Episode 102 - Losers are Winners: Chad Guillory's Secret to Failing Fast and Winning Bigger
Episode #102 | Losers are Winners | Chad Guillory's Secret to Failing Fast and Winning Bigger
What happens when two marketing minds start talking about failure? A surprisingly fun conversation about growth, trust, data, and why "measure, learn, change" beats chasing the perfect plan every time. Chad Guillory of CARD Companies shares hard-earned lessons from 30 years in sales and business development, proving that today's mistakes often become tomorrow's competitive advantage.
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Chad Guillory 00:04
I've got an adage I use with all my teams, which is MLC: measure, learn, change. So here are the new strategies. We're going to start implementing these. How do we measure? If we can't measure it, we're just guessing. And I think your podcast here, "Losers or Winners, right, is about that learning part. It's not just about the losing. Losing creates all the the advances, right?
Mark D. Williams 00:32
Today on the Curse Builder podcast, we had Chad Gellery on, and we talk all about failing fast. You're going to love this. You got two marketing minds going back and forth with different analogies on how to fail fast and how to be nimble as a smaller company. Without further ado, here's Chad. Welcome to Curious Bitter Podcast. I'm Mark Williams, your host. Today we're back in studio. We've got Chad Guillory. Welcome to the studio, Chad. Thank you, thank you. Glad to be here. All right, straight up from Burnsville. Why don't you tell the audience your company name, what you do for them, a little the 411 and then we'll get straight to some great loser stories. All right,
Chad Guillory 01:03
411 So I work for card companies. The card companies actually stands for can do attitude. It's kind of our four values, right? Can do attitude, attention to detail, respect syndrome. So card. Actually, when I interviewed for the company, when I saw the posting. It was just about how would you? How would you like to get out of corporate bureaucracy? Hard companies. I went. All right, that sounds interesting. I'm definitely looking to get out of corporate bureaucracy. So, got into this role. So the role is, we're kind of a management company for four big construction companies. So I lead growth and partnerships for an asphalt company, a couple concrete companies, and a concrete raising leveling company.
Mark D. Williams 01:46
I like it. I like it. I mean, that's actually kind of interesting. So, is one from a one parent company that owns all four, or they basically basically contract you to do business development for all four separate companies?
Chad Guillory 01:56
Today, the way it's set up is it's owned by one gentleman, and he is part owner of all four companies, so the four companies had their own ownerships and their own presidents, run by one of the owners that has this management company that does all the HR. Oh, that's kind of fascinating, actually. Sales and growth, yeah.
Mark D. Williams 02:13
Man, I'd actually like to bring him on to talk about how that all evolved. But today's podcast is not about that. Today's our Thursdays, losers or winners. So, how long have you been at the company?
Chad Guillory 02:22
I'm new to the industry.
Mark D. Williams 02:23
Okay,
Chad Guillory 02:23
I've got 30 years of sales and marketing business development, but I've been with this company for about eight months.
Mark D. Williams 02:28
Okay.
Chad Guillory 02:29
Yeah.
Mark D. Williams 02:29
Well, you probably don't have as many deep stories there, but I guess what have you got? What the whole premise of it, which we've talked about a little bit beforehand, is just you know what we learn way more from our scars, from our mistakes, from the times we fall down. Right. Yeah. So why don't you give us one from your previous 30 years of sales and marketing? I'm sure you have more than one, but what are some ones that stand out of you know major growth? What are some things that happened? You're like, oh man, at the time you're like that was either boneheaded or stupid or something that just really went wrong. But then you learn from it in a way that really catapulted you either in your career or the company that you're working with.
Chad Guillory 03:03
Yeah, I've got a couple actually from my current role, but I think I can jump back. Oh,
Mark D. Williams 03:08
either one is fine.
Chad Guillory 03:08
Yeah, I think coming into this role there was a some hiccups in my my journey. I think I start we're seasonal, right? Asphalt laid when it's hot, so it's kind of Easterish through Halloween, right? Same with some of our concrete work, mostly our asphalt work. So I got hired to help us grow. We've been on a growth trajectory for. I mean, it's a 50-year-old company today. This week, we just celebrated our 50-year
Mark D. Williams 03:33
crash. That's a big deal.
