Andrew: Three messages before we get started. If you’re a tech entrepreneur, don’t you have unique legal needs that the average lawyer can’t help you with? That’s why you need Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law. If you read his articles on Venture Beat, you know that he can help you with issues like raising money, or issuing stock options or even deciding whether to form a corporation. Scott Edward Walker is the entrepreneur’s lawyer. See him at WalkerCorporateLaw.com.
And do you remember when I interviewed Sarah Sutton Fell about how thousands of people pay for her job site? Look at the biggest point that she made, she said that she has a phone number on every page of her site because, and here’s a stat, 95% of the people who call end up buying. Most people though don’t call her, but seeing a real number increases their confidence in her and they buy. So try this, go to Grasshopper.com and get a phone number that will make your company sound professional. Add it to your site and see what happens. Grasshopper.com.
And remember Patrick Buckley who I interviewed? He came up with an idea for an iPad case, he built a store to sell it and in a few months he generated about a million dollars in sales. Well, the platform he used is Shopify. If you have an idea to sell anything, set up your store on Shopify.com because Shopify stores are designed to increase sales. Plus, Shopify makes it easy to set up a beautiful store and manage it. Shopify.com. Here’s the program.
Hi everyone, my name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. How do business people lead in tough times? To answer that question, I invited Jeffrey Hayzlett, author of “Running the Gauntlet”, former CMO of Eastman Kodak Company and the Founder of the Hayzlett Group. Welcome.
Jeffrey: Hey, it’s good to be here, Andrew. Thank you so much.
Andrew: So, can you tell me, to illustrate what the book is teaching entrepreneurs and other business people, can you tell me about that clock in the conference room that you mention in your book?
Jeffrey: Oh, this is a great example of being able to drive change. You know, in my first book, The Mirror Test, which was a best seller, I talked about how to ask the right questions. In this particular book I start to take off what I left off and one great example in the very first chapter, the very first story, because I like to tell things in stories, was around a meeting that you always have in these big corporations and companies and we’re sitting around the meeting and every time we had a meeting in this particular room, the folks would sit there and talk about, hey, that clock is off.
There was a clock on the wall that was always off, it was never right. And everybody kept complaining about it and complaining about it and always talking about it and what a waste of time and so forth and so on. And I said, well finally I pointed to someone and I said, well, why don’t you do something about it? And they said, well, we have to call maintenance and we don’t know who to call and you know, going on and on and on.
Finally, some young woman got up, pushed her chair over to the wall, stood up on the chair, opened up the clock and changed it. And that’s what it takes to be an agent of change. It’s someone willing to overcome the first three seconds of fear, be willing to be a beginner, you know, be willing to say, I’m going to do something that’s different and change it. And that’s all it takes. And that was the difference between a leader and someone who was going to sit around and complain and bitch and moan. And I thought it was a great example to open the book with.
Andrew: You know, you mentioned that you love telling stories and in your book, “Running the Gauntlet”, I found just story after story illustrating all these points that, all the tactics and all the big ideas that you’re teaching business people. I always struggle to get entrepreneurs when I get them on here to tell stories. Why are you so good at stories? Why are stories so important that you just filled your book with them? Why not facts and numbers and charts if you’re talking to business people?
Jeffrey: Yeah, well those are boring and I don’t like boring things. I like real examples and I think people learn from mistakes and successes that people have and so I thought a great way to be able to tell an illustration of a point is through a story because then you get to see it in real practical terms. You know, sometimes charts and those things are helpful but to me those are things that are more backwards looking.
I think stories are more of what’s now and what’s real and I think you learn better by telling those kinds of stories and seeing illustrations. You know, good and bad and I poke fun at myself throughout the book and I certainly poke fun at the companies that I’ve worked with. You know, we’ll talk a little bit probably about Kodak, both its successes and it’s failures because there’s going to be an interview coming up and you know, I think that’s a great way, you know, to be transparent and just lay it out.
Andrew: And when you had an issue at Kodak or at any companies that you worked with, can you just stop and tell a story when people are looking for direction?
Jeffrey: Oh, without a question. Why can’t you? I mean, why can’t you use it as an illustration? I mean, I grew up that way and maybe that’s my upbringing in South Dakota too, you know we tend to be a little bit more cowboys and Indians out there so we learn a lot through our history of storytelling. That’s important for us to be able to use. But, yeah, why can’t you? I mean there’s no reason why you can’t use a story or an example to be able to make a point and I think it’s good for us to teach. I mean, if you’re a leader in the company that’s your job. I mean, that’s your responsibility is to lead and what better way to do that than to teach and to teach through practical and real life examples.
Andrew: All right, I meant…
Jeffrey: Actually, I got to tell you, I had a speaker this morning, a Chief Marketing Officer for a four billion dollar biotech that I had breakfast with this morning, and this person was going to go speak at a conference and she said, give me some jokes, I need some jokes. I said, I can’t give you any jokes. All the jokes I tell are stories about me, I don’t tell fake stories. I tell real stories and real examples because that’s all I know.
Andrew: I mentioned the book a couple of times, “Running the Gauntlet”, what is a gauntlet?
Jeffrey: Well, everyone kind of knows what a gauntlet is or at least you’ve been through it if you’ve been in a corporation many, many times, but I talk about a gauntlet being something that you’re a white trapper in the Rocky Mountains in 1823 and you’re captured by a tribe of Indians and they drag you into the camp and they line up everybody in the entire village on two opposing lines and you’re made to run down that length of that gauntlet or that parallel line. And as you’re doing so, people beat you and hit you with sticks and throw stones. And we’ve seen it in the movies, you’ve seen these depictions before, some of the old Western movies that are out there.
And that’s what it’s like in corporate America. That’s what it’s like in most business. That you’re made to run a gauntlet, especially agents of change. And I call them, Andrew, those white buffalo that sit in the middle of a herd, they are easy to spot, they’re very sacred, they only show up every so often, and certainly Native Americans have always held them to be very sacred and most people and most companies should hold them to be very sacred because they’re the, they’re these people who want to go out and enact change.
And what happens is you run this gauntlet and if you get through they tell you that if you live then they’ll set you free. But usually that’s not the case. What they do is then they get on horses and tell you to take off running again and they’ll chase you down on the horses. I mean, it’s a never ending process when you’re an agent of change.
Andrew: So you’re telling me that as an agent of change, as a leader, as anyone in business, the analogy is it’s like walking a straight line and having people on both sides of you beat you with sticks, and kick you in the butt? Give me an example of who was beating you as you were doing your business.
Jeffrey: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is and they’re doing that and that’s even when you have permission. I mean, even when everybody knows that’s your job because they don’t want things to change. They are going to be naysayers, opportunists, you know, obstructionists…
Andrew: Can you give me examples? Who did this to you as…
Jeffrey: Oh, everybody. I mean, come on, every department, every group. I mean, you know, you’re job is to create tension in the company when you’re an agent of change. If you’re a leader of a company, you’re job is to take everybody from the center of the table and move them to the edge of the table. Where you know, but other groups like HR and Legal and other’s will say, oh, no we can’t do that, we’ve got to move you back to the center where it’s safe.
