Brian Gottlieb, Author of Beyond the Hammer, on Hiring to Your Weaknesses, Leading a Culture of Development, and Building Problem-Solving Systems

Transcript

Brian, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Thank you. Yeah. Very excited to do this.

Your stories are really remarkable ones. So 2009, you start this company on a plastic folding table with $3,000. And then how many years later, tell us a story.

Like how big did this company get before you, you ended up selling it, right?

Brian Gottlieb (3:07 – 3:44)

Right, right. Yeah. It was 2009, maybe not the best time to start a business, but so I decided to take the leap and it was in the back of a friend’s warehouse on a plastic folding table with $3,000 in cash.

The idea was to build something more than just a business. I wanted to build a brand that was woven into the fabric of the communities that we served. And over time, the business grew.

I, it became three separate businesses. When I finally sold the businesses a couple of years ago, so 12 years later, we had 600 employees and $150 million in revenue. It was quite the business and it was a really, really fun ride.

You can imagine. I, I learned a couple of things along the way too. It was, it was a, it was a blast.

Aydin Mirzaee (3:45 – 3:52)

Yeah, I love it. So what did the business do? So there’s three separate ones.

What industry was it in? What was the main thing you did for customers?

Brian Gottlieb (3:53 – 4:42)

Yeah, we were a home improvement company. So one thing we did was bathroom modeling. Another thing we did was replaced on windows.

And then we did decks for people, exterior decks, and we also did sunrooms for a little while, but it was really all about getting into customers’ homes and just making their homes a better place to live. It was a fun business, but you know, that’s interesting because the thing about the home improvement business is if you’re not familiar with it, unlike a lot of companies in the home improvement space, about 99% of every employee is customer facing. They’re all interacting with the customer, whether they’re setting an appointment at a home show or they’re on the phone with them scheduling an appointment or they’re installing something or they’re selling something.

Everybody’s a customer facing employee, which means that mindset and culture is so very, very important because if you don’t always create a great customer journey, you’re probably not going to have a very good business very long.

Aydin Mirzaee (4:42 – 5:32)

Yeah, it’s an incredibly tough thing to scale, especially like you said, with 600 people, everybody customer facing, it requires a lot of great management and a lot of great frameworks and some of the stuff that we’re going to talk about today. So maybe we can start with this original maybe question, which is, you know, as you were starting to build the business, I assume this is the first time that you were building a business that large, how did you teach yourself to basically scale, to be able to get to the size that you did without everything breaking, like were there some, you know, and we’re going to talk about the lessons that you’ve learned, but one of the questions I had, and for a lot of people listening to the show, they’re always trying to figure out how to grow themselves, how to get themselves to get to the next level.

And I’m just curious, like, how did you keep up with it all? How did you stay ahead of the growth of the business?

Brian Gottlieb (5:33 – 7:04)

Yeah. And it wasn’t a perfect journey. It was not a perfect journey.

And because the things I did, I’ve never done before, to your point, I think early on though, the one advantage I had is I made the decision that there were certain things I was doing in my role that were either draining or I was not the best person at it, so I just made the decision early on to hire to my weakness as soon as possible, but then also to make sure I was giving those people that I was not the best, I’m not a great CFO, right?

That’s not my thing, but I better have a CFO and give them a very loud voice in the business. And I think that’s an important lesson that when we hire to our weaknesses, first of all, we might not be the right person to onboard that person, but then also we have to really listen to them a lot because they’re going to bring a totally different perspective that really helped, I think, set the foundation of growth. And then also along the way, it was like, which comes first, you hire somebody and then hope to get the volume, or do you get the volume and then have too much of a backlog and then try to hire people?

And it’s really a delicate balance. I think that the more that we were confident in being able to, and I think it doesn’t matter what size business you are, I think that when you start to get really confident in being able to hit whatever projections you have laid out for the year, the stronger you are at predicting the future of your business, the more likely you are willing to invest in that business to do so. And I think for all entrepreneurs, they really want to focus on how do they become excellent at forecasting?

