Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] Sean: G’day everyone, and welcome to the ScaleUps Podcast, where we help first-time Founders learn the secrets of scaling so they can fulfill the potential of their businesses, make bigger decisions with greater confidence and maximise the value and impact they can have in the world. I am your host, Sean Steele. And my guest today is Jamie Christopherson, Director at Maximus International. How are you today, Jamie?

[00:00:40] Jamie: Thank you, Sean. How are you? Long time coming.

[00:00:43] Sean: The audience can hear me giggling because you and I have been trying to have this conversation for, I don't know how long, six months, multiple technical issues. Hilarious. I'm just super glad that we're finally having this conversation. That's great. Maybe a bit of background for those who don’t know you Jamie, I'll just have a quick crack. I mean, because you’re now Director at Maximus International. And we were introduced by Roby Sharon Zipser , the CEO of publicly listed Hipages for those who haven't heard that episode, episode 23, go back and have a listen. Fascinating. Actually, I did two episodes with Roby. So, you'll find another one shortly after that unpacking debt and equity structures and a whole bunch of things. But Roby had been through a pretty major transformation. And he'd said that you were pivotal in the transition from their, I think they're around 25 mil or something and things had flattened out and they needed help. And then, you know, five years later, they're at 55 mil. And so, I thought; wow, it's fascinating journey they'd been on. But one of the reasons I was so interested to chat to you is he kept referring back to how he got really clear on his strategy, and how he'd reorganised his team and the accountability models and the line of sight to the sort of the deliverables to the strategy and the cadence and the rhythm. And that you'd played a really key role in all that. And, you know, we're not going to be able to unpack every element of that in the half an hour or so that we've got. But I think, you know, we don't usually spend much time talking. We talk a lot to Founders on this show who've implemented their own strategies, but we don't get to chat to that many people who actually help Founders implement strategy and think about strategy differently. And because you see so many patterns and so many companies, you get just great insight. I think about stuff that works and stuff that you know can be left to the sides. So, that's really the goal of our conversation today. I just really want to bring a different perspective to. You've got a whole bunch of Founders listening to us today who are thinking about ‘How do I optimise my next five years and make it as meaningful as possible, waste the least amount of time as possible. Make it as, you know, maximise my growth rates and profitability and competitive advantage and all the other stuff.’ How do we help them do that? So maybe, to kick off Jamie, you could just give us a quick insight into what you're now doing at Maximus, just to create a bit of context and then…

[00:02:58] Jamie: Thanks, Sean. And listen, I wish you could follow me around everywhere with that articulate background story to myself. So, grateful for that. And I often just like to think of my role as really traffic control for really smart people in many regards. Yeah, listen, I've been in consulting since the early 2000s, and really starting off my career and strategy and having deep passion for how value my grades from getting the right people on board to then coming up with a customer value prop to then making some money out of it, to then trying to do it again the next year and the next year in a sustainable way. And you know, in the work that I've done around strategy, what I've really discovered over time is that, the organisations that really knock the lights out on their strategy and achieve their outcomes in the longer term, regardless of their size, regardless of their industry, have always over indexed on getting the human element connected with strategy. So, making sure that strategy is not an academic exercise, but one that taps into the hearts, the guts and the hands. You know, it's all too often, I've seen that someone has the world's best strategy has beautiful graphic design, it's PDF. It's perfectly meticulously. Yeah, 150 pages just to make sure that it's right and it's sent out by a CEO or an MD or an Exec Team with a carefully scripted message. And then we hope for the best that it will just, you know, take shape and form. And everyone will by magic know what to do in terms of mobilising to execute. So really, you know, over time I really started to discover in the work that I was doing around strategy was that, you know, an executive team would stop saying “we have all the answers” and saying “we're actually furthest removed from our employees, we're furthest removed from our customers and clients, we actually need to get close to our people who are managing our staff every day, who are out there representing our brand and our customer value prop.” And so, throughout my career, Sean, it's really been the interplay between strategy and leadership. And I kind of almost think of it like an off season and an on season. I don’t know which one is which, but I find that the combination of working with executive teams and boards to really synthesise a lot of intelligence into a cohesive and coherent story. That is executable as part of my year. And then the rest is about engaging the hearts, the guts and the hands in terms of capability to go from architecture into action.

