Managing Through Change: Pivoting, Communication, and Strategic Team Integration

What You Will Hear:

04:10 The discussion centers on leading by example, emphasizing that real leadership is learned through hands-on experience and self-reflection.

• How managing daily routines and responding to the emotional challenges of parenting both reveal and shape leadership style.
• Acknowledgment that true leadership skills develop over many years through both successes and mistakes.
• Early career missteps and growth moments are recognized as foundational learning experiences for better leadership in the future.

09:45 Creating a positive work environment is discussed as a company value, encouraging enjoyment and fulfillment alongside productivity and results.

• Team members can speak up if they are dreading work, fostering open communication about job satisfaction.
• Defining company values is described as direct and proactive, ensuring everyone knows the organizational non-negotiables.
• Reflection on values and fun is positioned as important to overall workplace morale and longevity.

16:25 Integration of distributed and nearshore teams into company culture with a caution against treating remote hires as separate or lesser contributors.

• Make certain all team members feel part of the larger organization, regardless of location.
• Misalignment can happen when moving too fast and forgetting individual and location differences.
• Managing across cultures is a process that benefits from transparency.

27:10 The challenges of distraction in the modern workplace are addressed, with strategies for helping teams focus and use their time effectively.

• Social media and technology are sources of distraction that compete with work priorities.
• Hear techniques for blocking time and encouraging uninterrupted work.
• Leading by modeling good time management sets an example for the rest of the team.

32:40 Cameo: Scott Mautz, Founder at Profound Performance reframes delegation from an administrative workflow into a core leadership discipline.

• Scaling a business forces a quiet confrontation: are you staying busy in the weeds to protect your outcomes, or are you building the mental strength to let your systems work?
• The Indispensable Attribute: Mental Strength in Leadership

41:40 Operational structure and regular leadership check-ins are key practices for aligning strategy and execution in a growing business.

• Weekly one-on-ones between key leaders support ongoing alignment and reflection on progress.
• Monthly and quarterly reviews, including strategy sessions and adjustments, help keep priorities clear and relevant.
• Annual in-person retreats are highlighted as opportunities to build team cohesion and refine collective strategy.

49:35 The conversation reflects on a major business pivot during the pandemic, when teams had to transition rapidly from in-person to remote and virtual delivery models.

• Fast, decisive action is necessary to adapt to the new reality and keep business moving forward.
• Embracing new technologies, like AI tools, is essential for survival and success.
• Leadership under pressure is a critical learning period which shapes future confidence and adaptability.

55:10 It is BOLD to purposefully slow down and codify your core strategic intent when the market is pressuring you to just hustle harder.

Resources

• Connect with Eric Tabone

Transcript

Eric Tabone 00:00
And so I take the values, I say, everybody, these are the five non-negotiable values, but I’m going to hire people for different strengths. I don’t want me’s in my company, because if I had me’s in my company, we’d probably be a disaster.

Announcer 00:18
This is the Bold Business Podcast, created for companies running real revenue. Your host is Strategic Growth Advisor Jess Dewell. Here, we drop the I’m fine mask. Here, we face today’s market demands together. Here, we build business instinct. Because the action we take today creates our company’s future relevance and the room for our teams to grow. Now, grab your tea or coffee and get ready to build your business instinct.

Jess Dewell 00:55
One thing that serial entrepreneurship teaches is how do we learn the lessons we need to learn so that we can do better in our next company quicker, right? And we do that with lessons of life too in every part of our journey. Eric Tabone is a serial entrepreneur and I’m excited to be talking with him today. He is the managing director at Nearshore Business Solutions. And we talk a lot about intentional leadership today. And what does that intentional leadership look like today in this fast paced world? These days, Eric lives in Latin America, specifically Bogotá. And his career went from what it was to be one that was multiple countries, multiple companies, and 200 plus hires. That he spent connecting U.S. companies with talented people outside of the United States so they could get the right work done to achieve their growth goals. Albeit, he’s using AI technology in his company. It’s kind of interesting to see the places it shows up, and I’m excited to watch and see how that continues. He also does in-country recruiting to ensure there is a fit and a connection for who they are trying to serve in the U.S. market. Being originally from Texas, he thinks like a U.S. operator because he is one. Even with over 16 years building teams in Latin America where his clients hire. Intentional leadership has very specific elements, and I’ll bet you already have one that you can lean into even more. In our conversation, we’re going to be talking about a lot of things like values, scale, what’s important to us, how are we making decisions. And when we’re talking about intentional leadership, there are three things to listen for along the way. The first is how often are you checking in with each person on your team, dispersed or not? Because it’s the way to build connection and open communication. The second thing, how are you strategically using your time to work on your company’s strategy? And how are you bringing that strategy to your leadership team so it can make it out to the rest of your organization? And third, Time is scarce and it is what you need to sense beyond the data alongside the data to find and start addressing any emerging emerging issues or opportunities. So I can’t wait for you to hear the whole conversation. Let’s get to the show with Eric Tabone. So transitioning in, I want to start with this. You’re working on your third business. You have two young children. You have a very active, dynamic life partner with you. And so I’m thinking about intentional leadership. What’s on the top of your mind today about all of that?

Eric Tabone 04:10
About all that? Yeah, I know, right? Where do I start? I could talk about that for 45 minutes. Yeah, happy to go in that direction. I think intentional leadership. I will never ask somebody to do something I wouldn’t do. And as a leader, I got to be the one captain in the boat. And I’m the first to do something. And that doesn’t only go with my business. Because yeah, I am on my third company. But I try to lead by example with my kids. How do I get up? How do I manage my day? Kids, you know this. This brings the emotions out of a lot of people. You know that.

Jess Dewell 04:42
It does.

Eric Tabone 04:44
Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Jess Dewell 04:45
You got the positive triggers. You got the other kind of triggers. You got the ups and downs, the self-discovery, the did I really just do that or say that?

Eric Tabone 04:57
I’m not going to say it’s easy, but it’s something that’s always constantly at the top of my head. And to an extent, I think intentional leadership, it’s like leadership isn’t something you could learn. You can’t learn that in school. It’s something you learn by doing over and over again. And I’ve been doing this for 20 years. And oh my gosh, I have so many disasters of my leadership stories when I was in my 20s, which we could dive into.

