Verne Harnish Podcast Transcription v1
Phil Rose: [00:00:00] My guest on the Sparks by Ignium podcast today is Verne Harnish. Verne is the founder of Entrepreneurs Organization and the creator of the Scaling Up Principle. I've come across Scaling Up in the last six years as a result of conversation with Dom Monkhouse and other people. Dom and I talked about this back in 2015, not long after the Scaling Up book was published, and I've learned so much just by being part of this organization for the last 24 months.
It took me a while to get in, but I'm glad I did. Reason being, we look at changing the world. We look at changing the world by helping those scale up so that bring power to the economy, that add value. And if you listen to Verne today, you're gonna hear so many little nuggets of advice that he's got from 30 plus years of doing this.
Verne's an engineer by background with an MBA, and he combines this to help you understand what it takes to drive your business forwards. This snap for his words on the huddle and how the daily huddles help them and other people bring value to their management team by asking some critical questions [00:01:00] around what is it is you're stuck on today?
What's the barriers to helping you achieving it? Because actually that's the bit that helps you coach your employees. 'cause when you're asking them questions, they can take their own action as opposed to relying on you giving it to them. So listen to what Vern says around that. Listen to his words. Words around being ambitious and ignoring what's going on in the marketplace and being possible to actually look at how you extend your reach by differentiating yourself in the future.
Being bold is what comes outta the end. Listen to this. Understand, as I always say, I can't hold you to account, but I can help you. Listen, there's so much material out there. If you need help, if you want coaching, the key message on this is about how a coach walk alongside you helps you achieve that performance.
Listening enough from me. Here's Verne Harnish. Enjoy the show. Lemme know what you think. So welcome to the Sparks by Ignium podcast. I'm Phil Rose, your host, and today I'm delighted to welcome Verne Harnish, founder of scaling up to the podcast. I've been a member of scaling up for the last 24 plus months and have loved what I've heard.
I met [00:02:00] Verne for the first time for real, in Dallas in April this year, and then later on in Dublin with Brian Keegan for another event. So I'm welcoming him to the show. I appreciate him taking his time out from his busy schedule. Verne Harnish welcome to Sparks by Ignium. Phil, it is an honor to to join you.
Thank you, by the way, for joining our tribe. We've got now a little over 200, uh, certified scaling partners on seven continents, and we're trying to do our best to help this kind of unsung heroes of our local and global economies. 'cause they're the ones, you guys are the ones that doing all the heavy lifting, innovations, jobs and all of that.
So Phil, it's great to have you on the team. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. It's been a great learning for me over the time. You know, having done this for a long time before, just to get into this, this new business effectively, learn more skills. So when we talked before this, we said we're not gonna go into history, but there's one piece I wanted to just touch on, which is that founder of the EO and how that morphed into scaling up.
So just 30 seconds or what got you here. 'cause Marshall Goldsmith always says what got you here won't get you there. But actually I think it has [00:03:00] got you here. So I wonder, just quick nugget, how did you get here? Well, you know, the short of it is I had a chance to host Steve Jobs back in 1986 for his first public speech after being fired from Apple, and I had about 1200 entrepreneurs there, Michael Dell, mark Cuban, many of the well-known names today, they were all in their twenties.
And Steve ended up staying for the party that I threw for that group afterwards, but he was standing alone in the corner. That moment I looked to a good friend of mine, Greg Stem, and I said, look, there needs to be an organization for the Steve Jobs of the world. And I, I recalled a, a quote of a good friend of mine, Joe Mancuso, who said, it's okay to be independent.
But no reason to be alone. And so that night, uh, was the idea that birth, what's today? The Entrepreneurs Organization we're about 16,000 members going to 160,000 hopefully over the next decade worldwide. And you know what I. At least there's 16,000 [00:04:00] entrepreneurs through our forums and the like, that are not alone.
So I figured it needed an executive program. Like YPO has a relationship with Harvard. So I went next door to MIT and 35 years ago I launched an executive program, uh, today called EMP, the Entrepreneurial Master's Program. They still let the old man come back and teach him, uh, and. And it was there that I was able to kind of birth the tools there.
