– Welcome everybody to today’s Building My Legacy podcast. I have with me today Sean Campbell. Sean Campbell is CEO of a company called Cascade Insights. He is fascinating because I think many people in this world of consulting, coaching services of all sorts, are looking at how do we really develop those services, scale it, and then once scaled, is it sellable? And Sean has figured that out for himself, and, has some very interesting perspectives on that. Sean is an author. He has talked at top tier conferences for fortune 50 companies, and other companies. He’s worked with IBM, Cincom, Cisco, and the list goes on. So his experience is wonderful, and really shows that he has some great insights that people value that he’s bringing to us today. He talks a lot about professional service firms and what do you really do with them to grow them, and to make them um, competitive, and then sellable. So Sean before we get too far into this, what have I not shared with the audience that they ought to know about you? And then we’ll get started.

– That was a fine intro. You know I, you know I’ve, I’ve really enjoyed owning services firms over my life. This is year 21 of that or 20, somewhere on the edge of that. And, I’ve just really enjoyed doing that. You know you gave a good summary. I… You know the other things are just the other personal notes. You know I’ve got two great boys who are teenagers. And so they play a lot of modern warfare and I try to keep up. I have a reasonable caddy ratio but it doesn’t hang with theirs. And, you know I’ve got a great wife, you know, she also works in, has worked in both businesses, mostly around like human resources and accounting and finance and that kind of stuff. And so, yeah. It’s been a great ride. So I’m very happy to be here.

– What got you started in consulting services to begin with?

– Well that’s a good question. I, I think I was probably always set up to do something fairly independent. And by that you know, from the first job I ever had outside of flipping fries at McDonald’s, I was, I was quickly turned into a waiter, which is a fairly independent job. You know, I mean in the realm of jobs, right? You walk into the place, you serve tables for eight hours and you kind of just, you make the money you can based of your own skill. And then I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. So I ended up basically um, going through my master’s program and I taught public speaking and interpersonal communications and that kind of stuff. Anyway, left that, ended up getting a job teaching, basically apps and desktop publishing and some networking tools. And at the time, and even now, there’s kind of an off-road from that where you can become an independent trainer. And so that was a very nice on-road to consulting. So I started basically… Broke away from full-time employment. And so… With a couple of other guys. We started a company called Three Weeks Solutions, where we went off and did independent training. And so we, we were basically doing training around Microsoft technology. So it wasn’t like our courses. We were training people on courses that another company had built, in the era when Microsoft was massively dominant and was using 97%. You know 97% of every computing device was running windows back then. And so, you know that was a great, great ride. And then that led to the foundation of a company with employees and the rest of that. So initially it was like a lot of people I think. You kind of figure out you can do things independently. You started out as an independent contractor. You find a couple initial engagements. And then there’s that moment though where you have to decide, are you going to stop there or are you going to move ahead and add employees? And there’s a huge chasm between the two. I honestly… That’s one of the biggest decision points I think anybody goes through with any business they own.

– And I think that’s where a lot of consultants get stuck Is in that .

– Agreed.

– So I wanna start by talking about the age of narrow. You talk about the age of narrow, what is it? And why is that important?

