[0:00] John Hosey: As the leader of this organization, I do two things every day: I get asked a question I don't know the answer to, and I screw something up. But what it's about is making mistakes and admitting mistakes, and then being quick about learning from them and fixing them.
[0:29] Rich Smith: Welcome to Revenue Science, the show where we translate marketing and sales complexity into boardroom clarity for CEOs, founders, and growth leaders building predictable revenue growth systems. I'm Rich Smith — CMO, founder, executive adviser, investor, and thrilled to be back behind the Revenue Science microphone as your host. Thank you for joining us today, and please help us reach more leaders by liking, subscribing, and sharing this episode.
[0:58] Rich Smith: Today's guest is John Hosey, CEO of the Advanced Leadership Development Institute, leadership adviser, executive coach, and organizational development expert whose work focuses on helping leaders build cultures that unlock performance, engagement, and long-term growth. What makes John's perspective especially relevant for Revenue Science listeners is that he approaches leadership as a system rather than a personality trait.
[1:24] Rich Smith: Throughout his career, he's worked with executives, leadership teams, and organizations seeking to scale performance by improving self-awareness, accountability, communication, and trust. Many business leaders assume growth stalls because of market conditions, competition, or execution challenges. John's work suggests a different possibility: organizations often grow only as fast as their leaders develop. Leadership blind spots create friction, misalignment slows decisions, lack of trust reduces execution speed — and eventually what appears to be a revenue problem becomes a leadership problem.
[2:01] Rich Smith: Today we'll explore the psychology of leadership, self-awareness, organizational trust, behavioral science, executive development, AI, culture, and what it takes to build organizations capable of sustained growth. Hey John, welcome to Revenue Science.
[2:20] John Hosey: Hey Rich, thanks for having me.
[2:22] Rich Smith: I'm excited to talk with you today. Full disclosure for our audience — you and I worked together for a period of time back at DVC, and I've just recently been reminiscing about some of those DVC days — you can see some of the memorabilia over my shoulder there. Just the lessons I learned, bringing that brand back to the market and learning what works, what doesn't, and how to do that — it was a formative time period for me. I'm curious what experiences you'd say have most shaped your leadership philosophy.
[3:05] John Hosey: Great question, and my time at DVC was formative for me too. It was one of the first times I was really stepping into a big operations role, with people on-site, people remote, vendors all over the country — stepping into that kind of environment, and it was a company in transition, going through a sale and transition to other corporate entities and owners. There was a big mix of things happening.
[4:01] John Hosey: One of the most formative leadership moments I have, that still sticks with me, involved my boss there, Katherine Eckert. I was new, and my focus was back-office, operational — my scorecard was based on setting up the operations, getting things moving, a laundry list of tactical things to get done.
[4:23] John Hosey: In that process, there was a colleague of mine on the sales side — I was the new guy, he was one of the senior, seasoned people. In my running around trying to get my arms around everything, I screwed up in that relationship. We were trying to meet, trying to get time on the calendar to hear his perspective on how things were going — he was ultimately an internal client of mine, on the front line serving the external client.
[5:11] John Hosey: With all my running around, I didn't prioritize well sitting down with him. It culminated in me setting up a lunch — I didn't blow him off, but 10 things came up at once, I was late, only saw him for a hot second, then I was out. To me, I was doing the right things, focusing on all the tactical stuff I had to set up. I apologized, but I just didn't make the time.
[5:43] John Hosey: This came right as I was getting ready to travel down to our big team in Texas — we were based in Pennsylvania. While I'm down there, Katherine calls and says, "hey, I got some really negative feedback from this colleague." I didn't respond well — I said something like, "I am so busy, I don't have time for this relationship management."
[6:27] John Hosey: She said something that was both a huge clarifying moment for me on how to operate as a leader, and took me down a path of realization. First thing she said: "I get it, but you got to solve it." That was, in the moment, her basically saying: look, I get that you're busy, I get all those things leaders deal with — doesn't matter, this is actually important. The other stuff you're doing, yes, it's important, but this is important too, maybe even more so — she didn't say that part, but that's what I took from it.
[7:08] John Hosey: She just said, "I get it, but you have to solve it." For me that was: okay, it's not about the busy work, it's about time and intention. This was a person in the organization saying "I need time to talk to you," and being gracious about it — when he gave that negative feedback, he wasn't yelling, wasn't unreasonable, he was just, "what's with John, he blew me off, and I really do need to talk to him."
