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Jamie Shilanski  

Lessons were learned this week at Shilanski and Associates, our RIA up in Anchorage, Alaska. Welcome back TPR nation. This is Jamie Shilanski in an episode of Worlds to Conquer, and I am going to share with you today about the hard knock lessons that our CEO got to learn and chief operating capacity. So we, we use the EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating system, within most of the framework of what we do in the C suite, I always think of the integrator as the CEO. That’s the chief operations officer, and it really, you know, the EOS suite likes to use that the integrator is the one that goes in and get things done. Well, so does the COO. So the CEO is normally the person that’s responded with the brand, the image, the design, the plan of where we’re going. They’re the ones that come in and rally the troops. They get client contracts in place, you know, brand awareness. But at the end of the day, it’s that Chief operation officer that really does the grunt of the work. And so in this last year, we’ve been training our COO to take over more of what I would have previously considered a lot of my responsibilities. So even as Co-CEO to our RIA up in Anchorage, Alaska, I was empowering. I’m trying to teach her and empower her to take over a lot of the roles and responsibilities that I have been doing in that capacity. And the reason that we’re doing that is, you know, one of the combat roles under jocko’s leadership program, and that’s on the Echelon front, is to decentralize command, and that makes sure that you’re not becoming the bottleneck of your organization. And so what we found my brother, my baby brother, Micah Shilanski  and I is that a lot of things were hinging on our decision making. And so the team would get to a certain point, and then they would stop, because they would need Micah or I’s input on what to do and how to get things done. And that really wasn’t creating a strategy in which we can continue to empower grow our team. And by the way, as I’ve shared with you several times, we only want a level team members in our organization, and in order to have that, that means that we can’t be the only ones calling the shots. We want a level team members that are empowered and capable of making decisions and executing the business plan, so that we can drive the company forward. And if that is 100% dependent on Micah and I being there in all capacities to answer every single question, then we weren’t going to be able to scale. We’re not going to be able to grow. And the reason that we are so gosh darn passionate about growing Shilanski and Associates is because we know there are three Shilanski advisors. There’s Floyd, myself and Micah, and together, we can only impact so many heartbeats. Bill Bachrach back in the 1990s he used to talk about your top 100 get to 100 ideal clients, and then you’re done. Well, we couldn’t help ourselves. We can’t be done. We think our top book is really a little bit more than that. We think most financial advisors have capacity to meet with around 150 clients. If you have more than 150 clients, I bet if you took a real long, hard look in the mirror, you’re going to find that you’re only servicing about 75 to 100 of those. You’re not fully servicing all of them. Instead, it’s as needed. You’re not having regular appointments. You’re not doing regular financial planning with them. What you’re doing is you’re saying, hey, if they have a question, if they’ve got a concern, of course they can call into my office and I’ll meet with them, and I’ll go over whatever. So we know that ashalan skis, we can only impact so many heartbeats, and then we’re capped out where we are at the capacity point that we want to be, that we choose to be at as a family, because our family unity is so important to us. So what we love to do is we love to bring on other financial advisors. We are actively, constantly recruiting for the right type of advisor to join our practice. And in order to join our practice, you got to be committed to the intensity. You got to want to change those lives of the heartbeats the clients that we service. But we also have to empower team members that are able to believe that mission so it lives on long beyond us. My legacy is not the name Shilanski, though I’m often very proud of it. Rather, it is the ability to believe in people to achieve what they thought previously was impossible to achieve. That is what I want to do. That is the legend I want to leave behind. And I believe that when you hire a team members and you bring them onto the organization, and they buy into the intensity of what you’re doing, you’re going to be able to perpetuate that type of legacy. And that is what motivates me. That’s what makes me spring out of bed every single morning ready to freaking conquer the world. So when I talk to my team members, and I find that decisions hinge on me constantly, then I know I’m not doing a good job empowering people, and so I’ve always made the hiring and firing decisions for the firm. And you know, we go through a group interview process. I of course want to get everyone’s buy in, because we are a small firm. We have 15 employees, but that’s a small firm compared to other companies that I work with, and having the wrong person can cost you the good employees. And so I really, really careful about doing so, and that means I’ve always made the hiring and firing decisions. But if I always have to make the hiring and firing decisions, guess what? Then I have to hand select every single team member. So I’ve got to start training my coo to come up into this capacity and be able to do this. So this last year, we’ve been looking for, we call it, a relationship manager. This is the receptionist, and it’s not just a receptionist, because you may be answering the phone, you may be greeting the door, but make no mistake, that is the person that makes the first and last impression with your firm. And oftentimes what I see businesses do and they fail in this over