You know, there's a lot of information, Phil, as you know, for startups, there's kind of an incubator on every corner, 11,000 new companies every hour in the world. So I don't think we're hurting for, for new companies. And I have an MBA that's supposed to teach you how to run a big company, but there wasn't anything, there wasn't the parenting manual of how to grow up a company.
And so I took a decade 91 to. 2001, we're moving about a thousand, you know, really accomplished entrepreneurs through that, that MIT program. And out of that [00:05:00] came my first book, mastering the Rockefeller Habits, updated it to scaling up in 2014. And so, you know, we wanted to create, uh, the tools and the techniques that would just.
Reduce the drama and the chaos that comes with trying to scale up any kind of venture from a few million to hundreds of million, which is kind of our, our sweet spot. Yeah, that's where it came from. Love it. Love it. And I love that about reducing the drama and chaos. And I think at this moment that's probably a really good segue into what's going on in the world.
You know, here we are 24th of August, 2022. Some people see drama and chaos everywhere. Some people see opportunity. You know, our job is scaling up coaches and I hope convert those who have the drama and chaos mindset to think about the opportunities out there. Scaling up. You are just about to re-release the scaling up book.
What was the thing that made you think this is the time to do this apart from time in your diary? Yeah, well it's, we are coming out of the pandemic. The book has been out for eight [00:06:00] years and we've learned a lot, particularly through the pandemic. And so yeah, it's significantly revised. It'll be out October 18th at our, our summit in Denver, and there were several significant pivots that we made in the book.
One. Original book I opened with a story that was all about the money. And of course money, you know, the, the financial side's important in the business. But I think people have come around and realized if I'm gonna keep my employees engaged, that it's gotta be as much about purpose as it is profit. And so I changed the intro to really emphasize that we're there to support.
How do you scale up your impact, the real reach and that, that's why most entrepreneurs do what they do is they wanna solve a problem that they see. Naomi Simpson in Red Balloon, you know, we, we got her when she had first launched the company in 2005 in, in Sydney, Australia, and. Next year, they'll do a quarter billion in revenue.
But that's not the important thing to [00:07:00] Naomi. It's that she has been delivering an experience instead of stuff. The difference she wants to make is it's a lot different. If you give somebody an experience, they're gonna remember that versus just give 'em some stuff. Yeah. And, uh, and so they've been delivering an experience.
2017 there was about one every two and a half minutes. Their BHAG is to be at one experience delivered sustainably. Every second. Wow. Wow. By 2030, we're talking about a 30 x kind of improvement. By the way, right now they're running one about every 39 seconds. That's amazing. Amazing. Um, in there we featured Hester, who, uh, launched a company called Tover Hits Dutch base firm.
And what they've done is created a hundred plus games being used in 16 countries to help people with cognitive challenges. And when we first started working with her, she had a, an aggressive goal to reach a million people a day. Wow. Playing [00:08:00] these games. But given the magnitude of this challenge of cognitive issues around the planet, we got her to see, and she feels now with our tools and techniques she can do.
That she'll be able to touch 30 million people a day by 2030. And look, obviously her profits are gonna come along, but what really energizes her is the, the impact that they can have in making people's lives better. And then we feature Don Wells who's got a nonprofit. You know, our tools work as much for, in that world we call it the for purpose world.
And he works for foster youth about 1600 a year, and his initial BHAG was to try to take that to 16,000. But after working with us again, he said, you know what? I can see that with your tools and techniques that we can get that to a hundred thousand. Youth that foster youth that we can be helping. And so in all of these cases, uh, it [00:09:00] really is as much about the impact that we scale and with our tools, then you're gonna be able to have the, you know, the numbers come with it.
'cause what you don't want to do is grow broke. Yeah. And a lot of companies can end up growing broke, and that's what we want to avoid. Yeah, and I think that's the key point, isn't it? You know, coming outta the back of the pan, the pandemic, we're seeing, you know, a lot of inflationary pressures on businesses at the moment worldwide.
