Jason Mlicki (00:00.654)
So, Jeff, I have a question for you. this is off the top of your head. I don’t expect you to have statistical data at the ready. What percentage of firms do you think survive a founder’s retirement? And when I say founder, mean, like the type of firm where you have a really visionary founder who is highly visible.

they’re very intertwined with the reputation of the firm. And so they’re that really strong visionary with a strong point of view on the market and where it’s going and people sort of follow them. When they retire, what percentage you think actually survive? I don’t know the answer. Like I said, this is off the top of your head. What do you think?

Jeff McKay (00:55.018)
A third.

Jason Mlicki (00:56.344)
third.

Yeah, I think it’s interesting. You think about like small businesses in this sense we’re talking about. They say like think a half, less than half survived the second generation, right?

Jeff McKay (01:11.222)
Yeah, the number is really low.

Jason Mlicki (01:14.476)
Yeah. And then even fewer survived the third. And you think about it, was thinking about this as we were chatting, Wendy’s, Wendy’s is headquartered in Columbus and it’s founded by.

Jeff McKay (01:26.838)
Wendy’s the hamburger place?

Jason Mlicki (01:30.126)
What other Wendy’s is there? are you?

Jeff McKay (01:34.156)
Well, this is a podcast about professional services. just threw me off there. was like, they were just in the news. Yes.

Jason Mlicki (01:38.862)
I’m teasing you. Yeah. So Dave Thomas founded Wendy’s back in, I don’t know, 70s or 80s. First restaurant was downtown Columbus. Anyway, that’s an organization that I think has always struggled since he passed away. Like it’s never really found its footing as the way it had when he was there. And you just think about like big companies like that with

Huge organizations and massive brands struggle when the visionary steps away. How much harder is it when the visionary is like intertwined is the persona that is the marketing and is the, I think you’d call it the insight engine and the relationship hub and everything else.

Jeff McKay (02:21.548)
Yeah.

Jeff McKay (02:28.33)
Yeah. The product.

Jason Mlicki (02:30.476)
Yeah, I mean the percentage so the percentage has to be small. It’s got to be it’s got to be maybe a third is generous.

Jeff McKay (02:37.132)
Yeah, I think it may be.

Jason Mlicki (02:40.002)
So it’s a problem, right? Like I guess that’s kind of what we’re talking about today is what do do about this? How do you survive this? know, when you have a founder leave or if you’re a founder, how do you prepare the firm for your departure? Or if maybe it’s not the founder really, maybe it’s like we’ve encountered some firms years ago, we met a firm in New England where there was a sort of prolific thought leader that wasn’t the founder of the firm.

he was definitely the voice and everything sort of like, you know, was built around this guy, you know, and, you know, and him leaving or would be a major problem, right? So.

Jeff McKay (03:22.7)
Yeah, but you’re talking about an issue where the brand and in particular the point of view is one in the same with the founder. We’re not just talking operationally, we’re talking the market face.

Jason Mlicki (03:36.248)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (03:44.888)
Well, I think it’s both, isn’t it? I mean, you have situations where you’ve got a strong voice that is very public facing, that’s maybe an author or a podcaster, or they’re very out in front and everybody’s visible and everybody knows who they are. And then you have situations where maybe you don’t see that as publicly, you don’t see them as visible from a marketing sense, but they’re

Jeff McKay (03:47.948)
Hmm.

Jason Mlicki (04:14.508)
They’re certainly in the market, driving the conversation with prospects. They’re the lead on the relationship. They’re the trusted advisor and everything is supporting them. By the way, this is a funny story. One of my friends worked in like hedge fund type on Wall Street. And he’d always would tell me the story about this fund. And I can’t, I don’t know the name of the fund. don’t even know who it is. And he’s like, literally Jason, he goes, go to this fund, the way it operates, there’s a guy.

the guy that is like the lead on this thing, the visionary, right? And he stands in the middle of a giant warehouse basically. And around him, it’s a circular table all around him with screens and keyboards everywhere. Imagine this guy, right? And he’s got a headset in and there’s like 200 people in this room around him. And he is basically just this like architect running at everything. He’s just running everything. You know, he’s telling everybody what to do. And he’s just sitting in the middle of this giant hub of like stock tickers and.

Jeff McKay (05:11.012)
just buy sell you know on a whim.

