How to Build a Team of All A-Players with Rick Crossland

Introduction and the busy habit problem

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken, Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:34Bill Gallagher: Music lets me know it's time to go again. This time, we're asking the question, what if every single seat in your company was filled with A player people who outperform typical folks in your industry by three to ten times and lift the whole team with them? Like, what if we had more of that? I know I've had some moments where I experienced that in my own companies and with my client companies. Our guest today says that's not a fantasy, but it's a system that you can apply in your business. We're going to talk all about how to develop a playbook to build a team of all A players, all A player workforce, and enjoy the things that follow.

01:17Bill Gallagher: Hey everybody, my name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. Show comes to you every week, tips, things like that, ideas, stories to make your company better, to enjoy the growth process, to get there and not hate yourself in your life and the business you spawned in the meantime. So all that and more. I think we're approaching six hundred fifty shows now at scalingcoach.com. So there's a few about almost every topic, all kinds of amazing guests and that kind of thing. And so find all that and more at scalingcoach.com or wherever you're getting this right now. So Apple Podcasts, probably number one, Spotify, maybe number two, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, etcetera, wherever you're getting it, like, subscribe, turn on notifications, do all that business. Or go to scalingcoach.com and then you'll get all that back catalog searchable, access to my AI, some other downloads, things like that. And you can sign up to join us for one of our weekly workshops where I get you started in this world of Scaling Up. I actually do some work with you live online, but live with me directly and some of our other folks.

02:36Bill Gallagher: All right. So Rick Crossland is an internationally known A player talent builder. He's an authority in the whole space. He's worked with and been published and etcetera in places like Inc., Entrepreneur, Fortune, recruiter.com. He's a certified coach in our world. He's one of my peers. He's very accomplished with a particular focus on the people side, the A player side. He spent nearly forty years helping build top performing teams at Johnson & Johnson, Zeneca, Planters, Lifesavers, Ford Motor Company, and on and on before going on his own to build A Player Advantage, his business around the whole thing. And he's written a book, The A Player, Definitive Playbook and Guide for Employees and Leaders Who Want to Play and Perform at the Highest Level. His mission is to have all A players at every team, right? It's like his impossible quest, right? He'll tilt at those windmills till the end of his life and do amazing work in the process. Welcome to the show, Rick.

03:33Rick Crossland: Hey, thanks, Bill. It's a real pleasure.

03:44Bill Gallagher: Well, it's nice to get you finally on. We've talked about doing a show forever and you just get busy, I was saying before we started recording. I've smiled and talked to you and shook your hand and said, yeah, should do a show on that. Then just forget about it. But then one of our other fellow coach friends, Jonathan, was like, oh yeah, Rick was just here and was talking to the group and did an amazing conversation about A players. I'm like, oh, yeah, we should finally do that. And so we got you on as quick as we could, only a few days later. So I'm glad I finally remembered to do it.

04:20Rick Crossland: That's great. Same here. I was like, actually reach out to Bill. We've been talking about doing the show, so it's great. Finally came together.

04:26Bill Gallagher: All right. To my other fellow coaches who've got great stories, systems, strengths, things like that, you should send me a note because I probably would love to do it. I just neither of us is thinking about it, making it urgent. So make it urgent. All right. Let's get into the A player picture. So if you were building a crew to go on a three year round the world sailing expedition, but you knew that you only had so many beds on this boat and the stakes were high and there would be not a lot of rest, reprieve, pit stops, that kind of thing along the way. What's the trait that you'd screen for? Who would you recruit?

05:06Rick Crossland: Yeah, I'm glad you asked, Bill, because it goes right to the heart of A player DNA. We describe that by the acronym CART, coachability, accountability, results, and tenacity. So I love your question. I'm a sailor actually, in Sydney, I chartered a boat and skippered it. Say you had eight berths on that boat, right? You had fewer or better people, maybe you want to go with six or seven sailors as opposed to using every single berth. So one of the concepts with A players is fewer, better people, that talent density. Coachability, right? So you're going to have to learn stuff. We need people who are learning. I really, back to my magic wand, I love that quest. I actually want to build, and maybe something you and I could do together, Bill, is build a true serum, an assessment around coachability. I have one thing to look for, give me a smart person who's coachable, we can do the world.

What if 90 percent were A players

06:03Bill Gallagher: So when I look for new clients, I look for three things, right? I look for ambition. If you don't really want to grow your company a lot, then you don't need a coach, at least not me as a coach, right? You need a different kind of coach. Maybe you just want to get out of running your business. I know a whole other coaching program that works for that. And they do that all day long. But if you really want to grow, you're like, I want to be number one in the world. I love playing with that. I want to be a billion dollar business. I love playing that game. That's for me, right? So the first thing I look for is this ambition, something that you think is important enough or you're driven enough to actually push and make a big deal out of it. The second thing though is coachability. And this one, I don't have any really great way. I ask some questions, I probe, I push back, I listen for it. I kind of trust my instincts. And I still, even after, I don't know, I've been coaching full time for thirteen years, I still don't get it every time. Like I still miss people who say, yeah, I'm super coachable. And then we get into it and I'm like, okay, why don't you try this now? And they're like, yeah, I don't really want to do that. Okay.

