Whether or Not It’s Broken – Fix It

4. Whether or Not It’s Broken – Fix It

“Teach people how to strategize and how to manage their workflow.”

—Jon Thomas

Branded Group

Podcast Transcription

Michael Kurland
Hello, I’m Michael Kurland, CEO and Co-Founder of Branded Group. Welcome to the #BeBetter Podcast. To me, our company’s mantra to “Be Better” is more than a tagline; it’s a culture that permeates our organization, propelling our team to Be Better to each other, our customers and our communities as well as to ourselves. Each week on the #BeBetter podcast, I interview leaders who authentically exemplify how they are being better in their professional and personal lives.

Today’s podcast is dedicated to Orange County Coastkeeper, a nonprofit clean water organization, dedicated to “protecting the region’s water resources so they are swimmable, drinkable and fishable for present and future generations.” Inspired by a Surfriders beach cleanup, we recently partnered with Orange County Coastkeeper and will be pursuing opportunities where the BeBetter team can do our part to keep our beautiful Orange County beaches in pristine condition. Learn more about how you can get involved at https://www.coastkeeper.org/.

Thank you for joining us on the Be Better podcast. I’m very excited today. We have a special guest. He is part of the #BeBetter culture on a daily basis. My partner in business, and my friend, and the president of Branded Group, Jon Thomas. Welcome, Jon.

Jon Thomas:
Hey, Mike. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Michael Kurland:
My pleasure. This is the podcast where I’m going to get to ask you all the questions that I’ve never had a chance to ask you before and you have to answer honestly.

Jon Thomas:
I’m okay with that.

Michael Kurland:
Let’s jump right in, Jon. You live the #BeBetter mantra with me on a daily basis. Actually, for those of you that don’t know, Jon Thomas coined the phrase #BeBetter. So, why don’t we tell that story real quick?

Jon Thomas:
Sure. I had moved to New York to work for a company similar to the company that me and Mike own today, and it was a long time ago. I think Mike had just gotten an extra room in his house, and he took me under his wing and let me be his roommate for a few months while I was looking for a new place. We were younger then. We would hang out a lot more at the bars. There’d be a couple of nights where maybe Mike would come back making a lot of noise and I’m trying to sleep or what have you. It went on like that for a few weeks, and I said, “Come on man.” He said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” One day he came out and said, “I’m sorry I was loud again.” I said, “You know what, don’t be sorry, just #BeBetter.” Then we were like, “Oh, that sticks.”

Michael Kurland:
I think what really spawned it though, is that we started making a joke out of it, and then we were-

Jon Thomas:
… that stuck.

Michael Kurland:
We were working and we’d say it about work stuff all the time. “Hey, be better. We just need to be better. If we ever start this company, we’re going to be better.”

Jon Thomas:
The phrase came well before the business, like we were just saying and then to your point, in the workplace, stuff would actually get serious. Just be better and it made sense.

Michael Kurland:
Right. That leads me to my next question. What do you do and why do you do it? You’re the president of Branded Group, and for the audience, I’m the sales, marketing guru guy. I’m the one that also does the HR, and the culture. Jon does the operations, and I can tell you without a doubt, without Jon, we would not be where we are today. He helped take Branded Group to the next level and allowed us to scale up to where we are. So, with that intro, what do you do, Jon, and why do you do it?

Jon Thomas:
On a daily basis, like you said, it’s a lot of oversight of a few different departments, so primarily it’s operations, but it also includes the finance section of the business too. I act as the oversight and CFO in that regard. I would say over the last year and a half, that’s probably taken up more of my time, as you well know, but day to day, it’s checking all of the little pieces that make the whole machine work and making sure that department heads are going down the same path that our vision has been aligned on to get us where we want to be, whether it’s a top line revenue number, or whether it’s helping an account grow that you’ve sold or your sales team has put in, and keeping things moving. Basically making the trains run on time, is the way I like to simplify it the most.

