Jim Watt: Jim, you're in the ass-bailing business. And I said, you're right, we are. 'Cause companies are in transition or needing sort of an all-hands-on deck approach. I even tried it on at cocktail parties. That was a blast. You know? 'Cause people would say, the ass-bailing business? What business is that? You know?

Matt Pennebaker: Imagine a Canadian expat who moved to Texas and started a new business by faxing a five-page proposal to Chesapeake Energy. He got a yes in 15 minutes, then leveraged that success to scale his employee benefits startup into one of the nation's fastest growing firms. Meet Jim Watt, turnaround addict, ass-bailing specialist, and killer of the long sales cycle. Watch out. Benefits just went full beast mode. Let's jump in.

Ward Pennebaker: Jim, it's so good to have you here to join us on today's episode of Rethink Change.

Matt Pennebaker: This'll be great fun. So why, why don't you start out with just your career arc from the beginning.

Jim Watt: I'll give you the truncated version. I was born in Canada, lived with my parents in Canada and in Europe, in Switzerland, Belgium, and then also Mexico City.

Grew up in New England. Went to Boston University. Graduated from the School of Management in 1985 and immediately went into the insurance business after moving to Houston. My father-in-law, I was looking for a business to buy. But my father-in-law suggested that I meet some of his friends talk with them about, you know, the city of Houston and the broader market and all that.

And so I did and met with one of his buddies. He immediately said, Gosh, I've got need here. work with some young guys, and I would like you to help them around employee benefits. And so I said, sure. It's just, lemme know when you want to get together. And next thing I know, I'm meeting him two days later at his office.

So he said, Would you consult to us? And of course, I. quickly said, Well, are you looking for help around your employee benefits and HR needs? You're looking the company acquire the kind of talent into the organization from the big EMP companies? And he said, Yes, that's exactly what we need.

So, I said, I guess I could. That resulted in me heading home, preparing a proposal over the next couple days. It was about five or six pages long. This was the days of email. But for whatever reason, I faxed that proposal and it came back 15 minutes later. And of course I said, oh my God, now I gotta do this work.

I hadn't anticipated that he would actually take me up on the proposal that and the services that I had proposed to him. So that's how Employee Benefit Solutions gets going. It was completely unplanned. And Chesapeake Energy Corporation was my very first client.

Matt Pennebaker: That's amazing. I had no idea that's how it all started. So, tell me about the early days of EBS. So clearly this totally circumstantial start to the company you're working with Chesapeake, and obviously organically it grows from there. Can you talk a little bit, a little bit about the early days?

Jim Watt: The early days were, were challenging, as I would imagine most any startup is.

Ironically, I had a great support system. My wife was very supportive. My father-in-law, himself an entrepreneur, was highly supportive. And, and it's, it's funny, about year and a half into it, I had lunch with him one day and I said, Wiley, you, you lied to me. You, you, you didn't tell me how difficult this was gonna be. And he goes, If I told you what the truth, you wouldn't have done it.

Like any, any startup had to find additional talent. The first was just finding an assistant to help me begin to manage my day. And then it was thereafter, shortly thereafter, it was about building out a team to support it while I went out and continued to acquire new work.

Once I was in it and understood how we could acquire work, it was, it was then really incumbent upon me to, to develop more and more of it because one client wasn't gonna do it. Chesapeake paid me well, but not that well, that I could support a family on it, and so I needed to hustle and that that's what I did.

Matt Pennebaker: So, a lot of early entrepreneur stage companies grow through the sheer will of the CEO, the founder. At what point did EBS kind of start to flatline and stall from a growth trajectory? And can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jim Watt: Well, you know, our, our early years, our, our growth was substantial. I mean, double digit every year. And it was really only about year 10 where we began to see, not the same trajectory upward, but it was still upward. But it was flattening. So, the things that we were doing really well at the time, Matt, is we were, we were innovators, okay? So, we'd entered a business that had a commodity kind of perspective to it, but we pressed the boundaries on the types of services that we could deliver.

