[00:00:00] Bill Flynn: We were the hero
[00:00:01] most of our lives,
[00:00:01] and decades have gone by
[00:00:03] where we’re rewarded
[00:00:04] and recognized for that.
[00:00:05] Pol Cousineau: and I’m sure
[00:00:06] a lot of people
[00:00:07] listening are like,
[00:00:07] “Ah, this sounds
[00:00:08] all too familiar.”
[00:00:10] Bill Flynn: the question
[00:00:10] you should be asking is:
[00:00:11] why did this decision reach me?
[00:00:14] Pol Cousineau: Okay, we lost 700 bucks,
[00:00:16] but I didn’t have to
[00:00:17] get bothered by that.
[00:00:18] Bill Flynn: how do you fire
[00:00:19] yourself from the day-to-day?
[00:00:20] How do you protect
[00:00:20] your decision capital?
[00:00:22] Pol Cousineau: I notice when
[00:00:22] there’s too many decisions,
[00:00:23] even if they’re not that hard,
[00:00:24] it creates a lot of anxiety,
[00:00:27] stress, and pressure
[00:00:28] just by the sheer
[00:00:29] volume of them.
[00:00:30]
[00:00:37] Pol Cousineau: Welcome to Mind of All Trades, the podcast where edupreneurs turn knowledge into impact. I’m your host, Pol Cousineau, and on this show, we look at the craft and commerce of educational businesses. So that means strategy, it means systems, it means the founder side of the business, and it also means the implementer side, where the ideas actually have to turn into something repeatable.
[00:01:01] Before we get into today’s episode, make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes. We’ll be sharing practical guides, conversations, and ideas for edupreneurs who are building courses, memberships, communities, and expert-led businesses. And if you want more support beyond the podcast, we created the Mind of All Trades membership.
[00:01:23] It’s a community and toolkit for founders, implementers, and solopreneurs who are building online educational businesses and want a more practical way to think through growth, systems, and execution. You can learn more at mindofalltrades.com/membership. Now, let’s get into today’s episode. In part one, Bill Flynn, executive coach and advisor to CEOs, showed us why customers don’t buy your product. They hire it to do a job.
[00:01:53] We also talked about how he built a one-person business around 100 working days a year, how he learned to sell, and why most businesses struggle to survive. We also got into Bill’s big goal, to touch one million lives. Incredible. In this part, we start with his books, including his new one, The Hero Trap.
[00:02:17] Bill shows us why being the hero is the trap, how to stop making every decision, and how to build a team that doesn’t need you to make every single call. We also get into making failure perfectly okay. Let’s pick up right where we left off.
[00:02:33] And let’s go to the books. Is that a way to reach more people and hit that one
[00:02:37] Bill Flynn: Yeah. So I would count one… So I have, I have– I made up a, I made up a, a calculation. So when I work with one team, one person on a team, I multiply each person by 64 because they have a team that they work with, and they’re generally four to six people. They all have families, you know, ’cause I’m hopefully making their lives better.
[00:02:59] They’ll be able to spend… So I, I, I worked this out years ago. I don’t know if it’s right, but it’s something. And that’s how I do my team stuff. But I only count a book– If I sell a book, then it’s one person. I don’t, I don’t count… There’s probably a ripple effect to that, but my, my rationalization is that I’m only gonna count that as one.
[00:03:19] Um, so if I sell a million books, then I’m there.
[00:03:22] Pol Cousineau: Yeah.
[00:03:22] Bill Flynn: But that’s not too easy
[00:03:23] Pol Cousineau: is the book helping you make more impact, reach more people, or is it to help then get CEOs and other leaders get exposure? How does that fit in the business model? Like what is the… Yeah, how, how
[00:03:34] Bill Flynn: Yeah.
[00:03:35] So, so the business, the books have now I’d say two, possibly three roles for me. One is, um, is I could potentially, uh, at the, at the be- at the end of, um, “The Hero Trap,” I talk about the cohort model. I say, “If you’re interested in this, give me a call.” So, so now I’m reaching hopefully hundreds, you know, hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands.
[00:03:57] I only need six to eight. May- so if I get a pu- c- bunch of people that might get the cohort model
[00:04:02] Pol Cousineau: And I’ll be specific, do you have a web link, a QR code,
[00:04:06] Bill Flynn: It’s, it’s a, it’s a link to my site which that says, “Go look at the cohort model.” Um, I think there’s contact information there as well. So that’s, that’s one way to do it, and that’s really the more commercial way of doing it, of sort of, uh, of enriching myself, you know, but, but also affecting the, the million, uh, the million lives.
[00:04:25] Um, and the other is, uh, just sort of, uh, an awareness of me to either be hired by someone and/or being asked to speak somewhere. And my first book, which is “Further, Faster,” which I have right here, um, I just did it… I mean, I did it ’cause I was asked to do it. I don’t actually like writing, Pol. I, I find it tedious.
[00:04:53] I actually didn’t write that. Susan wrote that. She was the ghostwriter. I mean, I spoke the book, and most of what… She just, she’s a much better writer than I am, and she took my words over seven or eight interviews, you know, two, three hours at a time, and produced what I thought was a pretty good book. Um, but it’s just like any other business book.
[00:05:12] It’s just derivative. Um, where these books, “The Hero Trap” and the other stuff, I think is much more… I think I’m adding to the canon, you know? And
[00:05:24] Pol Cousineau: is it because you’re coming up with your novel ideas or your own concepts or synthesizing what you’ve learned? Why is that, why are those books adding more?
[00:05:33] Bill Flynn: Yeah. ‘Cause, uh, ’cause I, I think it’s exactly what you said is that my brain seems to be pretty good at taking two or three different things that don’t seem connected and connect them in, in a, in a rational and cohesive way. You know, so, so with the hero trap, I mean, the heroes we talk about, you know, don’t be a hero, you know, don’t be a hero leader.
[00:05:55] So that concept is out there. But I took it and said it’s about identity, right? It’s not about, it’s not about, um, guilt or whatever, right? These, uh, which they’re basically saying, you know, you’re… They’re wagging their finger. I try not to wag my finger at anyone, right? It’s saying, look, you know, you have to understand, you’ve, you’ve moved to this level because you are really great at being an individual thing.
[00:06:22] Be a great student, great whatever, great contributor, great team person, whatever it, what it is. But now that you’re leading a team or a division or department or a company, it’s no longer about you. You have to, you have to suppress the, the need for the reward and the recognition of being the answer, of being the decider.