Michael Kurland:
That is a Jon Thomas original, making the train run. It’s original to you, but it’s something you say over and over again:  they make the trains run on time. But why do you do it, Jon?

Jon Thomas:
For me, my perspective on a business is extreme consistency. I’ve found that choppiness in organizations, and I’ve experienced choppiness in organizations, that lends itself to sporadic growth and also completely random downturns, and it’s completely lent itself to a sporadic process, right? There’s so many different pieces that go into any business, and people say it’s just ops and sales. It’s not. It’s everything that you’ve brought to the table, Mike, you’ve brought the culture, and the people, and then getting those people to operate down the stream that we want them to go. That takes a lot of consistency, and that consistency is just what builds an entire organization.  That’s why I do it, is because if things aren’t running on time, people aren’t getting to where they need to be, they’re not doing what they need to do, and ultimately, they’re not servicing the customer like they need to service them.

Michael Kurland:
You are the president. You keep the trains running on time, Jon. You’ve said that numerous times in your career, to me. It’s like a Jon Thomas ingrained in my head original. But why do you do it?

Jon Thomas:
I do it because realistically for any business, we have to get these things done. We have to get people to go in the direction we want them to go in. Alot of it for me is fear of failure in a big way. I’ve always been pretty driven by that, and that paranoia. I’ve actually tried to, in a healthy way, encourage that to our executive team and management staff that things can seem great one day, but you always need to be looking for the thing that you’re missing because you’re always missing something.

Michael Kurland:
You’ve also instilled, in the management team, to be on time, similar to the trains running on time. So, that leads me to a good segue. You said it’s a fear of failure, but what motivates you to be better besides that fear of failure?

Jon Thomas:
I’m a competitive guy. I think you know that. I don’t like to lose. When I first came out here after you had done the ground up work for the business and it was time to go through the scaling exercise, before meeting you, I’d never had any aspirations to own a business or anything. It wasn’t in my roadmap. I just wanted to do Excel spreadsheets all day, because why wouldn’t you want to do that for the rest of your life?

Michael Kurland:
It’s still fun.

Jon Thomas:
Don’t forget who taught you pivot tables, buddy.

Jon Thomas:
But when I started seeing the success that came from our collaboration and our partnership and how it could resonate through the business, we started to win more than I’d even expected. When you get that feeling of, “Oh, this can work,” and people are growing, and the business is smoothing out, and you start seeing it, it’s a pretty amazing feeling, and that keeps me going a lot.

Michael Kurland:
The compounded win on top of win, on top of win.

Jon Thomas:
Yes, big time.

Michael Kurland:
Pretty competitive guy, motivated by success and fear, driven by fear. These are good things to know. I’m just keeping a tally over here. Now, I’m going to get into the stuff that you don’t like. I’m going to start talking about you and emotional stuff. How are you Jon Thomas being better to yourself these days?

Jon Thomas:
These days… I mean, we’re talking quarantine days. I’ve been making it a point to make more of a schedule in my day, because look, you’ve seen in the office, I can get interrupted on a pretty frequent basis. When I have time to put in a solid two hours straight into something, I love it. But that lends itself to me getting stuck at a screen for a long time and I forget the time, and there are people that need to be called, and check ins with the management team, all that type of stuff. It’s easy to get sucked into the computer. I’ve been making it a point to get up, walk around and make some phone calls, continue the personal touch on a more frequent basis, because you just don’t have the luxury of walking by someone’s office anymore and saying, “Hey, what’s up? How you doing? How’s your day.” That’s been an important thing to me, just to get up and move around a little bit.

Michael Kurland:
Let’s not just talk about work though. How are you being better to Jon Thomas? What are you doing these days to take care of yourself a little bit, especially during this quarantine? I mean, we’ve been inside two months now. Human contact, seeing other humans is a rarity, social distancing is a thing. We don’t know how long this is going to last. What are you doing to take care of yourself right now, even before the pandemic started, but in the last two months? What is it, not work related? Talk to me about that.

