’re trying to think how do I accomplish the mission with these people, but it made me realize that these are all guys who went to high school, who have families and are trying to accomplish what they need to accomplish, and it just changed the way I looked at things. I always try to make it about the people and I think the same thing applies in business. You have to think about these people for who they are. So thanks for listening to that story.

Peter: Oh, you’ve had some really great stories and I like how a lot of went back to your days at the Naval Academy and… okay, so this is gonna sound funny, but you just clarified something for me. I didn’t realize that, when you graduate from Naval Academy, that you could go and be in the Marines.

Matt: Right.

Peter: Now you’ve clarified the whole NCIS show, because I was always wonder why the NCIS were always helping the Marines out.

Matt: [laughs]

Peter: I thought maybe that’s a flaw of the show but now you’ve straighten that out for me and I appreciate.

Matt: That’s right. The Marine Corp is part of the department of the Navy.

Peter: Yeah, that’s cool. Well, Matt, any last parting thoughts to my audience?

Matt: That’s a big question. You know, I think we’ve covered an awful lot, Pete, and thanks again for inviting me. It’s been a real pleasure talking about these things. I would just say that, going back to what I said at the very beginning, is just, if you want to be a leader and work on your self-awareness, there’s a quote from Tim Gallwey, who wrote The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game of Work, and his phrase is “awareness is curative.” If we’re aware of any situation, our unconscious mind allows us to fix it because we have those innate talents. So, if you’re aware of what you want to achieve, if you’re aware of your personality and what you want, you will just naturally start to be a better leader. If you’re aware of the people that you’re interacting with, you will do a better job. So I guess that’s the last thing I’ll leave, but thanks again.

Peter: Oh, I can’t thank you enough. I always enjoy our conversations and I’m gonna put you on the spot. You will be back. We’ll have another one of these because you bring a lot of great insight to this. You bring a different perspective to it, which I think is refreshing in a lot of ways, and you came up with what the definition of adding value is to me. That right there is the nugget for the day and I will be giving you a lot of credit on that.

Matt: Okay

Peter: and I’ll use that in the future, but thank you. I guess, as we part, Chuck, if you’re still listening through all of this, I guess we let you off the hook this time.

Matt: Yeah, didn’t happen.

Peter: Well I think the next one we will have to spend more time having fun at your brother-in-law’s expense.

Matt: [laughs]

Peter: and then the in-depth conversation. So I appreciate it. Thank you very much Matt, and I look forward to our next conversation

Improv Is No Joke – Episode 33 – Greg Kyte

Peter: Hey, welcome everybody. I’m here today with Greg Kyte, and Greg is the founder of Comedy CPE. This is the first time we’ve met. I’ve actually heard a lot about Greg over the years. I’ve heard that there’s another person who’s a CPA who enjoys comedy, we’re very rare in that way, and after a long haul I’ve been finally able to sit down and and have a conversation about… who knows what this is all going to come about! First and foremost, Greg, thank you so very much for taking time out of your busy schedule to sit down and have a conversation.

Greg: Totally. No problem. I don’t know if you know this, but I do my own podcast with Jason Blumer called THRIVEal Cast, so I’m a big fan of a of this kind of thing. And, you know, and share knowledge and try to get it out there for people. So, it’s my pleasure, is what I’m trying to say.

Peter: Thank you very much, and I will be subscribing to your podcast as soon as we’re done with this and pull it down. There’s a few of us in the profession who have a podcast: myself, you, John Garrett.

Greg: Yeah, John’s Garrett. Yeah, he’s a former CPA. He’s got a way better resume than I do, in terms of his accounting. He was, I think, a KPMG, for a bunch of years, and then finally he just like… I kinda hate this and I kinda love comedy, so he bailed out. He was doing comedy full time. He’s kind of a transitioned towards doing more like corporate. His stand-up was corporate gigs a lot, and now he’s doing some almost like motivational speaking through his Green Apple Podcast, another really great one. Have you been on his podcast?

Peter: I have not. I’m trying to get on his podcast, I have invited him on mine. We have met. We’re both members of National Speakers Association. We’ve met online, not face-to-face and had conversation, and our paths keep keep crossing, but I do listen to the Green Apple Podcast. I have enjoyed it and a mutual friend of ours, Kristen Rampe, was on his. I think you were on his podcast. Now, I’ve got both you on my podcast so we’re even now.

Greg: [laughs] That’s right, exactly. Full circle. Circle of life.

Peter: So tell me, if they don’t know you, a little bit of your background.

Greg: Well, I guess it’s that you have to paint with broad strokes. I changed careers, I had a midlife career change, and I do everything slower than most adults do. So I was 26 when by the time I finally earned my bachelor’s degree and my teaching certification. I got a bachelor’s in math from the University of Washington, got a teaching certification out here in Utah, and started teaching. Well, I did one year at a high school, and I didn’t hate it, but I definitely didn’t love it so I took about a year off and, in that year, I got married and I realized after getting married how important health insurance is.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: And so I thought maybe I need to get back into teaching. Between teaching, I spent six months as a waiter at a Mexican restaurant – by the way, I was amazing as a waiter. Of all my careers, I may be best suited to be a waiter – and I spent six months at a new and used car lot selling cars. Uh, I’m horrible at that. That’s a career that I was not built for, and then a middle school was in a crisis and they were like, do you know anyone who knows anybody who’s qualified to teach this unruly group of 8th graders? Get him get him in here and give them a job. So that’s how I got back into teaching. But again, just didn’t really love it. I mean, the hours were good but the the job was not so good… and, you know, being a public school teacher, the pay is not awesome. And, to go back further in my history, when I was in high school, my mom owns her own drugstore and so I started working for her, actually, even in middle school. I think I was 14 when I first started working for her, and before I could even drive I was starting to do the bookkeeping for the drug store and I really enjoyed that. So when I was in college it was kind of a tossup: do I do math, do I do accounting? I chose math. I chose wrong. So when this math thing was not so much fun, and it was not playing so well, I decided to go back to school to get my accounting degree. So it took me a couple years of doing that, mostly night and online classes. I finished my accounting degree in 2008, finished my MBA with an accounting emphasis in 2010, and I burned my way through the CPA exam. I did one section a month because I was in in the computerized era.

Peter: Okay.

Greg: I did one section a month for four months and somehow passed all four of them. Every section I took, I felt worse about, and somehow I actually got higher scores.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: And every time I was like, there’s no way I’m passing this one, and then the scores come back and I’d be like “what the hell.” So I did that. I spent a year at a at a local mid-sized CPA firm. I was in the technology department, and I’ve never opened QuickBooks in my life but I was supposed to be a pro advisor for that.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: And then come busy season I was also supposed to pitch in and help with taxes, which I spent my whole of the last six months learning QuickBooks not learning UltraTax. So I was pretty horrible at both of them, so when an opportunity came for me to get hired away by a client I gladly accepted and, ever since then, I’ve been a controller for a group of medical office buildings. So, that’s how I got to where I am, as a CPA, but then there’s my alter ego, which is the comedian. So, back to when I was teaching, my lower-end math classes. Like, Pete, you probably don’t remember eighth-grade math like I do. I remember quite well, and back then it’s not hard math. Like, none of my kids who were failing – well, no, there was one kid who was failing because it was too hard for him – all of the other thousands of kids I taught… it wasn’t that this math was too hard, it’s just that they weren’t motivated. So I started doing these things I called Motivation Mondays, which I admit right now sounds super lame. That’s like super lame dad thing to do.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: But I was doing that with these kids. Motivation was always like, hey what do you, really want to do, what are you really passionate about? And, you know, kinda making it where it’s like, whatever it you want to do, if you’re good at math that will make you better. But anyways, you can only ask kids what they really want to do with their life so many times before you look yourself in the mirror and say “I’m a middle school math teacher.”

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: “I want to be a professional skateboarder, I want to be a professional footballer, I want to be an actress,” and I go, no one’s saying middle school math teacher? Not a single one of you? And me neither, but I’ve always wanted to do stand-up comedy. So it was that year that I was like, you know, I gotta take my medicine. So I went to a comedy club, I cornered the comedians after the shows and was like, how do you get going? And they told me how the open mic thing went and invited me to an open mic that one of them was running. So I started doing that. I also started taking classes at the local improv club, and it took me forever but I finally became one of the cast members of their stage show at Comedysportz. You do improv, right?

Peter: I do improv and I’ve done stand-up, but primarily improv. There was, way back when, a group that was here that I would just come to sneak in and stuff with, but most of what I was doing as a guy from Second City Cleveland coming down to hold a workshop and spend a lot of time. I’ve been a student of it for over 25 years.