Well, that’s not their job, their job is to make sure that you don’t, you know that I don’t fall off and to make sure that I’m in the parameters but I’m still safe. And most people don’t look at it, they look at it like their job is to drag you back or to stop you or to put governance on your, or governors, you know, just like you’re not allowed to drive over 55. Well, why do you have to put a little rubber stopper on the gas pedal, just teach me that I’m not supposed to drive over 55. And quite frankly, maybe every once in a while I need to drive a little over 55 so when I’m going up a steep hill and I need to push the gas a little harder so I can keep and maintain my speed at 55. Did you think of that?
And so, those are the people that are all these obstructionist and naysayers that never, well, they’re in every company and sometimes they’re in your own departments and sometimes they’re in your own family, sometimes you know it’s your spouse and sometimes it’s your brother and sometimes it’s the people that you’ve hired. And you just got to learn as an agent of change, as a leader in a company, you’ve got to just move past these people.
Andrew: You know, it’s funny, I talk to new entrepreneurs and they say once I get experience I’m really looking forward to having people not just question everything that I do and finally accept that I know what I’m doing and follow me. And then I talk to experienced entrepreneurs and they say, you know people just keep doubting me because they don’t know how big my company is or they don’t accept that I’ve done something here. They don’t trust me based on my reputation. If only I were at a major corporation, then they’d respect me.
And here you are at a major corporation. You’ve made a big name for yourself. You’re on TV. You’ve talked about how you walk into Staples and people, celebrities, sight you. They say hey, there’s the guy we saw on TV and so on. Still, within your own organization, never mind in the outside world, people are doubting you. I’ve said that you’re a great story teller and you have lots of examples to illustrate the ideas that you express. Do you have an example of someone internally who doubted you? Someone internally who, and you don’t have to use a name. I’m not looking for a specific outing of a person but I want to get a sense of it. I want the audience to feel…
Jeffrey: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got a thousand of them, are you kidding me?
Andrew: Hit me.
Jeffrey: And by the way there’s no difference between that entrepreneur, that guy that’s on Main Street, say, in Dubuque, Iowa or a guy that’s on Wall Street in New York City. The only difference between those two businesses is the number of zeros in their numbers. Whether they’ve got 27 employees or 27,000 employees they’ve got the same problems, same issues. The only difference in revenue is just the numbers in the game.
That’s what my father-in-law came to me and said how do you keep all this straight? I just pretend like I’m running a business in Sioux Falls. It’s just got more zeros on the end. If it’s a bad decision, if I did it on Main Street in Sioux Falls, if I was running a business in Sioux Falls and I’m spending money on advertising and it looked like a really stupid decision there. Well, guess what, it’s an even bigger stupid decision on Wall Street.
Andrew: Sorry to interrupt but by the way, as an entrepreneur I’ve always done it the other way around. When I started out and it’d be just maybe $1,000 I always imagined three zeros on the end of that number just to say hey, I’m better than a $1,000 in revenue but $1 million, let’s pretend that this is $1 million. And treat that customer like he’s a million dollar client and go after them and their friends the same way.
Jeffrey: I love that. Andrew, I’m going to have to steal that because that’s the side of it of taking care of your customer and imagining what that opportunity is going to be. Don’t limit yourself to it’s only $1,000 customer. Well, it could be a million dollar customer. I love that idea.
Andrew: You know my dad, I’m sorry, one more time. I keep interrupting with my own stories but I’ve got to tell you this.
Jeffrey: No, this is fun. This is the internet. This is the way it’s supposed to be. This is running the gauntlet right now.
Andrew: It is, isn’t it? All right, and I promise for the audience it’s not about me. It’s about Jeffrey and we’ll spend most of the time on him. But I remember my dad had a wholesale clothing business. His whole life he was just manufacturing women’s clothing and then he decided you know what, I could open up stores too. Because I see some of these guys who open up stores, he said to himself, and they’re not any smarter than me. I’ll have a chain of stores.
He opened up one store and he started collecting like $10 in sales, $20 in sales at a time. He goes what is this $20 bill? What am I even doing in this place? I used to sell thousands of dollars at a time. $10, $20 is nothing. He couldn’t accept it, he went right back to wholesale. He should have pretended that there were zeros on the end of it and imagined when there were zeros on the end of the number of stores that he had. It maybe would have helped him.
But, you were saying, you’re still going through the gauntlet no matter what.
Jeffrey: I’ll give you an example of mine. I remember when Kodak made the change in their logo. They’d changed their logo before I’d gotten there. They’d updated it. They’d had the old, yellow box which was recognizable but dated. They decided to go with another logo. When I got there it had already been implemented for a year or two. Yet when I walked around the halls of Kodak they still had the old logo everywhere. People would sit there and tell me well, we can’t change the letterhead or the stationary because we’re saving money. We’re an imaging company. An imaging company! They provided millions of dollars worth of equipment to commercial printers yet they couldn’t change the letterhead and envelopes? Are you freaking kidding me?
Or I would walk around the all the new employees had brand new badges but the old employees, who had been there forever, had the old logo on their badges. I started telling people look, get those logos changed on the badges or I’m going to start cutting them up. I started telling people and I started walking around with a pair of scissors. I’d grab a pair of scissors and I’d walk down the hallway, like this, looking for people and pretending like I was going to cut their badges. Then people started to change it. Again, like the clock example, it was a great example.
The teams came to me and said we can’t replace the badges because they’re $5 a piece and it’s too expensive so people started losing their badges. Which they were very smart people because they’d say they lost it and had to get it replaced. Pretty soon the security guys caught on to that. Then people started actually making little stickers and they replaced the old logo with at least a sticker. They were at least trying to adhere to Jeff’s trying to change this. He’s right, we should look fresh, we should look new. We preach this so why don’t we walk the talk? Why aren’t we drinking the Kool-Aid?
I can remember getting called into the controller’s office because I was threatening to cut up people’s badges. The comment, I remember I think I’ve got this in the book, she said Jeff, you can’t cut up people’s badges. I said I haven’t cut up people’s badges. She said Jeff, we all know that you’ve cut up people’s badges. I said I have not cut up anyone’s badge. Name me one person whose badge I’ve cut. She couldn’t, she was quiet. I said I have threatened to cut people’s badges and I walk around with scissors wherever I go to threaten to cut up their badges in half because of the old logos. But I’ve never yet done it.
