Unfinished Business with Eric Mulvin

[Vistage Series] Why Your Current Business Structure Is Stuck in 1954 | Derrick Mains

• Eric Mulvin • Episode 18

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Are you running a 2026 business on a 1954 playbook? In this episode of Unfinished Business, host Eric Mulvin sits down with operational mastermind Derrick Mains to tear down everything you think you know about corporate management. Derrick challenges the standard structure of corporate departments, explains why traditional LLMs are already becoming tech tools of the past, and introduces the concept of agentic AI workflows. They also dive deep into the psychological reality of business exits, exploring why so many founders face severe depression after selling their companies. If you are looking to build a highly optimized, resilient, and human-centric organization that leverages next-level tech, this conversation is your blueprint. 


Episode Highlights

10:20  The Problem with Corporate Departments

14:30  The Paradigm Shift in Leadership

19:07  The Move from 1954 Management Models

19:44  The Next Wave of AI Infrastructure

20:48  The Wave of Agency Burnout

24:15  From Text Prompts to Agentic Workflows 

29:40  Operational Optimization over Micro Management 

34:17  The Reality of the Founder Exit

38:50  The Post Exit Depression Reality 

42:00  Cultivating Radical Communication

47:15  Breaking Down Communication Silos 

51:10  Engineering Environments for Success 

54:30  The One Year at Sea Challenge

55:40  The Illusion of Perfect Placement

57:00  The Trap of Continuous Resource Gathering


Follow Derrick Mains

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derrickmains/

Website: www.theprocessfixer.com 

Unfinished Business with Eric Mulvin

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Welcome to the Unfinished Business Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Mulvin. This is where we sit down and talk with CEOs, visionaries, leaders, and creatives who are out changing the world through business, through their organization, through their leadership or creativity. Because it doesn't matter what you've done or who you are, what you've accomplished, even people like Jim Collins still have something that they want to accomplish. And so we explore those stories here today on Unfinished Business with Eric Malt. Now I'm talking with leaders about the unfinished business tonight. This episode is brought to you by PacViz outsourcing. At PacViz, we help software, e-commerce, taxi, and NEMT companies outsource their customer support and back office tasks with a dedicated team in the Philippines. These are full-time remote staff who are working as part of your team, handling calls, emails, chat support, and admin tasks. So you can improve support, scale faster, and keep costs under control. For example, one of our clients who started working with us saved over $600,000 in dispatch costs a year by using PacBiz staff. And so if you're trying to lower costs or scale support, visit us at packs-biz.com to learn more, or you can call us Monday through Friday during business hours at 480-771-3009. All right, without further ado, my guest today has spent over two decades redesigning how organizations think and operate. He's an Emmy Award-winning storyteller who has deconstructed over 75 years of outdated management theory to rebuild it into a methodology for operational improvement. He's an advisor and coach to founders and executive teams who help leaders see their businesses as living systems that can be engineered for clarity and capability, eliminating the need to blame for 94% of business problems. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Derek Maines. Thanks for having me, Eric. Awesome. Thanks for being here. We've known each other for a long time. We have. Like a long time, right? So I mean, like, let me think, probably, well, it was still 2000s, right? Well, because you first met my brother. Yeah, your brother, right? Probably like 2013, I would think. Yeah. Which is now about 13 years ago. A long time. It's good to be here on the podcast. Yeah, great to be here. Great to be here in your office. Thanks for having us. Thanks for coming over. Awesome. So I have been excited to get you on the show here because I really want our listeners to learn about systems processes, what you do, and the amazing work that you've been doing with businesses all over. And so I don't know. Let's start with, I guess just give us a little background. I mean, I got the little intro there from your words. Sure. So I've really been doing this work for over 20 years. I I started as a turnaround guy. I didn't go to college, didn't do any of that kind of stuff. I started my own business in high school and a landscaping business, worked that through high school. And I got into early in my career, I was in sales, and uh ended up walking into a couple of situations that need to turn around. Where I got hired as a salesperson, you know, they're like, you need to get out there and sell because this whole thing is falling apart. And I'm looking around, going, why would I sell something into something that's falling apart? You can't manage the few customers that you already have. Why am I going to put more people into this system? So that ended up in a couple of situations where I took charge of a turnaround and said, hey, look, why don't we just do that? Like, let's just fix this first. Let's not just sit here and talk about growth. Let's spend a little bit of time trying to fix what we have and then let's see what happens. And in every one of those, it was able to radically turn it around by by stopping selling and stopping growing and saying, let's make sure we've got all our ducks in a row, everything is aligned, we know what we're doing, we can align with customers. Very, very quickly, not only did the sales grow, but they like automatically happened. Like people came back for more, they bought more stuff, they brought their friends. And I was like, do we even need a sales function? So there's this belief, I think, that we have to grow our organizations every year. But if we get back historically and we look at the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, the market doesn't grow up and to the right every year. For decades, CEOs had to plan, well, what if this is a year where we lose 10%? What if it's flat for the next four? What if we gain one, then lose the next, then gain another one, then lose the next, then gain another one and lose the next? What if the market conditions are different than what we anticipated? And that that is an environment we've gone through the longest period. I think there was 129 uh months in a row where we had growth in an economy. It's never ever happened before in any economy, everywhere, anywhere. So this is not normal. Yeah. It will end. And it's been propped up by, you know, new financial product offerings, new technology, all of these things. But I feel like we're starting to get to the end of that. I think AI is a little bit of the beginning and the end. And we've got to prepare our businesses now because there's going to be a rocky road for the next couple of years. I think we all can see it. Organizations like ITR Economics, I don't know if you're from, they've been predicting the Great Depression, a huge Great Depression in 2030. And every time I read their stuff, they're like, now our probability is up 10 more percent. Because it's because a lot of it is around debt and the restructuring of global trade and all of these kind of things. And I don't think anybody's saying that the bottom is gonna fall out of it forever, but I think what we're going to have is there's going to be a reset of the board. And we as business owners have to be prepared for that. We have to be able to prepare our business to say what happens if I if I lose, if revenue goes down by 5% every year for the next five years, what's your plan? What are you gonna do? Oh, I'm gonna lay everybody off. Well, that is not a strategy. So I'm I'm really anti-Western management in a lot of ways because I think it's been very perverted. And, you know, you mentioned Jim Collins in the intro and mad respect for his work, but I think right people, right seats is just totally nonsense. Doesn't make any sense to me. I don't think every person I've explained it to is like, that doesn't make any sense to me either. So I think we've got to move away from those old ideas. A lot of our ideas about management are 19th century ideas. I'm trying to run a 21st century business with an idea that came out before automobiles or before cassette tapes or air conditioning. I just don't see how those things are relevant anymore to today. We used to hire hands, now we hire brains. Even when you're hiring hands, you're hiring brains. So