Jess Dewell 05:16
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. This intentional leadership, where do we go? What does it mean? How does it look for Jess? How does it look when I look at somebody else? Can I tell are they, how intentional are they being for their self leadership and how they’re showing up in whatever their role is? Because I like to understand where I’m meeting people. And that’s something that’s important to me. So looking at myself, I was like, well, okay, I have a set of values. Then my company has a set of values and And my family, my household has a set of values and they’re all different. And the re and that way, just values that can be the cornerstone of my decision-making. Am I in the positive or the neutral? Can I find the infinity of whatever needs to be here from that place with whatever the overlap is in my household values? We have agreed. This is how we will do ourselves conducting ourselves as a family. This is how we will conduct ourselves in the professional realm with people who aren’t our family. I mean, all of the things I’m meeting there.

Eric Tabone 06:16
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Jess Dewell 06:16
And it’s amazing how much I catch myself not using my values when I’m thinking about decisions that need to be made.

Eric Tabone 06:23
How do you define your values? What are your values and how do you lead? And how do you separate those between? I’m curious on how you separate between your personal values and your business values, because I find my personal values are fundamental for the business because this is my third company, and I put my values inside the company.

Jess Dewell 06:41
Yep. One of the things I learned through all of the mistakes that I’ve made over the years is that nobody can be me. And my tendency with my personality and leadership style is that if my values were the cornerstone, everybody felt like they were expected to be mini-mes. And I kind of guided and mentored them to be mini-mes. And that didn’t work out because I was missing the diversity. So that’s where I’ll start is why they ended up being different. I wanted everybody to bring their own values to Red Direction.

Eric Tabone 07:13
So what I do within my company, I have the values that, to me, are these are the the five things that are non-negotiable within the company. So the way I define it, I look at it slightly in a different format. Not that mine is right or wrong, but it works for my family in my company. But the five values within my company is these are the non-negotiables. You must abide by these values. And I always say these are the only thing that would immediately get you removed from this company if you fail one of these values. And there’s no rocket science behind the values, but one of the biggest ones is transparency. And I preach this quite a bit across my professional network, and obviously this goes into my personal as well. But with transparency, if you’re thinking about it, I will not stand for anybody hiding something or trying to push something across when they know that shouldn’t be done. And so transparency, ethics, there’s a lot that could go behind that. And so I take the values, I say, everybody, these are the five non-negotiable values. But I’m going to hire people for different strengths. I don’t want me’s in my company because if I had me’s in my company, we’d probably be a disaster. And you hire, yeah, you know exactly where I’m going.

Jess Dewell 08:21
So yours are all the same. So my personal values are curiosity, grace, and truth. And how do they show up in the world? And what is that? Because we all have good days and bad days and it’s how do we show up when we fall down? And what is the truth of the situation, whether we can actually articulate it or not. And how do we stay open to whatever shows up? So that’s me personally, right? And then I bring that and mine are single words and they could be statements and all defined and that’s fine too. And I have all of that, but I’m just trying to keep it simple. And then for Red Direction, it’s advocacy. It’s, is it transparency? I don’t think it’s transparency. There’s a word like transparency that now that’s stuck in my mind and boldness, which is why we have the Bold Business Podcast. Everything that we’re talking about and doing, it’s, are we on the edge of things? Are we pushing the envelope and feeling that place where we have to think about what is transparent and not? What is ethical and not? What is right or not? My grace can really show up in that when I mess up and when I’m doing great. My curiosity can definitely do that, right? So that’s how we’re doing. That’s how I have set it up. And that’s how I have encouraged all of our people to show up is that we still operate this way. How we operate that way might be individual and it could look different for every single person in my organization.

Eric Tabone 09:42
Right. That’s awesome.

Jess Dewell 09:42
Look and sound and feel different. Yeah. So tell me your five.

Eric Tabone 09:45
Yeah. So within the company, we go with one of the biggest ones we have is velocity. As I mentioned, I work in recruiting. And so one of the things we have to do is just speed. So velocity, you just move faster than you think we should. Execution, how do we actually deliver? Client relationship, client-facing, however you want to fight it, and I often call that client experience because I want people leaving just saying, I had so much fun dealing with Eric and his team, with the nearshore team. Yeah, I think when you get that, that’s really cool. Yeah. Fourth is transparency, which I already talked about, and that’s the one I preach about quite a bit. And thankfully I’ve had very few issues with that value. And then the last is just have fun, and I talk about this one a lot, because I think, I think people forget the idea that, you know, when you’re, when you have a job, when you’re working, you do got to somewhat enjoy it. Now, I don’t expect people to jump out of bed on a Monday morning so excited, but I always tell my team, if you’re on a Sunday night and you’re dreading coming to work, you should probably come talk to me and let’s make a change because life is too short. So have fun with what you’re doing. And then that’s how I run the company values. And I’ve actually, this is something I’ve actually had to learn over the years with leadership and just running. Because when I first started my very first company 20 years ago, when I had hair and I was 30 pounds lighter, I didn’t think the values, mission, vision were important. But now I couldn’t have been more wrong. And I always start, anybody who comes in, I say, these are the values. And I talk them through that. And what I do on a business side, which is really cool, at least once or twice a month when we get the entire team together, I have everybody talk about a value and say, give me an example of somebody else in the team who showed that value. And so imagine when you have 15, 20 people on the call or however big your organization is and somebody says, hey, I saw this person did awesome at client experience. And I just want to say, hey, great job with that. And then because of that, you just start when you have that many compliments go around, everybody just leaves with a big smile. Yeah.

Jess Dewell 11:41
Well, and that’s twofold, right? That’s showing gratitude. That’s camaraderie. That’s collaboration. That’s being seen. That’s being understood. That’s being part of something greater on both sides. That’s fantastic.

