1776 – The Power of Personal Accountability with Jason Pearl

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0:58with us right now jason pearl jason you are the founder and ceo of nacre consulting you're found on the web at nacre consulting.com that's n-a-c-r-e consulting.com jason thank you so much for joining us thank you so much for having me josh excited about this well yeah i learned something new today uh so your last name is pearl so i guess you had the opportunity to call yourself Pearl Consulting, but you went with something a little bit more. Well, I'll let you explain what Naker is. So when I started my consulting firm almost seven years ago, I had always envisioned having a boutique consultant firm.

1:36So it wasn't just going to be me as a solopreneur. I wanted to surround myself with other really intelligent people that could help our client base. Most people don't like working for someone's name unless you're a law firm, right? So I kind of used a little bit of my marketing end and got a little creative and named my firm Nacre Consulting. Nacre is the organic compound that makes up a pearl, okay? So essentially, mollusks, clams, whatever, when intruders hit the inner skin, thousands of layers of nacreous compound encapsulate that. And over time, that's the iridescent makeup of the pearl. It's one of the strongest organic compounds in the world, as a matter of fact.

2:12So that's why I got a little creative and named it Nacre Consulting. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about your area of expertise the folks you work with and the impact that you have today. And a lot of this revolves around leadership. Absolutely. Yeah. So I've been in and around business my entire life. I'm a product of two self-employed parents. So they were entrepreneurs before it was cool to be an entrepreneur or say you were an entrepreneur. So I've been around business and leading people for a very long time. I had a corporate stint for about 15 years and really honed my skills at leading people in stressful production-based environments.

2:50So I have been a sales leader the majority of my life. And then seven years ago, I just decided I wanted to work with more businesses, help them scale faster. And I didn't just want to work with one. So I opened Nacre Consulting, focused on the small and medium-sized business market to help them scale faster using sales, marketing, and leadership custom programs to help their businesses bring in more revenue. That's what I did. And that's what I love to do. And how does that look today? So tell me about maybe a typical client that you work with and what that engagement looks like? Absolutely. So oftentimes our client is normally somewhere in that, maybe that three to$50 million range, which seems like a big range, but it's businesses that could come from tech or manufacturing or financial services.

3:35And what we do is we come in and work with them, oftentimes doing an initial engagement that we call like a go-to-market talent assessment, where we'll meet with the CEO and maybe the leaders of the go-to-market teams will interview and assess their team members with the hopes of building the team that they have up. We're not burn and churn, try to say, oh, this person shouldn't be here. This person needs to get fired. We try to take the talent they have and elevate them to the next level. So we'll do a small engagement, get used to each other, and then we can graduate into other programs of potentially custom building playbooks or doing variable compensation audits and rewrites or working directly with sales teams, do leadership coaching, all sorts of things like that.

4:18Yeah. All right. So if you were to give like a little, like mini, mini, mini, mini, mini little Ted talk on what is working well in leadership today, what would be maybe some of those pillar things that you would talk about? And feel free to dispense some wisdom. What can we learn based on everything that you do? Because there are a lot of SMB Founders Listeners podcast, help us out. Yeah. So I have a couple kind of core competencies when I talk about leadership and I talk about growth. And I am a firm believer that you as the individual, you need to understand a few things about yourself first.

4:53There's so many leadership books, business books, and everyone's going to tell you to do something different. But I think what's really important, number one, for the leaders or founders listening is you first need to understand what type of leader do you want to be, okay? So if you say, like, what leader do I want? What type of leader do I want to be? Then you need to ask yourself the hard question of, am I being that leader, okay? So the reason that I say that is there's a lot of folks that say, well, I want to do a little bit of this. I want to do that. But really, ultimately, I just want really good results and I don't care how we get them.

5:22And that's throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping something sticks, right? So when you first understand what type of leadership style you want, then you need to assess, am I leading that way? And then you need to make sure you're building your team around that style. So for example, for me, the leadership style I have, I want to be respected first. You may like me, you may not like me. I don't necessarily care so much about that, but you need to respect the leadership side of things, right? And then I want my people to know that I'm for them, right? That I am for their success and I am leading in a way that shows them that when they need something, they need help, I'm coming around them, supporting them, right?