– Well, basically the age of narrow, and I started calling it this a few years ago, I, you know, maybe I should have trademarked it or something, whatever, but like I’m sure other people said the same thing. So it doesn’t, it doesn’t really matter in terms of… They might not have used that phrase. But the basic gist is, everywhere today, we all like narrow things. And I don’t mean narrow-minded thinking, we don’t need more of that, but there’s this idea that when I go home, if I’m into Sci-Fi, like I am, I wanna watch The Expanse and Star Trek Discovery. And I wanna go watch Interstellar movie which is more time traveled than just space but still, I can, I can watch what I wanna watch. And it’s the same thing with everything, like food choices, everything else. So there’s this age where we’re narrowing our choices into these like little private cues of things we want. And in a way that’s great, right? You know, so on the other hand, in the world of business though, that’s translating over it. There’s lots and lots of people who are like, “I need a firm that is incredibly narrowly scoped to what I want, and just what I want.” And so that’s something I coach a lot of business owners on is that they wanna leave the aperture really wide open. And that’s a phrase that was told to me by a vice-president at HP, who basically at my younger days, you know I’m 50 now, but in my younger days, I was out there talking to, you know, big tech clients trying to grow things. And I was doing the pitch about what we do. And this guy put his hand out which is never a good sign, and said, you know basically, “I know you’re trying to leave the aperture wide open.” And it was a great way to say, you’re trying to tell me you do all these things but I’m not gonna hire you for everything. I’m just not. And most small business owners, they kind of chase dollars more than are more focused on what they want. And so to tie this together, you have to decide early on, what’s the market you’re gonna serve. And that’s defined by the personas, the kind of types of individuals you wanna go after. That’s defined by the industries or segments that you wanna target. That’s defined by like the jobs to be done that you wanna serve. And that’s even most importantly defined by what you can actually excel at. And the trap I think most business owners fall into is the minute revenue blips. They’re willing to say, “Well I can do that too. And I can do that too. And I can do that too.” And eventually the problem is three years later, they try to market this thing they built. They try to grow it. And it’s just all over the place. And worse yet, they probably have some skeletons in the closet of projects they didn’t do well because it was one of those days where they said, “Oh I can do that too.” And it didn’t really go that well. So they’ve also hurt their reputation. And so this is a strategy that requires a little bit of patience, but there’s lots and lots of benefits to it we could talk about too. But like, but it does require some patience in the beginning. And to be honest, entrepreneurs are probably not known for being patient, like by definition. So this, this is a challenging thing to kind of put into somebody’s head .

– Wow, you know what? It is one of those difficult things. And I think of it as like going fishing. If you put your fishing net out for the entire ocean, first of all you’d never be able to pull all the fish in. And secondly, nobody in the world has that bigger net. And how many boats would you need to be able to drop the net continuously all over the world with all the oceans, right? But that’s what we continue to try and do all the time. And then wonder why we ended up with nothing. So I love that analogy of the age of narrow. So I wanna go a little bit further with that. And you talked about… So for me the age of narrow is what allows you to be able to market, and have sales that are really effective. So talk a little bit about that ’cause you talk about the juxtaposition of those two and how to really grow and develop that.

– Well, it’s a few things. I mean if you talk about benefits you get from the age of narrow, is that one, I would say the biggest one is lead generation. Because when, when buyers are out there looking for vendors, consulting firms, whatever it is, and I’m not a negative person, right? I mean, I’m part Irish. So maybe there’s a bit of negativity in there. I don’t really know. But I’ve got other, other things too that are happy people right? You know genetic profile wise. But, so I’m not necessarily a negative person but, but it’s important to note that I’ve come to believe that when buyers are searching, they’re searching for what you don’t do. You’re not actually searching for what you do because, because trust is so low these days, that you know there’s so, there’s so little trust available to people these days that when they search for vendors, they’re scanning your website looking for like, what is it you’re not good at? And most websites spend all this time talking about what you’re great at. Like in the technology industry I say they’re filled with IDIS. You know there’s reliability, scalability, security, maintainability. They say all these things but there’s no proof points behind them. They just basically say, we are the most secure. We are the most… We are the fastest. We are the easiest to manage right? And so I think buyers have been brutalized honestly, to the point that they are, they’re hunting for anyone who will just say, I don’t do this thing. And so the age of narrow forces you to say what you don’t do and then what happens? Immediately is you actually get many more leads in that area that you’re focused on. And on top of that, clearly that leads to better references, that leads to you know, increase size of engagement as you’re more trusted in the space. That leads to greater reputation, all of that stuff. So that lowers cost of customer acquisition, all these good things. But again, it goes back to a degree of patience and a degree of, of willing to kind of limit what you might do. And the last thing I’d say is consulting firm owners are probably the worst at this. You know in the sense that um, I always think of a phrase, Reagan said once. He said, “You know the most… The worst phrase in English language is I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” For those folks who don’t like that politically, we’re not gonna go political but Reagan used to say that. And I’d say one of the most dangerous things is, you could almost say, “I’m from a consulting firm and I’m here to help.” Because consulting firms will, will habitually, and I’ve even heard this like anecdotally from people, like some folks we’ve hired or different people over the years, who said like, “Yeah my old boss, his favorite phrase was, “You know we’ve got smart people. We can do anything.” And that’s frightening. You know, consulting needs to be about context. You have to have enough context to really actually help that person. I’ve come to believe over the years, that context triumphs everything. I mean at the end of the day, that’s what, that’s what people want. That’s what they pay for, and it, and mousetraps and frameworks, and I’ve got this templated course or whatever it is. I honestly think most people find those things fairly boring. What they really wanna do is they wanna talk to somebody who’s got context on their problem and that’s the biggest thing.

