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Cultivating Excellence: How Bill Marriott’s Leadership Ideals Shaped a Future CEO
37 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Dan Sanchez talks to Brian Dietmeyer, former VP of Sales at Marriott, about effective leadership learned from industry legends. They delve into the impactful lessons Brian gained from his experiences under the guidance of Bill Marriott, emphasizing the prioritization of brand equity over short-term gains and the importance of clear leadership guideposts. This discussion illuminates how such leadership principles can profoundly influence decision-making and organizational success.
Timestamps:
00:00 Admiration for Bill Marriott's clear leadership guideposts.
03:30 Prioritizing brand over cash flow, making tough decisions.
06:34 Smart people not always good people; prioritize goodness.
11:54 Sales VP promotes servant leadership for success.
12:56 Brian shared leadership lessons learned from Marriott.
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Transcript
Introduction to Brian Deep Meyer
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome back to closed mode I'm Dan Sanchez and I'm joined today by Brian deep Meyer who has had a fantastic career through working at Marriott as a VP of sales and you've led your own consultancy you are now working at launching close strong and AI sales company.
00:00:21
Speaker
But I wanted to go back to the beginning of your career or near the beginning of your sales career because you've referenced it on the show so many times, Brian, that I'm like, oh, I know there's there's there's gold nuggets in there because you got to work with a legendary leader who really showed you a lot of like what really good leadership every time you share a story, I'm leaning into it because there's it's rare that you get to work with a leader that's that good at leading that kind of
Lessons from Bill Marriott
00:00:47
Speaker
a culture.
00:00:47
Speaker
So I wanted to kind of open it up to like, what did you learn from Bill Marriott while you were there that's become invaluable that you found was probably uncommonly strategic or uncommon leadership compared to other places you've been in now. What are some of those lessons that you learned? And you already know this, but I kind of have a hero worship relationship with this guy. And I didn't work directly for him, but I was fortunate enough to be in the room with him often.
00:01:18
Speaker
You've had, as you know, we've had other guests on the show that chief customer officer of new Mattone, Walt Zola, we had a United States Marina and talking about marine servant leadership. So as we add to our leadership body of work, I'm proud to add this in there, but.
00:01:32
Speaker
Bill Marriott has got guideposts that are crystal clear and, and even in a couple, a couple of his direct reports who I reported to, um, it came down to them. So Bill Marriott just had a way, uh, when we were struggling with decisions and I can give you an example. So, uh, we're, we're looking at a group of hotels that were, that were franchised and, you know, they kind of.
00:02:00
Speaker
They weren't hitting the right metrics that we were looking for. And we were all really struggling with it and looking at the fees, the management fees that came from these 10, 12 buildings, whatever they were. And we're like, Oh man, yeah, they're not doing things the way we want it to be done. But there's all this money and Bill Merritt and his typical way of, if you've never heard him speak, he's, he's very understated and sort of slow, almost as a draw. And Bill Merritt walked in and he's like, you know, what are you guys working on? And we told him, and he said,
00:02:29
Speaker
Just remember every decision you make is a deposit into or withdrawal from brand equity and bolted. And quite frankly, we, we are all focused on, on the money. These were management fees that are kind of pure bottom line stuff. And he made that his leadership made that so clear and it's impacted me. This was 25 years ago, Dan. And, and I remember the conversation today and, and my experiences at Marriott VP and then founding a couple of consulting companies.
00:02:57
Speaker
I keep that in mind, like short-term cashflow can go away. You know, you've got to think about the brand. What does it mean to your employees and what does it mean to your customers? And it's that, that kind of leadership that like made, makes decisions easy when you're making decisions in that framework of what you know your leader believes in. It's, it's pretty
Applying Marriott's Principles
00:03:18
Speaker
cool.
00:03:18
Speaker
Have you used that to guide any of your decisions on your own leadership? Like do you have guideposts now that guide your decision making or help your teams make better decisions? Yeah, I hope that folks around me in the last couple of organizations feel that, but I will prioritize brand over cashflow when we need to, long-term brand equity. And that means making some tough short-term decisions sometimes, you know?