5:59And then finally, I want to be a leader that takes action and gets things done, right? Gets results, right? And sometimes it's easier said than done. You can talk a lot, you can email, you can Slack, you can do all those things, but are you rolling up your sleeves? Are you getting your hands dirty? And are you being the leader that you want to be that makes your team successful? Because when your team's successful, you're going to have success as a leader. It's not the opposite way. You don't have success without your team. yeah that's absolutely true um are there any trends that you've observed over the past couple of years that you would say yeah leaders listen up if you want to know you know what i observe day to day where i see you know if we're especially you know we're talking about leadership of people um you know any trends that you've observed and what i'm really interested is over this next year as leaders where do our brains need to be and not just our brains our thoughts our focus, but our actions.

6:54But our actions. Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of things. Trend that I see, and I see a lot, is in the world we live in today, even outside of just business, there is more conflict on social media. But people from a human standpoint are so afraid to have conflict, healthy conflict. They're so afraid to say, you're not doing this right. We need to fix this. Here's why. And this is what we're going to do. I see a lot of leaders that even leaders that have a lot of experience, they're avoiding healthy conflict. And I think that's super problematic. And the reason I do is because when you don't initially see an issue and address it, that small issue oftentimes permeates into a much larger issue.

7:42And I feel like there's a lot of keyboard cowboys out there, especially in the remote environments that we work in and things like that, right? That it's a Slack message or it's a passive aggressive email. It's not a, hey, let's hop on a Zoom. Let's have a conversation about what I've witnessed or what I see going on, why we need to address it, how I'm going to support you, and what the results are going to be once we make these adjustments, right? So one of the trends I see is people ignoring pain. They ignore it or they put it to the side and then it becomes a much larger issue. Yeah. You know, I was just commenting, I was engaging with you, Jason, on your LinkedIn.

8:17Do you mind if I share this here? Because I think this is actually great advice for everyone, regardless of your level of leadership here. You know, and it's about kind of where we put our focus and it really invokes some thoughts from me. The world as a whole, it definitely thrives, particularly I think if we're thinking about social media, it thrives off of fear, negative headlines, you know, kind of a dog eat dog culture. There's a lot of stuff to get anxiety over if, you know, you're obsessing over the news and the headlines. So a couple of things that you'd recommended, and I think that this is so apropos and I've got my own thoughts on this, right, is, you know, try to drown out the noise.

8:54Hard work does pay off. If you have, you do have gifts and skills that do matter. There are some things, and this is where I'm going to kind of leap off here, is that there are things in the world as a leader I have very little to no influence on. But yet, if I historically look at how much time I dedicated to those things, I almost think, well, what a waste. I mean, it's okay, I guess, if I think of it as entertainment. But honestly, it's like if I don't have any influence on federal politics, for example, and I'm just really super frustrated by that, I don't know. I think that my time would be better spent.

9:31And it's almost like this serenity prayer, right? It's having the wisdom to know the difference between what I do can control and what I can't control. But I can tell you that I'm not perfect at this. But when I, as a leader, I said, listen, my life's not going to be forever. So I'm going to spend as much time as I can to be the best Josh I can, because I do have tremendous influence over my clients or my team. And in some cases, my audience as a whole. so I may as well stay in my lane. Yeah, right, right. And I love that you said that, right? Because one of the biggest changes that I've seen in my own personal life, and when I see others embody this as well, it really changes them.

10:16It's just the fact that you have as a leader, the ability to only hold yourself accountable and make sure that you said being the best Josh, being the best Jason I can be. I've got three pillars in my life. It's faith, family, and freedom. It's why I started my own consulting firm. It's in my faith walk actually helps me inform what I do in business because I'm the same outside of work as I am inside of work. And if I have this set of skills and morals that I follow, it's important to bring that to the people that I lead. And I think that what comes with that is like everyone can win. One of the platforms I live on is everyone can win.

10:53Winning and success is a personal individualized choice that you make every single day, okay? There's gonna be things outside your control that happen to you, but it's your choice of how you succeed and what you do about it. And I see too many people being led into a world, into a job, into a profession that they don't want because they've never actually gotten right with what they want out of their life, what they think success is for them. So they're being led by people or society or the world that says, you need to go do this, you need to go make money, you need to do all these things. It's like, well, if you're miserable, what does it matter, right?