Chad Guillory 03:34
Parade down in Belle Plain. Yeah, it's a big deal. It's a lot of history, a lot of awesome successes and failures. I think throughout the company, when I came on board, you know, I came from kind of big businesses, typically, right? Multi-billion-dollar, leading significant growth, and they're like, "This is the kind of guy we need to come in here and teach structure and teach sales, right? And help lead the marketing department. And I'm like, "I'm all about it. So for like, I think one of my first failures was, you know, I spent my first 90 days, kind of my onboarding, building these big strategic plans, right? My analysis, my insights, diving into it and figuring out like where do we grow. I think back to some of the models I built. Thinking back to, you know, I went to grad school here at the U, and one of the models I learned was the Answer model, right? Which is everybody familiar with the four box, right? That has customers and markets, and then current, existing, and new. So, what are your current products, and what are your current customers or markets? So, where do we take asphalt and concrete, our current product, into more of our current market, right? Who are we with today? We do a lot of national builders, some custom builders, and also some private retail homes. So, I built all this out and did all the analysis I could figure out with the data that was available, and checked in along the way, right? But my 90-day outlook. What was like this awesome, in my opinion, strategic plan for 2026 and 2027 and basically the feedback I got at the end was great. So how's it going? Are we on? Is it being executed? I'm like, no, this is like the plan, man. So I think a failure there is kind of me thinking through how to engage with an internal customer, right? Oftentimes, I'm focused so heavily on how do we grow externally that you kind of miss that a little bit of alignment on the internal side, meeting people where they're at, making some assumptions I think along the way, which were inaccurate.
Mark D. Williams 05:39
I just said recently, you know, there's that old adage of the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. And I was thinking, like, okay, if you have a 10 mile an hour wind, the apple can fall what five feet away from that first tree. Like, and I was relaying it to someone else about my clients. Like, I can only push a client so far, maybe five feet, 10 feet, 15 feet away from sort of their tree of decision. I can't move their decision 50 feet, like a mile. That's too much. And so I think about you know clients, and I I think about where we. So you mentioned existing clients. One thing that I think you guys have a huge advantage over us as being you're largely B 2b I would imagine, correct? Yeah. Is that as my business grows, so does yours. Yeah, and so also the opposite is true too. If I shrink, you shrink too. But you have repeat clients. If I'm building a custom home for somebody, which is my primary business, my cost of acquiring a single client it's very long and very expensive, and I only have the client one time. It's very rare you build a high-end custom home more than once for a family. Maybe you get to their kids someday. Maybe most likely it's a referral, something like that. And so, really, it dawned on me a couple of years ago, and I don't spend honestly enough time thinking about it right now. This conversation is making me think of I need to do a better job of it. Once you get the sale, our team needs to do a better job, and I don't love the word upselling because people have a negative connotation in it. But here's what we can do: we can sell deeper into the project with value adds. That just sounds nicer, right? Because no one wants to be upsold. But like you go into a base model of a car or any a national builder, I think they outsell us 1000 to 110, 1000 to one, right? You start off at the base here, and you go in. So even hearing you say that, we recently did this really cool concrete driveway at our Misahu's project, and the cost of the concrete was double normal concrete. And I don't even know what coating we picked-some sort of acid reveal wash, whatever, whatever-but it was super cool. I'm like, I love the way that looks, and you would know exactly what is if I can remember. But the point was, is now granted, I was leading it because I was from the design standpoint. But they took the same $9,000 driveway. It is now $18,000 Same amount of concrete. They took them longer, and they made. I don't know. I'm sure their margin increased as well. But you can do more, either more volume or at least higher margin with the same amount of clients, and so I'd be curious from your standpoint, what percentage of your sales is just increasing capacity, increasing new clients versus just going deeper with the ones you already have?
