1542 – Applying New Ideas with The ReWild Group’s Matthew Pohl

0:023, 2, 1. With us right now, it's Matt Pohl. Matt, you are the founder and principal with The Rewild Group. You're found on the web at rewildgroup.com. Matt, thank you so much for joining us. Josh, I really appreciate you having me today. Yes. And tell us what The Rewild Group is. Well, we are a business growth methodology creator. So we've developed this methodology based on nearly three decades of research of small and mid-sized businesses. And the discoveries from this research have created really a roadmap that helps business owners, business leaders, small and mid-sized businesses to understand how companies grow, understand the hidden barriers to growth, and really allow them to align their businesses to the best practices or what we call rules for growth.

1:04And our methodology really focuses on businesses with one to 350 employees. And where did you, like, how did you step into this role? Yeah, well, my background's a little bit different to be in this particular role. I'm an entrepreneur. I started my first business in my mid-30s, was running that business for, we were about a dozen years into that business, my business partner and I. And at that point, we kind of plateaued as an organization. We'd see spurts of growth, but often then we would pull back. And we just couldn't, you know, we had a good, successful, profitable business, but it just seemed like there was this invisible ceiling that we kept on bumping into.

2:00And around year 12, we were approached by a business broker who did a valuation on our business. And like most business owners, the first time you see what your business was worth, it was quite disappointing. It was a good amount. All that work and that's it? Well, that's exactly the reaction that we had. And yet, at that point, we hadn't really been intentional in how we were building our business. And so we were at a pivot point to say, well, do we just keep on having a nice lifestyle business, pays for our kids' college and our living and retirement and all those positive things? Or do we want to change things?

2:46And we said, well, we've got another decade at least of work ahead of us. Why not work hard in a right way, in a better way that increases the value of the business? So I went on a journey to try to find some methodology, some framework to help me and the business. And I ran into a book called Navigating the Growth Curve by James Fisher. and I had been given this book by a CEO I respected and he said this is the best growth methodology I've run into so I kind of devoured that kind of an odd book in that it's kind of a story it's not like a regular textbook business book kind of a thing so you had to kind of pull things out to to apply them and I noticed that the story takes place here in Colorado and I thought Well, that's kind of strange.

3:41I love Colorado. Most people love Colorado. Most people do love Colorado. Yeah, and it was like, okay, well, that's cool that they selected it. And then I researched the author, and oddly enough, he lived just a few miles away from me in basically the same metro area of Denver here. And so we hooked up, spent about a year kind of going through and being coached by him through a program he had for business owners. And one thing I'm pretty good at is when you show me the dots and kind of connect some of the dots, I usually can connect a lot more once I kind of see where it's headed. And so that really started this process of us really reengineering our business, rethinking our business.

4:31and between year 12 and year 15, so three years, in three years after having about a decade of being flat, we tripled our business. We tripled the number of employees. We improved our margins. And it was in year 15 that one of our largest competitors came and made us an offer, you know, too good to refuse, really. You know, it was pretty amazing, the offer that they came with. And what was really incredible, we couldn't have planned this any better as we had that valuation year 12. And then we have what we actually closed the business on. And when we sold it, our business value grew by 10x in those three years.

5:12So we left that experience just kind of shaking our heads, you know, being thankful for the opportunity that that we had just gone through. And, you know, as I was thinking about it, it's like, I know there's a lot of business owners who've been through a lot of what we had been through. Worked hard, decades, kind of getting burnt out. The value isn't great. You know, what do we do? You know, it feels like there's this invisible ceiling. And what we found is that we were doing about 80 % of the business right. You know, the blocking and tackling of the business, we were doing well. But there was some missing things, about 10 to 20 percent that I didn't know.

5:51You know, I went to business school. I didn't get taught it. And this methodology really was kind of that missing ingredient for us. And so coming out of that, didn't want to go into retirement, too young, too motivated. I was driving my wife crazy, basically. So she said, go start another business. Yeah. And it was at that time that the author of the book came to me and said, hey, Matt, I see how the methodology helped you. And he's he's the typical inventor, right? You know, brilliant, really insightful. But as far as operating a business that that just wasn't his strength, that wasn't his area of strength.

6:36And so he said, could you help me monetize this methodology? And so we founded the Rewild Group and put that intellectual property into the business and started working that. Startup businesses are hard, though, right? There's a lot of sacrifice. You go weeks, months without a salary, all those kind of fun things of starting a business. And James was just, he wasn't really in that mode. That's not where he was in life. He didn't really want to take that on. And so he stepped aside and I took on the reins of taking this methodology, his ideas that he had and discoveries from his research over these 30 years and researching over 1500 small mid-sized businesses that come up with this methodology.

