Synergistic Relationships

[00:00:14] Speaker A: Welcome to Momentum. Your inside track to the strategies, mindsets, and the how they did it stories behind World Synergys continued success. Let's unlock new levels of achievement together and join today's podcast. [00:00:27] Speaker B: So welcome to today's podcast. With us, as always, we have Glenn Smith, our CEO. Hi, Glenn. [00:00:35] Speaker A: Hi. Welcome. [00:00:36] Speaker B: Hi. And we have Charles behind the Glass. Hi, Charles. [00:00:39] Speaker C: Hello, team. [00:00:41] Speaker B: And I'm Matt Jones. Today we are continuing on our series of our core values, and we are going to talk about the core value system, synergistic relationships, which is the second half of our name, World Synergy. We've talked about world class customer experience already, and this is synergistic relationships, which we've tagged as better together than apart. That's our quick definition. But, Glenn, do you want to take us through kind of the elongated version of what synergistic relationships really is all about? [00:01:22] Speaker A: Sure. So, you know, again, going back to our history, 26 years in the making of world synergy, this is way before AI was a reality. So this is back in this concept. Matt, it might be hard for you to relate to, but because I know you're a big people person. Right. And this was back when we were in the office and teams had to come together and create projects. And the projects back in the day, 25, 30 years ago, no one could do any type of it, project or marketing project without involving multiple teams, multiple companies. And it involved a lot of finger pointing back in the day, because each team only knew what they did. And if there was an issue, they always blamed somebody else's team in that. So projects got delayed and costs got expanded and so forth. And so when I was coming up with the idea of starting a new company and knowing it would be a consultancy type, knowing that we'd have to build a team of marketing executives, it erp type of folks, I wanted to make sure that it was crystal clear in everyone's mind that to be successful in any project or any business, you had to work together. You had to bring your strengths together and have the belief that we're better together than we are alone. And so that's where the synergistic or synergy came from, is making sure that when we hired people, that we hired people that were bringing something to the table that was different than what we already had, so that we'd be able to, we would be stronger. And so that was the concept of synergistic relationships, which became our core value. [00:03:38] Speaker B: And so you pick some of the hardest people to bring together to make it, I suppose the only other thing you could have thrown accountants in and that would have, that would have really stirred the pot. [00:03:48] Speaker A: Well, I think accountants would actually would have been easy because they're pretty quiet, typically, and head down. But, yeah, it's a good point. [00:03:56] Speaker B: So obviously, there's some, some challenges in that, in bringing together different teams, which we've seen in particular in the market that we're in. We don't see a lot of businesses like ours looking at the small to mid size market space that have the marketing application technology groups in one organization. Right. And so that in and of itself is the challenge to bring that together and communicate effectively across teams. [00:04:35] Speaker A: Yeah. And so the synergy piece of becoming better together and having different types of teams, as you look at that model, it kind of instills innovation because you got to figure out how we can work together better to get one result right. So innovation was a natural progression or product of having synergistic relationships. And synergistic relationships, again, for the folks that are listening, isn't just world synergy employees, it's relationships between world synergy and our partners and our customers. It's our whole ecosystem that we have to make sure that we understand that there's value of each team and working. And when we work together and we share our unique expertise, that we, again, deliver a better product. [00:05:39] Speaker B: Yeah. There's typically what you see in organizations that do have one or two or, or more of these groups that we have is that they silo those teams. And so you're the marketing team and you're siloed and you do your own thing and we'll sell your service and we're really just in it to be able to sell as many different types of services as we possibly can. And so that's the challenge here, is not doing that and breaking down those silos more and more, especially as we hire new people who come from different organizations maybe already, that have those silos or that were just a single focus, that they have to realize that theres more to us than just that one silo. Right. Youre going to have to break down these barriers and figure out how to communicate effectively so that there's not finger pointing across the different teams and whatnot. [00:06:45] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. And so you've heard that old adage, if you want to go faster, go alone, but if you want to go farther, go together as a team, and you take that in consideration with, you talk about people bringing in different backgrounds, coming from different places and so forth, and you take