Leveraging Fractional Executives to Set Your Business on Fire with Eric Torigian

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Online Marketing Made Easy. Today, we'll be breaking down how to leverage fractional executives to set your business on fire. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Eric Tarigian and the EO Fire Studios. Eric is the founder and visionary behind the business operations and HR advisory practices at CHRO Solutions. He provides a unique perspective from his time as chief HR officer and leadership with companies such as Pepsi, Ford, at NBCUniversal and Comcast.

0:39And today at Fire Nation, we'll talk about how a big part of running a successful business is understanding the challenges, identifying the solutions, how to do this, how to get a thriving team working for you, and how to execute your action plan, Fire Nation, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Eric and our sponsors. Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Business Made Simple takes the mystery out of growing your business. Join my friend, Donna Miller, each week as he shares value bombs on topics like the secret to making better marketing decisions.

1:16Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Belay has spent over a decade helping thousands of leaders increase efficiency and productivity by leveraging flexible staffing solutions. Download Belay's delegation guide and learn six specific things that busy leaders must start delegating today. Text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E, to 55123 to download the guide and get started. Eric, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Well, you know what, John? When I think about a sentence like that, the immediate thing that comes to mind is how many people look and say, God, you're so lucky.

1:58And so much has happened to you that's luck. What they don't see is the hard work that's piled up behind those moments of luck. And I think at the end of the day, it's the people who, and I was thinking about the old Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and it's the picture of that pirate who puts the knife in his mouth and jumps from one ship to the next. And I think you just have to be willing to be that guy or gal where you're willing to commit everything. You pour yourself in, you jump from the ship, and you just go at it and you make things happen. I love that visual, brother. And Fire Nation, I know you're fired up to talk about leveraging fractional executives to set your business on fire.

2:40Because as you know, Eric, Fire Nation's made up of entrepreneurs, small business owners, and running a business can be hard. And a lot of people feel like they have to do it alone. Is that true? It's absolutely not true. Now, I will tell you this, when you're running a small business, and you know this as well as anybody, there's going to be days you better believe and you better be committed because there's going to be days where you are the only human being on the face of the earth who believes in what you're doing and some days you could have doubts too but if you can't pour that kind of passion in then you're in trouble now once you do you're not alone there's a lot of people around you who can support you who will walk the journey with you who will help you be successful but You're the hero in the story.

3:26Fire Nation, you're the hero in the story. I love that visual of that Tampa Bay Buccaneer jumping from ship to ship, knife in the mouth, asking and taking no quarter, just making things happen. And something that you've identified for sure, Eric, and I've obviously experienced it as well, is that a huge part of running a successful business is actually understanding the challenges and then identifying solutions. Let's go through this process. How do we do this? I will tell everybody, I'll tell the whole nation that I am at heart a salesperson. And early on in my career, I was trained by a very traditional Dale Carnegie salesperson.

4:08And what I learned was it's not the old joke of how do you fool somebody and how do you sell them a car with low mileage, right? What it is is how do you identify a problem and then create a solution to the problem? And if you can figure that one thing out, that's the core of all leadership. That's the core of everything we do in business. So much so that I have actually built an HR operating system that's entirely aligned around this one concept, which is how do you go identify problems people are having and then enable them to create solutions? Don't come give people solutions. Those are not meaningful.

4:51Those never get traction. Those never make it. Help them journey. They're the hero. Help them get to the solution themselves. Make enough people's dreams come true and so will all yours. One thing that I know a lot of our listeners understands is the value of creating a thriving team. Because in most cases, a thriving team means a thriving business. Not in all cases, but in a lot of cases. So let's talk about evaluating our team correctly and then the process of turning that into a thriving team. Yeah, and this has been a huge, huge learning for me. And I've been the team person for 30 plus years, and I've been leading transformations in HR and doing this work for a long time.

5:41And what I've realized now, and I've got the data to look at from mid-market companies and below and private equity and some giant companies, it's the number one factor that drives performance in any organization is leadership effectiveness. this. And why is that? It's because the better job you can do as a leader, the better job your teams can do making an impact. And the better your teams do making an impact, the easier it is to attract, develop, and retain those high-performance people. And this has been such a huge piece of how I want to help people make a difference that I came up with this thing that I call the leadership maturity model.

