speaker-0: We are coming in agnostically saying, let's find the gaps and holes and we're gonna work with you to fill those. How do you overcome that with your clients and get through to them that this diagnostic, this agnostic diagnostic piece is critical to pinpoint exactly where your business are to know which direction you need to head. I'm passionate about helping leaders get curious about the organizations and helping them create the infrastructure. and the alignment that allow them to grow and scale sustainably. Too often, these infrastructure and alignment pieces are missed and it creates a foundation of sand that every time you try to grow or go to the next level, you sink back down. What I've discovered is that majority of the time, it's because leaders do not have a process they can trust. Each week, I wanna give you tips and tricks about how you can create a sustainable growth organization based on the concepts of trust the process. because I've learned that to trust the process, it has to be a combination with your leadership mindset, your operational excellence, and your culture to have sustainable growth. I look forward to seeing you each week. Hello, welcome to the latest episode of Trust the Process podcast. I'm your host, Jon Basford. I'm excited about my guest today. It is Mike Malloy, who is the founder and CEO of Malloy Industries, which matches growth stage companies with Relit-lessly, generous fractional executives to scale their business. I've actually known Mike now for, think going on five or six years. I don't know exactly when we met. think sometime around. ⁓
speaker-1: global pandemic, John.
speaker-0: Yeah, United us all right over the years. ⁓ Mike has spent 18 plus years ⁓ with Deloitte Management Consulting also works for Waveboard Sunglasses as a CEO. ⁓ Halcyon incubator. Am I saying that right? Halcyon incubator. Yep. He's a bit of Georgetown University professor, entrepreneur in residence. He has been a mentor and advisor and a coach. Mike has done so much. throughout the business and startup industries and ecosystems. And I'm excited to have him on here. I will say this one last thing, because I can, I know this from experience, Mike is also a dad joke aficionado who always wears Hawaiian shirts. ⁓ If you've never, if you ever have a meeting with Mike, it is absolutely gonna begin with a dad joke. So.
speaker-1: So John, I'm just gonna cut you off there and I gotta ask man, like, what do you get when you combine a crab with a cheetah? Well, things go sideways real fast.
speaker-0: I have no idea. And there you have it folks. Well, Mike, thank you for being here. It's a pleasure. once you let's dive in a little bit here. Let's dive a little bit more about what you're doing currently with the fractional executive matchmaking and what got you into that.
speaker-1: Yeah, so. At this point, I'm all in that the future of work is fractional and our mission at Malloy Industries is to help entrepreneurs flourish, freeing them from the work that drains them and supporting them with one or more of our relentlessly generous fractional executives. So in 2026, as you're building and growing a company and you need additional expertise, it doesn't mean you have to go out and hire 10 people and pay each of them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with salary and benefits and overhead, especially if you only need five, 10, 20 hours. a week to take one of the 17 hats that you're wearing off and give it to somebody who, especially if you don't like wearing the hat, it doesn't fit, it's the stuff you procrastinate on or like do late at night, I don't really want to do that. Like give that to somebody who wakes up in the morning with zest and they're like, woo, alright, operations, let's build some systems and processes. Meanwhile, you're like, let me go visionary, you know, do all this new stuff and have these new ideas. That's what we do. I empathize deeply with founders. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I ran an incubator, worked with more than 100 entrepreneurs there. I teach at Georgetown. I see this day in and day out that every human has their own strength zone, their zone of genius. What are they uniquely gifted at doing? And they need help to have other people do the things that they aren't. And they need to be able to do it in a cost effective, flexible way. And that's what the Fractional Executive Model is all about.
speaker-0: Yeah, you know, you know, I work with a very similar audience with with growth stage startups and in small businesses and you know, I'm constantly asked like especially the beginning stages. John, when do I know? When do I know it's time to hire? And I always give a couple of reasons, right? Like one is is your your you're doing everything and you don't have time for anymore. ⁓ You're getting to a point where your expertise and knowledge in the the skill sets needed don't line up in. Quite frankly. you're doing, you're starting to get burned out because you keep doing all the stuff that doesn't wind your clock. That doesn't make you excited. The things you got into doing the business, ⁓ you're not doing that anymore. You get bogged down in the operations. You you mentioned in your ⁓ piece there about the process procedures, the operations, that gets me excited. Like I love finding the gaps and holes and the inefficiencies in operations.
speaker-1: Yeah, that's why and I have a chief of staff who does that and I have an ops manager under her now and like I Know that that has like drained me in the first couple of years of my business like we're on year six now and With the team of 16. It's very different than it was like all in Mike's head and like a couple interns and stuff And like those are you know, I think gross ⁓ Steps up over time. The other thing that I recommend for founders is like look at your calendars Look at last week and everything was on there and think, did this energize me or drain me? Like at the end of this 30 minute block, whatever it was, was I like feeling better or was I like, ⁓ that really took some out of me, I got overcharged. And the stuff that drains you should go to somebody else. And also the people you met with, maybe some people you should stop meeting with. Like I had a call already with a client. I was like, yeah, have this, know, one salesperson, somebody on my team, she's kind of the go-between, like I don't have to talk to her. He basically was like, that person really drains me. And so I put somebody in between us and like now I'm fine that it's there, but I don't have to deal with it.
speaker-0: Yeah, another thing I always tell people is, is think about what you you got into entrepreneurship, this business, this role for a certain reason. There's a certain dollar amount that you probably your head that is worth your time. What you should be paid worth worth that hour. And if you're doing bookkeeping work at $50 an hour, $30 an hour, and you think your value should be 200, $300, $500 an hour, you're in the wrong place. Right. Like, look at where you value yourself in what type of work you're doing.
speaker-1: And I'll tie on that John too that there's different higher leverage activities. know, like at this point, I'm not allowed to edit our website. If I see something, I have to just like tell Mar or some of the website team, hey, fix this thing here. It's not worth my time. And I forget who created this model, but there's like $10 work, $100 work. Thousand dollar work ten thousand dollar work not to say that you're actually getting paid that like the order of magnitude Like your emails is like ten dollar work You know like one of the first things you should do is get an executive assistant like I have Mel who's amazing in the Philippines like she runs my inbox Gives me a digest tells me those few that actually to do anything with ⁓ The $100 work is like stuff you could do, but there's no leverage. Like doing it doesn't free you time in the future. The $10,000 work is like building new partnerships, opening up business development channels, things that can like have huge positive impact. And there's a lot of leverage. And I think the $1,000 work is like only you could do it, but it's still, there's no leverage. Like, so just thinking about, again, like small hinges swing big doors. And so what are some of those hinges that you can lean on to have more impact with? your not just your time but like your energy management. I'm big on energy these days.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think, you know, one thing we're really can talk about here is the old adage of working on the business of in the business. Like if you're constantly in the weeds doing the business from someone who has kind of been both a visionary and an integrator ⁓ in my roles, I played, especially going to my own business now where I my service is being the integrator, but my role in my own company is the visionary now. So I have this dual role. You cannot do both the same time. You have to separate your head. so many shape or form. And so if you're constantly in the weeds, it is impossible to step out, take ⁓ a 10,000 foot view of your business, of what's going on, what's working, and making sure you're being strategic all along the way.
speaker-1: Can I piggyback on that, Joan, and say, ⁓ context switching, hopefully you understand what that means, like that's hard to cognitively, every 30 minutes I'm doing something very different. ⁓ And there's like maker mode, where you're in deep work, you're in flow, and there's manager mode, where like, yeah, I am flitting between meetings, and like, that's okay. I recommend you start your meetings at 4.30 and then four and then three, and like work your way to the morning, and protect as much of that morning time to talk to no humans, so that you can do the deep work, whatever the stuff only you can do and I know for me personally once I have my first meeting of the day like deep work stuff I'm not going back into it I'm not an afternoon energy guy like that means like we're recording this at like 320 I am higher energy now because you energize me I've worked with for years like I love this I can get up for this conversation like I can't do deep AI I've spent a bunch of time in notebook on the claw this morning like that was focused listening to my deep flow playlist and by the way you should have a playlist that gets you into flow like immediately if you don't have that on Spotify classical or your favorite that definitely helps.
speaker-0: That's interesting. That's something like, you know, I start every day, uh, in every, every night and start every day meditating, you know, take some time to center my breasts, you know, all that type of stuff. It's actually my last podcast episode. Uh, we really dove into more the mindfulness stuff of this, you know, he does some breath work and that type of stuff. And, know, it's vitally important, but, uh, you know, what are some of the biggest pain points that you hear from CEOs day in and day out as they're struggling through this journey?