[00:06:44] Uh, and which is really hard. And so I say, look, so you have a repertoire of identities, which is controller, builder, architect, and you should dec- you should know that you can decide which one of those is appropriate for the context of what’s going on. But you always
[00:06:59] Pol Cousineau: give us after that just kind of controller, builder, architect,
[00:07:03] Bill Flynn: Yeah.
[00:07:04] Pol Cousineau: are? Yeah
[00:07:05] Bill Flynn: Um, so, uh, controller is I, I do. Um, builder is I teach. And architect is I build systems, so I am no longer necessary for the previous two Now, very– there are very few companies that have created a complete architected system. Um, I actually talked about this this morning. There are only 10 that I can find, and I’ve been looking for years.
[00:07:33] Uh, and they are, uh, some of them are Amazon, Netflix, Zingerman’s, uh, Danaher Business Systems, Toyota. They have built systems that are, they’re architect-driven. So, um, so like, you know, Reed Hastings basically didn’t… And he finally left, right? But he didn’t, he didn’t really need to, to run Netflix anymore.
[00:07:57] He had lots of great people. He was directing them and, and, you know, if you will, understanding what direction the seas were going in, but he wasn’t the commander on the ship anymore.
[00:08:08] Other people were commanding the ships. Same thing with… Toyota’s been doing this. Toyota’s the best example. They’ve been doing it for 75 years.
[00:08:14] They have the Toyota Production System. It’s very geared towards manufacturing. But, you know, they have all these systems like Jikoda and Kaizen and the Andon Cord and Kata and, and, and these are all the things that they built over years. So, so Toyota has actually solved an unsolvable problem, which is we can make a relatively inexpensive car that has high quality and good service, right?
[00:08:39] There’s always this, this joke, right? Like, you know, pick one. Pick, pick two. You know, pick quality, service, or price. Pick any two and you’re good. They’ve been able to figure out how to do all three, right? You can buy a relatively inexpensive car and it’ll last you… I have a Lexus, which is obviously a high-end car, but it’s 13, 14 years old.
[00:08:59] I have 200,000 miles on it, and it runs like brand new,
[00:09:03] Pol Cousineau: Yeah.
[00:09:03] Down here in Costa Rica, people have 1990 Toyotas
[00:09:07] Bill Flynn: Yeah. It’s, you know, yeah, ’cause they, they’ve figured that out. So, so what happens is we were the hero most of our lives, and decades have gone by where we’re rewarded and recognized for that. And now for us to be a really good team leader, we have to s- we have to stop doing that, which doesn’t feel right because it feels like caring when we, when we do what we’re doing.
[00:09:30] We’re giving the answer and we’re, you know, and, and it feels good. We get a dopamine rush and all that kind of stuff. Um, and then what happens is you get bigger and you get promoted. You have more teams and more teams of teams, and now your life is out of control, right? You can’t, you can’t go home for dinner anymore.
[00:09:47] You’re always working on the weekend. You know, you’re always… It’s just o- consuming your life, and you can’t get out of it. Or, or if you decide you wanna get out of it, here’s the trap, right? You, you say, “Okay, I don’t wanna do that anymore. I have to figure out… I read Bill’s book,” or, “I read someone’s book,” or whatever.
[00:10:01] “I don’t have to be this way.” Then you start to pull away and your team says, “What are you doing? You’re abandoning me.” And they’re upset. So now that’s the trap. You’re stuck between these two things. Like, so how do you get out of this thing? Um, so that’s what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to say, “There, here’s a way out.
[00:10:22] It may take a while, but here’s a way out,” right? Is that let’s say you go in and, and it’s, and it’s a crisis. It needs to be done quickly, so you have to go in and be the hero. You have to go in, be the controller, and do the thing, run it, st- make it happen, et cetera. But don’t stop there. Then teach your team and say, “Here’s how I did that.
[00:10:42] Here’s the thought process I had. Here are the systems that I went through. So next time you guys can do it.” Now, the problem with that is The next problem is close to that, but it’s slightly different, and they need you again. So that’s when you need the system to allow them to be able to recognize it and then use their own brainpower and their own experience to then come up with th- their own solutions.
[00:11:09] And e- they do one of two things, is they just, they have full autonomy and they fix it, and they tell you after. Or they can say to you, “Here’s what’s going on. I intend to fix it this way. Are you okay with that?” And so, and you’re like, “Great. Sounds good.” You know, you, you might ask three or four questions, you know, how does it fit to the vision?
[00:11:30] Does it, does it violate our identity? Does it, you know, fit into our core principles? Okay, great. Go ahead. That’s very different than being brought in and having to solve it or having to direct the solution. Now you… If you do that and you teach all your team members to do that, you’ve now gone the opposite way exponentially.
[00:11:49] You have much, much more time to do the things that you should be doing, which is creating the future for the team and the business. Where if you don’t do it, you’re sucked into that, you never have time to do the future, and then eventually your business struggles and fails, which the data shows happens somewhere between year five and year 15.
[00:12:09] Pol Cousineau: I can definitely feel that trap a- and that’s what I’ve been working through over many years, and I’m sure a lot of people listening are like, “Ah, this sounds all too familiar.” Something that I learned, it was from Tim Ferriss, “4-Hour Workweek,” was about setting a threshold for monetary decisions.
[00:12:29] So, for example, okay, well, if it’s under $1,000, my director can just make the decision.
[00:12:36] Okay, we lost 700 bucks, but I didn’t have to get bothered by that. Now, I don’t remember what he had in there, but the, the principle is, okay, well, when is it the time to consult? Because that’s one of the modes, right? I’m thinking about this solution. Should I apply it? Much easier to say yes or no, but it could still kill you by a thousand needles, right?
[00:12:56] Where you constantly have to see these yes/no, and it uses your mental bandwidth for each of these decisions in there. And the bigger impact probably isn’t worth it. That’s why there’s that, that threshold. But there’s other levels of decisions where you can think, well… What I think is, “What could go wrong? What’s the worst-case scenario in
[00:13:16] here? And if it’s not that terrible, okay, then I’m okay with taking that risk,” which goes back to that risk assessment, you know, that we were
[00:13:24] talking about earlier. And one of the models that we recommend at Mind of All Trades is to have the operator in the business or an implementer role that can do all of the nuts and bolts and the day-to-day and work alongside the team, because what I find is that oftentimes that visionary work, that bigger direction, that gets reduced and reduced as the demands of the business keep increasing.
[00:13:53] And then I didn’t piece it that way, but that then you become that hero. But the disasters, the, the s- the problems, the situations keep growing, so what the hero could handle can no longer be handled, and now you’re in that bind because you’ve got all these problems, the team is used to it and, and whatnot.
