Transcript

Chapters

Jason Mlicki (00:02.062)
So listeners, Jeff wrote a book.

Jason Mlicki (00:06.542)
Okay, it’s not a published book necessarily. It’s an ebook. I think it’s actually titled, The CEO’s Guide to Differentiation, Growth, and Scaling a Professional Services Firm. And after, Jeff, I don’t know, how long have you been prodding me to read this? You’ve been prodding me for months and I’ve been saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll get to it, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll get to it, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll get to I finally got to it. And it’s very good, it’s very good.

So we’re actually going to sort of rip it apart over the course of a few episodes here and talk about, is that the right word?

Jeff (00:40.399)
Is that the right? Is that the right expression?

Jason Mlicki (00:46.766)
Yeah, I guess that makes it sound bad like I’ve got to tear it up and throw it in the fire I don’t mean it that way. I mean we’re going to peel apart. We’re going to dig into it. I don’t know. What’s the what’s Wait the right colloquial phrase

Jeff (01:00.923)
We’re going to delve into it. You know, we had a podcast guest, do remember Art Zards?

Jason Mlicki (01:04.032)
Hmm. It’s probably tighter.

Jason Mlicki (01:10.115)
Yes.

Jeff (01:11.653)
He informed me that one of the telltale signs of a AI-generated piece of content is the use of the word Delve. And I started laughing. I’ve been using the word Delve since junior high, I think. He was like, well, when people read that, they’re going to think it’s AI because it’s not a common word.

Jason Mlicki (01:22.85)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (01:33.934)
That’s super random. would think, now you’re going to make me want to dig into this. You would think that a large language model by design would use words that are more frequently used, not less frequently used, right? Because that would be how you would logically assume it would operate. So OK, well, we’re not going to delve into it then, because we don’t want to sound like we’re robots. So we’re going to, with precision accuracy, open up the interior. Oh, that sounds bad.

We’re going to dig into it. okay. It’s all about growth. The ebook’s all about growth. And there’s a lot of things in this that I really like a lot. But what I want to do in this series is I wanted basically, it follows a really nice logical arc around why firms struggle to sustain growth, to build systems that can enable growth to sustain over time versus having maybe, you know,

growth is sporadic or it’s you know you use a phrase growth by design. So what I want to start with today is you actually outline three hurdles of to growth. There’s sort of three structural things that firms face that makes it really hard to sustain growth. So I want to go into these in some detail because this whole section of the book is really well written.

And it really gets inside of what really happens in firms and why growth is so hard and why these magical LinkedIn elixirs that you see don’t usually work.

Sound good? Well, that always works. That always works. We just need more meetings, Jeff. Jeff, we’re really good. We’re really good in the room. I just need more meetings. We can solve any problem. We just need more meetings. So the magical elixir that every firm requires is more meetings. So.

Jeff (03:16.859)
cold callers do.

I’ll get you a hundred more maybe.

Jeff (03:33.425)
Need more bats, more bats.

Yeah. So let’s jump into this. You gave me a piece of feedback that I really appreciated because as our listeners know, I’m incredibly insecure. And when you put out, and we’ve talked about this so many times, putting a point of view out is risky. You’re going to be criticized. And if you’re insecure, that’s hard, but you have to

Jason Mlicki (03:49.998)
You

Jeff (04:07.557)
do it. And one of the concerns I had about the book, the novella, what are we going to call it? A novella. was did I take too long to explain these issues? And ultimately I said, no, I don’t think so because most firms have no idea what is in the way of their growth.

And I felt, and maybe this is a little grandiose, but I felt like I was the little boy saying the emperor had no clothes. And as a result, I went a little bit deeper on these things. But the fact that you said, you know, you know, it was good. It was good. So I appreciate that.

Jason Mlicki (04:55.938)
Well, one of the things we, I was explaining this to a client yesterday as a matter of fact, because she said, Jason, we hired you to go after the gnarly topics. I’m like, okay, I guess that’s a good thing. And the analogy I used was just an iceberg. When you think about that every problem has a surface that you can see to it. And you say, okay, we’ve got a growth problem and we think it’s this. We think it’s because we have.

not good enough thought leadership or our solutions are not strong as they need to be or our key people aren’t closing well, whatever you believe it is. But then of course, know, 98 % of an iceberg exists below the surface or something ridiculous like that. This analogy has been used for a million things. And that’s what you did so well here. You said, okay, look, there’s a growth challenge that you’re facing, but it’s much…

It’s more complicated than you realize and you need to fully understand all of the things that are limiting growth or blocking growth in order to do anything about it. And so you did a really nice job of doing that. So I want to dig into those hurdles because you really kind of talked about there’s three hurdles to growth. There’s three things that keep firms from either growing sustainably or growing to their full potential. I you’ve talked about that a lot through the years. A lot of firms just underperform their growth potential.

