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31–Hugh Massie: Reaching 1 Billion Annually with Behavioral Insights
16 Plays12 days ago
Eric Pratum speaks with Hugh Massie—founder and executive chairman of DNA Behavior—a behavioral insights company that helps individuals and organizations measure and leverage natural behavior patterns to drive financial performance, cultural alignment, and leadership effectiveness.
Hugh shares his journey from chartered accountant in Australia to global entrepreneur, explains how “financial DNA” and “business DNA” were born, and reveals how behavioral insights can predict profit, optimize hiring, reduce friction in business processes, and guide strategy in even the most complex environments.
This episode explores not only Hugh’s unique approach to leadership and entrepreneurship, but also how DNA Behavior has developed psychometric tools that are transparent, scalable, and able to identify performance-driving traits across teams, customers, and leaders. Hugh’s vision of behavior as a predictive tool—not just a descriptive one—is reshaping the way businesses understand their people.
Topics Explored:
- From Accountant to Behavioral Pioneer: How Hugh’s dissatisfaction with a purely financial world led him to psychometrics and human behavior.
- Hyper-Personalization in Finance: Why understanding a client’s behavioral profile was the cornerstone of Hugh’s wealth management success.
- The DNA Behavior Origin Story: How a coffee shop conversation and a curious team member launched a decades-long mission.
- Behavior Makes Money: Hugh’s research linking six core behaviors to profitability in Fortune 500 companies.
- The Rise of Digital Behavioral Scanning: How DNA Behavior is eliminating friction and profiling hundreds of millions of people without them ever taking an assessment.
- The Future of Behavioral Science: Why Hugh believes behavior is “the last frontier” in business optimization.
Links:
- Connect with Hugh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hughmassie/
- Check out DNA Behavior: https://dnabehavior.com/start
- Leadership Financial Value Creation Capability Research: https://kb.dnabehavior.com/gene/leadership-financial-value-creation-capability-research
- PwC Report: 45% of CEOs believe their businesses won’t be viable in a decade: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2024/economic-optimism-doubles-yet-almost-half-of-ceos-do-not-believe-their-businesses-will-be-viable-in-a-decade.html
- Play Bigger (book): https://amzn.to/4djaViL
For more episodes, visit: https://unfoldingthought.com
Join the conversation by emailing Eric at: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Unfolding Thought Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Hi, I'm Eric Pradham. Welcome to the Unfolding Thought Podcast, the show for leaders and deep thinkers who demand more than the usual fluff. If you're the kind of person who moves on from a book, video, or podcast, the moment it stops making you think or introducing you to something you can use, I hope you'll feel right at home here.
00:00:24
Speaker
In each episode, we uncover the deeper, often overlooked forces that shape our thoughts and behaviors so you can see yourself, your team, and the world from a whole new angle, and then actually apply what you learn to grow and do better.
00:00:41
Speaker
On the Unfolding Thought Podcast, we aim for minimal filler and maximum insight, challenging assumptions and sparking new thinking every step of the way. Are you ready to dive deeper?
00:00:54
Speaker
Then let's get started.
Meet Hugh Massey and DNA Behavior
00:00:57
Speaker
Today, I'm speaking with Hugh Massey from the company DNA Behavior. Hugh has devoted decades to understanding how our hardwired behavior influences our lives and work.
00:01:10
Speaker
We talk about his journey and about the work of his company, which I will say right now fascinates me and is well in line with the discussions with and interests of several of my recent guests.
00:01:23
Speaker
I hope that you will be equally as intrigued by Hugh as I was. And now I bring you Hugh Massey. Hugh, thank you for joining me.
00:01:35
Speaker
Would you mind telling me a little bit about yourself? Yeah, so it's great to be with you, Eric. yeah The first thing is for all the listeners, I'm not from Atlanta, Georgia, although that's where I live. I originally came from Sydney, Australia, so I've been in the United States 20 plus years. haven't I don't think I've picked up the accent yet, but and sort of in a way of of describing me or thinking of me and and connecting to my journey, think of it as that I'm a reformed accountant.
