The Decision That Separates CEOs Who Quit from Those Who Rebuild

Transcript Summary

00:01 — Introduction and Keith Norris background

02:05 — Personal motivation, biking, and energy outside work

05:03 — Defining the CEO’s job: making things better

06:13 — Culture defined as “the way we do things”

07:22 — Culture model: think, say, do

09:15 — Designing culture and confronting reality

10:09 — Values and prioritizing hard tradeoffs

14:59 — Continuous improvement as discipline, not slogan

19:39 — KPI Fire overview: strategy, metrics, and execution system

23:41 — Idea funnel and effort-versus-impact prioritization

28:13 — Near-collapse: layoffs, reset, and bootstrap survival

37:09 — Simplification as the breakthrough

45:18 — Deciding to keep going under pressure

48:15 — Culture revealed in crisis (Vistage keynote example)

54:15 — Fire Starter book and improvement philosophy

57:06 — Where to find Keith’s work and closing

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Full Transcript (AI generated and might include errors)

Jeff Holman (00:01.434)
Welcome back everybody to The Breakout CEO podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Holman. I'm with intellectual strategies and here to bring you stories behind the scenes from CEOs who are building awesome companies and having breakout moments. So today I'm really glad to have Keith Norris with me. Keith, welcome to the show.

Keith Norris (00:20.972)
Hey, thanks Jeff, thanks for having me, appreciate it.

Jeff Holman (00:23.238)
Yeah, glad to have you. If I'm not mistaken, I've seen some of your billboards along the freeway, right? You've had those up for a little while, haven't you?

Keith Norris (00:32.524)
Yeah, we've had a few different billboards up in the Salt Lake City area. We've got one for Standup Alice and we've got KPI Fire and we've got one now for our podcast, the KPI Fireside.

Jeff Holman (00:43.846)
Yeah, I was just listening to an episode of that earlier. I got to catch more of that. I didn't realize you had so many resources to provide. In fact, you're coming out with a book. I think you wrote a book before, is that right? And you're now coming out with another book?

Keith Norris (00:57.774)
Yeah, well, I've been working on a book for a few different times, but I finally got one that's ready to go out. In fact, I just got word today that it's on Amazon for pre-order the ebook. It's called Fire Starter. And we've got a website for it called The Improvement Book. And it's a book about just creating a culture of continuous improvement. So right in line with what we're talking about here today.

Jeff Holman (01:23.778)
Yeah, I love that. Yeah, we'll get into that more. Yeah, I want to hear more details and the website for the book is even cool. You got a ton of stuff going on. So I'm super excited and try not to interfere with your other daily tasks too much for today, but excited to chat. Hey, I like to start out sometimes and just because we're talking about CEOs, people running, starting businesses, it's a demanding job.

One of my intro questions is simply, you know, with all of these things going on and, you know, other things in your life, like just life and business, what keeps you motivated day to day?

Keith Norris (02:05.772)
that's a great question. You know, particularly when you're talking to CEOs and what is it that drives people like us, there's probably some sort of like childhood trauma or dysfunction somewhere in there somewhere. Because I think I like to suffer and I like pain a little bit. More constructively, I really like to ride my bike. So I spend a lot of time riding my bike and going uphill.

Jeff Holman (02:21.924)
We can agree on that.

Keith Norris (02:34.614)
on my bike, but I think there's something about, for me, I love to create and I love to build and I love to work with people and I love to work with people who are great at the things that they do. Like that's the kind of thing that just lights me up. In fact,

Jeff Holman (02:35.621)
Nice.

Keith Norris (02:53.518)
you know, as I've come to know myself better, it's an ongoing journey. There's a couple of things that I have figured out. And for me, a good day is, you know, I figure we all want to have a good day, right? So I've come to figure out that a good day for me is a product launch. I love to launch products. Those are always fun when you have something new to push out. So I was excited. I love to close a sale, particularly a big sale. Those are always fun.

Jeff Holman (03:15.76)
Books, podcasts, just whatever,

Keith Norris (03:22.348)
And I love to go for a bike ride, you know, so that see my family, that kind of stuff, like that's a good day. So.

Jeff Holman (03:27.93)
I love it. I love it. Road or trail or both? Yeah.

Keith Norris (03:31.506)
all of the above road, mountain, a lot of mountain lately. Yeah. I live in the Farmington area, so I am up in the Farmington Canyon area quite a bit.

Jeff Holman (03:35.598)
Yeah, where do you ride around here?

Jeff Holman (03:43.066)
That's a brutal climb. That's a lot. So are you climbing the road there?

Keith Norris (03:47.99)
Yeah, climbing the road there. I go up to the towers there quite a bit. That's kind of my happy place in the afternoons is to go up there.

Jeff Holman (03:55.128)
Okay, that's fantastic. I haven't done that climb. I'm just in Centerville, so we're nearby. But I've had a daughter who was on the mountain biking teams for a while and just fell in love with it. Never thought I'd be a mountain biker before that. I'm a soccer, tennis, and now a mountain biking guy, right? That's added into my, that's who I am now and it's fantastic.

Keith Norris (04:00.94)
okay.

Keith Norris (04:19.274)
awesome. I'm a huge cycling, biking, anything with two wheels is a lot of fun.

Jeff Holman (04:25.882)
Yeah, that's very cool. Well, if I were still running, you might see me running up that road once or twice, but haven't been doing that for a couple of years, unfortunately. In fact, it has nothing to do with the show, but you're getting me on a day when my right foot is swollen. I broke it the other day and it's, I got a fifth metatarsal that's got a clean break in it from soccer and I won't be doing any biking. In fact, I went mountain biking with my daughter Christmas Eve. I'm like, don't do this very often.

Keith Norris (04:32.12)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (04:54.726)
But now it's a boot for the next few months.

Keith Norris (04:57.902)
Oh no, yeah, that's no fun. Yeah, was definitely, it was warm on Christmas Eve there.

Jeff Holman (05:03.31)
yeah, yep, it was fantastic going up Mueller Park. So, well anyway, I could chat all day about all this other stuff, because I love the aspect of balance in my life and seeing other people who are running businesses and keeping balance. I could chat about that, but we're here to talk about a breakout moment when we'll get to that in a minute. I wanted to ask though, you've said a lot of...

stuff about culture. In fact, even before the show, you brought it up again, some things about culture. And I think you said that improvement is culture. It's not really a checklist, right? What does that really mean for leaders?

