It's Just Business

113. Business³ with Lisa Levy

February 01, 2023 Dana Dowdell and Russ Harlow Episode 113
It's Just Business
113. Business³ with Lisa Levy
Show Notes Transcript

How do I identify issues in my business? How do we innovate and create positive change? We have a deep conversation with Lisa Levy about making smart changes and improvements in business. Lisa is a #1 best-selling author and the founder and CEO of Lcubed where she helps clients gain the skills, capabilities, and self-reliance they need to thrive in the future.

Connect with Lisa Levy:
Website: https://LcubedConsulting.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisallevy/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisallevy1 
YouTube: https://youtube.com/lcubedconsulting
Book: Future Proofing Cubed 

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You can find Dana @adashofboss, @dana.dowdell and @hrfanatic
Dana DowdellBoss Consulting – HR Consulting
Google -  https://tinyurl.com/y4wxnavx

You can find Russ @reliable.remediation
Russ HarlowReliable Remediation – Disaster Restoration
Google: https://g.page/r/CXogeisZHEjMEB

Dana Dowdell  00:05

Hi, Russ.

 

Russ Harlow  00:06

Dana, what's happening?

 

Dana Dowdell  00:07

Nothing. How are you?

 

Russ Harlow  00:09

I don't know. Fabulous has been an interesting week. But that's okay.

 

Dana Dowdell  00:13

It's we're talking fabulous stuff today. Oh, yes, we are joined by Lisa Levy. She is the founder and CEO of L cubed consulting. She's a speaker. She's a bestselling author, and she also has her own podcast. So, Lisa, welcome to it's just business.

 

Lisa Levy  00:32

Dana Ross, thank you so much for inviting me to the conversation.

 

Dana Dowdell  00:36

Thank you for being here. So, tell us about your journey into business.

 

Lisa Levy  00:43

So my journey into business is not a particularly interesting story in and of itself, right. I went to college, I wanted to be a film director, I thought that it would be really cool to make an impact emotionally and influence culture. But you know what, it's really hard to become a film producer. And when I finished my degree in video production and went to find my first job and found out that I could make more money flipping burgers at McDonald's, than I could working in video production. And the math inside of my head said, That doesn't make any sense to me. And so I sort of made a shift. And I it was the mid-1990s. And I ended up in it. Right? It was a booming industry, everybody was there. And the process of producing videos, and the discipline of project management. It's the exact same thing. And so, I created transferable skills that I didn't know, were transferable skills into an industry that was going gangbusters. And I built a career in that space. And I didn't really enjoy what I was doing. I was working with companies and the more that we did, the more technology systems that we implemented, the more unhappy customers I saw. And so I started looking at that going, what is going on. And I started to understand that we were solving problems with technology without actually understanding the problem. We were putting in cool things that do really amazing things, some might say fabulous things. But they weren't solving actual business problems. So I had to roll it back and start to understand in the customer environment, what are the processes that they're using? Okay, if the processes aren't effective or efficient, when we put in technology, we have now created a super-fast, bad solution to reproducing a really bad process. And no wonder everybody was pissed off. So we took what was worst about their job and amplified, what sucked. So I said, Okay, let's look at this. And let's roll it back further. And what are who are the people who are doing the work? Do we have the right people in the right roles with the right skills and capabilities, doing processes that actually work? And then putting in technology doesn't make a difference? In your Rica, it totally makes a difference. Because now we have super-fast, good. And we have effectiveness, and we have efficiency. So I spent 15, almost 20 years in corporate America working on projects, working on processes, and learning that people have to go through a process of change to accomplish anything. And large corporations spend billions of dollars every year on these disciplines. But what does that mean to a small business. And when I chose to leave corporate, and start L cubed consulting, the purpose was to take all of this information and this intelligence and apply it to the beginning of the business journey, taking it to companies that were growing, that were emerging, that didn't have billions of dollars, but wanted to do things well, from the get go. And that's the real heart and soul of what we're doing at L cubed is taking all of this big company knowledge and sharing all of those secrets with smaller businesses. In 2019, I started writing my book future proofing cubed. And the goal was to share some of the secrets with what I thought would be the ideal client and I called that the middle market. I thought that that was businesses that had a fully blown executive team. They had business functions, they had layers in the organization, they're making 10s of millions of dollars, because they could start to use These concepts. When the book launched, the majority of the people who were most impacted by it were startups and people who might even still be solopreneurs, who caught on to the idea if we use these tools at the beginning. It makes our growth journey easier. And so that sort of brought me to where I'm at today. And with that, right, I'm coaching, I'm consulting, I'm speaking, I'm hosting a podcast to challenge the status quo in a in an in healthcare industry that is just so fraught with the opportunity to make change. But it's really about starting at the beginning and starting well.

