Episode 136: Trust-Fueled Growth & Delegation: Unlocking Your Business Potential

Mike O'Neill: Welcome back to Get Unstuck and On Target. I'm Mike O'Neill. Whether it's our team at Bench Builders working with a company, or it's me coaching a CEO one-on-one. Getting leaders in companies unstuck is at the heart of everything I do, and that is exactly what this podcast is all about. Each week, we bring your incredible guests who share their hard won experiences of getting themselves or others unstuck back on target and moving forward, I hope it gets you unstuck as well.

I'd like to first thank Theresa Harris of Harris Smarter Marketing Group for introducing me to today's guest. Joining me is Steve Fisher. Steve is a founding partner of Strategy Partners Group. He is, in short, a corporate strategist. He's got a great background and I think you, the listeners will enjoy learning a bit about how he got to where he is and how he helps his clients.

Welcome Steve.

Steve Fisher: Thank you Mike, for having me on. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Mike O'Neill: Well, as people who listen to this on a regular basis, know this is an unscripted conversation, and as such, I know that you have an interesting background that kind of led you to kind of where you are. It goes all the way back to college.

Don't, don't you have like an engineering degree?

Steve Fisher: That's right. It's, it's, my, my professional arc is pretty varied, and interesting and in, as in all of our cases, it explains who I am today. I started as an engineer. I thought I was going to be typical math guy, engineering guy. That was always my, my aptitude and, and that is my professional or my formal education as an engineering.

And I did that coming out of school for a little while. That moved into some consulting work when I was in my twenties. And then that actually ended up moving into, then moving into financial services and ended up being a CFO of a financial services firm for a couple of decades. And then when, when that part of chapter of my professional career came to an end, I moved back into consulting here in my but I have a little more gray hair now than when I did it in my twenties and have a little different, different, different amount of tools I can offer to a client.

So it's, it's just kind of, I've come full circle and I've come from engineering to CFO to now full-blown corporate strategist and advisor to business owners and C-suite executives.

Mike O'Neill: There's no question, Steve, that that arc that you described has served you well. I don't know if this has been your experience.

I spent 20 plus years in a corporate setting. I was a senior HR leader and I kind of learned all of the, the different seats that HR has to sit in the last 15 years I have been, for lack of better term, a consultant. And boy oh boy, a lot of people have a misnomer about being a consultant, but what they assume is you've got nothing but free time.

And what I'm finding that that's not necessarily the case. How would you describe your transition from being a CFO, not just a CFO, but a CFO for a financial services business? That's, that's a double. You gotta get it right. Does is it not?

Steve Fisher: Well, yeah. It's coming out of a heavily regulated industry.

So you do have to, you know, pay attention to your details and, and, and pay attention to your processes and procedures and, and actually the fundamentals of running a business and looking at, you know, collecting metrics, knowing which metrics to look at, that sort of thing, developing strategy, for, for going forward, that is pretty universal.

Those basic muscles to do that are pretty universal, independent of the type of industry you're in. Yes, you do have to, you do in every industry. There's some, there's some particular nuances you need to pick up and learn, but the, but you, but as a consultant, and you know this. You learn to develop that other muscle, which is learning to quickly adapt to, to different industries.

And, and, and one of the things that I've always considered, one of my strengths is the ability to quickly focus in on what the real key problems are, the key concerns are, and, and, you know, differentiate those from, we'll say the noise that you can get bogged down in. So, and then moving from like you couple of decades in as a W in a W two executive role.

And now back at, now back into consulting your focus now is, you know, probably, I would say even more focused on customer service, uh, than maybe you were in your, uh, prior W two world where your, your customer is your company. Now, your customer is all of your customers across multiple companies, multiple personalities you're dealing with and multiple schedules you're dealing with.

So it's not sitting back and. You know, and just working on your own time, so to speak.

Mike O'Neill: Right before we hit the record button, Steve and I were comparing notes. You've got a request from a client at 10:00 PM local time for you, resulting in you getting up early this morning. Maybe not early for you.