Jason Mlicki (05:14.157)
Yes, he’s like, you would not believe this. was this was years ago. I don’t know if it’s still around. And this is a highly successful fund, right? Where like the the the the fund lead basically was he was the show, you know, if he if he didn’t come back tomorrow, that play shuts down because nobody knew what to do without him.

Jeff McKay (05:32.883)
Yeah, sounds like Warren Buffett.

Jason Mlicki (05:35.849)
We’re going to find out, right?

Jeff McKay (05:37.887)
Yeah, that’s for sure. That’s for sure. So let’s jump into this topic of what to do when your whole brand and firm is built around a single individual. How do you move forward from there?

Jason Mlicki (05:56.878)
And it could be a single practice, right? It might not be the whole firm. It might be you have a practice built around it.

Jeff McKay (06:00.171)
Mmm.

Jason Mlicki (06:04.686)
And what do you do about that? So I’ve framed it as the working subject or the working title, finding and developing your next experts, right? Figuring out who your next experts are and then developing them so that they can be successful. Because there’s another half of this that we didn’t talk about. The other part of this problem is that if you are that person and you want to exit, you want to sell, then your firm is worthless if that’s how it’s built.

because no one wants to buy it for you to, for the best employee to leave. Right.

Jeff McKay (06:40.895)
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. That’s kind of the standard, entrepreneurial challenge when you start to build a business, right. And setting it up to scale beyond yourself. This one, that we’re talking about today just tends to focus on.

Jason Mlicki (06:42.008)
So that’s a problem.

Jeff McKay (07:08.403)
a thought leadership perspective, a point of view perspective that moves from founder as inside engine to institutionalized expertise.

I think is kind of the fundamental issue that we’re talking about.

Jason Mlicki (07:27.83)
Yeah, it’s funny because the inclination that I hear when we talk about this with clients is that they’ll say to me often the same thing. They’ll say, well, there’s no one person that could replace so-and-so, whoever so-and-so is, right? And they see that as a problem. It’s like, well, I mean, if we just had that one person who could step in and be Jeff and it’s like, I’m talking about you. And maybe that’s not the goal.

Maybe you’re better off having three or four people because of for so many reasons, we could maybe talk about that later. But maybe it’s, you you don’t want the one because you have a single point of failure. Why create another single point of failure? Right.

Jeff McKay (08:10.475)
Yeah, yeah, it reminds me of the movie Moneyball.

Jason Mlicki (08:14.445)
Yeah.

Jeff McKay (08:15.667)
when they were trying to replace key players, they just couldn’t do it. They couldn’t afford to replace the key players. So they built them in the aggregate. And I think that’s a fascinating analogy for us to consider. It’s who can get on base for the people that watch the movie. God, I love that movie.

It’s a great movie.

Jason Mlicki (08:45.878)
Yeah, that’s a great movie. It’s a really incredible story, just in general. OK.

Jeff McKay (08:49.963)
All right, so let’s knock this topic out of the park.

Jason Mlicki (08:54.186)
Okay, so here’s the thing. Where I started, by the way, is I said, okay, if you want to identify your next experts, then you got to start by understanding the characteristics of a great expert. Like, what are you actually looking for? Right? And, you know, as you know, I mean, you’re sure you follow the same bucket. We’ve worked with hundreds of subject matter experts over the last decade or two to help them bring out their best thinking and help them.

Jeff McKay (09:05.195)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (09:23.882)
figure out what their point of view is on the market and raise their visibility. And so I thought back to that. And I just thought through all the different people that we’ve worked with over the years to do that. And I thought about who is most successful and who’s least. And then I just kind of put that into a bucket of characteristics, what I see from the people that are best at this and have the most success with this. I also came up with five.

And I actually have them in priority. So I actually think that these five are the priority in which you need to think about them. Because the inclination for a lot of people is to look for.

you know, someone who’s magnetic, someone who can command the stage, who’s like, you know, Alpha dog or something, right? Someone that’s just a bit larger than life personas. And I actually don’t think that that’s the starting point. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Handsome, tall. That’s it. That’s it. That’s all I

Jeff McKay (10:23.039)
Somebody like you.

Jeff McKay (10:28.139)
Charming, intelligent.

Jason Mlicki (10:35.426)
So anyway, so I’m gonna start my first one with one of my favorite quotes. And not only enough, I had to end up doing some research on this quote, because it wasn’t from who I thought it was to I thought it was. It’s actually a quote that was delivered to Jim Collins by a guy by the name of John W. Gardner. And so when Jim Collins was early in his Stanford teaching career, he asked this guy Gardner for advice. Gardner, by the way, is super interesting guy that you can do a whole story about.

