Today we’re speaking with Kris Plachy. Kris has poured her life’s work into learning about understanding, and then guiding leaders through the tricky path of learning how to lead a team in a space where there’s a lot of noise and advice. Kris has designed the “How to have team leadership” through her lead your team roadmap, and we’re super excited to have her. Before we dive in though, I want to ask you to please subscribe to our podcast. You can find us on iTunes, Google podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, any podcaster of your choice. You can also subscribe at peopleprocesses.com where you will get some exclusive subscriber-only content, like our current telework checklist for going home base for your employees. 

Kris, thank you so much for joining us today. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be here. 

I’m super excited to talk with you because a lot of business owners right now are going through some difficult times. And I want to hear about how your leadership strategy works. But first, not many little girls and boys dress up as HR and leadership experts when they’re going to Halloween, right. We’re not exactly firefighters here. How on earth did you wind up after 25 years in this sort of profession in this space? 

Well, yeah, it’s funny, you should say that. I think people who might have known me when I was eight might have said, “Oh, yeah, you’re gonna be a leader. A bit of applause.” Yeah, that’s funny. Let’s see. So it was a very natural process. I started my career right out of college with a recreation degree, so you might imagine that didn’t lead me to a lot of…. 

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what is a recreation degree? I don’t want to take too long on your story. But you gotta tell me what that is.

Well it was, yes, there was one class where we learned how to do face painting. I’m not gonna lie. That actually did happen. But mostly it was quite interesting. We learned all about the importance of healthy leisure, and encouraging lifestyles of activity and recreation. So a lot of people who do study recreation go into the parks and recreation field, they become out as Park Rangers. You know, community park, district leaders, that kind of thing. I actually was interested in tourism, and travel and so I had every intention of staying in that space until I did about a year and a half stint and realized I hated it.

As we have with many colleagues.

Yeah, I needed to kind of stumble my way through that. So you know, but I did complete it. And I had this funny little minor in law because I wanted to be a lawyer first and then I decided I didn’t love that either. So yeah, I think when you’re sort of riffing there about, you know, little boys and girls don’t act like whatever this is for Halloween. I never knew what I wanted to be. I never had a clear career path. And so I just got a job when I graduated as a recruiter for a private startup online school program.

Nice.

And I was good at it. I was good at sales. I was good at consulting, which I later realized was coaching and this one in the early 90’s, when I discovered a side class. So I realized there were more classes on being a coach, being a professional coach. And this was honestly like 1994, Rhamy.

A long time ago.

So I went to this class and I was immediately like, “Oh, that’s what I’m supposed to do.” So what happened then, next many years, is I follow the trajectory of leadership. So I was a frontline recruiter for a couple years. Then I got promoted to manager for about four years. Then I got into training for several years. And then I got into senior leadership and I was leading upwards of 200-250 people. And all the while was continuing my learning and studies of coaching. And for those who have kind of followed the profession, that’s sort of been the trajectory as well, we started seeing more and more interest and support and resources and learning for people who wanted to be coaches and all sorts of different types of fields. So my last job in the organization I worked for was actually creating an internal performance coaching team. And I did something very different when I created that team, unlike most traditional learning and development organizations, I hired all high performing operations leaders to be my coaches on my team. And so then we ran a development program and on site performance coaching program for about 4000 leaders in this organization that I work with for. So that was my last gig in a business and then that company I was still in higher education. That was about eight years ago. That’s when just the floor fell out of that industry and everybody got laid off. And so that’s when I started my business. And I already had such a running start, because I’ve been coaching leaders for years, on how to manage, how to make decisions, how to coach, how to get out of their own way, when they have their own thoughts about their team that are affecting their ability to manage them. And I haven’t looked back, I absolutely love what I do, and what I’m able to help other people do.

Well, that sounds like an awesome journey. And now here you are, you’re consulting with great companies. You’re teaching them about leadership, and I want to learn more about that. But, before we do that, our listeners are entrepreneurs, some of them are an HR administrator, some of them are one man shops dreaming of their first employee and some of our listeners have five or 6000 employees they’re managing.

Right.

The thing that universally they all learn from is not our good stuff. It’s when we screw up.

Sure.

So what I’d love for you to do is take us to the moment in this last eight years of you running your company, or even in your corporate life, that was your worst entrepreneurial management leadership screw up and really tell us that story and how that happened. And we’ll talk about what we learned from it later. But for now, I just want you to take us to that real bad time.

Well, I think honestly, I have a few crucible moments, is what I call them. I’m a George fan who wrote the book “True North”. If anyone’s read it, it’s an incredible book for leaders. But I have one that always is kind of that moment where I was like, “Oh, you do that?”

Yeah. 

And it was honestly when I was a new manager. I had someone on my team. I was very young, I was 26. And most of the people on my team or my contemporaries, or a little younger than I, had one team member in particular who was very affected with herself. And now Rhamy, I live in California, so I think Taishan talked a lot like best and her face was really dramatic. And if she wasn’t happy, everybody knew it with her body language and her face and right like it was just so toxic and exhausting, as from a management perspective, I found her tedious to manage and we’ll call her Rhonda. That’s for anonymity sake.