There was an example of here was somebody trying to stop me. Called me in, said I couldn’t do these things but yet I hadn’t really done them. I just let the threat of doing them…
Andrew: It’s like getting called into the principle’s office in elementary school. You said in the book…
Jeffrey: It wasn’t just one time, I got called in many times. Trust me. You can imagine what it was like for me being loose in a fortune 100 company but that’s my job. My job was to go around and change things. My job was to create tension. In sports they’ve got the saying no pain, no gain. How come we don’t have some of that in business? That’s what tension is about.
Andrew: You did say in the book that you thought about setting a bonfire to all the old letterhead, all the old business cards, all the old everything that had that old logo because the company had so much invested in that paper. They didn’t want to chuck it out and get new ones. They wanted to use what they had. You couldn’t cut up people’s badges. You obviously couldn’t start a bonfire to burn all the old paperwork with the logos. What do you do? How do you, with those restrictions, implement change?
Jeffrey: Well, what I did was I pulled all the executive assistants together in the headquarters because mostly where I was seeing the resistance was at the headquarters. I did two things. One, I wanted to change people’s pictures as well because their pictures hadn’t been updated in forever. They said we can’t afford to do that. I’m going my God, we’re Kodak. If we can’t afford to change pictures then how can we expect our customers to do it?
What I did was I recruited all of the executive secretaries in the building because they’re the ones that really run stuff. I recruited them and told them what I was trying to do and how I was trying to do it. I told them what a terrible thing it looked like when we sent things out on old stationary. Could they help me? Could they go through all the file cabinets in the headquarters buildings, find me all of the old stuff? Now let’s go find a way to repurpose it and reuse it. Use it as scratch paper. Let me take it over here and have it made into pads where we use the backsides of it as scratch paper. What are the other ideas that you could use it for? They came up with other things and so we donated some of it. We did other things with it.
I was able to do that so I could drive that stuff out. Otherwise, I tell people if you, even your picture Andrew, if you use your picture and it’s one you don’t like, you give it to somebody it will take you at least two years to track it down through the internet to get rid of it. Then you never really get rid of it. Those were the things we had to do.
I can remember, Andrew, another example was changing the business card. I wanted to change the business card because it hadn’t been updated. I said look, one of the most iconic things at Kodak was to have a business card with your picture on it. I said why don’t we make this even more social, more conversational? Why don’t we allow them to not only put their business picture on the front but on the back of the business card put any picture that they would like to have on the back of the business card? Like a personal branding statement. For my business card it had me on the back of a horse in the middle of South Dakota because I’m a cowboy and that’s what I like to do. For other people they put pictures of their cats because they like their cats more than their kids. For other people it was a car, whatever. It was a conversation starter.
I can remember the folks in legal and HR coming to me and saying well, we can’t do that. I go what do you mean we can’t do that? Again these are these obstructions, these naysayers, these do-gooders who think they’re doing the right thing. They came to me and said Jeff, what happens if someone puts something inappropriate on the back of a business card? My response was I hope they do because one, it will liven this place up a little bit and two, more importantly, that’s how you find out who the stupid people are in the organization. Right? I said so we’ll solve it and I just went ahead and did it anyway.
Sometimes you have to do the right things even when you don’t always have permission to do that. That’s one example of doing it. What would have happened if we had made a mistake, Andrew? No one would have died.
Andrew: I’m writing down notes because there’s so much I want to bring up, including no one dies. We think a lot of times people would die. Actually, let’s start with that. No one would die. We do tend to stay up at night worrying in business. We do tend to be afraid to take risks because we’re afraid of some big thing and you say no one’s going to die.
Jeffrey: What’s the biggest thing that could happen to you? For the most part, and especially when you’re talking about marketing or other things. That you’re being fairly true to your brand. You’re going to make mistakes. It’s OK to make mistakes. Are you perfect? Everyone knows that if I go and do business with a company that I’m not perfect. Guess what? We’re humans. We’re not perfect.
I think people are OK with that. I mean, look at iPhone. The iPhone. They shipped a product that had a big mistake. You have to put some stupid little thing around it to have even used it, the damn thing. And they’re not dying. Just admit that when you screw up you screw up. I mean what’s wrong with that?
Andrew: So even though we know no one is going to die. Even though we know that Apple, Kodak, every major corporation makes mistakes too. We still worry about things. About making mistakes. We still worry about being called out on our failures. How do we deal with that?
Jeffrey: Well I think it has to be the confidence in yourself as a leader that that’s OK. You can call me out. Man have I made mistakes. I can make out a long list of them. My wife will give you a list. My mother will give you a list. My competitors will give you a list. And my employees will give you a list.
We should be making mistakes. Every good athlete. The king of home runs is also the king of strike outs. One goes with the other and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. I just think you got to keep it in proper perspective. You can make mistakes but no one, outside of being a brain surgeon or a heart surgeon, no ones going to die.
So I want you to take some chances. You should stretch a little bit. You should cause some tension. You should do some things to make it a lot more exciting and a lot more fun. Again. Give it a shot. Push it. If you are going to fail, I’m saying, if you are going to fail, fail big. I mean do it big. Don’t sweat the small stuff.
And I know what it’s like. Look. If you haven’t laid awake at night wondering how you are going to make payroll the next day you haven’t driven a good business. In my opinion.
I don’t like that feeling. But I’ve been there in my business career. Wondering if I’m going to make the tax payment the next day. How I am going to come up with this or having to put my salary off for a while. I’ve been there just like any good entrepreneur has been there.
And you are willing to roll the dice two or three times to make it happen. And I’ll do it again and again to make things go the way that I want to. Because that’s what I think entrepreneurs do.
Andrew: The best way that I know to get past that worry about failing in public is to just bring guys like you on here to Mixergy who have accomplished a lot to say, hey I’ve screwed up too. I think that if we as business people are surrounded by others who talk about their failures it doesn’t seem so big any more because it doesn’t feel like something that only I would make. Or that other people would call only me on.
It makes you feel like you are part of a fraternity of people who screw up because they are aiming big and for the most part they do really well and sometimes they screw up. That’s part of who we are. It’s part of our culture as business people. As fighters.
Jeffrey: Yeah. It’s OK to make a bone head move every once in a while. I made them. I mean I did them with big zeros behind them too. With Kodak. When I was at Kodak.
Andrew: What’s the biggest mistake? What’s the biggest bone head?
Jeffrey: My biggest one there. I’m sure that my team will probably point out a lot more but I’ll give you one example. I’m in a fight against big eight. One of the biggest companies in the world they are. They made nine billion dollars just off of ink jet cartridges alone last year. Nine billion dollars.
Andrew: Who is this? Can you say the name?
Jeffrey: I can’t say their name but their initials are HP. Give you an idea of who they are. Because of all the legal problems and everything else I’ll give you their initials.
They made nine billion dollars just last year off just ink jet cartridges. Their model is basically a free printer. Printer off the shelf. The ink jet cartridges are locked up behind the counter. It’s more expensive than human blood. Those ink and ink jet cartridges. No reason for it.
