From Pawn to Power Player: Chess Strategies Every Scaling CEO Should Steal

Summary

00:00 - Introduction to Chess and Business Parallels

05:28 - John Whitt's Journey: From Chess to Leadership

11:35 - The Importance of Clarity in Roles

13:53 - Navigating Adversity and Change Management

18:16 - Planning for Success and Avoiding Failure

20:05 - Transitioning Roles: From Construction to Technology

21:09 - The Five-Step Process for Project Management

22:31 - The Importance of Attitude in Success

24:16 - Common Failure Points in Hiring

28:58 - Identifying Team Issues and Leadership Quality

32:25 - The Hiring Process: Finding the Right Fit

35:41 - Key Takeaways for Breakthrough Success

‍

Full Transcript

Jeff Holman (00:01.157)

Welcome back everybody to the breakout CEO podcast. I'm Jeff Holdman, host, a founder of intellectual strategies. And I am excited to be here today with John Witt. John is joining us. heard him on another podcast and I'm like, I wonder if I can steal him over and get some of his thoughts for our audience. John, it's great to have you here.

John Whitt (00:20.984)

Jeff, it's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Jeff Holman (00:23.471)

of course, of course. I heard what you had to say and I thought that is something that our scaling CEOs need to hear. And so, so we've talked a little bit. I've got some of your background. You've, you've done some things over the years. You've, remember when we talked, you brought up that you'd played some chess and you might have a few tips for CEOs about the kind of derive from that. You're, you're very.

John Whitt (00:45.306)

you bet, you bet. And I love this story because, so when I was in high school, I was a competitive chess player. I got that way because club day, I thought I knew how to play and I went to play somebody and I got waxed like 15 games in a row. And I'm naturally competitive. my.

Jeff Holman (00:52.552)

Yeah.

Jeff Holman (01:01.918)

That's what's supposed to happen when you play chess, right? You start and you just get slaughtered.

John Whitt (01:06.182)

I was, I just couldn't figure it out. And so I decided I was going to learn some more about it. And that learning concept has stayed with me my whole life. Because if you think of Clefton Strengthsfinder Learner is my number one. But you know, so I played competitive chess, actually played in the United States chess championships in 1976 back in Philadelphia. I had won a couple tournaments beforehand, got invited, qualified. It was a big deal.

I didn't win anything, I competed well, and I didn't compete in the open section, so I wasn't in the master, grandmaster category. But I was in my own class and I got to go, so I thought that was pretty cool. Now, when I do tell my clients that the parallels to chess, I think there's several of them, and you can use a lot of things for it, but in chess there's a goal. In business there are goals. In chess the goal is the same all the time. You want to checkmate the king. In business you get to choose whatever the goal is.

But where they're similar is that you have resources on the chessboard. Those are your pieces. Each of them have different values, different strats, different places, different ways they move. And the more effectively you use those resources, the more likely it is that you're going to accomplish your goal. That's it, right? Now, you also have to keep track of the other person and what he's doing. That's the competition. Business has competition as well. So you have to understand that. So in business, the more you...

understand and allocate effectively allocate your resources the more likely it is that you're going to accomplish your goals but you still have to keep track of the competition because they're they're out trying to do the same thing or trying to thwart you from accomplishing your goals and your resources are different so you've got cash you've got maybe you've got facilities real estate inventory human resources you know you still have to put those in the right places to accomplish your goal and I've been asked like okay so in

In chess, the queen's really powerful and the pawn is the least powerful. What's the equivalent in business? Well, the queen is like clarity, right? If you know with clarity what it is that you're trying to accomplish and how you're gonna accomplish it, then you are miles ahead of everybody else.

John Whitt (03:14.662)

And that pawn is sort of represents the daily habits, the things that you have to do on a daily basis to keep trudging along, to keep getting things done, because that's how you're going to move forward a little bit better every day. And so just, you know, and again, if your habits are really strong in chess, if that pawn gets to the back rank, you can turn it into a queen. And now you've got extra power in the game. So I think there's some parallels that are kind of fun in doing that. just

It makes people, when I work with my clients, says, okay, so I should look at my resources. How should I position those resources? If you have human resources, very tricky, because humans are the most complex organism on the planet, right? They're, yeah, they're all different, and so their talents and their skills and their behaviors are all different. So the more you know about that, your team,

Jeff Holman (04:00.38)

They're dynamic, aren't they?

John Whitt (04:11.871)

and your team members, the more likely you can put them in the right place. The less you know about them, getting them in the right place is gonna turn into more luck than it is skill. So do whatever you can to get to know your team and your players. Where do they belong? Where do their strengths, where are their weaknesses? How do I get them in the right place?

