Transform Your Business with the Metronomics Framework

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1:02Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz and my guest today is Shannon Susco. She is celebrated for her strategic prowess, team leadership, and financial acumen. Having successfully co-founded Lead and sold two companies within six years, she developed the Metronomics Framework, fostering rapid growth and successful exits. And now she coaches CEOs and is the author of a number of acclaimed books, including Metronomics, One United System to Grow Your Team, Company, and Life. So Shannon, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks, John. Great to be here.

1:40You had a lot of hard words in your bio that I almost tripped over. I don't even know where that bio came from, John. I was like, wow. Someone on my team is working the word magic. So let's just start with Metronomics. Kind of what was the genesis of it? You know, how did your journey, you know, as a CEO kind of form it? Yeah, well, it started in my first company. Metronomics has been around for 24 years. It's a growth operating system. And it's one that we built out of pure, desperate need to figure out how to unlock, you know, a way to grow a company and have fun doing it. Right. And so it was our first business.

2:23We were stuck. and we decided with my leadership team that we brought in from all over the world, I said, like, there must be a system. You know, I asked my coach, you've got to have a system, right? Repeatable system. How are we going to do this? And you know what? You know, my coach of all, he'd already built, grown, sold many companies. I say many because I don't even know how many. And he's like, yeah, no, you're doing the right things. You're learning from the right people. Keep going. And I was like, nah, we got to find a way. So that's where Metronomics came from. It's a growth operating system to save leaders time and get them having fun in their business, get them outside the business, find the balance.

3:07So I don't know if I would call you a business book junkie, but I hear you reference a lot of books and a lot of names that are people that I know. Would you say that like all good entrepreneurs that you, like a lot of those people informed kind of where you ultimately ended up? Yeah. I mean, absolutely. When I was asking for the system, like I kept asking, there's got to be a system. Give me the book. You know, for two years, 24 months, I read four books a week because I actually didn't believe there wasn't a system. Sure. And so, you know, in doing that and then, yeah, I haven't stopped reading books.

3:46I still read a book a week at this point, not four, but at least a book a week. But you know what? All of the all the great thought leaders out there, you know, Jim Collins, Michael Porter, like in all the genres and all the different systems in the business, they all gave us the what. Right. And so you'd learn the what you'd go over and do that. What you'd play whack-a-mole on the cultural system or you play whack-a-mole on the human system or, you know, the strategy system. but none of them were connected. And it like, I was like, okay, like we got that fixed. Now this broke run over here, run over another.

4:24So we took all those great things and we actually plugged them into the system. It's like, you know, when you think of, you know, I have my background's technology. So when you think of a computer operating system that's running Mac or windows, many things plug into it. Right. But it's like the system that, you know, works day in and day out. That's what metronomics is. And we love taking, you know, all the different things that companies need and we plug it in when it's needed. So I'm curious about the term where you landed on metronomics. I'm envisioning Sister Colette, my first grade piano teacher and the metronome, you know, metaphor.

5:04So, so, so how did, how did you come to metronomics as the term? Yeah, well, funny enough. First book is called The Metronome Effect. And when I wrote that book, finished the book, finished it all, couldn't think of a name. I checked all these names, went out for a run. And there's a metronome on my Garmin. yeah yeah and i was like oh that's really interesting because the metronome sets the speed at which you're going to run play the piano and the ceo is the metronome in a business they set the speed at which you're going to grow your business so that's where metronome came into play i did have a piano teacher as well i did all those grades i did have it sitting up on the piano You know, but, you know, it made me think that day, okay, you set the speed and you must hold that speed or rhythm or whatever it is.

5:59So that's where that came from. Metronomics came from the word metronome, which represents the CEO who gets to set the speed. We want a consistent speed in the organization, not one that goes fast and slow. Economics is the other word. And it was really about the balance of your life and your business, your economics, balancing your time with the dollars. So there's a whole piece that we have in there. But that's what I was fighting is balancing teen, business and life. So that's where the economics piece came from. And there's definitely a method to that madness. And then the third word, and there's a fancy word for how we made up this word.

6:39I don't remember it today, but I know it's in the last chapter of Veteranomics. the book itself, but it's metrics. And metrics, you know, what we learned are not the things you track. It's the things you forecast and the things you control that flow through your business. And so everybody who works on a team in a business owns a thing. They do a thing every day. And there's so many of those things they do every day. And we call them widgets. So a metric represents And so that, you know, those three words made up metronomics, which is this big, long word. And, you know, maybe we shouldn't have made up that word, but we did because it represented, you know, the things that flow through the business represent the team that needs to connect to them.

