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Connecting Employee Succession Plans and Organisational Development – a conversation with Justin Abrams
9 Plays19 hours ago
How your people grow impact how your organization develops
Justin Abrams is the founder and CEO of Aryo Consulting Group(ACG) based in Boston, MA USA.
In this episode of the Abeceder podcast The Independent Minds Justin and host Michael Millward explore the employee succession plans organisations have impact the development of those organisations.
They discuss the
- Role of having the correct strategy
- Importance of making the correct hiring decisions
- Developing the correct skills
- Why senior roles change as organisations grow and what this can mean for the people in those roles
- Role of data and presenting that data to the right people
- Conflicts that exist in organisations
Discover more about Justin and Michael at Abeceder.co.uk
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Hosts
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr. it's The all-in-one podcasting platform that makes every stage of the podcast production process so easy. Use the link to zencastr.com that is in the description. There is a built-in discount.
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for every everyone.
00:00:36
Speaker
I'm your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abusida.
Succession Planning and Organizational Development
00:00:41
Speaker
Today, Justin Abrams and I are going to be discussing the connections between succession planning and organisational development.
00:00:51
Speaker
Justin is the founder and CEO of Ario Consulting Group, which we may refer to as ACG. I will ask Justin to explain the model that Aerial Consulting works for its projects at the start of our conversation with him.
00:01:07
Speaker
We'll be focusing on the HR aspects of that model. Aerial Consulting Group is based in Boston, Massachusetts. I have not visited Boston, Massachusetts, but if I did get to go, I would make my travel arrangements at the Ultimate Travel Club, because that is where I get trade prices on trains, flights and hotels, and all sorts of other travel-related purchases.
00:01:33
Speaker
You can do the same by using the link in the description, which has a built built-in discount on membership fees.
Purpose and Approach of 'The Independent Minds'
00:01:40
Speaker
Now that I have paid the rent, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds.
00:01:45
Speaker
That will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading, and subscribing to. Very importantly, on The Independent Minds, we don't tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think.
Founding of Ario Consulting and Its Mission
00:01:59
Speaker
Hello, Justin. Michael, how are you? I'm all right. How about yourself? are you doing? I'm doing excellent. I'm excited to to be here. Great. Tell us a little bit about how you ended up being the founder of Aerial Consulting.
00:02:13
Speaker
Yeah, so I started it right at the midst of COVID. You know, I come from a very traditional corporate business world, and those companies already had a lot of the the consulting companies to work with to kind of help them through this chaos.
00:02:32
Speaker
um but what i realized was there was a massive concern with the small businesses which really are the the backbone of the economy And so when I started the business, it was really to be that kind of professional McKinsey for small businesses.
00:02:47
Speaker
And then from there, you know obviously, COVID had since gotten much better. And then, you know, it's just kind of trying to adapt to the new issues and the new challenges and and really working with the small businesses to grow there to even larger businesses. There's only one thing that is certain in life and that is change. Exactly. A similar sort of story behind Abyssaida, the name itself means to put into logical order. It's a Latin word. So it means to put it to put a subject into logical order.
00:03:19
Speaker
And the the subject we put into logical order is employment.
Abusida's HR Focus and Ario's Business Model
00:03:22
Speaker
And we do that from the perspective of the employer and the employee because employment is a relationship and we need to have strong relationships in every organization. and put in place all those tools that help people to become more engaged in their organizations and see the work as part of their future and achieving their lifestyle aspirations. In large organizations where they've got HR ah departments, that's just taken for granted. The smaller organizations don't have that.
00:03:54
Speaker
They might have someone who comes in once in a while or someone who, oh, I've seen how HR works. I know I can do this. It's just form filling. Whereas HR is really about relationship building and making sure that you're building relationships with the right people because you've hired the right people. So there's more of a chance of them being successful. So there's some synergy around the sorts of work that we're doing. Definitely.
00:04:20
Speaker
Definitely. I mentioned that Aereo has a three-point model of the support that it provides. Tell me about the model. Yeah. So typically what we're finding is there's there's really three stages that clients will come to us.