You know, we've got massive inflation in the UK up to 18% at the moment, and predicted to go higher. We're gonna see interest rates rising on the back of the pandemic. We've also had great resignation, so businesses are in some cases struggling, but also running scared. And I believe that that word purpose is what unites people.
But other people think, Hey, it's not about purpose, just about keeping cash and making the business work. So we've got this real conundrum for these purpose-led businesses. What's the thing that we can do within scaling up to get that balance in people's lives again? So they can start seeing the wood for the trees and focusing on what's real for them.
Yeah. Well there it's [00:10:00] important that you make a couple of decisions and look, we expect it for it to be chaotic over the next 10 years. Yeah, and I, I think there's a couple of quotes that were shared by some top entrepreneurs at the beginning of this pandemic. We hosted, uh, Greg Brennaman who turned around Continental Airlines, and he's been the turnaround guy for many, many companies.
And, and in some sense, all of us feel like we're in a perpetual turnaround giving all of these pressures that are coming in that you just described. And he said, you know, first and foremost, we as leaders, we're expected to absorb the fear. And there is a lot of fear that those things create and exude hope.
Yeah. And that's, you know, it's, it's not fair, but we set the tone in our organizations and one of the things that I think we've gotta do then is what Margaret Heffernan, you know, the great serial entrepreneur and well-known author there in the uk Yeah. That said at the beginning of the pandemic. And that is a, that this is [00:11:00] a time to be ambitious.
You know, it's a little bit like what the great investors do. You know, they, they hold their cash like Warren Buffet did. Yeah. Uh, why the market was going through the roof. And then in March, at some point of what he thought was roughly the bottom of the market, he went all in with his 51 billion. Yeah, so it's important for us to be kind of counterintuitive that what I see when there's inflationary times and interest rates and all of this, I see those as blocking strategies.
You know, if you, those are, those are moats. Mm-hmm. That if you can figure out how to thrive and that's what our tools, and again, our approach help you methodically figure out. Yeah. If you can figure out how to take advantage of that and thrive. These times just wipe out all of your weak competitors. Yeah, yeah.
And really provide you an opportunity to be [00:12:00] ambitious. And so really two things. I think this is the time to be ambitious. So that's why we've seen our clients really up, they're big, hairy, audacious goals, and it's a time for you to really exude hope. Now what does that mean in a practical sense? That is, you have gotta be, you've gotta have.
The thing that has helped everybody win All Wars and markets is Intel. You have to be so in touch with your customers and your employees on We're talking about a daily basis. Yeah, and you've gotta use that intel through our daily huddle and our weekly meeting. You wanna move faster, pulse faster.
Remember who survives is not the fittest. Who survives is the most adaptable. And if you're, if you've got this ability to see what's happening sooner than the competition, and you're able to adapt sooner than the competition, you win. So it's that burn [00:13:00] decide act cycle. If it's the old ADA loop of fighter pilots, yeah.
If you can observe and orient and act quicker than the other fighter pilot, you win. Uh, and they lose. So, yeah. That's what our tools do is allow you to remain agile and to, to get the intel and make the decision slightly quicker, uh, than everyone else in the marketplace. And that's a huge advantage. I think that's true actually.
And you know, one, one of the tools that I love and I think we've used a lot over the last two years through the pandemic is, you know, the, the, the sweat tools. Strengths, weaknesses and trends. And I think one thing that, you know, look really become apparent to me in using that is, you know, we often talk about the opportunities and threats.
Is that internal focus and the external macro picture. But actually we're not looking at those trends in the marketplace, the trends in the industry, the trends in the society, and that's the bit where I'm seeing massive value for people when they're just getting a different perspective on the world by using that macro image of what's going on and then looking internally say, okay, what are we good [00:14:00] at?
What do we need to work on? And really focusing on their core competence to drive potential for themselves. Yeah. And then, you know, the other thing that, uh, we really focus on, we get down to the details around, for instance, pricing. Yeah. You know, not a lot of folks in our world, uh, really have their clients sit down and focus on what are the strategies around pricing.