07:11Rick Crossland: One of the things I found that I do with my clients, it's my eighteenth year in business, is that I play ethical best ball. It's in my book, The A Player. I play best ball. What's the best at this? There's no excellence in average, right? So you look for the best. So I'm like, Hey, be like Sean. Sean asked me, Rick, how do I approach this situation? So probably like you, Bill, my best clients are like, how do I approach this? Right? You give people good tools, and they just work those tools, concepts, systems, processes. So Coach Bill, what's missing? Right? That next thing, like, oh, give me some feedback on that.

07:40Bill Gallagher: I remember when I wanted to go up, I wanted to be a coach, wanted to do other things in life. I sought out coaches. I went looking for, I'm like, who could teach me? Who could guide me? And I'm like, hey, I want to, I remember one time I had a coach, a business coach some years ago. I'm like, listen, this is an intense period right now. I want to call you every day. And she's like, well, I don't want to talk to you every day.

08:09Rick Crossland: It's interesting. Professionals, Verne says all the time, professionals do it all. Amateurs only do the fun bits. And who likes practice? Back to coachability, pro athletes. You watch the NBA early, the John Wooden tying the shoelaces. The better you are, the more you like practice. Who doesn't like practice? Kids playing soccer on a 90 degree day, they don't like practice, but pros like practice, so coachability. Accountability, stand up, face the music, know your numbers. As we look at organizations, accountability is one of those high holies that always comes up. Results, right? Results are the name of the game. The ability to deliver, to back with accountability, to not squirrel out of something. If you look at A players and you look at our Scaling Up methodology, who can build a great strategy and who can execute? That top quadrant, great strategy, a better mousetrap, and brilliantly executed. That's the name called results. And it's never easy, right? Tenacity. And I'm a tennis player, and I actually updated the chart watching Roland Garros where that's right on the side. Victory belongs to the most tenacious. And that's a combination of get after it as well as resourcefulness and being able to tough through bad times. So yeah, on that sailing journey, I'll take six A players, keep two bunks open, we'll have more food to go around, and we'll have deeper relationships because we won't have to worry about those other two people.

09:35Bill Gallagher: You know, it's funny. I think it's mission dependent. Right? Like, so you think about the kind of journey and how many people you want and what caliber and your budget and all that kind of thing. On a certain kind of thing, you like races, weekly races in your nearby lake or bay or whatever, you want some rail meat, right? This is weight that you can hang off the side of the boat to keep the boat more straight up and down and give better performance for the sails to counterbalance the wind, right? But on your long journey, you don't want like dumb talent or like, it's all situational in that regard. When you think about the coachability business, going back to that, how do you test for that? I haven't thought about it as you say it, but I'm curious.

How to test for real coachability

10:29Rick Crossland: I'd like to get a better truth serum on it. I give them examples when I'm testing. The biggest thing, and we might touch on Topgrading recruiting or Topgrading interviewing, what you're trying to do is get it right. And the best thing are similar results in a situation. So I'll be asking, when have you been coachable? I go to sports a lot. I'd really like to hit over 100 mile an hour tennis serve. I have a little way to go. But that person who enjoys the process of the practice, right? Who can take getting their baby called ugly a little bit and also like, wow, Rick, that looked really good on that serve. You know what I mean? It's a process. And if you make that fun, but you still have to go out on hot days or windy days when it's not as fun and improve. So it's that coachability. So I'm going to ask them, I ask people what sports they play or if they're not a sporting person, are they big into music? Do they really work on their guitar? Something that takes practice. I'm looking for those analogs and try to apply them over to business.

11:29Bill Gallagher: Yeah. I think that the challenge that often comes up is they're like, right? And so they'll say something like that. So I have like this generic questioning approach I use around values. And I think it probably works well for coachability. So I might ask like I would with values. All right, so we value coachability around here. What does that word mean to you? Like define coachability for me. And then I'll let them answer that. And then I'll think about what they say. And then I'll ask, tell me about a time in your life where you were coachable. And give me a story from your real life. Like, think about it for a second. And then I'll probably ask them one or two more examples, right? Not they can come up with one story, but push them a little bit to see a pattern of coachability in different domains or realms of life. Right? So interesting.

12:24Rick Crossland: On that, when we do interviewing Topgrading, it breaks down job by job. I'm talking about a candidate here, not coaching prospects. And so we're asking for, what did you do? And we're looking for that as close as possible to what we're looking for. Right? It's all factual. I'll hit like a buzzer if someone just does a hypothetical. Here's an interesting point to your question. If I say, when were you last coachable? And our candidate could be a coaching prospect, a client, or could be a candidate to our business. If they say yesterday, the recency, it could be a shorter answer, but the recency of that is more telling than somebody, well, here's my philosophy on coachability because that can actually be made up.

