2209 - How Can Founders Empower Their Teams for Greater Innovation and Growth with Lcubed Consulting's Lisa Levy

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05With us right now, it's Lisa L. Levy. Lisa, it's so great to have you. You are the founder of L-Cubed Consulting. Your website is lcubedconsulting.com. You are also the author of the book, right? I'm seeing in the background, Future Proofing Cubed. I love that topic. And I think that that is on the forefront of most leaders' minds, hopefully at all times, but probably not. And hence, let's have this conversation today. Before we get into that, Lisa, do you mind share with us what you're currently into, geeking out on, doing for fun? I always love finding out what passionate entrepreneurs do when no one's looking.

1:52So my favorite passion that I do is it's really all about live music. My best friend is a musician. I have been his number one groupie for more than 30 years. And so my favorite thing to do is live music at a bar, listening to just, you know, vibing on what's going on. But he's on the verge of a really huge milestone birthday. So we're in the process of kidnapping him at the end of next month and taking him to Mexico. He has no idea that it's been planned. There's a whole group of us going. And until he's standing in line at TSA, he will have absolutely no idea what's happening in his world. So my passion is about family and fun and music because music makes everything better.

2:37Have you seen the movie The Game starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn? That's what you need to do. Dear. If I could put it all the way and just money wasn't any consideration for me, I would be a tour manager with a band that toured the country. Oh, that's great. I would be on the road. Does this artist have an online presence, I would assume? They do have an online presence. Go ahead and promote them, please. LosJones.com, LosJonesMusic. You can find them on Instagram, at LosJones. And they're fabulous. I have been listening, again, more than 30 years. So I also just sort of aged myself in this.

3:17I will add that when I started being a groupie, I might have been underage, and I might have been sneaking into the bars. Good for you. Good for you. That is the age to get to do that. And by the way, any age I think is a good age to do that. Sneak into places maybe you shouldn't be yet. It's fun, right? I love it. I love it. Well, Lisa, and by the way, that's losjones.com, L-O-S-J-O-N-E-S.com, and you'll see links to the socials and so forth once you get there. I agree with you. I haven't announced anything formally yet, but my wife and I see, we love tribute bands, and for whatever reason, Orlando is kind of a hub for tribute artists.

4:05and so we're just so spoiled here that we see tribute bands for Nirvana, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Jane's Addiction. I mean, I could go on and on and on and on, Red Hot Chili Peppers, like all these bands you get to see in small venues. I am of the opinion, Lisa, I think that seeing live music truly keeps you young. That's my opinion. Any thoughts on that? I'm holding onto it because the milestone that he's celebrating and it's literally one month from today, so this can air and it won't even blow the surprise, but he's turning like 60. And so he is on stage multiple times a month playing. And right.

4:42You know, we can look at Steve Perry. We can look at, you know, there's lots of, Steve Perry was a really bad example. I was trying to get to, we can get, you know, Aerosmith just stopped touring. But music it's, it's good for the soul, right? It gives us, it gives us harmony. It gives us a chance for us to step away from the chaos of running our business. Yes. Can I tell you, I had a moment. It was, we were watching a Metallica tribute band called Hardwired and they had a Pantera tribute band. I'm not really into Pantera a whole lot, but I, I love that performance. And, and I was, as I was looking around at the crowd and we are just all into it so hard.

5:24And I'm like, you know, this is such a magical moment right now. Cause here we are, everyone in this room, most of us are working our asses off all week long, working for the man, doing our thing, you know, serving our families, solving problems, dealing with chaos in our lives. And here we are. And it's this moment of of unified catharsis. And what was so beautiful, I thought is like, you know what? I think if in on social media, like if we were to all kind of just randomly bump into each other on social media, it would probably be all over the map. Like, you know, and unfortunately, you know, social media doesn't necessarily bring out the best in people, but music, live music does bring out the best in people.

6:10And it lets us remember that we have so much more in common than what divides us. And in this moment where we can all celebrate together as, you know, just members of the human race, you know, all two for whom the bell tolls, right? Great conversation. Now we've got literature thrown in there too. Go, Josh. All right. So Lisa, tell us about the work that you do. So L-Cubed is a consultancy and an advisory business. We've been working in the Phoenix area for more than 16 years now, which I just kind of did the math last year when, oh my God, we've been around for a while. And we work with founders and maturing businesses to help them align their people, their processes, enable with technology so that they can grow and scale.