Jeff Holman (04:31.356)

Yeah, that's, I have so many questions and I kind of want to jump in. you know, I think a lot of, a lot of CEOs would rather play checkers than chess just cause it's simpler, but the, but by virtue of where they're at, they're in a complex game. There's layers, their strategy, you know, there's multiple, you're playing, it's like multi-dimensional chess or something that old, what was that? S Star Wars, like those chess games they played and you know,

John Whitt (04:57.751)

Well, there used to be a 3D chess where there's multiple levels. I've never really played that one, so.

Jeff Holman (05:02.408)

Yeah. So, but, it's chaos, right? And so our, I think chess is, is such a good analogy. I'm, I'm a novice myself, although don't tell that to my son who I try to tell him I'm awesome. But, uh, I want to get into some of this, some of these layers, cause I think they're fascinating, but I don't want to skip over your background. Uh, give us, give us a little bit from the time in, I think you said 1976 and that caught my attention. Cause I think that was a great year.

John Whitt (05:13.385)

Everybody's in office at some point.

Jeff Holman (05:30.268)

at least it was a great year for me. That was the year I came to be and, between 1976 and where you're at today, coaching CEOs and somebody that fill in a few of those details. What were some of those major, major milestones in your journey along the way?

John Whitt (05:34.347)

Ha ha!

John Whitt (05:46.222)

Well, you know, I, my family never had a lot of money. In fact, how I got to the US Open is I took a, I spent $40 of my paper route money to buy a bus ticket to go from Santa Ana, California to San Jose, California. It took 16 hours to get there. And I played in the tournament. stayed with my mother's cousin, Jimmy, and I won that tournament. I won a thousand dollars and I flew home.

Jeff Holman (06:12.104)

16 hours that just to put that, if I remember, I lived in, I lived in the Bay area for a bit. Um, and I believe it was maybe four and a half, five hours for us to drive down to, so, but 16 hours, this was a, this was not the express bus. This was the $40 bus.

John Whitt (06:21.323)

Right.

John Whitt (06:27.725)

No, is the bus that stops, well, I mean, where else are you gonna get to San Francisco and back for $40? This was the bus that stopped at every bus stop, right? It was stop after stop after stop after stop. My point being that we didn't have a lot of money and yet I wanted to do certain things. I thought I could do certain things and my family always supported me. And so can you imagine a 15 year old kid

Jeff Holman (06:44.284)

Yeah.

John Whitt (06:55.617)

getting on a bus for 16 hours going, you know, four or 500 miles away. Today, I don't know if anybody does that. But back then, that wasn't all that unusual. was something. So I feel really supported. And so I did not go to college right away. I started working.

Jeff Holman (07:07.003)

Yeah, my-

John Whitt (07:14.529)

Had a lot of odd jobs, I had some sales jobs. One of the neat things about a paper up though is that you really get used to meeting new people and talking and starting up conversations. So building relationships, I got a lot of experience at that at a very young age. I started working corporate almost right away. I started out with an architectural firm because I was gonna be an architect. And then...

They were an architectural and engineering firm and they decided they wanted to specialize in the engineering space and they basically exited, exed out the architectural team. There were only four of us. And so, but they did work. They found us homes with other clients. And so I got to go work for.

Jeff Holman (07:50.295)

okay.

John Whitt (07:57.374)

a Fortune 500 company called Emerson Electric. They had a big manufacturing facility in Santa Ana, and I was a facilities planner. I had no idea what a facilities planner was, but I gotta tell you, planning does fit because that's what a chess game does. That's what you're planning and that. And a couple years later, the guy that hired me left to go work for Northrop and recruited me to go with him. And the senior vice president who I was working with, stepped in, he said, I think you could do Art's job.

Jeff Holman (08:03.688)

Mm-hmm.

John Whitt (08:27.466)

And the one and only time I've ever had this question, think about it over the weekend and tell me what it's gonna take for you to stay. Right? I totally undersold myself. I came back and said, look, I need this. And he said, yeah, done. Tomorrow the maintenance department works for you. I had no idea how to run maintenance whatsoever. But that's really where I got into my leadership piece, right? It was more than just leading me. It was like, how do I lead a team of really blue collar,

Jeff Holman (08:33.596)

yeah, that's nice.

Jeff Holman (08:41.448)

You

John Whitt (08:55.342)

Most of the maintenance members came from the service in some form or fashion. Definitely totally different than anything I'd ever done before. that's when I started doing the research, learning their leadership, reading the books, in search of excellence. That was a maintenance team of nine. We had a 13 acre facility and we made...

Jeff Holman (08:58.888)

Yeah.

Jeff Holman (09:09.532)

How big was that team?

John Whitt (09:19.554)

the old UPS systems, uninterruptible power systems. So today you can get a little box about that big that does your backup. Back then, it was 16 to 26 feet long and went to go, we made these for the big banks and stuff. And we made the batteries and we made the inverters and we made every little thing. We had a sheet metal shop and a paint shop and it was kind of crazy. And my first role was figuring out how do we lay out the operation so that it moves faster.