00:04:35
Speaker
The first is the growth stage. um You can think about that as a pretty common catalyst, I'd say. At least 60 to 70% of our clients are just stuck. They're in a revenue rut.
00:04:49
Speaker
some kind of of you know scaling issue. ah So that's the first piece. The second piece is on that optimizing and kind of that reducing the cost down.
00:05:01
Speaker
So that's obviously it so its own separate beast. And then the third is kind of that like after party. So you have that, you've kind of solved the growth, you've solved some of the optimization.
00:05:12
Speaker
And this is where I think um You know, you you end up seeing that either mergers and acquisition strategy, it's much more financial and really just building out that like long term longevity that you might not need or have thought about in that that growth in the optimization stage.
00:05:29
Speaker
It sounds really interesting. And it's, you're using that with smaller businesses.
Success Stories and Business Strategies
00:05:35
Speaker
Yes. You tell us a little bit about, i don't want you to select name clients or anything, but it's a scenario or a situation where you've applied that model into an organization and the sort of results that you've achieved for the for them. Yeah, absolutely. And I would say every business, uh, if anyone is interested in going into this field of like consulting strategy,
00:05:59
Speaker
Um, the cool thing about it is every business, uh, while, while I have certainly, you know, you can pick your favorites or not, they're all really hard challenges that.
00:06:10
Speaker
You do, you do end up seeing a smile on the the owner's face at the end of the day. So that's yeah like, you can take a lot of solace and just. yeah, I'm i'm helping like grow this business, but this is a challenge that someone else over the past XYZ years hasn't been able to solve for whatever reason. Maybe it's marketing has changed.
00:06:30
Speaker
um I just worked with a company. um they were doing so They were doing a little over a million dollars a year. um they They help train and educate healthcare workers.
00:06:44
Speaker
So they they're very much in this employment upskilling. Um, and what they were finding was a lot of their costs have been going up, especially in the marketing side and the number of their sales were going down. So their, their overall growth was not very, um, it wasn't something that they were excited about after about 30 to 40 days, 45 days, we can pretty much diagnose the underlying issue.
00:07:12
Speaker
Um, so now they've already, I just got off the phone with them. I'm picking some recency bias here, but They've already grown their sales about 40% month over month. So they themselves are really experts in the healthcare space.
00:07:27
Speaker
But like so many people, and I'm sure on your end as a business owner, like you could be the absolute best person in your industry. but they don't have the packaging to wrap that up into the marketing side or they don't, you know, it's, it's very common. Uh, like the best chefs in the world are often terrible business people and vice versa. And so it's like, you have to be able to work with these people who are experts in their field, educate them and, and actually see the progress.
00:08:01
Speaker
Um, so there's, there's quite a lot of like EQ involved as well. That's, that's really hard to, um, just put on paper. Yes, I understand what you
Challenges in Hiring and Business Growth
00:08:11
Speaker
mean. was talking to somebody in the armed forces not so long ago who was explaining that we're all a specialist and focused on our specialism until we can develop the skills that we need to be a generalist when our title job title changes to general.
00:08:31
Speaker
rather than captain or lieutenant. or We have to develop the skills to be a generalist um as well as the specialist. And a lot of people set up businesses so that they can be the expert in their field, but actually running a business means that you have to be a generalist.
00:08:52
Speaker
Absolutely. And you have to you have to be confident enough to give other people their leniency to make mistakes and to to scale on their own terms.
00:09:06
Speaker
Yes. See, one of the things I find with lots of people who set up businesses is that when they start recruiting, they're looking for people like They want to see themselves in the people that they're recruiting.
00:09:21
Speaker
I often find myself saying to them that the person who is going to be most like you is not going to be your employee. They are going to be your competitor. You need to find people who are different to you so that then they will be happy doing the job that you need them to do rather than thinking that they could do your job better than you.
