Defender’s Dave Lindsey on Creating Transformational Growth

Here We Grow

Episode 13

Episode Description

What does it take to drive remarkable business growth while building a mission-driven company culture?

In this episode of Here We Grow, host Marcia Barnes speaks with Dave Lindsey about the transformative journey of his business, Defenders, and the strategies that led to its unprecedented success. To transform your business, great leaders help people grow. Dave delves into the power of outsourcing non-core competencies, the pivotal transition from an hourly rate to performance-based compensation, and the importance of removing operational bottlenecks. He shares how these strategic decisions not only optimized his company’s marketing and sales teams but also fostered a resilient and collaborative work environment.

Tune in for a candid conversation as Marcia and Dave provide valuable lessons on leadership, innovation, and fostering a thriving organizational culture and how all three can lead to transformative growth.

To learn more about the podcast and Marcia Barnes’ book Here We Grow: The Marketing Formula to 10x Your Business and Transform Your Future, visit https://mathbeforemarketing.com/podcast/.

Full Transcript

Dave Lindsey:

Your job as the entrepreneur, and that might be as the lead entrepreneur but any role you play in an entrepreneurial business, is not to know the answer. It’s to find who knows.

Marcia Barnes:

That’s right.

Dave Lindsey:

My old boss used to tell me, “Find who knows who knows.” So we’re not going to learn how to build statistical models, but we have to find the person who can.

Marcia Barnes:

Right.

Working with Dave was as transformational for me and my business as it was for his. He was strong in finance and process, whereas I was strong in leadership and developing people. We were both committed to learning and growing our skills. He dreamed of the big dreams and I got things done. These different perspectives allowed us to learn from each other.

After doing some analysis, Dave approached me with a proposal to change how he paid for my company’s services. He suggested that instead of paying per hour for making appointments, he would pay per appointment set, which would actually increase the amount of money he was paying for my marketing services. Having a client suggest that they pay you more for your services may seem unlikely or an unwise business practice, but Dave thought that changing our payment model would also enable us to think in different ways which would benefit both of our businesses.

On my end, it would drive thought leadership and provide incentive to innovate ways for setting more appointments. At the time, I thought I was already providing as many high-quality leads as I could. I started thinking differently with this new variable pay model. The goal posts were being changed, so our approach would also have to change to keep as much money coming in as possible.

Being on a variable pay model worked for Dave’s visionary way of thinking about the financial model to drive growth, even though he was paying more for marketing than he was before. When you pay an hourly rate for marketing, you are not guaranteed that the money you’re spending is resulting in the maximum number of quality sales appointments. A marketer may talk to 15 prospects in an hour, but set only one or two appointments. Your cost for getting those appointments is the hourly rate divided by the number of actual meetings scheduled. The fewer appointments set, the more expensive your marketing spend. If you’re only paying when an appointment is set, your marketing costs are directly linked to a sales call that has a high likelihood of converting into revenue.

With this approach, you maximize the channel and can close sales more efficiently.

Speaker 1:

What does it take to achieve transformational growth? What if the answer is a simple change in mindset or an innovative new idea?

In this engaging episode of Here We Grow, host Marcia Barnes sits down with her longtime friend and business partner, Dave Lindsey, the Founder of DEFENDERS. Together, they discuss how a simple shift in thinking, from paying by the hour to paying by the lead, led to significant growth, as well as how Dave’s innovative approach to performance-based compensation empowered his team and unlocked exponential business growth.

Marcia Barnes:

Well, hello, everyone. Today we’re visiting with my dear friend Dave Lindsey, the founder of DEFENDERS, an iconic Indianapolis company.

Welcome, Dave, to the Here We Grow podcast.

Dave Lindsey:

Thank you so much for having me, Marcia. It’s a joy to be with you.

Marcia Barnes:

It is. You know, I was thinking earlier, 25 years, is that right? You started the business in…

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, it was ’98 actually. So what’s that, 26?

Marcia Barnes:

26, and the end of ’99 is when I met you.

Dave Lindsey:

Yes, 25 years. What is that, the golden anniversary coming up?

Marcia Barnes:

That’s right. Technically, I probably look younger today than I did then because-

Dave Lindsey:

You look great, awesome, and I will say you look better than when I found you.

Marcia Barnes:

Remember that gray hair? Yeah.

Dave Lindsey:

You had gray hairs and overalls on when I met you, so you’ve come a long way too. We both have.

Marcia Barnes:

Not the overalls, but you did talk me out of the gray hair on a flight back from the direct marketing meeting in New Orleans, I remember, on the plane.

Dave Lindsey:

I remember that. You got your first manicure-pedicure together.

Marcia Barnes:

Yes, we did. We did. And then that’s what business is about, ladies and gentlemen.

Dave Lindsey:

Yes. That’s it, that’s a wrap.

Marcia Barnes:

That’s a wrap. We’re done with this one.

Dave Lindsey:

Get a manicure-pedicure and you’re fine.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah, lots and lots of memories. Really a great journey together. Just wonderful, wonderful business that you created with lots of lasting impact across our city and our country and the world.

Dave Lindsey:

Thank you. That we created. You beat the drum and we danced and it was so fun together.

Marcia Barnes:

It was, yeah.

Dave Lindsey:

I miss those days.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah, it was indeed. And I was thinking through, there’s probably 100 topics we could talk to our audience about today that would help them in growing and scaling their business and creating abundance, and the thing that I observe in the marketplace is it seems to always come back to Jim Collins’s flywheel effect in the book Good to Great.

You know, Dave, you were such a model for lifelong learning, and one of the things that you put in place on the management team early on was before every annual strategic planning session, you would get a book that you felt like would be good for us to read and we would discuss that through that session for a few days. And in 2004, I believe the year it came out or shortly after that, you brought Jim Collins’s work in and we went through that book.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, I remember that.

Marcia Barnes:

And I remember reading that chapter three and thinking, “This is DEFENDERS,” you know?

Dave Lindsey:

Mm-hmm.

Marcia Barnes:

It really jumped out at me. And then a few years later, not a few years later, but a while later, one day, you went to the board in the meeting and the white board and you mapped out a flywheel and defined it as, “This is what our business is. It is a flywheel.”

Dave Lindsey:

Yes.

Marcia Barnes:

And so we’re going to take a look at that model that you drew on the whiteboard that day that we’ve put some artwork into here at Valve+Meter.

