E34 – Talking Growth, Retention, and Agility with Stephanie Kord Miller

E34 – Talking Growth, Retention, and Agility with Stephanie Kord Miller

In this episode of the Pipelineology podcast, host Gary welcomes Stephanie Kord Miller, the founder and CEO of Empower Your Results. Stephanie shares her insights from over 25 years in business management, consulting, and coaching. The discussion highlights the importance of retention for growth, the challenges businesses face at different stages, and the need for clear visions and strategic planning. Stephanie emphasizes the significance of implementation over just having a plan and introduces four principles of business agility. She shares success stories from her work with clients, explaining her method for integrating strategic vision with actionable steps to drive business success. Listeners will gain practical advice on achieving business growth, maintaining work-life balance, and implementing effective change management.

Discover:

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:39 Stephanie’s Background and Career Journey

03:26 Challenges in Business Retention

05:09 Starting Points for Business Growth

07:40 Importance of Strategic Planning and Implementation

12:05 Case Studies: Established Company vs. Startup

22:11 Principles of Business Agility

29:07 Stephanie’s Coaching Methodology

37:46 Contact Information and Closing Remarks

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Stephanie Kord Miller: You have to recognize that the bulk of your growth is going to come from building off of the retention. 

[00:00:06] Gary Ruplinger: Hello and welcome everybody to the Pipelineology podcast. Today I am excited to be joined by Stephanie Kord Miller, the founder and CEO of Empower Your Results, a business management and coaching and consulting company.

 Stephanie, welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks, Gary. It’s so good to see you again. Great. Great having you on. I’m glad we were finally able to get, find some time when our schedules matched up to have you on the show. 

[00:00:34] Stephanie Kord Miller: I know we’ve been trying for a while, haven’t we, but we did it. Yay. 

[00:00:39] Gary Ruplinger: So, for anybody who’s not familiar with you, I guess we can start there.

Is, can you give a little bit of background about yourself and kinda how you got started? 

[00:00:48] Stephanie Kord Miller: Absolutely. So, you know, my name’s Stephanie Kord Miller and, I have had this really great career of over 25 years of working across corporate, nonprofit and small business ex, you know, companies where, over time I found this kind of interesting pain point in the market about

the, the sustainability of small businesses and startups and, it really is how do we help them fail less and succeed more? So I’ve really leaned into that. and so I, I come from a background of executive experiences that, that really touch along the entire customer journey from business development all the way to retention, renewal, and building loyalty.

and so I’ve, I’ve been really excited about bringing kind of that entrepreneurship experience to organizations that are living entrepreneurship. and that’s because we have to transform from the inside out, both from an organization perspective and even as a human being perspective. and so what I’ve really been excited about with the, with my company is.

taking all this experience I have working inside of corporate environments, and understanding some of the kind of the. Shenanigans that go on there that aren’t necessarily the most productive or the most, the most kind of successful ways to, to operate inside of an organization. I’ve also worked inside of small businesses and nonprofits and seen some of the same shenanigans.

So we’re seeing a trend in how some things operate. And then, I’ve also, worked with startups where you see a lot of these, Hungry entrepreneurs who wanna start this business and they start building teams, but they struggle with retention because, they are not necessarily, skilled up in leadership and management and, they just don’t have the.

Experience, to know how to really pull out the best of your team and also balance what’s really critically important, which is the capacity and velocity of your resources. So this is what I like to say. We’re all used to people shoving 10 pounds of stuff into a five pound bag. and we all recognize that, like that doesn’t really work well.

We do that in business all the time and think it’s normal, and then we wonder why we’re burnout. Right. So, what I’ve, what I’ve really leaned into is trying to help organizations find that balance and that capacity and the velocity. Find that stride so they know how far and how fast they can run with what they have.

[00:03:26] Gary Ruplinger: Excellent. I know I’m probably, kind of starting backwards here, but I heard you mention the retention thing and I, yeah. I know internally for, for my own company, even. That’s been the biggest, biggest change for us, probably over the last two years is we’ve always been able to bring in new clients. 

