E655 | Dave Bailey, FounderCoach.com: From Founder to Coach - Competence, Curiosity & Scaling European Tech

27:45When you start working with a customer, what are the core things typically, yeah, even though every case is different, that you try to do ASAP, yeah, to achieve results? So maybe walk us through a few, and then I would love to zoom a bit more into founder mode what's your what's your video so very curious to go into that as well well let me tell you a little bit about my methodology i actually think a lot of coaching companies i think majority of coaching companies are really built around the coach that's why the you know the heart of most coaching practices is is the one-on-one and the one-on-one little trade secret it's like the easiest session to run as a coach don't let them fool you otherwise you go in you ask questions you say something smart there's no prep there's no post it's it's very convenient and a lot of coaches will build around that but i don't believe that if you if you really want to build a coaching system that delivers results i don't believe it's the most effective in fact we'll talk about founder mode after i run my business in founder mode and i can share with you some of the insights from that so i really wanted to build a very founder-centered approach And it's taken me, what, seven years of continuous iteration.

28:55When I say iteration, I mean, you know, we take feedback to the extreme. My company, we're collecting feedback signals every day and working around it. But let me tell you how the approach works by explaining some of the core principles. So the first thing is, if you want to get what you want, you have to know what you want. And so a lot of what we do early on and actually throughout is just helping founders to really clarify what it is they want. Sounds like a trivial question. my experience is none of us know what we want. If I asked either of you what you want and I kept asking it five or six times, the fifth time would be different from the first time and you'd be confused.

29:31You're like, actually, what the hell do I want? So this is why one of the pillars of my approach is planning. I bring all of my clients together once a quarter and we plan their CEO agenda. So CEOs often conceptualize their role as the company's results and the things I need to achieve. I'm like, no, that's not true. The company has goals, which is what everyone needs to align to. And the CEO has goals. They're different from the company goals. The CEO contributes to the company goals in a very defined way. And so we do a lot of planning. We build a roadmap. We clarify the specific results that the founders want to achieve over the quarter.

30:07Their responsibility is to get the results. My responsibility is to them to help them get results. Second big principle, competence before confidence. so like i say the emotional challenges around being a ceo and actually we know right that the the we got wimbledon in the uk right now we know that the person who wins wimbledon when they go into that final they're the most focused the most confident they know exactly what they have to achieve and they're like they they're unwavering but what you don't see are the years of practice that goes before that so i believe that confidence is a result of competence which is why i place a really big focus on training.

30:47I think training is the single most undervalued thing you can do in business. We expect people to come with all of the right behaviors, frameworks, and knowledge. And we're like, I'm not going to train you. Take too long. I've made it my business to be the most effective, efficient trainer of CEOs out there. So training's number two. Number three, fastest way to learn is to teach. You both know this, right? When you're explaining something to someone else, First of all, you learn all the stuff that, you know, people ask you good questions, kind of makes your own knowledge more robust. Also like leans into your own cognitive biases where like, okay, I'm really going to like focus on this for a period of time while I help other people level up.

31:29And every coach knows this. We get better when our clients get better. So I've actually integrated peer to peer coaching and support into my model. So we've got planning, we've got training, we've got peer to peer. Number four, action precedes clarity. You can overthink your problems all you like. You can connect your problem with what happened in your childhood and figure it out from there and sort of go down, you know, the, what do they say? The turtles go all the way down. But we place a really big focus on action. Action is what gets results. Doing things differently or doing things at all, if you've been avoiding stuff, is what gets results.

32:09We place a really big emphasis on agency. It's your job to get the results. I'm here to support you. What that means is if a client wants to call today after this call, we'll do it. Whatever is needed to get the result. And then we want to celebrate those results. And then the fifth is that company building is a marathon, not a sprint. And that means if you're a coach and you're, you know, you're thinking about your businesses, I'm going to work with you for three months. I'm going to teach you what I know and move on to the next one. I don't know if that's how business building works. I don't think you get that one insight and then everything changes.

32:46I think, frankly, every month you need a new insight. And so I built my process as a very long-term affair. So I think the average tenure of a client with me is something like 2.8 years, but it's highly skewed because I'm still working with many founders for, you know, five, six, seven years. And in point four, is it mainly that you just help them to really develop smart goals and then track whether they execute on it and to build a pattern of execution or how do you help them to be more actionable? So one thing that I learned along the way is that visual clarity is the highest form of clarity.

