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Episode Summary
You’re sitting in a leadership team meeting, everybody is busy, and somebody asks what the strategy is. You get five different answers from five smart people on the same team. That is the gap. Bill Flynn has been through ten startups (five for six on the first six, less rosy on the last four), spent the last decade coaching owners, and wrote Further Faster to name the few things that actually move the needle. I met Bill at the Small Giants Conference and couldn’t wait to get him on. We got into why hiring a star individual without first defining the team’s job is how you build an expensive bench (Belichick doesn’t do that). Why strategy and execution are not two things, they are two halves of the same thing, and most operators are executing on their own version of a strategy that was never written down. Why cash is the only number on your financials that won’t lie to you. And why none of this works without an owner-level goal sitting on top, which is where the Value Growth Plan™ and a real Three-Statement Model earn their keep. Real story from Bill’s LiveVault days where the answer to “why do customers buy?” turned out to be five words, sales never missed again, and Iron Mountain bought them at 10x revenue.
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## Top 10 Takeaways- Hire for the team’s job first, not the individual’s resume. Define what the team does, then find the pieces.
- Performance is a team sport. Define team success before you start filling seats.
- Strategy and execution are not two different things. They are halves of the same thing.
- If your leadership team writes down the strategy in their own words, you’ll get five different answers.
- Strategy is choice. Mostly choosing what not to do.
- Different beats better. Better is a marathon against your competitors that never ends.
- Cash is the only number on your statements that won’t lie to you. Make it your primary growth metric.
- Spend money in front of growth. Build the three-year plan, then pull the financials to fund it.
- Customers don’t buy your product. They hire it to do a job. Find the words they use and sell back.
- Great leaders fire themselves from the day-to-day. Few things matter, but those that do matter tremendously.
Sound Bites
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat.” (@TBD) — Bill Flynn
“When it comes to strategy, different and better is best. But different is always better than better. Better is hard. If you just want to be better than people, then they’ll always catch you.” (@TBD) — Bill Flynn
“Your sentence is perfect. Your pronouns are wrong. They don’t have to get it. You have to get it. You’re trying to solve their problem. You’re not trying to convince them how smart you are.” (@TBD) — Bill Flynn
“We were selling insurance, but they were buying time.” (@TBD) — Bill Flynn
“Great leaders fire themselves from the day to day because they realize that few things truly matter, but those that do matter tremendously. And their job is to figure out what those few things are.” (@TBD) — Bill Flynn
About This Episode
Bill Flynn is the founder of Catalyst Growth Advisors and the author of Further Faster: The Vital Few Steps That Take the Guesswork Out of Growth. He spent 25 years across ten high-tech Boston-area startups (speech recognition, e-commerce, online data protection) before moving into coaching owner-operators on the team-strategy-cash framework he adapted from Verne Harnish’s Scaling Up. Ryan met Bill at the Small Giants Conference, the event hosted by Bo Burlingham (author of Small Giants and Finish Big). Bill brings a builder’s perspective to operating-system work, having lived the difference between startups that figured out the customer and ones that fell in love with their own idea.
Resources Mentioned
- Further Faster by Bill Flynn — Bill’s book on the team-strategy-cash framework.
- Catalyst Growth Advisors — Bill’s coaching practice. — catalystgrowthadvisors.com
- Scaling Up by Verne Harnish — The operating system Bill drew his framework from.
- Traction / EOS by Gino Wickman — Referenced as the other major operating system in the market.
- Small Giants by Bo Burlingham — The book and conference where Ryan and Bill met.
- Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet — Intent-based leadership, “I intend to…”
- Bob Moesta — Jobs to Be Done — Progress theory, push/pull/habit/anxiety.
- Clayton Christensen — Referenced for Jobs to Be Done framework.
- Steve Blank — Definition of a startup as a temporary organization in search of a business model.
- Norm Brodsky — Iron Mountain / document storage as a real estate business.
- LiveVault / Iron Mountain — Bill’s case study, sold for 10x revenue.
- Intentional Growth Starter Kit — Ryan’s resource on projecting equity value through the three statements.
Connections
Phase + Module:
- Module 3 — Owner’s Playbook — Where the strategy gets written down so the leadership team isn’t running five different versions
- Module 7 — Leadership Team — Bill’s “team first” sits inside this module
Milestones:
- Milestone 21 — Leadership Development — The team-as-vehicle theme Bill anchors the book on
- Milestone 13 — Strategic Plan — The thinking that drives the plan, not the plan itself
- Milestone 12 — Five-Year Forecast — Bill’s rolling 36-month forecast (revenue, profit, cash, people, widgets)
- Milestone 9 — Monthly Ownership Meetings — Where the strategy-execution loop gets reviewed
- Milestone 7 — Value Growth Plan — The owner-level wrapper that makes the team-strategy-cash work coherent
Concepts referenced:
- Business Operating System — Scaling Up, EOS, the family of systems Bill compared
- Free Cash Flow — Bill’s “cash is oxygen, the only thing that won’t lie to you”
- Three-Statement Model — The financial plan that funds the three-year plan
- Value Growth Plan™ — The plan that makes the multiple expand
- Owner’s Roadmap™ — Where the target equity valuation lives that wraps everything below it
- The Owner-Operator Trap™ — Why founders fall in love with the idea instead of the customer