Episode 4: Integrating Marketing Into a Business Operating System

Randi Beth Burton 00:06
Welcome to the Atlas Rose Podcast. Mitch, thank you for joining us and sitting at the table with us, where Monica's holding up a coffee mug, but she might have bourbon in there, we don't know.

Monica Spieles 00:21
To be determined.

Mitch Lewandowski 00:22
Branden has a coffee mug with bourbon in it, no coffee.

Monica Spieles 00:26
Not even hiding.

Randi Beth Burton 00:29
No we like to think, and we wish we were all in person together, but this is our virtual table. We sit around and enjoy conversation with one another, and we're grateful to invite you into the mix, and to have you join us, thanks for

Mitch Lewandowski 00:44
It's good to be here.

Randi Beth Burton 00:45
Well, I'll set up the episode for us, and then we'll just, we'll get into to chatting. One of the conversations that we have a lot is, you know, for our for our marketer audience is the difference between coming into a business and selling a service or a tactic, or coming into a business and being a part of the conversations that marketing really should be a part of, and having a seat at the table. And we get to do that with you in the businesses that we work with, with you who are running on an operating system, for in your case, who are who are running on Pinnacle and so we talk a lot about the value as a marketer to being a part of those conversations. And how do you get a seat at that table?

Randi Beth Burton 01:38
We believe marketing becomes reliable when it runs on an operating cadence, when there's a process involved, and too often, we get treated like the department of pretty things or quick fixes. But if a business wants real growth, marketing has to be at the table. And business owners don't need another campaign. They need a marketer who contributes to the PnL, who thinks in the same terms as every other leader at the table, and you know, we're familiar with EOS. There's other operating systems out there, and we currently are using Pinnacle, but that gives small businesses the rails to operate in.

Randi Beth Burton 02:16
And so today we'll talk about how to click your marketing system into those rails where you you have a seat at the table and are helping to lead the plan and and so that the marketing voice gets respected, it stops being noise on the on the side, and start shaping the company's future. And so for our audience, if you're if you're tired of being the ad person or the make things look good person. This is the episode that gets you into the boardroom on purpose, and that's what we'll dive into today. Mitch Lewandowski is with you. I actually realized I've never said your last name out loud, so hopefully I pronounced that correctly to you. But he's a Pinnacle guide who has coached Atlas rose in our own businesses. He's watched us integrate into multiple client companies, and he has many talents. He's a road warrior. He enjoys Italian shoes. He's a marketing guy himself, and he's an expert at helping businesses scale. And so we learn a lot from him. Let's pull back the curtain. He's seen firsthand how a marketing system plugs into an operating system. And so we're just excited to pick your brain publicly, Mitch, and get to hear from you and are glad you're here. So let's just start.

Mitch Lewandowski 03:41
Well, I don't know. I think that I better leave now, because she teed up so well, anything that I say is going to be below what Randi said. So, okay, great. Great to see you guys. See you next session. Goodbye. Thank you for the very kind words Randi. Glad it could be here and happy to help contribute.

Randi Beth Burton 03:58
Well, why don't you start and give us your backstory and how you how you got where you are today?

Mitch Lewandowski 04:05
Yeah, yeah, sure. So for those of you that don't know me, my story starts out actually, when I was young, I grew up in a single parent family, and this will frame out the why of why, of what I do. Grew up in a single parent family. We were at the bottom of the bottom of the socio economic spectrum. Our joke we could get away with. It says we we turned that. They turned the sunlight off on our street because we didn't pay the electric bill. So we grew up. You know, the people with nothing came to came to us and gave us stuff. So when I was young, and I didn't realize where we were at in that situation, but it was probably when I'm 14, 15, years old, like, wow, we're poor. My mom would say, you know, we're we're not poor, we're broke. No, we're poor, we're poor.

Mitch Lewandowski 04:51
And what I had decided, and this was about 14, 15 years old, I said, I don't want to be poor. What's the opposite poor? I want to be rich. This is going to go somewhere. Stick with the audience. And so I went on this trajectory to make money, be wealthy and have things, because I was running away from what I knew as the life that I had and the life that I didn't want. Unfortunately, I got really, really good at that. And when I say, unfortunately, I got really, really good at scaling and making things grow, and creating things large that had economic numbers attached to it. A CEO of a company that I was involved in that was part of the Dial Corporation, he said, Mitch, you're my paratrooper. I can drop you in anywhere in the world, and you, you, turn it to gold. And he was right. And then, of course, him telling me that, and other people telling me that, just further perpetuated the lie that I was creating, that if you do these things, you get there's a result, and that equals success.

