Eric Housh
Hello and welcome back to the Fast Slow Motion Podcast, where we share strategies, ideas, and insights to help you build a business you love while still enjoying your life. I’m your host, Eric Housh, and joining me today in the studio is Fast Slow Motion CEO, John Burdett. John, thank you for being here.

John Burdett
Eric, so great to be here.

Eric Housh
We also got a special guest today, Jeff Fox. Jeff is the CEO and founder of Circumference Group. And he brings a rare lens to the scaling conversation because he has lived it from both sides. So he’s led large organizations as an operator. And today he works closely with leadership teams as an advisor and investor. Super excited to pick his brain today. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff Fox
Glad to be here.

John Burdett
Jeff, we’re just so grateful to have you on. I’m very grateful for our friendship and partnership. And it’s been so much fun working with you and your team over the last couple of years. We are business partners and you’re part of our family and part of the Fast Slow Motion family. And I’m so excited to extend that to our audience who can learn a lot from you. Cause you’re an operator first. You’ve been there and done that. And you’re also an investor and have a ton of experience investing in many, many companies and doing many, many things in your life. So very excited about what you’re going to share and I’m looking forward to what I’m going to learn today.

Eric Housh
Yeah, I’m the same. Jeff, John and I, obviously we know your story, but a lot of our listeners may be meeting you for the first time, hearing about Circumference Group for the first time. So we’d love just the Cliff Notes version of your career story. What kind of businesses have you helped scale? What did you learn by being in that operator seat?

Jeff Fox
Well, so my story has a backdrop, which is I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. My father was first generation educated. So think America is a pretty good place. He was a doctor and he was really, and this will be fundamental to the scaling discussion, he was a business person and he was skilled labor. He was a doctor.

And he built his own practice and he was a small businessman. And so as I was growing up, he would talk to me not about medicine as much as the business of delivering quality services to his customers, his patients and their families, and then running it as a business so that we could eventually benefit from his skilled labor and what it was worth in the economy.

So with that as a backdrop, when I graduated college, I was very blessed with no connections or background in finance. I started on Wall Street. This would have been 1984, just when computers were starting to be used to think through financial decisions. And so in my first job, I learned to take a business situation and put a financial analysis around it on a spreadsheet. So that would have been 1984. And I was essentially in the financial advice and deal making or deal making support business for my first 12 years in the business world. I worked first in New York and then was recruited to Arkansas to work for a multi-billionaire family, the Stephens family, and help them build that services skill set, help them build out the staffing to deliver that work product or that fee product. And then got hired by my largest customer, a company called Alltel, which had grown extraordinarily with a lot of acquisitions and was part of that team through three different transformation cycles over a 13-year period until we sold that business.

Since then, I’ve been blessed to be invited to be the CEO of two different public companies where I’ve used my financial background and operating experience from Alltel to be part of transforming two different public companies, both of which had great people, great customers, great assets, but had been mismanaged through a series of risky transactions that didn’t work.

Eric or John, anything I missed that you think will be helpful as we now talk about the scaling process?

John Burdett
I think that’s great. I think you’ve obviously lived scale, both from an operator perspective and a financial analyst perspective and also an investor perspective there. That often leads to complexity as we all know, as you get bigger, things necessarily don’t get simpler. They get harder and more difficult. When complexity shows up, and you go from that small scrappy business to you’re really growing, what’s the first kind of complexity that usually surfaces first that you have to deal with?

Jeff Fox
I mean, at the earliest stage, one of the things, and John, you’ll recognize this, there’s typically a founder, a founder team that are highly tuned into customer needs, delivering solutions. And so there’s this very proximate touch that the leadership team of a small business has.

And as you grow and scale, the complexity of just that proximate understanding of what’s really going on starts to break down as you end up with an organization or more customers, so less time with each situation. And so that is the first thing that breaks. And it manifests itself depending on what the business does in terms of different functional issues or quality issues, or frankly, win and loss issues when competing for business. But it’s always the same. Just that tight circle of people with their vision for value starts to get diluted and have to communicate and meet instead of work, deliver, and execute.