Jeff McKay (10:38.187)
All right, let’s hear them.

Jason Mlicki (11:05.198)
But and his quote was, occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested? It’s one of my favorite quotes. And what I love about that quote is that it’s again, the first the first trait to me is being interested. It’s not trying to be like you talk a lot about this, where you say, well, when someone would come to you and say, I want to build my personal brand, that’s sort of like that was a red flag for you.

Jeff McKay (11:16.181)
Take that.

Jason Mlicki (11:34.892)
this isn’t the right person. Because that means they’re trying to make themselves visible and you become more visible essentially by being just curious and interested in others.

Jeff McKay (11:50.026)
And the market and people more specifically, they see through that. It’s disingenuous and it makes it really hard, I think, to build credibility if you’re just trying to be interesting versus interested. I mean, that is just great counsel. I love that. And what a great characteristic to start with in an expert. So good choice.

Jason Mlicki (12:19.424)
Yeah, it’s funny because I would argue what’s funny about that, obviously it made a big impact because I mean, Collins wrote two of the greatest business books of all time, in my opinion. you know, and in the fundamental aspect of those books that are so compelling is that they are based on being interested. mean, they’re entirely research-driven, data-driven, and they’re just curiosity explorations. Why do great companies become great? How?

It’s a super open-ended question that he goes to try to unlock. So I actually think that that’s really cool that it ends up being this piece of advice he gets that clearly had an impact on his life and led us to, I would argue, one of the best thought leaders of all time and the Hall of Fame. Now, my second one you’re going to laugh is kind of the opposite. It’s actually being interesting.

Jeff McKay (13:05.717)
Yeah. Yeah, he’s good.

Jason Mlicki (13:17.462)
So oddly enough, when you get interested in the world, you become insanely interested, right? There’s this notion of T-shaped individuals. So people that are super deep subject matter experts on something, but they’re sort of well read, well traveled. They can connect disparate things together sort of easily. They’re just interesting to talk to and you want to spend time with them.

People like that make for great thought leaders. The ones that can say, well, Jason, when I was in India, I saw this, this, and this. Or when I was backpacking in the Andes, whatever. It doesn’t have to be a travel-related thing. could be anything. But it’s just the people that are the best subject matter experts are the best at becoming visible experts, whatever you want to call it, tend to have those two things together. They’re interested in the world, and that makes them interesting.

Jeff McKay (14:12.649)
Yeah, it’s an it’s a interesting tension that exists, right? I like that one as well. And I like that imagery of the T shape individual because that broad based experience allows you to kind of weave a tapestry, be a great storyteller, give context.

be able to relate to many different people. can always contextualize, ideas so that they resonate with people. think that’s, that’s a powerful combination. Good. You’re coming out of the gate fast, buddy.

Jason Mlicki (15:00.59)
That’s why I said these are sort of declining order. I mean that because like, I’ve got five here. It doesn’t mean you have to have all five. You might find that there’s a person that has one or two of these things and you feel like you can build something around them or you can help them in the other areas. It’s not like people just show up with all these innate characteristics. You don’t just show up one day and decide you’re interested in the world and then you’re interested, right? Sometimes that happens over time, but.

This third one could be, it could be more than one. Honestly, I kind of mashed them together mainly because I wanted five, but, also because I do think they sort of like kind of go together. And it’s this idea of being both sort of flexible and cooperative and confident all at the same time. You know, I opened this by saying your inclination is to look for someone who’s magnetic and owns the stage. Some of the greatest thought leaders, subject matter experts are

are actually very introverted and aren’t super comfortable with that unless they’re in their domain where they’re most successful. But at the same time, you can’t be afraid to be wrong. And they have to be comfortable admitting when they’re wrong. They have to be confident enough to take some arrows on their back, as you would say. Yet when I say flexible and cooperative, what I mean is you’re looking for people that are, I call them yes and people, not no but people. So people that have

Jeff McKay (16:25.823)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (16:27.394)
very much a growth mindset and can ingest new information and pivot and say, I think this is my view on the world. And then new information shows up and they say, well, I didn’t thought about that or I hadn’t seen that data before. Okay, well, let’s think about it differently. And they’re okay with that. They don’t kind of dig their heels in and get set in their ways and refuse to acknowledge new information. One, because they’re super difficult to work with, which means it makes it hard to get high quality.

perspective into the market and two, because it’s damaging. At the end of the day, the world’s complex and we’re learning every day. And if you’re not doing that, you’re not gonna be a very effective thought leader.

