In today’s volatile economy, entrepreneurial businesses face unprecedented challenges as they navigate tariffs, government policy shifts, and market uncertainty. While many organizations are cautiously retreating, entrepreneurial businesses have a unique advantage: the ability to pivot quickly, adapt strategically, and create new value even in turbulent times.
This webinar brings together experts in marketing, talent solutions, sales excellence, and business growth to discuss how entrepreneurial businesses can not only weather today’s economic storms but emerge stronger and more valuable.
Whether you’re ramping up a new venture, preparing for eventual exit, or simply focused on building sustainable value in your business, this session will provide actionable insights to help you frame your future with confidence.
Our panelists include Gary Braun from Pivotal Advisors, Mary Nutting from Strategic Talent Partners, and Bill Oelrich from The Resultants.
Key Takeaways
- Resilient businesses are built through intentional structure, strategic planning, and consistent communication, not by chance or reaction.
- Empowering leadership teams and decentralizing decision-making increases operational scalability, retention, and long-term value.
- Growth-minded cultures thrive when leaders foster safety for risk-taking, cross-functional collaboration, and continuous role improvement.
- Sales and marketing resilience hinge on clear plans, accountability, and reinforcing consistent processes over desperation.
- Even without an immediate exit plan, building a transferable, owner-independent business increases freedom, value, and options.
Full Webinar Transcription
Introduction and Setup
Jennifer Zick: Welcome guests to the Authentic Growth® Webinar. We’ve just opened the curtain and we’ll get started in just a moment. I’m going to give a few minutes for our guests to jump through the zoom hoops and meet us over here on the other side. So while you are joining us, please feel free to take a moment, get a beverage, grab a notebook and a pen. You might have some takeaways to jot down today, but thank you for being here. If you’re just joining, you’ve arrived at the Authentic Growth® Webinar where today we’re talking about a very timely topic, Entrepreneurial resilience. I almost said resistance. I mean there are days entrepreneurial resistance is real too. But we’re here to talk about resilience. We’re so glad that you’ve joined us. I’m Jennifer Zick.
I’m the founder and CEO of Authentic and I’m your host and moderator for today. And I’m also going to chime in on this conversation because as an entrepreneur I feel this and I’m excited to have this conversation with my friends today who I’ll introduce to you shortly. But first, if you’re a first time guest today with us on this webinar, let me introduce Authentic and the premise of this series. Authentic is a fractional chief marketing officer firm and strategic growth partner to entrepreneurial businesses. We help growing businesses to overcome random acts of marketing and confidently take the next right step in healthy growth. And so we usually work with businesses between 5 to 100 million in annual revenue, although that swings on either side.
But we work across industries and business models and that purview gives us insight into what’s happening in a lot of different businesses right now, today. So I’m excited to bring some of those insights to the table. And even though we have a wonderfully diverse audience today, the Persona that we’re really going to speak to in our conversation today is that owner, founder, CEO and executive leader in a growth business or in an entrepreneurial business that’s navigating some of the bumpy waters that are part of our current environment. So we’re going to go deeper on that soon.
But no matter who you are today, whether you work in a large enterprise or a startup, whether you’re a founder and an owner or you’re a leader of another team, we hope that today will be encouraging, that you’ll get some nuggets of wisdom and useful tips that you can take back into your day to day. So we’re gonna jump right in. And before we dive into the topic that we’re gonna discuss today, I’d love to introduce you to my friends and our esteemed panel today. We’ve got a really well rounded group of experienced advisors here that bring a lot of different dimensions to this conversation. So I’m gonna start with my friend Mary. Mary, would you introduce yourself please?
Mary Nutting: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me here today, Jennifer and all my friends. I’m Mary Nutting and I am co founder of Strategic Talent Partners. We help growing privately held companies reach their growth goals through specifically their leadership talent. So we provide executive level and leadership level search as well as succession planning and really leadership team development to help get them to that next phase.
Jennifer Zick: Thank you. Mary and Gary, over to you.
Gary Braun: Yes, thank you for having me as well. Gary Brown, founder of Pivotal Advisors. We are the sales that match up well with your marketing.
Jennifer Zick: Several clients, opposite sides of the coin.
Gary Braun: Several clients in common. We work with a lot of small midsize companies that get to a certain point in their growth and they can’t figure out how to get to that next level. And it could be we don’t have good system process, we don’t have the right team, we don’t have the right leader, we don’t have good accountability. Whatever else, we help them get a system in place that turns into their sales machine that can help them get to the next level. And we do that through fractional sales management services. Sometimes we coach their leader. We have peer groups, but we’re the. The sales to your marketing, Jennifer.
Jennifer Zick: Yes. Yeah, we’re good cousins out there in the world.
Mary Nutting: We appreciate you.
Jennifer Zick: And Bill, welcome to the Authentic Growth® webinar. Tell us about yourself.
Bill Oelrich: Thank you, Jennifer. Bill Oelrich, The Resultants. We’re a business advisory firm and we are kind of a similar ICP as everybody else on this call. But we work with leadership teams and help them install what we call a business operating system. So everybody needs a little structure in their life to keep them focused on the big issues of the day to help their companies go further faster. And that’s our focus.
Jennifer Zick: I love that. Thanks, Bill. And here at Authentic, we’re big fans of having a business operating system. And all of the businesses that are here today bring extensions to that core business operating system with the systems and proven processes and programs we’ve developed. So Gary’s team has a sales operating system at Authentic, we have our authentic growth marketing operating system and Mary’s team has just a really well developed process around Talent placement and development. And so you’ve got a lot of process minded people on today’s call. And that really is part of the resilience conversation we’re going to have today, the rigor behind some of that resilience. But let’s get the conversation started by acknowledging where we are in the world and also for our audience.