13:06Bill Gallagher: Yeah. A lot of people seem to have philosophies or beliefs that they don't actually practice.

13:10Rick Crossland: Correct. Exactly. And, you know, it's like, and that's why we embed core values into a Topgrading interview. We want to hide them in there because everybody has an orphanage in Costa Rica otherwise.

13:21Bill Gallagher: Right. They have these laudable aspirational things. So let's talk about some of this in practice and reality with some of your companies. You had some epiphany working with a sports team or with a group and thinking about sports teams. Tell us that story.

Why sports teams outperform family businesses

13:44Rick Crossland: Yeah. It's interesting. I've just finished No Rules Rules, the Netflix story. And they were talking about a lot of businesses and it's interesting because a lot of businesses are family businesses, so there was this model of the family business. Well, actually a lot of families are dysfunctional, first of all. You look at sports. You look at sports. Sports run really well. Like, the high school or probably the middle school soccer team or baseball team is probably better run than most businesses because there's rules. There's playbooks. There's ways to do things. So yeah, a long time ago and our colleague Jack Daly, you know, is of same belief. So we run businesses to playbooks. We make playbooks. It's interesting. I get a lot of pushback. Well, playbooks aren't creative. Well, writing's one of the most creative things you could do. You can video the playbooks as well, also creative. And we're looking for people to really build that base of knowledge. Here's the way we do it at this company. And when you go for evaluation, I know Bill, you and I get a lot of clients over a 6x multiple evaluation. You want to have all these playbooks lined up in the back that only once you're in due diligence, they get to see and open up. But like, here's the way we recruit. Here's the way we interview. Here's the way we develop people. Right? All these how-to systems. And what I found back to coachability, I ask young people all the time, do you want to be right or do you want to be successful? Now the ones I hire want to be successful and not right. And like, you know, here's our playbook. And back to coachability, if someone's like, this is a great playbook, mister, you know you're onto something, and we ask them to run our plays, and then the creativity comes from making the plays better. So yeah, that's a lot on the sports team, the accountability, the discipline. You and I could go all day long. A coach business is better run. It runs like a Swiss watch. You know? And if a client kind of retracts from that, they can't put the toothpaste back in the tube because we provide a discipline that a lot of times they're unwilling to do.

15:40Bill Gallagher: You know, it's interesting, the sports versus family kind of thing. We encounter a lot of companies who like want to create

15:48Bill Gallagher: Relatable environment. They're like, okay, it's going to be like a family. Except, you know, we tolerate a lot of stuff in our families that you don't want to tolerate in your business, right? And you can't fire your sibling really, a lot of times. And you end up like in family business, they own some of the company and things like that. So it's not a great… A sports team driven on merit and performance is a whole different environment, right? And you could still have fun. You could still be collegial. You could still have a great interaction. In fact, the best teams really gel, but they also push each other to perform at high levels, not tolerate that drunk uncle.

16:30Rick Crossland: Exactly. And there are a lot of drunk uncles and cousins who come in and pick up paychecks. Like, what are these people doing? It demoralizes the teams, by the way, right? The real people there making it happen get demoralized by those C players. And I mentioned, Bill, you mentioned sports team. There's also a piece on that that the manager or the coach has the obligation, or the CEO, to put the best player in that position. That's the difference with sports teams. And we see it in middle school and high school. They're playing the best players. And even the parents understand that. Like, put my kid in. Well, your kid, if they're a second or third stringer, will get their time, and maybe they're an underclassman, so they're an A potential. They'll get their playing time, but usually when the lead's there and the win's already established. So any manager, and if you knew there were better talent available and you didn't get them, they get fired. It's as simple as that. Most CEOs aren't that way. And it's because we care too much about people's outside life. The best companies, it's like we pay people well, we care about what we do here. Obviously care about them as human beings, but we don't micromanage their outside lives. That's up to them.

17:40Bill Gallagher: That's an interesting and fine balance, right? If you don't know anything about your people, the people on your team as a leader, then you don't have a very deep relationship. So you need to know something about them to be related, to get them as humans, to have effective communication. But if you fixate on them, like it's not your job to fix their marriage or their family situation or whatever they're dealing with. But to be aware of it, sensitive to it. What are they afraid of? What are they really hungry for? Because when you can connect what they want in the larger sense personally to what's happening at work, and you can relate to them as a whole human, you can pull a greater level of performance out of them, right?

18:29Rick Crossland: Well said, Bill. Well said.

Moving from 30 to 93 percent A players

18:32Bill Gallagher: So you worked with a company. What kind of company was it? I think twenty to twenty-three, where you moved from a typical team to an all A player team and they tripled their revenue. What kind of business was that? Tell us about that journey.