Jeff McKay (17:09.577)
Yeah. Well, the confidence, would definitely make my list because you do have to take risks. You do have to put yourself out there and you need to be okay when you’re attacked. So confidence goes without saying, but as you’re describing, this characteristic, what I’m hearing is they have a desire.

to pursue truth. They’re, they’re looking for what is right. What is correct? What is true? and when you have that mindset, you’re open to adjusting your perspective. You’re what is it? Strong opinions, loosely held, is kind of a mantra. I think of real learners.

Jason Mlicki (17:41.912)
Yes.

Jeff McKay (18:09.755)
but they’re pursuing truth and they’re open to, to new inputs as a result of that. and the litmus test is, does this move us towards truth? and I, I think that’s the, the characteristic on, on top of the confidence. you know, that in the end, that’s the goal.

Jason Mlicki (18:38.87)
Yeah, I really like the way you put that, that it’s pursuing truth. It’s funny as you were talking, I was thinking of myself, it’s in politics. If you change your mind, you’re a flip-flopper and you’re branded as a flip-flopper forever. It’s like, you have to show up on day one of your political career with all the perfect positions already aligned and you can never deviate off them for the rest of your life. But in this, that’s a huge weakness. You want the opposite of that. You want that person who’s like, well, actually it turns out I was wrong. I thought this was truth, but

truth. looks a little differently than I thought. And it’s actually also a super powerful skill to employ and thought leadership, being able to admit that you were wrong. Right. It makes that person that much more powerful in delivering a message. So, okay. My fourth one, they need to be articulate. And when I say that, I don’t, I don’t, you don’t, there’s a, there’s a belief that

great thought leaders are exceptional writers. Some are, most are not. In fact, many are not. I guess most is more than many, so most are not. What I mean by that is that they’re good at distilling complex ideas down and simplifying them in a way that people can understand. They’re good at logically structuring their thinking.

Jeff McKay (19:48.435)
Hahaha

Jason Mlicki (20:08.716)
I mean, ideally, they understand the foundations of a defensible argument, and they know how to make one. If not, can teach people, can learn that. But it’s really just this idea of there’s so many experts that we end up working with that really struggle just to get anything out of their head that’s coherent for other people to really interpret. So someone that already has some of those skills naturally is

going to be more successful than someone that struggles with those skills. I’m not saying you can’t develop them, because I truly believe you can. But you’re looking for that person that maybe already has that. Now, in fact, for years, our development partner that we worked with, the head of that firm that led to web development, I always felt like you could ask him about any piece of technology, and he could

give you a coherent explanation of what it was and how it worked. And in a way that you as a non-technologist could understand. He wasn’t a visible thought leader. He wasn’t out in the marketplace writing and speaking and doing all kinds of stuff. But man, he was incredibly articulate. And he was a thought leader in all of his interactions with clients, right? So that’s my fourth.

Jeff McKay (21:28.809)
But I think that’s a really good one. And my high school English teacher, Anne Richmond, would agree with you on this point. She would be a saint and to the point, Jeff. And while you don’t have to be an exceptional writer, writing helps you formulate your thoughts.

Jason Mlicki (21:38.158)
memory man.

Jeff McKay (21:57.716)
and be succinct and to the point. And it’s painful for everyone. Sure, some people can write faster than others because they have a gift. But if you’re gonna be a thought leader, you’re gonna have to write because that’s how you formulate succinct arguments and get on point.

Jason Mlicki (22:23.67)
And it’s also how you develop your thinking. listened to a great interview this morning with Cal Newport, who wrote the book, Deep Work. And he was talking about how he’s greatly concerned as others are that AI is sort of destroying the critical thinking skills of young people, mainly because they don’t feel like they have to read or write as much anymore. AI can summarize it, AI can draft it.

Jeff McKay (22:31.787)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (22:50.84)
draft a short piece. And sometimes it’s that act of researching, reading, learning, and trying to write it down, write down what you think about it, is how you learn and how you develop expertise, which is, again, so again, it’s almost a loop back to that notion of being interested again, right? But so anyway.

Jeff McKay (23:14.239)
Yeah, I agree with that one. That’s a good one. All right, last one.

