[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to Big Ticket Pros, the podcast for agencies, coaches and high end service providers who know what it takes to thrive in competitive markets. I'm your host, Josh Thomas. You can find me on social media.
Jt literally. Our guests share insider tips, strategies and sometimes cautionary tales to help you close bigger deals and scale your business faster. Big Ticket Pros is sponsored by Conversational Funnels, the new way to close deals in 2025 that doesn't rely on any of the old traditional methods everyone hates. We use this method to book 121 qualified sales calls in 10 days without any ad spend, outreach or endless social posting. You can download the free step by step blueprint that shows exactly how we did it at Conversational Funnels. Com. That's Conversational Funnels.
Today's guest is Drew Yancey, PhD. He is the founder and CEO of Telios Strategy, a premier strategic strategic planning leadership development execute Man, I forgot how to talk today. Drew. Executive coaching and succession planning advisory firm.
Those are all words that I know how to say normally, but, you know, whatever.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: I think you've had too much eggnog already. Josh, that's.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I really need to. I need to knock it off. I think you. With a proven track record in high performance, team building and strategic execution for over 15 years, Yansy solves challenging problems at the nexus of growth, strategy and innovation. Drew, welcome to Big Ticket Pros. In your experience, what is the best piece of advice that you would give to someone just starting out in your industry?
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Hey, Josh, thanks so much. Excited to be here. The best piece of advice comes to me from a mentor I had early in my career. I've spent a portion of my career in corporate strategy consulting and it was this really unique experience.
Very high stakes work. We were hired by Fortune 50s to come in and disrupt their business model intentionally. The idea was they wanted to disrupt themselves before their competitor did.
And in this line of work, there's a big focus on innovation. We even called ourselves an innovation strategy firm.
And my mentor told me and all of our team members don't innovate, solve problems. In other words, sometimes we get caught up in trying to be too cute and too fancy. And this whole idea of being innovative has a sort of mystique around it. At the end of the day, the most innovative leaders, the most innovative consultants, the most innovative companies are companies that have a really good ability to identify problems, break them down and solve them in a way that creates value for their stakeholder. If you can do that, you'll be Innovative.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Don't be cute. Solve problems.
Man, I have been busted doing that so many times trying to be cute. Well, I got this cool new idea. You know, what problem does it solve? Well, you know, it's really cool, though. Like, look at me. I'm so smart, but I'm not solving a problem.
And so can you give some examples of businesses that you've worked with that, that advice applies to where it's like, guys, you're, you're trying to be too innovative here. And, you know, people, people need shoes, and you're trying to sell them fancy watches and just sell them the shoes.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: You know what? That's such a softball this time of the year, Josh, for me, because me and our team, especially in fourth quarter, spend days and days and days with our clients in strategic planning. And we always put that in quotes.
It's a description of what we do, broadly speaking.
The problem is we believe traditional strategic planning is fundamentally broken. So we prefer the term, hence the, the word lasagna at the beginning of this episode. We prefer the term strategic execution.
And the reason for that is because if you look at the data, Josh, most strategic plan plans don't result in execution.
About 70% of ideas, initiatives, strategic initiatives in an average strategic plan is going to be unexecuted. And so what we focus on is this whole idea of prioritizing value creation on its biggest opportunities to solve problems. I was working with a very sophisticated manufacturing firm this past week, and they had all of these ideas about globally expanding their footprint, and they wanted to get into the Asian markets. They've been doing some, some really unique work in the Australian, New Zealand markets. And they, they manufacture a very unique product.
And these is, this is heavy equipment that a lot of road paving companies utilize, and they have some unique technology.
And kind of in passing, they mentioned, you know, our production the last couple of months is, is, is not been up to speed. We've, we've fallen short. We've had some quality issues.
So I was like, hold on, timeout. Were sitting here talking about all these ideas we have to expand and grow our footprint. And you're telling me that in your core business, you're starting to have some, some challenges with, with production and being able to fulfill, you know, the promise you're making to your customers.
We need to solve that problem first before we start talking about expanding our products and services.
A really simple example, Josh, of where when we think about a strategic plan, we need to make sure it's focused on the, what I call the radically few Challenges or opportunities that are staring our business in its face.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: The radically few. So, and is there a trend across any industry what those radically few things might be like? Is there, are there like some go to's that you focus on?
[00:06:55] Speaker B: I work with a range of industries. We, we are doing work in almost any industry you can imagine. And the common threads are more around what do we need to look out for when we get down to that radical few.
