Zoho Tools For Faster Growth

Tom DuFore 0:00

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CEO Job Description Problem

Tom DuFore 1:15

to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I'm your host, Tom Dufour, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as we open today, I'm wondering, as the CEO of your company, do you have a job description for for your position? And if you do, which I know a lot of CEOs don't, what do you think those top three responsibilities are? Well, our guest today is Trey Taylor, and he shares with us the three jobs that every CEO has. Now, Trey Taylor is the managing director of Trinity Blue, a consultancy designed to provide executive coaching and strategic planning to C-suite leaders. His experience derives from fields as diverse as technology, financial services, venture capital, and commercial real estate development. He's frequently featured as a keynote speaker. He's addressed attendees at the Human Capital Institute, the Ascend Conference, and many other engagements. You're going to love this interview, so let's go ahead and jump right into it.

From Accident To CEO

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Tom, thanks for having me. My name's Trey Taylor. I'm the CEO and managing director of several entities, but one of which is Trinity Blue, a consulting firm where I focus on helping CEOs regain their focus and lots of times regain the joy of being a CEO.

Tom DuFore 2:38

I was excited to have you on the show to talk a little bit about your book you released called The CEO Only Does Three Things. So I'd love for you to just give us a little uh origin story of why would you want to write a book like this?

SPEAKER_00 2:54

I came to the role that I'm in as a CEO completely by accident. So I now run our family business. And that family business is third generation business. And my dad had always told me growing up, like, don't do what I do for a living, like go find your own thing to do. And so I went to become an attorney, trained as a venture capitalist, and did those things. And then we had some tragedy hit where my dad passed at a super early age. And so I had to step back into the business. And I remember the first day of doing that, like closing the door and Googling how do you be a CEO. No, no exaggeration. Like I had no idea what the job was the next day. And I think so many of us are like that because if I asked you to go to your HR filing cabinet right now and pull out job descriptions, you have one for everybody in your organization except you. Right. And I felt like that was really missing. And so for the first four or five years, I kept a legal pad under my phone. And every time I learned one of these like between the eyes lessons, I took a note. And my intention at the outset was, you know, I wasn't going to stay in that job for a long time. So I was going to hand it off to somebody. And I was just going to hand them the notebook and say, hey, here's some things that I learned. Along the way, I started doing some consulting with some other companies in our industry. And I heard very frequently, you should write this down in a book. This could be useful. And so that was the sort of uh genesis of the book was if I hand it to a successor, if I hand it to a client, consulting client, you know, what could they make sense of out of it? And since we released the book, you know, I thought it would sell 500 copies and my mom would buy 300 of them. But we're over 100,000 copies now, and it is the most gifted book inside the Inc. 5000, which is a real honor to me.

Tom DuFore 4:44

Wow, that's amazing. Congratulations on that. And uh 100,000 plus copies is no small feat. That is a big, big deal in the book world for sure. And especially nonfiction.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

A friend of mine said that if it was a record, you know, if it was a recording, they would give me a gold record or something like that. I don't know what the math is on that, but uh maybe somebody will give me a gold book at some point.

Tom DuFore 5:08

Oh, that's wonderful. Well, let's talk a little bit about the book itself. You talk about CEOs should focus on these three things or these three pillars that a CEO should be doing. So let's just start with a broad overview on

