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The 45 Minute Business Breakthrough Creating More Incomewith John Gies After more than two decades in corporate, John Gies heard a potential client say that $400,000 tax free was not worth his time. John knew then that he wanted to work where he could make a difference. Over the next several years he gained his Coach Certification, He has taught and coached organizations around the country and he now works with small business owners and non-profit organizations to help them create the income they need to thrive. John's personal live vision is a world where people are inspired to leverage their power and influence to contribute to a more sustainable and positive workplace. Read the Interview [Due to a video issue, the beginning of interview is lost. Transcript begins when video was restored.] John Gies: A communication coach, that transitioned from- I see your face. Was there a question there? Hugh Ballou: No, I love that story. Go ahead. I’m excited about that. John: When I left, what I wanted to do is I tried to look at other companies or other industries. The roads seemed to be closed. I said, What do I like doing? I love speaking in front of an audience. I love training and mentoring my teams. I love facilitating that conversation around the table where we’ve got different interests, maybe sales, operations, and technology trying to create a common vision, and trying to get to that with all those different points of view. I said, Why don’t I become a coach and a trainer? I went to work with a company. I got a chance to do some teaching and coaching across North America and Europe around sales, sales training, presentation skills, negotiation skills. Hugh, I hate to sound stereotypical, but stereotypes do exist. The Brits were almost on time, the Germans were early all the time, the French and the Italians showed up when they wanted to show up. It was an interesting experience. The Americans unfortunately were the ones who said, “We’re doing great. We don’t need any help.” It was an interesting experience for me. Hugh: That’s a stereotype, but it’s sad, isn’t it? John: It is. Yet it sounds something about us, right? Stereotypes are stereotypes in some cases. His name is going to escape me. Someone once said, “If you hear a cliché, look to the truth in the cliché. There is probably something in there that led to the cliché.” Hugh: Isn’t that why they are clichés? John: Right. While I was working with them, when they had lots of clients, I was busy. When they didn’t have clients, I wasn’t busy, so I decided to embark on my own. Today, I work with organizations with what I call a wholehearted approach to business. It’s not a name that you often think of when you think about business. But wholehearted is three pillars. There is the profit/revenue/money. I used to work with a nonprofit healthcare executive, who I will call Sister Mary. She said, “People come to me all the time and ask why we don’t provide this for free.” Her response was, “If there is no money, there’s no mission.” It’s really making sure that we have the money to fulfill our mission. Then there is leadership. Self leadership starts. If we can’t manage ourselves, we can’t manage other people. Hey, Russell. Russell Dennis: Greetings. John: Then it’s the impact we have. Same impact we have on our people, our clientele, our community, the environment, the whole thing. That’s three pillars. Hugh: Russell, there is some background noise, so I muted you. You will have to unmute yourself when you come on. He is putting on his headset. John, I want to get those three points. Those went by fast. Let’s capture those bullet points. John: There is profit. Whether we are in a nonprofit, a small business, or a big business, we can’t fulfill our mission without money. People rely upon us to be here in the long haul. It’s not just a dream to serve. We have to create the sustainability for our future. There is leadership. Leadership starts with self-leadership before we can lead others. I can share with you what I mean about that. When I think of one place that leadership is the weakest, it tends to be ourselves. The third pillar is impact. What impact are we having on our clients, customers, employees, communities, and stakeholders? I was really influenced by a book called Firms of Endearment. It’s a good-to-great comparison of stakeholder organizations versus shareholder organizations. Stakeholders are employees, vendors, the community, the environment, and shareholders. They outperform the S&P by 16X. They outperform the good-to-great companies by a factor of 10X. This lasted even through the Great Recession we just went through. For me, it’s how we take care of all the people in our organizations instead of just focusing on one limited subset of our stakeholders. Hugh: Absolutely. We teach those very same things. But it’s good to have you on here because people don’t listen to us. We’re so much in sync with that. John Maxwell in his 21 irrefutable laws of leadership has the law of the lid. You hit the ceiling of the lid, and your organization can’t progress any further than your ability to lead. That is true over and over. Our boards, our teams, our cultures are a reflection of our leadership. You may or may not know I am a musical conductor. What they see is what