And, and if you don't get those things nailed right away, then all of a sudden you can wake up a year from now and your margins are gone. And the importance of having a good, better, best. Offering to the marketplace, not just a single price, whether you're a professional services firm or you're offering, you know, product solutions.
And then the equivalent of pricing internally, yeah. Is compensation. And so, as you know, we just released a book earlier this year. It was an ebook last year, but came out in print in April called Scaling Up Compensation. And for most of our clients, as you know, Phil Compensation is one of the [00:15:00] largest expenses.
That we have, and it's critical that we get the most out of every pound or dollar or euro that we spend on compensation. So we, we know that the, the devil is in the details. Mm-hmm. You can't just throw out these fancy bromides that you've gotta look at what we did. Five principles for designing a really robust compensation system that allows you to attract and retain Yeah, the right talent.
And then how do you price properly in the marketplace? Yeah. So you can continue to drive. And, and by the way, if I were to give us very concrete metric that I want everybody to stay laser focused on in this inflationary recessionary. Kind of resignation time, and that is your gross margin. Dollars, pounds, euros per employee, again for gross margin, pounds per [00:16:00] employee.
Um, and one of the things that we see is when companies hit about 10 million, that starts to drop because we start having to add in a lot of infrastructure and mid management. And if you're not careful, uh, that gross margin dollars begin to get squeezed. Yeah. So Andy Bailey, who's one of our coaching partners, who was an early client, you know, it wasn't Facebook or Google, he was running telecom stores.
Selling pagers later on cell phones. And when he started with us, they were running about 75,000. Now this is US dollars per employee, gross margin, dollars per employee. Seven years later when he exited, they had taken that to 275,000. Wow. Four x the industry average. And so that's what we want to do is have you look at your industry averages.
Revenue per employee. Profit per employee, gross margin per employee. And we wanna have you see, we want to help you three to [00:17:00] five times that. Yeah. As John Ratliff did in the call center business, that's an industry that averages 4% profitability. With our tools, he took that to 21.8%. Amazing. Amazing. And so there is a player in every industry.
And look, Phil, I'll let you get to your next question. But I want to give everybody a perspective here. You know, the, the, the GDP of the world was about 34 trillion in the year 2000. Um, last year it hit 94 and a half trillion. It's we're roughly three times the global economy. And even if we were to see depression, if the economy was global economy was to drop by 5%, which would be considered dramatic, we would just be back to 2019.
GDP. So my view is if you can't find a way to make a million or a billion out of that global economy, it's your fault. [00:18:00] Yeah. You're just not on game. Yeah. And that's why it's important. Yeah. No one ever achieve peak performance without a coach. Oh, I love that. And that's why we're in the business, is to be there by your side to help you make these things happen, as we've done for Naomi Simpson and Don Wells and 80,000 other companies over the last 40 years.
Wow. And, and I think that's amazing. There's, there's a couple of facts in there, which I love you bringing out. You know, this thing about, you know, three to five times your, your industry average. Per employee. I think that's one thing. But then also when you talk about that in terms of the economy, okay, we're three times where we are.
So even if we drop back 5%, we are still gonna be 2019 levels. So there's opportunity out there. Yeah. So there's a whole load of things there, which I think I'd love to just dive in a bit. Let's just come back to that, the ood loop, because I think that's a big piece around this, around, you know, mindset and actually the observe and understand, and orient.
Orient. Because a lot of businesses are fearful of what's gone before. They're looking in the rear view mirror rather than looking at the future to say, [00:19:00] okay, what could be, what can we do this? So from a mindset point of view, you mentioned that scaling up when the new book comes out is gonna be leading on purpose.
What's the key message that you would give business owners right now in terms of just getting their own headset straight? Apart from obviously having a coach walking beside them, what's the thing they need to be doing right now to recognize it's gonna be okay if you focus on this? Yeah. Well, I'm gonna cut right to it.