I want to acknowledge that those of us on today’s panel are scattered around the Twin Cities in Wisconsin, where there’s thunderstorms happening right outside our windows right now. So if you hear a boom or a dog barking because of thunder anxiety or if the electricity goes out, I mean, we’re just going to do our best here today. So thank you for weathering, but I feel like the weather outside of our windows is such a great analogy to what’s happening around us in this world. And it kind of sets the tone. Maybe the sun will come out right at the end of this webinar, which will be exactly where, you know, to see a rainbow and all of the sunbeams coming our way.
Current Market Conditions and Strategic Adjustments
Jennfier Zick: But in the meanwhile, we’re living in a world that has felt really uncertain for quite some time in different ways. And it keeps changing. And I know, I’m always comparing notes. I’m sure you are too, with your clients and with the CEOs that we serve and owners we serve as well, as I’m in two different CEO peer groups. We’re always talking about what the world looks like from your vantage point for your industry, for your team right now. And I know that amongst my peers, a lot of companies have been making some really tough decisions this year or trying to navigate how to respond to constant changes, whether it be with tariffs or the, you know, government funding changes or global wars or all the things that we’re navigating.
And a lot of businesses have been, you know, tentative about hiring or making new investments or needing to make some cuts. So it’s not an easy time. But at the same time, there’s a lot of good things still happening out there. And I’m excited to have this conversation today because I know that those of us in this room, either with literal or figurative gray hair, Mary and I have no gray hair. But we’ve all lived long enough, wink. We’ve all lived long enough to know that everything happens in cycles and you live through it. You build that resilience muscle. So we’re here to share from our vantage points something that’s going to help business owners today. And I’m going to start with you, Bill.
Help me understand as you’re talking with your clients and founders and owners and leaders, given the current volatility of the market, what are you seeing and how they’re adjusting their strategies not just to get through what’s happening right now, but setting them up for future success. What are you seeing and also what’s your team advising?
Bill Oelrich: Yeah. So two things stand out to me in this environment and one is focused on four separate engagements, four different company sizes, from small to massive. They are all looking at SKUs, numbers of SKUs. They’re looking at their core business model and focusing on what they can work on that’s actually going to move them. The needle, all the noise, all the shiny objects. They’re putting their hands up and they’re saying, enough, okay, we need to refocus and understand where we are best going to succeed. They’re also sharpening their pencils. They’re getting very clear on making decisions that are fact based. No more gut decisions. We’re making fact based decisions. So we’re doing recon in the numbers to make sure that the decisions we’re making are solid as we move forward.
And then lastly, I know I said two, but I’ll give you three. All of them are getting proactive and they’re saying no to reactivity. They are deciding to go on the offensive versus sitting back and waiting.
Jennifer Zick: Oh, so they’re overcoming random acts. I love that. And what you’re sharing makes me feel like you were in my conference room two weeks ago when we made the hard decision to shut down a program. We just stood up this year because I’m like this, as well intended as it was, is turning into a distraction in a time when we can’t afford any distractions.
Bill Oelrich: Right.
Jennifer Zick: So Gary or Mary, thoughts on this topic? Like what you’re seeing in strategy adjustment? Gary? Sure.
Gary Braun: Yeah. I’ve got several thoughts. This isn’t the first time we’ve gone through this. I think about the dot com bust right at the turn of, you know, 2000. We started our business in 2008, which was an awesome time to start a company right when we’re entering a recession. We went through all of this when we had the pandemic hit. This is not the first time, it won’t be the last time. What I see is the companies that communicate really well as a leadership team, they’re constantly talking about what are you seeing, what are you hearing? And coming up with options. So it could go this way if it does, what’s our plan? If it doesn’t go that way, it could go this way. What’s our plan? During the pandemic, I talked to Rhoda Olson, a brilliant woman. She was the CEO of Great Clips.
And imagine Great Clips in the pandemic, all the salons are shut down. I mean, they’re just shut down. You can’t do anything. And she says, we met every day, communicated every day. What are our options? What are we doing? And she says a crisis is only, I’ll never forget the A crisis is only a crisis until you have a plan. Once you have a plan, it’s just about executing the plan. It’s not sitting back and reacting to, oh my gosh, what’s going to happen. And I thought that was just brilliant advice. I brought that up so many different times. But don’t sit back and wait. Let’s see what our options are. Where could it go and what’s our plan if it goes that way?
Jennifer Zick: That’s so wise. And what about you, Mary, as you’re talking amongst your peers?
Mary Nutting: Yeah, well, I think, you know what Bill said about being on the offensive and then also, you know, just the focus, it requires different skills, you know, and you know, from a leadership team perspective, which I’m actually going to get into when I know you asked me my question.
Jennifer Zick: So this conversation reminds me a little bit thought of the famous saying and I won’t get it quite right, but like you don’t really know who’s swimming naked till the tide goes out. Like in times like this when everybody’s exposed that you can see which businesses do have a strategy and a plan or are capable of making those maneuvers and those hard choices and being decisive and strategically refocusing because there are, we’ve also, even though we’ve all lived through these cycles and periods of, of disruption, we’ve lived through cycles of, you know, sunshine and big harvests that were easy to come by. Like, that’s hopefully what’s on the other side of this. But anybody can grow when all the conditions are good for it. Not everybody can grow and thrive through tough times.
Gary Braun: Right to that point, Jennifer, I, when that dot com bubble was bursting, I was at an E commerce company and if you think about late 1990s, early 2000s, you didn’t have to be really good to be thriving in the E commerce company. Everybody was rushing to figure out how to sell their stuff online and we thought were awesome because, you know, sales just kept going up and were doing really great. And then when things got tough and the economy slowed down and things started busting, just like you said, the tide went out. The companies that had a really solid strategy, they had a plan, they had good processes, they had good systems, they had good accountability. Those are the ones that survived. The ones that were just in it and were winging it as they went.
Those are the ones that all, you know, boarded up and went away. So having your system, having your plan, having that was critical not only to survive but to grow as everybody else was going away.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And before I move on to the next question I have for Mary, which I’m excited to throw onto the table, I want to mention what I failed to mention as I opened this up in the audience. I know you’re going to have some questions for these wise panelists as we go. We’re not going to stop along the way to answer them. But there at the bottom of your zoom page, there should be a Q and A feature. There’s also a chat feature. Ignore that, but look for the Q and A feature. Drop a question into the Q and A. I’m going to try to leave some time at the end of our conversation to take a few questions from the audience.