So, we were always talking about a differentiated, unique offering relative to our competitors. And we were moving fast and, and so, but we got to a point in our success that we couldn't handle any more volume of work. That was a, a business constraint that we, we chewed on for over a year. At the time, everything that we were doing, Matt was organic, organic marketing.

It was knocking on doors, obtaining referrals. It was just really the basic stuff. We had not really emerged into, you know, how do we brand our company differently? How do we brand our services? How do we evolve the business? So, we were at this, this difficult inflection point, and mind you, we were successful.

We were making distributions across the company. Employees were happy, we were paying great bonuses. But I literally sat down with Brett and John one afternoon and I said, “Guys, it's over. It's over. It's not gonna get any better than this.” And they kept saying, “No, it's not over, Jim. God, we're acquiring market share, like there's no tomorrow.”

And I said, “How much more can you do?” And they both began to realize that they were at their outer limits. I was at my outer limit. And so, we had to rethink how we were organized and how we went to market. We were principle-centric, which meant that everything in the world revolved around the three of us.

And so, we had to be in the middle of everything. And yet we had these very talented, competent support people that could do all of the work that we could do. We just needed to let go. And so, as we reorganized our business, we became what we referred to as consultant-centric. Okay. Which allowed us more time to not then go out, develop new business, you know, bring real thought to differentiated services again.

And, and so that was, we, we, we flattened probably about year 10 through year 11. And then year 12 we saw things soar northward again. So it was, it was interesting. So, one of our hallmarks and was sort of the legacy of our business is that we infused inside of our culture a high-touch approach. We refer to it all the time as high touch.

We wanted our customers to experience things very differently than they had previously experienced them. And so, in the services that we delivered it, the client always had the sense that we had their back, we were doing the work, we always had their best interest in mind. And so culturally that was very pervasive and very important.

But at that inflection point, at that 10-year period, as part of our discovery, we, we knew how our clients selected us, but we didn't really know why. They selected us. Okay. And that, that, that took us a while to even discover, okay. We, we knew we were new. We knew we were innovative, we knew we were attentive.

All the things that a buyer would want, but we didn't. We had really didn't understand why they were buying from us. We, we had led ourselves to believe that it was only because of the way that we operated. Okay. In the, in the course of our discovery, we discovered the why. Okay. And as we look back at all of our client base at the time, the why came in a really interesting form.

That form was they were buying for us because they themselves were in transition. Okay? And it may have been, they've just made an acquisition, they've just gotten a new source of funding. They've just acquired new acreage. It was, there was something happening in their business. So, and it was really, it was a really interesting aha moment for us that we then said, okay, now, now that we understand that company and transition is a terrific opportunity for us, which doesn't mean that every company we ever approached that was in transition bought services from us, but they were available to consider services from us. And so that was a big, big change for us in how we identified.

Ward Pennebaker: So Jim, explain, you now have built a structure so that it gave you all more room to go out and get new business.

Jim Watt: Yes.

Ward Pennebaker: Explain the hurdles and the process it took to get new business and your success rate.

Jim Watt: Before we changed, the hurdles were, I think there would be typical hurdles, uh, Ward. You know, the buyer universe, even if they need help sometimes, doesn't get help. Uh, reluctance to change is a big impediment to, to growth. And not only our growth now, we were the fresh new innovator. We were the talk of the town. We then had competitors trying to mimic services quickly because we were acquiring work, uh, based on our, our innovation. But the, the, the biggest impediment always was a, a buyer willing to change. And, and so part of the way that we began to overcome that is that there's a tension in virtually every organization that exists out there.

You've got the CCEO and CFO who, you know, are the drivers of most businesses, uh, I would say all businesses, but let's just go with most. And then, um, you've got the HR, uh, department who are served preservers of the status quo. And I'm not saying that about a hundred percent of the people that we worked with because we had some really thoughtful, very forward-thinking HR executives that we work with.

