Jeremy Weisz 5:18
You find that some of the CEOs have a hard time delegating, like, what’s the what’s causing the dam to not look at the kings? Is it just the awareness? Or are there other things that are causing them not to be able to focus in on that?
Jim Schleckser 5:33
Yeah, so there’s two questions inside there. You know, one is the kink, and then the awareness of it. And what we find in our conversations that about half the CEOs know where the kink in their businesses, so half, don’t think like this, this is not their mental model. And they don’t even know where the kink is, even when probed to try to find it. And then of the half that nowhere it is, this is the funniest thing German you go. So okay, the kink is x, how much time do you spend on that and they go, Well, none, like, anybody think that’s a problem. So only about half of the half. actually spend, you know, let’s say 25 30%, at the point of constraint, trying to open it up going forward. So literally, if you just regularly find the kink, and fix the kink, you’re in the top 25% of all CEOs, just like that, with regard to the delegation, that’s a little different conversation. And I think that’s about standards. So when I look at somebody doing a job, they map themselves into that job. And they go, if I did that job, it would look like this. And, you know, look, CEOs are special people, they have extraordinary capabilities at something or they wouldn’t be in the job. And it is not fair to compare myself to somebody working, because otherwise they’d be the CEO, right? And so we have a rule of we call the 70% rule for delegation. So somebody is 70%, as good as you at the job. delegated. delegated, immediately. And now they go, Oh, my God, that’s scary. go, Whoa, there are levels of delegation. A very low level of delegation might be Hey, Jeremy, go check this out, see what you think. Come back and talk to me, we’ll figure out what to do. A more advanced level might be Hey, Jeremy, go check this out, figure out what you want to do. Send me a note. And if I just if I, if I don’t say anything, just go do it. So give me the chance to say hey, no, no, don’t do it like that. And the highest level is a Germany take this, and I don’t even want to know what you did figure it out. Deal with it. Right. And everybody thinks when I say delegation, they think that but no, no, no, there are like training wheels. And like tricycle, there’s levels of delegation. And so 70% to a low level delegation, gets it off my plate and saves me a ton of time. But it’s not all the way to, I’ll never see it again, which scares a lot of CEOs. I think delegation sits in the, I’m afraid of handing it off, they’re not as good as I am. So set the standard 70. And that enables you to give it at least the beginning level and overtime to higher levels of delegation.
Jeremy Weisz 8:11
Jim, I like how you impact you kind of have two different camps, like one is they know where the kink is. And one is they don’t know where they can get in without naming names or companies. Is there a person or company you could think of where they said, Jim, I don’t know where that kink is? And how did you walk them through the thought process of finding that kink?
Jim Schleckser 8:35
Um, yeah. And I talked to talk in the book about how some questions to ask to find the king. But I’ll give you the example. You know, I talked in the book about five hats. And this isn’t in the book is sort of bonus material that you’re about to get. So my thinking is advanced. And there’s two hats, which I call a player, and learner or analyst. And it turns out that layer, an analyst or learner, are the find the kink hats to wear. So when I want to figure out where the kink is, I need to either go into player mode or learner mode to find it. So the example is, we had a CEO that may had a cake manufacturing business up in Canada. And he wasn’t getting the throughput he want off his factory floor. He knew that but he didn’t know why. So he went down. And he worked on the floor for a couple of days and talked to people and went into player mode and learner mode. He’s doing both right. And by the end of the week, he knew where the problem was. Right? And he knew how to fix it. So he goes back to his office and begins to fix the kink with some other hats that we can talk about later. So, you know, a lot of CEOs going to player mode like to go get a sale, right? And you hear a big CEOs jumping in on sales, and that’s great, but it doesn’t enhance organizational muscle. If I go in and do but if I go in and do and while I’m doing I’m doing metalwork In the metalwork while I’m in the sales mode is, do I have the right offer? Do I have the right team? Are they supported by the right system? Should I change my pricing? Like all those business models, other kinds of questions, so then when you back out of player mode, you can then go deal with some of the things that you learned while in player mode. That works a little better for the extroverts the introverts go, let me look at spreadsheets. Let me analyze reports, let me stay perfectly valid, by the way, they both work. So it’s a little bit of personal technique. But so player, an analyst allow you to find the kink. Yeah, that’s all I can tell
Jeremy Weisz 10:37
them. They do it. Yeah, that’s I could tell them an extrovert. When you explain that I’m thinking that’s what I would I would just dive in, I’m not I’m not going to be looking at a spreadsheet or something like that. And you know that that’s really interesting to think about, and you apply those learnings to the process, you go back and improve the process and not just do it. But I love that talk about the the hats in their way. I encourage anyone, there’s a great talk that Jim gave. And he actually actually puts on the hats in this talk. So yeah,
Jim Schleckser 11:09
it’s a little a little kitschy, but hey, it works. Right? You remember it, I
Jeremy Weisz 11:13
remember it exactly.