They feel really good about the growth they’re getting, they’re just kind growing with the market. They’re not doing anything to get the growth. It’s just sort of happening. And that’s what the C-book is designed not to be. It’s not about that. It’s about how do you actually build growth by design that will sustain. So let’s dig into the hurdles.

Jeff (06:41.071)
Which one you want to start with?

Jason Mlicki (06:43.136)
I want to start with, what did I say I want to start with? I want to start with the BS of PS. We’ve talked about this. We’ve done a whole episode on this, but it’s one that when we did it, if I look back when we did it, we did it in a fun way, but I want to dig into what it really means because it’s a real problem that firms face. take us through it. What is the BS of PS? And I’m doing exactly what you asked me not to do, but.

What is the BSFPS and why is it blocking growth?

Jeff (07:15.397)
Yeah. The BS is the bull, you know, shit that goes along with professional services firms. And it’s a, it’s a term that I coined, probably to bring voice to the frustrations I felt as a CMO. and it is the structure and human elements of a knowledge driven firm that has

partnerships, fungible solutions, incentive structures like billable hours that just create all kinds of dysfunction. And for me, not being raised in a professional services firm, I didn’t come straight out of college into a firm. I was an experienced hire. I think I was 29 when I joined Anderson.

And I came out of corporate environments and I was just like, whoa, what is this? I mean, it was unbelievable how things unfold and how you had to get things done. And having been at three or four major firms, I’ve been able to juxtapose these phenomenon. I thought, maybe this is just way Anderson’s culture is. No.

Jason Mlicki (08:22.69)
Now what’s going on?

Jeff (08:44.699)
Towers Paren was similar in so many respects. It had its particular flavor. And then Hewitt was completely different. But they all had some form of this BS of PS, this cultural and structural dysfunction that just made it hard to get stuff done.

Jason Mlicki (09:05.742)
It’s some of the things underlying this. I’ll point at two that I really like that you’ve talked a lot about through the years. One is sort of like, how did you use the phrase, utilization is the king, queen and prince, I believe is what you said. It’s basically the only metric that matters in a lot of firms. mean, there’s just such a fixation on billability and utilization that everything else gets crowded out of the room. And that will rear its ugly head in the hurdle too, by the way.

Jeff (09:17.464)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (09:35.298)
But the other one I like that you always talk a lot in there about is this notion of culture of optionality. The idea that you can say you’re going to do things, but people can kind of just opt out and nothing really happens. Or there’s one I think you talk a lot about in here about this idea of it’s a larger than a very strong personality, a partner can sort of

bend the firm to do things that maybe aren’t in the best long-term interests of the firm, it’s in the best interest of his or her practice, but everyone kind of goes along because they’re a very strong personality or they’re a large revenue driver or whatever. And so I think those are some of the dimensions. Are there other ones that I’m missing that you would want to lump in there to get underneath that phrase?

Jeff (10:29.903)
I tell you the one that, really, makes things difficult is the optionality and you, picked up on it and it’s tied to that billable hour. It’s so easy to get off the hook of getting something done, whatever that is, that is going to feed the growth engine because all you have to say is I have a client call. I have a client meeting.

I have a client deliverable, right? Nobody ever questions that. Nobody. And as a result, all of these key inputs, if you will, that drive growth, don’t get done. And it’s perfectly okay. And that creates so much dysfunction because it opens up a vacuum.

That now has to be filled by what? Sales and marketing that are maybe ignorant of, you know, some of the SME stuff.

Jeff (11:40.599)
it’s it’s and it just plays on itself. None of these attributes stand alone. None of them stand alone. One is exacerbated by the other.