[7:41] John Hosey: That was a crystallizing leadership moment — the first time I really heard, it's not about busy, it's about the intentional things you need to do that are important. As a leader, it doesn't matter how busy you are — when problems come up, you have to figure it out, you have to reprioritize, you have to solve it. That was number one.
[7:57] John Hosey: Number two: when I actually took the time to sit down with this person, I ate humble pie — I truly felt bad about it, and my head had been in the wrong space. When I really talked to him, I realized how much I'd screwed up as a leader. I got to hear the challenges he'd faced historically with my organization before I took it over, and what was going on for him now, and the areas where I needed to deliver better.
[8:29] John Hosey: My organization was also in this internal valuation space — high level, I had to deliver from a customer service standpoint for our internal clients, things that mattered to the external clients, but also from an operations efficiency and compliance standpoint. So it wasn't just client service, there were other layers. Really sitting down and listening to him, and taking the time to connect, the other piece I got was how important it is as a leader to sit down and listen to all your constituents. He was very gracious — he didn't yell, didn't pull rank, it was just, "hey, I need your help, man."
[9:35] Rich Smith: There are some really good insights in there to unpack. I've fallen victim to this in my career too, where you don't emphasize relationships enough, and don't realize that most of your role as a leader isn't really doing anything — it's helping other people achieve their full potential. I think, usually, you learn from these situations, and the more you have them, the more they become great learning opportunities — sometimes I still have them.
[10:32] John Hosey: I think one of the big things it taught me — there's a lot of correlation here to leadership but also to the space you're in, particularly the marketing side — people ask me what the most important leadership skill is, and there are a lot of them, maybe it's over-reductive, but the one thing I say is most important is listening. In that moment I wasn't taking the time to really listen to the organization, to the people inside it, to say "what do you really need from me?" That was my first transition from being a tactical doer with a tactical team to now having to be a strategic leader.
[11:33] Rich Smith: Listening is part of having a service mentality as a leader — and if you're not listening carefully and reading between the lines on what people are telling you, you can't possibly put yourself in a position to serve their needs appropriately. One interesting concept for our audience — you were talking about this being an internal customer. A lot of organizations pay a lot of attention to customer service standards for external customers, but often don't set the same standards internally. My question is: how can you possibly expect high standards of customer service externally if you don't hold the same standards internally?
[12:43] Rich Smith: I'm a little biased, I'm a marketing person, I kind of feel like everybody's job in a company is marketing — the reason I say that is even the non-customer-facing areas of an organization are required to operate well in order for the customer-facing portions to serve the customer appropriately. If finance takes too long to get back to sales or marketing on a critical decision, that slows down their ability to serve customers, to accomplish what the organization needs from a growth perspective.
[13:27] Rich Smith: One of the best examples: early in my career I worked at MBNA America, a credit card company based in Newark, Delaware, eventually purchased by Bank of America. One of our standards was called "two-ring pickup." The idea was, typically, if the phone rings once or twice and gets picked up on the second ring, that feels good — they're on top of it. Three, four, five rings, you're ready to hang up. We had that standard externally — measured average speed of answer, two rings was about 21 seconds.
[14:23] Rich Smith: We had the same two-ring pickup standard internally — this was before Teams and Slack and instant messaging, we had email but it was clunky, so a lot of internal work happened over the phone. We had call trees set up so that would never fail — if I was away from my desk, the call would ring to a central administrator who'd answer within two rings. Senior executives really paid attention to it — people were diving over cubicle walls to pick up phones that were ringing because they didn't want a two-ring pickup miss.
[15:19] Rich Smith: And it bleeds into everything you do.
[15:30] John Hosey: You're a thousand percent right. What I saw a lot, and this was my mentality that I needed to shift — I was coming into that role thinking this job is kind of about compliance, kind of about operations, and at the time I hadn't wrapped my brain around: no, this is about the things you're doing directly impacting the client. You have many masters to serve in a leadership role, and you have to serve them all equally well, or prioritize who your real client segments are — what's your customer-centricity.
[16:18] John Hosey: That's something I see as really common, particularly in high-growth organizations. When a company's small, you have a small group of people generally aligned, who can get in a room, talk about strategy, pick up the phone if there are problems. As the organization gets bigger and pressure on performance grows, people slide back into their silos and lose that strategic connection — that what we're really here to do, whatever our product or service is, is do that better than anybody else in the industry. That's the goal — nobody starts a company to just be kind of good at it.