Keith Norris (05:43.471)
So one of my mantras, I guess, has to do with the number one job of a leader. So the number one job of a leader is to make things better. apply that to anything that you want to apply it to. Apply it to your family, apply it to your HOA, apply it to your city, apply it to your company. Be a leader, be somebody who is willing to make things better. And when you apply that to the

Jeff Holman (05:51.056)
Uh-huh.

Keith Norris (06:13.452)
the company perspective, what does that mean? What does that look like? know, a lot of times you hear people talking about culture and I have, I went really deep down this research of what is culture and the definition for culture that I subscribe to is really simple. It's the way we do things around here. So your family has a culture, your company has a culture, you know, whatever organization you're part of has a way we do things around here.

Jeff Holman (06:22.565)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (06:35.814)
Okay.

Keith Norris (06:43.892)
And the way we do things around here, and in my brain, I like to think of these little mental models. So I have a little three-part mental model that for me defines what culture is. And the first piece of that is what I refer to as the way we think. So if there's certain things that we think, that we have a shared mindset on, how do we think about this? How do we think about that? What do we think is important?

It's hard to look inside of people's head and figure out what they're thinking, but you can have conversations and say, do we believe this? Do we believe that? What are the things that we agree on? So that shared thinking is an important part of culture. And as a leader, it's one of those things that you can ask questions to figure out what do we believe? Do we have a shared belief about things that are important? The second part of that model is the things that we say or the way that we

Jeff Holman (07:22.618)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (07:41.188)
communicate and the idea that communication is more than just the words, communication is the visual. Communication can be body language. You know, one of the hardest things to deal with as a leader is passive aggressive communication, right? How do you correct somebody who didn't say something wrong, but their tone or tonality was like, you know, not something that you want. have teenagers,

Jeff Holman (07:50.704)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (08:06.766)
Wrong. It was clearly wrong,

Keith Norris (08:10.541)
You know, passive aggressive communication is one of those things that can be challenging to deal with. But if there's a culture problem, a lot of times what we're communicating, how we're communicating, mean, the behaviors that people are seeing others observe can be part of that communication. And then the third piece of that communication model is what I would refer to as the rituals or the behaviors. What are the reoccurring

patterns of behavior that exist inside of an organization. So one of my favorite questions to get an assessment of the culture of an organization is just to ask somebody, what are the reoccurring meetings in your calendar? Like if you answer that question with somebody, you can get a pretty good idea of how things work around here. You know, there's a lot of meeting where there's no meetings. So that's just a simple model that I like to think of whenever, you know, culture comes up. How do we think? What do we say? And what do we do?

Nice little model to think about solving any sort of culture related issue or addressing it. Solving it's not always easy, but addressing it.

Jeff Holman (09:15.994)
Yeah. And so as a leader, you're trying to set the tone for that, right? like how much can you control the culture of your organization as a leader? That's because I've looked at organizations, I'm like, I'm not sure who's in charge here sometimes. And others, you're like, man, these guys are so in charge. But are they really, is everybody else on board? Do you know what saying?

Keith Norris (09:38.992)
Yeah, absolutely. I think as a leader, I think you've got a responsibility to architect the culture. And again, I mean, if you're not connected to what's really going on, you can have this like ideal culture in mind, but you know, culture, the culture exists. It just is, whether it is what you think it is or not, but it is what exists.

Jeff Holman (09:48.218)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Norris (10:09.081)
So it's not so much necessarily designing and defining what it is as it is uncovering the culture that exists. And there's some things that I think that you can do when it comes to culture. Like for one, let's take this idea of shared values, right? Like part of the leadership responsibility is to define the things that we care about as a collective group. So.

That takes the form of things like mission, vision, values, of course. Everybody's going to say leaders should take a role in defining the strategic priorities. Communicating things that, I'll use the term strategies, strategies and values. So when you're faced with a difficult decision, which of these two things do you prioritize? Every business has versions of this. At some point you're going to face a difficult decision.

Jeff Holman (10:52.038)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Norris (11:05.507)
How do you help people prioritize when it's meeting a deadline or meeting a budget? Those are all the tough things that you can't necessarily just tell somebody what to do. You've got to help give them a framework for how to think. How do we prioritize A versus B? Those kind of things.

Jeff Holman (11:11.886)
Right, right.

Jeff Holman (11:24.922)
Yeah, especially when people have different roles, right? Like in my context, I see this a lot come up when it's like, hey, the sales team wants to close this deal, but the legal team where I'm often sitting is trying to make it so the deal doesn't hurt the business, right? Like the deal terms actually work with what we think are acceptable risks and that. so you gotta close the deal, but the deal terms aren't acceptable. And then you have to figure out who's...

Keith Norris (11:40.813)
Yeah, yeah.

Keith Norris (11:47.183)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (11:53.038)
That's a perfect example of this idea that I'm referring to where you say, looks like you've got two tensions, right? We want to close the deal. We don't want to close the deal. You sometimes people think of the legal as the folks that aren't related. So as a leader in that situation, if you can think about, what is the thing that we all want, right? What is the thing that we all want? If you can figure out how to find that, because it shouldn't have to be this versus that. There should be a bigger picture of, hey, we need to make sure the company is successful, right? Like that's this

Jeff Holman (12:02.264)
Right, That is true.

Jeff Holman (12:10.672)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Norris (12:22.979)
higher level shared value. And then once you can identify the shared value, can figure out, I mean, the communication thing is a really very juicy topic. There's so much that can go into communication. The mantra that I use for communication is that there's one right way to communicate, and that's assertively and respectfully. So I'm like a two by two matrix assertively.

Jeff Holman (12:23.3)
Right.

Jeff Holman (12:46.95)
Okay.

Keith Norris (12:50.967)
and respectfully because when you get into, you know, lot of problems that you see in leadership have to do with some version of disrespectful communication. So, you know, let's take that example you were just referring to the sales and the legal. So the sales guy comes in, he's complaining, he's like, man, these darn legal people, it's like they don't want me to get the deal closed. Like, really? Yeah, like you really think that's...

Jeff Holman (13:01.349)
Right.