Hugh's Career Shift and Wealth Management
00:02:05
Speaker
And my university degree at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, I did accountancy and economics. And then I left.
00:02:16
Speaker
When I finished with that, I went and worked in Arthur Anderson and became a chartered accountant. you know, and in my 10-year journey there, I was mainly a tax specialist for most of it. For the nine of the 10 years I was in is is in the tax area.
00:02:29
Speaker
So that's sort of why i I say I'm an accountant. I was pretty much... rational thinker, you know all about the bottom line, all about results, what the numbers said. That that was the you know the only thing in a lot of ways that that that mattered for quite a lot of that journey.
00:02:45
Speaker
And you know i I was always interested in business, doing deals. So I had things going on on the side from the moment I left university, yeah whether it was some sort of property project, trading in the stock market,
00:02:58
Speaker
underwriting, contracts, whatever it was that I could lay my hands on. i was somewhat into it. And at about age 30, I suppose I came to that watershed moment. Do stay where I am and Arthur Anderson, become a partner and spend the next 10 years or so doing that to justify going through that Or do I leave? And I looked at it and I sort of thought, man the people above me aren't that happy. That was a telltale sign.
00:03:29
Speaker
i think I wasn't as passionate about what I was doing. And I just had this itchy feeling that I was not in the right place for Hugh for a whole lot of reasons. And, you know, including psychologically, so what I would now call psychological safety. I don't think I knew that term then.
00:03:46
Speaker
But ah knew I knew I wasn't going to flourish maybe the way I could, and but I didn't know what I was going to. so But I always had this one thing in my head was, Eric, I wanted to provide a hyper-personalized experience for investors.
00:04:02
Speaker
And so once I left Arthur Anderson and I... Dusted myself off a little bit. A few months later, I formed a wealth management business, serving you know wealthy families, high high net worth executives, et cetera.
00:04:15
Speaker
And the goal was to provide a hyper-personalized experience, sort of putting a tailor-made suit on every person, treating them uniquely, Understanding the family differences. Now, that was not in the 1990s, late 90s, something that people really talked about because private bankers, was a lot of it was just a one-size-fits-all approach. Today, it still is, even though there's a bit more rhetoric around that.
00:04:42
Speaker
And we're moving towards hyper-personalization, but we're not completely there yet. I think technology is what allows us to do it.
Passion for Financial Empowerment
00:04:50
Speaker
And then about four years or so into my journey of having this wealth management business, a friend of mine asked me at breakfast one one morning on a Saturday morning, you you don't sing that happy with what you're doing.
00:05:02
Speaker
What are you really passionate about? And out came out of my mouth, well, I want to help people all over the world become financially self-empowered. And I'd never said any statement like that, certainly not clearly.
00:05:15
Speaker
And it rocked me a fair bit. And I thought, what in the earth does that mean? And knew enough that if I'd said that and had that had come from my subconscious, I needed to go and and and and reflect on it more and and work out how do I do that?
00:05:32
Speaker
Because that's maybe what I'm meant to do in the world. And I knew this was not about financial literacy in the sense of teaching people stocks and bonds and what's the stock market, you know how does it work and everything.
00:05:44
Speaker
in In a way, the basics, but they're also very important fundamentals. it was I came up with it was about teaching people about themselves. And that what I realized was that every person had a financial personality that drove their decision-making, partly coming from their natural hardwired behavior, from early in life experiences and from learned behaviors.
00:06:06
Speaker
And that also people who create wealth usually create it from their talents, not outright from investing. Now, for some people, it's the same thing if you're a fund manager.
00:06:19
Speaker
But for a lot of people, they're going to make their wealth from their work. And investing is a byproduct. So I knew I had to understand people's talents, but I also needed to understand how they made financial choices.