6:56in my previous life right i i am a process geek i am the most left brain human being you're ever going to come into contact with i can solve any problem with sticky notes and a dry erase board and boxes and arrows we can solve anything in that space but with my clients we really work hard to think beyond that and to get into the space where we're building teams of self-reliant leaders so that as a business owner and a founder, you're not stuck making every decision that needs to be made for your business because there's a point in time where that's no longer sustainable. And if you don't have people around you who you know and trust that they can do what needs to be done, my first question is why did you hire them in the first place and why do you keep them around?

7:40And so with the advisory and the coaching aspect of the business, we're really building a business model through our adaptive transformation framework that I described in Future Proofing cube, but so that that business can grow and scale without a founder present. Oh boy, does that sound like a dream? And I think that far too many of us as founders, there's probably things that we just don't give up. And we come up with maybe some really great justifications and reasons. I'm sure you've heard it all, Lisa. Why don't you pop some balloons for us right now on some of those justifications. And again, I'm sure some of them are very rightly so.

8:24Well, and there's moments, Ed, right? I framed that through the founder's eyes, but this can be a division in a larger organization, right? It's anywhere where you feel like you are the buck stops here. And they're the things that keep you up at night, right? It's the, oh my gosh, we have this problem and we've solved it. I swear we've solved it a dozen different times and it keeps coming back. Well, that's a problem in and of itself because you're not finding the actual root cause and getting to how you can transform a process so that that pain point goes away. Other things that present themselves are attrition and turnover.

9:00You've got really good people. You know that they were really good. You hired them in and then they're leaving. Why are they leaving? They're probably, if they're A performers, they're being micromanaged in some way, shape or form in some way, they are not being allowed to do what you probably hired them to do. And finding and tuning a team so that you let everybody rise to their fullest capability is really important because we're grown ass adults and we have mortgages and we may have rent, we have car payments, we make our utility payments. We do all of these things, but often we bring them into a business and then we tell them what to do and how to do it.

9:40Why are we wasting our time and energy if we're hiring skilled, capable people who should be helping us grow and scale so that as leaders, we're focused on the future. Day-to-day operations should be very uninteresting to us. That chaos should be managed by others. We should not have to do it. Amen on that. But and that's another thing. I'd say one of the easiest paths that I hope that every leader founder does is please get out of operations. Get that you are not you are not supposed to be there. I mean, this is basic Michael Gerber e-myth stuff there. But, you know, and Lisa, how about if you have someone who says, but I am the brand, people are paying money because they want access to me.

10:28How do you advise on that? That's a tough one because I live that every day, right? I am building with the first thing anybody sees about my business is me. And the reality is, yeah, the brand might be me, but the work has to be everybody else. And so there's a time and a place for that founder to be present. There is that opportunity in relationship building and relationship management. But again, it's not in operations. It's not in delivery of said product or service. We absolutely have to be present and seen and interactive. But if we are responsible and holding our own selves still accountable for actual delivery, we are the weakest link in our business.

11:14And that starts to cross into that conversation as businesses grow and scale. Are founders going to be the actual CEO of a business? That's a whole topic that we can spend a lot of time in, but not every founder is going to mature and grow into being a CEO. If we really, there's a time and a place when that change has to happen and a founder becomes a chairman of a board or a chairwoman of the board and not actually that CEO who is driving things into the future. You know, and I wonder too, you know, if let's say you're a founder and you've created a business for yourself and you're like, listen, there's no way I can step away from my business for two length of time.

11:57And Lisa, I suspect that there may come a point where you might want to reconsider or how can I future-proof my business in a way where I don't have to be here? And that might be R &D. That might be product development. That might be, say, listen, you've been the figurehead for so long. We need to come up with ways where we can create way more virtual Josh, for example. And again, I'm not suggesting e-courses because those don't really sell really well these days. But there are other ways that you can, like, for example, like we've, you know, all of my knowledge that I provide to clients. Here's a simple thing, right, is, you know, and this was several, many years ago.

12:41I said, listen, anytime I get a particular question asked from more than one client, I'm just going to produce a video. If the second person asks the same question, I'm going to make a video. I'm going to make an SOP. I'm going to provide a checklist to share all the resources that answer that question. And then we add it to our knowledge base. And then I train all of our pod coaches. They don't have to be experts, but they do need to be really good at curating my knowledge. So at least I don't have to spend as much personal one-on-one time with a client who just needs a simple question answered.

