Phil Rose - Host
My guest on the Sparks by Ignium Podcast today is Verne Harnish. Verne Harnish 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 Don 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 change 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 going to hear so many little Nuggets of advice that he's got from 30 plus years of doing this.

Burns, 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 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 around what is it is you're stuck on today?

What's the barriers help you achieving it?

Because actually, that's the bit that helps you coach your employees, because when you're asking them questions, they can take their own action as opposed to relying on you giving it to them.

So listen what Verne 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 out of the end.

Listen to this.

Understand as 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 will go inside you, help you achieve that performance.

Listening enough from me, here's Verne Harnish.

Enjoy the show, let me know what you think.

So, welcome to the Spark by Ignium podcast.

I'm , 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 them 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.
Verne Harnish
Well, 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.
Verne Harnish
Certified scaling partners on 7 continents, and we're trying to do our best to help this kind of unsung heroes of our local and global economies.
Verne Harnish
'cause, they're the ones.
Verne Harnish
You guys are the ones that do all the heavy lifting, innovations, jobs and all of that.
Verne Harnish
So, Phil, it's great to have you on the team.

Yeah, thank you very much.

I appreciate 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 of actually learn more.

Also, when we talked before this, we said we're not going to go into the history, but there's one piece I want to just touch on, which is that founder of the EO and how that mill 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 got you here.

So I wonder just quick Nugget how did you get here?
Verne Harnish
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 Dow, Mark Cuban, many of the well known names today, they were all in their 20s.
Verne Harnish
And Steve ended up staying for the party that I threw for that group afterwards, but he was standing alone.
Verne Harnish
In the corner.
Verne Harnish
And at that moment, I looked to a good friend of mine, Greg Stemen.
Verne Harnish
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, said.
Verne Harnish
It's OK to be independent, but no reason to be alone.
Verne Harnish
And so that night.
Verne Harnish
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.
Verne Harnish
And you know what? At least there's 16,000 entrepreneurs through our forums and the like that are not alone. So I figured it needed an executive program.
Verne Harnish
Like Ypo has a relationship with Harvard. So I went next door to MIT and 35 years ago I launched an executive program today called EMP, the Austrian Masters program. They still let the old man come back and teach him and.
Verne Harnish
And it was there that I was able to kind of birth the tools there.
Verne Harnish
You know, there's a lot of information fillers, you know, for startups.
Verne Harnish
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.
Verne Harnish
And I have an MBA that's supposed to teach you how to run a big company, but there wasn't.
Verne Harnish
Anything there wasn't the parenting manual of how to grow up a company. And so I took a decade, 91 to 2001 work, moving about 1000, you know, really accomplished entrepreneurs through that.
Verne Harnish
That MIT program, and out of that came my first book, mastering the Rockefeller habits, dated it to scaling up in 2014.
Verne Harnish
And so, you know, we wanted to create the the tools and the techniques that would just reduce the drama and the chaos that comes with trying to.
Verne Harnish
Scale up any kind of venture from a few million to hundreds of million, which is kind.
Verne Harnish
Of our our sweet spot.

Yeah, 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, 2020.
Verne Harnish
That's where it came from.

To 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're 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?
Verne Harnish
Yeah, well it's we are coming out of the.
Verne Harnish
Pandemic the book.
Verne Harnish
Has been out for eight years and.
Verne Harnish
We've learned a lot, particularly through the pandemic.
Verne Harnish
And so, yeah, it's significantly revised.
Verne Harnish
It'll be out October 18th at our summit in Denver and there were several significant pivots that we made in the book.
Verne Harnish
One, you know, original book I opened with a story that was all about the money and of course money.
Verne Harnish
You know, the the financial side is important in the business.
Verne Harnish
I think people have come around and realized if I'm going to keep my employees engaged, that it's got to be as much about purpose as.
Verne Harnish
It is profit and.
Verne Harnish
So I changed the intro to really emphasize that we're there to support.
Verne Harnish
Or how do you?
Verne Harnish
Scale up your impact, the real reach, and that that's why most entrepreneurs do what they do is they want to.
Verne Harnish
Solve a problem.
Verne Harnish
That they see Naomi Simpson and red balloon.
Verne Harnish
You know, we we got her when she had first launched the company in 2005 and in Sydney, Australia, and next year they'll do 1/4 of.
Verne Harnish
Billion in revenue.
Verne Harnish
But that's not the important thing to Naomi, it's that she has been delivering an experience instead of stop the difference she wants to make.
Verne Harnish
Because it's a lot different.
Verne Harnish
If you give somebody an experience, they're going to remember that versus just give them some stuff.
Verne Harnish
And and so they've been delivering an experience 2017 there was about 1:00 every 2 1/2 minutes there behag is to be at one experience delivered sustainably every second.
Verne Harnish
Well, 2030, we're talking about a 30X kind of improvement, by the way. Right now they're running one about every 39 seconds.