Talent Strategy and Leadership Development
Jennifer Zick: So grab your, yeah, grab your notebook, put your question in the Q and A and we’ll try to get to it. So, Mary, talent is always critical. It’s always like the foundation of a healthy business. But as companies are navigating these uncertain times, the word we’re all tired of is uncertain, but it’s there. Talent retention and acquisition become even more critical. So what strategies do you find are the most effective to identify, attract and retain the right people in the right seats in your organization when things are uncertain in the world?
Mary Nutting: Yeah, well, that’s a loaded question because there’s so many different avenues that I could go. But you know, thinking about this and just playing off of what Gary shared about Roda and great clips. You know, being able to bring talented people to the table to brainstorm ideas and to think about different opportunities is just, absolutely critical in today’s business climate. And so we’re really seeing this need for more growth based leaders. And when I talk about growth based leaders, it’s not just the individual leader or CEO that is going to webinars like this or reading blogs or you know, going to peer groups. Those things are all very important. But it goes beyond that. It’s really creating a culture of growth minded people. And you know, that starts with, you know, allowing people to challenge the status quo.
You know, looking at continuously making your processes more efficient. It is creating an environment where people feel safe to take risks and then to provide coaching and development around mistakes to create learning opportunities. So it really is a shift that we’re seeing in terms of, first of all, the leaders having this growth based mindset that allows this culture to foster, you know, people being attracted to this organization where they can use their voice, you know, and that can be difficult sometimes in a very hierarchical organizational structure because how do you get people’s voices to be heard? Right. And so there’s another shift that we’re seeing where it’s really important to bring people together from different functional areas. We call this kind of a matrixed environment. You know, you see that a lot in big companies.
You don’t see it as much in entrepreneurial organizations. And I think that is a trend that is certainly here to stay. And it’s being, you know, allowing you to bring people of, you know, diverse perspectives and functional expertise and get their thoughts to get the best problem solving and quite frankly, innovation.
Jennifer Zick: I love that. That’s gonna make a great sound bite after this webinar is done. But I wanna speak into that because in my last week in one of my CEO roundtable groups, we were having a lot of different conversations, a lot of different issues were discussed. But my coach offered and I took this down as a statement that I love as you’re building innovative, growth minded leaders in your team and everybody’s a leader in your company. To be entrepreneurial, you need everybody to be a leader. The idea is developing the kind of culture where people understand that if they take a role in your company, they don’t just. Nobody gets to just work here. The expectation is that you do your role and you improve your role constantly. Like constantly improving the business and helping us innovate forward.
But you can’t do that if you don’t have a culture that supports some risk taking and cross departmental collaboration. Love that. Right, Gary or Bill, anything you want to add on this idea of talent?
Bill Oelrich: I was just going to mention we talk a lot about this in terms of silos, okay. Communication silos inside of an organization. They can’t be vertical to Mary’s point. They need to be horizontal. They need to be across the leadership team so that the best ideas can rise up. You can have robust conversations, you can have open conflict and then come to a commitment and move forward. Right. Like you have to be very careful of how these siloed conversations go down because perception can be a problem and favoritism can be a problem. There’s a lot that goes on. So leaders have to get very focused on across the organization, communication, not just marketing, not sales, not ops, not admin.
Jennifer Zick: That’s so true. Gary.
Gary Braun: Yeah, I, I was just. The word retention just jumped out on your question. And when I think about retention, you know, three of the top five reasons that people leave a company is because of their leader. And, and I, I combine that with, you know, we don’t like to use the word, but at uncertain times. There’s a lot of stuff going on right now. And if I’m somebody on a team and I look at my leader or my leadership team and I’m not getting direction, I’m not getting confidence in what’s going on. And meanwhile, I got a recruiter calling me on the phone going, hey, we got a really good opportunity here. I’m going to listen now. Contrast that with my leadership team who came out and said, here’s what’s going on. Here’s. I need your input. Here’s what, here’s what our plan is.
Here’s how we’re going to execute. Here’s how we’re going to beat it. And they feel really confident that not only are they being supported, but the leadership team has their stuff together and we can go forward. That’s going to make them want to stay and they’re going to want to avoid the uncertainty of this other company. So a lot of it falls back on us as leaders to provide that confidence, to provide that direction and make sure our team knows we’ve got a plan. And we got this. Yes, it’s scary, but we got this.
Jennifer Zick: I love that. One of the other really impactful statements that I learned in my first ever Vistage meeting when I was a Vistage member, they brought in a speaker and she shared this phrase, the leaders bring the weather, right? Like, no matter what’s happening outside of our businesses, as leaders for our businesses. And again, any of you on this call who are listening in are a leader from your own role. Like, we get to choose what kind of weather we bring to the office, that we bring to our hybrid or remote work team. And that’s what I’ve been channeling while the world around us feels hectic and constantly changing and hard to predict. It’s like, well, here’s what I can control, here’s what I can predict, here’s my area to influence my World. So I’ve held onto that.
Gary Braun: To that point. We’ve got a lot of business owners, executives, CEOs and whatnot on this call. That’s great. We gotta look down one level to the frontline managers. Because if you again, kind of the comparison, if you’ve got the frontline manager who’s got in lockstep with the executive team and they’re like, here’s the plan, here’s what we’re going to do and everything else versus, oh my gosh, I don’t know what’s going to do. Boy, this is really scary. And they’re commiserating with their respective teams. You’re going to lose people.
Mary Nutting: Yeah.
Gary Braun: We need to make sure that not only do we have our plan and our approach together, but we’re equipping our frontline sales leaders or whatever, departmental leaders, that they’re communicating well. And guess what? Most of them have never been trained on that stuff. You know, they got promoted because they’re really good in whatever specialty they were in. And now they’re here and they’re supposed to just know how to be a leader.