speaker-1: They don't have enough time. And there's too many competing priorities and there's some level of financial stress, cash flow, runway, are we paying too much? And if you're an entrepreneur, every time you solve a problem and you get to an X level, you're like, there's a whole nother thing I gotta go learn now and new vocabulary or new things that, that is really, really hard. like... It is also hard to have this perpetual underlying anxiety imposter syndrome. I'm not good enough. I think you and I both and every entrepreneur has that. We're not alone. I have built a million plus dollar business. It has grown significantly. I'm able to provide for my wife and my kid. I love what I do. I still had a brilliant mental breakdown on Sunday last week because I was on vacation for nine days. It was amazing. It the first time in five years I've been off for nine days. No email, no Slack. Fantastic. Sunday I like opened up the things and I just got a flood of overwhelm and was like, oh man. Like, and it wasn't like, it didn't burn down. Like it actually did really well while I was gone. But just that understanding we're not alone. And it's like, okay to ask for help and to seek out people who can carry the work that we're not meant to carry.
speaker-0: And you know, one thing you talk about with time, one thing that I've discovered with a lot of, especially in the startup world, but it applies, as you know, I've done a lot of association work and small business work in other industries as well. But what I've kind of really come to understand is, you know, go back to the name of the podcast here is that too often CEOs, founders don't have a process they can trust. Whether there is no process whatsoever or the one they know that that's work, that one that's in process. that's operating, they know doesn't work, but they can't exactly put their finger on what's not working. And so they just keep doing it. How often do you see that happening?
speaker-1: I see it a lot and you know what got you here and more importantly who got you here won't get you there. And I think that's a Marshall Goldsmith book, phenomenal book by the way. I, within the past couple years have thought a lot more about like what are the systems and processes that scale and I really love the concept of a flywheel. And so Jim Collins, he wrote Good to Great. He has, if you look on Amazon, ask my buddy Jeff Bezos, he'll send it to you. It's like a Turning the Flywheel, it's like a 36 page book, super skinny but you gotta get the print version because it has pictures of flywheels in it. And so like I read this, beginning of last year I bought it for everybody on my team. And so we now look at the different departments of our organization and like what's the primary flywheel? And so like when we work with clients like the number one question we started is like what's your biggest constraint? What's the most expensive problem to solve? What's the thing that's like the ceiling you can't quite get above as you're trying to grow? And from there, and one of the things they're talking about in the book is the flywheel is not just five things in a random circle. It's you ask one and then you almost can't help but do the next one. So we have the constraint, we almost can't help but ask who of our relentlessly generous fractional executives can eliminate it? And then you almost can't help but create and execute a scalable solution. And then we almost can't help but train their team and shift that left to a less expensive resource. And then we almost can't help but have a strategic business review with the client ⁓ where we'll primarily ask, you know, what are the five things you need to accomplish in the next year to feel more pride, confidence, and excitement in your business? And as we go through those five and figure out when and prioritize them, then you almost can't help but ask, well, what's your biggest constraint? And now we're back at the top of that flywheel. And that's like how we've grown our business, how we've added second, third, fourth, fifth fractionals with clients by going through that and systematically attacking the biggest constraint. Because you cannot grow any higher than that big constraint.
speaker-0: Yeah, one thing I've really discovered as my career has advanced and I got more into consulting, you even stepping out of the fractional COO work, but really starting to advise and consultant being at that level is more and more I step into these roles. It's clear to me that if an organization wants to innovate, grow and change, they have got to have an overlap of working on their leadership, their culture and their operations simultaneously. You know, I wrote the book, The Curious Leader, and the more and more I talk about it and bring these concepts to leaders, I cannot talk about leadership without it falling into culture. I can't talk to the culture about falling into operations and vice versa. These three concepts overlap so much. And I know like part of what my process is starting with diagnostics. I know exactly that's how you start as well. So dive us through that process of your diagnostics. you piece of this and what you're trying to uncover to find out if you're the right fit to help the client.
speaker-1: Absolutely, and we have a pretty straightforward three-step process if somebody wants to hire a fractional executive from us. We'll do a quick discovery call, 15 minutes, to see if there's a there there. Can we help with fractional leadership? And transparently, we qualify. Is there a budget authority need timeline? Okay, great. If yes, then my team will book an hour with me for a scalability audit. And part of that is kind of looking at the business to ⁓ hypothesize what that biggest constraint is. In an hour, can I tell you everything and tell you exactly what to do for the next 12 months? No, but I can in six weeks. And that's why we have a six week strategic clarity and matchmaking program. It is a thorough diagnostic. It's like going to the dentist, man. We're going to tap every single tooth and see, ⁓ where's the, you know, where are those pains so that we can identify, okay, this is the biggest constraint. Your living room is on fire. We need to solve this. But by the way, client, you have these three dumpster fires out back that we should probably do something about in three to six months. And we can help you not only tactically solve them, but strategically think about what is that prioritized action plan and who on your team or who on our team can help solve it. You don't necessarily need five fractional executives at once. Let's bring in one or two. Let's focus on this big thing and then kind of tag them in and out as we have other things to solve. And at this point, we have a network where we're people who are way smarter than me who can come in attack those problems in three to six months and build these scalable solutions so it's not putting a bandaid it's ripping the bandaid off in some cases ripping off the duct tape and being like, okay, let's build the foundation so that this scales. ⁓ And it can scale ideally with such well documented SOPs and systems and processes that people you haven't even met yet in two years, you can hire as like an entry level person and do this for 50K salary. So you're not paying, you know, high level C-suite executive to do the work.
speaker-0: So something you made me think, know, obviously we probably approach our businesses in a very similar way, especially starting with the diagnostics and everything. for transparency for the audience, like I'm in Mike's network. I've gotten clients through Mike and helped some of ⁓ his.
speaker-1: You're definitely guys, John. You've definitely been here for like five years, man. We've worked on a bunch of stuff and have loved doing it. ⁓ I think something I'll give you credit for as well is like you help founders scale confidently. It's the confidence to know is this the right thing? Am I going in the right direction? Can I go raise money? Can I take a weekend off, let alone a week off, you know, and kind of feel confident that business is going in the right direction? ⁓ Yeah.
speaker-0: Yeah. And so one thing I was thinking about is, know, I wonder if you run into a very similar problem as myself, which is, you know, we're, coming into helping prospective clients in a very agnostic state. You know, we don't know how we are going to help a client until we have this diagnostic, until we're in these conversations. And I, I differentiate, differentiate us from other consultants who diagnostics where, know, the software developer is diagnosing your business. to sell you software. The HR company has diagnosed your business to sell you HR. We are coming in agnostically saying, let's find the gaps and holes and we're gonna work with you to fill those. How do you overcome that with your clients and get through to them that this diagnostic, this agnostic diagnostic piece is critical to pinpoint exactly where your business are to know which direction you need to head.
speaker-1: You know, like that is so important and we're not just selling one flavor. think the fact that we And I'm transparent, like how we run our whole business is like, we want to learn everything about your business because in 2026, like we use AI, we have an AI matchmaking algorithm that pulls in all of this data that we are getting, we're diagnosing and compares it to our afterwards. I updated this morning in notebook LM, our 602 fractional executive records to be able to identify who are the best people to solve the problems. And like we have a 10 point question. go through what finance operations, HR, marketing, sales, leadership, And as we see things, then we go deeper on our marketing scalability scorecard, a sales scalability scorecard. We have an HR growth readiness assessment. We have a marketing bullseye. We have a lot of different tools that we'll use based on what we pull out in that first hour kind of ⁓ scalability audit. that we dive into in the first two or three weeks. then weeks kind of three to six of our six week process, we're facilitating interviews with our fractional executives. And we have them record a five minute video that we give to our clients before the interview even takes place now. John, I think we didn't have that when we first started and we kind of leveled this process up because we want to save everybody 30 minutes. We want to make sure that, this person sounds like a good fit. We put together five custom questions based on all of our notes, what we know you need. And then we facilitate that. There's interviews by week four or five. You know people are able to bring them in and the magic with hiring a fractional executive Is that it doesn't take three months to onboard them and teach them your systems They're gonna come in and teach you how to better run operations or finance or marketing or whatever department they're in You know, there's a little bit of one or two weeks of hey, let me understand the whole business You know what the product solution is what the team org chart kind of looks like but it's amazing how quickly they can hit the ground running and start to add value because The most important vector of value is speed. It's like how quickly, you what's the low hanging fruit? How do we, you'd be like, ⁓ this was a good idea. I'm glad these people are here. And typically our clients say that within two weeks.