But HR on the whole is there to sort of preserve the status of the organization. So, change can be a scary, uh, word to some folks in HR. And so at times we could appear like a threat and there's a comfort in existing relationships. So disrupting relationships is, is a hard thing to do. Challenge for is challenge for us and challenge for every one of our competitors.

And so for our part, we always had to remain present. While we were prospecting.

Ward Pennebaker: And what percentage of people of companies were you closing because you put seven years effort, all this is work, and then you find out you didn't get it. What percentage were you not getting, you were getting your fair share, but…

Jim Watt: Yeah. So, you know, I mean, uh, so we had relationships with a broader set of the marketplace. Okay. And some of them, some, some of the relationships that our competitors had with. Clients that we wanted to serve, prospects we knew were pretty intractable and, uh, not likely to move unless something happened. So we'd stay close. You know, we used the, the phrase, uh, you know, hang around the hoop basketball, uh, analogy to try to stay close to people. So we weren't expending this, this great effort on everybody. The, but the ones that were ideal for us within our guardrails, the ones that met, uh, the profile of the type of client that we wanted to work with, we did a lot for, uh, to earn the opportunity to work with them.

Uh, the, the, the upside to long extended prospecting timeline is we also retained our clients forever. We, we had historical retention rates in our business that were well beyond our competitors. We were holding on to work longer and longer and longer than any of them. And so it took us a long time to earn the opportunity, but we also retained it over a longer period of time, which, which translated into profitability for us.

Matt Pennebaker: Can you tell me a little bit about your philosophy on the type of business you chased, let's say in the first 10 years, and then kind of beyond that as far as who, how, how could you tell if somebody was gonna be a good prospective customer or not?

Jim Watt: Um, it's, it's not easy. You, you're, you, you've gotta look at a lot of companies before you real readily define who it is that you wanna work with. But we would, for example, look at the composition of the executive suite, okay, their history, you know, their success. It may, may be in prior businesses and so forth. We, we wanted to work with the really progressive players. Okay. And what, what's interesting about this, Matt, is we sort of backed into this as well.

So we would look at sort of the personality and profile of the C-suite, the size of the organization, the geography, the type of business that it was in. But one of the ways we backed into really knowing who we wanted to work with is we had produced. A market survey in Houston, and ironically it was our clients that came to us and said, your data is exceptional. Uh, we love it. We use it in our own benchmarking. Our CEO demands it, it's even been presented at the board level. We would get feedback like that. They also said, if you could refine how you cut the data, it would be even more valuable to us. And so we began to segment our survey data by industry type.

Okay. And so instead of looking at just oil and gas more broadly, we started to look at the upstream business, the midstream business and the downstream business differently. And it's interesting, the profile of the type of employee inside of those organizations are very different. Okay. And, and then even when you, when you looked at subsectors of upstream, for example, when you look at an EMP company relative to a drilling company, the profile of the type of employee that sits inside it is very, very different. Okay? So their cost profiles are very, very different. Well, as we began to sub-segment all of this data, we attracted more buyers, okay, because suddenly we had the one thing the rest of our competitors were not producing for them, which was refined information on their sector.

Matt Pennebaker: So what kind of businesses were not good fits for you and how long would it take you to really uncover that?

Jim Watt: Um, well there's a lot of trial and error in the beginning and uh, I remember Ward asking us all, okay, so who are the clients from Heaven that you have and who are the clients from Hell? And it was really easy to define the clients from Hell, you know, they were the most demanding, the ones that paid us the fewest, the ones that required more, the ones that, you know, constantly were looking for additional services that would've been outta scope, uh, to us. So it wasn't hard to identify the bad ones.