One of the things that differentiates us, and this is gonna seem very tactical, but it's the daily huddle. Again, if you wanna move faster, you need to pulse faster. Yeah. You know, and it's 15 minutes or less. You know, we're talking about a restroom break here out of your 8, 10, 12 hour workday. And it was interesting, I, let me provide some context for it.
I recently, in my weekly insight, pointed to what I think is. Probably the most important podcast, Phil. I've listened to this century and it was the great strategist Gary Hamill outta Chicago. [00:20:00] All the rest are at Harvard, but he's the one rare one that's not Gary Hamill's interview of Jim Clifton. And Jim is CEO of Gallup.
Yeah. And Gallup for 50 years has been measuring employee engagement. And he said, look, I hate to be so simplistic, but in 50 years it, you know, inter, you know, interviewing a hundred million employees a year around the globe, across all cultures. He said, we've got two very simple conclusions. First. Nobody wants managed, you know, that's why we have these, this is what manages us.
But what people do need is coached. Yeah. And so, and most of us weren't trained on how to coach. And he said, so what does it really come down to to be a coach? And he said, if every employee could be asked one question every week. It would be this, what is your number one goal and what, and are there any barriers to achieving it?
And that employee's answer [00:21:00] creates the coachable moments. Now, how does that apply to the daily huddle? I'm gonna be a little technical here. I'm a mechanical engineer by training. A lot of you, me both, right? But you need six data points to really see a trend. So if you're only hearing what's going on once a quarter.
It's gonna take you a year and a half before you're able to react. You know, you survey the employees once a year. You survey the customers once a year. It's gonna take you six years to see what's happening. Now, if you're getting data monthly, it's gonna take you six months. If you're only looking at weekly, it's still gonna take you a month and a half.
But if you are getting a sense of what's happening in the organization daily, you're gonna see what's happening in a week. And so here's the crazy part, our agenda for the daily huddle, and we recommend every employee is in some kind of daily, is three questions. First, what's up to, what's your priority today?
And when I hear that from my team. [00:22:00] My question is, is that the most important thing they need to be working on versus the urgent? And is that aligned with what we've gotta do next? Yeah. Number two, I want to hear their metrics and by them having to verbalize the numbers, and I'll give you an example. In a moment, they're gonna feel it viscerally and you're gonna hear it every day.
And then number three, and then where is your stock? Where is the barrier to you achieving? So in essence, we are asking. The Jim Clifton question to every employee every day. Wow. And by me hearing the answer over the next five or six days, I'm gonna now know my coachable moments. Wow. Are they working on the right thing?
And I'm gonna see a pattern of stocks, barriers to being able to achieve that. So I'll give you a very specific Yeah. Um, you know, a lot of CEOs have one-on-ones with their teams. And individual team members. And this sucks [00:23:00] up 8, 4, 5, 6 hours a week. Yep. Too. Right? And the problem is, in those one-on-ones, you have to be the bad person.
You know, you're saying, you know, how is it going in recruiting employees And your head of HR is like, dancing around, well, da, da da da da. Always the same. Yeah. So when our, my, my one client that I still coach. Uh, Doug, he, he was doing the one-on-ones. I said, look, let's replace that with an eight minute daily huddle with your senior team.
It's 8:52 AM to 9:00 AM Pacific Standard time, and now as head of HR, every day is reporting out the number of open positions, the number of interviews, and within two weeks. You know, somebody having to say the same open position number every day for two weeks, all of a sudden starts to clue you in that the needle is not moving.
Yeah, yeah. And he ended up realizing we [00:24:00] could see it. He then could see it that he needed to replace her. She absolutely was the wrong person driving HR for their company. In addition, he was getting ready to raise another round of financing and in their business model, churn of their tenants is a critical number, and he was really only getting that number once a month.
Once he had his team reporting to him daily. What was the churn of their tenants? He, the whole team could see it and feel it and react quicker, and they got that fixed, which allowed them then to get the valuation close to an $800 million valuation, which never would've happened if they hadn't fixed that.
And then number three, they raised a serious round of money than to invest in properties. And one of the numbers that Doug has reported out daily is Alright. What did we buy in the last 24 hours and what progress are we making every [00:25:00] day in getting that money invested? So yeah, just looking at number of hires and interviews daily, what their churn is daily, what what they bought and invested in Daily.