The Three Jobs Framework

Tom DuFore 5:22

that.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Yeah. So the first thing a CEO tells you when I tell him, hey, you should only be doing three things, is the response is, yeah, right. You know, I wish that I only had three things to do. And it's the right answer because in your organization, you are literally the only one who everybody has the right to put something on your to-do list. Right. So if you're working deeper in an organization and you're in marketing, the finance guy doesn't come over to you on a frequent basis to say, put this on your to-do list and report to me when it is done. But it happens to the CEO all the time. And a lot of the effort that we have to get to is really defending sort of in a judo fashion, like, hey, don't give me that, let me give it back to you. So that I can focus on the things that only I have the accountability and responsibility to do. So if we approach it from that direction, I can ask the CEO, don't you feel like you were doing everybody's job at all times? And the answer is always yes. And I then say, wouldn't it be a lot better if you did your job and let them do theirs? And so that's the beginning of a fruitful conversation if we can get agreement on those two points. I'm not dodging your question, but that then will lead us to the answer to the real question is what is it that you have the responsibility and accountability for that no one else does? And my answer to that, my contribution to that conversation, is that it is culture, people, and numbers. And what do I mean? I mean not that you are responsible for reporting the numbers or even making them happen, although that can be the case in smaller organizations. Not that you are responsible for hiring and retaining the best talent and that sort of thing, although we all play a role in that. And not that you're the sole participant in a culture, right? But at the end of the day, who's the person that sets the agenda that says, this is what I want this to look like, and then holds the ultimate responsibility as to whether that happened and whether it was successful. And that's what I mean when I say a CEO only has three jobs, really, or only does three things. You're supposed to do culture, people, and numbers. You set the agenda, you manage the process, and you achieve the results.

Tom DuFore 7:36

Well, very, very interesting. Those three make sense to me as you kind of summarize that. And most leaders, whether it's a small business, mid-size, or a large company, that sums up what a good leader is going to be doing.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

But it doesn't make it easy. Simple is never easy, right? The simpler it gets, the harder it gets, or the more difficult it gets sometimes, I think is definitely the case.

Tom DuFore 8:00

I'm curious, with these three you list out with culture, people, numbers, do you prioritize it in that order? Is there a specific order that you like to flow? How do you see that happening?

SPEAKER_00 8:11

So when I'm working with a client and they brought me in because there's some problem there, there's some mismatch, there's some traffic jam somewhere. Typically I'll let them say, this is where everything's going wrong, right? But they are all equally connected. So if I start on one, I'm going to end up on the third one anyway. So it doesn't matter to me. If I come

Culture As Clarity And Standards

SPEAKER_00 8:31

into a clean engagement, I love to start at culture because culture is the environment that we've all agreed to live and work in. And there are lots of unspoken rules that I like to get articulated as best as we can. And there are lots of choices to make. I actually fundamentally believe that we start our own businesses because we want to see a version of our culture exist in the world. And if that that version existed, we would probably just go work there, right? Because that's a lot easier. But the CEO and the entrepreneur really want to create something that they don't feel is available in the world. And that's really what culture is. I also like to talk about culture like a fish tank. The underlying sort of Latin word, you know, root of culture is the same as cultivate, which means you have to go in and take the bad things out and make sure that the good things that you want to see growing are growing. And so I talk about that in terms of a fish tank because if there's a you know a predatory fish in the fish tank, I got to get him out of there. If he's eating up all the good food, then the rest of the fish won't be able to survive. I got to keep the water clean. The environment itself, I have to keep full of clarity. And all of this maps over to what I love for CEOs to do in their organizations, which is to be the final source of clarity. The major question that you should be answering anytime you get the opportunity to do so is how do I make this clearer for everyone involved? And that's the basic role in culture. How do we do that? We start off with our articulated value statements. We start off with saying, hey, we all agree that this is true, right? And it can be lots of different things for lots of different people, and it should be. Every single organization should be unique in that. I have a client that has four. They have four fundamentals. They're in the entertainment space, and every quarter they practice one of those articulated value statements in a ritualistic way. So on Fridays, we do this thing. Every staff meeting, we do this thing. We don't forget somebody's birthday and we all wear funny hats. And we're constantly having fun because we can't deliver fun unless we know what it looks like. That's the way that they think about that. I have others, I have another group that has 13 value statements, and they repeat those four times a year, because four times 13 is 52. And so it doesn't matter how many they have or anything. What it matters is the CEO says, this is the charter. These are the things that we believe. This is the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. This is what governs how we act towards each other, towards our clients and our customers, towards our partners, towards our, you know, spouses of our employees. Everything about that comes into those articulated value statements.

