Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman & Mark C. Winters | with guest Jodie Imam

0:01Welcome to Business Book Club, the show where top entrepreneurs break down the most powerful insights from the world's best business books. I'm your host, Sam Brown, and today we're diving into Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman and Mark Winters. Let me ask you this. Do you know anything about James Cousins or Roy Disney? Well, we know all about their business partners. Walt Disney dreamed up big stories, characters, and even theme parks. he was a visionary. But his brother Roy, he made the numbers work. He secured funding and he handled operations. Henry Ford, another visionary. He revolutionized the car industry, but none of it would have worked without his partner, James Cousins.

0:44He implemented the systems that enabled mass production at scale. So Walt Disney and Henry Ford, these are visionaries. Roy Disney and James Cousins, these are their integrators. Rocket Fuel, today's book, is about the visionary integrator relationship, how it works, how to manage it, and why, if it's functioning properly, it's rocket fuel for your business. It's co-written by the best-selling author, Gino Wickman. Gino is not just another business guru. He grew up in a family business, turned it around in his 20s, then spent years studying what made some companies thrive while others flopped.

1:19He created EOS, the entrepreneur's operating system that's helped over 200 ,000 leadership teams build businesses that scale. So I hope that's sufficiently wet your appetite for the book, but it only gets better. Joining me today is Jodie Iman. Jodie is the co-founder and CEO of Tractor Ventures. She's a non-exec director at Private Media Group and Fintech Australia. She's a champion for female leaders, a community builder, a serial startup mentor, and an entrepreneur at heart. She co-founded Occasional Butler, which was acquired by Airtasker in 2014 and Depo8 Coworking, one of Melbourne's first co-working spaces.

1:56And if that's not enough, she also directed startup programs at the Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship in Melbourne. You chose Rocket Fuel as the most impactful book that you've read. Why? It's probably one of the more recent ones. So I read it at the end of last year, but also it's one that I've fully embraced the tools as well as all the learnings. And it's actually changed how we work at Tractor and that has changed how I live my life. So it's had a big impact. So I've asked you to bring three of the biggest, most valuable lessons from the book. What's your first lesson? The first thing I took out of it was know your strengths and was very much around the visionary and the integrator and who's who and how to get comfortable with that.

2:41Great. So just before you dig into why it's so important to know your strengths, Can you just describe maybe a little bit of a typical integrator and visionary? When we picked up this book, it was something that my co-founder and at the time co-CEO were grappling with. Things weren't working with us. We just felt unproductive and that we're stepping on each other's toes or it just wasn't right. And a few people had said to us, read Rocket Fuel. And I think the thing that Rocket Fuel does with helping explain your strengths and weaknesses, it does it in the most ego gentle way. You know, with the visionary, it will talk about all the strengths, but then the weaknesses, then I think you look at the visionary as an absolute genius.

3:22And as in all geniuses, there are going to be characteristics that are sometimes not productive. So I think the way it's written and the way it's explained really helps appease the ego to the point that you can say, oh, yeah, that's definitely me and that's definitely not me. the visionary is big ideas think walt disney i suppose or steve jobs and the integrator is the person who kind of takes the vision and makes it happen because it doesn't fit in the skill set of most visionaries to get into the weeds and make stuff happen set up the systems that are really needed exactly yeah so the book make it very clear that in the case of my co-founder he is clearly the visionary one of their key characteristic is like solving the really big problems and sometimes as it means a visionary has to jump into sales if that's what it needs at the time but those sales typically would be like complex new like real problem solving style things whereas the visionary can't do is the consistent repetitive work that needs to be done to operate a business and whereas that's where I as integrator in this case I'm very comfortable in repeating the same tasks on a weekly daily basis for as long as it takes until we automate or delegate or whatever it is whereas Matt our visionary is more like he'll do the big chunky hard problem and then he'll move on to something else in the book there's a questionnaire for figuring out if you are a visionary or an integrator did you do that questionnaire yes we both teach yeah yeah and how kind of spot on were the visionary and integrator roles for the two of you because you might not have all of the characteristics of a visionary or all of the characteristics of an integrator but you need to sort of be complimentary.