Jason Mlicki (23:17.87)
All right, my fifth, what’s that? My fifth and final, and there’s probably more, but it’s just, you’re looking for someone who’s a great storyteller. And that’s why I said these are in declining order, because that’s something that I’m sure can be taught to some extent. But there are people that we know that are just, they just know how to hold someone’s attention and entertain and inform and guide all at the same time. I think back to, you remember the,

We had, can’t think of Gunnar Branson. Is that his last name?

Jeff McKay (23:49.769)
Yeah, Gunner. He’s a great storyteller.

Jason Mlicki (23:52.43)
What a storyteller that guy is. You could sit and listen to him all day, talk about anything. you wouldn’t really, you he was he was a guest on our show years ago. And there are people like that that are just such great storytellers that. You know, if you have that person and you see that person, that’s something you definitely want to lean into. I’m not going to say that that’s something that’s frequently there, nor is it easily identifiable.

But it’s a skill that if someone has, you want to take advantage of that.

Jeff McKay (24:30.335)
Gosh, that one is so important and it is both a gift and a skill. Gunner is gifted in this regard. He actually wrote a book about his childhood up in Alaska, which when you think about a carve out for a story, what a great story to tell.

but how he tells it is incredible. But if you ask Gunner, Gunner’s done a lot of writing and he’s done a lot of storytelling in order to build that skill. And I think he would argue that it is gift and skill and you’re gonna be starting from some point, but.

you need to be able to tell a story. I wish I had that gift. I wish I had the skill because when I look at myself, I feel like that is a characteristic I wish I had that I do not. But you know somebody who’s a storyteller when you’re sitting around them.

Jason Mlicki (25:46.616)
Yeah. And some of it, think to your point is, it’s not only a gift or a skill, it’s a love and a desire. There are people that love to tell stories. They love to entertain. And when you have that mindset that can spill over into this work, you know, there’s a belief, I’ve battled this belief sort of for years, which is that, you know, B2B marketing is boring, right? It’s boring stuff.

Jeff McKay (25:58.059)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Mlicki (26:16.606)
know, it can’t be entertaining, which is just not true. Like, you know, you can find all kinds of ways to engage and entertain people while you’re educating and informing them. But you got to have the confidence to do it. And as a firm, you also have to have the comfort to let it happen. A lot of firms aren’t comfortable with that. They want to be, you know, suit and tie all the time, buttoned up. you know, anything that looks not like that is a problem, right? And it’s less than it used to be, but there’s still a lot of that rolling around.

Jeff McKay (26:46.603)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think this is also an area where your marketing team can and should be helping you. If you don’t have the storytelling chops, maybe somebody on the marketing team does. Be open to letting them help you formulate a good story and let it evolve.

Jason Mlicki (26:47.118)
So.

Jason Mlicki (27:12.77)
which circles back to point three, know, like being open to that collaborative approach, to cooperative approach to getting a better way to get it, to get your thinking understood. So.

Anything I missed, those are my key five. I’m sure there’s hundreds more you could come up with, you know, and maybe, but, is there a key one that I missed for you? Like, Jason, how did you miss this?

Jeff McKay (27:45.287)
I cannot think of what it would be. I liked your,

Jeff McKay (27:52.585)
I liked your list.

My only addition would have been the pursuit of truth, which just built on what you said.

Jason Mlicki (28:03.64)
Yeah, which I love, by the way, by the way, I love that notion of pursuit of truth because it’s.

It comes back to that falling in love with the problem that we always talk about, Like not the solution. Now, we’re not here to redress the solution as thought leadership and try to get the market to think our widget is superior. We want to lead them to that conclusion, right? OK.

Jeff McKay (28:13.855)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (28:32.334)
Okay, so how do we develop them? so let’s, let’s go, let’s retrace to the start of this conversation real quick. Cause I think at the end of the day, like we said, you know, you’ve got this problem. You’re trying to decouple the firm from this visionary voice or this, you know, uh, founder point, founder leader or whatever, whatever, for one of many reasons. You now you’ve identified some people, you’ve got some things you’re looking for and you said, okay, here’s three or four people that we think are the right.

people do this, or maybe it’s more, maybe it’s 10 or 15. I don’t know. I it all depends on the size of the firm and how widely you want to look at this process. So how do we develop them? So I came up with five things here too. And I think these are in sequential order. They might not be, but I think they are.

Jeff McKay (29:19.691)
You mean we actually have to develop them? We can’t just find them with those characteristics and be done and just designate them thought leaders?

Jason Mlicki (29:29.366)
So correct, back to point three, can’t take a fixed or point, what was it? Yeah, point three, we can’t take a fixed mindset to a growth oriented problem, growth mindset oriented problem.