13:15And now they can get it answered quickly. And now we're building AI applications, which are really cool. So now everyone gets virtual Josh. Just some ideas there. I just wanted to kind of share with you. I want to take it in a different direction because yes, those are all things to sort of operationalize Josh. So that Josh isn't the one doing it so that you have that knowledge base was a great phrase for that. But for growth and scale over time, it isn't actually about Josh, right? So as a founder, we had a great idea. We started a business. We've grown it. We've scaled it. It's fabulous. And now we have people around us.

13:46And now if I have 10 great ideas in any given year, let's say that that's really awesome for Lisa, because at least as about 999 really awful ones. You're in the club, Lisa. I think everyone listening just nodded their head to, oh yeah, suffer from it. But if we have a team of people around us who are also having ideas and we're capturing those ideas and we're using those ideas to build our next products and services, we are now actively innovating. We are driving forward into the future, and those ideas are things that we get to play with. And this is a tool that I call an innovation engine. It's a three-step process.

14:25And it really is about generating ideas, lots of them from everybody. Have a place, a repository where somebody has an idea at 2 a.m., they can go key it in, and it's just this growing list. And with purpose, a couple of times a year, depending on the size of your organization, it could be monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, You're going to go through that list with a team and you're going to look at those ideas and you're going to prioritize a handful of them to play with. And I'm using very fun language here because this is a formal process that is not stodgy or bureaucratic because this is about creativity, not left brain.

15:03This is right brain thinking. And step two, when we prioritize those ideas, we're going to the conference room prototype them. It's a thought exercise with 10 of your smartest people. What would it take to make that idea real? Take that product or service to market, develop it, take it out and grow it into a new line of revenue. If you get through that thought exercise, step three, we're actually going to experiment with it a little bit. We're going to test it with a key group of our clients, former clients, clients that may not actually have liked our products or services previously because they're going to be most honest with us.

15:40And we're going to test that idea, that new product, that service, that change to a product or a service, that need to retire a product or a service. Test that out. So this three-step process, when we play with it, can be done in days, right? This is something on Monday you sit down and you talk about it a little bit, and by Friday you're making some calls and asking for feedback. that is going to give you a constant flow of new ideas that you can grow and scale. Because every product, every service has a life cycle. And once it reaches its peak, it will begin to decline. But if we have a throughput of many ideas coming behind it, our business does not go through the downside.

16:23It continues to grow with the new ideas. Because it's market directed and no one ultimately is smarter than the market. I'm certainly not. The market will surprise you sometimes. Lisa, your book is Future Proofing Cubed, and your website is lcubedconsulting.com. Do you mind maybe sharing to our friend that's listening in this conversation, if they want more Lisa, obviously you have some brilliant ideas. You're a great LinkedIn follow. But how else might folks engage or otherwise connect with you? So LinkedIn is the number one place to find me, Lisa L. Levy. I know that that will all be in the show notes.

17:04But on YouTube, there's also the channel at L-Cubed Consulting. My podcast is Disrupt and Innovate at disruptandinnovate.com. But Josh, your audience is so vibrant and so big. I really want to give an offer and make something special just for them because we've talked a little bit about the power of innovation and what that means to your business. And so for those leaders out there who were nodding their head earlier when we were describing the, oh, my God, I have to make every decision and my ideas aren't always great, but my people around me just aren't quite getting things done. I want to give them access to two aspects of my self-reliant leadership team program.

17:42And the first piece is a proven framework that will help them transform their team into that self-reliant team that can actually grow and scale the business without you. And that first piece is the Innovation Engine Blueprint. And it's a guide that will talk you through some of the things that I just shared in a little bit more detail so that your team can become more strategic, accountable, and results focused. But if that really gets you going and that says, oh, my God, that is awesome and I need more of this, I'm offering a 60-minute innovation clarity call with me. And in that, we will really talk about your team, what you're doing, and what some of those obstacles might be.

18:20And I will try and give you quick fixes in that 60 minutes that will make a difference in your business. All you have to do is connect with me on LinkedIn, drop a message with the word innovation, and I will get you the blueprint and we will connect to have that conversation. All right. I'm going for I'm first in line because I recorded this interview before it published. So I get to be at the line. Lisa, let's do this. Lisa, your website, lcubedconsulting.com, your podcast, your book, everything is listed right there. Thank you so much for being a guest. It's a wonderful conversation. Thank you, Josh.

19:25We are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm gonna share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies.

20:08Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to 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 every single day. Thanks for listening. And thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.