[00:05:50] Sean: Beautiful. And I love that. I'm super keen to chat to you also about how execution leads back to strategy, you know, where the interplay is between strategy and execution. And we just, actually just this week, I mean, people will probably listening to you a week or two behind, but people will be able to go and listen to Ben Thompson, the Founder and CEO of Employment Hero, who has just been published recently, and he had a very clear master plan for that business. And actually, that strategy really didn't change a hell of a lot, other than the strategic agility as they grew to focus on the right things, the right priorities for every 90 day period taking into account, what was actually changing, how the business was evolving because it was growing so fast. You know, you have constantly having to adapt, but the master plan really didn't change. And I think they're now on sort of master plan two or three, if you like. But to your point, it's not 150-page document. It’s just had some excellent, robust thinking about the problem, about the customer, about the market and where they should be playing. So look, I'm keen to get stuck into the ‘How’ today, you know, like the, how you get other people thinking about strategy. Just before we start there almost philosophically, if you like, before we get into the, ‘how’, how do you like to think about, or how do you even talk about what is strategy or what it represents when you sort of really boil it down to numbers?

[00:07:12] Jamie: Yeah. I mean, everyone's probably encountered definitions from Michael Porter and the like, and you know, I think for me, I'm always on a bit of a personal pathway of how do I take the complex pathway to using simple, plain speak. And at the end of the day, for me, it is about having intention to want better for the future and then having the attention to step into that future. And you know, what is required as part of that is having both a combination of why you exist, why you're in the business to start with, and for a lot of Founders and start-ups, that's kind of, all you start with in most cases is burning ambition to say, this is why I'm getting in to the business that I am, but to then combine that kind of timeless reason for why you exist with, what does success look like for me in the next passage of time, you know, and for a small start-up that might be, you know, making it to the next 6 months or 12 months. And as you start to grow and evolve, it's then starting to cast the eye out into a longer-term view over the next two to three years and saying, what would success look like? What's the kind of, and many people would've heard of a BHAG, a big hair, audacious goal. You know, what's a big hair audacious goal for the future. And then are there kind of three to five proof points that you would see on a footy match scoreboard that would make it true, and really getting obsessed with that ambition and that story, and then saying, “Well, how are we going to do that? We've got a sense of the why and the where to, how are we going to do that?” And that really then, is about looking at how are we going to attract, retain, grow, and develop the best people that will represent that purpose and vision in service of attracting, retaining and growing the customer lifetime value of those that we are wanting to bring into our ecosystem. And once we have a clear view on that is then saying, “Okay, strategy is about making tough choices. We can't make all the choices in the world because we don't have infinite resources all time. Let's get really tough and ruthless around three to five big be choices where we're going to over-index on our funding, our resources, and building our capabilities, our muscles, to be able to be excellent in that.” Now that can be in terms of the employee attraction, retainment, and growth. It can be in terms of systems and processes that you're investing in to strengthen your organisation, or it could be external priorities in terms of really being clear on segmentation or knowing which segments you're going to go after. And also starting to interrogate your growth pathways rather than saying, “I want to realise X percent in revenue or profitability”, being really clear around the quality of that revenue, what are the sources of those revenue going to come from and how will we go through it? Is it through new customers? Is it through new product development? Is it through new geo geographies? Is it through organic growth? Is it through partnerships with others? Is it through acquisition and just being deeply curious beyond the number, which is fantastic.
You know, if we think about a footy match, I'd like to say that if you're going to get a hundred on the scoreboard in a rugby union match, I'd much rather get a hundred points on the scoreboard playing the brand of footy that the New Zealand, all blacks play. Then maybe some of the other nations play where they're feel goaling and penalty goaling from all different directions without that running rugby. So, that's a long explanation. That probably goes a bit beyond the Michael Porter definition, but it's a combination of “Why do we exist? Where are we going? How are we going to get there? And what are the big bet strategic priorities that are going to help us in making that leap?”

[00:11:04] Sean: I can't remember who called them winning moves, I think might have been the Rhythm Systems guys, but I liked that kind of concept of those three to five, those big strategic pieces to your point where you've got a rally resource, you can't do everything. And one of the things I always talk to about with my clients is if you spend the next five years doing exactly the same thing, you may scale the business further. But the question is, what are your competitors doing that is actually strategically differentiating them. So, in five years they've been doubling down on something that you haven't been doubling down on. And now they own that space, that strategy, that customer, that problem, that whatever it is, they're going to be materially more competitive than you are and your business might be bigger, but it's actually probably at risk. So, you have to be doing that sort of that deeper thinking to be thinking about what are we going to over index, not how we're just going to do more of the same, but actually how we're going to be a much better business over the course.