Greg: Yeah, nice. So he was with Second City? Yeah, he’s with Second City. Isn’t there a Comedysportz in Columbus?

Peter: There is not.

Greg: I know Comedysportz has a locations across the country, but I know that there’s even more locations that do not have a Comedysportz. So that’s my brand, that’s what I came up with, and I did that regularly for about 5 years or so, but I started transitioning out of that after I became a CPA because it seemed like there was a lot of stuff happening, with me, with my skill set inside the CPA world, inside the accounting profession, and it seemed like it was more my stand-up stuff that was hitting than my improv stuff. But man, I love improv. I love improv. I love them both, but anyways I stepped away so now we do maybe a few improv shows every year. But anyways, that’s sort of the the origin story.

Peter: And you do stand-up? Actually, if you go on YouTube, I found a couple clips of your stand-up routine. You do a rant on an A&A update, which is beautiful. Love it! But then you just recently did something I thought was hilarious. You were doing tax comedy, and you were doing 33 years of Jeb Bush’s tax returns.

Greg: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter: It went all the way back. He was trying to connect with Millennials, so it went all the way back to 1989, which is the title of Taylor Swift’s new album, which I thought was hilarious.

Greg: I think that was the year she was born.

Peter: Yeah, something like that. I’ve heard a lot about you, but when I watch this stuff you’re able to take accounting and really put it into stand-up. And I’ve done that in the past but I’ve always found it… maybe I was always too close to it and I wasn’t seeing some things that others are others are seeing, but from what I’ve seen you’ve done an excellent job. Keep up the chops, dude.

Greg: Thanks. Thanks so much. I have found it’s weird doing my material, like my accounting and tax material that I do, in clubs. Like, doing that for audiences that are… because it’s kind of cool, when you do that stuff in a club, invariably there’s like one account there.

Peter: Right.

Greg: And that guy is like, he’s on cloud nine, he’s going I know every nuance. I get it. This guy’s speaking my language. He feels great and he’s laughing the hardest, and obviously it’s working otherwise they wouldn’t book me in clubs. The rest of the audience are having a good time too, but the accountants feel especially clicked in. But then what I found is, if I do my club material that’s like accounting and tax stuff, if I do it for an audience of all accountants then all they do is just like shoot holes. They’re like, “Well that’s actually incomplete. Your premise for that joke wasn’t exactly right.”

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: Like I have that one joke where I said, so you know charitable giving is a great tool for tax planning, and that was just a segue into a joke. That’s not even part of the joke, and I say that in front of a bunch of accountants, and they’re like “actually, no it’s not. It’s actually not at all. No one would say give more money away so that you can keep forty percent of it, at most, in taxes. You’re an idiot.” And I go, okay, you’re right, you’re all smarter than me. I’m just the Chuckle monkey here to make your life a little less unbearable, so my apologies.

Peter: [laughs] But that’s a stereotypical accountants right there, who can be extremely picky. I did this one thing for a firm in Dayton some years ago. It was bringing how laughter is beneficial to the workplace, and I said something to this fact. I said, when you laugh, it’s good for because it releases the enddolphins – you know, the endolphins? That crazy fish that swim through your bloodstream fighting stress, anxiety and depression?

Greg: [laughs]

Peter: I got 5 evaluations back that said this: Mr. Margaritis, dolphins are mammals not fish.

Greg: Oh my gosh. Oh my goodness. That’s hilarious.

Peter: And I know there’s somebody, there’s a few people who are listening to this right now that are like, they’re right, they’re mammals not fish. They can be a little more on the critical side, but I think when you get a couple of cocktails in them…

Greg: Right.

Peter: If you did a Christmas show, you’d rock.

Greg: Oh yeah. Don’t get me wrong. I just have to make sure I put on the right hat when I’m performing for the accounts and make sure I’m dotting all my i’s and crossing all my t’s. It’s very different. It’s a totally different feel performing for all accountants, rather than just whatever knuckleheads decided to show up for a club show.

Peter: So let me ask you this question: with a background in stand up and the background in improv, and you’re a controller. How have you found those skills to help you in your day-to-day world?

Greg: Just in my day job?

Peter: Yeah.

Greg: Well… can you see this environment that I’m working in?

Peter: I think you’re in a tool shed.

Greg: Yeah, it looks like a tool shed, possibly a meth lab, possibly a kill room.

Peter: That’s why I figure I just go with the tool shed.

Greg: Anyways, I am currently sharing offices with our building maintenance manager. He’s only here two days a week, and even with that he’s not in the office he’s running around fixing stuff. So I’m pretty isolated, in terms of my job, so I don’t have a whole lot of moment by moment human interactions. But I mean that’s a lot of my job. Talking with bankers, talking with the owners of the LLC’s, talking with vendors, talking with different sources that we might have to go to for financing. Things like this, and by being able to be approachable and having a good sense of humor and being funny, I feel like it’s a way that I’ve been able to develop quicker, stronger bonds with these people that I do rely on to be able to do my job. And the interesting thing is it’s not just bonds. It’s almost like people are more willing to be transparent with me because of my sense of humor. For instance, even in just the last week, I was joking around with my banker about all the ways that I could get him fired if I were to tell like the upper echelon of his company the different topics of conversation that he initiates with me about religion and politics and all these other things…

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: Even some possible confidentiality violations that he does, but I think it’s because of the sense of humor that I have and the humor that I can bring to the job that it does really kind of break down barriers, break down people’s defenses, and it makes for some real open and honest communication, which I think, in the long run, really helps me be more effective at what I do, and again that’s regardless of what I’m talking about. Whether it’s the real estate guy who is trying to lease out are vacant space or whether it’s the doctors who are owners in our buildings, or whether it’s the CPA firm that we still retain to do our review work and our tax returns, so all that stuff is all very helpful.

Peter: Breaking down barriers, the ability to make someone laugh, or to have that personality, you make friends a lot quicker.

Greg: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter: And. in a business environment, it’s all about networking, it’s all about connecting with people, but as a gentleman from another podcast, Jamie Richardson, Vice President of government and shareholder relations at White Castle Systems, because when he networks he looks at it as making friends, and by doing it he also just kinda lowers the expectations, and that kind of lowers the nerves where you can just have this conversation with somebody. It can turn into a friendship just just as quickly as it can turn into anything else, but it just opens the door a lot quicker.

Greg: So true. I mean, that’s a great way. I mean, so many people just cringe at the idea of networking, but I think if you look at it as I’m not I’m not going to lunch to get business cards and hopefully to get someone to put into my CRM. Think of it as I’m going to lunch to hang out buddies, then that’s how you can actually get yourself out of the seat and doing that kind of stuff. So yeah, I think that’s awesome.

Peter: You know why a lot of people don’t like to network? Because of their mothers in their head. Greg, what did your mother always tell you about when you meet people?

Greg: Clean underpants?

Peter: That was the second one. She said don’t talk to…

Greg: to strange women?

Peter: No, to strangers in general.

Greg: Oh, to strangers in general. Okay.

Peter I prefer talking to strange women, but just strangers in general, because their strangers. But a stranger is someone who’s in downtown Columbus, Ohio with a bottle of Mogen David looking at a light pole going “you’re awful awful awful tall and beautiful too.” But to your point, every business gathering is an opportunity.

Greg: Yeah.

Peter: So you get your mother out your head, and always wear clean underwear.

Greg: Yeah, I mean I think that’s a given. If there’s a CPA where that’s not a given, I’d say that’s a that’s a crime of moral turpitude and they should probably get their license revoked for that.

Peter: Exactly. The other thing about you, as a CPA, that I think will be fascinating to a lot of people is this ability to stand up in front of a group of people and either perform or present, because you are the founder of Comedy CPE, so you are NASBA approved. You’re going around the country interacting with a variety of CPAs and you’re standing in front of them and you’re doing public speaking and you’re not petrified.

Greg: Right. I’m not exactly sure how people came to their interests in different things but yeah I mean… the first time I remember getting up in front of people to speak is probably in ninth grade, maybe even before that. You know, I do stupid little things that everybody does in elementary school like plays and things, but I think somewhere in ninth grade I started like doing speeches to be student body vice president and whatever, stuff like that, and even when I first started that I would try to use humor as my way to get to get in. So I was going in that direction a lot anyways. Like I said, I was a teacher. That’s one of things you do. I mean, every day when you’re a teacher, you’re up in front of people all day long. 35 kids at a time trying to convey topics, trying to convey some pretty technical, pretty boring crap. Like the friggin quadratic formula.

