James Murray On How To Grow Exponentially By Blending Vision, Processes, And Technology (#171)

[00:00:00] Jeffrey Feldberg: Welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast where you learn how to extract your business and personal Deep Wealth.

I'm your host Jeffrey Feldberg.

This podcast is brought to you by Deep Wealth and the 90-day Deep Wealth Experience.

When it comes to your business deep wealth, your exit or liquidity event is the most important financial decision of your life.

But unfortunately, up to 90% of liquidity events fail. Think about all that time and your hard earned money wasted.

Of the quote unquote "successful" liquidity events, most business owners leave 50% to over 100% of the deal value in the buyer's pocket and don't even know it.

I should know. I said "no" to a seven-figure offer. And "yes" to mastering the art and the science of a liquidity event. Two years later, I said "yes" to a different buyer with a nine figure deal.

Are you thinking about an exit or liquidity event?

Don't become a statistic and make the fatal mistake of believing the skills that built your business are the same ones to sell it.

After all, how can you master something you've never done before?

Let the 90-day Deep Wealth Experience and the 9-step roadmap of preparation help you capture the best deal instead of any deal.

At the end of this episode, take a moment and hear from business owners like you, who went through the Deep Wealth Experience.

 It was over 12 years ago that James Murray was helping a client who was a business broker move the business to the cloud. The project went so well that the business broker invited James to join an association where James eventually became the president.

And it was at this association that James learned all about exit planning and began to include it in his technology offerings. Today, James helps clients with simple tweaks to the company's technology that creates exponential growth before a liquidity event.

Welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast. And as usual, we are not going to disappoint with our guest today. We have a jam-packed episode of value, insights, and takeaways. And for all you business owners out there, I'm going to ask you a question and please no eggs and tomatoes thrown my way.

It's a very honest question. It deserves an honest response and the question for all you business owners out there when it comes to your technology. Is it as efficient as it should be? Is it maximizing your profits? Do you even know what is and what it can be and what it should be doing? And regardless of whether you're having a liquidity event, because really the strategies of preparation are also the strategies of growth are one of the same.

Your technology should be leading the charge to get you to where you want to get to quicker, faster, and more profitably. And that's exactly what we're going to be doing a deep dive today with our guests, but I'm going to stop right there. No spoiler alerts here, James, welcome to the Deep Wealth Sell My Business Podcast.

It's a pleasure to have you with us. And James, there's always a story behind the story. What's your story? What brought you to where you are today?

[00:03:13] James Murray: That is a interesting question. It's not a straightforward answer at all. I started my first business when I was about 19 and about three years later, I broke my back. And had to pivot really quickly. And over the years I ended up going back to school, studying technology and I got into where I was pretty good technologist.

I thought this is really cool. And I walked into a new client one time and they were having problems with their systems being down all the time. And I thought I'm Joe technologists, I'll come in and make the day for these guys. And so we found the figured out the problem in about two hours and two hours later, I came in on the weekend, fix their problem, and they never had the problem again.

And I thought, see, I'm great. and I thought that was the end of that story. And about six weeks later, we picked up a new contract with this company and the CFO came to me and said, James, the strangest thing happened after you did what you did. We suddenly made $30,000 this last month that we didn't make before.

And it was like, really? that's pretty cool. Let's see. Yeah, we checked last year. We didn't make this much money last year and we didn't take this much money last month. So what did we do? So we went and did a quick analysis of the system and we found that all of their employees average an increase of 30% and worker productivity, just because the system was working the right way.

And I suddenly realized I'm not an it guy anymore doing deep technical problems. I have something else. And my exploration has been, what is it that IT can do to? help a business without just building faster servers or better technology and popping it up to the application opening level. I wanted to figure out how do we take it to the next level with business management teams that, and teach them and work with them to improve that, get that 30% improvement in worker productivity.

And I'm a firm believer that Technology is best when you increase that productivity. So, for the next 10 years or so, I'm working, doing what I love doing and it's helping people out it. And I always think of a small or mid-size business. That's a dream for them, that's their dream. And so when we're saving those businesses are making those business happen.

