[0:00] Richard Walsh: You have a hostage situation. That's what you exactly. Yeah. And you're the hostage. If a standard is not enforced, it does not exist.
[0:10] Rich Smith: Today, I'm excited to welcome Richard Walsh, US Marine veteran, best-selling author, and founder of Sharpened Impact.
[0:16] Richard Walsh: We call it tolerance accumulation. Every time you make a little more toleration, that grows. It compounds week after week, month after month, year after year. 089 was a big inflection point where I lost everything. Business crashed. You know, everything was shutting down, right? No one was spending money. I got six little kids under four years old, you know, dealing with like what do I do now? I'm losing my house. I'm losing this and everything else.
[0:38] Rich Smith: That sounds like the, you know, a tragedy.
[0:41] Richard Walsh: It was a great thing looking back. Of course, it always is. It was my leadership that failed, right? I didn't go to counsel, right? I didn't ask anyone. I had a billionaire client like trying to give me business advice and I literally like, "What do you know?" The floor itself, that's where the majority of profit leakage is. It's millions of dollars.
[1:13] Rich Smith: Welcome to Revenue Science, the show where we translate marketing and sales complexity into boardroom clarity for CEOs, founders, and leaders who are building predictable growth systems. I'm Rich Smith, CMO, founder, executive adviser, and lucky enough to be your host. Thank you for listening today, and please join our goal of helping more leaders to successfully grow their companies by liking and subscribing to this podcast. Entrepreneurship is the engine that drives our economy. And when founders succeed, they improve the lives of their family, their employees, their community, and lastly, but most importantly, their customers. Today, I'm excited to welcome Richard Walsh. Over 35 years in business and leadership, Richard has focused on one challenge many organizations underestimate, frontline leadership. His work centers on turning operational chaos into control, strengthening accountability and helping organizations eliminate the hidden leaks that quietly drain profit and performance. Richard's perspective is particularly interesting because so much of what drives operational performance mirrors what we discuss on this show around revenue systems and behavioral science, leadership, incentives, decision-making, culture, and execution all shape outcomes. Today, we'll explore what executives can learn from frontline leadership systems, why many organizations create complexity instead of clarity, and how leaders can engineer better performance from the ground up. Richard, welcome to the show.
[2:46] Richard Walsh: Rich, great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
[2:51] Rich Smith: Yeah, I'm really excited about our conversation today. You and I had a chance to speak on your podcast actually a few weeks ago and was such a good conversation that I think we both decided, hey, let's keep it going. Let's do a round two. I thought you know, so you're new to my audience, so if you could maybe give us 60-second version of Sharpened Impact, who you serve, what kinds of problems you solve, and your current focus.
[3:22] Richard Walsh: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, it's relatively simple. So, what I always tell people is most companies don't have a people problem first. They have an infrastructure problem. All right. So, most of them have standards. They got dashboards. They got meetings. They got processes, KPIs. They've got all that, right? But when pressure hits, the standard still drifts, right? So, the invisible layer—that's really what I focus on. So execution doesn't break because SOPs disappeared. It breaks because the operating structure around the SOP doesn't protect it under pressure. Right? So my work is about helping companies install command where leadership training usually fails because command's not a personality. It's the consistent enforcement of standards under pressure. Right? So that's kind of my world.
[4:16] Rich Smith: I love that definition and I think it's obviously coming from your military background. But I think that concept is applicable broadly to businesses and leadership. I wonder what you think about that and how do you talk about that principle with your clients and the people you work with?