And it doesn’t live in a silo with just a CEO. How do you get your whole team involved in that too? Because you’re going to grow a business by really growing people.

Aydin Mirzaee (7:05 – 7:25)

Yeah. This is a question that I’ve always had too. And you’re right, it doesn’t have an easy answer, but which does come first?

Does growth come first and you backfill it with people or did the people come first and then they’re the ones who bring the growth, but in your business, did you find that it leaned one way or the other, or how did you think about it? Or maybe it changed through various phases.

Brian Gottlieb (7:26 – 8:29)

The unique thing about the home improvement business is you don’t have a large book of customers that are returning customers. Every single day, you’ve got to find a new customer. Every single day you have to sell a new project and every single day you have to install in a new scenario.

And maybe the wise thing should have been make sure you have a big backlog and then start hiring people. But I just felt like, I felt like that we had something special. I felt like we had a really strong mission and vision, and I felt comfortable investing in the business and I wanted to have the right team around me so together we could win.

And all full disclosure for the first two years, I didn’t even take a paycheck out of the business. I just chose not to. Instead, I wanted to divert that money to other people that could really help me grow.

I had some other things going on on the side where I was able to earn some money and pay my bills, but really it was about taking some risk. And look, I think every entrepreneur has come to a point in their business where they have to push all their chips in and they go all in on an idea. And I think there’ve been several situations like that.

I’ve probably hired, I probably got beyond my skis when hiring people, but it all worked out in the long run.

Aydin Mirzaee (8:30 – 8:50)

So one of the things that you said was hiring for your weaknesses early on. Was it very obvious to you what your weaknesses were or as you started operating the business, you realized you were weaker and more things than you thought? Or how did that part of the play out?

Like, did you know even your strengths, like, did you know what they were or did you realize them over the course of time?

Brian Gottlieb (8:51 – 10:09)

Yeah. I think in the beginning I knew what my obvious weaknesses were. The ones that were right in front of my face.

I knew that I wasn’t again, a CFO. I didn’t know how to use a financial software, those sorts of things. That was the easy stuff.

As the business grew, I started to realize that there are other gaps in the business too, that I need to hire to. But then the other thing that, because it’s not just, I think, about hiring your weaknesses. It’s also about, in my opinion, replicating your strengths because, and I don’t think that’s talked about enough.

When I first started the business, you know, I grew up in this industry selling products at the kitchen table to Mr. Mrs. Jones. And if you’d have asked me when I first started the business, do I think I’d always be doing that? I would have responded, well, yeah, because I’m really good at it and I need to keep focusing on my strength.

But what I realized is that at some point the business will be limited based on my capabilities and I need to start replicating my strengths as well. So look, in all fairness, when you’re running a business and I’m pulling up to somebody’s home and trying to sell a project, but I got 12 other things that I’m dealing with. Am I really going to do as good of a job as I used to when that was all that I was doing?

So I need to hire people that I can train to be just all in and just fully focused on any certain area inside of the organization. So I think both are true. I think, yes, we have to hire to our strengths and yes, we have to hire to our weaknesses if we want to grow.

Aydin Mirzaee (10:10 – 10:47)

Yeah. So this is a really interesting one. I actually haven’t heard it put that way, which is you also need to replicate your strengths, which I think is a very wise thing.

It’s not often talked about. And maybe this is also a really interesting avenue to talk about. So because you were the founder, because you were there from day one, all the way to the acquisition date, I’m wondering how you think about your role during that time?

Like, how did it change? You know, are there distinct phases that you could identify in the company’s journey and how did your role change during all of those?

Brian Gottlieb (10:48 – 12:35)

Aiden, I had an epiphany. How about that? I actually had an epiphany and I’ll always remember it.

My wife and I were sitting out in our home in Appleton, Wisconsin. We’re sitting on our front porch at night, drinking a glass of wine, which we like to do in the evening, just chit chatting. And we just came off of this community event that was going on.

It was a music festival in our community. And I was reflecting and we’re chatting. I’m saying, you know, when the community is in a better place, we feel like we’re in a better place when the community does well, we do well.

