In this diagnostic episode, Brandon Gano, Fractional COO of Whadif, shares how he helps his clients cut through the noise to discover the only 3 things they need to work on to create the success they want. If you feel frustrated by your people or overwhelmed by your problems, you won’t want to miss this episode!
You will discover:
– How simple it is to balance process and people for maximum success
– Why almost every founder is trying to solve the wrong problem
– Why the secret to your growth isn’t found in more leads, more revenue, or perfect people (and how to find it)
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And here with us today is yet another high demand coach and the one and only Brandon Gano, who is a visionary entrepreneur who turned frustration into a successful business that he built, franchised and sold for a significant profit. He is passionate about helping business owners transform their companies from where they are now to where they want to be. As COO of human op, he is pioneering an unprecedented approach to educate and empower small business owners to achieve business growth like never before. Well, Brandon, we actually had a chance to meet at your podcast. So just before we jump in here, tell us a little bit about your show and and and who you’ve built it for. Who’s a great listener for you guys.
Brandon Gano
Yeah, Scott, well, first of all, thanks for having me. I love getting the chance to talk to you your episode on my podcast. Harmonious at lunch was a ton of fun, and I quite honestly, one of the best episodes we’ve had on the show. Now, I built it for, I built it for the me of a couple of years ago where, and I’m sure you’ve heard from entrepreneurs just say, I wish I could just cut through the noise and and hear from people who are are kind of like me, or have been in my shoes, but aren’t those celebrity entrepreneurs who just kind of, they talk to nobody. Quite frankly, that’s just my personal feelings about it. But, you know, I wanted to bring on amazing experts who have walked the walk, talk the talk, and actually grown their businesses and can help entrepreneurs do the same. I hope I can be that for your audience here today, but that’s that’s who we’re looking to put out harmonious at lunch for.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s awesome. Check it out. Wherever you get podcasts. You can look up our episode together. It was a lot of fun. So I’ve got this question, and I’ve actually been dying to ask it just hasn’t been the right time. But as a coach consultant, as someone who helps founders and leaders, how often would you say that they accurately diagnose the right challenge, the right problem before they begin working with you?
Brandon Gano
0% of the time. Maybe I’m being a little dramatic, maybe 1% of the time, but very, very rarely.
Scott Ritzheimer
And so let’s just unpack that a little bit, because I’ve had a very similar experience. What would you What did they think that the problem is coming in? What are the most common complaints that you hear?
Brandon Gano
Well, let me, let me flip that around, because this is actually where we start with a lot of people. So Scott, for you, I know you’ve you’ve grown businesses. You help businesses, you do a lot of things. What’s your favorite part of your own business to spend your time in?
Scott Ritzheimer
What’s my favorite part in the session room? Hands down, with the team.
Brandon Gano
Okay. And a lot of leaders would also say that. So what they’re gonna say is, the problem is with my leadership, or it’s with my people, because that’s where they spend most of their time. And it’s the same thing. If you spend if you started the business, you’re the entrepreneur who did the sales, you put the ops in place. You maybe like marketing. That’s your background. We always tend to think that that’s the first place we should look because that’s what we like doing the most. That’s where we’re most passionate about. And that’s that’s what people come to us with if they have a lead problem, for example, they’ll say, I have a lead problem. I know for sure there’s something wrong with my marketing or my lead gen. And like I said 99 times out of 100 it’s never where, where they say it is. It’s always somewhere else in the business. And the first thing we have to realize is your your business is not a set of silos. That’s what corporate America has taught us. That’s what the biggest companies in the world have taught us, that we have departments and silos and sales needs to fight with marketing, and Michael Scott needs to fight with Toby and so on and so on. I mean, it’s even in the TV shows that we watch. So we have to first realize that things are connected, and then we can start to understand the dynamics of how things work together, and really get to the root cause of problems in our organizations.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s interesting, because that connectedness is one of the huge competitive advantages for relatively small businesses. You know, in that 15, 2050, range, somewhere in there, it’s so much easier to get 1520 or 50 people connected than 1500 2000 you know, 20,000 and and so, you know this isn’t a conspiracy thing, but when we play the wrong game, we lose right as small businesses, when we play the big business silos game, we just do it worse and smaller than they do. And so I love this idea of turning that around on its head and actually taking advantage of one of the biggest advantages that we have. So getting back to this diagnostic issue. Why do you think it’s so common for founders to misdiagnose their problem? What’s? What’s getting in the way of doing that properly?