00:06:31
Speaker
And lo and behold, had a young staffer in my office by chance, and she was doing accounting work for us, but also she was studying psychology at university and accounting. So she was doing a sort of pretty interesting double degree.
00:06:46
Speaker
And I asked her, you know, said, Marta, go and research ABCD, you know, psychometric systems, risk profiling tools. Let's see what we come up with. And I also looked in my day journal, Eric, and I've been writing about this stuff for a few years and ah didn't realize I was. So this was underneath the surface for me.
00:07:06
Speaker
And but she didn't sort of come up with the conclusion, but she brought out enough that showed me, I like all these things. And then I had a chance meeting with
00:07:17
Speaker
Carol, who's been who was on my team until last year for 24 years or 23 years, and she thought she was coming to see me about hiring people, which a little bit it was, but we started talking about natural hardwired behavior.
00:07:32
Speaker
the The thing is that I noticed with clients was under pressure, there was this behavioral flip and that that people, when they're under pressure, were reverting back to more their instinctive behavior. And I thought, I need to know that.
00:07:47
Speaker
I need to understand how they're behaving under stress. I need to understand what causes them stress. It's always money and it's relationships, but often those two things go together too. and she so And I said, so Carol, can we measure this? And she said, you can, and I'll help you get a system built, but you need to meet these guys in Atlanta who can help with psychometrics and I'll help you build the rest of the what you need.
00:08:11
Speaker
So a journey started. I came to Atlanta every month for four years from about two weeks after that after that meeting. And that led to the birth of DNA Behaviour.
00:08:23
Speaker
We used the systems with our clients in Australia and then i realized, you know, my calling in life, I think which is important to this conversation, my calling in life was not being people's investment manager.
00:08:34
Speaker
It was helping them understand their their behavior. their financial mind, putting measurement to that. Because if you put measurement to it, you can see it.
00:08:45
Speaker
You can do something with it. And building technology so it could become a global business. Because the other thing that was important in this was moving from Australia to America is a big thing. Just even traveling across all the time is a big thing.
00:08:58
Speaker
You know, what am I supposed to be doing? And I came back through meditation to my boyhood dreams. I wanted a global business to have impact. That wasn't going to help him well happen in wealth management, but technology could allow me to do it.
00:09:13
Speaker
Technology wasn't in, in you know, 2001 and 2002. I don't think it's definitely not what it is today, but I could see what was what was going to happen enough that I needed to to go down this track.
00:09:29
Speaker
And so I did. And now, you know, 20 years later, I'm talking to you.
DNA Behavior's Global Development
00:09:34
Speaker
Thank you, Hugh. I appreciate that. And there's a lot of things in there.
00:09:39
Speaker
Yeah, there's so much in there that I want to dig into and there won't be enough time, unfortunately, but I think that's good because you're not just going to hopefully leave the listener, but also me, you're going to leave me wanting more. I can already tell. So thank you.
00:09:57
Speaker
as i understand it or am assuming at the moment, it seems like you, when you started down this path of psychometric testing, or dare I say, understanding behavior at the risk of being too vague, I suspect that one of the next steps was thinking about your clients' responses to you or responses to the market.
00:10:29
Speaker
And then you took further steps to take this from being a wealth manager to being DNA behavior over time.
00:10:41
Speaker
Yeah, that's a very good question because I'm going to say something today, perhaps that I've never i've not really ever said or don't regularly say. I think I've hardly ever said it. when i was in When I figured out that I was going to leave Arthur Anderson, which was about six months before I did, there was a seminal conversation that went on there that I don't need to share the details of, but I said, I'm gone.
00:11:02
Speaker
And then I had to figure out what I was going to do. And even after six months, I didn't figure it out, but I thought, okay, I just need to tell them and go. It's fair to everybody. But I did go and interview to work at an investment bank and they psychometrically tested me and cognitive tests and all that sort of stuff.
00:11:18
Speaker
But the whole process was very badly handled because I turned up at an an office to do the test. i was told you only need to allow 45 minutes. In fact, it was four hours. Well, I'm sitting there not understanding that and I've got clients waiting for me at Arthur Anderson and I can't get out of this room.