Daily. Doug is able now to see the patterns and trends and the team. And get a better gut feel for what's going on in the business. Yeah. And that has allowed them to move quick in this crazy environment where interest rates are going up and, and prices are starting to come down in real estate in the US and the like.
Yeah. So that's the oodle loop. Yeah. Love that. And I love that. You know, we always say, you know, keep the, keep the main thing, the main thing. But to me that sounds like the number one thing that CEOs managers need to be doing right now with their teams. Having that conversation, you come back to your point earlier, you know, to win the wars, to win the marketing you need to get the intel, and that's providing that intel six times a week, seven times a week if you need to.
And it's just eight minutes a day. Yeah. Well, and we saw when [00:26:00] we hosted, you know, there's a Ukraine war going on right now, and, uh, general McChrystal helped us get on top of the Iraqi war, and the key was the daily huddle. Yeah, they got all 6,000 special forces to come on for 90 minutes, and they would debrief the missions the night before so that the intel they picked up, the new techniques and tactics that they could pick up could be translated immediately.
Mm-hmm. As the teams went out on a set of missions the next night, by the way, because of that, they were able to 10 x. The number of night missions, which allowed us to get on top of it. So that's one of the key things that we're really focused on as well, is where in the business model can we 10 x something that's critical?
And so for John Ratliffe, uh, the call center business is just. Rife with employee turnover way before the Great resignation. Mm-hmm. Its, its averages [00:27:00] 200% a year. John was able to take that to 18%. Wow. That 10 x internal advantage over the competition, I was significant. So one of our key questions is, you know, first, do you have the intel that you need daily?
In order to maintain a good gut feel for how the business is doing and how your customers are feeling, number two, where is that 10 x advantage over the competition that then ultimately allows you to 10 x your impact and reach over the next decade? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and what's important is if you only think how do I two or three x, I only have to do a little bit better than what I'm doing right now.
But if I think, alright, what do I have to do to 10 x? Then I have, even if you don't achieve that, yeah. Then. You've gotta think differently, and it's that thinking different. Yeah. And being [00:28:00] ambitious, as Margaret Heffernan said, the combination of those two and then focusing on it daily, there's the magic.
And Phil, it's hard for us to explain that, except thank goodness we've got. Hundreds of case studies on our scale ups.com site that if people don't believe us, read that we're achieving every single day. And you see it, Phil? Yeah, I do. And I think this is this key. And I think that word ambition is the key bit there because I think, you know, hearing all these things there, it's about the ambition of the business owner, business, the the entrepreneur, the founder, to realize they can do these things, but actually sometimes you just need that other person walking alongside you to give you that bit of clarity.
And that's what we bring to it as coaches. And I've always said, you know, I've been coaching for a long time now. But actually we, we all should have the coach alongside. As Eric Schmidt said a long time ago at Google, the biggest investment that Google Boys made in him was about having that coach. And to me, that's the thing that gives you the 10 x thinking.
'cause without that, you're not thinking far enough into the future. So I'm hearing that loud and clear from you there. Yeah, you know, it is a good [00:29:00] example. You know, every year I named the number one business book. You know, it's one of the things I did for Fortune Magazine for a year. So I've continued that and last year's it was who Bear Joe Lee's book, uh, the Heart of Business.
And I really do hope, you know, besides reading Scaling Up, I hope all your listeners read who Bears Book. Uh, the Heart of Business. It was really one of the great turnarounds in the US of Best Buy. You know here you had Amazon coming on Circuit City, failing and all that, yet he 10 x. The value of that company from $11 a share to a hundred and um, $110 a share.
Wow. But what was interesting is, uh, you know, he is this French CEO and he came from Europe to come over and, and lead this turnaround. And even though he is this hugely highly experienced leader, the first thing the board did was get him a coach. And it happened to be, by the way, Marshall Goldsmith and, and this is new news, but we just landed, Marshall Goldsmith [00:30:00] chose us, our growth institute to produce his first master course on coaching.