 

Russ Harlow  05:45

I'm curious, are you familiar with Keith Cunningham's? The road? less stupid?

 

Lisa Levy  05:50

Yes, it's one of my favorite books.

 

Russ Harlow  05:52

Okay. Because, you know, as soon as you started talking about trying to fix a problem, that's not really the problem. That's exactly where my mind went back to. And he speaks to it. I won't say eloquently, but it definitely it is right?

 

Lisa Levy  06:09

Well, he speaks to it, honestly. Right. It's, it's in your face commentary about the world. And, you know, and I love the book, but in my world, I spell stupid S T. O O P ID, because when we're stupid, I mean, we do it well. And we need to not the goal of what I've created, what we call adaptive transformation, is the ability to do everything with purpose. So as a business owner, especially when your business is young and growing, and there's not a lot of money, right, there's like, it's really important to know, and focus in on your customers, and understand what they actually need, and what they actually value. Because those two things give you the formula for your success. If you can fix and fill their need in a way that they derive value, you will have a customer for life. And as you develop that relationship, if in that experience, you are listening to them year over year, and evolving to meet their ongoing needs, you're constantly innovating to support that you will both grow, and you will both flourish. And so it really for me when I talk to young businesses, it's are you doing it because it's what you love? Great, but you have a customer base that needs what you love? And can you make the love about what they need and satisfying and building for a purpose, which isn't necessarily the dollars in your bank account, but solving their problems, your customers problems? Because that drives revenue and value for them? And for you?

 

Dana Dowdell  08:09

What are some of the symptoms of a business owner doing things do bid?

 

Lisa Levy  08:17

Ah, so my one of them is you wake up at 2am in the morning and a cold dead sweat and you don't know why. Right? The things that wake you up in the middle of the night. The other symptom is well, we have this problem. And I know that we fix it like six months ago, but it's happening again. So right you're doing the same things over and over again, you might make little changes, but you revert maybe back to the way you had done it before. And you get stuck in that in that loop. And the other one is your team, you have people if you have people working and everybody is really, really, really, really busy. But nothing is actually getting done. You're stuck in some broken loops about things that just aren't working and right the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

 

Russ Harlow  09:14

I'm going to go back to Keith Cunningham again, because I was wondering if you could give us some examples of it's sometimes it's hard to identify when we say Oh, my art problem is we're not making enough revenue. So maybe we have to increase revenue and then somebody thinks that's the problem. And they're like, well add let's add all these products and service lines. But the underlying problem might not have anything to do with revenue, it might have something to do with how you're solving a client's problem or and so I think one of the having that realization was big for me. So what are the things and working with people that you find and some examples that you know, business owners can go oh,

 