00:11:37
Speaker
Anyway, I do it and I'm in trouble when I get back to the office, understandably, only because I couldn't manage time. But then I'm sitting there getting debriefed or asked questions in the interview and they're saying this about me and a ABCD. And I'm thinking, but I don't even know what you're reading that off. I can't see it. And I asked to have a look. Oh, no, we're not going to give that to you.
00:11:58
Speaker
and And I thought, okay, this is wrong. And so i just refused to go further in that kind of interviewing and testing with those types of people. That all ultimately was the catalyst for me just to work by myself and find my own path.
00:12:12
Speaker
And then, you know, the four or so years later, when I got onto the idea of psychometric testing, I thought not everybody's going to want to be measured. And so therefore, and certainly it can't be a secret.
00:12:22
Speaker
the The key point was it needs to be transparent. So what I did in the wealth management business when we started to go down this track was that I would show the clients my profile reports.
00:12:36
Speaker
This is you This is the strength and struggles I bring to the table. This is why i can help you in this situation. This is my team. This is what they're going to do. And therefore, would you like to complete the assessments?
00:12:49
Speaker
And you know out of 100 or so clients at the time, everybody bar one completed them. And it's because I showed myself first. I went ah i was authentic about it.
00:13:01
Speaker
And then the question the the conversations with the clients then became fairly interesting. They'd complete it. Husband wives had completed. They'd trade notes. Okay, now I understand why there's spending going on here or your entrepreneurial drive or whatever it was. it's ah it was a far It was generally ah fun conversation. But the key thing was, and what I what i sought to do was to change the culture.
00:13:24
Speaker
in-house ps psychometric assessments were delivered by there being open sharing. And the same goes in the hiring scenario when these are used in business for more business settings. The person going through the process must see, at least see their reports and what it's saying about them.
00:13:40
Speaker
And so, you know, in every anybody that works with us in any way whether it's clients, suppliers, whoever we put through the process, we always send them our results, you know, with theirs together so that at least they can see it.
00:13:58
Speaker
And that that creates a, you know, Eric, a level playing pitch for that conversation. No one's got more information than the other person and removes the risks of manipulation or people thinking, you know, what's going on here.
00:14:11
Speaker
So that's been the big cultural shift. I think that you know when I started doing this, it was very strongly around people's financial personality, that what we call their financial DNA.
00:14:23
Speaker
That was a market niche that I saw we could conquer with this because I knew there was already Myers-Briggs and DISC and other tools in the market. they weren't They were very fragmented then. It's still very fragmented today. That's another issue.
00:14:37
Speaker
But here's an area where I could be unique. And I saw i think with... you know While I've got a business mind, I figured out that was something that was important. If you're going to do something like this, try and own a corner of the market. doesn't matter how big. and you know Now I know more about business and you want to find a market channel that you can conquer and be the king of. There's a concept called Play Bigger, ah really good book around that. or you know, a book called Building Champions. Don't start a market channel unless it's worth a hundred million and you can be number one player in it.
00:15:07
Speaker
So that's what I did. But I soon started realizing working with a lot of the wealth managers. Once I'd moved this beyond my own wealth management business, once I started, you know, providing a subscription service to wealth managers,
00:15:20
Speaker
They not only wanted to understand clients, but we also realized for them to be better at that, they needed to understand their own team. Who is the right person to work with who? So not only in a team, but also with the clients.
00:15:32
Speaker
I knew in my practice that Hugh was good with certain types of clients, but there was a whole bucket of them that I wasn't the best with interpersonally. I might be the brain they wanted, but interpersonally,
00:15:45
Speaker
which is part of building the trust. You need people that make make you naturally feel comfortable. And so we figured all those things out. And then, so in a way, Eric, financial DNA was birthed, but not long after business DNA was birthed.