and over and over again. Think about every practice you’ve ever been in. Think about a medical office. Think about a Walgreens cashier. Think about going up to get your truck serviced. Think about anything in a retail client, customer capacity, and that receptionist, that person that’s answering the phone. They are oftentimes the lowest person on the totem pole, and the lowest person that earns an income in that capacity, in that job environment. And when that happens, what you’re getting is someone’s minimum and they’re looking to stay in that role for a year or two so they can gain office experiences, and then they can bounce off to something else. I think that receptionist is critical. I think they make or break the client experience. And, you know, we have an office in downtown Anchorage, and if a client comes in and they’re super, super frustrated, they couldn’t find parking, but that reception is that relationship manager has the ability to turn that around. They’re not disgruntled and upset by the time I get there, or they continue to inflate that experience. And so the client continues agitated. When we get in this conference room, we got to talk about tough financial matters, then they’re already coming in agitated. And so they really can make or break a company, and it is the one that we give the least amount of dedication financial resources towards. So Shilanski and Associates, we do that bit differently. I’m not looking for somebody that can just smile and answer the phone and answer the door. I want somebody that can really foster and build relationships that is a very specific type of person. And so we use the DISC profile. There’s Colby, there’s all these different ones out there. And what I’m really looking for when I use discs, so you have D, I S, C, so you have drivers. Those are, be bold, be brief, be gone. If you couldn’t tell I’m a driver, I’m definitely a driver. The I stands for influential. These are a lot of your real estate people. These are people that sell houses, oftentimes, because they have never entered an elevator and exited without friends, they strike up a conversation with absolutely everyone. And then you have your steady people, the ones that don’t like disruption. They don’t like change. Oftentimes they have a poker face. Can’t really tell what’s going on. They might have a lot of personal things that they’re contending with, and it won’t come out until later, till they have a massive breakdown. And you have a C as a very highly compliance person. And those are great operational people, because they check their they grammar proof all of your material. They make sure that everything is done down to the penny. If I call a highly compliant person, I see and I say, Hey, you owe us about $100 and it was 9076 guess what they’re going to tell me. The difference was they’re going to say, actually, what I show is that I owe you blah, blah, blah, and that’s my appointment. That’s the kind of person I want involved in the movement of money within my firm. But that is not the kind of person I want answering the door or the phone or having 1000 out of the day. They will become really, really annoyed. So what I look for when I’m hiring relationship manager, there’s, I’m looking to somebody that has a really strong ask, because I need them to be steady. I need them to be focused. I need them to track. And then right behind that, I’m looking for the I the influential, the charismatic part of them. Now you may be thinking, but Jamie, this is a person that’s going to have so many conversations with clients when they come in. Don’t you want it? I first and I don’t, and this is why, typically, high I people lack any type of detail. They’re not nitty gritty, they’re not going to follow the process, but they’re good at troubleshooting and but they fizz out really, really quick, so they bring high intensity to something. So think about real estate agents. They love showing you the house, but once it gets into the weeds of actually like going through the process, they run off to somebody else because the fun part is done. So if I have a really strong, high, really influential person that normally doesn’t mean that they’re going to follow the processes we have in place in order for that to be a successful experience for everyone in the office, in the organization, and they’re also really disruptive. They are almost never at their desk. They are always somebody else’s desk, because they get energy from other people. So I’m looking somebody that has a really high s, and just below it, I mean below it, a really high I as well. Now on this D, i, s, c, we have all of those components inside of us. We have all those characteristics inside of us, but we lead with one. We have a close second, and we have the ones that we least like. Now we can also have a natural style and an adapted style. A natural style is who you are on Sunday morning with the people you love the most, and the adapted is who you show up Monday morning, because that’s the role you’ve been put in and that you think you have to be. So I really want to make sure that their natural and adaptive style are still those strong s and a strong I in that capacity. So as I’m training my coo to come up, anyone that’s ever hired, anyone knows that it is a nightmare to post a job and go through that experience. And you would think technology has made this easier. I make the argument that technology say far worse experience, and the reason why, and I didn’t realize this until my good friend Stephen Jarvis over at retirement tax services, he told me one day he said, Jamie, I hate looking at indeed resumes, because I don’t know who’s really looking for a job and who’s marking the box for unemployment so they can show that they applied to a job. And I was like, Oh, my goodness, I never even thought of that. Of course, they’re doing that. So I look at a date, and you’re going to get, you know, hundreds of applicants flood in for a job, but you’re going to get a handful that are actually looking for a job and haven’t bounced around 1000 