What was, what was, and it wasn't really hard to define the good ones, too, 'cause they were the polar opposite. The, the challenge that we had with the clients from Hell is some of them were paying us in a very healthy way. Now, they weren't profitable. The time and expense that we had in these engagements often were way upside down So they may have been paying us three, four, $500,000 in consulting fees a year, but we were spending a million dollars in, in work and time. So it, once we had identified, we could identify who the most challenging clients were. It was then about identifying, well, how profitable are they? And so honestly, uh, one of the things that as a management team we got a lot of kudos for is we cut loose some high paying clients and we got to a point where we said, we, we either need to, uh, change the economics here, uh, and work differently, or we've gotta move on.

Matt Pennebaker: Having determined what those characteristics are of, you know, clients from having clients from hell. After you established that, how did it change, not just your philosophy and mentality, but to the rest of the organization and who they were talking to, who they're pursuing going into meetings?

Jim Watt: Well, from, from a prospecting perspective, it changed our thinking incredibly because we then realized we could determine what a client from Hell looked like before we, they became a client.

Matt Pennebaker: Knowing how you're structured and who you want to be going after and you don't, do you have any examples of you walk into a meeting for the first time and within 60 seconds, you know, this isn't gonna work? We gotta get outta here.

Jim Watt: We, we had a few of those. We, we, we had a few look those along the way.

Matt Pennebaker: Anything come to mind?

Jim Watt: Yeah. Well, yeah. I'm not gonna name names that, that wouldn't be fair, but, no, there, there was, there was many instances, even when we were euphoric about the opportunity where we realized 20 or 30 minutes into it that it wasn't going to be us. Um, and, and part of it, Matt, was us, us, us not wanting to go backward.

We used to say virtually in every prospect meeting we ever went to, we would love to help you. We're willing to perform these services, but we can't tell you where you're going until we know where you are. And so that way of working was very, very different than than our competitors. Uh, our competitors for the most part would say, okay, this is what the client wants to do, then that's, that's what we'll do

Ward Pennebaker: when you would, uh, have the first meeting with a prospective client and you would, you would ask certain questions to get a sense of, is this going to work? What kinds of questions were you asking?

Jim Watt: Well, we, we asked where they saw their problems, so we would ask the basic questions like, okay, so what's going right? What's going wrong? And we purposely intended for them to be open-ended, okay, so that the customer or prospective customer would talk more. And so we wouldn't say, uh, is your plan design working for you? We, we would leave it much more open-ended and we would learn a lot along the way. We would learn a lot about things that eventually created new businesses for us.

So, uh, you know, we would, we were expecting one answer from the prospective customer. We would get something entirely different. So, you know, we might be expecting them to say, we've got a funding issue, or we've got a cost issue, we've got a subsidy issue. That's what we were expecting. And they would talk about challenges with systems, challenges with integration of data, things that were, weren't sort of right down the middle for us, but, uh, gave us an insight into how that buyer was, was struggling with their, uh, with issues inside of their organization. And, and the one question I always, uh, love to ask, and this was my absolute favorite, and, and I, I always say, so who are you working with today? Okay. Who's helping you with this? And the customer that said, um, uh, hang on, let me think about it. Let me, I'll have to get back. You, let me, let me think about, it was an absolute winner for us because it, it, what hit us straight in the face was this is a customer who does not have a high touch service provider, and we can win on those grounds.

Okay. And it, it was, it was remarkable to me that, uh, 40 to 50% of the time we would get. Somebody that didn't know or couldn't remember or stumbled on the name or stumbled on the firm name. And so it just showed that, you know, we are living in an industry where service requirements were pretty lackluster. And, and we could out work 'em, out hustle 'em, and, and provide a high touch level of service that they hadn't seen before. And we got that feedback too when we acquired work like, wow, we've never seen anybody alike, like you guys and, and how and how you work. And, and so we were constantly trying to remain present, pre-engagement and remaining present post-engagement.

Ward Pennebaker: So you went through that guardrails process at one point, and can you kind of describe what. It was like what the aha moments were, what you carried away with it.