00:15:58
Speaker
And the two worked together, you really. that you know And for some businesses, they just wanted to do the business DNA part, not the client, the the financial DNA with clients. Others wanted to do The financial DNA with clients, less on team, you know, it was was a mixture. and And over time, more people started to find out we had business DNA and that led us to doing work in non-financial services businesses, you in all sorts of organizations.
00:16:25
Speaker
And so really the business is growing on that. With the models or approaches, assessments, any number of other things that you've developed, I guess, what do
Understanding Financial Behavior and Team Dynamics
00:16:36
Speaker
those look like? Have you integrated other assessments that are out there, such as you mentioned DISC or Myers-Briggs? Have you developed your own models, if I can use that word?
00:16:48
Speaker
So we built our own psychometric model. And one of the reasons was when I did the research, we with Marta, who I mentioned before, and then and then you know really it became Carroll, was that a lot of the assessments at that time were built on what's called Likert scoring. So to ask a question,
00:17:14
Speaker
and rank it one to five, get scored. Do that 25, 40 times, 100 times in some systems, you know one to five, one to seven. Well, your answers to those situational-based questions, because that's how they are, change.
00:17:28
Speaker
So that's not measuring natural hardwired behavior that's instinctive. That's measuring learned behavior, your preference to date. What I wanted to know is how you going to instinctively respond? And so that's got to remove situational bias. So where we came to was what's known as a forced choice scoring model where people choose between three words, let's say aspiring, patient, and detailed.
00:17:54
Speaker
I might say I'm all three of those. Well, I can be on certain days, but most of the time I'd be aspiring, then detailed, and patient is sort of at the bottom when I need to be.
00:18:05
Speaker
And so you do that enough times. One one that doesn't take much thinking with those types of questions, and they're not situational, and therefore you get a very consistent result.
00:18:16
Speaker
long time gaps, different pressure situations. And that's what we've tested over the past, you know, 25 years. And I don't think there's anybody who's marked us down for accuracy.
00:18:27
Speaker
So it's a different approach to it. There there are some other systems now that that do it, but it's it's on the rarer end. of of systems that profile people with that approach, but it was very specific to get to natural hardwired behavior. When we want to ask situational questions, let's say, how do you build a quality life or what's your leadership performance?
00:18:50
Speaker
We'll always have someone do the natural hardwired behavior questions first, the natural behavior questions first. And then we have them do a second set with a different scoring format.
00:19:01
Speaker
And that was the that's that's been the methodology that we've adopted to get the maximum accuracy in the outcomes. That's been our historical approach, Eric, to that.
00:19:15
Speaker
And the use cases or i suppose desires of your clients are things like, I want to understand my clients as a wealth manager, for example.
00:19:28
Speaker
I want to understand my clients' financial behavior or how they're going to act when times are stressful around money and finances. as well as whether I am a wealth manager or any other business, because as you said, you've expanded into other industries or verticals.
00:19:50
Speaker
i ah use case for me or a desire is to hire certain types of people or the right kind of people or to understand them. And then also, i suppose,
00:20:03
Speaker
to understand the people that I already have so that I think I encountered this maybe on your website or LinkedIn profile so that we can engender or have behavior that makes money fundamentally.
00:20:17
Speaker
you've got it You've got it right. So let's say you take the hiring. The key thing to understand is what talents are needed for the role. Well, you need to look at the team, what the team's doing, what its mission is, who do you need and what talents do you need on a team to fulfill that mission and what talents have you already got in in the people?
00:20:37
Speaker
That's the first thing. And you might find that you actually, okay, I want to hire for this type of customer support role and I've actually got somebody who'd be good at that already on the team, and but they're out of place because they're doing accounting or they're doing something in marketing, they they could be switched.
00:20:55
Speaker
So that's the first thing I think to work out before you go down the the wrong track. And then once you where you when you figure out where the where the gap is, that's who you hire for. But it's, it you know, our approach is very talent-based. So that comes from our metrics.