5:01Yes. How did that play out when you actually went through the exercise? Yeah, I think for Matt, like as the visionary, he was just, you know, it was clear. It was like a visionary. But for me, mine was a bit more blurred. Like there was definitely more areas where my character did display some visionary trades. The whole reason that Matt, as the visionary, brought me into the business at the start was because he knew he needed someone who could run this operationally. So we kind of knew it. But then going through the survey and actually, as those surveys do, they ask you the same question three different ways to take out any bias and getting that result makes it so clear.

5:36But yes, that's exactly where we both see it. And we see it play out. If there's a big hero problem that needs to be solved, that's a mad thing. If there's something consistent, process-driven management of the team, 100 % me. Is that the biggest difference that it's made then, figuring out your strengths and weaknesses? the delegation and breaking up of tasks between you has just made it really easy so that you're always working in that area of genius for sure once we figured that out and we were very clear on it we changed our titles as well so we're no longer co-ceo i became ceo and matt became head of capital and new projects interesting which is very visionary and what happened when we did that too it made it so clear for everyone in the team external everyone i'm the ceo and it's very clear that matters head capital and shareholder relations and all the work that he did to set up the business is very much his camp so i think what helped do for everyone was understand where the responsibility sat and that just gave everyone so much more certainty yeah that's the other thing isn't it it's not just the two of you it's the rest of your leadership team and whole organization gets to understand who to go to for certain things yeah and that's why the book talks about this is the key relationship first, this is the tip of the iceberg.

6:50And then when you figure that out, then you can redesign the whole organization, which is what we did. One thing that was really amazing was when Matt did announce that he was not going to be the CEO, he was stepping into his genius zone and changing his title. We got so much feedback from all stakeholder groups about how much leadership he showed by being able to put his ego aside and say, I'm now going to step aside and do what I'm good at and be the visionary. A lot of people were just like, that's true leadership to be able to do that. And I think that was hard for him to be like, okay, I've tried to do a job that I'm not doing very well.

7:28And so I need to tell everyone, I tried this and I didn't do very well. And that's a hard thing to do, right? But actually everyone applauded it as strong leadership. Let's move on to your second lesson that you brought today. What was the second lesson? Structure creates flexibility. I'm conscious that there's multiple ways to sort of inject a structure. What is the bit of the book that you are thinking about here that relates to flexibility? It's called the 90-day scorecard. And it's a plan for 90 days that links to the strategy. Because we're a small team, there's 10 of us. Every single person in the team has key metrics that they're responsible for to deliver on in the 90 days.

8:09and all those deliverables add up to the company achieving its prime goal and everyone's accountable to those two or three different metrics every week and we all come together every week and there's no escaping it like you're telling the rest of the team you either hit the goal for the week or you're progressing to the goal each week or you're not and what that's done is I no longer need to have all these one-on-one meetings with everyone to check in on how they're going are they're on track because every single week we come together as a full team and we can see if we're on track or not and so it just has reduced the need for many other extra meetings it's even mere structure to just trust that each person's going to go and focus on that goal and if they are not I'll know about it the following week and so I've trusted they'll go and do that and that trust has given them also so much extra flexibility because I don't mind when they do it I don't mind if they finish at 3pm and go pick up their kids and go to the park.

9:07It doesn't matter when. It's just that it is getting done. And so everyone in our team is working to the hours that suit them. Some people love getting up really early and getting it done and then school pick up. Others work into the evening. We do a four-day work week. So none of us work Fridays. But we all come together on the Monday and we all know who's responsible for what part of the overall goal. And it's just been such an unlock. amazing so just digging into exactly what the 90 day scorecard is a lot of businesses track metrics in some way but this is like a really specific way of doing it there's like a line item for every metric and the reason it's called 90 days is because you're looking back at the last 13 weeks oh we're looking forward so we started in january for the first quarter so from january through to march and so it's as you go through the 90 days so week one is the first week of the nine of the three marks.

