Communications like traffic, you need structure

Welcome to the Built by People podcast where we share the stories and insights of the world's top executive leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. That's crappy. Now let's jump in and get started with our next guest.

Welcome to the Build by People podcast. I'm joined today by Don Hammond. Don, thanks for joining me today.

My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

Absolutely. Always. As a starting point, I'd love to hear about your career journey, the unexpected turns, what ultimately led you to where you are today.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. So let's just jump right in, my friend. No, no warmups on this one. All right, fair enough. Yeah. Well, hey, that's a good question. I don't know, you know, I'm probably one of the 90 plus percent of white collar professionals who don't do what their degree was anymore. I mean, I guess, probably easiest way though to kind of break this down. I mean, obviously I, you know, I started out kind of in the, kind of over in the accounting and finance side of the house, but I mean, look, I was a numbers guy and, and you know, I also found that that was remarkably boring as a 21, 22 year old. Right. It was pretty terrible. That being said, I was already, you know, I'm sure we all have this, you know, high school sports, college sports, you know, we're pretty competitive. There's other things that are going on. And so, you know, you like to win. And therefore I think there's even at a, I guess take a step back. Like, I'm a firm believer, you know, there are intangible traits that everyone has, and those intangible traits are just who you are. You don't teach someone how to be hardworking. I don't think you teach someone how to be ethical. And so I don't care if you're 14, 34, 104, you know, you're kind of the core intangibles are kind of, you know, what, what you do, who you are. Look, I, I, I was always competitive. You know, I was the numbers guy sort. So, you know, and again, I like to win. So I never really wanted to sit around and I guess tolerate bad processes or bad outcomes or, or, or bad effort. And I also quickly learned nobody really had a lot of a big appetite to listen to the ramblings of a 22 year old either, you know, so I, you know, I dove into places where maybe I was or wasn't wanted and I optimized processes a lot. Right. That's what I did. And you know, as that happens, I think you get more and more notice, right? You find ways to save the company money via efficiency, more production, whatever the case may be. And then I think eventually, you know, you get to that point where as you're career rises, your authority rises and therefore you go from optimizing just processes and procedures and you start, I guess the easiest way to say it is you start optimizing people. And so I guess the benefit I had there is I like people generally speaking. So you know, that was a pretty easy transition for me. So yeah, I'm a bit of an odd bird. I'm one of the few people I've, you know, I've been in all silos of an organization. I've been on the finance silo, you know, finance accounts payable, accounts receivable, accounting. I've been in the red gen silo and then I've been in the operational side. So yeah, CRO, COO and CEO. So yeah, it helps, it helps a lot for the, the cross functionality portion of it all, for sure.

I love that. That's great. Currently, I know that you're still wearing a handful of hats. Tell me a little bit about your top priorities right now.

Yeah, actually I was just closing out a turnaround here just recently that went quite well. So actually company right now, GV correct, a MedTech startup. And that is where all my focus is going at this moment. We'll be moving to that whole thing, you know, my priorities. You know, it's fun. When you first asked that question, I was thinking, okay, does you mean that professionally, personally? And I think the answer's the same either way. You know, my priorities are. All this is going to sound strange probably to some of the listeners out there, but look, my priority is to be productive. I know that sounds a little weird whether it's work or at home, but look, your brain is at its happiest when you're accomplishing things, when you, when you're proud of the things you've been able to establish or educate yourself on or, or compliment. I think, you know, you eventually get to that point where you start doing things for yourself and others, right? Accomplishing things and so forth. And I think you get a much better appreciation of yourself and you get appreciated by others and I think that's a big motivator. So it's very cyclical, right? Be productive and be productive for yourself, be productive for the people around you and then kind of that old school karma thing, right? Let the good things come in your direction and keep bringing up the good vibes in other directions and yeah, be productive I guess. Simplest way.

What's one initiative you rolled out recently that you're really proud of?

Well, again with the startup, right now we're rolling out everything so we'll be going in through, through seed and everything coming up here in the second quarter. We're doing seed slash angel and stuff like that. But I mean I was part of a turnaround just recently where we turned that around from, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars a month on a loss to a couple hundred thousand dollars actually 300,000 plus a month in the black. It's a nice thing to hold your hat on. I think it always kind of comes down to the same things though. Believe look, size, company doesn't matter, industry doesn't matter. I think everyone says that stuff because it makes feel better. But look after it's all said and done, find ways to create scalable and sustainable process procedures. On top of that, find ways to generate revenue in multiple and exponential diverse ways, right? More than one way to make money, different marketplaces, different product fits and that sort of thing. And then last but not least, the third pillar there is, you know, learn how to hire and build talent accordingly. If you can do those three things in an organization, the process and procedure. So that's your efficiency in your production and the revenue which is obviously that's going to be a big driver in the go to market portion, that whole thing. And then the people, you know, the basis of your hiring people, not maybe just based on what your needs are for today, but hey, I'm, I'm going to hire Bob or Sally or whoever because I think they could do this job well. But we have another job probably a year from now that they're probably in a better fit for. Right. And really bringing the talent so for forth along, that's it, that, that is, that is how you, that's how you make companies successful. It's just process revenue and people.

You mentioned people on that. And one thing that we've noticed throughout the course of the episodes that we do for The Built by People podcast is employee communications really becoming harder across every organization? So what's one area where you have improved or are trying to improve engagement through better communication with your people? How do you improve approach making sure your people actually see, understand, act on the information that's sent out to them.