And the same is true in business. When the business does well, we do well. In fact, what I realized was that for the business to do well, the people inside of the business must do well.

And my epiphany was that for me to realize my full potential, the people inside of the business had to first realize theirs. In fact, I couldn’t realize my potential unless and until they first realized theirs, my epiphany was, that’s my role. My role is how do every day, how do I make every single day about helping somebody else realize and reach their potential?

And that’s when I had to really change the way I approached what I did on a daily basis, that it was really about empowerment and training. And, you know, if you’d have asked me what we were when we first started the company, I would have said, yeah, we’re, we’re a construction company. Maybe you’ve asked me five years later when we were had like a hundred employees, I would have said we’re a sales and marketing company that happens to be in home improvements.

But that epiphany made me realize what I really need to be as a training organization. That’s what we have to be. We have to be in the business of building and training people and systems and processes, and really giving folks a real opportunity to grow.

And when my mindset shifted to that, so did my focus every day. And that is when the business really started to explode.

Aydin Mirzaee (12:36 – 13:05)

I love that. What an amazing story as well. So I have to ask you, when did you have that epiphany?

Because when you say this, it makes all the sense in the world. There’s always a time where arguably this makes sense even on day one, but you know, when you’re the only employee in the company, or maybe there’s two other employees, like you said, you’re busy doing a lot of the individual things. So at what point did you really realize that your goal was to become, you know, a training organization and help people reach their full potential?

Brian Gottlieb (13:05 – 13:24)

Yeah. It was the summer of 2016 in August. How about that?

The first weekend of August is when that music festival was on. It was right during that weekend. And that was when I realized that.

But the other part of it was, how big was the company? We were probably doing, you know, 30, $40 million at the time. So it was still a big company.

It’s always had a lot of employees.

Aydin Mirzaee (13:25 – 13:29)

So still like in the hundreds of maybe two, 300 people or something like that.

Brian Gottlieb (13:29 – 14:40)

Yeah. In that general area. But part of that made me think then, okay, now that I understand my role, what do I need to be excellent?

What don’t I know? You know, in many times along the journey of running a business, I challenged myself saying, I really don’t know what I’m doing right now. I think so.

I would watch podcasts very much like your podcast, which is a great resource and other podcasts and read books. And I wanted to surround myself with the next level of people, people that have done, built much larger businesses than mine. So I actually heard about this executive education program.

I never went to college by the way, went from high school right into working. So I didn’t have that backbone either in me, but I heard about this executive education program at Harvard business school and I applied to it, not even thinking by the way that they would even accept me, but they did. And so I was excited.

I was petrified. It was all of that, but that put me on a three-year path. It was a three-year program at Harvard business school.

And it really gave me a great foundation to understand, okay, I can be more intentional in how to lead my business. I also got to meet people from all over the world and our class had 150 people in it from, I think, 49 different countries. So you get a worldwide perspective on problem solving and growing a business.

That was really, really helpful, really helpful.

Aydin Mirzaee (14:40 – 15:12)

Super interesting. So I guess maybe an interesting hypothetical question would be, so summer 2016, you have this realization and you change what you do on a daily basis. Like it really has a profound impact.

Do you think that the business would have turned out differently had you had that realization maybe in like 2010? Do you think that the realization came at the right time or do you think that if you had it earlier? I’m just trying to get a sense for how impactful was it that when you really changed what you focus on?

Brian Gottlieb (15:12 – 17:04)

If that epiphany came earlier, probably wouldn’t have been as impactful because look, in the early days of starting a business, especially when the entrepreneur is the only person in the business, business is all about execution, it’s all about execution. And it’s going to be in the business’s success will be based on how well the entrepreneur performs. But as you start to build a business, now you have teams.

Now the business’s success is really dependent on how well the teams perform, both in the entrepreneur’s presence and in their absence. So if that epiphany came too soon, I don’t think I would have been ready to really step up to the moment. I think it was at the right time.

And I’ll share another story with you. I’ll show you one of the changes that epiphany made. We all understand the importance of empowerment, right?