we've got to change our management philosophy. We need to, you know, we either need a lot of change management in our organizations or we need a lot of change management in our organizations. And I'm not saying throw out management, I'm saying that management has to evolve from its current position of goal setters. This is what management does in America. We just sit around and set goals and then we just go, yeah, yeah, like to try, you know, like here's a pizza. That is not, it's not leadership. Leadership is looking at the team that you have and saying, okay, how is this team gonna win a national championship? NCAA football winners this last year, great example. Terrible team. I mean, by everybody's accounts, one of the worst teams in in football, wins a national championship, defeats everybody, and does it with the same kids as last year. No big, oh, we gotta go out and recruit and get all these stars. No, the coach walked into the locker room and said, You guys are an NCAA championship winning team. And they were like, Really? He's like, Yeah, everybody in this room. Well, who are you gonna replace? Who are we gonna bring in? Nobody. This team is the team that wins the NCAA championship. And immediately something clicked in those kids' head, and they were like, Okay, we're gonna go freaking do this thing. Now, if we had sat around waiting for, oh, we gotta get Michael Jordan in here, we got you know, the worst baseball player. Uh, you know, and I'll be, I mean, there's probably some worse, but the worst that we all remember is Michael Jordan, terrible athlete in the game of baseball, in the game of basketball, he had the right setting and the right coach, the right talent, the right people around him, all of these things. And and so you you you've got to build the system for the people that you have. I call it, yeah, I've been challenging CEOs here lately to something called a year at sea, and and they're horrified when I tell them this. What I what I essentially say is I say, here it is. You you're today you launch on a year at sea with your company. You'll be leaving port. Everybody that's on the boat will be on the boat when you get off at the end of a year. You're not firing anybody, you're not hiring anybody. We're gonna figure out how to get this team to operate efficiently so that we can accomplish our goals. Now, if you really are egregious and you do something that's outside of the norms, you might be walking the plank. But there ain't no, but there ain't nobody else getting on this boat. I mean, other than if it's pirates. And and and take that idea and say, okay, now what do I have to do? And and and people go, well, that's crazy. Well, every military leader ever, that's exactly what they had to do. You don't get on it, you're not the admiral of a ship and you get on the ship, and then halfway across the ocean, you're like, well, get rid of half of these people and get me new ones. No, this is the team that goes to war, this is the team that has to accomplish it, this is the team that's world class. And a lot of psychologists will tell you this. And in the 1960s, a lot of managers warned us about the young managers that were coming up, these guys that served in World War II, and their command and control attitude. And managers at that time, guys like McGregor, said, Look, people, what 100% of your the time, your people are exactly who you say they are. If you say they're a bunch of bums, 100% of the time they're a bunch of bums. If you say they're world class, weirdly enough, 100% of the time they become world class. So it's up to us as the leader to lead the people, not to set goals and you know, try to encourage them with carrots and sticks to move forward. No, we have to lead them as a team. And that's what's missing on American management, and that's why we all feel like it's broken. That's why nobody stays anywhere in no more than two years. So there's a lot there, and nobody really wants to uncover the system that we have. Everybody wants to talk about the people and the events, but nobody wants to talk about what's actually happening. And that is that we are trying to operate businesses using ideas that are truly ancient from a technology perspective. I mean, think about it. The idea of departments, General Motors created that. Like, we didn't use departments before. Like, that's weird thinking about departments. Why would you break people up in departments? Why wouldn't you break them up by the function that they perform? Well, this guy's an attractor. What does that mean? Hey, it's every time we put him in a situation, people are like, I love this freaking guy. Like, we let me introduce more people to him. Find those people and make them attractors. Find the convincers in your organization and make them convincers. That that could be somebody on the dock that's just got to convince the truck driver. But find the functions of people and rely upon them, not these silly little, well, you're in the marketing team, so you have to do marketing things. And it's just a whole kingdom of fiefdoms that needs to be torn down and rethought, particularly in the world of AI. I have a lot of questions about all that you said. You know, you know, listen, you got to understand, I am a long form kind of guy. As everybody always says, there's a reason I'm not on TikTok. It's most of my stuff, you've seen some of my stuff, right? Most of my talks are three to six hours. So, and that's because when you're talking about something complicated, you have to break it down into simple concepts that people understand, and then you have to stack those together to say, okay, well, what does that mean now? If management is faulty, and I can show you statistic after statistic that shows you that the system that we use doesn't work, if it is faulty, well, what would work? Well, okay, let's look at history. Let's look at World War II where all of these women got poured into these factories and all the experienced people left. And managers had to figure out how to take women who had never been in these situations and get them to perform. By the way, the women in World War II produced 2.4 for each woman, they did the work of 2.4 men. How did they do that? Not because they were stronger or faster or smarter or knew more about manufacturing, for the exact opposite reasons is the reason because management understood they didn't have those things, and management said, we can't make more people. This is what we got. We have the disabled, we have the elderly people that couldn't get drafted in the war, and women as well as children, and Jeff TR allowed children over the age of 12 to enter the workforce. Could you imagine? How old are your kids? 10 and 10. So two years from now, imagine your 12-year-old coming home and saying, Hey, president says I can go get my own place and get a job and you can't do anything about it. Scary thought. Yeah, right. So the point is, is they didn't have experts, they had amateurs. And with those amateurs, they were able to accomplish significantly more than the experts were. Something's there, and we need to find it as a we need to define it and we need to bring it back into our management theory. So do you think if Michael Jordan was in the right system on the baseball team that he could have been successful? I think it's possible he could have, but I'm not sure he had the chops for it to begin with. Maybe that was the wrong in every aspect, it was wrong. I I wonder if he wouldn't have been, if he if he I think he still would have been a Hall of Famer if he wasn't on the Bulls, but I'm not sure he would have won what he won. I mean, Dominique Wilkins, who was in my TV show, Dominique Wilkins was an incredible player that had a team where there was no other real talent on it. And he beat Jordan in the dunk-offs. Like Jordan hated to go face to face with him because he's like, man, this one one-on-one, this guy probably gets me, but I have a team and he doesn't. So he's never gonna be me because he doesn't have that support. And not knocking the Hawks team at the time, but he did not have the team. I mean, Michael Jordan, every one of those guys on their own could have carried a team. Right. And my favorite thing about that whole like sports analogy is, and I learned this um after reading the Mamba mentality book, that these athletes, it doesn't matter who you are. Like, people look at these leaders and they're like, oh, they're doing it all and they're doing everything. And they see maybe stuff like this, and they're like, oh, Eric's running this whole show. Like, no, there's tons of people behind. And it doesn't even matter, like LeBron James. And if you dig into like his the amount of people that supports him, I think he's spending over like a million dollars a year just on like that, or millions of dollars a year. And so