– So talk a little bit about that. What really is context to you, and how does that differ? ‘Cause I think many people think their framework is their context.

– Well, I think the problem is, I’ve seen historically like two broad types of consulting firms, right? I mean I’m sure there’s more. So but like the two broadest ones that I’ve ever seen are, they’re what we call the mouse trap firms. And they basically have this mouse trap they built. They built this framework, it’s their three step path to whatever, it’s their 10 step path to whatever. Those by definition are used by generalist firms almost always. They’re used because the framework is the thing that gives the buyer security that they will go through a good process. But what you find, because we’re, we’re… Part of our firms’ delivery is doing research services for companies. What we find when we do like win loss studies, and you know studies that say like, why did you not select this firm? Inevitably one of the biggest things is the firm lacked context. They didn’t understand the client’s business. So I hear people all the time that say like, “Oh, we have our framework, whatever. And I can go work with a gold mining company one day, in a pharmaceutical company the next day, and I can work with a technology company the next day.” But ask yourself really, whatever recommendation that is, how good is it if they don’t understand the person’s business? I mean at the end of the day, how good can it be? Right? And so you end up with recommendations that are fairly general, fairly unfocused. And I, and I think to a large extent, those things don’t serve those buyers really well. Now that’s not to say that occasionally there can be a framework or a methodology that is just lightening like in its appeal. You know, Clayton Christensen’s innovator’s dilemma. Michael Porter’s five forces. You know, I mean you’ve got, you’ve got business frameworks or rubrics that basically truly aluminate a problem. But those usually aren’t developed by an individual consulting firm. And so I think, I think that’s, that’s the problem I see is that, that the buyers in the end would rather have the context over the framework, almost any day.

– Okay. So what I’m hearing you say with context is really an understanding of industry and specific needs of businesses within that industry, because then you understand how the business performs and works. What their challenges and threats are really in terms of how they operate. So a consultant then, or consulting services really needs to hone in on where’s their expertise. If it’s healthcare it’s healthcare, but you’re not maybe doing oil and healthcare at the same time, perhaps. I mean is that what I’m hearing?

– Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And that doesn’t mean you can’t build out an oil and gas practice someday, but you better hire somebody who really knows oil and gas. And most founders, I mean, if they’re being honest with themselves, there’s only so many areas that they’re good at.

– Right.

– Right? And, and you’re gonna do better if you just focus in on those, as opposed to kind of going really broad with this kind of like world domination plan, you know that, that really doesn’t ever work. And, and honestly if I had a nickel of the number of people, ’cause I don’t know in 20 years how many people have come to me and said, “I’m going independent. I’m gonna be great.” 12 months later they’re back working for somebody. And that leaves aside that even as a consultant, you work for somebody. It’s probably a harder boss than your any boss you’ve ever had. But like that’s, that’s a separate point. We talk about that too. But I, but the reality is, most of the time they just, they didn’t pay attention to age of narrow. They drifted off their contacts. I mean, there’s another primary reason I watched guys fail in their first year, but that’s, that’s a separate, separate reason. But one of the biggest ones is this inability to make a commitment to a, a focus area.

– Okay. So I can’t read that. What’s the second one? My brain just wants to hold.