Dave Lindsey:

Okay, nice. Yes, that was the first time really for us thinking about our business as this interrelated disciplines and how we all depended on each other and put it in that circular fashion. There it is.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah, a book that you brought in prior to that that was real helpful, Michael Gerber.

Dave Lindsey:

The E-Myth.

Marcia Barnes:

E-Myth, right?

Dave Lindsey:

Yep. Another great one.

Marcia Barnes:

He talks about the systemic processes of a business from department to department, and that really was captured in this flywheel.

Dave Lindsey:

Yes, I agree. Absolutely. And the goal is to get the momentum going around this wheel, right?

Marcia Barnes:

Right.

Dave Lindsey:

And I remember another, we’ll recite a lot of our leaders we’ve learned from, but John Maxwell used to always talk about managers work on problems, leaders work on momentum.

Marcia Barnes:

Oh, good.

Dave Lindsey:

And once you have momentum, a lot of things get easier. Yeah.

Marcia Barnes:

Indeed. The big mo.

Dave Lindsey:

The big mo, right? And you were our momentum, setting the beat, as I said earlier. Yes.

Marcia Barnes:

And as you taught us in this flywheel effect, you said, “Marketing creates the leads that go to the sales team. Sales then closes the deals. They hand that off to operations to install.”

Dave Lindsey:

Yep. To fulfill, for us, it was an installation.

Marcia Barnes:

Create, manufacture, yeah.

Dave Lindsey:

Exactly. To satisfy the customer.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. “And then you get paid and you spin off profit, pay your bills, pay your people, and reinvest in marketing.”

Dave Lindsey:

Exactly.

Marcia Barnes:

And at first, you would say that the more programs that we found that worked at marketing, the faster we could make that flywheel go.

Dave Lindsey:

Exactly. Our goal is to put a dollar into that top marketing, and have more than a dollar, hopefully $1.20, come back around, and then we can reinvest and keep growing.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. When we started working together, you wanted to put a dollar in and get eight back, and that grew your business exponentially from where you were at at that point. Later, you found ways that going a little more aggressive could cause you to be able to compete and push others out of the market, and so we got more aggressive year over year, as we’ll talk about in this flywheel effect today in our examples as well.

Dave Lindsey:

Yep.

Marcia Barnes:

And then you added to that later that all of the flywheel momentum, all of this stored energy that’s going to be released, cannot just come out of the marketing department.

Dave Lindsey:

Oh, absolutely. Well, it was the first time looking at this in a relationship was a different way to see our business. So much we view traditional org charts, which are really siloed, and we see these lines in the org chart and departments, but it doesn’t show any kind of interrelationship. And here, we really see that sales is the customer of marketing, and the better they do in closing the leads, the more marketing can send them more leads. Right?

Marcia Barnes:

Right, right.

Dave Lindsey:

And there might be a program that doesn’t work at a 20% close rate, but if sales can make it a 40% close rate, they unlock a bunch of growth that marketing can send to us. And sales also has to understand then behind them in the wheel is operations, so it’s no use in sending crappy sales that aren’t credit-approved or the customer really doesn’t know what they’re getting because then they’re just clogging up the flywheel below them.

And that whole interrelationship, I think, allowed everybody to see, “Well, if I can do my piece, it’s not just that my department’s doing better, but wow, I’m unlocking growth and opportunity for the people around me on the wheel.”

Marcia Barnes:

Right. The first time I saw you, we weren’t calling it a flywheel yet, but the first time I saw a big example of this type of thinking in you, because you were very natural in the way you thought about a business for this model to work well, but when we first met, you were my client and-

Dave Lindsey:

That’s right.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah, I had an agency not unlike Valve+Meter where we helped people get leads for sales teams to be able to grow, and you hired us to set appointments for your sales team. You paid me an hourly rate, which if memory serves me right, it was about $35 an hour.

Dave Lindsey:

Yep, sounds right.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. And after a few months, you observed that we could produce the right amount of leads for the $35, but maybe it stayed about the same, maybe some weeks it was a little lower, maybe you were growing faster or you always had a big appetite for marketing. You always would say, “Marcia, I have an unlimited appetite for marketing that works. If we can hit the right return, I’m going to buy all of that that I can.”

Dave Lindsey:

Yes, and that’s really important because as we talked about, if you can put a dollar into marketing and have more than a dollar come back out as you spin around the wheel, then why wouldn’t you just keep spinning it? Whereas a lot of companies, back to that siloed way we see our business, so many people, they just talk to they have a marketing budget. The budget’s this much, has been approved for this year, this quarter, and they just spend it and there’s not that interrelationship of understanding that if marketing can create more leads at $35 in those days, then we’ll staff up sales to take as many as we can.

And that allowed us to… I mean, we know all of our marketing vendors loved us because we would come meet with them and not say what our budget was. We said, “This was the acquisition cost. If you can help us acquire a customer at this amount, we’ll take as many as they did.” And I think that unlocked a lot of excitement and creativity from our direct mail vendors to you early on, way early, of saying, “Okay, how…” It put juice into you to say, “Okay, there’s an unlimited budget there. We can grow with this company.”

Marcia Barnes:

Right. You came to me after two or three months of working together and you said… Because the $35, I know it doesn’t sound like a lot, $35 per man-hour that I was billing you, but at the time in 1999 for outsource call center work, that was the rate, it was the standard rate. You came to me and you said, “Listen, I’ve been thinking, and it seems like if I paid you by the lead”-

Dave Lindsey:

Yes, instead of the hour.

Marcia Barnes:

“… instead of the hour, that you would be able to think and your team maybe would think more about how do we get more production faster and create more efficiencies?” Again, the beginning of this flywheel thinking.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, “So maybe with those leads, let’s just say for math, simple math, if we were turning half those leads into sales, instead of paying you $35 an hour, we could pay you $70 per lead.” And then that turned you to say, “Well, if I can be more efficient and create more, then it really…”

And that was something that was throughout the business. We had performance-oriented compensation for our partners and for our team that really augmented this wheel. Some people may be full commission, some people commission plus a bonus, but everybody had… And we’d have a KPI, key process indicators. They have what sales and what these numbers need to be, and there was always incentive that our team, every member of the team from the front line back, was rewarded as we got more efficient spinning that wheel.

Marcia Barnes:

Right.

Now, one thing I didn’t say in your intro, which I really need to emphasize because I want our listeners to really pay attention to what you’re saying, you grew a business from $2 million to over $400 million in the 14 years I was there, but I believe you went up to $800 million, even, at its peak.

Dave Lindsey:

Yep, yep. That sounds right.