Eric Tabone 11:55
Obviously, I work in Latin America. I’m originally from Texas, but I live in Bogotá, Colombia now. And so my first company, I was doing language training, but on the corporate executive level. So we were running English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese across three or four countries in Latin America. And I think, I don’t even know if I have a specific war story because I probably have 300 times where things just went off the rails. But I often explain, these were things like when I was young, I didn’t really know how to delegate. I didn’t know how to take ideas and communicate them. I often would think it was either my timeline or it wasn’t going to work, which isn’t always correct. I didn’t always understand how to let people run projects. I remember I had a big branding project and I didn’t like the way it was going, but I didn’t pull the plug soon enough. But then when I did, I just didn’t do it respectfully and in an empathetic way. And I ended up losing some people out of that. And then other things like I had a lot of things because we had English teachers, English teachers coming down. One time I counted, I had like 15 or 16 different nationalities on my team, which is cool.

Jess Dewell 12:59
Yeah.

Eric Tabone 13:00
But also very interesting to manage at times. But that just going through the experience and doing the motions over and over again.

Jess Dewell 13:06
The other one that I can’t, that I don’t talk about very often, I don’t think I’ve ever said it on the show was, let’s see. Oh, we were scaling. And so there were 10 of us, but we really needed 15 because of the amount and the volume of things. And there’s just only so much you can actually process coming in from the outside. So I gave everybody pseudonyms. And if anybody got upset, if any customer got upset, like the end user customers, and it happened often enough, not only was it a training experience for the inside, but I fired the person to the customer on the other side. And how’s that? Oh yeah. I made up people all the time and everybody so that we could just be like we know we’re gonna mess up and we gotta make it right somehow and this will be the quickest way to learn and nobody has.

Eric Tabone 13:50
Everybody feels like they went and… Did it work? Was there… That doesn’t sound successful, but did it?

Jess Dewell 13:55
Actually, we didn’t. Here’s the deal: I knew that was unsustainable. So while it was possibly one of the worst things I had ever done, we never had to—I think I used it, like, twice—we had to actually do that. Otherwise, and it wasn’t to our customers, it was to our customers, customers. So this was the external customer service part. And there, like I said, it was just too fast, too much. And basically, people didn’t feel like they were seen or heard and it was too rigid or short, or they were expecting something different. And so finally, we were trying to find how do you get short and clear? And how do you ensure satisfaction? And I was like, Okay, this is the casualty, we can have the imaginary one. And so that’s how I did data analysis on the fly, growing a company back when email was new, back when, you know, it’s actually when I changed my name from Jessica to Jess. Also, it was too many letters to type ICA. You know how much time I saved and how many more emails I could get done back then by dropping the ICA, Eric?

Eric Tabone 14:57
Two seconds per email, I would assume. But yeah,.

Jess Dewell 15:00
It adds up when you’re answering hundreds and like many hundreds of emails a day. Isn’t that wild? Not, yeah, no, it would. Thankfully I had the foresight to go, this cannot be the long-term solution. This is a bandaid to learn and grow and figure, basically, can I get us the more people? Yes. Could I get them fast enough at the time? No. How do we delegate? How do we onboard? How do we do all of those things? It would have been nice to have somebody, know somebody like you back then.

Eric Tabone 15:26
Yeah, that would, I probably would have made your life just a bit easier.

Jess Dewell 15:29
And today it would be easy in a different way, wouldn’t it? I mean, yeah, technology has changed.

Eric Tabone 15:33
And the way we do things has changed. Oh yeah. But so I think these are the experiences that, what, what shapes you, yeah, as a leader. And I go back to this. I think back, I don’t know about you, but I would not trade my first 10, 15 years as a leader, all that experience, for anything, because that experience is what made me become the man I am today, become the leader I am, become the father And all those things, those experiences just add up. Yeah, it is what it is. Well…

Jess Dewell 15:59
Fast forward for me, it’d be 26 years later from all of that awesomeness that I was just describing. What do you think? There’s got to be some sort of misalignment when you’re working with a team and you’re scaling and you’re bringing in nearshore, offshore people into a dispersed team. What is a common misalignment that you see or assumption that is made by your clients looking to scale their teams?

Eric Tabone 16:24
Yeah. So when clients come in, I always first try to understand exactly why are they doing this. And there could be several different reasons. But I think once I understand what their reasoning is, we could then help adjust and make sure things are moving forward. So some of the biggest misalignment issues I see more often than not in that first month, first two months, clients might treat nearshore, offshore as a different division or a different team and not part of the team. And so I often think that if you have your headquarters in the U.S., your team is in the U.S., you have 40 people, and you decide to bring on 10 people in Latin America, that’s not a different team. How do you integrate that and bring people together? And then you start diagnosing what does that actually take? Now, there’s a million different ways we could do it, but sometimes I think from the U.S. To Latin America, culturally, there are cultural differences. It’s not a 180 like it is possibly going from the U.S. To offshore. And because going from the US to Philippines, India, from a cultural standpoint, things do shift quite a bit more compared to Latin America. But when you are dealing with people in Latin America, how do you deal with conflict? How do you deal with communication? All these things have to be discussed before they actually get going. And then making sure there’s an alignment with that. I just go back to one of our values, transparency. I always say it’s easier to have that conversation before a problem happens as opposed to waiting until that problem actually happens.

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Jess Dewell 18:18
So what are your senses in transparency? There’s something that you’re sensing or you’re looking for, or you’ve seen before that says, Hey, it’s time to have a conversation. Even if I’m not quite sure what it is, this is a time to be transparent.

Eric Tabone 18:33
I’ll give you a very good example of something that happened very recently with one of our clients. They hired an AI operator, AI engineer. And so this is a role that we do quite a bit. And to put it frankly, all this is this person often goes into the company, helps figure out where the operation bottlenecks are, and they use AI or automation to help make sure things are moving forward. That person had been going wonderful for five, six months. And then I get a call email from the client and said, this person quit. What are we going to do? I said, well, did you talk to the person? Like, no, not yet. I’m like, well, why don’t you start off having that conversation? And so this is such a simple situation, but it happens more often than you think. And so finally the client got on and I’m like, just go onto that call and listen, see what was happening. And that’s the whole transparency, talking openly, seeing what’s going on. And the client figured out really quickly that this person, the only reason why they wanted to resign was because they felt like they weren’t doing a good job. When on the other side, the client was so incredibly happy and they were doing a great job. But there’s just a massive miscommunication and it took him 10 minutes to patch it up. And then they just raved to seal that. And they have that person, that person to be there for years because of that transparency, able to talk openly and look at that. And so I look at that. What would your first reaction be if a client comes to you saying like that?