[00:14:14] So, I’m sharing this because this can help people recognize their own patterns and then say, ” Okay, I’m in here now.” There’s something that you said, which was your team can almost have this knee-jerk reaction. Those weren’t your words, but like, “What are you doing, Pol? What are you doing, Bill? Why are you pulling back?”
[00:14:30] Bill Flynn: Yeah
[00:14:32] Pol Cousineau: How do we handle that communication? ‘Cause it seems like it’s about them gaining some kind of awareness, or is
[00:14:37] it not communication? How do we handle
[00:14:40] Bill Flynn: Yeah. So what I, what I recommend, and you actually, you just brought up like four things in what you said, so maybe we’ll touch them, maybe we won’t, but I’ll answer your question first, is, um, I– This is what I recommend is, uh, and I’ll call this vacation, but I’m doing vacation in quotes. So the… What I always recommend is take a vacation from a meeting.
[00:15:00] What I mean by that is go to the meeting, the one that you’re always in, you’re, you’re probably the one who’s making most of the decisions at the end or whatever, and tell the team, “I’m not gonna make any decisions in this meeting. Uh, I’m gonna direct the meeting and making sure that we get this, but, but you guys are gonna decide, and I will just, you know, let you know what I think.
[00:15:22] Uh, you know, I’ll just approve it and we’ll, we’ll see what happens,” you know. And if there’s these guidelines and gu- gui- guidelines and guardrails that you talked about, basically Tim Ferriss is talking about, I call it, I call them guidelines and guardrails, right? Is that if you give the parameters, um, for people, then they understand, you know, the constraints and, and they’ll, they’ll…
[00:15:39] Actually, the, they, they prefer that, right? They prefer constraints. There’s a freedom in constraints. Um, but I say just start there. Just say one meeting, uh, and then see what happens. And, and what’ll happen is over two, three, four, five of these meetings, they’ll start to get better and better ’cause they’ll start to get more confidence and, and they’ll come to the meeting prepared differently than they were before ’cause they know when they go to this meeting, you’re gonna make the decision anyway.
[00:16:05] So I’m just gonna show up and, you know, I’ll give my opinion, whatever, but, you know, most of the time I’m gonna be on my laptop or my phone ’cause, you know…
[00:16:13] Pol Cousineau: Stakes are low.
[00:16:14] Bill Flynn: Yeah. So, so, and then you, then you expand, right? Then you, then you keep going, and eventually you move towards an actual vacation, right? And you, and this is what Reed Hastings did.
[00:16:23] He didn’t do it on purpose, but it worked out this way ’cause he’s a big proponent of, of recharging, and he, he knew Netflix was a tough place to work. It was, it was demanding. So he would take six weeks off as, as an example to people to, you know, you need to recharge. Um, and what happened was one of the times he did it, he came back and he noticed what broke, but he also noticed what got better So the vacation test, as I call it, is a great way to do it, is, is just to, you know, you start with a meeting, but you take a week off and you, you can’t check in and they can’t find you, right?
[00:17:03] And then come back and see what happened. Chesky did this at Airbnb. Uh, there were a couple other ones who did it. And that’s where you know where you need to work on the business, right? Where you’re still the problem because you probably would’ve handled this and it would’ve, would’ve gone away, but when you’re not there, you know, something happened.
[00:17:22] Um, so that’s one of the things that you can do. But I do wanna touch on one thing which, which I think is interesting is, so the stuff that you talked about with Ferris, I have expanded into a larger concept that I call decision capital You have a limited amount of decision capital as a leader. Your job is to figure out where to spend it.
[00:17:45] And the question you shouldn’t be asking is, is… The, the question you should be asking is: why did this decision reach me? Did it need to? And I’ll tell you, most of the time the answer will be no. Right. I, I have my leaders do this all, all the time. I say, uh, I say, “Well, how do you spend your time?” “Well, I’m always doing this.”
[00:18:07] I say, “Okay. I want you to take a week or two weeks,” whatever. I said, “I want you to write down every decision you make, every single one, whether out loud or, or not out loud, and, and just list them out. And then when you’re done, I want you to look at the list and say, ‘ Which of these was I the only person who could have made this?
[00:18:29] I had the only unique capability or qualities or whatever.'” And I, I always say this. I will predict something. I’ll say, “Let’s say there are 100. My guess is there’s, like, two that you had to make. So let’s start figuring out how to teach other people to make the other 98,” ‘ cause then you’ll have more and more time to, one, make those decisions even better, because you’ll have more time to, to, to work through them, and you’ll have a lot more time to, to create the future of the business and think
[00:18:59] Pol Cousineau: And most likely you’ll feel better. I notice when there’s too many decisions, even if they’re not that hard, it creates a lot of anxiety, stress, and pressure just by the sheer volume of them
[00:19:10] Bill Flynn: Well, and also there’s fatigue, right? ‘Cause it’s, there’s called decision fatigue. It’s a, it’s an actual phenomenon, is, is your prefrontal cortex, which is really where you’re making most of these decisions, becomes less and less nimble and, and aware. So by the end of the day– So you might, like, at the end of the day, you can, you could probably like, “I don’t wanna make any more decisions.”
[00:19:29] And that’s what’s happened is you’ve just fatigued your brain and it’s t- it’s saying, “Cut it out.”
[00:19:36] Pol Cousineau: Yes
[00:19:37] Bill Flynn: so, so that’s, that’s to me a concept that I would love people to have is to, is understand as a, especially as a leader, but as a leadership team, understand that you have a finite amount of decision capital and you should be very jealous of it.
[00:19:50] You should not give it away freely, and you should always find ways to keep as much of it, uh, uh, uh, for the things that matter the most. ‘Cause one of my favorite sayings is, “Few things matter, but those that do matter tremendously.” And your job as a leader is to figure out what are the few things that truly matter, mostly to two constituents, your customers and your people.
[00:20:18] If you just focus most of your time on those few things, everything else will become easier or unnecessary But we don’t. We get sucked into the tyranny of the moment ’cause it feels good in the moment, you know, and our future self hates us, but at the moment we are not thinking about him or her
[00:20:36] Pol Cousineau: Now let’s say these decisions come to you and you didn’t– you don’t need to make them. Do you push it back or do you answer it and say, “Hey, next time I’m gonna push it”? Like, “I shouldn’t be the one. Here’s what you should go.” Because I tend to answer and I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know if I should have done that.”
[00:20:53] There was one just before we started the recording and I answered. I said, “But in reality, you should have talked to a manager. Like, I
[00:21:01] didn’t need to give you this answer.”