7:25And so that was really the start of Rewild Group. And so over the past several years, we've been taking these ideas, streamlining them, making them able to be applied by any business owner. and what we have today is what we call organizational rewilding and this is a methodology that identifies what's missing in your business and then helps infuse key elements that are the missing ingredients like I said my business I was doing a lot well but there were just some some things that I was missing I didn't even know to look for them and so that's really what this methodology does. The term rewilding, by the way, comes from a scientific concept that is most famously exemplified in Yellowstone National Park here in the United States, which is the oldest national park actually in the world.

8:25But in the 1990s, the ecosystem of the park was was deteriorating very rapidly. The elk herds had overrun the park. They were destroying the vegetation and just really making it uninhabitable for many of the species there. And it was the introduction of the gray wolf, I should say the reintroduction of the gray wolves, several packs that started this really magical process that really set off this chain reaction that not only impacted the number of elk, that was the obvious thing. It changed the behavior of the elk. It changed that had the ripple effect to the vegetation, to other light species.

9:08It even changed how the rivers flowed through the park because it changed how the vegetation held the streams into their place. So in just a short period of time, infusing this missing element into that ecosystem, set off these chain reactions. And so that's really how our growth methodology works. It identifies what's missing, kind of like the gray wolf in Yellowstone. It infuses that, and it gets at the heart of the issues. It doesn't focus on the surface symptoms. All those surface symptoms are meaningful, but they really point to deeper issues that then our methodology addresses. Yeah. On your website, rewildgroup.com, you have, again, so someone wants to look at this visually, is the stages of business growth.

10:02Yeah. What questions would you ask? I'm not sure if we're a stage, well, one, two, or three. We're somewhere in there. What questions would you ask to determine? I mean, just employee size, I don't know if that's a good gauge, Because then I'm looking at some of the considerations and the things that I'm concerned with. And the things I'm concerned with are more stage three. But yet I see some things in stage one and two that I think are applicable too. Yeah, I appreciate you asking the question. The stages of growth is one of the primary discoveries that came out of James' research. And so essentially what he was trying to understand is what causes businesses, some businesses to be able to sustain growth, others to get stuck, others to never really even get out of the starting blocks to kind of get never really see serious growth.

10:58And so that was the research. What is the cause of this? And what came out of this is this discovery that the reason businesses get stuck is they don't understand the rules that apply to the stage that they're in. They are operating the business by kind of playing a game that's not the right rules to be playing with. And so he identified these seven stages. Now, what's unique about the research was that the question is, well, what causes you to be in a stage? And many other models might use things like how old the business is. revenue is a big one for kind of slotting businesses. But the reality is that a$10 million construction business and a$10 million engineering firm are not the same, right?

11:53The businesses are so different that using that to be the indicator of your stage is not really an accurate indicator. So really, the highest correlation in the research was the number of employees. And here's the reason. The more people you have in an organization, the more complexity you have in an organization. So it's really the complexity that places you in a stage. And it's the number of people that are the indicator of the complexity of the business. So essentially what we have then is a roadmap that says, for example, if you're between one and 10 employees, you're in stage one. And we've identified these best practices on these somewhat hidden areas, areas that are not obvious to the normal business owner, founder, CEO, of things you need to be doing in stage one to make it easier for an organization to grow.

12:51But here's the thing is that once you get to 11 employees, you're now in stage two and those rules change. And what businesses do is they start to grow, they get to the next stage, and they still run the business as the old stage. And at some point, the rules catch up to you, they stop you in your tracks and often will pull you back. so that's that's not to say there are aspects of what stage you're in and the maturity of your business that may seem to be ahead of that that stage of growth but if you understand which stage you're in and you apply those rules you will find that your business is better set for growth And the analogy we use is it's not like if you violate the rules that you will stop tomorrow growing, but it does add up and cause kind of a headwind.

13:51And so we're in Colorado. One thing I like to do is try to climb a 14er every year. That's kind of my personal goal. It forces me to exercise throughout the year. but when I get to the trailhead to start the climb up to Mount Elbert I don't with my backpack on I don't I don't kneel down and grab a bunch of rocks and boulders and put them on a backpack I don't do that because I want my backpack to have what I need and not anything else but when you're when you're business when you're running a business and you're not following these rules that we've identified, you are putting bricks, you're putting rocks into your backpack, you're making growth harder than it needs to be.

14:34And you may still be able to get up to the top of that mountain with all that extra weight. But it's harder. And for most business owners, they get up part of the way onto the mountain. And they just say it's too hard. It's not worth growing anymore, because it's so hard, but what they don't realize is part of it is of their own making.