John Burdett
Yes, owners and founders are usually the problem, I guess, as you’re saying that as a nice way where we kind of choke the baby instead of letting the baby grow up and become independent.

Jeff Fox
Right.

But the blessing of a founder or a founder team is they can stay North Star focused, meaning customer value is still in their eyes. It’s in the work product. It’s in the team’s expectations. And so there’s nothing bad about the scaling process. In fact, the scaling process is what I would call a constructive journey where people that are open, leaders that are open and start with, did the customer get what they paid for? Are my employees getting paid and rewarded and proud of what we do? When you have leaders that keep those things connected, the scaling process really happens much more organically than it breaks immediately and there’s a crisis. So I just love seeing how different companies go through that journey. And just by background, John and Eric, in my first real operating job, I had a business unit that was six million and I had a business unit that was 250 million. And so part of my scale perspective is that early in my career, I had a portfolio of different scales, somewhat similar types of businesses. And it was a great learning experience for me, which is why I love the topic. And why I built Circumference Group to be the business that it is.

Eric Housh
Jeff and John, we’ve got a variety of business leaders that tune into the podcast that want to hear these ideas. A lot of them are at different stages in scaling their business. So today, kind of how I want to break this down is to think about it by stage and think about it from that five million revenue stage all the way up to 100. What are some of the things at each one of these different stages that our business leader audience may run into? So we’ve already heard it early. It’s that shift in mindset, that way that the leaders kind of have to get out of the way of themselves. They have to get the right team in place. They have to think about systems.

What else do you see kind of at that early sort of five million to 10 million stage that we have to get past first in order to get scale?

Jeff Fox
If five to 10 is the early trust period, you have to understand the decision making and then allocate trust to do it. And whether it’s just a project implementation team or a software development team or a sales team, somewhere between five and 10, the CEO, the founder, even the founder team has to start to instrument with systems and some level of expected metrics that can be measured. The responsibility to make real decisions, not come back up and down the food chain consistently. And so I think, and again, every business is different, but the sort of zero to five, five to 10, somewhere in that zip code, you have to be able to trust that your organization sees the North Star consistent with you as the leader or the leaders. And then you have to be able to see that they stay connected to that, but also delivering the value as investors. That’s what I see. I’m not sure if that’s translating to you guys, but to make it real.

We always as investors and operators talk about customer value and gross profit on that value being measurable and understandable and deliverable and referenceable. That doesn’t have to change in that zero to 10 range. What has to change is the decision making to make it happen at a bigger level.

John Burdett
Yeah, a lot of times we see leaders reacting to the symptoms from growth. A lot of mistakes I see oftentimes, and I’m sure you do as well, they try to hire their way out of it thinking that they’re going to hire a hero to solve all their problems instead of looking at the symptoms. I mean, the systems that should be put in place. What’s some common red flags you see around that conversation? And to piggyback on that a little bit,

One of the many things y’all have added a lot of value to us is putting those hard financial metrics tied to those things. So as you know, we’re very culture driven, people driven, customer value driven, operators at heart, but there’s an associated financial metric or key metric we should be managing alongside that proves we are truly customer value focused. That we truly are value focused from a cultural perspective. Help explore that a little bit with us, because that’s been really valuable for us.

Jeff Fox
Well, thank you for saying that. I think you guys have run a spectacularly thoughtful business, which is why we wanted to be your partner. But enough about the mutual affection society. The financial acumen, typically what we see, and this is a positive and a negative, is that businesses don’t really share their financial results up and down the entire company. That creates a lot of times challenges. And so the financials are typically constrained at levels. And that’s the nature of being smaller and private and owner operated, whether it’s financial investors or just founders.