Jeff Holman (13:10.566)
Right as if that was the objective right like I'm I don't want you to get your commission this this quarter

Keith Norris (13:17.551)
Sure, sure. you know, one of the most difficult challenges I'd say with leadership is this question of how do I handle this situation? And that little assertively respect, yeah, and it's always about a situation. You know, the idea that leadership is about choosing right versus wrong, I think is so naive because

Jeff Holman (13:31.576)
or these people, right? Sometimes. How do I handle these people? Yeah.

Keith Norris (13:47.569)
Too often it's about choosing right versus right, or something that's less than perfect versus something else that's less than perfect. How do you choose the lesser of two non-ideal situations? How do you find the tension between two things and not get stuck, but still find a way to move forward? That's what I would describe as strategic thinking, how to take...

Jeff Holman (13:52.4)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (14:15.258)
a step forward when it seems like you gotta try to go north and south at the same time and you gotta figure out how to still take a step forward.

Jeff Holman (14:23.514)
And I think that's like you mentioned earlier, that's part of the draw for a lot of entrepreneurs, right? It's kind of discovering these tensions or perceived incompatibilities and then finding a better way. Like, it's A or B. No, what if we create K as the option and we find this and it works for everybody? How cool would that be? I think that drives a lot of people.

Keith Norris (14:47.962)
Yeah, think it's creative thinking and strategic thinking. It's all that kind of that creative draw of problem solving that is a big part of leadership in general.

Jeff Holman (14:59.174)
Yeah. And so it seems to me like this, conversation about culture and values and priorities, like this all fits within your broader, maybe it's broader. don't know. Maybe you see it differently, but I would call it this broader topic of continuous improvement, right? You're like your business or businesses are all built around. How do we become better teams, higher performing businesses and that, right? So how do you define

continuous improvement or what is the objective that you'd like, you know, not just your team, but the people who, who come to you and use you and your products and services. How would you like them to experience that continuous improvement?

Keith Norris (15:44.923)
So continuous improvement is very much a discipline that exists inside certain organizations. It's a job title, but it's deeper than that. think that it's, you've probably heard the idea of growth mindset applied to people and individuals as values. I very much would subscribe to the core value of growth mindset. So I would use the concept that continuous improvement as a,

Jeff Holman (16:01.06)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (16:08.262)
Okay.

Keith Norris (16:13.85)
functional discipline, just like every organization has some version of a finance department or operations or marketing. So continuous improvement is a function that exists a lot of times in bigger companies with multiple sites where they really have to push through the entropy of stagnation and the status quo. So KPI Fire is our product that really leans into this discipline of continuous improvement. A lot of times through like

Jeff Holman (16:30.202)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Norris (16:42.286)
that the terms lean six sigma are used in this discipline. But I think it's something that every business has to push through, particularly every leader, you've got to drive that business forward. And a lot of times it's not easy. It's like as humans, we have this spark inside of us that wants to evolve, right? It's the spark that has driven the evolution of the human species for eons. It's that drive to want to approve and want to evolve.

Jeff Holman (17:01.381)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (17:10.938)
But it's also not natural, right? Like we all get into our comfort zone and we're like, know, like change is good, but not too much. And so organization, there you go. Yeah. Like, I mean, you we all want, we all want good change, but we don't necessarily want to be changed, right? I, know, every one of us is like, you know, yeah, they should change. Change should happen over there. But when the finger gets pointed at us, we're always.

Jeff Holman (17:18.116)
Yeah, that's work.

Jeff Holman (17:32.038)
Whoa, whoa, this isn't a marital podcast here. Well, you mentioned before something about the difference between leaders and managers, I think before we started recording. there maybe a concept where leaders and managers approach change and culture and improvement differently? Is that one of the distinctions or?

Keith Norris (17:37.444)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (17:55.793)
Yeah, so I have a simple mental model for this idea of leader versus manager. Of course, a lot of us are managers and leaders at the same time, but I kind of think of them as two different hats, right? The leader's job is to make things better, and to make things better, it means that there's got to be a change, right? And preferably a good change, whereas the hat of a manager, the job of a manager, if you think of it as to manage, it's like, hey, here's this thing.

Jeff Holman (18:14.864)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (18:23.301)
that works well and I wanna hand it to somebody else and I just want you to run it exactly the way that it's been running forever. Like just run it exactly like I do. If you're hiring an EA who's gonna work somewhere remote and you're just like, look, if you could just do this thing and this way, we'll be good. So a lot of what we think of as leadership is balancing this tension of things that I wanna keep the same and can I get it to run exactly the same? If you're gonna franchise some business, right? You have it working in

Jeff Holman (18:39.035)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (18:52.471)
one site and you want to have 500 of them, you want it to run exactly this way every single time versus the tension of making improvements, making things better.

Jeff Holman (19:03.014)
It's more of an operational efficiency mode for managers. Hey, do this, make it better, but don't change it to the point where the fundamentals change, right?

Keith Norris (19:12.056)
Yeah, yeah, and it's kind of an interesting paradox, I guess you'd say, in that to make things better, you have to change. And sometimes when you make a change, you know, you don't necessarily know if it's an experiment that you're doing, if that change is going to be for the better or for the worse. So it's, you know, it's kind of an interesting

Jeff Holman (19:31.79)
Yeah, because they all are, they're all experiments, aren't they? Every little change you're like, whoa, that didn't work or that worked better than I thought. How does KPI Fire fit into this? give us some context about what KPI Fire is and how it helps facilitate some of these conversations.

Keith Norris (19:39.599)
Yeah

Keith Norris (19:51.514)
Yeah, sure. So KPI Fire is a product that we sell primarily to large enterprises with multiple sites or locations or facilities who are really leaning into this continuous improvement discipline. There's really three primary areas of the application. We would say aligning strategy, so clarifying that strategic intent, what is really important and important part of, let's say, executive leadership.

And then the KPI part of KPFR is the numbers, the metrics, knowing which metrics you're going to measure against to make improvements. So again, mean, whether it's you're running and your fitness and how long it takes you to run a mile or whether it's the yield that you have on a mining facility or how many units per day you produce.