Jess Dewell 19:49
Oh, let’s see. I would have been like, huh, how much of it on a scale of one to 10, how much of a surprise was it?

Eric Tabone 19:59
He was surprised.

Jess Dewell 20:01
Okay, so he came to you surprised. Okay, so you already knew that. Okay. The second thing was, if you look a little closer, how surprised were you? Literally, it’s the same thing. Because I’m guessing there were clues, and if they can find it first, it makes the conversation that we get to have way more functional and productive.

Eric Tabone 20:21
So I think there’s an aspect to that. But then the first thing I thought of, and once again, I don’t know if this is right or wrong, but I was like…

Jess Dewell 20:27
Well, I don’t know if I’m right or wrong. Just asking me questions and I’m totally out of my depth because you’re the expert on this right so.

Eric Tabone 20:34
What I would say is, like, if you’re building a team, did you have those one-to-one chats, however frequently, where you could openly chat? That was my first thing because, yeah, I was surprised if supposedly the client was as happy as he said he was. And then, but I think your follow-up question, are you really surprised, if you kept asking, I wonder if he would have eventually gotten to the root of it. But so my question is, kind of going back to that open communication, transparency: was it that space for this employee to come and say, hey, this is what I’m feeling before it became an issue? Or was this person feeling this on month two, just kept holding on, kept holding on, and then you get to month five, month six, the employee was having a bad day, something blew up, and he resigned? And that was my first question. And so when you think of building these teams across the world, are people getting the space? Actually, do those conversations?

Jess Dewell 21:26
Some people may think what you do is a little bit plug and play. Some people may think that the people that you are bringing to the table are quickly and easily replaceable for scale. And they may be true, and they may be right, yet there’s so much more than that. And the other one thing that comes to mind is, like, well, reducing costs here, this is a way we can do this and we can reduce costs. So distributed teams, regardless of where they are in the world, is it a reality that it can reduce costs?

Eric Tabone 21:59
I think there’s two things because you mentioned the scale and cost. And so when people are trying to build out their teams and organizations, more often than not, we’re working with the companies that have from 10 up to 300 employees, give or take. And so I always kind of walk people through a structure. So I say, all right, you need to hire, you need to build out team. You could go onshore, i.e., in the U.S. And there’s a lot of roles that you need to hire in the U.S. You could go offshore, which is pretty much opposite time zones. And culturally, it is, you know, it’s a 180. Not a bad thing, but it’s just very different on how people think. And that works for a lot of support roles, different types of roles where maybe you don’t need people on the same time zone. Latin America is kind of that one that that follows in between. So not as cheap as offshore, but you’re going to save a bit of money on from the U.S. So there’s, there’s two aspects with that that map to, to kind of set the tone. Uh, absolutely when you do go to nearshore Latin America or offshore, you are going to save cost. Usually when you go to Latin America, if you’re going to be paying somebody, for example, in the U.S., I don’t know, 80 grand a year, it’s probably going to be forty thousand dollars a year in Latin America. Let me make something very clear, though: that’s not taking advantage of people because the cost of Latin America is so much cheaper. And what we were just talking about when we jumped on this call, I buy my wife and daughters 48 roses every single Saturday for $12. And I know roses are only one aspect that could give you an idea that the cost of living is very different here. But then I think the one thing that I think is even more important you said, and people often ask is like, are these people replaceable? Well, there’s two ways to answer that. I mean, number one, everybody’s replaceable no matter what. I’m even replaceable. But then I go and think, well, what is the cost to replace them? I don’t know about you, but when I hire people for my internal team, it takes me two to three months to get them up to speed. And my time…

Jess Dewell 23:49
At least…

Eric Tabone 23:50
That time to me is more valuable than any salary that you’re placing. So yeah, I mean, people are replaceable, but I think that the best organizations who are successful, they treat them like they’re members of the team. They realize they are valuable resources and they do it. So these employees or contractors, however they’re hired, buy in and they do not want to leave that company for years. And that’s when that investment is like, okay, this is working.

Jess Dewell 24:18
The way you describe it by the way you bring people on, the way that they’re integrated, the way you encourage your clients and the roadmap that you give them, that’s not only intentionally building a team that is connected. It’s intentionally building a team that can communicate. And it also seems to be like a team that also helps reduce distractions to actually get the right work done versus be one of the distractions that just kind of happens at work.

Eric Tabone 24:46
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so when you think about the communication, you know, I remember years ago, the book, The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman on how do people communicate across different cultures? And this still applies. And thankfully, COVID did teach us how to work remotely. And that is something that has opened up so many different opportunities. But how do you communicate across different cultures? And I often say, if you’re in Texas and you want to hire somebody in Oklahoma, to an extent, I mean, you’re still communicating across borders. Yes, it’s still in the same United States, but they’re still far away. And it’s the same, Texas down to Colombia or Argentina to Brazil or Brazil to China. But learning how to communicate efficiently, understanding that culturally people do have different values. And as a leader, as an intentional leader, how do you adjust to make sure that’s executed properly?

Jess Dewell 25:44
Back when I would make people up to fire them in case I needed it for customer service. Just to kind of put this, this is right around 2000. And maybe a little before. I will tell you one of the things that was also possible was this was possible back then. My team of 10 after acquisition became 35 and I only had nine other people besides me on site. Everybody else was remote. And that, yeah, and that was wild and interesting. And then our clients were also all over the world. So I understand exactly what you’re talking about with culture. And I just wanted to pause a second to let everybody else catch up with us because I agree. There are places in Texas that have a very different culture in general of how do you work together and what does that look like than people in Oklahoma or where I’m at in Washington or where somebody is in Washington, D.C. I mean, think about all the people you meet, the stereotype of people from the Midwest being nice wherever you go. I mean, there’s something to be said for that, but it’s also a stereotype that we have to get past and say probably everybody everywhere is nice. Right. To the point of where are we at? And so I’m thinking about distraction a little bit more. And I’m thinking about the time that’s necessary to help remove those distractions so that right work can be done. And I’d love your thoughts on that.