At Kodak our motto was at the time half price ink or cheaper ink. A better price for the ink. Pay a fair price for the printer but half price for the ink. So I said let’s show the decadence of the model. This was about four years ago.
Before Mobile was really big I said let’s do a Mobile campaign. Let’s go out and show that we are innovative. I was always trying to be innovative whether I was doing the Celebrity Apprentice or Peoples Choice Awards. Or we’re doing some different things that most people hadn’t pretty much done.
Infomercials. We did infomercials with a major product. When most companies the only thing you did was colon blow or something like that. And so we took the ink jet. Launched it on the infomercial. But I said let’s do a Mobile campaign and what we said was let’s show the decadence. So I went out and hired Vinnie Pastore. Vinnie plays big putsy on the Sopranos. I mean who better to show it than a gangster.
So you can imagine what the spot was. I said let’s take the spot and let’s put it in a motion picture theatre where that is our key audience. We know they’re there and we’ve got them captive and we will show them a commercial before the movie starts and they can see it and they can text us and we can send them a coupon. Now, think about this.
Here was the spot. He drives up to the docks on the East river outside of New York, gets out of a black Lincoln Continental, wearing a black leather jacket, carrying a baseball bat. He walks to the trunk, opens the trunk, looks in the trunk. You see, peering out, looking up at him, what you think is a body. He leans down into the trunk and he says, “You’ve been lying to us, you’ve been cheating us, you’ve been robbing us blind.” The family says, “You’ve got to go.”
Then, we show a picture of an HP Inkjet printer in the trunk. He takes it out, beats it with a baseball bat, puts a chain on it, ties it to a cement block and throws it into the river. He walks back, gets in his car, puts his arm around the Kodak printer and says, “Welcome to the family.” The headline says, “Don’t get whacked by high inkjet prices, text this number and take 50% off on the printer.” Wow. We tested it: double digit response. I said, “Let it go,” and we put it out everywhere. I come back in on Monday morning, waiting to see the results. Someone slides a sheet of paper with the number of texts we got over the weekend, and on that page was written “Two.” Two. And I’m going, “What, two million? Two hundred thousand?” They say, “No, just two.”
I said, “Get everyone in a room that put this campaign together,” and they got in a room. I said, “Somebody, please explain to me the results of this thing. Why did we only get two texts? We double tested it. Even entrepreneurs would find this funny. I almost peed my pants when I saw the test results. We got a double digit response and then we only got two texts? Someone explain to me what happened.” Some one raised their hand in the back of the room. I said, “What?” They go, “Jeff, what do you do with your phone when you walk into a motion picture theater? You turn it off.” And I said, “Where the heck were you when we came up with this idea?” So, that was my mistake. I didn’t think it through, I just said, “Go do it.” And since they were more scared of me than to question it, they went out and put this whole campaign together.
They did a great job, spent tons of money, and then we didn’t think of the fundamental thing: Will the dog eat the dog food? Should we walk through the process of what will happen to the person sitting there watching our spot? We blew it. So, that’s a bonehead move. But, no one died. We re-purposed the campaign for something else, and it was very successful. You’ve got to be willing to take chances.
Andrew: I don’t know if you saw, but I was shocked all over again when you said that. Hearing it from you is twice as shocking as reading it, and it’s still just a big failure. I’ve got it here in my notes. Our pre-interviewer, Jeremy, went through your book and got a bunch of stories for me to include and he said, “You’ve got to include this story because it’s such a shocker!” I’m still shocked hearing you do it again. Anyway, the thing that I’m wondering is, at that moment, when someone raises their hand and says, “Hey, people have their cell phones turned off in the theater,” I feel so stupid that I instinctively want to lash out at someone else and say, “Hey, where were you? It’s your fault. I’m running a major corporation here and I can’t think of every detail for you. Nobody tested it in the theater.” How do you stop from doing that?
Jeffrey: Well, you can’t. You’ve just got to say, “Look. Our attitude is you gave it your best shot, we screwed up on that one, but let’s get it right now.” If you continue to do that, a habit will develop which is not going to be good. If you have a professional football team, and you’re in the Super Bowl, and I have this guy who I pay $6,000,000 a year for blocking this other across from him who’s making an equal amount of money, and if every once in a while, he blows the block, am I going to throw him out altogether? No. Every once in a while, that guy across from him is just as good as him, and he’s going to beat him.
What I want to do is instill in the team this thought process that says you’re willing to take a shot. If you threw the block and you missed him, give it another shot and knock him next time because we’ve got to make this play. You can’t just throw these people out. In the end, you’re the quarterback and you’re the coach. You’re responsible and you’ve got to take the responsibility. I actually turned to my team at that point and said, “Look, this is my fault. I take responsibility. I should have asked the right questions. You guys went out and did what I told you to do. I should have made you put a qualifier on there: Will the dog eat the dog food? We tested it, but the problem is, we didn’t test it with someone with their cell phone off.” You learn those kind of things, and that’s OK to learn. We re-purposed it and again, it was a very successful campaign for us.
Andrew: You mentioned earlier that on the back of your business card, there was a photo of you on a horse. Tell the audience how you learned to ride a horse.
Jeffrey: Well, you’ve got to be a beginner. It’s a great example. In the book, I talk about this. If you’re going to be a great leader in business, you have to be willing to say, “I’m a beginner.” I don’t know that. When someone asks you hey, do you know so-and-so and so-and-so the first inclination is to go yeah I know them. Then it turns out you don’t know them because they gave you a fake name that wasn’t really a real person or whatever it is. You know, they catch you.
This is a great example of where I always, in my whole life, wanted to be a cowboy. I wanted to ride horses. I wanted to have a horse and do all that. I could never afford it, never had time and certainly never had the skill set for it. I decided one day I was going to do it. Look, I’m 35, 40, I don’t know how old I was at the time. I was about 40 years old and I said I’m buying horses and I’m going to ride horses. I’m going to get a horse. I went out and bought a saddle, I bought the equipment. I bought a trailer to get the horse. I went out and bought a horse, OK. I went to friends, a friend’s source. I read Horses for Dummies. I swear to God there’s such a book.
Andrew: Was it any good, was it helpful?
Jeffrey: Yeah, it was very helpful. Then I read all of these other books. I watched videos and everything else. Then I went to my friends and had them show me. Then I went and got the horse and brought it back and I boarded it at this place for a while. Now I have my own little place where I keep my horses out in the middle of a field and pastures and all that. At that time I boarded it and I’m going to ride the horse. But I don’t know how to put on a saddle. I don’t know the first thing about putting on a saddle. And I didn’t have anybody in my family that could show me how.
There was a 14 year old girl who was working at the stables. She was the mucker. She was the girl who basically brought the horses in, put them away at night, and then mucked out the stalls. She’s basically shoveling horse shit. A 14 year old and I had to go up to her and say miss, could you do me a favor? Could you show me how to put this on my horse?