Jason Mlicki (11:54.518)
And listeners should know it’s interesting because Jeff has put this ebook in front of me through drafts and I’ve helped him a little bit kind of like just give feedback on things. And I would constantly say, you need to like, you know, strip this out and just focus just on this. And he kept saying, no, no, no, these are all interconnected. And so I’m hoping what you’ll see as we get through these hurdles and kind of his thinking, you’ll see that this is, they’re all interconnected. And I’m to share an example real quick. So we’re,

Just recently, as a matter of fact, we’ve been working with a large firm on a SaaS product that they’ve built to help market the SaaS product. And so we did a bunch of internal conversations with practices, individual practices that could essentially bring the SaaS product to clients. And so it’s that kind of notion of cross-selling and internal trust, trying to understand that, the stuff we talked about with Charlie Green. And what do you think we were told when we went to one of the

people in the practices about why they haven’t got behind the SAS product. And I’ll give you a direct quote because you’ll laugh. But what do you think one of the main reasons was?

Jeff (13:04.101)
what was said and what was the real reason?

Jason Mlicki (13:07.778)
Yeah. Now in this case, this case, what was said was literally the reason it’s, there was no hidden, hidden comment. It was direct.

Jeff (13:16.055)
I don’t want you to screw up my relationship with the client.

Jason Mlicki (13:19.918)
Yeah, that was definitely the underlying premise, but the direct quote that we took back to our client, which I loved, was, why in the world would I sell this when I can sell 200 hours instead?

Jeff (13:32.287)
that’s another good one.

Jason Mlicki (13:33.93)
It was just a blunt statement of like, can sell a bunch of utilization in here. Why in the world would I ever take this to the client? And so that to me was like the essence of the BSFPS. was like, man, like that’s a real problem. Like, you know, we’ve got a clear issue here where it was like the innovator’s dilemma. All this kind of rolled into one. anyway.

Jeff (13:58.961)
So how did the firm deal with that? Did they just let it go or did they say…

Jason Mlicki (14:05.996)
Well, I can’t tell you, this is brand new. I don’t know yet.

Jeff (14:09.009)
well, here’s another important rule I live by as a result of the BS of PS. And it has made my life a lot happier and a lot more effective. It’s a quote by Charles Handon that says, intelligent people prefer to agree rather than be told.

And it is so true. And that is the essence of existing and being successful in a professional services firms. You can’t come in and dictate. You have to win over. In a situation like that,

I’d love to hear Brian Caffarelli answer this question. What do you say to the person that said I’d rather sell $200 an hour versus this SaaS product? But I do think that’s changing. I do, as firms become a little more corporate. You asked me what other things are there. One that wasn’t mentioned, but I think is critical, is Matrix.

Jason Mlicki (15:00.802)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (15:22.605)
Yes.

Jeff (15:24.241)
In smaller and mid-sized, the matrix isn’t quite as big, but you’ll get to a tipping point where you’ll begin to matrix the organization, right, by line of business or industry, and you’ll assign numbers to those so that the reward structure plays out properly. And that’s when things get confusing.

Jason Mlicki (15:36.77)
Yeah.

Jeff (15:49.989)
That’s when the culture of optionality really raises its head. And then if you go geographically, break up into regions or even go global, then it becomes really complicated. But.

Jason Mlicki (16:06.382)
Well, but then, but then Jeff, you get to jump from the matrix organization to McKinsey’s new Helix organization. Did you ever see this? They invented the Helix organization, which is a three dimensional rendering where you don’t have just one dotted line. You could have like three. So like that won’t confuse things or make our organizations dysfunctional. Right? So, yes. I think it’s a great one because it does. And you see it all the time. You know, see it, we see it all the time. You know, we see firms where they’re

Jeff (16:17.124)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (16:36.174)
They’re organized around geographies and industries simultaneously. And the people that we’re trying to work with don’t really exist in either one of those places. They’re not really clear. And so it’s really hard to articulate, well, what’s the point of view we’re going after here? What’s the issue we’re going after? What’s the client we’re going after? So I want to change gears, though. I want to change gears. OK, so there’s this BS of PS thing, which is sort of like all these inherent

things inside the firm that block growth. That’s over fixation on utilization, it’s matrix structures, it’s cultures of optionality. It’s all these things that are just baked into a firm that can make growth difficult. Let’s talk about the next one. Let’s talk about the next one that to me is related to the DNA of the firm, the culture of the firm. the next one is, there’s another layer to this. So take us through the next layer.

Jeff (17:37.945)
So if the BS of PS is the sand in the gear that we’re switching, and that’s really the best way to think about it. It just, it won’t kill it right away, but it’ll grind everything down, you know, slowly. The next problem is a concept that I took away from a book that I read called

Jason Mlicki (17:44.802)
Yep. Yep.