Mitch Lewandowski 05:54
But it was, what was wrong with that is I didn't build anything that was healthy. I didn't focus on creating good teams. I didn't create leadership development mindset. It was all about me. Branden's heard me talk about this just this morning, being a hub with 1000 spokes, where everybody comes to you and then you give out the answers and edit it out. You can, you can have a company like that, and you can make a bunch of money. But what do you really, really have? Let's just say you have a life circumstance. Or, you know, if you wanted to sell the business, it's not worth anything, you end up in the hospital for three months. The company's like, what do we do? What do we do? What do we do? And so part of my story, Randi, is learning how to do it wrong, drinking my own Kool Aid, and then having that wake up call on and around, say, 2010 or so, I'd sold one of several businesses, which is like, I can't believe they're paying me money for that, because, you know, I pray to myself, I went on a journey of discovering what it's like to be, what I refer to today is healthy, whole and profitable.

Mitch Lewandowski 07:01
And that brought me into pinnacle. I became a pinnacle client. We 10x the business using Pinnacle. I've been an EOS client as well. Patrick Lencioni, scaling up, you name it, different operating ethos to learn and apply building healthy businesses. So my product of what I am today is who I am today is a result of just doing a lot of things wrong in the past. And I'll wrap up with this. Somebody had said something nice to me recently, goes, Oh, that's you're making some great choices. And I said, Well, imagine you have a dozen eggs in a carton, and somebody says that 10 are bad and two are good, and you've cracked 10 bad eggs. What's the chance of the next one being good? Reasonably high. So I say to people, I've just made so many bad choices, the options left are better. You can plagarize that. Make sure you give me credit, Mitch fan.

Monica Spieles 08:02
I like that. I'll give you credit for that.

Mitch Lewandowski 08:04
That that's just a little bit of the backstory. But more importantly, the why behind what I do is I learn how to do it wrong. I believe the lies, and I see business owners across the country because I'm coast to coast, north, south, east to west that were doing the same thing that I was doing. I'm like, oh bro, I get it, sister, I get it. Yeah, I was doing I'm like, oh bro, I get it. Everybody hates you, and you have a 44% turn rate in the factory. Is that a bad thing?

Monica Spieles 08:28
Kinda.

Mitch Lewandowski 08:30
It depends on how you're counting, yeah.

Branden O’Neil 08:44
Mitch, I'm, I'm curious if you could, if you could dive into just maybe one or two of those lies. You know, you mentioned it a few times in your story, and I've heard you talk about them before, yeah, but that's, these are the these are the things that we like to dive into and understand, is, what are some of these pitfalls that we all fall into? What are some of these lies?

Mitch Lewandowski 09:03
Yeah, typically, when you've got putting myself in the entrepreneur's shoes, and a lot of the people that are going to be in this audience are either an entrepreneur or they're working with an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs often their success is by their drive, their grit and their gravitas to make things happen, and that energy that they bring in catalyzes businesses to get going. And then once it gets going, and you get a little bit of flywheel, and then you started making money, and then you, all of a sudden, you're making more money than you ever did working for somebody. You're like, oh, well, if I do more of whatever I'm doing, I don't know whatever, whatever I'm doing, just do more of that and that, that more does not equal healthy. So that's a lie that I bought into, and I see people buy into.

Mitch Lewandowski 09:50
The other lie is economics, financial success does not equal health. I have met some of the most amazing wealthy people out there that are ultra healthy, and I met some of the most dumpster style people, dumpster fire people that are ultra wealthy. Financial success does not equal health, and in the culture that we live in that's so much perpetuating you turn on anything on TV. I don't know if anybody watches television anymore, but if you have a non-premium subscription to YouTube all these ads, it's, you know, driving the latest car, having the nicest this got my shoe collection and, well, to get those nice things, I have to make money, okay? But money does not equal health.

Monica Spieles 10:40
What about the lie, this one, just for whatever isn't popped into my head is the lie that you have to be the smartest one in the room, or you have to be the smartest to lead the company, or to start a company, or to have a successful company.

Mitch Lewandowski 10:58
Yeah, in our culture, the other lie is, is that we are supposed to be independent. We're taught that in school. Our parents say, hey, now you need to get off the payroll, which equals, I'm going to be independent. For my parents, I'm going to get a job. I'm going to be financially independent. And the word independent is the counter to interdependence. And so we're taught this in our culture, but the truth is, we're designed to live in interdependence, independent. I've got it all figured out. I'm going to masquerade like I have it all figured out. Everybody in in this audience that's listening, including us in this room, have had imposter syndrome. We walk into room, Oh, dang, I got no clue what's going on. Not only did I forget my homework, I don't even don't even know what class I meant, and we just said, yeah. So I echo what, what Randi Beth says, because I have no I have nothing to say.