18:46Rick Crossland: Yeah, I'm going to leave it because we're actually going to do an exit event here, but they're a contractor for the Department of Defense. And I'm going to use this example, and we have, of course, many others. The reason I'm going to use this one is they have software engineers and high-end electrical engineers. And in many cases, it's just get me bodies, right? I'm talking like the best of the best, like really, really hard people to find. They do have a great culture. They started out kind of 70s, mid-80s in terms of percent A players. By the way, most prospects that I see when they talk to me about a coaching engagement, like, oh, people, I have a ton of A players, they have 30%. In our world, we're more in the 70, 80, 90% range. But anyway, we improved that business to 93% A players. I think you're going to talk about the A Player Talent Analyzer, our new Scaling Up tools during this broadcast. And a precursor to that, so we always measure the percent A's. By the way, definition, A player: enthusiastically rehire, top 10% of the industry for the salary that you have available, and they model your core values and beliefs. So these are really, really good people. So that's your A player. So we look at the percentage of A's. An A potential is an up-and-comer. By the way, there's a due date on the A potential. You can't be a permanent A potential. That's nine months to achieve A player status. You can't go from B to A potential, by the way. I've had clients try to do that. It's impossible. It's like your rookie season. So A potentials and A's, we count as A players, because the thing with an A potential, you're really happy with the value for money as you're developing that person with the systems and playbooks that I mentioned earlier. Then it's kind of like everybody else. Like, I really don't care what your mix of B's and C's are. The issue is non-A players because you can't win the Kentucky Derby with a donkey. So, and I do want to make one point because I do get…

20:48Bill Gallagher: Hang on. That's such a brilliant little nugget, right? And you just threw it away, right? You can't win the Kentucky Derby with a donkey. A donkey has a role. A donkey has a place. A beater bicycle has a place, right? The donkey doesn't belong in a premier horse race and your beater bike doesn't belong in the Tour de France, right? Your happy-day sailor doesn't belong in the America's Cup. Like there's a place for every system, company, and player as well, right? Don't put your donkey in the Kentucky Derby, but there's a role for the donkey.

21:25Rick Crossland: And thanks for recovering that point. Yeah. If you and I are going to go hike the Grand Canyon, I'm sure we both, we want donkeys, right? That is the A player for the journey down through the Grand Canyon and back up.

21:38Bill Gallagher: That's a brilliant point. There's a place for these people, right? And when you get rid of somebody because you don't have that place on your team in this particular company or at this time, it's great to know that there is a place for them and that they're never going to be awesome in your environment, right? That ought to help you to let people go with some grace.

22:02Rick Crossland: Exactly. And you're actually holding them back. You're putting your company at risk. Any client that I've had over the years, and think of the executive team, there's usually a B player or two that's holding the CEO back on the team. That's something I learned from our colleague Howard Shore is to find out who those B's are sooner than later. So that's one of the first things, who might be holding you back? And that's sometimes tough, but I ask that privately when we get started. And that's where I need to put the focus because it's marketing, sales, operation. There's some killer out there that's going to get your business. And if you're not shipping product, if you're shipping bad quality, that is going to kill you in the long run. You got to out those B players.

22:43Bill Gallagher: Yeah, it's really useful.

22:45Rick Crossland: You guys do something else on this. Everybody deserves to be an A player somewhere, right? It just might not be with you. And to your point, you're holding them back. They go in every day. It's a struggle bus. And I run into these people in the marketplace. You know, I see them at the Ohio State Fair. I'll see them in the mall. And they're actually, when we've let them go, no one's ever taken an outright shot at me. Like, well, you guys were a little intense there, but they're like, Rick, I'm happy. I found something really good for me. And I think that's the humanity of all this. You know? Let them free to be spectacular elsewhere.

23:16Bill Gallagher: Yeah, hanging on. And if you are hanging on to people out of pity, then you are really limiting them and really holding them back in every sense mentally. So I'm not sure if you finished that story then.

23:29Rick Crossland: You worked with the company and you started out with… Oh, DoD company. Yeah, back to the story. We moved that, and one of the secrets is you should get a great series of internal recruiters who are going and… You're in wine country, Bill. Great wine starts with great grapes, right? And the ability to look for that right talent. I have a new slide in my deck. A bonobo and a chimpanzee look very similar, but they're very different animals, right? The bonobo has a totally different social structure. They look similar to the outside world. Most people can't see the difference. You want your recruiter that good at A Player talent. A lot of people say, oh, you can make a B into an A through Topgrading. No, you can't. It's that raw stock. And what we're doing with the Topgrading interview is validating. So the business I'm describing, one of their key measures, and I hear this time and time again, Rick, thank you for bringing the A Player to us. It's had a profound impact on our business. And that's really what we use as the lead metric is the percent of A Players on the team. And that is a metric you need to look at all the time. And sometimes going down is actually good because maybe your definition softened a little bit, right? So tighten it up, then improving it to a better spot is actually a good outcome. So yeah, that client, I think you were talking in the notes at $43 million. They're actually approaching $100 million now, still over 90% A Players. I'm going to see them Friday, and they're going to have a very good event, probably a $250 million and probably a 20x multiple.