Jeff Holman (20:30.47)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (20:43.953)
in a manufacturing environment. We all have these metrics that we use to measure our performance. And then at its core, it's a basically project management and idea funnel software. So individuals closest to the work can suggest ideas for improvement. And then hopefully if you get this continuous improvement culture right, you get people who are noticing these ideas for improvement to help drive that improvement forward. So we would say

engage employees in a structured problem-solving approach because you don't necessarily want to just start changing things. You want to have a structured problem-solving approach so that you can do an experiment, you can evaluate the success of that experiment, and if that experiment works, then you go ahead and scale that and run that across the business as opposed to just making change for the sake of change.

Jeff Holman (21:21.316)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (21:37.114)
Yeah, nail it, validate it, right? You gotta get the validation in there before you scale it. So that's really interesting when you say an idea funnel. think what I've worked with lot of inventors over the years, innovators building new brands, platforms, products, stuff like that. So they need patents. need to protect their brand with trademarks and they're creating trade secrets and stuff like that. And I've, I've, I've ideated myself around how do we, how do we get a tool and maybe this is the tool. How do we find a tool where

people who are innovating or proposing change in some fashion can really do that in a way that also has a legal layer to it because I haven't seen a tool that does that well. I'll have to check out your tool and maybe that's the one that will do it.

Keith Norris (22:24.207)
Yeah. Well, this is particularly, know, KPI Fire typically sells to larger organizations. In small companies, it seems like, you know, somebody has an idea, somebody just does it. In a big company, I tend to think of things at like three levels of approvals, right? Like you have this level where...

Jeff Holman (22:35.686)
Sure, sure.

Keith Norris (22:45.997)
I don't know, like you as an individual, if you want to reorganize your desk or something, it's probably yours. just do what you want. You don't have to ask anybody's permission for that. If you're working on a team and you've got a team that you're working with, you want to change some process, you at least got to get your team involved with that. But let's say it doesn't cost any more money or doesn't need any more resources. You just got to get some people to restructure. And then you have this level of change that probably requires some investment or some approval from above.

Jeff Holman (22:54.469)
Right.

Keith Norris (23:15.535)
And every organization kind of lives in some version of those three levels, like stuff that you can change that you just need to decide to do it yourself, stuff that you need to get your team, so it's kind of a horizontal, and then stuff that requires some sort of approval from above. And the concept of an iDiff funnel, I'll say, when we talk about leadership, goals comes up all the time and...

Jeff Holman (23:20.73)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (23:31.172)
The vertical. Yeah.

Keith Norris (23:41.299)
Too many goals are too few goals. Most of us have too many goals. Most organizations, most people have a long list of goals. We're recording here pretty close to New Year, so we've got resolutions. A lot of people talk about how resolutions don't stick. I would say that the idea of funnel is the antidote to the too many goals problem. When you have too many things that you want to do, you have a tendency to not get very many of them done.

Jeff Holman (23:49.616)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (24:10.128)
The idea behind an idea funnel is that it's like a, it's a place to put stuff that you, that you, know, your ideas, stuff that you want to work, stuff that you might want to pull into your, to your list of goals at some point, but you, you store them there in a parking lot might be another word to use. And then you evaluate those on effort versus impact so that you can choose stuff to move into like the execution phase. We're actually going to get these things done with a higher.

probability of success of a fewer number of items.

Jeff Holman (24:42.916)
Yeah, that's actually, I think there's some concepts in the EOS system and traction and stuff that talk about having these holding areas and putting it into the right place in the funnel at the right time. It also reminds me, you said effort versus impact. It reminds me when I had two young kids many years ago. In fact, it's probably 20 plus years ago.

I had moved to Silicon Valley and we moved there around the same time as another young family. And I remember Nathan, the dad saying, yeah, I've got this theory about how to entertain my kids. It's all based on how much effort does it take me relative to the amount of enjoyment my kids get? And he's like, you see, Jeff, this swing, when I push them on a swing, that's not a whole lot of effort, but they love it. And so it's this high ratio of impact to effort. And I thought that's...

He was in finance and I thought, despite my engineering background, I had never stopped to create a model around how to entertain my kids most efficiently.

Keith Norris (25:52.082)
That's a pretty good model effort versus impact. The pushing on the swing, that's a great one.

Jeff Holman (25:57.158)
Yeah, it's it's it honestly has made me stop a few times in the last 20 years. I'm like, huh? How would Nathan do this so?

Keith Norris (26:05.51)
Well, you know what's funny about that? What we call the idea funnel. been a student of lot of productivity methodologies going back to the Franklin Covey methodology, the daily task list versus the master task list. The master task list being the long list of tasks and the daily task being the things that you pull into today. David Allen, another productivity guru would have his

Jeff Holman (26:25.658)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (26:35.962)
the, what does he call it? The inbox, you the place to put stuff and then the someday maybe list, you know, kind of the long list. A lot of folks are familiar in software, particularly with things like the agile methodology, the backlog, you know, the backlog is like the long list of stuff, wherever you got the current sprint. So there's a lot of different ways that that methodology has been.

Jeff Holman (26:40.379)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jeff Holman (26:52.452)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (27:00.102)
turned into different methodologies. We use the term idea funnel or project hopper to be a list of the staging area where things can be, know, because when you're talking employee engagement, when you start asking people for their ideas and you start, you know, they start sharing them, if you don't do something with them, then they're like, well, I'm not going to share any more ideas because you didn't do anything with it. But the idea funnel lets that idea live there and let it get some feedback. And you can kind of see, well,

Jeff Holman (27:21.38)
Right.

Keith Norris (27:29.894)
This is a good one, but it's got these other four things that are ahead of it in the schedule. So it's not that we're not doing it, we're not listening to it. It's just that we're picking things from, know, skimming the cream off the top, you might say, or picking the things that are gonna be a high impact, lower effort first.

Jeff Holman (27:41.765)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (27:45.734)
That makes sense. It's not forgotten. It's there. You know, we've put it somewhere. We've done something with it, even though it's not the top priority right now. Well, I want to switch gears just a little bit if we can, because as you've been building the business, writing your books and all of this stuff, I'm sure there's been a time or two in your journey where you've, you know, been on that path. You know, you've been grinding along or whatever you want to call it and

Keith Norris (27:54.449)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (28:13.69)
maybe run into some obstacles or felt like you plateaued. then usually what happens for businesses that still exist after those moments, they've had that breakthrough moment, right? They've been like, wait a second, why have I been doing it this way? What if I shift it and do that? Or, you know, the happenstance conversation with somebody who says something and it sparks a new idea or a new insight, you're like, I should do that. Have you had some of those along the way?