times and might be good fits for you, and the algorithms are showing your job to who they think is appropriate. So it used to be back in the 90s, early 2000s when you posted a job, it was posted, it was open to everyone in the world, and your human resources or front desk would be flooded with resumes as they came in from different individuals, but now the algorithms tell you which one of those candidates might be the most appropriate for you, and you think you have some control in the matter, but I’m going to make a strong argument you don’t have as much as you think you do, and so it doesn’t matter how much money you give, indeed, to run An advertisement and to highlight your ad and to do all the boosting and the posting for it, it’s not going to get in front of everyone. It’s going to get in front of who indeed thinks is appropriate to see your job. And you can monster zip recruiter. I mean, you can use 1000 different programs. They’re all using algorithms, and they’re all doing this process, so it’s really hard to get the resumes that would have come in in the 90s and the 2000s into your office today. Instead, they’re being filtered by the machine, by the algorithms. So you know, it is, it is labor some to try to find someone, but it’s also the most important task you will undergo. And so I’m going to share with you an epic fail that we had at Shilanski and Associates. And I hope, as I do so, you’re going to derive why it failed and why it cannot fail in the future. So as I’m instructing, my CEO, and she’s been with us, you know, 30 years in the organization, so there’s not one aspect of the job she doesn’t know inside out, because you don’t stay around that long and not see all parts of it. And so when she started, you know, posting the job, and she said, You know, I’m getting all of these candidates, and I’m just overwhelmed because I can have one of our team members begin to screen them. And I said, Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. And she said, so the way that that was going to look like was that they were going to pull out the resumes that they thought were best suited. They were going to get them on the phone, make sure they had a pleasant phone voice, right? You don’t want to call somebody that submitted a resume and they answer who this. So she wanted to call them, screen them, ask them a couple of questions, and then the next stage in our process is to schedule an in person interview with ever who the interviewee is. And then that gives us the ability to see, did the person show up on time? Did they find parking, or did they make that our problem? How was their dress appearance? How was their mannerisms? Were they too polished? If somebody interviews really well, guess what? They’ve been on a lot of interviews. I don’t like to hire people that interview super well. In fact, I want you to be a little bit nervous. I want you me to be able to say, Hey, I know interviews can be really intimidating. I don’t want that experience for you. Let’s just have a conversation, because that means that you’re really caring about what’s happening. So what I learned after this had happened, I was having her hire the front desk person the reception, and so she had the person screening was the person that had given their their notice, so they were on their way out of the firm. They were beautiful person. They absolutely loved our mission. We wish we could have kept working with her longer. She was called by Christ to lead her church in a more permanent capacity, and so felt, you know, that that was where she needed to go. Totally fine. So the CEO said, hey, you know what this job is. We’re replacing your role. Why don’t you screen all the candidates? And here’s where it went wrong. So she goes through and she screens the candidate. And what is she probably looking for? She’s looking for a replica of herself, potentially, and that’s really hard. And what our CEO, the first mistake that she did is she never asked the question, Hey, have you ever been responsible for hiring by firing someone, hiring and firing someone, both of those are important, and this individual has zero experience in it, so she strike number one, failed to ask that question, have you ever hired and fired someone? All right? Two, you didn’t sit down and given the parameters of what you’re looking for, what questions should you ask? What questions can you not ask in an interview which are equally important, what are the appropriate answers? What are we really trying to gage here? So we didn’t have those type of screen questions. And then what I found out later, only after the event, was that the candidate that ended up getting hired needed to reschedule their interview because they had a conflict, and it was on a day that the COO wasn’t going to be in the office. And so the CEO said, You know what? That’s fine to the person leading the organization. Why don’t you just have the interview and let me know if you want to, if you would hire her or not? Red flag galore. And so the gal comes in for the interview with a candidate, and she does a wonderful job. She’s really, she’s super nice. And they decide, hey, this is this a good person. So it got up to me. Said, Hey, we made our decision. This is who I want to hire. And I said, Okay, great. And I said, Well, have you met with her before? Yep, I’ve met with her. It’s, you know, she presented herself nice, etc. So my CEO did meet with her, but she met with her over zoom. She didn’t meet with her in person. And so the first day that the girl arrives in person, my CEO is at the office and is like, I don’t know if this is who I would have hired. And I said, Okay, well, she’s in that role now. So what are you going to do about it? And when the gal started, she had a really legitimate reason why to miss her third day of work, and she was trying to hold it together. They had an unfortunate thing happen, and she said, Hey, I’m going to need to take this time off. I understand, you know, if that means you guys can’t keep me. And my CEO was like, no, no, she’s really