Perhaps early for most at four, 4:00 AM we're recording this at 9:30. So you've already put a full day in. Because you're trying to take care of a client. We'll wrap up this recording. You'll go right back to taking care of the client. I, myself, I had a slack message from a client that was sent and I received it at 9:00 last night.

It happened to be about 6:00 for the client. Clients are on different time zones. And as a consultant, particularly as a corporate strategist, have you found that clients they want quick answers, But some of the questions they're asking are, there are no easy, quick answers, or they're not, so you've been up for hours working on a response here.

Is that typical the kind of request you get from clients?

Steve Fisher: Well, let me push back on something you just said. I would say they don't necessarily want a quick answer. They want a quick response. They want, they want a, they want an acknowledgement that you heard them. And then, and then, yes, you wanna get them an answer as efficiently as possible, but you need to make sure it's the correct answer.

And I have found that most, most clients, their people and they, what they really appreciate is you, responding to their request in a, in a timely fashion. And if you don't have the answer at your fingertips, explaining to them that, yes, okay, I don't have it. Just being very honest about it and saying, I don't have it at right now.

Let me research it. I'll know this afternoon, or I'll know tomorrow morning for you. And then, and then as you know, as a consultant, the number one thing is do what you say you're going to do. If you're, if you commit to that deliverable, deliver it and if you're not gonna make it, make sure you contact them before it was due.

No surprises, right? We don't want any surprises in, in the worlds we live in because there's enough that come our way that are not of our own making.

Mike O'Neill: So Steve, I'm glad you clarified something because you said something pretty powerful a moment ago and that, what, what is critical, this is true for everybody, but when you're working with clients, clients want to be heard.

And acknowledging the request is a form of being heard. You work with business owners and key business leaders. Is being heard something that kind of permeates in your own consulting practice? Do you see that time and time again?

Steve Fisher: Oh, yes. All, all the time. I, I mean, my, my clients reach out to me. At all hours, as we've discussed, and I've had many of them tell me directly that one of the reasons they enjoy working with me is that I acknowledge, at least acknowledge them and, and that that customer service is something that they appreciate.

It's also something that, I'm not gonna, I don't want to sound like the old crochety old man, but let's face it, customer service skills are lacking in across the board. And so when you come across. Do it. When you come across a business or a person that you're doing business with who exhibits a modicum of comp competency with customer service, you notice it, even subconsciously you notice it.

And, and I have found that that's a very effective way for me to grow my business and grow my own personal brand and my company's brand.

Mike O'Neill: You shared a few minutes ago that you have a knack. You're able to kind of leverage your natural inclinations from an engineering operations standpoint and financial to cut through the noise and get to the root issue.

What have you found is the approach you take to cut through the nose noise? What works for for you to get there?

Steve Fisher: Well, at the risk of of hijacking part of, you know, maybe where you wanted to go with this conversation. Let's just talk about moving from a tactical problem solving mindset to a strategic problem solving mindset.

And as the title of your podcast is Getting Unstuck one way, one big way that businesses get stuck is they can't make that transition from tactical problem solving, thinking, or as we call it, commonly firefighting to, to. Longer term strategic thinking. And, and so a lot of what I do as a corporate strategist is help those businesses move from one way of thinking to another.

Now specifically once we. Once we do the analysis and once we come to an agreement with, with the client about these are the long-term strategic goals, these are the steps that we will that we will take to get there. And that's all part of a structured growth plan is part of what I do. And we can always chat about what the differences between a structured growth plan and a plan is.

But once you have that in your frame of mind, every conversation I'm in with a client, and as you imagine, I'm sitting in a room or on a call with a client and maybe there's other, various levels of management of of their management team involved in the conversation. And as I'm listening to them to discuss things back and forth.

What's always going through my mind is how is whatever they're talking about moving the ball toward the goals that we set at a strategic level? And if it's not, it's noise, it doesn't mean, it doesn't mean that it not important. It doesn't mean it doesn't need to be taken care of. It often does, but it's important that I highlight to them that what is tactical thinking and tactical problem.

