Company transformation? Sometimes you can't do it without a guillotine: Vít Šubert (#200)
- Martin Hurych
- 8. 7.
- Minut čtení: 28
The company costs you millions and has dozens of people. So why are you still running it like you did when you were still in the garage?
It may look great from the outside - years of growth, a good name, paying clients. But on the inside? The owner decides every business card. The business runs "somehow." And what's not in the boss's head doesn't exist. Do you recognize yourself?
Then you should watch this episode all the way through. Because I've invited a guest who enters the pit stop with companies like this every day. Vít Šubert of Unicorn Attacks puts together the businesses that they've outgrown themselves. No illusions. Without unnecessary empathy. And no mercy when it comes to the guillotine.
We discussed, among other things:
Vit doesn't save companies with powerpoint. He talks tough but fair. And most importantly, he knows what he's talking about. He's been through it himself. And he's doing it to others today. If you're a business owner and somewhere inside you already suspect you could do better, this is the episode for you.
"Don't be afraid of business transformation. The biggest risk is not taking the risk. Don't be afraid of processes and dedicate yourself to sales management."
Vít Šubert | Founder @ Unicorn Attacks s.r.o.
(transcript)
How would he describe his business to his children?
Martin Hurych
Vít is the founder of the business pitstop Unicorn Attacks. We were talking here at the beginning before the show about how it's often difficult to explain what we do and what parallels we have to use to do it. What would your kids say about your business or what Daddy does?
Vít Šubert
Even my wife sometimes has trouble repeating what I do when someone asks her. They know that I hate the word consulting, so they usually characterize it by saying that we help fix businesses.
Martin Hurych
What does fixing companies mean in your definition?
Vít Šubert
We put the business pitstop because of that, because we were wondering what to compare it to, and the Formula 1 is perfect at that. They fly in, they've got 2.5 seconds to change the tyres, they don't even refuel nowadays, they fix what they can and off they go again. The company flies in, says they don't have a lot of time, they're terribly busy in the market, competition, and we have to fix these things quickly, often on the fly. We have it as if the mechanic sits in the pitstop for that rider because we're doing it with them, and off they go again. We need to understand the business quickly, fix those key things, which may not just be problems, but maybe growth things, and do it all on the fly.
What led him from the corporation to his own company?
Martin Hurych
To understand the angle from which we're commenting, what was it about corporates that bothered you so much that you decided to make your own company?
Vít Šubert
Ironically, I was not annoyed by so many things in the 26 years I was there. Everybody is annoyed by some things, but when somebody talks about internal politics and so on, that's just part of what happens there. What bothered me the most was that you had to do things, no matter how high up in the structure you were, that you weren't always convinced were 100% right or that you would decide differently yourself, but then you were held accountable for it. I don't have a problem taking responsibility whether it turns out right or wrong, but I want to have that feeling that it was my decision and that I was convinced that it was the right option.
Sometimes I've gotten hit for things that I didn't decide or even protested that I didn't think were a good idea, but I had to take that responsibility. Some might say that's part of the managerial role, but I found that terribly draining and that was probably the turning point for me. When I founded Unicorn Attacks, I was 47 at the time and I thought, if I don't do this now, I don't want to be starting a progressive company like this at 60. I thought, I've got to give it a shot because I don't want to be at 60 saying I was a coward and I didn't give it a shot.
What did corporate teach you about business?
Martin Hurych
I have also had a 20-year corporate career and I say that anybody who is thinking about going into business should go into a corporation for experience and learn how to run those companies. What do you think is really the grit or the essence where we can learn something from the corporate world as business owners and directors?
Vít Šubert
I think the corporation teaches you a lot of good things. My son has now finished university and is starting work and I was so glad he got into a really great corporation because I think it will teach him the right fundamentals. The corporation isn't a dirty word, it's that great because the company has grown up that way and it has some rules, often very logical, they may not be to everyone's liking but it makes sense given the business and the expectations of the shareholders.
I think a corporatist learns good fundamentals when one catches a good company of course, which I have been fortunate to have had the vast majority of good ones in my life with few exceptions. I learned the basics of business great, I learned marketing there, but the real marketing, not what is visual, but how to do pricing, how to do analytics, that sort of thing. I did school before the revolution, so we weren't taught much there, so I really learned it through practice and mistakes. What I learned between 1995-2005, I lived off of for the next 20 years. At the same time, I think the corporate world teaches you to think well in planning, because that's where you have to plan, and I see a lot of companies where that planning is a terrible sore spot and repeatedly fails or is underestimated.