sweet. She’s just had a really tragic thing happen, so we’re going to have, we’re going to give her this one day off. And so because the intensity of what had happened. I told my CEO. I said, Hey, this is not a one day request. And if they think it is a one day request, they are grossly underestimating the recovery that this person is going to need, and the hands on of shuffling around to different appointments, being able to take care of themselves, the cognitive skills that have to come back, all of these different motor functions. And I said, this will be more day. How do you want to handle it? And she’s like, No, no, they have a big support system. They’ve already thought through a lot of this. It’s going to be okay. And I said, All right, so in six weeks, the gal called out nine different times, nine different times in a six week period. And so when I was sitting there with my CEO, I said, Hey, I don’t think after the third week, she’d already been missed three days of work. I said, I don’t think this is the right person. They don’t understand the intensity of what we’re doing. And she advocated and said, No, no, I think she is really good, because when she was doing work, the work product was good. And here’s what my coo was really solving for. My CEO was really solving for. I hate interviewing. I need somebody up front, and here’s a person that’s willing to be in that role. That is what they were solving for. And one of the lessons that I learned early, early on from my mom, who always sat in the practice management role or organization, or I her, my dad started the company back in 1981 and she was the CEO. She ran all the operational aspects of the company. And as I began to come up, and she began to train me, she said, making the right hiring decision is the most important task you have, because firing the wrong person is demoralizing. It sucks. It takes the life right out of you. That is why it is so important to get it right the first time. So this candidate, we were in our mini surge. So our mini surge happens once a month, for a week, we all end up going through all the advisors. We have five advisors in her office. We all go through and have appointments outside of our big surges. Our big surges are in March and April and October, November. And so during this mini surge, she got a phone call she felt it was an emergency. Said, I have to step out. We’ve got clients coming in and out. And here’s what she did. She left her team members and she asked permission. She got permission, but she left her team members, and then the next day, she called out because she was still way too distraught. Had too much stuff personally going on to contend with that. Now, did she have real things going on? Yep, sure. Did 100% guess who else had real things going on? Everybody else, everybody else had real things going on, and when she decided to leave a mini surge in the middle of the day and then not show up the next day, what she showed me was that she did team. She didn’t care about her team, and second of all, she didn’t care about the clients. The Job did not seem so important that she needed to compartmentalize whatever she was going through and protect her team, and protecting the team is one of the most paramount virtues I must have in every single one of my team members, because there is no pyramid at our organization. It is a circle, and we are all interdependent. So when the receptionist steps out, what I have is an operations person needing to come up and greet clients. That operations person then can’t transfer money for clients. They can’t do trade, can’t fill out paperwork for appointments. They can’t do all the rest of their job. Rather, they’re covering two positions. No job in our organization is small or insignificant, because if it was, it wouldn’t be a job. We would just get rid of that position. It’s not fun for me to allocate money towards payroll. If I didn’t depend and need on you for your role, then you are obsolete and must go. You must go. And so what I had was a cardinal sin in my rules of running an organization. And so then I went to my COO and I said, Hey, I suggested that you get rid of this person. You advocated for the reasons that they should stay. Now I’m telling you, let them go. And she had to go in, and she said, Okay, well, can I let them go until we find a new person? Nope, sure, can’t. Sure, can’t. Why? Because if you keep the wrong people in your organization, you keep those B and C team members because you have so much going on that you don’t have time or want to dedicate time to replacing that person. Guess what’s going to happen? You’re going to lose the wrong person. You’re going to lose the wrong person. You’re going to lose the a team member that you really didn’t want to go anywhere because at members don’t want to work with B and C team members. It makes them feel taken advantage of. And so what happens by keeping the wrong person in that role is you lose all of the right ones, and I get it guys. I’m struggling right now because I know I’ve got team members I’ve got to replace in different organizations. But guess what that means? I’ve got to go through that interview process. I’ve got to get more hands on because clearly there was a massive, failure in my leadership when I handed over of hiring the front desk person, I don’t articulate enough the importance of making that decision. And so guess what I had to do? I had to put my CEO in the position of and I asked her, I said, Hey, you know it’s my name on the door. Do you want me to come in and do this? Are you going to let her go? And she said, Nope, I’m going to take care of it. I’ll let her go. And this is not the first person fired. It’s not but here was the difference, before, when she let people go, she let them go for cause, and when you fire someone for cause, you don’t lose a wink of sleep at night, because you know that they were an absolute tool to your organization, and they were hurting everyone else, and they needed to go. But when you fire a good person who’s going through some stuff and