that now into 2024 and you look at the culture and the generation, that generation gaps that we have. It's taken synergy or synergistic relationships so much further from one aspect and make me a little bit more complex because, you know, again, we're, a lot of folks are remote workforce. A lot of companies have to deal with people being remote in AI now. And so how do you figure out, how do you make that mix a better equation as you move forward? So I think some of the things we've had to shift because it's not in person so much anymore, and it's hard to pull things. That's why we've used tools like working genius, right. To figure out what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses? How do we bring that to the table no matter where you are, how do you look at communication styles, technology, to figure out what's the biggest value this individual is bringing and what's the best way that they want to communicate with us. So we've talked about that in other podcasts. It's taking that whole equation, looking at it from a holistic perspective and saying, you got to look at all these things and figure out, how do you move it? You know, how do you do this? And then move things forward, move it beyond, which, again, goes back to our, you know, our tagline is thrive is we want companies to feel like they're thriving, not just surviving. And you got to keep changing the equation as you're doing that. And you got to keep learning about different communication styles, different, different technologies. [00:08:52] Speaker B: Yeah. And the biggest challenge with that remote, and we've talked about this a little bit in the past, is you can allow the relationship, even internally, to become too transactional. And so by doing that, you're, let's say, following a process to the t, but you're not spending time truly getting to know each other across teams. Let's take the internal side of that, because we have a meeting. It's on teams, it's video. And then what? You don't hop on that meeting 15 minutes early like you would if you're walking into a meeting here in the office. Right. And you're chatting with the people who are there early, and you're just getting to know them. You're just talking for a minute. Right. That helps to build those cross team relationships, which helps in the communication across teams, too. [00:09:50] Speaker A: Right, right. That water cooler conversation is now a pre Zoom meeting. [00:09:55] Speaker B: Right. [00:09:55] Speaker A: Right. Where you're on a couple minutes before the meeting actually starts on Zoom, and you're just talking about whatever, you know, where you're from the weather. [00:10:04] Speaker B: Yep. [00:10:05] Speaker A: All the things that are in your office or bedroom or wherever you're, you know, you're. You're communicating from. [00:10:11] Speaker B: Yep, absolutely. [00:10:13] Speaker A: So another aspect of, you know, synergistic relationships is not just. Not just delivering a better work product or a better solution, but it's also recognizing the fact that there's a cost savings in it, which is a lot of what we do in how we do our jobs. Right. So we're teams that specialize in certain disciplines, and from an it or marketing or ERP perspective, however you want to look at it, is we're providing services to a company that doesn't have those services. And if they did have, you know, if they did have those services and needed some additional help, there'd be some redundancy there. So we typically are an extension of their business, augmentation of their business, but in our discipline, so we provide, you know, from an IT perspective or marketing perspective, that missing piece, that missing team that companies maybe can't afford on their own, or maybe it's just not the best use of time or energy for them. [00:11:21] Speaker B: Yep, absolutely. So I want to hit on the other side of that for a second, which is synergistic relationships is not just about the internal teams breaking down the silos between the teams, but it's also about how we work together with our clients. Right. In that relationship that we have with them, the partnership that we like to see with our clients, which a lot of that is being built throughout the other core values that we're doing. Right. Getting to know them, the platinum rule, all of those help to make that relationship synergistic. But in some cases, we do have. We have to work cross team in there. So let's say we have a marketing client who's only a marketing client. We might have to work with their tech team and their accountants. Right. Whoever it is. And so we need to prove that we have this same mindset with them, that they're a partner with us. Right. We can bring in the other teams to help in that instance. Like if you're talking to a tech team, for example, and you're making a DNS change with them, hey, we have a whole team that we can help you guys with this, help walk you through what's necessary. And so we can help build that synergistic relationship there as well. And not just. And not point fingers just because they're not a marketing and technology client. [00:12:52] Speaker A: Right. Right. And that's where processes and tools come into play that we're working with a client, a new client, and you know, we use a lot of terminology and acronyms of our business, but the customers don't know. And so one of the things to make these synergistic relationships work is we're