It's amazing maybe, yeah.
Verne Harnish
In there, we featured Hester, who launched a company called Tober hits Dutch Base.
Verne Harnish
And what they've done is created 100 plus games being used in 16 countries to help people with cognitive challenges.
Verne Harnish
And when we first started working with her, she had an aggressive goal to reach 1,000,000 people a day playing games, but given the magnitude.
Speaker 1
Right.
Verne Harnish
With this challenge.
Verne Harnish
Bunch of cognitive issues around the planet we got her to see, and she feels now with our tools and techniques she can do it, that she'll be able to touch 30 million people a day by 2030.
Verne Harnish
And look, obviously her profits are going to come along, but what really energizes her is the the impact.
Verne Harnish
That they can have in making people's lives better. And then we featured on wells, who's got a nonprofit, you know, our tools work as much for in that world. We call it the four purpose world.
Verne Harnish
And he works with foster youth about 1600 a year, and his initial behag was to try to take that to 16,000.
Verne Harnish
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 100,000 youth that foster youth that we can be helping and so in all of these.
Verne Harnish
It really is as much about the impact that we scale and with our tools then you're going to be able to have the, you know, the numbers come with it 'cause.
Speaker 1
Moving step.
Verne Harnish
What you don't want to do is grow broke.
Verne Harnish
And a lot.
Verne Harnish
Of companies can end up growing broken, that's.
Verne Harnish
What we want to avoid?

And I think that's the key point, isn't it?

You know, coming out of the back of the 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 going to see interest rates rising on the back of the pandemic. We've also had great racing.

And 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, said businesses.

What's the thing that we can do within scaling up to get that balance in people lives again so they can start?

Seeing the wood for the tree, then focusing on what's real.

For them.
Verne Harnish
Yeah, well, there it's important that you make a couple of decisions and look, we expected for it to be chaotic over the next 10 years.
Verne Harnish
And I I think there's a.
Verne Harnish
Couple of quotes.
Verne Harnish
That were shared by some top entrepreneurs.
Verne Harnish
At the beginning of this pandemic, we hosted Greg Brenneman, who turned around Continental Airlines and.
Verne Harnish
He's been the turn around Guy for many, many companies and and in some sense all of us feel like we're in a perpetual turn around giving all of these pressures that are coming in that you just did.
Verne Harnish
Try and, he said.
Verne Harnish
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.
Verne Harnish
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.
Verne Harnish
We've got to do then is what Margaret Heffernan, you know, the great serial entrepreneur and well known author there in the UK, sat at the beginning pandemic and that is it, that this is a time to be ambitious.
Verne Harnish
You know, it's a little bit like, what the great.
Verne Harnish
Investors, do you know they they hold their cash like Warren Buffett did.
Verne Harnish
Why the market was going.
Verne Harnish
Through the roof.
Verne Harnish
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.
Verne Harnish
So it's important for us to be kind of counter intuitive that what I see when there's inflationary times and interest rates and all of this, I see those as blocking Strat.
Verne Harnish
Geez, you know, if you those are, those are moats.
Verne Harnish
That if you can.
Verne Harnish
Figure out how to thrive, and that's what our tools and again, our approach help you methodically figure out, if you can figure out how to take advantage of that and thrive.
Verne Harnish
These times, just wipe out all of your.
Verne Harnish
Or wheat competitors and really provides you an opportunity to be ambitious.
Verne Harnish
And so really two things.
Verne Harnish
I think this is the time to be ambitious.
Verne Harnish
So that's why we've seen our clients really up their big, hairy, audacious goals, and it's a time for you to really exude hope.
Verne Harnish
Now what does?
Verne Harnish
That mean in practical.
Verne Harnish
That is, you have got to be, you've got to have the thing that has helped everybody win all wars in markets is Intel.
Verne Harnish
You have to be so in touch with your customers and your employees on we're talking about a daily basis.
Verne Harnish
And you've got to use that.
Verne Harnish
Intel through our daily huddle and our weekly meeting.
Verne Harnish
You want to move faster, pulse faster.
Verne Harnish
Remember, who survives is not the fittest.
Verne Harnish
That's who survives is the most adaptable.
Verne Harnish
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.
Verne Harnish
So it's that undecide act cycle.
Verne Harnish
If it's the old dude, a loop of fighter pilots, if you can observe and Orient and act quicker than the other fighter pilot, you win and they lose.
Verne Harnish
That's what our tools do, is allow you to remain agile and to get the Intel and make the decision slightly quicker than everyone else in the marketplace, and that's a huge advantage.