It's like we're fulfilling dreams. That's always been a fun thing in my mind. And then, I had one client who was a business broker. And he invited me to an association that he had started in the Seattle area is called the Pacific Northwest Business Brokers and Intermediaries. I was an intermediary and I came in and I watched this and the guy's talking about IT due diligence.

And I said, you're an attorney to myself. What are you talking about? IT due diligence about, I should be talking about that on the technology. And then he started saying some things. And I pulled out my notepad and started taking notes for the /next hour as he spoke, I learned so much about what I was doing as a technology person that was wrong. I had been hacking systems that were illegal to act, even though they were the owner of systems. I was doing all kinds of stuff that I just was impressed by. And then gradually as I joined the association six months later, they asked me to be on the board. So I joined and went on the board and I began talking to all of these business brokers, exit planners, investors, private equity people, banking companies, and they all said the same thing, that if you're a new business, you shouldn't be starting a business just to start a business because you have a good idea. You should be starting a business because with the idea of what your exit plan is. And so that changed the way I looked at when I went into a client site, I said, tell me about what we would start talking about, what the problems were, what it is that they needed.

And I would finally ask what's your exit plan. And they would say, Exit plan. What's an exit plan? And then we would start having a conversation about what an exit plan and how we use the technology to better optimize their exit planning. You've talked about getting the best deal in your liquidity thing.

I think that if we look at the statistics and we talked to investment bankers and what their strategy is for buying companies. The first strategy, of course, is we want to buy more customers. That's why we're buying this company. The second is they have some technologies that we'd like to sell to our present company's customers.

The third is we need it reliable technology. We know that 50% of technology projects fail. So it's better to buy a working technology than try and buy a non, then try and build it yourself and restart step 50%. And then the fourth thing is that they need an online marketing solution. Today. we look at online marketing and really what people are doing is exactly what they did before there was technology spam mail, we see that it's the same as spam mail.

And we see all these systems that are doing. So if you can present and online marketing solution, that's something that these investment bankers are looking for. I'm working online solution with a well-thought-out, that's working in.

They'll buy a company in a second because they can apply that to every single company that they own or that they're involved in. That's the direction that we started going is we wanted to walk into companies say, what's your exit plan? My wife, that's funny, you asked that question. My wife just kicked me out of bed.

Instead, if I don't sell this business in the next 30 days, I'm leaving you tired of waiting for us to have that final into the vacation. So they say well, you know, it's interesting. Do you know anybody that sells businesses? And I say I just happen to be. Later became the president of that business transition to association.

And so I have a small network of people that I can recommend those people to, but for the other people, they say, it's interesting you mentioned that. I just feel like every time I double my business. I'm just slipping more and more in the sand as my business digs deeper, deeper, but it's really having a hard and hard time.

And so we talk about what those problems are because I've been in this industry for 30 years in technology. I've probably seen most of the problems that most people have talked about. So we just start talking about. What's your CRM, like what's your accounting, what's your backend systems? What's your inventory management system?

What's your asset meant? What's your e-commerce platform? All those things. How do we align them together?

[00:09:50] Jeffrey Feldberg: That's terrific launching point because it you've said a lot there to unpack and that's wonderful. And you know what the question I'm going to ask, you're probably going to say well, Jeffrey, just really business dependent.

Every business is unique and depending on the businesses, depending on what's going on, but all of that said, you've mentioned a few things that as a business owner myself, and I'm sure everyone listening in on the podcast can relate to. It seems as though when a business gets to a certain threshold and then exceeds it the business was profitable. The money was coming in, but now the technology no longer keeps up and you've got to take those profits and invested back into the business. And now you're back into all kinds of other issues that are going on. But generally speaking, if we pull back from that for just a moment, what will be some of the typical mistakes that you're seeing most business owners make that if they just did these ones, two, or three things or knew the questions to ask for the technology, it would make a world of difference for them.