[17:19] John Hosey: The only way you keep that well-oiled machine is everybody having that same cultural direction and connection — we're all here to help each other deliver this excellent level of service.
[17:38] Rich Smith: I think it's also important to have practices in place that reinforce those things over time. I see a lot of organizations with great leaders but very poor alignment amongst the leadership team — not because the team or leader is bad, but because they haven't established a practice for maintaining alignment over time, since things tend to drift.
[18:07] Rich Smith: You do your annual plan, submit it in August, finish sometime after Thanksgiving, submit to finance, they approve it December 31st, January 1 you're off to the races. Go back two months later and ask anybody what's in that annual plan — most teams won't be able to answer, or they'll be all over the place. Maintaining alignment over time is a really critical skill leadership teams need to develop.
[18:42] Rich Smith: There's a quote — I forget who to attribute it to — "you don't rise to the level of your ability, you fall to the level of your training." That's exactly right. In difficult leadership situations you default back to your level of training, your typical activity as a leadership team. If you've established the practice of staying aligned, when difficult things happen, everybody's still operating from the same set of objectives and assumptions — that's super important.
[19:21] Rich Smith: Was there a particular moment you first realized leadership development could become a force multiplier for organizational performance?
[19:35] John Hosey: I think the moment it really clicked — a lot of our background has been in financial services. In one of my last corporate gigs I was at First Republic Bank, which was taken over by JP Morgan Chase, so the brand doesn't exist anymore. Jim Herbert, the founder, had this really simple core concept for everybody: he didn't go out and say "I want to start a bank" — he said "I want to start an excellent customer service organization, and the services we happen to sell are banking and financial services."
[20:16] John Hosey: Everything incorporated into the bank's DNA was about cultivating a human-to-human connection, people as the force multiplier, really investing in the quality of the people and creating a system where they were empowered to make good decisions around customer service and delivery, with guardrails.
[21:04] John Hosey: What that translated into was people working with their brains on, as opposed to just following scripts and P&Ps and becoming automatons. When you create an environment where people are working with their brains on and empowered to make decisions all the way down to the front line, you get a completely different customer service experience — that pick-up-on-the-second-ring mentality, not because people fear punishment, but because they understand and rally around: if I was on the other end of that phone, that's what I'd want.
[21:54] John Hosey: That was the first place I really worked that was less about procedure and more about the people — and it was one of the most amazing customer service organizations, the best I've ever worked for.
[22:18] Rich Smith: That's a great story. Many CEOs think they have a revenue problem or a sales problem when they actually have a leadership problem. How would you advise them to tell the difference?
[22:34] John Hosey: I've seen it not just in big companies but with entrepreneurs too — small company, they've got it together, think they have a pretty good model and product, and just need a sales strategy or marketing campaign. The truth is, if you don't match your activities to fill the top of the funnel with investment in the people and processes to make sure the delivery is fantastic once that funnel's full, you're only looking at one side of the problem.
[23:15] John Hosey: You're actually creating more of a problem for yourself, because you can sink a company that way — you exacerbate sales and cash flow problems quickly, and take a company that was struggling and push it right down the drain.
[23:54] Rich Smith: I think some of that occurs because people think of sales and marketing and customer acquisition as separate from the product or service — or even worse, separate from the culture, like they're their own entity, and then there's the company over here. It's got to be an integrated model.
[24:26] Rich Smith: I don't care what the product or service is — a lot of what the buyer experiences is part of that product or service, and that buyer experience starts way before the top of the funnel. Businesses need to think through their entire funnel and distribution system as part of the product or service they provide — the product or service doesn't begin after someone's bought, it begins at the top of the funnel. You take a factory mentality to the whole thing from start to finish, and it's got to be all in sync.
[25:20] Rich Smith: How do leadership blind spots show up in revenue growth, customer experience, and execution?
[25:36] John Hosey: There are a bunch of different ways a failure in leadership can affect revenue. First, if you have a leader in charge of something — and it doesn't even have to be an individual leader, it can be a cultural problem, like great leaders in different verticals who just aren't aligned well — the first easy-to-quantify challenge you'll see is customer attrition. That's the big red flag, and of course the last place you want to be looking, because that's looking in the rearview mirror at that point.