Mitch Lewandowski 11:52
I pick on people, and they say, Oh, I echo what Bill says. What did Bill say?

Monica Spieles 11:57
Just probably was good, whatever.

Mitch Lewandowski 11:59
Yeah, he said good stuff. Isn't it a break time now? So the the the lie of independence, as opposed to the life giving truth of interdependence, and when you can operate in an interdependent state, you realize I need other people, for me to speak successful, for us be too successful. I need other people to be really good at what they're good at, and especially if I'm not, I need to surround myself with people that are strong in the areas that I'm weak and be willing to speak openly about the areas that I'm not strong in. Hey guys, I'm, you know, I'll just give a great example. Hey, I'm not really good at establishing a marketing cadence, I'm just giving this example, marketing cadence for prospective customers. I could really use some help with that. Who's got some experience in that versus, oh yeah, I got this. Then you go into YouTube and AI, ChatGPT Hey, what is marketing cadence? You know, click, you're sorry. You should really ask the people on your team. Wait. No, no, no, no, no. Log in, log out, log out, try log into somebody else to give different answer. So independence, lie, interdependence, truth and like giving.

Monica Spieles 13:11
So I really love that, because I think that the that is a common lie. We all, whatever you call it, we all fall into that, that we've got to know the answer, and that not knowing the answer makes us weak. And so in the same in the same note, you know as you're an entrepreneur or business owner, or whatever you're leading, if you don't have the answer, and you're not the person who can figure it out, it feels defeating like by default, you're going to feel failure and defeat, rather than the celebrating the ability to use those around you to figure it out, celebrating that you've recognized in yourself you shouldn't know at all, like your grit and your will and your and the all the backbone of what you kind of came within that industry to get started is, is what got you there, and then you have to release at some point.

Monica Spieles 14:00
And so, you know, there's a, think there's a, I think there's a shift happening in that recognition in business leaders across, you know, the world, but really, especially in small business, because there is something to prove. And if you feel like you got to bring someone in, you got to bring in Robin, or you got to bring in whoever your sidekick is, it's like you feel like you maybe did it a little bit less with less success than if you just did it all on your own. And so I think there's a lot of people who just don't know that point, that moment in time, that you should actually just like, bring in your sidekick, bring in whatever that looks like, whether it's a person or whether it's a framework, you know, like a framework, could have that same feeling.

Mitch Lewandowski 14:43
Yeah, I mean that whole Do It Yourself thing that you're talking about. I'll give you a personal example. And some of you guys on this call may recall last year, this time, I had a really bad infection. It ended up becoming MRSA, where I had to have surgery this time, last year, and I could have said, You know what, I'll just take some this. I'll get that. I'll get that. I'll watch a YouTube video. Maybe I'll do this. You know? I could have tried to figure out how to do it all on my own. Now, the reality is, the MRSA would have killed me. But you think about in businesses, when business leaders or marketing leaders tried to do it all on their own, they're relying upon their own ability and their own knowledge, which is limited. We all have finite amount of ability, and that's only going to get you so far.

Mitch Lewandowski 15:33
In this case, if I didn't go see the doctor, they said you would have lost your leg. You would have lost your life. And in business, the stakes are also high when you're relying upon your own abilities and not going to outside people that specialize in something you're just saying, Oh, I got this and that can, I've seen companies go out of business because I got this, was the mantra from the top down.

Mitch Lewandowski 16:15
One guy, he wrote a circle on the board. He goes, imagine this is all the knowledge in the universe. Big circle was a whiteboard. And then he put a dot right there. And he goes, that's what you know. But which is a good illustration. You only know so much. What's the chance of out there being something that can help you. Well, now that you put it that way, Oh, you mean now that we look at the truth, and when people can let go of their dot little.of knowledge, and realize, Oh my gosh, there's people out there and there's things out there that can help us getting get further and faster, i.e. interdependence...unicorn.

Branden O’Neil 16:45
I think, I think I want to tease this out just a little bit more, because as we're tying into this subject of of getting a marketer into the boardroom, marketing being in the boardroom, especially executive level marketers and fractional marketers trying to make it into the boardroom level. I think that this imposter syndrome, there's two things going on. One, there's a lot of marketers out there that are calling themselves something that they're not right. So that can cause imposter syndrome where you you just picked up a marketing job last week, and all of a sudden you're a fractional CMO, you get picked up as a fractional CMO, and the imposter, you know, fake it till you make it, got you the job. Well, now you're screwed, right? Now you're screwed because you're the truth is coming out that you actually don't even know that much, right? And so I'm like, okay, yeah, exactly. So chat, GPT is actually running this ship right? So, so there's that side of things.