Marcia Barnes:

This isn’t, “I had a $2 million business and got it to $5,” right?

Dave Lindsey:

Yes, exponential.

Marcia Barnes:

This is really, really exponential growth. So this is magic that was created here really, and in this call center example with me as your vendor, you had done some little spreadsheet work and you said, “I think you’d make about 10% more if we went down this path.” And I agreed and we went from making $35 an hour to $85 an hour and I thought I was running a good shop. I thought, “I’m working hard, they’re working hard,” and that was true, but now we were working smart because we were thinking about, “Maybe that list could be refined a little bit, and maybe we do this in training, and maybe we do this to retrain.”

Dave Lindsey:

You were so good, Marcia, at meeting with the salespeople right away and understanding those were your customer versus just running a traditional agency that, “Okay, we get paid this many dollars an hour and let’s make sure we’re staffed.” No, it became very performance-based and that was always such a part of our culture. You can’t grow that fast without everybody having a performance. Competitive winners, I think, were some of the terms we used to use of hitting the numbers. That was really in our culture.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. And then a little while after that happened on that bottleneck, you came back and said, “I could pay you more if I paid you by the install,” and so we changed that again. And now what happened was now I’m dependent on my work and the sales team to be able to achieve the right goals, right?

Dave Lindsey:

Yes.

Marcia Barnes:

For both you, my client, and for our company. And one of my team members, not me, but a person on the front line observed, “Marcia, the salespeople are not going to some of these appointments. You need to go talk to Dave about getting that corrected.” And so I did and I was like, well, I had said to Carol, “Why wouldn’t they go? They’re on straight commission. It’s not like they don’t have a big earning opportunity.” She goes, “I don’t know, but they’re not going.”

You said the same thing when I talked with you about it, and when we got under the hood and looked at the data, data can inform what needs to be done in this flywheel, when we looked at the data, what we found was they were missing the later-evening appointments, that five or six o’clock appointment, and then went Saturdays. So if they had their sales, they were like, “I’m good,” right?

So we corrected that process, and hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed through the business as a result. Again, going to work on the bottleneck on that one was the sales team was not meeting their appointments for a while there. Once they were aware, they adjusted, right?

Dave Lindsey:

Yep, adjust either the time of day and just staffing. I think we found if you gave somebody two sales appointments and they closed one or two of them, the third one wasn’t that important to them, and lots of details figuring those things out.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah, yeah. Now, that would be an example of a bottleneck that happens on a vendor relationship. So then when the no-call list came into effect, we had been a customer and vendor for about four years, and then we saw, “We’re not going to be able to call outbound forever. We’re going to need to get the phones to ring in,” right?

Dave Lindsey:

Yes. Really, we reinvented the business three or four times over the life. Before I even met you, it was all door-to-door sales, and then we had the luxury of wow, we met this great partner that created leads so we didn’t have to knock on all these doors, and we thought we had it made. And then the no-call list, which a lot of people don’t even know about today, but used to be we didn’t have so many cell phones and people sat down for dinner and they got phone calls from six to nine asking them if they needed something for their home. But when that hit, that was for many, and many of our competitors in the industry, it was a death sentence.

And another mantra at DEFENDERS was, “Businesses don’t grow. People do.” And I applaud you, Marcia, because when that hit, immediately you and then I joined you, we went to that Direct Marketing 101 by the Direct Marketing Association and went to work on ourselves. What do we need to learn?

Marcia Barnes:

We did, yeah, because we didn’t know anything about-

Dave Lindsey:

We knew nothing about-

Marcia Barnes:

I knew call center works well.

Dave Lindsey:

Exactly, how to do creative, how to do an offer, should you do a postcard or a letter? This is pre-internet pretty much still, but we knew nothing about direct mail, and we went to work on ourselves. We met some really smart people at that first conference.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah, we did.

Dave Lindsey:

And I think we hired one of them to help us build a statistical model to start looking at our customers, George and-

Marcia Barnes:

David Shepard.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, David Shepard. That’s right.

Marcia Barnes:

You know, I was just talking about this situation with Mike Lance a few days ago about how we get concerned about are we smart enough to get things done, you know?

Dave Lindsey:

Yes.

Marcia Barnes:

And you and I go to this, it was a session on direct mail modeling with David Shepard & Associates, and these are brilliant PhD analysts at the time, and they’re doing a workshop on how to build direct mail models. And I’m sitting next to you and everything’s going over my head so far. I’m thinking, “Oh my God, he’s going to find out that I’m dumb.” And I’m sitting here the whole time, like pretend taking notes.

We get to the break and you go, “So what do you think?” And I go, “Oh, it sounds really good. It sounds smart. It seems like he really knows his stuff.” And you go, “Yeah.” You said, “Do you understand anything he’s saying?” I go, “No.” And Dave says, “I don’t either.”

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah. You know what? This is a really important point. It’s funny.

Marcia Barnes:

It really is, yeah.

Dave Lindsey:

I was just talking to a couple entrepreneurs in the last week. It’s very timely. Your job as the entrepreneur, and that might be as the lead entrepreneur, but any role you play in an entrepreneurial business, is not to know the answer, it’s to find who knows.

Marcia Barnes:

That’s right.

Dave Lindsey:

My old boss used to tell me, “Find who knows who knows.” So we’re not going to learn how to build statistical models, but we have to find the person who can.

And just the other day, I have a person working on the collections in his business, and it’s like he’s started out getting in the software, and you do have to get a little hands-on, but don’t waste your time doing that without somebody who knows what they’re doing. And he went on and found a consultant in his industry that’s good at collecting the AR which they use. They have insurance claims and somebody who’s good, but he found the expert, and that’s all… Honestly, I get a lot of credit as an entrepreneur, and we both do, and you’re talking about what we did is we just went out and it was relationships.

Marcia Barnes:

It was.

Dave Lindsey:

And jumped in the river.

Marcia Barnes:

Win-win.

Dave Lindsey:

We jumped in the river of direct marketing that day. And we met a PhD and said, “Can you build models for us?”

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah, we outsourced it.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, exactly. So this concept of finding who knows, and then you think you found the person, and then testing. We were really good at taking that learning and not just shifting the whole business wholesale over, but of doing testing it and doing A/B tests. We find two PhDs and have them both build a model and test them against each other.

Marcia Barnes:

We actually had that. We had a model we’d been using that was kind of starting to not get as good of results, and then we rebuilt with this new resource we found. But one of the things I see with business people a lot these days, and there is a trend to do this, to outsource the things that are not your core competency, and you were way ahead of your time on understanding the importance of that.