And so…

I always call my guy Chad. I got in a lot of trouble at some point because I wound up with a longtime listener who reached out to say, “Hey, we really want to work with you.” And I was meeting with him and he said, “You know my name. My name is Chad by the way. In every episode you mentioned me.” And I’m like, “Oh, we’ll go with Rhonda now and we’ll hope that you don’t have a Rhonda as a client.

In the past, for me, it’s been Lucy and I actually use that name in my book that I wrote for manager and I had somebody who emailed me and she’s like, “Uhmm,”

Alright, so here’s Rhonda, there’s Rhonda traumatic valid girl Rhonda.

Hairy, dramatic, and one day after a meeting, we had Monday meetings. I had it, like she just sat in the meeting and huffed and I rolled and crossed her arms and through her pen and just, I had it and so I went into her office and closed the door. And that’s about as good as it got. Because after that, I looked at her and I said, “What is up with your attitude, Rhonda?” And I’ll never forget it. She stood up. She looked at me and cocked her head, you know how people do? And she crossed her arms, and very slowly raised her pointer finger and said, “I don’t have an attitude. You have an attitude.” And that was when I realized you don’t argue with team members. Never. Because you never win. It’s not. Then one of the tenants of my work is that performance is not an opinion. But all that was for me that in that moment was opinion and you can’t, there is no substance to this argument when it’s based on my opinion of you. Right. And so that was a powerful moment for me, where I learned I had to learn how to speak to my employees about observable behaviors and evidence and not my opinion about their behavior. Because what I’ve come to know is the majority of issues when it relates to employee performance are behaviors. It’s not usually a skill. Every now and then, it is, right? But mostly, it’s this stuff. People are late or they miss their deadlines, or they’re kind of snarky, or they gossip. So that was it for me. It was very painful. It was mortifying, I was so embarrassed. I couldn’t back out of it. Anyway, it was terrible.

I think that’s a great lesson to learn. Yeah. And HR 101 insight reporting and documentation. Right?

Yeah. 

Here’s what I want to know about Kris. So you’re telling me and I love that story. And by the way, everyone who’s in this and going, I did that, we’ve all done that, right? And in years of doing this, at some point, you’ve said, “I don’t like the way you look,” right? The way you look at a person. I don’t know. But I got it. Here’s what I know. You’ve been doing this 25 years. You’re talking about the 90’s? 

Yeah. 

Your worst moment was yelling at a single employee. You are either a god-thing or you have not told us the worst moment for you. What was the hardest part? 

I mean, you can all go through the list. I had to lay off 25 employees and rehire them. But one could only rehire I think it was like 18. And I was doing it with a colleague. So we laid them all off the day before and then told them if they wanted to reapply, we would meet them all the next day, and they got set up for half hour interviews. And I woke up that morning and I was sick to my stomach. But I thought, “No, I’m fine.” And I went, and then this woman came in and pleaded to keep her job because her husband was on dialysis, and she didn’t have a car and had to take the bus. And we knew we weren’t going to hire her. And I proceeded to get wretchedly ill and couldn’t do any of the rest of the interviews. I completely. My whole body shut down and I couldn’t show up for the job.

And so my colleague had to do it. She had to make all the decisions, which was like, mortifying to me. But I couldn’t be there. I was literally retching. I couldn’t sit there and listen to people beg for their job. And the thing is for me that it’s been a struggle I’ve had always that’s why I’m so inclined. I feel like to do this work is incredibly sensitive, which I think is a tough cocktail when you’re in a leadership role. And I’ve had to work on learning how to remain me and not be too passive or give in too easily, but also not shut it all off, right,? Because it is a superpower when I use it well, but it’s been hard. It was very hard on me. When I first started, the first 10 years of my job as I kept getting more and more responsibility. I would really have to work hard to muster through very difficult decisions which I’m sure is what led me to focusing on writing books about how to deal with difficult people and how to deal with difficult circumstances, like I ended up specializing in it, but it wasn’t because I was great at it. At first it was because I was terrible at it. And I know the pain and shame, right? Of knowing you’ve got to step up and you can’t, you can’t do it.

I am, early on in our company, we’ve been in business coming up on 11 years and I think about four years on, at some point, we had a sales staff of almost 15 people and we went down to three that I remember that week and how that went. It’s one of the hardest parts of leadership. 

Yeah. 

That’s a real story.

Did you like that one? My first year that I made a lot of money as an entrepreneur and I didn’t pay my taxes.

Well that’s for a finance podcast. Those are bad days too.

Mistakes. Yeah. But for sure for me it’s been on that human to human level when it’s just the most palpable for me, but of course, the biggest learning. So now when clients call me and they tell me, “I have to lay off 27 people today,” which has been happening this week, we’re in the aspirants here in the States, right. “Man, I get it. I’m all in with you. But it doesn’t change the decision. It has to be made.”

So in your leadership training, I mean, obviously, you focus on a lot. And we want to talk about some of the processes that you’ve had, that maybe our listeners on a very simple level could hear the concept of and maybe adopt for themselves a little bit. But before we do, maybe if someone right now, this podcast is going to come out in April. There is a coronavirus thing, we’ve had of our clients almost 800 layoffs that we’ve had to manage on the process level. If they’re sitting there and as a business owner and going, we don’t have the money coming in or I can’t afford to pay this mandated sick leave or whatever it is that’s going on. What would your advice be to them on how to get through that or how to evaluate the decision? What could you in five or six minutes maybe give them a little ideas on?