speaker-0: So you guys have been at this for a while now. You've had a number of clients and you talk to a lot of people. Is there one particular gap that you see over and over again with these founders, with these companies, with the CEOs, know, one, one, one, you know, operations versus marketing, whatever it be, or strategic versus tactical. Is there a particular thing that, that sticks out to you more than anything else that's a glaring problem?
speaker-1: I got two for you. the first one, this is my opening question when I talk to founders is, so who handles your finances and accounting? And if they say me, I don't talk about anything else that we do, I say let's get you some outsourced finance and accounting, whether that's a CFO, accountant, bookkeeper, like there's no world in which you should be the person in QuickBooks. But unless you count pennies, I'm like, okay, we just gotta do that. But as you're getting to millions of dollars in revenue, and especially if you wanna go raise a seed series A, series B, you need that financial wizard fractional CFO. It is the most popular request that we hear, both from founders and from investors who have invested in a company early on, pre-seed seed, they're like, hey man, they need a grownup to build that series A model and help raise that money. that's one is making sure you have people smarter than you on the finance side. I'll be vulnerable with you too. I was a math major. I got a perfect score in every math standardized test I've ever taken. I went bankrupt at 30 because nobody taught me math with the dollar signs in front. I didn't take accounting in college. And so I learned a lot the hard way and there were some insecurities of me around financial models and working in my business now. I have a bookkeeper, have an accountant, have a tax guy, have a fractional CFO that we work with to help level those up. So I had to make decisions based on what the numbers are. and use it to, and most entrepreneurs are not risk averse, ideally they're risk aware. Like we will take risks where we should be aware that it's a risk, and using the numbers to inform that I think is important. So that is the whole bucket one of the pattern. The second bucket is how to transition out of founder led sales. You as the founder can get to one to three million with some charisma and a personal network and your origin story. Sorry, Barry, you can't get to 10 million. Somebody else has to come in and sell. And a lot of founders want to clone themselves. Why can't I find somebody just like me? Like, I always say this, because there's nobody just like you. Like, you started this company for a reason, but to bring another human who doesn't have that emotional attachment, who didn't start it because of their family thing, that whatever, you know, it is different. And to then ideally bring in a sales, fractional sales leader to build in BDRs and AEs, account executives on a whole sales team. Like, almost every founder is not great at building and running a sales organization within their company. You know, ⁓ at this point we have six people on my sales team. I have a fractional CRO. Like I drink my own Kool-Aid, I hire my folks and help me. Asad is my boss. Like when I go to the weekly sales pipeline meeting, he is holding me accountable. I have to have done my commits from last week. We're gonna go through the HubSpot pipeline, what's up with my deals, why did I not do some of the things. And like that has transformed our business in the past year, having that leadership. And then we have a full-time BDR. We have an accounting exec who will do the discovery calls and qualify. ⁓ and kind of that cadence of building a mature or at least like teenage, you know, maybe I'm mature, you don't have 20 reps or whatever, but like it's different than, well, I'm just gonna like go places and talk to people and sell and I got high energy and somebody's gonna buy, which does work for while.
speaker-0: ⁓ If you're EA, you're bookkeeper, operations manager, whoever is doing your books, if they're doing, entering everything every single time it comes in, paying things randomly, there's just no systems or process, you're wasting so much time, so much money, there needs to be a set day where you enter, a set day where you approve, a set day where you pay, all of these systems make it more efficient, make it more effective. create more clarity, create more insight, and quality control in how you're doing things. I know it seems so small, but you waste so much time when you do things ad hoc and reactionary. And the other thing I wanna ⁓ respond to was, you know, the CEO says, I wanna just clone myself. I hear that time and time again. I once was told, I don't want to know you just think, I want you to know you think like me. What you do when you have that mentality of, again, I think back to controlling ego, you have to learn to let go of, you are removing their special sauce, their secret sauce that makes them unique, makes them authentic. The reason why it's worked for you, because you did it in authentic way, then you're trying to make someone else act like you, which is removing their authenticity, which they're not going to have the same impact and results because they're not being authentic.
speaker-1: I love that, I got a couple thoughts there. One, leadership principle, people support what they help build. They don't support what they're told to do. And so creating space and oxygen and time to solicit feedback from people and I will often say, know, comments, questions, snide remarks, like, what part of this do you not understand? What part of your question did I not answer? What questions do you have instead of do you have questions? It just creates more space for people to speak up. You can't clone yourself, but if you are a starfish, you could like cut off some of those five limbs and let each to them go grow into their own little starfish and like they're gonna be uniquely themselves and maybe that's how you handle your operations and your marketing and your sales and your finance. Like I think that makes sense. I also love the pattern cadence monthly. Like the idea is like you should batch similar activities and like you know I have a 30 minute bi-weekly finance team meeting. That's when we do all the finance stuff. I don't have to deal with it in between and. You should also, as you're building your team, think about documenting the SOPs. like, Tina is my chief of staff. been with her for two and a half years. She accidentally was off for a week because of a blizzard. I took spring break for a week. We both worked on Monday, and now she's gone for three weeks to Italy. She's known all year she was taking a three week vacation. We didn't know about the week off, but we survived it because she'd been preparing and Mel, who's my EA, is now doing all of our finance accounts, receivables, accounts payables. And it's like well documented with loom videos and scribe SOPs and how to do QuickBooks and like a list of clients and who gets bills when and like typically everybody gets an invoice on the 20th that's due on the 1st. It's the 20th of every month it's due on the 1st. 20th, due on the like, we don't randomly send them out throughout the month, you know?
speaker-0: Yep. Yeah. mean, that's why things get missed, right? That's why payments get missed and invoices going out get missed. It's because when we do everything ad hoc, there's no system, there's no process and things fall through the crack. You know, another thing that you talked about there was, you know, creating that environment of people being able to speak up and, you know, leaders asking questions, being genuine. That's something, you know, I talk and write about a lot, you know, in there's Google did a study called Project Aristotle, where they're trying to define what made a team within Google successful. And when they came back was psychological safety, which is this notion that we build a culture where people feel free to speak up, speak out. I I look at it as, know, we live in DC or I live in DC metro area with the metro, you know, and, you know, the metro's slates slogans are, know, see something, say something, right? We got to create a. ⁓ culture in organizations that when someone sees something not working right, that there's a better way to do it, there's a problem happening, ⁓ that people feel safe to bring these ideas forward. I don't know how many times I've worked with an organization where the CEO uncovers some problem that they're so proud of, they go to the junior person who does it, and the person's like, yeah, I know. And what happens? The CEO gets mad at them for not bringing it up. I turn that around on the CEO. Why didn't you create the atmosphere and the mechanisms for that employee to speak up? That's the way to really innovate, grow and change every day, every week, every month by inviting your team to be along with it.