[00:21:04] Bill Flynn: Yeah. So, um, there’s this great book called “Turn the Ship Around.” Have you read this?
[00:21:07] Pol Cousineau: No
[00:21:08] Bill Flynn: It’s by, it’s by David Marquet. He was a US Navy sub- submarine commander. Um, and he was the premier captain in the Navy at the time. And he was being trained, and he learned the flagship, um, submarine, which was the Olympia at the time, and it was gonna be his command.
[00:21:26] And he studied this submarine for a year. They were building it. Studied it for a year. Two weeks before he’s going to take over the ship, one of the other captains retired suddenly. He was the only one available. So he didn’t go and captain the Olympia, he captained the Santa Fe, which was the worst performing submarine in the Navy.
[00:21:52] And he’s, he’s… So he’s like, “Okay, I’ll take over.” And so he starts doing what he normally does, right? He gets on the ship and he starts giving orders and stuff, and he gives an order. He’s, he’s, he’s… It’s a great video. He gives an order which says, says, “Two-thirds ahead, helmsman.” And the helmsman goes, “Two-thirds ahead, aye.”
[00:22:08] And nothing happens. And he’s, you know, Marquet’s like, “What’s going on?” He’s like, “Helmsman, two-thirds ahead.” ” Aye, sir.” ‘Cause, you know, that’s, they’re supposed to say yes, right? And he, and he says, “Can you tell me what’s going on?” He said, “Sir, we don’t have two-thirds on this ship.” he, he, you know, lucky for him, he immediately said, “Okay, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
[00:22:31] So he said, “I could kill all these people, so I can’t do what I was trained to do.” So he completely flipped it and he said, at that moment he said, “I am never gonna give another order again on this ship, except one, which was to launch a missile.” He said, “If, if I’m gonna potentially kill other people, I wanna be the one who burdens.
[00:22:51] That’s, that’s my burden.” But he said, he said, “I want everyone…” Now, uh, remember, we talked about competence and confidence. These were well-trained people, you know, they knew what they were doing. Um, so he had that advantage, which most business leaders don’t. Um, so he told them, he said, “Look, I want you to tell me what you intend to do.”
[00:23:10] He said, “This is, these are our orders, and I want you to tell me what you intend to do.” So he went to intent. And so everyone said, “I intend to do this. I intend to do that.” He just said, “Go ahead. Aye. Good.” He just agreed to stuff. Um, and, um, the second inspection… So they got an inspection six months later and, and they did okay.
[00:23:29] But the next inspection, a year after doing this, they became the number one submarine in the Navy. They ha- And they scored the highest score any sub had ever scored in the history of the Navy. And because of that, they completely changed how they did things in the Navy, ’cause it’s, this is a better way to do it.
[00:23:51] This command and control thing has, has a weakness, but this other, this intent-based thing is much better. Um, and he, uh, I don’t know if it was a record, but 10 of his people on the ship that he served became captains, which was an extremely high amount. Because he gave them autonomy and agency and confidence and whatever, like, so they, they felt like they could run another ship where if it was always command and control, you’re just accepting orders, right?
[00:24:22] As opposed to thinking for yourself. So that’s what I think we need to do. That’s how we create this decision capital. We have to create this environment where we help people do the intent thing. So to answer your spec- question specifically, my advice is to you, when someone comes to you next time, the first thing you say is, ” What do you think we should do?”
[00:24:48] Right? Or what do you think I’m going to say? Something that allows them to think for themselves. They might be right, they might not be right, but at least you’re starting to train them to think ahead of time. And by the way, I’m not a big fan of, you know, you can’t come to me with a problem without a solution, because I think that’s dumb.
[00:25:09] But it will start them to think about what are ways this could be solving. And this, again, you’re training them to think for themselves. And then if they’re wrong, you correct them, right?
[00:25:21] Pol Cousineau: Right
[00:25:21] Bill Flynn: You know, and then they’re like, “Oh, okay, that didn’t work.” And their brain’s gonna go, “Okay, that didn’t work, so let me try a different way.”
[00:25:26] And, and they… You’re close, you missed one thing. Oh, okay. And the next time you’re like, “Great, do that.” Right? So in three
[00:25:33] Pol Cousineau: Yeah, and there’s a part here which is making failure okay as well, and not– I mean, obviously sometimes there could be a high stakes, but generally the stakes aren’t that high, and the reaction to failure i- helps with the building that confidence. There’s someone in my team, we had a large project for building a knowledge base, and to be quite honest, it didn’t go as I wanted.
[00:25:57] And he’s in charge and trying to guide and, and whatnot, and let’s say it was a two-month initiative. By the end of it, I felt like, okay, now we need to make a decision. Is this going to be genuinely useful or this won’t move the needle? And the answer in the current ship was no, it won’t be useful. Okay, well, now we have to pull the plug on this, right? So then, uh, in that moment, I wasn’t like, “Oh, you wasted two months of our time. You got all these other team members on board.” It was like, “Okay, well, what did you learn from this? What happened with this process?” And then when we finished that, I think it was about a week later, he said, “Hey, you know what? Give me another couple weeks. I want to present something to you because I have another idea about the knowledge base.” And I said, “Are you sure about that?” He says, “Give, give me two weeks.” I said, “Okay, let’s see what happens.” Honestly, I was not thinking it was gonna go
[00:26:51] any
[00:26:51] better. That was… Right? I’m like, “Okay, well…”
[00:26:54] But hey, if I said no, what am I doing now? I’m killing initiative, right? We went through this. We did a debrief. We’re trying to learn, gain lessons. He says, “Hey, I think I got it. Here’s a new idea.” Honestly, two weeks later, he came back. It was amazing. I was shocked by that, and I said, “This is so great. This is so useful.
[00:27:14] The process is so much faster. The knowledge base is actually useful, will move the needle.” And for me, it was about how we handled that failure. And if you’re just on audio right now, make quotation marks around the failure, because if I just beat the person down, that second part wouldn’t have likely happened.
[00:27:36] Bill Flynn: Or even if, even if you didn’t and just said, “You know, we’ve spent enough time on this, we have to, we have to spend our time on other things.” It’s, it’s not beating them down, but it’s, it is having a, an effect, right? So there, there’s, there’s, there’s two things I would recommend in, in this situation, is you did what I would call an, a modified after action review.
[00:27:57] An after action review is an actual process that the military uses, and it’s four questions, and I recommend all of my leaders do something like this. Here’s one. It’s a good one. It works really well. The Navy SEALs use it. They’re pretty good. Um, and it allows you to do what you s- what you said is, you know, you first say, “What, what did we intend to do?