But with retaining them and it’s, it’s amazing how different a, you know, revenue and business and, and how much, much more fun it is to come into work and not have, you know, a bunch of people churning out every single one. Yes. It, it makes such a, a huge difference overall to, to the company overall and of course to the bottom line that, you know, you’re, if you can keep the ones you already have.

You’re you, it’s, you’re not, you know, trying to, you know, put deals together that may or may not make sense just to make sure you’re making payroll. So that’s 

[00:04:13] Stephanie Kord Miller: right. I mean, you have to recognize that the bulk of your growth is going to come from building off of the retention. and when you, when you start, when retention is critical to, growth in revenue and the success of your business because it’s going to be built a lot on your reputation and if you have so much churn that you can’t keep it, there’s probably some reputation reasons that need to be evaluated there, and looked at from the customer experience.

And so if you can retain your business and you have that opportunity to renew. Then you have an opportunity to offer new products or services so you can upsell and cross sell, which is where you start seeing that kind of exponential growth in your revenue if you can keep your base and keep it growing.

[00:04:59] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah. Wonderful. Alright. So yeah, so sorry to start at the end there, but 

[00:05:03] Stephanie Kord Miller: yeah, I love that. That’s one of my favorite parts. 

[00:05:06] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, let’s, I guess where, where should we kind of start though? If, you know, if you’re, you are a business and you know, you’re looking like, yeah, you’re, you’re kind of stuck, but you’re trying to grow.

Sure. Where, where do you start when you come into an organization? 

[00:05:19] Stephanie Kord Miller: So, when I, when I, I I, I ask them a lot of questions. I mean, really what I start is kind of helping them decode like, you know, what’s, what is a great question of what’s the difference between, a goal and a dream, right? It’s a plan. and a lot of times you find that people live in this, like, well, I’m just kind of gonna go with what my gut says and I’m just gonna kind of do the things that I’m comfortable doing.

and then what, what they tend to do is that they don’t have a really clear. Business model, they may not even have product market fit. you know, there are, there are actually reasons why people are struggling when they’re either early in their business or even if they’ve been in business for a while and they’re just hitting a plateau or a wall.

and so I wanna get a, I wanna understand what is their business model, you know, what are the mechanics? I wanna understand some of the fundamental, kind of financials. Right. So I, so I kind of do this like a little bit of a, this is where kind of the co the management consulting component comes in, where I kind of get a sense of like, I wanna understand your business, but most importantly, I wanna understand your vision.

Where do you see this business and where do you see yourself in it? Because as entrepreneurs or. Small business owners. This is a not a work-life balance thing. This is a work-life integration thing. because we’re in it all the time. We gotta, we gotta keep, we gotta keep moving the business and it’s a lot on us.

So part of it is recognizing that, your kind of plan that you need to develop has to incorporate both what you want and see for yourself, for your team, for and for your business, and also kind of where, where do you think you may wanna kind of exit or. Where, where you wanna be in like 10, maybe even 20 years, because you gotta create some foundational and make decisions that are gonna position you for that.

So it’s, I do an analysis and kind of get that in. and then it’s really about understanding or helping them really get crisp on the vision that they have for themselves that they may not have even articulated yet. 

[00:07:23] Gary Ruplinger: Excellent. And then once you have that kind of plan, where, how do you, where do you go from there with it?

Because I know a plan is, plan is great now, but I know you were kind of mentioning when we were offline about the implementation portion of 

1.  

[00:07:39] Stephanie Kord Miller: Yeah. So, so I, I love, you know, I love numbers and I’m, you know, it’s like how do you, how do you, you know, tell it to the heart and the mind of things, right?

So if, if you could have a plan that allowed you to go 30% faster in executing on what you gotta do for your business to achieve your goals, like, wouldn’t that be. Worth it to do and have. Right. And the difference is that if you implement it, you go 30% faster. Great. Awesome. But if you, but 67% of people who invest in building strategic plans or build their strategic plans, they don’t even implement ’em.