10:00And so you're tracking as you go. Ah, I got you. So a lot of people might be familiar with OKRs from John Doyle's book, Measure What Matters. Is it similar to OKRs? Would you say that there's a difference to the 90 day scorecard in OKRs? No. So for every metric we put in, we try and make them smart goals. So for example, I've got profit goals, which can't be tracked every single week, but I also do a lot of our content on LinkedIn, for example. So one of my goals in the last 90 days was on impressions. And it wasn't as a vanity metric. It was because that's the clear measure you get from LinkedIn impressions on your content.

10:35But those impressions then drive our marketing qualified leads and our sales qualified leads. And then others in the team, so the sales team had sales quotas, which are very easy to track, but also might partner referrals. The marketing qualified leads is a number. The sales qualified leads is a number. our tech platform 99 % uptime of our platform as a number yields profit all sorts of different things that people had accountability for I love the idea of having a quick one page or I don't know how big yours is but like kind of one page that that you can check your whole business health on and check in so regularly that it's just front and center and everyone sees what we've done is put percentage towards goal and we've done a cumulative.

11:21So for example, mine's an easy one because every week I'm getting new impressions. I add that to the subtotal and then that's a percentage of the goal. And so that percentage ticks up each week as we go along. Not every goal is that trackable and that regularly, but yeah, we're tracking against what the goal is for the 90 days as we go along. Like we had a meeting a few weeks ago because we were only 25 % of target on one of the metrics and we're nearly at the end of the 90 days. So this is a problem. Now let's put that into the issue part of the discussion and work out what we do because we can see that we're not tracking as we should be.

11:54So how often do you change your metrics? Do you refresh them every 90 days? Yes. So you never changed them before that? Oh, well, yeah, I've been pretty strict on us. Once the goal's in, we're tracking that goal through to the 90 days. But I don't want to be that rigid that if things come up and it's better to have a different metric. So in some cases, we've put in an additional metric, but I've kept the original metric in there just as a record so that by the end of the 90 days, even if we stopped working on it, we knew that at the start of the 90 days, we thought that was a metric, but during the period of time, we realized it wasn't.

12:29But I don't want to just delete it and forget that we ever had that there. So that's kind of how I see it. What's been the biggest change since implementing this? I think the biggest change is that we've never as a team felt more aligned. Every single person in the team feels like they're a key contributor to our success. And everyone has joy and gets a lot of benefit out of seeing what everyone else in the team is doing on a weekly basis. Because we all work remote and sometimes you're just in your area and you don't really see what's happening in other areas of the business. But by all coming together and sharing everyone's metric every week and what they've done to move their thing along, it's been very beneficial for others to just have that more holistic understanding of what's happening across the whole company.

13:12What is the third lesson? Yeah, so the third lesson is this level 10 meeting, which is another tool in the book. And it kind of goes hand in hand with the 90 day scorecard because it's a set meeting. It's 90 minutes blocked in. We do it every month at lunchtime. It's everyone in the whole team for us because there's 10 of us come together. And we work through the level 10 meeting agenda, which is kind of going through the highlights from last week, any customer highlights, that sort of thing. and any personal wins just sort of all getting together and then it goes into the 90-day scorecard where we'll go through and talk every single person will talk about where they're at with their metrics and then there's a whole section and the biggest part of this meeting is for discussing any problems so it's around issue resolution so as a team and if this was a leadership team and it was four or five like it works really well it's a bit hard for us with the whole team.

14:06It's a hard conversation that we haven't got right. But the whole thing is that this is where we discuss any issues. And so, for example, if someone isn't tracking to their metrics and they're behind and this rate won't hit their target, that's a problem. And we've tried to then pull that out into the next part of the meeting and talk about, okay, what are some ideas and how do we solve this problem so that we get back on track? But it is something that we're still struggling to get right, that part of it. Is it literally just the size of the group? that you think is the problem or are there just other bumps as well to the format?

14:40Well, we're struggling with what is a problem that's a good problem for us to, as a group, try and solve that for one. And I've just made up things like, well, we're not tracking, we're not on track, so let's talk about that. And because of that, I think in this problem solution section of the meeting, ideally you've got, okay, this is our problem. This is the pre-reading. Everyone put in their ideas and let's do our research. like actually have some meat on the bone before you're actually coming to me to discuss the issue we haven't done that well enough and there hasn't been I guess a very clear issue for us to then go okay this is a clear issue that we should bring to the meeting in two weeks time after we've done all the pre-work and we're ready to discuss it in a meaningful way from the 90 day scorecard you know in every other area of the business problems get surfaced as a team put these into the agenda into So the issue resolution section.