7:25The metronome represents the CEO and the economics is the outcome you get, which is balancing your business and your life. Because most CEOs, especially startup CEOs, but even when you get to eight, 10 years, people are tired of the same old and they can't seem to unlock it. And this unlocks it, right? It gets you back your life. So you have fun again and gets you the team you want to work with. So you mentioned a couple of names, Jim Collins, you know, Vern Harnish, Gino Wickman. I mean, of all the people that you recognize the names of creating similar systems, how would you, if somebody said, how are you different or how is metronomics different?

8:06It's a great question, John, because I, you know, I grew up on the late 90s on Rockefeller Habits, which was very hard-ish, right? And learning pieces of that. And we had pieces of that. And then, you know, Gino's work with EOS came out later, right? But, you know, he grew up at the same time with Rock Habits. And if you take great game of business, Jack Stack and, you know, all the mini games that happen, they're all very much influenced in all of this. And we put those pieces in place. We created the cash system. We created the execution system. We had the cultural system. We had those pieces, but there was still a gap in the middle.

8:47And the gap was the strategy and the strategy system. And the biggest difference is that by having your 10 to 30 year goal and having your annual goal, which, you know, scaling up EOS is great. They are great execution and cash systems. And they line up, you know, with the long term. Our three year highly achievable goal, that's the difference. That's the thing that connects your long term to now. And it's so close you can reach out and touch it. It's 12 quarters, right? But you must lay out the execution, you know, quarter over quarter, 12 quarters straight to get there. And the system itself, the strategy system, like it's not, we know these days, it's not like, oh, we create a strategy, our five-year strategy.

9:35Like it's happening, you know, strategy we have to talk about every day, week, month, quarter, year. And this allows us to give that connection and the alignment to the team. And that word widget and that word metric in regards to a three-year highly achievable goal connects your team to where you're going. It connects everybody in the company to the overall team results. And that's the difference. Now, do we love a company? Like I love a company doing EOS. And they usually get to a point where they need to look further, that strategic piece. And we just layer right on top of it. If you're doing scaling up, metronomics will layer right on top of it because it takes everything they've learned about a disciplined execution system with a little bit of strategy and some of the cultural pieces and just puts it on to a little bit more of a timeline rocket ship of three years, right?

10:33It really challenges it. So I don't know if this is the deliverable or the objective is to create kind of this repeatable playbook, right? that the whole company uses. How do you stop that? How do you keep that alive? Because I listen to you talk about so many people create systems and playbooks and nobody can actually even find the darn thing anymore, you know, a week later. So how do you keep that thing alive? Yeah. So the way you keep it alive, because you can write it down, you can have it out. And then nobody does it. At the end of the day, metronomics is about behavioral accountability. And at the end of the day, it's about behavior with your team on the field.

11:12And we actually created a field, a virtual field. It's a behavioral accountability platform that is called, you know, we call it Metro, you know, the company, you know, that it's in is Metronome Growth Systems. But it is the metronome in the platform. Everybody logs in to the platform every day. And a lot of people go every day. They look at what they said they would do. They look at the cadence at which they set it. All the meetings are running through that platform day, week, month. And it really starts with how does the playbook stay alive? Well, number one, a coach that understands the playbook.

11:50So I'll put my coach hat on for a second. But at the end of the day, it's the CEO with the leadership team commits to the team habits, the team habits of the playbook. and that's what keeps it alive. When the CEO and the leadership team don't want to do those habits anymore, the playbook, we evolve the habits, but they don't want to do it anymore. Yeah, the playbook is just a really nice like system sitting there that no one will use. And you know, as well as I know, in any business, a system is only as good as the users of the system, right? You got to use the system to keep it alive. Well, and that was really going to be my next point.

12:30I mean, a lot of what I think stops like great companies is that they get to a certain point where they, you know, a leadership, building a leadership team is different than managing a company. And so, you know, what, you know, how do we evolve with this? Right. We build the playbook. It's awesome. But now we've got like new problems. Yeah. So the interesting thing is we have the seven systems that all connect to one another and they exist in any business, whether you want to acknowledge them or not. That's one of the biggest things I learned early on in business. But the thing that we found in metronomics and with the research we've done over the last 14 years is that there's three phases of growth that every company will be in at some point, right?