Hiring And Keeping The Right People

Tom DuFore 11:23

That gives a nice overview here on culture. Let's talk a little bit about the people piece of this.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Yeah, the people piece is the hardest and the easiest at the same time, right? So we know, even though AI is coming in this direction, we know we got to have people. People are those that are on the journey with us. Those are they are those that have sort of signed the John Hancock of the Declaration of Independence and said, yes, this is what I want to live in. This is what I want to be true in the world. This is where I want to put my efforts. There, there are fellow travelers on the journey. You know, there are there are ways that we should use our culture to recruit those people and of course to retain those people for the long term. And a CEO's job is to do exactly that, to people the organization with those that believe and will act in accordance with the core beliefs of the organization. I have people all the time say, well, wait a minute, you want me to interview everybody in the organization? And my answer is no, I just want you to interview the ones that are cultural fits. So yes, of course I want you to interview everybody. Is that always possible? No. But do you know when Sergey Brenn was the CEO of Google, he reviewed 12,000 application packets a year. You couldn't get a job until it went across his desk. Now, eventually that became way too much for one person to do, of course. And then he began to devolve that into the organization. And we do that as well. As CEOs, we want the people who are going to be managing the people we hire or working beside them, of course, to come together. But what are we really doing? We're really trying to gut check like, do they have the capability for sure? But are they good cultural participants as well? Those are the two most important things to determine when we're recruiting people. And then when we retain them, it's all about gratitude and acknowledgement and coaching. So I want to be grateful that you're doing the job because God knows there's tons of jobs out there that people can do. I want to acknowledge when you've done well and when you need improvement. And I want to provide coaching for when that improvement could make you a better team member. And so we we dive deep into the book. There's a lot of good theory in the book about how do you recruit. I have a completely upside-down recruiting process that people tend to love. And we talk about the deep psychology of what makes someone a retainable employee, what makes somebody available to stay in an organization over the long term.

Tom DuFore 13:50

Well, for that upside-down hiring structure that you're talking about, where can someone get a copy of the book? What's the best place for them to go?

SPEAKER_00 13:57

Audible and Amazon, of course, are where everybody uh tends to get their books today. And so those are the two best sources for that.

Tom DuFore 14:04

We'll include the link in the show notes as well. Well, let's talk about the third pillar

Numbers That Guide Results

Tom DuFore 14:09

then. We're talking numbers now. And there are certainly lots of numbers in business that you can talk about and think about. So what do you mean by numbers?

SPEAKER_00 14:17

Yeah, so numbers I like to define as the point of what we are doing as people inside the culture. It's the results that we produce. And again, is the CEO the one supposed to be reporting the numbers and determining the numbers? Not necessarily. I mean, obviously, a lot of CEOs say to me, Well, I have a CFO that does that. Well, that's well and good and fine. But if the CFO is not governed by the CEO's vision for what the numbers should look like, what they actually tell you about the business and where they point to areas of improvement and opportunities and that sort of thing, then the numbers are really divorced from the rest of it. And that's not what we want. So we want numbers to be constant indicators. So we run KPIs, OKRs, all of those kinds of things. And we have a belief that everybody in an organization holds a number. It doesn't matter who you are. The CEO holds all of the numbers, the CFO holds the reporting of some and the planning of others. But what about the receptionist? You know, we have a thing in our organization that the receptionist should delight every single caller, right? So that's a number for her to stretch for every single day. So everybody holds a number. And then it is up to the CEO to translate those numbers and educate the people in the organization in a way that they can understand this is what that number means for me. This is what I can affect in my life and my business on that number. This is what it means for me, maybe in compensation standards or any of that sort of thing. So numbers are super important. I find that CEOs can be very intimidated by numbers. And I just want to um, you know, pop that bubble and dispel that myth as much as I can, because in my in my viewpoint, CEOs own the numbers of the organization because the numbers are the results.

Tom DuFore 16:03

What is it about the numbers that CEOs kind of maybe have some trepidation when they start digging into or looking at? What do you see in that?

