Episode 50: Jeff Standridge of Innovation Junkie on a Seven-Domain Diagnostic For Strategic Growth

Episode Transcript

 Shiv: Alright Jeff, welcome to show, how's it going?

Jeff: It's great. It's going great. She have great to be here and I appreciate you for having me.

Shiv: Yeah, super excited to have you on. So why don't we start with your background and your firm and we'll take it from there. 

Jeff: Sure. So after about 20 years as an executive in a publicly traded company, I was generally responsible for mergers, acquisitions and global operations. So I started and acquired multiple companies across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North and South America. I left to start an entrepreneurial support organization here in my own community. I live in the state of Arkansas. And our organization runs the technology commercialization center for the state of Arkansas. And also have a small venture fund that we use to augment some of those companies, really in an effort to try to build the economy. As a result of both of those efforts over the course of the last several years, we started having larger companies coming to us, saying that they really needed the same kinds of work we were doing with, with entrepreneurs and small scaling companies but needed to apply it to larger divisions of large publicly traded companies, private equity backed companies, venture backed companies and others to take some of those same concepts around innovation, strategic growth. And so we started a sister company called Innovation Junkie. And that's where I spend a lot of my time today is working with mid to large companies, divisions of large publicly traded companies and venture and private equity backed companies to help them innovate, number one, challenge the status quo and to create pathways and execution systems around establishing sustained strategic growth.

Shiv: And is that also through the state of Arkansas where it's more of like a government funded or public initiative or is that more of a private initiative?

Jeff: That's a private initiative, that is publicly, or that is a private initiative, billable consulting firm that works boundary-less. So we work wherever the companies are that request our services. The funded, what I call the funded consulting or the sponsored consulting that we do for the state of Arkansas is in fact funded by a number of sources. A large flagship funding source is the Arkansas Economic Development Commission.

Shiv: Got it, got it. Okay, that makes sense. 

Jeff: Two business models, so to speak.

Shiv: So what are some two different business models? And so what are some of the things that these larger companies are needing help with that previously you were helping some of the smaller companies in the Arkansas ecosystem that you're seeing are common themes and what is your approach to helping these companies?

Jeff: Yeah, so one of the common things that I see is, you know, they were coming to us basically because we have kind of a reputation for innovation and strategic growth. They were coming to us saying, hey, look, we've kind of gotten away from the rudiments of thinking like a startup, being agile, you know, being able to respond to things as we see them, but also building a framework that enables to do that within the framework of strategic growth. And so we actually, the way we tend to work with them today is we have kind of an introductory diagnostic that we perform, which we've written and created called the Growth DX. GrowthDX .ai is where you can check out a little more information about the Growth DX. But effectively, it is an assessment that's performed by, usually the top executives in the company, so call it five or seven to 12 executive team members, depending on how large the organization is, they answer 75 questions. Those questions are really best practices around seven different diagnostic domains. So if you imagine that there are seven domains and within those domains, there are, you know, eight or nine or 10 questions that are written around the best practices within each of those domains. And I can walk through those domains if that makes sense. First and foremost is revenue velocity. That effectively is the speed, the power, the effectiveness of the organization's sales, marketing, and client messaging efforts. The second one's organizational effectiveness, the clarity and focus that they have around the organizational plan for achieving sustained growth. So, do they know what sustained growth is? Do they have a plan for that growth? What is their strategy relative to that growth and how cogent is that plan as perceived by those top leadership executives? Operational effectiveness is the third domain, the structure and processes that enable them to execute consistently for their clients. Leadership effectiveness has to do with the climate that their leaders set across the organization so that they can establish a trust-based, high-performance culture, which we've also built a framework we call the culture of excellence and it assesses their deployment of that culture. Innovation readiness, the degree to which they have a thoughtful, deliberate approach to driving innovation throughout the organization. Digital readiness, the degree to which they're planning for and taking advantage of the opportunities that exist in the data and digital technologies that are available to fuel growth. And then finally, the financial disciplines, the degree to which they are actively and consistently engaged in financial management of the company, looking at those critical aspects of rudimentary financial management. So those are the seven diagnostic domains, about 70 or 75 best practices within those domains. And we provide a heat map of where they're strong, where they're weak, where they're maybe average. And from that, that informs the process that we engage then to help them create a, not only a remediation plan, but also a strategic growth plan based upon that information.