[00:28:18] What actually happened? Identify the gap, and then what would we do differently next time?” So that’s the end. Now, what you can do is what’s called a pre-mortem. Like if y- like next time you do a project and say, “Okay, let’s make sure we understand what we’re trying to accomplish. What– How would we describe wild success?”
[00:28:38] Right? “If we really did this well, what would that look like?” So everyone has a picture. And by the way, that also aligns people, ’cause you might have four or five people in the room and they’re like, “That’s– I wasn’t thinking that was success. I was thinking this was success.” And so you now get alignment, ’cause maybe your…
[00:28:52] Maybe he did a really good job of what he thought you wanted, but he didn’t know what you wanted, right? For whatever reason.
[00:28:59] Pol Cousineau: There, there was, there was a mismatch with what success looked like
[00:29:04] Bill Flynn: that’s why the pre-mortem’s great, right? Especially if you’re gonna do an expensive project, always do a pre-mortem. It takes like an hour, right? And it’s… But then you also say, “What would disaster look like?”
[00:29:16] Now it gives them freedom to just make stuff up, right? And just create. But it also might uncover potential things that you wouldn’t have thought of had you not gone through that process. And those two together, as you do them over and over and over again, your team gets better and better and better. And usually the projects take less time.
[00:29:39] They’re generally much more close to what you actually expected. So to me, if you, if you have a project, you know, you shouldn’t do it with everything, but, you know, pick, pick the ones that are, you think are sizable enough and, and do, do a pre-mortem and a post-mortem. And by the way, you can just Google these or whatever.
[00:29:55] Nothing I’m telling you is… I’m not a genius or anything. I’m stealing other people’s work, right? Um, but it, it works really well and gets to this sort, sort of thing that we’re talking about, which is how do you fire yourself from the day-to-day? How do you protect your decision capital? All that kind of stuff.
[00:30:10] Pol Cousineau: Mm-hmm. And what about that middle part? ‘Cause I felt like I gave too much autonomy before that check-in, and that two month felt more expensive than it needed to be
[00:30:22] Bill Flynn: Yeah. So those are the… I would obviously do milestones, right? And just say, “Look, hey, um, if he has assigned the product, just do me a quick framework and say, we now know what out- the outcome looks like. Let’s do a couple of leading indicators beforehand, and in like maybe in two weeks…” What’s it, what’d you say it was, a two-month project?
[00:30:41] Pol Cousineau: Two months,
[00:30:42] Bill Flynn: So maybe in two weeks we check in or a week, you know, just a quick one to say, and then maybe after a month, and then maybe, you know, just before. So then you’re, you can course-correct ahead of time. ‘Cause the middle is always messy. In any project, the middle’s always messy. So know that, but then say, “Okay, you know, it’s messy, but how close were we to where we thought we would be?
[00:31:04] And, and if we’re not there, why? And if we are, then great. Keep going.” And again, that’s a… That should be a five-minute conversation, right? It’s like, “Okay, we thought we’d be about this far along, this many things done,” whatever, whatever it is. Great. Are we or are we not? It should be a… It shouldn’t be a, “I think so.”
[00:31:22] It should be, “Are we there or are we not?” ‘Cause we have… He has discreetly and, and well articulated what those milestones are, so there’s no guesswork, right? I say to these people all the time is that people say, “Well, we want an improved this,” or, “We want more of that or less of this.” I’m like, “Nope. Unless you say less means 50% less or more means twice as fast or whatever.”
[00:31:48] You have to be able to measure the thing, so then you can objectively say whether it made it or not. And you’re still guessing a little bit, but it’s better than just… You know, ’cause if you do, if you say more and you’re 1% more, you did more, but is we really, is 1% what we wanted when we wanted 80?
[00:32:07] Pol Cousineau: Exactly. Is that gonna move the needle? Is that helping, right, reach our vision? And, uh, and having something measurable is also really good. I find it can be easy to get into those qualitative words and targets, but then how do we know if we’ve achieved it? And then you say, “Well, hey, if we asked five people, would they say the same answer when they observe the results?
[00:32:33] And what was the goal,” right? Well, if the answer is no, then it’s not a clear target. And to go back a little bit to the selling where we started off, I like to ask them, “Well, what do you mean by this?” So I
[00:32:47] had someone, we were talking about automating a process, and then they said, “Okay, I need to have the delinquency process amazing.” Okay, well, what is amazing,
[00:32:59] Right.
[00:33:00] What, what is that, right? What are the factors of amazing? So okay, wait. There’s a time period, there’s a time effort, there’s a… Was there manual intervention or not, right? But there was all these different criterias that were under that. Now, if I didn’t ask the question, I could come back and say, “Hey, this is amazing now.
[00:33:20] Look at your delinquency process.” And he have said, “Well, hey, look, these things are happening, these things are happening. This, this is not amazing at all.”
[00:33:27] So it’s also like, uh, finding out what is meant by the words
[00:33:32] Bill Flynn: Exactly. I say h- I say, “What do you mean?” all the time, and then I also say, “How do you know?” all the time. People say, you know, “We should be doing this, and this is, this is what…” And I say, and I would say, “How do you know?” And I’m not, like, being a jerk. I’m like, “Tell me. Walk me through your thought process. How did you get to that conclusion?”
[00:33:50] And unfortunately, most of the time when I ask how do you know, they don’t. It’s an intuition or it’s a whatever. And, and by the way, I’m okay with intuition, but you still gotta back it up, right? You know, you can’t just say, “Well, I feel… Trust me, I feel like I’m gonna do this thing.” No. It’s like, walk me through why you think that’s going to happen, um, and how, you know, and, and how you came to that so we’re not just, we’re not just letting hope be the process.
[00:34:20] Pol Cousineau: I like to formulate a, a hypothesis, and then we say, “Well, how would we validate that hypothesis?”
[00:34:25] Then we can find out, right? And then we can know. Now, when you say how do you know, I wanna go back to management science.
[00:34:33] Bill Flynn: Yes
[00:34:35] Pol Cousineau: giving us the, like part of the answer of how do, how do we know? Like, are you going back to different studies, or what does that
[00:34:42] Bill Flynn: Yeah. So, so I ask this a lot. When people, when I say, “Why do your customers buy from you?” They always give me an answer. And then I say, “How do you know?” “Oh, well, because I have 10 years of experience.” I’m like, “No. That’s not how you know.” I say, a lot of people say… I said, “I could go up to a guy who says, ‘I have 20 years experience,’ and then I, I say, ‘No, you have one year of experience, which you have done over and over and over 19 times.’
