2292 - When Best Practices Become Bad Habits with Town Square Business Advisors' Matthew Person

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0:58With us right now, it's Matthew Person. Matthew, you're a business strategist. You're an M &A advisor. And you are the founder and CEO of Town Square Business Advisors. You're found on the web at townsquare-advisors.com. Matthew, it's great to have you. Yeah, pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah. But listen, before we get into your superpowers and really excited to talk about culture and what's working today and what is not working today, Matthew, you personally, when you're not at work, what's part of your culture, your personal culture and your non-work time? I don't know if there's things that you're geeking out on or into right now, hobbies, music, movies, anything like that?

1:41Hobbies are actually trying to get back into competitive long drive golf. I'm now, thankfully, the youngest of the senior circuit. So I feel like that's a little bit of a competitive advantage. I competed maybe almost 20 years ago. Didn't do very well, but didn't really take it seriously. And now I still have that swing, still can hit it far. And I think it's time for me to get back out there and try to see if I can win amongst the senior crew. What's the age group for senior? 45 and over. That's got to be 45 as senior. That's like, you know, hitting 50 and being able to join AARP. It's like, get out of here.

2:18We're not that old. I don't make the rules. I just benefit from them. So I'm going to try to do my best. Hey, man, listen, for us in that age category, all those senior discounts are right around the corner. Exactly. I haven't broken a hip yet swinging, and I'm going to keep on. That's great. That's great. Well, culturally, it's probably kind of a cool vibe playing with seniors, right? The senior group. It's fun. Listen, it's just about being competitive again. I think everyone wants to get back to that in some form, have something to look forward to and try to do their best at. And this is something that I can do on the side and won't take too much away from my regular life as a, as a father and an executive.

2:58So, yeah, I've got a good friend of mine. He was actually probably about 10, 12, 15 episodes back. Roy Biancolana. He was a, he was a professional PGA golfer and now he's been in the seniors for quite some time. And he, he actually ranks very well from, from what he said, I haven't kept up with him, but I see he's always posting like he wants, you know, he wins tournaments all the time. I'm not there. Yeah. Yeah. A full round of golf with me is different than hitting a ball far. They're very different swings. When I get back into competition, my real golf game goes down because you just change your swing habits and it makes it harder to play real golf because you've kind of adjusted how you approach a swing.

3:34And so I love the game of golf in full, but I love hitting a golf ball further better. So I've stuck to that. Nice. Nice. Well, let's talk about the work that you do. And, And, you know, Matthew, you know, one thing I think we should address is almost like a state of the union on culture within workplaces. Can you give us like here we are in the second half of 2025, you know, a lot of weird things going on this year, a lot of changes, disruption, chaos here and there, different pockets, you know, both from technology and just broader systems things. but what are you observing generally from leaders who want to create a great culture, but we're kind of doing it a certain way?

4:21Well, it's a great question. The benefit I have in a lot of the roles that I've had, which is a little bit of a multi-foot stool, is I talk to a lot of companies. I talk to a lot of executives. I've seen and been a part of a lot of companies. What I've seen happen, especially recently, is that we've kind of common-sized culture. We've taken a best places to work mindset and said, hey, if that company is doing things that win them a best place to work award, then I should copy that. Right. And we do that a lot in business books. We say, hey, I've talked to 500 companies or a thousand executives that have taken these six attributes and they should work for you.

4:53But unfortunately, what happens as a result of that is that we're not intrinsically looking at what we actually want for what's best for our own company. And that, unfortunately, causes us to miss the important characteristics of systems that create the culture that we want. We've kind of taken this one-sided, common-sized corporate approach, and we've forgotten about the individual, and we've kind of forgotten about the uniqueness of what makes companies different and special. And that's led to maybe a little bit more of disenfranchisement when it comes to employee satisfaction. Yeah. Well, you know, that's got to feel like almost like a, I don't want to say a slap in the face, but, you know, it's like if you as an employee are feeling like, you know, there are some things here that are, that they're just, you know, mass vast majority of people I talk with just like, there's a lot of frustration around some different areas.