Mary Nutting: That’s not the case when I touched on the organizational structure, because, Gary, you’re absolutely right. You have to bring it down functionally. Right. But how do we then get that cross functional conversation and communication going? You know, Bill talked about that the silos are one of the biggest dangers in terms of squelching innovation and being able to pivot quickly. You know, so it’s, you know, I think it’s a combination, Right. Of getting everybody involved in the organization, but also continuously talking cross functionally.
Sales Team Resilience and Systems
Jennifer Zick: So good. What I’m already hearing bubble up out of this conversation is that part of a really huge part of being a resilient leader and resilient business is that it takes great intention and structure to build resiliency in a business. It’s not something that you like, that one person can like just carry alone. It’s not one. It’s not something you can just hope your culture is ready for. Takes great intention, productivity and structure to build resilient businesses. Gary, I wanna come back to you and dig a little deeper on the topic of talent, but go drill down into your area, which is sales. Obviously, when economics are high pressure times, sales teams face extra pressure. So what approaches do you see successful sales organizations and leaders implement to maintain revenue, growth, focus and great positive attitudes in the face of tough economies?
Gary Braun: Yeah, I’m gonna sound a little bit like a broken record here, but I go back to my plan and my systems and accountability to it. So if we have a plan and things are getting tough, salespeople do some weird stuff, they start getting desperate, they start chasing weird deals, they want to put anything on the board. And if I’m a less experienced sales leader and I let that happen and go, okay, let’s put it on the board, you’re basically telling them, that’s okay, keep doing that. And that’s not where we get our business. If we come back and go, it’s a tight time, here’s where we’re going to focus because here’s our biggest chance to win. And then we hold them to that.
And when they start getting weird and bringing weird stuff to us, we go, hey, hey, that wasn’t part of our plan. And we’re positive about it. We’re not whacking them over the head of the two by four. But we’re like, glad you’re doing that. But remember, our plan was this. And let’s do this and what’s our plan? And I love, especially during tough times, frequency of the touches. I, I think one of the most important things a sales leader can do is have weekly one ones. And it isn’t about, hey, Mary, what’s going on with the Johnson account? Hey, Bill, what’s going on with xyz? It’s about, what’s your plan for the week? How did we do against our plan last week? Who we focus on, what are the things that we’re going to get done and when they do it.
Rock on, man. You guys did a great job. This is really good. Or if they didn’t do it’s like, okay, we got some of it done. What got in the way? What do we need to do differently next week? But it’s not whack them over the head. Too many sales leaders, it’s like, our numbers are down. Go out there and get them, guys. You want to drive people away. I go back to the top three or five reasons people leave. It’s got to be structured, intentional, accountable, but in a positive way.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, I love that. And I know, you know, as somebody who grew up in sales and sales management before I became a marketing leader, I appreciate that because there are times if you as a salesperson, if you can hold on to the belief of the value of what your business is bringing to the world, and you can hold on to the fact that your manager is believing in you and equipping you can get, you can weather some bumpy economic times and still know you’re playing the long game, even as a seller, which is hard. It’s hard to keep sales teams focused on the long game when they’ve got, you know, right now, quotas to hit. But it really comes back down to, like, culture and talent. And that applies for a sales team, too. Yeah.
Mary Nutting: Jennifer, I want to touch on something you said. Everybody in the company sells. And, you know, for those of us who don’t have a formal sales background, sales can be kind of a scary thing. It’s like, oh, I don’t sell.
And I think one of the things that even we’re doing in our organization is breaking down the parts of selling, relationship building, great customer service, meeting new people, helping others, and figuring out where that can add value in terms of business development for your company and how you can apply that to any role within the company. So, yeah, you need both. Right. You need, you need the sales. Formal organization and holding people accountable and having a process, but everybody can partake.
Jennifer Zick: That’s brilliant, Marianne. It’s so true. And it ties. It dovetails perfectly into what I talk about in the sphere of marketing and brand marketing is the whole business. Everybody in the business delivers on the brand. The brand is the promise your business has made to the world. And it’s the whether or not the people who’ve heard that promise are actually, are you fulfilling it? What is your consistency? Are you developing trust? And that comes down to every role in the organization, down to the back office. And if someone has a question on an invoice, what’s our response time? How polite are we? How thorough are we? And following up on that’s all part of the brand experience. So everyone in the organization sells and everyone’s a brand champion. It’s all true. Bill, I think you had a thought to add.
Bill Oelrich: Well, it’s just, it’s that customer journey. Right. And it. You have to be very clear from the top of the organization to the bottom of the organization what the standards are of how we treat people.
And that’s a go, no go type of thing for a lot of organizations. If you can’t hold up our standards, maybe you’re not the right person. We need to reevaluate. And in a tough economy when companies could go sideways, talent’s going to start leaking out, too. So there’s going to be opportunities here for people who have their house in order and are very clear on opportunities that communicate those and then bring somebody in and they can actually see the Environment as tight, as thoughtful as. Nothing here is random. It is absolutely intentional.
Value Creation and Exit Preparation
Jennifer Zick: Yes, good point. That’s so true. Mary, I’m going to come back over to you next. You’ve worked with a lot of companies over the years, many different leadership teams. So how does strengthening key roles in a leadership team for an organization help to contribute to the value of the business? I want to shift from just like weathering times of trial or general growth. But I want to talk now about building a business that has transferable value. So what do you do with leadership team development in terms of creating transferable value that weathers any storm?
Mary Nutting: Love this topic. Partly because you know, we’re on the same journey at Strategic Talent Partners. My co founder and myself are looking at our own exit strategy and you know, how do we preserve kind of the legacy and the business that we have today, whether you know, no matter what happens in the future with our exit. But you know, when I think about a smaller entrepreneurial organization, the founder, the CEO is almost always involved in every part of the business and they’re oftentimes making the most strategic decisions in each functional area. And that does a couple of things right. It puts a lot of stress and pressure on that one person. It creates this dependency on that person.
