In this prescient episode, Brian Smith reveals how to get your business or nonprofit to where you want it faster by moving slower.
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello, and welcome once again to the Secrets of the High Demand Coach podcast. And I am here with yet another high demand coach. And that is the one and only Brian Smith. Brian Smith is a PhD, he’s the founder and senior managing partner of IA business advisors. If you haven’t heard of them, it’s a management consulting firm that’s worked with more than 18,000, CEOs, entrepreneurs, managers, employees, the works worldwide. Together with his daughter, Mary Griffin, He has authored his latest book, I’d love to dive into this individual influence finding the I in team which shares how to become our best self. With everyone we influence. Brian, I’m so excited to have you on the show, I’d love to just open up with your story. Tell us a little bit about how you got into coaching and whY.
Brian Smith
Thanks Scott. You know, it was really just the evolution of being a business advisor. And as we affected change and disrupted organizations with our business processes and our tactical work, you know, that affected the operations of business, we were simultaneously affecting the behavior of leaders, managers, and employees. And it just became a regular byproduct of our engagements with our clients over time that we really refined because of the number of engagements we were having both locally, regionally, nationally, and then internationally. So we developed this depth and breadth of understanding of human reaction and human action in change based environments, and put it together and started offering leadership and coaching to our clients.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. Fantastic. So tell us a little bit about I advise business advisors, and what would you say is the most important work that you guys do?
Brian Smith
Yeah, I think the most important work we do is helping humans interact with process and technology in a more positive way, allowing humans to understand each other, and the challenges we have with each other. With those outside influences, technology is moving so rapidly, which means processes are moving so rapidly demand is raised from human to human from human to technology, because we’re now interfacing with technology, we do a very good job of slowing it down, adding context to both the human process and technology side, and helping people engage better and work together better.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Because in my experience, I’ve found a lot of people see technology as kind of a solution in and of itself. It’s kind of if we had the right, whatever it is CRM, ERP, you know, Funnel System, whatever it may be, we kind of looked at that as the silver bullet or the the knight in shining armor that’s going to kind of save the day for us. But again, in my experience, a large number of those fail, maybe not outright, but they fail to achieve what you really set out to accomplish. Why do you think so many of those technology kind of applications or programs, or implementations is the word I’m looking for? Why don’t they pan out the way that we expect?
Brian Smith
Yeah, well, I think the expectation is up front is that I’m going to buy this, I’m going to turn it on, and it’s going to immediately start to solve the problems in our organizations. What most of our clients fail to take into account is they’re not in the change management business, they’re in the selling widget business, the whatever they do, I don’t care if you’re a doctor or a lawyer, if you sell products to a consumer or a business, you’re in that business, that is the context of your life. It’s not this new system that you’re trying to implement. And that system becomes a disruptor. That disruption becomes a nuisance. And we fall back on the habits, the human habits we have of how we do business. And what we’ve learned is that we will alter that we will choose the parts that help us now we’ll ignore the parts that might not help us now and we create this mess. And most of the time, as you pointed out, the mess becomes part of the day and the day becomes habit. And we just live with it. And it is a unhealthy and unhappy relationship between this new technology we bought that works about 15 to 20% of the time, the other 80 that percent of the time we just fall back into the old habits we had to begin with.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. And what do folks,… so they’ve kind of had enough? And and maybe they’ll at that point they recognize, you know, your organization someone like you can help, right? What do you find? leads them to that point? What do they try before they bring in someone like you?
Brian Smith
Oh, well, they try to other providers, self management, going back to a prior process that worked. A lot of changing personnel, you know, a lot of things in human environments that happens is blame. egos get in the way. And there’s always, as humans, we want to blame, we want justification, we want to point out that there was a reason why we failed, and it wasn’t us. So we look somewhere else. So we, we change personnel, we change vendors, we change customers, we create more chaos. And when it becomes when the chaos gets to the top, or to a decision maker that we tend to have a relationship with. So it might be the owner, it might be maybe the CPA who services the owner, it might be a lawyer who services, the company, it might be an insurance person, they recommend us and we slow everything down and try to using our methodologies try to understand where the breaking point was, what was the root cause? And then build from there?