25:02Bill Gallagher: It's really great. People don't realize that. You need to have a company that could do it, right? There needs to be a market opportunity. You need to have some differentiation. But so much can come from applying some of these ideas. One of our four pillars is the right people. And A Players are situational. What you need for that company is not what you need for every other company. I remember once having a realizing that I had an A Player team, virtually all A Players. And the second thought that I had about it is there's not a person here who went to an Ivy League school, right? It's got nothing to do with a stereotype of a blue chip employee, of some impeccable resume or whatever. They were situationally the perfect people for the job at the time and really engaged and, like, enmeshing well as a team and supporting and trusting each other, right? The wholeness wasn't just about individual A Players. It was about the whole team working together as a team of As, trusting each other and communicating and that kind of thing.

26:10Rick Crossland: And Bill, I know what you're doing behind the scenes is you were specifying, we call it an A Player Agreement, which shows somebody how to get an A in a position, right? What do I need? And going out and finding that. And here's the issue, and it's proven out in the book. I'm sure you've read First Break All the Rules. The manager's the culprit. The manager wants to rubber stamp it. I know we're both big AI users. We use it ethically. But like a lot of this stuff, people are now, and please don't do this, they're doing performance reviews in AI. But if you ask somebody what they should be doing, the manager needs to know the job of the people. I really like professional tennis. I go watch all the practice behind the scenes. And it's amazing. The player could be any of the coaches, right? They're younger, they're more fit, but the coach sees what the player can't. And they are helping with the design of the game, the strategy. You know, Stefanos Tsitsipas, I was there, and his coach Mark was working on his net game, his volley game, and that really improved at the time for Stefanos. Mark saw that. He brought that to the game. So knowing what you want, specifying it, unfortunately, too many managers can't do that, and they can't coach their people to systems and playbooks.

AI enhances people systems but cannot replace judgment

27:23Bill Gallagher: You know, it's interesting. You touched on AI. Let's talk about AI for a second because a lot of people are thinking about replacing people with AI. And I think at this stage, as we talk today, that's a profound mistake. And people are, you know, you might tune out right now, but hang on.

27:43Rick Crossland: I think they're all still on. I think they're all still on.

27:48Bill Gallagher: AI is a powerful tool, right? It's just not a replacement for anybody at this point. So if you were to give away your people selection to AI or your interaction or your communication or your sales or your like whatever to AI, give it away, right? You'd be making a profound mistake. But if you used AI at every step of your people, of your strategy development, of refinement, of running your sales and marketing engines. If you were to use AI at every step of that, you'd be brilliant, right? You'd be smart. You'd be ahead of the rest because you'd be adopting faster, but it is not yet ready to take over everything. It's in the loop, not the whole loop, right?

28:27Rick Crossland: Absolutely. We don't believe in job descriptions or actually people descriptions, but I know people are doing those in AI, right? And to the point we're both making is somebody, a human being with real intelligence, I call it RI, thinking about what they need. Then you can use AI to kind of enhance that, get some great insights. That's how we use it. When we do selection of executives, we're using AI in the background. What companies could we target? It's a calculator, right? It's really good for amassing data sets for us, but we need to know. I play with a Roger Federer tennis racket. Just because I do doesn't mean I hit it like Roger. You know what I mean? So you still really need to think through these things. So that's a fear that I have with people systems because coaching people and getting performance from them is still the job of human beings. We can use AI in the background to help us research, help us think about. I have the Rick bot. It's got all my content. It gives me some good insights so I can go faster, but I'm still curating everything. And that's a big thing. Managers do not know the job of their people. So that's a good way to test this in the age of AI because it is exciting. It gets better every day. But I call people who just put it…

29:42Bill Gallagher: The use cases expand every day, right? You want to go find some people. You could use different AI tools to go out and find potential candidates. You want to screen, let's say you just did a great job marketing a job and you have now 1,300 applicants. And you're smart, and you're using an applicant tracking system, and you're scoring and evaluating and things like that. But you could add AI to do some resume reading. You could add AI to help you prepare some things to poke at in their background that you didn't think to ask in your quick read of things. All of those steps along the way you could use some AI for, just don't try to give it all away.

30:25Rick Crossland: Right. And if I could, Bill, I'd like to maybe push back on the example you gave. So we have a recruiting division as well, right? When we're going after an executive and we do mid-market through C-suite, what we do with AI is who does this work, right? That Department of Defense, who are the defense contractors in this geography?

30:44Rick Crossland: AI returns that quickly, right, with some pretty good intel in there. What we want to do is only serve up, we call it rifle shot recruiting. We are looking, we're like Yiddish matchmakers, right? We are going for a specific… Our clients joke that we get it down to the hair color. And when we serve up those resumes, how did you know? This is a really curated profile, spot on what I'm looking for. So we use AI in the background, but then we have humans saying, oh, that's a good looking company, a similar revenue size. Oh, they're a little bit bigger, perfect. They use the same software, perfect. And then we are rifle shying that person with a very custom message. It's like, How'd you know I existed? Because we did the AI for our homework, but a real life human being was doing the matchmaking. So that's what I'd recommend. Anybody you're bringing in should be a semi finalist for the position. You don't need hundreds of people. You can do this with six to eight great candidates.