[00:10:45] James Murray: If we don't get into specific industries and we're just talking, what are the three variables that all businesses need to deal with? And I look at exponential equity growth. That's what I'm looking at. Most people will look at revenue growth, but that's a problem. But when it comes to exponential equity, growth, revenue will come.

And so the three variables that I look at. I've stolen them from Sun Tzu. If you've read The Art of War and Sun Tzu the first thing you got to look at is your vision. Is it aligned with the people, which is in Sun Tzu you would call up the Tao. Is the vision in alignment? If I'm selling buggy whips, there's not a whole lot of buggy whips out there.

If I'm trying to sell a vision of something that was old and isn't keeping up with techno, isn't keeping up with the culture, then I need to have that vision correct. The second thing that we have to look at is your business processes. Are your business processes aligned? Are they efficient? If they're efficient, that's great.

If they're not efficient, then that's a problem. And with just those two variables, we can build a linear business. But if we want exponential growth in our equity on our business, we need to add technology, but we can't just add a server to this whole mix. We have to align the technology to support the business process.

And if your business processes are inefficient, the technology has the effect of magnifying that inefficiency. So before we add technology into it, we want to go in and say, are my business processes efficient And that includes management, accounting, sales, marketing, HR legal, and production systems. And if those systems aren't aligned perfectly, then you build a technology that supports the vision and technology business systems that go along with it, and you will magnify the value of that.

I can tell story after story about companies that suddenly turned on, made one switch to their technology and suddenly productivity in the organization blew through the roof and reduced overtime costs and all those types of things.

[00:13:07] Jeffrey Feldberg: And James, what I like with how you're approaching this instead of let's plunk in a server and let's work around the technology is, hey okay. What you're saying, what's the vision is in line with the people what's going to be our business process. What does that look like? And then how do we get the technology to work for us instead of the other way around?

Because it seems as though most businesses are okay, we've got this technology, how do we fit into, how do we take a peg and fit it into a round hole or vice versa? And you're coming from it really at the complete opposite of that but in a much better, more methodical, and thought-out way.

[00:13:43] James Murray: Yeah, I think that's very true. And that's so if you open up a word document, the analogy is, they'd look at that word document and they say, where's my book. How come I don't have a book here? Well, here's a template. Okay. Here's a template from a book. How come I don't have a book?

It's the same with, for example, a more complicated program, like a CRM. They're going to give you a CRM, just the basics, very basic stuff. And you need to fill in the numbers, but if you look statistically 50% of CRM projects fail. it's not because of the technology it's because of the business. The business processes are not described or defined or anything.

So you can just go in and define those processes. What are the business requirements? What are the objective outputs? What's the input were expected to have we put that in. We configure the CRM to take those things and boom we're running off and running and same with ERP. Same with e-commerce all those things.

There's a big understanding of how to align those together.

[00:14:46] Jeffrey Feldberg: And James with what you're doing and the groups that you're working with. I know that you work with business owners who are smart enough to come to you before a liquidity event, but also know that you're working with buyers and private equity and bankers. And in the nine-step roadmap that we do in our 90-day Deep Wealth Experience step number four is due diligence.

And I squarely put what you're doing into the due diligence bucket there. And as I like to say, if you want to see a grown person, cry just mentioned the word due diligence.

[00:15:16] James Murray: Oh,

yeah.

[00:15:17] Jeffrey Feldberg: and off they go but the beautiful thing about preparation, it's the gift that keeps on giving when you do it right.

And you can actually get ahead of everything and do we're big proponents of doing an internal audit. There's a word audit, but we're big proponents of doing an internal audit where we control our time, our money, we're saving our health, and the speed of which we go along with things. Before we even speak to an investment banker, But because you've had that experience, you've been on the other side of the table.

So talk to us now when a potential buyer, it doesn't matter if it's a banker, if it's private equity, a family office, a financial buyer, whatever it's going to be, what are the buyers typically asking you to look for? Or what are you looking for when you give that report back to the hey buyer, beware here are all the skeletons in the closet from a technology standpoint that this company didn't look for what are some of the hot buttons for buyers?

