Intro
Broadcasting live from the Business Radio X studios in Dayton, Ohio. It's time for Dayton Business Radio. Now, here's your host.
The Mag
Lee Cantor here, another episode of Dayton Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today I have with me, David Ramey, and he is with Strategic Leadership Associates. Welcome, Dave,
David Ramey
Welcome. How are you doing?
The Mag
I am doing great. Before we get too far into things tell us about your work with Strategic Leadership. How are you serving folks?
David Ramey
Well, the consulting firm Strategic Leadership Associates I founded in 1987. So that is, what 33 years ago. So we started our 34th year, we were established to help businesses and organizations develop their long-term strategy. So we concentrate on the strategy development issues, and then the leadership and the resource capacity to support that. In those 33 years, we have worked with businesses, I think, in every economic sector throughout the United States, I think I've been in all but two states in the country. We've worked with government agencies, some large institutions, like the US Air Force, and NASA, the space agency, we have helped to create organizations emerge organizations. And I think our, you know, our core strength is helping leaders and their organizations and their workforce to anticipate trends and issues in the future and to respond to them in a way that promotes their growth.
The Mag
Now, how does an organization know it has a leadership problem, and they're going to contact you and your team?
David Ramey
Well, the first, contact is usually around a problem they're trying to solve. So we always try to keep that in mind, you know, every strategy is trying to solve a problem, like, we can't grow anymore, we had 10 years of growth, and we're stagnant, or we can't keep the high talent of people that we need to keep to be successful. Or we don't know how to get into the marketplaces that we think would be success successful in the future. So we try to start always with the presenting question, or the presenting issue, the organization is trying to address. And I think we're pretty good at helping them see that usually, that's one part of a much bigger strategy. And also the leadership capacity to get there.
The Mag
So it sounds like you start kind of from a strategic point of view, but then leadership is a tool that you use to kind of help them fulfill their strategy.
David Ramey
Yeah, so actually, we think of the strategy. It's called the preferred future. You know, that's the starting point, right? What's your preferred future. And then we think of strategy as one tool, and leadership as the second tool. And the third tool we think of is the engagement of your stakeholders. So that could be your workforce, your customers, in the case of a school district, that can be your parents and your teachers and your students, in the case of a local government, that could be your citizens. So we always look at that three-part solution set of leadership strategy and engagement. And usually design a, what we call kind of intervention or we'll call it a plan, you know, it's a less threatening, we've designed a plan to work with them over time to get there. What we're a little bit unique in most of our projects are not, you know, we're not in and out the door. turnstile consultants, you know, we are really with an organization a minimum of 90 days, sometimes as much as two years.
The Mag
Now, is it something that they have to kind of go all-in on or can they start with an assessment or a small project to kind of?
David Ramey
Yeah, we always break what we do into tasks, we call them tasks or phases. And we always give them the option to choose to go to the next phase or not, you know, usually, they do but sometimes they'll say, hey, you know, we were mentally tired or we want to see if that's to work or we want to conserve our financial resources. So we may go back later point in time to pick up on the following tasks. But you're right also in indicating that that first task is always some kind of an assessment.
The Mag
And then what kind of assessment do you use? Any kind of name-brand ones? Or did you develop your own?
David Ramey
Yeah, we usually kind of customize the assessment process, we look at a number of factors, we look at what we call the key performance indicators. So we try to work with an organization or let's say, let's say a small business, and capture some performance data over time, right. So that could be something as simple if it's a small business as revenue over expenses or one that we like to look at as what we call cumulative annual growth rate. So how inflation aside and price increases aside, how much are you actually really growing organically. So we tried to pull together some metrics, performance metrics from their past, that will help them get a picture.
So that's one picture. The second picture we like to look at is what their employees and customers say about them. So we like to capture that data through some type of survey or focus group or key, we call them key informant interviews, that help us get a picture of what others might say about the organization. And then the last piece is usually we talked to the leadership or assess the leadership on some standardized tools to help determine that, so we kind of try to take a two-bar phrase, a holistic approach to that assessment, to give them kind of a 360 look at where they're where are they really starting from.