Shiv: Got it. And thank you for walking us through that. So I think that would be, that's the framework for us to dive into, at least for the audience's benefit. So let's start with the revenue velocity one. What are some of the underlying factors that you're looking at to actually judge whether or not an organization is mature or at the level that you'd want them to be when it comes to that variable?

Jeff: Yeah, you know, we're looking at best practices around the role that sales plays in the organization. The degree to which people throughout the organization understand the role of sales, the degree to which people throughout the organization as, and again, as assessed by that senior executive team, the degree to which everyone is engaged in supporting the sales effort. The link between their sales and marketing organizations and activities. We find in many organizations, you've got marketing over here, you've got sales over here, and as we say in South Arkansas, ne 'er the twain shall meet. And so looking at the degree of integration that there is between the sales and marketing organizations as well. So those are some examples of things that we look at. Do they have a consistent sales process? Do they have a specific mechanism for doing customer discovery, et cetera?

Shiv: And even with some of those things, right? Somebody could have a good discovery process, but still not have a mature revenue generation function, right? So how do you judge that? And also like, how do you improve upon that as you're working with these companies?

Jeff: Well, in addition to those best practices, there are a number of what I call open response questions where executives are also able to, you know, number one, answer the question, what's the single greatest challenge you see in revenue velocity, right? And so we have some qualitative data that's there as well that we're able to analyze. And I'm pulling up some additional notes here so I can share some of that with you. But, know, for instance, you know, do they have a proven process for doing business with their customers? Is that process tested and is it followed by everyone in the organization? What we find in many organizations when it comes to sales and marketing is it's very much a maverick system. It's like go hire a good person and then cut them loose and let them go, and they're left to their own devices in many instances. Our experience is having a very clear cut sales process, understanding how your customers buy, understanding and equipping your salespeople to conduct a discovery process that enables them to deliver a solution that is best tied to your capabilities. You'd be surprised at the number of organizations that leave that to chance, so to speak.

Shiv: Do you think what is what is the most common gap that you see inside companies on the revenue velocity side?

Jeff: The most common gap that I see is not managing their sales organization effectively. Either measuring the wrong things in terms of activities, as I said, hiring people and not introducing them to a process that generates the best return on their effort and really not having a quality sales leader who understands both the art and the science of selling, who's actually carried a bag and they understand the art and science of selling, number one, but they also understand the art and science about how to lead, guide, direct and manage sales performers.

Shiv: Do you, and in terms of that, like as you're evaluating that function of sales or training and the maturity in the process, do you find that to be true across all sizes of companies or is it more the younger, more nascent companies that struggle with this?

Jeff: Oh no, I see that. I've seen it with small, more nascent companies. I've seen it with mid-size scaling companies. And I was in a billion dollar organization. I saw it there at times. Sometimes it was better than it was at others. But no, I think that exists. And in some instances, you might have a larger organization that's doing fairly well at revenue growth. Maybe they're growing double digits, 10, 11, 12%. But when you really dig away all of the layers of the onion, so to speak, you find that one or two sales teams within that organization are really delivering significant results and they're making up for the lackluster performance of many of the other sales teams.

Shiv: Yeah, I completely agree with that. In our experience, we've seen a hundred million to a billion dollar companies that still don't have their go to market figured out. On the revenue velocity side, how much are you focused on the marketing side? Because a big part of our business is helping companies figure out the marketing side. And we find oftentimes a sales problem is a marketing problem in disguise and companies haven't figured out that side of their business. So I'm just curious, are you spending any time on the marketing side of those companies as well?