And the biggest thing we need to look out for is confirmation bias. By that we mean we tend to evaluate new initiatives, new products, new services based on what's worked in the past.
And there's a logic to that. But as we often say, if your past is your only point of reference, guess what? The future looks awfully similar to.
Part of what we need to do in the strategic planning process, Josh, we call this externally scanning, is we need to look beyond our own business and beyond our owned industry.
What are other businesses in other industries doing to solve problems that might be adjacent to us but that we might be able to creatively leverage? And if you look at great companies that are out there that no one would argue aren't innovative. Netflix, Uber, pick your company.
Most of their disruptive innovation occurred when they took something that was happening in another industry and they applied it to their own industry. And so we need to be doing that ourselves as we lead our businesses.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: Makes a lot of sense. And so one other thing that I know you like to talk about is baking in mistakes. You know, it's like this is something that I have run into quite a bit where we're providing a certain type of service for our clients and we kind of copy the things that we've already done because it's the same service over and over and over again.
But what ended up happening is when we, when we copy that same thing enough times, it becomes a copy of a copy of a copy. And by the time you get like seven iterations out, it's like, this is gibberish. It doesn't make any sense. And we caught ourselves doing that. Like I'm reading this thing that's supposed to represent our client and I'm looking at it, I'm like, did anybody proofread this? It doesn't make any sense. But it was a baked in misstep because we should have just changed the messaging from the beginning instead of copying the other one.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: You know, it's fascinating and disturbing at the same time, what you're talking about, Josh, because especially, I find this especially applies to companies. Doesn't matter their industry. You know, they're moving from sort of that startup phase into the middle market, where they're past viability. Right. They've established a product or a service, it's working.
But as they're growing, what can happen? Growth can cover a lot of warts.
And when our growth starts to plateau is when we start to realize, oh, we've got some issues, that all we've been doing is scaling up our problems. And one way to protect against this, one way to hedge against this, is a framework that I, I absolutely believe in called the jobs to be done framework.
And at every turn of a product or a service, meaning every time we're incrementally improving it, we need to ask the question, what's the fundamental job to be done that our customer is hiring us to do with this job, with this product or service?
And does the product or service that we're continuing to offer and scale up fundamentally satisfy that job? If it does not satisfy that job, then we're heading in the wrong direction.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, I like that. And so talk to me a little bit about, over, over the years, have you found yourself gravitating toward a, a certain industry or have you been kind of more of a generalist across many different industries?
[00:11:17] Speaker B: Yeah, in our work, we have been taken into many industries. And part of that is, is because of my background in innovation strategy consulting, where you, you cannot stay siloed in any one industry, especially at the Fortune 50 level, where most global conglomerates don't fit neatly into a single industry.
Tell me what industry Amazon's in. You know, the better question to ask is what industry are they not in?
So, you know, there are certainly times where that lateral thinking, thinking across industries does not serve the right purpose. But in most cases, what I find is, especially for emerging middle market companies, they need to think across industries just as much as they're thinking within their own industry.
[00:12:19] Speaker A: I got you. And so who would be a good candidate to connect with you? And what, what would be kind of the first thing that, that. What are some of the first questions that you would be asking?
[00:12:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
We focus our work nowadays on designing and executing growth strategy for middle market companies. And the middle market description is a broad description, Josh, but it comprises the bulk of companies in North America, the middle of the bell curve.
And this is where the execution gap is the greatest.
The execution gap being the gap between what they plan to do in their strategy and what they actually execute.
And the reason for that is precisely because of the challenges of being in the middle market. You're no longer a startup. So there's not this, this natural focus in your business.
You're also not a large conglomerate. You don't have the resources that most of your competitors now have.
And so you can get pulled in a lot of different directions. We've created just over the years in our work with these types of companies a really unique assessment that will take your strategic plan and assess it along five different vectors to say here is your likelihood of being able to actually execute this plan based on the variables that we know a great strategic plan has that, that is actually executable. And you can get that at our website for free. You can go to Teleostrategy.com and you'll find a link to this strategic plan assessment. It's a great place to start because it gives you objective outside in reference points for, you know, when we think about our strategy in our business, here's where we have some strengths and here's where our biggest gaps are.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: Very well. So thanks so much for coming on and sharing that. And so we can go to telio strategy.com to to access this assessment.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: That's exactly right.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: Great. Hey, we're going to wrap from here. Thanks so much to our guest Drew Yancey for coming on and sharing a little bit of wisdom about how to thrive in competitive industries. You can again learn more and take the
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