Peter: [laughs] Yeah.

Greg: To people who really don’t want to be there, to a hostile audience. So I think that was one way that I was able to learn how to have a lot of energy and intensity, and be as engaging as possible. But yeah, I really do love being in front of people. It’s actually funny. One of the presentation areas that I like the least is doing webinars. I have hated them. I recently figured out how to love them, but the weird thing is in webinars you are presenting to, sometimes, you have no damn clue how many people you’re presenting to. It’s just you in front of your computer with a webcam. It’s like being in your bathroom talking to the mirror and I freaking hate it.

Peter: Yeah I’m with you.

Greg: It’s so hard because you have no sense of whether how many people are rifling through their desk for the gun that they keep it working to put themselves out of their misery because you’re so horrible, because there’s no feedback like that. I really I really get my juice out of the live presentations, when I do have an audience there that I can get the vibe off of, in terms of how I’m doing, and feed off of that. I’ll even try to fold that into my presentation. A funny thing with webinars: what I started doing, just recently, is I now I won’t do webinar without a co-host. So I’ll get a guest, I’ll get somebody to be there physically – not just to be on Skype like you and I are right now, but somebody physically present with me – that at least knows something about the topic. We’re having a conversation so I can be interesting and engaging, and so that’s kind of a trick that I’ve found. Feel free to use, and any of your listeners can too, but I love it. I tell my guest that my biggest priority here is for you and I to have a great, engaging conversation that we both think is fun. If we do that, first and foremost, that’s my performance indicator, whether or not this was a successful webinar. Did you have a good time? Did I have a good time? We both did? That’s the main KPI. The second one is did we get through all the bullet points? I put together a few slides to use as my webinar slides. If we get through all the main points, that’s the second KPI. If we hit both of those, I’m ecstatic and I know that we nailed it. The other thing with the webinar, this is more technical, is that, with GoToWebinar, you can share your webcam and share your slides at the same time so that people can see me and my guests interacting, but at the same time they can still see whatever slide we got out there so it helps helps with the entertainment. I actually was on some webinar and I remember being really, really interested in it and I can’t remember – I wasn’t presenting, I was just a participant – I think it was on fraud or something like this and there’s a couple guys having this conversation that I remember being engaging, but the whole time they were talking, for over half of the webinar, they had one slide up. They just had their pictures and their names and you couldn’t see these guys, they’re just talking. I thought this is horrible. I can’t handle this. But like, all you need to do is have little pop-up window of your webcam where you can see these guys talking to each other and all the sudden it’s like, oh look humans talking now I’m interested because I’m a monkey.

Peter: Yeah yeah yeah. I agree about webinars. I actually did a series of webinars with a guy out of New York and Connecticut, and unfortunately we weren’t able to be there, but the way we were able to be engaging is our voices were completely different.

Greg: Oh yeah.

Peter: I think that the dichotomy of the voices helped keep people engaged, because you’re right. You’re just sitting there looking at your computer screen, and what I can tell from you is you get your energy from others. On Myers-Briggs you’re probably an E, as in extrovert, and that’s how to get my energy – and that’s how I am.

Greg: Yeah

Peter: I do very few webinars these days, and even if I’ve got a smaller live crowd it helps.

Greg: Yeah.

Peter: But last week I was a Minnesota, for the tax office. I do a piece on ethics and had 850 people in the audience and I just – well I can’t say how I was feeling, but man. I just loved it. I told my wife about it and she said she would have crawled up in the corner and died. But she knows me because she said the more the merrier.

Greg: Oh yeah. Totally. Absolutely. Although, the bigger the crowd you flop in front of, that can be rough. My biggest claim to fame in stand up is I got to open for Weird Al Yankovic in 2004 at the Utah State Fair. Sold-out crowd of 3,500 13-year-old boys and their dads who brought them.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: I was only doing stand up for a couple years at that point, so the fact that I even landed that was pretty wild and I was super stoked about it. I was on for 20 minutes and I had a solid 20-minute set but they bill it as Weird Al, and there’s no indication that there even is an opening act, and I’m confident that most of these prepubescent kids in the audience didn’t even understand the concept of an opening act, and so all I am is I’m delaying their gratification for Weird Al. So biggest audience I’ve ever had, 3,500 people with Weird Al, but also I was kind of decimated at their uh… their distaste for me that night.

Peter: So was the body language arms crossed over the chest, rolling their eyes, looking at the watches.

Greg: Oh, no. I was heckled from the moment I got out.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: It was miserable. So here’s what happens: so I get booked for the show because Weird Al, at that point (I don’t know if he still does), but at that point and for many years, because I’ve met a bunch of other people who would open for him that same way I did and and, fortunately, they had similar stories to what I had, where it was just like not a great experience. People were not excited to see anything except Weird Al.

Peter: Right.

Greg: So I get books for this, I show up and I kind of wonder because I don’t really know even where to go before the show. I’m there maybe 30-45 minutes ahead of time and I end up finding the stage manager and he says, “okay so did they tell you the rules about what we need you to do?” I’m going no.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: Again, like I said, I’m two years in and they want me to do 20 minutes, and so I feel really confident with the material, with my 20 minutes of material, but I do not feel confident about changing a word of it right before this happens. He says, “well here’s a few things: first off we don’t want anybody doing any song parodies.” I say, well good, I don’t do that anyways, and he says, “and we want you to be clean and no drug references.” And then all of a sudden, because I’m in Utah and in Utah clean means different things. I’ve been routines at churches, and I say, well I reference people peeing in a joke and I do jokes about people peeing, and you know there’s that, and then there’s what you can get away with on late-night network television, where it’s mostly just language.

Peter: Right.

Greg: So I’m not gonna change anything there because I think I’m relatively clean, and then drug references like… at one point I compare the price of a teacup poodle to the to the street value of drugs. I’m going okay, is that a drug reference? I don’t know. It’s not about me doing drugs, but again I’m gonna do it. It’s too late. I’m doing what I’m doing. And then the kicker was this dude also says, “Hey do you mind doing your own offstage intro?” I should have said yes, I’m absolutely not okay doing my own stage intro, you do my freakin offstage intro and then I’ll walk on… but this was like my dream coming true. I’m think I’ll be hanging out with Weird Al and he’s gonna love me and ask me to tour with him indefinitely, so I’m gonna be the yes man of all yes men, and so I say sure I’m totally cool doing my own offstage intro.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: So it’s an outdoor venue. It’s at a State Fair. Outdoor venue, I’m doing my own offstage intro, so I’m like hiding behind that the stacks of speakers that they’ve got in the spare part. I know there’s people in the audience that can see me behind the speakers, and I’m using my best radio guy voice like “ladies and gentleman, welcome to We’re Al Yankovic, but first you’re opening act: please welcome to the stage Greg Kyte!” And then I walk out, holding the same mic that I just did my own offstage intro with, an the first thing I hear anybody say was “Who are you?!” And that began… I mean, up to that point, I’d always dealt with hecklers by just ignoring them because, if you’re in a club and somebody heckles and nobody responds they just feel like idiots and so they shut up, but when you’ve got 3,500 people you’re gonna have enough idiots who are shouting out stuff that they feel okay. It was about maybe 15 minutes in that some people way back in the bleachers just started chanting, while I was doing my set, they start chanting “Weird Al, Weird Al.” So my big comeback to the hecklers in the bleachers chanting Weird Al was this, this is a super clever, I said “shut up!”

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: Which, actually, was great. So they did shut up and a bunch of people applauded me telling them to shut up, so that felt good, but I was kind of off balance this whole time so I was like, I’m just gonna wrap it up. So I didn’t even do my whole 20 minutes. I should have said, I’m gonna do one last bit before I go. I should have said that. But, instead, I said I’m gonna go now, but first I’m gonna do one last bit. Saying I’m gonna go now got a bigger applause than I when I told the people to shut up.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: So I was decimated. The one thing that saved my self-esteem was that my brother had flown into Salt Lake City from Mississippi to see the show, and my brother’s one of those guys who, if I had bombed, he would be like “dude, never do that again, you’re bringing disgrace upon me and your family,” but afterwards he was like “no dude you’re really good,” and he was impressed with it. So I was like, okay, I must not have sucked because brother Bob would have put me in my place otherwise.

Peter: So to take away from that… not that many people would be able to handle something quite like that. So you can basically walk into any type of environment today, whether it’s a boardroom or a classroom or in front of a client or whatever, and, for the most part, be adjusted. What could be worse? There can’t be anything worse, to me, than walking out and and you have 20 minutes and they’re like “who are you?!” Honestly, that probably would have tripped me up right there, just on the get go, and they’re spiraling and chanting back and you just plow through and get the job done. So you can walk into any place, except maybe a woman’s restroom. Other than that, you’re walking in with confidence.