Versus what is a strategic problem. And just by simply highlighting that, oftentimes business owners will, will pause, and I can just see the, I can see the light bulb go off and, and they're able and they're able to tell, let's just say they're speaking to a, a, a junior level executive, and they'll say, that's important, but let's focus back on what we're talking about here.

You know, it's, and, and we'll do, we'll address that in a moment that, that type of thinking. So when we talk about getting unstuck, I would say that there is a great example of how companies can get stuck in making that move.

Mike O'Neill: So I appreciate your offering that as an example, and that as you see, oftentimes clients get stuck in the tactical and don't necessarily know how to transition to the strategic.

You mentioned that if the CEO or owner. Graphs this, then they can be very, very influential within the organization to kind of keep that focus on those strategic initiatives. You used a term a few minutes ago that I like to follow up on, and that is when you're looking at developing strategy, strategy for its own self is not what you're trying to do.

You're trying to hit certain targets. You referred to the ideal being a structured growth plan. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?

Steve Fisher: Sure. When we talk about, in, well, you're as a consultant, this, this should resonate, and any, any other consultants listening out there or people who've dealt with consultants?

We typically, when we begin talking to a client or a business owner, we ask some, at some point in the conversation we're trying to gauge where do they want to be, five, 10 years down the road, right? And we always ask that question, and I do it too in some format, but that's, and that is important, but I only ask that question to get to the next question, which is, what do you need?

What do you feel you need to be doing? What, six months to get there? What is the concrete thing your business or you personally, need to be doing in six months to get where you are? Where you wanna be in five, 10 years. Most business owners unfortunately can't answer that question with a degree of specificity.

Hmm. And that is because they don't actually have what I would consider a structured growth plan. A structured growth plan is a written step by step process. And this is the engineer in me coming out, right? Step by step process with with measurable targets, metrics that lead you to where you said you wanted to be.

Now developing the plan is, is only part of the process, right? Once you develop the plan, now you have to implement the plan, which means you have to now get your buy-in from all the various stakeholders at, at the comp. It's, and, and this is, this is also a process that has to be done. And then once you, once you may have made the entire organization aware of the plan.

And, and how, why it's important and why it will achieve the strategic long-term goals of, of the owners and benefit everybody. Now you have in the implementation is you have to develop, you have to help them develop their own muscle memory in executing the plan. And that can include things like a certain meeting, meeting cadence.

Now I hate meetings. Okay, I, I can tell you that. So, which is probably a good thing because then that means that any meeting you have with me is typically very, very short and very pointed and in fact, quick side note, I've actually been in meetings that I've run where I've taken all the chairs out of the room.

So everybody has to stand when we have this conversation because we're not sticking around having a chit chat. So my point is going back to structured growth plan. So a structured growth plan is a written plan. You write things down because we all know that when you physically, the act of physically writing something down embeds it deeper in your conscious, in your subconsciousness you begin to live that model, live that plan, and, and now you have to export that.

Plan throughout the entire organization. And so once you have these, this step-by-step plan, now you could, you'll miss targets as you go. You know, it's, this is life. This things happen on the unforeseen things, pandemic happens, you know, these things, but at least if you have. A structured plan in place, you can then adjust it as needed as you go.

You're not starting from, you're not ripping the whole thing up and starting from ground zero you're not changing, you're probably not gonna change your long-term goals. You probably are changing the timing. You might change what assets are needed to be obtained to, to, to get to that goal and that's part of what we do, especially on the, on the operational finance side.

And, and, to achieve it, but, but it's, I can't stress enough the value of having a written plan. You know, I was talking to a gentleman. Business owner, small business owner, fantastic guy. And I asked him this question. I said, do you have a, we were talking about structured growth plans. I said, do you have a written plan?

And to his credit, he opens up his wallet and he pulls out this piece of paper that had been folded about a thousand times and was probably five years old and fallen apart. And he actually had a written outline that he kept on him of how he was going to get where he was, where he wanted to go.