Lisa Levy  09:55

okay, so I'm gonna, I want to I'll tell a story and the story is from a big enough environment that's going to have a really big impact. So you can, then we can extrapolate that back down to just kind of any business. So I was working with a utility company, and they wanted to improve their customer experience. In one particular market segment, they work with new home developers in the Phoenix market, which is where I live and home construction here. When it's booming, it's really booming. And there's a piece of it, that is just mind boggling. The utility company was having a problem with the developers because they weren't getting power turned on to construction sites fast enough. And the, the builders were livid, it took too long for them to start construction, which meant it took too long to finish construction. And what they really wanted to do was it took too long to sell the house or at scale houses, you know, hundreds of them. And working with the utility company, I started asking questions, what do you do? How do you do it? And how many people are involved? And I worked with one group and they said, you know, it takes we tell our developers, it takes us 20 weeks to get them power to a new location. The reality is, it's probably closer to 3030 weeks before a builder can break ground and start doing work. I'm understanding why the builders, livid, I know that they get that the builders livid, but I said, Okay, why does it take so long? What are the processes? So well, there's all of these different teams that we have to work with. And the reality is, when that builder starts the process, there could be a gap of a week or two before we even actually get the official communication that it's real. And so we started looking at all of the pieces parts, all of the different team leads came into a large conference room, we had paper everywhere, the table was just covered with flowcharts, and roles and responsibilities and all of the things that everybody does. And I said, Okay, let's put this in order, how does it really work? And they all looked at me like I was crazy, because the teams had never been in a room together to talk about what they do. So as I started sequencing it, right, I love a whiteboard, big whiteboard and colored markers. And we start drawing everything out. And really got into the minutiae. This 20-week process had layers upon layers of rework, miscommunication, totally lost communication, and work that took a large amount of time and went absolutely nowhere. Nobody used the output. We spent four months going through all of it when we were done. What was taking 20 weeks became four. Okay, that is a huge gain. And I'll be really honest, right? Implementing that change was painful and took a lot of time. And it's still a work in progress. But we knew what the potential was. And the key to rolling all of that back and understanding started with basic communication. Do I as an individual, know what work I'm supposed to do? Do I understand where it comes from? And how I get it? And do I understand where it goes, and who uses it after me? This is a series of questions that any individual in any company of any size can ask. And when you don't have an answer, you know that you're wasting time and energy? If you can't answer why it's important that we do the work, or the answer is that's the way we've always done it. We have now hit stupid, right? And this is where, for me as a consultant, those are those opportunities where I know I can make what they do more effective, I can make it more efficient, they don't have to generate more revenue because they're gonna get the reduction in overhead gains, that will probably offset that need of revenue that they think that they're feeling so optimizing process is really a great place to start.

 

Russ Harlow  14:24

Then it's official when I become president united states, I found my Chief of Staff oh, we're gonna fix some things. Least holy cow.

 

Lisa Levy  14:32

Oh, well, in that scenario, we're starting with firing a lot of people. We're just gonna start over. Let's just start over.

 

Russ Harlow  14:40

Oh, man, so that's great. I think it's like we try to solve problems all the time. And then we run into it and we go, we never even evaluated what the foundational problem was. So in small business, what is it a lot of the times for people what are they running into that's common.

 

Lisa Levy  14:58

So in small business, It starts with, you know, one or two people, right who you have to do everything. I still run a small business, and I do my own invoicing and I My Accounts Payable, I my accounts receivable, I do all of those things. And there are many people who would counsel me that I need to stop doing that, because it's not my core competency. And they are right. But I have not let go of that control. But it's wearing too many hats, right? We're doing everything. And we do it with our heroic superhero cape on, because we need to keep the business moving. And so, we do everything. And then we hire people, and we train them on the way that we did it. Which may or may not be good. It certainly may or may not be right. But now we're training on what we did. And so we now have, we now have maybe two or three people around us who are doing things the way that I did them. And then we grow a little bit more. And those two or three people are training two or three more people on what I trained them on. And did anybody ever stop and look to say, Does it even make sense? And we don't, because we're busy. And we're focused on growing our business. And it's important to stop, look at what we do, why we do it and figure out how we're doing it makes sense. So there's an old set of business tools called the Five why's. And so you start to understand and ask, so why do you do it this way? And an answer in the accounting world might be because, you know, my accountant told me to do it this way. Cool. All right. Why did you end up you pull it back? Why are you doing it that way. And the accountant says, well, because that's what the accounting principles, say we're protecting your we're protecting you from tax liabilities, great, that's a great reason to do something. But when you roll it back, and you're doing things and you get to the that's the why the way we've always done it, that means that you were just building it without thinking about it. And it's time to think about it and make it more effective, make it more efficient. And usually, there are parts of that process that you can stop and throw them away because there's more effective ways of doing it. And that just means we need to take the time and reflect on how we run the business.

 

Dana Dowdell  17:20

Have you had things within your own business where you had kind of fallen into that lull of this is not the way that I should be doing it?