6:24And we actually do an audit based on this model. And the model's got nine different tracks. So what we do is we assess you. There's 10 different levels to it. And I assess organizations, whether they're immature, emerging, established, mature, or world-class. And then I look at them across a couple of different tracks. What are your company policies? So do you have just basic policies? Do you have a handbook in place or do you have strategic policies that are aligned in delivering what you want to as a business? Communications. How do you communicate? Are there informal communications? Is everything gossip and backdoor discussions?

7:06Or have you engaged the power brokers? And are conversations aligned between what leadership is saying and what the power brokers are saying? Is there ownership of messaging at all levels? Then we move in and we look at organization design. And do you have a strategic organization in place? Or is it informal? Or did it just grow at random? Do you have a bench? Do you have a succession for your people? Do you know? Like a world-class organization has a three-person deep bench for any role. Well, Eric, we're a really small company. We don't need this. Well, yes, you do. I'm not saying that you have to have three people identified for every role waiting in the closet, but you should know three moves out how you're going to solve problems if a problem comes up.

7:54Then change leadership. How do you manage change? So many organizations just let change happen to them, where if you can make change one of your core values and you can put this into your DNA and you can get ownership at all levels, and you're going to hear this word a lot, right? Ownership. you're going to be a world-class organization and then we look at the employee life cycle pillars and how do you do talent acquisition how do you do talent management how do you reward your employees how are you engaging them and all of this leads to my favorite and this is the one that you get asked a lot and i think all your listeners are going to start nodding their heads because we always hear this and how do i change my culture well you you can't change your culture and you don't pick your culture.

8:38There is no F of X for culture. Culture is the output of all these other things. Now, Fire Nation, I think that's probably the biggest takeaway is that culture is the outcome of all those other things. And a lot of people want to just start and say, you know what, I'm going to change my culture. Well, there's steps, there's processes, there's things you need to do before that culture is being able to be adjusted to the manner that you want it to. Now, one thing that I do want to talk about is growing our team and we have some other things to discuss as well when we get back Fire Nation from thanking our sponsors.

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12:11Text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E, to 55123 to download the guide and get started. Delegate to Belay so you can focus on what matters most. Eric, we're back. And as I kind of alluded to before the break, growing our team is what a lot of my listeners are looking at doing. And they want to do it the right way because they want to grow revenue. They want to grow their business. They want to be focused on the things that they want to be focusing on and having their team doing the other thing. So let's talk about building an action plan to grow our team in the most effective and efficient manner. I love the words you just used.

12:48It's action plan. And so many people are out there today and there's so many voices in the wilderness that are giving philosophy and they're giving these nebulous concepts, but very few people are actually building action plans. So what I want people to do is, you got to remember, talent acquisition is an advertising marketing function of your business. I will tell you that your recruiters have more contact with your customers than your sales team does many times. So the first thing you need to do, no matter what size organization you are, is you need to figure out what's your value proposition.

13:26Why should I come work for you? So look at all of your employees as independent contractors. They're independent providers. So I don't hire an FP &A person to just come do accounting for me. I go contract with this FP &A provider who happens to have one customer who's me. Now, what are you going to do to attract that person to come work for you as opposed to your competitor down the street? Once you understand that, you can now start to have these meaningful conversations. Real quickly, this turns into a talent management discussion because hiring good people only happens when you have a plan to develop them and move them forward.

14:11And I tell every organization, you have to put employee development into your DNA. You got to be thinking about what is going to happen. How am I going to grow these people? How am I going to train them? because otherwise you're just going to start training people for your competitors. Once you get them in, now you got to take a really good hard look at how are you rewarding people. It's not just pay anymore. Pay is table stakes. Now we have to look at the benefits. How do they work? Do they fit people's lifestyles today? What's our work modality? Can people work from home? Can they work from their cottage?

14:47Can they work from the beach? And why do you care? And if there's a meaningful reason why you care, how are you going to communicate that back to the work group? All of this should drive that employee engagement. And what are we really looking for out of employee engagement? But you know you've got it when people choose to spend their, you know, people have free time. It's almost like excess time. How do they choose to spend it? If they choose to spend it moving your vision and your mission forward, now you've got engagement. Fire Nation, this is an individual that has been there, has done that.

15:22He's grown teams. He's put together action plans to make sure that they are growing in that effective and efficient manner that we're talking about. But let's be honest, Eric. Creating a plan is one thing. Executing is another. So let's spend the rest of our time together today talking about the best ways to execute this action plan. And that's an incredible segue because I think number one, you've got to be authentic and you've got to build trust when you're executing these plans. And I always go back to an employee who worked at Frito-Lay. She sat outside of my office and she was a receiving clerk.