00:09:43
Speaker
Absolutely. No, was just going to that's one of the reasons why when it comes to growing a business, you can invest in whatever machinery that you like, you and people do. They invest in all sorts of things that are designed to enable your organization to do more with less. But when it comes to the people,
00:10:06
Speaker
We don't invest enough time as entrepreneurs in finding the right people with the right skills to do the jobs that we need them to do. There's a big gap.
00:10:17
Speaker
know We almost spend more time working out what machinery we're going to buy, but then, once we've got the machinery, we don't spend an equal amount of time working out what type of person is going to be the best at operating that machinery.
00:10:32
Speaker
Absolutely. In similar fashion to this expertise, it's extremely hard to hire if you're you're an expert in your field.
00:10:44
Speaker
But do you even have the right questions to ask the marketing hire or the manufacturing engineer hire like you? You can't obviously you can't solve for expertise.
00:11:00
Speaker
um so you have to then make it more of a culture and a personality interview and you know that has its flaws as well people can get scared so i do see us as kind of the in-between generalist to to to help them to understand because as a business owner i do have that that hat that i wear um But it's extremely difficult to to match personality to personality on two different jobs. and So, yeah, I think you're spot on with that. Sometimes the personality that makes you someone who is going to go out and set up your own business is completely the wrong type of personality to be. the quality assurance person, for example, or the financial person. There are some jobs where you need a personality like marketing or sales or the actual entrepreneur, where you need an element of risk taking and other other jobs which require a personality where they The last thing that you're going to do is be thinking, how can I cut a corner?
00:12:08
Speaker
How can I say, how can I save time money by not doing it to the exact standard? You don't want someone who's going to take risks in some jobs. So, you know, I think there is a case as well for saying it's not a case of matching the personality to the individuals.
00:12:24
Speaker
We've got, we'll all end up working with our friends in that way. What we want is to have people doing work. the doing the work that we don't want to do or who can do things better than us. And that may not mean that they automatically have to be people that we we want to make into our best friends. They're just colleagues.
00:12:47
Speaker
And I've seen too many entrepreneurs fall down because, yeah, that person was great would have been great at the job, but that's the person I want to go and play golf with. Which one shall we appoint? The one who's going to be great at the job or the one who's going to be great at golf? And you end up with some very strange combinations.
00:13:08
Speaker
You do. and And I can understand why you want to hire someone that you'd be friends with. It's a lonely life being an entrepreneur, but you have to think about the team and the lowest common denominator. And, you know, if you have a small team, even if it's a 30 to 100 person team.
00:13:31
Speaker
Yeah, every single person needs to be quite elite that you need to basically be hiring for the the best athletes in their respective fields.
00:13:42
Speaker
You know, if you can afford it and try and build something big together. Yes. i mean, there is a story that I was told, and I know there's an element of the truth to it because they made a movie out of it. I think it was called The Network, where one big tech entrepreneur was setting up his business and decided to employ the people or decided to work with the people who were his friends or the people that he wanted to have as his friends.
00:14:11
Speaker
And then there were another two guys who set up another high big tech organization and, you know, make billions of pounds, billions of dollars. Well, billions in whatever currency you want to talk about, to be honest.
00:14:24
Speaker
And they made the decision that when their friends came to them and said, you know, can we have a job? They said, well, only if you can prove that you are the best person for that job. And that became part of their... hiring recruitment strategy, we only hire the best. And if we can't find the best or convince the best to come to us, then we we'll will redesign the job.
00:14:47
Speaker
We'll change things well because we're not going to accept second best in our organization. And that they just, it's easy to say it, but the reality is that when you accept second best people into your organization, you are potentially saying it's okay to achieve second level growth rather than the top level of growth that you were capable of.
00:15:14
Speaker
Absolutely. And you're seeing this now in you know, Mark Zuckerberg has been poaching all of these top AI researchers and talent. It's putting $100 million dollar plus salaries to them.
00:15:28
Speaker
And, you know, i think it's just, um you know, if you want to play that game, which is a you know obviously huge, if you can win it, you can really win big.
00:15:39
Speaker
You know, you have to treat your business like a like an elite sports team and just try and give all your people best resources possible to grow together and it will really pay at dividends but it's hard it's easy to say that everyone says it but it's not the case most often you We're all too often recruiting in a panic.