The Mag
Now, if we can hold that in one place, and then look at those three legs to the stool that you mentioned earlier, it sounds like you're kind of dealing with the corporate culture of the organization, how important is culture, when it comes to achieving these strategic goals and kind of creating or helping nurture leaders.
David Ramey
But you know, the famous quote is, strategy, excuse me, culture will eat strategies, lunch every day. Culture, the organization, culture is very important. But while it's very important, it's also a very amorphous thing. I mean, it's very difficult to have the objectivity to sit down and say, This is our culture. And then even more difficult to say, this is how we want to change our culture, right. So if we have a complacent culture, it's very history bound. You know, sometimes we're going through an organization and we work with a major oil company, I probably wouldn't mentioned that the name on-air years ago. And, you know, when we did those initial interviews, it was my granddaddy work for this company, my great granddaddy worked for this company, you know, and, and so the company had a reluctance to change because the actually had influenced that part of the country and People's history of working there.
So culture is hard to get out of. And you got to break it into pieces, that people can get a hold of, you know, things like performance standards for individuals or setting annual customer targets. One of the things that we think almost every organization we work with, does struggle with is we try to get them to identify no more than 10 Key Performance Indicators. We call them KPIs that actually drive the business. And you know, when you sit down to do that, and say, okay, what really does drive the business? You know, is it really sales? Or is it something else, you know, is it? Is it the number of new customers we get every year, right, etc?
The Mag
The culture is one of those things that if you're being mindful and strategic about it doesn't, it's forming, whether you're trying to help it and nudge it along or not, right? Like there's going to be a culture one way or another. You might as well have some input on what it's going to look like at the end of the as your company.
David Ramey
And as much and as much as you can work to maybe bring that culture along to where you want it to be. That's always the challenge for like a privately held business is to move that culture along with major corporations that change the culture by changing the leadership team. So they, you know, they replaced talent given golden parachutes move people along, but now if it's a small family-run business, it's pretty hard to change that culture, even if you know you have to. Right.
The Mag
Now, do you ever come into a circumstance where the leadership is telling you this is the culture? And then you're then you do your assessment? You're like, that's not the culture at all like it does not look of that?
David Ramey
Yeah, about 60% of the time, probably,
The Mag
Really, almost two-thirds of the time. The leaders aren't aware of the culture.
David Ramey
Yeah, well think of it this way. Right? So if somebody said that to me, Dave, what's your personality? And how would you like to change it? Right, now, I'm probably not going to be overly eager to identify and disclose all those pieces that I don't want exposed. And then on top of that, to say, Oh, and by the way, I've got to change those, right. So. So very often, the feedback that we get from customers and employees is a very significant game-changer in getting an organization to change their culture and adapt their strategy, because usually people hear things that they were not aware of, perhaps or didn't realize how strongly employees felt. And that's, that can be a pretty dramatic factor.
The Mag
So now, how do you kind of once because obviously, they hired you to bubble this up, and then you present it to them? And then now they have the choice whether to act on it or not? If they choose to act on it. What are some steps you can do to help them kind of ease into this culture or to help make some changes in the culture?
David Ramey
Well, we actually take them through a process. That's we call the second phase, right? So this could say the assessment is the first phase, right? And the first phase, we look at those three dimensions, the stakeholder engagement, what's your current strategy? What's your leadership system and your predisposition, right? In the second stage, we actually help you build a strategy you want for the future. So what we say is, okay, let's set all of that aside, that we just learned, and let's talk about, let's paint a picture of where you want to be five years from now. So we actually help them construct the very detailed picture of what they want to look like, in five years, you know, their sales, their workforce, their approach to the market, their product mix. You know, we kind of take that it's almost like model building, you know when I was a kid, I used to love to build model cars and model airplanes, you know, so we say, you know, let's take Company X here. That's where you are.
And let's go out five years from now. And let's, let's, let's create the picture in detail of what you want this to look like, right? So this isn't just some vague image or picture that they can't imagine, you know, we put, you know, target numbers, strategies, or customer groups, product types, you know, we put the kind of all that into that model. We talked about the vision of the company, we talked about what the structure is going to be. So we really create a kind of a then and now picture, right? The now picture is the assessment, then pictures, the strategy in the second phase.