15:02How do you work with your clients? Like, what does that typically look like? Yeah, so my team here in Denver is really focused on the development of the methodology, the content, But we certify business advisors, coaches, consultants throughout the globe. And so we're on six continents with our network. Excuse me. So as an advisor, as somebody certified in organizational rewilding, you have really three ways kind of that we interact with the marketplace. And our marketplace is owners and leaders of small and mid-sized businesses. And so one way we do is what we call self-directed. We have a lot of our content on our website and available for free or low cost.

15:57We just published, I believe, our 12th book. We've got about five more books to publish this year. And then we'll have our library of content so that people can get off of Amazon books and kind of do it themselves that that's kind of their mode. The second way is through what we call coach supported. So we have a coaching program and we're launching a kind of a peer group esque kind of a program. But it's not it's not focused on just socializing. It's a rigorous 18 month program that you go through as a group. We're launching that in Australia in April. I guess it is April. So later this month.

16:41So kind of in this coaching, you know, meeting one on one with one of our advisors and you're chipping away with very specific things. This isn't warm and fuzzy stuff. You're getting in. You're working on your business in a very structured way. And then the third manner or modality is really advisor-led. So this is our most intense way where an advisor works with a business owner, leader, and typically their management or leadership team on one area, kind of one element of the business at a time. And that could be a specific element, say brand and core values or your business model. It might be just helping you get a strong management team in place.

17:30And so those are more intense engagements. You'd call them like a consulting engagement that we deliver the methodology through. Yeah, Matt, your website, rewildgroup.com, you have a lot of resources on this site. Where do we begin? where do we go next after this podcast? Well, there's, there is a lot of, it kind of depends, you know, the website split primarily into two audiences. You may be a business consultant, advisor, coach, and you're wanting to be able to impact your business, your, your clients deeper, more broadly. Just have more tools in your tool belt kind of a thing. There's an area called four advisors and that will teach you and, and help you learn just what the program is, how to get certified and the benefits that you can access as being a certified advisor.

18:27For business owners, we just have a ton of information on our website. We have, like I said, a whole series of books on Amazon that you can purchase and print or Kindle. We have a bunch of assessments that are free that you can learn about different aspects of it. We have downloads on the matrix. The matrix tool is really the summary sheet of all of our findings, and it's available for free on our website. So we have that kind of a resource. So then we have our network of advisors. So we've got professionals around the globe who are ready to help if you need. But again, if it's more of a you'd like to do it yourself.

19:13And What we find is most business owners, they will visit the website, they'll download some information, they'll see if it resonates with them. They might get a book on Amazon, they'll read it. They'll say, okay, does this seem like it resonates or is accurate? Can it help me? And once they go through that kind of self-learning, they then determine whether they're going to go down that kind of, they're going to do it all themselves or they're going to see if they have a coach to help them or if they want an advisor that's going to go more rapidly because they want to get this stuff infused into their organization as quickly as possible and as deeply as possible.

19:56Yeah. Rewildgroup.com. From there, like I said, hover over free resources and you go down the rabbit hole. You're going to spend some time. Plenty to chew on and get kind of working on ahead of time. But then, of course, grab some time and there should be a link, I'm sure, right? Contact, learn more. Oh, and then certainly when you fill out the calculator, I think there's an opportunity then to supply some contact information, get in touch and go from there. Really, really cool. Yeah, Josh, that's a great point. A single place to start is the calculator. and you can get to it easily at calculator.rewildgroup.com and that'll take you to the calculator.

20:48And that's gonna help you walk through and identify where you actually are based on the stages of growth methodology. It's gonna help you identify how many people you have in your organization because there's some gray areas and it'll walk you through that process. And then it'll land you on a page for your stage and that will get you to the stage specific resources that can help you where you're at today. And there are links then to schedule time if you want to know where to go next, what's the next step. So we're here to help. And like I said, our mission as an organization is to multiply the number of exceptional businesses globally.

21:29And the reason we do that is we think work matters. Work matters because it impacts us so greatly as humans. It's a key part, we believe, of human development, which is really interesting in this age of artificial intelligence and how does that impact us. I think we think as an organization that work matters. And because work matters, not just for the leaders and the owners, but everybody that's part of that organization, we want businesses to be exceptional because people who work at exceptional businesses, they thrive. They grow where they're working. They return to their home a better version of themselves.

22:12And it's not just about the employee. We want business owners to thrive as well. We want them to be profitable and financially successful. And that's really when we talk about an exceptional business is really is balancing those two things. Want a business that's highly profitable, but also highly effective in the marketplace. Yeah. Matt Pohl, again, your website, rewildgroup.com. Matt, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Josh, I really appreciate you hosting me.