1802 – Talking about Intrapreneurship with RJ Grimshaw

0:05Hey, thoughtful listener. Before we get going. Did you know that my company up my influence. dot com has launched more than 200 business podcasts. The hosts of our shows are amazing leaders and collaborators. Folks, I want to connect you with. Maybe you deserve your moment in the spotlight as a guest of one of these amazing shows. Just go to upmyinfluence.com where you can see more than 50 shows that are actively seeking business leader guests like you to celebrate right now in front of their high caliber audiences. Just click on the podcast tab at upmyinfluence.com where you'll see shows like the Optics in Action podcast hosted by the visionary Ryan Weiss, president of EPS.

0:55This daily podcast is a treasure trove of insights for anyone in the manufacturing and construction world. Are you a business leader or innovator in these industries? Then Optics in Action is your go-to source for stories that inspire and strategies that really work. Ryan and his guests dive deep into the journeys of successful founders, uncovering the secrets to scaling up in today's fast-paced business environment. But that's not all. If you are at the helm of a thriving company, Optics in Action is actively seeking guests like you in those industries, leaders who are shaping the future of manufacturing and construction.

1:37Share your story, your challenges, and your triumphs with a senior leadership level audience who are eager to learn from your experience. Don't miss this chance to be a part of a community of visionaries. Visit upmyinfluence.com, click on the podcast tab, and look for Optics in Action. Whether you're tuning in as a listener or stepping up as a guest, join us in driving the conversation forward in the world of manufacturing and construction. Your voice matters, and we can't wait to amplify it.

2:14With us right now, RJ Grimshaw. RJ, you are the former CEO of Unify, and you are now found on the web at rjgrimshaw.com. You are an intrapreneur coach. I love what you talk about. And I think that there's a lot of us who are listening to this conversation right now that find ourselves in situations where, you know, we're probably staffed up with a lot of independent contractors and those independent contractors are independent. They're doing their own things. So yeah, I'm so excited to talk about this topic of intrapreneurship. I don't think we've talked about this in a long, long time. So thank you so much for joining us.

2:53No, I appreciate being here and excited to talk about the topic. I'm very passionate about it. And at my heart, I am an entrepreneur. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. My dad's business plan hangs behind me in my office from 1983, which was handwritten in pencil. And I find it ironic that the interest rates when he wrote this business plan was at 12%. So we're all in shock right now with these raising rate environments. But yeah, this guy back here, and they took this business plan and grew to a$50 million company with three partners, handwritten pencil, didn't overthink a business plan, just put together the scope, responsibilities, accountability, and who does what.

3:29Three different owners, three different backgrounds. One was an accountant, one was sales, and my dad was the field operations person. So I just fell into entrepreneurship when I fell into corporate America. And I really self-identified probably in my mid-30s of, hey, that's who I am. I think like an entrepreneur because I was surrounded by that. But now I'm doing it in the confines of another business. And that really helped my career the way that it was. And like you said, most recently, I was the second president CEO for Unify. It was a company that was started in 1978. And over the last 10 years, we grew that from 13 million in sales to 150 million in sales.

4:07And now the time is right where I'm going to actually, I've exited the business and now going out on my own to become an entrepreneur and teach business owners the value of having entrepreneurs within their company. Yeah. I just noticed on your website, although I don't see that on your LinkedIn, that you're also a veteran-owned business. I didn't realize that. I was in the Air Force. I don't talk a lot about it. I don't know why. It's just, I went in for three and a half years in the Air Force. I went to college, really wasn't sure that was for me. I got married at a very young age. I've been married 33 years to my high school sweetheart.

4:41And like so many young people, right? They want to grow up so fast and then when they get there it's like oh i kind of liked it without the responsibilities without this adulting but i went in the air force and it was the best thing that ever happened to me and actually exited the air force at the the ripe age of 23 my dad who again was my mentor set my brother and i up when i say set it was all loans it was nothing was given to us to start our first business which is the bar restaurant um it's my first time of owning my own business. And he was the mentor that wouldn't enable, but he would point us in the right direction.

5:15He would say, this is where you have to go do it. I'm not doing it for you. So he provided the guidance, but not enablement. But then when I fell into corporate America, Josh, I quickly realized again, that my makeup and the way I thought about things was completely different than most people. And we get into functional and vital employees. And an entrepreneur is a vital employee in your organization. Like we were discussing before, we jumped on on the zoom here you feel that within your organization you have a lot of entrepreneurs and hence why you're successful because when you're able to surround yourself with people that have this skill set and it's really soft skills that you're looking for to identify it's not hard skills it's um again we'll talk through those but when you have those people in your organization it's magical it's what helped us grow from 13 million 150 and guess what we didn't add bodies.