16:02So she received all the rail cars into the manufacturing facility and she hated her job and she wanted to quit. And she would come in almost every day. She hates it. They hate her. She hates them. I want to go. I want to go. I want to go. And one day I sat her down. I said, listen, Mary, we're going to do $900 million in revenue as a region. That's a lot of bags of chips. To do that, we have to produce this many cases of chips. To produce this many cases of chips, we have to turn our fryers over this many times. To turn our fryers over this many times, we have to receive this many railcars full of fresh oil and dispatch this many rail cars of used oil.

16:43And the only person in this entire company who can effectively do that is you. The light came on because now she wasn't receiving rail cars anymore. She was enabling$900 million in revenue. That's what I mean by taking actions and being authentic and having these value-based discussions with people. Don't be afraid to talk Talk to your people like adults. They're adults. They can handle these conversations. You've got to be open with them. We have this great leadership maturity assessment, and we'll come in. If this would work for you, just contact me, reach out. I'm happy to do this for people.

17:24We do this all the time. We'll score you. What score you get will show you where you rank based on each one of these tracks. tracks but most importantly what we give you is an action plan to grow each one of these tracks. First thing we do is we get you synchronized. So if you are way behind in communications you're doing a great job in change leadership well we get your communications up to speed then we get you all to one level then we put action plans in place to grow and you only grow by taking one step at a time and this is the same as how we started this discussion you know how do you become a success?

18:00Well, you don't stop until you're successful and you keep taking these steps forward. You have a vision, you have a plan and you go implement it. There's a lot that I love about this Fire Nation. I mean, treating people like adults, giving them the right motivation, giving them the right understanding, like having that shift of what she was doing every day to what she was actually in charge of accomplishing. I mean, such a mindset shift. And, you know, don't over micromanage because you want these individuals to take responsibility and to have pride into what they're accomplishing because then they're responsible for the outcome.

18:37They can't blame, I was just following orders. No, like you are in charge of coming up with a plan of your area of expertise and executing upon that. Make that happen. Give them that responsibility. So Eric, you shared so much great content today. What would you say is the one key theme, the one takeaway that you really want our listeners to get from our conversation? The most important thing is that the number one factor driving performance in any organization is leadership effectiveness. And I always use the analogy, I can go buy my eight-year-old son a Ferrari tomorrow. I wish I could, but I probably could.

19:16But he is going to go out there and he's going to smash it. If I give him these instructions, teach him how to drive, a golf cart could be just as effective. We see as organizations constantly, they spend all this money on super sophisticated tools. They go out there and they try to find the greatest new system and the greatest new tool, but they never pause and say, are my leaders effective? If we could slow down, make leaders effective, give them the tools, give them the engagement, give them the direction and the vision, we're going to do so much more for our teams. Fire Nation, this is why we're talking about leveraging fractional executives to set your business on fire.

20:03Eric, if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, if they want to learn more about what you have going on, give us your call to action. I am on LinkedIn. I post every day at 815 and it's some topic around HR leadership, leadership effectiveness, and a lot of stuff I've been doing in the private equity space. Come follow me there. Come join in the discussion. You can find me at Eric Tarigian on LinkedIn. We're on Instagram at Corner Office Lessons. You can find me on Twitter. There's a lot of places that we can engage in this discussion. And we're really looking to help. We're really looking to make a difference and we're just wanting to be you know part of your success story and we're there to walk alongside with you and don't feel like oh this is so overwhelming or oh I don't need a giant HR team or oh I can't afford this you can't afford not to have this and we have I have a doctor's office that I just signed up to to help them out they're five people all the way up to an organization that's got 4 ,000 people.

21:07So don't let it scare you. Just come and get the help. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with ET and JLD today. So keep up that heat. For everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type Eric, E-R-I-C in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. Eric, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, brother, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks, Sean.

22:05And you can get it all in one place when you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Business Made Simple takes the mystery out of growing your business. Join my friend, Donald Miller, each week as he shares value bombs on topics like the secret to making better marketing decisions. Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Belay has spent over a decade helping thousands of leaders increase efficiency and productivity by leveraging flexible staffing solutions.

22:44Download Belay's delegation guide and learn six specific things that busy leaders must start delegating today. Text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E, to 55123 to download the guide and get started.