Scott Ritzheimer
And how do you differentiate that because I think a lot of folks struggle with it, especially in kind of younger, more entrepreneurial organizations we struggle with, how much of this is I got the wrong person doing an implementation, you know, or, you know, maybe I’ve created the wrong environment for them for decision making? Or maybe we’ve picked the wrong technology? Or maybe it’s just a bad implementation, and we need to rewind, how do you help people decipher the difference in what the actual root cause is?
Brian Smith
Yeah, for us, we use a process called biz vision. And it is a very structured data collection process that asks, oh, it’s upwards of a couple 100 questions. Those questions are oftentimes redundant. They’re redundant for a reason. But what we’re doing is, is we’re peeling the onion through the human into the process and technologies and looking for those key indicators that identify to us through experience and what we’ve done for the last 26 years, those breaking points, those root causes. And then once we identify that root, cause we look for all of the ripple effects around it. And we, we generally find more than one root cause it’s a bundling or a commingling of root causes that have created this ultimate, you know, failure in the organization that led us to this conversation that that you’re talking about.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. And I think that’s fascinating, because a lot of times going back to your comment on blame, right? We want to blame people. But we also want to blame a problem, we have a desire to simplify what’s going on, which to an extent is appropriate, right? All comes razor and, you know, most truth is simple. But it’s also not singular. You know, more often than not, there’s multiple things. And it’s the interrelationship between those that’s causing the problems that they’re having. So you read a book that’s talking all about this one topic, and you have high resonance AI recognize that I’ve got all the symptoms, well, it’s like, well, 19, things have that symptom, right. And it was kind of like when COVID first hit you, I was like, What are these is like, anything that you could possibly have was a COVID symptom. That’s a lot of times what it’s like inside our businesses, is we’re looking at all these different symptoms. And even if we do the heavy lifting of trying to get to a root cause I found a lot of people will make the mistake of looking for one root cause. And you can solve that, but it may not move the needle. What’s what’s been your experience there?
Brian Smith
Yeah, you know, we notice through our process that as we start to ask questions, the problems can bubble the top, white quickly. And as soon as the first one comes to the top. The people want to gravitate to it. Yes, that’s the problem. And they want to stop the q&a process. They want to stop the research process and pivot immediately because they think they found the problem. So you’re right. They do gravitate towards those symptoms quickly, and then they want to jump on those symptoms quickly. That’s where the slowdown process comes in, slow down and go through the entire data collection process. Let’s put the whole picture together so that we have full context. Any symptom out of context can mean almost anything. So having full context for us is so important. And one of our biggest challenges is that slow down moment. So that we have that clear vision, that clear context of the organization and the humans, technology and processes within the organization so that we can properly diagnose the symptom and understand it more clearly.
Scott Ritzheimer
And you keep using the phrase slow down, which is probably nails on the chalkboard for for a lot of our folks listening, it was like the that’s the last thing that I wanted, right? I was hiring you guys to help us speed up. So talk to us a little bit, because I’m with you on this. Like, why slow down? Why is it so important to slow down?