Well, I actually have been, all week, I did two open coaching calls last weekend and had several hundred people come and then this week I’ve opened up tons of coaching hours to all of my current clients. And so I’ve been talking with mostly women all week about these very things. And so I’m actually putting together something for my clients about this very question and to me, I’ve come up, there’s really four areas you’ve got to focus on. 

The first one, is your own mind management. You as leaders going through this moment in time, we have all our own concerns personally about ourselves and our families and our communities. Our kids are at home, like there’s so much going on. So having a place to work through your own thinking is critical. Because your brain is where all of this is going to come from. And we need your mind clean, just like you’re washing your hands. You need to wash your brain. We got to flush out all of the things that are going on in it. 

The second thing is, everyone needs at least a 90-day plan. Now, the problem is when we build a 90-day plan, it makes us look at the stuff we don’t want to look at and for a lot of people right now, that’s scary to look at 90-days from now. And I asked them to do a worst case scenario, you got to look at it. And then I’m here as your coach. I’m going to help you think through it, you’re going to work on your brain because your brains are gonna have a tantrum. And it’s not going to want to think about 90-days of no revenue. But we have to, we have to get really, really honest about what the circumstances are. And because what I’m watching a lot of people doing is, they’re anticipating what could happen, but they’re not planning for it. And then what happens is, if you don’t have a plan, you take action in reaction mode, instead of in something you’ve already thought through, worked through, you already had the brain tantrum. Now you can take action you can execute. So a 90-day plan has to happen that looks at finances, looks at team and it looks at your life. You, especially for Small business owners, right? I realized the larger businesses have a lot of other factors. But if this is you and you know, 15 employees, you got to think about it all. 

Then there’s the team, what are we going to do with them? How do we want this to play out? I spend a lot of time with when in normal circumstances, we look at values and we look at expectations. That’s where the way that we pay people comes from, how we decide to pay people is born out of our value system. So all my clients need to gut check. That part of who they are, what is the right decision for you and your company, not based on what everybody else is doing or the government is telling you to do. What works for you all. And that’s the plan that has to get into place. And I’ve been so impressed with how some of my clients have been so creative with how to make this work right now. 

And then lastly, I’m just calling it focus. And what that means to me is, you have to watch where you spend your time. A lot of people at least initially have been eating news, social media and it’s not good. It’s not healthy. Everybody manages to find out what they need to find out without consuming copious amounts of terrifying information all day. 

Right.

Because what we want your brain doing is create. Like, your brain can’t create if it’s scared. And your brain can’t create if it doesn’t have a plan and I’ve watched this all week. It’s the plan in place. They start brainstorming new ideas. And what I know, you and I both know, Rhamy, is amazing stuff that will come out of this. 

Exactly.

I feel like we never would have thought of. So there will be that. That will happen but we have to watch what we focus on and we have to do what we can to get into creating versus focusing on the problems.

I interviewed John Lee Dumas, he runs a podcast called fire one of those hooked me into podcasting. I started listening years ago and he has focus, is acronym for it is follow one course until success. 

Yeah.

Always, I think about that. It’s like I’m not one of those people who like to post notes and like cute scripts on the wall. But if I ever did, that would be the one follow one course until success. But now to recap that.. 

So helpful right now, but it’s going on like, if you could just get that one thing that you give your brain to work on and figure out and solve and play with. It’s so good for you.

It is. So when you kind of went through your steps you said, “Hey, first wash your brain.” 

Yeah.

So that means, in that, you’re talking about getting away from everything, sit down. 

Yeah. Right. Which is to really understand that there, we have circumstances that are happening all day, but our brain is defining those, right and how your mind to find them will trigger how you feel. And so a lot of us just have very unsupervised thinking and we believe that what we think is true, but it’s not. It’s just our thoughts. Now, if you’re consuming copious amounts of news, you’re believing what those people’s thoughts are. Right? We have to get yours. Yeah.

I got into this business in 2009. December 2009, is when the Affordable Care Act was passed. And in the next two to three years, most of those provisions went into place. And for many companies in the insurance world, that was a disruption on us, believe it or not, it cut up revenue in the realm of up to 60%. And I mean, companies in our world folded left, right and center and I’ve been in business six months, right. And at first when that happened, I was pretty upset. And after the first couple months into it, we were constantly trying to learn more and more and more and try to figure something out and like, we’re only a year into this, as a time to, and I don’t remember what triggered it, but at some point, it transformed from a terrible thing to an opportunity. Interesting. And I truly believe even as awful as this virus and its effect on the economy and people’s health of course and families. The businesses that figure out how to turn who the business owners, the leaders who go, alright, this is awful. What is the opportunity here? How do I change this? How do I reposition ourselves to make this an opportunity? Are they going to be the ones that come out of this just on fire with success? Because tons of companies, they’re going to do exactly as you described. Yeah, they’re going to panic, they’re going to consume a pile of news and they’re gonna give up, they’re gonna keep doing what they did three months ago, and think it’s going to work three months from now. Yeah. And this is an opportunity, and it can be an opportunity for every business. I don’t care if you’re a restaurant. If you’re a salon. If you’re a consulting service, a CPA firm, a law firm, there is an opportunity here for every one of them. I don’t know what it is for all of you. But there is one.

