Scaling Smarter: Insights from Sean Delaney

Catharine O'Leary: Hey everyone, welcome back to kick start the conversation. I'm your host, Catharine O'Leary and I am here with Sean Delaney. For those of you who haven't figured out that I'm Irish now, but Sean is here with us. Sean is a, an accomplished business executive, he has almost as many if not more, top, fortune 50 companies in his repertoire, as you've heard me say, but mine, that we were just reminiscing about some of the, I guess, war stories that come

down, that's a good way to say it. Yeah, so

Catharine O'Leary: more stories that come from the corporate world. Sean is the founder and CEO of what if a business acceleration company, which is dedicated to educating, protecting and motivating business owners to achieve their highest levels of success and impact in the world, his current focus is to help every business owner and operator who's hungry to scale, do so in the most effective and enjoyable way possible, because here's the thing you might scale and blow yourself up, because you don't actually have some of the foundational things that you need to, to have in place before you really scale. So it's all great to talk about scaling. It's another thing to actually be ready to scale. And and Shawn's gonna kind of talk a little bit more about that with us today. Sean has been working with the likes of MetLife and Nike and other the fortune 100. And what I love about the conversation that Sean and I had just before this was that it actually doesn't matter. In the sense of your billion dollar company, your Apple or your Tesla, or you're a solopreneur, the foundations end up being very similar, if not the same. And, Sean, I want to welcome you to the conversation. And let's talk a little bit more about that foundational.

Yes. Thank you, Catharine. That was great. Did I write any of that? That sounds great. I like it better when you say it than when I wrote it? That's fantastic. I sound I sound cooler than I think I might be. Yes. So over the 25 years, yes, the biggest thing that I found in working with the Nikes Uber's MetLife j&j As of the world is that all businesses the same every company is different. But all businesses the same, it's just a value exchange between individuals. And we've overcomplicated and big business because of politics and social dynamics and, and just the nature of nature. Silos formed disciplines got warped. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs look at big giant companies as then, well, they must be doing something right. And I think we've all been sold a bit of a bill of goods. And so over the course of my career, I realized that there are 10 disciplines that run under every single business, whether you are a massive titan of industry dominating company, or one person with a taco truck, trying to make a living, that the disciplines are there, it's just a degree of intensity and application. But you must have all 10 of the disciplines because if you don't, you're leaving growth, scalability, fun, and impact on the world. All on the table, you are leaching some of your impact some of your funds some of your results. And I have an architecture that has been designed to help everybody solve those problems.

Catharine O'Leary: And I love that you have fun in there. Because what I have seen over the past five years and working with entrepreneurs is that a lot of entrepreneurs end up creating a job for themselves. So they they end up with this, all of a sudden, this this business, that isn't any fun, because they're working all the time. It's a hamster wheel. It's like, honestly, sometimes corporate is easier than being on your own. Because, you know, like you have to inspire yourself to get up every day as opposed to, you know, just having to go and be you know, with a boss or something like that. And that's definitely hard. So the

seduction of corporate, the corporate model, is that the machine itself institutionalizes some of the stupidity, it makes it okay, right. So I've seen entrepreneurs who say, I'm great at business, I'm gonna leave corporate America, I'm gonna go on great at hiring. What do you mean, all my teams awesome. And then they go out, they started business, and then they have to, they get to the place where they have to hire people, and all of the people. They say all of my people are terrible. And in reality is they're great people in wrong jobs, because they did it wrong. And they say, I don't understand. I used to be so good at it. It's like, Well, what was good about it, HR vetted all of the they wrote the job description, that first Have you worked for a giant company that was already a beacon to people to want to come and work there. So you didn't have to do any marketing of any sort in there, people were already lined up to work there. Then HR wrote legally pre approved job descriptions that didn't get me in trouble. And, and after lots of vetting and lots of corporate understanding of what the role would be all that got filled out, salary got determined by corporate politics and and an understanding of looking at HR looking at rates relative to where you are, where are we in New York versus Ohio, get, they did all of that salary and band and all of that kind of calculation. They vetted the first 50 people and got rid of them. And they put three pretty good candidates in front of you. And you pick the one you felt best with and you How dare you tell me, you're great at hiring people, you're terrible at it, you didn't have any of that. Now, that machine, that entire giant corporate machine is broken, clunky, wrong. But it it institutionalized some of the disciplines for you, so that you didn't even have to think about it. And you could flex in your flavor and be better at someone else in that model. But it was taking care of a lot of the stuff you didn't know. Right? So then you have entrepreneurs who never worked in that model, and how do they get started in business, they have a great idea, they have a great concept, somebody pushes them something they're gonna born to try to start things, or somebody pushed them and said, Oh, my God, chip clip, that's great. And now somebody is trying to create the next pet rock. And they have a passion for something. So what happens, they start to get some success. They punch around at what they know about marketing and getting getting some things set up. They talked to their cousin who kind of dropped out second year law school, but he knows enough about that they should start a business on a with a company that sets them up with an LLC, right? They, they find their way in there. Then they get so big, they start asking their cousin to help them box up goods, and now they're using their friends truck to do stuff. Now they're picking up momentum. Now they have real hires, they fall ass backwards into a business, and they frankenz And they go, they start having even more success. So then they find gurus they go to Click Funnels live, and they think Funnels is the answer. And they do a little techie kind of stuff. They Frankenstein monster it together a business. That's making a million dollars a year. And they think they're a success. And they're killing themselves every day to keep this thing that while it's technically alive and lurching forward isn't really the beautiful thing that they had always hoped it would be. It's too tiring and too onerous to look at all the big giant companies and what they do in those disciplines. And you go, Oh, I'll never be that big, I'll never be that good, forget it, we'll do what we can. And if they are celebrating their million dollars a year, they're not realizing they could have been making 10 with less effort and more fun. If they had just distill things down to the 20% of activities that would have gotten them 80% of the results and ignored what the big giants are doing. Because it's just not reality.