But here at Valve+Meter, I use a fractional CFO, Mitch Katz. He’s a brilliant, brilliant CFO. I would never be able to afford him as a standalone employee, but for a small business, he’s absolutely a godsend. In my glance at ML Talent Strategies, I mean, I know how to build culture and engage people and hire, but to get it all together into the most efficient outcome, Mike’s the expert. And that, I think feeling like you have to have all of it in-house, that ship has sailed.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, I think it really has, and especially with remote work now too because you have experts that you can engage the best person in the country, and we’re used to Zoom calls and those sorts of things. So there’s quite a bit of infrastructure to get that best person instead of just thinking you have to have them sitting in your office every day.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. So that no-call list comes in. We know we need to make the phones ring in. On the same day, I said to your VP of Sales Marty Burling, I said… You had hired several people to head up marketing and they had not worked out. Again, coming from outside different types of applications, trying to understand your business and get it, was a miss. And I told the VP of sales one day, I go, “Man, I think I could figure this marketing thing out faster than where we’re getting with hiring these outside people.” This is when we’re still two separate businesses. And Marty said, “Oh, there’s no way Dave’s ever going to let you do that.” And I go, “I don’t know. I’m just saying I think I could figure it out.”

And the very next day, I was in your office and you asked to speak with me and you said, “I’ve been thinking that you could figure this out faster than…” And it wasn’t me figuring it out. It was you have a really brilliant financial mind around building your financial model for what to spend on marketing, and I knew how to take that and create the relationships and drive it forward. You know?

Dave Lindsey:

Yes.

Marcia Barnes:

So really, together, I don’t know that that would’ve been able to be done without that.

Dave Lindsey:

No, no. You’re right. It was businesses don’t grow, people do. You grew personally and you grew from being an outsourced partner to the CMO of the company, ultimately the CEO of the company over the years, but that was all your personal growth was reflected in the growth of our business. It all starts, all meaningful change starts on the inside, works its way out, and it starts inside each employee, that works its way out into the team, and then out into the company, and yeah.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. Well, you know know Kouzes and Posner say in their model of leadership, “The most important thing is to model the way.” I did not see a world, even after knowing you for a short time, where you could be relevant inside your business at DEFENDERS without being someone who did what you do, which was always learning.

Dave Lindsey:

That was our culture. That is, I’ll say it again, businesses don’t grow, people do. And the way we learned that, how did I, people ask me where I came up with that sentence, and it was really by looking at what was working. That’s a strategic mindset about investing in our employees. And I noticed… I always say all good strategy inside of business starts with a lot of times we look out, what could we do, what could we be. Good strategy, I always like to say, is, “First, know thyself.”

And I looked around our business in those early days and I said, “What departments are growing? Well, this area is growing because Marcia, she went to these classes, she’s brought it back to the business. She’s read good books, she’s reading books” that we just talked about, Good to Great, what we used to read as our management team, but I identified and saw that the more people grew personally, the more our business was growing, and we just kept stepping on that gas over and over for 20 years.

Marcia Barnes:

Oh, yeah. It was a winner every time.

So we put these two businesses together, I start doing the inbound marketing, and back then, you had never really done an acquisition and I had never sold a business. So it was kind of like, “Okay, on Monday, show up here and start working,” right? I mean, we just didn’t know what we didn’t know, right?

Dave Lindsey:

All we knew is you always were so good at, again, seeing sales operations, as your customers, as this partner of ours, that it was very natural for you to come inside and a lot of that was your doing.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. The only thing I was concerned about when we did that was I have believed that I’m not a good employee for a long time. And you asked me, because we had several conversations that I wasn’t always as willing to come inside your business, and you asked me what was the barrier, and I said, “I’m not sure I’m a good employee,” and that’s true, but you let me be an entrepreneur inside your business. And I really think that’s empowering for businesses if they could do that more, that think-like-an-owner piece.

Dave Lindsey:

Yes. That’s what we went back to of you jumped in and you found great people. You didn’t have to know all the answers, but you did bring that mindset of, “I’m going to find the people who know,” and thank you for that.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah, sure. That was a joy. I asked you in that first day or two, you and I were sitting down, you said, “Okay, we currently, we put $1 into marketing, we get $8 back.” That’s what your outbound call center results were. “So on inbound marketing, we’re going to run tests, and if we can put $1 in and get $8 back, we’re going to buy all of that we can find,” and you’re mapping out this financial vision that you have for how this business is going to scale.

And I said, “Man, great. That’s great. I have an unlimited budget for marketing that works. What’s your current return on marketing spend?” And this is the only time I ever heard you say this about a number, “I don’t know. I’m going to have to check and get back with you.” You always knew your numbers real well, but you’d had some different people in there helping with marketing, and back then, all marketing was pretty much a long-term agreement. You would need to sign an agreement for 18 months or a year or two years to be able to buy advertising.

And when you came back, it was 10 cents. You were putting $1 in and getting 10 cents back on these little tests that were being done.

Dave Lindsey:

Some of these little tests? Okay.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. And I’m like, “Okay, that’s a target-rich environment.” So I went to work on it. It took about six months to get it to break even. It took about another six months for you to realize you didn’t have to be mad as long as we were above break-even, but it was 18 months before we hit the right return on marketing spend.

Now, I share this story because I think it’s important. We never did hit 8:1, but what happened in that 18 months is you went to the sales team and you said, “We need the close rate to go up so that we can afford a little more marketing to be able to grow the business.” And you got the close rate up, you got the revenue per deal up. Then you went to the ops team and said, “I need you guys to look around the home, make sure people are well protected and that you’re doing upsells where needed.” And so the tech started upselling. They started installing at a higher rate. You went-

Dave Lindsey:

Yep. We made that a richer deal that put more money into the pie.

Marcia Barnes:

Yep, yep. You went to your security vendor and talked them down $25 per kit for the equipment we were installing, and you went to our revenue source and talked them into $50 more pay. And when you added all that together, a 6:1 would work, and that’s the number we hit.

And that, I just thought, was a brilliant early example of this flywheel effect. You didn’t wait, you didn’t insist on, “Marcia’s got to hit the 8:1, then we’re going to win.” You’re looking at, “What do I need to help Marcia do to get a number that will win for us?”