Jeff: We do, we do spend some time on, on the, on the marketing side. You know, what we find is that, with many organizations, gosh, probably more organizations than not. There's very little direct ties between their marketing efforts and activities and the, the sales, activities and results. And so really helping them to connect those together is probably one of the single greatest things we can do and make sure again, that we're measuring the right things. know, impressions mean nothing as you well know. It's, it's what kind of, what kind of qualified leads are we able to create for the organization? Now understand there, there are marketing activities that are crucial to an organization that may not be able to be directly tied to the creation of, of leads. But at the very least, need to be able to articulate to the salespeople and the salespeople ought to be able to articulate the softening of the ground that might take place with some more brand oriented type of marketing. They ought to be able to articulate the benefit or lack thereof that it has on their selling efforts.

Shiv: Okay. Well, let's move to number two. You said organizational effectiveness, what do you mean by that and give us some of the variables involved there.

Jeff: Yeah, so number one, do they have a clear written plan that has been properly communicated and serves as the basic for their strategic direction across the organization? So do they know where they're going? Three basic questions. Who are we? Where are we going? And how and when are we going to ensure that we get there? You know, a lot of organizations will talk about a vision statement as this flowery statement that gives people warm fuzzies on the inside. Well, I believe a good quality vision statement is an articulation of a specific destination at a defined time in the future, three years, four years, five years at a specific date, at which time I can look back and say, did we arrive or did we not? And so number one, do they actually have a vision of where they're trying to go in the next three, four or five years, a specific date tied to that destination, and then a specific plan to get there with clear, measurable, long-term targets, short-term goals, key performance indicators, quarterly priorities, et cetera. So that's first and foremost. And has that been, the second thing is do they have the plan? The first, do they have the plan? The second thing is have they properly communicated that plan throughout the organization? Have they cascaded it? And are the work plans of the various divisions, groups, units, and teams throughout that organization directly tied to the achievement of that strategic set of strategic outcomes? Do they have a large number of formal policies, procedures, and formalities that tend to get in the way? So what's the executive perception of their degree of governance? Is it accretive to the business or is it dilutive to the business? Do they have clear and consistent accountabilities across the organization or do they have duplication and redundancy? Do they produce high quality products, services and decisions, for instance? Is their core business clear? And do they keep their people, their systems and their processes aligned and focused on the core business or are they chasing shiny objects every chance they get? Those are some of the clear things that we see.

Shiv: Yeah, yeah, and totally. I think a lot of companies are missing that clear plan and even just a common understanding within everybody that's inside the organization about where the company is going. Maybe it's understood at the investor level or at the executive team level, but definitely not at a full organizational level. So completely agree.

Jeff: Yeah. And so one of the things that we do when we help them build out that strategic growth system for their organization, we don't call it a strategic plan for a couple of reasons. Number one, strategic plans are so badly done in so many organizations that they kind of have a bad reputation. Generally it involves the creation of reams and reams of documentation thrown in three ring binders and then put on a shelf that someone pulls out 11 and a half months later to see how well they've done versus a strategic growth system that can be captured, the essence of which can be captured on a single page, the details of which on three or four pages and a handful of slides, that then is cascaded throughout the organization and their entire meeting cadence is predicated on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. How well are we doing at progressing against that strategic growth system?

Shiv: Well, let's move on to number three. You mentioned operational effectiveness. How does that connect to this vision and strategic plan?

Jeff: So the operational effectiveness is the degree to which they can effectively deliver on their promises to clients. So organizational effectiveness is about their plan as an organization, which certainly includes their go-to-market strategy, their operating strategies, but the operational effectiveness is, okay, how well do we deliver on our promises to our clients? Do we have all the right people in all the right seats? Do we have, as Jim Collins in Good to Great said, the right people on the bus and the right people in the right seats. Do we have critical business meetings for the day-to-day operations of the business occurring at the same time, with the same agenda, with the same people involved? Do our teams clearly and consistently identify, discuss, and solve issues that are related to the long-term greater good of the organization? What happens in many organizations is an issue comes up, it comes up at the end of the meeting, we talk about it until we run out of time and then we go our separate ways and we come back the next week or the next month and we start right back at ground zero with that same issue all over again. Well, part of a good strategic growth system is there's a method to actually resolving those issues in priority order so that we're constantly achieving forward momentum with our business. Never do we come back and start at ground zero all over again. Do we have systems and processes in place for receiving regular feedback from our customers that enable us to serve them to a greater degree? And so those are some of the examples of the best practices.