the the it's not just the individual, but the team. It and listen, I would tell you, even, you know, people used to ask me, because when I used to do a lot of consulting, my base rate was a thousand dollars an hour. So, you know, people be like, wow, how do you get a thousand dollars an hour? I'm like, I get a thousand dollars an hour because I have a hundred dollars an hour analyst, I have two forty dollar an hour creatives, I have all of these things. I produce work that's worth a thousand dollars an hour. That doesn't mean I got paid a thousand dollars an hour. Yeah. Now that I get paid well for that, yeah, I did. I got paid really well for that. But I have a team that I know how to operate with that I can take an idea, give it to them, they can come up with four or five versions, run a bunch of scenarios, spend hundreds of hours of time to figure it out. And then when I turn in that $60,000 project, people go, wow, I can't believe you got this much done. You're right. I'm directing their acting, you know, and I'm given direction. And many times they're given direction because a lot of my philosophy on management is that very, very little can be discovered in a boardroom. Where you discover everything is my concept we call go and see, Gemba. You have got to peel your ass off your seat and get out there and see the actual work. That's fundamentally a problem in a world where we can't see the work anymore, especially with my business. Yeah, everything is virtual. So, what you have is you have this process, you have the people that are in it. And if we overlaid them, we would see how that would work. But we have all these conversations. You know, if you have 12 people in your organization that do 10 meetings a week and have eight contacts with uh external vendors or clients, that means there's 19,100 conversations a week in your company. You're trying to manage the process, the people in the events. No, no, no. What you need to manage is that 19,100 conversations. Now, can I decrease those? Yeah, I can. There's ways to decrease that. There's there's a whole four different types of meetings. The bottom of the barrel is the inform meeting, the status update. Let's catch up because that means that I'm running, we're running a race and we're not in sync because you're way behind me. You don't know where I'm at, or you're way ahead of me, or you think I'm someplace else. Those kind of meetings have to go. And that's about 30% of all labor is just in those silly little meetings. I believe it. And then you add Slack and DMs and everything else to it. And the water cooler talk, I mean, it's a massive portion of your business, is just trying to do that, just trying to keep each other up to date. So we got to figure out better ways to do that. But we also have to figure out better ways to take the communication in our organization and apply a glossary to it, apply a dictionary to it, apply a framework to it, or we say, here's how we talk about this. Every time you tell me about something that's happening, you got to give me a frequency. How often does it happen? You got to tell me exactly where it happens, in what process, in where exactly it is. You can't blame people or resources. You got to tell me what's wrong with the system. You got to tell me the impact of that, and you have to make an if-then statement that tells me at the end, hey, look, boss, if we make this $500 investment, I know I can get 5% more out of these people. Well, $500 for 5% more products. I just want those all day. I want thousands of those crossing my desk every single day. And I and listen, I don't expect all of them to be right. I tell my managers that, hey, if you got an idea and we spend some money on it and it doesn't work, no big deal. Now we know. Because we definitely waste plenty of other money on those 90,000 conversations. So manage that, right? Figure out how to get above the work and get control of it and get people talking in a way that when they do say things, if you hear it in a certain pattern, you go, Oh, oh, I know what that is. You know, I learned that a long time ago working around executives at bigger companies, that we would be in a uh in a lunch or like a cafeteria at one of their companies, and they would hear somebody say something like fiduciary responsibility shareholders, just in a passing conversation. Every single executive would be like, Who is that person? And they would follow them across, and and many times they would get up and go, Hey, whoy, who are you? Why why would you why would you talk about that? Why'd you use those words? Oh, well, you know, that's our purpose here, this fiscal responsibility to share. Wait, you're talking executive. What are you what who are you? What you're in the mail room? You're talking exact you speak executive. You need to come with us. You're not speaking that language. So teach people to speak the language that you understand and you know. And what most of us understand are numbers, specifics, and impact. What happens if you do this? What's the cause and effect? And and that's what we've got to start training people on because most managers don't have it. And if the market starts to go down, any idiot can lead on an up year. It's the down years where you get killed. And we we've got to we've got to improve our skills. I agree. 1 million percent. And I wanted to piggyback off going back to your first thing you said, you know, that we're all running these companies, ideas, and systems that were like from the hundreds. 1950s are, I mean, the most modern ones are 1954, pretty much. And if you're dropping practice management, yeah. Yeah. So if you're trying to adapt, you know, and change, and maybe you're like, oh, I've got there's some stuff that maybe came out in the early 2010s, but AI has changed everything. So now you're trying to play catch-up to rules that don't even exist anymore again. So what do you think about the companies now? Like, I don't know. I I have this thought that in some ways I'm really lucky that we're in the middle of all this transformation in my company while AI is here. Because if we would have done it like three years ago, we'd have to do it again. You have to do it all. And you're gonna have to do it again in another three years. Like Manus, the Mana's drop just a couple months ago, like, we don't use ChatGBTier Cloud anymore. We've got rid of all of those. We would just use eight agenic AIs now. LLMs are, I mean, that that that's search engine kind of stuff. That's for boomers. LLMs is for boomers. And I mean, I still do use cloud co-work and I use some some advanced things, but like I can't use the old tools. The old tools feel very calculator-ish to me. And how many people are watching right now that are like, old tools? I just started using no. I mean, claude cloud code and claud co-work, I would say, are pretty good. There's some new clouds coming out too. I have some friends that work in big tech that are getting access to some AI models that we're not seeing, but Mana's is where it's at right now. And I mean, I would say we spend probably spend $2,000 this month on Manaus, three of us just in the office here. I think I see us spending $10,000 to $20,000 a month on it going forward. But this goes back to, you know, your $100 or $1,000 an hour idea. Like, hey, with what we could do with this tool, the work you could put out must be worth the value. I will record myself doing a segment of a talk, talking about complexity or that that 19,100 thing that I said. Yeah. I recorded that, sent it to Manis. Manis built an entire website with all these very cool mandalas where you can enter in your information, it shows the levels of complexity, then it calculates this full complexity score and explains all of these kind of things. That was from a voice message that I sent to Telegram to my Mana agent and came back with an entirely built, branded website, working, functional, everything's there. And it's like, I bought a domain, here's the domain. What would you like me to do with this? And that was like 50, 60 bucks. I'm doing that 10 times a day now. Like I've gotten rid of my PowerPoint. I don't do decks anymore, I just build websites for a person. If I'm talking to you about a proposal, I'm just gonna take the read AI recording, give it to Manus and say, build an entire website, scrape everything, find all the comments for my clients, put those into it, go on to LinkedIn, look up Eric's background, find all the common connections, put it all together, put it all into a website, and I'm gonna meet with him in three minutes. So let's get to it. And it's not. I mean, there's we need to learn the one great thing I think about AI is it's forcing us to actually be better at giving instructions. Particularly when you get into agenic AI where it's costing you money and you're