Greg: Right. I wouldn’t want to do that. But the funny thing is I would say, and I think part of the allure to me of doing comedy, whether it’s improv or stand up, is that it’s high risks whenever you get there. With stand-up, you go up onstage you go this is just me. If you reject this, you’re rejecting me because this is this is just me onstage. If you hate this, you hate… it’s nuts. I mean, I know there’s a lot of people who can separate that, but for me it’s always been a real personal thing be onstage. Butk, for me, that’s what juices me up about it. So I’d say I put a little bit of a spin on what you said. I’m not I’m not intimidated by any audience to the point where I bail. You see I’m saying? And even with that I’d save the nerves and the anxiety that comes with presenting to any group, that I’m able to use that as fuel to propel myself to a better performance, whatever that performance may be. Whether that’s a sales meeting or a board meeting or whatever. So I can use that to get there, but I would say that the thing that persists is there is always is a bit of anxiety, but the payoff of going headlong into something that does scare the pants off you.

Peter: Yeah.

Greg: There’s just a huge payoff when you do that and you hit a homerun.

Peter: Yeah. I did that this past year, in February, when I closed the show for a theater group up in Detroit. I haven’t done stand-up in about 10 years and I had about eight minutes worth of material, and I heard it, I thought I heard a belly laugh. Someone recorded it and, when I watched it, I went yeah, there’s definitely a belly laugh there.

Greg: Good.

Peter: But it is that risk and reward. I mean, there’s a lot of risk because it’s just you and the audience is gonna love you or the audience could hate you, or it could be somewhere in between, but it’s a tough thing to stand in front of a crowd by yourself, no matter if you’re doing stand-up or if you delivering a CPE, because all the eyes are on you and you’re the subject matter expert.

Greg: Yep, exactly. I totally hear that. Do you go out and do open mics very much nowadays?

Peter: I will start doing it again from January to April because, since I’m not practicing CPA I have some down time.

Greg: Yeah, that’s dead zone. I hear ya.

Peter: And I will start working, around Christmas time, on some new material to take out and do some open mics here around the Columbus, Ohio area. You know, that guy told me to just keep doing it, to get the chops. I mean, you still have to get up there, but there’s a lot to learn from stand-up. In fact, I will share with you that, before, my fear, when I did some open mics in Columbus before I went to Detroit, and I forgot how people are really scared to do any type of presentation. I hadn’t felt that in a very long time so that that helped a lot in connecting with with the audience. To say, I’ve been there. Actually, I just revisit it, as well as to be able to stand up in front of a group and deal with crickets. Also writing, because, as you know, there’s no writing for improv. It’s all improvisation. There may be some shell around it, but writing for standup you’ve gotta keep cutting and cutting and polishing and cutting and polishing, and I look at that as a corporate memo going to the CFO.

Greg: Totally. That’s so that’s. I hundred percent agree with you and I think, for me, and I’ve eased off of this, for but for years I had a rule where I like forced myself to write and tweet 3 accounting jokes every day. So I’d go on to like Accounting Today and I get like the AICPA Daily News email stuff and use that as like my source material. If I couldn’t get it there I’d go onto like CPA trend lines or Growing Concern, which I’ve written for in blog form, and I just try to find I had three jokes every day and tweet those out. And I think Twitter was one of the big things, for me, that just sharpened my skills and it’s like… get rid of anything that’s not necessary. That’s a huge skill because how many times do you get an email where you’re like, this email went on and on but he could have said this in about three sentences. That’s so true. I mean. the fewer words you put in anything, whether it’s a direct message, a tweet, an email, a text, whatever. People are going to appreciate you for being concise, and yeah stand-up definitely makes you be concise.

Peter: Thank you for reminding me about the Twitter piece there because I used to do that for a while. I kind of got out of that habit but I have some comedian friends who do that, in the sense of it’s 140 characters Keep it to 140 and put it out. A little tangent, but there’s a podcast you might like to listen to from a friend of mine named Rik Roberts. He’s a touring comedian. he’s got a podcast called School of Laughs.

Greg: Okay.

Peter: It’s all about stand-up. He’s able to take stand up and separate the personal from the product itself, but every now and then I’m listening and I’ll pick up a tip or two just to keep in the back of my mind. He’s been doing it for a couple couple years now.

Greg: School of Laughs?

Peter: It’s Rik Robert. He’s based out of Nashville.

Greg: Okay.

Peter: But I found that improv helps in reading an audience, adapting to that audience, using Yes And, keep things moving in a forward and positive direction. Because, as you know as accountants, the precision is number one, in many ways. As you well know, anytime you get to do any type of performance or any type of entertainment we have to let precision go.

Greg: Right. Yeah, and that’s been a battle for me because I know, even in my stand up, I want to be super precise and it’s hard for me when I have a joke where it’s like… I know it’s a little better if I’m a little sloppier. Like instead of being really concise. So not so much like the stuff I was talking about before, like one of the tools we have in tax planning is the charitable contribution deduction. That’s different. This is more like allowing my wording to be less cerebral and more just, like, you feel it. That’s where that tension is for me, where it’s uncomfortable for me to go to those places where my communication is more intuitive and less logical. So I hear that.

Peter: Yeah, I hear from the precision standpoint. I get that piece from the material, but anytime you go and do any type of presentation you also have to expect something’s gonna happen that’s not going to go the right way.

Greg: Right

Peter: And it could be, if I’m so precise and memorized and I’m saying something and I forget a piece, if I stop and start to panic and I forget how to breathe and it just just snowballs into the paramedics showed up and trying to give me CPR.

Greg: Well here’s the thing I’ve been doing. So, for the last couple years, I’ve been getting as many open mics as I can, specifically open mics, because the stakes are lower because you don’t have a paying audience there – so I feel like I can kinda eff around a little bit more – but I’ve been putting myself in places where I try to show up without written stuff. It’s like I’ll have just some ideas maybe scrawled in a notebook, but not like real jokes written, and so for the past two years I feel like I’ve really sharpened my chops. And a lot of times, because in open mic only get, at most, 10 minutes (and that’s hardly ever, usually you’re talking between three and seven, sometimes two minutes they want to give you and that’s it). So sometimes I’ll do a whole set where all it is is it’s me making jokes about the guys who went up ahead of me. There was this one time where I was at I was at Wise Guys, that’s the main club that we got here in Salt Lake for an open mic, and there’s some guy that went up and he was horrible. Like horrible in that he ruined the night.

Peter: Wow.

Greg: Like he ruined it. Everybody’s just going what the hell just happened to us, and I was like oh I’m going to go but I’m gonna do my whole time about that guy. I know the club owner, and he was running the mic and I went up to him and said “Keith you gotta let me up, like, now,” because I need to rescue the room, and it was the best because it was stuff that just came to mind went up. It was not improv comedy, but it was off the cuff, and that was the best feeling because not only did I freakin destroy but I was able to take this open mic that was ok then this guy went up and just he ruined the party, and then you go up and you have this awesome set where you knock a homerun and you’re the hero. You just feel amazing, but I also think that that’s helped me when I do my ethics, because my main two presentations are ethics and fraud. So when I’m there and I know I’m able to just go off script and kinda monkey around with stuff that’s in my head. That’s a lot of power that you have, in terms of presenting.

Peter: Yeah, that has a tremendous amount of power, and there’s one thing you mentioned earlier that I want to get to before we wrap things up. You’ve got comedian, you’ve got CPA, you’ve got get improv, you’ve got controller, but you’re also a cartoonist, right?

Greg: Right. Okay, that’s the dumbest thing ever.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: That I’m a cartoonist… okay, so I don’t even really know the genesis of how or why I started cartooning, but not too long ago, just for fun, started sketching some stuff out and I go that’s not horrible, so I scanned it into my computer and I put it up on Twitter. It doesn’t even get much action on Twitter, but the stupid thing is – and this is the real lesson here – the whole idea that, if people are running a firm, they need to find a niche. Because, if you have a niche, you have so much more power than if you don’t. The way that relates to me is I see myself as a stand-up comedian, but my niche is accounting. Anybody who knows me from my comedy, they would say “Oh, Greg, he’s the angry accountant comedian,” and it’s like, yeah, because I yell a lot. I’m very intense when I’m onstage.