Jim Schleckser 11:15
So there’s five hats. That’s the great CEOs, wear as they think about this, find the kink and fix the kink. And I talked about the first two player and learner those are the find the kink hats. The other three are the areas in which the kink exists. And it either exists in your business model is stopping you from getting where you want to get. The talent you have in your business is stopping you from getting where you want to get for the processes and systems you use to run the business of stopping you. And so we’ve named those as hats. If you’re dealing with the business model, it’s called the architect hat. So I’m architecting my business, I’m building a business that has longevity and profit. And I’m going to tell you that you almost can’t spend enough time on this on a better business model wins. You know, Netflix in the early days of blockbuster just to pick up like it was just a better business model, you’d be insane to continue working with blockbuster after you’ve learned about the Netflix business model. And so a bet they came up with a better and they just dominated the industry. And you’ve seen that time and time again, they come up with a better model, and they win. So more time on business model is super important. And let me just by depict one thing to focus on in business model, it’s recurring revenue, you cannot have enough recurring revenue in your business, it is easier to finance, it’s easier to grow, it’s easier to manage. And when you sell it, you’re going to make a lot more money on your business. And I can get into why but recurring revenue is the number one business model thing while you’re in architect hat that you can imagine. The second one is player, sorry, coach, coach, coach, and coach is all about talent. This is get the right people on the team coach to people that are on the team, and peoples not performing, then get them off the team or move them to a different position. It’s all about talent, talent and talent all in and you know, once again, you know you’ve you’ve heard some stuff about get the right people on the bus and all that jazz. That’s all in the talent space. And then the third is processes and systems. And when we talk about processes, and systems are three elements that we think about in processes and systems. One is your values, which helps people and I’ll talk come back to why that’s important. Your SOPs or standard operating procedures are how we do things. You can almost think about SOPs as human software. How are humans supposed to work to respond in a particular defined scenario? And then it normally when I say processes and systems, people think it and I’m like, no, no, that’s just a piece of the equation. And that’s data and highly repeatable. And so why so if we’ve got it for data, and we’ve got SOPs for humans, why do we need values? And the answer is, and why is it part of my systems and processes? And the answer is, how do I know when somebody comes into a scenario that is not predicted? That don’t make the right decision? The decision you would make more or less, let’s say, right, you go, if I’ve got the right values, they go well, we always treat customers are always first we’re always ethical, we, you know, we always that guides the there’s no rules for me to how to handle this scenario. So I use the values to decide what to do. So that’s that’s processes and systems. So and that we call the engineer hat when I’m dealing with engineering processes and engineering systems in my business. And you know, it’s profoundly unsexy. Jeremy, entrepreneurs don’t like to spend time on systems they just don’t, you know, it doesn’t make me any more money. It doesn’t sell any more product. It’s just so unsexy. But
Jeremy Weisz 15:00
It’s sexy because they could sleep at night and not worry as much, right.
Jim Schleckser 15:03
And it allows you to grow a bigger business without just adding people. Normally the model when we’re early, is I got lots of problems, throw people at it, well throw people at it works to a level and then throw people at it doesn’t work anymore. And you need to build a system, so that I can do more with not more people. And that’s, by the way, how you build a business that can scale and make money at the same time.
Jeremy Weisz 15:25
Yeah. So architect, coach, engineer, player learner,
Jim Schleckser 15:32
that’s it. Got it, those are the five and to, to to find the kink to three to fix the kink. Because what I go learn from analyst or player is, I got a talent problem, coach, I’ve got a business model problem, architect, I’ve got a systematic problem, engineer.