They just kind of put it on the shelf and say like, look what we did. Yay. You know, we had a, we had an offsite and it was so much fun and we like talked and thought and brainstormed, and we said we wanted to do all these things. And then you go back and then you get caught up in the rig roll of the day to day.

And so 67% of strategic plans never get implemented. And so that to me is just. Like that’s gotta get better. You’re like, that just to me is like table stakes, y’all. You want a successful business, just start with that. Right? And so, but the challenge is how do you implement, what do you need to implement?

And so you find the organization may not understand how they’re going to actually do that. Change from the inside out, right? And this is why I really believe that you gotta have a coach. you need a coach, or you need a partner. You can call it a consultant, whatever you wanna call it. I, I don’t, I don’t care.

But you need someone who can help you figure out a rhythm and a cadence and a, and a system that you can implement that allows you to operate really just efficiently but focused. Disciplined and focused. So that’s what I do. So like it’s not just a, Hey, you can hire me to build your strategic plan and you will celebrate and high five and I’ll get a check and you put it on your shelf.

I’m here because I want you to succeed. I, you know, I make sure I really fit with my clients and that, and then I’m really invested in their success. So it really is a commitment of time that we work together. So it’s not just like we work for a quarter and we build a plan. We work for time, like we work for somewhere between an additional three or six to 12 months, depending on what level of kind of operational system you wanna build in.

And so it really comes down to not just giving you the plan and working with the plan, but it’s how do you implement the plan? And that requires change. Habits and behaviors inside the organization have to change. To make this happen, and sometimes they just don’t know where to start, and I like to help bring that change to them.

[00:10:29] Gary Ruplinger: Change could be a scary word. 

[00:10:30] Stephanie Kord Miller: Oh, huge. Scary word. Right? And it’s, and change can be very painful, but they don’t call ’em growing pains for nothing. Right. And so, you know, the change is if you have somebody to help you get through the change, you feel less pain and you get through that curve. They call the change curve much faster to get to like an acceleration out.

But if you don’t have a partner, you’re gonna sit in that pain a lot longer and it takes you and it take, and you’re slower to accelerate out of that pain. So if you know that you, you really needed to figure out a better way to work. Maybe you’re burned out, maybe your team’s burning out and they’re churning and it, it’s, it’s costing you a ton of money to try to reet those, you know, roles.

And you, you realize it’s probably better if you just figure out how to make it work for the people that you have. you have to be willing to make that investment in that change. and it’s scary because you don’t know what you don’t know. You’re walking into to somebody kind of telling you kind of, well, you need to change this habit, or you need to adopt certain behaviors and let’s coach you through how do we create these behaviors and the habit of those behaviors.

and you need, you need to spend a little time kind of in that process of building the habit before you kind of take the training wheels off. So I’ve seen that work really well. and I’ve also seen people just kind of put it up on the shelf and say, thank you and. Those are wonderful people to work with, but I, I want, I want more successful businesses in this world.

[00:12:04] Gary Ruplinger: Excellent. Well, I know when we were talking you said you had a, a couple examples of, of companies you’ve worked with Yeah. And know, you said one was a more established company that, you know, had hit a wall mm-hmm. With their growth and, you know, your, your challenge was to come in and get Yeah. Get it going again.

And then you had a one that was a little bit newer, more of a startup type of thing. Yeah. So I’m wondering if you could kind of. Give us some insights to how it, you know, worked in inside of a, a couple different types of businesses. 

[00:12:30] Stephanie Kord Miller: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s interesting because a lot of people have a lot of the very similar or same problems, but like where you are in your maturity plays plays a big role, right?

The, the more mature of a business you are kind of the deeper set into some of the habits that you have. And so. one example is, let’s get into this story, which is cool. either was this, there’s this really awesome, playground company in Texas and, this CEO she is, she’s amazing. She has built this all on her own.

and you know, obviously she has a team, but she has really. Driven this company for the last 15 years. But when I met, when I met her and we started talking, what she recognized was that, she was hitting a wall. She, the market, she had to, she just didn’t know how to capture some of the opportunity. She was super burnout.