Jon Thomas:
I’ve been a drummer for a long time. I’ve got my practice pads out and I’m getting my chops back up, my rudiments and everything through my drums. Because I live in a condo, the average age of my neighbors is like 70. I don’t think they’d be too keen on me setting up a five piece kit.

Michael Kurland:
Probably not. Funny story. One of the first times I ever met Jon Thomas, he alluded to it earlier about when he moved to Long Island, we would go out and we’d have a couple of drinks a couple nights a week, and there was this one bar that had open mic night. I didn’t know much about Jon Thomas other than he was a gregarious guy who likes spreadsheets and documentaries. We walk into this bar, and it’s open mic night, and there’s a band playing, but anyone can join. He literally walks up to the band and says, “Hey, can I get on drums?” They’re like, “Sure.” I’m sitting here thinking, “Who is this guy?” The guy walked up, and I don’t know what song he played, but whatever it was, it was definitely cool, and you jammed out with this band in the middle of the bar. I thought “That guy’s got something.” Anyway, a little tidbit. I’ll never forget that story.

Jon Thomas:
I think it was Motown or something. I think it was an Otis Redding song. I can’t remember which one though.

Michael Kurland:
They’re all so good. You’re a big documentary guy. I’m sure you’ve been watching a lot of Netflix and things of that nature over the past couple months. What’s Jon Thomas curious about right now? What are you into?

Jon Thomas:
This is still about me I’m talking about, right?

Michael Kurland:
You could talk about both. The Be Better podcast wants to get to know Jon Thomas though. What are you curious about?

Jon Thomas:
What am I curious about? Curiosity is my thing. I’m going to start with outside of work, because you’ve mentioned documentaries. I get down on some stuff that I don’t understand and I try to learn it. I’ve actually been using a variety of different documentary streaming services, like CuriosityStream. I haven’t tried MasterClass yet, but a lot of quantum physics and a lot of particle theory, just trying to understand stuff that is just so far beyond. I didn’t study physics or anything in school. I’m fascinated by it. It really gets me to wrap my head around things that people dedicate entire careers towards just to find a particle of a particle of a particle. That just blows my mind. I get wrapped up in that stuff for hours because it’s fascinating.

Michael Kurland:
That’s great. I actually just read a book by Deepak Chopra, which talked about the same thing. It’s not quite physics, it’s more like the metaphysics. He gets into the emotional. He’s a big meditator and emotional guy. He’s talking about how when you really break it down to our smallest atoms and whatever’s below an atom, protons and neutrons, I think, that nature, that when you get down to it, it’s all just energy. At the end of the day, we are the same energy as an atom or whatever’s smaller than an atom. The earth just flows in an energetic way and field. I thought that was cool.

Jon Thomas:
It’s basically the same stuff. I mean, you got gluons and quarks, and then you’ve got fields, those things, and you’d get different charges with those.

Michael Kurland:
He was talking about how a quark. If you aren’t watching it, it won’t move and it only moves when you’re watching it because you’re directing your energy at it.

Jon Thomas:
Because you’re interacting with it. Exactly. They’ve actually got a really cool thing. Actually, Einstein theorized it back in the day, and it’s called a spooky action at a distance. There’s always a quantum entanglement between two particles, and you can put them on opposite ends of the universe, and if you turn one up, the other one’s going to turn down at the same time.

Michael Kurland:
Oh wow!

Jon Thomas:
That defeats the idea of speed of light connection because that’s connected on different levels.

Michael Kurland:
You’ve blown my mind right now.

Jon Thomas:
CuriosityStream.

Michael Kurland:
Let’s talk a little bit about work, because you are an operational guru, in my point of view, and I’ve seen it up close and personal. I always say, if you’re not evolving, you’re dying, right. What is Jon Thomas doing right now? We’ve talked about earlier how you put all these procedures into place three years ago, only to tear them down and rebuild them later because they’re out of date at a certain point in time. What are doing to be better professionally, and what are you curious about in the professional setting, in the operational world that’s helping you be better?