And so recognizing that your organization doesn’t have the full financial picture means that you do need to use systems, processes, and some metrics so you can allocate trust that as the leadership team, you can see the boundary conditions where nobody can make the business lose a bunch of money because they have too much investment decision making without systems and processes in place. So we’re very much about the ability to scale will have a lot to do with committing to processes, systems, and metrics, and then sharing the financial information constructively and productively through that growth cycle. But you can’t get there if you don’t stay focused on a culture of delivering value and making sure that you make a gross profit on it.

Those are things that can always be shared, top line revenue and gross profit. So that people know that there’s money to work with to build the organization, to find the next customer, to make sure that you’re working on future solution opportunities. And so I call that the phase where you grow into an understood business model formation, but with customer value as the primary driver. More customers, more value delivered, more references, business model is being shaped. I’m part of something. Thank you for letting me make decisions with some accountability for some metrics. That’s best in class from my experience at that zero to 10 range.

John Burdett
Yeah, I think to double click on a couple of things you said, because I think it’s really valuable for owners and founders and entrepreneurs as they’re scaling their businesses.

You need to be proving that your financial metrics scale with the way you’re operating. So for instance, you have to start discriminating against different types of customers because not all customers are the same and you may enjoy serving them or you may like it, but they’re not producing the customer profit that may be necessary to scale the business and you’ll scale yourself out of business by not focusing on the right things.

And I think the other thing there, and I’d love to comment on it too, is a lot of us, let’s just say entrepreneurs, business owners, CEOs, are sometimes scared of partners like yourself because, they’re just going to run the business with a spreadsheet, right? It’s all about the money. It’s all about the money. It’s all about the money. Which is not the case, right? You’re saying it’s all about customer value.

And then we’re going to use the financial metrics and make sure we monitor that closely to make sure we’re around long-term to add customer value to serve this market. And that’s been awesome for us to experience with you to help us validate some of that stuff, because our intuition often lies to us in some of these things.

Jeff Fox
Well, first of all, you know, we had obviously numerous conversations before we ultimately became partners. And I hope that we’ve been what we said we were going to be, which is we are determined. I have a phrase called leading your capital that you’ve heard from me a couple of times. And so leading capital means the human capital of your organization, the financial capital of your investors, the financial capital of the revenue your customers give you to produce a business model that rewards your employees and your investors. So I do love leadership conversations about making sure that all stays connected and instrumented knowing that it’s really hard work but also knowing that it requires systems, processes and one North Star which is customers pay the rent. And so I’ll reiterate the point you just made which is sometimes when you’re the founder and the checkbook ain’t that full and the customer’s offering you money, it’s very difficult to walk away from revenue and so nobody listening to this podcast should hear revenue arrogance from us.

Revenue matters. Getting revenue is the lifeblood. It’s can you grow into a scale and a skill and a repeatability where you know some revenue is better than others. And when you do that early in a life cycle, which John, I do think Fast Slow Motion was disciplined about those things, it allows you to make more purposeful scaling choices and use the systems to allocate the trust and controls and responsibility. So I don’t know if that’s too much or too little, but we see that as a very integrated company by company thought process. And leaders matter in that thought process.

Eric Housh
And Jeff, as we continue the scaling journey past that 10 million mark, when you’re getting kind of that 10 to 25 million, you got real departments, you got handoffs, you got accountability, your team is growing, obviously. This is where we really need to start thinking about metrics. We need to start thinking about rhythms. We need to start really focusing on effective systems. What do you see show up in that band, that 10 to 25 band, that are just non-negotiables? If we’re gonna stay on this rocket ship, if we’re gonna keep scaling, what do we have to nail at this point in our scaling journey to get past?

Jeff Fox
Humility. You have to recognize that at a certain scale, no one has the level of nuances of what’s really going on at the customer level or at the competition to get a new customer level. There’s just too many. You have to have too many transactions, meetings, conversations, negotiations. And so the nuances start to become fuzzier and require more humble conversations about I don’t know what’s really going on here. And so decision making needs to go more and more into informed trust. And so the watch out is meetings where people aren’t really exchanging the right level of information. And so I would say the watch out is for the leaders in the organization to constantly be thinking, are we using this internal time to create forward competitive context and forward value delivery accountability? And it’s hard.