Keith Norris (28:43.73)
Yeah, as you brought that question up, there's probably two things that come to mind and maybe on two extreme ends of the spectrum. I think like, I would assume probably like a lot of folks that have spent more than a few years pursuing something that they're passionate about. There's always a breakthrough moment that comes at the end of the plank or the end of the cliff or the edge of the cliff.

Jeff Holman (28:54.886)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (29:11.674)
Yes, shortly before you're going to sell the company or shut it down, right?

Keith Norris (29:15.066)
Yeah, yeah, you know, have these decisions. you know, I'll go back probably about 14 or 15 years ago as a company, we had, we'd raised some money and I was a co-founder at the time. We were burning through lots of money. This is back when it cost a couple hundred thousand dollars a month just to run a SaaS company. You know, you're having to buy servers and, you know, put them in hosting facilities that you had to, you know, I mean, it was thousands of dollars a month just to have a single server hosted.

Jeff Holman (29:34.628)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (29:44.472)
And so we.

Jeff Holman (29:45.779)
Is this for the current company or is this for a prior company?

Keith Norris (29:48.946)
This is for the current company, basically. Yeah. So we had raised some money. We were pursuing a product. We had a little bit of market traction, probably, you know, in terms of revenue doing about half a million dollars in annual revenue. But our burn was way exceeding our cash flow at the time. And at the time I was a co-founder, we raised some money.

Jeff Holman (29:55.918)
Okay, yeah.

Jeff Holman (30:10.032)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Norris (30:20.319)
the investors at the time had wanted to bring in an adult, I guess you might say, a professional CEO. And we had done that and continued to raise a little bit more money and burn through even more money. And then it was funny because it was actually probably 14 or 15 years ago, almost to the day, because it was the very end of the year. It was December 31st. And we were out of money. And we had 30 people on payroll and we didn't have a way to pay them.

Jeff Holman (30:33.883)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (30:44.542)
well.

Keith Norris (30:49.931)
And the CEO that we had hired, his last action was to fire everybody and quit. And so then there was.

Jeff Holman (30:58.384)
shutting the doors or just like in a moment like, hey, we're just gonna close down.

Keith Norris (31:04.241)
Well, we knew that we were running out of money. We didn't have any more money to keep things going forward. you know, I mean, like at the time it didn't necessarily feel like we could run the company with the revenue that we had. So it was kind of like, you know, hey, we did everything we can. I think we're done. And so that was December 31st. And then, you know, come January 1st and 2nd, me and a couple of their people said, hey,

Jeff Holman (31:14.864)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (31:21.808)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (31:33.244)
I think that we could probably still make this work with a much reduced team. And so we basically went back to three hires. I think we had three full-time hires at the time. And then a number of the other employees were willing to take some pay cuts basically and to do some things on contract and to do some things on like commission only. And so come January 1, we went back to the...

Jeff Holman (31:40.454)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (31:55.515)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Norris (32:01.939)
to the board and the investors and some other folks and said, think if we did it this way, we could probably pick up some of the pieces that we had. Because we still had some revenue. still had a little.

Jeff Holman (32:13.956)
What was it that made you want to do that though? I mean, that's a, think sometimes entrepreneurs get to the point, it sounds like maybe this CEO for hire was at the point where he said, like, I've done this journey. I'm just, I got to move on. What made you feel like, you know what? I'm not ready to move on yet.

Keith Norris (32:30.869)
That's a good question.

I probably just felt strongly about the mission. liked what we were doing. I felt like what we were doing still was something good. I thought that there was still a mission in it. I felt like there was still something to be accomplished.

Jeff Holman (32:46.587)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Norris (32:52.913)
Yeah, that's a really good question.

Jeff Holman (32:55.344)
Well, so you went from like 30 people down to a 10th of that, down to three people. Plus some, plus some, some help from probably some very friendly folks who were like, you know what, I'll, I'll help get, get this, you know, here, here and there where I can.

Keith Norris (32:59.577)
Yeah, from 30 down to 3.

Keith Norris (33:08.531)
Yeah, and we ended up building things back up. And at that point, we turned in, we went from being, let's say, like a VC funded, funded kind of organization into more of just a bootstrap type organization. And from there, we built, we're still around, we're successful 15 years later.

Jeff Holman (33:28.729)
Okay.

Jeff Holman (33:36.218)
Was that a hard transition for, because it sounds like, it sounds like, you know, you had investors and then you didn't have investors or maybe not the same level of investors. that, that's not a conversation you hear about a lot. You just hear about the unicorn succeeding or the, you know, the startup failing and everybody moves on. Was that a difficult conversation with the investors or how did that go?

Keith Norris (34:02.708)
Yeah, it was a very difficult conversation and it took many years actually to get things back to a point where we could you know, really move forward in a a in a productive way so we had You know, there's different terms that are used in the industry. I think one of them is a zombie Company where you know, it's it's kind of hard to figure out

Jeff Holman (34:10.618)
finalized.

Jeff Holman (34:16.07)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (34:25.349)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (34:31.412)
the outcome of this, but after a few years, we were able to get some things restructured. Fortunately, had some, investors were willing to restructure some things and we could get the incentives back aligned in a more productive way. And I think that there's different ways of going about building a company. mean, you can go raise the Silicon Valley, venture money and swing for the fences and that's maybe one approach or.

Jeff Holman (34:33.413)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (34:54.724)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (35:01.298)
You can do a different approach like the bootstrap. And I think the way that technology has changed now, particularly now with how easy it is to like vibe code something like you can figure out with a lot less money, whether you have an idea that's worth pursuing and whether you can build some customers around an idea that you have.

Jeff Holman (35:21.54)
Yeah. Yeah. Time to revenue is, can be drastically shorter than it used to be. And like you mentioned those, you don't need the huge servers that you used to have in places. And so it's drastically, even in the last five years, drastically different. And I personally love the trend that we're seeing towards what Greg Head calls practical funding, It's a lot of opportunity is there.

Keith Norris (35:48.263)
Yeah, it's so interesting because it's so extreme, with hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars being thrown at some of these AI companies. at the same time, it's like you've got people just building something on the side of their day job or something, vibe coding stuff. there's all sorts of different ways to be successful.