Jeff Holman (09:22.972)

Mm-hmm.

Right.

John Whitt (09:48.428)

Right? How do we, you know, going from the material coming in to the material going out, what's the ideal solution? Right? How do we, how do we put the equipment, the machines, and the people in place to make it go fast? And then they'd say, well, we're going to bring this machine in. What should we do now? And so then I would do a new layout and we'd do that. And so that was kind of my first planning job. And then the maintenance guys, they're the ones that are responsible for keeping all that equipment working.

I didn't know how to do it. So I said, guys, you know what our role is? Our role is for you to keep this equipment up and running. So you tell me what you need to keep this equipment up and running. so basically had a deal with Ed. I remember Ed quite well. He was the senior, call it de facto leader of the group. And I said, Ed, give me the information I need. I'll go up front. I'll figure out how to get it for you. And so that's when we built a relationship. I wasn't telling them how to do their job because it was beyond my skill set.

Jeff Holman (10:42.428)

Right.

John Whitt (10:43.373)

But they basically said, hey, they couldn't do my job either. Like they didn't know how to interface with the CFO, right? So if we needed a new $100,000 piece of equipment, they could ask for it, but they wouldn't be able to give the CFO the information they needed to be able to make a decision to give us the money to get the equipment. But if we did the stats, we put the specifications together, I could put it in together in a package to the CFO and the CFO could say, oh, I see where the stats value and then could approve the expenditure. So we worked out a situation where we could work together.

Jeff Holman (11:09.863)

Yeah.

Jeff Holman (11:13.18)

Well, and that's, you're kind of highlighting one of these scenarios, right? Whether it's a team of nine or a team of 90, right? When you're building a company, you don't know everything. The roles are important. The ability to communicate is important. You know, so, and that's what our scaling CEOs deal with, whether they're, oftentimes, especially in tech or innovation, you get the technical CEO who then, you know, finds the sales oriented co-founder or the...

John Whitt (11:13.307)

Jeff Holman (11:40.603)

Or the sales CEO who finds the dev team, know, scrum master, whatever you want, the developer who can put it together. And they don't know what each other does or necessarily know how the other person does it. The roles are so distinct, kind of back to the chess pieces, right? The functions are so different.

John Whitt (11:59.886)

Very similar. Well, and having clarity in the role is what's really important because if there's a lack of clarity, it causes confusion. It causes ambiguity, right? So who's doing what, who's in charge when and where? If you have clarity, even with small business husband and wife teams, they have to have clarity as to like, what's their space? Then they own it.

The other person doesn't tell them what to do in that space. They own it, you know, and maybe they get together for joint leadership sessions, but they have to have clarity in what their roles are. If they don't, it gets ambiguous and creates contention and problems follow.

Jeff Holman (12:38.972)

Have you been, have you been looking at my bio? You know that my wife, my wife and I run this law firm. She's not the attorney. I'm the attorney. She, she actually does the operations and does a fantastic job, yeah, husband and wife partner, like whatever you, yeah, there is, there's that co-leadership aspect for sure. So.

John Whitt (12:41.653)

Hahaha!

John Whitt (12:48.906)

Uh-huh.

John Whitt (12:57.823)

You don't tell her how to do operations and she doesn't tell you how to do the law. That's not a good idea. Now you can set joint goals together, right? And you can make decisions about how you want to make your investments and where you want to go and how you want to specialize. But her role is her role and your role is your role. So if we have clarity there, then we can move forward. And if we don't, and that's why I say that the queen of business is clarity. If you have clarity,

Jeff Holman (13:01.306)

I mean, I've tried, John, but it's tough.

John Whitt (13:24.641)

then we can go forward and make some great things happen. If we don't have clarity, there's just a lot of wrong turns.

Jeff Holman (13:30.857)

So when people are looking for that clarity, because I think a lot of people, they start a business, right? And they're like, I'm gonna go make money, I'm gonna sell this thing, I'm gonna make this product, I'm gonna sell it to these people. And you have all these ideas, right? And it reminds me of that saying, what was it, Mike Tyson, everyone's got a plan until you punch them in the face. So you've got ultimate clarity on paper. It's that spreadsheet clarity. We've all been through businesses where like, this is gonna be awesome.

John Whitt (13:44.437)

Yep. Yep.

John Whitt (13:49.633)

That's right.

John Whitt (13:58.668)

This looks great.

Jeff Holman (13:59.675)

Yeah, this model works so well as long as the formulas are, you know, punched in correctly in the, in the spreadsheet. And then you get into it and you're like, there's regulatory issues I ran into or team dynamics or lack of resources or, you know, market doesn't respond the way that you thought. what, do you, cause you work with CEOs, how do you distinguish between that kind of, we'll call it that philosophical clarity versus boots on the ground clarity.