Jim Watt: Well, there were, there was a lot of aha moments, Ward, and, and so this is a while ago, and I'm dating myself. I'm sure things have evolved significantly for you, but you know, first it was just the discovery about our own organization.

Second was a discovery on when a client might want to buy, when they were primed to buy. It was, it was also learning more deeply about our existing customer engagements and those that we were super successful in, and others that we were really, really challenged by. So those were the, the bigger things that I recall from, from that work that we, that we discovered and, and then used to great effect as we evolved our business further.

Ward Pennebaker: And you were, you were, as I recall, you were focused on changing the organization for growth? Yes. Was there that same urgency among the other leaders?

Jim Watt: Um, oh, certainly my two primary partners, uh, this is the best thing that had ever happened to them. They, they knew a good thing. They, they had been in o other organizations that were stagnant, uh, and not growing. Growing is fun and, and so yeah, they were aligned around, uh, if Jim thinks we need to do something, then, you know, we likely should consider that. And now there was some push and pull along the way. You know, as Angela McDaniel, one of our former leaders used to say, nobody, uh, likes change except a baby with a wet diaper.

And, uh, and a true statement, you know, getting people out of their comfort zone. And, and here's the irony. You know, we were constantly evolving. We were constantly blowing up what had worked and making it better. So it's not like we were, you know, reluctant to change, but when we said we need to change, and we were talking more, more about structural parts of the business, new approaches to our marketing efforts, you know, those were, those were hard things to think through.

And, uh. I, I would tell you every leader that sat around the table, we probably had at least a dozen at that time. You know, this was tough work. And keep in mind this was work that we were doing independent of the already busy work that we had inside of the business. And I remember Kate like, like saying just about year 10, she was our CFO at the time, Jim, we, we we're, we, we spend so much time working in the business, we're not working on the business. And that was one of the key statements that drove me to say, we've gotta change this and we, and we gotta change it quickly.

Ward Pennebaker: And what was the outcome? How would you describe to a third party what the outcome of that whole process was?

Jim Watt: The, the outcome was very favorable to us for, you know, all the, the reasons previously stated. We, we reorganized ourselves to deliver the work more efficiently. Uh, each of the principles, uh, me, Brett, and John, we remained in the engagements and we were always a part of key meetings, but we weren't performing the, the day-to-day necessary work, uh, that was now being delivered by our consultants and our associates and, uh, and so that that freed us up to work more on the business and also to acquire more work that was a beneficial outcome. You know, the identification of our better clients and our not so good clients was a important inflection point for us too.

I mean, it, it's tough to turn away work. It really, really is, and it's counterintuitive for, for anybody. But, you know, once we, we dealt with the practicality of this just isn't worth it for us to continue. These are great people. We like 'em, it's a good business. It's got a great brand name, but we just, we can't continue to support it this way. You know, that would, that brought relief to us all, uh, and particularly those that were having to deliver the work, uh, and, and struggling with it, it allowed us to recruit, uh, better and better people along the way.

We had a very cult-like personality to our organization. We were not sort of the textbook IBM, blue suit, white shirt kind of group. We were, I would occasionally tease. I said, we are the, we are the land of unwanted toys. Right. You know, out of the Dr. Seuss movie. It, it was, we had people with different personalities, different perspectives, different ideas, different approaches, and provided the, you know, the necessary core work was, was done and well done.

Uh, we let our consultants and associates do their thing. We weren't going to dictate a specific way that they, if they needed to operate. We had our own guardrails for what good work looked like, um, and what peer review work looked like. But, uh, we weren't going to, uh, get in the way of them delivering things the way they, uh, thought was best. Um, we weren't gonna override that.

Matt Pennebaker: How did it change how you talk about the business? What does, what, what does EBS do?