Jon Thomas:
I’m curious operationally, and it’s been also more on finance and accounting. For what we do, everyone’s got a different timeline on their dollar, right? When we get a dollar through the door, when we get a request to do a job that will eventually convert into a check, hundreds of thousands of things happen. Maybe just up to a thousand things happen in between, depending on the job, right? I’ve been really curious and chasing this white whale of the predictive analytics of when a job comes in, what type of job is it, what are the characteristics of it, and how does that job generally tend to turn into real cash in a bank account? I’ve been working on that for a little while and getting much closer with the help of, as you know, a very good team.

Once you can figure something like that out, then you have a very, very good command over your cash flow and the decisions you can make today based off of when things are going to happen tomorrow. I’ve been chasing that one for a while. It’s just we have so many variables in our business that it’s a challenge for sure.

Michael Kurland:
When I talk to other people about what we do, they all think they know it, and then I describe it to them and they’re like, “Oh, that’s not even what I thought you did.” For me, from the sales point of view, it’s, “Hey, you deal with a lot of contracts, right?” I say, “No, some.” But there are some people that say “Hey, I like you. I’m going to use you guys.” Or, “I don’t like you anymore. I’m not going to use you guys.” It’s that simple.

Jon Thomas:
There are so many things in between all of that, from when a client calls and what they want on the other end. There’s so much static that can happen in between and so many things that can go wrong. We said this from the very beginning. We want to have the most consistently pure, best deliverable. Our product is service, and that service relies on people. Those people have to be consistent to deliver that level of product that we want to give to people.

Michael Kurland:
Absolutely. Let me ask you this, Jon. Being that you’re the president and you run the operations, what makes Branded Group better? What makes Branded group Be Better?

Jon Thomas:
I mean, hands down, it’s the people. We’ve got a really, really good crew, and the crew was assembled by me and you obviously, and others. But I think we’re very cautious about who we are bringing in, and we also never let ourselves get to the point where we’re hiring people and throwing them to the fire. We’re always ahead of the game, and I think that really helped build a better foundation for our people to want to learn and participate in the organization rather than just react to whatever was happening in that day. Over time, that’s really resonated because our people are really, really top notch folks all around, some of the best I’ve seen. I’ve had the good fortune of working with a lot of really, really high caliber people. That’s number one for me.

Michael Kurland:
You’re welcome.

Jon Thomas:
Number two from an operational standpoint is almost a tangent off of what I just said is, we’ve always been very cautious to adding too much stress to the organization and creating that caustic, acidic culture of fear. We’ve always been able to, with the culture side, especially with you, been able to put in things to help people know they are valued here. From the operational side and pushing the jobs, it’s letting people know that they make a difference on the jobs and they’re just not a robot. That’s critical. That’s what really does help us be better as well as all the process and the technology that we have working to aid those people in their job is what ultimately results in a better product for us and the customer.

Michael Kurland:
You’ve always had a different mentality when it came to operations. I think you’ve always been a forward thinker and you’ve gotten me to think about operations, which is something that I don’t enjoy at all. But the one thing that I always have appreciated that’s come from you and been planted in my mind is speed. Everyone thinks perfection or margin, but it’s really speed.  Talk to me a little bit about that. Why is speed so important for you and for us and the industry?

Jon Thomas:
There’s so many levels. When you’re looking at your balance sheet and your P&L’s, and everyone looks at overhead, and they’re saying, “Well, overhead is just going to be overhead. My compensation is my compensation. It’s only going to go up.” You’ve heard me say it before too. Alot of times you just get into the habit of squeezing the water balloon. Whatever you do here, it’s going to pop up over here. Whatever you do here, it’s going to pop up over here.

I would say that speed was something that I started dialing in on a while ago, because the faster you get a job done, the faster that same person can get to another job, right? For us, jobs are what we’re selling, and that’s what we’re providing to the client as a service is jobs. Rather than just tell the person to go faster, the idea was let’s get some technology additions and let’s have some process improvement to enable that person to make more decisions, cleanly and effectively, so they’re not just trying to burn through as much work as they can. Let’s teach people how to strategize, how to manage their workflow. That lends itself to speed.