[26:23] John Hosey: If you have leadership, cultural, and performance problems internally, you want headlights on that, not to be looking at the taillights of clients leaving. Consistently gathering net promoter score and client feedback is important — part of any continuous process improvement structure. But customer attrition is a big one.
[26:59] John Hosey: Another headlight indicator: taking internal surveys of your people, looking at disengagement, negative feedback on leaders or performance, high reported stress. Those are headlight indicators. The taillight indicators: what's your turnover start to look like — how many people are leaving. Studies from SHRM and others put the cost of replacement anywhere from 2x to 7x the individual's cost, depending on the study, because it's not just hiring — it's lost productivity while they're underperforming and unhappy, and while gone, plus the radiating impact on the team. That's a huge, well-documented cost risk where poor leadership shows up on your balance sheet.
[28:09] Rich Smith: If you're experiencing high turnover, that could be a symptom of a number of different problems — there's probably no simple solution. It can be cultural, your hiring practices could be off bringing in people who aren't a good fit, or you're not connecting folks to the purpose of the organization — yes, we all work to make money, but what are we really working for? To create meaning and a sense of accomplishment. People need to be connected to a purpose bigger than themselves.
[29:02] Rich Smith: Regardless of the cause, if you're experiencing this, dig in and diagnose the main factors and address them. But turnover is attrition among your employees — if you're running a high turnover rate among your own employees, how can you possibly expect a low attrition rate among your customers?
[29:35] John Hosey: Exactly. Another big one — if you're in the leadership chairs, maybe you're the CEO evaluating your own blind spots — it's looking at the strategic plan: you got your team together, came up with the plan for the next 12 months or quarterly, went after it, executed. Then it's, okay, how much of it is actually getting done on time? That's another headlight — as the leader, what have we actually accomplished strategically, and which initiatives are lagging?
[30:26] John Hosey: When they are lagging, dig into why. Was it an unrealistic goal? Something external, a macro influence we didn't think about? Or something internal? If it was the wrong goal, why didn't anybody speak up and say "I think this is the wrong direction"? That's a leader blind-spot evaluation: do I create an environment where I can have creative conflict with my people, where if they think I'm taking us down the wrong road, they can raise their hand immediately and say so, and we debate it — and as a leader, I harness that feedback through listening.
[31:32] John Hosey: If it's about externalities, then: why did we miss that, what's wrong in our evaluation process, are we really listening to the customer, really in tune with the market, could we have seen it, anticipated it, been more nimble to react? And if it's an internal thing — friction within teams, poor communication — blind spot evaluation: why is that happening, how do I dig in, get leaders aligned, and fix it to be more agile going forward?
[32:17] Rich Smith: I think one mistake a lot of leaders make is assuming they need to have all the answers — go back into their ivory tower, set the direction, have the vision, bring all the answers to the teams they lead. Even if you have all the answers, that's not the most effective way to lead. People respond much better to objectives they've had a part in creating.
[32:59] Rich Smith: I've managed marketing teams for much of my career, and the most successful campaigns were ones where I included sales, customer service, other people in the process of creating the campaign. Part of that is just better campaigns, because I get better information and input from people actually talking to customers and prospects. But the underappreciated part is that because I included sales and customer service in creating the campaign, they were bought in — even if they didn't agree with everything the marketing team finally came out with, they had a voice, they were engaged, and they cared as much as I did about making it successful.
[34:02] Rich Smith: Think about the reverse — marketing goes off, creates a campaign strategy in their conference room, then just announces it to the company. It might succeed — you can get lucky — but is it succeeding because of, or in spite of, the performance of sales and customer service? And it just gives everybody a reason to shoot holes in it. If you have that kind of finger-pointing internally, you're going to be much less effective.
[34:39] Rich Smith: So the lesson: as a leader, you don't have to have all the answers — you need to ask the questions and be inclusive. You can't just come up with something, put it out to everybody, and expect them to love it if they haven't had any voice or input in its creation.
[35:05] John Hosey: Agreed 100%. That's a common thing people do stepping into a new leadership role — they have anxiety around performance, feeling that pressure, maybe a bit of impostor syndrome: "I'm in this role, I was put here, so I have to be the person who really leads and directs, it's about my intelligence, my problem-solving" — all incorrect assumptions about what it really means to be a leader. It's all about internal anxiety as a human, feeling like you're in this lonely spotlight and have to perform.