speaker-1: And one of the best leadership principles is that you praise publicly, you reprimand privately. Anything good that happens, give them a shout out in a staff meeting. Create a hashtag shout outs channel on Slack. like whenever somebody on the team does something related to a value, give them a shout out and encourage other people to model your behavior. You you as the leader need to model the behavior you want your team to have. I think that's really important. One other thing that I'll add to in terms of giving feedback is to, if you know somebody, that's nothing up, ⁓ hey John, do you have a quick minute for feedback? They have to say yes. The other person must opt in and say that they are in the mental, emotional, physical state to receive this, but if they just got a text, their kid is sick, they gotta go pick him up at school, like, nah man, now's not a good time. I'm stressed out, I already have cortisol in my body, I haven't done the breath work to like... Breathe in twice and then exhale to like flush the cortisol, reactivate the prefrontal cortex. You need them in that right state of mind. And I want to drop another wisdom nugget here. There's a great question that I learned from Genius Network last month. A guy, Michael Bernoff, who said, do you even know what the second biggest win is going to be by achieving this? Whatever the goal is the thing you're talking about and there's a few magical things in this question. The first thing is that he starts with, do you even know? And when you start with that, that activates the prefrontal cortex. People start to think. If you start a question with what or what's, there's a level of defensiveness. It's like, mom, like, you know, what's, what, what's in the kitchen sink? When you're like. What do you want? Do you even know? When you say what the second biggest win is, that implies that there's a first biggest win that's pretty clear, and it implies that they've accomplished it. And so you are creating the neural pathways, the circuit to a future state where you have already done this thing. And so what are the second, third, fourth order consequences? And it is a really powerful thing internally for goal setting and like being able to see not just this, but the next things. And it's also really powerful in sales ⁓ where you then have to have the answer of like, well, do you even know what the the second biggest win is by having a fractional CFO. It's not just that they're handling your QuickBooks, it's that you're able to confidently go to your investors, explain why you're making these decisions, and they're gonna know you're right, and they're gonna wanna give you more money, which allows you to have less stress and hire more people and go on the, boom, boom, boom, boom, it's these dominoes. So I wanted to slide that one in for the listeners.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think, there's all again, you and I approach this a little differently and provide different services, but we're both here to help people get clarity about the organizations, have a process and people they can trust and truly trust them stepping away. But also through this process, whether it's, know, strategic operations with me or fractional work with you, the goal is, is that these founders and CEOs know that things are being handled right, can trust that without micromanaging. the more you're in the weeds, the more your micromanaging is, can I go back to our very beginning of the conversation here, is the less you're working on the important stuff in your business, can move it forward. If you don't trust your people, you don't trust your process, then you gotta stop where you are, find out how to get there, and rebuild it.
speaker-1: And I'm gonna tie this back into the trust the process. What a great name. And every behavior that a human takes, it either builds trust or erodes trust. And when somebody erodes trust, it takes like five positive things to undo that one erosion. And we've found this over time with our fractionals that we now have a standard process where every fractional executive submits a weekly TPS report, which is both an office-based joke and a trust-building progress snapshot of, hey, here's what I did last week, here's what I'm doing this week. Here are the meetings. Hey client. Here's where I'm stuck I need you to do x y or z give me access to this and here's my upcoming schedule all of that is about communication because happiness equals reality minus expectations and if you Proactively set those expectations about what's going on. They're not wondering what's going back there You know, they're not gonna micromanage you and like most people really like autonomy and they don't like being micromanaged and the reason people get micromanaged is because they don't communicate well. don't manage up. They don't let them know what's going on. They show up to a weekly status meeting that they're supposed to run and be like, I don't know, boss, what do you want to talk about? Like, dude, that's your 30 to 60 minutes with the CEO? come in prepared, boom, boom, I did all the research, here are the decisions we have to make, A, B, or C, I recommend B, like, decide literally means to cut off. know, meetings are for decisions, that's part of my belief there. And again, it comes down to what that process and how are things communicated. And for the leaders in the room listening, if you have one-on-ones with your direct reports and you're setting the agenda every week, stop. Create a shared Google document. Anybody can add to whatever they want and tell them, hey, this is now your meeting to run. ⁓ And you'll be able to pretty quickly tell who are the A players and who are the B or the C players to kind of filter those out. And if you want to replace them with a fractional executive or we even do full-time recruiting and placement now as well, let us know. I'm happy to help.
speaker-0: Yeah, just one little comment that will wrap it up here is, you know, one little tweak that founders and CEOs can make in changing that perspective of creating that environment of psychological safety. Instead of saying, what are you doing? Flip that question to what are you seeing? that opens it up to a general perspective of, I wanna tap into your perspective and how this business is working, what's working, what's not working. I wanna tap into that instead of figuring out, you doing what I want you to do in a step-by-step order? Are you performing the way I want you to? Make it collaborative in the sense that we are in this together to constantly be improving and changing things. you cut me off there. I was gonna lead into Mike. I know you got some exciting things coming on, but go ahead and dive a little deeper about your guys' shift, not shift, but your add-on. on that you're not just doing fractional anymore, but actually doing full-time work. So talk a little more about that real quick.
speaker-1: Absolutely, so we've been doing fractional executive matchmaking for over five years and I'm all in this is the future of work. I've also realized that as companies are growing and scaling they also need full-time people and we built this network of relentlessly generous experts who can come in on a fractional basis one two three days a week. We also have a team of recruiters in-house now that can help hire full-time employees and we kind of have two paths that people can engage with us. The first path is going through our strategic clarity a matchmaking program. It's the same six week program that we do for the fractal side. Like the first two weeks of that, we're going to dive so deep into the business. We're going to do the diagnostic and like no other recruiter does that. Like we want to understand the whole business, the culture, what does success look like? How do you want to engage with people? We have our candidates also do like the Colby A assessment, which is a good personality match and how that lines up. And we'll have a leadership team do that as well to mesh them in. And so that's a $7,500 investment. It's a six week program and We'll start the interviews in there. If you're looking fractional, we can always get them hired within six weeks. It may take a little bit longer for the full time. And then, like a traditional executive search firm, they charge 20 to 35 % of the first year total comp. We come in at 22.5%. There's the bottom end of that. And the $7,500 is like a deposit for the first role that we place full time. So excited about that offering. It's a way to help more companies as they're growing and scaling. And then if that is not the bread and butter, We also just offer a la carte. We can unbundle all the recruiting HR stuff, 150 bucks an hour. Tell us what you need help with on a project basis. And yeah, we want to help people grow. We want founders to, again, focus on their zone of genius. And I don't know that I've a founder yet that like HR was their zone of genius. like that's, you got to do more of that as you grow for sure, but you don't have to do all of the paperwork and applicant tracking system stuff and all that jazz. So happy to help and be a resource if I can.
speaker-0: Yeah, Mike, it's been a wonderful conversation. Again, you even our conversation, it kind of exemplified the fact that like you can't talk about leadership without also touching operations and culture. You can't talk about culture without touching operations and leadership, right? All of these, all these elements are uniquely intertwined for organizations that really want to innovate, grow and scale. We're going to put, you know, your information in the show notes, but please tell everyone briefly, you know, where's the best place to go to learn more about Maloya Industries and get in touch with you guys.
speaker-1: Absolutely, so my email is mike at maloindustries.com, our website, maloindustries.com slash pod. It's a M-A-L-L-O-Y industries, I-N-D-U-S-T-R-I-S dot com. ⁓ Happy to connect on LinkedIn as well. ⁓ And yeah, I'm a survey leader, I'm here to help entrepreneurs flourish and we got a lot of resources on our website as well and our number one core value is relentlessly generous. So I tried to share some nuggets on the conversation today. ⁓ But feel free to reach out if you need a tool or template and do it yourself, happy to share that and just help you be successful as you build and grow not only your business but your life. We do all of this to then also go spend time with our family and kids and ⁓ not just work 90 hour weeks.
speaker-0: Yep, so for all the listeners, again, I have worked with Mike for a number of years now and I can attest that he and his team really do come at this with a servant's heart and truly are ⁓ here to help people and organizations grow. ⁓ so if you're on those crossroads of like, you know it's time to scale, time to gather the weeds, time to do everything, time to stop doing everything yourself, reach out to Mike. you know, go through his process and dive in. So Mike, I want to thank you again for the time. It's been a great episode of Trust the Process where we really covered all these things. And more and more I get into these shows. The other part that we... can't help but bring up is the mindfulness stuff. Because it's so important as leaders in weathering the storms of the ups and downs of entrepreneurship and leadership and everything is finding those moments of clarity and centeredness, centeredness, is that word? Yeah. In your breath and how you show up for yourself every day, which automatically dictates how you show up for your company and for your employees. So Mike, thank you for being a part of this.
speaker-1: Last thought so I think I have like a 800 day meditation streak at this point I want to make a plug for there's a breath work meditation app called open I'll send you a link for like that. I don't mean I was like a 30 day free trial people can give it a shot I learned it from another entrepreneur like a month ago, and I've been doing a weekly breath mastery 45 minute session on Mondays for like three years now changed my life like I was this hippies stuff like guys It's good. You don't do 45 minutes You can do the five minute the three minute eat and even just the like inhale through your nose and then a second snort that second one flushes the cortisol reactivates it lets you show up centered it really makes a difference the other thing is like just move your body if you're feeling stressed and like hunched over like strap down and do like 11 push-ups and what okay I feel different like you feel different because you may not always be exactly better but it's definitely different and you're recognizing that I need to move my body to move my state to get out of some of those death spirals we might get caught in.