Peter: yeah

Greg: But the fact that I’m also serving the accounting profession means, okay… I mean I know there’s people who are like artists, who cartoon all the time, and can’t sell a cartoon to save their damn life, and they’ve been doing it forever, and I understand how insulting it is. how easy this was for me to get started. Obviously I’ve got a decent sense of humor, so I start drawing these dumb cartoons and was wondering if somebody might buy these from me. I’m gonna just try. I have some connections with different online media outlets for the accounting profession, so I started sending the cartoons to them I go “Hey, Tom Hood, would you pay me for this?” He’s kinda like, naw, and I’m like that’s okay, you shouldn’t, because I’m no good. I just started.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: So I send them to a few places then I go back to Going Concern, and I said I used to blog for them for long time, and I finally tried to quit a couple times and finally it stuck.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: I said, hey, would you buy these cartoons? They’re like “yeah.” So, all of a sudden, I’m getting my cartoons published every other week, basically. The schedule’s pretty much every other week that I get one on Going Concern. It has been a blast, and it’s weird because it’s so much fun for me to exercise that other part of your brain that is like drawing. So you kind of have the jokey side, which is one part of your brain, and the drawing, which is another, and it’s great, and I feel very honored that I have a platform to share that cartooning stuff.

Peter: Yeah, I’ve been following your cartoons. I went, man, this guy’s got a lot of talents. There’s been some real funny ones. There’s been a couple I looked at where I went, I don’t get it, but I know sometimes I’m just that way.

Greg: [laughs] It’s funny. Caleb Newquist is the guy who runs Going Concern. We talked about this and he’s like I’m okay. Because definitely a lot of these people outside the accounting profession are not going to get them.

Peter: Yeah.

Greg: And even, depending on your specialty inside and even your experience and possibly even your point of view, people inside the accounting profession might not get them. It’s like that’s okay, I don’t care. If it’s a smaller and smaller little group of people that get it, he’s ok with it. Plus he finds them to be a great way to populate the Pinterest page for Going Concern.

Peter: He’s the only Accountant I know with a Pinterest page.

Greg: Right, exactly.

Peter: So, before we leave, I do have one question for you. You got the accounting side, a little bit of the tax side, what’s your opinion on the deduction for the blind?

Greg: [laughs] Oh my gosh. I’m totally cool it. First off, my main opinion is that everything is more complex when you make accountants do it. So, like the tax code is obviously way more complex than it needs to be, and one and one of the biggest examples of that is the standard deduction. Because the whole idea of the standard is like – if you ask normal people do you know what the standard deduction is, they go yeah. And it should be a really straightforward concept because it’s a tax deduction and it’s standards, so depending on your filing status it’s the same no matter what… unless you’re blind, and, again, this is where, if I was doing this for accountants, I’d go “or unless you’re over 65, relax.”

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: I’m not going to focus on that. Okay, but the biggest thing is that blind people get a higher standard deduction, and I’m totally cool with that. Because it’s like, you know, I get it. It would be horrible to be blind, that’s gonna affect your earning potential, so if we give them a break on the taxes that’s wonderful. The thing I don’t get is why that’s the only disability, in the world, that gets it. Why is it that blind people are the only… it’s like here’s someone who’s blind and it’s like, dude, that sucks that you’re blind because you’ve never been able to see a baby’s face or a beautiful sunset… so how about we make that all better by allowing you to pay slightly less in taxes? Like, hey quadriplegic, stop whining about how you pay all of your taxes like a damn America.

Peter: [laughs]

Greg: It doesn’t make any sense, but that’s the world in which we live.

Peter: And and that’s the humor in the tax code, and how he’s been able to find that bit of humor just by saying the word “standard” deduction, which is for everybody. There’s a carve-out for blind people, but, hey, people who diabetes, a quadriplegic, keep paying your taxes!

Greg: Yeah, it doesn’t matter.

Peter: Well, Greg, thank you. I know we could probably do this for about three or four hours and it would be a blast. What I’m going to ask is I’d like to have you back on at a later date and we can pick this up and just keep keep flying with it.

Greg: I’d love to, yeah.

Peter: I appreciate you taking time. I’ve had a blast. I think you’ve had a blast too. I look forward to our next time. How can people find you?

Greg: Well, if you want to see those cartoons, go to GoingConcern.com. I still Tweet, probably not three jokes a day, but I probably get three a week out. So follow me on Twitter, which is @GregKyte. Or you can go to ComedyCPE.com. That actually takes you to my website, which I haven’t updated for a while, but there’s some links on that where you can check out some sketch videos and some standup videos that I’ve done.

Peter: Appreciate it!

Greg: Yep, thank you!

Peter: Hey, I’m with Randy Nelson today and Randy is the author of “The Second Decision: The Qualified Entrepreneur” and Randy has his foreword written by General Hugh Shelton, 14th chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. So, first and foremost, that’s very impressive. Second, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule, Randy, to spend some time with me on my podcast.

Randy: Thanks for having me. I appreciate your time.

Peter: Oh, I love doing this. I love having this conversation. Randy and Ii met a little over a year or so ago, at Advantage Media. We both had our books published by Advantage Media and that’s where we crossed paths. His book, correct me if I’m wrong, “The Second Decision” was the number one book in 2015 at Advantage Media Group?

Randy: You are correct, yes. I was somehow made Author of the Year in 2015.

Peter: That’s what it was. Author of the Year in 2015.

Randy: Yeah.

Peter: Yeah, well congratulations on that.

Randy: Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

Peter: That’s quite an honor from from a very accomplished publisher who puts out a lot of books a year, and well deserved. So how did you ever get a joint chief of staff, a general? Was he a cousin, relative, uncle who’s a retired colonel in the Air Force? I’m real curious about this. How’d you get this persona to write your forward.

Randy: It’s a great question. I’m probably not going to give you the answer that you would expect. So, just a quick background. My first career I spent almost seven years as a submarine officer, got out a Lieutenant, spent my time on ballistic missile submarines, and then, when I got out, my first business that I started, with a couple partners, we placed people coming out the military into full-time jobs. That company turned 25 this year, we started in ‘91, and we’ve placed over 36,000 veterans into full-time jobs over these past 25 years.

Peter: That’s great.

Randy: Fast forward to 2001. I read in my local newspaper, I’m in Raleigh, North Carolina, that General Henry Hugh Shelton, who is the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and had all military – by the way, he was he was the chairman from 97-2001, so he was sitting chairman on 911. He was the only plane flying over New York City that day.

Peter: Wow.

Randy: So, after his four years were up, he was required to retire and NC State University, in Raleigh, is his alma mater. So they knew that they had a rare gem, one of our nation’s greatest leaders, and they asked him if he would be willing to be part of the leadership center and with his name attached. So I read that the Shell leadership center is going to start enrolling and I immediately raised my hand and said, “I know John Shelby doesn’t know who I am I but I want to be a part of it, what can I do?” and I was on some of the initial planning meetings and was lucky enough to be selected for his his board of advisors, so he’s got 25 other people on that board.

Peter: Wow.

Randy: So pretty high level. There were two people who did not know him, by the way. Myself and one other guy who retired from the board this year at age 95. But most of the people, as you would imagine, they know him. In is stellar career, he has met a lot of people and impressed a lot of people. Very, very long story short, that board started in 2002. It is now in its 14th year, 2016, and I had the honor of Chair of the Board in 2014-15. I didn’t know him, but I can now call my very good friend and I just love being associated with him because you talk about a leader of leaders. He’s a great man to be around, as well as the other people on the board.

Peter: That’s an extremely impressive story, by far, and the thing that I really like about that is you didn’t know him from anybody, and you just raised your hand. How can I help? And, through this help, you become acquainted with him and next thing you know he’s writing your forward for your book.

Randy: Yeah, you know the way I look at leadership is you gotta earn your respect.

Peter: Indeed.

Randy: In the military, there’s two things. You’re given, in my case because I was an officer, your bars. I started as an officer so people had to salute me, they had to respect the position, but they didn’t have to respect me. I had to earn that respect, and I felt that with General Shelton too. I was lucky enough to be selected but, over time on the board, I thought my job is to help add to his building this thing. I love startups, so it was essentially a start-up. So you add value to the board and eventually you get to know the man and. Yeah, in 2014 I am proud to say that I was selected to run the board for two years.

Peter: That’s – wow. I’m at a loss for words. That’s pretty cool. You mentioned that you drove a submarine?

Randy: Yes, I did.

Peter: So you’re not claustrophobic at all?

Randy: No, no. I’m one of the few people, I think you can relate to this. Back in 1982, I had to choose. When you’re in ROTC, you have to choose between a Pilot Surface Warfare Officer and nuclear, and you can go nuclear submarine or aircraft carrier, and I had done well in school so I tried to get into nuclear power but I was an accounting major.