 

Lisa Levy  17:31

Oh my gosh, of course. So the accounting invoicing my clients is one of those things I absolutely should not be doing at this point in my career. And I hold on to it. Because with a team around me, it's a time in the week where I stop. And I see what everybody is doing. And I send that invoice great. But it also gives me the opportunity to reach out to Angela, to TA to Veronica to whomever is doing something and thank them for what they do and for their contribution. And how much it means to me how much it means to the customer that they're impacting. So I have I've tied those two things together, and I need to separate them, because I need to have somebody doing my book work. And I still need to value my employees and make that touch point to the impact that they're making. But I've always had that, you know, that touch point together. And I need to break that because it doesn't add value and my time is better served, not sending invoices. And that also means that my invoices would probably go out more accurately the first time, then they may actually always go out. Marketing is another thing, not my area of core competence, not an area that I've studied. And I waste a tremendous amount of time in any given week on LinkedIn, pretending that I'm positioning myself for something or whatever. And it probably drives absolutely zero value to my actual business.

 

Dana Dowdell  19:11

So how I'm in the same boat, I still do all my own invoicing, and I'm sitting here in this conversation being like, okay, maybe I need to whiteboard some processes with my team, because I hire very green employees, and they don't know business and they don't, you know, they just, they literally give or take the food that I feed them. And that's what they that is the fuel that that feeds them. So I'm having a very self-reflective moment right now. But to that point, like how, as a business owner, do you stay open to the idea that like you're doing things wrong, right, we start a business because we think we have this great idea, and that we you know, everybody needs our service and there's so much ego and being an entrepreneur. So how do you stay open to doing things differently or better wrong You know, how do you how do you keep that openness?

 

Lisa Levy  20:03

Okay, so I guess I have two answers to this, and one will be kind of the tongue in cheek, there are very few people who are truly the smartest person in the room all of the time. And right, as an entrepreneur, it takes an incredibly healthy ego to take the leap. But then the next best thing that you can do as an entrepreneur is acknowledge that you don't know everything. And you know, Dana, I love that you're talking about your team and how you bring them in young and green, and you're coaching and training them up. So, let's follow that thread for a minute. As that continues, you do need to take the time and a whiteboard and really map out the process. And I would say you need to look at it twice a year. And you need to understand is it still doing what it's supposed to do? Have the team members made enhancements to it, just because they had aha moments along the way and said, Hey, if I no longer mail out each invoice, I don't even know that we send invoices in the mail anymore. But that's where my head went, if instead of putting the envelope in the mail every day, I just wait and put a stack of them in the mail on Friday, instead of doing one thing five times I'm doing one thing once, right as an easy step. With email. That's a bad analogy, but it's the only one that came to mind. But when you look at those things regularly, your employees even though they're young and green, are going to find efficiencies all on their own, because inherently people are lazy. And I mean that in a positive way. I mean, that in the sense of if I can get the same results by doing less work, I'm happier. I also happen to be more efficient. And that's a good thing. Right? So those work arounds as long as they're not compromising the quality of the outcome, right, humans will find them will find ways to work around and make something faster. For business owner, the key and that then is understanding what it is if it's a good thing, making it the new process, and waiting for that next opportunity to improve. So what I've just talked about in a very roundabout way is the continuous improvement loop. And so underneath all of that, when we understand what our processes are, as business owners, we want them to be more effective and efficient in six months than they are today. And six months after that, and six months after that. And that's how we continue to be operationally sound, so that we're not wasting time, energy money on stupid things.

 

Russ Harlow  22:51

Now, we talked a little bit about as we were kind of ramping up for our conversation, Lisa. And I want to ask, too, how does this go into like, you know, our brain and how we think about things and how we approach life and business because I know you've got a lot of insight on this.

 

Lisa Levy  23:08

The as people, we process kind of left brain or right brain. So there are those creative people out there, those marketeers that I don't understand how they work, but they write you describe a problem to them, and they come up with the words and the images. And it's like, gosh, that's brilliant, right, there are our right brain creatives. And then we have our left brain system and process thinking people. And we're both key, we're all capable of both types of thinking, we just tend to leverage one or the other more. When I'm working with teams, it's important to learn how to stress and use the other part of our brain. With many of my business owners, they are systems and logic dominant. And so to get them into that creative side of their brain means that we're going to do some exercises to kind of turn on creativity. Because when we're ideating and looking for innovation, that's where we start to get really cool things happening when we push into the non-dominant part of our brain. And so it's a tool set that I use, it's designed thinking it is the human centric approach to solving problems. And so that's it's fun. It gets us out of the normal kind of problems solution mindset of the mathematical thinking of solving a problem and gets us into creativity and the, you know, the crazy impact that that can mean so the great description of what is the power of design thinking. If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted as an improvement to their horse drawn carriage. The common logic would have been faster Horses. Well, I personally would rather have the horsepower of a Ferrari than a faster horse. And so that's sort of the evolution of creativity applied to problem solving, right? Getting to the combustion engine versus, you know, faster horses, more horses, whatever it was to get that horse power to the carriage. That's how you get to the really clever solutions.