Now, at least it was there. The man had thought enough about it to, to take the time to write it down and carry it around with him and adjust it as needed. It was, it was, I've never seen anything like it, but it's a physical representation of what I'm talking about.

Mike O'Neill: And we unpack that little bit. Let me see if I heard you correctly, Steve.

And that is a structured growth plan. Must be written. It needs to spell out. Step by step detail. It needs to have clear metrics. And what I think I understood you to say is having a plan is not a strategic plan. It's executing to that plan. And what I heard you say is to execute to that plan, you've gotta kinda keep a time horizon.

What is it we've got to do? You mentioned in the next six months in keeping with. With that plan. Where do you find Steve, that organizations, they go to the effort of developing a plan. It's written, there's metrics built in, there's an effort to try to communicate that plan, but it kind of goes off track.

What oftentimes triggers a plan getting off track?

Steve Fisher: Well there's, it could be a number of things, but one big one. Is lack of accountability. One of the things I didn't mention, but Rabbi I should have mentioned is when you go to the problem, when you go to the trouble of writing that plan down and establishing metrics and goals and intermediate targets and all of that you also have to put in the plan specifically, who is going to be responsible for this piece and who is gonna be responsible for this piece, and how am I as the business owner going to.

Measure their progress towards those goals. And, and then how am I, as the business owner or, or organization, gonna hold them accountable to achieve those goals? So depending on a, the, the, the maturity of the organization or size of the organization holding people accountable can be a problem because my experience, for example, when you're dealing with smaller business owners, um, entrepreneur, very entrepreneurial people. These are incredibly talented forward-thinking people.

Typically, they are certainly willing to roll up their own sleeves and get things done, which is a whole separate issue of how you get stuck. But, but, but it is how they get their pro, how they get their company launched, how they get it to where it's gonna be, be viable. But these very, all these, these traits, oftentimes, unfortunately that muscle memory of doing everything yourself typically.

It goes right against the concept of holding somebody else accountable. Because your initial gut reaction to any kind of a hiccup is, let me do it myself. I've done, always done it myself. I can get it. I just had a conversation with a client this week, and I say this all the time to clients, but this fresh in my memory, I just said to her, I said, you know, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something.

And she nodded and she says, yeah, you're right. She said, I know. And, and it's that ability, the ability to know what to delegate and then how to measure or how to measure the progress on those items that you delegated out, and then how to hold people accountable. That is the next, that is the next skill that you have to develop as a business owner or C-suite manager.

That you may not have had. Remember, most of these, especially in the case of business owners, small business owners, they came up through the ranks of the doers, right? They, these were the people who, they did things they had, but they had this great idea and, and they had the energy and, and whatever, and they, so they developed this business plan.

So it's very, and it's fantastic, but it's very easy for them to slip back into what they know best, which is for them to do.

Mike O'Neill: You know, Steve, when you clarified that, when you have a plan, it needs to be specific. It needs to spell out what needs to be done by when, by whom. And there needs to be the accountability component.

And you raised interesting point, and that is oftentimes business owners have the capacity to do it themselves. And if an organization is going to grow, It means growing the folks within the organization. This owner needs to be able to effectively delegate. Do you find that business owners oftentimes struggle with that letting go and when they do, what tips do you have for business owners listening right now?

How to let go with confidence?

Steve Fisher: Well, in many ways, when I start working with a, with a business owner, I. And I would suggest this to you in your own practice, is that when, when they hire us as a consultant to come in to, to speak with them about whatever our, our, our focus is they've already taken a step, first step, which is recognizing that they have a problem that they cannot solve with what's between their own ears.

And so they've reached out to us to come in and to talk to them and help them. So that's a great first step. They, they, they realize it. Where it gets a little sticky is when I start talking to them about this idea of delegation. And I'll say, you know, why aren't you delegating that to, to Joe?

You know, and they'll say, oh, he's got so much to do and et cetera, et cetera. And, and, and at the end of the day, when you dig a little deeper, what you find is he doesn't trust Joe. And when I say that to them, Bluntly like that you don't trust Joe. What do you mean? I don't trust Joe. Joe's been with me for 15 years.