Catharine O'Leary: Well, and I mean, I've worked with and for a lot of the giants, and those, like those are behemoths like they are like the and they're not efficient news, there are a lot of inefficiencies. And I know that you and I have both gone into those corporations and said, If you just cut out doing these kind of weird things, you can save $30 million. And the thing is, is that you were saying that with one of your clients, it's not even a drop in the bucket for them.

Right and even move the stock price I saved one of those giants $30 million a year, over three years. That's what the project was. So $90 million in total over the three years, and no one even applauded. It didn't move the stock price. It was a soulless activity, because it's become a machine. It's not a real company with a living, breathing, feeling flow to it. And and so yeah, and all I did was come in and say you realize that 25% of your projects are duplicative of other projects and other departments. But no one talks to each other. And no one has common goals. And you incentivize everyone differently based on department. Do you understand that? Not only are is everyone wasting money, but their bonuses are tied to whether or not they're wasting money. And they're like, Yeah, well, you know, well, when you pointed out that way, it looks dumb. No, it was always dumb. I'm just showing you that it's there. And the only way you can see that there is by distilling everything down to its essence and saying, what are we really doing here? What are we trying to do?

Catharine O'Leary: Right. Yeah, and I think that entrepreneurs have have a leg up on corporate in this in this sense in the sense that, take a breath, right and go back. And you don't have to dismantle like a big behemoth like Apple or Adobe or anything like that, that has all these processes and you know, just grandfather stuff all over the place. But when you're starting your business, or when you're in your business, and you are thinking at least, that you're ready to scale, what are some of the core fundamentals? Because we talked about this a little bit it's been around, and a mission and vision, because if you don't have some of that, then it's really difficult to do your messaging or do your hiring or do the things that you do need to do when you are ready to scale. And people try to scale without these things, and they fail.