Michael Kurland:
Would you call that efficiencies?

Jon Thomas:
Massive efficiencies, ultimately leading to a faster throughput. There’s a really good book on throughput, called Goal. It’s by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.  It’s a really, really good book.  It was actually built around production line speed and your bottlenecks. I applied that to the service level. He did eventually come up with another book, called Critical Chain, for project management to manage their throughput and time. That’s what we chase, is the speed. Because more speed with the same quality means one person producing more work and you don’t have to hire somebody.

Michael Kurland:
Also jobs get billed at a faster rate.

Jon Thomas:
Exactly.

Michael Kurland:
That starts that timeline quicker. That’s what I’ve always hung my hat on. That’s fascinating stuff, operationally.  I’m glad we got a little chance to talk about that. What I do want to ask you though, as we’re starting to wrap up here is, what do you consider yourself to be an expert at? Whatever that may be, what is your best advice to our listeners on how to be better at that?

Jon Thomas:
I would say I consider myself an expert on-

Michael Kurland:
Spreadsheets.

Jon Thomas:
On the creation of process. Those have helped us tremendously, But now, half the time, we don’t even use spreadsheets anymore because we’ve converted to so many other things, right?

Michael Kurland:
Right. Sorry to interrupt. Continue.

Jon Thomas:
No, it’s okay. So, I’m an expert on dealing with Mike Kurland.

Michael Kurland:
Sometimes.

Jon Thomas:
I would say process, creation and improvement, and then scaling up. Because those are all intertwined for me. Those are probably where I would consider it to be the most, because clearly, it’s not in being emotionally available, most of the times.

Michael Kurland:
What’s the advice on how to scale up, to be better at it?

Jon Thomas:
I mean, I’ve said it in a number of different ways, but the biggest thing that I’ve lived by, and this has been even before Branded Group, stuff I picked up along the way. But never get married to a process or never put a process on a pedestal. If you want to scale anything, no matter how small you think the business is or how simple you think it is, you need a solid foundation, and that foundation is your process. If you think, “Oh, I’ve put it in place. It’s done. That’s going to be the best thing that’s going to carry me for the rest of the lifetime of the business.” You’re wrong. I will absolutely say that you’re wrong because everything’s changing. So, you have to be ready to rip apart anything that you made in the past. Never, ever think that that’s the way it is.

There’s keystone processes out there. They exist, but even those are not off the table for being ripped down and built up again. You just have to make sure that those processes that you have are not invincible to being improved upon. But before you can do anything else, you have to prepare yourself mentally to know that I might’ve made that one report or that one process that enabled people to operate day by day, but that it might get antiquated pretty quick. You just have to be ready to deal with that.

Michael Kurland:
You would say your advice is be open-minded and agile.

Jon Thomas:
That’s a very succinct way to put it. Yes. Don’t get hung up if someone that’s a junior associate comes up and says, “You know this is really old and stupid, right?” Say, “You know what? You’re probably right. Let’s fix that.”

Michael Kurland:
Jon, I want to thank you for being here today. It’s been eye-opening. I got to learn about some quantum physics. I didn’t think we were going to go there. I appreciate you coming on, and audience, thanks for tuning in. Appreciate you guys being a part of our little podcast here and look forward to speaking with you guys next week.

If you want to look up the Branded Group online, it’s www.branded-group.com.

I’d like to take a minute to thank you, our valued listeners. My intention is for this podcast to inspire you, in some way, to be better.  Change starts from within and radiates outward. Therefore, start with being better to yourself and only then will you recognize how to be better others and your community. Thank you for joining us today! If you want to learn more about Branded Group, then visit us at www.branded-group.com. From our website you can follow us on social media. Also, always feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Until next time, Be Better.