John Whitt (14:29.952)

Okay, so here's the thing, every plan is only as good as the day it was finished. It deteriorates from there forward. So in the military, they say that every plan goes to heck with first contact with the enemy. Like Tyson says, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the nose. Adversities come in your way. You don't get to decide if adversity shows up. And guess what? It's gonna show up. Because it always shows up. It's proven to show up. You don't know where it's gonna come. And so the thing that you have to do is you have to be able to adapt.

You have to see it as quickly as possible and then adapt. And that's where a lot of business get into trouble. Now, the book that I wrote, Translating Ideas into Money, check me, Translating Ideas into Money, step five is a change management plan. Because once you have your plan in place, you have to have a system for evaluating and course correcting that plan as you go along. Because if we don't evaluate and course correct in a period of time, we could be way off target.

or something might happen that had a massive impact and if we didn't make the adjustment effectively then the plant's really blown up.

It's sort of like the plane that moves, that's flying from New York to Los Angeles. It's off course most of the time, but there's autopilot that course corrects it all the time. And so we need a course correction plan. how often do you meet and go over that depends on the investment, the size of the project, the complexity. But no matter what, adversity is gonna show up, so you need course correction. First step in that plan is clarity. amazing. Second step is team, right? You gotta get your team in

Jeff Holman (15:59.005)

Yeah.

John Whitt (16:02.319)

You might need some people to help you with clarity. You might need some people to help you with testing or help you with planning or help you with change, but you got to get the right people on your team. And then you figure out how do I test this idea? How do I make sure that it's good, that it's going to work in the marketplace?

Because I know for a fact, I am not my market, right? How I think what I like, I, you know, the market's the market, right? I need to test my ideas and get some feedback. And it's better to spend a little bit of money to find out that it's not gonna work than to spend a lot of money.

and find out it's not gonna work. So find a way to test it. Make an investment, test your marketing system, test your sales system, make sure they're gonna work before you roll it out to the whole team, the whole organization, the whole company. Once you've proven that it's gonna work, now you can build a rollout plan, so to speak. You can go into detail, and then obviously then after that you have to manage that particular plan. So the two places people really fail is testing and change. And...

Jeff Holman (17:05.489)

Yeah.

John Whitt (17:06.765)

Hiring the right people, getting the right teammates, that's a make or break spot, right? The right person will take, A-level players pay for themselves. B and C-level players cause headaches. And so you gotta get the right guys.

Jeff Holman (17:21.766)

Yeah.

Well, so that's interesting. I'm hearing you say that, you you don't just have to have a plan, you have to have multiple plans. You have to have that test plan. You have to have the rollout plan. I don't know if you call it this, but you have to have that adaptation or change management plan. And you need to dynamically switch among all of those. It kind of makes me think, and maybe this applies within the context of chess also, as well as business. It reminds me, I think Charlie Munger said something about

John Whitt (17:36.375)

Change, change medicine with flan. Yeah.

Jeff Holman (17:54.374)

the best way to be successful in business, and I'm paraphrasing and probably misremembering parts of this, the best way to be successful in business is to identify all the risks and make sure those don't happen, right? I'm wondering in chess, or from your perspective in business, do you plan to success or do you plan to avoid failure, if that makes sense?

John Whitt (18:21.677)

It does and it's not one or the other it's both So in the chess game, I'm building my strategy, you know, saying okay. wanted I wanted to do this right But at same time I'm saying hey, how can my opponent stop me from doing that? Right. I'm evaluating their role what their what their options are to to stop me from doing that That's the risk. So in business, yeah, this is what I want to do. What are the things that could get in my way?

Jeff Holman (18:26.715)

Okay.

Jeff Holman (18:50.461)

Mm-hmm.

John Whitt (18:50.539)

What are the things that could prevent me from leveraging my team, my resources, my people like this? Those are the risks. You're looking at it. ideally, you do a great job of understanding it, but there's always a surprise. There's always adversity. Like, nobody knew there was a pandemic gonna show up, and it was like, did that change the world? Yeah, it certainly did. Nobody really understood the internet when it first came out. Would that change the world? Yes, it did. And those people that adapted to it first,

became much more successful. Those people just like when I started my coaching practice, so was in corporate for 30 years. I started out in that manufacturing facility and then I ended up doing construction projects for Bank of America. That was a volume based thing. So when you talk about systems and processes, we were running $500 million a year in capital projects for the bank.

So they had 15,000 properties west of the Mississippi and we had construction going on at about 10 % of them at any one point in time. And that's not an unusual number, it's just the total volume is just crazy. And so if you don't have a system and a process to manage that, it's gonna break. And so we built paper systems, Excel systems to do that and they could only go so far. And then we moved into a technology system and I actually transitioned from being a architect, contractor,

Jeff Holman (19:49.266)

Wow.