33:28A lot of the things that hold CEOs back is just knowing what good looks like. Maybe they're hiring. Like, I don't know what a good CMO looks like at this stage. Maybe they're having a difficult conversation. They're like, I don't know what a difficult conversation should look like, what the outcome should look like. Maybe they're doing a strategy and they've got like a 50 page strategy doc. No one remembers it or reads it. What does a good strategy doc look like? So a lot of my methods help people visualize what good looks like. Because when you have a super, when it's super, super clear what you need to do, you do it.

34:00So I'll give you a little story. This is about like four years ago. I was working with a client a really successful client but really complex problem the kind of problem that I hadn't seen before we were talking it through and about halfway through I'm a visual thinker halfway through I pull out my notepad and I start sketching and I'm like hang on is it does it look like this and I drew a triangle and it was the fastest route to an insight I've ever seen so he looked at the triangle he's like oh my god that's obviously it and I know exactly what I need to do. I've come to learn that visual models provide a really good way to help people get super clear on what needs to happen.

34:39I've built over 500 visual models. You know, it's squares, it's circles, it's triangles. Because if you get the right model, it's the fastest road to an insight. And a model, by the way, what a model is really doing is it's helping you, it's basically asking you to locate yourself on this model. It's asking the right questions, but a gray model is prescribing the right thing to do. This is what you need to do. So very quickly, I help my clients understand to get this result, this is the shape of the conversation that needs to be had and this is what you need to do. And on the behavioral level, it's actually made things super clear, but the behaviors over time really shape the mindset.

35:24And so agency is, you need the insight, you need the motivation, you need the capability. and what I try to do is to give them all three so they can act and get the result. And do you help them as well to implement kind of visual storytelling in their companies, right, to embed that in a culture? I actually think back to my days, like quite some time ago, I worked at Amazon, right, that what they use really well is a two by two and it goes all the way up. Yeah, so where essentially two by twos can look different, but it's typically business update, top left, risk challenges, then you go into like metrics and into benefit for a customer.

36:00And what it really forces you to do is to really think like what matters, you know, what is really important here. And then it's condensed all the way up to CEO level. Do you help companies with implementing this kind of stuff, whatever it is, different visual methods? Okay. Let me tell you a story. A lot of insights are delivered orally. And the way it works is you think about the anatomy of a one-on-one session. You talk, talk, talk, you're building up this context and some content and then as a coach you might either ask a question or drop an insight and it super lands but oral insights have three big problems the first is that they're slow to deliver it requires a lot of context building it requires that sort of putting the person in the right mindset putting all the pieces together for the insight to drop number two that makes them really hard to share so imagine this see who comes out of your board meeting it's like it's so clear now.

36:58Thank you board. Let me just share this with the team. All of a sudden, now you've placed a huge burden on them to try and create all of that context in order to get the team to understand it. Number three, it's really easily forgotten. You feel really good, right? You come out of that session, oh, I got that clarity. Two days later, you go, it's gone. And so what I realized is that visual clarity is the highest form of clarity. So let me tell you at least five things that visual models do. which is going to answer a question. The first thing a visual model will do, it will take a complex problem and it'll break it down into a number of questions that you need to answer.

37:36So it takes one big question into five little questions that are much easier. And what's more, it's not a blank page. It's like there's a model and you just have to answer the questions. Number two, it creates an insight that's much easier to explain. Explain the model, the insight drops, the insight lands. Number three, it depersonalizes the insight. So imagine you have to give some difficult feedback to the team. It's you and them. And the team are looking at you and they're like, you moron, you're so mean. Why are you telling this to me? With a model, you're both looking at the model. The model is independent.

38:19It's writing on a piece of paper. So it makes difficult insights and useful insights far easier to have those conversations. Number four, it focuses attention because we're all visual people. If we've got sight, we like to look at stuff. It's not just about thinking. And number five, it's shareable. So one of my clients, it's about a year ago, I said, and we've been working together for like five years. I'm like, what's the biggest result you've had from Founder Coach? And she turns to me and said, she thinks about it. She's like, tools and frameworks that I can apply to the team. and it feels like I'm cheating.

38:58It feels like I am cheating because like, you know, I showed them the model. They got the insight. They got the result. I feel happy, et cetera. And so, you know, remember I mentioned like one-on-ones have some drawbacks. As a founder and you need, when you need to scale your business, you'll quickly find your calendar becomes overwhelmed with one-on-ones. And even if you get better and better at doing one-on-ones, it's almost like you're becoming better and better at a job. You're just going to have to fire yourself from later because groups are the only thing that scale. And it turns out in the pursuit to teach managers how to run good one-on-ones, we underplay the importance of how to run great group meetings.