Her team was super burnout. and she knew the risks that were in play. And so when we took a look at things, part of part of what we did was kind of evaluate, okay, what, where does she wanna go and what kind of, what does she need? And she wanted to create, she wanted to make sure that she was capturing more market share in her region, and she wanted to make sure that she kept her employees happy because she didn’t like rehiring and retraining because she, it just, it just.

Took her off the path. Right? And then she also knew that she as a CEO, she had to find better balance in managing the business and also getting good sleep and having time for her family. And so what what we did was we, you know, we really took a big. Big, big, big, deep dive into the business. And there were some really, there were some interesting things that if, if that, if, you kind of step up into the balcony and you kind of look at the whole landscape, you can then start to see like, oh, well if we fix this and we improve this, then it unlocks.

Exponential benefit. So we, we noticed that, you know, to capture market, you know, she needed more boots on the ground, right? So we knew that she needed to expand her sales team. we also knew that, we needed to find a way to, right size compensation across the organization. So she was, keeping people happy, but also optimizing some margin, and creating space in margin so that she could actually take some, money and reinst.

Sit in other activities that were going to help her capture that market, which would be marketing and advertising. So, it was really about her recognizing that she had done a phenomenal job and she had not done anything wrong. She had just started reaching kind of, she just hit capacity and she was really pushing.

Over capacity and her team was just starting to die on the vine. So we, we worked to fix that. the, when we started working, her aspiration was that she wanted to go, go from like. About almost six 15 and a half million to 19 and a half million. And not only did we do a bunch of things to improve the, the kind of the retention and the culture of the organization rightsize some of the, budgets.

And to focus on where she could invest next. we were able to also find a way to then also like compensate her, you know, she was worrying about everybody else and she wasn’t worrying about herself. So we said, girl, you gotta put your oxygen mask on first. so that was what was really interesting. And by the end of kind of the year that we worked together, she exceeded her 19, her 19.5 goal.

and got closer to 21. So. Really excited to not only are we seeing, extending, the revenue goals by incorporating some of this kind of, let’s evaluate and let’s fix some of these problems. but it also was about giving her a sense of breathing room. And the ability to sleep at night. because that is critically important.

So that was a super, really fun business and, I’m super excited to say that not only was she a client, she’s still a friend, and, she’s actually going on, one of my birthday trips, next week. So I can’t wait to see her again and hear about what’s going on. So she’s been a, she was a phenomenal partner because it allowed me to really dig deep inside of like an established organization and understand that.

This isn’t about her, like running outta cash. this was about managing cash flow. This was not about product market fit. This was about market, like capturing more market share. So some of her challenges were a little different than kind of these earlier stage startup companies. So. Now let’s go to this other company, that I’ve worked with.

It’s a, it’s a communications agency specifically targeted to women in stem, and she was entering her third year. Now, what’s important about that is that 50% of small businesses make it to the year three 50%. So we got a 50% success and we got a 50% failure rate by year three. Right? And we know that 20, it’s really 20% of businesses will fail.

by their end of year one. Right? And that’s, that’s kind of where you see that kind of startup failure rates kind of blend into that as well. Although we know that, 95, 90% of, I’m gonna call it venture backed startups, tend to fail, right? And so, like, that’s a whole nother conversation of like, how do you get away with failure at 90%, right?

Like in co in, in, in corporate world, you’d be fired. So. Let’s go back to, to, to this communications agency. So she is entering year three. She is a mother. Okay. She’s a single mom. She has done a phenomenal job building a roster of clients, but she had pipeline problems and she also had, I’m gonna say capacity on the overall business in that as a consultant.

Sorry about that. As a consultant, if you are, kind of just. Customizing the experience all the time for every client. You can’t scale and you can’t then bring people in and train them how to scale up with you. So what we ended up doing was, we did her. We, I call it vision Scaping, where we kind of build out this kind of strategic plan that integrates both the work and the life, components of like, okay, you wanna buy a house in five years?