[4:41] Richard Walsh: Yeah, Rich, that's a good insight because yeah, I have the military background. I do apply some of this, but it's not barking orders. It's not demeaning. It's none of that kind of stuff. But the principles being holding on to the enforcement of a standard, maintaining that clarity when things are tight, right? When things happen because when you don't, that's when things can turn really bad. Now, you can put it in the military standpoint, people can die. But you can also put it in a manufacturing standpoint: that can lead to a lot of problems, not just physically but financially, right? That's where it all drifts. So if you think about being upstream, you got your systems, you got your processes, you got your green lights, your red lights—we're upstream of that, because where everything breaks is what we call the command drift. And what we learned in the military was you hold the standard no matter what, right? So, we're able to push through on that. But what I had to do from a business standpoint, well, I'm not dealing with a bunch of jarheads. I'm a Marine, so I can say that! I'm dealing with people, right? But it's still the issue: people holding the standard shift to shift, transfers, leadership changes, the number one guy not being there, that kind of stuff. So you kind of develop a system that can operate regardless of who's running the system. That's the key.
[6:10] Rich Smith: It sounds a lot to me like similar to the way I define culture within an organization. One of the ways that I define culture and get people to understand what I mean by culture, particularly talking to a CEO or a founder, is culture is how people make decisions when you're not in the room. That sounds very similar to what you're saying. So I'm curious, how do you equate that command architecture and thinking to creating a winning culture within an organization?
[6:54] Richard Walsh: Any culture has to have infrastructure. It has to have a foundation to build on. A lot of people will talk culture and it's a little foofoo, and they're looking for these kind of temporary things. But culture to me begins with identity. There has to be an identity in that business. Mine in particular, in the space I work in manufacturing, it's command infrastructure, right? It's identity. We actually make them commanders, but again, it's not based on them. They have a system they work inside of to uphold the standard, to enforce the standard. That's what's key. That becomes the culture. They see the drift, they correct the drift. A lot of people see the problem, they'll do a workaround, they'll do little deviations. And that's okay to keep throughput where it should be, but the accumulation of all those little deviations, those little alterations of the standard eventually end up in collapse, quality issues, and everything else you can imagine. So from a cultural standpoint, that level of enforcing the standard and maintaining that is what gives you the long-term strategy and people can attach to that, right? And they speak the same language, same vocabulary, so it crosses over very, very well. It's not dependent on the superstar, and then you got the slacker, then you got the guy in the middle, and that's three different shifts and three different things happen so you kind of have three different businesses running at the same time. From a cultural standpoint, that's kind of messed up, right?
[8:38] Rich Smith: Yeah, no, definitely. And I think when we talk about standards, if standards are moving all the time then no one really knows what to do within an organization, right? Imagine if you will, just to make a real-world example: if you have a dog and you let your dog out into the yard and one day you let the dog go all the way to the edge of the woods and that's no problem. And the next day you stop the dog halfway through the yard and you tell it, "No, it's bad." And then the next day you stop it on the driveway and you don't let it get off the driveway. And then the next day you let it go to the woods, okay? Does the dog know where its boundaries are? Does it have any idea? No, it does not. It's totally confused and it's total chaos. Now imagine you have 10 dogs or a hundred dogs. You're running an organization, you're running a company, and everyone's looking at different standards all the time, right? There's no continuity, no chance at success, and tons of inefficiency in a setup like that.
[9:46] Richard Walsh: Yeah. I've got a very simple saying. It's in my new book: If a standard is not enforced, it does not exist. It just cuts right to it, everything you just said right there. Very simply. Easier than the example you gave, but your example works, Rich. And that's what people need to understand. If they go into their company—we're talking to a lot of CEOs and owners here, right?—go in and just ask yourself: okay, how personality-driven and dependent is this function? It's a real simple way to go in and just kind of walk the floor, anything in your business. Is this dependent on a person only? I had an office manager like that, right? She could do everything. It was amazing. Thank you, I can go out and get things done, I can do all that stuff till the time she's not there. And then nothing gets done. And I'm scrambling because I'm used to writing stuff on napkins and handing it to her, because that's how I operate. But it's like there's no system. There's no process. And then if she decides not to come back, how do I train the next person to do everything that she did?