39:40And so like a model completely transforms your ability to communicate an insight to an entire group. And when you look at the best founders, they limit the number of one-on-ones that they have. And what they'll say is, you know, I hire people who are senior enough and they don't need them. But what they really mean is, I've actually figured out a few things that make our meetings a lot better and more useful. So I conceptualize my role as codifying what the best do into something actionable. And when you do the thing, it really does transform who you are as a leader. Just like coaching. Coaching is mysterious, it's vague, it's, you know, Do you have to know about psychology and trauma?

40:24Well, if you learn some basic behaviors and put them into practice, you will learn a huge amount about yourself and it will change. I've had people who go through Founder Coach and they're like, it's completely changed my relationship with my kids. Because how you do one thing is how you do anything. And so to your point, model is very, very powerful. And I've really made it the bedrock of my practice. I'm going to ask three very different questions. one, if you have to pick one, what's one of your favorite visual models? Whatever it is, yeah? Just the first one maybe that comes up that you've used a lot.

41:00Just curious. Second, you mentioned the group coaching, sorry, group meetings, yeah? Versus one-on-ones, they're not scalable. What is, if you, again, have to pick one, the most important thing to keep in mind, yeah? Like hosting, scalable group meetings. and the last one that and that's it's good that you're writing it down is i saw a video and i really loved what you are saying about product launches because what you said about product launches is you can use it ongoing as a way to align the concrete and i love that it's like building it's a milestone the whole company works towards so i know it's a lot packed in that's why I said three very different questions, but I'd love to hear.

41:45Let's go. Let me make sure I've captured the questions. One was, what's my favorite model? Visual model. The second one was, what's one thing for a group to improve your meetings? Yeah. So for the listener, for the founder of this instance here, you know, switching more and more from one-on-ones to group meetings. Yeah. To be more scalable. What's one thing that should pay attention to, you know, like that you find most important. Oh yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Running group meetings. and the third one goes into the product launches okay all right so my favorite model look my favorite model is always the last one i created so if you if you go to davebailey.com and you go to the workshop tab you can actually see the workshop that you've that you've seen and um i think the the model that had the big one well there's a few models that were really uh that really landed the we'll go into the product launch one as well the the recurring product launch but The other one was the onboarding on-ramp.

42:41So how to think about onboarding execs. That really resonates. So it's maybe not my favorite, but one that we're really discussing a lot in the community right now is about how to do great onboarding. And it's really the opposite of how most founders do it. And the model visualizes it. Maybe you could even remember the shape, right? Like it's a very visual system. It works really well. Given time, the best way to find that out would be on daybuild.com. So if you're trying to deleverage the amount of one-on-ones in your calendar, a couple of things to look out for. It's a broader topic, but I'll just pick two.

43:15The first is, particularly if you're an early stage founder and you don't have the kind of founder style, highly experienced, I know what I'm doing leaders, dropping one-on-ones is probably a bad thing to do. So I think one-on-ones are absolutely appropriate when you have slightly more junior people who need a little bit of showing the ropes, particularly on, you know, team dynamics and the basics. So if you have like a junior on your team, dropping one-on-ones, you need to do gradually and you need to make sure or put in other support mechanisms such as training. We do a lot of work on helping founders create training, rapid training to help people like that.

43:57So, but it's a bit of a gotcha, right? So the answer isn't to just like can all your one-on-ones. You have to do it appropriately. And then when it comes to group meetings, I would say one of the things that happens to a lot of my client or we work with a lot of our clients to do very early on is to radically deleverage their calendar. Many of them achieve 50, 60, 70 % freeing up of their time. So it's not a question of freeing up a couple of hours. We'll actually show people ways to lead their entire team in one or two days. And I think of all the people who've done my workshops, that's one of the biggest like, oh my God, I didn't realize you could do that.

44:32I'll show you how it's done. And then you do it. And so I get these messages from clients being like, I can't believe it. Like I freed up so much of my time. And the way to do it is this, or one of the components, you need to get really intentional with your meetings. And you need to understand that as a CEO, I mean, what I'm saying really applies uniquely to founder CEOs and to leadership, than elsewhere in the company. You need to really understand that your meetings need to serve you so that you can serve the team. So the team meeting is somewhat of a misnomer. I think the team meeting is really the CEO meeting.

45:11It's where the team are providing the CEO with the context, the information, the transparency so that the CEO can help guide the ship, coach when needed in public and actually run the business, which is what the CEO needs to do. And by doing that, by actually focusing, it's actually really helpful. By focusing on that, it actually helps the team to collaborate too. So I think you've got to get really intentional with your meetings to say, what meetings do I need to run the business and achieve my goals as a CEO? And what you'll find is, once you've clarified that, you completely rationalize the number of meetings in your calendar.