Okay, let’s figure out what we gotta do with the business to help you get there. So that, that’s what I’m talking about in the sense of let’s bring work and life together in the goal perspective. So we, we kind of restructured her, offering. So we basically restructured her delivery experience so that it could be a little more repeatable and less bespoke.

We also focused on helping her reduce her, her kind of the pipeline time. So when she was bringing new opportunities in, it could take her six months to a year to get to like a closed conversation. And I was like, that’s gonna kill you. so like, you’ve gotta, we’ve gotta reduce that down. So it was helping her.

Understand how to build kind of a sales process, a, a pitch and a close process. that she, as a background in journalism and communications didn’t necessarily have, right? So she didn’t have some, some sales skills in there. So we worked on some sales, skills. and we, we, we focused on kind of reducing time to pipeline.

and so just by. Helping her shift her delivery model so that she can have more repeatable processes and getting her to think about repeatable products and services and helping her understand how to kind of create a sales process that reduces the time to close. her end of, by the end of the year, she was 27%, growth in revenue year over year.

she’s been able to hold and maintain her contract staff and she’s been able to secure a five figure retainer. With, a, a major university in Boston. So we got her through year three. She is now inside of year four, and the goal is gonna see her to make her sustain, you know, successful past year five.

You make it past year five, you have a really good opportunity of keeping it going for longer term. So. Those are examples of kind of this like early stage, I’m gonna call it little startup, not a venture backed startup, but a startup nonetheless. And, it was getting through that critical year three, where then we also have the, the playground company where it was hitting, hitting a wall in year 15 and needing to push past it, but needing help kind of breaking that wall down so.

What’s interesting is that they were facing, similar challenges in some ways because it was around sales and marketing and advertising, and it was about managing ca, you know, managing the budget. but arguably it was to kind of, to, to create, different experiences for both of them. 

[00:21:37] Gary Ruplinger: Great. Well thank you for, for sharing those.

I know I always kinda. Give, give us some insight into how, you know, yeah. Things work. Especially, especially because comp. Those, those are such different companies. I mean, 

[00:21:47] Stephanie Kord Miller: yeah. 

[00:21:48] Gary Ruplinger: Who knew playgrounds, you know, 

[00:21:49] Stephanie Kord Miller: I mean, who, I mean, this is beautiful, thriving, B2B business of building commercial playgrounds. So you’re like, oh, when I drive past a park now I’m gonna be like, there are businesses that get to design and build playgrounds for their job.

How, how cool is that? Like how fun is that? It’s amazing. 

[00:22:11] Gary Ruplinger: So I know you had mentioned you have, you have four principles. Yeah. And I was wondering if we could get, get into those. 

[00:22:17] Stephanie Kord Miller: absolutely. So they’re not my principles. They’re the principles of business agility. And so there is an institute, it’s called the Business Agility Institute.

It is a bunch of researchers, independent researchers who have for, more than a handful of years, have been very interested in how do we get to these thriving kind of successful organizations. it’s kind of the future of work positioning and we’re seeing culturally, right? There’s huge shifts in expectations around, the workplace and how we work and how we also work with our customers.

So business agility is, the Business Agility Institute does a research project every year. They’ve been doing one since, I believe it’s 2000. Eight, let me just, kind of jump in here. Yeah. Two, sorry. 2018. And they have, and they have looked at over a thousand businesses. And essentially by sharing these insights and, against these principles, and these also they’ve got.

Kind of five domains. There’s a hand bunch of capabilities, and there’s a bunch of behaviors that kind of fit into this construct of the elements of the principle. So the four principles really are about business agility as a continuum. It’s not a, it’s not a state and there’s not like a final destination.

and business agility. I wanna be clear. I’m not talking about, you know, Kanban and Scrum, right? I’m talking about, behaviors and I’m talking about habits and capabilities inside of an organization that need to exist to represent the ability to be flexible and resilient. Right, while keeping healthy ba, you know, healthy teams working at their absolute optimal, right?