Here’s a 40 year old guy going to some 14 year old girl. First a guy with a young girl, and I’ve got to ask her to do what I consider a fairly manly kind of thing. That’s how I learned how to put a saddle on a horse, put the reins on a horse. You’ve got to be willing to get over that first three seconds of fear, of saying I’m going to be man enough to go ask this little girl who was half my size. She was a small, petite young woman. Beautiful young gal. Love her. She showed me how to saddle my horse.
I think it’s a great analogy though, Andrew, for what it should be like as an entrepreneur. If you don’t know this thing, go find the person who knows how to do it. This gal knew more about it than I did. If you want to become a maestro you have to become as a beginner. At some point you have to take a violin and draw the first note. That first note’s not going to be good. You need somebody to teach you how to draw the best note possible. How to position your hands. How to hold the bow. How to position it just correctly under your chin and what a good note sounds like.
Andrew: I had a hard time with that. I do videos with guys like you and so people start to think that I have all this great intelligence and they attribute all kinds of super powers to me because I’m talking to people who have these super powers in business. As a result I said I can’t admit that I don’t know how to do something in Word Press. Word Press, every kid’s got Word Press.
Jeffrey: I don’t know how to do anything in Word Press. I’ve got great people that know how to do things in Word Press.
Andrew: I had a hard time saying I need help with it. Because I felt like it was really basic. Once I did I felt two things happen. First of all, I got a lot of help and I got better at it. Second, I think people started to relate to me a little bit better. They started to come in with suggestions that I didn’t even ask for that were actually really helpful. It’s tough, it’s tough to do.
Jeffrey: It’s always tough. But that’s the remark of a great leader, though. Of someone who’s willing to say I need to go here. I can’t get there without the help. There’s nothing wrong with it. Again, what’s wrong with saying that? What’s wrong with getting a coach that can get you there or someone who has more experience?
Now I can tell you my experience with horses, use that as an example, is greater than that young woman’s. I’ll guarantee it. Because I became that maestro. I can look at a horse and tell whether they’ve got something wrong with them. I can look and see if their foot’s off. I instinctively know how to handle them now after spending a lot of time. You have to work it. Just like you working on Word Press. The more you do it, the better you get.
Andrew: What about the other side of that though? You are a leader in the company. People expect you to know everything about that company. They give you a lot more respect and credibility because they assume you know it. As soon as you say I don’t know this one little area. I don’t know how we could market online. I don’t know how we could do our website. I don’t know how to deal with retailers. Or whatever it is that you’re admitting, you’re letting people know hey, there’s a little bit of a flaw here. I don’t know that this guy is…
Jeffrey: Come on, but they know that, Andrew. They, look, when I owned a printing facility, a printing company back in my own time. I didn’t know how to run the press but I knew what looked good hot off the press. I knew that, I knew the organization that I only wanted to run certain colors on Monday. Monday was red ink, Tuesday was blue, Wednesday was this and so from a process perspective it made more sense to put jobs together that were like that in order to get the best efficiencies out of the process.
That I knew, but you know, I don’t think it would have helped them anymore, I mean it might have impressed them, but would it have been any more valuable for me to spend my time running that press? No. Just like that, the application of that press, the way it could be marketed, the way it could be used was absolutely without questions. So, pick your battles. You don’t have to know everything. I know I can clean toilets better than probably pretty much anybody else in the world but should that be what I should be spending my time on, you know? Or should I be making sales calls? All right, not, I want this person to know that I know how to clean that toilet, that if you’re not doing a good enough job at it I’m going to get on your rear end about it and we’re going to get it done right.
So those are the kind of things I think you need to be aware of. Now, the application process and when to buy but you don’t need to do everything. And you know this with entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs start off with a one man band and then they had devout followers and it’s only when they make that next skill set when they add all of the skilled technicians and professionals they need and the manager of that can they be successful. And some can’t always see to that level. So it’s important if you want to be a great leader to be able recognize those three steps and get to that upper tier as fast as you possibly can.
Andrew: One of the chapters in your book, I think it’s called Please, please, please fire the right people. I think I’ve got just the right number of pleases in there. I remember one of the most valuable parts of Jack Welch’s book was where he talked about how to fire people and the need to fire people, and of course he’s famous for doing this so he’s got a lot of experience. You haven’t done it quite as much, I don’t think as he has. But what have you learned about letting go of people? About doing it right?
Jeffrey: Well, typically I think most people that I’ve had to let go, and I’ve let go some people and some good people, friends of mine in fact, but they always knew, pretty much it was coming because see we’d already talked about conditions of satisfaction, we’d already talked about things they should have been doing and how they should of been performing at the levels they should be performing. So they should have had some expectation or knowledge about that or they knew about what the business was because sometimes you let people go even though they don’t necessarily deserve it but because you’re cutting back or eliminating certain chunks of the company, or so forth.
If you’re upfront and transparent and you’re talking about that, people should know that that’s going on. But the key thing is your driving conditions of satisfaction. For instance, I’ll use a pro football team again as an example, when I’ve got a huddle of people, you know I want that person to know here’s the expectation. I expect you to block this guy and if you’re not blocking this guy on a regular basis or we’re driving the ball past you or, I mean, you know I’m getting tackled or I’m getting killed then I want you to know that there’s a consequence in that. I’m replacing you.
But I also want to know, as part of the conditions of satisfaction, I want a team member that’s so honest and upfront about it that if he knows he can’t make it, he’s coming back to the huddle saying, I can’t handle that guy, I need some help. Because that’s a stronger player so I’m going to look for people like that as well.
Andrew: You mention in your book that there is a business person who you talked to who had trouble with an employee who wouldn’t let him go. Can you tell that story to the audience? I think that’s an important one for them to hear.
Jeffrey: Well, I mean, there’s constantly you find people in that situation who for whatever reason get fixated that they can’t let the person go, to sometimes the demise of their business. You can’t do that. Again, you have to hold people to certain conditions of satisfaction. When I see entrepreneurs and business leaders who don’t let certain people go, for whatever the reasons are, I mean, they get into it. It demoralizes all of the rest of the people in the organization because they know that person should go. And the second you let that person go, you’ll be surprised the people that come by and go, I’m so glad you did that, I’m so glad you did that, I’m so glad you did that. And the reason for it is because they know what effect that person had on the organization.
Andrew: So why don’t we let them go? The person I’m talking about is this guy had an employee, I think it was a guy, had an employee who was stealing from them. The person failed a polygraph test five times.
Jeffrey: Five times, yeah.
Andrew: But they don’t let him go because he was a good friend.