I think that strategy and you know, 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 tool, strengths, weaknesses and trends.

And I think one thing that you know look really become apparent to me and using that is you know we often talk about the opportunities and threats which is that internal focus on that external macro picture, but actually not looking at those trends in the marketplace, so trends in the industry.

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 and say, OK, what are we good at?

What do we need to work on and really focusing on their core competence to drive potential for themselves?
Verne Harnish
And then, you know the other thing that we really.
Verne Harnish
Focus on we get down to the details around, for instance, price.
Verne Harnish
You know a lot of folks.
Verne Harnish
In our world.
Verne Harnish
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 off to the marketplace not just a single price whether your professional services.
Verne Harnish
Firm or you're offering, you know, product solutions and then the equivalent of pricing internally is compensation.
Verne Harnish
And so as you know we just released a book.
Verne Harnish
Earlier this year.
Verne Harnish
It was an ebook last year, but it came out in print in April called Scaling up compensation.
Verne Harnish
And for most of our clients, as you know, Phil, compensation is one of the largest expenses that we have and it's critical that we get the most out of every pound or dollar.
Verne Harnish
That we spend on compensation.
Verne Harnish
So we we know that the the devil is in the details.
Verne Harnish
You can't just throw out these fancy bromides that you've got to look at what we did, the five principles for designing a really robust compensation system that allows you to attract and retain.
Verne Harnish
The right talent and then how do you price properly in the marketplace?
Verne Harnish
You can continue to drive and and by.
Verne Harnish
The way if I.
Verne Harnish
Were to give us very concrete metric that I want everybody to stay.
Verne Harnish
Laser focused on.
Verne Harnish
One in this inflationary recessionary kind of resignation time and that is your gross margin dollars, pounds, EUR per employee, again the gross margin pounds per employee.
Verne Harnish
And 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 that gross margin dollars begin to get squeezed.
Verne Harnish
Yeah, no, Andy Bailey who's one of our coaching partners, he was an early class.
Verne Harnish
And it, you know, it wasn't Facebook or Google.
Verne Harnish
He was running telecom stores, you know, selling pagers later on cell phones.
Verne Harnish
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 200.
Verne Harnish
And 75,000, 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.
Verne Harnish
And we want to have you see, we want to help you three to five times that as John Ratliff did in the call center business that's an industry averages 4% profitability with our tools he took that to 21.8%. And so there is a player in every industry and low.

Yeah, yeah.

Amazing, amazing.
Verne Harnish
Built that. 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.
Verne Harnish
Uhm last year it hit 94 1/2 trillion. Its were 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.
Verne Harnish
So my view is if you can't find a way to make a million orribile.
Verne Harnish
Again, out of that global economy, it's your fault.
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Verne Harnish
You're just not on game and that's why it's important.
Verne Harnish
No one will achieve peak performance without a coach, 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.

No, I love that.
Verne Harnish
For Naomi Simpson and Dawn Wells and 80,000 other companies over the last.
Verne Harnish
40 years well.

And I think that's amazing.

There's a couple of facts in 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, OK, with three times that we asked, even if we drop back 5%, we're still going to be 2019 levels.

So there's opportunity out there, so there's a.

All other things there, which I think I'd love to to dive in a bit.

Let's just come back to that.

The OODA loop, 'cause.

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, and they're looking in the rearview mirror rather than looking at the future to say, OK, what could be, what can we?

Do this.

So some remind step one of you, you mentioned that scaling up when the new book comes out of me.

Leading on purpose.

What's the key message that you would give business owners right now in terms of just getting their own headsets 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 going to be OK if you?