Martin Hurych
I'm going to publicly test a hypothesis here. My feeling is that the corporation is hated by the people who were at the lowest levels because there was a total failure of communication and those people didn't know what they were doing and why they were doing it. If someone was lucky enough to rise to some managerial level in the corporation and they've seen this, they can't praise the corporation. Do they agree?
Vít Šubert
That's right. I've been through corporate from the very bottom rung to CEO and it's about managing expectations along the way, what I want to do for a career there, or don't want to do, and I'm happy in what I'm pretending to be an expert in a field, and that's fine. You need to manage my expectations and manage the expectations of those around me, because corporate is very much about communication and it's in combination with managing those expectations that I think the person can then make the most of it for their own development. If he doesn't take advantage of that, then he can blame it on the corporation, but it's also his fault.
What is the most common mistake business owners make?
Martin Hurych
We've agreed that today, as part of our anniversary episode, we're going to take a little dig at owners and directors who primarily listen to us. What do you think is the most common mistake these people make in running their companies?
Vít Šubert
I think the most common mistake we see there is the management system of that company from within, because that company grew from nothing. What I often see with our clients is that the company is still being run as a garage company, even though it's already doing, say, a turnover of 500 million, a billion. It's still run in that ultimate Caesar way, where the owner decides everything, almost even buying pencils and where the business cards are made, instead of focusing on growing the business. He can't leave it because it's his baby, he built it from the beginning and that's a big mistake.
Another mistake is that every company that grows needs know-how from outside over time. Can't all people grow and nurture themselves from within. They have to bring in people from outside who have been through the same phase of the company, who have a proven track record of success and results, even in senior positions. It's not disrespectful to the people who have worked there for a long time, but with all due respect, those people don't have the experience to do it. I always say they haven't made those mistakes on someone else's dime elsewhere to learn the lessons, or they simply don't have the skills. Those owners often when they build the company that way, they have an emotional and affective connection to it, including the people, but then there are these incantations that we're a family business and we pride ourselves on not having anyone in management who hasn't been here 10, 15 years. But at the same time, it can hurt the company terribly internally because historically there's a lot of attachment, emotion, and at the same time a preoccupation with the company itself and there's not that perspective. The best managers in Czech companies are great at having distance and perspective.
Martin Hurych
Isn't that wedge with the family business actually an excuse for not wanting to move forward so quickly?
Vít Šubert
It is, because what is the definition of a family business that there are owners, founders? In that case, Dell is a family business, albeit one of the largest corporations in the world, because Michael Dell is still actively leading the board of directors. I think that's often frankly the biggest curse of employees towards the owners when they don't want some change process because they want to be a family business and not a corporation.
Martin Hurych
I'm going to take a step back, you said that there's this sort of Caesar effect of the owner, the CEO. Do you feel that's in every company, or is it partly because of when the companies were founded? I mean, I imagine that maybe there was no other way to dig it out of the ground in the 1990s.
Vít Šubert
I don't think it was possible and I think it was the only way to succeed, and that's why those companies are successful today, but times are changing, the market is changing. But that's not Covidem, as everybody says, 2015, 2016 was a watershed year, new technology, different way of doing business, much faster business periods, hyper-competition. I think that's where the tipping point of those owners who were enlightened and started to understand that those changes are going to come and maybe even want to get help in those changes. They may bring in somebody from the outside, like us, or they may bring in these experienced managers and then they don't need us. We've had clients from both camps, those who made the terrible mistake of not seeing it, not wanting to see it and calling us in as more or less crisis management, but then also those who wanted to get it rebuilt in time.
When do you flip a company over to professional management?
Martin Hurych
Where do you think the threshold is when one should think about some broader management or professional management from a founding dad?
Vít Šubert
I think there are two phases. One is age, I'm 54, so I can talk about that. Everybody has to say when is the point where I have got the house, I have got the car, I have got the wife, I don't want a second house, I just need one car and I don't want to change my wife and if it's time to slow down a little bit. I've worked my whole life, I've raised my kids, I've got some money saved up so I might as well enjoy it a little bit. That's one moment and it's a very personal and intimate decision for each person and business owner.