00:21:08
Speaker
And that's the first thing. And then the key thing is then how that person actually gets onboarded into the team as well. So what's the conversation that takes place with their leader or with their manager? How they integrated with the others?
00:21:20
Speaker
If you're going to have success, you know, if you're a wealth management business, then looking across, like okay, we've got this pool of clients, there are ABCD styles, who is serving them, you know, and and I'm very big on that.
00:21:33
Speaker
As I su said a few minutes ago, as ah as an advisor, you're probably going to only able to interact relatively easily with 40% of the types of people out there. That leaves 60% black hole. That needs to be filled by someone else.
00:21:49
Speaker
And it might even be less than that, but I think you can generally cope with 40% of personalities. The other 60%, it just doesn't work. doesn't matter who you are. And so that's that's the way to sort of optimize the business. Now, in terms of, Eric, in terms of sort of behavior makes profit or behavior drives profits, and we've always said behavior drives performance. But last year, we did a research study where we applied our profile, our digital plo profiling process. So I'll come back to how that works in a minute.
00:22:19
Speaker
To all of the Fortune 500 company leaders, So we're able to get all their names from public records using AI, put them essentially, think of it, they're put into a spreadsheet. And then now we then send out using prompts to gather information from public data sources that creates a behavioral style for them. So they didn't have to go through answering our questionnaire that it's done digitally.
00:22:43
Speaker
We've picked up the metrics on them to identify their style We've looked at the company profits and what we got to see was there were six behaviors that the stronger those behaviors were in the team, the higher the company profit were relative to competitors in the sector.
00:22:59
Speaker
And so that's where we get to saying, you know, behavior is, behavior makes money. Behavior is driving profitability. There's very linked. And that's something that's quite revolutionary in this field, because I think we've always said everything in a business happens through people.
00:23:16
Speaker
you know if you've got the right person in the right slot, they're going to, you know, to do better and it's going to be more efficient and productive, et cetera. But here's the exact proof of it.
00:23:27
Speaker
Is that something that you've published or you've made any of that information available? There's a white paper and see in our website. So if anyone goes to the educational resources in our area or in our website, you will see it there. And it's under leadership, financial value creation capability.
00:23:43
Speaker
The whole process is outlined how we did it. And I continue to do it. and And don't think everybody likes the results. see I had a private equity manager, you know, i was talking to about it, ah you know, six weeks ago. And he said, well, can you profile this team for me?
00:24:00
Speaker
And I did. and And it was one of the worst performers as far as behavior is concerned. And, you know, these guys, though, their strength was, as a leadership team, very relational, which is good. You need that. That's one part.
00:24:15
Speaker
But it was so loaded that way. and and and But where it missed is some of the innovation and then the fiscal controls. And I know at some point there is going to be a problem with that business,
00:24:29
Speaker
Because they're probably going to have a run-up in revenue from connecting with lots of people through doing lots of advertising and spending. But has it all been fiscally rational?
00:24:40
Speaker
And what about the innovation? You know, they that business I know sits on one product. It's not a multi-product business. So... Yeah, great. Keep pumping the one product, but someone else could innovate ahead of that business. And so you've got to you got to understand, you know, there's a range of things that all work together and and, you know, we can see it. And that's the thing. It's like some of the companies that were once the darling of the stock market.
00:25:06
Speaker
I was saying last year, Yeah. On paper, you've got the right people, but if they don't all turn up to work all the time and stay focused, like Tesla, it's a problem.
00:25:17
Speaker
And you know there are there are other cases of that. And so I think what we're doing this with this is that counting tells you is historical. Behavior is going to be predictive. It's the one way of seeing forward.
00:25:28
Speaker
And then you look at everything else that's going on around it. you know Tesla, if you've got that leadership team and it stays very focused, they're going to do it. Lose their focus. or make a bad people culture decision, not going to work.
00:25:42
Speaker
It's a very fine edge, but I think that this is what investors need to to understand. and And it's not saying, you know, the people are bad. It's how do we help them with leadership development? How do we hold them accountable?