– Yeah. The second one is, like if you pair into the hood of any small business, and this conversation happens the same way all the time, you say to the person who owns it, “Hey, what’s your client base like?” Or however you ask that question, right? And they say, “Yeah, we’ve got lots of clients you know. We’ve got a few big ones.” For most businesses when they say few big ones, they mean like, there’s these two guys that 70% of our revenue comes from them. Oh my God if they go away we’re dead. Like they almost… It’s always there. And they always try to minimize it.

– Right.

– And it takes real real effort to say no to your biggest client when they’ve reached what, what initially feels like an arbitrary percentage of your revenue. I put a blog post out recently folks could go search, it’s called the answer is still no. And it was written because, somebody on my team, wanted us to go beyond X percentage of our total revenue with an account. And by the way this account is a fortune 25 I think. I mean it’s at least a fortune 50. So they, they were making a good case that this company could give us all kinds of money. And I said, “Look they’ll go away someday. They’ll disappear.” And so the second reason is, people start out, and they get a gig, and they go work with one account, and then they get a couple more gigs from that account and a couple more gigs. And before they know it, they’re telling the world that they own a business. What they really are is a subcontractor. That’s what they are. And so someday that, that business relationship dies. Not because they did bad work, because contracting rules changed or your primary stakeholder moved on to another country or retired, or who knows what. And because in those first couple of years, they didn’t spend time learning how to do business development, ’cause most consultants don’t know how to do that. I mean unless you’re a sales consultant, then that’s your job. Most consultants are incredibly bad at business development. They’re domain experts. They don’t know how to do business development. Nor do they know how to do marketing most of the time. And so that time when they should have been honing that skill, in the early days when they can make mistakes and people say, “Hey, I know you’re new.” You know? “New people say stupid things.” It’s fine. You know what I mean? They’re past all that. So now they’ve got a mature business. They can’t make those same stupid mistakes . Maybe they’ve hired people, and they’ve got these anchor accounts that are sucking up all their revenue, and one day they go away. And so like for example, we made the exact same mistake. Our first company was almost equivalent a 50 50 revenue split between Microsoft and Intel. And we rode that way for about six years. Now somebody listening might say, “Well it sounds like success to me.” And I’d be like it was terrifying. The whole time we thought at any moment, somebody could come in, on their contracting side and say you’re gone. And now I gotta go let a bunch of people go. And you see this in the agency world a lot. They lose an anchor account and they’re just like, “20 people were gone.” And so with this business, the second one we founded, after selling the first one, I just said that’s never gonna happen again. So we have very hard and fast percentages and they vary a little bit based on the size of an account. So an enterprise account might get a little more percentage of our revenue, versus the mid market, but it’s never approached the numbers we had before. And it’s, it’s much safer ’cause to put a bow on this, this same account that this individual was pushing me to give more to. Mere months later, completely shut down.

– Wow!

– It shut off. They had a vice president changed. The whole thing went, kabang! And it was difficult ’cause it also happened right at the time of COVID, talk about a fun double whammy to deal with. But because we weren’t so anchored on that one account, we actually didn’t lay off anybody during COVID. At all. Which is, which honestly is one of the greatest blessings this year. Honestly is that we were able to, to not lay anybody off. And some of that’s ’cause we’re aligned with TAC and that’s done better and things like that. But anyway, sorry that went a little long.

– No. But I think what’s really interesting is, as we look at social responsibility and um, how we work with our communities, which is becoming a discussion that people are having about companies, is that not part of their responsibility. And so one of the thoughts that is put out there is the companies that will survive and thrive in the future will be ones who embrace that concept and move forward with it. But that means tending to your employees as well. So burning and churning and just dismissing it, may not be such a good strategy down the road, if you wanna play. So I think your strategy is speaking to that point as well, in terms of what may be coming down the road. I wanna go also to another item that you speak about, and that is the importance of quiet culture and shaping people is more important than what you give to people. Because I think we have simplified human resources, our employees, our customers even, into things that we give them. We almost productize them. And so talk a little bit about that.