Jeremy Weisz 15:52
You mentioned process, and there was one particular company in the call center space.
Jim Schleckser 15:59
Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, um, so this is a firm, we consider one of our successes, they were in the call center space near shore call centers. And, you know, when we started working with them, they were probably $5 million, making almost no money and a couple of partners that weren’t really contributing at a very high level. And they were trying to run a start up another business that was not particularly related. So the first one was about focus. And, you know, there’s a phrase we use, which is focus equals growth. And there’s a little bit there of people, they say, what defines me is what I do, and we say, no, what defines you is what you don’t do. So when you say no to something that defines you as an organization. So we got to say no to this other business, that was one. So I’m now 100%, focused on the call center business, I live or die on this business, that was one. And then you know, began to work on the underlying talent in the business, upgrading the talent with them, helping them identify where the the talent gaps were, and then adding and growing. And then the methodologies they use, were not delivering the results they wanted, helping identify them and help them figure out how to improve the MEF the systems that they had to go to the next level, we later just on sort of more the talent side, and writ large, we helped to move those two partners out because they really weren’t contributing. And so now, the guy we’re working with owns the whole business. It’s got the right people around the table, he’s now elevated what he works on, he’s not down in the business anymore. So he’s not in player mode at all. He has people doing all those jobs and the business growing like heck, I mean, I think last year, they ended $55 million, and making a big pile of money seven years later, so 10x in seven years, which is pretty, you know, I’d sign up for that anybody would write, and it was all about finding the kink and opening it up over time. And just the next one, the next one, the next one, the next one.
Jeremy Weisz 17:58
Yeah, I love what you said about what do you not do? Because it really allows you to focus in. So talk to people a little about the ink seal project, when so, you know, obviously it’s for CEOs. When I see I was like, Yeah, this sounds great, Jim, how does it work? Talk a little about
Jim Schleckser 18:18
that. So we do CEO peer groups combined with one on one advisory work. So we will put with a CEO will put them in a group, a curated group of other companies, their size and their complexity, that’s unique. There are other peer group companies out there, but they tend to be heterogeneous, and just whoever’s in your town that said yes to joining the group. And so you could be with a, you could be a $40 million software company, or with a $2 million dry cleaner and a $5 million scrap yard. And, you know, those problems that they have you had so long ago, you’ve forgotten about them, and maybe you never had them. And they really can’t relate to what you’re doing. It’s a very different business. So we try to build a curated, CEO peer group, right, same size, same complexity that will understand and be able to help you with the business. non competitive, though, that’s one very, very and growth oriented as several affiliated with Ink Magazine. So we’re growth oriented, that’s where we specialize. The second is we have a very rigorous methodology designed to win when we come together in a CEO peer group, a to hold ourselves accountable with a scorecard. And then be to identify the point of constraint, and group to a group processing methodology to really dig deep on that point of constraint and give you immediate feedback from we have seven, seven or eight group normally seven other really smart CEOs giving you feedback, almost always you have a breakthrough idea that goes, Oh, I never thought about it that way and boom, that to solve my problem, and they go back home and they fix it immediately. But the other thing that’s profound in it is because there’s seven other really capable CEOs around the table, you learn you have other leaders that you can model their behavior. I learn how Jeremy handled this or Jim handle this, and I can steal some of their good ideas and bring them back to my business. And that multi tracks your CEO experience and therefore gets you better faster if you just had a single track, which is your own business. And then the third element is, all of our advisors are former CEOs, we’ve all run companies at scale. So you know, most other peer groups don’t do that. And that means when we understand your business and comment, it generally comes from a place of experience. Not that you have to do what we said. But we were probably not totally wrong, because we probably experienced at one point another. So if you want to be in a group of like size, like complexity companies with a very sophisticated leader, giving you very direct feedback on the most critical issues on your business, I mean, there’s a lot of time in the barrel here, where you’re being your business being worked on, that looks like a sink compared to most that are out there. You know, if you characterize them as business 101, you know, smaller companies, bringing in a speaker to give you like, here’s how you do stock options, or most of our clients are beyond that. And they’re a little bigger, a little more sophisticated. And that’s the business we designed for that kind of client,
Jeremy Weisz 21:13
who Jim like, what’s the low range of like, maybe staff or something like who’s a good fit for the Inc CEO project?