Yeah.

John Whitt (20:10.529)

construction project manager into a technology product manager because they needed somebody that could tell them what the product had to do. We went to the CTO and said, hey, if we don't fix this out, we're going to make a mistake and there's too much money. It'll be a disaster for us. And they admitted, yes, that's true, but we don't have anybody on our team to do that. So can you put together a proposal as to what you need and we'll see if we can't fund it. And so.

Jeff Holman (20:28.092)

Yeah.

John Whitt (20:38.797)

30 days later, we came back and said, okay, here's a $15 million proposal. And they said, okay, go.

Jeff Holman (20:45.019)

was the second time in your life when they said, Hey, take the weekend. Tell me what it's going to take to get you do it, to manage this project. In a sense.

John Whitt (20:52.255)

Yeah, yes, yes. so, you know, we had to, what I discovered, and that's part of the reason why I wrote the book, is that the five-step process that I talk about, clarity, teams, testing, planning, and change, that works whether it's a construction project.

or a technology project or a marketing project or a human resources project, the same five steps. It's a lather rinse repeat model. Now, as you drill in, it's gonna be a little bit different based on the technology or the particular type of project you're at, but the high level requirements are gonna be the same. A project's a project's a project. And that's why I wrote it. And the other thing that really affects a project,

is attitude is so I in the book I said there's two requirements that you have to have you have to have the the attitude of a champion so if you think about a gold medal athlete what do they have to do to win the gold medal yeah certainly they have to have some skill and they have to know how to run the race or do the knowledge but 90 85 percent of that is

Jeff Holman (21:46.567)

Okay.

John Whitt (22:00.736)

attitude, it's discipline, it's perseverance, it's diligence, it's getting up in the morning, it's doing it again and again and again, it's the daily habits. That's what makes a gold medalist. That's what the heart of champion is. You know, you've got to be able to get, and that's what you need to get over the adversity. And you have to be willing to make mistakes because when you're bringing new stuff to the table is when you make mistakes.

And you can get upset if you want, but it doesn't help, right? What you really have to do is understand the mistake, learn from the mistake, and then take a new path, right? How do we address that? Because if you don't learn from the mistake, you're destined to repeat it again and again and again.

Jeff Holman (22:36.222)

Yeah. Well, so, oh, go ahead. I think you had one more comment there.

John Whitt (22:39.903)

Well, I was going to say one of the things I've one of the problems I've seen with small business owners is that they'll give an assignment to somebody on their team and say I need to do XYZ and it won't get done right. And it'll be a repeating assignment and they'll say, eventually they'll figure it out. But what the problem is that the training wasn't there and they're not going to just figure it out because they don't know how to figure it out. If they did, they would.

And so as soon as you see somebody that's on the failure to learn curve, If you're on the trial by error is the oldest learning tool in the history of mankind. If you learn from your failures, you'll always get somewhere. Thomas Edison said, hey, it takes 10,000 times to create the light bulb. He learned 9,999 times how not to do it. So if they're on the learning curve that is nature's learning curve, they're eventually going to get there.

But if they're not, if they're not learning from their mistakes, if they're making the same mistake again and again again, you gotta get them off that curve right away. Don't make another move without getting them off that curve. And you can reduce the mistakes curve with books and seminars and teaching and videos, et cetera, et cetera, the learning curve is the learning curve. That's where you make the mistakes.

Jeff Holman (23:44.294)

Yeah. Well, that's, that's exactly what the, the function of this podcast is intended for, right? Is talking with scaling CEOs and those people who are experts at coaching and helping guide scaling CEOs in their businesses. I'm really curious from your experience when you look back at your, you know, your, your process, your five steps or, or other aspects of what you're doing, what, what are, what are the kind of the,

most common failure points that you see and how have you helped to address those with scaling CEOs?

John Whitt (24:22.917)

I mean there's lots of different failure points, but I think the one that's most damaging is in hiring space. When you hire the wrong person. When you don't do your due diligence about what you need, not only do you need skill and experience to be able to do whatever job it is, you also need the behaviors. And if you've brought in the wrong person,

Jeff Holman (24:30.62)

Mm-hmm.

John Whitt (24:49.355)

and you've spent time and money to bring them in and time and money to train them, and then you realize that that's not the right person. And now you feel like, well, gosh, dang, I don't want to do that all over again, which means, because if I let them go, first off, I don't have anybody to do that work. Now I'm going to have to do that work. And then I'm going to have to go through all that work and bring them on again. It's really, really a mess if you hire the wrong person, even if it's your administrative assistant.

Jeff Holman (25:03.665)

Yeah.