Yeah, well, that's really funny. So the reason I'm kind of giggling right now, this, you're right, this is apparently a very palatable topic at the time because I've had about six former director reports hit me with this in the last 12 months. We have conversations like, I guess I'll just say the same thing, you know, that I've said to them. And you know, we got to understand what communication is and what it means. And that sounds a little vague and a little. But after it's all said and done, it's gonna, and please let me finish. Cause this is gonna sound awfully egotistical, but I haven't had communication issues as CEO on companies. I really haven't. But let me, but let me give an example. I think part of that is because I've never really followed the trends very closely, right. I don't, you know, I can go way back in the day when we're like, no one's gonna have offices, right? And we're all gonna sit in one room together and I gotta, and then of course, you know, but, but let's use what's a good example, Slack. Slack is a very good example. So everyone looks at Slack and they say, you know what's great about it? You can communicate anytime, anywhere, with anyone, any amount. And, and, and you know, maybe a less sophisticated eye might look at that and say, that's really progress or that's good. But it's not. Look, communications like traffic, you need structure around, you know, there's, you know, if you don't have any lanes, if you don't have any speed limits, if you don't have any boundaries, it just becomes a, you know, a bumper to bumper mess, right? It's a train wreck. It becomes overwhelming. So if you're not able to understand that and get people to understand, hey, we use certain platforms for certain conversations. And you know, I'm still a big believer in chain of command, right. I don't think you walk in on your third day and go, I'm going to email the CEO today, right? Slack them or whatever the case may be, you know, think. I think you sit down with the leadership team and you say, what are we going to use certain tools for? But maybe more Importantly or just as importantly, what aren't we going to use them for? When it comes to communication, let's put up, let, let's put up, you know, the stop signs and the yield signs. Let's put up the traffic lights, the greens and the reds. Let's make sure we got speed limits on this whole thing, right? And how we talk cross functionally and how we talk from management to non management, management to management, tangents and all that kind of stuff. Let's get that stuff down. And of course, you know, how do we get people there? Well, we communicate it. We make sure we gain agreement and that everyone's going to follow it. And if they don't follow it, then we got to make sure there's consequences, right? We're not going to necessarily give someone the guillotine for making a mistake, right? No, I copied the wrong person. But you and I both know exactly where I'm going with this. There are some people that, you know, when they have an opportunity to contact everybody, they're going to contact everybody. And so then what happens? Right? You only have two outcomes at that point because once one person sees that Don's doing it well, then they're going to do it, right? Why shouldn't I? And so your two outcomes are really simple. All of your communication inside your organization just turns to noise and you just learn to block it all out or just turns right into havoc. Right. And because people are missing each other, you know, it's not efficient, it's not productive and so forth and so forth. You know, you can do the same thing, you know, with the number of meetings you do have or don't have. Right. And you see companies all the time. What do you do? I have 10 meetings a day. That's probably too many, right? How long they last? Some are two hours. No, there's no one should have ten meetings a day with some of them being two hours a day. It doesn't mean make any sense. And so what we have to do is tools and resources are great, but only if we use them appropriately at the appropriate times. And I think as long as you can remember that, you know, it allows a very good governorship over how you manage things like communication.

If we sat down again in 12 months from now, what would you have hoped has changed most in your org and you can maybe start, you know, talk about your startup. What's, what's the biggest change in the next year from now that you know you're hoping for?

Yeah, yeah, that's the whole thing with startup we'll have you know, seed slash angel finished up. We'll probably be looking at a, around that time, give or take, you know, at least, you know, in the process lead up to that. FDA's will be knocked out at that point time. We'll have much more infrastructure put in place, go to market, getting ready to move forward, so forth and so forth. But maybe most importantly, you know, executive team is, you know, is established at this time. We just finalized that just recently and really create meeting, you know, that's, that's where the rubber is going to meet the road, right? Your 3, 4, 5 people you have running around on a day to day basis that's creating this whole entire foundation. They're also going to create that momentum, they're going to create that mood of the company, they're going to create that identity of the whole thing. And I guess, you know, if it helps anyone when you're out there hiring, you know, you see everyone kind of always talk about, they only talk about two things apparently. It's, you know, what's on their resume and are they a good fit. Right. And I'm putting fit in the air quotes and it's fun. Probably be careful how much time you spend on the resume part of it. I think we can all agree a portion of that's never gonna be quite as accurate as it stated. But maybe more importantly, I think it's to understand what good fit should mean versus what we want it to mean. And good fit is a tendency where we go well I like that guy or I like that gal and I could, I wanna work with them. No, that's wrong, that's emotional, that's not logic based. What you should be saying a good fit is, is that a person I respect a lot of and can they be productive inside the organization and help us to reach our goals and be successful. Whether you like them or not is completely irrelevant after it's all said and done. What you'll find though is if you respect someone, it's pretty easy to get along with them. And, and, and so you don't have to worry about that later on. But I think that's probably something I see all the time the communication side that you brought up and the hiring side, people bring it up to me all the time, right? We got 40% turnover rates. I'm like, yeah, probably stop spending so much time trying to hire all the people you like. And then versus hiring the people that, and I'll be the first one to tell you I have promoted a good number of people I do not like personally. It doesn't make a difference. They're good at what they do. I don't have to like them. They don't have to like me. Be great if we did, but it's not a deal breaker. That being said, I've had to fire friends before. I don't like that. It's terrible.

I don't.

I don't want to be part of that. But guess what? You know, we're all adults, or at least we're supposed to be. So, you know, we handle it accordingly. So I think that's what a lot of this comes down to today, where it's, you know, don't be afraid to be a leader, Bridge boy. We could use a lot more of it. And for if there's anyone listening right now, you know, keep that in your back pocket. It's pretty difficult to get in trouble for doing the right thing.

I love that. Well, Don, thank you for being a guest today. Great perspective, great insight. Really was a pleasure having you on the Built By People podcast.

It was my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.