Jim Schleckser 21:21
Yeah, we dip down to about $20 million of revenue, anything above $20 million, we can be very, very useful and impactful if they’re, and I think we, you know, the issue is that if you’re below $20 million, you’re always got the title of CEO, and meaning, whatever, you started the business, doing engineering, marketing, sales, accounting, whatever your thing was, at 20 million, you probably still doing that, and holding the CEO title. And so the first thing we usually do is try to get you out of that functional role and just doing the CEO job. But if your $5 million, and like, Okay, we’re gonna move you out of the sales role, you go, tell me how that works, because I got nobody else, right. And so I can’t help that individual as much as I can somebody who’s ready for that transition. And then we help them really become a super effective CEO as they go 20 40 60, like the guy talked about?
Jeremy Weisz 22:17
Yeah, I’ve not seen any better way to have breakthroughs than to be in a group of like minded people. Not only, like you said, modeling, looking at what people are doing, but like, just people see blind spots in that are so obvious to them. That is, people are too much in it to even see some of the stuff I find,
Jim Schleckser 22:38
you know, one of the funniest piece of feedback we had was there’s one guy who was as random as a human being can be right, just he was all over the map as a CEO. And he was given feedback to another CEO goes, Bob, you got to focus man, you got to pick one thing and really work on it. I go, do you hear yourself talking? But you’re right, it’s easy to see it and other people and sometimes we can’t see it in ourselves.
Jeremy Weisz 23:03
There was another situation, Jim, government IT
Jim Schleckser 23:08
company. Yeah, and this one’s all about business models, were really helped them transform their business model. This was a highly transactional government, it business selling hardware, and so forth, and software. So they’d make a little margin as they sold it across about $150 million, making a million or 2 million bucks, not a lot of money for an awful lot of effort, frankly. And over a number of years, we’re able to help them transform that business by modifications to the business model. And, frankly, when you change the business model, sometimes you need to change the people as well. So some people changed as a consequence of the business model changes. flashforward, it’s about a decade, but he’s now just a little bit bigger in revenue. And it’s all about changing the business model, maybe $200 million of revenue. But he probably makes $65 million a year. So dramatic just change the guy who just change the life of everybody in the company. And as I said, you can’t spend too much time on business model. You really didn’t. That’s the only thing he changed now all the ripple. From that change occurred, you know about the systems need to change and the talent need to change a bit. Now, I was actually just yesterday talking to a CEO about moving from a very transactional sale to more of a relational sale. And he’s like, this is great, and I can grow my relationship with my customers. I can solve real problems. I got all good except you’d probably have to fire all your salespeople. That’s what you’re talking about. If you’re a transactional salesperson, some can make the change to being a relational solutions oriented salesperson. Some can’t and that’s what I mean by a fundamental change in strategy sometimes means a change in the people that have to be in the business.
Jeremy Weisz 24:53
When you differentiate those is that in the follow up afterwards, or what are they selling something a little bit different when you talk about the transactional versus the racial relational sale? Is there an example that would be okay, here’s how the transactional type of sale would go. And then is the product the same? Or is the product offering a little bit different in that in that situation?