But even more so, it creates limits for those functional leaders to really own their role and to make decisions in the organization that are best, you know, best suited for it. And so it’s really important that those functional leaders are operating at their highest level. And the highest level can mean different things to different industries, different size organizations, different complexities. So it’s really important to understand, like in a business, you know, in this industry at $50 million, what does it look like to run finance? Really understanding those functional leaders’ roles and then allowing that individual to be developed up into that role is super critical.
Jennifer Zick: I want to ask a follow up question to you Mary, but probably redirect over to you Bill too because you’ve worked on a lot of strategy and team development over the years. Mary, how does your team work with a founder owner, like the original champion of a business, who might recognize that they need to start building a leadership team and actually empowering them to lead, but they’re still so wound up in it, they’re not sure like, but who to hire first and empower? How do you help an owner and a founder extract themselves and define how to build that team?
Mary Nutting: We actually have a process that we go through where we act. We write down the founders’ involvement in every functional area and we get very clear about what that means. You know, is it just giving your two cents or is it literally making the final decision? And so it’s really important for the owner or founder or CEO to understand where they’re spending their time today. And I think that’s a great takeaway for any of you that maybe in that boat, you know, take a few hours and just put it down on paper. Where are you spending your time and where are you having to put out the most buyers? So it really starts with that’s.
Jennifer Zick: So good an owner’s inventory, that then you start to elevate and delegate thoughtfully. That’s so smart. Bill, what about you? What have you seen in helping founder owners start to empower strong leadership teams?
Bill Oelrich: It’s a journey and it takes coaching, and it takes multiple sessions of coaching because first they have to warm up to the idea of relinquishing some of this control. Okay. And once they warm up to that, you can’t do it all at once. So we talk about the three legged stool of sales and marketing operations or production and admin. Right? If you are the founder leader and you are serving the functional boxes above each of those areas, you can’t hand them all off at one time. So first we have to warm up to the idea of handing something off. Next we have to begin to build a plan of how we do that. And then it rinses and repeats. We’ll do it again, and we’ll do it again. And how far do you want to go?
Do you want to end up just as the visionary or do you actually want to run any of this? That’s it. There’s no wrong answer there. Just get intentional about how you’re approaching it. If you want to create value, okay, if you’re good enough with the lifestyle business you’ve created, then I have no opinion. But if you tell me you want to create value, well, then this is the work that we need to do.
Jennifer Zick: That’s so good. And I appreciate that you leave space to acknowledge that different founders are motivated by different things in different ways. Some want to just work inside of a business that they enjoy being a practitioner in until they, you know, decide they don’t want to do that. And some want to have a meaningful, valuable exit and build a substantial team. And I fell into that ladder camp. And a lot of this, you know, speaks directly to me because I started my business eight years ago knowing that the most important job I could do was to fire myself from jobs along the way. But that is so hard because you become so invested and the, it’s so much of your baby too. So this is not easy. So. But thank you for acknowledging there’s a lot of shapes to this. Gary.
Gary Braun: Yeah, I just going to say we have this discussion often with business owners, especially when they’ve been the one managing sales and now they’re like handing it off and it’s tough for them and you got to get to the core root of why and it’s usually comes down to some factor of I can do it better, I don’t trust them to do that and everything else. So they’re constantly battling that and we want to show them. Okay, so are you cool with rather than getting a four to six times multiple on your EBITDA, getting a one to two times because the long term effect is you’re going to get a lot less for your business if everything flows for you to Bill’s point. If you want to go that way, that’s fine.
If you really want to scale this thing, you have to decide how you’re going to turn hand stuff off. And we have this cool tool that can be used in any part of the company, but it’s called an ask to tell. So whenever you’re bringing somebody up for a leadership position, here’s all the decisions that get made. So it’s just columns and you go, here’s the ones. Ask me before you do it because I want some input. Here’s the ones, just go do it. You know, and the last column is you can do it, but tell me you’re doing it. So I’m in the loop and I, you know, I might have some input and usually when we start with that everything is in the ask column because we just don’t trust it and I can do it better and everything else.
But over time you start to earn the trust and things start moving to the tell and, or even to the do column. And it’s a success. You can kind of measure success by how much of this stuff is moved over and you can, you don’t have to worry about it anymore.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah.
Gary Braun: But give them a path to show. I’m going to hand off these small decisions first and I’m going to get bigger ones then bigger ones. Pretty soon I’ve handed it off and my company’s worth more.
Jennifer Zick: Yes. And what a relief it is when you start to experience how other people can run parts of your business. I know when I was about five years into building my company, I was testing myself by schedule. I scheduled myself a one month sabbatical. I’m like, let’s see if I’ve put people in a position to run this well while I’m out. And it was amazing. I was gone for an entire month and the business ran. And there’s such freedom. And even though, you know, I was still very involved in my business at that point and I came back being involved, but there’s so much freedom in knowing that not everything is going to land back in your inbox and on your desk.
And that at least gives me space to re-energize, get away for a couple days, be visionary, you know, be the best contributor to my business that I can be, help to build a resilient business because I’m not so bogged down and burdened. So for me, that’s been a huge key to being resilient. Bill, coming back to your background, even before you joined The Resultants was in business transaction growth consulting. You’ve been in this space for a long time. So what kind of practical frameworks can founders use to effectively transition their roles from those entrepreneurial operators, hands in to strategic leaders, maybe nose in, hands out to prepare for an eventual exit.
Bill Oelrich: It’s back to the same conversation, but I’ll go, I’ll take this a little bit differently. It’s pretty simple what they have to do. They have to work their way out of their functional roles inside the company and hand them off to leaders who can take that baton and run with it. That’s the simple thing they need to do. Simple isn’t easy. I think, I think I got that from Gary Keller, right? Like simple is not easy if you want to build value. If you want to build a business that somebody else wants to buy, don’t give them four to six functional boxes to run after they close on the deal, okay?