Yeah, people come to me for the most often things they come to me for our what I call serenity, which is time management. They say I'm I'm overworked. I don't know what to work on. I say I can't even begin to clear up your calendar. Unless I know who you are, what you're trying to do. Well, you get that you can look at my website. Now. I want to really unveil this and see, was this built in the right way? And is your heart in the right place? And do you understand the true impact of strategic planning? Because a lot of people throw that out the window or they do some? I'm not talking? What's your strategic plan and the dudes left leaning on a Lamborghini and he's throwing money in the air going, I'm making a make it rain this year. That's my plan. That's not a plan. That's a Wild Hope. That's that's marketing, hubbub. You're Who are you? What are your core values? These are the things by which I will live and die. That leveraged everywhere, helps you go on vacation for three months without ever having a conversation with every anyone because so long as everybody in your organization lives and breathes by those same core values, that when a new thing happens that we didn't anticipate, if you know that one of our core values here is we tell the truth, no matter what, even if it's it impacts us negatively. That's one of our core values, then I don't have to tell you, Catharine that if I'm not there, and a client comes and asks us a question, and it's gonna hurt us to be truthful, we're truthful, you will never get in trouble for that here. Right? People can make their own operating procedures where there weren't ones before. That kind of leverage. That's just one way that you live with that right. But then mission, who do we really serve that avatar? If you don't know who that avatar is, I don't know how you write any of your marketing. I don't know how you write any of your job postings. I don't know how you develop your brand. Because you're not even sure who you're serving and why. I don't know how you they ran promises. Right? Yeah. And so then what you'll do is, and I don't know how you do your process management, because if you're not automating processes, that are the value drivers for your end user, then you're probably automating processes to make your life easier, possibly at the expense of your clients. My own my own. I had a an accountant for years and years and years, decades, he sold to somebody else young guy comes in obviously was thinking, I can make more money, if I automate a bunch of this stuff, will all of a sudden be automated was not in making my life easier. It was making his back office easier. And now me, my parents, and five other business owners I know who all used him are all saying we're gonna go somewhere else, this got really terrible. Confusing, it's awful. Well, yeah, he got way more efficient for him. But that's because he'd forgotten who his avatar was and what his mission was. So there's so much leverage around mission vision, what we're trying to serve what we're trying to accomplish that I couldn't do a lot of the other disciplines, but with entrepreneurs, if that wasn't done, right, like if you don't have your strategic planning done, right, I don't think you can get any of the other 10 disciplines. Correct. And if you get that, right, it's hard to get the rest of them wrong. That's kind of a hidden value in the architecture. Because a lot of people like I said, they come to me for I'm overworked. I don't know what you should be working on. Unless I know what your projects aren't. I know what your project should be, unless I know what your mission is, what this quarterly goal is, unless we can do that kind of strategic planning. I don't know how to tell you how to. And then the second thing is, they come to me for marketing. They say I got issues in my business, but more revenue will solve everything. Well, that revenue comes from an increased fulfillment and if your processes are already broken, if you can't fulfill now, the worst thing I could do is 10 Extra clients because it will crush you. And that has happened to businesses. Right? Well, yeah. I mean,

Catharine O'Leary: if you and just to kind of take this out of like, kind of a product space and into a service space, I mean, you can only serve so many one on one clients. Right? Like you only have so much time. Like, I mean, that's just I mean, that's just the way it is. So 10x in your client base may not be the way to go. So how do you do group coaching? Well, you have to do group coaching a little differently, you still have to fulfill, right, you still have to have the the facilitation and the back end consumer experience. Right. So like, from from onboarding all the way through to talking and having support and, and all the rest of it. If that's not there, then 10x in your business will actually break your business.

Amen. Right.

Catharine O'Leary: So he talked about the 10, the 10 disciplines, and this is a 10 disciplines that go across like any business, whether you're Apple, or Tesla, or you are the taco come, or the taco company, or the truck, or you're a solopreneur, you know, Coach mindset coach, for example. And having these 10 disciplines are, are the basis for basically, if you want to be Apple, you can be with these 10, you

can be Apple, you can be comfortable being that solopreneur. But, but you will feel better, more energized, it'll be more fun, it'll feel like flow, it won't be the chaotic mess, the arduous task that it already might feel like, because you're not chasing a false promise, it can be more simple, the dynamics have to be there, you can't not plan strategically. And in the way that I tell you to do it, it's 20% of the work with 80% of the results. You can't not think about inspiration, leadership, even if it's only you, you've got to be able to get out of that you've got to be the example. But if you have 100 people, you've got to be nailing this. And leadership, different than management. Because we all know people, managers who who can manage but can't lead and leaders who can lead the can't manage their two different disciplines, to different concepts. But you need to be able to also manage yourself, Am I optimized? Right, because I call it home, I don't call it HR, I call it home humans optimized in a meaningful environment. Are you in the optimal state to kill it today? Are your people in the optimal state and there are ways that we can make that happen inside of how you construct your business that are simple, easy and part of your natural day to day course of business. And is in a meaningful environment, meaning I hate to see you know, this, Catharine, corporate jobs where people be like, I just pull these levers, and then I go home, and they get a paycheck. And I come in and do that, that slog every day until I retire. That's terrible. People need to be able to connect what they're doing, what the end recipient for the value that they're creating, whether that's external, I do this, so our clients get free homes, right, I work for a charitable organization, I do this thing so people can get fed, or I pulled these levers so people can solve this problem. Or if they're not that close, I do this report so that Gary can do his job so that they can then help them up. Right. So understanding this value chain from taking nothing to something of value in the world. And understanding your place in it as an employee makes you a team member, regardless of what you're called and associate team member employee, cog number seven doesn't matter. I know, my beautiful value in the world in this job. And if I'm hired in the right way, for the right values and right mission, I am going to walk through walls for you as an employer. That's the way you want to set up your people. That's the way you want to set yourself up.