00:16:04
Speaker
Either there is too much work for us to do, so we need somebody now to do this work, make life easier, and we accept whoever. Or someone has left and we haven't worked out how we're going to cover the work that they used to do. And so it's like, well, we just need to find someone like them.
00:16:24
Speaker
And you have to think, like this person has left, why have they left? Is it potentially because the job has changed, the work has changed and they don't want to do it anymore? So this idea that we need to find another Jeff, another Janice, whatever, is that...
00:16:43
Speaker
We
Aligning Business Strategy with HR Practices
00:16:44
Speaker
don't. We need to look at the work that needs to be done and work out what type of person is likely to be best suited to doing that work and also enjoying doing that work.
00:16:58
Speaker
Definitely. Yeah. Which is where I suppose the whole sort of like business strategy, HR aspect of it, it also like blends and we've got to think about, you know, thinking, okay, this is where we are at the moment. This is where we want the organization to get to in five years. How do we actually move the organization from point A to point B within that timeframe?
00:17:24
Speaker
What resources do we need? And that, big variable in terms of resources the people what type of people are we going to need and how are we going to make them develop a little bit faster than the organization needs them to do so that they're not lagging behind and helping that growth what sort of strategies do you so they put into place to to try and achieve that yeah so the first thing i try to look at is
00:17:57
Speaker
You know, so much of the sales process and the growth process right now, a lot of it is just humans kind of figuring things out.
00:18:09
Speaker
And there there really isn't a right strategy because, as you mentioned, they've kind of fallen into the success. Maybe they had a few contracts work out.
00:18:22
Speaker
Maybe they've built their business over years. Um, but they don't really have a longterm strategy of, you know, they're, they're kind of resting on their laurels sometimes. And these are very, very bright owners, operators, CEOs, but they, they don't have a lens to compare it to.
00:18:44
Speaker
Um, that is a nice, thing about the consulting world is where most people run their business every single day, we help see, I've seen over 300 businesses now from top to bottom, all their financials, how their people operate, what's the systems in place.
00:19:03
Speaker
So I have a really good lens to actually see how things work and I can compare and contrast. And what I find is very very rarely are people truly truly dialed in what do you mean by dialed in yes great question like their operations is is well established they have kpis all being tracked they have a team whose entire job is to help automate some of the redundant parts of the the day-to-day and that they have a project management
00:19:41
Speaker
like internal structure built for the business to succeed. So it's like when you say that they aren't dialed in they've got a vision of how they want the organization to grow, but they haven't actually put in place the things that are going to enable the organization to grow. and including like when you talked about KPIs, ah key performance indicators, I suppose that's not just, oh, on the 1st of January, we are this size by the 31st of December will be size. It's like, what are you going to be at the end of January at the end of February? So you can track how you are progressing towards the target that you've set.
00:20:26
Speaker
And actually then you're building towards it. Definitely. It seems so straightforward and yet in many ways is also quite a big task to undertake that sort of target setting and setting in place those interim targets, those stepping stones to which you can then manage people's performance.
Role of Consultants and Data in Business
00:20:50
Speaker
Yeah, I try to tell my clients it's really hiring me isn't the we're not going to come up with something totally new that you've never heard of. that That's not what we do.
00:21:05
Speaker
and And I find it's never effective if you're trying something brand new. you don't have any case studies. It's really you know about doing the work day in and day out, about setting your targets and then reverse engineering that if you need to grow your business from $1 million to $2 million. dollars That means you need to make X number of phone calls a day.
00:21:32
Speaker
You have to spend X number of dollars a day. You have to be at this many conferences. What does that look like over a year? I've listened to some athletes talk about, and Michael Phelps specifically talks about this. if He knows within in the minute what's going to happen throughout his day. And when he was really at the top of his game,
00:21:55
Speaker
He was constantly preparing. So that's something that we need to say, OK, if you need to grow this amount, you need to make these many dials, which means you need to hit this percent.