Jeff McKay (29:42.282)
And you’re telling me with these five, this is a science. So this is perfect. You, you identify them and, and every time we identify them, we’re going to, we’re going to absolutely hit it out of the park because, the criteria are so solid and, nobody’s going to fail at picking a thought leader. Right.

Jason Mlicki (30:05.326)
100 % correct. This is an audio only podcast. But if you were watching in video, you would see me in my lab with my lab coat on and there’s a whole behind me. There’s just walls of beakers and gear, everything you can imagine in a science setting. I’m like Mr. Wizard here and every everything is perfectly. Yeah, exactly. So that’s the image I want everyone to take away from this is Jason in his in his mad science lab concocting the perfect process for

minting the next Jim Collins because it’s really easy. I don’t think you know, take anybody. You could literally take anybody.

Jeff McKay (30:36.329)
It’s really easy and guaranteed. comes with the JSON Maliki rattle back guaranteed to work. That’s good. All right, let’s jump into these five because I’m waiting with bated breath.

Jason Mlicki (30:49.39)
Seal approval. OK. I know you’re not, but. So OK. The first one is, think, music to your ears, is it all starts with culture, right? You have to make sure that you have a culture that rewards what I’m calling controlled risk taking and experimentation. Some of this is like.

You just have to have a culture where it’s okay for someone to have the space and time to do deep thinking and, and explore that thinking and try to develop perspective. if you’ve got a culture that is super, you know, utilization driven and all you care about is billability. It’s really hard for next births to emerge because they don’t feel like they’ve got the permission to do so. So you have to start with that. Do you have.

Do people feel like they have permission to do so? Back when I had a pretty large, well, it’s really large, but we had 10 or 12 people in our agency at one time. And when I started to push our thought leadership program off the ground 10, 15 years ago, that was the first thing that people would ask me is, well, you know, where’s the time come from? And I would say, well, let’s create time in your calendar and just agree on like you have X amount of time in a given week that you’re

you can work on this, at least that’s what I try to do. And so, probably better ways, but that was the first question that people were asking me, which means that our culture at the time was not set up to allow for that yet. And we had some work to do, right?

So that’s step one. And if you can’t get that in place, you can’t really do anything else, right?

Jeff McKay (32:36.041)
Yeah, I think that’s

I agree. agree. so right culture. Yeah. Slam dunk.

Jason Mlicki (32:47.968)
Okay, so the second thing is you have to give people a safe space. And what I mean by a safe space is a space where they can develop their voice, hone their skills, get their thinking into the marketplace without a whole lot of perceived risk or fear. A few large firms I’ve seen do this. I really liked a couple of things I’ve seen. There was a huge architecture firm called HOK.

And years ago, what they did is they had built, have their public facing thought leadership, which was sort of like everything you would imagine articles and insights to kind of keep market shaping narrative that they’re trying to take. And then they had a blog and in their case, their blog was more culture oriented, lower risk spoke more to talent, but you would notice that it was like, it was a great place for a junior person to sort of build their voice and get comfortable putting themselves out there.

in a less risky way. And I’ve seen other firms do similar things. you have to create a space where they can do it, where they don’t feel threatened or at risk, or they’re going to get chopped off at the knees somehow by accident. Whatever that is. It doesn’t have to be a blog. That was just an example of one that I thought for years was a really smart way to approach it. I don’t know if that was the thinking of what they were doing, but that’s what I saw in what they were doing.

Jeff McKay (34:09.161)
Yeah, there’s a lot of different venues for doing this. And they can even be internal facing. It’s about building up the muscles and the muscle memory of refining your storytelling capability of being succinct and to the point. And you can do that.

Jason Mlicki (34:20.29)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff McKay (34:33.717)
focused internally as much as you can externally as well, which feels a lot safer for people.

Jason Mlicki (34:36.365)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (34:41.058)
Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. I hadn’t even thought about that. You think about healthy social internet these days. That’s a great place for this to happen in a decent sized firm. And quite frankly, for junior staffers, raising their visibility in the firm is really important. And it’s kind of hard to do in a hybrid distributed workforce, right? It’s kind of tricky. So I love that. That’s great.

My third one is, I said provide collaborators. And what I mean by that, I always try to tell clients that thought leadership is a team sport. There’s this perspective, think, sometimes from marketers that thought leadership is the subject matter expert’s job and vice versa. that’s just not the case. So you can’t just toss them a chat GPT license and say, you’ll figure it out. Good luck.

