1523 – Building Resilience to Change with LCubed Consulting’s Lisa Levy

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0:58with us right now it's lisa l levy lisa you are the founder and ceo of l cubed consulting you are found on the web at lisa l levy.com and that's lisa l levy is l e b y lisa thank you so much for joining us josh i am so excited to be here talking with you in your audience today Yes. Well, you're also the author. Thank you so much. You are also the author of Future Proofing Cubed. And so we'll talk a little bit about that because I think all of us, well, we'd like to be future proof. And so can you give us maybe just kind of a quick overview of who you are and what you do in the world today? Absolutely.

1:40So I like to describe myself as an accidental entrepreneur. It happened about 14 years ago, and it was absolutely not my plan. I had made a commitment to the corporate world. I wanted 401k. I wanted PTO. I wanted all of that perceived sense of security until I realized that it really was just sort of a trap. And I embraced the spirit of entrepreneurial, the entrepreneurial journey jumped into the space where my parents had always played that caused me so much stress and so much anxiety as a kid. And I said, you know what, if I'm going to take control, I am going to take control. And here we are 14 years ago, and I've built a practice where we're helping business leaders grow and scale by leveraging our adaptive transformation framework, which takes key elements of best practices that large global corporations use every day, but makes them consumable for the startup and the emerging in the middle market.

2:39So that's what we've been doing. Yeah. And obviously, you know, one of the biggest things that you seem to address is the inevitable change. If there's one thing, right, that's inevitable, it's going to be change. I don't know how many of us had a global pandemic in our risk assessment, you know, where we kind of see, well, what threats might interrupt our business? global pandemic, not in the tea box for many of us, but here we are. What are kind of the main tent poles of being a little bit more resilient or able to work with change that we can either predict or not predict? So the reality, and it's a harsh reality, is there will always be change that we cannot predict.

3:23But to future-proof and be prepared for that uncertainty and that that thing around the corner that's going to jump out and scare us like a global pandemic is building resilience to change. And the approach that we take with that is really very simple. It's building an innovation engine inside of your business. It's a three-step process that anybody can do, whether you're a solopreneur or you own a billion or you're leading a billion dollar team, right? It's embracing the spirit of experimentation, constantly having a stream of new ideas. what could we do for our customers tomorrow that we aren't today?

3:59Understanding what those ideas are, prototyping, testing, experimenting with them, learning from the things that don't work because not everything will work and that's okay because that's where we learn our biggest lessons. When we have things and we experiment and find things that work, we want to amplify and do more of that. But when we hit the things that don't, walk away fast and don't look back and don't regret it because you learned something. So all of that is the innovation engine and we can all do it. You know, that last point that you just made, I think factors into mistakes, right? Or failed tests, right?

4:36And I think of, you know, the hundreds of thousands of dollars that we've invested in things that just really haven't worked out. And it could be so easy to say, well, man, I could think of a lot of other places I would have loved to have used that budget and it's gone. Well, and the budget question, that point is really important because to roll it back, if when the original idea presented itself, you had conceptually tested it before investing a single dollar, wouldn't you have liked to have considered that it might not work before you invested the money at all? And so our innovation engine actually plays at that pre-spend experimentation space so that when you do experiment, it's small and it's controlled.

5:21and maybe that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands becomes thousands into tens of thousands and those sunk costs get smaller. Yeah. Is this about, so let's say for example, for us, you know, there is a new offering that we would really love to make available to our audience. We have a really good audience. I would love to make sure that I'm presenting to them, you know, something that is going to fit. So obviously, I don't want to build the whole thing and then say, hey, guess what's for sale? You know, I don't think any of us, or let me ask you this before I kind of get more into that. You know, sometimes, you know, there's this misperception that, you know, we can all be Steve Jobs, who, you know, we have this perception that he knew what the market wanted before the market knew, which is not true at all.

6:17We don't. We don't know that. Nobody knows that. And so I'm going to try and take where you were going and where you went and put it all together because you're onto it. You're absolutely onto it. We who provide services, we who design and create products get stuck in what we think is really cool. The challenge with that is our customers may or may not actually agree with us. So one of the founding principles behind adaptive transformation is that it is a customer-centric experience. What I mean by that is if we don't know what our customers want or need, we shouldn't be designing or building anything.

6:57Their wants and needs should be at the center of every business decision we make, and we need to know what it is that they want. So we have to interact with them. We need to do focus groups. We need to do surveys. We need to do round tables, town halls, whatever it takes to get them talking and us listening so that those really cool products and services that sound so good between our ears actually drive value for them. They're the only ones that count. Yeah. So let's say, you know, maybe it's just an agency owner that's listening. They're like, hey, we've been thinking about offering SEO to our clients.

7:42We have someone, they're very good, we could offer this, but I don't want to build all the pages and build the offer. So do we send a survey out? How do we start gathering information, would you recommend? So in this, it's a conference room test is what I call it. And it's getting a handful of your most trusted customers, customers that you have a longstanding relationship with, people who will be happy to tell you that baby is ugly. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You want to hear it from them and you want to hear it from them honestly. And so have somebody make a few phone calls. If you touch and talk with 10 people who have been with you on the journey for a long time, that's going to be a representative voice.

8:31And so I like to start with those who are really in it to win it with you. But then if you're really bold and you're really brave and you can take the feedback, go to three or four customers you've lost along the way. and see if they'll have a conversation, give feedback, give insight, and you'll learn a lot about what you're currently doing that's working or not working. But if you're thinking about something new and you want to test that SEO idea, somebody who might not be a raving fan at that moment will give you some really blunt, honest feedback if they're willing to give you the time. Yeah, we don't want bad data.