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah, I was gonna say that's, that is the way you want to set yourself up. So how would somebody or how would a business kind of learn a little bit more about maybe where they need to tweak or where like, you know, there's 10 disciplines, but like, how can they get maybe an assessment?

I like the way you think you sound really smart when you say things like that. So I'm being ridiculous on purpose. We have fun. So the way would be what if.com/bad bat so whatever the D for disruption wha D if I'm from New Jersey, I'm sorry. That's how we say what if it's what if a what if we changed the world? What if.com/bad I'll also send you the link for that. If you go there, you will have the assessment that I used to charge six figures to the corporate, big giant companies just charge 1000s of dollars to have them take this assessment and have me review you the results with them, I have now made this into a quick and simple diagnostic where within eight minutes, it's okay. If it takes 10 You want to think about it, but look 10 minutes of your time. And you will get a report that says by answering these questions, and they're not hard questions, they're a little sliders. It'll say, I'll I share with my employees X information. It's either in your mind never always, I don't know, slide it somewhere, they're really easy to answer inside of 10 minutes, you will answer these questions. And I will deliver a diagnostic that is going to give you a really, really accurate report of where you are in your business. Even if you've barely started anything, answer it from yourself. If it's talks about employees, if it talks about your people, but a zero, we'll talk about it if we need to, you understand what the results are, we're going to come back when they say but you'll get a report that says this is probably what your business looks like. And here's what to do next. Yes, you don't even have to talk to anybody take the exam or take the diagnostic it'll tell you where it looks like your business is and what you should do next. And then if you want to have a conversation, unpack it and understand is the answer really, this was I being too hard? Was I being too light, it doesn't seem it seems awful little we'll talk about it, it rarely is. But then we can have that conversation if you want and we still are will not be selling you anything on that. On that call, this is really just about clarity, really, in a massive way. So

Catharine O'Leary: get get a baseline of where your baseline of

where you are, and I look forward to what it might take to to improve those scores.

Catharine O'Leary: Because the I can I can tell you because I've done this, I've done the Frankenstein, I've done the, you know the oh, if I do it myself, I can you know, I can you know cobble together this CRM and and this email service provider and God knows whatever else I've done. And it can God help you if something breaks, because you don't know where it broke or how to fix it. It can be easier than that folks it can be so it really does start, especially for solopreneurs are especially for you know, smaller businesses, it does start with your core mission. And it does start with your core values. And honestly, Apple started there, Nike started there, like they all started there, they may not be there now, but that's where they did start 100%.

So people don't see that as why they got there, they see well had a brilliant idea. They did other stuff, they got a lot of they fundraise early on, you think any of that was gonna happen if they didn't look like they have their stuff together? It would not have happened.

Catharine O'Leary: Right. And, and, and they get they get dinged if they go off brand, right. They do they if they, if they, you know go off onto a tangent that's like what the hell is that, if you want has gotten ding like Apple has gotten dinged on it. So you say true

Bud Light is a glaring, shining example of breaking the brand promise they didn't know they were doing it. Someone had might have had, you can say what you want come out wherever you want on their intentions and whether you like what they were doing or not like with you. And that's all social commentary that has nothing to do with the fact that they had a brand. And there was a brand promise, and people forgot it. And those people reminded them by leaving. That's it. Those are facts. The math is the path. It is true. And so you need to be cognizant of. And that's why don't build a brand that isn't in line with your core values because you're going to be subjected to breaking it, you will not because if you're orchestrating it, I want to say this is our brand to have this message to talk to these people so that I can make money. That's where you go south as opposed to, here's where I am. Here's the thing I know I can solve because I want to solve it for them. And then in doing that and delivering that the money will come in droves and never leave because you never break that brand promise. And

Catharine O'Leary: you're attracting the people that you want to work with because you actually care that they're getting the solution that like a

magnet, like a magnet and repelling the ones that you don't the beautiful, beautiful thing about a magnet is it has two polarities. You want to push away the ones you don't want.

Catharine O'Leary: Exactly. So if you are interested in in understanding a little bit where your business currently is, go to what if.com/bad Is that correct?

Yes, slash bad the business architecture diagnostic.

Catharine O'Leary: It will be in the in the show notes as well. There'll be a link there. But Sean, thank you so much for coming on to kickstart the conversation. I've had a blast, and I appreciate your time and to everyone out there safe travels and we will talk to you soon.