Well, because if there’s always somebody in your interest who’s spearheading it and I’ll tell you one of the ones that’s been really fun to watch because I just happen to attract a lot of healthcare professionals. I have doctors and dentists and my husband’s a physical therapist. So I actually have several physical therapy clinic owners. telemedicine, it’s all gonna be totally different. Like, this is changing that landscape. Because first of all, everybody needs to still make money. And all of these, my husband is a physical therapist, they’re figuring out how to care for people and not touch them. Right? And what is not there, it’s not going to come back.

It’s not gonna come back. Right. And that’s the thing with all of these industries. Well, same thing. I don’t want to go sit in your freaking waiting room for 45 minutes.

Oh, I know I’m right.

It’s like, in every industry, I was talking with my staff about it. We have invested heavily over the years and telework and secure call centers separately and just all kinds of different stuff. And there was always a taboo to a degree of when you’re meeting with someone who’s discussing direct finances. Like, why are you sitting in your home and oh my god, hey, there’s a dog over there. Like, that taboo is dying. And in three months of this, it’s going to be like, well, I have no problem meeting my attorney. While he’s sitting on his back deck. It’s a heck of a lot more convenient. And we can both sit there and drink the preferred drink. I don’t have to drink your crap coffee. I can drink mine. Right. So there is an opportunity here. 

Oh, yeah. I’m so glad you said that. Because that really is so important. But if your brain, the sky is falling, everything’s awful and here’s the thing, right now, it might make you decisions you never wanted to have, to make conversations you never wanted to have to have. But if you hold on to, it’s awful you can’t create and we need you. We need leaders right now, more than any other time, at least in my existence, right? Like, we need people to step up and be willing to stand out and try something. And get the double edge, right? Like, what the heck is she doing? And, Whoa, the heck is she doing? Right? Like that’s what has to happen right now. And it’s so fascinating to watch who steps up and who’s willing.

You were so optimistic. You and I both are obviously HR people. It’s like, it’s all gonna be fine. Everything’s great. But…

Eventually it will. 

It will be and it will be. But let’s let’s dial it back. And let’s give some practical advice here. You are an expert at making these hard decisions. How does someone who is just right now evaluating gotta lay off 100 people or five people or their first employee, how do they fire them? And live, right? How do you fire that person?

Well, it’s an interesting way to have time to do it. It’s almost like at least this has been what my clients are telling me because I would say half of my clients have already had to layoff people but everybody understands. So…

It’s a lot harder in a way it’s harder to fire someone because they consistently under-perform than it is to be like, “Look, we don’t have any clients like what do you want from me?” 

Wow.

That’s an interesting point.

And they get it. I’ve had people tell their boss, “I’ll just work for you anyway. You don’t have to pay me but I want to help you.” I do believe most people have the sense but this has an end to it versus the recession in 2008. 

Right.

What the hell was gonna happen? Right. But to answer your question,

Hold on HR insert, people can’t work for you for free. Hashtag compliance. Throw it out there. But I understand what you’re saying. Medical staff.

Do something different. I don’t follow mine on that one. To me, I guess is what I’m trying to say. 

Exactly.

Yeah, that could change. People could start to get more low on Maslow’s Hierarchy here and start to freak out. So what I have advised people and what I’m watching them do is they’re finding out on behalf of their employees, what the right solution is for the employee. And so in the case of several of my clients, the right answer was actually to lay them off, because then they qualify for a solution. So they set up the conversations that way, here’s how this is going to go, right. “I’m gonna fire you, I’m processing your employee history records, everything’s ready. You can file. And this is eventually once everything’s crankin, I will want to invite you back.” But the employers are doing some of that research on behalf of the employee so that the conversation has direction versus I can’t pay you anymore. You have to leave. Kind of. 

Right. 

Now, everybody handles that a little differently. I appreciate there’s laws in different states. Again, I’ll defer to your expertise. But when we tell people that we have to lay them off right now, I think it’s incredibly important that we honor who they are as a human, we tell them how important they are. We tell them this has nothing to do with performance. If it doesn’t. I have actually also advised some employees and some clients. If you have people who are not performing this is the opportunity to make some decisions too. So, in a time when everything is in flux, you have to always come back to what is right for the business. And that is a gut check when we love our people, but we can loop back to them. I’m very confident that’s all going to work out for people. Right now, what’s the right thing for the business? And then what are the services provided in your world, wherever you are, that help your employees as best as possible? And it does s

And today, we are interviewing Amber Hurdle. Amber hurdle is the CEO of Amber Hurdle Consulting. It’s a multi-award winning talent optimization firm. They pioneers using both science and marketing principles to strengthen customers’ brands from the inside out. She really helps with costly business problems like ineffective recruiting turnover, under performance, declining morale, leadership gaps, and we are so excited to have her in the show today. 