– Well I think, you know, one of the things I see, especially with the technology sector, which is what we were aligned with, right? So we work with folks like AWS and Microsoft, and you know you mentioned some of the folks in the beginning, right? If you really unpack what they do culture wise, certainly there’s some organic culture that grows up all of its own, but culture efforts seem to be what we give them. We give them a nice, bright, shiny office, right? Although companies aren’t doing that as much anymore, at least this year, right? You know we, we give them a huge benefits package. That’s part of culture, right? We take care of them that way. We, we give them you know, great coffee. We give them great cafeterias, we get… You know I mean, and no lie, some of these places, I, I mean this may seem strange to say but it’s true. I’ve had actually really good meals in company cafeterias. Now if you happen to work in one that doesn’t give you good meals, I don’t know. Maybe you just don’t work at a fortune 50. But some of these are actually decent meals. And so, I think it’s all about the gift giving becomes culture, right? How many events can we hold? How many activities can we hold? You know all that stuff. And at the end of the day, I don’t, I don’t think it’s really any of that. It’s that… For lack of a better phrase, they feel part of something and they feel taken care of. And that’s not really honestly, a lot about what you hand them, because I, I hate to say this, but it’s true. And I almost hesitate to say it because obviously employees listen to this too when I do this kind of thing. But it’s true. The minute you increase the benefit package within six months, at least one employee will have a reason for you to increase it again. You know the minute, the minute you do anything, build a better office within six months, somebody will want something more. But making people feel like, they’re able to achieve their career goals and be part of something, that’s great. And that’s honestly been our thing. I mean, at somewhat related point is that, we’re not really the company that writes like these vision documents that say, we’re gonna be 30 million in two years or whatever number you wanna pick. Those leave me cold. What we tend to do is, we go around the staff and say, what do you wanna build here? What do you wanna be a part of? You know what practice area do you wanna build? What’s something that you feel skill-wise you wanna learn and take on? And honestly, I mean, you know, but at least the subjective impression I get being CEO. I think they would rather have us do that all day long than give them a better 401K. Or, or give them free meals every day. I mean they’d take all those things, like who wouldn’t, but at the end of the day, I think people wanna grow and learn and achieve their goals. And if you can make that center to your culture more than just this crazy gift giving culture that you seem to see with most culture aspects and companies, I think companies would honestly be better off on a ton of levels.

– Our time goes very quickly Sean. So things we have missed that are important for our audience to hear about.

– Gosh, there’s so many things, you’re right. I was–

– If one of the things–

– No go ahead. Go ahead.

– I’ll come back to that. And you can, I’ll give you time to respond to that. But I want you to talk about apprenticing and the importance of that, rather than training, because I think we’re hearing right now, a tremendous amount of disillusionment meant over education. Come out of university and you’re, you’re really not capable of doing anything much, many times. And you have this huge debt, and people are, are feeling like they were sold a bill of goods, that there was never any intention to deliver on. And I have maintained over the years, that I could set up a free university online and guarantee everybody a job when they come out, by building in just what you’re talking about, apprenticeships. So people have skills when they come out. And… But talk a little bit about that if you would please.