Brian Smith
Yeah, so it’s funny. Scott slowdown is the biggest chapter in our book. So big, in fact that our publisher made us split it into two parts. And they asked us why it was the biggest part it is because it’s the biggest problem. One of the things I always revert back to was my dissertation. Back in 99, I started writing my dissertation, and it’s titled, technology induced attention deficit disorder. And this was before Facebook and before social media, it was just the beginning of technology, creating fast in our environment, you know, and I knew back then that we were going to have a speed of thought problem and a speed of expectation problem. slowdown is so important, because we make more mistakes going past that create more problems for us, than if we had slowed down in the future. There’s a lot of studies that support this, like, for instance, speeding, you know, if I drive faster, I’ll get from point A to point B faster. And when they measured somebody who went faster, they learned that they actually didn’t arrive any faster. But they arrived with a lot more risk, risk of tickets risk of accidents, well, you can apply those studies to human behavior in the office, if I’m going fast, I might miss a key text or a key phrase in a document, or a key instruction from somebody or I might miss a key part of an assembly process or a listening process or a speaking process. And going fast, creates risk, and creates mistakes, that have a ripple effect that are unintended, and that we don’t know where they’re going to go or what they’re going to do. So slowing down is the foundation of having viable communication, viable business, viable relationships, everything and I don’t mean slow it down to a back to a point where we disrupt workflow, just to a point where we dot the i’s, cross the T’s ask the right questions, get smart answers, we use smart a lot Get Smart answers to the business problems that face us. Right?
Scott Ritzheimer
Would you say that there’s a point where the end result of slowing down is ultimately the ability to speed up?
Brian Smith
Yeah, the environments that we are in including our own, that use slowdown as a foundation of action actually perform more efficiently and faster than their peers. Our office is a good example of that. We have eight companies in these offices, there’s less than 30 people in these offices, yet we manage literally 1000s and 1000s of transactions a day with the different organizations we have. But we all go at the same slowdown type of speed, and we get way more done our GNA cost, the efficiency of our team here is oftentimes double triple that of our peers in like organizations.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow. Well, and I thinkthat the that’s the real thing that makes it worth it, right? If it was slowed down onto slowing down, that might be a really nice academic exercise, right, but you’re not gonna get a whole lot of business leaders that can buy into that. But having worked with 18,000, CEOs, entrepreneurs, like you’re working with people and teaching them a process that they can not only come to appreciate, but love and and enjoy and see the benefits of and and I I think you’re so right, and you have this idea of slowing down so you can speed up and we had a guest on a couple months ago who or maybe even a couple of weeks ago who had mentioned that we can replace activity with progress or vice versa, right? We can we can mistake activity for profit grass or for, you know, doing for insight and and we just end up spinning our wheels and spinning our wheels. And I think it propagates this myth that to be in business is to be overworked and exhausted and hustle and do all of these things. And we kind of pat ourselves on the back righteously exhausted at the end of the day, but it was a problem of our own making. Would you agree with that?
Brian Smith
Oh, most definitely. You know, there’s a lot of organizations we go into, and people look very busy. But when you look at them from productivity, when you start to measure productivity, when you apply smart to the analysis process, you know, tell us specifically what you’re doing. Let us measure it, you know, tell us what you’re doing that’s attainable for you or for somebody else in in do you have realistic goals? And are you timely in what you’re doing? When we apply that to the q&a process? We learn what you just pointed out, people are going fast and spinning their wheels in doing things that are amazingly unproductive.
Scott Ritzheimer
Right, right. I had a question and it just completely left my mind. But oh, here it is. So I can hear the pushback on this right for some of the folks listening. And that’s like, if I go slow, I’m gonna get left behind, right? Or I like there’s lots of organizations who go slow, who do this whole analysis thing? And I’m beating them every day, right? They’re thinking of these kinds of large bureaucratic organizations. Is there a point where organizations kind of systematically take slow down too far, and miss the trigger point to speed up? Or how do you how do you differentiate between those?
Brian Smith
Yeah, there is, you know, you can over process things, you can make things too complex in the slow down environment. And that’s, again, gets back to putting the question, What am I slowing down, put down that put that question into context? What is it that I’m slowing down? And why am I slowing it down? You know, there are certain things that go fast, that should go fast. There are certain people in an organization that move quickly, that should move quickly. So slow down is relative to the person, the process and the technology and the reward, or the benefit that they bring in their function brings to your organization. So we’re not talking about apply slow down universally to everything. It’s, you know, look at your organization, look at where the mistakes are happening, look at where the opportunities are being overstepped. Look at where dollars are being stepped over to pick up dimes, look at where communications are being lost or missed. And find a way to slow those areas of your business down. So you stop creating these gaps and missing these opportunities.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s excellent. So this is a moment I’ve been waiting for. It’s my favorite part of the show. And I know our listeners have come to expect it. So we’re gonna give the people what they want here. And so I’d love to ask you, what is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret? What’s the one thing that you wish every leader entrepreneur, you know, business owner that was listening today knew?