Chad Guillory 08:10
That's a great question. There's two ways to grow, right? Net new customers going out and getting more custom builders on our side, right, or some more national builders are upselling, right? Existing customers. or decreasing
Mark D. Williams 08:23
cost,
Chad Guillory 08:24
or decreasing cost. You can grow through your margin area. Yeah, you can definitely do that. But net total growth is your business. Yeah, I'd say so. For us, we have a couple of our companies are heavily focused on national builders. So that's a long-term relationship game, right? Where they know your pricing because every year it's just coming up or down a little bit. So on the private side, those are new customers every day. So when you think about the customer cycle and earning trust, it's very difficult for my advisors to go out and build trust in one meeting, right? So it's a different game. So I'd say about a couple of our companies, 80 to 90% are national builders. So that's you're trying to earn through growing new communities every year, or you know just taking some price up. But it's very handy, right? Raises in margins, right? On our retail side, a couple of our companies have heavily invested in going out and getting new customers every day. Right? We get tons of leads every day. You know, that's not a that's not a challenge for us. Every company I've been in the last 30 years, even when I was consulting, is how do you get new customers? Help us get new customers for us on that side. Not a problem. It's a rare, you know, challenge for me because now it's about how do I close more? How do I, you know, build a sales team and a marketing team that gets the right customer? Like, what's our ideal customer? Right. If you think about it, at the core of what we're trying to get done. Who's our ideal customer profile? Even within the national builder side, right? Some of our builders love working with us. They're easy to talk to. One, we have a I have a biweekly meeting with every week, big national builder. Another one, good luck getting them on the phone, right? So it's a challenge. So in those worlds, it's like, how do I earn the right to advance with what we're trying to get done? Our strategies and meet them where they're at to to help them grow the way they want to grow.
Mark D. Williams 10:28
What are some other? I was just thinking about even you coming on. Have you ever had a story where I was just thinking about you know poured concrete and someone walks across it or like you know cats or dogs or I mean, I'm just thinking of like some epic fail stories of like things have just gone terribly wrong. A, what you learn from it, part of it is just the humor side. I mean, I think of like I've seen how hard our concrete crews work to form it up. It does. It's not as simple as people would like you to think it is. A lot can go wrong, and the guys work so hard, you know, making and especially with hot, it's humid. I mean, there's just you have a short window of time and a lot of jobs, and you're basically just shoving it down the straw. But what are what are some examples of some things that have gone you know pretty wrong?
Chad Guillory 11:11
I think some of the things that have gone wrong are as you build out from the center of the Twin Cities, right, which is where it's going now, right? You have to be out in Waconia or Buffalo. We got projects right now in in Rochester, right? Because that's where the land is. That's the undeveloped land, and when the land is undeveloped, there's a lot of stuff you don't know about it. And it starts to when you get done with the project, settling happens, right? So, big part of what our business is today is repair. So, how do you go back in and repair what has settled? What has broken? It may or may not have been anything to do with us. So I think the big fails there are along the builder side, like trying to figure out how do we influence and help them educate them on, you know, how to do things better. So for example, I know one one year about four years ago, I think we mats out underneath the asphalt driveways to help keep the the asphalt from settling, and what we learn is it does create a nice barrier, and it keeps some. But the clay and stuff will still come up through it and affect the asphalt.
Mark D. Williams 12:15
So let me understand. Yes. So you'll have a mat that you'll put out. What's it made out of?
Chad Guillory 12:19
I'm not even sure. Okay, it's like a rubber porous. Okay, slightly porous mat.