00:25:57
Speaker
How do we add in different roles to a team? And I think this is where we're seeing now so many businesses, Eric out there, you know, Pricewaterhouse did a research study last year. 45% of CEOs of major companies think their business is at risk of not being in existence by 2030. Okay, so that's done last year. That's a six-year runway.
00:26:17
Speaker
The issue is innovation, being prepared to challenge their own business model. You can come up with a new idea, but how hard are you going to push that in terms of your business model because that might threaten today's profits.
00:26:28
Speaker
It's juggling act. It's not simple when it's a big business. But Intel, I think, is a is a classic case of where this is a struggle right now and and you can see the results. But all I'm trying to do is to provide or bring transparency to the people issues that are there to get better questions asked.
00:26:46
Speaker
I think, and that's what we can do. How do you see, if I can call it behavioral science or your field perhaps, evolving over the next decade or
The Future of Behavioral Science in Business
00:26:57
Speaker
so?
00:26:57
Speaker
The first thing is it's going to evolve a lot. I think more people are now understanding the connection of behavior to business, and you know, to the business results, that measuring behavior brings visibility.
00:27:11
Speaker
That's starting to come out, the whole field of behavioral economics that I've been part of, which is really, you know, the intersection of behavior and money or psychology and money. is getting recognition.
00:27:22
Speaker
But behavior is the last frontier. What I would say is it' ah it is a highly fragmented market and you know there's lots of consultants in there dabbling with it. you know More people are getting psychology degrees.
00:27:34
Speaker
you know There's more work being done inside companies. But I think the barrier to it is that people have to complete a profile. It's still a problem you know in a financial services firm. like We've got one of our clients here in Atlanta that every time they've they've been growing by acquisition, every time they acquire another team, everybody's profiled.
00:27:54
Speaker
Then some of them start to ah deploy it on the clients. But let's say that over, you know, five, eight years, eight years or so, there's 3000 people profiled. Okay. That's good.
00:28:04
Speaker
But they've got 25,000 families, which is a hundred thousand people. Plus they have all the leads and prospects times that by three. We're talking now a big universe sitting around that company, 400,000 people.
00:28:20
Speaker
And I looked at this and said, you know, 18 months ago to my team at the end of 2023, okay, we've got a goal of hitting a hundred million profiles completed 2030.
00:28:31
Speaker
by two thousand and thirty We'd had about two and a half million completed at that time. We're we're growing. That's no small feat for complete startup in this field. But what if we thought about the goal differently and said we want a billion people in our databases by 2030? What do we have to do?
00:28:49
Speaker
We've got to go digital. That means we have to dust off the work that we started a few years before on building ah digital scam product, which I referred to before around you know the process of looking at all but the Fortune 500 leaders.
00:29:02
Speaker
How can we remove? or The problem for us fri is friction. Not every financial advisor wants their clients to have to complete a profile. It's not, I think some of them, they think, oh, I can read the people or it's just extra time. Don't need to do that.
00:29:18
Speaker
Really, most of it's, i don't want and I don't want to know more about myself and I don't want people to know about me. That's a lot of it. But there's friction points everywhere with the process. Well, how do we remove that?
00:29:30
Speaker
The digital scanning process removes that. And so that's what we've done. And now we've got people, like okay, I'm going to meet with ABCD. They punch in what they need to punch in to the system, which is...
00:29:42
Speaker
Not much more than the name and when where the person works to get an identifier on them. And the system will go out there and construct it. And is it as good as the original full scan profile that has to be completed? No, but it's more than accurate.
00:29:57
Speaker
Because of the work we've done over 24 years, we're able to reverse our and engineer our own system to make it work. And we'll only make it more and more accurate over time. And I think that's that's an opportunity for exceptional growth. We've got a database sitting there in our company now of 400 million people. I don't have to tell you what we did with it.