Jim Schleckser 25:17
Yeah, so I’ll talk about him in a minute. But there are really three bases of competition that are available to you. And this goes back, I didn’t come up with this, but, and I’m struggling to remember the name of who did but it’s not Porter. But you can either be my Porter actually, you can either be a cost competitor can be the cheapest. But you need scale to be the cost competitor, Southwest is a cost competitor, every planes the same. The flight attendants start cleaning the plane before you get off it, that’s all to get the plane back in the air as fast as they can make money. You can be a customer intimate competitor, meaning I wrap myself around the customer in a way that I will solve any problem they have any pain point they have, I want to make it go away. And I am burrowed into those customers. A nitro is an example of that. Ritz Carlton is an example of that. And then there’s an innovation better, we’ve always got the cool stuff, we’ve always got the leading edge, if you want the latest, coolest, most innovative product you come to us, that’s Apple, that’s three M that’s in those are the guys spend 20% of revenue on r&d, right? That’s what you have to do to be that kind of competitor. So this particular guy was talking to was in steel distribution. And, you know, a very cost driven market, like you make very thin margins. And he grown it to a very large size. Like, I’m a I’m a little worried about where the business I’m in is going. And I just this cost based competition that I’m in, I’m not the biggest, I don’t think I can win long term who’s right. So his idea, I said, I need to wrap myself around the customer and sell them and everything that they do, but not only help them with what they buy in, and it’s mostly materials, but help them dispose of those materials. Because they don’t know what right now they just sell them and it’s your problem. But they do need to get rid of some of that stuff. And he said, I’m going to wrap myself around, I’ll help them get what they need. And I’ll get rid of what they don’t need. And I’m going to solve the problem for my customers in a significant way. Well, that’s a whole different basis of competition, that’s going to a competitor and saying a customer and saying, hey, help me understand where your pain points are, help me understand a problem, you can’t get solved. And let me help you solve it. What’s beautiful about that is if you you’ve got a problem that’s costing you $50 million a year. And I can solve it for 25. You go awesome, make it go away, I just saved $25 million. Right? Now what it cost me to do that is irrelevant. It’s no longer cost based competition, right? Versus I bought steel from you, I know the market price is steel, I’ll let you make 5% By what I make, you’ll make more because I can buy it from the next guy for the same price. And so the whole idea of moving to relational selling changes is profit changes model but a guy that’s used to, Hey, Bob, I got steel, it’s 10 bucks a day, but New York sells Chicago by you know, devise a go talk to them understand their problems were related. They just son can make the transition in some camp. So that’s what I mean by
Jeremy Weisz 28:15
I love that. Yeah, because it’s almost taking a commodity, like a lot of people can be viewed as a commodity, even services can be viewed as a commodity, and becoming a not a transactional
Jim Schleckser 28:30
relationship. I love that. And look, Jeremy, you’re a relational sales organization. Right? You go look, this particular problem, if you’ve got it, we know how to solve it better than you do way better than you do. And so work with us because it’s better, cheaper, faster, higher value than any other option that you might have around. That’s not a cost based sale. That’s a relational sale. That’s a customer intimacy sale. Totally. Yeah,
Jeremy Weisz 28:55
I want to dig deep on the business model piece, because you’re like, that’s the number one thing you talked about this in the book, too. And, you know, one of the things you talked about is subscription, you kind of compare it, I think it was like Ford to Netflix in their their revenue, but what their actual value is because of that. So I want to dig deeper on that if there’s any other things people should be thinking about outside of just subscription when they’re thinking of business model.
Jim Schleckser 29:21
Yeah, certainly. And those numbers have probably changed. I wrote the book a few years ago, but at the two concepts the same, but Ford was selling for, you know, 75%, the full enterprise value of Ford was about 75 cents on the dollar for every dollar of revenue in a transactional model, sell a car. See in seven years, we’ll sell you another car maybe as opposed to Netflix, which is a subscription model. And they were selling for sort of seven times revenue. So they’re getting $7 of enterprise value for every dollar revenue. And that was the sort of valuation comment but maybe a couple of other things to think about in terms of business model. One is capital intensity, which is, how much capital do I need to run this business. And the example I use in the book is actually another steel distribution company that we worked with. And he had a massive amount of inventory to sell into his customers. And it was a pretty thin margin product, and I’ll get the margin in a minute as well. And so he couldn’t self finance his growth with his profit. In other words, every time he went and got another whack of growth, 50 million $100 million, he needed to go buy $25 million of inventory to support that $50 million of growth, which meant he had to go out to the market to raise debt or equity. And he was in this constant like, yeah, I got growth, I gotta go raise more money, it’s like, horrible cycle to be in, right. So imagine if his business