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, and that’s what was fun with our management team is we had a very healthy management team, I think, and it’s again, back instead of everybody sitting in a meeting thinking, “This is my department, this is my department,” we all understood, “This is our wheel and we want to spin it,” and lots of ideas exchanged and passed back and forth. There could be something you’re doing in marketing that can lead to an install happening faster. What neighborhoods are you targeting? What language are we using on the phone?

And so yeah, that understanding that we were all giving ideas to each department that let us serve our customers better around the wheel.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. Then I think the other type of bottleneck I’d point out, let’s take a look at scaling. So we opened three, four, five offices. Let’s show the bottleneck version of the flywheel, John. There we go.

So this is what I think happens in a lot of businesses is somewhere in the mix, maybe marketing’s not developed as much as the other departments is what this example is showing, but let’s say sales has some deficiencies and close rates not getting there. That triangle would shift to be between marketing ops and finance. I’ve had some businesses tell me, “We don’t even have a triangle. We have a straight line,” but something’s in the middle of that flywheel that’s slowing it down.

The triangle actually takes the same amount of energy each time you try to rotate that, if you’re trying to move a triangle thing across the room.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, that’s a lot of work to roll the triangle.

Marcia Barnes:

But in a flywheel, every time you circle the wheel, it releases a little bit of energy and it takes less.

Dave Lindsey:

Momentum.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah, that momentum again. So here we hit, we start to see the marketing working, it’s hitting the right return on marketing spend, and we’ve got eight locations, I think, around the Midwest, and we’ve got a return on marketing spend that’s working and we can buy that marketing across the country. So now the bottleneck is locations that we can be in, right?

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, geography. Sure.

Marcia Barnes:

The other thing that was in that is because our marketing was working, we could also make it work even better if we could buy a national footprint.

Dave Lindsey:

Yep, that gave us buying power to really reduce our marketing costs and print more.

Marcia Barnes:

So while you knew you wanted to have, you called it the manifest destiny, doing coast to coast, right? There was a time when we didn’t have that. And so what you did, Dave, which was brilliant, you had an idea that you could build an install network through your relationships around the country so that we could buy nationally and get the favorable rate-

Dave Lindsey:

And then sell the leads. So yeah, sell the leads to other partners until we got to that geography. So it allowed us to unlock the marketing and then backfill it with infrastructure, yeah.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. And then as you grew out around the country, then that partnership program morphed into partners who would send us leads and have us install them, right?

Dave Lindsey:

Yep.

Marcia Barnes:

Which was a big revenue-driver for the company as well.

So I think this bottleneck thinking is very unique to the flywheel. So Collins says, “You get to great by consistent results and continuous improvement,” but you added this, “Remove the bottleneck, keep removing the bottleneck that forms in the flywheel.” How did you get there to understand that bottleneck?

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, there’s another great book, The Goal by Goldratt. It came out right around the time we started DEFENDERS, and it talked about in factories, every person is a little factory, every business, this wheel is a factory in itself, and what you want to do is not have too much WIP in a factory, work in process, but you want to have a lean factory that’s flowing smoothly around this wheel.

And you know what? One thing I always tell CEOs, a thought that comes to mind from that book, is spend the time in your business where the bottleneck is. A lot of times, we feel, as CEOs or senior leaders, that we have to meet equally with every department. But I used to tell our management team, “You know, if the bottleneck’s in marketing, I’m going to be at your marketing meetings and I’m going to be maybe having daily huddles with you about that until that bottleneck’s relieved, and then you might not see me for a while because maybe the bottleneck’s moved on to sales.”

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah, I would have to tell my peers, “It is not a compliment to say, ‘Dave spends a lot of time with you because he likes you.'” No, he spends time with me when I’m the bottleneck, right? Yeah.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, yeah. And it can be authoritarian, “I’m spending time with you,” but also it’s in a support mode. I mean, who needs your help? If everything’s great in marketing and sales, but the installations aren’t getting in, that installation manager needs the CEO and the resources. In the center of this wheel, we sometimes talk about there’s legal, IT, that’s a big one, all the support functions.

Marcia Barnes:

Right, HR.

Dave Lindsey:

And sometimes those support functions, HR, they go to where the squeaky wheel is, whoever’s the last person to walk into their office and ask for something, instead of consciously having the management team identify, “No, the bottleneck right now is,” I’ll make this up but, “in operations,” then the operations teams’ request in IT need to be rising to the top, HR staffing, that needs to be where the whole company needs to realize we’re attacking that spot.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. You know, you started in your early in manufacturing, right?

Dave Lindsey:

Mm-hmm.

Marcia Barnes:

There’s a very tender story about your first management position.

Dave Lindsey:

Yes.

Marcia Barnes:

And this topic of time management, priority management, bottlenecks, and your dad.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, yes. So I had, like all of us, as a bag boy, I worked at McDonald’s as a cook, and we start out in frontline positions when we’re young in the work world, and if you work at McDonald’s, you have to make 16 hamburgers. When you make your 16 hamburgers, you’re done. But when you become a manager, which was my first job out of college, and first time I was a manager at Ingersoll Rand here in town, you start to be responsible for multiple people, maybe multiple processes, products, and you get this exponential list of things to do.

And as I started out as a manager, I’m going to every meeting, writing down all the things we need to do, I need to get done, and I’m working 14-hour days, but this page is just getting longer and longer. I remember calling my dad saying, “Dad, I don’t know if I’m cut out to be a manager. I got this list of things. I just can’t get it all done.” And he said these special words to me. He said, “David, they don’t pay you to get it all done. They pay you to get the most important thing done.”

And that really relieved, instead of seeing that I have this… We all have lists to do. If you’re a manager with any type of responsibilities, you know you have a list of stuff. Well, guess what? It will never all get done. Know that. And that actually is freeing. But your job is to now take that list and prioritize it.

And it’s simple. Mark everything A, B and C. Maybe A, I want to get done this week, B, I want to get done this month, C, I want to get done someday. But if you keep making your list A, Bs and Cs, and then what happens is your list ends up becoming all A’s. And then you got to go, “Okay, what are my A1s, A2s?” But forcing this prioritization, and what are we prioritizing by? The bottleneck thinking that we just talked about.

And what’s really funny then is you start to get some of those As done, magically, some of the Bs and Cs on your list become almost irrelevant. So that’s really important for young leaders to realize. You’ll never get it all done, but we really need you to get the most important things done.

And to that end, another thing we joke about, another moment we had together where I thought I was going to teach a time management course or a module to some of our leaders, and you’re like, “Dave, time management’s not your forte.” And I agree with you. Starting meetings on time, ending, was not always my… I was not very good at that.