[00:12:00] Jamie: Absolutely. I think there's a, you know, I mean, I always reflect back on this one strategy offsite I was running in Adelaide. I think it was, would've been the latter part of the first week of March, 2020. And I remember scanning the external environment and the competitor landscape and the executive team, they were taking it seriously, but it kind of felt a bit more like a formality before they kind of got to the crux of the inner belly of the organisation and making strategy from within the organisation. And obviously I remember getting off the flight back to Sydney, where I was living at the time and the world changed. And so, you know, I'd say more so than ever, you know, organisations again, regardless of size or industry, and particularly for Founders in the fast moving context are really needing to have what I'd call an “Outside-in perspective” to understand what's happening in their external environment. And acknowledging that, you know, whilst they're sharpening the saw from within and harnessing and honing their skills and their capabilities and their employee value prop, their customer value prop and their engagement with investors and the like is that they also need to be really thinking deeply about what's happening in the field of play outside in the broader ecosystem. Because it's moving at fast pace, and it's becoming incredibly hard to set a strategy for more than three years, because honestly the last two years, no one could have ever predicted including myself.

[00:13:31] Sean: Hundred percent. You know, for those who are interested, if you're thinking about strategy and you like this conversation, just as a starting point, you should also go right back to the beginning. I don’t know what episode it was, but Rishad Tobaccowala, who was the group head of strategy for Publicis, which has, you know, 82,000 employees around the world. And I was asking him his thoughts on strategy. And he said, you know, it's fundamentally competitive advantage. And like you said, he's like, you actually have to look out into the future. It's not about the Naval gazing and just going; Hey, it's great. You know, well, we've got this widget. We could sort of slightly move it this way. And it's like, that's great. but the world outside you is changing a lot. And that's not about getting obsessed with your competitors where all of a sudden you fall under the trap of copying what they're doing and trying to do everything just a little bit better, because that's a strategy to nowhere, right? Like that's a strategy to zero profitability, and you're basically just lagging everyone. So, it's how do you think about that? Because you know, you are really challenging your clients to think about the external environment, but not get so locked into what everybody else is doing that they're feeling that sense of loss, like got a bit of fomo because those guys have got this thing and we don't have that. How do you navigate that?

[00:14:38] Jamie: Yeah. I mean, I probably link it to the reading that I do, Sean, because I was a terrible reader in high school in my early 20s. And I remember deciding at a certain point that I wanted to be the type of person that read a book a week, and I didn't know how I was going to solve for that, but I'm a pretty good runner. And decided to kind of, as James Clear would call it the ‘Habit stacking’, I decided to do a bunch of audio books as I was running and, you know, commuting into the city and the like, and so as does the audible algorithm do it, you start off in a strategy and leadership sphere and you end up reading about Philosophy and Buddhism and plants, and all other interesting wild things. So, I do borrow from a lot of, and thanks to audible and Amazon for sending me down that pathway of not reading your typical HBR articles and the like, with where the insights are fantastic, but somewhat, you know, either heard before or quite predictable. I was doing some reading and learning up on the three Hindu gods of Braama, Vishnu and Sheva. And, you know, there's some huge wisdom that comes through from those three Hindu gods in terms of the creation of new, the preservation and strengthening of existing, and also the letting go or the death, or as its term ‘destruction of the past’. And this kind of combination of renewal that is expressed through the three Hindu gods has huge relevance at this point in history where we really need to be looking at creating new ways of working internally, new ways of creating and delivering value to customers and clients, and new ways of engaging in the commercial market as well in terms of, for Founders and start-ups, how you engage investors and partners. And for those that are wanting to make the leap from a kind of Founder led business to one that is, you know, listed in the stock exchange, it requires a really genuine commitment to being in the rumble with those three Hindu gods, if I can use that term. And so, when making decisions around strategic priorities, you want to see the elements of all three in there where it's like; What are we actually doing that is really new and compelling? What is it that we currently do that are our superpowers that we want to sharpen the soar on and continue to invest in? And as we grow and we increase our scope and our span, how do we be ruthless around what we let go of that won't serve our future?