didn’t require any inventory, just for the second, hey, I got more revenue, awesome. I don’t need more capital, I can just self funded and off we go. So acid intensity built, and you don’t want to have a capital intensive business are you gonna be constantly in this model of get revenue, go raise money, get money, so forth. So that’s one thing to think about decrease the capital intensity of your business is always a good move. Better never design a business that needs capital, right? Like your business requires almost no capital, as does mine, you know, I do professional consulting. That’s the good news. And in this particular model, the second one is margin. And, you know, gross margin. So cost to deliver the service or product, subtracted from the revenue I generate on that product. And, you know, we talked about unless you’ve got at least 50% gross margin, you don’t have an interesting business, the steel company I talked about was about 15%. And you saw what happened, he just didn’t have the cash to do freedom of action, to do what he needed to grow his business. If his margin was 50%, he might have actually been able to self finance that business, but because it was a cost based competitor back to our prior conversation that was not available in this market. And so you stuck with the model, he had actually argued he should have transformed that business to a service model. And said, Look, we’re not going to hold inventory, but we’ll manage your supply chain for you. And he goes from being a four or $500 million business selling a lot of steel, to a 30 or 40, or $50 million business. But he’d probably make 20 or $30 million a year on his $50 million business because there’s, there’s no asset, there’s only a few people, it’s all intellectual property. It’s a better, but smaller business. And so capital intensity margin and recurring revenue be the three things but I had to pick one, it’s recurring revenue. I talked about subscription I’ll give you just and the other one, though, is long contract periods. So part of the reason why people like, for example, government contracts companies, is they generally get five year contracts. And you know, their margin isn’t super incredible. But they got a five year contract. And there’s like an 86% probability that that you’re able to renew based on the grand average. So high probability of continuing long visibility on my revenue. And you know, my joke goes, Why do people like recurring revenue? Why to buyers like recurring revenue. And the joke is, because the 26 year old MBA that’s going to put in a spreadsheet can actually model it up and make it all make sense. And if I don’t have recurring revenue, they go what I put for next year’s revenue, and you go, I don’t know about what we did last year, maybe a little more. Their, their heads explode, right. But if I say, Well, historically, we renew 97%, of everybody we worked with, and then we usually add another 10, or 15, or 20, or 30%. And here’s the last three years I did that. So that’s the numbers you get awesome. I can put that in my spreadsheet and off they go. So it’s a bit of a joke, but it is predictable. And as an investable asset as a like a private equity group or something. They love, love, love, love, love businesses like that. Mmm hmm.
Jeremy Weisz 34:04
I’m going to ask you a question. My last question will be your favorite books. Okay. But before I get to the I’ll give you a chance to think next. I know you have a treasure trove besides your own book, great CEOs are lazy, unprofessional drinking, you have your Constant Learner. And I’d love to hear that. But But I want to dig deep on one thing you said. You know, when you talk about the relationship, you said to the person, you’re gonna have to find new salespeople, right? And when we’re talking about a relationship salesperson,
Jim Schleckser 34:37
I said, Hey, okay, that’s not good.
Jeremy Weisz 34:40
So whether it’s training but let’s say the person did need new salespeople because of the the mindset of those the transactional salesperson, what are some of the characteristics you would tell that person to look for in that relational salesperson when they’re hiring a new team?
Jim Schleckser 35:01
And by the way, you know, I would try to keep the people I had first because it’s the devil, you know. So can we educate them? Can we move them? Can we, before we go to let’s go find new one. So just so people don’t think I have a cold dead heart, you know? You know, there’s a book that we recommend called who it’s by GH smart. And he wrote top grading as well. He actually the father wrote top grading this by the sun. And the number one predictor of success in the future, the success in the past. And so if I was looking for somebody who knew how to do it, who’s going to be a relational salesperson, a solutions oriented salesperson, I would look for people and under your hat, who had been previously successful as solutions, oriented salespeople, so I would not look for the traditional transactional salespeople hope I found the golden unicorn that I could turn into one I go, forget it, I’ll just find somebody who’s done this and knows how to do it as a probability to be successful is higher than any other option I would have? That sounds stupid, simple, but I use this line when I talk about, you know, how do you build a culture, you build people that work in the culture? You know, when you fly on Southwest, everybody’s kind of happy and likes people? You know why? Because they hire people that are happy. And like people, it’s like, really simple. Like, there’s no corporate policy manuals that you will like people like I just hire people to wire to your values. That same exact thing here. I want a relational salesperson, I want a solutions oriented Win Win salesperson, I hire somebody with that mentality.