Focus on this.
Verne Harnish
Yeah, well, I'm going to cut right to it.
Verne Harnish
One of the things that differentiates us and this is going to seem very tactical, but it's the daily.
Verne Harnish
Metal again.
Verne Harnish
If you want to move faster, you need to pulse faster.
Verne Harnish
You know it's 15 minutes or less.
Verne Harnish
You know, we're.
Verne Harnish
Talking about a restroom break here out of your 8/10/12 hour work day and it was interesting.
Verne Harnish
I let me provide some context for it.
Verne Harnish
I recently in my weekly insight pointed to what I think.
Verne Harnish
Is probably the most important podcast Phil.
Verne Harnish
I've listened to this century and it was the great strategist Gary Hamel out of Chicago.
Verne Harnish
All the rest are at Harvard, but he's the one rare one. That's not Gary Hamel's interview.
Verne Harnish
Of Jim Crow.
Verne Harnish
And Jim is CEO of Gallup and now for 50 years has been measuring employee engagement. And he said, look, I hate to be so simplistic, but in 50 years get, you know, enter, you know, interviewing 100 million employees a year around the globe, across all cultures, he said. We've got two very simple.
Verne Harnish
First, nobody wants managed, you know?
Verne Harnish
That's why we have these.
Verne Harnish
This is what manages us, but what people.
Verne Harnish
Do need is coached, yeah.
Verne Harnish
And so, and most of us weren't trained on how to coach.
Verne Harnish
And he said, So what does it really come down to, to be a coach?
Verne Harnish
And he said if every employee could be asked one question.
Verne Harnish
Week and it would be this.
Verne Harnish
What is your number one goal and what end?
Verne Harnish
Are there any barriers to achieving it and that employees answer creates the coachable moments?
Verne Harnish
Now, how does that apply to the daily huddle?
Verne Harnish
I'm going to be a little technical here.
Verne Harnish
I'm a mechanical engineer by training a lot of not.

Yeah, me too.
Verne Harnish
Oh, right, but.
Verne Harnish
You need six data points to really see a trend.
Verne Harnish
So if you're only hearing what's going on once a quarter, it's going to take you a year and a half before you're able to react.
Verne Harnish
You know, you survey the employees once a year, you survey the customers once a year.
Verne Harnish
It's gonna take you six years to see what's happening.
Verne Harnish
Now, if you're getting data monthly, it's going to take you six months.
Verne Harnish
If you're only looking at weekly, it's still going to.
Verne Harnish
Take you a month and 1/2.
Verne Harnish
But if you're getting a sense of what's happening in the organization daily, you're going to see what's happening.
Verne Harnish
In a week.
Verne Harnish
And so here's the crazy part.
Verne Harnish
Our agenda for the daily huddle, and we recommend every employee is in some kind of daily.
Verne Harnish
It's three questions.
Verne Harnish
First, what's up today?
Verne Harnish
What's your priority today?
Verne Harnish
And when I hear that from my team.
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My question is, is that the most important thing they need to be working on versus the urgent?
Verne Harnish
And is that aligned with what we've got to do next?
Verne Harnish
#2, I want to hear their metrics and by them having to verbalize the numbers, and I'll give you an example in a.
Verne Harnish
Moment. They're gonna feel it viscerally, and you're gonna hear it every day. And then #3 and then where is your stock?
Verne Harnish
Whereas the barrier.
Verne Harnish
To you achieving so.
Verne Harnish
In essence, we are asking the Jim Clifton question to every employee every day and by me hearing the answer.
Verne Harnish
Over the next five or six days, I'm going to now know my coachable moments.
Verne Harnish
Where are they working on the right thing?
Verne Harnish
And I'm going to see a pattern of stocks, barriers to being able to eat that so.
Verne Harnish
I'll give you a very specific.
Verne Harnish
Uhm, you know, a lot of CEOs have one on ones with their teams and individual team members and.
Verne Harnish
This sucks up.
Verne Harnish
8456 hours a week.