John Whitt (25:14.559)

If it's the wrong one, it's the wrong one. It's just not going to be, it's going to be really painful. And so, so we see that happening at the lowest level. because often if you're a solopreneur, the first person you bring onto your team is an administrative assistant or a virtual assistant. and you want to make sure that you, bring the right one on board. What's the one that's gonna understand you? What's the one that's going to connect with you? You can do a lot of behavioral assessments to help identify some of those tools.

Jeff Holman (25:34.311)

Mm-hmm.

John Whitt (25:43.308)

We want to get some connection to make sure that they can do the task, that they will do the task, that they want to do the task, and they'll do it the way that we want them to do it. There's a lot to hiring that process, and hiring a wrong person is painful. Now, as you try to scale, eventually there's a point in time where there's not enough hours in the day for you to do everything you want to do. And so now you need a new person that can do what you do, or some of the things that you do. And again, you want to make the right decisions.

Think about hiring a number two person, right? Let's make the right decisions. If we hire somebody and we have to look over their shoulder the whole time, that's really not gonna help us resolve the time issue, right? We've gotta hire the right person. And it's more than just skills and experience, it's attitude and behavior. How are they gonna react to adversity? Because guess what, adversity's showing up. How are they gonna react to?

Jeff Holman (26:20.869)

Right.

John Whitt (26:34.029)

different people, customers, employees, et cetera, et cetera, do they fit our culture? Often, know, small business owners is running so fast wearing so many hats that they just don't give it the attention that it's necessary and they end up with the wrong person. And that can lead to any number of different challenges and issues. I had a client, a commercial painter, 25 person team.

three project managers and he was stuck at the $2 million a year revenue thing. It wasn't terrible, but he wanted to grow. And when we started working together, we did an evaluation of the team and then we started to process and process the metrics, right? So they could measure their improvement and everybody was able to see how they were doing. They could say, I'm doing well or I'm not doing well.

And we had one project manager that realized that he wasn't doing it very well and he was going to have to do some work to get better. And he decided that he was going to go to another job. He wanted to do something else. This wasn't his job. And so he tendered his resignation. And anytime somebody leaves the organization, it's sad because you've built up relationships and whatnot, but it's also an opportunity to upgrade the team.

Jeff Holman (27:51.335)

sure.

John Whitt (27:52.118)

And so we brought in, we got to make a decision, bring a new person in, brought in a young man that was super sharp. he, not only did he take over the project manager that left's role, but then he actually brought in some additional leadership skills, revamped a couple of things, and in 12 months, they had tripled their revenues. And all we had to do was get the right person in there.

And for the owner to make a decision, because he had a relationship with his team, they'd worked for him for a long time, for him to make that decision to let that person go, that was a really, really hard decision. And so we're very fortunate that he made a decision to leave on his own.

Jeff Holman (28:31.897)

So how does somebody who's, how does somebody first of all know they're in that situation? I mean, does it, does it become obvious that things just aren't quite working or you feel stuck and so you start looking at your team and saying, Hey, you know, it's not me because I'm here. I'm the founder. I'm not going anywhere, but how do I put the other people around me? I mean, what's the, what's the trigger that, that a CEO ought to be looking for. And, and when they see it, they say, I've got a, I've got something on my team.

that needs to be, that could be optimized. What does that look like?

John Whitt (29:04.683)

Well, I don't know if you know what it is, but one of the first indicators is frustration. You're not getting where you want to go. You might try X way and Y way and Z way and nothing seems to work. And you're not certain what to do next. There's something that's not there. Now I won't tell you that sometimes it's the CEO. Sometimes it's the leader. They need to make the adjustments. They need to become

So when you're running your team, you want A-level players on your team, because they will make a difference. When we hired that top talent for that painting company, team took off. You want A-level players. But if you want A-level players on your team, you need to be an A-level leader. And if you're not an A-level leader, then you need to do what you need to do to get there. If you don't have the chops to be an A-level leader, you're not going to be able to recruit A-level players, because A-level players want to work with other A-level players.

This is a sports analogy, The best of the sports players want to play with the best of the sports players, right? And they want to go work with an organization that is successful.

Jeff Holman (30:09.435)

Well, so, so how would one of these CEOs, evaluate if they're an A level player? You know what I mean? I've heard that I've heard the saying A level players hire the A level players and B level players, higher C level players, stuff like that. But how does the, how does the CEO first off know if they're, if they are the A level, A level player? It's not, I, there aren't criteria for it, right? Or are there? Okay.

John Whitt (30:32.398)

Well, yeah, there certainly are. Yeah, yeah. So based on the role, I have an assessment. It's about five pages. Based on your role, there are several of those sections in that assessment, maybe not 100 % of them, that are related to you, what you're supposed to be doing. And again, one CEO's role and what they do might be a little bit different than the other CEO's role and what they do.