45:47And that opens up time. Now, a lot of people think I'm suggesting that they don't spend any time with their team for 70 % of the time. What I really mean is that the regular meetings of which are highly intentional and you design to support you free up so much of your time that you can now, if that's your, you know, if that's the thing that you love to do, spend time coaching and thought partnering with the team in a completely different way from like a full calendar of recurring meetings, which is, it's a motivation killer for CEOs and founders. The third question, product launches. So this is a big secret.

46:22a lot of people think product launches are about marketing and they think that it happens at the very beginning you know just build the product if this wave of energy like we're going to launch on the you know the 31st of july and so there's this wave of energy everyone's focused on the launch what happens the scope that you wanted to launch with you're like no that's not going to work we need to cut the scope because we are we are going to make this date we've promised some people Brink brought some investors, we brought some customers together and we're going to launch. All right, marketing.

46:56Well, just think about what that launch is doing for you. It's making it super clear that we have a scope, we have a deadline, and the whole scope is designed to present to customers what you're doing. This is strategy. This is a strategic conversation. What are we showing our customers? And it presupposes that the most important thing is customers, which it is. question then becomes why launch just once how many of your customers remember your launch from you know 2015 no one does so launches are not this like one-time marketing event they're a strategic forcing function to have an external deadline focused on customers that provides your team with alignment it provides them with accountability and a huge moment to celebrate once it's done.

47:47And so it builds this kind of ambition within the team as well. And then I tell you this, and then I say this, every single at-scale tech company does product launches every year. Every single one of them. From the Apple showcase event that we just had a few days ago, to the Google IOs, the Facebook, and then all the B2B companies, they have these launches as well. So the launch is a strategic tool used in founder leadership It's one of these like invisible, visible practices that I collect and teach to align the complete team. And it goes even further. Not only are you aligning the team, it's a marketing moment for your customers.

48:29You can invite customers. You can invite prospects. You can invite investors. And they're all looking at you for that half an hour or two hours and listening to what you're saying. So you're bringing them in. You're creating this exclusivity. You're creating a community. by the way in the world of ai everything kind of evaporates except for community because everything else is copyable you can't copy community you're building community you're allowing you're basically getting feedback directly from customers how many times have you heard a founder say i wish i could get my my tech team to speak with customers i wish i could get my xyz team to speak more with customers well invite the whole team invite the whole team so that they can speak to customers and then what are you doing for customers?

49:12You're saying, customers, there's a point in time where I want you to look at me for like two hours and you're literally telling them all of the features of your product. What an amazing opportunity to increase retention. So you increase the sales, you increase retention. So it's a big secret and it's an incredibly powerful strategic tool. It's like way more powerful than OKRs. Okay, because OKRs is not as much as a forcing function. It's not a real deadline either, like three months. The financial calendar is not as much as a real deadline. And there's something immensely clarifying to say, okay, in six months, we're going to bring together our best customers.

49:51And we're going to show them what we've done for them. Yeah, I love that. I love that alignment and building up momentum. Yeah, thank you. I mean, I would love to maybe turn a bit into the other side of the metal. We can touch this briefly. But what would be your key advice for VCs? You work with a lot of venture-backed startups. You've been a VC before. you see the dynamic between the founder and the vcs all the time so what would be here your ask you know what what should vcs be better at what we should should we pay attention to what are you seeing in the ecosystem i would say a couple of things so i'm going to give you the same or give vcs the same advice like your founders i think it's a really worthwhile discussion to have maybe a couple times a year about what is the role of the ceo and what is the role of the board because boards don't have the same remit, right?

50:42There's the textbook thing, but then every board member is going to come in with a bit of an assumption. Who really sets the strategy? What does that mean? What do we do? What are the people's roles when there's disagreement about the strategy? Who makes the final call? Et cetera, et cetera. So I think actually clarifying the remits and the roles really, really helpful. We would do this anywhere else. I'd also, I do this with all my clients, have some sort of feedback loop on the board. could be two questions what went well what didn't go well but have some sort of feedback on the board by the way just as a slight aside when i'm doing my work at least some of the work i do with founders is in group and the way i run my groups my founders then imitate in their companies so you ask like how do you get better at groups well you need a model to follow you need someone to follow and so we always get feedback from every single session in the session it only takes a minute you get that feedback so i think if every board has had a feedback loop i think it'd be much more effective wouldn't it that's how we learn the last one because i thought about this a little bit is i think as a vc it's really worth at least asking yourself as i assume this board position do i fit with the company's culture or is the oh to flip it around is the company culture a fit for me?