Because you probably don’t have the scale to have a full marketing team or a full account management. So you don’t have all of those scale accoutrements. So it really is a set of people crossing lines in meetings between departments with one purpose in mind. And so I call it humility. You have to be able to get in those meetings and trust that you may be the boss, but you don’t know as much as the people bringing the information.

And they don’t know as much as you about what your financial model may need to be. So it’s humility to allow the organization to breathe information and decision making cadence to scale. I’m not sure I’m using the right words, but that’s how I think about it. It’s all visual.

John Burdett
Yeah, see companies that have a ton of data at this point, right? Very little of it’s useful and they definitely tend to lack clarity because of that, right? Their data is all over the place because it’s typically got a bunch of systems, got a bunch of people now, got a bunch of processes all over the place. What do you see the best teams doing kind of solving that visibility problem to get that consistency so that the company can then start making really good actionable decisions on the data to have clarity to really know what’s going on because yeah, I mean at the top, you’re not touching the customers. You’re not touching the frontline employees. You’re not seeing it on a day-to-day basis. So a lot of times you’re kind of driving the car blinded in a lot of ways.

Jeff Fox
And if it’s blind at the top, it’s blind at the bottom, right? And so I do think that the top couple of levels going all the way down need to have the willingness to use the data, use the systems, but have real humble conversations about why do we lose that?

We should have won that deal. That’s amazing. And so the ability to then pick specific areas that are the governors of the momentum and judgment and outcome, it still comes back to customers, the duration of the customers, the integration with the customers, the getting a reference.

There’s some things about what I keep calling the North Star that can always be true. They can be true up to multiple billions of dollars. The ability to humbly have the information exchanged as an organization, as owner operators that have a culture of value, keeping that by using systems and processes is what the great leaders figure out how to do. But you can’t do it by brute force. It just becomes overwhelming. Then it becomes nobody will tell the boss that he or she doesn’t understand what’s going on. You have to receive. You have to be open. You go from give wisdom to receive wisdom. It’s been my experience. And John, I can tell you that not everybody gets up the chain of command and says, I actually know a lot less than the people that are touching the work every day. I’m supposed to be the boss. I’m supposed to make the decision.

John Burdett
Yeah, I want to highlight something that you said, but I think it’s really important. And I almost call it a pro tip. And I think it comes so naturally to you, but it may not be obvious to a lot of people, is to fill in the data gaps and the visibility gaps, you scrutinize the data that is being sent to you. And if you criticize or make decisions or ask questions about the data that’s being presented to you at the top, you will force accountability all the way through the chains to make sure that data is accurate. And it’ll create a system of like, okay, everybody’s paying attention to this. We better make sure it’s right. And then it forces, and I see that a lot where at the top, a lot of times they’re not holding their team accountable to the data and they’re scrutinizing their team and the person instead of scrutinizing the data. And it’s a great way to disarm that conversation with the team, but also reinforce the value of like,

Jeff Fox
Yes.

John Burdett
This is important because our CEO is making decisions off this. And if it’s not right, we’re going to steer the ship into the ground.

Jeff Fox
Yeah, and at scale, John, it’s really the way I’ve always said it is, I want enough information coming to me as the top that I don’t go disrupt the organization looking for something I think I want to know. And so striking that balance of having the information come up or come through the organization and knowing enough about the systems and who gets to make the decisions to where you can make sure you understand what risks are being taken or where judgments are being made. That requires trust and conversation a lot of times with the CFO, the chief operating officer, a head of project management. So the ability to acknowledge that you at the top, you make a few big decisions, but you cannot make any decisions about the work being delivered. Right. Or if you are, it’s very few. And so just trusting and creating that trust with information systems and processes is, if you strive for it as a leader, then that empowers the people that are going to grow into your best decision makers because they’re going to feel room to take ownership. And we call that owner operators. And this is stylistically the way I’ve always told people, we are owner operators. We don’t own the whole business because I’ve always worked for public companies. We don’t own the business.