Wow. And so we're super excited that we're gonna be able to make that available because not only do you. Does a company need an outside coach, as Steve Jobs had, as Eric Schmidt did, as who Bear Jolie did, and our clients do, but then we've gotta learn how to coach internally and we're super excited that we're gonna have literally the guy recognized as the number one Yeah.
CEO coach in the world producing a master course for us. I think that's amazing. And, and the fact that you've chosen Growth Institute. I saw something on, on LinkedIn the other day about. Uh, growth Institute has just been recognized as well for some amazing growth in the US as well. So Growth Institute for any client who haven't seen that, you need to get on there because there's so much material you can pick up just by looking at some of the Growth Institute courses.
If you can't afford to read a book this week, go and look at Growth Institute course 'cause there's so much information in there. Um, and the, the guys that have really driven that business well, and what that does, it comes [00:31:00] back, Phil, uh, and let me frame this for your listeners. We, we rooted our work, a lot of our work in Jim Collins research.
You know, here's a guy that took 25 years, he's taken some hits, but. Look, he really studied what it took to get from good to great. Yeah. And so our four decisions, people, strategy, execution, and cash, we didn't just make that up. That was rooted in what Jim and the work at IDO did that said, if you want to go from good to great, you have to have disciplined people.
Mm-hmm. There's people engaged in disciplined thought that drive strategy. Through disciplined action, which is the execution piece. And then in Jim's last really significant book, great by choice, he then realized, but you can't run outta cash, so you better have, so the people strategy, execution, cash came from Jim's work and our three fundamental offerings.
The only way you're gonna have a disciplined people have disciplined people is with a coach. Any anyone who's ever worked out knows that [00:32:00] you're gonna progress much better and and more rapidly if you've got a trainer than if not. Same with golf. I'm, I'm really enjoying playing golf with my sons this summer.
And, uh, I, I was, I had this worst slice and I'm finally like, all right, who's the best guy in the world to fix a slice? Hank Haney, which is uh, was Tiger Woods coach. Okay. Okay. And, and Hank promised that he can, he's helped 70,000 people fix their slice. Five minutes, and sure enough I took him up on it and he did.
I have not sliced the golf ball since, knock on wood. So discipline people require coaching. Yeah. Yeah. Discipline thought requires ongoing education. And as you and I have talked about, you know, the final decision, Steve Jobs made. Before he died was to launch Apple University. People don't realize that was his really last and most famous contribution.
And look, I think the real [00:33:00] measure of a leader is how well do your children perform when you're not there? And how well does your company perform when you're not there? And look, Steve's been gone now for 11 years. It's the highest market cap company on the planet. And the credit goes to the fact that he installed a company university.
So our growth institute is really meant to be this outsourced company, university for mid-market companies. Yeah. And then he said the key to scaling action is through technology. And that then is our align or scoreboard. Yeah. Platform. So coaching. Learning and tech are our three offerings, and they're there because they're rooted in the science of what Jim described or discovered.
Helps you go from good to great. Yeah, so we've got the a hundred percent solution and, uh, frankly, none of our competitors do. I love that. And you know, and I'm working on a program with, uh, [00:34:00] with Dom at the moment with a worldwide company. There's a coach in Australia, a coach in Poland, me in the uk and Dom in the uk.
We're working worldwide with that. They're working through the Growth Institute program. We are coaching them, in fact, in 45 minutes time on an hour's call with guys in Canada and Europe to try and do that. And it's the value they get. They can watch the growth industry each week and, you know, I'm not selling it here, but I am selling it.
And since it's such a good program and then they get an hour of my time to answer the questions and do things there. So I love that that that combination you're talking about there, the technology which can enable it, which makes it happen. So look, we, we are gonna run outta time here in terms of, and there's so many more questions I could ask you, but your time's limited.
Um, this has been fabulous. If there was one thing, and it's always a question I always think about, you know, how do we end these shows? And I always think the question I always like to ask is, if you could go back 30 years ago when you set this up with what you know now, what would you do differently back then to get you off the ground?