Shiv: Yeah, yeah, I think this one in particular, it's like you can have the best plan, but if you have the wrong people or the right person in the wrong seat, it's almost impossible to execute on that plan. then having the right processes and frameworks to actually see it through is the difference between actually being successful with that plan and not. 

Jeff: That's right. No, I completely agree with you. Completely agree. You know, all the way down to key performance indicators. What are we actually measuring? You know, an income statement, even if I get my income statement delivered on the first day of the month for the following month that it's reporting on, at very best, it's a rear view mirror. So what am I looking at between income statement periods, ideally weekly? What key performance indicators, leading indicators am I looking at that enable me to keep my thumb on the business or my finger on the pulse of the business? And you would be surprised, you yourself would probably not be surprised, many of your listeners would probably be surprised about the lack of measures, internal measures that we have between financial reporting periods to manage the business.

Shiv: Yeah, you definitely need leading indicators, especially in companies with longer sales cycles. Like if your sales cycle is six to 12 months, you're not going to see the impact of some of your initiatives for a long time. So how do you measure what's working and what's not working along the way? So you definitely need that. Just to transition, how much of the people in the right seats, how much of that is the leadership team? And which is the fourth factor you mentioned is just leadership effectiveness.

Jeff: Yeah, so it's directly related to leadership effectiveness. We put it in the operational effectiveness category because that's generally where you see the breakdown. But the proactive work to drive right people on the bus and the right people in the right seats is very much a leadership effectiveness issue for sure. So leadership effectiveness is about the climate that's created. Do we have leaders who are setting clear direction? Are we encouraging the professional development of our employees? Do we create an environment that allows employees to deliver positive results? Do the leaders buy into, now these are senior leaders evaluating themselves and their direct reports in many instances. Do they buy into the plan? Do they buy into the culture? Are they living out the core values? I'm a believer that if you have something that you call core values, but you're not willing to recruit and select based on those core values, coach and develop based on those core values, actually promote into leadership positions based upon the consistent demonstration of those core values, and then ultimately fire people if they blatantly defy those core values, then they're just lip service. They're not core values at all. They're flowery statements that get graphically designed on a banner and stuck on a wall somewhere. And so we're actually assessing the degree to which leadership is bought into the direction, bought into the plan, bought into the employees, cultivating strong talent, et cetera.

Shiv: Yeah, I think a lot of the things that preceded this point is just about a culture of execution and operational excellence. And I think the leaders are just the most pivotal aspect of making that a reality, right? Because they are the ones that are kind of steering the ship. So a lot of what we hear from our private equity partners is they'll make sure that they have the right executives in the right seats as one of the first things that they work on inside their companies.

Jeff: You know, as we've worked with hundreds of companies over the course of the last few years, we've actually begun to observe what are some of those cultural pillars or cultural components, probably something for a different podcast, but we've actually created what we call the framework for cultural excellence. And it's six basic elements that kind of overlap with the Growth DX, but are specific to culture. And as we work with organizations, we immediately begin, even after the Growth DX, the creation of the Strategic Growth Plan, we begin to observe for the presence or lack of those six elements that contribute to the culture of excellence and build that into our work with them as well.

Shiv: Awesome. Let's transition to the next one, which is innovation readiness. I'd say that this is where it's a bit of a different area, right? Because up until now, we've been talking about revenue or just operational excellence, but this is about future looking ideas and items inside of an organization. So how do you even evaluate that in the market landscape that's often changing?