Peter: There you go.

Randy: So I was able to sell that I’d be a good person for their program. So they let me in and, after lots of schooling and lots of qualifications, I finally got a chance to get mine. In the air and the pilot world, they call it wings. In the submarine world, you get your gold dolphins. So, when you’re qualified as a submariner, you earn your goal dolphins. When we talk about the book, that’s where the whole qualified concept comes from. Because, as you would want, they didn’t let me drive submarines until I knew what I was doing and I was qualified.

Peter: So there’s a lot going on here. Submarine, accounting, and then you did tell me beforehand you get your degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, which is one of the stellar accounting programs in the state of Ohio as well as nationally. You’re a submarine driver, you get out, and I heard something that you said: I love doing startups, which gravitated you towards helping out the general. So, startups, help me there.

Randy: Startups is the environment where, every day, you have to figure out what’s the next thing to do and, in the beginning, I guess my history, from a macro standpoint, is I’ve built two companies and I turned one over at year 12 and the other one over at year ten because, once it gets too operational for me – too steady stated, if you will – then I really want to go back and and start something else.

Peter: Okay.

Randy: But I think the creation, just the energy and the creation that goes into starting something new from the ground and building it up. I’m not the startup guy that wants to start it and then a month later leave. I start up and built it for 12 years. I turn over a pretty good engine when it’s at 11 to 12 years, but then I’m motivated to go back and start something new.

Peter: That’s really interesting. I started my business, and nothing to to the capacity that you have built, but there’s something new everyday and it’s just a ton of fun, and you wake up the next day and you don’t know what’s coming at you. I can see why, if you have 12-13 years and it becomes a little bit more mature, little bit more stable, the systems are in place. Let’s go back and have some fun, see what we can create from scratch, and what can we build?

Randy: Yeah. I think to describe it best is the startup world is a lot of uncertainty, whereas my wife I could not do her job (she’s been teaching first grade forever and she’s fantastic at it). I don’t think I have the patience and I couldn’t do what she does so well. She like certainty, so every day where today looks like something she has seen before is what she wants. Uncertainty? No, that’s not her. For me, I’m the opposite. I thrive on uncertainty, and that’s where you have a chance to do the most sometimes.

Peter: Wow, I guess we are a lot of alike, because I struggled in a certain corporate America type of structured world where, in an uncertain world… I tell people that, since 2010 when I went full time, I have not worked a day in my life since that time. Ask my wife, who loves certainty, she’ll say he works all the time.

Randy: Right, yeah.

Peter: And I don’t look at it as work. So, with the startup stuff, is that what triggered writing the book “The Second Decision”?

Randy: No, I’m in a number of CEO peer groups – Vitsage, Entrepreneurs’ Organization – and since ‘98 I have been around other entrepreneurial CEOs, so we’re talking about building our businesses, learning from each other, and having made so many mistakes in my own companies over the years and looking back to when I sold my second business. I sold it to a very large German firm and had a chance to go build my business out throughout Europe and Asia. I had a lot of time to sit on planes and I said, okay, I was able to sell one business and I was able to sell a second. If I could teach anything to anybody, what would I be able to teach people? That was really my question, and how it worked was I spent a year putting content together and then I got to present it to my CEO group. I actually asked my wife to come, it was this big build-up, I said I’m about to unveil this, I’ve spent a year putting content together, I have two and a half hours in front of my CEO peers… and when I get done they get they had two takeaways for me. They said, Randy, number one that was quite possibly the worst presentation we have ever heard in our life.

Peter: [laughs] Okay.

Randy: Not what you were expecting, right?

Peter: No, no.

Randy: So what I did was, because I’d put all this content together, essentially I vomited my content out for two and a half hours. I was going to get it all out, so I wanted to prove to them that there was good content. The second thing they said was, even though it was the worst presentation, we think there’s something here. We think you should go write a book, because people need to hear this content, and that’s why I wrote the book. I never had the desire to be an author. One less I’ve learned is I’ve always been pulled rather than pushed, so when people say listen you should go do this because of that, I do listen, and a couple years later I had had my first book out. But it was it was not the start that I thought it would be.

Peter: So I just had a curiosity: when they said this is the worst presentation ever, and you and your wife are there, did you have this really sick feeling in your stomach, or did they say that with a little bit of a twinkle in their eye so you knew the however was coming?

Randy: Even funnier is my wife had gone because she had to get back to school, so when I got home she says so how did it go? How did they think you did? And I could see she wanted to hear from me first so I told her, well, they said it was the worst presentation ever. She said, “Oh, thank you, because I didn’t want to have to break that news to you.”

Peter: [laughs] Oh, that’s funny.

Randy: She said, “I’m your wife and I was trying so hard but I was thinking ‘Oh, make it end.’”

Peter: So basically the accountant in you came out and you were just doing a lot of content.

Randy: Oh! You know, there’s some speakers that are no content and all motivation, and then there’s some who are all content. Well, that day I was there. It was all content. So, I deserve it, but hey that’s what we gotta learn, right?

Peter: Yeah, it’s a great learning experience. So, the title of the book, “The Second Decision,” which makes me ask what’s the first decision?

Randy: So the first decision is when you decide to start your company, and the idea on the napkin… all of a sudden it works. Imagine yourself at a dinner with your wife or your best friend and you’re giving a toast to the fact that your business is off the ground, running, you’ve got employees and you got a good future ahead of you. That’s where “The Second Decision” comes in. You have to look at yourself and say, “Am I the right person to lead this company for the next three to five years?” Because it’s not whether the company works, at this point, it’s whether you work right for the company. So “The Second Decision” is, number one, do I want to leave this business? And, number two, I have five roles that I define in the book. Three of them are qualified and two are not qualified, so I go back to my Navy days where I had to be qualified before I ran the business. As entrepreneurs, we don’t have to be qualified to do anything to start a business. We just have to get the certificate, start and go.

Peter: Right.

Randy: So the three roles that are qualified are the leader, and the leader is the person who is at CEO and wants to be the person to lead the company future. The role player is the second choice, and that’s the person who says I don’t really want to lead, I like sales, I like marketing. Maybe I want to move to a chairman of the board role, or something along those lines. The Creator is the person who says I really like to start businesses. I’m the creator, I love to get it up and off the ground, I’m the startup person, but when they get going… well that’s not really me.

Peter: Right.

Randy: And then I have two unqualified roles: a dabbler and status quo. The dabbler is that entrepreneur that wants cash but is not really that interested in all this other crap they gotta learn to build a business. Status quo is I’m happy just where I’m at. So the qualified entrepreneur is somebody who is willing to get qualified, and in the book I mirrored what I did in the Navy. In the Navy, I had a submarine qualification system. It was the the qual card, and I created the entrepreneurial qual card in the book and said if you actually had to sit in front of a board of directors and prove to them you know what you’re doing, would you want to or could you?

Peter: And I was gonna make a comment about that because I’ve read the book and – first thing, I read the book and I said this is great – and two, you’ve got a workbook to help to determine if you are that qualified entrepreneur. Now, I call that January in my business because I’ve gotta slate it out to now go back through the book, in January, when I’ve got time to sit down. You have things laid out just ideal in here to help somebody make that decision.

Randy: Yeah. Going back to my Navy days, the way it worked there was they had all the qualifications that you needed to have a general understanding of running that submarine. So when the captain said you’re qualified and gives you your goal dolphins, he now trusts that you really have a feel and an understanding of what’s going on. The way it worked was there were lines. There were qualification points and I had to go in front of an expert, anytime I wanted to go get checked out on something. So, let’s say it was the main steam system on a submarine. I would go find the expert, I would go talk to that expert that expert would ask me question after question after question, and when they thought I knew enough about the main steam system they would sign my card. And I would do that for the 15 pages of qualification items and then I would end it with an oral examination and then another one in the final with the captain. When you think about “The Second Decision” book, all I want leaders and entrepreneurs to do is to go through there and it’s a self awareness issue for me. Do you really know enough about running your business that you could answers some of these questions that I built around the top reasons companies fail or underperform? This is not Randy Nelson’s theme of the month or because I’m successful entrepreneur and I have it all figured out – No. These are based around the things that everybody’s gonna have to know and do for the next 10, 15, 20, 50 years. You have to have cash, you have to understand how you spend your money, you have to learn the basics.