Then the second moment is when I find that the company is draining me terribly, we're treading water on the spot and I don't really know why, when I'm doing everything right, like I've done for 20 years and it's worked for me. That's the point where that owner has to self-critically admit to himself that he's starting to miss out a little bit on that market because the competition is starting to catch up, overtake them and there's no time to do anything about it. The longer he hesitates, the more radical the cuts have to be, unfortunately.
Martin Hurych
I had dinner with a recruited outside CEO yesterday and he said he would love to run the company if the owner didn't dig into it. How many people do you think there are who get to the stage where they think they should slow down, they should hand over because they need fresh blood? How many of those people can give the owner's brief to the professional management on what they want from the company?
Vít Šubert
I think about 1/3 from my experience. Plus there is another point that even if they give the assignment, they don't let the CEO do his job.
How do you keep management out of the job?
Martin Hurych
How to unblock such a person from the company?
Vít Šubert
Find him something else to do. Once the person has been working on something all his life, building something and has to pass it on to someone as his child, and has no other business or hobby that he wants to pursue, he has nowhere to direct that energy. The kids are mostly grown up because they grew up in between what we were working. If I don't have somewhere to direct that energy, I'm going to be putting it back into that company 100% in a roundabout way and I'm going to annoy the CEO terribly because I'm going to keep interfering with him. He's gonna do it differently than me, but that's why I brought him in. If it gets results, there's nothing wrong with him choosing a different management system over time. He might say he wants different people to do it, but that's what I brought him into the company to do. I think it's awfully hard for those people to move on if they don't have that energy to invest elsewhere.
Martin Hurych
You brought in a new CEO in January. What box did they pick for you so you wouldn't dig into management?
Vít Šubert
I chose it myself, because I prepared myself mentally for a year and a half. Moreover, I worked with Honza, who is our CEO, because I was his mentor for some time and we had no idea that it would turn out this way. I didn't even push him, it came out of the situation because he leaving something that he was in before. We worked together for 7 months, where he shadowed me a bit, I spent a lot of 1:1 time with him, letting him see inside my head so he could understand how I think about things and why I want to direct Unicorn Attacks in a certain way. I want us to be different and a bit piratey versus what is normal in the market, it makes sense and I enjoy it that way. If I don't enjoy it, it's going to be terrible for me. I needed to understand in those 7 months if we understand each other and it helped tremendously because then when he took over from January, I strictly said I'm not going to interfere.
I'm focusing on two things right now, growing the business and the big clients, because these people know me, I enjoy it, but I have no problem passing that on to the firm and not drilling down into it. I also have time now to think about where the firm should go next because luckily the firm is growing, we've never had a year that's been flat and I want to grow the firm further. So Honza is running the company as it is and I'm thinking about what's going to happen in 3, 4 years.
What else is missing in family businesses?
Martin Hurych
Going back to owners and directors and management mistakes, we discussed organisational self-centredness. What other mistake do you see most often in corporate governance?
Vít Šubert
I think one problem is the processes in those companies. That's always an interesting discussion to have with clients when you say process, because they all say we're going to draw flow charts and we're going to complicate things. The right process will sometimes simplify that company, which is what we try to explain. That process defines the journey from the time I reach out to the customer to the time I actually deliver that value to make it as simple as possible. There's another mistake that's made there, the primary way to get it right is to make it as simple as possible from the customer's perspective, not the company's. The customer is who we create value for by what we do. The terrible mistake is that those companies often look at it in the way that's best for them, but the best companies always put themselves in it from the customer's point of view. That's what I define as the right end-to-end process in a company. I'm not saying, let's do 20 processes, but let's take the most important ones. 80, 85% of companies have no idea how to do it or don't even try to do it, and I see that as a big pain point for these types of companies because they don't understand how they could simplify their lives if they set it up right.
How do you not piss off your own people?
Martin Hurych
I can see a lot of owners getting hives about what's going to happen at the coffee machine. I see the benefits at the end, but the path to those benefits at the end is so complicated that I don't want to piss off those Maruskas and Wereskas and I'm trapped by my own people who don't want to change. What do we do about it?