31:40Bill Gallagher: Yeah. Getting it down, finding them and honing in on it, right? Refining that thoughtfully is what I hear from you. About Heritage Hill, what happened there, your talent analyzer that you were just referencing.

The A Player Talent Analyzer and monthly tracking

31:58Rick Crossland: Yeah, it's actually going to be a new article. Actually, when I'm done with this, I'm going to finish it for Verne. So Heritage Hill, there's an article on scaleup.com, Heritage Hill Capital Partners. They do multifamily real estate. If you got $250,000 or more and want a good place to get a 20% return, check those guys out. Sean Blythe, YPO member, really a star client. He's one of those guys that, Rick, how do I approach this? Real hard driver. They had 66%… Actually, check that. 68% A players back in 2022 when Sean engaged us. It was 28 people at the time. Now there are over 43 people. The article says 43 and went up to 88% A players. So in that time, revenue went from two years, $20,000,000 to $27,000,000. And a point you touched on earlier, Bill, which is important to the CEOs listening, is how much happier he is with his team. Like, all the goop, all the stress. I mean, obviously, business can always be stressful, but all that has gone away, and he's never been happier with his team. Right? It's now a joyful business to be in. He's happier. The team's happier. I coach four executives on that team, and they touch base with me. And they all really like each other. Right? Because everybody loves to work with an A player, right? Nobody likes to work with a B player or a C player. Everybody likes to work with the As. The Bs sit there going, well, this guy's going to do all the work for me. But A players don't like working with Bs and Cs. So anyway, they increase the percentage. The new talent analyzer, the reason that came around is, again, for the listeners out there, measure the percentage. So the A player talent analyzer automatically, you need to broker these discussions with your team and say, okay, where do we think Josette is? Okay, they're lobbying for an A. I don't believe Josette's an A. I believe Josette's a B. Let's put it in. And the numbers change dynamically, the colors change so we can get an accurate number. I want to talk about coaching people. Once you have your team, the best thing you could do, and what we like to do is coach a B to an A. That's our favorite thing to do. That works about 50% of the time. Some Bs really don't want to be As in that organization. So the best thing you do at that point is the quantity and quality of coaching, which we measure in our IT solutions, right? With our coaching platforms, I know you use those as well, Bill. So we're measuring, okay, you had the session, we can open up the session, see what the coaching was about. Because how do you know if coaching works? The results improve, right? Both the bottom line and also the leadership competencies. So that's why these numbers are fluent. That's why we built the analyzer. I think it's, of all the systems out there, Bill, I think this is the best tool. And we also have what we call the personal performance promise notes, which is developmental plan. It's all on one sheet of paper. So you can really get at a snapshot, literally on an eight by eleven, eight and a half by 11, exactly where your team stands and what should be happening. And to the point about following up, are the managers doing the coaching? And we recommend that you pivot away from HR to a talent coach, which Heritage Hill's done. And that talent coach is in charge of, she's like special forces to make sure the coaching's being done. So she's a resource to get better coaching throughout the organization. And then in addition to coaching, we also have the recruiting arm, and the team knows we can find better. So we have a credible threat, if you will, that we're going to find better. And so that business, some innovative things. You mentioned strategy and differentiation. You have to differentiate your recruiting techniques. They do guerrilla recruiting where they go out. They're multifamily real estate. So they go and they recruit from hotels, hospitality, retail, and they have a developmental track and they've grown these young A potentials all the way to property managers and senior property managers. So there's some great stories about growing people that were A potentials who, they have a better deal, they have a differentiated, they're going out and touching people, either through big data tools, LinkedIn Recruiter. In the latest iteration, they're just going out in the marketplace and meeting the best of the best, the best servers, the best managers, best front desk people. And, you know, they're doing something their competition isn't, and it's made a world of difference. So I'm actually going through their quarterly plan on Thursday. Really looking forward to seeing that team. And it's a bunch of A players, so they're a joy to coach.

36:31Bill Gallagher: You know, you mentioned that coaching B players to A players is a thing we love to do and we should do, but it only works 50% of the time. And I don't have any hard data, but I would say that's pretty consistent with my experience. And I heard a funny joke, which will help make it. Yeah. How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?

36:53Rick Crossland: Oh, man, I don't know this one.

36:57Bill Gallagher: Well, it takes just one, but the light bulb really, really has to want to change.

37:06Rick Crossland: Oh, got it. Nice.