But we do because the owners don’t want to make all these decisions. So we need to make them as if we’re the owners and reward our owners for trusting us. And they will reward us back by giving us capital to grow our careers and grow this business. So that to me is the scaling cycle the whole way. Your future decision makers, you want them feeling trusted and empowered.

And they’re going to make some mistakes and the system has to identify and help you correct it and pick it up.

Eric Housh
Yeah, that’s an excellent point and a great segue, Jeff, as we think about this next band, this band from 25 to 50, obviously resonating with John and I. This is kind of the story we’re living right now where that operating system becomes crucial, where that accountability and ownership at every level, that humility you mentioned earlier now is mission critical to make it through this stage. What do you see in addition to those shifts that leaders need to be thinking about at this 25 to 50 band to keep their company scaling in a healthy manner without burning their team out?

Jeff Fox
Yeah, so I actually just had coffee Friday with the founder of a business that’s gone from 20 to 60. And at the end of breakfast, I said, you need to stop going and inspecting work.

Because no matter what, if you truly are that powerful CEO that had the vision for how the work is done, almost no one’s going to do it the way you would do it. And so really, I think that if you just said 25 to 50, the CEO or founder or the founders, depending on configuration, having boundary conditions, systems, processes, allowing people to make decisions the way they make them, do things slightly different, but allow the results to be inspected real time. Flipping it from, I’m gonna go inspect your work and coach you, or tell you how it should be done, to I’m going to receive the value of the way you all do it within boundary conditions, that’s really hard. And that is why, again, I’ll go back to this is not an infomercial for Fast Slow Motion. But we believe Fast Slow Motion instinctively with the way it thinks about systems and has a culture where that can be done. I think, you know, if you put John on a project, he probably would do it worse than your best person now. Right? Because maybe he’s not doing it as much. And so that from 25 to 50, it’s can you actually have that trust take hold? And then grow into the decisions you now will need to make to get the business to 100.

When you’re going from 25 to 50, in my experience, and this would be my coaching advice, imagine what you’re going to do when your team succeeds getting you to 50 and follow it and be ready for it as the leader. So that you’re already in step and you don’t have some restructuring or something to do at 50 or 47 because you didn’t believe your team was going to get there and you weren’t on top of seeing how it was going to affect the way you have to continue to work different. Leaders have the authority to trust their team or to get in their way.

John Burdett
Yeah, Jeff, as you were talking, I was thinking about something. So often I think you see it as where the leaders and the processes and the systems and really everything that got you where you are today isn’t necessarily where it’s going to get you to that next level. And so much of this oftentimes is, I mean, you can look at very few examples like Mark Zuckerberg’s one, very few examples that can take it all the way from idea through running a public company.

And as you’re going through these different bands of growth and from your experience, how are you mentoring and then really measuring, okay, is the leader capable of taking that next step? Because as you said, it’s hard, there’s nothing easy about that level of growth and the way you run the business and everything you did previously doesn’t really apply to leading and growing the organization at that next level. Just as you alluded to, I would be horrible today if I was leading a project. And thank God we got people on our team doing that way better than I ever thought possible. But a lot of times we see that where the leaders are still at the tip of the spear talking to the customers and doing all these kinds of things.

I assume you see that a lot as well. And then what conversations do you have with those leaders to help them either realize or get them to where they need to be before you bring in some new talent to help them get to where they need to be?