00:30:19
Speaker
Everyone's got a profile. So that that's where I think it can be a game changer. But I think it's still important to make this information understandable, easy to use for leaders. But I think that, and that's, that's thinking about it differently rather than thinking about it as hiring someone once and done or a little bit of coaching here and there or understanding a client. It's, I think it's leaders understanding every person, heat mapping their whole organization, understanding every person that's there.
00:30:47
Speaker
Then you can start to see the blockages. That's the difference. If you know, for marketing, okay. We're going to to this 50,000 people. Why not know who they are? And you can do that pretty quickly. And it doesn't have to be complicated, right? Yeah.
00:31:01
Speaker
And I can imagine so many use cases... There's a lot of use cases. Oh, yeah. And I think it's taking the friction out of it, but it requires business model changes to do it.
00:31:14
Speaker
Okay, we're we've done that. So I suppose we just see, but I think there's is a number of ways, I suppose, to change. you know This is one way of mass scaling hyper-personalization, I would put it, understanding people differently.
00:31:30
Speaker
But there are so many so many applications to use this kind of data in a meaningful way that's not just hiring and coaching people, which is important stuff. There are so many other ways this can be used because now we can predict how people are going to behave.
00:31:45
Speaker
Are there certain types of industries or roles, businesses that you would recommend seek you out and give this a try?
00:31:57
Speaker
think once upon a time, i would have said that what we're doing, our model, particularly before we had the digital scan, was applicable really to relationship-based and industries like financial planning. Okay, you want to get it you get a new client.
00:32:11
Speaker
They're going to be your client for five plus years, hopefully for 20, even accounting, you know any any banking, anything that was long-term relationship, that that that would have been the market. But today, it it can be any industry.
00:32:27
Speaker
Because every business has got clients or customers. Every business has got an ecosystem that's more than just its employees. And that makes this valuable for everybody, including the government.
00:32:39
Speaker
That's really interesting. I'm really intrigued. And, you know, you mentioned a few things, the leadership, financial value creation that I will link to. You mentioned some books and i am really interested in this. I'll link to this and, and those things.
00:33:00
Speaker
In the show notes, I am going to be talking to one of your colleagues pretty soon. So there will be perhaps some follow-up that I can do on your business.
00:33:14
Speaker
And hopefully people will then listen to both of those episodes. But in advance of that discussion, Are there places that people should go or ways in which they should seek out your business, but also Hugh?
00:33:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think the best place, Eric, thank you for that, is really is just is going to to our website at dnabehavior.com.
Connecting with DNA Behavior
00:33:41
Speaker
And particularly there, there's the they the learning area. So that's a whole tab. And you can click through there and find, you know, whether it's blogs, white papers, books.
00:33:54
Speaker
We also have a page, dnabehavior.com forward slash start. that's ah That's a way to sort of start the journey of getting familiar. with us But pretty much everything is there on the website.
00:34:06
Speaker
And then also my LinkedIn account's got a plethora of things there that have been posted, of course, all these podcasts, stories. So I think that that they're the they the the best ways to to get in touch with what we're doing and the methodologies.
00:34:24
Speaker
Thank you. I appreciate that. And there are ah lot of other questions that I want to ask you. But as I said, I had the sense right from your first response that you were going to leave me wanting more. And I suspect Anyone else listening to this conversation will feel the same way. So i want to say thank you. And maybe even we will talk again, depending on what makes the most sense and what's the most valuable use for your time. But thank you, Hugh, for joining me. I really appreciate it.
00:34:57
Speaker
That's a pleasure, Eric. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Hey, thank you for listening. I hope you got a lot out of today's conversation. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe, and please share it with someone you know who'd appreciate this kind of information.
00:35:15
Speaker
If you want to bring this kind of thinking to your own business, check out mine at inboundandagile.com. We specialize in helping leaders with challenges around marketing, communications, and leadership so they can inspire real action in their people and audiences.
00:35:34
Speaker
Thanks again for listening, and I hope you'll come back for future episodes.