Mark D. Williams 12:23
Yep, and you'll put that on over your class five or whatever. Yeah, and then, but it doesn't matter. The clay will still modify the top just through time. Yeah,
Chad Guillory 12:32
and if it's a clay area, it's good for us to know that and help partner with the builders and help them understand. Like, here's we've tried this; it hasn't worked, right? It's an extra cost. It doesn't really add value, so let's do another six inches of class five. Or you know, there's different ways we can help them with degrading to make sure the water is moved away from the trouble points. That's not only from. I mean,
Mark D. Williams 12:57
I'm sure builders across the United States can relate to this, but I think of asphalt over time. I mean, concrete does too. I mean, my joke with concrete is only does two two things, right? It gets hard into cracks. That's kind of the concrete. Is that still a joke? Yeah,
Chad Guillory 13:09
absolutely. And so
Mark D. Williams 13:10
it's like the wire mesh and all that stuff. But I had heard something recently about longevity. You know, in Minnesota, there's the joke that there's two seasons, right? There's winter and road construction. But if you go up to Canada, like the Trans Canadian Highway, someone had mentioned that there's 12 feet of base, and they don't replace those roads on a regular basis. Okay, and this is commercial. I don't know if you guys do commercial work. Do you have any idea, like what, like on 494, they rip it up? Any idea how far down they'll go with like class five gravel.
Chad Guillory 13:42
I don't know that. I know it's. I know with unlimited re asphalt, some of those sections it's it's a foot, right? It's multiple. Yeah, it's multiple stages too. Yeah, like lifts. You mean? Yeah, multiple lifts. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark D. Williams 13:54
Because I know, like in a development, I've done a few small developments, like I called the sack. You know, let's call it quarter mile, half mile, whatever. And typically, you'll lay in if you have you have concrete curbs or whatnot, or if you don't have curbs, it doesn't matter. You'll put in a two inch lift or four inch lift or whatever it is, and then you wait a year and it moves heavy construction traffic. It's moving that first year. It's just nice, and then you do the final lift at the end, and all that settling has really obviously already transpired as help is great. But I was thinking more on the commercial side. Like that is crazy, and and it came up in a conversation today that value is a function. Oh, what cost is too is a function of time, and so if you are willing to spend more money in the front end, but get let's say a normal asphalt driveway should last how many years?
Chad Guillory 14:40
So that's an interesting point you're making. You know, the front and back, and on the builder side, you know, we put in driveways that are compressed down to two inches. Okay, that's two years, 20 year driveway. A
Mark D. Williams 14:51
20 year driveway, two inches.
Chad Guillory 14:52
So now we work with now that they've been built, they become HOAs. So now we're out on the HOA side, and I've got a division of people work. On HOAs, so now what are you putting out there? You're putting in three and a half compressed on the three. Now it's a 30-year driveway, right? So we're looking for HOAs at around that 20-year mark because we know that that's all starting to fail.
Mark D. Williams 15:20
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Chad Guillory 16:35
Around that, I'm not exactly sure. We don't do a lot of concrete driveways now. We've got a big project in Rochester. In Rochester, the market is heavily concrete, right? They're not a big asphalt driveway region.
Mark D. Williams 16:49
I mean, mostly I would say this for us. I've noticed that once the home goes above two and a half, 3 million, it's almost always concrete. Always concrete. Yeah, and so for early on in my career, everything was asphalt. It's yeah. I think oddly enough, I think the cost of asphalt and the cost of concrete have come closer and closer together over the last couple of years. Yeah, it really
Chad Guillory 17:09
has. And you know, it's still more expensive to do concrete. It does last a little longer, but there's also when it cracks, it's it's very hard to repair or get into that. Salt affects it in Minnesota. We do a lot of salting, right? And this market is completely different than when you go even a couple states south. Yeah, so it's really up to the homeowner what kind of drywall they want. But yeah, on the higher end homes, perception is concrete is better. Yeah,
Mark D. Williams 17:37
interesting. What as you look at more maybe from a system standpoint, you alluded to a little bit before about you know designing your plan. What are you know? There's that common adage of you know I think Eisenhower had a great quote, which was I have found planning indispensable, but no plan. You basically can't marry the plan. Like you should plan, but be able to pivot from the plan. Do you have any? Honestly, your first 90 days is kind of probably example of that, where you spent all this time designing the plan, and then your bosses are like, "And what have we done so far? And you're like, "I don't know. I just created the plan. It's got to take some time. How do you marry the long-term marketing plan with also not that you need instantaneous results, but like you're sort of building it a little bit on the fly. It's not like you can just time out, do no sales for 90 days. Yes, good
Chad Guillory 18:23
question.