Marcia Barnes:

Your giftedness, yeah.

Dave Lindsey:

I don’t have many gifts there. But what I was good about was this priority.

Marcia Barnes:

Yes, absolutely.

Dave Lindsey:

So priority management’s very different than time management. Time management’s your calendar. “Okay, I have to be somewhere at 2:00, and I have to leave at 3:00,” and it’s calendaring. But priority management is separate from my calendar, “What really needs to get done today in my job? What really needs to get done this week in my job?”

And I think I’m good at that, and that was one of my gifts, but when you start to get into priority management, sometimes then maybe a meeting that’s only, I’m thinking going… The bottleneck, let’s say, is in marketing. I’m going to a marketing meeting. It’s only on a calendar for an hour. It might turn into a two-hour meeting. It might turn into me spending half the day there and canceling some other meetings because I’ve got to… That’s the most important thing to do.

So it’s not spreading myself equally. It’s attacking and giving my full priority of my time, talents to where it needs it, and we were really good at that at DEFENDERS. Yeah.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. You did multiply that throughout the business very effectively. I remember the CFO Bart Shroyer telling me one day he had been out playing golf with you and the other folks on the leadership team. And I always hated this question that you ask, but you had said, “Hey,” to my peers, “how’s Marcia doing?”

And the way Bart related this story is very cute because I could just hear it happening. He goes, “Somebody said you’re not really quick to reply to emails. You don’t always answer your phone. You would lose attention to details.” And you kind of just took it all in according to Bart and said, “That’s true. She doesn’t reply to emails a lot of times in a time-effective way, and she’ll drop some details and not return a phone call, but I’ll tell you something, Marcia does better than anybody else. She knows what the most important thing is and she gets that done.”

Dave Lindsey:

Yes, absolutely. You were outstanding at that and the growth of our business shows and that-

Marcia Barnes:

But you valued that.

Dave Lindsey:

Absolutely I valued that.

Marcia Barnes:

And I think a lot of CEOs don’t value that, and it’s how you get things done in business.

Dave Lindsey:

If you don’t value priorities, you’re going to have a wandering company. And you know, a lot of people when I talk about this, they’ll say, “Well, how do I know what’s most important in my job?”

The simplest way, because again, we all have this long list of 40 things to do that we’re looking at that’s overwhelming, go into the office of your boss and say, “Can I have a 10-minute meeting with you? I got all these things to do. I want to do a good job. Can you help me? Tell me which five are the most important. I’m going to put an A next to them and let’s get agreement that these other 10 at the bottom of the list aren’t going to get done right now.”

But you can manage up with this thinking too. It’s not just down because… And a great team member goes to their boss or go to a meeting and say it, maybe the marketing department needs to huddle up and go, “We got a lot of projects going on here, but what are the three that have to be really wrapped up this week?” And that is going to be where the bottleneck thinking. “Well, what one’s holding back our growth?”

So let’s not just go to work every day trying to weed through a list. Let’s work smart and prioritize it.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah, it’s really a brilliant approach. You talk about the habitual addiction to calendars being something that works in opposition of this.=

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, it is. Especially you can get into a rhythm and we have meetings… And the thing is, putting full resources, we might have a meeting, a meeting that happens every week. It’s got six people in it. Do all six of those people absolutely have to be in there? Of course we don’t want irresponsible people who’d normally be out on the golf course or goofing off, but if we have a priority that’s more important… We were routine, at DEFENDERS, known for one-hour meetings turning into four-hour meetings, but we all were locked in there.

And how many times did you get into a meeting, and 45 minutes into it, it’s really starting to hit its stride and creative ideas are coming out and people are really understanding the problem and into it? We’re like, “Oh, it’s 1:45, let’s wrap the meeting up. We’ve got to be out of here in 15 minutes,” instead of going, “You know what? At least for a couple people in this meeting, they don’t need to go to the next appointment. We need to stay here. We need to take all this momentum we have in the moment and knock this bottleneck out.”

Marcia Barnes:

RJ, my son, for those who are listening, and he and Dave are real good friends, and he made the observation a couple days ago with me that we were so effective in our meeting structure as a leadership team, he didn’t observe us coming out and disagreeing with one another. Once we agreed on a path forward, we went out and executed and we didn’t belly-ache about it or politic around it, you know?

Dave Lindsey:

Mm-hmm.

Marcia Barnes:

And I would agree with that, that you ran a really, really tight ship that way. You had no patience for politics. You cured me of a bad habit early on. I would have a habit of coming to you and saying something negative about a team member, not having had that conversation with them yet and doing it behind their back. And about the third time you heard me do that, you said, “Hold on a minute,” and you brought the other person in there and you said, “Marcia says that you blah, blah, blah, blah.” And just did it right there. And man, you didn’t get that from me anymore. You know?

Dave Lindsey:

Good. That’s biblical, right?

Marcia Barnes:

Right.

Dave Lindsey:

If we have a problem with our brother or sister, the process begins by going to that person and that works in life. I talk to my kids about that with friends and it holds true in business.

So you start to add all these up of going straight to the person you’re having a challenge with, account plans that are performance-based so everybody’s focused on the same thing, and then this circular momentum wheel thinking about the business, you put those three together, and that’s a powerful combination.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. And I would take it one step further because it’s not about… I don’t mean to make it sound like we always liked each other and everything was happy-go-lucky and puppies and dandelions and all because sometimes we didn’t like each other. It’s just a natural part of relationships. But what we did have was we had clear values. Our values, the reasons we knew we were there, were so clearly defined and called to that you could get through any kind of ripple in relationship.

Dave Lindsey:

Well, you know, it’s what we did then, we’re still doing today.

Marcia Barnes:

It’s the why.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah. We were building and developing leaders. That’s why we exist. Discipleship, we’re spiritual people. That’s another word that’s used. But we always saw this business, “Businesses don’t grow, people do.” We were trying to grow people. And that’s what gives us jazz today, and you’re doing it here at Valve+Meter. Mike’s doing it with his business and with TrueYou.

And people ask me what am I doing these days, and I’m doing a lot of mentoring of CEOs, and the numbers and the results come out, but the heart that goes into it has always been, for us, about building and developing leaders. And that’s joy.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. And so the things, the projects, the constraints, the things that don’t go right, can sit in back of a cause, the why behind what we’ve been creating and doing. Yeah.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah. You know, anytime two people are trying to get along, there’s always going to be challenges because there’s two broken people or two human beings on each end. But if we have a higher cost, sometimes we’ll draw it as a triangle, instead of just a straight line of two people trying to get along, if there’s something above it, and I always… Gronkowski and Brady back in the Super Bowl days, they may have had issue with things in the locker room, this or that, but instead of just trying to work it out by themselves, they reminded themselves of the Super Bowl. That was the goal.