Vít Šubert
That's exactly how it is. We, when we come to the company, we also try to communicate to the management and then to the employees what we are going there to do. That's the stage where those owners are excited, they say these people bought in, they're glad we're there and it really is. Because we say we're going to go to them a lot, we want to ask questions, the company needs to modernize a little bit, and each person sees from their point of view what could be improved and they're excited that we're asking them about it and that we're reflecting that. But then there comes a stage where those people start to hate us a little bit because we start to rebuild the company based on what we find out. But by doing that, we're going to start breaking up their comfort zones that they've built up over the years, the shortcuts and the paths that they've taken, we're going to pave new roads and they're not going to like that at all and they're going to come to us saying that we're making it a corporation, that it's nonsense. There's going to be a lot of pressure on that owner to stand up to that and say that's what he really wants and that company has to go through that because otherwise maybe in 3 years it won't even be here.
Martin Hurych
The moment you go and ask, you are usually told what doesn't work somewhere else. Is that right?
Vít Šubert
Of course, because it works for them. Sometimes they even tell us not to even look at their area because they have it figured out, which is usually a pointer to where to definitely go.
How do you handle the transformation phase?
Martin Hurych
You do these transformation projects fix time fix price, which means you have to have that transformation line of communication with people very well polished so that there's nobody throwing sand in the gears. What should we be looking at as an example of how you do that?
Vít Šubert
They will always be there. I'm relatively very open in communication, so I have no problem marching in there and telling that person to his face that he's deliberately screwing us up and that we're either going to fight with each other, which may not turn out well for him, or he's going to accept it. I'm there representing the guy and I want to help him fix the company he's been building his whole life. The person needs to realize that, because while I want to build it with them, I'm there to make their owner's business work, not to make them fall in love with me. I'm going to subordinate everything I do there to that. It's usually a shock because these people are not used to being confronted like that, so some get scared and start functioning normally and some fight and then sometimes it's associated with leaving. That can happen.
Martin Hurych
For a very long time, the prevailing thought was that the time had gone when you needed to execute once for a warning and you had to pass by a pool of blood, but it still works. Is that right?
Vít Šubert
It works. We're always really trying terribly in the first months to explain to everybody why it's being done, what the goal is, what their role is there, our goal is not to do staff audits. But if those people don't want to, and maybe even deliberately go against what's supposed to help the company, then I'm an advocate of taking chances by giving it a hard name so that you can't say that it's somehow been interpreted differently. I'm going to confront these people with it, I'm going to give it 2, 3 weeks to see if these people take it, and if they don't, then the confrontation comes by pulling down the visor and going into battle. Then sometimes the execution has to come. Nobody enjoys firing people, that would make you a psychopath, but sometimes you find out that that was the biggest accelerator for the company.
As an owner, how do you not get scared of corporate change?
Martin Hurych
Sometimes it happens that in the middle of the run there are so many grains of sand in the gears that the owner himself says that the gear is in reverse and not to go any further. What can I do as an owner to keep that from happening myself, but when it does, what would you do with me?
Vít Šubert
We have experienced this repeatedly and there are two things. The harder option is to convince them and constantly persuade the owner that he is hurting himself. It's difficult for him internally because those people had some merit there in that company, but now they are playing their own game or they are so old-school that it's rather hurting the company. Then it's better if that owner lets us in some relatively executive role to rebuild those things in that company and let someone from our team run some of those parts for a period of time. That's not even interim management, that's really a rebuilding thing, including having a free hand to replace people and to select new people, for example. We'll bring in the last two candidates and tell the owner to choose, but we'll make the change. Sometimes it's easier for that owner, I understand that, and I think that's part of our job, what we should do for that owner for that money.
Martin Hurych
That means that if I see Vitus in front of the gatehouse building guillotines, I should be afraid.
Vit Šubert
It's not quite like that, I really think that we go into these companies thinking that we're the happiest we can be with the people that are there. Those people have some history there, some experience, it's more comfortable for us because when somebody new comes in we have to onboard them, we guarantee that they've made a good choice and our people have to spend more time there.
Martin Hurych
You call these transformation sprints camps. How long are these camps in the order of magnitude?
Vít Šubert
It depends on the complexity and the size of the companies, but I dare say the shortest ones take 2 months and those are the simplest ones, where they just fine-tune some things. The longest ones take about 7, 8 months when it's a big transformation. The way we still do it is that we typically do 4, 5 of those camps on average with that client, but we never do more than 2 at a time, yeah, because that company has a business and if they bite off a lot of stuff at once, it stops them from the inside and it gets confusing. She has to produce her business, her turnover, her profits.