[00:17:18] Sean: Wow. And that just gets harder and harder as the business gets bigger, right? You've got more people with more expectation. You've probably got more investors. You got all these extra pressures. How did you, one of the things that Roby said to me was, that one of the big insights for them out of the work with you guys was almost at a, “Are we in the right business” kind of conversation like, you know, the way he described it to me and you, you might have a different view. And I know that a lot of businesses who have…I reckon out of probably 40 or 50% of the businesses who I've spoken to have ended up scaling. And of course, as the business is scaling, you end up sort of feeding the machine on the same sort of model. But of course, then you're having to find new customer types and new revenue types and the products expand a little bit. And there's this risk of becoming a bit generic and trying to be everything to everyone when you probably started relatively niche solving one problem. And now you're just trying to sort of feed the beast and there seems to be this sort of plateau stage where you go, hang on a second, profitability's getting squeezed. We've all of a sudden become generic or actually no longer competitive. And to your point, this opportunity to really renew and go; hang on, maybe there's one customer type out of all these customer type. We should really, you know, dig down on and actually be the experts in. We have this conversation with Chris Eldridge in one of the early episodes, they built up, I think, to about 40 mil and got their IT services sort of business, got exactly to that space and then realised actually their biggest opportunity, the customer they most liked that they got on with the best, that had the greatest value, where they could solve the biggest problem was like super funds. So, they doubled down on super funds and actually started solving really discreet problems in super funds, became the experts in super funds and actually such that over the next three to five years, nobody could compete with them because all the super funds knew that these were the guys you go to, because they're the ones who understand their industry and have problems and all the rest. But that process of letting go to your point when you've got this big beast that you are sort of serving, that's a really, it takes a lot of courage as a Founder. What kind of conversations did you get into with Roby? Because my understanding was, they got to a point where they thought they were in the platform's business and the lead generation business. And so, they had all these multiple lead generation businesses going. But actually, then through this process, they realised they'd sort of forgotten about their core customer, which was the trade. And so, they doubled down on how do we serve this trading customer better? And they went into developing all this, you know, software for, I guess, to help them run their business, not just generate leads for them. And that's seen the business double over the subsequent years. Tell me about that conversation.

[00:19:52] Jamie: Yeah. Oh, certainly. So, I think, I mean, I won't get into the particulars of the industry and I'll de-identify it from Roby and the team. Um, I mean, that's a scenario that has been commonplace for me over the years, and I mean, what I always think of, and this is where it comes back to that kind of theme. And I know I kind of, I'm probably oversimplifying it by calling it traffic control, but it really is that in the case that I always find myself in a room with people that are much smarter than me. And so, what I really do focus on is being a process facilitator rather than a content facilitator. I am never going in with the answer. And in fact, I make the point immediately and particularly post 20-20 of saying I'm not the expert of anything. I've got no idea what's going on. I have really like we're in a new territory. We've got one foot in the old story and our foot is stepping into a new story here. So, we're going to have to create the space for curiosity, rather than expertise. What got us to hear is not going to get us to there. And so, you know, when I look at a Founder-led business, a start-up, even with an executive team, but kind of looking to make it to that next step or to go from a, you know, like, let's say a 5 or 10 million business to a 20 or 30 million or even more, is when you've got the executives in the room, you've got a microcosm of the business, of the system in that room. And so how they behave with one another is a reflection of how their organisation or their business is operating in their ecosystem, in their industry. And so what I would really encourage here is that, you know, if that executive team or that group of leaders, or the two Founders that have started a business together and are kind of discussing their future, is they need to really reflect on the way that they're operating together as a team. And this is where there's a connection between strategy and leadership. Ariana Huffington calls it, compassionate directness, I think. And you know, it's kind of also known as like radical candour or just, you know, really over-indexing on both deep care and deep challenge. And so, within any of those contexts, because I'm relatively polite and I don't use a loud tone of voice, I get away with being quite direct with groups. And, you know, I've often been known to say that, "If you're going to really come up with a clear plan that is courageous and is going to take you to the next step. You've got to be in the rumble when you're having these conversations, you've got to learn how to disagree with each other respectfully, and you've got to be able to call out the conversations that matter.” So, for me, even though a lot of leadership teams and Founders that I'm working with, believe that we're setting strategy, when I come into the room, we're also working on taking their top team to the next level. And I see them as one and the same. If you are not evolving as a team, it's impossible to evolve with your strategy because you've got the system in the room that are not willing to say the things that matter, that are trying to preserve and protect the past and being unwilling to let go of things that won't serve the future. So, there's a lot of the human elements that, that play into that are incredibly. So, interesting that your question kind of angled a bit more towards the industry and the type of business that that Roby was in and from platform to another position, I really tapped into the human element of how that executive team were working together, which unlocked their intelligence, not mine.