You know, you have to give them access to comms people and designers and videographers and editors and people that can help them, you know, develop an argument, understand the flaws in that argument, tell a story, that kind of stuff. so, you know, if you want people to be successful, they need support. They can’t do it on their own. And sometimes I see in firms where we have the problem we’re talking about that, you know, larger than life persona did it on their own.

Right? They figured it all out and they can’t understand why other people can’t follow that vein. And that’s just usually not very realistic.

Jeff McKay (36:16.587)
Yeah. I think one of the most important support capabilities that a firm needs to have is a business minded marketer. if, if you don’t have a business minded marketer who’s helping to shape the story and the argument from a business perspective, you’re not well served. And I think too many firms have marketers.

Jason Mlicki (36:27.032)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff McKay (36:46.515)
without the business acumen required to really help take their thought leadership to the next level. The marketer should not be the one doing all of the writing and formulating of the point of view. That would be just contradictory to what we’re saying here, but they should be.

core to formulating the point of view. And in most firms don’t have that. And that’s because they’re not investing in marketing at the level that they should be. So if you don’t have a marketer that can raise your thought leadership game, consider getting a new marketer or making an investment in that marketer so they can.

Jason Mlicki (37:18.69)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (37:41.086)
And sometimes you talk about this, but there also has to be a desire from that marketer or marketers to want to learn the business and understand the business. Some just don’t really want to. They want the line, as you call it, the practices, the folks that work in to explain the business to them and then they’ll window dress it.

I’m not saying that’s everybody, but there are people that just aren’t interested in doing it. And going back to point one, you also need your marketers to be interested. They can’t just be waiting for the answer. In this portion of marketing, I’m not saying, I don’t know, maybe in consumer marketing it’s different, I have no idea. But in this world, I think it’s important for them to want to understand the business.

And I’m not convinced everybody does. Some people just don’t want to, and that’s okay. That doesn’t make them bad people, flawed human beings just means that that’s not what they want. So make sure you discern that. So I love that you brought that up because that’s how a healthy relationship needs to work. Again, as a team sport, which leads me to the next one, which is process. You we talked a lot about, you gotta put a process in place for this stuff.

I just think way too many firms, it’s very loosey goosey. Here’s a topic, we scheduled an interview, let’s talk.

show up and brain dump. And that’s not really very effective. You have to have a process governing how you go from, this is an issue in the market we need to take a position on to finish product, know, podcast, article, speaking event, whatever it might be that frames how you get from point A to point B.

Jason Mlicki (39:34.58)
And when you do that, when you establish a very clear structure process, what you do for your subject matter experts is you make their life easier because they know what’s expected of them. And that’s the biggest problem we see in most firms is they just don’t know what’s expected of them. They think they show up, you give them a topic, and they walk away and come back with some finished, crisp, complete, HPR ready article. And that’s not how it works. It never works like that.

Jeff McKay (39:58.718)
Right. That’s right. Making sausage is an ugly task. there is a method to the madness. You know, that might actually be a great episode for us to do at some point, is what does that process look like?

Jason Mlicki (40:18.702)
If you don’t think we’ll bore everybody to sleep, I’m happy to do it. You know what, we could record that. know, if you go on, there’s a, you know, water dropping or rainfall podcast, we can produce that. It could be our version of that. It could be the series of process podcasts. Yeah, exactly. Listen to Jason talk about leadership process. Oh my God. This is the worst.

Jeff McKay (40:21.843)
Yeah, yeah, we’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about that.

Jeff McKay (40:34.187)
Waking up at three o’clock in the morning and need some help getting back to sleep. Here you go. Here’s research development process. No, because you’re such a great storyteller. It will be compelling.

Jason Mlicki (40:50.322)
Kind of you to say, I’m not so sure. Okay, so the last one is just give training. I mean, it’s really just teach people the elements of a well-made argument. Teach them the process for developing one. Give them coaching and support along the way. This kind of loops back to number two, giving people safe space. One of the best ways to give them safe space

Jeff McKay (40:55.679)
Well, let’s bring this thing home.