The Mag
So now, if you do your job well, and they have a culture, and they have leadership in place that are thriving and growing and empowering their constituents, it helps them I would imagine, deal with crises that like we're having now it helps them manage the change that's happening, whether they want the change or not. Right, can you talk about how kind of applying some of your principles helps them through tough times like we're going through now?
David Ramey
Well, so I'm gonna use, you know, rather than talking about a client that might identify so I'm going to talk about our business here, right. So four years ago, or more four to five years ago, I thought that we were too lopsided into You know, episodic consulting projects right? Now, again, those episodes could be 90 days in length, or they could be a year in length or two years in length. But we were, we were living and dying on the number of consulting projects we could deliver. And I thought, you know, this, you know, in tough times, or a couple of key people get sick, you know, we're going to, we could be in trouble. I had no idea about a COVID virus or anything like that, obviously, right. So what we did is we said, you know, we're going to create another side of the house, for smaller organizations, who maybe don't think they can afford a standard day, but we're going to come up with a way to cut the market rate, to provide them with financial management, literally manage their finances, do their bookkeeping, their accounting, their CFO functions, and their HR function, so their workforce and their money.
And we're going to do it in such a way that they commit to us a minimum of a year at a time. And these become ongoing contracts. In other words, we've become part of their team. And we struggled to try to get to a discounted rate that would make that competitive, right. So the competitive advantage we were after was, what if we can give you a talented team of people and HR and finance that you ordinarily couldn't afford, but you didn't need them five days a week anyway, you only needed them eight hours a week, 12 hours a week, 14 hours a week. And we figured out a business model to get them to serve or support two or three other organizations so that we kept our team busy. But we could offer that to you at a competitive and discounted rate. And we did come up with what we call the shared service model now. And anyway, the long and short of it, directly answer your question.
So here we are five years later when I think the COVID would have probably put our traditional consulting business out of business. And our shared services basically saved the company. So here we are, we anticipated that you know, we were too lopsided in the way we got our revenue. We needed something more sustainable, more recurring revenue, more, maybe more retail, you might say, and that worked for us, and we're going to end the year-end 2020 probably where we were 2019, you know, we're not going to make a fortune. But we're going to, we're going to still be here going forward.
The Mag
Now, in your work, you mentioned a variety of different groups and organizations and industries, do you have a favorite or a sweet spot that you work particularly well with?
David Ramey
You know, we like doing the I call them the public projects, you know, things that make the world a better place, school districts, churches, local governments, fire departments, police departments, you know, the kind of entities that really make a first stable society. The other thing we find about working with those institutions is they tend to copy one another in a good way. In other words, they don't necessarily see one another as competitors, because they have jurisdictions that are geographic. So they have more of a tendency to look down the street and say, Hey, what's that police department down, they're going down the street around community policing, you know, to pick a current topic.
And maybe we should, you know, get with that Chief and see what he's doing. So you have a chance to have a little bit of a domino effect. That way as well, I also, I personally love working with small business owners, because, you know, I think we do not appreciate in this country, how much effort it takes to run a business, probably always, but certainly anymore. The pressures on a small individual business owner to be successful are enormous, you know, they gotta be marketing geniuses. They got to know technology, they have to worry about security. You know, and oh, yeah, they have to sell their product to you know, so it's a, it's a tough world out there.
And I think, as a society, you know, 60% of the workforce in the United States, works for those kinds of people. And, you know, we don't realize how powerful they are, plus in times like this, you know, that's where you see the loyalty come to the fore, right? In this virus type situation, you know, those small business owners, they're sacrificing their wages first and paying their employees or they're, they're waiting till they absolutely have to furlough people, you know, whereas the larger corporations, they tend to just be a little more distant, and maybe more objective about those things, too.
The Mag
Now, if somebody wants to learn more and have a more substantive conversation about you and your team and your firm, what's the website?
David Ramey
The Mag
Good stuff, David. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today.
David Ramey
Okay, great. Thanks for your time, Lee.
The Mag
All right, this is Lee Canter. We'll see y'all next time on Dayton Business Radio.
Image source: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-a-ramey-891b611/