6:07We didn't add employees. We added people that came in with a mindset of improving processes. And I was looking, well, why do we do it like that? There's friction here. What about this? And a lot of brainstorming, a lot of whiteboards in our offices that jump up. And I have them now in my office here where brainstorming with a whiteboard is the greatest thing ever. So maybe just let's lay just a little bit more foundation on what it means to create a culture that supports kind of that entrepreneurial energy? Yeah, let me start the foundation with the definition of an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is someone that thinks like an entrepreneur within the confines of an organization.

6:47And it's very critical that the entrepreneur aligns with the vision and mission of the company because if there's no alignment there, you're not going to get everything possible that discretionary effort or discretionary engagement out of employees if they're not aligned. So when you find that alignment, within a person in the company, that's when the magic happens. It starts with leadership, though. You as the business owner or the business manager really have to say, okay, I want to develop this type of operating system that we call it. It's a culture. And that culture is really first ownership of the manager or the owner.

7:21And then secondly, having a conversation either with your management team, or even if it's one manager, you're second in command per se, okay, of just fostering ideas to be shared within the organization. And when that happens, you have that communication back and forth because a recent study showed, Josh, that 75 % of employees in an organization believe that they have ideas that will enhance the business. And that'll be everything from process, go to market strategies, customer journey processes, even everything from delivery of product per se. And again, when you set up that type of environment in that culture, It's amazing to watch the benefits of it.

8:04Yeah. Well, so how can we encourage this within our organization? Because it sounds great. I would love, you know, for my team members to feel empowered to the level where they could bring these great ideas and we can kind of join in that passion for, you know, really creating the best possible version of ourselves, you know, so we can generate greater impact for our clients. And there's really two avenues. One, you can have a formal program, which we come in and we'll do a full immerse program where we track the ideas because we want to, there's a dopamine effect to it as well. When someone shares a good idea that you implement, you want them to feel part of the company and their voice heard.

8:46I'll give you an example. At Unify, we had a salesperson. And again, I had a blind spot to this. I was flying up here, worried about other things. And the salesman came to me and said, hey, RJ, I think we need to develop an online portal to receive payments from our customers. Remember, we're lending money to them to buy the equipment. However, we needed to set up an easier way for them to pay us via either an ACH or wire online. And so much is done online now, right? We did not have that. The company started in 1978. This was 2015. It was stagnant somewhat. So I said, great idea. I said, however, we don't have the capital to do that right now.

9:25We're in a growth mode. He said, well, why don't I take and try and run with it? Still do my core job. I still have to perform and hit my numbers and things of that nature. But I have time and bandwidth. I would like to really focus on this. And I said, wonderful. However, you're going to have to influence our IT team because this is not on the roadmap. And then you're going to have to influence the outside provider to do this. He did it within three months, Josh. Today, we process over$100 ,000 of monthly payments from our customers via that online portal. Again, that was a blind spot to me. Because if you're a business owner and you know the e-myth, right?

10:00You're working on the business and you're not in the trenches on a daily basis. So you have blind spots. So that's where you, if you have that communication and also allowing your entrepreneurs to do that, you'll see benefit. And I could go on and on with multiple stories, either within Unify or outside of Unify from a product perspective. But it's just amazing. And then the other thing it does, Josh, it increases the level of engagement of your team members because now they feel they have a voice in the organization. They feel they're putting skin in the game. It's not about paying them more.

10:33It's about having them feel and having the emotional attachment to the success of the overall organization and also their team members that they're surrounded with. The peer accountability goes up considerably as well. You know, and then there's there are going to be folks within our organizations that, you know, just looking at some kind of did a little bit of personality tests and and some people don't they just don't really want to disrupt anything. Their personality is they'd much rather just be given a set of instructions and, you know, just kind of like that's comforting to them. And they'd rather just kind of execute.

11:14Yeah. So we have a ratio to that, Josh. We actually tell our business owners and our managers that we work with, you actually want an 80-20 split. And we call them functional and vital because 80 % is functional. They have to do the day-to-day. You develop the processes, the systems, the SOPs, and they can follow those. However, to your point, you're never, ever going to get anything more out of those functional employees. And again, that's not a knock. That's just the way that they're wired. And we need those. Yeah, yeah. The 20 % is where you're going to get the uptick within this culture. And guess what?

11:46Those functional team members, all of a sudden you start seeing sharing more and more ideas. But you have to be consistent with the culture. And you just can't do it as an initiative for one month. You can't say, I'm going to lose weight, go to the gym one time and say, well, I haven't lost any weight. I'm giving up. This is really a long-term culture that you put and set in your organization. Yeah, if we currently don't have that, like, you know, let's say that, you know, when we have our leadership meetings or we have our, you know, internal meetings, and it just doesn't seem like there's a lot of input that's coming in.