[36:00] John Hosey: That's the biggest challenge we see — folks feeling like they have to be superhuman, have all the answers, can't show any weakness. Something I used to do, sitting down with my people or hiring someone for a new role, talking about culture and expectations — I'd be very upfront: "look, as the leader of this organization, there are two things I know I do every day: I get asked a question I don't know the answer to, and I screw something up every day."
[36:48] John Hosey: It's about being very open and empathetic, about making mistakes and admitting mistakes, and being quick about learning from and fixing them. It's also about, when you don't have the answer, not pretending you do, but being honest about it and figuring out where to get the answer from quickly — usually from your team.
[37:12] John Hosey: The other thing you said that's really important — sitting down with the team to together come up with a plan — a) it'll be a better plan because it's more heads and experts closer to the work than you are; b) you get greater buy-in, and better buy-in means better execution. But the other critical thing you touched on: as a leader, sometimes you do have to listen to everybody and then say, "I get it, but we're going to go in this direction."
[37:56] John Hosey: Sometimes as the leader you have to listen to everybody but still make a judgment call that goes a different direction than what the group is telling you, and they may not like hearing it. I've always found the best way to frame that is not "I'm just the boss, so here's how we're doing it," but "I hear everything you guys said, but in this instance I'm going to choose a different direction, and here's why" — really explaining the why.
[38:35] John Hosey: Leaders who master that art — and it's not really an art, it's just being human and empathetic, being a leader — get less of that "I knew it would fail anyway" syndrome, even when saying no to a group or taking it in a different direction. That's the way to get them positively invested in the outcome.
[39:08] Rich Smith: A lot of what you're talking about really ladders up to trust — and trust is vital for a leader to be effective. What other behaviors do you think create trust the fastest?
[39:30] John Hosey: I think humility and vulnerability really create trust. And then really listening — going into a room and genuinely asking people what they think, not just as lip service, but really connecting, really caring. I think the other piece is owning your mistakes in a very public way.
[40:07] John Hosey: When you choose to go down a certain road and it ends up being the wrong decision, turning around and saying, "as a leader we tried this, it didn't work out, here's why, and here's where that's on me, here's my promise for how I'm going to operate differently" — if I made a decision in a vacuum, I should have gotten more information from you guys, and if I had, I'd have seen I was going down the wrong path, next time it's going to be different, let's talk about it as a group.
[40:48] John Hosey: Owning the mistakes as much as being there for the rah-rah and driving victory — those are two really huge things.
[41:06] Rich Smith: I completely agree, and it's true for organizations too, how they create and maintain trust in the market. I've served as corporate spokesman for several companies, and talking to the media and reporters, one thing you never want to do is say something that's not 100% true — you're much better off saying, "I don't know the answer, but I'll find it and get back to you."
[41:46] Rich Smith: Even that kind of action creates trust, because they don't want to feel like they're being BS'd. Same with your staff and team — we all have millennia of evolution built into our neural systems to detect BS, an internal BS meter that evolved because it used to be a critical survival skill — if the tribe leader said "it's fine, I checked it out" and you didn't believe him and there was a lion down there, that could get you killed.
[42:31] Rich Smith: Authenticity comes from not trying to answer questions you don't know — find out the answer, be honest, be transparent about what you know and don't know. You don't need to be the smartest person in the room. In fact, if you are, you probably haven't hired well.
[42:56] John Hosey: That's right. So a lot of what a leader is required to do is create accountability within their team and other areas of the organization — but a lot of them think they need to make people afraid, do it from a place of fear. How do leaders think about creating accountability without creating fear?
[43:26] John Hosey: I think the way you do it is you make accountability a group sport. An example from one of my teams — we were building a process from scratch, taking on a new function nobody had managed before, and getting a lot of negative feedback from internal clients because it was new.
[44:08] John Hosey: What I did was create a meeting I called the "solve-it meeting." One of the first things I did was go around the room and ask everybody, "what's your job in this company?" They'd say things like "I do assignment," "I do quality control." I said, "okay, that's your title — it's not your job. Your job is to solve problems, and we're going to become excellent problem solvers together."
[45:03] John Hosey: That installed the ethos: problems come up, maybe you created it, maybe it came your way — put your ego down, put your job description down, you just have a problem in front of you to solve. That laid the groundwork: mentally you can put down your hierarchy and title, we're just here to solve problems together. Each of us owns problem-solving.