[00:23:43] Sean: I love that. So, if you think about, you know, I imagine, you've obviously got a process and even though I hadn't quite said; Hey, gimme the steps. You've pretty much outlined the steps for us, and really nicely, and simply said, thank you for that. There's always questions that you know that are coming. So, you're working on the team. You're trying to get them in the right psychology. You trying to get them to the right space in the room to hear probably some of the harder questions. What are some of the hard questions that you find really sort of stop the room and have people go, oh, like that's a big question or it's a deep question or it really, you find it really starts to shift people's thinking, what are some of those go-to questions that you think our Founders might get value from?

[00:24:25] Jamie: I mean, starting with… I think the very fact of engaging someone that's external to help with strategy is a real struggle for Founders. I know with the kind of Founder-led businesses that have kind of started out of your typical garage scenario, you know, highly intellectual, highly entrepreneurial individuals, they have all of the answers. They can already see 10 years down the track, what their business will look like. It's very hard for Founders to understand that, to scale your business to the next level, it won't be because of that individual leading the organisation, they really have a role to drive what we'd call distributed leadership, bringing people into the journey to help in sharing, making the decisions, and then acknowledging that once you actually have a compelling strategy that has the input of your business unit leads or your functional leads. Regardless if you're still in a small operation, you've got at least five or six different voices in that room, it's incredibly important to get that input and buy in. You've then once you've got a strategy, I think, and I don't know that I'm answering your question here, so I'm going to try and steer it back, but it's really hard for a Founder to understand that you need a strategy in the first place, because what a strategy looks like for a Founder is often back of the envelope after a couple of drinks of whiskey with a good mate. And when you get to a certain size and scale, I mean, you think of the Dunbar number of like, you know, societies or you know, tribes coming together. Once you get to a number of 150 people in a tribe, the system starts to break down because it gets too loose and too large and then unable to kind of work cohesively. And I would say that Dunbar number for an organisation is probably even less. Once you get to kind of 50, you can't rely on gut instinct and intuition and people just giving you a look and knowing what to do next. So, I think the challenging question for a Founder is like, what's the value of having a strategy that exists outside of the mind of the Founder or Founders. And you know, once you starting to get to a certain sky size and scale in terms of revenue and number of staff is that strategy is not going to be realised by the top leaders. You actually have to go through the process of, first of all, the cognitive, the head understanding what is the strategy, but then engaging the hearts of those who are going to be driving the strategy, you then have to tap into the guts in terms of what is required for us to balance between delivering today in terms of our BAU or Business As Usual, and also making space for building the future. And I think that's a real challenge for a lot of Founders and for kind of rapidly growing businesses is you get caught up in the timeline of ‘What decisions am I making for this week to get an outcome?’ Whereas strategy is kind of about ‘How many of my decisions in a week are contributing towards year two or year three of our next horizon?’ And then Sean, just the execution capabilities. It's like, you know, going beyond the PDF document that gathers dust to go, actually we want this to be a rhythm. Everyone uses the word operating rhythm, which is just like, it's kind of almost just a natural language for everyone in any business. What's our operating rhythm. I really feel like we need more space for a conversation around strategy rhythm. And how do we make sure that we're taking deliberate times out to say; How are we tracking against our purpose and our vision, our value proposition, our strategic priorities? Who's taking ownership of our priorities? And who's implementing the initiatives? What are we executing on successfully? And how are we becoming a learning organisation? Acknowledging that strategy is not just about executing, but it's also about learning along the way. So, I reckon I've answered maybe a 10th of your question and then just gone off on a meandering journey. So, feel free to reign me back in.

[00:28:29] Sean: Well, actually what it leads us to is a really interesting conversation about, because my next question was about how do we take strategy into execution and where does execution re-inform strategy? And, you know, how often are you encouraging leaders to think about the renewal and their sort of deep thinking? Because obviously when you're setting up strategy in the first place, it tends to be a pretty deep-thinking process takes fair bit of time. And not everybody wants to be doing that every three months because that’s probably not very economical. And you haven't executed much yet. So, how do you think about the sort of feedback loop between?