[00:35:07] That’s not the same year of having 20 years of experience where you’ve learned and you’ve grown and you’ve gotten better.” So what I wanna hear from them, and I would do this when I was the head of marketing, you know, and I would say, I want them to say, “I talked to 25 customers. I went through this interview process.
[00:35:24] I used jobs to be done or customer discovery from, you know, Cindy Alvarez or, you know, Steve Blank,” or I want them to say, “This is how I know,” not, “Trust me.” That’s not the same, right? So that’s what you need to… They need to be able to articulate the process that they went through that allowed them to get to that point, whatever it is, and it has to make sense.
[00:35:48] Um, that’s what I mean by h- like when I say, “How do you know?” They have to go through that,
[00:35:54] right? And, and unfortunately, most people don’t use that level of rigor.
[00:36:00] They were in a meeting, they heard one client say something, and they remembered it because it was pretty cool, or they already thought it, so they were just hear- listening for the things that, that was justifying their own thing.
[00:36:13] And I’m like, “No, that’s not the way to do this,” right? You, you wanna, y-you want to have a level of confidence, so when we get to the end, that, that potentially what you thought you knew actually was what you knew, as opposed to you hope you’re right.
[00:36:31] Pol Cousineau: It’s interesting the how do you know in the gut because in courses I’ve encountered at least a couple of clients where they said, “We need to make smaller, longer payment plans.” and I said, “Well, are you sure? Why is that?” And then they said, “The majority of people are picking longer and longer payment plans.” And then I said, “Well, are you sure?” “Oh, yeah, a hundred percent.” Okay. I take a look at their payment system, and then they have like six-month payment, nine-month payments. Less than ten percent of people are picking those longer payment plans, and the majority are almost paying paying full or three monthly payments.
[00:37:09] So then I said, “Well, that doesn’t line up. They’re not looking at longer payment plans. Maybe instead of adding a twelve month or an eighteen month, we just need to do a two pay or a four pay.” You know, like something very short, and we can get to that because we look at the data. And our hunch can be very misleading.
[00:37:29] Like, they’re there, they’re talking to their students, they’re interacting with them, right? And they know their students, but they weren’t actually looking at the payment system records to validate that
[00:37:41] Bill Flynn: Yeah. Could because some person was insistent, right? Because we, we, we remember the novelty and we, uh, give more weight to the novelty than we do to the actual. So my guess is someone or someones was constantly saying, you know, “You need, you need better long pain plans.” And it was like one or two people out of 100, but it felt like there were 80 of them because it was over and over and over again.
[00:38:09] It was loud, it was boisterous, it was… They were angry, whatever. So we then, our brain then goes, “Oh, you know, we have to solve this ’cause I don’t want this dissonance in my brain. I just want this to go away. So let’s just make up…” Like, as we said before, like the limbic system lit up, so our emotional side, and we decided, and then we made up the reasons after the fact.
[00:38:34] That’s probably what this person did, is they said, “Well, in order for me to get this emotional thing out of my brain, I need to make it sound good. And so I’m gonna make it sound everybody’s asking for this, you know? It’s like everywhere.” You know? And you’re like, “Give me the list.” “Well, you know, I, I don’t have a list, but ju- ju- trust me, it’s everyone.”
[00:38:53] Pol Cousineau: Yeah, I’ve had that as well. “Oh, there, there’s so many bugs in my system. Nothing’s working. There’s a lot of technology stuff.” And I said, “Okay, well, let’s take a look at it.” And then when– by the time I go, I said there was about 30 requests. One of them was a bug. Everything else was new desired things to be built,
[00:39:11] right?
[00:39:12] So you want a new email sequence, or you wanna change your form, or you wanna… I said, ” Well, those aren’t bugs. This is just something new you desire.” But these– the classification is quite different. Now, for them, they’re experiencing as there are so many problems with the system because they are considering it issues, considering it bugs, and then that now flavors their language.
[00:39:35] So then they’re talking with their team, “Hey, we’ve got all these problems, all these things.” And then I find it skews the direction because now everyone gets afraid of making mistakes, but that’s not what’s happening at all actually. People are not making constant mistakes. Actually, you’re in an innovation phase
[00:39:54] Bill Flynn: Right
[00:39:55] Pol Cousineau: and a different attitude needs to be taken altogether, right? Normally, you’re like, “Okay, let’s press on the gas over here, not the brakes.”
[00:40:04] Bill Flynn: And then, then you should be doing like, which of these are the best, you know, which will affect more of our customers, you know, where can we add more value? Whatever. So to me, that is a, that is a version of how do you know
[00:40:15] Pol Cousineau: Mm-hmm.
[00:40:16] Bill Flynn: Right? You basically is kind of saying, “Well, how do you know that?” And so you’re saying, “Let’s check the data,” which is how we’re, we’re actually figuring out whether this is true or not.
[00:40:25] Pol Cousineau: Mm-hmm.
[00:40:26] So then, so then for a, a business owner or someone in that business that might be the operator, like, would you recommend that they start building a system for gathering that data? Like, I’m familiar with like key performance indicators and, and KPIs, and then you look at that evidence. Or like if people don’t have that natural tendency to look back at the data or how did they know, what’s some first steps to do that?
[00:40:51] Bill Flynn: Yeah. So, um, so what I, what I do with my clients is we s- we figure out what, what are those few important things first Then, um, how do we measure them? And I generally, I call them controls and consequences, but they’re basically leading and lagging indicators. Um, I don’t like… I don’t– I like controls because it’s we control it.
[00:41:15] Where consequences, we don’t o- we really don’t often c-control a consequence, right? It’s, it’s an outcome of a number of things happening, and some of those things we have no control over. So, you know, but the stuff we do have control over, I want us to make sure we understand that. So we’ll just stay with leading and lagging indicators, ’cause that’s what most people do is, is you should have, you know, one, at least one lagging indicator so you, you can measure it.
[00:41:40] But you have to have leading indicators beforehand. You know, I say, I say, you know, “So what’s your lagging indicator?” And like, “What do you mean by that?” And I say, “Look at your P&L and balance sheet. Those are all lagging indicators,” right? Revenue margin, right, you know, that, those, those could be some of your things.
[00:41:54] But then what caused… Like, what was the thing that happened before one of those? So revenue is numbers of closed deals or pipeline or whatever, you know. Numbers of qualified leads, leads to a pipe, you know. So you have to understand what those are. And the fewer the better, because you don’t wanna over-measure everything, ‘ cause now you’re, you’re just twisting little tiny knobs that don’t make any difference.