Jeff (18:07.085)
leading firms by David Coleman. And he uses this term, but it’s a term that’s used in engineering and athletics called the performance envelope. And essentially it just, hey, what are our performance limits? Where do we operate most profitably? What’s our sweet spot, if you will. And I just love that

concept because it resonated with me as an athlete, so I’ve adopted it. And essentially, what firms don’t do and what gets in the way of their growth is that their core business that represents the current performance envelope. Those, excuse me.

Mark the time.

Jason Mlicki (19:06.638)
19.

Jeff (19:07.281)
19. Man.

Ahem!

Jeff (19:23.875)
I can’t remember where I was. the the cores and their most profitable business is being commoditized. And as a result, firms need to expand beyond that limit into new markets, new capabilities. And most firms don’t do that well. They either one are not aware

that it’s happening, that they’re being commoditized. And I can talk about the signs of commoditization in just a second. But they’re not proactively managing where they’re going to play. And in an industry where it’s driven by big ideas and epics, you know that the next thing is coming. And right now we’re in the middle of one with AI. And firms,

seldom have plans to expand that performance envelope in a proactive and structured way. As a result, they just spin off a lot of different businesses. It’s really inefficient use of capital and time and resources. And the top firms do two things. They recognize that there is a performance envelope and two, they identify

where the puck is gonna be and how they’re going to skate there, if you will, in the future.

Jason Mlicki (21:02.028)
Yeah, in the, in the, in the ebook, you’ve got a real nice graphic. It sort of looks like a hurricane and the hurricane, like the eye of the hurricane sort of has the core of the business. And then at the periphery are these sort of like emerging solutions and new practices. And that’s, that was helpful, I think for me to kind of visualize what you’re talking about here. And I think that there’s my sense is what you’re saying is that, you know, a lot of times what happens is the firm has a core.

And it doubles down on that core so heavily that it sort of pays little attention to the periphery until the core is essentially, you know, really ailing and really in trouble. And then they have to aggressively pivot to the periphery much faster than they probably would like. And then of course what happens, you know, growth stalls or, or, or declines or whatever.

while you’re making that transition because you made the transition too late. so, and I think right now, what’s interesting about this right now is that AI is going to, well, we’re seeing this a lot of dimensions is that it used to be the core would get commoditized, right? The core would get attacked by new competitors or it might get attacked by technology or whatever. But I think AI is sort of dismantling the core in some ways, you know? So there, it’s not just,

Dave Patnaik from Jump would use the phrase getting fracked, the idea that your core solution might just get fracked entirely. It might just be completely wiped out overnight. And so this notion of the performance envelope, I think is going to be way more important over the next decade than it’s ever been. It’s always been important, but I think it’s just getting way more important because that commoditized, it goes from high value solution to commoditized to irrelevant.

That’s happening way faster now than it may be used to happen.

Jeff (23:00.389)
Yeah. And there’s a very easy way to know if you’re being commoditized. the first one is you should just assume that you are because you are. the second is there’s some telltale signs and our listeners will recognize these and probably go now, or maybe they’ll go, boy. When you start to get really formal RFPs,

Jason Mlicki (23:11.18)
Yes.

Jeff (23:28.687)
that outline in detail the parameters of your offer from prospect, you’re commoditized. That means there’s an imbalance of knowledge and firms are selecting those that meet these very specific criteria because everybody knows what the solution is, your commodity. If you’re starting to discount in order to get business,

Chances are you’re a commodity and your core is being challenged. If you’re starting to see buying titles change, they used to be strategic. Now there are little more tactical types of buyers or they’re coming in from other functional areas. You’re probably being commoditized. If you’re starting to see competitor names that you’ve never thought about, you’re probably being commoditized.

So there are a lot of telltale signs that are out there. You can’t avoid it. That’s why it’s a big issue. Most firms want to avoid it. They’re, they’re ostriches putting their head in the sand when they need to say, Hey, we plan to move from the core A to expanded performance envelope B or C within the next three years.

Right. And here’s how we’re going to do that. Most firms will, will kind of say that we’re going to do that expansion, but they have no idea how to get there. And the core starves them. Like you, you said, right. You’re not taking my budget. That’s my budget. I’m not investing in that new business. That’s my money. I’m giving that to my partners. I’m giving it. And that’s, that’s why they don’t do it because the BS of PS.

starts to play in that asset allocation that is critical to R &D and expansion.