speaker-0: Yeah, and I've actually taken my meditation breathing to actually going to like a spiritual yoga, like not like a soccer mom yoga studio, but like, like in a commune, like a house with like 18 rooms where people live there. Like I'm going there and doing some meditation yoga and breath work in person because as a Westerner, I don't breathe well from my belly and you know, and all that type of stuff. And for all you listeners out there who don't know we're talking about look into this a little bit. It truly the breath work in just sitting yourself can can truly make a difference in how you show up every single day. But we've run out of time. So Mike, we could go on for hours about this, but thank you very much for being a part of this show and we'll have you back again and we can continue the conversation. Thanks lot, Mike.
speaker-1: Sounds good, brother. Thanks, John.
speaker-1: global pandemic, John.
speaker-0: Yeah, United us all right over the years. ⁓ Mike has spent 18 plus years ⁓ with Deloitte Management Consulting also works for Waveboard Sunglasses as a CEO. ⁓ Halcyon incubator. Am I saying that right? Halcyon incubator. Yep. He's a bit of Georgetown University professor, entrepreneur in residence. He has been a mentor and advisor and a coach. Mike has done so much. throughout the business and startup industries and ecosystems. And I'm excited to have him on here. I will say this one last thing, because I can, I know this from experience, Mike is also a dad joke aficionado who always wears Hawaiian shirts. ⁓ If you've never, if you ever have a meeting with Mike, it is absolutely gonna begin with a dad joke. So.
speaker-1: So John, I'm just gonna cut you off there and I gotta ask man, like, what do you get when you combine a crab with a cheetah? Well, things go sideways real fast.
speaker-0: I have no idea. And there you have it folks. Well, Mike, thank you for being here. It's a pleasure. once you let's dive in a little bit here. Let's dive a little bit more about what you're doing currently with the fractional executive matchmaking and what got you into that.
speaker-1: Yeah, so. At this point, I'm all in that the future of work is fractional and our mission at Malloy Industries is to help entrepreneurs flourish, freeing them from the work that drains them and supporting them with one or more of our relentlessly generous fractional executives. So in 2026, as you're building and growing a company and you need additional expertise, it doesn't mean you have to go out and hire 10 people and pay each of them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with salary and benefits and overhead, especially if you only need five, 10, 20 hours. a week to take one of the 17 hats that you're wearing off and give it to somebody who, especially if you don't like wearing the hat, it doesn't fit, it's the stuff you procrastinate on or like do late at night, I don't really want to do that. Like give that to somebody who wakes up in the morning with zest and they're like, woo, alright, operations, let's build some systems and processes. Meanwhile, you're like, let me go visionary, you know, do all this new stuff and have these new ideas. That's what we do. I empathize deeply with founders. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I ran an incubator, worked with more than 100 entrepreneurs there. I teach at Georgetown. I see this day in and day out that every human has their own strength zone, their zone of genius. What are they uniquely gifted at doing? And they need help to have other people do the things that they aren't. And they need to be able to do it in a cost effective, flexible way. And that's what the Fractional Executive Model is all about.
speaker-0: Yeah, you know, you know, I work with a very similar audience with with growth stage startups and in small businesses and you know, I'm constantly asked like especially the beginning stages. John, when do I know? When do I know it's time to hire? And I always give a couple of reasons, right? Like one is is your your you're doing everything and you don't have time for anymore. ⁓ You're getting to a point where your expertise and knowledge in the the skill sets needed don't line up in. Quite frankly. you're doing, you're starting to get burned out because you keep doing all the stuff that doesn't wind your clock. That doesn't make you excited. The things you got into doing the business, ⁓ you're not doing that anymore. You get bogged down in the operations. You you mentioned in your ⁓ piece there about the process procedures, the operations, that gets me excited. Like I love finding the gaps and holes and the inefficiencies in operations.
speaker-1: Yeah, that's why and I have a chief of staff who does that and I have an ops manager under her now and like I Know that that has like drained me in the first couple of years of my business like we're on year six now and With the team of 16. It's very different than it was like all in Mike's head and like a couple interns and stuff And like those are you know, I think gross ⁓ Steps up over time. The other thing that I recommend for founders is like look at your calendars Look at last week and everything was on there and think, did this energize me or drain me? Like at the end of this 30 minute block, whatever it was, was I like feeling better or was I like, ⁓ that really took some out of me, I got overcharged. And the stuff that drains you should go to somebody else. And also the people you met with, maybe some people you should stop meeting with. Like I had a call already with a client. I was like, yeah, have this, know, one salesperson, somebody on my team, she's kind of the go-between, like I don't have to talk to her. He basically was like, that person really drains me. And so I put somebody in between us and like now I'm fine that it's there, but I don't have to deal with it.
speaker-0: Yeah, another thing I always tell people is, is think about what you you got into entrepreneurship, this business, this role for a certain reason. There's a certain dollar amount that you probably your head that is worth your time. What you should be paid worth worth that hour. And if you're doing bookkeeping work at $50 an hour, $30 an hour, and you think your value should be 200, $300, $500 an hour, you're in the wrong place. Right. Like, look at where you value yourself in what type of work you're doing.
speaker-1: And I'll tie on that John too that there's different higher leverage activities. know, like at this point, I'm not allowed to edit our website. If I see something, I have to just like tell Mar or some of the website team, hey, fix this thing here. It's not worth my time. And I forget who created this model, but there's like $10 work, $100 work. Thousand dollar work ten thousand dollar work not to say that you're actually getting paid that like the order of magnitude Like your emails is like ten dollar work You know like one of the first things you should do is get an executive assistant like I have Mel who's amazing in the Philippines like she runs my inbox Gives me a digest tells me those few that actually to do anything with ⁓ The $100 work is like stuff you could do, but there's no leverage. Like doing it doesn't free you time in the future. The $10,000 work is like building new partnerships, opening up business development channels, things that can like have huge positive impact. And there's a lot of leverage. And I think the $1,000 work is like only you could do it, but it's still, there's no leverage. Like, so just thinking about, again, like small hinges swing big doors. And so what are some of those hinges that you can lean on to have more impact with? your not just your time but like your energy management. I'm big on energy these days.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think, you know, one thing we're really can talk about here is the old adage of working on the business of in the business. Like if you're constantly in the weeds doing the business from someone who has kind of been both a visionary and an integrator ⁓ in my roles, I played, especially going to my own business now where I my service is being the integrator, but my role in my own company is the visionary now. So I have this dual role. You cannot do both the same time. You have to separate your head. so many shape or form. And so if you're constantly in the weeds, it is impossible to step out, take ⁓ a 10,000 foot view of your business, of what's going on, what's working, and making sure you're being strategic all along the way.
speaker-1: Can I piggyback on that, Joan, and say, ⁓ context switching, hopefully you understand what that means, like that's hard to cognitively, every 30 minutes I'm doing something very different. ⁓ And there's like maker mode, where you're in deep work, you're in flow, and there's manager mode, where like, yeah, I am flitting between meetings, and like, that's okay. I recommend you start your meetings at 4.30 and then four and then three, and like work your way to the morning, and protect as much of that morning time to talk to no humans, so that you can do the deep work, whatever the stuff only you can do and I know for me personally once I have my first meeting of the day like deep work stuff I'm not going back into it I'm not an afternoon energy guy like that means like we're recording this at like 320 I am higher energy now because you energize me I've worked with for years like I love this I can get up for this conversation like I can't do deep AI I've spent a bunch of time in notebook on the claw this morning like that was focused listening to my deep flow playlist and by the way you should have a playlist that gets you into flow like immediately if you don't have that on Spotify classical or your favorite that definitely helps.
speaker-0: That's interesting. That's something like, you know, I start every day, uh, in every, every night and start every day meditating, you know, take some time to center my breasts, you know, all that type of stuff. It's actually my last podcast episode. Uh, we really dove into more the mindfulness stuff of this, you know, he does some breath work and that type of stuff. And, know, it's vitally important, but, uh, you know, what are some of the biggest pain points that you hear from CEOs day in and day out as they're struggling through this journey?