[45:37] John Hosey: The next piece: I started taking notes from our internal systems — how task processing was happening, communication happening or not, documentation — and sat the team down and said, "once a week in this solve-it meeting, we're going to take three scenarios and look at them as a team: what did we do well, what could we have done better?" I took the notes directly from the system and redacted names, but they were live-fire, our actual production queue.
[46:35] John Hosey: I tried to create the environment that this isn't about blame, we're problem-solvers, how do we solve this better — with names taken out just so there wasn't distraction. Everybody would read through the fact pattern in the same time frame as if they were sitting in their seat handling the call, then we'd talk about what could've gone better.
[47:22] John Hosey: What started to happen, making it a group sport and taking blame out of it — I redacted names so people wouldn't feel singled out — but the people who'd actually handled those particular inquiries would immediately raise their hand and say, without anyone else in the room knowing (I was the only one who'd seen the names), "you know what, this was actually mine — here was my thought process, and looking at it now, I think I could have done this, this, and this better." It was amazing, without fear, without shame, no retribution — no "okay great, thanks for pointing that out, you're fired."
[48:26] Rich Smith: I think a lot of times we want to hold people accountable for outcomes, and the problem is outcomes are often out of your control or the person's control. As a business, you are accountable for outcomes — the CEO is accountable for outcomes — but the further you get from the CEO's chair, the less an individual can control the ultimate outcome. What they can control is their day-to-day activity.
[49:23] Rich Smith: I like to separate accountability into: what are the most important actions you need to do this week that help us get to that outcome — don't give me 10 things, give me one. What's the one thing that, if you only did it this week, would have the most impact? Then hold the person accountable to that one thing. That's accountability that gets results. Trying to hold people accountable to the ultimate outcome when they feel they don't have much control over it doesn't tend to work — it actually has a negative effect.
[50:14] John Hosey: It creates a culture of blame that's toxic within an organization, and you really need to avoid it, or figure out how to get rid of it if you have it.
[50:24] John Hosey: In addition to focusing on things within your span of control — let's say it's a project where you have a piece of it, and there's a dependency on the next person doing their piece, like an assembly line. What you can hold someone accountable for is: how well are you setting up the next person for success, how well are you doing the handoff — really understanding what they have to do in their job and how what you do impacts them, and what you need to do to make sure they have everything they need to perform excellently.
[51:45] Rich Smith: I totally agree, and that extends outside the organization to vendors and partners too. I can't tell you how many times someone from my team has come in complaining about an agency — "they just don't get it, gave us garbage output, they're no good." My question is always: okay, show me the creative brief you sent them. "What do you mean?" Show me the email, what did you actually give them — because yes, the agency might be bad, but if you're not giving them good input, you can't expect good output. If you give good input and get bad output, that's an indication it's not the right agency — but if you're not giving good input, you can't complain about the output.
[52:50] Rich Smith: What's a widely accepted leadership belief that you think is completely wrong?
[53:07] John Hosey: I think it's what we touched on earlier — that a leader needs to feel like they have all the answers. The best leaders come in and say, my job is to gather as much information as I can from all the experts throughout the company — hire people a lot more intelligent than I am, better at these individual tasks than I am, really listen to them, gather information well, then set the strategic path and own it when things go well and when they don't.
[53:57] John Hosey: It's that bombastic, authoritative leader who has to come in and act like "I know all the answers, I'm the guy, I'm the girl," feeling they need to project that energy and infallibility all the time. Huge, huge mistake.
[54:18] Rich Smith: I agree — I won't belabor it, we talked about it a lot earlier, but it's something I've personally experienced, and I know other leaders have too. It's super common, but one you just have to try to get over, and be vulnerable — vulnerability creates trust as well, you said that earlier and it's completely true. Thinking about everything we've talked about today, what do you think separates organizations that scale successfully from those that plateau?
[54:56] John Hosey: Really good point. I think the ones that scale successfully, and scale their people successfully, are constantly looking at — and I know we have AI in the mix now, how that integrates, how it affects our people strategy, what tasks are being done by humans versus not, how we're building more economic leverage using AI — but even putting AI aside, it's companies looking at not just growth of revenue, sales, and marketing, but creating a parallel path of how I'm using my tech and platforms and how I'm redeploying my people and what their growth path is.