 

Dana Dowdell  25:28

Is there a part of it as well, that includes like staying out of our staying out of our own way, in some way, like, so Henry Ford, right? I've heard this story a couple times about how he went to his design team and said, create this type of engine. And they told him at first, like, it's not possible. And he said, figure it out. And so is that part of it as well, like, kind of knowing what you don't know. And not like staying in your lane? Right? If I if I don't have this type of expertise, I'm not going to muddle in it, because I'm just gonna fuck it up.

 

Lisa Levy  26:04

Well, and right, and we do that all the time as entrepreneurs, right? And, Dana, you asked at the beginning you earlier in this, right? How? How do we get to where we want to go as an entrepreneur and getting the ego out of the way, right, you've just brought us full circle, getting the ego out of the way gets us to that point of, I don't know what I don't know. And as a business matures, right, there's that point in time, where your founder, and you're starting something because you have that idea, my product, my service, whatever it is, is going to be great. But you may or may not have the capability of creating and making the idea real. And that's when you're starting to bring in smarter people around you. The design team that created the original engine, right, Henry Ford didn't do that himself. We need to bring in a support team, right? I want to not be the smartest person in the room of my business, I want everybody around me to collectively lift us up. And that idea is you know, collective intelligence, right? One plus one isn't, too when you're sharing ideas, and you're building creativity, right, the growth is exponential. And so it is important to get out of the way, once you found the right people. But you need to be confident that you have the right people. So going back to kind of my earlier analogy, you need to have the right people in the right seats doing the right work. And then you enable by technology. That is the sequence of how you grow and scale a business. I turn it into a mathematical equation, that is people plus process times technology equals growth in scale. So, I Russ is nodding his head, he had to do the math in his head right by people plus process times technology equals awesome sauce. And so yes, that is one as the entrepreneur founder, letting go of our ego at that point in time where we have people around us who are capable of doing that. We have to trust the people that we hire. And if we do not trust them, you need to question why you hired them. And then you need to allow them as a team to grow and evolve into a point where they are solving the problems. And it's highly likely that they're going to do it in a way that is not the way that you would do it. And you need to let them do it. Because that's what you hired them to do.

 

Russ Harlow  28:45

I mean, one plus one is 11, right? Yes, Henry Ford kept coming back to everybody who kept telling him one plus one was two. That's just not how it works. So do you find entrepreneurs that you work with or that you know, are more or less successful, the more or less they are self-aware? And so the second part of that is, do you use any kind of like, strength, you know, like Clifton Strengths or, you know, temperaments, analyzer or something to help them figure out who they are and how they process things.

 

Lisa Levy  29:22

Self-awareness, I love that you asked that question. Self-awareness, I think is the key. And I think it's bigger than an entrepreneurial question. I think that that's a human question. I think that self-awareness is what makes us a successful entrepreneur, and enlightened parent, a partner, right? Any relationship that we're in the self awareness level, is critical. And again, you guys you've tied it back to that ego at the beginning, getting out of our own way. So Self Awareness is the piece of that, that allows us to step out of our own way that allows us to turn down our ego and let our team do the work. So, you asked about tool sets, I try not to tie myself to any one set of tools, oftentimes, I go into an environment, and they have something that they've used or that they like. And that's great. And I can adapt and work within any of that. Personally, I like to start with, you know, the predictive index is a really good place from a behavioral perspective to start. And if people are using that there's, there's also the predicts, which as an offset of that, five voices is one that I've come across recently that, you know, talks about how we communicate and understanding, you know, that the importance of how we send information and how we receive it, and that not everybody communicates in exactly the same way and being aware of how what you're saying impacts somebody else. Just yesterday, I was talking with one of my team members, and she is the most curious human being I've ever encountered in my life. And all she does is ask questions, constantly asking questions, kind of, like a two year old might. And I adore that about her because in business, right? That's how we find obstacles, we find all sorts of information with good questions. But she looked at me and she said, I was talking with one of our clients. And they told me that I asked too many questions. And that I they feel judged. And then they had a very negative reaction to all of the questions that she was in some way, shape, or form, looking for fault. And that left me speechless for a minute because we learn in different things that right questions, and curiosity is an open form of communication. And that people are supposed to respond positively to that. But not everybody hears things the same way. And so, for this particular clients, who was feeling self-conscious and uncertain about things, now, these questions were amplifying her fear. And so as a team, we talked about, you know, this curiosity and the questions, and it came back to what I say, is not received by everybody the way that I intended it to be. And so for Angela, in this, in this case, she said, I know that I need to be really careful with my questions. In an environment where somebody who seems to be really quiet, right, if they're there, if they're shutting down, I need to slow down, soften, and respond differently. So it was a big self awareness exercise that we went through organically, because we thought we were doing all the right things. And it had a negative impact. And I have so much respect for the individual who said, timeout, you guys are freaking me out. So, self-awareness is critical to success.