Jeffrey: In that particular case, I was trying to remember which one it was, in that particular case, this guy was a family friend. And I had to say to him, are you flipping kidding me? He’s a friend and you’re still, he failed a polygraph test five times, he’s stealing from you. The guy had a pregnant wife. His wife was pregnant and she’s working in the business and this guy’s stealing from you. I mean, what are you nuts?
I mean, I don’t get people sometimes so, he was not holding his own conditions and satisfaction to himself and to his, it’s about protecting him. I finally had to punch him, punch him in the stomach. And I said, you don’t understand that that’s food coming out of that baby’s mouth, that’s what that is and so it sometimes takes people to kind of jar people out. You get complacent. You kind of get so caught up in stuff sometimes that you forget why you’re doing what you’re doing and that’s one great example of it.
Andrew: I think having that outside voice is helpful, because you internally know, hey, I’m losing money on this person. I’m losing money on other things that I have to do to correct the mistakes that this person is making, but you let it go because you don’t want the agita [SP] of the moment. You don’t want the frustration of having to deal with it, but if you have an outside person…
Jeffrey: Oh, it’s terrible. I mean, it doesn’t feel good. You’ve got to do this, Andrew, I’m sure in your business, too. It’s not nice sitting across from someone you know, someone you’ve spent, someone that might have even been to your house and might even have sometimes been a relative, and have to say, I’m sorry you need to go. It’s always tough. I mean, it’s never a nice thing. Because I think inherently as people we’re people and we love to be loved and we love to love other people and we like people to be happy and, you know, I don’t every one of us wakes up every morning and says, I can’t wait to be mean, I can’t wait to be cruel.
That’s not what we’re trying to do, but you have to be fair and you said this is what we’re going to do. So again, what’s your goal, what are you trying to drive and are you adhering to those kinds of things and you know I think you’re driving principles for you yourself are very important? And three key ones that I follow, and anytime I don’t follow them I get in trouble every time and I start doing stupid things.
Andrew: What are they?
Jeffrey: And I try not to do that.
Andrew: What are those three?
Jeffrey: Oh, for me it’s about I have to be in a position where I’m building wealth for me and my family. That’s how we keep score, right? I mean making the money, it’s great to make money and it’s great to make a lot of money because it allows you to do other things, that’s the free enterprise system. The other thing is I want to grow professionally. So, I want to be in something or doing something where I’m learning things all the time and that’s interesting for me. And the third thing is I want to have fun and if I can’t have fun, I’m not interested.
So, if I can’t have all three of those things I usually try to get the heck out of it as fast as I possibly can. And, but sometimes I trade that off and I’m like, well, I’m making good money on them but they’re not fun and then it’ll become a big pain in the butt and it’s the worst client I ever had and wish I never worked with them again but I try to let one weigh out the other and I have this little devil on my shoulder saying, tell me these things and I need to start listening to my core, these are my beliefs, these are what I’m going to do and if it doesn’t meet this, I’m out of here.
Andrew: You mentioned making money and keeping score using money. I want to get back to the tactics in a moment, but let’s take a step away from all these, from the gauntlets and all the bats that the world is aiming at our heads and talk about what’s the fun part of it. What’s one of the best parts of having made it as you have? What is it? You have a jet; do you have an island somewhere?
Jeffrey: I miss the jets.
Andrew: Yeah, you had a jet at Kodak.
Jeffrey: Oh, absolutely. But I miss those. People say, what do you miss at Kodak? And I always say I miss those people and I miss the planes.
Andrew: What happens when you get on a plane at Kodak? What’s the environment like? Tell it to me; I’ve only been on a model.
Jeffrey: No, I miss Kodak, but I’ve been in other companies with jets as well. It’s just a certain standard of being taken care of at a certain level. I mean, they’d just always, you know, have diet Mountain Dew for me on the plane, they’d…
Andrew: Because that’s your drink?
Jeffrey: Yeah, it’s one of the things I drink, although I’m trying to stop it and drink more better, nicer, healthier things. But no, it’s a way that you operate in terms of getting from one point to another, getting there fast and I can do three or four meetings in a day and do a lot of things.
Andrew: There’s no security, they just usher you right to plane?
Jeffrey: If you’re on a jet, you have to plan to spend a million dollars a year. Now, today I have, and I’ll just point out what I use today. I have this card, the George Clooney card, I’m a Global Services for United, which means I’m at the top of the top of the top and I have special lines and all that. Now, that I like, a lot.
Andrew: Uh-huh.
Jeffrey: Because, you know, the pilot came out the other day on the plane and actually gave me a signed copy of a book on the history of United. And, I actually, he woke me up to tell me he was giving me this signed book from all the pilots and the flight attendants and I finally said, whose flying the plane? Get back up there and fly the plane and give me the book later. But that’s one of the perks that you get with some of these things. But I travel a lot and I remember, somebody said, geez, well I’m a one, a guy who was bragging about being a one K, and I said well I usually hit one K in February or early March, so in terms of flights.
Andrew: I see. That’s how many flights. And you’re flying for what now?
Jeffrey: Just giving speeches and spreading the gospel, you know, that has been the Mirror Test, which was my first best seller and I think this one is going to hit best seller because already, while we’re doing this interview right now in December, they just printed the book and it’s hitting the stores and actually out on January 3rd. Depending on when we broadcast this, during that time period they had to reprint the first printing of the book because we’ve already gotten so many pre-orders. We’re pretty excited about that.
Andrew: Pre-orders are good. (Inaudible) doing these interviews is all those pre-orders count towards sales on the first day which helps with the New York Times best seller list.
Jeffrey: It’s already early December and we’ve already, personally I’ve already pre-sold over 20,000 books.
Andrew: What do you mean you’ve personally pre-sold 20,000?
Jeffrey: Meaning I’ve been booking with groups and people who say I need 100, I need 50, I need 2,000. I had one group call and say I need 5,000. I love those groups.
Andrew: How do you get a group that’s going to do 5,000?
Jeffrey: They want to do a promotion. They’re using the book for a sales promotion. Make an appointment or come to the webinar, they use my book as incentive.
Andrew: Ah, I see, so if you come to the webinar you get a book?
Jeffrey: Yeah. They’re doing it for their own product. Or if you make a sales appointment to talk about X,Y,Z we’ll give you a copy of Jeff Hayzlett’s new best selling book, “Running the Gauntlet”.
Andrew: Why do they pick your book specifically?
Jeffrey: Because they’re smart.
Andrew: Love to talk offline about how you got them to use your book. Sounds like because you’re smart.
Jeffrey: They’re extremely smart and insightful people. That’s why, Andrew. Because they see the value of the draw of that book. It’s a very small incentive to pay in order to get some great sales.
Andrew: Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup” told me that what he did was any time somebody wanted him to speak somewhere he said I don’t want you to pay me, even though ordinarily I would. What instead I want you to do is guarantee me a certain number of book sales. That’s the kind of thing that we’re talking about.
Jeffrey: That’s a great way, and we do that as well. I usually get paid to speak and get the books.