[11:01] Rich Smith: Same principle, totally agree. And I apply the same principle to founders themselves, because you often find founders are involved in every aspect of the business. They're running HR, they're running sales, they're running marketing, they're running finance, and they don't realize it, but they become a bottleneck. I actually published an article this morning about what I call the "founder business trap," which is exactly that. You get to this point where you get stuck and you plateau, and the reason is every little task is requiring some of the founder's time, and the founder is only one person and they only have so much time.
[11:41] Richard Walsh: Yeah. My first book is called Escape the Owner Prison because you're the bottleneck. You're having to do everything. You have to turn that key each day, open the door so business happens. Really bad place to be, and we've all been there. I always tell people, you work hard, you wear all the hats for the first two years getting this thing off the launch pad, but then next thing you know, 10 years goes by, you've repeated the first two years five times, and that's why you're not growing. That's why you're not able to reach a point to scale or anything like that. So oftentimes, and we all have to admit this as founders and CEOs, we're the problem, okay? We can't let go of certain things. But once you can see that, it's unbelievable what can happen when you understand that and you start letting go and going, "Okay, what do I have to do?" Even if you got to do it in little increments so you don't have the separation anxiety not being able to do everything. I was talking to a large company we're looking to acquire—great company, family-run, deep in the details. They're amazing, but they're in every detail, okay? As we want to accumulate and acquire other companies and roll up, it's like, okay, this is going to be a challenge. They get it, but when it comes time to do it, there's going to be some eggshell walking a little bit as we try to wean them off of that control that they have.
[13:16] Rich Smith: Yeah. So I want to change gears a little bit and get a little further into some of your concepts around leadership. Was there an inflection point or an event in your life that changed your view of what leadership is or means and what it should be?
[13:34] Richard Walsh: Yeah, I think 08–09 was a big inflection point where I lost everything. It made me think. Business crashed, everything was shutting down, right? No one was spending money, especially on the luxury items that I provided. They could wait. So the issue was that I got six little kids under four years old, dealing with like, what do I do now? I'm losing my house, I'm losing this and everything else. Now that sounds like a tragedy—it was a great thing looking back. Of course, it always is. But it was my leadership that failed, okay? It's my decisions as the leader, that bottleneck guy that had to do everything. And I look back on that and that's when I really said, "Wow, I did so many things wrong." Yeah, my crew was great, I was great with the guys, I trained them, we did a lot of good things and we built incredible things, world-class stuff. But the decisions I was making were really wrong, right? I didn't go to counsel, I didn't ask anyone, and I had people volunteering. I had a billionaire client trying to give me business advice and I literally was like, "Well, what do you know? You just own manufacturing plants and professional sports teams. I build water features and do steel sculpture, how can you help me?" You know, because I was just that level of thick where I was going to do all this. So that's the first thing: really opening that up to counsel, to coaching, mentoring, whatever you want to put in there, and really looking for better ways to lead. It has to be a continuous learning process. I think that was my big flip there. It took losing everything, but I got it now.
[15:33] Rich Smith: It's funny how events like that can be a wakeup call, and as you're going through them, they're horrendous, but then you look back and you think about how much change and growth that you had during that time frame. I was the Chief Marketing Officer of AIG Bank in '08–09, so I was right at the epicenter of the financial crisis. So I get what you're saying! Those were definitely trying times and I think we all learned a lot during that time period. That's a story for another day. I want to get into thinking about the businesses that you've built and run. Do you feel like your growth came more from systems, or culture, or leadership discipline?
[16:23] Richard Walsh: Wow. Those are tough to do individually because they kind of tie together. My first big thing was systemization. That was the first thing: why do they need me all the time? I literally broke it down to the simplest thing. This is going to seem incredibly rudimentary, but my next business after losing the first one, I had one requirement. Now, we had six kids, my wife's at home, we're going to homeschool the kids. I said, "Okay, my goal is that if she needs me, I want to be able to be there in 15 minutes." That was my goal, that's all I had. I said, "So, I'm going to build this next business around that. So, what do I have to do to do that right now?" She never really needed me, just for the record! But that forced me to go: "Okay, now I have to have this system. I have to have other people doing the work." I opened a gym, boot camp-style training, so I started to really learn how to build a system, build a lane, and then drop someone in it so they can function without me, right? Because a lot of times we just think they're going to figure it out, and they don't. So the systemization aspect was really, really important. That's kind of your foundational thought process. So that's where it began, and then you still got to lead and do the other work.