Jim Watt: What we, we, well, uh, we, as part of the Pennebaker project, we got a whole different set of messaging, uh, that we used. And, um, you know, I can, I can remember, uh, you know, we, we've talked about clients in transition, right? And, uh, Ward came up with a phrase and it was a really good one. And so we would talk about it internally. And he, and he said, Jim, you're in the ass-bailing business. And I said, you're right. We are. 'Cause companies are in transition, are needing sort of an all-hands-on-deck-approach. Uh, they're needing direction, they're needing a strategy, they're needing all sorts of things to help them evolve and remain competitive for talent in the marketplace.

And so, uh, we use that all the time. And, uh, in fact, uh, I even tried it on at, at cocktail parties. That was a blast, you know, 'cause people would say the, as bailing business, what business is that? You know? And so, uh, you could, you could carry forward a conversation, uh, fairly easily. And, uh, so it was a internal catchphrase we used mostly. But my guys would come back from prospect meetings and I'd say, uh, how did it go? And, and they would use things like these, they don't need ass-bailing, you know, they need a lobotomy or something like that, or they're not willing to, to look at, uh, us as ass-bailers, you know. So, uh, we, we used it, uh, jokingly inside the organization more than, than others. But it also gave me an indication, all right, this is a business that's in transition or, or not. Uh, this is a buyer that is motivated to do something or not. And so, you know, prior to that, it took us a lot longer to try to understand why somebody would or wouldn't do something, and so this helped us distill it a lot better.

Matt Pennebaker: I love those anecdotal stories about internally, how other stakeholders would come in and say, oh no, they're not in the ass-bailing business. How did it change your culture?

Jim Watt: All for the better, all for the better. And it's interesting, again, we developed some of these phrases ourselves. We found our ourself in a place where we could pick off the best talent that was available in the marketplace. And they wanted to come to our organization because we were growing, and it was a fun place to work.

And it and it ironically, you know, we'd never dictated hours or anything like that with people. I regularly worked on Saturdays. I just did and always have. And there would be, you know, a third of the office would be in there too, or in on like rainy weekends especially. And so we always had the air conditioning going on, on, on Saturday mornings.

Interesting thing about talent, though, that is probably interesting to share with you as well, is I said we, we had the pick of the litter. We, we could, we could pick off virtually anybody we wanted from any firm of any size. We could pay them competitively. We could give them lots of opportunity and freedom. We weren't going to put, put 'em in a box. But the one thing that was a failing of ours initially is we would bring people into the organization that were exceptional practitioners. I mean, deep students of the subject, knew their particular focus better than anybody else in the marketplace, but they're also a lone wolf. Okay. Didn't work well with others. Didn't play well with others. And along the way we had some casualties, right? We had some very good employees, very loyal to the organization who may have been working underneath one of these individuals that finally said, I've had it, I'm leaving. Uh, and so it took us a couple years to discover not everybody's a fit, even if they have exceptional talent. Okay. We needed them to be a team player. And so, you know, we often referred or referred to ourselves as a wolf pack. Uh, and when we identified somebody that wasn't fitting, we would say they're a lone wolf. And the idea was that we were gonna get rid of all the lone wolves and in the future, do a better job of trying to identify what a lone wolf look like.

Matt Pennebaker: Yeah. So oftentimes, you talk about the leadership team doing the offsite. Oftentimes teams go through this and it's kind of, that's nice, the people who are there and maybe resonates with, but it kind of dies on the vine and doesn't really permeate within the organization. How did y'all translate essentially the business that you're in, this as bailing concept and all the other aspects that came out of it into something that's really tangible, that the rest of the organization grabbed hold of?

Jim Watt: Well, we talked about it a lot. We, we, we used the, the words and phrases that we obtained from the Pennebaker project. And so our whole language evolved and how we worked with one another, how we defined work and projects, how we consulted to, to clients, how we prospected, which I, I previously mentioned that permeated through, you know, it's, it's interesting the, the other interesting change that we evolved to as the organization continued to grow and got on this greater growth trajectory. We had some of our employees, which were really good employees, had been with us a long time, but couldn't keep up with the evolution of our business that we had to let go and, and that was one of the harder things that I ever had to do was somebody who had demonstrated their, their, their loyalty to the organization, had done good work, was well liked by peers, but could no longer perform the work that was necessary going forward. You know, we had to, we had to part ways, uh, with some of them.