11:25You won't do a good job at what you're doing if you're miserable. Yeah. Who should be reaching out, Jason, and engaging with you? Or who might be like an ideal connection? So, and what I'm thinking about specifically is things that they may be saying personally, or they may be hearing in their organization, where it might indicate a gap that needs to be explored with someone that's got some objectivity in this area. Absolutely. So oftentimes the people that come to Nacre Consulting first is either the founder, the CEO, or somebody in that C-suite world, right? And there's normally like three types of companies that we'll work with, right?

12:05There's the startup, like a capitalized startup, right? So a post revenue capitalized startup that is really looking to scale. They've got a product that they like, and they want to make sure that they have the right guardrails, they have the right strategy, and they have the right things to go. Oftentimes the founder is the head salesperson or something like that, but they want to be able to grow. So there's those folks. Then there's the company that has really just had either flat or down revenue years recently that is looking for an outside opinion on how they're able to kind of energize and change the business that they're in.

12:36Then there's the fast scaling. The third is the fast scaling company that is like, hey, we are almost like wildly scaling and it's a bit reckless because we've got this awesome product, but we don't have the talent, the strategy, or the guardrails in place to make sure that we can have stackable and scalable growth, right? So those are normally like three different buckets of companies that come to us. The fourth is the confused company, right? They could be succeeding, they could be failing, but they don't know what they have with their go-to-market team and go-to-market being sales, marketing, customer success, right?

13:08They don't necessarily know, do they have the right talent? They'll bring us in and say, hey, just do an assessment so we understand what's going on. And then we can help them start making the choices they need to make to scale the right way. Yeah. And Jason, tell me about Nacre Consulting itself, like the company and how you guys operate and how you've grown and maybe what your goals are over the next year. Yeah. So we started, I was a solopreneur, right? But I knew I wanted to add team members. So currently right now I have a small team. There's five of us and they all are, we are all highly educated.

13:43We've done it before. We've succeeded in the private sector, being W2 employees. And we've all made the choice to go out and be consultants because we want to change the nature of the business landscape for growth and teach them these things. So our goals, honestly, we went from being almost like a fractional shop, where we did a lot of fractional CRO, VP of sales stuff. And we've over the last year and a half transitioned into a more productized business where we offer growth assessments, right? So if you're interested in wanting to kind of understand where you're at and maybe even get some free advice, we have a growth assessment that you can go through on our website.

14:21We do business model canvassing and consulting, right? So we'll look at your business model and we'll identify areas of your business model that need areas of attention so you can have more growth. We'll go in and look at kind of the holistic nature of working with your sales team or your marketing teams or your production teams and say, like not only are they given the right training and talent, but are they compensated properly, right? Everybody wants to grow, right? But not everybody pays for growth, right? So we'll go in and we'll look at that. So what we've really done and where we're continuing to go is to create more doors into the Nacre house that allow businesses to work with us without having to say like, I need to allocate$150 ,000 a year to work with them.

15:03It's like, hey, can we do a couple project things? Can we do some products to see how you can help us? And then we can kind of graduate there. So it's been a big effort to go from kind of that fractional high-end, high-dollar product to switching over to productized marketing. But it's really worked for us because we're able to work with and bring on more new customers. Yeah. Your website, NacreConsulting.com, when somebody goes there, what would you recommend they do if they're like, I like this Jason guy? Still don't understand what Nacre is. I think it has something to do with pearls. Yeah, right.

15:33Exactly. But where do they go next? and what would you recommend they do if they're maybe ready for a conversation, but definitely want more Jason? Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing to do is go to nacreconsulting.com backslash leadership. I offer a five-day leadership course. It's an email course. It's completely free. For five days, five minutes or less, you're gonna get an email with a video and with a corresponding template that's going to help you execute on the leadership lessons that I have. So I would say that that's the first step to take because not only can you understand and learn more about leadership and leadership style, have some templated takeaways that are all free, but you're also going to kind of understand the essence and the aura of who I am and who Nacre Consulting is.

16:12And if that's somebody that you want to work with, right? Because the way that we do things is we attract and detract certain people, right? We're not a burn and churn shop. We're not looking to bring on companies that they want to fire everybody and they want to run everybody in the ground. We're heart-centered growth folks, right? So we want people, we want founders, we want businesses that care about their people and want to get more for themselves, their employees and their business. Yeah. Jason Pearl again, founder, CEO, Nacre Consulting, N-A-C-R-E Consulting.com. Jason, it's been great having you.

16:44Thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it, Josh. Thank you so much. It's been a blast.

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