Brandon Gano
It’s a proper analysis of self, first and foremost, and a willingness to understand where the problems are. It’s it’s one thing to say logically on paper. Paper, you know, my problem is an area I didn’t consider, however, as as leaders, as entrepreneurs, we start to get our ego in the way, or maybe pride a little bit a little bit of vanity you you don’t want your people to look down on you or think any less of you and say, how come he didn’t see that our problem was actually in the way we measure our lead gen. It wasn’t actually the lead gen. Is he stupid? Is he incapable of leading? We have all these thoughts in our heads. We have to understand first ourselves and what we’re good at, what we were naturally gifted at, and then be willing to step into that role. I we’ve consulted with a number of small businesses where the first thing we did was get the entrepreneur out of the way. And I say it exactly like that, to be a little bit dramatic, but also to say in most cases, the the CEO, the founder, they’re not they’re not at a point where they can lead an organization any further. They’ve got it to the 25 employee mark, and now they’re just not built to take it any further, but they’re really good at at lead gen, at sales, at people management, in a certain department, whatever your skill set may be, they need to step out of the way and let somebody else lead. And that’s that’s the one thing that I find most often gets in the way of companies growth is not being able to identify what the next roadblock will be and solve it before we get there. Most entrepreneurs are in a reactive mindset, and you just can’t grow efficiently when that happens.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so there’s folks listening there. We’ve been through strategic planning, another round of it now, this time of year, and everyone’s identified problems. Everyone’s working on problems. Now someone might be sitting there thinking, Well, did I pick the right ones? What are some signs that you’ve picked the wrong challenges? What are some signs that you’re barking up the wrong tree, if you will? And then, how do we correct that?
Brandon Gano
Yeah, well, first of all, can I can I just say how important it is that that you hit on that. I mean, most companies don’t do any strategic planning, believe it or not, and the ones who do do it at the end of December, and they said big goals that they’ve already forgotten about by February. So the fact that you’re hinting at we’ve already been through a second round of strategic planning is crucial. So I’m a huge fan of that. Now, selecting the right problems is really taking a temperature check of the whole organization. We need to hear not just from department heads, but ideally, as many people as possible, and start to analyze what are the commonalities? Revenue is usually one of people’s biggest goals, revenue and or profit, something monetary, which is a good goal. I’m not knocking it in general. I’m just saying we might overlook actually problems that are causing way more problems by focusing on that surface level. So if we just say we need more revenue as a company, but we don’t go downstream and figure out that there’s something in our operation that’s causing inefficiencies to show up in maybe six or seven different areas of the business that if we just solved that, we would take care of all the higher level problems. So what I like to do is get all of the issues on the table, and again, hear from as many people as possible, not just the leaders and the quote, unquote decision makers. Let’s hear from the people in the trenches. What do they think? What are their problems? Then we can start to categorize these inefficiencies or discrepancies and say, Where are the three buckets where most of our problems are coming from, and then investigate that deeper the way that we do strategic planning, at least. It takes almost a full week, and it’s it’s kind of ridiculous in some cases, but we want to go. We want to go person by person, whoever has a stake in the decision making, and say, Why is that more important? Why is it important that we solve that? And then keep asking that question, why is that important to solve? Why is that important to solve? And once we get to the bottom of that, and we really identify those three core issues, we don’t do any more than three per quarter, then we can start building a plan off of that, but the uncovering of the problem takes at least a full day of our strategic planning meetings.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so you’ve mentioned a couple of things through the episode of challenges that many times we think we have or we may have, but aren’t necessarily root causes. So things like revenue, having enough leads problems with your people or your leadership team in in doing this work, for folks doing these deep dive diagnostics, what have you found? Tend to be the some of the more common, real problems that they’re experiencing under the hood.