Andrew: And get the books? That’s a good life. Let’s see, what else do we have here?
Jeffrey: Life is good. I mean I’m a happy kind of guy. I mean, look at me. I’m not eye candy so I’m out there giving speeches and I’m having a great time. I’m loving what I’m doing and I get to do it every single day. My wife always talks about the fact that he’d do this if he didn’t get paid. I said shh, quit telling people that because we are getting paid. We’re getting paid a lot and we like doing what we’re doing and we’re having a blast doing it. You can’t ask for better than that.
Andrew: Let’s keep going here with the interview but just for people who are wondering what the name of the book is it’s “Running the Gauntlet”. Of course, you can buy it on Amazon.com right now. You’re required to link to the other book sellers, right? You may not even be this connected to the website but from what I hear from authors they have to link to Barnes and Noble if they’re going to link to Amazon or else otherwise Barnes and Noble will pull the books off the shelves. They have to link to some independent book seller website or else the independent book sellers rip their book off the shelves. I should do an interview with an author about what the book sellers require them to do but they can’t talk about it.
Jeffrey: Well, I don’t know if they’d talk about it. Our book is being handled by McGraw Hill so McGraw Hill handles all that stuff for me. I know that, like at Barnes and Noble we’re going to be on the featured best seller. I know at Amazon they’re featuring us on the business center and doing a mailing out to all their business clients. We have some very positive things. On the independent sites, I do a lot of book signings in independent book stores as well as in the big chains.
If you actually go through and saw the last year and a half, two years where I had my first book, I go into book stores and sign the books wherever I’m at. When I’m walking down the street in Chicago, on X,Y,Z Street I’ll stop in. They’ll have five, ten copies of the book. I’ll sign it and I’ll take my picture with the clerk and I’ll put it up on Facebook. We do a lot of things like that to activate it. Usually the next day after we do something like that those five, ten books are gone. We try to do as much of that kind of activity as possible.
I let the politics of that stuff, that’s why you have McGraw Hill. Unless you’re doing your own. If you’re self publishing or you’re doing it more on the lines that you’re talking about then it gets to be a little tougher. At some point (inaudible) so I don’t have to worry about that.
Andrew: McGraw Hill is fantastic. They reached out to me and then when we didn’t reach out to them in time they came back and they helped us find a way to make sure that this interview worked with my audience. No, I think good book publishers and I think specifically the people at the publishers, if you get the right one, they’re fantastic.
Jeffrey: We’re doing something different. I think this is kind of a cool thing. I don’t happen to have a copy with me because we’re selling them like crazy but we’re using a snap tag, or what’s called a two dimensional code, in every single chapter. In every chapter of this particular book, Running the Gauntlet, is a picture of a small little icon that you can take a picture and snap the picture and either text it or download the reader and it will take you to a video of me talking about what you’re going to read in the book in that chapter. We have one at the beginning of every single chapter.
Andrew: I see it. I have the PDF of the book, before it got pressed I guess, and it’s got QR code on the bottom of every chapter.
Jeffrey: Yeah, actually QR, really, what it’s called is more smart [sounds like] response code.
Andrew: OK.
Jeffrey: So quick response codes, you’ve seen them, I call those ugly codes. This has a much more branded look to it, so. Being in marketing, I like branding.
Andrew: Hey, one of the chapters is, I think it’s called, “Be Direct and Talk about the Elephants in the Room”. I worked at Dale Carnegie and one of Carnegie’s big messages is, if you tell people they’re wrong, if you point out their flaws in the wrong way, they will become resistant to listening to you. They’ll fight back instinctively. How do you do it right? What’s your tactic for doing it?
Jeffrey: It’s usually not about them, it’s about the issue. So let’s talk about the issue. I mean, how many of us, Andrew, have been in the world, and by the way I’m a huge fan of Dale Carnegie and always have been, having read the books when I was 14, 15, 16 years old, I mean I just love Dale Carnegie. But think about the process. It’s usually about the process. We’ve all been in those rooms, those meeting rooms, where there’s this huge elephant sitting right there in the middle of the room. And we’re not talking about it. And we go through the whole meeting, and we still haven’t talked about it. And then as we leave the meeting, someone leans to the other person and says, “hey, did you see that elephant in the room?” “Yeah, I saw it there but I didn’t want to bring it up, I didn’t want to talk about it.”
And so, then it starts festering for the next week, or two weeks, and then the group gets back together and now it’s become a huge problem. Then someone finally tackles it and someone says, “Yeah, I saw that.” Well, what’s that about? Why wouldn’t you talk about that right there? Why wouldn’t you just deal with it right then? Why wouldn’t you be transparent and be honest with your team members, and be honest with one another, to deal with those problems them? Why let the thing fester for a couple of weeks and let it walk around trampling on things, breaking things, and eating everything and defecating everywhere, and having the problems that you’re going to have? I just don’t get things like that.
Andrew: All right. Let me make a quick plug here and then I’m going to ask you a question that I think a lot of people probably, in the early part of this interview, thought that I wasn’t going to ask. And maybe some of them turned off the interview. Shame on them for doing it. I’ll ask you about the elephant in the room in a moment. But first, let me put this plug in there.
I’m going to read a reader’s e-mail here, this comes from Alexandre Houle: “Honestly, your guest testimonials piqued my curiosity,” he’s talking about Mixergy premium where you get courses by many of the people that I’ve done interviews with on Mixergy, so he says the testimonials are what got him, that’s why I’m reading his e-mail, to give the audience another testimonial, hopefully it’ll get them over the edge and get them to sign up for Mixergy premium, anyway, he goes: “Hey, it’s really under priced. I thought, is it unpriced, really, or did Andrew just go to the dark side of marketing and he’s got some kind of trick up his sleeve?
Well, after playing with Mixergy premium membership for a day now, I can’t believe how cool your courses are. How the hell are you making money with that? The copyrighting video alone is worth more than 100 bucks, at least,” and by the way, I know a lot of people online, when they do a testimonial, they do first name, last initial, I always give the exact name, because you can look them up, you can ask them questions behind my back, this is Alexandre Houle, H-O-U-L-E, Alexandre, A-L-E-X-A-N-D-R-E. You can check it out with him and see exactly what he really believes.
But I’ll tell you why many people are excited about it. Because, you know when you have an issue with business, like, how do I get people to come to my website? How do I get those people to buy from me? How do I get someone to notice that I’m building this website, maybe write a blog post or an article about me? Whatever those issues are, when you want to research them, you go to Google. And what do you find in Google? Lot of link-baiting blog posts. People who have top seven ways to get traffic, but really all they’re doing is hooking you to come to their website and then feeding you off to some ad. Or what you can do is, you can try to figure it out for yourself and spend a year doing it and making mistakes.