like, shoot, I just did that and realized that just cost $100 and it's garbage. Yeah. Because I didn't know how to explain it. Burning through tokens and the output is not there. And listen, I don't look at it as a mistake anymore. I look at it as okay, how much labor, how much better did I have to come out speaking? At people because I figured out how to talk to a machine. And not that they're the same thing, but but you know what I mean? Like I'll give the detail. I realize the holes in what I talk about. Yeah, because with a person, you might give minimal, and I've been dealing with this in our organization. Like, how do we level up the communication? Because we're all so busy that people aren't spending enough time giving the necessary context so that they could make the right decision. And so bad decisions are being made, but you're not getting that immediate feedback loop. Maybe it might be three, three weeks, four weeks before you see the implications of that decision, where with a chat, you're like, oh, this is garbage. And then you realize instantly. So that is an interesting thing. It's like MVP. It's everything is an MVP. Now every conversation is an MVP. Every every proposal is an MVP. And then when I find one that really works, I'm like, whoa, okay, remember this. This is now it's called skill creator. I'm like, now save that skill. So next time I can just say, go to that skill. And instead of Eric Malvin, it's now Gabe. Bam. Two seconds later, it's done. Yeah. And it's like, dang, that's what we need. And that is what's going to really change the world. I don't, you know, I'm very optimistic about the future. I don't think we're going to have, you know, AI take over the world. I think we're going to let AI take over the world. I don't think it's going to do it on its own. I think we're going to realize very, very quickly that the logistics systems across this planet, we know there's at least 60% inefficiency in them. When you buy a pencil and they ship it from China, and the store down the street from you has the same pencil, that's inefficiency. That's a good point. But there's so a massive Those are going to solve. And once you see one or two of those fall, all of a sudden now an AI comes out and goes, you know, I could do this with healthcare. And I know that's what they're working on with like cancer research. I've been to talks where, you know, the studies for new cancer drugs, like the difficult, I didn't ever realize the difficulty they have finding like qualified people to like that have these exact conditions that can test this drug out. And now it they're able to match people up in seconds. And the doctors would be the ones that would spend days working on this stuff. So how many more people can you treat when you're not dealing with that? So that's just like smooth your will. Yeah, you're right. So the process, the systems are going to become more efficient. But if we still have 19,100 conversations that are just full of shit, that's a problem. Yeah. And even if those conversations go to 10,000, yeah, that'll improve the organization. But we have to, I really believe that when you hire somebody, you have to sit down with him and you have to say, look, before we even talk about this job, you got to understand some definitions. When I say this word, this word means these things. When you say to me, hey, boss, I have a problem, I expect you to have these five things before you mention it to me. You have to have them thought out, you have to have them laid out. You know, and I might push back to you and say, hey, I want you to go talk to five other people that do the same job and see if they have the same experience. Like we're gonna work this as experiments. I'm gonna teach you how to be a thinker because in biology, you know, a biological cell has what they call a thinker and a doer. The doer is, or I'm sorry, a sensor and a doer. The doer is the tail. If you think of like a sperm, it's the easiest thing to think of because everybody knows it, right? Yeah. The tail is the doer. The body of the sperm is the sensor. It's sensing where to go. And it's giving information to the doer so that the doer can move the tail. Oh, go this way. Oh, this there's food over this way. They do those things. But but but but when you think about that in an organization, we're the do we're the doers. The executives are the doers. We're the ones that control the volume, the velocity, the direction, all of these things. Where do we get our information? Well, mostly from news, from outside sources, from advisors, from coaches. That tells me nothing about the actual conditions. The actual conditions are known by the sensors. And the sensors, interestingly, in biology, the sensor and the doer, the the the the combination between them is called the mind. The mind of the organization is the communication between the sensor, the frontline, and the doer, the executive. But yet we get all of our information from outside sources or from managers looking at it from different perspectives. I can't imagine any species, we would be our as a species, we would be extinct. Yeah. If if single-celled organisms did that, they'd be extinct. But yet, me, with trillions of organisms, I'm trying to do it a different way. I have to get connected to the sensors. It's the difference between a scout and a soldier in the military. A soldier stands there with his gun and protects the position. A scout, like, wait, hold on, let me run back. He goes back and goes, hey, general. You're pointing the road. Yeah, this ain't gonna work, man. Like, this is not, he's not tattling on the people. He's telling about the enemy's position, the conditions at the front. Hey, it's raining down there now. Now it's getting muddy. He's giving the conditions at the front so the general can actually move the organization, and our generals stand around and listen to podcasts or set goals. It doesn't make any sense to me. And I think even when you talk to higher-up military people and you explain them American management, they're like, you gotta be kidding me, right? I'm like, they're like, they run it like a what? Yeah, why would they do that? It's so silly. Don't they know thousands of years of how you motivate people and bring them together in teams and take them to war? There is some experience there in how people work together and how communication works. And communication is the reason that Rome was the country it was, right? So we've got to get back to that piece. But it seems like people think that it's these 19,000 conversations happening every week. We're communicating, right? Yes. Why is there a disconnect? There's a disconnect because we don't have that vocabulary. When if I say dog, think of a dog. Well, I'll think of a dog. How many of you thought of my dog? Not me. No, you thought of a different dog, right? So when you say pain, uh you don't think about my pain, you think about your pain. So what I have to do is say, oh no, no, no, here's a dog. Here's the dog that we're gonna talk about. What do we know about this dog? Well, that dog's much smaller than mine. Yeah, it is. What else is different? And we start to talk about it, but we both can look at it. Now we still have perspective because you see it from that way and I see it from this way. So I also have to have a leadership style that that really believes that not only decisions are made at the top. I have a firm belief that there's three ways to run a company my way, your way, or collaboratively. And for a long time I thought collaboratively was the right way, and I was wrong. It's not. What's actually the right way is all three of those. So there are times that you bring something to me, and I do this with people all the time, and I encourage CEOs. If somebody brings you an idea and it's like a $500,000 idea, say yes to every single one. Yes, yes, yes. Don't even question it. Just if you think so, yeah, go ahead and do it. Go, do it, go, go, go, do it, do it, do it. Because some of those things, they're gonna be successful and some are gonna fail. But now my manager's gonna learn, or my person's gonna learn, the difference between what looks like success and failure. And that really doesn't cost me a lot. I'm gonna make way more money on the upside than I am gonna lose on the downside. Yeah. So I've got to encourage people to do those experiments, and I have to give them the structure on how to do it. Now, that's for me giving in to them. There are also times where somebody will come to me and I'll go, okay, wait a second, let's think this thing through. I focus on those two types of management, collaborative and giving in. Because when I do need to move, now I can say, okay, decision's made, here's what we're doing. Well, but we should just decision's been made, here's what we're doing. Don't I give in to you most of the time? Yeah, you're like, yeah, yeah, you're right. 