Jason Mlicki (25:34.328)
Yeah. Yeah, no, I was thinking about your note, your comment about how you’re always getting commoditized and I’m going to tell a quick story. It’s going to be accelerated, but Bob Bade actually gave a great talk on this years ago, probably 10 years ago now at the knowledge architecture, K Connect conference in San Francisco. I was out there speaking and he spoke about his experience with re-engineering the corporation. So he was the marketer on that.

when that thought leadership concept came to market. And what he talked about was how the company that the firm that created the insight, I think it’s CS index, is that the name of it? Something like that sort of missed out on all the revenue that flew out of it. And essentially they created the insight, they created that solution, right? But it got scaled by the Accenture’s and the IBM’s of the world.

It was a multi-billion dollar solution and that firm that invented it got maybe $130 million out. And so, but that’s what great big firms do, right? Is they operationalize stuff and essentially sort of commoditize it. And that’s what large businesses do exceptionally well. So assume that anytime you discover some, you know, compelling insight and some unique solution, that that’s what’s going to happen and be prepared for that.

So he is a really great talk. can link out to it if I can still find it where he explains kind of, and it really is, it’s a failure in operationalizing the IP is really what it comes down to in that particular case. At least to hear him tell it. So my point in saying that was that these are, are interesting. I think they’re connected. So, um, all right, let’s talk, let’s talk about the third, the third hurdle of growth, um, because it’s, you know, so

So let’s say you navigate the culture. You figure out how to get the culture, moving in the right direction. You’ve managed the performance envelope and you’ve said, okay, we understand our core. We understand our periphery. We’re going to invest in our periphery. We’re going to, you know, our core is our cash cow. We’re going to use the money from the cow to feed the periphery. Right? Okay. You do all those things. Well, you figure that all out. And we’re to talk more about this in a subsequent episode, but there’s still a third hurdle that can basically knock you down and keep you from.

Jason Mlicki (27:58.04)
from succeeding and what is that?

Jeff (28:00.849)
I call it the thinker, seller, doer dynamic. most people will recognize this concept. You may not call it thinker, doer. As a matter of fact, was somebody threw out an expression at our IC triad roundtable that

Their BS and PS culture calls the thinker, seller, doer, the minder, the grinder, and the finder.

Jason Mlicki (28:32.546)
Yeah, yeah.

Jeff (28:34.893)
everybody recognize that there’s hunters and there’s farmers, right? We, we know these terms. I prefer the thinker seller doer to me. It’s more clean. but what ends up happening is these thinker seller doers because of the BS of PS and because there is no.

Jason Mlicki (28:49.09)
Mm-mm.

Jeff (29:03.729)
proactive management of the performance envelope really just start to operate in a decentralized and autonomous way. Generally by a practice or line of business. You’ll get somebody that’s a thinker seller and they will start generating insights in order to build their little practice. Maybe I should take a step back. I’m assuming everybody knows what a thinker seller do or

is. Let me anchor it in Jeff McKay’s thinking about this because I think it’s critical to think about how you solve it because this really is critical operationally because this is where the rubber hits the road because in professional services because of the BS of PS the structural and human elements of this the people are the product and they’re selling

the product and their R and D for the product.

And that whole mess of traditional commercialization in a, CPG or manufacturing firm is conducted in a very functional and disciplined way, but not in professional services. The SME carries all the weight and the strong voice and what they say tends to go and

the marketing and salespeople generally don’t have that deep kind of CPEG commercialization skillset. So the thinkers, you know, commercialize the product and it’s never market ready or seldom market ready. So the thinkers are the R and D, the insights, the thought leaders within the firm, the sellers,

Jeff (31:07.793)
are the people, not just the rainmakers, but the account managers, those building relationships with the firm. And then the solutions are the doers map to the solutions. How do we actually execute this to your earlier example? Is it a SaaS solution or is it $200 an hour? Right? Those are two ways of solving a problem. But right there, you had a seller doer saying, I’m doing it this way.

versus the other. That’s the type of dysfunction. One step further, and most people listening to this podcast are probably going to push back on this, but I align marketing with the thinkers. And some people would argue, no, no, they just communicators. And that’s probably true in a lot of firms, but people like you and me, we’re the thinkers and the marketers.

and I prefer to align marketing with the thinkers, the sellers, obviously with sales, doers are delivery and that’s a simplistic overlap, but that’s how I tend to think about it.