Mark D. Williams 18:24
How do you transition, especially leadership? I mean, you essentially had a leadership role where you came in that hired you for your abilities to change. But like, it takes a while not only to affect the culture, let's say a couple of years potentially, but also the strategy has to change. And how do you not alienate your people that are sort of married to the previous either design or you know what I'm saying. This it's a the handoff is important.
Chad Guillory 18:44
That's an interesting question. I think for me the my first motivation always is mindset. How do I get my new teams to have the same mindset, the growth mindset that I've got? And I've got an adage I use with all my teams, which is MLC: measure, learn, change. So here are the new strategies. We're going to start implementing these. How do we measure them? If we can't measure it, we're just guessing, right? And I think your podcast here, losers or winners, right, is about that learning part. Right? It's not just about the losing. Losing creates all the the advances, right? But it's learning from those losses. So measure it, learn, and then change. So if we have the mindset that we're going to start measuring everything, why do we need to put all this stuff into HubSpot? If I can't measure the close rate or how many deals we've got in different stages, it's hard for me to manage where we put resources to improve, right? And if we're not learning from the data, right, what's driving? I'll give you an example of failure right off the bat. So early days, right when I first started, you know, my guys were off ice fishing for you know four months as we do when it's off season. And one of the key insights I thought I had was when we meet with homeowners. Our close rates way higher, and it made sense to me. Like a guy came to look at my air conditioner the other day, and he gave me a quote in person, and I'm like, "Yeah, do it. Just yeah, I'm not going to go. I don't have time to right. But that's a different persona. That's me, right? Get some markets, people are like that. Some people are very cost conscious.
Mark D. Williams 20:18
That being said, salespeople are the easiest people in the world to sell to, exactly. I would imagine that you and I. My cousin is an engineer, and he laughs all the time. He's like, if just speaking to us as a stereotype, he's like, if you wrap it in something shiny, give it to you fast, you'll buy it. I know you will. And I'm guessing you're the same thing. It's like, I want my time back. How fast can I make this problem go away? Yeah, yeah. It was,
Chad Guillory 20:40
it was like I. But you know what it is? It's trust. When I listen to the person talk about it, and I can I'm listening for what I know to be what I look for when in in sales leaders. Right, is I'm I trust them. I ask them a couple pointed questions, and if they got good, honest answers, done deal. I'm not looking to go find a better mousetrap, right? So I went and I'm like, so guys, you know, they come back from their break and it's like, here's all the I'm the new guy. Here's kind of our new go-to-market. We're taking a guy and putting him over on HOAs, and we're gonna have you guys doing these different things. And I want your 10 estimates a day, whatever it is, right? To be face to face, and then we're going to do less because it can take way more time. But
Mark D. Williams 21:27
your close rate goes way through. Exactly goes up. Out of curiosity, what is the difference? Sounds like you've measured it. Yeah,
Chad Guillory 21:32
it's it's in theory about 25 points higher, which is massive. Okay, reality is my fail took up way more time than anticipated because we didn't have the systems to really back it up. Homeowners didn't really want to talk to us, right? Because they're-it's a little different than my air conditioner's broken, right? I got a 30-year driveway potentially. I can wait another year or two. I'm going to shop, right? So how do we build that trust and earn that right to to advance with them quicker? They didn't really want to talk. Most of the people, most homeowners, don't want to. They they want to go shop. They want to say, okay, it's an $8,000 driveway. I'm going to go see if I get it for something. So when we go spend that time with them, it really wasn't moving the needle, and it broke down our system, right? We we were growing at a very low rate, and we're used to growing at a high rate. And with me on board, it should be even higher. So I'm like, oh God, here we go. So what we did is, I said, listen, guys, we got to go back to the old way, but we're going to capture data better, right? So I need to understand the data because this isn't working, and in theory, it should work, right? So how do you measure learn change? So now we're bringing in some new tools into our HubSpot, which can capture when we ask a homeowner how do you want us to come out and give you your estimate and talk you through it? It's either phone, text, or email, right? So now we're like, but I can't measure that. If my guys are texting people back and forth, I can't tell what's going on, what they're saying, what their objections are. How do we respond to those objections? So now we've got a tool that comes into our HubSpot that captures all that data, every text message back and forth, with an AI tool that can help analyze it. So now it's like let's go back to the old way. Now let me capture data differently and make different choices based on the new data I'm getting because the old data wasn't working. So big fail, changing, implementing new technology to start solving to still solve that need of I want to grow our close rate, but it's not all about going and engaging a customer on the spot.