[00:16:10] James Murray: That's an interesting question. Buyers are interesting people. They think they're the smartest people in the room and they think that it's all about EBITDA and financials. They're looking at the financials and they're saying based on the financial assistance what we're going to do, but when they come to me, they know that technology is important, but they don't know why it's important.

And so what I say to them as I looked at him, I said, are you looking for, what are you, what is your plan for this company? Why are you buying a company like this? And is it, are you wanting to take a cut on an underperforming company and turning into an over-performing company? Do you want to flip it in five years or do you want to have it long-term?

Are you looking for a high level of business that you can just invest in and know that the systems are correct? And you'll never do that. They're keeping up with their they're buying the right equipment. If it's a paving company, are they keeping up with all of their equipment there?

And everybody has a backend technology, do they have the right technology for their system and what they're planning on doing over the next 10 to 20 years, whatever it is, their plan will this company scale and how can I scale it? And they usually don't think I have an answer for those kinds of things, but I say, I'm going to give you a report when we're done in this report You will have on the one page, we'll look at the technology and we'll look at the business systems and we'll define yes, these business systems and technology are in alignment or 99% of the time. No, they aren't in alignment. And because they aren't in alignment, they have this weakness. And I'll say the scalability of this company is limited because they have these weaknesses. And most of the things that's going on here with the technology, the owner doesn't know the business managers don't know, the technologists are not even aware that the business owner doesn't know and don't even bring it up.

That it's a problem. They probably know, but they don't know anything about business. So if I go in and talk to them, I say something like I'm looking at your system and this seems to be the problem. And they say, yes, we've been trying to talk to the owner about this for five years and it's never gone at that So I simply go back to the owner and I say, and I explained in business language, what the problem is. And he said, oh yeah, sure. Here's somebody right here. Can I go back? And the technology goes, oh my gosh. And then they take the money and they run with it. So we do the same thing for the business owner is we say in the first half, we're safe.

These are all the problems. These are the problems they know about. These are the unknown problems. This is what's holding them back from scaling on the other half of the report I say here's the missed opportunities. They have this technology in place, but they haven't turned on this piece and they haven't turned on this piece, therefore they can never scale.

So all we have to do is it costs us maybe 20 bucks, or it might cost us $500, or our two weeks we can get this all turned on and integrated with the new system, and then we'll be able to increase the productivity of employees. And I'll usually go low and I'll say it by 10%, would 10% be interesting to you and they go, yeah, that'd be great.

Usually, that's a very conservative, low estimate. It's 30% is, it's very common for these types of optimizations and it's not unusual to have a 300% optimization in by understanding these questions.

[00:19:37] Jeffrey Feldberg: And so James, this is really fascinating. I'm curious though when you come on the scene and let's just take the scenario where a business owner said, you know what James, I really want to position this company for growth at one point, yes, I'm going to be doing the whole liquidity event. I'll do the whole Deep Wealth experience.

I'll get all the preparation, but I need to know what I'm dealing with right now. So you come into the situation. What does it look like when you're, and I'm going to use that a word, the audit, when you're doing your technology audits but with the vision of having both scalability, exponential growth, and the liquidity event. What is your process look like in terms of how long does it take and what are you doing?

[00:20:17] James Murray: I found it's actually much easier and simpler then what I would do 10 years ago, 10 years ago, I would go in and look at every log file and every server I would go and do all those other things. But I find now that I can simply have a conversation with some of the key players and some of the non key players, the regular workers and the employees and people that aren't getting the attention and the board meeting and just ask them some questions.

It can take me, I've done it in three days for $50 million company. I've done it in six months for a billion dollar company. And depending on how far they want to go, it's usually just a conversation and we start talking about what is it that you're concerned about right now.

And then they tell me and I go, okay, great. And they start telling me what their concerns are, and then I've clerked putting together a backlog. And so the backup, I don't know what if you understand project management, agile, project management, all the things that you work on is called a backlog.