Jeff Fox
You’ve experienced this, so you know that it’s very simple. It is customer value. Typically, a business will start with one value proposition, one buyer. It’s the complexity of the growth curve in terms of number of different things you actually sell. There’s what I would call a complexity curve through that growth cycle that is every company is a market of one. Every company is different. So how a company like a Mark Zuckerberg, right? They hit a demand with one value proposition and got to monstrous scale with advertising revenue. So there’s examples like that, whereas there’s examples of businesses that you can imagine it being 15 million, but its ability to address demand and deliver value is constrained at 10. And so I always like to, with that as a backdrop, think the size of the market opportunity and the demand to fulfill and the complexity of how you fulfill it in the range where you can and cannot really deliver value. That is really important for the owner of a business or owners of a business to be measuring and talking about. That will always be true up the scale curve. Every business is going to be different. I can make a yellow school bus and I can sell 300 million dollars of those a year and that’s all I need to do. Or I’m going to do business implementing Salesforce and MuleSoft and HubSpot. So there’s design to meet the demand opportunity and ambition of a business. I always encourage leaders and owners to be as ambitious as the value they can deliver allows and then go a little beyond it if you think the market wants you to do more than you’re sure you can do. But hold yourself accountable for not failing to deliver it and then figure out can you make it scalable. And that is the discipline of looking at who you are and what you can be. But the complexity will then drive everything, and complexity meaning number of different value propositions typically, complexity of your inventory if you’re a manufacturer. So every business has these complexity levels and you as a leader and an investor have to make a judgment on how to design off of and with those variables to hit a demand opportunity. You have to hit demand. You have to find revenue.

That sounded like motherhood and apple pie, I’m sure.

Eric Housh
Jeff, everything we’ve talked about today is resonating. Obviously customer value, client value, systems, humility, leadership. We’ve talked our way up this chain now. We’re at this 50 million to 100 million band.

At this level, and you mentioned this a few moments ago, we have to have fundamental changes in leadership. We have to be thinking about the business in different ways. What else do you see at that level in a company’s maturity and in a company’s evolution that really is that game changer of, we’re gonna keep growing this thing and expanding this thing and delivering value, or maybe we’ve hit our ceiling and this is what it is?

Jeff Fox
First of all, I would say any leader or leadership team that gets a business from wherever to whatever should be applauded. Growing a business is what drives our economy. And so the capital, the constraints, the ambition, the things that allow a business to continue to grow has leaders that want to compete and grow.

And if those leaders get to 50 and say this is enough for us or the market’s saturated or this is getting too hard, we want to go back to doing different jobs. There’s a lot of things about leading the capital at any point in scale that are choices and these are blessed choices in our economy. And so if your ambition as a leadership team is because you think a market can allow you to get to 100 or 200 or 300 or Mark Zuckerberg level, the ambition, the market opportunity needs to be met with your humility and willingness to change and work and grow and scale and live with different trust and allocation of decision making.

And that’s all require systems. It all requires commitment to processes. Some companies will be a little better than others or a lot better, but nobody gets there without those things. And I don’t know if I hope that helps, but I really think that leaders can imagine and execute and sometimes they surprise themselves. Sometimes they get where they wish they could have gotten and they’re done. Nothing is bad.

Everything is good because somebody is benefiting when a person or group of people with or without capital partners puts a business in motion to grow and satisfy customers. Nothing bad happens in that journey for our country, for our people. That’s it. To me, it’s very simple. Ambition and market opportunity don’t always have to align with what you effort. If you have capital partners, you’re supposed to effort it, right? That’s part of what John had and you guys had to decide, which is we can’t get comfortable here. We actually want to go there. To go there, we think Circumference Group, Jeff and his team will help us. They won’t get in our way. And so I do strongly believe that on that scale curve, somewhere in there, you don’t necessarily have to bring in partners, but being able to find people that can give you aligned truth and real aligned insights or coaching, that is not a bad thing to do. You don’t have to do it, but that’s why we set up Circumference to participate with some companies that feel like they want some of that.