Mary Nutting: You won’t buy it.
Bill Oelrich: They won’t buy it. 2 out of 10 transactions. And there’s a reason 2 out of 10 transact. Okay? Secondly, you, if you don’t want to be the bank when it comes time to sell your business, you better not sit in all the boxes, okay? Because the bank that would maybe write a loan to finance the sale of your business is not interested in you handing off all the work to somebody else who’s never done that work before and expect them to get the same results. So there’s a humbling that happens very quickly in the M and A process. If you hold all of the power you have none of the value. Okay. You need to work yourself out of it. It’s no more simple or clear than that.
You have to have leaders inside of your business who understand your vision, who are willing to go to war for you. And whatever product or widget or service you sell, enroll them, get them involved, and then an outside buyer can actually look at you and see value. And if you want to see sadness on a person’s face, go through a buyer seller meeting where the buyer is asking, oh, why are or what’s your role in this business? And they list off every functional role and they say, well, thank you very much, I’ve seen enough, I’m out of here. Right?
Mary Nutting: Yeah.
Bill Oelrich: It’s a humbling experience, no doubt. Yeah.
Jennifer Zick: So for founders who recognize, okay, I’m at an inflection point on my journey. I’ve built something of mass. I need to start extracting myself more, putting more leaders in place, being more exit ready minded, even if that exit’s not on the near term horizon. I’ve heard many times it’s three to five or more years to prepare for exit, especially if you’ve got to put leaders into place. And I’ll tell you from experience, not every hire is a winner. Like sometimes you have to work through a couple hires to get the right leaders in place. That’s painful, but you’re starting that journey and then you find yourself in the storm of this world right now. Tariff madness and economic uncertainty.
And I see a lot of founders right now and I feel this myself, like, oh, I felt like I was making progress on this longer term value creating plan where my role is becoming more elevated. But it’s turbulent now. So I’m going to dive back in. I got to get my hands back in. I got to do more for operations right now to get us through this turbulent time. Some of that is something you can’t argue with. But what advice would you give, Bill, to businesses, to owners that are in that position? Like, I’m trying to elevate, but also my business needs me right now.
Bill Oelrich: If you have to step back into any of those functional roles, it’s temporary. It’s a mindset thing. We are going to put our finger in the hole of this boat right now and we’re going to get safely to shore. I’m going to put a new person in there, but I’m not wavering from the fact that I’m not going to be in charge of any of these functional boxes any longer. I’m working my way out, period. So if you have to recommit, you do it for the good of the business because that’s what we’re all concerned about. But get back and start looking for new talent to put back into that chair. Don’t accept it as a long term solution.
Jennifer Zick: That’s so good. So it’s mindset and it’s clear communication to your team, but it’s also doing what the business needs done right now and not just, you know, avoiding dealing with what is necessary in the moment. Right.
Gary Braun: I’ll add on, yeah, nobody’s trained us either on how to get through all these hard, turbulent times. Right. So. So we’re winging it a little bit, I’ll say. If your tendency is to just dive right back in and take over, you’re undermining the people that you put into that position. If your mindset is, let’s see what these people can do. And rather than say, here’s what we’re going to do, team, you go, okay, Jennifer, you’ve got marketing. What’s your plan? Mary, you’ve got talent. What is our plan? Bill, you’ve got this. What is our plan? And come back. You can certainly have an opinion and you can certainly provide input, but there’s a big difference between empowering them to come up with some things versus you’re just going to take over and give direction. Even if it’s on a temporary basis.
There’s some things you’re going to have to step into. But you hired these people and you put them in place for a reason. Now let’s battle test them and see if they can come up with something. And if we can all get in the room and say, all right, team, here’s what it is. Don’t give them the answer, what should we do about it? And you sit back and say, let’s listen. That’s way different than just diving back in.
Mary Nutting: Totally. I love that. You know, I can’t tell you how many times being an executive search, I have talked to a very seasoned executive who is like, oh, you know, I, I’ve grown businesses like that. Been there, done that. I know exactly, you know what to do. Come in and, you know, turn this around. And it’s like, that was a different time. That was, you know, you had a different generation of talent. And I think, you know, while you, when you need to pivot, you need that leader, that owner perspective, it is such a perfect time to get, you know, your talent together and get the ideas out on the table and challenge the status quo challenge that, you know, you’re doing this because it’s what you’ve always done and who knows what could come out of that?
Like Rhoda Olson and great clips.
Gary Braun: And you. I’m going to make a blanket statement. Small businesses have not been historically great at hiring leaders.
Mary Nutting: Right.
Gary Braun: Hire somebody who’s from their industry, who’s got a good track record and the references are good and hey, the interview went well and maybe we did an assessment and that’s it. We weren’t. All leaders are not created equal. Some are more strategic, some are more executional, some are good in the field, some are good at building things, while others are good at managing things. You have to figure out what kind of leader you need and then craft your whole interview process around that. But we call it the sales leader dilemma is most sales leaders fail on their first time being a sales leader. Like 80% of them fail. But now I’m an experienced sales leader and I go to a different company and hey, I’m from the industry and I’ve got experience managing everything.
And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to a CEO and said, well, I assume they know how to do that because, you know, it’s part of their job. No, nobody’s ever taught them. And by the way, you didn’t interview for that either. So I, you know, the big thing that we say is if you’re gonna. It’s a buyer build decision. If you’re gonna buy, really look under the COVID and see if they have the skills that you need for your company. But if you’re gonna build, invest in the leader, teach them how to do a lot of this stuff because that’s a big missing piece in a lot of companies.
Jennifer Zick: So true. And just to. Oh, go ahead, Bill.
Bill Oelrich: Well, what Gary’s explaining is that’s the head coach coordinator philosophy. Okay. I, as the head coach, have a plan for this team, but I’m there to support my coordinators. They go out and build the plans and all of ours. Right, like for all our functional boxes. Become a coach. Don’t necessarily become the doer. It’s a shift in your thinking. And when you shift that way, your team feels it and they’re going to begin performing at a different level because they have your support, they have autonomy. They have. They can grow. Right? They sense they can grow. It’s not, they’re not limited anymore by one person.