5:43And then here comes management or leadership coming in saying they just won some new award. That's got to feel, I mean, like, wow, they didn't ask me. Right. I have a lot of friends, a lot of colleagues, a lot of people I've interacted with that work at the best places to work. And they're like, I actually didn't really like working there. So how does that happen, right? How do you and I end up at the same company and have totally different experiences? You know, one of my favorite statements is new employees don't start their first day disgruntled, right? They come in excited, ready to change the world.

6:15But somehow, according to research, somehow almost 50 % of new hires quit in their first 18 months. That is the outcome of a common-sized approach to this best places to work. Hey, if it works for everyone, it should work for you. And there's a scarlet letter that is placed on employees that don't work out. It's almost as if it's that employee's fault. And that's a tough place for those employees to be. I think somewhere along the line, all of us have felt that experience. What I'd like to argue is that it's a two-way street. Culture is the relationship between that individual and the company.

6:47But again, companies are not one individual. You've got four employees, 40, 400, 400, 100 ,000. How do you take all those unique partialities and put them into one bowl and make sure they all work? The key here is realizing that the ways of doing, the personal beliefs of both the employee and the company have to match. When those two things align, you've got great culture. They love each other. If you are outside that kind of what I call a square of the ways of doing, that known and communicated ways of doing, then you don't like the culture. That doesn't make either party wrong. It just means that they have different perspectives and you have to align to get that good outcome.

7:21Employees need to know their working environment, their ways of doing the systems and processes that foster their best outcomes. And companies also have to be responsible for creating the construct that's going to allow their employees to succeed. Where we failed is that a lot of companies don't put the full square together or maybe don't know even the full component parts that would allow to affect a great corporate culture. And that's what I'm trying to work on is to build the very actionable and easy to identify system that will give every executive the path to creating a better corporate culture.

7:52Well, you go through something called the four I's. Do you mind kind of going through that? Yeah. Well, the four I's create something called the fifth I. And the fifth I is called constrained independence. Constrained independence is actually the output, the culture, and that is the known degree to which an employee can action their own ideas. And why is that important? That's because it's not binary. They can bounce around inside the square, and the square can be varying size. It can be very, what I call, heavily constrained or very narrow. And that, in effect, means that the employee has less autonomy, or it can be a very big square.

8:27And that big square would mean the employees have a lot more autonomy. The four I's are structured to create the sides of the square that deliver that degree of constrained independence that employees would have to work within. The first I is identity. And that's how your organization defines itself. It's missions, values, brand, personality. The key question there for executives is do our people know and our clients know what we stand for and why? The second I is instruction. That is how we operate. The clarity and consistency of expectation. It's onboarding protocols, training and knowledge transfer.

9:03The clarity, the question there is, are roles and expectations and processes clear and scalable? The third eye, intercommunication. This is what everyone thinks culture is. The ping pong table, the happy hour beers on Thursday. That's how people interact. It's hierarchy structure. It's meeting Kate. It's use of communication tools, tone. The key question here is information flowing in a way that drives clarity and trust. And lastly, the one that we have to put it all together is information feedback. That's how we improve both as a company and as executives, as employees. How performance is measured.

9:33How do we share and use that data in a feedback loop to review ourselves and make sure that we're advancing? Are we learning the key question? Are we learning and adapting fast enough to stay competitive? Each side of the square has 10 elements that can be leveraged in a very heavy, moderate, or light degree to affect that desired degree of constraint. And when you put all of them together, you have a complete square and that known degree of constrained independence that will give you a high-performing, high-trust corporate culture because everyone will be bouncing around inside of it. Yeah. Share with us the work that you do, Matthew, like when you're working with clients.

10:12And I know you've got, you know, you're working on a book as well. But how do you engage? Like, how do you serve leaders? The goal here is actually to make this so actionable that it's actually something that you can implement yourself. One of the things that I've always been frustrated with as an executive is that people always want to give you consulting or leave you with something, and then you're kind of left doing it yourself. The goal here is that if you understand the why, how culture got broken in the first place and how you can put it back together, then this methodology, it's actually available on townsquare-advisors.com, all 40 elements.

