 Hi everybody, Colin Dupree here excited for a conversation today about finishing strong and starting stronger. So joining me from the CRIs group is John Harris who will be co-hosting with me. John, how you doing? Doing great, Conn, happy to be here. So before we kind of kick off and let our fantastic panel share their thoughts on how they finish strong and start stronger, a little background on kind of how they got here and where this topic came from. So Think Tech Hawaii and Security Matters are always so gracious to allow CRIs to come on the show and share their thoughts and info to the security industry. And during some of our recent conversations about what topics we could cover, a number of the sales team or the sales members of the RISE group always kind of joked about how they would get their sales numbers and their quotas and things like that, end of March or April and how sales kickoff meetings start at the end of February. And that really led us to start talking about how that needs to change and how can you start to put things in place sooner and really balance that finishing strong and starting stronger mentality when you don't know what your year is going to look like until a quarter of it's all the way through. So we wanted to bring together some experts from various aspects within our industry, CEOs, sole proprietors, sales leaders and have them share their thoughts on how they balance the end of the year and the start of the year. So I'm going to kick it over to Antoinette King to share a little bit about how how do you balance reflection versus preparation and what are some of your tactics to finishing strong? Sure. Thank you so much for having me, Antoinette King founder of Credo Cyber Consulting. So one of the things I like to do right now this time of year is really reflect back on the year, both personally and professionally to think about what are the things that worked for me? Where did I really shine? What are some of the things that I could have done differently and maybe use that to really determine am I spending my time in places that are going to serve me and serve my customer base? So it's both while I'm in meetings, am I talking about the things that are going to generate revenue when I'm volunteering for organizations like CIO or ASIS, am I helping to build my personal brand and what are the events that I went to where I got a really good ROI and was able to get a captive audience so we can be more efficient with our time and what are some of the events where next year maybe I won't need to go there. Essentially determining was my time spent well and am I efficient in growing my business or was I efficient in growing my business this past year? And Antoinette, you've been in various roles with other companies too and so do you see like, is that something that you've held through in your different roles of just personally reflecting on you and your performance and your roles from an integrator and working with manufacturer now as a business owner yourself? Is that something you learned along the way, something mentorship taught you? How did you pick up that practice? Yeah, I think for me it was through mentorship, right? So specifically while I was at ASIS, just learning with the Swedish culture, it's a lot about reflection. And so from the beginning, from first day when you go to Sweden, when you used to go to Sweden for kickoff and learning about the Swedish culture, it's really about reflecting and it's taking the time to think about your role and how you are part of a bigger ecosystem and a bigger team. So it's important to me now as I look forward and backwards, right? To reflect on things that serve me and serve my business versus, you know, trying to just pick out minutiae and or look at someone else and model out of over someone else. All right, fantastic. So I'm going to take it over to Eva, if you look at it from a different perspective, you're the most senior leader in your organization, you're seeing it had a big picture, right? So it's not just about the sales team, though. Maybe they want it to be about them. It's not just about any organization. You're seeing the big picture strategy. So how do you position that? How do you communicate it? How do you work this kind of dichotomy of finish strong and start strong and communicating that throughout your organization? Thank you, John. My name is Eva Mark, and I am the president and CEO of Project Design, a security integrator based in Minnesota, and we are 100 percent employee owned. So we have a small team, excuse me, of about 50 employees. We all own the company together. You know, there is when I think about finishing the finishing the year strong, some of the things that we do are just the basics, right? We have to make sure that we close out as many projects as we can. They find all the stragglers, a lot of our contracts in UN 1231. Let's not miss any. Some of this is just basic work that we have to do. But there are still opportunities. Sometimes I say in the fourth quarter, there isn't much you can do in a project based business. We have to plan further ahead than the next 30 days. But there are still opportunities. And one of the challenges of motivating a sales team that by now probably met their goals. You know, there are still things that we can do at the end of the year. We've done a few things like taking us compensation for the fourth quarter to give a little bump to make sure that we don't slow down reminding the team that there are opportunities out there. A lot of organizations have 1231 as the year end. So there's probably some unspent budgets that let's help them spend it with us. You know, those kinds of things. I also at the end of the year, I don't I always encourage people to reflect on the people that helped us. So that is, you know, it's important to think about expressing gratitude to our clients and to our partners, because this is a team sport all around. And, you know, the last last year in about June, when a lot of organizations close their doors, that's when I realized that when we talk about partnerships with our clients through partnerships, that's when you see it. When people, you know, our clients was having shoulder surgery and on Monday and he came in on Sunday to make sure that all the paperwork was in so we can continue working. So expressing gratitude is important and I encourage our team to do that. That's awesome. I love that one of expressing gratitude. Is there is there anything right now that is happening at the end of this year with with COVID and supply