[00:29:02] Jamie: Yeah. So, I think, as you've mentioned, I've alluded to kind of the strategy architecture, the strategy alignment, and then the strategy action. And then I think also with understanding where the strategic maturity of the organization is at is really important. So, to meet the group where they're at is to, to say; well, some organisations, some start-ups, some Founder-led businesses believe that strategy is your back of the envelope. Or the idea that sits in your head. Others might have a strategy, which actually is more like a 12-month operational plan. And then others might actually have one that genuinely is like a three-year strategy, which articulates those, the Why, the Where To, the How, and the What with some execution plans and timelines and teams that are mobilized around those. So, meeting the organisation where they're at in terms of their strategic maturity is really important. I've worked with a lot of organisations that have gone; Yeah, we've done strategy for years, but actually it is actually quite a basic operational plan. And so giving them the context and understanding of what a strategy is important. For some organisations however, they've been really robust in having a very comprehensive strategy and sometimes to their detriment, having the 150 page version that you talked to earlier. And then it is about saying, fantastic, we've got a really well articulated, rigorous strategy. What's the next step, you know, and quite often there's a gap in terms of acknowledging that strategy requires mythology. It requires narrative. It requires story. It requires engagement between people who are going to interact with this strategy. So, whether that's, you know, leadership team members talking to their direct team or to cross functional teams or to their customers or clients, or to their partners, or linking it in with their branding messaging to the market, is that, that strategy as a document is pointless. It's a nice theoretical exercise and a couple of leaders might elevate their level of strategic understanding, but it's not going to translate into meaningful action if they don't know how to socialise it in their conversations. So, making strategy part of conversation in the everyday is a really important thing in terms of, you know, kind of quite structured, you know, you might see, like in larger organisations, you might call it like a town hall or like a road show where they go and share the new strategy. For a smaller business, for a Founder-led business, or a start-up, it is about, you know, it could be just to the point of like; Hey, how do I go from holding the strategy in my head as the Founder, or as the Founders to kind of actually start practicing telling the story to others that are part of the business. And I've always kind of said, you never know how little or how much you know, until you try to articulate it to someone else. So, for Founders I would really say is that your strategy is obvious to you. You got into the business and you knew what your strategy was to really take your business to the next level. You need to be able to articulate that strategy, so that people understand it. And so, they actually give a shit about the strategy and they know what the direct line of sight is between what they'll do every day and how that ladders up to the big picture.

[00:32:25] Sean: Can you give me an example, Jamie, of how you get someone, a Founder, maybe who hasn't done much communicating of strategy to create the, I guess, the connectivity, the sense of connection to it, the interest to your point that, you know, the hearts and the guts of the people on the ground who are like; well, I've never heard anything about strategy before. Like why are we having this conversation? How do you get them to sort of bridge that gap and get them to think about how to make it more real? Is there an example you could share?

[00:32:51] Jamie: Absolutely. I mean, I think that as part of the strategy process with an executive team, it is always built in at the end of these processes to get the leaders to think about, “Okay, great, are we like, we're set with the strategy. We're going to sign off on this strategy. Now, how are we going to tell the story?” And so, what you'll start to find is we'll actually just practice, you know, in a risk free environment and just go, some of you are going to be natural storytellers. Some of you are going to be horrible storytellers, and I can guarantee I've encountered everything in between that, and it's acknowledging that, you know, for a Founder who's genuine about scaling their business or pair of Founders is that everyone has to be able to tell the story. And I think, there is a sense that, you know, once the strategy has been realised that it's just going to be the Founder that tells the story. And typically, by personality type, they're quite engaging. They're entrepreneurial, they're able to inspire the hearts of others. But if you are scaling a business and you are opening the reigns to other leaders, being part of the mix in helping to grow the business, everyone needs to be able to tell the story. And now, this is not about memorising the strategy and knowing how to perfectly articulate everything that has been carefully wordsmithed, it is about being able to tell the authentic story of the strategy in a way that suits your style and that suits also the person who's the recipient of the story. So, if you are telling your direct team, you've got to be able to articulate how this one page strategy that articulates your “why”, your “where to”, your “how” and your “what’s”, how that relates to the day to day for the team. Or indeed, if you're talking with a partner, it's got to really talk to the partnership element in terms of a strong partnership, embodying a shared sense of that, why and a shared sense of that ambition for the goal that you're working towards and what their role is in supporting the value proposition. And so acknowledging the role of, it's almost, I'd say that strategy that has been developed as a document is the cheat sheet for rich dialogue. And so, I don't think it's something that people develop immediately, but it's certainly something that executive teams or Founders with a couple of additional leaders that they've added to the business are really having to get quite effective at. And, you know, we only have to look as far as the likes of Amazon and other kind of world class organisations at the moment. They're not investing in the 30-page reports at their executive and board meetings. They're investing in, what's the story you're going to tell. Tell us a story that moves us, and that inspires the next steps of the direction. Boards want to be inspired as well, not just teams and organisations. And so, for Founders who are looking for, you know, that have a board or are looking for investors, also acknowledging that strategy is incredibly important for being able to get further funding or to be able to get further buy in from the board to approve certain next steps.