[17:51] Rich Smith: It is a little bit of a loaded question, right? Because all three of those things are very much interrelated and I think you described it very well. Systems build culture, leadership discipline creates systems. It's a circular process for sure. I do want to double-click on something you said though about replacing yourself. You talked about the importance of creating systems that allow people to replace tasks and functions that you may have been doing or someone else in the organization may have been doing at the time. What that does is allows you to level up, and if you're not leveling up, your company is not scaling up. You've got to scale yourself in order to scale your company. That's just a really important concept that I want to make sure our audience internalizes: think about where are you doing things that somebody else could do cheaper than you could do it, and how do you build systems to make them successful in that role? I'll let you react to that.
[19:13] Richard Walsh: Yeah, and there's the big takeaway in the last thing you said there. You have to build these lanes, the system where you're going to drop someone in there. Let me use sales as an example. You get this great A-player salesperson. Well, if you just bring them to your company and say "Go sell," all right, that guy ain't staying because there's no system in what winning looks like. What you have to design inside this lane is not only the how-tos, the job function, the training on how to do it, but really what does success look like on the day, the week, the month, the quarter, and the year. They need to know how to win on the daily. No one wants to come in and figure out your sales system. That has to be built if you want A-players to come in and really move the needle. They want to get dropped in and do what they do. They know how to sell—you're not teaching them how to sell. They just need to see your system, acclimate to it, and run to the goalpost. How do they hit that every day? So I think that's where a lot of founders and owners really drop the ball: they don't build these lanes out for each position. That's why they can't release it, because if you build it that way, they can jump in it and go and they're winning. Why would I stop them?
[20:42] Rich Smith: Thinking specifically of sales because you used that example, the reverse of it is also true. A lot of times CEOs will think, "Well, I've got these one or two rockstar salespeople and everything depends on them, and if either of them leave, we're in a lot of trouble." If you find yourself saying that or thinking that, you have a lack of systems.
[21:13] Richard Walsh: You have a hostage situation! That's what you got. And you're the hostage.
[21:21] Rich Smith: Yeah! A really good salesperson, you can plop them in pretty much any environment and they'll figure it out, but they'll figure it out their way, and it's not necessarily systematic and repeatable for the rest of the organization. How many rockstar salespeople are there? Are you going to build an entire team of them? Probably not. So that element of having them work within a system is just so important to really being able to scale in a predictable way.
[21:54] Richard Walsh: Yeah, and don't forget, in that system you have to install your values, your ethics. They'll go sell, all right, but there's a lot of ways to sell, okay? And they may not align with your value system because you didn't lay it out, you didn't interview for that, you didn't find out if you are in alignment with that kind of stuff. So there's little things like that too that can make a big difference on the ability to scale or maintain your reputation alone. It's important.
[22:30] Rich Smith: Many CEOs obsess over tactics and tactic design while overlooking what comes before and after, which is strategy and frontline execution. Why does that happen?
[22:44] Richard Walsh: I think because most owners, depending on the business and if they started from the ground up, they're hands-on people. Tactical is super rewarding. It is a sense of accomplishment on the daily. That's why you see these businesses who are just firefighting all the time and you think, why are you doing this? They learn to love it because they're the hero. They become the hero who puts the fire out all the time, they got everyone coming to their door and knocking on it, and they get addicted to that. Or it becomes the operational standard because they've permitted it. I've dealt with companies like that where I'd always have to give them different lead times. I'd have to lie, because if I wanted it in two weeks, I'd have to tell them I want it in a week, because they're never on time. They're always reacting to fires. So the problem is they really get stuck in that realm and that's why they can't let go, because they don't understand the freedom of true delegation and what that means. I always say I want the top of the chain to be working on what I call their 5%. It's the 5% of the business only they can do: the growth. Tactical compared to strategic: strategic is looking at the whole map. On a battlefield scenario, you got to see everything. You can't just look at one battle, one platoon, or one company. You have to see the entire map. What's the actual objective? How do you win the war? That's why they get caught in the tactical: because it just feels good and they're accomplishing, but they really don't take any ground. Tactical is a defensive position often in a business situation. You're kind of maintaining, but it's World War I trench warfare. Nothing moves.