37:10Bill Gallagher: Yeah. And I think that a lot of people need coaching, could use some coaching, but I think an awful lot of people really don't want to be coached. And so we say, Oh, well, you've got potential. I just want to give you some coaching. And you're like, Yeah, don't coach me. And that person is not really A potential. They're a solid B and they're not interested in changing to another environment in that environment, in that job, at that moment. They're not open to it for whatever… And like the saying, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. There's a lot of people like you could see, might even say it at a surface level, Oh yeah, I want to get better at my job. But in reality, I'm comfortable. I just want to keep doing the same thing I'm always doing. And you will see that very regularly. I often get asked to coach a top person on a team that is going through some issues, grappling with something. And I find at least half of them aren't really interested in the coaching. They don't show up. They show up late. They don't do the work. They don't do any deep introspection. Like, they're just like, I'm here because my boss said I need to be here. Right?

38:14Rick Crossland: Well, Bill, in the appendix of my coaching agreements, I have here's what an A player looks like, a B and a C in terms of coaching and showing up. I think it's in my book as well. You're right. The B players who want to be C players, they'll blow off coaching. They think they know more.

38:29Rick Crossland: I've actually had some people, executives, who at first did not like coaching, didn't understand it, who are now big-time fans. There's one at Heritage Hill. He's a great young man. He did not like coaching, and he just kind of got into it, and his whole demeanor changed, and his stock went up. Everybody loves this guy, and he's one of my favorite clients now. So yeah, I do get some pushback. I bear with him. But a couple things on that is managers are not taught how to be great coaches. So coaching with any organization, we can help at the top and coach the top team. We want to deploy that coaching down through and get a culture of coaching. And that's where you can get results. And you know right away or very quickly if someone's not going to take the bait. To your point, there's an adage: the people will change or the people will change.

39:23Bill Gallagher: Oh, there's some popular event references going on right now that I'd love to make there, but I'm just going to resist that because, okay, all right, wrong direction. But yeah, inevitably people are going to change, right? Businesses will come and go. People will work out for a while. There's a player who worked at one of my companies some years ago, and I'm still in touch with them to this day. I think very fondly of them. I recognize them. They know they're an A player. I know they're an A player, right? Like, it's a long time. And yet, after some years working in business, it was time for them to move on. It just, you know, it was tough.

40:04Rick Crossland: Exactly. Well, the other thing with doing the A Player Analyzer, we recommend monthly, is somebody might have a tough quarter. Right? I'm sure you and I've had tough quarters. Right? It's not a permanent piece. And, you know, you might just be on the struggle bus for a quarter. We have, you know, the rules change. You have to figure out a new way to go to market, a new way to adapt. Or sometimes it takes a while for the flywheel to kick in on a good initiative. All of a sudden it kicks in and you look like a hero. Right? But it might have been a little bit of a struggle. So you're looking at both the effort, and obviously results are the name of the game, back to the cart analogy, where ultimately the results have to be there. But sometimes there's a long effort before those results, you know, what is it, the ten thousand hour overnight successes.

Coaching only works when the person wants it

40:53Bill Gallagher: Maybe, let me throw you one and see if you can answer this serve. All right. Maybe, and keep this on anonymous, a company that you just couldn't help and they just refused to do it. You have any bad examples that you could share anonymously?

41:17Rick Crossland: Yeah, I had one. This is funny. I like we can have fun, Bill. So she said, 'I'm going to swipe right on you, Rick Crossland.' I think she liked me. And just really, in fact, I know you know this person, didn't want the coaching, right? It was a know-it-all. Occasionally, people just think it's voodoo magic. And she had had a B player underperformer. She had a market expansion in mind that when we actually went to plan it, 'Oh, I could do that. It's not even worth writing down.' She still hasn't done it. So yeah, that one did not end pretty, but there's only a few that don't. I will say, I've had some very successful clients, maybe they go five or six years with the program, Scaling Up program. Some people are like, 'Let's try to do it ourselves.' And what I advise people, if it's running well, keep it running. Because once the toothpaste is out of tube, they really can't get the discipline back. And I just heard from one of those clients that they did have a setback because an A player that we had placed, and he had done remarkably well, he had been like going. We touched base with A players, and he'd given me abreast of that. So most of them turn out great. That one situation was only, I don't know, six months or something. Really didn't want to do it, didn't want to upgrade any person. I think she wanted to complain. And I don't know, maybe she had other designs for me as well because with the swipe right. But that's one that comes to mind. Fortunately, I don't have a lot of those, though.

43:00Bill Gallagher: I would say that, well, I've worked with so many companies over the years. There's definitely quite a few who think they want something. They're like, 'Oh, I read the book or my friend in YPO suggested this or whatever.' And then they're like, 'I want those results, but I don't want to do that work.' Whatever it is, people or strategy or whatever. It's like they want the results, but they don't want to like, 'Oh, my team doesn't like the daily huddles or oh, we don't really want to use a job scorecard because we have this other thing.' Okay.