speaker-1: They don't have enough time. And there's too many competing priorities and there's some level of financial stress, cash flow, runway, are we paying too much? And if you're an entrepreneur, every time you solve a problem and you get to an X level, you're like, there's a whole nother thing I gotta go learn now and new vocabulary or new things that, that is really, really hard. like... It is also hard to have this perpetual underlying anxiety imposter syndrome. I'm not good enough. I think you and I both and every entrepreneur has that. We're not alone. I have built a million plus dollar business. It has grown significantly. I'm able to provide for my wife and my kid. I love what I do. I still had a brilliant mental breakdown on Sunday last week because I was on vacation for nine days. It was amazing. It the first time in five years I've been off for nine days. No email, no Slack. Fantastic. Sunday I like opened up the things and I just got a flood of overwhelm and was like, oh man. Like, and it wasn't like, it didn't burn down. Like it actually did really well while I was gone. But just that understanding we're not alone. And it's like, okay to ask for help and to seek out people who can carry the work that we're not meant to carry.
speaker-0: And you know, one thing you talk about with time, one thing that I've discovered with a lot of, especially in the startup world, but it applies, as you know, I've done a lot of association work and small business work in other industries as well. But what I've kind of really come to understand is, you know, go back to the name of the podcast here is that too often CEOs, founders don't have a process they can trust. Whether there is no process whatsoever or the one they know that that's work, that one that's in process. that's operating, they know doesn't work, but they can't exactly put their finger on what's not working. And so they just keep doing it. How often do you see that happening?
speaker-1: I see it a lot and you know what got you here and more importantly who got you here won't get you there. And I think that's a Marshall Goldsmith book, phenomenal book by the way. I, within the past couple years have thought a lot more about like what are the systems and processes that scale and I really love the concept of a flywheel. And so Jim Collins, he wrote Good to Great. He has, if you look on Amazon, ask my buddy Jeff Bezos, he'll send it to you. It's like a Turning the Flywheel, it's like a 36 page book, super skinny but you gotta get the print version because it has pictures of flywheels in it. And so like I read this, beginning of last year I bought it for everybody on my team. And so we now look at the different departments of our organization and like what's the primary flywheel? And so like when we work with clients like the number one question we started is like what's your biggest constraint? What's the most expensive problem to solve? What's the thing that's like the ceiling you can't quite get above as you're trying to grow? And from there, and one of the things they're talking about in the book is the flywheel is not just five things in a random circle. It's you ask one and then you almost can't help but do the next one. So we have the constraint, we almost can't help but ask who of our relentlessly generous fractional executives can eliminate it? And then you almost can't help but create and execute a scalable solution. And then we almost can't help but train their team and shift that left to a less expensive resource. And then we almost can't help but have a strategic business review with the client ⁓ where we'll primarily ask, you know, what are the five things you need to accomplish in the next year to feel more pride, confidence, and excitement in your business? And as we go through those five and figure out when and prioritize them, then you almost can't help but ask, well, what's your biggest constraint? And now we're back at the top of that flywheel. And that's like how we've grown our business, how we've added second, third, fourth, fifth fractionals with clients by going through that and systematically attacking the biggest constraint. Because you cannot grow any higher than that big constraint.
speaker-0: Yeah, one thing I've really discovered as my career has advanced and I got more into consulting, you even stepping out of the fractional COO work, but really starting to advise and consultant being at that level is more and more I step into these roles. It's clear to me that if an organization wants to innovate, grow and change, they have got to have an overlap of working on their leadership, their culture and their operations simultaneously. You know, I wrote the book, The Curious Leader, and the more and more I talk about it and bring these concepts to leaders, I cannot talk about leadership without it falling into culture. I can't talk to the culture about falling into operations and vice versa. These three concepts overlap so much. And I know like part of what my process is starting with diagnostics. I know exactly that's how you start as well. So dive us through that process of your diagnostics. you piece of this and what you're trying to uncover to find out if you're the right fit to help the client.
speaker-1: Absolutely, and we have a pretty straightforward three-step process if somebody wants to hire a fractional executive from us. We'll do a quick discovery call, 15 minutes, to see if there's a there there. Can we help with fractional leadership? And transparently, we qualify. Is there a budget authority need timeline? Okay, great. If yes, then my team will book an hour with me for a scalability audit. And part of that is kind of looking at the business to ⁓ hypothesize what that biggest constraint is. In an hour, can I tell you everything and tell you exactly what to do for the next 12 months? No, but I can in six weeks. And that's why we have a six week strategic clarity and matchmaking program. It is a thorough diagnostic. It's like going to the dentist, man. We're going to tap every single tooth and see, ⁓ where's the, you know, where are those pains so that we can identify, okay, this is the biggest constraint. Your living room is on fire. We need to solve this. But by the way, client, you have these three dumpster fires out back that we should probably do something about in three to six months. And we can help you not only tactically solve them, but strategically think about what is that prioritized action plan and who on your team or who on our team can help solve it. You don't necessarily need five fractional executives at once. Let's bring in one or two. Let's focus on this big thing and then kind of tag them in and out as we have other things to solve. And at this point, we have a network where we're people who are way smarter than me who can come in attack those problems in three to six months and build these scalable solutions so it's not putting a bandaid it's ripping the bandaid off in some cases ripping off the duct tape and being like, okay, let's build the foundation so that this scales. ⁓ And it can scale ideally with such well documented SOPs and systems and processes that people you haven't even met yet in two years, you can hire as like an entry level person and do this for 50K salary. So you're not paying, you know, high level C-suite executive to do the work.
speaker-0: So something you made me think, know, obviously we probably approach our businesses in a very similar way, especially starting with the diagnostics and everything. for transparency for the audience, like I'm in Mike's network. I've gotten clients through Mike and helped some of ⁓ his.
speaker-1: You're definitely guys, John. You've definitely been here for like five years, man. We've worked on a bunch of stuff and have loved doing it. ⁓ I think something I'll give you credit for as well is like you help founders scale confidently. It's the confidence to know is this the right thing? Am I going in the right direction? Can I go raise money? Can I take a weekend off, let alone a week off, you know, and kind of feel confident that business is going in the right direction? ⁓ Yeah.
speaker-0: Yeah. And so one thing I was thinking about is, know, I wonder if you run into a very similar problem as myself, which is, you know, we're, coming into helping prospective clients in a very agnostic state. You know, we don't know how we are going to help a client until we have this diagnostic, until we're in these conversations. And I, I differentiate, differentiate us from other consultants who diagnostics where, know, the software developer is diagnosing your business. to sell you software. The HR company has diagnosed your business to sell you HR. We are coming in agnostically saying, let's find the gaps and holes and we're gonna work with you to fill those. How do you overcome that with your clients and get through to them that this diagnostic, this agnostic diagnostic piece is critical to pinpoint exactly where your business are to know which direction you need to head.
speaker-1: You know, like that is so important and we're not just selling one flavor. think the fact that we And I'm transparent, like how we run our whole business is like, we want to learn everything about your business because in 2026, like we use AI, we have an AI matchmaking algorithm that pulls in all of this data that we are getting, we're diagnosing and compares it to our afterwards. I updated this morning in notebook LM, our 602 fractional executive records to be able to identify who are the best people to solve the problems. And like we have a 10 point question. go through what finance operations, HR, marketing, sales, leadership, And as we see things, then we go deeper on our marketing scalability scorecard, a sales scalability scorecard. We have an HR growth readiness assessment. We have a marketing bullseye. We have a lot of different tools that we'll use based on what we pull out in that first hour kind of ⁓ scalability audit. that we dive into in the first two or three weeks. then weeks kind of three to six of our six week process, we're facilitating interviews with our fractional executives. And we have them record a five minute video that we give to our clients before the interview even takes place now. John, I think we didn't have that when we first started and we kind of leveled this process up because we want to save everybody 30 minutes. We want to make sure that, this person sounds like a good fit. We put together five custom questions based on all of our notes, what we know you need. And then we facilitate that. There's interviews by week four or five. You know people are able to bring them in and the magic with hiring a fractional executive Is that it doesn't take three months to onboard them and teach them your systems They're gonna come in and teach you how to better run operations or finance or marketing or whatever department they're in You know, there's a little bit of one or two weeks of hey, let me understand the whole business You know what the product solution is what the team org chart kind of looks like but it's amazing how quickly they can hit the ground running and start to add value because The most important vector of value is speed. It's like how quickly, you what's the low hanging fruit? How do we, you'd be like, ⁓ this was a good idea. I'm glad these people are here. And typically our clients say that within two weeks.
speaker-0: So you guys have been at this for a while now. You've had a number of clients and you talk to a lot of people. Is there one particular gap that you see over and over again with these founders, with these companies, with the CEOs, know, one, one, one, you know, operations versus marketing, whatever it be, or strategic versus tactical. Is there a particular thing that, that sticks out to you more than anything else that's a glaring problem?