Before we dive too deep, I want to ask you real quick, please subscribe to our podcast. You can find us on iTunes, Google podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, pretty much any pod catcher of your choice. And you can subscribe at peopleprocesses.com which will give you exclusive subscriber only content. Last week for example, we sent out sample furlough letters and updated policies around the Family’s First Coronavirus Relief Act. This is recorded 3-23. Our subscribers had sample policies 24 hours after the law passed. 

Now let’s dive in. Amber, thank you so much for being on the show. 

Thanks for having me, Rhamy. 

Well, I am just ecstatic to have you in. There’s a lot going on in the country right now. Like I said, this is a March 23 recording. This probably won’t come out until mid April. We have no idea what the situation is going to look like out there. So we’ll try to keep our coronavirus info to the minimum and instead focusing on the things that you have accomplished. Now, Amber, not many little girls and boys dress up as leadership and HR consultants when they’re eight years old to go trick or treating. How on earth did you wind up in this very strange field? That’s pretty dang busy right now.

Well as someone who dressed up like Janis Joplin for I don’t even know how many years in a row.

You know what, she inspires people, it’s leadership. There we go.

That’s right. Yeah. I think and I talked about this a lot when we talk about personal branding is, that there are breadcrumbs that you can follow if you look back on your history and see how you chose to show up in various situations, whether that’s professionally or in your family or in your social settings or volunteerism, or whatever. And you can see that there are some very specific gifts that keep popping up as something that you feel led to share with other people. And so the gifts that I have from a vantage point of really being able to see somebody for who they are or a situation for what it is.

Being a very quick thinker, being able to really put chaos into a strategic streamlined process to work through. I can create common chaos very quickly and then buy people into that solution. And then connecting people. So engagement and communication have always been things that have served. I’ve used to serve other people. And it just made sense in the end, to do that in a professional setting because I can impact more people by going into an organization or into an audience than trying to do it otherwise.

That’s very self aware, Amber, and that’s awesome to hear. But what I want to hear is you have a pretty unusual way though, right? Because if I remember from your bio, you were a teen mom. I’m kind of on a very different path than consulting with international celebrities and fortune 100 companies.

Knocking on my door back then.

Give me that story. How did you get from, you know, I don’t know. I can’t imagine the place you were in there to kind of now grown kids and rocking out all over the world.

Well, good question. I credit a lot of what I’ve learned in life to that experience. And I wasn’t like a bad girl. I was actually very involved. I mean, not to marginalize any teen mom, but I’m just saying like, I wasn’t a troubled youth. I didn’t have a troubled childhood. None of that, like I was very normal. I was on channel for news at Six and 10 for a week. Like, just weeks before I found out I was pregnant because they were featuring me and about a dozen other Middle Tennessee students because we were stable and good kids and they wanted to have conversations with us around hard things that were going on and that parents were having a hard time talking to their children about. So, it was quite the fall from grace, well, just say, I was president of this, vice president of that in school and I had to give up all those leadership. I chose to because my actions weren’t very leadership like for high school anyways. I guess the quick version of the story is I had to get out from behind the eight ball very quickly. And I had to figure out what people saw in me so that I could just pick up an extra shift at the Applebee’s or get a better job that maybe I didn’t have the education for, because I dropped out of college. I was very tuned in to what people saw in me so I can do more of that so I can find more favor and I can have more opportunities come my way. I started collecting mentors because I didn’t have the same structures in place that most people had. I mean, my parents were amazing. Don’t get me wrong. We’ll just put them aside. But most people have professors and you know, people that kind of help guide them as they start their career. And I was just kind of free falling.

Right.

So as I was figuring that out, I didn’t know that I was creating a personal brand that wasn’t a buzzword. I mean, you had a professional reputation but that wasn’t a thing back then. And I surely didn’t understand what I was doing at the time. But reflecting back on it now. That’s it. I just had to figure out what I was amazing at and I had to go out and show people and prove that that is, that’s what they should see in me, that they should see the value that I saw in me, but I had to use people as mirrors to even figure out what that was.

And and so you think that teen-mom experience really, I’ve thought about this too, my wife and I we met when we were 16, where we started dating when we were 16. We’ve been together our whole lives. Highschool sweethearts, started the company together 11 years ago and have certain experience. And having certain responsibilities in your life it’s impossible to say like what you would have done otherwise. Right? And a lot of times when I’ve had similar interviews where it’s like, “Well, what do you credit your success to?” It’s like, “Well, when I was 18, I moved out so that I could start a family with my girlfriend,” which is so weird as even at the time I was like, “There’s no way this is gonna work.” This is obviously silly stuff to do. And yet those choices put me in positions where my back was against the wall. We had to live on our $700 a month kind of budget, and it changed everything. So what do you think being a teen-mom taught you specifically about what you do now? The branding, the consulting side of what you do now?