00:03:48
Speaker
And it's just the same in my last consulting company. I had a lot of 1099s who were out there selling for me and there'd be times when their expense reports would come in and something would be gray on a commission or that daily rate that they should be paid. And if it was gray at all, what I used to say to our accountant is anytime it's gray, you default to them.
00:04:11
Speaker
You know, of course, unless someone's taking advantage of it, they do it five times in a row. But anytime there's a lack of clarity, even if I, I pretty certain Dan and I had this discussion, if there's any grayness whatsoever, I'm paying the extra fees. And then I'm gonna come back to you and go, okay, for the next time, you know, let's do it this way. But that, yeah, that's a really tactical level piece where it's super easy for me to just go, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pay it. Uh, because my personal brand equity, my company brand equity with these 1099s,
00:04:40
Speaker
just, just went way up. I did a similar thing with a guy who had a piece of soft equity, mirror equity in our business. And he was leaving just prior to vesting. And this was, oh man, this was 15 years ago. And, and I vested and paid him out when he left. And for 15 years, he's been almost like an indentured servant and he's a consultant. And there's many times when I call him up, I'm like, dude,
00:05:05
Speaker
I mean, I need help with whatever. And I just want a few email, a few sentences in an email back and I get spreadsheets from him and tons of research. And he, he goes back to that time and he's like, yeah, this, I'll never forget. So that, yeah. And that's not me that, that came, that came from, from Bill Marriott and it's, it's an easy filter to run your decisions through.
Core Values in Decision-Making
00:05:28
Speaker
So there's essentially two, two lessons here. One is around.
00:05:34
Speaker
always preferring reputation over the short-term gains, especially cash capital gains.
00:05:40
Speaker
Yeah. But the other lesson is having clear stakes in the ground as far as what you believe and how you want your company to operate in. Yep. Which are really preference over one thing over the other, like brand and reputation over short-term profits. Yes. That was a guidepost, but you could have different guideposts. You could always opt for short-term cash because maybe you're, I don't know why you would do that as a company, but sometimes they clearly do. I don't know if that's a guidepost for them or if they're just thinking short-term.
00:06:08
Speaker
Uh, it's clearly a thing, uh, but having other values and stakes in the ground that you know, this is what we value here. So we always choose. Well, the, the short, a lot of, a lot of people have core values, but they're not, they don't really help guide your decisions most of the time. They're just kind of like be good. You're like, okay. Well, we had in my last business and we've pulled it over into the next one. As we say, we're a company who's run by smart people who are good people. And, and I, I had a couple really smart people who were not so
00:06:39
Speaker
good on the good side and i had some of my partners come to me and they're like dude what. What about the smart people are good people and then these these two gentlemen that at one point had seventy three seventy three percent of my revenue that they were bringing in.
00:06:53
Speaker
We shot both of them over a period of the next three months and it was painful, but the team came and called me out on it. They're like, you're, you know, yeah, you're leaning into the smart with these guys, but you're not leading into the good. You know, the other thing that Bill Marriott used to say, and I think he may have even gotten this from his father, Jay Willard Marriott, that take care of your employees, take care of your customers, profit to take care of themselves, which is very closely related to the other thing that
Balanced Scorecard Approach
00:07:21
Speaker
we talked about. And it's those leading indicators.
00:07:23
Speaker
And even the, the scorecard for some of the hotel was margin, guest satisfaction and associate satisfaction. So if you're, if you're doing great margins and you're making your customers happy and you're, and you're killing your associates in a service business, that's death. So it wasn't, it wasn't enough and it would be enough in most businesses. Margin is usually enough.
00:07:46
Speaker
Even if customer sat a little bit lower, but no margin customer sat and, and associate sat in this, this balanced scorecard. He called it like you, you had to be hitting on all three or, or you weren't, you weren't getting a bonus for the year. You weren't getting your number.
00:08:00
Speaker
That's the key. I mean, that's kind of the key for any company, right? Because if you might get, you might get margins in the short term, but if you don't take care of the other two, those margins are going to suffer in the long term. Yeah. So you have to work to balance all three. That's why they balance because they're opposing each other. Yeah. Because it's easy to optimize one.
00:08:20
Speaker
It's a little harder to optimize too, but optimizing all three is wicked hard, but that's our goal. That's our task. It was crystal clear. It was backed up. If we made decisions based on that balance scorecard, we knew that they were going to fly.