Jeff: Sure. Well, I think we have to first of all define innovation and we define it as planned change. That's kind of the first criterion is that it's planned change versus haphazard change or accidental change. Planned change that's normally directed at more pleasant, more efficient, more effective ways of doing things than we currently do them or directed at ways of doing things that substantially reduce the transaction cost of doing business. And so there's incremental innovation, which is many times really about making small changes over time that over a long period of time can produce pretty transformational results. But we're not setting the world on fire with that. There's breakthrough innovation where we basically take an existing technology and apply a new business model to it, or we take an existing business model and we apply new technology to it. And then there's truly disruptive innovation where we are literally disrupting a competitor, disrupting an industry, disrupting a market, and something's going to actually go away because it's replaced by the disruption that we bring into play. So we look at the culture around innovations and the degree to which the organization has practices and methods that constantly cultivate innovation within the organization. So number one, do they have an innovation strategy? Do they actually have an innovation strategy? Do they have resources that are properly allocated to the innovation efforts? Do they consistently explore better ways of executing against their core business, which would be some of that incremental innovation? Are there well-defined metrics to be able to quickly assess whether an innovation is something worth investing in or whether it needs to be killed and we need to redeploy those resources somewhere else? Does innovation have a priority within the organization of the company? Is there an incentive system in place for innovation, et cetera? So it's less about what the innovation is. It's more about, do they have innovation processes in place?

Shiv: How do you trade off between the innovation side and making sure that the core business is as strong as it can be? Because like we said earlier, a lot of these companies may not have core processes built out. Maybe their go-to-market motion isn't as strong. Maybe they haven't really nailed down their team. There's a lot of these things that need to be nailed down before you can think about the next thing that you're going to invest into. And you can easily kind of spread yourself thin. So how do you balance those things?

Jeff: That's a great question. You know, I think part of that is the leadership maturity and the leadership expertise at the top, top one, two or three people in the organization to recognize when their current core business is suboptimal and recognize that the deployment of resources to try to figure out new things might not be the right deployment of those resources. But to deploy those smart people who are innovators at heart, change agents at heart, to deploy them toward the optimization of the existing business first is a way to stimulate innovation, but it's to direct it toward a different end, if that makes sense. So once you feel like that you're in a good place, you may not be completely optimized on your core business, but you're certainly not massively suboptimal, then you know, making innovation part of everyone's job, expecting and establishing as part of your strategic growth plan that you will look at new ways to innovate on a regular basis is what we find. Leaving it to chance is the absolute worst thing to do in my experience.

Shiv: Yeah, in some way, no matter what you have to be looking at the market, you have to think about what your customers need more of and be on the cutting edge so that you're not usurped by somebody else. So I think that makes sense. What about on the next one is on digital readiness. How does that connect with the innovation side and everything else that we've talked about so far?

Jeff: Well, a lot of people think when they think innovation, they think digital data and technology, right? And while the vast majority of innovation is probably happening in our world in that instance, I really separate these in terms of diagnostic domains and in terms of operational domains, because to not do so, I think lessens the significance of both. So there's a lot of digital and data capabilities out there that organizations have yet to even explore implementation of that are based upon innovations that happened five, six, seven years ago. In other words, they're not terribly innovative today in the marketplace, but they might be transformational for that organization. So some of the best practices that we assess around digital readiness have to do with, number one, is there a clear understanding of the digital technologies available that will transform your business or your industry in both the short and longer term? And so again, remember we're assessing the expert opinions of the top leaders in the organization. Do you guys feel like you have a clear understanding of what technologies are available out there? Do you have a clear and compelling vision for how the company will win in a digital future? And are you taking steps to achieve that? Are you effectively leveraging digital and data technologies to improve and differentiate your products, your services, and your customer or channel engagement? Have you incorporated digital and data technologies into all aspects of your operations? Do you understand what data drives value for your organization? And are you using those data and analytics associated with that data to guide your decision-making? So those are some of the examples of things that we look at in the digital data technologies.

Shiv: How often do you find that organizations just don't have a good plan on this side? We've seen it on the go-to-market side where companies are super traditional and not looking at digital channels and a big chunk of their audience is sitting in those channels and the same is true across all kinds of domains. But I'm just curious how often you come across companies that just aren't mature in this area?

