Sam Donaghey

Hello and welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. We’ll talk key learnings cheat codes, hacks and principles that have served us on our journey in the hopes that they serve you as well. I’m Sam Donaghey, director of recruiting at Fast Slow Motion. Today, I’m joined by Eric Housh FSM’s Chief Growth Officer, and John Burdett, FSM’s Founder and CEO.

This is the introductory episode of the podcast. And there’s a lot of podcasts out there. For somebody that’s listening to us who may have just discovered us. John, Can you tell us who is this podcast built for? 

John Burdett

This podcast is built for leaders who are growing businesses. We’ve had the privilege over our careers to build multiple businesses, and we created a business called Fast Slow Motion to help other people build their businesses the right way.

Our mission is actually to be a blessing to business leaders as they grow their businesses. As many of us know, and if you’re in the process of building a business, it’s hard. There’s nothing easy about it. And we want to help people enjoy the journey. 

What we mean by that is we want them to build a business that’s excellent, that has a great culture where their people enjoy what they’re doing,their customers love what they do and they make good money and they build wealth over time and they have meaningful family lives. And we really believe that “AND” is important and we really believe that is possible. 

So we’re going to be able to share all the mistakes we’ve made along our journey, hopefully help other people not make those mistakes and as add as much value to people that are growing businesses as possible.

Sam Donaghey

Fantastic. Okay. So it’s going to be a valuable resource and hopefully, we’re going to make a big impact. Eric, What sorts of ideas can leaders expect to hear on this show? 

Eric Housh

So we’re excited to bring our listeners different content around three different families of concepts. Concept number one, we’re going to talk about people, people are the number one asset of any business.

They’re the reason we exist. They’re the way that we execute with excellence. And here, we’ve built a world-class method for finding, hiring, and developing talent.Sam, you know, as our director of recruiting – last year alone, you interviewed over 1500 candidates for our open positions. It’s a very rigorous process, a very effective process. And as a result, candidates that we find that we bring on board stay here.

They want to grow here. They want to be here for a while. We’ve got a good process for growing and helping people develop as well. We’re going to unpack all of that. We’re going to talk about our framework for being an ideal team player and growing into an ideal team player. And then finally, culture. We’re a remote-first shop, and we have always been really proud of the culture we’ve built. So we’re going to talk about how to build a winning culture. How do you protect your culture? How do you get your employees bought into that? They’re fierce protectors of it as well. 

Sam Donaghey

So we’re going to be talking about building a world-class culture, but we’re also going to be talking about how do you hire people to that culture. 

Okay. That’s a ton of value that we’re going to be offering. And, you know, surely every growing business out there stays on the lookout for ways to improve the processes around those two. John, what else are we going to cover? 

John Burdett

The second family, a concept that we’re going to talk about is operational excellence. We believe the standard is the standard, and you don’t lower the standard at all.

If anything, you raise the standard over time. And so we believe in doing things in an excellent manner, but we also believe that you shouldn’t have to sacrifice other things by doing things in an excellent way. And as Eric mentioned and as you know all too well, our job is to grow people up into those roles and take advantage of their unique skill sets and help them make a difference and really go to that standard and not lower the standard for the people.

We raise the standard and grow them into that. And that happens with a lot of good systems and processes and we can get into a lot of those details in these podcaststhast are going to be coming up. And we’ve learned a lot of painful lessons over the years doing that. So we’ll definitely share some cheat codes and some tricks along the way.

But these are things you don’t learn in business school. These are more practical manners of how to run and grow a business. And it’s where the real things happen. Business and life is a lot messier than you’re going to read and academia and there’s nothing wrong with that. There are some great concepts you’ll learn in business school, but we want to help people from a practical level, get to the next level and take their business to the next level and do that with intentionality and focus.

Sam Donaghey

Today, I’d say executives are looking to people of influence for actionable insights. Why should business leaders value our opinion?

Eric Housh 

Our company – Fast Slow Motion – is one of the leading Salesforce and HubSpot consultancies in North America. We’ve helped hundreds of growing businesses professionalize their processes using these two platforms, and we’ve got dozens of certified experts on staff who have solved very complex problems with these two technologies at the core.

We’ve seen a lot. We’ve done a lot personally, and we’ve helped a lot of businesses with things that they’re facing. 

John Burdett

Just to build on that a little bit, Sam. Most people see these tools as just a CRM and Salesforce, just as a CRM or HubSpot, just as a CRM. And a lot of times it becomes a glorified contact database or spreadsheet, and we believe there’s more out there.

The business process and the way you do things is by far the most important thing. But you need to apply what you do in a consistent manner and use tools like a CRM to do that, especially for smaller growing businesses, small businesses trying to grow, and the big businesses, you don’t need multiple software platforms. You can do everything in one place.