We’re talking about optimal work performance here, operational excellence. And so yes, you can incorporate things like Scrum or Kanban or other Agile methods, but sometimes it’s about kind of finding the right rhythm for yourself. Right. So that’s the first one, which is, it’s, it’s a journey. It’s a continuum.

The second principle is, it is an expression of a range of these capabilities, right? So, because there’s a lot of them, you, you may not, you may not embrace every single one, but embracing some of them can have a material, right? And, and a and an a real life. Impact, and material change inside the organization that actually benefits the organization and the people inside of that organization.

So that’s the second one, which is, it is, it is about, capabilities. and it is about strong and emerging capabilities that we’re seeing now being put towards the future of work or the expectations around work, that are, that are reflected in these principles now. The third is that there is no single like framework or path to business agility, right?

Because, this is about incorporating, capabilities and behaviors, and habits. And what we find about this is that because there are lots of different operating systems in the world, right? You have, so I’ve mentioned things like Scrum, and Scrum is now transcending, to scrum at scale, to working with more enterprise organizations.

You have things like Kanban, which are very much very product line oriented. but you also have other. management systems, right? So you have, the scaling up system that is our, you know, people might think of it as like the Rockefeller habits you all, but that’s really serves like large enterprises.

you also have things like entrepreneurs operating system EOS, which is a really. Amazing system, and it’s designed for private companies that have, you know, 10 to 200 employees that are doing like over $2 million. And they’re actually looking for like that next wave of change that’s kind of sits on top of your, your, your mature operating engine of the day to day.

Right. And you might need to improve or tweak the operating engine, but ultimately it’s really, it’s another change management. System, and then it’s a, it’s an operating system to have you be really focused on, the most important things and just. Let everything else go. Don’t get distracted. It’s awesome.

But it’s also, it’s kind of got its place. all of these systems have really interesting tools in them, so you can kind of cherry pick some of the tools, or you can do an all in full embrace, like pure play on a system. But again, there’s no single path or framework. The third principle. Okay, so 

[00:27:01] Gary Ruplinger: well thank, thank you for telling me what EOS stands for, by the way.

It’s one of those ones, I see it all the time, and it’s one of those ones you’re like, I wonder what that stands for, and then you get to the point where you’re like. Well, now it’s kind of too late to ask everybody. I’m sure everybody knows, but I, I don’t, so I 

[00:27:16] Stephanie Kord Miller: never know. So now I know, right? Yeah, I mean, acronyms, you know, acronym Soup is the life that we live.

but it’s called Entrepreneur’s Operating System. And it’s, it’s a really, really smart, and it was, developed by Gino Wickman, and he’s written a couple books about it. traction is the book, that’s kind of the manual to EOS. But, rocket Fuel is a great narrative to talk about how they look at these kind of interesting partnerships between a visionary and, an inter and, and, and an integrator.

That’s what they, the kind of language they use. and we could talk about that forever on a different podcast. but, again, there’s no single path or framework. And then the fourth principle is that it can only be expressed, expressed through behaviors, right? So, You can’t really cheat on this one.

Right? and, these behaviors are things that you, it’s specific, observable and repeatable action that is taken by a person or a group inside of an organization, right? So it is about. Action. And it is about being able to see it and feel it inside of the organization. So those are the four principles that I anchor my coaching business around.

and what’s interesting is that, you know, people get a little overwhelmed when I, I kind of share things like, well, there’s, there’s no path and there’s no framework. So they’re kind of like, so it’s a free for all. How do we do this? And, you know, sometimes people will self implement and they’ll go do the work and they spend a lot of time researching and talking to others and doing that, and then they experiment inside the organization.

Awesome. And some people are saying, I want somebody who’s gonna come in and help me learn how to embrace business agility, but I don’t have time to do that. Like, investigative deep dive, finding the right way. and so I’ve developed a method. And right now I’m calling it strategical. I’m trying to figure out if that’s the right word I wanna kind of productize it against, but I just think of it as, you know, a method of bringing business agility to life.