Jason Mlicki (41:16.052)
is to put them into groups and give them the opportunity to work together to bring out their thinking on, on, on a issue with again, the help of a collaborator. Right. So, when we do training for clients, that’s how we structure it. We structure it as, know, you assemble people into groups, you let those groups work on an issue, and give them support along the way. And so it’s experiential learning, right? They’re learning how to do something in a, in a safe space.

in a controlled way in which they’re taught process and all those things. So I can’t emphasize enough how valuable that is for firms that actually invest in it. Most firms don’t because they don’t invest in process or training. They just don’t see either one as super important here. They just think, well, we just need a good writer in the room who can capture all my brilliant ideas and turn them into something. I need a great videographer to film everything and edit it down. AI will edit it down.

That’s kind of, but I don’t know if you’re going to get to lasting meaningful insight.

Jeff McKay (42:22.239)
Well, one of, I think one of the things that’s really important, and I don’t know, this pulls together a couple of your items, but if you’re going to develop thought leaders, you need to get as many at bats as you possibly can in terms of, you know, formulating ideas.

Jason Mlicki (42:22.498)
So that’s my five or my 10.

Jeff McKay (42:49.151)
but the delivery of those ideas. If we separate the two, although it’s a Venn diagram in my mind, because the more you talk about, write about, teach around this given topic, you’re going to evolve the ideas. So get as many bats as possible. And when you think about a channel mix,

writing, podcast, webinar, those are all different contexts for, is context the plural of that? Context, different contexts in order to present. But one of the things that I always tell my thought leaders to do, they don’t all do it because it’s a time requirement.

Jason Mlicki (43:30.286)
Context, context I made that up.

Jeff McKay (43:48.064)
But to join an organization like Toastmasters, where you’re up in front of people always presenting ideas, they may not be your thought leadership ideas, but it’s amazing what Toastmasters methodology does to developing confidence and articulation for thought leaders. So if you live in a geography that has Toastmaster chapters,

Jason Mlicki (43:51.468)
Mm. Yeah.

Jeff McKay (44:17.949)
I would strongly suggest that you become a part of that because it will make a big difference in your thought leadership creation and delivery.

Jason Mlicki (44:29.582)
and in your career in general, right? I mean, just getting more comfortable in front of it. I what’s that famous Seinfeld line is that people’s two biggest fears, number one is public speaking and number two is death. So essentially if you’re at a funeral, they’d rather be in the casket than delivering the ULG. One of his greatest lines, right? It’s like, so yeah, it’s a big fear, big fear for people.

Jeff McKay (44:31.807)
Yeah, yeah.

Jeff McKay (44:49.343)
Hahaha

Jeff McKay (45:01.055)
So get some of that.

Jason Mlicki (45:01.186)
Well, yeah, I like that. I like that a lot, too. If you you bring more repetition to things, it becomes easier the more you practice. I still remember, you know, I’ve been writing our weekly newsletter now for, think, I don’t know, almost 15 years. Missed this week, by the way, so for listeners, anybody who reads it, sorry, but I still remember the first time I wrote the very first piece that went into that and being so nervous and so scared to put this thing into the marketplace.

and now I’ve been, I’ve written, I don’t know how many of these things, thousand I’ve lost track. and I forget what I’m so well, thank you. But, but you get more comfortable over time and you get more comfortable in your voice. So get more comfortable and you get better at it as you go. Right. so it’s just, that’s, that’s a great piece of advice and the toast masters, both of them are great pieces of advice. So, all right. Well,

Jeff McKay (45:35.679)
Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great newsletter. Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (46:00.394)
Thanks for going on this journey. Hopefully this was an enlightening story and not a, you know, rainfall episode for listeners.

Jeff McKay (46:09.259)
Yeah. So you know the best time to start formulating your next birth.

Jason Mlicki (46:15.438)
Yesterday?

Jeff McKay (46:18.101)
Yeah, yeah. Get started on it. inertia is strong around this, particularly if you have a strong founder who’s already doing the task. and that founder is probably a control freak and a perfectionist. you got to let go of that and you have to start formulating, your next birds.

Jason Mlicki (46:45.666)
I’m looking forward to meeting the founder that’s not a control freak and not.

Jeff McKay (46:49.867)
Hey, I’m raising my hand on that front. I’m raising my hand.

Jason Mlicki (46:53.134)
I mean, yeah, that’s a tricky one, right? I think it’s hard. I think it’s hard to not be those things. think it’s such a rarity. So all right.

Jeff McKay (46:59.071)
Yeah.

Jeff McKay (47:05.237)
So if you’re having trouble letting go, give one of us a call, we’ll help you.

Jason Mlicki (47:09.07)
Fair, fair ask. All right, man. I’ll see you next week.

Jeff McKay (47:14.667)
See you, buddy.