Branden O’Neil 17:45
But then there's the really good marketer that is just trying to make their way, especially in a consulting world, consulting, coaching, fractional CMOs, we all, we all can, can buy into this lie of us needing to be the smartest guy in the room, right? Which, which, again, might get you in the room. And let's say that it does. If you continue that attitude, if you continue this independence mentality and not the interdependence mentality, you're going to be flushed out, because nobody's ever going to be able to trust you, right? And so I that's what I wanted to kind of drop in the room right now, Mitch, and just hear your thoughts on that is like, think about a fractional CMO. Think about them coming in. And they really have two ways of coming in, one of authenticity and interdependence, understanding that the client is brilliant. They know way more than you do about this business. And you know a piece of that universe, a dot in that universe, versus this, this sorry versus the independence and trying to be the smartest guy in the room and what those two would do to you?

Mitch Lewandowski 19:00
Yeah, a couple things on that, and I'll try to be as narrow as I can on this. Number one is when a fractional marketer is wanting to have a seat at the table the and I had a guy that used to work for me, wonderful guy. He's actually a client of mine now up in New York, he said a lion doesn't have to tell you that he's a lion. And I was like, that's good. He's had, he's he's got a few good quotes, of which are, some are not suitable for broadcast television. So he did say, right now, he said one thing he did say, I can tell you, said, Mitch, I can tell you right now, if I put my wife and my dog in the trunk and I drive around for an hour, I know exactly who's going to be happy to see me like, good point. Hey, getting back on truck, a lion doesn't have to tell you it's a lion if you if you want to see that the table, you need to be able to present yourself from a I talk about a lot of times when I coach on this.

Mitch Lewandowski 20:00
Are you operating from a position of abundance or a position of scarcity? Scarcity Mindset. I got to prove myself. You know, abundance mindset. Hey, how can I help? I'm here to help you grow. I care about you, and you hold it loosely. A CEO will see that position of comfort, and I want to use the word confidence, but not from a cockiness standpoint. You're comfortable being there. You're not like keying up an answer and trying to have the best answer. He says something. Well, what can you do for me? Well, that's a great question. You know, it really depends on where we're trying to get to, you know, you you get to re navigate the conversation, versus, oh, we're going to do this. And again, I got this presentation and like this, where that's that imposter trying to prove themselves in the room.

Mitch Lewandowski 20:46
Another thing is with executives, typically, you've got this two CEOs. I got it all figured out, and I need help if I'm a fractional fill in the blank, and I do this in Pinnacle, you guys know, you know, got people all over the country, when I'm first meeting with a potential client, and I had a meeting this morning with a and I what I would call an ideal customer profile Company Profiles, I'm looking and I'm listening to, is this person coachable? Or she? He or she. Are they coachable? Are they teachable? Are they inquisitive? Do they want the counsel and guidance from other people? If they're just coming across like they're the smartest person in the room and they're just looking, Oh, can you give me, like, an a la carte little training? Talk to my people about, you know, how to do a flyer or a brand campaign or, you know, a some handouts for a trade show. And if he's just looking for stuff like that, I'm thinking, that's not the person I can help. That's not my customer anyway. So why would I want to invest a lot of time into that person when he's not my person? She's not my person.

Mitch Lewandowski 21:59
I'm looking and listening, and this is me, and I tell people, know, a lot, by the way, I haven't think you guys don't have a no butthole policy. It's like, you know, if I feel like somebody's going to be a jerk and high maintenance, like, no, life's too short. You guys know I suck at dying anyway. So while I'm around, I want to work with people that I'm going to really enjoy that want to grow. And so if I'm a CMO or, you know, any type of fractional fill in the blank, and I'm looking at being involved in the company, I'm listening very closely, I'm interviewing them, is, is this going to be a good fit for me? Are they coachable, teachable? Do they want to grow? Because if not, I'm just pitching wares out into the the ozone, there, the ether, whatever I know, where the ether, the ether zone, and that's thing, look it up, and it's totally a total waste of time. Yeah, the ether zone. Mitch "Ether Zone" Lewandowski, EZ.