 

Dana Dowdell  33:14

So, it's sort of a good lead. And I had a question from the beginning that I've been holding on to and I think, so I own an HR consulting company. And when I started, I was I was like, that's just what I'm going to call myself a Human Resources consultant. And I did not realize how many people in this universe think that they know what HR does, because oftentimes, it's not it does not feel like consulting. And so, I'm really curious from your perspective. What how do you define consulting? So, for someone who's like, I'm going to be a technology consultant, I'm going to be a business consultant, I'm going to be a leadership consultant, like, how do you define that?

 

Lisa Levy  33:56

So that's, I love that question. Because I personally think that the role of a consultant is a really powerful and impactful thing. I think that the role of consultant has been abused and bastardized by the Big Four and become this thing that is a revenue generating monster. So consulting to me in its purest form, is helping a business be better tomorrow than they are today. It's that simple. It means helping them become self-reliant, teaching them skills and capabilities and solving a problem that they can then take and go forward without another consultant present. In all of my engagements, everything that I do is designed to solve a problem. Leave them capable of running with the solution. And I walk away, or my team walks away, we may reengage for another problem, we may, you know, there may be multiple things, but it is not about landing and expanding and putting more and more resources and building an addiction dependence on external people to run their business for them. Sorry, I just imagine that's one of my favorite things.

 

Dana Dowdell  35:30

It's, that's so good. Because I, you know, I, I think there's a lot of people are like, I'm going to start a consulting business. And I think without having a very clear vision of what that looks like, you know, I ran into that, where I had to read a couple books, I think I read like, I have flawless consulting. And I read another one, because I was, I was finding myself in that position where they were tapping into us to just do it. And we had to dial it back to really do the self, the self-efficacy component.

 

Lisa Levy  36:00

Yeah. And so there's a component of consulting, that is very much tied to a set of deliverables, right, tangible outcomes. And that is the part that that consultant will do. The running it, the maintaining it, the keeping it going, is not consulting, that is the responsibility of the clients, they may need external resources to do that work for them in the mindset of staff augmentation, that's a totally different animal. And we get those things blurred so often these days, because that ongoing person playing the role of creates fabulous revenue for a consulting company. But I do not believe that that is what the consulting company is most designed to do. And it's best definition. And I for me, I keep very clear lines of distinction between those things. And the third component that I play with my, my engagements is coaching, which is also something different. And I guess I'll tell the story, I didn't buy into coaching as an executive, corporate business practice, because my first learning about it, right, it was life coaches. And I don't want to demean people who do that elegantly. But I have a hard time with a 24-year-old on Facebook, selling life coaching skills when they haven't had any life experience and experience is important and everything that we do. And so it took me a while to understand what real coaching is. And the aha was, I've been doing that in my consulting practice all along, because I have to build up skills and capabilities in the environment too in the client environment to get them to a point where they can become self-reliant in own whatever it is that we're doing. So I am playing with breaking that out into its own thing. But the key is always their self-reliance. And that's the part that the land and expand consulting model has lost sight of. And then it's about feeding the consultants revenue engine, and I find that abhorrent. And it makes me actually angry.