I get. What I practice in real life as a conductor works in the board room, works with the staff, works with the volunteers. It really doesn’t matter where we’re leading; the concepts are the same. Russell is coming in from a remote location. He was trying to find a connection last we spoke. Russell is the one who connected with you and suggested you be our guest today. I have looked over your website. It’s good stuff with some nice design. I am impressed with what you do. Thanks to Russell for finding you and finding the synergy. One thing you said was about the mindset. Thinking about the profit, leadership, and impact, and the stakeholders. [Audio issue] Clergy, people like that. Maybe even major donors. If you want to get money, you want to make sure you demonstrate impact. We want to see a difference. [Video freeze] Did I lose you? I’m here. Talk about that a minute, and where that fits into your thinking, how people misperceive profit, how people misperceive leadership. Can you hear me? I think he’s frozen. Maybe, we’re having a technical issue today, folks. So maybe we’ll get back together. John, he showed up over there. We seem to be having some technical issues. John, your video dropped out. There you are. Russell? Same neck of the woods as him. Is there an internet outage out there? Russell: I am downtown preparing for the GlobalMindED event. We have leaders here, global-minded. It’s a nonprofit that provides services to help first-generation college students connect with employers. Very big event coming up here. Starting tomorrow. It will be running through Friday. That’s where I’m at. Helping with that, looking to set up interviews with leaders and coverage of the event so we have things to talk about. Hopefully, John is back with us. He has done a lot of work. He started out with healthcare organizations and started seeing some leadership challenges around that. He has done a lot of work and worked with a lot of organizations here in the Denver area to deal with some of the bottlenecks you experience with leadership. When those bottlenecks are prevalent, you can run into issues with funding. He wrote a book about that. That is one thing I want to ask him about later and have folks get access to that. It’s a very good book. Hugh: We did a teaser about the book. We haven’t told anybody about it yet. John, before the technology devil came in here and ate up your feed, I was talking about the misconception of the word “profit” with nonprofits, and how boards have gotten into a negative groove. Do you want to talk about that a minute? Then I will hand it over to Russell, who is the one with the real tough questions. John: Great. Yeah. If I understand you, the question is profit versus nonprofit? It’s interesting. Russell did this for a long time. There really is no difference. If there is no money, there is no mission. We have to generate enough profit, retained earnings, income, whatever you want to call it, so we can redistribute it. I often encounter both in the corporate world from healthcare providers who were nonprofit, and nonprofits I have volunteered with over the years, that money is not the big thing. It’s all about service. It’s all about serving the customer, the patients, our clientele. If you can’t keep the lights on, you can’t deliver any service. I feel like I’m rambling a bit. This is where my wholeheartedness comes from. If you look at the way businesses are being structured today, more and more of them are being structured to deliver a different kind of value than just the bottom line. There are benefit corporations. There are LLCs that are for-profits embedded within nonprofits. There is a whole host of ways we can use our work, I have air quotes up there, to do good in the world. I think it was Kahlil Gibran who said, “Work is love made visible.” Regardless of what we’re doing, we should be able to bring love into the world, or wholeheartedness, even at a profit. Hugh: We generate income because we generate value. Russell has helpful observations and questions. I’m going to park for a minute and let him participate. Thank you, Russ for being here. I know it was a challenge getting on today. Russell: Thanks. It’s good to be here. I know John is an amazing person. I am glad I met you. One of the things that you and I talked about over coffee was the notion of value, and how that is being redefined today. Folks that are running businesses to make a profit often talk in terms of value. It seems to be a word that nonprofit leaders haven’t wrapped their arms around yet. Even if they do, some of the team may not be aware of what exactly is value. How do you ramp up those discussions when you are talking to nonprofit organizations in terms of speaking to value and what that means to the different audiences they serve? John: What a great question. Nonprofits deliver such value. Whether it’s providing a roof over our heads, food and shelter. They look and say, “That’s what we are giving to our clientele, people who need that value.” They’re also delivering value to the donors and people who are fundraisers. I met with a young man who moved here from D.C. His whole background is in philanthropy. If I’m a donor, the example I was thinking through on this is do you remember Sally Struthers and the Feed the Children campaign from years ago? She would