Jeff Holman (36:13.638)
What do you think was the impact of making that change? It sounds like it took some time to get everything, you know, discussed and resolved and on track for where you're at today. But, you know, when did you start to see, hey, this is working, like we did the right thing. And how did you know that was going the right direction?

Keith Norris (36:40.02)
You know, I think that that's an interesting question. I think that it's hard to know. I think all of these journeys that we're on, it's... It's always hard to know what the path not chosen was going to be. I personally learned a lot of lessons. So give you an example. You asked for like a breakthrough

Jeff Holman (36:52.422)
It's continuous improvement, right?

Keith Norris (37:09.882)
moment. I had a number of breakthrough moments on our journey here and one of them that I'll point out was we're building software in the productivity space. We've got four products now that we are actively currently selling and supporting and maintaining and they're all versions of productivity tools. We talked a little bit about KPI Fire. There's one called Standup Alice which is one of our products. I love this product and

Jeff Holman (37:31.931)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Norris (37:39.367)
It's a very simple product. I've kind of learned with building software, you can go really wide and you can be the everything tool for a certain type of customer, or you can have just like a narrow slice of something and go really deep. so one of these breakthrough moments that I had as a CEO and as a leader was, I think we're trying to do too much.

We're over complicating this thing. We're trying to do too many things for too many different people.

Jeff Holman (38:12.686)
Was that because you're building too broad for one product or what? I mean, what do mean by that?

Keith Norris (38:19.284)
Yeah, basically, mean, you know, trying to do too many things for too many, know, having too many...

Jeff Holman (38:28.678)
Just too many irons in the fire.

Keith Norris (38:29.662)
Too many voice of customer, know, too many customers in too many different types of industries to really be super successful in any one of them.

Jeff Holman (38:37.018)
Yeah, I like to call those separate businesses. Some of my clients don't love it. They're like, no, no, no, Jeff, it's not a separate business. I'm just starting a new product. And it happens to be for a different customer base. And the pricing model is different. And we're on a different growth trajectory. I'm like, no, no, that's like a different business. The revenue might be in the same accounting financials, but that's a different business.

Keith Norris (38:57.128)
Yeah, it's, I... Yeah.

Keith Norris (39:02.994)
Yeah, I agree with you. And from that perspective, we basically have four different businesses running internally. we now, we basically run them as separate businesses. We have some shared functions that serve all of the businesses, like our finance. It's easy to, receivables and payables and payroll is pretty easy to do across multiple products. But we have like a product manager and a,

Jeff Holman (39:16.71)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (39:21.36)
Sure.

Jeff Holman (39:26.715)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (39:32.512)
technology leader that sits over each one of those products and is driving it forward. One of the breakthrough moments was this Standup Alice product where we're selling productivity software and we were using this tool for managing our daily standups all the way back into 2017. And we had a moment where we had an opportunity to sell

Jeff Holman (39:36.752)
Okay.

Jeff Holman (39:56.763)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (40:02.597)
one of the products that we had and so we were looking at an exit and I was in a moment of like, okay, let's say we sell that and now I get a chance to go back and rethink what I'm gonna do with my life and I'm still young enough that I'm gonna continue to work. So what do wanna do? And I got thinking, like, I want a product like Standup Alice. It's drop dead simple. It just asks a couple of questions. It plugs into Slack, it plugs into Teams.

And I, so I just actually reached out to the guys that had developed that product and I said, hey, would you think about selling this to me? And they, no, we didn't develop it ourselves. We went and we were able to acquire that product. It was a few years old. And so that was one where it was just like a turn into just like doing something a little bit more simple. So in some ways that was.

Jeff Holman (40:36.201)
okay. So you hadn't developed it yourself. You bought this at some point.

Keith Norris (40:55.637)
what you might call a breakthrough moment where it's just like, hey, in this moment of clarity, like how can we simplify this complex thing that we're doing and just break it down and do like a very, very simple, you know, behavior that's a very common behavior. Daily standups is something that a lot of tech companies are familiar with, but I think that it's very applicable to, you know, almost every company is having a daily meeting. It happens a lot in, you know, hospitals do. I mean, a lot of companies do it. you're not doing it, it's definitely something I recommend.

the morning check in with your team.

Jeff Holman (41:27.834)
Yeah, we've done that at different levels in my law firm for several years now, either daily for some functions and weekly for others. I wouldn't run a business, let alone a law firm, any business, differently without doing that. It's kind of magical. So how did that translate into a breakthrough for you guys? Just the simplification of it or?

Keith Norris (41:51.232)
Well, it was really just a moment of clarity. We had an opportunity to sell one of the products and I was faced with this moment of, okay, I'm going have some of this time back in my schedule. What am I going to do with myself? And so it was this moment of clarity where I had a chance to make a decision based on the benefit of hindsight and all the mistakes that I had made and to intentionally say, all right, this is...

Jeff Holman (42:05.861)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (42:20.085)
This is how I want to benefit from all of those mistakes that I've made in the past by making a good decision at this point. And what's interesting, I guess, is a breakthrough is we felt like buying something was a shortcut rather than like just building that thing from scratch, which, you know, from where I'm standing right now, it seems like a brilliant idea. Who wants to go through the brain damage and trauma of building something from scratch? Because it's so hard.

Jeff Holman (42:23.28)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (42:46.768)
Well, you know, as you said that, I'm like, yeah, of course, an entrepreneur, what are they going to do with their free time? They're going to get into another business. But a second time or a serial entrepreneur, what are they going to do? They're going to find the business that aligns with where they want to go. One where they can bring their skills to it. They can leverage it. One where they know, because, you know, this show is about kind of seeing around the corners that maybe some of our audience hasn't been around before, but you have, you've been around that. And now you're like, okay, this is the type of business.

Keith Norris (42:54.143)
Sure.

Jeff Holman (43:14.48)
that I want to have for these reasons. This is, I think I can leverage this from where it's at to where it's going. That's the true difference between first time and second time founders, you know, to simplify it.

Keith Norris (43:27.657)
Yeah, and I don't know how many times founder I am technically with the different products that we're starting, because every day still feels like, you know, like it still feels like the first day in some ways, you like there you always feel like there's something more to do, I think. So you're, you know, for me, it's always in pursuit of like this, this next thing, but also, you know, trying to balance that with

Jeff Holman (43:46.096)
for sure.