chain and everything that is different than finishing years in the past for you? Well, you know, one of the things I was thinking about that we still have to do everything that I just said. But on top of that, we have COVID and it isn't over, it continues. And so, you know, some of the things that I think are very important from my perspective, we all say that it's all about our employees, right? It's our people. We all say that all the time. But this past year and a half has taught me that if you don't take care of your people, you don't have anything that will allow you to get through the uncertain period that you've been through. And so, you know, yes, it is about the team, understanding what their needs are, understanding the stress that they live through daily and doing their best to help them. And I really, I really spend a lot of time thinking about that. How do we make sure that we know when people struggle with they care or with illness or with parents or anything else that they are responsible for? And so, you know, that's something that I focused on. And I encourage my management team to focus on that. And let's not forget the management team. You know, we talk about all the people in the company, but the management team is under some stress, too. So, you know, encouraging people to look at the balance in their lives. I put on some of the things that I have shared with the entire company don't have to, not necessarily, but the new widget that we will be selling, but about how to deal with stress, how to get things done when you're feeling down, all those kinds of things. So I really focused on that. Awesome. Great. So transition over to you, Brittany, you know, Eva talked a lot about kind of the team approach. How do we personalize this a little bit? Right? How do you maybe the year isn't going so well? Eva talked a little bit about maybe achieving the numbers. But what if the numbers aren't going in your favor? How do you approach the end of the year and in your terms, thrive instead of survive at the end of the year? Yeah. So so there's a couple of things here, too. And I think there's two there's two versions of this. There's the leadership level of we're not meeting our goals or we haven't met our goals or we weren't able to meet our goals because of an outside influence, maybe that's supply chain issues, whatever that is. And then there's the personal side of this, which is if you're a leader, leaders notice a lot, especially over the loop. I'll say the course of the pivotal last 12 to 14, 16 months of what's happened in the industry and many other industries is that a lot of this wasn't our influence or our fault, that things maybe didn't go as planned. However, we were expected to still meet the goals. Maybe those things didn't happen. But I'll tell you, good leaders or great leaders noticed who was working, who was who was putting in that extra effort, who that rock star was, they were noticing that. And that's really what comes down to it from a leadership level is regardless of whether you hit your numbers at the end of the day, did you put your your best foot and a further foot forward than you or your peers or your colleagues? Because when I share my bonus pull out in a really tough year like this, like this, I'm going to put that in evaluation. And maybe who cares if you met your number or not? But you have to try and you have to try better than the next guy next to you because that's only the only thing that's going to get me to notice, right? Especially virtually, which is what we have to deal with today. And then the spin of that is that Q4. And you mentioned it, like, what if you, you know, what if you've already met your numbers and maybe you're like, OK, I can, you know, put the put the brakes on until the beginning of the year and or I haven't met my numbers. I know I haven't met my numbers and it might not be a great bonus season or I might not get the promotion I was after, but what can I do? Well, personally, I always use Q4 as a very good networking and personal growth quarter. What that means is you spend Q4 connecting with your colleagues, that your company is connecting with leaders that are outside of your department that are at the managerial or leadership level that you think you might be able to learn something from, that you might be able to get a new mentorship, you know, tip or advice from. You you figure out how to network with people in your industry to solve problems that you have. So the example is if I have a supply chain issue and I know that my company is struggling to solve this or solve this worth our current vendor, have I gone out and done the analysis in the market and said, here's five other vendors that might have the same pricing strategy that we that would be great for our clients. Oh, by the way, manager, here's how I would sell that to our leadership to bring them on to give us some options, right, to meet our goals and in our expectations from a sales or revenue perspective. I think that there's there's always the way I look at it is there's never a problem. There's an opportunity. There's an opportunity for growth. There's an opportunity for personal growth. There's an opportunity to grow your network and there's always an opportunity to grow outside of a problem that you have. And I think with that mentality, what you do is you start switching the mindset of I can't, I won't, I don't have time for somebody, somebody else has stopped me from doing something. And you've what you start doing is putting in immediate solutions to these problems without even realizing it. And then your world opens up. That's great, Brittany. And I mean, just that like thought and that mindset shift. I think it's extremely powerful when when, you know, transitioning from just like I can't or or like we can control this versus what's my sphere of influence, bring the solutions to the table, you know, getting things done, right? So I think that's fantastic. Antoinette, I'm going to I'm going to swing it back over to you. Let's talk about 2022. Let's talk about moving forward. You know, you're you're how are you doing that? What what thoughts, you know, either like maxims that you've had historically that you've used approaches to your career, or now it's as a sole proprietor and you're you know, you're like, you know, kind of, I hate to use the overused euphemism, but you're hunting to eat, right? You you got to go get it. So what does that look like for you? And how does that play out? I love January as kind of that reset month. And I always