[00:42:22] Um, then if once you sort of all align on that, then all I say is, is on a regular basis, weekly, monthly, whatever your cadence is, do a red, yellow, green. That’s all I want you to do. And red, yellow, and green mean certain things. And I learned this from Alan Mulally, who you mentioned, which was the CEO of, um, Boeing and Ford, is red, uh…
[00:42:45] Green means everything’s going as expected, right? We’re on track, we’re on time, you know, in budget, all that kind of stuff. Uh, yellow means we’re off track, but we have a plan. We don’t know if the plan’s gonna work, but we have a plan. We’re gonna, we, we know, we think if this plan works, we’re gonna be green.
[00:43:01] Might take a week, two weeks, whatever it is. Red is, it’s not, uh, off track. We have no plan, right? Very objective, right? Because you don’t want… Someone’s red could be someone else’s yellow. And I’ve had people do this, and I’m like, “No, it is objective.” It’s working. It’s going as expected. It’s not working, but a plan.
[00:43:22] It’s not working, no plan. Then you decide, okay, now what do we do, right? Then you have to, if you will, double-click and then say, “Why is it red? What’s going on that’s red?” And then you dig into whatever it is. So to me, that’s what I reckon. But you have to set up the standard first. The problem is we don’t take time to set up standards, and then we’re rooting around trying to find the problem, and then we have to get feedback and all this kind of stuff.
[00:43:49] And I say, “Look, I hate feedback. I think feedback is a terrible thing.” It’s something that you need to do sometimes, but it should be the absolute last resort with someone for most everything The way to avoid that is create standards and say, “This is how we run a meeting. This is how we write priorities.
[00:44:09] This is how we measure priorities.” And then when a meeting goes badly, you don’t, you know, you don’t go to them and say, you know, “Let me give you some feedback on the meeting,” because by the way, they’re gonna freak out right away. You know, if you did it in front of everyone else, you’re now calling them out.
[00:44:24] I mean, so they’re not even gonna listen anyway, ’cause you put them in a threat mode. But you can say, “How did you think the meeting went?” And if, if they understand, you know, if they’re not delusional, they’re gonna be, “You know, it went okay. You know, I thought some good, some…” “Okay. You know, I think so too. So what is, what is our standard for the meeting?”
[00:44:44] And it’s like, “Well, we have six steps, right? We do outcome first, then we do, uh, people, and then we do agenda, then we do the list, then we do the follow-up, then we do whatever.” “Okay. So which one of those did we miss or didn’t do so well?” “Oh, I think we, you know, we did, we didn’t do two and four.” “Okay, great.
[00:45:00] Why don’t you and I work together to figure out how to make two and four better next time, so when you run the meeting next time, we can improve two and four?” So they… You didn’t give them any feedback at all, right? You just said, “Here’s the standard. How’d we do?” They said, ” We missed these.” Okay. Th- they’re giving themselves feedback, which is always better, and you’re helping them to solve it.
[00:45:23] You’re not just leaving them alone saying, “All right, great. Do it better next time.” You’re like, “Let me help you.” Right? You know, ’cause maybe they don’t quite know how to do it. And then you say, “Great. Let’s meet until that meeting is the, the best version of that meeting, then we’ll stop meeting and, and you’re good.”
[00:45:39] So you’ve now created a reward system where it’s better, they feel autonomous, they feel supported, they feel all these good things, um, and not put them into threat mode by tapping them on the shoulder saying, “Can you follow me back to my office so I can give you some feedback on this meeting?” Which all sorts of terrible things happen when you do that.
[00:45:59] Pol Cousineau: Exactly. And then setting up that standard too is really important, and that’s something I find that I do regularly. This morning we were talking about processes and procedures, and we’re making some changes there. So then I said, “Okay, well, I want you to come up with what is an ideal process, and let’s have a few examples of those.
[00:46:21] Let’s have examples of what are bad, because if we’re gonna go through the whole process, I guess again, right? Of, of revamping this, making it better, let’s make sure we know what a good one is, what a bad one is, and then once we’ve got that, then we can start rolling it out.” But otherwise, then we’re not going to be improving things, then we’re just kinda remixing the same sauce that we had, and then our processes won’t be any better. And we identify challenges of when and where and why people are not following processes. And then I, I also said, “Well, talk to some of the team members as well.” And it’s not a matter of chastising them, but it’s to really understand. So a very easy example of that, that we were debriefing, ’cause we went through several iterations over the years of how we did processes. Well, in the past, some of them were hyper-detailed, and it was overwhelming how they were being described,
[00:47:18] especially in context for what needed to be done. So then that was one of the reasons why they weren’t being… And then there were several other reasons, right? So we’re taking these learnings, but then that person is saying, “Hey, here’s gonna be the standard.” Otherwise, later on, if we have a team member say, “Okay, you just did this. Document the process.” Then you say, “Well, what was that process? That was really bad. You don’t know what good looks like.” That’s not fair either, and it’s unlikely it’s gonna match your expectations.
[00:47:43] Bill Flynn: Right. Agreed. Yeah, I, I’m a big fan of, um… So I’m, I’m very outcome-oriented, right? ‘Cause a process is in service of something. And I say, “Let’s just make sure we agree on the ideal outcome first.” Then back into, “Okay, what would be the ideal process to give us the best chance of reaching that ideal outcome?
[00:48:03] What would have to be true?” All these kind of things. And then you build that, you build that in. And as you were talking, you know, some processes are, are, are, um, ones that you have to follow. Like a, a pilot has to follow the process ’cause if he or she doesn’t, they could crash and kill lots of people, right?
[00:48:25] So what do they do? They, you know, they’re all well-trained. I mean, pilots are probably the most well-trained people on the planet. They have to go through hours and hundreds of hours every year, get re-certified, all these kinds of things. Yet they’re still human, and they get tired, and they’re whatever, hungry, you know.
[00:48:42] So they… What do they do? They have a checklist. And they, even though they’ve done it a thousand times, they go through the checklist, right? Flaps and engine, just to make sure. Some processes need that level of detail, some don’t, right? So you also have to understand, maybe we do need a really highly detailed process, but instead of having people to remember it, just make a checklist, right?
[00:49:05] And let them go through it
[00:49:06] Pol Cousineau: And what are the stakes, right? What could go wrong
[00:49:08] if this fails? In one, catastrophic disaster with hundreds of lives possibly,
[00:49:13] right? And
[00:49:13] Bill Flynn: We want a checklist for that one, but
[00:49:15] Pol Cousineau: Yeah, exactly.