Randi Beth Burton 23:03
Branden, when you were talking about imposter syndrome, I was thinking about when I first left my company corporate job and started to be my own, you know, my own company of marketing, providing marketing help to businesses, and I had my my areas of specialty that I knew I could win business on. And so I would do that. And then naturally, you then become, this is what you're saying. It's okay, but can you do this? And I also need this. And then if I'm not an expert in it, for me, it was, I wouldn't lie about I don't know how to do that, but I would say I'll figure it out. And so then I become more okay, I'm just going to figure out how to do it, but I'm still on an island of one, trying to learn how to do that, and feeling like I'm not succeeding in most of the areas, because I'm just figuring it out. And that's in finding Atlas Rose and joining your team, that is, that's one of the biggest benefits that I gained right away, is a team. So I wasn't by myself. I was able to round out my skill set in that and you were operating in a process.

Randi Beth Burton 24:15
And so I'll list many, many things that I love about Atlas Rose and about our team, but that's one I don't mention very often, is that there was this structure that I was entering into that by default, meant that whenever we went to serve clients, we could have authentic conversations about what we can do and be and be sitting in that leadership position where we're actually providing true guidance to a business that they need and that they're looking for, without trying to fill all of those parts, because we had a process around us that plugged in Well, that didn't just rely on the one person and the and the the CMO even sitting in that. Seat. And you know, at the time you were running on EOS.

Randi Beth Burton 25:05
So I would love the question to our team, is just kind of hearing, from your perspective, what that did for Atlas Rose, whenever, whenever that started to contribute to how, how we run the business. And then for Mitch, I want to maybe you can give us Pinnacle in 60 seconds, and why you adopted that? Because your your work history is fascinating, and you had success in scaling businesses. But what you know, why did you adopt Pinnacle and make that this, this season of your career? So Atlas Rose first, you know Monica and Branden. What did EOS do for you, what's that story? Because I came into it and it allowed me to be authentic and not have imposter syndrome or fake it till I make it.

Monica Spieles 25:54
I laugh when you ask that question, because I just think of the chaos in our minds and in our inboxes before any kind of structure. It's like, well, what it did for us was it kept us from just throwing everything we could think of on a whiteboard and be like, well, this is how we're going to run our strategic quarterly. Because it's although we can just, you know, dump onto an area and go, let's just solve it. It's like, anything you're trying to accomplish if you have no framework, you just are sitting in chaos. And so I think kind of marrying the two together.

Monica Spieles 26:25
When you talk about introducing a framework to the business that allowed you to just kind of shed all of the all the sideways thinking, all the like, what am I missing? What about what should I be doing? It's like we kind of forget how much energy is taken up just in by just by thinking, what am I missing out on, or what should I be doing? That takes up a lot of space in our head. And so when you think about our previous conversation of of trying to get trying to operate in the in at the executive level, and be back in the boardroom in the way we should that's really difficult to do in an interdependent way with the freedoms that you need to do. Because you're, if you're trying to sell a bag of tricks, then you're just, you're that's all you're focused on. You're like, am I going to pull the right rabbit out of the hat? Am I going to do the right thing at the right time. When you have a framework and

Mitch Lewandowski 27:23
Branden's got a hat on, so be careful.

Monica Spieles 27:24
Well, that hat, you can see, you can kind of see through.

Branden O’Neil 27:24
There's a rabbit, not hair.

Monica Spieles 27:28
So when you're when you're following a framework, I just think it creates a freedom for you that you get to shed a lot of things you don't realize you're carrying, which then presents a more authentic being, which then allows you to start thinking and operating at the boardroom level like you wanted to in the first place. Whether that be again, whether you're a fractional marketer trying to try to do that for a client, or you're running a business, that framework just provides freedom, and I think that's what it gave us, is we just were like, we don't have to worry. I mean, yeah, we're not going to do it perfectly. We're not We're not legalistic by any means, in the way that we practice, whether we were practicing EOS or Pinnacle, was like, we've you, you're a small business, you still have to be agile. But the ability to have a framework was like, just, we could take off, we could go, yeah.

Branden O’Neil 28:15
So for me, for me, it was since the beginning of of starting Marketing Strategy Coaches and now, and it turned into Atlas Rose. I had just been I'm a figure it out guy, right? So I just figure it out. I figure out what I'm supposed to do today. How is this meeting supposed to run? What am I supposed to do for my clients? How do I do finances? What taxes do I pay? Which I learned based off of the love letters IRS sends me. I've graduated off of that, but that's how I learned, right? So as an entrepreneur, you just do stupid things over and over again, you fail, you win, you lose, all that stuff, and that's how I figured out. But, but what EOS and now Pinnacle gives us is a framework for that we get to sit back on and put my energy instead of figuring things out on how to run a business, I now just get to go figure out how to serve clients better, or innovate for clients, or start the next thing right? So it takes the if you've got 100% energy, Mitch actually has 150%

Mitch Lewandowski 29:18
I have 99% energy. I'm looking at my upload speed.