Yep, 2 right?
Verne Harnish
And the problem is in those one on ones you have to be the bad person.
Verne Harnish
You know, you're saying you know how is it going in recruiting employees and your head of HR is like dancing around well, Dah Dah Dah.
Verne Harnish
Dah, dah, always the.
Verne Harnish
Same, yeah.
Verne Harnish
So when are my my one client that I still coach?
Verne Harnish
Doug, he he was doing the one on ones.
Verne Harnish
I said, look, let's replace that with an 8 minute daily huddle with your senior team.
Verne Harnish
It's 852.
Verne Harnish
AM to 9:00 AM, Pacific Standard Time and now his head of HR.
Verne Harnish
Every day is reporting out the number of open positions, the number of interviews.
Verne Harnish
And within two weeks.
Verne Harnish
You know, somebody having to say the same open position number every day for two weeks all of a sudden starts to clue you?
Verne Harnish
In that the.
Verne Harnish
Needle is not moving and he ended up realizing we could see it, but he then could see it that he needed to replace her.

Yeah, yeah.
Verne Harnish
She absolutely was the wrong person.
Verne Harnish
Driving HR for their company.
Verne Harnish
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.
Verne Harnish
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 happen if they hadn't fixed that in the #3.
Verne Harnish
They raised a serious round of money than to invest in properties and one of the numbers that Doug has reported out daily is, all right, what did we buy in the last 24 hours and what progress are we making every day in getting that money invested? So just looking at.
Verne Harnish
Number of hires and interviews daily.
Verne Harnish
What their churn is daily what what they bought and invested in daily.
Verne Harnish
Doug is able now to see the patterns and trends and the team.
Verne Harnish
And get a better gut feel for what's going on in the business and not allowed them to move quick in this crazy environment where interest rates are going up and and prices are starting to come down and real estate in the US and the like. So that's the OODA.

Yeah, I love that and I love that, you know, we always say, you know, keep them, 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, and you need to get the Intel.

And that's providing that Intel Seattle.

A Week, 7 * A week if you need to, and it's just 8 minutes a day.
Verne Harnish
Yeah, well, and we saw when we hosted, you know, there's a Ukraine war going on right now. And General McChrystal helped us get on top of the Iraqi war, and the key was the daily huddle. They got all 6000 special forces to come on for 90 minutes and they would debrief.
Verne Harnish
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 as teams went out on a set of missions the next day, by the way, because of that.
Verne Harnish
They were able to 10X the number of night missions, which allowed us to get on top of it.
Verne Harnish
So that's one of the key things that we're really focused on as well as where in the business model can we 10X something that's critical. And so for John Ratliff, the call center.
Verne Harnish
Business is just life with employee turnover. Way before the great resignation, it averages 200% a year. John was able to take that to 18% of that 10X internal advantage over the competition.
Verne Harnish
It 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 #2, where is that 10X advantage over the competition?
Verne Harnish
That then ultimately allows you to 10X your impact and reach over the next decade.

Yeah, yeah.
Verne Harnish
And what's important is.
Verne Harnish
If you only think.
Verne Harnish
How do I two or three XI only have to do?
Verne Harnish
A little bit better than what?
Verne Harnish
I'm doing right now.
Verne Harnish
But if I think all right, what do I have to do to 10X then I?
Verne Harnish
Have even if.
Verne Harnish
You don't achieve that.
Verne Harnish
Then you've got to think differently and it's that thinking different and being ambitious as Margaret Heffernan.
Verne Harnish
Said the combination of those two and then focusing on it daily.
Verne Harnish
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 scaleups.com site that if people don't believe us, this is that we're achieving every single day and you see it built.

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 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, because I've been coaching for a long time now, but actually we all should have the coach alongside.

As Eric Schmitz a long time ago at Google, the biggest investment the Google Boys made in him was about having that coach.

And to me, that's the.

Thing that gives you the 10X thinking 'cause without that.

You're not thinking far enough into the future, so I'm hearing that loud and clear.