65% of the time, you would ask me, you would either let me do it or you would ask me for my opinion if you could, if, if you needed to. Obviously, in this instance, you don't need to. I'm gonna follow that out of respect for the system that we've created. And if you do those three things really well together, people don't feel like they're being told what to do. They actually feel like they're part of management. And I really feel that management, we we we think of it as a role, but it's actually a function. It exists inside of each of one, every one of us. Every one of us has to do something every single day. We have to update something or create something or read something. So let's get those management skills down to the bottom so that they can talk the same language we talk. It's uh, you know, I find that really interesting because you know, with a company like mine, we have we do a call center, we have a lot of frontline agents. That's uh there's a lot of labor there. And and actually we had a recent guest, Agitesh, who was he came from Google Cloud. He worked on uh Gemini, and he talked about how like customer-centric their organization is and how much, like he learned so much about how important it is to talk to the end user. And it's such it's crazy because it it sounds so it sounds like it's logic, it makes sense. Yeah, but in practice, in business, it's so foreign that it sounds like a crazy concept when it's like the answers are in our face. Like, I I can't tell you how many times, like because of us developing software these last you know 14 months, like going back to we need to talk to the customer, we need to talk to the end user. And I have to remind the team over and over again, because they're like, oh, we have this idea and we started working on this. I'm like, what do the customers think? We don't know. We didn't talk about it. It's just it, it's almost like we've made it second nature somehow. We we really have, and it's unfortunate. And I challenge CEOs this all the time. I just did one a few years ago where uh a CEO, I was talking to an event and I said, What do people think about your company? He said, Well, it's great. And I said, Well, tell me about referrals. So we don't get a lot of referrals. I said, That's interesting. I said, Why don't you and I I threw a number out there was a pretty big number, and I said, I'm gonna call three-year customers. Give me, give me, share me the numbers of three-year customers. I'm gonna call as an interested party that's interested in your services, and I want to see what they say to me. Every single one of them said, run. Do not buy this product. Oh my god. They said it works and it's amazing. It's amazing, and it does everything it says it does. They what they promise, they deliver. They said it would take 90 days, it took 340 days. They said the training would be uh that when we switched over, they would teach us on day one how to do the functions that we needed to do. No, training started out with the history of the company, their company. Bro, I just pulled my whole team in here to get trained on how to make the changes in the system right now because we just went live. Don't be telling me about your company. Yeah, how do I put an order into the system and run reports? Oh, well, we don't teach that until the third time we come out. So I'm out of business now for the next three months? Yeah. I mean, I heard everything from these people and went back and told him this. And he was like, oh my God. He's like, now that you say it, I was I saw it all along. Yeah, it was happening all along, and I just couldn't see it because I was like, Well, I gotta, it's private equity, I gotta get this money raised, and then we have this new transaction, and we didn't hit our quarterly returns, and we're going back and forth. And the actual problem with the company is none of those things. It's the last thing private equity would tell you to do. Go talk to the freaking customer, go talk to the employee and ask them. The employee, if we think about this, we talk about like competitive advantage and all that. All of the interaction with the customer and our company is at front lines. Yeah, and I don't talk to the front lines. I mean, it's almost immoral. I mean, it's like, you know, I feel like if I was still a pastor, I'd be telling people they'd be going to hell for this. You know, but but I feel that way. It's like I don't think it's moral to do that. Somebody is suffering, somebody's struggling, people are struggling with your organization and with its structure, and you know nothing about it because all you're worried about is growth. That's why I love a great recession. I've been praying for one for years. They're excellent because they wash out all the dumb managers out there. Those who can't manage, all they know how to do is set goals and yell. Those guys all get to go be paperboys again and you know, and do real estate agents. Yeah, they could be, yeah, they all can become real estate agents again. But you know, it's finance bro to paperboy for them. And and because they are so concerned about the short term. I I think this we've been polluted with this idea that you have to sell your business. I was asked by somebody the other day, they said, what's your exit plan? I said, I have zero exit plan. Death is my exit plan. They're like, wow, like, don't you want to sell? I'm like, no, I want to build a really great company and have a great lifestyle. I know the lifestyle I want, I know the days I want to work, I know the weeks I want to have off. I have it all planned out. That's what I'm building. I'm building something somebody can buy. I'm building something that I can hold on to and never want to sell. I can I want something when I'm 90, it keeps me alive for another 10 years because I'm like, you know what? I only have to go in there one day a week, but I love going over there because I love meeting with those people and I know they're all flourishing. And I saw the one just bought a brand new house, and I saw this one just got a boat, and I'm excited, and I want to go celebrate with them that we all made this together. That's what I care about. That's that's really fascinating because I feel like there's so many businesses where it's like, that's the goal, right? And silly. You're building everything for that moment or that point, and then you sell in and I don't know, you get to work with people and and you know people who have gone through this process who have exited. And what it's horrific. It's how do they feel after everybody hates it afterwards, everybody hates it. They all, I was with the CEO the other day that just sold her company. I mean, she she never ever needs money ever again. And she's she's feckless, she's wandering around, not really sure what. I'm just meeting with people. I think I want to join some boards, I want to do some things. She's figuring it out, yeah, but it was devastating the first. I mean, she was seriously depressed to think about having a payout, a payout that would change your life, a nine-digit payout, and you're you're depressed. Because now what do you do? I loved working, I loved my people, I love developing them, I love doing all these things. I just hated the reports and I hated this and I hated the board meetings. Well, could we have a could we have designed the company so that you didn't have to do those things? We could have done that pretty easy because you were in charge, but instead you sold it. And now what do you want to do? Find something else to buy so you can try this again. In the same probably industry. Yeah. Potentially competing with your and then, you know, then I hear this conversation all the time from the they're disappointed, and I'm like, well, what are they employed? Oh, they hate it, they hate it. They they just, you know, they're like, is there any way you can buy it back? I think most people regret it. It's sort of like kids. You know, everybody says, oh, no, no, no, it's great. And I'm like, seriously, dude, I don't have kids, and here's what I can do with my life. I'm gonna go to Antigua at the end of the. I think it's going to Antigua. We just decided to be on, we should go to Antigua. We can do whatever we want. We'll jump in the motorhome this weekend and go away. Or we can do whatever we want. So I'm not sure that everybody who has kids is uh is telling me the truth. I think they might be full of shit. And uh, and everybody that sold their business that tells you, I think when you get a beer with them, they go, Yeah, well, it's not so great. And but but what we could have done is built something to last. You know, IBM was a meat grinding company when they started. Then they started, yeah, IBM International Business Machines. I mean, they started in the 20s