Brandon Gano
Quite honestly, it sounds like a sounds like a woo, woo issue, and we get that every time, and people post back on it, but almost 90% of the time, from the diagnostic that we do run, there’s a problem with the company’s navigation. That’s our name for that discipline, but it’s, it’s strategic planning, like you’re saying, and what we look at first, though, is actually before we get into the plan, it’s, what are your company’s core values, the mission and the vision, the. That’s the part where your whole audience just rolled their eyes. And I get it. I think you you even did a little bit too, Scott. But the way that we integrate those three aspects into not only the plan, but the rest of the company, is where all of the power comes from. So when we’re when we’re analyzing, what are we going to do this quarter, what are those three problems we’re going to solve, or objectives we’re going to shoot for, if we’re not first saying what’s the mission we’re on and what are our core values as a team, as a company, and tying everything we do back to that, we’re already deviating. We’re getting off track. So what we found is people actually, I’ll give you an example. We had a client recently. They were, they were in the professional trades. We’ll say, I don’t want to get too specific, but we would ask them, like, what? Why are you here? Why do you even exist as a company? They didn’t know their employees. Didn’t know the the subcontractors that they work with, had no idea. And finally he got to the point he’s like, Dude, I just don’t care. I want to make money. Like, that’s it. I just want to get rich. And I immediately, I was like, I don’t want to work with you. That’s that is not a good reason to be in business, because with that as your prime directive, you’re going to make decisions that will end up compromising other people you’re working with, whether it’s your employees, your subs, your clients. And we started to do a little digging and found out that they actually were ripping off both clients and subcontractors, but it was, I mean, technically, they were in line because they just wanted to make money, yeah? So that’s an extreme negative example, but you can see the power of that. If you tie everything to your mission for good or for bad, you can at least make decisions in line with that mission?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. I couldn’t agree more, because this, this space, you know, 25 plus employees somewhere in that you don’t necessarily have a ton, a ton of structure, but you can’t not have structure. And it feels like you’re in this messy middle of a lot of different realities and and what I love about this is it’s not just mission values and like, Let’s go away and come up with new values that we can put on shirts or on the wall or something like that. But it’s like, how do we actually live that out? And that tends to be what’s lacking for organizations of this size, is you can’t do that by, like, kind of personal you know, it willpower, charisma anymore. There’s just too many people. And so there has to be some degree of system or even just sophistication to say this is what it looks like, right beyond just watch me, this is what it looks like. And I love the clarity on on dialing that in. And I also love the conciseness of, we only do that in three areas, because some folks would hear that it’s like, oh, we have to change everything. It’s everything. It’s like, well, then you’re gonna change nothing. So it’s really powerful, really, really powerful framework. I love that. Brandon. There’s a question that I have for you ask all my guests. I’m interested to hear what you have to say. What would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Brandon Gano
Simply put, it’s that the marriage of people and process is actually way simpler than we think. And to elaborate a little bit, I’ll say, you know, there’s hundreds of 1000s of books, I’m sure, written on both of these topics combined and and, and we tend to think that we have to over manage and micromanage. And then there’s, there’s this framework and that framework, and it’s we read all these books and we just get confused, or watch the courses, or hear from from coaches and consultants. The The simpler you make both of those disciplines, the more effectively and efficiently, you can grow your organization, and there’s truly nothing that’s going to get in your way when you do them both, right? But the more we get in their way, the more we convolute those two spaces which are the most overly focused on. That’s when we stunk our growth as entrepreneurs.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow, wow. So there’s some folks listening to this and and they want that. They want simple. They’ve just been drowning in the but like the sea of opportunity, the sea of challenges, it just feels like there’s a ton of everything, and they need someone to help walk them through, clarifying that and getting down to just two or three things that they can really work on. How can folks find more out about you and the work that you guys do there at human op?
Brandon Gano
Yeah. So the first thing to do is, is to truly understand yourself and who you are, as as a human being, also as a leader. And once you know that, you can leverage that to grow your company, if you don’t know that any diagnostic I give you on your company, you’re gonna think is wrong because, well, I explained that before. So go back and rewind the episode, and also give give Scott a rating. Give him five stars. Like this episode, comment on it, because, Scott, you’re doing a phenomenal job here. So thank you. But go to humanop.com download our app, take our assessment. It’ll objectively tell you who you are as a human being and how you can live into that to be an even better leader for the company you have right now.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So good. Brandon, thank you for being on again. Just want to reiterate that humanop.com it’s in the show notes. Head on over there. Check out the site. The app, fantastic. Just a brilliant resource. And Brandon, thanks for being on the show. Love the opportunity to turn the mics around and have you here with us today. Great job. Really appreciate it. And for those of you watching or listening today, you know that your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Brandon Gano
Brandon Gano is a visionary entrepreneur who turned frustration into a successful business he built, franchised and sold for a significant profit. He is passionate about helping business owners transform their companies from where they are now to where they want to be. Now, with his business partner and friend Sean Delaney, he’s pioneering an unprecedented approach to educate and empower small business owners to achieve business growth like never before.
Want to learn more about Brandon Gano’s work at Whadif? Check out his website at https://whadif.com/
Podcast Booking Status: Open
We are looking for podcast guests, and we want to share your story.
Are you a coach, consultant, or advisor for entrepreneurial organizations? If so, let’s do a great show together – and we can promote you to our audience on all our social media channels, website, and email list.