Branden O’Neil 29:22
So most of us only have 100% of the energy that we actually have. What part of it do you want to invest into what? And I just looked it up while you guys were talking. I was curious, how many businesses there were in America ever, right? And it just says some uncountable number that it was, it has, it's not able to be tracked. So then I was like, Okay, well, then what was it last year, 34.8 million small businesses. So small business is defined by 500 employees or less. So 500 employees or less last year, there existed 34.8 million businesses. So then you think, Okay, since the beginning of America, that's a lot of businesses, right? That's a heck of a lot of businesses. Why do I think that I need to figure out how to run a business off of my own one and my one and only business? Am I really that special?

Mitch Lewandowski 30:18
That's data knowledge.

Branden O’Neil 30:20
That's my data knowledge, exactly. It doesn't make any sense. Why would I not go to a framework that's proven and offload that expertise, or even expedite my expertise by grabbing on to a framework, right? And so that's really what it was for me, is I'm going to glean off of what other people have done so that I don't have to continue to do things that I'm not strong at anyways, so I can do the things that I am strong at and increase my hourly rate just by doing that, right?

Mitch Lewandowski 30:54
Wow. Well, couple of thoughts for me to springboard off that number one, in businesses, one of the challenges that entrepreneurs will run into is the look at using an outside resource. There's the I got it, and if they start to operate past that to I need somebody. Oh, this is going to cost money. We can just do it ourselves. Okay? And I was, I was with an owner down in Fort Lauderdale not too long ago, and he was like, well, that's a lot of money. He started using the word money. And I'm like, and I actually went like this. I said, Hey, what? What kind of are you Apple or Android? Total leading question, because if you ask Apple or Android, he's one of the two. Okay, he didn't say, Ma Bell, okay, I'm Apple, yeah, me too. And so we just asked him a question about his phone. What do you like about your phone? He's got the latest iPhone. Like, cool. Me too. I got the exact same phone and I drew him. It was a total setup, by the way, manipulative, 100% I go, we have the latest iPhone for what it can do for us, and it was $1,000. We don't say, heck no, I'm not getting that. I'm going to use a landline with a cord. We're going to use the latest tool to get things done in our business. And if I told you you could, you had to go back. You had the option to go back to the pager era and pay phone, would you take it? Rhetorical question. Heck, no. Okay, great.

Mitch Lewandowski 32:24
You're looking at me like $1,000 iPhone that you haven't tried yet, but yet, all around you, there are people walking around with the latest iPhone, running their businesses just like you know how to run it now. So this is not a cost standpoint. This is a tool. If you're just looking at from a cost standpoint, you're looking at for the wrong perspective. So independence to interdependence, and then cost to investment, is the next gap that I have see people have to jump through, and then I will share from again, because I've experienced all of these on the inside. When, when, when we used EOS, when we went from Gravitas to EOS, it gave us a framework. And then when we had another business that we used Pinnacle. The reason why we use Pinnacle instead of Eos, because there was a lot more tools, a lot more flexibility. It was custom. We could customize it for what we needed, versus being in a, I say, a rigid structure, those are my words, and it just gave us more ability.

Mitch Lewandowski 33:23
And so in my consulting practice, when I said, Okay, as I'm focused on my clients, what do I want to offer them? And I talked to I talked to everybody again, I'm like, Okay, I know this about these companies, but what, what do they have to offer? You know, let's go through that. Let's just do a full analysis. And it was a no brainer for me to offer Pinnacle to the companies that I work with, because it gave me more freedom to help them grow based upon where they're at, versus a prescriptive as a matter of fact, the the client, the client that I met with this morning goes, Oh, yeah, we just, we just met with an EOS guy too. I'm like, perfect. I love it when people say that. Awesome. Because, if not, they just say, Oh, I'm thinking about EOS or Pinnacle. And they put them in operating system, they commoditize them as an offering. And then they look at costs. Okay, I can pick one of these. This has a cost. This has a cost. I like this guy more. I like this guy less. Usually they like me less. I tell people a lot of things they don't want to hear in the beginning, so I get rid of the people that wanted me to be nice.

Mitch Lewandowski 34:27
But once he said, Yeah, it was, it was, it was really in the box, and it was pretty restrictive. And we're kind of over here where we need more, like awesome. So that's what I've seen from on the inside and from the client side, is when people look at what they can do with an operating system like Pinnacle, it's more attractive because of the greater flexibility, the larger tool chest. And it's we say don't pick us, but also we say don't pick a system. Pick a guide, pick a person, and when clients do work with me, it's because, oh my gosh, he so gets it. He's like, I don't know your business. You have a dental practice, you have wealth management firm, you have a 3D printing company. That's you're not bringing me in to know because you don't know enough about the dental practice. You're bringing me in because I know a whole lot about building healthy, whole and profitable businesses using an operating system that happens to be here. You may kiss the bride with liberty and justice for all. Let's eat.