The owners are excited about the change in the beginning and want to do everything, but we're holding them back by starting 2 camps and then going to the next one so that it has some order. It doesn't cost them more, instead they spread it out even better in cash flow. 50% of that money is actually paid to us up front when we specify exactly what the delivery is and 50% is paid to us at the end of that camp when they accept that we actually delivered what we promised in writing. If you are serious about the transformation of that company, I think it is better to spread it out over time because it is also easier for those employees to accept all the changes gradually, it is easier to explain it to them and the company is better able to adjust to it.
What are the milestones to track?
Martin Hurych
Whether I take you on as an owner or director to tune the company or I do it internally, what KPIs or what milestones should I be tracking to know that the process is running as it should?
Vít Šubert
I think it's terribly important to say at the beginning of the boot camp what are the expectations, what is the deliverable that will be tangible. The output must not be that the owner will be satisfied, that can take many forms and we can't measure it with anything. I understand that sometimes it's hard, but the output should be something measurable that I can touch through numbers, that not only maybe describes the process, but actually gets physically deployed into that business, that the business starts to follow that. I'm not going to measure that on a number, but I'm going to say, in a completely demonstrable way, that that company is now operating in that logic.
It's always important to put some 2-4 KPIs in there, no more than that, that's pointless because you lose focus. 2, 3 KPIs is ideal and based on those you can evaluate at the end that Unicorn Attacks delivered what they should have and what they promised me or not and I'm not going to pay them 50% until that happens. Sometimes those companies tend to go very soft on the end that we don't even have to write it down, but that's terribly dangerous for both parties. Everyone's expectations can be quite different, even if we think we're going for the same goal. We're trying to do this up front and build on those KPIs so that it's easily verifiable.
Why is sales the owner's priority?
Martin Hurych
So we have the personality of the owner, we have the processes, what is the third mistake?
Vít Šubert
Sales, in almost every company. Now, we're not going to go into the details of the fact that 70% of our clients don't have a CRM, or they have a CRM but they don't use it or they have it as a phone book. They don't understand the principle of CRM, what it's for when we talk about measuring it through a weighted pipeline, they don't understand what I'm talking about, funnel, they don't understand what I'm talking about.
Martin Hurych
I just put out a number last week that I think 80% of the companies here can't trade and I immediately got a storm that that certainly can't be the case.
Vít Šubert
I think so too. That's the real experience of the clients we've done over the years, and there are over 100 of them for sure. I really dare say that 80% of them have sales set up wrong, which is not to say that they're not selling the way everybody thinks they are, but they're selling in a complicated way, they're not working with the data the way they could. It's inefficient, they're losing margin along the way, they don't have the upsells figured out, the right follow-ups aren't there.
Sales is a discipline and should have some rules and CRM is also an insurance policy for me as a business owner that I know that if that salesperson leaves, gets sick, moves, I have a history. I know what went on, what was agreed in the meeting, that maybe meeting minutes are taken and put into the CRM.
Martin Hurych
That means that somebody is going to check those minutes and somebody is going to enforce some discipline.
Vít Šubert
That's what the sales manager should be there for, the owner shouldn't even be doing that. The owner should have that dashboard that when he looks at it, in 10, 15 minutes he can see absolutely clearly how he's doing and he can predict his cash flow because he's doing it on a weighted pipeline. But that's often science fiction to them. On the other hand, I have to say that if you explain this to somebody, every owner understands it, buys into it, and is very willing to really push it in that company. They just don't have the know-how in that company because they built that company from scratch from a small company and they didn't bring that habit. Let's not live under the illusion here that if I bring in an outside salesperson, they're going to immediately want a CRM and they're going to type everything in. We have to mandate that and if he doesn't use it, we don't pay him a commission on it.
Martin Hurych
I think a lot of times a senior salesperson, when they see that there's no CRM, they don't even go into that company. I divide salespeople into salespeople, salespeople and feeders. There are very few, very few salespeople and they usually ask for things like that. I agree that the owner can be explained. But what to do so that there isn't this rebellion in the village and these people don't worry that if they share their know-how that the owner will then fire them?