SPEAKER_00 16:10

It's the layered dependency most of the time. And you usually, and this is a really broad generalization, but usually CEOs are really good at going from point A to point B, right? Regardless of whether the world tells them they can do so or not, I'm gonna put my shoulder into it. I'm gonna push until I get from point A to point B. But if I'm doing a lot of numbers work, then you know maybe this number has to happen before this one can come to fruition. And it gets to be a little bit complex, not that we're afraid of complexity, but you know, it's hard to do one and the other. And so I really try to translate that and bring it up 10,000 feet off the ground and say, look, if you achieved the thing you wanted to achieve, what numbers would have to be true to make that happen? That's enough. That's setting the agenda. Now, if that one of those is the sales numbers, we need to talk to the sales team. If one of them is a client retention number, we need to talk to the group that's important in that process. Maybe it's a pre-marketing thing, maybe it's the CFO, you know, at the end of the day that we need X amount of dollars by the end of the month. Those things are fine and we delegate and we manage. But to set the agenda, you have to come up and say, what results do I want my organization to achieve? What do I need? What inputs do I need to put into that? That's how we start a business plan for numbers.

Why Numbers Feel Complicated

Tom DuFore 17:31

Trey, what's the best place for someone who says, this is very interesting. I'd love to learn more. You shared the link to the book earlier, but how can people get in touch with you or learn more about what you're doing?

SPEAKER_00 17:42

So I have a personal website at Trey-Taylor.com. You can't find me there. I'm on LinkedIn, of course, as well. The book has a website. A CEO only does three things, and we have some uh special content there as well. So pretty easy to find. I do a newsletter. The newsletter comes out whenever I feel like I have something to say. Sometimes that's four days a week, and sometimes it's once every four weeks, but it is what it is. And you can subscribe to that newsletter. It's free, it always will be at plantyourflag.live.

Tom DuFore 18:11

This is a great time in the show, Trey. We make a transition and we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question we ask is have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?

SPEAKER_00 18:23

If I only had a miss of one or two, I would be uh thrilled. And I know people say that to you all the time. Yeah, I think the biggest miss in my life was living in the first phase of my life with a definition that I received from other people. You know, the the standards of success that I held were those that other people thought were important for me and I bought into them. And then when I hit them and ran through those ribbons, I wasn't satisfied because it wasn't my vision to begin with. And so the older I get, the more I understand that, you know, that for it to be something that I'm proud of or or that I'm glad that I put effort into, it needs to be calculated and formulated on a different basis. And so I'm sure that other people came to that realization much earlier than I did, but I really lived a different definition of life for a long time that I think was amiss.

Tom DuFore 19:12

Let's look on the opposite side of that. Let's talk about a make, a highlight or two you'd like to share.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Yeah, so I'm a deal guy by nature. And, you know, I love to find the thing that nobody else is looking at and see the value in it and then bringing it, bring it out. That applies in my world to people. So I'm really proud of people that I sort of pull out of a non-traditional circumstance and see something in them and they blossom. And so my entire team is this sort of ragtag bunch that, you know, we didn't, we didn't fit in anywhere else. They call it the island of misfit toys sometimes or something like that. But when I get somebody aligned behind a vision for what we can do

Where To Get The Book

SPEAKER_00 19:51

as a group, as a scrappy little group, that's a real delight to me. So I could tell personal stories about that. And then in investing deals as well, you know, I've done a lot of real estate deals where I drive by something and say, that's not what it should be, but this is. And then we turn it into that and hopefully we make uh we make money, and that's a success.

Tom DuFore 20:09

Let's talk about a multiplier you've used to multiply yourself personally, professionally, or organizations you've run.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Not to be cliche, the culture is a multiplier. If everybody is singing from the same hymn book, you know, the service goes by a lot faster. That's a multiplier, and it's not one that I knew when I took the job. I thought culture was just something that sort of existed and it was a little bit of a guru term. So culture is definitely a um a multiplier. The the team that you put around you that can go through the fire with you, most definitely a force multiplier. I am to the point in my career now that uh in my core business, I'm working 10 to 15% of the time on the things that are necessary today, and 85% of the time on the things