So you get a list of all the tasks that they want to work on. Then you go to each list, each task on the list and you prioritize it based on any number of things, money, time, return on investment that we need this right now. It's a business objective. So we reprioritize the whole thing and then they put a date when they want this accomplished by. And so then we start putting the dates in and then I say, and they already have the cost of what it's going to take. So then they just start, James, let's do it. And James, do you know somebody that can do this for us? And that's it. I'd be happy to do that for but so, that backlog is the important thing and they make the decision. What's important. They make the decision, the order, the money that they want to spend on how long the time period is. Every project is it's all a scope of work, time and cost and quality. But you focus on the first three and you can build an agile process really quick to bring it around.

I don't know if I'm answering the question.

[00:22:13] Jeffrey Feldberg: No, you have an actually you said something really interesting. I'm curious to hear your answer on this. So you said back in the day, back in the day, you would look at the actual logs from the servers and all the errors and the outputs and everything else. And you stopped doing that. So you stopped with the technology.

 So you still do that, but you're not relying on the technology exclusively a hundred percent that you're now having conversations with the people. So what was that change? What was that shift for you that said, okay, you know, these computer logs are important. They do show me where perhaps there's some glitches that maybe nobody knows about, but at the same time, it's not going to be where I'm exclusively focusing on and not even where I'm starting.

What was that mindset change for you to start with the people?

[00:22:56] James Murray: That's a very good question. And my whole career, the last 30 years, I've been asking the question, why does technology fail? And I assumed it was the technology was bad. And so I started as a desktop support person and I worked my way up to system administration consultant. And the more I studied, the more I realized

there are 10 reasons why business fail. The number one reason is the business objective was not met. And I find that the business objective wasn't communicated, not just to the technology team, but to the business team. And the business objective is the number one key piece. So I said, oh if I sit down and interview and I'd say tell me about the past.

What kind of bad things have happened? What kind of things are you struggling with? What's the business objective that you're trying to drive? The second reason businesses business projects fail is at the board level. There is no person on the board that owns this solution for this business objective. And the third reason there's no management team manager. That's given authority to cut the red tape, to get this project through quickly because it's an important project. So let's get this through. And it just goes down like that till you get down to number seven and you hit what's your bit met.

What's your project management process? That's mixed up and then you get down lower. And finally, the last two, it's all about the technical team business process and the technology itself. Sometimes technology is buggy just deal with

[00:24:36] Jeffrey Feldberg: I'm wondering James, as you're going through this, you're speaking with the owner and the staff and everything else. Are you taking the time to understand what the narrative of the particular businesses, what their big vision is or BHAG is, as some people would say in certain circles and what they're looking to achieve and how does that fit into your whole process?

[00:24:56] James Murray: My process starts With the mission statement. What is the vision? What is the mission statement? What is your objective? What is the company? This is interesting, I'll share a story when I was in my first job was a part-time job working for the chamber of commerce in Spokane and I was like, gung-ho, I'm going to fix the world with new technology.

And I thought, okay, great. We have a brand new chamber of commerce president. I can finally get something then. And I came up with this proposal of all these things specifically, this one thing I thought this would change the world. And it was a fax system that would connect into the server and all this other stuff.

And I felt it would reduce the time of faxing by three or four hours. I thought that would be really cool deal for the whole company. I put this proposal together for this fact software system as a faxing system and gave it to the president and let him review it.

And he called me back and he said, James We just spent two weeks or a month going over mission, vision, and all these things that other new mission visits since I've taken over president, I said, yeah. And he said, ah, I don't see any alignment with that in what you've proposed. And I said you were actually serious in my mind.

I said if you were actually serious about that and he said, yeah, that was my mind saying, yeah, he was very serious about it. He said I want you to rewrite this in a way so that when I present it to the board, they will see the alignment with the mission, vision, and everything.

That's fine. So I said, okay. And I went and rewrote the whole thing with the mission with the project in mind, with the vision of the chamber of commerce in mind I took it back to him. He took it to his board and they came back to me and said the system that I proposed was like, say one X, they proposed, they said they wanted a system that was three X bigger than what I had.

They decided they want to stop doing mailings to the entire chamber of commerce and instead respond with faxes. So they would send out a fax overnight to the entire 2000 membership. And they knew that if they sent a fax, they would get a response from 90% of the people that they sent that to.