These tools are powerful enough to customize to not only handle sales and marketing, project management, account management, HR, even key aspects of accounting and payments and website management. There’s a lot that you can do. We love taking people on that journey to professionalize each aspect of their business and then codify that in the CRM. So you’re capturing good data and you’re doing things very consistently so that you know why you’re winning and you also know why you’re losing If you’re winning and you don’t know why you can’t repeat that.

So you want to make sure that you can build consistent results over time so that you can grow and scale your people the right way and stay focused on who you really are. And then that also buys you margin to enjoy life and to build a business that you like and not be frustrated with the chaos that often ensues as you’re growing and scaling a business.

Sam Donaghey

I’ve heard you say this a lot of times, John. You know, you have to architect businesses the right way, do things the right things right. Can you tell me a little bit about that? You know how Fast Slow Motion, builds businesses the right way and what separates us from the next management consulting?

John Burdett
I mean, we’re technologists, we understand technology. But to be frank, technology is the easy part. So there are a lot of great technology consulting firms out there, but they’re going to do what you ask them to do. If you’re giving them bad information because you don’t know how to do things, they’re going to build the wrong thing or it won’t be adopted the right way because it’s not aligned with what you should be doing.

So we very much believe in bringing that business consulting, that management consulting that the large companies often have and get from the McKinsey’s of the world and the Accentures of the world and the management consulting of the world, we want to bring that to the smaller growing business because they need that. They need to know what to do, how to do it, and they need it done fast and they need it in a way that’s scalable and flexible because the thing that’s going to happen over time, which is a guarantee, is change.

So we want to be able to adopt that and do it the right way. It’s the combination of all of those things. That is what adds the most value. The technology, once we know what to do and how to do it, implementing the technology is usually the easiest part of the whole equation. 

Sam Donaghey

So guys, how often can subscribers expect new episodes?

Eric Housh

We will bring new episodes to our audience every two weeks on Tuesday morning, starting with this episode. Every episode is going to be about 15-20 minutes long. We’re designing it so that you can listen to it on your way in, on your commute, and a lot of these ideas and concepts and tactics we’ll be sharing – you can begin implementing that very day.

You can begin having conversations when you get to the office about these ideas that you’ve heard and how you can apply them. For each episode we’re also going to include some downloadable things so you don’t have to worry about taking notes on your way in. You’ll be able to download the show notes once you get back to your desk at www.fastslowmotion.com. 

We’ll be on all the podcast platforms. So if you subscribe, we will automatically drop new episodes into your feed and then we’ll archive each episode on www.fastslowmotion.com/podcast.

Sam Donaghey

What about any listeners out there who might be struggling with something specific with their business right now? What do you say to those people? 

Eric Housh

Yeah, we’d love to hear from them so they can email us at podcast@fastslowmotion.com  if they’re struggling with something specific and we’ll dig into that, we’ll have an episode on it.

We have seen a lot. We’ve helped businesses solve a lot, so chances are their problem isn’t unique and we’ve we’ve helped other businesses solve it before. But we’d love to hear from them. We’d love to dig in on that, and provide some value. Any sort of questions I have or any general feedback, we’d love to hear your thoughts. 

John Burdett

Eric, just to build on that just a little bit too. Why should you talk to us or listen to us? We actually implement the things that we’re talking about. So there’s nothing we talk to our clients about or we’ll talk about on this podcast that we don’t do ourselves –  that we haven’t practiced or implemented. We run our entire business on a CRM and we do everything in it and have all our data in one place, and we’ve been on that journey not only to help hundreds of clients do it, but also do it ourselves and run our business the same way.

Sam Donaghey

You guys really have a heart for people and you have a heart for businesses and you really care about the outcome. You know, client satisfaction scores are non-negotiable at Fast Slow Motion and very much by the same token of working with a business at the other end of that, you’re more than happy to actually not work with a business doing the right thing.Can you talk about that a little bit, please? 

John Burdett

One of my favorite quotes is from DL Moody, and he says, “Our greatest fear shouldn’t be of failure, but of succeeding in something that really doesn’t matter.” And so what I’ve learned along my business career is it doesn’t matter if you win, if you don’t do it the right way and you don’t enjoy it with the people that you’re coming along with.

And more importantly, you’re not building real relationships with your teammates and your clients. Because at the end of the day, as Eric mentioned earlier, people are all that really matter. And so we want to help people do things the right way so that when they’re looking back, they’re proud of what they did. They had a lot of success from a financial perspective and from a business perspective, but most importantly, from a relationship perspective.

And we think that’s the Holy Grail, the trifecta. That’s the thing you really should should go after. And we think it’s very achievable. And to be really frank, from our perspective, if we can’t achieve that, we don’t want to do it. I mean, it’s not worth it. There’s no amount of money that’s going to be worth more than real, meaningful relationships with people that you care about.

Sam Donaghey

Okay, guys, that’s the end of the first episode of the Fast Slow Motion podcast. Just remember to subscribe to episodes on your favorite podcast platform, or you can find archived episodes at www.fastslowmotion.com/podcast , and we’ll see you for the next one.