Vít Šubert
I think that's the first thing when I'm recruiting a trader or I have one and he says that, that's a good signal not to put him in. I think the owner has to insist on it because sales is the engine, it's the gasoline and oil to that business to make it work that brings in the money. I've got to get that injection under control, speaking of that pitstop.
Martin Hurych
If there's one, two salespeople, I can understand that, but I'm seeing, for example, sales teams where there's 14, 15 people and there's a revolt in the village. If my former teams didn't have CRM, you can't manage that.
Vit Šubert
That's right. I think this is the complete alpha and omega, the owner needs to understand that. If I've got more than 3, 4 salespeople, I think somebody is managing them and they should be the primary enforcer and if the manager isn't enforcing it, then I've got a problem in that manager. So how does he manage that, how does he look at that, how does he measure that funnel, how does he measure acquisition conversion? I think there's another thing there, that the owner or the top sales manager should be with the customers on a regular basis to see that reality, so that they're not just reading it from the CRM or living in the idea that it's still working like it did in his day.
When I was running O2 B2B division and one of those departments was sales, where there were over 300 sales people, I had every Thursday off in my calendar and I would go to the sales floor. I picked a salesperson more or less at random and said I was going to go into meetings with them that day. I was there to help him sell and at the same time I wanted to see that reality with the customers so I wasn't living in an illusion. Most of the time, I would get in the car with the salesperson and tell them why we were going to the meeting and what we wanted to leave the meeting with so that we were satisfied that the meeting made sense. When I started doing that, a third of the salespeople didn't have an answer at all. They were going to the customer for coffee, saying it's a relationship business, but the relationship has to have some closure too, and if it doesn't, I'm going there for nothing. Try doing that sometimes, you might be surprised.
Should a CSO have its own customers?
Martin Hurych
Should a sales manager have his own customers?
Vít Šubert
I don't think, optimally, if it's of a size that I can afford. If I have 5 salespeople, I don't think he should be running the store anymore. I think if there's a big customer and that salesperson doesn't have that experience, then he should go help sell it, but he shouldn't have a portfolio of customers tied to him. Because he's going to be dodging his own business and it's going to be a distraction. So from 5 salesmen upwards, I would be very much in favour of let him drive.
Martin Hurych
I even think he's a different type of person personally.
Vít Šubert
He may be, that's another thing. Of course, we both know how common is the absolutely wrong logic that the best trader will be the best business manager. That doesn't work, I can make a great trader into a very bad manager with this move. Plus even the good salesmen, specially the acquisition ones, who don't have great mileage accounting on their cars, have a bit of a mess in everything and I'll make a bit of a goat of a gardener. He was great at acquisitions, but those habits of his will logically carry over into that sales job for me.
A great sales manager doesn't have to be a top performing salesman.
What's the most common order?
Martin Hurych
As times change, I would expect the demands on those internal processes to change as well. For example, what is the most common thing you are currently implementing or where have you learned your lessons?
Vít Šubert
Everybody asks us about AI of course. Now I'll skip that 3/4 of people perceive AI as I have ChatGPT on my mobile and I use that as a search engine instead of Google. That's not AI, because that ChatGPT then searches on that Google anyway. So aside from those things, it's really those practical things, if I'm producing something as a company and that client orders it, how do I really get it through that company as painlessly as possible so that that client is happy, informed along the way and I'm not losing margin. That's totally alpha and omega for me. That profitability is often lost internally, it's not lost with that customer and I see that as one pretty key process that doesn't require AI, that requires common sense, logic and some insight that I know how to do and set these things up.
Another thing to manage the company from the inside is meetings and meetings. People don't like the word meeting, but a meeting makes sense, it just has to have some logic. I've seen both with clients, they had almost no meetings at all and it was handled at the coffee machines, or conversely they had an awful lot of meetings until I didn't know what they were talking about. When I went to the meeting afterwards, I told them that they weren't discussing anything, they were just stating how things were, but they didn't need to meet for that. It sounds strange, but really setting up that internal workings of the company, there's a nasty English word governance, is the other thing that's worth tweaking. Nowadays everything has to be reacted to more quickly, that's why I say it's changed and it usually affects the business model of that company. That's where I think we need to step in a little bit today and change it and adapt to how things are done in the marketplace.
Where is Unicorn Attacks not following its own advice?