fall back to my my one of my favorite books in terms of personal development, Simon Sinek Start With Why, right? And so remembering why we're doing this and what is the mission and Brittany, you couldn't have said it any better, you know, relationships are typically at the core of all of the business that we do. If you're really good at your role, then you develop relationships that are lifelong and in in the bad times, in the hard times, in the times where things are out of our control, you're going to rely on those relationships to help bring you through. And so this is a perfect opportunity, this transition from last year to next year to, you know, start with your why, understand what your mission is, and then really focus on fostering the relationships that are going to help carry you through these different times. I don't want to call them uncertain anymore because life has always been uncertain. They're different and that we're constantly being thrown curveballs. And if we've learned nothing over the past 18 months, it's that we need to be resilient as individuals, resilient as organizations, and we need to remember to think outside of the box. I love everything that Brittany said in terms of finishing strong. And then to start stronger, you just kind of build on top of that and and really put your best foot forward and re-energize through the relationships that you have and through remembering what your mission is. So, Internet, when you come back to that why, right? And as a sole proprietor, when do you start to put the numbers to it, right? For people who are in our industry who have been getting their sales quota in April for the last, you know, 15 years, but have this idea and want to break out and want to go do something on their own, you know, what would you share from your experience of planning of, OK, I've got the why. I have the vision. I know what I want to do, but I have to eat. So how do I start? How do I start to put the numbers on to that plan? Yeah, you have to take your why and you have to make a business case for it. And I've been super blessed with having some space to be able to do that. And if your mission is focused on solving challenges, as Brittany said, you know, there's there's never problem. There's always an opportunity. If your mission is focused on solving challenges and you're able to articulate the business case for that, the numbers fall into place. And I firmly believe, I know it sounds a little bit woo-woo, but for me, that was my experience. I recognize that there was a need within our industry. I articulated the business case to my clients and it's been well received. So for me, it's just, you know, partnering with organizations that have similar mindsets as I do. And then you don't have to sell anything. Then it's a matter of how, again, as Eva said, how are we going to partner? How are we going to grow together? And how am I going to help you grow your business? And for me, when it comes to cybersecurity, tying cybersecurity objectives to my client's business objectives for 2022 is actually the way in which I'm able to help them grow their brand and build trust within their brand. Awesome. Thank you. Eva, coming to you as we looked into this starting stronger piece. I know you're in an interesting position where you have your team on one side that you're messaging to and you have your board on the other side that you're messaging to. From a board's perspective, when you're in this end of Q4, end of Q1, how much focus is on finishing strong and how much focus is on the plan for 2022? So, you know, from the board's perspective, the end of the year is kind of a given. They are focused on next year. So what have you learned? What worked? What didn't work? What are you going to do differently? You know, it's, I think that the strongest message for me comes that the message to the board and message to my team isn't that different. I do what I call the state of the company presentation to the board quarterly. I do the pretty much the same presentation to all the employees that are all hands meetings. You know, there may be detailed, different here and there, but the message is the same. I need to, I need, you know, the, but the board wants to hear from me is, I got it, I understand it, I understand where we are. I have command of the facts. The team, the employees, my fellow employee owners want to hear the same thing. But I also am very careful about saying there are things I don't know, especially now, but in this time, you know, the, we're all in this together. I repeat myself on a regular basis. And I say, you know, put your seat belts on because it's going to be a bumpy ride, but we're going, we're going to get there, we know where we're going. It may be a detour or two or three or 10, but, you know, we know what it is that we do. We know RY, which is protecting, making a world safer with technology. And that's what we do. We do good work in the world and we know what we are focused on. And so that's the message. You know, the communication is extremely important. When we are dealing with things like the supply chain issues, the management team meets every day for 15, 20 minutes just to talk about what is the latest, you know, where are the sudden cameras or when are we going to see mercury bores again? And, you know, and we share that. We share that with the entire company. Everybody knows where we are at because there's some decisions we have to make that are not going to please everybody. You know, some, we have to prioritize things differently. And so communication and some, you know, I think to not mention the resilience, that an optimism. I mean, we just have to continue believing in ourselves. And that's the message I give the board and that's the message I give the team. So I'm going to pick up on something that is a little bit off topic. So if you need a moment to think about it, that's fine. But how do you, you talk a little bit about the supply chain challenges, right? And we're at a unique position where demand may be far ahead of our ability to deliver, right? And so from a CEO seat, how do you budget when your sales may take you here but you can only deliver here? So how do you forecast with some of those constraints and do you adjust your revenue budgets? Do you put stretch goals in? How do you balance this unique time where the supply and demand may not equal each other? So I have always budgeted in terms of my background is finance and operations. So, you know, this comes naturally to me. I've always talked about a range, you