Whereas when they send out a mail, they only got like a 10% response. So they said, we want this three times bigger and we want it to do this and this. And I was like, oh my Gosh. And we got, they didn't trust me. I was too young, but we got a project manager that I knew from the company that was one of my mentors.

And he came in, did this thing. It was great. And it allowed the legal people to actually go in and address issues in the legal system, send it out, send out a fax to the entire chamber. They would get responses from the entire chamber in minutes and they would start calling up their representatives.

It was really cool. I was just like, whoa, this is way bigger than I ever expected. And that's the cool thing about all this stuff is you just start talking and people say, wait, if it can do that, can it do this? Can it do this? And you just say, why would you want to do that? and that's what I try to emulate in the conversation.

I start with the president, I say, so the mission vision of your company is this XYZ. Oh, my gosh, you're a technology people. What do you care about that? And we go from there.

[00:28:10] Jeffrey Feldberg: And James, what's interesting with what you're sharing from in the trenches, in the field, real-life experiences, and for our listeners, I'm going to point you to step number two of the nine-step roadmap, which are X-Factors that insanely increase the value of your business. And James, one of the reasons when a business owner goes through our 90-day Deep Wealth Experience, one of the reasons that we start with X-Factors, it really becomes a foundation.

In your words of a company that's exponentially growing, not linearly, but exponentially growing, because one of the X-Factors that's in there it's well, there's many X-factors but having that narrative. Okay. What are we all about? How are we changing the world? What's the why? How are we doing that? Does everyone understand that?

And another X-Factor to your point are the four points of clarity. Is this being documented? Do people know what they're doing? Why they're doing it and how to get that done. So we know what our KPIs are. And when you take that narrative that you created as an X-Factor and you go into a liquidity event that becomes foundational for when you speak to your investment banker.

To the future buyer or the future investor, their investment banker. And it just goes down the list.

[00:29:19] James Murray: And that's the secret I found. If you want to get money from a manager for your project at any level is you start with a mission and vision and you show them how what you're doing can improve the mission vision of the organization. And what can they say? No, I don't want to improve my vision. They might say Let's put this off for another month or six months, but they can't deny it unless they find a better solution than what you've got.

[00:29:46] Jeffrey Feldberg: And James, I'm going to put something controversial out there and you can agree or disagree. Here's my thesis, when you take the approach that you're taking and let's get the technology to work for the company, not the other way around, let's make sure that the technology solution is really supporting the vision and the mission and the company's narrative.

And that helps a company become efficient and more profitable, and it can grow exponentially. I'm going to say it doesn't really matter if it's a boom time or it's a bust time. When you have the technology right. When you have working with the mission, you're not going to survive. You're going to thrive no matter what is going on.

Am I on base with that? Am I off-base with that? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

[00:30:31] James Murray: I think we're fairly in alignment with that. If say an economic thing changes and the vision still works. The tout, the people want that vision then yes, you're exactly right. And then in the reason why businesses fail in a recession is because A there's nobody that's interested in buying what they're buying or B the most business processes. Entrepreneurs and small mid-sized businesses are not master degree PhDs in business management process. Most of them, learn it by trial and error. So when they build an organic management system, it's never perfect. It always looks like a scraggly old apple tree that just grew from a seed someplace.

But if you want to build best apple tree of all and go down to Wenatchee and you see the really forward-thinking apple stores and they have prune these things so that the apple trees are at the right height for picking that they're spread out so that the apples are coming out right in the easy way to pick and making and everything works perfectly.

When you're sending those harvested out, it takes you less time to do it. We do the same thing for our technology. The people that have done that work ahead of time that have built. I think there's two things. There's innovation and there's efficiency. So you can build an efficient system until it can't be any more efficient.

Maybe there's no there's diminishing returns on building efficiency, and then you have to figure out how am I going to do this differently? So like with spam mail, we can send millions and millions of spam but how efficient is it? Or we can have an analytical process.