43:33Rick Crossland: Keep at it. I find my new thing, Bill, I know you love music, is high fidelity. So I am preaching that Australia presentation. Maybe we could do something together on that. But I was on stage, a YPO group had invited me back after thirty months. And it's an Australian group, and they are very literal on systems. These guys had run it. I had someone grab me at the Qantas lounge and said, 'We implemented A Player thirty months ago. It's gone marvelously.' There were seventy-eight million at the time. Now they're four hundred and seven million. And so the chairman grabs me in the Qantas lounge, right? They intercepted me when I got out of the gate and they had a two-page, they want a debrief and coaching on it. And I gave them some things and they were really grateful on that. High fidelity, they didn't muck with the system. I was part of a different coaching franchise years ago, and it's like, don't mutilate the system. Everybody thinks they're innovating, right? It at first, high fidelity. Then if you know what you're doing, soup it up. Right? But don't try to soup it up because you don't know the basis of design. Use the tools, run them, do your daily huddles, run the system as is. Three years in at record profitability, keep going, then we can get a little bit exotic. And I like soup and stuff up too, but you got to have that basis right.

44:53Bill Gallagher: Talk about before we run out of time here, maybe touch on purpose magnets and how purpose factors into the recruiting and the development of people. What are your thoughts on that? That's one that I value a lot, use a lot, popular with all my—

Purpose magnets versus coin-operated players

45:09Rick Crossland: Yeah. So this would be a great discussion, Bill. So several years ago, I was thinking of purpose and I saw that some clients had like an internal purpose and they didn't do as well. So I always believe that purpose has to benefit the end user, right? Think of PING golf clubs when they came back, right? Their purpose was to make golf more fun, very powerful. So purpose, you want people who align to that purpose. I say in my book, The A Player, is, you know, A players really don't work for money, the money follows. And when you have the discussion, and I do like variable bonus, we like to have money flying all over the organization, but they're like, 'Yeah.'

45:49Bill Gallagher: Money raining?

45:51Rick Crossland: We had this great quarter, right? And we're going to the Reds game or we're doing something. We had this event and that. And I've literally seen where we're handing out envelopes. And our people don't pillow talk nearly as much as other organizations. I'm more of a private matter. I'm like, 'Hey, Adam, what's in the envelope?' And I knew what was in the envelope. And he goes, 'I'll open it at home.'

46:11Rick Crossland: It's like, look at this, we got to buy a new fleet of trucks because we had such a great quarter. And you align the purpose and the money follows. You know what I mean? Only follow the money, we call those people coin-operated. The purpose never goes. So yes, and that's within Scaling Up, nail that purpose. Core values obviously inform and drive culture. And I'd recommend don't post them up on the wall and quiz people, but organic in the interview, make sure that's aligned. Find out what their personal purposes are realistically, not hypothetically. But yeah, when you align that, you get somebody who wants to—I joined Ford Motor Company because I wanted to improve American cars at that time. I was tired of my friends saying American cars are rubbish. It really hurt me. I was a Taurus brand manager. We turned the car line around by $750 million. And I still feel good at that. And I'm mad at Ford for exiting most of the car lines because I feel like we weren't in the fight. But that's why I joined, because I was just tired of hearing that. So if you find people who are aligned to your purpose, it's just a better way to do it. And then purpose defines a strategy because you have to put your money where your mouth is. So I think it's a perfect alignment. You get people who really want to do that.

47:31Bill Gallagher: It's funny how things change, your motivations, things like that, right? Pretty soon you won't be able to buy a sedan, right? It's going to be all trucks and SUVs.

47:39Rick Crossland: Yeah, I still like a convertible or a sports car. Yeah, I like to be low.

47:45Bill Gallagher: Yeah, it's funny. So funny, like, and things, tastes change, things come and go, like things fall in and out of fashion, and what drives people and the way they interpret, right? The fundamental, like, underlying thing about purpose and motivation are pretty similar, right? People want to feel successful, and people want to feel like their work matters, like it makes a difference, right? But specifically where and what kinds of things, those things move over time, the way they're expressed, right, is something to kind of keep up with. It's a really great conversation. If you want to know more about Rick's work, you're going to go to aplayeradvantage.com. We'll throw that on the screen here right now if you're watching on video right there. And then, of course, it'll be in the show notes, but not hard to remember. Aplayeradvantage.com is Rick's website where you can find out more about all his work around helping your people get right.

48:41Bill Gallagher: Rick, it's nice that we finally got a chance to do this.

48:45Rick Crossland: No, it was wonderful. Really enjoyed it.

48:47Bill Gallagher: Thanks to our mutual friend and mentor, Verne Harnish, who created this whole Scaling Up mess that we are a part of and who we use in our work with people like you who are listening and growing your companies, getting it right, applying the tested few things that make a real difference in getting it. Also, thanks and shout out to Wanda and Anna who get our show scheduled and prepared and released and all the stuff that goes into bringing a show like this to you every week. And to everyone else, subscribe, like, turn on your notifications, like everything. Go to scalingcoach.com if you want to know more or want to join me in a workshop this coming month. Scalingcoach.com is the place to go find all that and more. Thanks again, everyone, for watching, for listening. Until next time, keep scaling.

49:43Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.