– Yeah. Yeah. And it’s a fine one to end on. I mean just briefly other things I’m curious about that if people saw stuff we’ve written on the blog or other things I’ve done, or like I really believe strongly in that positioning is the foundation of everything. That’s a pretty big thing of mine. And you know, there’s some things I, I probably would’ve touched on marketing and things like that, but I, but if you, if you think about apprenticizing, this is something that’s interesting to me, just from a intellectual standpoint. You’ve got a guy one college professor, a guy who did training for a living. I would fly into cities and do five day events. I am incredibly pro-education. My you know, if you boil me down to one phrase, Sean loves to learn things and then tell other people what he learned. Like that’s basically, that’s basically been me since day one. But corporate culture unfortunately, and, and HR has turned, and leadership teams too. It’s not just that, honestly it mostly comes from them. Have made this like thing about onboarding and training this machine, you know, where it’s like attend this one day training, attend this half an hour training, attend this whatever. I started that way. I started to try to build training programs for my employees and you know, slide decks that we do this and you know, sit down and I’m gonna talk to you for four hours. I’ve come to realize it’s, it’s much better to just apprentice them. As the business leader, it takes, it’s like a marathon. It’s more strenuous for you over time. Because you, you don’t get to disengage from the employee. You might apprentice for a year. You actually though probably spend an equivalent amount of time that you would have tried to build a training program, and then deliver the training program and fund the training program. And at the end, you get much much better employees. Because, because there’s so many things that just… You can’t put in a box and say go learn. And so I’ve basically flipped to a model where, when I put somebody in a new role in the company, and they report to me, and it’s, it’s interesting. They’ll be like, well so where’s the training materials. Where’s this that, you know, what can I go read? I’m like, you’re just gonna work with me. And, and there, yes there are some things we’ve written down that are like here’s the best practice for this and the best practice for this. But mostly, I’m gonna observe and help apprentice you. And here’s one last thing, on this is that… And again, I say this with a little bit of reluctance ’cause employees listen too, I think to some degree, some millennials are resistant to apprenticizing. And here’s why. This is the culture that always got a trophy regardless of whether they even got a hit, right? This is what they are. That’s an objective fact. I coached little league baseball when my sons were here. I was dramatically different coaching that than when I played baseball. Like everybody got the same trophy it didn’t matter what they did, right? And all those kinds of things. And so apprenticizing a millennial is really interesting because very shortly they realize, you’re not gonna just give them the ability to do this on their own the same way, as if they’ve done a training class and they just went out and did it. And so there’s this inherent tension where you’re basically for lack of a better word, parenting them for a really long while. What I found though is that the end of that apprenticeship, and probably even before the end, they tend to really love it. Because they realize they’re getting a lot of personalized attention, but they don’t get that same early blip of blessing, like hey, here’s my training certificate. I can now go sell people. And so there’s this, this middle road of tension where the millennial is saying, “Why won’t you tell me I’m good enough to do this on my own?” And I’m like, “Cause apprenticeship takes a while. Be happy it’s not three years.” You know what I mean? I mean this isn’t a medieval guild, and you’re sitting here being an indentured servant for 10 years. You know you’re… This might be only three months or six months or whatever of apprenticizing. And so you just gotta work with that tension. I think we’re so quick to wanna award people with like completion certificates. And most things in life, 10,000 hours. People probably heard that phrase before. There’s no completion certificate for 10,000 hours for mastery. It just takes time. And so if business leaders allowed themselves to be more apprentices, like I mean to apprenticize people, I think their businesses would be better. Especially small consulting shops, for sure.

– You certainly have to think through your processes and a lot, because you’re, you’re having to, as you say teach them and show people how to do it. And, you know it’s the easiest thing you can do is to offload it to somebody and then wonder why it’s not working.

– Well, one quick point on that. That’s the other thing I noticed that’s interesting too, is that, this is endemic in small businesses. The business owner hires people, and then they quickly get to the point that they have middle managers of some kind, whatever you wanna call them. Shift supervisors, middle managers, whatever they are. And all the training goes to them. So every time a new employee comes on this like middle manager, who’s maybe been there a year or two, trains. And I’m not saying that’s like, that’s not the fault of the middle manager. I’m not pointing fingers at them, but ask yourself this, what is the most important thing you can do with a new employee? Apprentice them. And who’s the person in the best position to do that, but the principals or the owners of the company who’ve been around for so long? And, basically I think it’s a huge miss. Because owners will quickly say, well I’m building my business. You know, E-Myth revisited type stuff I’m working on my business, not in it. That’s all good stuff to say. But if you’re not apprenticizing your employees, especially the most junior ones, your business is just gonna teeter over and fail at some point. Because you’re kind of just having less experienced people, train less experienced people. And it kind of just kind of flows out that way. And so I think that’s a big mistake that I see a lot, ’cause when you brought up the point about, it takes time of the leaders, it does. But it’s a bit of one of those patience games where it actually builds great dividends in the end. You just have to force yourself to do it. And get it done.

– So many things come under that rubric. Got to do it. And you’ve got to figure out, how to put your arms around it so you can actually do it. Sean, thank you so much. It’s been wonderful to have you with us today on Building My Legacy podcast. I… You’ve had wonderful insights to share. So thank you so much.

– Glad to have been here. Thanks again for having me on.