We call the John Henry process, which will actually pre identify the people that are going to buy from you that are interested. And, if you know your industry, know your customers, the three problems those customers have, and you can actually, even there's enough public information, you can tell by their advertising what their problems are.

You can actually walk and get an introduction from somebody that's connected to them on LinkedIn or some other way to your network and walk right in and say, hey, it's really good to meet you. I'm interested in learning about your business. What I find with companies like yours is you have this problem, and it turns out to be the exact same three problems that you thought that it was beforehand you don't have to send out an email you don't have to put on advertising on TV and interrupt everybody from their great programming. Now you're just actually going out and talking to the people that need what you need.

And they may not know you need it that day, but you've analyzed it in a way so that you know what they need.

[00:33:10] Jeffrey Feldberg: I'm just going to call you the technology whisperer, because what you're doing and I can see a situation where you're even brought in with a business everything's going like gangbusters it's working terrific.

But the CEO or the founder is saying, look, James, as good as things are. Here's where we want to be. Here is our vision. Here's where we're changing and what we're doing.

 And then you can take that and say, okay, given where you want to be from where you are today, let's put into place a roadmap, a technology roadmap.

That's going to strategically help you meet your vision and get you there and be behind the scenes so that the business is in front of everything. And you're really front and center. And for all you business owners out there As successful as you are. You're not standing still. So as you look to go forward to the next level, wouldn't it be helpful to have someone like James come in and do a technology audit and a vision audit of, okay, here's the gaps.

Here's how we're going to get you there. I mean, imagine how much quicker and more profitably you'd get to your end destination when you do that.

[00:34:07] James Murray: You would think that, so when let me ask some questions there, view you've set a technology roadmap. And I said there was three variables in that formula and I said, technology's no lasting to consider.

So when we go in and we look at this business process and we figure out it takes two days to do this per customer, because there's a lot of manual steps in this process. So we start talking. Would it be an advantage to you? Would it be helpful to you? May not be helpful to reduce that process from two days to two minutes. And they look at you, their eyes open a little bit because they've never even thought about doing that. They'd never thought it was possible to do that. So you say what if we could, and then they go could you do that? So I explained how it could be done. And then they say if you can do that, can you do this?

And I go I say, why would you want to do that? And they start telling me from a business standpoint, the value that they would get, if we could apply this automation principle, I just shared with them to one process in the company in manufacturing, another process in sales, another process and all. I said we might just be able to do that.

And now all of a sudden, instead of following that two-day process, We're following a two-minute process. They start growing that's innovation is where we're not even necessarily doing the same 2-day process. We're doing the two-minute process become second nature.

And we're actually looking for new ways to do things that nobody's ever thought of before, because the blinders were on.

[00:35:44] Jeffrey Feldberg: And again, taking a page right out of the Deep Wealth liquidity event, playbook here, preparation. It's all about preparation. When you do the preparation in advance, when you've got the narrative down, you've got your vision, everything else falls into place, but you know, James, look, I could go down this rabbit hole for hours with you, but we're starting to bumb up against some time here. So let's begin to transition as we look to start the wrap-up of the episode, and let's do a very quick thought experiment. And the question for you is this. I'd like you to think about the movie Back to the Future. And in the movie, you have a magical DeLorean car that can take you to any point in time.

So imagine now James is tomorrow morning, you look outside your window and not only is the DeLorean car there, but the door is open and is waiting for you to hop on in so you'll hop on in and you can now go to any point in your life. It's James, as a young child or a teenager, whatever the point in time would be.

James, what are you telling your younger self in terms of life, wisdom or lessons learned or, hey James do this, but don't do that. What would that sound like?

[00:36:48] James Murray: You do a lot of introspection on yourself as you're trying to figure out what you're doing wrong. I think that the first thing that I would tell my younger self is it's not about how good you are. It's about how good your team is. It's more important than for you to develop the right team, to work together with a lot of different experience, business, technology, all different areas, learn how to be a team builder. You'll get much further than just becoming the top expert in your field. That would be the first thing I would tell myself that's completely different than this core individual contributed started out as.