getting better and better with defining processes, giving visuals of here's what onboarding looks like, here's what the next 90 days, here's what the next twelve months look like to make sure that we're seeing these things over and over again and giving clear definitions of how the secret sauce works, our repetition of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, how all those things work to get to the result that we want and those cadences, that's the synergistic piece we got to share with our clients and making sure that they're willing to commit to, because we're not an island by ourselves. We can't do it in a vacuum. We need the customer to give us input, feedback, what have you. And so again, get back to tools, processes. Those things are incredibly valuable because we need customers to communicate and we want to treat them unique in their sense of this is their style. But we need to come to a common set of tools so we can communicate and, you know, move the needle. [00:14:23] Speaker B: Absolutely. And it's part of the power of who we are to be able to be agile like that. Right. Communicate the way they like to be communicated, but also still follow our process. Right. And at the same time, going back a little bit to bringing in other teams, the strength of who we are is to be able to say, oh, you have a question about marketing. I've got a person that can answer that question. I can bring them in to the next call. [00:14:58] Speaker A: Right. [00:14:58] Speaker B: We've got a whole team dedicated to that. The ultimate goal, of course, is the cross sell. But if the cross sell never happens and we're only helping to support the client, to say, hey, we can answer a couple questions for you, we can help you out. That's who we are. That's the strength of who we are. [00:15:16] Speaker A: Right, right. And you get into economies of scale in some cases that, as you know, as small mid sized businesses need our services, is that the economies of scale is it makes sense for us to bring on a team of, let's say five or six people with a bunch of unique set talents that they couldn't afford with one, they wouldn't find with one. Right. So you get some of that. And then, so we talked about employee, employee, synergistic, employee to customer, client. There's also certain peer groups that we belong to that are of the same mindset. So from a marketing perspective, we have peer groups, we have it, peer groups and ERP and so forth, and they all bring together their own unique talents, but they strengthen it in a particular discipline. So now we bring all that together to even provide even more value to our clients. So there's different types of relationships. And Matt, you know that I belong to organization called Vistage, where one of the baselines or basic understandings of these different groups. So for those not familiar with Vistage, it's a CEO group and it's an international group. And so the way it's designed is that vistage sets up teams of entrepreneurs that are in different companies and they get together couple times a month to talk about their business and processes and they bring in experts and talk about it. But the synergy of the vistage group is that you're bringing in a team of executives that are from all different walks of life, all different types of industries. No two are the same. So you share different experiences towards running a business. And there's, so here, the synergy here is that you have different styles, different expertise, but you're all about trying to grow and run an efficient business. So, you know, again, Synergy doesn't have to be necessarily of different. We brought up some examples of where that makes a lot of sense, but it can also be of the same and then just bring different backgrounds into marketing or it, or what have you. Yeah. [00:17:55] Speaker B: And in fact, when we talk about building relationships with clients, and this is true internal as well, one of the things that we'll often say is find the common ground, find the similarities to help first bridge that gap. Right. Starting off with just the differences makes it hard. Right. Find that common ground that you have with each other and use that as the intro, the baseline to start building this relationship together, whether that's client to employee, employee to employee, cross team, whatever it is, there's common ground that we all have in different things. I'm not going to go to a client. This is an example I actually used the other day talking to one of the teams is I'm not going to go to a client and they are an avid golfer, and all of a sudden I'm going to start talking golf with them. It's not going to happen. I know there are drivers, there's putters. Right. It's just not going to. They're going to be able to see right through me and think, wow, he's really being fake in this conversation. Right, right. But there's some common ground I have with them. It's just not going to be that. That might be their most interesting thing. Right. But that's just not going to be the common ground I have with them. So we have to find what is that common ground that we have together. In vistage, your CEO's, you're all trying to run businesses. That's the common ground that you have to help focus each other. It's easy to find the common ground within your teams. Like, hey, we're all marketing people, we're all tech people. It's very easy to find that common ground. It's a lot