and stuff. And their motto for the for the first 50 years they existed was just one word, think. Mission, vision, values of your company. What is it? Think. Can't get more sense. Think. That's it. And and because of that, they went from meat grinders to calculating machines to cash registers to computers. I don't even know what IBM does to this day, but I know they're still huge and they're big blue. I have no, do you know what IBM does? I see that they have they still do a lot of like AI big computing stuff. Is there a meat grinder that you can go to the store and pick up? You can't go buy any IBM off the shelf. The organization was built on the concept of thinking, and they just said, look, it doesn't really matter the product. We just think. That's what we do. We just think. Where's the market going? We just think. You got to build an army of thinkers. You have to be a CEO that's willing to walk down and get into the weeds with people when they need that to become thinkers. You have to train them to be thinkers. People are not born thinkers. We are, if anything, our brain does not want to think because it requires a lot of energy. So we make shortcuts. If I say to you, I have three apples and you take away two, how many apples do you have? I got one left. Think about it. You took away two. How many apples do you have? Two. Right? But the point is, that's a riddle to show you that everybody does it. I have four or five of those that I can do because it shows people that we we just jump to conclusions on stuff and we're so sure about it. And then when we think about, we're like, oh shit, you did say if you took away two, yeah, I would have two apples, right? Sometimes we have to slow that down and we have to teach people how to think that way. We have to teach people to think more slowly, more deliberately. We need to teach them the different types of thinking. And engineers, engineers and architects use all different frameworks, the five whys, Pareto charts, all of these things, because they know they can't trust their brain. They have, I know what my brain thinks, but I need to write this down and I need to go through some steps of five whys, why, why, why, why? Oh, wait, no, I was wrong. It's this. Our first impression is wrong a lot. So we have to teach other people in our organization to do that too. And let me let me just tell you: if everybody in your organization, if you taught everybody to just ask why one more time a day, you'd have a totally different company in six months because they would start asking customers, well, why are you canceling? Well, you know what? I was really disappointed in this experience and this and this and this. Okay, and now that passes back up to the CEO. Now we can change that experience for other people. And and but we don't want to do that because we just want to sit around and set goals and yell at the, you know, yell at the world. It doesn't work. So you think differently than like anybody else that I know. Yeah. Where did this come from? You know, that's funny that you say that because I don't talk about it a lot, but I've just been talking about it for the last two weeks. So my parents were both very blue-collar. Nobody in my family ever went to college, me included, or my brother, didn't hear about it, know about it, do anything with that. They were very blue-collar. My dad drove a school bus when I was a kid growing up. My mom worked part-time at JCPenney seasonally. It was a struggle. You know, we didn't, we didn't have a lot. My dad eventually got a job in a dairy and moved up into the salesman's role and did okay. By the time I graduated high school, you know, they were, they were lower middle class. But I saw that both of my parents were highly intelligent. My mom was an itinerant speaker that used to go out and talk to women's groups. Very well, I mean, pack the house, people, three, four hundred people would show up to hear her talk. My dad became the same way, you know, later in his life. And I realized that they were extremely intelligent people, but they were trapped inside systems that just did not want to listen to them. And they worked inside those systems for years and years and years. And they had a spark about them that it never came out at work. And I saw that. And ever since those days, I've always believed that people the people inside the company are the solution to the problems. And I prove it every time I go out. Hundreds of times I go out, I prove it to people. I show them with numbers. I was just with somebody recently. We were walking a production floor, and I said to somebody, How long you been here? He said, 25 years. I said, What's gonna happen next? He said, That machine's gonna break down tomorrow. How do you know that? Because it always sounds that way the day before the machine breaks down. Does anybody else in this place know that? Nope. Does maintenance know it? Nope. Management know it? Nope. One guy, 25 years standing in the same spot, can tell you more about your business than any because he has seen it all. And listen, you might go, well, he ain't as productive as he used to be. That's true. But six months from now, when that one unique case comes through that could shut you down, and he goes, dude, 18 years ago, and we had the same thing happen. Let me show you what we did. And all of a sudden, the value of that person was not how much you paid them per hour or their KPI or anything. The value was what's in their brain, what can't be captured by AI, what you can't train anybody else on. That's the value in your company, and it is hidden and it's buried underneath lays of layers of management and miscommunication and fear and concern for their own well-being and KPIs that are misaligned. It's all down in there. And if we can figure out a way to release those people, not that everything that they say has to make it to the CEO. You know my method. If there's a hundred things, we're getting it down to three. What are we just keeping put the little things? Boiling it down, boiling it down, boiling it down. Okay, and but if like we got to get there, what's the one thing I can tell the CEO? And time and time again, it's it's the most important information in the in the company. It it it changes the trajectory of the way that people see the work. And I we just got to do more of it. And I just am I'm frustrated that I've spent 20 years trying to tell this message, and you know, there's not a lot of followers in comparison to what I would expect. But then, you know, somebody reminded me recently, they said, you know, hey, there was this guy, Jesus, he got 11 followers in three years. Well, I actually had 12, but one of them ended up betraying him. And you know, so he didn't do such a good job, right? Yeah. You need to die first. Yeah, I mean, that might be, yeah, right. It's like the starving artist. And then all of a sudden, you're like, wow, Derek, this is this guy. Yeah, you you know, you you've gotta be you gotta be dead for your art to be truly seen. I hope that's not the case. But but the good news is that we've seen in the last six months, I think, a real transformation in the way CEOs are thinking now. A lot of them are starting to see that this doesn't work. They see that there's so many external factors. There's we're one tweet away from the whole world being different. And I don't mean that in a Trump, I just mean it in everything. There's breakthroughs in energy, there's breakthroughs in science and cancer research. I mean, some of this stuff in the last six weeks that AI has helped find, I mean, I don't know if we're gonna have cancer, you know, 20 years from now. I mean, these things are gonna go away. The whole world's about ready to change. And I think we have to change our management style because if we continue to manage like it's 1895 Taylorism, you know, that's what we're gonna get. What we're gonna get is nothing. Those who manage, those who actually lead and engineer and design their company in the future are the ones that are gonna lead. And everybody else will just follow the wayside. So there's so much advice packed into here. And I know we're we're wrapping up on time here when I wish I could uh keep it going for another hour. But for people listening today, maybe they're hearing some stuff, they're like, yeah, that makes sense. And I think that's the case all the time. You everything you're like, you always gotta check in more with me. There ain't no one close uh one one one uh one one click sale with me, right? I mean, it's like there's a lot of depth to this kind of stuff. But like, what's something that a business can do? Like they're like, you know what? Yeah, I do need to talk to my people more. You know, I do need to talk to the frontline staff, to the people who are out doing the work, talking to the customers. Is it as simple as just like, hey, let's let's go sit down and talk? It depends. I mean, I I like to bring people together and just talk about stuff, and and I think you need sticky notes, you got to put them on the wall, and you gotta go, hey, we're looking at this, we're not blaming each other. What's wrong? With this. I think that's a great place to start. I think you find stuff very, very quickly in just getting people to think differently. Instead of look having them look face to face, now they're looking shoulder to shoulder at something, that can be really beneficial. I also think, like I said, the real challenge is the one year at sea. Could you do it? Could you do it? Could you do one year at sea? No hiring, no firing for one year unless they walk the plank. Uh that right now. You'd have to think about it. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You'd really have to think about it. It would be a challenge. But what would you do differently if you didn't have to spend all your time on hiring and looking for the right people and trying to manage all the SHR stuff, all that time you get back, if you devoted that to say the people you have and say, okay, how do I uplevel these people to a point where they become that? I think you would find that your money is well is better spent investing it into what you have. And I'm not talking about raising their salaries. That might be something that you do. I'm talking about investing into things that that make it easier for them to do the work. Because if the work's easier to do, they'll do more of it. That's like new technology. It's it's everybody gets an iPhone. It it's it's weird things. Well, one that I suggested to a CEO years ago, which which uh he used and I used it a few years back. I had a bunch of 20 somethings working here a few years ago. And for Christmas, I gave everybody a temperature mattress. Okay. With sheets and the whole works. And they were like, why? I'm like, because every one of these guys working here sleeps on a mattress that their parents got them when they became 12 years old, right? Because they're all sleeping in the dorms. Like they're I'm like, they have a horrible night's sleep. They always come in here looking like they got ran over by a bus. Yeah, I'm like, get them a good night's sleep. Who does that benefit more? Me or them? I it's hard to tell. Arguably it's probably me. Yeah. If they show up better, uh our COO here had a baby back in January, and the company bought her a snoo. I don't know if you're familiar with the snoo, but it's a bassinet that's AI enabled. It moves around. That moves around. Yeah, it like listens to their heartbeat and stuff and figures out, and this baby's sleeping six and a half hours a night as a newborn. How different is my COO six and a half hours a night sleep versus what usually you get to sleep? Yeah, that's a big deal. It's a big improvement in her well-being, which is a good thing for me. So, I mean, she feels like I did her a favor, but I did myself a favor. I mean, that's like the do unto others thing. I don't think people truly understand that the golden rule, right? It's in all religions, every religion has this do unto others thing. You know, we call it the golden rule, but it's not golden because of where it stands, but because it's reward. When you do unto other people, when you invest into other people, you actually get a return out of that. See, we're in the mode of extracting out of other people. How much can I get out of them? How many hours can I get out of this person? How much work can I get out of them? But the exact opposite is also true that if you invest into them, you get more out of them. So what if we could just reverse the whole equation and just say, hey, instead of extracting, we're investing. And what happens? And listen, you can go back and look at the financials of every company in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s with 20 years, 30 years, all of the things where people worked and had legacy with companies. All of them did that. Invested in, not extract out. Yeah. Awesome. I I wanted to touch a little bit on this because I love the work you do. Like we're getting ready to implement this in our own company. And you've been able to do this for a lot of amazing organizations, including the U.S. Olympic team, right? Yeah. So we do some stuff with U.S. Olympics. Now they're just getting started, but we've had some other folks down here for training. I've been up there. We're going to do some more stuff this summer. It's really cool because what I found is going up there and meeting with Olympic athletes and Paralympic athletes, is this makes so much sense to them. Because they're like, yeah, you have to have a regimen. You have to know how you're going to communicate with your coach. You have to have sort of code work. You have to have sort of like your safe word with your coach, you know, you have to have all of these things. And we're not looking to shave off 10 or 20 or 50%. You don't become an Olympic runner by being, you know, 50% improvement. You do it by a hundredth of a second at a time, over and over and over. So they really like that idea. I talk a lot about this concept of 1% better. I don't like proposal. If I see proposals from employees that they're like, we can make it 5% better with this, I'm like, I don't want to do that. Because that's going to cost change management and project management. I don't want to do that. Just everybody make it 1% better a week. At the end of the year, I'm going to get way better results, and everybody can find something that they can do little. So that fractional piece, I think that's what US Olympic really likes and why we've been training facilitator there. We're doing some work up there. It's it's fun. That yeah, that's incredible. That you it doesn't matter whether it's a business, organization, athletes, like the same thing is needed. I'm sure government, we could definitely they need to have a lot of people. I was just to the university yesterday, right? I mean, yeah, and and some and actually some of our method goes back to the Medicaid system in the US, where some of those systems were actually developed using our methods early on, because the work that I do has roots back in the early 90s when it was created in the tech industry, some of some of our tools. So yeah, I think there's a lot there. And I think it is very broad. It's not just about business, it's about everything. How do you run organizations more efficiently? Anytime where there's a coordination of people, how do you run them most efficiently? Cool. You did it. You were able to do a succinct answer. I tried hard. So we always end the show with this one question, and I I can't wait to hear your answer on this because I think I think it could be five possible answers. But you know, this is So now I have to do a sixth. Okay, so I have to think about this one for a second. The show is unfinished business with Eric. So for you, with you've done so much, and you still have a lot that you want to do. You know, that this your concept and these ideas, there needs to be more people following you. So, what's some unfinished business for you? What's like the big thing that you would like to see in your career or your before before you die? Okay, okay. So I'm gonna do it succinctly. There is a paper called The Theory of the Firm, 1939, Ronald Coase, efficient coordination is competitive advantage, wins a Nobel Prize. This concept that competitive advantage isn't growth. It doesn't happen outside, it happens inside the company. Wins a Nobel Prize for this. So that's how big of an idea it is. 1976, Jensen and Mecklen, two other economists that write a rebuttal paper to that, that said, well, look, yes, that's true. Efficient coordination of resources is good, but companies now have all these people that have been there 20, 30 years because they think that's about efficient coordination of resources. But isn't it true that people are just greedy and all they want is money? So why do you pay these people pensions? And why are you keeping them around? Keep them for one or two years, throw them away. You don't want people hanging around forever because they'll learn your business and they'll steal it from you. That became the new idea starting in 1975. That's why pensions ended, that's why corporate corporations restructured. It's so all I mean, you can see it all comes from this one thing. I want to write the theory of the system, which will be a paper that finishes that completion and says, look, efficient coordination of resources is right. Uh, but to really understand an organization, you have to understand it as an organism and you have to think about it in a little bit different way. So I'm working on that. And so maybe we'll get the Nobel Prize for that. So there we go. We'll