John Burdett
Yeah, that was, you know, was on the personal side for me. And, you know, I talked a lot about this when we were dating, so to speak, is like, I’ve never built a company this big and I want to be a good steward of this opportunity. And I love the way you kind of phrased it is because a lot of times we beat ourselves up as anything, right? Any person with ambition or people that are constantly trying to get better, it’s never good enough, right? You’re always late. And then just recognizing that at some point you are gonna be done, whatever, right? You’ve worked yourself out of a job. There’s somebody better than you that can do it. You don’t have the hunger that you once had before. It stops being fun. You’ve hit the market top, right? There’s no more demand there to take, no more value to extract, whatever it may be. But recognizing that, having the humility to recognize it, that self-awareness to recognize it and the ability to like, okay, let’s work through this as a team with a partner like Circumference Group is just extremely invaluable. And it’s been huge for us to have you and your team on board to help us on these journeys to figure these things out because they’re hard decisions and you want to be a good steward of things. Early on, you have nothing to lose. At the $100 million level, you’ve got a lot to lose, right? And you don’t want to screw that up.

Do you see anything other than kind of that leadership cap or perhaps the demand cap or anything else that causes businesses at that level to stall?

Jeff Fox
I mean, competitive context and shifting value. So at any point, this is part of the gift that I do think we try to, I don’t think it’s a quote gift, but it’s part of what we do is at any moment in time, you have competition and shift in value that is occurring. So no matter what, you can stay doing what you do today in a lot of businesses, static businesses. There are static businesses out there like folks that do pavement work. There’s things that are relatively static.

If you’re in a business that’s relatively dynamic, you have to always be thinking about, this is what we do today, but in one, two, and three years, we can’t let that get old. We can’t let that get rusty. And so I really think dynamic leaders, sometimes the complexity of scale sucks the forward thinking out of the system.

That tends to be, and then we got to make some money here. There’s money to be made. And so I would always challenge people not to criticize them, but to say, imagine, always remember that you as the leader and owners are allowed to and should be saying, are we going to be selling something different in 12 months or 15 months? Because your competition, may not even know what they’re doing.

But people are going to be competing. If you find your organization static, that’s when you as the leader need to say, I may be the problem. I don’t need to fire myself. I need to re-energize or rethink my role. And so I think when we look at a business, we just try to see, is this team committed to customer value? Do they know how to drive rewards for an organization? And do they actually want to dynamically work with a partner on these conversations? Because the answer is always, it depends on what we are trying to accomplish, what’s going on around us, and what we think we can execute. Sorry, I’m giving you long answers today, John and Eric.

John Burdett
Those are great answers. Yeah, I’ll just double click just one highlight. I mean, and it’s obvious, right? Everybody’s kind of facing this with AI. And so just what you talked about, it’s like forcing every business, even the people doing pavement work are having to rethink how they do things because everybody’s business is being disrupted. And there’s businesses that are thinking like you’re thinking have a huge advantage right now.

The ones that want to just stay status quo and are fighting the complexity and chaos of all the things we talked about, they better wake up or they’re going to wake up one day and their business is going to be disrupted. And it’s going to be sooner rather than later based on the way this technology is evolving.

Jeff Fox
That’s exactly right. Now, the good news is, at least as it relates to Fast Slow Motion, you’re at the heart of helping your customers have information that if used properly is extraordinarily important in terms of the nuances of forward growth for your customers.

Your customers seeing what’s happening with their accounts, their prospects, their pie. And so that’s part of why we were attracted to Fast Slow Motion. We felt like you as a company are in the middle of some of the information that has to be used wisely. And you’re also technical enough and strategic enough to maybe help your customers, at least some of them, think beyond just the instance they’ve implemented and be thinking about what else can I drive off of this core platform or these platforms or Fast Slow Motion’s skill set in terms of integrating other ideas. And so I think that Fast Slow Motion is a business with opportunity through the complexity. Not all businesses can get on their front foot when it gets this complicated.

But yes, this AI thing has come on faster and more disruptive than anything in my lifetime. And I will tell you, if it’s helpful to your audience or our audience, I was talking to not one, but a couple of my PE friends who own technology businesses. And some of their portfolio companies are on their front foot, and some of their portfolio companies are not.