Martin Hurych
I have the feeling that nowadays we do not go to meetings, but to meetings, which means that we do not go to consult, but we go to meet. Devil's advocate question, what do you observe of this, does the blacksmith's mare go barefoot?
Vít Šubert
That's where, of course, you have to work non-stop with the owner because that's where it starts and ends at the end of the day. I don't really like that kind of what if system, I like to point out real things and argue and feel free to give real examples from other clients that I've arranged with that I can use as an example. For example, if I can't convince the owner, there's an opportunity to set up a lunch with the owner of another company where we've done this and they can talk about what he went through in his head. It was mentally tough for him too, but it bore fruit. That helps and of course by doing it for a long time we have the advantage of having a good relationship with the owners.
We do we meet about 3/4 of the owners during the projects, which breaks down the unnatural barrier a bit. Plus, what I can do with the relationships there is that I can connect them that way because they have the same problems, they share the same pains, and sometimes that helps. I understand that it's our duty to be a little bit of a psychologist there and guide that owner through that change psychologically as well, because it's challenging when you've been building something for 20, 25 years and now it's about to change relatively a lot.
Martin Hurych
I was thinking a little bit differently. We've got an interesting topic anyway, but we both advise on transformation, so I wanted to ask where the blacksmith's mare goes barefoot.
Vit Šubert
As far as transformation is concerned, we are not so big that we have to go through transformation, plus we have been in existence for 7 years, so that is still a period where the transformation is probably not big. We honestly try to do it once a year on an ongoing basis that we have an offsite with all the people, we go somewhere for 2 days, the theme is put together by the people in the company and we as the owners have maybe a third of that program. They pick what topics they want to open up there, we randomly pair them up and they always have to come up with something they think should change, improve, move forward in that company. At the same time, we tell them to come right out with a solution, and if we all say that it makes sense to us, that it's not just the view of the two of them, then they will be tasked with changing that in that company. We, as management, are going to put everything in their hands and let them change it. Of course, some of those things will fail, we'll find that we've seen it too simplistically, that we've taken a big bite because we need time to make that change, but we need to focus primarily on the clients.
Martin Hurych
Do you go to meetings or do you go to meetings?
Vít Šubert
We are atypical in that because we don't have either. We have a breakfast meeting once every 6 weeks, all the staff, our CEO tells them what's the news, updates, new clients, outlook and the people who run the clients give everybody that quick overview in 3 minutes what's happening on what client. Outside of that, we only do meetings on partial clients because each client is really very different, so that client's team gets together and they only do meetings on those specific business topics. Those are really meetings because they work through the topics in very relative detail to move the client forward. But we don't have those standardized meetings at all.
Summary
Martin Hurych
I figured that as soon as we were done, I would rename my meetings on my calendar. If the last few seconds or minutes of this piece were to remain in condensed form, some points, what would that be for you?
Vít Šubert
I understand that owners have their inner fears and anxieties to rebuild the company that they've spent their whole life building, but they shouldn't be afraid of that because I say the very biggest risk is to take no risk. They feel the change is a risk, so let them have that courage and don't let them be broken on the inside by a few people who don't want the change because it breaks their comfort zone. I think that's terribly important. Let them not be afraid of the word process, because process has a positive connotation when understood correctly. The third thing is don't underestimate that sales management because sales is the lifeblood of that company and it should be managed, it shouldn't be haphazard or done with good will and feeling.
Martin Hurych
Thank you very much, I couldn't have closed better today. I wish that the unicorn continues to attack and that you continue to thrive, that you grow, that the flood of clients grows in intensity and in prominence.
Vít Šubert
Thank you very much for the invitation and especially thank you for such a great preparation and for the really intelligent questions, it makes you happy to talk.
Martin Hurych
You see, today we've leaned a little bit into you, the owners, the directors, the bubble that's listening to this podcast, so if we poked you under the ribs, we make no apologies, we did our job well. I hope that even though it may have hurt you, you'll give us a like, a subscription, or forward this episode to someone where it might be useful. I'll certainly ask you to consider signing up for my newsletter, which at this point already has over 1,500 owners and directors like you subscribed. As The Ignition takes a well-deserved summer vacation after its 200th episode, I wish you success not only in rebuilding your companies, but in business in general. Thanks and have a great summer.