Eric Tabone 27:10
With today’s age with AI, internet, I think there are more distractions than ever. And it’s the most simplistic distraction that I see, at least with my teams, is the dopamine hits. How do you open up social media, get your click, different things like that. And so, you know, on a leadership style from within the organization, we don’t control that. We encourage people to set and use their time properly. So that’s one of the things we do coaching quite a bit. And we try to actually teach the team because at the end of the day, if we say, don’t use this during the work hours, everybody’s a grown adult. And so our job is to control the time. But what we do within my organization, myself, and I have a few others leaders, we show people how to block out times and to make sure your focus stays and the distractions don’t happen. And so there’s two ways, two stories I would tell about this. How we teach our team, we usually teach our team to work in hour blocks. And so with that, you have 45 to 48 minutes where you work pretty hard. Then you take your 10 to 12 minutes and you get up and walk around. And so if you shut everything down for 48 minutes, you’d be shocked at how much you could get done. Me on a personal level, yeah, it’s wild. Me on a personal level, I was mentioning this when we were chatting earlier, but I have my schedule set up to not only run a growing company and a semi-decent sized team, but also be the leader within my household. And so I know that if I wake up at 5 a.m., yeah, it’s early, but I know 5 to 6 a.m., nobody’s going to be calling me. Nobody’s going to be writing me. And that first hour and a half, I could get done. I could get finished in what most people could take five or six hours to do. And so that’s what I personally do then on a distraction basis. But I also know that there’s certain times that I’m probably not going to be the best at staying focused. I know after lunch, I’m not going to be doing high focus, high attention to detail work right after I take a lunch. I’d either rather go for a walk or take a 10 minute nap or whatever it takes to make sure I stay focused and I keep pushing forward.

Jess Dewell 29:06
I love that you brought in here are the things that we’re working with that are distractions. By the way, it doesn’t matter if they’re on site or not. They’re the distractions of the day.

Eric Tabone 29:14
It’s the same. It’s the same.

Jess Dewell 29:16
And I was thinking back to where I started this section of our conversation and all we had were message boards and email. We could pick up the phone, but it was still really expensive to call. So the majority of our work was digital between all of these different locations. And I think the hardest thing for me was recognizing other people, regardless of time zone, we all can take that into account. There are going to be people in their own time zone that wanted to work on my team from 2 to 4 a.m. And there were other people that wanted to work from 3 to 7 p.m. And yes, they were working their whole shift, but that was, like, the core part of when they were working. And I’m like you, I like it in the morning. And so I think, to me, one of my leadership awakenings, if you will, something that was that totally allowed. I didn’t. Back then you also were supposed to have all the answers. And so then there was a little bit of the flip side of you’re, we’re looking for control. And as soon as I let go of that control, and it was like, as long as this stuff is getting done, as long as we’re effective in our communication, as long as we’re not waiting days to be able to hand this off and get something completed, it’s just time zones. Awesome. And so that was a huge opportunity for me as a leader to go, oh, everybody has their best, and if they’re really using their time wisely, the job’s going to get done. The effort is there. The result is in the way we’re communicating and that it’s actually happening, and we can have one-on-ones and we can have these side conversations. And we do see each other when travel occurs in real life, even if it might be once every other year or something like that. So that was a big, that was a big change for me somewhere along the line. And I think managers today still are facing that because even though we talk more openly about we don’t have all the answers, this is a thing that scares us. Here’s a place where it’s really vulnerable to talk about, even if it’s outside of our work, because it’s just, we can’t leave stuff at the door. We’ve now proven that, right? All of these business things that still have lasting impact and impressions that we still have to root out and get rid of. I think young managers, first-time founders, maybe even second-time founders sometimes depending on our age and experience, really have to get to that place where it’s a you don’t know that you’re trying to control until you stop and pause and see it.

Eric Tabone 31:43
Or have somebody tell you but this idea that we’re talking about I think this this still happens quite often because people, the idea of letting go and trusting your team just to do the job, that’s not easy. And I’m on my third company. My first company, I didn’t know how to do this at all. Second, not really. I finally got there, but that’s something, like these ideas that we’re talking about, it’s still an uphill battle for a lot of people out there.

Announcer 32:16
Eric just named something important. It’s still an uphill battle. Even three ventures in. So let’s pause right here. When a leader struggles to let go, it’s usually diagnosed as an operations problem. We assume the system is incomplete or something wasn’t thorough or on target enough.

Jess Dewell 32:40
At Red Direction, when we take leaders through a Business Basecamp, we find the real bottleneck usually isn’t the process. It’s internal friction. Beneath that need for control sits unexamined doubt. Scott Mautz, author of The Mentally Strong Leader, studies this exact moment in a leader’s journey. He explains that mental strength is not bravado. It’s the capacity to regulate doubt. He tells us how to reframe doubt to lead with genuine fortitude.

Scott Mautz 33:13
There’s a continuum of doubt almost, just if you think about it. And I have a picture of this in the Mentally Strong Leader, and I talk about it as a tool. But if you think on one side, the hope is that you can be self-confident on one side of the scale and self-accepting and there’s self-belief. But on the other side of the scale, There’s this thing called fear, and we’re paralyzed by fear. And so many of us are paralyzed by fear, and we forget sometimes that we have the ability to reframe the way we look at fear. We can remind ourselves that there’s only three ways to fail, when you quit, when you don’t improve, or when you never try. We can remind ourselves that failure is never, ever a person. It’s only an event, a point in time. We can remind ourselves that pit that we feel in our stomach before we try something that makes us nervous. That pit’s not there to scare us, that feeling. That feeling’s there to remind us that something must be worth it or we would be feeling nothing. And what happens is in that continuum, you try to be in the middle of that. You don’t want to be paralyzed by fear. And frankly, you don’t want to be overconfident on the other side of the scale either. You want to fall perfectly in the middle where you’re embracing a sense of healthy doubt, believing in your ability to figure things out along the way. But a lot of us get trapped on the other side of that continuum where we get paralyzed by fear. And I’m sure you have seen that in clients that you’ve worked with over and over again.