Peter: When you talk about cash, I’m going through the book here and you’ve got three chapters there from the financial perspective, and the one thing that you said you highly recommend for entrepreneurs is, at the beginning of every month, figure out what your cash flow is for the next six months… and I read that and I thought I should be doing that. I’ve shared that with others, when I’m speaking, and I get the same look from them that I had. It’s like duh. That’s probably the most important thing I should be doing: looking at cash flow for the next 6-9 months and ensuring I have enough cash to run the business, but I think a lot of entrepreneurs don’t think that way or think about that, even an account.

Randy: Yeah, maybe this will help because you can get different numbers with different people, but up to 70 percent of businesses fail because of lack of cash – and I think a lot of the time people think I’m going to run out of cash because I’m not successfully but it’s just the opposite too. I’m growing too fast.

Peter: Right.

Randy: And you know the story that I always tell is January 2004 I had $650,000 in the bank. I have a credit line of a million dollars that I can tap based on a receivables formula, so I can tap $700,000 that money. So I’m I have $650,000 in the bank and I have $700,000 more on the credit line. I’m sitting absolutely pretty.

Peter: Yeah.

Randy: I went to my two partners and I said we need to contribute $200,000 a piece by March 1st and they said are you nuts? We have 650,000 dollars in the bank. And, because this forecasting out the bank balance, I forecast (and I got pretty good at it) our bank balance was going to be minus -$650,000 in June.

Peter: Okay.

Randy: So we will be within $50,000 of tapping out the credit line, if things went just as I predicted. And you know that in our world things don’t always go that way, too.

Peter: Right.

Randy: So number one: with cash, you gotta understand that trends are different than the bank balances, so looking out six months can help you make some good decisions before you’re forced to make bad decisions.

Peter: I have taken it to heart, I do it now, I’m religious with it and I’ve made some modifications into my business based off of that six months cash flow model, because when you see it from a cash perspective and black-and-white you really open your eyes.

Randy: Well, coming from somebody who understands financials like me, that’s a great thing to hear. Because, if you’re doing it, imagine somebody like you and I who really are financial people going way back and we went through school. There’s a lot of entrepreneurs who really do not like numbers.

Peter: A lot of them.

Randy: Yeah.

Peter: And a lot of times, in stories… I’ve got a friend who lost three-quarters of a million dollars because his controller went to the Caribbean with his money. I was playing golf with him a couple years before that and I made the comment, are you looking at reconcile, are you just double checking the stuff? He says no, I completely trust my controller. I’ve known for a very long time. And I said you’re setting yourself up for something disastrous, potentially, and he just kind of blew me off. I saw him soon after that happened and he said you’re right, I should have paid a little bit more attention, but I’m always looking at that bigger picture.

Randy: To me it’s the number one, until I sold my business and it was it was taken away from me, I’d check my bank balance every single day. And then when it gets sold to a large strategic company they sweep the money out so you aren’t really in control of your cash anymore because the big company controls it. Number one thing I looked at every single day of my life when I was an entrepreneur – and still do.

Peter: I don’t know if you know this but I’m a former banker from back in the day and I used to lend commercially, and even though I may not have done the six months I still had my former VP of lending in the back of my head going “cash is king, everything else doesn’t count. Cash is the lifeblood of the organization, net income is not all cash.” So I’m not worried about that, I want to see cash flow. I want to see how they are paying that debt service and marrying that with your six-month plan, because now it’s much more visual, but it just very striking when you see it.

Randy: Yeah, six month cash is king. That’s what I like to say. I also want you to look at your covenants, from what your lenders are doing out six months, because you might be within the covenants now – and the interesting part was, because we put money into the bank, our commercial lender trusted us more because I shared with him what we were doing and why we were doing it. Our lender, who was a great business thinker, he was much more supportive of our business because we were taking responsibility as well, not just asking the bank to bail us out.

Peter: And it sounds like you created a partnership with him if you went and shared this information with him, because I know a lot of times those who borrow go to the back asking for forgiveness vs permission.

Randy: You go it.

Peter: Yeah.

Randy: And I’ll tell you one more story about the three financial chapters. When you write a book, and you know this like I do, the final edit cuts a lot of the book out.

Peter: Yeah.

Randy: In my case, I don’t know what, it was about forty percent. You work your heart out, you say okay here’s my baby, you think all your book’s going to get published, and then the editor cuts out a bunch. They said we didn’t cut out anything in the three financial chapters. We think it’s that important and that information needs to be there. We didn’t touch it. When I’m speaking, and I speak with lots of CEOs and leaders, I say, if you read one chapter, take one of the financial chapters, because that gets you thinking the “I’m big and I don’t know what I don’t know” philosophy. What I want to do is get some people outside their comfort zone because this is not real complicated. I’m not asking to become MBA’s, like you said, all we really want to do is get cash forecast about six months, not just one.

Peter: Right, and I think coming from someone with your background, who is an entrepreneur who has started and businesses, and I like how you talked about it earlier. You’ve got some scars, you’ve had some failures out there as well, but that’s all part of growing businesses and being that entrepreneur, and throwing the three financial chapters in I would assume it’s getting people’s attention. I don’t see CPA or accountant, only maybe in the sleeve of it where it’s not that bright, that maybe they’ll listen to you just a tad bit more than maybe their own account.

Randy: Yeah, I think when I point out the the the metrics… I would say one of the most prominent takeaways from when I speak the group’s is that they have to improve their metrics. They understand that they’re going a little bit too much on their gut and a little less on the pure data that exists inside the business. They may not necessarily love it, but if, when I go ahead and coach companies, the very first thing I do is baseline that company with their metrics. If I can look on one sheet of page and I can see three to five years worth of history of your company’s metrics, and I can see where you’re at today and I can see where your were before, we can build a forecast out 2-5 years. That is powerful information. I don’t need to know anything about your business, but if I know your numbers… number one, you can’t hide from the truth and your numbers are what they are.

Peter: Right.

Randy: So I would say yes, from a takeaway standpoint, the whole financial area, the whole metric area, is something that I gets their attention. Outside of that, outside of the financial area, what what gets their attention? What makes them get that look where you see the light bulb go on over the head and their eyes get nice and wide and and their pupils dilate? What is that piece in your book, outside of the financial pieces?

Randy: The general challenge I give to them at the beginning is that the growth of a company is limited by the growth of its leader. It’s a self awareness issue that, for you to ask anybody else to do something, you really have to ask are you prepared, yourself, to help them grow as a person. Because we all know what to grow our company we have to grow leaders, we have to grow the people below us so that they can take on more responsibility, but what I learned the hard way, and I use this program called Birthing the Giants in the book. My first decade in business we grew 50 percent a year.

Peter: Wow.

Randy: We had grow from a handful to over 200 employees, we had grown from nothing to over 20 million. We had grown from one to nine offices. And, in 1999, I get accepted into this program called Birthing and Giants. Now there are 60 of us, 60 of us entrepreneurs around the world, that are sitting on campus at the MIT Endicott house and I’m just ecstatic because I have been so successful and I’m so excited to learn. It’s right when the dot-com era was booming and, quite honestly, I was pretty cocky at that time. So I remember getting into the room and the first person comes up and they’re talking about the critical success factors for growth, and I’m like I got this stuff. I mean, look at how I’ve been growing. I feel pretty confident.

Peter: Yeah.

Randy: And then they start talking and I start taking notes because I don’t really know what they’re talking about… and then I take more notes and I take more notes I take more notes, and by the end of that week I humbled and embarrassed. I was shocked at how little I knew about really running a business, so what I try to get out to the entrepreneurs, leaders, CEOs out there is it really took somebody showing me how much I didn’t know I didn’t know. We all know what we know, we all know what we’re good at, but until somebody pointed out just how how much I needed to learn – and from that point on I committed that I was never going to be the leader who asked anybody to do anything I was not doing myself first, and then it just goes from there. We talked about all the different aspects of the qualification card that I built, but I really am pushing leaders for self-awareness on whether they are the right person in that right seat. It’s a combination of self-confidence and self-awareness. If you have both, it’s a powerful combo. If it’s just the self-confidence piece without the self-awareness, it’s a risk.

Peter: So, listening to what you just described and you said that you were a little cokier back then, so when you’re hearing this you had to really just put your ego aside in order to accept, listen, learn and grow. Because, if you maintain that complete self-confidence and that ego was in the way… it would have stopped you, wouldn’t it, or would you still have gone, I don’t know what these guys are talking about? I don’t know what the hell I’m doing?

Randy: I tell the story that in my first decade, even after the Navy, as an entrepreneur, when you’re getting success, you’re going to feel pretty good about yourself. You have the guts to start a company and then it’s successful, you’re feeling pretty good but you feel like nothing can go wrong, and I tell people that until I really took Stephen Covey advise that you don’t listen with intent to reply you listening with the intent to understand, I was replying a lot because I thought it was right. I thought I knew everything and I was just telling people how to do things. I’m a different leader now and I try to get that across to people. You have a lot of people with really, really good opinions and thoughts, if you’re really open to listening to them.