The very first thing that it blessed me with is that humility. I don’t judge people, there’s just not room for that. So there’s always what I refer to kind of a cocci term is, there’s always judgment, free awareness and in my office or on my zoom calls, or in the opposite of my clients, so anything can be admitted, worked through. You mentioned the term self awareness. That’s what served me then. And so that is what we build on. Once we have that judgment, free awareness, then we can work to self awareness. And then it also helped me see where I fit into a bigger picture, right? Because I was only able to benefit from the collective like I couldn’t do it on my own. I had to do it in the context of other people being involved. And so when you’re looking at the personal branding, that comes from self awareness and that sort of thing. But when you talk about employer branding, you have to understand the bigger picture and you have to understand where your personal brand fits into that employer brand and the employer has to be able to understand that as well. And then, of course, just that so much was quote fixed. I’m using air quotes alone in my office right now.

I have medically diagnosed a DD. Most people don’t know that because team motherhood also forced me to really put those processes in place. I mean, that’s what I love. I love your People Processes, because people forget that, to be successful in business, to scale in business, it’s not just functional processes. You have to have people processes too. And so everything about my life was structured. It was organized. I did a budget like I literally had a ruled paper that I did each week on an effort at the bottom of the paper. It was like, “Okay, I’m negative this time.” And dollars left, I mean, it taught me to negotiate, it taught me how to be honest and to fail forward. I mean, I called my car company all the time and I told the story from the stage and just let them know like, “Hey guys, I thought I was going to have my payment this week. But here’s what’s going on. I’m working at this job. I’ll make this much money in cash. I’m anticipating getting my paycheck. it should be this much. And so by Friday, I can get you this dollar amount.” But that’s probably going to be it and to be able to just confront the brutal facts, but not just faith.

That’s a valid dragon, right? 

Yeah. Slay the dragon.

Under the notice. Right? 

Yes. I could have faced it head on, call it what it is, and then come up with your solution. And they were so gracious with me. And they did not repossess my car. And as many times as they could take a payment in the end they did because I stayed in constant communication with them even though I was in the midst of failing. So I don’t know, I mean, Rhamy, we could sit here all day about the things that I learned that have served me well now as a teen-mom but those are probably some big nuggets there.

Well. Now, you are a successful entrepreneur, you have multiple businesses. And along the way, how long when was your first business startup? How long ago was that?

Let’s see here. My very first which is not in existence anymore was 2006-2007 and I rode the wave of 2008. And came out on the other side. So I ran a very successful celebrity event planning company through the worst economic downturn in US history. Because of what you said earlier, just sheer grit. Like when your back’s up against the wall, you have to innovate and you have to make it work and my vendors and their families and their ability to feed their families were very dependent on me because I was oftentimes the number one client of theirs or their number one source of business.

That only-go system.

Yeah. And at that point I was divorced. I had two kids. I was a single mom trying to make everything work. But yeah, it was super stressful but we made it happen. And then through this whole COVID-19 situation we’re in. That’s just my stance. I was talking to my friend the other day, and he and I are just basically the same human, only he’s male. And we both were just laughing because we said we refused to participate in 2008. And we’re refusing to participate right now. I mean, I’m not ignorant and I’m not naive. I know that bad things are going on, but you can do what you can do. Instead of sitting and crying and waiting for somebody else to rescue you.

There’s an opportunity everywhere.

Always. And usually really juicy ones in the midst of chaos.

Absolutely. Well, we’ll go into that in a minute but our listeners there, they vary, their everyone from color. Students trying to figure out what they want to do up through, CEOs with a couple thousand employees to HR managers at a local plumbing shop. And I have found, in terms of our feedback, the number one thing that I get is that they learn the most when our guests tell us about their biggest mistakes. You’re rocking out now. But what I’d love for you to do is take us to the time when you had your worst entrepreneurial moment, and we’ll get to maybe what you learned about it. But really, I want you to take me to the series of events that led to that worst moment and tell me a little bit about that.

Well, I’ve had multiple business partners or strategic alliances throughout my career and probably dissolved a partnership that we got into without an exit strategy. And that was bumpy and disappointing and it broke the relationship. And I honestly don’t regret how I managed my side of it because I think that I did it with as much integrity as I possibly could. But whether you are going into business with somebody, going into a project with somebody, or even when you take on new clients or customers is really important to have everything spelled out on the front end, and it’s something that I do in my business. Now even when friends come to me and want to do business with me, I always just tell them like we’re going to sign an agreement, not because I don’t trust you or you don’t trust me, but it just immediately builds trust and we always know what the expectations are and we always have something to go back to to make sure that you’re staying the course.

Absolutely. You’re talking about support structure. I have a great family. I love them to death. But my father was a Postal Inspector. So he was a federal law enforcement. I don’t know an entrepreneur in my family. I’d never spoken to someone who owned a business. But some of the lessons that came from my dad just because he was who he was. I mean, since we were 12 years old, there was a sheet of paper on top of the fridge so I couldn’t get to it. Where we laid out any agreements we made. You’re going to take the trash out on Fridays and mow the lawn on Saturdays. Yeah, we wrote it there. And we signed it. How do we stop doing it? I loaned you 20 bucks to go to the mall because I’m a 90’s kid. It’s right there, on the sheet. And I don’t know, because of that, I just never had the fear of being like, no, we’re writing this down. It’s going. We’re both signing this napkin to a grab thing. We don’t put it in writing. It didn’t happen. I don’t know. So for you, some of your worst experiences have been around strategic partnerships and those sorts of things and their disillusion, when maybe it didn’t work out, or just the environment changed.