52:04Because I think that should be more of a discussion about how the setup of the board is aligned to the company's way of working, which by the way, in a founder-led company is very linked to the founder's way of working. So if I was saying, what would I predict a really effective VC-CEO relationship to look like? It'd be one in which they have very similar ways of working, approaching problems etc etc in many cases by the way this actually cuts across the grain because one of the common narratives is that we should always value diversity over everything including diverse ways of working and i think that while it sounds true i don't know if it is and i actually think that's understanding the things that you you demand similarity is a really powerful thing to do because it's not all about, I think the diversity thing is important, but it crowds out.

53:00When is similarity essential? So I would be looking for somehow some similarities. It's got nothing to do with what group you are part of. It's actually more of a belief. You can think of it as a belief system or a mindset or a set of approaches and behaviors to certain things. I would look at that and take it seriously because you can have the perfect company. And if the way the CEO wants to run their business is fundamentally different from the way you would run your business, you're going to have a lot of conflict that just slows things down and actually in in the game that we're all playing speed is absolutely paranoid we just want to move fast and learn and iterate so slow you know diversity often leads to better decisions but what people don't talk about is they're much slower much slower decisions and particularly if you believe in consensus then it's even slower consensus business building takes a lot of time so take from that where you will discard the bits you don't like.

53:56I especially agree in the board part of the dynamic dimension, because I think that's often very toxic, where it becomes a reporting exercise for the CEO, right, to sit for two hours and like show all the numbers and then get some, you know, very obvious questions from the DC sitting there at the table, where it could be turned around into like reporting up front, we ask some of the key questions up front, and we focus the session purely into where are the bottlenecks? What is it that the company needs? And taking into additional people, for instance, into the board meeting if needed for experts to address strategic issues and going back to the beginning of the call, just asking better questions.

54:34I'll double click on that. So I think the first principle I mentioned to you is if you don't know what you want, you won't get what you want. And the way you describe the board meeting is actually very similar to the way the best founders that I work with run their board meetings. So we have a lot of, we basically transform the whole structure and philosophy of that meeting when we're working on board issues with clients. But the underlying idea is this, is that one of the models that founders have on the board is it's their job to sell the ideas and to sell the progress to the board members. So the board members are buying and the founders are selling.

55:14And this dynamic starts during the fund rose because they're literally selling equity in their company. and it's very clear who's making the decisions. The investors making the decision and the founder thinks of themselves as like the seller. When I'm working with the CEO, we actually change the dynamic by changing the role that the CEO thinks they're playing on the board. They're not the seller. They're the buyer. They are buying the insights and the questions and the ability to contribute from board members. And when you set high standards and you know what you want, people tend to live up to your standards.

55:51So if standards need to change on the board, it really has to come from the CEO. And you as board members will feel a little bit, you should feel a little bit uncomfortable being like, wow, this, this CEO means business and I have to raise my game. And it's not immediately obvious that the CEO is going to buy what I'm saying. Because in this model, it's the CEO who makes the decisions. And I believe this is why I think we need to clarify the role of the board and the CEO. Is the board making decisions, which often means the loudest board member, or is it an empowered CEO who's making the decisions and therefore wants to be, you know, it's their decision.

56:27They just want as much input. You talk about low ego, right? Like get the ego out of the way. You just need to define, is this helpful? Is this data request helpful? Is it? Sometimes it is. It's like, yeah, just got to do it. Sometimes it isn't. In which case I tell people how to push back in the right way in a respectful way the way you run a board meeting can have a big impact on some of those dynamics that are um yeah and i love the phrase from by from seller to buyer we are running out of time um i think this is actually a great way to wrap it up i think and i don't know adres whether you want to add anything i've truly enjoyed just listening in for once it was incredibly enjoyable very nice to have my mind blown a bit by you dave uh incredible conversation Thank you for bringing that to the pod, Mike.

57:11It's my pleasure. If anything has resonated with any of the listeners, you can go to dave-bailey.com, find out a little bit more about my work. There's a lot of free resources. And of course, if you want to get in touch and get some support in scaling your business, there's a place to do that too on the website. So thanks very much for having me. I've loved it. Absolutely. Thank you so much. I really hope everyone who tuned in just as I did today have enjoyed it just as much as I did. Thank you, everyone. Before we start the show, a quick note. If you're building or running a fund, you know it takes the right partners.

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59:59Tear down this wall. It's more than just an alliance. This is a union of values. Let's start acting.