[00:49:16] Bill Flynn: a checklist. Right
[00:49:18] Pol Cousineau: yeah. And the other one, okay, a video that no one ever watches didn’t get archived, maybe not that high stakes, right,
[00:49:24] in that, in that context. So as we’re reaching to an end of our discussion, which has been really insightful, Bill, is there something important that you want our audience to take away, either that we’ve covered or maybe something we haven’t covered?
[00:49:39] Bill Flynn: So remind me the main part of your audience, like, and what do
[00:49:43] they,
[00:49:43] what do they l- what do they want?
[00:49:46] Pol Cousineau: Yeah, so they wanna grow an educational-based business that has like trainings, memberships, et cetera. Now one of their main challenges is that they’re caught in all the weeds because it built up over time and they’re literally in that hero trap.
[00:50:01] Bill Flynn: Yeah, yeah.
[00:50:02] Pol Cousineau: So then they can’t– Like they’re trying to do all the implementation, they’re answering everyone.
[00:50:06] A lot of them have distributed online teams, so then they’re getting bombarded constantly with Slacks and all of those things
[00:50:14] Bill Flynn: Yeah. Um, so my advice would be f- for that would be two things. Um, one is there’s this really good book by Cameron Herold called “Vivid Vision.” Buy it. It’s a super short book. It’s like 100 pages. It’s a recipe book, and it, it walks you through how to write a vision that isn’t a vision statement. It’s not like a computer on every desk in every home, in every office, whatever.
[00:50:39] It’s a very detailed… It’s five to seven pages long. It describes in three years, he does it in three-year chunks, what we want this business to look like, what we think this would look like, and have that as a clear understanding of that’s where you’re trying to head. And then with that in mind, take a look at all the things that you’re doing and say, “Oh, maybe we’re doing 10 things.
[00:51:06] Which of these 10 things contributes the most to get us to there?” And most of the time it’s gonna be two or three of the 10, right? So that’s where you wanna really make sure you’re, you’re, you’re nailing that. You’re, you’re optimizing that. You’re, you’re understanding your customer, understanding the value they want.
[00:51:24] You’re understanding, am I solving this problem as well as I can? And then you might not even have to worry about the other. You might just sunset the other seven things because that’s only 10 to 20… I do this with people all the time. I, I have them do this with their customers, and I go through, “Where is most of your profit coming from?”
[00:51:41] And, and typically it’s, it’s 90/10. 90% of their profits come from 10% of their customers. And actually, there are customers at the bottom of the list that are taking profit away. If they fired them in a compassionate way, their profit would just increase automatically
[00:52:01] Pol Cousineau: Yeah
[00:52:01] Bill Flynn: ’cause they’re losing money on these folks.
[00:52:03] But we don’t take time to do that. So that’s what I would say is make sure you, again, understand the outcome, understand what v- your vision is, and really look at, at your business and say, and measure it. Like, as you said, walk me through the process, walk me through the bugs. You know, say… I did this with one client.
[00:52:18] They had five different businesses, and they were sort of breaking even as a business. And I just did a really simple exercise and said, “Okay, let’s list the five businesses. Tell me how much revenue each one provides, tell me how much profit each one provides, and tell me how much of these generate cash for the business.”
[00:52:36] And in 20 minutes, we did this in 20 minutes, they immediately decided to sunset a business that they all loved, but it was losing money and they couldn’t figure out a way. They wanted to keep doing it. It was with kids and it was help- it was wonderful, you know. And then the other two, they’re like, “Yeah, you know, these aren’t very good.”
[00:52:55] So they, most of their business came from two of their things. And so I said, “Well, just make those awesome.”
[00:53:01] Pol Cousineau: Mm-hmm.
[00:53:01] Bill Flynn: Uh, and it took 20 minutes. So it’s the same kind of thing, right? It’s just, you know, understand what it is and then really look at it hard and say, “Okay, I’ve got 10 products, 10 learning products.
[00:53:12] Re- tell me exactly how much does each of it contribute to the, to the value of our business in a hard and fast way, and then make a decision.” That would be my advice.
[00:53:23] Pol Cousineau: And you said there was two things. Was that
[00:53:25] one or was that both?
[00:53:26] Bill Flynn: Have a vision first. Then through that lens, look at your offerings
[00:53:31] Pol Cousineau: Ah, okay. Perfect
[00:53:32] Bill Flynn: Right? And say which, you know, if I have 10 offerings, how much is each, how much revenue is each contributing? How much profit is each contributing? And by the way, sometimes you’re gonna have to guess because we’re not, we don’t necessarily know.
[00:53:44] But use your gut. You might be close. You might have to do some math and bring in a, you know, a finance guy or something to figure out what really it is. But you’re probably pretty close. And then you might have to make a hard decision.
[00:53:56] Pol Cousineau: Mm-hmm.
[00:53:57] And most people would know their enrollment numbers, and then you can say, “Hey, here’s our price right now.” Let’s kind of multiply students or, or
[00:54:04] something like that, right? And then get an approximation. Your systems should be getting that information pretty quickly.
[00:54:11] Bill Flynn: Yeah. And it, by the way, again, the Viv vision will take you a while, but once you nail that, the, the, the thing, this next step should take you an hour if you have the data
[00:54:21] Pol Cousineau: Yeah. But without a vision, where are you
[00:54:24] Bill Flynn: Yeah, ’cause it, you know, what it’s– I like to say this thing is, uh, Alice went to th- Alice in Wonderland, you know, Alice went to the Cheshire Cat and he said, “Where are you headed?” And she said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Well,
[00:54:35] any road, any road, will do.”
[00:54:37] Pol Cousineau: Yeah, exactly. You’re there. We did it. Woo-hoo. Let’s celebrate, right?
[00:54:41] Uh, uh, it was so great having you on the show, Bill. I wanna make sure that everyone again knows where to find you. So your website is the best place, catalystgrowthadvisors.com. You have an upcoming book coming out in October. You have more books down the line as well.
[00:55:00] We’ll put all of these links inside of the show notes so that you can grab that whether you’re watching, listening. And again, it was just a real delight having you on Mind of All Trades
[00:55:11] Bill Flynn: Great. Thank you very much. And, and, and if people do like what I said and I, I need pre-orders for “The Hero Trap,” if they would love to go and order it ahead of time, that would be great. My publisher would be very happy with me. I’ve got about 30 or so right now. I need like 70, 75 for Amazon to care, I guess, these days.
[00:55:28] So that would be wonderful.
[00:55:30] Pol Cousineau: And can they just punch it in on Amazon? Obviously, we’ll have links, but they could just search for it on
[00:55:34] Bill Flynn: Yeah, “The Hero Trap” on Amazon with my name. It’ll come right up
[00:55:39] Pol Cousineau: Excellent
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