harder across team to find that common ground. Sometimes it may have nothing to do with work as a starting point, and then you build into the rest of that relationship, you start really communing together and you'll find more common ground. That does have to do with work after that. [00:19:55] Speaker A: Yeah, that's interesting that you make me think about the way you said that is about teams, sport teams, and then businesses and us with eos. So, you know, how eos brings together synergistic relationships is that before eos, for us as a company, we were improving processes and we were running standard meetings, if you will, but not really growing as a company and not really growing individuals the way we wanted it to grow. And so what I think is helpful in synergistic relationships is that you have a. An agreed process or an agreed format of how you want to run the business and communicate, and that common language, just like you would on a sports team, of these are the rules, right? And so you don't break these rules. But most sports teams have unique players, unique talents, and they understand what the rules are and the objectives of the game. Much like business and much like in a company, once you establish that, then they can bring their best selves to the playing field. And again, there's all these different tools that has helped us along the way. Not just one, but eos working genius. These all have helped us to hopefully build better relationships with our clients, better relationships with our employees. And in some instances, you talk about the positives mad as well as the negatives. Well, we've also identified where there's just no room in world synergy for prima donnas. There's no room for people that might be phenomenal in their own right, but just don't fit on a team. And I think that's a hard thing for a lot of companies to deal with, because again, even in sports, I think there's great examples where you might have a phenomenal player, but they're not a team player. And it just brings the team down because it doesn't galvanize them, it doesn't bring out their best talents because there's no trust there. Right. [00:22:11] Speaker B: Yep. And it really makes it easy for the team to revert back to becoming siloed if you have prima donnas on the team, especially if one is a leader. Right. That tends to then split things that say, hey, we can do this on our own. We don't need to be better together. Right. [00:22:32] Speaker A: Right. [00:22:32] Speaker B: And so. Or they might take that adage of going faster. Right. I don't care about going farther. I just care about going faster because I want to get it done right. And that hurts the team, hurts the culture, hurts this core value. Of course. [00:22:49] Speaker A: Well, how many times have we heard, I might as well just do it myself. I can do it a lot faster. Right. [00:22:54] Speaker B: Yep. [00:22:55] Speaker A: And understand that that's not the world synergy way. Yes. You could get it done faster, but then that individual or the team will never learn. Right. And then you no longer, you as an individual, don't grow because you're not delegating anything, you're not releasing anything to other people on your team or inside the company. Therefore, you don't grow and they don't grow. [00:23:17] Speaker B: Yep. [00:23:18] Speaker C: And I can speak to that actually just personally, because before coming to world synergy, I was that quote, unquote, lone wolf, that person that would do things on my own and get stuff done. But there was no collaboration. There was no place for me to personally grow and have a team that essentially had my back for the areas in which I didn't have the knowledge or the strength from that aspect. And being here has shown me that the team helps me to grow. I would have never grown into the roles that I am in now, not just, you know, from a work standpoint, but from a personal standpoint and personal development. So that's. [00:24:09] Speaker B: Yeah, it's really a difficult thing because it's not always just based on being a prima donna. Sometimes is based on wanting to truly help, but to be able to say to someone, no, that's not me, or, no, that's right. In the right context to allow somebody else. Sometimes it's easier to just say, oh, yeah, I'll do that. Thanks for. Right. I'll do that just because I know I can get it done faster. I don't have to train anybody else, et cetera. Right. All those reasons. And so sometimes it's a harder because those of us, sometimes our core nature is to just do it, just get it done. Right. Somebody asked me to do it, therefore I'm going to do it. As opposed to stopping taking a step back and thinking, am I the right person to do it? Am I the person even in the process that's supposed to do it? And if not, it's okay to say to them, let me get you so and so, who is the person, the best person to help with this situation? Like you said, that allows the person that's supposed to do it to grow. Right. It allows you to grow because it allows you to do the things that you supposed to be doing as opposed to just reacting to the nature around you. Right. And that is, I think, a really cool thing when that crosses teams to be able to say, oh, I'm not the person to sit on this call with you. Right. I don't know anything about SEO, but let me get you in touch with, I'll send an email or I'll schedule a meeting to get you in touch with so and so. Who is