Keith Norris (43:58.869)
The idea that you've got to enjoy the journey because when you do get to the end, whether the exit is a huge exit or not a huge exit, you get to the end. I mean, I've had this conversation with a lot of friends who have sold their companies. Sometimes they'll say things like, the most depressing day of my life was the next day after we sold it because I didn't have a purpose. didn't know what. Yeah, so I think that's kind of an interesting

Jeff Holman (44:17.924)
Yeah. They didn't have a mountain to climb on their on their bike that next morning.

Keith Norris (44:26.996)
you know, in terms of just like advice and things to share, like, yes, be hungry, be in pursuit of that next big thing. But at the same time, pause periodically and remember that the journey is the beautiful part. Like that's part of the part of the fun, you know.

Jeff Holman (44:41.35)
Well, what's something that you think somebody listening to this who's on a similar path, maybe looking to buy a company or start a company or work with VC, like what's something that they could take away from your experience and apply and find positive progress or momentum for their own businesses?

Keith Norris (45:06.545)
let's see. That's a good question.

Jeff Holman (45:09.038)
And you've given us a lot of stuff with culture and core values and leadership. What do you think is one of the more important parts that they should take away?

Keith Norris (45:18.432)
I mean, if I think about things that define me and my journey, one of them that comes to mind is just, you know, resilience. One thing that I think about periodically, because I've had a lot of opportunities to quit along the way, and sometimes those opportunities to quit would be in the form of an exit, and sometimes they'd just be in the form of a fail and start over. One thing that I think about a lot is you only have to quit once.

Jeff Holman (45:28.399)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Norris (45:48.181)
Like, if you decide to quit, you're done. you're, you know, you're on whatever, you're onto the next thing, right? But you have to decide to keep going every freaking day. You got to decide to keep going every freaking day. And so, you know, I guess I'd say from a resilience perspective, prepare yourself to keep going because it is going to be hard. Every day is going to feel hard. That's just, that's just what it's going to feel like. So.

Jeff Holman (45:48.292)
What do mean by that?

Jeff Holman (46:17.158)
What do you use to get through that then? Because, you know, any CEO or founder who's listening to that goes, every day this morning, this afternoon even, you know, twice today, I've had to tell myself I'm not gonna quit. What do you, do you have tools or?

Keith Norris (46:30.922)
Yeah.

So my tool, I've already mentioned a little bit, one of my tools is my bicycle. Like my therapy is getting out and being physically fit and physically active. To me, that's one of the things that's as near and dear to me as anything is just like get physically, get your body moving to get out of your head, you might say. And I think that there's a strong parallel to

a strong body and a strong mind, the same mindset that you have to have to keep turning your pedals over when you're going up a hill is very similar to the resilience and mental toughness that you need to have when you're like, maybe I should just go try something different. Maybe I should quit. Maybe I should stop. So I think that's.

Jeff Holman (47:25.862)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (47:31.19)
Well, for those that don't bike, I know when I was running more intently, by mile six or eight, my problems looked different. They weren't so drastic. They were manageable or even forgettable sometimes. I'm like, well, that'll be there when I get back. I got X miles to go. I'm just going to keep running and the problem will be, the solution will probably present itself in the meantime.

Keith Norris (47:42.486)
yeah.

Keith Norris (48:00.843)
Yeah, I'll tell you, if you don't have your health, every other problem in the world seems tiny, you know? It's like... you know...

Jeff Holman (48:05.286)
Yes, I know that. And have a lot of help I'm thankful for, but this broken foot thing is going to test my patience. So we'll.

Keith Norris (48:15.094)
So you asked a little bit about breakthrough moments and one other one that came to mind for me was back in 2017, I was sitting in a, I think it was a Vistage event and Cameron Harold, who's a...

Jeff Holman (48:18.267)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (48:27.352)
Okay. And Vistage is the is a paid kind of peer CEO group, right? Okay.

Keith Norris (48:33.598)
Yeah, peer CEO, networking, consulting type group. It was a conference that they were doing. They had a speaker, his name was Cameron Harreld. He was the former COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, and he was giving a keynote. And he was explaining how they built this great culture at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. And the epiphany that I had was like, if you can have any, you know, have these pictures of like this great culture and these parties and the fun things that they're having. like, and the breakthrough that I had was,

Man, if you can build a great company where people love coming to work and your job is picking up trash, like you can do that anywhere. So the epiphany for me was it doesn't, I mean, I'll take pride in choosing like software as a service or B2B SaaS is like a smart decision to, you know, choose a market and stuff. At the same time, like you can be successful doing a lot of different things. It matters.

Jeff Holman (49:11.696)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (49:30.856)
I mean, it matters, of course, what market you choose. If you're getting into machine learning and AI, that's probably a good choice. There's probably some other careers that are less good. But how you do what you do is so much more important than any of these other things. And so in terms of advice, you really have to enjoy the process of what you're doing.

You know, and that, mean, some people will say like follow your passion and whatnot. Like my passion is bikes. That doesn't necessarily mean I want to go open a bike shop. Like.

Jeff Holman (50:06.662)
Right, right, Our local bike shop just moved, didn't they? The one in Bountiful. Well, how did you take that message, that insight and apply it to your company?

Keith Norris (50:10.785)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (50:20.641)
So for me, the idea was, if you can build a great company where people really enjoy what they're doing, picking up trash, there's gotta be a way to do that building software, which is great, helping people, does a lot of good. So it was really just kind of an unlock for me that there's gotta be a way to figure out this puzzle. There's gotta be a way to build a company where it meets the financial needs of the investors and the employees.

Jeff Holman (50:49.039)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Norris (50:50.679)
It is a great place to work. People really enjoy coming to work there and they like what they do. It serves the needs of the customers. You I think that to build a business, you've got to be a little bit competitive and you want, you've got to want to have like the best solution, whether you're, know, whatever you're doing, you know, everybody's got competitors somewhere. You've got to have a little bit of a competitive drive to want to, you know, Hey, me and my team or me and my friends are going to beat you and your friends at whatever it is that we're doing here.

Jeff Holman (51:06.149)
Right.