From you there and feel.
Verne Harnish
That you know, it's a good example I.
Verne Harnish
Know every year I named the number.
Verne Harnish
One business book.
Verne Harnish
Yeah, it's one of the things I did for Fortune Magazine per year, so I've continued that.
Verne Harnish
And last year it was who bared joulies.
Verne Harnish
Book The heart of business, and I really do hope.
Verne Harnish
You know, besides reading, scaling up.
Verne Harnish
I hope all your listeners read who bears book the heart of business.
Verne Harnish
It was really one of the great turnarounds in the US of Best Buy. Yeah, you know, he had Amazon coming on Circuit, City failing and all that, yet he 10X the value of that company from $11.00.
Verne Harnish
The share to 101 hundred $10 a share.
Verne Harnish
But what was interesting is, you know, he's this French CEO and he came from Europe to come over and and lead this turn around.
Verne Harnish
And even though he's this hugely, highly experienced leader, the first thing the board did was get him a coach.
Verne Harnish
And it happened to be, by the way, Marshall Goldsmith.
Verne Harnish
And and this is new news, but we just landed Marshall Goldsmith chose us our growth institute to produce his first master course on coaching.
Verne Harnish
And so people are excited that we're going to.
Verne Harnish
Be able to make that available because.
Verne Harnish
Not only do you does a company need an outside coach, as Steve Jobs had, as Eric Schmidt dead, as Hoober Jolie did and our clients do, but then we've got to learn how to coach internally and we're super excited that we're going to have literally the guy recognized as the number one CEO coach in the world producing a master.
Verne Harnish
Course for us.

I think that's amazing and and the fact these children Growth Institute, I saw something on on LinkedIn the other day about Growth Institute is just being recognized as well for some amazing growth in the US as well.

So growth into for any client, 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.

Forces, 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 and the guys that have really driven that business.
Verne Harnish
So what that does, it comes back filled.
Verne Harnish
And let me frame this for your listeners.
Verne Harnish
We, we rooted our work, a lot of our work in Jim Collins Research.
Verne Harnish
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. And so our four decisions people strategy.
Verne Harnish
Execution and cash, we didn't just make that up.
Verne Harnish
That was rooted in what Jim and the work at Ido.
Verne Harnish
That said, if you want to go from good to great, you have to have disciplined people.
Verne Harnish
There's people engaged in disciplined thought that drives strategy through disciplined action, which is the execution piece.
Verne Harnish
And then in Jims last really significant book, great by choice, he then realized, but you can't run out of cash so you better have so the people strategy.
Verne Harnish
Execution cash came from Jim were and are three fundamental offerings.
Verne Harnish
The only way you're going to have a disciplined people, they have disciplined people.
Verne Harnish
Is with the coach.
Verne Harnish
Any anyone who's ever worked out knows that you're going to progress much better and more rapidly if you've got trainer than if not.
Verne Harnish
Same with golf.
Verne Harnish
I'm I'm really enjoying playing golf with my sons this summer and I I was had, I had this worst slice.
Verne Harnish
And then finally, like, alright, who's?
Verne Harnish
The best guy in the world?
Verne Harnish
Fix a slice, Hank Haney, which is was Tiger Woods coach.
Verne Harnish
OK, and and Hank promised that he can. He's helped 70,000 people fix their slice in 5 minutes.
Speaker 1
OK.
Verne Harnish
And sure enough, I took him up.
Verne Harnish
On it, and he did.
Verne Harnish
I have not sliced the golf ball since.
Verne Harnish
Knock on wood.
Verne Harnish
So disciplined people require coaching discipline.

Yeah, yeah.
Verne Harnish
Thought requires ongoing education.
Verne Harnish
And as you and I talked about, you know the final decision Steve Jobs made.
Verne Harnish
Before he died was to launch Apple University.
Verne Harnish
People don't realize that was his really last and most famous contribu.
Verne Harnish
Mission and look, I think the real 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.
Verne Harnish
And look, Steves been gone now for 11 years, and it's the highest market cap company on the planet.
Verne Harnish
And the credit goes to the fact that he.
Verne Harnish
Installed a company university, so our growth institute is really meant to be this outsourced company university for midmarket companies and then he said the key to scaling action.
Verne Harnish
One is through technology and that then is our align or scoreboard platform.
Verne Harnish
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.
Verne Harnish
You go from good.
Verne Harnish
To great. So we've got the 100% salute.
Verne Harnish
Solution and frankly none of our competitors do.

No, I love that.

And you know, and I'm working on a program with the with Don Monkhouse at the moment with a worldwide company.

There's a coach in Australia or coaching Poland, me in the UK and I'm in the UK.

We're working worldwide with that.

They're working through the growth since 2 program and we are coaching them in fact in 45 minutes time on an hour call with guys in Canada and Europe to try and do that and it's the value they get they can watch the growth into each week.

And you know, I'm not selling it here, but I am selling it since it's such a good program.

And then they get an hour of my time to answer all the questions and do things that so I love it there.

That combination you're talking about that the technology which can enable it.

