[Video] Making the Inc. 5000 List

This morning, Holden Advisors earned a spot on Inc 5000's list of America’s Fastest Growing Companies! It's been a thrilling few years of expansion at the firm, and I sat down with President Brian Doyle to debrief his learnings from the journey. For a transcript of our conversation, please see below.

T: This is Tracy Dent with Brian Doyle, President of Holden Advisors. Thank you for joining me, Brian. 

B: Thanks for having me, Tracy.

T: We're here to chat about Holden Advisors making the Inc 5000 list. Congratulations!

B: Thank you. 

T: Super exciting accomplishment. As we were talking about it earlier, there were some different themes that came through. So I thought why don't we hop on video, talk about some of the insights that you've had since being President and since hearing about this accomplishment, and do a little debrief together. 

B: Sounds great. 

T: All right. The first thing that came up, tell me a little bit about your thought process about decision making. We have this theme from the Air Force that you were telling me about, the OODA loop. Let's start there. 

B: The bottom line Tracy, is that the ability to make quick, accurate decisions is the difference between thriving and dying as a business. And like you said, I learned this concept when I was an Air Force officer. It’s called the OODA Loop. O-O-D-A. It's a funny acronym, but what it stands for is Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. The concept is: whatever business can get through the OODA Loop the fastest with accuracy is the one that succeeds and beats out the competition.

B: It was so crystal clear in terms of a way to consider this, and to use the OODA loop was when I really first stepped into the President role. I became President of the company in February of 2020. Right as the pandemic was becoming something real. We had to think about what its impact was going to be on our company. 

B: The first thing we did was we observed. “Sounds like there's a virus coming out of China.” Then we oriented ourselves to what we saw: “What does this mean to us?” We quickly came to the conclusion that we do an awful lot of consulting and workshops in person. We thought that this virus was going to keep us from traveling. It was going to keep us from doing those workshops and that consulting engagement in person. And so we oriented on that, and had to make a quick decision. That decision was: we need to take our Negotiating with Backbone workshops and make them virtual.

B: Then of course, the next step is to act. We went from the end of February until May 4. We went through this loop, we made a decision, we acted, and on May 4 was our very first virtual workshop. The team was able to take this tremendously engaging educational workshop that used to be in person and replicate it virtually. It was a really proud moment for us.

T: It's exciting too because the entire delivery system is then more flexible for moving forward, for when clients do want to be in person, or when they would prefer to do it virtually even though they can travel now.

B: That's right. We can offer the workshops in both different ways. And of course, we can do consulting engagements virtually as well.

T: So there's the delivery, then there's also just people's overall headspace in the company. You’re managing a lot of stress, managing a lot of different things going on in the world. That takes us to the next category. How do you support the team in those stressful times? And how do you think about that?

B: With everything going on in the world, it is so easy to get distracted. That's why it's so critical for us as a leadership team to help our team compartmentalize, which is one of my favorite words. How to compartmentalize your efforts, from all those other factors pulling us in different directions, and answer the question: how can we stay focused?

B: For us, it starts with creating an environment of trust. Working to a clear common goal, having open and honest communication, treating everyone (include their ideas) with respect. It's very clear to everyone I work with I don't have all the good ideas. But if I can get great ideas out of all the different members of the team, that's how we really succeed. People can bounce their ideas back and forth. It takes us from ideas coming from one or two people, to ideas coming from everybody. And our clients feel that, because they get better and better consulting engagements because of the ideas of all these people coming from a variety of different backgrounds and experiences.

T: It seems to me too, there's a lot to manage in compartmentalizing and then in the culture in general. We've got people from all over the country, different locations, new team members, so how do you think about the culture, and people making mistakes? You’re handling different personalities… why don’t we go in that direction. 

B: There's a lot there, Tracy. Let’s start with talking about that trust I was referring to just a moment ago. Intellectual safety is part of that as well. Like you said, what happens when somebody makes a mistake. We've all made mistakes over the last couple of years. And I think how we handle them, enabled people to grow and enabled our business to grow. I'll give you an example. 

B: We recently had a client request a significant change just prior to delivery due date, and the person who received the message made the decision to accommodate the client. In retrospect, that decision created a fair amount of extra work, and we probably should have delayed that client delivery. But the big takeaway here was that we had a team member who took ownership, gathered as much information as they could in a short period of time, and made a decision that benefitted our client. Directionally, that's exactly what we want. We can debrief the details later, but no one's going to get punished for exhibiting those leadership characteristics. If we're doing the right thing for our client, we can work everything else out later.