I, I, I trust him implicitly. I said, no, you don't, because if you trusted him, you delegate this to him. There's still a part of you that doesn't trust him. And so that is, and when you say it like that, it, it's so like a, it's like a blast of cold water on them oftentimes. And they'll say, well, think about it.

They'll either say some version of, you're right, or they'll start trusting Joe, or they'll start delegating to Joe and giving Joe the chance to succeed or fail. And by the way, as far as if you're in Joe's position, you're being given this additional responsibility and you can look at it two ways if you're Joe.

One is, I'm getting all this extra work and I'm overworked, and yada, yada, yada, and you're going to go into it with the wrong, what I would consider the wrong attitude and you will fail, Joe. And then Joe is gonna be removed from the, from the situation which at the end is a net benefit to the business, by the way.

And then, or Joe is gonna take it as, this is great, I'm getting more responsibility. Joe's gonna excel, or Joe, Joe's gonna be, Joe's gonna develop skills that he needs to, to, to, to excel, and now you have a much more valuable Joe in the organization. So again, the organization benefits. You know, we talk about working with Gen Z now and, and you know, all these folks entering the workforce and they always, but for, I've heard it for 30 years, it's always about the, the newest generation moving, entering the workforce.

They wanna, they wanna learn, they wanna develop. Well, this is one way you help them do that and you keep them engaged by continually giving them interesting things and maybe some not so interesting things to do, but are necessary. And as long as you explain to why it is necessary, they will typically excel or they won't, and they'll identify themselves quickly and you can, you can adjust as needed within your organization.

Mike O'Neill: For those who are looking at this podcast on YouTube, they see me nodding. Up and down, up and down with a number of the comments you made. Um, the comment that you shared about, in the case of Joe, is the owner didn't trust Joe. It seems that that word trust comes up a lot in my work with clients, and that is if you don't have trust in the organization, it's hard to build an organization that in fact could go execute.

A structured growth plan. Has that been your experience as well?

Steve Fisher: Oh, yes, because there's so many steps involved to, you have to, you have to delegate steps to, to other parties outside of the primary business owner. So you have to trust them. And, which, by the way, this, this, at the end of the day, what do you have?

You're the, you know, you're the professional HR, former HR professional and, and all. At the end of the day, you end up building a fantastic team. And, and, and the development. And so it, this is fa and then this, the weight, this takes off the owner's shoulders. You know, the, the, the relief, the sense of relief is, is immense.

I get, I've had clients tell me that I've been working with over a long period of time, you know, they'll, they'll just, you know, they'll just catch me to the side and I'll say, Hey Steve, I just wanna really thank you because you, you let me sleep at night now. It's like, because I'm not stressed about the fact that I don't have.

Don't have something in place, or I don't have the right person in place. And it's more about that not having the right person in place is usually the one that really gets them. As opposed to not having the right piece, the right tool or financing or something like that. There's ways we can work on that.

It's the personnel problem that at the end of the day is, is one that really gets them to, to stay up at night.

Mike O'Neill: Well, more, the reason for me to invite you on the podcast, you're singing my song. You know, Steve, we have had an unscripted conversation about a pretty wide variety of topics, but you have identified fundamentals that really transcend companies of all sizes, and I suspect you work in multiple in industries.

Do you find that the, what you're doing really apply as well, regardless of the size or the nature of the business?

Steve Fisher: Yes, it does. It, it, it, it scale. You know, one of the, one of the things that my company takes pride in the fact that we offer scalable solutions. And so and so, so that is what it says.

It's it, what I'm offering my guidance I would offer to a smaller business mid-sized business owner to a larger multi-location corporation, fundamentally is, is the same. Thought process, different tactics, you know, different, different methods of execution, different levels of investment are acquired.