[24:49] Rich Smith: That's a really great way to look at it. When it comes to the development of strategy, seeing the big picture and seeing the entire field of battle, I sometimes wonder whether CEOs avoid that because they don't want the answers to the questions that they would be asking of themselves. Do you ever run into that?
[25:15] Richard Walsh: Yeah, it's kind of a double-edged sword. I love vision stuff. I'm all about where can we go with this, what does this look like, what do we have to do? I love to go out to the end and reverse engineer: let's start at the exit. Where are we going with this thing—10 years, 15 years, whatever that is—and then work our way backwards. But I think you've got a point. I think they get stuck in the operation and they're maintaining. Let's just pick a revenue number: "Well, we average 20 million a year in our revenue." And they want to maintain that because it can fluctuate depending on the economy, prospects, the whole thing. But they get laser-focused on that and end up holding that defensive position. Defensive positions are only meant to be temporary. You want to be advancing constantly, moving and taking ground, but if you don't know where that ground is, it's hard to go. Now, I'm a big fan of profit over revenue. Revenue feeds the ego and profit feeds the family. I'd like to feed my family, so I focus on that! But I think that's where they can get that hesitation, that inability to really look at the long view, because it can be overwhelming.
[26:48] Rich Smith: Because of that, what are some of those hidden leaks that are costing companies millions all the time?
[27:00] Richard Walsh: I'll give you my example from manufacturing floors. The floor itself is where the majority of profit leaks. As we talked about in the very beginning, it's deviations, it's not enforcing standards, it's workarounds. The floor learns what's acceptable. You can have the most perfect manual and every SOP, but that's just a manual. What they're really doing is trying to still get throughput and keep the light green, but they're making all these adjustments—like hitting the machine twice with a hammer on the left side! Instead of saying "Escalate this to the engineer, bring them in, correct this, get this thing working properly," they don't want to stop production to fix things. It's very short-term thinking. Every time you're doing that, you're losing money. When we do a diagnostic of the floor, Rich, we're able to diagnose all of this through simple interviews with shifts and leaders, and show them the disparities in these gaps. If they just close them by 10%, the ROI is millions of dollars. And here's the beauty: it's just leaking. You don't have to get more headcount, you don't have to buy new machines. You have to plug the holes, and putting in the command infrastructure recovers millions and millions of dollars for these operations.
[28:42] Rich Smith: I think that's a great example, and I want to try to extend it a little bit. I work with a lot of B2B service businesses. They don't make a product, they don't have a manufacturing floor per se, but I talk about similar kinds of concepts. One concept I discuss a lot with the companies I work with is removing friction from the buyer journey. If you think about a B2B service business, its factory is the buyer journey and the customer experience after they've bought. That's your factory, right? I think that analogy works between what you just talked about on the operations floor and what you might look at in a service business. Is that pretty equivalent? Is that how businesses should think about it?
[29:45] Richard Walsh: I'm a big fan of service businesses. It's totally applicable, because again, even if we just go back to standards: how are you delivering your service? How consistent are you in your standards in deliverance of this service? If everyone gets to do whatever they want as long as they finish the job, the customer experience—which is even bigger in service—suffers. You only get great customer experience through standards and consistent enforcement of those standards. When people say "These guys are amazing," and the next person says "These guys are amazing," and the fifth person says the same thing, everyone's telling you the same story. Go to Chick-fil-A—that's a service business. Does everyone talk about this? Yes, they do. It's the same experience wherever you go, and that's why they're the highest, most profitable chain ever. They have the system, they have standards, they enforce the standard, and they have duplicatable performance. Service is way more challenging because you're dealing with more people and different environments all the time, so it's a challenging thing to adapt to.