 

Russ Harlow  38:34

Yeah, I get that. I, I wanted to talk a little bit to about I'm always impressed when somebody has said they've written a book, specifically, specifically, you know, a best seller. And I think, you know, maybe I got a book hit me, I got a lot of things. I got a lot of opinions. People need to hear what I got to say. But I think that's probably a bad reason to write a book. Can you tell me a little bit about, you know, future proofing cubed, and why you wrote it? And well, you know, what the message is?

 

Lisa Levy  39:04

Absolutely. And so, this whole conversation has been about future proofing cubed. And it's been about the adaptive transformation framework, which is our method, our framework, how we do things, it's the alignment of project management, Process Management, internal controls, organizational change, all of those big best practices that I talked about the large corporation is using. future proofing cubed is using all of those in the smaller business space, taking what works, putting those skills and capabilities in the hands of every individual in the company. And it was designed to just let people have that aha moment of it's not actually difficult to tune a business. It requires some choices and it requires the commitment and the on purpose. Use of Time to get things working the way that they're supposed to. But if we have all of these things running that continuous improvement engine that we were talking about the innovation and the ideas, so that you can continue to grow, all of this is how you future proof your business. Right? The book actually released in May of 2020. And it was hugely impactful at that moment in time, because right people were at home, and they were reading, which was awesome. And I could never have planned that if you know, if I had, you know, tried. But it gave everybody this point of, I can make an in, I can make an influence change in my business. I wrote the book for that market, where we had 10s of millions of dollars in revenue, because I thought those were my ideal clients. Again, I mentioned that the solopreneurs. And startup, individuals who read the book had the greatest kind of reaction to it, because they can take those pieces and start right at truly the very beginning. Whereas I thought that it was sort of a middle midpoint step to ensure growth over time was effective. And so for me, I learned that all of this applies even to a solopreneur. Which I guess, kind of as somebody who tap dances on being a solopreneur, I should have understood that because I do it in my own business every day.

 

Russ Harlow  41:25

Yeah, and there's a lot of there's a lot of small businesses that are really small, including solopreneurs. So that's a, that's good advice. I love it. We're gonna go through some questions we call lightning round that we'd like to ask all our guests start off with, is there one thing that you wish you had known before starting a business?

 

Lisa Levy  41:44

It's really hard work. Yeah, it's really hard work.

 

Dana Dowdell  41:53

What about your favorite way to market your business?

 

Lisa Levy  41:57

Referrals? I People say more, there's nothing I can do that has the power of the impact of a client or a former customer saying something?

 

Russ Harlow  42:11

Yep, that's a good one. Because you're kind of given a boy, you've looked at that reputation with every one of those. And that's great. Is there one business platform that has changed your life?

 

Lisa Levy  42:27

LinkedIn definitely changed my life. And I was an early adopter into that platform. And just really, I still don't know that I'm leveraging it to its fullest value to me.

 

Dana Dowdell  42:41

What about? I'm very curious for answered this, because we've gotten some fun ones. When did you feel like you had made it? As a business owner?

 

Lisa Levy  42:50

I'll let you know when I know.

 

Dana Dowdell  42:53

We get that a lot.

 

Russ Harlow  42:56

Yeah, that's a good one. And is there one business book that's had a big impact on you and your business, and you like a favorite one.

 

Lisa Levy  43:08

So we talked about the road less stupid, which is hugely impactful, because it is somewhat tongue in cheek. And so I definitely think everybody should read that. But I think that foundationally it all starts with communication and Crucial Conversations has been out there since the for 20 years, probably at this point in time. But I think every entrepreneur needs to understand how to foster Crucial Conversations.

 

Russ Harlow  43:36

Awesome. Well, I want to thank you for being here. You've been this has been a quick, quick, fast time and it's just flown by so much more that we can dive into where if people want to know more and learn more, where can they connect with you?

 

Lisa Levy  43:51

The easiest fastest way to find me is Lisa l levy LTE vy.com.

 

Russ Harlow  44:00

That is easy. And I see where the elk cube came from now. I'm smart. And our listeners are smarter. They've been here listening to this conversation. Thank you so much for being here. Spend some time with us and sharing your expertise with us and our listeners. Thank our listeners for being here reaching the end. And now I want to thank you. You can thank us for having guests like Lisa by liking and sharing, subscribing, doing all the things you can find us on it's just business podcast on all the places leave us a great review. Leave us some constructive criticism. That's okay. Even though it gives Dana Odda because it's just purse. It's not personal. It's just business.