Mark D. Williams 23:40
How do you, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but how do you take something that's considered a commodity, and especially if you're going national, so stereotypes of price. I mean, it's always like, how do I understand from my standpoint? I build high-end luxury, and so like it's relationship all day long. And I think most people would say that. How do you, when you're going to the national builders or the national accounts. How do you become not just a number? How do you, you know what I mean? I mean, hey, this guy will do it for 8100 This guy will do it for 8300 That's a $2 swing. Hey, he might love you, but on 10,000 driveways, that's a lot of money. How do you handle that?
Chad Guillory 24:16
We struggle with it every day. I've led back in the day. I was leading big brands, right? Big national brands, and you can get commoditized, right? And a lot of big companies like Kraft and Conagra, those guys, they don't deal with tier two brands. They just have the leading brand because the leading brand you can drive the price value, right? So the way I talk about it with my teams is kind of the the triangle. You know, I learned back in the day of sales, right? It's focus on the customer, right? Listen to them, not sell to them. Focus on the customer, right? Persuade through involvement, especially on the builder side. How do I involve myself with where the builders are at today? So housing first. I mean, part of that. Right, I'm sponsoring golf holes at their golf events. I'm getting engaged. I'm focusing on building that relationship, and then the last one's earn the right to advance. Right, if we are just talking, I'm not earning the right to advance. I got to build that trust. So, how do you separate yourself from a commodity to that value? And you have to do those three things, otherwise, literally, where I came in from, right? It's like we're sending them a quote. We haven't; they don't know anything about us. They're looking at 8006 1000. They're like, "I'm going 6000. They don't know anything. So there's lots of facets to how do we actually show our value because it's a value game, right? And that's built on relationships. And we talked about earlier. How do I build a relationship with you, Mark? If I'm just meeting you for the first time and I'm talking about my driveway, right? It's you've got 10 minutes. National builders different. I can earn the right to advance and focus on their priorities differently. So it's a challenge for me. It's training the guys, right? It's a lot of sales training, like objection responses. When you hear this objection, like okay, now we're just going to go shop this. What's your response? Right, training them on talking through with the customer how to solve their pain points. Oh, we're going to get some more quotes. Great, it's smart to get more quotes. Right, you're not going to find us to be the cheapest quote, but why we've got a 4.99 star review and we've been in business for 50 years, right? Is because we have seven man crews versus three man crews, and we attention to detail, and you're gonna get a 30 year drive with it. Things like that.
Mark D. Williams 26:34
I love what you said. I think you're reframing the question lately. I was having I was talking to a real estate agent this morning on our spec home, and someone else planted the seed. Like all people in sales and marketing, you know, a seed is planted in a book we read and a conversation we have, and before you know it, we're figuring out ways to sort of modernize it into our own business. But for me, it was I really dislike the price per square foot. I get why people ask it; they do it, and I'm sure they do it for asphalt and concrete because it makes sense. It's a, you know, it's a driveway. It's a square. It's a rectangle. It's area length and width. Here we go. What's the square foot? So I get why they do it. And there's some that does not tell me anything about the relationship. That doesn't tell me anything about your seven person crew. None of those things. And I have a feeling you're going to take this line because I took it and now I love it. But for home building, it's not price per square foot. Someone said it's precision per foot or performance per foot. I like that. And it's just it's just but also you're doing is reframing the value proposition of it and just planting a different key. Even sometimes builders will. I've not tried this, but people tend to remember the first number you tell them. If you give them a range, if I told you asphalt driveway was between I don't even know what they are anymore, but let's just say it was between seven and $12 a foot, the client's going to leave from there. And what number do they going to remember? Seven. They're not going to remember the 12. And so, like in a high-end custom home, let's just say you told someone, "Hey, we're going to build anywhere from 500 to 800 bucks a foot, or 500 to 1000 doesn't matter. They remember 500 and the builder will tell their team, "Hey, I just told this client 500 to 1000 They remember 1000 so the salesperson remembers the high number, and the client remembers the low number, and now you have this big gap, which is a real problem at at some future point. And so someone had suggested flipping the narrative, rather than saying five to seven, which we normal go a you know a to z or one to 100 Flip it. Say hey, you know what? We're 1000 to 500 bucks a foot.