Misses, Wins, And Multipliers

SPEAKER_00 20:57

that will be true for us in the future. I'm relying on my team to cover the bases there. And they're doing a great job on that. So the team is a multiplier because it lets me go be me in a in a bigger stage, in a bigger way, and I can make things happen and bring back and execute on. And then as a parallel, you know, agentic AI is a big topic of conversation today. I was super early into that. You know, I have built out a uh a six or seven agent system that I access, you know, from my phone, and I can say, hey, here's a real estate deal. I want the analysis done in the way that I would do this. It's my wife's birthday coming up. We need to book a trip to Disney. You know, my mother-in-law needs some flowers, and it can do all of those things without me having to chase down any of the work myself or without me even having to really deal with a with a real person who I would rather have in my organization doing things that are not so sort of routine. So I see really a multiplier as far as that goes. And the and the key there is it isn't doing anything that someone else necessarily. Couldn't do, but in freeing those people up, they go always, people, humans, we gravitate towards the most creative and interesting thing to do. So if I take all of the mundane away, then my team begins to bloom and say, hey, I didn't have 10 hours of yuck work to do yesterday. I wrote this book or I wrote this business plan or I think we could do this. And that's been really fun to watch over the last probably about three months. So I'd say those uh culture people and AI for now are my multipliers.

Tom DuFore 22:31

Very good. Well, the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?

SPEAKER_00 22:37

Having the freedom from obligation so that I can be a blessing to those that need whatever brand of something that I bring to the table. So I have three children in the home now. And so every time I don't have to get pulled away to do something that it's not even that I don't want to do, I don't want to feel obligated to do something. Then I can come home and be a blessing, you know, to those kids. We can do something fun, we can do something not fun. We had a homework issue in the house last week, and dad was there to be able to handle that. And I wasn't pulled away and I wasn't, you know, forced to sort of say, you deal with that, and I'll check it when I get home. That was the real blessing to me. So freedom is the ability to make that choice every day, to put my energy where I want to put it and not have it obligated or spoken for already before I make the choice.

Tom DuFore 23:26

And as we bring this to a close, Trey, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven't had a chance to yet?

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Tom, one of the things that that I love is I had a guy say, How do I be a good CEO? And obviously the answer is to buy my book, right? That'll that'll do it for everybody. But how do you be a great CEO? That's the real thing. And I think there's a good story here. A great CEO takes the principles in the books, uses those to run a good organization, but a really great CEO and the one that you remember long after you're not working at that place anymore, is someone who saw something in you before you could see it in yourself and called it out. So I call that preception and invocation. And what I really love is when I'm working with CEOs who finally get their head above the water, right? We poke out of the fish tank for a minute and realize that everything isn't to-do lists, everything isn't what I promised and I'm late about. But part of the job and the joy of the job is being able to look at the people in our lives, business or personal, and see a gift in them that they probably haven't seen yet and encourage them to take a step into that gift. It's the most fulfilling thing that you can ever do as a human. That's always my answer is to what a great CEO is. You handle your business, you meet your obligations, you do all the things you're supposed to do. But then you get this extra little blessing of being able to say, hey, I notice this in you, and I'd love for you to experience what I see in you. That's a real gift.

Tom DuFore 25:01

Trey, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. And let's go ahead and jump into today's three

Success, Great CEOs, And Seeing Gifts

Tom DuFore 25:07

key takeaways. So, takeaway number one is when he said there is often no job description for a CEO. And he talked about how when he started as CEO of his family business, that he had to Google how to be a CEO. Takeaway number two is when he talked about the three things that every CEO does. Number one, culture, number two, people, number three, numbers. He gave a quick overview of each, but he described culture being like a fish tank. And you have to make sure you get the bad things out and make everything clear. For people, he said you have to find capable people and cultural fit people, and then retain those people. And then for numbers, he said you need to understand what results you produce. So you need KPIs, and everyone should know their number. He said, Every person should have a number and they should know their number. And takeaway number three is when he talked about living the first phase of his career with a definition of success or defining what other people thought it should be, not what he thought. And that changed as he got older. And now it's time for today's win-win. So today's win-win comes from the end of the episode when I really liked how he closed with he said, You can learn to be a good CEO by reading his book. But to be a great CEO, he said that's when you are able to see something in someone else before they see it and then call it out. So see something in someone else before they see it and then help call it out. And so that's the episode today, folks. Please make

Key Takeaways And Next Steps

Tom DuFore 26:53

sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at BigSkyFranchise Team.com where you can schedule your free no obligation consultation. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.