And yet when you’re the entrepreneur and you’re the owner of the business and your whole world is dependent on the success of the business, your whole world, it’s very easy to want to micromanage every single step of the process because you can’t afford to make mistakes because if you don’t make mistakes, you don’t pay a mortgage. And that’s a big problem. And it’s all about staying in business.

I remember distinctly that there was a time where people used to be lined up outside of my door in order to get an answer on a question, and that just is simply not a scalable model. So around the time of my epiphany, I decided to remodel my office and I got rid of my classic desk and put in just this flat tabletop slab with no drawers and no place to keep papers. Cause I made the decision that I’m going to be a training organization.

Then if a piece of paper is in my office, it’s in the wrong place. That means somebody is not empowered to do their job. And then that’s my fault.

So I really took a personal ownership on just absolutely obsessing on training and developing people. In 2010, I only had a few employees. You know, there’s only so much training I could do.

I need to be a co-producer in the business. In 2016, I needed to be a leader and it’s a big difference.

Aydin Mirzaee (17:05 – 17:25)

Yeah, I love that. And it seems like there really was these distinct phases. It really did seem like you reinvented your role at different stages of growth.

I’m curious. So once you made the decision that this was going to become, you know, a training organization, what kinds of things did you put in place? Like what was kind of the Delta before and after that?

Brian Gottlieb (17:26 – 19:19)

Yeah, before that Delta was, we tended to be very reactive. We tended to be very reactive. And when we saw what I saw is that as the business was growing, the different departments in the business, there was friction between departments.

We were starting to get some turnover issues that were coming up. I don’t think everybody understood everybody’s role and there was friction. So I took one entire wall of my office and I drew this horizontal line and the line was the entire customer journey.

What is the entire customer journey from start to finish? And there’s a lot of complexity in construction, right? You’re in and out of somebody’s home.

You’re dealing with different phases. And we mapped out every single time that there’s either an interaction between an employee and the customer or an employee and another employee, because those were all potential friction points. And let’s start by documenting what those processes need to look like.

Let’s start with what are the potential friction points and let’s create a piece of paper that documents our process. Even if that process had two sentences on it, I didn’t really care. I just wanted something written down.

So we have some start, some foundation of a documented process. And then how do we teach and train that as the business continued to realize the impact of training and development in a big and very intentional way, we started looking at our managers and we realized that, well, when we onboard an employee that’s customer facing, whether it’s a salesperson or an installer, we train them for weeks before we let them talk to a customer. But when we looked at our management training program, it was really non-existent.

We put somebody in a management role because they had maybe the most experience, but not really understanding how to be a great manager. So we created our own list of the 10 practices of high performing managers, built that out, and that’s when, again, the business really took off as an aligned team, by the way.

Aydin Mirzaee (19:20 – 19:28)

Yeah. So you basically figured out the things that make managers successful at the company and you actually created a framework around that, like a checklist.

Brian Gottlieb (19:29 – 21:36)

In fact, one of the pillars in the book that I write about is that managers need a checklist. And there are essentially 10 things I go into quite detail on. It’s very actionable on how you can plug this into any business.

It’s super helpful because I think the disconnect that I was struggling with is I thought I needed a manager. And I speak on this by the way, at conferences around the country, I ask rooms full of business owners, what’s the difference between a leader and a manager? And I get things like, well, you know, the manager tells you what to do.

The leader shows you what to do as if it’s two separate people. But in reality, it’s not two separate people. It’s often one person doing two separate roles.

Sometimes you have to put on your management hat and sometimes you have to put on your leadership hat. And I call those levers of influence and levers of control. Management is about levers of control, ensuring systems and processes are being followed where leadership is about levers of influence, driving change in human behavior, change in future performance, change in belief, all of those sorts of things.

So it’s not necessarily two roles, but it’s knowing which hat to put on and when, because each hat definitely creates a very different result. I needed to teach my team which hat to wear and when under what situation. And they needed more than just an idea.