come on TV and see all these images of hungry children. We would make a donation. We got a letter from that child. We are in relationship to that child. Now there is this warm, fuzzy feeling of, I, as a donor, am getting real value from that donation in my heart. What happens for a lot of us today is we don’t think about how we’re delivering value to all of our stakeholders, be they fundraisers, donors, clientele, you have different kinds of value to each one of them. For a donor, one of the big questions donors all have is, “If I give you money, will it go to the end user, or will it go to administrative costs?” There are a whole host of people who are doing valuations and rankings around that. How can I pluck John’s heartstring? How can I pluck Russell’s heartstrings? A friend of mine had a daughter who came into the world with a lot of physical challenges. In Children’s Hospital for years. Her mom was in and out. If I deliver a message to her that talks about children and supporting people while they are waiting for a child to come out of the hospital, that is delivering value to me because it sings and resonates with me. Does that make sense? Russell: That’s the trick. That’s the challenge a lot of for-purpose enterprises (as we prefer to call them, a term given to us by one of our guests). That is the challenge. You have multiple audiences. Value is not only something that has to be quantified in material terms. It’s different for every audience. The way that we relate to each other is through stories. People are discovering that. The big question is what is your story? Different people have different metrics, depending on their perspective. How important is it to have ways to measure what is valuable? How do you help nonprofits navigate that when they have these multiple audiences? How do you help them navigate figuring out what the message is for each audience? John: Really good question. When I share measurements, I think to my friend Annette, who is a good evaluator, who does research to quantify numbers and cents. When you think about a sentence or a paragraph or a story, how do you measure the ROI? What is the equation? Actually, there is a lady by the name of Nancy Duarte, who has mapped a really good storyteller. She took Martin Luther King’s “I Had a Dream” speech, and mapped the structure of the speech with its peaks and valleys to lead to the enrollment of the audience in his message. To answer your question, sometimes the impact is emotion. Even though we are driven by our spreadsheets in business, those are only to back up the emotional decisions we have already made. Working with a nonprofit, when we think about the donor, we have to think about what emotions we touch on. If I am talking to a philanthropist or a fund, like The Knight Foundation, what is the emotion or feeling I want them to feel about what they’re going to do for us? When I am trying to pull people off the streets as clients into my organization, how do I want them to feel? What I find most of us do is we run, run, run. And we don’t stop to think about the value. It’s not always what we think it is. What I counsel my clients on is it’s not putting food in someone’s hands. It’s answering a question about the concern of who is giving them the food. I’ll give you an example. Most painting contractors think they are hired to paint the house. They will tell the consumer, “We do great painting.” The reality is, the consumer is thinking, I’d like to have my house painted, but how do I know that painter will be on time, done on time, and won’t leave a mess? We have to answer the questions behind the question to call those, whether it’s a donor, a fundraiser, the clientele, or the public because the public can be very strong advocates for our for-purpose organizations. Great word choice by the way. I’m bouncing a bit, but that changes the whole framework of how you think about the organization. There is the nonprofit and the for-purpose. There is a withdrawal and an engagement. Good choice of words there. Russell: I’d like to go back to the statement of people looking at how you spend the money. I think we have seen some perception problems with the structure of an organization. A lot of people want to write checks for programs, but they don’t necessarily want to pay the nonprofit’s rent. You have to have a structure to deliver a program. But if you are running the organization delivering the programs, you have to be efficient. You have to be good stewards of the resources entrusted to you. Talk about some of the things you do when working with organizations of any stature to navigate that. John: When you say stewardship, are you talking about attracting money? Are you talking about managing expenses? Russell: Taking care of the money entrusted to you. Making the best use of it and maximizing value with it. Taking good care of it. John: A great question. Years and years ago, this will surprise you. I ran into a nonprofit collection agency. This was an organization embedded within another organization. Their money was to support the organization they were embedded in. For them, they could have really good expenses and really nice cars and really great lifestyles, but a lot of that wasn’t coming back to what was originally meant for. I…
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