10:45you can go through it and answer and determine and learn how you would affect for each of the 40 elements, a high, moderate, or low degree of constraint. And you can then go action and execute against it immediately. This is a great diagnostic tool. If you aggregate it, if you use it as a survey and you have the executive, senior, middle, and frontline employees take it, and you aggregate their scores, you will tell for each side, because each side has its own score, where the disparity or the delta is in answers. And it'll help you understand, wait a second, I've got a problem on onboarding. Our frontline employees feel this way.

11:18Our top line executives feel this way. We've got a mismatch. This might be the source of where some of our problems that are operating are coming from. Other places sometimes go awry in identity. The common failure there is product to mission skew, where you haven't set up your brand identity properly, and you've relaunched something in the market that confuses both the staff and the market, and you have to stay on par for that. So this is a great, great diagnostic tool. If you're a startup founder and you're listening to this and you want to go through this survey and you have great IP, but you're like, geez, I've never structured a company before.

11:50You can immediately go take this and figure out the elements that'll help you put together the right company, a structure from a process and systems and procedures perspective. And that's the goal here. We don't want to belabor people with all this time and effort to go figure something out. Let's do it quickly and immediately. Let's action it right on the go. That's the point of the methodology. Yeah. Yeah. And so I know you've got some resources and you have a quiz. Do you mind just sharing a bit about what this quiz is and what someone might learn from going through this? And again, this quiz is available at townsquare-advisors.com.

12:27That's right. There's two of them. They're both free and they're both 10 point questions. They're designed to help people first just understand the concept about the ways of working. A lot of people think they know about themselves and you want to look at this from you can take it as an individual, but they don't necessarily put it all together and say, geez, I haven't thought about it that way before. And and frankly, that's what I hear most about the quiz is, yeah, actually, I learned something about me that I didn't really know. And maybe I want to take this back and help me better prepare myself from a communication perspective or a working environment perspective.

12:58So that quiz will help you unfold and unlock more insights about yourself and your preferred working partialities. You can also take another quiz if you're an executive, which is designed to help you understand how you would prefer to structure your company. And a lot of executives and a lot of companies miss the complete square. That's probably the most common problem, right? They end up with what we call fiefdoms in the common world, but I call mini-square, where every company has its own way of doing because they haven't completed the square and people are left to then complete that square themselves.

13:25That's where chaos starts. You take this quiz and you can walk through your unique partialities and understand, hey, this is probably how I need to change my company and set it up. If you want to dig into the full 40-point element of the methodology, all those aforementioned four I's and the component parts, you can take the 40-point survey as well. I love that. That, again, is available on your website. right? Townsquare-advisors.com. And then I would imagine then, Matthew, that have conversations with folks. What do you typically talk about in a, you know, like a kind of a 30-minute introductory call?

13:59Yeah. A quick introductory call is helping people understand the value of a complete square and why it's important and necessary. Because sometimes it can be overwhelming, 40 points, 40 things. Well, companies are the amalgamate of a lot of constructs, a lot of systems and procedures. And working through all of them is extremely important. If you're running a company, you have an obligation to get this right, to help your employees know the value of being in this complete square. The other thing is teaching people about the value of what I would call the constitution to adhere to the system. We often have people who say things on paper and then they veer from it.

14:33That's a very common practice. A great example of this is your high-performing salesperson who is completely deviated from the norms of the company, but no one wants to let them go because they're such a high performer. It ends up doing more damage to the company because of that one problem child employee. You have to have the constitution to stick to who you are and what you said you'd do. That's a key component of why a lot of cultures go sideways. That's that bait and switch. We're going to say something up front and then we don't do it on the back end. And so walking through people that tenants of why this works is usually what we walk through in the course of a conversation.

15:06Awesome. All right. The website, townsquare-advisors.com. Matthew Person, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, really a pleasure to be here. Always happy to talk about it. Thanks for the time.

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