They needed a checklist to follow. So that’s just really effective. If you’re finding yourself in too many meetings and still struggling for visibility in all areas of the business, the team at Fellow developed an AI meeting assistant that records, transcribes, and summarizes your meetings.

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Aydin Mirzaee (21:39 – 22:05)

And so you mentioned the book, so we should mention it here. So you took all of the learnings. And so the book is called Beyond the Hammer.

And launch date is September 10th. And so this podcast, this should go out September 12th. So by the time this is live, you can go out and order the book.

But what is the premise of the book? So who’s the audience for the book? Who should read it?

And what kind of things do you think people will be able to take away?

Brian Gottlieb (22:05 – 23:28)

Right. Well, the book is written for both managers and leaders alike. And it’s really about how do you create not just a team, but how do you create an aligned team that performs at a high level and with consistency?

And what do you get that team aligned around? What do you, what should they believe? You know, how do you change their mindset?

Because how people think affects how they feel. And it, which also, by the way, affects how they act, which ultimately defines organizational performance. So the book is really about aligning, aligning an organization around a shared set of beliefs and what is our role as a leader, as the business grows.

There’s one section of the book that I write about. I remember we had an HR director that when somebody would leave, we would do an exit interview. Like a lot of organizations do exit interviews and we challenged ourselves and we said, you know, we get great information.

Why are we doing it only when they exit? Why don’t we do what’s called a stay interview? And I think it’s a great tool that instead of waiting for somebody to leave to find out what they thought about the business, let’s conduct stay interviews with our people.

So we started implementing stay interviews as to, you know, what makes you want to come to work every day? What would one day make you want to leave? What’s one thing we’re doing wrong as an organization?

What’s something you’re not getting out of your manager that you really need today? And the stay interview really gave us great insight on the mindset of the team and allowed us to become better leaders because of it, little nuggets like that, actionable nuggets are all through this book that I think you’ll enjoy.

Aydin Mirzaee (23:28 – 23:35)

That’s amazing. And that’s a really cool idea on the stay interview. So is that something you would do once a year or what kind of cadence did you end up doing that?

Brian Gottlieb (23:36 – 24:23)

Yeah, we tried to do, we did two specific reviews of getting their feedback. We did upward surveys once a year, and then we did stay interviews once a year, but they overlapped. So every six months we would do a upward reporting survey, and then we would do a stay interview six months later.

So we just found it really helpful and certainly helped with retention. And you know what? People want to feel that their voice is heard.

They want to feel like, you know what, their voice is heard. Their opinion matters. And if you can create an environment that allows that to happen, when people are happy about where they work, they tend to do a better job.

You know, they just tend to be more invested in things and it’s the leader’s opportunity and the manager’s opportunity to create that environment to help people feel like they’re valued and appreciated because more important than a paycheck is being valued and appreciated and recognized.

Aydin Mirzaee (24:24 – 24:52)

Yeah. This is one of the things, I mean, again, it just goes back to the, you know, empowering people to make sure that they can do their work. And, and part of that is when they have opinions to actually take those into account and there’s nothing as powerful as, I heard something when talking to an employee, maybe during a stay interview and as a result of that, here’s some changes we made in the company.

Like that goes a very far way in, in showing people that you care about what they think.

Brian Gottlieb (24:52 – 25:42)

Toyota uses something at their production line is called an Andon Cord. And when something goes wrong on the production line, every single person on that production line is encouraged, not just told to, but encouraged, empowered to pull the Andon Cord, which stops the entire production line. Because if somebody is trying to put a headlamp in, maybe the screws aren’t lining up, but the problem could be somewhere much earlier on in the production line, the people that pulled the Andon Cord are then involved in finding the root cause of the problems.

They can fix it. Now you don’t necessarily have to have a true Andon Cord in your business, but when you get people in your business to have their own type of Andon Cord that they can say, Hey, this is where the company is doing something wrong and I care about it and seeing it get fixed and having them part of the process of fixing it, it’s really important to people. They feel like they’re making a difference and they are.

So it’s good.