Yeah, I mean, I learned the hard way best, unfortunately. But when I do go through that, I do learn and I take my notes and I fail forward and turn those losses into lessons and do it better than next time. So you’ll never see me get into any type of professional situation without having very clear expectations of outcomes and what happens if something goes sideways. Because it will, I mean, we’re human, right? 

Absolutely. 

Even in a corporate environment, things go sideways, because people are involved. That’s why we have people processes.

Exactly. Actually, we’re gonna go into some more standard questions in a second, but this is just a random thought that occurs to me. I get this question from small business owners quite often or their HR people. When we’re entering into something like this. And even if it’s not a large issue like, bringing on a new vendor, or maybe you’re entering into like, a reselling agreement or a partnership, where you’re going to bring on somebody as an independent contractor, do you think that it’s necessary to involve a lawyer every time? Where do you think that you can figure it out on your own?

My best friend is a lawyer.

Ah. Cheater.

Yeah, well, no, he’s a dirt lawyer. So yeah, it’s not business law, but I’m just saying he’d probably disagree with me. But I don’t think that you need a lawyer every time and when you are onboarding even a new employee, you have your basic employee contract, if you will. And every state is different and how that shows up. But you’re going through your onboarding process that is essentially kind of an ongoing agreement of, “Okay. Here’s the job description. Here’s why we hired you. Here are the expectations. Here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s how we’re going to train you, here’s how we’re going to integrate you. And here’s how we are going to follow up on these items and measure our success.” And putting those pieces in place is the unofficial agreement of, this is what we expect, this is what you expect. We’re going to do regular check-ins to make sure that we’re on the same page. And so it’s just anytime that you want success, and you want to minimize the pain, you have to control the controllables because the uncontrollables sure are coming.

Absolutely, absolutely. That’s actually in a lot of depending on your state, as you mentioned many times it is actually a contract. 

Yeah.

Very legally binding issue. So okay, I think that’s a very good point. I just was curious if it came to me when you were talking about partnership agreements and those sorts of things. I mean, normalization you must remain a going concern. Don’t let a lawyer put you out of business. But if you don’t hire a lawyer, you may go out of business.

Yes, that’s true. That’s a tweetable.

So what we normally recommend is, of course, in people processes we do a lot of that HR consulting, we build handbooks, we build onboarding paths, all those sorts of things. And we do have attorneys we work with in those processes. And a lot of times what we do is we say, “Here’s all the sample, here’s all the build out, here’s our custom HR stuff,” but if you want it to be a contract, legally enforceable, it’s your authority saying that it’s right or you need to hire an attorney who will put their letterhead on it.

Oh, yeah. I mean, every business should have a CPA and attorney. Definitely on deck at all times. Because this, I mean, your business is a legal entity to do it all without having any type of I mean, even if you just use Legal Zoom or something, I mean.

Yeah. 

Betsy likes, just to make sure that somebody with an actual law degree is at least on call for when you have those moments.

Absolutely. Well, that’s a great story. Now what you do is in this world, it seems to be a mixture of branding and marketing, but also very focused on the HR side of things. So when a client comes to you, how do you work with these, what’s kind of your process when a client comes and works for you?

Well. So in the branding and marketing process, we use data to inform the strategy, right? So anytime you go grocery shopping and you scan your loyalty card, that’s data that informs the strategy for the grocery store that you shop with. Same thing with, if you go to Best Buy, they’re collecting data, if you click around on a website, they’re clicking data so they know how to respond to their unique customers, right? And so they create customer profiles. And that’s how they market to you and billions of dollars are committed to this every single year. And as I was really niching down so many years ago to internal Publix, from a PR perspective, I realized that you need data for that too. And so there’s different things that you can do to collect data, just homegrown things like an exit strategy or an exit interview. Rather, I’m sure you could sit here and list all the different analytics that can be done internally. But when I’m talking about my type of analytics, it’s psycho analytics. So I want to be a marketer, I want your brain, I want in your head, I want to know what your underlying needs are in a work environment. And once I know that, then I can understand those needs, then drive your behavior. And so I’ll give a personal example of this, of why this matters so much. 

So I was a young, broke teen-mom and I had the opportunity to work at a local manufacturing plant. And it was a place where people waited for years to get a job there, it was a coveted place because it was very consistent work. It paid well, there were lots of benefits. And it was just one of the most solid areas and of course, because of the relationship, I had an end. And not only did I have an end and did not have to wait at all to get a job there. I got on the first shift, not third, not second, but first and on top of it. I was put in refurbishing, which all that means is it was the most cush department you could possibly work in. I mean, it was just you didn’t have to ask permission to come off the line. You weren’t screwing anything up to go use the restroom. I mean, it was just the most lakhs you could possibly have there. So I had all of these benefits, right? It was just handed to me on a silver platter and yet I just guessed how long I lasted.

No, it sounds too good to be true. I’m thinking about two weeks.

