Build Your Business Vision And Culture With Management Insights Founder Todd Wheeler

When you start a business, you need two things: a vision and culture. So how do you build these two things? Stephen Jaye interviews the CEO of Management Insight, Todd Wheeler, on the role of leadership and communication. Todd also discusses the importance of community, learning to focus on the right things and understanding. Starting up a business? Or are you looking to improve an existing one? Then tune in and learn valuable lessons from Todd. --- Listen to the podcast here: Build Your Business Vision And Culture With Management Insights Founder Todd Wheeler One important aspect of everybody's lives or most people's lives is work culture, organizational culture, the culture that we all spend a good part of our days in. These things are changing. The Great Resignation assertion of what a lot of people have been feeling for years, what they want out of their work culture, which is an organization that benefits, values them and is still pretty early into this whole transformation. We are going to take a little while before we see how this entire thing turns out. However, there are a lot of interesting things going on in this field, hopefully leading us toward a better and more productive work culture in the future. My guest, Todd Wheeler, is the Founder and CEO and by CEO, he refers to as Chief Enthusiasm Officer of an organization called Management Insight, which helps high-level personnel, CEOs, etc., set the tone for the culture that their organizations are going to be employing. --- Todd, welcome to the show. Thank you. It is great to be here. Let us start with Management Insight is what you do with the organizations that you engage with. Fundamentally, we like to create cultures of community and communication. We do this by basing things on acknowledgment and appreciation. If an organization does just those two things, it will be able to maintain and keep people. People need to be listened to. They need to be heard and appreciated. Oftentimes, I have gone into companies where they have an open-door policy. They have suggestion boxes throughout. Nobody ever reads the suggestions or does anything about them if they have read them. That is not an open culture. I have been working in and around culture for years and it comes from a space of trying to understand why things do not work in organizations. The famous consultant says that culture relates to strategy anytime. If you don't have the right people to execute with the right attitude, it doesn't matter. Peter Drucker was who I was thinking of. Peter Drucker is the Founder of Organizational and Management Consulting. The whole idea behind it is you have got to have a lot of these things working in alignment. Culture, to me, is the foundation. I look at what I call the non-financial aspects of corporate performance, strategy, structure, and leadership style, all based on the organization's stage of development. With the culture piece added to that as a foundation, that is what is going on. I have always said that soft skills are the hardest skills. My tagline for my organization is it is simple, but it is not easy. If you have to hack your way through a jungle and you have a guide who knows where you are going and where the crevasses and rivers are and what you are going to need to get to the other side, it's a lot easier than hacking your way through the jungle. Any organizations start without a clue about how to do what they need to do. 'I have seen an incredible shift in cultural appreciation and the importance of it. I was laughed out of boardrooms in the 90s, bringing up the importance of culture and how people feel and how you treat them.'Share on X You start with a discovery. I have got this great idea. My generation and generations before and after what we were always told were put a plan together. My belief is that it is 100% wrong. If you come up with an idea and put a plan together, you are missing two key steps that have to be done with guidance and intention. The first step is discovery. You got an idea. What do we need to make this happen? That is the what. What do we need to do? What are the elements? We need finance, marketing and operations. Those are the big three and everything else is derivative of those. Everything else can come under that. Of those things, who are the people we are going to need? How are we going to get it done? What is our timeframe? The second step is, once you have got all of these things and this can fill a wall with sticky notes is prioritization. What are the most important things we need to be doing? Prioritization has a time, manpower, finance and human component. All of these things need to be thought and talked about for you to assure the success of an organization. Now that you know what you are going to do and the priorities, they are being dealt with. There are historic things that show what should be done first. I have the whole theory about that, but each organization is different. If it's you starting a company by yourself, there are steps that you need to take. If it's you who is starting a company, the first thing you want to do is build a team. There are steps that you can take. What are the roles and responsibilities? How do we want these people to come across? Who are the people? I don't mean who is them, Steve and Jay that I need for this job. It's what are the other roles and responsibilities that these people will need to fulfill? They have prioritization, which is a challenge and I find it to be, after working with Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials and Gen Y, all of these generational aspects of people and human nature. I'm a human and culture guy, but strategy and structure are also key. Once you understand what those things are, you can then move forward. Once you have got the prioritization and got this figured out now and only now, you can focus. Focus is the third step. What happens is people say, “I am so busy. My plate is full.” One thing I do is I provide bigger plates, so things are not so full, but now that you have understood what you're trying to do, what the priority is now and only now, can you focus because if you are focusing on the wrong things, you don't get where you want to go. “We are making a great time, so don't tell us we are going in the wrong direction.” Do you typically engage organizations at this seed stage when people are beginning with their ideas or do you often find yourself coming into organizations that have already made good time but are driven in the wrong direction? They could be making a great time to go in the right direction. They want to understand what the key elements are so they know what to be focusing on and how to do it. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of areas of focus that you can look at. Based on your question, I have worked with both. I have worked with startups, early-stage companies and growth-based companies. Five years ago, I was called out to Zappos. It has been renowned as the leading customer service company in the world. Their customer service ethos is very simple. Their customer service ethos is based on the most simple of things that will take anything back. That is their customer service. Not easy, but very simple. They called me in because they wanted to redo their internal customer service platform. They wanted to know how to take care of their people better and build their culture so they could perform more effectively. I went out there and worked with them. I was only out there on-site for a few days, but we redid everything. I had a company called Colorado Concierge and Concierge Resource and we provided on-site and virtual concierge programs to hospitals, high-rise office buildings, gated communities, large organizations. We offered our program as retention, recruitment, productivity enhancement tool. People spend anywhere from 20% to 35% of their at-work time or non-work-related activities that could be handled by somebody else. What we would say was, “We do what you don't want to do, what you don't have time to do, or what you don't know how to do. You tell me half a dozen of those things and I can show you where we can save time and your employees or the employee themselves would not need to leave, focus, go online, drive somewhere or take care of things to do that.” You have discovery and overall concept. Vision And Culture: We need finance. We need marketing. We need operations. Those are the big three. Everything else is derivative of those. Think about what you are doing. People rush into jobs. They rush into building businesses. The numbers have not changed since the SBA started doing the research. Since about the ‘60s, they have found that 60% of all businesses fail in the first five years. That number has not gone down. The reason you have higher numbers than that now is because more businesses are starting. Therefore, more businesses are starting, they are going to get more failures. Are people more aware of that now than they were in the past because you have been at this for a little while? Are these trends moving in any direction or is it still the same? These are the things that people tend to ignore. I don't think people are any more aware of it at all. Let's take the cannabis space, for instance, which is big in Colorado. They have an idea. They don't have any idea what it takes to start and run a successful business. They think, “We have a product that everybody wants.” There is a long way from success between, “We have a product that everybody wants and having a successful business.” I have not seen any increase in the consciousness or awareness of the true things that are needed to start and run an organization. Anyone out there reading who has an idea and you go through the Will It Fly exercise or anything else and decide I will pursue it, what is the next thing someone should be thinking about? ...