Jeff: I would say well above 50%, probably approaching 75 to 80%. And even what I found, so I working for a publicly traded company a few years ago that was in the data analytics space, I inherited the running of all of the internal systems. So all of the business support systems. Now this was not the technology that was used to deliver clients and products and services to clients. It was the technology that was used to manage the organization. And the adage about the cobbler's children usually has no shoes, could not have been more truthful in this particular organization. All of the investment was focused on the digital and data technologies to drive products and services. And virtually zero effort was focused on the digital readiness of the operational aspects of the organization. So I say that to say that it is industry agnostic, the degree to which organizations fail to leverage the digital data and technologies available to their businesses. And I think it's probably because those capabilities are farther ahead of the human's ability to adopt it, if that makes sense. And many human's ability. And in fact, I looked at a curve by Friedman, I'm trying to remember the name of the book now. I can't remember it off the top of my head, but he actually showed the curve of human adoption versus the curve of technology. And there was a gap between the two. And I think that's probably what's driving that. 

Shiv: Yeah, it's also just you find success as a company over time doing a certain business a certain way, including your systems, your tech stack, your sales process and everything. And changing that almost never makes sense, even though there's sometimes or often many better ways of doing some of those same activities. So you kind of are incentivized not to change it, even though it might make things better.

Jeff: Well, and that's where I think we start to see a meshing between innovation and digital readiness, innovation readiness and digital readiness. So I talked about innovation being planned change. So it's like the scientific method applied to innovation. And what I mean by that is so many times in organizations, someone comes up with a great idea and everyone rallies around that great idea. They make a bunch of investment to actually execute against that idea and six months later they're backing away from it because they realized that number one, it wasn't worth the effort or number two, they couldn't achieve it all. And so we're very pedantic in the innovation work that we do to say, let's start by identifying the problem or the opportunity. What's the problem we're trying to solve? What's the opportunity we're trying to see? So first of all, let's articulate that very, very clearly in a clear, crisp, concise problem statement or an opportunity statement. Then let's begin gathering some quantitative data to actually quantitatively validate that that problem opportunity exists, number one, and that it's big enough to actually have an impact. Is it going to be worth the effort? Then let's qualitatively validate it by going out and having some well-constructed, open-ended, non-biased generating questions, customer discovery questions to our customers and key stakeholders. Could be internal customers, could be external customers, to qualitatively validate those assumptions that we have around this quantitative problem or opportunity we've identified. And generally we find that when we first created that problem or opportunity statement, our assumptions were about 50 to 70% accurate, usually aggregating around 60% accurate, which means about 40% of the time our assumptions were inaccurate or incomplete. And so that quantitative validation and that qualitative validation helps us to pivot those problem and opportunity statements so that by the time we start getting ready to invest in a solution, we know precisely what the problem is we're trying to solve, what the opportunity is we're trying to seize, and what the outcomes are that we're looking to create. And we know that based upon the investment we're about to make, we know that if we make that investment, it's gonna produce this kind of outcome. 

Shiv: Isn't there a risk though, and we see this with our companies, a lot of our clients as well, is you can spend a ton of time on, let's say digital transformation or changing your tech stack and all of those kinds of things, but your core business doesn't improve as a result because it's more like an infrastructure project. So how much are you factoring in that risk?

Jeff: We factor it in a lot when we're working with clients. We don't factor it in in the digital readiness assessment because we want to know purely what the leadership feels about the digital readiness of the company. But as we start helping them implement a plan around digital readiness, everything we do is about creating sustained strategic growth for the organization. That can be growth in the top line and often is, and it should also be growth in the bottom line and often is as well. And so that then requires us to look at what's going to be the outcome of this digital transformation. And we don't even really use the phraseology digital transformation because we believe that if you're waiting to the point that you have to transform the digital landscape of your business, it's probably suboptimal. You've probably waited too long. There are incremental changes you can make along the way to produce real business outcomes to right size the investment for the outcome that you're looking to create. And that prevents you from having to go through a complete, throw the baby out with the bathwater kind of exercise.