When we have this higher goal, and our higher goal was always about building and developing leaders and we had a lot of other things we wanted to do as a business, but having those higher purposes, that’s become more popular, but we were really cutting-edge in that 20-something years ago. We used to talk about more than just profit and paychecks, but really the purpose of our business, and yeah.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. And then a lot of times, there were tough decisions that had to be made, and I never heard you leave the meeting after a discussion about maybe we need to let somebody go or cut a line of business or stop working with a vendor or switch vendors, those types of things, that you didn’t ask the question, “What does this do for our people?” That you didn’t pause to consider the impact.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, thank you for that. One thing I remember that we shared, we had one crazy year where the economy went crazy and we had troubles with our partner ADT, and we were having a crappy year and missing our numbers. And we always did one of the things, we always had an annual conference where we really grew our people, and it wasn’t just technical skills, but it was about being better parents, better friends, better financial stewards. And we were like, “Are we going to have this conference this year?” And there was a lot of thought, especially from our finance guys, of, “This would be an easy way to save some money for the year.”

And in that management meeting, we’re like, “No, this is the most important year to have this conference because this is the way we get out of this is growing our people.” And we put our money where our mouth was then and numerous times that the method to get out of our challenges was to grow through them and that meant growing our people.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. The priority-

Dave Lindsey:

So often, I’m sorry to cut you off-

Marcia Barnes:

No, please, yeah.

Dave Lindsey:

But so often, that’s the first thing cut.

Marcia Barnes:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Dave Lindsey:

And you think, “Oh, these training programs, we can have them when we’re hitting budget, but we can’t.” But when you’re not hitting budget, that’s the most important time.

Marcia Barnes:

Right, exactly. Same thing with marketing. Things are bad, let’s cut back on marketing, cut back on people. Those are the last two things you want to do.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, yeah.

Marcia Barnes:

Yeah. So in this priority management realm, we had a way that we worked with those priorities around what you called actions in progress, AIPs. And if you’re an EOS company running today, there’s several thousand of those around the country, they call it Rocks, but it’s the plan that you have to accomplish an objective, to make a change, to get an outcome that’s different from where you’re at today.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, and AIP came from the term WIP in manufacturing. I was alluding to this earlier, but a factory is inefficient if they have lots of work in process, so like half-done. If you’re trying to make a car and you got a lot of bumpers, a lot of tires, a lot of windshields, but you don’t have a finished car, you can’t sell it yet. And the same thing with us. If we have a lot of projects going on, a lot of different marketing programs, let’s say, but none of them are released and working, then we can’t monetize it. So we have to be careful limiting the number of AIPs we have.

And we used to be pretty ruthless about you can’t have more than two or three, that you can have two, and you might start a third as one’s wrapping up, and those are the strategic projects you were working on. And everybody in the business, I think we had them written on our door, we’d post on our door sheets of paper so we knew what everybody’s AIPs were.

The prioritization of those AIPs, we’d have a quarterly meeting and we’d all come together and we’d all agree where this bottleneck is and, okay, say it’s in operations. Well, what AIPs in your department are going to most help relieve that bottleneck for this quarter? We put a rally cry out. So everybody in the business, that’s from Patrick Lencioni, that everybody knows this is what we’re trying to accomplish this quarter and my AIPs support it. And then as a management team, we would take everybody’s AIPs in the business and at least prioritize the top 20.

So IT would… It’s always a scarce resource in every business. Instead of them just doing what’s most technically fun to do or what their vendor’s saying needs to be the next upgrade in the software, no, we are doing what the management team just decided is the priority. And every department’s AIPs became prioritized.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. All the way down to the individual.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, exactly.

Marcia Barnes:

And then we also were good about, as you went through the quarter, the daily huddles by department would focus on how we’re doing on the AIPs that are there to resolve the bottleneck. The scorecards would be shifted and changed to reflect measuring what’s happening inside that bottleneck. There was an orientation of the whole of the business, not just a department going, “We’re the bottleneck,” and by themselves while everybody else is staring at them to get that fixed.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, absolutely.

Marcia Barnes:

It was all in.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah. The bottleneck may have been in operations, but sales might’ve realized, “Well, if we can ask these couple more questions while we’re in with the customer before we hand it off, we can make the installation go smoother.” And it’s amazing how other departments can help the one where the bottleneck is.

Marcia Barnes:

Absolutely. Even to the point of just collaborating together and helping get ideas on how to get things done, I would take the bottleneck and I would, on the weekend typically, just sit down with a cup of coffee, probably catching up on my soap operas, and I’d have a yellow pad and I’d just be sitting there thinking about that bottleneck and just brainstorming all the things that I could change that might impact that bottleneck. And there might be four or five pages, 50, 100, 200 ideas that would come, big and little, you know?

Dave Lindsey:

Sure.

Marcia Barnes:

And not try to vet whether that’s a good idea, not decide as I’m building, just get them all out, right?

Dave Lindsey:

Yes.

Marcia Barnes:

And then I would go through and look at them and say, “Okay, which ones look likely to get the biggest impact?” Then I would actually go run the numbers or the financial outcome of that deal and look at what the costs and risks were for that. And then I’d bring you a list of maybe five to 10 that I had looked at and, “I think these two or three are the ones that we want to go after.”

But then later I added to that, taking that brainstorming activity, I would do mine, but I’d have the other team members do theirs too, and we’d come all together and capture all these on a list to have that same exercise.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, it’s pretty profound when you think that you have this whole management team really focused on this one part of the business, and it might not even be in your department, but of what can I do to help this? And then changing that each quarter. Some quarters, the bottleneck didn’t move and we would agree it’s still the same bottleneck and we’re going to keep attacking it. A lot of times, by the next quarter, it had been released and then we would identify where the next one was.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. Yeah, it really was very, very effective.

You also have pointed out to me over the years that sometimes we tend to, in the flurry of our days, we’ve talked about the habitual addiction to calendar, but there’s also this thing about, “These are the things I like to do or I feel like I have to do or there’s pressure to do them.” Can you speak into that a bit? Especially that person who’s early in their career or maybe think about that first manager’s job that you had, throwing that off, is that entirely around putting these actions into place, or what’s the mindset shift that has to happen?