Randi Beth Burton 35:39
Well, we've gotten to be a part of three different companies who you've actually started Pinnacle with while we've been there. So it's it that's been fun, I think, on our side, to get to see the transformation that we see happen within our clients, in, you know, implementing some of the structure to it. What do you see? If you could put your finger on change that you see happen whenever you're able to install something like this in a business what do you see?

Mitch Lewandowski 36:13
Oh my gosh, this, this speaks to the heart of one of the things that I love the most about what I get to do. I never take this for granted. By the way. I get to see hearts and minds transform in business. I refer to what I do is professional discipleship. And when I'm investing in the hearts and the minds of individuals and teams, and seeing this massive light bulb moment goes like, Oh my gosh. We recently got to sit in on a meeting where we were talking, and it was, I'll keep the names out of this, but the owner of the company with the leadership team, and he actually said, you know, I learned this thing about the law of the lid that Mitch talked about from Maxwell, when you take the lid off, when all sudden, people can come out of the jar, and they get to grow. And here's my new ops manager that now is just taking the reins and running with this who's been there for, I don't know, a dozen years, but was kept in a spot, doing a role, and now she's been given freedom to fly, and she's blossoming like this amazing flower. And he's like, this is awesome. Yeah, same people, same company, different heart and mindset by the ownership.

Randi Beth Burton 37:30
And that's not easy getting there, but that's what I appreciate about the structure, is, I mean, there's there's permission to bring issues to the table and and own it, and everybody's doing it, and so you're not having things getting pushed under the rug and artificial harmony. Yeah, that it does away with that, and that that's what I've sacred calves seeing in this, in this particular business that you're talking about as well, is, is we're talking about the right things that we should be talking about, which gives people permission to to do well and excel and perform and and, yeah, that's something that I have seen. And then what have you seen in us? Because you've coached us. Have you seen us?

Mitch Lewandowski 38:23
Yeah, I'm not sure if we want to say that here. Monica's like, gotta go. Not a Mitch fan. She just changed the title

Monica Spieles 38:36
I wanted to draw off that too, after you Branden, because there was, it was, you're setting up something so well. RB, I don't know if

Branden O’Neil 38:46
You want to trump my trump?

Monica Spieles 38:49
Yeah, I'm going to try. Okay, I'll draw the line. I'll draw the line back. I'm going to, I'm going to bring us back to the beginning conversation, and that was bringing marketing back into the boardroom, starting with this interdependence conversation and and as we are talking about the freedoms that come with with operating in this way, operating freely with it, with a system, and you're just seeing like this growth that's happening in people. That's the same thing that's desired, whether you're fractional or internal or whatever it is, the same things desired in in your leader, in your marketing leader, which is why having a framework creates that interdependence. They're less concerned about how they're showing up to have that bag of tricks, and instead have real conversations with other leaders in the boardroom. So there's this now. There's not just interdependence, there's integration. And so you've got a blossoming of all because now you're talking about the things that matter. You're not just talking about the thing that's going to make you look good that day. And on top of it,

Mitch Lewandowski 39:53
Or the loudest person in the room getting to talk about what they want to talk about.

Monica Spieles 39:57
Exactly. And so and. Oftentimes, you see we, you know, we say this a lot, that the rising tide raises all ships. And so when you start showing up in that way, all leaders have to start showing up that way, or it's just an obvious gap. And so it's, it's, it's not common that that happens in a fractional world, but it does, and that's the beauty of what can happen if you open that, open those doors, you open the lid, right? And, oh, there was one other point in there. It doesn't matter. But basically, I just see the way it all weaves together so beautifully and that it's purposeful. It's not just here's a we just want to have a loud voice in the boardroom, because that's what we believe you should have. That marketing should be in there. No, it's it. It shouldn't be siloed, because here now you have business leaders that have a common goal, which is, which is the business's goal, not just a campaign that we want to run and what make look pretty and things like that. So now the conversations are all elevated, and that is, I just see all these draws back to that from the beginning. That's right. Okay, sorry, Branden, now you go.

Branden O’Neil 41:01
That's okay.

Mitch Lewandowski 41:01
Cede to Florida to Senator O'Neill,

Branden O’Neil 41:07
yeah, we got a filibuster going on. So what happened? Would you call me? Listen here, buster. What happens when we're talking about interdependence and independence, is, is oftentimes, especially for, obviously, for marketers, what happens is, we tend to when we come in and we're feeling this imposter syndrome, or, or, or we're trying to fake it till we make it, or we're trying to be more than we are. What happens is we freak out and we move to tactics.