know, the best case scenario, what if this happens? What if that happens? And I seldom present a number. I tend to present the range and I talk about the risks. These are the risks that we are going to be facing. Those are the known knowns and the known unknowns and then there are of course the unknown unknowns and who knows, we've had a lot of those, right? So one of the things that I focused on this year is a simple way of presenting a very complicated concept. We are basically a project-based company. We are trying to do more of the recurring revenue but we still do a lot of projects. That's what we do most of. And so tying together what sales does, that's what production can accomplish. You know, we talk about sales results and the capacity on the production side and it's all about timing, timing, timing, right? It never works right. So we've really focused on a simple way of graphical presentation of time available hours because that's what we live by. So everybody can see it. So there is a much easier conversation about, okay, sales is meeting their nominal revenue goals but what does that mean for production? So those are some of the things that I really focused on, how to tie the communication that everybody can see it and everybody can understand it. And I present the same to the board. That's fantastic and one observation that I'm getting is just a level of almost radical transparency and candor that you present to your organization which I think is fantastic. And it feels to me that that allows all these things to be a little bit easier or the dialogue to be easier because there's an expectation of truth and trust and integrity. And I think that's just fantastic. So we got about five minutes left here. So I'm gonna bring it through to Brittney for kind of last comments here. And so Brittney, how about you? When you're looking towards 2022, you're setting the stage here. What's your approach? How are you making sure as you've articulated a bit and you've touched on this a little bit but what are your strategies for really ramping up and making sure your organization doesn't just necessarily have to be sales but kind of like all global strategy perspective. How do you make sure you're gonna ramp up that new year the right way? Yeah, and running a tech company inside the security industry I'll say is a bit different animal too because we have employees all over the world globally that we also have to take care of and think about at your end as well. So there's a couple of things that are mandated. I do inside of our company as the chief success officer which is really I'm in charge of people process and then revenue. And if you think about that that's three different pieces but they all require attention in Q4 and not only just attention, thoughtful attention as a leader. And what I try and do is not only create a wave of transparency in about October is wave of transparency is that your performance review should never be a surprise but I also don't necessarily believe in performance reviews anyways. I think weekly or daily feedback is much better than an annual or semi-annual cadence regardless. But that being said, those three I'll say arms of your company are really what you need to focus on. And so October I generally focus on transparency of what we did or didn't do by the start of Q4. Where do we need to clean up? So we do a massive cleanup exercise in November which is all people people issues, process issues and then revenue sales issues, right? So that by Q4 when December comes around our clients are happy, successful and we can really get an accurate view of what the books are gonna look like what the numbers are gonna look like and we'd leverage then December for really that huge planning exercise of, okay, we know what the goal is we know what the targets are we know what that kind of thing is that was already done in August, September but how are we gonna tackle this and approach that? And what that does and I've found is that transparency with your team and including them inside of that exercise it creates a type of energy in Q4. It creates that momentum of that snowball. And so that snowballs you write into January, February and Q1 where a lot of teams are just coming back a little off the wall after the holidays little full from all the dinners and really kind of in this mushy brain part whereas what we've done is just ramped everybody up in December they go into the holidays take some time with the family get energized everybody's happy week one, week one January, 2022 we're off to the races we know exactly what's happening we've planned it already it was done in early December and we can hit the ground running and I think that pre-thoughtful approach from a strategic perspective, it's worked and it's worked a lot. And so I think taking that time at the end of the year in October, November, December with a team regardless of even your managing people or you're not managing people I mean, I've done this with lateral peers so not even managing them but I got my group together and I said, hey guys, we've got two weeks left nobody's taken vacation everything's winding down what can we work on? What can we clean up? And what happens is your executive leaders or your leadership notice those things they notice that you've taken on things at the end of the year that maybe they didn't think about they didn't want to think about they didn't want to have the time for or they didn't have the time for they didn't even know we're an issue and so from a bottoms up perspective that's how you make yourself look good, right? And from a bottoms down perspective is that's how you get a team energized in Q4. I love it, I love it I just that thought a kind of expression of like building up, going away, detaching getting energized and coming back and not having to think, just move is like spot on. All right guys, well, we're at time thank you so much for everybody one quick plug for everyone watching at home the RiseYP scholarship wraps up in three days. So if you're a C a member either a student member or with a member organization you're eligible for it. There's multiple scholarships available so please, please, please apply this is free money y'all. So get after it and I want to thank all of our panelists here today and Colin and I thank everyone on behalf of the C rise organization Colin, any closing comments or anything from your perspective? No, thank you all very much for joining us and love the insights into finishing strong and starting stronger. So thank you all for joining us.