12:21What can we as leaders do to start evoking a little bit more where folks feel like it's a safe environment to share some of these things that they might have, these ideas that they may have? So we do one of two things. Either we will tell business owners to set up an email within their organization called ideas at whatever the domain is. And then your team members can actually put in writing because we want them critically thinking. We just don't want them winging ideas all over the place. That doesn't make sense. And that's back to the alignment of the mission and vision to that individual. And then start looking for soft skills within your organization to prop them up, the champions within the, you know, entrepreneur operating system.

13:02And it's really soft skills. You're looking for individuals that have an ownership mentality. They come in and they own what they're doing on a daily basis to their life learner. They're always wanting to learn. And entrepreneurs, if you assign them a job or a task to do something, they'll typically, just like I would, look at it and say, great, this is great. It's not in my job description, but I get to learn something new, just like that gentleman who set up the portal for us. He has that skill for the rest of his career to be able to do that. and he didn't go to school for it. It wasn't part of his job description.

13:32He just felt it was the right thing to do. The third thing you want to look for is passionate people. They're passionate about life. They're passionate about everything they do. They're just excited about life. They enjoy the journey that we're all on. And then they also are willing to take calculated risks. And that's the difference, I believe, between an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur. That entrepreneur, they're fine to take the risk. They're willing to put their capital on it. The intrapreneur might not be as tolerant to take that risk from a monetary perspective, but they're willing to take the risk to push the boundaries to make improvements within the organization, especially again, back to that alignment that they feel passionate about the mission and vision.

14:08And then the last thing, they drive spark and change. Their wheels are always spinning. They do drive people crazy, like you mentioned earlier, because a lot of functional employees be like, why can't we just, we've always done it like this. And it's really easy. You say, well, I guess we can be like Blockbuster or we can be like Sears and we can go on and on and on, dropping names like that. And I do a presentation that I speak to at national conferences and the title of the presentation is actually don't be the next blockbuster. And it's specifically in the times we live in, because it's so critical for both the entrepreneur and also the company, because if you're a vital employee and an entrepreneur, and unfortunately, if a company's looking to downsize people or have to make cuts, do you believe that that vital employee will be cut.

14:55No, they're too incredibly valuable to the organization. But that functional employee, typically, and let's be honest, it happens in every single company when those discussions start. It's a stack ranking, who brings what value to the organization, high value activities versus low value activities. And entrepreneurs are always doing high value activities. Yeah. RJ, your website is rjgrimshaw.com. For folks that have been listening to our conversation, like, RJ, I need more. I want to, like, I'm already finding myself like, I want to geek out on this topic. Where do I go from here? Yeah, just come to my website, rjgrimshaw.com or just Google me.

15:33There's all kinds of YouTube videos out there, podcasts like do this because my main mission now is to have, when someone says, what are you? And people say, oh, I'm an entrepreneur. I would like people to start identifying, hey, I'm an intrapreneur and have that be just as sexy and it's just as cool as that entrepreneur. Because guess what? Every single entrepreneur needs a good entrepreneur within their organization. They're the doers. We're the doers, the entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs are the visionaries. So it's commissioning, really. You want people in your company, we call it commissioning with you, to have success.

16:09I really like how cool is that? There's someone on my team or someone within any organization says, yeah, so what do you do? Well, I'm actually an entrepreneur within my influence. So, you know, it's my responsibility to do this, this, this, and we are always innovating. We believe in constant, never-ending improvement. And, you know, it's my job to always be looking for great opportunities so that we can evolve and, you know, and truly become the category leaders that we desire to be and, you know, make that impact in the world. That's really cool. By the way, that looks really good on a business card, I'm going to say.

16:42So this is back to the individuals where we coached the individuals as well as the business owners. And I preach and evangelize to individuals. Put that on your resume because that is if I see that on someone's resume, they've already defined themselves as an entrepreneur. And they probably of course, we're going to interview and things of that nature. However, in assessments to make sure that they do have those traits. Also, we teach business owners that, you know, war on talent. It continues. You know, if you're a high value team member, you know, there's other companies that are probably wishing to hire you.

17:15We have them put on their job descriptions, entrepreneur mindset. All of a sudden, by doing that one little subtle change, you saw the level of your candidates improve tremendously because now that's attracted to them because they know their voice is going to be heard and they're going to come in and be able to do meaningful work within the organization. Love it. RJ Grimshaw, again, your website, rjgrimshaw.com. Again, entrepreneur, coach, and former CEO of Unify, which is a substantial bank in Michigan. So RJ, listen, great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. I've really enjoyed this.

17:56Thanks, Josh, for having me. Appreciate it.

18:03Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com slash guest. If you're a listener, I'd love to shout out your business to our whole audience for free. You can do that by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or join our listener Facebook group. Just search for The Thoughtful Entrepreneur in Facebook. I'd love even if you just stopped by to say hi. I'd love to meet you. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day.

18:47Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful entrepreneurs. Hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes each day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.