Aydin Mirzaee (25:42 – 26:16)

Yeah. So the other thing that you mentioned, and I know this is a big part in the book as well, is this idea of achieving alignment. This is probably the biggest thing.

I don’t know if you would agree, but it’s probably the biggest thing that gets people motivated and wanting to show up to work and making progress probably. Yeah. You know, the key pillar of having a high performing team, how did you end up doing it?

Because you talked about at some point there was friction between different departments and getting everybody on the same page and very excited about coming to work. What were some of the things that you did to get that level of alignment?

Brian Gottlieb (26:16 – 28:10)

The first thing that we did is we instituted something known as a daily huddle. So where I had a daily huddle with my executive leadership team, a little 15 minute phone call. It’s nothing formal.

It’s not even a zoom meeting. It’s just very approachable. And then the managers were encouraged to have daily huddles with their team.

And then the managers also had daily huddles with each other manager. So, because what we found is that the managers didn’t understand that some of the decisions they were making, how it might’ve adversely affected another department. Again, the business was just out of whack and that created by the way, also an inconsistent customer experience.

When departments inside of any business have competing priorities, the customer journey tends to be fragmented. So that was one piece of alignment. The second part was just, you know, whether it’s trading jobs for a day or just creating an environment where they could talk to each other and really appreciate each other was really important.

And then also shared KPIs that ran through the entire organization so that each department had to physically fill out their results at the end of the month. And they could see how their results truly affected another department’s results. And again, that just another way to create alignment, but all of that was under a strong mission and vision statement.

Because without that, the alignment doesn’t really stick. You know, our mission was to do well and do good. And it’s our belief that the purpose of business is to make a decent profit decently.

And then of course, you know, our vision, where are we going? I think a lot of people in businesses, they don’t understand, well, I understand what I’m doing here today. I understand my role, but where are we going?

You know, I use the analogy of, I love to ride a motorcycle cause I’m here in Wisconsin, which is home of Harley Davidson. And if I’m by myself, I can go down any random country road. If I don’t like it, I turn around and go back.

And if I want to pull over and smoke a cigar, that’s great. But if I had 20 motorcycles following me and they don’t know where I’m going, they’re never going to want to go with me again. People deserve to know where they’re going.

And that is really important when it comes to alignment.

Aydin Mirzaee (28:11 – 28:37)

I love that analogy of riding the motorcycle. And I was going to ask you about this daily huddle concept. So that’s super interesting.

So it sounds like it’s something that happens every single day. I mean, some tactical questions for you. Does every team decide when they do it?

Is the structure of the daily huddle, something that every team does in the same way, how prescriptive were you about explaining the purpose of the huddle?

Brian Gottlieb (28:37 – 29:24)

Yeah. My role was to create an environment where communication could happen. That was my role.

My role is not to dictate what that communication should be because they were on my huddle. They had probably an example to follow. My huddle wasn’t about me talking.

It was about getting them to understand what are we working on? Where are we getting right? What challenges do we have?

What do we need to be thinking about? And then they had their huddles, but they got to run their huddles as they chose. And because again, different departments, different, even different leaders have different, different managers have different communication styles and different messages, but highly, highly effective.

I strongly recommend that as I didn’t realize the difference that it made. And by the way, when COVID hit where communication in the business was really, really challenging, we already had a direct line with each other and it just made getting through that very difficult time a whole lot easier. So for everybody.

Aydin Mirzaee (29:24 – 29:41)

So how did it work? So, you know, the huddle starts again. This is getting very tactical here, but you know, the huddle starts.

Who brings the topics? Is it a series of things that you talk about? Is it like, what did we get done?

What are the obstacles or what is the format? Maybe explain that a little bit.

Brian Gottlieb (29:41 – 29:59)

Sure. So if let’s say we’re doing a huddle four days a week, I like to do them Monday through Thursday. I didn’t feel it was necessary to do on a Friday.

And the first time you’re launching a huddle in the very beginning, everybody’s on the phone and like, well, what do we talk about? So you kind of have to steer it a little bit. Like, so, Hey production, what are you guys working on?

Hey, marketing, what do you got to share? So you have to.