speaker-1: I got two for you. the first one, this is my opening question when I talk to founders is, so who handles your finances and accounting? And if they say me, I don't talk about anything else that we do, I say let's get you some outsourced finance and accounting, whether that's a CFO, accountant, bookkeeper, like there's no world in which you should be the person in QuickBooks. But unless you count pennies, I'm like, okay, we just gotta do that. But as you're getting to millions of dollars in revenue, and especially if you wanna go raise a seed series A, series B, you need that financial wizard fractional CFO. It is the most popular request that we hear, both from founders and from investors who have invested in a company early on, pre-seed seed, they're like, hey man, they need a grownup to build that series A model and help raise that money. that's one is making sure you have people smarter than you on the finance side. I'll be vulnerable with you too. I was a math major. I got a perfect score in every math standardized test I've ever taken. I went bankrupt at 30 because nobody taught me math with the dollar signs in front. I didn't take accounting in college. And so I learned a lot the hard way and there were some insecurities of me around financial models and working in my business now. I have a bookkeeper, have an accountant, have a tax guy, have a fractional CFO that we work with to help level those up. So I had to make decisions based on what the numbers are. and use it to, and most entrepreneurs are not risk averse, ideally they're risk aware. Like we will take risks where we should be aware that it's a risk, and using the numbers to inform that I think is important. So that is the whole bucket one of the pattern. The second bucket is how to transition out of founder led sales. You as the founder can get to one to three million with some charisma and a personal network and your origin story. Sorry, Barry, you can't get to 10 million. Somebody else has to come in and sell. And a lot of founders want to clone themselves. Why can't I find somebody just like me? Like, I always say this, because there's nobody just like you. Like, you started this company for a reason, but to bring another human who doesn't have that emotional attachment, who didn't start it because of their family thing, that whatever, you know, it is different. And to then ideally bring in a sales, fractional sales leader to build in BDRs and AEs, account executives on a whole sales team. Like, almost every founder is not great at building and running a sales organization within their company. You know, ⁓ at this point we have six people on my sales team. I have a fractional CRO. Like I drink my own Kool-Aid, I hire my folks and help me. Asad is my boss. Like when I go to the weekly sales pipeline meeting, he is holding me accountable. I have to have done my commits from last week. We're gonna go through the HubSpot pipeline, what's up with my deals, why did I not do some of the things. And like that has transformed our business in the past year, having that leadership. And then we have a full-time BDR. We have an accounting exec who will do the discovery calls and qualify. ⁓ and kind of that cadence of building a mature or at least like teenage, you know, maybe I'm mature, you don't have 20 reps or whatever, but like it's different than, well, I'm just gonna like go places and talk to people and sell and I got high energy and somebody's gonna buy, which does work for while.
speaker-0: ⁓ If you're EA, you're bookkeeper, operations manager, whoever is doing your books, if they're doing, entering everything every single time it comes in, paying things randomly, there's just no systems or process, you're wasting so much time, so much money, there needs to be a set day where you enter, a set day where you approve, a set day where you pay, all of these systems make it more efficient, make it more effective. create more clarity, create more insight, and quality control in how you're doing things. I know it seems so small, but you waste so much time when you do things ad hoc and reactionary. And the other thing I wanna ⁓ respond to was, you know, the CEO says, I wanna just clone myself. I hear that time and time again. I once was told, I don't want to know you just think, I want you to know you think like me. What you do when you have that mentality of, again, I think back to controlling ego, you have to learn to let go of, you are removing their special sauce, their secret sauce that makes them unique, makes them authentic. The reason why it's worked for you, because you did it in authentic way, then you're trying to make someone else act like you, which is removing their authenticity, which they're not going to have the same impact and results because they're not being authentic.
speaker-1: I love that, I got a couple thoughts there. One, leadership principle, people support what they help build. They don't support what they're told to do. And so creating space and oxygen and time to solicit feedback from people and I will often say, know, comments, questions, snide remarks, like, what part of this do you not understand? What part of your question did I not answer? What questions do you have instead of do you have questions? It just creates more space for people to speak up. You can't clone yourself, but if you are a starfish, you could like cut off some of those five limbs and let each to them go grow into their own little starfish and like they're gonna be uniquely themselves and maybe that's how you handle your operations and your marketing and your sales and your finance. Like I think that makes sense. I also love the pattern cadence monthly. Like the idea is like you should batch similar activities and like you know I have a 30 minute bi-weekly finance team meeting. That's when we do all the finance stuff. I don't have to deal with it in between and. You should also, as you're building your team, think about documenting the SOPs. like, Tina is my chief of staff. been with her for two and a half years. She accidentally was off for a week because of a blizzard. I took spring break for a week. We both worked on Monday, and now she's gone for three weeks to Italy. She's known all year she was taking a three week vacation. We didn't know about the week off, but we survived it because she'd been preparing and Mel, who's my EA, is now doing all of our finance accounts, receivables, accounts payables. And it's like well documented with loom videos and scribe SOPs and how to do QuickBooks and like a list of clients and who gets bills when and like typically everybody gets an invoice on the 20th that's due on the 1st. It's the 20th of every month it's due on the 1st. 20th, due on the like, we don't randomly send them out throughout the month, you know?
speaker-0: Yep. Yeah. mean, that's why things get missed, right? That's why payments get missed and invoices going out get missed. It's because when we do everything ad hoc, there's no system, there's no process and things fall through the crack. You know, another thing that you talked about there was, you know, creating that environment of people being able to speak up and, you know, leaders asking questions, being genuine. That's something, you know, I talk and write about a lot, you know, in there's Google did a study called Project Aristotle, where they're trying to define what made a team within Google successful. And when they came back was psychological safety, which is this notion that we build a culture where people feel free to speak up, speak out. I I look at it as, know, we live in DC or I live in DC metro area with the metro, you know, and, you know, the metro's slates slogans are, know, see something, say something, right? We got to create a. ⁓ culture in organizations that when someone sees something not working right, that there's a better way to do it, there's a problem happening, ⁓ that people feel safe to bring these ideas forward. I don't know how many times I've worked with an organization where the CEO uncovers some problem that they're so proud of, they go to the junior person who does it, and the person's like, yeah, I know. And what happens? The CEO gets mad at them for not bringing it up. I turn that around on the CEO. Why didn't you create the atmosphere and the mechanisms for that employee to speak up? That's the way to really innovate, grow and change every day, every week, every month by inviting your team to be along with it.
speaker-1: And one of the best leadership principles is that you praise publicly, you reprimand privately. Anything good that happens, give them a shout out in a staff meeting. Create a hashtag shout outs channel on Slack. like whenever somebody on the team does something related to a value, give them a shout out and encourage other people to model your behavior. You you as the leader need to model the behavior you want your team to have. I think that's really important. One other thing that I'll add to in terms of giving feedback is to, if you know somebody, that's nothing up, ⁓ hey John, do you have a quick minute for feedback? They have to say yes. The other person must opt in and say that they are in the mental, emotional, physical state to receive this, but if they just got a text, their kid is sick, they gotta go pick him up at school, like, nah man, now's not a good time. I'm stressed out, I already have cortisol in my body, I haven't done the breath work to like... Breathe in twice and then exhale to like flush the cortisol, reactivate the prefrontal cortex. You need them in that right state of mind. And I want to drop another wisdom nugget here. There's a great question that I learned from Genius Network last month. A guy, Michael Bernoff, who said, do you even know what the second biggest win is going to be by achieving this? Whatever the goal is the thing you're talking about and there's a few magical things in this question. The first thing is that he starts with, do you even know? And when you start with that, that activates the prefrontal cortex. People start to think. If you start a question with what or what's, there's a level of defensiveness. It's like, mom, like, you know, what's, what, what's in the kitchen sink? When you're like. What do you want? Do you even know? When you say what the second biggest win is, that implies that there's a first biggest win that's pretty clear, and it implies that they've accomplished it. And so you are creating the neural pathways, the circuit to a future state where you have already done this thing. And so what are the second, third, fourth order consequences? And it is a really powerful thing internally for goal setting and like being able to see not just this, but the next things. And it's also really powerful in sales ⁓ where you then have to have the answer of like, well, do you even know what the the second biggest win is by having a fractional CFO. It's not just that they're handling your QuickBooks, it's that you're able to confidently go to your investors, explain why you're making these decisions, and they're gonna know you're right, and they're gonna wanna give you more money, which allows you to have less stress and hire more people and go on the, boom, boom, boom, boom, it's these dominoes. So I wanted to slide that one in for the listeners.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think, there's all again, you and I approach this a little differently and provide different services, but we're both here to help people get clarity about the organizations, have a process and people they can trust and truly trust them stepping away. But also through this process, whether it's, know, strategic operations with me or fractional work with you, the goal is, is that these founders and CEOs know that things are being handled right, can trust that without micromanaging. the more you're in the weeds, the more your micromanaging is, can I go back to our very beginning of the conversation here, is the less you're working on the important stuff in your business, can move it forward. If you don't trust your people, you don't trust your process, then you gotta stop where you are, find out how to get there, and rebuild it.