Jeff Holman (30:55.409)

Sure.

John Whitt (30:55.662)

But you can go down and rate yourself in the category and this is where you have to be honest, right? Because if you're not honest, it's not going to help much. But on a scale of one to five, how well do you do this? How well did you do that? How well do you do that? A lot of times CEOs will look at that and they'll say, man, I didn't know that. I needed to do that. And so sometimes that's it. But really getting an understanding of what your role is, what's your responsibility.

Jeff Holman (31:02.875)

Right.

John Whitt (31:20.366)

and then being able to honestly evaluate yourself. And a lot of times you want to bring in an advisor, you want to bring in a coach, somebody that knows a little bit more about it to get some help. In fact, even coaches need coaches. I think everybody needs a coach. I think the world needs more coaches because we're stuck in this little space between our ears. That's all we know. That's all we got. Nothing more. And there is so much more to the world than what's in between my ears.

Jeff Holman (31:47.228)

Yeah. Well, I want to follow that up with, so let's say that they take this assessment. say, okay, I've, I'm being honest with my assessment. I've got some areas to improve in. If they make those improvements, how do they, is it a similar assessment in the hiring process? You just say, Hey, does this, does this candidate meet these criteria to be an A level player or, how does that work with hiring, especially when it's early on? Cause you, those first hires,

seem to be very, very critical. It's like you make the wrong hire and if you don't make the right hire, like you might as well not hire anybody. I think that probably keeps a lot of people from hiring sooner because they're afraid of making the wrong hire to begin with.

John Whitt (32:20.328)

so important.

John Whitt (32:28.654)

Sure does.

Yeah, make the right hire. You've got a place to jump off from. Make the wrong hire. Now we're trying to fix it.

Jeff Holman (32:37.221)

Yeah. And on paper, that's super easy. You just, you just put down that you hired the right person and, and your business revenue goes up. But in reality, what does that look like?

John Whitt (32:46.882)

Well, the hiring process. we need to have, let me give you a different example. In the marketing world, in the sales world, we talk about our ideal client profile, ICP. And we do all the possible work we possibly can to describe who that is. Who are we looking for, right? Because the world's a big place and there's some people that really want to say yes to our product. We do detailed work, right? You need to do the same level of work on the person that you want to hire.

I want to know in great detail who's my ideal employee in this particular role. So they're going to have to have skills. They're going to have to have experience. They might have to have education. But what are all the other things that they need to have to be successful at this role? What's their behavior? What's their attitude? How they react to challenge? How they react to issues? You want to build a whole profile, almost a dossier, on who it is that you're trying to bring on board. And now we're going to go find that person.

And everybody that you interview, pretty much everybody that submits for an interview is gonna say, yes, I can do that. But now you have to learn how to do interview skills. And the problem with a small business owner, they don't typically have a big HR team, right? They don't have people that can do that. Right, so if you have the HR team, what happens? There's somebody that screens the first person and they've got a series of questions. Did they pass this test? Because if they don't pass this set of tests, they don't go to the next level.

Jeff Holman (33:49.115)

Yeah.

Jeff Holman (33:56.379)

Yeah, no, that's one more hat. Let me take off this hat, put on the HR hat and yeah.

John Whitt (34:12.108)

And it might be two or three or four people that this person has to go through and pass test after test after test that before they get to me, which means I know they've crossed all of the bridges that I've set up in the beginning. And now I have my personal things that are really important to me. How would you respond to this question? How would you respond to this situation? Tell me a time when you've had this happen and what did you do? That's the level of detail that you really want to do. If you want to get the right person, that's the level of detail that you want. In the game of chess, a bishop

white or black, travels on the white squares, the black squares in the diagonal. Very obvious what the bishop does. In the game of business, it's not as obvious as what, you know, for people, because people are complex.

Jeff Holman (34:55.525)

Yeah, for sure. Well, this has been fascinating. I want to be respectful of your time. What's a takeaway from all this that we've talked about and drawing on anything else that you want to bring into the conversation? What's a takeaway either about teams or hiring or A players or chess or anything else that you'd want to leave with somebody who's maybe facing, we'll call it a potential breakout moment. They're looking ahead and they're saying, I...

John Whitt (35:13.41)

Hahaha

Jeff Holman (35:24.155)

Like I feel stuck a little bit. feel like I'm, I feel like it's there. Like it's on the other side of the wall. I can't see it yet. How do I get from this side of the wall to the other side of the wall? How do I get from this side of the chessboard to the other side of the chessboard, turn my pawn into a queen, get that added clarity? like what's that? What's that move that you would suggest?

John Whitt (35:48.419)

Alright, so when I was a chess player, one of the reasons why I got good so fast, I was able to go play in the US Open is because our advisor brought in a coach who was an international master, was very talented. And he said, I got four rules, four things I'm going to help you with. I'm going to tell you some things that you don't need to worry about.