Dave Lindsey:

Well, it starts at the top. Like we said, we gave a lot of clarity to the team.

Marcia Barnes:

Right, that’s true.

Dave Lindsey:

And that’s really important. But a small thing, I guess, that we used to talk about is even using text and email and those sorts of things, in our business, in DEFENDER, our rules were if you have an email, your phone or your computer can’t flash. We’re not going to be slaves to email.

Marcia Barnes:

I actually had a little bit of PTSD right before you got here today because my computer gave me one of those notifications.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah, no notifications for email. We agreed as a team email is going to be a 24-hour response time, and we wanted everybody to budget two or three times in your day that you’re going to look at email, but you’re not just going to be working on something important and just get an email that distracts you. Text, for us, was I expect the same-day response. I expect probably within a couple hours. And if I need a response right now, I called you. And I still use that today with different folks that I work with and find it to be really efficient.

So I really recommend it to young people. Of course, your job might be to answer emails, so of course you’re going to look at those others, but in general, think about these notifications and those three forms of communication and how you’re using them, and be smart about it.

And the other thing is starting your day with attacking the bottleneck, that first hour of work, those first couple hours when you’re fresh, of that’s when you really should be working on your AIPs because we know we’re going to get distracted. Everybody made two major AIPs, but somebody’s going to come to your department and ask for something, and we’re reasonable within this, but what are you doing with those first two, three golden hours? And that’s your chance to be intentional and really work on the AIPs and not start your day just opening up email and responding to things that are not strategic, they’re not in your priority.

And then as we rise up to through management and the ranks, it’s not just being a politician trying to spread yourself equally to everybody. It is being that bottleneck-reliever and attacking and spending your time where it needs to be.

Marcia Barnes:

Right. You know, I think it boils down to people in leadership are good at spotting problems. Leaders who can solve problems are rare, but it’s just a much smaller group that actually can find a solution.

Dave Lindsey:

It is. And those leaders who solve the problems, as we talked about earlier, usually are good at finding people who can solve them with them and for them.

Marcia Barnes:

There you go.

Dave Lindsey:

It’s not just being a magical leader is you’re just great at solving problems. It’s not like doing a Sudoku puzzle every day. It’s relationships, it’s going to the conferences, being a sponge, asking lots of questions, and having a Rolodex of people that, when the problem comes up, get on the phone, get on your text, and start finding the person who can help solve it with you.

Marcia Barnes:

Well, and you were really good about finding who had had that problem before and knew what to do about fixing it, you know?

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah.

Marcia Barnes:

And you would go after that information, yeah.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah. To me, that’s what an entrepreneur is.

Marcia Barnes:

Right.

Dave Lindsey:

It’s a series of non-stop… Way back when you and I started, I didn’t know anything about setting leads, direct marketing, and I started doing research and someone told me, “Hey, there’s this lady in Sunman, Indiana who’s really good at it.” I’m like, “Okay. I go to go meet with her.”

Marcia Barnes:

Somebody in Texas said that, yeah.

Dave Lindsey:

Yeah. I called to Texas to be referred to you in Sunman, and then look at where that relationship went. But I didn’t have to figure it out, but I needed to find the person who could figure it out with me.

Marcia Barnes:

Right, good. Dave, as we wrap up today, thank you so much for doing this, what is your advice to… And you know, you and I have been out of it a minute. You sold the business in 2019, I think.

Dave Lindsey:

Yes.

Marcia Barnes:

You’ve been doing coaching and other investments since then, but for that person that’s sitting at their desk now, that business owner like you in 1998, who’s going out and knocking on doors and learning to install security systems and working in the business, not on it, where should they start? What’s the top thing they should be thinking about?

Because I work with a lot of people like this who are in that $5 million to $10 million type of stage, and there’s a lot to think about in that space. You know?

Dave Lindsey:

I think it’s thinking systematically, and our four passions at DEFENDERS were one is self-improvement, we’ve talked a lot about that today, of that person should be reading good books, going to conferences, being around smart people. And then as they start to grow their business, to do it systematically. And we use that word. What does that mean? It’s really a lot of checklists. But in the early days, if it was knocking on a door, I didn’t just knock on doors, but I wrote a script. “This is the exact words we’re going to say when you knock on the door,” so then I could hand it to somebody and somebody else could do it. If it was even faxing paperwork over to ADT back in our fax machine days and stuff, it was a checklist on how to do that.

So that person who’s sitting there with a small business that wants to grow it, it’s not just hiring smart people; it’s creating smart systems. We used to say, “Great systems allow ordinary people to do extraordinary things.” And yeah, it’s that type of thinking.

Marcia Barnes:

To the point where you would say all the time, you were a small, small business, when I first met you, you were saying this, “Build the process like we have 100 locations.”

Dave Lindsey:

Yes, yes. Michael Gerber, our friend, used to say, “A big business is just a small business that thought big,” and we can’t start thinking like a big business when we’re a big business. We’ll never become one. A small business that allows themselves to think mom-and-pop ways will stay mom-and-pop ways. And some people want to do that, that’s fine, but if your goal is to be a big business, you want to think big.

And big for me was I did every job at DEFENDER at one time or another from, as I said, faxing paperwork to knocking on doors, even installations. I never installed a security system of the millions we put in, never by myself, but on our very first three or four installations, I went with the best technician and I created a 15-point checklist. I kept asking them, “Okay, what?” And then I created a 15-point checklist that we give to every installer that we hired for the next two years after that and said, “Do it this way.”

So I went to work on the system. Instead of just, “How do we get more installs done? How do we get more of these?” I sat down and went through the guy who did them the fastest, the guy who had the best quality score, and I watched what he did and created a checklist, and you can do that with your salespeople, and then it became managing these systems instead of managing people. The system is the solution. That was one of our other passions, right?

So you’re never going to be able to grow just by hiring these great people. We give ordinary people great systems, and then they do great things.

Marcia Barnes:

That’s fantastic. It’s just great, Dave.

Dave, I’ve learned a lot today, even after working with you all those years, and it’s always good to sit and hear the knowledge drop off of you. I’m sure this is going to make a big impact for a lot of leaders. Thank you so much for coming to do this.

Dave Lindsey:

It’s a pleasure. It’s always good to be with you, and as I said, we both continue on our purpose, building and developing leaders. I’m glad to spend some time, more time doing it with you today.

Marcia Barnes:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

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Defender’s Dave Lindsey on Creating Transformational Growth

Here We Grow

Episode 13

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