Jess Dewell 34:39
Doubt doesn’t disappear when you build a bigger team. It simply develops into discipline to stop letting that doubt dictate the day. When you build mental fortitude to step back, there is an elimination of hovering. And there is an intentional designing around structures that allow our teams to be autonomous in their actions and empowered to take the action. Trusting your team doesn’t mean leaving their time to chance, though. You still need practical boundaries to protect, focus, and eliminate the reactive noise that derails growth. The way to ensure you have the space to do your most important work is in that place. So let’s get back to Eric. He’s explaining how he sets up blocked-out time for focus and the simple matrix he uses to help his team distinguish real priorities from pure distraction.

Eric Tabone 35:42
But I let everybody manage that however they want. And yeah, that’s one strategy. And one other strategy we often use is the Eisenhower matrix.

Jess Dewell 35:50
Yeah, love the Eisenhower matrix.

Eric Tabone 35:51
And that’s one of the most simplistic things out there. But, and for the listeners who don’t know what this is, you pretty much have a square, four blocks, and you do, I might get the names wrong, so correct me if I’m wrong. But you have urgent and important. It has high priority. Urgent, not important. Not urgent, important. And not urgent, not important. So not urgent, not important. You delegate or don’t do, and then you delegate. Yeah. But that’s so something, one of the most, the best ideas out there, that just helps with efficiency.

Jess Dewell 36:19
People in our teams, I almost wonder, I have, and I’m just now getting to this point where it’s okay for me to say something like that to my team versus expect it of them because everybody has their own way. And so once I understand their personality and I’m lucky that everybody that works with me has worked with me for over 10 years. That’s awesome. I am incredibly lucky. We have that kind of a dynamic team. And so, so I think we have a different dynamic starting over. The next time, however far in the future that is, I will say that is something that would be really important to me upfront to also root out and just be like, Hey, this is a tool we use. If you don’t want to use it, what tool will you use so we can support you in its use?

Eric Tabone 37:05
But then I would also just, just ask, I got a question for you. Have you been in a situation where people possibly abused that and how did you manage it?

Jess Dewell 37:14
You just can’t. Let me just be real. It is, or it isn’t. The person either, and the result is in the effort and the outcome, right? So the results come, I should say that differently. The results come from the effort put in. And so who am I to say without sounding controlling that, or basically you’re not doing it my way, there’s a problem. That’s really what it comes across. So really coming back and bringing my personal value of curiosity into this of, I really want to understand their perspective. What do they, I think they’re abusing it, but what is it really abuse over time from the first company to this company? We have a tech stack. Guess what? In addition to our tech stack, we have at any point in time, four to 15 tools that are not part of the tech stack that we have to deal with from a security standpoint, because everybody’s using it because they have their own way of doing their job best. Yeah, my organization, I think that we handle it different because we’re very small, in a midsize or a larger organization that becomes a severe security risk. And I know you have to have some of that. So I’m wondering, is it, I’m going to say abuse, maybe but now what do you think about that whole concept of well, if we’re not using the same things, we get there might be another cost and where is that where is that unique point that could be found and do you know have a way that it looks and feels to know stuff might be might be outside of our workflow being used but it actually is helpful for that person or that team but it might not be right for the whole company.

Eric Tabone 38:55
Yeah, yeah. So I think when I think about abuse or things like that I would think more like on somebody comes in and they decide to not use the tools and they’re just not able to get their job done. Now, this doesn’t happen often. This is one of the things I will flag. My leadership style, what I’ve learned thankfully and very gratefully over the years, this works 95% of the time, but you are going to have people who just don’t fit into that. For example, I had a situation recently where somebody just wasn’t, I knew it wasn’t working out. And so I’m going to go back I think I loved how you asked that question earlier. Like, are you sure? Was it working? Are you sure? And so I was just thinking, this happened with somebody I had, and he was abusing my leadership style. So that has changed things. And what I would say, so I have a slightly different answer, I guess, on how it would be. But when that does happen, I do think it’s so important that as a leader, you learn. Leading with grace, leading with empathy doesn’t mean people are allowed to take advantage of you or the organization. And I think this is a misconception, especially with young or growing managers. You’re still firm.

Jess Dewell 40:03
Yes.

Eric Tabone 40:04
And if somebody does cross that line, you make that decision pretty quickly.

Jess Dewell 40:07
And hopefully we know the line ahead of time, right, Eric?

Eric Tabone 40:10
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

Jess Dewell 40:12
And I think it circles all the way back to the beginning when we were talking about non-negotiables. When you said these are our five values are really just the non-negotiables of the way we do our work here.

Eric Tabone 40:22
Yep. Yep.

Jess Dewell 40:23
And so if the lines or the boundaries are in place and somebody gets close or crosses that, it’s preset. But here’s the thing. I’ll be real with you. And this was a really big, but I usually don’t say, but in this case, I am because there are things that we’re still going to discover of who we are today, who we are evolving. And our interpretation of that boundary, that line may shift and evolve. And by the way, as it should, not only for us as individuals, for our company, for dynamic longevity, being able to constantly evaluate that is something also very important.

Eric Tabone 41:00
I just wanted to make sure that that was clear because I think the whole leadership, being an empathetic leader, leading with grace does not mean you’re weak. And so learning how to do that. But yeah, that’s awesome.

Jess Dewell 41:13
In addition to the blocks of time that you have to do your work, day to day, what about the month to month, the quarter to quarter? What kind of cadence do you and your leadership team use to make sure you’re staying in the direction that you want, course correcting within that range that you’re looking for to continue to be the company that people keep coming back to and working with and trust.