But the overall thought, my overall thought process that I bring is the same. And, and, and also, if I might add this level of, of trust and all of that, you know, as you probably know, I do a lot of work in mergers and acquisitions. On both the buy and the sell side. You wanna talk about a case where you're trying to, you have to rapidly develop a level of trust with new parties.

That's it. You know, if you're a business owner, you go in and acquire you acquire, you know, as part of your growth strategy is, is acquisition. And so you go and acquire a competitor, you have to merge those cultures as well as all the, the tangible items. But where the deal falls apart often is in the merging of that culture.

And you have to learn, you have to develop a level of trust both ways. Those people have to develop. because they don't know you either. So, so all of what I just said is applicable in that arena as well. And I would say maybe even, well, not more so, but is equally equitable. Equitable,

Mike O'Neill: You know, when you just mention the merging of the cultures as being oftentimes the most challenging that's been my experience as well, it's hard to put your finger on that term culture. What is culture And I'm not gonna go down that path because I don't think we have time to go too, too far with, with it. But Steve, as you look at what.

What you do, what your organization does, is there a a certain type, size organization or circumstances that is an I most ideal fit for you and your team? At Strategy Partners Group.

Steve Fisher: I seem to get involved mostly in situations where an enterprise is having, it has leveled out, their revenues have leveled out.

That's where I seemingly get a lot of, of, a lot of calls to come in and help. And it's, it's where we've reached a certain level, usually a, usually a revenue level, and the owner or ownership cannot figure out how to get to the next level. They can't quite figure out what's holding them back or breaking through to the next level.

They do know that they've reached a point where, They've exhausted all the resources they have within their four walls. And so now they reach out to me and say, what, where? Why are we, to your point, why are we stuck? And, and, and what do we, what do we need to do to move to the next level? And that's, At the end of the day, that's what I do.

Now, that could be if you're trying to break through that $5 million a year revenue number or that 10 or 10 to $12 million revenue year number or the 20 to $25 million a year revenue number or up to, you know, 75 to a hundred million, that, whatever that number is. But one of the things I do tell them when we get through, when we do, we work, do this work, as I said, now understand you're gonna reach another level.

You're gonna plateau again, and we're gonna have to have this conversation again about now what do we do Now the plan changes, right? It's, it's now we need new resources and new, a new strategy to break through to the next level. And that's, that's, that's kind of where I get brought in, I guess, is, is what I would say.

Mike O'Neill: Steve, I'm learning a lot in this conversation. I trust listeners are doing the same. If they wanna reach out to you to connect, what's the best way for them to do so?

Steve Fisher: You can reach out my company website, www.strategypg.com, sfisher@strategypg.com. Those are the best ways to, to reach out to me.

I love to talk, to talk, to, talk to folks. I always tell, tell people. It doesn't cost anything to have a conversation. So let's so it, I would love to talk to people. I love talking to different business owners, different industries. It, it helps my own growth, professional growth and, and it's just interests me.

It's why I do what I do. I, I just love the diversity that I, of folks I talk to.

Mike O'Neill: Like I shared with you before we hit the record button, that's in large part why I enjoy these podcasts. It brings me in contact with smart, articulate people like you. I can learn and in my learning hope I can share that with my own clients.

Steve, thank you for sharing that expertise and obviously that passion for what you do.

Steve Fisher: Oh, Mike, thank you. This has been very enjoyable conversation. Love to have another one. Maybe we could touch on a, a, a subsequent subject. But, but love to chat down the road.

Mike O'Neill: I would welcome that. I also wanna thank our listeners for joining us today for even more insights about getting unstuck and moving your business forward.

Let me invite you to subscribe to this podcast by going to Unstuck.Show. While you're there, you can also sign up for our weekly management newsletter called The Bottom Line As a leadership strategist, I empower CEOs and business owners to unlock their full potential, strategically transforming their leadership skills to drive team success and foster business growth.

So if you're trying to grow your business, but the people problems have slowed you down, let's talk head over to bench-builders.com to schedule free discovery call. So I wanna thank you for joining us, and I hope you have picked up some quick wins from Steve that'll help you get unstuck and on target.