Chad Guillory 28:32
Yeah,
Mark D. Williams 28:32
it's going to kind of make their brain pause a little bit. I don't. I've not tried it enough to ask people if they would remember the 1000, but it kind of. I think the whole point of the whole exercise is just get people to actually listen a little more acutely to what you're saying, and again reiterate: we always want to go back to value, and I want to find a value match. It's okay if we aren't a good fit, but wouldn't you rather know that today than down the road?
Chad Guillory 28:58
Yeah, man, I was in a company a few years ago, where my job was to disqualify.
Mark D. Williams 29:03
Oh, tell me about that.
Chad Guillory 29:05
I was like, after I started that, that's what they told me. I'm like, okay, I'm the growth guy. I'm out here disqualifying customers, but it worked because it was all about core values aligned with ideal client profile, the ICP, right? And we know. Are you familiar with EOS? Yes. Okay, I heard a couple of your podcasts and a couple other people mentioned it. Yeah. Nobody said EOS, but I kind of heard indicators and
Mark D. Williams 29:30
quarterly
Chad Guillory 29:30
rocks. I'm like, okay, so we're an EOS house. Yeah. This was also right, and we knew that the ideal customer profile for us ran on EOS, okay. So there's 220,000 companies in the U.S. right now that run on EOS, and we were a kind of a B 2b professional services company, right? So we're talking companies like you help you grow, and built basically I built a scorecard that said, what are the most important things that we know. Is a good customer for us, right? Someone who's got money, right? Companies want to grow, but they don't have money. Somebody who's failed at marketing leadership. We were a fractional CMO firm, so we put fractional CMO in place to help you drive your two to four year growth strategies. Build it up because they've got 35 years of building that over 50 other companies. Entrepreneurial built a scorecard. Now, when they reached out to us, a lot of times it's referral. My job was to send thank you, send them a link and say, please fill us out before we have our discovery meeting. I'd have nine questions on there, and each one of those would be ranked. And if they didn't score a 80% I would say, hey, this isn't going to be a good fit for us, and disqualify because we've learned over time that if you don't run in the U.S. if you don't have money, if you're not founder-led, sales-driven, da da da, right? It's not going to be a good fit for us. If it's not a good fit for us, why are we going to spend all this time to try and figure it out?
Mark D. Williams 30:55
Well, and I was-I mean, I love everything you just said, and this, but we've already done a half hour, right? No, no, no. It's not your fault. It's mine. It's like I keep asking questions because you know when you get two salespeople in the room, like you know you're speaking the same language and you like where it's going. I, I was listening to the. I don't know if you ever listened to the Founders podcast. No, he reads books about famous entrepreneurs and they just talk about their key takeaways, right? Like the Warren Buffett's the Steve Jobs. But one of the ones that you were talking about the disqualifier, Steve Jobs when he came back into the company after he had been let go and then came back to revitalize Apple. I think they had like now I'm blank on the number, but let's just call it. They had like 110 different offerings. Yeah, he narrowed it down to like four or five, and he said just paired them all away. All this other stuff is just drag. What are the what are we the best in the world at? And then they led with design, and then that's where you got the iPhone, the iPod, the iPad. All these things came out of that. The iMac, and it was just less is more. And I think the hard part is, especially the entrepreneurial spirit, you know, more is more. And so you just keep on adding and adding. It takes way more discipline to pare it away and to get rid of it. And I think most companies over time have to go through this evolutionary cycle where you get too fat, then you have to shed, and then they get lean and they get fat, and it kind of is like, I mean, honestly, I didn't think about it right now. It's a little bit like a, you know, it's like the seasonal pattern of being a Minnesotan, right? Usually, get a little bit fluffy over the winter. You're not as outside. You're not outside as much. And then in the summertime, you know, you get a little bit leaner. You're outside. You're working in the yard. You're mowing. You're doing sports or whatever. And so you kind of go. But businesses follow that same kind of trajectory, and you need people on your team that are sort of analyzing what do we need to say no to because it's kind of easy to say yes to everything.