15:32And the difficulty is that making sure that you've only got the problems in there that are relevant to be speaking about as a big group. Is that the main thing? I guess so. So we've kind of adapted this tool to suit us. The extra discussion really comes out of the scorecard. So we'll do all of our highlights and go around the room and personal wins and that sort of thing, which is great just reconnecting as humans and as a team. And then we go through the no guy scorecard. and then that's where everyone gets to share and gets the transparency across the organization. And then if something has come out of that conversation, we might stay and talk about that a little longer.

16:08And then the fun part of this meeting is you have to rate the meeting. Everyone in the meeting has to give it a rating out of 10. And so the aim is that it's a 10 out of 10 meeting for everyone, meaning that it's worth their time, productive, useful, helpful for them to go and do their job. And so that's always a fun bit. And I've actually started sharing the host duties around. So I'm not running every single meeting. So everyone else in the team has had a turn of running the meeting. And then when the team waits the meeting, it's been a bit of fun as to whether that person's been able to get a tenner or not.

16:41When you do exercises from books like this and you try and implement things, how do you think about what is important and what is the thing that makes this meeting a tool, a benefit for your company and what you can drop out of it do you try and do everything and then whittle down and kind of figure out which don't work and then over a few reps it kind of gets better exactly and we tried by the book like literally this is the agenda it's in a notion page that we all we know where it is i'm like now we have to do this bit now we have to do that bit exactly as it was by the book but then when we were getting six and sevens as a rating for the meeting and the reasons people were rating it so low was because the IDS part, the problem solving part was clunky and unproductive.

17:23So that's where we tried it a few different times and a few different ways. And then we've got to a point now that we just don't push it, push that part, but it's there. And I think we know if we had an issue that we think we can always bring it back in. You know, if you ask someone to name a number, the majority of people say seven. So when I implemented this rating meeting system a little while ago as well in some of the meetings i run and the one rule is like nobody can pick seven yeah if they're like on the fence it's like oh what is it was it good was it all right everyone goes for seven and then you make them make a decision like was it good and then pick an eight or something and then actually does this need improvement and then they go down to a six it makes it a lot more obvious i found that really helped me anyway yeah yeah it's funny we used to have a sort of a pulse check and everyone in our leadership team had to give a number between one and five but you couldn't choose three because otherwise everyone's just three all the time but in this case we haven't done it but it's a lot of eights there's a lot of eights and nines so what's been the impact then there have been bumps it's not like the easiest thing and you're still trying to iterate and get it right what it looked like before implementing this versus after and how it shifted the dynamic of the team or what's improved yeah i mean i feel like everyone has just felt way more engaged.

18:37They feel way more informed, feel more ownership. They feel more empowered. And so the results have been phenomenally better. And actually just this week I've been doing performance reviews and it's the most easiest performance review process I've ever done because for one, I can look back at the last 180 days and see exactly how everyone tracked to their accountable measures for one, but then they do an up with a feedback with me and the feedback's been, they've never been happier. They really appreciate the trust that's been instilled in them to do their thing. And by having that trust instilled in them, they've felt that they can really rise and it's lifted all of them.

19:21Like they're doing way more and bringing way more into their role than ever before. And you could just see that in a 90 day, 180 day period already that's incredible yeah it's fantastic i can see why you picked it as the most impactful book i can live rent free a lot more on all of these little elements because it's just there and everyone knows it's there and we look at it every week as a team and i don't have that as much overhead of just making sure i've got all the balls still in the air and so for me my life becomes less stressful just want to wrap up a little bit and just going to take us through the lessons.

19:55So first one was know your strengths. So this is starting with the most important relationship in the company, which is the co-founders. And once you've got this relationship right, you can then work on the rest of the org. So how you do this is figuring out what your strengths are and assigning someone the visionary and the integrator roles, someone to tackle the big problems and someone to get into the data, into the processes, into the organization and get things done. I think you said as kind of repetitive tasks, It helps you stop stepping on each other's toes and helps keep you working in your zone of genius.