[31:48] Rich Smith: Do you see any parallels between frontline leadership failures and revenue failures?
[32:01] Richard Walsh: Yes, that's where it all happens! That's my focus. We're recovering millions and millions of dollars from frontline execution. Again, it's not that people don't know what to do; it hasn't been dialed in and we're not enforcing the standard. They haven't built what we call escalation—meaning, you don't have the authority to fix this machine even though you can fix it. There's things in a car you might be able to fix, but if you got a Ferrari, you take it in to maintain the warranty so you don't void it. Same principle in business: that's not your job, so you need to escalate that up quickly when there's a problem. That should go through service businesses as well. What is that escalation path? When does it happen? What are the timeframes? Also, do you even listen to your people? In an adaptive field, you might have someone who figures out a better way to do it, and they need to be allowed to bring it to you, and maybe you're going to change the system because they actually figured something out. That's a great adaptation, so you have to have that flexibility. But from the floor and execution, that's where everything leaks. Every time shifts hand off in two-to-three-shift manufacturing plants, everyone's got a different standard. That's where everything is diluted. It's all the in-between that's the problem.
[34:15] Rich Smith: What do leaders most often misunderstand about how people actually behave versus how they think they behave?
[34:21] Richard Walsh: Behavior is where it's at, just like accountability. Why aren't people held accountable? What's the behavior, and what's tolerated? We call it tolerance accumulation. Every time you tolerate a little bit, that grows and compounds week after week, month after month, year after year. What are you setting as the standard, and then how do you enforce it? Inside there, you're going to get command drift, and drift always happens. So we install command, and commanders upload what's going on every week. When did you detect drift? You want to get it early. If they ever upload "no drift detected," they get an email that calls BS, because there's always drift—you're just not paying attention! Once you understand that, it's about early correction, but it has to be identified.
[35:34] Rich Smith: Another thing that a lot of leaders believe and rely on are incentives—creating incentives, merit-based pay, bonuses, equity, etc. How do incentives unintentionally create the wrong outcomes?
[35:56] Richard Walsh: Anything at all costs—get my incentive at all costs. That's how it undermines it. There's nine different ways to get that incentive: "I can work around this, I can do this." Earlier we talked about keeping the light green—the throughput came out, but what's it doing to the equipment? What's it doing to the quality of the product? "I'm still hitting my numbers, but how is that happening?" All of a sudden one day you have a major breakdown: "Oh, what happened?" Well, this started six months ago, this started a year ago, and now it's showing results. Systems are dumb—they just do their thing. They're showing what's going in and what's coming out, but they're not tracking in-between when things start to drift. So you have to structure the incentive differently: how do you maintain the standard? That's where it has to be, not just the output. That's hard for a lot of owners who are revenue-driven, because they don't understand that the profitability aspect is being eroded because of that drift.
[37:30] Rich Smith: That makes total sense. There are always unintended consequences when you introduce incentives, and I think in many ways they're overused. I firmly believe in: hire good people, pay them well, and set standards for their job. If you're relying on activity-based or outcome-based incentives, it makes it even harder to build repeatable systems. Thinking about people and performers, what kind of behavioral patterns do you see that consistently separate high performers from the rest of the group?
[38:29] Richard Walsh: Ownership. They own what they do—that's the difference. A top performer owns what he or she does, taking full responsibility for what goes in and what comes out. They're not pointing fingers; they're getting stuff done. To dovetail this back into the incentive thing: I know a company that has an efficiency bonus, but they have 35 people on the floor and they all have to produce at a certain level. So you've got to depend on 34 other people to get your bonus. How does that make you feel when you're killing it, and John over there doesn't give a hoot and is doing the bare minimum? Top performers take ownership. If they say "I need 40 sheets a day minimum," they'll knock out 75 because they figured it out. But if that is stopped because the next guys aren't producing their levels, a lot of these systems are self-sabotaging, and your top performers usually leave. If you don't have a top-performing culture where you're enabling your people, giving them the toolset, and building systems properly where they can excel, those people will leave. Who doesn't want to be a winner every day? If you enable that, you get a top-performing culture.