Jennifer Zick: Yes. And I want to take on something that Mary was talking about. When you’re interviewing leaders and they’re like, oh, I know exactly how to get in there and be the change agent. And I’ve done this before. It’s so true that all of us are doing things for the first time in a new world every day. Every day I feel that way. Oh, my gosh. I’m doing a job I’ve never done before in a world I’ve never lived in before. That’s true for all of us. And I feel like the most resilient, innovative businesses that I’m seeing thrive among our clients and hopefully in our own walls are the ones led by humble people who are willing to acknowledge. I’m still figuring this out, too. And we need each other. And we’re going to be collaborative and as transparent as we can be.
We’re not going to ignore or hide from the hard truths, but we’re going to remind ourselves of how resilient we’ve been in the past and how we’ve solved things in the past and, like, harness that belief to propel us through it. So that’s at least how I’m trying to show up and practice this. And it starts with leaving ego at the door and being like, I’m doing it for the first time, too, in a whole new world.
Mary Nutting: Hallelujah.
Practical Implementation and Final Advice
Jennifer Zick: Yeah. Seriously. Well, I’ve got one final question for this whole lineup of panelists, and I’m going to start with you, Gary. If you could share one piece of actionable advice for entrepreneurial leaders who are facing the new world we’re in today with all of its uncertainties, what advice would you give them?
Gary Braun: Leverage your team, leverage your investment, and leverage your leaders. Don’t provide the answers. You know, it’s a little bit of what we just talked about. But when you get into a situation, if you really want to develop them, if you really want to see what they’ve got, if you really want to see if you’ve got the right team in place, when you come into a room, ask, don’t tell. You come in there and you start saying, what do you think we do? What’s your ideas? Here’s some things to think about. What’s our best approach? But you become more of the facilitator. You can still be the final decision maker. Don’t get me wrong there.
But if you want to leverage your team so it’s not so dependent on you, and by the way, they have brilliant ideas, things that you haven’t thought about if you’re Leveraging their team, they’re going to come up with stuff that you. You would have never even conceived. So leverage your team, ask a lot more, Facilitate. And don’t just be the. I’m the hero, and I’m going to provide all the answers.
Jennifer Zick: That’s so good. What about you, Mary?
Mary Nutting: Well, building off of that would be my number one. So number two would be to create an environment that facilitates that. Right. So I talked a little bit earlier about, you know, creating that environment where it’s okay and safe to take risks, calculated risks. Right. And when you make mistakes, coach and develop together to learn from those, you know, mistakes so that the decisions get better and better over time. So it’s. It’s really just creating that environment to get people’s opinions and then to try things.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, Love that. Bill, what’s your advice?
Bill Oelrich: Well, if you don’t have a team, please begin building one. Okay. So that you can begin to offload some of this work. And as you build your team, make a commitment to not being the smartest person in the room. Find people who are going to take you further and. And coach them and support them and communicate well with them and do the kinds of things that you would want done to you if you were in their chair. Become a leader.
Jennifer Zick: That’s so good.
Gary Braun: I sat in one of my peer groups. I have a CEO peer group as well, and we had a great speaker. And he says, sometimes we just can’t help it. And even just based on our personality or how strong we are and whatnot, we just kind of take over, and you have to be intentional about it. And he says, rather than come in and say, here’s a plan I’m thinking about, and everybody’s like, I know where this is going. We. The plan’s done. You have to be super intentional and come in there and go, here’s a plan. I’m thinking about it. I know it’s got holes in it. Your job, guys, is to poke holes in the deal today. Now you just created a whole different expectation. And they’re like, really? Is he gonna let us poke holes and stuff?
But your words matter how you show up and your words. And when they do respond, even if you violently disagree, it’s like, well, that’s one alternative. And you got to keep facilitating this out. Even if it’s the stupidest idea in the world. You got to keep facilitating this stuff out, because as soon as you shut. Shut somebody down, the rest of the group goes, oh, okay, we’re not doing that anymore. You have to be so intentional as a leader to make it safe for people to suggest things, to do things. Otherwise you will be confined to you. And that doesn’t scale.
Mary Nutting: And Gary, you made a great distinction. You don’t just give it to everybody to figure out, right? And do this and say, I’m going to go on vacation, I’ll come back and you guys have it figured out. You know, you have to create some sort of, you know, sense of vision and high level strategy. Right. And maybe even some ideas. But then to ask for that feedback, that’s great.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah. And I know this will shock all of you, but I tend to be a pretty high energy, fiery, full of words kind of leader over here at Authentic. And so after one of our most recent off sites, as a leadership team, I came away with like, the goal of the quarter for me was to be more literal with my leadership team about when am I asking for input or when am I giving directives? Because I’m thinking out loud all the time. And you don’t realize when you’re the CEO and you’re thinking out loud that people are like, this is what she’s asking us to do. When in my heart of hearts, I’m just asking for their input. Right?
So being intentional, being aware of oneself and having to be like really literal, sometimes I just need to stop the meeting and say just, you know, that was not a directive. I’m just floating an idea. I want your ideas too. So some of these things are hard to put into practice. But again, like, as I recap on this great rich conversation we’ve had over a number of topics, what I am taking away, and this is so applicable for me today and probably for all of us, this has been, like I said in my LinkedIn post today, this has been a therapy session as a founder to just be with you all today. I hope it has been for our guests as well. But building resilient businesses takes intention, it takes productivity, it takes structure.
And if I were to add to that last word of advice, the round we did there, my advice to our guests would be like, look up and play the long game. Like, don’t let what’s changing around us in the world today freak you out and take you off of your long term vision. You might have to change some of the strategies and some of the approaches, but like play the long game. Look beyond where we are right now and ask yourself, are the decisions I’m making today going to still be in alignment with where I want to be? One to three to five years from now. So that’s where we’re at. We’re here playing the long game and helping our clients do the same with no random acts of marketing right now.