Leadership and Mentorship Stories
00:08:34
Speaker
There's so much about working from area that I learned Steve Wise was a direct boss of mine and I often tell people the story. One year he called me junior and it was when I was first promoted to VP of National Account Sales and I get a Christmas card from him.
00:08:49
Speaker
and saying, junior, you were a big part of my success for this year. Well, by the way, Dan, I knew that was bull crap. Steve was at a pretty high level, but that, that investing in the associates, this isn't, I think it was an EVP sent me a handwritten Christmas card, making me partially responsible for his success 20 years ago, dude. And it's still fresh in my brain. You know, my, my, my direct boss, my last direct boss, Roger Dow,
00:09:17
Speaker
He and I didn't get along really well in the beginning. It was mostly kind of on me. And he heard from other people that I wasn't fond of him. And he gave me a book called Lincoln on Leadership. And Roger came up to me and said, you can't be a good leader until you're a good follower. And that's all he said and handed me this book. And I knew, I knew what happened in that moment, but it's those kinds of leadership
00:09:38
Speaker
qualities that ran across the board in this place that I remember all these years later. And, and, and because I know how they all felt, whether I was making a business decision or someone four levels above me was, was telling me something like that. That's this is leadership. And again, alongside the other folks we've talked to about leadership on, on the podcast. Yeah. I hope these ideas resonate a little bit with others.
00:10:04
Speaker
That's such a power move, but such a grace-filled move at the same time. They're handing you the book and being like, be a good follower. Because, man, there's a lot of things he could have done and what leaders mostly do is they don't say anything and then they passively, aggressively just move you somewhere else, let you go.
00:10:21
Speaker
Just kind of put you in the corner without saying anything about is usually that is precisely That's precisely the right way to round out the story that that's a really good point because that is that is the alternative and I think that's a little more typical and again He didn't even reference the incident. I knew
00:10:38
Speaker
I knew it's harder to actually go and have, and like, usually a crucial conversation is hard to have. They're a little longer. He does it in like three cents, like one sentence puts it in your court to either get it right or, or he would justifiably let you go.
00:10:56
Speaker
Yeah. And completely, completely elegant. You know, the same with Steve Vai's sending me this Christmas card, making me responsible for his success, which I'm sorry. No, I wasn't like all of those things. We forget as leaders that like giving people clear true North to make decisions in and then investing back, you know, keeping associate satisfaction high, you know, as good leaders evidenced by their behavior with Roger and Steve.
00:11:21
Speaker
So that's kind of the lesson from this episode. Like, set a true north as guideposts. Operate within that, especially as a leader. You gotta go above and beyond to demonstrate it like you did with sending a Christmas card. And have a balanced set of metrics that you're holding people accountable to. And it probably should be the same ones that we just mentioned. Do right by the customer, have good margins, make sure you treat your employees well, and everything that those are the three
Sales Leadership Insights
00:11:46
Speaker
things to do. And even as a sales leader, it's treat your reps well.
00:11:49
Speaker
make sure the customers win, make sure you hit your numbers and the company's still profitable because you can't discount everything. Yeah. I learned that from one of our last leadership interviews with the United States Marine where he was, I shouldn't say former Marine because I guess you're never former, but he's current VP of sales and said, you know, a lot of sales leaders are kind of dogging people about what's happening with your pipeline. And his approach as a servant leader was
00:12:14
Speaker
How can I help you? This, this deal is stalled. Like internally, is there something I need to do? Is there something with the customer? How can I help you move this forward? It's, it's a subtle shift, but it's, that's leadership versus like accounting or auditing, which is what a lot of people do and they call it leadership. And it's like, you know, it's, it's, it's math management and, you know, yeah, some of that is in our role, but leading with a human.
00:12:39
Speaker
is yeah, it's impacted me. Like I said, I can, I can tell these stories and remember the actual conversations 20 or more years later, precise conversations. I can also remember some bad ones too, by the way, a different organization. So save those for another episode. We'll break those for the doom and gloom episode. Brian, thank you so much for taking some time today to share some of the leadership lessons you've learned from your past. Thank you.