Eric Tabone 41:40
That’s such a great question. So my leadership right now, my company, we have set pretty much in three different pods. And to an extent, there’s a leader or some type of figure within each pod. So my number two who runs operations, what we do, we have at least a one-to-one every single Friday without fail. And we always go through certain aspects to make sure how was the week? What are we going on? What are we thinking about? On a monthly basis, we are constantly syncing with our AI operations to make sure from an operational and efficiency aspect, are we delivering what needs to be done? And I do think like with AI and how quickly things are moving so quickly, these are chats that we’re constantly thinking improving and moving forward. Quarterly, we obviously close out every single quarter to make sure where are we, what’s coming the next quarter. Thankfully for my industry, quarter four is always our biggest quarter. And August was one of our biggest months ever, which is a great thing to have. But I remember, so we finished August and September 1st, the clock started back over and we have September to finish out quarter three. And then we review at the end of quarter three, are we set up for quarter four? And we’re constantly thinking, do we have enough people within our team for manpower to make sure we could execute what’s coming for quarter four? And then one thing we do that is so cool, and I encourage remote teams to do this, at least once a year, get the entire team together. And we just had our offsite retreat in the jungle house that we were in. I was in a few weeks ago. I brought the entire team out there. For listeners, I’m in Bogotá, Colombia, but I had a jungle house for about a month. And it was just 80 degrees every day, blue skies, just gorgeous place to kind of reset. And I took my whole team out there and we painted our strategy. And we use, I always say, don’t have a complicated strategy. We use the Blue Ocean Strategy and I pretty much break it down. What are our four pillars, external, internal. And I take them through everything and say, this is why we do things so you guys understand. And this is how the strategy comes together. And I open up everything and let them ask any questions because if they understand why we ask something, it’s no longer, oh, I don’t want to do this because it sounds stupid. I understand we’re going to do this because this is going to help us execute or deliver on this.

Jess Dewell 43:52
What about you personally? Do you take time to do this deep work, this strategic time for yourself on any cadence?

Eric Tabone 44:01
Me personally or me personally within the company?

Jess Dewell 44:04
You personally as your company and your company role. Yes.

Eric Tabone 44:08
Yeah. So with that, yeah, great question. So that’s something obviously with the strategy, obviously I have all my pod leads who do quite a bit of implementation with that and ideas, but I try to review that on a quarterly basis. I guess each company has their own cadence, but I like to look at that at least on a quarterly basis because I think within our industry and I think what’s going on with the world, strategy things are changing so quickly so the strategy I put in quarter one there’s a good chance someone that’s already out to date and so the way I usually do that that tends to be the last month of the quarter so for example next week I know I’m going to be reviewing it making sure we’re aligned and then I sync with my pod leaders the mid usually the mid part of the month before the next quarter to make sure we’re aligned for the quarter and then me on a personal aspect just a slight detour. That’s something I love doing over the end of December and going into January. And I find January to be the most inspiring month out there because no matter what happens, it’s always a fresh start. And thankfully, the past couple of years that have been going in the right direction, but it still gives me time to take a step back, focus, identify goals, not only for the company, but for me personally, as well as my family. And then we just get to work and re-execute. And so I do that at least on a yearly basis.

Jess Dewell 45:27
When you make a strategic plan and you’re checking in once a quarter, how far out does that plan look?

Eric Tabone 45:34
We tend to have our strategic plan set up for the year, but I’m going to give my disclaimer. Things I set up in January, I removed in quarter two because I saw they did not apply anymore. But we also work in a very agile environment. So that’s why we do a slightly shorter strategic plan as opposed to other organizations that need one, three, five, and some organizations need 10-year strategic plans. My company, one year ago, we looked completely different than where we are today. And that’s why I often set these yearly plans with quarterly expectations, and that’s adjusted on a quarterly basis.

Jess Dewell 46:08
From a revenue perspective, I totally get that from a, from a project initiative perspective. I also get that one of the things I find in the companies that I work with, and this happens in my company too, is that when I look at 24 to 36 months, and then I look way out, I’m like, I’m going to go that direction, but we’re going to just really see, because here’s the deal, Even in a year like you, so much can change. I just make my lily pads to the future a little farther out. And where was I going with this? It was more of things that are going to have, some things I think are going to happen between month 24 and 36 actually end up happening in month three. And so it changes everything. And here’s the deal. The deal is business instinct was right. The pauses and the effort and the time of this deep work and this real connection mattered. And it’s because of that kind of a cadence, it was possible. And then guess what happened? Everything else just shifted out or was solved and never had to be addressed in the first place. So the things that come out aren’t because they’re obsolete. It’s because they were accidentally already done too.

Eric Tabone 47:14
How far out do you go?

Jess Dewell 47:15
I want this company to be around 20 years from now. So I’m looking at that, but do I have a plan on how to get there or what the size is going to be or who’s going to be in charge? No. In the next three years, it’s what in my role is going to be obsolete? What are the new things that my team and I have to learn to continue to do what we’re doing and make sure we’re equipped and we have the right roles and the right support for all the things that we are doing? And we’re getting the right work done. And I actually think that’s a really hard thing to do year to year. And I like to look out a little farther than that just because it helps me personally lead our organization to that. Here’s what we might ask. Here’s where we’re going. And now what does that mean for each of us?

Eric Tabone 47:58
So I got to ask, where do you see your organization in 20 years? What’s your plan?

Jess Dewell 48:03
I still might have a podcast.

Eric Tabone 48:05
There we go. That’s a good plan. That’s a good plan.

Jess Dewell 48:08
Isn’t that hilarious? Whatever podcasts have become, that’s a little cheeky of an answer, but I was actually just thinking about that. And I said, I’m still going to be having great conversations with great people. And they’re still going to be shared with the world because this turned out to be a really awesome resource here in season 10. And I can’t believe we made it this far. So here we go, Eric, why not 30 years down the road, still be figuring out how do you share this knowledge and these experiences and these ideas that in some cases will change with technology yet at the core are timeless. That is what I would like to make sure that the things that we are sharing and putting out there continue to do.

Eric Tabone 48:48
Well, very honored to be here on season 10, but congrats. That just shows how amazing this is and how the information is just going out to the…

Jess Dewell 48:55
And just helping people. Just helping people. Well, thank you for that. I really appreciate that. You’ve experienced both boutique consulting and corporate consulting. How, how do you personally guide you and your team to know on, I, in either of those scenarios, maybe it’s the same, and if it’s not, I guess you could pick one, um, when is it time for you slash your leadership team to re-architect that core intent for shifts that you sense coming?