Like let’s remember what is the brand we’re trying to build and what is the pathway to get there and build long term trust. So we’re all cheering you all on. And if you’re watching today and you don’t yet know Mary, Gary, Bill and their teams or myself and my team, I hope you’ll get more acquainted with our businesses because they are invited here as my guest today because they truly help first leaders and companies. They want what’s best for your business and they’ve got a track record of helping so many businesses grow through all different kinds of changes.
And we do have a couple minutes for questions, but before I take a couple questions, I want to make sure I share that all of the businesses represented in this meeting today, as well as several other partners are joining forces to put together a really fantastic full day conference coming up in the Twin Cities this fall. So if you’re not familiar with the Twin Cities Business Growth Conference, it will be held on November 20th at the Metropolitan Ballroom. This is a conference designed exclusively for owners and CEOs of growth businesses. So companies with 10 or more employees who are getting to critical mass or they’re beyond that critical mass and they’re looking for better value creation strategies, even more leadership development ideas.
We’re going to be bringing together a full day of content across the disciplines that we all lead, really to help support local owners and leaders in being resilient growth businesses. So there will be more that we’ll be sharing about the conference soon. But if you’re an owner or a CEO on this call today, we would love for you to join us live and in person here in the twin cities on November 20th. So thanks for joining us today. Let me go over to some of our questions here and I’m going to just jump in right on Pete’s question because his name’s on his question. So Pete posed a question. I haven’t read it yet, so I’m going to read it out loud for Bill. Pete agrees that this environment is creating an opportunity to optimize your operating model. Control what you can control.
Along with the financial metrics that you mentioned, what are the next steps, two operational model areas that you’re likely to point clients to focus on.
Bill Oelrich: Okay, so help me understand because I’m sorry, it’s we’ve got the framework we’re working on the framework, we’re getting super clear on where we’re going. We’re getting clear on our metrics. After that, I’m working on my team. I’m beginning to optimize my team. Right people, right seats, that is, I’m doing that before I’m doing the other stuff, actually, because I want to make sure I have the right team members in place. And then it’s once you have that and you begin optimizing your, what we call the three legged stool. So know who’s doing what, like roles and responsibilities. Get super clear on what everybody inside this organization should be focused on. Give them the 20% to focus on. That’s going to move the needle 80%. Okay. So if I understood the question right, that’s where I’m going with it.
I’m digging into my people and I’m making sure they are absolutely in the right chair doing work that’s uniquely suited to them.
Jennifer Zick: Great, Great. This is an interesting question that I want to pose for all of you or any of you who have a perspective on it. For founders who aren’t yet thinking about an exit, why is it still important to build transferable value today to think about value creation? Bill. Bill’s a guy.
Bill Oelrich: I’m gonna jump out of my chair. Thank you. Because the same thing a buyer wants is what’s going to make your life better, more fulfilling every. You get owner freedom. You might never sell your company, but you still achieved owner freedom. Right? Like that’s the goal. And if you want to sell your company, you’re going to get four to six times ebitda. So you’re going to get four to six years earnings. If you build a company that can run on autopilot, literally as you as a visionary leader forever, you can take earnings in perpetuity, 20, 30, 40 years. I’d rather have the latter.
Jennifer Zick: I was just gonna say. I was just gonna say. Basically what you’re saying, Bill, is either way, you’re building toward freedom, profitability and optionality and Mary.
Mary Nutting: Yeah, and just along with that, you may decide not to sell, but that frees you up to work on the business and to think about, you know, how to create a vision for what’s next.
Jennifer Zick: Whether we want to admit it or not, we all exit our businesses, even if they have to carry us out in a body bag. So having a plan and a team in place is a good idea. Gary
Gary Braun: It just reduces the chaos. I mean, if you really want to grow, you can’t walk around where everybody has everything in their head and there’s no plan and there’s no systems and there’s no metrics and you don’t do that when you’re a brand new company. You start off there a, there’s no such thing as a plan and everything. Any money’s good money. You know, if they can fog them here, they’re prospecting. You do whatever you can. You bend the rules, you create stuff as you go along that school at some point that doesn’t scale anymore. And when, you know, we think about it in sales all the time, we always look at these teams and they might have eight people on their team. Two of them have really figured out how to sell.
You got four in the middle, two are just struggling like crazy. If you operationalize all that, if you get, we’re all singing from the same songbook. We’re all following the same process, we have the same plan, we’re chasing the same customers or differentiating. Everybody’s following best practices. You sell more stuff. I mean, it’s been proven over and over again and it applies to every other department in your organization. Standardize it. You’ll grow. Now, if you don’t care about growing and you got a lifestyle business and you like the way it goes, you don’t need to, but if the intention is to grow or to eventually sell or reduce the chaos, it’s been proven about a million times over.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah. So true.
Bill Oelrich: And if you, if you stop growing your business and you want to sell it, you will pay a price for it. Yeah. A flat business is not a valuable business. You have to maintain your foot on the gas pedal. Okay. Simple as that. Growth fuels everything else too.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. That’s a great note to end on. And I just want to invite from our audience, if you’re here today and you’re a founder, a CEO, an operating leader responsible for growth and health in an area in your business, but you’re recognizing risk, random acts, whatever it is, whether it’s in your core operational structure, if it’s with the wrong people in the seats, if it’s with how your sales team is functioning, if it’s with random acts of marketing, you’ve got a group of people here who want to see you reduce that risk and move from random to revenue results and resilience. Do you see how I did that just off the cuff? I mean, we’re that good over here. So we want to thank you so much for joining us. The sun is, I think, trying to break through here in Edina.
So that’s good. That’s a good omen. I wish you all just the very best day, and I want to say thank you to my good friends and panelists today. I just enjoy being in your circle, and I learn something every time I’m with you. So thanks for being here and sharing your time and wisdom. We appreciate you.
All right. See you on the next webinar, everybody. Until then, take care.