00:22:07
Speaker
That turns into, quote unquote, luck. But it's really not. It's just staying on top of the numbers.
00:22:16
Speaker
Yeah. And understanding the numbers. Really ah understanding the numbers would actually mean knowing which numbers are important to understand as well. Which numbers do you need in order to understand how your business works and how it might work in the future and having those in some sort of straightforward dashboard that you can look at on a daily basis?
00:22:43
Speaker
Absolutely. It should all be going back to the CEO and then the CEO can then push and pull on different requests as they need to be occurring, because people are going to slack off, numbers are going to drop.
00:22:58
Speaker
We need to give that and empower that CEO to be able to push their team and give them specifics on what they're doing wrong.
00:23:09
Speaker
Yeah, and you're using data to help identify where a problem may exist. yes not to actually say this is the problem, but to say this is where the problem may exist and then enabling people to clarify, identify and create a remedy to the problem. So from an with my HR hat on, I'm thinking that means allowing people to create their own solution to the issue so that that can develop further.
00:23:42
Speaker
Yeah. Absolutely. Get them get them more engaged in the business. Absolutely. Yeah.
00:23:54
Speaker
So what is the well, what do you see as being the biggest problems that organizations face when they try to adopt this type of approach? So there's two problems.
00:24:09
Speaker
I think one of them is and So somewhat of my side, which is you have to convince them to stay on track. It's important work, but there's other constant battles that are happening inside the company.
00:24:28
Speaker
And so I think it's you really have to. And one of the reasons why when you do work at a McKinsey or a Bain, they are extremely focused on working with the CEO.
00:24:41
Speaker
if they can't work with the ceo it's very difficult to get other people on a team on board if you're working with the cfo they have financial obligations but they don't maybe have logistics operations or hr operations that they they care about as much so you really have to get this trust built and tell them this is this is exactly what you need. This is the protocols.
00:25:10
Speaker
We can improve them. But this is from day one to, say, day 90. This is our 90 day plan. What are we going to do here? How do we hit that number? That's the first part.
00:25:24
Speaker
The second part is actually on your side, which is the hiring. So if those numbers are going up and you are so increasing your sales, you need to start adding people at the right time. And that is something that doesn't scale so well.
00:25:43
Speaker
So working with someone professionally who can hire the right people and find you at the top two or three people that that's really powerful. And and that isn't, that's a ah tough part of my job is, you know, I can't solve the hiring side. That is something that the, the CEO and the hiring manager have to solve.
00:26:03
Speaker
Yes, there can be an element of luck in the hiring. The right person needs to be wanting to move when you need to or want to hire them. And just throwing silly money at people may get them to move, but it won't necessarily get them to stay or get them motivated to work in the way that you need them to work. They're just being monetarized to move.
Handling Employee Departures and Conclusion
00:26:30
Speaker
Yeah. and the same The same thing happens if there are employees that leave, especially critical employees. yes um How do you reset your targets without just setting them on fire? You need to really be practical.
00:26:47
Speaker
And so we do build a lot of redundancies in, but everyone knows what's what's written on paper isn't going to be perfect when someone at the top leaves.
00:26:58
Speaker
No, everything can change. But that's you know that's also an opportunity, I suppose. Definitely. Definitely. You know, Justin, it's been a great opportunity to today to learn more about the work that you do over in Boston, Massachusetts, and think about how it compares and complements the work that we're doing as HR professionals here in Boston, UK, as well. I've learned a lot.
00:27:25
Speaker
Thank you very much. i really appreciate your time today. It's been great. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director Abusida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Justin Abrams, the founder and CEO of Ario Consulting Group, based in Boston, Massachusetts, usa You can find out more information about both of us at abucida.co.uk and more information about Aereo at aereocg.com. There are links in the description.
00:28:00
Speaker
I'm sure that you will have enjoyed this episode of The Independent Minds as much as Justin and I have enjoyed making it. Please give it a like and download it so that you can listen anytime, anywhere.
00:28:10
Speaker
To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think.
00:28:21
Speaker
Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.