[56:05] John Hosey: Companies that really focus on, when I bring somebody in, what are the pathways I'm creating for them to grow in this organization, so I get lifetime value out of my employees — versus looking at them as just a line-item expense. That's not going to go great. At the end of the day, people deliver service and drive an organization — AI is taking more of a role, but it's still people making final decisions. You need to invest equally — not just financially, but in time and energy — in your people strategy and platforms as much as your sales and marketing strategy.
[57:05] Rich Smith: I completely agree. One concept I talk about a lot: if your organization has plateaued, you can't expect to scale your company without scaling up your leaders. When you're starting an organization very small, everybody has a wide span of activity and control; the larger it gets, the narrower those spans get. A CEO's job, grossly oversimplified, really comes down to three things: vision, people, and money.
[57:53] Rich Smith: If they're not spending their time on those three things, anywhere else they're spending time is time that could be better spent by somebody else. That's true for every member of your leadership team, from senior to middle management. To scale your organization, you have to scale your leaders — put them in positions closer and closer to only the things they're really good at. You can't scale an organization as CEO without scaling yourself up.
[58:41] Rich Smith: On that note — if one of our CEOs listening today wanted to improve their leadership effectiveness over the next 90 days, how would they start? What would you suggest?
[58:49] John Hosey: This is where it becomes a sales pitch. Anytime — I think getting an executive coach can really help, and you want one with history and experience working with somebody at your level in the organization — if you're a CEO, working with CEOs, understanding the challenges CEOs face. Having some background, either lived experience at an executive level or coaching specifically in your business, can help — not always necessary, but it helps, because they'll have shorthand on what you're going through, understand the industry and the challenges you're dealing with.
[59:33] John Hosey: The third thing that's really valuable: you get a completely separate, fresh set of eyes — they don't know you, they're not going to buy into any of your personal BS, and they're going to hold you accountable. If a CEO's going to invest in executive coaching, they want someone who's really a good accountability partner — not talk therapy, but focused on: I understand the intensity of the change we need to deliver, or the upleveling needed within a time frame, and I'm going to create a program where we move fast, and I'm going to hold you accountable, and you have to invest in it too.
[1:01:05] John Hosey: It's an investment, like going to school, or getting a personal trainer at the gym — if you miss your sessions and half-ass it, you're not going to get the results you want.
[1:01:27] Rich Smith: Everybody can use a coach, no matter how good you are — a coach gives you an outside third-party perspective, a safe place to talk about things you're working on or want to improve. LeBron James has a coach, Sidney Crosby has a coach, Tom Brady had a coach — doesn't matter, you can be at the peak of your industry and still use a coach.
[1:02:07] Rich Smith: Really good advice. Hey John, this has been a great conversation — where can people go to find out more about you and your work and connect with you?
[1:02:19] John Hosey: Sure — I have two companies. One is the Advanced Leadership Development Institute, focused on executive coaching for high-growth companies, execs experiencing that challenge of building a rocket ship as it's launching into space, and that unique set of stressors and agility you need.
[1:02:52] John Hosey: The other is a company called Alloy Consulting, focused on Main Street businesses — if you're the owner-founder, or the second-generation owner of a founder's business, and you want to grow but you're stuck in that "chief cook and bottle washer" scenario — you started the business with a strategic vision for what you wanted your life to look like and what the business would create, then quickly realized running a small business is hard, and now you're buried in the tactical and want to get back on the strategic path, create more intention and more life for yourself — I help with that. Those are the two areas you can reach me through.
[1:03:39] Rich Smith: Great, we'll put links to those in the show notes for everybody. John, thanks again — I really appreciate your time and being here today, sharing your insights with our audience.
[1:03:52] John Hosey: Thanks for having me, Rich — it was a lot of fun, always good to see your face again, going back, God, close to 20 years to the DVC days at this point.
[1:04:01] Rich Smith: Wow, I don't think it's quite 20 — let's not take ourselves too far yet — but yeah, it's been a minute, for sure.
[1:04:10] Rich Smith: All right, John — thanks, see you.
[1:04:14] Rich Smith: Thank you for your time and attention on Revenue Science today. I hope you've gained valuable insights to put into practice in your own life and work. Please join our goal of helping more leaders successfully grow their companies by liking and subscribing to this podcast. To connect with me, go to richsmith.com.