13:14And some may never get out of the first phase, which is the foundation phase, right? It's the very first phase. There's five things that we've really got to pull the lever on to get, you know, to move from the foundation growth phase to the momentum growth phase. The third growth phase is the compounding growth phase. Most companies, and whether it's called that or not, it doesn't matter. Most companies get stuck there because it's a willingness to have a repeatable cash system and put the effort in to forecast cash first, have an execution system that works without the leaders. Right. Right. But in order to have that, the leadership team must be, you know, like it's the CEO plus all the functional leaders that we have in companies.

14:03And it has to be, you know, whatever the definition of that team is, 100 percent A players. And the last thing is it must be cohesive in order to get that far. Right. Well, we're doing all that in the foundation growth phase. We're mapping the strategy. and to keep it online, mapping the strategy gives us strategic pictures. Whether we have all those other things working or not, we can still map our strategy, but it's lining all those things up so that, you know, I always say it doesn't make it easy. It creates some ease. It takes some pressure off. We actually get some growth results just from picking off each one of those things, which actually brings the team back to keep doing it.

14:50The thing that actually will take the team through to the other side and really grow, like, you know, the system, I always say the playbook meets you where you are, right? And so I go into companies and they have an A player leadership team. It's cohesive. They have a cast system and they have a great execution system that's working without them. And I go, fantastic. Let's get to work out strategy, right? Because that's what they're looking for. Others come in that phase and they may have a couple of those things, but they might be stuck on that A player leadership team. It depends how that team is formed.

15:27But we're going to meet the teams there and that keeps it alive in the phase that they're in. And then as they pick off the critical path, we know there's a critical path for growth. We will move to the momentum phase, which you got to keep all those things alive in the foundation phase. Then we got to validate with confidence the strategy so that we can make better, faster decisions to keep up with the speed of growth of the organization. We need to take the leadership team to that next level of cohesiveness. You know, I call it team trust 2.0, but it's where they're at the point now that they have the time to coach their team, work on strategy and, you know, grow themselves.

16:13And, you know, Jim Collins would call the level five leader. Bill and Bob Adams scaling leadership would call it integral, you know, leadership. But it's actually, you know, that next version of the leaders, they have time to grow themselves at the rate the company's growing. And of course, the last phase is compounding. We see companies going into the compounding phase, top line, and they can't sustain it. Right? Because the thing that, you know, all those things have to be true in the first two phases. The last phase is you got to, you know, basically what we call the coach cascade system. You've got to cascade out the growth and learning of your team members in order to keep up with the growth of the company.

16:55And those are the things that's why, you know, like some of the clients I've had for 11 years. And someone goes, have they not got it yet? You know, but the playbook has evolved as they have evolved. And it's really fascinating. To me, it's really fascinating, but very much reflects my 10-year journey in my first company, where, you know, it's not a straight line across the growth phases. And once you get there, it's not that you necessarily always stay there. The external environment can push you back. Your team coming and going can push you back, right? Your strategy can push you back. So yeah, it's really exciting to actually put this in place and a team gets so good at it.

17:39They forget about it. They forget about the system and then they're just thinking within their business, but following the cadence. So I'm tempted not to ask you this question because we are close on time, but I know it's a big one. How big of a hurdle is the CEO and their inability to let go in your work? Yeah. I love working through the phases of this with a CEO because, and you know, what I call a desperate CEO, I was a desperate CEO. My coach could have said, stand on your head, Shannon, and spit out nickels, and that will get you there faster. I probably would have done that. And there's different levels of desperation on how bad you want to win, right?

18:23Whatever winning is for that company. And so what I find is CEOs will, I was on a call earlier this morning, and they are so, they'll do whatever, they'll follow that system, right? Because of where they want to go. So I always say it's how bad does that CEO, and I'm going to go plus leadership team want to win their game. That is how fast a CEO lets go of things. And once they start letting go, like, you know, take off the sales hat and give it to someone else and take off the finance hat and give it to someone else. And they see the time they get back to doing the things that are in their sweet spot.

19:06It goes a lot faster, but it's just got to give them a little inkling of what it might be to let it go. But they've got to want to. There's lots that don't. They think everything's great. And if I think, if they think it's great, then it's great. And they're going to grow along at one to 3 % a year. And like, fantastic. As long as they're having fun, right? Life's too short. Absolutely. Well, Shannon, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. Is there anywhere you would invite people to connect with you and find out more about your work? Yeah, you can absolutely just look me up on LinkedIn.

19:41Shannon Byrne Susco on LinkedIn. Easy. I'm not, I think the only one out there with that name. and as well on metronomics.com. Everything's there. Lots of free resources, webinars. Yeah, please come and join our community if you're interested. Awesome. We got a Canadian resources there too, just to put a little fine point on that. Yeah, oh good. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Again, well, hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

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