just that'll be it. I love the Nobel Prize in Economics. We'll take, we'll take one of those. Okay. Well, you know, I've got the I've got the Emmy, so instead of working on the E got the Emmy, the Grammy, the Oscar, the Tony, yeah, I'll just do a knee, Nobel, just that that would be a new double-started new thing. Well, yeah. I mean, it is a very sought-after prize. I mean, it's something I mean, there's one, there's one a year, and and they you better be legendary to do it. So that's what I'm aspiring to. All right. And I mean, seriously, I actually wrote that down years ago. As I was like, because I see this thing from the economics perspective and see how the market conditions affect it and see how people affect it, I'm like, this is actually an economic theory that there's a different way of doing things. And uh, so yeah, that's what I'd like to like to accomplish. I don't have any business goals, sell, none of that kind of stuff. I think a Nobel would be at least a nod, at least a nomination. You know what I mean? That'd be that'd be some good validation. That would be good validation, right? Kid that didn't go to college, has no background in economics to write an economics paper that wins a Nobel Prize. What a incredible story. The problem with Nobel Prizes, though, is it usually takes about 40 years for you to get it after you write what you write. If you look at most of them, it takes about 40 years for their work. I mean, I'm 50 maybe 53, that's 93. I would be. I mean, yeah, like you said, you can work till then. We're not gonna have cancer in the next 20 years. And you'll be able to see those 40 years after your paper is published. So for people that are watching today, you obviously do this as a business to help companies, and and you got a lot of amazing ideas that you get out there. So, how do people, if they want to learn more about the process fixer or just hearing some of your ideas, how do they get in touch or so the process fixer is going away. We're actually sunsetting the brand right now. Everything is moving under the system because we no longer really see it as process. We're seeing it as efficient coordination of resources. So we've moved under the system. Uh, websites, the system is the problem.com, and and it's all about how the system is the problem, but also we have a system that we think can help you solve that problem uh and see the business in a different way. Cool. And any place on social media where you're sharing. Yeah, yeah. LinkedIn heavy. I've been off for a while. We're getting ready to really start to launch something here in a couple of weeks. So LinkedIn will be really heavy and TikTok will be really heavy. I have a new team that insists that the message that that it's highly likely that the message that I'm bringing is not relevant to executives today. So now I got to talk to 18 to 25 year olds that will be executives in 20 years. Wow. You are thinking so far ahead. Yeah, I mean it's I I truly am thinking about it, not from this generation of leaders. I'm not sure they'll get it. I really don't. Even this week, I have my uh head of sales who usually we work with old family run businesses, you know, that CPA firms that. She's at all tech conferences this week, talking to young entrepreneurs and going, hey, look, don't form, don't, don't, don't think about departments. Don't think about it this way. Think in a different way. And and see how that changes the way that you run your business. So that's my challenge for you, too, is I'd like to hear back from you. One year at sea, could you do it? All right. Well the problem is you can't fire like 30 people and then call one year at sea. You know, it's like offload them all and then be like, well, now, now we're we start the clock today. I think we'll be good. We've made a lot of change, so you made a lot, so you listen, you people say right people write seats, right? Oh, I need the right people right seeds. When you hired those people, were they the right ones? At that time you thought they were, or you wouldn't have hired them. So either they weren't the right ones or you aren't very good at management. Which one is it? Well, you're always going through this turnover, and I'm not talking to you directly, right? I'm saying in management in general. Well, I you know, yeah, I believed right people right seats for 20 years. Well, then that means the people that you have are the right people. Well, they were then. Well, what's changed? Them or you? Well, them. Well, how have they changed? Well, they're not any good anymore. Okay, so you put them in your system and now they're not any good. So you hired Michael Jordan, put them on a professional baseball team. Sounds sounds about right. So do we get rid of the coach or do we get rid of that? I think we get rid of the basics. It's an NBA, you get rid of the coach. Yeah, you get rid of the coach. You know, you start to go, wait a second, we have a team that we didn't we already recruit the best team three years ago, and now you tell me this team doesn't do it anymore. I'm sorry, you need to go find a job in high school, you know, Pee Wee football. We gotta we gotta be grown-ups here. We gotta stop thinking that I do vistage talks every week. I've been 121 or 121 vistage talks plus like 40 in the last two years of other things. That is crazy. And everyone is CEOs and every one of them believes right people, right seats, and every one of them sits around and blames everybody else for all their problems. Real leadership is to stop blaming everybody else and just say the only problem that there possibly could be here is me, and fix you and then see what happens. I think what you'll find is it's a totally different, much less anxiety, a less stressful way of managing people. When I take out the threat, and if I tell my people I'm doing one year at C and they know for the next year they can't get fired, wow. Now, first thing you thought is, oh, they're gonna screw off. I mean, that's what you've been trained to think. Instantly. Instantly. How did you do that? That's the first thing I thought. Yeah. But what if they don't? What if I actually say to them, look, we want you guys to be here for the next 20 years and we want to figure this thing out? And I think the people in this room are the best that there is. So why should we be looking for anybody else? Now, if you prove that you're not, block the plank. You can leave, you can jump off the boat, and if you go really far overboard, we're gonna walk you off of here. But for the rest of you, what if we could make what if 30 years from now we were all here together as leaders of an organization of 25,000 people, and every one of you was a leader of a group. Well, you know what? We'll gotta stay in touch because maybe we could make that happen to my company, and I can't wait to hear more of that. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm I'm doing this little thing for you. I'm just gonna announce it to your whole company on that. And no, you're dude, you look terrified. I've been telling them. But on that note, no. No, yeah. Well, you understand what I'm saying. Just look at it differently. Like uh we constantly are, oh, why do you, what do I need, what do I need? You got it all, bro. You got all the tools you need right there. Now you gotta figure out how to take those out and actually do something with them. And if you just sit around saying, well, I just still need more stuff, I still need more stuff, all you're doing is just sitting in the bay in your boat waiting. You haven't sailed out on anything yet. All you do are sitting in the bay trying to collect resources and selling to the settlers. And you gotta launch out there. Go find out what's over the sea. I love it. Love the message. Well, Derek, thank you so much for being here. Super appreciate it. If you guys love the message you heard today and you want to hear more amazing leaders speak, then make sure you follow us at BizWithEric on social media or follow up, subscribe to the podcast Unfinished Business with Eric Malvin. And uh, we'll see you guys on the next episode. Bye, everybody. The world's changing fast. We're talking to business leaders who adapt, innovate, and keep moving forward because nobody's business is ever finished. This is unfinished business with Eric Mulvin. Took my last check from Yelp, turned it into a taxi ride from my street NBA, lessons to find by six LSPs, laid a backbins at new heights. Now I'm talking with leaders about the unfinished business tonight. Moving intelligence for AI, the launch too high. CTO's envisionaries shaping what's to come, building more than profit, lifting everyone, every bad week, but it takes a choice to grow. Set your goals and shape the way your future goes. That's on too high. Subscribe, look for subscribe, look for subscribe, look for.