I'm going to tell you some things to focus on. I'm going to help you with your games. I'm going to go over your games. I'm going to go over your material with you. And I want you to read this book. And my rating skyrocketed, which is why I was successful and was able to go places. But if you think about it, same thing is true in business, right? Don't worry about all this stuff in the periphery. Don't get distracted. Don't go chasing shiny objects. Know what you need to focus on. What are your metrics? What are the most important stuff, right? Have somebody help you go over the business, right?

Jeff Holman (36:24.647)

Hmm

John Whitt (36:33.294)

You just need an outside perspective, whether it's a coach or a mentor or a consultant or whatever that is. Don't do it all yourself. And then reading a book, continuous learning, continuous improvement. Read a book a month, read a book a week. Yeah, not everybody can do that, but don't stop, right? Continue to grow and learn. There's lots of material out there.

and the world keeps changing. But some books are timeless, right? So if you go back to the books that I first read when I was an early manager in search of excellence, good to great. know, anything by anything that was written by Buffett was always really good. You know, there was just a series of instrumental

Jeff Holman (37:05.285)

Hmm.

John Whitt (37:22.08)

influential materials that I read that allowed me to grow my career. That's it. That's what I'd say. know, learn to stay away from things, learn to focus on, get somebody to help you, continuous learning, continuous. And again, if you're not reading books, you can watch videos. I mean, I think that works too. Or listen to podcasts. Yeah, absolutely. Wherever that learning is.

Jeff Holman (37:38.939)

Yeah, or listen to podcasts. So, no, that's great. I mean, I think you're really saying get more perspective. Never stop bringing perspective into what you're doing, right? Get the perspective of new insights from books, from coaches, from other places, bring those into your business, figure out what works, do that testing and maybe...

Maybe you can get to the other side of that wall.

John Whitt (38:09.976)

Well, I think you can, I think more people can if you follow the process. But if you think you're the smartest person in the room and you know it all, I think you're in for a surprise.

Jeff Holman (38:20.91)

Yeah. Well, it's been fantastic. If somebody is looking for that coaching or looking for just to connect with you, follow along with what you're doing, you know, read more about your your experiences, your chess history or the book that you've written. Where could they get a hold of you? How should they connect with you?

John Whitt (38:41.73)

Well, or even if they want to do a leadership assessment, I'm happy to help somebody through that process. So my website, businesswit.com, the word business, last name WIT, W-H-I-T-T. That's my website. There's a services page that lists all the different things that we provide. But the home page has a contact us thing. You can set up some time for initial discovery type call. That's what I do. I'm happy to do that to find out if I can help somebody. And we'll decide together if that makes some sense or not. Yeah.

Jeff Holman (38:51.642)

Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (39:09.73)

Awesome. And I think you said you do some one-on-one coaching, do some group coaching, you're launching some things like that, right?

John Whitt (39:15.702)

Yes, right. So one-on-one coaching is really great for people that have the capacity to use it. So if you've got a business, you've got 50, 100, 250 employees, and they can help you build, one-on-one coaching is really valuable and perfectly happy to do that for you. If you're in earlier stage, if you're in that micro business stage, one to 20 employees, right, trying to figure out how do I make that first scaling job?

Jeff Holman (39:26.502)

Mm-hmm.

John Whitt (39:40.747)

A lot of times you don't even know the right questions to ask for one-on-one coaching. And so a mastermind is going to be way better for you. A mastermind that's the one like I run one on called Whole Life Leadership. And we talk about we have a day we spend every month on vision.

and we spend another day on relationships and people, and then another day on goals, and another day on how to build a team, and then how to do strategic planning, and then how to do financial management, you're gonna get a lot more from something like that and all the people that participate in that mastermind than you'll ever get in a one-on-one coaching. So either one of those, I'm happy to provide that service, that's what I do, and you can go to the website, set up a time, and we'll figure out what's best for you.

Jeff Holman (40:10.404)

Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (40:20.76)

Awesome. And that website again is business wit W H I T T right. Business wit.com. Awesome. Hey, well, John, it's been a pleasure having you. I really appreciate you taking the time out from your busy schedule with the more prominent podcasts that might be out there that I've listened to and found you on. And it's been, it's been great talking with you and I look forward to hearing more about you following your journey, reading your book, maybe participating in a mastermind group at some point myself. So thank you so much.

John Whitt (40:24.864)

Yeah, businessweight.com.

John Whitt (40:47.906)

Jeff, it's been a pleasure. Thank you as well.

Jeff Holman (40:50.756)

Yeah, and that's it everybody. Thanks for joining us today on the breakout CEO podcast. We'll look forward to seeing you again later on the next show. Thanks.

Jeff Holman (41:02.331)

Alright, I'll get this stopped.