Ah nail that. Yes. Okay, so single-broke teen-mom was working multiple jobs to barely get by and oftentimes not. It was a pretty rough season of my life. And here I was handed on a silver platter, the ability to stand every single day and unscrew a screw and put a new screw in into a TV all day long, eight hours. Now. That didn’t work for me because I have underlying needs of extreme freedom and having the opportunity to be in charge and to work independently. And I like my ideas best and I am definitely designed to be a leader. I have an extreme need to have a social environment. I need to be around other people. I need to spitball ideas. I need to bounce things off the wall with other people’s reflection. I move fast. I want ever changing priorities. I never want the same day to look the same, or various days to look the same. And I sure don’t want to be doing the same thing all day long for eight hours. That sounds like torture to me now that I’m self-aware. And I’m not a great rule follower. So I’m innovative and I like to change things up and to think of having to crawl into a box every day and stand, staying there is asinine to me now.

So yes, was that an ideal job for me? Yeah. But it’s not, could I do the job, I could physically do the job. I had the resume to do the job. I had the values that fit that company. I had the passion and the ability to show up well, but it doesn’t matter that I could do the job. I didn’t want to do the job. I would not do the job and I would not do it well over a prolonged period of time. So that was a misfire on their part. No complaints but that was not a fit for me. And this happens all the time we have people come into organizations and they look great on paper and their pedigree is awesome. Their history and where they went to school and they show well in the interview, and it’s like, “Okay.” Yeah, their values align with our company values, let’s hire them. But we never stopped to ask, like, “What are they wired to do?” And so once they’re in the organization, and you’re not getting that discretionary effort out of them, and they’re not hitting their goals, because it’s simply just not something that they’re wired to do every day. It’s like that, that 90-day comes and you’re like, “Who the heck are you, I hire this other person. And now you showed up, and I don’t know who this person is.” And that happens every day. So just like when we were putting together a marketing strategy, you have to look at the data and say, “Okay, based on this data, this is how we are going to tackle this and here’s how much market share we’re going to be able to get based on the facts.” And so when you have a business strategy, you have to look internally too. It’s not just about market share, it’s about how we are going to mobilize our people. How we are going to adapt our people processes to ensure our people strategy matches the business strategy. And once we have that people strategy now we have to kind of come up with some ideal employee profiles, just like we would come up with ideal customer profiles and marketing. And once you have that, now you’re cooking with gas. And it might be that you see this person is doing all of these things, but we might want to carve off these responsibilities and go put those with this person because they would rock that out. And that’s gonna water down this other person and what they’re capable of. So many examples I could give but sales, don’t give them admin stuff. Just go let them write, go let them hunt and let somebody else do all that behind the same stuff that is going to be painful and keep them out of selling.

So of course, when a company brings you on, you’re doing these sorts of analytics, these psycho analytics to try and determine the key focus areas for each job. Helping design some sort of interviewing or filtering process so you get to the right people. And I want to hear more about that. But could you break it down? For me? Let’s say there was a company listening right now that has five employees, and they’re going to hire their sixth. What are two or three things that they could do this afternoon in three or four hours, sit down, and really improve the likelihood of success and hiring for that position?

Yeah. Okay. So, step 1 is, review your operational goals, what are you trying to accomplish in 2020? Step 2 is, review your culture. What are you about? What type of family member Do you need to fit the family rules? Number three is to evaluate your team. What is your team great at now? What are you missing? You don’t need six of the same people. So if you’re missing, for example, a rule follower, if everybody is what we would call NPI, we have different letters for everything for predictive indexes, one of the tools I use, we would call it a vitamin D deficiency because no one has D, which is that drive for. I call it rule follower, rule breaker. That’s not the official way. But if you have a team that is maybe missing some of that, or maybe you have a team that is missing, somebody who’s really great with people and needs to be around people, then you might want to take that in consideration. And so once you have those things under control, and you have somewhat of an idea of the people strategy to match the business strategy. 

Now, everyone needs to contribute to what this person needs. Ask simple questions. Is this person going to be interacting with customers? Will they be interacting with the community? Will they be leading other people in the organization? Are they going to be sitting behind a desk most of the time? Will they be working independently? Will they have to make decisions on their own? Do they need to be more of a team player? Do they need to be more of a leader? Do you want them to follow up everybody else’s ideas or do you want them to create the ideas? Do you want them to be agents of change or do you want them to be implementer’s of change? Do you want them to be out of the box and think of different ways to do things or do you want them to just do the same thing every day? Amen. 

These are the things that will impact that person. And then once everybody has feedback on what this person needs in a work environment, now you can start playing with that language and go out there and put an awesome job description out there and not a boring like litany of responsibilities. It could be something like, “Hey, if you’re a team player, and you’re always in for the greatest good of the team, if you love talking to people every day, if you just couldn’t imagine having the same day every day and you loved diverse, exciting, changing experiences, then keep reading because this job is for you.” That is going to create an emotional connection just like we do in marketing. So we’re always trying to evoke emotion, as opposed to this job is going to have community engagement responsibilities. This job is going to lead a team. I mean, that’s just so boring. So those would be my steps. 

And then you have to think about integrating into that team. So how are we going to onboard this person based on their profile that we’ve created for them? If they’re more of an analytical person, they’re not a big people person, then maybe parading them throughout the office and doing a big round of applause and putting them on the spot on the first day in a meeting is not the way to do that. Maybe you have little mini meetings instead, one on on