My method, is really about the kind of reverse eng, you know, like reverse engineering that vision into business goals, and then building a strategic, like building a strategic business roadmap. And then we really break it down where we have an actionable 12 month. Roadmap where it’s, it’s prioritized for where it is in the moment.

And then we start incorporating kind of the, what I call, like the reset, the presets, which is we look at the budget and we align, we realign the budget based on what are the priorities and that need to be made for the investments. Around the commitments that are with these, the roadmap. and that’s a big one.

because man, that p and l it is a story. I can look at your p and l and I can actually say, and pretty much pick out. So you really, so you love marketing because you’re heavily invested in it, right? Or I can see like. You know, you, you pay your people a lot of money, and this is why you’re struggling with your margin, right?

And so your numbers don’t lie, but your numbers also tell people where your priorities are, because what you invest in is what you have prioritized. Right. And that also helps me understand whether or not, the words and your aspirational kind of like, this is what you think and this is what you, you believe is really translated to the investments that you’ve committed to.

Example, so. If you are, if you come to me and say like, I know that marketing’s important. I gotta do marketing, and I have been doing marketing, and I keep hiring and firing all of these agencies because they just don’t give me what I need or give me what, oh, it’s not need, it’s give me what I want. And you’re like, okay.

And it’s so I, I, let me take a look at your budget and you realize that they’ve probably invested maybe 1% of their total revenue into marketing, and then they don’t know why they can’t cultivate a marketing engine. Right. And that’s because if you really wanna cultivate and build a marketing engine, you need to be putting at least about 5% into that business.

And that’s all in that, it’s that staff, it’s contractors, it’s agencies, it’s all of it. and, but that’s, that’s an example of what you think you’re doing. Like, I think this is a good investment I am investing, versus how much you really need to invest for this to become successful. Right. So we, we go through that kind of right sizing the budget, and then we start kind of working on do we have all the people in the right seats, right?

So then it looks at the, let’s look at what, because you have new initiatives, because you’ve identified new priorities, do you have the right skillset? You need to fulfill these initiatives. So, and then it becomes, you gotta take the people out of it and you gotta make it about the roles and then you plug people back in.

because this is a, another one of those things, that you see happening in businesses as they kind of grow and mature organically is that you hire somebody, they become your friend and you love them and they’re great, but they have. They have constraints on some of their skillset and instead of, and so what happens is that you start building a job kind of just for them where it’s like cobbling together kind of the responsibilities that might be over here or over here or over here.

and then you’re kind of deconstructing kind of. The roles and you’re doing it to create custom roles that doesn’t benefit anybody and it does not benefit your business. So you need to kind of take some of the personal out of it, and you need to create an org structure that’s actually gonna help you drive the commitments you made in that.

12 month roadmap and that you’re right sizing your budget too. So there sometimes can be a little shake up, but sometimes it’s just resetting expectations and just sharing kind of like, this is where we’re going and these are, these are the roles and this is where everybody kind of fits in. And I hope everybody’s happy with that.

Let’s give it a try. And then, then we go into, so all that we’re doing here is really about helping manage the change of the people through the process of these decisions. And so this is really where like people kind of get a little, little, little, you know, upset about like, what about my job? What about my role?

Is it gonna be safe? And all of this stuff. That’s not, that’s, that’s, that’s 100% what you’ve gotta work through when you’re trying to change and kind of like reposition the org to kind of get to the next phase of success. And you just have to do it humanely and transparently and with, with, with kind of love and support as much as you can, but with an eye on your business, you gotta, you gotta focus on what you want for your business.

So. As we’re building these kind of capabilities and behaviors, around kind of people first, leadership engaged culture, right? Value-based delivery, flexible operations, right? These are some of the domains that we work with inside of business agility. Then we start to incorporate some of the, the rhythm building, which is what is that operating system or what are the tools from some operating systems that are gonna help them drive this roadmap?