Brian Smith
Wow. So you know, you just spent this entire conversation talking about it, it’s this whole slow down, foundation of leadership and management. So answering you with that seems like I’m kind of beating the horse, if you will. But second to that is that every person in your organization has influence, and they have a place and you should treat them with that understanding that from what you might deem the lowest position in your organization to the highest. You all have the same level of influence within your organization. And understanding that and applying that knowledge to your team. And to those people will elevate you and your organization beyond what you think it can. And I think that’s the biggest secret is that everybody has a place. Everybody is important. So treat them that way.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that is so good. We may be various levels of authority may be various levels of power, but everyone carries the same level of influence. That is, that’s fantastic advice. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for sharing, love. Last question. And then we’ll talk about how people can get in touch with you because I know there’s folks listening, they’re like, We have to have that. But I’ve worked with enough coaches and consultants, advisors folks in that world to know that we have a tendency to kind of put our best energy out for our clients and don’t necessarily leave enough on the table for ourselves. So I’m gonna have you take off your coach, consultant advisor hat, I’m gonna have you put on your CEO hat and talk to us a little bit about what the next phase of growth looks like for you and I a business advisors.
Brian Smith
Yeah, for us, as you pointed out, we have a book that’s out. And we are building on that body of work our, our work is supporting our consulting work identifying the importance of the individual, and the individual to us is singular one person. But as two people or many people come together, they become an individual together working towards common goals. We are building a broader and bigger body of work around our books that allow us to go out and speak to teams, to associations to larger organizations, and bring to them this understanding of slowing down this new version of individualism and how to apply that to the people process and technology model that we live every day for us and our clients. How do we bring it we’re working on bringing that to, to the public through continued public work, and a new SAS that we’re developing that actually provides a way to operate your business in this smart business vision environment that we create.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic. So you’ve touched on it here a little bit, but I’d love for you to just maybe 60 seconds or so on the book, and then tell us where we can find it.
Brian Smith
Yeah, so The “I” in Team series is the name of our book series. So we will have three books in this series. The first one, Finding the “I” in Team is available on Amazon. It comes in all formats. Kindle hardback, audio, a CD, you can find it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, we’re really proud of it. It is an international bestseller. It’s been on the top of five different categories. And we’re really proud of it. The second book will be out early next year, we’re in the middle of editing and getting it ready for publication. And the third one will be out like 23, early 24.
Scott Ritzheimer
Excellent. Excellent. And and your website if folks want to learn more about you and your services.
Brian Smith
Yeah, it’s www.iabusinessadvisors.com And use that same name. And you can find us. We’re very active on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And you can find us on those. Fantastic.
Scott Ritzheimer
Well, Brian, thank you so much for being here. It was absolute pleasure, amazing conversation. I so enjoyed it. I love what you guys are doing there. I love your message of slowing down. I think we just we need you to continue saying it again and again and again. And eventually when they will hear it eventually when they will hear it. So keep on doing what you’re doing. It’s important work and we really appreciate it. For those of you who are listening, your time and attention are just the absolute greatest honor that we could receive. And we’re so thankful that you spent this time with us. I hope it was as impactful for you as it was for me and I look forward to seeing you again next week. Take care.
Contact Brian Smith
Brian Smith, PhD, is founder and senior managing partner of IA Business Advisors, a management consulting firm that has worked with more than 18,000 CEOs, entrepreneurs, managers, and employees worldwide. Together with his daughter, Mary Griffin, he has authored his latest book, Individual Influence: Find the “I” in Team, which shares how to become our best self with everyone we influence.
You can learn more about Brian and his work at more at IABusinessAdvisors.com or grab a copy of his book on Amazon