speaker-1: And I'm gonna tie this back into the trust the process. What a great name. And every behavior that a human takes, it either builds trust or erodes trust. And when somebody erodes trust, it takes like five positive things to undo that one erosion. And we've found this over time with our fractionals that we now have a standard process where every fractional executive submits a weekly TPS report, which is both an office-based joke and a trust-building progress snapshot of, hey, here's what I did last week, here's what I'm doing this week. Here are the meetings. Hey client. Here's where I'm stuck I need you to do x y or z give me access to this and here's my upcoming schedule all of that is about communication because happiness equals reality minus expectations and if you Proactively set those expectations about what's going on. They're not wondering what's going back there You know, they're not gonna micromanage you and like most people really like autonomy and they don't like being micromanaged and the reason people get micromanaged is because they don't communicate well. don't manage up. They don't let them know what's going on. They show up to a weekly status meeting that they're supposed to run and be like, I don't know, boss, what do you want to talk about? Like, dude, that's your 30 to 60 minutes with the CEO? come in prepared, boom, boom, I did all the research, here are the decisions we have to make, A, B, or C, I recommend B, like, decide literally means to cut off. know, meetings are for decisions, that's part of my belief there. And again, it comes down to what that process and how are things communicated. And for the leaders in the room listening, if you have one-on-ones with your direct reports and you're setting the agenda every week, stop. Create a shared Google document. Anybody can add to whatever they want and tell them, hey, this is now your meeting to run. ⁓ And you'll be able to pretty quickly tell who are the A players and who are the B or the C players to kind of filter those out. And if you want to replace them with a fractional executive or we even do full-time recruiting and placement now as well, let us know. I'm happy to help.
speaker-0: Yeah, just one little comment that will wrap it up here is, you know, one little tweak that founders and CEOs can make in changing that perspective of creating that environment of psychological safety. Instead of saying, what are you doing? Flip that question to what are you seeing? that opens it up to a general perspective of, I wanna tap into your perspective and how this business is working, what's working, what's not working. I wanna tap into that instead of figuring out, you doing what I want you to do in a step-by-step order? Are you performing the way I want you to? Make it collaborative in the sense that we are in this together to constantly be improving and changing things. you cut me off there. I was gonna lead into Mike. I know you got some exciting things coming on, but go ahead and dive a little deeper about your guys' shift, not shift, but your add-on. on that you're not just doing fractional anymore, but actually doing full-time work. So talk a little more about that real quick.
speaker-1: Absolutely, so we've been doing fractional executive matchmaking for over five years and I'm all in this is the future of work. I've also realized that as companies are growing and scaling they also need full-time people and we built this network of relentlessly generous experts who can come in on a fractional basis one two three days a week. We also have a team of recruiters in-house now that can help hire full-time employees and we kind of have two paths that people can engage with us. The first path is going through our strategic clarity a matchmaking program. It's the same six week program that we do for the fractal side. Like the first two weeks of that, we're going to dive so deep into the business. We're going to do the diagnostic and like no other recruiter does that. Like we want to understand the whole business, the culture, what does success look like? How do you want to engage with people? We have our candidates also do like the Colby A assessment, which is a good personality match and how that lines up. And we'll have a leadership team do that as well to mesh them in. And so that's a $7,500 investment. It's a six week program and We'll start the interviews in there. If you're looking fractional, we can always get them hired within six weeks. It may take a little bit longer for the full time. And then, like a traditional executive search firm, they charge 20 to 35 % of the first year total comp. We come in at 22.5%. There's the bottom end of that. And the $7,500 is like a deposit for the first role that we place full time. So excited about that offering. It's a way to help more companies as they're growing and scaling. And then if that is not the bread and butter, We also just offer a la carte. We can unbundle all the recruiting HR stuff, 150 bucks an hour. Tell us what you need help with on a project basis. And yeah, we want to help people grow. We want founders to, again, focus on their zone of genius. And I don't know that I've a founder yet that like HR was their zone of genius. like that's, you got to do more of that as you grow for sure, but you don't have to do all of the paperwork and applicant tracking system stuff and all that jazz. So happy to help and be a resource if I can.
speaker-0: Yeah, Mike, it's been a wonderful conversation. Again, you even our conversation, it kind of exemplified the fact that like you can't talk about leadership without also touching operations and culture. You can't talk about culture without touching operations and leadership, right? All of these, all these elements are uniquely intertwined for organizations that really want to innovate, grow and scale. We're going to put, you know, your information in the show notes, but please tell everyone briefly, you know, where's the best place to go to learn more about Maloya Industries and get in touch with you guys.
speaker-1: Absolutely, so my email is mike at maloindustries.com, our website, maloindustries.com slash pod. It's a M-A-L-L-O-Y industries, I-N-D-U-S-T-R-I-S dot com. ⁓ Happy to connect on LinkedIn as well. ⁓ And yeah, I'm a survey leader, I'm here to help entrepreneurs flourish and we got a lot of resources on our website as well and our number one core value is relentlessly generous. So I tried to share some nuggets on the conversation today. ⁓ But feel free to reach out if you need a tool or template and do it yourself, happy to share that and just help you be successful as you build and grow not only your business but your life. We do all of this to then also go spend time with our family and kids and ⁓ not just work 90 hour weeks.
speaker-0: Yep, so for all the listeners, again, I have worked with Mike for a number of years now and I can attest that he and his team really do come at this with a servant's heart and truly are ⁓ here to help people and organizations grow. ⁓ so if you're on those crossroads of like, you know it's time to scale, time to gather the weeds, time to do everything, time to stop doing everything yourself, reach out to Mike. you know, go through his process and dive in. So Mike, I want to thank you again for the time. It's been a great episode of Trust the Process where we really covered all these things. And more and more I get into these shows. The other part that we... can't help but bring up is the mindfulness stuff. Because it's so important as leaders in weathering the storms of the ups and downs of entrepreneurship and leadership and everything is finding those moments of clarity and centeredness, centeredness, is that word? Yeah. In your breath and how you show up for yourself every day, which automatically dictates how you show up for your company and for your employees. So Mike, thank you for being a part of this.
speaker-1: Last thought so I think I have like a 800 day meditation streak at this point I want to make a plug for there's a breath work meditation app called open I'll send you a link for like that. I don't mean I was like a 30 day free trial people can give it a shot I learned it from another entrepreneur like a month ago, and I've been doing a weekly breath mastery 45 minute session on Mondays for like three years now changed my life like I was this hippies stuff like guys It's good. You don't do 45 minutes You can do the five minute the three minute eat and even just the like inhale through your nose and then a second snort that second one flushes the cortisol reactivates it lets you show up centered it really makes a difference the other thing is like just move your body if you're feeling stressed and like hunched over like strap down and do like 11 push-ups and what okay I feel different like you feel different because you may not always be exactly better but it's definitely different and you're recognizing that I need to move my body to move my state to get out of some of those death spirals we might get caught in.
speaker-0: Yeah, and I've actually taken my meditation breathing to actually going to like a spiritual yoga, like not like a soccer mom yoga studio, but like, like in a commune, like a house with like 18 rooms where people live there. Like I'm going there and doing some meditation yoga and breath work in person because as a Westerner, I don't breathe well from my belly and you know, and all that type of stuff. And for all you listeners out there who don't know we're talking about look into this a little bit. It truly the breath work in just sitting yourself can can truly make a difference in how you show up every single day. But we've run out of time. So Mike, we could go on for hours about this, but thank you very much for being a part of this show and we'll have you back again and we can continue the conversation. Thanks lot, Mike.
speaker-1: Sounds good, brother. Thanks, John.