Shiv: Gotcha. And then let's get to the last one, which is financial discipline and how these companies are run on the financial side. What do you look at in particular there?

Jeff: Again, we're back at looking at the processes and best practices of the executive team about how much time are they spending and what processes are they going through to look at the financial performance of the organization. So it starts at budgeting and cashflow assessments. It looks at the accuracy of the financial records and the ability to break those down unit by unit across the organization to look at the performance of products, the performance and profitability of clients, and the performance and profitability of actual units within the organization. It has to do with the amount of days cash on hand that they're keeping available in order to weather certain storms in the organization or to make opportunistic investments when we find that those investments could escalate the completion of our strategic growth plan or the execution of our strategic growth plan. It looks at the degree to which the leadership team feels that there are the right levels of controls in place, the level of debt that they're willing to take on as an organization, and the degree of long-term financial planning, not just long-term strategic growth planning, but also long-term financial planning to assess the need for capital that they're going to have in next two years, three years, five years, etc.

Shiv: Do you find this to be the case? We work with a ton of institutional investors and this is all that they focus on. And so do you find that the maturity is higher when an institutional investor is involved versus a smaller company?

Jeff: If that institutional investor has been involved for a period of time. If we get up, say a PE or venture backed company where they're within the first year of that venture backing or PE backing, not necessarily. It usually takes a little bit of time for those. Now, generally we'll find that there are some first pass of disciplines that that institutional investor will require and in short order within the first three to four months will get executed. But we find that if it's in years two, three, beyond, there's a much greater degree of financial maturity or financial discipline maturity within the organization.

Shiv: Do you find that one of the things that we noticed even as a gap in larger companies or ones that are backed by institutional capital is there's just a gap in the understanding there's we can do basic bookkeeping level or controller level or I just say your GAAP financial statements and having your accounting records in order versus strategic finance, which is really bottom up forecasting, knowing what's possible in the market. Like, is that the gap that you're seeing?

Jeff: That's right. Yes, completely. And even, you know, even in a lot of early stage companies and even, even, you know, up into the $50 million mark or so, you know, you would be surprised at the, the manual nature of the, the accounting and bookkeeping processes and the management accounting, so to speak, management accounting in many instances won't even exist. Or, or, or if the management and, accounting and bookkeeping processes are decent, the length of time that it takes after the close of a period to actually produce a financial statement. So, you're talking 30 days, 45 days, 60 days in some instances. So by the time we get our financial statements, we're almost to the end of the next reporting period, quarter in many instances. So that's one issue. And then for sure the lack of strategic finance. That's probably one of the single greatest gaps that I see in any business is, how are we looking at customer profitability? How are we looking at our cash cycle? How are we looking at the profitability of products? Our white space analysis in terms of products and services that exist across our client population and how that contributes to our profitability or lack thereof. So absolutely agree with you. And our capital projections, not really having a good understanding of what kind of capital we're going to need to make investments for the longer term.

Shiv: Yeah, completely agree. That's awesome. We're coming up on time here. So before we jump off, Jeff, like if people want to learn more, what is the best way they can find you and your firm and learn more about this framework as well?

Jeff: Sure, so the easiest way to go and find a growth DX is at growth dx .ai DX is an abbreviation for diagnosis in the medical field. So growth dx .ai that can get me at Jeff S at innovation junkie .com that's Jeff S, S is in standards, Jeff S at innovation junkie .com, jeffstandridge .com and I'm very active on LinkedIn.

Shiv: Excellent, we'll be sure to include all those links in the show notes. And with that said, Jeff, thanks for coming on and sharing your wisdom. I think the framework and kind of how you went about that, I think it's gonna be very helpful to firms and companies as they think about growing their respective businesses. So I appreciate you coming on to share.

Jeff: Thank you, Shiv. It's been my pleasure and I appreciate the opportunity to join you.

Shiv: Appreciate it. Thank you.