Chad Guillory 32:27
Yeah, and those are the ones that fail, right? You got to have hyper focus, and that's very hard when you have all these growth strategies, like the things I came up with when I first started. Yeah, I think the point you made is around what do you what did you learn, right? These are failures. What did you learn? You know, I think I used to, I used to think my job was to have the answers. Today, I think it's to learn faster than my competitors.
Mark D. Williams 32:52
Oh, I like that.
Chad Guillory 32:53
Yeah, I mean, it really is right. Like, if I'm out there and I'm doing the things I need to do to get the measure, learn, change, right? Get all that data, learn from it, be adaptable and change quicker than my competition. That's the real value.
Mark D. Williams 33:06
I heard a great quote, which is "failure is great, but like basically fail fast.
Chad Guillory 33:11
Fail fast.
Mark D. Williams 33:12
That was the key thing because that you're really talking about your metric, your MLC. How fast can I measure it, learn it, and then hey, that didn't work. Okay, quick. And I think Adam, honestly, I think how many total employees are you?
Chad Guillory 33:22
We have about 300
Mark D. Williams 33:23
I mean, that's actually pretty big. But compared, I mean, I think there's always bigger tiers. Like I, I run with some guys that like United Health Group. I mean, there are hundreds of 1000s of people, right? Like for them, I mean, they are the USS Titanic or whatever the initials were on that detect to move that thing. And like, I'm a scrappy little zodiac boat, like you know. So there is some huge advantages to being a small business, and so there's some disadvantages too. Really rough seas, the zodiacs go down.
Chad Guillory 33:50
I'll tell you, I came from multi-billion-dollar companies, right? And the bureaucracy slows everything down. Now, but you come to a small company like this, you don't have all the resources in the world, but I can move at the speed of Chad. Like however fast I can go and think and motivate my team and organize them to win, we can move. There's no hold to bar, which I love. And fail fast, fail cheap. I'm a huge fan of it. Right? Like when you're leading growth for 30 years, that's your job. In my that's in my opinion. That's why I tell my leaders, my job is to go out there and fail. So we learn what we got to do to do it better next time. Then we take that winning. You go down that direction. You keep pushing. If you're not driving and pushing and failing, failing fast. If it takes you a year to fail, look at all the resources you just you got to fail fast, fail cheap.
Mark D. Williams 34:38
I love it. I appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on the podcast today. We'll have your company in the show notes. If anyone wants to reach out here locally in Minnesota, what's the best place to reach out to you guys?
Chad Guillory 34:46
Go to my website. Go to our website. There's jw asphalt. com. That's probably a good place to start and get a hold of the rest of the companies that way.
Mark D. Williams 34:55
Perfect. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for the supporting the industry and for all those tuning in. Please. Share this episode with someone that might find some value from it, and don't forget to fail fast. Yeah. Till next time, Curious Builder over and out. Hmm. Thanks for tuning in to Curious Builder podcast. If you like this episode, do us a favor: share it with three other business owners. The best way that we can spread what we're doing is by word of mouth, and with your help, we can continue to help other curious builders expand their business. Please share it with your friends, like and review online, and thanks again for tuning in.
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