Jason Mlicki (32:26.41)
Yeah, it’s 100 % accurate. I agree with it entirely. What I see in a lot of firms is there really isn’t a thinker. It’s just a sell or doer. That’s all there is. And it’s not saying that people don’t think. Of course they think. It’s just that the firm is sort of so fixated on the here and the now, selling the next project.

Jeff (32:34.257)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (32:51.394)
But that’s all they think about. And they never step back to say, well, are we selling the right projects? Are we solving the right problems? Do we have a clear solution on how we solve point of view and how we solve them? All those types of questions. So in those firms, marketing is a support function to the seller. So it’s a seller to our firm. Marketing is a support function to the seller. Marketing should be in the thinking set. It should be in the teaching and educating space. That’s the real role of marketing.

I believe so. OK, now we’re we’re coming up on time. Here’s what I want to do is I want you to sort of tease the solution. So you’ve built a growth framework that helps firms overcome these three sets of hurdles to build what you call growth by design. And, you know, it’s going to be one of those kind of like, you know, it’s this old school television where it’s like, hey,

Coming next time, here’s the two minute sales pitch. So give us kind of like the kind of the just the quick two minute summary of the framework itself. And next time we get together, we’re going to break down the three systems underlying the framework that lets you solve for these three hurdles. So give us the two minute version.

Jeff (33:51.737)
Hahaha

Jeff (34:12.429)
So in the paper, I use my cycling life as a metaphor for how to think about growth. And when I first started cycling seriously, I thought I was really fit. And then I got with some fit guys and I got dropped. And I realized I was just working out and they were training.

I mean, they had disciplined approach. had diets. They were doing things for sprints. They were doing things for endurance and all of this stuff. So I said, I need to get some help. I got a coach and I was introduced to this training model by a coach named Friel. And it was so simplistic and powerful to help me understand how you increase performance of given areas. And I was like,

that really applies to growth in professional services. So it became the impetus for this model and these systems. And essentially the framework is made up of seven elements or building blocks that are structured in a molecular fashion, kind of like McKinsey’s helix, right? They’re all, they’re all.

Jason Mlicki (35:32.68)
great, a helix too.

Jeff (35:35.805)
all connected and interdependent in a weakness in one helps the other. But those atoms are arranged into three systems. The first one is what I call the GPS system, and it addresses the performance envelope. It says, we’re here, we’re going there, and here’s how we’re going to get there. Very strategic and very specific. The second one,

is the IC triad. The IC triad addresses that thinker, seller, doer dynamic. And it’s probably one of the most critical systems in the whole framework because that’s where the rubber hits the road and where most of our listeners live day to day and where the BS of PS and all the dysfunction plays out the most. And then the third

is what I call the grit system. And that is the cultural DNA of the firm. What makes it tick? What does it reward? You made a comment about, you most firms don’t have thinkers, they have seller-doers. That’s part of a culture. They worry about the short term, they don’t think long term. Innovation is not important. Thought leadership is not rewarded.

And the grit system is the limiter on growth, I shouldn’t say on growth, on the options open to you for your go-to-market strategy. You can’t be a thought leader and position your firm to be a thought leader if you don’t reward innovation, right? It’s that simple. So the grit system,

looks at what’s your culture, what’s your flavor of BS, PS, and how do you use that to your advantage?

Jason Mlicki (37:40.206)
Yeah. No, I really like your working out and training analogy. I really, in this case, you use the metaphor of cycling, but it’s very helpful to the reader. I mean, I’m kind of, I guess, encouraging people to read the ebook as we kind of, we’re going to unpack this further. It’s helpful. It’s a helpful metaphor to understand why you need these systems. Because at the end of day,

when you wake up and say, wait a minute, we’re going to grow this business by design, not just through raw effort and hope. You need a framework to do that. need an underlying model to govern the things that you do. so, you you’ve done a really nice job with that. So, okay, let’s take it to wrap. I know we’re kind of leaving listeners hanging a little bit, but that’s by design.

We dug into the three hurdles, I think really well. And next time we get together, we’re going to dig into the growth framework itself and those three systems and how they help you overcome those hurdles as a firm leader. So great work, great thinking, excited to kind of get to episode two of this series. So we’ll do that next week.

Jeff (38:58.235)
See you buddy.