[00:36:06] Sean: How often do you see, or do you encourage clients to talk about strategy with customers?

[00:36:14] Jamie: It's a really good question. And I think, you know, for me, it's a bit like with, I don't know, for some of your listeners, Sean, some of them might have done some leadership diagnostics and they kind of answer the 150 questions or whatever it might be that gives them like a personality profile or, you know, their leadership effectiveness or whatever it might be. And quite often I get the question in debriefs around that, which says; well, is it my work self or is it my personal self? Is it my home self? And I would view it as kind of one and the same, really. So, you know, with regards to strategy, I quite often get a similar question, which is; well, is this strategy for us to kind of keep as a secret internally in our organisation? Or is it one that ladders up to marketing and branding and shooting from the tops of buildings. And listen, I think again, meeting the organisation where they're at, is I would be saying if you're not prepared to develop a strategy that you'd be able to have a conversation with your client or customer about, then perhaps it is not very customer focused. And I think, I always acknowledge as well from a competitive viewpoint as well. I always think of the example of Elon Musk. I mean, Elon Musk, from what I understand, and I'm not so close to the detail, but I did see recently, he said that he doesn't patent a bunch of his technology and that if there's someone out there that can leverage and build upon that technology and that Tesla goes bankrupt, well, then he thinks that's a pretty cool thing for the world. So, I feel like in a post 2020 world, I feel like we need to be stepping beyond scarcity mindset to be lifting the bar collectively. And for Founders, obviously there is an aspiration to expand the revenue growth and the commercial value of your entity. But to think about how, in what way is that servicing the broader industry in which you're a part of, how is that contributing to the betterment of society both today and in the future? So, I'm always of the view. I take a bias towards saying, I unapologetically put it out there. And you know, many people have tried to replicate the Apple strategy and failed because they just don't have the same, the DNA and makeup as Apple have. So, I'm of the view that it should always be both internal and external. And again, the story that you tell is nuanced.

[00:38:57] Sean: Is nuanced. Yeah. That's such a…I love the challenge that you've got in that question around. Well, how focus is the customer? How customer oriented is this strategy if you can't talk about it with a customer. And I also think, you know, if you don't have the customers, I mean, I've been in lots of strategy sessions over my time and there's been lots of them where there's been no customer input in the room. There's been no research done. None of the executives are talking to the customers and none of the people who are on the ground are talking to the customers are in the room and you're like, we're doing this in a vacuum. And so in the absence of being able to talk to a customer about strategy, which is theoretically about how you serve customer those customers better, how do the people who are actually doing the execution, get feedback from the customer about where the customer goes; yeah, but that's not really what's going on in my industry. That's not really my problem. Like my problem is this and you guys can't aren't solving it that way. And so, you're not creating the opportunity for the feedback and the input. And to me, that's the biggest risk is if you don't have that, if you're not tuned into what's going on with your customers, you can have the greatest strategy you think in the world. But if it's like you cut a point in time and you go; Hey, that's the strategy. And now we're just going to execute that three years and then we're going to wake up in three years and everything's going to be perfect and everyone is going to go, “Wow, that was incredible.” The customers could have completely changed during that time in terms of what they want, how they're getting their problem solved, who they're getting them solved by. And so, it has to be adaptive.

[00:40:19] Jamie: You know, everyone really follows the song sheet of Amazon's customer obsession. You know, imagine a world in which organisations of all sizes and scales walked alongside their customer to co-design a strategy together that services the customer. It kind of seems pretty basic to me. That requires some real courage at the same time.

[00:40:43] Sean: Yeah, geez. That's beautiful. I remember listening to a podcast some time ago where this guy had been really successful in all these marketing gigs and become a big sort of marketing influence. And he said; well, the first thing, the only thing that I did that made me successful was in every single job. The first thing I did was I blocked out the first two weeks of my diary and I rang 300 customers. And he said, and I didn't do a thing before I did any of that. I'm like, just give me the list of customers and I'm going to call people until I actually understand what is going on with them. And he of course had knowledge that there was nobody else who could say, well, I know what the customers are doing. He's like, I've just spoken at 300 of them. I know exactly what the problem is. Now, let's have a look at the business and see how well we are lined up to service that.

[00:41:24] Jamie: Looking at that, that's a huge amount of investment of time. But if we think of that, notion of slow is smooth and smooth is fast. If we slow down to really deeply understand the problem we're trying to solve, we'll have disproportionate impact later down the track.