Well, at Mixergy, what I do is, I bring the guys who I interview here, who build successful businesses by getting traffic, or getting PR, or knowing how to sell online, or in this case, doing copyrighting. And I say, “turn on your computer screen, I’m going to record your computer screen, walk me step-by-step through how you do it, so my audience can watch it and then they can do the same thing”. And that’s what Alexandre’s excited about, that’s what thousands – is it thousands? Might be close to thousands, let’s say hundreds – of paying Mixergy premium members are excited about. Every month we get another few hundred people who sign up and I hope you do too. If you haven’t yet, go to mixergy.com/premium, sign up. We’ve got dozens of courses, hundreds of case studies, that will all help you build up your successful business. Alright, how did I do with that? You’re a marketing guy, did I do OK?
Jeffrey: That was pretty good, yeah. Telling people right up, and I love the way you’re transparent, like, here it is, make use of it, go for it.
Andrew: Yeah. Thank you, I appreciate that. I was kind of fishing for a compliment from the marketing expert.
Jeffrey It was good, it was good.
Andrew: Thank you. . . [??] . . .
Jeffrey: . . . repeat the value again and again and again so you get it and then get the credibility by the fact it came from one of your users, and somebody who’s saying, “hey, it’s a greater value, I’d pay you more”.
Andrew: They would. And maybe at some point in the future I’ll have to raise the prices. So here’s the thing that I wanted to ask you about, and I didn’t get a chance.
Jeffrey: Oh, here’s the big question. It’s the big K question. It’s coming, I hear it coming.
Andrew: You’re right. Exactly. So, here it is. I’m looking at a New York Times article about Kodak says, it’s reporting weaker than expected third quarter earnings. Kodak stated that its ability to continue operations during the next 12 months depended on whether it could sell or license its vast trove of patents and raise as much as half a billion dollars in financing. Basically this is a company in a tough situation. What’s going on?
Jeffrey: Yeah, it is tough and they’ll actually get the thing sold. They just made a recent announcement to 300 million that they’ve sold already. I’m sure they’ll make it. They’ve got a few more days before the end of the year. They’ve always pulled it together with Mark Patel on the team. On the intellectual properties, they’ve done it before and they’ll do it again. I’m pretty sure they’ll get that done. You know it’s been two years, really, since I’ve been there. So, it’s been a little bit of a time even though everybody says, hey, he’s still with Kodak, because I believe in the company and I still love the company but it’s got some problems. I mean they had the hubris of success.
In my book, “Running the Gauntlet”, I talk about some of the good things there and I talk about some of the bad things there. You know, it’s things you just do stupid and it’s stupid and so some of the things that they’ve done they just haven’t moved with the greatest speed to get out of the problems that they had. They invented the first digital camera back in 1975, and then they sat on it. Why? Because they wanted to protect film. Well film’s a dead business. Film has been going down and down and down and down and then plummeting after that and yet they are still holding onto it and still doing a part of it. So, you know, sometimes you have to jettison some pieces of it.
There are great parts in that company that make enormous amounts of money, billions of dollars and why aren’t they concentrating on that. So, it’s trying to spread too many bets across too many things and then coming to their worst economy at the same time, chances are you’re not going to win. And that’s indeed what’s happened. Not the bet that I would have done had I been the CEO but I’m not the CEO, I don’t make that call.
Andrew: What would you have bet on?
Jeffrey: I would have bet on the B2B business. The B2B business is solid. You could have taken that company down to about a 5 billion dollar company, thrown off 2 billion dollars a year in profit and still been a great company. Would it have been the company it was in the past? No, it would have to build itself back. You know, that’s no fault of the present leadership, that’s the fault of the former leaderships that were there over the many years of seeing this coming and then didn’t act on it.
Andrew: I see.
Jeffrey: Those are the people I hold responsible. Those people back in the 90’s and early 2000 who just did not react to the change that they were seeing in front of them. Shame on them.
Andrew: And if you were running the business what you would say is forget the printers, digital cameras, anything that’s consumer related, focus on the B to B part, which is doing well. Go back to be a smaller company and then build from there?
Jeffrey: Absolutely. Build back on the core innovation. What would George do? That’s the question I’d ask. And so George would sit there and say we’re going to serve the company, we’re going to build the best camera there possibly is so what he’s talking about is building the best product that you can and making sure that you’re out there, really truly serving the customer, make it easy, you know. And that’s the kind of fundamentals of the business and they got away from that. They got complicated and they forget. You know, they’re not a film company any more; they should be an innovation company. They’ve got some great products in the B2B, they’ve got some goods one of the B2C side, they just don’t have the chutzpah, they just don’t have the stomach to be able to do what they have and they don’t have the scale anymore because they made the change too late. So, you need to realize that and stop riding that horse.
Andrew All right, and of course…
Jeffrey: And by the way, I’m the first one, again, I was leading part of that business although I came in on the B2B side and said this is where I’m from, I’m more of a B2B marker, I am a consumer marker and have been will learn a consumer side because I had to. And there’s some great successes, the ZIA camera that they have, the video camera is one of the best I’ve ever seen in my life and the inkjet is a great model, but you know, did it come a little too late and a little too costly to the game? Um, I think that’s probably been proven now, that’s probably the case.
Andrew: Of course, as you said, you’re not at Kodak anymore. Jeffrey is now at Hayzlett Group where he is the Founder and the book that he came out with is “Running the Gauntlet” and I didn’t even get to ask you about some of these notes that Jeremy and I made. So, tell you what guys, if you get the book here are a few chapters you might want to take a look at, Be Prepared To Live Your Brands Promise In Bad Times And Good. That we thought was an interesting chapter. Accept Incurred Mistakes, Be Direct And Talk About The Elephant In The Room. We talked about that. Process Makes Perfect, I wish I had time to talk to you about that but I’ve got to be fair with your time. That’s a great chapter. Making It Personal, listen to the story of what happens when Jeffrey goes into Best Buy and Staples and, of course, Adapt Or Die, and we just heard a little bit about what happens when you don’t do that.
Jeffrey: Couple more coming up. Friend Sourcing is a great chapter in there talking about how to friend source. And then How Do You, especially as an entrepreneur, Be a Chief Listening Officer, which relates to that Staples and Best Buy story.
Andrew: Really? What I love about this book and what I like a lot about your style is that you are a good story-teller, it makes reading your ideas so much more interesting and so much more memorable. There were times when, I had notes here on this interview but I guess I wrote too many notes, there were times I couldn’t find them but I remembered the story. I remembered Elmer Fudd so I was able to talk about that if that came up. I remembered the stories and through them I remembered your message and I appreciate you writing the book and I appreciate you coming here to do this interview. It’s great to meet you.
Jeffrey: It’s a pleasure and if anybody ever needs anything just stop by and see me in South Dakota or New York depending on where I’m at.
Andrew: All right. I’d love to do it, too. Thank you all for watching. Bye.