Eric Tabone 49:32
Recruitment also to an extent is consulting and I, I, I never try to camouflage it. And so the way I look at this, I like, how are we solving the problem? And if what we do is able to solve the problem and create so much value that the client walks away as a better person, better company, just so incredibly happy, that means you’re going on the right track. For example, when you start to see a shift in patterns, and thankfully, this is my third company, I have yet to see a major shift that I have to adjust for, but I pick up on the signs early. Am I noticing that maybe our solution or how we work no longer solves the problem? That means I’m getting my leadership team on a, not a call, an in-person get-together, hey, this is what we’re facing. How do we fix this and how do we adjust our model? And I’ll give you a really good example of that that happened with my first company and talk about a major pivot this was when I was leading the language training company when you’re across Latin America yeah February 2020 uh February or March 2020 pandemic and so that one yeah that happened really quick and I’m sure that everybody remembers how quickly that happened and I vividly remember because we were doing in-person training for everything. And we were forced in a matter of 48 hours to completely up and shift our model. And now I look back at it, I’m like, obviously we now understand Zoom, we understand Google Meet, but before pandemic, for a lot of people, that wasn’t used that frequently. And that was something I still vividly remember when in Colombia, the government actually shut down the entire country and we were quarantined to our houses and we could only go out on certain days and either to walk at our dog or to go buy toilet paper or whatever it was. But that was probably one of the biggest pivots I’ve ever had to do in my life. And at least for me, I don’t know how it was for you, but I remember those 48 hours on that shift, not much sleep in those 48 hours, getting everything pivoted and set to just to make sure even as language training, we were consultants, providing value to the clients.

Jess Dewell 51:42
Oh yeah. I was in a lot of meetings. Although I will tell you, I remember there were two things that were sensed ahead of time. One time—so we’re totally taking a side tangent here, we’re not talking about business anymore—I come home one day and my partner in life, my husband Ryan, he says, we ought to buy a freezer. And I said, what, a freezer? We don’t have a deep freeze, we don’t have an extra freezer. I’m like, okay. And this isn’t—this was in the beginning of February, and it took us over a month to get said freezer because somehow along the lines freezers were already in this weird place. And so the freezer came and we had—we were—we started to fill it. It wasn’t very full when the big day happened. And looking back, somewhere along the lines, all of these indications. My husband’s a tech guy. We, who likes to do yard work in the, in the most, in the, in all of these other things. So when he says something like that, I’m like, well, sure. Okay. I didn’t even think anything of it. I was like, it would be great to have extra food and vegetables around just because I don’t want to cook. I’m loving this and you don’t want to cook. Then we can pull stuff right out. And sure enough, we needed it because we couldn’t get groceries. I thought that was a wild, I don’t, I think it was more than coincidence. That’s what I was trying to share the story for. And I do remember then thinking nothing of it. And I wish I had, because I remember the 19th of March, I was going out with some friends and I was going dancing downtown Denver. We lived in Boulder at the time. Ryan called me and he said, I hadn’t even made it out of Boulder yet. He said, I really need you to come home. I don’t feel really good about this. This is really important. And by the next morning, everybody was on lockdown. Wild, wild. And so again, one of those weird senses that he has. And it’s because of the amount of data that he’s consuming out in the world that’s very different than mine. And so then the first week of that, nonstop calls all day. They were 16 hour days on with clients and within our teams, just trying to figure out what are we doing? How are we going to do this? So I can totally relate. And there’s some instinct that came out that might not really relate. And I’m bringing this up in hindsight for the first time ever, actually, Eric. So something, what you were saying is making me have this connection. What if we looked, and this is for everybody, what if we looked a little closer at the stuff that happened? And what do we, how about if we look at the stuff that seems serendipitous, because there was something in that we can leverage today to actually use it as our levers in the future.

Eric Tabone 54:23
I think about those, those first couple of months with COVID and pivots, leadership, all that. That was probably one of the biggest tests I’ve ever had. And once again, I’m grateful, going back to what I mentioned earlier, I would not trade these experiences for anything. Because at the time, I was probably what, mid-30s, give or take, trying to lead a company. And I remember that was a year that my first company, it was just blowing up. Obviously, COVID took 50% away of that. And that’s a different story. But it brought me to where I am. And so you just think back, it’s like, all right, how do you take those experiences and learn from it and move forward and adjust. How do you manage whatever’s going on, whether it’s within your team, clients, family? And that’s one of the best pivots I’ve ever remembered doing. Not best, but one of the most challenging pivots.

Jess Dewell 55:08
Sure. Especially with all the stuff to take forward, which makes me think, Eric, it makes me think of this boldness, right? Hello. Hi. Welcome to the Bold Business Podcast. So I want to know from you, what makes it bold to really purposefully slow down and make sure your strategic intent, your transparency stays true when market pressures ask you to hustle harder.

Eric Tabone 55:29
Yeah. I think being bold, it’s something that you have to make an effort to do. It doesn’t come naturally. And it goes back to the leadership. How do you become a bold leader? How do you become an empathetic leader? Are you making the right decisions? And this is going to go a bit deeper. Are you making the right decisions, not only for your profit or your company, but are you making the right decisions for your community, for your family, for your team? Are you making the world a better place? And I think back, there’s been times where I had to make decisions that sacrificed. I couldn’t build whatever because of this reason, because it went against my values. And now, thankfully, I’ve been in those enough situations I can say no quite often. Are you turning down the client? Are you being bold to say no to this? Because that wasn’t the right thing. That doesn’t align with your strategy, with your values. And does that all line up?

Announcer 56:22
Future relevance isn’t built in theory. It’s built on the actions we take today. Don’t let what you heard today stay in this episode of the Bold Business Podcast. For full show notes, transcripts, and over 500 episodes created for companies running real revenue, visit reddirection.com. To continue the conversation with Strategic Growth Advisor Jess Dewell, reach out directly. Thank you for joining us. Keep building your business instinct. Produced by The Scott Treatment.