[00:41:40] Sean: So interesting. Mate, we are getting close to time and God, I've got a thousand more questions for you, so we might have to do round two in a year's time and see what's been happening in your world. What else do you think if you, if you put your mind in the audience where we've got these Founders, you know, typically anywhere from probably, you know, one to 20 mil, a lot of them are services Founders, they're trying to sort of scale up their business. What are the things that you'd really like to leave them with? Questions, a process, key advice of a couple of things that you think are really important for them to think about if they really want to optimise the next three years in terms of their time and every, you know, fundamentally the quality of the questions they're asking themselves are dictating the work that everybody is doing. And so, really important that they are thinking about this sort of stuff sensibly. What would you like to leave him with?

[00:42:30] Jamie: Certainly Sean, and this is not an all-inclusive list, but just a few thoughts would be, acknowledging where the leaders of these start-ups are out in their journey as individuals as well, acknowledging that they started off as technical leaders with hands on the tools, you know, doing the technical task and they've obviously become really proficient and effective in doing so. As their business grows, they're going to have to become really proficient and effective in engaging the hearts and minds of others. And as the business continues to grow, you then start to move into this enterprise leadership space and having to think big picture holistically long-term, whole versus parts, short-term versus long-term, growth versus profitability. And I think for Founders, it really does require those clear career transitions. Even though you've avoided the corporate landscape, you still do go through those career transitions of technical expertise to people leadership, to strategic or enterprise leadership. So being really clear on it, what do I need to do to get off the tools, delegate to others so that I can focus on engaging the hearts and minds. And then once you've got people managers, people leaders in your business is how do you free up your space? Like you said, Sean, to get in front of the customer, get deeply curious, start thinking about longer term, bigger picture decisions to be making. Second thought and it's probably more a summary of what we've covered in our earlier discussion is, having the architecture of a strategy is not enough. You need to be able to go into the storytelling, create a mythology and an energy across your organisation and with your customers, with your partners, and even in the ecosystem, visible to your competitors about what you stand for and what you're up for in the future. And then building the kind of the cadence, the rhythm to execute the strategy. And this is where I'd really tap into the likes of James Clear, who wrote the book on atomic habits is, you know, for Founder-led organisations quite often a highly entrepreneurial individual or set of individuals that have started a business are quite intuitive and tend to be less structured is that, you're going to have to get the scaffolding in place to allow for that creativity and entrepreneurialism to continue to be available to you, make sure you have a level of standardisation and people who can be detailed and structured around you so that you can continue to shine through with your brilliance. The final thing I'd say, Sean is just, you know, in the world that we're in now is I like to refer to as like captains and pirates in strategy. So, captains is that you have a clear plan, you know where you're going, you know there's going to be headwinds and tailwinds, you know you've got to mobilise a crew, but also acknowledging. You know, when I was in Adelaide in March, 2020, the whole world changed. And you know, when the whole world changes and you don't know what's happening, you can't plan for anything. There's a benefit of being taking on a bit of a pirate mindset and being opportunistic and being able to slow down, hear the sites, the smells, the sounds, be curious, let go of expertise and discover what is emerging before anyone else does. There are a few thoughts I could keep going, but I'll pause for fear of monologue.

[00:45:51] Sean: Well, that was awesome. I'm still processing them all. And thinking about all of this great wisdom in the context of some of my clients who I know would hope to get huge value from today's conversation. Jamie, such a joy getting to finally have this conversation. Thank you so much. I'm definitely keen to have more of the future. So, we'll be inviting you back. How do people get in touch with Maximus, find out what you're doing, where would you direct?

[00:46:13] Jamie: Yeah. Maximus international, you'll find them online. Yeah, I’d love to have another chat with you, Sean. And we'll see you in the future.

[00:46:30] Sean: Mate, sounds great. Folks, really hope you've enjoyed the show today with Jamie Christopherson from Maximus International. Thank you so much, Jamie. Obviously we love reviews. If you feel like doing a review, we'd be super grateful. There is a team of people behind me who help put this show together and they really get a huge kick out of it. So, thank you for all those people who send them reviews. You can find us on www.ScaleUpPodcast.com. We've got full transcripts of all the episodes there. You can find it on YouTube. If you like the visual version or you can find us on all the socials. And you'll see some little video grams, snippets of this conversation popping out on the different socials over the course of time. Thank you so much, Jamie. And thank you everybody. We'll speak with you again next week.

[00:47:09] Jamie: Thanks Sean.