[00:37:24] Jeffrey Feldberg: I love that. And you said that'd be the first thing that you tell yourself. Is there a second thing while you're at it while we're on the topic here?

[00:37:30] James Murray: I think I was a very introverted, Very shy person. I would probably tell myself to go to Toastmasters sooner than I did. And I would give myself the handbook that I was looking for to try and understand what are the rules to have a high social IQ.

And my father was a brilliant engineer, but he was more introverted and had a lower social IQ than I did. There's a book called Discover Your Strengths. I was raised to think that you need to be perfect at everything.

And in that book, Discover Your Strengths it just lifted the weight off my shoulders. When it says you have five world-class strengths, focus on those and you'll go further than you ever would. If you focus on everything.

[00:38:12] Jeffrey Feldberg: Couldn't agree more words from the wise, and it's just a terrific way to start wrapping things up. So, James, if someone would like to reach you online, what would be the best place?

[00:38:23] James Murray: So my website is executiveoutliers.com. I take steal a little bit from Malcolm Gladwell and say we're looking for executives that want to be outside of the curve. If you want to just be average or just keep up or follow the crowd, we're probably not the right company for you.

And you can book communication with does it cost anything? We can put the conversation and see if we can help you out and continue the conversation as we go

[00:38:50] Jeffrey Feldberg: And for our listeners, I will put all that in the show notes. So it'll be a point and click couldn't be any easier. James, thank you so much for taking part of your day and spending with us here on the Deep Wealth Podcast. And as we wrap things up at heartfelt, thank you. And as always, please stay healthy and safe.

[00:39:05] James Murray: Thank you. It was my pleasure. I've enjoyed myself immensely.

[00:39:09] Sharon S.: The Deep Wealth Experience was definitely a game-changer for me.

[00:39:13] Lyn M.: This course is one of the best investments you will ever make because you will get an ROI of a hundred times that. Anybody who doesn't go through it will lose millions.

[00:39:23] Kam H.: If you don't have time for this program, you'll never have time for a successful liquidity

[00:39:28] Sharon S.: It was the best value of any business course I've ever taken. The money was very well spent.

[00:39:34] Lyn M.: Compared to when we first began, today I feel better prepared, but in some respects, may be less prepared, not because of the course, but because the course brought to light so many things that I thought we were on top of that we need to fix.

[00:39:49] Kam H.: I 100% believe there's never a great time for a business owner to allocate extra hours into his or her week or day. So it's an investment that will yield results today. I thought I will reap the benefit of this program in three to five years down the road. But as soon as I stepped forward into the program, my mind changed immediately.

[00:40:12] Sharon S.: There was so much value in the experience that the time I invested paid back so much for the energy that was expended.

[00:40:22] Lyn M.: The Deep Wealth Experience compared to other programs is the top. What we learned is very practical. Sometimes you learn stuff that it's great to learn, but you never use it. The stuff we learned from Deep Wealth Experience, I believe it's going to benefit us a boatload.

[00:40:35] Kam H.: I've done an executive MBA. I've worked for billion-dollar companies before. I've worked for smaller companies before I started my business. I've been running my business successfully now for getting close to a decade. We're on a growth trajectory. Reflecting back on the Deep Wealth, I knew less than 10% what I know now, maybe close to 1% even.

[00:40:54] Sharon S.: Hands down the best program in which I've ever participated. And we've done a lot of different things over the years. We've been in other mastermind groups, gone to many seminars, workshops, conferences, retreats, read books. This was so different. I haven't had an experience that's anything close to this in all the years that we've been at this.

It's five-star, A-plus.

[00:41:20] Kam H.: I would highly recommend it to any super busy business owner out there.

Deep Wealth is an accurate name for it. This program leads to deeper wealth and happier wealth, not just deeper wealth. I don't think there's a dollar value that could be associated with such an experience and knowledge that could be applied today and forever.

[00:41:39] Jeffrey Feldberg: Are you leaving millions on the table?

Please visit www.deepwealth.com/success to learn more.

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As we close out this episode, a heartfelt thank you for your time. And as always, please stay healthy and safe.

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