And to hear these highest level in our economy professionals admit that it happened fast. That’s the part that no one should say, my gosh, I’m terrible. I missed this. It’s about accepting it, thinking about it, responding to it, and doing that thing that leaders do. That’s been my encouragement. The people that are flying their own airplanes have been overwhelmed by the velocity of how fast things are being driven. Infomercial, use Fast Slow Motion to help you.

Eric Housh
I think just on a broader scale, Jeff, and the value CG’s brought to us is just having an external perspective, having someone else come in and take a look at your business, ask those tough questions to help you kind of scale. We are drawing close to our time together here. Want to be respectful of that. Jeff, one thing we ask all of our guests is if you have one piece of advice or one quote that has made a significant impact on you as a leader that you would love to share with our listening audience, what is that quote or piece of advice?

Jeff Fox
Well, I mean, is it OK if I give you a couple that link? So focus, simplify, execute is something that I’ve said for, I’ve modeled that behavior and somebody finally used those words and said, this is what Jeff thinks. I was like, yeah, that’s it. Focus on customer value. Simplify, simplify, simplify, and execute what you said you were going to do.

Eric Housh
Absolutely.

Jeff Fox
And that means that they have to be willing to let you make a profit. At least a gross profit. So focus, simplify, and execute. One of my board members at Alltel, when I was complaining about something after delivering a really good quarter, he said, if you’re not happy when you can be, you never will be. So you have to celebrate wins, particularly in a complex evolution. Every meeting isn’t going to be good. Every customer situation isn’t going to be good.

The financials may not be good, but you have to as a leader, find a way to celebrate, to re-energize your team, to re-energize yourself. And then a great quote that I’ve used and that my boss coined, which is success has many parents and failure is my child. Now, I don’t like to fail. So we’re going to get in a room and figure out how to not do that again.

And that’s on a bad implementation of software with a customer. That’s mine, but we’re not doing that again. Those are all, Eric and John. They’re really about the blessing of working in an economy where if you try to do a good thing for customers and then you intentionally design to do it for more customers, sometimes you fail and laugh.

Sometimes you succeed and laugh. Sometimes you’re exhausted. But that is what leadership in this economy now with AI disrupting everything is going to require. So I highly encourage people find the wins so that you can drive through the hard work and stay focused, keep it simple and execute.

Eric Housh
Jeff, all that’s incredibly valuable and I hope our listening audience has really been taking notes, paying attention, dialing in to some of the concepts we’ve unpacked today. John, before we wrap, any final thoughts or quotes from you?

John Burdett
Yeah, I just, I agree with Jeff. I often say to myself first and then to our team that, you know, we should always be grateful and content, but never satisfied. And we’re very blessed, but man, I want to get better. I want to improve and hard is fun and easy is boring. And so if things aren’t hard right now, we’re doing something wrong, right? We’re not trying hard enough. We’re not growing fast enough. We’re not challenging ourselves fast enough. So I encourage our audience like you did, Jeff, is just to hang in there, enjoy the journey and it’s worth it. And it’s exciting and fun and scary all at the same time.

Eric Housh
Jeff, John, thanks again. For our listeners, if you wanna learn more about Jeff and Circumference Group, we’re gonna have some information in the show notes on any of the platforms. You can see us there. If you’re listening and thinking, hey, this sounds like us. We’ve outgrown our current way of operating. We need some of these conversations within our business. That’s the kind of problems we solve here at Fast Slow Motion. So not giving you the sales pitch, but we do help those leadership teams build the right processes, implement the automation and visibility to scale on Salesforce or HubSpot. As always, you can catch past episodes of this show at fastslowmotion.com slash podcast, Spotify, YouTube, all the major platforms. While you’re there, we’d love to hear your feedback. If you want us to touch on a subject in the future, you want to drop us a comment, thumbs up, thumbs down. We’re trying to deliver the maximum amount of value with this content that we can to you. So definitely let us know what you think. Thanks again for joining us.