[40:38] Rich Smith: A poorly designed incentive plan applied across top, middle, and low performers evenly can actually manufacture employee dissatisfaction where it wouldn't otherwise exist. That's the tragedy of it.
[41:03] Richard Walsh: I see it. I see the animosity. It's a haze over the floor—you can smell it and feel it when you walk in. You can just tell by the way people move, look, and communicate that stuff is broken. A lot of owners don't want to deal with the human element; they want to rely on their system because they think the system will save them. They'll drop $400,000 on software in a heartbeat, but they won't train their people or spend time to build out systems and levels. The human capital aspect of business can never be tossed to the side. Leadership starts at the top: show me the owner, and I'll tell you everything else about the company.
[42:41] Rich Smith: In your experience, what leadership belief that is commonly held by a lot of CEOs you work with do you think is simply wrong?
[42:54] Richard Walsh: They think leadership is about charisma or accountability—all these things inside someone. Those are important, but it's not the number one thing. To go back to the theme: enforcement of standards. If that's not the company baseline, all that charisma isn't going to be effective. You're not going to send someone to a three-day leadership camp and expect permanent change—they're going to be great on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and by Thursday they're back to the old thing because you haven't installed an identity. Identity is what sticks. Inside the Marine Corps, being a Marine is an identity that stays with you your whole life. If you don't have identity in your business, why do they care to get up and go to work? Is it who they are? They spend a lot of their life at your place, so leadership needs to build that connection. If you don't start there, you're not going to get the buy-in and people aren't going to listen.
[44:51] Rich Smith: That's a great way to put it. This has been a great conversation, Richard. To bring the conversation to a close, if one of our CEOs listening today wanted one practical step tomorrow morning to diagnose some of these problems or begin to solve them, what should they do?
[45:23] Richard Walsh: Walk out to wherever your business is. There are three questions you have to ask: First, what depends on personality? Where are you losing things? What are we tolerating on the floor? Next, go back to standard enforcement: What is the standard? What protects it under pressure? And what happens when it drifts? Everyone has standards, but what protects it under pressure, and what happens when it isn't working and drifts? Put those three together and go, "Okay, that's my mission." Once you see that, a lot of doors are going to open and you're going to see things very differently.
[47:07] Rich Smith: That makes complete sense. Thanks for giving that advice to the audience. Last question: if people want to engage with you, learn more about you and your work, where should they go? How do they connect with you?
[47:24] Richard Walsh: You can go to grit2lead.com. Really simple. There's great stuff on the website. I got a simulator on there where you can plug in some questions about your business and it'll pop out answers on what's leaking on your floor. You can engage me further from there, but grit2lead.com is the place.
[47:43] Rich Smith: That's great, we'll put that in the show notes for everyone. Thank you so much for being on Revenue Science today. I really enjoyed our conversation and appreciate the time you've given us. I also want to thank you for your service as a Marine and thank you for your son's service as well.
[48:11] Richard Walsh: He's a far better Marine than I was! He's doing really well.
[48:17] Rich Smith: Well, that's what we all hope for as parents, right? That they turn out better than we did!
[48:22] Richard Walsh: Exactly, he's doing it! Rich, thanks for having me on, this has been so much fun. I love talking about this stuff, so I appreciate the opportunity.
[48:32] Rich Smith: Great, we'll talk soon. Thank you for your time and attention on Revenue Science today. I hope you have gained valuable insights to put into practice in your own life and work. Please join our goal of helping more leaders to successfully grow their companies by liking and subscribing to this podcast.