And I remember having conversation with this, this woman, she was, she was great. Uh, loved her to death. She fit that profile exactly. She was divorced, had a daughter. These were tough things for me to, to contemplate, but I remember having, having, sitting down with her and having a very practical discussion, and she, she came to her own conclusion. Yeah, Jim, I don't think I'm going to be a good fit here going forward. Okay, so I, here, I forced the discussion, but she, she opted, opted into it. Well, you, you, you might think that there's, there could be some resentment. I mean, this was an otherwise well adjusted, happy individual providing for she and her daughter and positioning it to let her go, uh, or conversation to let her go.

Well, every year since, since she departed, she calls me on my birthday. And it's, it's just a remarkable outcome because if I were in her shoes, I, I'm not sure I'd feel exactly the same way. And, and so who is the end, who's the one in the end who ended up with all the grace? I guess it was me and, and I, I can't wait for her phone call every year.

And now here's, here's the, the, the coda to the story. She ended up in another role. She has flourished in. She's made exceptional amounts of money. She's provided very, very well for her daughter, daughters now already, uh, through school and I think even may, maybe married now. But she was happier in the end too. And so that's one of those feel good stories that comes from a, a transition moment like we went through.

Matt Pennebaker: No, I, I, I love that. Uh, and I love stories like that. How, over time, it's just natural for, for people to forget things. You know, you go through, go through something like that and you've codified the type of people that you want working in EBS and the type of clients that you want to be pursuing and the type of characteristics of, you know, urgency that they have.

How do you stay true to that and remember that? Is there anything that you refer to to make sure that new people coming on board still breathe and feel and live these, these aspects?

Jim Watt: You know, that, I think that's a challenge for any business, right? So when we did this project, we probably had 25 or 30 employees. Well, we evolved to place at our height where we had 160 employees. Okay? So cascading down that message, uh, to three quarters of the organization is, it's tough work. And, you know, I would say, uh, near the end, uh, just before we, we sold our business to Carlisle, it was sticking probably a little less than than it once did.

Ward Pennebaker: When you launched with all the new messaging and we're going to trade shows and were going to, to clients, what was the response in the marketplace from your competitors?

Jim Watt: What's interesting, of course, we're recruiting, right? We're recruiting people that are coming from our competitors. So they, they would tell us the things that bothered them about us and how we approach things. And, and so we would get incredible feedback about how different we really were. And, and in some cases they had misunderstandings of what it is that we did or didn't, uh, or they would guess at what we did or didn't do. But the messaging was taking a toll on them.

And, and the, the better ones, the, the ones that saw what we were doing, saw our growth trajectory, they quickly imitated, they tried to imitate, and, and the ones with, uh, with deeper pockets, they, they would come after our employees. And what do they say? Imitation is the highest form of flattery. So, uh, they would attempt to poach our employees and, and interestingly, they would have to lure them over for a lot more money because the, there was reticence for most of our employees to, to go elsewhere. 'Cause they were happy at what they were doing. They felt they were being paid well. So it had to be that much more compelling.

Ward Pennebaker: Jim, thank you so much for your time today.

Jim Watt: Of course, of course.

Ward Pennebaker: This has been, this has been terrific as always.

Jim Watt: Yeah. Always great to see you, Ward. Thank you. Always a pleasure, Matt.

Thank you, uh, enjoyed the conversation.

Matt Pennebaker: Thanks.

Jim Watt: All right. Okay.

Matt Pennebaker: Thanks for listening to Rethink Change. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it and be sure to follow the show so you don't miss a single episode. If you're a disruptor looking to challenge a status quo and don't know where to start or what to do next, Pennebaker can help.

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