is down on their luck, it sucks, and the day it stops hurting you, the day it feels good, the day you’re okay with it, you shouldn’t be leading people, because then you forgot what we’re in this for in the first place. Now, when she got done with it, and I told her to get rid of her immediately, because I can’t afford to lose my good team members, and to me, she violated that cardinal sin of not protecting her team and and I kept her, I feel strongly. I could have lost a team member. Maybe they would have stayed. Maybe they wouldn’t have they really wasn’t on the line. I wasn’t given an ultimatum, but it was my integrity that was on the line. It was How dare I preach how important every single person’s role is, and then allow someone to dump on someone else allow that to happen. And I’m not talking about pinching in because somebody’s going through something that’s not at all the conversation, the conversation is that it shouldn’t have happened so many times, repetitively, and she didn’t care about the team. When she decided to walk out, what she cared about was what she was personally going through. She didn’t care about the clients. She cared about what was happening in her world. And that’s okay. That’s just not a part of my organization. It can’t be. After the work day was done, she calls me up and she says, Hey, I’m just, you know, I can’t do anything tonight. I’m just totally wiped emotionally from this event, because it is an ordeal. It does hurt. It does make you feel something for that other person. And so when she got done, you know, I said, Hey, listen, I know this is a really sucky thing to go through, but there’s some really great takeaways from this. There’s some really good lessons. And the first lesson is, you have to be so, so selective in that hiring decision, so that you’re never put in this position again. That is a lesson that my mother taught me, and a lesson I want to impart to you. It doesn’t feel good to fire good people, and if you want to avoid that, then you’ve got to make sure that those people are the right ones for that right position at the right time. Now, a couple of other things that we learned from this. One was the handoff on the hiring. Clearly, before she began the interview process, I should have been stressing over and over and over again the importance of making the right decision, and just because we had an immediate need and she felt the pressure of the former employees last day coming up, doesn’t mean we should have acted hastily, because we act hastily, we put the wrong people in the roles. And that’s what happened here. We took somebody that that we needed to fill position. It was the best of what we had to look at at the time he put them in there. And to make it even worse, you didn’t even physically interview that person. Rather, you outsource that. You delegated it to somebody else that may not have been qualified to make those decisions, and certainly didn’t have the instructions in front of her, and gone through the scrutiny you would have, because after 30 years of being in your organization, you know what you’re looking for. You know who you’re looking for. And so we did a lot of things wrong there, and unfortunately it cost somebody their job. Now I can sleep at night because I also know that person played a role in that. They played a role in deciding not to come to work. They played a role in calling out so often. They played a role in choosing to go home versus looking at the day, and by the way, we’re not talking about they went home because, you know, somebody had severed their leg and they’re bleeding all over the kitchen. They chose to go home because they emotionally distraught and they couldn’t handle that. And that ended up meaning that everything got dumped on another team member. Now, at that particular time, we had people out of the office, and we had all the advisors in the office. You know, we had something on their honeymoon, someone on vacation. We had work, remote employees. We had different things. And so you consciously made a decision during that time period to leave your other team members high and dry. And that’s what you did. It wasn’t a big deal to you. So you made it a really big deal to them, and it cost her her job, and I think she played a role in that. Now I think we did things wrong, starting top down, starting with me, but we certainly didn’t help the situation, nor did she, and all we can do from this moment forward is to get better. We can get better. And so instead of thinking about these lessons, we’re going to go back and we’re going to revisit our hiring ethos. We’re going to go back to those procedures, and we’re going to put down why each one of these is important. We’re going to go over the rules of when somebody starts their employment. And one of the things I told me CEO, I said, Hey, listen, what starts in the beginning lasts until the end. And when you hire somebody during those first 90 days, they should be showing up in their absolute best. They should be so excited about that job. They should be so nervous about not being able to keep that job that they are going above and beyond. And when you don’t have somebody doing that, when you have somebody immediately showing that job as a second priority to them, or not very important to them at all, then you’ve got to immediately address it with them, and you’ve got to set an example so that the rest of your team members know that for them, yet alone, we haven’t even tapped into the client experience of seeing multiple people change in and out of your office, and what that does to your social reputation. Because there is a cost. We pay a price for everything, and so when that happens, our clients are seeing a new phase around says all of the time. That’s not the right the right decision. We need to be very, very selective about who we put in that particular role. It is one of the most important roles within our office, TPR nation. This is Jamie Shilanski, an episode of Worlds to Conquer. Go find people who share your values and change the world.