Jeremy Weisz 36:39
Love it. That goes into transition perfectly into books. Top Grading a big, big shout out to Chris Mursau who I know who is CEO at Topgrading actually doesn’t live too far from me. Yeah, and they have a great podcast, check it out. Um, what are some of your favorite books of all time?
Jim Schleckser 36:58
Yeah. And you know, when you get asked this you got so what who’s your favorite child? Right, but but I’ll give a go on a couple. And tell me when to stop because
Jeremy Weisz 37:10
I’ll keep going. I could listen to all damn audible credits. So give me Yeah, right.
Jim Schleckser 37:15
Beyond great CEOs are lazy and professional drinking, but actually, I don’t think those are the best books ever. They’re decent. But, um, you know, thinking Grow Rich. It’s an old book but the Polian Hill love it, it’s now actually probably not an audible because it’s out of copyright. Dale Carnegie but not um, How to Win Friends and Influence People, he wrote a book called How to Stop Worrying and start living. It’s a sort of a less popular book, awesome book. And, and, gosh, dang it, if everybody read the book and lived it, the world would be a pretty cool place actually. There was a book called profit patterns by a guy named Zlatni. I think the name was and then a co author. And he talked. And this was really where I started thinking about business models as a younger guy. Like, wow, there are designs of businesses that are more profitable than other designs of businesses, and to be really thoughtful about that matters. So that profit patterns is really quite good. Who, as I indicated, we recommend that book all all the time awesome book. Let’s see here. Um, recently, I’ve been recommending a book called necessary endings. And it’s sort of you know, don’t let your wife see when you bring this into the house. But you know, it’s about that everything has a season, and endings happen and endings are okay, because they open up capacity for something new to happen, which is a beautiful thing. And, you know, we’ve seen like, like that CEO, I talked about with the partners, I made him read that book. He came back from reading that book, and he goes, alright, let’s get this done. It just changes. And that’s happened more than one time. It’s a, it makes it okay to end something, which is sometimes you need to hear that. That’s a really powerful book. And then I’ll maybe I’ll just pick on one, I guess I could go forever on this. But radical candor is another good book. And I’m, I’m struggling remember the woman’s name who wrote it. Kim Scott, maybe it talks about the idea that classic consulting grid, right of directness, and compassion, and if I’m highly direct with no compassion, I’m a jerk, right? I’m not being direct. Is is. It’s like ambivalence, right? You know, I tell people when I give you feedback and give it to you, because I love you, because the opposite of love is not hate. It’s ambivalence. And so not giving people feedback is like abusive, to not tell them they’re not doing well. So the golden spot, according to her is radical candor, which is directness, from a place of compassion. And I think that’s just a really profound and More people could stand to sit in that CT quadrant versus some of the other ones that they tend to sit in and see like an Ayn Rand, you know, I read a bunch of Ayn Rand and it was influential to me in it is okay to celebrate human achievement. You know, I don’t buy everything Ayn Rand said. But the idea that humans and their creative ability are super profound and appropriate to be celebrated is in the collective. I’m not all the way with her. But the collective has its issues and some things I see in politics. Echo some Randy and stuff so but that that’s a pretty been an influential book as well. I’ll stop. I love
Jeremy Weisz 40:39
I love it.
Jim Schleckser 40:40
I’m a big, big, big reader.
Jeremy Weisz 40:42
I love it. No, I love this. And they just thank you, thanks for sharing all your knowledge and wisdom. And I want to encourage people to go to IncCEOproject.com That’s IncCEOProject.com and there any other places online. We should point people towards to check out.
Jim Schleckser 40:59
Yeah, you can find us on LinkedIn where a lot of business people we have a group that’s pretty active or you just follow me or follow organization, you’ll get some of our content. I do have a column on Inc.com that publishes every Tuesday morning. I’ve been doing that for about eight years. So there’s hundreds of articles. And then if you’re an in serve your Twitter person, Inc CEO Project on Twitter, you can follow us there and we put a bunch of our stuff out there as well. Well,
Jeremy Weisz 41:26
only the first one Jim, thank you. Thanks everyone and keep watching.
Jim Schleckser 41:31
Thank you.