9:08An example of this would be, you know, I'm on Facebook with all my Facebook friends who like me and I say, Hey, I'm thinking about starting a food truck. Should I follow my dreams? No, no. You need actual market data to support that and understanding of that's a hard business to start and make successful. Yeah. Not, not the best data. Cause again, you know, maybe publicly your friends want to support you. They, you know, and, and of course it's really easy for to tip, tip our hands, uh, you know, that, that, Oh, we're really excited about it, but just because we're excited about it doesn't mean that it's a good idea.

9:45Yeah. Right. Excitement and going to market are two different things. Your specialty obviously is you have a lot of wisdom in and around operations and operations can become, I mean, there's a lot of things that can disrupt operations. How can we be more resilient, especially when we're thinking about maybe opportunities where we immediately have to scale up or unfortunately, maybe we have to immediately scale down and how that affects people. And I mean, there's a lot of considerations there. Yeah. How can we be a little bit more change resistant from that perspective? So from that perspective, that's really core to our adaptive transformation.

10:29That's how we handle our people, our processes, and our technology. um my glib oversimplification of this is people plus process times technology equals growth and scale so it is sequential you have to have the right people doing the right work you have to have processes that are effective and efficient and then we leverage technology to make it better faster cheaper when we're looking at our operations and we're running we have to build on purpose from the beginning in that space. And so as we're looking at things strategically, making sure that we're investing and have the right people in the right seats, that they know what they're there to do, and that we have looked at the processes and we understand what happens before we touch something as an individual and what happens after we do something to, you know, how it flows to the next person.

11:18If at any point in time we're looking at this and we don't know why we're doing it and we don't know why that action adds value to our customers, I can give you a very pricey piece of free consulting right here and right now. If that's the way we've always done it is the answer to why you're wasting time, you're losing money, and your customers are not getting value. And if those three things are happening, you are not where you want your business to be. Yeah. One thing I know, Lisa, that you've shared just a bit, and we're recording this around Women in Business or International Women's Day. What observations have you seen?

11:59I know you've spoken on this as well about, you know, female executive leadership and maybe, you know, considerations that we should all have or, you know, what do you see as maybe, I bet you're you asking this is maybe trends. I know, obviously, I think the gap, I think from the outside has been closing, you know, and it's like, but maybe not enough. Can you give us maybe just a quick state of the union of, you know, kind of your what you see? Because I know one of your books is the gift of the universe, women that lead. Yes, yes. And so we are part of the challenge with that topic is the data is all over the board.

12:41So quick synopsis, prior to the pandemic, there was research that said it was going to take 80 years for there to be parity at the C-suite level, where women and men were equal leaders in corporations and businesses across the world. After the pandemic, as women stepped out of the workforce again and out of leadership roles because they were taking care of their family and running their household, I've seen numbers that are saying we are now 300 hundred years away from that parody. All right. I think that that's my earlier assumption. I don't know that your assumption was wrong. I write it. Where does the research come from?

13:18And I don't, I'm not going to unpack that here with us today, but right. It's still not good, but the trend that I'm seeing that is good is that females are stepping into the entrepreneurial space. So those metrics are talking about those CEO slots at the large enterprise global corporations at Fortune 500 and pulling it down. But when we start looking at small businesses, emerging businesses that are growing, we are seeing more and more women and women of color and women of different ethnicities. And we're becoming a presence in the largest space of business in the world, right? When we talk about those big, big corporations, we're talking about less than 5 % of businesses in total.

14:07So we measure against them, but they're a very small pool of the actual businesses. So I like to focus on the startups, the small businesses, and the growth that's happening in that space, because that's where those move the economy forward. forward. So I think there's hope. I'm excited by that. Yeah. Lisa, who do you work with and what does that typically look like? So we're really fortunate. We work with a diverse set of customers and our clients are small startups all the way through large organizations, including government agencies. But our sweet spot is in that space where we have a business that's growing that wants to do more tomorrow than they're doing today.

14:51So really needing to focus on getting the people, the process and the technology well aligned so that they can scale. We've worked in industries in healthcare. We've worked in financial services, technology, government, academia, the team, we have a lot of experience. And the cool thing about that business engine, the business engine is the same regardless of the vertical. And so the more industries we've been in, the more insights we have that we can share that really make a big impact for our clients. You are a speaker as well as obviously consulting, but who do you speak with and who should be booking you?

15:34Everybody should be booking me. Are you kidding? No. Seriously, I love speaking to audiences of emerging leaders. I love corporate engagements where we're talking about how to build leaders from within. because some of the things we've been talking about today are ideas that I call being disruptive on purpose to drive innovation. And so learning how to challenge the status quo and ask why, every organization needs to ask those questions. So I love speaking to groups, to corporations. I am happy. If you have an audience, give me, I will stand up and I will share wisdom. them. Yeah. Lisa, your website is lisallevy.com.

16:21When somebody goes there and they're like, I like Lisa, what do they do next? What would you recommend? Well, if they like Lisa, throughout the website, there are places where you can simply click and schedule an appointment with me. I make 30 minutes available to anybody who wants to have a chat about what they're doing with their business, where they want their business to grow. If they're interested in talking with me about the speaking opportunity, all of that's fair game. And I'm on LinkedIn as well. Lisa L. Levy is the easiest way to find me. Lots of opportunities. And YouTube, L Cubed Consulting on YouTube has lots of videos with my insights and tips and tricks.

16:59So you can get really comfortable with me before you click schedule a call. I love it. Lisa L. Levy, again, founder and CEO of L Cubed Consulting. You're found on the web at lisallevy.com. Lisa, thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely, Josh. Thank you.

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