the right person to have this conversation with you? So it's sometimes knowing that, and I can have that problem too sometimes. Sometimes I just want to do it, get it done. And sometimes it's because I just want to help. Sometimes it's because I don't feel like I have the time to train somebody at that moment. Right. But in doing so, yeah, we cut off the other people from being able to learn and do it better the next time. [00:26:17] Speaker A: Right, right. And we've learned this over the many years in how to hire for synergistic people. And this is, I think, probably four years ago I heard this, this analogy is when you're looking to hire somebody for a specific role or seat, is that you, sometimes you're stuck with a conversation, the decision of best versus the right. And the best person might be someone that just knows this job. They could nail it, like they're an expert in this and realize they've done that all their life. But the right person might be someone that has less skill but has the ability to adapt and change and work as a team. And we've done that many times. We've had some misfires and mis hires because of that. We hired somebody that, yep, they fit the box. They checked off all the things that we needed, but they weren't willing to adapt and change. And while they fit a mold and they fixed a problem that we had, they weren't a long term play. So that's another thing about synergistic relationships is we know that to work in most companies, you have to be able to adapt and to be able to grow, because the business that you are tomorrow is nowhere near what it looks like today. [00:27:43] Speaker B: Absolutely. Absolutely. We've personally experienced that many times throughout world. Synergy's history, right. Where we are today is leaps and bounds beyond where we have been in the past. [00:27:56] Speaker A: Right. And, you know, again, it gets back to process. We've talked about process, that process, for us to keep these core values and to really, to embody them, it's a process. It's a discipline. It's not something where you just say it. You actually have to. You have to put structure in meetings, you have to put policies in place. You put in our handbook, you do a variety of different things to make sure that you're truly embodying a synergistic relationship. It's not a, hey, I'm gonna do it when I feel like it, which, you know, we've encountered that throughout the many years where you hire somebody that's incredibly talented, but they come in spurts. And what we've realized is that to be great at what we do, it's got to be reliable, it's got to be consistent. You have to have a discipline, because if you have somebody that's just going to come and go in spurts when you need something done, it may not be when they're at their ultimate best or reliability. So I'd rather have good than great if I could depend on good when I need it. Because it gets the job done. [00:29:11] Speaker B: Absolutely. So, with that, any closing thoughts on synergistic relationships? [00:29:17] Speaker A: Charles? It's hard, isn't it? [00:29:19] Speaker C: That is an understatement. But it's worth it, right? [00:29:23] Speaker A: Right. It's a challenge. And for those, you know, listening to this, it's about sharing our differences and our unique talents. And that's, you know, again, what makes us a great company. Using those unique talents, those unique abilities, using the working genius to figure out what gives you energy, what gives you frustration to get to that, you know, that best, your best self, we'll just leave it there. [00:29:53] Speaker B: And from you saying that and now relating it to kind of like a marriage, right? You are two unique people who have to figure out how to work together in that common ground, and it's allowing each other to be those unique people at the same time as being one. [00:30:16] Speaker A: Right. And sometimes it's a lot easier to be a dictator. Right. It's a lot easier to be the heavy hand, but it's one of the reasons why, you know, I have anniversary lunches with everyone. It doesn't matter who you are because your opinion matters. You're a person and you have value, and we just got to figure out how to best utilize that. You talk about marriage. The first thing that came to my mind is talking about my kids. Right. In growing young adults, you want them to have independent thinking, and you can't do that if you tell them, just do as I say all the time, and you don't give them the ability to have a conversation with you or to even, quote unquote, talk back because they have an opinion. Right. And so you get what you tolerate in a lot of cases. And some of that is, you know, it's difficult because you want your kids to be independent, and that means that they have now an opinion, and that means you got to listen to that opinion. Right. And we've said how many times? Well, everyone here has an opinion. Doesn't mean we're going to go with it. We just want you to know that we value it and we hear you and here's why we made these decisions. [00:31:34] Speaker B: Exactly. Still waiting on those nap pods. All right. So I think we're done with synergistic relationships here. So thank you, Glenn, very much. Appreciate it. [00:31:47] Speaker A: Thanks, gentlemen. [00:31:48] Speaker B: Thanks, Charles. [00:31:48] Speaker C: No problem. [00:31:49] Speaker B: So, until next time. [00:31:58] Speaker A: Thank you for joining us on momentum today.