T: I think working it out is also a part of how you've set the team up in terms of how to work together. What you're looking for, especially growing so quickly and hiring a lot of people fast. Let’s talk a little bit about how you were approaching the hiring process.

B: We made a decision on the hiring process to take a little bit longer to make sure that we got the right fit. And that's tough because in this environment that we've been in, people were hiring very fast. We were growing like crazy. when you're growing 200, 300, 400% a year, you need more people! But by the same token, you can't hire anybody who's going to wreck the culture that got you to the 400%. You have to hire people who are going to be great fits. 

B: So like I said, we made the decision to take a little bit longer. I refer back to Patrick Lencioni in his book The Ideal Team Player, and what he says there is: other than skill set, you should be hiring for people who are humble, hungry, and smart. And when I say smart, I mean EQ / Emotional Quotient, not IQ. You have to hire for the skill set: if you need a software programmer, you need somebody who can program. But after that, we're looking for people who are humble, hungry, and smart. And when we do that, it makes all the difference.

T: You've also got a pretty wide range of personalities on the executive team. And then in the broader team. It seems like that was important to you to—finding people that could complement each other, and that complimented your leadership style.

B: Diversity is important in in all its different forms. It's important to have diversity of race, of gender, of background, of beliefs, of different ways to solve problems. Ultimately it comes down to hiring people who think differently than you. I'll be candid, I am not the most creative person in the world. When I look to fill out my leadership team, I want people who are. And that’s what we did over the last year. We hired Jeet Mukherjee, our VP of Pricing, leading our pricing practice. Super creative guy. And we recently hired Silvia Li to lead our sales strategy practice. Same thing, really creative person. By having them be creative, I can come back into my comfort zone a little bit more, which is a little bit more process oriented. They can do their thing, I can do my thing. And together with the rest of the leadership team, we complement each other very well.

T: I would imagine too, a big part of the dynamics of leading right now is building off of the legacy of the past. You’re building off of everything that worked to get you where you are, and then also creating the future and kind of bridging those two worlds. How does that look in the last couple of years in terms of learnings?

B: Tracy, it's not lost on me that Reed and Carolyn Holden's name is on the door. So when they asked me to become President of the firm, that was a major obligation, a major responsibility. We've been in business for 20 years. That’s 20 years of intellectual property, and effort, and learning that got us to where we are today. How do we learn from that, respect that, grow from that into where the future's going to be? 

B: It reminds me of Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great, he has the concept of the hedgehog principle. Basically what the hedgehog principle is: make sure you keep doing what you do really well. And that's what that's what we're doing. We're growing, we're expanding, we're trying new things, but we're not forgetting what got us here. An example would be our pricing and negotiation intellectual property. It translates really well into a sales strategy practice and executive deal coaching, to name a couple of things. Those are natural additions that clients have come to appreciate from us over the last couple of years. When I say appreciate, I mean to the tune of them earning an extra $100-200 million in increased profits over those last two years. We see that works with clients. We see that this is an opportunity to share that expertise with other clients. So we grow in areas that expand on our core competencies.

T: Building on those core competencies, you've also got hiring people quickly. People with different capabilities, different skill sets, and how do you really free those people up to bring what they bring to the table, while also building on the past? How do you think about setting them up in a really powerful way when they join? 

B: A lot of moving pieces isn't there? We're growing the people, both in terms of numbers and in terms of skill set, and growing what we offer our clients. We're expanding into new clients. There's a lot of moving pieces and for me, it comes down to hiring the right people, giving them the context that they need to go be great, and then letting them run. I've had the question in the past: how would you describe your leadership style? I always find that to be a difficult question to answer, but if it came down to one word I would say its context.

B: As a rapidly growing company, we don't always have processes in place to handle the new day-to-day. Some things become one-offs. When you have a great team, if you can give them an area in which to focus, along with your intent as a leader, then they can go run with it. We see that all the time in our customization and our workshops and our pricing projects. Even some of the internal things we're doing, like human resources processes. They're all now streamlined because smart people have the right context and the authority to go solve those issues. And that's key too—giving them the authority, not just the responsibility.

T: We've got context and authority, we've got compartmentalizing during times of high stress, we've got making decisions quickly and building on the past in order to create the new future. There's a lot in the mix here. We've got a lot of exciting things to come for Holden Advisors. So thank you for this, and congratulations again. 

B: Thanks, yeah, I agree it's those pieces all moving in concert that got us to the Inc 5000 list. I appreciate this time.