Peter: Wow. I actually didn’t realize that that came from Covey, because we use that a lot in improv. It’s the ability to listen to understand vs listening to respond, and if you can listen to understand and park your agenda, you’ll go a long way; versus listening to respond, interrupting, pushing your agenda, don’t care just keep driving that way… it does go a long way. This whole listening to understand, we used to call that active listening back in the day but we’re not in that environment anymore where everybody’s just trying to butt in, respond, push the agendas, and it becomes… it’s defeating.

Randy: Yeah, the entrepreneurial role, and leaders in general, I think we think sometimes we have to know all the answers, that it’s a sign of weakness if we don’t. I turned it around, I tell people you don’t have to know all the answers. I challenge him to be able to ask really, really tough questions, the right questions, by listening. Because that way, when somebody comes to you, if you can ask the right questions then they still have to figure it out for themselves, but you’ve challenged them and given them the direction that they need to go. I think that that’s a skill that everybody needs to learn, or be self-aware to say I don’t like doing that crap. I want to go back and start businesses, and I want to hire somebody else to be the leader of my company, which is really “The Second Decision” that I ask people to make. If you hate doing all the stuff, if you don’t want to learn about all the leadership stuff and you don’t want to take all that responsibility, if you’d much rather just be in the startup world, then go be a creator. Hire or leave behind.

Peter: So let’s go back to that, because the qualified were the leader, the role player and the Creator, but one of the ones that didn’t qualify was the dabbler. Remind the audience about the dabbler.

Randy: So if you look at the the entrepreneurial qual card that I created, and if you had to have all that knowledge to run your company (and I consider it general knowledge that you should know. You should know about strategic planning, you should know about leadership, you should know about cash, you should know about expenses, you should know about lots of things to run your business.) The dabbler says I know I need to know that stuff but I’m going to kind of skip six of those pages because this doesn’t really interest me. I’m not really that interested in numbers so I know I probably should know about metrics, but I got cash and I got cash and I’m really good cash so I just choose not to look at that stuff. I am not really interested in marketing and I know it’s important to know and people tell me I should try out this Twitter thing, and I understand that social media is not going to go away, but I’m not that interested. So they dabble. And you know, I think a key point that I that I want to bring out is I’m not judging people, either.

Peter: Right.

Randy: The people who make the decision to become an entrepreneur, good for them, it takes guts to do that. So I’m not going to say it’s wrong to be a dabbler if your company is successful and you’re dabbling. What I am going to do is I’m going to point out two facts: I’m going to point out, number one, that your competition may be led by a qualified entrepreneur, which means they’re trying to build that company day in and day out. So you’re at risk of falling behind them, if you care. The real numbers that I point out are that fifty percent of all businesses fail within the first five years and seventy percent fail within the first 10. Business is tough.

Peter: Yeah.

Randy: It’s easy to get that first sale, and maybe to get a couple sales, but to sustain it and build it overtime – businesses is tough.

Peter: So let’s say there’s somebody in the audience who happens to be a dabbler. They say okay, that’s me, but you know what? That Randy’s right. So, if my competition are qualified and I’m over here in the dabbling world, how do I move to the other side? Is it going back through this process and learning about becoming a qualified entrepreneur, as well as somehow changing that mindset that you have a thirst for knowledge for everything?

Randy: The first challenge I would give them is, what are they telling their employees? Are they challenging their employees to be the best that they can, and then they’re a dabbler? Because if they are then, as a leader (which is really what my book is, it’s a leadership book), I’m challenging them as a leader to do the right thing. Because yes you started the company, yes you’re the entrepreneur and yes you’re the one who owns the company, but if you’re holding everybody accountable below you of being qualified and you’re dabbling, then I have a little problem that and I think your employees will have a little problem with that over time. If you have a bunch of employees that are dabblers, just like you’re a dabbler, then that’s okay. What I don’t want you to do is I say you’re building great company and say you’re doing all the right things, but in fact you’re really not. I had to go through one of my biggest learning experiences. Our military recruiting business that got 36,000 veterans jobs over 25 years, that company has done really, really great things, it was sold to private equity in 2007. I remain on that board and remain active, so it’s a success story. We’ve done really, really well. Well, in 911, when everyone remembers where they were, our business, our supply, went away because the military went on stop loss. People couldn’t leave the service and demand went away because the economy went away, so our company that I mentioned that had grown 50 percent a year for a decade got downsized by seventy percent.

Peter: Wow.

Randy: So, when you look at the book, you know, a lot of these are lessons like the metrics. If you know your metrics, you can get through any type of either upswing or downswing. But, in the end, the real key for me is the leader making leader decisions. Dabbling is great as long as everybody understands that’s the expectations, but if you have employees that are relying on you and put the trust in you… they have families and they have goals, and if the leader’s dabbling and they expect that leader to be leading, then at some point there’s a mismatch there.

Peter: The house of cards will fall apart.

Randy: The house of cards will fall apart at some point, yep.

Peter: Because you’re really not walking the talk. You’re trying to get everybody else to do it but you, as the leaders who is in charge the business aren’t putting in the same effort. It’s not gonna be sustainable.

Randy: It’s a house of cards, and hopefully it never falls, but you look at the fortune 500 list of 1980 versus 2010 and not a lot of the same names are on there.

Peter: No, and a lot has to go to leadership. A lot has to do with complacency, too. We get complacent. By the way, do you have a Blackberry on you right now?

Randy: I have an iPhone.

Peter: Yeah, but 15 years ago I bet you had a blackberry.

Randy: I did.

Peter: Yeah.

Randy: But I have an iPhone 5c and I feel like I still have a blackberry.

Peter: [laughs] Well, you might wanna upgrade, but that’s okay. I mean, you’re looking at your cash flow, right?

Randy: You bet.

Peter: So, before we end this, what’s next on the horizon? You got another book or two out there?

Randy: I’m writing “The Third Decision.”

Peter: Okay.

Randy: “The Second Decision,” as we’ve talked about, is built around the top 10 reasons that companies either fail or underperform. “The Third Decision” goes to all of our lives that we have outside of business that we don’t talk about a lot but we lead, which is our personal life, and the book is built around the top regrets that each of us have in our lives – based on research, based on statistics, and then I’m giving that to the entrepreneurial world, the leadership world, for how is it that we deal with these regrets? Again, it’s a self-awareness book. I’m asking people to, especially from a regret standpoint, I always look out for 3-5 years. I don’t talk about your legacy or your whole life. I don’t want to talk about too far out, about three to five years. What I’m looking at is how can you avoid some regrets in your life by being more self aware of the decisions you make in your personal life. I’ll give you one example. I have asked every audience I have talked to, what are your personal non-negotiables? And a personal non-negotiable is not up for discussion and you’re not going to compromise. I’ll give you an example. For me, it was coaching my boys in baseball when they were 7-15. It was not negotiable. it was scheduled. I coached them, I went to the game. I didn’t get there twenty percent of the time. If somebody has really, really solid non-negotiables then that might actually restrict the growth of their company because they’re not willing to grow at fifty percent clip because all of a sudden they realize they’re non-negotiable. I think we’ve all heard, when we have a death in the family, those are the times when we think I’m going to change, I’m going to learn from this. Nobody does, we all forget about it. Like in “The Second Decision,” in the third I want to talk to you and I want you to say, he’s talking to me and he’s asking me some hard questions that I really can’t avoid answering. So it brings an account of personal life. I’m excited about it, it’s coming along good. Hopefully it’s gonna be out sometime in late 2017.

Peter: I’m looking forward to it coming out because I will pick that up because I thought it’d be a good read. It made me think what are my non-negotiables, and I need to put a little more thought into that, but if it’s anything like “The Second Decision” then, once again, you’ll be author of the year.

Randy: No, you get that one next time.

Peter: I am working on it, but I’ve got some pretty stiff competition. I’m looking him square in the eyes right now.

Randy: I’ll vote for you.

Peter: It’s a pleasure talking with you. The book “The Second Decision: The Qualified Entrepreneur.” I would HIGHLY, highly recommend it. It’s a must buy. You can be any type of entrepreneur, you may want to think about being an entrepreneur. Do the read, do the work. Don’t be a dabbler, be qualified. Thank you so very much, I’m looking forward to the next time that we can get together and chat again.

Randy: Me too. Hopefully it’s soon. Take care.

Peter: Thanks!

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