Keith Norris (51:19.477)
And I think that the benefit of doing something that's good for the world that helps people out is always a bonus too. So think if you get those kind of four areas right, you can have a lot of fun in building a business.

Jeff Holman (51:34.49)
Did you and did you bring that message like back to your team at the time? What what did that look like? Who was on your team or who had those conversations go?

Keith Norris (51:39.864)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. mean, that was kind of the foundation of just making the culture an important part of what we do. you know, one of the things that I would say about our company is it's a great place to work for people who are high achievers. It's, you know, maybe not a great place to work for anybody anywhere, but a great place to work for high achievers and people who really like to

I mean, like I said, I love to work with people who are great at what they do. So, yeah.

Jeff Holman (52:15.238)
And I think that means aligned, right? It kind of gets back to priorities and the importance of communication. High achievers, like a lot of people do really good stuff, but to be a high achieving company, you've got to have high achievers who are also communicating well with each other. They're in alignment on their priorities. They know how to resolve the tensions, right? Like there's a lot more to it than just, you know, a whole bunch of so-called A players maybe, right?

Keith Norris (52:43.007)
Yeah, the whole conversation of A, B, C, D, E, F, G, whatever players is always an interesting one. Again, one of my favorite mantras is this assertive, respectful communication. Sarcasm is great for comedy, but it's not so great for leadership. You want to be clear about what your intent is and

Jeff Holman (52:58.63)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (53:04.656)
Yeah

Yeah.

Keith Norris (53:12.139)
One of my pet peeves, guess, is sarcasm in leadership.

Jeff Holman (53:17.422)
Yeah. Have you read the book, unreasonable hospitality? That's, written by Will Gunnara. He was part of 11 Madison Avenue. think it was a company or 11. It's not my EMP was the initials. Anyway, I'm reading that book right now and I, you've reminded me of it because it's, he brings up that specific point. Like, like to be able to give criticism the right way is important. And sarcasm is never the right way to give criticism.

Keith Norris (53:21.431)
I don't think so.

Keith Norris (53:45.395)
is, is, yeah.

Jeff Holman (53:45.624)
or praise. like it doesn't it belongs in comedy perhaps but not in not in business communications.

Keith Norris (53:53.065)
Yeah, sarcasm is great for comedy, not so much for leadership. Yeah.

Jeff Holman (53:57.156)
Yeah, I love it.

Well, Keith, it's been fantastic talking with you today. I really enjoy it. There's a lot to learn. I don't want to necessarily cut off the conversation because I wanted to reserve a few minutes here so you can tell us more about the book that's coming out.

Keith Norris (54:15.938)
Sure, yeah, absolutely. the book, Fire Starter, How to Ignite Improvement. And the idea of the fire starter is as a leader, even as a leader for yourself, there's that spark inside of all of us that wants to improve, wants to make things better. So that's where the title comes from is this idea of how do you find that spark? How do you nurture it in others?

Jeff Holman (54:20.612)
I love the name by the way. I love it.

Jeff Holman (54:37.402)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Norris (54:43.948)
So the book is about how to build a continuous improvement system. So it goes into what a continuous improvement system is, and then it talks about the mechanics that you need to have in place. It talks about the culture thing that I discussed a few minutes ago, the building blocks of culture, talks about an idea funnel, talks about things like an issue log, how to keep track of what things are going wrong, because the issue log is how you find

Jeff Holman (55:07.224)
Yeah.

Keith Norris (55:13.688)
places to improve. So it basically talks about the structure of improvement and it's not necessarily anything that I invented or developed. It's something that I just, like you said, I've got a podcast also. I've been interviewing a lot of folks that have been leading improvement and leading organizations. I've had a lot of conversations in selling software to these folks. This has just really been uncovered from a lot of these conversations. So these are just best practices for how some of these

Super successful organizations. In fact, last year we just did a year in wrap up and KPI Fire helped our customer companies business improvement initiatives. $650 million was the verified, identifiable, on the KPI's business improvements from those companies. it was a super, our goal for the year was 500 million. We hit 650 million. So super exciting to.

Jeff Holman (55:58.224)
Wow.

Jeff Holman (56:10.262)
That's awesome.

Keith Norris (56:11.958)
to see that. So it's just really a manual for how to set that up. I think it can apply to a leader over a small team or a big company. And it's just really the lessons that we've learned in building that product and working with those companies.

Jeff Holman (56:26.694)
Very cool. Oh yeah, I was just going to ask who that's for. So people don't need to wait until they're an enterprise to start reading, learning, and implementing these things. I could do that on my team of 10 people in the law firm.

Keith Norris (56:38.648)
Yeah, mean, the ideas presented in there are very applicable to anybody who's a leader and even anybody who's an individual contributor. There's good stuff in there about just how to get things done, because every one of us wants to make something better, even if it's just to fix the way that the process works that you're a part of. How do you get in and have the tools to make things better?

Jeff Holman (57:06.118)
Yeah, well Keith, this has been awesome. Your book website is theimprovementbook.com, right? Coming out in two weeks or so.

Keith Norris (57:11.874)
That's right. Yeah, it just went up today for a pre-order on Amazon. So by the time this comes out, it'll probably be available on Amazon and all the places. Yeah. The improvement book.com.

Jeff Holman (57:18.15)
Pre-Sale, Pre-Order.

Jeff Holman (57:24.198)
Cool. And if somebody wants to listen to your podcast, it's a KPI Fireside. Is that right?

Keith Norris (57:29.1)
That's right. Yeah. The podcast is KPI Fireside, a continuous improvement podcast.

Jeff Holman (57:34.032)
Fantastic. And we'll have to grab the names of all of your companies to put into the show notes too. But it's been a pleasure chatting with you. I love it. And I don't know of any leader out there, any CEO, any founder who doesn't need and doesn't want to improve a little bit right now, but continuously along their journey. So this is an awesome topic that I think has huge broad applicability to.

you know, our audience and all of the, all of the startups and scaling companies out there.

Keith Norris (58:05.688)
Well, thanks so much for having me. It's been fun conversation. I really appreciate it.

Jeff Holman (58:09.958)
Yeah, it's been a pleasure. And to all of you guys who are listening out there as part of our audience and our community, thank you for joining us this week on The Breakout CEO podcast. I'm Jeff Holman and we'll talk to you later.