Forward so that they’re transparent, they’re focused, they’re continuously prioritizing, and that they reevaluate, the skill, like they reevaluate where they are. And so we also build, a KPI scorecard that allows them to track progress and performance and react at much faster than like waiting six months and saying, oh, I don’t think that project worked.

We might be able to figure that out in four weeks. See what I’m saying? So, it’s a way of helping bring people through transformation, kind of growth, repositioning, and, and getting, and also like creating a culture where you’re able to literally pull out the best of your people to create kind of predictable productivity and achieve the goals by the end of the year that you, that you kind of always.

Kind of, oh, we missed a little, you know, this is where like, let’s not miss, let’s succeed. Right? Let’s, let’s, let’s surpass. So that’s why having a coach when you are working through these things is incredibly valuable because you’d have a confidant, a sounding board, and somebody who’s going to be able to say, Hey, let’s take, let’s, let’s, let’s take a beat on this and let’s go have a conversation about.

What kind of, just what happened here? or it’s, you know, Hey, time out in this conversation. You guys are distracting yourself from the, from what you wanted to happen in this meeting. Let’s take a time out real quick and let’s make sure we come back to what the issue is on the table, and let’s not get distracted.

So let’s, let’s bring it back so you have somebody that kind of brings you back into the conversation to stay focused and help kind of build the habit for you to learn how to not distract yourself in that way. So it’s a lot of stuff. but it’s super fun and you can break it down into, we can just work on that strategic plan.

We can work on the kind of the, the, let’s reset around the strategic plan and then let’s start developing and cultivating your kind of operational system and we can pluck a system. Scrum or we can pluck certain components from systems to build something a little more, useful for your organization.

I wanna say that it’s, I’m not a bespoke service, but I’m configurable. Meaning there is a system that I run people through, but it’s configurable along the way based on where they are and what they need. so it’s not just a cookie cutter experience. It does. Focus on their specific outcomes and needs and the results they wanna drive.

and and it’s, I think it’s super fun because I love to plan. Planning is one of my favorite things to do in this whole world. And I love helping businesses kind of break through that wall and just feel, feel that confidence and, and that sense of control over your business again. And then you see these people just breathe and then they just feel that they can just.

You know, they can handle it. And I, that’s something that’s really important to me. 

[00:37:45] Gary Ruplinger: Great. Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing all that. So if somebody is out there interested and is listening and is saying, well, yeah, I’ve, I’ve kind of hit a wall, or, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re struggling to make it through year three here, I need to get back on a growth track.

Yeah. What would they get in touch with you? What’s the best way for them to, to, to find. 

[00:38:03] Stephanie Kord Miller: Well, thank you for asking. That’s great. so my website is EmpowerYourResults.com. and there’s some information there about the, the program and how we work. And you can book a call with me, kind of anytime you want.

I always say yes to 30 minute calls. I’m, you know, and I, if you have a question, I’m gonna answer it. If I don’t have a question, I might know somebody who can. and if you wanna learn more, that’s great. And then I also have, LinkedIn. I am very, I’m very, I’m very much on, so come find me on LinkedIn. And it’s Stephanie Kord Miller and it’s Kord with a k, K,O,R,D.

Because there’s a lot of Stephanie Miller’s out there, believe it or not. So I, I like to differentiate. But yeah, so empoweryourresults.com or you can find me on LinkedIn and, I would, would love to, you know, meet with people if they’re interested. 

[00:38:51] Gary Ruplinger: Wonderful. Well thank you so much Stephanie. So that’s empoweryourresults.com, or, or find, Stephanie Kord Miller on LinkedIn.

So yay. Stephanie, thank you so much for coming on today. Really appreciate you sharing with us 

[00:39:05] Stephanie Kord Miller: and it’s so good to see you and congratulations on your, on your success. I think. I think what you’re doing is awesome. 

[00:39:10] Gary Ruplinger: Well, thank you so much. Well have a great day. Alright, and take care. 

[00:39:14] Stephanie Kord Miller: Take care. Bye. 

[00:39:18] Gary Ruplinger: Thanks for listening to the Pipelineology podcast.

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