Which makes it happen.

So then that we're.

Going to run out of time here in terms and there's so many more questions I can ask you about your time is limited and 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 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?
Verne Harnish
Uhm, I think it's always to be even more bold, you know, I think and and I I forgot who said it was at Bill Gates or one of them who said we way overestimate what we can achieve in a year.
Verne Harnish
But we way.
Verne Harnish
Underestimate what we can achieve in 10 years.
Verne Harnish
And trust me, at my age, I, as you know, I just turned 50 about 13 years ago.
Verne Harnish
That, you know, 10 years goes by quick and what has been impressive whether it's Jean Brown with City Ben, who just by the way, finally exited that company there in in Ireland or Naomi Simpson or any of them when they only set her let's let's maybe end where we started.
Verne Harnish
So there in 2005 Naomi had had sold about 7500 experience.
Verne Harnish
This is and she just, you know, she's an ex marketing exec from Apple, but she just couldn't get the thing going.
Verne Harnish
So she brought her team to our first two day workshop we offered in in Sydney.
Verne Harnish
And by the way, Scott Pruitt and his team were there from Atlasi and eight.

Alaskan guys yeah, yeah.
Verne Harnish
60 billion in market cap and I've moved Scotts endorsement to the front of the book in there.
Verne Harnish
Their vision.
Verne Harnish
And he still has been kind enough to give me shout outs.
Verne Harnish
Most recently at the Wells Fargo board meeting, he shouted out my name is is why they think they've achieved what they've done to 60 billion.
Verne Harnish
But Naomi was sitting there and we got her to focus on a behag of selling 2,000,000 experiences.
Verne Harnish
And as I quote in the.
Verne Harnish
Intro of the revised book.
Verne Harnish
She thought that was.
Verne Harnish
Insane that they would achieve that, yet she beat it by two years.
Verne Harnish
So she accomplished it in 2013 instead of 2015, ten, eight years later. And that's what's helped her continue to be bold in setting these very aggressive, big, hairy, audacious goals. So.
Verne Harnish
I think that.
Verne Harnish
That's I don't have really regrets. I'm proud of video and all that we've, the number of companies that we've really helped and the stories that were able to share. But look, I I want to continue to help tan, if not 100 X.
Verne Harnish
Yeah, hopefully in my next, you know?
Verne Harnish
50 plus years.

Yeah, I love that, you know, we're running the program, the 20,000 scaleups worldwide as well, so you know.

From our perspective now, we'll behind this to make this work because actually if we can get that economy going, that small business that start up their business to turn into scaleups, that's where the world.

'cause I saw a great press release from the UK government recently that there can be can be creating special visas to scale up programs and scale up companies in the UK to bring employee then.

And to me, that's the key to do it.

But 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 focus on.

Scale up 'cause.

That is the bit that's going to spin the economy.

Faster and it says at the beginning of the scaling up book, you know, you gotta get that middle ground going because actually the elephants have passed it.

The, the, the start of the gun.

We've got to get that middle ground 'cause.

That's what drives the economy long term, and that's what we need right now.
Verne Harnish
Well, in Philly you saw we just, we just put the article up a few weeks ago, you know, we promised the City of Westminster, which by the way is a client of ours, you know, directly with them and leading their planning.
Verne Harnish
And they want.
Verne Harnish
To be the number one city for scale UPS.
Verne Harnish
So our promise with the 20,000 scale UPS is that we would help some of the 150 companies we're working with exit.
Verne Harnish
For something north of a billion, because that money tends to stay local well.
Verne Harnish
Four of the five companies in our first cohort 48 months ago have all exited for combined almost billion dollars.
Verne Harnish
So we've already we beat our own beat. We promised that over 10 years. It got accomplished in the first 48 months. So.

It's amazing.
Verne Harnish
We do know this stuff works.
Verne Harnish
Still, I'm glad you're there to help us support.
Verne Harnish
Both the UK and the Globe and and I appreciate the time here to share these items.

Thank you, Claire, and it's been great to speak to you and thank you very much.

I really enjoyed it.

I look forward to seeing.

I won't see you in Denver, but I shall look forward to seeing you when we're next path.

Ross, somewhere in the world, but burn Harnish.

Thank you.

It's been a pleasure talking to you.
Verne Harnish
All right, Phil, take care.

Thank you.
Verne Harnish
Thank you.

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