Mitch Lewandowski 41:50
Yep.

Branden O’Neil 41:51
Right. We freak out.

Mitch Lewandowski 41:53
Come up with a plan, implement it, get a bunch of stuff out there, show a bunch of activity that's right to bright lights a big city.

Branden O’Neil 41:59
And guess what that does? It literally moves us out of the boardroom. It takes us away from the table, right? Because if, if we are meant to be strategic, if we're meant to be the protectors of the brand, if we are calling ourselves executives, but we're out there and defaulting to the tactics, that's literally relegating ourselves to to to a lower seat, right? We're telling them where we belong, and so this interdependence thing. Mitch, thank you for that. That's gold. That is. That's literally that's a major, major reason why a lot of us find ourselves exiting the boardroom, and why we find marketing doing the same thing as an industry as a whole, is because we continue as an industry to do that very same thing. We're trying to be more than we are. We're trying to be magic tricks and silver bullets and things like that, which can only have a short lifespan. And of course, then we're going to move right to tactics.

Branden O’Neil 42:55
And then maybe the last thing I wanted to say was, we've been talking a lot about frameworks, and Mitch has grabbed on to a framework called Pinnacle, and he, like he says, He's the guide who happens to have a framework that he's able to implement in. Atlas Rose, we have a framework. We're doing the same thing, but from a marketing standpoint. And so our our proposal to fractional marketers is to whether it's ours or not, grab on to a framework, it expedites that expertise, right? And it's something that you get to lean on, you then get to be the guide who happens to be able to implement the framework, just the same as what Mitch has found a lot of success in.

Branden O’Neil 43:33
But one thing that you said earlier, Mitch, that I really wanted to just loop back around to and give a very pointed, a pointed point, which is what they should be note, is piece of advice, and don't, I don't want anybody to miss this is on the front end, the reason why Mitch his story around that client who's finding all these ahas about the team that was already in place and removing the lid, the reason why he was a the reason why Mitch was able to get him there was because he entered on the front end. He recognized that teachable spirit in this client. I keep wanting to say his name.

Mitch Lewandowski 44:14
That's Mr. Client to you, bucko.

Branden O’Neil 44:16
Mr. Client and Mr. Buster client and and, and so he was able to teach him into that. And so for us in a marketing world, fractional marketers highly suggest that on the front end, as you are, as you're interviewing, as you're trying to get business, don't be desperate. Don't take everybody, but definitely look and evaluate if this client, if this prospective client is looking for marketing magic or silver bullets, don't take it. Don't take it because you're never they don't have a spirit of growing. They don't have a spirit of learning. They've got a spirit of magic tricks. And you're not going to be there. You're going to be you're going to be chasing your tail, going all the way down the rabbit hole of tactics, or you're going to be out right? So I think that's one another way of.

Monica Spieles 45:05
That difficult lesson to learn. But I mean, we've seen it over and over, and we've heard it from other many other people, and then I will say that it's very this, this framework is very helpful, of course, to the fractional marketer, but even to an internal marketer, it is extremely valuable to follow a system, to have to be able to show up the way that your your peers and your you know, whoever sitting around the table with you expects you to and actually probably beyond what they expect. This is, this is something that's valuable there as well. But same applies. It's the industry. We kind of did it to ourselves, so we're going to undo it. That's the goal, anyways.

Mitch Lewandowski 45:46
You know something to add on to this, whether we're talking to a CMO or to a CEO, and that is if people, if people are happy with what's going on in their business, and somebody coming in with skills and abilities, cannot help that person that's again, looking for the coachable, teachable, but also somebody who wants more. And one of the things that I said, which was a hard truth for the client to hear, and I've said this 100 times when I said it once, and that is this, if you are satisfied with the with the results that you're getting, keep doing the same thing. I mean, if, if you're happy, what I we shouldn't even be talking. But if you're interested in talking to me about what I do for clients, just like you, that hopes to suppose that you're not satisfied with the results that you're getting, and you're looking for more, and you're looking for people that can help you, just like the doc that helped me with my MRSA, you know, I have coaches in my life, I have mentors in my life. Those people are helping me to get further and faster than I could on my own.

Randi Beth Burton 46:57
Well, Mitch, we're grateful that you're a person in our life that's doing that for us, and thank you for your time today to sit and chat and share your knowledge with us. It's a joy and an honor.

Mitch Lewandowski 47:11
Awesome. Great to be here, glad to participate with you guys, to co-labor with you all in the growth of folks all around the country.