Or what would you do the same again if you made it right the first time? Um, I think it's always to be even more bold. [00:35:00] You know, I think, and, and I, I forgot who said it, was it Bill Gates or one of 'em who said, we way overestimate what we can achieve in a year, but we way underestimate what we can achieve in 10 years.
And trust me, at my age, uh, I, as you know, I just turned 50. About 13 years ago, uh, that, um, you know, 10 years goes by quick. And what has been impressive, whether it's Gene Brown with Citi Bend, who just by the way, finally exited that company there in, uh, in, in Ireland. Yeah. Or Naomi Simpson or any of them.
When Naomi set her, let's, let's maybe end where we started. So there in 2005, Naomi had, had sold about 7,500 experiences and she just, you know, she's an ex marketing exec from Apple, but she just couldn't get the thing going. So she brought her team to our first two day workshop we offered in, in Sydney.
And by the way, Scott f uh, and his [00:36:00] team were there from Atlassian Atlassian guys. Yeah. Yeah. They spent 60 billion in market cap, and I've moved Scott's endorsement to the front of the book in the revision. Um, and he still has been kind enough to give me shout outs. Most recently at the Wells Fargo board meeting, he shouted out my name.
Is why they think they've achieved what they've done to 60 billion. But Naomi was sitting there and we got her to focus on A-B-H-A-G of selling 2 million experiences. And as I quote in the intro of the revised book, she thought that was insane that they would achieve that. Yet she beat it by two years.
Wow. She accomplished it in 2013 instead of 20 15, 10, 8 years later. And that's what's helped her continue to be bold in setting these very aggressive, big, hairy, audacious goals. So I think that's, I don't have really regrets. I'm, I'm proud of [00:37:00] EO and all that. We've, the number of companies that we've really helped and the stories that we're able to share.
Look, I'd, I want to continue to help 10, if not a hundred x. Yeah. Uh, hopefully in my next, you know, 50 plus years. Yeah, I love that. And you know, we are running the program, the 20,000 scale ups worldwide as well, so you know, from our perspective, yeah. Know we are all behind this to make this work because actually.
If we can get that economy going, that small business, that startup business to turn into scale up, that's where the world goes. I saw a great press release from the UK government recently that there can be gonna be creating special visas to scale up programs, scale up companies in the UK to bring employees in.
And to me that's the key to do it. You know, we've been through Brexit, we've lost a lot of talent, I believe, and actually we need to do something different. So actually the government's focused on scale up. 'cause that is the bit that's gonna spin the economy faster. And it says at the beginning of the scaling up book, you know.
You've gotta get that middle ground going because actually the elephants have passed it. The, the, the startups are gone. We've gotta get that middle ground. 'cause that's what drives the economy long term. And that's what we need right [00:38:00] now. Well, and Phil, you saw, we just, we just put the article up a few weeks ago.
You know, we promised the city of Westminster, who, which by the way, is a client of ours. Yes. You know, we're working directly with them and leading their planning, and they want to be the number one city for scale ups. So our promise with the 20,000 scale ups is that we would help some of the 150 companies we're working with exit for something north of a billion, because that money tends to stay local.
Well, four of the five companies in our first cohort. 48 months ago have all exited for combined almost billion dollars. So we've already, we beat our own B we promised that over 10 years. Yeah, it got accomplished in the first 48 months, so it's amazing. We do know this stuff works. Phil, I'm glad you're there to help us support both the UK and and the Globe and, and I appreciate the time here to share these ideas.
Thank you Verne. It's been great to speak to you and thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. I look forward to seeing it. I [00:39:00] won't see you in Denver, but I should look forward to seeing it when we're next path cross, somewhere in the world, but Verne Harnish. Thank you. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
Alright, Phil, take care. Thank you. I hope you've enjoyed listening to this podcast as much of I've enjoyed you recording it. This is just one of the great conversations I've had the privilege of being part of since I started recording the Sparks by ignium Podcast. So please go back and listen to some of the others.
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