20:26And one of the best ways that you did this was to change both of your titles from co-CEOs to CEO and head of capital. And this not only helps define everything, but it also built a lot of respect for you both from people in your company. Learning two, structure creates flexibility. So having all your business fundamentals on one page is super easy and it's a quick way to make sure that you're staying on track and enables you to solve problems before the P &L tells you that there's an issue, which is way too late. Another kind of upside of that is that it reduces the amount of meetings that you've had, which is always a bonus without losing productivity and has increased the trust because you've become more outcome orientated as an organization.

21:13And then it's learning three, the level 10 meetings. So there's a set meeting, 90 minutes every week, with a set agenda. And the bulky part of this is the issue resolution. So you have a place where the whole organization, in your case, 10 people get together and you can solve the biggest problems that you can see in the organization every week. Again, keeping you on track as an organization. And you rate this meeting with an aim of getting 10 out of 10 from everyone, which is something that I would encourage everyone to at least try out. It was a bit of a game changer for me If you don't know that the meetings are five out of 10, then you can't do anything to solve it.

21:47And then the biggest upside of this and this level 10 meeting, and I think probably all of this coming together, is it's built trust, it makes morale better. And not only is it an easier job for you because you can see the company, what's going on in the company better, but everyone is actually doing a better job as a result of all of this. So it's just wins on all fronts. Exactly right. Yeah. So before we go, can you tell us a little bit about Tractor Ventures and a different approach to funding? So we're called Tractor Ventures because we're different from the VC model in that we're not for the rockets.

22:21And so the rocket is that VC model where you've got an absolute moonshot. You've gone from very little to landing on the moon and maybe ringing the bell at the NASDAQ and you're a multi-billion dollar company. And that's the VC model because they need outsized returns on the one or two rockets that do land on the moon to return the whole fund. And so in my co-founders experience, we've seen many startups wanting to go on that rocket journey. But what happens is if they don't triple the business, then triple it again, then double, double, double as per the model, then the funding stops. And so the rocket runs out of fuel and falls to the ground.

22:59And so we want to provide a different sort of capital for the tractors or for the companies that either won't get VC funding anyway because they're never going to plan on it or they just don't want to go on that journey. Because once you give up those shares and that control, because often there's all sorts of board voting rights and all sorts of things that come along with that money. And so our capital is non-dollative. And so you can think of it as a business line that's unsecured. And we come at it from a founder lens. We're not from the finance industry, so we've designed flexible lending products that help founders keep control of their company and their ownership.

23:37It's best used for shorter-term return on investment activities like sales and marketing. We have now deployed over$95 million to over 230 companies and helping them just ramp up their marketing, ramp up their advertising, put more salespeople on the ground. it might be breaching to another round. So if they can get their revenue up, the next time they raise money, they're going to have a better valuation and therefore less dilution. So those kinds of things. So it actually works well if you don't want to sell shares, but it also works if you do want to continue to raise equity along the way, but just limit the dilution as you do it.

24:16That's incredible. I've not come across another VC that does anything similar. And do you still work in a similar way to other VCs where you still help the founders and meet them and give them advice and that sort of thing? That's a great question. Thanks for asking that. I missed that whole part of what we do, which is definitely we call it the village. And so we have all of our founders come together with all of our investors. So we have investors in Tractor to get us started who are all exited founders, mostly as a family officers and angels, but they've all had lots of experience. We also have growth partners.

24:49We have what we call perks partners. so AWS, Stripe, Notion all the big tech players that can give discounts so there's a lot of other value involved not just the money How can people get in touch with you if they want to find out a little bit more about that? Yeah so either through LinkedIn on LinkedIn most days or they can go to our website tractorventures.com that's the best way Great stuff and if you want to buy Rocket Fuel there's going to be a link in the show notes you'll be helping the show by clicking that link thank you so much for listening I hope that you taking away some really valuable lessons today and encourage you to put into practice something that you've learned today just don't wait get it done the last thing is that I also love to hear from you I'm also on LinkedIn so send me a message tell me what you're working on or you know how you like this episode so see you next time and thank you so much Jodie it's been great thank you